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Disarm the IRS, De-Militarize the Bureaucracy, and Dismantle the Standing Army

By John & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | May 2, 2023

What does it say about the state of our freedoms that there are now more pencil-pushing, bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with weapons than U.S. Marines?

Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the IRS, Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities.

Add in the Biden Administration’s plans to swell the ranks of the IRS by 87,000 new employees (some of whom will be authorized to use deadly force) and grow the nation’s police forces by 100,000 more cops, and you’ve got a nation in the throes of martial law.

We’re being frog-marched into tyranny at the end of a loaded gun.

Make that hundreds of thousands of loaded guns.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of federal agents armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment, authorized to make arrests, and trained in military tactics has nearly tripled over the past several decades.

As Adam Andrzejewski writes for Forbes, “the federal government has become one never-ending gun show.”

While Americans have to jump through an increasing number of hoops in order to own a gun, federal agencies have been placing orders for hundreds of millions of rounds of hollow point bullets and military gear.

For example, the IRS has stockpiled 4,500 guns and five million rounds of ammunition in recent years, including 621 shotguns, 539 long-barrel rifles and 15 submachine guns.

The Veterans Administration purchased 11 million rounds of ammunition (equivalent to 2,800 rounds for each of their officers), along with camouflage uniforms, riot helmets and shields, specialized image enhancement devices and tactical lighting.

The Department of Health and Human Services acquired 4 million rounds of ammunition, in addition to 1,300 guns, including five submachine guns and 189 automatic firearms for its Office of Inspector General.

According to an in-depth report on “The Militarization of the U.S. Executive Agencies,” the Social Security Administration secured 800,000 rounds of ammunition for their special agents, as well as armor and guns.

The Environmental Protection Agency owns 600 guns. The Smithsonian now employs 620-armed “special agents.”

Even agencies such as Amtrak and NASA have their own SWAT teams.

We should be alarmed that government agencies being turned into military outposts.

As James Madison warned, “We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.”

Unfortunately, we’re long past the first experiment on our freedoms, and merely taking alarm over this build-up of military might will no longer suffice.

Nothing about this de facto army of bureaucratic, administrative, non-military, paper-pushing, non-traditional law enforcement agencies is necessary for national security.

Moreover, while these weaponized, militarized, civilian forces which are armed with military-style guns, ammunition and equipment; trained in military tactics; and authorized to make arrests and use deadly force—may look and act like the military, they are not the military.

Rather, they are foot soldiers of the police state’s standing army, and they are growing in number at an alarming rate.

This standing army—a.k.a. a national police force—vested with the power to completely disregard the Constitution and rule by force is exactly what America’s founders feared, and its danger cannot be overstated or ignored.

This is exactly what martial law looks like—when a government disregards constitutional freedoms and imposes its will through military force, only this is martial law without any government body having to declare it: Battlefield tactics. Militarized police. Riot and camouflage gear. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Drones. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Concussion grenades. Intimidation tactics. Brute force. Laws conveniently discarded when it suits the government’s purpose.

The militarization of America’s police forces in recent decades, which has gone hand in hand with the militarization of America’s bureaucratic agencies, has merely sped up the timeline by which the nation is transformed into an authoritarian regime.

Now we find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of administrative, police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military with little to no regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.

This quasi-state of martial law has been helped along by government policies and court rulings that have made it easier for the police to shoot unarmed citizens, for law enforcement agencies to seize cash and other valuable private property under the guise of asset forfeiture, for military weapons and tactics to be deployed on American soil, for government agencies to carry out round-the-clock surveillance, for legislatures to render otherwise lawful activities as extremist if they appear to be anti-government, for profit-driven private prisons to lock up greater numbers of Americans, for homes to be raided and searched under the pretext of national security, for American citizens to be labeled terrorists and stripped of their rights merely on the say-so of a government bureaucrat, and for pre-crime tactics to be adopted nationwide that strip Americans of the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty and creates a suspect society in which we are all guilty until proven otherwise.

Don’t delude yourself into believing that this thinly-veiled exercise in martial law is anything other than an attempt to bulldoze what remains of the Constitution and reinforce the iron-fisted rule of the police state.

This is no longer about partisan politics or civil unrest or even authoritarian impulses.

This is a turning point.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are sliding fast down a slippery slope to a Constitution-free America.

If we are to have any hope of salvaging what’s left of our battered freedoms, we’d do well to start by disarming the IRS and the rest of the federal and state bureaucratic agencies, de-militarizing domestic police forces, and dismantling the police state’s standing army.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

May 2, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , | Leave a comment

One killed by Israeli missile strike – Syria

The Cradle | May 2, 2023

Israel launched fresh airstrikes on Syria’s Aleppo in the late hours of 1 May, killing one soldier and once again putting Aleppo International Airport out of service.

“At about 11:35 PM, Israel carried out an aerial aggression using waves of missiles from the direction of southeast Aleppo, targeting its airport and several sites in its vicinity,” a military source told SANA.

“The Israeli aggression claimed the life of a military personnel and caused the injury of seven others [including two civilians],” the source added.

This is the second time in less than two months that Aleppo International Airport has been crippled as a result of Israeli airstrikes.

On 7 March, Israeli jets bombarded Aleppo airport, damaging its runway and forcing aid deliveries for quake-struck Syria to be redirected to Latakia and Damascus airports.

A few days later, the UN issued a statement condemning the strikes and saying that such attacks “impede humanitarian access and could have drastic humanitarian consequences for millions of people who have been affected by the earthquake.”

“Attacks must never be directed against civilians or civilian objects. The humanitarian community has been responding to one of the worst crises that hit Syria since 6 February against the background of 12 years of conflict, economic decline, and a desperate humanitarian situation,” the UN statement said at the time, adding that Aleppo is “one of the worst earthquake-impacted governorates in Syria.”

Both Damascus and Aleppo airports have been regular targets for the Israeli air force. At the start of this year, Israeli strikes left Damascus International Airport crippled and out of commission.

This is the eleventh Israeli attack against Syria since the devastating earthquake ravaged much of the country in February. Just two days ago, Israeli strikes in Homs left several injured.

Israel’s airstrikes on Syria are illegal under international law but frequently happen under the pretext of targeting Iranian and Hezbollah targets. More often than not, however, the strikes target the Syrian army.

As a result, Tehran has expressed its willingness to bolster Syria’s air defenses to counter the continuous Israeli attacks better.

May 2, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , | 2 Comments

The US grip on the Middle East slips, and peace breaks out

By Robert Inlakesh | RT | May 2, 2023

As Washington’s influence in the Middle East declines, countries throughout the region are taking to compromise, rapprochement, and peace talks, inflicting a blow to the US narrative that seeks to depict its role as a stabilizer and democracy advocate.

Under the leadership of US President Joe Biden, there has been a notable downgrade in the status of the West amongst various long-time Middle East allies. As the US-led West exerts the majority of its efforts on the war in Ukraine, its poor decision making in the Middle East has finally begun to catch up to it.

The first major blow to Washington’s influence came in the form of a Chinese-mediated agreement to end a decades-long feud between major regional actors Iran and Saudi Arabia, one which led to the severing of ties in 2016. This has a number of implications for US power in the region.

The first being that this collapsed a strategy that the US was developing, to unite Saudi Arabia with the likes of Egypt, the UAE, Jordan, Bahrain, and Israel, against Iran and its allies in the region; the alliance was speculated to serve as a “Middle East NATO.” The second is that the Iran-Saudi rapprochement appears to have caused Riyadh to scrap its plans for normalizing ties with Israel at this time, something that the Biden administration clearly values as a foreign policy achievement. There is also the additional aspect of this being negotiated by Beijing without any regard for how it would reflect on the White House.

Despite attempts in Washington to make the deal seem like something it approves of, and repeated remarks by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about how close normalization with Saudi Arabia is, it was clearly a blow and has major consequences to the US approach to the region. In March, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman said that he didn’t care if the US President had misunderstood things about him, and later in April it was reported he also told advisors that pleasing the Americans is no longer a priority.

Immediately after the Saudi-Iran normalization, Riyadh entered into serious negotiations with Yemen’s Ansarallah (the Houthis), in order to end the war that has been raging between the two sides since 2015 and has claimed around 400,000 lives in the country. To make things worse for the US, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister recently made a trip to Damascus to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In addition to Riyadh’s moves and Tunisia re-establishing ties with Syria, it also appears as if Ankara may be on the cusp of rapprochement with Damascus and there is a push for Syria to be re-integrated into the Arab League, which clearly runs contrary to the US agenda.

Then we have the fact that Qatar has announced it is restoring ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which is not as significant as the above mentioned moves, yet adds to a list of peacemaking decisions taken without America. On the level of optics, this makes it seem as if the common denominator is the absence of the US. On the other hand, Washington’s development of ties with the Kingdom of Morocco is egging on tensions with neighboring Algeria. Not only is the Biden administration adding fuel to the fire in the diplomatic feud between both sides, but is helping exacerbate military tensions in a Rabat-Algiers arms race. Earlier this April, the US approved a potential $524.2 million sale of HIMARS artillery rocket systems to Morocco.

Furthermore, the top Middle East partner of the United States, Israel, has been severely weakened by an ongoing domestic political crisis over a proposed judicial overhaul by the Israeli government. Problems have also arisen with Israel’s approach to issues like maintaining the status quo at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a holy site where neighboring Jordan maintains custodianship, and it has caused major rows between Amman and Tel Aviv in recent months. This presents another obstacle to the US, which is being forced to mediate between both sides to maintain calm. Another layer is the feud between Biden and Netanyahu, which has called into question the special relationship between Israel and the US for the first time since the 1950s.

The US strategy in the Middle East has been to impose its dominance, primarily through the military sphere. Its selling points have been security, weapons sales, threats of military action against foes, and the creation of a Sunni-Shia cold war that pitted Iran and Saudi Arabia against one another. The strength of Iran’s weapons programs, along with its regional alliances, has largely left the US incapable of maintaining a military edge that severely outweighs the power of its opposition. The American overstretch in the region has seen it driven from Afghanistan in an embarrassing fashion and rendered it incapable of protecting its allies from the damage of potential missile strikes from Iran and its allies. Washington actively builds relationships based upon strategies that put its own partners in the firing line, but where air defense systems it sells to them do not provide enough protection.

Even when it comes to the Palestine-Israel conflict, an issue wedded to the US since 1967, US leadership is waning. Earlier this week, China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, proposed to his Palestinian Authority and Israeli counterparts that Beijing step in to facilitate dialogue between the two sides. Although the conflict is not going to be solved overnight, the mere fact that another world power is stepping into the arena will certainly send a message to American policy makers.

Instead of engaging the region as equals, looking for economic partnerships that are mutually beneficial, the US has used its military might to divide and conquer, inflicting millions of deaths and spending trillions of dollars in the process. This may have succeeded in the past, but America’s ability to wage regime change wars has been severely curtailed. The main US enemies, Iran and its allies, have made significant leaps in the military field, making direct war increasingly unfeasible, and has even pressured Tehran’s former adversaries to rethink their strategies. Although we are only at the beginning of this new phase in the Middle East, it is clear that poor policy decisions and the inability of Washington to envisage a way forward are pushing away key allies, and this time for the better.

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.

May 2, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | 1 Comment

The Extreme Center: How the Neocons Went Woke

By Oliver Williams | The Occidental Observer | May 2, 2023

No lessons, no consequences

The Iraq war was spearheaded by a remarkably small group of people. It has become politically untenable to justify that overt disaster and some of the key architects of that war have, much belatedly, come to acknowledge as much. As late as 2013 Max Boot was still arguing there was No Need to Repent for the Iraq War. He had changed his tune by 2018, writing in his book The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, “I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” Boot claims, “It was a chastening lesson in the limits of American power,” yet in the same book complains that the modern conservative movement is “permeated with” racism, extremism and isolationism.

David Frum now describes the invasion as “a grave and costly error” and gives a thoroughly equivocal mea culpa. Robert Kagan says that the war “didn’t go exactly the way we wanted it to” and that “many aspects of the war” were “unfortunate.” Bill Kristol acknowledges that Iraq was “very difficult” and that “many things were done badly,” but concludes, “I’m inclined not to think it was [a mistake].” Since the inauguration of Trump, Kristol has changed his mind on trans rights, on gays, on abortion — but not on the catastrophe that led to over a hundred thousand civilian deaths. He told Jewish Insider: “Ironically, I’d say I’ve changed or rethought my views more on domestic policy issues… Foreign policy, I haven’t really changed my views. And I’ve been critical of Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

Despite the repeated disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere, these figures remain as combative as ever. In 2018 Kristol told Vox, “the fact that the public is, quote, “war-weary”… those instincts have be challenged.” He told the Al Franken podcast that the Iraq intervention “didn’t destabilize the entire Middle East, I wish it had destabilized some of those places more.”

The neocons have been consistently wrong about foreign policy, and not just wrong, but wrong in the loudest, most doctrinaire and most uncompromising way possible. You’d think they might face some career blowback…

What actually happened?

Liberal adulation

On his MSNBC show, Ari Melber referred to 2018 as the year when “many people began referring to ‘woke Bill Kristol’.” According to Melber, this was “A tribute to the idea that people do evolve and that Trumpism can create strange bedfellows.”

Joy Reid, perhaps the most noxious personality on MSNBC, was positively glowing with praise:

One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with. I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together.

It turned out that in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome, being vehemently against Trump was enough to garner liberal adulation. During Donald Trump’s four years in office we saw the wholesale rehabilitation of the most discredited propagandists of the war on terror. After Trump called the Iraq war a “big fat mistake” in the 2016 Republican presidential debate, the neocons rebranded themselves as the ‘moderate’ voice against the danger of a Trump presidency. They went on to find lucrative positions in the liberal messaging apparatus. Frum became a senior editor for The Atlantic. Boot is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a CNN analyst, a columnist at The Washington Post, and a contributor to the New York Times op-ed pages. Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an editor at large for The Washington Post. Kristol is a frequent commentator on CNN and MSNBC.

In the liberal imagination, the Neocons shifted from being war criminals to sensible moderate centrists, and, after the 2020 election and January 6th, brave and principled defenders of democracy.

How did this happen?

Hawks for Hillary

In 2014 Jacob Heilbrunn, author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, predicted “the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.” Attending a Foreign-Policy-Professionals-for-Hillary fundraiser, Robert Kagan was quoted as saying, “I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump. I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.” Hillary won the endorsement of almost every high-profile Neoconservative you could name. Eliot Cohen, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century; John McCain speechwriter Mark Salter; think tank goon James Kirchick. Boot said he would “sooner vote for Josef Stalin than[he] would vote for Donald Trump.” The Wall Street Journal’s most hawkish columnist, neocon Bret Stephens, penned an op-ed titled Hillary: The Conservative Hope. But no one else went as far as Bill Kristol, who, when, after running a rival candidate in 2016 proved a fool’s errand, tweeted that he would “prefer the deep state to the Trump state.”

This wholesale coalition between Bush-era neocons and hawkish Democrats started before Trump and it continued after he left the White House. In 2008 The Weekly Standard celebrated Hillary Clinton as “the great right hope” of foreign policy, hailing her transformation from “First Feminist” to “Warrior Queen.” In 2013 John McCain described Hillary Clinton as a foreign policy “rock star.” In a 2014 profile of Robert Kagan in The New York Times, Kagan mentions that he served on Hillary’s “bipartisan group of foreign-policy heavy hitters at the State Department, where his wife worked as her spokeswoman.” He said of Clinton’s foreign policy, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that.”

This was more than a temporary marriage of convenience to stop Donald Trump. This is more than a pragmatic alliance. It’s an ideological convergence. The Neocons have cast off any pretence to conservatism while the Democrat Party has become uniformly pro-war. David Frum explained the realignment:

Trump pushed Never Trump Republicans into partnership with moderate Democrats — and prodded even formerly conservative minded people — to see power in ideas like Me Too and Black Lives Matter. … Old patterns are dissolving into something new.

The neocons had lost access to power in the GOP and needed to find a new constituency. Robert Kagan co-authored an article in 2019 attacking “America First” foreign policy with Antony Blinken, who is now Joe Biden’s Secretary of State. Kagan’s wife is Victoria Nuland. The two fell in love “talking about democracy and the role of America in the world.” Nuland is the ultimate example of the continuity (only interrupted briefly by Donald Trump) of personnel regardless of the administration. Nuland was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, a State Department spokesperson under Obama, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden administration. Her worldview is identical to that of her husband.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy, the national security advocacy group responsible for the Hamilton 68 scam of Russian pro-Trump influence, is governed by a board that includes Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security under George W. Bush; Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama; Bill Kristol; John Podesta; and, at one time, Jake Sullivan, now national-security adviser to President Biden. If there were ever a meaningful distinction between the liberal interventionists and the Neoconservatives, the two are now fully merged.

Invade the world, invite the world: Imperialism + Immigration

High-profile neoconservative figures have radically changed their positions on a whole range of issues to appeal to their new liberal followers but they’ve always been remarkably consistent on two policies: never ending war and unrestrained immigration. Preventing the migration of Muslims from such terror-prone countries as Afghanistan is beyond the pale, bombing those same people is seen as just fine.

Bill Kristol wants “new Americans” to replace a population he brands “lazy” and “spoilt” — “luckily you have these waves of people coming in.” Kristol has mourned the “insanity and cruelty” of ICE raids. “I’d take in a heartbeat a group of newly naturalized American citizens over the spoiled native-born know-nothings of CPAC” he tweeted in 2018. Kristol made open borders a litmus test of respectability. Asked about his previous endorsement of the brain-dead Sarah Palin he said: “I regret that. … To be fair, if you look at what she said in 2008, apart from some of the silliness, she was not anti-immigration. She was not xenophobic. She was not isolationist. … So, in a funny way, if we could have co-opted some of the populism and given them a place in a McCain-nominated Republican Party, maybe that would have been a good outcome.”

He told Vox : “I will say, you know, the Weekly Standard was pretty unapologetically anti-Buchanan. … Pretty liberal on immigration.”

As documented by the repentant former neocon Scott McConnell in a 2003 article in the American Conservative, and more extensively in the book The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement, the neocons were instrumental in the cancellation of any Conservative that expressed reservations about immigration.

Boot expressed the ultimate synthesis of imperialism abroad and multicultural colonisation at home . Bemoaning the size of the America’s fighting force, he noted, “there is a pretty big pool of manpower that’s not being tapped: everyone on the planet who is not a U.S. citizen.” He floated the idea of simply paying Afghans to occupy their own country: “The most efficient way to expand the government’s corps of Pashto or Arabic speakers isn’t to send native-born Americans to language schools; it’s to recruit native speakers of those languages.”

Historically the imperial project enabled the successful military power to attain new territory for its people to settle. Under the new imperialist framework, America invades countries only to welcome the waves of refugees that war inevitably creates. So the return on the blood and treasure expended in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya is ever more Iraqi’s, Afghan’s and Libyan’s finding living space in the USA. According to the New York Times, in 2005, just a few years after 9/11, “more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents—nearly 96,000—than in any year in the previous two decades.”

Invade/invite are both formed by a similar panglossian view of diversity. For all the celebration of diversity, there’s a blindness to it, a belief that that deep down we’re all basically Americans, yearning for secular democracy and ‘freedom’ (in the form of unrestrained liberal hedonism and free markets). If diversity is a strength, there’s no reason to think that forcing democracy on a deeply sectarian country like Iraq might not work out. Here’s Kristol on Iraq: “I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni.”

In reality the Shia didn’t get along with the Sunni and horrific bloodshed between the two groups followed Saddam’s ouster.

In 2016 Robert Kagan wrote an article about Trump titled This is how Fascism comes to America :

His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.

But he won’t bomb them. Therein lies the problem.

Anarchy at home, military occupation abroad

In 2020 over 130 senior Republican national security officials signed a statement that condemned Donald Trump because he “stokes fears that ‘angry mobs’ and ‘anarchists’ are destroying our country” and violated America’s “legacy as a nation of immigrants.” America’s foreign policy elite would like to wage non-stop war to “keep America safe,” yet when America’s urban centers themselves resemble war zones, the establishment either shrugs or cheers on the rioters (at least 25 people died during the BLM riots, including a Trump supporter assassinated in the middle of the street in Portland).

Kori Schake, Director of Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, writes: “Recent protests in Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere show that what happens in America matters for the advance of human rights and civil liberties elsewhere. … Our struggles are the world’s struggles, because the values that form our republic are universal values.” Schake was a foreign policy adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign and served as director for Defense Strategy on the National Security Council under George W. Bush. In an article titled “This Upheaval Is How America Gets Better,” Schake celebrated the violent riots of 2020: “We are now seeing America becoming better than it was. This churning, disputatious, and even sometimes violent dynamic is what social change in America looks like.” She praised the military for “modeling how to amplify black voices” while linking to a video of Dave Goldfein, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, talking about turning the force into a “safe space.”

“I used to be a smart-alecky conservative who scoffed at ‘political correctness,’” wrote Max Boot, but 2017 was “the Year I Learned About My White Privilege.” “The Trump era has opened my eyes. … I have had my consciousness raised. Seriously.” He has referred to increasing support for BLM as “a reason for optimism.” This is the man who, a month after 9/11, penned an essay for the Weekly Standard titled “The Case for American Empire” where he called for America to “embrace its imperial role.”

David Frum, the man who coined the infamously ludicrous “axis of evil” phrase as a speechwriter for George W. Bush, is a senior editor for The Atlantic, a magazine that marries Black radicalism with rabid militarism. During the wildly destructive Black Lives Matter riots it published articles with titles like “Anger Can Build a Better World” and “How Rage Can Battle Racism.” I’ve previously written that “The hegemonic ideology of America is now a mutant symbiosis of the thought of Dick Cheney and Ibram X. Kendi.” On theatlantic.com articles by Kendi and David Frum (albeit not Cheney himself) are but a click apart (Joe Biden’s Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice at the State Department recently met with Kendi and had a discussion about “the ongoing, global impact of white supremacy & the importance of collective effort across sectors to build a world where racial & ethnic equity & social justice prevail”). The New York Times, the ultimate vector of elite consensus-forming, became a home for Max Boot and Bret Stephens to call for America to act as the world police while also publishing articles like Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police – but not, of course, the military.

Jennifer Rubin, another former neocon and a deeply unserious blogger who specialises in emotion-laden hyper-partisan bluster, has performed a remarkable political one-eighty, but continues to be one of the nation’s most rabid warmongers. Rubin went from being an anti-abortion zealot to worrying “if women cannot get abortions, will the military have trouble recruiting women?” In 2011 she criticised Newt Gingrich for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the Iraq war. She wrote a blog post that called out John McCain for opposing “enhanced interrogation techniques.” More recently, Rubin has become the Biden White House’s favorite pundit.

Responding to census data, Rubin tweeted, “a more diverse, more inclusive society. this is fabulous news. Now we need to prevent minority White rule.” During the widespread riots and looting of 2020, Rubin tweeted “BLM is peaceful.” “White Christian nationalism”, by contrast, “will inevitably lead to violence, cruelty and lawlessness.” She blamed the violence of 2020 on “white agitators.” Combining both her neocon and woke credentials in a single sentence, upon the death of civil rights agitator John Lewis she claimed it “is easy to be despondent — as many were after the passing of John McCain.” Lewis’s courage, she tweeted, was “honored and echoed in the actions of BLM protesters.”

Speaking on MSNBC’s AM Joy of Trump supporters, Rubin said of the Republican Party (that she’d been a member of just a few years earlier):

What we should be doing is shunning these people. Shunning, shaming these people is a statement of moral indignation that these people are not fit for polite society.… We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again.

Rubin has shown herself more than willing to support the actual physical levelling of ideological enemies abroad, so perhaps this isn’t hyperbolic rhetoric so much as a literal policy prescription.

When the official GOP Twitter account accurately pointed out that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson supported critical race theory, Bill Kristol shot back “No more dog whistles. Just unabashed bigotry.”

Conclusion

In “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” David Frum managed to accuse those conservatives sceptical of the Iraq war of being both nativists and unpatriotic. The neocons managed to instrumentalize and exploit a redefined version of American nationalism that entangled American identity and nationalism itself with their own ideological proclivities. In that essay Frum accuses the great conservative intellectual Sam Francis of pursuing “a politics devoted to the protection of the interests of what he called the ‘Euro-American cultural core’ of the American nation,” and he condemns White advocates like Kevin MacDonald. That, in the minds of Neocons, is the very definition of unpatriotic.

Many conservatives still reflexively venerate the military. This increasingly resembles a case of battered-wife syndrome. Enoch Powell once told Margaret Thatcher that if Britain were to become communist, he would still fight for his country in war. I always regarded that as a moronic sentiment. One wonders how long Toby Keith-style nationalism can be instrumentalized for a political project that is fundamentally at odds with the interests of those actually doing the fighting and the dying. For all his faults, Trump was correct when he told Tucker Carlson that the biggest threat to the United States is no external enemy: “Who’s the biggest problem? Is it China? Could it be Russia? Could it be North Korea? No. The biggest problem is from within. It’s these sick, radical people from within.”

In a campaign video Trump reiterates, “The greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It’s ourselves.”

America won the Cold War against the Evil Empire only to one day resemble a gay, trans, racialized version of it — a woke Leviathan straddling the globe. Michael Ledeen, perhaps the most overtly deranged of all the Neoconservatives, wrote in his book War Against the Terror Masters:

We tear down the old order every day. … Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

Increasingly, that historic mission is the global spread of critical race theory and radical gender ideology. If ever it had any moral claim to police the world or export its way of life, that claim was burnt to the ground in 2020. It’s when the woke mob stops burning the American flag and starts waving it that the world really has a problem. When the moral certitude of social justice meets the impervious militarism of Neoconservatism, it will make for the most noxious and destructive brand of imperialism the world has ever seen.

May 2, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , | 5 Comments

Who Stole the 2020 US Presidential Election?

Antony Blinken and others have much to answer for

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MAY 2, 2023

The corruption engaged in by the Democratic Party leadership appears to be never-ending and no one is ever held accountable. A recent report described how Michael Morell, the former acting Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director, colluded with Antony Blinken, who was then a senior official in the 2020 Joe Biden presidential campaign, to prepare and find signatories to a letter to discredit those seeking to exploit the emerging Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which was threatening to do real damage to the Biden electoral prospects. Following in the footsteps of the Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign, which sought to use fabricated information from the Steele dossier to smear Donald Trump and some of his advisors, Blinken suggested that Morell promote the argument that the laptop story involved Russia and should be dismissed as little more than a disinformation operation ordered by President Vladimir Putin. At the time, there was no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Russia had had anything to do with spreading fabricated information regarding Hunter Biden or his laptop, but that was regarded as immaterial.

The conspiracy to use a false narrative to corruptly influence the outcome of the election, for that is what it was, was recently revealed in testimony by Morell to the House Judiciary Committee, led by Republican Representative Jim Jordan. Morell described how he had been instrumental in convincing 50 other former colleagues in the intelligence and national security community to sign on to the letter that he had drafted. Morell told the committee that Blinken acting for the Biden campaign helped to strategize about the timing and distribution for the public release of the letter and he described how his two objectives in drafting and releasing the statement was “to help then-Vice President Biden in the upcoming presidential debate and assist him in winning the election.”

Presumably Morell, known for his ambition and ruthlessness, may have expected Biden to appoint him head of the CIA when it came time to hand out rewards after the election was over. Concerning his own political ambitions and inclinations, one recalls how in 2016 Morell wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that was picked up nationally which headlined “I ran the CIA: now I’m endorsing Hillary Clinton.”

By virtue of exploiting his own top level connections inside the Agency, five of Morell’s letter’s signatories were former Directors of the CIA. The letter included the assertion by the signatories that they were “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case… If we are right this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.” It concluded that the laptop allegations exhibited “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

After the letter was prepared, Blinken advised Morell on its most advantageous timing, selecting a date close to the election so it would have maximum impact. The laptop story itself had appeared in the New York Post on October 14th, revealing emails demonstrating how the Vice President Joe Biden appeared to have pressured Ukrainian officials into firing a prosecutor who was investigating corruption in the energy company Burisma. Joe met with a top company official, which led to the granting of a sinecure position on the Burisma board to his influence peddling son Hunter, which paid him $50,000 per month. Material also included on the laptop revealed Hunter’s moral turpitude and drug use.

The Morell rebuttal appeared in Politico five days later, two weeks before the election, on October 19th, and was picked up by the mainstream media all over the United States. Joe Biden also used the material in his debate with Trump on October 22nd, accusing Moscow of targeting his son in an elaborate propaganda operation, claiming that the laptop story was “garbage” and part of a “Russian plan.” Biden referred to the many signatures on the intelligence community letter to declare that “nobody believes” that the laptop is real. And the denial did have a genuine impact on the campaign. After the Morell letter appeared, nearly all major social and news media platforms that had allowed linking to or discussion of the Hunter laptop story either censored the material completely or limited access to it while also posting warnings that the tale had been debunked by knowledgeable experts. Also to be considered is how the Blinken-Morell letter fueled the false perception that Russia and Putin were supporting Trump through clandestine and underhanded means.

Investigative journalist Jim Bovard, writing in the New York Post, reports ironically how Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the closing speech at last month’s Summit for Democracy “piously proclaimed” that “As President Biden has said, democracy doesn’t happen by accident. ‘It requires constant effort.’” And shortly after he became Secretary of State, Blinken had had the nerve to claim that the US government doesn’t sweep problems “under the rug… We deal with them in the daylight, with full transparency.” Indeed, Blinken may have been rewarded by Biden with his cabinet position after his successful plausibly illegal intervention. Also apparently rewarded was a signatory on the Morell letter – Avril Haines who is now Director of National Intelligence.

To be sure, the “honorable” Secretary of State Antony Blinken should now be instead offering his resignation over the exposure of his blatant and possibly successful attempt to change the outcome of an election by conspiring to corrupt the electoral process with false information to sway voters. Bovard opines how the Morell letter defused what had become “the biggest threat to the Biden presidential campaign … Polls show that Biden would have lost the election if the media had accurately reported the contents of that laptop.”

And there’s more to the Hunter Biden story and the corrupt hand of government. An IRS employee has recently turned whistleblower and stated that his Agency has been moving sluggishly on an investigation of Hunter regarding tax evasion relating to foreign income derived largely from Ukraine and China. And he claims that another senior Biden appointed official is involved in the politically motivated foot dragging. No less than Attorney General Merrick Garland has been identified as the unnamed senior official whose sworn testimony to a congressional committee is being challenged in a letter from the whistleblower’s attorney alleging a cover-up of the Hunter Biden criminal investigation. Attorney Mark Lytle wrote that the longtime IRS employee would like to provide information to congressional leaders to “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee” — now identified as Garland — and also to provide details of claimed “preferential treatment” in the criminal probe of Hunter.

One more tale just might illustrate where this country is going under Joe Biden and company, where party and personal interests are all that matter to a leadership which regards “integrity” as a dirty word. In fact, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech or writing that in any way challenges its power, exposes its corruption, reveals its lies, and encourages the citizenry to resist government overreach. The Biden Administration has recently indicted four Americans and charged them with conspiracy to spread Russian propaganda and acting as unregistered Russian agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938. The four are members of the African People’s Socialist Party, which has criticized and opposed US foreign policy since 1971 and currently is against Washington’s promotion of the war against Russia in Ukraine. They potentially face 15 years in prison. This exploitation of quite plausibly unconstitutional “lawfare” is nothing new, as in my own experience the Justice (sic) Department has been moving to silence Americans who write for Russian news sites by threatening them with huge fines or even imprisonment. It is a tendency that is unfortunately not unique to any particular presidential administration which has been building since 9/11, though it has become far worse under Joe Biden and Merrick Garland. In no cases that I know of have any of those pressured or accused actually been receiving direction or secret benefits from the Russian government.

That all means that the definition of illegal speech or writing has been considerably broadened of late. The Biden Administration has been actively waging a campaign to eradicate what it chooses to call “disinformation,” to include those who allegedly share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” with terrorists. It is, in fact, the United States government that is the world’s largest purveyor of disinformation, to include adopting the Israeli practice of defining anyone who resists US hegemony as a terrorist. For example, that is how the Justice Department labels white so-called supremacists as “domestic terrorists.”

And, of course, the government is being assisted and protected due to the fact that nearly all the negative stories about Biden and his crew have predictably been suppressed by the mainstream media, which has become a de facto a partner of the White House disinformation program. Consider, for example, the Seymour Hersh revelations about the hideous “act of war” Nord Stream pipeline destruction and the corruption in Ukraine, or the revelation of disinformation regarding the war in Ukraine itself exposed by leaker Jack Teixeira, or the biolabs in Ukraine, or the incessant lies denigrating Russia and its leadership. And where does one go to for any legitimate criticism of the reckless White House driven direct engagement in Ukraine that could go nuclear even though it is in support of no real national interest? Or the thoughtless threatening of China over Taiwan? And how about the State Department using overseas Embassies to promote “woke-ism” rather than protecting American travelers and interests? All these stories are targeted and diminished deliberately, gone or going, never to be seen again.

So it should surprise no one that the White House and media are right now trying to kill the exposure of how Blinken and Morell turned around the story of the Hunter laptop because that would confirm suspicions that Joe Biden may have actually stolen the 2020 election. And the back story is that the fabricated material planted by the Clinton and Biden campaigns in 2016 and 2020 only succeeded because of the media’s surrender of its traditional role as an exposer of government crimes and evasions. The phony Morell intelligence letter and its possible consequences is a scandal of huge proportions that would once upon a time have ended in resignations, impeachment, and plenty of jail time for all of those involved but Michael Morell and Antony Blinken have not even been touched or even interviewed by the FBI. Nor have the other fifty national security puppets who signed off onto claims made in a document that they must have known to be fabricated for political reasons experienced any discomfort. They have no shame and are all disgraces to the oath of loyalty to the Constitution that they once swore. And the real danger is that if the clueless government and media continue to be able to bury stories they do not approve of, the United States will cease to be a functioning democracy and every election will be little more than a farce.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

May 2, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Whither Ukraine’s counteroffensive?

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | MAY 2, 2023 

The month of May has arrived but without the long-awaited Ukrainian “counteroffensive”. The western media is speculating that it may come by late May. There is also the  spin that Kiev is judicious to “buy time.” 

The chances of Ukraine making some sort of  “breakthrough” in the 950-km long Russian frontline cannot be ruled out but a Russian counteroffensive is all but certain to follow. An open-ended war will not suit Western powers.

Last week, NATO’s top commander, US Army General Christopher Cavoli stated that the Russian army operating in Ukraine is larger than when the Kremlin launched its special military operation and the Ukrainians “have to be better than the Russian force they will face” and decide when and where they will strike.

Cavoli said Russia has strategic depth in manpower and has only lost one warship and about 80 fighters and tactical bombers in an air fleet numbering about 1,000 so far. The general gently contradicted Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chief of General Staff Gen. Mark Milley who have been propagating that Russia is on the brink of defeat.

Speaking at the House panel on Wednesday, Gen. Cavoli said, “This war is far from over.” On Thursday, he went further to tell the Senate, “I think [the Russians] can fight another year.” At the House hearing, Cavoli also said Russian submarine activity has only picked up in the North Atlantic since the beginning of the war and none of the Kremlin’s strategic nuclear forces have been affected by operations in Ukraine.

He said at one point in his written testimony, “Russian air, maritime, space, cyber, and strategic forces have not suffered significant degradation in the current war. Moreover, Russia will likely rebuild its future Army into a sizeable and more capable land force… Russia retains a vast stockpile of deployed and non-deployed nuclear weapons, which present an existential threat to the US.” 

Clearly, the entire narrative of lies and obfuscation created by the neocons in the Biden Administration through the past year has unravelled. The balance sheet shows there is nothing to justify the massive amount of aid to Ukraine through the past one-year period — in excess of $100 billion dollars, which is pro rata vastly more than what the US had spent in the twenty years of war in Afghanistan. 

Gen. Cavoli’s testimony came soon after the leaked Pentagon documents recently, which has presented a grim picture of the state of Kiev’s military preparedness and the Biden Administration’s lack of confidence in the Zelensky regime.

The Pentagon documents echoed, in effect, a January study titled Avoiding a Long War by the RAND Corporation, which recommended that “the paramount US interest in minimising escalation risks should increase the US interest in avoiding a long war (in Ukraine).  In short, the consequences of a long war — ranging from persistent elevated risks to economic damage — far outweigh the possible benefits.” 

Indeed, it appears that there is a significant stream of dissenting opinion within the US security and defence establishment, which estimates that President Biden has taken the US on a disastrous policy trajectory that is fated to have a calamitous outcome — a humiliating defeat in Ukraine that may damage the NATO alliance, weaken the transatlantic system and erode the US’ credibility as a global power. 

Well-informed veterans of the US intelligence community regard the leaking of Pentagon documents itself as a mini-mutiny. The former CIA analyst Ray McGovern told China’s CGTN, “I believe it could be that some senior policymakers in the Pentagon at the highest reaches of the Department of Defence have decided, ‘You know, it’s a fool’s errand in Ukraine. Maybe, we got to get out the truth. Maybe, we got to expose people like Joint Chief of Staff Milley and Secretary Austin for the lies they have told about Ukrainian progress and Russians being just pulverised. And, maybe, that will stop this widening of the war.’ ”

The well-known former CIA analyst Larry Johnson shares the same view. He wrote: “This looks like a controlled, directed leak… the leaked material is not random intelligence material. It is designed to tell several stories. The most prominent is the deterioration of Ukrainian capabilities and the major obstacles confronting the United States and the rest of NATO in supplying badly needed air defence, artillery shells, artillery pieces and tanks. In other words, Ukraine is going to crash and burn.”

Johnson added, “Let me suggest one possibility for this leak — create a predicate for forcing Joe Biden from office. The revelations in the classified documents are not fabrications designed to deceive the Russians. Nor are they the kind of material to rally more U.S. support for pouring more resources into the black hole of Ukraine. These leaks feed the meme that the Biden team is incompetent and endangering American interests overseas.”  

Make no mistake, such coup attempts by the Deep State are nothing new in US presidential history — Eisenhower was undercut when he sought détente the Soviet Union; a whole corpus of materials available today suggests that CIA framed Nixon in the Watergate affair. Today, all this is happening against the backdrop of President Biden seeking a second term in the 2024 election.

As for Zelensky himself, he is acutely conscious that success or failure of his “counteroffensive” will be critical for continued western support. All things taken into account, a messy diplomatic scenario is looming ahead, one that would also open up divisions between western countries, and in which China could play a more important role. 

There is no guarantee that public support for Biden’s proxy war would hold through the 2024 election. Suffice to say, it is  increasingly doubtful whether Biden will sacrifice his presidency over the Ukraine war. These are of course early days. A large ship needs a big arc for turnaround. 

The Russians are taking their decisions on the basis of their own assessments. There has been a perceptible scaling up of Russian strikes against Ukrainian military facilities. Massive strikes deep into the Ukrainian military’s rear areas have been reported.

An attack on Sunday on railroad infrastructure and depots for ammunition and fuel in Pavlograd, a major communication hub near Ukraine’s fourth-largest city of Dnepropetrovsk, was particularly devastating. The Ukrainian troops had been accumulating in Pavlograd for an offensive toward Zaporozhye. Two S-300 missile divisions were destroyed.

Over the weekend, former president Dmitry Medvedev wrote on Telegram that Russia should seek “mass destruction” of Ukrainian personnel and military equipment”; deal a “maximum military defeat” on the Armed Forces of Ukraine; strive for “the complete defeat of the enemy and the final overthrow of the Nazi regime in Kiev with the complete demilitarisation of the entire territory of the former Ukraine”; and press ahead with reprisals against key figures of the Zelensky government, regardless of their location, and without limits.”

Medvedev added, “Otherwise, they will not calm down… and the war will drag on for a long time. Our country doesn’t need that.” The mood has turned ugly and the conflict is set to take a vicious turn, as diplomacy has run aground completely.

May 2, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , | 1 Comment

Murdoch Spoke on Phone With Zelenskyy Weeks Before Tucker Carlson Left Fox News

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | May 2, 2023

More speculation as to the reason behind Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News is raging after it was revealed that Rupert Murdoch held a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy weeks beforehand.

Some have argued that Carlson’s vehement opposition to the United States’ deepening involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict was a primary reason as to why he left the network.

Indeed, as we highlighted last week, members of the military-industrial complex celebrated the Fox News host’s departure, with one senior DoD official declaring, “good riddance!”

Now it turns out that Murdoch had been in communication with Zelenskyy back in March.

“Fox News Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch held a previously unreported call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this spring in which the two discussed the war and the anniversary of the deaths of Fox News journalists last March,” reports Semafor.

“The Ukrainian president had a similar conversation with Lachlan Murdoch on March 15, which Zelenskyy noted in a little-noticed aside during a national broadcast last month.”

“The conversations came weeks before the Murdochs fired their biggest star and most outspoken critic of American support for Ukraine, Tucker Carlson. Senior Ukrainian officials had made their objections to Carlson’s coverage known to Fox executives, but Zelenskyy did not raise it on the calls with the Murdochs, according to one person familiar with the details of the calls.”

The report also notes that Carlson had previously described Zelenskyy as a “dictator” and that him leaving Fox has now relieved pressure on Republicans who have vehemently supported Ukraine.

As Chris Menahan points out, at around the same time of the Murdoch-Zelensky phone call, Tucker told Redacted host Clayton Morris that he felt he may be fired for his stance on Ukraine.

“I’m saying what I really think and I think it really really matters and if I get fired for it, I don’t know what to say, I’m not going to change,” Carlson said.

He also revealed that a top boss at Fox News texted him to say, “For the record, I really disagree with you on Ukraine!”

Carlson’s opposition to big pharma corruption has also been cited as a reason for his dismissal, given the jaw-dropping amount of advertising money news networks make from pharmaceutical companies.

May 2, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 1 Comment

U.K. Could Lose 75% of its Energy Supply by 2050

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MAY 2, 2023

The United Kingdom is likely to have barely a quarter of the energy in 2050 promised by the Government and its Climate Change Committee if all the legal obligations of Net Zero are followed. This shocking news is forecast by the latest energy review recently published by U.K. FIRES. Government-funded U.K FIRES writes that the “whole excitement” of its project has been to recognise that such a shortfall is close to a certain reality. Excitement is not perhaps a word that comes immediately to mind when contemplating Britain’s almost certain economic and societal collapse.

As we have noted before in the Daily Sceptic, UK FIRES bases its recommendations on the brutal, and many would argue, honest reality of Net Zero. It does not assume that technological processes still to be perfected, or even invented, will somehow lead to minimal disturbance in comfortable industrialised lifestyles. Speaking to architects in 2021 at a RIBA climate conference, UK FIRES leader, Cambridge-based Professor Julian Allwood, said the UK Net Zero strategy is as unrealistic as “magic beans fertilised by unicorn’s blood”.

It can be argued that the £5 million of taxpayer funding to UK FIRES is money well spent since its honest Net Zero appraisals contrast with the fanciful stories and deceit that surround many other claims by Net Zero promoters.

The above graph shows how UK FIRES expects only one quarter of electrical power to be available in 2050, compared with all other forecasts. By 2050, electrical power will be the primary source of all energy. It notes that all other scenarios depend on negative emissions technologies such as carbon capture to deal with ‘residual emissions’ – shown in the graph in orange. UK FIRES notes that it reflects the reality that to date no such technologies are operating in the UK, and therefore it states that by 2050, “we should continue to anticipate that they would not exist”.

Allwood, and his colleagues from a number of universities including Oxford and Imperial College, are dismissive of many of the proposed Net Zero mitigation technologies, noting, for instance, that biofuels are unsustainable since they threaten biodiversity. In 2021, Allwood observed that delivering Net Zero by 2050 “will require governments to utilise all available abatement opportunities, yet current policy largely ignores socially-driven mitigation in favour of technological innovation in the energy sector”

In plainer English, these government driven social “abatement opportunities” might reference the World Economic Forum’s advice that you will eat bugs, own nothing, and, it need hardly be added, be happy. As we have previously reported, UK FIRES promotes a world with no flying and shipping by 2050, drastic cuts in home heating, bans on beef and lamb consumption, and a ruthless purge on traditional building materials such as bricks, glass, steel and cement, to be replaced with materials such as “rammed earth”.

The UK Government is committed to reducing emissions by 68% from 1990 to 2030. Most of the easy cuts have been made with a switch from coal to gas, and the offshoring of a great deal of British manufacturing capacity. But the easy cuts, and the ubiquitous virtue signalling that goes with them, have ended. To comply with legal requirements going forward a massive ramp up of green energy is required, and there is little evidence that it is occurring.

The above graph from Atkins ‘Engineering Net Zero’ is referenced by the UK FIRES energy report. It analyses the build rates required to deliver the energy infrastructure predicted by the Climate Change Committee. There has, of course, been some building of renewable power sources in the last ten years, – wind and solar taxpayer subsidies of £12 billion a year for providing about 5% of total energy needs, attests to that – but nothing to suggest the build can ramp up to the required levels to even try to keep society functioning. Allwood notes that the correct interpretation of this graph is that it isn’t going to happen. “There is no possibility of this level of energy infrastructure being built by 2035, and if anything approaching this rate of construction is to happen beyond then, the public financing commitment needs to be made right now, before the next election.”

Mainstream media is very keen on horrific climate stories, but UK FIRES predictions are more or less ignored – presumably on the grounds they are the wrong type of Net Zero scares. But UK FIRES seems keen to scare the horses, noting that in articulating and promoting what it calls “opportunities”, it is aiming to open up “a more credible pathway to delivering zero emissions in reality”.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

May 2, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Is the US about to conduct a nuclear false flag in Ukraine and blame Russia for it?

By Drago Bosnic | May 2, 2023

The United States is the only country in history to have used all three types of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, chemical), starting with the atomic bombings of Japan in the closing months of the Second World War to mass usage of chemical and biological weapons against numerous other countries it has attacked ever since (particularly Vietnam). And yet, the belligerent thalassocracy just adores chest-thumping about its supposed “morality” and even “warns” that its geopolitical adversaries are about to use such weapons (naturally, without ever providing any evidence). This is precisely what’s been happening in Ukraine in recent weeks.

On April 28, one of the most prominent neoliberal mouthpieces, the New York Times, ran a story about America setting up numerous radiation sensors across Ukraine in order to detect nuclear blasts. The NYT claims that “such sensors can detect‌‌ bursts of radiation from a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb and can confirm the identity of the attacker”. It adds that “the goal is to make sure that if Russia detonates a radioactive weapon on Ukrainian soil, its atomic signature and Moscow’s culpability could be verified”, further claiming that “…experts have worried about whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would use nuclear arms in combat for the first time since the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945″.

Firstly, it should be noted that Russia has a very clear doctrine about the usage of WMDs in an armed conflict, one that has even been updated recently and that states in what sort of situations Moscow would use such weapons. The Ukrainian conflict is still nowhere near a point where Russian WMDs could be used. Secondly, the Russian military dominates the battlefield, inflicting enormous losses on the Kiev regime forces. Even in the case of the much-touted offensive against newly integrated Russian regions in the Donbass and former southern Ukraine, Russia wouldn’t use nuclear weapons. However, the NYT claims precisely that is the case, supposedly because Russia is “desperate” to stop the attack.

Expectedly, “experts” the NYT allegedly spoke to are anonymous and they claim that the goal is to “prevent Russia from conducting a possible dirty bomb false flag in Ukraine”. The operation is officially run by the Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), part of the Nation Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Interestingly, the NYT notes, citing a 2009 book “Defusing Armageddon” by Jeffrey T. Richelson, that “the NEST often teamed up with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), an elite military unit so secretive that the Pentagon for years refused to acknowledge its existence”. It should be noted that JSOC is being used to conduct covert operations of all kinds across the world, including false flags.

So, according to these so-called “experts”, we are supposed to believe that US agencies and military units involved in actual false flag operations around the globe will prevent an alleged “Russian false flag” and not use the opportunity to conduct yet another covert op to fake such an event and then blame Russia for it? The NYT itself claims that “Moscow could falsely claim that Kyiv set off a nuclear blast on the battlefield to try to draw the West into deeper war assistance” and that “…in theory, with the sensor network in place, Washington would be able to point to its own nuclear attribution analyses to reveal that Moscow was in fact the attacker”.

The NYT then parrots the usual about Russia’s supposed “battlefield failures” that are “making Mr. Putin, if anything, more dependent on his nuclear arsenal” and how this “could increase his willingness to pull the nuclear trigger”. Even though such claims are laughable to anyone familiar with the actual situation on the battlefield, in the minds of rabid Russophobes this makes “perfect sense”. In addition, recent weeks have seen a dramatic surge in the Kiev regime’s attacks on civilians not only in the Donbass and other newly integrated Russian regions, but also in areas such as Bryansk and Belgorod oblasts (regions), with dozens of civilian casualties.

All this would be used to push the narrative that Russia could indeed be the alleged culprit behind a dirty bomb false flag. On the other hand, back in October last year, when Moscow warned that the Kiev regime might use a dirty bomb and then blame Russia for it, the political West rejected it all as a “conspiracy theory”. According to their “logic”, it’s only Russia that could do such a thing, because the Neo-Nazi junta, as a “true beacon of freedom and democracy”, certainly has the “moral high ground”. Additionally, the mainstream propaganda machine usually claims that the Kiev regime doesn’t have the capacity to create dirty bombs, so it allegedly couldn’t do it even if it wanted to.

However, recent reports about “sensitive US nuclear technologies” in (former) Ukrainian nuclear power plants (NPPs) show such claims are patently false. Russia controls one of such NPPs, but still hasn’t disclosed what sort of covert US support the Neo-Nazi junta got. Washington DC itself has “demanded” Moscow to return these “sensitive US nuclear technologies”, meaning they are worried about what might be revealed to the world. It’s not unlikely Russia is keeping the evidence secret for the time being as a possible deterrent to US and Kiev regime’s plan on detonating such a device and then blaming Moscow, which could simply reveal the evidence in case a dirty bomb is used.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

May 2, 2023 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | 4 Comments

BE CAREFUL NOT TO “ACCIDENTALLY” DISABLE ANY ROBOT POLICE DOGS

AntiNWO | April 23, 2023

Meryl Nass:

There are dozens of ways those fierce-looking $75,000 robocop dogs invented by Boston Dynamics can be disabled. And many of these methods would probably disable other robotic, anti-human machines. Which is why you must watch this.

May 2, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment