Biden Administration Admits 'Racist' Lab Leak Theory...True!

It was one of the most heavily-censored views in the United States. Anyone suspecting the Covid virus had escaped from a (US-funded) Chinese lab was "racist" and had to be silenced on mainstream and social media. Suddenly the Biden Administration admits it's probably true. Thus we see the danger of censorship: it doesn't combat disinformation...it destroys truth. Also today: Hungary demands an investigation into the Nord Stream attack. Finally: Drones fall deep into Russian territory...is the CIA behind the targeting! Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Biden Administration Admits 'Racist' Lab Leak Theory...True!

The Covid Lab Leak is a Scandal of Media and Government Censorship

Energy has concluded that Covid-19 likely originated from a Chinese lab. According to the report, American intelligence has found evidence to support the long-dismissed “lab theory.” This has led to another media “my bad” moment where news outlets are shrugging that the theory may not be a conspiracy or racist theory after all. As usual, there is little attention to the experts who were shredded for raising the theory or the reporters who insisted that this was a debunked conspiracy theory.

Here is the column:

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Energy Department has concluded that the COVID pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak.

The conclusion is reportedly based on a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. Many will be exploring why the scientific evidence of a lab leak was so slow to emerge from intelligence agencies.

However, for my part, the most alarming aspect was the censorship, not the science.

There will continue to be a debate over the origins of COVID-19, but now there will be a debate.

For years, the media and government allied to treat anyone raising a lab theory as one of three possibilities: conspiracy theorist or racists or racist conspiracy theorists.

Academics joined this chorus in marginalizing anyone raising the theory. One study cited the theory as an example of “anti-Chinese racism” and “toxic white masculinity.”

As late as May 2021, the New York Times’ Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli was calling any mention of the lab theory as “racist.”

She embodies the model of the new “advocacy journalism” at the Times. Reporters who remained wedded to the dated view of objective journalism were purged from the ranks of The Times long ago.

Mandavilli and others made clear that reporters covering the theory were COVID’s little Bull Connors. She tweeted wistfully “someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.”

However, one former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade chastised his former colleagues for ignoring the obvious evidence supporting a lab theory as well as Chinese efforts to arrest scientists and destroy evidence that could establish the origin.

Others in academia quickly joined the bandwagon to assure the public that there is no scientific basis for their theory, leaving only racist or politics as the motivation behind the theory. In early 2020, with little available evidence, two op-eds in The Lancet in February and Nature Medicine went all-in on the denial front.

The Lancet op-ed stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”

We were also supposed to forget about massive payments from the Chinese government to American universities and grants of some of these writers to both Chinese interests or even the specific Wuhan lab.

No reference to the lab theory was to be tolerated. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) merely mentioned the possibility in 2020, he was set upon by the usual flash media mob. The Washington Post ridiculed him of repeating a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.”

In September 2020, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a virologist and former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong, dared to repeat the theory on Fox News, saying, “I can present solid scientific evidence . . . [that] it is a man-made virus created in the lab.” The left-leaning PolitiFact slammed her and gave her a “pants on fire rating.”

President Joe Biden accused Trump of fanning racism in his criticism of the Chinese government over the pandemic and his Administration reportedly shutdown the State Department investigation into the possible lab origins of the virus.

When Biden later revived an investigation into the origins, he was denounced as “sugar-coating Trump’s racism.”

The categorical rejection of the lab theory is only the latest media narrative proven to be false. The Russian collusion scandal, the Hunter Biden “Russian Disinformation,” the Lafayette Park “Photo Op” conspiracy, the Nick Sandmann controversy, the Jussie Smollett case, the Migrant Whipping scandal.

On the lab theory, media like the Washington Post piled on senators like Cruz and Cotton for mentioning the lab theory only later to admit that it could be legitimate.

All of those experts and writers who were called racists or suspended by social media were simply forgotten in media coverage.

That is why this is really about censorship.

The media guaranteed that we did not have a full debate over the origins of the virus and attacked those who had the temerity to state the obvious that there was a plausible basis for suspecting the Wuhan lab.

None of this has diminished demands for more censorship. Even after Twitter admitted that it wrongly blocked The New York Post story before the 2020 election, Democratic senators responded by warning the company not to cut back on censorship and even demanded more censorship.

Recently, the Twitter Files revealed an extensive and secret FBI effort to censor citizens on social media.

This included undisclosed efforts by members like Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.) to get Twitter to ban a columnist and target critics. In a House hearing, democratic leaders like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md). called for more censorship and opposed investigations into the censorship efforts.

These same figures in politics and media are just moving on to the next approved narrative.

President Biden previously called for more censorship and accused Big Tech of “killing people” by not censoring more views deemed “COVID misinformation.”

The opposite is true. By suppressing alternative scientific and policy views, the public was denied a full debate over mask efficacy, vaccine side effects, COVID origins and other important issues. Many of those questions are only being recognized as legitimate and worthy of debate.

Censorship does not, as President Biden claims, save lives.

It is more likely to cost lives by protecting approved views from challenge. It does not foster the truth any more than it fosters free speech. Whatever the origin of COVID-19 may be in China, the origins of our censorship scandal is closer to home.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

from The Covid Lab Leak is a Scandal of Media and Government Censorship

Mass Protests In Europe Against Ukraine War - Critical Mass?

Following the Washington, DC antiwar rally last week, similar - and much larger - protests are breaking out in London, Berlin, Paris and across European capitals. New opinion polls in Germany show that most oppose more German involvement in Ukraine. Is the tide turning? Also today, David Stockman writes on Biden's desire for nine more Ukraines! Finally: What did the "experts" get right about Covid? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Mass Protests In Europe Against Ukraine War - Critical Mass?

Schrodinger’s Russia Paradox

The people who run D.C. are quick to inform us that Vladimir Putin is an all powerful dictator. He is the second coming of Hitler, they say, adding that “Putler” has plans to march through Europe and exterminate any resistance to his path across the continent.

The Blob also informs us, using their incredible strategic wisdom, that Russia is a weak paper tiger, and the humble army of Ukraine is well-positioned to defeat the clumsy Russian bear, pending a couple more fancy toys from Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed and friends.

Let’s be clear about what’s at stake. If you don’t want to support #Ukraine, you will soon be sending #American troops to fight in #Poland. If you don’t want to honor #NATO obligations to fight in Poland, you will see #Russian ships and planes just off our coasts.

— Gordon G. Chang (@GordonGChang) February 25, 2023

Despite Putin’s 80-plus percent approval rating in Russia, our legislators and thinkers have determined that he must be defeated at all costs, even by means of a foreign liquidation event. Russia only has a mere 6,000 nuclear warheads, and there are plenty in the Kremlin who would take a much more aggressive anti-West stance than Putin. What could possibly go wrong, anyway?

Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton repeatedly calls for regime change in Russia, demanding that those closest to Putin forcibly remove him—as if he were some kind of unelected dictator. Completely unhinged. pic.twitter.com/TifN7M9sgM

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) February 26, 2023

Russia is both so powerful that their ships will be “off our coasts” in no time. And at the same time, Ukraine should be able to defeat the Russian military with an extra push or two. As Bush 43 once said, “We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.” Just support Zelenskyyyyyyy and he will show those Russians who’s boss!

The U.S. must give Kyiv the weapons it needs right now: ex-envoy to Moscow https://t.co/vHTUTRxrez

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) February 26, 2023

Our D.C. Uniparty narrative conveniently excuses away any potential role that they played in helping to spawn this fiasco. It’s very important that you accept their claim that this is an “unprovoked war” and our ruling class totally didn't launch a coup in 2014 against the legitimate government in Ukraine. That’s conspiratorial crazy talk. Probably best to just ban it. The idea that the people in charge of our country would want to bait Russia into the conflict by arming up a series of fascist militias on their border is unfounded, so don’t watch any doctored videos that show otherwise.

The Beltway class wanted to launch the Russia-Ukraine war in 2016, but then Trump got elected and it screwed up their plans. pic.twitter.com/gDgXFACRQr

— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) October 8, 2022

It might seem like none of their explanations make any sense whatsoever, but that’s why we are supposed to remain good plebeians, embrace Schrodinger’s Russia paradox, and support the war effort. You see, that’s what the Great Thinkers in D.C. are for. They do the complicated thinking, proceed to loot the American taxpayer, I mean, “invest” in Ukraine, to the tune of well over one hundred billion dollars, and accomplish the mission.

Obviously, it’s the height of patriotism to support Ukraine and dismantle our own military in the process. Disagree? That’s pretty transphobic of you, MAGAt traitor!

No no. Really, it’s simple, stupid.

Ukraine Man Good.

Russia Man Bad. 

Why are we supposed to hate Russians again, you ask? Well, because they are born to wage imperial conquest, or something. Remember Stalin? Remember the Cold War. Damn those Russians! Good thing our ruling elites are honorable front line freedom fighters, as proven by their ability to successfully free Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the whole continent of Africa. Today, liberty thrives in these places. Thank you, Science!

Remember, the hate is literally in their blood, and “there are no innocent Russians,” according to the totally non-xenophobic Russia Experts in Washington. Our fearless Russia Experts have an excellent track record. Let me remind you of their greatness by pointing out that they used their unparalleled expertise to determine the phony Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation. They also frequently remind us that Russia “hacked the 2016 election” by spending 12 dollars on Facebook ads.

Is everyone else in the media just going to pretend this giant lie didn’t happen?

In their letter, they admitted they didn’t have evidence to say the laptop was “disinformation” but they said it anyway,

It gave media the excuse to ignore the story.https://t.co/ftFatWgTJm pic.twitter.com/GE61zZPrfz

— Tim Murtaugh (@TimMurtaugh) March 19, 2022

If all else fails, just make sure to hate Russia by default. They hack us. They’re probably hacking you right now! Slava Ukraine! A real American understands the importance of raising the Rainbow Flag over Crimea, and showing Putin that the people in charge here are a force to be reckoned with!

Back to serious mode to conclude this.

Before committing to all of the noise coming out of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, it’s worth taking a few moments to check the premises of the people in charge. Schrodinger’s Russia paradox shows us that their carefully crafted chronicles fall apart under even the lightest touch of scrutiny.

Reprinted with permission from The Dossier.
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from Schrodinger’s Russia Paradox

The Antiwar Movement Roars Back to Life

On February 19th, the National Mall in Washington, DC saw its largest antiwar rally in 20 years. The speakers list included four former US presidential candidates and a broad and diverse collection of antiwar activists from beyond the left and right.

The aptly-named “Rage Against War Machine” rally drew thousands of attendees, however many pro-war advocates eagerly pointed out that it did not match in size some of the larger rallies against the Iraq war 20 years ago.

To that I say, “who cares”? The US mainstream media engages in war propaganda non-stop, with the only exception being Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. So I think it’s a miracle anyone had the courage to travel to the heart of the war machine in Washington, DC to make their voices heard! We don’t need a majority to fight back – an educated and dedicated minority will do quite nicely. And we certainly had that at the rally!

As I sat in the green room waiting to speak, I had the opportunity to visit with former Democrat presidential candidates Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich and former Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Political commentators Jimmy Dore and Chris Hedges were there, along with many leading and well—spoken libertarians. Everyone backstage carried the same message: we must put aside our differences to build a new, broad coalition against this war!

I believe the antiwar movement is starting to catch fire both at home and overseas. The DC rally was followed by much larger antiwar rallies in Paris, Berlin, London, and elsewhere.

Several recent polls, including by Pew and AP, show that American support for Ukraine is evaporating. Even in the EU, new polls show a public turning sharply against their governments’ support for the war. According to a recent Ipsos poll, less than half of Germans support continuing to send weapons to Ukraine. Change is in the air.

The DC rally took place in the backdrop of Seymour Hersh’s explosive investigative report demonstrating how the US government blew up the Nord Stream pipelines and the mainstream media’s desperate attempt to cover it up. The truth is coming out, and it’s even uglier than we imagined.

The US mainstream media is clearly getting nervous that its control over the narrative is also evaporating. How do we know they’re nervous? They have turned up their lies and slanders of antiwar rallies and voices.

Rachel Maddow, who fed America a steady stream of “Russiagate” lies for the past six or so years, let loose with a slanderous blue streak about the Rage Against the War Machine rally. Literally everything Maddow said in her post-rally rant was objectively false and her mischaracterization of rally participants as “weird” was devious. She falsely claimed that the rally was full of “white supremacists,” “Proud Boys,” and “anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists.”

No one who was at the rally would have had any idea what she was talking about. But her job was not to describe the rally, it was to defame it. What does Maddow’s hysterics about the rally show? They are nervous. It shows that the mainstream media, despite having near-total power, is afraid. They are afraid they are losing the narrative. Good. It’s about time. Let’s hope that more Americans begin to rage! Rage against the war machine!

from The Antiwar Movement Roars Back to Life

US Military Aid To Ukraine Exceeds The Costs Of Afghanistan

Ukraine receives the most military aid from the United States: Since the beginning of the war and as of Jan. 15, 2023, $46.6 billion in financial aid for military purposes has flowed to the country now at war with Russia.

When calculating the average annual costs (in 2022 prices) of previous wars in which the United States has been involved in, the true magnitude of the country's Ukraine aid expenditure can be seen.

As Statista's Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below, the payments to Ukraine have already exceeded the annual military expenditure of the US in the war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2010. The US military costs in the Vietnam War, the Iraq War and the Korean War were significantly higher - according to calculations by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy as part of its Ukraine Support Tracker.


(bigger)

You will find more infographics at Statista

In the Vietnam and Korean wars, the high usage rate of ammunition and other supplies cost a particularly large amount of money, in addition to the wear and tear of equipment and numerous other assets such as the care of the wounded. Further complicating matters in each case was the great distance to the theater of operations. Although the US maintained a number of bases in Southeast Asia, the large weapons systems and the required replacement components all had to be shipped or flown across the Pacific. In addition, a large fleet of aircraft carriers was always deployed off the coast of Vietnam. The numerous missions of the air force also caused significant costs.

In the US, criticism of the scale of military aid to Ukraine is already coming from within the Republican ranks.

Some of the US Republicans in Congress have announced that they intend to block aid to Ukraine.

Nevertheless, the day after his visit to Kyiv, US President Biden underscored his country's commitment to continued support of the Ukrainian war effort. Speaking in Warsaw, Poland, he said:

This is not just about freedom in Ukraine. It's about freedom of democracy in general.

In addition to the military aid detailed in this infographic, the US has also supplied weapons and equipment worth over $5 billion.

Reprinted with permission from Zerohedge.

from US Military Aid To Ukraine Exceeds The Costs Of Afghanistan

The Lesson of East Palestine

The lesson learned, and largely ignored, is that the government Americans vote for every two and four years does not “represent” them.

East Palestine is the lesson du jour. So long as it remains in the corporate media’s “news cycle,” coverage will downplay the federal government’s decision to ignore the poisoning of thousands of people, not only in East Palestine but across Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Joe Biden does not believe this disaster warrants a reaction. He has not traveled to East Palestine. Biden’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, waited more than two weeks to travel there, and only to shore up the government’s image as responsive and caring, which it is not.

The fact of the matter is, the government does not care about your welfare or protecting you from psychopathic profit-centric corporations. It has nothing but contempt for those, not of the billionaire class, the bankers, CEOs of transnational corporations, and attached lobbyists passing out fiat dollars to keep the crony capitalist game moving along—until it falls off a cliff, as it will soon enough.

The residents of East Palestine are outraged that Biden refused to send FEMA in response to a corporate-caused crime against humanity. As a comparison, consider FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

“The storm flooded New Orleans, killed more than 1,800 people, and caused $100 billion in property damage,” writes Chris Edwards. “The storm’s damage was greatly exacerbated by the failures of Congress, the Bush administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Army Corps of Engineers.”

Many Americans have arrived at the conclusion the government is incompetent, corrupt, and unable to respond effectively to natural and manmade disasters. In fact, the problem is far worse than mere incompetence and bureaucratic red tape.

FEMA actively blocked the emergency response to the disaster. FEMA turned away doctors volunteering their services at emergency facilities. FEMA blocked rescue flights headed to New Orleans. FEMA denied the Red Cross acess. FEMA turned away trucks from Walmart loaded with water. FEMA and the Bush administration seriously aggravated the human catastrophe in New Orleans.

It is absurd to think all these “failures” were the result of mismanagement and stupidity. The fact of the matter is, the federal government simply did not consider Katrina and the lives of mostly poor in the Ninth Ward worthy of a humanitarian response. George Carlin was correct: the government doesn’t give a f*#@ about you. It has other priorities. At the time of Katrina, the top priority was killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wow!

Treasury Secretary announces $10 billion in economic aid to desperate Americans in East Palestine, Ohio

Just kidding - it’s all going to Ukraine

pic.twitter.com/wo0oIE8EdN

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) February 23, 2023

Now the priority is kickstarting WWIII. Forget about Joe and Pete, they are mouthpieces and apologists for crimes of the state. East Palestine—or Flint, where polluted drinking water has gone unresolved for almost a decade—is not worthy of a response. Ohio is a “red state,” and partisan politics define the uniparty.

Ukraine is not about people. It’s about saving the USG-dominated Empire.

Russia and China are capable challengers, never mind their own problems with corruption and authoritarianism. Russia has said on numerous occasions it will respond with nuclear weapons if confronted by an existential threat.

Lloyd Austin, boss of Murder Incorporated, has specifically stated the objective is to balkanize Russia. It is eager to confront China in its own backyard. For the ruling elite, this competition is the only issue of concern. The people are only needed during elections and, as sacrificial lambs, during manufactured wars.

The lesson of East Palestine and Ukraine is that your welfare is irrelevant to the state. However, through its miseducation system and corporate media, the crony capitalist state has managed to indoctrinate and brainwash millions of people into believing government exists to help them. The excuse is that the government is a bureaucratic dinosaur unable to respond. It’s true, the state is a dinosaur. However, as should be obvious to all, there is scant evidence bureaucrats and statist apparatchiks actually care about you and your family.

They serve a predatory crony capitalist state and its “stakeholders” (large corporations, banks). This is fascism, or corporatism, as Benito Mussolini called it. Fascism is antithetical to individualism. It considers people to be little more than pawns to be used and discarded in pursuit of global hegemony, the process of swindling humanity out of its birthright, and turning the planet into a control freak slave gulag “where you will own nothing” and will be at the mercy of psychopathic killers.

Reprinted with permission from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.
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from The Lesson of East Palestine

The Ontological Incoherence of American Imperial Exceptionalism

Jingoism originated during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, when many British citizens were hostile toward Russia and felt Britain should intervene in the conflict. Supporters of the cause expressed their sentiments in a music-hall ditty with this refrain:

We don't want to fight, yet by jingo if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men,
We've got the money, too!

Someone holding the attitude implied in the song became known as a jingo or jingoist, and the attitude itself was dubbed jingoism.

Jingoism

Lost Cause

This is ostensibly a critical review of Arta Moeini’s recent essay published at UnHerd: Is the West escalating the Ukraine war? Nevertheless, its purview extends far beyond Moeini’s isolated expression of the pervasive fallacies my critique addresses.

Moeini’s article emerges from the milieu of the past several weeks, during which time we have observed a pronounced rhetorical revolution in the popular western narratives regarding the NATO/Russia war in Ukraine.

“Lost cause” is in the air. Many who have privately known this to be the case for some time have finally been sufficiently emboldened to publicly embrace the obvious – albeit reluctantly, and often with a good measure of rationalization and lingering misinformation in tow.

To be clear, I found Moeini’s essay a worthwhile read; thought-provoking on multiple levels – although not always in the way I suspect he intended. And I more or less agree with the majority of his observations of matters as they currently stand.

But as the poet well-noted, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Nor does it require an aspiring think-tank geopolitical “expert” to inform one at this juncture that the gambit to use Ukraine as a kamikaze bomber to mortally wound Russia has failed abysmally in every fundamental geostrategic respect.

Indeed, it has backfired in multiple largely unforeseen and now irreversible ways.

More on that below.

Meanwhile, I will address those of the author’s arguments that fail principally due to his apparently obligatory compulsion to echo American exceptionalist orthodoxy.

Of course, Moeini lives and breathes in the stultifying atmosphere of the Washington Beltway ideological miasma. His career aspirations are no doubt compellingly influenced by his environment, and therefore it comes as little surprise that he would be so pliant to its domineering imperatives.

He imagines that he is crafting a critique of the shortcomings of what is sometimes called The Chicago School of geopolitical realism, typified by the works of John Mearsheimer. In reality he is merely finding fault with one set of logical fallacies while embracing its seemingly more attractive cousins:

To understand Western decision-making and the peculiar inter-alliance dynamics of Nato, we need a more radical realism that takes seriously the non-physical, psychological, and “ontological dimensions” of security — encompassing a state or an organisation’s need for overcoming uncertainty by establishing orderly narratives and identities about its sense of “self”.

The incoherence of a call for “radical realism” in order to address the “ontological dimensions of security” and “overcoming uncertainty by establishing orderly narratives and identities” clearly eludes our young author, focused as he apparently is on the geopolitical relevance of the “sense of self”.

That said, it is to be expected that a mind cultivated by the current generation of imperial academicians would be loath to question their catechisms, foremost of which is the conviction that the “indispensable nation” is the one sovereign worthy to define the parameters of a “rules-based international order” and, by virtue of its unimpeachable self-perception, conduct the planet to a glorious destiny.

Moeini continues:

In a recent study for the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, which I co-authored, we investigated the structural reasons that drive Ukraine’s strategic calculus. We suggested that, as a “regional balancer”, Ukraine took a massive risk in defying the Russian redlines about Kyiv explicitly rejecting Nato overtures and stopping any military integration with the West. This was a maximalist gambit that presupposed Western military support and risked actively provoking Moscow to its own strategic disadvantage.

This is a distortion of what really happened in Ukraine over the course of the past quarter century.

The Ukraine

The inherently disharmonious nation-state currently assigned the toponym “Ukraine” on maps of Europe is incontrovertibly an artificial construction of relatively recent origin. The socio-political and cultural facts underlying this reality were ably exploited by the Germans in the Second World War when the Nazis successfully recruited large numbers of its western inhabitants (primarily from Galicia) to join them in a war of annihilation against the Poles, the Jews, and the more numerous and prosperous “Muscovites” who inhabited the agriculturally fertile and substantially industrialized regions of historical Novorossiya.

This was the polity within the geographic region known as the Ukraine that, beginning as early as the immediate aftermath of the war, was systematically cultivated by the Anglo-American western hegemon as a disruptive force to undermine Soviet power and influence in eastern Europe.

And in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union which occasioned the rise of the global American empire, this was the polity that was methodically groomed to eventually become a disposable proxy for imperial designs which explicitly aspired to dismember Russia and despoil its nearly limitless natural resource treasures.

Any set of arguments aiming to dispute this interpretation of events is demonstrably erroneous, logically fallacious, and historically revisionist – but I will set aside that debate for another day.

My point for now is that Moeini’s characterization of what happened since 2014 as Ukraine exercising its own agency to effect a geopolitical gambit against Russia is a tortured misrepresentation of the facts.

The reality is that the ruling junta in Ukraine – raised to its principality by imperial intrigues – was cunningly seduced into believing it was uniquely capable of becoming the tip of the empire’s spear to slay, once and for all, the subhuman “Muscovites” who had long-dominated the left bank of the Dnieper River, Crimea, and the regions bordering the Black Sea.

Moeini comes close to acknowledging this reality – apparently without apprehending its necessary implications:

Practically all of America’s security alliances today are asymmetrical arrangements between the United States and regional balancers — a class of smaller, more peripheral regional states seeking to balance against the dominant middle powers in their respective regions. As a great power, America possesses an inherent capacity to encroach on other regional security complexes (RSCs). In this context, it is reasonable for regional balancers to attempt to coax and exploit American power in the service of their particular regional security interests.

Running with the Devil

What he is describing is a hegemon/vassal relationship wherein the empire defines, measures, and imposes both the quid and the quo of every transaction between the parties.

In the case of Ukraine, this pact with the devil entailed the empire pledging to equip and train a military force which would become the vanguard in a bold maneuver to not only reclaim Novorossiya and Crimea for Ukraine, but also to substantially attrit Russian military capability; humiliate and depose the despised Vladimir Putin, and then, as their just reward, to assume their supposedly rightful place among the great nations of Europe and the world.

As it were, the emissaries of empire took their chosen Ukrainian aspirants to the top of an exceedingly high mountain, showed them all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory thereof, and solemnly vowed, “All these things will we give unto you, if you will fall down and worship us.”

And, without hesitation, the credulous Ukrainians replied, “Hell yes! We’ll take that deal!”

Enticed by disingenuous flattery and the imagined deliciousness of the promised prize, they worshipfully knelt to kiss the ring, and willfully blinded themselves to the inescapable reality that their reach would exceed their grasp.

For, as Moeini further states:

Setting such a lofty objective, however, effectively meant that Kyiv could never succeed without active Nato intervention shifting the balance of power in its favour. By virtue of its decision, Ukraine, along with its closest partners in Poland and the Baltic nations, became the classic 'trojan ally' — smaller countries whose desire for regional clout against the extant middle power (Russia) is predicated on their ability to persuade an external great power and its global military network (here, the US and, by extension, Nato) to step in militarily on their behalf.

In this paragraph we are greeted at the door by a glaring tautology, only to then be treated to the first unmistakable specimen of Moeini’s fundamental miscalculation – and yet not his, for it has been the fundamental miscalculation of the exceptionalist gospel since its genesis: our dutiful author characterizes Russia as a “middle power”.

Herein lies the key to the entire exceptionalist fallacy.

I will expand upon this thought further below.

The Immovable Object

Meanwhile, Moeini continues (emphasis added):

Ukraine’s future as a sovereign state would now hinge on its ability to successfully engineer an escalation.
…
For it is in Kyiv’s interests to steer Nato into becoming more closely entangled in the war.

The essential premise of both phrases is false – preposterously so. If the author is not dissembling in stating them, then he is tragically disinformed as to the reality of events as they have transpired.

Ukraine is not a principal actor in this movie. They are playing the “cast of millions” part.

This is and always has been a power struggle between the current iteration of western empire and its favorite nemesis: Russia. That is the context in which it is being prosecuted, and defines the terms upon which it will be decided.

“Escalation” was always an essential parameter of the empire’s calculus. The dissolution and vassalization of continental Russia has never ceased to be the prime directive. The imperial suzerains simply failed to accurately perceive that the Russians possessed escalatory supremacy. They erroneously imagined themselves to be the irresistible force and dismissed the historical evidence that Russia is the immovable object.

That increasingly evident reality has now abruptly sobered the western masters of war and forced them to reassess the entire equation of the conflict.

Moeini continues:

… Ukraine cannot defeat Russia without Nato fighting on its side. The question now is whether the West should allow itself to be entrapped into that war and jeopardise the fate of the entire world in doing so.

What he apparently fails to comprehend is that the empire is already entrapped – precariously suspended between the Scylla and Charybdis of a scorched-earth tantrum or a humiliating retreat that will forever shatter the myth of American military supremacy, and greatly accelerate the transition to the historical norm of a multipolar world.

And yet he persists:

In the materialist framing of security offered by most realists, there is little upside for America and western Europe, and certainly no genuine national or strategic interest, in getting dragged into what is essentially a regional war in Eastern Europe involving two different nationalistic states.

<sigh>

I am compelled to repeat, this is NOT “essentially a regional war in Eastern Europe involving two different nationalistic states.”

Ukraine is NOT a principal actor in this movie. They are playing the “cast of millions” part.

This is and always has been a power struggle between the current iteration of western empire and its favorite nemesis: Russia. That is the context in which it is being prosecuted, and defines the terms upon which it will be decided.

Nevertheless, in the succeeding paragraph Moeini manages to indirectly affirm this perspective – although he frames the issue once again in the mystifying naïveté of his “ontological” construct:

From an ontological standpoint, however, an Anglo-American foreign policy establishment that strongly 'identifies' itself with US unipolarity has been heavily invested in maintaining the status quo, and preventing the formation of a new collective security architecture in Europe, which would be centred on Russia and Germany rather than the United States.

In other words, he frankly acknowledges that this war is, at its root, about the preservation of the unipolar status quo – or restated in terms I have employed for many months now: this war is an existential struggle between Russian sovereignty and American imperial continuity.

Before I elaborate on this point, I want to digress into a brief discussion of vocabulary.

Moeini repeatedly employs the term “ontological” in his paper. Ontological refers to a metaphysical assessment of the nature and meaning of being. It relates to one’s sense of identity. It is abstract in the extreme, inherently subjective, and therefore susceptible to pronounced volatility.

Existential, on the other hand, is a term referring to one’s physical continuance in time and space. It is life reduced to its bare essence. Although it can be employed in an abstract sense, it is fundamentally concrete, and is instinctively perceived as an objective quality – especially when threatened with annihilation.

Returning again to Moeini’s framing of Anglo-American foreign policy within an ontological construct, I fully acknowledge the presumed prerogatives associated with the various vainglorious imperial narratives:

- “the shining city on a hill”

- “the indispensable nation”

- “spreading freedom and democracy”

- “champion of the oppressed”

et cetera

The Calculated Façade of American Exceptionalism

Of course, all of these expressions are variations on the more ancient western theme of “the white man’s burden”. And all are fundamentally jingoistic at their root. More meaningfully, all are illusory qualities of the empire, whose unbridled imperial avarice and moral hypocrisy have always been insuperable stumbling blocks to its holier-than-thou pretensions.

In any case, as it relates to imperial foreign policy, I adamantly assert that these ontological pretensions have never been more than a calculated façade. The imperial masters do not hold genuine aspirations to spread righteousness and prosperity around the world. As with all declining empires that preceded this one, the imperial elite aspire to dominion as an end per se. It is the self-satisfaction of unquestioned primacy that is the ultimate wellspring of all their actions – at least insofar as the apparatus of tribute and plunder remains adequately intact.

Therefore, in the context of a “collective security architecture” in Europe, it is not the alleged threat of despotic Russian expansionism that has motivated imperial actions, but rather the thought that the Europeans themselves would agree to a mutually satisfactory multilateral security arrangement, and then firmly request that the Americans finally take all their military toys and go home.

Concerningly, it has become increasingly evident that the empire would rather rule over the ashes and rubble of Europe than permit its constituent nations to reclaim their sovereignty on their own terms, and by their own volition.

To reign is worth ambition though in hell:

Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.

Moeini correctly observes that the empire’s most acute concern in recent years had been the discernible advance of Russo-German reconciliation and economic collaboration. Going back over a century, this prospect has always been understood as the single greatest threat to Anglo-American dominance of the western world, and hence a development that must be arrested before it can ever gain momentum.

He then accurately characterizes the empire’s stratagem to nip Russo-German partnership in the bud:

… the US establishment has worked to destroy any possibility of a Berlin-Moscow axis forming by aligning itself with the Intermarium bloc of countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea, repeatedly opposing (and openly threatening) Nord Stream gas pipelines, and deliberately rebuffing Russian insistence on a neutral Ukraine.

The historical naïveté and impaired foresight of this imperial machination is a topic for another discussion. Suffice it for now to say it betrays an abject ignorance of the centuries-old frictions and volatile alignments of the disparate Slavic nations comprising the region in question.

As the often-prophetic Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote during the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War which contested the southern portion of the Intermarium:

Between themselves, these lands will forever quarrel, forever envy each other, and intrigue against each other.

In any event, the empire successfully enticed most of the Intermarium to seek its identity with the rest of the western European vassals – with Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic chihuahuas being most in thrall to the imagined bonanza.

While seemingly blind to the inevitable calamity for the Kiev regime, Moeini obliquely touches upon the cynical reality of how the empire designed to exploit Ukraine to further its own hegemonic goals:

In relation to Ukraine, the initial objective for an ideological Western alliance that is skewed toward 'shared values', as Nato has become with the dissolution of the USSR, was to turn that country into a Western albatross for Russia, to bog down Moscow in an extended quagmire to weaken its regional power and influence, and even to encourage regime change in the Kremlin.

Once again, Moeini inadvertently reveals his bias towards the delusions of western policy makers in relation to their ill-conceived Mother of All Proxy Armies gambit in Ukraine. But rather than crafting anew a response to this reference to the “best-laid plans” of the not-quite-geniuses in the Pentagon, Whitehall, Langley, and Foggy Bottom, I will cite a few paragraphs from my maiden commentary on this war:

I initially believed NATO military leaders must have had a sober view, far in advance, that their half-million-strong, well-armed, trained-to-NATO-standards Ukrainian proxy army had almost no chance of prevailing on the field of battle against Russia.

But watching drone video of Ukrainian fortifications has convinced me the US military brain trust effectively disdained the Russian military, and its commanders, in the course of their eight-year-long preparation of the eastern Ukrainian battlefield.

Their vanity persuaded them the Russians would mindlessly smash themselves to pieces against an entrenched well-armed force.

Indeed, they were so confident of the genius of their plan that they persuasively encouraged many hundreds of now-killed or captured NATO veterans to “share in the glory” of humiliating the Russians and bringing down the Putin regime once and for all.

They deluded themselves into believing the Russians lacked strategic and logistical acumen, a sufficiently well-trained force, and – arguably the biggest miscalculation of all – sufficient stockpiles of ammo to conduct a protracted high-intensity conflict.

In short, I have come to believe US/NATO commanders actually persuaded themselves that this 'Mother of All Proxy Armies' had an excellent chance to soundly whip the Russians in a battle situated in their own back yard.

In other words, they disregarded centuries of European history that they somehow convinced themselves had no relevance to their 21st century aspirations to defeat Russia militarily and take a great spoil of its resources.

From Napoleon to Hitler to the amorphous contemporary entity I have dubbed the Empire At All Costs cult, the would-be imperial overlords have fantasized a Russia that is intellectually, organizationally, culturally, and – most consequentially – militarily inferior to its enlightened western cousins. And in every instance it has been proven to be a catastrophic miscalculation.

And yet here we are again.

<sigh>

The Inexplicably Unforeseen Return of Industrial Warfare

Moeini then proceeds to muse tendentiously over the possibilities of the empire somehow finding a way to snatch victory from the inexorable jaws of defeat.

First he imagines that continued deliveries of western weapons to Ukraine can freeze the conflict in a state of attritional stalemate from which some fashion of geopolitical victory can be forged. Apparently he is among those bewitched by the pervasive myths of two-hundred thousand Russian dead and thousands of units of destroyed armor, vehicles, and artillery – not to mention an allegedly impotent and all-but-invisible Russian Air Force whose radically diminished fleet of antiquated Soviet-era aircraft is barely combat capable; far beneath the supposedly lofty standards of the legendary western air armadas.

He, like so many in the overcrowded ranks of ostensibly “prudent and measured” western “experts”, seems to envisage rank upon rank of demoralized, under-trained, under-equipped, under-clothed, under-fed Russian conscripts trembling in frigid terror that yet another in a fictionally inexhaustible series of fearsome HIMARS strikes is about to blast them and their emaciated comrades to smithereens.

In a final leap of ludicrousness, he moots the consequences of even further western escalation in the form of longer-range missiles and F-16s which just might permit the Ukrainians to drive the depleted Russian forces out of the Donbass, and even eventually deliver Crimea from its Russian occupiers.

Consistent with the ontological imperatives of a perspective rooted in unquestionable imperial rightness and might, he cannot conceive that direct NATO intervention could result in catastrophic defeat at the hands of the “obviously inferior” Russian conventional military, but only finds himself capable of fretting over the possibility that, for Russia, the prospect of conventional military humiliation:

… would dramatically increase the likelihood of a nuclear event, given how Moscow regards protecting its strategic stronghold in the Black Sea as an existential imperative.

There are, as I have noted above and elsewhere, true existential imperatives at work in this conflict – for both Russia and the empire. But the essential difference is that Russia entered into this conflict cognizant of that reality, and – contrary to the misinformed delusions of almost everyone in the west – the Russians were much better prepared to prosecute a protracted conventional conflict than all of the atrophied NATO militaries combined.

And now, after a full year of the most high-intensity European war since 1945, the Russian economy is effectively on a war-footing. Latent Soviet-era armaments factories have been running round-the-clock shifts for months already, producing every type of weaponry the prior year of combat has proven to be most effective, and in quantities western military planners can only dream of.

Russian war-time production levels coupled with its now nearly mature half-million-strong mobilization of reservists — virtually all of them as yet uncommitted on the battlefield — projects the tableau of a Russian military substantially more potent than it was just one year ago, and growing stronger with each passing month. Anyone who continues to believe otherwise has simply been comprehensively propagandized by the pervasive western intel psyop that has operated on the cynical principle that:

“If you can’t win a real war, win an imaginary one.”

That works satisfactorily well so long as the narrative can be persuasively perpetuated. But imaginary troops, equipment, and ammunition do not win real wars.

Meanwhile, anything that could have been characterized as “surplus” NATO stores is all but exhausted. Oh, to be sure, there have been recent announcements of new mountains of NATO armaments to be shipped to Ukraine – hundreds of incomparable western main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, mobile artillery platforms, and a long list of other supposedly war-winning sundries.

The Arsenal of Democracy is just beginning to flex its muscles!

Or so the story goes.

However, upon closer examination, the “mountain” of awesome western stuff is revealed to be little more than a modest molehill of mostly antiquated equipment, along with woefully deficient quantities of additional ammunition.

To make matters worse, in the ensuing weeks, what was initially touted as hundreds of main battle tanks has become only a few dozen, most of them long out-of-service and requiring extensive repair to render them combat capable.

The “Arsenal of Democracy” is not a massive muscle waiting to be flexed in the eyes of an easily shocked and awed global public. It is a mirage.

As I described the situation in a succinct commentary published three weeks ago:

The US military is not built nor equipped for protracted high-intensity conflict. Nor can it supply a depleted proxy army with the means to prosecute a protracted high-intensity conflict.

The incontrovertible reality is that the US and its NATO allies are presently incapable of supplying the massive material demands of modern industrial warfare, as Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Alex Vershinin articulated so well in this essential June 2022 analysis: The Return of Industrial Warfare.

And yet the public discussion of potential war always includes convinced voices proclaiming that, just like in the Second World War, US industry could very rapidly ramp up to produce armaments of surpassing quality, and in overwhelming quantities.

This titillates the biases of American exceptionalists in general, and is a particularly seductive fantasy of the #EmpireAtAllCosts cult drones propagandizing for filthy lucre at the countless armaments-industry-funded “think tanks” in Washington and London.

But the notion that the rapidly declining empire can resurrect the Arsenal of Democracy band for one final farewell tour is a singularly delusional vanity.

You see, for all its massive plunder of the public purse, the US armaments industry is effectively a modestly scaled high-end boutique.

Building the Perfect Beast

Even more significantly, in a development I and many others have predicted for several years now – in the face of almost universal ridicule, I might add – the empire’s seemingly endless string of hubris-driven blunders has rapidly accelerated the formation of what is quite arguably the single most potent military/economic/geostrategic alliance seen in modern times: the tripartite axis of Russia, China, and Iran.

In its misguided and short-sighted gambit to thwart the long-dreaded Russo-German rapprochement — incomprehensibly punctuated by the late September 2022 sabotage of the Nordstream gas pipelines — the empire has astoundingly managed to jump from the frying pan of a regional proxy war against Russia into the fire of a global conflict all three of its steadily strengthening adversaries now view as existential.

In my considered opinion, this is almost certainly the single most inexplicable and portentous series of geopolitical blunders in recorded history.

For the time being, the fighting will remain confined to Ukraine. But the entire complexion of this war has been irreversibly altered.

Ontological Insecurity Goes to War

Moeini then proceeds to wax tendentiously verbose about the compulsions of “ontological insecurity” under which the empire and its heretofore thoroughly indoctrinated vassals are now laboring on account of Russia having acted in direct contravention of the dictates of the “rules-based international order”.

He adopts an almost-Hofferesque “true believer” affectation as he characterizes America as an “ideological great power”. In a Manichaean rapture, he implicitly asserts that the greatness of the current hegemonic order is a direct byproduct of the “humanitarianism and democratism” he imagines to be at its core.

He bemoans his conviction that the “compulsion toward escalation” derives directly from an unforgivably aggressive Russia that has disrupted the “unified sense of order and continuity in the world.”

He then concludes with this remarkable rhetorical flourish:

As we begin the second year of the war, it has finally dawned on many in Washington that the likely outcome of this tragedy is stalemate: 'We will continue to try to impress upon [the Ukrainian leadership] that we can’t do anything and everything forever,' one senior Biden administration official said this week. For all the talk of Ukrainian agency, that agency depends entirely on Nato’s commitment to continue to support Kyiv’s war effort indefinitely. Such a maximalist desire for 'complete victory' is not only highly attritional and suggestive of yet another endless war, but it is also reckless; its very success could trigger a nuclear holocaust.

Moscow has already paid a high price for its transgressions in Ukraine. To prolong the war at this point in an ideological quest for total victory is both strategically and morally questionable. For many liberal internationalists in the West, the clamour for a 'just peace' that is sufficiently punishing to Russia suggests little more than a thinly-veiled desire to impose a Carthaginian peace on Moscow. The West has indeed wounded Russia; now it must decide if it wants to let this wound fester and conflagrate the entire world. For unless Moscow is provided with a reasonable off-ramp that recognises Russia’s status as a regional power with its own existential imperatives of strategic and ontological security, that is the precipice towards which we are heading.

It is a breathtaking encapsulation of the analytical transgressions of this archetypal expression of American imperial exceptionalism.

I shall respond to the most noteworthy among them:

The “likely outcome” of this war is not “stalemate”. Rather, it is the all-but-certain scenario of Russia effectively annihilating the hybrid NATO/Ukrainian military force clinging to existence along the current line of contact, and then dictating new borders consistent with Russia’s conception of satisfactory “strategic depth”.

The notion that the US/NATO can “continue to support Kyiv’s war effort indefinitely” is a delusional conceit. As I have written above and elsewhere:

The US military is not built nor equipped for protracted high-intensity conflict. Nor can it supply a depleted proxy army with the means to prosecute a protracted high-intensity conflict.

Escalating the degree of US intervention in this war is not reckless because it risks backing the Russians into a corner from which they will feel compelled to use nuclear weapons, but rather because, in the face of catastrophic NATO losses on the ground and in the air of a conventional conflict, the United States government could very well find itself so desperately humiliated that it will yield to the enticings of the Empire At All Costs cult to sally forth boldly into the nuclear abyss.

The Persistent Myth of Russian Weakness

Moeini imagines that “Moscow has already paid a high price for its transgressions in Ukraine.”

To be sure, Russia has suffered losses in this war. Aggregating all the major components of the Russian military effort so far (Russian regulars, Donbass militia, Wagner PMC, and Chechen volunteer regiments), the Russians have very conceivably incurred as many as twenty-five thousand killed, and twice that wounded.

On the other side of the balance, it is now a near-certainty that the Armed Forces of Ukraine have suffered over two-hundred thousand killed, and at least twice that many irrecoverably wounded.

It is Ukraine that has paid a high price for the transgressions of the empire in its futile attempt to mortally wound Russia!

Utilizing a resolute “economy of force” strategy for an entire year — on both the offensive and the defensive — the Russians have exacted the most disproportionate casualty ratio of any major war in modern times.

Contrary to the propaganda-driven hallucinations of the overwhelming majority of western military analysts — as well a surprisingly large number of Russian critics of Putin, the Kremlin, and the Russian Ministry of Defense — I remain thoroughly persuaded that future historians and war college professors will acclaim the past year of Russian military operations as the most impressive large-scale campaign of urban combat ever witnessed. It will be admiringly studied for centuries to come.

Meanwhile, as many as a half-million Russian combat effectives remain uncommitted in the theater — a mixture of battle veterans and mobilized reserves. They have been abundantly equipped with the finest armor, vehicles, and firepower yet fielded on the Russian side in this war.

Over 700 fixed-wing and rotary aircraft are dispersed within striking distance of the front.

Russian armaments production has proven all the imperial think-tank naysayers wrong. They have mobilized their latent but massive manufacturing capacity to such an impressive extent that it would take the west at least five years, and more likely a decade, to “catch up”.

The unadorned truth of the matter is that the US/NATO simply cannot and most assuredly will not win this war.

The Moment of Greatest Danger

Moeini concludes his treatise by musing that “unless Moscow is provided with a reasonable off-ramp that recognises Russia’s status as a regional power with its own existential imperatives of strategic and ontological security”, the world stands on the brink of a nuclear holocaust.

He correctly fears a nuclear calamity, but misattributes the source of the risk.

It is the empire that desperately needs an off-ramp at this point. The imperial potentates imagined up for themselves a world in which they commanded the sole “great power” on the planet. In casually dismissing the relative strength of the civilizational powers whom they have converted into mortal foes — Russia, China, and Persia — they have now consigned western civilization to an ontological and existential crisis of their own creation.

Reprinted with permission from imetatronink.
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from The Ontological Incoherence of American Imperial Exceptionalism

Donald Trump in New Campaign Video is Following Through on Running as the Peace Candidate

On February 8, I wrote about indications that Donald Trump may run as the peace candidate in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Concluding, I commented, “We’ll see if Trump follows through with this campaign strategy.” This week, the Trump campaign released a new video of Trump speaking about matters related to war and peace. The video indicates that Trump is indeed following through on that peace candidate campaign strategy.

The title the Trump campaign put on the video promotes the peace candidate message with gusto: “Agenda47: President Trump Announces Plan to Stop the America Last Warmongers and Globalists.” The “Agenda47” in the title is an apparent reference to Trump holding the 47th American presidency should he win the 2024 election.

In the video, Trump starts off with a bold and blunt comment in line with the video title, declaring:

World War III has never been closer than it is right now. We need to clean house of all of the warmongers and America Last globalists and the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the national security-industrial complex. One of the reasons I was the only president in generations who didn’t start a war is that I was the only president who rejected the catastrophic advice of many of Washington’s generals, bureaucrats, and the so-called diplomats who only know how to get us into conflict, but they don’t know how to get us out.

Proceeding, Trump points to the United States Department of State and individuals including Victoria Nuland, who Trump mentions by name, having been “seeking confrontation for a long time” including through supporting uprisings in Ukraine. He compares their activities to the activities taken by others before to stir up conflict with Iraq. The Iraq related activities were a major matter Trump complained about again and again in his successful 2016 presidential campaign.

While Trump says that “none of this excuses in any way the outrageous an horrible invasion of Ukraine one year ago” by Russia, he also asserts that, had he — instead of Joe Biden — been in the White House, that invasion would not have taken place. Further, asserts Trump, the war in Ukraine could be ended “in 24 hours with the right leadership.”

Explaining how his approach would be different, Trump notes his support for building up the military for “peace through strength” along with a plan to eliminate the pressure toward war that arises from the military-industrial complex. Trump states: “We’ll also stop the lobbyists and the big defense contractors from going in and pushing our senior military and national security officials toward conflict only to reward them when they retire with lucrative jobs getting paid millions and millions of dollars.” Trump here seems to be committing to the task President Dwight D. Eisenhower recommended in Eisenhower’s farewell address in the relatively early days of the national-security state. Though that task may involve undertaking a difficult to impossible balancing act, it is refreshing to see a candidate talk about at least attempting to accomplish it instead of just signing off on whatever the military-industrial complex demands.

In contrast with his presentation of himself as the peace candidate, Trump calls his adversaries in the election contest “candidates of war,” stating:

Take a look at the globalist warmonger donors backing our opponents. That’s because they’re candidates of war.

Concluding his comments in the video, Trump declares:

At the end of my next four years, the warmongerers, frauds, and failures of the senior ranks of our government will all be gone, and we will have a new group of competent national security officials who believe in defending America’s vital interests above all else.

While this Trump campaign video does a good job of presenting Trump as the peace candidate, there is reason to suspect that Trump will, after election to office, end up falling short on delivering as a peace president. Journalist Aaron Maté, substitute hosting at the Jimmy Dore Show, presents reason for doubt of Trump’s peace cred in his review of the Trump campaign video, while also not totally dismissing Trump’s comments. Maté discusses Trump’s time as president when his administration took actions including, in relation to Russia, sending weapons to Ukraine that the previous presidential administration would not and imposing sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that could transport Russian gas to Germany. While Trump ran in 2016 as a candidate critical of prior American warmongering, Maté discusses how in office as president “he appointed a bunch of warmongers and he pursued warmongering policies.” You can watch Maté’s insightful critique here.

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2023/february/24/donald-trump-in-new-campaign-video-is-following-through-on-running-as-the-peace-candidate/

Biden Goes All in on Proxy War Against Russia

No, Joe, that’s not Hunter you’re sniffing. But Zelensky is a pretty good substitute – every bit as corrupt, drugged-up and delusional as the First Son.

So hug away. You have already proven (repeatedly) that there is no betrayal of America’s true homeland security you will not eagerly embrace.

And, yes, unlike the manifold images on Hunter’s laptop, this picture of the purported hero of the free world snorting cocaine was probably photo-shopped. But so what?

How would our addle-brained President tell the difference!

After all, he apparently can’t even tell the difference between friend and foe. That’s surely the implication of the great Seymour Hersh’s latest bombshell about the pipeline bombings.

According to Hersh’s Deep State sources, the guy shuffling around the Oval Office is so befuddled that he actually ordered the bombing of the $25 billion and strategically crucial Nord Stream pipelines. The latter, of course, are half-owned by Germany, which is by far Washington’s most important and powerful European ally, and have been the economic conduit for cheap Russian gas that has fueled the German industrial economy.

To be sure, Biden apologists keep blathering about his intrepid stand for the postwar"liberal international order". But given that Washington has been a serial invader, occupier and destroyer of dozens of countries since WWII, that’s a risible joke. Still, who in their right mind would incinerate the economic lifeline of an ally, hoping that the damage just might possibly ricochet and hit an enemy, too?

Indeed, Joe Biden said in no uncertain terms before the event that he would do it, even if he hasn’t yet explicitly confessed. But he doesn’t need to because there are exactly zero alternative suspects.

In that regard, we insist on ruling out Russian self-sabotage. Putin is no prince of men, but he is most definitely not irrational or stupid. The fact that at the time of the explosion last September the mainstream press cast a sideways glance at Moscow and then promptly went radio silent on one of the most brazen acts of war in recent times tells you all you need to know.

Even the nattering nabobs of the national security states’ knee-padded fourth estate didn’t buy the "Putin did it" canard.

By the same token, who could possibly believe that the likes of Latvia or Poland did the deed without Washington’s blessing and specialized equipment and super-frogman capabilities?

After all, the pipelines were made of heavy duty ultra-hardened steel, which is further coated with immense layers of concrete. To be exact, each section of the Nord Stream pipelines has a steel case nearly two inches thick, which, in turn, is surrounded by a concrete coating another three-to-four inches thick.

It was estimated by German authorities, therefore, that the explosions which mutilated these super-pipes – probably beyond repair because the inner lining have now been flooded with saltwater – had the force of 500 tons of TNT and registered at 2.5 on the Richter scale.

So, as they say, this was the work of a "state actor" from a list that was never larger than one. And now we know for sure because Sy Hersh has always exposed lies, not told them: My Lai, Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, the CIA’s domestic spying program, the Abu Ghraib torture chambers, the CIA weapons "ratline" from Benghazi to the Syrian terrorists – were all his reporting, about abominations which most definitely did happen.

So it is in the context of the utter madness of the Nord Stream pipeline bombing that Sleepy Joe’s appalling trip to Kiev, on President’s Day no less, needs be understood. That is to say, this wasn’t just White House grandstanding complete with phony air raid sirens in yet another rendition of foreign policy by photo-op. It was actually evidence that Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine has descended into stupidity and wickedness that knows no bounds.

In the first place, there is not a scintilla of benefit to America’s homeland safety and security being served by this infinitely foolish proxy war against Russia. The mere $1.8 trillion GDP and middle-level technology of Russia is no military threat whatsoever to the $47 trillion of NATO GDP, along with the high tech muscle that Washington brings to the table.

And that’s to say nothing of the comparative resources plowed into defense spending per se. For NATO that now totals $1.2 trillion per year (two-thirds of which is footed by Washington) or 14 times the $84 billion being spent by Russia, including the enormous expenditure of material and equipment in Ukraine.

In other words, there is not a snowball’s chance in the hot place that a Russian military, which got bogged-down on its own doorstep against a rag-tag, nearly bankrupt state run by thieves, fanatics, adventurers, opportunists and clowns, could possibly mount the global land, sea and air armada with 5,000 mile supply lines that would be needed to storm the New Jersey shoreline.

By the same token, Cool Hand Vlad may be an evil-doer against his own domestic subjects, but he’s not about to attempt national suicide by attacking America’s triad deterrent armed with 3,750 nuclear warheads. Not when just a handful of successful strikes would be more than enough to obliterate Moscow, St. Petersburg and the rest of Russia’s major cities.

In a word, Russia has absolutely no way to circumnavigate America’s ultimate defense – the great Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats – either by conventional forces or nuclear attack. Therefore, the risible idea that we are "fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here" is just plain crackpottery.

Nor do we need a proxy war in Ukraine to defend Poland, Germany and the rest of the European land mass from Putin’s alleged intention to recreate the Soviet Empire. Again, there is not a shred of evidence for this proposition outside of neocon whoppers constructed from whole-cloth, and the proof is actually in the pudding.

To wit, if the Polish, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, Dutch, German and Spanish leaders, for example, thought Russia would really be rolling in the tanks after finishing off Ukraine, they would be spending a hell of a lot more than 2.42%, 2.36%, 2.34%, 2.10%, 1.65%, 1.44% and 1.01% of GDP on defense, respectively.

The fact is, the combined defense budgets of the above seven European nations amount to just $115 billion or 1.60% of their collective GDP. That’s a lot more than Russia spends, of course, but barely 50 days worth of Pentagon extravagance.

Stated differently, they don’t think the Rooskies are coming for them, not even Poland and the Baltics, because their meager defense budgets betray their true security assessments. At the end of the day, what is driving their pro forma support for Washington’s Ukraine madness is essentially domestic politics.

After all, the German Green Party, which is the essential minority partner in the Olaf Scholz-led coalition government, used to be the peacenik wing of German politics. But now they have become raving war-hawks for a barely disguised reason. Namely, they’ve discovered that the best way to get rid of fossil fuels is to outlaw the massive supply of natural gas and petroleum that was coming from the now demonized Russia.

That is to say, the road to "net zero" apparently wends its way through Moscow!

Likewise, for more than a century running anti-Russia howling has been a staple of domestic Polish politics – before, during (sub-rosa until the rise of Solidarity in 1980) and after the Soviet occupation. And that’s especially been the case since Uncle Sucker brought them into NATO in 1999 and offered to foot the bill for a needlessly provocative stance against their far larger neighbor.

But notwithstanding all of the anti-Russian fulminations by their politicians, it is evident that the Polish establishment is not quaking in its boots about Russian divisions heading their way. The proof lies in the fact that they spend only $430 per capita on defense compared to America’s defense spending of $2,600 per capita.

That’s right. The defense spending per capita of Poland, which is way over there next door to its historic enemy, is only 16% of what’s being spent by Washington, which is way over here far beyond the reach of Putin’s military.

By the same token, Russian leaders, and Putin is no exception, have long understood that they are loathed by the Poles, the Germans and especially the non-Russian inhabitants of the Baltics. So the very thought of Russians re-occupying lands that were exploited to the hilt by Moscow during the Cold War, and which left an immense distaste for things Russian, is a giant non-starter.

Indeed, unlike Joe Biden, Vlad Putin is actually fiscally literate. He knows that attempting to occupy any part of non-Russian Europe would be a costly catastrophe.

And we use the term "non-Russian Europe" very precisely. What is the opposite of non-Russian Europe is the Russian-speaking precincts of Crimea, the Donbas and the Black Sea rim through Zaporizhzia, Kherson, and Odessa.

Those regions comprised Novorossiya ("New Russia") for 150 years during which they were settled and developed by Russian workers, farmers and capitalists. And all this occurred long before they were arbitrarily inserted into Ukraine at gunpoint by Lenin and Khrushchev during the 20th century.

In the case of Crimea, for instance, it’s about as "Ukrainian" as Senator Pocahontas Warren is Cherokee. That is to say, one-sixteenth, at best.

Moreover, not only did all of these regions overwhelmingly vote to rejoinMother Russia during Putin’s September referendums, but the dog which isn’t barking behind the so-called line of contact tells you all you need to know.

These millions of mainly Russian-speaking folks are not begging to be liberated from the yoke of Moscow. Nor is the Russian Army being harnessed, fragged and sabotaged from the rear by a local resistance waiting to welcome the Ukrainian Army with open arms.

To the contrary, by all the evidence they simply want an end to Kiev’s NATO-funded and promulgated war on their regions. This utterly unnecessary and unjustified internal war has been brutal and unrelenting more or less since they choose to breakaway from the Ukrainian state after the Washington-instigated and financed coup of February 2014 installed a nasty little band of Russian-hating Neo-Nazis in Kiev.

That is to say, the answer is and always has been partition of the unnatural hodgepodge within Ukraine’s current borders put together by communist dictators who long ago departed for the hot place they didn’t believe in.

What prevents this salutary outcome is neither the ruler in Moscow nor the overwhelming portion of the American electorate. Instead, at the end of the day the roadblock lies with the two hideous men pictured in embrace at the top of the page.

One is senile and stupid. The other is stupider still and delusional beyond measure.

Yet they march the world toward a nuclear Armageddon. And now the detestable little freak who dares to demand that the world bend to his every beck and call for arms and aid has even said the quiet part aloud. Said Zelensky earlier this week –

"Because if China allies itself with Russia, there will be a world war,

Well, no, fortunately there will be no world war, but only because the impending Russian offensive is set to finish off the Ukrainian army before Washington can effectively respond and just after Zelensky books safe passage to South America in the nick of time.<

In turn, that will mean the end of the American Empire because after Washington’s ignominious retreats from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the world, like the children in the fable, will be jeering the Naked Empire and its utterly senile leader.

And that would be just in the nick of time, too.

Reprinted with author's permission from David Stockman's Contra Corner.

from Biden Goes All in on Proxy War Against Russia

When President Grover Cleveland Rejected Congressional Pressure for War against Spain

During the Tuesday episode of the Ron Paul Liberty Report, host Ron Paul answered questions that viewers had submitted. In the process of answering one of the questions, Paul mentioned that there was an instance in which President Grover Cleveland, who Paul has praised before, stood up against congressional pressure for the United States to go to war.

While Paul did not go into details about the instance when mentioning it in his answer, what Cleveland did was refuse to go to war with Spain in the name of aiding an insurrection in Cuba.

Historian Henry F. Graff briefly addressed the matter in a Miller Institute article regarding Cleveland’s foreign policy. Graff wrote:

In Cuba, Cleveland wanted to remain neutral, refusing to support the insurrection against Spanish rule and urging instead that Spain adopt reforms that would lead to gradual independence. On this issue, he stood in opposition to the Senate, which had adopted resolutions urging Cleveland to recognize the belligerency of the Cuban rebels. Congress then moved to defy the President by threatening to recognize Cuban independence. Cleveland responded flatly, saying he would characterize any such resolution as a usurpation of presidential authority. The matter remained unresolved at the end of his second term.

Ivan Eland ranks Cleveland second-best among American presidents in in his insightful book Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty. Eland provided in his book this additional information:

In 1896, Cleveland — unlike his successor William McKinley — resisted congressional and public pressure for interventionism by avoiding war with Spain over the rebellion in Cuba against its empire. Cleveland could have profited politically from such a war — because it would have taken the American public’s mind off the economic downturns of the 1890s — but he instead bore the substantial costs of doing the right thing.

As Eland suggests, things were very different after McKinley in 1897 followed Cleveland in the White House. In 1898, McKinley brought the US into the Spanish-American War that serves as a good marker of when the US transitioned into being an empire.

Yale Professor William Graham Sumner captured well the importance of the Spanish-American War in transforming the nature of America and its government in his “The Conquest of the United States by Spain” that he presented soon after the war’s conclusion. Sumner began his speech, which still today is important for helping understand the nature of interventionist foreign policy, by laying out his thesis that the US in winning the Spanish-American War was moving down an imperialist path that threatened “ruin” for America:

During the last year the public has been familiarized with descriptions of Spain and of Spanish methods of doing things until the name of Spain has become a symbol for a certain well-defined set of notions and policies. On the other hand, the name of the United States has always been, for all of us, a symbol for a state of things, a set of ideas and traditions, a group of views about social and political affairs.

Spain was the first, for a long time the greatest, of the modern imperialistic states. The United States, by its historical origin, its traditions, and its principles, is the chief representative of the revolt and reaction against that kind of a state. I intend to show that, by the line of action now proposed to us, which we call expansion and imperialism, we are throwing away some of the most important elements of the American symbol and are adopting some of the most important elements of the Spanish symbol.

We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of ideas and policies. Expansionism and imperialism are nothing but the old philosophies of national prosperity which have brought Spain to where she now is. Those philosophies appeal to national vanity and national cupidity. They are seductive, especially upon the first view and the most superficial judgment, and therefore it cannot be denied that they are very strong for popular effect. They are delusions, and they will lead us to ruin unless we are hardheaded enough to resist them. In any case the year 1898 is a great landmark in the history of the United States.

In the 125 years since the Spanish-American War, the imperial path taken by McKinley — in contrast with Cleveland’s exercise of restraint — has been chosen many more times by US presidents.

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2023/february/22/when-president-grover-cleveland-rejected-congressional-pressure-for-war-against-spain/

Microsoft Company Pushes Discredited GDI Blacklist Targeting Conservative and Libertarian Sites

I have been writing about the controversial funding of the Global Disinformation Index by the congressionally-creating and federal funded National Endowment for Democracy. I recently disclosed that, after my Hill column ran, NED contacted me to say that it was stopping any further funding of the GDI. However, major questions still remain on the NED’s funding of this highly flawed scoring system that targeted conservative and libertarian sites.

This is an effort to deter advertisers from supporting these sites while listing highly liberal sites like Huffington Post as some of the most reliable sources. It appears that a Microsoft company is supporting this effort. According to the Washington Examiner, Microsoft’s Xandr  is running a blacklist based on the discredited GDI listing. However, it includes additional sites popular with conservatives, libertarians, and independents beyond the ten most dangerous sites flagged by GDI.

It now appears that NED is not the only federally funded group supporting GDI. The State Department also supports the Global Engagement Center, which gave GDI funds for this blacklisting effort. It also includes sites like the Drudge Report, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, and sites associates with individual figures like Sean Hannity and Mike Huckabee.

The Democratic members, writers, and pundits have increasingly embraced blacklisting of conservatives and even justices. There is also a chilling turn toward labeling critics as Russian sympathizers and “Putin lovers” after they called for investigations into government censorship efforts. In attacks that increasingly sound like Red Scare 2.0, Democrats are denouncing anyone who questions efforts to censor social media.

For years, the Democrats pushed a Russian collusion theory that collapsed. It was later disclosed that the Clinton campaign hid and then lied about funding the infamous Steele Dossier. Nevertheless, people like Carter Page were falsely accused of being Russian agents and critics of the investigation labeled as Russian apologists. Ironically, the FBI was warned that the dossier appeared to be the result of Russian disinformation and relied on a presumed Russian agent.

If anything, my warning of McCarthy-like attacks and measures seemed to be taken more as a suggestion than an admonition by some. Soon after the end of the hearing, MSNBC contributor and former Sen. Claire McCaskill appeared on MSNBC to denounce the member witnesses (Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Ron Johnson, and former Rep. Gabbard) as “Putin apologists” and Putin lovers.

She exclaimed, “I mean, look at this, I mean, all three of those politicians are Putin apologists. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard loves Putin.” (For the record, she also attacked me as not being “a real lawyer.”)

Microsoft’s involvement in the blacklisting is particularly concerning. This is a company with many conservative, libertarian, and independent customers. Yet, it is actively seeking to blacklist sites through this transparently biased scoring system.  It is part of a chilling alliance of government, corporate, media, and academic interests to censor or control political speech on the Internet.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

from Microsoft Company Pushes Discredited GDI Blacklist Targeting Conservative and Libertarian Sites