“I can’t die now,” Graham joked, according to Axios. “I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out and do Israeli-Saudi normalization.”

Lindsay Graham, just hours before he would pass away from a ruptured heart valve, aorta.

Although feeling bad, he procrastinated getting help until after his Meet the Press appearance the following Sunday.

If you’re not following, he didn’t make it.

Upon opening Gmail, 4:15 am, Sunday morning, the first email to grab my attention was the subject line: “RIP Lindsay Graham, Senator from South Carolina,” from the Washington Post. They’re much too self-important to send out a troll like that from their official account.

Further investigation concludes this being totally legit, and since he is one of my—and all those who feel as I do’s—favorite enemies, I will do my best to eulogize his exploits.

Lindsey Graham was an evil man, a bad man. Not Lord Voldemort-type evil, he was something else.

He was dumb evil. I mean he was smart enough to know what he wanted and why, maybe had the charisma to baffle the more inexperienced folk he ran up against. Someone taught him to be the way he was, they must have, but he took to this belief and never readjusted. Why? Because it made him feel important. He was a lifetime politician, a bureaucrat, the type who’d never been good at anything in his life until he ran for office and won, putting him in the same room with people of ever-increasing power and he took that and ran with it.

Hannah Arendt had a thesis she gained from seeing his type in real life during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, which she coined “The banality of evil:”

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

She further explains:

For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain.' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.

Look, I don’t like to dance on gravestones. I prefer to believe he’s received judgement already upon his soul’s exit from this world. I can’t help it, I am sensitive about death, but you know who wasn’t? Lindsey Graham.

Truth be told, Lindsey Graham brought hell on Earth to a lot of people, and if there’s any kind of just God, I can only imagine the hell he is now facing.

Graham was a plaything of entrenched interests, a utility for dark powers who fed off the blood and mayhem of war. With his own unquenchable thirst, nobody did the bidding of the elites the way he did.

Although not a doctrinal neoconservative from the original branch, he was an ideological chameleon just like his two compadre’s, John McCain and Joe Lieberman—. Like the Kristol’s and Podhoretz Jr + Sr, floating from one ideological extreme to the other depending on which side is backing their geopolitical blood feuds and acting as the crutches for Israeli defense and/or society. His principles changed based on who was in office and who would hear him out at that specific moment, sometimes flip flopping based on who was in the room.

This made him a figure well known for his ability to make things happen. He would mix with anyone, cross any aisle, and get bipartisan approval for legislation no matter who was in power. For this he has a legacy which is loved by few and hated by many, my issue with him was on the things he never faltered on.

Now, what “things” did he never falter on, you might ask?

Think burn pits, mass graves, children buried in rubble with mothers and fathers screaming prayers for God to “please save them!”

And children screaming for their mother or father, not knowing it’s too late and they are know alone in the world.

Incineration of apartment complexes with no vacancy when someone on a watchlist to be killed, had a cell phone ping on a nearby tower, these are the things that Lindsey loved.

It is why he woke up in the morning.

Lindsey: People ask me, “Is it worth it?” Here’s what we’ve gotten for our investment.

• We haven’t lost one soldier.

• We’ve reduced the combat power of the Russian army by 50%.

• Not one of us has died in that endeavor. This is a great deal for America.

Holly Williams: You’ve previously said that it’s, “the best money we’ve ever spent.” Is that still true?

Lindsey: Since we helped Churchill stand up to the Nazis.

He looks and acts the part with self-righteous compassion and confidence only a true believer or one too stupid to consider another could gin up.

Reminds me of Danny Devito’s part in Matilda as the con artist car salesman showing his son the “family business.” He rewinds the mile meter in a car he is selling to make it appear newer than it actually is. Unperturbed by what will happen when someone buys the clunker, or what might be obvious to anyone else, if you keep selling cars like this, eventually someone will catch on, and your credibility, or worse, will be all that anyone remembers about you.

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The Great Sending-Off of the Bloodiest Propagandist the Any Elected Office has EVER Seen

A speech was given on the house floor by Tom Cotton, a Senatorial warhawk of the same stripes as Linds, reading it almost had me in tears, so I felt obligated not to include it here. If you’d like to read it, I will link to it above.

When Graham was calling for U.S. military strikes on Iran in 2019, something Donald Trump refused to do at the time, the president rebuked the senator by telling reporters, “Ask Lindsey how did going into the Middle East, how did that work out? And how did going into Iraq work out?”

In the end they worked it out:

“He actually said he was tired, but he wanted to pass the SAVE America Act, and I said, ‘Well, we’re going to get it done, Lindsey. We’re going to get it done. I’ll see you, like, soon,’” Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, adding that the two believed they might meet on Sunday.

In a separate interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Trump said that Graham was also “telling me about the trip” in their phone call, noting that the senator “had a great trip.”

Trump remembered the late senator as someone with a “unique ability,” saying that Graham could work out issues with Democrats and that he “loved being a politician.”

“If I had a problem, a real problem, I wouldn’t often ask. But if I had a problem with a Democrat, he could work it out,” Trump said. “He was a great, he was a great politician, actually.”

At the same time, Trump said, the senator could be a “tough cookie.”

“If he wanted to get something, if he thought he was right, and he had people against him, he could be very tough, actually,” Trump said. “But he was a good person.”

Graham had been scheduled to appear on “Meet the Press” on Sunday following his trip to Ukraine. The senator was a prominent foreign policy hawk within the Republican Party.

Graham had pushed for Trump to support Ukraine in the war against Russia, and he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Friday, just a day before he died.

The senator also had urged Trump to take a hard-line approach against Iran, pushing for military intervention while arguing that Iranian leadership was an unreliable negotiating partner.

As he liked to say, “I don't care if you're an isolationist or a religious fanatic, so long as you have an R next to your name, I want you to win.”

Man, what a partisan sycophant. If that’s the case, why was he against Massie? Oh, to get further into Trump’s ear. To help push for more war.

Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of @Drop Site news said the following during an interview with Democracy NOW!:

Ted Cruz, however, would say of his ideological twin sister, “He was a very close friend. Waking up Sunday morning to the news was just stunning. By any measure, Lindsey Graham is one of the most consequential senators to have ever served this country.”

South Carolina has the richest economy for the Military-industrial complex:

Graham, a 58-year-old Republican running for reelection this year, is likely to keep his job for as long as he likes. For many conservatives, this may be a difficult pill to swallow. In the realms of talk radio and the right-wing blogosphere, Graham’s name is a joke. He’s known to Rush Limbaugh’s listeners and Michelle Malkin’s readers as “Lindsey Grahamnesty.” Mark Levin, another conservative radio host, calls him “Goober” and the “Arlen Specter of South Carolina.” Will Folks, a South Carolina-based blogger and political troublemaker, refers to him as “Senator Lindsey Graham (RINO-S.C.)” and says his politics appeal to a “center-left base.”

Some smell blood. So far, four Republicans have declared themselves candidates in the 2014 primary against Graham, including a state senator and the first female graduate of the Citadel, the state’s military college. What’s more, some say Republican support for Graham in South Carolina is crumbling. Republican party committees in seven counties, including Graham’s native Pickens County, have voted to censure the senator. Sounds remarkable, except that in Pickens just 23 party members showed up for the vote. The language they adopted is harsh, accusing Graham of having committed “a long series of actions that we strongly disapprove of and hold to be fundamentally inconsistent with the principles of the South Carolina Republican Party.”

The censure goes on to list 30 points on which Graham has been “fundamentally inconsistent” with the GOP platform. He supports amnesty for illegal immigrants without closing the southern border. He voted for Obama’s nominees to the Supreme Court and to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He worked with Democrats on a cap and trade bill. Graham, according to the censure, has also supported “NSA spying on private American citizens,” “Obama’s drone program against American citizens,” and “subordinating American sovereignty to the United Nations.” Republicans have lost primaries for lesser sins, but even Pickens County Republican chairman Philip Bowers is skeptical Graham will lose in 2014.

It is almost as if he loved everything the deep state loved.

Matthew Kroenig, a vice president at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., said Graham once told him there was no point in trying to defy Trump.

“As a good politician, he recognized Trump commanded the Republican Party and the Republican base and if you tried to work against him you’d get nothing done,” Kroenig said.

He argued Graham’s approach has paid off in Trump’s second term as the president hasn’t abandoned Ukraine while also green lighting interventions in Iran and Venezuela that the senator advocated.

“Look at Trump’s foreign policy — it’s more of a Lindsey Graham foreign policy than a Tucker Carlson foreign policy,” Kroenig said, referring to the conservative commentator who is a prominent opponent of American intervention overseas.

Zelenskyy:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Graham, whom he met twice in the past week, had visited Ukraine 10 times since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, and “was here with our people when it was most needed.” He said that “Lindsey was a true defender of freedom and the values that make our world safer.”

Here is the very best representation of who Lindsay Graham was:

In the clip above, Israel has laid siege to Gaza and ordered Palestinians in northern Gaza to evacuate. Israeli officials are appearing across news programs, proclaiming the IDF as the “most moral army” and assuring the public that designated safe zones—like the “humanitarian area in Tel al-Sultan, Rafah—will not be bombed.

Many sources reported that the area that Israel attacked had previously been designated by Israel as a “safe zone”.^[16][17] CBC News showed pictures of Israeli leaflets that read:^[18]

For your safety, the Israeli Defence Force is asking you to leave these areas immediately and to go to known shelters in Deir el Balah or the humanitarian area in Tel al-Sultan through Beach Road.

Don’t blame us after we warned you.

Eventually, a spokesperson from the Prime Minister’s office announced that they intend to bomb Rafah. In response, Biden—despite his age and clear shortcomings—tells Netanyahu that the U.S. will restrict weapon shipments if Israel goes through with it, even calling it a “red line” in an interview following the State of the Union. Not completely, mind you—just the 2,000-pound bombs known as “bunker busters” that Israel lacks on its own.

Note: By the end of the clip, you’ll notice he is no longer addressing Welker. He is speaking directly to Israel: “TO ISRAEL, DO WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO DO TO SURVIVE AS A JEWISH STATE. WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO DO.”

Their Blood (Ukrainians), Their Bullets (MIC), But Your Life, Lindsey “WASTED”

One Year Earlier

They’re sitting on 10 to 12 trillion [dollars] of critical minerals in Ukraine. They could be the richest country in all of Europe. I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China.

If we help Ukraine now, they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of. That 10 to 12 trillion dollars of critical mineral assets could be used by Ukraine and the West, not given to Putin and China.

This is a very big deal—how Ukraine ends. Let’s help them win a war we can’t afford to lose. Let’s find a solution to this war, but they’re sitting on a goldmine... to give Putin 10 or 12 trillion of critical minerals that he will share with, uh, China…

He appeared 24 hours before his death at Skyfall (pictured above), a drone factory in Ukraine to—somehow—help them beat Russia.

Afterward, he spoke a few words about the Russia-Ukraine proxy war and about beating Putin back. This was just a few hours before he passed away—the last time he would speak publicly. And honestly, these were the least homicidal statements I believe I’ve ever heard from him. Almost reasonable, like he knew something was coming.

He said he’s “never been more optimistic” and that “we have the formula to end this war.” No shit, he did say “help Ukraine be more lethal”—hawkish, but not his normal blow-up-the-world screed. Then he said this:

“Let those supporting Russia know there’s going to be a price to be paid if you keep doing it.” (It being destroying Ukraine.)

“…And try to find an off-ramp, not to humiliate Putin, but to end this war, so that Ukraine will thrive and survive.”

Beautiful, almost peaceful coming from him. Too bad he already helped Ukraine run out of men—from young fighting age all the way to their late 40s. So bad, in fact, that they’ll need all of our undocumented immigrants from the Biden years to immigrate there post-war just to bring back their economy.

It’s particularly interesting when you consider that, not long ago, he was pushing for even more and younger Ukrainians to be forced into war:

How brave of Graham.

The above is a report of a report from the Washington Post, who allows nothing outside the paywall, however, The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft does. QI Continues:

(D)espite encouraging Ukraine’s young men to fight in a war many of them don’t believe in and don’t want to die in, Graham actually voted against the last Ukraine aid package because it did not include funding for U.S. border security.

So, he was comfortable withholding money for a war over politics — a war he proclaims to believe in deeply — while urging citizens of a foreign country to march into oblivion.

MTG explains to the TYTs why he would seem to be almost peaceful on the day he died, based on personal knowledge of Linds:

South Carolina is BOR—ING

Lindsey Graham pushed for wars even when they weren’t on the table. What didn’t you hear him talk about much? His constituents in South Carolina. To him, they were boring.

They weren’t the ones keeping him in office. The real forces keeping him in power were defense contractors in South Carolina and AIPAC. In fact, the most I ever heard him say about South Carolinians was when he was boasting about the weapons companies across his state.

Or using them to persuade more neutral middle eastern countries into a “wider war.”

“I'm going back to South Carolina and asking them to send their sons and daughters over to the MidEast.”

Lindsey’s passing? Sad, sure. But it might just be the best thing that could happen for the United States.

He wanted us in World War III, worked tirelessly to ensure it, and as I mapped out above, he was no benign figure. He held influence over nearly every high-profile politician across our modern landscape—left, right, and center.

Could the damage already be done? Absolutely. I hope not, pray not, and you should too. To whoever it is you hold holy.

That our leaders find fulfillment in whatever it is that makes them crave violence.

Otherwise, do we really stand a chance?

Thank you for reading,

This is , Founding & Contributing Editor, of The Lee Canter Report

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If you found this interesting OR if you hated it, I’ll be in the comments section waiting to reply.

Correction: In an earlier version of this article I claimed my father had been in jail for stealing “$1.3 million dollars from the government.” It was actually $75,000 which has been verified by court documents, still in the possession of his co-defendant. It had been a prevailing myth in my home my whole life. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve told that to.

It doesn’t change the story, nor is it relevant to the points of this story, but it is relevant to whether you should believe anything I say after that point.

In this world we don’t have institutional backing or fancy college degrees (most of us anyway), but what we do have is our credibility. In fact it is all we have, so I’ll never play fast & loose with the facts, and if I get something wrong please notify me with the source, because if I say it, I believe it and verified it through someone I have faith in.

I care about nothing more sacred than finding the truth, together. The old but, great cliche still rings true, “The truth shall set us free.”

As a young lad, about yay🤏tall I was asked by much much, much older Aunt Norma if “what I was gonna be when I grew up?”

She said, “You gotta pay attention in school and get good grades so one day you can be president.”

Now, my immediate reaction to this was, “I don’t want to be president.”

She said, almost hurt in tone, “Well what are we raising you for, it’s the most important job in the world?”

In my mind I thought, I don’t know any president's. Why would I want to be president. I wanted to do whatever my dad did, he was my real hero. Unfortunately he was in jail, on his way to prison for defrauding the government out of $75K in AFDC checks & food stamps. I should’ve just humored her, lesson learned.

“I think being president would suck.”

From there I got a civics lesson followed by a “you’re not supposed to use that type of language” devolving into an argument about “doing your best” and all that good stuff and the point is that her generation had an almost unreal belief about the importance of the office and it being the most important job in the world and how everyone should strive to be the best. That latter part I agree with, while keeping in mind a footnote underneath, something like: Our goal should be to be the best at whatever it is that you do1

Boy, she would be disappointed today. I am disappointed today.

I have never been crazily caught up on all the ethical measures a president is supposed to live up to. In fact, I am pretty understanding of the fact that the president is just a man. He is a dude who won a popularity contest. If we were to hold them to the same laws that we have to abide every president in at least the last hundred years would go straight to Alcatraz as soon as their term was up, so although I very much disagree with all the warmongering, I really don’t believe it’s much to ask not to send our brothers and sisters to die in war especially if you sold this presidency to us on being the one who would be focused on keeping us out of war. I’m pretty understanding of the president benefitting from office, but my God this dude is out of his mind!!!

I planned on writing about FISA abuses, but starting with the president’s recent filing of Form 278-T, it opened the door to an unbelievable level of corruption, unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

did a great explainer on the obvious illegalities of this story:

Trump invested in both Paramount and Warner Brothers while his Justice Department is reviewing their highly controversial proposed merger.

The following images clipped from disclosure documents:

Equaling $45K to $150K;

Justice Dept. approves Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery

Updated June 12, 20269:49 PM ET

The main gate to Paramount Studios is seen on Melrose Avenue, July 8, 2015, in Los Angeles.

Nick Ut/AP

The Justice Department on Friday approved Paramount’s proposed $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.

After concluding its antitrust investigation into the pending merger, the department said in a statement that it found that the deal posed no threat to competition or consumers of film, broadcast television or streaming.

The decision clears the way for a merger of two rival Hollywood studio titans: Paramount, the owner of CBS, including CBS News, will swallow the much larger Warner, which includes HBO and CNN.

The DOJ’s Antitrust Division concluded that a union of two studio giants isn’t anti-competitive because the streaming market has expanded the competition for conventional Hollywood studios, which includes Netflix, Apple and Amazon, as well as smaller streamers. The Justice Department’s view is that, for the same reason, consumers won’t lose out because there are plenty of other places to get entertainment.

Also, buying and selling Netflix stock all year, this year:

And the following purchase between $500,000 and $1,000,000 taking place in the 4th quarter 2025 disclosure:

He invested in Oracle at the same time he brokered their deal to buy TikTok, setting aside concerns about national security.

These transactions starting as early as Halloween 2025:

There is a very strange sleight of hand happening here that I wish I was more knowledgeable on this subject because it could mean nothing or it could be everything. Every major company on this list follows the same trajectory he buys, buys, buys some more and then sells, sells, sells, in some cases such as Vanguard, he buys something like $10 million and sells something like $20 million.

I guess that would mean that he made much more money than he spent. Spending $10 million on the stock and reselling it in just a few months for double.

It’s truly un-fucking-believable, and I must figure out how to wrap my head around it.

It’s clear now who all the odd faces were on the inauguration stage a year and some change ago. Obviously, we knew who most of them were, but not why?

They were Donald Trump’s new business partners and why were they there?

For a little taste of what was to come. Donald Trump is selling us off to his new friends the technocrat oligarchs.

The Ellison's (Larry and David) 🔼⬆️↖️⬆️↗️

Aaaaaand…. Peter 🧟Thiel🧬💊Joe Lonsdale🩻💉Alex Karp, both onstage during the inauguration.

Donald Trump invested in Palantir as they competed for and won major government contracts, worth billions of dollars, in defense and other sectors.

The US Department of Homeland Security has entered into a five-year agreement with Palantir Technologies valued at up to $1 billion aimed at expanding the department’s use of advanced AI tools and data analytics platforms across multiple agencies.

This blanket purchasing agreement allows individual DHS components to acquire Palantir platforms without initiating separate competitive contracts, establishing pre-approved pricing and terms that will be executed through task orders distributed over the five-year period.

Palantir CEO and co-founder Alex Karp argued in early December that the firm is “highly ethical,” while also acknowledging that its products could be used to process data from legal surveillance.

“Are we building a database that can be used for surveillance? No,” Karp said at The New York Times DealBook Summit. “OK, but the more subtle version is if you’re legally surveilled … could you put it in our product? Yes. Are our enemies surveilled using data that goes into our product? One hundred percent, and I completely support that.”

The company, which was co-founded by venture capitalist Peter Thiel in 2003, has seen its federal contracts expand steadily over the years. They grew from $4.4 million in 2009 to $541.2 million in 2024, according to USAspending.gov, a government site that tracks federal spending.

In 2025, Palantir’s federal contracts nearly doubled, rising to $970.5 million. This has proven fruitful for the company, which has repeatedly posted strong earnings this year, crossing $1 billion in revenue for the first time in the second quarter.

The contracts included a $30 million deal with ICE in April to build an “Immigration Lifestyle Operating System,” referred to as ImmigrationOS, to track self-deportations, help select targets for arrests and create an “Immigration Lifecycle Process” to increase the efficiency of deportations.

Palantir’s work with ICE comes as President Trump has worked to make good on his promise to carry out the largest mass deportation operation in history. That effort has included widespread raids in cities and arrests at courthouses where immigrants had required appearances.

While the Trump administration said they would go after “the worst of the worst,” more than 70 percent of those arrested have no criminal history and many of the actions have targeted immigrants with legal status.

It’s not clear exactly how ImmigrationOS works, and Palantir already had an existing contract with ICE doing similar work. But the latest contract said Palantir will leverage “external” sources in addition to ICE and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data.

Of coursed “external sources” would be social media, email, phone calls, tower signals, anything that gives the government a better look at what you are doing.

• “We don’t know completely what’s happening,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who alongside other Democratic lawmakers recently requested an investigation into Palantir’s ties to top Trump officials. “I mean, this is the information we’re trying to get, but we just don’t know.”

  “Of course, the history has been that a lot of techniques and technologies are used against noncitizens, and then very quickly, are turned to the citizen population. So it’s never too early to get on top of any Orwellian practices,” he said.

• “Palantir says it only builds the tools, not the rules. However, the architecture of an AI system — how it integrates data, flags individuals, and triggers action — is a form of policymaking. Designing a system like ImmigrationOS means deciding which data is included, what prompts alerts, and what gets overlooked,” Steven Hubbard, a data scientist at the American Immigration Council, wrote in an August post.

  “In practice, AI-driven enforcement systems can be far from perfect. Mistakes in automated systems can have outsized effects, depriving people of their liberty through detention, loss of legal status, or wrongful deportation. Even if error rates are low, the stakes for affected individuals are high.”

• “It’s dangerous,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) told Semafor in June amid reporting on the combined databases. “When you start combining all those data points on an individual into one database, it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused.”

• Palantir denied at the time that it was “building a master database.”

• The tech outlet Wired separately reported that Palantir participated in efforts with DOGE earlier this year to build a “mega API” at the IRS that could access data from across the agency.

• In September, the Treasury Department announced that it had awarded a contract to Palantir to create a “unified API layer.” It’s unclear whether this contract is related to the previous efforts.

• Wyden said he’s still not convinced Palantir is a trusted contractor.

  “Palantir is one of the companies making a lot of money out of this,” he told The Hill. “There’re privacy problems with what they’re doing. There’s a lack of transparency. There’s questions about the rule of law. I mean, this has been a great, as I call it, a great harvest for these kind of technology operations and virtually no accountability.”

• “The concern out there will always be: If you had the wrong people in government, are there protections to make sure that privacy is protected?” Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who co-chaired his chamber’s AI caucus last Congress, told Semafor. “And that’s a fair question to have.”

• One House Republican aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, put it far more bluntly: “This is the first time in a while I’ve thought, ‘Oh boy, this is really bad.’”

  “These guys are freaks with no sense of humor and a very disturbing sense of morality — and now they have all the data,” the aide said of Palantir. “Someone should do something.”

• “All I’ve seen is what’s in social media — and it sounds bad,” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who played a lead role in last year’s surveillance fight, said of Palantir. “I’m concerned.”

• “The Republicans that are essentially part of the anti-PATRIOT Act, anti-surveillance state, pro- ‘get a warrant’ side kind of collectively share a concern about where this is headed,” Davidson said.

• That includes Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who told Semafor that she has “a lot of questions” about Palantir’s work inside the Trump administration.

  “I’m big on sharing data — but for the right purposes, and as long as we’re protecting people’s privacy,” Mace said.

• Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., told Semafor that “Americans should be extremely alarmed that the Trump administration is creating a central government database with our sensitive financial, health, and personal information.”

• “A database like this can be easily abused by this or any president, and put Americans at risk of a massive data breach,” DelBene added.

With all that said, here is why we are talking about this today:

Everything about this company is an obvious conflict of interest, but that didn’t stop Donald Trump from investing millions into it.

In reporting early on in the Palantir talk there was even scrutiny about Stephen Miller owning hundreds of thousands in Palantir stock, and the response then was “Mr. Miller had divested from his holdings so as not to have an issue with Officer of Government Ethics.”

Both White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and his senior policy adviser Kara Frederick own tens of thousands of dollars in Palantir stock.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that Miller “fully divested from stock holdings early in the administration in coordination with the Office of Government Ethics and the timeline guidance they provided,” adding that “there are no conflicts of interest.”

Fellow Substacker put me onto this, and I quoted her extensively. She was the head of the department in the White House overseeing pardon requests. She told her harrowing story of believing everything was going to be okay after the new administration took over only to find her department hollowed out and used as a way to sell pardons to the highest bidder.

Here’s the CATO Institute on that:

First: Biden’s pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in financial penalties (fines, restitution, and forfeitures) owed to victims or the government. In contrast, Liz Oyer, the former lead pardon attorney of the United States, has calculated that Trump’s second-term pardons have forgiven criminal debts of more than $1.5 billion. This staggering sum—composed of money owed to crime victims and to government treasuries—has been zeroed out by presidential edict.

Trump’s pardon pen was a boon to ex-criminals like Trevor Milton (who no longer must repay the investors he defrauded $660 million) and Lawrence Duran (who no longer must repay the government he defrauded $87 million). It was also a boon to HDR Global Trading Ltd., which owed the nation a $100 million fine; in this case, Trump also made history by granting the nation’s very first pardon to a corporation.

Second: Trump has normalized the pardoning of disgraced politicians, such as former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez (who orchestrated a spree of state-sponsored drug trafficking leading to a 45-year prison term), Nevada legislator Michele Fiore (who embezzled $70,000 out of a police memorial fund for personal expenses like rent and plastic surgery), Virginia sheriff Scott Jenkins (who handed out badges to untrained businessmen in exchange for $75,000 in bribes), and Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada (who defrauded state government with a fake-payee kickback scheme). Perhaps I should disclose my proximity to one such pardon recipient, Arkansas legislator Jeremy Hutchinson (who traded official acts for bribes, embezzled from campaign funds, and filed false tax returns); Hutchinson’s tenure in the state Senate, which ended with simultaneous indictments in three federal districts, began when he defeated me in a Republican primary.

Third: Trump’s pardons are beginning to undermine the contemporaneous work of his own Department of Justice. Alina Habba, Trump’s own US attorney in New Jersey, announced Joseph Schwartz’s three-year sentence for $38 million in tax fraud in April; Trump pardoned him seven months later. Real estate developer Timothy Leiweke was charged earlier this year with conspiring to rig the bidding process for a Texas sports arena; Trump pardoned him in December. Federal investigators and prosecutors must find such pardons demoralizing and self-negating.

Fourth: Several features of Trump’s pardons set off alarm bells for self-corruption—either of the president or of his associates. For instance, the ordinary vetting procedures of the Office of the Pardon Attorney have often been sidestepped. Formality in pardon deliberation is desirable because it immunizes the president from the appearance of pay-to-play; the absence of such formality makes it plausible that a multitude of recent pardons are transactional. Trump pardoned Paul Walczak (who evaded millions of dollars in taxes) after Walczak’s mother raised millions of dollars for MAGA candidates and paid a million dollars to dine with the president at Mar-a-Lago. Trevor Milton—the securities fraudster mentioned above—donated $1.8 million to Trump’s campaign before a presidential pardon wiped out all $660 million of his restitution obligations. (That is, if nothing else, an impressive ROI.)

Before Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao—who headed the cryptocurrency exchange Binance while it fostered more than 1.5 million illegal virtual trades as well as prohibited transactions to Al Qaeda, Isis, and Hamas—Zhao had brokered a $2 billion investment in Eric and Donald Trump. Jr.’s cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial. (When asked about Zhao in a subsequent 60 Minutes interview, Trump explained, “I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration.”

Another Trump pardon recently immunized Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar (D) and his wife from prosecution for receipt of bribes. Trump evidently hoped Cuellar would return the favor by switching parties to the GOP; when that didn’t happen, the president released an angry statement on Truth Social, criticizing Cuellar for “Such a lack of LOYALTY, something that Texas Voters, and Henry’s daughters, will not like. Oh’ well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!” Previous presidents would surely take offense at the suggestion that a pardon could be traded for something of value; Trump took offense apparently because Cuellar didn’t hold up his end of the trade.

Fifth: Here is another occasion for alarm bells: Donald Trump has increasingly focused on providing pardons to his campaign supporters who stretched or broke the law, such as John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis. (As the president’s pardon attorney, Ed Martin, famously explained on X, “No MAGA left behind.”) Indeed, Trump apparently views the exercise of his pardon authority to forgive federal crimes as insufficient; Trump’s inability to eliminate state-level convictions has apparently led him to pressure state government officials to pardon state-level offenses related to the 2020 elections.

And John Kiriakou on Democracy Now!:

Here it is on page 25 of the 70 page court filing against Giuliani in Federal court in 2023 (crazy how we heard so little of this)Courtesy of the Internet Archive:

He also asked Ms. Dunphy if she knew anyone in need of a pardon, telling her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split. He told Ms. Dunphy that she could refer individuals seeking pardons to him, so long as they did not go through “the normal channels” of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, because correspondence going to that office would be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act

---

Oyer:

One of Trump’s biggest buys was millions of dollars in Nvidia stock. Nvidia makes advanced AI chips, which they have been trying to sell to China for years. The U.S. government has restricted the sale of these chips to protect our national security. But Nvidia’s CEO lobbied Trump for months to change that policy, and in December, Trump agreed—raising alarm among foreign policy and security experts.

Then Trump went a step further. This week, he took Nvidia’s CEO to China with him—on Air Force One—to sell their AI chips to the Chinese government. During the trip, the U.S. government for the first time cleared 10 Chinese companies to purchase the chips. Nvidia’s stock price has now climbed 26% since January, and 70% over the last 12 months.

And there are 14 more entries in the disclosure, just like all the others.

After the recent reporting of the Epstein cover up in the Times, and reporting that there may have been an actual recording because people in the administration said some of the quotes were so close to the actual thing they were afraid to deny it, it seems not at all conspiratorial to say, this disclosure was held back until this big “UFC on the White House lawn” thing was taking up the bad headlines and the Iran peace deal was covering the good, leaving no room to talk about the hundreds of millions he spent on practically every industry that he’s had his hands on enriching. And these are just the big stand out examples.

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There is 3600 entries. It looks like in one section he is buying up millions of Vanguard stock and then reselling it for 3 times it’s worth, but in Vanguard’s “money overseas” venture and if that’s not the method for using Vanguard’s service to stash his presidential riches in offshore accounts I don’t know what is.

Whatever all of this shit is, it’s not legal. This guy is breaking so many laws in such a blatant way, there is no way he thinks he’s gonna walk away from this presidency. I called the people who said this before hysterical, but seeing all this, I am starting to think they are correct.

Either he doesn’t plan on ever leaving office, his hubris has led him to believe he’ll never face accountability, or someone over there has calculated that the other side would never go after him for these crimes, no matter how blatant, because they commit the same crimes—not so ballsy, much less subtle—and if they were to send investigators going down these financial rabbit holes they’re risking being caught themselves? Who knows.

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Benjamin Netanyahu, a years after assassinating his rival Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin

"The United States has given Israel—how can I tell it to this body? The United States has given Israel, apart from political and military support, munificent and magnificent assistance in the economic sphere. With America's help, Israel has grown to be a powerful, modern state." He told his audience, "I know that I speak for every Israeli and every Jew throughout the world when I say to you today, Thank you, people of America.'"

The Israel Lobby:

And they’ve cost us:

As a 4th District Kentuckian this is a dark moment in American life.

Gas prices are bubbling from day to day between $4 to $5 dollars a gallon. The great battery factory that was supposed to provide lots of well-paid jobs has turned out to be a data center, these data centers threaten to take everything from us. I thought about this the day of the election last week, as I stood in my factory job, hopefully one day I’ll be able to move along from, but in the near future there might not be enough energy to provide my work with power while still powering these data centers. It’s a good thing we’ve got someone standing up for us…..

As of this moment we have lost the only representation that wasn't a fucking monster who would sell out their constituent for tickets to Six Flags or anything else for that matter. This was at the behest of the president who has been bought
As a 4th District Kentuckian this is a dark moment in American life.

As of this moment we have lost the only representation that wasn't a fucking monster who would sell out their constituent for tickets to Six Flags or anything else for that matter. This was at the behest of the president who has been bought and sold by the lobby who we are currently fighting a war with. A war nobody asked for. A country who could care less who represents us, as Americans, and a President who cares very little for the American people.

I’m talking, of course, about Thomas Massie, the Israel Lobby, and President Donald Trump.

I’ve listened to more disingenuous attack ads against Massie than I’ve ever heard coming out of the general election. I get so mad I’m yelling at the screen and then I’m overcome with resolve when I think, “no one would actually buy this horse shit. Our voters voted him in, they wouldn’t fall some unprincipled swine, put up by a foreign lobby who refuses to appear in public, making easily disprovable claims, they’ll never fall for this.” Then I march back downstairs and continue my reading.

So, I am not really sure how—since all opponent Gallrein’s supporters are wheelchair bound—but, the youth lost to a deep state composite of a person and he is who is representing the largest block here in Kentucky.

Honestly, I just don’t get who showed up to vote for this guy. I barely made it and everyone at the polls was a Massie voter, at least that I could tell. I asked a couple people but was dirty from work since I went straight to the polls from there. I didn’t see any Fox News people, by that I mean senior citizens.

The thing is this was a primary vote. I had to register as a Republican to even vote in it, which means Independents, which most people are nowadays, I am, I registered as a Republican just for this vote. The people voting for the primary were those who were, obviously, “Donald Trump” voters. They know nothing except what the television and tells them.

These fools created an AI video that didn't look real believable to me, but obviously convinced someone, that showed Thomas Massie checking into a hotel with AOC and Ilhan Omar.

It’s easy to see who the liars and the truth-tellers are. Below I’ve included Thomas Massie’s concession speech and it is everything. He is the happy warrior that American’s deserve. And believe this, he will be back.

But until he is, let’s talk about that funding. Politico did a breakdown on the funding put in place to by Donald Trump to take Massie out.

As of 7/31/2025

GOP megadonor Paul Singer was the largest donor to a super PAC seeking to oust Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) last month, according to a filing submitted to the Federal Election Commission on Thursday.

The group, MAGA KY, raised $2 million between its launch in late June and the end of the month:

• $1 million from Singer

• $250,000 from hedge fund manager John Paulson

• $750,000 from Preserve America PAC, a super PAC tied to Miriam Adelson that backed President Donald Trump last year

Trump allies launched the super PAC last month after Massie voted against Trump’s signature “Big, Beautiful Bill.” The Kentucky lawmaker has also criticized the president on a range of other issues including war powers and the Epstein files. MAGA KY has spent $1.2 million so far on ads opposing Massie, according to AdImpact, as the group aims to take him out in next year’s primary.

Paul Singer was also lobbying for the war on Venezuela, where he has investments, which Massie+Rand Paul were against.

In the Kentucky 4th Congressional District Republican primary, incumbent Representative Thomas Massie was defeated by challenger Ed Gallrein. According to commercial ad-tracking data from AdImpact and subsequent campaign finance reviews, total spending in the race reached between $32 million and $35 million, officially marking it as the most expensive U.S. House primary in history.

A significant portion of the capital deployed against Massie came directly from pro-Israel political action committees and mega-donors targeting his record on foreign aid and non-interventionism. Below is the breakdown of the primary Israel lobby PACs and aligned funding structures involved in the race:

Principal PACs and Funding Breakdown

• United Democracy Project (UDP): The flagship super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent over $4.1 million directly on the race to unseat Massie (Anadolu Agency). Alternative baseline tracking reports from media outlets recorded direct UDP-affiliated independent expenditures at a minimum of $2.6 million (Times of Israel).

• RJC Victory Fund: The super PAC arm of the Republican Jewish Coalition heavily saturated the district’s media market, with expenditure tracking showing outlays of $3.9 million (Anadolu Agency) to $5 million (Times of Israel) allocated to anti-Massie advertisements.

• MAGA KY PAC: Though structurally organized as a pro-Trump super PAC rather than an explicit single-issue foreign policy committee, this entity injected over $7 million into anti-Massie campaigns (Anadolu Agency). Federal disclosures show the PAC was primarily financed by a network of billionaire mega-donors who double as prominent pro-Israel financiers, specifically Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and John Paulson (Financial Times).

Cumulative Spending Metrics

• Direct Core Lobby Spending: Independent expenditures originating directly from explicitly branded pro-Israel committees (such as UDP and the RJC Victory Fund) totaled more than $9 million (Al-Monitor).

• Aggregated Aligned Spending: When integrating cross-organizational tracking data—which encompasses both direct PAC outlays and individual billionaire donor money routed through allied hybrid committees like MAGA KY—the total pro-Israel financial footprint backing Ed Gallrein’s candidacy is estimated at $15.5 million (Anadolu Agency).

Here is the analysis as of the night of the Primary from Blake Maisley of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft an excellent source of information, free of propaganda:

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) lost his bid for re-election to primary opponent Ed Gallrein 54% to 45% with nearly all votes counted on Tuesday night.

Massie’s defeat will no doubt be seen as a triumph of both the continued durability of pro-Israel forces in the party, as well as the president’s own ability to dictate outcomes in intra-party races. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who voted to impeach Donald Trump during his first term, lost his primary election over the weekend against a Trump-endorsed candidate.

Massie, who had served seven terms representing his state, is a fiscal conservative and libertarian. He had emerged during Trump’s first term as a rare Republican who stood up to the president, notably opposing Trump on his massive $2.2 trillion COVID spending bill. More recently he proposed and helped to pass a law in November opening the Epstein files, and then supported a series of war powers votes as a major critic of Trump’s war on Iran. Massie has also opposed bills that would provide aid to Israel for its own wars.

This drew Trump’s ire. The president called the Kentucky incumbent “Worst Congressman in the History of our Country,” in a series of social media posts hours before the primary. Trump has also called him a “moron,” “bum,” “obstructionist,” and a “fool.”

The race also attracted the attention of the Republican Jewish Coalition and the pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). PACs associated with both, with multi-million dollar contributions from powerful pro-Israel GOP donors Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and John Paulson, helped it to become the most expensive primary election in the U.S. history. The two other most expensive primaries (in 2024) also featured AIPAC-backed candidates defeating incumbents (both Democrats) who were deemed to be too anti-Israel.

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AIPAC praised Gallrein on Tuesday after the race was called. “Pro-Israel Americans are proud to back candidates who support a strong [U.S.-Israel] alliance and help defeat those who work to undermine it,” they wrote on X. “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!” The group’s super PAC had called Massie “the most anti-Israel Republican in the House.”

In his concession speech, Massie poked fun at the relationship, saying that he would have conceded earlier, “but I had to call my opponent (...) and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

In the lead-up to Tuesday’s voting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth campaigned for Gallrein, saying that he would “vote with [Trump] when it matters the most,” unlike Massie, who had, in the secretary’s words “acted like his job is to stand apart from the movement that President Trump leads.”

Massie’s friend and colleague, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who worked together to pass that aforementioned Epstein files law, was quick to comment on his loss.

On Monday in Responsible Statecraft, Jack Hunter laid out the stakes of Massie’s election. “Can Kentuckians trust that Washington is working in their best interest, or in the case of so many different lobbies in town, is it only serving those with more money, more influence?” Hunter wrote. “Tuesday’s race may not decisively answer that question but it is clear that this one issue, specifically AIPACs role in U.S. elections, has been thoroughly aired and vigorously debated in Kentucky’s 4th District.”

That in the video above is the reason Massie was targeted. Plain and simple. The Israel lobby, especially when combined with the administration of the most powerful government in the world have tentacles so far reaching. Thank God we’re only facing a loss, not an assassination.

Here is President Jimmy Carter, on the lobby in 2006:

The most expensive congressional primary in history.

They had Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, campaigning for Gallrein, while the United States is at war. This is where we must find the optimism.

They, as stated by Massie, tried to by his vote for 14 years, they couldn’t, so they bought the seat and it got damn expensive. He’s one man in our little district. It is the largest in Kentucky, but let’s be honest, it ain’t Los Angeles.

And who knows, maybe he can do more from the sidelines, maybe we got a new contender for president.

I know I’ll never find myself on the same side as or or any of these other losers who will blindly follow the loudest guy in the room off of any cliff. The Republican Party is doomed to die in the dustbin of history, just like the corpse who just released their autopsy.

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The government has always needed the people, brainwashed and obeying, to carry out their evil deeds. Some people are raised up to have no morality problems when it comes to carpet-bombing villages like they did to the citizens in Indo-China and Laos or turning asphalt into liquid molten lava and sucking the oxygen out of the air from so many bombs being dropped at the same time, like in Dresden, Germany when the allied forces (the “good guys”) took out the Nazi regime.

Some people are Oliver North or Henry Kissinger on these issues and some are . The government wants us all to be Kissinger, or , “Bill”, , or Ben Shapiro. The government wants us to be accountable to them, but the constitution wants us to be accountable to our own morality.

This is why we start school so young and stay there longer than most murderers and all pedophiles stay in prison. Memorizing facts instead of learning to think critically, in what’s known as the “Prussian Model” for schooling, the last time the people were against war:

The Prussian model of education wasn’t designed to create critical thinkers; it wasn’t even designed for kids. Prussian leaders built it to produce disciplined, obedient soldiers who would follow orders without question.

This was in response to the military weaknesses exposed by Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon. The defeat revealed shortcomings not only in military tactics but also in the population’s readiness and loyalty. This led Prussian leaders to recognize the need for a more unified, reliable, and well-trained citizenry that could support the state’s military and political objectives.

This shift in control allowed the state to decide what children learned and, more importantly, how they learned to think — or rather, not to think. In Prussia, schooling was a tool for control, shaping young people into compliant subjects who wouldn’t question authority or run tail in the face of a canon.

Horace Mann, an American reformer, visited Prussia and saw potential in the Prussian model as a way to bring order and predictability to a young and rapidly changing country. By the 1830s, more than 80% of children in Prussia were attending state-run schools.

Mann took these ideas back to America, convinced that the Prussian approach was the answer to creating good, orderly citizens. By adopting the Prussian model, we began to trade our local autonomy for a one-size-fits-all system and not one that supports our form of government. Republics require a knowledgeable and engaged citizenry capable of thinking critically about their society and their government rather than obedient soldiers.

Under the influence of Mann and other like-minded reformers, America’s educational system began to take on the shape of a factory conveyor belt. Children were sorted by age, taught the same subjects in the same ways, and evaluated based on standardized assessments. This system no longer fit the diverse needs of different communities; it became an assembly line creating predictability and uniformity across the board.

As standardized schooling spread across the United States, our education system gradually lost its local, personalized touch. We moved further away from the early ideals that had shaped education in the colonies. Instead, American schools became an extension of the state, focused on compliance and uniformity.

With the educational implementation of the populace of brainwashed prisoners who cannot think for themselves , who, when confronted by pushback, do what they’ve been taught to do spout memorized propaganda and talking points as fact, “America’s the greatest country in the world.” “Most powerful country.” “Israel is: Only democracy in the Middle East; America’s greatest ally;”

“Based around freedom, liberty, and the constitution.”

The propaganda goes on and on…

The Vietnam war led to the fracturing of the American psyche as a whole followed by full-scale retreat leaving the American empire terminally ill. After all, how can you have a global empire if you’re not willing to defend it? The point was to… NOT.

Post-1975: Americans had written off war wholesale. The White House and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), or the Pentagon, the “Spy Services” (CIA, NSA, FBI, etc.), any of these relative structures of death & decay, there, not to “preserve” life, but to destroy it. There was lots of talk behind the scenes of the troubles of dealing with a populace with “Vietnam Syndrome.” They needed us willing to die in for our country at the drop of a hat. Otherwise, when they act like gangsters, as American leaders often do, who would enforce it att= the barrel of a gun?

US intelligence helped Saddam's Ba`ath Party seize power for the first time in 1963. Evidence suggests that Saddam was on the CIA payroll as early as 1959, when he participated in a failed assassination attempt against Iraqi strongman Abd al-Karim Qassem. In the 1980s, the US and Britain backed Saddam in the war against Iran, giving Iraq arms, money, satellite intelligence, and even chemical & bio-weapon precursors. As many as 90 US military advisors supported Iraqi forces and helped pick targets for Iraqi air and missile attacks.

The killing in the of the U.S. didn’t stop after Saigon fell, what did was American morale towards the entire institution of militarism, and war making, what continued just that, the systematic destruction, economically or actually, of anyone not sufficiently willing to play ball with American interests.

This would lead to a constant stream of “blowback terrorism” like the American hostages in ‘79 to ‘80, the Barracks bombing in Beirut, 1983, claiming over two hundred American lives, and eventually 9/11, when we trained, armed and funded future al-Qaeda members, at this time known only as the Mujahideen, Arab rebels against the atheistic Soviet Communist-backed government who had taken power in Afghanistan, including one Saudi businessman/Sunni Muslim extremist AKA Usama Bin Laden.

Then came Iraq War I. A pre-planned attack on American ally Saddam Hussein, they would make Desert Storm the “opposite of Vietnam” With a win that came so easily this would be the propaganda that would lead give the “Okay” for the whims & woes of American foreign policy of the next 30 years beginning with military operations all through the 90’s leading to 9/11 and subsequently the Global War on Terror, where we would suffer devastating loss, and a new “syndrome” which could only be healed by a new Desert Storm-like win, in Venezuela, or so they thought.

Our spirits were broken after Vietnam.

The public was “done” with war, but the elites don’t change their policy when an obstacle appears. Instead, they’ll simply change the public.

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Infrastructure for Consent

According to reporter Arnold Isaacs, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft believed that since the United States’ defeat in the Vietnam War, a “paralysis” had crippled American national security policymakers and U.S. troops would only be sent into harm’s way under the most idealized conditions.

As a defense of John McCain and every other corporate news outlet who refused to publish Sydney Schanberg’s John McCain-P.O.W. cover-up scandal after Vietnam “most Americans chose to tuck-tail and run away from the entire Vietnam situation as hard and as fast as possible, with zero consideration of the lessons that should have came from the first military loss faced by the United States,” but no one took heed, making the soon-to-be implemented strategy of overcoming our broken spirit from the pandemic of “Vietnam War Syndrome (VWS)” so damn easy to sell us we were unaware we were even the customer in this transaction.

In 1991, the American public was still reeling from “Vietnam Syndrome”—a deep-seated skepticism of foreign military intervention. Memories of the Iranian hostage crisis and the failed rescue attempt at Desert One were fresh and humiliating.

While Operation URGENT FURY—the invasion of Grenada in 1983—was presented as a show of force, it did little to truly cure this scourge of the security state. It was actually the decisive victory of Desert Storm in 1991 that finally provided the psychological permission for future American foreign policy and effectively killed the “ghost of Saigon.”

The mission was mounted in haste, ostensibly to rescue American medical students. In reality, it was a “coup de main”—a surprise attack with overwhelming force designed to achieve a quick, decisive victory. It took exactly nine days to eliminate the “threat” and restore a popular government.

Although not the cure, it would be something like pre-op medications to prepare for a major procedure, see, without the easy “win” in the Caribbean, the American public never would have bought the “New World Order” pitch for Iraq.

Penicillin For the New “Afghan Syndrome”: Why Venezuela?

After Operation Epic (Epstein) Fury, and listening these psychopaths describing the current Iran excursion, I couldn’t help but wonder “Why Venezuela?” if the real target is Iran.

The answer is that Venezuela was never about the oil—it was about the momentum.

Trump’s decision to attack Iran was gut-driven, like everything else he does, but that gut was filled with the confidence of previous easy victories. Specifically, the “hasty seizure of the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro (AND HIS WIFE-MIGHT I ADD) in January,” an operation where “no American lives were lost”.

Venezuela was the modern “Grenada.” It was a bloodless, ostensibly, televised victory used to convince the president and the public that the next operation would be just as “quick and decisive”. When intelligence officials warned that the plan to topple the Ayatollah was “detached from reality” or “farcical,” Trump pointed to Venezuela.

He believed it would be easy “because it always is”.

Sold and organized as the anti-Vietnam, it had the opposite of all the perceived negatives of the Vietnam War, it went on in infamy to be one of the two most bloody, pointless, and fraudulent military excursions America ever embarked on, as of today. Will Iran take third place?:

A decade later, after the U.S. military smashed Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait in the First Gulf

War, George H.W. Bush exulted that the country had finally “kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once

and for all.” As it turned out, despite the organization of massive “victory parades” at home to prove

that this hadn’t been Vietnam redux, that war kicked back. Another decade passed and there was H.W.’s son W. and his advisors planning the invasion of Iraq through a haze of Vietnam-constrained obsessions.

W.’s top officials and the Pentagon would actually organize the public relations aspect of that invasion and the occupation that followed as a Vietnam “opposite’s” game — no “body counts” to turn off the public, plenty of embedded reporters so that journalists couldn’t roam free and (as in Vietnam) harm the war effort, and so on. The one thing they weren’t going to do was lose another war the way Vietnam had been lost.

Boy, were they wrong!

Yet they managed once again to bog the U.S. military down in disaster on the Eurasian mainland, could barely manage to win a heart or a mind, and even began issuing body counts of the enemy dead.

“We don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks, Afghan War commander, had insisted in 2001, and as late as November 2006, the president was still expressing his irritation about Iraq to a group of conservative news columnists this way: “We don’t get to say that — a thousand of the enemy killed or whatever the number was. It’s happening. You just don’t know it.” The problem, he explained, was: “We have made a conscious effort not to be a body count team” (à laVietnam). And then, of course, those body counts began appearing.

Somehow, over the endless years, no matter what any American president tried, The War —that war— and its doppelganger of a syndrome, a symbol of defeatso deep and puzzling Americans could never bear to fully take it in, refused to depart town.

They were the ghosts on the battlements of American life, representing — despite the application of firepower of a historic nature — a defeat by a small Asian peasant land so unexpected that it simply couldn’t be shaken, nor its“lessons” learned.

Just like the Gulf War was there to ease “Vietnam Syndrome”, a new ill had come to pass post-Global War on Terror campaigns known as “Afghan Syndrome” which needed its own dose of antibiotics.

That was “why Venezuela?”

From “Dumb McNamara” to the Current Stalemate

The tragedy is that this trick only works if the next target is just as small.

Iran is not Iraq. It is not even Venezuela in January. .

We are now witnessing the return of the “McNamara” era of war management. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, has been mocked as “Dumb McNamara” for lobbing statistics at reporters like hand grenades—”Over 10,000 enemy targets destroyed,” he crows, while the war remains a bloody, expensive stalemate.

Just like in Vietnam, the Pentagon bombards the public with statistics to hide a “horrible failure”. And just like in Vietnam, the state is now dealing with a populace that is “done” with the “immorality, bigotry, and economic cost” of endless war.

The “bitter fruit” of these policies is a moment where the U.S. has lost its leverage. Because we used Venezuela as a “switchboard” to signal our toughness, we are now trapped in a war of choice in Iran that has given Tehran a “death grip” on the global economy. We can “blockade the blockade” all we want, and Trump can pontificate about “America having our own oil” until he’s blue in the face, but the truth is right there in our faces every time we go anywhere and have to refuel, over and over and over again, Why Mr. Trump, if we don’t need the Strait of Hormuz, why has gas risen $1.50/gallon since March 1st? Right. He’s either stupid or a liar. We all know which one…Both.

The “Vietnam Syndrome” isn’t a disease. It’s the immune system of a democracy. And Venezuela was the immunosuppressant that let the current disaster in.

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By using terms such as “minor-attracted people” to reclassify actual pedophiles as a protected class, pushing LGBTQ pride events where men and and woman celebrate with their genitals out, and push drag queen

The right, however, are a basket of deplorables, who want women remanded to the kitchen, a repeal of the 19th amendment, a reinstatement of Jim Crow, immigrant children locked in cages, and the destruction of institutions like NATO, the federal workforce, the IRS, Social Security, and want 24/7 surveillance on every woman's uterus by a complete national ban on abortion, regardless of the circumstances, says MSNBC, partisan Democrats, politicians,

The “radical-left lunatics want to destroy our country, in fact, we won’t have a country left” through policies of “endless war, diversity-equity-and-inclusion taking agency away from minorities and stripping away merit-based programs” said President-elect Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

“Leftists who are proxies of Hamas and Iran are attacking Jewish students in new age pograms on Ivy League campuses and putting 10 year old’s on hormone blockers who are unsure what gender they were born of,” says Benjamin Netanyahu and Fox News pundits.

Far-right fascists want to take us back to before women and minorities could vote, when Jim Crow laws was the law of the land, says Rachel Maddow.

They want to take away abortion because they want control of your uterus

They’re anti semites whose isolationist policies would usher in the next Hitler if given the chance, says MSNBC, and other left wing pundits

The left supports transing kids and an opened border that lets in millions of people that deflate our wages says Fox news and other right wing pundits.

The right supports locking kids in cages, forever wars, and firing civil servants, that’s what they really mean by the deep state.

These are all forever arguments going back and forth painting each other with the worst brush possible based on the minority view of a few uninformed partisans. They even say that this is what they are doing, here’s Christopher Rufo:

CR: “Look I think you need to remind the American people just how radicalized the left has become over the last 5 years, a lot of these politicians are now pretending to walk away from their most extreme positions, like defund the police race based reparations transgender everything, but the fact is that once they get in office they might try to hide it for the campaign, that's exactly what they're going to try to push as public policy, and so I think we have to remind people the radical core of the left has not changed, in all these years.

Highlight the positive things the president's done and then polarize public opinion against Democrats by tying them to their least popular position.

That last line is exactly the type of thing that’s being done on both sides.

The idea is to paint the left and the right with the most destructive brush so that when election time comes it’s an easy decision who you vote for: Who do you get your news from?

But the things that are actually destructive are pushed to the wayside or completely ignored at all, why? Because they are the things the corporate left and right actively collaborate on to destroy the lives of the lower half of America.

If you ask Americans what they care about we are not really all that far apart, however, we are painted as extremists. The most extreme takes on geopolitics is “we should not be funding and waging wars overseas,” this is the most destructive brush they paint us with, the “isolationist” that wants us to allow dictators to murder their own citizens, but in every situation that I can think of the people of that country were better off without the intervention of our military, sanctions, and aid that comes with a string attached to it, being ownership of resources by American business ventures.

We take a false premise of human rights abuses, apply sanctions cutting off resources from the outside to come in, use nearby and sometimes inside military bases to enforce these sanctions, allow government-funded non-government organizations to provide relief for the sanctions applied on the government, fund and train opposition groups to oppose the government, and backup these forces with military air power, topple governments putting the opposition in power who are in most cases much worse than the government who was there in the first place. See Operation Timber Sycamore, or Operation Ajax, where the CIA and State Department overthrew the government of Iran in 1953, only to find out he was worse than the government they had and overthrow that government 10 years later, who was then overthrown by the Ayatollah in 1979 during the Iranian revolution, and the Iran-Iraq war, a war we initially took Saddam’s side in but would eventually fund both sides of the war. What started all of this? The government of Iran made the dire choice to nationalize the countries oil to benefit the Iranian public instead of allowing it to be stolen by Western corporation's. The same reason we are currently framing Venezuelan leader and his wife Nicholas Maduro with being members of a fake cartel, created by the CIA.

Timber Sycamore in Syria (The following is the Abstract to a report on this operation for the Irregular Warfare Initiative):

The Central Intelligence Agency ran a covert operation in Syria from 2012 to 2017 called Timber Sycamore. This qualitative case study employs content analysis and descriptive inference to analyze declassified documents, government records, and other primary sources surrounding this shadowy case. This study finds that the operation suffered from numerous challenges stemming from oversight shortfalls, limited vetting, and accountability problems. Some weapons disbursed under the program were diverted to groups like the Islamic State, while certain groups trained in the program subscribed to the very Salafi-jihadist ideologies that U.S. forces were deployed to the Middle East to counter. This case offers lessons on complications that Title 50 and Title 10 programs pose while training, equipping, and controlling irregular forces beyond the contours of ordinary security cooperation programs.

This operation, based on a premise of a creation of “Creative Chaos”, although ended in 2017, would create a domino effect eventually causing the fall of Syria to former commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which was first formed as an affiliate of al-Qaeda, and had been widely designated as a terrorist organization Mohamed Al-Jolani, now known as Ahmed al-Sharaa, the massacre of Kurdish and Syrian Christians to say the least and the full-on “ruin of Syria with no plans to rebuild.”

If you disagree with your tax dollars being spent on any of this you’ll be painted as a “radical leftist” dove who doesn’t know what they’re talking about or a “radical rightwing isolationist” who doesn’t care about human rights.

On the subject of “Human Rights” what if you are one of the many Americans who believe healthcare is a human right. To this you are called naive, dumb, or even lazy, but ask those same people this, “How many countries that we are providing with aid of one kind or another are able to provide health insurance to their population?”

According to Gemini, a shit ton, yet, how many reading this understand that a health crisis could mean bankruptcy? A loss of everything you’ve worked for and the rest of your life unable to take care of yourself?

Regardless of how pundits and politicians on the left and the right treat us we all want the same things.

Security, Health, and another day to spend with those we love. The people who want more are sociopaths. If power is somewhere in your list of necessities you are a sociopath. Sure, we’d all love to be rich, but a wiseman once said, “enough money that I can sit down in a restaurant and order without worrying about the price is the most you really need, the rest is bullshit.” I’m not there yet, maybe you're not either, but that’s financial success.

What I want, and I think a good majority of us want from our leader's is not to put us in danger, allow us the freedom that the constitution promises and not to misuse the money that we give them to make sure these things happen.

As of yet, not a single administration of my lifetime has been able to follow-through with that, and these pundits painting us all with the brush of far right and far left must know that they are the extremists, not us, they the minority and we are the exhausted majority.

Thank you for reading.

This is Editor-in-Chief

As foretold on Breaking Points really informative broadcast just hours after the president announced his stupidity on the world stage and, gaslit the whole planet, Saagar preceded this with:

“Don’t be annoying, but when people bring it up, try to get into it and really get because the propaganda is going to be unbelievable.”

I know nobody brought it up, but the interweb is burning brighter than the Palisades with many sides being represented. But only one side is the truth, and I’m here to represent that side as quickly as I can. There’s a lot of context to cover, if you feel I fell short on anything, please reach out. I’ll make, and publish the correction, unless of course you’re wrong, then I will provide sources citing why I am right.

(Apologizing for the subject matter, already, what a sad soul you are Jordan.)

There’s nothing more prescient at the moment than informing the public on the who, why, when, and what of the preemptive attack by the “mostly peaceful” tyrants calling the shots in DC, and I have spent every moment I've had to spare obsessively researching, writing, fact checking, getting a grasp on the crime story, that is our government for years now. I've lost touch with friends, a woman I thought I would marry, and at least one job, where I had worked for a decade, in pursuit of understanding how things like this happen. So that I could ascend from the rabbit hole, and report to the commoners what I seen down that hole.

So, when shit hits the fan, if I was to now write about the Winter storm hitting the East this week, well, that would be journalistic malpractice of the highest order. Sorry, Epstein, you’re six feet under already, and since I sat down to write this (the following was added in post) Supreme Leader Khamenei, alongside many of the leadership in Iran, 50+ children and staff at an all girls school in Iran, courtesy of the offense (U.S. or Israel, unsure which), and three American servicemen, (so far) and thousands more at risk.

The Dissident

In The Name of 'Helping Iran', The U.S. And Israel Slaughter Over 100 Iranian Schoolgirls.

During his announcement of the current U.S./Israeli regime change war on Iran , Trump framed the war under the pretext of helping Iranians, saying…

Read more

6 months ago · 67 likes · 20 comments · The Dissident

Charlie got it right, and for that they did him wrong.

Another Day, Another Treasonous Vomit of Lies

The geopolitical equilibrium of the Middle East was fundamentally altered on the late night into early morning, February 28, 2026. President Donald Trump announced the commencement of “Operation Epic Fury,” a large-scale, multi-domain military offensive against the Islamic Republic of Iran. According to the Washington Post, who was the first journalist to make contact with the president post-strike. The early bird bought a belly full of lies, right? I’m believe that's how the line.

“All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump said in a brief phone interview shortly after 4 a.m., when asked what he hopes his legacy will be as a result of the military action and a push for regime change in Iran.

“I want a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have,” the president said, his first reportable remarks after announcing in a 2:30 a.m. video message that the U.S. had launched “major combat operations.”

Iran quickly launched counterstrikes in response to the attack, which the Trump administration named “Operation Epic Fury,” and multiple U.S. military bases were targeted by Iran. Officials have not reported any injuries of American service members. Seven Arab countries and Israel also reported missile attacks.

Trump spoke to The Post from Mar-a-Lago, his home in Palm Beach, Florida, where he arrived Friday night just hours before the military strikes began. Television news played in the background at the time of the call.

Strikes launched parallel to the Israeli Defense Forces’ “Operation Roaring Lion,” the campaign represented the culmination of rapid military buildup in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, characterized by the deployment of what the administration described as a “vast armada”. At approximately 2:30 AM Eastern Time, in an eight-minute video address released via Truth Social, the President detailed the tactical objectives of the mission:

“Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”

“We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally — again — obliterated. We’re going to annihilate their navy,” Trump said.

This announcement coincided with reports of heavy explosions across Tehran, Isfahan, and Karaj, as over 200 fighter aircraft and hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles targeted approximately 500 sites across the Iranian heartland.

The administrative justification for this unprovoked escalation rests on the premise of an “imminent threat” to the American homeland and its regional allies. President Trump characterized the Iranian leadership as a “vicious group of very hard, terrible people” who have waged an “unending campaign of bloodshed” for nearly five decades.

Central to this narrative is the assertion that the regime had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program following the limited strikes of June 2025, known as “Operation Midnight Hammer,” which the administration previously claimed had “obliterated” Tehran’s enrichment capacity. This shift, from limited tactical strikes to a full-scale regime-change war, is another slap in the face to the 73-million Americans, majority low-to-middle working class who trusted this man after seeing how the dark forces around Washington, Langley, and other spook training centers for Lindsey Graham-think-alikes in “Big Intel (The Swamp)” and democratic power parishioners, whose elitism and fake compassion blinds them of the forest AND the trees, had colluded to frame the man for treason, fraud, and other crimes normally reserved for people like them. Those of us who hate authority, and know how the system fucks us all, really started empathize and figured after seeing shoe on the other side foot, maybe he could begin to empathize with them. After all, he did pardon Ross Ulbricht.

More than anything, he became the Republican that real Americans have always hated. The con artist & war hawks, enemies of the people, titans of big oil, pharma, and the military-industrial complex, and this group of corporate RINO’s—as the like to call them—are the neocon’s of a new age, same as the old age, leading the departure from the “Peace through Strength” rhetoric that defined the 2024 campaign, moving instead toward a doctrine of “Epic Fury” designed to force a total collapse of the clerical system.

The Official Casus Belli: Lies, Lies, Lies

The case for war articulated by President Trump and his senior cabinet members involves a synthesis of historical grievances, nuclear non-compliance, and alleged ties to global terrorism.

In his 2:00 AM address, the President provided a detailed, if controversial, account of Iranian “sins,” framing the current military action as a long-overdue response to a variety of provocations. The administration’s argument is built upon several key pillars intended to mobilize public support and justify the bypass of congressional authorization.

The first pillar is the “Imminent Nuclear Breakout” narrative, which is nothing but a copy/paste campaign from the failed Iraqi invasion that Donald. Despite the 2025 “Midnight Hammer” strikes, the administration claims that Iran continued to enrich uranium to 60% purity, positioning itself just “weeks away” from a functional nuclear device.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that Tehran was utilizing underground tunnel complexes in Isfahan to hide enriched material from IAEA inspectors, rendering further diplomacy “legally untenable”.

The second pillar involves the “Mass Terror” claim, which holds Iran responsible for a litany of historic attacks, including the 1979 hostage crisis, the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing, and the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel by Hamas. The administration asserts that 46 Americans were killed and 12 taken hostage during the October 7 events, for which Iran serves as the primary “state sponsor”.

Perhaps the most significant claim is the “Bin Laden Proxy” assertion. President Trump explicitly stated that Iran was “probably involved” in the al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in 2000 and has historically served as a critical support network for Sunni extremist groups, including Osama bin Laden. This narrative seeks to blur the lines between the Shia clerical regime in Tehran and Sunni Salafist terror networks, framing the conflict as a definitive strike against the heart of global jihadism.

Finally, the administration cited the “Massacre of Protesters” as a humanitarian mandate for regime change, alleging that the Iranian government murdered “tens of thousands” of its own citizens during economic protests in late 2025 and early 2026. By portraying the Iranian people as “oppressed” and “asking for America’s help,” the President has positioned the United States as the liberator in a mission of “freedom”, but let's avoid amnesia and stay in reality. Remember how Iraq would “greet us as liberators?” Turns out, not so much.

The Sectarian Paradox: Dissecting the Sunni-Shia Divide and the Proxy Myth

The administration’s claim that Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden functioned as proxies of Iran faces substantial theological and historical scrutiny. The fundamental schism in Islam, which dates to the 7th century, is centered on the legitimate succession of the Prophet Muhammad, with Sunnis following a consensus-based model and Shias adhering to the bloodline of Ali ibn Abi Talib. Al-Qaeda, an organization rooted in the most austere forms of Sunni Wahhabism, views Shia Muslims as “apostates” (takfiris) who have corrupted the faith. The Iranian regime, a Shia theocracy governed by the “Guardianship of the Jurist” (Velayat-e Faqih), represents the ideological antithesis of the Al-Qaeda caliphate.

While some transactional cooperation occurred in the 1990s—facilitated by Hasan al-Turabi in Sudan to target common Western enemies—this relationship was never a “proxy” arrangement.

Experts note that Al-Qaeda and Iran have spent much of the 21st century in a state of mutual hostility, particularly during the Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, where Iranian-backed militias and IRGC forces were the primary ground combatants against Al-Qaeda affiliates and later ISIS. The administration’s attempt to link Iran to the USS Cole bombing and Bin Laden’s broader network overlooks the reality that Al-Qaeda’s ideology mandates the destruction of the “Rafidah” (a pejorative for Shias) alongside the “crusaders”. This conflation is viewed by critics like and as a calculated piece of propaganda designed to trigger the legal and emotional mechanisms of the Global War on Terror to justify a war against a sovereign state.

The 2024 Election Narrative: From “Peace Candidate” to Wartime Escalation

The current state of war represents a dramatic reversal of the “Peace Candidate” messaging that defined Donald Trump’s successful 2024 presidential campaign. Throughout the election cycle, the Trump-Vance ticket, supported by figures like Steve Bannon and RFK Jr., argued that the Biden administration was leading the country into “unnecessary and endless wars”. Trump frequently cited his first-term record of “no new wars” as proof of his isolationist credentials, claiming that his “force of personality” could resolve the Iranian nuclear issue without firing a single shot.

Specifically, JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio and vice-presidential running mate, gained notoriety for his vocal opposition to neoconservative interventionism, urging the Republican Party to “overlearn” the lessons of the Iraq War. Bannon, through his “War Room” platform, championed a “Sovereignty First” agenda that sought to dismantle the military-industrial complex and avoid Middle Eastern entanglements. However, the 2026 transition to Operation Epic Fury has been accompanied by a shift in rhetorical framing. High-profile administration officials now argue that the “Peace Candidate” was “betrayed” by Iranian intransigence. On the eve of the strikes, President Trump told reporters in Texas that he “would love not to use” force, but that Iran’s “difficult people” had left him with “no choice”. This evolution suggests that the “Peace Candidate” identity was a conditional strategy, intended to secure the populist vote while maintaining a latent capability for maximalist military action.

Historical Restraint: The Bush Administration and the Voices of Deterrence

The push for regime change in 2026 mirrors the intense internal debates of the George W. Bush administration between 2005 and 2008. During that period, the “drumbeat for war” was at its loudest, with Vice President Dick Cheney and senior neoconservatives advocating for strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. However, a coalition of military and intelligence experts successfully deterred such action. Admiral William Fallon, the commander of CENTCOM during the 2007-2008 period, was a pivotal voice of reason, publicly stating that a war with Iran would be a “catastrophic mistake”. Fallon’s resignation in March 2008 was reportedly tied to his refusal to support plans for a “preemptive strike” that he believed lacked a strategic endgame. The Admiral was no dove by the way, according to Military.com:

Admiral William J. “Fox” Fallon (Ret.), the only U.S. officer in history to command both U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) and U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), spent more than four decades at the center of some of America’s most critical military decisions.

Furthermore, the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) served as a critical deterrent, concluding with “high confidence” that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons development in 2003. This assessment, alongside warnings from the 1973 War Powers Resolution advocates, compelled the Bush administration to pivot toward covert disruption rather than overt combat. The deployment of the Stuxnet virus in “Operation Olympic Games” demonstrated that industrial sabotage could achieve tactical goals without the risks of regional conflagration. In contrast, the 2026 administration has dismissed these historical warnings, with President Trump arguing that the “failed diplomacy” of the past 25 years only emboldened the regime. The absence of a modern-day “Fallon” in the current Pentagon leadership has been cited by critics as a primary reason for the lack of internal institutional resistance to the current strikes.

The Israeli Architecture of the War: Lobbying and Strategic Imperatives

The case that Israel is the primary driver behind the 2026 conflict is documented extensively by scholars like Trita Parsi and Scott Horton. For decades, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has portrayed Iran as an “existential threat” to the Jewish state, frequently using visual aids and “red line” rhetoric at the United Nations to lobby for U.S. military intervention. According to Parsi, the Israeli strategy has been to “ensnare” the United States into a war that Israel itself cannot win alone, effectively turning the U.S. military into Israel’s “third aircraft carrier” in the region.

The 2026 strikes, occurring on the Jewish Sabbath and reportedly timed to coincide with biblical passages regarding the eradication of “Amalek,” highlight the ideological fervor driving the joint operation. Israeli military officials described the mission as a “joint, broad, and powerful operation” aimed at the “elimination of existential threats”.

Not a chance that date was set by American lawmakers. It’s not like Christmas. This was planned and date set by someone with knowledge of Jewish holidays.

Domestic voices in the U.S, such as Mark Levin, have mirrored this rhetoric, claiming that “neocon is a pejorative for Jew” and that anyone opposing the war is an “appeaser” of an “Islamist-Nazi regime”.

Levin’s direct threats toward the Ayatollah (”We’re coming to get you”) and his lobbying at the White House exemplify the degree to which non-elected media figures have influenced the administration’s tactical decisions. This synergy between the Netanyahu government and a network of influential American neoconservatives has created a political environment where de-escalation is framed as a betrayal of a vital ally.

Information Warfare: Mossad Infiltration and the Protest Narrative

The Trump administration’s claim that the Iranian government was “murdering its own people” is a central component of the moral case for Operation Epic Fury. However, the narrative of these protests is complicated by evidence of foreign infiltration and information operations. While human rights groups like Iran Human Rights (IHR) verified over 3,400 deaths during the December 2025 – January 2026 unrest, the Iranian government has alleged that the uprising was manufactured by the CIA and Mossad. Tehran points to specific social media accounts, widely identified as Mossad-affiliated, that actively encouraged Iranians to “come out to the streets together” and promised that “the time has come”.

And the Grayzone also covers the influencer who is the originator of the “30,000” dead hoax.

If you don’t know why the NED is significant, they are the regime change wing of the CIA. I cover them extensively here, here, and here.

Analysts at the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) have documented how these foreign-linked posts were used by the Iranian state as “proof” of external meddling to justify a more brutal crackdown. The “digital playbook” described by researchers involves framing organic economic grievances as a foreign intelligence operation, thereby fracturing domestic solidarity and allowing the regime to label protesters as “rioters”.

At the same time, activists have shared verified footage of bodies in the Kahrizak morgue, suggesting that the scale of the state’s violence was indeed unprecedented. The Trump administration has seized upon this brutality, with the President telling Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand” and urging them to “take over your government” once the bombings cease. This demonstrates the effective “repackaging” of domestic unrest as a military tactical opening for regime change.

The truth of the matter, however, is there was absolutely foreign meddling. If those people were really killed, and God rest their souls. Western leaders should be put on a pike for this. Everybody who does any kind of dealings with us end up dead or in the Epstein files. We should all be isolationists, somebody stop us before we kill again! US and Israel led those protestors down the primrose path to doom!

Hoops and Hurdles: The Systematic Sabotage of Negotiations

The claim that Iran refused to negotiate is challenged by the detailed history of the Geneva talks held in February 2026. In the weeks leading up to the 2:00 AM strike, the Iranian government “jumped through hoops” to accommodate U.S. demands mediated by Oman. In the final rounds of technical discussions, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reportedly offered to completely shut down high-level uranium enrichment and allow IAEA inspectors back into sites targeted in the June 2025 “Midnight Hammer” strikes. Tehran proposed a “down-blending” of its highly enriched stockpile (including 400kg of 60% purity) and a return to low-level enrichment under constant UN surveillance.

However, the Trump administration, influenced by Secretary Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff, shifted the “goalposts” to include the permanent dismantling of the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan facilities, as well as the termination of Iran’s ballistic missile program. These were conditions that Tehran viewed as an “existential surrender” of its sovereignty. By demanding “zero enrichment forever” and the physical destruction of infrastructure, the U.S. team effectively ensured a deadlock. Critics argue that the administration utilized the negotiations not as a path to peace, but as a “pre-scripted failure” designed to build a public record of Iranian “intransigence” before launching Operation Epic Fury, and I believe the critics were correct. By the end of the negotiations, just like Maduro, they offered everything, but we’d gotten the taste of blood and were ready to kill.

Iraq 2003 vs. Iran 2026: The Repackaging of WMD Propaganda

The propaganda utilized to sell Operation Epic Fury bears striking similarities to the “intelligence debacle” that preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2003, the Bush administration relied on a “willful overinterpretation” of intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, a case that was ultimately disproved but only after a decade-long war. The Trump administration has repackaged these themes, but with a critical difference: while Iraq did not have a nuclear program, Iran actually possesses the technical knowledge and infrastructure, which allows the administration to frame a “real” threat into an “imminent” one.

The “repackaging” process involves the same rhetorical devices: the promise of a “cakewalk” victory, the characterization of the enemy as uniquely evil, and the dismissal of critics as “fifth column isolationists”. The 2026 campaign has also utilized modern technology, such as “Voice of America” and targeted social media pushes, to incite an internal uprising, much like the failed efforts to encourage Iraqis to rise up in the 1990s. Senator Tim Kaine and other critics point out that the administration has “learned nothing” from 25 years of unproductive wars, repeating the cycle of “lashing out” without a viable strategy for what comes after the regime falls. The “propaganda of victory,” where the White House manufactures successes and derides concerns over casualties, is already being deployed to drown out the reality of a “war of choice” that lacks congressional authorization.

And finally…

Operation Epic Fury and the concurrent Israeli Operation Roaring Lion represent the most definitive attempt to resolve the “Iran Problem” through overwhelming force and the total dismantling of the Islamic Republic’s power structure. By itemizing a 47-year history of grievances and utilizing a controversial “Bin Laden proxy” narrative, the Trump administration has sought to create a legal and moral mandate for a conflict that bypasses the traditional constitutional checks and balances of the American government. The analysis of the Geneva negotiations reveals that while Iran was willing to make unprecedented concessions on its nuclear program, the U.S. administration’s move toward maximalist demands rendered a peaceful resolution impossible.

As the conflict progresses, the reliance on the “protestor massacre” narrative and the active role of Israeli strategic lobbying suggest that the war’s objectives go far beyond nuclear non-proliferation, aiming instead for a complete reordering of the Middle Eastern map. The lessons of the Iraq War and the restraint of the Bush-era military experts have been discarded in favor of a “gamble” that assumes an internal Iranian collapse is imminent. Whether the “hour of freedom” promised by President Trump leads to a stable, democratic Iran or a protracted regional catastrophe remains the central question of this 2:00 AM war. The architecture of this conflict, built on a foundation of repackaged propaganda and strategic brinkmanship, now faces the ultimate test of military and political reality.

The last thing I have to say about this is if you are not fucking retarded and you are still still supporting these fucking losers than we are not the same. I’m not even sure we are the same species, or could it be you are caught up in some kind of Crispr, inbred, form sociopathic being that keeps you so mentally unwell that you can’t keep up with what happened from one moment to the next.

Otherwise, as I said in the last piece, it's time for a change. Time to relocate these scumbags to the funny pages, but until then, keep our troops, and serviceman, in your prayers, they’re under bad leadership, and even if they’re assholes, their families aren't.

And the poor souls whose homes are getting bombed. God be with them.

And if you made it this far, God bless you, and thank you, so very much for taking the time to hear what I had to say.

Happy trails, stay tuned for more.

, Editor-in-Chief,

Q: Can you help me understand, “Opposing the War parties,”

Does that have any limitations. I hear the slogan often, but I don’t readily buy in.

If Israel received the support from the US that it does from Canada (my home country) it would long ago ceased to exist.

As, I’ve indicated, I come very close to loathing Sam Harris. I agree with him however on the issue of Israel/Gaza/Hamas. Of the “New Atheists” Hitch was my favorite, although he could employ sophism reflexively. A statement I bookmarked from him years ago (I’m not sure it originated with him) was, “There are certain regimes that are impervious to unassisted overthrow from within.” And the same case could be made for Israel in the middle East. They are a sitting duck without outside aid.

Please, help me understand what “Opposing the War parties,” would entail.

In the style of Rothbard’s “Anatomy of the State” Here’s What the War Parties are Not:

Both parties of the American two-party system reflect to their constituents that, in return for their vote, they will carry out various tasks important to that voter—upholding law and order, protecting citizens, and representing the beliefs of the people in the government. The people vote for them; therefore, they vote for us. When legislation, spending, and of course, war, are litigated, the people we choose to represent us—be it left, right, or center—are chosen to carry out the “will of the people”. Our interests are represented by these people. That’s what our country was founded upon, and how the Constitution was framed.

A constitutional republic, “if you can keep it,” as Benjamin Franklin cautiously answered Dr. James McHenry at the close of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. When asked if the delegates had created a monarchy or a republic, Franklin emphasized that the nation’s survival as a representative democracy depends on the active, informed involvement of its citizens to maintain it, rather than it being self-actuating.

This has never been the result, not my generations, my fathers, or my grandfather, who was hit by a kamikaze pilot in WWII, and started a cycle of addiction that rampaged through my family, ending with me. Obliging me to feel the need to name this publication after him, .

Consider Murray Rothbard’s description of the state:

If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that “we owe it to ourselves”; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is “doing it to himself” and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have “committed suicide,” since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. ...We must, therefore, emphasize that “we” are not the government; the government is not “us.”

They are not actually carrying out the interests of their constituents. They are elected to office after wasting more money—for most representatives—than the voters in their district make in a year, COMBINED! If they are one of the “lucky” souls to make it across the finish line ahead of the pack, they’ve been bought and sold more times than Frederick Douglass. They’ve broken more laws than Bernie Madoff, and their allegiance belongs to the entrenched interests of the donor class.

This is why every so-called “representative of the people,” by the time they make it to office, fall in line with Tucker Carlson’s observation at the 2024 RNC:

Let’s pay attention to what people actually want. And the lack of interest in that question in Washington is something that ultimately drove me out of the city after 35 years.

Lawmakers stepping over the prostrate bodies of their fellow citizens—ODing on drugs—to go cast votes to send money to some foreign country.

Actually, we’ve lost more Americans from drugs in the past four years than we lost in World War Two, our bloodiest war. More than we lost in World War 2. Does anybody care? It is pathetic.

And do you hear a single word from Washington about doing anything about it?

We know where the drugs are coming from. We know the supply routes, the US military spent billions bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

You don’t see our commander-in-chief suggesting that we use our military to protect our country, or the lives of its citizens. No, that’s for Ukraine.

And it’s too much, actually, it’s too insulting.

It’s a middle finger in the face of every American. It’s a very clear statement which is unmistakable and that is, we don’t care about you.

These are the moderate corporatists who make it into office, and we don’t get an option to the contrary; we have zero choice. Russell Dobular of spoke at the Rage Against the War Machine rally pre-election, and his words cut like a hot razor through warm butter:

“Bob Dylan, late in his career... recorded the forgettable blues tune ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’. The conceit was that no matter who you are, laborer or King, you have to bend the knee to something, or someone. ...And as the election approaches, like a meteor set to strike the last of our illusion of ‘American Exceptionalism’, with its choice between a ‘half-bright narcissist and a Deep State hologram’, we can see formerly sturdy knees hit the dirt, one by one, and formerly sensible mouths speaking the most ridiculous justifications for their service to one of these two exemplars of social collapse.”

Nothing changes unless everything changes, and nothing has changed in a long time. We’ve been stagnant, paralyzed, spinning in the mud—stuck on ice in rear-wheel drive on an incline, and for all our next-level technological advancement, we’ve not advanced an inch. The names have changed, hairstyles and music sound different, prices have risen, and the bombs are bigger, but the parties still drop them on children in the name of peace and human rights.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his famous Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72—credited by George McGovern aide Frank Mankiewicz as being “the least accurate, but most truthful campaign book to be written on the 1972 race”—a passage fitting for today’s subject and the banality of our democratic processes:

“That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon! It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.” I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but ‘regrettably necessary’ holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me, and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with, a chance to vote for something? Instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils... I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.”

“More of the same,” that’s what he remembered way back then, as if Barry Goldwater was just running for office yesterday.

During every conflict since Paul Revere’s ride, the ruling party, hungry for flesh and blood, bites at the bit to send your children to die. The party on the bench begrudgingly cheerleads, knowing their chance is right around the corner.

Our political parties Do NOT:

• Organize varied and sometimes competing interests into coalitions.

• Unite people to achieve common political goals. They divide us into hating and sometimes killing our neighbors.

• Help voters learn about candidates and elected officials. In fact they pretend they have no opposition and weaponize the courts to ensure they don’t.

• Encourage civic participation. Increase cynicism so the last thing we care about is voting.

They are not like us and it’s high time the two-faced coin of politics are replaced.

The Parties Oppose Peace, We Should Oppose Them

The Great War, unwanted by any nation—even Germany—was unexpected until it burst devastatingly upon Europe. At its height, it was by far the largest, bloodiest, cruelest, and most savage war in history. Winston Churchill wrote:

“All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them... Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals—often of a greater scale and of longer duration. ...Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared their bodies. ...When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.”

And he was for the war. He had been dreaming of it since he was a young child. As had FDR; many little boys did, since they were fed hearty portions of war slop propaganda from the womb. Churchill knew that the fastest way to political advancement lay in active service, complaining that the world was growing too “sensible and pacific”.

This bloodlust would later be highly useful for Churchill when he needed the US to join World War II as an ally. While America was staying out of it—as we should have—he befriended Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Together, they utilized his position as a war correspondent to publish disinformation campaigns in American newspapers as a psychological operation to drag us into the conflict. This is not a controversial story; mainstream historians cite this as a successful use of covert disinformation against a population. As History.com notes, they used fake news, forged maps, and sabotaged groups to help FDR pass interventionist legislation like Lend-Lease.

Notice how they use the word “isolationist” every time they describe these opponents? It is not “isolationist” to oppose the destabilization, destruction, and pillaging of villages and populations; it’s being a “good neighbor”. These people were bipartisan anti-warriors. That didn’t stop the bipartisan war parties from treating them as scum, slandering them as Nazis and anti-Semites.

Murray Rothbard noted in For a New Liberty:

“Isolationism was coined as a smear term to apply to opponents of American entry into World War II... If not actively pro-Nazi, ‘isolationists’ were at the very least narrow-minded ignoramuses ignorant of the world around them, in contrast to the sophisticated, worldly, caring ‘internationalists’ who favored American crusading around the globe.”

As Rothbard outlines, the greatest yield of the First World War was the Second World War, germinated by the appalling consequences of 1918. And from the Second World War came a rash of wars—chief among them the Cold War, alongside dozens of other conflicts across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Between 1945 and the present moment, war has been the rule, and peace the exception.

The evils of this paradigm are plenty. Wars, regime changes, and genocides top the terrible list of things the government does with its monopoly on violence, fully supported by the Republican-Democrat paradigm. But the corruption doesn’t end there.

Donald Trump, with his technocratic-deep state-neocon administration who he picked through painstakingly rigorous “review” of all their past awfulness’, even his most hopeful cabinet members turned straight to the dark side upon confirmation, but the other option is equally as twisted.

Take Hillary Clinton's infamous defense of a rapist in 1975, where she later laughed on tape about passing a polygraph and the crime lab's accidental destruction of DNA evidence. Or consider the John Podesta emails released by Julian Assange regarding the Uranium One deal. As Russian interests gradually took control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States, millions of dollars were donated to the Clinton Foundation by individuals directly connected to the deal.

“The prosecutor called me a few years ago, he said he had a guy who had been accused of rape, and the guy wanted a woman lawyer,” said Clinton in the interview. “Would I do it as a favor for him?”

The case was not easy. In the early hours of May 10, 1975, the Springdale, Arkansas police department received a call from a nearby hospital. It was treating a 12-year-old girl who said she had been raped.

The suspect was identified as Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old factory worker and friend of the girl’s family.

And though the former first lady mentioned the ethical difficulties of the case in Living History, her written account some three decades later is short on details and has a far different tone than the tapes.

“It was a fascinating case, it was a very interesting case,” Clinton says in the recording. “This guy was accused of raping a 12-year-old. Course he claimed that he didn’t, and all this stuff” (LISTEN HERE).

Describing the events almost a decade after they had occurred, Clinton’s struck a casual and complacent attitude toward her client and the trial for rape of a minor.

“I had him take a polygraph, which he passed – which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” she added with a laugh.

Clinton can also be heard laughing at several points when discussing the crime lab’s accidental destruction of DNA evidence that tied Taylor to the crime.

---

The Podesta Emails; Part One

Today WikiLeaks begins its series on deals involving Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta. Mr. Podesta is a long-term associate of the Clintons and was President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff from 1998 until 2001. Mr. Podesta also controls the Podesta Group, a major lobbying firm and is the Chair of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank. Part 1 of the Podesta Emails comprises 2,060 emails and 170 attachments and focuses on Mr Podesta’s communications relating to nuclear energy, and media handling over donations to the Clinton Foundation from mining and nuclear interests; 1,244 of the emails reference nuclear energy. The full collection includes emails to and from Hillary Clinton.

In April 2015 the New York Times published a story (link not paywalled) about a company called “Uranium One” which was sold to Russian government-controlled interests, giving Russia effective control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for the production of nuclear weapons, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of US government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off the deal was the State Department, then headed by Secretary Clinton. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) comprises, among others, the secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce and Energy.

As Russian interests gradually took control of Uranium One millions of dollars were donated to the Clinton Foundation between 2009 and 2013 from individuals directly connected to the deal including the Chairman of Uranium One, Ian Telfer. Although Mrs Clinton had an agreement with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors to the Clinton Foundation, the contributions from the Chairman of Uranium One were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons.

When the New York Times article was published the Clinton campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, strongly rejected the possibility that then-Secretary Clinton exerted any influence in the US goverment’s review of the sale of Uranium One, describing this possibility as “baseless”.

Mr Fallon promptly sent a memo to the New York Times with a rebuttal of the story (Podesta Email ID 1489).

In this memo, Mr Fallon argued: “Apart from the fact that the State Department was one of just nine agencies involved in CFIUS, it is also true that within the State Department, the CFIUS approval process historically does not trigger the personal involvement of the Secretary of State. The State Department’s principal representative to CFIUS was the Assistant Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Business Affairs. During the time period in question, that position was held by Jose Fernandez. As you are aware, Mr. Fernandez has personally attested that “Secretary Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter.”

What the Clinton campaign spokesman failed to disclose, however, was the fact that a few days before sending his rebuttal to the New York Times, Jose Fernandez wrote on the evening of the 17 April 2015 to John Podesta following a phone call from Mr Podesta (Email ID 2053): “John, It was good to talk to you this afternoon, and I appreciate your taking the time to call. As I mentioned, I would like to do all I can to support Secretary Clinton, and would welcome your advice and help in steering me to the right persons in the campaign”.

Five days after this email (22 April 2015), Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon wrote a memo to the New York Times, declaring that “Jose Fernandez has personally attested that ‘Secretary Clinton never intervened with me on any CFIUS matter’,” but Fallon failed to mention that Fernandez was hardly a neutral witness in this case, considering that he had agreed with John Podesta to play a role in the Clinton campaign.

The emails show that the contacts between John Podesta and Jose Fernandez go back to the time of internal Clinton campaign concern about the then-forthcoming book and movie “Clinton Cash” by Peter Schweizer on the financial dealings of the Clinton Foundation.

In an email dated 29 March 2015 (Email ID 2059), Jose Fernandez writes to Podesta: “Hi John, I trust you are getting a brief rest after a job well done. Thanks no doubt to your recommendation I have joined the CAP [Center for American Progress board of trustees, which I’m finding extremely rewarding.”

Julian Assange

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---

The money the "philanthropic" Clinton Foundation raked in from back-room defense industry deals represents the generational wealth of ten lifetimes. Fortunately for them, no one will be left to tell the tale after the human race is wiped away by nuclear holocaust.

And if you need more on why to oppose the center right, just keep in mind, these are their people:

And them…

Now, back to the question….

Opposing the War Parties and What That Entails:

First off, limitations. My limitation for the opposition to war is at, or within, the borders of the United States. Our military should not be put in danger for anything that is not a direct threat to our borders. In that same spirit, it is time to disband NATO; Europe has been fully modernized and should take care of themselves.

Let’s look at the entire “War on Terror”. We did Osama Bin Laden’s bidding; his play was to provoke us into a war to bankrupt us and bleed us dry of our military and resources, just as the Mujahideen had done to the Soviet Union with our weapons, funding, and training. He told us this explicitly. Al Qaeda leadership endorsed the “1,000 wound policy” to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy by forcing us to spread out our forces and expend tremendous resources.

“Israel could not have existed without our support.” Maybe that was true in 1948 right after the founding of Israel, but I don’t believe that is true now. Looking into their actions over the last 70 years, they wouldn’t have the capacity to be quite so violent and ruthless, and would have been forced to make peace a lot sooner with their neighbors, if they didn’t have the backing of the biggest bully on the block.

After all the times they’ve betrayed us, we should’ve abandoned them long ago. They’ve targeted and murdered our servicemen (the U.S.S. Liberty), stolen our nuclear secrets (NUMEC), and passed that technology to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. That is aiding our enemy during a time of war.

As for Sam Harris’ position on Israel: The attack on October 7th was barbaric, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. The people of Palestine have been held captive since 1967. It is Israeli policy to periodically round up Palestinian families and imprison them indefinitely without charges—they call it “Mowing the Lawn”. They’ve been “putting Gaza on a diet” for years by mathematically restricting the number of calories they let into the region. When Palestinians attempted to protest these conditions during the “Great March of Return,” IDF snipers started killing and maiming the most vulnerable in the group.

Then comes the Abraham Accords. Although Arab nations surrounding Israel had promised to pressure Israel for a two-state solution, signing this treaty all but guaranteed that Palestine would never be free. This signaled to them that all was lost. This is the context that led to the biggest attack on Israel in its 75 years of existence.

I don’t disagree with self-defense. If someone breaks into my home, that’s prima facie intent to harm my family, and I will lawfully eliminate that threat. However, if they get away, and instead of contacting authorities I decide to handle it myself—hunting them down and killing them—that is premeditated murder. What if I don’t stop there? What if I continue and kill their entire family, and everyone of the same genealogy? That is serial murder. You definitely don’t get to claim to be the victim at that point. I’d call it terrorism. Yet, if you commit the same acts in the name of a foreign nation-state, intelligence agency, or the White House, well, that’s just “war,” and “war is hell,” right?

So, what do I mean when I speak of “opposing the war parties?”

In the 1920s, those against war and big government were considered to be on the left. That flip-flopped after FDR and the New Deal. The original “America First” movement was vehemently attacked by FDR and his supporters as anti-Semitic, appeasers, and pro-Nazi.

In short, when the left holds power, they become vicious war hawks to “save democracy and human rights.” When the right holds power, they become fascistic imperialists to maintain “peace through strength.” Both sides of that coin are total bullshit. They are cash grabs and corruption born from the military-industrial complex. They make our families less safe, our homes less safe, and the only way out is to trash them both and follow the Constitution exactly the way it was written.

A constitutional republic. That’s the only way we can keep it.

Thank you for reading.

Editor-in-Chief

The British comedy duo of yesteryear That Mitchell and Webb Look asked “Are we the baddies?” The question I am asking is close to that. Philosophically in line, anyways. After Donald Trump’s leaked messages from Macron just ahead of the WEF in Davos, I took a scroll through the comment section below as one does, under the video by Breaking Points and was hit with a deluge of comments that left me wondering during the rise of the National Socialists in Germany pre-WWII, are people looking at us the same as the global community looked at the Germans? Getting a strange feeling that maybe we have been here before.

Now, please understand I am not calling Donald Trump a Nazi. I am not sure there is an ideology to explain him. I’m also not saying that the Nazi’s were good, they were definitively bad. But all of German society were judged for what the minority at the top did, and we are right around the corner from that.

I consider WWII the founding of the American empire and an evil unlike anything unleashed on the world since the fuhrer himself. I totally denounce the so-called lessons learned from WWII as legitimate. The idea that anything less than all-out war is the only way to deal with people like this and the actual evil is appeasement is patently absurd. And the post-war liberal consensus should be sent to the dustbin of society.

But, now more than ever these are exactly the beliefs of all of those who base their entire worldview on WW2 for fear another Holocaust could be right around the corner. Due to this fear we could easily see Americans treated like the new Germans and Donald Trump as the Fuhrer.

You see, we never know how things look to other countries, but when Donald Trump does things that has his most sycophantic supporters raising an eyebrow we must remember that the world is watching.

Consider this, Germany after World War One went through an “affordability crisis,” as we are here today, which was hyperinflation from the sanctions/blockade regime placed on Germany by the Versailles treaty. Hitler used this. Offering himself as the one man who could fix it all with “global Jewry” placed as the enemy causing these omens on the German people.

Sound familiar?

Now, this comparison is obviously lazy at best, and hysterical at worst, but we mustn’t forget how history tends to rhyme. America, as a nation, are on a suicide mission. More militarism, more spending, more aggression, and if we don’t see that we do so at our own peril.

In the following I will outline some more ways there seems to be a throughline between the rise and fall of the National Socialists Germany and the current appearance of Donald Trump as the President of the United States.

Please understand that I am personally guilty of all these delusions.

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The “Management” Delusion

The most striking parallel isn’t necessarily between the men themselves, but how the established political class convinced themselves they could control the “disruptor.”

In the 1930s, figures like Neville Chamberlain and conservative elites in Germany (like Franz von Papen) viewed Hitler not as an existential threat, but as a vulgar but useful tool. They believed he was a “transactional” figure who could be “tamed” by the institutions or appeased with specific concessions (The Munich Agreement). They mistook ideological fanaticism for rational bargaining.

You can draw a direct line to how global leaders and the GOP establishment initially viewed the “Current Regime.” The belief was that the “adults in the room” (Generals, career bureaucrats) or the weight of the office itself would constrain the impulses. This is the hubris of the establishment believing they can ride the tiger without being eaten. Clearly displayed in the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

I believed the checks and balances of the other branches would hold the executive to account, of course I should’ve seen that the government as a whole is an administration of corruption and force and would do nothing to hold them back.

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The “Bulwark” Justification

Then: Many Western leaders (and even US industrialists) hesitated to stop Hitler early on because they saw him as a necessary bulwark against Communism. They tolerated the brutality because they feared the Soviet Union more.

Now: You see a similar dynamic where global leaders (like Orbán in Hungary or the Silicon Valley factions within the US) align with the current regime not because they love the chaos, but because they view it as the only effective bulwark against “Globalism” or “Wokeism.”

There is also the faction of Western leaders like Macron in France who is at the beckon call when it comes to war with Iran, “totally in line” with putting al-Qaeda in leadership in Syria. But couldn’t imagine he might go for Greenland next. The enemy of my enemy is my “Strongman” right?

They argue that the Left is not a political opponent, but a “Regime” that seeks to end the American way of life. Therefore, conservatives must support a “strongman” (Trump) not because they like his character, but because the alternative is “national death.”

In recent statements (like President of the Claremont Institute Ryan Williams’ post-victory declaration), they frame the current term as a “Counter-Revolution” necessary to dismantle the “Administrative State.” This mirrors the 1930s logic: We must use extreme measures because the enemy (Communism then / “Wokeism” now) will destroy us if we don’t.

But, as we see with the picks for his administration that are directly from the “deep state” the “Counter-Revolution” seems to be against us, not for us.

The United States is drifting into the status of a “Rogue Superpower” in the eyes of the world, creating the conditions for a coalition to form against it—just as the Allies eventually coalesced against Germany.

How They See Us

In the 1930s, Germany was seen as a state that could not be bound by treaties—it tore up the Versailles Treaty, rearmed, and ignored the League of Nations.

Today, much of the “Global South” (BRICS nations) now view the U.S. similarly: as a power that weaponizes the financial system (sanctions) and ignores international law when it suits them with wars of intervention.

When the world decides a superpower is no longer a “stabilizer” but a “predator,” they stop seeking integration and start seeking containment.

The Economic “Stalingrad” (De-Dollarization)

Germany’s fall wasn’t just military; it was the total collapse of an autarkic economy that tried to survive alone.

The U.S. relies on the dollar being the global reserve currency. If the world (China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia) decides the U.S. is too unstable or dangerous—just as nations eventually cut off trade with the Axis—they will accelerate de-dollarization.

If the dollar loses reserve status, the U.S. can no longer print money to fund its debt. The result isn’t just a recession; it’s a standard-of-living collapse that would rival the post-war ruin of Europe. The “Fall” here is economic hyperinflation and infrastructure decay.

The most terrifying parallel is the disconnect. In 1940 Berlin, citizens were enjoying the spoils of conquest, largely unaware of the hatred building against them across Europe.

The “Normalcy Bias” we are facing domestically is fatal. We believe we are the “Good Guys” because that is the domestic narrative, while the rest of the world sees a destabilizing force. When the bill comes due, the American populace will be completely unprepared for the hostility and the hardship, because we never did the hard part and looked in the mirror.

Look at the official joint statements from recent BRICS summits. They explicitly talk about “multipolarity”—which is diplomatic code for “ending U.S. hegemony.”

Which is good. We do live in a multipolar world. Long gone, are the days when we acted as the world police, but if we continue to weaponize our financial system against the other poles of the world we are going to face a collapse ourselves, or worse.

What I am arguing is that the United States is currently experiencing a “Soft Encirclement.” The world isn’t invading with armies; they are invading with ledger entries and trade agreements that exclude the U.S.

Just as we did with NATO encircling Russia.

📉 The Local Consequence

This might seem like something that could not reach outside of DC, but that is just not true. Anything that affects them, affects us in the middle class a hundred times worse with no one able to hear our calls for help. The “Fall” won’t look like explosions; it will look like insolvency. In 1945, Germany’s currency was worthless. In a U.S. “De-Dollarization” scenario, the dollar doesn’t disappear, but it loses the “Exorbitant Privilege” of being the global default. Then prices collapse.

The Global Shift: Central banks are quietly dumping dollars for gold. In 2024–2025, central bank gold buying hit historic highs (over 1,000 tonnes/year). They are building a “lifeboat” while the U.S. is still on the ship.

The Domestic Reality:

“Wal-Mart” Inflation: If the dollar loses reserve status, it depreciates massively. Everything imported (electronics, clothes, car parts) doubles or triples in price. The “cheap goods” era that masked American poverty ends overnight.

Cities like Louisville and states like Kentucky where I live, hold massive “unfunded liabilities” for public pensions. They rely on issuing bonds (debt) to pay this.

If global investors stop buying U.S. debt (Treasuries) because they don’t trust the dollar, interest rates skyrocket. Local governments can no longer afford to borrow. Result: Municipal services are slashed, and pension checks stop clearing. It’s not a war zone; it’s the sudden, brutal evaporation of the middle class’s safety net.

The Psychological Encirclement

To prove the “Rogue State” narrative, we don’t look at what we say; we look at what they say. The language has shifted from “Competition” to “Containment” just as we had against communism back in the Cold War days.

The editors of The New Indian Express noted this January, Washington has ceased to be a partner and has become a 'volatility risk,' forcing the world's largest democracy to seek 'strategic autonomy' from us.

🇨🇳 Beijing (Global Times): The “Chaos Agent” Narrative

The Rhetoric: Recent editorials have shifted from calling the U.S. a “rival” to labeling it a “source of global instability.”

They are framing U.S. foreign policy (sanctions, tariffs) not as “strength,” but as “weaponization.” They argue that the U.S. is “abusing” its financial position, which justifies their push for a “multipolar” (i.e., non-U.S.) world.

Interestingly, they have even framed U.S. influence on Europe as leading to “civilizational erasure”—positioning themselves as the defenders of sovereignty against American cultural/political imperialism.

🇮🇳 New Delhi (The Hindu / Indian Policy Circles): The “Unreliable” Partner

India is the ultimate “swing state.” Their commentary has moved toward “Strategic Autonomy.”

Editorials highlight “diplomatic setbacks” and U.S. “unilateralism.” The sentiment is that the U.S. changes its mind every 4 years (or every tweet), making it impossible to trust with 20-year security deals. They aren’t anti-American, but they are hedging—buying Russian oil and trading in rupees—because they see the U.S. as volatile.

🇧🇷 The “BRICS” Fortress (The Global South):

The Mechanism: The “Insulation” Strategy. The BRICS summits are no longer just photo-ops; they are building a parallel financial plumbing (alternative swift systems, local currency settlements).

The Parallel: Just as nations insulated themselves from a collapsing Germany in the 30s, the Global South is building a firewall against the “weaponized dollar.”

We, the American people are living in a “Truman Show” of stability.

The Illusion: We think we are sanctioning them.

The Reality: They are slowly sanctioning us—by exiting our financial system.

When the exit is complete, the U.S. is left with $35+ trillion in debt and no one to buy it. That is the “Economic 1945.”

Thank you for reading. We could be approaching a tougher season than anything recently experienced. Buckle up and cling tight to your loved ones.

This is editor-in-chief of the

Late, But Accurate

Late, as usual. However unfortunate it may seem to you, dear reader, I assure you my tardiness is a most fortunate turn of events.

What I do here—fancying myself a journalist and all, maybe a data journalist—is strictly about getting the whole story. I’ve seen the term “Solidarity Reporting” thrown around, and the definition seems to stick, as long as the field doesn’t evolve into some kind of negative incantation. You know the type: labeled as “biased,” “not credible,” or any other derogatory term used to discredit this movement of independence happening at this great free platform we are a part of.

I do my best to get the whole story, whatever the subject of the piece is. I follow and listen to sources that I have learned to trust—not blindly, of course. I look into everything they say because I can’t cite it myself if I have no source. I believe my positions on most things are too radical or controversial to not make damn sure I provide lots of evidence. I also really love going through documents and putting pieces together; what a great place to be. I should kill my guidance counselor.

So, although “I have not been there” like Douglas Murray, I definitely do not refrain from speaking of a place until I visit, as he claims to. However, I don’t write speeches for leadership supporting the wars that are the subject of my reporting, either. Douglas Murray and David Frum do, however. Talk about bad ethics.

Many otherwise credible reporters, journalists, pundits, and speakers received word from Congress and others close to the White House regarding an announcement of war. Even the most hardworking and credible journalists on this issue, like and , heard from their sources that a declaration of war with Venezuela would happen in Donald Trump’s end-of-year address.

As it turns out, the word “Venezuela” wasn’t even spoken in the speech. The closest he got was an offhand comment mid-brag:

“They decimated the bloodthirsty foreign drug cartels. We did that all by ourselves with our people. And we’re so proud of it, because they were poisoning and destroying our population. Drugs brought in by ocean and by sea…”

If only it were so…

So, what happened? Someone from the White House sent some little stories up the grapevine, maybe to feel things out, maybe to cause confusion, that the president would be announcing war with Venezuela during the end of year address. However, told Fox News received the “real intel,” that the speech would be “about the economy.” Turns out they got a trick or two up their sleeves and would love, more than anything, to sow chaos and ruin the credibility of anyone in opposition to the president’s agenda.

But, these tricks are useless. There’s no longer a gate being kept by the halls of power stopping these tricks from being exposed. So, the next day when everyone reported the same story it was very obvious where the foul play came from.

That is why this is the greatest time to be alive. We were sold a lie, a fake bill of goods when leadership promised to be the carriers of mass disclosure, regardless of every time they sold us up the river in the past, we believed them. What they didn’t realize, however, is disclosure is no longer up to them.

As long as the internet is free and forever, disclosure will remain at the tips of our fingers, and whatever they might be hiding, be patient, and the dark will come to the light.

So, with that being said, some Housekeeping:

My stories might be old news by the time that I get them published, but what I strive for is accuracy. This is a long-term project I’m doing and I hope to be considered one day at levels as high as say, or or maybe even Anti-War.com.

One more thing, I’m thinking of changing the name of this here publication, something like, “Late, But True”…. Late, But Accurate? How about this: The Late, But Accurate Report? I got it, I’ll do a poll, wherever the vote is when the ball drops into 2026, that’s what we’ll go with. This is a for-the-people type of operation.

Donald John Trump doesn’t read books to inform his decisions, he follows his stomach, and reportedly goes with whatever the last person he talked to said. If that’s true he has very apparently been taking calls from some real spooky types, or one closeted-gay Republican congressman… You know who.

Regardless, I bought that BS, hook, line, & sinker, myself, but as the Commander-in-Chief of my adolescence once famously declared:

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

When the MAGA-fanatics start in with the “Art of the Deal” line it’s usually preceded by some kind of disastrous policy announcement so far out of bounds from being “only America first” or in line with the populist promises which delivered Donnie a landslide popular vote+electoral college win, and this time is no different.

As I sit and type this ‘ode to disaster’ the president, Rubio, Pete Hegseth, intelligence agencies, and the rest of the president’s men are busy spinning the narrative about “narco-terrorism” and other obfuscations to make us believe that they are fighting for us.

​But this is not a war about drugs. It is not a war about "narco-terrorism," and if you want to know what this war is actually for, you needn’t look at the destroyers off the coast of La Guaira—you need to look no further than the prison release form signed in West Virginia earlier this month and listen to the words of Donald Trump and all of his men.

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Armada: “Th3 Gringos are Coming! Th3 Gringos are Coming!”

​The Pentagon sold this deployment as a standard counter-narcotics surge. A review of the naval assets currently on station reveals a force package designed not for drug interdiction, but for total air dominance and amphibious invasion.

​This is the largest accumulation of American firepower in the Caribbean since the Cold War:

​The Crown Jewel: On November 11, 2025, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) Carrier Strike Group entered the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility. This is the world's largest warship, carrying over 75 aircraft’s including F/A-18 Super Hornets and electronic warfare squadrons. You do not deploy a supercarrier to chase speedboats; you deploy it to level air defenses.

​The Invasion Force: The USS Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) has been on station since August, carrying the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit—thousands of combat-ready Marines capable of hitting the beach within hours.

​The Air Power: In Puerto Rico, the Pentagon has forward-deployed a squadron of F-35B Lightning II stealth fighters. These jets are designed to penetrate sophisticated air defense networks.

And the one that scares me the most:

​The “Robotic” War: On November 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth officially announced “Operation Southern Spear,” debuting a new strategy involving “robotic and autonomous systems.” Unmanned surface vessels are currently patrolling the coastline, creating a surveillance dragnet. This started in early 2025, by the same name, “Operation Southern Spear,” now in an official capacity, commanded by SecDef Pete Hegseth:

“Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people. The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood — and we will protect it.”

I hate to say this in such an unscientific and anecdotal way, but if you can’t beat ‘em, join em. Everybody, and I mean everybody who has seen a Vice documentary knows that the fentanyl is coming from clandestine labs in Mexico, receiving the pre-cursor ingredients from chemical/pharmaceutical companies in China. Venezuela accounts for less than 5% of America’s cocaine supply, and 21% of the boats, according to coast guards, are innocent of carrying that cocaine. They’re simply trying to provide for their families.

Venezuela’s Buildup…

In Venezuela they are making their own preparations for the coming conflict mobilizing 25,000 to the borders.

Along with that Maduro signed a decree granting himself expanded emergency powers in case of U.S. incursion, allowing him to mobilize forces nationwide and grant the military control over public services and the oil industry, declared Christmas in October, and conducted amphibious warfare exercises, keeping in mind, the Americans are back to sow chaos again.

​ The Kinetic Reality: The "Double Tap"

​The war has already started. Since September 2, 2025, U.S. forces have conducted 28 confirmed strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.

​The official body count is 104. The administration claims they were all cartel members. However, leaked after-action reports suggest a far darker operational standard.

War Powers Resolution’s Failed to Resolve

After the president made it clear that he had no intention of seeking a Congressional “Declaration of War” Congress made their attempt at passing a War Powers Resolution that would put the power to declare war back into the hands of Congress, the way the framers of the constitution wanted.

Reporting for The Intercept:

Advocates for the war powers resolution sought to cast it as an embodiment of MAGA non-interventionism in a bid to sway Republican senators. The GOP, however, largely lined up behind Trump instead as he mulls attacking Venezuela.

Senators voted 51-49 against the resolution, dooming it even as a U.S. aircraft carrier sailed toward the Caribbean. The resolution would have faced long odds even if it had passed, since Trump could have vetoed it, as he did in 2019 in the face of a measure blocking him from supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

Using language drawn from the MAGA lexicon, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., the lone Republican co-sponsor of the measure, asked his colleagues on the Senate floor to block the potential strikes.

“For decades, the globalists in Washington have led our country into one disastrous foreign war after another, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Venezuela,” Paul said. “The warmongers have recycled these experiments in regime change again and again, and what has it brought? Instability, chaos, suffering, and resentment. It is the height of arrogance to think we can forcibly remove the dictatorship in Venezuela and expect a different result.”

​War Crimes From Strike #1:

In late November, reports surfaced that Secretary Hegseth authorized a “double tap” strike—bombing a disabled vessel, waiting, and then striking again to kill survivors. Presented to us as a video clip, you see the boat, the explosion, and then they are gone. What you don’t see is the two survivors clinging on for dear life, and the second strike to take out the survivors. It’s a scene reminiscent of Wikileaks “Collateral Murder” video which cost Chelsea Manning four years of her life in prison for releasing.

Collateral Murder (above): 5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

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Initially Navy Adm. Bradley said he was given an order to take out the survivors and gave the orders for the double tap strike. Hegseth, said in an X post of the Washington Post report:

As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.

Later he blamed it on the “fog of war” and the president stated “he didn't know about the second strike,” the administration has now admitted the tactics were used, and although he has their full support, are placing the blame solely on Adm. Bradley.

“Let’s make one thing crystal clear: Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support,” Hegseth said in an X post. “I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since. America is fortunate to have such men protecting us. When this @DeptofWar says we have the back of our warriors — we mean it.”

Kentucky Senator (My Home) Rand Paul said of this: “Secretary Hegseth said he had no knowledge of this, and it did not happen. It was fake news. It didn’t happen. And then the next day, from the podium at the White House are saying it did happen. So, either he was lying to us … or he’s incompetent and didn’t know it had happened.”

Now, thanks to reporting by The Intercept, we know that Adm. Bradley, in the 45 minutes before the final kill-shot on the two survivors, wasn’t watching them float or popping champagne as I imagined he was, or getting a nap in, instead Bradley was seeking legal counsel from his top legal advisor:

[F]or some 45 minutes, Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of Joint Special Operations Command — sought guidance from his top legal adviser. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on September 2, he turned to Col. Cara Hamaguchi, the staff judge advocate at the secretive JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command).

Regardless, Bradley made the wrong choice:

“Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” one of the sources said, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”

Raising both hands is a universal sign of surrender for isolated members of armed forces. Under international law, those who surrender — like those who are shipwrecked – are considered hors de combat, the French term for those out of combat, and may not be attacked. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is explicit in this regard. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the guide.

But that’s not how Bradley — now the chief of Special Operations Command, or SOCOM — saw it. Bradley declined to comment to The Intercept, but a U.S. official familiar with his thinking said he did not perceive their waving to be a “two-arm surrender.”

​ The “Smoking Gun”: The Honduras Connection

​The White House claims this escalation is a moral imperative to stop “narco-terrorists” from poisoning America.

The events of December 2, 2025, prove this is a lie.

​On that day, President Trump issued a full presidential pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former President of Honduras.

​ Why does this matter?

Well, as it turns out, in 2024, Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.

According to prosecutors, he trafficked 400 tons of cocaine—far more than the U.S. accuses the Venezuelan regime is accused of moving.

While Hernández was in power, he was a U.S. ally. Now, Trump calls his conviction a “setup.” Hernandez, Trump wrote, had been “treated very harshly and unfairly.” Setting a convicted drug lord free while simultaneously bombing Venezuela for the exact same crime.

Interesting, right?

What’s more interesting is the money paid by Hernández to Republican lobby firm, BGR, of $660,000, who are also the #1 contributors to Marco Rubio’s campaign. Who is ALSO the #1 proponent of regime change in Venezuela.

​The message is unmistakable: You are not a "narco-terrorist" if you serve American interests. You are only a target if you sit on the world's largest oil reserves without American permission.

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​The C.I.A.’s Nobel Prize-Winning Puppet & Domestic Resistance

​Inside Venezuela, the political situation is fracturing. On November 18, opposition leader María Corina Machado released a document, titled the “Freedom Manifesto.” An obvious plagiarism if you ask me, but never mind that. While she declares a “new era,” her call for transition is being used by Washington to justify kinetic action, among their many scapegoats.

Many will call this conspiracy theory. They say things like “do you not believe in a Democratic uprising?” Forgetting that the presence of the “democratic” part leaves little room for uprising. But, what we are talking about here has nothing to do with anything organic or Democratic. This is a coup d’état carried out by Western powers through covert action by the CIA.

As a refresher, here’s a few of the last incursions into Venezuela by yours truly:

The Money & The Contract

To understand the mechanics of these coups, we must “follow the money.” Since the “official” narrative exists to obscure the financial and contractual realities established by primary documents.

Operation Gideon (2020): The Silvercorp Contract

This was not merely a rogue plot; it was a contracted commercial transaction for regime change.

• The Contract: A General Services Agreement was signed on October 16, 2019, between Silvercorp USA (a private military contractor led by former Green Beret Jordan Goudreau) and the Venezuelan Opposition’s “Strategic Committee.”

  The total value of the contract was $212,900,000.

  Political Strategist J.J. Rendón admitted to paying Goudreau $50,000 from his personal funds for “expenses” to kickstart the operation.

• The Signatories:

  • Jordan Goudreau (Silvercorp)

  • Sergio Vergara (Opposition MP)

  • J.J. Rendón (Strategist)

  • Juan Guaidó (Goudreau produced a copy of the contract bearing Guaidó’s signature; Guaidó denied signing it, but Rendón and Goudreau confirmed the negotiations took place).

• The Objective: The contract explicitly outlined a mission to “capture/detain/remove Nicolás Maduro,” secure the country, and install the recognized interim government.

• US Knowledge: While the US State Department denied direct involvement, Goudreau claimed he had been in contact with US officials. The operation relied heavily on the expectation of US support once the beachhead was established, and if there was any doubt left over in your mind, officially this op was titled “Operation Gideon.” Unofficially, however, it was called the “Bay of Piglets.” A humorous throwback to the 1961 CIA-backed regime change attempt on Cuba, that failed when John F. Kennedy refused to call in air support. More on this from the Grayzone, who interviewed Jordan Goudreau after he became a wanted man and went into hiding.

  

The 2002 Coup: The NED Connection

Unlike Gideon, which was a mercenary contract, the 2002 coup was financed through “democracy promotion” grants that empowered the specific civil society actors who executed the coup.

The Funding Mechanism: The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), funded by the US Congress.

In the months leading up to the April 2002 coup, NED funding to Venezuelan organizations quadrupled.

Key recipients included CEDICE (a business advocacy group) and the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV). The leaders of these very groups were the ones who signed the “Carmona Decree” dissolving Venezuela’s democratic institutions on April 12, 2002. One of them happening to be María Corina Machado (Page 23).

State Department Admission: A report by the US State Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) later reviewed US policy during this period. While it found no evidence that the US “ordered” the coup, it confirmed that the US was funding the groups involved and that “mixed signals” from US officials may have emboldened the plotters.

The Case Against María Corina Machado

Subject: María Corina Machado (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, 2025) Thesis: Critics and investigative journalists argue she is not merely an organic opposition leader, but a curated asset of US foreign policy, groomed to replace the current administration.

Below is the documented evidence used to support the argument that she functions as a US-backed replacement, often cited as the “CIA connection.”

The “Súmate” Financing (NED/USAID)

The foundation of Machado’s political career is the NGO Súmate, which she co-founded.

The Evidence: Súmate received a documented grant of $53,400 from the NED in September 2003, specifically for activities related to the recall referendum against Hugo Chávez.

The Implication: Under Venezuela’s “Law for the Defense of Political Sovereignty and National Self-Determination,” receiving foreign government funds for political activities is illegal. This funding established the direct financial link between her operation and Washington early in her career.

The “Allen Weinstein” Admission

To understand why “NED Funding” is often equated with “CIA Funding,” one must look at the source.

• The Quote: In 1991, Allen Weinstein, a founder of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), famously told The Washington Post:

“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

• The Argument: The NED was created to do overtly (and legally) what the CIA used to do covertly: fund opposition groups, unions, and media to destabilize unfriendly governments. Machado being a primary recipient of these funds fits this historical pattern.

I wrote about this last year. If you would like to know how regime change is enacted this way.

Sign 3: The 2005 Oval Office Meeting

In May 2005, María Corina Machado was granted a meeting with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office.

It is virtually unheard of for the head of a foreign NGO to be granted a solo audience with a US President in the Oval Office. This level of access is typically reserved for Heads of State, but if you are being chosen as the next Head of State….Why not?

This meeting was widely interpreted by diplomatic observers as Washington “anointing” her as their chosen leader, bypassing the traditional Venezuelan political parties.

In case you thought they cared about “democracy.”

By the way, click here, for a copy of Machado’s grant from the NED.

Sign 4: Wikileaks Cables

Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks reveal the US Embassy’s long-term view of Machado.

• The Strategy: Cables from the US Embassy in Caracas have historically described Machado as a polarizing but essential asset. While some cables noted her “elitist” approach alienated voters, they consistently identified her as a key point of contact for US strategy in the region.

• The “Voldemort” Cable: In some cables, former US Ambassadors discussed the difficulty of uniting the opposition, often citing Machado’s uncompromising stance—a trait the US later leaned into as they moved from an electoral strategy to a “maximum pressure” strategy.

Sign 5: The Nobel Prize as “Validation” (2025)

Her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize win is viewed by skeptics not as a recognition of peace, but as a geopolitical tool.

The Precedent: Historically, Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded to opposition figures in rival nations to grant them international immunity and legitimacy (e.g., Liu Xiaobo in China, Lech Wałęsa in Poland), and this time is no different.

The Function: By designating her a Nobel Laureate, the international community makes it significantly harder for the Venezuelan government to arrest her without facing global backlash. It effectively grants her diplomatic armor, a tactic consistent with regime change “soft power” operations.

Summary of the “CIA Replacement” Argument

The argument is not necessarily that she carries a CIA badge, but that she is the product of “Soft Coup” infrastructure from the CIA:

1. Funded by the NED (historically linked to CIA functions).

2. Legitimized by elite access (Oval Office).

3. Protected by international awards (Nobel Prize).

4. Positioned to take power not through organic coalition building, but through external pressure and “maximum pressure” campaigns designed in Washington.

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Now for a Large White Pill

​With all that being said, the American people are not buying the narrative:

​According to Polls released by CBS News/YouGov in late November, 70% of Americans oppose military intervention in Venezuela, and only 13% view the country as a major threat.

​On December 6, protests organized under the slogan "No War on Venezuela" erupted in over 50 U.S. cities, signaling the anti-war movement is awake.

​As the CIA are planning their color revolutions, sowing discord among the Venezuelan people, we are very aware of what our government is up to.

Stopping supplies from entering Venezuela to starve the people until they turn against their leader is the oldest trick in the book. They must see that Maduro is not doing this to them, Maduro is not the enemy of the Venezuelan people, Marco Rubio is. Donald Trump is; María Corina Machado is, instead of becoming the leader by democratic means; They’re using the militant option.

A Region on the Razor's Edge

We are witnessing the most dangerous moment in the Western Hemisphere in over thirty years. The shadow war between the United States and Venezuela has officially moved out of the shadows.

What began as a counter-narcotics mission has evolved into a de facto naval blockade. Following a rejected ultimatum from President Trump to Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. has declared Venezuelan airspace “closed,” and the death toll in the Caribbean is rising daily. Operation Southern Spear, has commenced, is bigger and more technocratic than anyone knew, and is coming into the light today.

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​Political Standoff and Failed Diplomacy

​The military pressure is paired with intense political and diplomatic efforts to force Maduro from power.

​Our leaders have built the legal framework for escalation by designating the Cartel de los Soles—an amorphous grouping of Venezuelan military and political officials—as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, increasing the scope for military action.

​President Maduro has used the U.S. actions to rally domestic support and frame the conflict as an imperialist threat.

“Colonial Aggression”: Maduro has condemned the U.S. military buildup and threats as “psychological terrorism” and a “colonial threat,” asserting that Washington’s true motive is to “appropriate Venezuela’s vast oil reserves,” which are the largest proven oil reserves on the planet.

​The current atmosphere remains highly unpredictable, with both sides entrenched in their positions. International observers and U.S. lawmakers are increasingly concerned about the legality of the military strikes and the potential for the conflict to escalate beyond targeted maritime attacks.

December 24: Chevron executives were spotted at the White House. With oil prices hitting $110/barrel due to the blackout, the economic pressure for “stabilization” has reached a fever pitch.

December 26: As of this morning, the “Silent Invasion” is over.

Reports from Cúcuta, Colombia, confirm that heavily armed units—suspected to be Delta Force or SEAL Team 6—have crossed the Táchira river into Venezuela.

Video footage shows soldiers operating in the La Mulata jungle sector using advanced American night-vision tech. Explosions have been reported near National Guard outposts.

They told you it was about drugs, but they pardoned a drug lord.
They told you it was about democracy, but they bypassed Congress.
They told you it was a “rescue,” but they sent an invasion force.

We are now in the opening hours of a major conflict. Possibly, within 72 hours, the limited “rescue” operation will expand into a full assault on Caracas. The war is here, and it was manufactured in plain sight.

Thank you for reading. This was a long one. Needless to say, I really hope I won’t be talking about Venezuela again for a long time.

Editor-in-Chief

What a disappointment!

Donald Trump is, no doubt, proving to be truly worthy of the office he holds, regardless of the rhetoric by Trump and his MAGA coalition, anyone who heard his posturing and saber-rattling towards Iran and Venezuela and China and Gaza on the campaign trail, should’ve known better than to think Donald Trump was for peace. However, many of us—including myself—did.

Maybe it was the constant repetitive chants all up and down the campaign trail, media appearances, and wherever else he might pop up, he never let up on his claims of “no new wars”, and pontificating braggadocio about all the wars that were “ended” or “avoided” by him being in office. The big one for me, however, was during his controversial Town Hall on CNN with Kaitlan Collins, airing adjacent to the Republican Primaries he refused to take part in.

Collins pulled a shitty little “gotcha question”, on the subject of (America’s proxy) war between Russia and Ukraine, and to say it backfired…. would be the understatement of the year.

His reply, exposed all who heard it to the possibility that maybe this guy isn’t as bad as they say. And his promise to “end the war on day one,” “end the killing.” That was even the point that Joe Rogan started to soften about the guy. Although he might be the least credible, at least someone was talking like this.

Not from Biden, Kamala, not from anyone in the ruling class. Or potentially to become the ruling class. It showed a respect for the mortality of others, not present from any other president of my lifetime.

But now we have this:

Above, starting at the 1:00 mark of the 1:18 long clip, responding to what at any other time would be a softball question “What about a ‘declaration of war’ from Congress?” As the constitution says is a must for going to war with another country using the United States military. To this he responds, finally, blowing it off, following it up with some much colder rhetoric than we, or at least, I am used to:

Oh, I don’t think we’re gonna need a declaration of war. We’re just gonna kill people who are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them.

So much for the “peace candidate……”

What the fuck happened to “No More New Wars”?

This is a continuation of Cold War rhetoric from—as far as I am concerned—ancient times.

He was supposed to be the refutation of the status quo. Now he is the status quo. Dismantle the deep state. Now he is the deep state. Drain the swamp? We should consult his friend Jeffrey about that.

America carried out their first failed coup against Venezuela in 1908. There is nothing “America First” about following the same catastrophic policies preceding the worst event(s) to ever happen in the history of the world, World War One, World War Two, and the destruction of Europe at the hands of the “Allied Forces” including Joseph Stalin, who became the next enemy—and rival—of Western Civilization, and the start of the five decade long Cold War against the Soviet Union (USSR).

It is insane to me how badly Donald Trump has wasted all the good will that he had gained from being pursued legally by his successor/predecessor which landed him back in office.

Squandered. Smashed. Pissed in ALL OF OUR FACES! For what?! It’s your legacy Mr. Trump, that is being destroyed. What a fucking fool.

Before the Election last year, I went out and surveyed everyone who’d listen “who” they “like in the election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump?” And completely astounding to me, no one under 50 years old was against him, when four years earlier, post-J6, his supporters almost had to bury their heads in the sand.

Now the dark days seem to be retFFurning with a vengeance, even his most ardent supporters have to caveat their support with things like, “however, I don’t agree with the ICE shit” or “the censorship of pro-Palestine protestors is ridiculous and illegal” or “war with Venezuela is not we voted for” or “this wholesale support of genocide by Israel is not the America First he promised us.”

It seems “America First” was simply a slogan, just like Make America Great Again, or Kamala Harris’ “We’re Not Going Back”(ICK) or Barack Obama’s infamous “Vote for Change” or “Change We Can Believe In” depending on the year.

Politics is fighting words again. Watch your step. Be mindful of your surroundings. Charlie Kirk was murdered for speaking his beliefs out loud. By all means, speak your mind but, do so with all discretion advised. Now, back to the Caribbean….

Regime Change! Yea, That’ll Show Em’

After the blood thirsty clip of him coldly speaking of murdering Venezuelans (Clip at top of page) and their democratically-elected leader, Nicolás Maduro, what world is that not grounds for impeachment but the stupid Ukraine call was. Wonder why? I’ve got a hunch.

As we speak there have now been 20 illegal boat strikes by American drones, offering zero evidence that they might be anything more than fishermen trying to feed their families', currently causing families to go hungry, and a fish shortage in mainland Venezuela because the citizens are afraid to fish for fear that they might be next.

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America Threatens a New “War on _______” as Supposed “Narco-Terrorists” Enter Stage Left

So, now I must ask what happened to arresting motherfuckers!? Due process? Western values for God sake.

What happened to the agreement that the government side was flawed, and therefore should consider everyone “innocent until proven guilty” to avoid sentences from being passed against people who were innocent but had their lives ruined anyway.
While the president drone strikes fishermen, the heroin—poisoned with fentanyl, and a new, Narcan-resistant demon, xylazine—is still moving from Mexico and the Middle East, leaving the streets thrashed with sleeping zombies, and lab grade crystal meth, more abundant and cheaper than any other drug on the market. Followed by Abscesses, psychosis, and violent eruptions from this crystalline evil taking place on a daily basis, and what does our fearless leader do about it? Go after the wrong country under recommendation of State Department crony Marco Rubio, and others.

The war on drugs being carried out, failure be damned, is a war on the most vulnerable of American souls. The very people he campaigned on saving. And he, representing their last glimmer of hope, is using their illness as an excuse to go on the warpath towards war with the wrong fucking country. Go figure.

And “Narco-Terrorists”? Give me a break. Firstly, if any one of those twenty boats had drugs in them it doesn’t mean the people were fucking terrorists. In most cases the cartels make these people into mules through extortionist tactics (intimidation, kidnapping, etc). If someone would arrest them instead of blowing them up, you might be saving their lives or God forbid their families’ lives.

Secondly, we failed just as badly in the war on terror as we did in the war on drugs! Of course, Trump doesn’t know this. He has never read a book. You think he’s ever seen “The Wire?” How about “Snow?” Doubt it. Now we’re doing a “war on drug-terrorists?” That’s bound to be a winner.
Donald Trump and his group of imbeciles are really overplaying their hands.

His credibility collapsed with the botched cover-up of Jeffrey Epstein, which gets worse and worse daily and the stripping of the First Amendment, when you decided to turn your dogs on blue cities and disappear protesters who are not even protesting America, and chose a fake ally, a vassal state of the U.S. over his own people.

He’s horribly subservient to Israel, we knew he would be. He took a half-a-billion dollars from the Adelsons, who he admits would choose Israel over America, for his legal bills and campaign, but dude, we didn’t sign up for another war on anything.

We can’t win “War(s) on things.” We fail every time!

War on Drugs? Lost.

War on terror? Hell, they’re visiting the White House!

How did the War on Terror, lead to more terror worldwide? The same way that the War on Drugs led to more deadly, and more abundant drugs around the world, and right here at home.

Both of them were created by us, and destabilized the whole world in the name of saving it. How did this happen? Let’s talk about it.

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The War On Drugs

• The war against drugs began with Harry Anslinger. The author of “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs,” Johann Hari explains in the book above and in an interview (below) with the ACLU:

Johann Hari: The most influential person who no one has ever heard of is Harry Anslinger, the man who invented the modern War on Drugs — way before Nixon, way before Reagan. He’s the guy who takes over the Federal Bureau of Prohibition just as alcohol prohibition is ending. So, he inherits this big government department with nothing to do, and he basically invents the modern drug war to give his bureaucracy a purpose. For example, he had previously said marijuana was not a problem — he wasn’t worried about it, it wasn’t addictive — but he suddenly announces that marijuana is the most dangerous drug in the world, literally — worse than heroin — and creates this huge hysteria around it. He’s the first person to use the phrase “warfare against drugs.”

• Harrison Narcotics Tax Act (1914): The foundational pillar of U.S. drug policy. It effectively criminalized the non-medical use of cocaine and opiates. Enforcement was driven by racialized fears of African Americans in the South using cocaine and Chinese immigrants using opium.

• Marijuana Tax Act (1937): Spearheaded by Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger, this act effectively banned cannabis. Anslinger utilized sensationalist propaganda and racial tropes against Mexican immigrants to secure its passage.

• Boggs Act (1951): Established the first mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, setting a precedent for the draconian sentencing structures of the 1980s.

• October 27th 1970, President Richard Nixon signed into law the ‘Controlled Substances Act’ which was the first formation of the I-V Controlled Substance Scheduling and the basis for drug regulation still used (and unrevised) today.

• Although the first push against drugs began in 1909 with the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act banning the possession, importation and use of opium for smoking.

• Then, in 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act, which required narcotics manufacturers, sellers, and distributors to register with the Bureau of Internal Revenue under the U.S. Treasury Department. The act was the first comprehensive law in the U.S. to regulate whole classes of drugs., which regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and cocaine.

• Next came alcohol leading to the Volstead Act and the prohibition of alcohol starting what is known as the Prohibition era (1919-1933).

This “War” as we know it today, however, began in June 17 1971 when Nixon addressed the nation with the following statement:

America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.

Under Nixon this was almost immediately used as something like a pretty new pistol for the FBI and CIA crushing of anti-war/pro-civil rights sentiment through the many operations pegged against us (COINTELPRO, CHAOS, and others). Carter’s win posed as a reprisal to Nixon’s policies and started the decriminalization of reefer. Reagan made the same declaration in 1982, however, with a bit more of a charming disposition.

And again in 1986 with the enlistment of First Lady Nancy, and the now infamous, “Just Say No” Campaign. (Below)

So cute, are they not? Nancy Reagan telling people to “just say no” during the “Crack epidemic.” Patronizing people in the throws of addiction, just trying to survive.

H.W. Bush declared the same war. Here he is (1989) making that declaration followed by a speech by a much more spry Joe Biden on the same subject.

George H.W. Bush: Some used to call drugs harmless, recreational, they’re not. Drugs are a real, and terribly dangerous threat to our neighborhoods, our friends, and our families. No one among us is out of harm’s way when four-year-olds play in playgrounds strewn with discarded hypodermic needles and crack vials it breaks my heart.

When cocaine, one of the most deadly and addictive illegal drugs, is available to school kids, school kids, it’s an outrage! And when hundreds of thousands of babies are born each year to mothers who use drugs, premature babies born desperately sick, and even the most defenseless among us are at risk.

These are the tragedies behind the statistics, but the numbers also have quite a story to tell. Let me share with you the results of the recently completed household survey of the national institute on drug abuse, it compares recent drug use to three years ago, it tells us some good news and some very bad news.

First the good, as you can see in the chart in 1985. The government estimated that 23 million Americans were using drugs on a current basis. That is at least once in the preceding month last year that number fell by more than a third that means almost 9 million fewer Americans are casual drug users. Good news because, we changed our national attitude toward drugs, casual drug use has declined. We have many to thank, our brave law enforcement officers, religious leaders, teachers, community activists, and leaders of business and labor.

We should also thank the media for their exhaustive news and editorial coverage and for their air time and space for anti-drug messages and finally i want to thank the president, and Mrs. Reagan for their leadership. All of these good people told the truth, that drug use is wrong and dangerous, but as much comfort as we can draw from these dramatic reductions, there is also bad news, very bad news, roughly eight million people have used cocaine in the past year, almost one million of them used it.

And here he is visiting a crack house.

The law came down on these people (majority minority) selling crack-cocaine harder than they’ve ever come down on sex offenders or murderers—. Which, by the way, still stands. Problem was, that the cocaine they used to make the Crack came from the office of the vice president, yes, it came from THEM!!! So they could fund the very thing that they are currently planning to do to Nicolás Maduro, Regime Change.

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Iran-Contra

As explained by Arun Gupta at The Intercept:

Bush was at the CIA during the height of Operation Condor, an international “kidnap-torture-murder apparatus” run by six Latin American dictatorships and coordinated by Washington. In an Operation Condor plot carried out in October 1976, Chilean secret police assassinated former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American Ronni Moffitt with a car bomb in Washington, D.C. Bush misled an FBI investigation about Chile’s responsibility. Also as spy chief, Bush met his Panamanian counterpart, Manuel Noriega, already suspected at the time of drug trafficking. (As president, Bush ordered the invasion of Panama in 1989 to remove Noriega from power, who was the country’s ruler by that point.)

As vice president, Bush became an architect of the “secret government” that came into being for the Iran-Contra operations. Official investigations of Iran-Contra are limited to the period after October 1984 when Congress banned military and intelligence services from providing direct or indirect support to the Contras. But Gary Webb’s expose on CIA and Contra links to cocaine smuggling, “The Dark Alliance,” dates to 1981 the covert U.S. support for the Contras. Cobbled together from remnants of Nicaragua’s defeated National Guard, the Contras were notorious for torture, assassination, and other atrocities. The Phoenix-Condor link reached Central America, as the CIA recruited veterans of Argentina’s Dirty War to train the Contras, who ignited a decadelong war that killed an estimated 50,000 Nicaraguans.

Rolling Stone dates Bush’s involvement in the Contra war to 1982, when he reportedly conspired with CIA chief William Casey in an operation they code-named “Black Eagle.” Working under Bush, Donald Gregg managed finances and operations for the Contras, according to Rolling Stone. Rodriguez handled arms flights to Central America and negotiated with military commanders there. Historian Douglas Valentine has claimed that in 1981, Bush authorized these veterans of the Phoenix Program to initiate a “Pink Plan” terror war against Central American insurgents.

Black Eagle masked its operation by relying on the Israeli Mossad to acquire and ship weapons to Central America, employing Panamanian airfields and companies as fronts, according to the Rolling Stone story. But the planes, once emptied of their arms cargo in Central America, were repurposed by Noriega and the Medellín cartel to ship drugs back to the United States. The CIA allegedly stuck a deal with the Medellín cartel’s primary contact, Barry Seal. In return for Seal hauling weapons to the Contras, the CIA protected him as his operations smuggled an estimated $3 billion to $5 billion in drugs into the United States.

The White House also leaned on Gulf State monarchies to cough up more than $40 million for the Contras, violating the 1984 congressional ban known as the Boland Amendment. In 1985, Lt. Col. Oliver North coordinated with Israel to ship more than 2,000 anti-tank missiles to Iran through Israel in exchange for Iran’s assistance in freeing American hostages held in the region — and the profits were used to fund the Contras.

The maneuver, which violated the Arms Export Control Act, was extraordinarily cynical. Iran was mired in a brutal war with Iraq, which was backed by Bush and other senior Reagan administration officials beginning in 1982. Through the BNL bank that would later collapse in scandal, Iraq received more than $4 billion of U.S. Department of Agriculture credits. Most of that money reportedly went to buy weaponry even as Iraq waged chemical warfare against Iran and its own Kurdish citizens.

Both the Contra weapons shipments and the arms-for-hostages deals were exposed in 1986.

So, after sanctions passed by Congress it was legislated that we would no longer fund the Contras. An unruly group, kind of like Al-Qaeda, remember Al-Qaeda? The head-chopping Bin Ladenite wannabes who now rule Syria, visit the White House, play basketball with military leaders after we armed them against Syrian “dictator” Bashar al-Assad, just a decade after they flew planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, killing 3,000 Americans at home, 4,500 in the illegal invasion we carried out in Iraq, causing trauma that has led to the suicide of 30,000—and counting—of our bravest and brightest. They (Americans) are gone, but not forgotten, like the saying goes, however, we seem to have forgotten that they’re—al-Qaeda—not gone!

After the Reagan administration was banned from funding the Contras, who he repeatedly compared, publicly and privately, with the forefathers of America calling them a ‘‘moral equal to our Founding Fathers” minus the cocaine, I guess, and a lot more genocide. Not sure if Ronnie really believed that or if it was just a dope line from a throw away speechwriter that he was hoping would manufacture consent, to steal a Chomsky term, of the populace and Congress, unfortunately for the Contras, the latter wasn’t buying it.

President Ronald Reagan, and his pack of neoconservative wolves, however, wouldn’t take “No!” for an answer.

As mentioned above, following the president’s green-light, CIA Director Bill Casey, Vice H.W. Bush, and the rest of the warmongering snakes collaborated with Israel’s Mossad, to sell weapons to Iran, illegally of course.

Taking the profits from the weapons sale, to provide more weapons to the contras, and thanks to VP Bush/CIA/State Dept. hammering out a deal with the Medellin Cartel & Noriega—who Bush would go on to arrest during his turn as president—would fill up the plane—now empty in Nicaragua—with cocaine which would then be sold to a dealer in Los Angeles—Freeway” Rick Ross ring any bells—with profits, once again, being used to repeat the cycle.

At the same time this was happening, trouble was brewing domestically, as the LA street dealer, Rick Ross was expanding his empire with the tons of cocaine he was buying, turning to freebase (smokable cocaine) and marketing as “Ready-Rock” was taking America by storm and began the beginning of the crack epidemic as we knew it.

What was our beef with the Sandinista government? The same beef we got with Maduro in Venezuela and why we are in process of replacing him. Because we don’t own them. Back then we called it “Communist” but really they were just further to the left than Ronald Reagan, and not in the pocket of the US government, yet.
Our narco exploits didn’t end there. Below the War on Terror will crash together with the War on Drugs in a way that we can only speculate.

You see, when prosecuting the intelligence agencies most secret operations, especially after being given the time to cover-up said operations we are left, simply with outlines of what actually happened, and we must draw our conclusions from an abundance of circumstantial evidence, however, enough pieces come together to form a narrative just about any twelve jurors would find “beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
After bombing Iraq all through the 90’s and putting military bases all over the Middle East which offended the former Mujaheddin who beat the Soviet Union into submission in Afghanistan with our weapons. This caused a string of terrorist attacks all leading up to a climactic attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001. This was a plan from the beginning to provoke us into invading Afghanistan to bleed us dry the same way that they bled the USSR dry just over a decade earlier.

When we invaded Afghanistan and pushed the Taliban to the margins, a few unintended consequences took place, one of them being the—once almost clean of drug cultivation—country would become the largest producer of heroin in the world, with American soldiers running cover for the farmers and USAID subsidizing the farms. At the same time here in the states the opiate boom came, bigger than anything anyone had ever seen. Wave after wave the drugs came and decimated what was left of the inner cities.
Now, those drugs that Nancy Reagan told us to “Just say no” to while Ronald was feeding them to us by the ton, and the heroin that our soldiers took up guarding for the “good of the people” are nothing compared to what they evolved into.
We had fentanyl, manufactured in mexico using precursors from china being mixed with heroin from Afghanistan and Xylazine, a horrible tranquilizer that there is nothing to reverse an overdose to, killing on average 100,000-”A 747 full of people shot out of the sky every single day.” -Jelly Roll-Americans every year, but we’re worried about Venezuela.
With that we introduce the failed War on Terror.

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We Lost the War on Terror

The War on Terror was a failure. We spent 8 trillion dollars, lost 4500 American servicemen and a million Iraqis and that was just in Iraq. No telling how many more became the “casualties of war” in the seven that we destroyed.

We created ISIS when we opened the doors to Bucca prison in Iraq. We fought on the same side as the guys who flew the planes into the towers in an attempt to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. We tortured Arabs who turned out to be innocent, locked them up indefinitely to cover it up, and sent the only guy who dared to speak against it to prison, a CIA officer named John Kiriakou.

During one five-month drone-strike campaign in Afghanistan, nearly 90% of the people killed were not the intended targets.
30,000 and rising, servicemen from the War on Terror have taken their own lives, at 24 a day, no telling how many more can no longer take part in society, all this for our War on Terror.
But, surely we defeated terrorism, right? Right!?
Wrong.
At the beginning of this war on terror there was 440 members of one group called al-Qaeda. By Christmas they were all but decimated. However, according to reports al-Qaeda alone has grown by a thousand times:

Al-Qaeda has recruited an estimated 40,000 fighters since Sept. 11, 2001, when the Osama bin Laden-led extremist group attacked the United States, according to the not-for-profit Council on Foreign Relations.

Despite a United States-led global “war on terror” that has cost US$5.9 trillion, (now $8 trillion) killed an estimated 480,000 to 507,000 people and assassinated bin Laden, al-Qaeda has grown and spread since 9/11, expanding from rural Afghanistan into North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, the Gulf States, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Thousands of members of hundreds of new groups. Every time we seek out to overthrow a regime who we “don’t like” it causes Blowback as Chalmers Johnson wrote in his book by the same name. Coined by General McChrystal, “Insurgent Math” You kill 5 insurgents and 10 rise up because when you kill 5, it emboldens the 10 to fight back and practically does the recruiting for al-Qaeda.
No one in corporate media even talks about Iraq anymore, images from Libya are so bad. Reports of slave auctions, the sodomized Qaddafi. It doesn’t get uglier.
All for money and ego, that’s it.

We, for our own damn ego and oil, destroyed the Middle East. How about Yemen. Two years ago we stopped backing the Saudi’s in their genocide against Yemen. Straight from a member of Trump’s cabinet in his first term: We can’t stop bombing Yemen because we owe Lockheed Martin too much money. They called it “putting the defense industry on welfare.”
No worries Lockheed Martin. No worries at all. Regime change is in the air. It reeks of death and oil.
The shrieks of joy from little Marco the neocon, sound like the sound barrier breaking overhead, this is after all his lifelong mission, to be the blood-soaked monster that destroyed Venezuela.
Using weapons of war to murder “drug dealers.” Who the fuck do we think we are. We are truly overplaying our hand, the world hates us. No one can trust us. Anyone we shake hands with, must know their days are numbered.
Twenty speed boats have been bombed now, the country is encircled by our weapons.

The blowback from the Middle East led to 9/11, what do we think this will lead to. Venezuela is so damn close to us, ninety miles off our coast, what makes anyone think that this wouldn’t be another disaster for America.
We militarized the police with both wars. Bled our own country of resources, and handed the ball to organized crime all over the world.

We created an overdose crisis with the “War on Drugs.”
Created terror with the “War on Terror.”
How exactly do we think we could now win the war on this imaginary hybrid we are calling “Narco-Terrorists?” Does such a thing even exist? We should probably look a little closer to home, because in most counts, the real culprits are sitting in Langley or the State Department of Washington, D.C.

Thank you for reading.

This is Editor-in-Chief

My phone rings. A startling ring. It’s all that I hear. Jeez, why is it so loud. Fuck! ear buds. I furiously tap my ears to silence the sound. First thought, bill collector. It’s the only calls I get. Take a number, asshole. I take my phone out, to swipe “Ignore,” but pause on the number. It a local number. 502 area code. Maybe I should take this.

I head from my work area towards the break room. Turn off Bluetooth to disconnect the earbuds and slide my finger across the touchscreen to “Accept” it. Here goes.

Maybe it’s a social quirk, maybe my generation. I used to talk on the phone for hours. Nowadays I’ll press ignore in a heartbeat to send you a text. I can think through what I am about to say. Consider what you said. On the rare occasion that I actually have to speak on the phone I am as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs;-) Dad used to say that. He had a hundred of them. “Sweating like a whore in church.” I never got that one. Is it because she feels guilty. These days that’s the least “unholy” job you could have.

“Hello?” I say, feeling a bit nervy.

“Yes, is this Jordan Canter?”

“Yes it is.” Hmm… Doesn’t sound foreign.

My voice is audibly shaking.

“Hi Jordan. This is Dana at the Cleanse Clinic.” Relief begins to rush until I think, wait. Why? What is this? Drug test? Bloodwork? Why are you calling? Who the hell is Dana.

I’m not left in suspense.

“Jordan, you’ve been selected at random for a pill count.”

“What?”

“Random pill count. Gather all your medicine together and get down here. We’ll get this done as quick and painless as possible and we can all move on with our day.”

I’m so shocked that I don’t ask any questions about the details.

It’s always been a rule since legislation was passed regulating the use of this drug.

The doctor had to undergo special courses to be allowed to prescribe it.

The patient has to attend at least two 30 minute one-on-one counseling sessions with a licensed therapist or two 60 minute group therapy sessions per month, or one of each, a monthly drug screening, and undergo at least one random pill count per calendar year. It has now been eight years, and this is my first time getting one.

They must be trying to get in compliance. I knew immediately that I was fucked from at least three angles:

One, I’m at work, broke, since I cleaned out my account last week to see the damn doctor, and would have to figure out how I could get from here, all the way home to get my medicine, to the doctor, then back to work.

Two, I will have to somehow explain this to my supervisors at work who will have to get someone to take my spot at this, very last minute, notice. It’s not like I have a habit of dipping out of work often. In fact, I’ve left one time in my entire career here, and that was followed by me being hospitalized for four days on IV antibiotics.

Three, and here’s the worst: My count is off. I am short by about 15. I’ve picked up a bad habit of taking an extra here or there on especially loooooong days. Then borrowing from friends who take the same medicine as me. After a year of doing that, I am about 15 behind. I don’t know how I will explain this without getting myself into trouble, possibly even legal trouble. It’s against the law, definitely, to borrow or transfer narcotics from one person to another.

Or what if they think I am a drug dealer. My record doesn’t exactly call me “clean as a whistle.”

I don’t know what the fuck is about to happen now, but I know this isn’t good.

Back in the office, watching the husks of human souls floating by. Up to the sign-up sheet at the window, to the seats to wait, into the office when they’re called upon. This is what's left of them after being ravaged by the streets. The goal here is to return them, us, back to whole.
The office waiting room is dim like a nightclub, yet sterile like a mortuary.

What is this place?
To some it's hell. To some it's heaven.

To some of us it's a tool to get well, save face, or possibly make your best friend or girlfriend answer your calls again. To me it was all of these things.
The souls floating in and out of this place had another destination in life, just like me, before they’d found themselves facing down rock bottom, familial turmoil, and shame unlike anything they’d felt before. The lucky ones found this place before they found their final resting place. The least lucky found it but, still didn’t survive.

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Where Am I?

When this place opened under its current name it was listed online as a kidney doctor. Hence the name "Cleanse", but when the "Recovery Business" became a profitable enterprise, so come the investors from all around. The Cleanse Clinic was just the same.
Downstairs from a pain management clinic, where the problem tends to start, it just seems like poetic justice that you would go downstairs to get fixed.

I started attending this place in 2017, when Passport started paying for M.A.T. Medication-Assisted Treatment. That was my in, and my way out.

It was a fateful time. I was losing friends daily, any day, I felt, my number would be up.
At the beginning I was able to kick the heroin habit but, continued to show up dirty for meth.
The doctor back then, Dr. Haq, once said to me in his thick Indian accent, "You have to stop taking the meth or it will kill you. If you won't than why quit any of it? If you die from heroin at least it will be peaceful. Meth, however, is painful no matter how it gets you. You could bleed out from your brain, that sound fun?"

It didn’t.
Bedside manners were never his strong suit.
I fought tooth ‘n nail to hold on to that little bit of ice I'd been doing but eventually I gave that up too. (A story I told here and here.).
This is a suboxone clinic. Where helpless souls, hopelessly addicted to drugs, mainly opiates, go for help when AA/NA isn't enough.

To understand the following plot, you must understand my state of mind.

For instance:
On the bus. In such a panic. Today might be the day that they refuse my medicine. I think back to Susan's words, after me attempting non-chalance when I say, "hopefully there's no problems at the doctor or the pharmacy." Because there has been problems at both, I think.
Sensing the impending doom I must be experiencing, she attempts to reel me in. "Jordan, is there anything more that you could of done?" I think this through, and shake my head.
"Then what do you have to worry about?"
Nothing. She was always so good at keeping me grounded, now that we're apart I'm like a lost ship floating out of orbit. But even then, it didn't last long. What she didn't know is I've been dreaming nightly for months about a place, it's kind of like a trailer park but there's people just kind of everywhere. And lots of people from throughout my life are here too. My father is there.
My father is in every dream, every night. I think it's how I cope with losing him. In the dream I'm trying to find a doctor that will take me. There's a countdown to how long before withdrawal. There are always different scenarios keeping me from the medicine and I always wake up right before I get it, at first in a complete panic and then, relieved, it was only a dream.
Back on the bus.
I'm getting closer to my stop at which point I'll make a dash across Broadway from the TARC Station, across the parking lot of Platinum Food Mart, up the alley around back along the edge of the hood, Village West, cross Roy Wilkins Parkway and I am there.
But these moments, excruciating moments, feel like an eternity.

I just know something bad will become of this. I can feel it deep down inside of me.
I hop off the bus and make my dash. The sun is heating up, it’s a late Spring morning, there are homeless people at the corner of the hood, like normal, I get to Roy Wilkins and stop on the median to finish my cigarette, when the fear returns. It's 10AM on a Thursday. The office closes for the day at 12PM. I light another cigarette, paralyzed by fear. I couldn't shake it, no matter how hard I tried. I finally made it into the office to sign-in at 11:45AM.
The receptionist met my eyes with a smile, I thought here it comes. They can't see me. WHY DID I WAIT SO DAMN LONG. I self-sabotaged, that's what happened!
"Good to see you Mr. Canter. We were wondering when you were gonna show up. Here, let's hurry up and get you in front of the doctor before she leaves."
..... Go figure.

Thirty-eight Days Ago

At the Cleanse Clinic: I walk in to sign-in for my appointment.
Since I started getting my insurance through work, I have been paying a $40 co-pay to be seen. Which was how much the Cleanse Clinic said I had to pay. This insurance cost $300 a month. Almost a quarter of what I take home.
I'm met, not by the normal, sweet receptionist, but by the small, putrid, skunk of a man, known here as the "money man" and by all means should never be interacting with people attempting to better their lives.

His eyes see indifference and his energy stinks of the greed of the robber baron. The contemporary version of the company men who came to appalachia in their fancy suits to rape the settlers who settled on that land with sneaky tricks because they didn't know how to read. He takes advantage of our addiction.
He says, "Hold on, we're gonna need a payment from you."
I think, oh my co-pay. And reach for my wallet. As I get it out he continues to talk, flipping through papers in front of him, "it looks like you are behind $780 before this visit." My heart drops, to somewhere near the groin level. I hear him say, like he's a million miles away that I will "have to make a substantial payment before I can be seen today."
I feel every ounce of anxiety that I've stuffed down start to boil up.
"But I'm paying my co-pay every month."
"Yea, but you have a $2,000 deductible."
"Dude, I wouldn't have signed up for the insurance if I had to pay $2,000 up front, not a chance."
I think for another moment, I do have a $2,000 deductible but my job pays that for me. I step out of line and call the office of BJK Plastics. The secretary answers. She's new, I still don't know her. The old secretary, Amber, got a better job, more money, closer to home, good for her, but she was so great. Hated to see her leave, she'd know what to do here. I ask for Miss Mary, who handles, I'd guess, everything.
"This is Mary."
"Miss Mary, this is Jordan Canter. An employee in production—"
"Yes, I know. Whad-ya need Jordan?"
"I am at my doctor's office right now and they said that I owe over a thousand dollars, but I have been paying my co-pay every month on my visit—"
"No, Jordan, you do not have a co-pay. You don't have to pay anything at all. Most doctors bill you in advance.” Yeah, I think, they do. “You bring the bill down here and we pay it. You do have a $2,000 deductible, but with it is an expense account for $2,000 which covers that. So that you don’t have to pay anything out of pocket."
She was right. This office, however, who has been spoiled by Passport, and people who need help for they might die today, is hearing none of that.

Yea, but. This guy isn’t a doctor; he isn't even a CNA. He's a little dweeb who wants to shake up lives. Hurt people. Maybe an inferiority complex, maybe he gets paid in commission and his wife (?) is busting his balls because he is 32, already impotent from porn addiction and not bringing home the type of money he swore to her father he would. Well, he's a junkie just like me. Except with more incestual clickbait.
I begin to empathize with him. He's just a boy, trying his best to make it in the world. Maybe: He is an Arab but loves Israel, so he calls himself a Frenchman, but deep down he knows that they would kill him if in an out of bounds zone in Gaza. He can't help how things look. It looks like I am trying to be seen for free. Unless he took into consideration that I have never pulled anything like that in nearly 10 years coming here, and I was on heroine and meth when I got here for Christ sakes. I am practically one of their success stories, and this idiot is ready to throw that away. I wonder if the owner of this place knows that. What if he stopped me from being seen today, after coming here for a damn decade, started to go into withdrawal by tomorrow, acquired a bag of heroin, shot it into my arm and it was carphentanyl, or worst xylazine. I could be dead in 24 hours over this. Nope. Still hate him.
"--Jordan. You still there?"
"Oh, yes Miss Mary, sorry."
"Jordan, we can get the money you paid reimbursed. Just get a receipt showing you paid it, and we'll get you paid back. Just maybe do it next week when I am less busy."
I put it on speakerphone and step up to the glass receptionists window.
"Hi, Dick, I mean, excuse me what's your name?" Not amused, neither am I.
"I've got my boss here on speakerphone. Miss Mary can you tell him about that?"
"Yes. So, if you or someone at that office, can get him a printout of all of the bills that he owes for this year, he will bring them here and they will be paid-in-full. Other doctor's offices would send a bill and he could bring the bill down and we pay it—"
He chimes in, "—yea, that's against our policy here."
"Uh-huh. Okay, so is that all you need from me Jordan?"
"Yes Ma'am. Thank you so much for your help straightening this out."
"Yep, Bye."
The phone hangs up and to my back pocket it goes.
I turn back to him feeling triumphant. But this talking PEZ dispenser was completely unphased that he had talked to anyone.
After an uncomfortably long silence I ask, "So, are you going to print out these bills so I can get them paid?"
"Yea, I'll make a note and put it in your file and next time you come in I'll try to have them ready. But I still need a substantial payment before you can be seen today."
Indifference. That's what his eyes say to me. I see in them that he is not going to budge. I better do whatever I can to get past the troll under the bridge.
Feeling utter defeat, I say, "what's the minimum that you'll take? I came ready to pay the $40 co-pay that I was being charged although I didn't owe it. But I was mostly broke outside that."
He says, "that won't work. How much do you have?"
I look in the app in my phone. I have $208 even.
But $175 of that is supposed to go to rent. In fact, I am supposed to pick it up while I am out.
I tell him truthfully, "Man, I got $208. That's it—"
"Same card as last time?"
"Yes, but—" He already had it pulled up.
"—Alright, it went through." He handed me a urine sample cup and says, "come on back." And that quickly I was broke. Damn.
I could've argued maybe and gotten him to put the money back, that was after all illegal as hell, but I felt defeated. I was just happy to be getting to see the doctor. Ten minutes earlier I was in pure shock from the thought of it. This place, and this medicine has been like a security blanket for so long. If I lose it, I'm afraid I might lose myself. But now I have another issue. I don't get paid for two more weeks, I don't have my share of the rent, I have a ride to and from work, but what if something unexpected occurs. What will I do then.

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AUGUST 7TH, 2025

I hang up the phone, not quite grasping what has just happened. A pill count? Really?!
Yes, I know they do them, but now? After all these years of worrying , and making damn sure that when this does occur my count will be right, but for some time now I've been taking an extra one here, there, and when I'm too far behind to make it until my appointment I can borrow from a friend that knows I would give them back. Now, they want a count and I am fifteen short. I. AM. FUCKED!
I reach out to a couple friends that might loan me what I am short until after the pill count and I can give them right back, but they don't have them either.
I'm thinking I will just have to go in short. Tell them the truth and if they kick me out, they kick me out. I'm at work, which means I will have to explain this to my immediate Supervisor, go home, get the medicine, and get to the doctor's office. What if they take them away from me for being irresponsible. I don't know how this works. What if they think I am dealing drugs, bring the authorities into the mix. This is crazy! Wait! I don't have the money to go down there even if I was good. That fucking Frenchman robbed me blind. At this point I see there is nothing I can do. I’ll have to change my doctor at the last minute. The way I used to change my bank account before payroll went through after I’d overdrawn my account so badly my whole paycheck would be gone.
I know of at least one other doctor I could transfer to. A coworker who used to go to my doctor has been telling me every time I talk to her that I need to transfer.

Fear can destroy things that have taken years to create in a matter of moments. It can render you completely useless, paralyzed in its wake. But it can also create bonds that never existed and strengthen bonds that were already there. The fear of the unknown is always the strongest fear, right? I spent the next three weeks completely paralyzed by this unknown fear, and made misstep after misstep.
But realized things that maybe I would've never known and met at least one person who I'm sure I wouldn't of known.
I lived my entire life in some kind of crippling fear. Fear of dogs. Fear of the dark. Fear of my mom. Fear of hospitals. Needles. Woman. Fear of the law. Fear of death. Fear of God. Could never be so lucky to have so much commitment that I could fear it but, fear of never being committed to, that’s real.
I fell down in a huge way, but came just short of irreparable damage, and landed just safe of sustainable growth. I couldn't ask for a better fall from grace.

Three weeks since the call. Had an appointment for a different doctor but didn't go. It was such a long trip I would've been on the bus for six hours, there and back, I was not ready for it.

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I called the Cleanse Clinic office line just to feel out the situation. I am confident that exile from the program is inevitable, but I keep holding onto a microscopic piece of hope that they will show a little bit of humanity when I get there. I call to "update my contact information" and the receptionist, Krystal, who I am very positive is lowkey on crystal, answers the phone.
She says, "Jordan, I am real busy right now. Can you call back tomorrow morning, and we'll get your information updated in the system."

“Yes, no problem. So, there’s nothing else right now?”

“What d’ya mean? Oh, Jordan. Have you and the kids made it to Kentucky Kingdom this year?”

She asks me this every time she recognizes me. As if to let me know that she remembers me from three years ago when she seen Susan, the kids, and I there.

“No, Krystal. She and I split up.”

“Oh, that’s right. Sorry Jordan. Just gimme a call back earlier tomorrow and I’ll get your contact info updated.”

“Alright, thank you Krystal.”

I hang up the phone, my bit of hope growing in size. She didn't mention it, and she's known for carrying all the gossip in the office, exaggerating it to epic proportions. If she hasn't heard it maybe I am okay.
As if by self-sabotage I stayed up all night, the night before, digging my grave deeper and deeper and not even mentioning to my housemates that my appointment which they know I need to be at was taking place at 10 o' clock, the following morning. I set no alarms and crashed around 7 o'clock. I woke up at 11:50 in a rageful panic. They leave the office for the day at 12 o'clock. Amber got me an Uber down there at the last minute. I walked in at 12:05 to meet the Frenchman at the window, disappointment on his face.
He says, smugly, or I consider smugly, from him, yep I'm getting kicked out, I'm sure of it, "alright, so here's the deal. You're super late."
"Yes, yes I am." I say as he scribbles on a Cleanse Clinic appointment card, "We need you to be here on Tuesday at 8 AM. You will get to see the dr then."
I don't want to be left in suspense for another weekend, so I throw the feelers out, "Alright, so will I see a regular doctor?"
"You'll see whoever is available."
"Ok. I am out of medicine. What do I do about that?"
He says, as he hands me the card, "take that to U of L hospital and show it to them so they know you have a scheduled appointment. They will give you medicine to hold you over until your appointment. Bye."
He's beaten me again. I've been late to my appointment before. A few times. They've never told me to go to the hospital. The other times they called the doctor, and he/she had called me in medicine until I could be seen again. I was absolutely positive they were tossing me to the trash. I turn to walk out, I can feel my emotions welling up, I try to fight back the tears, but they won't stop. Ah, fuck, should’ve taken my Paxil.

Like dominoes in a tsunami, everything is falling to pieces. I take out my phone to see if Amber can get me an Uber home, 1% battery. Oh, fuck. I'm about to be stuck downtown. She had told me to find a link to metro free Wi-Fi since I, of course, haven't paid my phone bill, and she'd get me a ride home. I am now walking up the sidewalk on Broadway at 10 Street. Searching for Wi-Fi.
Searching...
Searching...
Searching... I am able to hold my emotions together, but just barely. I know my reaction to this is ridiculous, but regardless this is reality.
Searching... I've got to keep my composure.
Searching... Keep it together Jordan.
Searching... Oh! There it is. Come on man, connect, PLEASE....
Oh, shit. It's connected. I open my free texting app, TextNow. Click on Amber. Start typing.
"Please. Send for a ride to the same spot. Will explain when I get home. Thank"-----DEAD
"FUCK----"
I sit behind a large tree facing away from any passersby and sob quietly to myself. Trying to assess every decision that brought me to where I sit.
There is obviously nothing sadder and sorrier than a middle-aged white guy crying about his doctor not seeing him. My last article was about the systematic genocide of an entire nation of people. I'm crying because I might have to find another job, maybe go to rehab at the worst.
I get my composure after about 15 minutes.
Consider staying here. As I see the homeless people gathered across the street, I wonder what this moment was to them. Did they have a crying behind a tree moment? Or did they take this in stride. Decide this was their homes? Would they rather be in the streets on drugs than in a home as a productive member of society, as some conservatives like to suggest, or did life systemically break their spirit. The American dream crush their dreams and the world break their, all to large, hearts. I've often envied them. Dreamed of having no worries. Acuna Matata, right?

At one point I considered spending a year in the tent city of Skid Row, Los Angeles, document it and write a book. Like David Simon did for The Corner, the book that would go on to be the award-winning HBO TV show The Wire.

I thought maybe it would be the moment that jumpstarted my career in journalism, but thought better of it. Imagine it, I go there, get strung out on California drugs, already living in a tent, I might never leave.

Through these thoughts I gain my composure. I am about 40 blocks from home. On about five hours of sleep in several days. All I want to do is lay down.

Okay, Jordan, you are still in the spot where you found the Metro connection. The phone died while I am sure 20 other apps were running. I just need it to stay charged up long enough to connect to the wifi, open the free texting app, and shoot a message to Amber. Okay, here goes…

I turn on the phone. Wait for it to startup, it takes so. damn. long. to start up. I stare at it for what must be the most excruciating 3 minutes of my life. And it is up.

Wifi, connected.

TextFree, Amber, I type, “Same place. Phone dead. Please help.” Send.

Sent, YES! And it died. Oh fucking well. I got the message out.

One Hour Later I was back at home planning the rest of my life, because after today, I was sure, that nothing would be the same, so I took some of the same with me and continued my reacquaintance with King opioid and Queen amphetamine.

No worries reader, it’s short-lived.

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“What’s your plan, Jordy? You’ve gotta have a plan.”

Her words could wake me up out of a dead sleep. So, I believe in every one of our lives that people are placed in our lives and taken away for reasons unknown to any of us. Maybe this is God, maybe forces of nature, maybe it’s energy that can move mountains. I don’t know. I tend to follow the Jordan Peterson belief, only on this, that if we are unsure about God or have problems keeping faith than if we at least follow the principles of the bible for the most part that our lives will be better. Not sure how well I do this, but so far I haven’t killed anyone, and that’s a plus.

Tuesday morning. Judgement day. I’m scheduled at the Cleanse Clinic at 8 AM. My roommates know about it this time. Amber offers to get me an Uber down there, “but you’ll have to catch the bus back home.” She tells me.

“If I go, all I need is bus money. I can use the same bus pass to get home.”

“Why wouldn’t you go?” She says.

I very grimly tell her, “It feels like I am attending my own funeral.” Dramatic? I don’t think so.

I get dressed to go. It’s 7 AM, if I wanna get there on time I should leave now. But I lay back down in bed. The fear of what lies around the corner exhausting everything. How far down am I? Not that far Jordan, but this appointment will tell it all.

I went to work on Saturday after staying up much too late. They sent me home and told me “before I could come back I needed a doctors note saying that I am in treatment and stable.”

I needed this appointment to go okay but I know it will not.

When I got home Saturday a friend of my roommates (and now a friend of mine) was there. I’d met her a few times and we talked and talked and talked and talked. We touched everything from racism to life stories. But something she said cut razor deep into my psyche. I can feel it as I lay here in bed, basking in my own self-pity.

“Jordy, what’s your plan? You’ve got to have a plan.”

She’s right. I always have a plan. As if channeling reality directly into my frontal lobe, that’s where decisions are made, see, she says to me. “Get to the suboxone doctor, get the paperwork you need and try to save your job. You have to have a job Jordy. No matter what you have to do. Get a ride, ride the bus if you have to but, you’ve got to have a plan to get your job back.”

She’s right, “You’re right. I can’t lose this job.”

Fear. There is rational fear, and irrational fear. I don’t know what fears are more rational than others. Fearing a drone strike is irrational if you live in the Midwest, but not if you live in Yemen or Syria. At least, today that is true.

Drive-by shootings are not a worry if you live in the suburbs but in South Central LA, any kind of shooting is a possibility.

I spent most of my life fearing the irrational. When I first got clean I started having panic attacks when I thought about dying. It was like my mind making up for the years that I didn’t care about myself, and that fear that, it turns out is not uncommon at all was showing itself by making me believe I was dying right then. It got so bad at one point I was taken out of work by an ambulance because I was positive I was having a heart attack.

I thought, at one point that I would not go anywhere that I couldn’t take a bus to since buses were much safer than cars and car wrecks claim more deaths than heart disease per year. If I am to close to heart disease to turn back, I could at least steer clear of cars. This fear was irrational. As was the fear that had me still lying in bed at 10 AM when Tricia’s voice again invaded my psyche, “Jordy, you’ve got to do everything you can—”

I looked at the time, 10:15, I’ve got to go. How will I explain that I didn’t even try.

“Amber!” I holler out to the room next to mine. No answer. I get up and walk to their door and knock, they must’ve went back to sleep. A couple more knocks and she answers, “What Jordy?”

“Will you still order me that Uber?”

“Yea, as long as it is under $9.44. That’s what I have left.”

“Thank you. I can’t skip this, I’ve got to at least try.”

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30 Minutes Later…

I’m getting out of the Uber in front of the doctor. With not a second to spare I head on in. I called them ahead of time to tell them, “I am late, but on my way.”

The sign reading “Cleanse Clinic” beaming down at me, I wonder if it’s the last time I’ll see this sign. Stop being so dramatic Jordan. You pass this place every time you go downtown. You’re getting discharged. Not dying. Maybe not.

I enter through the first set of automatic doors. Take the oh so familiar left through the next set into the waiting room, dim enough to be a nightclub, yet sterile like a mortuary. I see the first good sign in days as I walk up to the receptionists window. Priscilla. She’s the best, so nice, she remembered for a whole month one time to bring me her husband’s old backpack, which I still use everyday.

I look around, no sign of Frenchy. I thought for sure he’d be here to hound me about the bill. I say nothing, but take a pen to sign in on the sign up sheet.

Priscilla looks up and smiles, “hey Jordan, how are you?” Then eyes back to the computer. Searching for whatever it is that she does on that side of the window.

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I tell her in the most apologetic tone I can muster, "So sorry. I am so damn late.” She looks from the computer and locks eyes with me. Not in a look of passion, but stern, serious. Haha, it turns out more like Howard Stern on Sirius (Get it. Howard Stern is the star of Sirius Satellite Radio. Literally the only draw to Sirius, if that). She holds that stare and right when my nervous are about to give and I must look away it turns to a menacing smirk followed by, “you think we’re sweating what time you show up?”

I think, damn, I wish that was how everyone felt about me here, but I keep it to myself. After all, I can’t blame everyone here for one Arabic-Frenchy going through some kind of identity crisis because he has such a high tolerance to Cialis he’s about to file Chapter Eleven (it’s bankruptcy, see).

Instead I laugh through it like I always do when I don’t know what to say.

She giggles a bit. Grabs a new urine sample cup and a sharpie. Writes my name in J. Canter, looks up at me over her glasses like my aunt does, except when she does I am normally in trouble. But not with Priscilla, “Birthdate, 3, 1, 90, right?”

Good memory on this one, “Yes, that’s it.”

She passes me the cup through the window, says, “come on back,” like always and I remember, for the first time in days the realization sets in, holy shit, I jumped off the deep end, risked everything including my life, panicked over something that was never happening! Fear.

Irrational fear.

But now I’m back…

Stay Tuned… Thank you for reading.

Editor-in-Chief

The new Hasbara is making al-Qaeda seem like a wholesome crowd. Hitler a friend till the end.
Scrolling through X last night my feed was inundated with the pictures of dead journalists from an airstrike the night before.

I can't write about anything else. It feels like malpractice to carry on about anything else when children are being slaughtered and my government is running cover for them, using bombs and ammunition manufactured in my country, paid for with my tax dollars. Scrolling through my drafts I have 27 articles that are nearly finished or have a good start, but I keep hitting a roadblock in the form of an airstrike on innocent children, men, and woman whose only crime was being born in the wrong skin.

My first thought was well, everyone is covering this. It won’t make a damn bit of difference if I do or not. And maybe that is so, but even if my writing doesn’t move the needle a millimeter or change one person’s mind at least I can get this shit off of my chest.
The latest crimes by the Israeli Gestapo have the entire world up in arms. The only people who aren't completely outraged are those who stand to benefit from the actions of their masters. Those who are already bought and paid for by the blood-soaked racket. They know who they are and I hope it was worth it.

Crazy, they were called when they accused them of imposing a hunger blockade right out in the open.

August 1st, 2025 from Drop Site News:

President Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee toured an “aid distribution” site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Rafah in southern Gaza on Friday. During the U.S. envoy's highly stage-managed visit, at least 82 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks across the enclave, including 49 people seeking food aid with more than 270 injured.

The visit came as the leading international authority on food crises—the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—this week said that the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,” warning that the situation has reached “an alarming and deadly turning point” and predicting “widespread death” without immediate action.

“A theatrical performance is currently taking place at the U.S. aid distribution centers, attended by Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff: A civilized distribution of aid, without repression and pepper gas, without gunfire or casualties, without stampedes," Eyad Amawi, a representative of the Gaza Relief Committee and a coordinator for local NGOs based in Deir al-Balah, said. "Today, the goal is to discredit thousands of video clips, to wipe away the blood of nearly 1,000 starving martyrs and hundreds of wounded in the traps of humiliation.”

Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza reached a tipping point last month, with Palestinians collapsing in the streets and with men, women, and children dying from hunger and malnutrition on a daily basis. Three new deaths from the spreading famine were recorded by the ministry of health on Friday, bringing the total number since the start of the war to 162, including 92 children—many of them over the past three weeks alone.

This deliberate act of starving these people, not due to a shortage but simply because they can, is on the level of the Holodomor in 1932-33 Ukraine, when Joseph Stalin instituted a hunger blockade leading to a “man-made famine” on his own people as a means to crackdown on dissent.

How is this any different.

June 12, 2025 at 12:38 pm ET | Gaza, Israel

Gaza’s Health Ministry said Thursday that Israeli forces killed 103 Palestinians and wounded 427 over the previous 24-hour period as Israeli troops continued to shoot people seeking aid, and airstrikes and artillery pounded the Strip.

Details about Israeli strikes, photos, and videos were not as widely available as usual on Thursday, as Palestinian authorities reported a total internet blackout due to an Israeli attack on the last remaining main fiber optic cable connecting Gaza. The UN said that the blackout had hampered its aid operations inside the besieged enclave.

---

Even President Trump is talking about the starvation in Gaza:

President Trump acknowledged on Monday that there was “real starvation” in the Gaza Strip, comments that came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed there was “no starvation” despite the daily malnutrition deaths that have been caused by the US-backed Israeli siege.

“That’s real starvation stuff, I see it. You can’t fake that,” the president told reporters while meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at a Trump golf course in Scotland.

Trump said the US would become “even more involved” with getting aid into Gaza. However, the current US aid system, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), has created death traps for Palestinians as they are regularly gunned down by the Israeli military near GHF sites.

The Serial Slaughter of the Free Press in Gaza

Flippantly they tell us, “You’re losing your mind,” when they’re accused of targeted assassinations of Palestinian journalists. And follow-up with the excuse that, “The people you are talking about are not actual journalists, they are Hamas militants.” They used this excuse as recently as last night to cover their asses for the six Al-Jazeera journalists they just killed in an airstrike.

I have to wonder if these people are militants where is their weapons? They don’t have any? Unarmed? And you killed them anyway.

Early in the assault on Gaza a Palestinian poet, writer, and teacher, known for teaching his students not to hate Jews, Refaat Alareer, had taken up reporting what was happening in Gaza. For this they hunted him and when they found him staying at his sister they bombed the home and killed everyone inside.

He left this poem behind:

Since then 236 Palestinian journalists have been murdered, 2 Israeli. Western journalists are not allowed in Palestine. Without these journalists we would know nothing, and the Israelis know this.

The most recent journalist massacre as I mentioned above was a deliberate airstrike of the most prolific Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif and five others all working for Al-Jazeera and “Mohammed Qreiqeh was well-known for his eloquent way of speaking, a skill he displayed to the world in a live TV report just moments before Israel killed him.

“The 33-year-old Al Jazeera correspondent was one of six Palestinian journalists killed in a direct and deliberate Israeli strike on their media tent beside Gaza City's al-Shifa hospital on Sunday.”

Middle East Eye:

Their names were Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa and Mohammed al-Khalidi.

Israel has killed 238 Palestinian journalists in Gaza since the beginning of the war, according to the Gaza government media office.

Sharif was a renowned Al Jazeera correspondent who had gained prominence for his brave reporting during the conflict.

Qreiqeh was a Middle East Eye contributor who had reported on Israeli atrocities and most recently was working for Al Jazeera.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ):

An Israeli army spokesperson had called Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza correspondent Anas al-Sharif a terrorist multiple times before his death in an Israeli airstrike on August 10, 2025.

The CPJ started to worry that the Israelis were about to act and were using the premise that “Anas was a terrorist” as their excuse to kill him. This is someone who reported on the assault on Gaza 11 months straight at one point.

New York, July 24, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists is gravely worried about the safety of Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza correspondent Anas al-Sharif, who is being targeted by an Israeli military smear campaign, which he believes is a precursor to his assassination.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee has stepped up his online attacks on al-Sharif, by falsely alleging that he is a Hamas terrorist, since the journalist cried on air while reporting on starvation in Gaza. The 28-year-old journalist has been a key source of news from Gaza for international audiences since the war began more than 650 days ago.

“We are deeply alarmed by the repeated threats made by Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee against Al Jazeera’s Gaza correspondent Anas al-Sharif and call on the international community to protect him,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “This is not the first time Al-Sharif has been targeted by the Israeli military, but the danger to his life is now acute. Israel has killed at least six Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza during this war. These latest unfounded accusations represent an effort to manufacture consent to kill Al-Sharif.”

The IDF have made unsubstantiated claims that many of the journalists they deliberately killed in Gaza were terrorists, including four Al Jazeera staff — Hamza Al Dahdouh, Ismail Al Ghoul, Rami Al Refee, and Hossam Shabat. CPJ classifies such cases as murder.

Al-Sharif was one of six Al Jazeera journalists that the IDF accused in October 2024 of involvement with Hamas or Islamic Jihad militant groups, a claim that the Qatari-based channel rejected as “baseless.” Shabat was later killed and Talal Al Arrouqi was injured.

Two other Al Jazeera staff journalists – Samer Abu Daqqa and Ahmed Al-Louh — have been killed during the Israel-Gaza war, as well as eight journalists who freelanced for the channel, according to CPJ data.

Because he was recorded crying in a video over the people being starved they decided that Anas was a part of a “false Hamas campaign on starvation.”

Israel is coming under increasing pressure to stop shooting Palestinians at aid distribution points and allow more food in, amid global alarm over reports of deaths from hunger and images of emaciated children.

In a July 24 video, Adraee accused al-Sharif of being a member of Hamas’ military wing, Al-Qassam, since 2013 and moving during the war “to work for the most criminal and offensive channel.”

In a July 23 video, Adraee described Al Jazeera’s reporting on starving Palestinians as “a fabricated drama starring Anas al-Sharif, who sheds crocodile tears,” while playing a clip of the journalist crying while reporting on July 20.

In a July 20 video, Adraee played the same footage of al-Sharif crying and accused him of “propaganda” and being part of a “false Hamas campaign on starvation.”

On July 12, responding to al-Sharif’s post calling for a ceasefire, Adraee described the journalist as “a mouthpiece for intellectual terrorism.”

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---

“There IS NO ETHNIC CLEANSING or GENOCIDE!”—Says Israeli Spokesman

“Yes, There Is!”—Says Benjamin Netanyahu!

It is anti-semitic, a “blood libel,” to say that were committing ethnic cleansing.
Now, with the backing of the American empire they’re committing these things out in the open.
To say this is evil is the understatement of the decade.
They starved these people for months, and that was letting nothing in, which is kind of a red herring because before they sealed the place up for months and wouldn’t let a crumb in and arrested anyone who tried to get past them to feed the people they were already not allowing enough food in to feed the people.
Then when they let in food they would open fire on the lines of hungry people, gathered to relieve their aching bellies. Killing as many as forty-nine people at once, standing in line.

So far, they have killed 245 people while they were simply trying to eat.
People, yes, people, these are people just like you and I.

In the past 24 hours 60 Palestinians were murdered.
6 of them journalists for Al-Jazeera.
Over 300 injured and 36 were murdered in line to get food.

“The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has warned that a “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out,” predicting “widespread death” without immediate intervention.”

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Benjamin Announces His “Final Solution” Like His Predecessor in the Third Reich.

The Israeli leader claimed he didn’t want to ‘keep’ Gaza but the Israeli plans involve the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from large swathes of Gaza with the goal of driving them out entirely

by Dave DeCamp | August 7, 2025 at 3:28 pm ET | Gaza, Israel, Palestine

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed in public comments on Thursday that his goal for Israel’s next military offensive in Gaza is the takeover and full Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory.

Netanyahu claimed that he doesn’t want to “keep” Gaza and that Israel would hand over the territory to an unspecified Arab force, but the Israeli military plans involve the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza City and Gaza’s central refugee camps with the goal of driving them out of the Strip entirely.

“We intend to control all of Gaza. We don’t want to keep Gaza. We want a security perimeter. We want to hand Gaza over to Arab forces that will govern Gaza properly,” Netanyahu told Fox News.

In another interview, Netanyahu said Hamas and the Palestinian Authority couldn’t govern Gaza and that the Israeli military would be responsible for “overall security,” meaning Israel would maintain a tight grip on the territory. “We will never hand [Gaza] over to the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. We will provide overall security. There will be a security perimeter provided by us,” he said.

Netanyahu’s plan has faced resistance from the military since heavy Israeli troop casualties are expected, and the Israeli captives in Gaza will likely be harmed or killed during the offensive. Thousands of Israelis are protesting against the planned escalation, and the families of the hostages are calling for a diplomatic deal to free their relatives.

Despite the risks and the daily slaughter and starvation in Gaza, the Trump administration has decided to back whatever Netanyahu decides to do. “President Trump has decided not to intervene and to let the Israeli government make its own decisions,” Axios reported on Thursday.

According to reports, the military offensive on Gaza City and the surrounding refugee camps in the center of the enclave is expected to last for months. Israel will push the civilian population out of the area and direct them to the south in an effort to prompt them to leave.

This is everything that the more moderate voices said would never happen. This is the Greater Israel plan that they wanted all along. Planned since the 90’s when Netanyahu was approached by the neocons who’d go on to be consequential to the post-9/11 War on Terror. Outlined in their policy memo, addressed to Benjamin Netanyahu on his way into office for his first term as Prime Minister. Titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.

They’ve kept Syria weak, so it’ll be no problem to take. Settlers have taken the West Bank piece-by-piece and according to recent reports, it’s already in Israels possession. Piece-by-piece the Greater Israel Project is falling into there hands.

The people of Gaza City are so weak from malnutrition, what are they really gonna do? Someone should do something. But who? What?

Whether you’re the praying type or not, we should all say a prayer for the Palestinian people.

They need a miracle!

Thank you for reading. This is Jordan Lee Canter Editor-in-Chief

The Freedom Manifesto

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Scrolling through some clips about the Tucker Carlson X Nick Fuentes fallout and I run into this Adam Sosnick pontificating as to why Candace Owens/Dave Smith/Tucker Carlson might be so critical of Israel.

After the latest news that they literally voted this week for the ethnic cleansing of all the Palestinians from Gaza, it’s unbelievable that anyone could still be in wonder about why anyone would oppose these people.

At this point, if you are not in opposition to Israel, you are guilty of a crime against humanity.

Especially if you have a platform that millions of people watch, that’s even worse. By all means, if you don’t or can’t pay attention to all this shit, I get it. But if you are watching and find yourself thinking, I wonder why everyone is so upset at them? Maybe it’s because she has a Catholic husband, as Adam so stupidly suggests, you are in fucking dream world.

There was a crazy literary battle between James Baldwin and the Jewish Community, including Norman Podhoretz and others (you’ll see).

Norman Podhoretz is the Godfather of Neoconservatism. Without his ideas there would have been no 9/11. No ‘War on Terror.’ And the Middle East might just be experiencing peace. He grew up in a different time, that is true, but what follows is so very shocking, especially when you find out it was published in mainstream publications Commentary, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and the New York Times.

I had to dig to find these, so I am publishing them in full. This is a lost way of debate. Long gone with the technological advancements of our day. For the better? You decide. Let’s discuss in the comments section.

But this will be forever “Crystallized in Stone.”

Look, I am copy/pasting these articles side-by-side so we can see the full exchange. There will be words that we don’t use anymore in current society. This shit’s raw and I refuse to censor a single word.

Continue at YOUR OWN RISK.

Thank you, Sincerely,

Management,

February 1963

My Negro Problem—And Ours

One of the Most Controversial and Powerful Essays Published in COMMENTARY

by Norman Podhoretz

And so for a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about—and doing it, moreover, to me. During the early years of the war, when my older sister joined a left-wing youth organization, I remember my astonishment at hearing her passionately denounce my father for thinking that Jews were worse off than Negroes. To me, at the age of twelve, it seemed very clear that Negroes were better off than Jews—indeed, than all whites. A city boy’s world is contained within three or four square blocks, and in my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes. What could it mean, then, to say that they were badly off and that we were more fortunate? Yet my sister’s opinions, like print, were sacred, and when she told me about exploitation and economic forces I believed her. I believed her, but I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.

It had not always been so—that much I can recall from early childhood. When did it start, this fear and this hatred? There was a kindergarten in the local public school, and given the character of the neighborhood, at least half of the children in my class must have been Negroes. Yet I have no memory of being aware of color differences at that age, and I know from observing my own children that they attribute no significance to such differences even when they begin noticing them. I think there was a day—first grade? second grade?—when my best friend Carl hit me on the way home from school and announced that he wouldn’t play with me any more because I had killed Jesus. When I ran home to my mother crying for an explanation, she told me not to pay any attention to such foolishness, and then in Yiddish she cursed the goyim and the Schwartzes, the Schwartzes and the goyim. Carl, it turned out, was a Schwartze, and so was added a third to the categories into which people were mysteriously divided.

Sometimes I wonder whether this is a true memory at all. It is blazingly vivid, but perhaps it never happened: can anyone really remember back to the age of six? There is no uncertainty in my mind, however, about the years that followed. Carl and I hardly ever spoke, though we met in school every day up through the eighth or ninth grade. There would be embarrassed moments of catching his eye or of his catching mine—for whatever it was that had attracted us to one another as very small children remained alive in spite of the fantastic barrier of hostility that had grown up between us, suddenly and out of nowhere. Nevertheless, friendship would have been impossible, and even if it had been possible, it would have been unthinkable. About that, there was nothing anyone could do by the time we were eight years old.

Item: The orphanage across the street is torn down, a city housing project begins to rise in its place, and on the marvelous vacant lot next to the old orphanage they are building a playground. Much excitement and anticipation as Opening Day draws near. Mayor LaGuardia himself comes to dedicate this great gesture of public benevolence. He speaks of neighborliness and borrowing cups of sugar, and of the playground he says that children of all races, colors, and creeds will learn to live together in harmony. A week later, some of us are swatting flies on the playground’s inadequate little ball field. A gang of Negro kids, pretty much our own age, enter from the other side and order us out of the park. We refuse, proudly and indignantly, with superb masculine fervor. There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first nauseating experience of cowardice. And my first appalled realization that there are people in the world who do not seem to be afraid of anything, who act as though they have nothing to lose. Thereafter the playground becomes a battleground, sometimes quiet, sometimes the scene of athletic competition between Them and Us. But rocks are thrown as often as baseballs. Gradually we abandon the place and use the streets instead. The streets are safer, though we do not admit this to ourselves. We are not, after all, sissies—that most dreaded epithet of an American boyhood.

Item: I am standing alone in front of the building in which I live. It is late afternoon and getting dark. That day in school the teacher had asked a surly Negro boy named Quentin a question he was unable to answer. As usual I had waved my arm eagerly (“Be a good boy, get good marks, be smart, go to college, become a doctor”) and, the right answer bursting from my lips, I was held up lovingly by the teacher as an example to the class. I had seen Quentin’s face—a very dark, very cruel, very Oriental-looking face—harden, and there had been enough threat in his eyes to make me run all the way home for fear that he might catch me outside.

Now, standing idly in front of my own house, I see him approaching from the project accompanied by his little brother who is carrying a baseball bat and wearing a grin of malicious anticipation. As in a nightmare, I am trapped. The surroundings are secure and familiar, but terror is suddenly present and there is no one around to help. I am locked to the spot. I will not cry out or run away like a sissy, and I stand there, my heart wild, my throat clogged. He walks up, hurls the familiar epithet (“Hey, mo’f—r”), and to my surprise only pushes me. It is a violent push, but not a punch. A push is not as serious as a punch. Maybe I can still back out without entirely losing my dignity. Maybe I can still say, “Hey, c’mon Quentin, whaddya wanna do that for. I dint do nothin’ to you,” and walk away, not too rapidly. Instead, before I can stop myself, I push him back—a token gesture—and I say, “Cut that out, I don’t wanna fight, I ain’t got nothin’ to fight about.” As I turn to walk back into the building, the corner of my eye catches the motion of the bat his little brother has handed him. I try to duck, but the bat crashes colored lights into my head.

The next thing I know, my mother and sister are standing over me, both of them hysterical. My sister—she who was later to join the “progressive” youth organization—is shouting for the police and screaming imprecations at those dirty little black bastards. They take me upstairs, the doctor comes, the police come. I tell them that the boy who did it was a stranger, that he had been trying to get money from me. They do not believe me, but I am too scared to give them Quentin’s name. When I return to school a few days later, Quentin avoids my eyes. He knows that I have not squealed, and he is ashamed. I try to feel proud, but in my heart I know that it was fear of what his friends might do to me that had kept me silent, and not the code of the street.

Item: There is an athletic meet in which the whole of our junior high school is participating. I am in one of the seventh-grade rapid-advance classes, and “segregation” has now set in with a vengeance. In the last three or four years of the elementary school from which we have just graduated, each grade had been divided into three classes, according to “intelligence.” (In the earlier grades the divisions had either been arbitrary or else unrecognized by us as having anything to do with brains.) These divisions by IQ, or however it was arranged, had resulted in a preponderance of Jews in the “1” classes and a corresponding preponderance of Negroes in the “3’s,” with the Italians split unevenly along the spectrum. At least a few Negroes had always made the “l’s,” just as there had always been a few Jewish kids among the “3’s” and more among the “2’s” (where Italians dominated). But the junior high’s rapid-advance class of which I am now a member is overwhelmingly Jewish and entirely white—except for a shy lonely Negro girl with light skin and reddish hair.

The athletic meet takes place in a city-owned stadium far from the school. It is an important event to which a whole day is given over. The winners are to get those precious little medallions stamped with the New York City emblem that can be screwed into a belt and that prove the wearer to be a distinguished personage. I am a fast runner, and so I am assigned the position of anchor man on my class’s team in the relay race. There are three other seventh-grade teams in the race, two of them all Negro, as ours is all white. One of the all-Negro teams is very tall—their anchor man waiting silently next to me on the line looks years older than I am, and I do not recognize him. He is the first to get the baton and crosses the finishing line in a walk. Our team comes in second, but a few minutes later we are declared the winners, for it has been discovered that the anchor man on the first-place team is not a member of the class. We are awarded the medallions, and the following day our home-room teacher makes a speech about how proud she is of us for being superior athletes as well as superior students. We want to believe that we deserve the praise, but we know that we could not have won even if the other class had not cheated.

That afternoon, walking home, I am waylaid and surrounded by five Negroes, among whom is the anchor man of the disqualified team.

“Gimme my medal, mo’f—r,” he grunts. I do not have it with me and I tell him so.

“Anyway, it ain’t yours,” I say foolishly. He calls me a liar on both counts and pushes me up against the wall on which we sometimes play handball.

“Gimme my mo’f—n’ medal,” he says again.

I repeat that I have left it home.

“Le’s search the li’l mo’f—r,” one of them suggests, “he prolly got it hid in his mo’f—n’ pants.”

My panic is now unmanageable. (How many times had I been surrounded like this and asked in soft tones, “Len’ me a nickel, boy.” How many times had I been called a liar for pleading poverty and pushed around, or searched, or beaten up, unless there happened to be someone in the marauding gang like Carl who liked me across that enormous divide of hatred and who would therefore say, “Aaah, c’mon, le’s git someone else, this boy ain’t got no money on ‘im.”)

I scream at them through tears of rage and self-contempt, “Keep your f—n’ filthy lousy black hands off a me! I swear I’ll get the cops.”

This is all they need to hear, and the five of them set upon me. They bang me around, mostly in the stomach and on the arms and shoulders, and when several adults loitering near the candy store down the block notice what is going on and begin to shout, they run off and away.

I do not tell my parents about the incident. My teammates, who have also been waylaid, each by a gang led by his opposite number from the disqualified team, have had their medallions taken from them, and they never squeal either.

For days, I walk home in terror, expecting to be caught again, but nothing happens. The medallion is put away into a drawer, never to be worn by anyone

Obviously experiences like these have always been a common feature of childhood life in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, and Negroes do not necessarily figure in them. Wherever, and in whatever combination, they have lived together in the cities, kids of different groups have been at war, beating up and being beaten up: micks against kikes against wops against spics against pollocks. And even relatively homogeneous areas have not been spared the warring of the young: one block against another, one gang (called in my day, in a pathetic effort at gentility, an “S.A.C.,” or social-athletic club) against another. But the Negro-white conflict had—and no doubt still has—a special intensity and was conducted with a ferocity unmatched by intramural white battling.

Why, why should it have been so different as between the Negroes and us? How was it borne in upon us so early, white and black alike, that we were enemies beyond any possibility of reconciliation? Why did we hate one another so?

I suppose if I tried, I could answer those questions more or less adequately from the perspective of what I have since learned. I could draw upon James Baldwin—what better witness is there?—to describe the sense of entrapment that poisons the soul of the Negro with hatred for the white man whom he knows to be his jailer. On the other side, if I wanted to understand how the white man comes to hate the Negro, I could call upon the psychologists who have spoken of the guilt that white Americans feel toward Negroes and that turns into hatred for lack of acknowledging itself as guilt. These are plausible answers and certainly there is truth in them. Yet when I think back upon my own experience of the Negro and his of me, I find myself troubled and puzzled, much as I was as a child when I heard that all Jews were rich and all Negroes persecuted. How could the Negroes in my neighborhood have regarded the whites across the street and around the corner as jailers? On the whole, the whites were not so poor as the Negroes, but they were quite poor enough, and the years were years of Depression. As for white hatred of the Negro, how could guilt have had anything to do with it? What share had these Italian and Jewish immigrants in the enslavement of the Negro? What share had they—downtrodden people themselves breaking their own necks to eke out a living—in the exploitation of the Negro.

No, I cannot believe that we hated each other back there in Brooklyn because they thought of us as jailers and we felt guilty toward them. But does it matter, given the fact that we all went through an unrepresentative confrontation? I think it matters profoundly, for if we managed the job of hating each other so well without benefit of the aids to hatred that are supposedly at the root of this madness everywhere else, it must mean that the madness is not yet properly understood. I am far from pretending that I understand it, but I would insist that no view of the problem will begin to approach the truth unless it can account for a case like the one I have been trying to describe. Are the elements of any such view available to us?

At least two, I would say, are. One of them is a point we frequently come upon in the work of James Baldwin, and the other is a related point always stressed by psychologists who have studied the mechanisms of prejudice. Baldwin tells us that one of the reasons Negroes hate the white man is that the white man refuses to look at him: the Negro knows that in white eyes all Negroes are alike; they are faceless and therefore not altogether human. The psychologists, in their turn, tell us that the white man hates the Negro because he tends to project those wild impulses that he fears in himself onto an alien group which he then punishes with his contempt. What Baldwin does not tell us, however, is that the principle of facelessness is a two-way street and can operate in both directions with no difficulty at all. Thus, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I was as faceless to the Negroes as they were to me, and if they hated me because I never looked at them, I must also have hated them for never looking at me. To the Negroes, my white skin was enough to define me as the enemy, and in a war it is only the uniform that counts and not the person.

So with the mechanism of projection that the psychologists talk about: it too works in both directions at once. There is no question that the psychologists are right about what the Negro represents symbolically to the white man.

For me as a child the life lived on the other side of the playground and down the block on Ralph Avenue seemed the very embodiment of the values of the street—free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic. I put the word “erotic” last, though it is usually stressed above all others, because in fact it came last, in consciousness as in importance.

What mainly counted for me about Negro kids of my own age was that they were “bad boys.” There were plenty of bad boys among the whites—this was, after all, a neighborhood with a long tradition of crime as a career open to aspiring talents—but the Negroes were really bad, bad in a way that beckoned to one, and made one feel inadequate.

We all went home every day for a lunch of spinach-and-potatoes; they roamed around during lunch hour, munching on candy bars. In winter we had to wear itchy woolen hats and mittens and cumbersome galoshes; they were bare-headed and loose as they pleased.

We rarely played hookey, or got into serious trouble in school, for all our street-corner bravado; they were defiant, forever staying out (to do what delicious things?), forever making disturbances in class and in the halls, forever being sent to the principal and returning uncowed. But most important of all, they were tough; beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything. To hell with the teacher, the truant officer, the cop; to hell with the whole of the adult world that held us in its grip and that we never had the courage to rebel against except sporadically and in petty ways.

This is what I saw and envied and feared in the Negro: this is what finally made him faceless to me, though some of it, of course, was actually there. (The psychologists also tell us that the alien group which becomes the object of a projection will tend to respond by trying to live up to what is expected of them.) But what, on his side, did the Negro see in me that made me faceless to him?

Did he envy me my lunches of spinach-and-potatoes and my itchy woolen caps and my prudent behavior in the face of authority, as I envied him his noon-time candy bars and his bare head in winter and his magnificent rebelliousness?

Did those lunches and caps spell for him the prospect of power and riches in the future? Did they mean that there were possibilities open to me that were denied to him? Very likely they did. But if so, one also supposes that he feared the impulses within himself toward submission to authority no less powerfully than I feared the impulses in myself toward defiance.

If I represented the jailer to him, it was not because I was oppressing him or keeping him down: it was because I symbolized for him the dangerous and probably pointless temptation toward greater repression, just as he symbolized for me the equally perilous tug toward greater freedom. I personally was to be rewarded for this repression with a new and better life in the future, but how many of my friends paid an even higher price and were given only gall in return.

We have it on the authority of James Baldwin that all Negroes hate whites. I am trying to suggest that on their side all whites—all American whites, that is—are sick in their feelings about Negroes. There are Negroes, no doubt, who would say that Baldwin is wrong, but I suspect them of being less honest than he is, just as I suspect whites of self-deception who tell me they have no special feeling toward Negroes. Special feelings about color are a contagion to which white Americans seem susceptible even when there is nothing in their background to account for the susceptibility. Thus, everywhere we look today in the North, we find the curious phenomenon of white middle-class liberals with no previous personal experience of Negroes—people to whom Negroes have always been faceless in virtue rather than faceless in vice—discovering that their abstract commitment to the cause of Negro rights will not stand the test of a direct confrontation. We find such people fleeing in droves to the suburbs as the Negro population in the inner city grows; and when they stay in the city we find them sending their children to private school rather than to the “integrated” public school in the neighborhood. We find them resisting the demand that gerrymandered school districts be re-zoned for the purpose of overcoming de facto segregation; we find them judiciously considering whether the Negroes (for their own good, of course) are not perhaps pushing too hard; we find them clucking their tongues over Negro militancy; we find them speculating on the question of whether there may not, after all, be something in the theory that the races are biologically different; we find them saying that it will take a very long time for Negroes to achieve full equality, no matter what anyone does; we find them deploring the rise of black nationalism and expressing the solemn hope that the leaders of the Negro community will discover ways of containing the impatience and incipient violence within the Negro ghettos.¹

But that is by no means the whole story; there is also the phenomenon of what Kenneth Rexroth once called “crow-jimism.” There are the broken-down white boys like Vivaldo Moore in Baldwin’s Another Country who go to Harlem in search of sex or simply to brush up against something that looks like primitive vitality, and who are so often punished by the Negroes they meet for crimes that they would have been the last ever to commit and of which they themselves have been as sorry victims as any of the Negroes who take it out on them.

There are the writers and intellectuals and artists who romanticize Negroes and pander to them, assuming a guilt that is not properly theirs. And there are all the white liberals who permit Negroes to blackmail them into adopting a double standard of moral judgment, and who lend themselves—again assuming the responsibility for crimes they never committed—to cunning and contemptuous exploitation by Negroes they employ or try to befriend.

“Crow-Jimism”- In the 1950s, the poet Kenneth Rexroth coined the term “Crow-Jimism.” He was referring to the belief among many white liberals that Negroes, as they were then called, could do no wrong and were in many ways superior to whites. Rexroth recognized that “Crow-Jimism” was an inverse form of racism, which didn’t prevent it from spreading.

And what about me? What kind of feelings do I have about Negroes today? What happened to me, from Brooklyn, who grew up fearing and envying and hating Negroes? Now that Brooklyn is behind me, do I fear them and envy them and hate them still? The answer is yes, but not in the same proportions and certainly not in the same way. I now live on the upper west side of Manhattan, where there are many Negroes and many Puerto Ricans, and there are nights when I experience the old apprehensiveness again, and there are streets that I avoid when I am walking in the dark, as there were streets that I avoided when I was a child. I find that I am not afraid of Puerto Ricans, but I cannot restrain my nervousness whenever I pass a group of Negroes standing in front of a bar or sauntering down the street. I know now, as I did not know when I was a child, that power is on my side, that the police are working for me and not for them. And knowing this I feel ashamed and guilty, like the good liberal I have grown up to be. Yet the twinges of fear and the resentment they bring and the self-contempt they arouse are not to be gainsaid.

But envy? Why envy? And hatred? Why hatred? Here again the intensities have lessened and everything has been complicated and qualified by the guilts and the resulting over-compensations that are the heritage of the enlightened middle-class world of which I am now a member. Yet just as in childhood I envied Negroes for what seemed to me their superior masculinity, so I envy them today for what seems to me their superior physical grace and beauty. I have come to value physical grace very highly, and I am now capable of aching with all my being when I watch a Negro couple on the dance floor, or a Negro playing baseball or basketball. They are on the kind of terms with their own bodies that I should like to be on with mine, and for that precious quality they seem blessed to me.

The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overlarded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself. It no longer has, as for me it once did, any cause or justification (except, perhaps, that I am constantly being denied my right to an honest expression of the things I earned the right as a child to feel). How, then, do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared? I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism; I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple; and I know it from the violence that can stir in me whenever I encounter that special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone.

This, then, is where I am; it is not exactly where I think all other white liberals are, but it cannot be so very far away either. And it is because I am convinced that we white Americans are—for whatever reason, it no longer matters—so twisted and sick in our feelings about Negroes that I despair of the present push toward integration. If the pace of progress were not a factor here, there would perhaps be no cause for despair: time and the law and even the international political situation are on the side of the Negroes, and ultimately, therefore, victory—of a sort, anyway—must come. But from everything we have learned from observers who ought to know, pace has become as important to the Negroes as substance. They want equality and they want it now, and the white world is yielding to their demand only as much and as fast as it is absolutely being compelled to do. The Negroes know this in the most concrete terms imaginable, and it is thus becoming increasingly difficult to buy them off with rhetoric and promises and pious assurances of support. And so within the Negro community we find more and more people declaring—as Harold R. Isaacs recently put it in these pages²—that they want out: people who say that integration will never come, or that it will take a hundred or a thousand years to come, or that it will come at too high a price in suffering and struggle for the pallid and sodden life of the American middle class that at the very best it may bring.

The most numerous, influential, and dangerous movement that has grown out of Negro despair with the goal of integration is, of course, the Black Muslims. This movement, whatever else we may say about it, must be credited with one enduring achievement: it inspired James Baldwin to write an essay³ which deserves to be placed among the classics of our language. Everything Baldwin has ever been trying to tell us is distilled here into a statement of overwhelming persuasiveness and prophetic magnificence. Baldwin’s message is and always has been simple. It is this: “Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.” And Baldwin’s demand is correspondingly simple: color must be forgotten, lest we all be smited with a vengeance “that does not really depend on, and cannot really be executed by, any person or organization, and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army: historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance based on the law that we recognize when we say, ‘Whatever goes up must come down.’”

The Black Muslims Baldwin portrays as a sign and a warning to the intransigent white world. They come to proclaim how deep is the Negro’s disaffection with the white world and all its works, and Baldwin implies that no American Negro can fail to respond somewhere in his being to their message: that the white man is the devil, that Allah has doomed him to destruction, and that the black man is about to inherit the earth. Baldwin of course knows that this nightmare inversion of the racism from which the black man has suffered can neither win nor even point to the neighborhood in which victory might be located. For in his view the neighborhood of victory lies in exactly the opposite direction: the transcendence of color through love.

Yet the tragic fact is that love is not the answer to hate—not in the world of politics, at any rate. Color is indeed a political rather than a human or a personal reality and if politics (which is to say power) has made it into a human and a personal reality, then only politics (which is to say power) can unmake it once again. But the way of politics is slow and bitter, and as impatience on the one side is matched by a setting of the jaw on the other, we move closer and closer to an explosion and blood may yet run in the streets.

Will this madness in which we are all caught never find a resting-place? Is there never to be an end to it? In thinking about the Jews, I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant. Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz? It is a terrible question and no one, not God himself, could ever answer it to my satisfaction. And when I think about the Negroes in America and about the image of integration as a state in which the Negroes would take their rightful place as another of the protected minorities in a pluralistic society, I wonder whether they really believe in their hearts that such a state can actually be attained, and if so why they should wish to survive as a distinct group. I think I know why the Jews once wished to survive (though I am less certain as to why we still do): they not only believed that God had given them no choice, but they were tied to a memory of past glory and a dream of imminent redemption. What does the American Negro have that might correspond to this? His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma, and his vision of the future is the hope of erasing the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness.

*Miscegenation-marriage or admixture between people who are members of different races or ethnicities. (I had to Google it, I didn’t know what it meant)

I share this hope, but I cannot see how it will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation. The Black Muslims, like their racist counterparts in the white world, accuse the “so-called Negro leaders” of secretly pursuing miscegenation as a goal.

The racists are wrong, but I wish they were right, for I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned. I am not claiming that this alternative can be pursued programmatically or that it is immediately feasible as a solution; obviously there are even greater barriers to its achievement than to the achievement of integration. What I am saying, however, is that in my opinion the Negro problem can be solved in this country in no other way

I have told the story of my own twisted feelings about Negroes here, and of how they conflict with the moral convictions I have since developed, in order to assert that such feelings must be acknowledged as honestly as possible so that they can be controlled and ultimately disregarded in favor of the convictions. It is wrong for a man to suffer because of the color of his skin. Beside that clichéd proposition of liberal thought, what argument can stand and be respected? If the arguments are the arguments of feeling, they must be made to yield; and one’s own soul is not the worst place to begin working a huge social transformation. Not so long ago, it used to be asked of white liberals, “Would you like your sister to marry one?” When I was a boy and my sister was still unmarried, I would certainly have said no to that question. But now I am a man, my sister is already married, and I have daughters. If I were to be asked today whether I would like a daughter of mine “to marry one,” I would have to answer: “No, I wouldn’t like it at all. I would rail and rave and rant and tear my hair. And then I hope I would have the courage to curse myself for raving and ranting, and to give her my blessing. How dare I withhold it at the behest of the child I once was and against the man I now have a duty to be?

¹ For an account of developments like these, see “The White Liberal’s Retreat” by Murray Friedman in the January 1963 Atlantic Monthly.

² “Integration and the Negro Mood,” December 1962.

³ Originally published last November in the New Yorker under the title “Letter From a Region in My Mind,” it has just been reprinted (along with a new introduction) by Dial Press under the title The Fire Next Time (128 pp., $3.50).

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James Baldwin, right after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature wrote the following editorial. In response to the above by Norman Podhoretz, father of John Podhoretz — The Neocon God & Godfather — in Commentary Magazine:

April 9, 1967

Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White

By JAMES BALDWIN

When we were growing up in Harlem our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish, and we hated them.

We hated them because they were terrible landlords, and did not take care of the building. A coat of paint, a broken window, a stopped sink, a stopped toilet, a sagging floor, a broken ceiling, a dangerous stairwell, the question of garbage disposal, the question of heat and cold, of roaches and rats—all questions of life and death for the poor, and especially for those with children—we had to cope with all of these as best we could. Our parents were lashed to futureless jobs, in order to pay the outrageous rent. We knew that the landlord treated us this way only because we were colored, and he knew that we could not move out.

The grocer was a Jew, and being in debt to him was very much like being in debt to the company store.

The butcher was a Jew and, yes, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New York citizens, and we very often carried insults home, along with the meat.

We bought our clothes from a Jew and, sometimes, our secondhand shoes, and the pawnbroker was a Jew—perhaps we hated him most of all. The merchants along 125th Street were Jewish—at least many of them were;

I don't know if Grant's or Woolworth's are Jewish names—and I well remember that it was only after the Harlem riot of 1935 that Negroes were allowed to earn a little money in some of the stores where they spent so much.

Not all of these white people were cruel—on the contrary, I remember some who were certainly as thoughtful as the bleak circumstances allowed—but all of them were exploiting us, and that was why we hated them.

But we also hated the welfare workers, of whom some were white, some colored, some Jewish, and some not.

We hated the policemen, not all of whom were Jewish, and some of whom were black. The poor, of whatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason so, and God knows we didn't. “If you must call a cop,” we said in those days, “for God's sake, make sure it's a white one.”

We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder—on your head—to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other niggers.

We hated many of our teachers at school because they so clearly despised us and treated us like dirty, ignorant savages. Not all of these teachers were Jewish. Some of them, alas, were black. I used to carry my father's union dues downtown for him sometimes. I hated everyone in that den of thieves, especially the man who took the envelope from me, the envelope which contained my father's hard-earned money, that envelope which contained bread for his children. “Thieves,” I thought, “every one of you!” And I know I was right about that, and I have not changed my mind. But whether or not all these people were Jewish, I really do not know.

The Army may or may not be controlled by Jews; I don't know, and I don't care. I know that when I worked for the Army, I hated all my bosses because of the way they treated me.

I don't know if the post office is Jewish, but I would certainly dread working for it again.

I don't know if Wanamaker's was Jewish, but I didn't like running their elevator and I didn't like any of their customers.

I don't know if Nabisco is Jewish, but I didn't like clearing their basement.

I don't know if Riker's is Jewish, but I didn't like scrubbing their floors.

I don't know if the big, white bruiser who thought it was fun to call me “Shine” was Jewish, but I know I tried to kill him—and he stopped calling me “Shine.”

I don't know if the last taxi driver who refused to stop for me was Jewish, but I know I hoped he'd break his neck before he got home.

And I don't think that General Electric or General Motors or R.C.A. or Con Edison or Mobil Oil or Coca Cola or Pepsi-Cola or Firestone or the Board of Education or the textbook industry or Hollywood or Broadway or television—or Wall Street, Sacramento, Dallas, Atlanta, Albany or Washington—are controlled by Jews.

I think they are controlled by Americans, and the American Negro situation is a direct result of this control. And anti-Semitism among Negroes, inevitable as it may be, and understandable, alas, as it is, does not operate to menace this control, but only to confirm it. It is not the Jew who controls the American drama. It is the Christian.

The root of anti-Semitism among Negroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored peoples—all over the globe—to the Christian world. This is a fact which may be difficult to grasp, not only for the ghetto's most blasted and embittered inhabitants, but also for many Jews, to say nothing of many Christians. But it is a fact, and it will not ameliorate—in fact, it can only be aggravated—by the adoption, on the part of colored people now, of the most devastating of the Christian vices.

Of course, it is true, and I am not so naive as not to know it, that many Jews despise Negroes, even as their Aryan brothers do. (There are also Jews who despise Jews, even as their Aryan brothers do.)

It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots—or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry. It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew.

It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home. Going, with your money in his pocket, to a clean neighborhood, miles from you, which you will not be allowed to enter.

Nor can it help the relationship between most Negroes and most Jews when part of this money is donated to civil rights.

In the light of what is now known as the white backlash, this money can be looked on as conscience money merely, as money given to keep the Negro happy in his place, and out of white neighborhoods.

One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro's suffering. It isn't, and one knows that it isn't from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.

For one thing, the American Jew's endeavor, whatever it is, has managed to purchase a relative safety for his children, and a relative future for them. This is more than your father's endeavor was able to do for you, and more than your endeavor has been able to do for your children. There are days when it can be exceedingly trying to deal with certain white musical or theatrical celebrities who may or may not be Jewish--what, in show business, is a name?--but whose preposterous incomes cause one to think bitterly of the fates of such people as Beside Smith or King Oliver or Ethel Waters. Furthermore, the Jew can be proud of his suffering, or at least not ashamed of it. His history and his suffering do not begin in America, where black men have been taught to be ashamed of everything, especially their suffering.

The Jew's suffering is recognized as part of the moral history of the world and the Jew is recognized as a contributor so the world's history: this is not true for the blacks. Jewish history, whether or not one can say it is honored, is certainly known: the black history has been blasted, maligned and despised. The Jew is a white man, and when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery. The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this, and it certainly contributes to their attitude toward the Jews.

But, of course, my comparison of Watts and Harlem with the Warsaw ghetto will be immediately dismissed as outrageous. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is that while America loves white heroes, armed to the teeth, it cannot abide bad niggers. But the bottom reason is that it contradicts the American dream to suggest that any gratuitous, unregenerate horror can happen here. We make our mistakes, we like to think, but we are getting better all the time.

Well, to state it mildly, this is a point of view which any sane or honest Negro will have some difficulty holding. Very few Americans, and this includes very few Jews, wish to believe that the American Negro situation is as desperate and dangerous as it is. Very few Americans, and very few Jews, have the courage to recognize that the America of which they dream and boast is not the America in which the Negro lives. It is a country which the Negro has never seen. And this is not merely a matter of bad faith on the part of Americans. Bad faith, God knows, abounds, but there is something in the American dream sadder and more wistful than that.

No one, I suppose, would dream of accusing the late Moss Hart of bad faith. Near the end of his autobiography, “Act One,” just after he has become a successful playwright, and is riding home to Brooklyn for the first time in a cab, he reflects:

“I started through the taxi window at a pinch-faced 10-year-old hurrying down the steps on some morning errand before school, and I thought of myself hurrying down the streets on so many gray mornings out of a doorway and a house much the same as this one. My mind jumped backward in time and then whirled forward, like a many-faceted prism—flashing our old neighborhood in front of me, the house, the steps, the candy store—and then shifted to the skyline I had just passed by, the opening last night, and the notices I still hugged tightly under my arm. It was possible in this wonderful city for that nameless little boy—for any of its millions—to have a decent chance to scale the walls and achieve what they wished. Wealth, rank, or an imposing name counted for nothing. The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream.”

But this is not true for the Negro, and not even the most successful or fatuous Negro can really feel this way. His journey will have cost him too much, and the price will be revealed in his estrangement—unless he is very rare and lucky—from other colored people, and in his continuing isolation from whites. Furthermore, for every Negro boy who achieves such a taxi ride, hundreds, at least, will have perished around him, and not because they lacked the boldness to dream, but because the Republic despises their dreams.

Perhaps one must be in such a situation in order really to understand what it is. But if one is a Negro in Watts or Harlem, and knows why one is there, and knows that one has been sentenced to remain there for life, one can't but look on the American state and the American people as one's oppressors.

For that, after all, is exactly what they are. They have corralled you where you are for their ease and their profit, and are doing all in their power to prevent you from finding out enough about yourself to be able to rejoice in the only life you have.

One does not wish to believe that the American Negro can feel this way, but that is because the Christian world has been misled by its own rhetoric and narcoticized by its own power.

For many generations the natives of the Belgian Congo, for example, endured the most unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Belgians, at the hands of Europe. Their suffering occurred in silence. This suffering was not indignantly reported in the Western press, as the suffering of white men would have been. The suffering of this native was considered necessary, alas, for European, Christian dominance. And, since the world at large knew virtually nothing concerning the suffering of this native, when he rose, he was not hailed as a hero fighting for his land, but condemned as a savage, hungry for white flesh.

The Christian world considered Belgium to be a civilized country; but there was not only no reason for the Congolese to feel that way about Belgium; there was no possibility that they could.

What will the Christian world, which is so uneasily silent now, say on that day which is coming when the black native of South Africa begins to massacre the masters who have massacred him so long? It is true that two wrongs don't make a right, as we love to point out to the people we have wronged. But one wrong doesn’t make a right, either.

People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't.

They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.

In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man—for having become, in effect, a Christian.

The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro's understanding. It increases the Negro's rage.

For it is not here, and not now, that the Jew is being slaughtered, and he is never despised, here, as the Negro is, because he is an American. The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American.

When an African is mistreated here, for example, he has recourse to his embassy. The American Negro who is, let us say, falsely arrested, will find it nearly impossible to bring his case to court. And this means that because he is a native of this country—”one of your niggers”—he has, effectively, no recourse and no place to go, either within the country or without.

He is a pariah in his own country and a stranger in the world. This is what it means to have one's history and one's ties to one's ancestral homeland totally destroyed.

This is not what happened to the Jew and, therefore, he has allies in the world. That is one of the reasons no one has ever seriously suggested that the Jew be nonviolent. There was no need for him to be nonviolent. On the contrary, the Jewish battle for Israel was saluted as the most tremendous heroism. How can the Negro fail to suspect that the Jew is really saying that the Negro deserves his situation because he has not been heroic enough?

It is doubtful that the Jews could have won their battle had the Western powers been opposed to them. But such allies as the Negro may have are themselves struggling for their freedom against tenacious and tremendous Western opposition.

This leaves the American Negro, who technically represents the Western nations, in a cruelly ambiguous position. In this situation, it is not the American Jew who can either instruct him or console him. On the contrary, the American Jew knows just enough about this situation to be unwilling to imagine it again.

Finally, what the American Negro interprets the Jew as saying is that one must take the historical, the impersonal point of view concerning one's life and concerning the lives of one's kinsmen and children. "We suffered, too," one is told, "but we came through, and so will you. In time."

In whose time? One has only one life. One may become reconciled to the ruin of one's children's lives is not reconciliation. It is the sickness unto death. And one knows that such counselors are not present on these shores by following this advice. They arrived here out of the same effort the American Negro is making: they wanted to live, and not tomorrow, but today.

Now, since the Jew is living here, like all the other white men living here, he wants the Negro to wait.

And the Jew sometimes—often—does this in the name of his Jewishness, which is a terrible mistake. He has absolutely no relevance in this context as a Jew. His only relevance is that he is white and values his color and uses it.

He is singled out by Negroes not because he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn't. His major distinction is given him by that history of Christendom, which has so successfully victimized both Negroes and Jews. And he is playing in Harlem the role assigned him by Christians long ago: he is doing their dirty work.

No more than the good white people of the South, who are really responsible for the bombings and lynchings, are ever present at these events, do the people who really own Harlem ever appear at the door to collect the rent. One risks libel by trying to spell this out too precisely, but Harlem is really owned by a curious coalition which includes some churches, some universities, some Christians, some Jews, and some Negroes.

The capital of New York is Albany, which is not a Jewish state, and the Moses they sent us, whatever his ancestry, certainly failed to get the captive children free.

A genuinely candid confrontation between American Negroes and American Jews would certainly prove of inestimable value. But the aspirations of the country are wretchedly middle-class, and the middle class can never afford candor.

What is really at question is the American way of life.

What is really at question is whether Americans already have an identity or are still sufficiently flexible to achieve one.

This is a painfully complicated question, for what now appears to be the American identity is really a bewildering and sometimes demoralizing blend of nostalgia and opportunism. For example, the Irish who march on St. Patrick's Day, do not, after all, have any desire to go back to Ireland.

They do not intend to go back to live there, though they may dream of going back there to die. Their lives, in the meanwhile, are here, but they cling, at the same time, to those credentials forged in the Old World, credentials which cannot be duplicated here, credentials which the American Negro does not have. These credentials are the abandoned history of Europe—the abandoned and romanticized history of Europe.

The Russian Jews here have no desire to return to Russia either, and they have not departed in great clouds for Israel. But they have the authority of knowing it is there.

The Americans are no longer Europeans, but they are still living, at least as they imagine, on that capital.

That capital also belongs, however, to the slaves who created it for Europe and who created it here; and in that sense, the Jew must see that he is part of the history of Europe, and will always be so considered by the descendant of the slave. Always, that is, unless he himself is willing to prove that this judgment is inadequate and unjust. This is precisely what is demanded of all the other white men in this country, and the Jew will not find it easier than anybody else?

The ultimate hope for a genuine black-white dialogue in this country lies in the recognition that the driven European serf merely created another serf here, and created him on the basis of color. No one can deny that that Jew was a party to this, but it is senseless to assert that this was because of his Jewishness. One can be disappointed in the Jew if one is romantic enough—for not having learned from history; but if people did learn from history, history would be very different.

All racist positions baffle and appall me. None of us are that different from one another, neither that much better nor that much worse. Furthermore, when one takes a position, one must attempt to see where that position inexorably leads. One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads.

And if one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy.

If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself. I know that my own oppression did not ennoble me, not even when I thought of myself as a practicing Christian. I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated. I learned this from Christians, and I ceased to practice what the Christians practiced.

The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom's most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.

—James Baldwin, New York Times Magazine

Response to James Baldwin in New York Times Magazine in the following issue. As much controversy as Podhoretz piece created, as did James Baldwin’s.

Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They Want a Scapegoat; A Reply to James Baldwin

By Robert Gordis
April 23, 1967,

Section “The New York Times Magazine,” Page 235

THE brilliant Negro writer, James Baldwin, wrote a characteristically articulate and frank article on Negro anti-Semitism in The New York Times Magazine two weeks ago, His, thesis was clearly expressed in the headline: "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White." In a prefatory note we are informed that Mr. Baldwin resigned from the black nationalist magazine Liberator, which had published a series of anti-Semitic articles, saying, “I think it is distinctly unhelpful, and I think it is immoral, to blame Harlem on the Jew. . . .” He concludes his piece with these words: “The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom's most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.” Thus, he graciously absolves the Jews from the crime of deicide which for centuries, in Israel Zangwill's words, “has made the people of Christ the Christ of peoples.” Baldwin also declares, “I know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated.”

Here is impressive evidence indeed of James Baldwin's anti-anti-Semitism. These credentials notwithstanding, he devotes the bulk of his lengthy article to a passionate justification of Negro anti-Semitism today. In the process he utilizes all the time-honored devices of propaganda perfected in our century. For decades Negroes have been battling energetically to destroy the white man's various stereotypes of the Negro as shiftless, irresponsible, happy-go-lucky and contented with his inferior lot. Nevertheless, Baldwin does not hesitate to set up a series of stereotypes of the Jew in Harlem in order to explain the anti-Jewish prejudice of Negroes.

The landlord who exploits the Negro tenant, the grocer and the butcher who overcharge and short-weight their customers, the pawnbroker who battens on the misery of the Negro-all these, we are told, are Jews, and the Negro therefore hates the Jews.

Baldwin “does not know” whether Grant and Woolworth are Jewish names, but the Negro hates the Jews.

He hates the welfare worker and the policeman; “we hated black cops even more than white cops.” Though Jews on the police force are not particularly numerous, the Negro hates the Jews.

Not all public-school teachers in the Negro ghetto are Jews, but he hates the Jews.

He feels the same way toward the union to which his father belongs, which is “a den of thieves.”

So, too, with the Army which “may or may not be controlled by Jews; I don't know and I don't care [italics mine(author)]. I know that when I worked for the Army, I hated all my bosses because of the way they treated me.”

The same reaction applies to the great business corporations, to Hollywood and Broadway, to the post office, to the television industry and to Wall Street. To be sure, Baldwin doesn't think that they are all controlled by Jews, but the consequence is anti-Semitism, which is both inevitable and understandable." Baldwin would dismiss as irrelevant such factual questions as the degree to which Jewish businessmen and landlords dominate Harlem and other Negro ghettos stretching from Boston to Miami, from New York to Seattle, from Washington to Los Angeles. It does not occur to him to compare the exploitation of Negroes allegedly practiced by Jews with the treatment they receive at the hands of non-Jewish merchants and landlords, both white and black.

He ignores the fact that preliminary studies by social scientists at the University of California suggest that the attitude of Negroes toward Jews is less negative than toward white non-Jews, and that Negroes tend to recognize that Jews have often treated them with a greater degree of fairness and decency than have white Christians.

Since the substantial funds contributed by Jews to the civil-rights movement are denounced as "conscience money,” it is fatuous to expect any recognition-let alone any appreciation of the disproportionate role that Jews have played in the civil-rights struggle. The deaths of Jewish civil-rights workers are passed over in total silence. To recall the earlier work of Julius Rosenwald in Negro education and of Joel E. Spingarn in the founding of the N.A.A.C.P., or the current efforts of Morris Milgram in inter-racial housing, would obviously be out of place.

It is a truism of military strategy that the best defense is an offense. We are warned against examining critically the exaggerations which Baldwin seriously advances as legitimizing Negro anti-Semitism. Thus, he writes: "The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this, and it certainly contributes to their attitude toward the Jews.” Baldwin recognizes that his comparison of Watts and Harlem with the Warsaw ghetto "will be immediately dismissed as outrageous" and declares that there are many reasons for this. He overlooks the only important reason: the comparison is totally false. In the Warsaw ghetto, defenseless men, women and children were systematically attacked and butchered by the world's most powerful military machine. In the Watts and Harlem riots, Negro youths, abetted by their elders, were the attackers, beating and killing white men and women upon whom they chanced to come, and looting and destroying millions of dollars of property. Whatever reasons the rioters had for resentment and bitterness, there was no physical attack upon their lives to justify the resort to mass violence. In the best tradition of the purveyors of prejudice, the Jew is blamed for his virtues as well as for his vices. Thus the complaint is advanced that "the Jew is recognized as a contributor to the world's history: this is not true for the blacks.” Here again the distortion underlying the comparison is patent. It is no criticism of Bulgarians or Algerians or, for that matter, of Belgians or Swiss-to say that their group contributions to Western civilization are less than that of the Jewish people, and that their respective literature and history are correspondingly less familiar to the rest of the world than the traditions enshrined in the pages of the Hebrew Bible. There can be no doubt that the time is long overdue for a greater knowledge and appreciation, by whites as well as by blacks, of Negro culture created both in Africa and in America. But to offer this condition as an apology for anti-Semitism (since no note of objection is interposed) is indeed going far afield. Nor is it true to say that the American Jew tells the Negro "his suffering is as great as the American Negro's suffering. We suffered, too, but we came through, and so will you. In time.” Baldwin's reticence in opposing anti-Jewish prejudice is all the more striking when contrasted with the vigor of style he employs in criticizing Jews. He declares, "It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots-or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry" (italics mine). The italicized adverb is deeply revealing and disturbing. The statement, of course, is false. I challenge Baldwin to offer evidence that the slaughter of 6,000,000 Jews by Hitler is used by Jews, shamelessly or otherwise, to prove that they cannot be bigots. Jews have demonstrated their capacity for bigotry and, by that token, their link with all humanity-time and again. And not only vis-à-vis non-Jews, but also in their relations with one another! It may be true that, in general, Jews are like other people, only more so. In their relations with Negroes, they, like all other white Americans, have been guilty of major sins both of commission and of omission. But their record, though far from admirable, is nonetheless at least as good as and in most respects better than that of others. If Baldwin is right and the Jew is "singled out by Negroes not because he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn't," Negro leadership is confronted by a crucial moral issue and not merely a problem of strategy and finances.

WHAT is most disturbing in the approach of Baldwin and other apologists for Negro anti-Semitism is not so much what is said, but what is left unsaid. One searches in vain in the article for any forthright recognition that hatred is as disastrous to its perpetrator as to its victim. No effort is made to grapple with the problem of

MARCHERS Police throw tear gas at civil-rights supporters in Selma, Ala., during the demonstrations there in early 1965. a possible cure or amelioration of the disease. Nowhere is there one word of admonition or warning addressed to the Negro community, urging them to fight the incubus of Jew-hatred which he finds both ubiquitous and justified. Instead, all the ills of contemporary society in general and the plight of the Negro in particular are placed at the doorstep of the Jew, the scapegoat of the ages. Jews and all white men of decency and good will do wish to speak with their Negro brothers in fruitful confrontation. But the undertaking does not become easier in the face of the exaggerations and distortions which are being advanced.

ONE of the gravest intellectual errors of which men are capable-and its consequences in the practical sphere are devastating-is simplism. The phenomenon of Negro anti-Semitism is tragically oversimplified and by that token dangerously distorted when it is explained-and justified-in terms of one cause only. Undoubtedly the social and economic factor is a basic element in the anti-Semitic complex. But other strands are woven into the age-old chain of Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitism in the Christian world derives its original impetus, and much of its present hold on men's spirit, from religion. This remains true even in an age marked by both unbelief and ecumenicalism, and the two phenomena are not unrelated.

Yeoman efforts are being made today to extricate Western society from the burdens of prejudice and ill will inherited from the earliest period of traditional Christianity. When the Christian church first came into being, its leaders confidently expected that Jews would flock to its fold since it claimed to be the new Israel, the heir and successor of the old. The hoped-for mass conversion, however, did not take place and Jews, by and large, refused to accept the new dispensation. The church expressed its resentment by charging the Jewish people not merely with the rejection of the Savior but with His death. Thus the Jew became the cosmic villain in the Christian drama of salvation. In every age there were a few great-souled exemplars of religion who spoke out for brotherhood and love, but they were usually voices crying in the wilderness. For 19 centuries Jew-hatred was not merely condoned but glorified as a religious virtue. Even today, anti-Semitic prejudice is difficult to dislodge because it is so often sustained by a conviction of self-righteousness and piety. When the American Negro was kidnaped from his native Africa and brought to the United States and cast into slavery, he was converted to Christianity in its most literalistic form. Lacking the education and sophistication which even his white masters rarely possessed he could hardly be expected to counter the outspoken anti-Jewish bias of the Gospels. He therefore tended to identify the Jew, whom he knew from the New Testament, with the enemy of God. The seeds of prejudice, having been sown in the soil of faith, continued to produce their bitter fruit in the arena of life. When the Negro met Jews, rarely in the rural South but more commonly in the urban North, and often in situations of economic hostility, the religious basis for anti-Semitism was strengthened. This prejudice has remained even with the Negro who has surrendered or attenuated his commitment to Christianity. As Zangwill pointed out with bitter irony years ago, many a Christian who is sure that Jesus never existed is certain that the Jews killed him.

BOTH the religious and economic motives for Negro anti-Semitism have provided the basis for a deep psychological need in the lives of many Negroes. Oppressed, exploited and despised by the white majority, often suffering from the malaise of a sense of inferiority, he needs an avenue of relief. He often finds it in anti-Semitism because here, at least, he can identify with the dominant white majority, give vent to his pent-up hostilities and indulge a sense of imaginary superiority. The same psychological mechanism explains why "poor whites" in the South have historically been among the most rabid supporters of "white supremacy" and the most active practitioners of violence against their Negro neighbors. Similarly, the Negro anti-Semite who echoes the prejudice of white Americans compensates for his sense of inferiority by believing that he is "better than the Jew." It is only when this deeply intertwined complex of factors in Negro anti-Semitism-religious, psychological and socio-economic-is understood and clearly recognized that we can hope to attack the disease at its roots. Without abating an iota of their zeal in the battle for equality on every front, Negro leaders have an obligation to fight black anti-Semitism, not merely because it is a dangerous diversion from the long and arduous struggle for Negro freedom and equality, but for the sake of their own moral and intellectual integrity. Nearly 70 years ago, the Socialist leader August Bebel, speaking of the Jew-hatred endemic in his native Germany, declared: "Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools." We may add that black anti-Semitism is the democracy of charlatans. In the difficult struggle for racial justice that confronts Negroes and all Americans, Jews have not been altogether idle. Without minimizing in the slightest the obligation of white Americans, individually and collectively, toward the Negro community, and in deepest friendship and sympathy for their problems, American Jews are perhaps more conscious than others of another moral challenge confronting Negro leadership: the obligation to mobilize its resources for self-help and mutual responsibility. Here, the past experience of the American-Jewish community is by no means irrelevant. During the four decades from 1880 to the outbreak of World War I most Jewish immigrants to America arrived penniless and from backward countries. They were unfamiliar with the language and the customs of the new land, faced by countless temptations and exposed to poverty, overcrowding and disease. It is true that some agencies for the new arrivals were established by their coreligionists who had settled here earlier. But the East European Jews who crowded the ghettos of our great cities were not long content to be recipients of help, even from their fellow Jews. Almost immediately they created a vast network of institutions of philanthropy, education, recreation and culture of their own. I do not suggest that the pattern of the American-Jewish experience can be taken over ready-made by the American Negro, but there is a lesson to be derived nevertheless. To the outside observer, however sympathetic, there seems to be too little evidence of self-help and mutual responsibility within the Negro community. Growing numbers of Negroes are today well-to-do, if not wealthy. Many thousands of Negroes employed in government, industry and commerce live considerably above the subsistence level. Yet in Harlem, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and in other areas of Negro settlement throughout this city and nation, Negro-sponsored and Negro-maintained settlement houses and schools, cultural, vocational and welfare institutions are few and far between. It is true that Jewish immigrants to America possessed one great and incalculable advantage. In Judaism there has existed for centuries love of learning and a tradition of mutual responsibility. The Negro, on the other hand, is a comparative newcomer to the Western world. In the face of intolerable brutality and oppression he has had to close the gap of centuries in one or two generations. His position has been heartrendingly difficult since his period of physical slavery lasted until only a century ago and his social and economic burdens have remained heavy. Particularly in view of the grave responsibility the American people must bear for the condition of the Negro, both before and since the Emancipation Proclamation, the Negro cannot be expected to "go it alone" in raising his present status and his future prospects. But he still has the obligation to put forth his best efforts to do as much as he can for himself. Help from others, however necessary, inevitably breeds ill will, ingratitude and a sense of inferiority. La Rochefoucauld observed that we are never able to pardon those we have injured. As a corollary one might say that the existence of Negro anti-Semitism testifies that we can rarely forgive those who have helped us.

AS the battle for the removal of all external restraints on the Negro enters its next, difficult phase-and it must be crowned with success if America is to survive-we need to recall a truth, painfully discovered by Moses when he liberated the Israelites from Egyptian bondage. The Negro, like Everyman, can attain real freedom not through emancipation but through self-emancipation. Twenty centuries ago, a Hebrew sage set forth what might well become the slogan of the American Negro: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what good am I? And if not now, when?” Mature and intelligent men and women in the Negro community should recognize and act upon the recognition-that hatred of whites in general, and of Jews in particular, points not to liberation but to perdition. There is a better way.

WATTS “In comparing what happened at Watts with the Warsaw ghetto uprising, novelist James Baldwin recognizes that the comparison 'will be immediately dismissed as outrageous' and declares that there are many reasons for this. He overlooks the only important reason: the comparison is totally false."

The following is taken from ’s article “Blacks and Jews Pt. One", on the tensions throughout the 20th century between African Americans and Jewish Americans, of which I wouldn’t know took place if I hadn’t read/listened to his series on this. I couldn’t find the original anywhere of the following, but it’s too good, I couldn’t leave it out

The Martyr Made Substack

Blacks & Jews, pt. 1

Long before the recent hullabaloo surrounding Kanye West’s self-immolation on the steps of the Anti-Defamation League’s headquarters, much ink had been spilled over the complicated relationship between American blacks and Jews - though, not much recently. When, every so often, a black celebrity hits the news for saying something that causes Jews to feel…

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4 years ago · 244 likes · 98 comments · Darryl Cooper

Some congratulated Podhoretz’s courage to write the essay, but others were outraged. One of the latter was the black author, and Village Voice columnist, Joe Wood, wrote a blistering essay in response, accusing Podhoretz of repressed homoerotic feelings for black men, envy of the black penis, Jewish self-hatred, and many other defects of body and character (and, of course, of racism).

Podhoretz is barking from the shadows, gentle reader. Don’t be afraid - read the record and see for yourself: remember how much the writer envied Negro strength, notice how he fails to mention the millennia of “stigma” between Jewish “past glory” and “imminent redemption,” notice how easily his lunatic description of black experience could be used to describe Jewish experience. Then dare to follow my reasoning to its unattractive and obvious conclusion. At bottom, a profound self-hatred menaces in (Podhoretz’s essay): each time he reveals his weakness, as whiteness, he is confession how much he hates his weakness, as Jewishness, gentle reader…

Throughout (his essay), Podhoretz unwittingly gives readers a glimpse of the peculiar blend of desire, anxiety, and racism that informed the Jewish American discourse during the Depression. This collision of impulses is never better revealed than in the writer’s discussion of his black playmate named Carl… It is here that Podhoretz comes closest to describing how his boyhood world shaped his ideas about black people. The scrape with Carl is perfectly typical of New York City, where ethnic clashes are routine, but the incident also condenses nicely a worldview peculiar to immigrant Jews at the time, which can be boiled down to a question: With goyim slamming you from above, and blacks threatening from below, what is a person to do?...

In choosing to open his essay with a spotty memory of a black boy whose most notable feature is his moral equivalence to goyim, Podhoretz dismisses the idea of a special black moral station. It is an understandable move. African-Americans’ history of subjugation bestowed a moral authority historically reserved for Jews by Jews in Christian Europe… Since Jewish Americans could basically be themselves without the kind of penalties they had suffered in Europe, a Jewish identity based on that oppression made no sense. One way to deal with the resultant confusion was to hate the displacers, the blacks.

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And here we have Commentary Magazine's “Letter to the Editor” in response to Norman Podhoretz “Negro Problem” that he shares with all of us.

“My Negro Problem”—II

by Our Readers

To the Editor:

Here is where I am: I found Norman Podhoretz’s unfortunate contribution on the stance of one liberal an ugly item. Ugly because of its arbitrary excision of history in order, apparently, to indulge in a personal aggravation against history. It is the only reason that I can think of that his amazing explication preferred to ignore the sophistication of concern with the commodity value of the blanket opposition of an entire people and roam around instead, presumably as befits a “psychoanalytical” age, in the field of narrative of boyhood iniquities tellingly peppered with the traumatic impact of lots and lots of “mo’ f—r’s”. . . .

I mean to say that an attempt to reduce the situation of U.S. Negroes to an exchange of personal memorabilia of the brutalizing hazards of an urban upbringing is a sheer outrage. I would have supposed even that Mr. Podhoretz’s sensibilities would enjoy more dignity had his lingering distaste for bullies led him, if not to a bus due South, then to a fiercely angry, if safe, pen, in behalf of the objects of the most notorious and institutionalized bullying of the moment.

Above all was I struck with Mr. Podhoretz’s hanging implication that he feels absolved from any crimes that might have been going on around here because, after all, his ancestors were somewhere else when the slave ships docked. To long for that particular absolution Mr. Podhoretz and everyone else will have to give up that sweeping phrase which he uses without hesitation in the middle of his article—“we white Americans.” . . .

The main impression gained from the article was that the world is changing and Mr. Podhoretz is agitated because it is so apparent that the liberal ought be saying and doing something; that he ought be stepping into the street to join the parade but that, as always, His Majesty has discovered that he hasn’t got a stitch on, despite the weaving of intricate platitudes of liberalism for generations.

Thus that “blood” which has been flowing in our streets for three hundred and forty-four years of racial antagonism finally seems a threat; that same three hundred and forty-four years of “miscegenation” in which so much blood has mingled that at least about 40 per cent of the writer’s remembered bullies probably were “misceged”—is now seen by him as the “only solution.” This despite the fact that he can only feel “prurient” stirrings at the mere sight of a “mixed couple”; and is sent into ravings and rantings at the thought of his daughter marrying “one.” But history, once again, has not waited for Mr. Podhoretz’s adjustments and education and it would be beside the point that he would probably be confounded in the face of our own black ultras, and not only the “separatists,” who perceive and curse the implication in This House that the presence of the undiluted black is intolerable and therefore this nation must now weigh, in a manner suggesting the taking of hemlock to the lips, sexually absorbing what it will not love! Black pride, including that untouched by fanaticism or racism of any kind, is, it must swiftly be understood, more ferocious than that! The Negro demand is for equality for Negroes; the biological and sociological reality of Negroes as they presently exist. Which individuals shall choose to marry or otherwise have sexual union with whom remains on all counts outside the scope of any kind of politics.

Finally, reading Mr. Podhoretz’s article, I was ashamed for it in a particular way for I thought that I recognized in it an adolescent expectation and hope that the writer would be congratulated by black and white alike on his—“honesty.” As if, somehow, his recitation of perfectly old fashioned racist motifs would lend a refreshing bit of ambiguity to the tasks at hand and be properly appreciated by all like himself who are trying like the devil to avoid the enormity of the actual confrontation before us. It is a saddening posture for the editor of a responsible journal.

I charge Mr. Podhoretz with not dealing with the greater honesty at all; I charge him with offering up a confessional which will merely be a device of those anxious to see the world stay as it is—“just a little longer.” But most painfully of all, I charge him with something I know that he cannot presently appreciate the seriousness of: of having given those impassioned young black folk who have “given up the Mr. Podhoretz’s” a document with which to heighten their ever-deepening articulation of their contempt of his self-exemption. Those of us who feel that we stand between, trying to maintain the chain, have been handed a body blow. . . .

Lorraine Hansberry
New York City

To the Editor:

. . . God knows the white liberal needs help, and both Baldwin from the outside and Podhoretz from the inside have been of help in discussing the problem. But does the February 1963 COMMENTARY hint at solution? Yes, on the last page the editor proposes one. For a moment I thought it was important: the problem will disappear when color in fact disappears. Assimilation and miscegenation he says are solutions. Then comes the letdown: “I am not claiming that this alternative can be pursued programmatically or that it is immediately feasible as a solution,” says the editor. . . . For a moment I could picture Southern Gentleman-hood rolling up sleeves and taking delight in resuming extra-curricular activities which have been hampered for exactly 100 years this winter. But, no, “programmatic” solutions are to be denied the white male, anti-liberal though he be, who works toward assimilation. He is only to talk about it.

It is not the programmatic assumption that disturbs me so much as the theory be-behind it. The footnote on page 93 suggests that the editor is a bit diffident about undertaking so controversial a topic in a journal devoted to better intergroup relations. He should not worry about that. All solutions that can be conceived ought to be proposed in these dark days. He is wary about spitting out the word “miscegenation” though I know of few high religions that intrinsically rule it out, however aesthetically improbable it is to most. There is some health to bringing into the open the most radical solution; it makes the more moderate steps seem possible. That could be in Podhoretz’s mind. But that is not in his words, and we are analyzing words. . . .

Baldwin and Podhoretz and all of us find it necessary to reach back to boyhood to find the matrix from which bad attitudes are born. Here is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant sample. Mine comes from a prairie boyhood in the white-majority culture of Nebraska (I’ll bet neither B. nor P. has ever met anyone else from there!). We loved the Negro because the nearest one was ninety miles away in Omaha and each summer the Piney Woods singers, as they came through town to clap their hands and sing their spirituals, showed us how simple, lovable, and godly the Nigger Soul is. Our Sunday School literature told us that the Jew was being punished because his grandfather had shouted to the heavens and to Pontius Pilate: “Jesus’s blood be on us and on our children.” Like Podhoretz, I was puzzled by this kind of mythological approach. The only Jews I knew were the merchants in Norfolk, Nebraska—five or six of them—who were being punished by making more money than all the gentiles in sight. Everyone knew how the Jews are, after all. But we could love even them. They were potential converts.

Our problems were more with the like, not the unlike. First there were the “Cathlicks.” Tension took no more violent form than the snowball fights with the gangs from the Guardian Angels school. But to be told that Catholicism was a beleaguered minority (even in a state where today it is a majority in only ten counties!) was an unbelievable improbability. Our battle cry was always the plaintive, “They that be against us, O Lord, are more and mightier than those that be with us.” They were consolidated, better organized, and like all Polacks, Bigger than we. We always lost. But we still loved them, for they were separated Brethren long before the Pope started calling us that.

Our problems, the location of our real passionate intensities, were the other Protestants in that Protestant county, the other brands of Lutherans in that county of Lutheran majority. The people we were taught to mistrust, despise, and hate: the people concerning whom we drew practical conclusions that we were to stand off, were the people most nearly like us. We did stand them off, and vice versa. “The United Lutherans are all right, but would you want your daughter to marry one?” was a question that was real and practical and thus more threatening than the dramatic ones Baldwin and Podhoretz ask. I hope the parable seems trivial. God, it was and is trivial! And in its triviality is its point: we do no better with the most obscure and subtle shadings of difference than we do with the vastly different. We do worse. For we: Baldwin in Harlem, Podhoretz in Brooklyn, I in Nebraska, were insecure. The former two had real reason to be—I think—and we did not. In that lies a great sociological difference. But theologically and personally the problem was the same for all of us and remains so.

Our Negro problem; our Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and secularist problem is unbelief. We do not believe anything. We do not really believe in the God or gods in whom we profess to place our trust or in His or their revelations of plans and programs for man. . . .

Baldwin and Podhoretz are showing how Will Rogers’s observation is useless in intergroup relations. They are willing to admit that they did meet men they didn’t, they couldn’t like. . . . But their religion and ours, which let us down at the crucial test, told them that they would never meet a man they couldn’t love. Sociology was against them and us, in boyhood as today. But theology and personhood were for them, and neither they nor any of us will get anywhere if we wait until difference disappears. When difference diminishes we will grow more insecure, more fierce—Next Time, The Fire.

Martin E. Marty
Associate Editor
The Christian Century
Chicago, Illinois

To the Editor:

Sad, sad are the statements in Mr. Podhoretz’s “My Negro Problem—And Ours.” The current militancy (a word coined by whites) of the Negro can be partially laid to just such honesty set down by Mr. Podhoretz. To be more specific, he has revealed the classic in-depth feelings of the liberal now and perhaps always perceived by the Negro.

. . . It appears that it is self-hate rather than hatred that the author feels, and it had early inheritance from school days when he was beaten on the street by Negroes. He quite carefully points out that he did not fight back, hated himself, and transferred this hatred to the Negro boys. Forget about the black boys who have been beaten in the streets, not because of medals, not because of giving correct answers in the classroom, but just because they were black.

So the son of countless victims of East European pogroms and the sons of numerous lynching victims, forced into the poverty box, turned even as rabbits will to a kind of cannibalism. A further line will help Mr. Podhoretz to understand the neo-nihilism of the Negro boys. . . . The Negro has been in America for over four hundred years. From then until now he has acquired little. But an Irishman runs the government with a good many Jews in it (and a token group of Negroes), the old Italian with the handlebar moustache has vanished. Postwar refugees, Hungarian Freedom Fighters, Cuban refugees, all move ahead. The Negro waits, history having a way of by-passing him in terms of advancement. If not in the spoken word all this was the sense of things in the 30’s and now. Those black boys who were the author’s classmates knew it and those who are boys today know it. . . .

I do not agree with Mr. Baldwin’s opinion that every Negro person hates every white person. There are times—God, yes. But hate cannot be lived with continually; it is too energy-sapping and too, too overwhelming in its ultimate sense, a love for those who are so hated.

I cannot understand the shock of the Jews at what Mr. Podhoretz calls “Negro anti-Semitism.”. . . Massive historical conditions which to a large extent have excluded Jews from sharing to the full the benefits of American capitalism, have brought Jew and Negro into harsh commercial contact. It is sheer delusion to ignore the fact that 90 per cent of the stores in Harlem are Jewish-owned or to deny that on the upper West Side where Mr. Podhoretz now lives the apartment-hotels are largely owned by Jews who charge exorbitant rents and permit sub-human living conditions and the accompanying violations. The result of all this is not anti-Semitism, but a striking back at whoever seems to be in control, seems to block the nervous progress of the Negro. . . .

And yet for all this confusion and misunderstanding . . . our primary “advance” organizations are officered, staffed, and superbly aided by Jews. Few people of any other Caucasian kind have been so concerned with the lot of the Negro. A former officer in such an organization remarked privately (for the facts are hard) that Jews realize subconsciously that their future goes hand in hand with that of the Negro. . . . Furthermore, he went on, there is that “tradition” rooted in Judaism which submits . . . not that all men are equal, but that all men shall be equally judged, a concept more splendid at the root than the Bill of Rights.

With such a concept in mind, why is it that the Black Muslims cannot be seen in proper perspective? . . . To my mind their work has been good. They’ve salvaged junkies, worked savagely to replace the pride lost through generations of second-class citizenship. . . . They say they will defend themselves if attacked. Can one ask more of a man? To cloud this issue of self-defense, turn its meaning into a perpetual threatening offensive against whites is to misunderstand for the sake, not of misunderstanding, but to give excuse for additional mayhem against all Negroes. . . .

But I disagree with separation. Perhaps I am blind. Speaking for myself, I have no intention of giving up what several generations of my people have rightfully earned by hard, hard labor. This land upon which we walk, especially the South, was sown with the bones of my forefathers. That is a truth not worth arguing. And, like the Jew who sought Israel, I mean to have it, and further, I will have it and my rights as well.

Mr. Podhoretz is aware of this sense; it contributes, I believe, to his anguish which is painfully clear. For how may a man see the solution of our racial dilemma through legal or condoned or completely acceptable miscegenation, and in the same breath voice his hatred for the mixed couple? But the author is quite through, it seems, deluding himself. This is an important step and indicates, as trite as it may seem, blessed hope for us all.

John A. Williams
New York City

To the Editor:

The publication of Norman Podhoretz’s article is to be commended. The experiences he describes have the ring of truth. Precisely because this “truth” is likely to be distasteful, it is vital that it be presented and understood.

Unfortunately, his proposed solution (miscegenation) does not appear to resolve the issue which he poses. . . . Is the “melting pot” an appropriate goal in the fight against discrimination? Granted that a society is desirable in which miscegenation is accepted, should not the true goals of the humanist in this connection be: (1) preservation of ethnic differences; (2) loyalty of an individual to his own ethnic group; and (3) respect by the individual for other ethnic groups and their members? My belief is that our social health would be better served by the continuation of a variegated culture with respectful competition among the several ethnic groups.

Mr. Podhoretz has, of course, presented the supreme challenge to my position in asking: “In thinking about Jews I have wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant. Did the Jews have to survive so that six million . . . people should be one day burned in the ovens of Auschwitz?” While this question may, as he stated, be unanswerable, I wonder whether the assimilation of the European Jew could have insulated him from the terrors of Nazism. It certainly afforded no protection to that most assimilated of all Jewish communities, that of Germany.

Jerome Lefkowitz
New York City

To the Editor:

. . . . I feel that Norman Podhoretz’s article represents a beginning of the unpleasant educational process that the “enlightened” white liberal must undergo before any real progress can be made in race relations in this country. Everyone tells everyone else that race relations are just as deplorable in the North as in the South, because there is so much hypocrisy about them here. But to my knowledge Mr. Podhoretz is the first established white liberal to make an effort to explain why, from his own experience and not just from psychological theories, northern liberals are such hypocrites. . . .

My background could hardly be more different from Mr. Podhoretz’s—I am a middle-class, small-town, Midwestern Protestant who had no contact at all with Negroes when I was growing up. . . . I can’t point to any actual experiences in my background that give me a right to the confused and conflicting feelings I have regarding the Negro. But I have these feelings, and I know that everyone with whom I talk about this question . . . has feelings just as “sick” as mine. . . .

Why can’t it be realized (or even discussed), by Negroes and whites alike, that the society that has done what it has to the Negro has also taken its toll among the oppressors? . . . I am convinced that my feelings—and those of others like me—are important, and that if more whites understood themselves and each other we might truly begin, as Mr. Podhoretz says, to free ourselves from the sickness that keeps us and our leadership from being anything but hypocritical in our attitudes. This doesn’t mean that I am so optimistic as to think that, even if we do become more honest, our actions will necessarily be much more positive; I too am a pessimist. But at least it wouldn’t be quite so easy for us to declare that we are free of prejudice, which is the kind of declaration that makes a mockery of liberalism.

I suppose we shouldn’t ask the Negro to try to understand that our feelings, too, are complex and that we too have been victimized by our white society. He’s got enough troubles of his own. But I have tried and I suppose I will continue to try not only to understand the Negro’s position and feelings but to get him to understand mine. . . .

And I will continue to prod my white friends; I think there is no excuse for them, if they have any integrity in this matter, to put off much longer an honest attempt to analyze and admit to their own attitudes. The white liberals are a big stumbling block to the improvement of race relations. (In time this too will become a cliché if it isn’t already). . . . Surely there is more harm in pious platitudes and empty gestures on the part of the white liberal, in the long run, than there is in an honest expression such as Mr. Podhoretz’s, even if it seems unkind or cavalier in the short run. . . .

In all, I am grateful to Mr. Podhoretz for his honesty and intelligence, and hope that more of us, myself included, will be prompted to display some of our own, no matter how unpleasant the immediate consequences might be.

Georgia Griggs
New York City

To the Editor:

COMMENTARY deserves great credit for having the courage to publish what must be an agonizing self-appraisal of a liberal. However, I feel that there are several points in Mr. Podhoretz’s article which merit and undoubtedly will receive vigorous further discussion. His feelings toward Negroes are admittedly conditioned by his childhood traumatic experiences in contact with some of them, yet he somehow fails to grasp the essential fact that Negroes’ feelings toward whites are similarly conditioned by a collective traumatic experience which extended over a period of several hundred years. . . .

Indeed, the profound effect of slavery on the psyche of the American Negro is something which must be increasingly reckoned with by all who are interested in the future of race relations in this country. Frequent or sporadic outbreaks of apparently senseless brutality, violence, and amorality must be viewed against the background of that institution which relegated us to the position of animals, and subjected our forebears to the inhuman condition of being bartered and sold, and bred like horses and cows. . . .

I find it quite significant, also, that Mr. Podhoretz, in company with the Black Muslims and others, in looking toward the future, can envision, with peculiar blindness, only the two extremes of further, more fervent hatred, on the one hand, or miscegenation on the other. . . . He asks, rather derisively, what does the Negro have that could possibly make him wish to survive as a distinct ethnic group, yet, a few paragraphs earlier, he waxes almost eloquent about those very qualities of “physical grace and beauty” which characterize our physiognomy. Perhaps the terms hate-love, rather than hate-envy, could better be used to describe this dichotomy of the emotions, and explain this tendency to think of bloodshed and rioting in the same breath with sexual intermingling, and perhaps the psychiatrist’s couch for all of us would be a fortunate substitute for a mad dash to the marital bed of miscegenation and/or the bloody streets of race rioting.

Most of us believe that there is a middle way, a path which avoids both of these extremes. And the patient, careful search for this way must be the ultimate goal of all liberals.

(Dr.) Robert E. Fullilove, Jr.
Newark, New Jersey

To the Editor:

The significant quality of Norman Podhoretz’s article is the high sense of irrelevance reflected in its personal emphases. The Negro problem in America in the last one hundred years has been the denial of equal status before the law. It is not basically a problem of racial brotherhood. That aspect might take time but we cannot wait, ever, to rely on public attitude in assuring equal status before the law. That must be guaranteed to every individual, particularly against hostile prevailing majority hate.

Irving Ferman
Vice President
Playtex
Washington, D.C.

To the Editor:

. . . As, I hope, a good Jew, and as the wife of a Negro, I think I have some insight into Mr. Podhoretz’s feelings. Even though I must admit I was stopped short by his prurience (disgust?) at the sight of an interracial couple, I forced myself to go beyond that—something perhaps that his detractors have not done—and complete his piece. I want him to know that we—my husband and I—do understand what he is trying to say and respect him for it. . . .

Having said all this, may I then take a few lines to indicate where I think he has not been completely honest—or perhaps realistic is a better word. For example, he says that in the world of his boyhood there was little difference in the poverty of the Jew and the poverty of the Negro. And yet, I wonder if he really thinks back hard, wouldn’t he find that perhaps all—or most—of the shopkeepers—however hard they may have worked and however small their profits—weren’t they usually Jewish? And the consumers—who were perhaps sometimes overcharged or sold defective goods (because, let’s face it, that poor little grocer had to sell the stale rolls to somebody)—weren’t they almost always Negro? The problem with being exploited is that you don’t always see the man at the top. When I was a little girl in the Bronx—we were refugees from Vienna and Hitler, circa ’38—we lived in a neighborhood mostly Irish and Italian. (Incidentally, I was afraid of them as Mr. Podhoretz was of Negroes, and for the same reasons. . . .) My parents, in their stinking little grocery, worked seven days a week, sometimes fifteen and sixteen hours a day, delivering bottles of milk to the sixth-floor walk-ups to keep a customer, never looking right or left, but only to “get ahead.” They, on the other hand, had parents who worked in banks, factories, and the like; they got new outfits (cheap, but flashy) for all their holidays (while on the High Holy Days, as well as the rest of the time, I wore hand-me-downs); their parents got drunk every Saturday night, and I, too, envied and despised them, all at the same time. Of course, my parents did get ahead a little, and then they accused us of being secretly “rich” and cheating them!

What I am trying to say is that one serious mistake in Mr. Podhoretz’s generalization about the very real chasm between the races in this country is that he thinks that all white children who grew up near Negroes, grew up with the same feeling toward them. That there is hatred, jealousy, and even fear, I am not denying. But I am suggesting that they are based on something different from what Mr. Podhoretz’s personal case suggests. My husband, as a shy, frightened, black boy from Jamaica, moving to the States when he was twelve, was prone to the same emotions Mr. Podhoretz describes for himself when, on moving into a formerly “all white” neighborhood, he and his friends were terrorized by a group of young white hoodlums whose ferocity might have made a good match for Mr. Podhoretz’s childhood nightmares. Their favorite word may not have been “m’t’r f’kr,” (a word probably originated by Southern whites, according to the best of sources) but they were pretty free with their own obscenities and racial epithets, so it all kind of works out to the same thing.

And still I agree with Mr. Podhoretz—for him, and me, and people like us only—more than I disagree. As I grew older, as the state of Israel emerged, and I realized that to be a Jew didn’t have to mean letting yourself get abused without fighting back, as I learned more about my religion and culture (perhaps fortunately, for my development, not from official sources, but, as with all lonely children, from books), I took the same path he did of having intellectual convictions which were for a long time not matched by emotional growth of the same order. By the time I was sixteen and lived in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood in Yonkers, I had still had little personal contact with Negroes. . . . Then, I read Native Son, and my awakening nationalism, my new Jewish pride, seemed to insist that I see the fight for Negro rights in this country as my fight. Those few Negroes I had in my classes at this time were similar to the ones Mr. Podhoretz has described, except that this middle-class environment did not permit them to terrorize white children, only each other. Nevertheless, I began consciously to seek to change my feelings—to regard what had seemed to me almost another species (don’t forget I was European, and they were strange to me) as equals. I blush with shame at the thought of all the patronizing I must have done in my own kind, stupid way, on the road to salvation.

This was not meant to be the story of my life, and yet I must, for Mr. Podhoretz, add a few more words. He ends his article by saying what his reaction would be if his daughter decided to marry black. When I was finally faced with a man whom I loved, who loved me, whose simple fault in the eyes of the world was his black skin, I could not morally, intellectually, or any other way reject him for that reason only. What did I owe white? Hadn’t our people been murdered by them for two thousand years? There would have been more hesitation on my part if he had been a practicing Christian. And did I not know that the child of a Jewish mother is Jewish? My thoughts of our future children were set at rest in this way. I told my parents of my decision. They were, naturally, quite upset. My mother said I would soon be sitting shive for them. My father—who does not stoop to such tactics—said that I was throwing my life away, it could not possibly work, and they both agreed that we would not be able to see each other if I went ahead with my plan.

It was a lovely wedding. My mother took only a few weeks to come around. She had done everything she could to stop me, and having failed, she still wanted her daughter. My father took longer. . . . Nevertheless, our little daughter has been the apple of my parents’ eyes since her birth, and whatever my papa still holds against the marriage, he couldn’t love her more. She’s almost eleven, incidentally, quite proud of being a “Jewish-Negro” girl, and one of the better students at the Hebrew school she attends.

I agree with Mr. Podhoretz completely about the phony liberals who move to the suburbs, the sick ones who come to Harlem looking for thrills and vitality (and oh, do they get abused for their troubles), and the ones with a double standard of morality. I also think that the many problems faced on the West Side are problems of poverty and ignorance. If Mr. Podhoretz ever meets one of what the late Dr. Franklin Frazier called the “black bourgeoisie,” he will find that he is as frightened of violence, unrepressed sex, and nonconformity as any middle-class Jew. . . .

Finally, as long as Mr. Podhoretz remains on the West Side, probes honestly and deeply (à la James Baldwin), and is willing to contemplate so radical a solution (to what is, after all, an American dilemma) as a Negro son-in-law, then only the foolish and misguided dare call him racist. I call him friend.

(Mrs.) Ronald Gibel
New York City

To the Editor:

My congratulations and gratitude for Norman Podhoretz’s courageous and liberating article. . . .

Melvin J. Lasky
Editor
Encounter
London, England

To the Editor:

When a brilliant writer, Negro, describes his childhood and youthful experiences in order to give the unknowing white man a glimpse into the ghetto, this should not constitute an invitation to a less talented writer, liberal and Jewish, to answer with a reminiscence of his own. Unfortunately every Negro knows and understands the antipathy Norman Podhoretz feels for him. . . .

The liberal must begin to understand that Negroes are different from whites, they have a culture white men are not part of. The Negro’s past is no more a stigma than the Jew’s—it is filled with a heroic battle to survive, with poetry and music. . . .

Mr. Podhoretz’s program for miscegenation is a sophisticated racist argument; to wit, we can only solve the Negro problem when there are no more Negroes; everything will be all right when everybody looks alike. Miscegenation is probably the most radical sounding reactionary slogan a white liberal can find. . . . Until Mr. Podhoretz begins to understand that Negroes are human beings who are brutalized in this society, and that it is their responsibility to stop the brutalization, relations between Negroes and white liberals will deteriorate. . . .

Rachelle Horowitz
New York City

To the Editor:

When Mr. Podhoretz in “My Negro Problem—and Ours” writes autobiographically of his youthful experiences with Negroes in a specific part of Brooklyn, I am sympathetic. When, however, on the basis of such experiences, he vaults to the conclusion that “the Negro problem can be solved . . . in no other way” than miscegenation, I must object strongly. . . .

Whether granting the Negro his constitutional rights might lead to increased intermarriage is presently irrelevant. Marriage is a personal decision and one’s sister or daughter can always say “No.” . . . To grant or to deny the Negro his rights as an American citizen on the basis of “the wholesale merging of the two races,” or on the disappearance of color “in fact” is to introduce inflammatory nonsense into an already blazing conflict.

Lawrence Jarett
Roslyn Heights, New York

To the Editor:

Having just read Norman Podhoretz’s courageous and strugglingly honest account of the Negro-white dilemma, I am moved to suggest that the prospect is not as near-hopeless as he suggests. Nor as James Baldwin had previously suggested in the New Yorker.

For, Ecclesiastes to the contrary, there is something new under the sun, something I believe that can be “caught, not taught” by the American Negroes and may help them walk with pride down those streets to which, by their own efforts and those of the forward-looking whites, they are now gaining access. This “something” is the appearance on the world scene of the independent African nations and, on the domestic scene, because of African curiosity and willingness to travel, the appearance throughout the country of these new nations’ UN representatives. . . .

By and large—with exceptions of course—these Africans do not have the proverbial chip on shoulder. They are whole and rich and vital persons who turn out to be, with their openness and their humor, more like Americans than are many of the more skeptical Europeans or more reserved Asians. . . .

The result is that, today, when such an African suffers a racial slight in this country, his reaction is not one of diminishment but of righteous wrath. . . . The experience of growing up as part of the majority, a majority, moreover, which in former times had regally ruled itself, appears to be such a wholesome one that not only the person involved but those who later identify with him can profit from it. . . .

For what has been imported into this country, duty-free, as a by-product of the UN’s being established here, is precisely the consciousness of being black as something good, something to be respected by those of paler hue and perhaps thinner blood. The Africans themselves refer to this consciousness as Négritude or The New African Personality. . . .

In addition to the personal impact of these UN Africans, there is also the new political dimension to which Harold Isaacs referred (COMMENTARY, December, 1962). For as the African nations grow individually and collectively in international importance—and if they succeed, as they hope to, in developing a “third force” which may prevent the white nations from blowing each other to ashes—then the American Negro, more and more, may lift up his eyes unto the (African) hills whence cometh what may feel like salvation, namely the removal of the stigma Mr. Podhoretz talks about. The UN Africans in their robes may thus be paving the way for American Negroes not only into previously lily-white restaurants, hotels, and clubs, but, more importantly, into the inner realm where self-acceptance is nurtured. . . .

(Mrs.) June Bingham
Riverdale, New York

To the Editor:

As neither I nor Mr. James Baldwin is a psychoanalyst, perhaps I can with at least equal authority on one point presume to disagree with him, or with Mr. Podhoretz’s interpretation of his feelings. I am a Negro and I do not hate all white people. However, as a sociologist, I have long been interested in the expression of values and conflict within the society of whites. . . .

I believe Mr. Podhoretz’s comments would have represented a more useful agonizing reappraisal if he had chosen to write either as a Jew relative to the Negro or as a white American relative to the Negro. The alternating perspective, incomplete in both instances, weakens the reader’s understanding of either. . . .

To the extent that categorized social relationships can be usefully analyzed between the various groups in America and American society as a whole and/or between themselves as separate entities, it seems clear and supported by data that the relationship between Negro and Jew in either its positive or negative manifestations is not identical with that between white Americans and Jews. That there are certain common features which make them similar in many respects is quite another matter. . . .

A forthright personal expression in the field of race or ethnic relations is always very welcome because it is so rare. Its greater value, however, beyond that of personal therapy, rests on giving it the proper theoretical, or if you will, categorical focus.

(Mrs.) Adelaide Cromwell Hill
African Studies Program
Boston University

To the Editor:

Mr. Podhoretz’s article is a moving confession of his feelings about Negroes but throws light only on his own state of conflict. It has the virtues of honesty and good will but, alas, not of insight....

Mr. Podhoretz was intimidated and persecuted by some boys acting in groups and singly. Had they been white or mixed or unidentifiable to him in ethnic background, they would simply have been malicious boys. How is it that the fact that they were Negro boys remains so salient in his memory?... They could have been identified in a number of ways—“group 3” boys, or boys from a certain block, or boys from bad homes or from the opposing team. It is not the fact of their skin color but the meaning given to this fact in our culture by its agents of transmission that is crucial....

If this were not so, why should it be that many middle-class whites who have never been beaten or threatened by any Negroes, who may have never even been close to a Negro, share the same fears as Mr. Podhoretz (and, I would submit, probably to an even greater degree)?...

As any Jew should know... the essence of the minority problem... is the deeply-held conviction that there exists an evil or inferior Negroid or Jewish essence which makes the ethnic adjective seem appropriate. Otherwise, why include it? This is the conviction against which minority group members continually bang their heads in a hopeless and frustrated attempt to demonstrate and explain the facts of biological and cultural life to the majority....

No, Mr. Podhoretz, your experiences, traumatic as they may have been, are probably irrelevant to your present feelings. As a social psychologist once observed: “We get our attitudes toward minorities not from contact with minorities themselves but from contact with the prevailing attitude toward minorities.”

Charles Herbert Stember
Department of Sociology
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey

To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz’s “My Negro Problem—And Ours” is bound to evoke howls of rage from some quarters, but I found his article both a beautiful piece of prose and an uncommon act of courage. I am not myself a partisan of miscegenation, possibly because it has always seemed to me a union between guilty whites and self-hating Negroes. And since we are all losing our color so rapidly in a world without distinctions, I would prefer a solution which allowed to both races their self-respect, privacy, and special identity. Still, Mr. Podhoretz has carried liberal thought to its inexorable conclusion, an intellectual feat which contrasts refreshingly with the pious platitudes of most white spokesmen, and even with the ambiguous exhortations of James Baldwin, who invariably mitigates an orgy of anger and hatred with contradictory pleas for Love. It is Mr. Baldwin’s individual experience, like that of Mr. Podhoretz, which, if honestly and courageously presented, can be of most value to us; for it is as personal witnesses, rather than as public spokesmen, Brotherhood peddlers, or salvation salesmen, that both are making genuine contributions to this necessary debate.

Robert Brustein
Department of English
Columbia University
New York City

“My Negro Problem-and Ours” at 50

Reflections on a controversial essay and its legacy.

by Norman Podhoretz

This year marks the 50th anniversary of possibly the most controversial but certainly the most notorious piece ever published in COMMENTARY from that day to this. Its title was “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” and it was written by me. Over the years I have often been asked what impelled (or as it was sometimes put, “possessed”) me to write such a thing when I must have known that (in the words used by a critic when it first came out) “there was something in it to offend everyone.” Yes, of course, I would usually answer, I did know that many readers, both white and black, would be outraged. But contrary to a widely held suspicion that this was precisely my purpose in writing it, I had no conscious desire “to offend everyone.” Nor did I enjoy having provoked so much anger (though I very much enjoyed being applauded by those who admired the essay for one reason or another). In any case, the truth is that both the idea and the instigation came not from me but from James Baldwin. And thereby hangs a tale.

In those days, in common with just about everyone else in the literary world, I considered Baldwin one of the best writers of any kind in America, and among black writers Ralph Ellison’s only rival for the crown. As a novelist, he had produced nothing to compare with Ellison’s Invisible Man, but his essays were much better than Ellison’s, and there was no more elegant prose stylist then writing in any genre in English. Nor was there anyone, white or black, who had cast more light on the complexities of the relations between the races—a subject about which passions ran even higher than they do today and that were about to be further exacerbated by the rise of the Black Muslims.

This movement, whose leading spokesman was the incendiary Malcolm X, totally rejected the idea held by the dominant civil-rights movement that the solution to what everyone then called the Negro Problem¹ lay in the “integration” of the two races. The goal of the integrationists, both white and black, was a society in which the two races would live and work and rub shoulders together, and the way to get there was through a gradual dismantling of the discriminatory barriers that were forcibly keeping them apart and denying blacks an equal chance in the “pursuit of happiness.” But the Black Muslims had no wish to associate with whites on any terms whatsoever. What they wanted was to have as little to do with them as possible. Indeed, they did not flinch from (literally) denouncing the whole white race as a creature of the devil.

To the surprise and consternation of the devout liberals who led and supported the civil-rights establishment, the Black Muslims seemed to be gaining influence within the black community. This was due in no small part to the brilliant oratorical skills of Malcolm X, but the main cause was that many blacks were beginning to feel that progress toward integration was too slow and that in the end whites would never stop resisting it.

As for me, I was then on the left and still about five years away from “breaking ranks” with my erstwhile political friends. I was also at the beginning of my fourth year as the editor of COMMENTARY, where a number of Baldwin’s most powerful essays, later collected in Notes of a Native Son, had first appeared. This was before my time, but having traveled for ages in the same literary circle and attended all the same parties, we had come to know each other, and—because I liked him for the work he had done, and he liked me because I admired him as a writer—we had become fairly friendly. Inevitably, then, when it struck me that an important article was clamoring to be written that would explain why the Black Muslims were becoming more and more influential and how this wholly unanticipated development might play itself out, I simultaneously decided that no one could do the job as well as, let alone better than, Jimmy Baldwin. As a passionate antagonist of separationism, he would undoubtedly hold out against the pernicious ideology of the Black Muslims, but as an imaginative observer with a wonderfully perceptive eye and a pen to match, he could also be relied on to understand and elucidate the growing appeal of Malcolm’s message.

The minute I proposed it to him, Baldwin immediately saw the possibilities of such an article and he accepted the assignment with alacrity and enthusiasm, promising moreover to deliver the manuscript in just a few weeks. But a few weeks came and went and then another few weeks, and still no manuscript. When I finally reached him after a string of unanswered calls, he nervously confessed that he had finished the piece but that his agent had sent it to the New Yorker.

Now, selling an article proposed and commissioned by one magazine to another was so egregious a breach of trust and common practice that it could not be justified, at least not in my eyes, even by the fact that the New Yorker could pay him about 10 times as much as COMMENTARY could have done. And to deepen my chagrin at having been robbed of a major editorial coup, it (deservedly) created one of the great journalistic sensations in living memory when it came out under the title “Letter from a Region in My Mind”—and then in book form as The Fire Next Time.

The poet Kenneth Rexroth had recently coined the term “Crow-Jimism” to describe the tendency of white liberals to make special allowances for blacks who were guilty of any sort of offense, up to and including violent crimes. This was exactly how most of my friends and colleagues responded on hearing what Baldwin had done, but I was having none of it. Consequently when, at his request, I agreed to meet him for a drink “to talk this thing over,” I let him have it with both barrels even after the minimal contrition he now showed. His refusal to justify himself was all very well, I told him, but it did not make what he had done any less dishonest and dishonorable, especially coming from someone who went around preaching the virtue of “paying one’s dues.” The truth was that the only reason he had dared to behave so abominably was that, thanks to the white liberal guilt he himself had often written about with the authority of a frequent beneficiary, he could count on getting away with it. But he was very much mistaken if he thought that I felt even the slightest degree of guilt toward him or toward Negroes in general. How could I, when I had grown up in a slum neighborhood where it was the Negro kids who persecuted us whites and not the other way around?

I then proceeded to tell him a few stories about my childhood encounters with black thugs of my own age and about the resentment and bitterness and even hatred with which this experience had left me. It had also left me, I said, with an irritable attitude toward all the sentimental nonsense that was being propagated about integration by whites who knew nothing about blacks and by blacks who imagined that all their problems would be solved by living next door to whites. The trouble went deeper than the integrationists seemed to understand; there was something almost psychotic in the relation of whites to blacks in America, resembling in its imperviousness to rational analysis or political action the feeling of Christian Europe toward the Jews. You yourself, I went on, have told us that all blacks hate whites, and I am here to tell you that all whites are twisted and sick in their feelings about blacks. This was where the Black Muslims, for all the craziness of their “white devil” theology, had a point. But if they were right that integration was not the answer, they were dead wrong to place their faith in separation. In fact, the ideal conclusion to the whole sorry story would be the opposite extreme: the wholesale merger of the two races through miscegenation.

As I talked, Baldwin’s normally bulging eyes bulged and blazed even more fiercely than usual. “You ought,” he whispered as though participating in a conspiracy, “to write all that down.” It was important, more important than I realized, for such things to be said; and they had to be said in public. Thus it was that Baldwin repaid me for giving him the idea and the incentive for The Fire Next Time with the idea and the encouragement for “My Negro Problem—and Ours.”²

Relatively speaking—since the circulation of the New Yorker was about 20 times greater than COMMENTARY’s—the sensation “My Negro Problem—and Ours” caused upon its publication in February 1963 was, in its own league, almost as great as the one that had greeted Baldwin’s piece. Rarely in the history of COMMENTARY had there appeared an article that drew more than a few letters. Even for controversial articles, 10 was a lot and 20 extraordinary. “My Negro Problem—and Ours” drew more than 300, and it also elicited dozens of pieces in newspapers and other magazines.

All this comment did indeed bear out the critic who would later say that there was something in the essay to offend everyone. Integrationists were beside themselves over my dismissal of their ideas as naive and even deluded. Separationists—including, along with the Black Muslims, various other groups waiting in the wings such as the ultra-left Black Panthers who would in the near future coalesce into the Black Power movement—were outraged by the slighting references to the history and culture of their people I made in the course of arguing for the desirability of miscegenation. Nor were black nationalists alone in feeling this way. Ralph Ellison, as fervent an enemy of separatism as could be found, lashed into me in private for my blindness to the central place that black culture held in American culture at large. And finally, many of my fellow Jews were horrified when, piling injury to them on top of this insult to blacks, I said that if the survival of the Jewish people, who carried so rich a culture with them, might not have been worth the suffering it entailed, how much less would it matter if the blacks, who had nothing to lose but their “stigma,” were to disappear through miscegenation.

Still, not everyone was offended. To be sure, hardly anyone agreed with my endorsement of the hope Baldwin had held out in The Fire Next Time that “color as a fact of consciousness” could some day be made to disappear in America and my own addendum that wholesale miscegenation was the only way to banish it. Nevertheless, while taking issue with me over miscegenation, a fair number of the 300 letters we received and even a few of the pieces in other periodicals commended the essay for its “intellectual integrity” in refusing to back away from the logical conclusion of the analysis, however shocking or distasteful it might be. But the majority of those who admired the essay mainly focused on its “honesty” in confessing to feelings that they themselves also unhappily harbored and that they could now begin to confront and try to overcome. Most also commended me for my “courage” in exposing myself so nakedly to attack. And what was most gratifying of all (as any writer will understand), more than a few letters hailed the essay as an exceptionally powerful and eloquent piece of writing

This, then, is how things stood in 1963, and since then “My Negro Problem—and Ours” has been cited and reprinted more times than I can count. I like to think that what accounts for this continuing interest is its literary qualities. But my guess is that another factor was at work that had far more to do than prose style with keeping it alive for half a century. For as the years went on, a curious reversal occurred, as a result of which this essay that originally had something in it to offend everyone turned into a piece that now had something in it to please, if not everyone, then a growing number of both blacks and whites.

This something was the idea that all whites hated blacks.³ Of course, that was not exactly what I had said. My own words were that all whites were “twisted and sick” in their feelings toward blacks. But to many readers, it turned out, this formulation was indistinguishable from the charge that all whites, very much including the liberals among them who had been lifelong participants in the black struggle for equal rights, were incorrigibly racist in their heart of hearts. (As I write, an op-ed piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the New York Times has just leveled this very accusation at all “the good people” living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the very heartland of American liberalism.) And just as I had invoked the authority of Baldwin in saying that all blacks hated whites, “My Negro Problem—and Ours” was made to serve as definitive evidence of the universally reciprocal feeling among whites. The reason it was made to do so, of course, was that this interpretation lent itself perfectly to the view that the “Negro problem”—the only Negro problem—was external oppression, and that nothing blacks themselves did or failed to do made, or could ever make, more than a trivial difference.

It pains me to think that “My Negro Problem—and Ours” may have played a part, however small, in this kind of thing. For the almost complete abdication of black responsibility and the commensurately total dependence on government engendered by so obsessive and exclusive a fixation on white racism as the root of all racial evils has been nothing short of calamitous. It has spawned attitudes and policies that have undermined the very habits and behaviors that are essential to the achievement of independence and self-respect, and it has thereby helped consign three generations of black kids to the underclass while contributing to the immiseration of countless black lives.

It has also had the indirect consequence of fostering thuggery and aggression. In 1963, the stories I told about my own childhood experience of such thuggery and aggression were very shocking to most white liberals. In their eyes, blacks were all long-suffering and noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of the civil-rights movement in the South—the “heroic period” of the movement, as one of its most heroic leaders, Bayard Rustin, called it. Although none of my white critics denied the truthfulness of the stories I told, they themselves could hardly imagine being afraid of blacks when their first-hand acquaintance with them was limited to nannies and cleaning women.

Today, it is still other blacks who are most often the victims of black crime, but black-on-white violence is much more common than it was in 1963, so that many whites could now top my stories with worse. And yet even today, few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime. Doing so remains dangerous to one’s reputation: To borrow the phrase I once appropriated from D.H. Lawrence in talking about ambition, white fear of blacks has become a “dirty little secret” of our political culture. And since a dirty little secret breeds hypocrisy and cant in those who harbor it, I suppose it can still be said that most whites are twisted and sick in their feelings about blacks, albeit in a very different sense from the way they were in 1963.

It therefore seems to me that the narrative section of “My Negro Problem—and Ours” is perhaps as resonant today as it was then. I cannot, however, say the same for other parts of the essay.

Obviously I was right in predicting that integration as it was naively envisaged in those days would never, if ever, come about. Yet I have to admit that some of the goals of integrationism have been achieved. For example, a larger proportion of the black community is economically better off than was the case in 1963, and blacks have acquired much more political power than they had then. But at the same time relations between the races have deteriorated. Gone on the whole are the interracial friendships and the interracial political alliances that were quite common 50 years ago. In their place we have the nearly impassable gulfs of suspicion and hostility that are epitomized by the typical college dining hall of today where black students insist on sitting at tables of their own and whites are happy to accept this segregated arrangement or feel hurt at being repulsed.

Ironies abound here. For one thing, this development represented the cooptation of an integrationist goal by the black-nationalist ideal. By this I mean that the process of reverse discrimination euphemistically known as affirmative action, whose intention was to further the integrationist vision of a society in which blacks would mingle on equal terms with whites, ended up serving the separationist purposes of the Black Power movement (not to mention how it also ended up aping the segregationist practices in the South that the civil-rights movement had fought so hard to abolish).

Because I failed to anticipate such developments, I found in 1963 no path to the elimination of “color as a fact of consciousness” except the wholesale merging of the two races. I knew of course, as Baldwin did too, that there was an even smaller chance of this coming to pass in the foreseeable future than the much less ambitious goals of the integrationists. But because my objective in writing the essay was to speak the truth as I saw it and to go where it took me no matter what the consequences, it would have been a cowardly betrayal to shrink from the conclusion to which my analysis inexorably led.

Yet if I did the right thing from the perspective of intellectual coherence and literary fitness, I was wrong to think that miscegenation could ever result in the elimination of color-consciousness. I had already been half convinced of this in 1963 by an angry Ralph Ellison, who stopped me in my tracks, again in private, with the biting observation that, far from making us color-blind, racial intermarriage would only succeed in producing more babies who would be considered black. But what settled the matter once and for all for me was what has happened since the election to the presidency of a pure product of miscegenation. For the ascension of Barack Obama from out of nowhere to the White House has if anything heightened the American consciousness of color. Worse yet, instead of putting an end to the compulsive insistence on the racism of American society, it has given this obsession a new lease on life. Thus, any and every criticism of Obama’s policies is now ascribed to racist motivations, and any and every little incident involving the mistreatment—or the alleged mistreatment—of a black is seized upon and blown up into another proof that racism remains rampant, if largely hidden, in American society. So far has this libel traveled that no less mainstream a personage than the editor of the New York Times Book Review has recently disgraced himself with a long article arguing that the ideology of the entire conservative movement is a covert species of racism, and that this ideology has now infected the Republican Party and sickened it unto death. In this intellectually and morally perverted reading, the party of Abraham Lincoln is magically metamorphosed into the party of John C. Calhoun, his greatest political enemy.

I now think that Ellison was also right to excoriate me for my dismissive attitude toward black culture, and that my Jewish critics were right to take offense at my questioning whether the survival of the Jewish people was worth the suffering it entailed (though at the time, the proximity to the Holocaust made it very hard for me to keep this question out of my mind and to refrain from raising it in print).

On the other hand, though I think what I said about white racism in 1963 was right, the contention that nothing has changed since then seems to me almost demented. Surely the election of Barack Obama proves beyond any reasonable doubt that there is infinitely less anti-black bigotry than there was in 1963, when such a thing was simply unthinkable.

No, the problem today is not white racism. Today the root cause of all the ills that plague the black community is the astounding proportion of black babies born out of wedlock who grow up without fathers, and who are doomed to do badly in school, to get into trouble on the streets, and to wind up in jail. Efforts have been made to blame even this tragic state of affairs on white racism, but they all founder on the simple fact that in 1963, when white racism was by any measure far more pervasive than it is today, only about 23 percent of births among black women were illegitimate, whereas the number is now fast approaching 75 percent.

Which points to yet another of the ironies abounding in this unhappy story. For if there is white racism at work here, it is precisely the perverse liberal variety that lies in the contemporary multiculturalist mutation of such “Crow-Jimist” efforts. A perfect recent example is the Planned Parenthood attack on the campaign launched by New York City to discourage unmarried teenage girls from having babies. Since most of these girls are black, Planned Parenthood felt obliged to denounce the “stigmatizing” assumption that there was something wrong with what they were doing.

Given all these disagreements with my younger self, why have I permitted “My Negro Problem—and Ours” to be reprinted so many times without revision? The answer is that I have always been proud of it for the boldness it exhibited in grappling with what was then, and still is, the most difficult subject for any American to discuss without hiding behind the usual clichés and pieties and without taking refuge in cant.

But to be as recklessly candid about this question as I was about race in the essay itself, I also have to admit that looking at it through the eyes of the literary critic I used to be, I cannot help seeing it as a fully realized piece of writing. It is in the nature of such a work that it achieves an existence independent of its author, and so it is with “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” Almost from the day it was published, I have felt that it no longer belonged to me and that I had no right to tamper with it, let alone to kill it off. All the more is this the case now that it has survived to the ripe old age of 50.

What you are about to read is a review of the book “Reportage: Essays on the New World Order.” I wish every person on Earth could get the information in this book streamlined into their information bank. Since they cannot, this is the next best thing, right?

Liars are never persecuted, only those who tell the truth. James Corbett is one of those truth-tellers.

James Started in 2007, and either we are all late or he was ahead of his time because what he coined his work all the way back then is “Open-Source Intelligence News” and when you look through his work back then all the way up to now, he has continued this philosophy. Now onward and up, we go. —JLC. EIC. TFM.

Introduction-What Are We Talking About?

So, my book reviews, I know, are not well formatted, they fall somewhere on the spectrum between, revealing the main points so you don’t have to read it, debunking the fake, and giving them flowers when they are great, like this piece. Doing my best to separate the truth, from the lies being published as truth, and the propaganda being placed to deceive the reader, but there is no lies to reveal here, and you don’t have to take my word for it, you can look into every claim for yourself.

Not sure what a standard book review should look like. When I was in school, I would read the book in class and skip the report, so I don’t even have that as a reference point. I’d take an F before I stood up in front of the class and read a report. I was that kid. All I know is I love this book, and I want others to know about it.

This will most definitely be a “Flowers”-type review. This man, James Corbett wrote such a beautiful, well-sourced and extremely important, collection of essays from the last 15 years. Barely Western-centric, being he is a citizen of Japan, human-centric is more like it. This is just an unimpeachable piece of artistry, interesting, informative-but not dull-informative, dense with facts but saturated with stories and storytelling you want to know the conclusion of. Conspiracy theories, some would say, till you notice the little numbers throughout each essay and realize they are linked to evidence of every claim made in the essay.

Check this guy’s track record he’s been ahead of his time on every issue over the last 20 years. Intuition? Maybe. But there is evidence for every claim he makes.

Every chapter is an essay with unimpeachable sources that James goes out of his way to make available to the reader.

Source Availability to Reader

This is probably the coolest part of this book, especially to someone—like me— who fancies himself a fellow seeker-of-truth. James purposely made this book a masterpiece to people of my ilk.

It begins with a beautiful foreword by Journalist/Author, , founder of the terrific publication Unlimited Hangout and author of the most researched and well-sourced books on the Jeffrey Epstein story One Nation Under Blackmail Vol. 1 & 2. There is way too much to say about Whitney's work, hit the link above or search for her anywhere.

Relative to this, her foreword for Reportage was as perfect as could be:-) If we were to put James and Whitney’s work into a genre of journalism, say Open-Source Intelligence, they would be as close as you could get to each other. As far going for the stories that others dare to tread, exhaustive sourcing, leaving no room for anyone to poke holes in your arguments, but so unique that no one could ever call it a copy+paste from either end.

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Author’s Preface is next up to bat and plugs you in to whatever relative info remains, James takes this time to give you the “day of birth” scenario and how the book came to be in your possession.

The final introduction chapter came to be something close to my heart, like a shout-out to the nerds to which I am proud to be. A how & why section for factchecking his work yourself. He makes it abundantly clear, which might not be if you’re if you’re new to his work, that this guy is simply trying to share the truth. And it’s my personal position that any person who has read/listened/ingested/absorbed his work in any form will be that much better because they did, without a second wasted.

Let me explain:

The 3rd pre-section, past the foreword and preface is “A Note on Notes”, which is an instruction manual to utilize the steos that were taken on his end to makedamnsure that you, the reader, are empowered to verify every claim made so you can follow the evidence yourself and see what conclusion you come up with.

And by the way, Woodward & Bernstein, WOULD NEVER!

“To avoid overcrowding the page” and causing a distraction he used “endnotes” instead of “footnotes,” following each chapter. Because they are all separate essays that, although different, piggyback off of each other, and definitely fall in the same genre, but each carry their own sources (endnotes) before the next chapter (essay). Each essay has its own message. And the endnotes are not there as a formality as they are for some. They are there to be checked. They are there for credibility’s sake. And so that you may look into it yourself and find more. They are literally there to further educate the reader.

Explanation from the book:

Instead, I have striven to provide exactly as much information as is necessary for you to independently search for the source yourself. For books, this includes the publisher and year of publication; for websites, the name of the website as it appears on the website and the date of publication (if available); for videos, the exact title of the video and the name of the uploader. Misspellings and grammatical mistakes have been preserved for the sake of accuracy.

He addresses the issue with sourcing to web publications, which you—no doubt—must do to get anywhere, and provides his best solution to the problem of dead links:

First, there is the problem of impermanence: links tend to break over time, meaning that over the course of several years most of the online posts cited in this volume will no longer be accessible at their original address.

And second, there is the problem of readability: long URLs are unwieldy and as such are useless to all but the most meticulous of readers.

Solution:

In an effort to feed two birds with one scone, then, I have tried wherever possible to cite archive.today website capture links...

Unfamiliar with archive.today, it’s a web archiving site that saves screenshots of web pages. Those website captures are preserved at the same archive link even if the original page gets changed or removed. Not only does this solve the issue of impermanence, it also helps with the problem of readability, as archive links are considerably shorter and easier to read (and reproduce) than regular URLs.

And for content that is not capturable using Archive.Today there is other methods to instill this information in time:

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It is made abundantly clear, that not only does he provide evidence for the claims he makes in this book, he goes above and beyond to make damn sure that if anyone wants to look into, or do further reading, it is available, with the least effort possible. And it even provides a few tools for future use. In my own sourcing, I try real hard to provide links from the “Wayback Machine (Internet Archive)” so there is less chance of them disappearing or being altered, and any time I hit a dead end when looking for anything online I search it there also. It’s an amazing tool for finding articles that the “Powers That Be” tried to remove or memory holed. It’s also a good way to bust through paywalls, some of the time.

My final word on the sourcing: I’ve been packing this book to work with me for, I don’t know, six months, every single day, people have asked about it, but not a word about the mention on the cover of the “New World Order”, until last week, I had it sitting next to my work computer and someone unfamiliar to me at the time asked me about the book, specifically about the reference to the “New World Order.” I didn’t know if he was complaining, so I got defensive, and he said, “Oh, I don’t care about you having a book out here, I just don’t know why you would be reading these kooky conspiracy theories, you’re smarter than that, right?”

It was a glorious moment, I opened the book to the first essay I ran into, flipped to the end notes and showed him there is evidence for every claim made here.

Including the term “New World Order.”

I said, “I’m not chasing kooky conspiracy theories. In fact, this is a book about conspiracy truths, not theories and has links to evidence of every claim. And the reference to the “New World Order” isn’t crazy, it was said by many people including our president George H.W. Bush” (on September 11th, 1990, H.W. Bush said, “Out of these troubled times, a new world order can emerge.)” To which I showed him.

It was a pretty cool moment, because after I showed him what I was talking about he was no longer talking down to me like some lost idiot and was talking to me.

Let me also be clear, I am aware that it is normal for nonfiction books to have a bibliography/footnotes/endnotes with their sources, I just love the way that James went above and beyond to make his sources unbreakable. Also, lots of Pulitzer Prize winning authors use bad sources and don’t expect you to follow up. This is what made Norman Finkelstein’s career and will hopefully destroy Bob Woodward’s.

Let us now move on to the content.

The Reportage of “Reportage”

Reportage is a collection of 18 extremely well-researched essays on what I’d describe as stories left out of the syllabus in grade school, whether it be due to ignorance or “for your own protection.” I suspect the latter. These are the stories that make corporate media slugs sleep with one eye open and they would never tell you about. Things left off the record for fear of being, according to the DHS, “mal-information”, you know, “Information that is based on truth but is shared with the intent to attack an idea, individual, organization, group, country or other entity.” Key phrase: “Based on Truth”

A great scholar of our time, by the name, Michael Malice, once said, “You take one red pill, don’t swallow the whole bottle.”

In this book James takes us down a winding road of perfect metaphors and storylines, initially *red pilling you, then *black pilling you, and then ends with a bow and a nice *white pill.

In case you have no clue what the f**k I just said:

*James tackles a topic in each essay that has been otherwise cloaked in secrecy, the consensus has marred it a third rail, “conspiracy theory”, or a topic not spoken about in polite society, and in the following pages the cloak is ripped from your eyes, leaving no room for reasonable doubt, with the effect of what I would call positive radicalization (taking the red pill).

*As it continues you start to consider what this really means, is everything a lie? The world seems like a darker place (taking the black pill).

*Through the muck and the mire James seems to always be able to find a positive call to action, leaving you feeling like maybe things will be okay after all. You have taken the ‘white pill.’ Courtesy of the mind of James Corbett

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New Media

Let’s start with chapter one, Reportage: Adventures in the New Media. Being the introduction chapter to the book, many dynamics are introduced in this chapter. We meet the “Mighty Metaphor” as James uses in many forms throughout the book.

“As an ook comth of a litel spir.” Translates to “Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”

And with this he introduces us to the “little acorn” the Corbett Report began as. Like that little acorn that grows to a mighty oak so did James. This is an introduction to how James Corbett came to be James Corbett of the Corbett Report.

Beginning with a studio apartment in west Japan, all he could afford on his “entry-level salary and student loan debt from” his “fun but economically ill-advised time earning a master’s degree in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin.” Which very luckily had an internet connection that came with the apartment. Exploring the internet in 2006 he found that podcasts had happened, and discovered YouTube, whose algorithm kept pushing him 9/11 Truth videos and although a lot of them were silly he was finally served one with enough truth in it that he could do a search and verify it. This claim was, that the CIA had met with Bin Laden in the summer of 2001, he looked it up and it was true.

There was a report in Le Monde on October 31, 2001, that Bin Laden had travelled to the United Arab Emirates for kidney dialysis in July of 2001 where he met with a representative of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Or it could’ve been Operation Northwoods, a verifiable “false flag attack” approved by everyone all the way up the line then vetoed by John F. Kennedy.

James describes his red pill moment:

I wish I could remember precisely which video or series of videos got me chasing these “wild rumours” down the internet rabbit hole. . .

All I know is that I spent the fall of 2006 learning more about the world than I had learned in my 26 years combined.

From there the chapter continues until The Corbett Report is born and the acorn is now a mighty oak.

The lesson here is, I believe, that great things come from humble beginnings. These are words everyone in alternative media should hold onto. Keep going, our credibility doesn’t come from institutions, it comes from telling the truth!

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The 9/11 Terror Trade

As inspiring as the previous is, it’s followed by tragedy. The ultimate high/low two piece makes appreciate the high. The first time I read this chapter I tried to tell a friend about it, and she reacted to what I was saying with, “Jordan, the people jumping out of windows? It’s too terrible, there must be some kind of coincidence!” Indeed!

The day after the attacks on the World Trade Center the SEC opened an investigation into “an unknown group of equities traders with advance knowledge of the 9/11 plot” that “made millions betting against the companies involved in the attacks.”

One example: United Airlines. The Thursday before the attack more than two thousand contracts betting that the stock would go down were purchased. Ninety times more in one day than in three weeks. When the markets reopened (after 9/11), United’s stock dropped, the price of the contracts soared and someone may have made a lot of money, fast!

United wasn’t alone, they were only a fraction of the companies who stood to gain, and did, from these blood-soaked bank transfers.

They are either an ugly, greedy mistake, meant to leave us chasing our tails in confusion, or as a message: You can’t touch us, we’re bigger than you’ll ever be, go ahead and try.

I think it might’ve been the latter and If you’ve seen the news lately, I think the were right. They drew us in, drained us, and maimed us for twenty years until we said, “Fuck! You win, Jesus Christ, keep the shit!”

Right!? We never honestly left, so, they’ll be back.

Accompanying United Airlines in the blood moneey smorgisporg, included Boeing, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Munich Re, and the AXA Group.

These Wall Street “anomalies” were not only beating the system by betting against it, they were also trading on stocks that were guaranteed to do good, especially if you had “insider information” confirming that business was about to be booming.

In the same period as the suspicious short sells they're was also a six-fold increase in purchase of Raytheon stock which shot up in price as Raytheon-supplied Tomahawk missiles were deployed to Afghanistan.

Not stopping there, “9/11 researcher and author Kevin Ryan uncovered an important clue in a 2003 FBI briefing document that was declassified in 2009. In “Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11” he examines this document, which describes the results of the Bureau’s investigations into two of the pre-9/11 trades it had identified as suspicious. One of those trades was the purchase of 56,000 shares of Stratesec in the days prior to 9/11. Stratesec, which provided security systems to airports (including Dulles Airport) as well as to the World Trade Center and United Airlines, saw its share price almost double when the markets reopened on September 17th, 2001.”

Here’s where it gets real dark:

The Stratesec trade traced back to a married couple whose names are redacted from the memo but who are easily identifiable from the unredacted information: Mr. and Mrs. Wirt D. Walker III. Wirt is a distant relative of the Bush family and a business partner of Marvin Bush, brother of George W. (Bush).

According to the briefing Wirt and his wife, Sally, were never even interviewed, because the FBI’s investigation of them had “revealed no ties to terrorism or other negative information.

It doesn’t end there but I won't spoil the best. James tells the full story in this essay. Leading one to ask, who are these people? What world is this really? Moving on…

Up/Down Politics

(I think this is my favorite.)

The next chapter starts with the “Parable of the Ants”. I really love how James does these parables to carry the story.

This essay begins with a colony of ants who live on a “loop of string.” Torn apart and polarized by the divisive opinion of which direction to go since the string where they call home is only big enough to go in one of two directions.

One group of ants, who called themselves “forwardists,” contended that to move forward was to maqke progress. And since progress was, in the forwardists’ estimation, the key to happiness, they believed all the ants should move forward all the time.

On the flip side of course:

Another group, known as “backwardists,” disagreed. They chastised their forwardist friends for confusing progress with happiness. True happiness, the backwardists preached, lies in knowing where you came from, not in dreaming of where you had never been.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Despite their differences for the most part they got along until one defining event split them down the middle. This almost sounds like Israel-Palestine before 1948.

For a while the forwardists and the backwardists lived and worked together happily enough, despite their differences. One day, though, a fast-moving backwardist inadvertently ran into an inattentive forwardist coming the other way, knocking him off the string. Recriminations followed. Angry forwardists and spiteful backwardists started to separate and form competing camps. Ants who had never had a strong opinion on the matter—the ones who moved forward on some days and backward on others—were forced to pick sides. As a result, children were separated from their parents, spouses divorced, siblings split up, friendships dissolved.

Soon. The ants erected a barbed wire fence between them. “Then, as battle lines hardened, they replaced the fence with a brick wall. Before long, guards were stationed on either side of the wall to make sure no one breached it.”

Germany? Vietnam? Israel-Palestine? Maybe in the beginning, but here’s the tragic part.

The ant opponents stopped speaking to each other, except to hurl the occasional taunt or insult across the divide.

Within a generation, no one even remembered what the wall meant anymore or what the whole argument was about. The philosophies became muddled. So muddled, in fact, that some forwardists began walking backward and some backwardists walked forward.

Despite the confusion, the ants remained determined to pass their traditions down through the generations. Forwardists told their children scary stories about the monstrous backwards ants who ate forwardists’ children for breakfast, and the backwardist children were likewise taught that forwardists were ravenous beasts who preyed on all but their own kind.

Fearmongering led to fear, fear led to fights, fights led to wars. Sometimes the FWDist would win, sometimes the other side would.

Finally, the ants had enough on both sides and sought out a truce. Both sides would go “their separate ways.”

The forwardist, afraid of a sneak attack kept lookout behind them, just in case. The backwardist did the same.

But then, a most remarkable thing happened.

Off in the distance, each ant leader saw something approaching. As the two leaders drew nearer, they discerned not a single form ahead of them, but many forms. A long line of moving forms, marching single file. They looked tiny. They looked black.

At last, the objects were close enough for the leaders to recognize individual shapes. Ants. And not just any ants, but the very ants they had sworn to never see again.

Suddenly, all the ants in each long line realized, to their horror, that the unthinkable had occurred. Forwardists and backwardists, who had set out in opposite directions and had travelled without changing course, were now heading toward each other. What they believed to be a permanent split from the other camp of ants had in fact been the reverse. Halfway around the string, the old enemies were converging.

What does this mean… I don’t want to spoil it but there is many similarities between the forwardists/backwardists and our politics between the left and right. Completely superficial. James goes on to explain that just like the ants, if we were to see our left/right politics from a different angle, or another dimension maybe it wouldn’t seem so perplexing either.

Continuing with all new metaphors to explain our politics at home.

Meet the Uppists: The “elites” in our society.

Meet the Downists: The regular people just trying to get by.

Through this, with excerpts from Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope James brings light on uni-party politics and how they fail us all.

What else?

Following the “ants” James takes a stroll down memories lane for a lesson in EUGENICS from the people that we should’ve suspected, of course!

“The Ptech Story” was about a cyber attack to scale with 9/11, that also happened on 9/11.

Followed by “Selling Your Soul for a Matrix Steak” takes a real life look at what money actually is, and how close to eating a “Matrix steak” we really are.

Next James gives us the plans to “Really Defeat Globalism.” Exposes the “Biotech Billionaires” and their “GMO Doomsday.”

A slight intermission…..that looks like this:

Followed by “The Strange Life of Maurice Strong.” Another favorite James rights the obituary that he should’ve received after his passing and tells the story starting a generation earlier with his anti-capitalist aunt and the newly formed Soviet Union.

Here’s what the obituary would’ve said in a “reasonable world” by James Corbett:

Disgraced kleptocrat Maurice Strong died in 2015 at the age of 86. He was shunned from polite society and forced into a life of exile in Beijing after his decades of business intrigues, crimes against humanity, and environmental destruction unraveled. His savagery culminated with an attempt to profit off the death of starving Iraqi children.

His funeral was a quiet affair, attended only by those few family members who could not find it in their heart to ignore him completely. Former friends and business associates like Paul Martin, James Wolfensohn, Kofi Annan, Conrad Black, and Al Gore all avoided calls for comments on their disgraced colleague’s passing.

And here is what was actually said:

On Wednesday, hundreds will gather across from Parliament Hill for an extraordinary commemoration. The Governor General, the Prime Minister, the Minister of the Environment, the former president of the World Bank—among other dignitaries, in and out of office—will pay homage to one of the great Canadians of his generation.

They will celebrate the life of Maurice Frederick Strong, who died on November 27. His passing brought the obligatory obituaries and personal tributes. But in a country that often hides its light under a barn, Maurice Strong—and the feverish, consequential life he led at home and abroad—should not go uncelebrated.

And here is his final resume if you will.

President of Power Corporation of Canada. President of the Canadian International Development Agency. Chair of Petro Canada. Chair of Ontario Hydro. Head of the United Nations Environment Programme. Founding member of the World Economic Forum. Father of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Committed globalist.

James tells the story of his life. He was the founder of the Canadian International Development Agency, which does the same type of stuff as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). If you don’t know about them here is my own work on USAID:

The Real Meaning of “Independence”

Fourth of July; Independence Day in the United States is the most important holiday currently in circulation. It is a “reminder of the war that was fought in the name of liberty to cast off an oppressor.”

In the course of human events, nothing has been more dangerous to the ruling class than the concept of freedom. I'm not referring to the documents that have encapsulated and encouraged freedom and charted the development of this idea—the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation, or any of the other pieces of paper on which the concept of freedom has been inscribed— but to the idea itself.

• All human beings are born equal.

• There exist inalienable rights that no self-proclaimed (or proclaimed any other way either) authority is ever justified in usurping.

• Our life, our liberty and our property are inviolable.

• We are duty-bound to resist anyone who seeks to violate this freedom.

• “These are the truths we hold to be Self-Evident:

  “On the shoulders of philosophical giants,” we stand, “who possessed not only the intuition and understanding to grasp that living under tyranny is not the natural condition of humanity, but the courage to fight and die for those convictions.”

  The idea of freedom has been dangerous to those who aim to dominate others precisely because it is an idea—a fire in the minds of men that, once lit, can never be put out. will ne

  The “Idea of Freedom:”

• Once aflame the torch of freedom cannot extinguish.

• Although the torch carriers can, the “torch of freedom cannot be imprisoned, stabbed, shot, or guillotined.

• The documents which enumerate these ideals can be ignored, amended, or destroyed altogether, but the light of freedom shines eternally.

• “is dangerous precisely because it is innate, indestructible, and, ultimately, irrepressible.”

All true in the days of old.

Examples in the book include the 73 BC, slave rebellion sparked by Spartacus; The 1381, Peasants’ Revolt, when King Richard II of England levied a poll tax on the British serfs, already in poverty under the English Feudal system. But what about in the 21st Century?

But the tyrants of the twenty-first century are not stupid. They do not suffer from the same delusion as the tyrants of old—namely, the idea that human freedom can be suppressed by the barrel of a gun. Granted, there remain repressive regimes throughout the world that employ the infrastructure of a police state to encroach further and further upon the rights of the people. Yet more insidious by far is the way that the deep state operators, the powers-behind-the-throne of today’s democratic dictatorships, use psychological warfare to convince us that slavery is freedom. That the answer to the problems created by centralized forms of control is to impose even greater centralization of control. That people are most independent when they are in a state of utter dependency, relying fully on these systems of ever-more-centralized control.

Find examples of this in Reportage.

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The Final Fourth(ish) of the Master-Piece “Reportage”

First up is “The 9/11 Whistleblowers” essay based on the research James put into a documentary by the same name.

The Corbett Report

Episode 362 - 9/11 Whistleblowers

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7 years ago · 1 like · The Corbett Report

Because “someone would have talked” and someone did, many someone’s.

The last few I will leave for you to discover

“Why we must oppose Bilderberg”

“Introduction to Spontaneous Order”

“Who Controls the Environmental Movement?”

“Escaping The Grand Chessboard” which zeroes in on internationalist/globalist Zbigniew Brezinski, father to Mika Brezinski of MSNBS’s Morning Joe. Detailing Zbig’s use of civilization as one grand chessboard and the people who inhabit as the pawns on this board.

And many, many more. If this does not interest you, I really do not know what you are doing with your life!

More to come, very soon.

Thank you for reading!

Editor-in-Chief

“…And you will know them by the fruit that they bare.”

What Donald Trump’s base seemingly wanted to believe about him, has now pressed his back against the wall and not the wall that “Mexico” was “gonna pay for.”

Through his 2024 campaign Donald Trump was quick to offer a declassification of the files on 9/11, the murder of Robert and John F. Kennedy, even Martin Luther King, Jr. but being that this question always is followed up by questions of the file on Epstein President Trump would be forced to answer the question of transparency on Epstein. I don’t know if they workshopped this response but, through hemming and hawing and half-answering, by the time he was reelected his supporters, for the most part, considered the Epstein files release as a campaign promise and his detractors were exclaiming that “he would never!”

It seems like the latter would be closer to the truth. There were many people who only voted for the guy because they believed he would expose the elite class and Jeffrey Epstein seems to be a proxy for that. It’s at the very least the most vilely blatant example of elite misgivings to be covered up and now Donald Trump himself is party to, if not the greatest purveyor of, the cover-up that is the Epstein scandal.

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So, it was clear that they were having a hard time getting these files to the public. Starting with public comments from Attorney General Pam Bondi that the file with the client list was “on her desk waiting for review.”

Then there was the “MAGA Influencer” photo op with the folders reading “Epstein Release: Phase One.” Which turned out to contain more redactions and less information, than was already publicly available.

Followed by reporting that the San Francisco FBI office was caught destroying information from the Epstein file and that FBI Director Kash Patel would be handling the situation. Since Kash is, and has been, the most vocal advocate for transparency, especially on this issue, this was great news!

Following that was radio silence for a couple months followed by the—now infamous—interview on Fox News with Deputy Director of the FBI Dan Bongino and Kash Patel to his side where the two of them nervously asserted that they have seen the evidence, soon we (the public) will see too, the evidence that Jeffrey Epstein, well, “He killed himself.”

Kash would go on to repeat this again on Fox the following day and on the Joe Rogan Experience a couple weeks later with mention of footage showing proof that no one else gain access to the cell on the night of his murder. This was strange because according to reporting at the time of his death the guards were asleep and the cameras to Epstein’s cell block were turned off or malfunctioned. Regardless, this footage would be released to the public, just like Patel and Bondi said it would, but there was just a few small problems.

1st problem, the video that spanned many hours on the day of Epstein’s death after digital forensics had their way with it realized at first that it was missing a minute from the video, which was explained by Bondi, had been spliced together with footage from another day using Adobe Premier, and is video from a completely different floor than Epstein was being held. They’d duped us again.

This led to a lot of debate, a lot of lost faith, a lot of talks of Patel, Bongino, and Bondi being compromised, the erosion of public trust to the point of disintegration.

Then comes the release of the memo and video (minus 3 minutes):

As part of our commitment to transparency, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have conducted an exhaustive review of investigative holdings relating to Jeffrey Epstein. To ensure that the review was thorough, the FBI conducted digital searches of its databases, hard drives, and network drives as well as physical searches of squad areas, locked cabinets, desks, closets, and other areas where responsive material may have been stored. These searches uncovered a significant amount of material, including more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence.

The files relating to Epstein include a large volume of images of Epstein, images and videos of victims who are either minors or appear to be minors, and over ten thousand downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography. Teams of agents, analysts, attorneys, and privacy and civil liberties experts combed through the digital and documentary evidence with the aim of providing as much information as possible to the public while simultaneously protecting victims. Much of the material is subject to court-ordered sealing. Only a fraction of this material would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial, as the seal served only to protect victims and did not expose any additional third-parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing. Through this review, we found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials and will not permit the release of child pornography.

This systematic review revealed no incriminating “client list.” There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.

Consistent with prior disclosures, this review confirmed that Epstein harmed over one thousand victims. Each suffered unique trauma. Sensitive information relating to these victims is intertwined throughout the materials. This includes specific details such as victim names and likenesses, physical descriptions, places of birth, associates, and employment history.

One of our highest priorities is combatting child exploitation and bringing justice to victims. Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends.

To that end, while we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein and ensured examination of any evidence in the government’s possession, it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.

Unsigned by the way, no doubt to allow for an argument as to who wrote/released this.

But anyone who knows anything about this story knows this just is not true.

Following this release there was what could best be described as an all-out revolt!

From the most dedicated to the least, Donald Trump’s support starts to fall off a cliff with mainstream journalists and democratic party operatives much to oblige.

The day following the report above, during a press conference with Trump, AG Bondi, Noem, Hegseth, and Rubio, Bondi is asked about the report, you can see the President kinda fidgeting nervously as the reporter speaks and President Trump interrupts very condescendingly, “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? …That creep.”

Reporter: Um, your memo and release yesterday on Jeffrey Epstein, it left some lingering mysteries. One of the biggest ones is whether he ever worked for a American or foreign intelligence agency. The former labor secretary who was uh Miami US attorney, um, Alex Acosta allegedly said that he did work for intelligence agency. So, could you resolve whether or not he did? And also, could you say why there was a minute missing from the jail house tape on the night of—

AG Bondi: Yeah, sure.

DJT: If I could I just interrupt. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years. You're asking—we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time on—Do you feel like answering?

AG Bondi: I don't mind answering.

DJT: I mean, I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this. Where we're having some of the greatest success and—and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems, uh, like a desecration. But you go ahead.

This marks the beginning of the end. We might’ve overlooked the bombing of Iran, the obvious wealth transfer by the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” from the most vulnerable to the least or not being able to end the Ukraine war on day one.

But there is no way we will ever overlook the coverup of the world’s most prolific child molester, but we all had to ask why? Why is he covering for this guy, and I think the truth has been right in front of our faces the entire time. He’s not covering for Jeffrey Epstein, or Israel that breaks every deal we set up for peace, or the CIA that tried to frame him for treason or the MOSSAD that has been spying on us for years, Donald Trump is covering for himself.

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Following his condescending comments during the press conference with Miss Bondi Donald makes statement after statement appearing to blame Obama, and Comey, and Clapper, and Hillary of setting him up which makes no fucking sense, it sounded like he was rambling about nothing until the weekend came around and the Wall Street Journal dropped their report of a 50th birthday present to Epstein that Maxwell had put together which was a leatherbound book with each page being a personalized note from his closest friends one of these pages being from Donald Trump that seems to be the eeriest, creepiest shit I’ve ever heard.

Written inside a hand drawn outline of a naked lady with Donald’s signature as the pubic hair was the following note:

Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won't tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.

(Signed) Donald

From here all hell breaks loose in Trump world. Reporting comes out that he had approached the owner of the WSJ threatening suit if he releases this report and to their credit, they did it anyways which means they must be willing to go to trial with this, which means there must be some validity to it.

His response:

President Trump, as well as Vice President JD Vance, strongly denied the report while threatening to file a lawsuit.

“This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story. I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women. It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”

“I’m gonna sue The Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else,” he said, according to the newspaper.

Although he says he “never wrote a picture” he has drawn “doodles” to be sold at auction as early as 1995 to as late as 2017.

So, what lends the most validity to these claims, it’s not like I trust the Wall Street Journal wholeheartedly, and I definitely don’t trust Donald Trump but his late claims that this is a “Hoax” from the Democratic party are what truly makes me believe that this is a Trump cover-up.

He’s taking our broken trust over Russiagate and using it against us. That was, no doubt, carried out by the Clintons, Obamas, Comey, the intelligence community, and FBI. Because he knows that we know this and he knows that their credibility is in the can so he can put the blame on them and we’ll believe that shit, but what he’s not aware of is how much we actually know about this. At this point I believe that everyone from Nixon on up to the present are implicated in these Philes and nothing but the truth, will repair this sinking ship.

Truth and a mass firing of the entire executive branch. Give everyone a polygraph. Do it against their will or they go to prison.

In life he was known as some mysterious evil, cutting corners and building bridges to aid in the crossing of enlightened souls into the darkness of night.

So, what was he? A child molester/extortion extraordinaire? Only when he wasn’t schmoozing with Real Estate developer and the financial class to provide upkeep for his image.

Was he a money launderer? It sure looks that way, but above all else Jeffrey Epstein was a spokesman for the evils of excess. How would Donald Trump not be involved in that? He has gold toilets for Christ sakes!

Even in death this piece of shit is wreaking havoc in our world.

Most recent report is as of yesterday, reported by the Wall Street Journal that the Justice Department advised Donald Trump in May of this year that his name was among many in the Epstein files.

It seems there is a leak at the Justice Department, I don’t know how else they would be finding this stuff out.

According to polling from January to now Trump’s approval rating went from +6 pts in January to -11 now in July Donald Trump is squandering his 2nd chance, starting with bombing Iran.

New Russiagate Disclosures

As of this past weekend new disclosures on Russiagate were released which reveal it was former president Obama’s decision to use the Steele Dossier as evidence for the illegal FISA warrant that needed to frame Donald Trump as a Russian spy. Too bad it took our president being implicated in a pedophile ring to get these revelations brought to light.

If the timing of these revelations didn’t seem suspicious to you, no worries, the president makes it perfectly clear when he does what he’s best at and says the quiet part out loud, “It’s a witch hunt, just a continuation if a witch hunt, the witch hunt you should be talking about is they caught President Obama absolutely cold, Tulsi Gabbard (did), what they did to this country… You ought to take a look at that instead of this nonsense….”

He’s outright admitting that you should be going after these Russiagate revelations instead of pursuing the case that he is implicated in.

By the way, these new implications against Obama are very much important but the timing is ridiculously obvious. And just as Donald Trump will never be held accountable neither will Barack Hussein Obama, James Clapper, James Comey or anyone else for that matter.

This includes the “high level bounty hunter” for finding dirty money to fund the lifestyles of his rich, slob clients, nor the clients themselves.

July 24th, 2025, Jeffrey Epstein’s literal partner-in-crime while seeking a pardon from the Trump Administration is meeting with the Deputy Attorney General of the United States to hand over any information on clients that her and Jeffrey had since apparently no one has ever asked her for such information. Un-fucking-believable! These people had victims in common with Prince Fucking Andrew and no one wanted to know what that was about. Not to mention Bill Clinton! Republicans didn’t want to know that shit?! And Donald Trump? Are you telling me Democrats didn’t wanna know about that?! This is ridiculous!

The problem with this happening now instead of in the first place is for one, she will be incentivized not to include anything she might know about Donald Trump or anyone connected to him because she is wanting a pardon from Donald Trump, my God! If he pardons this evil witch…

For two, if she has information that connects Donald Trump to a pedophile ring and we never found this out because the first investigators refused to ask her any questions, that might be the greatest act of incompetence ever imposed on mankind. Second to none that I can think of.

July 25th, 2025: This story will never end, I’m publishing this before anything else can come out, I’ve got to publish something!

The New York Times have revealed notes by Ghislaine Maxwell adding to the validity of the birthday book from the Wall Street Journal and there is just no doubt in my mind now, where there's smoke, there’s fire and Donald Trump looks like the Murrah Building after the Ryder truck blew up.

One More Thing to Consider

Connections: Jeffrey Epstein, 22-year-old college drop-out, was hired by Donald Barr, ex-CIA before it was the CIA, in 1974, as a math teacher at the elite Dalton school in New York, Donald Barr was father to Bill Barr who would go on to work under three presidential administrations including Donald Trump’s, and oversee the arrest and death of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. He was also lead counsel as an attorney to the CIA.

The lead Federal Prosecuting Attorney who handled Epstein’s arrest in 2007 and plea bargain, the Deal of a Lifetime, Jeffrey Epstein had dozens of victims willing to testify against him,

Despite ample physical evidence and multiple witnesses corroborating the girls’ stories, federal prosecutors and Epstein’s lawyers quietly put together a remarkable deal for Epstein, then 54. He agreed to plead guilty to two felony prostitution charges in state court, and in exchange, he and his accomplices received immunity from federal sex-trafficking charges that could have sent him to prison for life.

He served 13 months in a private wing of the Palm Beach County stockade. His alleged co-conspirators, who helped schedule his sex sessions, were never prosecuted.

The deal, called a federal non-prosecution agreement, was sealed so that no one — not even his victims — could know the full scope of Epstein’s crimes and who else was involved.

The U.S. attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, was personally involved in the negotiations, records, letters and emails show.

And he was given work release six days a week.

Alex Acosta would go on to be Labor Secretary for the Trump Administration from 2017-2019.

When he was asked why he gave Epstein such a sweet deal, he replied that “he was told by his bosses that Epstein belonged to Intelligence (CIA, MOSSAD, MI5, one of them).”

Just a couple more unbelievable connections between Epstein and Trump that might’ve seemed innocuous had everything else not transpired.

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I don’t even know how we got here at this point. Turns out, we don’t have a Russian spy in office, but a billionaire sexual predator….?

Thank you for reading. More to come. Hopefully not about pedophiles in the White House or any house for that matter.

Editor-in-Chief

"Biden’s too old", says Jake Tapper; "Duh!!!" Says America.

The following video added in post, due to not being able to find it before publishing:

So, I’ll begin with this. When I first heard that this book was coming — after Tapper shamelessly plugged it everywhere in America — my first thought was what a hilarious thing to do.

Get a book deal, write a book, and promote it as an investigated, researched, tell-all of the cover-up that you and your entire sector of journalism carried out personally.

The book should’ve been called “My Original Sin.” But before I go on to criticize it mercilessly, I must first say this… It’s pretty good. It contains mainly everything. Plus, some tidbits that weren’t public. Nothing that changed the story, but enough that we can read between the lines and see it in a more detailed light.

It has zero enlightenment, or accountability, but it does confirm everything we were seeing with our own eyes and journalists on the right and left (mainly outside of corporate media) had been yelling at the top of our lungs and being called bad names for saying.

It’s a pretty honest book to be written by such a dishonest person.

The premise is dishonest, but the book seems to be honest.

Going through it I kinda had to remember that while he is saying all of this, he is also leaving out his part of the corporate media cover-up, but it didn’t matter because this cover-up was so vast and broad that you could write a detailed book about the cover-up, leave out your part, and it still feel complete.

I also thought that maybe he was gonna admit to his part in the cover-up. Take accountability for it a little bit, but that chapter must have got cut by the editor. Maybe they said it too “wordy.” Like this introduction.

With that being said, if you want the whole “Behind the Scenes” of how far they were going and how things were playing out, all wrapped up in one place this is an excellent book, and an even better book review.

It’s all there, all the way down to how they rigged the Primary to make sure the sitting president was the only one with a chance to win.

There’s quite a bit of apologia for party and the administration. Mostly in the form of things like, “No one else could beat Trump.” Or one aptly named chapter “He Totally Fucked Us”.

I don’t know much about Alex Thompson, maybe he’s as innocent as they come, but if he is he’s in bad company, because Jake Tapper definitely took part in the cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline, and even the character assassination of anyone who criticized the president or his media lapdogs.

Maybe he secretly wanted Biden to drop out and allow a Primary process that would possibly produce a viable candidate for the Democratic party. Hell, they might’ve got my vote. I’ll vote for less bombs and more speech. Now, enough about myself, let’s get into this book.

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The “Original Sin”

This book was filled with villains. Most of the villains in this book, were working in their own interests. They had a job to do and that job was keeping the 25th amendment at bay. If Biden was impeached, it would be unemployment for them.

There is, however, moments of villainy that really stand out. Such as the acts of White House doctor for the president Dr. Kevin O’Conner.

On November 19—the day before the president’s seventy-ninth birthday—the White House released the results of Biden’s health examination by White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor. The assessment was perhaps more notable for what it didn’t include than for what it did: There was no mention of a cognitive exam. That seemed odd to physicians who were paying attention. Many consider it standard practice to begin performing such tests when a patient turns sixty-five, even if they aren’t showing symptoms. Several of the tests can be done in about ten to fifteen minutes. They do not provide conclusive diagnoses; rather, they are a tool for early detection.

It seemed appropriate to perform a cognitive test on a seventy-eight-year-old man—especially one who was starting to show flashes of memory loss, especially one who was president of the United States.

Dr. O’Connor has been Biden’s doctor for 13 years. Let’s see what he had to say about President Biden’s decline:

O’Connor told people that the ten-minute test was for physicians who saw their patients only occasionally, and he constantly saw the president.

When others suggested doing the test to make sure that Biden was capable of being president, O’Connor would sometimes point to the Oval Office and say, “Biden’s already being president.”

He’d add that people may not like how Biden was doing the job, but that was different than being incapable.

“President Biden remains a healthy, vigorous 78-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency,” he wrote.

Still, O’Connor detailed Biden’s physical deterioration. The president’s “ambulatory gait is perceptibly stiffer and less fluid than it was a year or so ago,” and he has “experienced increasing frequency and severity of ‘throat clearing’ and coughing during speaking engagements,” he wrote. Biden was old and had a shuffle, so O’Connor arranged for a neurological exam to see if his physical movements signaled a deeper disorder, such as Parkinson’s.

“There were no findings which would be consistent with any cerebellar or other central neurological disorder, such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or ascending lateral sclerosis,” O’Connor wrote. Still, some doctors speculated that the only reason to perform a neurological test but not a cognitive one was if you feared the results. (pp. 46-47 Kindle Edition)

{h}e privately expressed worry about the toll it was taking. He fought other Biden officials on scheduling to try to get Biden more rest. O’Connor quipped that Biden’s staff were trying to kill him, while O’Connor was trying to keep him alive. (p. 48)

Let’s skip to right before the election. A chapter called “The Last Medical Exam”, which came in the aftermath of the Hur report, where Special Council Robert Hur stated he would pass on prosecution because the jury would see Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” and would never convict. Good news, right? Wrong.

We can now actually watch that interview in full, but it’s a long rough watch. I’ll post it below:

Taking place in February 2024, “The Last Medical Exam” seemed to be a fluke, now, since they obviously missed the cancer that was currently growing in his prostate. Dr. O’Connor:

O’Connor had long pushed back on political advisers interfering in his medical evaluations. He told others that he did not believe the science required him to do a cognitive test. He saw the president frequently, and if he had reason for concern, he would have performed one. Ultimately, Biden’s political advisers agreed.

They had also boxed themselves in with their own public insistence that Biden had not lost a step and was as sharp as ever. Finally doing a test would be an admission that there were reasons for concern. And even if Biden did do a test, his aides believed that his critics would still not be satisfied. There was also the risk of the unknown, of what such a test might reveal. On February 28, O’Connor released his final medical summary, which listed degeneration of Biden’s spine and the new use of a nightly breathing machine for sleep apnea. But Doc declared Biden “fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”

Citing O’Connor, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at the briefing that Biden had no need for a cognitive test.

“He passes a cognitive test every day.” (p. 146)

That was in February.

Now, take those words, and watch this video:

See how smooth he talks, now here’s 2020:

Pretty rough but we could explain it, now here’s 2024, post-“final exam”:

So, my only defense of this is I have 2 little kittens. Now, I see them every day so it’s hard me to tell they are growing, because it’s happening gradually every day. But I looked at a picture of them from a couple months ago and realized, “Oh, shit, they’re getting really big!”

Or, even more relevant to this, I have a kind of a stutter but it’s more like, I repeat a word quickly halfway through it. But I do it so quickly it’s hard to notice. A friend who was used to seeing me every day came to visit me in jail, and five minutes into the conversation she said, “Jordan! Are you developing a stutter?”

I said, “No, I’m talking-I’m talking j-just like I always have.”

She said, “Are you sure? Are you okay in there?”

I said, “I’m doing fine. It’s-it’s actually not so bad, so bad, in here right now. Dad’s in here with me and it could be a lot-lot worse.”

I haven’t stopped noticing it ever since. But she didn’t notice it until she hadn’t seen me in a while.

Maybe, now this is granting him a lot more grace than I think he deserves, if Dr. O’Connor hadn’t seen him all the time he would’ve noticed that Joe Biden doesn’t have a stutter, Joe Biden is dying in front of us on live television, or maybe he’s a villain in this conspiracy also, and didn’t want to lose the highlife. Working as a doctor to the president.

The name of this book should have been “The Great Enabling.”

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Let’s Talk About the Politburo

The “Politburo” is the group of loyalists that came with Biden. They all had extensive experience in politics and had the ear of the president.

One of them, the aides would sometimes joke, “could get Biden to start a war if they wanted.”

In the 2020 campaign, titles meant little. There was technically a campaign manager, a communications director, and deputy campaign managers, but the ultimate decision-makers were a group of seasoned political veterans known internally by any number of nicknames, including “the Politburo”: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and the policy wonk Bruce Reed. They’d worked with Biden for many years, if not decades.

There were other close aides. Anita Dunn and her husband, Bob Bauer, joined the team in 2015 to help Biden prepare for a presidential bid, even as most of their colleagues from the Obama administration backed Clinton. (p. 20)

• Mike Donilon

  • “Donilon had been in the center of Democratic politics for decades, shaping dozens of campaigns, beginning in the late 1980s when he worked on the campaign of Douglas Wilder, the first African American ever elected as governor. Something of a loner, he was a man of few words and could be immovable when he had a theory of the case. A former pollster, he now often went with his gut. He had crafted Biden’s messaging for 2020—“a fight for the soul of the nation”—even as the data supporting that approach was fuzzy at best.”

  • “Donilon’s brothers were also in the national spotlight; one had been a national security adviser for Obama, and the other was the spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Boston. They shared Biden’s Irish Catholic working-class self-image. The president valued Mike Donilon’s advice so much that aides would later joke that if he wanted, he could get Biden to start a war.”

• “Ricchetti, an affable former lobbyist and an alum of the Clinton White House, had been Biden’s chief of staff through Beau’s illness. Ricchetti was also a friend, and all four of his children would end up working in the Biden administration.” (p. 21)

• Reed had grown up in Idaho, the son of a politician, and had been a Rhodes Scholar studying English literature and a speechwriter for Al Gore. (p. 21)

The next layer of leadership outside the Politburo was “Anita Dunn, expert in communications and (Bob) Bauer, a respected lawyer, who had both worked for the most powerful Democrats in Washington. They didn’t have the almost familial ties that Donilon, Ricchetti, and Reed did, but Dunn and Bauer had more credibility with the Democratic establishment, including Obama.” And with them came another layer of secrecy about the president.

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Aspects of the Cover-Up

This cover-up, maybe not as consequential, only time will tell that, but more widespread, with more characters and more dishonest actors, than Watergate or Iran-Contra.

This cover-up started with his family, then the “Politburo”, the aides, the Cabinet, Pentagon, State Department, then if it gets past all that, the corporate media is there to do their due diligence and discredit what you “think” you saw.

Press conferences were pre-planned and workshopped. Joe had flashcards and pre-written answers during interviews. When something happened like in the picture above when Joe fell off the bike, there was an internal crisis, and prewritten answers for when it came up during the press conference.

Jake Tapper maintains that he wasn’t part of this and was actually “very critical” of the president’s health, but there is no way that he didn’t know about the president reading off a teleprompter during interviews. Interviews that took place at CNN.

And get this, it still wasn’t enough. They couldn’t coverup everything. Not in the information age. I’ve never been to DC, but I knew my president’s health had declined, and I was still very early in my political journey. Joe Rogan was talking about it in 2020!

Anyone who pointed out this decline, especially if they had something to lose was shamed into losing it.

Critics of the Decline

In the right wing/independent left everyone said that Joe Biden was fucking up by running again. His decline was obvious to anyone not part of the “blue-no-matter-who” cult.

But they were ignored, slandered to the fringes, or inside their own silos. Screaming into the ether.

I’m talking Megyn Kelly, Glenn Greenwald, , Michael Shellenberger, , and many others, you know who they are.

The voices from within the corporate structure of what was once the “Mainstream” or from within the establishment, that attempted to sound the alarm were attacked brutally, criticized daily, and relentlessly discredited. The book talks about this, maybe not enough, but it’s there.

Special Council Robert Hur, the book says, “was an American success story:”

Hur had worked for years in the public sector including as a US attorney for Maryland and was now comfortably ensconced as a partner at Gibson Dunn, a white-shoe firm where he represented big clients—such as Meta and the NFL—and was finally making some money to support his wife and three kids. Hur was an American success story. He was the son of refugees from the Korean War, and his father remembered American soldiers sharing their food with him when he was a boy. Born in New York City, Hur had been taught to appreciate the greatness of America. His parents didn’t talk politics, but they told Hur and his sister to work as hard as they could. And they told him that he would go to Harvard, which he did, followed by Stanford Law School, then a clerkship for US Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. (p. 95)

He accepted the job as the Special Counsel and had no clue who he would be Special Counsel for:

Hur’s phone rang one Friday in January 2023. It was Miller, who wanted to know if Hur would consider serving as a special counsel.

“Can you tell me anything else about it?” Hur asked.

“Not really.”

“There isn’t anything else you can tell me about the investigation? Who’s being investigated?”

“A senior government official,” Miller said.

Hur asked for the weekend. He discussed it with his wife, Cara. They speculated that it was some undersecretary of the Interior in trouble for an improper flight or something. A quick and easy matter.

On Monday, he called Miller back. “I’m inclined to do it,” he told him. “But it would be helpful if you told me more about it.”

“It’s a very senior government official,” Miller said. (pp. 95-96)

“In addition to a sense of patriotic obligation, Hur felt a sense of duty toward the Justice Department, which had been caught up in some very difficult cases with politically charged dynamics.”

Fastforward a bit: the report goes public, and the character assassination begins (from the book): “The White House communications strategy was to slime Hur as an unprofessional right-wing hack, and Garland as weak—and essentially fired.”

• Kamala Harris called his comments in the report, ‘“gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate, the way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated—gratuitous… [W]e should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.”

  • “Gratuitous became the word of the day for partisan Democrats.” (The old trick Tapper knows all too well.)

• “Special Counsel Hur report on Biden classified documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions,” tweeted Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder.

• MSNBC anchor Ari Melber devoted a segment to the question of whether Hur was succumbing to “ageism.”

• One New Republic writer raised the stakes for fellow journalists, saying, “Any news org that puts Biden’s memory in the headline is actively rewarding Hur’s bad faith and giving the Trump campaign what they want.”

• On February 10, two people close to the president told Politico that Biden thought Garland hadn’t done enough to rein in Hur’s report, that “Hur went well beyond his purview and was gratuitous and misleading in his descriptions.”

• Biden sources said that most of the president’s senior advisers “do not believe that the attorney general would remain in his post for a possible second term.” They added that Garland “should have demanded edits to Hur’s report, including around the descriptions of Biden’s faltering memory.”

  • To Garland allies, this was basically Biden publicly firing Garland, his exit date to come after the November election. The cause? He had behaved ethically.

• (In front of Congress) “You could have chosen just to comment on the president’s particular recall vis-à-vis a document or a set of documents,” observed California Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff. “But you decided to go further and make a generalized statement about his memory, didn’t you?”

  • Hur argued that his “assessment in the report about the relevance of the president’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair. Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe. I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly.”

  • I think the Authors misquoted this exchange between Hur and Schiff. It’s a distinction without a difference, but I don’t like it when writers change quotes to make them sound better or flow easier or whatever reason. Tell me what you think (this is their only exchange I could find, and I scrolled through the entire hearing):

    No. I figured it out, the Schiff quote is what Schiff said to Robert Hur directly and the Hur quote is from his opening statement at the beginning of the hearing, but when you put them together it sounds like that was Hur’s response to Schiff.

Finally, what happened to Hur:

Hur had no doubt assumed that he would just go back to Gibson Dunn once he finished his stint investigating that “undersecretary of the Interior.” But after the report came out, Hur had been roundly vilified by the Biden administration, Democratic officials, and Democratic allies in progressive media circles.

It was not unlike how the political right had treated James Comey and Robert Mueller. Law firms and corporate legal teams got the message.

Hur spent several months looking for work. (pp. 144-145) Emphasis my own.

Dean Phillips:

Congressman Dean Phillips’s grandmother was Pauline Phillips, better known by her pen name, Abigail Van Buren—the famous advice columnist behind Dear Abby.

Dean Phillips, although there were several other viable candidates trying to primary Joe for the democratic nomination (Marianne Williamson, Robert Kennedy, Jr.) Dean was the only one who was from the DC establishment, and the only one who was treated openly as a threat. The other two were attacked legally behind the scenes, but Congressman Dean Phillips was treated like a real problem.

He was also the only one attacking the most obvious issue, the one they were all complicit in covering up, his mental decline.

Throughout 2023, as the president’s speaking and walking skills seemed to visibly decline*, it was clear to Phillips that Biden’s communication problems likely indicated some cognitive issues. It was also clear that his fellow Democratic officials were in deep denial about this. “People will talk their way into beliefs,” Phillips would later say. “Even O. J. believed he didn’t do it at the end.” When Phillips pressed them, some Democrats would offer what the congressman called the “yes, but.” As in: “Yes, Biden is in decline, but can you imagine Trump winning?” (p. 120)

---

*It was sooner. His visible decline was there my first time seeing him during the 2020 debates. Oh, not to mention, “You ain’t black!”

---

Phillips believed that Trump would win if Biden was the nominee. We’ll never know for sure if he was right but what we do know for sure, Kamala Harris wasn’t the one. I know they say she started too late in the season, but other countries spend just a few months on election season. No where else in the world are the leaders and representatives of the country perpetually running year-round for the next election season, like we do here.

Canada’s election season is limited to minimum of 37 days, max of 51.

Only in America is election season an entertainment spectacle used to boost ratings.

A way for campaigns to drain money from the people, networks to sell ads, and news. I know this, I participate, the election season is like March Madness for me.

Anyways, Dean Phillips sees Joe Biden is declining, physically and cognitively, he begins to seek out a competitor to primary Biden, for fear of Donald Trump winning, who he believed was an existential threat. If he didn’t find anyone he would have to do it himself, which he doesn’t want to do.

In July 2022, WCCO’s Chad Hartman asked Phillips if he wanted Biden to run for reelection in 2024. “No, I don’t,” Phillips told the radio host. “I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats who step up.” (p. 121)

Before trying to run himself, he first tried to push the leading Democrats into running, to no avail.

“[a] day before appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Phillips called House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the White House to give them a heads-up that he would be making a call for a competitive Democratic primary.”

White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients called him “insane” for what “he was about to do.”

Phillips requested to talk to the president, Jeff Zients said, “that’s not going to happen.”

Acknowledging that he would consider running, first he wanted a primary to see if there was a better contender out there. He was very complimentary to Biden. Couldn’t have said it sweeter.

Phillips went on NBC’s Meet the Press and said he would like to see “Joe Biden, a wonderful and remarkable man, pass the torch, cement this extraordinary legacy.” His preference for another Democratic presidential candidate, he said, would be “a moderate governor, hopefully from the heartland, from one of the four states that Democrats will need.” (p. 121)

Unfortunately, the niceties didn’t carry over to the corporate media fanatics.

He opened the show with “Biden currently faces just two minor democratic challengers. Robert Kennedy, Jr (I was surprised he said his name) has a famous name…” “Lawyer…” “…Vaccine skeptic whose candidacy has been boosted by Steve Bannon (El Diablo!) and financed in part by *MAGA donors, believe it or not.”

*What Chuck meant to say is some Americans supported him.

“Marianne Williamson” is a “self-help author and was on the debate stage briefly in 2020.”*

*He means she’s not serious.

“And Cornell West…” “…Green Party…” “…taking votes from the left…”

From this moment Dean Phillips became the enemy.

Back in 2016, when Bernie Sanders would complain about the extent to which the process was rigged, with the DNC making it difficult to challenge Hillary Clinton, Phillips thought he was just being a sore loser. When Marianne Williamson, another outsider Democratic candidate, would complain about being shut out of the process in 2020, Phillips would deride her. But now he came to see what they had meant. (pp. 122-123)

That was the end of the conversation—and the beginning of an effort by the Democratic establishment to exclude Phillips from the process as much as they could. Every White House pressures its party establishment to make things harder for potential challengers, but members of the Biden team tested and pushed those boundaries.

They did their best to pretend Dean Phillips didn’t exist.

The DNC subverted the primaries to land more in Biden’s favor. Because Biden won South Carolina and had a lot of support there the DNC changed the calendar to make the South Carolina primary the first one scheduled which has never been done.

In 2020, Biden had come in fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire, second in Nevada, and first in South Carolina, where he had deep appeal with older Black voters. Without looping in other Democratic Party leaders, Biden unilaterally called for making South Carolina the first state contest.

Listen to their reasoning for this, publicly:

Clyburn (South Carolina Congressman who “didn’t ask for his state to be first”) admitted later that the White House did it to protect Biden from “embarrassment.”

Biden framed his decision as about lifting underrepresented Black voices and suggested that anyone who questioned it—including Phillips—was undermining Black voters, even racist. That claim was undercut by the fact that he called for the calendar change to be for only one presidential cycle—the one he was running in—and the calendar would be revisited in 2028.

Internally, however:

Internally at the White House and the DNC, aides privately admitted that the main motivation was helping Joe Biden, not uplifting Black voters.

The DNC also made clear that there would be no party-sanctioned debates, challengers notwithstanding.

It was machine-style politics to ensure that Biden would be the nominee, even as millions of Democratic voters were making plain their serious concerns about his ability to do the job.

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin and its chair, Ben Wikler, refused to recognize Phillips as a candidate.

Phillips had to sue all the way up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that he should be included on the ballot.

This is what every challenger of Biden faced. Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, a very wealthy tech entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, spent hundreds of millions of dollars of her own money fighting the hundreds of lawsuits that were thrown at them by the party establishment, and that was just for challenging him.

Dean Phillips treatment was unprecedented, unbelievable, authoritarian, and undemocratic. And he only got a fraction of the attack that RFK, Marianne Williamson, and others received.

It turned Bobby Kennedy, lifelong Democrat and champion of the environment to join Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

Everyone should listen to the speech below. I followed the story he tells as it happened. It contains no lies!

The Question we are all Looking for the Answer to, “Who was running our Country?”

wrote in his final article of 2024:

1. WHO’S RUNNING THE COUNTRY? In what may be the most ambitious coverup of the modern era, Joe Biden withdrew as candidate for re-election without a clear explanation of why (“I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down”), technically remained president despite obvious unfitness and non-engagement, yet his White House to this day has escaped questions about who’s making executive decisions. We now know America hasn’t had a functioning president for at least this year and probably longer, which means someone other than the president has been making presidential decisions.

   What few queries that have come in about this have been met with chiding disapproval by the White House, which issued verbal whacks of rolled-up newspaper. A conspicuous example was an exchange between James Rosen and National Security Spokesman John Kirby in an August 26th gaggle. “Who’s running the country?” Rosen asked, at the beginning of a two-week Biden vacation. “Is he a ceremonial figure in some sense at this point?”

   “You know better than that,” Kirby snapped. “I mean, my goodness, he talked to Prime Minister Modi today… He monitored in real time what was going on over the weekend. I mean, come on.” Somehow answers like this were good enough for most people in Washington.

   The Wall Street Journal, perhaps the only major press organization to commit resources to the question, ran a series of stories noting that as far back as October, 2021, former Majority leader Nancy Pelosi had to grab a microphone away from Biden in the middle of a speech to Congressional Democrats explaining a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. That debacle marked Biden’s last such meeting with his own party’s caucus.

   Biden aides were instructed not to show him negative news articles about himself, and told the Journal that national security meetings as far back as 2021 were sometimes canceled on Biden’s “bad days.” These scattered tales come from unnamed sources, and unraveling how this almost certainly illegal Weekend at Bernie’s illusion was maintained by the entire White House across the years will be a major task for incoming officials, prosecutors, and future historians.

   This scandal notably required the active cooperation of nearly every reporter with a White House pass. Worse, the security and policy disaster is ongoing. We still have nearly a month to go in a tense foreign policy environment, and the public has essentially been told to stop asking who gets the call if missiles start flying. Is it Kirby? Pelosi (doubtful)? Jake Sullivan? Jill Biden? Barack Obama?

   The White House has been brazen in all this, not even bothering to prop up recently defeated Kamala Harris as its putative executive (she and husband Doug Emhoff bugged out to a $7 million Hawaiian retreat after Election night, not even pretending to remain involved).

   America has seen incredible political deceptions in its past, from the Gulf of Tonkin to WMDs, but this real-world Dave script involves someone not named Biden steering presidential authority to approve billions for shooting wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, while handing out pardons in record numbers, among God knows how many other things. Is there even a word for fraud on that scale? A lot of people need to go to jail behind this caper.

It’s funny. You could read that instead of this book and be totally caught up. However, it is nice to know everything it looked like it was, yes, it really was. Who was running our country? NOT, Joe Biden.

Matt Taibbi wrote this and published it before new year’s, 2024. He doesn’t have a White House press pass, or CNN backing him, all he has is what he has built himself in his little independent Substack . And the paragraph above is more scathing, and more complete than two veteran reporters with a book deal and access to the White House could do.

Outlined above is a stolen presidency, covered up by an internationalist cabinet of neoliberal war hawks secretly running the country, while White House Aides, Jill Biden, and various friends and representatives of the president were at the controls.

Controlling the world with the push of a button and the slide of a pen. Praying to God the ship stays on course, and they keep their jobs.

Just look at Kirby, the guy is terrified!

While the public stands by yelling as loud as they can that “the emperor has no clothes!!!”

And they just smile and wave, smile and wave, smile and wave….

Farewell Joe, farewell.

Thank you for reading. This is Editor-in-Chief at

Now, the war drums are beating. The bombing has already started, and Ted Cruz, a good ole’ boy from Texas is beating the drums harder than anyone looking for a change of regime and a military occupation. Why? It wouldn’t be because he’s lobbied by the most powerful lobby in American history, who is the mortal enemy of the country in the crosshairs, right?

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Who is Ted Cruz?

Ted Cruz is someone who has been down-right heroic on domestic issues of censorship and border control. In the interview I’m referring to it’s quite hilarious how the only thing Ted can admit that Tucker has gotten right was on the border even though he mentions many times in this interview that he reads Tucker’s newsletter every day. But Ted tends to be great on these policies, when that government happens to be Democrat, when the shoe is on the other foot however, he turns into a scouring partisan hack.

Ted Cruz is a Texas Senator. He’s known for having a silver-tongued dialect and intellect that is second to none. Here is CNN, who are no fans of Teddy:

The first Hispanic American elected to the US Senate from Texas, and a graduate of Harvard Law School and Princeton University, Cruz had argued nine cases before the US Supreme Court by the time he ran for Senate – more than any practicing Texas lawyer or member of Congress. Anyone who has authored 70 Supreme Court briefs, which Cruz did as solicitor general of Texas, surely must have skills to marshal the power of facts.

Yes, he must. According to people who would know, such as our very own novelist intellectual, , he is known to be a quite formidable linguist on the debate stage, but on the subject of Israel, well, he sounded as he appears like a bumbling religious fundamentalist redneck.

Now, I don’t doubt he’s a formidable debater with a silver tongue, but the hardest thing to debate is a bad argument that you don’t actually believe in. He appears dumb in this exchange because his arguments were dumb.

It’s very hard to argue for the moral high ground when you’re arguing in favor of a nation that just carried out the new Holodomor by blocking the entrance of food for three months, have murdered over a hundred journalists who were trying to report the situation on the ground, have killed a minimum of 50,000 civilians and are now carrying out a preemptive strike on a country that are currently in peace talks with us.

However, the things he spoke with confidence about were also very telling in their own. So, let’s get into it…

It only took four minutes to inject the term “Isolationism” into the conversation where I must insert the quote by Murray Rothbard’s Libertarian Manifesto:

“Isolationism” was coined as a smear term to apply to opponents of American entry into World War II. Since the word was often applied through guilt-by-association to mean pro-Nazi, “isolationist” took on a “right wing” as well as a generally negative flavor.

Isolationist became then, and forever, the number one slur against anyone who went against the state’s proliferation of violence.

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‘I have not said that.’

Let’s start with ‘I have not said that’ when Tucker confronted Ted for calling for a “military regime change.”

SENATOR TED CRUZ: No, no, I’ve not. Not said that once. I don’t think we need to use military force to do regime change. I said I support it. I would like to see it happen. You asked me how should it happen, A popular uprising. So what I’ve advocated for….

So, this is a fun one, and one that I’ve written about extensively.

Any time they call for a “popular uprising” what they are doing is rallying the people, for our NGO’s to start pumping in money to the protest movements and prepare for, what we call, a “Color Revolution.” This is an uprising funded by a foreign government that wants to install a new government that is willing to play ball with our interests. It’s easier to hide behind the protest movements, and carried out by the CIA.

When a countries government is not friendly to our interests we send in Government-funded NGO’s such as USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute, and wouldn’t you know it, the United States Agency for International Development. They rattle the people, train the rebels, overthrow the leaders and install the new one, all under the supervision and assistance of the US State Department, CIA, and US Military.

Check out the screenshot below is from another piece I did on this. All sources cited, paid for by the Government-Funded NGO, the National Republican Institute. Because Republicans have historically been interested in “transgender art” and “Sex changes for Peruvians”, right?:

When Ted says, “I have not said that”. This is what he means. He works in Congress; Congress funds these uprisings. When he says “Regime Change” it’s much different than some rando pundit saying it. His words have action behind them.

Is Ted “Bought and Paid For”

Something that comes across through this interview, mainly because Ted Cruz says it explicitly is his love for Israel ahead of Texas. Because, though it may seem “weird” how many questions Tucker asks about Israel, but I find it weirder how little regard Ted has for Texas. It seems Joe Rogan has more good things to say about Texas when he’s talking to scientists and alien abductees than this actual “representative of Texas”. But just for shits n giggles let’s take a look back at his 2012 campaign and see how much he had to say about “being the leading defender of Israel in the United States Senate."

So, I found what seems to equal up to his claim at: TRUE. The following headline was put out by Fox News in 2014:

This was after walking off a stage earlier that year, as the keynote speaker at a Christian Arab event:

In recent days Sen. Ted Cruz received a warm embrace by the crowd he addressed during a Zionist Organization of America dinner at a New York City hotel.

Cruz, a conservative Texas Republican, has emerged as a staunch defender of Israel. Just two months ago he made headlines when he lectured hecklers at a Christian Arab event – where he was keynote speaker – telling them anyone who hates Israel also hates America, and then walking off the stage.

Which calls to question, what exactly is the role of a Texas Senator? Is it not to represent the needs of the people of Texas?

Is the state of Texas doing so well that Texans can afford to sacrifice their representative and allow him to instead represent a foreign country? A client state?

What’s good for Israel might not be good for Texas, can Texans trust that if ever the time came Ted would vote in favor of what’s good for his real constituents? Above what’s good for Israel? I think we already have that answer.

Texas has a high percentage of the military living there, with the bases and the patriotic culture. How does it benefit them to have the most pro-Israel representative also representing them? Just because they love the military, does it mean they want to fight a war of choice on behalf of a client state. I don’t think so, no doubt his extremist Evangelical dispensationalist views fit great with the cults of Texas, but what about the regular people who simply want to live their lives without the grid being knocked out.

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The “Careful Word Game”

Ok, for this I believe we start with Ted’s antisemitism game. To make this a piece that could be read and understood in a timeless manner, the context of this interview is that Israel has bombed Iran and many pro-Israel politicians are calling for an “American” bombing campaign and regime change, including Ted Cruz, that’s the context of the interview.

About 40 minutes into the interview Ted Cruz swaps “Israel” for “the Jews”, Tucker immediately takes issue with it and says, “no one said anything about ‘the Jews’

Although Ted might not have seen how obvious this was because he was in it, it was so very obvious. They’d been talking about Israel and the support of Israel’s war with Iran than as soon as Ted didn’t want to answer the question he was being confronted with, he derailed it by replacing Israel with ‘The Jews’, Tucker caught it and responded so “now I’m an antisemite”, and Ted accuses him of being ‘obsessed with the Jews’ and then ‘obsessed with Israel’ this was after just espousing that his “number one goal” when running for his Senate seat was to be the “leading supporter of Israel in the Senate.” Tucker calls this out.

Then Ted accuses Tucker of playing a “careful word game” by referring to Ted Cruz’s admission that when he ran for congress in 2012 he ran as the #1 defender of Israel in the Senate.

Ted was the one playing a word game here, anyone listening could hear it, and his constituents in Texas, I hope are paying attention. They are being represented by an empty seat.

Their representation is busy with a hostile foreign power and maybe if he has time he can worry about their needs.

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Dispensationalism and the Separation of Church and State

SENATOR TED CRUZ: And the reason is twofold. Number one, as a Christian growing up in Sunday school, I was taught from the Bible, those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will. Will be cursed. And from my perspective, I want to be on the blessing side of things, of the.

TUCKER CARLSON: Those who bless the government of Israel.

SENATOR TED CRUZ: Those who bless Israel is what it says, doesn’t say the government of. It says the nation of Israel. So that’s in the Bible. As a Christian, I believe that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where is that?

SENATOR TED CRUZ: I can find it to you. I don’t have the scripture off the tip of mine. You pull out the phone and use the.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s in Genesis. But. So you’re quoting a Bible phrase, you don’t have context for it. You don’t know where in the Bible it is. But that’s like, like your theology. I’m confused. What does that even mean? Tucker, I’m a Christian. I want to know what you’re talking about.

SENATOR TED CRUZ: Where does my support for Israel come from? Number one, because biblically, we are commanded to support Israel. But number two.

TUCKER CARLSON: Hold on, hold on. You’re a senator and now you’re throwing out theology. And I am a Christian and I am allowed to weigh in on this. We are commanded as Christians to support the government of Israel.

SENATOR TED CRUZ: We are commanded to support Israel and we’re.

TUCKER CARLSON: What does that mean? Israel?

SENATOR TED CRUZ: We’re told those who bless Israel will be blessed.

TUCKER CARLSON: But hold on. Define Israel. This is important. Are you kidding? Kidding? This is a majority Christian country.

SENATOR TED CRUZ: Define Israel. Do you not know what Israel is? That would be the country you’ve asked, like 49 questions about.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s what Genesis. That’s what God is talking about.

SENATOR TED CRUZ: The nation of Israel.

Ted says this with such confidence it’s infuriating!

What he is referring to is a new way of reading the Bible that came out in the last hundred years called “dispensationalism.” It means during different eras of the bible you follow god’s words differently. So, this bit is from the It’s from the Old Testament and doesn’t say this at all. The Mises Institute did an excellent explainer of this interaction if you’d like to know more. Here’s what it actually says in Genesis 12:1-3:

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

It doesn’t say “Israel” at all but Ted doesn’t say that. It’s really misleading. He’s saying that when God refers to “You”, that You is Israel. And Tucker is saying, “You think God is referring to the government of Israel?” And I think that takes the cake.

This alone is the reason there is a separation of church and state. The idea is so crazy that in a country whose founding was based on the freedom of religion, for us to, 300 years later, to now be on the brink of war at the behest of a religion that is now being deciphered to say, whatever they want it to say.

Maybe next year we should go to war for the Mormons? Or, actually, according to my translation everyone is supposed to pay their taxes to me, because, well, here’s what happened, every preacher all across America who says to give the Lord 15% of your income, who they’re actually referring to is me, so if you want those blessings, you shouldn’t let our god down.

What’s stopping anyone from saying that. And what if you don’t believe in that? What if your religion is completely opposed to that? Or maybe you believe when you blow some shit up you’ll get 40 virgins in the afterlife, like some do, should we now institute legislation at state level or should we say you’re fucking nuts, and so is the other one and even if I believed any of you it has no grounds, because the constitution of the United States doesn’t allow it, and I represent my countrymen, not yours.

Fuck you, Ted Cruz!

Thank you for reading!

Editor-in-Chief

It doesn’t matter who you vote for you always wind up with John McCain.

Tom Woods, Woods’ Law #3

Conference call: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; President Donald J. Trump; Senator of Texas Ted Cruz;

Thursday June 12th, 2025:

DJT: Bibi, as far as they know we are continuing peace talk with the Iranians for the “nuclear deal.” Are you going ahead with the strike?

BB: Yes. Our bombers are committed and set on course. We must take out Iran if we are going to advance our removal of the Arabs from Judea and Samaria (Palestine). How is public sentiment on the war, Mr. President we are going to require American support.

DJT: If they’re not on board they will be. There’s an IAEA report that came out May 31st claiming Iran is enriching their uranium to a dangerous level. It’s fake, of course, but they don’t know that, and it should help quiet the dissent. I’m the president, I say who we support.

BB: Well, Mr. President with all due respect some of the biggest voices in your coalition seem to be dissenting, regardlesss. Umm, what will you do about Tucker Carlson? And the black girl, Candace Owens? They are spreading propaganda which is poisoning our effort.

DJT: This is why the report was necessary, using their own organization against them. As you know IAEA is no friends of Israel, when they put out a report the dissenters listen. Look, Bibi, don’t worry about them, they can talk all they want, and say whatever they want, the people will follow me—

Ted Cruz: —Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister—

DJT: —Teddy you weren’t supposed to talk until we call on you—

TC: Sorry sir…

DJT: Well, continue now, you already started.

TC: Okay, MAGA is behind you no matter what, the faction of dissent taking Tucker’s position, the “complainers”, are soon to coming to an end. I have a meeting with him next week, aired publicly, and we’ll set the record straight. After that, the “isolationist” faction will no longer have a leg to stand on. They’ll follow us to the very end. Iran is a scourge on the face of humanity and must be wiped out, so will it be.

DJT: Thank you, Teddy.

BB: If he starts to get the best of you Teddy, you use every trick in the book, make sure no one will listen to him ever again, slander him as an antisemite, a Jew hater, blood libel, he loves Hitler, whatever we gotta do.

He turns his attention to Trump.

BB: Mr. President, this strike must be victorious, and we need your support. Please don’t pull a Kennedy on us and abandon us at the last minute like the “Bay of Pigs.” And the American people, must be in support—

DJT: Bibi, you worry too much. I am MAGA, they’re gonna do anything I say. They’ll follow me to the end of the earth. I say what is America First, after all I created it, and America First is Israel First. The Iranians think we’re still scheduled for peace talks on Sunday. They should’ve known, I gave them 60 days, today is day 60, tomorrow will be 61.

TC: I’ll set the record straight with Tucker, and in turn all his followers.

DJT: Okay, Teddy. You can go now.

Ted Cruz: Thank you, Mr. President; Mr. Prime Minister.

(Cruz disconnects, but the meeting continues)

DJT: So, you really think they have weapons of—nuclear weapons, Bibi? You know our IC threat assessment—

BB: MOSSAD has their own threat assessment, and it says, ‘BOMB THEM NOW.’ The AIEI has released a new assessment that says they are days away from nuclear weapons, we must strike them now. No, they don’t have them yet, but we can’t wait put it off until there’s a mushroom cloud over Tel-Aviv, or even New York, maybe Washington. We must strike them now; we’ve been waiting decades for this. Don’t forget this isn’t only about the bombs, but it is mostly, it’s also the Greater Israel project. Deferment is at our own peril—

DJT: Okay, well you got our full support—

BB: Boots on the ground?

DJT: If it comes to that.

BB: It will. Once we take out Iran, we will have no more enemies in the Global South, and we can finish dealing with Hamas and our Greater Israel project.

DJT: Yea, so what will you do with all those people?

BB: I don’t care. We’re thinning the herd as much as we can, and the rest that survive, fuck ‘em. They can be spread out throughout the Arab lands. Or maybe we can send them to Iran after we take it over, but if Iran doesn’t go none of that happens.

DJT: Alright Bibi, appreciate the call. You’ve got our full support.

BB. I appreciate the Truth post, throwing them off our trail.

(End of Transcript)

As the genocide of the Palestinians comes to a close Bibi Netanyahu knows the time to pay the piper is closing in.

As illustrated in the new documentary “Bibi Files”, Netanyahu’s goose is cooked.

Just like Zelenskyy won’t allow his war to end because he knows he’ll be thrown out of office, neither will Netanyahu.

First, let's talk about our leader, because he's who actually matters to me.

Diplomatic Deception

Publicly, “peace talks” were scheduled for Sunday between the President and the Iranian negotiators, it soon became clear that there was no peace talks on the docket.

Thursday night Israel carried a good old Friday the 13th surprise with a preemptive air strike on several bases, and assassinations of key military leaders provoking return fire from Iran. Iran and Israel traded strikes, and the cycle of violence began. Anyone saying — and they are — that Israel or Iran is not targeting civilians or residential areas is full of shit, that’s what war is, and this no different than any other. The goal of war is to kill people and blow shit up. Devastate their society as much as possible.

As late as 5PM Thursday night Donald Trump was suggesting that diplomacy was still on the table, but he already knew that it was not:

Now that six days have passed, we now know that 60 days prior to June 13th Donald Trump gave a warning that if there is not a deal in 60 days (quote the post), there was nothing else said about it, it seemed like maybe a far-out threat as Donald Trump tends to make.

President Trump told the New York Post the day of the first strike that he “always knew the attack date,” maybe the Israeli leaders and American leaders were laughing amongst themselves at the bad luck coming to Iran on Friday the 13th.

Leading up to the weekend Donald Trump made many posts referring to the peace talks happening that Sunday, but this what’s being referred to “diplomatic cover” because we now know Israel’s attack on Friday, and the days that followed, was with Donald Trump’s blessing.

His response to the attacks:

“Iran should have listened to me when I said — you know, I gave them, I don’t know if you know but I gave them a 60-day warning and today is day 61,” he told CNN.

“They should now come to the table to make a deal before it’s too late. It will be too late for them. You know, the people I was dealing with are dead, the hardliners,” the president said. He would not specify which people he was referring to.

“The people I was dealing with are dead.” What an ominous, dark thing to say, Donald Trump, with that statement killed peace as an option forever. Iran’s only choice now is to build a nuclear bomb and as they say bring “Death to America & Death to Israel!”

How would another group of Iranian’s come to the negotiation table when the last ones who did, were killed!

Essentially Donald Trump gave cover to Israel. Publicly stating that peace would commence! While behind the scenes Israel planned their attack.

On The Ground

Correspondent from FOX News in Tel Aviv, yelled in his report, “Israel is targeting military structures and Iran is targeting civilians…”

But this isn’t true, from either side. The news is flipping between Israel’s damge and Iran’s damage, it seemed like they were trading apartment complexes, reduced to rubble.

In Israel, and I’m sure in Iran too, censorship is running ramped, suppressing battle damage reports, and arresting journalists for trying to report what is happening.

In Israel, on day one, a civilian apartment complex had been destroyed, a man was stuck underneath the rubble, and his son sat on the sideline, praying he’s alive.

In Tehran the report was less personal. Downtown Tehran, from a drone view I suppose, buildings were destroyed, it looked like 10 missiles hit in a big cluster.

The Neocons have wanted Iran since the 90’s, publicly, to run their little experiment. They said, “we would be greeted as liberators!”

Here is info on the targeted nuclear sites, stated to be for civil-use, i.e. nuclear energy:

Iran’s nuclear industry is well-established, with important centers spread over the country, and some buried deep underground, to protect from the kind of aerial attack Israel has just launched.

A war for regime change, is at bay. Like John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hitman) said, “when all else fails they send in the jackals.”

The lies and propaganda reminiscent of 2002 and 2003.

Think about this: an Arab country that has kept up with the nuclear treaty and allowed inspectors to carry out inspections of their sites. Since 2007 our intelligence has said “they don’t want nukes, and have no intention to get nukes,” but their neighbor who picks fights with everyone swears they’re lying, swears they’re lying, swears they’re lying, and wants help from American troops just in case they’re lying. That neighbor was the same person who appeared in front of Congress in 2002 to appear as a “regional expert” and testifies according to his “expertise” first that “Iran could get weapons of mass destruction in no time, they’ve been ahead of Iraq in developing them, but Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and if we overthrow Iraq it will reverberate throughout the middle east, the people will rise up and overthrow their leaders and democracy will sweep the region.” This was Benjamin Netanyahu (See next section).

By following this expertise, Iraq is such a disaster that no one even talks about what is happening there. Libya has a modern-day slave trade. Syria is now run by a leader of al-Qaeda who killed American soldiers in Iraq. Afghanistan is being run by the Taliban. And here is Iran, the one we never got to war with, the one that got away, if I may.

We displaced 150 million people which caused a refugee crisis in Europe. We killed a million Arabs, 500,000 children, and starved half a million more.

Are we not done yet?

Donald Trump has failed us.

He campaigned non-stop as the president that didn’t get us into anymore wars, which was mostly true.

Now his rhetoric is this:

He said, hundreds of times that he “Just wanted to stop the killing.”

On Ukraine, he said he’d stop the war on day one, he said he’d bring a solution to the fighting in Palestine, now he' is openly supporting it and supporting the proliferation of violence in another country that is not our fight. Another protracted regime change war, another nation-builder who never built nothing.

He campaigned on a policy of “America First” and is dragging us into a war that our own Intelligence community (Click here or image above to view, Page 26 is Iran-WMD) reported wasn’t a threat just a couple months ago, pictured below:

If you cannot see the image above here’s what it says, “ANNUAL THREAT ASSESSMENT OF THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY” released March of 2025:

We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so. In the past year, there has been an erosion of a decades-long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public that has emboldened nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus. Khamenei remains the final decisionmaker over Iran’s nuclear program, to include any decision to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran very likely aims to continue *R&D of chemical and biological agents for offensive purposes. Iranian military scientists have researched chemicals that have a wide range of sedation, dissociation, and amnestic incapacitating effects, and can also be lethal.

*R & D is Research & Development

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It’s Time for “America First” to Give This Traitor the Boot

I’ll bet the Republicans don’t get another term like this.

After all the bullshit this guy has gotten away with, after the crimes and corruption, after “rape” that didn’t happen, accidentally sending a gay hairdresser from Venezuela to a gang prison in El Salvador.

After lying to 350 million people about the most important issue to our survival, we are at war with Iran, and the peace deal is over, if it ever existed. It might’ve been diplomatic cover to blindside the Iranians from the beginning.

Donald Trump will leave behind a legacy of ashes.

It’s time to pull support from this guy.

If you’re anti-war, Donald Trump is not on your side.

If you’re worried about immigrants taking your jobs, Donald Trump is not on your side, if you’re worried about freedom of speech, or the freedom to assemble, Donald Trump is not on your side.

If you wanna “Make America Great Again”, Donald Trump is not on your side.

If you wanna “Make America Healthy Again”, Donald Trump is not on your side.

And if you are America First, if that is the flag you fly, Donald Trump is not on your side.

Bibi Netanyahu said the quiet part out loud on Fox News the night after the initial attacks, he said, “Iran was the one who attacked Israel on October 7th.” When he was challenged on this, he said, “Because they provided the weapons and the funds to carry out the attack, they are a proxy.”

Yes, Bibi, and now so are we. We are at war with Russia, at war with Palestine, and at war with Iran, by proxy.

From the world’s oldest propaganda outlet, The Atlantic, Donald Trump said, I decide what America First means. It’s time for America to strike first against the warmonger-in-chief that has been in disguise and throw this motherfucker out of office. J.D. will do a much better job anyways.

has already uncovered the war plans that have been in the works behind our backs, let’s look at what he’s saying:

Seymour Hersh

WHAT I HAVE BEEN TOLD IS COMING IN IRAN

This is a report on what is most likely to happen in Iran, as early as this weekend, according to Israeli insiders and American officials I’ve relied upon for decades. It will entail heavy American bombing. I have vetted this report with a longtime US official in Washington, who told me that all will be “under control” if Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “departs.” Just how that might happen, short of his assassination, is not known. There has been a great deal of talk about American firepower and targets inside Iran, but little practical thinking, as far I can tell, about how to remove a revered religious leader with an enormous following…

Read more

a year ago · 518 likes · Seymour Hersh

This is a report on what is most likely to happen in Iran, as early as this weekend, according to Israeli insiders and American officials I’ve relied upon for decades. It will entail heavy American bombing. I have vetted this report with a longtime US official in Washington, who told me that all will be “under control” if Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “departs.”

Regime Change, that’s the plan, but who will it change to? How’d that work out in Libya?

HumanTraffickingsearch.org:

The situation in Libya is a result of years of political instability and conflict. The country has been divided since the overthrow of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Two governments now control different parts of the country, and the situation has led to a rise in criminal activity, including human trafficking. Many migrants from neighboring countries, including Nigeria, Eritrea, and Somalia, attempt to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. However, many of these migrants are captured by human traffickers and sold as slaves in open markets.

The issue of the open slave market in Libya gained widespread attention in 2017 when footage of migrants being sold at an open-air market in the city of Sabha went viral. The footage showed individuals being auctioned off for as little as $400. The images were shocking and disturbing, and they served as a stark reminder of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

More poaching from Sy Hersh, who is the greatest reporter America has ever seen:

Sy’s reporting continues with the following:

I have been told that the White House has signed off on an all-out bombing campaign in Iran, but the ultimate targets, the centrifuges buried at least eighty meters below the surface at Fordow, will, as of this writing, not be struck until the weekend. The delay has come at Trump’s insistence because the president wants the shock of the bombing to be diminished as much as possible by the opening of Wall Street trading on Monday. (Trump took issue on social media this morning with a Wall Street Journal report that said he had decided on the attack on Iran, writing that he had yet to decide on a path forward.)

He also exclaimed in another Truth post, “They are always wrong and negative. It’s why MAGA HATES FoxNews, even though their anchors are GREAT.”

Destroy the centrifuges at Fordow, which are stored at least eighty meters underground. It has been agreed, as of Wednesday, that US bombers carrying bunker bombs capable of penetrating to that depth, will begin attacking the Fordow facility this weekend.

The delay will give US military assets throughout the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean—there are more than two dozen US Air Force bases and Navy ports in the region—a chance to prepare for possible Iranian retaliation. The assumption is that Iran still has some missile and air force capability that will be on US bombing lists. “This is a chance to do away with this regime once and for all,” an informed official told me today, “and so we might as well go big.” He said, however, “that it will not be carpet bombing.”

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The retaliation against our troops stationed within Iran's reach was always the biggest fear. If one person gets hurt when Donald Trump knew what he was doing and that this was planned ahead of time with American cooperation he should be impeached and have to pay reparations for it.

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The planned weekend bombing will also have new targets: the bases of the Republican Guards, which have countered those campaigning against the revolutionary leadership since the violent overthrow of the shah of Iran in early 1979.

The Israeli leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes that the bombings will provide “the means of creating an uprising” against Iran’s current regime, which has shown little tolerance for those who defy the religious leadership and its edicts. Iranian police stations will be struck. Government offices that house files on suspected dissenters in Iran will also be attacked.

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They are planning an uprising, and the NGO money from org's like USAID will be pouring in, just like Iran & Netanyahu's money pours into Hamas through Qatar.

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The Israelis apparently also hope, so I gather, that Khamenei will flee the country and not make a stand until the end. I was told that his personal plane left Tehran airport headed for Oman early Wednesday morning, accompanied by two fighter planes, but it is not known whether he was aboard.

Only two thirds of Iran’s population of 90 million are Persians. The largest minority groups include Azeris, many of whom have long-standing covert ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis. Jews make up a small minority group there, too. (Azerbaijan is the site of a large secret CIA base for operations in Iran.)

---

What Sy Hersh means is there is already CIA connections inside of Iran which will, through NGO’s and such, be able to assist the uprising as I explain in my piece “Interference: The Anatomy of Regime Change.”

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Bringing back the shah’s son, now living in exile in near Washington, has never been considered by the American and Israeli planners, I was told. But there has been talk among the White House planning group that includes Vice President J.D. Vance, of installing a moderate religious leader to run the country if Khamenei is deposed. The Israelis bitterly objected to the idea. “They don’t give a shit on the religious issue, but demand a political puppet to control,” the longtime US official said. “We are split with the Izzies on this. Result would be permanent hostility and future conflict in perpetuity, Bibi desperately trying to draw US in as their ally against all things Muslim, using the plight of the citizens as propaganda bait.”

Izzies=Israelis; That last line is gold and should sum up the entire war.

Context: They are arguing about who will be the leader of Iran after they topple the current leader Khamenei or he is “deposed.” The White House planners, including VP Vance, would like to install “ a moderate religious leader to run the country” but the “Izzies’ “bitterly objected to the idea” and here’s the money line:

“They don’t give a shit on the religious issue, but demand a political puppet to control,”

The longtime US official said.

“We are split with the Izzies on this. Result would be permanent hostility and future conflict in perpetuity, Bibi desperately trying to draw US in as their ally against all things Muslim, using the plight of the citizens as propaganda bait.”

One more time:

“Permanent hostility and future conflict in perpetuity” and “Bibi desperately trying to draw US in as their ally against all things Muslim, using the plight of the citizens as propaganda bait.”

---

Back to Hersh:

There is the hope in the American and Israeli intelligence communities, I was told, that elements of the Azeri community will join in a popular revolt against the ruling regime, should one develop during the continued Israeli bombing. There also is the thought that some members of the Revolutionary Guard would join in what I was told might be “a democratic uprising against the ayatollahs”—a long-held aspiration of the US government. The sudden and successful overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was cited as a potential model, although Assad’s demise came after a long civil war.

It is possible that the result of the massive Israeli and US bombing attack could leave Iran in a state of permanent failure, as happened after the Western intervention in Libya in 2011. That revolt resulted in the brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi, who had kept the disparate tribes there under control. The futures of Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, all victims of repeated outside attacks, are far from settled.

Donald Trump clearly wants an international win he can market. To accomplish that, he and Netanyahu are taking America to places it has never been.

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The Plan Under Wraps

So, if anyone hasn’t seen the documentary by Alex Gibney, The Bibi Files, I’ll post the free YouTube versions below.

Btw, I posted all of them I could find because I believe they won’t last long on YouTube.

Iran has always been the big dog. The final boss, if I may, after 9/11 when there were talks between Ariel Sharon and the W. Bush administration Sharon wanted us to overthrow Iran first, this was part of the Wolfowitz doctrine that carried over from Bush’s father’s time in office. We know about this doctrine because not only was it published but four-star General Wesley Clark, admitted it in what is famously known as the “seven countries in five years plan (see below).”

General Clark elaborated many times on this including most recently during a debate with on Piers Morgan’s show Uncensored, where he said that he actually seen this plan the first time in the 90’s and was something the neocons of the Bush one and two era had lobbied for from the beginning when they were a part of the Nixon administration and the Reagan administration.

In fact, every Republican administration follows this plan. The Trump administration, if you listened to his rhetoric on podcasts and on the campaign trail you would come away thinking, finally a Republican not owned by the Neocon faction of the right.

Looking at Kamala Harris’ final move promoting her endorsement of the neoconservative wing i.e. Dick & Liz Cheney, Robert Kagan, all of their staffers, it truly seemed like the war pigs had hopped sides, which gained Donald Trump a substantial number of votes, but it seems they were playing both sides of the fence.

Donald Trump even denounced “neocons and nation-builders” during his speech in the middle east a couple weeks ago.

Listen to this, it was a month ago:

So, think of that, other industries are now bigger, even, than oil! Which is always going to be a big monster. It's a big one! But that's a great tribute to you and economic development properly used.

In other cities throughout the peninsula, places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Doha, Muscat, the transformations have been unbelievably remarkable.

Before our eyes a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce not chaos!

Where it exports technology not terrorism!

And where people of different nations, religions, and creeds, are building cities together not bombing each other out of existence.

We don't want that!

And it's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from western interventionalists or flying people in, on beautiful planes, giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.

No, the gleaming marvels of Riad and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called “nation-builders”, neocons, or liberal nonprofits, like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities.

Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.

The people that are right here, the people that have lived here, all their lives developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies, in your own way.

It's really incredible what you've done!

In the end, the so-called “nation builders” wrecked far more nations than they built.

And the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.

They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.

Peace, prosperity, and progress, ultimately came, not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions, and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly.

He was in Saudi Arabia talking to the Middle East that we’ve spent the last 40 years destroying. He was going against the people that he is now in line with. That was a month ago! What happened?!

This is what is heartbreaking and should be a lesson to us all, it pays to read books. He might’ve meant what he said, he probably meant it per his translation. I know these speeches are written by other people but damn it would really be great if our president read a book sometime, he has “experience knowledge” but zero book smarts. He has no clue that he’s been over run, once again, by the deep state, neocons, and nation builders that he campaigned on getting rid of.

There is no doubt now, the deep state has won. The “Wesley Clark-exposed-plan” has made it to Bowser. The very large, very militant, country of Iran.

Afghanistan took 20 years to fail at; Iran might take 40.

Even George Bush’s deep state apparatus stopped short of overthrowing Iran. “Experts” at the time said that if we go into Iran, it will be a bloodbath for Americans. Iran has access to far too many vulnerable American positions in the middle east, the country is large and mountainous, we will be entrenched in a war of attrition for many years if we invade Iran.

And nothing has changed.

It’s time for cooler heads to prevail.

Donald Trump is taking on the same legacy as the Governor Bush and Hussein Obama, but we don’t have to follow him. The MAGA coalition, the America First coalition, it’s time to let go. This is a war crime, Congress didn’t authorize the war, there’s the 25th amendment, Donald Trump has been compromised by the deep state, it’s time to replace him.

Elon Musk said it two weeks ago, impeach him, maybe even a little prison time, just a little, and put J.D. in office he’ll do much better.

One last thing:

So, What the Hell am I Talking About?

Bibi Netanyahu let’s put aside the corruption charges he will be up against if the wars end in the Middle East. This guy has been saying since the 90’s that Iran is “dangerously close to weapons of mass destruction.”

First let’s start with this from CNN:

When Israel launched its series of strikes against Iran last week, it also issued a number of dire warnings about the country’s nuclear program, suggesting Iran was fast approaching a point of no return in its quest to obtain nuclear weapons and that the strikes were necessary to preempt that outcome.

However, our intelligence said that they weren’t even close.

But US intelligence assessments had reached a different conclusion – not only was Iran not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing, according to four people familiar with the assessment.

Hahaha! “Four people familiar with the assessment.” CNN never ceases to fail as a media outlet; the assessment was public. I am familiar with the assessment, lmfao! Fools, then they go on to call for US support of the military strike in Iran, but at least they said the first part. Onto Bibi’s history of floating this lie.

• In 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his Knesset as an MP, “Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb,” he declared at the time. The prediction was later repeated in his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism.

• On July 10th, 1996, he addressed the joint session of US Congress at the Capitol in Washington, DC and called on Europe and Asia to join efforts to isolate Iran and Iraq and prevent them from developing nuclear capabilities that he warned would bring catastrophe.

• In 2002, he addressed Congress in the wake of 9/11 as a “regional expert” of the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu, suggested that the U.S. invading Iraq would have "enormous positive reverberations on the region," implying it would lead to peace or stability in the Middle East. He argued that removing Saddam Hussein from power would send a message to other "despots" in the region, including Iran, that the time for such regimes was over. Netanyahu also stated that an invasion of Iraq would be easier following the victory in Afghanistan.

  • “Iran is also, outpacing Iraq in the development of ballistic missile systems that they hope will reach the eastern seaboard of the United States within 15 years.”

  • “Regime Change”

  • Full Hearing, September 12th, 2002

• In September of 2012 Netanyahu gave his presentation with the Bobomb from Super Mario pictured above, where he claimed the following: “By next spring, at most, by next summer, at current enrichment rates,

  they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it's only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.”

• In Washington, DC, on March 4, 2014, Netanyahu addresses the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He urged world powers not to allow Iran to retain the ability to enrich uranium, saying it must be stripped of all nuclear technologies with bomb-making potential.

• In March of 2015, he appeared before Congress(?) and said that, “The foremost sponsor of global terrorism (he means Iran) could be weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons.”

• October of 2015, he claimed the following in a speech aired on UNTV: “That would place a militant Islamic terror regime weeks away from having the fissile material for an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs.”

• June 13th, 2025, appearing on Israeli media, but speaking English so that he all get it: “If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time. It could be a year, it could be within a few months, less than a year.”

While we play Risk from air-conditioned conference rooms young men get dragged to war with “insurgents” who look just like them and have everything in common, but nothing alike. He doesn’t hate you, and you don’t hate them. Were at war either way because it’s how the game was played.

It’s time for the games to stop.

Thank you for reading!

This is Editor-in-Chief at

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that. Although intuitively something about that statement felt wrong, I thought maybe it’s just my paranoid misgivings about privacy and whatnot, until I read a book that put it all in perspective. It’s called Bottoms up and the Devil Laughed: A journey through The Deep State. The whole book is good, and relevant to this story, but one specific line blew my mind, here goes:

Who are you? You are data about data.

You are a web of social relationships.

You are a map of connections.

This morning in the car line at the Montessori school you called a pediatric dermatologist and spoke for two minutes, the time it takes to make an appointment.

From Target, you called a ski instructor and spoke for seventy-two minutes, which is eight minutes longer than yesterday and twenty-three minutes longer than the day before that, which suggests an escalating interest in someone not your spouse.

The ski instructor and you both receive emails from the Montessori school, which suggests that this is how you met.

Both you and the dermatologist receive frequent texts from the Democratic Party.

Both you and your spouse receive emails from the Audubon Society; you used to open these emails, but now only your spouse opens them.

It is intuitive to think that it is the content of our communication that matters, the words of our emails, the turns of phrase with which we text. We want to believe we exist in what we choose to say, but this overstates our autonomy; we are at least as realized in our connections to other people. “A man,” wrote sociologist Charles Cooley in 1901, “may be regarded as the point of intersection of an indefinite number of circles.”

To make themselves real, children invent imaginary friends.

It’s too late, of course; you are already known, though the you that is known is not the you that you are.

Willingly you have surrendered many bits of information that, taken together, form a sclerotic social identity with a strange relation to the real.

Surveillance finds truths, and surveillance serves the creation of elaborate untruths.

In our time we have cast disappearance as suspect —“ghosted,” we say, as if it’s a bad thing—while we celebrate the keeping of a kind of terrible track: I have the receipts.

A paper receipt might get trashed or lost or misfiled, out of reach of digital discovery. But it is our fate to live in the age of the indelible. We all have to have the receipts, receipts for everything, receipts for texts and one-line emails and Facebook messages, an ageless record of the time I made a bad joke in a group thread and my friends twice-tapped haha! so as not to leave me hanging. To study surveillance is to learn, over and over, that we cannot escape ourselves.

At the NSA they have long known that you can make precise predictions simply by knowing the location of people, who they are calling, and for how long. From this “metadata” one builds a picture, makes predictions; one concludes that the Montessori parent will not go on the birding trip with the spouse, but will abscond with the ski instructor.

From this metadata, the intelligence community decides whom to kill.

That last line is, damn, so you see how an entire narrative can be built with your data. And the details can be whatever they like them to be.

Palantir

Palantir was created in 2003, founded by Peter Thiel, originally created to aid the government in the War on Terror, just like the PATRIOT Act.

This section is for businesses but just imagine our information being inserted into this thing.

They have another section called “GOTHAM,” think about that, for fixing crime riddled places like Gotham from Batman.

It has been used for “Pre-Crime Predictions”, consider that, using it to predict whether you were going to commit crimes or not based on your movements.

It will be used to create vaccines that are personalized to you, can’t imagine how that would go wrong.

From the guy who said to Joe Rogan, way before Kash Patel, that he couldn’t see Jeffrey Epstein killing himself, Peter Thiel, and CEO Alex Karp, who I’m sure was a Batman villain in their origin form, this program is going to be a catch-all for all the things our government doesn’t do well, it’s going to handle everything from the IRS to pharmaceutical's, ladies if you're worried about “keeping the government out of your uterus” wait until they’re being injected into your skin.

Just like the PATRIOT Act this will started as counterterrorism and is now being turned towards the people.

Just listen to what the MAGA sycophants have to say about it:

Even better, here’s Laura Loomer on Palantir two years ago

Here she is last week: