I want to thank Matt Ehret to pointing out the speeches by Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president and later Secretary of Commerce under Harry Truman, concerning Russia and the threat of a world war, and a cold war.
Although I do not fully agree with Henry Wallace’s arguments, I find his speeches inspiring and think they offer us great potential at this dangerous moment in history. There is also an argument to be made that another world was possible that did not include the Cold War of the 1950s, or the Cold War of 2023 (the second “cold war” works on the basic principle that “Cold Wars repeat: first as tragedy and again as farce”).
The first speech of 1946 was the one that led to President Truman demanding his resignation. The second speech of 1947 was made once he had positioned himself in explicit opposition to the Truman administration. Wallace suggests a “competition of ideas” for mutual benefit that has strong appeal for us today.
The perfect expression of this mentality was when a liberal NYC parent explained his opposition to an integration plan at his kids’ school by saying, “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children.”
Yes, it’s also more complicated when it’s about your own Nazis.
With how the hard-left mainstream media and its allies throw around the terms “Nazis” and “white supremacists,” often applying them to those merely opposing their woke racial agenda, you’d think they wholly despised Nazis and white supremacists. And with the way these establishment guardians seek to cancel anyone thus labeled, you’d think that actually exhibiting the passions in question would be disqualifying anywhere, anytime.
You would think that, that is, if you thought that thought was the issue, if you fancied that principle and not situation-determined priorities governed these self-proclaimed fascism fighters. Since they’re in thrall to feelings, however, it’s not surprising that the Western media have now found actual Nazis they cotton to — in Ukraine.
For seven years, Western institutions have warned about Ukraine’s Azov Movement, which began as a neo-Nazi paramilitary group in 2014 and became notorious for its worldwide recruitment of extremists.
Then came Russia’s invasion. Within months, Azov fighters were being feted in Congress and at Stanford University. MSNBC swooned over a Ukrainian soldier whose Twitter account overflowed with neo-Nazi images. Facebook made the stunning decision to allow posts praising the Azov Battalion, even though the company admitted that it was a hate group.
This overnight normalization of white supremacy was possible because Western institutions, driven by a zeal to ignore anything negative about our Ukrainian allies, decided that a neo-Nazi military formation in a war-torn nation had suddenly and miraculously stopped being neo-Nazi.
But the truth is that this is an easily debunked fantasy spun out by a handful of propagandists. Yet Western media has repeated their falsehoods with a neglect for the basic tenets of journalism that stretches beyond the fog of war into the realm of intentional blindness.
Golinkin buttresses his case with concrete examples of Azov’s neo-Nazi bent and the establishment’s whitewashing of it. As to the latter, he relates that in 2018, “The Guardian had published an article titled ‘Neo-Nazi Groups Recruit Britons to Fight in Ukraine,’ in which the Azov Regiment was called ‘a notorious Ukrainian fascist militia.’ Indeed, as late as November 2020, The Guardian was calling Azov a ‘neo-Nazi extremist movement.’”
Yet by “February 2023, The Guardian was assuring readers that Azov’s fighters ‘are now leading the defence of Mariupol, insisting they have shed their previous dubious politics and rapidly becoming Ukrainian heroes,’” Golinkin continues. This reflects the media’s general conversion on Azov, too.
Several U.S. government agencies have reportedly been hit by a cyberattack while Chinese spies appear to have separately infiltrated hundreds of public and private networks around the world.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in a statement to CNN that the agency was “providing support to several federal agencies that have experienced intrusions affecting their MOVEit applications.”
It was not immediately clear which government agencies had been impacted or who the culprit was, although a “Russian-speaking ransomware group” reportedly claimed credit for the campaign, which targeted other entities around the world.
CISA Director Jen Easterly told MSNBC that the software that was targeted is used by agencies and companies around the world.
A California state senator has urged parents to “flee” the state if they “love their children” in response to what he calls alarming language in a new gender identity bill.
Sen. Scott Wilk (R-Santa Clarita) is one of two lone Republicans on the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee , and has served in the state legislature for 11 years, according to the Daily Signal, who notes that he was the lone voice warning against language in the bill, AB 957, which was amended on June 5 by a Democratic senator to rewrite the state’s Family Code to list “gender affirmation” alongside a child’s need for “health, safety and welfare.”
Rep. Scott Wilk (R)
Under AB 957, introduced by Assemblywoman Lori Wilson (D) and co-authored by Sen. Scott Weiner (D), a parent could lose custody of their child for not “affirming” their claims about gender identity.
“I’m now in year 11 in the state legislature, and all the time we’re proposing policies to protect children. After 11 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to start protecting parents.
That’s just not happening.
I’ve been here and witnessed a full frontal assault on charter schools, taking away parents’ choice in how their children are going to be educated to the detriment particularly of children of color.
In recent years, we have put government bureaucrats between parents, children, and doctors when it comes to medical care—and now we have [AB 957] where if a parent does not support the ideology of the government, [children are] going to be taken away from the home…” -Scott Wilk
“I was born and raised in this state. I love this state, but I’m not going to stay in this state. It’s just too oppressive and I believe in freedom and so I’m going to move to America when I leave the legislature,” Wilk continued.
This, of course, doesn’t mean that the use of marijuana or any other drug is not harmful, dangerous, addictive, immoral, risky, or foolish. It just means that it is none of the government’s business as long as in doing so one doesn’t infringe upon the personal or property rights of others.
It is not the purpose of government to prevent people from engaging in bad habits, risky behavior, or immoral activities; protect people from harmful substances, unhealthy practices, or dangerous activities; or prohibit what people can buy, sell, or consume.
Colorado and Washington were the first two states to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in 2012. Delaware and Minnesota this year joined twenty-one other states and the District of Columbia in legalizing recreational marijuana. This was accomplished in both states by legislation instead of the usual ballot measure.
California was the first state to legalize the medical use of marijuana in 1996. Kentucky this year joined thirty-seven other states and the five U.S. territories in legalizing medical marijuana. This was also achieved by legislation.
The recreational and medical use of marijuana are both illegal in the states of Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
Notwithstanding the states, the federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) with “a high potential for abuse,” “no currently accepted medical use,” and “a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug under medical supervision.” Possessing, growing, transporting, or distributing marijuana is a federal felony, with violations resulting in fines and/or imprisonment. And the Supreme Court, in the case of Gonzales v. Raich (2005), has ruled that the federal government has the authority to prohibit marijuana possession and use for any and all purposes.
New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat not only wants to keep it that way, he believes that the states’ legalizing marijuana is a big mistake. Douthat is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “where he studies American politics, culture, religion, and family life.” He is also a film critic at National Review.
Douthat is distressed that public support for marijuana legalization has climbed. He believes that “marijuana legalization as we’ve done it so far has been a policy failure, a potential social disaster, a clear and evident mistake.”
Legalization “isn’t necessarily striking a great blow against mass incarceration or for racial justice,” nor “is it doing great things for public health.” And of course, marijuana has the risks it has always had: “The broad downside risks of marijuana, beyond extreme dangers like schizophrenia, remain as evident as ever: a form of personal degradation, of lost attention and performance and motivation, that isn’t mortally dangerous in the way of heroin but that can damage or derail an awful lot of human lives.”
A while ago I reported to my readers that for several years the most widely read articles on my website were those presenting the overwhelming evidence that Germany did not start World War II, so striking were the facts from the false narrative we had been told.
Be certain to watch David Irving’s lecture, which is included in Unz’s article and can be found here: https://www.bitchute.com/video/C9z1fCgUn5If/ You will learn from Irving, without doubt by far the best historian of World War II, that there was more damning evidence that Winston Churchill was a war criminal than were the Germans sentenced to death at Nuremberg.
For the most part academic historians are court historians who write feelgood accounts, accounts based more on war propaganda than on documents and facts. Academic historians who are the exceptions, such as A.J.P. Taylor and Harry Elmer Barnes, and tell the truth are “disappeared” as a consequence. In Irving’s case a decades long campaign has been conducted against him for writing history based on the documents rather than repetition of the feelgood narrative.
What it so often comes down to is that in America and the Western world to be a success a person has to ally with an influential interest group and write lies that advance the interest group’s interest. This is the main activity of university faculty. It even affects science. Consider how many physicists and chemists, for example, receive salaries or research grants from the federal government.
Israeli surveillance technology is empowering antidemocratic governments to track journalists and human rights activists. Regulation is virtually nonexistent.
The following is an excerpt from The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (2023, Verso Books). It has been edited for length and clarity.
Griselda Triana is a Mexican journalist, and human rights activist whose husband, Javier Valdez Cárdenas, was slain by a drug cartel on May 15, 2017, in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state. Valdez was the cofounder of the media outlet Riodoce, which investigated corruption and crime, and wrote about the bloody drug war. He paid the ultimate price — a grenade was thrown into his office in 2009. He had received death threats in the months before his murder, but he bravely continued his groundbreaking work despite the threats.
Ten days after his killing, Triana started receiving unexpected text messages on her mobile phone. She had no idea that they were suspicious until almost one year later, when it was discovered that there had been attempts to infiltrate her phone with the Pegasus system, a phone-hacking tool sold by Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, almost certainly by elements within the Mexican state. “Before Javier’s murder I did not know that we were being monitored,” she told me. Javier had never informed her about the possibility of phone hacking, and she presumed that he was taking precautions for his safety. “Javier knew about the risks of reporting criminal activities, but even so he was aware that someone had to document the atrocities of criminal organizations,” she said.
The murder of Valdez devastated Triana. “He was my husband and father of my two children. I was really shocked because Javier didn’t want to leave Sinaloa even though he knew they [the cartels] could kill him.” I asked her why she thought she had been targeted by Pegasus. She said she believed it was because “they thought that by tapping the phones they could get data from various sources of information or listen to calls related to Javier’s crime investigations.” To this day, Triana has never been told by the Mexican state why it spied on her — and there’s been no court case for the man accused of masterminding her husband’s death.
Both the Mexican government and NSO claim that Pegasus is used solely for the purposes of fighting crime and terrorism, but Triana’s case proves that this claim is false. Mexico has been a major testing ground for NSO technology. “The problem is that it has been used to spy on people who do not represent a danger to the country,” Triana said.
After Valdez’s death, Triana moved to Mexico City, where she works as a journalist and activist. The fear has never gone away, however — the feeling of being violated by both her husband’s gruesome death and the state’s intrusion on her communications. “I am afraid every time I visit Culiacán,” she said. “It is something that I have not been able to overcome.”
Israel’s surveillance apparatus is a competitor and ally of Washington’s National Security Agency (NSA), the most powerful eavesdropping network in the world. While outmatched in terms of manpower, Israel has a long history of spying on its closest ally, a fact that does not appear to publicly bother the superpower. Some estimates suggest that around 350 American intelligence officials spend their days spying on Israel. Despite this, the NSA partners with Israel and has passed on data-mining and analytical software. In turn, says a former NSA intelligence official, Bill Binney, Israel transfers this technology to private Israeli companies, which allows them to gather a massive amount of sensitive military, diplomatic, and economic information to be shared with Israeli officials.
This is the frame around which to see the role of NSO Group, the world’s most successful cyber-surveillance company, and other Israeli high-tech outfits. NSO works with the Israeli state to further its foreign policy goals, and is used as an alluring carrot to attract potential new friends. Since its inception, NSO has been funded by a range of global players, including London-based equity firm Novalpina Capital. One of the biggest investors in Novalpina, to the tune of US$233 million in 2017, before NSO was on the company’s books, was the Oregon state employees’ pension fund. In 2019 pension money for the British gas provider Centrica was also invested in Novalpina.
Former Haaretz tech reporter Amitai Ziv, who has done some of the most insightful work uncovering NSO, told me that the power of NSO is not in the money that it makes but in diplomacy: “When Israel is selling cyber-surveillance to some African country, they can assure their vote at the United Nations. Since there’s an occupation, we need the votes.”
“The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation,” reads the report.
The US Government has been purchasing troves of information on American citizens from 3rd party data providers, according to Wired, which cites privacy advocates who say this constitutes a “nightmare scenario.”
The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago.
The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans’ lives are described soberly and at length by the director’s own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members. -Wired
“This report reveals what we feared most,” according to attorney Sean Vitka of the Demand Progress nonprofit. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.”
The government has been using ‘craven interpretations of aging laws’ to bypass privacy rights, as prosecutors have increasingly ignored limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance.
“I’ve been warning for years that if using a credit card to buy an American’s personal information voids their Fourth Amendment rights, then traditional checks and balances for government surveillance will crumble,” according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).
During a March 8 hearing, Wyden pressed Haines to release the panel’s report – after Haines said it should “absolutely” be read by the public. On Friday, that’s exactly what happened after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released it amid a battle with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) over various related documents.
“This report makes it clear that the government continues to think it can buy its way out of constitutional protections using taxpayers’ own money,” said EPIC law fellow, Chris Baumohl. “Congress must tackle the government’s data broker pipeline this year, before it considers any reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” he said (referring to the ongoing political fight over the so-called “crown jewel” of US surveillance, per Wired).
The ODNI’s own panel of advisers makes clear that the government’s static interpretations of what constitutes “publicly available information” poses a significant threat to the public. The advisers decry existing policies that automatically conflate, in the first place, being able to buy information with it being considered “public.” The information being commercially sold about Americans today is “more revealing, available on more people (in bulk), less possible to avoid, and less well understood” than that which is traditionally thought of as being “publicly available.”
Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device’s location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge’s sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.” -Wired
What’s more, the report notes that it’s relatively easy to “deanonymize and identify individuals” based on data that was originally been anonymized prior to its commercial sale. According to the report, the data can do things like “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records,” posing serious civil liberty concerns over how “large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations.”
The report goes on to say that in times past, access to sensitive information about a person was part of a “targeted” and “predicated” investigation. That’s no longer the case.
“Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, [commercially available information] includes information on nearly everyone,” it reads, adding that both the “volume and sensitivity” of information available for the government to purchase has exploded in recent years thanks to “location-tracking and other features of smartphones” as well as the “advertising-based monetization model” that underpins much of the internet.
According to the ODNI, this data “in the wrong hands” could be used against Americans “facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming” – all offenses that have been committed by intelligence agencies and the White House in the past.
“The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation,” reads the report.
A horrific turn of events unfolded in Texas when Waco Police officers, responding to a 911 call, arrived at the wrong address and fatally shot an innocent couple’s dog. Bodycam footage of this gross incompetence has been released by the Waco Police, which provides a harrowing view of the entire incident.
The act of puppycide occurred when the police dispatch system unwittingly autocorrected the original address reported in the 911 call—from the 3200 block of North 20th A Street to North 20th Street—sending officers to the wrong home. A tragic case of technology failing humanity at a critical moment.
Finn, the victim of this egregious error, was a black Labrador owned by the innocent residents Cassandra Page and Matt Vasquez. The officers claimed the dog “acted aggressively” and lunged at them, a statement the distraught couple adamantly disputes.
The bodycam footage presents two perspectives. The video captures how the officers, without knowing if a suspect was present or armed, approached the house and came across several dogs.
Following their standard protocol, the officers announced their arrival, and, shortly afterward, were confronted by multiple dogs. One officer claimed Finn lunged at him twice, provoking him to discharge his weapon. The footage also shows the second officer tasing one of the dogs.
In the aftermath of this tragic event, the officers interacted with a shocked Cassandra Page, explaining their monumental blunder, offering an apology, and assuring her that it was a case of mistaken location.
“We got a call that someone was breaking and entering,” the officer says. “Your door was wide open. It doesn’t look good in our situation. That’s why we’re here.”
The officer then informs Page that he shot Finn.
“The dog charged me, so I shot it,” the officer says.
“You shot my dog?” Page asks. “With a gun?”
Page then runs over to Finn, and screams when she finds him.
By the time Matt Vasquez rushed home after receiving Page’s frantic call, Finn was en route to an emergency animal clinic. Tragically, due to Finn’s age and the severity of his injuries, he couldn’t be saved.
Upon realizing their error, the Waco Police Department extended their sympathies, offering to cover Finn’s veterinary expenses, and pledged to conduct an internal investigation. They have issued an apology for the incident and promised to “work diligently” to rectify the root cause of the location discrepancy to prevent a recurrence of such heartbreaking incidents.
While these actions are appreciated, they can never compensate for the loss of Finn, a casualty of a tragic miscommunication and a grim reminder of how even minor errors can lead to devastating outcomes.
Space Force veteran Lt. Col Matt Lohmeier — who was relieved of command after he said on a conservative podcast that Marxism was infiltrating the U.S. military — argued in a tweet that Burt had actually done what he was fired for doing.
“I was once fired from command in the @SpaceForceDoD for allegedly ‘being politically partisan while acting in an official capacity.’ That allegation was totally false,” he said. “Lt. Gen. Burt here demonstrates what being politically partisan while acting in an official capacity really looks like.”
This person is in command of nukes floating over your head. Feeling safer?
United States Space Force Lt. Gen. DeAnna M. Burt admitted during a recent Department of Defense (DoD) LGBTQ+ PRIDE event that she would allow access to “gender-affirming care” to take priority over qualifications when assigning officers.
Burt referenced several states that have passed laws banning transgender surgeries — and in some cases, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones — for minors, and said that while she would normally consider job performance and qualifications before selecting officers for certain jobs, she had to also consider whether her troops and their families would feel safe in those assignments.
“Transformational cultural change requires leadership from the top, and we do not have time to wait,” Burt began. “Since January of this year, more than 400 anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been introduced at the state level. That number is rising and demonstrates a trend that could be dangerous for service members, their families, and the readiness of the force as a whole.”
“When I look at potential candidates, say for Squadron command, I strive to match the right person to the right job,” she continued, adding, “I consider their job performance and relevant experience first. However, I also look at their personal circumstances, and their family is also an important factor. If a good match for a job does not feel safe being themselves and performing at their highest potential at a given location, or if their family could be denied critical health care due to the laws in that state, I am compelled to consider a different candidate, perhaps less qualified.”
MCViewPoint 
