Sure, Chip, that’s what’s been causing all that vital resource expenditure in the US military: the promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion. Can’t possibly have anything to do with all that extremely expensive military equipment you’ve been moving into every corner of the earth now, can it?
Republican politicians have found a way to reconcile the fact that scrutinizing the behavior of the US war machine appeals to their base and wins votes with the fact that the Republican Party is built around facilitating war and militarism at every turn. Their solution? Pour mountains of energy into championing the case that the nation’s military has gotten too “woke”.
Because everything in mainstream American politics is geared toward channeling the public’s political attention down channels that pose no threat to the rich and powerful, and because the United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is held together by mass military violence and the threat thereof, it was only a matter of time before we started seeing the war-weary sentiments harnessed so effectively in Trump’s 2016 presidential run diverted into scrutinizing the military in ways that pose no obstacle to US warmongering.
Republican congressman Chip Roy published a press release on Thursday declaring that he has “called on Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to provide a full accounting of the department resources that will be used to impose woke gender ideology on America’s men and women in uniform during the month of June.”
“It has come to our attention that the Department of Defense (DoD) will once again divert American families’ tax dollars away from advancing its mission to ‘deter war and ensure our nation’s security’ to the promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) events during the month of June 2023,” Roy wrote. “Expending vital resources on this type of political maneuvering, most apparent during the month of June, is inconsistent with the national security interests of the United States and is an inexcusable use of taxpayer dollars.”
The proposed method of punishing Ugandans is rather curious, however. Note that the sanctions being discussed include—ironically—cutting off AIDS relief dollars, plus dollars that the regime has long insisted are absolutely vital to economic development and poverty relief in the developing world. If that’s true, then the US regime proposes trying to impoverish ordinary Ugandans as punishment for acts of the Ugandan regime.
Denouncing the Saudis or the Qataris, on the other, hand might bring geopolitical “complications” and thus you won’t hear much about Saudi or Qatari punishment of homosexual acts in the US media or in Washington.
In an excellent display of how US foreign policy can be used as a means of pandering to domestic interest groups, the Biden administration has threatened to impose sanctions on Uganda as punishment for that regime’s adoption of new laws criminalizing some types of homosexual behavior.
While it is abundantly clear that this move from the Ugandan state presents absolutely no threat to any vital US interest, the Biden administration apparently believes the situation requires immediate action by the US regime.
According to Axios, the Biden Administration’s proposed actions
includ[e] whether the U.S. will continue to safely deliver services under the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and other forms of assistance and investments. … Biden administration officials will also review Uganda’s eligibility for the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which provides eligible sub-Saharan African countries with duty-free access to the U.S. market for hundreds of products.
What exactly are these new laws that require the State Department to get involved in the internal affairs of a country 8,000 miles away? According to The Hill,
The new anti-gay law would impose the death penalty in cases of “aggravated homosexuality” and would impose a life sentence for engaging in gay sex. The state defines “aggravated homosexuality” as homosexual acts carried out by those infected with H.I.V. or homosexual acts that involve children, disabled people, or those drugged against their will.
Or put another way, the death penalty will be imposed in many cases on those found guilty of engaging in sex with children and with people unable to consent. Even in those cases, these are pretty harsh penalties, and certainly few Americans—from any part of the political spectrum—would support such measures.
The proposed method of punishing Ugandans is rather curious, however. Note that the sanctions being discussed include—ironically—cutting off AIDS relief dollars, plus dollars that the regime has long insisted are absolutely vital to economic development and poverty relief in the developing world. If that’s true, then the US regime proposes trying to impoverish ordinary Ugandans as punishment for acts of the Ugandan regime.
It is also notable that the US regime appears to now be fixated on such laws in Uganda when similar laws already exist on the books of several US allies. For example, the death penalty can be imposed for various homosexual acts in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. “Death by stoning” is also inflicted on alleged homosexuals in US ally Pakistan. Moreover, after 20-years of US occupation, Afghanistan imposes similar punishments. Those are just the places where the death penalty is potentially imposed. Homosexual acts are criminalized in a variety of countries that retain friendly relations with the US including Egypt—the top recipient of US foreign aid—plus Iraq, Jordan, South Sudan, and Nigeria. Homosexual sex between males can bring life imprisonment in Tanzania.
So why is Uganda now so much in the crosshairs while Saudi Arabia escapes notice?
The fact is the US regime is threatening sanctions on ordinary Ugandans because it can. Given that there is no sizable or electorally powerful Ugandan population in the US, it costs the administration nothing to denounce Uganda while also virtue signaling to extremely powerful and well-funded domestic LGBT interest groups.
Today in tyranny we’ve got three stories on the rapidly increasing authoritarian abuses in western “free democracies”.
Let’s dig in.
1. Grayzone reporter detained by British counter-terrorism police for doing journalism.
The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg was detained by “six anonymous plainclothes counter-terror officers” who “grilled him for over five hours about his reporting” upon returning to Britain on the 17th of May, according to a new report by Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal.
Blumenthal reports that Klarenberg was asked many questions about The Grayzone and his work with the independent outlet, saying police “seized the journalist’s electronic devices and SD cards, fingerprinted him, took DNA swabs, and photographed him intensively,” threatening him with arrest if he didn’t comply.
Blumenthal writes that the police action was likely a retaliation for Klarenberg’s reporting for the outlet, which has angered British officials and establishment media figures with the inconvenient information it has reported about their behavior:
Klarenberg’s interrogation appears to be London’s way of retaliating for the journalist’s blockbuster reports exposing major British and US intelligence intrigues. In the past year alone, Klarenberg revealed how a cabal of Tory national security hardliners violated the Official Secrets Act to exploit Brexit and install Boris Johnson as prime minister. In October 2022, he earned international headlines with his exposé of British plans to bomb the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian Federation. Then came his report on the CIA’s recruitment of two 9/11 hijackers this April, a viral sensation that generated massive social media attention.
Among Klarenberg’s most consequential exposés was his June 2022 report unmasking British journalist Paul Mason as a UK security state collaborator hellbent on destroying The Grayzone and other media outlets, academics, and activists critical of NATO’s role in Ukraine.
Asserting that Klarenberg did nothing more nefarious than engaging in “the same journalistic practice that the West’s most prominent legacy newspapers, from The New York Times to The Washington Post, depend on to break news themselves,” Blumenthal says it appears that “British authorities did not detain Klarenberg for any legal breaches, but because he reported factual stories that exposed the national security state’s own violations of both domestic and international law, as well as the malign plots of its media lackeys.”
Blumenthal himself was subjected to legal harassment and intimidation in the United States a few years back, arrested and charged with having committed “assault” while reporting on imperial efforts to drive the Venezuelan government out of its embassy in Washington DC. The charges were later dropped.
The Grayzone has been doing some of the best independent reporting in alternative media over the last few years, and should wear its now-evident status as a thorn in the empire’s side with pride.
2. South Australia passes draconian anti-protest law.
Reacting to recent inconvenient demonstrations by environmental activists, the state of South Australia has just rapidly shoved through legislation — without consulting the public — to exponentially increase the penalties for unauthorized protesting. Demonstrators will now face up to three months in jail and fines of $50,000 if they are deemed guilty of the extremely vague offense of “obstructing a public place” with their protesting.
Turner’s comments come after a Chinese fighter jet flew directly in front of a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea last weekend, and a Chinese warship came within 150 yards of a U.S. Navy destroyer on Saturday.
“Well, what we’re seeing is an unbelievable aggression by China,”
Against the US military in the South CHINA Sea. How did Turner qualify for the “intelligence” Committee?
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH) said the United States is seeing “unbelievable aggression” from communist China directed at Western nations.
Turner’s comments come after a Chinese fighter jet flew directly in front of a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea last weekend, and a Chinese warship came within 150 yards of a U.S. Navy destroyer on Saturday.
“Well, what we’re seeing is an unbelievable aggression by China,” Turner told ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday. “If you look at the balloon that flew over the United States, the Chinese police stations, the aggressiveness against our both planes and ships in international water, it goes right to the heart of what President Xi said when he stood next to Putin in Russia, where he said, they’re trying to make change that had not happened in 100 years.”
As it has become undeniable that school closures did more harm than good, teachers unions have since tried to rewrite history and claim they were in favor of reopening schools, even though a long trail of documents show that they consistently fought to “reopen schools safely,” with their focus being on ensuring that the definition of “safely” would mean a very high barrier to opening.
Government helping government. You? You gotta help yourself.
Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for MomsRising Together / Paul Morigi/Stringer via Getty Images
Newly obtained text messages show the heads of both major teachers unions personally texting then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky as the agency was putting together a scientific analysis of reopening schools during coronavirus — with the CDC making a key change that allowed schools to stay closed and appeased the unions.
On February 11, 2021, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten texted Walensky saying that she had heard a “leak” from The New York Times about what was in the CDC’s upcoming guidance, and expressed concern that it was “at odds with [their] discussion.”
“They are running with a full speed ahead angle” for reopening schools, Weingarten wrote. She said the Times sent her a copy of the internal draft guidance that said, “At any level of community transmission, all schools can provide in-person instruction.”
“Hmmm. Argh,” Walensky wrote to the union honcho.
The next day, Walensky’s agency released guidance that was different. It said, “All schools have options to provide in-person instruction.” That allowed school districts to stay closed while still saying they were following CDC guidelines. “Middle and high schools in virtual only instruction unless they can strictly implement all mitigation strategies and have few cases,” it added.
Weingarten’s union then put out a statement praising the guidance, and texted the document directly to Walensky with the message, “Thank you.”
Walensky responded glowingly, saying, “This gave me the biggest smile of my week. Thank YOU, Friend!”
Weingarten then gently chided the CDC director for not going further to push stricter guidelines that would keep schools closed, saying “:) we will fuss a little on ventilation but I am so grateful.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The House voted 314-117 Wednesday to approve a bill raising the US debt ceiling. The bipartisan compromise allows the country to avoid the devastating impact of fiscal responsibility for another two years.
Sources say the negotiations were touch and go for several weeks, but in the end, Republicans and Democrats were able to come together on the one issue that unites them: recklessly spending other people’s money while avoiding any and all accountability for it.
“Phew, that was a close one,” said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy after the vote. “If we hadn’t passed this bill, the government would have been forced to stop borrowing money and balance the budget. Crisis averted!”
President Biden praised members of Congress for passing the bill. “In this era of partisan politics, it’s good to see Republicans and Democrats agreeing to completely destroy America’s fiscal stability,” he noted in a statement given to a turnip in his root cellar. “Garbflibblemurflin!”
Economists noted that the bill would slightly reduce government spending in future years, but McCarthy urged Americans not to get too hung up on the details. “This is just phase one of our spending plan,” he said. “We’re confident we have the votes to drastically increase deficit spending through the passage of new legislation over the next several years.”
At publishing time, representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had issued a statement asking when the maintenance crews would be arriving to paint the new debt ceiling.
On a number of key issues, from decoupling from China, to China’s role as a broker in negotiations on the war in Ukraine, to multipolarity, France seems to align more closely with Beijing than with Washington. And on each of those key issues, Spain seems to sound a lot like France.
In April, French President Emmanuel Macron emerged from three days of meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing sounding as comfortable talking to Beijing as he does talking to Washington.
The US is pressuring Europe to decouple from China by reconsidering their relationship and breaking their significant economic ties. But when Macron traveled to China, his travel companions were a crowd of French business executives. And they weren’t there to discuss breaking economic ties with China. Instead, Macron declared that “any decoupling, or “de-linking,” is not good for Europe, given the vast economic interests at stake.” He rejected the US insistence that “differences over political systems that make Europe and China ‘rivals’ should . . . lead to the ‘decoupling’ and ‘escalating tensions’.” Far from breaking economic ties and ending the relationship, France’s aim is to “reinforce those ties” and “re-launch a strategic and global partnership with China.”
This independent stance, which Macron has frequently referred to as “strategic autonomy,” was to be just the first of several comments that sounded more like Beijing than like Washington. Macron was independent, but he was not alone. Charles Michel, the head of the European Council, after saying that “There has been a leap forward on strategic autonomy compared to several years ago,” revealed that “On the issue of the relationship with the United States, it’s clear that there can be nuances and sensitivities around the table of the European Council. Some European leaders wouldn’t say things the same way that Emmanuel Macron did … I think quite a few really think like Emmanuel Macron.”
One of those European leaders may be Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. Weeks before Macron went to China, Sanchez blazed the trail. Seeking a more balanced trade relationship with China, Sanchez announced agreements to increase Spanish exports to China and Chinese tourism to Spain. Sanchez “also wants access to China’s rare earth minerals.” He expressed a willingness to “deepen bilateral mutually beneficial cooperation, especially cooperation in areas including electric vehicles, green energy and digital economy . . . and jointly promote further development of Spain-China relations.” Like France, Spain seems to be holding out against US demands to decouple from China.
The staggering ‘Diversity, Equity, Inclusion’ mind control program at the University of Florida; An entire bureaucracy; This is the future NOW; It has to be crushed
exposes (see also here and here and here) the University of Florida Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program and the details:
The HR department held a training to lecture employees about their “white privilege,” “white fragility,” and the “‘unearned advantages’ of whiteness.” As part of their “personal journey,” white employees were encouraged to confront their pathological whiteness.
They learned mantras from twelve-step programs for overcoming their whiteness, including Racists Anonymous: “I have come to admit that I am powerless over my addiction to racism”; “We admit our collective history is rooted in white supremacy.”
University of Florida has created a radical DEI bureaucracy that promotes racial preferences in faculty hiring, encourages white employees to engage with a 12-step program called Racists Anonymous, and maintains segregated scholarships that violate civil rights law.
Officially, the university has reported that it hosts 31 DEI initiatives at a cost of $5 million per year. But I have obtained internal documents via Sunshine Law requests revealing the stunning scope, scale, and radicalism of UF’s DEI bureaucracy, which is embedded everywhere.
In 2020, UF planned out a huge number of diversity initiatives, including mandatory diversity training, an entire year focused on “racism,” a presidential task force to explore the university’s racist past, and recommendations for banning “historic racist imagery.”
In 2021, the university moved to create a massive “DEI infrastructure” and deploy DEI cadres to each division, school, and college. The embedded cadres were tasked with administering loyalty surveys to test faculty and staff’s “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
According to documents, UF has created 1,018 “DEI initiatives” and the ideology has penetrated nearly all of its divisions: 73 percent “have a DEI committee” and “DEI officer”; 70 percent “espoused commitment to DEI”; 53 percent “have a DEI strategic plan.”
The university encourages racial preferences in hiring, with favored practices including “specific formal training in [DEI],” advertising jobs through “DEI identity” groups, using an “equity specialist” for search committees, and engaging in race-based recruiting and benchmarks.
—end of Rufo statement—
He paints a picture of university infiltration on a massive scale.
It would be impossible to install such a program without key players in MANY key positions.
The rest of the university employees are scared sheep and willing foot soldiers.
—The 12-step program as overt mind control.
People surrender their will, power of choice, intelligence, and sign on as slaves waiting for orders from above.
As I’ve been writing for some time now, these programs have nothing to do with equality of opportunity or meritocracy. They’re about who holds the power.
The rulers and enforcers of the USSR and China would find the U of Florida structure quite familiar.
Tyrants form collectives. It hardly matters what the “subject matter” is. The whole point is subjugation.
At the U of Florida, no doubt there was a point, along the way, when supervisors, department heads, deans, executives, and boards thought: “Well, all this is somewhat troubling, but we can live with it. It’ll progress to a certain level and then stop. These people couldn’t be actually trying to take over the University.”
But these people were, and they did.
That’s always the way it is. People don’t rise up and squash the criminals. They wait. And then one day it’s too late.
The criminals rely on The Group. The force of The Group. Not the ideas. Not the philosophy. Not the logic. Not on anything sensible. The thoughts the criminals spout and the theories—those are just the cover. The root is group intimidation. The calculation is: “We have enough force to overwhelm the individual.”
It’s war.
The idiots and the cowards and the passive ones refuse to see this.
That tells you something about the awesome lack of integrity residing in these high-minded professors who teach at the university level.
If the United States and its NATO lackeys really wanted to avoid a direct war with Russia, then they know what to do: stop arming the reactionary Kiev regime and get down to serious diplomacy.
This insanely dangerous conflict could end right now.
This week saw a swarm of military drones attack the Russian capital. The Russian authorities claimed that all of the unmanned aerial vehicles were shot down or electronically disabled, but not without some of the aircraft inflicting damage on civilian apartment blocks.
Nearly four weeks ago, a double drone attack was launched on the Kremlin Senate building close to where President Vladimir Putin has a residence.
Moscow has never been attacked in such a symbolic way since the Great Patriotic War when the Soviet Union was fighting Nazi Germany at the very gates of the capital.
Elsewhere across the Russian Federation, Ukrainian drones have targeted major Russian oil and gas installations, as well as military air bases deep inside its territory. Latest reports say Russian children are being evacuated from the Belgorod and Bryansk westerly regions due to constant heavy shelling by Ukrainian forces. Those regions have also seen commando-style incursions by militants using American-supplied armored vehicles. The CIA media front Radio Free Europe is evidently delighted by the anticipated sapping of Russian morale.
Russia is incrementally being subjected to a tightening aggressive vice, which when viewed in perspective presents a shocking attempted assault on its existential interests. Moscow has warned that its national defense doctrine permits the use of nuclear weapons if its existential interests are threatened. The U.S. and its NATO partners are provocatively shaping the Ukraine conflict into Russia’s existential concerns. The aggression is being fully directed and intensified by Washington and its NATO accomplices, in particular Britain.
The nearly 15-month conflict in Ukraine seems to be spiraling uncontrollably toward a direct war between the United States and Russia, the world’s two biggest nuclear powers. Russia did not want this conflict. Its proposals for diplomacy and dialogue over geopolitical security concerns due to NATO expansion were dismissed out of hand by Washington and its European minions in the weeks before the Ukraine war erupted on February 24 last year.
We need to be clear: the onus is on Washington to halt the slide toward world catastrophe.
Finian Cunningham
