MUST SEE—Trump against empire: is that why they hate him? (Video & Text)

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Christian Parenti • Aaron Maté

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Biden and Trump (Donkey Hotey)

 
Trump was ideologically incoherent and crassly transactional. But the threat he posed to American empire and thus the gargantuan security state helps establish a motive for why US intelligence intervened in both the 2016 and 2020 elections.


As president, Donald Trump lavished the rich with tax cuts and deregulation. Yet, contradictorily, he also threatened the structure of American global hegemony that does so much to keep the American one percent tremendously wealthy. In fact, Trump undertook the most momentous rollback of American military and diplomatic power since the current architecture of American informal empire first took form at the end of World War II.

Trump campaigned on an end to “nation building” and then, amazingly, set about actually winding down America’s “forever wars” by simply packing up and leaving. Nor did he start any new wars. Trump cut the number of US troops in Iraq by almost half. In Afghanistan, he cut the US occupation force by half and negotiated a framework for total withdrawal. He tried to end US combat deployments in both Somalia and Syria, and in both cases, despite Pentagon opposition and slow-walking noncompliance, Trump did manage to withdraw the majority of US personnel. In Syria, bases abruptly abandoned by US special forces were taken over by Russians – a development that prompted the New Yorker to accuse Trump of the “abandonment of Syria.”

Worse yet in the eyes of the national security state, Trump went after US operations in Germany and South Korea, threatening highly strategic lynchpins in the global system of US military power. He also made great strides towards normalizing relations with North Korea and producing a peace treaty on the Korean peninsula. In Libya, he declined to escalate and worked with Russia towards a peace settlement. In Venezuela, he first allowed John Bolton and the CIA to attempt a color revolution-style coup fronted by pretty-boy Juan Guaidó. But when that effort faced resistance Trump grew bored, started making flattering remarks about “tough” Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his “good looking generals,” while complaining that his National Security Council director John Bolton wanted to get him “in a war.”

Understanding how Donald Trump threatened American empire and thus the gargantuan security state and its associated industrial complex of contractors and think tanks helps establish a motive for why the FBI and over 50 former intelligence officialsactively attempted to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, thereby putting their thumbs on the scale during the 2020 election.

It also helps us understand why, in 2016, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and the Director of National Intelligence all signed off on the Russiagate narrative despite the lack of credible evidence. And it helps us understand why, as Matt Taibbi has reported, over 150 private philanthropic foundations came together to create and fund the intelligence-adjacent Alliance for Securing Democracy, which in turn funded the spooky outfit Hamilton 68 which pushed the Russiagate hoax. In short, it helps explain why they hate him.

Trump described his foreign policy as “America First,” thus tapping into a more-than-century-long strain of American isolationism, or conservative anti-war sentiment. But his attacks on American empire were not ideologically coherent. He hated NATO but he loved Israel. He increased pressure in Cuba, but did the opposite with North Korea. He increased the military budget even as he attempted to withdraw troops all over the planet. His reasoning, when given, was crassly transactional.



For example, six months into his administration, Trump met with the increasingly worried Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon in a super-secure meeting room called “the Tank.” The meeting was an attempt to talk sense into the new president. As the Washington Post described it, the Joint Chiefs tried to “explain why U.S. troops were deployed in so many regions and why America’s safety hinged on a complex web of trade deals, alliances, and bases across the globe.” The presentation involved maps and graphics intended to make the issue clear and simple.

oil?”

Accusing Russia of cheating, Trump terminated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. But he also held a cordial face-to-face summit with Putin in Helsinki that took his opposition’s Russiagate paranoia to unprecedented heights. Trump withdrew from the Treaty on Open Skies, an almost 20-year-old mechanism for preventing weapons proliferation. He started to scrap the hard-won nonproliferation treaty with Iran and revised America’s Nuclear Posture Review to, insanely, allow an atomic response in case of cyber-attack!

Most shocking of all, Trump repeatedly expressed his wish to remove the US from NATO, which would have destroyed NATO if it had been done. If NATO fell apart, the entire US-centered global system – that is, the largest, most effective, complex, and expensive imperial project in world history – would undergo a seismic destabilization. American empire is not inevitable, it is not natural, and it is widely resented. It only continues to exist because of constant, diligent, sophisticated leadership. Trump, like a toddler wielding a hammer, spent four years almost randomly smashing holes in that delicate structure.

 

What is American power?

Since 1945, American global hegemony has rested on a vast system of infrastructure: embassies, listening posts, 800-plus military bases, naval assets, satellite networks, undersea cables, etc. It also rests on an array of long-standing, multi-national relationships involving state institutions, politicians, diplomats, military officers, contractors, intelligence networks, corporations, business executives, humanitarian professionals, academic specialists, and journalists.

Central in all this, yet often overlooked, is the role of building consent for American power among allies. This consent allows Washington to use allies against adversaries. But it is also a form of control over those same allies. Thus, NATO is about keeping the Russians out of Western Europe, but it is also about controlling Europe, one of the most powerful centers of global capitalism.

bookThe Making of Global Capitalism:

“The American state, in the very process of supporting the export of capital and the expansion of multinational corporations, increasingly took responsibility for creating the political and juridical conditions for the general extension and reproduction of capitalism internationally….As with the informal regional empire that the US established in its own hemisphere at the beginning of the twentieth century, a proper understanding of the informal global empire it established at mid-century requires… [identifying] the international role of the American state in setting the conditions for capital accumulation.”

Trump, it seems, never understood this big picture stuff. Instead, he saw the raft of relationships, alliances, institutions, and programs that comprise the post-1945 American-led global order as little more than a poorly run security business. Consider his view of NATO:

“I met them last year. Stoltenberg, Secretary General, great guy, of NATO. Big fan. No one was paying their bills. Last year I went, a year ago. We picked up $44 billion. Nobody reports it. I just left recently and we’re going to pick up at least another, close to a $1 billion extra. I said to him, ‘you got to pay your bills.’”

Trump treated powerful allies as poorly as he treated subcontractors during his real estate days. Recall the G-7 summit of 2018: Trump arrived late, left early, and refused to sign a joint communiqué reaffirming the G-7’s commitment to a “rules based international order.” When then-German Prime Minister Angela Merkel pressured him to sign, Trump took two Starburst candies from his pocket, tossed them across the conference table and sneered, “Here, Angela, don’t say I never give you anything.”

In 2020, the US Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations described Trump’s foreign policy as “marked by chaos, neglect, and diplomatic failures.” The President’s “impulsive, erratic approach has tarnished the reputation of the United States as a reliable partner and led to disarray in dealing with foreign governments…. Critical neglect of global challenges has endangered Americans, weakened the U.S. role in the world, and squandered the respect it built up over decades. Sudden pronouncements, such as the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, have angered close allies and caught U.S. officials off-guard.”

Mark Esper, who spent a year and half as Trump’s second Secretary of Defense, made an art of blocking implementation of Trump’s empire-wrecking directives. When Trump demanded that one third of the American military personnel in Germany come home, Esper drew up a plan to instead “redeploy” 11,500 troops with more than half of these remaining in the European theater. Indeed, Esper even managed to spin the redeployment as advancing America’s traditional agenda of threatening Russia.

If, like the majority of DC elites, you see American global leadership as fundamentally moral, even vital and indispensable, then Trump’s brazen attacks upon it are extremely dangerous. From such a vantage point, the truly responsible thing to do would be to sabotage Trump’s policy, his legitimacy, his base, and the possibility of his reelection.

Trump’s foreign policy team worked to actively thwart him. Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic advisor, went so far as twice stealing from the president’s desk important documents awaiting presidential signature. One would have withdrawn the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. The other would have unilaterally pulled the US out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Later, Trump did renegotiate NAFTA, transforming it into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which did, in fact, include higher wages for Mexican autoworkers.

Trump regularly demeaned and insulted his foreign policy team. In a conversation that included the Irish Prime Minister, Trump called across the room to his National Security Adviser, the dementedly bellicose John Bolton, “John, is Ireland one of those countries you want to invade?” In 2019, Trump unceremoniously fired Bolton by tweet.

Trump’s first Defense Secretary, Jim “Mad Dog” Mathis, openly opposed most of the administration’s foreign policy moves. Displeased, Trump started calling Mathis“Moderate Dog.” In January 2019, when Trump ordered US troops withdrawn from Syria, Moderate Dog resigned.

A “shaken” Nancy Pelosi declared the turn of events “very serious for our country.” Republican Senator Ben Sasse called it “a sad day for America” while a “particularly distressed” Mitch McConnell worried openly about “key aspects of America’s global leadership.”

Vandalizing NATO

Most alarming to the national security establishment was Trump’s 2020 attempt to cut by one-third the US military presence in Germany. Considered the “bedrock” of NATO, Germany hosts 35,000 American military personnel stationed across 40 different installations. The air components for both U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command are headquartered at Germany’s Ramstein Air. These German-based assets — bombers, fighters, drones, helicopters, AWAC surveillance planes, as well as associated radar, air traffic control, and signals intelligence infrastructure — cover 104 countries ready to provide “expeditionary base support, force protection, construction, and resupply operations” even in “austere conditions.” Germany also hosts an estimated 150 US nuclear armed missiles.

Surprisingly far-flung US military operations depend on German bases. When American soldiers were wounded by roadside bombs in Iraq, their first stop was a local Combat Support Hospital, but once stabilized the wounded were immediately flown to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at the U.S. Army post in Landstuhl, Germany, near Ramstein Air Base. Yet, in the summer of 2020 Trump ordered the Germany deployment cut by 12,000, or one-third.

fees.”

The redeployment reportedly “blindsided” both German officials and some American military leaders because neither group was properly consulted in the process, nor was there much planning of any sort associated with the momentous move. As already mentioned, Esper did all he could to distort and block Trump’s order.

More important than the quantity of troops Trump sought to withdraw is the qualitatively greater damage of those withdrawals from one of the most critical, high-tech logistics hubs in the entire imperial apparatus. The Council on Foreign Relations worried aloud about the “message to allies and adversaries alike that the United States is no longer committed to European defense.”

Final Assault

By November 2019, as Trump’s friendship with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was in full blossom, the American president started musing about withdrawing troops from South Korea and demanded that South Korea – and all other allies hosting US military personnel – pay “cost plus 50%” for American protection.

As with Germany, the US presence in South Korea is the high-tech fulcrum of a region-wide system of bases, air wings, and naval fleets. American Navy assets in South Korea support the Japan-headquartered US Seventh Fleet which contains 50 to 70 ships, 150 aircraft, and 27,000 Sailors and Marines.

In 2020, Trump announced that he wanted all US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The latter half of Trump’s term also saw the beginning of the end of the Afghan war. Even though it was Biden who presided over the final US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the conditions for that withdraw were negotiated by the Trump administration. American agreement with the Taliban stipulated that US troops would be out of Afghanistan in 18 months, provided that the Taliban fought to contain terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.

Those who dismiss Trump’s treaty with the Taliban do not understand how the US withdrawal from Afghanistan unfolded. While thirteen American soldiers were killed in an Islamic State suicide bombing at the gates of the Kabul airport and the United States left vast amounts of hardware such as Humvees and helicopters – in large part because the Pentagon refused to cooperate until it was too late – had the Trump Administration not reached an agreement with the Taliban, the US withdrawal would have been a desperate fight to escape.

In 2019, Trump momentarily took an interest in the Libya debacle. In typical fashion he started courting Khalifa Haftar, a US-groomed warlord who came to oppose the US and United Nations-backed Libyan “government.” But then, despite considerable pressure from American allies like Turkey, Egypt, and others to commit more resources, Trump backed off and, once again surprising allies, called for a cease fire.

The United States mission in Somalia, which began in 2007, has been described as “a cornerstone of the Pentagon’s global efforts to combat al Qaeda.” Anyone looking at a map can see the country’s strategic importance: at the tip of the Horn of Africa, jutting into the Arabian Sea, not far from the mouth of the Persian Gulf, with a shoreline along one side of the Gulf of Aden which leads north to the Suez Canal. But in early December 2020, Trump (who in a crude display had referred to Haiti and African states as “shithole countries”) pulled the plug, ordering a near total withdrawal of the 700 US special forces, military advisors, and CIA operatives in Somalia.

The view from inside

Put yourself for a moment in the position of people like FBI director Christopher Wray, or his predecessor, James Comey. Looking out upon Trump’s foreign policy vandalism, you would feel deep concern. If, like the majority of DC elites, you see American global leadership as fundamentally moral, even vital and indispensable, then Trump’s brazen attacks upon it are extremely dangerous. From such a vantage point, the truly responsible thing to do would be to sabotage Trump’s policy, his legitimacy, his base, and the possibility of his reelection.

The FBI and the CIA have illegally intervened in domestic politics, historically by targeting left-wing social movements. We know they infiltrated Trump’s 2016 campaign, then worked to paint him as a Russian puppet throughout his presidency. Are we to believe that the intelligence agencies would not and could not have intervened to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump? Or that they would not have attempted to entrap, then hound and severely punish the MAGA that that rioted for several hours at the US Capitol on January 6th 2021? Such a proposition strikes me as ridiculous. Yet, many of my left-wing friends refuse to explore the mounting evidence suggesting that such agencies moved against Trump and his base because they cannot see why the intelligence agencies might have pressing reasons to do so.

But look abroad. Trump threatened the entire system of US global hegemony. He threatened it for different reasons and in different ways than might grassroots, socialist, anti-imperialists, but he threatened US empire nonetheless.


 

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


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The Delusions Of Western Leadership

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ROGER BOYD

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MAR 11, 2024
CBS Blinken Biden


The inability of the West to subjugate Russia, Iran and China creates a challenge to the Western elites’ ontological security, their comfort that their view of the world is a tenable one. The disconnection between external reality and an internal worldview is known as cognitive dissonance and can result in either a positive outcome, a change to the internal worldview to align better with external reality, or a desperate attempt to maintain the internal worldview through the rejection of the new external reality and a construction of increasingly disconnected-from-reality rationalizations that support the threatened worldview.

For over five centuries the Western elites have been increasingly reinforced in a civilizational-supremacism (and an explicit racial supremacism until that became passé) belief system that viewed the West as the height of civilization (“the garden”) and the Rest (”the forest”) as requiring Western tutelage. The ability of a recently derided Russia (“a gas station with nuclear weapons”) to not only withstand Western sanctions but to flourish and gain overwhelming military supremacy in Western-backed Ukraine directly contradicts the Western elite worldview.

To understand where the Western elites are in accepting the new reality we can peruse the pages of their major mouthpiece journals and the work of their bought-and-paid-for academics and public intellectuals. I will regularly cover such work as a way of assessing whether or not the Western elites are still struggling in denial or are showing some ability to move on and accept the new reality.

The war in Ukraine is said to be “Putin’s project” rather than the reality of intervention forced by the 2014 Western-backed fascist coup and the ongoing attempted subjugation and ethnic cleansing of the Donbass. Now that Russia has not collapsed as expected under the massive Western sanctions and foreign exchange reserves theft, a new narrative must be composed of a “weak” Russia. This is what Kolesnikov’s article is all about. He starts with this utter propaganda:

Although it retains market fundamentals, the Russian economy is increasingly dependent on government investment. The military-industrial complex has become the overwhelming driver of this unhealthy and unproductive economy, as the 2024 budget makes clear: military expenditures will be 1.7 times higher even compared with last year’s inflated figures, to reach 25 percent of all spending. Meanwhile, Russian exports, primarily of oil and gas resources, are providing diminishing returns because of the closure of Western markets and discounted sales.

Then Kolesnikov mentions the low Russian birth rate, which it shares with many Western nations, and tries to insinuate that Russian military losses are so high that the combination will lead to a demographic collapse. Given that the level of Russian military losses has been extremely low, as reported by Mediazona here, and that in no way does the Russian government plan for “a future permanent state of war”, Kolesnikov is simply making stuff up. The incredible demographic collapse of Ukraine and the Baltic States is never mentioned.

Then we have pure sophistry, with increases in social spending and preferential treatment for the poor being spun as a bad thing! Only from a Russian oligarchic disciple and Western academic vassal could such tripe spew forth.

One of the scarcest resources, however, is psychological. Unable to satisfy the public’s hunger for peace and normality, the regime has resorted to gigantic social expenditures and preferential treatment for the poor, turning Russia into Putin’s Barbieland. Russian society in turn has been reduced to adapting and surviving, rather than developing

Then he waffles on again to elevate both Nadezhdin and Navalny to a status that they have never enjoyed while ignoring the overwhelming popularity of Putin. The line of people to say goodbye to Navalny was supposedly “enormous”, whatever that means. Even CNN counted the lineup as only “thousands” hardly enormous in a country of 140 million! This man can simply not get his head around the fact that the Russian population hated the oligarchs that Putin tamed, and fully support his intervention in Ukraine to protect the ethnic Russians of the Donbass and the security of the Russian Motherland.

Then there are just reams of garbage about Gaidar being incorrectly “blamed … for destroying the Soviet economy and impoverishing the population” when he was really the true architect of Russia’s success in the author’s estimation! An utter reversal of history by this seeming Gaidar super fan, it seems that he is part of the “Gaidarees” a parallel of the “Swifties”. How dare Putin steal Saint Gaidar’s thunder! How dare Putin unthrone the crook oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky (referred to laughingly as a “tycoon”)! How dare he take back control of the media from the oligarchs! How dare he take actions and change the constitution to reduce the possible influence of foreign funded and foreign born vassals and fifth columnists! How dare Putin act in the best interests of the Russian people and the Russian nation!

The author then falls back on his misrepresentation of Russian losses in Ukraine as he states “The Kremlin now spends human capital profligately, as if it were a mere commodity”, which is yet another utter lie. The Russian tactics in Ukraine have been designed to keep casualties to a minimum while generating huge Ukrainian losses. And oh no, Russia is showing its traditional values - how dare it celebrate family values, as Irish voters have recently in rejecting their elite’s attempts to change the Irish constitution to reject such family values:

To further this goal, the Kremlin continues the fight against same-sex relationships and abortion while promoting “traditional” families. It is no coincidence that Putin declared 2024 the Year of the Family and devoted much of the 2024 presidential address to supporting large families.

a healthy 2.89%, and given Russia’s continued growth in 2024 further healthy gains can be expected; utterly demolishing the author’s economically ignorant assertions.

He finishes with a flurry of delusional copium:

But Russia is defending a dying model of development, one that requires a totalitarian and imperial ideology—and that necessitates using up resources now, including the same old oil and gas.

So this is what the author spent thousands of words of utter tripe to spew out, the ravings of a delusional who is unable to accept the reality of a strong Russia that is only getting stronger while the West only gets weaker. Reflecting the position of the US oligarch class who pay his wages.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/russia-burning-its-futureG


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROGER BOYD is an academic researcher in Geopolitics and Climate Change. Fellow, Balsillie School of International Affairs


Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


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America’s Super-Elite Disconnect

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By SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER

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Editor's Note
For the most part, the "Super Elites" analysed in this article are the "visible ruling class" to the majority of ordinary Americans, as well as most foreigners. Although often very rich, In practice, they are merely members of a new "Mandarin class" sometimes initiating and almost always executing the wishes of the actual ruling class, a far more concentrated and remote —"exclusive"—group of individuals and clans who far outweigh these Mandarins in wealth, power connections, and depth of state penetration. That said, the picture gets blurry quick because many in the Mandarin class inhabit a continuum with their "betters". Indeed they share much of the social acculturation process, values and outlook, of the richer ruling types. And besides intermarriage and a measure of permitted fluidity between different strata also tend to hide the more salient differences between the huge and the merely big, at least in the eyes of the untrained observer. 

America's Super-Elite Disconnect
 

Last month came a fascinating new report from the institute of Scott Rasmussen, founder of the famed Rasmussen Reports polling center. Its aim was to, for the first time, quantitatively define the true ‘elite’ of society, which control most of our social narratives, politics, and general ‘orthodoxy’.

The first-ever survey research defining the characteristics and beliefs of an Elite 1% who are the root cause of political dysfunction in America today.

It has been picked up by a variety of publications, from NYPost:

To Boston Globe, and others:

The full report centered on a members-only webinar presentation by Rasmussen, but the provided PDF file summarizes the most salient survey graphics and point breakdowns.

For those interested, Rasmussen appeared on Newt Gingrich’s podcast to discuss the results, where he eloquently summarized his chief findings, as well as how he first stumbled on them.

The NYPost article summarized the dataset best:

The United States has a wealthy, partisan elite class that’s not only immune from and numb to the problems of their countrymen, but enormously confident in and willing to impose unpopular policies on them.


This is a recipe for disaster.

And this supplemental Newt Gingrich writeup describes just how Rasmussen first got wind of it all:

While doing their two weekly national surveys, Rasmussen and his team noticed an anomaly. Out of every 1,000 or so respondents, there would always be three or four who were far more radical than everyone else. After several months of finding these unusual responses, Rasmussen realized they all shared three characteristics.

The radical responses came from people who had graduate degrees (not just graduate studies), family incomes above $150,000 a year, and lived in large cities (more than 10,000 people per zip code).

What’s more, is that amongst this 1% ‘elite’, there is an even more radicalized subset Rasmussen calls the ‘super-elite’, which are characterized by primarily attending one of twelve identified elite schools:

Gingrich adds:

Charles Murray in his classic work, “Coming Apart,” analyzed zip codes and proved that graduates from “dirty dozen” universities that Rasmussen described, live, work and play in the same zip codes. They are an isolated set and create a “power aristocracy” that has no knowledge of the rest of us – and contempt for most of us. This perfectly explains Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” line.

But more on those later.

First, who are these garden variety 1% elites in question? Rasmussen breaks them down into three prerequisites:

  • Postgraduate degree

  • Make more than $150k per year

  • Live in a densely populated urban area

Their other basics come down as follows, which reveals they are ‘surprisingly young’:

Granted, much of this may come as fairly self-evident to most of us. But the data has rarely been collated in so intuitive and presentable a fashion.

Let’s first look at the actual disparities between the normal population and the elites at the heart of the analysis, before extrapolating that outward.

The first revolves around perceptions of individual freedoms:

Nearly 60% of regular voters believe there is not enough freedom, while only 21% of the elites do so. A shocking nearly 50% of elites believe there is too much freedom, while only 16% of voters think so.

In the Gingrich interview, Rasmussen elaborates on this tack, explaining that many of these haut monde strongly resent how the bellyaching hoi polloi acted during the Covid ‘pandemic’ era, in particular—not only their refusal to mask, but the subsequent consolidation of their anti-vax stance. This deepened the rift between the two sides, with the ‘elites’ further consigning their estranged underclass to the ash pile of entitlement. As always, there is nothing more effective than fear of bodily harm in forging visceral resentment between people.

But the mechanism most strongly behind this fault-line has the following wellspring: 70% of elites trust the government, while only a miniscule less than ~20% of the public does:

Even more staggering is the vast gulf between each side’s trust in the ‘professional class’:

Another:

77% of the elite would impose restrictions on gas, food rationing, etc., due to “climate change”, while 63% of regular voters oppose such measures. In fact, the elite in general roundly support bans of gas-powered vehicles, wood stoves, SUVs, non-essential air travel, and even air conditioning while the vast majority of voters are totally against.

Here’s one of the twelve mentioned universities from which the majority of 1%-ers sprout:

On the topic of institutions, it’s no surprise that the twelve keystone mostly Ivy League schools form a sort of conduit which filters the elite into pedestals of power in society. It’s a well-established pipeline that feeds a narrow, pre-selected segment of society increasingly higher through an ideological purification strainer meant to weed out any pesky nonconforming slip-throughs.

Anyone who’s studied the history of the 20th century’s rise of transnationalist institutions will know that from the early 1900s, cohorts like that of Milner and Rhodes established various programs and fellowships like the ‘Rhodes Scholarship’ precisely for this purpose. Such ‘pipelines’ have pullulated throughout the Western world, and include the modern day grooming lab known as the ‘Young Global Leaders’, of Klaus Schwab’s extraction.

"The CFR article is a burlesque travesty of hypocrisy: it belabors the point about Russia and China’s putative ‘aggression’ and ‘illiberal’ policies—like the Ukraine ‘invasion’—while cretinously ignoring U.S.’ own far more numerous transgressions, invasions, and occupations of various sovereign states, not to mention the current facilitation of full-blown unmitigated genocide in Gaza, for which the U.S. just delivered another huge batch of bombs to Israel as of this writing..."


These institutional programs serve as a winnowing mechanism for the global financial elite to distinguish the candidates with the right genteel pedigrees, sociopathic leanings, philistine and transnationalist compositions in order to find groom-able candidates for future leadership appointments. Take a look at the bonafides of any top globalist leader or policymaker—whether they’re from financial institutions like the ECB, IMF, Federal Reserve, or security organizations like NATO—and you will invariably find longstanding membership or distinctions from the handful of established ‘Old Order’ programs. The unelected cronies, which are in fact hand-selected and appointed by the nameless nomenklatura above, almost always originate from the same small clique.

It’s well known that the top economists, hedge fund directors—for firms like Goldman Sachs, for instance—constitutional lawyers, etc., all originate from this exiguous collective of schools, like Harvard. This is designed to allow the elites to precisely control the small pool of vetted loyalists before inducting them into their rarefied and closely-guarded ranks. It’s a closed loop system, and is central to the regulation of the upper strata which serves as the fabric of the elite’s control mechanism.

When it comes to Rasmussen’s report, it’s clear that the ‘super elite’ serve to become pillars of influence-making in society, acting as the enforcement guardrails to further manage and regulate the interests of the most exclusive managerial class, tied to the old banking families. In short: it’s a well-oiled, highly-selective pipeline which continually funnels the “right people”—ambitious, but malleable and servile to globalist interests—to the top.

Rasmussen’s survey reveals just how out of touch they are with regular society. Given that their milieu remains their own closeted cohort, these people never truly intermingle nor experience the cares or frustrations of the average worker in the street. They exist solely in a parallel simulated reality, which is reinforced for them on a daily basis through the confirmation bias generating engines of leftist social media, and liberal-controlled-and-dominated big tech corporations, which filter society for them like a pair of AR glasses.

The extremes of their out-of-touch stations are witnessed daily, e.g.:

The one seeming contradiction is that these elites predominantly “live in zipcodes exceeding a population density of 10,000 people per square mile.” This misleading implies they live in large cities like New York, where they would in fact be forced to endure daily commingling with the peasantry. In reality, we know they sit entrenched in highly sequestered aristocrats’ quarters within these cities—like the Upper East Side in Manhattan, or Kalorama in D.C. Being shuttled in swank car service to and fro, they rarely deign to cross paths with the commoners for whom they have nothing but contempt, apart from some token quick-grab at the corner coffee-and-bun kiosk to reassure themselves that they’re ‘in touch’ with the slipstream of society.

No better representation of this class has been put to film in recent times than the DeLillo-adapted, Cronenberg-directed Cosmopolis.


In many respects, this is an age-old problem: elites have always existed in parallel societies. However, the advent of digital and social media technologies have allowed them to encase themselves in an ever-impermeable confirmation bias bubble like never before. Listen to interviews with top Washington policymakers, corporate bigwigs, etc., and note how they exclusively mainline the most mainstream corporate publications like WaPo, NYTimes, etc. It becomes its own hermetic self-referencing feedback loop increasingly shut-off from the real outside world of human experience.

As the earlier NYPost article described:

If America is to avoid a tailspin into this toxic feedback loop, its elites will need to step outside their bubble, stop conforming in an effort to blend in with their myopic peers and start addressing the legitimate grievances of their fellow Americans.

This explains such things as the elites’ obsession with climate change, as that is one issue that exists solely ‘on paper’—as an abstraction—and is not realistically felt in the common quarters. The aristos who repeatedly reflect their own shrill echochamber alarmism on this issue get increasingly radicalized, particularly given that—as reported earlier—they put far more store in institutions of authority than the average prole. This results in the calcification of their blind belief in specters like climate change, despite their paying only lip service to it, and not acting accordingly in light of such an existential ‘threat’.

The problem is exacerbated by social ills which create divisions along gender lines, disproportionately giving weight to female-centric concerns, as per the Longhouse theory:

The Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.

Women are naturally wired to be more sympathetic—and thus suggestible—to the social engineering imperatives co-opting the current narrative. Men are being increasingly pushed out from higher education, which means that even among the elites funnelled upward, the stances skew increasingly to the ‘Longhouse’:

 

 

This feminization of the managerial class can be seen from a variety of vantage points:

As everyone is now aware, unmarried women by far make the most disproportionate jump into Democrat Land, as well as increasingly radicalized hyperliberal policies—which reflects in other interesting ways:

As an aside, one X user had a topically cogent comment about the screenshot below:

 

Most of the bluecheck unpacking of the collapsing male college enrollment story focuses on how worrisome it is that these men won't espouse elite political opinions

But one of the most revealing disparities in the Rasmussen survey showed just how out of touch the elites are specifically to economic issues which affect the plebs most—as opposed to the airy abstractions of fringe intellectual culture war issues:

Here you can see that a whopping 82% of elites believe Biden is succeeding on jobs—which by extension means approval of the economy. Only 41% of voters think so.

This is particularly revealing because jobs and the economy are the one lifeblood issue directly felt by regular voters first hand. The elites have little connection to it, as no matter how big or small the unemployment numbers get, they remain secure in their entrenched upper-strata affluent lives.

The last area which Rasmussen says shocked even him, was the question surrounding the elites’ amorality. He found that nearly 70% of the super-elites would be fine with their candidate cheating rather than losing an election. Only a tiny 7% of regular voters harbored such amoral predilections:

Rasmussen said that this project has revealed the scariest single polling number he has seen in nearly 35 years of studying popular opinion. According to his data, 35 percent of the elite 1 percent (and 69 percent of the politically obsessed elite 1 percent) said they would rather cheat than lose a close election. Among average Americans, 93 percent reject cheating and accept defeat in an honest election. Only 7 percent reported they would cheat. -source

This is most stunning if only for the reason that it presents by far the widest margin of difference of any of the other questions. It alone explains many of society’s ills, including how readily the influence-wielding elite were already proven to use their considerable wealth and reach to put a ‘thumb on the scales’ of the 2020 election.

It’s not surprising, then, that this pervasive culture of amorality reflects in all the current narratives leading to the 2024 election:


The above article from Foreign Affairs—the official journal of the Council on Foreign Relations—is particularly emblematic in this regard, specifically because the CFR in many respects represents the 1% super-elite totem pole under discussion. The conclave is made out of not just one particular class—like world leaders—but seeks to network and uniformize the entire fabric of the upper echelon, from business elite, bureaucratic royalty, and even top pop culture influencers like Angelina Jolie, who’s held membership for years.

The article is a testament to exactly the types of hypocrisies inherent to much of the ruling class. They speak of ‘worthy goals’ being pursued via ‘unworthy means’ for the sake of ‘liberal’ and democratic objectives, but the problem is: who decides on these ‘worthy goals’? According to their estimate, toppling a variety of unsavory, or simply ‘incompatible’, leaders around the world was a ‘worthy goal’. But inherent to ‘democracy’ and the very liberal ideals they claim to champion is the citizenry’s democratic approval of such policymaking directions.

In the ‘liberal’ West this tiny consort of elites pass off their own self-serving agendas with phony euphemisms couched as ‘democratic ideals’, when in reality the people have no say in any of it. That’s why this version of ‘liberal democracy’ is nothing more than a counterfeit guise to carry out geopolitical objectives necessary for the continued dominance of the world banking and financial elite.

 

The article is a burlesque travesty of hypocrisy: it belabors the point about Russia and China’s putative ‘aggression’ and ‘illiberal’ policies—like the Ukraine ‘invasion’—while cretinously ignoring U.S.’ own far more numerous transgressions, invasions, and occupations of various sovereign states, not to mention the current facilitation of full-blown unmitigated genocide in Gaza, for which the U.S. just delivered another huge batch of bombs to Israel as of this writing. China and Russia’s elections too have proven far more democratic and ‘liberal’ than that of the phony U.S. electoral ‘production’, which saw an obvious stolen ‘victory’ for a reviled candidate in 2020, or even that of today’s charade of the coordinated invasion of millions of illegals for the purpose of upending another “democratic” election in 2024. The breathless jeremiads of establishment footsoldiers are nothing more than desperate backstops meant to levee and dike the crumbling edifice of their superannuated Old Order.

Just behold the ideals of ‘liberal democracy’ the elites so steadfastly preen about:

 

Who knew Democracy was so complicated?

And ‘liberal’ ideals, which were supposed to stand for personal freedom, are all the rage these days:

In reality, all of these terms and concepts are merely the artifacts of the shibbolethic facade erected to serve the elites’ control paradigm. It all ties back to the subject at hand: the 1% class from Rasmussen’s poll have created a suprapositioned tier of institutions which serve as the The System’s dominance preservation gearwork. The self-referential design is a purposeful ideological enforcement mechanism meant to flue the ‘correct people’ to the top of the pyramid structure, while gate-keeping undesirables not blue-blooded enough for the exclusive soiree.

Ultimately, the author of the Foreign Affairs piece on amorality above, Hal Brands, is a fitting example of this very pipeline. A glimpse of his wiki shows he not only bears the ‘distinguishing’ mark of some Henry A. Kissinger plaudit—precisely the type of Rhodes Scholar pipeline-for-the-elites I spoke of—but that he even attended not one, but two of the 12 ‘chosen’ institutions singled out by Rasmussen:

That makes Mr. Brands the poster child of this insulated elite class. Sitting on their endless plush NGO stipends and sinecures, figures like Brands hack away their lives penning screed after dishonest screed pushing the most radical of globalist agendas for their Olympian coevals, all distantly detached from the lowly concerns of commoners beneath the clouds.

For another exemplary showcase of the disconnect, look no further than this new MSNBC clip about the upcoming barn burner titled White Rural Rage:

For another exemplary showcase of the disconnect, look no further than this new MSNBC clip about the upcoming barn burner titled White Rural Rage:

Naturally, the authors are representative of Rasmussen’s intellectual and affluent beau monde—one of them a political science professor at University of Maryland, the other a WaPo writer and fellow at some beltway NGO-linked ‘foundation’ which incubates precisely the type of establishment flacks in question.

Unfortunately, there is no solution for the societal split. Institutions receiving corporate funding of any kind can be deemed captured, as there are always strings attached. This leaves the only way forward as to shun, desecrate, and vilify any and all institutions so that the break can eventually resolve into a total decoupling from original and authentic society. Once a parallel system is developed, the empty ‘institutions’ of former consequence should desiccate and shrivel into flaky carapaces, to be trampled underfoot like locust crusts.


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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Simplicius The Thinker is the nom de guerre of an slavonic geopolitical and conflict analyst of great depth and insight, "with a dash of the sardonic.  You can support him by pledging here or tipping him at: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/Simplicius

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COUNTER INSURGENCY – US IMPERIALISM GOES TO WAR WITH ITS CITIZENS

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COUNTER INSURGENCY - US IMPERIALISM GOES TO WAR WITH ITS CITIZENS - With Rainer Shea

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WHO rules you? Who decides much of what will happen in your country, in your city, in your life? Here’s a masterful dissection of the ruling elite.

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Garland and Joti Brar unmask the largely hidden face of the ruling elite, a tiny, obscenely rich segment of humanity that uses a "Mandarin class" (corporate execs, politicians, military figures, media flunkies, etc.) to run the world for them. 

 

Meanwhile...as they continue to send munitions and weapons to Israel...

 

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