It’s raining, late in the evening and you have been driving for most of the day. You want to get home. It’s cold and the pangs of hunger stir. You are on the home straight, and through the darkness and rain your beams of light illuminate the familiar. Suddenly ahead of you a car is on the side of the road, hazard lights flashing, a lone stranger is attempting to change a tire. Assuming that you know your way around a tire and you are not concerned for your safety, many of us would stop and offer assistance. Some may drive on, declaring that it’s none of their business. Assume that you do...
empire
Now You Care About the Spilling of Blood?
Actress Megan Fox recently claimed on social media that she and other Hollywood elites enjoy drinking each others blood, exciting those critical of Hollywood culture. In their minds it proves the evil, secret Pagan nature of the liberal American establishment. It's as though a sub-culture of drinking blood has never existed prior or that the symbolic drinking of blood and eating of the flesh of a body is not an already widely accepted ritual. In any case, a video of a woman boasting of her involvement in the voluntary ritual of blood drinking is upsetting to some. Drinking blood is bad....
The War in Ukraine and the ‘Star Wars Effect’
The American media’s Ukraine narrative is a vast deception that functions as a reassuring fantasy. The facts on the ground in Ukraine have overwhelmed the narrative being deployed in the West, but the American media simply ignores those facts. The effect is to placate the American people in service to the American state. The American state has learned well the lessons of Hollywood. The blockbuster film Star Wars (1977) allowed the American people, disillusioned from the recent defeat in Vietnam, to project onto and root for a victorious rebel insurgency. The state-driven media...
Lessons from Douglas Murray’s ‘The War on the West’
“We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has laid some very golden Eggs.”- Douglas Murray, author of The War on the West “[A]s recently as 2006, about 18% of social scientists self-identified as Marxists.”- Bryan Caplan, Ph.D., The Prevalence of Marxism in Academia (March 21, 2015, EconLib.org) I was always ashamed to be a Westerner. A civilization, I was told all through my public schooling years, uniquely contributed to the world in the following ways: slavery, child labor, bad working conditions, greed, sexism, genocide, racism, McCarthyism, and a bunch of useful...
Support Ukraine’s Independence? Then Support Secession Everywhere
By now, it should be abundantly clear to all that the official U.S. regime narrative on Ukraine is that one is supposed to be in favor of Ukrainian political independence. That is, we’re supposed to support the idea that Ukraine is a separate state that is politically independent from the Russian state. By extension, of course, the idea that Ukraine is a sovereign state also implies it is separate from all other states as well. But how did Ukraine get that way? States, of course, don’t appear out of nowhere. They generally come into being through one of two ways, or a combination of both....
Former NATO Commander Disguises War Propaganda as Novel
On March 9, 2021, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Admiral James Stavridis, co-authored a fiction novel with Elliott Ackerman, another former U.S. military officer. The book, entitled 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, imagines a kinetic war between the United States and China. Given the pedigree of its authorship, the novel provides a compelling window into the psychology of NATO’s military leadership and, correspondingly, the foreign policy establishment behind it. To those familiar with said psychology, the events of the novel will not be surprising. It begins with a...
Lew Rockwell Was Right About China
Over the last year, I have focused much of my work on opposing the New Cold War with Russia and China—particularly with China. In a recent piece, “‘No One is Calling for War with China,’” I tackled a claim that I’ve been hearing recently. I understand the argument to go like this: “advocating tougher China policy is not advocating war against China.” In a very literal sense, this argument is correct. Those who advocate tougher China policy are not literally suggesting war with China. But even real dyed-in-the-wool China hawks aren't demanding war. So, if not literally calling for war is...
Backdraft: How U.S. Sanctions on Russia May Burn the Dollar
There’s much to despise about economic sanctions. Aside from the fundamental immorality of making innocent individuals suffer for the sins of governments, sanctions almost universally fail to achieve the goals of those who inflict them. Nonetheless, sanctions have become the knee-jerk U.S. government response to any real or claimed foreign misdeed. According to the U.S. Treasury department, the number of U.S.-imposed sanctions soared 933% between 2000 and 2021. Where today’s Ukraine invasion-prompted sanctions are concerned, civilians in Russia and all around the world are already feeling...
Uncle Sam’s Grand Delusion
On Monday, March 28, the Pentagon submitted its 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) to Congress. While the entire report remains classified, an unclassified fact sheet was released to the media. It identified the Pentagon’s four main defense priorities: Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC. Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and its partners. Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russia challenge in Europe....
The ‘Threat’ of the Big Bad Bear
At the height of the late Cold War period, Andrew Cockburn wrote The Threat, a book that explored the bear cave of assumed Soviet military dominance. Challenging the narrative of Soviet supremacy—the belief that the Red Bear not only had greater numbers in their favor but also technological marvels that were capable of ensuring swift victory in time of war—Cockburn exposed myths that had been invented: a perceived supremacy that helped justify NATO, the Pentagon’s spending sprees, and a military-industrial complicated nation state that continues to grow long after the Berlin Wall fell and...