No crystal ball was required regarding the eventual sundering of the relationship between Trump and Elon Musk. Here were noisy, brash egos who had formed a rancid union in American politics, with Musk lending his resources and public machinery to The Donald, knowing he could also have sway in the Trump administration as a “special government employee”.  That sway took the form of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), a crude attempt to right the wrongs of misspending in government while politicising the public service. Awaking from a narcotised daze, Musk decided to focus on his floundering companies, notably Tesla, and step back from the inferno. In doing so, he expected “to remain a friend and adviser, and if there’s anything the president wants me to do, I’m at this service.” Gazing at the raging inferno that is Trumpian policy, that convivial attitude has all but evaporated.

For one thing, Trump’s proposed tax breaks and increases in defence spending, espoused in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, seemed to undermine the very premise of DOGE and its zealous mission of reducing government spending. The legislation promises to slash $1.5 trillion in government spending but increase the debt limit by $4 trillion. “I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk said in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning last month. Such a plan merely inflated, not reduced, the budget deficit. “I think a bill can be big or beautiful. I don’t know if it can be both.”

This month, Musk became even more irritable. His temper had frayed. “I’m sorry, I just can’t stand it anymore,” he barked on his X platform on June 3. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.” He continued to heap shame on members of Congress “who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

On June 5, Trump expressed his disappointment “because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill”, leaving open the possibility that the billionaire might be suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.” Musk had “only developed the problem when he found out that we’re going to have to cut the [electric vehicle] mandate.”

A blow was in the offing, coming in the form of a post on Truth Social: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised Biden didn’t do it!” Musk’s embittered retort: “Such an obvious lie. So sad.” He also proposed, in light of the President’s announcement, the decommissioning of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, vehicles used by NASA to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The ripples were finally getting violent.

Musk then decided to do what he called dropping “the really big bomb”. Trump, he revealed, “is in the Epstein files. This is the real reason they have not been made public.” Given Musk’s estranged relationship with reality and its facets, this can only be taken at face value. It’s a matter of record that Trump, along with a fat who’s who of power, knew the late Jeffrey Epstein, financier and convicted sex offender, for many years.

The trove of government documents known as The Epstein Files has offered the easily titillated some manna but, thus far, few bombs. On February 27, US Attorney General Pamela Bondi released what were described as the “first phase” of files relating to the financier and “his exploitation of over 250 underage girls at his homes in New York and Florida, among other locations.” In an interview with Fox News on February 21, Bondi revealed that Epstein’s client list lay “on my desk right now.”

Trump’s response to Musk’s latest gobbet of accusation proved almost melancholic. “I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago.” He went on to praise “one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress.”

In characteristically bratty fashion, Musk went on to share a post agreeing with the proposition that Trump be impeached and replaced by the Vice President, J.D. Vance, advocate “a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle” (a touching billionaire’s wish), and predict “a recession in the second half of this year” caused by Trump’s global tariff regime.

In the scheme of things, Trump has survived impeachment, prosecution, litigation, and a divided US electorate that gave him a majority in both the Electoral College and the popular vote.  Like a Teflon-coated mafia don, he has made compromising people a minor art.  Musk, compromised in his support and having second thoughts, can only go noisily into the confused night.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

But there is a method and mad dash of hope in this formula of once-a-month tributes to hard work, that is, highlighting the hard work of “heroes” in this hard land of penury and disaster and predatory (retaliatory) capitalism.

Today’s piece in my local rag (5/21) is emblematic of my own proof that we can fight the surge of shallow thinking and even shallower writing.

Here, just heading home from assisting at the 60+ Center (senior adult center), I caught this show, on the radio station where I broadcast my own Wednesday show, Finding Fringe. 6 PM, PST, streaming live on kyaq.org.

Hard work of reporting: Thirsting for Justice: East Orosi’s Struggle for Clean Drinking Water (Encore)

East Orosi hasn’t had safe drinking water in over 20 years. The water is full of nitrates, runoff from industrial agriculture, which is harmful to human health. The community has taken action to find a solution, from lobbying at the state capital to working with neighboring towns.

And they may finally have one. New California laws, passed  in the last five years, have opened up funding to build water infrastructure in small towns like East Orosi. But even as laws and funding develop, implementation has been challenging.

We visit East Orosi and talk to Berta Diaz Ochoa about what it’s like living without clean drinking water and the solutions on the horizon in part one of a two part series. — Listen.

Learn More:

• Community Water Center
• Self Help Enterprises
• State Water Resources Control Board

So, imagine, a sound bite around the issues of field workers pulling up crops that are destroying healthy water systems, forcing them to have to drink that toxic water or paying for bottled water to survive. Is water a human right? In California is it.

So, take ANY community, not just the fenceline ones, the communities that are in the sights of the perveyors of criminal capitalism because they are poor and probably BIPOC, and then find how infrastructure and services and even bloody retail enterprises like pharmacies or grocery stores are being gutted by Capitalism, pre-Trump/post-Trump.

You have any axes to grind? You live in a flyover state or rural community?

Here,

Stop trying to save Rural America.

Efforts to write it off as “disappearing” are complicated by the 60 million Americans who call a rural community home.

We must recognize that innovation, diversity of ideas and people, and new concepts don’t need to be imported to rural communities – they’re already there. Rural entrepreneurs and community leaders have always, by necessity, been innovative.

Rural communities have faced some harsh realities in the last generation: they’ve seen manufacturing move overseas, farming monopolized by big outfits with only 5% of rural residents working in agriculture, generational migration to bigger cities, school consolidation, and the absence of basic community resources such as health care and broadband, and, more recently, threats to the lifeline that is the U.S. Postal Service. This, and the pandemic.

Every brightly lit corporate store on the edge of town is a monument to a system that does not build community or advance a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem.

And before the super out-of-touch elite from err, New York City call us bumkins, get over it: Don’t Blame Rural Residents for a Broken Political System

While noting the decades of gerrymandering to enhance the power of rural officials, New York magazine author Ed Kilgore concludes, “Underlying it all are real differences in outlook between different parts of the country, made more important by the distinct institutional features of a constitutional system designed to protect the interests of small, largely nonmetropolitan states.”

Sorry, Ed; the values of citizens of rural areas have as much to do with school violence and immigration resistance as do video games. In fact, Kilgore undermines his own argument by citing Ronald Brownstein’s analysis in the Atlantic of the red-blue divide. Alas, the same Ronald Brownstein reported on CNN just one week later that a prosperity gap was the source of the split between Democrats and Republicans. “Observers in both parties agree that the sense of economic displacement in recent years has intensified the long-standing movement toward the GOP among small-town and rural communities initially rooted in unease over cultural and demographic change.” It’s fair to observe that gun-loving nativists did not create the dismal economic prospects that drove them to vote for candidate Trump.

It is true that after years of civic disengagement, rural voters turned out in record numbers to elect the only coastal elitist who showed up in their communities and asked for their votes. So, Trump won and Clinton lost. Beyond that, any generalization about the impact of rural citizens on national politics is just horsepucky. Rural citizens didn’t create the electoral system that permits unlimited campaign donations to state officials who draw Congressional districts to favor entrenched wealth. In fact, rural citizens are the victims of gerrymandering as much as any disenfranchised cohort that ends up in a noncompetitive legislative district.

Alas, here’s the Google Gulag AI response to “all the problems in rural America”:

Rural communities face numerous interconnected challenges that can be described as “broken systems” due to a combination of historical disinvestment, geographic isolation, and economic shifts.

Here’s a breakdown of some key broken systems in rural communities:
1. Healthcare:

Limited Access: Rural areas often have a shortage of healthcare providers, specialists, and hospitals, forcing residents to travel long distances for care.

Hospital Closures: Rural hospitals are closing at an alarming rate due to financial difficulties and staffing shortages, further limiting access to care.

Lack of Services: Rural areas may lack crucial services like mental health care, substance abuse treatment, and specialized medical care.

2. Economic Systems:

Job Losses: Rural communities have experienced significant job losses due to the decline of manufacturing and agriculture, leading to higher unemployment and poverty rates.

Limited Opportunities: A lack of diverse industries and businesses can limit economic opportunities for residents, particularly young people.
Brain Drain: Young, educated individuals often leave rural areas for better opportunities in urban centers, further weakening the local economy.

3. Infrastructure:

Poor Broadband Access: Many rural areas lack access to reliable, high-speed internet, hindering economic development, education, and access to telehealth.

Inadequate Transportation: Limited public transportation options can isolate residents and make it difficult to access jobs, healthcare, and other essential services.

Aging Infrastructure: Rural areas may have aging infrastructure, including roads, bridges, and water systems, which require significant investment to repair and upgrade.

4. Education:

School Consolidation: Rural schools have been consolidated, leading to longer commutes for students and the loss of local schools as community anchors.

Funding Challenges: Rural schools often face funding challenges, which can impact the quality of education and available resources.

Teacher Shortages: Rural schools may have difficulty attracting and retaining qualified teachers, impacting student outcomes.

5. Social Systems:

Social Isolation: Geographic isolation and limited social opportunities can contribute to social isolation and mental health challenges for residents.

Lack of Community Resources: Rural areas may lack access to essential community resources such as libraries, childcare facilities, and recreational opportunities.

It’s important to note: These “broken systems” are interconnected and often exacerbate each other. The challenges faced by rural communities vary depending on location, demographics, and economic conditions.
Addressing these challenges requires a multi-faceted approach involving government, businesses, non-profit organizations, and community members.

+–+ Here is May 21st’s piece.

Identify, Diversify, and Harmonize How We Think this May

By Paul Haeder/Lincoln County (Oregon) Leader
One may wonder how the heck did we get all these national and international days of celebration. It is a feature of Homo sapiens to celebrate accomplishments and honor causes and individuals who make the world, well, theoretically a better place.

May is no exception, and of course, the International Workers’ Day is May 1. In this time of rampant hatred of so many professions by Trump and Company, it goes without saying that his shallow but deeply narcissistic persona just will never grasp the value of the worker.

His entire raison d’être is about tearing down and imploding institutions and attacking individuals for which he deems “the enemy.”

The billionaire classless cabal sees workers as the enemy. And the goals of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 were clear: Shorter work hours; safer work environment; fair wages; elimination of child labor; the ability for the state to regulate labor conditions.

Ironically, I was in Ashland on International Firefighters Day, talking to two captains in the city’s two fire stations. I was told that a few years ago firefighters responded to 1,600 calls annually. Last year, Ashland’s stations went out over six thousand times.

Aging in place and lack of family and support precipitates many of the EMT calls. And a fire engine they are waiting for is still four years out, to the tune of $2 million once it’s completely outfitted.

If you watch the milquetoast mainstream media, you will have recalled the Accused Sexual Predator Trump made a mockery of National Teacher Day by laughing at all the cuts to the hundreds of educational initiatives smart and reasoned individuals over decades had initiated for the betterment of society through the intellectual progress of our youth.

Another group of workers in the bulls eye of Musk, Thiel, Stephen Miller and Vance/Trump is nursing professionals. We see the almost total breakdown of nursing and doctoring in Lincoln County because of the hard reality of a for-profit health care system putting profits over patients. Add to that the lack of affordable housing, and rural counties throughout the land are suffering massive nursing and doctor shortages.

Which then brings us to National Day of Reason, where groups of people see the value in enlightened thinking. You know, valuing the separation of church and state, which for all intents and purposes under this fascist regime has been imploded into a crusade against reasoned thinkers who do not see prayer or faith as central to their lives.

Humanists and Secularists created this National Day in response to the national day of prayer.

Celebrations have taken the form of blood drives, secular events and activities, and in some cases, protests against the National Day of Prayer. Imagine Trump and Company having the wherewithal to wrap their heads around this celebration – the Secular Week of Action when people volunteer to make the world a better place.

Two not necessarily different international recognition days in May include World Day for Cultural Diversity and International Day for Biological Diversity. Did you get the memo yet that Trump-Vance are on the attack against affirmative action and ecological health.

In fact, on the biodiversity front, Trump and Company have “redefined” harm as it is applied to the Endangered Species Act. This pinhead thinking is just the tip of the iceberg of clownish but dangerous moves.

Defenders of Wildlife explains:

“Trump administration is hell-bent on destroying the ESA  to further line the pockets of industry. The vast majority of imperiled wildlife listed as endangered or threatened under the ESA are there because of loss of habitat. This latest salvo to redefine ‘harm’ to eliminate protection for wildlife from habitat destruction, if successful, will further imperil threatened and endangered species. We will fight this action and continue to protect the wildlife and wild places we hold dear as a nation.”

Are you seeing the pattern carried out by billionaires such as Miriam Adelson, Larry Fink and Larry Ellison? Given the fact half of American cities are under air advisories, we have International Asthma Day to lend pause to how destructive these executive actions have been and will continue to be decades from now.

‘Harm’ is what unchecked air pollution in many forms continues to do to young and old. Harmful air advisories come in daily, and the fear is that Trump will just ban the notifications as a way to say, “See, I have cleaned up the air since there are no more warnings.”

Maybe we can pray the polluted air away.

The backers of Trump’s ideal America will see our “secular humanist” society based on science and reason destroyed. The Ten Commandments will form the basis of the legal system.

Finally, we have World Press Freedom Day. If you have any deep regard for the so-called Fourth Estate, then shivers should be running up your spine under this anti-journalist regime.

Mickey Huff of Project Censored states press freedom succinctly:

“We have to remember that it’s the independent media that is often the grassroots voice of the people. It is often the independent press that is operating on ethical standards and principles, and it is the independent press that is reporting in the public interest, not the corporate media.”

Diversify your news media diets. Find independent outlets, and for journalists, we need to reform the media and create better avenues for news reporting, including better accuracy and what we call “solutions journalism,” which creates truly constructive dialogue in our communities.

*****

Footnote: And not one mention of the genocide in Gaza, the trillions stolen from Arab nations’ populations, the trillions stolen from citizens of Canada, EU, USA, for the starvation and immolation and rape of a people.

There are no other topics to write about with the same amount of importance that Palestine conveys, from every aspect of War Terror of the Capitalists of both Jewish and Goyim descent.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

On Monday President Donald Trump telephoned President Vladimir Putin and they talked for two hours before Trump put lunch in his mouth and Putin his dinner.

On the White House schedule, there was no advance notice of the call and no record afterwards. The White House log is blank for Trump’s entire morning while the press were told he was at lunch between 11:30 and 12:30.

Putin went public first, making a statement to the press which the Kremlin posted at 19:55 Moscow time; it was then 12:55 in Washington. Click to read.

Trump and his staff read the transcript and then composed Trump’s statement in a tweet posted at 13:33 Washington time, 20:33 Moscow time. Click to read.

If Secretary of State Marco Rubio and General Keith Kellogg, the president’s negotiator with the Ukraine and FUGUP (France, United Kingdom, Germany, Ukraine, Poland), were consulted during Trump’s prepping, sat in on the call with the President,  or were informed immediately after the call, they have remained silent.

The day before, May 18, Rubio announced that the Istanbul-II meeting had produced agreement “to exchange paper on ideas to get to a ceasefire. If those papers have ideas on them that are realistic and rational, then I think we know we’ve made progress. If those papers, on the other hand, have requirements in them that we know are unrealistic, then we’ll have a different assessment.” Rubio was hinting that the Russian formula in Istanbul, negotiations-then-ceasefire, has been accepted by the US. What the US would do after its “assessment”, Rubio didn’t say – neither walk-away nor threat of new sanctions.

Vice President JD Vance wasn’t present at the call because he was flying home from Rome where he attended Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural mass. “We’re more than open to walking away,” Vance told reporters in his aeroplane. “The United States is not going to spin its wheels here. We want to see outcomes.” Vance prompted Trump to mention the Pope as a mediator for a new round of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations, first to Putin and then in public.

Kellogg is refusing to go along. He tweeted on Sunday: “In Istanbul @SecRubio  made it clear that we have presented ‘a strong peace plan’. Coming out of the London meetings we (US) came up with a comprehensive 22 point plan that is a framework for peace. The first point is a comprehensive cease fire that stops the killing now.”

FUGUP issued their own statement after Trump’s call. “The US President and the European partners have agreed on the next steps. They agreed to closely coordinate the negotiation process and to seek another technical meeting. All sides reaffirmed their willingness to closely accompany Ukraine on the path to a ceasefire. The European participants announced that they would increase pressure on the Russian side through sanctions.”

This signalled acceptance with Trump of the Russian formula, negotiations-then-ceasefire, and time to continue negotiating at the “technical” level. The sanction threat was added. But this statement was no longer FUGUP. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was omitted; so too Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The Italian, the Finn and the European Commission President were substituted. They make FUGIFEC.

Late in the Paris evening of Sunday French President Emmanuel Macron attempted to keep Starmer in Trump’s good books and preserve the ceasefire-first formula. “I spoke tonight,” Macron tweeted, “with @POTUS @Keir_Starmer @Bundeskanzler  and @GiorgiaMeloni  after our talks in Kyiv and Tirana. Tomorrow, President Putin must show he wants peace by accepting the 30-day unconditional ceasefire proposed by President Trump and backed by Ukraine and Europe.” By the time on Monday that Macron realized he had been trumped, the Elysée had nothing to say.

By contrast, Italian Prime Minister Meloni signalled she was happy to line up with Trump and accept Putin’s negotiations-then-ceasefire. “Efforts are being made,” Meloni’s office announced, “for an immediate start to negotiations between the parties that can lead as soon as possible to a ceasefire and create the conditions for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”  Meloni claimed she would assure that Pope Leo XIV would fall into line. “In this regard, the willingness of the Holy Father to host the talks in the Vatican was welcomed. Italy is ready to do its part to facilitate contacts and work for peace.”

For the time being, Putin’s and Trump’s statements have put Rubio, Kellogg and the Europeans offside. Decoding the two president’s statements shows how and why.

President Putin’s Statement

Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/76953 

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good evening.

Our colleagues asked me to briefly comment on the outcome of my telephone conversation with the President of the United States.This conversation has effectively taken place and lasted more than two hours. I would like to emphasise that it was both substantive and quite candid. Overall, [1] I believe it was a very productive exchange.

First and foremost [2], I expressed my gratitude to the President of the United States for the support provided by the United States in facilitating the resumption of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine aimed at potentially reaching a peace agreement and resuming the talks which, as we know, were thwarted by the Ukrainian side in 2022 [3].

The President of the United States shared his position [4] on the cessation of hostilities and the prospects for a ceasefire. For my part, I noted that Russia also supports a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis as well. What we need now is to identify the most effective [5] ways towards achieving peace.

We agreed with the President of the United States that Russia would propose and is ready to engage with the Ukrainian side on drafting a memorandum [6] regarding a potential future peace agreement. This would include outlining a range of provisions, such as the principles for settlement, the timeframe for a possible peace deal, and other matters, including a potential temporary ceasefire, should the necessary agreements [7] be reached.

Contacts among participants of the Istanbul meeting and talks have resumed, which gives reason to believe that we are on the right track overall [8].

I would like to reiterate that the conversation was highly constructive, and I assess it positively. The key issue, of course, is now for the Russian side and the Ukrainian side to show their firm commitment to peace and to forge a compromise that would be acceptable to all parties.

Notably, Russia’s position is clear. Eliminating the root causes [9] of this crisis is what matters most to us.

Should any clarifications be necessary, Press Secretary [Dmitry] Peskov and my aide, Mr Ushakov [10], will provide further details on today’s telephone talks with President Trump.

Keys to Decode

1. This is a qualifier, meaning there are serious differences on the details — Putin asked Trump to pause, halt or cease all arms deliveries to the Ukraine, including US arms shipped through Israel, Germany, and Poland. This is a bullet Trump hasn’t bitten, yet.

2. Putin has made a firm decision to give Trump the “peace deal” he has asked for and wishes to announce at a summit meeting. In their call Putin was mollifying Trump’s disappointment at the failure of their plan to meet when Trump was in the Middle East. A Russian source comments: “Whatever concessions have to be made will be made only by Putin and only to Trump. The Europeans are trying to hog the headlines and turn their defeat into some sort of victory – Trump won’t let them have it and Putin won’t either.”

3. Putin does not publicly admit the mistakes he made with Roman Abramovich and Vladimir Medinsky in March 2022 at Istanbul-I. They have now been corrected at the  consensus decision-making session with the military and intelligence chiefs (May 14 Kremlin session) and then on May 16 in Istanbul with Admiral Igor Kostyukov of the GRU seated on Medinsky’s right with General Alexander Fomin, Deputy Minister of Defence. For more details, click to listen.

Source: https://ria.ru/20250516/peregovory-2017151081.html
At top left, 2nd from left, Fomin, then Kostyukov (obscured) and then Medinsky.

4. Soft qualifier. This means Putin did not agree with several of Trump’s points relating to intelligence sharing, arms deliveries, Ukrainian elections.

5. Future tense. Putin suggested to  Trump that he stop Kellogg and FUGUP encouraging Zelensky. Putin made an especially negative remark about the role played by Prime Minister Starmer.

6. This is a Russian lesson in escalation control. By putting the memorandum of understanding in Russian hands to initiate, Putin returns to the key parts of the December 17, 2021, draft treaty which President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken summarily dismissed. Placing agreement on these terms first, before a temporary ceasefire, and making that ceasefire conditional on ceaseforce (halt to battlefield intelligence sharing and arms re-supply), Putin has invited Trump to choose between the US and FUGUP; between Zelensky and an elected successor;  and between his personal negotiator advisors, Steven Witkoff and General Kellogg.

7. Reiteration of the formula, negotiations first, then ceasefire.

8. Qualifier repeated – see Key 1.

9. This phrase refers to the European security architecture and mutual security pact of December 2021, as well as to the two declared objectives of the Special Military Operation — demilitarization and denazification.

10. Following Putin’s statement, Ushakov added: “other details of the telephone conversation. Among other things, Putin and Trump touched upon the exchange of prisoners of citizens of the two countries: the format of ‘nine nine’ is being worked out. The leaders also discussed their possible meeting and agreed that it should be productive, so the teams of the presidents will work out the content of the summit between Russia and the United States.”

President Trump’s Statement

Tweet source: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114535693441367601

Trump followed in a stumbling speech in the Rose Garden in which, referring to the morning telephone call, he said “they [Putin] like Melania better.”

Just completed my two hour call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. I believe it went very well. Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire [1] and, more importantly, an END to the War. The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of. [2] The tone and spirit of the conversation were excellent. If it wasn’t, I would say so now, rather than later. Russia wants to do largescale TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic “bloodbath” is over, and I agree [3]. There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is UNLIMITED. Likewise, Ukraine can be a great beneficiary on Trade, in the process of rebuilding its Country.

Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine will begin immediately. I have so informed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, of Italy, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, of Germany, and President Alexander Stubb, of Finland, during a call with me,[4]  immediately after the call with President Putin. The Vatican, as represented by the Pope [5] has stated that it would be very interested in hosting the negotiations. Let the process begin! [6]

Keys to Decode

1. Trump accepts that negotiations should come before ceasefire.

2. This amounts to rejection of Kellogg’s 22-point term paper first decided with Zelensky and FUGUP in London on April 23 and repeated by Macron the night before Trump’s telephone call; as well as rejection of Witkoff’s term paper discussed at the Kremlin on April 25.

Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/76797
From left to right: Witkoff’s interpreter, Witkoff, Putin, Ushakov, Russian interpreter, Kirill Dmitriev. For analysis of the term sheets, read this.

3. Agreement with the business deal-making which Witkoff has been discussing with Kirill Dmitriev. For the deal beneficiaries on both sides, read this.

4. This list includes two Germans, both Russia haters — Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Ursula von der Leyen, former German defense minister and supporter of the German rearmament plan to continue the war with Russia into the future. The British Prime Minister has been dropped by Trump, and also Polish Prime Minister Tusk. Included for the first time in this context are the Italian and Finnish representatives with whom Trump has demonstrated personal rapport. Research by Manos Tzafalias indicates that there is a substantial money interest in Finland for Trump’s associate, Elon Musk.

5. Prompt from the Catholic convert, Vice President Vance.

Vance and Rubio meeting with Pope Leo XIV on May 18. They invited the Pope to make an official visit to Washington. The last papal visit to the White House was in September 2015 on the invitation of President Obama and Vice President Biden.

6. Trump has covered his disappointment at failing to hold a summit meeting with Putin in Istanbul on the afternoon of May 16 by dismissing the negotiations which occurred without him. For details of Trump’s abortive summit plan, read this.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Helmer.

US president Donald Trump is not beholden to that epithet and neither is his vice-president JD “I don’t like China” Vance.

Previously, in January 2018, Trump was criticized for referring to Haiti and African countries as “shithole countries.”

On 8 April 2025, Trump took pleasure in describing countries purportedly cowering at the prospect of US tariffs being levied on them:

These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are, they are dying to make a deal. Please, please sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything sir.

The same lack of respectful discourse is followed by Vance. At a meeting in the White House on 28 February 2025, Volodomyr Zelenskyy found himself attacked on two sides. However unsavoury a character Zelenskyy is, and however improper his remarks might have been when he was at the White House, he was a guest. And the attack, in particular by Vance, on a guest was unbecoming.

In March, Vance complained about Chinese oligarchs. Now it is Chinese peasants:

We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.

Decidedly, it was a boorish comment from the vice-president. China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian was not impressed:

It is surprising and sad to hear such ignorant and impolite words from this vice president.

Is Vance merely revealing his ignorance as well as rudeness? Is there any truth to the depiction Vance proffers on China?

Today’s Chinese “peasants”

China has eliminated extreme poverty. The US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) and official poverty data report 5.3% of Americans (around 17.5 million people) as living in “deep poverty” (with incomes below 50% of the federal poverty line) (source: Census.gov – Poverty Tables [Table B-1, B-2]).

An end to extreme poverty posits an end to homelessness. In the US, homelessness is rising in recent years. Ecofact.org reports:

There were 771,480 people recorded as homeless in 2024 — or about 23 per 10,000 people. This represented an increase of over 18% relative to the numbers recorded in 2023. The data show that  36 percent of the homeless were unsheltered — that is, they lived in places not considered fit for human habitation …

Chinese peasants live in the world’s largest economy expressed as GDP (PPP). Chinese peasants put up a space station on their own. Cars produced by Chinese peasants are dominating the world market. And Chinese peasants have developed (Chinese tech is stolen according to Vance) flying cars for the markets, when the markets are ready. These peasants are great at innovating and manufacturing: Comac C919 narrow-body airliner, Long March rockets, 30-satellite Beidou positioning system, molten salt thorium reactors, HarmonyOS, 5.5G, 3nm chips, robotics, AI, hypersonic weapons, etc, etc.

And pertinently for peasants, China’s agricultural sector is undergoing significant transformation through technological innovation, while in the US, farmers are worried about China’s retaliatory tariffs.

Many Americans, if presented the choice, might well opt for Chinese peasant status.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

US president Donald Trump is not beholden to that epithet and neither is his vice-president JD “I don’t like China” Vance.

Previously, in January 2018, Trump was criticized for referring to Haiti and African countries as “shithole countries.”

On 8 April 2025, Trump took pleasure in describing countries purportedly cowering at the prospect of US tariffs being levied on them:

These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are, they are dying to make a deal. Please, please sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything sir.

The same lack of respectful discourse is followed by Vance. At a meeting in the White House on 28 February 2025, Volodomyr Zelenskyy found himself attacked on two sides. However unsavoury a character Zelenskyy is, and however improper his remarks might have been when he was at the White House, he was a guest. And the attack, in particular by Vance, on a guest was unbecoming.

In March, Vance complained about Chinese oligarchs. Now it is Chinese peasants:

We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.

Decidedly, it was a boorish comment from the vice-president. China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian was not impressed:

It is surprising and sad to hear such ignorant and impolite words from this vice president.

Is Vance merely revealing his ignorance as well as rudeness? Is there any truth to the depiction Vance proffers on China?

Today’s Chinese “peasants”

China has eliminated extreme poverty. The US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) and official poverty data report 5.3% of Americans (around 17.5 million people) as living in “deep poverty” (with incomes below 50% of the federal poverty line) (source: Census.gov – Poverty Tables [Table B-1, B-2]).

An end to extreme poverty posits an end to homelessness. In the US, homelessness is rising in recent years. Ecofact.org reports:

There were 771,480 people recorded as homeless in 2024 — or about 23 per 10,000 people. This represented an increase of over 18% relative to the numbers recorded in 2023. The data show that  36 percent of the homeless were unsheltered — that is, they lived in places not considered fit for human habitation …

Chinese peasants live in the world’s largest economy expressed as GDP (PPP). Chinese peasants put up a space station on their own. Cars produced by Chinese peasants are dominating the world market. And Chinese peasants have developed (Chinese tech is stolen according to Vance) flying cars for the markets, when the markets are ready. These peasants are great at innovating and manufacturing: Comac C919 narrow-body airliner, Long March rockets, 30-satellite Beidou positioning system, molten salt thorium reactors, HarmonyOS, 5.5G, 3nm chips, robotics, AI, hypersonic weapons, etc, etc.

And pertinently for peasants, China’s agricultural sector is undergoing significant transformation through technological innovation, while in the US, farmers are worried about China’s retaliatory tariffs.

Many Americans, if presented the choice, might well opt for Chinese peasant status.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

US president Donald Trump is not beholden to that epithet and neither is his vice-president JD “I don’t like China” Vance.

Previously, in January 2018, Trump was criticized for referring to Haiti and African countries as “shithole countries.”

On 8 April 2025, Trump took pleasure in describing countries purportedly cowering at the prospect of US tariffs being levied on them:

These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are, they are dying to make a deal. Please, please sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything sir.

The same lack of respectful discourse is followed by Vance. At a meeting in the White House on 28 February 2025, Volodomyr Zelenskyy found himself attacked on two sides. However unsavoury a character Zelenskyy is, and however improper his remarks might have been when he was at the White House, he was a guest. And the attack, in particular by Vance, on a guest was unbecoming.

In March, Vance complained about Chinese oligarchs. Now it is Chinese peasants:

We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.

Decidedly, it was a boorish comment from the vice-president. China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian was not impressed:

It is surprising and sad to hear such ignorant and impolite words from this vice president.

Is Vance merely revealing his ignorance as well as rudeness? Is there any truth to the depiction Vance proffers on China?

Today’s Chinese “peasants”

China has eliminated extreme poverty. The US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) and official poverty data report 5.3% of Americans (around 17.5 million people) as living in “deep poverty” (with incomes below 50% of the federal poverty line) (source: Census.gov – Poverty Tables [Table B-1, B-2]).

An end to extreme poverty posits an end to homelessness. In the US, homelessness is rising in recent years. Ecofact.org reports:

There were 771,480 people recorded as homeless in 2024 — or about 23 per 10,000 people. This represented an increase of over 18% relative to the numbers recorded in 2023. The data show that  36 percent of the homeless were unsheltered — that is, they lived in places not considered fit for human habitation …

Chinese peasants live in the world’s largest economy expressed as GDP (PPP). Chinese peasants put up a space station on their own. Cars produced by Chinese peasants are dominating the world market. And Chinese peasants have developed (Chinese tech is stolen according to Vance) flying cars for the markets, when the markets are ready. These peasants are great at innovating and manufacturing: Comac C919 narrow-body airliner, Long March rockets, 30-satellite Beidou positioning system, molten salt thorium reactors, HarmonyOS, 5.5G, 3nm chips, robotics, AI, hypersonic weapons, etc, etc.

And pertinently for peasants, China’s agricultural sector is undergoing significant transformation through technological innovation, while in the US, farmers are worried about China’s retaliatory tariffs.

Many Americans, if presented the choice, might well opt for Chinese peasant status.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

I’m going to visit some of our guardians in the Space Force on the northwest coast of Greenland and also just check out what is going on with the security there of Greenland. As you know, it is really important: a lot of other countries have threatened Greenland and threatened to use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States, to threaten Canada and of course to threaten the people of Greenland, so we’re going to check out how things are going there. So speaking for President Trump, we want to reinvigorate the security of the people of Greenland because we think it is important to protecting the security of the entire world. Unfortunately, leaders in both America and in Denmark I think ignored Greenland for far too long. That has been bad for Greenland. That has also been bad for the security of the entire world. We think we can take things in a different direction, so I am going to go check it out.

Vance says a lot of other countries have threatened Greenland (and Canada and the US). Trump points to Russia and China as threats to Greenland, without any evidence to back it up. It comes across clearly as blatant fearmongering, conjuring up a boogeyman and presenting the US as coming to the rescue.

Do Greenlanders feel afraid? If Canadians are afraid, it is about the threats the US made against Canadian sovereignty. A poll reveals that Canadians feel angry (57%), betrayed (37%), and anxious (29%) toward the Trump administration.

However, it is just silly to think Russia and China would risk world opprobrium to take over the world’s largest island, and for what? Resources and commodities that they can get by trading?

But there is a country that threatens Greenland.

Trump said to Greenland,

We strongly support your right to determine your own future. And if you choose, to welcome you into the United States of America. We need Greenland for national security and even international security. We’re working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it really for international world security. And I think we are going to get it; one way or the other we are going to get it. [people can be heard laughing and booing] We will keep you safe. We will make you rich …

Trump is clearly speaking out both sides of his mouth, saying he respects Greenlanders right to self-determination and then making threatening comments that the US “one way or the other we are going to get it.”

Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen complained that the US is putting “unacceptable pressure” on Greenland and Denmark. During a DR broadcast, she stated, “It is pressure that we will resist.”

Former Greenland prime minister Múte Egede realizes that the US dream to annex, own, and control Greenland is serious and calls upon allied countries to declare their support for Greenland.

Jens-Frederik Nielsen who was sworn in as the prime minister of Greenland on Friday, 28 March responded to Trump: “President Trump says that the United States is getting Greenland. Let me be clear: the United States won’t get that. We do not belong to anyone else. We determine our own future.”

On Saturday, 29 March, Trump responded about the potential use of force to take over Greenland: “I never take military force off the table. But I think there is a good chance that we could do it without military force.”

Vance and Trump Criticize Denmark

Vance criticized Denmark: “Denmark has not kept pace and devoted the resources necessary to keep this base, to keep our troops, and in my view, to keep the people of Greenland safe from a lot of very aggressive incursions from Russia, from China and other nations.” Trump echoes that sentiment, saying that the waters around Greenland have “Chinese and Russian ships all over the place” and that the US will handle the situation.

Has anyone heard of any “very aggressive incursions” by Russia, China and other nations (presumably US-designated enemies, such as Iran and North Korea) into Greenland?

Trump doubles down: “We need Greenland, very importantly, for international security. We have to have Greenland. It’s not a question of, ‘Do you think we can do without it?’ We can’t.”

What Does US Investment and Security Look Like for Its Colonies?

“Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance said. “You have underinvested in the people of Greenland, and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful land mass filled with incredible people.”

Does the US do right by its overseas territories? What about US investment in overseas territories it has previously annexed? About Puerto Rico, Ben Norton wrote, “Poverty is rising in one of the world’s oldest colonies: In Puerto Rico, 41.7% of people, including 57.6% of children, live in poverty. This is nearly four times the US rate. And Puerto Rican workers are getting poorer even while unemployment falls.” The US 2020 Census revealed that Guam has a poverty rate (20.2%) twice that of the US mainland. The same 2020 census indicated, “The percentage of families in poverty for the U.S. Virgin Islands showed a slight increase from 18.3% in 2009 to 18.6% in 2019. The same census reported a decrease for families in poverty in American Samoa; poverty declined to 50.7% in 2019 from 54.4% in 2009. Is this what Greenlanders can look forward to? In comparison, in 2023, the poverty rate in Greenland was 17.4%, as calculated at below 60% of the median equivalized income,¹ which is slightly above the EU average of 16.2%. However, the poverty rate in recent years has been on the rise in Greenland.

And what has US security meant for Puerto Ricans? From 1941 until 2001 the US Navy and US Marine Corps carried out bombing drills on nearby Vieques Island. Starting in 1999, protests drew attention to US militarism in its colonies. The departure of the US Navy “left the island peppered with remnants of undetonated bombs, PFAS chemicals, uranium, mercury, napalm and more. All of which are toxic materials known to have serious effects on human health along with generational impacts on the health of island youth.”

For Hawaiians? After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the island of Kaho’olawe (known as the Pacific’s Battered Bullseye) became a bombing range for the US until president George HW Bush ordered it shut down in 1990. The bombing was massive, designed to simulate the effects of a nuclear detonation. Huge 500-ton TNT charges created shock waves, vapor clouds, and sent rock and soil high into the sky, and destroyed the island’s only fresh-water aquifer.

For Micronesians? There is the ignominy of the 67 nuclear tests by the the United States in the Marshall Islands carried out between 1946 and 1958 with its concomitant fallout of radiation and the forced migration of tens of thousands of Marshall Islanders.

Even Greenland has been affected by the use of nuclear weapons by the US. In 1968, a B-52 bomber carrying four 1.1-megaton bombs crashed on the ice 19 kilometers (12 miles) from Thule, killing one crew member and leaking radioactive plutonium into Greenland’s waters. Reports of cancer and other illnesses surfaced among Danish and Kalaallit Thule Air Base workers.²

The Pentagon made a risible attempt at concealing the nuclear blunder at that time, even to the extent of one official stating: “I don’t know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you are looking for.”

Many people, including former Thule Air Base workers and Danish parliamentarians, state that an unexploded American hydrogen bomb also disappeared — serial number 78252. Niels-Jørgen Nehring, head of the state-sponsored DUPI [Danish Institute of International Affairs now called the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)], gave credence to the claim that a lost bomb remained off Thule.

The US Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base) led to the forced relocation of the Inughuit. Obedient to US dictate, colonial Danish authorities illegally exiled 650 Inuit in May 1953 from Uummannaq, Pituffik, and neighboring locales to a tent community about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north in Qaanaaq, away from their ancestral lands. “They were given four days to abandon a home that had been theirs for almost 4,000 years. They have never been allowed back,” wrote Jørgen Dragsdahl.³ The ethnic cleansing from Thule Air Base was a precursor to the subsequent ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Ilois from the erstwhile pristine coral atoll, Diego Garcia, in the Chagos archipelago by British and American governments to construct one of the largest US military bases outside the US.⁴

Insultingly, Greenlanders are also required to clean up the mess left by US military installations. Then US secretary of state Colin Powell rejected US responsibility, saying it had been transferred to Greenland where it would stay.

What do Greenlanders Want?

Polling results from 29 January 2025 indicate that 85% of Greenlanders do not want to exchange their present status to become a part of the US. Six percent wish to join the US and 9% are unsure. However, on the question of Greenland independence, if a referendum were held, 56%  would vote in favor, 28% would vote no, and 7% didn’t know how they would vote.

The US Track Record

The US has a track record. Trump and his chosen team are operating straight out of the CIA playbook. They will lie and cheat in order to steal the homeland of the Kalaallit. The US has done this many times already. The Chagossians were shipped to Mauritius. The Chamorro continue to strive for self-determination. Palauans finally achieved it, at least partially, by agreeing to a Compact of Free Association with the US which allows the US to operate military bases in Palau and make decisions concerning external security. The Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown in a US corporate coup. Indeed, the continental US is established through the genocide of the Indigenous nations that had inhabited the landmass for millennia before Europeans reached its shores.

As well, the US has a track record in Greenland. And as the current tariff war adduces, no ally (except, it seems, Israel) can feel secure in its relationship with the US.

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Rather than appreciate the fact that there was a journalist there to receive information on military operations that might raise a host of concerns (legitimate targeting and the laws of war come to mind), there was a chill of terror coursing through the commentariat and Congress that military secrets and strategy had been compromised. Goldberg himself initially disbelieved it. “I didn’t think it could be real.” He also professed that some messages would not be made public given the risks they posed, conceding that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s communications to the group “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

This seemingly principled stance ignores the bread-and-butter importance of investigative reporting and activist publishing, which so often relies on classified material received via accident or design. Normally, the one receiving the message is condemned. In this case, Golberg objected to being the recipient, claiming moral high ground in reporting the security lapse. Certain messages of the “Houthi PC small group channel” were only published by The Atlantic to throw cold water on stubborn claims by the White House that classified details had not been shared.

The supposed diligence on Goldberg’s part to fuss about the cavalier attitude to national security shown by the Trump administration reveals the feeble compromise the Fourth Estate has reached with the national security state. Could it be that WikiLeaks was, like the ghost of Banquo, at this Signal’s feast? Last year’s conviction of the organisation’s founding publisher, Julian Assange, on one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC), might have exerted some force over Goldberg’s considerations. Having been added to the communication chain in error, the defence material could well have imperilled him, with First Amendment considerations on that subject untested.

As for what the messages revealed, along with the importance of their disclosure, things become clear. Waltz reveals that the killing of a Houthi official necessitated the destruction of a civilian building. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” Vance replies: “Excellent.”

As Turse reminds us in The Intercept, this conforms to the practices all too frequently used when bombing the Houthis in Yemen. The United States offered extensive support to the Saudi-led bombing campaign against the Shia group, one that precipitated one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises. That particular aerial campaign rarely heeded specific targeting, laying waste to vital infrastructure and health facilities. Anthropologist Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, also noted in remarks to The Intercept that fifty-three people have perished in the latest US airstrikes, among them five children. “These are just the latest deaths in a long track record of US killing in Yemen, and the research shows that US airstrikes in many countries have a history of killing and traumatizing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc on people’s lives and livelihoods.”

The appearance of Hillary Clinton in the debate on Signalgate confirmed the importance of such leaks, and why they are treated with pathological loathing. “We’re all shocked – shocked!” she screeched in The New York Times. “What’s worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.” As a person with a hatred of open publishing outlets such as WikiLeaks (her own careless side to security was exposed by the organisation’s publication of emails sent from a private server while she was Secretary of State), the mania is almost understandable.

Other countries, notably members of the Five Eyes alliance system, are also voicing concern that their valuable secrets are at risk if shared with the Trump administration. Again, the focus there is less on the accountability of officials than the cast iron virtues of secrecy. “When mistakes happen, and sensitive intelligence leaks, lessons must be learned to prevent that from recurring,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stated gravely in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “It’s a serious, serious issue, and all lessons must be taken.”

Former chief of Canada’s intelligence agency, Richard Fadden, was even more explicit: “Canada needs to think about what this means in practical terms: is the United States prepared to protect our secrets, as we are bound to protect theirs?”

Signalgate jolted the national security state. Rather than being treated as a valuable revelation about the latest US bombing strategy in Yemen, the obsession has been on keeping a lid on such matters. For the sake of accountability and the public interest, let us hope that the lid on this administration’s activities remains insecure.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

Two weeks later in a letter to US Catholic Bishops, Pope Francis responded strongly to this outrageous distortion of the teachings of Jesus, explaining:

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups… The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.

Worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.

I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters. With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.

You don’t have to be Christian or a religious person or even a supporter of Pope Francis to appreciate his willingness to speak truth to power, and his efforts to get US Catholic Bishops to do the same. On this issue, the Pope demonstrated timely and important moral leadership.

As I’ve gone through life I’ve increasingly come to view this particular teaching of Jesus of Nazareth as both an ideal I should very consciously, daily, strive for, as well as a needed approach when it comes to building organizations and movements that are about systemic political, economic and social change.

In my 21st Century Revolution book I said this along these lines: “There are many aspects of a winning strategy, but the one that I have come to believe is most fundamental, the one that is the key link to the social transformation process so urgently needed, is this: building and deepening a way of working together and developing organizations that is collaborative, respectful, democratic to its core and which, as a result, is truly transformative, built to last.” (pps. 22-23)

In other words, we need a way of working which puts love for others at the center. And this is true for each of us in the way we go about our organizing work whether we are Christian, religious in some other way, agnostics or atheists.

Vance speaking about his “concentric circles” approach to loving others is, however, of value. It helps to deepen our understanding of what is motivating him, Trump, Musk and other leading MAGA’s, with corruption and dishonesty at obscene levels among the billionaires and power-hungry politicians who lead this retrograde movement.

Fortunately, not all who voted for the MAGA’s in 2024 are this far gone. Polls and other developments, like the recent victory of a Democratic State Senate candidate in Lancaster County, Pa. in a district held by Republicans since 1889 (!), are concrete evidence of some MAGA disillusionment. Our job as progressive organizers is to do the visible and activist movement-building and outreach right now to keep this momentum going. Next up for all of us should be taking part in the massive and extensive April 5 Hands Off action this Saturday.

We must hold fast to the vision of a world where, yes, “do unto others as you would have done unto you” is a guiding principle of how human societies are organized. We’ll only get there if we live our lives accordingly.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

Commando Zelenskyy

One thing that instantly struck me watching the White House press conference February 28, 2025 with US President Donald Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was that the grand welcome accorded to Zelenskyy by the previous US government of Joe Biden and some Western European governments had gone to Zelenskyy’s head. He expected that as he was like an idol to warmongers like Biden and to reporters itching to see Russia defeated, that he would be so to Trump, too.

(Watch Biden/Zelenskyy bonhomie at a press conference with reporters from the dominant/major/traditional/legacy media, the war media, to whom Russia is the “evil empire,” per President Ronald Reagan’s label.)

Zelenskyy was told to put on a suit when visiting the White House. He showed up wearing a commando like stylish black sweatshirt with the logo of Ukrainian tryzub or trident and black pants, both from Ukrainian fashion designer Elvira Gasanova’s menswear label Damirli.

One should have the freedom to wear whatever one wants, however, Zelenskyy has not always worn such casual clothes. He used to wear suits till Russia attacked¹ Ukraine, since then his attire has been military/commando style clothes which he says he’ll wear till the war ends. Zelenskyy is not always on the war front, but his clothing creates an impression that he is just coming from the war front, this in turn deludes him into believing that he is kind of a commando. This commando mentality proved almost fatal for the United States-Ukraine relations when he acted as one during the meeting. On March 3, Trump ordered a pause to all military aid to Ukraine — the first wise step to stop the war. Intelligence sharing is also on pause. Zelenskyy needs to come out of this commando mentality.

If Zelenskyy was more powerful than Trump, he could do, wear, say, whatever he wanted to. But he is not. He met Trump for Ukraine, not for himself. If the meeting was a personal one, no one will give a damn even if he blew it up. No. This interaction was for Ukraine and he should have remembered that. As the saying goes: Beggars can’t be choosers. Or as Trump put it: “You don’t have the cards. With us, you have the cards. Without us, you don’t have any cards.”

Zelenskyy badly needs a class in 101 diplomacy. You don’t cut off the branch you’re sitting on; Zelenskyy almost cut off the branch (of the US aid tree) on which Ukraine depends. During the meeting, he constantly argued rather than try and take the conversation towards a more agreeable path.

Despite the fact that US Senator Lindsey Graham, a strong Trump supporter, had warned Zelenskyy beforehand: “Don’t take the bait. Don’t let the media or anyone else get you into an argument with President Trump.”

Zelenskyy’s arguments wouldn’t have mattered if he was arguing with the Biden team, because it was the Biden regime’s war.

Another thing one can deduce from Zelenskyy’s behavior is that he’s not smart like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu or India’s Narendra Modi (both have big egos and cruel mentality, and wouldn’t hesitate to unleash violence to achieve the desired goals). But neither argue or show any displeasure when they meet Trump because they know they are weak partners vis-a-vis the US which is very strong — I would say too strong for our world, not a very good thing. Israeli leaders are famous for insulting, bypassing, or ordering US leaders but they can’t do that with Trump — of course, instead, they get things done with flattery.

Invited for lunch, but humiliated and shown the door without lunch from the White House, Zelenskyy flew into London in the warm and comforting embrace (albeit, a momentary one) of Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the UK. (Britain, once the greatest empire in the world, now has not much power except, every now and then, it makes some noise to draw attention.)

A conference of 18 leaders: Europeans and Canada’s Justin Trudeau, were called to support Ukraine which Starmer called “coalition of the willing.” The unwilling ones will be crushed or maligned. But the leaders were aware that without the US not much can be accomplished.

Donald Tusk of Poland: “Dear [Zelenskyy], dear Ukrainian friends, you are not standing alone.”

Tusk should have added: We are all together but still alone unless the Globo Cop US joins in.

It seems like Zelenskyy came his senses. On March 4, he said:

“None of us wants an endless war. Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians.” “My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.”

Zelenskyy must be feeling very humiliated: first for being dressed down by Trump, and, then for accepting “Trump’s strong leadership.”

Advice for Zelenskyy, if he’s allowed to stay in power, or any other leader who takes over: Try to stay neutral, avoid joining NATO, be friendly, as much as possible, with your neighbors, including Russia, and prevent being a proxy in the hands of US/European warmongers. The devastating result in the form of death and destruction for both Ukraine and Russia is in front of you, due to your prolongation of the war.

Ukrainians must watch the following video of a speech given by Jeffrey Sachs to the European Parliament.

Business-being Trump

The effective rate for many anti-bacterial, disinfectant, and other products is advertised as 99.99% effective. In other words, it’s not absolutely effective and not totally potent.

The same analogy can also be applied to Trump. One could say Trump is 99.99% nasty, greedy, cruel, or whatever. That, however, leaves room for some uprightness in Trump.

Trump’s figure for US support of $350 billion dollars to Ukraine was, as usual, exaggerated, the actual amount is about $183 billion — huge sum of money for the war, for which major support comes only from the Democratic Party’s “affluent upper-middle class base.” However, the total amount Ukraine received from the US, European Union institutes, several countries, and groups amounts to $380 billion.

For Trump, Zelenskyy is not a hero. Trump is a different entity with a diverse agenda; he has been talking about ending the Russia/Ukraine war for a long time and so it was counterproductive to argue and throw tantrums rather than listening to Trump and then requesting a favor here and a favor there. Of course, Trump has his own interest in facilitating a ceasefire, he is eyeing Ukraine’s rare earth minerals.

After all, Trump is business-being and like most businesspersons, his motive is always a financial one.

Trump is right when he points out the danger of the Russian Ukraine war:

“You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with World War Three².”

Trump attacked

The war news media and many European leaders instead of thanking Trump for his efforts in working for a ceasefire, which would not only prevent loss of life and destruction in Ukraine and Russia but would also save US and European taxpayers’ money, lambasted him for being a “bully” and termed discussion with Zelenskyy an “ambush.”

Financial Times’ Europe editor Ben Hall said Trump and Vance “were spoiling for a fight” with Zelenskyy. Marc Polymeropoulus, MSNBC’s National Security & Intelligence Analyst noted that Trump and Vance “have humiliated the United States” when they shouted at Zelenskyy.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier: “The scene in the White House yesterday took my breath away. I would never have believed that we would one day have to protect Ukraine from the U.S.A.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) accused Trump and Vance of “doing Putin’s dirty work.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) described Trump’s berating of Zelenskyy “utter embarrassment” for the US.

Trump is wrong on a huge number of issues but not on this one. All those criticizing him are foes of Ukrainian people; it’s they who are paying the price for this meaningless war.

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.R. Gowani.

Art requires the use of imagination, but so does political and social analysis. But imagination is just a first step; it proves nothing.

Evidence is required. But imagination rules out nothing from the start. If one cannot imagine an hypothesis or a scene – no matter how seemingly implausible – to be possibly true, one will leave it unexamined or unwritten.  As Graeme MacQueen, the author of the crucial book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, and much else, put it:

Suppose our imaginations can embrace the possibility that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by elements in the U.S. government. In that case what do we do next? There is no mystery. Once the imagination stops filtering out a hypothesis and allows it into the realm of the possible, it can be put to the test. Evidence and reason must now do the job. Imagination cannot settle the question of truth or falsity any more than ideology, morality, or “common sense.”

We know that in the case of the attacks of September 11, 2001 that this is precisely what did not occur. Various hypotheses were ignored and emotional patriotism held sway.  The script had been written in advance and the good and bad characters chosen.  “It was another Pearl Harbor, bin Laden did it from his cave in Afghanistan, it seemed like a movie, etc.”  And those anthrax attacks were claimed to be second stage terror attacks of these monsters, except that it turned out this wasn’t so and that the anthrax came from a U.S. government lab.  MacQueen proved in his book that this was so and that the anthrax attacks were directly linked to the those of September 11, later showing through meticulously logical and evidence-based research that both were inside jobs.

Even today, this conclusion is hard for most people to accept, for the conclusion they started with – what was planted in their brains – precluded imagining another hypothesis.  To do so was considered too outrageous – an impossibility that offended the patriotic heart.

And of course the Bush administration’s lies steamrolled any skepticism, the Patriot Act was quickly passed, and endless U.S. wars of aggression ensued, both preceding and following Colin Powell’s Academy Award performance at the United Nations. But he too was an honorable man.

They too are honorable men.

So if you sat with your mouth agape in shock at the dog and pony show in DC between Trump, the reality TV actor, and Zelensky, the comedian, who became Ukraine’s president and Trump’s apprentice in 2019 during Trump’s first term, let me suggest a bizarre possibility at a time when the bizarre has become commonplace.

Across the spectrum of opinion on the mainstream and alternative media, it is assumed without question that what took place on Friday, February 28, 2025 between Trump and Zelensky, ably assisted by Vance, should be taken at face value – in other words, as real.

The political reactions to that shouting match are what one would expect.

The Democrats are outraged that Trump (and Vance) would bully and humiliate an heroic ally who has been fighting a valiant war against the evil Russians and Putin.

Thus Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, toeing the party war line, had this to say:

Trump criticizes Zelensky, the leader of a democratic country who is courageously fighting Russian imperialism, while he aligns himself with Putin, the dictator who started the bloodiest European war in 80 years. Sorry, President Trump. We believe in democracy, not authoritarianism.

And on the Republican side, Senator Lindsay Graham, while calling the meeting “a complete disaster” but urging continued support for the war for “democracy,” said he was never more proud of Trump:

What I saw in the Oval office was disrespectful and I don’t know if we can ever do business with Zelensky again.

These reactions have been repeated ad infinitum. They are equally absurd propaganda in the service of the U.S. elites’ Repubmocratic tandem team of imperialists.

And then there are the reactions of utter shock from all corners who call this fight an historic and a diplomatic turning point to be immortalized.

It is hard, I know, to hear an unbearable possibility: But suppose it were a performance, not just in the sense that Trump and Vance set Zelensky up, but as a coordinated reality TV show in which all the principle actors were performing from a script whose goal was the opposite of all the subsequent interpretations. A script that allowed for some improvisation, as comedians like Zelensky and reality TV stars like Trump are adept at.  Improvisations that may have gone a step too far and elicited outbursts that tarnished the performance but did not derail the overall goal of showing that the puppet-apprentice serves at the whim of the show’s host, and despite all the loot showered upon him, he could still be fired and replaced with another puppet, as the play would proceed under a new name.

As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “There are unconscious actors among them, and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors.”

If it sounds hyperbolic to entertain such a thought, I agree. Yet I assume you would agree that we are living in hyperbolic and vertiginous times, a society of the spectacle, as Guy Debord called his famous book. A time when acting is promoted as the pinnacle of the professions, a skill requisite for spy craft, stagecraft, and political craft in equal measure.

A meaningless coincidence it no doubt is, but the famous shout down of Zelensky by Trump and Vance and Zelensky’s responses just “happened” to occur 48 hours before Hollywood’s self-celebration of the Academy Awards.

Of course I have no evidence for this hypothesis and it might sound as if I have come unhinged. But wouldn’t it serve common sense to entertain it as an alternative interpretation when hyper reality has become commonplace and the realization that we have been ruled by con men and fraudsters is widely accepted?

Over the same 48 hours, the Trump administration, that is allegedly antiwar and deeply affected by all the deaths in Ukraine, has had Secretary of State Marco Rubio expedite the shipment of $4 billion in military aid to Israel to continue its savage slaughter of Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, et al. Rubio said this is part of the $12 billion Trump has approved in arms for Israel since he took office 42 days ago. Antiwar.com has reported:

The statement came a day after the statement [sic] department approved three separate arms deals for Israel worth nearly $3 billion, which includes a huge number of 2,000-pound bombs. The biggest sale, which will likely be funded by US military aid, includes 35,529 MK-84 or BLU-117 2,000-pound b[sic]ombs and 4,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads.

Israel has used heavy bombs in strikes on residential buildings that have killed hundreds of civilians. It has also weaponized the bombs as chemical weapons after finding that dropping several of them on tunnels releases deadly carbon monoxide gas.

As I have written previously, there is far more to consider when you hear clapping for Trump’s plans to “end” the U.S. proxy war against Russia. You can end the overt war and continue the covert.

As the Roman poet Virgil, drawing on Homer and Greek mythology, tells us in his great poem The Aeneid, that after a fruitless ten year siege of Russia – I mean Troy – the Greeks built a huge wooden horse at the request of Odysseus, the “wily” one, within which they hid Odysseus and his armed men.  The Trojans, believing they were being gifted, wheeled the horse into the city, only to be shocked when in the night the Greeks emerged from the horse and destroyed Troy.

So to paraphrase a few lines from Bob Dylan about my speculation here – Don’t fear if you hear a foreign sound to your ear, it’s alright, reader, I’m only wondering – Who holds the joker in this “card game”?

I sense, said Laocoön in The Aeneid, “some crookedness is in this thing.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

White House etiquette is something else. I was quite taken aback by viewing how Donald Trump and JD Vance ganged up on their Ukrainian guest Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This is not to side with Zelenskyy who is a disagreeable personage to me; by refusing a security agreement, he set the stage for an unwinnable war against Russia which has condemned hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men to death.

Zelenskyy made some bizarre and distorted utterances during the videoed meeting. Nonetheless, there is a proper way for Trump and Vance to express disagreement. But diplomacy, etiquette, and niceties are often rare in the bullyverse of Trump.

Moreover, an often heard complaint from Trump is that things are not fair. Was it fair to have two native English speakers against one non-native English speaker?

Fairness

A common saying tells us that bees are more attracted to honey than vinegar. Maybe the Trump-led administration doesn’t give credence to this saying, or it believes it can bully others into submission — probably the latter. Trump believes he can use tariffs as a big stick to gain an upper hand in trade. Given the size of the US economy and its willingness to resort to violence to back its demands, smaller countries find themselves in a precarious situation. Without another big country’s backing, smaller countries are susceptible to regime change operations. Witness was happened to the Syrian government in late 2024.

Fortunately, China is willing to engage in win-win trade with other nations. The Chinese honey appears to be preferable for much of the Global South to the American vinegar. China is also a military power, and it can readily defend itself against any US military provocations. China is unlikely to let the US physically interfere in its trade arrangements with willing partners. Neither is Russia about to do this. This has led to a global realignment, one feature of which is the deepening relationships of China and Russia with African countries.

But the record shows that Donald Trump does not limit himself to smaller countries. During his first administration, Trump began a trade war with China, and he does not look to be letting up this time. Trump, however, considers the world as his oyster, to deal with as he pleases. Even the US’s erstwhile allies are targeted, including its northern neighbor, Canada.

Will Canada Supplicate Trump?

United States President Donald Trump sounded off during the first cabinet meeting of his second term, among other topics was that of Canadian sovereignty:

I say Canada should be our 51st state. There’s no tariffs, no nothing. And I say that we give them military protection. They have a very small military; they spend very little money on military. On NATO they are just about last in terms of payment because it’s not fair. It’s not fair that they’re not paying their way. And if they had to pay their way, they couldn’t exist.

Upon what basis does Trump claim that the US is protecting Canada? Because Canada is a member of NATO and NORAD? The latter allows the US military access into Canada, the junior partner in the relationship. And just who are these enemies that the US is purportedly protecting Canada from? Is there any country posing a credible military threat to Canada? If so, it seems that the US would come first to mind. If Canada is a willing and uncoerced member of certain military organizations, then Canada should abide by its agreed upon commitments. Canada does come up short of the 2% minimum of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to defence spending in NATO, but that 2% minimum is a guideline and not a hard-and-fast obligation. Trump speaks about fairness, but how fair is it that one NATO member gripes about what it determines another member’s contribution should be?

And why is Trump demanding 5% of each NATO member’s GDP as a contribution? This is alluded to by NATO:

To carry out its missions and tasks, NATO needs Allies to invest in interoperable, cutting-edge and cost-effective equipment. To that end, NATO plays an important role in helping countries decide how and where to invest in their defence.

Which country is best situated to reap the financial benefits of demanding interoperability among NATO members? According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the world’s leading seller of arms, the US, increased its arms sales from 34% in the period of 2014 to 2018 to 42% in the period of 2019 t0 2023. Adhering to the Trumpian definition of economic fairness, is it fair that the US with 4% of the world’s population should dominate arms sales, especially considering that interoperability is expected among NATO members?

The National Post listed Trump’s fickle justifications for engulfing Canada:

The rationale, at various points, have included: building up domestic American industry, preventing the illegal importation of fentanyl, stopping illegal border crossings, and reducing the United States’ modest trade deficit with Canada. Trump has also complained about the access of U.S. banks to Canadian markets and the amount of money the U.S. spends on continental defence.

The National Post questioned Trump’s facts: “he often says the United States subsidizes Canada between $100 billion and $200 billion. The trade deficit, in fact, is more like $32 billion, while America’s global trade deficit [is] around $1 trillion.”

Trump is unrestrained vis-à-vis the US’s biggest trade partner: “We don’t need them for the cars, we don’t need them for lumber. We don’t need them for anything. We don’t need them for energy, we have more energy than they do.”

Although Trump has claimed the US doesn’t need Canadian oil, economics analyst Sean Foo makes the case that the threat of tariffs is about getting more Canadian cheap oil.

A Snowball’s Chance in Hell

Among the many reasons, there is one area of deep importance that suffices to emphatically underline why Canadians will never allow themselves to become Americans under present conditions. Canadians are very fond of their medical-care-for-all system. The system is not perfect, and Canadians will complain about when the governments (health is a provincial jurisdiction) curtail funding; long waiting times; and the shortages of doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers. However, many Canadians have heard about the financial horrors that can be visited upon susceptible Americans who are without medical coverage. That is something the vast majority of Canadians would never countenance in their country.

Given the desire of most Americans for medical care for all (62% according to a Gallup poll conducted 6-20 November 2024) maybe they ought to clamor to become Canada’s 11th province.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

With such ingredients, the White House has become a studio, with the statesmanship of the bullying show paramount.  The electors are to be entertained by what might be called colosseum politics.  They want bread, but are very keen on the circuses.  They want season tickets to the MAGA tent where they can witness muscular events.  They want to know that the US will recoup what it gives, with interest.

When the satirically gifted Hugh Hector Munro (“Saki”) warned that being a pioneer was never wise, seeing as the Early Christian tended to get the fattest lion, it would be better to say that the lions here – Trump and his shock troop deputy J.D. Vance – seemed to have been on lettuce offerings and stale water for a week.  The lean, mean duo were remorselessly and disgracefully hungry, making sure the Ukrainian leader was subject to a battering that proved unusually long.  (These Oval office briefings before the press are usually short, snappy matters: a few anodyne questions; a few general remarks that barely ripple.)

It was also evident that Zelensky had not gotten the brief about Trump, prompting Marek Magierowski in the National Interest to describe him as “a worse psychologist than [French President] Emmanuel Macron and [UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer], who had paid a visit to the White House just before him and, to some extent, ‘charmed’ the US president.”

Unlike the two leaders who had come before him, Zelensky thought it wise to engage in a squabble about Russian intentions and the character of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the factual record (always dangerous in dealing with Trump, who regards facts as, as best, malleable), a duel that saw shock trooper Vance weigh in.  According to the Veep, Zelensky was not there to “litigate” the matter before the American public, which is precisely what he and Trump seemed to be doing.  This was the language of prefects and school masters, with the student reluctant to play along.

It was a salient reminder that support for Ukraine has iced over, that it is no longer the blue-eyed boy of US politics, Western civilisation’s consecrated prop against Russian savagery.  Republican Senator from South Carolina Lindsey Graham even went so far as to demand that the Ukrainian leader “either … resign and send somebody over and we can do business with, or he needs to change.”

Trump’s opponents have fumed at the president for having laid an ambush for the Ukrainian leader and promoting Russian talking points, naturally exonerating previous administrations for their contributory role (former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s intervention comes to mind) in feeding the conflict.  “Zelenskyy flew to Washington,” quipped Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Jake Auchincloss, “but he walked into the Kremlin.”

What remains crudely apparent is that Zelensky had been given ample warning about what awaited but seemingly failed to see the billowing smoke signals.  At a Saudi-sponsored investment meeting in Florida, Trump had declared that the Ukrainian leader was only “really good” at one thing: “playing Joe Biden like a fiddle.”  He was also a “dictator” who had refused to have elections.  “He’s low in the Ukrainian polls.  How can you be high with every city being demolished?”

Zelensky had also done little for his own cause last year by injudiciously involving himself in the US elections, speaking at a Kamala Harris campaign rally and paying a visit to a munitions plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania last September.  “It is in places like this where you can truly feel that the democratic world can prevail,” Zelensky stated at the time.

That the visit was also conveniently located in a battleground state that the presidential contenders had to win hardly helped his case in the Oval Office skirmish.  Vance could not resist unsheathing his sword.  “You went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October,” he snapped.  “Offer some words of appreciation for the United States of America and the president who is trying to save your country.”

As a result of colosseum politics, no deals were reached, and certainly not one regarding US access to Ukrainian rare earth minerals, leaving Zelensky to seek solace in the bosom of weak European powers unhinged by the values of Trumpland.  The lustre of the cause, at least across the pond, has not entirely vanished, though European support is hardly likely to swing matters on or off the battlefield for Kyiv.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Case in point: Of all the ludicrous political ads this season, there is one I cannot stop thinking about. It is a video of Bernie Moreno, running to be Ohio’s senator. He is addressing an audience with women. He says that reproductive rights shouldn’t be an issue for women over 50—that it’s a bit crazy. Mr. Moreno is a 57 year-old man—so why is it an issue to him? There is laughing in the background at how crazy older women are.

He goes on to say that “you don’t get in pregnant in the checkout line at Krogers—you need to take personal responsibility.” I’d like to point out to Mr. Moreno that the only way a woman becomes pregnant is by a man. Yet, where are the laws requiring a man to take “personal responsibility” from the moment of conception? Where are the groups of women making laws for men and their rights?  Take the issue of reproductive rights out of this equation and think about how he disrespects women in his comments—how he, as a man, feels he can judge our feelings and decisions, and make it a joke.

Why are women still voting for misogynists? The VP nominee, J.D. Vance, has made it clear that women are only worthwhile if they have children. He has suggested tracking women’s menstrual cycles and that women should stay in violent relationships for the sake of children—in short, women have no value other than to please men.

The presidential nominee has called Kamala Harris retarded, even though she is far more qualified and experienced. He, of course, was elected after saying on tape that he could do anything he wanted to women because he was famous (and was found liable for sexual assault in a court of law). A elderly male senator recently said that hurricane survivors didn’t “give a function” about tampons, as if he’s an expert on women’s periods.

To be clear, this is certainly not all men. It’s a loud minority though, and it seems that it is acceptable to our society. Sexual harassment was brought to light during the #MeToo movement—so why are these men in position to run our country? Moreover, why are women voting for them?

When I was a young teen I developed large breasts. I did not want the type of attention it got me from boys and grown men. There were comments yelled as I walked home from school, and disgusting comments right to my face. Men unapologetically stared at my chest as if it was their right to do so. It deeply affected my self-esteem and body image for decades. I slouched and tried to cover myself when men were around. But men felt free to say whatever they wanted, letting me know that when they saw me all they really saw was my body. I did not have the self-assurance or temerity to fight back or express my discomfort. Like Dr. Conley, I thought that’s just the way it was then.

What happens when a society demeans the value of women? Look at Afghanistan. In the 70s women were wearing miniskirts and enjoying personal freedoms—now they are covered head to toe in burqas, banned from education, and not even allowed to look at men. That’s what happens.

Lilly Ledbetter just died, as well. She filed a suit against Goodyear after learning that she earned less than men doing the same job. The Supreme Court passed an act in her name in 2009—yes, only fifteen years ago. Until 1974 women could not have a credit card in their name without a husband signing off on it. Shall we go back to those good old days? In my mind, the constant disrespect from prominent men is heading in that direction.

Women, consider the lives of your daughters and granddaughters. This election is not just about reproductive rights, it is about respect and value for all of the female citizens of this country. I plead with you—it is up to us to vote discrimination and sexism out of office for good.

There are plenty of respectful men who could be leading this country, men who see women as equals and treat them as such. I know, I was raised by one, I am married to one, and I raised one myself

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Diane Vogel Ferri.

The true end of Man… is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes… Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies but merely with mechanical exactness…

[T]he principle of the true art of social intercourse consists in a ceaseless endeavor to grasp the innermost individuality of another, to avail oneself of it, and, with the deepest respect for it as the individuality of another, to act upon it… The very variety arising from the union of numbers of individuals is the highest good which social life can confer, and this variety is undoubtedly lost in proportion to the degree of State interference. Under such a system, we have not so much the individual members of a nation living united in the bonds of a civil compact, but isolated subjects living in relation to the State…

The entire book is an elaboration of these ideas. In them, we do not see a vulgar individualism, a reduction of humans to mere nodes in the cash-nexus who buy and sell to one another and need protection from each other, the kind of anti-humanism for which traditionalists and Marxists have criticized classical liberalism. We see, instead, an appreciation of the richness of every individuality; an emphasis on the human need for community, respect, friendship, and love; an anarchist critique of coercive institutions, in particular the state; a proto-Marxist theory of the alienation of labor; socialistic intimations that people have the right to control their own labor; in short, a liberal humanism of the sort that leftists of various persuasions would embellish in the following two centuries.

If one were to believe the “postliberals” who have burst onto the ideological scene in recent years, liberalism doesn’t have the moral or intellectual resources for such a mature humanism. It seems they haven’t read Humboldt.

Postliberalism has emerged in the UK and U.S. during the last ten years as a reaction against the manifest failures of what its thinkers call liberalism. The economic, social, political, and environmental crises that afflict the world they attribute to a systemic lack of regard for the “common good,” which, in turn, they attribute to a liberalism that has been horribly successful in its reduction of humans to atoms—“increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” So writes Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed. Other vocal postliberals include Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, Yoram Hazony, Adrian Pabst, Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, and some other writers associated with such magazines as American Affairs, UnHerd, and Compact. For all their differences, these writers share a rejection of any one-sided fixation on liberty, whether it be that of right-wing libertarianism—the “free market” doctrine to which the Republican Party is at least rhetorically committed—or left-wing social liberalism, the liberalism of identity politics. They seek to resuscitate ideas of social obligation, duty, community, and tradition, for example in the forms of family, church, and nation. The modern understanding of liberty is unhealthily and immorally licentious; better is the ancient and Christian conception that true freedom consists in self-control, self-discipline (under the constraints of tradition and religion), rather than slavish submission to base and hedonistic appetites.

Postliberals, therefore, criticize the modern gospel of “progress” and its ideological cognates, alleged solvents of social bonds, such as “Enlightenment rationalism,” or the application of critical reason to all forms of order and authority for the sake of dismantling whatever isn’t emancipatory, liberal, or conducive to economic growth. Their perspective is reminiscent of that of the social theorist and historian Christopher Lasch, whose 1991 book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics was an extended critique of the ideology of progress and a history of its dissenters in the United States. Preferring an honest recognition of ineluctable limits—not least ecological limits—over modern liberalism’s faith in endless economic growth, endless moral progress, and liberation from the benighted parochialism of the past, Lasch turned to the culture of the lower middle class as a more human and realistic alternative. Without denying the historical vices of this culture (“envy, resentment, and servility”), he was nevertheless impressed by “the moral conservatism of the petty bourgeoisie, its egalitarianism, its respect for workmanship, its understanding of the value of loyalty,” in general its rootedness, so different from the deracinated future-fixation—detachment from the past—of contemporary liberal elites. Postliberals share these concerns and values.

What postliberalism amounts to, then, is a rejection of dominant tendencies of modernity. Some writers are more willing than others to acknowledge the positive achievements of liberalism—for instance, in The Politics of Virtue (2016), John Milbank and Adrian Pabst grant that liberalism “has afforded some protection against the worst transgressions upon the liberty of some by the liberty of others”—but, on the whole, postliberals are attracted to a kind of Burkean conservatism. “Right-wing on culture, left-wing on the economy” is how they are usually characterized. Through this formula, they think, it may be possible to bring back social cohesion, “the wisdom of tradition,” and respect for “the common good.”

Two books published this year by leading lights of postliberalism, Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari, provide an opportunity to critically evaluate this “new” school of thought (perhaps not so new). On the one hand, Deneen’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future illustrates the weaknesses of the ideology; on the other hand, Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It illustrates its potential strengths. Ultimately, however, despite its mutability, postliberalism is misguided and dangerous in its idealism, its theoretical confusions, its political naïveté, and many of its political commitments. It too easily slides into proto-fascism. What is valid in it can be and has been expressed more sophisticatedly by the Marxist left.

Since it has the ear of some right-wing populists, such as J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley, and it seems to be growing in influence, this ideology should be taken seriously. Leftists may be able to find common ground with its advocates on certain issues, but in general, they should strongly resist this latest brand of conservatism.

The Idealism of Postliberalism

One of the major analytical flaws of postliberalism is, in fact, one of the weaknesses of all conservatism: its anti-Marxian idealism. In all his romantic talk of reverence for ancestral traditions, Edmund Burke abstracted from the actual daily functioning of these traditions, from their foundations in appalling violence, in constant violations of the dignity and freedom of the lower classes, in the irrationality of a nation’s being subject to the will of some arbitrary monarch who happened to be born to a previous monarch. A very different conservative, Milton Friedman, similarly abstracted from the daily realities of capitalism—the indignities of working for a boss, the suppression of the right to unionize, the violence in which the rule of capital is grounded—in his simplistic paeans to “freedom.” (His famous book Capitalism and Freedom (1962) consists of abstract idealizations like this one, chosen at random: “The kind of economic organization that promotes economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.” As if, in the real world, economic power doesn’t tend to confer political power!) Fascism was even worse: it idealized will, nation, race, the state, the Leader, and war, abstracting from the grubby realities of all these things.

Being a type of conservatism, postliberalism does the same. Its very name is idealistic and simplistic. “Liberalism” can’t be the fundamental problem we face today for the simple reason that there isn’t only one liberalism, there are many. Among the classical liberals, there were British, French, American, and German figures, as diverse as John Locke, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Kant, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, John Stuart Mill, and Tocqueville. There were socialists, anarchists, and capitalists. There were deists, Protestants, Catholics, and atheists. There were democrats, republicans, and monarchists. And in the twentieth century, liberalism evolved in even more complex ways, towards social democracy and its protection not only of “negative liberty” but also “positive liberty,” as in the freedom of people to have a living wage, a home, an education, and affordable healthcare. Even the anarchist communism of Peter Kropotkin can be said, in some respects, to belong to the liberal tradition. In short, the core intuition of liberalism—“a general enlargement and freedom and rational direction of human life,” as Lionel Trilling described it—can be fleshed out institutionally in innumerable ways, including in socialism, i.e., people’s democratic control of their work. (In fact, one can argue that Marxism is but a continuation and conceptual deepening of the best traditions of liberalism.)

Patrick Deneen’s two recent books—Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change—exemplify the idealism of conservatism. Again and again, imposing a false unity on the liberal tradition, he blames liberalism for things that are more realistically attributed to capitalism. When he refers to “[recent] decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance,” what he means is capitalist dismantling. Liberalism is but an ideological attitude, a constellation of philosophies; capitalism—how people work, how they acquire property, how they exchange goods, how class relations are structured, how culture is produced and politics is organized—is the real basis for a way of life.

When Deneen, in Why Liberalism Failed, writes that “[liberalism] has remade the world in its image, especially through the realms of politics, economics, education, science, and technology, all aimed at achieving supreme and complete freedom through the liberation of the individual from particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities,” one recalls the words of an infinitely more profound thinker:

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations… It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation… All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…”

No mere ideological “tendency” (to quote Trilling again) could achieve all this. It is the class structures of capitalism that have remade the world.

Regime Change is shot through with idealism. The basic structure of the book is reasonable enough: in the first two chapters, Deneen diagnoses the faults of liberalism, including not only its ostensible ripping apart and atomizing of the social fabric but also its elevation of hypocritical liberal elites (“the managerial class,” the real power elite) who don’t care about “the people” but use identity politics to pretend they do, shredding the last vestiges of traditional norms in the process. In the next three chapters, he presents the postliberal vision. He calls this “common-good conservatism,” associating it with Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, and G. K. Chesterton, but more generally with “the classical and Christian tradition of the West—a common-good political order that seeks to harmonize the various contentious elements of any human society.” This conservatism aligns itself with the “common sense” of ordinary people, who “seek stability, predictability, and order within the context of a system that is broadly fair.” The solution to contemporary social ills is to implement the political philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, a “mixed constitution” (democratic and aristocratic) in which an elite much more noble than that of today will “work to improve the lives, prospects, and fate of the people,” as the people, in turn, demand excellence from the elite and themselves are influenced by the virtues of the new aristocracy.

In the final two chapters, Deneen fills out his Aristotelian vision, which he calls “aristopopulism,” while also gesturing towards an answer as to how this glorious new society will be realized. His answer isn’t particularly satisfying: “an ennobling of our elite” will come about “through the force of a threat from the popolo [people],” that is, “through the efforts of an energized, forceful, and demanding populace.” This is pretty much all he says on the matter. Likewise, his sketches of the better world to come consist of empty bromides and exhortations. Rather than meritocracy, we need a society that integrates the “working-class ethos of social solidarity, family, community, church, and nation” with the “virtues of those blessed by privilege.” To combat racism, we shouldn’t embrace affirmative action or other divisive approaches but should resurrect Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a “deeper ‘integration.’” Tepidly criticizing the ardent nationalism of people like Yoram Hazony (author of The Virtue of Nationalism), National Review editor Rich Lowry, and other “national conservatives,” Deneen proposes instead “a new form of integration of local, national, and international” (italics in the original). What that concretely means he leaves unsaid. His practical program for reinfusing religion into social life is similarly perfunctory, containing little more than such vague entreaties as “a simple first step would be to publicly promote and protect a life of prayer.” Politics should be “a place for prayer, since politics is how we together seek to realize the good that is common.”

One of the greatest swindles of postliberalism is its nostalgia for an idealized past. According to Deneen, the Enlightenment project of individual liberation required the overthrow of “older social forms that had taught and reinforced the cultivation of virtue.” Traditional institutions “protect the stability and order that most benefits ordinary people,” and in fact are deeply democratic “because they are the creation of countless generations of forebears” and “largely develop from the ‘bottom up.’” As it happens, feudalism wasn’t a particularly democratic institution that cultivated virtue. Nor was absolute monarchy. Nor was the Catholic Church, which, until the spirit of liberalism finally began to permeate it, was a rapacious tyranny that burned heretics, policed thought, crusaded against the advance of knowledge, and made common cause with autocrats everywhere. (Also, of course, it now has the distinction of systemically aiding and abetting child abuse.) However inspiring the figure and philosophy of Jesus may be, history has shown that religious institutions, like all administrative hierarchies, are prone to abusing their power unless suffused with the liberal spirit of respect for individual rights.

This worship of religion is a classic instance of mistaken idealism. Postliberals are enamored of Christianity, attributing much of what is good in our civilization to its religious inheritance and much of what is bad to its abandonment of religion. Most of the time, they ignore questions about whether, after all, it is true that something called “God” exists or that Jesus is His son and was resurrected after dying for our sins, or any of the other dogmas of Christianity (or Judaism)—and rightly so, for in order to evaluate the plausibility of any proposition, it’s necessary to use the Enlightenment’s “rationalistic” method they dislike. With regard to socially relevant questions, they appear to have a pragmatist conception of truth: if a belief is useful, we might as well believe it. But is religion in fact useful? Its violent, tortured, bigoted history suggests otherwise. Nor is it at all clear that humans need religion in order to enjoy a healthy communal and family life or to heed the moral duties that bind us all together.

Often, religion has functioned to undermine the well-being of communities and families. It isn’t a secret that conservative politicians use appeals to religion to convince people to vote against their economic interests. An infamous example is that of Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas, a religiose Christian who passed radical tax cuts in 2012 that, as the Brookings Institution summarizes, “led to sluggish growth, lower-than-expected revenues, and brutal cuts to government programs” like schools, housing, infrastructure, and police and fire protection. Similarly, for over a hundred years, businesses in the American South have used conservative Christianity to ward off the threat of unionism, helping to keep the region in a state of relative poverty. In Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South (2015), historians Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf describe how corporate executives in the postwar era relocated their factories to this region, where “chambers of commerce advertised the benefits [of] locating in a ‘distinctly religious city’ where the ‘labor is of native Anglo-Saxon stock—loyal and efficient.’” The CIO’s Operation Dixie was unable to overcome the resistance that evangelical Protestantism (among other forces) put up to unions.

On the whole, then, postliberals have a rather uncritical attitude towards tradition and religion, as conservatives usually do. They’re nostalgic for a lost social cohesion, the lost unity of “Western culture.” As Adrian Pabst writes in Liberal World Order and Its Critics (2019), identity politics (combined with “corporate crony capitalism”) is “changing the fundamental character of Western civilisation from being a cultural community bound together by common values that define shared interests to a ‘business community’ based on sectional interests that promote divisive values.” But when, exactly, was “Western civilization” such a unitary entity? The history of Europe is the history of constant clashes, constant wars, constant struggles between different value systems and interests and cultures, long centuries of violence and bloody suppression of innumerable popular uprisings. Divisiveness is history. And idealism is false history.

Buried under all the confusions and shallowness of postliberalism, however, there is a truth: throughout its five-hundred-year history, riven by war, privatization and the destruction of the commons, mass immiseration, and the crushing of democracy, capitalism has profoundly disrupted communities and uprooted identities. This is precisely why, or one reason why, leftists and “the people” have fought against it. Genuine leftists are well aware of the human need for roots, for order and stability and community. The great anarchist mystic Simone Weil even wrote a book entitled The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul… Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive.” There is no reason such a recognition should be incompatible with the best traditions of liberalism, for instance Humboldtian liberalism. That is, there is no reason a philosophy of individual rights and individual dignity should preclude a recognition of mutual obligations and the essentially social nature of humanity, including even a valorization of honorable traditions and shared norms that constrain unfettered liberty. This isn’t the place to delve into the philosophies of communism, socialism, and anarchism—the writings of Kropotkin, William Morris, Anton Pannekoek, Rudolf Rocker, Murray Bookchin, etc.—but the societies they envision are hardly licentious or degenerate or atomized. (Or remotely similar to the Soviet Union’s state capitalism, with which socialism and communism are absurdly associated.) They are eminently ordered, communal, and democratic, because they are grounded in a liberal humanist sensibility.

Indeed, one might even say that the real reason the world is in such an awful state is the opposite of that given by postliberals: there is too little freedom, not too much. There is too much authoritarianism, not enough liberalism or democracy. In particular, the authoritarian structures known as corporations have overwhelming power—including over governments—which they certainly do not use in the interests of humanity, community, or social harmony. Noam Chomsky is surely right that classical liberalism, or libertarianism, in its profoundest forms is not only not fulfilled in capitalism but is actually incompatible with it, inasmuch as capitalism tends to violate both the negative and positive liberties (“freedom from” and “freedom to”) of ordinary people. A vast literature of the left, of journalism, and of historical scholarship exposes the tyrannical nature of capitalist institutions; for example, in 2017, the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson published a well-received book called Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It). (A corporation is “a government that assigns almost everyone a superior whom they must obey… [T]here is no rule of law… Superiors are unaccountable to those they order around. They are neither elected nor removable by their inferiors,” etc.) The most recent addition to this literature may be a surprise, though: Ahmari’s new book.

Tyranny, Inc. could not be more different from Regime Change. It appears, in fact, that Ahmari is undergoing a semi-conversion to the left, or to aspects of the left. It is striking, after all, that a postliberal should have written a book the very subtitle and substance of which valorizes “American liberty.” Whereas Deneen wallows in a lazy idealism that traffics in windy abstractions like virtue, excellence, and tradition, Ahmari investigates the material conditions workers have faced under the neoliberal onslaught, together with the corrupt political economy that has brought about these abysmal conditions. Where Deneen believes that an enlightened Aristotelian aristocracy will magically come into being and work to uplift the people, Ahmari comprehends the essential fact of class struggle and advocates the resurrection of strong unions and social democracy. He even uses Marxist language: “cultural norms, practices, and beliefs…rest on a material substrate that includes law, politics, and economics.” In short, while Deneen and his co-thinkers blame a unitary ideology of their imagination called liberalism, Ahmari, at least in this book, blames capitalism.

One can’t help wondering if the postliberal gang is a little unhappy with Ahmari’s semi-apostasy. Consider his criticisms of conservatives in his concluding chapter:

[C]onservative defenders of the [social] system are often the first to lament its cultural ramifications: …a decline in civic and religious engagement, particularly among the poor and working classes; low rates of marriage and family formation; and so on.

…[What results] is a downright ludicrous politics centered on preaching timeless virtues while denying what political theory going back to the Greeks has taught, and what every good parent or teacher knows: that cultivating virtue requires tangible, structural supports. A child will struggle to master honesty if his parents routinely model dishonesty; a body politic will likewise spurn the virtues if subjected to merciless economic exploitation.

It’s true that more populist conservatives these days are prepared to defend right-wing cultural values against ‘woke capital.’ But few if any dare question the coercive power of capital itself. Dig into the policy platforms of tub-thumping GOP populists, and you will likely find effusions of unreserved praise for capitalism.

Here, he is coming close to the realization that right-wing populism is completely phony, that it has always functioned to distract from the class conflicts that are fundamentally responsible for popular suffering, so that a large portion of the public instead rages against LGBTQ people, liberals, Muslims, immigrants, Jews, Communists, China, and anyone else not big business. To be sure, postliberals don’t effusively praise capitalism, as other populist conservatives do. But if they really valued “the common good” about which they prattle, they would, like leftists and the new-and-improved Ahmari, direct their ire at the chief agents of the collapse of community, family, morality, and the natural environment, namely the capitalist class. Otherwise they’re in danger of being useful idiots for this class that is interested only in further shredding the social compact.

Tyranny, Inc. is dense with journalistic investigations of a litany of types of “coercion” corporations inflict today on employees and the public, informed by a competent telling of the history behind it all (relying on scholars like Karl Polanyi, John Kenneth Galbraith, and David Harvey). Among other topics, Ahmari illuminates the many ways in which the sacred doctrine of “liberty of contract” between employer and employee conceals chasmic disparities in power that can ruin people’s lives. He illustrates the capture of the judiciary by the corporate sector. He exposes the predations of private equity, including its use of private emergency services (firefighting firms, ambulance companies) to fleece unsuspecting innocents of tens of thousands of dollars. He discusses the ongoing evisceration by Big Tech and Big Finance of the U.S.’s newspaper industry, which has seen almost a third of its newspapers shutter since 2005 (while many of the remainder are gutted by their new Wall Street owners). And so on. The most viable solution to all these tragedies, he argues, is to revive Galbraithian countervailing power. “Once more, it’s up to the American worker to drag our politicians and corporate leaders into a new consensus.”

Insofar as Ahmari remains a postliberal, his book shows the mutability of this ideology. Its proponents can choose any particular agenda to devote their energies to, whether reconstituting unions and social democracy, advocating a Catholic theocracy (like Adrian Vermeule), fighting against the rights of non-heteronormative people, seeking a much more restrictive immigration regime, denouncing so-called “liberal” interventionist foreign policy, or prohibiting the teaching of the history of racism in the U.S.’s public schools. Rhetorically at least, all of this can be defended in terms of shoring up the disintegrating social order and protecting “communal solidarity.” In a sense, this mutability can be considered a strength, for it allows postliberalism to appeal to people of very different values and interests. But it is the strength of fascism, an ideology that likewise prided itself on being postliberal. Fascism was no less resourceful in appealing to different groups of people, including peasants, landowners, industrialists, the petty bourgeois, racists, traditionalists, even a small minority of workers, who were told their interests would be represented in the great community of the nation bound together by common traditions. In practice, of course, fascism, as a species of conservatism, ended up representing above all the interests of the ruling class, while crushing unions and working-class political parties.

The Proto-Fascism of Postliberalism

Tyranny, Inc. shows that leftists can find common cause with postliberals on some issues. To the extent that someone of the right really does care about the common good, or rather the good of the vast majority (to which the good of the ruling class tends to be inimical, since its power rests on the exploitation of others), a socialist might well be willing to work together with him. Such an alliance, necessarily limited and conditional, is often ridiculed as “red-brownism” by leftists, but it does happen in politics that people of different ideologies cooperate on a political campaign or policy that will conduce to the greater good. A politics that rests on maintaining one’s purity is unlikely to get very far.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that postliberalism is very dangerous, potentially fascist. Insofar as it is anti-liberal—which left-leaning postliberals, such as Adrian Pabst, are not—this isn’t a difficult case to make. “Within the West, Hungary has set the standard for a reasonable approach,” Gladden Pappin believes. Vermeule deplores the expansiveness of liberal rights: “Yesterday the frontier was divorce, contraception, and abortion; then it became same-sex marriage; today it is transgenderism; tomorrow it may be polygamy, consensual adult incest, or who knows what.” In Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony argues that “cultivation of the national religion is an indispensable purpose of government.” He goes so far as to affirm, quoting Irving Kristol, that “there is no inherent right to self-government if it means that such government is vicious, mean, squalid, and debased.” But who is to make such a judgment? Why is your definition of what is right and good necessarily better than someone else’s? Are you infallible? What gives a reactionary religious nationalist like Hazony the right to impose his vision of the good life on an entire society?

Apart from the noxious political commitments of most postliberals, there is an even deeper problem: in conditions in the United States today, to ground one’s politics in attacking liberalism is to undermine postliberals’ own professed values of “national resilience,” “common purposes,” and the “social covenant” (to quote Adrian Pabst’s Postliberal Politics). This is because the chief beneficiaries are the forces most aggressively sabotaging these values, the Republican Party and reactionaries in the business community.

To put it bluntly, postliberals’ embrace of politicians like J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, even (in some cases) Donald Trump, and their hope for an authentically populist, working-class Republican Party, is incredibly naïve. Nor is it new. At least since (in fact, before) Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Republican politicians have been clothing themselves in populist garb, stoking culture wars and denouncing liberal elites in order to cleave the “working-class” vote from Democrats. As Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew traveled the country attacking “permissivists,” “elitists,” “radical liberals,” “thieves, traitors, and perverts.” Reagan liked to invoke the “postliberal” themes of family and community: “When they [Democrats] talk about family, they mean Big Brother in Washington. When we talk about family, we mean ‘honor thy father and mother.’” These themes, of course, have been a mainstay of Republican rhetoric for generations. “I am here to say to America,” Bob Dole pontificated, “do not abandon the great traditions that stretch to the dawn of our history. Do not topple the pillars of those beliefs—God, family, honor, duty, country—that have brought us through time and time again.” George W. Bush preached the virtues of compassionate conservatism, which proved to be just as oxymoronic as common-good conservatism will doubtless be. Today, the enemies du jour are critical race theory, transgenderism, and wokeness, but the underlying strategy is always the same.

And what does that strategy eventuate in? Tax cuts for the rich, gutting of regulations to protect the environment, and a war on workers and the poor. Trump’s NLRB waged an “unprecedented” attack on workers’ rights. His administration weakened or eliminated over 125 policies that protected the country’s air, water, and land. His budgets savagely slashed benefits for low-income Americans, continuing a longstanding Republican practice. The great “populist” senators Hawley and Vance give, at best, tokenistic and rhetorical support to the working class: neither has even cosponsored the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, and Hawley, according to the AFL-CIO, has almost always voted against the interests of workers. Vance, a venture capitalist, finds it much more congenial to spout racist “great replacement” nonsense and blame those with a low income for their own failures than to actually do anything to help the latter. Meanwhile, the Republican Party remains rock-solidly opposed to even the mildest proposals to address global warming, which threatens not only working people but all life on earth. If this sabotage of life itself is what the postliberal common good looks like, one might even prefer the classical fascists.

Analytically, a key error that helps make possible postliberal political naïveté (assuming the likes of Patrick Deneen and Yoram Hazony are acting in good faith) is to associate together, in one overarching nefarious tradition, classical liberals, modern economic conservatives, New Deal liberals, contemporary centrist liberals, woke identitarians, and “liberal” imperialists from Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. In a sense, even Marxism is included in this tradition, inasmuch as it shares the orientation towards progress of all these groups, their detachment from and denial of the virtues of tradition. (As if the left doesn’t want to preserve healthy traditions and abandon unhealthy ones.) This is a hopelessly confused classification, wholly superficial because of its idealistic focus on the supposed shared commitment to vague concepts of progress and freedom. In order to understand political history, you have to consider the material interests that these different groups and ideologies serve.

For example, economic conservatives like Milton Friedman or Paul Ryan are liberal or libertarian in name only. Their talk of free markets is a fig leaf for outright authoritarianism in the form of slavish support for corporate tyrannies (as Ahmari describes), which would have horrified classical liberals like Adam Smith. Most conservatives don’t care about a mythical free market anyway, as shown by their enthusiasm for exorbitant government spending on the defense industry and for munificent tax breaks and subsidies for corporations. Capitalism could not survive without these sorts of government interventions, nor can markets operate without some firms soon exerting “illiberal” market power; so it is idle for postliberals to talk about a nonexistent economic liberalism.

New Deal liberals were and are totally different from self-styled economic liberals, serving a popular constituency—so it’s odd that Deneen attacks them, too. After all, they often acted—as progressives still act—in approximately the same way as his ideal aristocracy would, “work[ing] to improve the lives, prospects, and fate of the people.” If one cares about the common good, why denounce social democracy, which more than any other capitalist formation protected families and communities? But because the progressive state was irreligious, non-traditional, and supposedly inspired by elite fear and loathing of the people (?), it was and is bad. (Deneen also opines that redistribution of wealth to workers has “led to extensive damage to the broader economic order,” citing no evidence.) His preferred reforms include increasing the size of the House of Representatives to 6,000 members; requiring that every American serve one year in the military; “substantially reducing” university education and investing in more vocational education; breaking up monopolistic companies; investing more public funds in infrastructure and manufacturing; penalizing companies that employ undocumented immigrants; banning pornography and passing laws that promote “public morality”; and enacting policies that reward marriage and family formation, such as Hungary has instituted under Orbán. Predictably, he says nothing about labor unions, except, as a parenthesis, that strengthening them is “a worthy undertaking.”

Leftists would be more sympathetic to postliberals’ contempt for the conventional centrist liberalism of the Democratic Party today, albeit not necessarily for the same reasons. Indeed, many are similarly disdainful of the performative, business-friendly identity politics that has become a dominant ethos in the “professional-managerial class” that postliberals despise. But to call this “class” the real power elite, the real oppressors—as Deneen and others do—is both laughable and proto-fascist. This thesis is a core premise of right-wing postliberalism, for, if you can find a villain that isn’t the capitalist class, you don’t have to locate yourself uncomfortably close to the left. The PMC will do the job nicely, since it’s a diffuse category of people, many of whom have an elite status, that pervades and partially runs society’s hegemonic institutions. Its members tend to be culturally different from the masses of Americans without a college degree, so it’s easy to stir up resentment against them, which can be used to elect reactionaries who will do the bidding of the real ruling class (while blaming woke liberal professionals for the suffering that results).

Deneen’s treatment of the “managerial elite” is influenced by a favorite text of postliberals, Michael Lind’s The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (2020), which itself is influenced by James Burnham’s famous book The Managerial Revolution (1941). Burnham posited that ownership and control were separated in modern corporations, and that, as a result, a new managerial class was replacing capitalists as the ruling class. This was a flawed analysis: for one thing, despite the transformations of the economy that had indeed occurred in preceding decades, corporations were still subject to the logic of capital, which required that they squeeze profits out of the exploited labor of workers. Capitalism was not ending. But whatever plausibility the thesis may have once had was long gone by the time of the 1980s’ shareholder revolution, which Deneen and Lind seem not to have heard of. The stubborn fact is that some people still make their money from ownership and investments, while others make money by selling their labor-power. These two groups tend to have antagonistic interests, an antagonism rooted not in the vague cultural differences between the “meritocracy” and “the people” that Deneen describes—such as (he says) the former’s mobility, its “disconnection from a shared cultural inheritance,” and its identity politics—but rather in objective structures of how money is made and how power is distributed in the workplace and the economy.

It is true that most professionals occupy an ambiguous place between capitalists and the larger working class. Barbara and John Ehrenreich theorized this ambiguity in their landmark 1977 essay “The Professional-Managerial Class,” and Marxists since then have devoted a great deal of effort to making sense of this huge group of people, some of whom have more interests in common with the traditional working class and others with corporate executives and owners. Since its emergence in the early twentieth century to help manage “the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations,” the PMC has, most of the time, not shown much solidarity with the blue-collar working class. In fact, in their 2013 essay “Death of a Yuppie Dream,” the Ehrenreichs argue it “has played a major role in the oppression and disempowerment of the old working class.” Professionals (usually more or less politically centrist, or “liberal” in today’s parlance) are easy to dislike, since they often exhibit the vices of high-status groups everywhere: they’re prone to being smug, elitist, hypocritical, conformist despite their pretensions to independent thought, complicit in the neoliberal evisceration of society, etc. Leftists are, perhaps, almost as fond of ridiculing them as conservatives; see Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class (2021) and Amber A’Lee Frost’s “The Characterless Opportunism of the Managerial Class” for examples.

Nevertheless, if you want a more communal, just, and sustainable social order, you have to think about strategy. No class exemplifies virtue. The question is whether your agenda will be to dismantle corporate power, the real engine behind the atomization that postliberals decry, or to attack the relative peons of the PMC, who (as the Ehrenreichs note) are beginning to succumb to the disintegrating economic and political forces that have decimated the old working class. The second path is the road of fascism, the search for a scapegoat that only ends up empowering the most vicious elements of the ruling class. The first path, according to which professionals in precarious economic circumstances ought to be appealed to instead of vilified, is the road to genuine social change.

In other words, postliberals have to make a decision: do they want to concentrate on combating social liberalism—banning pornography, criminalizing gender-affirming health care for those who suffer from dysphoria, erecting draconian barriers to immigration, banning “liberal” books and school curricula that address America’s real history—thereby empowering faux-populist Republicans who will cut social programs, attack unions, increase military spending, accelerate environmental destruction, give corporations and the wealthy even more power than they have, and devastate families and communities? Or do they want to concentrate on tackling the latter crises and forego a war on social liberalism? They can’t have it both ways, because only the left will ever honestly confront the material catastrophes that are savaging working-class communities. The left itself would do well to start prioritizing class solidarity rather than only identity politics (as some leftists have argued), but at least it is trying to do far more for the working class than the right is (since the right, after all, exists to serve business). Even Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which couldn’t pass because of Republican opposition, would have enormously benefited working families through its investments in childcare and preschool, paid family and medical leave, community college, child tax credits, physical infrastructure, affordable housing, health care, and environmental protection.

Thus, because of its alleged interest in the public good but its conservative (Republican) orientation, postliberalism is ultimately incoherent. It is not a new ideology, being in many ways a return of paleoconservatism, of the anti-modernism of Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan, even of the—admittedly more extreme—alt-right of several years ago, which shared a lot of the reactionary cultural grievances of postliberals. Deneen & Company try to make their ideas more respectable by invoking Aristotle, Aquinas, Tocqueville, Pope Leo XIII, and other exalted names, but this is a transparent exercise in idealistic mystification. The proto-fascism is right below the surface.

There is a particle of hope, however. If more postliberals choose the left-wing path of Tyranny, Inc. than the far-right path of Regime Change, they might manage to make a positive contribution to American politics. But this will require shedding their illusions about the likes of J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, and instead following the example of, say, Bernie Sanders. That’s where a humane, working-class politics is to be found.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Chris Wright.