There’s a new focus-grouped term to re-brand the relentless addiction to unnecessary development.
Since the so-called “involuntary homeless” now occupy a cornered market of government-subsidized housing projects, the term “workforce housing” has come into play. This latest evolution of the “affordable housing” scheme helps guarantee that developers can exploit a whole new market of desperate people. The expression was recently redefined by the Montana Legislature during the 2021 session, causing many public-money addicts to begin licking their chops. The newly minted legal idiom has become a favorite answer to homelessness and poverty by the irrational authorities who daily abuse the public trust.
Now that housing in the United States has become universally unaffordable, an alliance of parasites and predators insist the only solution lies in more development, destruction and debt. But we don’t need to build affordable housing; we need to make existing housing affordable. Our goals should involve the restoration and preservation of what we already have, and doing so would easily house and employ many dormant sectors of the economy.
Not only are new homes poorly built (because everyone cuts corners these days), we simply don’t need them if the goal is merely housing the unhoused. Why construct new buildings when 15.1 million American homes sat vacant in 2022? That’s more than 10% of the country’s total housing inventory. Yet developers and their loyal cronies continue, in vain, to build their way out of the approaching economic disaster, thereby accelerating the financial ruin of everyone else.
Homes that are actually affordable for locals are all too often bought by tourists and tend to get bundled into packages by fund managers who gobble up as many of the smaller fish as they can. During the plandemic such agencies purchased properties like never before as they capitalized on the wave of foreclosures that resulted from the subsequent economic crash. This practice of real estate roulette calls into question the ethics of owning a home without actually having to live in it. Hedge funds and corporations are able to buy large swaths of homes and they can charge exorbitant rents for them. Now that this economic piracy has displaced an entire sector of the economy, the game is on to figure out how to profit from corralling the dispossessed into even smaller cells.
Modern workers already live in cramped stack-and-pack apartments that atomize individuals and maximize isolation which deters any possible sense of community. Every cheap apartment unit crapped out by development firms is a facsimile of all the others. Anonymous neighbors behind every wall, ceiling and floor who either make too much noise or complain about everyone else’s. Our formerly strong communities were robbed from the people who built them because most of us cannot afford the real estate anymore. If you’re “just a worker” then a quiet home with a private yard or garden isn’t just out of reach. It’s out of the question. According to CBS News, the majority of Americans cannot afford homes in 99% of America. Perhaps people will soon turn to solar-powered sleeping pods as the next innovative solution.
Nothing about the euphemism “workforce housing” inspires confidence because it essentially translates to substandard conditions. Reading between the lines one is able to sense the opposite of quality in this definition:
“Workforce housing is generally understood to mean affordable housing for households with earned income that is insufficient to secure quality housing in reasonable proximity to the workplace.”
The politically loyal true believers in Missoula’s power rings are obsessed with increasing housing density, but they wrongly assume that people will desire (or even tolerate) life inside a stack-and-pack apartment.
According to Missoula Mayor Andrea Davis, prospective transplants earning salaries up to $130k declined to move here because they couldn’t secure housing.
“Davis, one of the panelists, offered one example she had just come across at a meeting in Kalispell. She said Applied Industrial Technologies, a significant employer in the Flathead, could hire 200 workers tomorrow at salaries of $60,000 to $130,000, but there are no homes for them to move into.“
Since most American workers earn less than $35,000 annually (and service jobs in Missoula pay less than $13,000) it doesn’t take an advanced degree in economics to figure out that Montana’s long-time locals are certainly screwed by this formula in the long term. At current rates of economic inflation and the associated property tax increases, the threat of financial displacement now affects all wage-earners, not just service workers.
Press events that highlight the homelessness catastrophe in Missoula have become great opportunities for officials to prattle on about “workforce housing” developments as the solution because doing so allows for further feeding frenzies on their primary addiction of public money; the approval of more TIF bonds (debt) that benefit the donor class at the expense of Missoula’s municipal tax base.
Because this process is ugly and complex, Missoula’s public-money addicts enlist the public relations services of the Montana Democratic Party’s former spokesman. When the City of Missoula needs a party loyalist to put a positive spin on miserable policy decisions (like the relentless abuse of Tax Increment Financing), they turn to stenographer-in-chief Martin “Gomer” Kidston. After the State of Montana reworked the definition of “workforce housing”, Kidston championed the new opportunities available to everybody’s favorite local band of tax addicts, the Missoula Redevelopment Agency:
“The term workforce housing may mean different things to different groups, and cities across the state are wrestling with how to define it. But if MRA can ramp up a new program around such housing using tax increment as a catapult, it could help spark a new tool for development.”
As the 2023 legislative session approached, Gomer confirmed the primary goal of Missoula’s rulers:
“Other city priorities include protecting Tax Increment Financing and aligning it with the state’s new definition of workforce housing.”
Perhaps the most offensive aspect of the euphemism “workforce housing” seems its rather obvious manifestation of Klaus Schwab’s “own nothing and be happy” ideology that governs the World Economic Forum’s murderous “Sustainable Development” agenda. The ruling class want us all reliant on the state to satisfy all of our needs, including housing.
Since housing has become so appallingly unaffordable, the state increasingly offers vouchers for residents to offset the rising cost of property taxes. But nothing is free. Signing up for vouchers can automatically nullify many of your rights and often results in inconveniences like unannounced inspections of your apartment. And if the inspectors decide you’re not behaving in accordance to the rigid standards of the corporate policy, you’ll have a whole new set of problems. Just ask anyone who has lived in a property managed by the Missoula Housing Authority and endured the stringent legal terms and conditions inherent in subsidized living arrangements.
The sterile tone of the phrase “workforce housing” indicates how economic elites feel about the plebes. The ruling class and their loyal bureaucratic puppets see workers as just a temporary phenomenon of America’s cities, not a cornerstone of them. The globalist models treat workers like temporary drones and inconsequential statistics because they’re based on an obsession with predictability modules and social control. We can never build solid communities if people must constantly relocate out of financial necessity.
What transformed the formerly safe neighborhoods of the American west into the post-apocalyptic bazaars of meth, trafficking and murder they are today? Within less than a decade tent cities rapidly emerged from public parks and sidewalks and grew into shantytowns and Hoovervilles like the ghastly disgrace called “the Zone” in Phoenix, Arizona. Over the past five years, these symptoms of societal decay have grown visibly worse. In the face of this humanitarian crisis, many public officials have made an institutional commitment to ignoring the problem, claiming that their hands have been tied by a decision made by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018. This technocratic abdication of duty is not only legally inappropriate, it normalizes a sadistic indifference toward human suffering that dramatically accelerates the urban decay of the American west. After a five-year long headache, this colossal policy failure now lies before the US Supreme Court for reconsideration.
“Five years ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided a case called Martin v. City of Boise that radically transformed how local governments address the problem of homelessness and vastly worsened the nation’s homelessness crisis. Now, the Supreme Court is poised to consider whether to overrule that decision—and a subsequent decision called Johnson v. Grants Pass.”
Both Martin and Johnson proclaimed that it is unconstitutional to enforce anti-vagrancy laws unless there are adequate shelter beds available for homeless persons. These lawsuits rely on a ruling from the 1962 case, Robinson v. California, wherein the Supreme Court held that people cannot legitimately be punished for immutable characteristics; in this case, the immutable characteristic of being “involuntarily homeless” – a term that has yet to be defined.
That argument held sway in the case ofMartin v. Boise. This case began after a Boise man named Robert Martin fell asleep on an Idaho park bench and was cited by police for doing so. Martin and five other homeless Boiseans in turn sued the City after being cited for sleeping in public spaces. The decision climbed up the ladder to the Federal Appellate Court who eventually ruled against the City. In that case, a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that punishing homeless persons for sleeping in public violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” if shelters are not available for them. As a result, this ruling conveyed to every western court that the City of Boise had violated the constitutional rights of homeless people by imposing criminal penalties for sleeping and camping outdoors.
The expansion of the Martin ruling began in 2018 when a homeless woman named Debra Blake (alongside fellow plaintiffs John Logan and Gloria Johnson) sued the city of Grants Pass, Oregon in federal court for similar reasons. “The city of Grants Pass is trying to run homeless people out of town,” the lawsuit stated. “On any given day or night, hundreds of individuals in Grants Pass, Oregon, are forced to live outside due to the lack of emergency shelter and affordable housing in their community.” The Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, citing Martin v Boise as precedent.
These rulings were meant to reiterate that people have an inherent right to exist in public spaces. Martin established that municipalities cannot criminalize people for sleeping in public and Grants Pass ultimately reiterated the human need for insulation against the elements.
Lazy bureaucrats have twisted these legal decisions into the end-all absolution from municipal responsibilities. Duly-unelected interim-mayor Jordan Hess demonstrated this point perfectly in his County Courthouse Address on 26 April 2023:
“We don’t have – the reality is that we do not have enough indoor shelter in our community for everybody. … Uh, cities across the west have, of course, seen a high increase to the cost of living and the cost of housing as, um, these – as our desirable communities have become destinations for, uh, for people moving into our communities. …
“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.”
Hess strategically actuates the predictable “criminalizing homelessness”strawman. Relying on public ignorance, lazy bureaucrats ladle out helpings of such logical fallacies frequently and generously. In this case, Jordan relies on the intentionally misrepresented proposition of “criminalizing homelessness” because such fallacies are easier to defeat than the real arguments concerning the actual issues like addiction, mental illness, and financial collapse. Hence “attacking a strawman”.
Arizona Judge Freddy Brown expounds on the folly of “criminalizing homelessness”:
“Martin’s presumption of helplessness is also manifested in such rhetorical tricks as the Respondents engage in when they accuse Petitioners of “criminalizing homelessness.” This is a semantic device intended to substitute intimidation and accusation in place of rational legal analysis. It’s safe to say that no party or amicus in this case seeks to criminalize homelessness. Rather, the laws in question are laws against sleeping in public parks, polluting public areas, and other acts which are voluntary, at least in the vast majority of cases, and that the exceptions can only be discerned on a case-by-case basis.”
Despite what lazy officials and mayoral liars may allege, City governments can still enforce anti-camping ordinances. But Martin’s bizarre application of the concept of “involuntary homelessness” has created a legally unworkable situation that combines a lack of shelter beds alongside a declaration of “involuntariness” that then entitles a person to reside indefinitely in public spaces—while completely exempt from law enforcement intervention as a matter of constitutional entitlement.
“At least that’s how many municipal officials interpret Martin. Notwithstanding the caveats in that case, such officials have taken Martin’s bizarre “involuntariness” theory as an opportunity to shrug off their responsibility to enforce laws that are wholesome and necessary for the public good. The result is a stark homelessness crisis in cities across the west.”
Since the Ninth Circuit enjoys jurisdiction over the entire American West from Arizona to Washington and even Alaska and Hawaii, their rulings set precedent for all lower courts of nine western States, including Montana.
With Grants Pass up for review before the US Supreme Court, the city attorneys from that case point out the obvious effects of this ludicrous policy in a separate brief:
“This Court can see the track record under Martin in the Ninth Circuit — sprawling encampments, rising deaths, and widespread harms to the community, as localities are forced to surrender their public spaces.”
Timothy Sandefur’s amicus brief elucidates on this observation:
“One need only look at the multitude of dangerous and dehumanizing homeless encampments and open-air drug markets in cities under the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit—such as the Zone in Phoenix—to see the profound impact that Martin and Grants Pass have had. … And the decisions also provide a convenient excuse for other city leaders that wish to do nothing while such encampments grow and fester.”
In January the Supremes agreed to hear an appeal from the City of Grants Pass of the 2022 ruling by the Ninth Circuit that expanded the 2018 Martin ruling. As Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle reported in January:
“The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear a case that could dramatically reshape how cities across the West respond to the homelessness crisis. Gov. Gavin Newsom, governments in 20 other states and organizations of cities and counties had asked the court to review and overturn a September 2022 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that prohibited local governments from sweeping homeless encampments unless shelter was available for the camp’s residents.” …
“Families can no longer walk the streets of Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle in safety,” said lawyers for the 20 states, led by Idaho and Montana.
Writing for Planetizen, Irvin Dawid clarifies that the appeal was filed under “Grants Pass” even though the case that originally created this monstrous precedent was Martin v. Boise:
“Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal, the case goes by title, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. Note that the high court refused to hear an appeal of Martin v. Boise in December 2019. Since the Grants Pass ruling involved precedent set by Martin, consideration of appeal means that both are up for reconsideration.”
MISSOULA RESCUED BY THE STATE OF MONTANA, AGAIN
When Missoula drops the ball on enforcement, the State of Montana must often mop up the mess. Both the $250,000+ Reserve Street shantytown eviction as well as the $20,000 burrows rebuild came out of the State budget because both areas are owned by the Montana Department of Transportation. So while Jordan Hess and other pathetic bureaucrats whine about the State legislature hoarding budgets from Missoula, these overwhelmingly expensive mistakes—made by Missoula ideologues—were paid for by all Montanans.
Why was the State of Montana allowed to do what Hess said couldn’t be done?
Jordan Hess reflects on time in office
Jordan Hess demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the law when he claims—falsely—that his government wasn’t allowed to protect innocent taxpayers against people who are unable to control their own actions. By this nincompoopery, if a shelter runs out of vacancies then the police and citizens must stand down and watch the town burn.
While the City of Missoula claimed its hands were tied regarding the Clark Fork Colonies proliferating around the Reserve Street Bridge, the State of Montana took legal action against Missoula County to enforce an eviction of 100+ John Does “from accessing, residing on, or otherwise occupying the Property.” The 2022 complaint from the State of Montana addresses factors like health, dangerous fires, improper disposal of waste, the building of permanent structures on land owned by MDT, and vandalism:
“The lawsuit includes five counts including forcible detainer, trespass, a claim for public and private nuisance, a request for injunction and a declaratory action.”
“One such health and safety risk involved the continual risk of contamination to the Clark Fork River due to the encampment’s improper waste disposal system and the encampment’s proximity to the river. …
“In Montana, a nuisance is defined as anything that is injurious to health, indecent or offensive to the senses, or an obstruction to the free use of property, so as to interfere with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property, or that unlawfully obstructs the free passage or use, in the customary manner, of any….public park, square, street, or highway.
An abandoned sliver of the 2022 Reserve Street Shantytown
A similar situation arose this past November when Chinese President Xi Jinping was due to arrive in San Francisco, whereupon California’s Governor Newsom cleaned up his city literally overnight. Presenting a kind of Potemkin Village, the entire downtown was barricaded by miles of black fencing while authorities purged the district of tents, garbage and homeless. Newsom didn’t hide behind the Ninth Circuit decision, admitting that the cleanup was only performed for Xi’s arrival.
By legal precedent, Federal law is supposed to supersede state andlocal laws, but with several caveats. Since individual states exist within the regional boundaries of the Ninth Federal Circuit District’s jurisdiction, the Martin and Grants Pass decisions are technically binding. But since Federal rulings are not supposed to infringe on states’ rights, decisions can be lawfully challenged and presumptions rebutted.
The State of Montana would seem well within its rights to file a complaint petition, as it did two years ago in the case of the Reserve Street Shantytown. Article IX of the Montana Constitution guarantees that “the state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”
Furthermore, the Ninth Circuit never declared the west was a free-for-all to make encampments wherever anyone desires, nor did it legalize public endangerment, the contamination of public waterways or the degradation of public spaces. Their ruling was narrowly defined. But that hasn’t stopped municipalities like Missoula from twisting the decision into a one-size-fits-all excuse to ignore a profitable catastrophe while redirecting public funds into private partnerships and blaming fallout on those dastardly Republicans at the State Legislature.
Sandefur elaborates:
“The Martin/Grants Pass rule has not only worsened the homelessness problem—by confusing and frustrating city officials who want to do something to clean up their communities and help the unsheltered—but it has also encouraged irresponsible and foolhardy policies that only exacerbate the homelessness crisis. Cities such as Phoenix and San Francisco responded to those precedents by adopting the failed policy known as “Housing First,” which has actually increased homeless populations. And some cities, including Phoenix, took Martin and GrantsPass as handy excuses to do nothing about the homelessness problem—ignoring the laws they’re supposed to enforce, and endangering the hardworking taxpayers who have the right to police protection. We saw the practical consequences of that in The Zone.”
“The idea behind “Housing First” is simple: there will be no more homelessness if everyone has a home. The fault with that logic is that there are many individuals who do not want housing—at least, not at the cost of giving up their addictions—and for that reason choose not to take advantage of available aid.”
Despite what their pushers may allege in the corporate media, so-called “Housing First” policies have overwhelmingly proven themselves a failed strategy in the west. From 2014 to 2020, the States of Oregon, California and Washington all initiated “Housing First” initiatives that resulted, quite ironically, in dramatic increases in homelessness on the streets of their cities.
Liberal mayors in both Missoula and San Francisco committed to ending homelessness within a decade. Missoula’s ten-year plan to end homelessness was called “Reaching Home” and ended in such utter failure that by its conclusion in 2022 none of its former proponents were enthusiastic about its mention.
In the meantime, Missoula burns while mayor Andrea Davis fiddles with her “urban camping” working group, which concluded earlier this month “without clear recommendations” for policymakers. This doesn’t seem particularly surprising given that Davis introduced her working group back in February on KGVO with murky statements like this:
“So, our plan here is in addition to obviously, long-term community planning that we’re doing, to come up with our next plan to address homelessness, is to make homelessness rare, brief and one time only.”
Andrea Davis discusses the unhoused in Missoula
It is already the case that most people who become homeless are only so for a day or two, according to Dennis Culhane’s Five Myths about America’s Homeless, which reveals that chronic homelessness is usually the result of addiction or mental illness. Once again, the reality on the ground doesn’t fit with the narrative being forced down from above.
The reality-averse bureaucrats pulling the purse-strings of local government will constantly assert that the solutions lie in constructing more affordable housing. They’ll never discuss whether it’s possible to make existing housing affordable because their developer donors want subsidies to build new apartment complexes. Whether the proposed solutions are effective at “eliminating homelessness” becomes completely irrelevant once the money changes hands.
CRUEL AND UNUSUAL
Prohibiting homeless persons from sleeping, camping, and lodging wherever they want, whenever they want, cannot be construed as torture. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what the lawyers in these cases argued, and the Ninth-Circuit-Numbskulls bought it. The arguments bolstering the Martin ruling (and by extension, Grants Pass) hinge entirely on the bastardization of the Eighth Amendment’s clause prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment”. Timothy Sandefur expounds on this misinterpretation:
“The Martin and Grants Pass cases declared that it’s unconstitutional to arrest people for living in tents in public parks or other public property, any time there aren’t enough beds available in government-run homeless shelters to accommodate the city’s unsheltered population. Relying on a 1962 precedent calledRobinson v. California, which said that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment” bars the government from punishing people for things that are outside their control, the Ninth Circuit reasoned that if the number of homeless people is greater than the number of shelter beds available, those who sleep on the streets must be doing so because they can’t help it. Everyone must sleep, after all, so a person who can’t find a place to stay, and falls asleep on a sidewalk, is doing so as part of what the judges called the “inevitable consequences of being human.”
It seems obviously dubious that anyone who chooses to live indefinitely outdoors can be said to be doing so only as an unavoidable “consequence of being human.” Nevertheless, this is where legislators and bureaucrats tend to get lost in the weeds.
“Dissenting, Judge Bumatay stated that nothing in the text, history, and tradition of the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause comes close to prohibiting enforcement of commonplace anti-vagrancy laws, like laws against sleeping on sidewalks and in parks.”
While homeless individuals are certainly entitled to the utmost respect and compassion, they are not therefore immune from the law. Breathing in public is quite different than building structures into the riverbank and polluting the waterway with dangerous chemicals and hazardous substances. Judge Bumatay describes how the Martin decision flipped the Eighth Amendment completely upside-down:
“Today, we let stand an injunction permitting homeless persons to sleep anywhere, anytime in public in the City of San Francisco unless adequate shelter is provided. The district court’s sweeping injunction represents yet another expansion of our court’s cruel and unusual Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. Our decision is cruel because it leaves the citizens of San Francisco powerless to enforce their own health and safety laws without the permission of a federal judge. And it’s unusual because no other court in the country has interpreted the Constitution in this way. …
Based on this innovative reading of the Clause, our court thought it was “compel[led]” to prohibit enforcement of Boise’s anti-camping and disorderly conduct ordinances whenever shelter is not offered. Id. Martin reasoned that sitting, lying, and sleeping are “universal and unavoidable consequences of being human” so that the “conduct . . . is involuntary and inseparable from status.” … So Martin felt that governments cannot criminalize the “state of being homeless in public places” if “there is no option of sleeping indoors.”
Sandefur illustrates the logical fallacy inherent in this reasoning:
“By the Ninth Circuit’s logic, if a person drives home intoxicated from a bar, and gets into a collision that kills someone, she cannot be held criminally responsible—because the government failed to provide her with a taxicab. That is illogical. Likewise, someone who chooses to start a fire that gets out of control and consumes a neighbor’s house has no “involuntariness” defense to an arson charge just because the government did not give him an electric heater. And a person who pours poisonous waste into a river is not “involuntarily polluting” simply because the government failed to provide her with a toxic waste disposal service.”
Among other “unintended consequences” of the Ninth Circuit’s dimwitted decision was the explicit validation of an extraordinarily vague term: “involuntarily homeless”. According to dissenting judge Patrick J. Bumatay, “The district court didn’t even define what it means to be “involuntarily homeless” and gave conflicting signals on the point.”
But comparing involuntary homelessness to voluntary substance abuse seems an inappropriate conflation on the verge of non sequitur. Voluntary intoxication is not a defense in criminal proceedings per Montana v. Egelhoff. Sandefur further explains the absurdity of associating human behavior under the auspices of “involuntary”:
“[…] both rulings embody an untenable assumption that people lack free will—and therefore cannot be held responsible for their actions—whenever the government fails to provide them with a free-of-charge alternative to breaking the Law. …
“A corollary mistake in both cases is the assumption that the government cannot penalize “involuntary” conduct—and is thus powerless to protect innocent citizens from harms inflicted by people who are unable to control their actions. … The law cannot punish people for who they are, but it certainly can arrest and incarcerate people for what they do.
“To regard the homeless as lacking free will—or, in today’s fashionable jargon, as lacking “agency”—not only paralyzes public officials and harms the hardworking taxpayers who expect their public employees to enforce the law for the protection of their neighborhoods; it’s also dehumanizing to the homeless themselves. To treat the destitute as choice-less underestimates their capacities and, by failing to regard them as ordinary people, risks denying them full humanity.”
Sandefur further describes why overly-simplistic declarations like “the answer to homelessness is housing” represent the flawed reasoning of low-effort thinkers and their antisocial shepherds who ignore the phenomenon of “shelter resistant” individuals:
“Take, for example, the plaintiffs in an ongoing federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU involving Phoenix’s infamous “Zone”—which until recently was occupied by as many as 1,000 people living in tents on downtown sidewalks. In that case, the plaintiffs are a man who admits he’s lived on the streets for nearly 25 years, and a woman who is not only physically and mentally competent, but even maintains a credit card account. These people are clearly not incapable of making decisions in their lives, and characterizing them as “involuntarily homeless” is ludicrous. So is giving them a constitutional right to reside indefinitely in tents on public property.
The infamous “Zone” of Phoenix, Arizona
SCOTUS REVIEW WILL LIKELY OVERTURN DISASTROUS NINTH CIRCUIT DECISION
The Supremes appear to be siding with the City of Grants Pass in this case, though they haven’t ruled yet and probably won’t until the very end of their session next month. According to the New York Times:
“A majority of the Supreme Court appeared inclined on Monday to uphold a series of local ordinances that allowed a small Oregon city to ban homeless people from sleeping or camping in public spaces.… The conservative majority appeared sympathetic to arguments by the city of Grants Pass, Ore., that homelessness is a complicated issue that is best handled by local lawmakers and communities, not judges.”
Another factor that makes a SCOTUS overturn of Martin very likely is the multilateral support the appeal has garnered from a wide variety of unlikely allies. The San Francisco Chronicle notes that, “The case has become a rare instance in which officials across the political spectrum, from Newsom to conservative state senators in Arizona, are seeking the same outcome.”
“Dozens of parties have submitted amicus curiae or “friend of the court” briefs, many of them backing Grants Pass in its bid to overturn the ruling. And the case has produced some strange bedfellows, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the conservative Goldwater Institute, not to mention the attorneys general of Idaho, Montana, Nevada and other western states. …
“What’s really striking is how many states, how many counties, how many cities here on the West Coast — governments run by liberal Democratic mayors and governors — have filed briefs with the court saying that ‘This is unworkable.’”
Beyond being unworkable, the Martin ruling results in policies that ironically mock the very compassion their authors purport to embody. Sandefur’s amicus brief concludes:
“Leaving people to remain living indefinitely on the streets, or in tents in a park—precisely on the grounds that they are unable to do otherwise!–is not a compassionate response. On the contrary, it simply reasserts, under the strangest of disguises, the cold attitude of a past era that viewed the poor as a mere “surplus population” beyond possibility of rescue. …
“A compassionate response would consist of providing people with the care they need—including taking them into custody against their will if they are unable or unwilling to manage themselves. … Finally, the law-abiding, taxpaying public deserves compassion, also. The victims of municipalities’ abdication of their law-enforcement duties aren’t just the homeless—who certainly deserve better than to be left to live on the streets—but also members of the community who must suffer threats, pollution, damage to their properties, and the ruin of their businesses as the consequence of a legal principle that is indefensible.”
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
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!
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