Hungarian media is abuzz with angry reactions after a leak obtained by The Washington Post revealed that Ukraine was planning to blow up the Druzhba oil pipeline that transports crude from Russia to Hungary.
According to the leaked documents, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposed at a February meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Yuliya Svyrydenko that Ukraine should blow up the pipeline in order to incapacitate the part of the Hungarian energy infrastructure reliant on Russian oil.
Government spokesman Zoltán Kovács reacted in a tweet with a short question: “How is it possible that Ukraine is plotting against a NATO country??”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis slammed federal law enforcement officials on Monday who were involved in the FBI’s 2016 investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion, saying that “manufactured a false conspiracy theory” to take down Trump.
DeSantis’ remarks come in response to special counsel John Durham’s 306-page report on the origins of the probe that found that the FBI had no evidence to support launching the investigation and found “sobering” differences in how the FBI approached the Trump probe compared to other politically sensitive investigations.
“The Durham Report confirmed what we already knew: weaponized federal agencies manufactured a false conspiracy theory about Trump-Russia collusion,” DeSantis wrote on Twitter. “It reminds us of the need to clean house at these agencies, as they’ve never been held accountable for this egregious abuse of power.”
An 18-year veteran in law enforcement warned to beware of Homeland Security training that is being pushed to local law enforcement. “You might be a Domestic Terrorist If” you believe in civil liberties, or if you actually believe in your Constitutional rights. Sadly, this is NOT a joke.
We’ve all heard the “You might be a Redneck If” jokes, but in this series “You might be a Domestic Terrorist If” you believe in civil liberties, or if you actually believe in your Constitutional rights. Sadly, this is not a joke. You might also be a terrorist if you have ever expressed concerns about Big Brother. Are you a Christian who has ever discussed the anti-Christ, the apocalypse, or even mentioned the book of Revelation? Guess what, according to DHS then you too qualify as a potential domestic terrorist.
Are you a conservative, a libertarian, a Christian, or a gun owner? Are you opposed to abortion, globalism, Communism, illegal immigration, the United Nations, or the New World Order? Do you believe in conspiracy theories, do you believe that we are living in the “end times”?
According to official U.S. government documents, If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are a “potential terrorist”
At one time, the term “terrorist” was used very narrowly. The official definition of terrorism is “The use, or threat, of force with the intention of achieving a political goal.” That makes it pretty clear what sort of people are covered, and for decades it worked well. The government applied the label “terrorist” to people like Osama bin Laden and other Islamic jihadists. But the Obama administration removed all references to Islam from terror training materials, and instead the term “terrorist” was applied to large groups of American citizens.
Fraser Myers points out: “‘I am intersectional… I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder… I refuse to internalise misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be… I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are…’
These are not the words of some blue-haired student or tedious Instagram activist. Rather, they come from a recruitment video for the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency – infamous for ‘enhanced interrogation’, drone warfare and trafficking drugs to pay for foreign coups – has officially gone woke.
3. Being woke is easier than actually paying workers.
When people complain about woke culture, they usually think about universities. They are sick of fake courses, demands for diversity, constant complaints of oppression, and the like. What we need to realize is that the situation is much worse than that. Woke culture in universities is just one part of an insidious plot to make our entire society woke.
Dr. Paul Alexander writes on May 9, ““’When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,’ a current Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told the DCNF.
‘As part of the larger military-wide effort to promote diversity in the service’s pilot ranks, the 19th Air Force command near San Antonio, Texas, ‘clustered’ racial minorities and female trainees into one class, dubbed ‘America’s Class,’ to find out if doing so would improve the pilots’ graduation rates. However, not only did the effort fail to boost minority and women candidates’ success rates, but officers involved say they were ordered to engage in potentially unlawful discrimination by excluding white males from the class, documents show.
‘When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,’ a current Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told the DCNF.
A ‘significant backlog’ of pilot candidates waiting to begin classes offered the 19th Air Force, which conducts pilot training for the entire service at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, a chance to build a class from scratch, a spokesperson for Air Education and Training Command (AETC) told the DCNF. So, the 19th Air Force ‘clustered’ candidates from ‘underrepresented groups” into Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training (SUPT) class 21-15, with the initial intent of roughly mirroring the racial and gender makeup of the U.S.”
The entire defense establishment has become woke, and this has become a means of spreading the American Empire. Fraser Myers points out: “‘I am intersectional… I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder… I refuse to internalise misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be… I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are…’
These are not the words of some blue-haired student or tedious Instagram activist. Rather, they come from a recruitment video for the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency – infamous for ‘enhanced interrogation’, drone warfare and trafficking drugs to pay for foreign coups – has officially gone woke.
The recruitment video went viral. It outraged the right for portraying America as weak to its adversaries. And it outraged the left, who accused the CIA of dishonestly ‘co-opting’ progressive politics.
In truth, the CIA has been woke for some time – and no one should be surprised by its drift in this direction. The ‘Humans of CIA’ campaign, which highlights the diversity of the agency’s staff, has actually been running since 2019. A year before, Gina Haspel, despite her alleged involvement in ‘extraordinary rendition’, became the first female CIA chief – a move the Trump administration tried to spin as a victory for ‘women’s empowerment’.
It’s not just the CIA, either. The broader defence establishment is now bound up with woke politics. A watershed moment arrived in 2019 when MSNBC could proudly proclaim that the ‘military-industrial complex is now run by women’. As well as Haspel at the CIA, Andrea Thompson at the Pentagon was America’s lead weapons negotiator and in charge of the nuclear stockpile. The five largest arms contractors – Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defence arm of Boeing – were also run by women. In the same year, Raytheon, the world’s largest manufacturer of guided missiles, began its partnership with the Girl Scouts, apparently to ‘close the gender gap in STEM’.
Of course, for US militarism to be truly ‘intersectional’ it has to encompass race and sexuality as well as gender. At the weekend, the US Navy celebrated its first ever all-gay helicopter crew. Dow Chemical, which produced skin-burning napalm for the Vietnam war, has drawn media praise for its gay CEO. ‘How Dow Chemical Got Woke’, was how Bloomberg reported it. Earlier this year, ex-CIA chief John Brennan made headlines when he declared that he was ‘increasingly embarrassed’ to be a white man – perhaps not everyone can be ‘unapologetically themselves’ at Langley, after all.
Why do they bother? Why have the warmongers gone woke? Partly it is a question of image. Of course, just as big companies like to align their corporate missions to Black Lives Matter because it is too gauche to say they are out to make a profit, the CIA and the defence establishment cannot simply say that they are out to dominate other countries or defend US commercial interests.”
Wokeness has spread to the business world as well. Michael Rectenwald offers an outstanding analysis: “Why have the biggest and most profitable American corporations embraced leftist politics, as seen in their woke advertising and social justice activism? Hint: It’s not because they’ve become non-profits and taken up philanthropy.
Washington is trying to pressure Egypt into closing its airspace for all Russian military flights, but the regional US ally isn’t having it, which also awkwardly comes following a recent Pentagon leak showing Cairo planned to supply Moscow with rockets.
“Egypt has ignored U.S. requests to close its airspace to Russian military flights, American and Egyptian officials said, testing the limits of Washington’s ability to choke off Moscow’s supplies ahead of an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive,” The Wall Street Journal reports Friday.
“The U.S. and Ukraine persuaded countries including Turkey, Jordan and Iraq to cut access for at least some Russian military planes last year after the invasion of Ukraine, forcing Moscow’s aircraft to fly 2,000 extra miles and up to five hours further to reach strategic bases in Syria,” the report continues.
Washington’s concern is that Russia has likely been using Egyptian airspace to transport weapons from its arms depots elsewhere in the Middle East – for example in Syria where since 2015 it’s had a significant military build-up, particularly focused along the coast.
The founders of great corporations wouldn’t have put up with this bizarre nonsense. They were entrepreneurs with ethics and courage. But corporate suits are just managers who don’t want to jeopardize their gigantic salaries and huge stock options by running counter to whatever seems to be the fashionable meme of the month.
I’m not a church-going person, but previous ideas of what was morally right and wrong were handed down to Americans by their religion, Christianity. That’s changed now. The new religion is Greenism and Wokeism. Those things are now setting the moral tenor of society. This trend is in motion and still accelerating.
International Man: Recently, several large corporations have made self-destructive moves.
A prominent example is the Bud Light marketing fiasco which saw year-over-year sales plummet 17%. As a result, Bud Light’s parent company lost nearly $5 billion in market cap around the same time.
It should have been obvious that Bud Light’s marketing program featuring a trans activist wouldn’t go over well with its customers. Yet, they went ahead anyways.
What is your take on this?
Doug Casey: It’s shocking that a tiny percentage of the population has such an outsize influence in all areas of life. LGBTQ+ wield power not just in academia and the media but in business and corporations.
What’s amazing is not only the tiny number of people LGB-whatever represents but the fact that many or most of them are highly neurotic. Some of them appear to be psychotic. They have severe psychological problems, yet they’re being held up as models to influence other people. The fact that the suits who run major corporations go along with the ridiculous charade proves that not only do they have extremely bad judgment, but they’re despicable cowards.
Mises’s fundamental point, which logically precedes Hayek’s later addition, was that without real, honest market prices for all inputs, the economic calculation required for rational and efficient mass production would be impossible. And, he went on, you can’t have honest market prices without private ownership and markets in resources and producer goods. (The Marxists sought the abolition of private property.) Flourishing and even life itself thus depend on prices and their prerequisites — prices that cannot be ascertained or even generated except in the market…
May 8 marked the 124th anniversary of the birth of F. A. Hayek, the 1974 Nobel-winning economist of the Austrian school. (He died in 1992.) That makes it a good time to acknowledge one of his many contributions, his epistemic case for the free and competitive market order. It’s well-suited to the information age.
What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions….
This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces…. The reason for this is that the “data” from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society “given” to a single mind … and can never be so given.
When accountability for bad behavior is removed from society, it emboldens criminals. And now these criminals are robbing gun stores and arming themselves with guns while the Biden administration is adamant about disarming law-abiding citizens.
Some say… We’re living in a clown world.
I remember an article from several years ago where ATF data showed gun crime surged when some city, in VA I think, offered a gun buy back program.
Progressive district attorneys’ failure to enforce law and order has resulted in a surge of smash-and-grab thefts across American cities run by Democrats. The rise in thefts, particularly at retail stores, has become a significant problem for the retail industry, amounting to $100 billion in shrinkage in 2022. Even more concerning is that organized criminal gangs now target gun stores instead of clothing, jewelry, and pharmacy stores.
Diving into Bloomberg data, the story count for “gun shop robbery” in all US news media stories soared to a record high in the fourth quarter of 2022, with data going back to 2013. The surge even surpassed levels during the early virus pandemic.
As of late, a series of gun store robberies in the Mid-Atlantic area have alarmed gun shop owners, local police, state police, and federal agencies. These shops are located in the Washington-Baltimore metro area, where Democrats have been in control for decades.
On April 30, two gun stores, one just outside the Capital Beltway in Fairfax County, Virginia, and another one in Rockville, Maryland, about an hour north, were targeted by what some in the firearm industry have described as criminal organized gangs.
One of the owners of Engage Armament in Rockville told FOX 5 that he believes the suspects that targeted his shop and Dominion Defense in Fairfax were part of the same gang.
MCViewPoint 
