This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.
Donald Trump will become the 47th president of the United States and given the host of global debacles the US has its hands in—ranging from the genocide in Gaza, to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Iran to the Ukraine war—nobody is quite certain what direction the country will take with the former president at the helm again.
Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. With his extensive insights and expertise into the Middle East and American foreign policy, Wilkerson provides a valuable understanding into what a Trump presidency may look like outside of the borders of America.
Wilkerson predicts Trump will stay true to “his disdain for war,” emphasizing “it's genuine. I don't think he likes war. I don't think he likes starting wars.” Regarding Ukraine, Wilkerson thinks Trump will shut down the war effort. But when it comes to the Middle East, that commitment clashes with one of Trump’s long standing loyalties: unwavering support for Israel.
War with Iran seems increasingly likely by the day despite, according to Wilkerson, resistance from the Pentagon and prior administrations. In the case of Trump, however, “you wonder how long that resistance can hold up if the president of the United States is intent on—and this is the one place where Trump really worries me—doing everything in his power for Israel,” Wilkerson notes. He adds, “Trump has made it quite clear that that's his policy, that's his belief, and I think he's being honest about it.”
Citing war-game simulations, reports, personal sources as well as his own expertise, Wilkerson lays down the reality of potential war with Iran: sheer disaster. With sources saying that the IDF is already taking heavy casualties in Lebanon, any sort of escalation with Iran would compound the suffering of the US and Israel. “Iran will top $10 trillion, take 10 years to pacify, if it's even moderately pacified, and cost a fortune in blood and treasure,” Wilkerson warns.
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, retired and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is a Vietnam War veteran, who attended Airborne School, Ranger School and the Naval War College, and who as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam logged over 1,000 hours on combat missions. He went on to serve as deputy director of the Marine Corps War College at Quantico and was executive Assistant to Admiral Stewart A. Ring, United States Navy Pacific Command and Director of the United States Marine Corps War College. His disillusionment with the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East followed the revelations of detainee abuse, the ineptitude of post-invasion planning for Iraq and the secretive decision-making by the Bush administration that led to the invasion of Iraq. At a congressional hearing recorded on C-SPAN in June 2005, he gave his analysis of the Iraq war's motivation: "'I use the acronym OIL,' he said, 'O for oil, I for Israel and L for the logistical base necessary or deemed necessary by the so-called neocons – and it reeks through all their documents – the logistical base whereby the United States and Israel could dominate that area of the world.'" Wilkerson has said that the speech Powell made before the United Nations on February 5, 2003—which laid out a case for war with Iraq—included falsehoods of which he and Powell had never been made aware. "My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life,” he has said. “I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council." He called the U.N. presentation "probably the biggest mistake of my life.” He has taught at the College of William & Mary and George Washington University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, a group of former military, intelligence and civilian national security officials who describe themselves as offering "alternative analyses untainted by Pentagon or defense industry ties" and countering "Washington’s establishment narrative on most national security issues of the day." Joining me to discuss U.S. foreign policy, the conflicts raging in the Middle East, including the genocide in Gaza, and the fate of the American empire is Lawrence Wilkerson.
Let's begin with the election and its effect. I mean, you saw the intelligence community, Milley, all sorts of figures essentially joined the Democratic campaign in support of Kamala Harris. Let's talk about why Trump triggers such deep animus within the Pentagon and the intelligence community, and what you see happening during a second Trump administration.
Lawrence Wilkerson
I think the animus was created—within my community anyway, I still call it that, the Pentagon, the military in general—because they don't see any concerted effort on his part to express a strategic appraisal that agrees with theirs. Theirs being the one most parroted by the New York Times, for example, and others of their ilk, who are simply spokespersons for the military industrial complex and for the national security state, which we have most assuredly become. And so they're worried about anyone who would come in and threaten to break the china. And that's what Trump that's what his forte is, starting to break the china. And they're very protective of their china, just as are the national security agencies in general and the 16, I guess it's 16 now, entities that we have that are supposed to be our intelligence eyes and ears, led by the CIA. Not led by the DNI, because he still has no real power over the CIA, but led by the CIA. I would say Bill Burns is the most powerful guy in the United States with regard to intelligence and what goes to the White House and what doesn't go to the White House. So that's part of the reason they just don't know this guy, except from the first term. And the first term would not, through Kelly and Milley and other people's eyes, give you much hope if you were a Pentagon member of the bureaucracy, if you will. The second reason, I think, is because he's so mercurial. He's all over the map, and the military doesn't like that at all. They like constancy, even if it's incorrect constancy. They prefer constancy to change and mercurial nature. And I think that's a problem with them. And there's a third reason too, and that is that they're worried about what I call Christian nationalism, some of them anyway, others are aiding and abetting it. And what that means, in essence, is not just this far flung, but very ripe and alive effort by certain Christian groups in America to make Christianity the national religion, to change the Constitution in that effect, or to discard the Constitution with regard to religion, but they're worried that they have flag officers in the military who are very much Christian nationalists. We have an occasion right now that we're looking at it, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey Weinstein's group out in New Mexico, where the [inaudible], the three star general who is the chief of personnel, the personnel man for the Chief of Staff of the Army is married to a woman who rolls in the aisle and speaks in tongues. And Mikey's obtained a video of this general in uniform being at one of her gatherings with this group. That's just the surface, if you will. There are people like General Flynn, for example, who are still in the military. So that's disconcerting for the bulk of the military that doesn't subscribe to this theory or this desire to do away with the Constitution when it comes to freedom of religion. Those things are bothering them, and Trump has shown a propensity to use the Christian movement in this country for political gain and to not have much in the way of regard for what that might mean otherwise. So that's disturbing.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, I graduated from Harvard Divinity School and wrote a book on the Christian right a little over a decade ago, called American Fascist: The Christian Right and the War on America. And of course, I know Mikey's work well. Let's just unpack that. Why do they see Christian nationalism—it's interesting that you raise that as an issue—why do they see that as such an important issue? Just explain, in their vision, and perhaps yours, how that could roll out in a really negative way. You're
Lawrence Wilkerson
You're talking about the way the military looks at it, yeah, at least those who aren't... Yeah, I think they're most concerned about it in terms of what it might mean for the tyranny that would have to come along with it, and they're having to enforce that tyranny, because if you make Christianity the national religion, and that's their ultimate goal, is to not just put Bibles in classrooms and stop abortions completely, not those social issues that always loom up, and paint them with their brush. The secret that they want no one to know until it happens is they do want Christianity to be the national religion. In that regard, we even have a branch of American Catholics who are working on this. If you look closely at what's happened in the last 50 years, in particular, with the Catholic Church. My wife was Catholic, so I'm aware of some of the things in the Catholic church that I wouldn't have been aware of had she not been. She's passed away now. But if you look closely at it, there is this behind the scenes movement in America to create an American Catholic Church. We don't like it being in Rome, its head being in Rome. We don't like Francis in particular. We despise Francis. And when I say, "we" I'm using a rhetorical device to describe these people. We'd like to have our own Pope and our own Catholic Church. And there are people, some would say, one or two on the Supreme Court right now, are of that mind too, and would work for that, or might be working for that, were they given the occasion to do so. You put that together, that Roman Catholicism, Opus Dei like Roman Catholicism, and the other people who are, for example, like John Hagee fund funding millions of dollars to West Bank settlers in Israel, even now. And you've got a real fear on the part of rational military people, this might get out of hand Be more specific, in what way? If you make Christianity the national religion, and you do all the things that you would have to do, constitutionally and otherwise, or just totally disregard the Constitution in that process. What you get, as we have just seen probably enough Americans behind you to do it, then you have a whole different ball game for the military. Because the military then is called on, domestically and otherwise, and most Americans don't understand the domestic missions that the Army in particular, but the military in general, has to defend that, and they don't want to. They think that's fractious, they think that's unconstitutional. They think that's something that would cause more harm than good. And I'm glad to say that there are still some people like that left in my military.
Chris Hedges
Well I mean, Trump has an ideological void, of course, but we saw in his first term that he filled it with these Christian nationalists or Christian fascists, Betsy DeVos, Mike, Pence, Bill Barr and others. Certainly it appears that they will fill that void again. I want to talk about Ukraine.
Lawrence Wilkerson
Let me add one other thing. This is not just Trump. Remember, I served in the George W. Bush administration. I cannot tell you how many times I had to deal with the White House personnel office over such things as this man can't go to Iraq. Why can't he go to Iraq? Why can't he serve in Iraq? He's not a Christian. Talk about counterintuitive.
Chris Hedges
Let's talk about Ukraine. I mean, Trump has deviated from the establishment consensus on Ukraine, I never understood, perhaps you can unpack it for me, the whole Ukraine policy, other than as a kind of proxy war to degrade the Russian military and isolate Putin. I was in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down as a reporter. I was there when the promises were made to Gorbachev not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany. And of course, as you know, the Soviet Union had to acquiesce to the reunification of Germany. And that was the promise made. And I'm not defending the invasion, obviously, of Ukraine, but we certainly baited the Russians and Putin. But let's talk about Ukraine. I don't see how any military strategist seriously could think that in a war of attrition, the Ukrainians could dominate, but explain what's happening and then how you see if there isn't going to be a difference, how you see a difference in a Trump administration's policy towards Ukraine and Russia.
Lawrence Wilkerson
Let me say, first I was there too. I was special assistant to Chairman Powell, and the change that took place with the advent of Bill Clinton was absolutely disastrous, and I attribute to William Jefferson Clinton a lot of the problems we're living with today, including the violation, major violation of that promise not to expand NATO. That's a longer story, better enough for another time. I think what we're looking at in Ukraine vis a vis Trump, or Trump vis a vis Ukraine, is his—and I think Doug McGregor, for example, is right about this, I just watched him on Judge Napolitano's show—is his disdain for war. I think it's genuine. I don't think he likes war. I don't think he likes starting wars. I don't think he would be a president who... He'll go off and kill someone like the Iranian IRGC member or other people whom he's told are terrorists or whatever. But I don't think he wants war. [inaudible] war, and so he's willing to shut down Ukraine. Now there's another reason too. I think he detests NATO for different reasons than I. I don't like NATO much either. I think it's well beyond its sell by date. And he sees NATO as being—and he's right in this—as being an aider and abettor, Brussels is, of the war in Ukraine, as Washington is, led by that perfidious [inaudible]. And so he wants to shut that down. And I think his ultimate goal is to not abandon NATO per force, but he wants to get the United States out of its relationship with NATO, which he thinks we pay for everything we do, all the heavy lifting they do very little. Come back to the United States, as it were, and say you've got our nuclear envelope, but everything else you do because we're not with you anymore, and of course, save the money that that saves too. I think it was part of his first term, and he just didn't get to do it the way he wanted to do it. So those, I think, are the major reasons that he will be positive with regard to Ukraine. Because you're right, Ukraine is a disaster right now. Yeah, and most apparently, for Ukraine, they're dying by the dozens every day now, and they have no people left. They're having difficulty, they're having to impress young people, bring them into the military to get them to fight. And they're lucky if they don't desert within the first week, because either going over to the Russians or running away wherever they can go. It's a disaster. And we don't have generals in the Pentagon saying this. Now we have Lloyd Austin, he's right there with Joe Biden. But we don't have generals in the Pentagon, in my view, anyway, who are expressing these kinds of views that generals on the outside are expressing like David Petraeus and Barnes and other generals, who are saying, well, Russia is losing. They're lying through their teeth. They're lying through their teeth, either that or they're just stupid and incredibly dumb, really, not just stupid. So I think Trump would shut that down. And I'm looking forward to that. I hope he does. I hope he shuts it down forth with,
Chris Hedges
Well, they should have read the history of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin would send out a million men who would either get captured or die, and then he'd just send out another million, kind of the Putin strategy.
Lawrence Wilkerson
And people don't realize that the Wehrmacht—right after it invaded, really, the first 14 months—began to lose almost immediately, partly because of its repine as it moved along, it made enemies of everyone in its path, even Napoleon wasn't that stupid. And partly because they overextended and partly because the rule of thumb that Hitler thought would work, his food minister told him it would work, that all that food coming from Ukraine and the steps of Russia would feed not only the Wehrmacht forces going that way, but Germany, too didn't come true.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, that's because the Russians destroyed everything, scorched earth policy, we can do another show on World War II, which I have an obsession with, but he also split his forces because of Stalingrad. Let's talk about the Middle East. What will be the difference between a Biden administration and a Trump administration vis a vis the genocide in Gaza, in Lebanon, the attacks in Lebanon, which I want you to talk about, because they're not going particularly well for Israel. And then this knife's edge we're sitting on between Israel and Iran.
Lawrence Wilkerson
I could get very complicated and complex here and try to describe what I think is going on over there, and I've made as much of an effort as probably anyone in this country to keep up with it. But let me just say right now what I'm concerned about with Trump coming in. I'm concerned about something happening between the time that this is all consolidated, which won't be long, apparently, and the inauguration and what the Biden administration does this.
Chris Hedges
Let me just interrupt you, Larry, what do you mean by consolidated?
Lawrence Wilkerson
Well, there's going to be some court cases and other things, I'm sure, but it's going to be pretty quick. I think, because the margin of victory is so great. May look razor thin, but it's pretty great, from what I've seen, popular vote and electoral college. So all those things that the election task force I was a member of, for example, were worried about with a razor thin margin aren't going to happen. So we're going to get satisfied, and the votes to the Electoral College, and the process complete pretty quickly. I don't think the Democrats will be like the Republicans would be had it been the other way around. And I'm a Republican, so I can get away with saying that. I'm worried about what's going to happen because I think Bibi [Netanyahu] is still intent, and firing Yoav Gallant was indicative of this par excellence. He's still intent on going after Iran, but he's intent on the United States going with him. And the force deployments that we've made, the force deployments we're making right now, the number of troops we're sending actually to Israel right now, indicates to me that we are cognizant of this fact. We might not be yet ready to go along with it, but we are cognizant of it to the point where we're putting the forces in place that we think will be necessary. I think we're wrong. I think we're going to get our rear ends handed to us if we do what Netanyahu wants to do with regard to Iran, which is full bore war. We're going to find out how weak we are when we do it. If Iraq and Afghanistan weren't sufficient, this will certainly seal the deal. But I'm worried about this interim period, and what the Biden administration might actually do in this interim period, not just to do what Bibi wants them to do, and what I think Joe Biden is inclined to do, but to mess Trump up. I mean, what better way than for the inauguration takes place while we're involved in a huge war in the Middle East, and it would be a huge war if we go at it big time the way Bibi wants, and we discover immediately that we can't do what we think we're going to do in a short period of time. It's the old bugaboo again. You know, air power, air power, air power, air power is not going to defeat Iran. It is not going to stop their nuclear program, it's not going to defeat them. So you wind up with a choice, you either invade or you stop. And that's not much of a choice, very bad choice, as a matter of fact.
Chris Hedges
So my understanding is the Pentagon was always reticent. They did not want, they blocked, I mean, there was a huge push in the interim between Bush and Obama to go to war with Iran and you know more about it than I do, my understanding is the Pentagon just said absolutely not.
Lawrence Wilkerson
They are saying that now, but you wonder how long that resistance can hold up if the president the United States is intent on—and this is the one place where Trump really worries me—doing everything in his power for Israel. And Trump has made it quite clear that that's his policy, that's his belief, and I think he's being honest about it. Of course, there's the AIPAC business and the money involved, and Trump is, if anything, a transactional, "I want the money" man, but I think he's committed to it in a way that Miriam Adelson, for example, indicates in the amount of money that she gave.
Chris Hedges
She's his largest donor, I think, $100 million, right? Well, what would be the difference, then, between a Trump administration vis a vis Israel and a Biden administration? Can't get any worse for the Palestinians in Gaza. What would be the difference?
Lawrence Wilkerson
I agree with you, although there was, I think, and perhaps this is applicable on the other side too, but there was some political space opening up for Harris. I think she was made aware, vividly aware, of how much the Gaza policy, if you will, with regard to the Biden administration, had harmed them. I would say it probably lost them almost a quarter of the progressives that would have voted for them otherwise, particularly in some of the battleground states, key states. And that political space opening up, might have changed policy with her somewhat. I'm not saying it would be a [inaudible] but I am saying it might have been a more mellow policy with regard to Israel, and a harder policy on Netanyahu and a complicit policy—and we could do this if we wanted to—to get him out of there. We have the power to get him out of there if we wanted to use it. He's his own worst enemy in that regard. But we're not. We're not doing that. We're leaving him in there, partly because we know that those around him who might replace him would be just as bad as he, but with maybe a little bit better record and a little bit better outlook on things, especially getting the hostages back. And we've got some hostages that are left alive there too, so that political space would have given her room, I think to change policy somewhat, to meddle our policy a little bit. I don't think Trump will do that. I think Trump is in for a penny, in for a pound for Israel. And that's dangerous. I just was looking this morning at the meeting between the Saudi National Security Advisor, Blinken and Jake Sullivan and others, and very indicative of what's happening right now. The Saudis were very forceful about not making a deal until there was a Palestinian state deal that looked like it might have some viability politically, if not in reality. Now they are here, and he just inked the deal, so to speak, making a bilateral relationship go. Israel's not even in it, a security relationship. And this adds to the one we just did with the UAE, we just did with Bahrain. All of them are different deals, but they all amount to almost non-NATO major ally status. We just did one with Qatar, where Al Udeid is, the biggest Air Force base in the world, and it looks as if the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, is sort of being wedged aside and we're doing all these bilateral treaties, if you will, with these countries. They don't have the force of treaties, but they're executive agreements for defense cooperation and so forth, and so that means Mohammed bin Salman is now playing the typical Saudi game of "I like Russia, I like China, but the United States is my old haven, and I need the United States," so I'm gonna make a bilateral deal with them. If that's happening, they're worried about Iran, even though they're talking more with Tehran than they've done in the past, as are all the states, they're worried. They're worried about what might happen. They're worried about what Iran might do if Israel doesn't attack Iran's oil facilities, because Iran will wipe out all the oil facilities it can in the Gulf region, 20% of the world's oil supply. It won't make any difference that we're 22 million barrels a day now if they do that, because the price of oil will go to $300 a barrel, insurers won't insure and shippers want ship, then we'll have a real problem. And the Saudis know that, that's their nest egg, that's their future. They don't want to put that in jeopardy, so they're back with the United States. Now this is a very strange meeting, in my view, because the words were not there to support it, and then suddenly he's here doing this. I'm worried. I'm worried that we might be walking into a war that we cannot walk away from because of Netanyahu.
Chris Hedges
But the Saudis, Qatar, they've all made it very clear that the US is not allowed to use these bases if there are strikes against Iran.
Lawrence Wilkerson
Well, the prime minister in Baghdad did too, but we went ahead and let the Israelis fly over Iraq. And I'm told that the King of Jordan said no. Then we did it anyway, and rather than looking like a fool, he said he had grudgingly given permission, so we don't seem to care about what they think. And if it comes down to it, as this visit has just testified to I think, if it comes down to it, and they have to choose, they're going to do what we want to do.
Chris Hedges
I want to talk about what a war with Iran would look like. The Iranian Air Force, as I understand, is pretty decrepit, not very effective, outdated fighters, many going all the way back to the Shah. I don't know what their air defenses are like. Certainly it would start out as an aerial bombing campaign. Would it look like the bombing campaign that we carried out under the Clinton administration against Iraq during the sanctions? Well, what's it going to look like?
Lawrence Wilkerson
It's not going to look anything like that. In fact, it's going to look quite different. And it's principally because of China, but more so Russia. I think the Israelis, in this last attempt, they're lying about it now, and I have that from very good sources, they're lying about it. They're propagandizing it. They didn't do any damage at all to speak of to Iran, and the reason they didn't was because they ran into a buzz saw of Russian provided air defense systems. They didn't know what to do. They didn't know how to read the radars. They didn't know how to jam the radars. Their suppression of enemy air defense, SEAD, did not work. They took a few out, but it didn't work enough to where the pilots thought they could go any further. So they launched all their missiles, as I think was the plan originally, for the first echelon. After the SEAD got through from outside Iran, they were deterred from going inside, and they would be deterred again. And there's every reason to believe that there might be some S400s, as well as S300s on the ground and the S400, sorry Lockheed Martin, sorry, Raytheon consumed by Lockheed Martin, is the best air defense system in the world. That's another thing that's happening right now that's disturbing our defense contractors, Chinese and Russian equipment is out doing in Ukraine and in the Middle East, American equipment, which is three or four times as expensive. One of the reasons India is back with Russia again for its armaments and such, despite what our protests are. So we're looking at a situation where we will think that aerial will be all we'll have to do, that is to say bombing. Israel is going to think that, Israel really can't do anything other than bomb Iran, ballistic missiles and bombing, air launched cruise missiles and such as that. It's not going to do it. It's not going to work. It's simply not going to work. There'll be some damage done. There will be some toll in Tehran and elsewhere, in the outlying territories where the nuclear facilities are and such. But it's not going to work. So what do you do then? I've war gamed this. I war-gamed it with the Lieutenant General in the Marine Corps who took great censure from his own buddies in the Pentagon. He was retired at the time, but he used to be my boss when I was down at Quantico War College, and he said we would lose. He ran the war game two times just to prove that the computers were not wrong. I think he's right. I think one of the things the Iranians will do is take out a US aircraft carrier, that's 5,000 US souls on the bottom of the sea or in the water. And incidentally, we now have so few escorts for our CVs, our aircraft carriers, that let's say there are 2,000 sailors in the water, we couldn't rescue them all because we don't have birth space on the escort ships. Interesting development there. We can't even man some of our ships because we're so short in terms of recruiting. I think it would be a disaster. And what do we do when we get into a disaster like that? It's America. We don't back away. We don't retrench. We don't check our six and look around and say, maybe we made an error. We double down. That's what we'll do, and then it will be a full fledged war. And if you like Iraq, and you like Afghanistan, Iran will top $10 trillion, take 10 years to pacify, if it's even moderately pacified and cost a fortune in blood and treasure.
Chris Hedges
You're talking about ground forces going in?
Lawrence Wilkerson
That's the only way you rid the country...
Chris Hedges
Yeah, that's true. But where do they go in from? Iraq?
Lawrence Wilkerson
Well, you'd have to sit down and do what we did in the Pacific when we were... I actually had the war plan for taking on the Soviets in Iran. You recall, we were very worried about them, looking for a warm water port around [inaudible] a typical Russian Empire thing to do, go back and check the history of the Russian Empire. We thought that was the case. So out in the Pacific, the force provider for all of this, we were war planning for fighting the Russians, the Soviets, inside Iran, in the Zagros Mountains and elsewhere. I know that terrain really well. It's not Iraq, very different country. Great strategic depth, 53% Persian. Great homogeneity amongst that 53% lot of problems around the periphery, but basically a homogeneous population, 10 years, $10 trillion and you still haven't solved what you wanted to solve, which was to defeat the nation anymore than...
Chris Hedges
I'm just curious, where would the ground troops go in from? I have a hard time believing the Iraqi government, which is...
Lawrence Wilkerson
We are illegal, illegal under international law and under our own domestic law. We are illegally present in Syria right now.
Chris Hedges
That's true.
Lawrence Wilkerson
We're there protecting oil going to Israel.
Chris Hedges
Which Trump said, got him in a lot of trouble, but was an honest statement.
Lawrence Wilkerson
Yeah, and we would go through Syria without batting an eye.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, let's talk about how it might start...
Lawrence Wilkerson
Incidentally, when we were doing the war gaming out in the Pacific, our major invasion was amphibious. That'd be a little difficult today, we had a lot of amphibious bottoms. The ones we have today are broken. Ask the [inaudible] Marine Corps, and we don't have many.
Chris Hedges
How would it start? So there would be an Iranian strike on Israel with significant Israeli casualties. What do you see as the trigger?
Lawrence Wilkerson
The debate in Tehran is heated right now, I'm told. This is about 48 hours old, but Doug Macgregor sort of confirmed it this morning. The debate is between the different groups of security personnel in Tehran, the IRGC, The Guardian Council, the Ayatollah, the new president, so forth. Do we continue with our previous plan? And the previous plan was we're going to smack them and we're going to smack them really hard. Israel has seen nothing like what's coming. Much in the way they're seeing real casualties, significant casualties in Lebanon right now. The debate as to whether to go ahead and do that or not, because they don't want the new president in particular, doesn't want war with the United States. They got enough problems. They don't want war with the United States. I don't know how that debate is going to fall out, but if they decide, and Netanyahu wants them to decide this, I'm quite confident of that, to go back whole hog at Israel and do some really significant damage that his propaganda machine cannot hide, which he has done a lot of up to this point, like, for example, hiding the casualties in Lebanon. The casualties are enormous in Lebanon right now, for the IDF, they're enormous.
Chris Hedges
Have you heard a figure? I have not. Have you heard a number?
Lawrence Wilkerson
I've heard 4,000. And here's the kicker, modern armies do not show loss or win by KIA [killed in action], battle, tactical, operational, whatever. They show it by WIA [wounded in action] because they have such sophisticated battlefield surgery and such sophisticated hospitals that... look at our casualties in Afghanistan, what you have is high rates of WIA, the WIA is over 4,000. That's missing arms, missing legs, you know, whatever. So when you're looking at a modern army fighting on interior lines in Israel, it's very interior lines. No evacuation route, hardly at all. You look at the WIA, not the KIA and the WIA in Lebanon are screamingly high right now, particularly for the IDF. I think you'll see them leaving very shortly, you'll see them leaving or moving.
Chris Hedges
They haven't moved very far.
Lawrence Wilkerson
No, not at all.
Chris Hedges
In terms of interior lines, they haven't gone very far into Lebanon.
Lawrence Wilkerson
What they're doing is precisely what they do almost every time they encounter this kind of resistance, though they've never encountered this stiff resistance, they bomb the hell out of the cities and the infrastructure, right? They killed Lebanese,
Chris Hedges
They got driven out in '82 and of course, that's the invasion that created Hezbollah. I remember Sy Hersh telling me a little while ago that the reason that Netanyahu wants the United States to engage Iran is because he needs the US to take out Iran's air defense systems, which seems to be in agreement with what you said. Would that be correct?
Lawrence Wilkerson
I think so. But I think we are going to get a rude surprise too, when we lose F-35s, extended range F-15s, F-16s and other flights that will come out of Al Udeid and off carriers, F-18s and such. We're going to lose a lot too. The war game said 30% attrition.
Chris Hedges
And is Israel's motive the same as pushing us to invade Iraq, which is Iran is a powerful center within the region that it wants to essentially cripple the way it crippled Iraq, is that the motive behind the Israeli push for a war with Iran?
Lawrence Wilkerson
I think that's the major motive behind it. They see Iran as the last impediment to their hegemony in the region.
Chris Hedges
Let's talk about Israel from a military perspective because you know so much more about this than I do. How do you look at Israel in the Middle East from a strategic point of view, as a US ally?
Lawrence Wilkerson
As a total liability. A strategic liability of the first order. And right now, at this moment, right now, I would say Ukraine, notwithstanding, they're the greatest strategic liability we have.
Chris Hedges
Explain why. Why?
Lawrence Wilkerson
Because there's no positivity to it. Everything is us, nothing is them.
Chris Hedges
But we took out a lot of those missiles coming in from Iran.
Lawrence Wilkerson
We did. We depleted our supplies to the point now where I'm not sure even if we decided we were going to do a major aerial attack on Iran, we wouldn't run out of munitions very shortly.
Chris Hedges
And the genocide. I mean, I think we supply 68% at this point of munitions to sustain the genocide in Gaza. Is that correct?
Lawrence Wilkerson
At least that much. If you look at the entire panoply of things we've given Israel, I'd say, Gideon Levy at Haaretz is right when he says, you share 50/50 responsibility for every death in Gaza and, for that matter, in Lebanon too.
Chris Hedges
How do you see it playing out in Gaza? I've actually been in the Middle East quite a bit in the last year, in Egypt twice, spent much the summer in Jordan, was in Qatar, was in the West Bank. And everything I can glean, Israel, of course, wants to push them into the Sinai. In the Egyptian military, I was told by Egyptian journalists in Cairo, has just been adamant, has told Sisi that there's no way. A Palestinian is, in fact, according to them, if Israel attempts to push the Palestinians into the Sinai and Sisi accepts them, he's finished. That's what they said. But how do you see it playing out? We know what Israel's intent is, which is, of course, depopulating, annexing northern Gaza. They're largely towards that goal, creating a humanitarian crisis in the south, but eventually ethnic cleansing, these genocidal tactics are now increasingly being used in the West Bank. How do you see it going? The US must be completely aware of what Israel's intent is. But where do you see that developing?
Lawrence Wilkerson
There are two sets of thoughts, I think, or beliefs, strategic goals in the US, and it depends on what body of people you're talking about. Are you talking about Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and a host of others, Lindsey Graham? Or are you talking about saner people, I would say, on the other side of the aisle, or even in the Republican Party. They think that Israel is doing our job for us, as Bibi Netanyahu is want to say if Israel was not killing or ridding the region of these Arabs, Palestinian or otherwise, and think about how MBS must think about this, we'd have to be doing it. And so he's doing us a great favor. He's doing our dirty work for us. He even has said that publicly. The other side says, No, Israel is our ally and our friend, and we have to stand by them no matter how heinous Bibi is. We'd like to get rid of Bibi. We'd like to put a different picture on Israel, but he's there, and he's in charge, and he's doing what he needs to do. And then there's the group that I belong to, I think, that says this is horrible, what we're doing. And we all warned about this in the military, we warned about this. David Petraeus even testified to Congress one day and let it slip that Israel was a greater liability than a strategic asset, and maybe we ought to think about rearranging the relationship. After that got out, of course, he walked those remarks back, as David is want to do, but the military understands how much a strategic liability Israel truly is, especially down in the ranks, where people have actually had a chance to look at it, to study it, to look at the history and to understand what's happened and understand the real history of it, which is often propagandized by the Israelis and the US for consumption by the public. But the military understands that history. The military understands [USS] Liberty, for example, they understand that those sailors were machine gunned.
Chris Hedges
Now we should explain. That was the ship that the Israelis attacked and killed, was it 36 or something? I can't remember. 31 US sailors were killed.
Lawrence Wilkerson
Yeah, and a bunch wounded, and I don't think there's any question, having looked at some of the investigation and some of the obscuration of that investigation, there's any doubt in my mind that Israel did it intentional.
Chris Hedges
That was the '73 war.
Lawrence Wilkerson
Yeah, I don't know whether it was because they thought we were picking up information that they were uploading an atomic weapon, or they thought we were sharing some of the information we were picking up with a very sophisticated spy ship, which Liberty was, with Moscow in an attempt to bring pressure on Israel. I don't know what the reason was, because they wouldn't let the investigators get into the real nitty gritty. President cut it off. But I do know that Israel knew what they were doing.
Chris Hedges
Israel had carried out a series of massacres of captured Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai. That was one of the theories. And the ship obviously would have known about that.
Lawrence Wilkerson
Well, you remember in the London Times, I think it was reported. And then, when the London Times was a good newspaper, and it was reported by the BBC, on Panorama, by the I can't remember his name now, terrible short term memory. I was just reading his piece last night where he's having the conversation with Golda Meir. He sent her a dozen or two or three red roses every time before he went to Israel. And she really appreciated that. So she'd give him the first interview whenever he was there. This time, she wouldn't give it to him. She said, I have to give it to the Americans, I'm sorry. And he just sent her the roses and everything. Anyway, he did talk to her on the telephone, and he reported this in that article in the London Times and on Panorama. He asked her, point blank, would you use the Samson option? I don't think he used that phrase. He said, would you use a nuclear weapon if Israel's existence were in question? Without batting an eye she said, of course. And he said, you understand what that means? And she said, Yes. Now was that for public consumption so that people would understand that Israel was serious about winning this conflict, a conflict they started? The Egyptians didn't start the '73 war.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, I know. That's another myth they peddled.
Lawrence Wilkerson
But I do think that Netanyahu, if his back was to the wall and he were forced to do so, the big question, of course, that was being asked was, even if you knew you would be taking the world into a nuclear holocaust, would you still do it? Yes.
Chris Hedges
I mean, how much damage do you think Iran can inflict on Israel? Israel's a small country. I think it has a population of 6 million. What does Iran have 90 million? I mean, I can't remember.
Lawrence Wilkerson
If you're talking about between the river and the sea, about 14 million Israeli citizens. 7 million plus are Palestinian and 7 million, not quite as much, are Jews. Very small, not as small as Gaza, no bigger than the Greater London, or smaller than Greater London. Gaza is where they're dropping all that ordinance, just putting the military template on it and saying, how many casualties, how many casualties have been... that ordinance, that concrete, that rebar, those streets, those buildings, the template puts down on the terrain and says, with great accuracy, how many casualties? It's 200,000. Guarantee it's not 40 or 50,000. The template says it's well north of 100,000 and we'll not know, because you won't find some of these people, they're buried so deeply under rubble. If Israel were to really be attacked by the full weight of Iran, it would be a nightmare for Israel. It's becoming that way just with Hezbollah. You're never going to get those Israelis to go back to their homes. They're going to evacuate Israel eventually. I was told the other day by a friend in Tel Aviv that already, by his count, a million Jewish Israelis have departed.
Chris Hedges
Since October 7, yeah, that's numbers they've hidden. But I've heard 500,000 but certainly a significant number have just left the country. And these are often the best educated, they tend to be the secular part of society.
Lawrence Wilkerson
Putin was exercising his prudence and strategic verve by offering any of the Russians who had immigrated to Israel: come back, we need you, you're our brain trust.
Chris Hedges
Yeah. I mean, one of the things, just to talk about the Israel-US relationship, is that [Jonathan] Pollard who gave Israel all sorts of intelligence information, he gave them information on CIA and Russian assets, which allowed the Soviets to roll it all up but he gave it to Israel, and then Israel was giving it to the Soviet Union in exchange for the release of Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. But it destroyed the, obliterated the intelligence operation of the US in the Soviet Union.
Lawrence Wilkerson
And Pollard is now, I'm told, I learned this 24 hours ago, Pollard is now instrumental in and very important to Bibi's propaganda effort with regard to Gaza and Lebanon. A traitor, and we let him go, and Bill Clinton did almost as much damage as Trump in that regard with Pollard. Bill Clinton pardon Marc Rich as his last ignominious act in office. I think it was David Rothkopf, or someone, said that was the most ignominious use of the pardon power by the president in the history of the country. I think they were right.
Chris Hedges
You should explain who he was.
Lawrence Wilkerson
Marc Rich really ran a company that, a huge company that sold, amongst other products, discounted price oil to Israel, and was responsible, in large measure, for Israel's economic success under the finance minister named Bibi Netanyahu, and then later, as he became prime minister, interrupted only by his fellow mate, Ari Sharon. Marc Rich made sure that Saddam Hussein's oil in the UN Oil-for-Food Programme was stolen and shipped to Israel. He also made sure that the pipeline in Syria, the one we were just talking about, was pumping to Israel. And he made sure that, eventually, the pipeline out of Kirkuk, out of northern Iraq, which has always had a problem with Baghdad, was shipping to Israel. So one of the reasons Israel's neo... what do you call their system of capitalism? It's not quite what ours is, but they have more billionaires per capita than we do. He made that happen with that discounted oil and now look at what Netanyahu has done. He had inked an agreement with Lebanon for the richest gas field in the Mediterranean thus far. That's abrogated, it's all belonging to Israel. Now there was a deal that Gaza had the second richest gas field in the Mediterranean for its own. That's gone, he's got that too. 30 years of the future needs of Israeli energy are contained in those two gas fields. He's got them both. Yeah, they're off the coast of Lebanon and Israel. That's an important point that's often missed in terms of the occupation of Northern Gaza, because they need the coastline. Let's just close by talking about the institutions themselves, the CIA, the Pentagon, which, and I mean, I'll characterize it, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, these institutions appear hostile to a Trump presidency, especially the intelligence community. How much can they damage, constrain, control Trump? That's an excellent question. First of all, the intent has to be there, and it has to be at some of the higher levels in order to do that. I'm not sure it's going to be particularly because he can take care of those levels if he wants to. But if it is there at the second echelon, so to speak, or the second, third echelons, it can be disturbing of anything that he wants to do as it could any president. It can falsify intelligence. It can lead the president astray with regard to serious national security issues. Right now, one of the most serious issues Trump's going to face, I think, I'm no economist, but I know a lot of economists, and they're telling me, the bond market right now is what we should be looking at, not the stock market. In fact, the stock market is euphoric and for the rich. The bond market is saying Trump is going to have one of the worst economic situations by midterm in our history. Our aggregate debt is also saying that. CBO released a report saying it's $50.2 trillion in a decade, decade and a half. The interest payments on that debt are already the defense budget equivalent, almost a trillion dollars, this year, almost a trillion dollars. By the end of that period, the CBO looked at about 10 to 12 years, and they think they're being optimistic, it's going to be 2 trillion. It's going to be the equivalent of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the defense budget combined. We cannot sustain that under anybody's rules of gerrymandering the financial system in the world or whatever, we just can't stand that. And when the American people understand some of this intuitively, and the crisis of confidence comes with that understanding, and many are saying it's going to happen on Trump's watch, he's going to have a real problem, and he's going to have to retrench majorly. I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know what we're going to do as a country when this comes to bear with full force.
Chris Hedges
All right. Well, that was Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. I want to thank Diego [Ramos] Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges] and Max [Jones] who produced the show. You can find me at Chris Hedges.Substack.com.
As a rule, no American election means as much as the shouting immediately afterward might lead you to think. Every four years, with a regularity that clockwork rarely matches, the supporters of the winning party pile all their daydreams of Utopia onto their candidate, while the partisans of the losing side howl that this time the jackboots and armbands will show up for certain. Then the new president is inaugurated, and something close to business as usual resumes.
These have been getting plenty of use since November 5.
This time, granted, the yelling is unusually loud. Some of that is an unintended byproduct of the losing side’s demonizing rhetoric during the last weeks of the campaign. Having convinced themselves (if no one else) that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, many Democrats are quaking in their shoes, sure that he must now act out the role they assigned him and throw them all into camps. Those camps have featured so relentlessly in recent rhetoric that I’m starting to think that the people who babble about them actually want to be flung into some such institution, where Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, will personally spank them with a riding crop or something. The return of the repressed really can take strange forms.
Then there’s the Twitter campaign now under way to encourage Democrats never to use Donald Trump’s name in speech or print. In one sense that’s a reflection of just how terrified they are of our next president—am I the only one who remembers how the cowardly characters in the Harry Potter novels were afraid to speak Voldemort’s name aloud?—but it’s also revealing in a deeper sense. It speaks of the Democratic establishment’s desperate longing to return to the world before 2015, before the working classes found ways to speak up for their own needs and interests, in place of those it was convenient for wealthy liberals to put in their mouths.
For a majority of Americans, on the other hand, November 5 was a very good day.
I’m beginning to wonder, though, if the current example may be the exception that proves the rule. Get past the giddy excitement of the winners, the fainting fits and dismayed shrieks of the losers, whatever dubious longings might be shaping our national rhetoric around those vividly imagined camps, and the rest of it, and what remains is a sense that something may have shifted on a deep level in American life with Donald Trump’s comeback election. Partly, of course, he confounded the stereotypes by taking a commanding majority of the popular vote as well as a huge lead in the Electoral College. Partly Trump and his inner circle are promising sweeping changes in some of the core policies of the bipartisan consensus that, in recent decades, has done so much to run this country into the ground.
To my mind, though, the most striking aspect of it all is the curious fact that Kamala Harris did everything she was supposed to do, according to the playbook of early 21st-century American politics, and still crashed and burned. She had armies of pundits and talking heads on her side. She had a glittering list of celebrities eager to shill for her. She raised three times the money the Trump campaign did, and spent it so freely that her campaign ended the election millions of dollars in debt. Nearly all the big corporate media venues bent over backwards to promote her campaign, to the extent of suppressing news stories that might reflect badly on her while flogging every available story that could be used to assail Trump. She had all these things lined up on her side, and yet she got a world-class drubbing once voters went to the polls.
And of course then there was that laugh.
Some of that, it has to be said, was the candidate herself. I’ve never met Harris and have no idea what she’s like as a person, but the kindest label that can be applied to her political career is “undistinguished,” and she has an odd inability to speak coherently in public without a teleprompter telling her what to say. That might just be stage fright, but it does not give the rest of us any confidence in her ability to handle the pressures of one of the world’s most stressful jobs. Like him or not, Trump thrived in the high-pressure world of commercial real estate and handled his previous stint in the White House without undue signs of stress. At a time when the US is caught up in two intractable proxy wars and faces a rising tide of challenges around the globe, that in itself may have been enough to settle the matter for many voters.
Here again, though, I think there was more going on than this. All the way through the campaign, it felt as though the Harris campaign was off in a corner somewhere, talking to a small coterie of privileged liberals about issues that don’t matter to most other people, while the issues that do matter to most other people never entered the discussion When people tried to bring up those issues in Democratic venues, furthermore, they got ignored, shouted down, or told to their faces that things they themselves had experienced weren’t real and they should believe what they were told by the Democrats and their media allies instead. Meanwhile the Trump campaign was hammering night and day on the issues Harris’s people wouldn’t address.
According to Oswald Spengler, it’s always dissident plutocrats like Julius Caesar who lead the revolt against a dysfunctional kleptocracy. Behold our Orange Julius!
It’s heartening to note that some Democrats have grasped this. Since the election, in fact, there have been a certain number of essays and talks in mainstream venues talking about why the Democrats lost, and bringing up some of the points just made. Social historian David Kaiser, in a post that ran through a litany of standard accusations against Trump, still took the time to notice that his rise was made possible because both parties had given up addressing the concerns of ordinary Americans in a time of increasingly serious crises. His was far from the only such sign of dawning insight among Harris supporters in the wake of her ignominious defeat.
Yet it’s the pushback fielded by such obviously sensible efforts that is, to my mind, the most revealing thing about our current political life. Nearly all that pushback has focused on finding something to blame for Harris’s failure other than the obvious fact that she never got around to addressing the issues that most Americans care about. Some of it has been predictably petty—I’m thinking here especially of the attempts by Harris allies to blame Joe Biden for what happened, and the corresponding efforts by Biden allies to push the blame back on Harris.
On a much higher level of discourse is this article by Michael Tomasky, which appeared in The New Republic on November 8. I encourage my readers to take the time to read it carefully before proceeding. As you’d expect from an essay in one of the premier liberal magazines in the country, it’s cogent, logical, and clearly written. It’s also stunningly obtuse. As with most examples of really high-grade cluelessness, its weakness lies not in itself but in the unstated preconceptions that underlie it, and the fact that Tomasky doesn’t appear to have questioned or even noticed these preconceptions is far and away the most fascinating thing about them.
The equivalent image in an Asian idiom. Millions of people in east and south Asia have bought these, and burn incense to Trump’s image to make their businesses, families, etc. great again.
Tomasky argues that the real cause of Trump’s rise and Harris’s fall was the ascendancy of right wing media over the last few decades. It was only when media venues began to slip free of the grip of the liberal consensus, he insists, that it was possible for a candidate like Donald Trump to attract any attention at all, much less the passionate mass support that saw him easily brush aside Republican rivals in two primary campaigns and spread his appeal widely enough to win the narrow victory of 2016 and the much more robust triumph of 2024. It’s plausible at first glance. Like so many examples of catastrophic cognitive failure these days, however, it suffers from a peculiar defect: it fails to ask the next obvious question.
How was it, after all, that the media venues that Tomasky lambastes as spreaders of right-wing misinformation clawed their way in from the fringes to become wildly popular among ordinary Americans? What caused people to listen to these insurgent voices? That’s not a question Tomasky addresses. The right-wing media appeared, and hey presto! All of a sudden, for no reason at all, people just started believing them.
There are good reasons why this attitude has become common in recent years.
The unnoticed ironies in Tomasky’s essay get an edge sharp enough to shave with when he proposes that back in the days when Edward R. Murrow was the most respected figure in broadcast news media, the rise of a figure like Donald Trump would have been unthinkable. Here again, let’s ask the next obvious question. Why was Murrow accorded the kind of respect that today’s media figures can only dream of having? Two key factors come to mind. The first was the fact that in those days all broadcast media in the United States was subject to the Fairness Doctrine—the rule, imposed on them as a condition of being licensed to use a share of the broadcast spectrum, that they had to present both sides of politically controversial news stories. The second was that Murrow himself was known as a man of integrity who wouldn’t distort news stories to fit a preconceived agenda.
The Fairness Doctrine went whistling down the wind long ago, however, and so did the standards of journalistic ethics that gave Murrow the reputation he had. It’s a source of bleak amusement that some of the journalists who have been quickest to scream “misinformation!” have been involved in spreading and covering up misinformation on the grand scale. Do you recall, dear reader, when Barack Obama insisted that if Obamacare was passed, you would be able to keep your physician, and your health insurance premiums would go down? Do you recall when Joe Biden insisted that once you got the Covid vaccine, you would not catch Covid? Both those statements were false; both of them misled and harmed millions of people.
Sometimes it takes a long time for the obvious to sink in.
If Edward R. Murrow had still been around when those statements were made and disproved, he’d have asked all the hard questions our media avoided, followed up the story no matter what pressures he faced, and crucified the government officials responsible on a cross made of newsprint and radio airtime. He was not the kind of man who would cover up a scandal just because it might hurt the party he favored. His epigones in today’s corporate media, by contrast, lack the ethics and the backbone that earned Murrow his reputation. They’ve earned a different sort of reputation, for which the phrase “partisan hack” will do as well as any.
Mind you, I freely grant there’s no shortage of partisan hacks in conservative media as well; the absence of the Fairness Doctrine and the collapse of journalistic ethics cuts both ways. Here again, though, we need to go deeper. Over the decades just past, conservative media venues have seen their viewership climb steeply upward, while liberal media venues have had their viewership plunge just as steeply downward. Tomasky never gets around to explaining why this happened. It’s as though he thinks that the mere appearance of right-wing media was all that it took to get voters to turn their backs on the wise and trusted pundits of the mainstream media and flock mindlessly to Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and ultimately Donald Trump.
Notice what’s being left out here. Nowhere in his essay does Tomasky appear to consider the possibility that ordinary people might have taken an active role in this process. Nowhere does he wonder whether maybe, just maybe, voters compared the mainstream media to the alternatives and came to the conclusion that they had reason to choose the latter. The idea that American voters might have agency is apparently alien to him. In fact, he ignores one of the most crucial details of the 2016 election in order to avoid dealing with the agency of the ordinary individual.
That first campaign — the First Meme War, as it’s called these days — has earned a legendary status in certain circles. “For a short while, Kek walked among us,” memed one participant. “And it was glorious.”
His article claims that the torrent of dank memes that sent the Democratic party reeling in 2016 came from the right-wing media. This is inaccurate. Those memes were created by a loose and sprawling network of alienated young men linked by online imageboards, of which 4chan is the most infamous. It was there, in the crawlspaces of the internet, that enthusiasm for Trump’s brash antics built a raffish subculture that embraced Pepe the Frog as its mascot, the Euro-pop song “Shadilay” for its anthem, and Kek the Frog God for its half-serious deity. This subculture flooded the internet with memes supporting Trump’s campaign and gave him a crucial boost. The rise of the “chans” was one of the most astonishing twists of recent political history—and it is quite literally unthinkable to people who share Tomasky’s views.
Here the bottom drops away and we plunge into very deep waters.
Back in 2002, the BBC aired a documentary titled The Century of the Self, which focused on one of the more dubious offshoots of Freudian psychotherapy. Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the central focus of the documentary, was the man who launched public relations as an industry. He insisted, based on his uncle’s theories, that human beings would respond like automatons if stimulated by the right words and imagery, and he claimed to be able to make this happen for his corporate and political clients.
Edward Bernays. He was always his most important product, and his self-marketing was no more honest than any other PR campaign.
I discussed that documentary in a post here a little more than two years ago. As I noted then, the most interesting thing about it is that the documentary never challenged Bernays’ claims. Rather, it took them at face value, despite the fact that the campaigns Bernays carried out were by no means as invincible as he claimed. (To cite only one of many examples, though Bernays was hired by Herbert Hoover’s reelection campaign in 1932, this did nothing to keep Hoover from suffering a thumping defeat.) I argued that the program was aimed, like most highbrow BBC documentaries, at members of the managerial class, and that it was an exercise in reassurance, meant to keep doubters believing that the corporate-bureaucratic system they served really did have the power to tell the restless masses what to think and how to feel.
Deficient as it was as an account of history, in other words, The Century of the Self accurately reflected the consciousness of the Western world’s privileged classes just when the corporate-bureaucratic system and its reigning ideology—call it “corporate liberalism”—were beginning their long slide down from the zenith of power. It’s indicative that the same attitude was expressed at nearly the same time by a Washington bureaucrat (persistent rumors insist that the speaker was Karl Rove) who famously told reporter Ron Suskind, “When we act, we create our own reality. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
It’s one of the supreme ironies of our time that the heirs of the 1960s have turned into the establishment they once fought, and conservative populists are the new, hip, youthful counterculture.
Does this remind you, dear reader, of the ideas splashed across the mental landscape of our time by Rhonda Byrne’s pseudospiritual bestseller The Secret, or by thousands of less efficiently marketed New Age speakers and writers? It should. Across the whole sweep of elite culture in the Western industrial nations, and above all in the United States, a set of beliefs took root that treated the individual member of the Western world’s comfortable classes as the measure of all reality, and assigned to everything and everyone else in the cosmos the roles of painted marionettes jerked around by strings to play parts in some childish melodrama.
It’s far from inaccurate to label the era over which this ideology reigned the Century of the Self, because the ideas that gave Byrne, Rove, and her many equivalents their fifteen minutes of tawdry fame did in fact get their foothold a little over a century ago, as the subtler and more reasonable teachings of what was then called New Thought got simplified, distorted, and marketed to a fare-thee-well by figures such as Napoleon Hill. The idea that we each create our own reality was a central theme in this ideology of the imperial ego, but inevitably it turned in practice into ideas like those marketed by Edward Bernays and his many heirs, in which the privileged call the tune and everyone else has no choice but to dance mechanically in step.
All along, there were alternatives to those empty slogans.
You can see the same thing reflected in the way that, during the Century of the Self, people in the privileged classes assumed as a matter of course that their peculiar subculture, with all its beliefs and prejudices and odd obsessions, was the natural goal of human cultural evolution, and that every person of good will would of course gravitate toward it once they were shown the error of their dissenting ways. That’s the attitude that put classes in queer theory in universities in Afghanistan during the American occupation of that country, to cite only one tone-deaf absurdity among many, and it also explains the frantic hatred and rage flung against those who fail to fall into line. The ideology of corporate liberalism is so obviously superior to the alternatives, the logic goes, that only the deliberate embrace of evil can explain anybody’s refusal to buy into it. That, in turn, was the attitude that led Kamala Harris and her prodigiously funded campaign straight to electoral disaster.
Thus the change that we’ve just passed through can be described easily enough. The Century of the Self is over, and the Century of the Other has begun.
All around the world, people who reject the values of the Western world’s privileged classes are in the ascendant. Russia, which shrugged off Western sanctions with aplomb and is nearing victory in the Ukraine war, is returning to its roots in Orthodox Christianity; across the Middle East and North Africa, traditionalist Islam is resurgent; further east, the ancient civilizations of China and India are rising to reclaim the preeminent role in the global system they had before the age of European world conquest. In Africa and elsewhere in the global South, one nation after another is throwing off neocolonial arrangements and establishing social and political forms relevant to their cultures and needs rather than those the liberal elite wants to assign them.
This is how corporate liberals liked to imagine the world — but that delusion has passed its pull date once and for all.
Around the globe, as a result, the Western elites who like to think of themselves as history’s sole actors now face intransigent Others who refuse to accept a role as bit players in someone else’s melodrama. Our would-be lords and masters are confronted by hostile and increasingly confident rivals who reject the values that corporate liberalism considers self-evident, and embrace visions of destiny that are antithetical to everything that corporate liberalism stands for. The monolithic future imagined by the Western world’s privileged classes has thus shattered into a thousand glittering shards. What is rising in its place is a kaleidoscope of possibility in which the dreams of Harris and her allies are only one option among many.
In much the same way, Donald Trump united a wildly diverse coalition of supporters, embracing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, midwestern factory workers, Amish farmers, Muslim immigrants, and much more, to bring about his victory. What drew these disparate interests together, more than anything else, was their rejection of the claim by the liberal elite that the reality it likes to imagine is the only one that counts. Harris’s campaign insisted that sky-high grocery prices and mass migration across the southern border didn’t matter, because it was inconvenient to her that these things should matter. To the voters, on the other hand, they mattered a great deal.
Huge hubbub surrounds Trump’s rapid-fire picks for key Cabinet positions over the last few days. A great division has ensued, between the two opposing sides, one screaming “betrayal!” at the slew of establishment Neocon Zionists chosen, while the other exults in triumph at the boldly unexpected picks.
Let’s examine what we have first—the longer list so far:
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SO FAR:
•Vice President: JD Vance
•Secretary of State: Marco Rubio
•Attorney General: Matt Gaetz
•Defense Secretary: Pete Hegseth
•Secretary of Homeland Security: Kristi Noem
•Director of National Intelligence: Tulsi Gabbard
•National Security Advisor: Mike Waltz
•CIA Director: John Ratcliffe
•White House Chief of Staff: Susie Wiles
•EPA Administrator: Lee Zeldin
•Ambassador to the United Nations: Elise Stefanik
•White House Counsel: Bill McGinley
•Deputy Chief of Staff: Stephen Miller
•Border Czar: Tom Homan
•Ambassador to Israel: Mike Huckabee
•Government Efficiency Advisors: Elon Musk & Vivek Ramaswamy
•Middle East Envoy: Steve Witkoff Dan Scavino, James Blair and Taylor Budowich will also take senior staff roles in the White House. Just the start.
Now, here is an elucidating post only and specifically from the perspective of the Ukraine situation:
Who the US President-elect has chosen for his administration. Trump's nominees
▪️For the post of US Secretary of State – Marco Rubio
He is an opponent of military aid to Ukraine, known for his anti-Castro and anti-Russian statements. Rubio has repeatedly advocated for launching peace talks and abandoning attempts to return Ukraine's lost territories .
▪️For the post of national security adviser – Mike Waltz
He advocated lifting restrictions on Kiev's strikes with Western long-range weapons on Russian territory, the Washington Post wrote. Waltz also suggests using economic pressure on Moscow to resolve the Ukrainian conflict .
▪️For the post of Minister of Defense – Pete Hagseth
He criticized sending money to Kiev amid domestic economic problems. He believes that in the Ukrainian conflict, Russia is getting its [way] .
▪️John Ratcliffe for the post of CIA Director
He has repeatedly spoken about the dangers of the partnership between Russia and China, and in 2020 he accused Russia and Iran of attempting to interfere in the US elections. However, it was Ratcliffe who dispelled the fake about the Russian trace in Trump's election campaign in 2016.
▪️For the post of Director of National Intelligence – Tulsi Gabbard
Gabbard was in the Democrats' camp, at the beginning of the SVO she even supported Ukraine, then she switched to Trump's side and began to criticize Zelensky, accused Biden of dragging the United States into a nuclear war, and admitted that the United States, under the leadership of the Democrats, is waging a proxy war with Russia.
▪️Elise Stefanik for the post of US Permanent Representative to the UN
In 2022, she advocated for Kiev to be accepted into NATO, but now she thinks differently and opposes financial support for Ukraine and Kiev’s entry into the Alliance .
▪️For the post of Secretary of Homeland Security – Kristi Noem
She is known for her criticism of American aid to Ukraine. In the spring of 2023, she said that military support for Ukraine was a “costly strategic mistake” that only served to strengthen the alliance between Russia and China.
▪️For the post of Attorney General and Head of the Department of Justice – Matt Gaetz
He stated that Ukraine’s goal of “separating Crimea from Russia” is unachievable. Gaetz has repeatedly spoken out in favor of a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis, and also noted that the United States “has sent enough money to Ukraine.” He also called it a “historically corrupt country.” (ed: he also prefers to bring Russia into NATO over Ukraine.)
▪️Susan Wiles for White House Chief of Staff
Known as the Republican Party's leading strategist, she is known as the "ice maiden." She is said to have been the chief architect of Trump's victorious campaign. She is a private person.
▪️For the post of deputy chief of staff for political affairs – Stephen Miller
He is known as the main ideologist of tough measures in the field of migration policy. His policies are characterized as far-right and anti-immigration.
▪️ Tom Homan has been nominated to serve as the "Border Czar" or "Border Czar"
He advocates for the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, which will likely be Homan's first task in his new White House position, which involves overseeing all immigration and border security issues.
▪️For the position of co-directors of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) - Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy
Both support Trump's policies, including the Ukrainian conflict. Ramaswamy withdrew his candidacy in favor of Trump. He said that the US should promise Russia that Ukraine will not join NATO .
A few things first: some believe that a few of Trump’s picks are either deliberate troll jobs or merely favors for support to people he knows cannot possibly be actually confirmed by the Senate. For instance Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, even RFK Jr.
On the other hand, Trump has tricks at his disposal, such as the infamous ‘recess appointment’ which would controversially allow him to put in his nominees while the Senate is at recess. Some have complained, yet when Obama put in various recess appointments in 2012, it seems no one batted an eye. Also, isn’t it interesting how there was no outcry when Obama considered RFK Jr. for his own Cabinet once long ago?
Now, Thomas Massie has gloatingly confirmed Trump reserves this right:
“You think he’ll (Matt Gaetz) will be confirmed by the Senate?”
“Doesn’t need to. Recess.”
GOP Massie says “recess appointments” when asked if GAETZ can get confirmed by the Senate “He’s the Attorney General. Suck it up!”
Though some thought the nomination of Gaetz was a kind of gag, Gaetz immediately resigned from his House seat, burning the ship behind him as token of his confidence. Even if something were to happen, Florida Governor DeSantis reserves the right to install Gaetz into Marco Rubio’s now-vacant Florida Senator seat, which I believe would last until 2026.
Now some of Trump’s more controversial picks have fired up the Deep State operatives in ways that are extremely elucidating in regard to how the Deep State works and keeps power amongst its own pre-vetted in-house people. John Bolton, for instance, has called Matt Gaetz’ nomination to Attorney General as the most shocking and ‘worst’ Cabinet nomination in the country’s history—how’s that for hyperbole?
Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic Senator from Connecticut, stated earlier today that 10 Republican Senators have already said they will not Approve the Nomination of Matt Gaetz to Attorney General; which if True, makes it very likely that his Appointment would be Rejected.
And this, of course, needs no introduction or explanation:
But the most telling reaction has been for Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Some of the most entrenched establishment figures crawled out the woodwork to waylay Tulsi for being an ‘outsider’ who would be ‘dangerously’ privileged with the most sensitive need-to-know information in the country.
But most revealing was what ex-CIA agent and House rep Abigail Spanberger said about why Tulsi absolutely cannot be allowed to become the DNI—listen closely:
She mentions how it’s the DNI’s job to control the information flow to the president. This is precisely how the Deep State wags the dog by easily misinforming US presidents into officiating any policy they so need. They don’t even have to lie: the main weapon in the DNI’s arsenal is careful curation of facts by omission. The things omitted from the president’s Cabinet meetings are even more powerful than the things said.
In short: this is a Deep State panic and revolt about the reality that they are about to lose their ability to totally puppeteer the US president into doing the bidding of foreign intelligence services, which are effectively who control the US agencies beneath the DNI.
By the way, Avril Haines—the current DNI—is a quite nefarious spook from the Obama days, and Tulsi would be leagues better than her. How about ex-CIA and NSA head General Michael Hayden replying to histrionic Spanberger from the video above, with the suggestive “what can we do” in keeping Tulsi out:
GenMHayden George W. Bush's CIA and NSA chief (who failed to detect 9/11) joins CIA operative RepSpanberger's panic over Tulsi's nomination. He was one of the 51 intel agents who signed the false Hunter Biden letter. These are the people who need to feel threatened and upset by Tulsi’s nomination.
Can you see how the entire Deep State neocon cabal of the Bush-Obama-Clinton dynasty days are in revolt against an ‘outsider’ cleaning house and installing actual patriots in key positions to insulate Trump?
Most people don’t know this, but since the days of Rockefeller, Kissinger, and co., the chief and only role of the presidential Cabinet is as bulwark against a ‘rogue’ president. The Cabinet is entirely selected by donors, financial interests, and foreign intel agencies and its members are essentially “minders” or ‘grey controllers’ whose job is to enforce a series of ‘off limits’ guardrails for the president. How can they enforce this? The 25th Amendment, which specifically gives the Cabinet the power to vote the president out of office due to “incapacity”. In short: if the president goes off-script, the Cabinet can vote to immediately remove him.
Recall that Obama’s entire Cabinet was famously chosen by Citigroup Bank:
“One month before the presidential election of 2008, the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama campaign a list of its preferred candidates for cabinet positions in an Obama administration. This list corresponds almost exactly to the eventual composition of Barrack Obama’s cabinet.”
So, Trump got his great Cabinet—everything should be peachy now, right?
Well, not exactly—I’ll leave the arch-Zionist of Twitter to explain:
Virtually every pick is not just pro-Israel, but is of a particularly virulent pro-Zionist stripe in the most cult-like and messianic way possible: Pete Hegseth, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Mike Waltz, and last but not least, Kristi Noem, who betrayed freedom of speech by literally signing the ‘strongest hate crime bill in America’ to combat “antisemitism”—a bill which vastly expands definitions of ‘antisemitism’ as guidance to law enforcement agencies in helping them prosecute the nebulous specter of ‘hate crimes’:
So, yes: we know Trump’s Cabinet is basically full of Israel-firsters, that’s no real shock. But the one aspect surrounding discussions that’s missing is the following: Everyone is busy making blanket generalizations because mentally differentiating the nuances is tiresome and time-consuming for most.
But we can clarify Trump’s picks as follows: They are pretty good domestically, and bad for foreign policy.
Obviously, for Americans the domestic issues take precedence, and it’s better to have a bunch of Zionists who will clean out the country, than a rotten lot that will be great for ending foreign wars and such, but completely totalitarian at home—or something to this effect. People must accept the fact that we will never solve all issues at once, and we must take our blessings where we can get them. That means if the next four years can be used to clean up the domestic in large part, there will always be time afterwards to worry about the other huge issues—like the US’ total enslavement to Israel.
The fact is, many of Trump’s picks will do wonders for cleaning up the domestic bureaucracy that has hollowed out the country and turned it into a dystopian techno-fascist panopticon. RFK Jr. can really go to town on Health agencies; hell, just look how Big Pharma tanked on his announcement:
Gaetz replacing the monstrous Deep State traitor Merrick Garland as AG will have incalculable trickle down effects on the Justice Department and every other facet of government. Of course, Ramaswamy and Musk will do a clean sweep on extraneous agencies and begin balancing the US’ check books for once—though it will likely end up being a drop in the bucket.
My colleague at MoA agrees that we should give Trump some iota of a chance and have an open mind for the time being. I think huge strides can be made on the domestic front with his picks, while the foreign stands as always to be 50-50, and has the chance to be usurped by the same old neocon policies of war against Iran, aggression and escalation against Russia, economic terror against China, and the like. But as I said, we have to start somewhere, and cleaning up the domestic bureaucracy could be a springboard for more eventual housecleaning of the foreign-policy neocon remnants.
Case in point: Pete Hegseth is a giant Zionist, but he’s about to patently take the scythe to the triple-headed Hydra of DEI, CRT, and ESG in the US military:
Then look at Trump’s new border czar Tom Homan—the guy is serious about mass deportations which could roll back much of the damage done by the globalist clique of the past couple decades—or even the ‘60s if you want to go as far back as the Hart-Celler Act of ‘65.
And there are other potentially disruptive appointments still coming up:
Don’t you think it’s at least a start? Rome wasn’t built in one day, and the US has been slowly encrusted in bloodsucking foreign limpets since about the early to mid-1900s. They have to be scraped off slowly and carefully, so as not to roust the roost and spark a full-on mutiny. Considering what we’ve gotten for the past several administrations, these appointments on paper appear revolutionary in nature; but as always: that doesn’t mean we must be naive and credulous, expecting them all to work out without a hitch—I myself remain skeptical as always, but cautiously optimistic.
After all, Trump has effected a perfect syzygy of Republican power that can give him a once-in-generations ability to carry out virtually any policy his team desires:
There’s still grave danger that Trump may fall short of accomplishing much of the above, though, particularly since the Deep State is regrouping and re-strategizing as we speak. For instance, here’s Democrat Rep Wiley Nickel openly calling for a ‘Shadow Cabinet’ to be formed in undermining Trump’s new administration and counteracting each of his ‘dangerous’ Cabinet picks:
Apparently committing treason is now “protecting democracy”:
https://x.com/RepWileyNickel/status/1857141802660229224
Like I said, Trump’s picks are strong on domestic and dangerous on foreign relations. Here’s an example—National Security Advisor nominee Mike Waltz describes how he believes Trump can or will end the Ukraine conflict, which is another way of saying how Mike Waltz will advise and militate for Trump to carry out the negotiations; and it’s not very promising or assuring:
Namely: Enforce the energy sanctions on Russia, which is nothing more than a ‘gas station with nukes’, then threaten Russia with allowing Zelensky’s long range strikes—typical hubristic neocon escalation.
As a last note, many astute observers have brought up just how oddly surreal it is that the person on the right is able to simper and dawdle with the person on the left, who he had just recently characterized as a grave ‘threat to the nation’, the new Hitler, et cetera. It beggars belief that one could smugly shake the hand of a man one believes to embody evil itself—it’s what made yesterday’s first post-election White House meeting between the two such a classic study:
The occasion calls for a larger-than-life splash page, as books could be written on the symbolism of this one photo alone:
The hieratic tableau is pregnant with meaning.
The only question is, which initiate level did he confer?
Jests aside: I personally believe Trump more liable to have made a threatening “gun gesture” with his hand at Biden, or perhaps even for cameras as a sort of “gotcha back” or “I know it was you” moment, referencing the hit attempts—made particularly poignant with Biden’s subtle choice of pinstripe gangster suit:
We all know the changing of the guard is just one mafia clique shoving off the other, but just like in the case of the Godfather, where Pacino’s character Michael had a generational plan to clean things up during his tenure so that the future of his family could go totally legit, Trump and his flawed team, too, can initiate some semblance of a move toward the light for the country.
There’s still a hell of a fight left, and we shouldn’t take for granted that Trump will even be allowed to take office. But given the abrogation of true neocon vermin like Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo in exchange for flawed characters with at least an inkling of some promising virtues, we’ve for once got an innings chance for improvement. For now, that makes the outlook considerably better than it’s been for quite some time.
Donald Trump and the impossible destination of Globalism (revisited)
Back in 2016 a month before Donald Trump was elected for the first time, I wrote a piece that I'm revisiting here. So much of what I said then still applies that I encourage you to read that piece. My thinking was heavily informed by a lecture by the now late French philosopher Bruno Latour entitled "Why Gaia is not the Globe."
Latour made the case that Trump's perplexing popularity could be traced to his ability to give voice to the anger and fear generated by the effects of Globalism. In fact, Latour noticed that the anger and fear were actually widespread and reflected in Great Britain's exit from European Union and the many right-wing movements in European countries that now are all too familiar eight years later.
I am capitalizing Globalism because it really is an ideology and not the "inevitable" reality that so many of us think it is. In fact, as Latour explains, it is an impossible destination. First, let me lay out a definition of Globalism by quoting from my 2016 piece:
With the discovery and then exploitation of fossil fuels on an ever growing scale, societies everywhere were faced with figuring out how to govern a world with ever increasing energy surpluses. Those surpluses made so many new things possible and in doing so led to rapid social and technological change.
We tried laissez-faire capitalism, communism, fascism, democratic socialism and finally globalism which I'll define as the management of worldwide economic activity and growth by large multi-national corporations which have no particular allegiance to any one country or people. Our belief has been that this arrangement is the most rational and efficient. Therefore, trade deals which bring down barriers both to international trade and to the movement of capital and technology across borders are believed to encourage global economic growth. That growth supposedly will ultimately lift the world's poor into the middle class and enrich everyone else while doing it.
Latour explains the binary trap we have laid for ourselves as a global society. We believe we can move forward toward a future of global economic growth and integration OR we can go backwards to a past of antiquated morals and technological stagnation.
But we already know that climate change, resource depletion, toxic pollution and species loss will prevent us from arriving at the endpoint implied by Globalism. As Latour puts it, the ever-expanding globe of our imagination will not actually fit into the thin layer of life where we live called the biosphere. In short, Globalism cannot be scaled up forever and, in fact, has already exceeded the limits of the biosphere. To continue our journey there is ecological suicide.
What we need to find then is another destination that neither situates us in an unrecoverable past nor forces us into an impossible-to-survive future. The binary trap keeps us locked into a framework with no good answers. As Latour says, we are like people on an airplane whose destination has disappeared and whose city of origin no longer exists. We must first realize this is our predicament, and then find a place to set down. But, to date, "we are extremely poor in inventing futures," he says. It would help, however, if we all starting looking for that third place.
Latour explains the anxiety of those not prospering under the continued movement toward Globalism. They seek protection in the form of work that supports them and their families, a stable community, and a stable identity as parent, spouse, provider and/or nurturer that anchors them in their community. But, the land of the "globe" in Globalism has striped away their protection by sending jobs abroad, damaging their small and rural communities through a loss of people and key institutions (closed schools and hospitals), and a loss of identity—under pressure of jobs losses and retrenchment at significantly lower wages and newfangled notions of gender roles and power—that can be painful, humiliating, confusing and stressful not just to men but also to some women.
The third destination that we are seeking will have to address these needs in order to be satisfying to these disaffected people.
There is also an epistemological disturbance in Globalism that is extremely disorienting. In the past, the lived experience was also largely regarded as reality. In the modernist world of Globalism, our lived experience is discounted and real is determined by "objective" science. In short, if our lived experience runs counter to the ideology of Globalism (often conflated with "objective" reality), we are told that we are ignorant, backward and unscientific, and need to get with the modernist program (even if we think that program is a corruption of our values).
The third destination needs to heal the rift between notions of reality and lived experience.
Latour does not offer a description of this third destination, but rather invites us to think about it and create it. He does not think the backlash against Globalism is actually doing the hard work of creating that alternate destination. But the backlash should not be dismissed as a mere desire to go back to the past. This backlash is actually an incipient recognition that Globalism as a destination is no longer either desirable or possible. What comes next is the political struggle of our age. To respond to that struggle with a reaffirmation of a destination that is impossible is of no use to human society and a failure of imagination.
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
During his first term, President Trump decorated the Oval Office with a portrait of President Jackson.
Almost all commentators do not understand what the re-elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, is doing because they wrongly interpret his actions through the prism of Republican or woke ideologies. However, Trump, who has successively frequented the Democratic Party, the Tea Party, and today the Republican Party, claims to be a follower of a fourth ideology: Jacksonianism. During his first term, he decorated the Oval Office with a portrait of his predecessor Andrew Jackson.
But what is Jacksonianism?
Andrew Jackson, whose family had almost all died as a result of the wars against the English, was a lawyer. In this capacity, he wrote the Tennessee Constitution (1796). It was considered to give too much power to the Legislature and not enough to the Executive (the governor), and it did not establish a Supreme Court. However, it was hailed as "the least imperfect and most republican of constitutions" by the President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson.
Section 1 of Article III gives the right to vote to all free men (white and black), 21 years of age or older, who own freehold property or have resided in the county for six months. There is also a provision giving men serving in the militia the right to elect their officers. The Bill of Rights contained in it states that agnostics and atheists have the same rights as believers. These last three provisions were a direct blow to the puritans of the East Coast.
During the war between France and the United Kingdom in 1812, Paris and London imposed a naval blockade. It was to force the Russian Empire to respect it that Napoleon attacked Russia and because Her Majesty’s Prime Minister confiscated 900 American ships that were trying to trade with France that Washington once again went to war against its former colonizer.
During this "second war of independence", Andrew Jackson, who had become a general, distinguished himself as much by his military as by his diplomatic skills. He managed to maneuver Creek Indians, especially Cherokees. This war was useless because it ended with a treaty that established a return to pre-war conditions, but General Jackson won the first military victory in the history of the United States.
Andrew Jackson later retired to Florida, where he was elected governor. He had two British spies executed, although this was not explicitly within his power, which his opponents called an assassination. He ran for president of the United States in 1824 and won a majority of the popular vote and a majority of electors (designated by the governors), but, following a sleight of hand (a post-election agreement by the two other candidates), he was not considered elected. The electoral college (i.e. the representatives of the governors) nominated John Quincy Adams (as in 2020, it nominated Joe Biden against Donald Trump). Furious, he created the current Democratic Party to rally his supporters. The reality of the election stolen by the corrupt political class served as an electoral theme for Andrew Jackson (as for Donald Trump).
He was elected by a landslide in 1828, when many states had adopted the consultative vote to indicate to their governors the electors they should choose (Reminder: the United States Constitution does not indicate that the president must be elected by universal suffrage, direct or indirect, but by the representatives of the governors. In the words of the "founding fathers", it was especially not a question of establishing a democracy). He was therefore the first president elected, not by, but with the support of universal suffrage. In his inaugural address, he pledged to push the Indians back to the West. His popular base came to cheer him at the White House, but his supporters were so numerous to crowd that they devastated it and forced him to flee through a window.
Jackson had married young Rachel who believed she was divorced, but in reality the act had not been registered. His opponents made a scandal of it, accusing him of living with a married woman. In fact, Rachel died before his second term. He therefore entrusted the role of "first lady" to his niece Emily who married her cousin, Andrew Jackson Donelson, who was his private secretary.
When he formed his administration, Andrew Jackson dismissed corrupt officials. Unable to replace them, he ultimately appointed his relatives and friends. Jackson appointed one of his friends, John Eaton, Secretary of War. For reasons of convenience, he was staying at the White House during the absence of the president. The anti-Jacksonians then spread the rumor of a scandalous life of the Eaton couple.
These sex scandals, all invented by his puritan opponents, caused Jackson to separate from his vice president, who thought like the East Coast elite.
In 1830, Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act. It was about sharing the territory of North America by placing the Indians west of the Mississippi. 70 treaties were signed for $68 million in compensation. Jackson then opposed the legendary David Crockett (representative of Tennessee). About fifty tribes were displaced, including the Cherokees who also signed a peace treaty. The tribe appealed twice to the Supreme Court to clarify its meaning. The exodus of the Cherokees (the episode of the "Valley of Tears") was particularly hard, a quarter of them died during the displacement. However, this genocide did not take place under Jackson, but under the presidency of his successor. Today, the Cherokees, who, unlike the other Indians, did not question these treaties, are the only tribe that is prosperous.
Andrew Jackson, like George Washington and many others, was a slave owner. Two centuries later, the woke movement presents him as a slave owner and a slaughterer of Indians, an adversary of minorities. In reality, he had adopted as a son an Indian baby, orphaned by war, whom he named Lyncoya. He was therefore accused, by his contemporaries, of corrupting civilization by introducing an Indian to the governorship of Florida, then to the White House.
He approved of the "Monroe Doctrine" which meant, at that time, that the European powers abstained from colonizing the Americas while the United States forbade itself from intervening in Europe. This principle was only twisted half a century later to allow the United States to colonize Latin America without European rivalry.
In 1832, he vetoed a law extending a private/public Central Bank of the United States (initially created by Alexander Hamilton). Similarly, in 1836, he vetoed the creation of the Federal Reserve (today’s Fed). In the meantime, he made sure to repay all of the country’s public debt. This is the one and only time in their history that the United States was not in debt (the public debt is now $34.5 trillion, or 122.3% of GDP).
Andrew Jackson, who symbolizes in the popular imagination the resistance to the power of financiers, appears on the $20 bill. The Democrats wanted to remove his image to replace it with that of a black woman symbolizing the dignity of minorities.
His opposition to the central bank crystallized the conflict between the elites and the farmers. He believed that this bank had monopolistic powers and played a role in political life, implying that it corrupted parliamentarians so that they would vote against the interests of the people. Andrew Jackson managed to broaden the electoral base in many states so that at the end of his mandates, seven times more citizens could participate in the electoral consultations. His re-election, in 1833, was triumphant: 55% of the popular vote against 37% and 219 electors against 49 for his rival (Reminder: in the United States the president is not chosen by electors. The popular vote indicates to the governors the color of the electors that he asks him to choose. It is only these electors who designate the president). His opponents accused him of populism.
Then came the dispute over customs duties, which would turn into a civil war 25 years later (which, contrary to official history, has nothing to do with the abolition of slavery that both sides practiced). South Carolina decided not to apply federal customs tariffs (sectionalism). Andrew Jackson, presenting the danger of a civil war, condemned these actions as well as the idea of secession. He threatened to kill those who took this path. The president managed to restore calm and preserve the unity of the nation by successfully proposing a middle position between that of the southerners (free trade) and that of the northerners (protectionists).
Andrew Jackson was the first US president to be assassinated. At that time, presidents had no personal protection measures.
Andrew Jackson always defended the central power against the governors, not out of a centralizing principle, but out of distrust of local elites. He tried to prevent civil war by appealing to the people. In his view, the interests of peasants and early workers coincided, while those of large landowners and captains of industry diverged. In this conflict, the central bank played the main role by speculating internationally and making the US economy dependent on fluctuations in foreign markets. It was therefore he who concluded tariff agreements with the United Kingdom, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. He designed a vast network of means of communication across Latin America to export US products to the Far East. He negotiated with the European powers for indemnities for the Napoleonic Wars. He was intractable with the French king, Louis Philippe. He failed, however, to buy Texas from Mexico, probably because he surrounded himself with bad diplomats. Although the expression is later, Andrew Jackson began to think of the "manifest destiny of the United States" ("To extend ourselves over the whole continent which Providence has allotted us for the free development of our millions of inhabitants who multiply every year"). However, it was only after him that this concept justified the extension of "the perfect form of government" throughout the world.
Jackson’s puritan opponents presented him as an atheist fighting against the Churches, as a manipulator of the populace against the educated elites.
On July 13, 2024, an individual linked to the US Intelligence services in Ukraine attempted to assassinate candidate Donald Trump. The Secret Service, responsible for his security, acknowledged a malfunction, but none of its members were sanctioned.
Jackson and Trump
The example of General Jackson has become a doctrine under the leadership of the President’s private secretary, Andrew Jackson Donelson. It is organized around two strong ideas:
• From a tactical point of view: move the conflicts opposing the federated states to the federal power towards the division opposing the people to the puritanical elites of the East Coast.
• From a strategic point of view: substitute trade for war. Tactics For example, during his first term, President Trump pushed the Supreme Court to refer the issue of abortion to the responsibility of each federated state. This led to his woke opponents, including Kamala Harris, wrongly accusing him of banning abortion, even though it is legal in 38 states.
Tactics
For example, during his first term, President Trump pushed the Supreme Court to refer the issue of abortion to the responsibility of each federated state. As a result, his woke opponents, including Kamala Harris, wrongly accused him of having banned abortion when it is authorized in 38 states.
Andrew Jackson tried to reform the electoral system in order to give the right to vote to all males, regardless of their skin color. He only succeeded in imposing universal suffrage for the election of senators. Donald Trump intends to extend universal suffrage to the election of the president by eliminating the electoral college designated by the governors.
Let us remember that the Constitution was designed by large landowners who wanted to found a monarchy without nobility and especially not a democracy. In their minds, and in the text they wrote, there was not supposed to be universal suffrage. Contrary to what we think, the debate on the 2020 election refers first to the ambiguity of the text of this constitution and not to the counting of the votes cast. The massive re-election of Donald Trump has proven that the reality of the popular vote has nothing to do with the impressions of the ruling class.
Trump, like Jackson, has consistently relied on the popular vote. Both have designed “populist” election campaigns, meaning, in their case, that they respond to people’s expectations rather than endorse the solutions they imagine. Trump has relied on Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica techniques: scanning social media to analyze what people think, then targeting specific profiles with messages designed for them. In contrast, his opponents have relied on Cass Sunstein’s behavioral and cognitive techniques.
A quick note on crowd reactions. Andrew Jackson’s supporters who came to cheer him devastated the White House, not because they wanted to destroy it, but because there were too many of them. Similarly, Donald Trump’s supporters damaged the Congress buildings, not because they wanted to destroy them, but because there were too many of them. There was never an attempted coup as their opponents claim, but rather a mismanagement of the crowd by the police as Joshua Philipp (The Real Story of January 6) has shown.
Strategy
Andrew Jackson wanted to end the Indian wars by compensating and deporting the tribes, with the mixed success that we have seen. It is to be feared that Donald Trump will approach the Israeli-Palestinian question in the same way by compensating the Palestinians and forcibly displacing them to the Sinai. However, this would be to put on the same level the “manifest destiny of the United States” and the expansionism of the “religious Zionists”. This risk exists, but for the moment, there is no evidence that this will be the case.
Andrew Jackson expanded U.S. trade around the world, negotiating bilateral (not multilateral) deals. Donald Trump, a businessman, has withdrawn from multilateral trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). While his predecessors were about setting standards with their economic partners and then imposing them on China, Trump has no use for international standards as long as the U.S. can penetrate markets.
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, both re-elected with strong popular support, will soon meet. They are already discussing through special envoys. They resume their old relationship, except that now Russia is stronger militarily than the United States.
International relations are changing extremely quickly on several fronts at once.
The last two weeks have shown that Iran has abandoned its revolutionary ideal and distanced itself from its Sunni allies in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and even Shiites in Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi and Yemeni Ansar Allah [1]. These points are largely confirmed by the meeting during which Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated by the IDF "thanks" to Iranian information, the confusing statements of Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq, and the measures taken to prevent the assassination of Abdel Malek al-Houthi in Yemen [2].
Then, we showed that the BRICS, at the Kazan summit, affirmed their attachment to international law against the “rules-based order” of the Anglo-Saxons [3].
This week, Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the US elections marks the triumph of the Jacksonians over the Democrats, but also over the Republicans, although Trump was supported by their party. It should follow that the United States will cease its wars in Ukraine and the Middle East in favor of an all-out trade war.
On the European continent, we witnessed in the United Kingdom the fall of Rishi Sunak and his replacement by a member of the Trilateral Commission (i.e. support of US business interests), Keir Starmer. We expect, in Germany, the fall of Chancellor Olaf Schloz and, in France, that of Prime Minister Michel Barnier, without knowing who will replace them.
In the West, these events have the same meaning everywhere: neo-conservative ideology and woke religion are condemned in favor of the defense of nations. This is a revolt of the middle classes. These, who are not xenophobic, no longer accept being sacrificed, in the name of the specialization of the world imposed by Anglo-Saxon globalization.
Generally speaking, in the coming years we are moving towards abandoning both the imperialist will of the Anglo-Saxons and the anti-imperialist will of Iran. At the same time, we should see a strengthening of international law, although it is not recognized by the Jacksonians. However, they admit, in commercial matters, the importance of signatures. It is likely that Washington will push the Three Seas Initiative into Central Europe after forcing Ukraine to admit defeat to Russia. This will result in the rise of Poland to the detriment of Germany and a weakening of the European Union. The United States and BRICS will agree on the need to cooperate, but will clash over the reference status of the dollar.
These important changes are still hidden from us because we do not understand the way in which each of these actors think. We misinterpret what they say and do based on their place in the ancient world.
We are particularly blind towards the United States, which we continue to consider as our masters. We only know the neo-conservative doxa and we imagine that the United States thinks this way even though it has just freed itself from its rule. The election, or rather the re-election, of Donald Trump, his overwhelming victory for the White House as well as for Congress, marks the revolt of the US middle classes against the Western intellectuals who had all united against him.
Let us recall that Donald Trump, while a real estate developer in New York, was the first personality, on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, to question the official version of the supposedly Islamist attacks. Subsequently, he financed, within the Tea Party, the challenge to the legitimacy of President Barack Obama. Finally, he took over the Republican Party despite resistance from former Vice President Dick Cheney (who was a member of the “continuity government,” what Trump called the “deep state”). He campaigned in a new way based on observation of social networks and responding symbolically to the expectations of the middle classes. Upon his election and even before he took his seat in the White House, the Democratic Party launched a global smear campaign against him [4]. Throughout his mandate, he had to face his own collaborators who did not hesitate to lie to him and do the opposite of what he ordered them, then to brag about it. However, he managed, alone against everyone, to interrupt the "endless war" in the Middle East and the CIA’s military and financial support for Al-Qaeda and Daesh.
On the contrary, Joe Biden assembled his team from staff at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the Rand Corporation, and from General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. He restarted wars in the Middle East, then started a new one in Ukraine.
We do not know whether Donald Trump will attempt to continue during his second term what he undertook during his first. He now knows the pitfalls of Washington and has put together a team that he was without the first time. The only unknown is what he had to concede to be able to win this time. His policy in the Middle East was to replace war with trade via the Abraham Accords. It was misunderstood because his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was responsible for implementing them, is deeply racist. He also moved the United States embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, implying that it was the capital of the only Jewish state. During his campaign, he accepted considerable donations from the widow of Sheldon Adelson, an unconditional supporter of the "revisionist Zionists". No one knows whether he is committed in return to supporting the State of Israel or the colonial project of Vladimir Jabotinsky.
Donald Trump’s victory will not end the clashes, but will move them from the military battlefield to that of the economy. Be careful, to analyze his policies, the political categories with which we have been thinking since the 18th century will prove ineffective. He does not intend to choose between protectionism and free trade, but between economic sectors: the products that he will defend with customs duties because they will not be able to compete with those of his competitors, and the products that are capable of flooding the global market. Donald Trump is not the friend of all entrepreneurs, far from it. He opposes those who live off the State by selling it bad products, as the American military-industrial complex has been doing for thirty years. The notions of right and left, interventionist and isolationist are all equally obsolete. What is happening today is of a different nature.
Does Donald J. Trump have an ideology, and what it is? The first part of the question is redundant: every individual has an ideology and if we believe that they do not have it, it is because it might represent an amalgam of pieces collected from various ideological frameworks that are rearranged, and thus hard to put a name on. But that does not mean that there is no ideology. The second part is a million-dollar question because if we could piece together Donald J, Trump’s ideology, we would be able to forecast, or guess (the element of volatility is high), how his rule over the next four years might look like.
The reason why most people are unable to make a coherent argument about Trump’s ideology is because they are either blinded by hatred or adulation, or because they cannot bring what they observe in him into an ideological framework, with a name attached to it, and to which they are accustomed.
Before I try to answer the question, let me dismiss two, in my opinion, entirely wrong epithets attached to Trump: fascist and populist. If fascist is used as a term of abuse, this is okay and we can use it freely. Nobody cares. But as a term in a rational discussion of Trump’s beliefs it is wrong. Fascism as an ideology implies (i) exclusivist nationalism, (ii) glorification of the leader, (iii) emphasis on the power of the state as opposed to private individuals and the private sector, (iv) rejection of the multi-party system, (v) corporatist rule, (vi) replacement of the class structure of society with unitary nationalism, and (vii) quasi religious adulation of the Party, the state and the leader. I do not need to discuss each of these elements individually to show that they have almost no relationship to what Trump believes or what he wants to impose.
Likewise, the term “populist” has of late become a term of abuse, and despite some (in my opinion rather unsuccessful) attempts to define it better, it really stands for the leaders who win elections but do so on a platform that “we” do not like. Then, the term becomes meaningless.
What are the constituent parts of Trump’s ideology as we might have glimpsed during the previous four years of his rule?
Mercantilism. Mercantilism is an old and hallowed doctrine that regards economic activity, and especially trade in goods and services between the states as a zero-sum game. Historically it went together with a world where wealth was gold and silver. If you take the amount of gold and silver to be limited, then clearly the state and its leader who possesses more gold and silver (regardless of all other goods) is more powerful. The world has evolved since the 17th century but many people still believe in the mercantilist doctrine. Moreover, if one believes that trade is just a war by other means and that the main rival or antagonist of the United States is China mercantilist policy towards China becomes a very natural response. When Trump initiated such policies against China in 2017 they were not a part of the mainstream discourse, but have since moved to the center. Biden’s administration followed them and expanded them significantly. We can expect that Trump will double-down on them. But mercantilists are, and Trump will be, transactional: if China agrees to sell less and buy more, he will be content. Unlike Biden, Trump will not try to undermine or overthrow the Chinese regime. Thus, unlike what many people believe, I think that Trump is good for China (that is, given the alternatives).
Profit-making. Like all Republicans, Trump believes in the private sector. Private sector in his view is unreasonably hampered by regulations, rules, taxes. He was a capitalist who never paid taxes which, in his view, simply shows that he was a good entrepreneur. But for others, lesser capitalists, regulations should be simplified or gotten rid of, and taxation should be reduced. Consistent with that view is the belief that taxes on capital should be lower than taxes on labor. Entrepreneurs and capitalists are job-creators, others are, in Ayn Rand’s words, ”moochers”. There is nothing new there in Trump. It is the same doctrine that was held from Reagan onwards, including by Bill Clinton. Trump may be just more vocal and open about low taxes on capital, but he would do the same thing that Bush Sr, Clinton and Bush Jr. did. And that liberal icon Alan Greenspan deeply believed.
Anti-immigrant “nationalism”. This a really difficult part. The term “nationalist” only awkwardly applies to American politicians because people are used to “exclusive” (not inclusive) European and Asian nationalisms. When we speak of (say) Japanese nationalism, we mean that such Japanese would like to expel ethnically non-Japanese either from decision-making or presence in the country, or both. The same is true for Serbian, Estonian, French or Castellan nationalisms. The American nationalism, by its very nature, cannot be ethnic or blood-related because of enormous heterogeneity of people who compose the United States. Commentators have thus invented a new term, “white nationalism”. It is a bizarre term because it combines color of the skin with ethnic (blood) relations. In reality, I think that the defining feature of Trump’s “nationalism” is neither ethnic nor racial, but simply the dislike of new migrants. It is in essence not different from anti-migrant policies applied today in the heart of the socio-democratic world, in Nordic and North Western European countries where the right-wing parties in Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, and Denmark believe (in the famous expression of the Dutch right-wing leader Geert Wilders) that their countries are “full” and cannot accept more immigrants. Trump’s view is only unusual because the US is not, objectively by any criteria, a full country: the number of people per square kilometer in the United States is 38 while it is 520 in the Netherlands.
A nation for itself. When one combines mercantilism with migrant dislike, one gets close to what US foreign policy under Trump will look like. It will be the policy of nationalist anti-imperialism. I have to unpack these terms. This combination is uncommon, especially for big powers: if they are big, nationalist and mercantilist, it is almost intuitively understood that they have to be imperialistic. Trump however defies this nostrum. He goes back to the Founders’ foreign policy that abhorred “foreign entanglements”. The United States, in their and in his view, is a powerful and rich nation, looking after its interests, but it is not an “indispensable nation” in the way that Madeleine Albright defined it. It is not the role of the United States to right every wrong in the world (in the optimistic or self-serving view of this doctrine) nor to waste its money on people and causes which have nothing to do with its interests (in the realist view of the same doctrine).
Why Trump dislikes imperialism that has become common currency for both US parties since 1945 is hard to say but I think that instinctively he tends to espouse values of the Founding Fathers and people like the Republican antagonist to FDR, Robert Taft who believed in US economic strength and saw no need to convert that strength into a hegemonic political rule over the world.
This does not mean that Trump will give up US hegemony (NATO will not be disbanded), because, as Thucydides wrote: “it is not any longer possible for you to give up this empire, though there may be some people who in a mood of sudden panic and in a spirit of political apathy actually think that this would be a fine and noble thing to do. Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go”. But in the light of Trump’s mercantilist principles, he would make US allies pay much more for it. Like in Pericles’ Athens, the protection will no longer come for free. One should not forget that the beautiful Acropolis that we all admire was built with gold stolen from the allies.
On Monday, without comment, the Supreme Court ended the last of the 2020 election cases, rejecting Trump v. Wisconsin Election Commission in a one-line order. It was a quiet ending to a tumultuous election season, but like a football game with a contentious call at the end, the debate over who really won will likely go on much longer.
The courts have always served as a pressure-relief valve on our internal disagreements. From the battle with an unscrupulous car dealer to a nasty divorce that requires discernment over how to split everything from the antique Corvette to the kids, wise judges can help to bring peace and healing. Surely, for a nation reeling after a tempestuous presidential election filled with strange occurrences, the courts were needed to bring us together.
We needed the steady hand of impartial jurists. Most of all, the losing side needed to know that a fair shake was given, and that justice prevailed, even if it wasn’t the outcome they wanted. That did not happen after Nov. 3. Despite a stack of cases that worked their way through the legal system, we remain bitterly divided.
A Rasmussen survey last month found that 61 percent of Republicans say Joe Biden did not win the election fairly. That number hasn’t changed much since early January, when 69 percent of GOP voters voiced the same concern. That 34 percent of all voters and 36 percent of independents agree with them is a strong signal that something went terribly amiss in the maelstrom of election cases.
The election is over. There has been an inauguration. So why did ABC’s George Stephanopoulos feel the need to berate a U.S. senator and his audience with the demand, “Can’t you just say the words: This election was not stolen?” Why must he shout, “There were 86 challenges filed by President Trump and his allies in court. All were dismissed!”
Perhaps, the answer lies in the details of those cases, as much in how they were adjudicated as in the final rulings.
Taking Stock of the 2020 Election Case List
Let’s start with some clarity: The list of more than 80 cases includes both the same cases that were appealed through various courts and many that had no direct tie to the president’s legal team or the Republican Party. In reality, there were 28 unique cases filed across the six contested states by President Trump or others on his behalf.
Twelve were filed in Pennsylvania, six in Georgia, and two or three in each of the other states. Of course, there was also the lawsuit filed by the state of Texas against the state of Pennsylvania that had the potential to change the outcome. So let’s call it 29.
To be sure, that is still a lot of cases. Yet to understand why there is still widespread unease with the election, would it not be better to stop demanding conformity and instead dig deeper to see what the courts told us in those cases, and what they did not? A review of them shows that, contrary to a common narrative, few were ever considered on the merits.
Death by Technicalities
First of all, we can recognize that many of the cases produced no useful information relative to election integrity. We learned nothing from a lawsuit dismissed by a state judge in Georgia (Boland v. Raffensperger) on the basis that the plaintiff had sued an “improper party” rather than hearing the merits of why the ballot rejection rate allegedly dropped from 1.53 percent in 2018 to 0.15 percent in the 2020 general election.
Also, did 20,000 people vote who do not live in the state, when Georgia’s electoral votes were allotted by an approximately 12,000 margin to Biden? We never learned the answers to those questions nor even examined the evidence, because Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was not a candidate for office nor the election superintendent who conducted the election, and therefore per state law, was not liable.
Similarly, a Trump lawsuit in Michigan (Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Benson) alleging state law was violated by the failure to allow access by observers, and seeking to stop counting, was ruled moot since it was not filed until 4:00 p.m. on Nov. 4, after votes were counted. The judge simultaneously relieved the secretary of state of responsibility for any wrongdoing because she had issued guidance requiring admission of credentialed challengers.
So we are left with the memory of the videos of vote counters clapping as Republican observers were evicted and of covers being placed over windows. The judge on this case also said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson bore no legal responsibility for video monitoring of drop boxes nor of making video from such surveillance available, despite a recently passed law requiring surveillance of all drop boxes installed after Oct. 1.
A lawsuit in Pennsylvania, Metcalfe v. Wolf, claimed “approximately 144,000 to 288,000 completed mail-in and/or absentee ballots” in Pennsylvania may have been illegal based on testimony from a U.S. Postal Service contractor. The contractor said he was hired to haul a truck of what he believed to be this many completed mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. The complaint also alleged there was “evidence” of ballots that were backdated at a postal facility in Erie.
The judge tossed it since the state’s Election Code required their request to be filed within 20 days of the alleged violation, which was Nov. 23. They filed Dec. 4. We’ll never know if that truck brought in pallets of completed ballots—an amount sufficient to overturn the state’s Electoral College vote.
In Wisconsin, the Trump v. Evers suit alleged that violations of state election law had occurred in Milwaukee and Dane Counties as municipal clerks issued absentee ballots without the required written application, that they illegally completed missing info on ballots, that absentee ballots were wrongly cast by voters claiming “Indefinite Confinement” status (and for which no ID was provided), and that Madison’s “Democracy in the Park” event violated election laws.
A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to hear the lawsuit, sidestepping a decision on the merits of the claims and instead ruling the case must first wind its way through lower courts—an effective death sentence given the timing.
Absurdities: When ‘Shall’ Doesn’t Mean Shall
At times, judges resorted to Clintonian wordsmithing to relieve a word of its recognized meaning. A state Supreme Court judge in Pennsylvania was tasked with reviewing the eligibility of 2,349 mail-in ballots that were purportedly defective according to the state Election Code (Ziccarelli v. Allegheny County Board of Elections).
In the court’s decision, he noted “We agree with the Campaign’s observation that…the General Assembly set forth the requirements for how a qualified elector may cast a valid absentee or mail-in ballot … We further agree that these sections of the Election Code specifically provide that each voter ‘shall (emphasis added) fill out, date, and sign’ the declaration on the outside envelope. We do not agree with the Campaign’s contention, however, that because the General Assembly used the word ‘shall’ in this context, it is of necessity that the directive is a mandatory one …”
Indeed. Why even write laws? Perhaps the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would feel differently if their rulings were subjected to such an open interpretation.
A federal lawsuit in the same state (Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Boockvar) included a claim that some Democrat counties implemented a “notice and cure” policy, allowing defective ballots to be fixed and counted, while Republican counties did not, thereby creating an equal protection issue.
The judge found that two individual plaintiffs had indeed been harmed by the denial of their votes, but that they lacked standing since the defendant (Democrat) counties “had nothing to do with the denial of Individual Plaintiff’s ability to vote” as their “ballots were rejected by Lancaster and Fayette [Republican] Counties, neither of which is a party to this case.”
So the judge effectively created a legal “Catch 22” in which one must show direct harm from an unrelated party in order to prevail. Logically, under this standard, no equal protection claim could ever be substantiated.
In a Nov. 5 filing (Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Philadelphia County Board of Elections), Republicans alleged that the Philadelphia County Board was “intentionally refusing to allow any representatives and poll watchers for President Trump and the Republican Party … [and] continuing to count ballots, without any observation” by Republican poll watchers. The Commonwealth Court agreed on appeal that observers be allowed within six feet of vote counting while complying with COVID-19 protocols.
However, the state Supreme Court reversed that ruling, finding that the Election Code allows the board to make rules “for protecting its workers’ safety from COVID-19 and physical assault,” and that the only requirement is that “one authorized representative of each candidate in an election and one representative from each political party shall be permitted to remain in the room”— not necessarily within close-enough range to observe vote-counting (emphasis original in court decision). So what is the point of an observer who cannot observe anything?
In the case of Ward v. Jackson et al. in Arizona, an issue over election observers was ruled as “untimely” since “the observation procedures for the November general election were materially the same as for the August primary election, and any objection to them should have been brought at a time when any legal deficiencies could have been cured.” Lacking in that statement was an explanation as to why any Republican observers would have been needed in a Democrat-only party primary.
Judicial Blindness: See No Evil
In the same lawsuit (Ward v. Jackson et al.) the judge also rejected a claim of improper signature verification after allowing a review of 100 sample ballots. Plaintiff and defense experts found 6 and 11 percent of signatures, respectively, to be “inconclusive.”
On the same page of his opinion, the judge noted that out of the total 1.9 million mail-in ballots, only approximately 20,000 had been identified as having a signature issue, or 1 percent. There was no explanation as to why poll workers found six times fewer issues with signatures. The math would suggest either a bias to accept, despite signature issues, or that the sample examined was statistically invalid.
Further mystifying, he wrote that “there is no evidence that the manner in which signatures were reviewed was designed to benefit one candidate or another.” But surely fraud can easily benefit the offender alone, even with use of a uniform vote-count procedure. Fill out 1,000 ballots consisting of 500 for Trump and 500 for Biden, then mix in 100 more that are fraudulent for Biden and count them using any method. Who wins? It’s not a hard possibility to imagine, but the judge ignored it.
He also concluded “the evidence does not show illegal votes”—in a state in which an estimated 419,000 illegally present foreign citizens reside, and which went to Biden by a margin of just more than 10,000 votes out of a total of more than 3.2 million.
Importantly, the judge noted at the outset that “the Plaintiff in an election contest has a high burden of proof and the actions of election officials are presumed to be free from fraud and misconduct.” It’s a fair statement of the law. It’s also an indication of the difficulty in prevailing, even when issues exist. Every case across the nation was evaluated under a similar high hurdle, with the status quo treated as sacrosanct.
Too Early and Too Late
Republicans also often found themselves in an impossible “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation on the timing of challenges to election laws.
In Georgia Republican Party, Inc. et al. v. Raffensperger et al, candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue sued prior to their U.S. Senate run-offs, alleging harm would occur from unconstitutional election procedures. Their counsel noted (on appeal) that the court “dismissed the case for lack of standing, reasoning that ‘the Supreme Court instructs that a theory of future injury is too speculative to satisfy the well-established requirement that threatened injury must be certainly impending.’” Filed too early.
In the same state, a federal judge dismissed Sidney Powell’s lawsuit (Pearson v. Kemp), in part citing that it was filed too late—it should have been filed before the election. As another example, in Trump v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, a judge dismissed the president’s suit saying it involved “issues he plainly could have raised before the vote occurred.”
Together, it demonstrated the hurdle that many election cases faced—denied before the election as “speculative,” or afterward as too late.
The Clock Ran Out: January 6
Several lawsuits were resolved not by a weighing of merits, but as a practical consequence of the electoral vote on Jan. 6 that certified Biden as the winner of the presidency.
Trump had filed suit on Dec. 4 in Georgia (Trump v. Raffensperger) alleging violations of state election law and the inclusion of specific ineligible votes: 66,247 underage votes, 2,423 persons not registered, 15,700 who had changed address, 1,043 who illegally listed a P.O. box address as their address, 8,718 who died prior to their votes being cast, 92 absentee ballots counted prior to the date those voters requested a ballot, 217 ballots shown as applied for and sent out and received on the same day, and 2,560 votes from felons with uncompleted sentences. These were significant numbers in an election that was decided by fewer than 12,000 votes.
The suit had also noted that 305,701 had applied for an absentee ballot more than 180 days prior to election, thereby violating state law.
The suit had also noted that 305,701 had applied for an absentee ballot more than 180 days prior to election, thereby violating state law. Importantly, it also took issue with the secretary of state’s Consent Decree with Democrats, which allowed signature matching on envelopes and applications, but not versus registration rolls. And it cited the low 0.34 percent rejection rate of mail-in ballots, a tenth of the rate of prior elections, despite a six-fold increase in number of such ballots cast.
The suit was withdrawn on Jan. 7, with none of the issues resolved, the day after Congress met and the matter was rendered moot.
Another Georgia suit (Still v. Raffensperger) alleged that Coffee County Board had been unable to replicate electronic recount results, and that the error was sufficient to put the outcome of that county in doubt, with a potentially similar issue in others across the state. It noted that Raffensperger had forced an arbitrary Dec. 4 deadline to certify the results despite the county’s letter of the same date saying the results “should not be used.”
The legal battle continued, and the state’s counsel eventually demanded in a Jan. 3 letter that all lawsuits against Kemp, Raffensperger, and the State Elections Board be dropped in order to “cooperatively share information.” Otherwise, they would remain in a “litigation posture”—quite a telling comment. Why was cooperation ever resisted?
Trump’s counsel accepted the offer of dismissal to get information they had requested, but it came as the timeframe to use it ended on Jan. 6. The suit was withdrawn on Jan. 7.
The Supreme Court Punted
The nation’s highest court showed some early inclination for involvement in the brewing election issues, such as Justice Samuel Alito’s order to separate certain late ballots in Pennsylvania in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar. Yet it soon took a different tone. A petition to expedite a hearing was denied and later the court refused the case.
In December, the court rejected a key lawsuit filed by the state of Texas (Texas v. Pennsylvania), and joined by 18 other state attorneys general, alleging that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin violated the U.S. Constitution by changing election procedures through non-legislative means. The justices ruled that Texas lacked standing under Article III of the Constitution to challenge the results of the election held by another state.
The court could have held these claims up to the objective light of justice, and either exposed it all as painfully true or wildly false, but it didn’t.
In Kelly v. Pennsylvania, Rep. Mike Kelly claimed that the recently enacted Act 77 to expand mail-in balloting violated the state constitution, as amended in 1967, that “allowed for absentee ballots to be cast in the four (4) exclusive circumstances authorized under Article VII, Section 14.”
He also noted that “the legislature first recognized their constitutional constraints and the need to amend the constitution in order to enact mail-in voting, sought to amend the constitution to lawfully allow for the legislation they intended to pass, and subsequently abandoned their efforts to comply with the constitution and instead enacted Act 77 irrespective of their actual knowledge that they lacked the legal authority to do so unless and until the proposed constitutional amendment was ratified by approval of a majority of the electors …”
A Commonwealth Court judge agreed on Nov. 25 and ordered that any action to certify the election be stopped, pending an evidentiary hearing two days later. However, on Nov. 28, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania reversed that decision, saying the “Petitioners sought to invalidate the ballots of the millions of Pennsylvania voters who utilized the mail-in voting procedures established by Act 77 and count only those ballots that Petitioners deem to be ‘legal votes.’”
Yes, that is exactly what the plaintiffs sought—the counting of only legal votes. But again, like many other courts, this one relied on a philosophy that excluding any ballots would disenfranchise voters. So they set aside the state constitution for their own preference.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to expedite an appeal on this case when it would have mattered, then recently refused to hear it at all, a decision Justice Clarence Thomas called “inexplicable” in his dissent.
The Supreme Court also refused to hear any of Sidney Powell’s cases—in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan—and in doing so, deprived Americans of the chance to hear evidence for and against very serious claims that electronic voting machines could be manipulated. Of all of the allegations, perhaps none more so instilled fear into voters as the possibility that our votes could be tampered with and changed, thwarting democracy itself.
Did the machines really show decimal totals for votes rather than integers? Were they designed to flip votes, and in such a way that no audit could trace it? Were these machines connected to the internet on election night, and did data show that foreign actors accessed it? Voters will never know. The court could have held these claims up to the objective light of justice, and either exposed it all as painfully true or wildly false, but it didn’t.
When most needed, the court that once took the time to render a decision on whether a tomato is a fruit or vegetable chose to punt on each of the key presidential election cases. American voters are worse off for it as confidence in elections erodes.
Lessons Learned
President Trump always had a very uphill climb to prevail. This wasn’t a one-state battle as in the George W. Bush versus Al Gore contest. Trump was effectively required to play six-dimensional chess, in six states, all in the span of a few months.
Trump was effectively required to play six-dimensional chess, in six states, all in the span of a few months.
As Andy McCarthy noted, “a brutally tight time frame took effect [upon contesting the election], imposed by state and federal deadlines. It is a drastic departure from the normal litigation pace of investigation, legal research, and the formulation of cognizable claims.” Indeed, it was a nearly impossible task. It was even harder when Trump’s attorneys were influenced and threatened.
In the end, should we be surprised that voters retain a strong sense of skepticism over the outcome of the presidential election? That a man who largely campaigned from his basement, who exhibited signs of age-related mental decline, could handily defeat a vigorous incumbent who drew immense crowds is naturally hard to believe.
The election of 2020, which included more than 155 million votes, was decided by approximately 300,000 votes in six states, or 0.2 percent of the electorate, all of which came by an unnatural flip of results late on election night. Despite judges’ repeated hand-wringing that any court action would disenfranchise millions of voters, the reality is that millions of others may have been disenfranchised, and they instinctively suspect so.
The one thing many voters seem to have learned through the legal chaos is that it’s easier to commit election violations than to stop them. So the electorate remains divided—even after “86 election cases.”
Among the final acts of Donald J. Trump’s time in office was to approve a last-minute flurry of presidential pardons. On the list are many of his disgraced cronies, including Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone. But there was no mercy, evidently, for whistleblowers like Edward Snowden or Reality Winner, nor for Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange.
Yet even as Trump’s team was preparing a clemency list of dozens of people, the president was overseeing a record number of federal executions. Trump has made executing people a priority during his final few months in office, overseeing more federal execution than any other president. Indeed, there have been more federal executions in the past six months than in the previous 56 years.
“How ironic that Donald Trump could show clemency and mercy in his final days, whilst also being the country’s most prolific executioner President in more than a century,” wrote lawyer and anti-war campaigner Aamer Anwar.
Breaking with traditional protocol, the Trump administration has rushed to oversee 13 executions by lethal injection since July. There had previously been no federal executions since 2003. Among the 13 was Lisa Montgomery, the first woman to be put to death by the federal government since 1953. Human rights groups, and even the United Nations, condemned the execution, arguing that Montgomery was clearly psychotic and in no state to stand trial, let alone be executed.
A get out of jail free card
While Trump has rushed to execute death row inmates, he also made a point of granting clemency to his political associates. Bannon, who was Trump’s chief strategist and advisor on his 2016 presidential campaign, is a particularly contentious recipient of clemency, as he is yet to stand trial, let alone be convicted. He is accused of fraud stemming from a case where prosecutors allege he swindled Trump supporters out of millions of dollars intended for the construction of a privately funded wall on the Mexican border. In 2019, Bannon joked on a YouTube live stream about “[taking] all that money from Build The Wall.” The campaign, which Bannon ran, had raised over $25 million. A White House statement noted that “Mr. Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement,” when explaining the president’s decision.
Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was found guilty in 2018 of eight financial crimes, including filing false tax returns attempting to hide tens of millions of dollars he received lobbying for Ukrainian politicians. Stone, the 45th president’s longtime friend, was convicted of lying to Congress and trying to impede the government’s investigation into Trump’s connections to Russia.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner were reportedly key figures in drawing up the list of figures to pardon. It is perhaps not surprising that Kushner’s family and friends also feature prominently on the list. Jared’s newly-pardoned father Charles was convicted in 2005 for preparing false tax returns, witness retaliation, and making false statements to the Federal Election Commission. He pleaded guilty and served two years in prison. After he found out his brother-in-law was cooperating with federal authorities investigating, Charles also hired a prostitute to lure him to a New Jersey motel room where he filmed their encounter, sending it to the man’s wife (and Charles’ sister). Jared’s friend Ken Kurson, charged with cyberstalking and harassing a woman by sending her threatening emails and phone calls and sending messages to her coworkers claiming she was having an affair with her boss, was also pardoned.
And while Trump was keen to punish civilian murderers like Montgomery, throughout his tenure, he has gone out of his way to show sympathy to killers in uniform. In December, he pardoned four Blackwater mercenaries convicted for the Nisour Square Massacre — the murder of 17 Iraqi civilians, including children as young as 9 years old. In 2019, he also freed Lt. Michael Behenna, who had stripped an Iraqi prisoner naked, blindfolded, and handcuffed him, drove him out into the desert and shot him in the back of the head. Behenna said he felt “no remorse” and “would do it again,” as he was acting in “self-defense.”
In contrast, there was no clemency granted for prominent whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden or Reality Winner, nor for publisher Julian Assange, who, despite being an Australian living in Europe, remains incarcerated at the behest of Washington. While there had been a large public campaign in his name, privately, Republican lawmakers were lobbying Trump not to entertain the idea of pardoning them. As CNN reported: “Trump decided against it because he did not want to anger Senate Republicans who will soon determine whether he’s convicted during his Senate trial.
A deadly legacy
The United States is one of the very few Western countries that still practice capital punishment. In 2019, only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt executed more of its citizens than the U.S. Incoming president Joe Biden ran on a platform advocating the abolishment of the federal death penalty and giving states financial incentives to do the same.
The final few months of each president’s rule presents them with an opportunity to frame how they wish to be remembered. Obama commuted the sentences of over 1,500 people, including whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who leaked the Iraq War Logs to Assange. Trump, by contrast, has pardoned far fewer people and used his power to save many of his political associates and disgraced members of the American war machine. All the while, he has personally overseen a dramatic spate of federal executions. If he did not want to be remembered as a corrupt individual with a penchant for violence, this was not the way to go about his final days.
Blue’s embrace of the woke cultural revolution may turn out to be its Achilles’ heel. It runs contrary to the historic norms of human cultures.
Predictions for the year ahead must be so ephemeral that they become pointless. The ‘unknown unknowns’ are too many; the situation, too dynamic. Yet, it is possible to take some key variables, which are all too easily taken for granted, and to look them more directly ‘in the eye’. Why do that, if ‘to look’ is uncomfortable? The answer, the ancients, told us is, that without that piercing ‘look’ of consciousness, our unspoken anxieties evolve through our unconscious, into psychosis – or physical sickness. Our bubble boundaries requires firstly rupture.
Let us then start with the U.S. at this point of fundamental inflection: Biden’s Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan speaking in recent days, exuded confidence that Biden’s chumminess with lawmakers ‘across the aisle’ in the Congress will help push through his China policies: “He (Biden) knows his mind on China and he is going to carry forward a strategy that is not based on politics, not based on being pushed around by domestic constituencies (sic – interesting comment). Sullivan described it as a “clear-eyed strategy, a strategy that recognises that China is a serious strategic competitor to the U.S. – that acts in ways that are at odds with our interests in many ways including trade.” Yet, at the same time, “it is also a strategy that recognises that we will work with China, when it is in our interests to do so”.
What is there to complain about in such ‘a normal, rational statement’? Nothing per se – except that it presumes a return to the old bi-partisan politics, in which Red and Blue lawmakers attend the same Washington cocktails, and assumes a shared desire to engage together in the ‘business’ of Washington.
Patricia Murphy of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who has been covering the senatorial runoff in Georgia, noted that: “Republicans just don’t trust the election … Not one Republican voter, Murphy has spoken to since Election Day, believes that President-elect Biden won. “Not one, not a person”, she said. “And many of them don’t even think he’ll be inaugurated on January 20”.
Murphy’s statement speaks forcefully to two American realities: One is rooted in a deep distrust of the élites, and of a soiled status quo; the ‘other’ reality views Murphy’s interlocutors as not only in denial, but views them with contempt.
We have today almost unlimited web access: Yet, its sheer overload seems to cause us to ‘dig in’, rather than ‘open up’. Anyone who wants it, can find a whole universe of alternative viewpoints online, but very few do. Paradoxically, the Information age has made us less willing to consider worldviews unlike our own. We cleave to the like-minded. We want to hear from the like-minded and have them as our friends.
And since it is so much easier to confirm our perspective and biases – and disdain others’ – the notion of politics by argument or consensus, is almost entirely lost. We can, and do, live in our segregated digital worlds, even when physically, those ‘others’ may indeed be our next door neighbour. This has meant for the architects of the Trump campaign that his campaign – and politics more generally – must be about mobilisation – rather than persuasion. Politics, in other words is now Post-persuasion; post-‘factual’.
The ‘insurrection’ at the Capitol Building – for those who may have witnessed revolutionary mobs elsewhere – was comparatively inoffensive (one unarmed, former U.S. Air Force vet protestor, was shot dead by the police through a closed door). Clearly, this assault on the Hill was never intended as a real ‘coup’; it was rather Trump manoeuvring to keep his base energised and mobilised – and with him firmly in control of the Party. Nonetheless, it has been PR disaster, leaving many of his supporters bewildered. If the aim were to expose details of fraud as part of the confirmation hearing, it failed.
If it were a coup at all, it was one aimed by Trump at the GOP ‘old guard’, such as Romney, (who was taunted as a traitor, by fellow passengers during his flight to Washington). It is the country-club GOP élite who are struggling to ‘take-back’ the Party from the Trumpistas. Will they succeed, in the light of what has happened? The Deep State has closed ranks irrevocably against Trump. Are his nine (cats’) lives now expended?
Though Trump be at the forefront of what happened on 6 January, it is not just about him (as the MSM insist). Rather, the U.S. today is skirmishing its way towards an existential fight: This is a battle over the nature and direction of change itself; Over where society and its constitutional order are going; and how the legitimacy of republican rule, in its essence, is to be defined. “Simply, America’s longstanding political equipoise (from c. 1876) has completely broken down. Continuity and change, for better or worse, is now locked in a classic death match. How will it be resolved? How will it end?”.
Not trusting in the election, in U.S. democracy, therefore flags a profound change in politics taking hold in America and in Europe. The Georgia loss, perhaps, is less crucial now: Elements of the GOP are preparing for radical opposition (to save the Republic, which they see as courting complete loss). The objecting members of Congress knew that they could never succeed in obtaining supporting majorities in both houses of congress for their objections. Their aim rather, seemed to be to establish a baseline (evidence of fraud) for future activist opposition to the results of the 2020 election. Along this baseline they will insist that Biden/Harris are not legitimately elected, and are usurpers against whom any means of resistance is justified. They hoped to inherit Trump’s base, and to ‘ride its wave’. Is there a vacancy now? That is a question for 2021.
The next question for 2021 then, concerns that old adage: ‘Beware not to win too much’. It can be a mistake to corner your adversaries to having nothing to lose. The Blue state has ousted Trump; and Blue has taken everything across ‘the board’, and are ready to implement the ‘Re-set’ – the ultimate subjugation of Red by main force, achieved by the preponderance of wealth, ruling institutional leverage, and military power. A social ‘woke’ revolution, as well as a political transformation. The full outcome would likely reconstitute the constitutional order, in ways unrecognizable to most Americans today.
But will Red America succumb from exhaustion, or lack of leadership; or, on the other hand, might it find the energy to revitalise ‘their’ Republic? We shall see – a big question whose ramifications might make the EU élites particularly nervous. Of course Blue now possesses force majeure. But there is another old adage: ‘No passionate, partisan assessment has any value, save to inflame’ – and Big Tech and the MSM’s censorship and accompanying humiliation of Trump may turn him a martyr, and make the spirit of defiance all the stronger.
Despite the GOP Old Guard attempted ‘counter-revolution’ (talking 25th Amendment action), the divisions between the two Americas are now so great that it can only mean ultimately a de-coupling of the ‘across the aisle’ chumminess (even if this has to be postponed until the 2022 congressional election round). Is Jake Sullivan’s optimism that Biden’s chums across the aisle will allow him to push through his China policies unscathed – especially as Biden is viewed as deeply blemished in respect to China? Might 2021 rather underline the new era of civil conflict, rather than a return to old civilities – and hence to new, ‘take no prisoners’ politics?
The priority issues for all western leaders surely will be Covid; the concomitant push-back from small and medium sized businessmen against lockdown, and dealing with the noxious ‘them-and-us’ effects of a ‘free money’ economic paradigm. Foreign policy – other than China and Russia (on which there exists the one, and almost only, U.S. bi-partisan consensus) – may garner lesser attention.
And here are the inter-related shibboleths that may require a little more critical re-thinking for 2021: America and the EU – understandably – desperately want their economies to snap-back into recovery: “Biden’s blue wave almost guarantees it”, the Telegraph’s economics editor Evans Pritchard exalts – “as Fiscal stimulus meets monetary jet fuel already tanked in the system – just as America comes out of the pandemic”.
It may seem a tad curmudgeonly even to question such panglossian hopes. The vaccines have been sold as ‘the hope’ for normal; but the notion that the vaccines are about to propel the U.S. tout suite into jet-fuelled nirvana, seems premature. The WHO says that it is yet to be determined whether the vaccines actually stop infection (as opposed to merely mitigating its more severe symptoms).
It is yet to be discovered whether the vaccines are effective, at all, against the new strains of the Covid virus (such as the UK and South African mutations); and it is uncertain how many Americans will even accept to be vaccinated. It seems rather, to boil-down to a race between accelerating infections, and dawdling vaccine manufacture and distribution – with a final outcome to this race still uncertain. That outcome, whatever it is, will have political consequences – for the EU in particular in the year ahead.
There is too, a fragile and peripatetic frontier (in both America and Europe), between the notions that Covid lockdowns are a deliberate élite ploy to concentrate the economy in the hands of a few oligarchs – and, on the other hand, a conviction that the infection is a grave risk, requiring a high degree of public discipline. Where this ‘frontier’ flows; on which side of the median it comes to rest during this year; as well as the success (or lack of it) in rolling out effective and safe vaccines, will constitute a key political event – maybe even an existential one for some governments and institutions.
It is hard to see growth simply springing forth out of further massive increases in government debt – Biden’s ‘jet-fuel’. Since 2008, debt has suffocated growth, seeded a crop of zombie companies, and stimulated mainly a runaway asset appreciation. And it is hard to see such growth coming from an economy that is centralising around huge monopolistic behemoths, who stifle innovation, whilst small businesses are massacred. The question is about real growth, or are we looking at just another just another puff of liquidity pointed towards ‘make-believe’ growth? Polls (Forbes) suggest that 48% of American small businesses, risk closing for good.
Of course centralisation of economic activity around big business represents the central plank to the Great tech Re-set. The latter is promoted as an unstoppable, supply-side ‘miracle’ which will transform productivity, and growth. Yet, this thesis seems is not supported by history: “For a quarter of a century, post WW2”, the Chicago Booth Review notes, the value of production of every worker hour rose 2.7 percent per year. Then there was a slowdown for 20 years, from 1974 to 1994, when productivity growth fell to 1.5 percent per year. This was a period that included the rise of the personal computer and the integration of new technologies in a number of industries – and, as is the case today, people wonder why it was that productivity growth slowed down”. Robert Solow famously said, “I see computers everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.”
“Eventually, we did see the computers in the productivity statistics. Around the mid-1990s, productivity accelerated again, up to about 3 percent per year. It stayed there for a decade, before slowing again. It hasn’t yet picked up. So the 1.2 percent average annual productivity growth we’ve been experiencing since the mid-2000s is less than half of what it was in the decade prior, and is slower even than the 20-year slowdown from 1974 to 1994.
“Despite what seem like incredibly rapid changes in technology, we don’t see technologically-driven growth in the data – and in fact we see the opposite pattern. Since economic growth requires productivity growth: If we don’t figure out why this is happening, and how to fix it, we won’t get sustained increases in GDP per capita”.
Blue has swept the board. Yet, the year is new-born: Blue’s embrace of the woke cultural revolution may turn out to be its Achilles’ heel. It runs contrary to the historic norms of human relations and cultures. The danger of the liberal-style Re-set for Francis Fukuyama, would be that it cannot assuage the Homeric heroic ideal of Thymos – the greater passions which drive man to seek glory and renown. Fukuyama observes that “Thymos is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice”. With all our material and political wants satisfied, the human soul will search out deeper, older drives, a need for recognition and glory like that which drove Achilles, foreknowing, to his death on to the battlefield of Troy.
“Those who remain dissatisfied, will always have the potential to restart history”, Fukuyama observes.
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Jake Angeli, high priest of the growing cult of Emperor Donald Trump, dressed as the horned God Cernunnos. The deification of Emperor Trump in Washington, yesterday, didn't go so well, but we are moving along a path that the Romans already followed during the decline of their empire, including the deification of emperors, starting with Caligula. So, comparing Roman history to our current conditions may tell us something about the future.
I already speculated on what kind of Roman Emperor Donald Trump could have been and I concluded that he might have been the equivalent of Hadrian. The comparison turned out to be not very appropriate. 
Clearly, Trump was no Hadrian (a successful emperor, by all means). But, after four years, and after the recent events in Washington, I think Trump may be seen as a reasonably good equivalent of Caligula, or Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, who also reigned for 4 years, from 37 to 41 AD.
Caligula was the prototypical mad emperor -- you probably heard that he nominated his horse consul. And he was not just mad, he was said to be a cruel, homicidal psychopath, and a sexual pervert to boot. In addition, he tried to present himself as a living god and pretended to be worshipped. He even claimed to have waged a war against the Sea God Poseidon, and having won it!
But, really, we know little about Caligula's reign, and most of it from people who had plenty of reasons to slander his memory, including our old friend Lucius Annaeus Seneca (he of the "Seneca Effect") who was a contemporary of Caligula and who seriously risked being killed by him. The Romans knew and practiced the same rules of propaganda we use today. And one typical way to slander an emperor was to accuse him to be a sexual pervert.
But it really doesn't matter so much if Caligula really was so bad as we are told he was. The point is that there is a certain logic in his actions. In Rome, just as in almost every ancient empire in history, Emperors were far from being warmongers. And that was for perfectly good reasons: imagine you are the emperor: you are the richest person in the world, you can have everything you want, you may order people to do whatever you want to do, and if they refuse you can have them killed. You can even force people to worship you like a God and many will do that without any need of forcing them. Then, why should you risk all that for the mere pleasure of slaughtering a bunch of bad-smelling barbarians?
That put emperors in a quandary: their power was based on military might, but the soldiers needed to be paid. And in order to pay them, military adventures needed to be undertaken. But military adventures, then as now, are risky and you never know who will win a war unless you fight it. This problem was the reason why many Roman emperors didn't end their careers in their death bed. Either they were reckless and then defeated, or too prudent, and they were killed by their own troops. The latter was the destiny of Caligula, who refused to engage in the invasion of Britannia. No invasion meant no booty and no bonus for the troops. And the troops were not happy. In the end, Caligula was killed by officers of the Praetorian Guard, a military corps that was supposed to protect him.
At this point, I think you can see how Trump's rule can be seen as similar to that of Caligula. Of course, Trump never made senator a horse, but he surely had stormy relations with the US congress -- as you saw in the recent events in Washington. As for considering himself a God, well, Trump may not have gone as far as Caligula, but surely he tended to aggrandize himself more than a little! The apparition of Trump's follower, Jake Angeli, dressed as the horned God Cernunnos, even gave a certain theological meaning to the occupation of the Capitol building in 2021.
The main point in the similarity, then, is that both Caligula and Trump did their best to avoid major wars and succeeded, at least in part. Trump had to compromise with the military, providing huge financing for the military apparatus. We don't know if Caligula did the same, but his fake campaign against Britannia may have been an attempt to appease the military without risking a real invasion. Whatever the case, Caligula was eliminated and replaced with an older and more pliant Emperor, Claudius.
Something similar occurred with Donald Trump, replaced by an older and more pliant emperor because he clearly showed that he did not plan any major military campaigns. Unlike Caligula, and luckily for him, Trump was not physically eliminated (so far). But the trend is clear: The Washingtonian Emperors are desperately trying to acquire more and more powers in order to try to control an increasingly divided society. "Deification" - turning the leader into a God - may be a good strategy in this sense and it is likely that we'll see more and more US presidents using it in the future
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This being how things stand, can we use the Trump-Caligula analogy to conceive future scenarios? The future is always difficult to predict, but it is also a lot of fun to try. So, let's tell first the story of the Roman Empire after the death of Caligula, then we'll see to create a narrative for what the modern Global Empire after the removal of Donald Trump.
Caligula's successor, Claudius, was a relatively weak emperor who couldn't oppose the military adventure in Britannia that nearly brought the Roman Empire to its doom. Initially, the invasion was successful but, later on, the Romans seriously risked losing everything when Queen Boudicca led a revolt against them in 60 AD, nearly succeeding in throwing back the invaders into the sea. Eventually, the Romans managed to quell the revolt, but it was a close call.
The problem was not so much Britannia, but the fact that the Empire had seriously overstretched itself. While Boudicca's army scoured Britain, torturing and killing Roman citizens, on the opposite side of the Empire, in Palestine, a revolt was brewing. It exploded with tremendous fury in 66 AD and, this time, the Romans failed to quell it immediately. It took nearly eight years of hard fighting to reestablish the Roman domain in the region. During this period, the survival of the Empire itself was at serious risk.
We may imagine that if the Romans hadn't needed to garrison Britain, they could have had more resources to defeat the Jewish insurrection. As it was, instead, the effort of having to control two unruly regions at the same time and at the two opposite extremes of the Roman dominion led to financial problems and to turmoil all over the Empire. Emperor Nero lost control of his generals and was forced to kill himself. For a year, four different generals fought each other for the imperial throne. Eventually, Vespasian, a general who had fought both in Britain and in Palestine, restored order in 69 AD. But the situation remained difficult. One indication of the financial problems of the time is that in modern Romance languages, urinals are named after Vespasian, probably because for the first time he placed a tax on their use.
In time, the Roman state managed to recover a certain balance and the deep state scored a major victory when they placed a career soldier at the top, Trajan (53-117). Trajan may have seen himself as the successor of Alexander the Great and he maintained his promise to expand the Empire. In 101 AD, he engaged in a successful military campaign against Dacia (more or less modern Romania). Then, in 113 AD he embarked in an ambitious campaign destined to get rid once for all of the competitor Parthian Empire, in the East. It was nothing less than an attempt of world domination.
At the beginning, Trajan obtained some major victories, but he was not Alexander the Great. The Romans conquered the region that we call Iraq today, but further advances were simply unthinkable and the Romans had overstretched their domains to an extremely dangerous level. In order to finance his campaigns, Trajan had devaluated the Roman currency and a new civil war could have shattered the Empire. Fortunately for the Romans, Trajan died before he could truly wreck the Empire's finances. His successor, Hadrian, stopped the wars of conquest and reorganized the Empire within militarily sustainable borders. Of course, the Roman empire was doomed anyway, but at least Hadrian avoided that it would collapse already during the 2nd century AD:
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Now, let's start from these ancient events to create a scenario for our times. Joe Biden is clearly no Trajan, but he has something in common with the weak and old Claudius. As such, Biden may well fail to stop the military from engaging the US Empire in one or more risky military adventures, for instance attacking Iran, or maybe Syria.
The military strength of the US is so large that it is hard to think that this kind of relatively minor campaigns could be unsuccessful, but they would seriously weaken the Empire and generate internal frictions. The attack on the Capitol building already gave us a taste of what the results could look like.
After Biden will be gone, it may be possible to see the Global Empire in the hands an aggressive military leader. Such a leader might decide to do what Trajan did. She might engage in an all-out effort to destroy the rival empire, the Parthians for the Romans, the Chinese for the current Global Empire. (why did I say "she"? You know that!)
Could a warlike Empress succeed in bringing the US Empire to global dominance? Unlikely. Just like Trajan nearly wrecked the Roman finances in his attempt, our Empress may well wreck the Western economy -- or the whole world's economy -- forever, with the additional result of wrecking the whole ecosystem as well. But history seems to reason in its own terms that was unavoidable from the beginning. For one thing, in our times things seem to happen much faster than in Roman times and the fall of Washington to a Barbarian army doesn't seem to be so unthinkable as it was just a few days ago.
China, Russia and Iran are the top three existential “threats” to the U.S., according to the National Security Strategy. Three features distinguish the top three. They are all sovereign powers. They are under varying degrees of sanctions. And they are the top three nodes of the 21st century’s most important, evolving geopolitical process: Eurasia integration.
What do the three sovereigns see when they examine the dystopia that took over Exceptionalistan?
They see, once again, three – discombobulated – nodes in conflict: the post-historic Pacific and Atlantic coasts; the South – a sort of expanded Dixieland; and the Midwest – what would be the American heartland.
The hyper-modern Pacific-Atlantic nodes congregate high-tech and finance, profit from Pentagon techno-breakthroughs and benefit from the “America rules the waves” ethos that guarantees the global primacy of the U.S. dollar.
The rest of America is largely considered by the Pacific-Atlantic as just a collection of flyover states: the South – which regards itself as the real, authentic America; and the Midwest, largely disciplined and quite practical-minded, squeezed ideologically between the littoral powerhouses and the South.
Superstructure, tough, is key: no matter what happens, whatever the fractures, this remains an Empire, where only a tiny elite, a de facto plutocratic oligarchy, rules.
It would be too schematic, even though essentially correct, to assert that in the presidential election, invisible campaigner Joe Biden represented the Pacific-Atlantic nodes, and Trump represented the whole South. Assuming the election was not fraudulent – and that remains a big “if” – the Midwest eventually swung based on three issues.
- Trump, as much as he relied on a sanctions juggernaut, could not bring back manufacturing jobs home. 2. He could not reduce the military footprint across the Greater Middle East. 3. And, before Covid-19, he could not bring down immigration.
Everything that lies ahead points to the irreconcilable – pitting the absolute majority that voted Dem in the Atlantic-Pacific nodes versus the South and a deeply divided Midwest. As much as Biden-Harris is bound to isolate the South even more, their prospects of “pacifying” the Midwest are less than zero.
Whose ground control?
Beyond the raucous altercations on whether the presidential election was fraudulent, these are the key factual points.
- A series of rules in mostly swing states were changed, through courts, bypassing state legislatures, without transparence, before the election, paving the way to facilitate fraud schemes.
- Biden was de facto coronated by AP, Google and Twitter even before the final, official result, and weeks before the electoral college vote this past Monday.
- Every serious, professional audit to determine whether all received and tabulated votes were valid was de facto squashed.
In any Global South latitude where the empire did “interfere” in local elections, color revolution-style, this set of facts would be regarded by scores of imperial officials, in a relentless propaganda blitz, as evidence of a coup.
On the recent Supreme Court ruling, a Deep State intel source told me, “the Supreme Court did not like to see half the country rioting against them, and preferred the decision be made by each state in the House of Representatives. That is the only way to handle this without jeopardizing the union. Even prominent Democrats I know realize that the fix took place. The error was to steal too many votes. This grand theft indicts the whole system, that has always been corrupt.”
Dangers abound. On the propaganda front, for instance, far right nationalists are absolutely convinced that U.S. media can be brought to heel only by occupying the six main offices of the top conglomerates, plus Facebook, Google and Twitter: then you’d have full control of the U.S. propaganda mill.
Another Deep State source, now retired, adds that, “the U.S. Army does not want to intervene as their soldiers may not obey orders.
Many of these far right nationalists were officers in the armed forces. They know where the nuclear missiles and bombers are. There are many in sympathy with them as the U.S. falls apart in lockdowns.”
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s dodgy dealings simply will not be made to vanish from public scrutiny. He’s under four different federal investigations. The recent subpoena amounts to a very serious case pointing to a putative crime family. It’s been conveniently forgotten that Joe Biden bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations
that he forced Ukraine’s chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin to be fired exactly when he was investigating corruption by Burisma’s founder.
Of course, a massive army of shills will always invoke another army of omniscient and oh so impartial “fact checkers” to hammer the same message: “This is Trump’s version. Courts have said clearly all the evidence is baseless.”
District Attorney William Barr is now out of the picture (see his letter of resignation). Barr is a notorious Daddy Bush asset since the old days – and that means classic Deep State. Barr knew about all federal investigations on Hunter Biden dating back to 2018, covering potential money laundering and bribery.
And still, as the Wall Street Journal delightfully put it, he “worked to avoid their public disclosure during the heated election campaign”.
A devastating report (Dems: a Republican attack report) has shown how the Biden family was connected to a vast financial network with multiple foreign ramifications.
Then there’s Barr not even daring to say there was enough reason for the Department of Justice to engage in a far-reaching investigation into voting fraud, finally putting to rest all “baseless” conspiracy theories.
Move on. Nothing to see here. Even if an evidence pile-up featured, among other instances, ballot stuffing, backdated ballots, statistical improbabilities, electronic machine tampering, software back doors, affidavits from poll workers, not to mention the by now legendary stopping the vote in the dead of night, with subsequent, huge batches of votes miraculously switching from Trump to Biden.
Once again an omniscient army of oh so impartial “fact checkers” will say everything is baseless.
A perverse blowback
A perverse form of blowback is already in effect as informed global citizens may now see, crystal clear, the astonishing depth and reach of Deep State power – the ultimate decider of what happens next in Dystopia Central.
Both options are dire.
- The election stands, even if considered fraudulent by nearly half of U.S. public opinion. To quote that peerless existentialist, The Dude, there’s no rug tying the room together anymore.
- Was the election to be somehow overturned before January 20, the Deep State would go Shock and Awe to finish the job.
In either case, The Deplorables will become The Ungovernables.
It gets worse. A possible implosion of the union – with internal convulsions leading to a paroxysm of violence – may even be coupled with an external explosion, as in a miscalculated imperial adventure.
For the Three Sovereigns – Russia, China and Iran – as well as the overwhelming majority of the Global South, the conclusion is inescapable: if the current, sorry spectacle is the best Western liberal “democracy” has to offer, it definitely does not need any enemies or “threats”.
Forecast 2021 — Chinese Fire Drills with a side of French Fries (Jacobin-style) and Russian Dressing
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As I write, the presidential election is still not resolved, with dramatic events potentially unfolding in the first days of the New Year. I’m not convinced that Mr. Trump is in as weak a position as the news media has made him out to be in these post-election months of political fog and noise. The January 6 meet-up of the Senate and House to confirm the electoral college votes may yet propel matters into a constitutional Lost World of political monsterdom. The tension is building. This week’s public demonstration by one Jovan Hutton Pulitzer of the easy real-time hackability of Dominion Voting Systems sure threw the Georgia lawmakers for a loop, and that demo may send reverberations into next Wednesday’s DC showdown.
There may be some other eleventh-hour surprises coming from the Trump side of the playing field. As I averred Monday, we still haven’t heard anything from DNI Ratcliffe, and you can be sure he’s sitting on something, perhaps something explosive, say, evidence of CIA meddling in the election. There have been ominous hints of something screwy in Langley for weeks. The Defense Dept., under Secretary Miller, took over all the CIA’s field operational functions before Christmas — “No more black ops for you!” That was a big deal. There were rumors of CIA Director Gina Haspel being in some manner detained, deposed and…talking of dark deeds. She was, after all, the CIA’s London station-chief during the time that some of the worst RussiaGate shenanigans took place there involving the international men-of-mystery, Stefan Halper, Josepf Mifsud, and Christopher Steele. Mr. Ratcliffe seemed to be fighting with the CIA in the weeks following the election over their slow-walking documents he had demanded.
What else does Mr. Trump know about this rumored inter-agency feud? Or a number of other fraught matters surrounding the election, and also questions concerning the harassment he suffered from the four-year rolling coup run by his Deep State antagonists (many of them CIA). What does he know of China’s infiltration into our national affairs, of which the Biden Family’s business deals with CCP-connected companies is only one piece? Or of China’s relationship with Dominion systems — China is rumored to have acquired a 75-percent interest in the company as recently as October.
In any case, the president cut short his holiday break in Florida before New Years Eve to fly back to Washington. The company line is that he wants to exhaust all the prescribed legal procedures to contest the November 3 vote tally. And if none of it avails to correct the outcome, he might move on to… something else. If even the so-far publicly revealed evidence of the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes overseas is true — and the emails and corporate memoranda from Hunter’s laptop seem genuine — then it would be Mr. Trump’s duty to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president. And outside the constitutionally-mandated process in the national legislature, that would leave him some sort of other emergency executive action.
Mr. Trump has called for a gigantic assembly of his supporters on January 6 in Washington. He didn’t call them there to watch him get humiliated. Something is up. You can feel it in the air. I’ll give it a fair chance that Donald Trump is the one with his hand on the bible come January 20. One caveat to all that: 2021 is going to be very rough sledding, with many discomforts, traumas, and things left behind for America. Whoever occupies the Oval Office is going to be buried in trouble. In theory, I would have preferred to see a Democrat left holding that awful bag, if only as payback for all their bad faith and dirty fighting of the past four years. But Mr. Trump is apparently willing to shoulder that burden, and, in such an existential emergency, he’s likely to be a better leader than the corrupt and feckless Ol’ White Joe.
Okay, I’m going to just come right out and splatter a bunch of individual forecast predictions up-front in this lead chapter, and if you’re interested, you can continue on to the finer points and arguments below. I’m grateful for all of you interested readers coming here twice a week, and for those of you who keep this outfit afloat with your Patreon support. A healthy, sane, purposeful, and upright 2021 to you!
A Bill of Particulars for 2021
- The election is re-adjudicated, fraud subtracted from the tally, and President Trump is declared the winner.
- The mail-in vote for the Georgia Senate seat runoff is disqualified as systematic fraud is revealed. Stacy Abrams is indicted for organizing the fraud.
- A number of political celebrities, DC swamp rats, K-Street hustlers, media figures, and tech company executives are arrested and charged with serious crimes around election fraud.
- The CIA is purged and reduced to a strictly analytical role for advising the executive.
- The FBI is likewise purged; Director Wray is charged with obstruction of Justice.
- Following the reversal of the news media’s election narrative (and the actual election results), Black Lives Matter and Antifa are loosed upon a number of cities and wreak considerable destruction, but eventually get their asses kicked by federal troops. City mayors who allowed the havoc to proceed are arrested, charged with abetting insurrection, and removed from office pending trial.
- Nancy Pelosi replaced as Speaker of the House. Mitch McConnell replaced as Majority Leader.
- US Attorney John Durham brings charges against lawyers involved in the Mueller Investigation, including Andrew Weissmann, Aaron Zebly, Brandon Van Grack and Jeanie Rhee. Mr. Mueller is named as an unindicted co-conspirator due to mental incompetence.
- A special Prosecutor is named to investigate the Biden family business operations; indictments follow late 2021.
- Stock market enters long, deep asset value deflation through first and second quarters and bottom-bounces the rest of the year. S & P falls to 550 range; DJI under 10,000; Nasdaq under 3000.
- The dollar DXY index falls under 80 by 2nd quarter, 60 at year end.
- US GDP down by 40-percent year end 2021.
- US oil production (minus natural gas liquids) down by 40-percent, year-end 2021.
- Banking system thrown into disarray due to non-payment of rents and mortgages. Federal government intervenes with direct renter relief payments. Home owners in default are allowed to remain in their houses on provisional basis (which is never reconciled).
- Bubonic plague outbreak among homeless of Los Angeles as rats proliferate in their encampments.
- Pension funds collapse as broken chain of rent-and-mortgage payments destroy Real Estate Investment Trusts.
- Federal government forced to organize massive food giveaway programs.
- Millions enrolled in make-work projects a la the New Deal (some of them of value).
- New York City forced to curtail subway service to bare minimum as money runs out.
- California Governor Gavin Newsom recalled out of office.
- George Soros and several directors of Soros-funded NGOs charged with racketeering and election campaign finance crimes.
- General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford are back seeking bankruptcy protection. This time, their assets are sold and reorganized into smaller companies. No bailouts.
- Covid virus fades from the scene by 3rd quarter, but economic carnage remains. Huge amount of restaurant equipment sold for dimes on the dollar.
- Bitcoin “Hodlers” becoming Bitcoin “Sodlers” as cryptos tank.
- “Woke” hysteria evaporates as Americans struggle with desperate reality-based problems of everyday life.
- Collapse of higher education begins in earnest as college loan racket implodes. Scores of colleges and even some universities shutter; others shrink drastically in desperate effort to carry on.
- Hollywood celebrities apologize en masse for past “Woke” behavior, beg forgiveness from cancel victims and fans. Nevertheless, collapse of the movie industry continues as, post-Covid, Americans desperately seek the company of other people instead of canned entertainments, which they have grown sick of.
- Professional sports collapse as business model fails. Impoverished Americans start-up low-cost, local baseball and football leagues.
- Twitter and Faceback become public utilities.
The Covid Crisis and Economic Meltdown
I won’t have a whole lot to say about the Covid-19 virus that others have probably analyzed better elsewhere, so I’ll make it short. In the fog of pandemic, it’s hard to know who or what to believe. The outbreak in early 2020 induced similar official responses and social changes in many other nations, raising the question: did the whole world get played? If so, it was quite a stunt. Was it intended as a cover to enable the much blabbed-about “Great Reset?” More on that below.
One big mystery is how, in China, the disease seemed mostly contained within Wuhan and its Hubei province, and how rapidly that country got over it compared to so many other places around the world where the illness lingered and got a second wind in the fall. All that said, it’s apparent that, in America, the virus was gamed opportunistically by the Resistance and its news media handmaidens, first to make Mr. Trump look as bad as possible, then to promote the mail-in ballot scheme that led to a fraud-riddled election.
Much of the confusion about the disease itself — ventilators or not… masks or no masks… hydroxychloroquine or not… lockdowns or not — ended up damaging the authority of the medical and scientific experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Surgeon General Adams, the NIH and the FDA, and is still not settled to many people’s satisfaction. And, as if we didn’t already have a big enough problem with failing institutional authority, that scientific failure added to our already acute cultural corrosion. I’m suspicious of the statistics regarding true case numbers and the official spinning of Covid-19 deaths actually from other causes, as well as the tests that produced so many false conclusions. It seems pretty obvious in these tense weeks post-election that The New York Times, CNN, and other media have worked to ramp up the Covid hysteria to distract the public from emerging news about the contested election.
What’s quite clear about the whole Covid-19 episode to date is how badly the states’ government response harmed the small businesses of America that make up at least 40 percent of the economy. According to Bloomberg News, more than 110,000 restaurants shut down, 17 percent of them permanently out-of-business, surely with more to come with the winter lockdowns. More than three million employees lost their jobs in that industry alone. Data from the University of California Santa Cruz indicates that nearly 317,000 small businesses closed between February and September, 60 percent for good.
The nation’s economic affairs were in considerable disorder before the Covid-19 virus threw things into more desperate disarray. Decades of off-shoring industry decimated the working class. In much of Flyover Country, the working class has been reduced to a demoralized idle-and-addicted class with a strikingly high suicide rate, especially for men. The situation only improved marginally under President Trump, who, after all, was bucking practically all of corporate America, which liked the benefits of off-shoring just fine.
I believe that working class will return to laboring, and not in the giant American factories of the kind we had in the 1960s, but because the government social safety nets will be running out of financial mojo in the coming decade. So, they will have no choice but to labor — at the same time that many automated activities we’ve enjoyed will not be running much longer. A lot of that automation has been applied, for instance, in agriculture, where one person could plow or harvest hundreds of acres a day riding in the air-conditioned cab of a multi-million-dollar rig guided by GPS, allowing the driver to watch movies while he “worked.” Well, that agri-business model is about to fail. The scale is all wrong and the capital requirements are too exorbitant. Bottom line: many idle working-class folk have a future in agricultural work. They don’t know it yet. Expect, also, more opportunities as household servants as American society becomes more distinctly hierarchical, and in more fine-grained strata than merely the rich and the poor. Far from being an evil outcome, consider how important to human psychology it is to have a place in this world, both in terms of purpose and a physical place to call home. And, anyway, how wonderful is the former working-class’s current plight as drug-addled, often homeless, and suicidal? Would you want things to stay that way, or can you imagine new social arrangements to meet new economic realities?
The consolidation of commerce into a few giant companies such as Walmart, Target, Amazon had reached a deadly and tragic pitch before Covid-19, destroying all lesser organisms in the business ecosystem, and thousands of local Main Streets in the process. With the Covid lockdowns, the big boxes were somehow exempted from closure. Though they seem to be triumphing for the moment, these giant national chain merchandising outfits are in their sunset phase headed for twilight. As I’ll surely state again in this forecast, the macro-trend is for downscaling and re-localizing in everything, all activities. The chain-stores and big boxes depend on systems and arrangements that won’t persist, for instance, the long supply lines from the factories of Asia. The end of mass motoring will also prove problematical for commerce at the giant scale smeared all over suburban landscapes. And, of course, Amazon’s business model of home delivery for absolutely anything and everything, was perfectly suited to the Covid-19 crisis — though in the longer term its model will prove fatally flawed, since it depends on trucking every single item to its customers, and the reason will become evident further down.
The catastrophic failure of so much small business in America through 2020 will provide the seeds for a rebirth of small businesses when the giants fall. A lot of equipment will be available at dimes on the dollar. Rents will be cheap. Enterprising people will have to be careful about where they decide to set up for new businesses: better Main Street than out on some empty strip-mall. Consolidation will be working in a different way — not to make companies bigger, but to bring many small businesses closer together in places people can get to without a car (what used to be known as a business district or downtown or Main Street). America is not going to need nearly as much shopping infrastructure as we had before 2020, and also not nearly as many restaurants. But we’re going to need some of these things and done in a new way. I can also imagine new businesses that would have been unthinkable a year ago. At some point when Covid-19 exits the scene, people will want to get together with other people very badly. Think about opening a dance hall or a nightclub with live music, even a life performance theater.
The American economy had already entered a zone of dangerous structural fragility before Covid-19 stepped onstage. As Tim Morgan and Gail Tverberg argue so well in their respective blogs, the economy is an energy system that, in the advanced techno-industrial form, depends absolutely on fossil fuels, which have become a problem the past two decades, leading to the present inflection point bringing on de-growth, the onset of a long emergency, and what others call a fourth turning. Same things, really. We’ve entered a state of contraction, and it’s in the nature of large economic organisms to move from contraction to collapse fairly quickly, because the complex interconnections in their systems ramify and amplify each other’s failures. The virus has made it all worse, and faster.
Oil
Hardly anyone paid any attention to the oil story this year with all the frightful distractions of Covid-19, the economic havoc of lockdowns, and the janky election. The oil story is probably more important than any other single factor in the current situation, and is largely responsible for America’s economic mess. Everything in the USA runs on oil and our business model for doing that is broken. De-growth changes everything.
From 2000 to 2008, we were on a downward slide with our conventional oil supply — the kind of oil where you just drill a pipe into the ground and the oil flows out, or, at worst, gets sucked out by a pump-jack — all-in-all, a simple procedure. In 2008, total US oil production was under 5-million barrels-a-day, down from the old production peak of just under 10-milliion b/d in 1970. And of course, our consumption kept going up to about 20-million b/d by 2008. So, we were importing most of our oil then.
That created terrible problems for our balance-of-payments in international trade, but we fudged that by pretending for decades that deficits don’t matter, as Veep Dick Cheney famously put it. The result, via the recondite and pernicious operations of financialization — that is, replacing a production economy with one based on the sheer manipulation of money and its derivatives — was the 2008-9 Great Financial Crisis. The GFC was presaged in the summer of 2008 by the price of a barrel of oil reaching just under $150 — which badly strained what remained of real productive industry. The dynamic in play induced political authorities to quit regulating wild misconduct in finance and banking, as they attempted to replace productive industry with money games. These malfeasances played out most vividly in real estate and the “innovative” securitized mortgage bonds that were gamed to a fare-the-well by the banks. The abstruse crimes have been chronicled widely elsewhere (e.g., my 2012 book Too Much Magic). But consider, also, that all the mortgage fraud of the early 2000s was based on the last gasp of the suburban expansion, and understand that suburbia was entirely at the mercy of mass motoring, which depended on affordable oil.
So, oil shot up to just under $150, the economy wobbled, the banks and the automobile companies had to be bailed out and central bank interventions became normalized, including zero interest Federal Reserve policy, a desperate legerdemain to keep up the appearance of a sound economic-financial gestalt. And that led to the “shale oil miracle.”
It was more a stunt than a miracle, really. First, you had this suite of techniques that could be employed to goose the last bit of oil from otherwise unproductive source rock. These included computerized horizontal drilling and the injection of fluids plus chemicals to fracture the impermeable rock and release the oil. This was “fracking.” It was not new but had not been scaled up into a major activity while the easier pickings were good. It was way different from the old simple method of drilling a pipe in the ground and letting it flow out of permeable rock. The old simple method cost about a half million dollars (in current dollars) per well to drill and start the oil flowing. Shale oil, with all its complications, cost between $6-12 million per well. The old 1960s conventional oil wells produced thousands of barrels a day for decades. The new shale wells produced maybe 100-odd barrels a day for the first year and they were done after four years. The depletion rate was horrendous.
Shale oil was made possible by the Federal Reserve’s ultra-low-interest, easy lending policies. They made a lot of cheap capital available, and hundreds of billions migrated to the new shale oil plays in expectation that they would produce excellent steady revenues. Big institutional investors like pension funds and insurance companies especially were looking for reliable revenue with bond interest rates so low due to Fed policy. They thought they’d be swimming in shale oil company dividends and revenue streams from loans to shale drillers that paid better than US treasury bonds. One thing for sure, they thought: America wasn’t going to stop needing lots of oil. So, shale oil seemed like a sure thing. Except that after a few years, it turned out that nobody was making any money producing shale oil.
It just cost so damn much to get that stuff out of the ground. And the depletion rate was so savage that you had to drill and re-drill incessantly. And what was worse, the economy had evolved to the stage where there was no sweet spot for oil prices. Oil over $75 destroyed the business model for productive industrial activities that relied on cheap oil; while oil under $75 destroyed oil companies because they couldn’t make a profit at the well head. The melodrama played out over ten years through several rounds of Fed Quantitative Easing (money creation from nowhere) and relentless run-ups of government deficits. The oil companies themselves were caught in a “Red Queen syndrome” (ref.: Alice Through the Looking Glass) in which they were producing as much and as fast as they could just to keep up their cash flow to make loan repayments, without generating any profits — and quite a few companies couldn’t even keep up with their loan repayments, so shale was a total bust for them and they went bankrupt. It all came to a head in early 2020.
Just before the Covid-19 virus hit, shale oil production stood at over 9 million barrels a day, with another roughly 4 million from conventional oil, offshore oil, and natural gas liquids, for a grand total of nearly 13 million barrels a day in US oil production, a new record! That was 3 million b/d higher than the previous peak of 1970, at just under 10 million b/d. Quite a feat! Added to that was just under 5 million b/d in natural gas liquids. Daily US consumption was around 20 million b/d heading into 2020. It fell briefly during the initial Covid panic to around 15 million b/d and bounced back a little to around 18 million b/d in the fall of 2020. So, production appeared to be basically equal to our consumption.
However, the quality of the oil skewed the equation of “oil independence.” Shale oil tended to be ultra-light oil, composed mostly of gasoline-grade distillates. Fine, America uses a lot of gasoline because we drive everywhere and incessantly so. The trouble is, shale oil contains little of the crucial heavier distillates: diesel fuel, which the trucking industry and heavy machinery depends on, aviation fuel (basically kerosene), and bunker fuel, a heavy oil fuel for home heating and ships’ engines. Neither did those nearly 5 million barrels a day of natural gas liquids, which were really only used for cutting heavy oil, which was mostly what the USA did not produce and was not well-equipped to refine. The bottom line was that the US had to swap a lot of gasoline to other countries to get heavier distillates to keep the economy going. It worked, but it was awkward and involved a tremendous amount of transport. So, America’s oil situation coming out of 2019 was superficially stabile but fragile.
But entering 2020, shale oil production was in collapse. The lack of profitability finally caught up with the industry. Investors finally noticed that the shale oil producers couldn’t make money. At one flukey point in the Covid-19 spring of 2020, the oil markets became so disordered by collapsing demand that oil on the futures market cratered to a surreal negative-$40 a barrel. It soon corrected to the positive-$30-40 range, which was not nearly enough for the shale oil business to turn a profit. Consequently, the companies could not get new financing to continue their “Red Queen” operations, and without new financing they could not keep up cash flow… and they crapped out. Thirty-six producers filed for bankruptcy in 2020, including Chesapeake, Oasis, Lonestar, Ultra, Whiting, and Chaparral. Oil field service companies that are subcontracted to perform the drilling and fracking have also gone bust.
Shale oil production fell by roughly 2.7 million b/d from March to May 2020, recovered a little at mid-year and stumbled again with the winter wave of the virus. Oil analyst Steve St. Angelo predicts that total US oil production (shale and everything else) will fall to between 9.5 and 10 million b/d in 2021, which would put us back to 1970 levels when the nation’s population was just 205 million (compared to 330+ million today). So, that’s a lot less oil-per-capita, to view it from another angle. Independent oil analyst Art Berman is predicting a more severe production crash by midyear 2021 to roughly half what it was at year-end 2019. Nafeez Ahmed, Director Institute for Policy Research & Development, is simply calling this the end of the oil age. Ahmed says it “will begin over the next 30 years, and continue through to the next century.”
I believe it will go down much quicker than that because falling production is so destructive to the business model of industrial society that it will induce gross economic, social, and political disorder. All that disorder will generate self-reinforcing feedback loops making a return to previous levels of comfort, convenience, prosperity, and order much less likely. The net effect will be a much lower standard-of-living among formerly “advanced” nations, and also falling populations. We’re just experiencing the beginning of that process with the destruction of America’s middle-class. It is the essence of the long emergency. We just can’t tell right now how far down these dynamics will drive us, and how fast. 2021 is likely to manifest intense disorder in the USA as people reel from the loss of small businesses, economic conditions deteriorate further, and political grievance gets amped up by institutional failure to resolve, or even address, our many problems and quandaries.
As for transitioning into a “sustainable economy” powered by “renewables” such as solar and wind power, that just ain’t going to happen — unless you’re talking about oxen and firewood, and a human population about ten percent of what the planet currently carries. All our fantasies about a high-tech utopia driven by wind and sun depend on a fossil fuel economy to produce the hardware for it and then the replacement parts for the hardware, ad infinitum. It’s not worth going into it further here, but if you want to see more elaborate arguments, they’re in my recent book Living in the Long Emergency (BenBella Books, 2020).
The So-called Great Reset
Life in the USA, and other “advanced” nations will reset, but not in the way that most people blabbering about “the Great Reset” think or say it will.
Surely, there are groups, gangs, claques, and covens of people in the world who have some consensual agreement about how things might work, and how they would run them to their benefit, in their hypothetical ideal disposition of things. For instance, the so-called “Davos Crowd.” What are they? A convocation of bankers, market movers, politicians, business moguls, tech entrepreneurs, Hollywood catamites, black ops runners, and PR errand boys who have plenty of financial and political mojo in their own realms, but not enough collectively to carry out the kind of global coup that comprises the standard paranoid Great Reset fantasy. That they meet-up in an ultra-luxurious setting out of a James Bond movie every year stokes terrific fascination, envy, anger, and paranoia that they are capable of anything beyond a festival of ass-kissing, mutual self-congratulation, and status-jockeying, which are the actual activities at the Davos meet-up.
For another thing, in the USA, at least, there are too many pissed-off people with small arms, hardened by years of proffered bad faith and dishonesty from the political/media/higher-ed complex, to just bend over and take it up the back-door from a gang of seditious, would-be aristo-totalitarians with lèse-majesté dreams of nostalgie-de-la-boue Marxist redemption. If you have any doubt about how disruptive angry people with small arms and lots of ammo might be to condescending elites, just review the events in the Middle East the past twenty years and imagine those dynamics transferred to Kansas.
What does the “reset” fantasy supposedly include? A “new world order,” a phantasm of a unified world government, which is preposterous because the macro-trend at this moment of history worldwide is the opposite of consolidation and centralization of power, but rather breakup, downscaling, and re-localization. Why? As you saw in the Econ chapter, because the scale, pitch, and range of all our activities must be reduced to survive in the post-industrial conditions of resource and capital scarcity. And it will happen whether we like it or not and despite anybody’s objections.
What else is in the Reset grab-bag? Supposedly a single world currency, also absurd for reasons already stated — unless you are talking about gold and silver, which may eventually become the universally-accepted medium of exchange (and store of value, index of price) if the post-industrial contraction is severe and destructive enough. But fuggeddabowt “digital currencies,” especially in the USA because too many people are “un-banked,” or otherwise depend on cash-money in the informal “gray” economy of just-getting-by (and there will be a lot more of these types as the middle-class gets pounded further down into the mud), plus a large cohort of digitally-capable people just plain ornery about being herded into an IRS surveillance cul-de-sac — and the whole lot of them will fight like hell to prevent government-sponsored crypto-dollars from replacing what used to be considered money. And, if, in the unlikely event that rebellion fails, it’s back to gold and silver by default — and that might literally mean by default.
Now, I grant you that there are fer sure problems with all the major currencies, especially the USA dollar, and they are all liable to become worthless eventually for all the usual and traditional reasons. The US dollar is especially vulnerable since its status as the world’s “reserve” currency — a reliable medium of exchange in global trade — is no longer consistent with the true financial condition of our country, which is morbidly obese with debt that will never be repaid — a terminal case. There will eventually be some kind of default, either the straightforward way, by declaring nonpayment to bond-holders and creditors outright, or by sneakily engineering a hyper-inflation of the money supply to destroy the value of the dollar. If either of those events plays out, the nation will be thrust into serious social and political disorder, blame will get cast, people will get hurt, and it will be a while before the finer points of the social contract get pasted back together — such as any agreement to introduce a “new dollar” of some kind to replace the ruined old one. By then, the old USA may not still be standing intact, and it would be up to states or regions to address the money issue.
I don’t believe it will be settled as a new digital money for reasons outlined above, but also because digital money is utterly dependent on the Internet, which, in turn, is utterly dependent on a reliable electric grid, and both systems are susceptible to going down in the kind of socio-political convulsion that would attend financial collapse. Not only would transactions become impossible, but records of money ownership — “wallets,” or files — could be permanently lost, wiping out fortunes. This obviously includes Bitcoin and things like it. Blockchain is only as strong as the chain, and without the Internet there’s no chain at all. So, again, gold and silver must enter the picture, perhaps backing a paper currency, perhaps circulating as coin.
In the meantime of such a crisis, very little of daily life would come out the other end looking the way it used to in the years prior to 2020. We’ll see a Great Reset, all right, but not some totalitarian gruel dished out to the plebes from the Davos steam-table or any other elite catering service. It will be an emergent, self-organizing phenomenon, from the ground up, in which everyday people will have to improvise new systems at the local level for getting food, arranging for shelter, and creating business activities around their most fundamental needs: food production, transport, trade, manufacturing, energy supplies, medical care, cleaning, building, et cetera.
I’ve been saying for a while that this might amount to “going medieval.” Could be better, could be worse. Well, there it is. There’s your Great Reset for you. Stand by and prepare to scramble.
The Abyss Stares Back
The federal eviction moratorium passed by Congress with the spring 2020 onset of Covid-19 will expire at the end of January as things stand now, placing 30-million renters at risk of losing their dwellings. Another 28-million house-holders have been placed in a mortgage moratorium. What happens a month from now? Well, for one thing, don’t overlook the brutal fact that these moratoria don’t excuse anybody from having to pay all the back rent and back mortgage installments that were suspended for the year. The federal government just can’t keep rolling that forward forever because it thunders through the banking system. If landlords don’t get paid, they cannot pay their mortgages — and most rental real estate is mortgaged to allow for a coherent cash-flow, tax payment, and business model. Neither can the landlords pay their taxes to the municipalities (states and US government). The cities are especially harmed by collapsing tax revenue because they can’t keep with infrastructure repair, can’t cover pensions, or schools, the vicious cycle of urban decay.
How are people who have lost businesses and livelihoods going to come up with the money to make up these back payments. They probably will not. So far, there is no national discussion of that problem, but we’re seeing the first signs of an emotional response in rent rebellions under the banner “cancel rent.” This quandary points to the likelihood of a campaign for the federal government to bail out renters and homeowners, and/or a campaign for the program that made its debut in the 2020 Democratic primaries, “universal basic income” (UBI). Either one of those has a fair chance of happening as America’s economic collapse proceeds and politicians panic.
These programs won’t work. As soon as they are bailed out for their old debts, the renters and home “owners” will start racking up new back-payments if they have not done enough to generate a regular income, or simply can’t because the economy is so broken. And then what? Another bail out in six months? All the money creation to fuel that wheel of futility will only hasten the inflationary depreciation of the dollar as ever more money is created from thin air to make these bail-outs and hand-outs. The kind of UBI that was bandied about in the 2020 primaries, especially by candidate Andrew Yang, amounted to $1000-a-month. Most renters probably could not cover their monthly rents out of that, not to mention all the other costs of living. So then what? $5000-a-month? If you’re going to give away large sums of money for nothing, why not just make every impoverished American a millionaire? (And then watch the price of a Dunkin’ donut go up to $150.)
A parallel crisis has also ripened in commercial real estate as companies adjust to their employees working from home and try to get out of their leases – or just bail if their leases are up for renewal. The office building may not be altogether a thing of the past, but it won’t be like it was before 2020, and the problem is most acute in a place like New York or Chicago where midtown is chockablock with megastructures that went from being assets to liabilities virtually overnight. We have no idea what will become of them, but I doubt they will be retrofitted into apartments for two reasons: 1) the cost would be out-of-this-world, and 2) the apartment tower is just an accessory to the office tower, and if the office towers are obsolete, so are the apartment towers.
This leads to what I have been saying since I wrote Too Much Magic: our cities are going to contract substantially; the process is going to painful; and there will be battles over who gets to inhabit the districts that, for one reason or another, retain value — waterfronts, older small-scale, low-rise neighborhoods. Covid-19 plus riots-and-looting have prompted people-of-means to resettle hastily in the suburbs. But this trend is a head-fake. Facing the oil problems that we do, the suburbs will quickly follow the cities into disutility and dysfunction. The people who moved there the past year will discover that they made a major mistake, especially if they bought a house.
The more permanent shift will be to America’s small cities and small towns, places scaled to the energy and capital resource realities coming down on us, including the need to live closer to where your food is grown.
This snowballing national existential fiasco certainly suggests the need to reorganize the American economy and the choices are pretty stark. The Democratic Party and the whole left-leaning side of the transect is inclined to attempt centralized control of economic activity in a way that strongly resembles the gigantic national experiments of the 20th century that went by the name of socialism. I mean… what else can you call it? It doesn’t really exist anymore in practice, not even in China, which is now merely totalitarian racketeering state. The 20th century was a moment in history when everything really was growing in scale, and with it came a wish for controlling all that by national governments. It was tried in many places and everywhere it was tried it ended in tyranny, hardship, and mass murder
Things have changed. They have reversed. Things are contracting. So, the other choice we have is to go with that flow, scale down the things we do and the terrain we occupy and the range of things we think we can control. That will ultimately be the only choice, of course, since the urge for a new statist socialism is against the current impulse of history, and therefore against nature. It will fail and then we will have to get with the program that the zeitgeist actually offers.
Wokesterism
Sometimes societies just lose their shit and go crazy and that is kind of what happened to America in 2020. The distress had been building for years, especially since the GFC of 2008-9 when the middle-class began dissolving in earnest. Now, their grown children discern that the future is going to be very unlike the recent past, and that their programmed hopes and dreams do not jibe with what that future actually requires of them: rigor, realism, earnestness, and rectitude. It’s too much for them. It’s too painful. And they’re not ready for it. They retreat into fantasy, cynicism, and ambiguity. So instead of virtue, we got virtue-signaling and, in adults who ought to know better, the kind of bratty behavior you’d expect from 13-year-old girls.
The ground for this was prepared by a society that opted to turn most of its important institutionalized activities into rackets, most particularly, higher education, which entered a late-stage metastasizing expansion fed by government guaranteed loan racketeering. The loan racket allowed the universities and colleges to jack up their tuition extravagantly, which prompted them to regard their debt-burdened, overpaying students as customers, which evolved into just plain pandering to their every wish.
Already in place, as a legacy of the 1960s, was a faculty of crusaders and activists in revolt against the bourgeois indignities of their own comfortable lives, making common cause with all other imagined “victims of oppression” as a form of careerist theater. They concocted curricula of bullshit disciplines for various victim-identity cohorts to monetize their grievance obsessions, and it all worked splendidly until Covid-19 ripped through the campuses and started blowing up the whole business model. And now college enrollments are headed down an estimated 20 percent for 2021, and an awful lot of the not-so-well-endowed schools will be going out of business, with even better-endowed schools soon to follow.
Another thing happened in parallel to the grievance hysterias on campus. The half-century-long civil rights campaign that went up a dead-end with all the family-destroying social services policies of the late 20thcentury, became such a manifestly embarrassing failure with an ever-growing hostile and dangerous underclass, that, in abject shame and disappointment, all of white liberaldom had to come up with an excuse for that failure, which finally fluoresced as Critical Race Theory with its hobgoblin-in-chief, systemic racism.
Hence: Black Lives Matter, based on the fantasy that white policemen were engaged in a genocide against people of color. Really, what you had with Trayvon Martin of Sanford, FLA, Michael Brown of Ferguson, MO, Tamir Rice, of Cleveland OH, and a long line of insta-martyrs, was a series of extremely ambiguous incidents at best, and, at worst, episodes of teens with poor impulse control acting out in ways very likely to get them into big trouble. And then, finally, with the maddening Covid-19 upon the land, and temperatures rising around Memorial Day, came George Floyd, middle-aged ex-con (home invasion, armed robbery, etc.), sometime porn star, hustler, a drug abuser who was “turning his life around” in Minneapolis, suddenly trapped under the knee of officer Derek Chauvin….
Black Lives Matter can be simply understood as a well-funded hustle, and by “hustle” I mean a program for dishonestly extracting goods from others, a crude “street” variation of a racket. BLM also features a patina of moral fakery, namely its supposed “Marxist” credo — an attempt to appear intelligent and political where it is actually merely criminal. In reality, it’s just a destructive force, a vehicle for punishing its perceived enemies, especially the police who are supposedly (but not in reality) perpetrating racist genocide. This gets to the heart of the Wokesterism more generally in all its aspects from Critical Race Theory to cancel culture to the #Me Too game. Its animating purpose is coercion, the wish to push other people around, to find excuses to punish them, and to do it for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching them squirm, suffer, lose their livelihoods, and perish. That’s it. The rest is sheer bullshit.
In the new year, the ongoing economic carnage will be so severe that the nation may not have time for the finer points of Woke theory and philosophy, or the patience to hear tedious explications of identitarian complaints. Women will have to stop pretending to be an alt version of men, and begin conceiving of some plausible role for themselves as a complementary division of the human race in a new and harsh struggle to thrive. Woke cries of “racist, racist, racist” will no longer be greeted with supplication, apologies, and cosseting. Claims of special victimhood will be laughed out of the public meetings. For the first time in decades in the USA, everyone will have to pull his-or-her own weight, and shut the fuck up about it. Hard times will shake America out of its squishy fantasies and concentrate millions of minds on looking after their basic needs without mommy-hugs, participation trophies, or affirmative action line-jumping.
Antifa, a Woke auxiliary with a really bad attitude, spent most of the Covid-19 year as a social space for youth meet-ups as all the usual social venues — campuses, bars, coffee shops, parties, concerts, etc — all got locked-down. In Seattle, WA, Portland, OR, Minneapolis, MN, Philly, PA, and NYC, NY, where feckless politicians forced police to stand down, or crippled them with sanctions against the use of force, or just fired a bunch of them wholesale, Antifa rioters discovered that it was especially fun to play adult versions of capture-the-flag or ring-a-leevio on warm summer nights with the cops. They got to wear groovy street-fighting outfits and wield umbrellas against gas attacks, and the hormonal young men showboated acts of derring-do with fireworks, skateboards, baseball bats, and, more than once, alas, firearms. If they happened to get rounded up by the police, the local DA’s let them go and many returned to the fun riots time after time, all summer long.
A lot of property got damaged, statues of famous Americans got pulled down, spray-painted, peed-on, busted up, decapitated. Businesses having a hard enough time staying afloat under the Covid lockdowns, had their storefronts smashed, equipment and merchandise looted. Fifty years from now, wrinkled old Antifas will recall how romantic it was. In 2021, the public will lose patience with any further Antifa antics in the streets. They will just get their little umbrellas shredded and their asses kicked, and they’ll go weee-weee-weee back to whatever the equivalent of a crash-pad is nowadays, or to mommy’s basement. We’ll also learn a thing or two about who was funding Antifa in 2020, paying for their airplane tickets to stage their fun riots in city after city, and make sure they were well-supplied with pallets of bricks, Roman candles, and bear spray. Many of today’s Antifas will be tomorrow’s agricultural laborers. Having spent their youth rioting, drugging, playing with their gender presentation and their phones, they won’t be qualified for anything else.
Chinese Fire Drills with Russian Dressing
Donald Trump attempted to put the schnitz on the established order of things between the US and China, which had steadily turned against our own national interest. For a couple of decades, they sent us cheap manufactured goods and we sent them US treasury bond paper. China liked that arrangement well enough, but it really wasn’t working out so well for us. Having given away our manufacturing sector to them, and everybody else in East Asia, our working class no longer had decent-paying jobs and were increasingly strapped to buy all that cheap stuff made in China, even at low, low Walmart prices. So, Mr. Trump made a stink about it and slapped tariffs on Chinese goods, and they have lately been dumping US treasury paper instead of loading up on it as before. They still hold over a trillion dollars’ worth, and they can’t dump a whole bunch of it at once without destroying its value. And we still buy a lot of stuff from China, though the relationship is now very fraught.
Some say we’re at war with China, that it’s a new kind of war, an information and infiltration war. Just what and who does China own in the USA? The American people are starting to find out. Gawd knows what else our unreliable Intel Community knows. Perhaps China owns our CIA now. Perhaps that’s why Mr. Trump has been so busy stripping away the CIA’s various perqs and capacities. We’ve learned for sure that they bought and paid for the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, through a series of lucrative business deals made by his son, Hunter, with a subsidiary of China’s own Intel Agency. Nobody seems to care about that at the moment — but maybe they will care more as we approach his hypothetical inauguration.
It’s pretty clear that China put a bid on Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA), a majority member of the House Intel Committee. They sent a little fortune cookie named Fang Fang over to California some years ago when Mr. Swalwell was a member of the Dublin, CA, city council, and she hung with him for years, bundling campaign money and helping him rise into a congressional seat. He was rumored to be playing hide-the-winter-melon with her, for years. Was he owned? Nobody seems to care for now. Perhaps that will change.
And, of course, we learned some time ago that Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) had a Chinese (national) chauffeur and go-fer for twenty freakin’ years — including her years as chair of the Senate Intel Committee. He vamoosed to China when his identity as a spy was revealed. Nobody cares. That’s what a sloppy-ass country we’ve become.
China, apparently, has thousands upon thousands of carefully placed agents throughout America, especially in big academic research centers and American tech companies and even the news media. Reports say that a Chinese company purchased a 75-percent interest in Dominion Voting Systems for $400-million from Staple Street Capital in October 2020 in a shadowy deal run through the Swiss Bank UBS. It has been demonstrated that Dominion voting machines used in the recent national US elections, were connected to the Internet, though, by law, they are not allowed to be connected. Weird, a little bit. Connected to whom? So far, nobody seems to care.
Oh, and there was China’s Lunar New Year gift to America almost a year ago: Covid-19.
Thanks, China. What do we actually know about how that went down? Apparently, they are busy as I write destroying virus samples in the Wuhan lab.
Will this so far informational and economic war between China and the US heat up and become a different kind of war? I don’t think there’s much in it for China to go that route. Anyway, they’ve got their hands full waiting to see if their bought-and-paid-for errand boy, Mr. Biden, actually becomes president and also perhaps waiting to see exactly how the USA falls apart in the coming year. They will lose a lot of customers for patio furniture and sundry other stuff, but then they won’t have to worry about us monitoring all their activity elsewhere around the world, where, let’s face it, they have a lot going on. The main thing is, China is nearly as fragile as we are, only in different ways. They don’t have whole lot of oil reserves, and they’re burning almost 13-million barrels a day, of which they produce close to 5-million and import the rest. Not a great situation, and not appreciably better than our own. Their banking system is at least as janky as ours, probably worse, since their banks only have to answer to the CCP and they can paper-over any financial sucking chest wound. A global depression could create serious unemployment problems for them, and hence political pressure on and within the CCP. For 2021. If, by some chance, Donald Trump ends up back in the White House, things could go a bit more non-linear.
Reports emerged only days ago that President Xi Jinping will be undergoing brain surgery for a worsening aneurysm. They imply a power struggle in the CCP to ensue in the event that the surgery doesn’t turn out well. I can’t confirm these rumors, but there it is… just sayin’….
Russia appears best positioned to sit out the economic disorders of the West and the discontents of China. Russia has already been through a traumatic economic and political collapse and emerged much lightened, streamlined, and viable. Due to punitive US sanctions, she has had to develop an import-replacement economy, supplying more of her own needs. She has about twice the proven oil reserves as the USA and less than half our population. She has been steadily acquiring gold reserves and has been making noises about establishing a gold-backed currency — which would be a real novelty in a world of fiat junk money. She has a well-educated and relatively homogenous population of capable people who have recovered psychologically from the 75-year-long political mind-fuck of communism. She has an arsenal of world-beating hypersonic nuclear weapons. She has rational and intelligent political leadership. And Russia just passed a law stating that anyone who brings false #MeToo accusations against another citizen faces five years in prison. One looks on in awe!
Europe
Achhhhh. Fugeddabowdit. No oil. No mojo. Buried in debt. Failing social safety nets. Over a million hostile Muslim immigrants looking to burn the joint down. In 2021, the EU will break down and states will scramble desperately to shore up their economies. They will not succeed. Disorders follow and governments will fall. Angela Merkel waves goodby to das volk. Boris Johnson faces a no confidence vote in parliament. Macron survives and gets very tough, but France grows poor and bitter. Everybody starts saying nice things about Victor Orban.
There’s the whole shootin’ match. Forgive me for leaving out only about ten thousand other topics and issues, including climate change, about which I will only say: believe it or not, we’ve got more urgent things to worry about. Happy New Year everybody!
Trump at the Rubicon
How the Insurrection Act and Militia Act Empower Trump to Cast the Die
In the closing days of 50 BC, the Roman Senate declared that Julius Caesar’s term as a provincial governor was finished. Roman law afforded its magistrates immunity to prosecution, but this immunity would end with Caesar’s term. As the leader of the populares faction, Caesar had many enemies among the elite optimates, and as soon as he left office, these enemies planned to bury him in litigation. Caesar knew he would lose everything: property, liberty, even his life.
Caesar decided it was better to fight for victory than accept certain defeat. In January 49 BC, he crossed the Rubicon River with his army, in violation of sacred Roman law, and begin a civil war. “Alea iacta est,” said Caesar: The die is cast.
In the closing days of 2020 AD, the American media has declared that Donald Trump’s term as president is finished. As the leader of the deplorables faction, Trump has many enemies among the elite irates, and as soon as he leaves office, these enemies plan to bury him in litigation. Bill Pascrell, the Chairman of the House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Oversight, has officially called for the prosecution of President Trump for “government crimes” following his term in office. In his thirst for vengeance, Pascrell has made it clear there will be no Nixonian escape by pardon:
Donald Trump, along with his worst enablers, must be tried for their crimes against our nation and Constitution. Any further abuse of the sacred pardon power to shield criminals would itself be obstruction of justice, and any self-pardons would be illegal.
Like Caesar, Trump now must fight for victory or lose everything. Come January 2021, will Donald Trump decide to cast the die and cross the Rubicon? He might.
The same people who warned us that Trump is worse than Hitler will now scoff: “Donald Trump is no Caesar!” That’s true. Trump is in a much better position than Caesar was.
Unlike Caesar, Trump can cross the Rubicon legally. He need violate no sacred law. He has all of the legal power he needs to act and win. Congress has given it to him. All he needs to do is invoke the Insurrection Act.
Invoking the Insurrection Act
During the 2020 summer protests and riots, commentators on both the Left and Right argued about whether Trump would use the so-called Insurrection Act against the crowds. Strangely, no one seems to be considering the fact that Trump could use it now.
The history of the Insurrection Act dates back all the way to 1797, and the legislative record is so long and tortured that it’s woeful to contemplate. Suffice to say that in the 21st century, the Insurrection Act has been pleasantly re-titled “The Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act” and codified in four sections of the US Code:
Of the four provisions, the most recent and the most powerful is 10 USC § 253, which was written in 2006. This is the one that liberal pundits always forget to mention when they blab about Posse Comitatus and governors. It reads:
The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it-
so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
That’s powerful language! Consider:
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The authority is vested solely in the President. He does not need the invitation of state governors to intervene, nor does he need the approval of the Supreme Court. Older provisions of the Insurrection Act required either a governor or a judicial proceeding to authorize its use, but these limits were purposefully removed by Congress in § 253.
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There is no time limit on the President’s activities. Older versions of the Insurrection Act limited the use of force to brief periods of time and then required legislative approval. Those limits, too, are also gone.
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The President is allowed to use any means that he (and again, he needs no one else) considers necessary. This includes using the armed forces (which enables him to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act) and using the militia (which we’ll discuss in more detail below).
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The President’s ability to use force isn’t restricted to actual rebellion or insurgency. He can act against merely unlawful combinations and conspiracies. To be clear: If the President decides that a conspiracy has deprived people of a right and believes that authorities fail or refuse to protect the right, he can send in the troops.
In blunt terms, Congress has given the power to President Trump to proclaim:
“I, President Trump, have determined that a conspiracy has deprived 70 million Americans of their right to vote and that the other authorities are refusing to protect this right. I therefore order the suppression of this conspiracy by any means necessary.”
And with that, Trump will cross the Rubicon.
Horror and Denial: He Shouldn’t! He Wouldn’t!
If you are of libertarian leanings, you are likely to feel horror: “Why on Earth did a free republic vest so much power into one man?”
You should feel horror. The Romans required a Senate vote to appoint a Dictator with emergency powers, and that Dictator served a strict six-month term limit. In America, we’ve given the President the right to decide when he should become a Dictator and for how long he can retain his emergency powers.
This was certainly unwise; but it is done. “Game over, man.” The power has been given. The power can be used. And it probably will be used if the Democrats continue on their foolish campaign to seek vengeance on Trump.
If you are in the grip of normalcy bias, you are likely to be in denial: “Trump wouldn’t dare! The US Armed Forces would remove him from office! The troops wouldn’t respond to his call!”
Pompey said the same about the Roman legions. He was wrong. He was so wrong, in fact, that his decapitated head ended up in a stylish gift box presented to Caesar as a present when he landed in Egypt. Don’t be Pompey.
Now, I don’t expect beheadings (just helicopters) but I do expect that the US Armed Forces would obey Trump’s orders. Although he is not popular with the Pentagon, Trump remains popular with actual soldiers, especially with white middle-class men who make up a disproportionate number of the infantry, armor, pilots, special forces, and other combat arms. (His support among law enforcement personnel is even higher. The men with guns love Trump.)
But let’s assume the Armed Forces are paralyzed, split, or neutral. If so, Trump still has millions of troops available: The militia.
Calling Up the Militia
The militia is defined by 10 U.S. Code § 246:
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and… under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
This is, again, an incredibly powerful piece of legislation. Put into plain English, and ignoring a few minor exemptions (postal workers, etc), Trump commands an unorganized militia consisting of every able-bodied man between the ages of 17 and 45. The men don’t need to be in the National Guard. They don’t need to be veterans. They don’t need to be anything except 17 to 45 and able-bodied.
Remember that 10 USC § 253 grants the President the power to use the militia to take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress conspiracy. The militia is statutorily defined to include the unorganized militia.
Therefore, when you combine 10 USC § 253 with 10 USC § 246, the President can call on every able-bodied male age 17 to 45 to take any means he deems necessary to suppress the conspiracy to deny Americans their voting rights.
How many men is that? With 328M Americans, 50% of them male, and 40% of them between 18 and 45, that’s 65M militia members.
Organizing the Unorganized
When Trump calls up the unorganized militia, how does it get organized? What Federal statutes, regulations, and case law govern what happens next? The answer… Well, there isn’t one.
“The Citizen-Soldier under Federal and State Law”, a lengthy law review article published in 94 W. Va. L. Rev (1992), reviewed all of the available statutes, regulations, and case law relating to the use of citizen-soldiers. Turns out, there’s not much about the unorganized militia. In fact, in the entirety of the 20th century, there has only been one case:
In 1946 Virginia Governor William Mumford Tuck issued a call to the state's unorganized militia to come to the aid of the state and to quell a labor dispute.
Let’s quickly look at what happened. According to the Encyclopedia Virginia, the crisis began when the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union announced that its members would strike against the Virginia Electric and Power Company unless its demands were met by a deadline of April 1, 1946.
At the time, “Virginia law divided its militia into four classes: the National Guard, the Virginia Defense Force, the naval militia, and the unorganized militia. This latter unit hypothetically consisted of all able-bodied males between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five who could be summoned by the governor if needed.” (Virginia law thus mirrored 10 U.S. Code § 246.)
Two days before the strike deadline, Governor Tuck “unilaterally decreed that all IBEW employees were summarily drafted into the unorganized militia and ordered, on pain of court-martial, to continue at their jobs.” Shortly thereafter, the dispute was resolved and questions as to the constitutionality of Tuck's actions were left unresolved. However, the next month, US President Harry S. Truman “used a similar tactic in threatening to draft into the U.S. Army railway workers whose union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, was calling for a nationwide strike; as in the VEPCO affair, the two sides reached a settlement at the eleventh hour.”
So in the only recorded instance in the last 100 years, an unorganized militia was called up, drafted, and ordered to perform particular duties on pain of court-martial, unilaterally by a governor, without any other legislative action, new statute, or court order. And rather than condemn the governor, the US President thought this idea was so awesome he used it himself the next month on the federal militia.
With no apparent limits whatsoever, the Insurrection Act combined with the Militia Act isn’t just a blank check; it’s a blank check book. Apparently our government can call on its citizens to do whatever it wants! I would protest this, but I’m currently on lockdown.
The Balance of Forces
Let’s return to our earlier assumption that Trump has invoked the Insurrection Act and then used it to call up the militia. Let’s continue to assume that the US Armed Forces are either paralyzed with indecision, split in their loyalties, or opting to stay neutral, and just look at the militia. So who is going to fight?
Now, no matter what the law says, not every eligible militia man would respond to Trump’s call. But it seems likely there’d be a large number who did respond, and an even larger number of noncombatant supporters. Right now, 70% of Republicans don’t think the election was free and fair. If Trump calls on the unorganized militia to save the Republic from voter fraud, a militia will come.
So too would an anti-militia or resistance. In fact, lots of people who are willing to fight are fighting on the streets already. It seems likely that if Trump crosses the Rubicon, he will trigger a civil war, just like Caesar triggered a civil war.
When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he had only one legion against the might of Rome. What would Trump and his opponents be able to muster?
Let’s assess the balance of forces. Trump’ voters consisted of 58% of 98M white men; 55% of 98M white women; 36% of 30M Hispanic men, 28% of 30M Hispanic women, 20% of 22M black men, and 9% of 22M black women.
Meanwhile, the demographics of gun ownership in the US are as follows: 48% of white men own a gun, while only 24% of white women own a gun, 24% of non white men, and 16% of non-white women.
Assuming that women largely don’t fight (which is the historical norm), the balance of forces looks like this:
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98 million white men x 58% Trump voters x 48% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 11 million white gun-owning Trump militia
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36 million Hispanic men x 30% Trump voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 1 million Hispanic gun-owning Trump militia
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22 million black men x 20% Trump voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 0.4 million black gun-owning Trump militia
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98 million white men x 42% Biden voters x 48% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 8 million white gun-owning anti-Trump resisters
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36 million Hispanic men x 70% Biden voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 2.4 million Hispanic gun-owning anti-Trump resisters
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22 million black men x 80% Biden voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 1.7 million black gun-owning anti-Trump resisters
This basic math suggests 12.4 million potential Trump gun owners and 12.1 million potential anti-Trump gun owners.
However, it’s likely the odds would stack more favorably to Trump. Although only 39% of Americans are Republicans, gun owners are actually 64% Republican. In other words, those who own guns are disproportionately Republican by a factor of 1.64! If we replace the percentage of Trump voters with the percentage of Republican gun-owners, then the balance of forces changes to 17.6M pro-Trump and 6.9M anti-Trump.
3% of Americans fought in the Continental Army during the Revolution. If 3% respond to the call for the militia, that would mean between 450,000 to 700,000 militia and 210,000 to 450,000 resisters. To put that in context, there’s only 60,000 soldiers in the Infantry Branch of the US Army.
Of the militia who do respond, those on Trump’s side will be much better trained. As noted earlier, the military’s combat arms are disproportionately white, with the infantry being 79% white and only 9% black. Since the United States has now been at war for 20 years, there are millions of combat veterans, and the vast majority of those who fought as infantry are likely to be on Trump’s side. Likewise, the vast majority of LEO veterans seem likely to fight on Trump’s side, if they chose a side.
The Oathkeepers, a hundred-thousand-strong organization made up of military and law enforcement veterans and personnel, has already stated that it will refuse to recognize a Biden presidency. “We’ll be very much like the founding fathers. We’ll end up nullifying and resisting,” said founder Stewart Rhodes.
The founding fathers resisted, of course, with guns.
This Is Not a Drill
Meanwhile, those in the grip of normalcy bias still think that the ‘nuclear option’ is for Trump to ask the state legislatures to appoint some electors to the college. Using legislative ballots isn’t the nuclear option. It’s barely a grenade. The nuclear option is Insurrection Act and the Militia.
Left-wing media is a parade of ostriches marching heads down in the sand. “Trump will lose in a landslide!” Wrong. “Trump has already lost!” Wrong. “There is no evidence of fraud!” Wrong. “Civil War could never happen!” Wrong. Maybe it won’t happen. The future is unpredictable. But it really, really could happen.
If I had told you last November that in the next 12 months the US would endure the worst pandemic since Spanish Flu, AND the worst depression since the Great Depression, AND the worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War, AND the worst civil unrest since the summer of 1968, AND an unprecedented nation-wide lockdowns that led to the end of sports, bars, restaurants, movies, in-class attendance at school, and commuting to work, AND that it would culminate in the World Economic Forum announcing a Great Reset to the global economy to lock in this new normal, would you have believed me? No, you’d have laughed me off as a tinfoil nutjob. Yet here we are.
To repeat a statistic from earlier: 70% of Republicans think that the most recent election is illegitimate. In a functioning democracy, if 70% of the second-largest political party in the country thinks an election has been stolen, the elites come together to cooperate to investigate and restore legitimacy in the eyes of the voters.
In the US, that’s not happening. Instead, an enormous machine, consisting of tech oligopolies, liberal media, watchdog groups, and partisan activists, is doing everything it can to silence and suppress the dissenters. Simultaneously, this same machine is making enemy lists and actively declaring that when it wins, it will be taking vengeance, against Trump, against everyone who helped him, and against everyone who voted for him.
This is not a drill. This is where we are. If Trump is standing on the banks of the Rubicon, it’s because the leftist machine has purposefully widened the Rubicon River until it reaches his feet.
Clear-headed left-wingers — if there are any left — need to step in and deescalate the threats against Trump and his supporters, and listen to 70 million Americans clamoring for fair and fraud-free voting. There is still time.
Otherwise, as another great military leader put it, “when on death ground, you must fight.”
Update (1230AM 11/20/20): This afternoon, Trump’s legal team made serious allegations of election fraud in the Presidential election and indicated their intent to pursue these allegations in as many as 10 states. In response, Democrat thought leaders have declared the litigation efforts to be an attempted coup, begun a #sedition hashtag on Twitter, and written op-eds demanding felony charges against the entire legal team for treason — a legal team led by one of the nation’s most respected prosecutors and mayors in history! Taking the position that litigating before the Supreme Court is sedition is a perfect example of purposefully widening the Rubicon River until it reaches Trump’s feet.
“Yeah, like [in] a church. Church of the Good Hustler.”
– Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in The Hustler
At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, A Doll’s House, Nora, the aggrieved wife, leaves her husband’s house and all the illusions that sustained its marriage of lies. She chooses freedom over fantasy. She will no longer be played with like a doll but will try to become a free woman – a singular one. “There is another task I must undertake first. I must try and educate myself,” she tells her husband Torvald, a man completely incapable of understanding the social programming that has made him society’s slave.
When Nora closes the doll’s house door behind her, the sound is like a hammer blow of freedom. For anyone who has seen the play, even when knowing the outcome in advance, that sound is profound. It keeps echoing. It interrogates one’s conscience.
The echo asks: Do you live inside America’s doll house where a vast tapestry of lies, bad faith, and cheap grace keep you caged in comfort, as you repeat the habits that have been drilled into you?
In this doll’s house of propaganda into which America has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.
Americans who voted for either Trump or Biden in the 2020 election are like Torvald clones. They refuse to open that door so they might close it behind them. They live in the doll’s house – all 146+ million of them. Like Torvald, they are comforted. They are programmed and propagandized, embracing the illusion that the electoral system is not structured and controlled to make sure no significant change can occur, no matter who is president. It is a sad reality promoted as democracy.
They will prattle on and give all sorts of reasons why they voted, and for whom, and how if you don’t vote you have no right to bitch, and how it’s this sacred right to vote that makes democracy great, blah blah blah. It’s all sheer nonsense. For the U.S.A. is not a democracy; it is an oligarchy run by the wealthy for the wealthy.
This is not a big secret. Everybody knows this is true; knows the electoral system is sheer show business with the presidential extravaganza drawing the big money from corporate lobbyists, investment bankers, credit card companies, lawyers, business and hedge fund executives, Silicon Valley honchos, think tanks, Wall Street gamblers, millionaires, billionaires, et. al. Biden and Trump spent over 3 billion dollars on the election. They are owned by the money people.
Both are old men with long, shameful histories. A quick inquiry will show how the rich have profited immensely from their tenures in office. There is not one hint that they could change and have a miraculous conversion while in future office, like JFK. Neither has the guts or the intelligence. They are nowhere men who fear the fate that John Kennedy faced squarely when he turned against the CIA and the war machine. They join the craven company of Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. They all got the message that was sent from the streets of Dallas in 1963: You don’t want to die, do you?
Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, its vast intelligence apparatus, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious.
It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, or Jimmy Carter. The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why.
All the while, the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful. It is now essentially an electronic prison that is being “Built Back Better.” The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population through their corporate mass-media stenographers. Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other.
Only those backed by the wealthy power brokers get elected in the U.S.A. Then when elected, it’s payback time. Palms are greased. Everybody knows this is true. It’s called corruption. So why would anyone, who opposes a corrupt political oligarchy, vote, unless they were casting a vote of conscience for a doomed third-party candidate?
Leonard Cohen told it true with “Everybody Knows”:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
And yet everybody who voted for the two men backed by the super-rich owners of the country knew what they were doing, unless they live under a rock and come out every four years to vote. Perhaps they were out buying stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey, so they can give thanks for the farce (stuffing: Latin: farcire ).
They have their reasons. Now the Biden people celebrate, just as Trump’s supporters did in 2016. I can hear fireworks going off as I write here in a town where 90% + voted for Biden and hate Trump with a passion more intense than what they ever could work up for a spurned lover or spouse. This is mass psychosis. It’s almost funny.
At least we have gotten rid of Trump, they say. No one can be worse. They think this is logic. Like Torvald, they cannot begin to understand why anyone would want to leave the doll’s house, how anyone could refuse to play a game in which the dice are loaded. They will deny they are in the doll’s house while knowing the dice are loaded and still roll the die, not caring that their choice – whether it’s Tweedledee or Tweedledum – will result in the death and impoverishment of so many, that being the end result of oligarchic rule at home and imperialism abroad.
Orwell called this Doublethink:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.
And while in Nineteen Eighty-Four Doublethink is learned by all the Party members “and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox,” today in the U.S.A., it has been mastered even by the so-called unintelligent.
To live in the U.S.A. is to live in the Church of the Good Hustler.
People often ask: What can we do to make the country better? What is your alternative?
A child could answer that one: Don’t vote if you know that both contenders are backed by the super-rich elites, what some call the Deep State. Which of course they are. Everybody knows.
The so-called left and right argue constantly about whom to support. It’s a pseudo-debate constructed to allow people to think their vote counts; that the game isn’t rigged. It’s hammered into kids’ heads from an early age. Be grateful, give thanks that you live in a democracy where voting is allowed and your choice is as important as a billionaire’s such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Charles Koch. In the voting booth we are all equal.
Myths die hard. This one never does:
“Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams, will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.”
— Donald Trump, January 20, 2017.
“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite. And to heal.”
— Joe Biden, November 7, 2020.
“Above all else, the time has come for us to renew our faith in ourselves and in America. In recent years, that faith has been challenged.”
— Richard Nixon, January 20, 1973.
Your voice – our faith – it’s time to unite and heal.
Ask the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Afghanis, the Libyans, the Palestinians, et al. They sing a different tune, one not heard In the Church of the Good Hustler.
After campaigning hard for the losing presidential candidate in 1972, I nearly choked when I heard Richard Nixon’s inaugural address in January 1973. Clinging to the American myth the previous year, I had campaigned for a genuine anti-war Democrat, Senator George McGovern. The war against Vietnam was still raging and Nixon, who had been first elected in 1968 as a “peace candidate,” succeeding the previous “peace candidate” Lyndon Baines Johnson, was nevertheless overwhelmingly elected, despite Watergate allegations appearing in the months preceding the election. Nixon won forty-nine states to McGovern’s one – Massachusetts, where I lived. It was a landslide. I felt sick, woke up, got up, and left the doll’s house.
“Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” wrote the French sociologist Jacques Ellul in 1965 in Propaganda:
It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness…. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths.
In a country where loneliness is widespread, the will to believe and the power of positive thinking are far more powerful than the will to truth. Unlike Nora, who knew that when she left the doll’s house she was choosing the loneliness of the solitary soul, Americans prefer myths that induce them to act out of habit so they can lose themselves in the group.
This is so despite the fact that In the Church of the Good Hustler, when you play the game, you lose. We are all Americans and your vote counts and George Washington never told a lie.
Serbian President Aleksander Vucic checks out the agreed minutes of their meeting when US President Trump suddenly announces Serbia's commitment to moving its embassy to Jerusalem in July.
As one Russian commentator said, Vucic finds he has been had in all holes. Now see how the North American public sees the same event
The demonstrations are no longer directed against racism, but against the symbols of the country’s history. The National Guard has been deployed to protect monuments. Here on June 2nd, 2020, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C..
Protests across the West against racism in the United States are masking the evolution of the conflict there. It has evolved from a questioning of the remnants of black slavery to a conflict that could challenge the integrity of the country.
Last week I pointed out that the United States should have disbanded after the break-up of the Soviet Union to which it was attached. However, the imperialist project (the "Endless War") led by George W. Bush had made it possible to revive the country after the attacks of September 11, 2001. I also pointed out that in recent decades, the population had moved around a great deal in order to regroup by cultural affinity [1]. Inter-racial marriages were again becoming rare. I concluded that the integrity of the country would be threatened when non-black minorities entered the challenge [2].
This is precisely what we are witnessing today. The conflict is no longer between blacks and whites, since whites have become the majority in some anti-racist demonstrations, Hispanics and Asians have joined the processions, and the Democratic Party is now involved.
Since Bill Clinton’s term in office, the Democratic Party has identified with the process of financial globalization; a position that the Republican Party belatedly supported, without ever fully adopting it. Donald Trump represents a third path: that of the "American dream", i.e. entrepreneurship as opposed to finance. He got elected by declaring America First! which did not refer to the pro-Nazi isolationist movement of the 1930s as claimed, but to the relocation of jobs as later verified. He was certainly supported by the Republican Party, but remains a "Jacksonian" and not a "conservative" at all.
As historian Kevin Phillips - Richard Nixon’s electoral adviser - has shown, Anglo-Saxon culture gave rise to three successive civil wars [3] :
the first English Civil War, known as the "Great Rebellion" (which pitted Lord Cromwell against Charles I 1642-1651);
the second English Civil War or "War of Independence from the United States" (1775-1783);
and the Third Anglo-Saxon Civil War or "Civil War" in the United States (1861-1865).
What we are witnessing today could lead to the fourth. This seems to be the view of former Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis, who recently told The Atlantic that he was concerned about President Trump’s divisive rather than unifying policies.
Let us go back to the history of the United States to see where the sides are. Populist President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) vetoed the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) established by Alexander Hamilton, one of the fathers of the Constitution, who favoured federalism because he was violently opposed to democracy. Just as Jackson’s disciple, Donald Trump, is today in opposition to the Fed.
Twenty years after Jackson, came the "Civil War" to which today’s protesters all refer. According to them, it pitted a slave South against a humanist North. The movement that began with a racist news item (the lynching of black George Flyod by a white policeman from Minneapolis) continues today with the destruction of statues of southern generals, including Robert Lee. Actions of this type had already taken place in 2017 [4], but this time they are gaining momentum and governors from the Democratic Party are participating.
The Democratic Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, announced the removal of a famous statue of General Lee at the request of white protesters. It is no longer a question of fighting racism, but of destroying the symbols of the country’s unity.
However, this narrative does not correspond at all to reality: at the beginning of the Civil War, both sides were slavers, and at the end, both sides were anti-slavers. The end of slavery owes nothing to the abolitionists and everything to the need for both sides to enlist new soldiers.
The Civil War pitted a rich, Catholic, agricultural South against a Protestant, industrial North aspiring to make a fortune. It crystallized around the issue of customs duties which the South believed should be set by the federal states, but which the North intended to abolish between the federal states and have the federal government determine.
Therefore, in debunking the Southern symbols, the current demonstrators are not attacking the remnants of slavery, but denouncing the Southern vision of the Union. It was particularly unfair to attack General Lee, who had put an end to the Civil War by refusing to pursue it with guerrilla warfare from the mountains and by choosing national unity. In any case, these degradations effectively pave the way for a fourth Anglo-Saxon civil war.
Today the notions of South and North no longer correspond to geographical realities: it would rather be Dallas against New York and Los Angeles.
It is not possible to choose the aspects of a country’s history that one considers good and to destroy those that one considers bad without calling into question everything that has been built on it.
In referring to Richard Nixon’s 1968 election slogan, "Law and Order," President Donald Trump is not trying to preach racist hatred as many commentators claim, but is returning to the thinking of the author of that slogan, Kevin Philipps (quoted above). He still intends to make Andrew Jackson’s thought triumph over Finance by relying on Southern culture and not to cause the disintegration of his country.
President Donald Trump finds himself in the situation Mikhail Gorbachev experienced at the end of the 1980s: his country’s economy - not finance - has been in sharp decline for decades, but his fellow citizens refuse to acknowledge the consequences [5]. The United States can only survive by setting new goals. Such change is particularly difficult in times of recession.
Paradoxically, Donald Trump is clinging to the "American dream" (i.e., the possibility of making a fortune) when US society is stuck, the middle classes are disappearing, and new immigrants are no longer European. At the same time only its opponents (the Fed, Wall Street and Silicon Valley) are proposing a new model, but at the expense of the masses.
The problem of the USSR was different, but the situation was the same. Gorbachev failed and it was dissolved. It would be surprising if the next US president, whoever he may be, succeeded.
The media continue to tell fairytales about Qassem Soleimani and about Trump's decision to assassinate him and PMU leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Meanwhile the Resistance Axis announced how it will avenge their deaths.
In their descriptions of Qassem Soleimani U.S. media fail to mention that Soleimani and the U.S. fought on the same side. In 2001 Iran supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. It used its good relations with the Hazara Militia and the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which both the CIA and Iran had supplied for years, to support the U.S. operation. The Wikipedia entry for the 2001 uprising in Herat lists U.S. General Tommy Franks and General Qassem Soleimani as allied commanders.
The collaboration ended in 2002 after George W. Bush named Iran as a member of his "Axis of Evil".
In 2015 the U.S. and Iran again collaborated. This time to defeat ISIS in Iraq. During the battle to liberate Tikrit the U.S. air force flew in support of General Soleimani's ground forces. Newsweek reported at that time:
While western nations, including the U.S., were slow to react to ISIS's march across northern Iraq, Soleimani was quick to play a more public role in Tehran's efforts to tackle the terror group. For example, the commander was seen in pictures with militiamen in the northern Iraqi town of Amerli when it was recaptured from ISIS last September.
...
Top U.S. general Martin Dempsey has said that the involvement of Iran in the fight against ISIS in Iraq could be a positive step, as long as the situation does not descend into sectarianism, because of fears surrounding how Shia militias may treat the remaining Sunni population of Tikrit if it is recaptured. The military chief also claimed that almost two thirds of the 30,000 offensive were Iranian-backed militiamen, meaning that without Iranian assistance and Soleimani's guidance, the offensive on Tikrit may not have been possible.
It is deplorable that U.S. media and politicians blame Soleimani for U.S. casualties during the invasion of Iraq. Shia groups caused only 17% of all U.S. casualties and fought, like the Sadr Brigades, without support from Iran. There are also revived claims that Iran provided the Iraqi resistance with Explosive Formed Penetrators used in roadside bombs. But that claim had been proven to be was false more than 12 years ago. The "EFP from Iran" story was part of a U.S. PSYOPS campaign to explain away the real reason why it was losing the war. There were dozens of reports which proved that the EFPs were manufactured in Iraq and there never was any evidence that Iran delivered weapons or anything else to the Iraqi resistance:
Britain, whose forces have had responsibility for security in southeastern Iraq since the war began, has found nothing to support the Americans' contention that Iran is providing weapons and training in Iraq, several senior military officials said.
"I have not myself seen any evidence -- and I don't think any evidence exists -- of government-supported or instigated" armed support on Iran's part in Iraq, British Defense Secretary Des Browne said in an interview in Baghdad in late August.
Iran is not responsible for the U.S. casualties in Iraq. George W. Bush is. What made Soleimani "bad" in the eyes of the U.S. was his support for the resistance against the Zionist occupation of Palestine. It was Israel that wanted him 'removed'. The media explanations for Trump's decision fail to explain that point.
The New York Times reported yesterday that Trump picked the 'wrong' item from a list of possible courses of action that the military had presented him. That sounded like bullshit invented to take blame away from Trump and to put it onto the military.
The Washington Post reports today that the idea to kill Soleimani came from Secretary of State Pompeo:
Pompeo first spoke with Trump about killing Soleimani months ago, said a senior U.S. official, but neither the president nor Pentagon officials were willing to countenance such an operation.
...
[This time o]ne significant factor was the “lockstep” coordination for the operation between Pompeo and Esper, both graduates in the same class at the U.S. Military Academy, who deliberated ahead of the briefing with Trump, senior U.S. officials said. Pence also endorsed the decision, but he did not attend the meeting in Florida.
It is possible that the report is correct but it sounds more like an arranged story to blame Pompeo for the bad consequences Trump's decision will have.
During his election campaign Trump did not even know (vid) who Soleimani was. Someone indoctrinated him. The idea to assassinate Soleimani came most likely from Netanyahoo and must have been planted into Trump's head quite a while ago. Israel could have killed Soleimani several times while he was openly traveling in Syria. It shied away from doing that as it (rightly) feared the consequences. Now the U.S. will have to endure them.
The consequences continue to pile up.
The decision by the Iraqi government and parliament to kick all foreign troops out of the country leaves some flexibility in the timeline. The U.S. and other military are in Iraq under simple agreements that were exchanged between the Iraqi Foreign Ministry and the other sides. The ministry can fulfill the parliament decision by simply writing letters that declare that the agreements end next week. It could also choose to wait until the end of the year. But Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi has publicly declared that he can no longer guarantee the security of foreign troops on Iraqi ground. That makes the issue urgent and it is likely that the troops will leave rather soon.
Trump did not like the idea and threatened Iraq with sanctions:
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, the U.S. president said: “If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.”
“We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it,” Trump said.
The president added that “If there’s any hostility, that they do anything we think is inappropriate, we are going to put sanctions on Iraq, very big sanctions on Iraq.”
There are also some 2,900 Twitter bots who try to let the parliament decision look illegitimate by tweeting "I am Iraqi and parliament doesn't represent me". It is not known if these are Saudi or U.S. bots but their behavior is inauthentic.
There is nothing Trump can do to keep the troops in Iraq. If the Iraqi government does not tell them to leave the Popular Militia Forces will attack the U.S. bases and evict the U.S. military by force. When the U.S. assassinated Soleimani and PMU leader al-Muhandis it made that step inevitable.
Yesterday Iran took a decision to exceed the number of centrifuges that are allowed to run under the JCPOA nuclear agreement which the U.S. has left. The decision had been expected and the Soleimani assassination only accelerated it. Iran took the step under §36 of the agreement which allows Iran to exceed the limits if the other sides of the JCPOA do not stick to their commitments. That means that Iran is still within the JCPOA and that the step is reversible. The IAEA will continue to have access to Iran's sites and will continue to report regularly about Iran's civil nuclear program.
The JCPOA co-signers France, the UK and Germany issued a very unhelpful statement today that puts all blame on Iran and does not even mention the U.S. assassinations of Soleimani.
Iran has not announced what kind of operation it will use to avenge the death of its national hero Qassem Soleimani. It will likely be some asymmetrical operation against the U.S. military somewhere around the globe. It will certainly be a big one.
Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah, a dear friend of Soleimani, announced yesterday that the Resistance Axis will take its own, separate revenge.
Here are edited excerpts from Nasrallah's rather long speech (which is worth reading in full):
Today we commemorate Soleimani and al-Muhandis, two great commanders, and their Iraqi and Iranian companions who were martyred in this recent crime. The date of Soleimani's assassination is an inflection point in the history of the region, not just for Iran or Iraq. It is a new beginning.
...
Soleimani's assassination isn't an isolated incident. It's the beginning of new American approach to the region. The U.S. carefully weighed what move they could take to reverse all their previous failures. But this wasn't war with Iran. Trump knows war with Iran would be difficult and dangerous. So, what could they do that wouldn't lead to war with Iran? They settled on killing Qassem Soleimani, a central figure in the Resistance Axis.
...
Qassem Soleimani was the glue that held the Resistance Axis together, and so they decided to kill him, and to kill him openly, which would also have its psychological impact.
...
Our responsibility in the Resistance Axis is divided into three points.
- Trump's goal was to terrify us all, and subjugate us. The leadership of Resistance will not waver or back down at all. To the contrary, the martyrdom of Soleimani and Muhandis will only drive us forward.
- Resistance must coordinate and become closer, to strengthen itself and its capabilities, because the region is heading toward a new phase.
- In terms of response, we have to consider just punishment. In terms of this crime, the one who committed it is known, and must be punished.
Soleimani isn't just an Iranian matter, he is all of the Resistance Axis - Palestine, Lebanon Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and every country which has supporter and lover of Resistance. The umma. This isn't an Iranian issue alone. Iran can also respond as it pleases, but that response doesn't exempt the Resistance Axis from also responding. Iran won't ask you to do anything - to act or not to act. But Resistance Axis forces must decide how to deal with Soleimani's death.
So, if any Resistance Axis faction avenges his death, that their decision, and Iran isn't behind that. Iran won't ask anything. It's up to us how to respond. Do we content ourselves with mourning and eulogizing? We must all head towards just punishment.
What do we mean by just punishment? Some are saying this must be someone of the same level as Qassem Soleimani - like Chairman of Joint Chiefs, head of @CENTCOM, but there is no one on Soleimani or Muhandis' level. Soleimani's shoe is worth more than Trump's head, so there's no one I can point to to say this is the person we can target.
Just punishment therefore means American military presence in the region, U.S. military bases, U.S. military ships, every American officer and soldier in our countries and regions. The U.S. military is the one who killed Soleimani and Muhandis, and they will pay the price. This is the equation.
I want to be very clear, we do not mean American citizens or nationals. There are many Americans in our region. We don't mean to attack them, and it is wrong to harm them. Attacking US civilians anywhere serves Trump's interests.
The American military institution put itself in the midst of battle by carrying out the assassination.
There are those who will say I'm blowing things out of proportion. I'm not. I'm seeing it as it is. We won't accept our region, its holy places, and natural resources to be handed over to the Zionists.
If the resistance axis heads in this direction, the Americans will leave our region, humiliated, defeated, and terrified. The suicide martyrs who forced the US out of the region before remain. If our region's peoples head in this direction - when the coffins of of U.S. soldiers and officers - they arrived vertically, and will return horizontally - Trump and his admin will know they lost the region, and will lose the elections.
The response to the blood of Soleimani and Al-Muhandis must be expulsion of all U.S, forces from the region. When we accomplish this goal, the liberation of Palestine will become imminent. When US forces leave the region, these Zionists will pack their bags and leave, and might not need a battle with Israel.
General Esmail Qaani, Soleimani's replacement as commander of the Quds Brigade, endorsed Nasrallah's proposal:
Going Underground on RT @Underground_RT - 00:14 UTC · Jan 6, 2020
Esmail Qaani, the new leader of Iran's IRGC Quds Force:
"Our promise is to continue the path of martyr Soleimani. Due to the martyrdom of #Soleimani, our promise will be the expulsion of the US from the region in different steps."
These are not empty threats but a military project that will play out over the next years. I would not bet on the U.S. as the winner of that war.
There were millions of Iranians in the streets of Tehran today to mourn Qassem Soleimani. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei shed tears while reciting the funeral prayer (vid). As Ayatollah Khomeini once said: “They call us a nation of tears, but with these tears we overthrew an empire.”
Fereshteh Sadeghi فرشته صادقی @fresh_sadegh - 5:15 UTC · Jan 6, 2020
I was given this poster tonight by 2 young men next to a stand that offered tea and dates to motorists (dates as a sign of mourning in Iran), I want to stick it on my car’s rear window. It reads: A world will avenge you, with hashtag #crushing_response
There will be hundreds of thousands of volunteers should Iran need them to avenge Soleimani. That is why we predicted that the U.S. will come to regret its evil deed.
And while the situation can be reasonably compared to the build up to the war on Iraq I do not see a war happening. Wars are very risky as the enemy gets a vote. Any war with Iran would likely cost ten thousands of U.S. casualties. Trump is probably not stupid enough to launch such a war and certainly not during an election year.
During his campaign Trump said he wanted the U.S. military out of the Middle East. Iran and its allies will help him to keep that promise.
The day after two US drones fired missiles that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, President Trump gave a press conference where he explained his action by saying: “We took action last night to stop a war. We do not take action to start a war.”
To what war was Trump referring?
In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Trump’s ‘America First’ policy spooked the Israelis because it reeked of isolationism and possible divestment from the Middle East. As everyone (or at least everyone in Israel) ‘knows’, if the US left the Middle East, Israel would soon be ‘overrun by Muslim hordes’ and left with little option but to use its ‘Samson Option‘ and take as many of its Arab ‘enemies’ down with it.
These fears were assuaged, to some extent, by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, turn the sanction screws on Tehran, and move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Of course, these favors to Israel were, to a large extent, purchased in advance by way of a $25 million Trump campaign donation (the largest donor to any campaign in 2016) by Jewish casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. After Trump’s election win, Adelson gave another $5 million to his inauguration, the largest single presidential inaugural donation ever made. According to US politician Newt Gingrich, Adelson’s “central value” is Israel, and given that in 2013 Adelson said that the US “should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran”, I’m inclined to believe Gingrich.
But Israeli pathological fears of abandonment by the goyim are deeply entrenched and impossible to dispel, and no doubt were reawakened by a November 2018 interview that Trump gave to the Washington Post. When Trump was asked about whether sanctions should be imposed on Saudi Arabia for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he responded: [emphasis mine]
“I just feel that it’s very, very important to maintain that relationship [with Riyadh]. It’s very important to have Saudi Arabia as an ally, if we’re going to stay in that part of the world. Now, are we going to stay in that part of the world?**One reason to is Israel. Oil is becoming less and less of a reason, because we’re producing more oil now than we’ve ever produced. So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point where you don’t have to stay there.”**
The 2003 invasion and destruction of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein was a plot hatched by US/Israeli Neocons to do away, once and for all, with (among other things) Ba’athism, an ideology that sought to unite several Middle Eastern nations under [nominally] secular, socialist pan-Arabism (a serious threat to Israel). While the chaos spread by the US invasion and occupation achieved that goal, it also opened the way for Iran to increase its influence among Iraq’s Shia Muslims – who constitute 65% of that country’s population – and who had been held in check by Saddam, a Sunni Muslim (Iran is 90% Shia). Over the last 10 years, this growing Iranian influence has led to increasingly strident calls from Israel for ‘something to be done’ about Iran.
In the last year we have seen repeated Israeli airstrikes on what are labeled ‘Iranian military targets’ across the Levant, including several Israeli airstrikes on Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, multiple coordinated attacks on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf – which, though initially blamed on Iran, did not provoke a war because regional investigations ‘proved inconclusive’ – and what was likely an Israeli false-flag operation targeting major Saudi oil refineries (also tepidly blamed on Iran).
The primary reason for Israel’s increasing anxiety about Iran is the significant progress that Iran has made in forming political and military alliances inside Iraq (a direct result of the Israel-inspired destruction of the country by the US) and across the wider region, and the fact that it is today the only country in the region with the human and military resources (and intent) to pose a threat to the Jewish state’s desire for regional hegemony.
Recently released diplomatic cables dating from 2014-15 detail the extent of Iran’s influence inside the Iraqi government, showing how Iranian intelligence officers have co-opted much of the Iraqi government’s cabinet, infiltrated its military leadership, and even tapped into a network of sources once run by the CIA. In the 4-5 years since then, Iranian influence has only grown and, from an Israeli perspective, reached a ‘red line’ point where Iraq could be used as a staging ground for attacks on Israel.
Given this, and Trump’s talk of there being “less and less reason” for the US to remain in the Middle East combined with the upcoming Iraqi parliament vote to officially demand the removal of US forces from the country, it’s likely that the killing of Soleimani was a negotiated (by Trump) alternative to a relatively imminent, large-scale Israeli attack on Iranian assets in Iraq, and possibly Iran itself. Such an attack would have sparked a real war between Israel and Iran, which would inevitably have drawn in the US. This is, I propose, what Trump meant when he said that “we took action last night to stop a war.”
In this scenario, public statements made by Trump administration officials that killing Soleimani was necessary to stop “significant strikes against Americans” in the region can be understood as necessary lies to cover up the truth: that rather than protecting its own immediate interests, the US government was acting to prevent Israel from doing something dangerously irrational that would threaten the lives of millions in the Middle East and beyond.
What US officials privately told their Iranian counterparts soon after the assassination fits this scenario. Rear-Admiral Ali Fadavi, deputy commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, told Iranian state television that “the Americans resorted to diplomatic measures” the very next morning. Fadavi said Washington asked Tehran to respond “in proportion.” They “even said that,**if you want to get revenge, get revenge in proportion to what we did”** which makes the entire situation seem like something of a sordid geopolitical game. This evening, rockets were fired at the US ‘green zone’ in Baghdad. Perhaps that is Tehran’s proportionate response.
Then again, it’s possible that there is more than mere geopolitical pragmatism motivating certain members of the Trump administration…
Stay tuned…z
The drama of the removal of President Donald Trump continues. After the first series "The Russian Affair", the second "The Ukrainian Affair" does not seem better written. Above all, it shows the inability of the Democrats to criticize the president for his policies and could turn against them.
The Democrats in the House have made an impressive showing in the impeachment hearings so far. They have made known that they have several more star witnesses. On their part a few of the Republicans in the House did put the two diplomats off kilter for a few embarrassing minutes when they posed the question whether any of them had personally seen any written Trump missive to the Ukrainian President which could be construed as quid pro quo. Another aspect they repeated frequently was that while the Obama Administration had dithered on providing lethal arms the Donald Trump administration had done so including the supply of Javelin anti tank missiles that the Ukrainians were demanding. From the hearings so far most Democrats would have realized that from what had transpired so far, impeachment was a charge that might not hold water; Rejection by the Republican majority in the Senate becoming a later development, should it come to that. Therefore it appears that the Democrats would generally be satisfied were the proceedings to expose Trump and the manner in which foreign policy was being run during his watch. They hope that it would make a dent in his vote bank. What then are the anomalies that the Democrats would be loath to touch upon and the Republicans to date have failed to highlight? The most glaring ones are summarized in the ensuing paragraphs.
The matter raised by the diplomats who kept returning to it during their deposition related to the informal channels that were working simultaneously. Without saying it in so many words they opined that these undermined the formal channels and by implication were irregular and were being used to further the President’s agenda. It would have been known to such seasoned diplomats that what they term irregular diplomacy and what countries around the world term back channel diplomacy, is fairly common. Heads of state often conduct the same through their National Security Advisers and very often through special representatives in whose discretion they have full confidence to deliver sealed missives directly to the head of state being contacted. There are so many examples of past Presidents of the United States doing the same. The most important one was during the Cuban Missile Crisis when President Kennedy used his brother Robert Kennedy for back channel diplomacy with his Russian counterpart. The back channel diplomacy succeeded. The Russians agreed to withdraw their missiles from Cuba and the world released its breath. The quid pro quo was the withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Several examples can be cited from actions by other countries in the two World Wars and throughout the Cold War. These often avoided more serious outcomes. The practice was followed by the adversaries in the Cold War. After the War years many heads of state and their governments started using these for what has been termed as parallel diplomacy or quiet diplomacy far removed from the media and prying eyes. India and Pakistan have been using the same for decades. It has more often than not dampened situations that could have become explosive.
Clandestine actions by former US presidents to further their agenda have taken place in the past from time to time. Many never came to light while others were revealed or unearthed well after the events. The most questionable and controversial one took place during the Ronald Reagan presidency. It related to what became known as the Iran Contra Affair. It seems to have been directly conducted from the White House under the aegis of the President. In the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran to bring about the release of American hostages held in Lebanon. Money from the Iran weapons-sale was then used to fund the Contras, a group of guerrilla “freedom fighters” opposed to the Marxist government of Nicaragua. Col. Oliver North who met President Reagan on several occasions was chosen to carry out the negotiations. It was also known in Iran as the McFarlane Affair. Oliver North was indicted on sixteen charges in the Iran–Contra affair and found guilty of three—aiding and abetting obstruction of Congress, shredding or altering official documents and accepting a gratuity. His convictions were later overturned on the grounds that his immunized testimony had tainted his trial.
The most glaring omission in the impeachment trial on the part of Nancy Pelosi and the House democrats was not to have discussed the Vice President Biden and his son’s dealings in Ukraine thoroughly prior to commencement of the impeachment hearings, in closed-door discussions if they felt that was necessary. Had they done so many questions that should have been thrashed threadbare might either not have arisen or if they arose they would have done their home work in advance and would have had answers ready. It was not the case. Vice President Biden was heading to become the leading democrat contender to take on Trump in the forthcoming 2020 elections. His chances were considered bright. Due diligence required that the former Vice President’s and his son’s involvement that many today would term questionable be thoroughly gone into by face-to-face interactions. Should doubts have arisen they might have decided to delay the impeachment hearings till all matters had been clarified to their satisfaction.
It is only a matter of time that Republican senators in the House bring it up as the hearings proceed. Or they might decide to turn the tables decisively in the Senate when the time came were the matter to reach the Senate. So far from what is known the Trump quid pro quo was related to the Ukrainian government investigating the Biden father and son’s dealings. In recent weeks, Trump has relentlessly mocked Hunter Biden, to the point that his presidential campaign began selling shirts that say, “Where’s Hunter?” highlighting that the former vice president’s son had been out of the public spotlight for weeks. At a recent political rally, Trump noted that Hunter Biden had been thrown out of the Navy. Hunter Biden was discharged from the Navy Reserve in 2014 after failing a drug test and has struggled with alcohol and drug abuse. He told ABC News that, “like every single person that I’ve ever known, I have fallen and I’ve gotten up.”
The House Democrats should realize that were the hearings to go deeper towards indicting Trump the tables might be turned on them. Were Mr. Biden to become or have become the Democrat presidential nominee sooner or later the people, the media and even representatives on the Capitol Hill would have raised the question as to whether former Vice President’s dealings in Ukraine were questionable or not as these had started directly or by proxy while he was still in government. Further, was the involvement so deep that were he to ascend to the White House the Ukrainian government would be in a position to demand quid pro quo from time to time.