MOA—The Agregados Policiales de América Latina (APALA) is supposed to fight international organized crime in Latin America. It is curiously hosted in Washington DC. These police and military men cooperated with a racist Christian-fascist multi-millionaire to bring Morales down. Morales had clearly won a fourth term in the the October 20 elections. The vote count was confusing (pdf) because it followed the process defined by the Organization of American States.

On November 11, following victory in the October 20 presidential election and a vicious right-wing coup attempt, President Evo Morales resigned. Signs that a coup would occur if Morales won re-election surfaced before the election took place. Violent groups burnt buildings of Morales’ MAS (Movement Toward Socialism) Party and tried to cause chaos in the streets. Immediately after the election, coup-supporters claimed there was election fraud without evidence to support the claim.

NINO PAGLICCIA—In the meantime another opposition figure came to the forefront with his mission to create enough political division, but the division may also be along the race line in the Bolivian society. After all Evo Morales has been the first indigenous president in Bolivia. This is a very significant factor in a region where the indigenous population has been decimated and oppressed for the last 500 years. Luis Fernando Camacho is a white wealthy lawyer from Santa Cruz who has accused Morales of being a “tyrant” and a “dictator”, not unlike Juan Guaidó in Venezuela.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—James Le Mesurier, the founder of the White Helmets, has died. He was found to have plummeted from a height to the street outside his home, and authorities are reportedly calling it a suicide. Le Mesurier has a history with British military intelligence and was fundamentally involved with an extremely shady narrative management operation geared toward manufacturing support for yet another imperialist military intervention in yet another Middle Eastern nation, so obviously any claims of suicide should be taken with a grain of salt no smaller than a Buick.

FRED REED—He probably thinks of Mexicans as just gardeners and rapists and we have all these beautiful advanced weapons and beautiful drones and things with blinking lights. A pack of rapists armed with garden trowels couldn’t possibly be difficult to defeat by the US. I mean, get serious: Dope dealers against the Marines? A cakewalk. You know, like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That sort of cakewalk. Let’s think what an expedition against the narcos would entail, what it would face. To begin with, Mexico is a huge country of 127 million souls with the narcos spread unevenly across it. You can’t police a nation that size with a small force, or even with a large force. A (preposterous) million soldiers would be well under one percent of the population. Success would be impossible even if that population helped you. Which it wouldn’t.

EDITOR’S NOTE—Orwell is frequently quoted—even by sharp political observers like MoA’s editor—as a visionary in matters of propaganda, but he was also himself an early convert to the Western anti-communist postwar disinformation effort.

PAUL FRENCH—In folk tales tigers kill bad men and protect the virtuous. Those born in the Year of the Tiger are thought to be brave, strong, stubborn and sympathetic. The body parts of a tiger are believed to bestow energy, courage and strength, and their use in traditional medicine has speeded the population’s decline. Tigers are now extinct in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, with perhaps two dozen remaining in Myanmar and an unknown number in Thailand’s Kayah Karen Tenasserim ecoregion, all thought to be Panthera tigris tigris.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—As happens every single time the US tries to overthrow a government these days, social media is currently swarming with small, brand-new and suspicious-looking accounts, many of which are publishing the same words verbatim, all defending and supporting the coup.

MAS—During the entire day of November 11, the coup plotters put the lives of our leaders Evo and Álvaro at serious risk, first with public threats from police to proceed with operations to stop them and then with the closure of our air space, through administrative obstacles of the Bolivian Air Force, preventing the entry of the Mexican airplane that came to pick them up.

The Bolivian people are living terrible moments, with policemen and motorcyclists creating panic in the streets and with the military high command deciding to attack the people in the name of pacification, even preventing personalities, church and politicians from finding constitutional and democratic solutions to the crisis we are facing.

MICHAEL RECTENWALD—Much like Jordan Peterson, my tipping point involved the pronoun wars, although, as you’ll see, I enjoyed a more satirical approach. When the University of Michigan instituted a policy that offered students a carte blanche pronoun preference opportunity, a clever student offered “His Majesty” as his chosen pronoun, and his blasphemous pronoun choice made the news. The satirical trope hilariously underscored the absurdity of gender and pronoun proliferation, and the institutional lunacy that has attempted to keep pace with it.

JIM KAVANAGH—The war in Syria continues; we cannot say it has ended until and unless every US soldier and piece of military hardware leave Syria. The residual military presence that the neocons have persuaded Trump to keep in Syria continues to deny the Syria government full control of its own sovereign territory and maintains redoubts from which the rump US and proxy forces threaten the Syrian government—economically for certain, and potentially militarily.