It’s a dark and snowy morning in Missoula, Montana. A billow of smoke rises up from beneath a pedestrian bridge where several hooded figures huddle around a morning campfire near the river’s shore. A path through the foliage leads away from the campfire toward a shoreline shantytown of tents and lean-tos. Further down the trail a man solemnly lugs a large section of tree recently chopped down by the Parks department that he plans to use for firewood. The morning traffic of the city hums anonymously overhead along the bridges that span the Clark Fork River.
A new society has formed on the banks of the Clark Fork River within the Missoula Valley. From Deer Creek to Deep Creek, an anonymous community of laborers, vagrants, addicts, gypsies and criminals has embedded itself into the riverbanks and adjacent parks. In the spring, this dissociated network tends to cluster into a central village near the California Street Bridge where the real estate is wide and inviting, at least until the river rises with the April runoff.
This was the location of an incident on 02 January 2024 involving several propane tanks that ignited and exploded. The discharge launched flaming shrapnel past several firefighters.
Near Yoke‘s grocery store on West Broadway, the steep banks leading down to the Clark Fork River are smothered by multicolored detritus blobs. Gnome homes stand sculpted into the turf alongside tree houses, meth-dens and shanty settlements built onto the vertical banks above the beach. An abandoned hammock swings in the morning breeze as the tarp suspended above it rattles between the trees. The band of contiguous settlements lines both sides of the river for as far as the eye can see. This is Missoula’s New Hellgate Village, a living topography that shifts with the tides and continues to grow.
When Missoula was first getting started as a trading-post town in the mid-1800s it was originally called “Hellgate Village” and it was a very violent place where duels and killings were a regular occurrence.
Today, paintball shootings and tent stabbings characterize the more charming incidents that transpire in New Hellgate Village.The now infamous Authorized Camping Site (ACS) was the home of so many instances of meth dealing, human trafficking and violent attacks that it had to be shut down in November of 2022 after only ten months in operation. A body was also purportedly found hanging from a tree near the Reserve Street Bridge.
As a result, Missoula’s riverfront has transformed into a veritable dumping ground for what’s left of the American dream. Endless strings of discarded refuse coagulate into sloppy amalgamations of plastic bags, broken glass, rotting fabric, human feces, aluminum cans, hypodermic needles, rubber gloves, disintegrating bed mattresses, bicycle tires, sex toys and cigarette butts.
Many locals are understandably heartbroken by the condition of the city’s riverfront. Citizens with jobs don’t have the time or the energy to clean up after the shantytown catastrophe unfolding all around them, or address the structural reasons for its existence. Taxpayers expect their government to do something about the problem but popular will gets stifled by the red tape of bureaucracy. Eventually some citizens inevitably grow tired of the lack of response and simply take matters into their own hands.
ARRESTED FOR UNAUTHORIZED BEAUTIFICATION
The trouble began when an apparently “mysterious private group or solitary citizen” removed “an entire dump-truck load of garbage” from Missoula’s West Broadway island and left it on the sidewalk. According to the Missoulian, the trash included dozens of syringes and was castigated as unauthorized:
“We don’t really know who’s doing the cleanup, that’s still being investigated,” said Charmell Owens, the city’s code compliance program manager. “We were just surprised early (Monday) morning by six larges piles of garbage and trash that had been collected and was placed adjacent to the sidewalk on Broadway. When that occurs, we have to then pull crews from streets to do a cleanup.”
In the days that followed, NBC Montana noted trash was continuing to find its way up the riverbank and sought the identity of the “Clark Fork Custodian”:
Ryan Tollefson and his dog, Avaya, often stroll along the Clark Fork River, and recently Tollefson says he’s noticed things piling up, like needles, human waste and garbage he never expected there. Tollefson grew up in Missoula, and he’s never seen it like this before, so he did what he thought was right. In late February, he took it upon himself to start cleaning the bank of the river — spending his time off from work to tidy up the place he loves.
Ryan Tollefson and his dog Avaya
“There has to be a solution, man,” Tollefson said. “I just don’t think that giving them syringes and clothing and food and watching it all end up in the river is the solution.”
When he started cleaning, he placed the trash where everyone could see it — on the sidewalk — reminding others that just because it’s out of sight doesn’t mean it should be out of mind. That’s when he got in a little trouble. In early March, Tollefson received a citation from the city for blocking the sidewalks. He said police showed up and questioned his motives.
“I said, ‘Are you going to take me to jail for picking up garbage?’” Tollefson said. But the citation didn’t deter him. Now he’s just strategic about where he’s placing the debris.
Tollefson was initially cited by law enforcement for blocking the sidewalk on 05 March 2024.
While his efforts were appreciated by local taxpayers, they managed to attract fury from several of the Village’s more aggressive residents. On 14 March 2024, Ryan was assaulted with a chain and lock that were whipped down on top of his head by an unstable individual. He wasn’t concussed, unconscious, or bleeding, but law enforcers were reticent to press charges against his attacker.
“The first incident, when I got hit with the lock with the chain, they came and they didn’t even arrest that guy. After he hit me with the chain, he pulled out a big knife –like a Crocodile Dundee knife– that was at least 12” long. But they just said it was my word against his and there were no witnesses or evidence so they let him go scot-free. I asked the officer to feel the back of my head because there was a big lump back there. She just said, ‘“’That could just be your skull.’”
On 20 March 2024 Ryan returned to his beachhead and continued his work, and was again physically assaulted, this time by a different homeless individual than the week prior, and with a different weapon. As reported by Travis Mateer:
“A man allegedly pushed Ryan three times, resulting in Ryan calling 911, but according to Ryan nothing was done to address the issue, so he continued working to remove trash from near the river bank. The man who pushed Ryan got increasingly agitated, then chucked two hockey sticks at him, so Ryan broke the hockey sticks in half and added them to the trash pile, which is when the man began “wailing” on Ryan. When the police responded to a passerby who called 911, they allegedly accused RYAN of stealing the man’s personal belongings.”
Authorities charged Ryan with disorderly conduct, the one-size-fits-all excuse to arrest anyone at any time for any reason. According to NBC Montana:
“Ryan Tollefson said police arrested him after he defended himself when a homeless person attacked him. The man accused Tollefson of taking away his possessions.”
Ryan elaborates:
“This incident happened a week and a half later [than the chain lock incident] at the same spot. A different guy was pushing me around at first so I called the police because he was pushing me. He got upset and they warned him about putting his hands on people. And right after they left, that’s when he threw a hockey stick at me. I broke the hockey stick and that antagonized him. So he started punching me in the face. And then a passer-by called 911 and the police came back. They arrested him for assault and they arrested me for disorderly conduct. But they didn’t have to arrest anyone.”
Three weeks after Tollefson’s arrest, internationally-recognized “firebrand” journalist Travis Mateer conducted his annual cleanup with a crew of volunteers on 08 April 2024. Within a week of this effort, Mateer also was arrested and detained in the Missoula County Detention Center.
In effect, it appears these individuals were cited and arrested for picking up garbage.
Meanwhile the individuals doing the littering are shielded from prosecution because they’re protected by the law. So-called “involuntary homeless” individuals can litter the river, cause a scene and assault citizens with impunity. But if anyone tries to do anything about the trolls living under the bridge, the authorities throw them in the clink.
As someone who oversaw homeless outreach for the Poverello Center from 2008-2016, Travis Mateer sees Ryan’s arrest as symptomatic of a notable deterioration in substantive outreach by relevant authorities:
“If I was still coordinating the Homeless Outreach Program–a program I grew from its infancy in 2010 to a well-respected part of the service delivery system when I left in 2016–this incident with Ryan Tollefson would NEVER have happened.”
Speaking of things that would never have happened, that gaping hole in the burrows beneath Broadway that MDT repaired was only discovered because Tollefson excavated the mountain of trash piled in front of it.
Ryan began his work across the street from the Yoke’s grocery on Broadway. “That’s where I was concentrating my clean up efforts because that’s where it’s the worst,” he said. In the process of excavating this area, he discovered the hidey-hole.
“I found that. [Authorities] didn’t even know that was there until I started cleaning up. … all I was doing was putting the garbage on the sidewalk. And I took such a huge amount of trash out of the river when they came to clean it up, they saw that the hole was there. All the garbage was all around that and was covering it up before I removed it.”
The burrows below Broadway were so badly damaged by the illegal settlements that Montana taxpayers paid upwards of $20,000 for the repair:
“When NBC Montana started reporting on trash cleanups in the West Broadway Street area, we learned about holes dug into the bank of the Clark Fork River. After removing some of the retaining wall, individuals dug underneath the sidewalk, creating nooks for belongings.”
Whether anyone will be charged for the damage remains to be seen. Ryan reflected on whether the people on the beach committing offenses are breaking the law or not.
“No, they’re not. They’re protected somehow. And these guys are just running the streets, stealing, building houses on the river, and throwing needles everywhere. These people aren’t even getting a misdemeanor. And I understand that the court system is flooded and the prison is flooded. I don’t see any point in locking anybody who is addicted to substances up because there is a better way around addiction.
“I said [to police], ‘Why aren’t you guys doing anything about the needles on the ground?’ I mean, if you were investigating a crime that I had supposedly committed and there were syringes all around my feet, would you or would you not assume those were my syringes? And wouldn’t you want to search my person to see if I have drugs on me? You have probable cause to search any one of these people that have syringes within their reach and you don’t do it. You have all the time to encourage them to go to the shelters and places where they can get help, and you’re not doing that either. You guys are sitting in your cars, driving around, doing nothing’.
“When I called the police about the lock and chain incident it took them 25 minutes to respond to the scene, and they drove by three times without stopping. And I was so sick of them driving by without stopping I finally flagged down a Sheriff who was driving by. And then a city police officer called me five minutes later and was like, ‘Where are you at?’
“Instead of helping the issue, instead of helping to solve the problem, they’re going to ticket me for cleaning?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, you’re breaking the law’.”
This isn’t the first time that a citizen has ignored institutional limitations and taken the responsibility for cleaning up the riverfront onto their own shoulders. Last year a group of volunteers directed by Travis Mateer launched the 2023 Earth Day Meth-Den clean-up and successfully removed nearly 3 metric tons of garbage from a segment of riverfront by the Missoula College at great personal cost to its organizer. Mateer spent $1,200 of his own money to ultimately be ignored by the City and local media. A fellow journalist from the Missoula Current purportedly covered the event only to have the story axed by her boss, Martin “Gomer” Kidston. Mateer has a long history of assisting such clean ups.
Tavis Mateer gives the thumbs-up following the successful liquidation of the Meth-Den in 2023. Above: before and after pictures of said beachfront Meth-Den.
The 2023 Meth-Den clean-up yielded literally thousands of glass test tubes along the riverbank. It seems ironic that summertime river floaters are constantly reminded to make sure they never ever bring glass onto the water lest they be cited by law enforcement for potentially littering the shorelines with dangerous shards of fractured glass.
If you have an address and a life and things to lose, the authorities can threaten you with fines and court as a means of controlling your behavior. But the vagrants living on the riverbank don’t have anything left to lose so fines and court won’t do much to change the situation.
So what will? And who’s responsible?
A JURISDICTIONAL JIGSAW PUZZLE
Many local Missoulians have become outraged in recent years at the accelerated deterioration of their community. Permanent residents who pay taxes to the City and County and State are rightfully beginning to wonder why no organization or agency of government can coherently name who is responsible for maintaining cleanliness and order along the riverbank. As it turns out, determining who bears responsibility depends on which part of the riverbank we’re talking about.
All land below the low water mark along the riverbank seems to be managed exclusively by the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) as corroborated by this 2020 DNRC announcement:
“Based on historical evidence the Bitterroot River is commercially navigable from the mouth of Jenning’s Camp Creek on the east fork (SW1/4, Sec.27, T2N, R18W) to its confluence with the Clark Fork River. Therefore, the state claims ownership of the riverbed below the low water mark between these two points. … DNRC has no jurisdiction above the low water mark.”
Meanwhile, the land above the low water mark along the riverbank is managed by a plurality of agencies and offices including (but not limited to) the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT), US Army Corps of Engineers, Conservation District, Floodplain Administrator, and others. Depending on which segment of Missoula’s riverfront jigsaw-puzzle we’re talking about, the jurisdictional finger-pointing can also regard lands owned by the US Forest Service, the University of Montana, as well as Fish Wildlife and Parks (FWP). For example:
“The two major camps – off the Kim Williams Trail and under the Reserve Street Bridge – are on U.S. Forest Service and Montana Department of Transportation ground, respectively.”
Meanwhile, the West Broadway Island is operated exclusively by Missoula Parks And Recreation, who’ve closed it for reasons of “vegetation management.” It certainly is true that vegetation has a hard time competing with propane explosions.
Riverfront jurisdictions carve their way through a gauntlet of boundaries and the resulting confusion allows for selective enforcement of the law. Some of these agencies belong to the City of Missoula, some represent Missoula County, and still others are managed by the State of Montana. That’s a lot to juggle, and we haven’t even covered the relevant Federal jurisdiction that’s thrown a wrench into this already byzantine structure.
MDT was placed between a rock and a hard place in 2020 when they faced steep fines from the Missoula City-County Health Department for the human waste ending up in the river as a result of unchecked illegal camping settlements under the Reserve Street Bridge. There were also serious concerns of rampant fires that threatened to close said bridge and necessitate detouring Highway 93 through the heart of Missoula.
Under the constraints of a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision known as Martin v Boise, MDT couldn’t legally move the encampments without an answer to the question of “Where do they go?” So the now infamous Authorized Camping Site experiment was created as a temporary landing platform in January 2022. MDT spent more than $163,000 on a chain-link perimeter fence to deter future settlements. This fence was soon thereafter cut and penetrated by persistent individuals. So in mid-April of 2022, MDT sought a court order to begin a formal eviction process of the remaining encampments under the bridge.
“At its peak, approximately one hundred and forty individuals resided on the Property in tents and temporary structures built with scavenged materials.”
Following a summer where literally dozens of fires ran ablaze below the Reserve Street Bridge, the area was cleared of illegal camps in 2022 and remains mostly clear to this day. MDT Maintenance Chief Steve Felix was happy to report that the site formerly home to more than 100 “urban campers” remains largely empty following the eviction.
Felix’s name comes up whenever repairs are necessary due to illegal settlements that threaten to destroy the highway infrastructure flowing through Missoula, as was the case with the 2022 Reserve Street Camps eviction:
“The fires, propane tanks, and other heaters present in the encampment also posed a risk of significantly damaging the integrity of the Reserve Street Bridge, a vital aspect of Missoula’s public infrastructure. The fires have already caused damage to the Reserve Street Bridge in the form of concrete delamination. … “The only way to abate the ongoing health and safety hazards and threatened damage to public infrastructure is to remove Defendants and their personal belongings from the Property.”
EARTH DAY SCHMEARTH DAY
Government is not capable of solving our problems, as more people are beginning to realize. The riverfront got cleaned up in spite of the City government’s attempts to keep it contaminated. As Mateer attests:
“I can coordinate a safer, cheaper, more efficient cleanup than ANY individual or entity in this town, and if you doubt me, just scroll through the 20+ links featured in yesterday’s post if you want proof about how kick-ass I am.”
Regardless of what any individual or organization might claim about the complexity of managing this ongoing zombie apocalypse transpiring in our streets, it’s obvious to everyone that the problem is growing worse, and government’s solutions are haphazard at best. Activists are exhausted and community clean-up efforts become more difficult to organize when everyone is struggling financially.
Institutions can never solve our problems. They are an impediment to change. The moment they are formed their existence hinges on fooling us into believing we could never live without them.
You don’t need your city officials and you don’t need your government. Your government needs you. No matter how the corporate forces might try to twist “the consent of the governed” into some kind of religious obligation to the state, the power ultimately lies in the hands of We The People no matter how many of us have fallen asleep at the wheel. Public servants exist at the pleasure of the electorate. They’re not our overlords and we’re not their subjects. They’re employees of the public trust.
The inhabitants of New Hellgate Village aren’t bad people. Most of them are a bit rough because they have to be to survive in difficult circumstances. The city’s riverfront was not meant to house tent dwellings, and our society did not have to choose the cruelty of publicly ignoring such profound human suffering on such a massive scale. The City of “Missoula has spent roughly $138,000 on ‘urban camping’ cleanups” in the past year with no end in sight. Will Mayor Davis’ Urban Camping Working Group task force yield competent solutions or prove to be one more instance of institutional cruelty? If Engen’s 10-Year-Plan-To-End-Homelessness is any indication, the answer won’t feel encouraging.
It’s no secret that our miserable status quo actually benefits some people and organizations. Hence the business that is the Homeless-Industrial-Complex and its cousin the NonProfit-Industrial Complex. The people and organizations who profit from the lethal misery in our streets tend to expand the powers of government to benefit authoritarian cronies. These parasites don’t want to problem to be solved because it would end the disaster-capitalism gravy-train.
Tucker Carlson elaborated this point last week on the Joe Rogan Podcast:
“There’s an entire sector of the economy now that feeds off of human misery. The drug treatment centers that don’t work, the homeless advocates who create more homeless migrant workers, American-born aid agencies, … the arms manufactures that help kill people in foreign countries; people are making money off of this.”
Those who profit from industries related to homelessness are keenly aware of how the optics of what they do could work against them. As a result, a tremendous amount of effort has gone into maintaining public ignorance.
County Commissioner Emails recovered during a FOIA request revealed a conspiracy of silence in 2021. According to Mackenzie Smith, the Emails are evidence that Missoula County officials have deliberately kept constituents in the dark regarding “collaborations” with the private nonprofits who consistently profit from the homelessness crisis:
Emails released in a Freedom of Information Act request appear to show Missoula County commissioners using private partnerships to advance their projects in an effort to intentionally keep plans out of public view.
“We asked United Way to start convening to try to tackle this issue outside the public/media eye,” wrote Commissioners’ Office Chief Administrative Officer Chris Lounsbury to the three Missoula County commissioners in a March 27 email.
“We definitely want to structure this in a way to avoid media parachuting in and derailing productive staff conversations,” replied District 2 Commissioner David Strohmaier.
“The commissioners’ emails regarding the TSOS are riddled with this type of language and blatant desire to conceal their actions from the public and media. And with the aid of United Way of Missoula County, it appears they are able to do it.“
Nonprofits like United Way alongside private sector partners like Blue Line Development (owners of the real estate beneath the Transitional Safe Outdoor Space) work with governments to profit from the disaster while their government counterparts flasely claim their hands are tied. None of the companies or individuals want the causes and conditions of the disaster to be addressed because that would end their gravy train. It would seem community outreach has become co-opted by corporate forces.
HOMELESSNESS IS NOT THE ISSUE HERE, DUDE!
While homeless Americans freeze in the makeshift dwellings of illegal “urban camps,” 15.1 million empty houses remain unoccupied at the behest of their owners, primarily BlackRock. If the answer to homelessness is “housing” – as United Way Executive Director Susan Hay Patrick contends – then why can’t “the richest country in the world” free up some of the 15.1 million empty homes that Wall Street continues sitting on?
There’s no doubt that Missoula’s homeless catastrophe pales in comparison to that of San Fransisco, Portland or Seattle. It is, however, representative of the same institutional indifference toward human suffering that the 9th Circuit has apparently mandated for Western States. The common excuse that “it’s not that bad here” seems quite obtuse when considering that San Fransisco didn’t burn in a day. There were incremental steps that led formerly great cities down this skid-row abyss, such as their deliberate indifference toward theft, vandalism, arson, assault and murder.
As the former homeless outreach coordinator for Montana’s largest homeless shelter, Travis Mateer knows the difference better than most between the legit local homeless population and the harmful criminal elements taking advantage of services meant for said locals:
“I’m including the deteriorating situation in San Francisco in today’s report because of my concern that fear will lead our own community to degrade our ability to make distinctions between houseless people who are dangerous and need to be held accountable, and houseless people who are NOT dangerous, and face just as much risk, if not more, from the dangerous people riding the carousel between the jail, the hospital, and the streets.”
While it’s true that society cannot ethically outlaw homelessness or addiction or mental illness, many of the most violent incidents that occur in Missoula (and require taxpayer-funded services) are perpetrated by drifters, not locals. Peaceful people who’ve fallen on tough times cannot depend on our shelters because criminal gangs have taken them over:
“[R]esidents of this camp don’t feel safe staying at the Poverello Center. Incidents of sexual assault and violence INSIDE THE [Poverello Center] is confirmation of those claims that some people feel safer living outside than they do in an overcrowded shelter where active drug and alcohol use has led to some very bad outcomes.”
It has also become an observable reality that local homeless individuals differ significantly from their transplant counterparts. In 2014 the Missoulian reported that transient Gilbert “Jack” Berry “was brutally beaten, tortured and killed by several non-local transients”:
“[Missoula Police Officer Andy] Roy, who is the city’s main bicycle police officer, primarily deals with the homeless and transient population. He said there’s a big difference between the local transient population and the newcomers. The locals heed his warnings and abide by city ordinances, for the most part. But when he approaches the new transients, Roy said he’s consistently met with a “lousy” attitude.”
We shouldn’t welcome everyone because some people are criminals and bending over backwards to provide them services will result in increased exploitation of said services. If too many people overwhelm the life boat, it sinks. As Mateer explained in 2020:
“The majority of humans across the socio-economic spectrum are not bad, violent people. But some are, and Missoula residents shouldn’t be shamed for worrying about that fact. Do I need to remind readers that a sweet, old man by the name of Lee Nelson had his skull bashed in last month because he and the monster who senselessly murdered him were both staying at the Poverello Center? … So yes, I understand the concern about “who our new neighbors are”, but I also understand how the illuminated braintrust operates, and they will hide behind their homeless-people-guilt-shields all day long if critics wade into this area of criticism without the constructive focus on policy.”
Nobody can assert for sure where any of these people are from, and it only takes one psychopath to keep a whole town busy. Train hoppers and seasonal vagrants aren’t from here, but they’ll gladly exploit any services offered by enablers practicing “fool’s compassion”.
Enforcing the law with regards to murder, assault, battery, vandalism, and theft cannot be conflated with “outlawing homelessness”. Regardless of who owns the land beneath New Hellgate Village, criminal activity within the City Limits is the City’s prerogative, and therefore ultimately the Mayor’s responsibility. The highest overlap of jurisdictions occur within the City Limits. In the past Missoula County Commissioners have proclaimed a state of emergency regarding hazardous waste entering the Clark Fork River. But if criminal activity occurs on the riverfront and someone calls the DNRC or MDT, they will tell the caller to dial 911 and report it to City law enforcement.
Andrea Davis can choose to do something about the crime in the streets or she can continue to serve the interests of global elites. Given that she received her training in the “proper” management of her community at Harvard at the start of her term alongside 26 other freshmen Mayors from around the country, she may likely favor the latter.
The Clark Fork Coalition holds an annual Earth Day cleanup that is undoubtedly commendable. But every year the camps consistently reappear the very next day. The task couldn’t be more Sisyphean and locals have taken notice.
In 2021 volunteer efforts successfully removed more than 15 tons of trash from the Missoula riverfront. In 2022 volunteers collected more than 67 tons of trash. Locals are worried the problem is growing worse and believe that people of means and ability can and should do something about it.
On 26 April 2023, duly-unelected interim-mayor Jordan Hess told Missoulians to donate to charity if they want to see these problems solved, because the City apparently lacks the funds to do its job:
“First of all, uh, we, we suffer from a shortage of resources to address these issues. Uh, members of the public can make a meaningful difference by donating to organizations that work in this space, um, such as the Poverello Center or other organizations that help such as Hope Rescue Mission.”
Did you get that, Missoula? As the City of Missoula wastes money on mountains and hotels, Jordan Hess thinks overburdened taxpayers should donate even more money they don’t have to solve these problems.
But the favorite excuse of Missoula “leaders” whenever the abomination of our public spaces are brought to their attention revolves around the now infamous 9th Circuit ruling on Martin v Boise. This is how Hess framed the limitations imposed by the Martin ruling:
“Municipalities cannot criminalize homelessness, uh, nor can we ticket nor arrest or remove people who are camping in public places because there are no shelter beds, um, because there are no shelter beds for them. So since we don’t have, uh, shelter beds we cannot remove, uh, someone from an encampment, um, in a public space.”
He goes on to deputize the public and further eschew any institutional responsibility:
“We’re asking the public to visit the City website and to follow the information on the homepage, uh, to learn how to report, uh, situations that involve threats to help their safety. People need to understand that if we investigate and we don’t find threats, we cannot ask the campers to leave. Uh, nor will we. …
“We receive dozens of complaints each day and we lack the finances and the staff to get to every situation. Years of cuts at the State level and at the Federal level, uh, but especially at the State level, to mental health services and a lack of support at the Federal level, have put us and other communities in a really untenable position where we’re dealing with these issues as best we can.
Mateer jumps to the observable punchline:
“Ok, so is there anything our hamstrung leaders CAN do? Yes, they can blame the state, which they always do. And they can beg the public to give more money to enablers, like my former employer, the Poverello Center. …
“Are we, as a community, going to be held hostage by these petulant tax addicts who can’t achieve their transformative utopia without squeezing every spare penny from taxpayers while complaining all the way to the bank that it’s never enough when evidence of their failure becomes too obvious for the narrative controllers to hide?”
Travis Mateer operates his bullhorn during a post clean-up poetry reading.
Problems that remain perpetually unsolved tend to be profitable for lazy bureaucrats with an inflated feeling of importance. So, we’re told over and over that there either just isn’t enough money to do what needs to be done or sent on a jurisdictional wild-goose chase.
The onus here is not on citizens. Wall Street has hoarded all of the real estate, the economy is in the dumps, people are desperate, our politics are corrupt and our infrastructure is crumbling. This isn’t about solving the problems exacerbated by those who profit from them. Standards of living have fallen nationwide and supposedly “compassionate” communities have overwhelmingly chosen to ignore the ongoing humanitarian disaster. This is simply about survival.
Missoulians already pay taxes to a City government hell-bent on wasting them. The City of Missoula takes in hundreds of millions of dollars, always needs a little more, and can never complete basic objectives—like fixing roads—with what it has. So the Fire Department has to ask the citizens if they’d like to pay more taxes through a special levy that can’t be robbed by City bureaucrats who’ve depleted the tax base from the General Fund toward projects that gentrify the community, driving up housing costs, driving out locals, and starving municipal services.
Due to the fact that government officials seem reticent to accept uniform responsibility for the abortion that our rivers and streams have become, the work of cleaning them up has fallen on community activists and other people who are tired of watching their community rot before their eyes.
Travis and Ryan have both illustrated their unconditional and uncompromising love for the Missoula Valley. If more locals participated in the management of their communities perhaps we wouldn’t have to outsource said management to disconnected bureaucrats.
In the face of all the adversity he’s experienced, Ryan remains committed to restoring Missoula’s riverfront:
“I’m just trying to be a better person and give back to the city, because I love Missoula so much. It’s my home town. I was born here 43 years ago and I love this place so much. And I just can’t stand to see what it’s becoming.”
“It seems like the whole Pacific Northwest is becoming like this, except for Idaho. I don’t know what Idaho does to keep their state so clean. But everywhere else there’s homeless people and fentanyl and meth. It’s crazy.”
It’s been exactly ten years since the American-backed coup d’état that overthrew democratically elected president Yanukovich in Ukraine on 23 February 2014. After the decade of civil war that followed, many Americans still don’t know why Russia “invaded” Ukraine’s eastern border. Most of us have never heard of the Donbass or the neo-Nazi Azov Battaltion responsible for the horrific war crimes that took place there. Indeed, most Americans have no idea where the endless billions in military aid for Ukraine have gone.
Nineteenth century author and journalist Ambrose Bierce famously stated that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” It seems ironic that this statement remains true in the age of the internet, but corporate media’s monopoly of the airwaves has rendered Americans dangerously misinformed about Ukraine, as well as the nature of international conflicts generally.
We’re repeatedly told Ukraine is a “democracy” by the corporate media. But the fact remains that the Ukraine’s quasi-fascist government has outlawed opposition political parties, closed down the news agencies and thrown all the religious leaders in prison.
“Journalists in Ukraine are threatened, jailed, or worse. Journalists inside and outside Ukraine are listed on a website which for all intents and purposes amounts to a murder for hire list. The website, called Myrotvoretsor Peacekeeper, was started by Ukraine’s Information Ministry in 2015. It serves as a clearinghouse to showcase undesirables and has targeted people for assassination.”
American journalist Gonzalo Lira died in a Ukrainian jail cell in January of 2024 following months of gruesome torture, beatings and sleep deprivation at the hands of Ukrainian security forces. He was arrested in 2022 for posting videos critical of Ukrainian policy that the Ukrainian government twisted into “justifying Putin’s invasion.” Lira was arrested again on 01 May 2023 and held without release. Washington implicitly allowed Lira’s incarceration to continue unabated until his death.
Stating the facts should never assume the waving of pom-poms for either side in any ongoing conflict. Having said that, it is not an ingratiation of Putin or his policies to observe the obvious with regards to the civil war in eastern Ukraine.
The eastern corner of Ukraine geographically known as the Donbass is the home of the three “breakaway territories” that declared independence following the 2014 Maidan coup. Ukraine was already ideologically divided between the northwest and southeast regions, with the former moving toward European integration and the latter toward Russia. In eastern Ukraine, citizens of the Donbass weren’t happy about Washington’s overthrow of their democratically elected government. Over 10,000 people attended a rally in Donetsk’s Lenin Square in eastern Ukraine on March 1, 2014 to demonstrate their stance with Russia and against Kiev.
As reported by former Marine Intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter:
“Over the course of five days, from February 18 to 23, 2014, neo-Nazi provocateurs from the Svoboda (All Ukrainian Union ‘Freedom’) Party and the Right Sector, a coalition of far-right Ukrainian nationalists … engaged in targeted violence against the government of President Viktor Yanukovich. It was designed to remove him from power and replace him with a new, US-backed government. They were successful; Yanukovich fled to Russia on February 23, 2014.
“Soon thereafter, the predominantly Russian-speaking population of Crimea undertook actions to separate from the new Ukrainian nationalist government in Kiev. On March 16, 2014, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, both of which at that time were legally considered to be part of Ukraine, held a referendum on whether to join Russia or remain part of Ukraine. Over 97% of the votes cast were in favor of joining Russia. Five days later, on March 21, Crimea formally became part of the Russian Federation.”
Washington immediately claimed Crimea’s referendum was unconstitutional. At the same time, the Ukrainian government reacted by cutting off Crimea’s electricity and damming Crimea’s agricultural fresh water sources. As Scott Ritter explains, “The damming of the North Crimean Canal and the destruction of the electrical transmission lines were simply the radical expression of the indifference shown by Kiev.”
After Crimea seceded from Ukraine, millions of ethnic Russians in two eastern territories also refused to cooperate with Washington’s new puppet government and followed Crimea in declaring independence from Kiev. On 07 April 2014, separatist Russians of the Donbass formed the Lugansk & Donetsk People’s Republics (LPR & DPR) which were both formally recognized by Russia. The breakaway republics ratified an agreement entitled, ‘Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Russian Federation’, which began military and financial cooperation with Moscow.
“The “Anti-Terrorist Operation” in southeast Ukraine was launched on April 14, 2014, by an order issued by Oleksandr Turchynov, the acting president of Ukraine. Those Donbass citizens who refused to recognize the coup d’etat were labeled “enemies” and “terrorists.” The horrific Odessa Trade Unions House massacre happened on May 2, 2014; about fifty individuals were burned alive and bludgeoned to death. On May 9, 2014, participants in the Victory Day Parade in Mariupol were slain and subjected to persecution by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and the military. Additionally, the Ukrainian regime began bombarding Donbass.”
“First, there were attempts at arresting them [ethnic Russians] using the police, but the police defected to their side quite quickly. Then the central authorities started to use Special Forces and in the night, people were snatched and taken to prison. Certainly, people in Donbass, after that, they took up arms. Ukraine’s government started to use weapons directly – tanks and even military aircraft. There were strikes from multiple rocket launchers against residential neighborhoods. … Russia repeatedly appealed to this new leadership asking them to abstain from extreme actions. However, the civil conflict only grew worse withthousands of people killed in some of the worst violence that Europe has seen since World War II. … When Stone asked about the “annexation,”Putin responded: “We were not the ones to annex Crimea. The citizens of Crimea decided to join Russia.”
“Along with Maidan leaders, and Western-backed fascist paramilitary Right Sector, the snipers were also implicated in the May 2014 Odessa massacre, a gruesome incident in which scores of Russian-speaking anti-Maidan protesters were forcibly herded into the city’s Trade Unions House, which was then set alight. In all, 46 died due to burn injuries, carbon monoxide poisoning, and attempts to escape the horrors by jumping out of windows. Non-fatal casualties reportedly totaled around 200. … All these developments paved a path to the eight-year-long civil war in Donbas, which claimed the lives of over 14,000 and precipitated Russia’s invasion in February 2022. ”
Russia responded to Ukrainian war crimes by deploying military resources to protect the civilians of the breakaway republics. Since the Donbass is overwhelmingly inhabited by ethnic Russians, Putin felt great pressure to defend them and put an end to the civilian bloodshed. Putin has stated on numerous occasions that Russia didn’t cross Ukraine’s border to start a war, but to end one.
This brings us to the question of whether Russia’s military action constitutes an “invasion” or not. Russian military forces never approached the capital city of Kiev because doing so would have triggered an automatic response from NATO amounting to a no-win situation for Russia. Even the establishment Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft publicly admitted this fact:
“A Russian seizure of the whole of Ukraine, as imagined by Washington, seems inherently unlikely. An occupation of Russian-speaking areas of eastern and southern Ukraine is much more plausible. … This would fall far short of invasion. It would mark only a limited escalation in the conflict that has been going on in the Donbas since 2014.”
It’s an open secret that Ukraine is managed in no small part by a neo-Nazi government. In a piece called “The Ukraine Mess That Nuland Made,” Robert Parry writes, “the new regime in Kiev was permeated by and dependent on neo-Nazi fighters and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who wanted a pure-blood Ukraine, without ethnic Russians”. A great deal of Ukraine is overtly run by Pravy Sektor:
“The political formation is known as “Pravy Sektor” (Right Sector), which is essentially an umbrella organization for a number of ultra-nationalist right wing groups including supporters of the “Svoboda” (Freedom) Party, “Patriots of Ukraine”, “Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian National Self Defense” (UNA-UNSO), and “Trizub”. All of these organizations share a common ideology that is vehemently anti-Russian, anti-immigrant, and anti-Jewish among other things. In addition they share a common reverence for the so called “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” led by Stepan Bandera, the infamous Nazi collaborators who actively fought against the Soviet Union and engaged in some of the worst atrocities committed by any side in World War II.”
Svoboda is not just a neo-Nazi political party, it’s Ukraine’s fourth largest party and its members have held major Cabinet positions in Ukraine’s government. This unholy alliance caused a rather awkward moment at the United Nations in December of 2020:
“In December, the United States and Ukraine were the only two nations to vote against a United Nations measure (passed 130-2), “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance.”
“[…]the two main neo-Nazi entities have been entrusted with key positions which grant them de facto control over the armed forces, police and national security. … members of Svoboda and the Right Sector occupy key positions in the areas of defense, law enforcement, education and economic affairs.”
In 2015 The Daily Beast also weighed in on the question of how many neo-Nazis the U.S. was backing in Ukraine, admitting that “The U.S. government is knowingly training and arming neo-Nazi Ukrainian ultranationalist paramilitary members in broad daylight in an unstable country with an unclear future.” While Svoboda may have lost a few chairs in parliament since 2014, Ukraine’s trend towards Nazism continues under Zelenskyy’s administration. In fact, it was Zelenksyy’s visit to Canada that prompted the notorious Yaroslav Hunka scandal.
Canadian parliament’s standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, the elderly Ukranian who fought in Hitler’s Third Reich for the SS, was neither a fluke nor mistake. Hunka was announced in the Canadian parliament as someone who had “fought against the Russians” without a shred of irony. It’s as if Canadian schooling has become so lethargic that their citizens forgot that America and Russia were allies against Hitler, or that Russia lost more than 20 million citizens fighting the Third Reich.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dismissed the parliamentary applause of Hunka as “Russian disinformation.” Nevertheless, Anthony Rota who had introduced Hunka as a man who had “fought against the Russians in World War Two,” stepped down as Speaker of Canada’s House of Commons soon thereafter.
What seems particularly ironic is western media’s constant portrayal of Putin as “the next Hitler” while Russia defends the Donbass from literal Nazis. If Hitler remains the quintessential symbol of evil for the west, how can American tax dollars finance literal neo-Nazi regimes in Ukraine?
Acute students of history are less surprised by Washington’s support of literal Nazis. Beyond the auspices of Project Paperclip which sought to recruit the Third Reich’s top people (like Wernher von Braun) before the Russians could, the American Military-Industrial-Complex has a long established history of arming terrorists in countries it wants to overthrow. John McCain’s meeting with Svoboda neo-Nazis in the lead up to the 2014 coup differed little from his meetings with Isis in Syria. The motivating factors that propel Washington into these unsavory partnerships go deep.
The Central Intelligence Agency has spent the past ten years waging a “shadow war” against Russia, building more than 12 underground command centers along the Ukraine/Russia border and training an elite Ukrainian commando force known as Unit 2245. The espionage operation yielded such a gold mine of Russian communications that the CIA station in Kiev had trouble keeping up with it. After a decade of denials, Washington finally disclosed the CIA’s Ukraine operations this week in the New York Times:
The underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed command center in the months after Russia’s invasion, is a secret nerve center of Ukraine’s military. There is also one more secret: The base is almost fully financed, and partly equipped, by the CIA.
Russophobia has been and continues to be the official rhetoric of the Party in Washington and its obedient mockingbird media. Nancy Pelosi’s desperate attempt to conflate anti-war sentiment with loyalty to a foreign country sounds crazy because it is. Nevertheless, Washington think tanks run by sociopaths like the Atlantic Council use propaganda like this to smear anyone critical of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) or US foreign policy as a “Russian agent.”
Hillary Clinton went out of her way to demonize Tucker Carlson as Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot, even though George Stephanopoulos, Barbara Walters, Charlie Rose, Oliver Stone, Megyn Kelly and many others have successfully interviewed Vladimir Putin without sustaining such accusations or having to overcome similar hurdles. But Carlson’s recent interview contradicts the corporate image of Putin as an unhinged maniac and that’s bad for business as usual in Washington.
Carlson was even the target of a foiled assassination attempt allegedly contracted by Ukrainian intelligence. In a confession tape following his arrest, 36 year-old Vasiliev Alexeieovich told interrogators that he was recruited by Ukrainian Special Services through the internet and instructed to place a bomb in the underground parking lot of Moscow’s Four Season’s Hotel, where Carlson was a guest. After several weeks of training, he was activated on 31 January 2024, the day prior to Carlson’s week-long visit to Russia.
Following the Putin interview, Carlson spoke passionately at the World Government Summit about how Washington deliberately sabotaged any potential for détente between the east and west:
“Russia has been rebuffed by the west. I’m not flacking for Putin. I’m an American. I’m not going to live in Russia. I don’t love Vladimir Putin. I’m stating the facts. He asked Bill Clinton to join NATO … and NATO said, “No, we don’t want you.” … The post war goal of NATO was to keep the Russians – the soviets – from coming into western Europe. It was a bulwark against the Russians. So if the Russians ask to join the alliance that would suggest you have solved the problem and you can move on to do something constructive with your life. But we refused.”
“Ukraine, since 1991 – the collapse of the Soviet Union – has been a cesspool of Western corruption. Oligarchs were not only allowed to rise, but were in fact encouraged to rise by the western powers, in particular the United States, because the United States figured that by way of these oligarchs, these countries could be controlled. … But what happened was that slowly over the years, Putin started edging out the oligarchs. And even as he put in his own oligarchs, he started making those oligarchs smaller and weaker, which is what he’s been doing for the past 23 years. Had Putin not existed in Russia, Russia would be what Ukraine is today. Americans started realizing that Putin was subtly resisting them, resisting their attempts to turn Russia into a whore.”
Washington’s strategy to split up Ukraine along ethnic lines traces back at least three decades, when Zbigniew Brzezinski published the west’s plan for Ukraine in his 1997 book, “The Grand Chessboard”:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
Noam Chomsky succinctly observed many years ago that the purpose of NATO has been altered away from defense against the Soviets and toward guaranteeing corporate hegemony over worldwide energy markets:
“Why did NATO even exist after 1990? Throughout the whole history of the cold war we were told NATO is necessary to defend western Europe from the Russian hoards. Okay, no more Russian hoards. What happens to NATO? It expands to the east. Its mission changed. Its official mission is not to defend Europe from the Russian hoards, it’s to control the global energy system – sea lanes and pipelines, and to serve as a US-run intervention force. …
“If NATO is there to defend the west from the Russians, why is it now expanding right to the borders of Russia, becoming a global US-intervention force, protecting sea lanes and pipelines and so on? What that tells us is all the talk about the cold war was just a pure lie.”
In violation of promises made following the end of the Soviet Union, NATO has expanded eastward not just once, but five separate times. Consider the trove of declassified documents from the National Security Archives that “show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner.” Again from Mint Press:
“In 1990, the U.S. government promised Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would stray “not one inch eastward” from its current position in exchange for Soviet support for German reunification. However, it later reneged on this promise, and between 1999 and 2004 NATO galloped eastward, even admitting three former Soviet republics, all of which share a land border with Russia. In 2008, NATO also invited Ukraine and Georgia to join.”
In February 2022 US Vice President Kamala Harris urged Zelenskyy to join NATO at the New York Security Conference. Meanwhile, NATO had just turned down Russia’s December 2021 security agreements seeking to secure peace in Europe.
Russia proposed another ceasefire in March 2022, prompting Boris Johnson’s sudden appearance in Ukraine to threaten Zelenskyy with sanctions if he agreed to the peace settlement:
“The Minsk II process for a resolution of the Donbas conflict is now dead — though to be fair, the Ukrainian government had long since made clear that it had no intention of implementing its basic provisions (on autonomy for the Donbas), and the West had made clear that it had no intention of pressuring Ukraine to do so.”
The head of the Ukrainian delegation at the 2022 peace talks in Istanbul, Davyd Arakhamia, confirmed that the Russians “were prepared to end the war if we agreed to – as Finland once did – neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO,” but the US sabotaged the peace deal.
THEIR WARS RELY ON YOUR IGNORANCE
In 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych angered the west after turning Ukraine’s back on Europe to renew economic collaborations with Russia. Yanukovych realized the EU’s new association agreement would require Ukraine to bankrupt itself attempting to transition its entire infrastructure to conform to EU standards, and ultimately saw it as a poison pill for his country:
“Nikolai Azarov, Yanukovich’s closest aide and adviser, at the 11th hour calculated that switching to European standards would indebt Ukraine at a scale one had never imagined,” Matyushin said. “The transition envisaged changing everything, starting from sockets to railway tracks, everything had to be rebuilt. [The Yanukovich government] concluded it was unprofitable and refused [to sign the agreement with the EU]. After that, students took to the streets and were dispersed by Berkut on camera, which caused a wave of indignation in Kiev. From that point Euromaidan started to gain momentum.”
When protestors began to congregate in Kiev’s central Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), on November 21, 2013, both John McCain and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland immediately flew to Kiev. Paul Craig Roberts reported that the US and EU were paying Ukrainian rioters and protesters in Kiev, reminding readers that, “Nuland is the State Department stooge who got caught red-handed naming the members of the Ukrainian government Washington intends to impose on the Ukrainian people once the paid protesters have unseated the current elected and independent government.” Another key organization in Maidan called CANVAS turned out to be a US-Financed NGO that had helped plan the “carefully-orchestrated” Kiev protests.
At a National Press Club Conference on 10 December 2013 Nuland announced the US had invested $5 Billion in the Ukraine to pay protesters cash to overthrow the government, but peaceful protests hadn’t yet produced results. Five weeks after this meeting Kiev was suddenly gripped with violence.
On 20 February 2014 the infamous Maidan massacre horrified the world with footage of snipers firing upon protesters in Kiev. By the end of the day 94 people lay dead. At the time many Ukrainians were sure former President Victor Yanukovych had ordered the violence.
However, the Ukrainian Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that Yanukovych could not possibly have been responsible for the massacre that preceded his overthrow. On 18 October 2023, the Sviatoshyn District Court made their ruling:
“The evidence “was quite sufficient to conclude categorically that on the morning of February 20, 2014, persons with weapons, from which the shots were fired, were in the premises of the Hotel Ukraina,” the court found. Another section reveals “Hotel Ukraina” was “territory… not controlled by law enforcement agencies at that time.” Numerous video recordings show that before, during, and after the massacre, the building was overrun by the far-right opposition party Svoboda, whose leaders used the premises to coordinate their anti-Yanukovych activities on the streets below.
The “mysterious snipers” of the bloody Maidan massacre remained hidden in the shadows of anonymity until last year, when Covert Action Magazine exposed the American paratrooper who led the sniper teams that day:
“One of the great mysteries surrounding the Maidan coup and the civil war which has followed is how the rabble of soccer hooligans and neo-Nazis who orchestrated the coup were able to become an army capable of subjugating the nation so quickly. … As it turns out, they had a good teacher: an American paratrooper by the name of Brian Boyenger.
“In early 2014, the ongoing Maidan coup reached a stalemate. Time and bitter cold had driven many of the protesters on both sides back to their homes and the revolution was facing the very real danger of simply fizzling out. To prevent this, Mamulashvili needed a spark of violence to light the fire of revolution. He hatched an audacious plan to fire on the crowds and blame the attacks on the Yanukovych government. His point man for the plan was the U.S. Army-trained sniper, Brian Boyenger. On February 20, 2014, snipers, allegedly under the direct command of Boyenger, opened fire on the crowds from the Maidan-occupied Kyiv Philharmonic building, killing dozens of both police and protesters. The plan worked, and the sniper attacks were the pivotal moment that gave the Maidan the momentum to finally depose the democratically elected Yanukovych government.”
Robert Parry corroborates Nuland’s pivotal role in the 2014 overthrow:
“For her part, Nuland passed out cookies to anti-Yanukovych demonstrators at the Maidan square, reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the US had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” declared “fuck the EU” for its less aggressive approach, and discussed with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who the new leaders of Ukraine should be. “Yats is the guy,” she said, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
“Nuland saw her big chance on Feb. 20, 2014, when a mysterious sniper – apparently firing from a building controlled by the Right Sektor – shot and killed both police and protesters, escalating the crisis. On Feb. 21, in a desperate bid to avert more violence, Yanukovych agreed to a European-guaranteed plan in which he accepted reduced powers and called for early elections so he could be voted out of office. But that wasn’t enough for the anti-Yanukovych forces who – led by Right Sektor and neo-Nazi militias – overran government buildings on Feb. 22, forcing Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives. … Instead of trying to salvage the Feb. 21 agreement, Nuland and European officials arranged for an unconstitutional procedure to strip Yanukovych of the presidency and declared the new regime “legitimate.” Nuland’s “guy” – Yatsenyuk – became prime minister.”
Victoria Nuland hands out cookies to Maidan protesters in 2014
Ukraine’s democratically elected government was usurped by Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Wall Street-supported puppet prime minister who put the country into debt by negotiating loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Yatsenyuk’s interim government transitioned to one run by billionaire oligarch Petro Pereshenko, the fifth president of Ukraine, who served from June of 2014 to May of 2019. Poroshenko pushed Russian separatist forces into the Donbass region and ignored the Minsk Agreements Ukraine had agreed to.
Before his death, Gonzalo Lira indicated that Victoria Nuland is Ukraine’s shadow president overseeing continuity of government between administrations:
“These Ukrainian extremists, they hate ethnic Russians and that fits very neatly with Nuland. She’s always allied herself with people who hate Russians. When the Maidan revolution started, she supported the Right Sector. She micromanaged the Maidan revolution and that implicated her. When Poroshenko came to power –the next president– she made sure that that government abused the Russians. And of course, she made sure that the Ukrainian army started getting seriously supplied with weapons and she used that Ukrainian army and she micromanaged this to attack the Donbass. You have to understand that, in a very real sense, Victoria Nuland has been president of Ukraine since 2014. And so the weapons flowed into Ukraine starting in 2014 after the coup d’état.”
Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Ukraine’s sixth president and by far the most obedient of the west’s puppet figureheads. With no political record (aside from playing the president on a West Wing style TV show), Volodymyr Zelenskyy succeeded incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in a 73% landslide vote in April of 2019. Zelenskyy was depicted as an anti-establishment political outsider, but his backing by Ukrainian billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky revealed his administration would return Ukraine to a familiar state of “corruption as usual”.
“[…] to put it concisely, the 2019 Ukrainian election did not meet international standards. While legal according to Ukrainian law, the 2019 election and processes are illegitimate by ODIHR, Council of Europe, PACE, and OSCE standards and practices.”
Ukraine’s status as the “most corrupt country in Europe” is not a newly minted smear campaign, but a long understood historical fact that has never changed. Case in point, several billion dollars extracted from United States taxpayers has financed Ukrainian oligarchs and their luxury “superyacht lifestyles” in Monaco. Similarly many Americans have never heard about (or remain in denial of) Hunter Biden’s scandalous relationship with Ukraine’s biggest gas company, Burisma Holdings.
Last summer, Kanekoa News reported on Hunter Biden’s Maltese Bank Account Opened by Burisma amid “FBI allegations of $10 Million bribe.” The same Maltese bank was shut down altogether in 2018 for violating money laundering laws. And when Ukraine’s top prosecutor began looking into Hunter’s dealings, daddy Joe Biden claims he gave President Poroshenko six hours to fire the prosecutor or let the country go bankrupt:
“At the heart of the matter is Biden’s role in threatening Ukraine if they didn’t immediately fire their top prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin – who was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into a natural gas firm – Burisma Holdings – which Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors. Biden openly bragged about this at a January CFR event.
“In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.”
Europe’s energy relationships have motivated the west to meddle in Ukraine’s affairs perhaps more than any other single factor. That’s part of the reason why the Biden Administration targeted the Nord Stream energy pipelines that delivered cheap Russian gas to Germany. Mike Whitney of the Ron Paul Institute writes:
“Washington sees the [Nord Stream II] pipeline as a threat to its primacy in Europe and has tried to sabotage the project at every turn. … They don’t want Germany to become more dependent on Russian gas because commerce builds trust and trust leads to the expansion of trade. … In a world where Germany and Russia are friends and trading partners, there is no need for US military bases, no need for expensive US-made weapons and missile systems, and no need for NATO. Ukraine is Washington’s ‘weapon of choice’ for torpedoing Nord Stream and putting a wedge between Germany and Russia.”
During a White House press conference in 2022, Biden stated emphatically that, “If Russia invades … there will no longer [be] a Nord Stream Two. We will bring an end to it. … I promise you. We’ll be able to do it.”
Nuland, who now serves as Biden’s Under Secretary for Political Affairs, said the same thing:
“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream Two will not move forward.”
Washington officially denied any involvement, and even blamed Putin for the sabotage of Russian-owned pipelines. Nevertheless, the truth about Nord Stream eked out last year when Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh learned how America destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines from an anonymous military source, published in a Substack piece called “A Year Of Lying About Nord Stream”. Following his exposé, Hersh appeared on Democracy Now, Jeremy Scahill, Chris Hedges, Russell Brand, and elsewhere to back up his findings.
Nord Stream isn’t all the Biden Administration is lying about. The repeated Ukraine “foreign aid” bills that have justified more than $113 Billion of American support constitute little more than taxpayer-funded stimulus packages for weapons companies, and the $95 billion Ukraine bill that just passed the Senate is no different.
US Senator Mitch McConnell admitted that the Ukraine funds constitute a money laundering scheme that funnels the cash, not to Ukraine, but to “American defense manufacturers”.
In a video tweet from 10 February 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spelled out how the $113 Billion for “Ukraine aid” ultimately benefits companies that are all owned by BlackRock:
“So Tim Scott, during the Republican debate, said, “Don’t worry, It’s not a gift to Ukraine. It’s a loan.” … So why do they call it a loan? Because if they call it a loan they can impose loan conditions. … Ukraine has to put all of it’s government-owned assets up for sale to multinational corporations, including all of it’s agricultural land – the biggest single asset in Ukraine. … They’ve already sold 30% of it. The buyers were DuPont, Gargill and Monsanto. And who do you think owns all of those companies? Yeah, BlackRock. And then in December, President Biden gave out the contract to rebuild Ukraine. And who do you think got that contract? BlackRock.”
“Ukraine grain” is actually owned by US/EU corporate giants. When people talk about “Ukrainian grain” they’re actually talking about grain that is now owned by US and EU mega-corporations such as Vanguard Group, Kopernik Global Investors, BNP Asset Management Holding, Goldman Sachs-owned NN Investment Partners Holdings, and Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.
It’s unlikely that any of Ukraine’s soldiers knew their country’s ancestral farmland would be auctioned off to the highest corporate bidder as a result of Washington’s proxy war on Russia. To add insult to injury, the people of Ukraine have suffered such unimaginable personnel losses that their military is no longer combat effective.
According to Scott Ritter, Ukraine’s military campaign has failed to meet even the first line of Russia’s defenses, having lost the majority of their fighting force in Russia’s minefields, trenches and ambush zones.
The National Pulse reports, “Ukraine’s new head of the armed forces, Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, announced the withdrawal of Ukrainian units from the eastern city of Avdiivka.” After sustaining heavy losses throughout the Donbass conflict, Ukraine is low on soldiers.
Following a controversial delivery of cluster bombs, the latest “wonder weapons” for Ukraine include a kayak with a grenade launcher, and AI-assisted swarming drones. While corporate media frames every one of these cute technological updates as “game changers,” they’ve failed to bring about the tactical success imagined by Washington. All they’ve done is rob Ukraine of half a million young men while also losing ground.
Rumors have now begun to circulate in Kiev that Victoria Nuland has grown so desperate for NATO troop intervention in Ukraine that she’s willing to sacrifice the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in a meltdown to be blamed on Russia. In June 2023, Zelenskyy issued a warning to Ukraine that the Russians were plotting an attack on the plant.
When it comes to people attracted to power there are few, if any, “good guys” up there at the top of this world’s cutthroat corporate food chain. In America’s corporate political duopoly (Republicans v. Democrats) there is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Monsanto or the Military-Industrial-Complex. In a very similar way, the architecture of world government now takes the shape of another two-sided duopoly between NATO and BRICS. This global government scheme threatens to corner us all in one of two authoritarian camps, and the dividing line between east and west has proven an extraordinarily lethal one in Ukraine.
President Zelensky awarding the Hero of Ukraine title to Dmytro Kotsyubaylo, leader of the Pravy Sektor group, December 2021
Both George H.W. Bush and Vladimir Putin have spoken publicly about the benefits of a New World Order, even if they were talking about different aspects of it. Putin, who has spoken at Davos and met with WEF chairman Klaus Schwab, serves the same authoritarian interests as Bush’s New World Order. As mentioned, appraising the facts honestly requires objective observation, and that means abstaining from cheering on the team you like the most. Legendary historian Howard Zinn explains why it pays to be cautious when choosing sides:
“Nixon and Brezhnev have much more in common with one another than we have with Nixon. J.Edgar Hoover has far more in common with the head of the Soviet secret police than he has with us. It’s the international dedication to law and order that binds the leaders of all countries in a comradely bond. That’s why we are always surprised when they get together – they smile, they shake hands, they smoke cigars, they really like one another no matter what they say.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with WEF Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab
This coming April, Hollywood is set to release a movie called Civil War that depicts a conflict between the Federal Government and so-called “separatist forces” in Texas and California. Meanwhile, Texas Governor Greg Abbot floats the possibility of an actual civil war due to an ongoing jurisdictional grievance about how America’s borders should be managed. Following the deployment of dozens of National Guard units to Texas, more than 700,000 truckers are purportedly amassing in Texas on Saturday for the “take our border back” convoy as part of the Army Of God in support of the new efforts behind Abbot’s Operation Lone Star.
This chapter began in September when Texas authorities put up concertina wire in Shelby Park at Eagle Pass to stop the most prominent influx point for illegals pouring into the country. The Biden Administration swiftly ordered that wire to be cut, issuing a 24-hour ultimatum that was “forcefully rejected” by the Attorney General of Texas. The Supreme Court then ruled on 22 January 2024 that Texas could not block feds from cutting the wire.
When the outrage finally hit fever pitch, Governor Abbot (who is in India right now) stepped into his role as controlled opposition and published an open letter officially referencing the invasion clause of the Constitution in order “to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself” before deploying the Texas National Guard. Twenty-five State Governors signed a letter in support of Texas, with nearly half of those states deploying additional National Guard and law enforcement resources to Texas.
From the letter:
“We stand in solidarity with our fellow Governor, Greg Abbott, and the State of Texas in utilizing every tool and strategy, including razor wire fences, to secure the border. We do it in part because the Biden Administration is refusing to enforce immigration laws already on the books and is illegally allowing mass parole across America of migrants who entered our country illegally.”
The Biden Administration falsely claimed that the southern border couldn’t be closed without new legislation from Congress before threatening to nationalize the Texas National Guard (which is a bit redundant since National Guard units already deploy on Federal orders, in addition to their duties to their individual State). Abbot fired back, claiming that he was “prepared” for such an outcome.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick since appeared on Fox News to ask, “What is this going to turn into, a civil war? You’ve got the Texas rights versus federal rights, both sides with guns?” Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins echoed this sentiment in a tweet, stating that President Biden is “staging civil war” by ordering the removal of border barriers.
The stage is set for something awful to happen as a “showdown” between Feds and Texas authorities seems more and more likely. Many Americans are now traveling to Texas in the hopes of witnessing history and supporting the enforcement of lawful border security. Unfortunately, this noble pursuit will likely be exploited in exactly the same way it was at the January 6th protests of 2021. The Feds placed people on the terrorist No Fly List just for being in Washington DC that day, even if they never went into the Capitol. And those who were led into the Capitol by law enforcement were later charged with terrorism and sentenced to draconian prison terms. If a protester’s license plate is observed by a Texas traffic camera, will that be enough for the Feds to retroactively charge that person with terrorism? The warning signs of a similar scenario taking place in Texas are present for any who care to read the writing on the wall.
Ten retired FBI senior executives warned congressional leaders in a letter last month that the US is suffering a “soft invasion” by thousands of “military aged men” from “hostile nations” from across the southern border:
“It would be difficult to overstate the danger represented by the presence inside our borders of what is comparatively a multi-division army of young single adult males from hostile nations and regions whose background, intent, or allegiance is completely unknown.”
Even known terrorists are now passing through border stations and making their way into the heartland. The recent arrest in Minnesota of a reported al-Shabaab insurgent revealed the greater security hole befalling the United States. Infamous offenders on Homeland Security’s “terror watchlist” regularly bypass the international border and roam throughout the country. Citing an anonymous source, the Daily Caller reports that, “50 individuals on the terror watchlist were caught between October and December of last year alone.”
Meanwhile, a new program introduced by the Biden Administration allows migrants to bypass the mess at America’s southern border by flying straight into a US city of their choosing. More than 210,000 illegals have flown directly into 43 cities, according to the Department of Homeland Security. At the same time, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas now faces impeachment for violating his oath by “willfully failing to secure our borders.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared in Yuma, Arizona over the summer to show Americans what was happening at our southern border, later declaring that the “cartels are running immigration policy in this country.” He revealed that Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs) have facilitated the trafficking of more than 7 million illegal migrants from 117 countries into America throughout the past three years (that number now looks to be at least ten million, with more than 300,000 official border violations just in the month of December 2023).
Elon Musk visited Eagle Pass, Texas, the epicenter of this situation, after Feds were ordered to disable Texas’ barriers the first time back in September 2023. Musk illustrated how the world has come to revere America’s borders as OPEN, attracting millions more migrants than officials have reported, the majority of whom are military aged and not from Latin America.
The Daily Mail reported in October that “America’s Border War Has Begun” following a siege led by Texas Rangers to re-take a large river island near Fronton, Texas from heavily armed DTO gangs that had fortified it with improved fighting positions and sniper nests.
In December 2023, Muckraker reported on recently discovered NGO-fundedmass migration blueprints with the declaration, “The collapse of the US southern border is the result of a carefully planned and deliberately executed industrial mass migration program.” From the link:
“According to an August report by progressive left-leaning media watchdog organization Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, President Biden’s Department of Homeland Security allocated $363 million to NGOs to assist illegal aliens once in the US.”
The Take Our Border Back website is “calling all active & retired law enforcement and military, Veterans, Mama Bears, elected officials, business owners, ranchers, truckers, bikers, media and LAW ABIDING, freedom-loving Americans” to show up and protest Washington’s deliberate mishandling of the crisis.
That Abbot waited until now – after years of escalating conflicts – to pretend to do something about it, reveals the greater hand at play. Texans who live near the Mexican border have been suffering escalating robberies, vandalism and assaults at the hands of nefarious cartel elements for the past two and a half years. They’ve complained to their elected bureaucrats but nothing happened until the election year, when the ruling elites could figure out how to channel and absorb the palpable hatred against them into an outcome that benefits them. Many analysts are warning patriotic Americans to stay away from the conflict, as it appears to be a likely reincarnation of the J6 entrapment scheme.
The path toward tyranny follows a serpentine course of left then right just like a hockey puck is nudged down an ice rink. We’re managed by a corporate Democrat for a period of four to eight years, and predictably returned to the management of a corporate Republican for the next period. One administration sets up the tee ball and the other knocks it out of the park. Goldman Sachs and the war machine fund both parties, and both parties circle the wagons on war and bank bailouts.
The American immigration crisis has steadily snowballed into the avalanche it is today as a matter of deliberate policy. Trump’s administration may not have started any new wars, but it dropped a bomb, on average, every 12 minutes just in the first year. This was an extension of the Obama Administration’s dramatic acceleration of the drone war from the extremes waged by the W. Administration that started this whole “War On Terror” in the first place. General Wesley Clark’s warning that the United States intended to invade and overthrow “7 countries in 5 years” was nearly fulfilled at the end of Obama’s term, with only two exceptions: Iran and Lebanon.
Basic context for why this immigration crisis has been occurring in the western world remains consistently absent from corporate media headlines, especially with regards to the swarms of displaced refugees fleeing America’s constant bombardment of drone attacks across the entire Middle East. As the empire has consistently destabilized the entire region, one country at a time, those people began to flee away from the smoldering craters they once called home. They sought a better life and most looked for it in Europe and the Americas.
While cities like New York, Chicago and Washington DC once proudly identified themselves as “sanctuary cities” with politicians proclaiming that “no one is illegal,” those voices have since reversed their stance. After New York legislated mandatory housing for illegals, bus loads of migrants arrived and filled every hotel in the city at taxpayer expense. Veterans were kicked out of their housing to make way for illegals. Schools were closed down to make room for illegals. Americans were asked to open up their private homes to illegals. Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and Boston’s Logan Airport recently became de facto migrant shelters.
Perhaps the most telling anecdote related to this crisis comes in the form of a video that recently surfaced of two NYPD officers unable to defend themselves against an attack by a group of four illegal migrants who were all subsequently released without bail.
New York Mayor Eric Adams admitted in September that the constant incoming waves of illegals would, “destroy New York City” and that “The city we knew, we’re about to lose.”
“This will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City,” Adams repeated. “We’re getting 10,000 migrants a month. … One hundred ten thousand migrants we have to feed, clothe, house, educate the children, wash their laundry sheets, give them everything they need, health care.”
With New York’s social services completely overwhelmed and school playing fields repurposed into tent cities, the rhetoric from this so-called “sanctuary city” shifted dramatically in 2023. Adams blamed the Federal Government for not doing more to help New York and blamed Governor Abbot for busing illegals to the Empire State. Adams’ senior advisor soon thereafter called on the Federal Government to “close the border” to stop the flow of migrants into New York City.
Surely Mr. Adams and his apparatchiks share some of the blame for pushing these crazy policies in the first place. Being that states like New York, California and Illinois that called Texans “racist” for stating the obvious are now experiencing the greatest adverse affects of America’s open border policies, it seems decidedly ironic that they decided not to endorse Texas’s effort to enforce the law.
After decades of drone bombings all over the world, the chickens are coming home to roost through America’s border. Sanctuary cities willfully absorbed the problem until they began drowning in the consequences of their “solutions” to the crisis. The Hegelian Dialectic strategy of manipulating society seems clear enough; the authorities create a problem until public outrage makes demands on the authorities to “do something” which then justifies whatever totalitarian aims those in power wish to impose. We’re meant to respond to these crises with the familiar chorus of, “The government should do something about this!” But we’ve been here before, and many are beginning to realize that it may be time to stop asking the government to fix the problems it’s responsible for creating. Those still seeking a government solution are placing their hopes in the vague language of a $14 Billion “border bill” that promises to do absolutely nothing but further enrich the very interests responsible for the problem.
As Brandon Smith at Alt-Market observes, the Pentagon’s Operation Garden Plot (created in coordination with the REX-84 martial law protocol) cited social breakdown as a result of uncontrolled mass migration and ensuing economic unrest. Given that Dick Durbin and other scumbag politicians have been pushing the idea of military service for illegal immigrants in exchange for citizenship, Smith’s hypothesis that the so-called “great replacement” is more about erasing American communities by diluting society with masses unfamiliar with the concept of individual liberty and personal sovereignty nails the stated intentions of the cultural engineers who have been publishing their plans for decades.
After years of watching our systems crumble apart due to deliberate malfeasance, support for Texas seems fundamental to American interests. However, this moment looks to be the point of no return. We can absolutely expect the Feds to come down even harder on “high value targets” of this movement than those they crushed for participating in the J6 Capitol protests. Our governments have failed us, the people are pissed about it, and now they’ve been invited to a “showdown” with the Feds in Texas.
One month ago, agents of Hamas somehow infiltrated one of the most heavily defended fortresses of one of the most technologically advanced societies in the world, killed 1,200 Israelis and claimed several hundred hostages. Israel responded by bombing and invading Gaza, in turn killing many of their own hostages alongside more than ten-thousand civilians.
Hamas is funded by Israel, which is funded by American tax dollars. This fact was admitted as recently as 2019 when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly announced the need for more funds to help “bolster Hamas” as part of his strategy “to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank”:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he [Netanyahu] told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019.
When Yasser Arafat began peace talks with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians twenty years ago, the threat of peace breaking out led Israel to bolster Arafat’s political competitor:
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009.
For decades the 2.3 million inhabitants of Gaza have been unable to leave their walled concentration camp. The vast majority of these people are refugees who were displaced from their native lands by a 75-year old occupying force. The 5-mile wide by 25-mile long strip of land called “Gaza” is the only place on earth where refugees will be shot if they try to escape. Israeli snipers shoot to kill anyone who tries to leave, whether by boat or by foot (think of Jon Carpenter’s Escape From New York).
Anyone who grows up in such a prison will inevitably dream of breaking out, violently if necessary, especially after decades of watching friends and family murdered by bloodthirsty fanatics. And now the Israeli authorities have not only cut off water, food, medicine, fuel, electricity as well as internet and telephone communications from the Gaza strip, they’ve also bombed it into oblivion … again.
“When you live under an empire of lies you’ll be asked to believe a lot of very stupid things. The dumbest thing we’re being asked to believe this week is that Israel’s intelligence services are simultaneously so incompetent that Saturday’s Hamas attack took them completely by surprise, but also so competent that all the buildings they’re destroying with their relentless bombing campaign on Gaza are directed solely at Hamas.”
Although numerous organizations continue to expend a great deal of effort and resources twisting human rights violations into polarizing debates to ensnare us all in elaborate divide-and-conquer narratives, the fact remains that targeting noncombatants with lethal force will never be honorable or heroic, no matter who is doing it.
In the Middle East, two seemingly separate factions have targeted two different civilian populations; one inside of Gaza, and one outside of Gaza. Hamas terrorists targeted civilians in Israel, and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in-turn targeted civilians in Gaza as an act of “defending itself” while ignoring Hamas headquarters in Qatar. Both terrorist factions draw contempt by targeting civilians. Period.
Evidence continues to mount suggesting that Hamas attacked Israel at the behest and knowledge of Israel. Jewish charity leader Cecily Routman publicly accused Israel of initiating a 7-hour long “stand down” order when militants were known to be killing civilians. How 400 combatants managed to break through Israel’s defenses without anyone noticing remains a puzzle. In the days prior to the 07 October 2023 “surprise” attack, Israel was repeatedly warned of imminent terrorist threats by both the American and Egyptian intelligence agencies.
But Israel’s foreknowledge of October Seventh reaches as far back as 2022. According to the New York Times, Israeli authorities had specific knowledge of the attack over a year prior to its execution. Netanyahu has since denounced such stories as “fake news”, but it seems worth noting that two weeks prior to the Hamas attack, Netanyahu was showing off his Palestine-free map of The New Middle East at the UN General Assembly in New York.
Israeli authorities further violated international law on 11 October 2023 when water, electricity, fuel, communications and food were all blocked from entering Gaza. Without water, hospitals in Gaza rapidly turned into morgues. Some Israelis took to social media to openly mock the plight of Palestinians.
It’s worth noting that Hamas agents murdered Israelis with American-made weapons. Then Israel responded by targeting unrelated civilians on the strip of land that Israel covets most: Gaza. Not only is the ground beneath Gaza purported to contain half a trillion dollars of oil and gas reserves, Israel now wishes for a canal to run through the northern portion of Gaza to compete with the Suez Canal’s ability to link the Mediterranean and Red Seas together.
Not only have American politicians failed to condemn the criminality of collective punishment and collateral damage, they’ve actively pushed for wildly disproportionate escalations of violence. It is a war crime to commit collective punishment on a civilian population and Israel knows it. But a curious cat has the tongue of many American officials who remain unable to condemn Israeli violations of humanitarian law (such as Israel’s deployment of white phosphorus against civilians in Gaza and Lebanon).
Between its lobbying power and the Loyalty Oaths pushed on American professionals, Israel has deep roots overtly influencing the American political system. The Alliance for Israel Advocacy openly pushes American politicians to fund the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) provides all-expenses-paid trips to Israel for American politicians and media personalities and pours $4 million annually into influencing American officials. The Israel Lobby has bragged for years about how effectively their money influences Washington DC. Bibi Netanyahu has boasted about how “America is very easy to influence”. The Israel Lobby have even attempted to universally criminalize criticism of Israel.
With regards to Israel’s Stranglehold on American Politics, Chris Hedges observed in 2019 that, “The Israel lobby’s buying off of nearly every senior politician in the United States, facilitated by our system of legalized bribery, is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact.”
Meanwhile the well-funded American Christian Zionist movement supports the Jewish ethnostate because they believe Israel can usher in the “fire and brimstone” events necessary for Jesus Christ’s “Second Coming.”
Unlike American politicians, who deny war crimes, Israel justifies them as a badge of honor. Israeli leaders publicly revel in the carnage and readily admit that the weapons employed are very much intended for civilians. Former Israeli Ambassador to Italy Dror Eydar admitted that, “For us [Israel] there is one objective: to destroy Gaza, to destroy this absolute evil.” It’s not “collateral damage” because it’s not an accident. A myriad of Israeli officials have explicitly stated on international television that they deliberately target civilians because Palestinians are nothing but “human animals” in service to Hamas (which Israel funds). Israel readily admits that Hamas militants are all deep underground in an elaborate tunnel system but continue turning the above-ground portions of Gaza into rubble with American bombs.
Israel’s most fanatic Zionists will readily admit that they want all the Palestinians to disappear, and a leaked document from Israel’s Intelligence Ministry recently surfaced that recommends the “forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula”.
Is it any surprise then, to learn that in 2014 the Times of Israel published an article titled “When Genocide Is Permissible”?
Clearly Israel has international carte blanche to murder civilians with impunity. Since Israel wouldn’t have a military without US tax dollars, if American-made weapons are found to have been used against civilians, the United States is required to cease supply of said weapons under international law (not to mention basic morality). After years of condemning Russia for civilian casualties, the fact that $4 billion in weapons are gifted annually to Israel stands as the single worst double standard of American foreign policy, which operates at a very low ethical bar already.
From Charlie Wilson’s Mujahideen to the CIA’s al-Queda, terrorists are very often funded by American tax dollars. America’s corporate terrorism empire abandoned $80 billion in military equipment to the Taliban and another $6 billion directly to Iran. The same network of crooked actors likewise provided finances and arms to ISIS, with one “loss” accounting for nearly $1 billion worth of weapons and military equipment. This method has played out for so long that in 2017 Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard introduced the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act” which would formally “prohibit the U.S. government from using American taxpayer dollars to provide funding, weapons, training, and intelligence support to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.”
Needless to say, Tulsi’s bill did not receive much support from the war profiteers of the American Congress. And as the vultures circle over Gaza in 2023, weapons stocks have “soared” as the merchants of death have told investors to expect big profits from the next deadly wave of Middle Eastern conflicts.
Since it’s founding in 1948, Israel has accepted more than $158 billion in military assistance from the US government. If US citizens ever became savvy to the truth about Israel’s war crimes, the unlimited funding might come to an end. This is why the conversation is so “controversial” in the US. As long as Israel exists as a client state of America, it will always remain dependent upon American tax dollars.
The Politics of Revenge
It might come as a surprise to Americans that the majority of Israelis are opposed to the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. It may come as a surprise to Americans that Israel intentionally targets schools, hospitals and mosques, or that 40% of all Palestinian casualties are children. It may come as a surprise to Americans that the West Bank is a military occupation where fanatics from the world over are encouraged to purge Arabs. Few of us seem aware of the fact that American police officers regularly conduct counterterrorism training in Israel as part of an international “exchange program”. These facts surprise us because we in the west are exposed to an unfathomably gargantuan volume of corporate propaganda that daily justifies the systematic annihilation of our fellow humans with antiquated ideas and harmful ideologies. It is this propaganda apparatus that has cleverly conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism as a time tested method of deflecting criticism.
America funds Israel. The Israeli government in-turn funds Hamas. Hamas are neither based in Gaza nor the West Bank, but farther east in Qatar (which depends on American military support and hosts an American military base) at the request of the United States government. Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office for the same reason; to provide a venue for bureaucrats to conduct meetings.
Zionist fanatics will never acknowledge that the Palestinian peace movement called the “Great March of Return” was neither engineered nor directed in any way by Hamas. Starting in 2018, tens-of-thousands of men, women and children marched every Friday for 18 months in a peaceful act of mass civil disobedience that lasted until the end of 2019. The Israelis responded to every one of these peaceful marches with snipers who targeted civilians (including children, journalists and medics) with deadly force, killing hundreds and wounding thousands.
Following Israel’s unprecedented blockade of Gaza in 2006, some Palestinians began to view Hamas as the only viable political option as the walls literally grew up all around them. But Hamas was sponsored by Israel, first as a means of ousting Yasser Arafat and later as a reliable boogie man to justify further land grabs.
Sadly, the utterance of such obvious truths is predictably labeled as (or conflated with) pro Hamas “hate speech” by those who benefit from the bloodshed and the fanatics who support them. The path toward justifying the genocide of the Palestinians is paved with all the same cancel culture tactics we’ve seen before. Accusations of anti-Semitism are vigorously employed against anyone who dares question Israel’s sacred infallibility. Former Israeli Minister Shulamit Aloni admitted that “antisemitism” is a weapon against criticism that “we always use”.
Nothing justifies the indiscriminate murder of children, but that hasn’t stopped war-hungry fanatics from denouncing such matter-of-fact wisdom as “anti-Semitic” hate speech. Never mind the fact that the term “Semite” applies equally to Hebrews, Arabs, Akkadians and Phoenicians. It is therefore not anti-Semitic to denounce Zionism for the death cult it is. If the condemnation of child slaughter can be construed as “anti-Semitic” then our cultural values have become perverted and hijacked.
Referring to those who oppose this genocide as “anti-Semite” seems as transparent as referring to Jews critical of Israel’s actions as “self-hating”. Anyone who questions Israel’s indiscriminate mass murder of innocent civilians and ongoing apartheid of the native Palestinians is always automatically labeled a de facto Nazi by the zealots who daily prove themselves to be the very thing they claim to be against, becoming indistinguishable from the evil they claim to be fighting. Indeed the shocking alliance between Zionism and Anti-Semitism goes even deeper.
The fact that Israeli students are required to visit Auschwitz to guarantee such atrocities “never happen again” is made into mockery by Israel’s decades-long subjugation of millions of people who are trapped in a literal concentration camp called Gaza. Routine massacres dubbed “mowing the lawn” have regularly occurred within the walls of this open-air prison since it’s inception, just as hundreds of massacres have taken place in the West Bank territories with support from the Israeli authorities since the expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine began in the 1940’s.
The wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian population has remained mostly invisible to Americans, largely due to a western assumption that Arabs are inferior people who must be “modernized” if there is to be hope for them. Such “orientalism” allows for the luxury of hiding behind the false reasoning that those dirty Palestinians just aren’t willing to compromise.
Corporate media bias helps reinforce anti-Arabic perspectives which amass together from the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, David Frum and Richard Perle who unanimously conclude that the Middle East is a, “fetid swamp that must be drained and reconfigured in a western image of democracy.”
Israel has also unabashedly justified their repetitious cycle of genocidal mania by claiming that the Holocuast was conceived by Muslims. Bibi Netanyahu angered the world when he declared in 2015 that Hitler did not intend to exterminate Jews until a Palestinian Muslim convinced him to do it. Speaking to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu arrogantly stated:
“Hitler didn’t want to exterminated the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews and Haj Amin al-Husseini went up to him and said if you expel them, they’ll all come here [Palestine]… ‘So what should I do with them?’ He [Hitler] asked. He said, ‘Burn them’.”
In a similar way, propagandists often posit the logical fallacy that if Palestinians really aren’t just “human animals” then why don’t the surrounding Arab states accept any of them as refugees? Not only is this claim blatantly untrue (as of 2015 more than 3 million Palestinian refugees had made their way to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria) but this talking point was explicitly used by Hitler to justify the expulsion of Jews from Europe.
Ironically, Zionists in Israel are actually brought up to believe the very thing that Americans are taught about Germans under the Third Reich: they are taught that they are a supreme master race. Non-Jews are inferiors called “Goyim” and the public justification for civilian deaths in Palestine is referred to as “Hasbara”. They’re also taught that anyone who questions the corrosive mentality of Zionism is a “pathetic Jew-hater” and deserves bloody execution, especially fellow Jews. After everything westerners have been brought up to believe, it seems maddeningly ironic that support for Zionism provides fuel for the very same definition of “anti-Semitism” that’s employed to censor and control speech.
Caitlin Johnstone notes that, “The fiercest and most incisive critics of Israel I follow are all Jewish. Don’t let propagandists frame this as “Jew haters vs Jews” when it’s really justice vs injustice.”
When snowflake Zionists like Ben Shapiro post fake images as proof of atrocities to accuse impartial viewers of being “pathetic Jew-haters” they reveal themselves as agents of the state in service to the war machine.
Cleverly crafted “atrocity propaganda” invites us to internalize the hypocritical notion that Israel’s violence is not only acceptable, but righteous. President Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed pictures” of beheaded babies in Israel when no evidence of any such occurrence ever existed; a contrivance that originated from an IDF reservist named David Ben Zion who was instrumental in destroying a Palestinian village earlier this year.
No matter how the propagandists might twist it, targeting large masses of civilians with lethal force is not an act of war, but an act of genocide. Whether it’s Dresden or Gaza, it’s a repugnant war crime. Experienced tacticians know that such moves only create more enemies and greater hatred.
Despite the explicitly murderous rhetoric of Israeli officials, western leaders continue to proclaim their support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” while the corporate media continues to blame Arabs for resisting their own extermination. George Carlin noticed this double standard when he said, “Israeli murderers are called commandos, Arab commandos are called terrorists.” American tax dollars fund both groups.
In his book Inside Terrorism,Bruce Hoffman revealed the fact that Israelis were just as guilty of terrorism as Hamas, from the July 1946 King David Hotel Bombing that killed 91 and injured 45, to the lynching of 150 British Soldiers to the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 Americans. The incontrovertible proof of Israel’s barbaric war crimes is as voluminous as it is nauseating.
Corporate media whitewashed the 2018 Gaza massacre and subsequent bombing campaign just like they lied about the 2014 massacre of 2,000 Palestinians in “Operation Protective Edge” or any of the other countless massacres Israel has waged in it’s 75-year existence that most westerners have never heard about. And time and time again the Israeli authorities repeatedly blame the overwhelming number of dead civilians in Gaza as resulting from Hamas’ employment of “human shields”.
In a News Target piece entitled, “Why I No Longer Stand With Israel,” former UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspector Scott Ritter writes:
In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, the muscle memory in my heart and brain told me that I must stand with Israel as it responded to this atrocity.
But then I watched as Israeli generals and politicians openly advocated for war crimes on national television, calling the Palestinians “animals” and openly advocating for their elimination.
I watched as the Israelis lied about the nature of the Hamas attacks, turning what had been a flawless assault against a series of militarized settlements and military strongpoints that encircled the open concentration camp that was Gaza, into a narrative of uncontrolled bloodlust which was then fed to an unquestioning western audience by a compliant mass media. I watched how the world rallied to the shock generated by the fiction of 40 beheaded Israeli babies, while remaining silent over the real deaths of nearly 400 Palestinian children killed—no, murdered—by Israeli air attacks.
Without American support, the unconscionable human suffering of the hell that is Gaza would simply not be possible. America protects Palestine’s tormentor. Americans, in turn, sponsor the deliberate killing of innocent Palestinian children while CNN assures us that Israel’s violence is simply a matter of self-defense. This has been the case for decades. The Israel Lobby has leveraged our collective memory of the Holocaust as a smoke screen to obscure their own murderous crimes against humanity. How anyone can lament concentrations camps while taking steps to perpetuate and ignore the exact same thing happening on a much larger scale in real time shows the world what depraved depths a few psychopathic criminals are willing to plunge.
In the interest of preserving words whose meanings are threatened by the Orwellian redefinition of everything, it becomes necessary to reevaluate one of the most glaring contradictions that daily confronts the mass of western society.
Namely, how can millions of people self-identify as “left” while supporting the very antithesis of lefty values through the promotion of endless wars for profit, unfettered surveillance and centralized censorship?
Furthermore, what does it actually mean to be “left-wing”?
The American Eagle stamped into coins and carved into courtrooms clutches 13 arrows in its right talon, symbolizing armed defense. Conversely, the eagle clutches an olive branch with 13 olives in its left talon, symbolizing peace, diplomacy and reconciliation. By definition, identifying with the “right-wing” of this bird of prey signifies a “hawkish” pro-war stance and the “left-wing” signifies an anti-war position. This is why, historically speaking, the “left” stood for human rights and the pursuits championed by leftists were thus humanistic. In recent times this stance has become known as the “classical left”. In a similar way the word “liberal” extends as a branch from the ideals of “liberty.” If you don’t earnestly believe in liberty of the individual, you cannot call yourself liberal.
Why then are so-called “leftists” so bloodthirsty for military conflicts and international war? Biden’s apparently “liberal” administration provided billions upon billions of dollars and weapons to fund an endless and bloody quagmire in Ukraine while Maui survivors received a measly $700 in “relief” as corporate vultures flocked in to capitalize on their misery.
We live in an era when black Americans are jailed as “white supremacists” and political candidates are criminalized for holding different beliefs by people who call themselves “liberal”. How was such a large group of college-educated suburbanites ever persuaded to continuously support the very antithesis of their own purported beliefs?
As David Rubin articulated in his essay, Why I Left The Left, “Defending my liberal values has suddenly become a conservative position.” Rubin refers to the “regressive left” who falsely believe it somehow “progressive” to prohibit politically incorrect words or to ban speakers whose opinions you don’t agree with from participating in public forums:
“Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that his children would be judged by their character and not their skin color was a liberal idea, but these days, it’s not a progressive ideal. …
“Today’s progressivism has become a faux-moral movement, hurling charges of racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia and a slew of other meaningless buzzwords at anyone they disagree with. The battle of ideas has been replaced by a battle of feelings, and outrage has replaced honesty. Diversity reigns supreme – as long as it’s not that pesky diversity of thought.
“This isn’t the recipe for a free society, it’s a recipe for authoritarianism.”
COEXIST OR DIE
As a matter of cultural normalcy, most “Libs” are the way they are because they were trained to be accepting of everything and everyone, however dysfunctional or harmful. Their instincts were gradually weaponized against them as they were encouraged to ignore obvious red flags in the name of compassion, tolerance and inclusion. But this perverted version of “liberalism” actually encourages an embrace of something called idiot compassion, a term coined by Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Greg Graber summarizes this concept aptly:
“Idiot Compassion takes place when during times of trying to display compassion to others we end up letting them walk all over us. This often happens when we try to avoid conflict. In these instances, we learn quickly that this is not compassion at all, because it actually increases suffering. Sometimes people need to be told they are wrong. There are even instances when people need to be given a hard time.”
Lori Gottlieb elaborates, “In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.” Idiot Compassion is not fueled by a desire to lessen suffering, but by the ego’s obsession with external approval.
Today’s so-called “liberals” also tend to conflate compassion with outright cowardice. When the impulse to “be accepting of everything” gets taken to unhealthy extremes, the lib program makes a litany of excuses. The “lib” continues to accept the unacceptable while pretending it’s normal because otherwise they’d have to something about it. This helps explain the pathological aversion to the news that’s so freakishly common among this demographic. It seems easier to ignore reality and live in delusion, but only to the naive mind. The experienced mind knows that ignorance is not bliss; it is only oblivion. Being unaware is only acceptable if you’ve never been confronted with the facts before (nescience). Conversely, being unaware of the facts makes you look stupid if you’ve been confronted with them and willfully chosen to ignore them (ignorance).
Today’s so-called “liberals” couldn’t be more contradictory. They spew blatantly racist hate speech in the name of so-called “anti-racism”. They employ the ruthlessly violent tactics of fascism in the name of “anti-fascism”. They foment intolerance toward the majority of Americans in the name of “tolerance”.
Most quintessential of all, so-called “lefties” exclude the majority of the population in the name of so-called “inclusivity”. The rainbow flag hung in the widows of Biden’s White House is a literal banner of exclusion. If you’re white, straight and/or hetero (i.e. most Americans), it’s not a fan of you.
Malcolm X understood the flip-flopping nature of modern leftists, famously saying, “The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative.”
It follows that the US military’s covert sabotage of the Nordstream Pipeline at the behest of the Biden Administration proves what little regard the Democratic Party has for the environment that they claim to care so much about. The Nordstream explosion caused the single largest emission of “greenhouse gasses” and represents the single most destructive act of international eco-terrorism in recorded history. But so-called “liberals” ignore this giant elephant in the room, favoring instead to sacrifice the poor and underclasses in the name of overpopulation and anthropogenic climate change absent any discussion about geoengineering or military emissions.
If “my body, my choice” is not a statement of bodily autonomy but only a political statement about abortion you’ve succumbed to Orwellian doublethink. The same goes for wearing masks that are demonstrably harmful and ineffective against sickness.
Some things should not be tolerated, and what determines those taboos should not be decided by The State in a society that’s supposed to be free. Many New Yorkers are beginning to understand why this is so as their “sanctuary cities” are overrun by swarms of invading illegals. The overwhelming burden on social services in blue cities has caused Democrats to suddenly turn against the very open border policies that only a year ago they insisted you’d have to be racist to oppose.
How Did The “Classical Left” Lose It’s Way?
In principal, the left is supposed to represent the voice of the underclass. Chris Hedges likewise argues that a functioning Liberal Class exists as an institutional check that made incremental reforms for the working class possible. He also clearly defines “classical liberalism”:
“Classical liberalism was formulated largely as a response to the dissolution of feudalism and church authoritarianism. It argued for non-interference or independence under the rule of law. … Classical liberalism has, the philosopher John Gray writes,
“four principle features, or perspectives, which give it a recognizable identity: it is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against any collectivity; egalitarian, in that it confers on all human beings the same basic moral status; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the species; and meliorist, in that it asserts the open-ended improvability, by use of critical reason, of human life.”
How did the left become today’s “establishment loyalists” rather than a group of principled individuals dedicated to the pursuit of justice and truth?
Hedges traces the Death of the Liberal Class to the First World War and illustrates how state and corporate power were consolidated over every aspect of western life. “With the rise of the corporate state,” he writes, the Liberal Class, “has been rendered impotent by its embrace of unfettered capitalism, the national security state, globalization, and staggering income inequalities.”
Following this birth of neo-Liberalism, politicians continue to speak in the “feel your pain” rhetoric feigned for the working class while simultaneously selling out to anonymous corporate forces. As the demented geriatric stumbling through his role as the American president amply proves, no one’s in charge whose face you can see. Hedges elaborates:
“The anemic liberal class continues to assert, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that human freedom and equality can be achieved through the charade of electoral politics and constitutional reform. It refuses to acknowledge the corporate domination of traditional democratic channels for ensuring broad participatory power. …
“The inability of the liberal class to acknowledge that corporations have wrested power from the hands of citizens, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality.”
Journalist Matt Taibbi traced the transformation of what he calls “former liberals” into their modern expression back to the year 1972 when lefties mourned the defeat of George McGovern to Richard Nixon. He says that during the 2016 presidential campaign season he observed the Democratic Party publicly lamenting McGovern’s loss as proof that the ends always justify the means. Since winning became more important than ideology, the Party made a show of tossing notions of idealism aside.
This brings us to the “left’s” inability to peacefully debate and disagree with other viewpoints. Their minds are made up already. They are certain that anyone questioning the orthodox narrative is automatically a bigot, or a racist, or “extreme right wing” especially if those are the behavioral characteristics intrinsic to their own character. Such intractability reveals a great deal, including a lack of sophistication and an absence of intellectual acumen. Their fanatic embrace of censorship reveals authoritarian beliefs, not liberal values. Likewise the ugly insults spewed against heretics of the corporate order stand as revealing projections of their own inner filth.
Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication “language of life” has proven to be, in practice, little more than a carefully camouflaged dictatorial control of communication by fragile hysterics who feebly pretend that the Cancel Culture is fundamentally concerned with civility and manners. The same went for pronoun enforcement. This demographic cannot cope with the fundamental differences between facts and feelings.
Emotional statements are opinions, evidence-based statements are facts, and facts don’t give a damn how you feel about them. But that doesn’t stop modern liberals from contorting themselves into paralyzed pretzels through the mental gymnastics of corporate anti-logic. Like the ironic disconnect that emerged within environmentalists who can’t identify plant species but sure know how to whine about carbon. They forgot that a classical liberal would punch up at the powerful people and organizations that daily undermine everyone’s health. Instead, these “leftists” routinely waste their limited political energy by attacking ordinary people with little money, power or influence.
“The liberal class found it was more prudent to engage in empty moral posturing than confront the power elite,” Hedges writes. “They busied themselves with the boutique activism of political correctness.” Chris continues:
“Liberals, who claim to support the working class, vote for candidates who glibly defend NAFTA and increased globalization. Liberals, who claim to want an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, continue to back a party that funds and expands these wars. Liberals, who say they are the champions of basic civil liberties, do not challenge politicians who take these liberties from them.”
Thus the manufactured “climate crisis” happening before us has become an engineered class war masquerading as an ecological movement. It’s leaders are hypocrites who expend more fossil fuel volume in one private jet trip than most Americans burn in an entire year. The evangelical priests of the corporate climate movement buy multi-million dollar beachfront properties that would ostensibly be underwater if any of the things they tell us about rising sea levels were true. To add insult to injury, their proposed “solutions” to the crisis always involve further gouging poor people who can’t afford access to energy in the first place.
It is said that tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance. Today this is true in the sense that any utterance critical of the imposed status quo is automatically branded by the orthodox cultural priesthood as disinformation linked to MAGA extremism and therefore Trump and therefore Russia (all of which are assumed to be irrevocably evil). Why even have a conversation with this “basket of deplorables” if not to try to change them?
So what do we call this segment of the population? Those who uncritically repeat mainstream media lies at all of their acquaintances and unquestioningly repeat the pro-war propaganda spewed by the Party and its media? The smug automaton who mindlessly parrots corporate talking points on masks, mandates, lockdowns and jabs? The intolerant bigots who repeat harmful lies fed to them by criminals? The myopic morons who give standing ovations to Nazi SS officers of Hitler’s Third Reich in the halls of parliamentary democracy?
Authoritarian leftists are so common they’re almost cliché. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Lenin, etc. Today’s so-called “leftists”are no exception. They don’t believe in democracy, as evidenced by their allegiance to unelected bureaucracies like NATO, the UN, WHO, CDC and WEF. Instead, they tend to kneel at the feet of rogue military agencies like the CIA, FBI, NSA, ICE and DIA. This is why Barack Obama’s apparently “liberal” Administration repealed Habius Corpus and in turn removed due process for any protester or dissident (who could now be arrested by military personnel or even assassinated), all justified by rebranding political opponents of the globalist agenda as “terrorist” threats.
THINK FOR YOURSELF
If you’ve fallen for this divide-and-conquer psyop you’re not alone and it’s not too late to get off the backwards ride. Everyone who succumbs to The Crowd unwittingly submits to an explicit form of hypnosis, or “mass formation psychosis.” Gustav Le Bon elaborates on the inherent and inevitable barbarism of The Crowd:
“Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct. … “It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would disapprove, that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person. Taken separately, the men of the Convention were enlightened citizens of peaceful habits. United in a crowd, they did not hesitate to give their adhesion to the most savage proposals, to guillotine individuals most clearly innocent, and, contrary to their interests, to renounce their inviolability and to decimate themselves.”
To get off the ride ultimately requires the genuine courage to acknowledge your own vulnerability and weakness (human) and admit to yourself and to others that you were wrong. But to transcend requires an admission of fallibility; an admission of imperfection. Admit it first to yourself and then to everyone else. You’ll be glad you did.
Next, put aside the notion that people who hold different views, opinions and perspectives than you are the enemy and need to be corrected for the betterment of humanity. That’s just entrenching division, and precisely what our unelected masters want us to continue doing. We must quit rushing to take sides in contrived arguments that are deliberately rigged to sow division among those who ought to be working together. On this point, Chris Hedges asserts that the divide in America is not between Republican and Democrat, but rather that, “It is a divide between the corporate state and the citizen.”
For those genuinely interested in embracing classical liberalism, these are some of the philosophical dilemmas that must be pondered with sincerity. It means seriously considering whether our actions, speech and thoughts have lead us toward harmony or away from it.
If you live in America, please remember that you’re allowed to utter sentences that are factually incorrect, and you’re allowed to make honest mistakes and you’re allowed to learn from them. You’re allowed to insult people. You’re allowed to make people feel uncomfortable. You have the right to offend. It’s the only way to ensure an honest conversation among equals. By contrast, censoring and canceling everyone arbitrarily ensures that we can never have an open conversation between equals based on truth, facts, logic, reason or common sense. Conflict is necessary to prevent bloodshed. Unresolved conflict leads to violence. A riot in the street is ultimately the language of the unheard.
Should those who are on the fence fail to recognize how their compassion and empathy have been weaponized against them through the sophisticated emotional manipulation of modern propagandists, they will be led unwittingly into the jaws of a war they’re not prepared to fight and impoverish the entire world in doing so.
The Limousine Liberals with the wealth and resources to survive what is coming are also themselves dangerously out of touch with reality beyond their feeble attempts to impose their will over it. For those sincerely interested in enduring the upcoming hardships, it seems extremely foolish to follow the increasingly dangerous delusions of this demographic.
The hardest part of getting off the ride is admitting that you were wrong and that you could be fooled. It seems that many people would rather die than admit they’ve been deceived. If you have, don’t feel too bad about being duped by very sophisticated predatory interests because they’re skilled in what they do and have successfully fooled a great many for a very long time. But you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, and the truth cannot stay hidden forever. The ongoing corporate cavalcade of bullshit stories based on lies will expire eventually, as it always does, and those who stood for truth in times of universal deceit are usually vindicated in the long run. Above all, no matter how far you have walked down the wrong path, turn around!
Don Lemon told CNN viewers that those who refuse the vaccine should be shamed or “left behind” and Jimmy Carr referred to anyone skeptical of pharmaceutical companies as “really quite fucking dense.” Meanwhile Jimmy Kimmel told his audience that unvaccinated people should be denied life-saving health care with the dismissal, “Rest in peace wheezy.”
Those who unfortunately embraced the bullshit vomited from the mouths of these corporate snakes and Limousine Liberals immediately became a tangible threat to their neighbors. Hypnotized armies of automatons who enforce irrational authoritarianism against their neighbors quite reliably prove themselves to be a danger to anyone with a brain. The authoritarianism seemed scientifically driven at first glance, but behaved more like a dogmatic, faith-based, belief system that led many fearful citizens down the path of sanctimonious zealotry. In short, their allegiance to Pharma mirrors the behavior of a cult.
Those of us who understood our rights under the Law tried to tell the Covidians that we reserve the freedom to choose, and beyond telling them to leave us alone we never told them what to do. Conversely, we were scolded and corrected and attacked if we questioned the unlawful edicts and unconstitutional orders. The Cult portrayed anyone with the ability to think and the courage to question authority as a domestic terrorist threat.
Meanwhile new domestic terrorism laws were introduced by the White House. Our judiciary attempted to normalize the indefinite detention of Americans without trial. Following publication of the DHS trade and travel report that “reads like an instruction manual on how to exploit the public’s fear of COVID,” the federal government began installing facial recognition scanners in dozens of airports. A White House task force met with health technology companies to create a national coronavirus surveillance system to provide Big Brother with a real-time view of where people seek treatment and for what.
Under these new emergency suspensions of the law, the American police state waged the most organized and sophisticated state terrorism campaign in history.
United Airlines kicked a 2-year-old girl off an airplane for refusing to wear a mask. The CDC threatened the arrest of travelers who failed to wear two masks.Bureaucrat Susan Michie believed that mask mandates and social distancing should continue “forever”, comparing the compulsory actions to “wearing a seat belt” and “picking up dog poo in the park”.
We were told to follow the science, and then actively shamed for embracing the truths revealed through practicing the scientific method. Masks and social isolation and unnecessary medical procedures have all done far greater harm than the Cultists will ever admit. Phrases like “trust the science” are inherently anti-scientific because skepticism is inherent to the scientific method. Nobody ever trusts the results unequivocally. Now that the law is finally catching up to the hysteria, it’s easier to see that the masquerade served as a clever smoke screen to camouflage the bloodthirsty authoritarianism of the Cult.
Science is never settled unless you’ve thrown away the scientific method and begun playing politics with the data like Big Tobacco and Monsanto have done for decades. Beyond looking foolish, wearing masks in public places did little but display compliance and obedience to the modern dictatorship. The medical tyranny that accompanied masking was decidedly anti-American and itself corrosive to the expression of liberty this country is supposed to embody.
In March 2020 Governor Gavin Newsom locked down the entire state of California, Governor Andrew Cuomo locked down the entire state of New York and Governor J.B. Pritzker locked down the entire state of Illinois. Washington Governor Jay Inslee declared that anyone refusing to cooperate with contact tracers and compulsory testing would not be allowed to leave their homes for any reason. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine ordered the creation of covid camps.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer defied the Law and her own legislature by enacting emergency power laws to justify the passage of executive orders that extended unconstitutional lockdowns. The Michigan government in-turn threatened businesses with six month jail sentences for failure to surveil their customers, and Michigan authorities were instructed to arrest anyone they suspected of being sick with the illness. In April 2020 an FBI strike team raided a hospital in Michigan after it had successfully treated several patients with vitamin C.
Kentucky residents were threatened with ankle monitors for “failure to isolate.” Ford Motor Company tagged their workforce with social-distancing wristbands that vibrate when employees get within six feet of one another. A couple from Connecticut was fined $3,000 for leaving the state. A Key West couple was jailed for violating state quarantine. In the Cayman Islands, Skylar Mack and Vanjae Ramgeet were both sentenced to four months in jail because Skylar removed her “geo-fencing bracelet” and broke quarantine for seven hours to watch a jet-ski race.
The New York City police cracked down on congregating with armed social distancing busts. New York City announced mask patrols would issue fines to people refusing to cover their faces outside. NYPD dispatched 1,000 officers and a swarm of law enforcement drones explicitly to enforce social-distancing rules. New Yorker Donni Wright was violently tackled and arrested in Manhattan’s East Village for not wearing a mask (by a plain-clothes officer who also lacked a face covering). Some New York workers were issued “travel papers” to avoid arrest while commuting to their jobs. In January 2021 the State of New York proposed the formation of covid detention camps for anyone identified as a “case, contact or carrier” of a contagious disease. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio deployed “covid checkpoints” to fine people up to $2,000 for traveling during Thanksgiving.
Los Angeles authorities threatened to cut the water and electricity from the homes of those refusing to comply with the lockdown. Los Angeles County cracked down on illegal New Year’s Eve parties with a “Superspreader Task Force” comprised of “hundreds of detectives, patrol deputies, and Specialized Response Teams” that detained and arrested hundreds of citizens. Los Angeles elementary schools required “entrance tickets” from students who were required to daily apply for a new QR code that had to be scanned to gain admittance to educational facilities.
Californians were encouraged to report on their neighbors for coughing and sneezing indoors. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti proclaimed that “snitches get rewards” if they tattle on their neighbors. Brits were likewise encouraged to snitch on each other for visiting relatives over Christmas. Police in Bellevue, Washington encouraged neighbors to report on their neighbors with the MyBellevue app. And Bill de Blasio publicly urged New Yorkers to snitch on each other for failure to social distance.
As early as May of 2020, cities in Louisiana, Texas and Missouri told “nonessential” bars and restaurants eager to reopen their doors that they could do business again under the condition that they agree to snitch on and collect the personal information of all their customers as part of Homeland Security’s “contacttracing” initiative.
But compulsory snitching didn’t always go the way bureaucrats intended. Overwhelmed dispatchers in Toledo, Ohio were so flooded with calls from people snitching on each other about “not socialdistancing” that police took to twitter to encourage tattling citizens to call the health department instead.
Canadians who “recklessly” defied quarantine faced million-dollar fines and three-year prison terms. They also faced death by execution:Canadian police shot and killed an elderly man after he refused to wear a mask in a grocery store. Canada also took children away from disobedient subjects: an Ontario court discontinued the custody of a father’s children, claiming that his “beliefs” about the pandemic were a danger to his children because the love for his kids would always be “subordinate” to his “worldview”. And to top it all off, Canadian police even cited vagrants: Hamilton police in Ontario issued $750 tickets to homeless people for failure to observe social distancing rules.
Those of us who could think and read did our best to appeal to the reason of the Cultists and learned very quickly that the Cult is not interested in evidence or debate or logic or reason or common sense. The Cultists are only interested in pushing authoritarianism. It doesn’t matter how economically crippling lockdowns proved to be for poor and working families. It doesn’t matter how many people perish from the lethal decision to allow the death jab willingly into their veins. Adherence to the Cult demands that believers simply repeat the corporate lies they hear from the captured communication apparatus.
In March of 2021, former Baltimore health commissioner Dr. Leana Wen appeared on CNN to further coerce Americans into overcoming their so-called “vaccine hesitancy” by dangling their innate freedoms before them like a carrot on a stick.
The authorities continuously propose ever more ridiculous protocols for their subjects in spite of their knowledge of how dangerous they are. The bigwigs in big pharma know it too. The St. Anthony nursing home in Auburn, New York experienced zero deaths during the panic until they began vaccinating residents, whereby 24 died within two weeks of getting jabbed.In December Reuters had to admit that the majority of people getting sick are vaccinated. Another study out of California confirms that boosted folks are more likely to get sick than the unvaccinated.
How many young and healthy people have died suddenly and inexplicably in recent months from these “unavoidably unsafe” products? How many unnecessary heart attacks and blood clots and strokes have “mysteriously” occurred since this began? And how many cases of leprosy? How many more lame excuses can we entertain for the sudden and dramatic increase of fatal blood clots and heart attacks in recent years? And how many millions more will die?
Nevertheless, we were told over and over again that this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Exactly how the unvaccinated can be construed as a threat to the vaccinated if vaccines indeed protect their host remains one of the unsolvable mysteries of the universe. The vax didn’t stop transmission. On the contrary it proved lethal for many and continues to kill many more who were foolish enough to take it and keep taking it. Unfortunately, arrogance prevailed among those who refused to acknowledge they could be and have been manipulated.
The global lockdowns were exploited by governments all over the world to arrest, harass and even execute reporters, journalists and political dissidents. The Cultists who made it all possible bowed before their almighty Pfizer, the primary financier of many Cult media programs. We were told that the unvaccinated were a threat, but the phenomenon of mRNA shedding proves thatit’s the vaccinated who pose the threat– the complete opposite of the frantic claims of corporate media.
A few bureaucrats in England eventually admitted to “unethical” and “totalitarian” behavior to control the masses throughout 2020, with one scientist adding that “The way we have used fear is dystopian.” In March 2020 the UN privacy chief publicly reminded the world that “dictatorships and authoritarian societies often start in the face of a threat.” The advent of “freedom bracelets” solidified the notion that our societies have succumbed to an institutional form of “Stockholm Syndrome”.
The terrifying predictions of possible deaths resulting from covid made by Neil Ferguson at England’s Imperial College were “grossly overstated” and smacked of Monsanto-style corruption of science and falsification of data. Among the first to sound of the alarm was Kurt Nimmo who, in April of 2020, identified the crisis as a pretext for world government and totalitarianism to “frighten the public and manipulate ill-informed citizens into embracing economic and social decapitation”.
So-called “liberals” from coast to coast completely forgot that they had ever chanted the words, “my body my choice”. Instead, an angry mob of bossy boot lickers took to the streets to shame their neighbors in an organized campaign of mass behavior modification.
Did anyone ever apologize for the fruitless shaming tactics or ignorant accusations, beyond the likes of Scott Adams, Tim Robbins and Megyn Kelly? Despite a few outliers, not only did loyal Cultists fail to apologize for their mistakes, they actually doubled down on the lie. For anyone who saw the light, realized they’d been fooled, and apologized for their sheep-like behavior, congratulations on having some integrity.
The past three years were characterized by a herd-like embrace of a hostility that was anti-scientific, anti-American and anti-human. Now that illiterates who put their naive trust in Big Pharma are dropping dead all around us it’s obvious that those of us who questioned the Covidian narrative were absolutely correct in doing so. It wasn’t exactly difficult to anticipate the turn-key tyranny of 2020 because oligarchs the world over have been publishing their dictatorship plans for decades.There were plenty of attempts to warn followers of the Cult, but a horse can only be led to logic. One cannot make it think.
Despite what we were taught in public school, the most enslaved populations on earth are those who know how to read but are never taught how to think, because they’re the most susceptible to the poisons of propaganda. After all, a population that can’t read cannot uptake the psychological manipulation to the same degree as one that can. They’ll repeat what they read and what they’re told uncritically. The very same hateful sentences that were vomited out of Racheal Maddow’s pretentious face about so-called anti-vax deplorables were repeated word-for-word from coast to coast by these zealots. Their religion is Scientism and their Pope is Saint Fauci.
For the most part, those who never recovered from the institutionalized brain washing pushed by the Cult will never be able to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that C19 injections constitute lethal clot shots, or the fact that their deployment signifies a mass murder campaign of a truly biblical magnitude.Blind faith in vaccinations has led the civilization down the blind alley of a completely avoidable mass slaughter. And this genocide was completely voluntary. Those of us who warned that following this insanity represented collective suicide were unfortunately vindicated again and again. The judgmental vitriol of the true believers who repeated Pfizer’s talking points uncritically was rewarded in kind.
So, now that the tables have turned and the shoe is on the other foot, are those who have endured profound discrimination throughout the last three years really expected to abstain from schadenfreude? After witnessing the macabre ritual of synchronized dancing nurse teams throughout 2020, are we not justified in dancing over the graves of Cultists who wished the rest of us dead?
The Cultists would clearly dance on our graves if they could, and that mentality is part of what differentiates them from everyone else. It’s ultimately our humility that differentiates us from the Cultists. To avoid becoming our enemies we must be careful not to hate them the way they hate us.
At the same time it seems mortally unwise to simply ignore the Cult’s totalitarian aims. It is true that the Cult might be tempting people into violence by baiting us with one glaring injustice after another. And the window to resolve these problems peacefully seems to be closing fast. But if the Cult’s goal involves destroying traditional values and subverting the Law, thoughtful Americans would do well to acknowledge and avoid the traps before taking action. To be effective, a rational response must also be creative, as opposed to the destructive acts that define the Cult. Whatever we do, we should beware of embracing the same hatred that has consumed the Cult’s followers.
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