The Golden Age Of American Jews Is Ending

theatlantic | Americans maintain a favorable opinion of Jews. The community remains prosperous and politically powerful. But the memory of how quickly the best of times can turn dark has infused the Jewish reactions to events of the past decade. “When lights start flashing red, the Jewish impulse is to flee,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.

 Back in 2016, many liberals blustered about leaving the country if Donald Trump was elected president; after he won, many Jews actually hatched contingency plans. My mother tried, in vain, to get a passport from Poland, the country of her birth. An immigration lawyer I know in Cleveland told me that he had obtained a German passport, and suggested that I call the German embassy in Washington to learn how many other American Jews had done the same.

 The German government, for understandable reasons, doesn’t count Jews. But the embassy sent me a tally of passport applications submitted under laws that apply to victims of Nazi persecution and their descendants. In 2017, after Trump’s election, the number of applications nearly doubled from the year before, to 1,685, and then kept growing. In 2022, it was 2,500. These aren’t large numbers in absolute terms; still, it’s extraordinary that so many American Jews, whose applications required documenting that their families once fled Germany, now consider the country a safer haven than the United States.

 I also saw signs of flight in Oakland, where at least 30 Jewish families have been approved to transfer their children to neighboring school districts—and I heard similar stories in the surrounding area. Initial data collected by an organization representing Jewish day schools, which have long struggled for enrollment, show a spike in the number of admission inquiries from families contemplating pulling their kids from public school.

 After 1967, the previous moment of profound political abandonment, the American Jewish community began to entertain thoughts of its own radical reinvention. A coterie of disillusioned intellectuals, clustered around a handful of small-circulation journals and think tanks, turned sharply rightward, creating the neoconservative movement. Among activists, the energy that had once been directed toward Freedom Rides was plowed into the cause of Soviet Jewry, which became a defining political obsession of many synagogues in the 1970s and ’80s. Meanwhile, Jewish hippies turned inward, creating new spiritual movements centered on prayer and ritual.

 Although not all of these movements proved equally fruitful, this history, in a way, is cause for optimism, an example of how conflict might provide the path to religious renewal and a fresh sense of solidarity. It’s also a reminder that the Golden Age was not an uninterrupted rise.

The case for pessimism, however, is more convincing. The forces arrayed against Jews, on the right and the left, are far more powerful than they were 50 years ago. The surge of anti-Semitism is a symptom of the decay of democratic habits, a leading indicator of rising authoritarianism. When anti-Semitism takes hold, conspiracy theory hardens into conventional wisdom, embedding violence in thought and then in deadly action. A society that holds its Jews at arm’s length is likely to be more intent on hunting down scapegoats than addressing underlying defects. Although it is hardly an iron law of history, such societies are prone to decline. England entered a long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290. Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s. If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.

Class Not Race Is The Dividing Line In American Politics

realclearpolitics  |  Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy editor of Newsweek and author of the new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, speaks with RCP Washington bureau chief Carl Cannon on Thursday's edition of the RealClearPolitics radio show.

"People don't talk about it like it is an outrage," she said about the transformation of the Democratic Party into something other than a party for the working class. "It is such a fait accompli at this point that we forget that it is outrageous for a party that used to represent labor, the little guy against big corporations and the rich, completely abandoned that constituency to cater to an over-credentialed college elite on one hand, and the dependent poor on the other. And it is double outrageous because that party still masquerades as the party of the little guy, even though it is not the case anymore."

"It started with the handshake agreement between both parties that we're going to become an economy that embraced free trade," she said. "That was Bill Clinton's contribution to this, signing NAFTA into law and trade agreements that resulted in the offshoring of 5 million manufacturing jobs to China and Mexico."


"And then President Obama showed up and said repeatedly those jobs are not coming back, and pioneered this idea that everyone was going to go to college and become part of the knowledge industry, and that was going to be the pathway to the American dream. And then it became the only pathway to the American dream!"

"Joe Biden played his part by effectively opening up the border, decriminalizing illegal border crossing, and welcoming in 11 million new migrants to compete with working-class Americans for the jobs that remained here," she said.

"It's true that immigration raises the GDP in the aggregate. The problem is nobody lives in the aggregate. GDP is not equally distributed across the nation. We know the top 20% now has 50% of the GDP at its disposal. The very people who love to rail against the 1% are the people who have made the largest gains in the last 50 years, and they are the consumers of low-wage migrant labor, which is why, of course, they want more of it. It is an upward transfer of wealth from the working class to the elites who consume that labor."

"If you bring in 11 million people and you know they are going to be employed as cleaning people, landscapers, and in construction, you have effectively stolen wages from the Americans who were employed in those jobs. It is just obvious supply and demand."

Carl Cannon asked: "Do they really hate the working class, or are they just in their politically correct bubble and don't see what they're doing?"

"They can not stand the idea that they will lose, even if they lose in a very obviously democratic way," Ungar-Sargon said. "They are very comfortable when they can sit there on cable news making millions of dollars to sneer at the working class. They're comfortable when the working class can't clap back."

"This was really Obama's revolution, the idea that the 'smart set' should run things. We should have an oligarchy of the credentialed. But when the working class has their audacity to vote in their own interest and clap back by putting somebody like Donald Trump in power, that sneering contempt turns to hate."

If .45 Was The Commander In Chief - Why Didn't He Decapitate The Intelligence Community?

roburie  |   While the Washington Post has long been considered the mouthpiece of the CIA, the New York Times has been more effective at carrying water for it in recent years. The recent longish Times article entitled The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin contains  recitation of CIA-friendly talking points that portrays it as indispensable to ‘our’ ability to commit pointless, petty atrocities against Russia as the US  sacrifices more Ukrainians in its misguided war. Missing from the piece is any conceivable reason for the US to continue the war.

The oft ascribed motive (and here) for the CIA’s existence is to act as the US President’s secret army abroad. The wisdom of this arrangement has been debated over the years. Former US President Harry Truman, who oversaw the founding of the CIA from its predecessor, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), later regretted the decision and argued that the CIA should be brought to heel. Later, the Cold War presented cover for the CIA to act badly under the cover of national defense.

In Stephen Kinzer’s book, All the Shah’s Men,  the CIA paid people to pretend to be communists so as to convey the fiction that the CIA’s effort was about ‘fighting communism’ rather than stealing Iran’s oil. Similarly, in the US coup that ousted Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz for daring to raise the minimum wage paid by foreign-owned industries in Guatemala, also featured fake communists intended to convince the American press that the CIA was fighting for freedom and democracy rather than to steal wages from poor people for the benefit of rich Americans.

Together, these imply that fake communists had been more effectively demonized by Federal agencies than other available out groups because of the threat they didn’t pose to American capital. Recall, in 1919 Woodrow Wilson sent the American Expeditionary Force to join the Brits, French, and Japanese in trying to reverse the Russian Revolution. Later, through the Five Eyes Alliance, ‘the West’ spent the post-War era attacking the Soviets while alleging that they were responding to political violence that they (Five Eyes) started.

Oddly, given recent history, the claim that the CIA is the President’s secret army still appears to be the received wisdom in Washington and New York. This is odd because while the CIA appears to be acting as Joe Biden’s secret army in Ukraine and Israel, it went to war with (the duly elected President of the US) Donald Trump for his entire four years in office. While Mr. Trump played the victim of the US intelligence agencies to perfection, he didn’t do what many normal humans would have done in his circumstance--- clear out the top few levels of management at CIA, the FBI, and NSA and see where this leaves ‘us.’

Implied is a reversal of political causality whose proof can only be deduced. Is Biden directing the CIA, or is the CIA directing Biden? For instance, while Biden was Barack Obama’s point-man in Ukraine before, during, and after the US-led coup there in 2014, Mr. Obama was publicly arguing that Ukraine was of no strategic value to the US. With Donald Trump following Mr. Obama as President, the CIA likely saw its 2014 coup in Ukraine going to waste. This interpretation sheds a different light on the Hunter Biden laptop fraud perpetrated by 51 current and former CIA employees.

(FBI informant Alexander Smirnov has been convicted of nothing related to the new charges of ‘Russian interference.’ As was proved with Russiagate, charges are easy to make, difficult to prove. No one--- not a single person, was convicted on the now antique charges of Russian collusion. Those who were convicted were convicted on process charges unrelated to the collusion charges. This use of the law as a political weapon is called lawfare).

The view in this piece is that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 because Barack Obama threw several trillion dollars at the malefactors on Wall Street who blew up the global economy while he pissed on the unemployed, the foreclosed upon, and every working person in the US. In so doing, an income and wealth chasm was rebuilt between the public welfare recipients who run Wall Street and Big Tech and the former industrial workers whose jobs were sent abroad as the final solution to the ‘problem’ of organized labor.

With the current panic in the US over the rise of the BRICS (China and Russia), the same politicians and economists who thought it wise in 1995 to gut the industrial base with NAFTA are now busy launching WWIII. These people never learn from their mistakes. For instance, it apparently never occurred to them that outsourcing military production might come back to bite when geopolitical tensions inevitably flared again. Likewise, just-in-time production and inventory management produced economic brittleness / fragility that created problems when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Biden was a known quantity when he was appointed by Barack Obama to be President in 2020. The CIA, acting in league with the FBI, had spent prior years softening up the American public with lies about US foreign policy, lies about American history, lies about Donald Trump and his supporters, lies about their own roles in rigging American elections, lies about the American-led coup in Ukraine, lies about Russian military ambitions, and lies about US plans for the destruction of Ukraine. To be clear, these American agencies weren’t lying to the Russians. They were / are lying to the only people who believe their bullshit--- Americans.

So, where is this going? With the CIA’s and FBI’s undermining of the elected President’s (Trump) political agenda and its open efforts to rig the 2020 election in favor of his opponent (Biden), it certainly appears that the CIA is now running the US. Biden’s foreign policy team---Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland emerged from the Clintonite death cult buried deep within the bowels of the American foreign policy establishment, That they appear to be as uninformed and arrogant as their policy outcomes to date suggest they are is only a surprise inside Washington and New York.

However, this is at best a partial explanation. What is surprising about US foreign policy is how ignorant of world history, US history, basic diplomacy, military tactics, economic relations, and basic human decency the American political leadership is. It’s almost as if the answer to every foreign policy conundrum of the last century has been to bomb civilian populations, kill a whole lot of people, and then pretend it never happened. Vietnam? Check. Nicaragua? Check. Syria? Check. Iraq? Check. Ukraine? How can the body counts be hidden from beleaguered, clueless, citizens so effectively?

Some recent history: the US launched a war against Russia when it (the US) invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked coup there in 2014 (see here, here, here) and ousted its elected government. The Russians had taken issue with the US / NATO surrounding it with NATO-allied states (maps below). Years earlier, as Russian President Vladimir Putin stated in his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Mr. Putin had approached former US President Bill Clinton about Russia joining NATO. Mr. Clinton ‘spoke with his people’ before telling Mr. Putin no to joining NATO as he reneged on George H.W. Bush’ s promise to keep NATO away from Russia’s border.

A bit of additional history is needed here. The USSR was dissolved in 1991 to be replaced by non-communist Russia surrounded by former Soviet states. Ukraine is one such state. The political – economic reference point of post-Soviet Russia was an anachronistic form of neoliberalism. Recall, Americans had been told since at least the early twentieth century that ‘communism’ was the ideological foe of Western liberalism. Current Russian President Vladimir Putin is proudly anti-communist. But the US MIC (military-industrial complex), of which the CIA is a part, needs enemies to justify its existence.

Following the dissolution of the USSR (1991), there was discussion inside the US regarding a ‘peace dividend,’ of redirecting military spending inflated by the Cold War towards domestic purposes like schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure. However, the CIA had been so hemmed in by Federal budget constraints that it had inserted itself into the international narcotics trade forty years prior in apparent anticipation of just such an event. With the (George H.W.) Bush recession of 1991, an election year, the peace dividend was rescinded.

Why Is The Mainstream Media So Quiet About The Southern Border?

FAIR  |  The United States is on the verge of a constitutional crisis, one that enlivens the nationalist fervor of Trump America and that centers on a violent, racist closed-border policy.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (NBC, 1/14/24): “The only thing we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

In January, the Supreme Court, with a five-vote majority that included both Republican and Democratic appointees, ruled that federal agents can “remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along some sections of the US/Mexico border” to make immigration more dangerous (CBS, 1/23/24). The state’s extreme border policy is not merely immoral as an idea, but has proven to be deadly and torturous in practice (USA Today, 8/3/23; NBC, 1/14/24; Texas Observer, 1/17/24).

In a statement (1/22/24), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton decried the decision, saying that it “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Paxton, a Republican, vowed that the “fight is not over, and I look forward to defending our state’s sovereignty.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, “is doubling down, blocking the agents from entering the area,” the PBS NewsHour (1/25/24) reported. PBS quoted Abbott declaring that the state’s constitutional authority is “the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.”

University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck (Houston Chronicle, 1/26/24) observed that Abbott’s position “has eerie parallels to arguments advanced by Southerners during the Antebellum era.”

For a great many people, a Southern state invoking its “sovereignty” over the federal government in defense of violent and inhumane policing of non-white people sounds eerily familiar to the foundation of the nation’s first civil war.  And 25 other states are supporting Texas in defying the Supreme Court (USA Today, 1/26/24), although none of them are states that border Mexico.

Texas media are sounding the alarm about this conflict. The Texas Tribune (1/25/24):

From the Texas House to former President Donald Trump, Republicans across the country are rallying behind Gov. Greg Abbott’s legal standoff with the federal government at the southern border, intensifying concerns about a constitutional crisis amid an ongoing dispute with the Biden administration.

Houston public media KUHF (1/24/24) said this “could be the beginning of a constitutional crisis.” University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck said in an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle (1/26/24) that Abbott’s position is a “dangerous misreading” of the Constitution.

Other legal scholars are watching with concern. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school of the University of California at Berkeley, told FAIR, “I think that this is reminiscent of Southern governors disobeying the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions.” He added, “I agree that it is a constitutional crisis in the sense that this is a challenge to a basic element of the Constitution: the supremacy of federal law over state law.”

But the New York Times has not covered the issue since the Supreme Court decision came down (1/21/24). The AP (1/27/24) framed the story around Donald Trump, saying the former president “lavished praise” on the governor “for not allowing the Biden administration entry to remove razor wire in a popular corridor for migrants illegally entering the US.” The Washington Post (1/26/24) did show right-wing politicians and pundits were using the standoff to grandstand about a new civil war. NPR (1/22/24) covered the Supreme Court case, but has fallen behind on the aftermath.

The “legal expert” quoted in Fox News‘ headline (1/25/24) works for America First Legal, a group founded by white nationalist Stephen Miller to “oppose the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade.”

Meanwhile, Fox News (1/25/24, 1/25/24, 1/27/24) has given Texas extensive and favorable coverage of its feud with the White House, citing its own legal sources (from America First Legal and the Edwin Meese III Center—1/25/24) saying that Texas was in the right and the high court was in the wrong.

Breitbart celebrated Abbott’s defiance as a states’ rights revolution, with a series of articles labeled “border showdown” (1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/24/24, 1/25/24, 1/28/24) and several others about Republican governors standing with Texas in solidarity (1/26/24, 1/28/24).

The white nationalist publication American Renaissance (1/25/24) stood with Abbott but lowered the temperature, saying that it is “unclear whether this could cause a constitutional crisis, but the optics are not great for the White House in an election year.” “This will not be a ‘Civil War’ or anything close to it unless someone on the ground wildly miscalculates by firing on the Texas National Guard,” the openly racist outlet asserted. Rather, the publication saw Abbott as recentering the immigration debate as a way to weaken President Joe Biden’s reelection chances. “We couldn’t hope for a better start to the election-year campaign,” it said.

The National Review (1/28/24) admitted that Abbott is probably wrong on the constitutional question. Nevertheless, it called him the “MVP of border hawks” for orchestrating a public relations coup by forcing the federal government’s hand:

Abbott has managed to get the federal government in the position of actually removing physical barriers to illegal immigration at the border and insisting that it is imperative that it be permitted to continue doing so. This alone is a PR debacle for the administration, but it comes in a controversy—with its fraught legal and constitutional implications—that will garner massive attention out of proportion to its practical importance.

This is impressive by any measure.

The support of Republican states for Abbott elevates the matter further, but this also is a relatively small thing. The backing for Abbott is entirely rhetorical at this point and perhaps not very serious on the part of some Republican governors. It nonetheless serves to elevate a conflict over security on a small part of the border into what feels like a larger confrontation between all of Red America and the federal government.

Lots Of Talk About Depopulation Agendas

⚠️Holy shit⚠️

US Congressman @RonJohnsonWI alleges that covid was “pre-planned by an elite group of people. Event 201”.

In reference to the John’s Hopkins Center tabletop exercise with the WEF and the Gates Foundation.

Pretty substantial allegations!pic.twitter.com/IfziWIE3SB

— Clandestine (@WarClandestine) August 11, 2023

merylnass  |  Here is another wonderfully researched and written look into the long morbid history of how the powerful repeatedly sterilize the powerless. Hard to believe, but California was still sterilizing women in prisons until about 20 years ago, that we know of. The Midwestern Doctor has produced another tour de force.

The Forgotten Side of Medicine

How Did We Know That the COVID-19 Vaccines Would Decimate Global Fertility?

When I started this Substack, my goal was to draw attention to the things with the vaccines I felt would create significant problems in the future if something was not done about them. One of the initial topics I decided to cover (on April 2nd 2022) was the history of elitist population control initiatives because I saw a lot of different signs that re…

Read more

15 days ago · 442 likes · 334 comments · A Midwestern Doctor

Michel Chossudofsky discusses actual news reports of meetings on depopulation:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/secret-may-2009-meeting-of-the-good-club-billionaire-club-in-bid-to-curb-overpopulation/5742626

“Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”: Secret Gathering Sponsored by Bill Gates, 2009 Meeting of “The Good Club”

Is Worldwide Depopulation Part of the Billionaire's "Great Reset"

For more than ten years, meetings have been held by billionaires described as philanthropists to Reduce the Size of the World’s Population culminating with the 2020-2022 Covid crisis.

Recent developments suggest that “Depopulation” is an integral part of the so-called Covid mandates including the lockdown policies and the mRNA “vaccine”. 

Flash back to 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal: “Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”.

In May 2009, the Billionaire philanthropists met behind closed doors at the home of the president of The Rockefeller University in Manhattan.

This Secret Gathering was sponsored by Bill Gates. They called themselves “The Good Club”. 

Among the participants were the late David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg  Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and many more. 

In May 2009, the WSJ as well as the Sunday Times reported: (John Harlow, Los Angeles) that

“Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.”

The emphasis was not on population growth (i.e Planned Parenthood) but on “Depopulation”, i.e,. the reduction in the absolute size of the World’s population.

To read complete WSJ article click here—and I have a subscription so have reproduced the full text at the bottom of the page—Meryl

UFO Secrecy And The Death Of The American Republic

greyfalcon  |  There is another, less appreciated, dimension to UFO secrecy. These objects, we know, have demonstrated amazing manoeuvring capabilities. Some of them, at least, can accelerate instantly in all directions, turn on a dime, stop and hover motionlessly, and remain silent the whole while.

Our military aircraft have been unable to compete. In 1975, UFOs that could hover like silent helicopters and move like silent jets were unmolested by U.S. aircraft. In a well-known incident over Belgium in 1990, a triangular UFO thoroughly outclassed F-16 interceptors. During the summer of 2002, just outside Washington, D.C., a UFO easily outpaced and outmanoeuvred pursuing F-16s.

A common question that arises is, what kind of propulsion system do these objects use. But I wonder, what makes them go?

This question is more than academic. There are legitimate reasons to expect that we are about to experience a petroleum crisis of epic proportions, much sooner than we expect. Once a fringe belief, there are now many oil analysts who believe this.

The problem is basic supply and demand. The supply is finite; the demand shows no signs of limit. In fact, global oil demand is now increasing at the fantastic rate of 4 percent annually, which translates into a doubling rate of every 17 years. I don’t care what your supply is, you cannot double demand of anything indefinitely, and certainly not at the rate the petroleum demand is moving.

Recall the ancient Chinese story about the peasant who performed a good deed for the Emperor. "I will grant you any wish you ask," said the grateful Emperor. The peasant took a chess board and said, "I don’t ask for much. Simply place a grain of rice on the first square, then double the amount for each successive square on the board, and I will be content." "Silly peasant," thought the Emperor. "I would have given him something of value." For much of the board, the amount of rice was small enough. By the last few squares, however, the Emperor went broke. By the final square, the amount of rice would have exceeded all the rice in the world.

Experts argue about when the petroleum crisis will hit, but it is the height of folly to pretend it won’t arrive. Whether it will be 50 years, 20 years, or 5 years, our civilization needs to find a way to replace petroleum. UFO technology very likely holds part of the answer, maybe all of the answer.

Some people agree with this assessment, and believe that the "powers that be" are simply holding out on us until the oil truly runs out, just to maximize their profit. Then it’s free energy time – although we assume someone will find a way to make money from it.

You had better hope that such blind trust turns out to be accurate. I’m less confident that a benevolent elite will bail my ass out at the eleventh hour. For all I know, they may have decided that there are too many of us on this planet, anyway. "Time to clean house. I’ve got my bunker. How about you?"

Freedom and Self-Governance

For a democratically-based political system to function, there must be a reasonable amount of congruence between what people believe and what is actually the case. You elect a member of congress with the idea that he or she will represent your interests within the nation’s primary instrument of political power: the Congress. Except that Congress has been made irrelevant by other centres of power, or been taken over by them.

You get your news from television or your newspaper with the idea that the journalist on the other end is a kind of watchdog, looking out for the public interest. Except that the journalist is working for a corporation which is itself antithetical to the public interest.

Unseen structures of power have evolved over the previous generations, advancing sometimes slowly, sometimes with a dramatic suddenness. But most people lack the conceptual means by which to understand what is happening.

As I have suggested, I believe that a significant part of that power structure involves the possession and exploitation of UFO-related technology. And I certainly believe that the secrecy has gone on for so long that it has become integral to keeping the whole system together.

Once you start lying, how can you un-do the lie? Today, UFO secrecy has been with the U.S. – and by extension the world – for about sixty years. That’s nearly as long as the Soviet Union existed on the basis of its own labyrinthine web of lies.

The comparison is apt. I still recall holding in my hands a commemorative oversized Soviet book celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The book was published in 1937, during the depths of Stalin’s rule. There was a colorized version of a famous photograph showing Lenin at a podium speaking to a crowd, and I noticed that Leon Trotsky – Stalin’s great political enemy – had been airbrushed out of the picture. That’s simply how the Soviet system worked. The government lied constantly, and everyone knew it, and everyone in the country pretended that the government didn’t lie.

Constant lying in the Soviet Union meant that the official powers had to systematically think about how to organize and manipulate public information to keep people in line. I remember trying to read through The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, an impossibly organized mess of propaganda and fact so that you couldn’t learn anything about anything that truly mattered. That’s just how it was.

Looking back, we can see how it would have been impossible for such a society to continue indefinitely, ruled as it was on the basis of a series of lies. When Gorbachev took power in 1985, he wanted to reform that society. His catchphrases were glasnost and perestroika: openness and restructuring. I was a young student of Soviet history at that time, and remember the excitement well. I also recall the scepticism of some of my professors who continued to believe for some time that this was yet another communist plot.

No matter. Within six years, there was no more Soviet Union. What happened? Well, one thing that happened, a big thing, was that the process of reform spiralled out of control. You make a big change here, and the next guy wants change over there. It becomes hard to put on the brakes. You start with openness, for example, and you open the books on Stalin’s gulag. You open the books on the particulars of the Bolshevik coup. Or the reconquest of the Ukraine in the 1920s, or the capture of the Baltic States in 1940, and on and on. Before long, entire subject peoples want to bolt, and many openly question the legitimacy of the Party’s rule. Then it is over.

Disclosure Scenarios

It’s no different today in America, and the UFO secret is at the core. Imagine if the President of the United States were to decide to end UFO secrecy. How would he do it?

I can see him now. President George W. Bush steps up to the podium. Beloved Vice President Dick Cheney stands behind him. Trusted lieutenants Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice are there, too. The cameras of all the world’s media are upon him.

"Good evening," he begins. "Through a series of meetings with certain senior scientific and defence officials, it has come to my attention that the UFO phenomenon apparently is real, and is of extraterrestrial origin."

Hokey dokey, that’s really all I have to say for now. We’ll provide updates as we get ‘em. I’m going on vacation for a while. Goodnight everyone.

Well, maybe not. Disclosure is a Pandora’s box with a panoply of taboo topics just waiting to spring out. It is, as one friend of mine calls it, "a sloppy tar-baby," a threatening, friendly, frightening, and inseparable bundle of unavoidable eventualities.

So I can imagine a few questions, even from a media as compliant as the American. "Mr. President," one correspondent might say, "what are the intentions of these aliens?" Or, "Mr. President, what does this say about the claims of alien abduction? Are they real, after all?" Or how about, "Mr. President, what about claims of underground alien bases? Or claims of secret possession of alien technology?" These questions might not arise immediately. But they would arise eventually. Once you open that lid, it will be very difficult to control the outcome.

The answers would not be pretty. For this reason, I doubt that disclosure will come from America ’s political establishment. But there are always other countries. There are always the aliens. The truth is already here; it’s simply waiting to land.

After all, what exactly are the secret keepers protecting? Let’s see. Power, wealth, control, their plans for the future, access to information, underground bases already built, the status quo.

But there must be more. How about communication with aliens? Worm hole technology? Access to our genetic code? Or any number of technologies that we have not even begun to discuss openly in our society. Remember the statement of an Area 51 insider to aerospace journalist James Goodall – this was back in the 1980s – "we have things in the Nevada desert that would make George Lucas envious." In other words, Star Wars technology.

Can you imagine the front page of the New York Times following a true disclosure of all this? "MASSIVE COVERUP EXPOSED." The biggest journalistic fiasco in history would finally be acknowledged, wholesale resignations would sweep the intelligence community, a political third party would do a clean sweep of Washington. Congress would promise emergency hearings, Arab oil nations would be in a state of collapse as oil price futures plummet, and the stock market would be in a headlong tailspin.

People would realize that a massive power structure has existed for generations, and has siphoned away trillions of dollars. They would learn that it has played a dominant, though unacknowledged, role in shaping their lives.

Think about NASA and the space shuttle program. There are no shortage of quiet discussions about the antiquated nature of NASA’s shuttle technology. Astronauts have died because better technology was denied to them. And that is merely the tip of the iceberg, for this issue goes far beyond NASA.

No, people wouldn’t be pleased or especially understanding. Heads would roll.

The American system of government, as it has come to exist, and by extension American society, and by extension our current global civilization, is not compatible with true UFO disclosure. Disclosure would rip it all away.

You might argue that this would be a good reason to maintain the secrecy. On the other hand, I would argue it’s the best reason for disclosure.

As bad as things look today, I retain hope for a post-disclosure world. I retain a faith – yes, I guess it’s faith – in the value of truth over all things. A statement by my favorite writer, Leo Tolstoy, hangs before me every day: "the one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth." I cannot believe that a society based on a foundational lie can be better than one based on a foundational truth.

Everyone In This Documentary Has Been Suicided Or Died Under Strange Circumstances

projectcamelotportal  |  5.21.21 BREAKING NEWS:   According to a key source:  Mark Mccandlish offered to give testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee and contacted Marco Rubio on this just prior to his death… His potential testimony along with his obsession with building the ARV probably got him killed.  Just as it got Gordon Novel killed.  And James Allen the director of the film Zero Point (all about Mark McCandlish).  This is no distraction or disclosure dog and pony show… This is also about THE TRUMP CARD that Trump is holding—his ties to Nikola Tesla and this tech.  And this is all about bringing Zero Point energy into the public and the battle to keep it quiet.

–KERRY CASSIDY

PROJECT CAMELOT

According to a source the Redding City Coroner said there are 5 different agencies looking into the death of Mark McCandlish.   Judging from the past history of intel agencies and “suicided” victims it is highly likely that at least one of those agencies is right now working hard to come up with a feasible set of lies.  The objective would be to convince the general public that Mark was killed by some “lone gunman” or chose to commit suicide “suicided” as opposed to what really happened which all signs point to a typical Cabal-styled hit job.

Mark McCandlish was a highly refined, passionate engineer and designer whose illustrations were intuitive and detailed while at the same time technically accurate.  A person who spoke to him the night hefore he died indicated he was tired but upbeat and focused on moving forward with his projects.  Having served in the American military he felt it was his duty to testify should the opportunity arise, before the Senate Intelligence Committee.  His contact with Marco Rubio is said to have been ongoing. He wanted the truth about UFOs and zero point energy (some call it energy form the vacuum)  to come out and that the people have a right to know.

Update.  5.22.21

According to another source Fred Bell also was also killed and had knowledge of this tech (and of time travel which is intimately connected to how UFOs fly).  As does Sean David Morton who they just took back into prison.  Sean was writing a series of books based on whistleblower testimony and papers given to him by his lawyer….With advanced cancer Sean appears to be targeted in the same way.  Sean was about to release information all about time travel in his 4th book when he was arrested a few years ago.  

The list goes on with people and inventors who have died or been threatened surrounding the story about Zero Point Energy or energy from the vacuum or “free energy”.  Another example is former Mars astronaut, Brian O’Leary was killed by a fast-acting cancer in part for interviewing and writing a book about this energy called the Energy Solution Revolution https://www.amazon.com/Energy-Solution-Revolution-Socio-Political-Suppression/dp/0979917646

and the list goes on.

It is worth noting Mark was killed 33 years from when Brad Sorenson first saw the ARV in a hangar (either at Norton Air Force Base or if the story posted here is true, at the Lockheed Martin Skunkworks facility). The 33 year connection is another indicator of the stamp of the Illuminati on Mark’s death in addition to the method of death which is another trademark “shotgun to the head”.

Excerpt from book:  SPACE WARP PROPULSION-PART 2 Alien Reproduction Vehicle SANTOSH DANDIN (a real name?)

 

 It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that Marco Rubio and the sudden push to release highly sanitized versions of the UFO/UAP story is coming from somewhere deep in the intelligence community and deep state.  If you are willing to suspend disbelief momentarily and consider Trump’s close relationship to his uncle who was instrumental in getting Nikola Tesla’s tech into the hands of the deep state this sudden push becomes clear.  What the Cabal seem to be doing is racing against time to “one-up” Trump and take control of the narrative to spin it where they want, before he releases this tech into the public.  Once he wins back the Presidency by way of proving vote fraud and outside interference… “A digital Pearl Harbor” as Juan O. Savin is fond of saying Trump would be in a perfect position to literally change the world.  When Trump (who is still Commander-in-Chief and has the nuclear codes, is reinstated, in theory the tribunals would start against the human traffickers-adrenochrome junkies of the deep state.  At some point Trump would during his last 4 years then bring his “trump card” forward which is ZERO POINT energy… Zero Point is considered the keys to the kingdom encompassing UNLIMITED and free access to energy that makes all things possible including travel through wormholes, aka Portal technology aka time travel.  Greening the deserts, unlimited access to food, water at no cost and the end of the fossil fuel stranglehold on our economies….

 

Not to mention weapons technology that is of course already in the hands of the Secret Space Program … but that access would be worldwide and in the hands of our enemies as well.  Some would say it already is….This is of course the double-edged sword that surrounds the release of this technology and why in part, the military industrial complex has fought so long to keep it all secret.  But the secrecy has forced human society to split with the majority of humans living lives of desperation and growing limitation while the secret government/secret space program has access to unlimited wealth and prosperity and what some of my witnesses have said are as many as 10,000 years in advance of the average person.

 

So this recent push for a type of disclosure is another effort to OWN THE NARRATIVE and arguably could involve A FAKE ALIEN INVASION staged by the military so that they can get out from under the karmic burden of 70 years of secrecy while people lived lives dependent on scarcity and need, trading humans for alien tech and much more…. 

Mexico Continues Nationalizing Key Industries Despite U.S. Objections

qz  |  With AMLO's purchase of 13 Spanish-owned power plants, the majority of Mexico's electricity production is now state-controlled.

The Mexican government agreed to purchase 13 power plants from the Spanish energy company Iberdrola for $6 billion on Tuesday (April 4), giving its state-owned power company, Commission Federal de Electricidad (CFE), majority control over the country’s electricity market.

Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopes Obrador (AMLO) called the decision part of a “new nationalization” of some of the country’s major industries, including mineral and oil production, according to Reuters.

The acquisition of the power plants will give CFE control of more than 56% of Mexico’s total production—up from approximately 40%, and surpassing AMLO’s previously stated goal of 54%.

The US and Canada have strongly opposed AMLO’s actions, and have threatened a trade war if Mexico continues to roll back access for international corporations in Mexico’s power and oil markets.

Iberdrola said the power plants would be taken over by CFE within five months as it looks to reduce its operations in Mexican energy markets. The company’s CEO, Ignacio Galan, said that the deal was a win-win.

“That energy policy has moved us to look for a situation that’s good for the people of Mexico, and at the same time, that complies with the interests of our shareholders,” Galan said after a joint appearance with AMLO announcing the deal.

AMLO has repeatedly compared Iberdola’s power over Mexican resources to Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century, even threatening to pause diplomatic relations with Spain over perceived neo-colonial actions by foreign energy firms.

Less than a month ago, more than 500,000 people flooded Mexico City to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the nationalization of the oil industry by president Lázaro Cárdenas del Río in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.

AMLO addressed the crowd, promising to carry on Cárdenas’s legacy, specifically highlighting his decision to nationalize the country’s energy and mining sectors, including Mexico’s burgeoning lithium reserves in the Sonora desert.

“Mexico is an independent and free country, not a colony or a protectorate of the United States,” AMLO said in a forceful rebuke of American influence in the country’s economy. “Cooperation? Yes. Submission? No. Long live the oil expropriation.”

 

 

White House Transcript Shows Biden Bit A Golda Meir Line At The 11 Minute Mark...,

Whitehouse |  THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, Poland!  (Applause.)  One of our great allies.  President Duda, Prime Minister — Mr. Prime Minister, Mr. Mayor, and to all the former ministers and presidents, as well as mayors and Polish political leaders from all across the country: Thank you for welcoming me back to Poland.

You know, it was nearly one year ago — (applause) — nearly one year ago I spoke at the Royal Castle here in Warsaw, just weeks after Vladimir Putin had unleashed his murderous assault on Ukraine.  The largest land war in Europe since World War Two had begun.  And the principles that had been the cornerstone of peace, prosperity, and stability on this planet for more than 75 years were at risk of being shattered.

One year ago, the world was bracing for the fall of Kyiv.  Well, I have just come from a visit to Kyiv, and I can report: Kyiv stands strong!  (Applause.)  Kyiv stands proud.  It stands tall.  And most important, it stands free.  (Applause.)

When Russia invaded, it wasn’t just Ukraine being tested.  The whole world faced a test for the ages.

Europe was being tested.  America was being tested.  NATO was being tested.  All democracies were being tested.  And the questions we faced were as simple as they were profound.

Would we respond or would we look the other way?  Would we be strong or would we be weak?  Would be — we would — would we be — all of our allies — would be united or divided?

One year later, we know the answer. 

We did respond.  We would be strong.  We would be united.   And the world would not look the other way.  (Applause.)

We also faced fundamental questions about the commitment to the most basic of principles.  Would we stand up for the sovereignty of nations?  Would we stand up for the right of people to live free from naked aggression?  Would we stand up for democracy?

One year later, we know the answers. 

Interesting How Robert Kagan's Revisionist Bloviations Run For 3 Days In The WaPo...,

WaPo  |  How quickly do times of apparent peace become times of conflict; seemingly stable world orders come crashing down; the hopes of many for improvement of the human condition are dashed and replaced by fear and despair.

For the first dozen years after World War I, the three powerful democracies — the United States, Britain and France — were in substantial control of world affairs, economically, politically and militarily. They established the terms of the peace settlement, redrew the borders of Europe, summoned new nations into being, distributed pieces of defunct empires, erected security arrangements, determined who owed what to whom, and how and when debts should be paid. They called together the conferences that determined the levels of armaments the major nations could possess.

All this was possible because they had won the war; because the United States and Britain controlled the banks and the seas; because France wielded predominant military power on the European continent. With this power, the three Western democracies sought to establish and consolidate a world system favorable to their interests and preferences. They argued over how best to do this, and they became increasingly estranged from each other in these years. But they all wanted a stable, prosperous and peaceful Europe. They all sought to preserve their global empires, or, in the United States’ case, its hemispheric hegemony. They all sought to defend the liberal, capitalist economic system that enriched and protected them and in which they believed. None doubted the rightness of their vision of international order or much questioned the justice of imposing it.

And there had been successes, certainly from their point of view. By the second half of the 1920s, the world had grown less violent and marginally less miserable. In Europe especially, economies were recovering, living standards were rising, general violence was down from the immediate postwar years, and the dangers of war and aggression seemed as low as they had been in decades. Internationally, trade had risen by more than 20 percent, despite growing protectionism, driven largely by the American economic boom. Nations spent more time discussing measures for peace than preparing for war. The League of Nations had come into its own. Germany seemed to be on a moderate, democratic course. In general, the threat of a return to autocracy and militarism seemed low. Democracy seemed to be ascendant.

Even those who openly defied the new order had to move cautiously. The Soviets promoted their revolution abroad but not so aggressively as to challenge the dominant powers, and they wound up settling for “socialism in one country.” Benito Mussolini, ruling an Italy surrounded in the Mediterranean by British and French naval power and dependent on the United States for financial support, thought it best to play the responsible European statesman. The 1920s were his “decade of good behavior.”

Adolf Hitler, too, proceeded with caution as he ascended to power in the early ’30s. Impressed by the United States as “a giant state with unimaginable productive capacities” and by Anglo-American domination of the global economy, and well aware of the role it had played in selecting Germany’s past governments, he worked at first to soften Washington’s opposition to his rise. He reached out to the U.S. ambassador, gave numerous interviews to prominent American media figures, including William Randolph Hearst, in the hope of making “the personality of Adolf Hitler more accessible to the American people.” He promised to pay Germany’s “private debts” to American bankers and went out of his way to assure the English-speaking world that his national socialist movement would gain power only in a “purely legal way” in accordance with the “present constitution.” After taking power, he told the press and his own officials to play down the campaigns of antisemitism that began immediately. He sought to keep German rearmament under wraps in what he called the “perilous interval” during which the “whole world” was “against us.” Until the economy recovered and German rearmament was further along, he feared that the national socialist revolution could be crushed at any time by the superior power of the democracies.

It was remarkable how quickly the winds were shifting, though. An American journalist identified the moment when history pivoted. “In the first five years after the World War,” he wrote, “the nations of Europe, on their backs and seeking American aid, took all pains to avoid offending us and therefore appeared to give careful and weighty consideration to our altruistic advice. The succeeding five years have changed that.”

One indicator of the shifting trends was the declining fortunes of democracy throughout Europe. It was inevitable that some of the new democracies, implanted in lands that had never known such a form of government, would not survive. The rise of dictatorship in various forms in Hungary (1920), Italy (1925), Lithuania, Poland and Portugal (1926), Yugoslavia (1929), Romania (1930), Germany and Austria (1933), Bulgaria and Latvia (1934), and Greece (1935) had many internal and external causes, including the global depression that began around 1930. But the overall decline of European democracy from the second half of the 1920s onward, and the turn away from democracy in Japan, also reflected the declining influence and appeal of the great-power democracies and their order.

Liberal democracy was not just losing ground. It faced a potent challenge from a vibrant and revolutionary anti-liberal doctrine that attracted followers and imitators throughout Europe and beyond. Americans, British and French during World War I and for decades afterward assumed that Bolshevism posed the greatest threat to liberal democracy. But Bolshevism proved less easily exported than both its proponents and its opponents believed. Ostracized by the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union turned inward to wrestle with the transformation of its society. When democracies fell in the 1920s and ’30s, they fell to the Right, not the Left.

 

We're The Next Lost Civilization....,

kunstler  |    In 2011, relations between the US and Russia soured when President Putin accused the US of fomenting protests in Russia over its parliamentary elections. And from there, our State Department decided that Russia and the USA could not even pretend to be friendly.

     Jump ahead to 2014: Neocons in the Obama administration figured it was time to cut Russia back down to size. That effort crystalized around the former Soviet province, Ukraine, and blossomed into the US-sponsored-and-organized Maidan Revolution, utilizing Ukraine’s sizeable Stepan Bandara legacy Nazi forces in the vanguard, to foment violence in Kiev’s main city square. The US shoved out elected Ukraine President Yanukovych — who angered America by pledging to join Russia’s Custom’s Union instead of the EU — and installed its own puppet Yatsenyuk, who was ultimately replaced by the candy tycoon, Poroshenko, replaced by the Ukrainian TV star, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Ha Ha. Who’s laughing now? (Nobody.)

     From 2014-on, Ukraine, with America’s backing, did everything possible to antagonize Russia, especially showering the eastern provinces of Ukraine, called the Donbas, with artillery, rockets, and bombs to harass the Russia-leaning population there. After eight years of that, and continued American insults (the Steele Dossier, 2016 election interference), and renewed threats to drag Ukraine into NATO, Mr. Putin had enough and launched his “Special Military Operation” to discipline Ukraine. Once that started, American Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated explicitly to the world that America’s general policy now was to “weaken Russia.”

     That declaration was accompanied by America’s policy to isolate Russia economically with ever more sanctions. Didn’t work. Russia just turned eastward to the enormous Asian market to sell its oil and gas and utilized an alternate electronic trade-clearance system to replace America’s SWIFT system. Sanctions also gave Russia a reason to aggressively pursue an import-replacement economic strategy — manufacturing stuff that they had been buying from the West, for instance, German machine tools critical for industry.

     Russia did sacrifice more than $50-billion in financial assets stranded in the US banking system — we just confiscated it — but, ultimately, that only harmed the US banking system’s reputation as a safe place to park money, and made foreign investors much more wary of stashing capital in American banks. Net effect: the value of the ruble increased and stabilized, and Russia found new ways to neutralize American economic bullying.

     Europe was the big loser in all that. For a while, Europe could pretend to go along with the US / NATO project, pouring arms and money into Ukraine, and at the same time depend on Russian oil and gas imports. Eight months into the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the US blew up the Nord Stream One and Two pipelines, and that was the end of Europe’s supply of affordable natgas, to heat homes and power industry. In a sane world, that sabotage would have been considered an act of war against Germany by the USA. But it only revealed the secret, humiliating state of vassalage that Europe was in. Europe had already made itself ridiculous buying into the hysteria over climate change and attempting to tailor its energy use to so-called “renewables” in history’s biggest virtue-signaling exercise. Germany, the engine of the EU’s economy, made one dumb mistake after another. It invested heavily in wind and solar installations, which fell so short of adequacy they were a joke, and it closed down its nuke-powered electric generation plants so as to appear ecologically correct.

    So now, Germany, and many other EU member states, teeter on the edge of leaving Modernity behind. They managed to scramble and fill their gas reserves sufficiently this fall to perhaps squeak through winter without freezing to death, but not without a lot of sacrifice, chopping down Europe’s forests, and wearing their coats indoors. Now, only a few days into Winter, it remains to be seen how that will work out. We’ll know more in March of the new year. France had been the exception in Europe, due to its large fleet of atomic energy plants. But many of them have now aged-out, some shut down altogether, and “green” politics stood in the way of replacing them, so France, too, will find itself increasingly subject to affordable energy shortages.

     Prediction: Europe’s industry will falter and close down by painful increments. The EU will not withstand the economic stress of de-industrialization. It will shatter and leave Europe once again a small continent of many small fractious nations with longstanding grudges. Some of these countries may break-up into smaller entities in turn, as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Russia did in the 1990s. Keep in mind, the macro trend world-wide will be downscaling and localization as affordable energy recedes for everyone. Since the end of World War Two, Europe was the world’s tourist theme park. Now it could go back to being a slaughterhouse. The Euro currency will have to be phased out as sovereign bankruptcies make the EU financial system untenable, and animosities and hostilities arise. Each country will have to return to its traditional money. Gold and silver will play a larger role in that.

     The USA poured over $100-billion into Ukraine in arms, goods, and cash in 2022. That largesse will not continue as America sinks into its Second Great Depression. In any case, much of that schwag was fobbed off with. The arms are spent, the launchers destroyed. A lot of weapons were trafficked around to other countries and non-state actors. Russia is going to prevail in Ukraine. The news emanating from American media about Ukraine’s military triumphs has been all propaganda. There was hardly ever any real doubt that Russia dominated the war zone strategically and tactically. Even its withdrawals from one city or another were tactically intelligent and worthwhile, sparing Russian lives. The Special Military Operation wasn’t a cakewalk because Russia wanted to avoid killing civilians and refrain from destroying infrastructure that would leave Ukraine a gutted, failed state. Over time, the USA proved itself to be negotiation-unworthy, and Ukraine’s president Zelensky refused to entertain rational terms for settling the crisis. So, now the gloves are off in Ukraine. As of December 29, Russia shut off the lights in Kiev and Lvov.

     The open questions: how much punishment does Ukraine seek to suffer before it capitulates? Will Zelensky survive? (Even if he runs off to Miami, he may not survive.) What exactly will be left of Ukraine? In 2023 Russia will decide the disposition of things on-the-ground. Failed states make terrible neighbors. One would imagine that Russia’s main goal is to set up a rump Ukraine that can function, but cease to be an annoying pawn of its antagonists. Ukraine will no longer enjoy access to the Black Sea; it will be landlocked. The best case would be for Ukraine to revert to the agricultural backwater it was for centuries before the mighty disruptions of the modern era. Perhaps Russia will take it over altogether and govern it as it had ever since the 1700s — except for Ukraine’s brief interlude post-USSR as one of the world’s most corrupt and mal-administered sovereign states.

     Bottom line: Ukraine is and always was within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, and will remain so. The USA has no business there and it will be best for all concerned when we bug out. Let’s hope that happens without America triggering a nuclear World War Three. (Yeah, “hope” is not a plan. Try prayer, then.) Mr. Putin’s challenge going into 2023 is to conclude the Ukraine hostilities without humiliating the USA to the degree that we do something really stupid.

Hypernormalization

wikipedia  |   The film contains nine chapters, and is composed primarily of montage with voice-over.

1975

The fiscal crisis in New York City and the emergent idea that financial systems could run society; shuttle diplomacy between then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Middle Eastern leaders in the Arab-Israeli dispute and the subsequent retreat by Hafez al-Assad of Syria; and the onset of hypernormalisation in the Soviet Union.

The Human Bomb

Following the United States' involvement in the 1982 Lebanon War, a vengeful al-Assad made an alliance with Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran. They planned to force the US out of the Middle East by encouraging civilians to carry out suicide bombings on American targets in the region, thereby avoiding reprisals. In February 1984, the US withdrew all its troops from Lebanon because, in the words of then-US Secretary of State George P. Shultz, "we became paralysed by the complexity that we faced".

Altered States

By the mid-1980s, banks and corporations were connecting through computer networks to create a hidden system of power, and technological utopians whose roots lay in the counterculture of the 1960s also saw the internet as an opportunity to make an alternative world that was free of political and legal restraints.

Acid Flashback

John Perry Barlow's vision of cyberspace as the 1990s equivalent of the Acid Tests. Barlow had been part of the LSD (also known as "acid") counterculture in the 1960s and founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He wrote a manifesto called A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Addressed to politicians, it declared "the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose upon us". Two computer hackers—Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak—knew that in reality corporations were using the internet to exert more control over the lives of people than governments had done in the past, and they demonstrated that hierarchies did exist online by obtaining Barlow's credit record from TRW Inc. and posting it on the internet.

The Colonel

This chapter describes the Reagan administration using Muammar Gaddafi as a pawn in their public relations (PR) strategy of creating a simplified, morally unambiguous foreign policy by blaming him for the 1985 Rome and Vienna airport attacks and the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing that killed US soldiers, both of which European security services attributed to Syrian intelligence agencies. Gaddafi is described as playing along for the sake of increasing his profile in the Arab world as a revolutionary. The 1986 United States bombing of Libya, 10 days after the disco bombing, is described as an operation carried out mainly for PR reasons, because attacking Syria would have been too risky.

The Truth Is Out There

See also: Paul Bennewitz and Mirage Men

This chapter begins with a montage of unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings recorded by members of the public in the United States. It argues that the phenomenon surrounding UFOs in the 1990s was born out of a counter-intelligence operation designed to make the public believe that secret airborne high-technology weapons systems tested by the US military during and after the Cold War were alien visitations. Top secret memos forged by the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations were allegedly leaked to ufologists who spread the manufactured conspiracy theory of a government cover-up to the wider public. The method, called perception management, aimed to distract people from the complexities of the real world. American politics are described as having become increasingly detached from reality. Curtis uses the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s as an example of an event that took the West by surprise because reality had become less and less important. A Jane Fonda workout video is shown to illustrate that socialists had given up trying to change the real world and were instead focusing on the self and encouraging others to do the same. The video is intercut with footage of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, being executed by firing squad and buried following the Romanian Revolution in 1989.

Managed Outcomes

Ulrich Beck is identified as a left-wing German political theorist. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he saw the world as too complex to change, and Beck asserted that politicians should merely keep the West stable by predicting and avoiding risks. Curtis looks at Aladdin, a computer that manages about 7% of the world's financial assets, analysing the past to anticipate what may happen in the future; and how anti-depressant drugs and social media both stabilise the emotions of individuals.

A Cautionary Tale

The start of this chapter is about the flaws of trying to predict the future by using data from the past. Curtis tells the story of how a card counter was recruited by Donald Trump to analyse the gambling habits of Akio Kashiwagi at his casino, the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, after Trump had lost millions of dollars to Kashiwagi. In an effort to avert the impending bankruptcy of the casino, a model was devised that predicted a way of recouping the money from Kashiwagi, who lost US$10 million. However, before he could pay, he was killed by yakuza gangsters and the casino went bankrupt, with Trump having to sell many of his assets to the banks.

Attention turns back to the Middle East and the Lockerbie Bombing in 1988. Curtis says that immediately after the bombing, journalists and investigators blamed Syria for carrying out the attack on behalf of Iran in revenge for the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by the United States Navy.^[a] It was generally accepted as true until US security agencies announced that Libya was behind the attack. Some journalists and politicians believed that the West had made the volte-face to appease Syria's leader, who the US and the United Kingdom required as an ally in the coming Gulf War.

He focuses on the spread of suicide bombing tactics from Shia to Sunni Islam and the targeting of civilians in Israel by Hamas during the 1990s. The resulting political paralysis led to a stalling of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. It is described as an unintended consequence of Israel's response to the 1992 killing of an Israeli border guard.

A montage is shown of clips from pre-9/11 disaster films in which New York City landmarks are variously destroyed by alien invaders, meteorites, and a tsunami. Curtis argues that such films were characteristic of a mood of uncertainty that pervaded the United States at the end of the 20th century.

Curtis shows how Muammar Gaddafi was turned into the West's "new best friend."

A World Without Power

The effect of the Iraq war wreaks havoc on the American psyche and people retreat into cyberspace. Judea Pearl creates Bayesian networks that mimic human behaviour. Judea's son, Daniel Pearl is the first American to be beheaded on a video uploaded to YouTube.

Meanwhile, social media algorithms show information that is pleasing to their users and hence does nothing to challenge their beliefs. Despite this, Occupy Wall Street emerges in an attempt to disrupt the system by imitating the leaderless system that the internet was once imagined to become. Using a similar method, the Egyptian revolution of 2011 commenced.

Britain, France and the US turn their backs on Muammar Gaddafi once Libyans rise up against him. The US drops bombs using drones, and then footage is shown of Gaddafi being captured by rebels.

Neither Occupy Wall Street nor the Arab Spring turn out very well for the revolutionaries.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his cabinet of political technologists create mass confusion. Vladislav Surkov uses ideas from art to turn Russian politics into a bewildering piece of theatre. Donald Trump used the same techniques in his presidential campaign by using language from Occupy Wall Street. Curtis asserts that Trump "defeated journalism" by rendering its fact-checking abilities irrelevant.

The American Left's attempt to resist Trump on the internet had no effect. In fact, they were just feeding the social media corporations who valued their many additional clicks.

Syria's revolution becomes more vicious and violent. The technique of suicide bombing that Curtis argues Hafez al-Assad introduced in order to unite the Middle East has instead torn it apart. Russia uses Surkov's concept of "non-linear warfare" to fight against the Syrian rebels. Russia claims to leave Syria, but doesn't.

Abu Musab al-Suri in Syria suggests that terrorists should not carry out large-scale attacks such as Osama Bin Laden's, but instead carry out "random" small-scale attacks throughout the West to create fear and chaos, against which it would be more difficult to retaliate.

Destabilisation of the West's psyche leads to the vote for Brexit and the popularity of Donald Trump.