CORPORATE OWNED PARTIES

CJ HOPKINS—Go back and read those quotes from the German Interior Ministry and the DHS again slowly. The message they are sending is unmistakeably clear. It might not seem all that new, but it is. Yes, they have been telling us “we are being attacked” and denouncing critics, protesters, and dissidents for twenty years (i.e., since the War on Terror was launched in 2001, and for the last four years in their War on Populism), but this is a whole new level of it … a fusion of official narratives and their respective official enemies into a singular, aggregate official narrative in which dissent will no longer be permitted. Instead, it will be criminalized, or it will be pathologized.

ERIC ZUESSE—Le Pen is the daughter of the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen, but after taking over leadership of the far-right Party that he had founded, she expelled him from it, and has made increasingly clear, since then, that she is a progressive (including a passionate opposition to any imperialism) — so much so that now the Wikipedia article on her, in its section “Political Positions”, presents political viewpoints that would be hard to distinguish from those of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders in America, and of Jeremy Corbyn in UK. The biggest difference, perhaps, between her and those other progressives, is simply that whereas in U.S. and UK the dominant political ideology is imperialist-fascist (springing from the Englishman Cecil Rhodes in the late 19th Century), that’s not so in France. (Twentieth Century France had nothing like Cecil Rhodes — a leading and impassioned champion of racist aristocratic rule.) Consequently, French public opinion isn’t as hostile toward progressivism as is the case in U.S. and UK.

GLENN GREENWALD—In a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Yale Law School’s constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld warned that Congress is rapidly approaching this constitutional boundary if it has not already transgressed it. “Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats,” the duo wrote, “Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.” Added: Deleted: That article compiled just a small sample of case law making clear that efforts to coerce private actors to censor speech implicate core First Amendment free speech guarantees.

In this video Caleb discusses the origins of liberalism and individualism as a progressive development in the 17th and 18th centuries, essential parts of the anti-feudal capitalist revolutions, and their eventual ideological degeneration as capitalism itself became dialectically obsolete and an obstacle to human progress.

ERIC ARNOW—WHEREIN our colleague and friend, Eric Arnow, provides a helpful aide memoire for those who—even technically in “left” ranks—still cling to the notion that the sociopathic narcissist and con man Donald Trump and his entourage of swamp creatures represented some sort of improvement on the usual disgraceful team of oligarchic bootlickers that passes for an American executive. Alarmingly incompetent at best, and even if he had had genuine good and “patriotic intentions” toward the American hoi polloi, which we doubt very much considering his betrayals of the working class at every turn, a posture which would have roughly aligned with the disorganized effort by the lesser bourgeoisie supporting Trump to preserve some of the attributes of an American labor aristocracy and semblance of an old fashioned middle class, Trump still represents a complete and utter failure as a president. You don’t have to be a brainwashed or a cynical Democrat to think that Trump was a dangerous and profoundly undemocratic and destructive leader.