Comments from Charles K. Asima:
Fascinating study. America, Russia, Israel, China, and the UAE spend the most money on manufacturing consensus. Imagine my shock. But most nations and political parties use bots and paid shills, or some combination of both, to get support. Yet the authors still consider Russiagate a scandal, even though everybody knows that Russia has used highly sophisticated propaganda to manipulate the American public at least as early as the Great Depression.
Press TV. Listen here.
Britain will have to choose whether the United States or the European Union could benefit it more economically once it leaves the EU in March of next year, according to a US-based political analyst.
“Britain is now essentially caught in the middle between the United States and the European Union,” said Keith Preston a political analyst from Virginia.
British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal has worried US president Donald Trump because it could put the EU in a more favorable position for Britain than the US, Preston said.
In remarks late on Monday, Trump slammed the Brexit deal and said it would benefit the EU while damaging the UK’s ability to trade with the US.
“Sounds like a great deal for the EU” he said at the White House.
“We have to take a look at seriously whether or not the UK is allowed to trade. You know, right now, if you look at the deal, they may not be able to trade with us, and that wouldn’t be a good thing,” Trump said.
The British government furiously reacted to Trump’s interventionist remarks, saying it was wrong to say that London will not be able to reach its own trade arrangement with Washington under the deal reached between Britain and the EU last week.
Preston said Trump, as a president known for his “hawkish” stance on trade, especially with the EU, is of the idea that the terms of the Brexit agreement will prevent Britain from engaging in certain trade activity with the US.
He said it was not clear whether Trump really believed in those claims or was just using them as a tactic to drive a wedge between Britain and the EU.
“What is Trump is doing essentially he is using a negotiating tactic. He wants to negotiate a trade arrangement with England which is currently being developed…” he said, adding that Trump’s criticism of the Brexit deal could also be a “rhetorical weapon” against the EU.
The expert said that May’s government is going to feel huge pressure from both the EU and the US as the two would do their best to develop more stable trade ties with Britain.
“Europe actually has more wealth and a denser population than the United States as far as the entirety of the European Union is concerned although the US has the world’s largest economy of any nation,” he said.
Preston concluded that his believed Britain could finally end up finding itself in a closer trade arrangement with the US as the distance between Washington and the EU keeps growing over various issues, including on trade, NATO and issues of international relations.
My recent interview with Kevin Barrett. This is one of the better interviews I have done. Listen here.
Keith Preston is a notable anarchist thinker and incisive critic of Secular Humanist Idiocy Tending Towards Political Correctness (SHITT-PC)*…the same hegemonic pseudo-religion Jonathan Revusky calls Anti-Religious Religious Fundamentalism (ARRF).
In this interview we discuss Keith’s recent book Thinkers Against Modernity, a concise and readable synopsis of intellectuals who have influenced the European New Right. Though it leaves out the two most important Traditionalist thinkers—René Guenon and Renée Girard—Thinkers Against Modernity does a terrific job of elucidating complex and difficult ideas, and showing why late 19th and 20th century intellectuals who questioned progressivist materialism (among other post-sacred cows) are now more relevant than ever.
Thinkers Against Modernity is cheaper than a course in 20th century intellectual history—and offers a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than is normally found in the academy. It also has the courage to ask the million dollar question: What will happen when the Western world completes the process it is now undergoing and finishes losing faith in nihilism?
Some of us, following René Guenon, have lost faith in nihilism and turned to traditional religion in general…and the best-preserved one, Islam, in particular. Others have sketched out other possible paths: Belloc and Chesterton’s Catholicism, Nietzche’s superman, Junger’s heroic individualism, or various forms of political engagement. Keith Preston’s book is a terrific introduction to some of the most significant thinkers who have seen, and struggled with, the failure of modernity.
*Don’t blame Keith for that acronym, I just made it up.
“Well, I think there is a number of issues going on. First of all, we have to understand the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States. Saudi Arabia is probably one of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East along with Israel. And Saudi Arabia is also a major export market for American armaments. Recently, there was a multibillion-dollar arms deal between the United States and Saudi Arabia and this is a major boom to American arms manufacturers. This is essentially a foreign export market for armaments that is underwritten by the American government. So, there are a lot of vested interest who want to preserve this relationship,” Keith Preston, the chief editor of AttacktheSystem, told Tasnim.
The United States and Saudi Arabia are connected at every level, he added.
Referring to the situation in Yemen, Preston described it as serious.
Medieval reenanctor dies after 7-foot-long lance spears his abdomen. Civil War and World War Two reenactors can apparently get pretty wild as well.
By Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post
A Virginia man, who was playing a Medieval knight during a reenactment performance, impaled and killed himself with his seven-foot-long lance.
Peter Barclay of Woodbridge, Va., a retired Army lieutenant colonel, died after he was impaled with his lance in a timed competition Saturday in Williamstown, Ky. Barclay was a longtime and active member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, according to the group’s president John Fulton.
Fulton said the 52-year-old was competing in an equestrian game at the Kentucky event inside a large pavilion while spectators watched. In the game, riders had to pick up their lance from a hay bale and then ride, using it to pick up a paper plate.
Barclay, who performed under the name “Master Terafan Greydragon,” had the lance in hand, picked the paper plate off the ground and was finishing the course when the accident happened.
This is probably the best and most comprehensive set of proposals for immigration reform that I have seen to date in the sense of upholding humanitarian values, while giving due consideration to everyone’s interests.
By Nathan Smith
My fundamental convictions have not changed: I support open borders. And yet one can’t tilt at windmills too long without feeling a sense of futility and even foolishness. We may have had an impact. We have been noticed in high places, a little. But of course there is no prospect of open borders being adopted as official policy in any of the world’s developed countries anytime soon. Meanwhile, there is room for reasonable hope that immigration policy will move quite a ways in the right direction, and for reasonable fear that it will move far in the wrong direction, in the coming years, and it’s far from clear that advocating open borders is the best way to help accomplish the former, or avoid the latter. To advocate open borders, assuming, as seems likely, that that aim cannot be achieved for decades at least, can only help indirectly, e.g., by expanding the “Overton window,” and might plausibly hurt, by provoking a restrictionist reaction against an open-borders bogeyman. For those idealists who really want to know what justice demands, we’ve explained that. I’d be happy to explain it again, debate it, whatever. But the value of refining the case for open borders still further seems doubtful until there’s evidence that people exist who really want to do the right thing, have read what has been argued so far, and are still unconvinced. My impression is that among people with a thorough exposure to the public case for open borders, as it has been made here and elsewhere, the insufficiency of the arguments offered is not a very important factor in any failure to persuade. Some of the unconvinced just aren’t very smart, while more aren’t good enough to do the right thing when they start to see it, so they bluster and stonewall and scoff.
So in this post, I’m going to attempt something a bit different, involving an unaccustomed degree of compromise. I’m going to lay out a policy platform that, while falling well short of open borders, lies, I think, at the radical end of what might actually find a coalition to carry it through to success in the United States in the near future. It doesn’t institute open borders. If passed, deportations would still occur, and billions who would benefit from immigrating would be excluded from the territory of the United States permanently from birth. Indeed, the centerpiece of this proposed policy, the Residents’ Bill of Rights, wouldn’t increase at all the number of people enjoying a definite legal right of residence, much less a path to citizenship. But it would ensure that all those residing in the United States would be treated a little more justly. It would make it harder to backslide into a harsh enforcement regime or a reduction of immigrant numbers. It would give the foreign born, however they got there, a certain dignity and a certain security. It would cause many acts of wickedness, many violations of fundamental human rights, to cease. It would give conscientious Americans the right to be substantially less ashamed of the way their government treats immigrants. At the same time, by empowering immigration skeptics to act locally instead of nationally, it would appease some of their more legitimate fears. It would not institute open borders, but I believe it would help to prepare the way.
This is how it needs to be. One thing this article doesn’t mention is that the Rainbow Coalition was also oriented toward building relationships with Chicago gangs like the Blackstone Rangers. Both the Nixon-Hoover FBI and the Chicago police thought this idea was so dangerous and threatening that they literally assassinated the project’s leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
“In his short time as a Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton wanted to advance the group’s goals by forming a “Rainbow Coalition” of working class and poor people of all races…
Former members of the Chicago Panthers and YPO tell different versions of the same story of how the groups connected: Each attended the other’s organizing meetings and decided to work together on their common issues. Over time, the Black Panthers learned to tolerate Confederate flags as intransigent signs for rebellion. Their only stipulation was that the white Young Patriots denounce racism…
In the end, the Illinois Panthers brought together various elements of the black community, Confederate flag-waving southern white migrants (Young Patriots), Puerto Ricans (Young Lords), poor white ethnic groups (Rising Up Angry, JOIN Community Union, and the Intercommunal Survival Committee), students and the women’s movement. The disparate groups under the coalition’s umbrella pooled resources and shared strategies for providing community services and aid that the government and private sector would not. Initiatives included health clinics, feeding homeless and hungry people, and legal advice for those dealing with unethical landlords and police brutality.”
Interestingly, it only seems to be tendencies like Attack the System and National-Anarchist Movement that have any interest in going this route today.
Recently, this meme was posted on an N-A page:
And these were some of the comments in response by leading N-As:
A leftist writer discusses the history of leftist opposition to open borders.
By Angela Nagle
American Affairs Journal
efore “Build the wall!” there was “Tear down this wall!” In his famous 1987 speech, Ronald Reagan demanded that the “scar” of the Berlin Wall be removed and insisted that the offending restriction of movement it represented amounted to nothing less than a “question of freedom for all mankind.” He went on to say that those who “refuse to join the community of freedom” would “become obsolete” as a result of the irresistible force of the global market. And so they did. In celebration, Leonard Bernstein directed a performance of “Ode to Joy” and Roger Waters performed “The Wall.” Barriers to labor and capital came down all over the world; the end of history was declared; and decades of U.S.-dominated globalization followed.
In its twenty-nine-year existence, around 140 people died attempting to cross the Berlin Wall. In the promised world of global economic freedom and prosperity, 412 people died crossing the U.S.-Mexican border last year alone, and more than three thousand died the previous year in the Mediterranean. The pop songs and Hollywood movies about freedom are nowhere to be found. What went wrong?
Of course, the Reaganite project did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Reagan—and his successors from both parties—used the same triumphalist rhetoric to sell the hollowing out of trade unions, the deregulation of banks, the expansion of outsourcing, and the globalization of markets away from the deadweight of national economic interests. Central to this project was a neoliberal attack on national barriers to the flow of labor and capital. At home, Reagan also oversaw one of the most significant pro-migration reforms in American history, the 1986 “Reagan Amnesty” that expanded the labor market by allowing millions of illegal migrants to gain legal status.
Popular movements against different elements of this post–Cold War vision came initially from the Left in the form of the anti-globalization movements and later Occupy Wall Street. But, lacking the bargaining power to challenge international capital, protest movements went nowhere. The globalized and financialized economic system held firm despite all the devastation it wreaked, even through the 2008 financial crisis.
This article by Nathan Smith is the best analysis of the immigration issue that I have seen to date in terms of nuance, honesty, and depth. He argues that there would be both tremendous benefits and tremendous costs if the borders of the United States were to be opened completely (where moving to the USA from another country would be no different than moving from California to Texas or from Virginia to Maryland). Smith summarizes his analysis as follows:
In short, I think the most wild-eyed predictions of the open borders optimists will come true, and to spare, but I think a lot of the forebodings of the grimmest open border pessimists will also prove more than justified.
He ultimately comes down on the side of open borders, primarily on the grounds that the Global South would be the net winners on the economic level. See a critique of Smith’s position by Robert Montenegro here.
By Nathan Smith
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called “The American Polity Can Endure and Flourish Under Open Borders.” I would not write that post today. The American polity might endure and flourish under open borders, but I wouldn’t claim that confidently. What changed my mind? A greater familiarity with the theoretical models that are the basis for “double world GDP” as a claim about the global economic impact of open borders, especially my own. It turns out that these estimates depend on billions of people migrating internationally under open borders. Previously, my vague and tentative expectations about how much migration would occur under open borders were akin to Gallup poll estimates suggesting that 150 million or so would like to migrate to the USA. Others may disagree, but I was fairly confident at the time that the US polity was robust enough to absorb 150-200 million immigrants (over, say, a couple of decades) and retain its basic political character and structure. I do not think the US polity is robust enough to absorb 1 billion immigrants (even, say, over the course of fifty years) and retain its basic political character and structure.
Todd Lewis will be interviewing David Friedman on his work Law Very Different than our Own both his lectures and upcoming book.
A discussion with the C-Realm podcast. Listen here.
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KMO welcomes Keith Preston of Attack the System back to C-Realm Radio to talk about the current political and social division in the United States. Keith first offers a technological explanation for the intensity of the social animosity on display in public discourse. He then delves into the history of left and right political movements in the US to describe in more detail how we came to our particular historical moment.
A recent interview with the Rebel Yell podcast. Listen here.
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Rebel Yell 20181110 330 Keith Preston, Attack the System
This is Rebel Yell – a Southern Nationalist podcast of the Alt-Right. I’m your host Musonius Rufus. Joining me are my cohosts Mencken’s Ghost and Ryan McMahon. For our 111th episode of Rebel Yell, Mencken and I speak with Keith Preston of Attack the System.
And check out his podcasts Kick the Puppy and Unraveling Political Theory.
11.25.18
Trump lets the cat out of the bag on Israel and Saudi Arabia, American missionary killed by natives on North Sentinal Island, Trump’s Playboy model wife to speak at Christian university event, young people leaving religion, churches starting to close, number of witches growing in US as Christianity declines, social dislocation and dysfunction, identity issues, the wealth gap in the USA, Latin American-looking Californication, bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism, suicide increasing among American workers, Republican governor blames mass shootings on Zombie television, George Soros, mainstream paranoia.
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
White Guilt is a very serious affliction in this country. Its symptoms include cultural appropriation, political correctness, and obsessive NPR consumption. Fall is peak White Guilt season, wedged between our country’s most cherished celebrations of genocide, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. A common misconception is that White Guilt is a mental illness. While it can cause delusions in more severe cases, White Guilt is actually a completely natural response to conspicuous consumption, particularly when this addiction to material garbage is built on an ancient Indian burial ground.
Trump’s candor leaves Anglo-American-Zionist-Wahhabist axis exposed. Well done, Mr. President (even if the intentions were polar opposite).
The Times of Israel
US President Donald Trump on Thursday suggested that Israel would face major regional difficulties in the Middle East if it were not for the stabilizing presence of Saudi Arabia.
“Israel would be in big trouble without Saudi Arabia,” Trump told reporters after a Thanksgiving Day telephone call with members of the military from his Mar-a-Lago resort home in Florida.
The US president was asked to comment on reports that the CIA had concluded that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman ordered the brutal murder of US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October.
“If you look at Israel, Israel would be in big trouble without Saudi Arabia,” Trump said. “So what does that mean, Israel is going to leave? You want Israel to leave? We have a very strong ally in Saudi Arabia.”
“The fact is that Saudi Arabia is tremendously helpful in the Middle East, if we didn’t have Saudi Arabia we wouldn’t have a big base, we wouldn’t have any reason probably…” Trump said, without finishing the sentence.
Critics in Congress and high-ranking officials in other countries have accused Trump of ignoring human rights and giving Saudi Arabia a pass for economic reasons, including its influence on the world oil market.
Noting that Saudi Arabia helps keep oil prices down, Trump on Thursday argued that almost no country is without its faults.
“If we go by a certain standard we won’t be able to have allies with almost any country,” he said.
Press TV. Listen here.
US President Donald Trump’s remarks on Saudi Arabia’s importance for Israel prove right longtime speculation about Riyadh’s secret alliance with Tel Aviv, American political analyst Keith Preston says.
Faced with international pressure to hold Riyadh responsible for murdering dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump has argued that punishing the kingdom hurts the US more as it would alienate the key Middle East ally and jeopardize billions of dollars in arms sales.
But the biggest reason, as he told reporters on Thursday, was the risk that losing Saudi Arabia’s services would pose to Israel.
“Israel would be in big trouble without Saudi Arabia,” Trump said after a Thanksgiving Day telephone call with military personnel from his Mar-a-Lago resort home in Florida.
“If you look at Israel, Israel would be in big trouble without Saudi Arabia,” he added. “So what does that mean, Israel is going to leave? You want Israel to leave? We have a very strong ally in Saudi Arabia.”
The President said the Saudis were “tremendously helpful” in the region as they also helped keep oil prices down.
Preston, chief editor of attackthesystem.com, said the remarks corroborated previous reports about growing ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
“Trump is unusual for an American president in that he frequently goes off-script and says things that are unusually candid,” Preston told Press TV on Friday.
The analyst said while many people seemed to think that Riyadh and Tel Aviv were enemies, Trump’s statement proves that they are not.
