Hidden History -- In The Making

EPSTEIN’S TIES TO TRUMP ARE THE FOCUS OF THE MEDIA WHILE THEY IGNORE HIS TIES TO ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE

This Is Such A Perfect Example Of How Western Media Ignore Anything That Doesn’t Fit Neatly Into The Media Worldview That Israel Can Do No Wrong.

If there’s not some kind of partisan angle to it that Democrats can use to attack Republicans or Republicans can use to attack Democrats, it tends to get conspicuously overlooked.

Which just so happens to align nicely with the objectives of the American empire.

The empire doesn’t want people looking too closely at the evil things the American regime and Israel have been doing together regardless of who is in office, so the western press tend to ignore these things wherever possible.

The empire doesn’t want people keeping track of what countries the American regime’s war machine is bombing from administration to administration, so the western press keep this information so silent that every few months I’ll see a viral tweet from some American going “Wait a second we’ve been bombing Somalia this whole time?” or “We’ve got troops in KENYA??”

The overwhelming majority of the empire’s abuses remain in place regardless of which political party happens to be in power or what the current president’s campaign platform was. War. Genocide. Militarism. Imperialist extraction. Ecocidal capitalism. Soaring inequality. Poverty. Homelessness. Police militarization. The ever-expanding surveillance network. Censorship. Propaganda. Government lies and opacity. The crimes of the imperial intelligence alliance.

All of the worst things about our dystopian civilization here in the globe-spanning power structure that is loosely centralized around the United States keep marching forward completely uninterrupted from presidency to presidency, while the mass media ignore them and keep the public fixated on irrelevant feuding between America’s two mainstream political factions.

This is because the mass media of the western world do not exist to report on the major news stories of our day. They exist to indoctrinate, distract, and manipulate. They are not news services, they are propaganda services.

Adding a few more details of Trump’s already well–documented Epstein ties to the information ecosystem will drum up a lot of interest and attention and monopolize political discourse for a day or two, but it won’t change anything. The American public developing a universal revulsion toward Israel and its involvement in their own country’s affairs, however, would have far-reaching consequences that could change the face of the world. Which is why the propaganda services of the empire are focusing on the former rather than the latter.

BECAUSE THEY ARE LOSING CONTROL OF THE NARRATIVE, THE ZIONISTS ARE FREAKING OUT

More And More Often We’re Seeing Them Say The Quiet Parts Out Loud As They Frantically Scramble To Manage Perceptions And Manipulate Minds Around The World.

Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made some very revealing remarks during an appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly on Sunday, expressing frustration with the way younger Jews are dismissing pro-Israel arguments because of the carnage they’ve seen in Gaza.

“We are now wrestling with a new I think generational divide here, and I think that’s particularly true in that social media is now our source of media,” Hurwitz said. “It used to be that the news you got in America was American media, and it was pretty mainstream; you know it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media, which is the global medium; its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews. So while in the 1990s a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them; they find them on their phones.”

“It’s also this increasingly post-literate media; less and less text, more and more videos,” Hurwitz continued. “So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us cannot have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds: carnage. And I sound obscene.”

Hurwitz went on to say that Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad.

“And you know I think unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism,” Hurwitz said. “Because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people. So, when on TikTok all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”

It’s just so fascinating to see a former White House speechwriter making so many of the points that anti-Zionists have been making for years, but taking the exact opposite meaning from them:

The mainstream legacy media has always hidden anti-Israel views from the public — and that was a good thing.
Social media has now given Palestinians the ability to expose the truth about Israel’s abuses — and that’s a bad thing.
People aren’t falling for the Zionist spin and narrative-diddling anymore because they’ve seen the carnage in Gaza with their own eyes — and that’s a problem.
People who learned from Holocaust education that genocide is wrong have been applying those same lessons to the genocide in Gaza — and this means they’re “confused”.

Hurwitz isn’t denying Israel’s abuses or framing its genocidal atrocities as the problem, she’s just coming right out and saying that people obtaining information and moral clarity about those abuses is the problem. The atrocities aren’t wrong, what’s wrong is people seeing those atrocities and calling them what they are.

She complains that she looks “obscene” for trying to lay out arguments and narratives justifying the Gaza holocaust for people who’ve seen the “wall of carnage” from the genocide. Yes obviously you’re going to look obscene if you try to tell someone why raw video footage of massacres, mutilated children and emaciated bodies is actually showing something that is justifiable and acceptable.

You can’t stand in front of a pile of child corpses justifying their murder and then whine when people ignore your spinmeistering and keep staring at the tiny bodies. That’s like murdering an entire family and then telling the cops, “But you’re not listening to my reasons for killing them!” They’re doing the normal thing while you are being obscene.

There’s a viral clip of this tirade going around Twitter and some were curious if Hurwitz had said anything after the video segment ended which might have made what she said sound less horrible, after checking out the original video on the Jewish Federations of North America’s Youtube channel, it turned out that nope. It didn’t get any better.

Hurwitz went on to say that people are wrong to carry the lessons of Holocaust education into opposition to Israel’s genocidal atrocities because the Holocaust was Nazi Germany blaming Jews for all their problems in the same way people think Israel is the source of all the world’s problems today.

She then mourned the way western Jews “re-imagined Judaism as a Protestant-style religion” in order to integrate into western society rather than retaining a strong identity that is loyal to the state of Israel.

“The problem is, we’re not just a religion,” Hurwitz said. “We’re a nation. Civilization. Tribe. Peoplehood. But most of all we’re a family. And so if you are a young person raised in America who thinks Judaism is a Protestant-style religion, then the seven million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists. So my co-religionists, if I look at them and they’re not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them?”

“But that’s a category error,” says Hurwitz. “The seven million people in Israel, they are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists, it’s easy to slide into anti-Zionism. You don’t necessarily have that connection to them.”

Hurwitz is saying here that Jews around the world should be loyal to Israel no matter what Israel does, not because that’s the moral or truthful position but because Israel is where their loyalties belong.

We don’t know about you, but if our siblings were murdering civilians we would immediately become their enemy. We wouldn’t defend my brothers if they were going around shooting children in the head like IDF snipers have been doing in Gaza, in fact we would feel a special responsibility to stop them exactly because they are my brothers. Genocide doesn’t magically become acceptable if the perpetrators are your “siblings”, unless you are a sociopath.

It’s just incredible how hard Zionists have been freaking out about the way Israel has lost control of the narrative these last two years. More and more often we’re seeing them say the quiet parts out loud as they frantically scramble to manage perceptions and manipulate minds around the world.

Many things which used to be hidden are finding their way into the light.

HUNDREDS DETAINED AS ISRAEL RAIDS DOZENS OF HOMES IN A WEST BANK TOWN

The Israeli Army Reportedly Turned The Municipal Stadium Into A Makeshift Holding And Interrogation Site. Videos Showed Israeli Soldiers Escorting Bound Palestinians Inside The Town.

The Israeli army detained about 100 Palestinians in the town of Beit Ummar, north of Hebron (al-Khalil) in the southern occupied West Bank, after sealing all of the town’s entrances early on Wednesday, it was reported.

The raid came hours after an illegal Israeli settler was killed and three others were wounded, one critically, in a ramming and stabbing operation at the Gush Etzion junction in the southern West Bank. The operation was carried out by two Palestinians, one of them from Beit Ummar, who were shot dead by Israeli forces, the report noted.

On Tuesday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said the Palestinian Civil Affairs Authority – the official liaison with Israel – notified it that Imran al-Atrash from Hebron and Walid Mohammed Sabarneh from Beit Ummar were killed by Israeli fire near Bethlehem in the southern West Bank.

DOZENS OF HOMES RAIDED

Israeli forces stormed Beit Ummar early on Wednesday and raided dozens of homes, including the Sabarneh family’s house, damaging its contents, witnesses said.

They said the army launched a broad arrest campaign in the town, detaining about 100 people.

According to the witnesses, the army turned the municipal stadium into a makeshift holding and interrogation site.

Videos circulating online showed Israeli soldiers escorting bound Palestinians inside the town.

ENTRY AND EXIT RESTRICTED

Residents said the army sealed all entrances to Beit Ummar with dirt mounds and iron gates, restricting movement in and out of the area. It was reported that ambulances were unable to enter or exit the town.

According to the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS), the field interrogations were accompanied by torture and severe beatings, a news agency reported.

The occupation forces also stole money and gold jewelry, confiscated vehicles and electronic devices, turned homes into military points, using residents as human shields, and distributed leaflets containing direct threats against the residents, the report stated.

HANAN AL-BARGHOUTI ABUSED IN DETENTION

Meanwhile, the Prisoners’ Media Office reported that the Palestinian detainee Hanan Al-Barghouti is being subjected to repressive measures, abuse, and continuous starvation in Damon prison.

She also suffers from “the policy of repeated revolving-door detention” which involves the arrest and release of detainees several times, often without charge or trial. The Media Office urged human rights organizations to campaign for her release.

Barghouti was freed from detention in December 2024 and rearrested in April this year, and again in September this year. She was also freed in November 2023 as part of the prisoner exchange deal with Israel.

Hailing from the village of Kobar in Ramallah, Hanan is the sister of Nael Barghouti, who was previously the longest-held Palestinian prisoner until his release and deportation in the February 2025 prisoner exchange.

ESCALATING ATTACKS

The Israeli army has escalated its attacks in the West Bank since the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023.

More than 1,076 Palestinians have since been killed, and 10,700 others injured in attacks by the army and illegal settlers in the occupied territory. More than 20,500 people have also been arrested.

In a landmark opinion last July, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

AMERICANS DON’T WANT WAR WITH VENEZUELA – ASK THEM

Reports Say The President Is Preparing To Attack, As Lawmakers Ignore Their Constituents And Refuse To Stand In The Way Of The Armed Robbery Of Venezuela’s Massive Oil Reserves.

As the Trump administration’s made-for-Hollywood strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats have dominated the news, the Pentagon has been positioning military assets in the Caribbean and Latin America and reactivating bases in the region. More recently, The Washington Post reported that high-level meetings were held about a possible imminent attack on Venezuela and The New York Times has learned that the president gave authorization for CIA operations there.

There is one problem: Americans don’t seem to be very enthusiastic.

While voters returned Donald Trump to office in 2024 based on a host of campaign promises, his faithful took his long-voiced complaints about spending on foreign aid and entanglement in overseas wars as vows to focus on the homeland. A range of Americans are in sync with his past statements about avoiding war; opposition to military intervention abroad is common for the left and right. Simply put, the public is not interested in going to war. Indeed, one recent poll found that just 15% of American adults support invading Venezuela.

Some see Trump’s Venezuela moves as an attempt to distract from domestic policy failures or the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, but his actions can’t be dismissed as wagging the dog. Trump has shown himself willing to engage with militarism. It’s not just “drug boats,” and it’s not just Venezuela. He has spent 2025 belying the myth, which has persisted over his three campaigns for president, that he is averse to war-making.

WHAT POLLS SAY ABOUT VENEZUELA

The public has mixed views on some of the Trump administration’s specific actions toward Venezuela. Asked in a recent YouGov poll about the Navy’s presence in Caribbean waters, for example, the percentage who approve (30%) was not much lower than the percentage who disapprove (37%).

Framing its actions against the South American nation as narcotics enforcement seems to have benefited the administration: A poll in early October found 71% of registered voters in favor of “the US destroying boats bringing drugs into the United States from South America.” Different wording — and perhaps media coverage of the continued boat strikes raising issues of their necessity, legality, and effect — could help explain why a poll in mid-November found only 29% answered yes to the question, “Should the U.S. government kill suspected drug traffickers abroad without judicial process?”

Importantly, however, in a survey, roughly two-thirds of American adults said they oppose an invasion of Venezuela and, as noted above, only 15% support one. Over half oppose the American regime using the military to overthrow the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

A 2023 survey found a souring of views of military intervention more broadly, with growing numbers believing that intervention by the American regime tends to “worsen situations.” Respondents seem to have based this on more recent examples, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars. None of these interventions were seen by the majority of those polled as “successful” uses of American forces abroad.

A COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS

Overall, Americans do not want to get, to use Trump’s own words, “bogged down” in foreign wars. Public opinion on intervention appears driven by a cost-benefit analysis as John Mueller, Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Ohio State University describes it. This may be why some Americans are more willing to accept action in the form of targeted strikes such as the boat bombings and limited displays of military might.

Since the Cold War and especially the 9/11 attacks, America has become increasingly militarized. One measure of this, of course, is government spending. The Costs of War project estimates that the American regime has spent $8 trillion as a result of the post-9/11 wars. The $22 billion in support for Israel’s war in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023 is one of the latest and most egregious instances of the American regime’s support for a military first approach.

Unfortunately, the official end of the post-9/11 wars was not the end of their financial costs to ordinary Americans. The percent of the discretionary federal budget devoted to the military continues to rise and at the expense of domestic programs. Pentagon spending alone in 2026 will jump to well over $1 trillion. Though many of the economic costs of war are hidden and/or deferred to an indeterminate future — especially when they are funded through deficit spending — Americans still rightly worry about getting involved in costly conflicts like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

CAN PUBLIC OPINION HALT TRUMP’S MILITARISM?

Many have taken note of how Congress’s passage of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force has helped concentrate power in the executive, enabling swifter, unilateral military deployment by the commander-in-chief. With the AUMF, Congress relinquished its constitutionally assigned war powers and ceded to the president its duty to decide whether, when, and where to use the military to combat terrorism. Since then, the executive branch has conducted counterterrorism activities in an astounding 78 countries.

Despite Americans’ low trust in Congress, they nonetheless want the president to seek congressional approval before going to war. Feeding their mistrust, Congress has failed to respond to them on this crucial issue.

Look at how a compliant Congress has abdicated responsibility for oversight of the bombings in the Caribbean — which have now killed more than 83 people — as the Pentagon arrays warships, missiles, drones, and jet fighters in the region. Senate Republicans voted down legislation that would have required Trump to get their approval for any attacks on Venezuela, blatantly ignoring the disapproval of a public they are meant to represent.

So the bombings and the build-up continue, with Trump matter-of-factly telling a journalist, “We’re just going to kill people” without seeking congressional approval.

In the end, Trump may not attack Venezuela, but it likely won’t be because the people are against it. He is in the process of commandeering all armed capacities of the American government, military, and law enforcement to serve his purposes foreign and domestic. Reasserting the rights of the people, including the right to peace, requires Congress to aggressively reassert its constitutional duty and the citizenry to demand its will be met.

AMERICA’S BILLIONAIRES MOVE TO SILENCE DISSENT AS ISRAEL’S IMAGE COLLAPSES

A Poll In July Found That 32 Percent Of Americans Approve Of The Israeli Campaign In Gaza, While 60 Percent Disapprove, A 10 Percent Drop In Support From The Previous September.

A research center findings showed that a third of American adults (33 percent) say the country sends Israel too much military aid, a larger portion of the population than those who say the American regime provides the right amount (23 percent) or not enough (8 percent).

A majority of Americans hold a negative view of Israel and report being “extremely” or “very” concerned about its military strikes killing Palestinian civilians and about starvation among Palestinians in Gaza.

A poll revealed that there are slightly more Americans who sympathise with the Palestinians than those who sympathise with Israel.

Israel’s popularity crisis is particularly acute among young Americans, with only nine percent of those aged 18 to 34 backing Israel’s military action in the Strip. Forty-two percent of those in the 18 to 29 cohort say the American regime grants Israel too much military aid, compared to 21 percent whose opinion is that the regime is giving the right amount or too little.

One influential ghoul after another – from Hillary Clinton to wealthy tech investors and members of Congress – has attributed this shift to TikTok, as if American youth are incapable of independently concluding that it is wrong to repeatedly set fire to tents filled with displaced persons.

Amid the decline in pro-Israel sentiment, which is functionally the same as a decline in support for American imperialism in and beyond the Middle East, the American regime’s ruling class is aggressively asserting control over powerful media organs.

CONTROL OF THE NARRATIVE

On 25^th September, President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating that for TikTok to continue operating in America, one or more Americans had to own the majority of the platform.

Trump’s actions, it is worth noting, build on the Biden administration’s approach to TikTok, which also called for American control of the app, a position with bipartisan support in Congress.

Accordingly, a group of American investors led by the software firm Oracle is taking control of 65 percent of TikTok.

Oracle is set to oversee TikTok’s American operations, provide cloud services for user data storage and secure a licence to take charge of the app’s algorithm.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison is one of the top donors to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), an American nonprofit that effectively subsidises the Israeli military. He has said that he feels a “deep emotional connection to the State of Israel” and “we”, seemingly a reference to Oracle, will “do everything we can to support the country of Israel”.

A similar process has unfolded in traditional news media. In August, the Ellison family’s media company, Skydance – an outfit financially supported by Larry Ellison and run by his son, David – acquired Paramount, a movie studio that owns CBS and a host of cable channels.

Bari Weiss, a talentless behind-kisser and tattle-tale passionately opposed to free speech and to Palestinian freedom, has been named CBS News’s editor-in-chief.

Now, the Ellison family has its sights set on Warner Bros Discovery, which owns HBO, TBS and CNN.

MEDIA CAPTURE

While there is ample space for pro-Palestine messaging on TikTok, it is not as if traditional news outlets like CBS have a record of supporting Palestinian liberation.

CBS, like all major corporate media in the United States, far more often than not produces content favourable to American-Israeli objectives in West Asia.

For example, in the last year, the CBS News website ran 2,575 stories that mention Gaza, with only 388 containing the word “genocide”.

In other words, in a period that mostly predates the Ellison-Weiss regime, only 15 percent of the site’s Gaza coverage mentioned the crime of crimes, even as one credible source after another has concluded that Israel has carried out a genocide in the Strip.

Thus, CBS News already had a record of what has previously called genocide denial by omission, a form of media distortion that helps enable genocide by reducing the likelihood that enough of the American population will accurately understand that their government is party to an extermination campaign to bring it to a halt.

CNN, for its part, helped manufacture consent for the Gaza genocide by making pro-Israel propaganda its official policy.

What the latest developments in the media landscape represent are, as with so much else in the Trump era, a movement towards vulgar, unabashed assertions of raw power that dispense with the typically hollow and hypocritical pretences of an open and democratic society that characterised America’s recent past.

LOSING LEGITIMACY

The American state and the billionaires it serves know that they cannot win the Palestine-Israel debate, and they see that their colonial outpost is rapidly losing perceived legitimacy.

Trying to stamp out content that makes Israel and the American regime look bad by occasionally giving audiences a partial glimpse of American-Zionist barbarism in Palestine is a sign of desperation rather than strength.

The gambit will not work.

Media outlets do not operate in a vacuum, and people are not empty vessels that news firms can simply fill with whatever they like.

The American state and the billionaires it serves know that they cannot win the Palestine-Israel debate, and they see that their colonial outpost is rapidly losing perceived legitimacy

Israel’s image cannot be restored, and neither can that of the American ruling class, certainly not among young people who won’t soon forget their peers being suspended, expelled or chewed up by the American regime’s merciless deportation machine.

They won’t soon forget their colleges turning riot cops against them or putting snipers on the roofs of school buildings during pro-Palestine student protests. They won’t soon forget the mainstream media lying to them while Palestinian journalists showed them the grieving parents whose bereavement was enabled by western, and especially American, taxpayers.

If the Gaza “ceasefire” holds, the international movement in solidarity with Palestine may lose some of its energy in the West.

However, even if the frequency of mass demonstrations in western cities dwindles, the organizations and alliances formed after October 7^thare not all going to disappear.

Indeed, many of these formations predate 2023, with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement having established nodes around the world and achieved numerous successes since its inception in 2005.

That institutional memory cannot be erased by media manipulation, nor can the experience, political organizing skills and self-confidence that pro-Palestine activists have gained by fighting, and sometimes winning, through 20 years of BDS or two years of resisting genocide.

THE ISRAELI KNESSET APPROVED THE FIRST READING OF BILL TO CUT UNRWA ACCESS TO WATER AND ELECTRICITY

The Amendment Stipulates That Water And Electricity Providers Will Not Supply Any Property Registered Under UNRWA As The Consumer.

It also grants the state authority to take control of lands registered with the Israel Land Authority that are used by UNRWA. (United Nations Relief and Works Agency)

The amendment follows a previous Knesset law prohibiting any connection between state authorities and UNRWA, which raised debate over whether water and electricity services fall under this “connection.”

The new bill clarifies that the prohibition also applies to vital services, including supplying UNRWA properties with water and electricity, and allows the state to seize properties used by the agency, particularly in occupied Jerusalem.

The proposed legislation is seen as part of broader Israeli efforts to undermine UNRWA’s work and attempts to marginalize the Palestinian refugee issue.

This should give you a good idea of the very nature of the Israeli regime and it’s supporters.

LEARN WHY TRUMP SHOULD ACCEPT PUTIN’S NEW START OFFER

On February 5th, 2026, The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), The Sole Remaining Nuclear Arms Control Agreement Between The United States And Russia, Will Expire.

This September, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to voluntarily adhere to the treaty’s warhead limits on long-range missiles for a year, should the United States reciprocate. President Donald Trump reacted favorably, saying it “sounds like a good idea to me,” but fell short of agreeing. Tensions have since soured, with Trump ordering the Pentagon to resume nuclear testing in response to reports that Russia tested nuclear-powered weapons that can be equipped with a nuclear warhead. Reacting to Trump’s move, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov affirmed that “Russia will respond in kind.”

Without New START, or a successor agreement, the United States and Russia may embark on an arms race that funnels hundreds of billions of dollars into weapons of collective suicide. China would likely join in rather than be left behind. At best, the enlarged arsenals would sit dormant for decades waiting for some faction of politicians and bureaucrats to argue that the technology is obsolete and requires “modernization,” diverting ever more government resources into the illusion of nuclear security. At worst, a geopolitical crisis could precipitate nuclear use, eventually spiraling to mutual destruction.

BETTER OPTIONS EXIST

The most vocal opponents of a New START extension are neoconservative policymakers and intellectuals, including veterans of the George W. Bush administration. These darlings of the foreign policy establishment recycle the familiar threat inflation tactics they used to promote forever wars in the Middle East to push the United States into a trilateral nuclear standoff.

They contend that Russia and China seek to outmatch the American arsenal for coercive purposes. Hence, they reflexively advocate for the United States to upload additional nuclear warheads onto deployed delivery systems beyond New START’s limit of 1,550 (technically 1,770). Neoconservative arguments for reactionary expansion couch their belligerency in the language of maintaining an arsenal of numerical, technical, and situational effectiveness vis-à-vis China and Russia.

Concerned that Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping seek collective nuclear superiority as coercive leverage to subvert American global power, many national security observers say the American regime must expand its nuclear arsenal in response, to address a growing and diversifying list of potential targets. Indeed, some who argue against extending New START do so on the basis that “China’s nuclear build-up puts upward pressure on the size of the U.S. nuclear force” and “Xi is committed to a larger nuclear arsenal and is not willing to trade it away.” Rather than attempting to understand and address why the Chinese may be apprehensive about engaging in arms control negotiations, their “solution” is to reinforce one of the main drivers of animosity.

Underpinning the neurotic worldview of those who advocate arsenal expansion is a devastating overconfidence in counterforce targeting, or taking out military infrastructure while sparing civilian populations. These advocates, by superimposing some generalized, presumptive lens on the decision-making process of Russian and Chinese leaders, believe they know what targets the American regime’s nuclear forces must hold at risk to effectively deter adversarial aggression. They throw nuance to the wayside. Wrapping their ignorance in faux legalism, they insist that by targeting “legitimate” military and political sites, many of which are collocated in or near civilian population centers, counterforce strikes would abide by international law, limit the potential damage an adversary could inflict on the United States, and thus deter adversaries by ensuring the American regime would prevail in a nuclear conflict. You may suppose some of us still need bedtime stories to help us sleep at night.

Counterforce targeting warrants consideration as a paradoxical device in the American regime’s nuclear policy debates. Proponents of the doctrine champion it as both a means of dissuading nuclear aggression and an end to nuclear tensions by implicitly promising to preserve comparative dominance in the destructive capability of the American regime’s arsenal. They insist this is the necessary precondition for the United States to engage in arms control diplomacy, while incoherently maintaining that any reciprocal measures by other nuclear powers are concerted efforts to destabilize relations. Essentially: good for me but not for thee. Counterforce sycophants can only be satisfied by the achievement and preservation of American nuclear superiority, which in itself is not conducive to productive diplomacy, especially with leaders who want their states to be respected as equal stakeholders in global peace and stability.

Nuclear superiority and, by extension, counterforce targeting, are thus under-scrutinized assumptions of American national security observers who argue against an extension to the limits of New START. These doctrines are detrimental to the prospects of mending the frayed relationship between the United States, Russia, and China. The American interest in preventing a nuclear war requires robust diplomacy which cannot be predicated upon some fanciful desire for unparalleled bargaining leverage. Arms control agreements are indicative of stable bilateral relations as much as they are a pragmatic tool of engagement and cooperation for nuclear risk reduction.

In other words, the health of the treaty—its endurance, political purchase, and sustainability—mirrors the health of the broader relationship. Commitments to maintain treaty levels, even those in principle, signify a desire to stabilize and improve relations. Despite all the bluster from yesteryear’s strategic minds about needing to maintain a counterforce-capable arsenal to counteract Russia and China’s technical and numerical nuclear advancements, the fact remains that the current American nuclear arsenal is capable of inflicting untold destruction on both countries simultaneously under the New START limit. Likewise, Russia and China can inflict untold destruction on us, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. No targeting doctrine or favorable disparity can guarantee victory any more than it can guarantee collective defeat, for no one knows what Pandora’s box has in store should its contents be unleashed.

The willful expiration of the New START treaty would mark a concerning low in the American regime’s relationship with Russia and bode poorly for trilateral engagement on nuclear disarmament—a mainstay of Trump’s foreign policy instincts. He must resist the subversive influence of neocons who seek to implant their universalist interventionism into his agenda. They care not for restraint but for a fanciful preponderance of American power. Trump should leave their views in the trash heap of history, where they belonged after his 2016 ascendance.

Pursuing nuclear arms control with Russia is one way to start.

DO ANY OF YOU HAVE WAR POWERS?

It Is Long Past The Time For Congress To Exercise Its Constitutional Role To Rein In The Runaway War Machine. America Is Embroiled In Foreign Wars That Consume, With Growing Unease, Our Attention And Resources.

When America’s Founders were creating the Constitution, they had just won a war against King George III of England. They deliberately and unambiguously invested the power to wage war in the Congress, judging it to be more reticent about entering war than a head of state, who would see a war as an opportunity to increase his power.

Fast forward to today. America is embroiled in foreign wars that consume, with growing unease, your attention and resources. Yet the Senate on Thursday sunk legislation that would have required the White House to get congressional approval before attacking Venezuela. We should rely on the carefully designed constitutional structure our Founding Fathers provided to avoid further disasters and use those tools to extricate us from existing ones.

During the 2024 election campaign, you were all told the wars were a waste and would be ended swiftly if Donald Trump won. It looks like you were fooled again.

Ukraine was supposed to be settled quickly. However, after the 10 months since President Trump’s inauguration, the current debate is whether to provide nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles to reach deep into Russia, which has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Doesn’t your governing elite think shooting nuclear-capable missiles into Russia could be risky?

Recently, and with fanfare, the Palestinians released their hostages to the Israelis, but Israel’s military, using American supplied and funded weapons, has repeatedly and dramatically violated the ceasefire. It looks like all the lofty rhetoric about peace deals was just hot air.

In less than a year in office, the Trump administration has directly engaged in the bombings or has supported the bombings of Gaza, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, and possibly Qatar. It has also been financing political turbulence in countries across Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and who knows how many in Africa. Alarmingly, Trump recently has started arguing for military intervention in Nigeria.

Over the past two months, the Trump administration has been illegally assassinating, without any due process, “suspected narco-terrorists” off the coasts of Latin America. The Washington elites are circulating stories sotto voce among themselves that there are Hezbollah terrorists in the Venezuelan jungles. Now, you are supposed to be really threatened. It won’t be long before they will be whispering about Hamas fighters training in Cuba to attack Key West, or even Miami!

These fairy tales are the latest additions to the long list of old discredited war propaganda gems such as: the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, the German soldiers bayoneting and decapitating babies during World War I in France, the domino theory, the faked attack in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam, Iraqi soldiers ripping babies out of incubators in Kuwait, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, poison gas attacks in Syria, the fake Libyan mass rape claims, or of course the completely debunked claim of the many beheaded babies in Israel.

The American regime is operating an empire spanning the globe with 800 military bases and overseeing numerous military actions in many countries. All these hostilities are acts of war without a constitutionally required declaration of war. The national debt stood at about 6 trillion dollars before the start of the Global War on Terror. It is now 38 trillion and counting while there seem to be more terrorists and wars than before. Much of this would stop if the money was stopped.

What’s worse, none of these wars have even remotely turned out as promised. Often the results are the opposite of the propaganda.

There was a ceasefire in the Korean War in 1953, yet we still have troops stationed in Korea seven decades later. We were told we had to protect Vietnam from Communism. We even destroyed villages to save South Vietnam from the Vietcong. In the end, we fled Vietnam, the North Vietnamese won, and Hanoi normalized relations with Washington a couple decades later. Afghanistan, after 20 years of war, crumbled to the Taliban in 11 days. Don’t forget the Carter administration supported Sunni fighters in Afghanistan before the 1979 Soviet invasion. Under President Ronald Reagan they became the vaunted American regime-supported Mujahideen, whose post-Soviet civil war helped lead to the rise of the Taliban. The American regime still has troops in Iraq and Syria. Libya is a continuing wreck and embroiled in a devastating civil war. It is a safe bet that this new regime change adventure in Venezuela will end badly. As will Yemen, Ukraine, and Gaza.

During the Vietnam tragedy, Congress became increasingly alarmed about the excesses of presidential power amid the war’s horrifying human and economic costs, so they formulated and finally passed the 1973 War Powers Resolution. This Resolution was designed to limit the president’s power to wage war without the constitutionally required congressional approval.

It is time for Congress to exercise its constitutional duties and stop shirking its responsibility to restrain these destructive actions. Some courageous members of Congress have taken the initiative to introduce a bill entitled: “H.Con.Res.51 – To direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities that have not been authorized by Congress.”

Members of Congress who are concerned about America’s future should support this effort to constrain its illegal runaway militarism before the regime runs out of borrowing power and credibility. It may be difficult for many members of Congress to resist the influence of the military industrial complex and various foreign interests, but those who can, must, before America becomes embroiled in more failed military fiascoes.

How many Americans would die or be maimed in a war in South America? What if we wreck Venezuela—how many people would flee and exacerbate the worldwide refugee crisis? How would this adversely affect America’s relations with other countries in the hemisphere? How would war against a country with one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world affect the price of oil for consumers?

The looming war against Venezuela is, like the others, clearly unlawful on many levels and should be stopped before things spin out of control with deadly and ruinous unanticipated consequences.

It is time for Congress to ignore the propaganda, vote the interests of the American people, and follow the Constitution to end this reckless destruction.

MR. PRESIDENT – DON’T DO IT!

An American Regime Led Regime Change In Venezuela Would Worsen The Problems Trump Promised To Fix. The Administration’s Public Case For Its Venezuela Policy Is Insultingly Ridiculous.

Donald Trump did not campaign on a program of an American regime-led regime change in Venezuela. Somehow, though, he is on the verge of doing just that. His administration has sent a Marine Expeditionary Unit to the region, and now has ordered the USS Gerald Ford and its carrier strike group to the Caribbean as well. The Trump administration appears to have a round chambered with the Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro’s name inscribed on it.

These moves follow a campaign of standoff strikes against alleged drug boats allegedly headed to the United States. The administration’s case for this precursor action is that they are protecting Americans from dangerous drugs like fentanyl. This argument is flawed; fentanyl doesn’t come to the United States from Venezuela, and the boats in question do not appear to have enough range to reach the United States in any case.

So what is America doing there?

The administration’s public case for its Venezuela policy is insultingly ridiculous. At an October 15^th press conference, the president declared that “every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.” Considering that there were only around 84,000 overdoses in the United States last year, and that they have so far blown up 10 boats, they should have declared victory and come home seven boats ago.

A cynic would observe that the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act has run into legal trouble. Among the issues raised by the American courts is the fact that the United States is not at war. It is hardly a leap of logic to wonder whether administration officials are thinking, “The courts are saying we don’t have the power because we’re not at war—but that could change.” Taking the United States to war would be a likely remedy for that legal shortcoming.

Supporters of regime change in Venezuela have invoked the Monroe Doctrine, arguing that the United States has long intervened in the Caribbean. The historical referent is wrong here—the Monroe Doctrine was about keeping European empires out of the Western Hemisphere. The Roosevelt Corollary was about policing Latin Americans ourselves.

In any case, the history of American intervention in Latin America ought to counsel restraint and not emulation. Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in Mexico to capture Pancho Villa ended with the outlaw leader still on the lam. Two interventions in Nicaragua bedeviled four American presidents over 20 years. Uncle Sam cut its occupation of the Dominican Republic short after an immediate case of buyer’s remorse, but nevertheless slogged through its occupation of neighboring Haiti for nearly two decades.

By the end of the 1920s, Washington wanted out of the business of regime change in Latin America. Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt wisely retrenched from the region. They eschewed the paternalism of their predecessors, judging that the costs of intervention and occupation outweighed the supposed benefits. The White House is drawing the wrong lessons from this ignominious period of American diplomatic history.

Furthermore, proposals for a forcible regime change in Venezuela, presumably through airpower and covert operations, have few direct precedents in the region. Operation Urgent Fury, the 1983 American invasion of Grenada, seized an island of only 133 square miles. The 1989 ouster of Manuel Noriega in Panama was assisted by the already large American military presence in the small nation. The heyday of American Banana Wars in the Caribbean was similarly facilitated by collaboration on the ground and incremental intervention.

Such conditions do not exist in Venezuela, as the country is more than twice the size of Iraq and is led by a regime that, at least for now, enjoys the loyalty of the military. If it changes Venezuela’s regime, the White House risks recreating the endless wars and quagmires of the Middle East, but this time in its own neighborhood. The size of the strike package suggests a campaign on the scale of President Barack Obama’s Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya. The outcome there was chaos, civil war, and open-air slave markets.

The administration has made the strange decision to admit to a finding authorizing the CIA to take covert action inside Venezuela. Venezuelans will now attribute anything that goes wrong in their country to American meddling. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, had already blamed one earthquake on the United States. Now that an American president has explicitly authorized CIA operations in Venezuela, an otherwise outlandish claim has gained credibility.

In his second inaugural address, President Trump announced that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.” In his telling, “we will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

This promise is a far cry from a call for creating a Libya in the Western Hemisphere. Trump should stop listening to the hawks in his administration and recall the promises of his second inaugural.

YOU KNOW HOW THE MEDIA NORMALLY REPORTS ON A MASS ATROCITY

If The Press Had Not Been Aggressively Protecting Israel And Its Interests, All Of Their Reporting On Gaza Would Have Looked Like The Reporting You Are Seeing On The Genocide In Sudan.

The Washington Post has published an article titled “Families shot down, held at ransom as they flee Darfur’s killing fields,” subtitled “Sudan’s RSF paramilitary and its allies have carried out mass ethnic killings and hostage taking in the captured city of El Fashir, survivors told The Post.”

The article opens with a paragraph humanizing the victims of the El Fashir massacres: “Families gunned down as they huddled for safety. Young children weeping over their mother’s body in the desert. Doctors seized for ransom and executed.”

It names the perpetrators, “the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces,” in the second paragraph.

It names the backers of the perpetrators in the third paragraph, saying that “The RSF is backed by the United Arab Emirates.”

It mentions the word “genocide” three separate times. “Ethnic killings” appears twice. The UAE is named repeatedly; even the fact that it is “a key U.S. ally” is explicitly highlighted.

Do you notice anything strange about this reporting?

You shouldn’t. What stands out, reading this article here in the year 2025, is how completely and utterly normal it is.

It’s not fantastic or extraordinary journalism, it’s just normal for a mainstream western publication. The reporters talk to the victims, describe the massacres they were told about, explain the various power dynamics at play from a mainstream western perspective, name some American officials who are pushing for a halt to the RSF’s atrocities, and use appropriately strong language to describe the horrors they are documenting — including in the headline.

They do all the normal mainstream news reporter things. They cover a depraved mass atrocity the same way they’ve typically covered such things for generations.

None of this would stand out on its own, if we hadn’t spent two years watching the mainstream western press do absolutely none of these normal journalistic things in Gaza.

The passive-language “Gazans perish in explosion” headlines. The contortions to avoid naming the perpetrator and the governments that are backing its atrocities. The adamant refusal to use the word “genocide” except to frame it as a dubious claim being made by another party which Israel forcefully denies. The wildly biased discrepancy between the strength of language used to describe violence inflicted by Israelis versus violence inflicted by Palestinians.

If the western press had not been aggressively protecting Israel and its interests this whole time, all their reporting on Gaza over the last two years would have looked very much like the reporting we’re seeing on the genocide in Sudan. There’s a discrepancy in the reporting because there’s a discrepancy in the propaganda needs of the western empire.

It is good that the western press are doing actual journalism in Sudan and covering that genocide with the normal level of urgency and emphasis. If they had been reporting on Gaza in the same way these last two years, the west’s support for Israel would have completely collapsed by now.

Which is exactly why they haven’t been doing it.