John Weeks | The Libertarian Institute

Israel’s Imperial Techno-Optimism

by John Weeks | Jul 31, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

On Saturday, a rocket struck a soccer field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. At least twelve people were killed, mostly teenagers and children. Israel blamed the Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah for the attack. Hezbollah denied the charge and claimed Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome technology malfunctioned and hit the soccer field. On Tuesday, Israel hit the southern suburbs of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, with an air strike. The bombing killed civilians and possibly a Hezbollah commander. However, the Golan Heights bombing, which Israel might frame as the “inciting incident” for an...

You Don’t Want to Get Out of Line…

by John Weeks | Jul 25, 2024 | Featured Articles, Politics

The fallout from the failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania continues. Speculation abounds that it was an “inside job,” the head of the Secret Service became “embattled” and resigned, and the assassin’s bullet that just missed the mark killed Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday. Reaction to the assassination attempt has also revealed just how deeply, how fanatically, and how pathologically the Establishment and its minions harbor contempt and hatred for anyone who deviates from their...

Trump’s Attempted Assassination and the Betrayal of the Heroic Ethos

by John Weeks | Jul 15, 2024 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Politics

On Saturday, former president Donald Trump came within less of an inch of being assassinated by a rooftop sniper during an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A Secret Service counter sniper “neutralized the shooter,” but not before Trump and at least two rally attendees were injured. One rally attendee was killed. The fallout has (and will continue to be) historical. There are a lot of questions being asked right now. Important questions. Disturbing questions. But the botched attempt on Trump’s life has already highlighted something that everyone, especially young men, should know: the...

The Means of Our Future Horror

by John Weeks | Jul 11, 2024 | Featured Articles

Presidential campaign season is in full heat. Given the vast power of the state, the warring identity lines within our society, and the people’s susceptibility to all manner of propagandistic discourse, it’s looking a lot like midnight in America. Americans consume their propaganda the way Walter Benjamin observed people consume art: “Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise.” It is therefore not surprising that film (and television) deploys...

A Social Critique of the Judgment of Imperial Taste

by John Weeks | Jul 3, 2024 | Featured Articles

Taste is existential. For example, if your tastes include Christianity, homesteading, homeschooling, firearms and dining at Cracker Barrel, the “decent and loyal people of America” will fully support the federal government burning your house down with you and your children in it. The state, viewed as a corporate agent, has its tastes. And it sits at the apex of a social system in which the way taste is “legitimated” by regime intellectuals subtly legitimates the state itself and perpetuates a government-supremacist, anti-capitalist cultural order. The philosopher and sociologist Pierre...

A Critique of Practical Hasbara

by John Weeks | Jun 20, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Immanuel Kant published The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. It was the same year the Rebel Alliance triumphed at Yorktown, Virginia. The victory at Yorktown made possible the decline of the British “liberal” empire and the eventual rise of Washinton DCs “non-empire” empire. The “first critique” made possible the rise of Kant into the pantheon of western philosophical “big rocks,” alongside Plato and Aristotle. Kant created a shockingly contemporary interpretation of reality without recourse to the as yet to be conceptualized theory of evolution by natural selection or quantum field theory...

New Book Is A Must Read For Iraq War 2 Enthusiasts

by John Weeks | Jun 14, 2024 | Blog

Iraq War 2 is ancient history, like Athens’ defeat at Aegospotami or the NATO-Russia Founding Act. But for some of us, it seems like only yesterday we were being lied into one of the greatest geopolitical disasters of the Western imperial order. There’s a new book about that pivotal catastrophe: Deadly Betrayal, by Dennis Fritz. It pairs well with the Institute’s Enough Already and Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War. And all these books pair well with Moon Does Artisan Coffee, official caffeine dealer of the Scott Horton Show. So, buy the books. Buy the coffee. Drink the coffee. Read the...

A Critique of Pure Hasbara

by John Weeks | Jun 13, 2024 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Hasbara is a central feature of genocidal Zionism: “Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has successfully created a new illogic of its own; an illogic that has made the illegal seem legal, the immoral appear moral and the undemocratic sound democratic. It has masterfully marketed a number of myths that have become a part of the political and mainstream media.” As the marketing of Israel’s mythology, “hasbara” has been charitably characterized as “public diplomacy,” less charitably viewed as “propaganda,” and roughly translated as “explanation” or “explaining.” Familiarity with the...

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