Category Archives: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

Reasons not to take the Julian Assange story at face value 16

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: , ,

By Adam Ormes

News from Nowhere

Witnessing the uniformity of the popular response to Assange’s removal from the Ecuadorian embassy demonstrates that precious few commentators are willing to discuss the numerous ‘red flags’ in his story. It would seem therefore that it is this reluctant sleuth’s duty to lay them out.

There are perhaps 5 main points to consider here:

  1. Assange’s connection to ‘The Family’ child LSD brainwashing cult – which was very likely an intelligence operation. Substantiating evidence for this claim is provided below.
  2. Assange’s hacker alias, which he used from the age of 16, was Mendax – meaning ‘liar’ in Latin. He was caught after a police raid in 1991, and charged in 1994 “with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes. In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges (the other six were dropped), and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond. The perceived absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood were cited to justify his lenient penalty.” [link]
  3. Assange’s relationships with US government. “On the 17th of November 1994, Julian Assange replied to an email from NASA employee Fred Blonder(,) the UNIX toolkit coordinator at NASIRC (NASA Automated Systems Incident Response Capability). (…) Someone from Los Alamos National Laboratories (mcn) was copied on the email (identity unknown). Also copied on the email was Quentin Fennessy from Sematech. SEMATECH was formed in 1987 as a partnership between the United States Government and 14 U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturers.” Likewise, his former hacking comrade Pieter Zaitko, who went on to work for BBN Technologies, a DARPA military contractor, claimed that Assange’s “graduate work had been funded by a US Government grant, specifically NSA and DARPA money which was supposed to be used for ‘fundamental security research’.” This was subsequently revoked; however it begs the question as to how and why such funding was obtained in the first place. [link]

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The Strange Success of Russiagate Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It was the popcorn fart heard round the world. After two years of the vilest Russophobic hysteria seen since McCarthy was hauled off to a laughing academy in a straight-jacket, Robert Mueller, patron saint of butt-hurt Dems and indefinite Muslim detention, came to a conclusion on Russiagate only stunning to those of us who don’t live outside the bulletproof walls of stone blind denial. After 37 indictments for totally unrelated Beltway scumbaggery. After $26 million of the taxpayers pilfered dollars flushed down the fucking toilet. After five hundred thousand hours of unhinged sore losers like Rachel Maddow giving Alex Jones a run for his money screaming their bloody heads off about one grassy knoll after another. The results of the great Russian Inquisition of 2019 are bupkis, notta, zero, no collusion whatsoever between one Donald J. Trump and the Putin regime. You could have heard a pin-head drop at MSDNC.

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In America, talk turns to something not spoken of for 150 years: Civil war 4

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies

By Greg Jaffe and Jenna Johnson

Washington Post

At a moment when the country has never seemed angrier, two political commentators from opposite sides of the divide concurred recently on one point that was once nearly unthinkable: The country is on the verge of “civil war.”

First came former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, a Fox News regular and ally of President Trump’s. “We are in a civil war,” he said. “The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over. . . . It’s going to be total war.”

The next day, Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative turned MSNBC commentator and Trump critic, played a clip of di­Genova’s commentary on her show and agreed with him — although she placed the blame squarely on the president.

Trump, she said, “greenlit a war in this country around race. And if you think about the most dangerous thing he’s done, that might be it.”

With the investigative report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III said to be nearly complete, and with impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election campaign ramping up, fears that once existed only in fiction or in the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists have become a regular part of the political debate. These days, there is talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war.

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Fuck the Border 6

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Well, he finally got what he wanted, dearest motherfuckers. That vile crusted jizz rag we call a president has finally managed to manufacture an actual crisis at the border. After months of saber rattling conspiracy theories about secret jihadists and child actors, after years of demonizing people escaping the shitholes that Uncle Sam dug himself in the killing fields of the Northern Triangle, the grand swarms have finally arrived, too great in number for even the Donald’s enemies on the fake news to ignore. Naturally, Trump is playing up this tragedy as vindication for all his racist wolf-crying but the sick reality is that it’s likely largely the result of it. A self-fulfilling doomsday prophecy for the MAGA era.

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Will the Red Tribe Revolt in the Face of Blue Tribe Victory? 7

by • Activism, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy

Leading fourth generation warfare theorist Bill Lind, a paleconservative, discusses the possibility of a Red Tribe revolt as the Blue Tribe increasingly achieves national hegemony. Some highlights:

“…But something far more powerful than any issue is motivating the base: an ever-stronger feeling that it’s us against them.  “Us” is average people who work for a living, follow the rules, go to church on Sunday, and try to be good fathers, mothers, and neighbors.  “Them” is a mix of elites who despise average people, blacks and immigrants who live on working Americans’ tax payments while committing violent crimes and the Globalist 1% who get rich by exporting average peoples’ jobs….I don’t think it will accept that outcome, not when a radically Left Democratic president starts opening the borders, turning the White House into a LGBTQ wedding chapel and lets millions of black criminals out of jail while giving them the vote.  At that point, there is going to be a rebellion.

In much of the South, the rebellion could take an old/new form: nullification.  That issue seemed to be settled before the Civil War, when the Supreme Court ruled that states could not nullify acts of the federal government.  But in recent years, nullification has come back, not from the Right but from the Left, and, because it is coming from the Left, it has been accepted by the Establishment.  Two clear cases are laws regarding marijuana and enforcement of federal laws against illegal immigration.  On the former, state after state has legalized marijuana despite federal law that makes its sale or use illegal.  It is as clear a case of state-level nullification as I can imagine.  With regard to illegal immigrants, many Left-ruled cities have proclaimed themselves “sanctuary cities” where local police will not enforce federal immigration laws.

This is more or less the same argument I have been making for decades. The Blue Tribe (“progressives”)  have largely won the “culture wars” on most issues, and the “Blue zones” (large cities and coasts) are where most of the US population lives, with the Red Tribe located in the territorially large but sparsely populated rural areas. Decentralization involving urban-surburban-rural separation would largely  have the effect of achieving self-determination for most cultural factions while underming the state/ruling class/power elite at the same found. An anarchist-led revolutionary populism with a  far-left/radical-center/far-right “base” against the neoliberal/establishment is clearly the way to achieve such an objective. Think something like Italy’s Five Star Movement or the Pirate Parties on steroids.

One of the objections that is often raised to my perspective is that people will still be oppressed by authoritarian rightists in the Blue zones, or by authoritarian leftists in Red zones. But that is why pan-anarchism is necessary. There will not merely be Blue and Red zones, but purple, green, pink, lavendar, black, white, brown, yellow, and polka-dotted zones as well. This is not science fiction. Ancient Greece was a collection of thousands of cities with hundreds of different political systems. The Holy Roman Empire was a collection of hundreds of kingdoms and thousands of unique territories. The prototypes are already there. There are thousands of autonomous communities and startup societies around the world today.

Read the entire article here.

It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD 4

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

A good article from Matt Taibbi, though I don’t really agree that the Russiagate hoax is comparable to the WMD hoax (that Mueller was involved in perpetrating as well). The WMD hoax started a war that possibly killed over a million people, while Russiagate just makes the bulk of the media and political class look like idiots (which most people already know anyway).

By Matt Taibbi

Note to readers: in light of news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation is complete, I’m releasing this chapter of Hate Inc. early, with a few new details added up top.

Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

As has long been rumored, the former FBI chief’s independent probe will result in multiple indictments and convictions, but no “presidency-wrecking” conspiracy charges, or anything that would meet the layman’s definition of “collusion” with Russia.

With the caveat that even this news might somehow turn out to be botched, the key detail in the many stories about the end of the Mueller investigation was best expressed by the New York Times:

A senior Justice Department official said that Mr. Mueller would not recommend new indictments.

Attorney General William Barr sent a letter to congress summarizing Mueller’s conclusions. The money line quoted the Mueller report:

[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

Over the weekend, the Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. As with most press coverage, there was little pretense that the Mueller probe was supposed to be a neutral fact-finding mission, as apposed to religious allegory, with Mueller cast as the hero sent to slay the monster.

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You Can’t Be Pro-Life and Pro-War 24

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I’m a creature of sonic evolution, dearest motherfuckers. A hand grenade with Luna moth wings. It’s rather ironic for a diagnosed agoraphobic but the only thing that’s evolved more than my fluid gender identity is my equally fluid ideology. In thirty short years I’ve evolved from indentured Catholic to agnostic existentialist to Gnostic Christian witch, from juvenile anarcho-punk to Bolivarian Bolshevik tankie to panarcho-syndicalist gadfly. One thing that hasn’t changed throughout this intellectual metamorphosis however is a life long devotion to the sanctity of life.

Being a far-left pro-lifer has always seemed like a contradiction to most of my ilk but it has always made perfect sense to me. Egalitarianism in all its dimensions has always been about the stewardship of the weak in humanity by the strong. I actually believe that my early pro-life values are largely responsible for informing my radicalism rather than contradicting it. In a strange bid of karma, the Catholic Church may have accidentally created this church-burning commie-pinko by instilling those values in me at an impressionable age. I guess you could say I did a reverse Dorothy Day, from devout do-gooder to bomb-throwing heretic, sunrise, sunset.

This doesn’t mean that I’m on the same page with the pro-life movement at large, not by a long shot. I personally find your average pro-lifer to be a self-serving, single-minded, chauvinistic, pig-fucker with a severe penile Napoleon complex. As much as I despise the idea abortion, I’ve come to the hard conclusion that you can’t regulate someone else’s body without creating a berth for tyranny too wide for any self-respecting anarchist to tolerate. My approach to the issue has essentially become one of harm reduction. Combat abortion by making it irrelevant through the proliferation of affordable alternatives like the morning after pill. I feel that with this issue the bulk of the pro-life movement has revealed themselves to be puritanical hypocrites, more concerned with policing behavior than creating viable alternatives for desperate young women. As two thirds of a female and a feminist to boot, I find this hypocrisy to be particularly hard to swallow. You don’t have to be pro-choice to recognize that a rape victim doesn’t deserve to be polluted by a monster’s progeny, you just have to not be a dick. A tall order for too many of my fellow pro-lifers.

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The Next Ron Paul? 7

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags:

I almost never endorse politicians. I generally regard all elected officials, from the President to dogcatchers, as employees of the real ruling class (C. Wrights Mills’ “power elite”). Voting is merely participating in the king’s coronation rituals in a way that conveys legitimacy on the state. However, there are times when political campaigns can be used for propagandistic purposes. Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 are examples, and Tulsi Gabbard’s present campaign is another potential example.

I doubt she will get the nomination. The Democrapic party will either find a way to block that from happening (i.e. cheating), or she will simply fail to do well in the primaries because, in my experience, most of the kinds of people who are likely to be voters in the Democratic primaries are not people who consider foreign policy to be a primary issue. What passes for “the Left” in the US is, with some exceptions, pathetic when it comes to international relations. They’re far more interested in idpol, expanding the welfare state, and environmentalism (i.e. advancing the interests of the left-wing of the First World middle class). However, a Tulsi vs. Trump contest in 2020 would be a highly interesting turn of events for a range of reasons.

I think she would actually do better in a general election than in the primaries, though I don’t know if she could beat Trump or not. I think not because not only are there the standard issues like incumbent’s advantage but also because, given her views on international relations, the overlord class would pour money into the Republicans to keep Tulsi out of the White House, and the media would work overtime to ensure her defeat. Notice the only time the media (other than FOX) ever said anything good about Trump were the two times he attacked Syria. It would be a highly interesting and comical situation because the political class, capitalist class, deep state, media, etc would suddenly rally behind Trump after years of endless hating on him because they would view him as objectionable though more easily contained and less immediately threatening to the empire’s interests. It would be a true “memory hole” moment. Such a situation would also greatly exacerbate the cleavage between neoliberals (most of whom would move to Trump) and progressives (most of whom would stay with Tulsi). Certain dividing lines would become clearer among the center (radical center vs. establishment center) and right (neocons vs nativists vs populists vs non-interventionists) as well.

Of course, even if she won Gabbard would be constrained by the wider ruling class, political, and deep state apparatus. At best, she would be another Jimmy Carter, i.e. a moderate who is a generally decent person but essentially unable to maneuver within the framework of a system of overwhelming opposition by elites. The “Trump hate” that has been piled on by the wider ruling class is nothing compared to the “Tulsi hate” that would come about if she were elected (the same would be true of a Republican with similar views).

Any US president who seriously moved against the interests of the oligarchy would meet the same fate as Mosadegh, Arben, Suharto, Diem, Sihanouk, Allende, Saddam, Qaddafi, so many others.

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CNN’s Horrible, Terrible, No Good Tulsi Town Hall Questions Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags: ,

A good discussion of how the corporate imperialists circle the wagons around anyone with even moderately anti-interventionist views. US foreign policy is essentially a Roman-like imperialism that is committed to large-scale massacres as a matter of policy. The Democrats and Republicans are fine with this, and committed to preserving it. Most progressive liberals and SJWs consider anti-imperialism to be just another issue, or a matter of indifference. Even a supposed “far leftist” like Alexander Reid-Ross-Podhoretz-Kristol is more concerned about Russo-Assadist conspiracies on behalf of the Learned Elders of Thule than opposing the US empire of corpses.

Tucker Carlson Responded Correctly to MediaMatters 4

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism • Tags:

Yep. This is a pretty good analysis. It’s also important to recognize that political correctness/totalitarian humanism is not just a Left/Right conflict. It’s also an intra-Left conflict as well, with all kinds of left-wing factors shitting all over themselves to out-PC each other, or to accuse each other of some kind of heresy. ATS is a revolutionary left perspective for those who don’t give a flying fuck about this stuff, and refuse to play along with it.

The First World Left vs. Anti-Imperialism, Third Worldism, Pro-Indigenous, and Lumpenproletarianism 1

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right

The problem I have with figures like Bernie and Alexandria is that they’re not radicals. They’re simply representatives of the left-wing of the First World middle/upper middle class, pushing issues that are important that socioeconomic demographic. Unlike the traditional American middle class (now the right-wing of the middle class) they don’t necessarily see the state as impeding their upward mobility by means of taxes, business regulations, etc. Instead, the left-wing of the middle class represents upwardly mobile members of traditional outgroups like ethnic minorities, feminist women, gays, etc (hence, the fanatical emphasis on idpol), their aesthetic interests (hence, their interest in environmentalism), their desire to be protected from the “dangerous classes” (hence, their fanatical emphasis on gun control, and their fear of guns in the hands of icky rural rednecks and inner-city brothas). They see the state as a means of upward mobility by means of public sector employment, social security, free schools and healthcare, anti-discrimination laws, etc.

I have no time for any of this. I am (generally speaking) anti-imperialist, Third Worldist, and pro-indigenous in international relations, and pro-lumpenproletarian in First World class relations. Historically, the Right was the party of the traditional elite, the Center was the party of the middle class, the Left was the party of the respectable working class, and the Anarchists were the party of the lumpenproletariat. I stand with the latter.

Redefining the ‘N’ Word 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Jimi Hendrix was a n*ggaJesus Christ and grandma, too Jackson Pollock was a nigga Nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga Nigga, nigga, nigga Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me
Outside of society, if you’re looking That’s where you’ll find me Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me Outside of society
-Rock n Roll Nigger, Patti Smith

Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? “Are there any niggers here tonight?” I know there’s one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let’s see, there’s two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kike. And there’s another kike— that’s two kikes and three niggers. And there’s a spic. Right? Hmm? There’s another spic. Ooh, there’s a wop; there’s a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there’s three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there’s one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm.

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Don’t make women register for the draft. Just end draft registration for everyone. Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Men and Women, Military

The anti-Vietnam War and anti-draft movements of the 1960s and 1970s are a shining example of what I would consider to be an anarchist success. No, the government wasn’t abolished. But the most powerful state in history was forced to withdraw from a war of imperialist aggression by means of a combination of illegality (draft resistance), civil disobedience, mass protests, riots, civilian armed struggle (there were literally thousands of bombings in the US during that time, as well as armed confrontations between feds/pigs and militant organizations), and passive resistance, mutiny, and “fragging” (assassinating officers) by soldiers.

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Far Left Democrats Declare WAR On Moderates Threatening The Democratic Party Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right

Unlike Tim Pool, who is a centrist vlogger, I am very appreciative of the divisive and disruptive effect that supposed “far left” Democrats are having on their party, just as I am very appreciative of the effect that Trumpism is having on the Republicans. The neocon/neoliberal duopoly is being forced into a defensive position. Interestingly, in one of Pool’s recent videos he describes SJWs as a religious movement, i.e. the Left’s version of theocratic social conservatives, which is the position that I (and others on the margins) have been advancing for years.

‘No Allegations of Human Trafficking’ and ‘Women Could’ve Walked Out’ In Florida Massage-Parlor Prostitution Stings 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Sexuality and the State • Tags: ,

Sex trafficking hysteria is the new “War on Drugs.” Like the war on drugs, virtually every category of do-gooder is getting duped once again.

By Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Reason

It’s been nearly a week since Florida police started bragging about their big “human trafficking” bust, an operation that pulled in professional football owner Robert Kraft, more than 150 other men, and several Chinese immigrant women associated with Asian spas in Palm Beach County. Police say the spas were fronts for prostitution, that the workers there were victims of sex trafficking, and that their six-month long investigation was time well spent.

Six months is a long time, however, and it’s hard to reconcile the cops’ timeline with their heroic rhetoric. If the women employed at these businesses were really the victims of “modern slavery,” why did police take six months to get them out of that situation? Why did it require repeat intimate undercover visits and building misdemeanor prostitution charges against all sorts of random men before these “heroes” decided to intervene?

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The Future of US Party Politics? 3

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right

A reader at AttacktheSystem.Com nails it:

“I’ve noticed more and more folks on the current right becoming anti-war (at least, selectively anti-war for pragmatic reasons, though some have begun to sound like full-on peaceniks). If nothing else I guess that reflects neocons’ losing hold on the GOP.

 

Which raises another interesting question. What is the future of the Republican Party proper? As you pointed out yesterday in your Coming Dystopia piece, and in the past, the kind of Republicans that make up Trump’s base are largely a (literally) dying breed. And the more time passes the more I agree with your assessment that the new “conservatives” will essentially be neoliberals who reject progressive-style economic proposals and/or some of the excesses of SJWism.

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The Coming Dystopia? 22

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right

The future of the US, or the future “post-US” or the “future of the Western world” or “the future of the global order, will be rule by the techno-oligarch/new clerisy alliance, where neoliberals constitute “conservatism” and progressives/SJWs constitute “liberalism.” Everyone, including the historic WASP culture, will be a minority. We will have a highly stratified Latin American-style class system with the Rainbow Culture as its self-legitimating state ideology. The emerging ruling class will also have a world empire, a military industrial complex and a police state that it will have inherited from previous regimes.

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Slavoj Žižek: Trump’s rise is a symptom of a dark and subtle force 22

by • American Decline, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

For 25-30 years, I have said that the main political issues in the USA are imperialism, widening class divisions, and use of the wars on drugs, crime, and (later) terrorism to create a domestic police state. Regrettably, most of liberal and left opinion during this time has been more focused on “identity” issues and (to a lesser degree) environmentalism or expanding the welfare state instead.

We are seeing the consequences of that now. The US has killed millions of people in …the past 20 years with wars of aggression. Class divisions are the widest they have been in a century, and incarceration rates are setting world records. In fact, it’s often been the far right (paleocons, libertarians, sovereign citizens, isolationist xenophobes) who are more in tune on many of these issues than liberal and left opinion.

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