The right wing alleges that Antifa and Black Lives Matter are the “violent lefties” of yore — and though the kernel of truth is that leftist anarchists did have a reputation for violence a century ago, these days it’s the right whose militant fantasies routinely animate stochastic terrorism and planned aggressions of all sorts. Antifa […]
Some of us have been boning up on this topic for about 6 years already, while others are just tuning in now based on the horrors of recent events. It can be overwhelming to come in cold, so here — don’t go it alone! Take this: Putin’s war against the west President Biden “declassified” an […]
Research has shown that emotional repression causes authoritarianism (Altemeyer, Adorno, Stenner et al). Fundamentalist religious groups favor the most repression, culturally — ergo, fundamentalist groups are at the highest risk for nurturing authoritarian traits. Emotional repression is the keystone of fundamentalist parenting. The strict application of “Biblical law” as cherry-picked by extremists is inherently contradictory […]
Or capital vs. labor, oligarchs vs. plebes, plutocrats vs. proles, rich vs. poor — however you want to narrate it, the property vs. people struggle continues on in new and old ways, each and ere day. Here in America, the plutocrats have devised many clever methods of hiding the class struggle behind a race war […]
It’s not just here at home in the US that fascism seems to have taken root in the population. There are many burgeoning nationalist movements resurrecting right-wing populism around the world, and as per many experts’ warnings, right-wing authoritarianism is on the rise around the globe. Many of the right-wing populist thatches that have sprung […]
Then-candidate Trump signed a letter of intent to move forward with this project in 2015, while at the same time denying its existence publicly, repeatedly. Jan 2016: Michael Cohen speaks with Dmitry Peskov, Russian government press secretary, about the project. There is no way this would have occurred without the blessing, or instruction, of Vladimir […]
Siloviki is a Russian term for those who have backgrounds and employment in security services, the military, and police under the former USSR. More unofficially, the word can refer specifically to a group of high-ranked politicians around Putin, his security cabal, and the heads of the Russian power ministries — many of whom were formerly […]
Russia’s state oil company. Soon after the election, 19.5% of the company was sold to parties unknown; the Steele dossier indicated that Putin offered Trump 19% of the company if he became president & removed sanctions.
Novichok is a military-grade nerve agent developed by Russia and used in the poisoning of former FSB agent turned Putin critic Andrei Skripal and his daughter in Lonson in March, 2018.
Fifth World War refers to a concept of non-linear war; the war of all against all. The term was coined by Vladimir Putin‘s vizier Vladislav Surkov. According to Surkov, the first four world wars were fought with physical weapons and military power, while the fifth world war is being fought with information (and disinformation), culture, […]
“Eternal Rome” is an ideology positing Russia as a geopolitical bulwark of conservatism against a weak-kneed West (part of Alexander Dugin‘s reformulation of Eurasianism theory). It explains part of the seemingly sudden appeal of Russia to a political party once responsible for McCarthyism — whose acolyte Roy Cohn would later groom Donald Trump for the […]
This list casts a wide net in enumerating the various principals of interest to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election… and beyond. The Russia scandal has continued to unspool throughout the Trump presidency, including the real estate magnate’s first impeachment over his extortion of Ukraine, and his second impeachment over the armed insurrection he […]
I’ve been reading John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” and am reminded of the quintessential liberal definition of the term: The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain […]
Did Russia hack the 2016 US election? Most certainly. The FBI, CIA, and entire intelligence community is in agreement on this point. Russian information warfare has been infamous the world over for decades — with a recent flare up starting with the Brexit vote as an obvious canary in a larger coalmine, and extending to […]
We Americans thought it ended, anyhow — but we were wrong. The revanchism that in some sense was of high potential after the fall of the former Soviet Union indeed came to pass — and later to be accelerated by the rise of Vladimir Putin to power. Along with that trajectory, a curious development path […]