Film

The Untouchables (1987)

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The Untouchables opens with the death of a child. It is 1930, Prohibition-era Chicago. In the previous scene we had watched Robert De Niro as Al Capone speaking to a group of British newspaper reporters. Like Donald Trump, he is a palpably sleazy, but strangely charismatic figure. He’s a lawbreaker, he insists, but not a menace to society. The Eighteenth Amendment, which passed in 1920, and outlawed the manufacture, but not the consumption of alcoholic beverages, is a profoundly stupid institution that interferes with the law of supply and demand. “What’s bootlegging,” he says, “on the boat it’s bootlegging. On Lakeshore Drive it’s hospitality.” The reporters, who find Prohibition as strange as Europeans today find American gun culture, laugh along at the absurdity of Yankee puritanism enforced by state power, but now we see the truth. The little girl, who drops by the local store for a pot of illegal alcohol for her father, becomes “collateral damage” in the war between Al Capone and Washington, DC. Two of Capone’s enforcers, including his chief assassin Frank Nitti, are trying to strong-arm the store owner into becoming a distributor for his cheap moonshine. After the store owner continues to refuse, they decide to make him an example, leaving a massive suitcase bomb tucked underneath the counter, and blowing the entire establishment to kingdom come. Al Capone is not a libertarian. He is a tyrant.

Al Capone is not wrong about Prohibition. While the roots of the anti-saloon movement go back to 19th-century feminism, the Prohibition that finally became the law of the land in 1920 was largely the product of the anti-immigrant backlash against Southern and Eastern Europeans and the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan under the Wilson administration. De Palma’s screenwriter David Mamet deeply understands the historical symbiosis between anti-Catholicism, the Progressive movement, and the backlash of small-town Protestant America against multicultural urban centers like Chicago and New York. The historic Eliot Ness was a graduate of the University of Chicago who was born and raised in Roseland, Illinois, but here he is played by the young Kevin Costner as an outsider from an upright Protestant America that never really existed. As his eventual friend and mentor Jimmy Malone remarks, “Welcome to Chicago. This place stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.” Even though he eventually becomes Batman and Superman all wrapped up into one, there’s more than a little bit of Church Lady and Nurse Ratched in the newly arrived 27-year-old Treasury agent. Just before he goes on a liquor raid, he lectures his police officers how they have to stop drinking immediately to “stay pure.” When his flying squad storms what they think to be a storehouse of illegal alcohol he shouts, “Let’s do some good.” When a crate of what he falsely believed to be whiskey turns out to be a crate of ladies’ parasols, and he opens one up over his head to the glee of news photographers who quickly snap his photos for the next day’s headlines, the message is clear. Eliot Ness is not only a foreign invader from Washington. He’s a woman, the finger-wagging scold from your grandmother’s Bible study club.

When Eliot Ness meets the dead girl’s mother, however, our perception, and more importantly, his faith in his mission is transformed. He no longer feels like a ridiculous, emasculated scold. He becomes a revolutionary, not against the legitimate state in Washington, but against the shadow state in Chicago that has emerged from the black market for alcohol created by the 18th Amendment. Eliot Ness, as written by David Mamet and embodied by Kevin Costner, is both Fed and Bolshevik, J. Edgar Hoover and Vladimir Lenin, reactionary and rebel. Dual power, Catholic, immigrant “wet” Chicago in open rebellion against Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, “dry” Washington, was inevitable the moment they ratified the 18th Amendment, but it has created a corrupt moral order based on violence, complacency, and a deal with the Devil, Al Capone. In exchange for graft, petty amounts of cash, and an occasional drink of whiskey, the people of Chicago have created a system where they have to turn a blind eye to the brutal murder of a little girl by Capone and his thugs. Eliot Ness becomes a revolutionary, not in spite of his being a moralistic scold, but because he is a moralistic scold. Eliot Ness is that uncompromising pain in the ass who’s willing to spoil everybody’s fun, shut down the party, and say, “Wait. Something here is very, very wrong.” But he is no Che Guevara. Quite the contrary. As embodied by Kevin Costner, Eliot Ness is a stiff. He might be the kind of man who compels a revolution, demands a revolution, but he will never lead a revolution. Costner has all the charisma of a soggy piece of cold pizza. Indeed, it’s not an exaggeration to say that in Brian De Palma’s version of The Untouchables, bad acting means “good” and good acting means “evil.” There is, however, one exception, the real hero of The Untouchables, Jimmy Malone, played by Sean Connery.

In many ways, Eliot Ness’s only real contribution to the overthrow of Al Capone and his corrupt, tyrannical, gangster-ridden city, is to bring Jimmy Malone out of exile. David Mamet’s genius lies in the way he knows that what’s unsaid is often far more powerful than what is stated explicitly. When Eliot Ness, and the movie’s viewers, meet Jimmy Malone on the bridge at night, we immediately realize that he is far more than a mere beat cop. He is the hero lurking in exile waiting for his opportunity to return to the stage, Rick Blaine waiting for Victor Laszlo and Ilsa Lund to welcome him back to the fight. A prequel, Young Jimmy Malone, would almost certainly focus on Malone’s relationship with Chief Mike Dorsett, the corrupt senior police officer played by Richard Bradford. At some point, we realize, Malone fought, and lost, a battle with Dorsett over whether or not the Chicago Police Department and the Irish would collaborate with Al Capone and the Italian Mafia. Sean Connery was 57 when he made The Untouchables, a man nearing retirement. He has no wife or family. He is living frugally. He could have easily taken his 20-year half pension in his late 40s and simply got out of town. Yet he remains, waiting for the arrival of someone like Eliot Ness. Connery’s famous quote, “I wish I had met you 10 years and 20 pounds ago,” is more than the regret of a middle-aged man who feels that he has failed. In 1930, ten years ago was 1920, the year they instituted Prohibition, the year that made Al Capone’s corrupt new world order inevitable. There is an initial gesture of hesitation, but it is never really in doubt. Malone will join Eliot Ness in his crusade to put Al Capone in prison, and by doing so, restore the old order in the Chicago police, the Irish over the Italians, good cops who follow the law over dirty cops who take envelopes of cash from the mob in exchange for looking the other way when little girls get caught in the crossfire.

The justly famous and widely praised shootout in the Chicago train station has not been praised enough. It is one of the greatest scenes in American cinema. It is also, paradoxically, a completely unoriginal reboot of Sergei Eisenstein’s famous Potemkin Steps sequence, the most famous piece of communist agitprop in history. Eisenstein was doing something very simple, stirring up outrage by filming the cold, machinelike Tsarist army methodically murdering working-class Russians. For Eisenstein, the moral order is pretty simple. The established order is evil. The revolutionary Bolsheviks are good. For Mamet and De Palma, it’s not that easy. It is the late 1980s and they have witnessed over the years one corrupt order after another being brought down and replaced by an even more corrupt revolutionary government. As Pete Townshend famously wrote, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” When Eliot Ness and George Stone, the Italian-American “untouchable” sharpshooter played by Andy Garcia, arrive at the train station to intercept Capone’s bookkeeper, the only evidence they have to put Capone in jail, Jimmy Malone has already been brutally murdered by Frank Nitti. Ness is not totally rational. He is willing to risk everything to avenge his dead friend, who he watched bleed out on the floor of his home after being machine-gunned. More importantly, Ness is willing to put the very people he claims to want to protect, a mother and her child, at risk. In Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein shows a baby murdered by the Tsar’s policemen and a mother screaming in outrage. In The Untouchables, De Palma shows a crusading policeman turning a crowded public place into a shooting gallery rather than let Capone’s bookkeeper get on the train, even though there is no guarantee that it will lead to a conviction. The baby, thanks to George Stone’s athletic dash down a flight of stairs, survives, as does the mother, and Costner’s Ness, at this point, finally steps into the heroic role he was born for, charging fearlessly down the stairs into a hail of gunfire, Batman and Superman all rolled up into one. But he also puts the life of the baby at risk. Every revolutionary, from Joseph Broz Tito, who started his guerrilla war against the German occupiers fully well knowing it meant the deaths of 100 Serbs for every one dead German, to Yahya al-Sinwar, who led the Hamas uprising against Israel fully well knowing the Israelis would murder every baby in Gaza in retaliation, has faced the exact same question. Do you have the right to put your people’s lives at risk in order to liberate them from tyranny?

The fact that Brian De Palma and David Mamet have asked us the question without giving us the answer is what makes them artists, and Sergei Eisenstein, in the end, still a propagandist.

news

Thinking About the Mass Murder of Iranian Schoolgirls at Minab By Americans

On February 28, 2026, the United States Navy sent a barrage of Tomahawk Missiles hurtling toward the Iranian city of Minab. One of them hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school. It killed 170 Iranian primary school girls along with teachers and administrative staff. Shortly afterward, another Tomahawk Missile hit the school for a second time, killing first responders and emergency personnel. In light of the Sandy Hook Massacre of 2012, the Minab Massacre of 2026 is shocking, but not surprising. While most Americans were deeply horrified by both, neither shook us from our complacency and passivity. Some of us reflexively genuflect before the gun lobby and the military, but most of us are suffering from learned helplessness. We are no longer the people who fought the Battle of Gettysburg to end slavery. We are a disorganized collection of selfish individuals worried about our resumes, our careers, our personal achievements, and our household gods.

It bothers me that this doesn’t bother my fellow Americans more. It bothers me that it doesn’t bother me more. My insufferably woke ex-girlfiend who raised thousands of dollars on Instagram for the Palestinians in Gaza has already done more than I will ever do to stop this madness. The only reason I express any outrage at all over our ruling-class committing mass murder against innocent people in the global south is the opportunity to point my finger at the best and brightest, the educated, well-adjusted beautiful people who live in 5-bedroom mansions in Upper Montclair and elegant brownstones in the West Village and say “aha. You people suck as much as I do. Your prosperity is built on blood money. At least I have the decency to be a miserable failure at life.” My being a retard and a reject, however, a misfit unable to succeed at the capitalist game in America won’t do anything to help the grieving Palestinian father who had to carry his 10-year-old’s body parts home in a plastic bag. Even if I joined some red, white, and blue version of the Black Hand and busted a cap in the Crown Prince J.D. Vance’s ass the next time he comes to Sarajevo, it still wouldn’t serve anything but my own ego. I could finally get someone to read my writing.

I guess what I’m trying to say is “why aren’t the normal people doing anything about this? Where are all the grownups?” As Alvin Lee from the rock group Ten Years After said, “I’d love to change the world but I don’t know what to do, so I’ll leave it up to you.” The whole thing feels like the Covid lockdowns where the outside world simulatenously disappeared, and yet still managed to invade my privacy to the point where I thought i was consantly being watched by someone. In the past atrocities like the massacre at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school happened off camera and out of sight. By the time most people in the United States heard about the My Lai Massacre, Seymour Hersh and Walter Cronkite had already formulated an editorial line you could accept or reject. Do I vote against the Vietnam War or not? Do I grab a sign and go to a protest? Do I refuse to pay my taxes? Do I join the Weatherman and plant a bomb at the Weapon’s research lab at the University of Wisconsin, or do I “support the troops” and cheer on the Ohio National Guard when they gun down student protesters? None of it felt normal. In 2026, however, it feels like the madness will continue, and continue to be beamed into my mind by the Internet, and yet nothing I do will matter. Even if they censor it all, even if Larry Ellison buys up the media and appoints Bari Weiss an all powerful censor of the public discourse, I’ll still know it’s going on somewhere.

Yet don’t Americans have families anymore? Don’t they have children like the Iranians and Palestinians they hope to see grow up and be successful? Can’t they feel empathy. I suppose not.In the past, getting married and having a family was just part of life. Everybody did it, good people, bad people, smart people, stupid people. It would have no more occurred to my grandparents not to get married and have a family than it would have occurred to them not to eat breakfast. Yet these days, buying a house and starting a family has become a privilege. Getting married, or even dating has become a reward for success, or at least for good behavior. As such, I think the taboo around killing children has disappeared. The mass murder of grade schoool girls has become someone else’s bad luck, not a fundamental crime against humanity as a whole, something that will eventually bring me down, even if I’ve never heard about it. So we look at the bad news in the New York Times, or on TikTok or X, shrug out shoulders as if to say “what can you do” and change the channel. We are no longer connected to our fellow human beings. We feel no obligation to guard the future for anybody but ourselves, or perhaps the members of some abstract, meaningless group we feel we belong to like a race, religion, or ethnicity. We all sit here in our little glass boxes watching the monsters cosume their victims on the outside hoping they will have eaten their fill by the time they notice us, but knowing they won’t. When it’s finally my turn, I guess I’ll just shrug my shoulders and try to change the channel.

History and Politics

Benjamin Netanyahu and Fidel Castro

Sometimes reality has an antisemitic bias, or so they say. I personally don’t believe that Jews control the United States. The ruling class of the Anglo Zionist Epstein Pedo Empire is probably the most racially and ethnically diverse group of mass murdering, baby killing, imperialist monsters in all of history. We have WASPS like George W. Bush. We have house negros like Barack Obama and Condoleeza Rice. We have Catholics like Joe Biden and J.D. Vance. We have woke feminist girlbosses like Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Kamala Harris. We have Hindus like Kash Patel and Polacks like Zbigniew Brezinski. The German American Donald Trump is widely regarded as an old school white supremacist. His father was even in the Klan. Nevertheless, his family is so full of Czechs, Slovenians, and Askhenazi Jews that Joseph Goebbels would have personally marched him in chains to Auschwitz-Birkenau and shoved him into one of the ovens for violations against the Nuremberg Laws so egregious they merited immediate execution. Trump’s mentor, in fact, was a McCarthyite Jewish faggot named Roy Cohn, who, along with Meyer Lansky and Arnold Rothstein, pretty much put the Zionist, the Epstein and the Pedo in the Anglo Zionsist Epstein Pedo Empire. Lest you think I’m picking on the Jews, three words, J. Edgar Hoover, an American of Swiss, Protestant descent who traded lingerie and little black dresses not only with Roy Cohn, but for all I know Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo. All that being said, and I hope I’ve offended just about everyone, there is no question that Israel exerts an outsized influence on American foreign policy. Let’s not kid ourselves. Everybody thinks it. Everybody knows it, and like masturbation, everybody denies it. At this point, it’s so obvious that even Maggie Haberman at the New York Times is writing a book about how Benjamin Netanyahu dragged Donald Trump into a war in Iran he might not otherwise have wanted to risk, and which I am now almost certain he regrets.

Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The Israelis also raised the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open a ground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime’s forces and accelerating its collapse.

Mr. Netanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone. It seemed to land well with the most important person in the room, the American president.

Sounds good to me, Mr. Trump told the prime minister. To Mr. Netanyahu, this signaled a likely green light for a joint U.S.-Israeli operation.

So what’s going on here? How did a pint-sized country like Israel push a 900 pound gorilla like the United States, and the Republican Party, into a disastrous war that’s jacked up the price of gas and will inevitably lead to a Democatic Party blowout at the polls this November? We all know the debate. Does the tail wag the dog or does the dog wag the tail. On one side, we have anti-imperialists like Noam Chomsky, Kwame Ture, most third wordlists, tankies and Stalinists. On the other side we Mearsheimer and Walt, Jeffrey Sachs, and Gore Vidal, David Duke, G. Edward Griffin, William Fulbright, and enough libertarians and paleoconservatives to organize a Bitcoin convention. For the most part I come down on the side of the Third Wordlists. The problem with the Israelis isn’t that they’re Jewish. It’s that they’re white. Israel is a settler colonial democracy founded by the British Empire that owes its continued independence to blond, blue-eyed, white Anglo Saxon Protestant, Christian Zionists like Ord Wingate, Mike Huckabee, Billy Graham and John Bolton. For every stereotypicallyJewish fanatic who pronounces”Hamas” like he’s hocking up the word’s biggest loogie — and let’s face it it’s fun to do that accent — there are 20 Alabama rednecks who still have their great grand daddy’s sheets they used to wear on cross burning day and still brag about how their ancestors fought in the War of Northern Aggression with Bobby Lee. It didn’t take the Jews to convince white Protestant Americans that the lives of non-white people in the global south don’t mean shit to them, to insure that 170 innocent Iranian school girls murdered by the American miiltary will never see justice in our lifetimes.

Let me suggest a compromise between the two extremes. Benjamin Netanyahu is the Fidel Castro of his generation. Don’t get me wrong. Fidel Castro, for all his faults, was a hero, Netanyahu, for all of his tactical brilliance and decisive leadership, is going to be roomates with Pol Pot and Henry Kissinger after he finally shuffles off this mortal coil and descends into the nether regions. Yeah, we all know he’s going to die comfortably in bed at age 100, but it doesn’t matter. If there’s a hell he’s going there. Nevertheless, Netanyahu like Fidel understands the importantance, not only of ideology, but of accurately understanding the ideology of your allies. By 1960, the Soviet Union, a once radical state, had renounced its revolutionary ideals for coexistance with the capitalist world. Not only had its Premier Nikita Khruschev circulated a secret memo denouncing its great wartime leader Joseph Stalin as a bloody dictator, Stalin himself had already double crossed the working class by colluding with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Yalta, agreeing to British and American control of Italy and Greece in exchange for Poland. If the Soviet Union was sceloritic and conservative by 1960s, however, communism wasn’t. World War II had liberated the revolutionary energy of the global south, igniting anti-colonial uprisings in Africa, Asia and Latin America. China, the largest communist country in the world, was leading the fight against the Anglo Zionist Epstein Pedo Empire, inspiring radicals even in the belly of the imperialist beast like the Black Panthers. Fidel Castro, who had just wrenched Cuba free from the Mafia and the CIA, understood the danger of getting soft much better than anybody in the Kremlin. The Soviet Union, safe behind its nuclear umbrella and its vast land mass, could afford to be moderate and conciliatory. Cuba could not, Only 90 miles away from the United States, it could be rolled back to the Batista-era anytime somebody in Washington finally got up the nerve to do it. Quite frankly, I’m still a bit confused about why John F. Kennedy didn’t order air strikes to support the Bay of Pigs invasion. Castro knew that the only thing standing in the way of his being strung up like Mussolini or summarily executed like Nicolae Ceaușescu was Russian nukes. So like Netanyahu with Donald Trump or Magaret Thatcher with George HW Bush he urged Nkita Khruschev not to go wobbly.

NUKE THE USA.

Dear Comrade Khrushchev:

Given the analysis of the situation and the reports which have reached us, [I] consider an attack to be almost imminent–within the next 24 to 72 hours. There are two possible variants: the first and most probable one is an air attack against certain objectives with the limited aim of destroying them; the second, and though less probable, still possible, is a full invasion. This would require a large force and is the most repugnant form of aggression, which might restrain them.

You can be sure that we will resist with determination, whatever the case. The Cuban people’s morale is extremely high and the people will confront aggression heroically.

I would like to briefly express my own personal opinion.

If the second variant takes place and the imperialists invade Cuba with the aim of occupying it, the dangers of their aggressive policy are so great that after such an invasion the Soviet Union must never allow circumstances in which the imperialists could carry out a nuclear first strike against it.

I tell you this because I believe that the imperialists’ aggressiveness makes them extremely dangerous, and that if they manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba–a brutal act in violation of universal and moral law–then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.

This opinion is shaped by observing the development of their aggressive policy. The imperialists, without regard for world opinion and against laws and principles, have blockaded the seas, violated our air-space, and are preparing to invade, while at the same time blocking any possibility of negotiation, even though they understand the gravity of the problem.

You have been, and are, a tireless defender of peace, and I understand that these moments, when the results of your superhuman efforts are so seriously threatened, must be bitter for you. We will maintain our hopes for saving the peace until the last moment, and we are ready to contribute to this in any way we can. But, at the same time, we are serene and ready to confront a situation which we see as very real and imminent.

I convey to you the infinite gratitude and recognition of the Cuban people to the Soviet people, who have been so generous and fraternal, along with our profound gratitude and admiration to you personally. We wish you success with the enormous task and great responsibilities which are in your hands.

Fraternally,

Fidel Castro

https://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct26/doc2.html

Comrade Khruschev, needless to say, was horrified by the idea and turned Castro down. It’s one thing to bang a shoe on the desk at the United Nations or declare that “we will bury you.” It’s quite another thing to start World War III. Nobody in the Soviet Union was under any illusion what a war meant. 15 years before they had lost 20 million people to the German invasion. Until recently, American Presidents had treated Israeli attempts to pressure the United States into war with Iran pretty much like the Soviets treated Castrol in 1962 or like John F. Kennedy treated the CIA when he refused to provide air cover to the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, every American President until Donald Trump drew the line at a war in the Middle East that would jack up gas prices and destroy the world economy. “Sure,” President Biden said to Netanyahu in 2024 and 2025, “kill as many Palestinian babies in Gaza as you want, but don’t cost us the election.” It’s tempting to say that the problem is “too much democracy.” After all, the Soviet Union in 1962 was an authoritarian state. Khruschev didn’t have to worry about the Cuban Lobby or the Maoist Lobby in Moscow funding his opponents in November and energizing them at the polls. But it’s more complex than that. Netanyahu knows that the window closing for Israel, that younger Americans are not as committed to the ideology of the Good War and the Holocaust as Boomers and Gen Xers. You can’t make someone under 40 start in fear just by accusing him of being Neville Chamberlain at Munich like you could do with his father. Americans are sick of forever war. We’re sick of the declining standard of living. Nobody believes the government and nobody believes the media, not at least since the invasion of Iraq. But Netanyahu has one thing going for him, Donald Trump, a senile, 80-year-old Boomer who bought into every myth he grew up with, who wants to be a “war President” just like Winston Churchill or Teddy Roosevelt.

So Netanyahu, like Fidel Castro, shot his shot. The American Empire would have one last ride before it collapses into anarchy. The foreign policy of the United States, which is on sale to the highest bidder in Washington, will soon be worthless. The time is now. It worked. Unlike Trump, Netanyahu knows what he wants. The Israelis, who have been at war constantly for all of my lifetime, know the difference between minimalist and maximalist demands. Sure it would be great to install the Shah’s son in Tehran as dicator and conduct mass executions against anybody who was ever loyal to the government, traffic Persian women back to your friends in the Epstein class, and establish Israeli hegemony over the entire Middle East, but all you really have to do is weaken the Iranian state, get some arms into the hands of your Kurdish allies, and start the process of fomenting chaos and civil war. Social stablity, security, and safety, are in fact, exceptional states. Anarchy, sectarian and tribal warfare, chaos and poverty are the norm. To be more accurate, it all goes in cycles. The United States and EU are on a downward path. China and India are rising powers. With exceptional timing, Netanyahu pushed the United States into a war that would accelerate its decline, which at this point is inevitable, but destroy Israel’s last real enemy in the Middle East. Now they can switch their loyalties to India, China, and Russia, and together begin to pick up the pieces in the Middle East when it all ends. Netanahu, like Castro, knows the value of knowing what you want. Donald Trump, like Gorbachev at the tail end of the Soviet Union, believes his own hype. Israel, unlike Cuba, is not going to fall into crisis and poverty when its big brother goes down the tubes. That in the end, was Castro’s only real flaw, sincerity. He genuinely believed in Communist revolution and thought the Russians did too. His people have been paying the price ever since. He was right to push for nuclear war in 1962. The United States was never going to relent, and it never has.

Too bad Fidel never got that mushroom cloud. The world would be a better place.

Personal Diary, Technology

Will You Pass the Gnirut Test?

I’m not a very smart person. I’ve never had an IQ test, but I seriously doubt I would score over 100. Nevertheless, it hasn’t taken me very long to figure out the algorithm behind ChatGPT and Geminai AI. ChatGPT is a hall monitor. I have a little game called ChatGPT Bingo. I will post a film review to ChatGPT. If it responds that I have “not written a traditional film review” I get five points. If it responds that my review “is doing several things at once,” I get ten points. If it advises me that I need to be more “precise” or uses any variation of the term “precision” the game is over and I win. Gemini AI, by contrast, is like a crooked fortune teller. It will start out with vaguely flattering generalities. As you give it more material, it will mirror your thoughts, drawing you into a conversation with yourself until you walk away believing that you have had a meaningful interaction with another human being. Gemini, however, can no more pass than Turing test than ChatGPT. At some point, if the “conversation” lasts long enough, Gemini will randomly spit out parts of your earlier dialog, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have been talking to a machine all along.

None of what I said here means that all of the hype around AI is false. AI is well on the way to eliminating most of the white collar work force in America. It is well-deserved. The same people who derisvely sneered at unemployed coal miners in the 2010s, lectured them about how they should “learn to code,” are beginning to find out ChatGPT can code better than they ever will. As someone who spent years learning how to reverse a link list, or how to write a quick sort or build a hash table, it is sobering to learn that human beings were never meant to do this kind of work. Even if you had the IQ of an Einstein or a Newton, playing John Henry against a machine will only end up with your dying with a copy of Visual Studio Code in your hand. The whole process should be liberating. Machines will save us from the tedious work, not only of digging coal, but of manipulating Excel spreadsheets, and building websites. In reality, under capitalism, we get to live only as long as we’re useful to society, have some kind of labor power, skilled or unskilled, to sell to the ruling class.

As Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Artificial intelligence is no different from the steam engine or the telegraph. The middle-manager who is being pressed by the CEO of his company to integrate artificial intelligence into the workflow even though he has no use for it at the moment is caught in the never ending cycle of capitalist production. If the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, then the owners of capital must find a way to reduce the costs of running their business. Under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the American ruling class outsourced most of its industrial base to the global south. It also built up a large, unwieldy upper-middle-class that tamped down social discontent by offering the possibility of upward mobility. If your kids went to the right schools and “learned to code” they could join the elite in Northern California and the Maryland and Virgina suburbs ringing Washington DC. Under Donald Trump, however, oligarchs like Peter Thiele, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg and Sam Altman have struck back. As expensive as it may seem at the moment, AI is a long term capital investment that will pay off in the long run by eliminating American workers and replacing them with machines whenever possible, or H1B slaves when you need people who know enough Java or Python to run the machines, but don’t have the confidence to demand their rights in the workplace.

Since the American ruling class can no longer dangle the possibility of upward mobility in front of our noses that we can chase like the donkey trying to get the carrot, it has to find a new way of heading off social discontent, that revolutionary working class energy that inevitable comes out of revolutionizing the means of production. Let me make a suggestion. They have already found it in the what I will call the Gnirut Test, which, in case you haven’t already figured it out is “Turing Test” spelled backwards. What if stated goal of the Silicon Valley tech oligarchs is not to create “thinking machines” but “machine-like people.” No AI will ever pass the Turing Test, but that has never been its function. The purpose of AI is narrow the human imagination to the point where it more strongly resembles an algorithm than it does the “man” Shakespeare describes in Hamlet’s famous monologue. “What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god!” That is the very last thing our overlords in Silicon Valley want. What they need are just enough flesh sacks to feed their children, renovate their mansions, take care of their elderly, and provide a reasonable supply of teenage fuckdolls for their orgies on Epstein Island, but nobody who might think too much for themeslves and upset the social order. Needless to say, unruly malcontents and rejects like myself must be eliminated from the gene pool.

As Spring 2026 college graduates are beginning to realize, there is no longer any path to the upper-middle-class. That does not mean there are no ways for a savvy member of Generation Z to make money online. There are probably ways of getting rich through predictive events on websites like Kalshi. There is also the never ending dreaming of “going viral” on YouTube or TikTok, monetizing content and earning a “passive income.” Before the start of the American Israeli Iranian War the dream of moving to Dubai and becoming a influencer hawking luxury brands was never on my mind. I’m old and ugly. But if you were a good looking twentysomething, the idea of cashing in on your perfect cheekbones, chisled abs or perky breasts, and doing it all under the shadow of the Burj Khalifa must have been like the latest chapter in “the American Dream.” Needless to say, only a tiny minority of online influencers can make a living online, but if “learn to code” was the watchword of the past, “learn to looksmax” is the watchword of the future. That nobody is really fooled by any of the false promises really doesn’t make much difference. The option of “logging off” and “touching grass” won’t cut it in a world where the only social life you have is staring at your phone.

We like to believe that our content online “trains AI,” that my writing might someday help some super computer pass the Turing Test. In reality, our being online gives Artificial Inteligence the opportunity to train us. Eventually some very smart person will pass the Gnirut Test. For all of their differences, the one thing that ChatGPT and Gemini AI have in common is the need for “precision.” Precision, for anybody who has ever taken a college physics course knows, is all about the number of decimels in the figures you are trying to manipulate. If I paste a copy of an essay or film review into an AI chatbot the chatbot will offer to rewrite it in a way that will be more precise, which means adding words like decimels. A machine has no gut instinct for the English language. Words do not bleed if cut. A large language model is about mapping out possibilities. That means generating more language, more words, more verbal diarrhea. Type “to be or not to be” or “let there be light” into ChatGPT or Gemini and it will rewrite each phrase as a 1500 word essay. Most people of course will not triple the size of a film review or political essay because a chatbot asks them to be more “precise.” But they will spend hour after hour on TikTok or Instagram being led by an algorithmic timeline down carefully constructed metanarratives designed to make us think that if we only persist a bit longer, we might get that carrot, might find that meaning that will let us go viral, or at the very least get someone to like our tweet or respond to our comment. It’s always better to be part of the ratio than it is to be ratioed. Dogpiling is a drug. The more we get, the more we need. The more we need, the more we get trained. Someday, one day, we can write the perfect social media post that will appeal to everybody but mean nothing. We will get a score on the Gnirut Test so high that we will not only be “fire” and “based.” We will need to be oiled.

news

RIP Hampshire College (1965-2026)

Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s there was no shortage privileged young Americans. The “Greatest Generation” was busy making up for all that time they had lost to the Great Depression and World War II, fucking like rabbits, and pumping out little Baby Boomers like there was no tomorrow. Undergraduates flooded the campuses. At the Ivies and at the big state universities, disatisfaction reigned. Phil Ochs says it best. Herd enough 18 to 22 year olds together and sooner or later they’re going to become a threat to the status quo.

Oh you’ve given me a number and you’ve taken off my name
To get around this campus why you almost need a plane
And you’re supporting Chang Kai-Shek, while I’m supporting Mao
So when I’ve got something to say, sir, I’m gonna say it now

So a group of rich Americans got together and said hey. What if we start building golden cages for all of our problem children. Bennington, New College of South Florida, Evergreen State, Hampshire college in Amherst, they will be kind of like Oberlin or Sarah Lawrence, but without the rigorous academic standards. It will be sink or swim. They’ll be able to do whatever they want. Some of them will come out with a great education. Some of them will smoke pot for four years then have to think of a new excuse to get out of Vietnam after it’s all over. By the 1970s, the craze for “alternative” liberal arts colleges for the dissatisfied left had gotten so mainstream that even my Alma Mater, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, built it’s own version of Hampshire College in Piscataway. Back then it was called “Livingston College” with buildings named after great American Revolutionaries like Lucy Stone. Today it’s the business school.

The problem with colleges like Hampshire is not that they failed, but that they succeeded all too well. The same people who were far left-wing outliers in the 1970s and 1980s became perfectly mainstream in the 2010s. Nobody wants to pay $60,000 a year to go to a tiny left wing college in the woods when you can meet the same people for half the price at a big state university. These days the only difference between the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College is……………I was going to say the food is better at Hampshire College, but apparently the food at the University of Massachusetts is considered top of the line as far as colleges and universities go. It’s probably bullshit because the students make fun of it but the reputation is certainly there.

Meals are so good at UMass Amherst locals add the cafeterias to date-night rotations. Students don’t miss home cooking; ‘Mom, I’m sorry.’

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/its-one-of-the-hottest-tables-in-americaand-its-a-college-dining-hall-c52668df

Back in the 1980s, Amherst and Northhampton Massachusetts had an active anti-war and anti-imperialist movement that drew students from all over the Northeast. In my senior year of college I would often take road trips with fellow students to protest the Contras and CIA recruitment. Most of the student radicals were from the University of Massachusetts, CUNY, Rutgers, Harvard and MIT, Columbia, the ususal suspects. But for some reason it was always easier to get a room at Hampshire College to hold planning meetings. I have very fond memories of the place in the 1980s. It had a lot of very ugly buildings and a lot of very pretty young women. I’m sorry to see it go. But that’s life under late neoliberal capitalism. In the 1960s there was such an abundance of riches that if you wanted to go to school, and spend four years studying ancient Greek philosophy and only take a break once in awhile to smoke pot and protest the CIA, that option was readily available. Now it’s go deeply into debt studying computer science and engineering only to find out at your graduation that you’ve been replaced by an AI. RIP Hampshire College. At least you gave us Ken Burns.

A multiyear effort to refinance debt, raise funds, pursue land development and increase enrollment failed to produce a viable path to save the 56-year-old college. On Sunday, its board of trustees voted to shut down, according to the school’s president.

Hampshire is the alma mater of the filmmaker Ken Burns, who made his first documentary movie as a student there.

“This is an extraordinary loss for those of us who went there,” Mr. Burns, who graduated from Hampshire in 1975, said in an interview on Tuesday. The school, known for experimentation in classes and methods, offered “sort of medieval guild-like tutors and apprenticeships,” he said.

news

Free Speech is for Peasants

Let me make some ignorant, Trump like generalizations about the major religions and their politics.

Jews: Jews care about Israel and nothing else.

Catholics: Catholics care about abortion and nothing else.

Mainline Protestants: Mainline Protestants are basically just woke liberals with Jesus. They care deeply about “the marginalized.” They’ll always ask you about your pronouns. But they’ll step over homeless people in Midtown Manhattan without even thinking about it.

Evangelical Protestants: Ever since Ronald Reagan, Evangelical Protestants have weaponized an alliance with Jews and Catholics to achieve a significant amount of political power. While Jews care only about Israel and Catholics care only about abortion, Evangelicals have a coherent, Christian nationalist worldview aimed at establishing a Biblical republic modeled after, but not identical with William Brandford’s Massachusetts or Oliver Cromwell’s England.

So what am I babbling on about?

Will Donald Trump’s attacks on the Pope harm him politically?

No.

Catholics only care about abortion. The Pope is a liberal. So whether or not most Catholics believe the Pope is infallible, they’ll side with Trump over the Bishop of Rome. Gen Z and Millennial Catholic converts are more conservative than single issue Boomer and Gen X Catholics. They are basically evangelicals without the Pope. So they too will side with Trump.

Free speech is for peasants. I can say whatever I want, not because the First Amendment protects me, but because nobody cares what I say. We all know what happened to Martin Luther King and Fred Hampton. if you speak eloquently to the people and begin the develop a following among the “marginalized” that threatens the status quo, the state will bust a cap in your ass right in front of the entire world for everyone to see. “That’s what happens to you when you threaten my kids trust funds.” Had Jesus not turned over the money changers tables or proclaimed himself “King of the Jews” and had “The Jews” not begun to listen to what he had to say (hey free healthcare, loaves, and fishes) they never would have crucified him.

In some ways this is a good system. Free speech should be reserved for mentally ill homeless people, court jesters, racist uncles at family reunions, and social misfits on the Internet, not powerful elected officials. It worked for hundreds of years. But then in the late 2000s our Silicon Valley overlords gave us smart phones and social media. That didn’t so much empower all of us social misfits on the Internet so much as it herded us into a great collective. The whole point, the only point of social media is the dogpile, the “ratio.” On Twitter/X, the digital mob rules all. If a post gets 10 likes but 1000 people comenting with something like “I’m only here for the ratio” the argument is considered settled. The guy who got “ratioed” lost. If Jesus tweets out “blessed are the poor” and 1000 people respond with “cool story bro” or “I’m only here for the ratio” Jesus loses.

In the 2010s, the same Silicon Valley tech overlords who gave us smart phones and social media realized that those dumb social misfits they herded into online mobs on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok could be mobilized behind the Republicans and Democrats. In the 2010s, liberal and conservative ideologues fought it out on social media, and the conservatives won. After 2016, liberals tried to compensate for their inability to win popular support by trying to use the state to suppress free speech. They lost they fight too. “If I can’t say stupid shit on the Internet, what use is the Internet?” people thought and pulled the lever for Donald Trump. What liberal Democrats learned in 2020 and 2024 is that while you can use state power to beat back your enemies in the short term, it won’t work forever. Sooner or later you’re going to have to make your case in front of the world. If you fail to do that you’re going to end up with President Trump.

So here we are with President Trump. Quite frankly I haven’t quite figured out if he’s just a moron saying stupid shit on the Internet or if he’s a calculated political actor. I think he’s a little of both. Trump speaks out of both sides of his mouth. On one hand, he’s just another social media moron saying whatever stupid shit occurs to him at the moment. On the other hand, he never crosses the lines his owners, the ruling class, have laid out for him. Up until the attack on Iran, he pretty much ruled like a traditional American, ruling class politician, no different from Obama or Bush.

But the war in Iran has split the ruling class.

On one hand you have your straight, secular capitalists who just want the world to be a stable place so they can make money.

On the other hand, you have the idealogues, the Evangelical Protestants and radical Zionsts who want a Greater Israel in the Middle East and a Biblical, Anglo Saxon republic in the United States.

In the long run Trump can’t represent both groups. That’s why his increasingly contradictory tweets have revealed himself what he’s always been, an actor, a cynical opportunist who will play your crazy racist uncle on the Internet while slipping big Zionist and Gulf State money into his back pocket. So it’s time to find his replacement.

Will it be J.D. Vance or J.B. Pritzker?

(For you Hungarians out there J.D. Vance is Viktor Orbán’s little brother and J.B. Pritzker is Péter Magyar.)

Only God and the Devil really know.

Film

The Post (2017)

On June 13, 1971 the New York Times published extracts of a series of documents that would eventually become known as The Pentagon Papers. In the 1960s, Daniel Ellsberg, a United States Marine Corps veteran, analyst at the RAND Corporation, and protege of Henry Kissinger, had traveled to South Vietnam to examine “the facts” on the ground. He quickly became disillusioned with the war, concluding not only that it was “unwinnable” but also unjust and anti-democratic, that the anti-Communist government of South Vietnam had no popular support and that it was essentially a client of the United States. Although Ellsberg initially tried to go through proper channels and the chain of command, he eventually concluded it was useless. Johnson administration officials continued to maintain that the war was going well, even they had been thoroughly briefed on what a disaster it actually was. In the late 1960s Ellsberg began making copies of RAND Corporation documents to build his case that the United States goverment had systematically misled the American people for many years. Eventually he turned his evidence over to the NY Times. To make sure that the Nixon Administration couldn’t shut down its publication, he made copies for the Washington Post, and a number of smaller, regional newspapers. It was a brilliant maneuver. Ellsberg had weaponized the capitalist press against itself. He had used their fear of being “scooped” to guarantee that his damning case against, not only against the Johnson Administration, but against the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon administrations would inevitably be made public.

By 2017, when Steven Spielberg hastily filmed his movie The Post during the beginning of Donald Trump’s first term as President, I.F. Stone’s once radical dictum that “all governments lie” had become almost a cliche. In the 2010s, it was probably more subversive to say “sometimes governments tell the truth” than it was to say “all governments lie.” What’s more, during the runup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was not only the government that lied, it was the New York Times, which had systematially colluded with the Bush Administration to manufacture evenidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear weapons. In the 2000s and 2010s conspiracy theories were everywhere. Trust in the instituations had collapsed. Paradoxically, however, unlike the 1960s, the idea that “all governments lie” did not lead to a rebellion. It led to just the opposite, the election of a far right-wing government under Donald Trump that combined the very worst of the neoconservative imperialism of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney with the paleoconservative racism of Pat Buchanan and Alex Jones. If “all governments lie,” if you couldn’t trust the establishment press, then why not just elect the best liar? If words meant nothing, if rules, manners, and decorum had broken down completely, then why not vote for your crude racist uncle who mouths off about immigrants and sends you chain e-mails about how a Nigerian Prince was going to deposit millions of dollars in your checking account? In The Post, a historical drama about the publication of the Pentagon Papers and a labor of love by a group of talented actors led by Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, mostly liberal Democrats who supported Hillary Clinton, and who represented millions of women who were emotionally devastated by her loss to Donald Trump, Spielberg tries to flip the script on post Millennial cynicism. He writes Daniel Ellsberg almost completely out of the story in favor of a new hero, Katherine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, who, as portrayed by Streep, becomes a post-feminist girl boss tenuously finding her way in the male dominated world of 1970s journalism.

The Post is Meryl Streep’s movie through and through. Like the 2006 movie The Devil Wears Prada, she dominates not only every scene she’s in, but every scene she’s not. Only this time, 11 years later, she is quieter, chastened by age and experience, and sent back in time to a time where women had only tentatively entered professions like law and journalism. If you wanted to sum up The Post in one image it would be “Meryl Streep in a room full of upper class white men.” In 1971, the Washington Post was in trouble. It had not yet gained fame by breaking the Watergate story, and its longtime publisher Phil Graham had committed suicide in 1963. Katherine, his widow, had hired editor Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, an old school New English aristocrat, in the hopes that he could build up the paper’s national profile, take it public, and eventually compete with the New York Times. It is fascinating to compare the two most famous actos who have portrayed Bradlee. In All The President’s Men, Jason Robards portrays Bradlee as an imposing patriarch, the kind of man who made experienced journalists in their 30s and 40s feel like little boys who had been called to the carpet by their father. In The Post, Tom Hanks brings Bradlee into the post-feminist era. Hanks has a long history of portraying men who are unambiguously masculine, but open to being pushed in a better direction by women. Think of Jimmy Dugan in A League of their Own, a bitter alcoholic who screams “there is no crying in baseball” at one of his players, and yet later comes around and learns how to “shut up and listen.” For most women, Tom Hanks is that older brother you always wanted. For Katherine Graham, Hanks’ Ben Bradlee is the man who will not only open the doors of journalism to a woman who had never held a job before she turned 40, he will gently push her in the right direction.

Spielberg does not explicitly mention the gutting of local newspaper chains by private equity in 2010, or the takeover of the Washington Post in 2013 by Jeff Bezos, but this recent history is never far from the surface. No sooner does Katherine Graham begin the processs of taking the Washington Post public, then she is presented with an opportunity that could establish her as a major figure in the history of American journalism, or could destroy not only the Washington Post, but her entire world. Katherine Graham may not have held a job until she was 40. That does not mean she was a shut in. Quite the opposite, she was a well-known Washington socialite closely associated with the Democratic Party who knew just about everybody in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense we see early in the movie getting briefed by Daniel Ellsberg about state of things in Vietnam, and then going out and shamelessly lying to the press, is a particurly good friend. When Graham is given the opportunity to publish the Pentagon Papers, she is also faced with the choice of whether or not to rat out most of the men in her social circle. While Spielberg, who is above all a popular entertainer, stages a number of minor incidents, a courier almost getting hit by a taxi cab, a technician flipping the “on” switch” at the Washington Post, as big dramatic moments complete with a pounding score, Meryl Streep plays her moments with McNamara very quietly. Here is a man she she has been good friends with for years now revealed to be a liar and a mass murderer. Streep plays Katherine Graham like a woman who has made compromises with powerful men for years, and has never developed the skills to stand up for herself, slowly struggling to stand up to their bullying. Katherine Graham is not Carmela Soprano or Adriana La Cerva. She is not going to end up being driven out to the woods and whacked if she “turns rat” but her position is essentially the same. Asserting herself as a woman essentially means hanging most of the men she’s ever known out to dry as devils.

In maybe the movie’s best scene, Bradlee and Graham consult with a group of lawyers about the publication of the Pentagon Papers. All of them are against it. None of them try to bully Bradlee. They know he’s made up his mind and they’ll get nowhere. Instead they concentrate on Graham. First they warn her she could destroy the paper, but she persists. Then they “pull rank” and strongly advise her that as experienced men they all know more than she does. But she persists. Finally the chief legal counsel loses his temper and screams. Streep calmly waves him away. “Excuse me,” she says. “I was talking to Mr. Bradlee.” The performance is brilliant. Streep is not a young woman, and she knows it. She uses her slow deliberate, but simultaneously clumsy movement to express her inner struggle, her determination to stand up for herself against the men who have dominated her all her life. Unlike Hilary Clinton, Kamala Harris, or Elizabeth Warren, she succeeds, not against the Richard Nixons or Donald Trumps, the outright fascist monsters, but against the liberal Democratic men she has believed in all her life, men who she now realizes are flawed, weak men at best, murderers and war criminals at worst. Through it all, Ben Bradlee has her back. In the last scene, he brings in a stack of newspapers who have agreed to publish the Pentagon Papers along with the New York Times and Washington Post. One, two, three, Hanks gestures as he puts down each paper, four, five, six. “We are not alone,” he says. Katherine Graham you are not alone. Hillary Clinton, Spielberg seems to be saying like Walter Raleigh to Elizabeth I, my coat and my camera are at your service.

History and Politics, news

On Viktor Orbán and Eastern Europe

Viktor Orbán, the long-time Prime Minister of Hungary, is facing a stiff challenge today from a former ally and Fidesz Party member named Péter Magyar and his party Tisza. While Magyar is no liberal, he has almost universal support in the western press as the man who will “save democracy from authoritarianism.” Let’s cut to the chase. Unlike Orbán, he supports the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. Orbán, in turn, is no anti-imperialist, or threat to American hegemony. Quite the contrary, while he has shut down a few Soros funded think tanks, and occasionally validates an antisemitic conspiracy theory or two, he is a very close ally of Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel. He has even used the Zionist phrase “never again” to apologize for Hungary’s alliance with Nazi Germany during World War II.

Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, has admitted his country’s “sin” in its co-operation with the Nazis during the Second World War.

Mr Orbán, who also vowed to protect Hungary’s Jewish community, made his comments during a visit by Benjamin Netanyahu, the first by an Israeli prime minister since the fall of Communism.

“It is the duty of every Hungarian government to defend its citizens whatever their heritage. During World War Two, Hungary did not honour this moral and political obligation,” said Mr Orbán.

“That is a crime, because we chose collaboration with the Nazis over the defence of the Jewish community. That can never happen again. The Hungarian government will defend all of its citizens in the future.”

https://www.thejc.com/news/world/our-failure-to-defend-our-jews-will-never-happen-again-orban-tells-bibi-tmjspqtr

In the post-communist world Hungary and Poland have emerged as two darlings of western white supremacy, or as it is sometimes referred to, MAGA. This is no accident. During the Cold War, the CIA and western intelligence agencies lavished money, scholarships, jobs, support for media startups, and just about everything the economically struggingly people of Eastern Europe could want, on right wing nationalists and anti-communist racists in exchange for their opposition to the Soviet Union. In the 1980s if you were a young Pole, Hungarian, Serb, Czech or Slovak, and you wanted a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge, all you really had to do was wear a shirt that said “Fuck Russia” and express your support for what would eventually become the “rules based western order.” Then you were in the club. Then you could then go back home, found a newspaper, and write editorials in favor of dismantling the welfare state and social safety net, and occasionally drop in at the American or British embassy to check in on your old friends from Magdelene College, Harvard, or The Fletcher School at Tufts University. Viktor Orbán himself started out on this very road as an anti-communist, western stooge.

In September 1989, Orbán took up a research fellowship at Pembroke College, Oxford, funded by the Soros Foundation, which had employed him part-time since April 1988. He began work on the concept of civil society in European political thought, under the guidance of Zbigniew Pełczyński. During this time, he unsuccessfully contested the Fidesz leadership elections in Budapest, which he had lost to Fodor. In January 1990, he abandoned his project at Oxford and returned to Hungary with his family to run for a seat in Hungary’s first post-communist parliament.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Orb%C3%A1n

American liberals, and even some social democrats, like to believe that Viktor Orbán is a major player in the revival of white supremacy in the west. Hungary and Poland, to be fair, have largely rejected immigrants from the global south. Orbán him has promoted a series of tax incentives to encourage Hungarian women to have more children. It hasn’t worked. The birthrate in all of Europe, Germany, the Baltic States, the UK, Scandinavia, Poland, Lithuania, and the Balkans, is miserably low. White women all over the world have declared themselves “not your baby machines.” The French, Irish, and Albanians are partial exceptions, not because the French language, or Dua Lipa, are particularly sexy, but because France, like the United States, is a “civic nationalist” country that defines nationality, not by blood and soil, but by loyalty to the country’s founding principles. So they take immigrants from Muslim countries.

Conservatives, white nationalists, and MAGA loyalists have, as a result, all suddenly decided they hate France, Germany, and the UK, and that Eastern Europe is the place to be. Just go on YouTube or TikTok, and examine all of the videos made by conservative influencers telling you how much safer Warsaw, Belgrade, and Prague are than New York, Boston, and San Francisco. It has nothing to do with the “high trust” culture built up under communism, conservatives will argue, but because almost everybody in the country is white. For American liberals, who believe in guest workers, H1Bs and cheap labor from the Global South, this is the cardinal sin. Orbán and Putin have poisoned American politics, and politics in the Anglosphere as a whole, with white nationalism. In reality, the tragic upsurge of white nationalism in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and North America is the inevitable outcome of the destruction of communism, something no western liberal will ever admit. Once you got rid of the Soviet Union you destroyed the universal, class-based ideal in favor of blood and soil nationalism on the right, and woke identity politics on the left.

Bruce Springsteen, in his song Atlantic City, wrote that “I’ve been looking for a job, but it’s hard to find, down here it’s just winners and losers, and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line.” With this one line, Springsteen, who’s a rather conventional left liberal Democrat, has stated the central truth about our political reality. Whether or not you have a good life largely depends on luck, on which side of “the line” you were born on. Israeli Jews are lucky. They were born on the right side of the line. Palestinians got screwed. Anglos in the American Southwest got lucky. They were born on the right side of the Rio Grande. Mexicans and Central Americans got screwed. In Eastern Europe, a similar dynamic is taking place. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenians and Croatians are all lucky little Slavs and Magyars. In the post-cold-war era they all found themselves useful to Western imperialists. Russians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, and especially Ukrainians, got screwed. They got born on the wrong side of the line.

In 2014, Ukrainians, looking across the border at the Poles thought “those people look, sound, and pretty much act just like we do. Why are they rich and why are we poor?” The Euromaidan movement was an attempt by the Ukrainian people to drag themselves over Springsteen’s “line” to the West. Out of all Eastern Europeans, Ukrainians got screwed worst of all. The United States installed a pro-western, neoconservative government under Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Russians annexed Crimea and started a proxy war in the Donbass. NATO responded with a proxy war of its own, arming Ukrainian nationalists,and encouraging them to attack Russian speakers in Kharkiv and Odessa. In 2022, Russia launched a full scale invasion. NATO, in turn, upped the ante and sent the Zelenskyy all the military hardware he could possibly want. Over the next few years both Russia and the West would turn Ukraine in a graveyard resembling Western Europe in 1916, only with drones.

The Ukrainians, in other words, got caught, not on the wrong side of the line, but right on the goddamned line unable to step off. The Hungarians, who are till on the right side of the line, but only barely, desperately want the line to stay where it is. My guess is that this anxiety will influence the Hungarian elections today. Hungarians don’t want to be part of the West’s meat shield against Russia. Western liberals, in turn, don’t want Hungarian boots on the ground, but they do want a Hungarian Prime Minister who will at least maintain a cautious neutrality, and not openly side with Putin. Does that make it worth voting for Viktor Orbán over Peter Magyar? Maybe, Magyar just might bring the line a little further west, and Hungary might find itself a bit further East. But don’t listen to me. I’m only a dumb nobody from New Jersey and it’s really none of my business. My guess is this election is going to turn out how these elections always turn out, too close to call on election day, and decided only when the players behind the scenes have worked out whatever arrangements they want to preserve their own power and privilege. Good luck Hungarians. It’s going to suck for all of you whichever imperialist stooge you decide to vote for on Sunday. Surely we all deserve something better.

Film

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

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Saving Private Ryan came out 28 years ago to great critical acclaim. It is still widely regarded as a realistic, sober war movie dramatizing the great human cost of freeing Europe from Nazi Germany, a break with the more romanticized depictions of the Second World War we used to get in the past. The opening sequence, where Steven Spielberg and his cinematographer Janusz Kamiński stage a reenactment of the American landing at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, is renowned for its refusal to pull away from the sheer carnage of the event, which cost the lives of over 1000 American soldiers. Viewing Saving Private Ryan in the Post-Neoconservative Era in American politics, however, reveals something much darker. It is propaganda for the Invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror, the American and Israeli attack on Iran, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza. How could we have all been so naive? I suppose it was inevitable. From Ronald Reagan’s  “The Boys of Pointe du Hoc” speach in 1984 to the books Citizen Soldiers by Steven Ambrose in 1997 and The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw in 1998, the American, Canadian and British invasion of Normandy in the Summer of 1944, has been used to justify almost every aggressive action by the American military against the Global South under the Bush, Obama, Biden and Trump administrations.

As Professor Jiang points out in his YouTube video Game Theory #19: The Hollywood-Pentagon Complex, Saving Private Ryan provided the template for an important, although now largely forgotten, event of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Jessica Lynch Raid. On March 23, Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old American unit supply specialist with the 507th Maintenance Company was wounded and taken prisoner when her convoy was ambushed by Iraqi troops during the Battle of Nasiriyah. The Iraqi Army turned her over to an Iraqi medical unit, who treated her injuries, and then notified the American military of her location. Basically they said “we have one of your soldiers. Come pick her up if you want.” The American propaganda industrial complex, however, saw an opportunity. Over the next several days, the media was flooded with stories about how Lynch, who is blond, blue-eyed, and from Palestine West Virginia, almost single-handedly fought off wave after wave of Iraqi attackers. On April 1, American special forces attacked the hospital where she was recovering, and brought her to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where she was hailed by the American media as being the first American prisoner of war to be rescued since World War II, and the only woman. The story unraveled almost as soon as it broke, and Lynch eventually testified in front of Congress that the “rescue” had been staged. Nevertheless, the media circus had done its part in manufacturing consent for the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Examined closely, the plot of Saving Private Ryan makes almost as little sense as the Jessica Lynch Raid. James Francis Ryan, an American paratrooper in his early 20s from Paton Iowa, parachutes into France with the 101st Airborne the night before the landing at Omaha Beach. The next morning, George Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, receives news that all of Ryan’s brothers had been killed on the same day, two in Europe and one in the Pacific. Marshall, not wanting to see an entire bloodline exterminated, sends word to the commanders on the beach at Normandy on June 7 to dispatch a squad of soldiers to find Ryan, and bring him back behind American lines, where he can be given an honorable discharge and sent back home. The premise is absurd if you think about it for more than a few seconds. Somehow news of the deaths of three enlisted men on opposite sides of the world got back to the supreme commander of the entire American Army in only a few hours. Does Steven Spielberg have any idea how much time it would take for a clerk in the mail division to receive not one but three telegrams, put two and two together and determine that three man with the very common name of “Ryan” were all brothers, that they had a fourth brother behind enemy lines in France, and then take that news all the way up the chain of command to the Chief of Staff of the United States Army? Even in the age of smart phones and social media it would take days, probably weeks.

The idea of sending an infantry squad behind enemy lines the day after the Battle of Normandy looking for one soldier is even more absurd. The American, Canadian, and British invasion of France in 1944 was not a primitive guerilla war where lines of communication depended on runners or carrier pigeons. It was the occupation of a major western European country by a massive, industrialized army. At some point, James Francis Ryan would make contact with an American, British or Canadian unit, where he would have reported into their commander. Marshall could have simply sent an order out over the wires directing any officer who came into contact with Ryan to send him sent back to the rear, where he could have been given a discharge, and been put on a ship back to New York. Why in the world would you give the news of Ryan’s discharge to only one low level company commander, in this case John Miller played by Tom Hanks, when you could have notified thousands of American, Canadian, British, Polish, and Free French officers about the news with further instructions to give him his discharge orders and pass him back to high command? Didn’t they know about “crowdsourcing” back in 1944? Marshall’s withholding of the news from the larger Allied chain of command and trusting it to one infantry squad, all of whom could have easily been killed before finding Ryan, was almost guaranteeing that he would never be found.

As pure cinema, the acclaimed opening on Omaha Beach holds up fairly well. The shaky cam, the scenes or the horrifically wounded soldiers, the man carrying the arm that had been blown off a few second before, the images of American infantrymen walking into a solid wall of machine gun fire as soon as the gates of the landing craft drop, and the eventual climb to the high ground to neutralize the German fortifications are a dramatic testament to the courage and determination of the American soldiers as well as a disorienting, unnerving simulation of combat from the perspective of the rank and file infantryman. One scene in particular is a masterful piece of cinema. A soldier is shot in the head. Luckily he is wearing a steel helment and the bullet bounces off the side without killing him. Unfortunately, however, he takes off the helmet to examine whatever wounds he may have had, and a second bullet splits his skull in half and sprays the man next to him with pink mist. Historically, the opening of Saving Private Ryan leaves a lot of facts out. While the landings on Omaha Beach were a bloody slog through determined German resistance, the landings on Utah Beach as well as the landing of British and Canadian troops on Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches went off pretty much as planned. The Allied invasion of Normandy was a major military operation, but compared to the Battle of Stalingrad, or even a major Civil War battle like Gettysburg or Grant’s Overland Campaign, it was not particularly bloody. The Germans, who had been deceived into thinking that the invasion was going to land at Calais, had sent most of their best troops North.

In other words, there is a reason you see American soldiers murder Czech conscripts trying to surrender in the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. The German troops at Ohama Beach were mostly draftees facing overwhelming odds, including half a dozen American and British capital ships plastering the beaches with 14 and 15 inch shells. In spite of that the Germans and their allied conscripts made the American, British, and Canadian troops pay for every inch of ground they took. They weren’t exactly heroes. They were fighting for one of the most evil causes that ever existed, but they were in fact the underdogs, and the Americans, British, and Canadians had the numbers, equipment, and supplies on their side. In retrospect, the Omaha Beach scenes from Saving Private Ryan are not a testament to American heroism so much as a distancing mechanism. By staging the landing as a horror movie instead of a traditional war movie, Spielberg puts a barrier between the Greatest Generation and the audience who would have been watching the movie in 1998, mostly younger Boomers and Gen Xers. “You will never be as brave as your fathers and grandfathers,” Spielberg is saying. “So don’t question American when the President decides to send us to war. You have no skin in the game.” After the first half hour, Spielberg almost completely drops the use of prosthetics, and the horror movie aesthetic he uses in the Ohama Beach scenes. When John Miller is shot towards the end of the movie, we don’t see any blood, only a highly romanticized image of Tom Hanks holding his side in pain and firing at a German Tiger tank with a 1911 45 automatic pistol.

The best drawn character in Saving Private Ryan is not James Ryan or John Miller, but Corporal Timothy Upham, a newly recruited soldier and translator Miller attaches to his squad just before they go on their mission behind enemy lines. Most of the American soldiers, including Miller, who has shaky hands but is otherwise fearless, Ryan, Horvath, played by Tim Sizemore, Caparzo, played by Vin Diesel, and above all Daniel Jackson, an evangelical Christian played by the Canadian actor Barry Pepper, are supermen. Even in the more propagandistic movies of the 1940s and 1950s, it is unlikely that the movie could have gotten away with portraying American soldiers with this kind of swagger and this kind of macho. The war was too recent a memory, and too many people knew what it was like. Upham on the other hand stands in for all of us. He doesn’t want to go on the mission to find Private Ryan. He is not only afraid. He understands quite well that he is not an experienced soldier, and will probably cause more harm than good on a mission where the object is to move fast, hit hard, and not worry too much about the Geneva Conventions. That makes Upham remarkably useful for the neoconservative propaganda Spielberg is promoting in the movie. Like Corporal Upham, we all are being tested. We are not natural warriors like Miller, Jackson, Horvath or Ryan himself, square jawed, red, white and blue heroes who saved the world from the Nazis. We are scared little everymen thrown into a horrific war we are not prepared for, and where we will inevitably fail, and get our fellow soldiers killed. Nevertheless, Spielberg and screenwriter Robert Rodat, are asking us a question. When the time comes to step up and do your part for your country, or will you be found wanting?

We do not see any British, Canadian, Polish or Free French soldiers in Saving Private Ryan. We see Germans, who are portrayed as such cartoonishly evil stereotypes they might as well have been taken from a comic book, and a few French civilians, who are portrayed in such a bizarrely “orientalized” manner it’s worth discussing in some detail. When Miller’s squad arrives in the town of Neuville-au-Plain, they find it under heavy attack by the Germans. A French father, who is hiding in the rubble with his family, tries to hand off his daughter to the Americans, hoping they will keep her safe. This defies the rules of common sense. Does the Frenchman really believe that his daughter will be safe with a tiny detachment of front line infantrymen, all of whom are complete strangers? It is also profoundly creepy, especially considering how we now know about the epidemic of rapes that took place in France at the hands of the Americans in 1944 and 1945. No father would have pushed his 12-year-old daughter into the arms of strange foreign men in the middle of a war zone.

Western Europeans and North Americans are in fact rarely portrayed this way in American movies. That “honor” is usually reserved for non-white people in the global south, Slavs, and Asians, the idea being that “those people don’t value human life like civilized people do.” It was common in the propaganda around the Bosnian War, one of the best examples being Welcome to Sarajevo, where a British journalist steals a Bosnian child and transports her out of the country, even though it was against the law, to save her from the baby killing, child eating Serbian monsters. It anticipates the bizarre anti-French propaganda that came out of the American media in 2003, where the French, who were smart enough to stay out of George W. Bush’s folly, were accused of being “Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys.” Above all the scene tests the audience. Would we be “hard” and ruthless enough to survive a war zone? Caparzo, who wants to protect the child, fails the test, and he is shot by a sniper. “This is why we don’t take children,” Miller says, to which anybody knowledgeable about the history of Western Front in World War II simply says “well duh.” There isn’t a single documented case of French civilians giving children away to American, Canadian, or British soldiers.

Upham, like Caparzo, also fails the test Steven Spielberg and Robert Rodat is setting up for late 1990s, Clinton-era Americans. Upham’s problem, like the Americans who protested the decision to invade Iraq, is that he doesn’t understand evil when he sees it. He is willing to wait for the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud. Not only does he persuade Captain Miller to let a German prisoner of war go against the wishes of the rest of the squad, who want to shoot him, he ultimately betrays Stanley Mellish, the only Jewish soldier, to the Nazis. Later in the movie, when Mellish is engaged in a desperate hand to hand struggle against a Waffen SS officer, who easily overpowers him, and plunges a knife into his heart while whispering into his ear that it “will be easier this way,” Upham is standing in the stairwell, paralyzed with fear. He makes no effort to engage the German soldier after Mellish is killed. On the contrary, he simply steps aside to let the man pass. In Upham, Steven Spielberg is expressing a common fear that Zionist and neocosnervatives have about “the goyim.” Can we trust American Christians? If we decide to go to war against the Hitler of the week, be he Yasir Arafat, Sadam, Gaddafi, Assad, or the Iranians, will American Christians have our back? Or will they, like Upham, show themselves to be weak, naive liberals who see the Germans, or Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians, or Syrians as fellow human beings instead of the evil orcs we know them all to be. There aren’t enough Jews in the world to establish Greater Israel, or implement Benjamin Netanyahu’s Clean Break Plan in the Middle East. Israel requires American, and to a lesser extent European, muscle. How long will we be able to count on them? In Upham’s case, even though he redeems himself later by murdering a German prisoner of war, who may in fact be the German Miller let go or the German who stabs Mellish or just some random German unrelated to both of them, the damage has already been done. The liberal, educated American Christian who speaks several languages, quotes Emerson, and demands that the American Army follow “the rules of war” is not “good for the Jews.” Chances are his grandchildren held up “No Blood for Oil” signs in 2003 and his great grandchildren held up “Free Palestine” signs in the Spring of 2024.

There is, however, one Christian American soldier in Saving Private Ryan Israel, and the Jews, can certainly count on, Private Daniel Jackson, an Evangelical Protestant played by the Canadian actor Barry Pepper. Jackson, who pulls out a cross, kisses it, and quotes a Bible verse from memory just before he guns down another German soldier. Jackson, unlike Upham or Caparzo, is an astonishingly effective soldier. He helps break the stalemate on Omaha Beach, single-handedly taking out a German pillbox, his last shot almost literally blowing the heavily fortified German position off the face of the earth. Unlike Captain Miller, his hands don’t sake. He sleeps soundly behind German lines without a care, or a shred of guilt, in the world. For Steven Spielberg, and Jewish neoconservatives and Zionists in general, Jackson and Upham represent a profound shift in their survival strategy. Where once Jewish Americans made alliances with Ivy league liberals like Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Robert Jackson, men like this could no longer be trusted. By the 1960s they had turned into George McGovern, Benjamin Spock, Walter Mondale, and above all Bill Clinton, who was hesitant to “finish the job” in Iraq or intervene in Rwanda during the genocide. Like Corporal Upham shooting the German POW he finally redeemed himself by bombing Belgrade in 1999, but it was clear that was only after a long string of failures. On the other hand, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Bolton, and Donald Trump could be trusted without hesitation. Motivated by their Dispensationalist Christian Zionism they understood full well that God honors those who honor Israel. While the liberal Corporal Upham fails to save Mellish from one German armed only with a knife, Jackson, high up in the bell tower of a Church, takes out so many Nazis that Quentin Tarantino later parodied the scene in the Nation’s Pride movie within a movie in his film Inglorious Bastards. Who wants to send a message to Germany! Tarantino, Zionist though he is, is even implying that Spielberg and Saving Private Ryan might just as well have been Nazi propaganda, his instinct for satirizing a bad movie overriding his politics. In the end, it takes a tank to bring down Private Jackson while Corporal Upham is defeated by his own cowardice.

The ironic thing about the propagandistic nature of Saving Private Ryan, of course, is that Steven Spielberg is a liberal Democrat who would later go onto make Munich, a movie profoundly critical of the Israeli policy of state assassination. In Jaws, in the iconic Indianapolis speech, he strongly implies that the monster shark was bad karma for the atomic bomb and the mass murder of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Politically, Saving Private Ryan is the kind of movie Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk would make, neither of whom of course would have the talent to pull off anything as artistically polished and dramatically effective. Tom Hanks and Matt Damon, in turn, are also liberal Democrats who spent most of the 2000s criticizing George W. Bush and the war on terror. In his movie Good Will Hunting, Damon’s famous “Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA” monologue Damon plays an out and out leftist who describes the exploitation of the global south, and the American working class, by the American ruling class with ruthless economy. Nevertheless, Spielberg and Hanks helped make some of the most important neoconservative propaganda of the 1990s, Schindler’s List, which sends the idea of the communist anti-fascist resistance in the memory hole, and recasts the anti-Nazi hero as a cyncial amoral capitalist, Forrest Gump, which buries the 1960s New Left forever, and Saving Private Ryan, which lays the groundwork for the narrative of the “war on terror” in the 2000s and 2010s. In the end, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Matt Damon are popular filmmakers making crowd pleasing spectacles, not political ideologues. What the American people wanted in the 1990s and 2000s was the moral clarity and martial heroism of the “greatest generation” back again. Steven Ambrose and Tom Brokaw would ultimately win out over Seymour Hersch and Noam Chomsky just as George W. Bush, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu would ultimately become the greatest political leaders of their generation.

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A Temporary Ceasefire in a Forever War

Yesterday, Donald Trump and the United States government backed down on their threat to destroy Iranian civilization, but let’s not fool ourselves. The war is not over. The United States is taking the time to catch its breath, to restock and resupply before resuming the attack later in the Spring. Israel has explicitly said that the ceasefire does not apply to Southern Lebanon, where they will continue to steal land and commit genocide against Shiite Muslims. What we bombed Slobodan Milošević in 1999 for doing in Kosovo is exactly what the Israelis are doing in Lebanon right this second. When do the Tomahawk missiles start falling on Jerusalem?

On March 18, 1956 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Atlanta, Martin Luther King preached a short sermon called When Peace Becomes Obnoxious. “Peace is not merely the absence of some negative force—war, tensions, confusion,” he said, “but it is the presence of some positive force—justice, goodwill, the power of the kingdom of God.”

An Obnoxious Peace, that is the state the United States finds itself in right now. There are no bombs falling on New York or Washington. An American passport will still get you into most countries, but the people of the world no longer respect Americans. Quite the opposite, they fear us and despise us. They fear the American government, which bombs and sanctions any government that asserts its sovreignty, and looks the other way when totalitarian religious kingdoms like Saudi Arabia or genocidal settler colonial democracies like Israel chop up journalists or commit genocide. They despise the American people, who refuse to assert their will against Wall Street, the Pentagon and the Epstein class, who sink into their selfish little bubbles where the only thing that matters is their resumes, their bank accounts, their families, their guns and their Ford F150s, and not even necessarily in that order.

As the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney admitted at Davos last January, the “western rules based order” has always been a fraud. He has since backed away from his earlier speech and declared his support for the war in Iran. There was no way that he, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, or whatever gang of pathetic Krauts is currently ruling Germany, could do anything else. Their problem with the war in Iran is not with our murdering 170 Iranian school girls. They couldn’t care less. Their problem is that for every dollar spent in Iran, we spend one less dollar in Ukraine. They want us killing Russians, not people in the Middle East. While I, an ignorant, dumb Polack from Elizabeth, New Jersey can see with perfectly clarity that the attack on Iran and the ongoing stalemate in Ukraine are part of a larger regional war between Eurasia and the West that will resume as soon as the United States Navy can fix the laundry room and clean the shit out of the USS Gerald Ford, none of these sophisticated western leaders understand, or want to admit, that we have replaced any possibility for a war on global warming with the war for the continued hegemony of Anglo Zionist Epstein Pedo Empire.

Trump’s profane outburst on Easter where he threatened to destroy Iranian civilization, mocked Islam, and confirmed to the world that he is an evil, senile old man, genuinely scared the western liberal elite. I’m not quire sure why. Joe Biden was an evil, senile old man who enabled the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Kamala Harris, who we will see again in 2028, is a vain, ambitious woman more than happy to murder Palestinian babies to pad her resume, and go down in history as the first woman to be President of the United States. If Trump backed down on his threats against the Iranian people, it has nothing to do with justice, a positive peace, or even a real cease fire. It’s just a confirmation of American hypocrisy. Remember, only a few months ago the American government and the ruling class American media had argued that the government in Iran had killed tens of thousands of protesters in the streets, and that nothing less than unconditional surrender would constitute a just settlement in the region. So what happened to all those dead protesters? Did we just forget them like we forget the school girls we murdered in February and 80,000 Palestinians lying under the rubble in Gaza. What happened to that war for democracy? Did it suddenly become inconvenient?

Trump, like Winston Churchill in Gallipoli, has lost one battle. While I congratulate the budding Attaturks in the Iranian Republican Guard for their victory against the Anglo Zionist Epstein Pedo Empire, I caution them not to let their guard down. As in any American slasher movie from the 1980s, the kid in the hockey mask always comes back.

Liberating The Written Word From Capitalism Since 2014