freedom and reason

Update (March 6, 2022): On March 1st, Broken Anthem shared Ukraine on Fire, a documentary by Igor Lopatonok, which provides a historical perspective for the conflicts in the region that lead to the 2004 Orange Revolution, 2014 uprisings in Ukraine, and the violent overthrow of democratically-elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. I had thought of watching this documentary for some time but never got around to it. Given recent events in Ukraine and a convenient link appearing on one of my social media platforms to which I am subscribed reminding me of its existence, I sat down and watched it last night. If you have not watched this, you should.

“Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.”—Samuel Johnson, The Idler, 1758

“There was a near universal understanding among diplomats and political leaders at the time [1989] that any attempt to expand NATO was foolish, an unwarranted provocation against Russia that would obliterate the ties and bonds that happily emerged at the end of the Cold War.”—Chris Hedges, “Russia, Ukraine, and the Chronicle of a War Foretold,” MPN News, February 25, 2022.

Less than a week ago, Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered troops into Donetsk and Luhansk, which have declared themselves no longer part of Ukraine. Meeting with leaders of the rebel forces, the Russian president officially pledged aid and cooperation. Having already established Russian military presence in Donetsk some eight years earlier, Putin sent more troops to carry out “peacekeeping” operations there. Biden and Putin agreed to keep diplomatic lines open even while Washington pushed the narrative that all this is pretext for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now Putin is conducting large-scale military operations in Ukraine and the United States has imposed sanctions. Biden seemed to have understood better than I—and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, as well—the consequences of United States weakness and the fruit of its labors.

The question has been put to me: Do I agree with Putin’s actions in Ukraine? No. I am very rarely for war. But, if an observer wants to understand why something is happening, then he needs to look at history, politics, and situation. Whether you agreed with GHW Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in January 1991, Saddam Hussein had reasons for invading Kuwait in August of 1990. The questions of US military action is on the table in the current crisis. Do I support US involvement in the Russian-Ukraine conflict? No. This is not my fight. I disagreed with GHW Bush’s intervention in Iraq. I disagreed with Clinton and NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milošević had reasons for his actions, as well. Examining the reasons that justify in Putin’s mind the invasion of Ukraine, does not make one a supporter of the invasion and whatever follows. There is a history here that needs knowing. And we need to know it to determine whose side to take—or whether to take no side at all.

It is clear that the public is not really interested in the exercise of rational sides-taking. Heroization of Zelensky and the Ukrainian people in contrast to demonization of Putin and the Russian military is ubiquitous in the West. Westerners have eagerly organized their allegiances in terms of the official narrative. You have no doubt seen the “I stand with Ukraine” slogans and stickers on social media. If you didn’t know what the flag of Ukraine looked like before, you do now. One saw nothing like this when Saudi Arabia launched its military campaign in Yemen in March 2015. Had Saudi Arabia intervened on behalf of the Houthi movement over against Yemen president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi would that have made a difference? No. Saudi Arabia is an American ally. Russia, on the other hand, is a perennial boogieman. Reflexive fear and loathing of Russia, and its earlier configuration as the Soviet Union, has justified trillions of military spending and proxy wars around the planet. The corporate media, Democrats, and the permanent security establishment were able to hoax tens of millions of Americans for so long with ridiculous claims that Trump was a Russian agent because of deep life-long conditioning in Russophobia.

Given that how Western influencers have pitched the conflict may in the end be leveraged to justify kinetic war between the United States and Russia (at present economic sanctions are the order of the day, which will likely hurt ordinary Americans as much as ordinary Russians), it is important to determine what lies behind all this. A war with Russia would be a disaster for humanity.

If we pause to examine Putin’s position, we find there are reasons that, if given in other contexts, complicate matters. Among Putin’s justifications is the claim that the objective of military intervention is to defend the safety and rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, especially those living and working in Donetsk and Luhansk, which declared their independence from Ukraine in the chaos of 2014. Putin characterized Russia’s “special military operation” as the “denazification” of Ukraine. “Its goal is to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide,” he said of years since Donetsk and Luhansk declared their independence. “And for this we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.” Although the Western media feigns a puzzled look at the mention of Nazis in Ukraine, Putin is not wrong—and the media knows that. Donetsk and Luhansk have large populations of ethnic Russians who seek Putin’s help; there are extremist groups in Ukraine who mean them grave harm.

Putin is also concerned about NATO expansion, viewing the prospect of Ukraine joining the Western military alliance as an hostile act. Consideration of Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO dates to 2009 and incorporation looks rather certain in light of the pattern of the last few decades. The US militarization of Ukraine looks like the cultivation of a proxy to antagonize Russia. In December of last year, Putin demanded from US and NATO guarantee that Ukraine remain outside NATO’s security sphere and that the alliance quit its ambitions in Central and Eastern Europe. The United States and its allies did not concede to Putin’s demands and continued the provocation. This left the problem of the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, with the Ukrainian government seeking to return those regions to its sphere of control, in the lurch. More generally, Putin has argued, Ukraine is a construct, not an integral nation-state. “We have every reason to say it’s Bolsheviks and Vladimir Lenin that created Ukraine,” Putin explained, asserting that “modern Ukraine was completely created by Russia.” For this reason, Putin finds an independent Ukraine (Ukraine declared its independence in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union) a sign of the disintegration of greater Russia.

It may have surprised many to read a November 2017 op-ed by Lev Golinkin, published in The Hill, providing support for Putin’s claim that Ukraine is a nest of Nazis. Golinkin was writing in the context of Trump mulling sending weapons to Ukraine. The author thought it useful to make his audience aware of “the far-right forces employed by the Kiev government,” taking issue with Kristofer Harrison’s op-ed in the same publication a month earlier. “Some Western observers claim that there are no neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine, chalking the assertion up to propaganda from Moscow,” writes Golinkin. “Unfortunately, they are sadly mistaken.” Fascism of the rankest kind (which serves the interests of the more sophisticated sort of the emerging transnational corporate state) is a very real problem in Ukraine and, as noted, this fact is well known among those who pay attention to such things. However, there an awful lot of people who know this awful truth who do not want others to know about it. Golinkin opines, “The fact that analysts are able to dismiss it as propaganda disseminated by Moscow is profoundly disturbing.” Indeed.

Zelensky, his Jewish heritage suggesting he could not abide by Nazi presence in his government and country (certainly the press is making something of Zelensky’s ethnicity, suggesting that it somehow makes Nazism an impossibility in Ukraine, as if a man’s ethnicity subsumes and negates untoward cultural and political tendencies), has, to put the matter charitably, nonetheless been struggling to disentangle Nazis from Ukraine’s military establishment. This entanglement is a long and storied one and one has to understand the throw of a century to grasp its significance. For example, the Azov Battalion, founded in 2014, has integrated with the National Guard. Its commander, Andriy Biletsky, was the leader of the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine. Several members of that organization followed Biletsky into Azov. To give you a sense of Biletsky’s mindset, the man believes the mission of Ukraine is to, in his own words, “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen.” Azov’s logo is a combination of two neo-Nazi symbols, the wolfsangel and the Sonnenrad. The Sonnenrad was displayed among those marching in Charlottesville, prompting Trump to categorically condemn neo-Nazism and white supremacy (a condemnation that, despite being preserved on video, the establishment media flipped in their reporting).

Golinkin notes that Ukraine’s far right encompasses more than Azov. There’s the Democratic Axe, the Right Sector, and the Resistance Movement Against Capitulation. Alerting his audience to the fact that the Nazis movement “regularly stages torchlight marches in honor of World War II-era Nazi collaborators,” Golinkin asks readers to imagine Charlottesville but with thousands of participants. Radio Free Europe (RFE) reported twenty thousand marchers at an event honoring the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which, according to RFE (remarkable given their history of rationalizing rightwing ambition), “carried out vicious acts of ethnic cleansing in which tens of thousands of ethnic Poles in the region were killed.” RFE reports that with the torches were also Nazi salutes.

While few Americans know much of anything about this, those whose experiences with Nazis are a matter of the worst atrocities in history are well aware of the rise of rank-and-file fascism in Europe and are highly concerned about it. “Kiev’s rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators—a hallmark of European far right movements—has been condemned by Jewish organizations including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry, Yad Vashem, and the World Jewish Congress,” writes Golinkin. Golinkin wonders why, if American pundits and politicians eagerly condemn Charlottesville, they appear willing to disregard fascism and white supremacy in Ukraine? “It’s difficult, if not impossible,” he writes, “to imagine mainstream media describing reports on Charlottesville as propaganda and questioning the motives of lawmakers who try to counter today’s alarming surge of white supremacy. Why shouldn’t we view Ukraine—a nation to which we send billions in foreign aid—in light of the same standards?”

Why does Zelensky have so much troubling dealing with the Nazi threat in his midsts? For one thing, Ukraine is a loose confederation of regions, several of which, as we have seen, consider themselves as autonomous and semi-autonomous, and many of them are majority ethnic Russians. Ukraine also has a thriving Jewish population (among the largest in Europe). Ukrainian Nazis loath ethnic Russians and Jews, and they’ve been terrorizing these populations for years. Putin is a student of history. He knows the perils of tolerating Nazi aggression—especially against his people. The Russians lost tens of millions to Hitler and the military forces under his command, the ranks of which organized ethnic groups from across Eastern Europe against the Russian people. The Ukrainian Nazis, as did the Croatian Ustashi, represented the most virulent strain of rank-and-file Nazism. Numerous scholars of the Holocaust have documented the grim fact that even the German SS were taken aback by the barbarity of their Eastern European counterparts during the Holocaust.

For another thing, Zelensky, who has been in power since May 2019, replacing the far-right Poroshenko government, the result of the 2014 US-backed coup that toppled the pro-Russian government, often finds the far right useful to push his anti-Russian line, which is supported by the United States and global elites. Moreover, Zelensky is a bit of an authoritarian himself. The United Nations Human Rights Council reported in December, in a document covering nearly two years of Ukrainian state action, that “fundamental freedoms in Ukraine have been squeezed” under the Zelensky regime. According to Nada Al-Nashif, Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations, “restrictions on the free expression of critical or unpopular opinions, and on participation in peaceful assemblies on sensitive topics, as well as the safety of human rights defenders in Ukraine were of concern.”

The report states: “Political and legislative developments resulted in restrictions on civic space, and attacks against opposition political parties, their members and staff impacted freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly and association, and the right to participate. Government sanctions in February and August of 2021, which led to the closure of television channels and online media outlets, were not in line with international human rights law as they limited public access to information and undermined critical journalism.”

The report documents numerous incidence targeting bloggers, journalists, and media professionals expressing opinions critical of the government and mainstream narratives. “Of particular concern is the lack of accountability for threats and violence targeting human rights defenders, media workers, and individuals who expose corruption, express opinions online, or attempt to participate in policy-making.” This included criticisms of COVID-19 restrictions. According to reporting by Jason Melanovski, of the World Socialist Web Site in February 2021 (WSWS is a publication of the Trotskyite International Committee of the Fourth International), Zelensky shut down three popular television stations associated with pro-Russian opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk. Medvedchuk was not the only prominent target of government repression.

Moreover, Melanovski reports, on December 2, Zelensky introduced several bills into the Ukrainian parliament that would be used to deny Donbas residents citizenship and voting rights. Donbas is the region where Donetsk and Luhansk have established independent republics. These measures put the lie to government denials that no coercive actions have been taken to pull the region back into the sphere of Ukrainian control. Melanovski continues, “Such anti-democratic measures could easily be used to deny citizenship and voting rights to not only separatists in the Donbass, but any Ukrainian who opposes the right-wing nationalist and war-mongering policies of the Zelensky government.” The measures would also strip citizenship from Ukrainians with Russian passports. The working class of the Donbas region have relatives living in Russia and use those passports to travel across the border to see family.

All this is not disconnected to US machinations in the region. As reported by Branko Marcetic, writing for Jacobin in mid-January of this year, the CIA has been working at least since 2015 with far right elements as part of the campaign of Western belligerence towards Russia. Putin is well aware that the West is using military and irregular forces in Ukraine against his country and that the most ready troops for such a campaign are those carrying in their marrow their hatred of Russians. This was the same strategy the CIA used in Afghanistan in developing the mujahideen there to launch attacks against the former Soviet Union (see Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan).

Also in 2015, to facilitate its clandestine work, Congress passed a spending bill with hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid to Ukraine, “one that was expressly modified to allow that support to flow to the country’s resident neo-Nazi militia, the Azov Regiment.” Why would the United States support a neo-Nazi organizations? Because, as Marcetic suggests, “its effectiveness in fighting Russian separatists.” Ukraine has become a proxy for a cold war against Russia. Speaking of President Biden, Marcetic writes, “The US alliance with Nazi-infected Ukraine has already proven awkward for a president who is both trying to strike a contrast with his far-right predecessor and establish the United States as the leader of a global effort to strengthen democracy.” Late last year,” writes Marcetic, “in a vote that went completely unreported in the press, the United States was one of just two countries (the other being Ukraine) to vote against a UN draft resolution ‘combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism.”’

In place of a record of diplomacy attempting to foment peace instead of war in the region, the evidence makes clear that Zelensky, leveraging his ties to the far right, and the United States, along with its allies, have worked hard to scuttle peace efforts; indeed, Zelensky has encouraged right-wing organizations to take up arms against Russia, with the United States supplying military aid and logistical support. Zelensky has made clear his steadfastness in his commitment to the proposition that there will be no compromise with Russia. So here we are, with Russian troops advancing on Kiev and Zelensky telling the media that “the fate of Ukraine is being decided right now.”

“In reality,” Melanovski concludes, “imperialism has been systematically building up a rabidly right-wing oligarchic regime and neo-fascist forces in Kiev in order to prepare both for a military conflict with Russia and the violent suppression of the working class.” All this is twisted by such organizations as the Atlantic Council (the same group that played a prominent role in the color revolution that saw the ousting of Trump from the White House), which recently claimed that it is not NATO expansion that concerns Putin but “Ukrainian democracy”—as if the purpose of organizations like the Atlantic Council is not to undermine democracy around the planet to prepare world proletariat for incorporation into a global neo-feudalist order. And there’s this: “Since taking office,” Marcetic writes, “Biden has launched an incipient domestic ‘war on terror’ on the basis of combating far-right extremism” in the United States. “Yet at the same time, three separate administrations, Biden’s included, have been providing training, weapons, and equipment to the very far-right movement that’s inspiring and even training those same white supremacists.”

* * *

The NATO piece is covered well by Chris Hedges in the article I cited at the top of this essay (I will cite it again here for your convenience). I do want to share an additional quote by from that article as it punctuates my own: “The war state needs enemies to sustain itself. When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become, in the words of Senator Angus King, the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe. The full-throated cries for war, echoed shamelessly by the press, are justified by draining the conflict of historical context, by elevating ourselves as the saviors and whoever we oppose, from Saddam Hussein to Putin, as the new Nazi leader.”

Also, with respect to the NATO question, I want to direct the reader’s attention to Norman Solomon’s “Bob Dylan, Masters of War, and the Ukraine Crisis,” published in Common Dreams. Solomon quotes Jeffrey Sachs, from his essay “The US should compromise on Nato to save Ukraine,” which lies behind the dense paywall of the Financial Times, “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the US forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.” Sachs notes, “Many insist that NATO enlargement is not the real issue for Putin and that he wants to recreate the Russian empire, pure and simple. Everything else, including NATO enlargement, they claim, is a mere distraction. This is utterly mistaken. Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin.” Sachs continues, “Neither the US nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging no NATO enlargement is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

As Hedges correctly points out, the appetite of the war machine sabotaged the post-Cold War context. “The war industry did not intend to shrink its power or its profits. It set out almost immediately to recruit the former Communist Bloc countries into the European Union and NATO. Countries that joined NATO, which now include Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia were forced to reconfigure their militaries, often through hefty loans, to become compatible with NATO military hardware.” He continues, “There would be no peace dividend. The expansion of NATO swiftly became a multi-billion-dollar bonanza for the corporations that had profited from the Cold War. (Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other US military equipment.) If Russia would not acquiesce to again being the enemy, then Russia would be pressured into becoming the enemy. And here we are.”

In the next section, I will take up the question of Ukrainian fascism, a subject that is not a tired as those in the know make it out to be (since they are the only ones who know about it, maybe it feels that way to them, but there are also other motives in the dismissal). Raising the matter of Ukrainian fascism is not an exercise in whataboutism, either. The role of fascism in US foreign policy is a crucial one to grasp if one wants to more fully understand the present situation. Before I turn directly to that, I want to briefly explain how I came to know about this and how it shaped my understanding of geopolitics, hence the purpose of a separate section.

In the second academic publication of my career, “The US and NATO in the Balkans,” appearing in 1999 in the Australia-based journal New Interventions (now defunct, so I have blogged the article here), I write about the US and NATO assault on Serbia in the context of the destruction of Yugoslavia. In that article, I discuss the network of fascists associated with the Washington establishment to shine light on the logic of sides-taking in that conflict. That’s right, the association of globalists and Nazis didn’t recently appear in the Ukraine; this is a decades-long association.

For that section of the article, I leaned heavily on a book with the provocative title: Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party. The book was the work of investigative journalism by Russ Bellant published in 1991. (Bellant is associated with Political Research Associates, which has published my work in the past in the pages of its journal Public Eye.) Bellant’s reporting concerned the association of the Republic National Committee with Nazis during the Reagan-Bush administration as well as with GWH Bush’s successful presidential run in 1988. It has become even more obvious in the years unfolding, as the foregoing demonstrates, that the network of Eastern European fascists plays a continuing role in actualizing, indeed in shaping US foreign policy in the region (indeed, around the world). This is a history with deep roots in relations between the US national security apparatus and émigré Nazi groups.

There are similarities with the US and NATO’s involvement in this present situation with how Clinton and NATO orchestrated the disintegration of the Yugoslavia. In the drive to globalization, which on the Eurasian landmass involves NATO expansion (an organization that frankly should no longer exist in light of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was its raison d’être), the corporate state and media conveniently left out of the narrative terrorist actions against ethnic Serbs, primarily in Kosovo, carried out by Albanian separatists as part of the strategy to further Balkanize the region. This is typical of deep state work on behalf of imperialist ambition. Facing parallel circumstances, Putin’s motives are threefold: (1) defend ethnic Russians in territories formerly under Soviet authority; (2) resist the expansion of NATO; and (3) disrupt the project to weaken the integrity of Russia. Similar motives are easily inferred from the actions of Slobodan Milošević in the Balkan crisis. (In addition to my 1999 articles, see Michael Parenti’s review of Louis Sell’s Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, published in the Fall 2002 edition of Mediterranean Quarterly. Noting that Sell is a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, Parenti correctly locates the book in the propaganda tradition of demonizing the democratically-elected leaders of countries scheduled for regime-change.)

The purpose of the next section is to alert readers to a a few works in the literature of US association with Nazis over the last several decades. Before I move on to that, I want to save a little time by alerting the reader to a synopsis of Bellant’s book in form of quotes I shared years ago on a listserv in a post unearthed by SourceWatch and used as the primary source in their entry on the American Security Council. I wrote this post in the early days of the Internet when listservs were essentially our blog platforms. The University of Colorado hosted several of them, and while I am not exactly sure which listserv this post initially appeared, I suspect it’s the Progressive Sociology Network (it was here that my first academic publication originated). SourceWatch describes my post as “a public email” and dates it 1996, which sounds about right. That was around the time the third edition of Bellant’s book appeared and I remember being quite keen on making sure that those around me were aware of the book and its findings.

That SourceWatch, maintained by the Center for Media and Democracy, recovered this post testifies to the investigative skills of those running that wiki; those listservs were pulled down years ago. I wrote extensively across listservs but have never found the time to dig into the Internet archives to recover them. How SourceWatch came to do so I have no idea. No matter; it may serve as a useful synopsis of Bellant’s findings, keeping in mind that no synopsis is a substitute for the original text.

* * *

It was Russ Bellant’s discovery that Eastern European fascists were working for the 1988 Bush presidential campaign, nine of whom resigned, including two from the Ukraine, that compelled Bellant to dive deeper into the connections between fascists and the Republican Party establishment. His research was the first time I learned about how deep the association ran (albeit I knew something about the early history of this, as I discuss below). The can of worms Bellant opened provides insights into the nature of deep state that, in turn, shed light on what we see unfolding today. For this reason, I want to spend some time highlighting some findings of Bellant’s work.

With respect to the earlier history, arguably the best source for that is Christopher Simpson, a professor at American University, and his 1989 book Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on The Cold War, Our Domestic, and Foreign Policy, and the follow up in 1995, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century.  In Blowback, Simpson, as the subtitle indicates, details the US government’s recruitment of former Nazis and the role of the far right in US foreign policy. It should be noted, given Bellant’s antipathy towards the Republican Party, that the national security apparatus, which includes the Central Intelligence Agency, was established in September 1947 when President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act into law. The National Security Agency, established in November 1952, was also Truman’s work. It was during the Truman presidency in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat that US intelligence services recruited Nazis to the United States. In The Splendid Blond Beast, Simpson’s reveals the role CIA chief Allen Dulles, a Truman appointment organized the escape of the highest-ranking SS officer, along with several of his senior aides. (Others besides Simpson has looked into this, as well. Investigative journalist Jack Anderson, for example, reported on the pro-Nazi backgrounds of some of the ethnic advisors in the Nixon administration back in 1971.)

What Simpson’s research finds is that, from early on, indeed at its birth in the aftermath of World War II, the US security state cultivated and maintained a close working relationship with fascists, and one of the primary purposes of this relationship was the geopolitical strategy of containment of the world communism, a doctrine articulated by George Kennan and executed by Truman. This was the foundation of the Cold War. And so Russians found themselves once more facing reactionary forces from the West. And they were, once more, Nazis. This relationship is the background that explains how GHW Bush, head of the RNC under Nixon, director of the CIA under Ford, and Vice-President under Reagan could be so comfortable with fascists working for his presidential campaign. Before the objection is raised that Bush was a torpedo bomber pilot in WWII, dramatically fished out of the water after being shot down by the Japanese in 1944 (a film camera at the ready), a bona fide war hero, it’s worth noting that Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, was found guilty of trading with enemy during World War II. Like father, like son.

Not all Republican administrations were intimate with the Easter European racist contingent. The Eisenhower, Reagan, and the Trump presidencies are remarkable for the fact that they break the continuity of elite machinations organizing and leveraging such associations. (I throw Reagan in there because, despite Bellant’s suggestive reporting, I find it difficult to believe the former New Dealer and Goldwater conservative would knowingly truck with Nazis. However, I have no problem believing the Head Spook of the CIA would.) The émigré Nazi groups Bellant identify in his book have been a fixture of the deep state all along and have exerted influence—and have been used—by numerous administrations across the alleged partisan divide (more public relations that anything, especially when it comes to economics and geopolitics). Americans had the best chance to learn about this when Bellant’s story broke. It got a fair amount of attention at the time. But it was quickly buried and forgotten; today, hardly anybody knows who Bellant is or what he found.

Of course, not everybody had forgotten Bellant’s contributions. In early March 2014, Paul Rosenberg interviewed Bellant for the activist publication Foreign Policy in Focus (a project of the Institute for Policy Studies) to discuss points of historical contact related to US reaction to Crimea’s declaration of independence from the Ukraine and Russia’s intervention in that dispute, which had the Obama Administration rattling sabers. The interview carried the title “Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret”and was published on the day Russia annexed the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol. (Realizing its significance, the The Nation picked up the interview ten days later, where the story pretty much died.)

Rosenberg prefaces the interview with this: “As the Ukrainian crisis has unfolded over the past few weeks, it’s hard for Americans not to see Vladimir Putin as the big villain. But the history of the region is a history of competing villains vying against one another; and one school of villains—the Nazis—have a long history of engagement with the United States, mostly below the radar, but occasionally exposed.” I will let the audience read the piece for itself, but I want to give you a flavor of the exchange and make some connections. The interview is useful because it focuses on the Ukrainian contingent.

In the interview, Bellant explains that the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a specific branch of it known as the Banderas (OUN-B), are behind the Svoboda party, which had received a number of key positions in the new interim regime. Remember, at the time of the interview, Ukraine was in the middle of a revolution (a US-backed coup, as many would have it), with Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych removed from office and fleeing the country in February of that year. Within days, the European Commission recognized Oleksandr Turchynov as Ukraine’s interim president. The popularity of the Svoboda party has since faded, but the Ukrainian fascist movement is a persistent network of far rightwing groups that move in and out of each other.

Bellant tells Rosenberg: “The OUN goes back to the 1920s, when they split off from other groups, and, especially in the 1930s began a campaign of assassinating and otherwise terrorizing people who didn’t agree with them. As World War II approached, they made an alliance with the Nazi powers, they formed several military formations, so that when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, they had several battalions that went into the main city at the time, where their base was, Lvov.” He describes “a documented history of them participating in the identification and rounding up Jews in that city, and assisting in executing several thousand citizens almost immediately. There were also involved in liquidating Polish group populations in other parts of Ukraine during the war.” 

Bellant notes that the OUN were backers of the 14th Waffen SS Division, the First Ukrainian division, all-Ukrainian division that became an armed element of the German military, OUN continues to defend its wartime role; indeed, members glorify that history. “If you look, insignia being worn in Kiev in the street demonstrations and marches, the SS division insignia still being worn. In fact, I was looking at photographs last night of it [again, the interview was conducted in March 2014] and there was a whole formation marching, not with 14th Division, but with the Second Division, it was a large division that did major battle around the Ukraine, and these marchers were wearing the insignia on the armbands of the Second Division.” Bellant notes that “current leaders of Svoboda have made blatantly anti-Semitic remarks that call for getting rid of Muscovite Jews and so forth. They use this very coarse threatening language that anybody knowing the history of World War II would tremble at.”

Much of the rest of the interview details about how the Ukrainian fascists came to occupy a central position in the association between Washington and the Eastern European émigré community, which also includes émigrés from Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, and Romania, those same ethnic groups that comprised the multinational alliance on behalf of the Germans. In the United States, the groups organized as Captive Nations Committees, depicting themselves as oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe, oppressed by the Soviet Union, thus speaking for the Warsaw Pact nations. Bellant fudges a bit here to lay the blame on the Eisenhower administration, who, he claims, “made the policy decision in the early 1950s” to bring Nazis into the apparatus. But, as Simpson’s work makes clear, this occurred under Truman and through leadership appointed by Truman. Nonetheless, the Captive Nations Committee gravitated towards the RNC and mobilized their communities for the Republicans. Bellant notes a special relationship with Nixon who “in 1960s actually had close direct ties to some of the leaders like the Romanian Iron Guard, and some of these other groups.”

“When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968,” Bellant explains, “he made a promise to these leaders that they would, if he won the presidency, he would make them the ethnic outreach arm of the Republican National Committee on a permanent basis, so they wouldn’t be a quadrennial presence, but a continuing presence in the Republican Party. And he made that promise through a guy named Laszlo Pasztor, who served five years in prison after World War II for crimes against humanity.” Emphasizing the particular ethnic groups involves, Bellant tells Rosenberg: “They didn’t have a Russian affiliate because they hated all Russians of all political stripes.” There were no Jewish affiliates, either. He notes that “for a while they had a German affiliate but some exposure of the Nazi character of the German affiliate caused it to be quietly removed, but other [Nazi] elements were retained.” Crucially, the RNC protected the émigré groups from the Office of Special Investigation (OSI), which was “investigating the presence of Nazi war criminals in the United States.”

Bellant usefully explains how all this worked its way into contemporary European politics. The OUN was also “embedded in a variety of ways in Europe as well, like Radio Free Europe which is headquartered in Munich. A lot of these groups in the ABN were headquartered in Munich under the sponsorship of Radio Free Europe. From there they ran various kinds of operations where they were trying to do work inside the Warsaw Pact countries. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a number of them moved back into the Ukraine as well as the other respective countries, and began setting up operations there, and organizing political parties. They reconstituted the veterans group of the Waffen SS, they held marches in the 1990s in the Ukraine, and organized political parties, in alliance with the United States, and became part of what was called the Orange Revolution in 2004, when they won the election there.” It was clear that the United States government favored the far-right elements there. “The United States was very aggressive in trying to keep the nationalists in power,” Bellant tells Rosenberg. “The United States was spending money through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was pumping money into various Ukrainian organizations.”

I encourage the audience to read the Rosenberg-Bellant exchange and consult the other sources I have referenced here. This is a deep rabbit hole and I cannot begin to cover it all in this blog. But I want to share enough to substantiate the claims I am along in this essay. Since so much good work has been performed by others, I will leave the reader to that body of work if they so choose to follow up on all of this.

I want to emphasize that, given the title of Bellant’s book and those associations he emphasizes in his interview, the linkages between the United States and Eastern European rightwing extremists are bipartisan and represent a persistent element in the establishment project to weaken those nations considered obstacles to standing up a new world order organized around transnational corporate governance and financial control. Establishing hegemony, as Antonio Gramsci told us from his cell in Mussolini’s prison, requires marginalizing ones enemy while at the same time pulling the enemy of ones enemy into the sphere of ones power. All this depends on manufacturing consent around the interests and goals of the hegemonic elite, in this case the transnationalist corporate class. It is this dynamic that finds majorities throughout the West reflexively taking one side over another in a conflict they know little to nothing about.

I find it troubling to see the rightwing in America neglect the Ukrainian fascism problem on account of pathological anti-communism. That stance misses the point both ways. Constituents of the populist right need to be careful or else they will find themselves making common cause with that brand of rightwing ideology from which they have for decades endeavored to distinguish themselves—and progressive Democrats have sought to make an automatic association. This is unhelpful for the populist project to transcend the left-right divide to build a mass-based popular movement against the corporatocracy.

This is why this is such important political work for readers of Freedom and Reason to do. The establishment has convinced the vast majority across the trans-Atlantic sphere of influence that we should all regard Russia as the enemy. Indeed, for those who read this blog and feel like its slighting the other side, they should admit that, even if they know nothing about the facts of the case, they’re well aware that the other side suffers no shortage of oxygen. The establishment is powerful; it can fend for itself. The situation needs counterpoint.

* * *

The corporate state uses different tactics at different levels at different times and in different places. Rank-and-file Nazis are the shock troops of a much larger force seeking to dominate the world. Deep state actors in the West have been cultivating the forces of extremism on the ground in Ukraine and elsewhere in order to expand and entrench the transnational corporate order. Corporate power has never had a problem with national socialism per se, which is not really socialism at all, but an instantiation of corporatism in a particular time and place. The greater logic of corporatism underpins the European Union (the fascist origins of which will be the subject of a future blog entry) and the transnational world order.

World War II was waged because Germany, late to the imperialism game, pursued territorial expansion rather than the emerging neoimperialism paradigm. Walter Benjamin and Franz Neumann suggests that war is the only outcome of this particular brand of corporatism. Perhaps. My view is that, had Nazi Germany pursued a different path, had they avoided total war, transnational corporatism would be much further along than it is presently. The transnationalist project has been unfolding for more than a century and one might consider world war as something of a stress test for the emerging world order. Democracy and liberalism are once more suffocating amid the totalization of corporate statism. The current conflict may prove to be the same sort of thing—hopefully at a much smaller scale. The point is that all of this is connected. Think relationally, not categorically, if you want to understand the longue durée.

Those who suffer in all of this—as in every war—are ordinary folk. Elements of the US government I have opposed my entire life have brought this to the peoples of Ukraine at least as much as Russia has. Zelensky and Putin need to talk to bring an end to hostilities and address the misery they have wrought. The announcement coming from the Zelensky’s office that a delegation would meet with Russian officials for talks near the Belarus border is hopeful news. At the same time, Russia has put its nuclear forces on high alert, returning to consciousness a fact we don’t like to think about: Russia is still armed to the teeth with civilization-ending weaponry (as is the United States and a handful of other nations). Another piece of hopeful news, reported by USA Today, is that a senior Defense Department official told journalists that Russia is under no threat from the United States and its NATO allies. Enlarging the conflict would only serve the interests of no one whose interests matter from the standpoint of humanity. The suffering of ordinary folk would only be enlarged by either NATO military strikes on Russia or Americans fighting Russians side-by-side with Ukrainians on the ground. That’s a nightmare scenario I would rather not even work out in my head. I shutter as I write it.

Again, this was never our fight, and the US having prepared Ukrainians for war does not obligate Americans to wage that war (although it may obligate those who seek justice to prosecute those who put folks in this situation or at least remove them from power). My sons owe nothing to Ukraine. Even if I thought they had a duty to fight on the grounds of honoring a commitment to an alliance, even if I could convince myself that none of this were part of a grand plan by the global elite, I could never be comfortable with my sons choosing comradeship with fascists and upholding an alliance forged by leaders who do not represent the interests of the American republic. Ukraine has done nothing to deserve the loyalty of my family. Nor has the Biden regime. The Ukrainian flag is not my flag. And Americans need to take their flag back from the globalists who took it from them.

As noted in a previous blog entry (Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds), there is a robust social psychology in the discipline where I hold advanced degrees. George Herbert Mead, a principal founder of the perspective Herbert Blumer tagged “symbolic interactionism,” describes his own views as “social behaviorism.” Erving Goffman writes powerfully on mental life, as you will see below, as does Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (social constructionism). Howard Becker and his cohort pioneered labeling theory. There is also a robust tradition in sociology of critical examination of the institution and practice of medicine, including psychiatry, while clarifying and deepening understandings of the latter. This essay is yet another instantiation of that tradition, leveraged here to throw some light on the controversy over Texas examining the practice of “gender-affirming care” (see also A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer and Living at the Borderline—You are Free to Repeat After Me).

Executive and legislative action in Texas concerning medical interventions for minors suffering from gender dysphoria is rooted in state law that prevents the sterilization (surgical and chemical) of minors. A person in Texas must be 21 years of age to consent to sterilization. Surgical procedures and cross-sex hormones used in “gender-affirming care” can and do result in sterilization. Thus, the question of whether such procedures constitute child abuse is a reasonable one. These procedures must be examined to see if they square with state law.

One needs to understand history to understand why such laws are in place and the establishment media is doing a very poor job of helping the public understand history. The United States has a long and storied past of those in authority, aided and often pushed by medical authorities, who profit from their participation, altering the reproductive capacity of both females and males to reduce social problems and shape demographic patterns reducing subpopulation numbers. For more than a century, progressives pushed an ideology of eugenics that used medical interventions to disrupt reproduction for the purpose of social engineering. 

You may have missed my blogs on this (the principle ones: The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes; On the Ethics of Compulsory Vaccination; Biden’s Biofascist Regime), but an early version of the mandatory vaccination law (smallpox) that progressives are keen on seeing instituted everywhere, a desire that includes requiring shots in arms for children, was cited by the Supreme Court back in the 1920s to justify state laws mandating tubal ligation and, by extension, other procedures, such as hysterectomy, partial and total. This decision was made even though the precedent established by the previous court sharply limited the ruling to one vaccine and, moreover, to the question of state not federal power.

It was after the Nazi medical experiments in which bodies were altered in various ways by doctors interested in various things that the horror of allowing the medical-industrial complex to “treat” those who cannot consent to “treatment” shook the world, however unevenly. This led to states passing laws (not quickly nor broadly enough) that not only eliminated mandatory sterilization programs (nearly thirty states had such laws at one point, as did Canada, Great Britain, Sweden, and many other European countries), but passed laws recognizing the special vulnerability of those under the ages of 18-21, thereby forbidding medical authorities, including psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, as well as the social engineers, from taking advantage of immaturity to obtain “consent” for unnecessary or questionable medical interventions. (For a discussion of Nuremberg see above links as well as The Immorality of Vaccine Passports and the Demands of Nuremberg.)

With respect to minors, in order to make medical decisions for them, the question turns on whether a medical intervention is necessary and reasonable (safe and effective) to prevent or treat a legitimate physiological illness or a severe psychological malady that roots in physiology. Psychiatric interventions that involve pharmaceuticals and surgery are troubling given the problems with the validity of diagnostic categories in this field. I have examined the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) across its many editions and what cannot escape such an exercise if one is critical is how categories change over time, as well as come and go, and the overarching drive to medicalize what are, as Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Mental Illness described as “problems in living” and “indirect forms of communication.” (Szasz went on to document the horrors of psychiatry in The Manufacture of Madness, after taking up the question of ethics in, among other works, Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry.) It may be one thing for a consenting adult to agree to radical body modification (this is not itself a settled question), but the rules must be different for those who cannot reasonably be considered capable of consenting to life-altering chemical and surgical interventions. Consent in medical treatment is essential to human rights, and consent requires the capacity to reason—and an objective ad verifiable reason for putting a person in such a situation.

It is an easy matter to find out what moved Szasz to criticize his own profession. The conscientious student of history will find alongside the horrors of eugenics the horror of chemical and surgical interventions in the realm of psychiatry. I will spare readers the details of psychic surgery (the above image should serve the purpose of horrifying you). But I do need to emphasize the long-standing association supposed among medical professionals between the reproductive parts of human beings and emotional and psychological function. It is no accident that the terms “hysterectomy” and “hysteria” both find their root in the Greek word for uterus: hystera. Theories of the association continue into the twenty-first century.

The medical-industrial establishment has a long history of altering brains and uteruses to remedy emotional and psychological maladies. It could be expected that doctors would move to altering other parts of bodies to achieve these ends. Surgeons have moved well beyond facelifts, rhinoplasty, and breast augmentation to radically altering human bodies to fit the delusions and desires of their patients (see Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds). And where doctors won’t go, tattooists and piercers will—ear-pointing, injecting dye in eyes, tongue splitting, subdermal and transdermal implants, whatever, it seems. It’s only a matter of time before doctors get in on all the action. There’s money to be made and they have the power to declare such modifications the domain of their profession. And why not? If complete removal of a person’s genitalia is not the paradigm of extreme, it is hard to imagine what else could be. The arm is an appendage, too.

The law in this area needs to be sorted out. It is understood that, as a general rule, body modification is illegal without informed consent, and that would necessarily make it illegal to modify the body of a minor without an objective and verifiable medical reason, the intervention necessarily reasonable, who cannot consent to such a procedure. Even then it is a tricky matter. We should not suppose that a mother suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy should be allowed to have her daughter surgically altered for the mother’s esteem and reputation. We certainly would not think it okay for a mother to mutilate the genitalia of her daughter for cultural or religious reasons. Do we? (Yet we allow the father to mutilate his son in the same way.) Other areas of the law are murkier. Consent alone doesn’t necessarily make a procedure legal. As this article on FindLaw notes, for example, “sadomasochism that results in bodily harm” is “recognized as neither socially useful nor morally acceptable, and therefore cannot be legalized by consent, even if the person is an adult.” (Given what one can see for free on Pornhub, this must not be the rule in every state.) With respect to the moves Texas is making, the point of the exercise seems to be to shed some light on some of the murkier areas of the law.

As I suggested in my previous blog entry, beyond sorting out the law, what the world needs is not only a healthy dose of anti-psychiatry (which is not to say there isn’t madness, Munchausen by proxy being an instantiate of such), but more broadly a healthy skepticism of the promethean confidence of the medical profession. In the age of technocracy, the study of the world of things has moved beyond science into scientism. The nightmares of Mary Shelley are upon us. One must therefore consider the sociology of all this (even if my discipline has gone to the dogs, the sociological is real). The desire to transcend one’s physical body may be a manifestation of the trans-humanism that seems all to eager to ushering out of the theater of man his human right to bodily integrity. Progressives notions of consent are a jumble. Sometimes the world needs to take a deep breath. As it should have before it let Walter Jackson Freeman drive his icepick into the brains of his patients.

With Pfizer conducting trials of an omicron-specific mRNA product, it’s imperative we educate the public about the science surrounding SARS-CoV-2 and the so-called vaccines being pushed on the public.

The mRNA and viral vector COVID shots are therapeutics not vaccines. Health authorities admit this now (they are even now claiming that these products were meant to be therapeutics all along). These products reduce symptoms of disease without immunizing people from disease. There is no such thing as “breakthrough cases” (which is why the term is almost always in quotes in the medical literature as it always in on Freedom and Reason); people contract and spread the virus whether or not they are vaccinated.

The mass vaccination program thus comes with a (let’s assume this is the case) unintended consequence: many of those who have been vaccinated carry more virulent mutants (or variants, as they are popularly known) of the virus but feel well enough to go out into public and spread those mutants; by enhancing the ability of sick people to interact with others, these products disrupt the natural process of the virus, which is to mutate towards greater transmissibility and diminished virulence. Omicron notwithstanding (Omicron originated in the least vaccinated population in the world), technology affords more virulent mutants an unfair competitive advantage.

As noted, Pfizer is now conducting trials of the omicron-specific mRNA therapeutic. If this product is released before omicron completely subsides (it has already substantially subsided, as you can see below), and the company can get enough people to take it—or persuade other companies and governments to mandate it—we will see the likely a continuation of the pandemic, with possible mutants more virulent than omicron (which isn’t particularly virulent) emerging, possibly more virulent than delta and earlier mutants. Indeed, as I write this, public health authorities have detected an Omicron mutant hat may be more virulent. They are reporting that it has arrived on America’s east coast.

In light of the history of these technologies (mRNA and viral-vector), the campaign to inject tens of millions of children with mRNA technology is especially troubling. Thankfully, Pfizer has back off seeking authorization from the FDA for its mRNA platform for administration to children under five years of age (“need more data”). But it is still shooting spike protein into the bodies of children five and older.

On Sunday, the busiest day of the news cycle, The New York Times published a blockbuster: “The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects.” The subtitle: “The agency has withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations and, until recently, wastewater analyses.” The opening paragraph is a bombshell: “For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public.”

Why? There are actually two “whys” here. Why is the CDC withholding data and why is the NYTimes now reporting this fact? The CDC says it’s withholding data because they they are worried about vaccine hesitancy. According to the NYTimes, “The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.” How could misinterpretation be a possibility given how successful the government and the media have portrayed these vaccines? Are we to understand that the claims of efficacy are not beyond reproach? Are we really prepared to accept that the government is withholding evidence for our own good? What is in these data?

We know that the data the CDC is particularly worried about concerns the booster they pushed on 18- to 49-year-olds. Severe COVID for this very large age cohort is rare. Excepting those with metabolic disorder (obesity) and immune deficiency, boosters are really unnecessary for these individuals. Public health has never been the reason for pushing boosters on younger Americans. This cohort is targeted for profit and to rationalize expansion of the biosecurity state. Do the data show little or no benefit? (Any benefit would likely only be statistically marginal in light of cohort size.) Do the data indicate poor safety profile for the technology? Do the risks of death and injury from these therapeutics outweigh their marginal benefits? Otherwise, why worry about hesitancy (i.e., reluctance to justify the government transferring billions of dollars into the pockets of Big Pharma)?

The second “why” strongly suggests a desire to get out ahead of the story—which was always waiting to be written—that the CDC and FDA have been lying about the threat of COVID-19 and the safety of these products. The Biden regime turned to the NYTimes to soften the blow. When in the future references are made to the CDC coverup, it can be dismissed as “old news.” It is up to us to continue pushing the story out there.

The desire of the power elite to limit the ability to push out news like this, as well as the wealth of research and the army of experts who contradict the official narrative, California Assemblyman Evan Low (Democrat) introduced Assembly Bill 2098 on Feb. 15 that would prevent licensed physicians and surgeons from “spreading COVID-19 misinformation.” If passed, the law would sanction disciplinary actions by the Medical Board of California and the Osteopathic Medical Board of California to those who promote alleged misinformation. What is COVID-19 misinformation? As suggested above, any scientific position that is at odds with the narrative established by corporate-captured doctors and scientists and their institutions. Such censorship is contrary to the norms of science—and make no mistake, this bill is an attempt to formalize corporate state censorship using the legitimacy of the law. Even rightwing libertarians would have to concede that this is censorship. If passed, this law would serve as a model for other state legislatures.

This Friday past (the slowest of day of the news cycle), the White House released its Notice on the Continuation of the National Emergency Concerning the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-⁠19) Pandemic. (I am sure all of my readers are aware of the vote in the Canadian parliament that affirmed Prime Minister Justice Trudeau’s declaration of the state of emergency.) Biden’s notice extends the national emergency beyond March 1: “Therefore, in accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing the national emergency declared in Proclamation 9994 concerning the COVID-19 pandemic.” Therefore what? The pandemic is over. The biofascist regime persists despite the fact that the pandemic is over.

One suspects that part of this is a scheme to give secretaries of state reason to override state constitutions and pursue another round of postal voting, which will help Democrats in the upcoming primaries and elections that are sure to go sideways unless progressives perpetrate another act of massive voter fraud.

I want to close with a reality check. I know the reservoir of good will towards doctors and appreciation of scientists and technologists runs deep. But doctors, scientists, and technologists are human, and as humans they are corruptible and can be greedy and self-serving and often are. President Eisenhower warned us about what would happen when the corporate state captured the experts. Developments in the meantime have fulfilled that prophecy.

Remember, as I reported recently on Freedom and Reason, the third leading cause of death in America is medical error. This is an industry that is comfortable with death and injury. They know the likelihood of being punished for following orders, let alone criminally charged for harming patients, is next to nil. Do you really think the “side effects” of these vaccines bother doctors and scientists captured by the system? To them, you’re a consumer (in many ways, you are a commodity, one that is already worked by the food industry). It’s not personal. Their bed-side manner and pretense to beneficence are a charade. That’s public relations. You are manipulated into trusting them for business.

No notion is more indicative of the technocratic mindset and of the anti-principle of profit over people than that we should let doctors and scientists determine our freedom.

Under cover of and enabled by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declaration of a state of emergency in Canada (the last Canadian leader to assume emergency powers was Pierre Trudeau, Trudeau’s father, in 1970), Ottawa police are now arresting peaceful protestors at gunpoint, zip tying their wrists and ankles and hauling them off to jail. Arriving in armored vehicles, with drones flying overhead and snipers positioned on rooftops, highly-militarized officers with batons have descended on protestors in the streets, blinding them with pepper spray and tear gas, tossing stun grenades into and driving horses through crowds with children, disabled, and elderly people present. The scenes are horrific. We mustn’t deny what this is. This is tyranny.

The protestors—our fellow Americans to our north—are demanding with nonviolent acts of resistance an end to the authoritarian controls the state has unjustly imposed on their lives—and the state is meeting those just demands with more and greater violations of basic liberties and rights, using the same tools against citizens they have used against foreign terrorists. And now the state has turned to open violence. Justin Trudeau’s authoritarianism has sanctioned the exercise of naked power.

Ottawa police: “If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges, absolutely.”

I seem to have missed the part where there was any actual crime..pic.twitter.com/ECPmDQWYUp

— Michael P Senger (@michaelpsenger) February 20, 2022

We are witnessing extraordinary political action perpetrated by a nominally democratic government on those it is in principle organized to represent, whose liberties and rights its officials are sworn to defend and protect. We must recognize this for what it is: an instantiation of the new fascism that is sweeping the West. This is the end of democracy. And, at a human level, while state violence is not unexpected given the irrational moment we are suffering through, it should nonetheless shock the conscience of anybody whose empathetic circuitry has not been disabled by fear or corrupted by ideology.

This moment demands we testify to our choice of comrades. I am posting this today not only to alert you to the situation but to make publicly known with whom I stand and for what I stand. I stand with the protesters and for their cause. I condemn the actions of the Canadian government and call on the police to stand down and respect the human rights of those they are sworn to protect. And I call on Justin Trudeau to resign. He has betrayed Canada.

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien shows Winston the future: “There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.” He then tells Winston, frighteningly: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Humanity has agency. So I leave you with these words from the Declaration of Independence by the British colonists in 1776, what Karl Marx correctly identifies in his sensational letter to Abraham Lincoln (on the occasion of Lincoln’s re-election to the US presidency 1864) as the first declaration of the Rights of Man:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

From a public health standpoint, mandating masking for those who have not been vaccinated, while allowing those who have been vaccinated to choose whether to wear a mask, is irrational. Vaccination does not prevent the transmission of this virus. That’s a scientific fact. If you are vaccinated, you are just as likely to get the virus from a vaccinated person as from a person who is not vaccinated. And if you or the other person with whom you are interacting is not wearing a properly-fitted respirator, you have near-zero protection from exposure to the virus. The masks that are mandated will not protect you. Again, that’s a scientific fact.

Further adding to irrationalism of such a policy from a scientific standpoint is the fact the majority of population has had and recovered from this virus (multiply the number of documented cases by at least a factor of four and look at the number). Moreover, having the virus is better than a vaccine in every respect. Demanding that those with natural immunity who have foregone the vaccine is demanding those who are less likely to spread the virus wear a mask. It makes no sense from a public health standpoint.

Let’s be truthful about what this policy is about: stigmatizing those who have not submitted to vaccination is not because they represent any threat to others but is an authoritarian tactic intended to punish those who have not followed the commands of those in power. As with the symbol Hester Prynne was compelled to wear in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter to publicly mark her as an adulterer, the mask is wearable stigmata intended to shame those who choose not to or cannot subject their bodies to the unreasonable demands of corporations and governments. Stigmatization is a medieval practice. It’s an expression of neo-Puritanism. Neo-Puritanism, alongside censorship (for heresy) and cancelling (or excommunication), is a feature of the New Fascist attitude. It’s a sign of biofascist desire.

I have only worn a mask in public where it is required that everybody wear a mask regardless of vaccination status. I have always recognized that doing so was participating in an irrational practice, but I did so to avoid being punished. There was also a degree of solidarity in there, I must admit. That fellow-feeling kept me from fighting the matter to the extent I probably should have. So many of my comrades were willing to sign up to mandatory mask-wearing. But to punish some and not others is a matter of fundamental justice. That is a matter of discrimination. To be separated from others via the imposition of stigmata is destructive to solidarity. This we must reject.

Show your solidarity with those who are subjected to such irrational demands by writing letters of protests to their places of business. If the corporation where you work has this policy, write me and let me know. I will write a letter and encourage others to do so.

“Sanewashing” is a technique of reframing a crazy idea, movement, or persona as moderate or “sane” and “reasonable.” Remember the call to “abolish/defund” the police? Sound crazy, right? Who will be in charge of public safety if we abolish the police? Sanewashers want to save the idea come in and clean it up. “We don’t really want to abolish or defund the police,” the sanewasher says. “What we really want is to reform policing.” (It appears that concept of sanewashing was coined in reference to the defund the police movement.)

What’s wrong with reforming policing? Nothing. We’ve been reforming the police for decades (and we have been quite successful at it). That’s not the real purpose of the the sanewashed version. Sanewashers are abolitionists interested in weakening public safety who want to make sure that the audience perceives the idea as reasonable and not crazy. Sanewashers make the crazy sound normal. (In my essay Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds, I reference sanewashing throughout, I just hadn’t yet learned of the term.)

Once you know about the practice of sanewashing, you start to see it all around you. Sanewashing and similar strategies have been a general trend in our society since the 1960s, at least in a big way. The term can be expanded to include rhetoric defining down deviance (what the defund the police tendency harbors at its core) and normalizing mental illness, to take two obvious examples. We also see it in campaigns to normalize obesity, cutting, and other extreme acts of self-harm. One may expand the scope of the term because the angle of sanewashing is to accuse those who challenge a desired mode of existence of misrepresenting that desire. So the desire to pursue a diet that makes one unhealthy is redefined in such a way as to portray the norm that stigmatizes that desire as discrimination rather than a check on self-destructive behavior.

To be clear, I am not talking about efforts to destigmatize criminal or psychiatric labels or health conditions. Rehabilitation depends on reintegrating lawbreakers into society. Successful treatment of mental illness depends on reducing alienation of those who suffer from such illness. Obese people need medical attention. I am a big proponent of destigmatization and helping people get the help they need. Rather, I am talking about a strategy that denies criminal behavior, psychiatric disorders, and so forth are actual things or things that cause actual harm by redefining those things as normal and even laudatory. The idea that depolicing society is not harmful to public safety is a dangerous one if put into practice. Indeed, just the idea that the police should be defunded because the police are racist against black people has promoted criminal violence by demoralizing a segment of the population.

What explains sanewashing? It’s in part consequence of cultural relativism and postmodernist thought. The idea that there’s no truth or that there are multiple truths, each dependent upon one’s own subjective perspective, is corrosive to normative action. This is a manifestation of anarchy. The denial of a shared reality with objective physical, natural, material, and normative structures that exist or have evolved to protect members of society from harmful behavior presents obvious problems for freedom and reasonable expectation of safety and the preservation of the social order that guarantees liberty and rights.

This is not an argument for the status quo. Anybody who follows me know that I am a proponent of identifying problems people face and overcoming them. The social problems that concern me are too many to identify here, but a good example is my advocacy for the decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. I believe that individuals should have the right to determine what they do to their bodies. That’s the default position. But there are limits. I do not support, for example, the surgical removal of ears on the grounds that the person seeking such a procedure suffers from a pathological loathing of ears. If the person wants to remove his ears, it may be difficult to stop him. He might get a sharp knife and sneak off into the woods. But we can surely stop surgeons from harming people with psychiatric disorders by criminalizing ear removal without a legitimize medical reason. As I explain in Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds, mental illness is never a legitimate reason to mutilate a person.

In Chapter 3 of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels identify the various “socialist” movements of the day in order to distinguish their brand of socialism from the rest (most of which do not appear to be actually socialists).

Among the competitors is “conservative or bourgeois socialism,” a brand of socialism in name only of special significance for the contemporary observer. Marx and Engels’ description of conservative socialism bears striking resemblance to the present-day ideology of the corporate state. Marx and Engels describe this ideology as belonging to that “part of the bourgeoisie [that is] desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.” I will reproduce most of the remainder of this section from that notorious pamphlet below without further comment save for one at the end.

“To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

“The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

“A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

“Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech. Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class.”

In other words, the corporatist solution to the problems of class struggle is a fake socialism that today we call “progressivism,” known in Europe as “social democracy.”

According to PEN America, over the course of 2021, and continuing into the new year, legislatures across the United States introduced dozens of separate bills that portend the restriction of teaching of children and adults, as well as the training of administrators and teachers, in K-12 schools and higher education. Included in these bills are are restrictions on training in public institutions and state agencies. “The majority of these bills target discussions of race, racism, gender, and American history,” PEN warns, “banning a series of ‘prohibited’ or ‘divisive’ concepts for teachers and trainers operating in K-12 schools, public universities, and workplace settings. These bills appear designed to chill academic and educational discussions and impose government dictates on teaching and learning. In short: They are educational gag orders.”

It is true that some of the bills go to far. However, we have to keep in mind that efforts to impose “content- and viewpoint-based censorship,” have as counterparts efforts to impose content- and viewpoint-based ideologies on children, college students, and workers. There is indeed a potential problem in signaling “that specific ideas, arguments, theories, and opinions may not be tolerated by the government.” But this depends on what those ideas are and who is targeted to receive them. PEN contends that, while the legislation includes “language that purports to uphold free speech and academic inquiry. This language, intended to help safeguard these bills from legal and constitutional scrutiny, does little or nothing to change the essential nature of these bills as instruments of censorship.” This is a claim of which we must be skeptical. The problem lies in the deployment of the term “censorship.” It is not censorship to prevent an institution of public instruction to indoctrinate those under its charge in particular ideologies.

There are things that administrators and teachers wish to expose children to that should be age-restricted. If you don’t understand this then you don’t understand basic developmental psychology. Preventing teachers from discussing with five-years-olds the possibility that may not be the sex indicated by the chromosome and gonads should be uncontroversial. Little kids don’t get abstractions, They have vivid imaginations and are often unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. They are highly impressionable and suggestible. If you know about the satanic ritual hysteria of the 1980s and, more broadly, the problem of social contagion, then you understand why we have to be careful about what we introduce to a captive audience of children. We also have to understand that the desire to expose young children to gender ideology is a political project. Those pushing the ideology don’t deny this.

As for the things administrators and teachers wish to expose to older children, in high school and middle school, there is a difference between debating and discussing ideas about race and gender and compelling children or creating an environment in which children feel compelled to receive as true and to adopt as personal commitment particular political-ideological lines. In its totality, the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights protects freedom of conscience, speech, and association. A necessary part of that fundamental freedom is freedom from compelled thought. Indeed, one difference—perhaps the biggest difference—between a free society and an authoritarian one is the right to freely choose what one believes and says.

It is one thing to teach high school students in a social studies class about world religions. It is quite another thing to have them to repeat slogans associated with a particular religious doctrine. You can no more obligate a student to list the pillars of faith in Islam than to chant that the only path to salvation and ever-lasting life is through Jesus Christ. The same is true with partisan political ideologies. There can be no attempt to recruit students to any political party. The same is true with gender and race doctrines. Gender and race doctrines are ideological in the same way that religion is ideological. Compelling children or making children feel compelled to adopt a gender or race doctrine violates the very essence of the First Amendment. It is moreover a violation of their fundamental human rights under international law. A public school’s task is not the climb into a child’s head and either install or uninstall ideologies. Public schools are not to be reeducation camps or a series of programming/deprogramming sessions.

This problem has nothing to do with requiring students to produce the correct answer on a math or science text, use correct grammar and spelling in their essays, or even state accurately the facts of history as reached through consensus (open to revision) by professional historians. However, if you indoctrinate students in the belief that that math, science, and language rules are ideological systems, say the expression of “white supremacy,” or that historical understandings hailing from the standpoint of marginalized groups must be given epistemic privilege, then you run afoul of the First Amendment (and the norms of objectivity). If you teach children as fact that some of them live on stolen land, that some of them bear historical responsibility for the actions of their ancestors, or that some of them enjoy racial privilege at the expense of other children with a different skin color, then you run afoul of the First Amendment, not to mention the truth. You are not teaching in these instances. You are engaged in indoctrination.

As a matter of democratic principle, almost everything public educators do should be transparent to parents and taxpayers. This does not mean that teachers should not enjoy academic freedom or freedom of conscience, or that in the case of abusive relations at home children should not enjoy some expectation of confidence with a counselor (admittedly a tricky area, there are extraordinary cases). Rather, it means curricula and pedagogical techniques should be available for review by parents and concerned and interested citizens.

In a democracy, the people have a right to know what the institutions that serve them and their communities (and I mean here actual communities, not abstract or rhetorical ones) are doing and to criticize those policies and practices—and to reform them if they do not meet constitutional standards. Public education should not be a black box. Public education should not consist of programs to indoctrinate children in the ideologies consuming the professional-managerial class that has captured the institutions of our republic.

I am writing this today because the flood of bills coming out of the states concerning race and gender ideology are uniformly met by progressives as violative of academic freedom—a sentiment reflected in the PEN document I have shared with you. To be sure, some of the bills go too far by essentially banning discussion of ideas that may, in an age-appropriate manner, and in an even-handed and objective manner, be entertained in a classroom. But the blanket condemnation of these bills is knee-jerk. It does not reflect what is actually in many of them. Moreover, a lot of what will follow passage of these bills will work itself out in practice. There will be court challenges. There will be an emerging consensus. But something must be done to stifle the woke turn corrupting public education. Public education has become clearly ideological and in a particular direction. It shouldn’t be ideological at all. It may not be possible to get ideology out of everything, but this should be the goal.

I have heard the righteous indignation from teachers about these bills (remember, I am a college teacher). Administrators and teachers as functionaries of a public institutions really don’t have a right be get defensive over calls for transparency. When it comes to the rights of individuals before state power, then the notion that, if one has nothing to hide, then one should not remain silent, has purchase. But this principle is not true for the government and its institutions and its functionaries. Government actors who attempt to conceal the operation of public institutions deserve suspicion and are subject to review. The burden switches in these respective situations. If they’re doing nothing wrong, then there is no reason to hide curricula and pedagogy from parents and the public generally—and administrators and teachers shouldn’t be the ones deciding what’s right and wrong in a democracy. That’s for the people to decide where not limited by the inherent rights of the individual. When it comes to children, parents have a special right to know what is going on and to object if they believe it is harming their children.

What you can do as a defender of democratic and liberal freedoms is tell your legislators where these bills go too far and how they can be improved, and then help your neighbor understand the importance of transparency and public and parental oversight in curricular and pedagogical matters.

(For more about the training piece of this problem see Can I Get an “Amen” to That? No, But Here’s Some Fairy Dust; The Woke Church and the Threat to Free Speech and Religious Liberty. For more on critical race theory, see Critical Race Theory: A New Racism. I have written quite a lot on this topic, but that should give some idea of the spirit of my writing.)

From the Communist Manifesto: “Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.  10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.”

I am lecturing on the Communist Manifesto in a few days and I anticipate a question about the progressive income tax plank of that famous what-is-to-be-done list. There are also planks about free public education and central banking that might stir student curiosity. Several of these other planks have come to pass in some partial form or another. Are we a communist society? A socialist society? We’re neither, and the indication is that the realization of these planks in practice move society towards a socialist end, which is a means to communism, but do not complete the transition (the final destination is never clearly defined in Karl Marx’s work). Planks 1, 3, 6, 8, and 9 if achieved would signal a clear path to socialism. Planks 2, 4, 7, and 10 less so (obviously). Why are so many planks at least partially institutionalized in a capitalist system? Based on what I have argued on Freedom and Reason, the problem of capitalist crises and the emergence of the corporate state necessitate many of these appearances. The ultimate question in all of this concerns social class, not one of innovations from an itemized list generated more than 170 years ago.

In preparing for these questions I have been looking at recent facts and trends and found information on the question of income taxes that I want to blog about today. Also, Tax Day is not that far off and records are already arriving in the mail. The Internal Revenue Service is slower with data dumps than the Bureau of Justice Statistics, but these are fairly recent (2018 and 2019 numbers). These statistics come from the Tax Foundation. First, the United States sits atop a huge economy. Income captures only part of it. In 2019, taxpayers reported earning almost 12 trillion dollars in adjusted gross income. They paid some paid some 1.6 trillion trillion in individual income taxes. The top one percent of taxpayers paid an average individual income tax rate of 25.6 percent, which is more than seven times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (which is 3.5 percent). The share of the federal individual income paid by the top one percent was nearly 40 percent of all revenue. The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all individual income taxes (the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent). The top one percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (at nearly 40 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (just over 29 percent).

Does this mean the tax structure is progressive? Not nearly as progressive as it was under Eisenhower (I am sidestepping the matter of wages versus income, earned and unearned, to keep things simple). Johnson slashed taxes in the 1960s, fulfilling Kennedy’s promise the Chambers of Commerce and the globalists and kicking off the trend towards less progressivity. Clinton raised taxes in the early 1990s (within only a few years, the nation started running budget surpluses) but then, beginning with G.W. Bush, a new wave of tax cutting was initiated. To capture these changes, I share a chart from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez from a few years ago published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Given the long throw of history covered in this blog, the article is recent enough for our purposes today, which are, admittedly, not very ambitious. The charts cover other forms of taxes, so this will allow me to make a point about progressivity overall.

As you can seem the system remains substantially progressive on the income side. The pattern has not changed much since 2004, so, as I said, this article will do (if it doesn’t, please let me know in the comment section). What was sharply reduced after 1960 were corporate taxes and estate taxes. Moreover, payroll taxes have expanded, and these impact workers the most. Thus, despite the retention of a substantially progressive income tax scheme, the overall system of taxation has become rather regressive. Deeper questions remain unexplored: what and who generates income and how do we reckon wealth in discussions of inequality? The superrich have stores of natural wealth and the social surplus that income tax statistics don’t capture. This means looking at estates, etc.. But this must be said about the taxation of income: one would expect to see the rich and well off paying most of income tax revenues given that, by definition, the rich and well off take most of the income—and most of everything else.

Yesterday, just before the fourth NTAS expired (which is today), Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas issued a National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin regarding “the continued heightened threat environment across the United States.” The threats in question are not the continuing coercive behavioral and medical programs of the public health apparatus. Nor are they the drastic rise in criminal violence occurring in American cities. What are those threats? This is the subject of today’s blog. Here’s the spoiler: For the most part, citizens who dissent from the transnationalist program of managed decline of the American Republic constitute the “continuing heighten threat environment.”

The current NTAS reports (for much of this I am quoting from the press release as the actual document is a tedious series of bullet-points): “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM)….” You may be unfamiliar with the latter term, as it is not one usually deployed in such an open manner. Although meaning different things, the first two are often carelessly used interchangeably. So let’s clarify. The standard definition of the terms are these respectively: sincerely held but false beliefs (misinformation); purposeful dissemination of false belief (disinformation); circulation of true or false information to sow division and destabilize the status quo (mal-information). The DHS lumps these together as MDM.

Those engaged in MDM are referred to as “threat actors.” You have to grasp the consciousness of the New Fascism to fully understand to whom they are referring. We know Antifa and BLM are not among the “threat actors” who moved the Biden-Harris regime to establish (the move was announced on the first day of Biden’s presidency) the new domestic terrorism branch within DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis “dedicated to producing sound, timely intelligence needed to counter domestic terrorism-related threats”—even while those entities represented the forces of chaos throughout the nation during the summer and fall of 2020 (and one suspects those forces will return). Spokespersons for the security state apparatus will point to January 6, 2021 Capitol affair as the reason, but it’s a claim that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It’s much broader than those who walked through the Capitol building that day.

The bulletin identifies “foreign terrorist organizations” (which must by now include the Canadian trucker convoy). Based on the “soft targets” identified one presumes that the small number of white supremacists at the margins of US society are also on the list. But the bulletin’s rhetoric concerning what is at stake must necessarily includes another, much larger group. According to the press release, “These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.” The discord and unrest sought by foreign terrorists organization is only in the heads of jihadis. The vast majority of Americans find Islamism repugnant, and those who don’t are the last persons to concern the DHS. Likewise, the white supremacists enjoy no significant support among the American population.

It’s clear from the pattern of words spoken and actions taken of late that those who actually comprise the “threat environment” are patriotic Americans who, as did the American Revolutionaries, question government action and call for reigning in state power. The first items in the bulletin itself include “widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.” Since when did concerns for election integrity and fraud and mass vaccination programs constitute domestic terrorism? “Grievances associated with these themes inspired violent extremist attacks during 2021,” the document claims. Was the United States subject to violent extremists attacks through the previous year? Is the bulletin referring to parents at school board meetings objecting to mask mandates and the indoctrination of their children in racist ideology? The tens of thousands who attended MAGA rallies? The tens of millions of downloads of the War Room: Pandemic?

These manifestations and more indeed represent something terrifying to elites. Consider these words from our nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Against the odds, the American Revolution achieved this state of affairs. It was accomplished with unity and purpose—and, as a historical fact, violence. However, with the ascendancy of the corporate state following Reconstruction, the republic became corrupted and was derailed. Progressive Democrats installed a new government—a technocracy. What governs today is the imposition of counterrevolutionary forces. In the demand to defend of life and liberty and the human desire to pursue happiness, the objective of the patriot is clear: dismantle the corporate state and its technocracy and restore and renew the republic. To the ears of oligopolists and globalists, criticisms of corporate governance and the administrative state, calls for popular action against the tyranny of the power elite and the restoration of the republic sound discordant and destabilizing. People demanding back their country is a scary sound to the elites who stole it.

This is a nation founded on the principle of limited government and the elevation of the rights and liberties of creative and productive individuals above the desires of mobs and the powerful minorities who inspire and direct them. This is a Constitutional Republic that, in its Bill of Rights, explicitly protects religious liberty and the rights to speech, the press, assembly, and association (First Amendment), the right to be armed (Second Amendment), the right to be secure in one’s person, papers, and effects (Fourth Amendment), as well as in the sanctuary of one’s own mind (Fifth Amendment), the right to be treated with dignity (Eight Amendment), the recognition of negative liberty (Ninth Amendment), and the right to a federal system of republic states (Tenth Amendment). The corporate state negates these liberties and rights. Republican freedom is not possible in a transnational system under corporate rule and centralized state power. Corporate state rule is established through coercion, intimidation, surveillance, and violence.

Review the bullet points towards the end of the press release. Here’s a summary for your convenience: The CP3 provides “communities” with “resources and tools” to prevent “individuals from radicalizing to violence.” DHS’s Homeland Security Grant Program now designates “domestic violent extremism” as a “National Priority Area.” Tens of millions of dollars have been allocated for “target hardening and other physical security enhancements.” And there are “increased efforts to identify and evaluate MDM, including false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories spread on social media and other online platforms.” These efforts involve “enhanced collaboration with public and private sector partners [to] increase the Nation’s cybersecurity through the Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).”

In all this, DHS wants to reassure Americans that the Department of Homeland Security “has renewed its commitment to ensure that all efforts to combat domestic violent extremism are conducted in ways consistent with privacy protections, civil rights and civil liberties, and all applicable laws.” I can hear those who know the history of the DHS and the organizations orbiting its sun laughing through the Internet. But laughter will come to an end in the coming months. “The months preceding the upcoming 2022 midterm elections,” warns the bulletin, “could provide additional opportunities for these extremists and other individuals to call for violence directed at democratic institutions, political candidates, party offices, election events, and election workers.” It should be obvious from this and other actions that the ground is being prepared for efforts to undermine the populist movement. The see the Red Tide coming and they mean to mitigate its effects.

The press release warns the nation: “Mass casualty attacks and other acts of targeted violence conducted by lone offenders and small groups acting in furtherance of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances pose an ongoing threat to the nation.” What are the ideological beliefs and grievances to which they refer? If you are ever unclear as to what motivates the tyranny of corporate state action refer to the items enumerated in the previous paragraph. Liberty is the antithesis of totalitarianism.