Authored by Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org…

The following is entirely from open online sources that I have been finding to be trustworthy on these matters in the past. These sources will be linked-to here; none of this information is secret, even though some details in my resulting analysis of it will be entirely new.

It explains how and why the bottom-line difference between Donald Trump and Barack Obama, regarding U.S. national security policies, turns out to be their different respective estimations of the biggest danger threatening the maintenance of the U.S. dollar as the world’s leading or reserve currency. This has been the overriding foreign-policy concern for both Presidents.

Obama placed as being the top threat to the dollar, a breakaway of the EU (America’s largest market both for exports and for imports) from alliance with the United States. He was internationally a Europhile. Trump, however, places as being the top threat to the dollar, a breakaway of Saudi Arabia and of the other Gulf Arab oil monarchies from the United States. Trump is internationally a Sunni-phile: specifically a protector of fundamentalist Sunni monarchs — but especially of the Sauds themselves — and they hate Shia and especially the main Shia nation, Iran.

Here’s how that change, to Saudi Arabia as being America’s main ally, has happened — actually it’s a culmination of decades. Trump is merely the latest part of that process of change. Here is from the U.S. State Department’s official historian, regarding this history:

By the 1960s, a surplus of U.S. dollars caused by foreign aid, military spending, and foreign investment threatened this system [the FDR-established 1944 Bretton Woods gold-based U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency], as the United States did not have enough gold to cover the volume of dollars in worldwide circulation at the rate of $35 per ounce; as a result, the dollar was overvalued. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson adopted a series of measures to support the dollar and sustain Bretton Woods: foreign investment disincentives; restrictions on foreign lending; efforts to stem the official outflow of dollars; international monetary reform; and cooperation with other countries. Nothing worked. Meanwhile, traders in foreign exchange markets, believing that the dollar’s overvaluation would one day compel the U.S. government to devalue it, proved increasingly inclined to sell dollars. This resulted in periodic runs on the dollar.

It was just such a run on the dollar, along with mounting evidence that the overvalued dollar was undermining the nation’s foreign trading position, which prompted President Richard M. Nixon to act, on August 13, 1971 [to end the convertibility of dollars to gold].

When Nixon ended the gold-basis of the dollar and then in 1974 secretly switched to the current oil-basis, this transformation of the dollar’s backing, from gold to oil, was intended to enable the debt-financing (as opposed to the tax-financing, which is less acceptable to voters) of whatever military expenditure would be necessary in order to satisfy the profit-needs of Lockheed Corporation and of the other U.S. manufacturers whose only markets are the U.S. Government and its allied governments, as well as of U.S. extractive industries such as oil and mining firms, which rely heavily upon access to foreign natural resources, as well as of Wall Street and its need for selling debt and keeping interest-rates down (and stock-prices — and therefore aristocrats’ wealth — high and rising). This 1974 secret agreement between Nixon and King Saud lasts to the present day, and has worked well for both aristocracies. It met the needs of the very same “military-industrial complex” (the big U.S. Government contractors) that the prior Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, had warned might take control of U.S. foreign policies. As Bloomberg’s Andrea Wong on 30 May 2016 explained the Nixon system that replaced the FDR system, “The basic framework was strikingly simple. The U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.”

This new system didn’t only supply a constant flow of Saudi tax-money to the U.S. Government; it supplied a constant flow of new sales-orders and profits to the military firms that were increasingly coming to control the U.S. Government — for the benefit of both aristocracies: the Sauds, and America’s billionaires.

That was near the end of the FDR-produced 37-year period of U.S. democratic leadership of the world, the era that had started at Bretton Woods in 1944. It came crashing to an end not in 1974 (which was step two after the 1971 step one had ended the 1944 system) but on the day when Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981. The shockingly sudden ascent, from that moment on, of U.S. federal Government debt (to be paid-off by future generations instead of by current taxpayers) is shown, right here, in a graph of “U.S. Federal Debt as Percent of GDP, 1940-2015”, where you can see that the debt had peaked above 90% of GDP late in WW II between 1944-1948, and then plunged during Bretton Woods, but in 1981 it started ascending yet again, until reaching that WW II peak for a second time, as it has been ever since 2010, when Obama bailed-out the mega-banks and their mega-clients, but didn’t bail out the American public, whose finances had been destroyed by those banksters’ frauds, which Obama refused to prosecute; and, so, economic inequality in America got even more extreme after the 2008 George W. Bush crash, instead of less extreme afterward (as had always happened in the past).

Above 90% debt/GDP during and immediately following WW II was sound policy, but America’s going again above 90% since 2010 has reflected simply an aristocratic heist of America, for only the aristocracy’s benefit — all of the benefits going only to the super-rich.

Another, and more-current U.S. graph shows that, as of the first quarter of 2018, this percentage (debt/GDP) is, yet again, back now to its previous all-time record high of 105-120%%, which had been reached only in 1945-1947 (when it was justified by the war).

Currently, companies such as Lockheed Martin are thriving as they had done during WW II, but the sheer corruption in America’s military spending is this time the reason, no World War (yet); so, this time, America is spending like in an all-out-war situation, even before the Congress has issued any declaration of war at all. Everybody except the American public knows that the intense corruptness of the U.S. military is the reason for this restoration of astronomical ‘defense’ spending, even during peace-time. A major poll even showed that ‘defense’ spending was the only spending by the federal Government which Americans in 2017 wanted increased; they wanted all other federal spending to be reduced (though there was actually vastly more corruption in military spending than in any other type — the public have simply been hoodwinked).

But can the U.S. Government’s extreme misallocation of wealth, from the public to the insiders, continue without turning this country into a much bigger version of today’s Greece? More and more people around the world are worrying about that. Of course, Greece didn’t have the world’s reserve currency, but what would happen to the net worths of America’s billionaires if billionaires worldwide were to lose faith in the dollar? Consequently, there’s intensified Presidential worrying about how much longer foreign investors will continue to trust the oil-based dollar.

America’s political class now have two competing ideas to deal with this danger, Obama’s versus Trump’s, both being about how to preserve the dollar in a way that best serves the needs of ‘defense’ contractors, extractive firms, and Wall Street. Obama chose Europe (America’s largest market) as America’s chief ally (he was Euro-centric against Russia); Trump chose the owner of Saudi Arabia (he’s Saudi-Israeli centric against Iran) — that’s the world’s largest weapons-purchaser, as well as the world’s largest producer of oil (as well as the largest lobbies).

The Saudi King owns Saudi Arabia, including the world’s largest and most valuable oil company, Aramco, whose oil is the “sweetest” — the least expensive to extract and refine — and is also the most abundant, in all of the world, and so he can sell petroleum at a profit even when his competitors cannot. Oil-prices that are so low as to cause economic losses for other oil companies, can still be generating profits — albeit lowered ones — for King Saud; and this is the reason why his decisions determine how much the global oil-spigot will be turned on, and how low the global oil-price will be, at any given time. He controls the value of the U.S. dollar. He controls it far more directly, and far more effectively, than the EU can. It would be like, under the old FDR-era Bretton Woods system, controlling the exchange-rates of the dollar, by raising or lowering the amount of gold produced. But this is liquid gold, and King Saud determines its price.

Furthermore, King Saud also leads the Gulf Cooperation Council of all other Arab oil monarchs, such as those who own UAE — all of them are likewise U.S. allies and major weapons-buyers.

In an extraordinarily fine recent article by Pepe Escobar at Asia Times, “Oil and gas geopolitics: no shelter from the storm”, he quotes from his not-for-attribution interviews with “EU diplomats,” and reports:

After the Trump administration’s unilateral pull-out from the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), European Union diplomats in Brussels, off the record, and still in shock, admit that they blundered by not “configuring the eurozone as distinct and separate to the dollar hegemony”. Now they may be made to pay the price of their impotence via their “outlawed” trade with Iran. …

As admitted, never on the record, by experts in Brussels; the EU has got to reevaluate its strategic alliance with an essentially energy independent US, as “we are risking all our energy resources over their Halford Mackinder geopolitical analysis that they must break up [the alliance between] Russia and China.”

That’s a direct reference to the late Mackinder epigone Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski, who died dreaming of turning China against Russia.

In Brussels, there’s increased recognition that US pressure on Iran, Russia and China is out of geopolitical fear the entire Eurasian land mass, organized as a super-trading bloc via the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), [and] the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), is slipping away from Washington’s influence.

This analysis gets closer to how the three key nodes of 21st century Eurasia integration – Russia, China and Iran – have identified the key issue; both the euro and the yuan must bypass the petrodollar, the ideal means, as the Chinese stress, to “end the oscillation between strong and weak dollar cycles, which has been so profitable for US financial institutions, but lethal to emerging markets.” …

It’s also no secret among Persian Gulf traders that in the – hopefully unlikely – event of a US-Saudi-Israeli war in Southwest Asia against Iran, a real scenario war-gamed by the Pentagon would be “the destruction of oil wells in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council]. The Strait of Hormuz does not have to be blocked, as destroying the oil wells would be far more effective.”

And what the potential loss of over 20% of the world’s oil supply would mean is terrifying; the implosion, with unforeseen consequences, of the quadrillion derivatives pyramid, and consequentially [consequently] of the entire Western financial casino superstructure

In other words: it’s not the ‘threat’ that perhaps, some day, Iran will have nuclear warheads, that is actually driving Trump’s concern here (despite what Israel’s concerns are about that matter), but instead, it is his concerns about Iran’s missiles, which constitute the delivery-system for any Iranian warheads: that their flight-range be short enough so that the Sauds will be outside their range. (The main way Iran intends to respond to an invasion backed by the U.S., is to attack Saudi Arabia — Iran’s leaders know that the U.S. Government is more dependent upon the Sauds than upon Israel — so, Iran’s top targets would be Saudi capital Riyadh, and also the Ghawar oil field, which holds over half of Saudi oil. If U.S. bases have been used in the invasion, then all U.S. bases in the Middle East are also be within the range of Iran’s missiles and therefore would also probably be targeted.)

Obama’s deal with Iran had focused solely upon preventing Iran from developing nuclear warheads — which Obama perhaps thought (mistakenly) would dampen Israel’s (and its billionaire U.S. financial backers’) ardor for the U.S. to conquer Iran. Israel had publicly said that their concern was Iran’s possibility to become a nuclear power like Israel became; those possible future warheads were supposed to be the issue; but, apparently, that wasn’t actually the issue which really drove Israel. Obama seems to have thought that it was, but it wasn’t, actually. Israel, like the Sauds, want Iran conquered. Simple. The nuclear matter was more an excuse than an explanation.

With Trump now in the White House, overwhelmingly by money from the Israel lobbies (proxies also for the Sauds) — and with no equivalently organized Jewish opposition to the pro-Israel lobbies (and so in the United States, for a person to be anti-Israel is viewed as being anti-Semitic, which is not at all true, but Israel’s lies say it’s true and many Americans unfortunately believe it) — Trump has not only the Sauds and their allies requiring him to be against Iran and its allies, but he has also got this pressure coming from Israel: both the Big-Oil and the Jewish lobbies drive him. Unlike Obama, who wasn’t as indebted to the Jewish lobbies, Trump needs to walk the plank for both the Sauds and Israel.

In other words: Trump aims to keep the dollar as the reserve currency by suppressing not only China but also the two main competitors of King Saud: Iran and Russia. That’s why America’s main ‘enemies’ now are those three countries and their respective allies.

Obama was likewise targeting them, but in a different priority-order, with Russia being the main one (thus Obama’s takeover of Ukraine in February 2014 turning it against Russia, next door); and that difference was due to Obama’s desire to be favorably viewed by the residents in America’s biggest export and import market, the EU, and so his bringing another member (Ukraine) into the EU (which still hasn’t yet been culminated).

Trump is instead building on his alliance with King Saud and the other GCC monarchs, a group who can more directly cooperate to control the value of the U.S. dollar than the EU can. Furthermore, both conservative (including Orthodox) Jews in the United States, and also white evangelical Protestants in the U.S., are strongly supportive of Israel, which likewise sides with the Arab oil monarchs against Iran and its allies. Trump needs these people’s votes.

Trump also sides with the Sauds against Canada. That’s a matter which the theorists who assert that Israel controls the U.S., instead of that the Sauds (allied with America’s and Israel’s billionaires) control the U.S., ignore; they ignore whatever doesn’t fit their theory. Of course, a lot doesn’t fit their theory (which equates “Jews” with “Israelis” and alleges that “they” control the world), but people whose prejudices are that deep-seated, can’t be reached by any facts which contradict their self-defining prejudice. Since it defines themselves, it’s a part of them, and they can never deny it, because to do so would be to deny who and what they are, and they refuse to change that. The Sauds control the dollar; Israel does not, but Israel does the lobbying, and both the Sauds and Israel want Iran destroyed. Trump gets this pressure not only from the billionaires but from his voters.

And, of course, Democratic Party billionaires push the narrative that Russia controls America. It used to be the Republican Joseph R. McCarthy’s accusation, that the “commies” had “infiltrated”, especially at the State Department. So: Trump kicked out Russia’s diplomats, to satisfy those neocons— the neoconservatives of all Parties and persuasions, both conservative and liberal.

To satisfy the Sauds, despite the EU, Trump has dumped the Iran deal. And he did it also to satisfy Israel, the main U.S. lobbyists for the Sauds. (Americans are far more sympathetic to Jews than to Arabs; the Sauds are aware of this; Israel handles their front-office.) For Trump, the Sauds are higher priority than Europe; even Israel (who are an expense instead of a moneybag for the U.S. Government) are higher priority than Europe. Both the Sauds and Israel together are vastly higher. And the Sauds alone are higher priority for Trump than are even Canada and Europe combined. Under Trump, anything will be done in order to keep the Sauds and their proxy-lobbyists (Israel) ‘on America’s side’.

Consequently, Trump’s political base is mainly against Iran and for Israel, but Obama’s was mainly against Russia and for the EU. Obama’s Democratic Party still are controlled by the same billionaires as before; and, so, Democrats continue demonizing Russia, and are trying to make as impossible as they can, any rapprochement with Russia — and, therefore, they smear Trump for anything he might try to do along those lines.

Both Obama and Trump have been aiming to extend America’s aristocracy’s dominance around the world, but they employ different strategies toward that politically bipartisan American-aristocratic objective: the U.S. Government’s global control, for the benefit of the U.S. aristocracy, at everyone else’s expense. Obama and Trump were placed into the White House by different groups of U.S. billionaires, and each nominee serves his/her respective sponsors, no public anywhere — not even their voters’ welfare.

An analogous example is that, whereas Fox News, Forbes, National Review, The Weekly Standard, American Spectator, Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, Breitbart News, InfoWars, Reuters, and AP, are propagandists for the Republican Party; NPR, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, The New Republic, New Yorker, New York Magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and Salon, are propagandists for the Democratic Party; but, they all draw their chief sponsors from the same small list of donors who are America’s billionaires, since these few people control the top advertisers, investors, and charities, and thus control nearly all of the nation’s propaganda. The same people who control the Government control the public; but, America isn’t a one-Party dictatorship. America is, instead, a multi-Party dictatorship. And this is how it functions.

Trump cancelled the Iran deal because a different group of billionaires are now in control of the White House, and of the rest of the U.S. Government. Trump’s group demonize especially Iran; Obama’s group demonize especially Russia. That’s it, short. That’s America’s aristocratic tug-of-war; but both sides of it are for invasion, and for war.  Thus, we’re in the condition of ‘permanent war for permanent peace’ — to satisfy the military contractors and the billionaires who control them. Any U.S. President who would resist that, would invite assassination; but, perhaps in Trump’s case, impeachment, or other removal-from-office, would be likelier. In any case, the sponsors need to be satisfied — or else — and Trump knows this.

Trump is doing what he thinks he has to be doing, for his own safety. He’s just a figurehead for a different faction of the U.S. aristocracy, than Obama was. He’s doing what he thinks he needs to be doing, for his survival. Political leadership is an extremely dangerous business. Trump is playing a slightly different game of it than Obama did, because he represents a different faction than Obama did. These two factions of the U.S. aristocracy are also now battling each other for political control over Europe.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Authored by  James Georges Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation…

It’s déjà vu all over again.

First US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and appears to make some progress towards his stated goal of putting ties between Washington and Moscow on a positive course. Immediately, all hell breaks loose. Trump is a called a traitor. The “sanctions bill from hell” is introduced in the Senate. Trump is forced on the defensive.

Next Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky visits Moscow, where he meets with Putin and gives him a letter from Trump proposing moderate steps towards rapprochement. Paul also talks with Russian Senators and invites them to come to Washington to continue the dialogue. Immediately, all hell breaks loose. Paul is called a traitor. The State Department “finds” the Russians guilty of the using illegal chemical weapons (CW) in the United Kingdom and imposes sanctions. Trump is forced even more on the defensive.

In each instance the actions of the Washington establishment, both in Congress and in even in departments and agencies allegedly part of the Executive Branch of government headed by Trump, moved quickly to nip in the bud even the most tentative efforts by Trump to keep his campaign pledge. With regard to the new CW sanctions it is unclear whether Trump had anything to do with them at all; most likely they either were imposed without his participation or he acceded to them because he felt he had no other option.

It is debatable how much of the US government Trump actually controls. The baseless CW finding by the State Department (with heavy pressure from Congress) is the work of Trump’s globalist enemies in the bureaucracy and in Congress (all of the Democrats, and almost all of the Republicans), with the complicity of his own appointees, to undermine his overtures to Moscow and further erode his Executive authority. Besides blocking every possible path to détente with Russia, this is another step to setting Trump up for removal from office.

Regarding the timing of a second set of sanctions set to kick in November, it’s hard to see how that will be avoided. Russia will not submit to inspections, which the US is arrogantly demanding of Russia, as if she were some pipsqueak country like Libya. Given that the OPCW certified in 2017 that the Russians had completed destruction of 100% of their CW stockpile (cf., the US still has almost 10% of our stocks, which are not expected to be completely gone until 2023), the demand is the equivalent of proving that you have stopped beating your wife (to the satisfaction of someone who admittedly continues to beat his own wife).

In the absence of capitulating to the US demand, which Russia will not do, legally Trump can waive the sanctions. But that option is no doubt part of the political trap being laid for him, presenting him a Hobson’s choice. On the one hand, he can waive the sanctions, further hyping the charges of treason against him (and, if the waiver is before the elections, giving the Democrats another red flag to wave), as well as inviting new legislation passed by a margin “Putin’s puppet” cannot veto; or he can let them go into effect.

If, as seems likely, the harsher measures are applied it is hard to overstate the danger created. These are the kind of things that countries do just one step from totally breaking relations in advance of war: cutting off access to American banks, barring Aeroflot from the US (in context, the least of our concerns, though symbolic), effectively blocking all exports and imports, and downgrading or suspending diplomatic ties. With respect to the last – a direct assault on Trump’s presidential authority to send and receive ambassadors under Article II of the Constitution (oddly, no one in Congress seems to care that presidents routinely usurp their authority to make war) – this likely would mean withdrawing the US ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador in Washington, while maintaining relations if at all at the chargé d’affaires level.

In word, this is insanity. What’s perhaps worse is that this political warfare is being conducted with total disregard for the truth, much less an honest attempt to find it. It’s worse than a presumption of guilt; it’s a positive, unambiguous verdict of culpability under circumstances where the accusers in Washington and London (I would guess but cannot prove) know perfectly well that the CW finger pointing is false.

It has been clear from the beginning of Trump’s meteoric rise on the American political scene that he and his American First agenda were perceived by the beneficiaries of the globalist, neoliberal order as a mortal danger to the system which has enriched them. Maintaining and intensifying hostility toward Russia, even at the risk of a catastrophic, uncontainable conflict, lies at the center of their efforts. This political war to save globalism at all hazards is intensifying.

It would be a mistake, however, to understand hostility to Russia as just a cold calculation of pecuniary and social advantage by a corrupt mandarin class. It is all that of course, but it is also deeply ideological, reflecting the agenda of the entrenched pseudo-elites to dismantle the traditional national identities and Christian moral values of the West – and impose their godless agenda on the East as well.

But there is something else too, something that touches the emotional heart of both Russophobia in a global context and anti-Trumpism domestically. That is the accusation of racism.

Unsurprisingly one of the first to give voice to this concept was Hillary Clinton, who in her August 2016 “tinfoil hat speech” sought to portray Trump as a creature of the “Alt-Right” because, among other things, he once complimented Infowars’ Alex Jones: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.” But in Hillary’s estimation, who is “the grand godfather” of the worldwide Alt-Right? You guessed it: “Russian President Vladimir Putin.” A month later she doubled down in her infamous “basket of deplorables” speech, branding Trump’s tens of millions of supporters “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.” (In an evident oversight, she omitted mention of Putin.)

Give the warmongering old girl credit for her doggedness. Hillary has stuck to this theme even as she sinks into irrelevance (while still reportedly harboring ambitions of a 2020 presidential run!), in June 2018 calling Putin the leader of the worldwide “authoritarian, white-supremacist, and xenophobic movement” who is “emboldening right-wing nationalists, separatists, racists, and even neo-Nazis.”

Hillary is not alone. As summed up by Jodi Jacobson of Rewire.News (“Putin, Trump, and Kavanaugh: A Triad of White Supremacy and Oligarchy”):

‘Putin is a dictator. His interests are in amassing wealth and power at any cost, both in Russia and globally. … He is an ethnic nationalist, a white supremacist, and an Islamophobe. He aligns himself with radical right-wing religious and political groups to marginalize and attack the rights of women, LGBTQ communities, and religious and ethnic groups outside his power base.’

But perhaps the most revealing description comes from putative comedian Bill Maher on a recent episode of his HBO program, explaining that “Race Explains Shift From Party Of Reagan To Party Of Putin” and excoriating not just Putin but Russians as such for their genetic characteristics:

‘UPDATE, with video The “dirty little secret” that explains how the Party of Reagan morphed into the Party of Putin is a four-letter word, Bill Maher said tonight: Race.

‘“Russia,” Maher said during his New Rules segment on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, “is one of the last places on earth to say, ‘F**k diversity. We’re here. We’re white. Get used to it.’”

‘Attempting to explain how 87% of Republicans (according to a recent poll) are fine with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin visiting the White House, Maher chalked it up to racism, and even quoted a tweet from his old pal Ann Coulter.

‘“Last year Ann Coulter tweeted that ‘In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European.’ As far back as 2013 Matt Drudge called Putin the leader of the free world. David Duke called Russia the key to white survival.

‘“Today’s Republicans, what’s left of them, do not like the melting pot,” he said. “And Russia? That pot don’t melt.”

‘Making jokes about White Russians (“Let’s see, I want to get drunk but I also want a glass of milk”) and Russian basketball players (“the team that played against the Globetrotters”), Maher compared racial diversity (or lack thereof) in Russia to that of Western Europe.

‘Ending the bit with a bite, Maher concluded, “A Barack Obama does not become the president of Russia. Wingnuts used to accuse Obama of being a foreign agent who took over America, but when a foreign power actually did take over America and it was the proudly white one, their response was ‘come right on in.’

‘“To the members of the Grand Old Party, Russia meddling in our elections isn’t a breach of national security, it’s just white people helping white people. Or what Republicans call governing.”’

Maher gives away more than he suspects. Very little in the foregoing says anything about racism, either Russian or American, but it does say a great deal about Maher’s own disdain for Russia because it is “recognizably European,” also known as (if you’ll pardon the expression) white. One suspects he doesn’t castigate, say, Koreans or Japanese for the fact that their countries are “recognizably Asian” and are going to stay that way.

Shifting to the US, it is increasingly obvious that what poses as antiracism and opposition to “hate” is little more than hostility to the identity and values of the core American ethnos: English-speaking Christians of European descent, including completely or partially assimilated descendants of immigrants. (In other countries this would be understood in specifically national terms – Russian, French, German, English, etc. – but for historical reasons too complex to summarize here, the core American demographic is generally seen in terms of race, not ethnicity. This stems in part from the absurd but widespread claim that the US not an ethnic state, only a civic one.) More and more this hostility is expressed as hatred of “whiteness” itself, in a manner that would be totally unacceptable applied to any other ethnic, racial, or religious group.

The current Exhibit A of such hatred is the controversy over a newly appointed member of the New York Times editorial board, Korean-born Sarah Jeong, whose expressions of anti-white bias were parodied by African-American conservative Candace Owens, only substituting “Jewish” and “black” for Jeong’s “white.” Unsurprisingly, Owens was suspended from Twitter while Jeong – who also trashes men and the police – is the beneficiary of full-throated support from the assembled forces of diversity, tolerance, and overall wonderfulness.

Jeong is just one example of a phenomenon that has become fashionable among the haters. “White thoughts” are a disease, as is whiteness itself. Among the items various college professors have denounced as tainted by white racism are math, farmers’ markets, interracial friendship, solar eclipses, the Bible (of course), environmental pollution, college football, the song “Jingle Bells,” the nuclear family, punctuality, and (it goes without saying) supporting Trump. The existence of entire US states like New Hampshire and Vermont that are just “too white” is an affront to diversity, a problem demanding a solution. For the über-PCHuffPost.com, whiteness constitutes an entire issue category for the grievances of other racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual “communities,” including helpful advice to liberal white feminists to just “shut the f**k up!” The inevitability of the United States’ becoming a majority-minority country is stated as a fact as inevitable as sunrise and sunset, but it’s “unabashed white nationalism” for even mainstream conservatives who are light-years away from the Alt-Right to point out that Americans never voted for or were asked their opinion about such a future. Conversely, “white-bashing” by self-loathers is a demonstration of the “nobility that flows from racial self-flagellation.”

Connecting Putin and Russia with racism feeds into cockamamie phantasmagoria of Crimethink concepts that increasingly are considered outside the protection of what was once quaintly known as free speech: hate speech, fake news, conspiracy theories, white nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, “cisgenderism,” and many more. (Astonishingly, this recent video from ADL’s Orwellian-named “Center for Technology and Society,” which claims to identify “online hate” with 78 to 85 percent accuracy through the use of artificial intelligence, is real, not a parody.) Just to be accused of subjectively and politically defined hate is now sufficient to trigger a coordinated muzzling of the offender’s online presence by the lords of the Internet, getting them fired from their jobs, and even subjecting them to physical attack from violent enforcers like Antifa. Ostensibly these actions are undertaken by private entities, conveniently hiding the government hand encouraging tech companies to police content to counter “Russian meddling” and other thought crimes.

The current coupling of a globalist agenda with demonization of our country’s majority demographic has a disquieting precedent. In August 1915 the committed internationalist Vladimir Lenin issued his infamous call to “turn the imperialist war into a civil war.” In that, if in nothing else, his program was a smashing success, resulting in the deaths of up to ten million people through savage warfare, “Red Terror” repression, disease, and famine. As he summed it up, “I spit on Russia! That’s only one stage we have to pass through on our way to world revolution!” No sacrifice of other peoples’ lives was too high a price to be paid to implement Lenin’s version of globalism.

As Anatoly Karlin notes (“The Real Lenin: Traitor, Parasite, Failure”) the horrendous destruction inflicted by the Bolsheviks was motivated in part by Lenin’s conscious hatred – perhaps not very different from Maher’s today – of Russians as the majority ethno-religious group, who had to be crushed to liberate the certified oppressed minorities. That hatred gives “an inkling of the real reason why Western intellectuals like Lenin a lot more than Stalin,” writes Karlin. Indeed, in light of the Russian experience there is a chillingly familiar ring to today’s legitimatization of racial detestation of the American majority.

Via Ben Garrison’s GrrrGraphics.com…

In early America many cities had ‘town squares’ in which citizens could stand on soapboxes and shout out various messages. Our First Amendment protects such speech.

The Internet is today’s town square. The soapboxes are social media.

The Deep State and the left are intertwined with Silicon Valley. The CIA helped Google and Facebook get started. Why? To make it easier to spy on people. Over time, millions gravitated toward Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Conservative and Libertarian voices became very strong and that alarmed the Deep State. So they began demonetizing conservatives. Then they shadow-banned them. Now they are deleting them outright.

For many years, Alex Jones reached millions with his journalism and rants. His tirades helped wake people up. He yelled at us about the Deep State, including the corrupt security agencies, the Bohemian Grove, the CFR, the Bilderbergs, fluoride in our water, the lies about 9-11, and yes, even Sandy Hook. The latter had many anomalies that should be questioned. Alex brought all of this up and more before anyone else had a inkling about what was really going on with such matters. He was routinely dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by the establishment. However, much of what he has been saying over the years is now acknowledged as self-evident. The legacy media, the Deep State, and Silicon Valley could not stomach the fact that he was informing and influencing minds and elections. They all got together and confiscated his soapbox. Their lame excuse? They claimed he was a purveyor of ‘hate speech.’

Having previously endured years of hate speech aimed toward me, I know what it is and what it isn’t. To me, it’s libel, defamation and death threats. Alex Jones has never engaged in hate speech. Questioning climate change is not hate speech. Jones is not a racist, a bigot or any of the other ‘phobic’ names the left enjoy pinning on ideological opponents. ‘Hate speech’ sounds alarming and terrible, but it’s also vague. Who gets to decide what it is? The Supreme Court ruled it was legal speech, but apparently the Silicon Valley and Deep State commissars want to overrule that decision. They own their social media game and they’ve rigged it in their favor. They have all the money in the world, so they can afford to lose revenue from the millions of conservatives and libertarians they’re forcing out of the game. They can’t win the argument, so they’re resorting to censorship.

Censorship is what China does, and companies like Facebook and Apple are eager to please the communist oligarchs. The Deep State wants what President Xi enjoys—a rigged Internet that does not allow dissent or criticism of the political elite. Right now, even Winnie the Pooh is being banned in China. Why? Because Xi opponents in China were using the cartoon bear as a ‘meme’ to criticize their leader. Remember, conservatives greatly out-memed the left during the last presidential election. Hillary is no doubt very angry that we have the ability to meme and ridicule her pomposity. She once said herself that the Internet needs an ‘editor.’ She would welcome a Chinese-style, well-censored Internet that she and her ilk would control.

The leftist media have dominated American minds for decades. The lies they told were readily accepted as facts. That kind of mind control is no longer working for them, thanks to the Internet. We know their ‘Russia collusion’ narrative is bunk. We’re not going along, so now they want to force us to go along and if we don’t, we get banned as ‘haters.’

It will get worse. PayPal is already banning users who are being smeared as ‘haters.’ The left will make that tactic seem fashionable, so it’s a matter of time before banks get in on the act. Maybe even the Bezos-owned Amazon?

What can we do? Many think conservatives should develop their own social media. That is no easy task and we will receive no generous funding from the Deep State to do it. What we should NOT do is ask government to ‘regulate’ social media. That would only add bureaucracy and regulations on free speech and if the left regains political control, they will use it to their advantage. Just like they used the IRS to harass conservatives.

The only thing we can do now is keep our cool and let the leftist oligarchs play their game and reveal themselves for who they are—tyrants who want control over our minds via their game of monopoly.

—Ben Garrison