Ten French citizens will go to JAIL for making comments on First Lady Brigitte Macron’s gender. The court found these people guilty of cyberbulling Macron by claiming that she is a man. This ruling does NOT mean that she has proven that she is a woman. She still has not. The court ruled on harassment, not evidence. Macron did not “prove” anything beyond persuading a court that the speech caused harm under French law. That is precisely why this case is chilling. The French president and his wife used criminal law to punish their own constituents for speech about a public figure. In a society that claims to value free expression, that should alarm everyone. Article 11 of the EU Charter guarantees freedom of expression, yet there has been no meaningful condemnation from the European Union of a ruling that criminalizes speech about those in power. In a free society, people are allowed to question what their own eyes tell them, whether they are right or wrong. Courts are not meant to arbitrate truth through punishment, and governments are not meant to be insulated from speech by force of law. This case confirms that in France, speech about the government and its figures can now trigger criminal penalties, not merely civil liability. If you cannot offend the government, you do not live in a free society. The post This Is Chilling, France! appeared first on Redacted.

NATO leaders are pretty nervous about President Trump’s let’s-take-Greenland talk. Why? Because it would pull European countries into a land conflict with themselves. Greenland is a territory of Denmark, which is also a NATO country. If the U.S. waged war on Denmark, the snake would eat itself. NATO pretends that it is only a defensive organization but, lol. It’s first operation under President Clinton was an unprovoked bloodbath. Usually NATO can hide behind some made up pretense for its many wars but there would be no such cover for taking Greenland. You can’t claim self-defense while attacking your own members. Why is President Trump ruffling feathers about Greenland anyway? We’ve been warning you since 2023! It’s all about the arctic trade route. And where would that leave NATO? Would it fight for it’s U.S. paymasters or piddly little Denmark? Strip away the mythology, and what’s left is an alliance that only works as long as its internal contradictions are never tested. Greenland would test all of them at once. The post Greenland Would Break NATO appeared first on Redacted.

Politics The New Neoconservatives Bari Weiss gate-keeps the right against antiwar conservatives. Sound familiar? Nobody escaped 2020 without hearing of at least a couple of media personalities that became wildly popular amongst conservatives for abandoning the left. They themselves, though, framed things a little differently. “The left left me,” they proclaimed. There is something deeply revealing in this statement. These commentators didn’t move an inch to the right. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Bari Weiss, former op-ed editor at the New York Times and now editor-in-chief at CBS News and at her own publication The Free Press. Weiss earned respect from American conservatives in 2020 when she resigned from the Times, publicly accusing it of left-wing bias. Weiss’s recent vault into editorial control of CBS News was backed by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder and world’s third-richest person Larry Ellison. Unsurprisingly, given her lack of qualifications, Weiss has stumbled in her impressive new role.  Weiss’s town hall with Erika Kirk, the widow of assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk, garnered low ratings and drew criticism that it degenerated into “gotcha” moments featuring left-wing activists and Israel supporters in the audience. And the network’s credibility took a hit with progressives after Weiss’s decision to delay a 60 Minutes segment critical of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Despite her adherence to left-wing social policy and hawkish foreign policy, Weiss has found herself a leading gatekeeper of the right. What has she done with this power? The Free Press has made “combatting antisemitism” a major focus. It recently republished a speech by Ben Shapiro, a conservative pro-Israel commentator, that amounts to an effort to excommunicate Tucker Carlson, a critic of Israel, for alleged antisemitism. Other pro-Israel conservatives also grace the pages of the Free Press, including Eli Lake, Matthew Continetti, Niall Ferguson, Abigail Shrier, Douglas Murray, and Nikki Haley. Bari Weiss and her so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” allies comprise our generation’s band of neoconservatives. Of course, not every hawk is a neoconservative, but the label aids understanding in the case of Weiss and her ilk. The origins of neoconservatism can be traced back to the Trotskyite and social democratic left. The first generation of neoconservatives included Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Norman Podhoretz. Bell was a former editor of The New Leader, a prominent socialist and labor-affiliated magazine. He edited, alongside his friend Irving Kristol, The Public Interest, the neoconservatives’ publication of choice for many years. Kristol got his start as a member of the Trotskyite wing of the Young People’s Socialist League and then later moved towards hawkish liberalism.  Moynihan himself was a Cold War liberal who only moved rightward after the reaction to the controversial Moynihan Report, which was critical of black American culture. Norman Podhoretz was editor of the American Jewish Committee’s magazine Commentary, which he initially nudged to the left until he became dissatisfied with cultural leftism. Black Radicals who echoed antisemitic theories and anti-Zionist attitudes following Israel’s Six-Day War in 1967 pushed many of these intellectuals into the arms of the American right.  Their hostility to the Soviet Union and somewhat critical attitudes towards some aspects of the welfare state made them the darlings of conservative “fusionists” who were hawkish on foreign policy and libertarian-leaning on economics. These former Trotskyites maintained a deep resentment towards the Stalinists who ran the USSR. Many neoconservatives were first “Scoop Jackson Democrats,” named after the Senator from Boeing, Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Jackson was an arch-Cold War liberal and technocratic hawk who advocated for lavish spending on defense to counter the Soviets. Second-generation neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle were veteran Jackson staffers.  When George McGovern, whom they saw as a peacenik and appeaser, secured the Democratic nomination in 1972, many jumped ship. Any stragglers caught a boat off the sinking ship of Jimmy Carter’s Democratic Party years later.  With this history under our belts, we can get a clearer picture of what makes a neoconservative a neoconservative, rather than just a hawk.  As the movement came into being, a neoconservative often was a former leftist or left-liberal who gravitated to the right in response to perceived excesses of antiwar and counter-cultural leftism. They were always foreign policy hawks, often out of solidarity with Israel. They were often Jewish but many were not, as evidenced by Catholic Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Presbyterian Jeane Kirkpatrick. They were never laissez-faire capitalists by any stretch of the imagination, nor was their conservatism particularly animated by cultural issues like abortion or gay marriage. They may have criticized the welfare state at the time but, as Irving Kristol admitted in his essay “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” they envisioned a better-managed welfare state––likely one that wouldn’t produce black radicals or socially degenerate behaviors. Repealing the welfare state was never on the radar of these social critics, who were more dedicated to a hawkish corporate state than a laissez-faire limited government.  No wonder, then, that in our era many neoconservatives, including David Frum and Bill Kristol, have become Never Trump Republicans. They have much in common with the left and resent the rise of Donald Trump, who lambasted their ideology. So, what does this have to do with Bari Weiss and her cadre? One may feel a tinge of amusement when one realizes that the “Free Press” was also the name of a prominent neoconservative imprint of Simon & Schuster. If you look for a used copy of Irving Kristol’s Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, you are likely to find “Free Press” printed on the spine. That aside, more significant similarities are not amusing.  Bari Weiss popularized the term “Intellectual Dark Web” to describe those opposed to what was once called “political correctness” and the more pervasive elements of the 2010–20s radical left. These figures include Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and perhaps even Weiss herself. All of these figures were prominent academics, intellectuals, and journalists who found themselves shouted down by the “politically correct” left. Weiss and her Free Press colleague Abigail Shrier would face expulsion and ostracism from legacy media for critiquing the excesses of the woke left. Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson quickly became enemies of the left and darlings of the right. Rubin’s self-presentation is perhaps the best example of “the left left me” as a piece of rhetoric. He fashions himself a classical liberal of sorts whilst holding much the same opinions he did as a left-wing commentator.  All of these figures gained their fame amongst the right for their critiques of left-wing excesses, especially on free speech and transgenderism. Never mind that many of them were champions of gay rights, which the American right had long fought against; they were opponents of the most recent excess of the left, and that was enough to earn them their credentials.  It appears that these IDW types have congregated today in Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and Weiss’s The Free Press. Alongside columnists like Weiss and Abigail Shrier, their pages are home to explicit neoconservatives like Matthew Continetti, Eli Lake, and Douglas Murray––whose recent fame for opposing Islamic migration to Britain obscures his origins as author of Neoconservatism: Why We Need It and founder of the UK’s Henry Jackson Society.  While they maintain a semblance of opposition to left-wing excesses today, The Free Press now seems far more focused on the rise of antisemitism across the West, tying it to anti-Western sentiment rather than opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. Abigail Shrier, who found fame on the right after writing a book on transgenderism, Irreversible Damage, has lately become a defender of Israel against its fiercest critics. Even when at the Times, Bari Weiss accepted the label of unhinged Zionist. It appears that the Free Press has dedicated more of its time defending Israeli military policy and trying to play gatekeeper of the American right than anything else. Even its attacks against Zohran Mamdani, a man whose policies are likely to be destructive for the city, were focused on his opinions of Israel.  Weiss and her cadre check all the boxes of neoconservatism. They are former left-wingers or left-liberals who now oppose left-wing cultural excesses. They have changed little in their economic or cultural positions and only spoke up when the left went beyond them and attacked them specifically. They now are dedicated to a hawkish foreign policy and trying to marginalize antiwar conservatives, especially those critical of U.S. support for Israel. Just as Norman Podhoretz and Bill Kristol would go after the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, Bari Weiss, Douglas Murray, and Ben Shapiro have launched a war against Tucker Carlson, whom they accuse of antisemitism.  They also have their own version of technocratic hawks to work alongside. While the first and second generations had Republican apparatchik Donald Rumsfield, our new generation has mega-rich tycoons, including the founders of tech companies like Palantir and Anduril. Weiss herself co-founded a non-accredited university that has accepted major donations from Zionist billionaires. The Ellisons, who placed Weiss in charge of CBS News, also style themselves Zionists whilst operating a company––Oracle––that regularly contracts for the CIA. The American right has made the mistake once of allowing the neoconservatives to become not just members but gatekeepers. It should not make the mistake twice. This crowd should not dictate to the American right who belongs in its ranks. The post The New Neoconservatives appeared first on The American Conservative.

Books How the War Industry Captured U.S. Foreign Policy The Trillion Dollar War Machine documents how defense contractors and their allies normalized waste and permanent war. The Trillion Dollar War Machineby Ben Freeman and William D. Hartung336 pages, $30.00 In recent weeks, prompted by a series of fraud investigations in Minnesota, Conservatism Inc. has pushed a narrative portraying Somali immigrants as uniquely prone to abusing government programs. A new book by William Hartung and Ben Freeman should remind us why that argument is unserious. There exists a far larger and vastly better documented class of American hucksters: U.S. defense contractors, who are responsible not for millions but billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse. Through close reporting and rigorous research, Hartung and Freeman document how Pentagon contractors over the past 40 years have captured the entire foreign policy–making process, from the House committees chaired by top recipients of defense contractor contributions where defense industry pork is packaged, to the cable news studios where the wasteful and often criminal behavior of defense companies is ignored or laundered in puff pieces that border on infomercials, all designed to ensure that five companies receive their annual welfare checks from the U.S. government. Most troubling, as The Trillion Dollar War Machine makes clear, much of this corruption is perfectly legal, even banal; it is institutionalized through the defense-industry revolving door, ensnaring the bipartisan political class and the military brass alike. Roughly two-thirds of defense lobbyists now come from the Pentagon itself—often former acquisition officials who once wrote, audited, or managed the very contracts they later lobby to expand—while campaign contributions are routinely delivered to members of Congress on the same days those lobbyists meet with them to press for increased weapons spending. Readers will come away with a sturdier framework for decoding the war industry’s most durable propaganda, above all, the fiction that the military–industrial complex is simply a collection of public-spirited actors seeking ever larger defense budgets out of some patriotic concern for the national interest. Many of the same lobbyists pressing Congress on behalf of U.S. arms manufacturers simultaneously represent foreign governments such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Tracing the history of our military’s nuclear buildup, The Trillion Dollar War Machine proves how for decades, the American war lobby has hijacked American foreign policy to pursue its own corporate interests over those of the United States while insisting the two are identical. Nowhere has the contrast between the interests of the MIC and the interests of the United States been more obvious than in our nuclear weapons policy, which since the Cold War has been governed by the logic of profit rather than deterrence theory. Policy experts who study nuclear war such as Daniel Ellsberg, Norman Solomon, and the former Secretary of Defense William Perry have long considered our intercontinental ballistic missile program (ICBM) to be, in their words, “some of the most dangerous weapons we have,” “a world-ending accident waiting to happen,” and “completely superfluous to a reliable deterrent.”  Yet despite decades of warnings from those nuclear policy experts, the Pentagon is calling for a $2 trillion “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear program and has already authorized a new ICBM program from Northrop Grumman called “Sentinel,” originally projected to cost $77 billion but now pricetagged at over $140 billion to develop and purchase. To explain why the U.S. government approves the budget for such a dangerous and unreliable weapons program, Hartung and Freeman convincingly point to lobbying in Congress, led by representatives like Liz Cheney, as well as regulators on the Strategic Posture Commission—nine of whose 12 members had direct ties to military contractors. Perhaps the most damning revelations of the book concern our corporate media and think tank class, who often serve the role as spokesman for defense companies rather than journalists and academics engaged in neutral and serious analysis of our foreign policy. Hartung and Freeman show how major news outlets routinely grant arms executives soft, uncritical cable hits—such as CBS’s Face the Nation interview with Lockheed Martin CEO James Taiclet, in which he was not asked a single substantive question about the F-35 program, a plane that costs $12–13 billion annually but may never actually be fully ready for combat due to its myriad of flaws. Meanwhile, Washington’s think tanks, which present themselves as neutral arbiters of foreign policy, increasingly operate off a funding structure sustained by Pentagon contractors and the foreign governments they lobby arms for. Drawing on disclosures compiled by the Quincy Institute’s Think Tank Funders Tracker, the authors note that more than $110 million has flowed to U.S. think tanks from foreign governments, roughly two-thirds of think tanks that publish donor lists receive foreign government funding, and between 2019 and 2023 defense contractors provided at least $24.8 million to these institutions. Unsurprisingly, the firms receiving the largest Pentagon contracts were also among the largest donors to the think tanks most frequently cited in media and congressional debates. Readers unfamiliar with the corruption of the military industrial complex can learn a great deal from this book while policymakers who may already be well versed in the scams of our nation’s best-funded corporate welfare queens will receive a precise blueprint on how to rein in defense spending and reassert our national interests over corporate ones. For any American concerned with government waste, The Trillion Dollar War Machine is a must-read. The post How the War Industry Captured U.S. Foreign Policy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs What Comes Next in Venezuela? Maybe it will come off, but the plan is far from clear. Hysteria is the enemy. The United States’ daring January 3 raid in Caracas to capture Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro was, to put it gently, a surprise to many (not least to Maduro). In the absence of much information, speculation and team sports rushed into the void.  The operation, as with the rest of the Venezuela pressure campaign, was premised on dubious legal and constitutional theory. The U.S. government declared that Maduro is not the “legitimate” president of Venezuela, connected him somewhat dubiously to Venezuelan drug-smuggling operations (and, even more dubiously, connected those operations to American drug fatalities), and decided that, consequently, the U.S. government can do whatever it wants to him without pesky nuisances like congressional approval for military action. For those who would like to see an American polity less oriented towards unaccountable war and executive imperialism, this is stuff for alarm, irrespective of the short-term success of the mission or the long-term prospects for American interests in Venezuela. As I wrote some months ago, “Whatever is going on with Venezuela is kicking up the same clouds of political dysfunction that have attended every such adventure since the Spanish–American War: public lies, legal improvisation, camarilla politics. The fear is less about what a quasi-war would do to Venezuela and its neighborhood, and more about what it will do to us.” These criticisms are ideological or theoretical; they stand or fall on the type of country you think America is and should be. But the deed is done, so of necessity the focus will now swing towards whatever comes next in practical terms. There’s a fair amount of vagueness in the messages the administration is sending about this. Marco Rubio says we are using an oil blockade and the threat of further violence as leverage over the Venezuelan regime; President Donald Trump says we are “running” the country, and we “aren’t afraid of boots on the ground.” There is some reporting that suggests Stephen Miller will be the Venezuela czar or viceroy. It seems the best-case scenario is that the regime, not liking the looks of what happened to Maduro, will cut a deal with the administration, allow us whatever rights for mineral exploitation we’re asking for, agree to some sort of middle-term transition to a more amenable government, and everyone rides into the sunset.  Let’s hope that’s the case (although it is not entirely clear how this endstate is different from or more desirable than the offers of concessions Venezuela made before Maduro was ousted). There is nevertheless much that could go wrong, and the administration has not made a clear argument for why it won’t go wrong. One of the premises of this whole thing is the hopeless corruption of the Venezuelan military. If Delcy Rodriguez, the Bolivarian Republic’s acting president, tries to cut a deal with Washington (or if she has already done so), it does not seem a sure thing that some number of generals aren’t going to try their luck at maintaining their rackets. What then? A war on Colombian-style drug paramilitaries? That seems difficult and bad. Conversely, what if Rodriguez is pressured into resisting the administration’s demands? Are we just going to keep running raids until something changes? Do we think we can do this sort of thing indefinitely? That is far from clear. Or, if it all ends in pizza, what if the oil companies whom Trump seems to think are going to be responsible for rebuilding the country find the implementation of their plans for infrastructure hampered by any number of accidental factors—Venezuelan crime, unexpected expense, and so on? These are all contingencies that must be considered; they would all put a serious damper on all the triumphant hooting coming from the administration’s allies. Snap polling has suggested the American public is less excited by this escapade than the popular strikes on Iran last June. Are they going to tolerate an unexpectedly difficult project they didn’t ask for and didn’t find particularly stirring? The administration has been (for now, more or less) committed to presenting this as a fundamentally different adventure than the Iraq War. It is true that Venezuela has far more to do with America than the Middle East does, and that a robust and occasionally aggressive policy in the Western Hemisphere has much to recommend it. And the administration and its allies insist there will be no equivalent of “debaathification,” which is something of a comfort—as is the fact that the “regime collapse” touted by some of its allies did not in fact occur. But everything coming off well seems to involve a lot of “ifs.” Maybe these guys know what they’re doing, and there’s a grand plan that has yet to be revealed. That isn’t this administration’s usual style, though; the burden of proof is with the administration to show that this dubiously legal, dubiously prudent course of action will work. We’ll find out soon enough. The post What Comes Next in Venezuela? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Dancing with the dark side. The post When a satanist cult invited Black Sabbath to play a show at Stonehenge first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

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