Mask and social distancing mandates, government control of private industry, and some of Biden’s other executive actions, such as one creating a new “Public Health Jobs Corps” with responsibilities including performing “contact tracing” on American citizens, are the type of actions one would expect from a fascist government, not a constitutional republic.
Joe Biden, who is heralded by many of his supporters as saving democracy from fascist Trump, could not even wait one day before beginning to implement fascistic measures that are completely unnecessary to protect public health. Biden will no doubt use other manufactured crises, including “climate change” and “domestic terrorism,” to expand government power and further restrict our liberty. Under Biden, fascism will not just carry an American flag. It will also wear a mask.
Almost immediately after his inauguration, President Joe Biden began creating new government dictates via executive orders. Many of these executive orders concern coronavirus, fulfilling Biden’s promise to make ramping up a coronavirus-inspired attack on liberty a focus of his first 100 days.
One of Biden’s executive orders imposes mask and social distancing mandates on anyone in a federal building or on federal land. The mandates also apply to federal employees when they are “on-duty” anywhere. Members of the military are included in the definition of federal employees. Will citizens of Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries where US troops are or will be “spreading democracy” be happy to learn the troops shooting up their towns are wearing masks and practicing social distancing?
Another one of Biden’s executive orders forces passengers on airplanes, trains, and other public transportation to wear masks.
Biden’s mask mandates contradict his pledge to follow the science. Studies have not established that masks are effective at preventing the spread of coronavirus. Regularly wearing a mask, though, can cause health problems.
Biden’s mask mandates are also an unconstitutional power grab. Some say these mandates are an exercise of the federal government’s constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. However, the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to regulate interstate commerce. The president does not have the authority to issue executive orders regulating interstate commerce absent authorization by a valid law passed by Congress. The Founders gave Congress sole law-making authority, and they would be horrified by the modern practice of presidents creating law with a “stroke of a pen.”
Just as important, the Commerce Clause was not intended to give the federal government vast regulatory power. Far from giving the US government powers such as the power to require people to wear masks, the Commerce Clause was simply intended to ensure Congress could protect free trade among the states.
Biden also signed an executive order supporting using the Defense Production Act to increase the supply of vaccines, testing supplies, and other items deemed essential to respond to coronavirus. The Defense Production Act is a Cold War relic that gives the president what can fairly be called dictatorial authority to order private businesses to alter their production plans, and violate existing contracts with private customers, in order to produce goods for the government.
Mask and social distancing mandates, government control of private industry, and some of Biden’s other executive actions, such as one creating a new “Public Health Jobs Corps” with responsibilities including performing “contact tracing” on American citizens, are the type of actions one would expect from a fascist government, not a constitutional republic.
Joe Biden, who is heralded by many of his supporters as saving democracy from fascist Trump, could not even wait one day before beginning to implement fascistic measures that are completely unnecessary to protect public health. Biden will no doubt use other manufactured crises, including “climate change” and “domestic terrorism,” to expand government power and further restrict our liberty. Under Biden, fascism will not just carry an American flag. It will also wear a mask.
This absurd claim completely falls apart, since later Pennsylvania Health Department guidelines make it explicitly clear that nursing homes must readmit covid-positive patients and continue to accept new ones even if they are covid positive, as well. Guidance issued on May 12, 2020, states that “A positive test result is not a reason to refuse readmission to a resident” and that “An NCF [nursing care facility] must continue to take new admissions, if appropriate beds are available, and a suspected or confirmed positive for COVID-19 is not a reason to deny admission.”
On January 19 it was announced that Joe Biden planned to nominate Rachel Levine, the Pennsylvania (PA) secretary of health, for the position of assistant secretary of health in the Department of Health and Human Services. This is potentially good news for Pennsylvanians, who will finally be rid of her after having had to endure her disastrous covid lockdowns and restrictions for nearly a year, but is likely bad news for the rest of the country.
News coverage of Levine’s nomination is focused almost entirely on the fact that if she is confirmed she will be the first transgender official to be confirmed by the Senate and barely mentions or completely glosses over her handling of the pandemic in PA. NPR doesn’t mention her track record at all other than noting that she, unsurprisingly, called for more federal funding to deal with the virus. The Morning Call at least reported that Levine has faced criticism over her handling of the virus response but failed to mention that under Levine PA nursing homes were forced to accept covid-positive patients.
After the announcement of her forthcoming nomination, Republicans began to attack Levine on social media, especially concerning her nursing home policy. In response, Newsweek published a laughable excuse of a “fact check,” asserting, “There is no evidence to support Greene’s [a Republican representative from Georgia] claim that Levine placed coronavirus-positive patients in nursing home facilities, thus likely contributing ‘to the thousands of elderly deaths in Pennsylvania.’”
However, the author, Julia Marnin, seems to have failed to adequately research PA Department of Health guidelines. She cites a guideline issued in March of 2020 that states that nursing homes “must continue to accept new admissions and receive readmissions for current residents who have been discharged from the hospital who are stable,” and that “This may include stable patients who have had the COVID-19 virus.” Marnin then argues that this language didn’t mean that nursing homes had to accept positive patients but that “they can” and that there is no evidence that Levine’s policy “placed coronavirus-positive patients in nursing homes or contributed to thousands of elderly deaths in the state.”
This absurd claim completely falls apart, since later Pennsylvania Health Department guidelines make it explicitly clear that nursing homes must readmit covid-positive patients and continue to accept new ones even if they are covid positive, as well. Guidance issued on May 12, 2020, states that “A positive test result is not a reason to refuse readmission to a resident” and that “An NCF [nursing care facility] must continue to take new admissions, if appropriate beds are available, and a suspected or confirmed positive for COVID-19 is not a reason to deny admission.”
Until the late fall/early winter surge in cases and deaths, roughly 70 percent of all covid fatalities in Pennsylvania were among nursing home and long-term care facility patients. Since the latest surge, that number has dropped to roughly 50 percent. Yet, even with the latest drop, it is clear that the state government’s nursing home policy has been a disaster, and the media does a great disservice to the country by sweeping a discussion of that record under the rug.
Perhaps even more disturbing than forcing nursing homes to accept covid-positive patients is Levine’s policy goal of social justice–based rationing of covid treatments that was released by the PA Department of Health under Levine’s leadership.
As I have written about previously, this guidance, entitled “Ethical Allocation Framework for Emerging Treatments of COVID-19,” states that “a core goal of public health is to redress inequities that make health and safety less accessible to disadvantaged groups—we show equal respect for all members of society by mitigating the structural inequities that cause certain communities to bear the greatest burden during the pandemic.” In other words, according to Levine’s department of health, public health isn’t just about medical health issues, it is about using the response to medical health issues to engineer society to promote “social justice.”
In this scheme, the state recommends that healthcare providers use a weighted lottery system to ration care and encourages hospitals to weigh a patient’s entry based on his or her socioeconomic status as determined by old data aggregated from census blocks. You would think that promoting “equality” would mean that whether you receive life-saving medical treatment wouldn’t depend on where you live, but some patients are apparently more equal than others.
The fact that someone who apparently subscribes to such a radical egalitarian agenda is likely to soon be one of the most powerful healthcare bureaucrats in the country does not bode well, as calls for the federal government to nationalize healthcare continue unabated. Levine’s radicalism, combined with the incompetence she displayed by forcing nursing homes to accept covid-positive patients and other heavy-handed lockdown measures, will hopefully at least lead to a serious analysis of her record during her Senate confirmation hearing. But don’t hold your breath. Author:
Are you dissatisfied with the November 2020 elections? If you value constitutional liberty, the results may actually give reason for hope.
I don’t care much about party labels, but during the campaign season one of our major parties seemed to embrace large doses of socialism in practice if not in name: Medicare for all, free college, government takeover of economic activity in a “Green New Deal,” etc. Some of their most prominent candidates practiced race-based identity politics and peddled a “woke” view of America as congenitally unjust.
Their presidential candidate may have won the popular vote. But voters did not ratify his party’s posture. Instead of gaining, his party lost seats in the House of Representatives, and the other party—the one that, despite its faults, vociferously rejected woke socialism—held statehouses and governorships across the country and may likely hold its U.S. Senate majority. The blue wave was a ripple against a red crosscurrent.
Moreover, the siren song of identity politics rang false to many. African-American and Hispanic voters gave the Democratic candidate a lower percentage than in any recent election. To be sure, 80% of Black men voted Democrat. But this was down from 95% support for Barack Obama in 2008, 87% for Obama in 2012, and 82% for Clinton in 2016. Forget the partisan dimension: it is healthy when citizens reject race-driven identity politics.
Election results held surprises even in California, supposedly the bastion of Big Government. Even while they voted two-to-one for the Democratic presidential candidate, California voters rejected measures he endorsed on the state ballot. They rejected expansion of rent control (Proposition 21), race-based affirmative action (Proposition 17), increased property taxes on businesses (Proposition 15), and the essence of California’s Assembly Bill 5 restricting independent contractors (by supporting Proposition 22).
The Independent Institute had something to do with this. We had already won key arguments in the court of public opinion. For example, our “Open Letter to Suspend AB-5,” signed by 153 Ph.D. scholars across California and widely promoted, successfully made the case against California’s war on the “gig economy”—thus enhancing momentum for Proposition 22.
Likewise, we argued against a state-mandated “ethnic studies” curriculum, which would have taught high-schoolers that “capitalism is racist” and accused Jews, Koreans, the Irish, Armenians and other minorities of “white privilege” for simply working hard and succeeding. Our arguments in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other outlets, influenced Gov. Gavin Newsom to veto the mandated curriculum. And, this victory against racialism carried over into voters’ rejection of Proposition 17.
In California, as elsewhere, Americans were not sold on woke, nor on socialism. Most Americans like America—including individual liberty and the rule of law. This is good news indeed and shows the power of good ideas over bad ones!
The ascendance of the Joe Biden era in Washington is giving some lawmakers renewed hope that the lopsided executive-legislative power imbalance on war and peace issues will be addressed as a top priority.
According to a January 21 report in Politico, the top Democrats on the House foreign affairs, intelligence, and rules committees have written to President Biden calling on him to work with Congress to eliminate the 2002 authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) and begin the process of paring down the 2001 AUMF that has justified every U.S. counterterrorism action since September 2001. There is some evidence the Biden administration intends to work with interested lawmakers on curtailing these resolutions.
The 2020 Democratic Party Platform states that “we will work with Congress to repeal decades-old authorizations and replace them with a narrow and specific framework that will ensure we can protect Americans from terrorist threats while ending the forever wars.”
Antony Blinken, Biden’s choice for secretary of state, made similar comments to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his confirmation hearing this week. “It is long past time we revise these [AUMFs] and review them in many instances,” Blinken told the committee. “It is long past time we do this and I welcome the opportunity to do that.”
“Long past time” would be the understatement of the century.
The last time members of Congress voted on an authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF, Nelly had the hottest song in America. Kiefer Sutherland’s “24” was the most popular television show in the country. President George W. Bush’s approval rating was in the 60s. And the specter of Saddam teaming up with al-Qaida to end American civilization was actually treated as plausible by respected politicians and intelligence officials in Washington.
All of which is to say that the geopolitical situation and indeed the entire world was vastly different in 2002 than it is in 2021. And yet, nearly 20 years removed from the Iraq War vote that would linger over the heads of lawmakers for years on end, the law itself is still on the books along with a 60-word authorization passed a year earlier which gives the president a near-blank check authority to use force wherever and whenever he wishes.
For the executive branch, the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs are gifts that keep on giving — invoked as legal justification for successive military actions against targets far removed from the laws’ original intent. The 2001 AUMF, crafted to provide the Bush administration with statutory authority to decimate al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, has been cited dozens upon dozens of times across four consecutive administrations in countries as far away as the Philippines and Georgia. The entire situation is eerily reminiscent of an 18th century monarchy, where the king decides to thrust his forces into a conflict and the powerless commoners on the sidelines merely nod in agreement.
The difference, of course, is that the U.S. Congress is not a powerless, rubber-stamp body that meets every so often to put their symbolic signature on a presidential action. Far from it: it’s an independent and co-equal branch of government that, according to the U.S. Constitution, is the ultimate authority of when and where the United States goes to war.
It has taken years of executive branch overreach for lawmakers to come to grips with a disturbing reality: On debates over war and peace, Congress has essentially neutered itself. The predominant opinion on Capitol Hill is not one of skepticism of military action, but reticence of second-guessing the commander-in-chief (of course, on the perverse flip-side, Congress as an institution is more than willing to second guess a president if it means gumming up the works on getting out of a 20-year conflict).
It often takes an act of such egregiousness and stupidity to shock Congress into action. Saudi Arabia’s premeditated murder of dissident writer Jamal Khashoggi in the fall of 2018 was a key motivator for the War Powers Resolution passed less than seven months later rescinding U.S. military support to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen (Trump would quickly veto the resolution). If it weren’t for Khashoggi’s grisly killing, it’s an open question as to whether this resolution would have been debated at all.
Fortunately, there are lawmakers in the rank-of-file of both parties who care about these issues. Reps. Barbara Lee, Ro Khanna, and Matt Gaetz in the House and Sens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Jeff Merkley in the Senate have been trying to educate their colleagues on the necessity of curtailing the executive’s stranglehold over war powers.
Reps. Khanna and Andy Biggs created the War Powers Caucus in June 2019 to advocate for Congress’s constitutional role in the war-making process. On some occasions, the efforts have made progress. In 2019 and 2020, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the 2002 AUMF against Iraq, both on a bipartisan basis. Last July, the House Appropriations Committee tucked a repeal of the 2002 AUMF into the defense spending bill, this time on a party-line vote. Unfortunately, none of those efforts passed the full Congress, with each attempt either killed or bottled up by Senate Republican leadership.
Most people agree on the problem. But if nobody can agree on a solution, the problem merely festers. And therein lies the real issue: cobbling together a bipartisan solution that encompasses the views of progressives, moderates, and classic interventionists on a subject as controversial as war powers has been as difficult as herding cats.
The Obama administration tried to add a sense of urgency to the issue by issuing a draft AUMF for the war against the Islamic State and encouraging Congress to revisit the original 2001 resolution. Yet the White House received resistance in the Senate almost immediately.
Proponents of AUMF reform face two main challenges: First, a general reluctance on Capitol Hill about crossing the commander-in-chief during a time of perpetual war, and second, extreme fear of taking a consequential vote.
We can talk about the details of what a replacement AUMF would look like, including how narrow what the specific objectives would be, how long the authority would last, which countries are covered, and how often the White House would be required to brief Congress on the particulars of a mission. But the sad truth is that until the atmosphere changes, it will be extraordinarily difficult for the fiercest and most committed AUMF-reform advocate to cross the finish-line.
Secession is the natural right of all people, and can only be successfully achieved by individual dissolution from the state. It cannot be successful through any political process or voting that aims to amend the governing system into another form of government. Past history has certainly shown this to be the case. For if eliminating all government power leads to individual freedom, then rebuilding another governing structure that allows for certain powers over the people by the political class will only end in more tyranny.
The elimination of the dollar by the people is of vital importance, because the plan of the global power heads is to replace the dollar with digital currencies that can be completely controlled by the technocrats. Once in place, everyone will be able to be controlled, and all assets can be turned on or off based on behavior.
“Despite the popular idea of anarchists as violent men, Anarchism is the one non-violent social philosophy.… The function of the Anarchist is two-fold. By daily courage in non-cooperation with the tyrannical forces of the State and the Church, he helps to tear down present society; the Anarchist by daily cooperation with his fellows in overcoming evil with good-will and solidarity builds toward the anarchistic commonwealth which is formed by voluntary action with the right of secession.”
~ Ammon Hennacy. “The Book of Ammon,” (First published 1954 by Fortkamp)
Speaking of secession to the general population brings out first the idea of civil war, slavery, killing, and failure. This is the exact opposite of how secession should be viewed, but in the common American psyche, this is what has been purposely taught and mostly accepted by the masses. The attitude toward breaking away from tyrannical rule is therefore tainted; not by accident, but by design. The ruling class will always and forever defend aggressively against any separation from their rule, because they fully understand that secession is meant as a way for the people to protect their liberty from those in power that would strive to destroy it. While it is a simple concept, it is vastly misunderstood, and is certainly the only way to achieve true freedom. Perception in most cases leads to reality, so a change in perception about the moral right to be free is necessary in order to understand that the state is the enemy of the people.
Secession is the natural right of all people, and can only be successfully achieved by individual dissolution from the state. It cannot be successful through any political process or voting that aims to amend the governing system into another form of government. Past history has certainly shown this to be the case. For if eliminating all government power leads to individual freedom, then rebuilding another governing structure that allows for certain powers over the people by the political class will only end in more tyranny. That is why states seceding through the political process, but retaining political power at the state level will naturally fail. When people decide to separate from what is referred to as the “Union,” a further separation is mandatory if true liberty is to be won and sustained. This is why I have always advocated for total secession, even if incremental in its initial advancement, so that the final result would be that the people themselves actually control their own destiny.
The secession that occurred during the American Revolution did not go nearly far enough, for soon following the breaking away from the British Crown, the states formed a union that set up a centralized governing system, a system that was granted massive powers, and that proceeded to reduce freedom over the course of our history. The Southern fight for independence was bold and a great start, but the central government that had been built was able to defeat the idea of freedom by murdering American citizens in order to retain total power. This is why secession or removing government power can only be accomplished with individual unity, so that the resulting system does not allow for any central government, or any government that can claim authority over any individual.
To achieve today actual freedom from rule would be difficult in that the people have over time given total and complete power to this evil monster called the U.S. government. It controls at every level, including the very important matter of controlling all money and monetary policy. This allows the government to control the economy, and thereby control all people. In order to start the process of breaking away from government, the most important aspect of gaining freedom will be to take away the government’s power over money and money printing. In order to accomplish this, the masses must begin to use and print their own money, and refuse to use the state controlled and worthless fiat currency. Once again, this has to be done at the individual level by acting in concert with one another. Therefore, the division amongst this terribly confused population must be remedied so that we work together instead of against each other. This does not have to be universal, as smaller bands of people all around the country can make great advances in order to separate from the current system.
The requirements to gain freedom through distancing ourselves from government will necessarily mean that going back to a more fundamental lifestyle, at least temporarily, will have to take place. Our use and production of money will need to change, and our production and distribution of untainted and natural food will have to take precedent over this current system. Food quantity and quality are being manipulated and controlled by the very government and its corporate partners interested in population control (eugenics) through starvation, and the replacement of natural products with GMO alternatives controlled by the same claimed governing ‘elites’ that wish to control humanity. Personal farming, good seed stocks, local farmer’s markets, and less dependence on big agriculture will go a long way in protecting the health and minds of Americans.
The elimination of the dollar by the people is of vital importance, because the plan of the global power heads is to replace the dollar with digital currencies that can be completely controlled by the technocrats. Once in place, everyone will be able to be controlled, and all assets can be turned on or off based on behavior. Social scores will take on a whole new meaning, and a robot-like society, think transhumanism, will be created and can be sustained due simply to the state’s control of all assets of value, including money. Setting up many different private money systems of exchange, barter, and secure digital as well, all through voluntary participation, will allow for the people to gain control for themselves instead of relying on the corrupt and manipulated central banking federal system of money printing. By moving away en masse from this criminal government monetary system, the possibility of gaining independence escalates dramatically, and with more individual power concerning money, other aspects of freedom will naturally fall into place.
The end of currencies will take place when the direct control of money by central banking digitized systems is achieved. These plans are already being created, and are also being telegraphed in order to desensitize the public so that mass acceptance is more likely. If this critical stage is reached, there will be little if any ability to forestall the complete takeover of humanity.
So many other factors to consider in any quest for freedom are of great importance so that people can retain control of their body, minds, and of their very lives. It is vital to remember that everything that happens in government is planned in advance, is intentional, and is meant to achieve very nefarious agendas. This completely fraudulent Covid-19 scam was plotted for at least twenty years, and false virus pandemics as a way to control the general populace have been in play for decades. Therefore, ‘vaccines,’ biosecurity measures, surveillance, injectable operating systems that alter RNA and DNA, immunity passports, and restrictions at every level must be avoided at all costs. People must deny government mandates, must not comply with state orders, must not wear dehumanizing masks, and must attempt aggressively to do whatever is necessary to protect individual sovereignty.
In order to save us from certain slavery, secession is the answer to eliminating the massive power that has been attained by this horrendous government. Instead of considering secession as an impossibility due to the complicated nature of going about gaining independence through the state political process, consider simply the idea of removing all support for government and its edicts individually. All should be based on individual unity, as our numbers are incredibly large, and their numbers are incredibly small. Say no to every government order; get away from their money and monetary system at every opportunity. Refuse to obey mandates, protect your health and immune systems, refuse any injection of poison, open up every business in this country, and defend your freedom by whatever means necessary. That is the way to regain American integrity, and to stop this planned oppression and takeover of humanity.
“An anarchist is someone who doesn’t need a cop to make him behave. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation with the right of secession. The individual or the family or the small group as a unit instead of the State.”
~ Ammon Hennacy. “The Book of Ammon,” (First published 1954 by Fortkamp)
No more tubes forced down the throat (intubation). No more liquid feeding tubes. No more damage to the lung from positive pressure ventilators. Patients able to communicate freely, drink through a straw and eat solid food with assistance (spoon feeding). I’ve said it many times, we ought to go back to the iron lung if we are going to end up with scarred lungs from positive pressure ventilators.
There’s a news story about a US military convoy entering Syria being shared around social media with captions claiming that President Biden is already “invading” Syria which is getting tons of shares in both right-wing and left anti-imperialist circles. The virality of these shares has inspired clickbait titles like “Joe Biden Invades Syria with Convoy of US Troops and Choppers on First Full Day as President“, which are being shared with equal virality.
But if you read the original report everyone jumped on, accurately titled “US military convoy enters northeast Syria: report”, you don’t have to read too far to get to this line: “Other local media report that such maneuvers are not unusual as the US often moves transfers equipment between Iraq and Syria.”
So while this is a movement of troops between illegitimate military occupations which have no business existing in either country, it is nothing new and would have been happening regardless of which candidate had won the last US presidential election.
Another inaccurate narrative that’s gone completely viral is the claim that Biden is sending more troops to Iraq. This one traces back to a single Twitter post by some Trumpy account with the handle “@amuse” who shared a Jerusalem Post article with the caption “BREAKING: President Biden is considering reversing Trump’s drawdown in Iraq by adding thousands of troops to combat growing terror threats in the region as evidenced by Thursday’s attack near the US embassy.”
If you read the actual JPost article titled “Baghdad bombing could be the Biden admin’s first challenge” you will see that it contains no such claim, and if you were to search a bit you would find @amuse claiming that they were sharing something they’d learned from “sources” in DC instead of accurately summarizing the contents of the article. Unless you know this person and know them to be consistently trustworthy, there is no valid reason to believe claims allegedly said by alleged anonymous sources to some openly partisan anonymous account on Twitter.
But the bogus tweet was amplified by many influential accounts, most notably by Donald Trump Jr with the caption “Getting back into wars on the first full day. The Swamp/War Inc. is thrilled right now.” Its virality then caused it to work its way outward to dupe many well-meaning anti-imperialists (myself included until I looked into it) who are vigilant against Biden’s notorious warmongering, and now there’s a widespread narrative throughout every part of the ideological spectrum that Biden is escalating warmongering in both Syria and Iraq.
It is entirely possible–probable even–that reliable warmonger Joe Biden will end up sending more US troops to Iraq and Syria at some point during his administration. But if the antiwar community keeps staring at the movement of ground troops with hypervigilant intensity, they won’t be paying enough attention to the areas where the more deadly aspects of Biden’s hawkishness are likely to manifest.
Donald Trump is the first president in modern history did not start a new war.
Rather than a throwback to “new wars” and the old-school ground invasions of the Bush era, the warmongering we’ll be seeing from the Biden administration is more likely to look like this. More starvation sanctions. More proxy conflicts. More cold war. More coups. More special ops. More drone strikes. More slow motion strangulation, less ham-fisted overt warfare.
It is certainly possible that Biden could launch a new full-scale war; the empire is in desperate straits right now, and it could turn out that a very desperate maneuver is needed to maintain global domination. But that isn’t the method that it has favored lately. The US empire much prefers nowadays to pour its resources into less visible acts of violence like economic siege warfare and arming proxy militias; the Iraq invasion left Americans so bitter toward conventional war that any more of it would increase the risk of an actual antiwar movement in the United States, which would be disastrous for the empire. So rather than tempt fate with the bad publicity of flag-draped coffins flying home by the thousands again imperialism is now served up with a bit more subtlety, with the military playing more of a backup role to guard the infrastructure of this new approach.
It appears clear that this would be the Biden administration’s preferred method of warmongering if given the choice based on who’s going to be in it. The incoming Secretary of State Tony Blinken now advocates replacing the old Bush model of full-scale war with “discreet, small-scale sustainable operations, maybe led by special forces, to support local actors”. Biden’s nominee for CIA Director William Burns urged caution in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion and later expressed regret that he didn’t push back against it. Rather than picking bloodthirsty psychopath Michele Flournoy for Defense Secretary as many expected, Biden went with the less cartoonishly evil Raytheon board member Lloyd J. Austin III. All this while depraved coupmonger Victoria Nuland is being added to the administration and the murderous Venezuela coup is folded into its policy.
Nominee to lead State Department Tony Blinken recently explained that Biden’s pledge to “end the forever wars” means the US will reduce large-scale deployments while expanding secret wars waged by special forces and proxies.
Too much of the antiwar community is still stuck in the early 2000s. The western war machine just doesn’t generally kill that way anymore, and we need to adjust our perspectives if we want to address the actual murderousness as it is actually showing up. If you keep looking out for obsolete ground invasions, you’re going to miss the new form of warmongering completely.
Trump supporters who claim to oppose war missed this completely throughout the entirety of his presidency, confining the concept of “war” solely to its most blatant iterations in order to feel like their president was a peacemaker instead of a warmonger. One of the few positive developments that could potentially arise from the Biden administration is helping such people to recognize acts of violence like starvation sanctions as war, since they will be opposing Biden and that is how this new administration will be manifesting much of its murderousness.
The political/media class likes to keep everyone focused on the differences between each president and his immediate predecessor, but we can learn a whole lot more by looking at their similarities. Biden’s warmongering is going to look a lot like Trump’s–just directed in some different directions and expressing in slightly different ways–despite all the energy that has been poured into painting them as two wildly different individuals. Once you see beyond the partisan puppet show, you see a single oligarchic empire continuing the same murderous agendas from one sock puppet administration to the next.
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But just as President Biden proclaimed that “America is back” at his inauguration, the rest of the world could see that “regime change is back” as the cornerstone of US foreign policy. Suddenly Assad faces the prospect of a new war against him and his secular leadership and the Russians see a direct threat of a jihadist resurgence masquerading as a “democracy movement” in Syria… and beyond.
But wait…there’s more! After re-igniting the totally failed “regime change” policy in Syria, the incoming Biden Administration reignited the also utterly failed – and perhaps far more dangerous – “regime change” policy in Russia!
Say what you will about President Biden’s foreign policy team, they’re no slouches. Biden had not been president for one full day when a convoy full of military equipment and a reported hundreds of US troops rolled (illegally) into Syria from Iraq.
Readers will recall that it was the Obama/Biden Administration that came up with the brilliant idea that funding, arming, training, and equipping jihadists and terrorists in the Middle East would be a terrific way of bringing democracy to Syria.
As Syrian president Bashar al-Assad faced defeat at the hands of US-backed rebels (often, as with al-Nusra Front, affiliated with al-Qaeda) and ISIS, he in 2015 formally requested Russian assistance. Facing the prospect of al-Qaeda and ISIS on its doorstep if they succeeded in Syria, Russia accepted the request and Assad was able to slowly regain much of Syrian territory.
The hysterical warnings that Assad would genocide his people if he re-took control of the major cities proved to be all hot air – or more likely just pure war propaganda.
The US retained military control of parts of Syria, predominantly Kurdish areas, and proceeded to help itself to the Syrian oil in those areas. Though President Trump did order two attacks on Syria in response to bogus charges that Assad gassed his own people, he more or less gave up on the Obama/Biden “Assad must go” policy. Or at the least he was less enthusiastic about it than the neocons he put in charge of Middle East policy.
But just as President Biden proclaimed that “America is back” at his inauguration, the rest of the world could see that “regime change is back” as the cornerstone of US foreign policy. Suddenly Assad faces the prospect of a new war against him and his secular leadership and the Russians see a direct threat of a jihadist resurgence masquerading as a “democracy movement” in Syria… and beyond.
But wait…there’s more! After re-igniting the totally failed “regime change” policy in Syria, the incoming Biden Administration reignited the also utterly failed – and perhaps far more dangerous – “regime change” policy in Russia!
Four years of the US mainstream media relentlessly parroting the bogus “Russiagate” narrative has resulted in many if not most Americans still believing the utterly shredded conspiracy theory that somehow former President Trump was an agent of Vladimir Putin and that the Russians were conspiring to impurify our precious bodily fluids.
With the anti-Russia hysteria still – incredibly – at a fever pitch, imagine what would have happened if it came out that the Russian Embassy in Washington had posted information that made it easier for the perpetrators of the January 6th “melee at the Capitol” to launch their “insurrection” (or…as Schumer calls it),
Anybody doubt the war drums would be at a fever pitch, particularly from the Democrat and mainstream media circles?
But that is just what the US Embassy in Moscow did for the violent anti-government protests in Russia yesterday. Though Washington has long wanted to crown the deeply unpopular Alexei Navalny the Juan Guaido of Russia, taking down the Russian government has unsurprisingly proven a bit more tricky than Hillary Clinton’s overthrow of the democratically-elected president of Honduras.
But the US Embassy, Moscow, is never discouraged by its failures. Under the guise of warning US citizens to avoid the planned demonstrations across Russia, the US Embassy published on its website all of the specific locations of the protests and the times they were to take place.
The US posting even included a strangely familiar helpful mention of a planned “march towards the Kremlin” – sounds like the “march on the Capitol” on the infamous 1/6 “insurrection day.”
Unsurprisingly, Russian officials were not amused over US officials encouraging an unauthorized protest in Moscow just a few days after those same US officials were calling for the identification and arrest of Americans participating in an unauthorized protest in the US Capitol.
Hypocrisy has always been the central organizing principle of US interventionist foreign policy. And boy it is back in vogue these days!
Oh, and the neocon buffoon Juan Guaido? The Biden Administration has announced that it will continue Trump’s boneheaded policy of recognizing the corrupt (and unelected) Venezuelan politician as that country’s legitimate president.
Plus ça change…
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Sincerely yours,
Daniel McAdams Executive Director Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
