Coming up to the 38th Martin Luther King Day, it is obvious to everyone that integration has failed. The Floyd and Black Lives Matter Hoax riots last year, the ridiculous debate over Critical Race Theory, invites a question no one, least of all the worthies who run Conservatism, Inc., wants to ask: Now what? And that question occasions a look back at two remarkably honest essays, one from Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Little Rock [Dissent, Winter 1959 (PDF)], and the other from Norman Podhoretz, My Negro Problem—And Ours for Commentary [February 1963(PDF). Both tacitly suggested that black-white racial problems were insoluble.

Arendt originally wrote her piece for Commentary, but the editors spiked it because her views “were at variance with the magazine’s stand on matters of discrimination and segregation.” That was rich given the atom bomb Podhoretz dropped four years later. Arendt wrote that federal intervention to desegregate southern schools was a dangerously stupid idea, particularly President Eisenhower’s deployment of the fabled 101st Airborne to Little Rock, AR enforce the U.S. Supreme Court’s post-Brown v. Board ruling to desegregate schools with “all deliberate speed.”

On this day in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower deploys troops from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. pic.twitter.com/Rj0FIM8z5M

— Military History Now (@MilHistNow) September 24, 2020

Though “things had quieted down temporarily,” she wrote, but “[r]ecent developments have convinced me that such hopes are futile and that the routine repetition of liberal cliches may be even more dangerous than l thought a year ago.”

“The achievement of social, eco­nomic, and educational equality for the Negro may sharpen the color problem in this country instead of assuaging it,” Arendt wrote, and although this didn’t necessarily have to happen “it would be only natural if it did, and it would be very surprising if it did not.”

By “equality,” Arendt meant forced desegregation and integration. Predicting they would cause more racial trouble did not mean one opposed them, she wrote, but such foreknowledge should “commit one to advocating that government intervention be guided by caution and moderation rather than by impatience and ill-advised measures.”

The federal government must proceed cautiously:

It has been said, I think again by [Southern novelist William] Faulkner, that enforced integration is no better than enforced segregation, and this is perfectly true. The only reason that the Supreme Court was able to address itself to the matter of desegregation in the first place was that segregation has been a legal, and not just a social, issue in the South for many generations. For the crucial point to remember is that it is not the social custom of segregation that is unconstitutional, but its legal enforcement.

Thus the law must desegregate buses, hotels, and restaurants because they are required for a person to carry on life’s quotidian routine. With an apparently straight face, Arendt concluded “this does not apply to theaters and museums, where people obviously do not congregate for the purpose of associating with each other.”

They don’t?!

Then Arendt pushed the gas pedal. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 that inspired the Southern Manifesto “did not go far enough” to abolish “unconstitutional [state] legislation,” she wrote:

[F]or it left untouched the most out­rageous law of Southern states—the law which makes mixed marriage a criminal offense. The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one’s skin or color or race” are minor indeed.

But at least Arendt added a proviso. SCOTUS, which eventually banned anti-miscegenation laws in Loving V. Virginia, never would “have felt compelled to encourage, let alone enforce, mixed marriages.” Yet it did feel compelled to force integration .

That aside, Arendt lamented that Leftists were conscripting children to serve as human shields, and that forced integration meant parents would lose the right of free association:

It certainly did not require too much imagination to see that this was to burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve. … [D]o we intend to have our political battles fought in the school yards? …

To force parents to send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies—the private right over their children and the social right to free association. …

[G]overnment intervention, even at its best, will always be rather controversial. Hence it seems highly questionable whether it was wise to begin enforcement of civil rights in a domain where no basic human and no basic political right is at stake, and where other rights—social and private—whose protection is no less vital, can so easily be hurt.

It seems impossible to believe that a public intellectual, particularly a Jewish one, could or would write that public education is a “domain where no basic human and no basic political right is at stake.” Then again, that’s one obvious reason Commentary rejected Arendt’s piece.

An amusing note about Arendt’s piece, versus Podhoretz’s, is how she introduced it. “Like most people of European origin I have difficulty in understanding, let alone sharing the common prejudices of Americans in this area,” she wrote:

[A]s a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the Negroes as for all oppressed or underprivileged peoples for granted and should appreciate it if the reader did likewise.

Of course. Like most Europeans at that time, Arendt had no direct experience with blacks. This was in dramatic contrast to Norman Podhoretz, who very frankly reported that, during his Brooklyn childhood, black kids beat him to a pulp on his way home from school.

Podhoretz was mystified. Why do blacks hate Jews with the same ferocity they hate all other whites? he wondered.

“To me, at the age of twelve, it seemed very clear that Negroes were better off than Jews—indeed, than all whites” [in his neighborhood] he wrote. This was despite his older, radical sister’s claim that black were oppressed:

[I]n my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes. What could it mean, then, to say that they were badly off and that we were more fortunate? Yet my sister’s opinions, like print, were sacred, and when she told me about exploitation and economic forces I believed her. I believed her, but I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart.

No one could blame him. The beatings were brutal, on par with attempted murder. He received a bat across the head for answering a question correctly in class that a black thug had missed. A track team that cheated and lost a meet against Podhoretz’s high school assaulted him and his teammates. The blacks wanted to steal the medals. And so on. Podhoretz learned early the wisdom encapsulated in the late Colin Flaherty’s book title: “Don’t make the black kids angry.”

Podhoretz bluntly noted that that blacks are low IQ academic underachievers, then tried to explain why “the Negro-white conflict had—and no doubt still has—a special intensity and was conducted with a ferocity unmatched by intramural white battling.”

Wrote Podhoretz:

[A] good deal of animosity existed between the Italian kids (most of whose parents were immigrants from Sicily) and the Jewish kids (who came largely from East European immigrant families). Yet everyone had friends, sometimes close friends, in the other “camp,” and we often visited one another’s strange-smelling houses, if not for meals, then for glasses of milk, and occasionally for some special event like a wedding or a wake. If it happened that we divided into warring factions and did battle, it would invariably be half-hearted and soon patched up. Our parents, to be sure, had nothing to do with one another and were mutually suspicious and hostile. But we, the kids, who all spoke Yiddish or Italian at home, were Americans, or New Yorkers, or Brooklyn boys: we shared a culture, the culture of the street, and at least for a while this culture proved to be more powerful than the opposing cultures of the home.

Why, why should it have been so different as between the Negroes and us?

Leftist homosexual James Baldwin “describe[d] the sense of entrapment that poisons the soul of the Negro with hatred for the white man whom he knows to be his jailer,” Podhoretz observed.

Yet he was still “troubled and puzzled”:

How could the Negroes in my neighborhood have regarded the whites across the street and around the corner as jailers? On the whole, the whites were not so poor as the Negroes, but they were quite poor enough, and the years were years of Depression. As for white hatred of the Negro, how could guilt have had anything to do with it? What share had these Italian and Jewish immigrants in the enslavement of the Negro? What share had they—downtrodden people themselves breaking their own necks to eke out a living—in the exploitation of the Negro?

Baldwin himself answered that question four years later in The New York Times under this refreshingly frank headline: Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White [April 9, 1967].

The opening paragraphs indicted Jews by stereotyping them as unscrupulous, moneygrubbing landlords, grocers, and merchants who kept blacks in debt:

The butcher was a Jew and, yes, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New York citizens, and we very often carried insults home, along with the meat. We bought our clothes from a Jew and, sometimes, our secondhand shoes, and the pawnbroker was a Jew—perhaps we hated him most of all. The merchants along 125th Street were Jewish—at least many of them were; I don’t know if Grant’s or Woolworth’s are Jewish names—and I well remember that it was only after the Harlem riot of 1935 that Negroes were allowed to earn a little money in some of the stores where they spent so much.

But in the end, that exploitation didn’t matter. White Christians were Baldwin’s real enemy:

The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.

Baldwin certainly knew not to rile the people who bankrolled and provided legal and intellectual firepower to the Civil rights movement that got blacks everything they demanded and more, not least anti-white discrimination.

Fast forward 50 years.

Blacks are angry and unhappy despite being among the most powerful politicians and wealthiest athletes, doctors, lawyers, entertainers, professors, and public intellectuals in the world. Blacks are angry and unhappy 30 years after the federal government canonized rapist Martin Luther King. Blacks are angry and unhappy 13 years after Americans elected a black president, then elected him again.

Almost 70 years after Brown, almost 60 years after the Civil and Voting Rights acts, decades after Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and Barack Hussein Obama became household names—the farther away we go from Jim Crow and segregation—the angrier and unhappier blacks become.

• They demand reparations for slavery despite trillions of white tax dollars dumped into their communities;
• Despite their wanton criminality often directed at whites, they are “exhausted” from dealing with imagined “microaggressions.”
• “Systemic racism” is still our arrant, defining moral failure.
• Whites are censored, fired, and professionally ruined if they disagree in the slightest with leftist racial dogma.
• “Whiteness,” we are told, is a pandemic-level disease more dangerous than the Flu Manchu.

Podhoretz could think of only one solution, an early blueprint of The Great Replacement. A black man’s color must “disappear as a fact of consciousness,” Podhoretz wrote:

[I]t will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation. …

[T]the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned. … [T]he Negro problem can be solved in this country in no other way.

If eliminating the white race is the only solution to Podhoretz’s “Negro problem and ours,” then it may never be solved. Most whites won’t go along, including Leftists whose zeal for black liberation, Podhoretz confessed, did not match their desire not to live anywhere near or put their kids in school with blacks.

As Joe Sobran once quipped, college gives white leftists all the right attitudes about minorities…and the education and income to move as far away from them as possible.

They have good reason. Even Leftists know, to rephrase Rodney King, that we just can’t get along.

When will we admit it?

unz.com

This may sound either arrogant or forgetful, but I could not possibly remember the number of times I was in the same room or at the same protest as Desmond Tutu. And the main reason I know he was there is because I was there listening to him speak, often from a distance of not more than two meters or so.  I say this not to associate myself with the great man — though I’ll forgive you for thinking I’m a terrible, narcissistic name-dropper — but just to be sure we all know this all really happened, because I saw and heard it.

It seems very important to mention, because of the way this man is already being remembered by the world’s pundits and politicians.  As anyone could have predicted, Tutu is being remembered as the great opponent of apartheid in his native South Africa, who was one of the most recognized and most eloquent leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle there, for most of his adult life.

Being a leader in the movement to end apartheid in South Africa was probably the greatest achievement of the man’s life work, and it should come as a surprise to no one that this is the focus of his many obituaries, along with the Nobel he was awarded in 1984.  After Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, he was remembered by the establishment in much the same way, as a leader of the movement against apartheid in the US.  The fact that he had become one of the most well-known and well-loved voices of the antiwar movement in the United States and around the world at the time of his death has largely been written out of the history books, a very inconvenient truth.

But as with Martin Luther King, many of the same political leaders commemorating Tutu today would have been unlikely to mention him a day earlier, lest Tutu take the opportunity to speak his mind.  This is certainly why he was not invited to commemorate his friend and comrade, Nelson Mandela, at Mandela’s funeral eight years ago.

Like King and so many others, we can be sure that all the praises of Desmond Tutu as the great moral compass of the world will be made safely, after he’s dead.  Before then would have been much too dangerous, and he was best ignored until then — at which point his passing can be used as an easy way for liberals and conservatives alike to talk about how they also opposed South African apartheid, eventually.

Looking back at Desmond Tutu’s life, searching for various references to protests I recall him speaking at, there’s a headline from the Washington Post on February 16th, 2003 — “thousands protest a war in Iraq,” in New York City the day before.  There were at least half a million people at the rally, on one of the coldest winter days anyone could remember.  What I recall most vividly is being behind the stage, which was even colder than most anywhere else at the protest, because it was also in the shade.  Huddling amid the frozen metal scaffolding were a variety of leftwing luminaries, including Desmond Tutu, Danny Glover, and Susan Serandon, who were getting all the attention from the media, allowing me to hang out with Pete and Toshi Seeger, since no one else wanted to talk to them, or me.

The following year there was a rally in Copley Square in Boston, Massachusetts against Israeli apartheid.  It was very windy, and there were hundreds of people filling the area in front of the big church there on Boylston Street.  I don’t remember who else spoke, but Tutu was the main speaker, and he spoke at length, after I sang “They’re Building A Wall” and other songs related to the anti-apartheid struggle in Palestine, as it was an event in solidarity with Palestinians.  Being such a well-known leader in the struggle against South African apartheid, when he would compare Israeli apartheid to the South African version, this was just the kind of support the movement to boycott Israel needed, and Tutu did his best to provide it, over and over again.

There were three overlapping social movements in the early 2000’s that I was involved with as a musician, all of which Tutu was deeply involved with.  I apologize for speaking of these movements in the past tense, but none of them are anywhere near as big or active as they were in the early 2000’s.  I’m talking about the global justice movement and the movement to cancel debt in the Global South, the movement against Israeli apartheid, and the movement against the US/UK invasion of Iraq.

At the time I wondered how it was that Desmond Tutu was showing up at so many of the same protests, conferences, and other events I was attending, promoting, or singing at.  There was a lot going on, and at the time I didn’t know Tutu was actually living in the United States much of the time in the early 2000’s, as a visiting professor in both Georgia and Massachusetts.  There were a lot of other South African radicals at so many of the rallies, especially around the global justice movement, such as representatives of the South African trade unions.  The South African poet, the late Dennis Brutus, was everywhere back then as well.

Journalism, they say, is the first draft of history.  The journalists, when given the job to cover Desmond Tutu, generally did so when it had something to do with South African apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which he chaired, etc.  The journalists aren’t present elsewhere.  Their bosses didn’t send them to cover the protests Tutu was speaking at in Boston or New York, for the most part.

Lots of other drafts of history are then rewritten, for the text books, and for the obituaries, when once again Desmond Tutu’s centrality to the struggle against South African apartheid will be highlighted, with most everything else papered over or ignored entirely.  Others will recall Tutu’s service to the global social movements that arose in the decades after apartheid, to which he gave the full weight of his moral standing — whether these movements were covered by the corporate press or not, whether most of us knew these movements existed or not.

Yes, for those of us who were involved with the social movements that were active when Tutu was a spry young man of 70 or so, we will remember him as a fierce critic of capitalism, of Israeli apartheid, and of US and British wars of aggression.  And we know why he is being praised now by media outlets and politicians who have had no time or space for him since 1998 or so.

Desmond Tutu failed to remain in his historical place.  Had he played his cards differently in the post-South African apartheid period, he could have been a very rich and even more venerated man, winning lots more awards and schmoozing with the world’s power brokers.  Instead, before his official retirement from public life at the age of 79, he spent his seventies campaigning around the world as part of social movements for equality, dignity, and peace, and being a thorn in the side of so many of the rich and powerful people praising him today.

Dead people can’t speak out in their own defense, which makes them much less dangerous than when they were alive (especially if they died of natural causes).  So it’s up to those of us who are still here to speak, and to remember.  Long live Desmond Tutu.  Long live Desmond Tutu’s vision of a world free of oppression — a world in which so many of the politicians praising him today would be in front of a truth and reconciliation commission tomorrow, if Tutu were calling the shots.  Amandla awethu.  Our time will come.

counterpunch.org

You might think they did if you got your information about the Waukesha massacre from mainstream media.

By Sohrab AHMARI

Imagine that the mainstream press simply disappeared one day: that by some strange, miraculous course of events, the major corporate organs simply vanished off the face of the earth. Would the American people, and our republic, be any worse off than they are now? Might we even be better off?

It’s the sort of naughty counterfactual that crosses one’s mind when confronted with corporate journalists’ role in stoking racial unrest in this country—and in actively misshaping public perceptions of events when those events undermine the media narrative of a white-supremacist nation that hunts its black citizens for sport.

The latest outburst of media knavery came in response to last week’s Waukesha parade massacre that killed six innocents, including an 8-year-old boy, and injured more than 40. If your media digest consisted solely of mainstream outlets, however, no one could blame you for thinking the killing was the work of a sentient, evil SUV—and not of Darrell Brooks Jr., a black man with a long rap sheet and a history of anti-white racism.

“Here’s what we know so far on the sequence of events that led to the Waukesha tragedy caused by a SUV,” tweeted the Washington Post on Nov. 24, days after the true nature of the event had been established (the tweet has since been deleted). The underlying article was little better: Brooks didn’t make an appearance until the fifth paragraph, and throughout, the paper kept referring to the vehicle, not its driver, as the wrongdoer.

On Sunday, meanwhile, CNN informed us that “Waukesha will hold a moment of silence” to memorialize “one week since a car drove through a city Christmas parade.” What a terrible, nasty car. Bad car.

My own favorite entry in the genre came courtesy of David Begnaud, CBS’s chief national correspondent, who tweeted on Nov. 23 that a sixth person, a child, “has died in the Wisconsin parade crash.” Behold a network-news correspondent’s sheer determination to turn an apparently intentional vehicular killing spree by a Black Lives Matter devotee into a simple crash, the sort of thing that sadly occurs dozens of times every day across the land.

Come on: It’s painfully obvious why reporters and editors, including increasingly influential social-media editors, would turn to such cheap tricks of the hack’s trade when faced with a figure like Brooks. The man in every way upends the story the media, and our elites more generally, have been spinning about race in America. As Pedro L. Gonzalez documents on his invaluable Substack blog,

[Brooks’] social-media posts present a range of extremist views, from encouraging “knocking out white people” and enslaving them, to supporting Black Lives Matter, the Black Panther Party and the Black Hebrew Israelites, a militant black-supremacist hate group. In one of his rap songs, Brooks bragged about being a “terrorist” and a “killer in the city.”

This is all extremely inconvenient for our ruling class. So it must be airbrushed away.

It’s true that the media have always, well, mediated the truth for readers and viewers. National and international news outlets came into being because no one person can figure out what’s going on in his own city, much less the nation or the world. Serving the media consumer’s needs necessarily involves shaping the daily pile of news into relatively compact and, yes, interesting narratives.

Yet a clear line distinguishes this legitimate task (of curating and framing) from Pravda­-style propagandizing in behalf of power and powerful ideologies. The American corporate media crossed that line a long time ago; the shameless, support-the-D.C.-consensus-at-all-costs drum-beating for the Iraq War was an early transgression.

Today’s race-narrativizing is next-level stuff, as the kids say. It reminds me of nothing so much as how European media cover crimes and terror attacks committed by recent migrants from the Middle East and North Africa: You often don’t learn that the perp was a migrant until the last few paragraphs of the story—if at all. Open borders are a priority for Europe’s ruling classes, and so reporters and editors airbrush, say, the inconvenient fact of women raped by “asylum-seekers” in Munich.

“Following the story wherever it takes you”? Yeah, not anymore.

Consider our media’s coverage of Nick Sandmann, the Catholic high-schooler instantly framed by the media as a racist because he…smiled at a Native-American elder who was obnoxiously banging a drum in his face. Or of Kyle Rittenhouse, who mainstream outlets just knew was a racist, on the basis of exactly zero evidence. Sandmann sued his defamers, forcing CNN and the Washington Post to settle. Now there are rumors swirling of Rittenhouse doing the same thing, though so far, his spokesmen insist there are no immediate plans.

I say go for it, Kyle. Media owners’ pockets are deep, but not infinitely so. We can’t wish away CNN and the like. But the media’s victims should counterpunch as hard as they can by all lawful means. “Don’t mess with me, lest I hurt you back”—does any other principle govern American public life these days?

theamericanconservative.com

History enlightens us, perhaps too much. In the sense that too much information often confuses us, especially if those who write the books that recount the past are not honest, which is a well-known problem. The fact is that it is not a (historical) mystery that Berlin has always wanted to lead Europe. And from Europe, the world. The first and second world wars are there to prove it.

In both conflicts, Berlin didn’t succeed, even though in WWII it even co-opted Paris in a certain way. As Robert O. Paxton explained to the French, including those on the left; Vichy did not happen by mistake, but by calculation and by affinity in the will – especially of the French elites – to overpower Europe, thus to rule it.

We know how that ended.

But the details, summarized in the Paperclip Operation, should tell us that perhaps there is something more. At the end of WWII, the most important Nazi scientists that could be useful to challenge the emerging USSR, were extricated by the Americans. Even before WWII, a German economic-lobbying base had been operating for some time in New York inside the Thyssen Bank. The purpose of this lobby was to avoid the USA going to war against the Axis.

It is a fact that after World War II many of the leading Nazis disappeared mysteriously, to the point of doubting that they had been secretly taken in by the Americans, perhaps because of their tremendous and public misdeeds. Or they were hired by the OSS, (now CIA), or by the U.S. industrial-military apparatus in the race for post-nuclear dominance against Moscow. Von Braun, Gehlen, and Skorzeny are perhaps the most emblematic cases. Mengele and Muller (Gestapo) are the most mysterious cases. In between, there were dozens if not hundreds of former Nazi criminals who have collaborated post-war with the winning power.

Sounds pragmatic? Perhaps. I would also say risky, in this case.

This risk was – in the long run – one of creating a German bridgehead, or rather an ex-Nazi bridgehead, with its values and absolute power in the USA for purposes unplannable at the time, but still available. In this context, one must inevitably consider the fact that, yes, there can be only one “Head of the West”. And today, that is the USA, although the Germans would like to take its place, being the “first among equals” like the ancient Romans liked to depict themselves.

* * *

With a leap of 75 years, we arrive at the present day and we must note that too many strange things have happened since late 2019/early 2020 to today. The first was the struggle with President Trump, then COVID, which helped to create a very contested U.S. election, then the vaccines, and then the suppression of freedom from various world governments to fight a disease that kills very few… events that seem clearly linked if not downright coordinated.

We would like to make an overall observation, without getting caught up in conspiracy theories (that we do not like), that in global events this is the first time since the end of WWII that we do not see the USA addressing a clear and precise explanation as to what is happening in the whole western world.

Without forgetting the growing Western, but better “Anglo”, challenge to China. Let’s bear in mind that, before the alliance with Japan, Berlin (before becoming Nazi), was very close to Beijing. They well understood – based on German pragmatism – that to challenge the rising power of the USA, a critical mass was needed. (The alliance with Japan came only later, following a certainly risky move on the Japanese side, but which paid off: the invasion of northern China).

And here we are, with clashes in the streets that are being repeated as they were during the U.S. election last November. Perhaps the oddities of the Rittenhouse case are a symbol of what is happening in the world. A symbolism that, incredibly, seems almost to act as the glue for an interpretation of history imbued with pragmatism.

The young Rittenhouse, the face of a child, but with a surname that is, I would say, resonant for American history, is brought to trial for something that, from the outside, would seem to be self-defense: armed with childlike idealism, Kyle took to the streets during the night of the riots in Kenosha, with a rifle in his hand, to defend private property and deter the clashes. Clearly, for someone, it didn’t go quite like they wanted, even if it seems that part of the evidence in his defense was tried to be kept hidden by the FBI.

On the other side of the fence, subjects who were killed by Rittenhouse (2) or wounded (1), we will see if it was an act of self-defense or not. Subjects that, unlike the armed young man, do not carry heavy surnames for the stars and stripes history: Anthony Huber, 26, and Joseph Rosenbaum, the two victims, and Gaige Grosskreutz, wounded. All white males.

Judging the case, Judge Bruce Schroeder, also white. And he too has a surname that is not so prominent in the USA, certainly much more so in other European countries.

Above all, according to the writer, we should remember the famous vote to choose the official language in which to write the American laws, choosing whether to introduce the German language as well. We all know that the English language vote won, but only by one vote, 42 to 41, sanctioning the choice of the official U.S. language. This is to say that the weight of German culture in the USA, especially in the north-eastern areas subjected to strong European immigration, has always been preponderant.

What we are observing in the Rittenhouse trial is really a symbolic aspect. Whichever way the trial goes, Judge Schroder has decided to take on a starring role with his attitude, assuming a certain torment – outside of the final decision – for the trial of the young Rittenhouse.

In this context, we can only agree with CNN, that perhaps there would never be a need for a black judge and a black jury since the defendant and the victims are all white.

* * *

The strategic question remains – is what happened in Kenosha a symptom of a deep internal fault in the United States, that is reviving ancient rivalries between the Anglo world and the proto-German world?

This doubt is similar to the one described above; that from Operation Paperclip onwards there has been a very high-level influence in the U.S. intelligence by ex-Nazis, people not so recommendable in their intentions, since in any case, they are enemies – although defeated – of the USA. The USA, I remind you, has always been the adversary to defeat, in order to reach the “head” of the western world idealized by Berlin.

All of this and always giving high specific weight to subjects of purely German origin, who are clearly constantly present in the American culture “that counts”. Although, as in the case of Kissinger, it often cannot be said that here presents the soul of the stars and stripes, given that, for example, the venerated Henry himself was born in a Germany that a few years later would become Nazi Germany.

In this context we finally arrive at the title: perhaps it would not be surprising if the Stasi or what remains of it (today absorbed in other institutions, ed.) has also acted indirectly within the USA, to destabilize it. We do not dare to speculate how such a hypothetical end could be pursued, clearly.

Thus, we limit ourselves to observing the history of Antifa, born as a movement in Germany, in 1932 (Antifaschistische Aktion), to fight the fascism represented at that time by Mussolini. And then transited, what remained of it, into the GDR, its natural home in terms of theoretical political positioning.

Thus it was able to leverage itself during the Cold War on the organizational power of what was the structure very cleverly governed by Markus Wolf, the famous Stasi.

Today Antifa has spread all over the world and is organized almost militarily in its global “interventions”. Could it be also an objective/tool of the ex-GDR secret services? Impossible to exclude, indeed (its protests against the Trump presidency were unforgettable for example).

Apart from pointing out that the Stasi also financed and trained members of the RAF – Rote Armee Fraktion, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang: after the fall of the communist government in East Germany in 1989-1990, it was discovered that the RAF had been trained and supplied, and had received protection from the Stasi, the secret police of the former communist regime.

John Philip Jenkins, professor emeritus of history at Baylor University, says the RAF’s tactics are similar to those used by Antifa today:

“The goal of their terrorist campaign was to trigger an aggressive response from the government, which the groups’ members said would trigger a broader revolutionary movement.”

Bettina Röhl, the German journalist of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, presented an unmissable analysis on June 2, 2020 on the subject, noting how Antifa is paid by the German government to fight the extreme right (…). Even going so far as to state the following:

“One might wonder if the Antifa movement is something like an official RAF, a terrorist group financed by the state under the pretext of ‘fighting against the Right’”.

Based on public denunciations from Republican members of the House of Representatives, whether true or false, we cannot exclude that Antifa may have been involved in the Capitol Hill protests. It is enough to refer to the chronicle of the beginning of the year 2021 to see the pieces of evidence left behind to be able to understand what happened

* * *

The basic consideration remains: perhaps the U.S. is not as united as it may appear. And perhaps there is a hidden driving force that could leverage such internal divisions to weaken the “head” of the Western world, perhaps precisely on a Teutonic basis.

Such a consideration would also justify the global “directing” chaos within the West for the last two years.

Remembering the discovery of the famous Zimmermann Telegram (the German diplomatic telegram that, to make a long story short, tried to foment a Mexican revolt against the USA during the First World War, in order to avoid a U.S. military involvement in the Great War) we’ll stick to watching the events unfold.

In the end, we are mindful of Mark Twain’s teaching that history often, if it doesn’t repeat itself, it still rhymes…

Was Kyle Rittenhouse carrying out a premeditated act or protecting his own life when he shot three and killed two rioters in Kenosha last year? What does the trial say about the state of the criminal justice system in the U.S.? Was the November 22^nd mass killing event in Waukesha the consequence of the Rittenhouse verdict?

Rittenhouse’s verdict of “Not-Guilty” on all counts was a moment of shock and disappointment for millions of Americans who were unaware of the facts of the case, but had instead followed mainstream media reportage which had falsely depicted the youth as a militia member and white supremacist.

Even blue-checkmarkistas on twitter were surprised to find out that the three people that 17 year old Rittenhouse had shot were not black, but instead white. Further disorientation ensued when they discovered the atrocious criminal records of the two who were killed in self-defense.

Both the UK Independent and Euronews wrongly reported that Rittenhouse had killed black protestors, for reasons unknown but quite easily inferred.

But how was the tactic of the color revolution applied to the Rittenhouse case such that the state feels obliged to transform self-defense into a so-called ‘active shooter scenario’?

If this subject was introduced into trial, as prosecutors and the defense had already both recognized this was a political case, then I believe the public may have been better situated to understand similar tactics in the future.

That future came on November 22^nd when Darrell Edward Brooks Jr. drove his red SUV into a Waukesha parade, killing at least five and injuring many others. Color tactics will be operationalized to capitalize on the horrific mass casualty event which occurred, apparently in revenge for the Rittenhouse verdict.

The BBC and other corporate media outlets were quick to dismiss the possibility of terrorism in relation to the Brooks case, where intentional homicide charges have now been filed, following the racist media bias that all black mass violence is mental health related and all white mass violence is white supremacy.

This is oddly justified in reportage by confusing terrorism for acts which must involve a group of people, entirely misrepresenting this in light of the FBI’s own categories of terrorism which include lone-acting perpetrators. Brooks was a BLM supporter and had previously made a social media post explaining how to run people over and get away with it.

But in the case of Rittenhouse, the word ‘terrorism’ was used repeatedly.

Days earlier, the Rittenhouse defense team was successful in articulating that the prosecution had not made its case. But as this case was among the most watched trials since OJ Simpson’s, it would have helped to inoculate the general public better from the likes of the Nov. 22^nd mass killing event in Waukesha.

Had the Ziminskis been brought to testify, and their phone data, emails, brought into evidence, there would have been further evidence that I believe would have shown a plan of sorts to kill one of the armed citizens should the opportunity arise.

Besides a whole list of prosecutorial misconduct throughout this trial, why were the Ziminskis not brought to testify, and how would have their testimony exposed a broader plot related to the direct use of violent mobs by the Democrat Party in that fateful year?

November 17th Trial Date. From L to R, Attorneys Richards and Chirafisi, with defendant Rittenhouse

The fact that there is even a Kyle Rittenhouse case at all is a problem in itself. The internet world is abuzz with legal experts, live streaming their YouTube and twitch accounts, with a highly granular focus on the play-by-play. And while much of this blow-by-blow misses the broader point, and in fairness it’s not really supposed to go there, the fact is that the prosecution effectively suppressed the possibility of hearing the testimony of the Ziminskis.

It was this couple, with Joshua Ziminski wielding a gun which he fired, that set off Joseph Rosenbaum to do the crazy things he was expected to do, ultimately ending his life as he lunged for the same rifle that Rittenhouse fired into him.

Images of Joshua Ziminski: left-most, holding gun at the Kenosha riots

The protests that Kyle Rittenhouse came out to protect and provide first-aid for, based on his own strong views on the 1^st amendment, at the invitation of a couple of used car lot proprietors, were in fact part of a larger color revolution tactic. The terrorism of 2020 was matched only by the Covid lockdown police state which affected and still affects far too many.

But what the internet has gotten wrong about color revolutions in relation to the U.S. case, and I say this as someone who probably first introduced to the public that this was what was happening to the country, is that color revolutions are based on real existing grievances. As should be expected, this understanding of color revolutions and that the U.S. was experiencing one, caught on like wild fire in the digital sphere. But what was twisted to fit a partisan agenda, was that color revolutions were inherently left-wing in nature.

To the neo-Nazis of Ukraine, the notion that their Maidan Square color revolution was ‘left-wing’ would be news to them. To the ultra-patriarchal theocrats who ushered in the Muslim Brotherhood agent Morsi in Egypt in the Tahir Square color revolution, this would also be big news to them. Of course I could go on and on about ultra-nationalist, chauvinist, theocratic, far-right color revolutions that Soros and the NGO industrial complex along with the U.S. deep state have pulled off, or at least tried to, because it’s my job to. What had been forgotten along the way is that Soros was a Jewish volunteer for the Nazis, who went out with his fellow Nazis and rounded up other Jews, and sickeningly remains unrepentant about this fact to this day. The recurring theme for Soros is that he is not ideological, unless that ideology is Sorosism.

Now surely one can argue that in many cases, the real existing grievances are somewhat manufactured, but hardly are they ever manufactured in a way that works against the general tendencies of human nature operating within systems that work to the benefit of some portion of the elites – say, for instance, the privatized prisons system in the U.S..

There is apparently a crisis in the criminal justice system in the U.S., one which easily fits the definition of a crisis but for one feature. Can endemic and chronic phenomenon be considered crises? Or does it just become normalized? What I have noted as particularly fascinating in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, is the polarization around the issue. Sadly, it wouldn’t be the case if the real issues were driving social attitudes.

And roughly it boils down not only to worldview and political outlook, but to information sources. The cultural revolution of wokeness as seen through the lens of Covid ‘do your part’ ritualized jabbing, is ushering in a dystopia which, oddly, we forget about just for a moment when we talk about the Kyle Rittenhouse case.

But what has gone relatively unnoticed, is that with the Kyle Rittenhouse case, we have precisely the levels of prosecutorial misconduct on open display, that have landed millions of black Americans into prisons. Yes, all Americans too, but there is some persuasive evidence that black Americans receive heavier sentences for the same precise crimes when all other factors (including priors and related charges) are included.

Kenosha riots, August 23 – September 1, 2020

The BLM protests (white riots) last year in Kenosha where Rittenhouse exercised, what he claims and appears reasonable to me to conclude as self-defense from all the evidence I’ve seen in dutifully observing a dozen days of the trial, were a reflection of the upside-down world we’re in. They were, as I’ve said of course, white riots and not black protests, and more to the point they were direct assets of the Democrat Party’s color revolution scheme that ripped the country apart in an attempt to overthrow Trump.

And what of this color revolution scheme and the Ziminskis? That’s what should be on trial.

The Ziminskis were critical to this trial, and it was a huge loss that they were excluded, I believe illegally but absolutely immorally, by the prosecutors.

As an expert both in insurgency techniques using ideology and social movements, as well as a former chief negotiator for a prominent SEIU local, and knowing the precise techniques, organizations, and individuals, I know that this aspect involving the Ziminskis was left alone by prosecutors to avoid unearthing the larger plot.

SEIU was involved deeply in this Color Revolution, SEIU’s color is purple incidentally, and the color revolution which the Transition Integrity Project hailed, has been called the Purple Revolution by adherents and critics alike.

The Ziminskis were excluded from testimony by the prosecutors, and the timing of their trial was concerted through collusion between the D.A and the courts, so that Joshua Ziminski could not be crossed. This is despite Ziminski’s intimate knowledge of the events, and that his testimony would have established coordination between his actions and Rosenbaum’s.

In other words, self-defense becomes clearer when one is attacked by two men, one armed, and the other lunging for a tackle or for the gun: it becomes a necessarily lethal encounter where self-defense is profoundly evident.

Ziminski, who goes by the alias Alex Blair, himself had a long criminal record and therefore was potentially not an SEIU staffer himself, though under such conditions as the color revolution tactic, such involvement would not be unlikely.

What would have been revealed? What evidence would have come to light? Citizens must understand that the events in Kenosha were staged by a fascist technique executed by the corporate oligarchy. Not indirectly, not systemically, but directly by organizing the riots.

It does not matter that the ideology of the professional rioters is ‘far left’. The color revolution operation is fascist in nature because the financiers are globalist corporations, and the techniques used are not mobilization of the masses against elites (as in Marxism/Anarchism), but the mobilization of a part of the population against another part of the regular population, financed by corporations.

The Ziminskis were armed field organizers or field coordinators, or had been operationalized by such, either on the SEIU payroll or through its own COPA piggy bank, and/or of the various front groups similar to if not the same as ‘Our Revolution’, ‘Our Wisconsin Revolution’. There is the Wisconsin ‘People’s Revolution’, and similar. All operate identically. Grosskreutz, whose arm was vaporized as he attempted to shoot Kyle Rittenhouse by obscuring his gun side and trying to run around him, also testified to having been an activist and sympathizer of the same organization that the Ziminskis worked for, or were operationalized by.

But the organization was not some stand-alone group, without ties to the establishment, and herein lies our point.

“Our Revolution” was a spin-off of the Bernie Sanders campaign, designed at first part to capture the ‘rage’ of the nomination being stolen from Sanders by Buttigieg/Biden.

These are organizations funded through the Soros NGO, “Democracy Alliance”, and its professional field organizers and coordinators, hired often under the title ‘community organizer’, were typically leased through SEIU. This raised countless hundreds of millions to pay for travel, legal, and housing expenses for professional agitators. Following the Buttigieg move against Sanders, “Our Revolution” was launched, but initially they pretended to be unaffiliated with the Bernie Sanders campaign.

SEIU field organizers and political directors, including Rafael Navar, worked to redirect the mass disappointment of SEIU activists and community organizers once they surrendered the DNC nomination to Biden without protest at the DNC convention.

From this, “Our Revolution” was born, its criminal aim was to introduce professional organizers into the ranks of BLM/Antifa protests during that fake, elite manufactured, year of ‘red rage’.

These professional agitators also use mentally unstable and criminal elements, like Ziminski and Rosenbaum, referred to in Marxist theory as the ‘lumpen-proletariat’, to carry out the acts of violence, arson, and even murder.

That was the real relationship between the Ziminskis, who acted as handlers for Joseph Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum was brought in by the Ziminskis or was identified on the spot earlier that day or in those days as a lunatic, and egged on to be as crazy as possible. Identifying and making assessments of community members, similarly to worksite employees in union organizing drives, is a part of the work the Ziminskis involved in.

The Ziminskis were there in the parking lot. Joshua Ziminski fired his gun, triggering or signaling to Rosenbaum to attack Kyle Rittenhouse.

It goes deeper again. The governor, DA’s office, mayor’s office, were all in collusion with the Soros front groups, to never prosecute the criminal conspiracy as they were part of it.

The Ziminskis not testifying, for ostensible reasons of the related gun-charges case that will probably be later dropped, is the central factor that would have established a prosecutorial conspiracy. No judge would have even been able to allow a trial, and would have compelled the charges on Kyle to be dropped.

In fact, it’s more than likely that Judge Bruce Schroeder is privy to politically “inadmissible” evidence, which came to him in the form of amicus curiae briefs and other data drops, which connects the dots we have discussed in the above. These may well be what Schroeder refers to in his admonishing of the prosecutors.

Nevertheless, this trial and more to come just like it, will not be over until the DNC and its SEIU foot-soldiers are put on trial for their color revolution scheme which destroyed neighborhoods and led to not only the deaths of an agitated populace, but changed the course of the 2020 election. Though Rittenhouse has been exonerated, the American people will still be subjected to destabilizing schemes carried out by the various facets of the deep state until these schemes themselves are put on trial.

Through his administration’s recent policies towards Haiti and Haitian migrants, President Joe Biden is carrying out a crime against humanity. Unfortunately, this represents continuity in a decades-long, bi-partisan policy toward Haiti.

Biden recently ordered the breakup of a camp of 15,000 mainly Black Haitian migrants under a border bridge in Del Rio, Texas. The migrants—many of whom had traveled thousands of miles—had fled to the U.S. in the hopes of being granted asylum from the horrific oppression and exploitation they face in Haiti, Chile, Brazil, and other states in the region.

In scenes that evoked the history of U.S. slave catchers, Border Patrol agents on horseback used their reins as whips to beat the refugees they chased down and captured. Eager to join the racist frenzy, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the National Guard and Texas police to form a miles-long “steel wall” of patrol cars and military vehicles to block migrants from escaping Biden’s dragnet.

When these horrific scenes were caught on camera, Biden had the gall to condemn the Border Patrol for carrying out the orders he had given. But he did not rescind his policy to expel and deport the encamped Haitians based on Title 42, which Trump had previously invoked to close U.S. borders to all migrants during the pandemic. In fact, this was another in a series of actions that exposed the lies of Biden’s pre-election promises to establish a “humane migration system” and combat “systemic racism.”

From the Del Rio encampment, Biden expelled 8,000 migrants to Mexico, deported 7,000 to Haiti (many of whom had not been in the country for a decade), and admitted about 12,000 from the camp and Mexico into the U.S. Many migrants remain detained and others have been chained with tracking devices while they apply for asylum.

They will likely be denied for being so-called economic migrants, not political refugees, or for having residence in a third country, and then face deportation. Once the camp was cleared of human beings, the bridge was reopened for commerce.

Biden carried out this racist repression to send a signal to tens of thousands of Haitians, who are making their way north through the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia, that the border is closed to migrants. The Mexican state collaborated every step of the way, clearing out the encampment on its side of the border in Ciudad Acuña, deporting many to Haiti, shipping others back to southern Mexico, and promising to stop Haitians from reaching the U.S.

The manifold crises driving Haitians from their country are not natural or some quirk of history; they were caused in large part by U.S. imperialism. Instead of helping Haitians overcome those crises, the Biden administration is compounding them, shoring up the morally repugnant elite that runs Haiti, and blocking migrants’ escape routes with Washington’s racist, regional border regime.

The Imperialist Origins of Haiti’s Crises

The mainstream media present the crises in Haiti that are driving migration—its poverty, so-called natural disasters, political corruption, and gangsterism—in sensationalized fashion with ritualistically repeated and neutered phrases like “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” They pathologize the country as if there is something inherently wrong with it.

In fact, blame for most of these crises lies with the U.S. and other imperialist powers’ intervention in the country. From the Haitian Revolution right down to today, these powers have waged an unrelenting attack on the Haitian people’s struggle for liberation, democracy, and equality.

When the enslaved Africans overthrew their French oppressors in 1791 and declared Haiti’s independence in 1804, the great slave-holding powers of the time—France, Spain, England, and the newly independent U.S.—did everything in their powers to destroy the new Black republic. France, Spain, and England all deployed armies in a vain attempt to prevent the revolution’s victory.

After their defeat, they moved to isolate Haiti and stop it from becoming a precedent and inspiration for revolutionary risings of the enslaved in the region. France only recognized the country’s independence in 1825 on the condition that Haiti repays their former masters in reparations for the loss of their “property,” that is, their land and enslaved human beings.

To pay this “debt,” Haiti had to take out loans at usurious interest rates from French and U.S. banks, stunting its economic development. In today’s money, they shelled out $21 billion for recognition by the great powers. Even then, the U.S. did not acknowledge Haiti’s independence until the middle of the Civil War in 1862.

The imperialist powers of the 19th century shackled Haiti with debt until its last payment in 1947, isolated it from the world system, and blocked its independent development. They made the country pay an enormous price for its liberation—poverty and structural adjustment from its birth.

Washington: Haiti’s Twentieth Century Overlord

After the U.S. rose as a new imperial power at the end of the nineteenth century, it viewed the Caribbean as an “American lake.” It aimed to prevent its European rivals from encroaching on its fiefdom and treated the region’s states as vassals to be commanded and, when insufficiently obedient, subjected to military intervention and occupation.

Haiti was one of its prime targets, with devastating consequences for that country’s politics and economy throughout the twentieth century and to this day. Woodrow Wilson sent in the Marines to occupy Haiti from 1915 to 1934, seizing control of the country’s financial and economic assets as compensation for the government’s failure to make loan payments. Wilson also wanted to ensure that U.S. corporations, and not those of Germany, would control the country’s economy.

The U.S. handpicked the country’s leaders, imposed forced labor on peasants, brutally repressed the Cacos rebellion, and, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ripped up the country’s revolutionary constitution and imposed a new one that allowed foreign ownership of the country’s land. To ensure “order” when it left, the U.S. created and backed the dreaded Haitian military, the Forces Armées d’Haïti,  whose only function was to repress the country’s people.

During the Cold War, the U.S. backed the brutal dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier as an anti-communist counterweight to Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The Duvaliers ruled from 1957 to 1986 through state terror carried out by its murderous paramilitary, the Tonton Macoute. With Washington’s tolerance, if not encouragement, the father-son dictatorship killed as many as 60,000 people, especially socialists and advocates of democracy and social reform.

Washington used Baby Doc’s regime to impose one of the most predatory structural adjustment programs in the region. It promised to remake the country’s economy by privatizing state-owned industry, dismantling its welfare state, opening it up to international agribusiness, and employing displaced peasants in urban sweatshops run by multinationals. This neoliberal prescription was so life-threatening that Haitian activists called it “the plan of death.”

Damning the Flood of Social Reform

In one of the first rebellions against neoliberalism, Haitians rose up in a mass movement called Lavalas (“the flood” in Haitian creole) to topple Baby Doc from power in 1986. This led to the country’s first free and democratic presidential election in 1990 won by Jean Bertrand Aristide. A liberation theologist, Aristide promised to rip up the roots of the old order and implement a program of social democratic reforms.

Threatened by these reforms, the Haitian army, backed by the country’s ruling class and Washington, carried out a coup against Aristide in 1991. The administrations of George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton stood by while the military carried out mass repression and murder.

Infamously, then-Senator Joe Biden argued that intervening to stop the bloodshed in Haiti was not a priority and that the U.S. should ignore the humanitarian catastrophe. He stated that “if Haiti quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.”

Clinton only agreed to intervene and return Aristide to power in 1994 on the condition that Aristide abandon much of his social democratic agenda and implement “neoliberalism with a human face.” He did manage to abolish the army and resist the worst of the neoliberal program, but his hand-picked successor, Rene Preval, implemented much of it between 1996 and 2001.

Aristide again ran for and was elected president in 2001 on promises of social reform and securing reparations of $21 billion from France for the debt it imposed on Haiti to be paid on the 200th anniversary of its independence in 2004. The U.S. under George Bush Jr. imposed an aid embargo on Haiti, stopping Aristide from implementing even a modest version of his program.

The blockage of reform demoralized the Lavalas movement and gave space for right-wing paramilitaries to mount increasingly violent opposition, which Aristide confronted with his own paramilitaries. With the country on the brink of a conflagration, the U.S., France, and Canada organized a second coup against Aristide, kidnapping and exiling him to the Central African Republic until he secured asylum in South Africa.

The U.S. deployed the UN to occupy the country from 2004 to 2017. While of course sold as a humanitarian mission, the UN forces proceeded to repress popular protest, rape women, and introduce cholera into Haiti, killing 10,000 people in an epidemic.

Meanwhile, the U.S. backed a succession of weak, quisling presidents from Rene Preval for a second time to Kompa band leader, Michel “Sweet Mickey” Martelly, to the widely despised and recently assassinated, Jovenel Moïse. Each won office in elections with collapsing voter turnout, had little to no popular support, and were widely viewed as illegitimate.

Each administration introduced increasingly draconian neoliberal programs that hollowed out the Haitian state, which was so incapacitated that it barely could be said to be in control of the society, let alone regulate it and provide any services to socially reproduce it. That void of service provision has been filled by privatized services for the rich and international NGOs for everyone else.

Those NGOs were in no way beholden to the Haitian people, but to the corporations and imperialist states that bankrolled them. Indeed as Mark Schuller, Haiti became a republic of NGOs, and one under an occupation entirely controlled by foreign capitalist powers.

Neoliberal Disasters and Creation of a Dependent Aid State

U.S. imperialism’s incapacitation of the Haitian state set the country up to be devastated by so-called natural disasters. Haiti had few to no regulations to ensure that buildings were capable of withstanding earthquakes, few remaining trees to absorb winds and rain from hurricanes, and no state services ready to provide relief and reconstruction.

So, when the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Port au Prince in 2010, it laid waste to the capital, flattening the presidential palace, destroying homes, killing as many as 300,000 people, and impacting millions more. Over the next decade, a succession of hurricanes and tropical storms ravaged the country’s deforested land turning rivers into torrents that flooded lands and wiped out buildings. And, to top it all off, this August another magnitude 7.2 earthquake devastated the island’s south, killing 2,200 people, injuring another 12,000, and destroying 7,000 homes.

While people of the world responded with the utmost generosity, they sent money mostly to the corrupt NGOs like the Red Cross that had collaborated in the incapacitation of the Haitian state, and much of the funds never made it to the people in need but got diverted into other projects and the salaries of bureaucrats. Meanwhile, the U.S. state and its imperial accomplices  promised billions to “build Haiti back better.”

Predictably, they launched yet another neoliberal development plan overseen by Bill Clinton. The states funneled $13 billion into building more sweatshops, setting up walled-off tourist resorts, and funding more NGOs to provide services and aid. While billions were spent, conditions only got worse for the country’s majority; 60 percent of the country lives in poverty, 46 percent of the population lives in acute food insecurity, and 217,000 children face moderate-to-severe acute malnutrition.

Haiti became what Jake Johnston has called an “aid state,” a government entirely dependent on funds from imperial states and international donors. For the people to survive, they depend increasingly on remittances sent from their relatives working in low-paid jobs in other Caribbean countries, Latin America, and the U.S.

Corruption, COVID, and Political Chaos

When the UN occupation ended in 2017, this dependent aid state descended into ever-worsening corruption and infighting between factions of the political elite over who would steal a bigger slice of the aid pie for their own enrichment. Their theft stoked mass anger in a population desperate for reforms to alleviate their plight.

The Petrocaribe Scandal is the worst example of the venal elite’s corruption. Venezuela allowed Haiti to borrow oil from it to be paid back in 25 years. That freed up over $3.2 billion that was intended for reforms to improve people’s lives. Instead, the political elite, including President Moïse,  simply pocketed more than $2 billion for themselves and their cronies. With the money gone, Haiti still is on the hook to pay Venezuela back. Revelations of this corruption sparked mass protests, calling for Moïse’s resignation.

Despite the spiraling crisis, Trump and then Biden continued to support Moïse, even after he dissolved parliament and opted to rule by decree after his term expired. With Washington’s backing, he became for all intents and purposes a dictator, who deployed cops, paramilitaries, and gangs against his opponents.

At this moment of complete political chaos, COVID-19 struck a country without a functioning healthcare system and with only 64 ventilators in a country of 11 million people. Up until this summer, the government had no plans for mass vaccinations amidst relatively low rates of infection and death.

When the delta surge struck, the U.S. and the Haitian government finally started a program of vaccinations, but they still only have half a million doses for a population of 11 million. Even worse, the global economic crisis triggered by the pandemic threw Haiti into a sharp contraction cutting Haitian living standards, a fact only compounded by drops in remittances from Haitians abroad who had lost their jobs during the recessions in Latin America and the U.S.

With the society coming apart at the seams, gangs began to emerge, some with the backing of the government. Armed with guns, mainly imported from the U.S., they built mobster-like fiefdoms, ran extortion rings, stole aid, kidnapped people demanding ransom often from relatives abroad, and carried out revenge killings against their rivals.

With Haiti spiraling into social and political chaos, Moïse was assassinated in July by a group of foreign mercenaries made up mostly of former soldiers from the Columbian military, many of whom had been trained at the School of the Americas. While it remains unclear who ordered the murder, it has all the hallmarks of a hit ordered by Moïse ’s opponents in the ruling class. To maintain some semblance of government, the U.S. has appointed Ariel Henry as president, a man who aided and abetted Washington’s second coup against Aristide.

Washington’s Border Regime Deployed Against Haitian Migrants

U.S. imperialism’s interventions and support for reactionary Haitian governments are the cause of the waves of migrants that have fled the country. The Washington-backed Duvalier dictatorship drove out hundreds of thousands of people, the first coup against Aristide sent tens of thousands out of the country, the 2010 earthquake drove tens of thousands more abroad, and now the complete social crisis in Haiti, as well as deteriorating conditions in Latin America, is triggering a new wave of tens of thousands of people fleeing to the U.S.

While U.S. imperialism was causing mass migration, it was at the very same time building an immense border regime to buttress global capitalism’s state structures, block people from entering the U.S., and criminalize those that successfully evaded the border cops as racialized cheap labor in everything from agribusiness to meatpacking. Washington has used its border regime to block most Haitian refugees, only granting partial exceptions when faced with political pressure and protest.

It has subjected Haitians to xenophobic, racist, and politically discriminatory treatment. This has led to them having the lowest rate of asylum of any nationality with high rates of application.

During the 1970s, Jimmy Carter, despite his self-proclaimed support for human rights, applied a double standard to migrants from Haiti and Cuba. Because Washington supported the Duvalier dictatorship as a Cold War ally, Carter denied Haitian migrants refugee status, arrested them when they arrived in Florida, and deported them back to Haiti, while it admitted all mostly lighter-skinned Cubans fleeing the Castro regime which the U.S. opposed.

Ronald Reagan, who pushed for the neoliberal program in Haiti in the 1980s, deployed the Coast Guard to interdict undocumented migrants at sea and applied the new policy mostly to Haitians. The U.S. intercepted boats with Haitians before they reached U.S. shores, denied them the chance to apply for asylum, and returned them to Haiti. In 1987, Reagan introduced a ban on anyone with HIV from being allowed into the U.S., even if they qualified for asylum, and used it against Haitians in particular.

Jailing and Repatriating Refugees from Washington’s Coups

After Washington’s first coup against Aristide in 1991, George Bush Sr. blocked boats filled with Haitian refugees and jailed 34,000 in vast concentration camps set up in Guantanamo, Cuba. He repatriated most of them to Haiti, some to certain death at the hands of the coup regime.

He did grant a third of them asylum, but he used Reagan’s ban on HIV-positive migrants to keep 270 Haitians in a segregated camp even though they qualified for asylum. While Bill Clinton campaigned against Bush’s policy, once in office he broke his promise and kept the concentration camp open. A court case forced him to finally admit the 270 HIV-positive asylees into the U.S.

After Washington’s second coup against Aristide in 2004, George W. Bush threatened to interdict and repatriate any migrants fleeing Haiti. He deputized the UN to lock people in place and impose “order” on the country.

The Obama administration, infamous for deporting more migrants than any in U.S. history, treated Haitians little better. While he granted 60,000 Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitians in the U.S. after the 2010 earthquake and stopped deportations, it was open to review every 18 months. While he renewed TPS, Obama re-started interdictions and deportations in 2016.

Trump’s Unleashes the Border Regime’s Racism and Xenophobia

Trump’s America First agenda made explicit and more radical all the xenophobic and racist features of Washington’s border regime. He placed all migrants, including Haitians, in Washington’s crosshairs.

In a flurry of executive orders, some upheld by the courts and others struck down, Trump imposed a Muslim ban, implemented Remain in Mexico that forces those applying for asylum at a U.S. port of entry to return to Mexico while they await their hearings, and then in the wake of COVID-19 imposed Title 42, shutting down the borders to all migrants. He unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to go after migrants, restricted to 15,000 the number of refugees the U.S. would grant asylum in 2021, and gutted the asylum system to make it difficult to process even that tiny number of applicants.

Trump attacked TPS for Haitians, Salvadorans, and several African countries, raving “why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” After noting his preference for white migration from countries like Norway, Trump raved “Why do we need more Haitians. Take them out.” He ordered the termination of TPS for 400,000 people in the U.S., including 60,000 Haitians. Only court rulings blocked that attack.

Haitian migrants faced similar assaults in Latin America where they had fled after the earthquake to find jobs during the region’s China-fueled commodity boom. With that ended by the Chinese slowdown and global recession triggered by the pandemic, Haitians lost their jobs and became the objects of racist scapegoating in Brazil and Chile where they were concentrated in the largest numbers.

Facing desperate conditions, Haitians closely watched the U.S. presidential elections. When Biden won, they began the long trek by foot and bus to the U.S. in the hopes that they would now be welcomed.

Biden’s Betrayal of Migrant Justice

Tragically, they were soon betrayed. In reality, there was little basis in Biden’s record to expect him to treat Haitians or any other migrants differently than his predecessors. His fingerprints are all over the creation of Washington’s border regime and, when he was last in office under Obama, he was an accomplice to his boss as the Vice-Deporter-in-Chief.

But, under pressure from activists who had protested Trump’s unconscionable policies, and faced with liberal challengers in the Democratic primary, Biden verbally tacked left, mouthing promises to repeal the worst of his bigoted predecessor’s executive orders, replace them with a new “humane immigration policy,” pass so-called comprehensive immigration reform, and redress the causes of migration in Central America. At the same time, however, Biden made clear that he would pair such reform with border enforcement and expansion of the border regime into Central America.

Once in office, Biden did repeal some of Trump’s executive orders, but he has enforced the closure of the border under Title 42 and Remain in Mexico. He has used these to intercept 1.5 million at the border, expel 700,000, and place tens of thousands, including families with children, in what under Trump had been called concentration camps.

While Biden introduced a proposal for comprehensive immigration reform, it included onerous and punitive conditions for citizenship and was paired with even more border enforcement, including plans for a new virtual border wall. It was a far cry from the movement’s call for unconditional legalization for all and abolition of the border regime.

Without even a fight, Biden let this bill die in Congress where it never even came up for a vote. And when the parliamentarian blocked an attempt to include it in the reconciliation bill, the Democrats capitulated obeying an unelected bureaucrat’s non-binding judgment.

With reform dead in the water, Biden abandoned his promise to impose a moratorium on deportations when it was blocked in the courts and started to repatriate people. He deputized his Vice President, Kamala Harris, herself a child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, the new “Immigration Czar” to carry out all this border enforcement.

On her junket to Washington’s vassals in the Northern Triangle and Mexico, Harris told migrants, “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders. If you come to our border, you will be turned back.” She also announced a new initiative for Central American countries that combines neoliberal development aid, support for so-called “democratization”, and assistance for them to build up their own border regimes.

Haitians Collide with Biden’s Border Regime

Haitian migrants collided directly into Biden’s border regime. Biden did extend TPS for another 18 months, but that only applied to 150,000 Haitians who had been in the U.S. before May 21st of this year, not new arrivals.

When Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas announced the administration’s decision, he declared “Haiti is currently experiencing serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.” Despite these conditions, Biden has continued to deport Haitians, the first planeloads on the first day of Black History Month.

But Haitians in Latin America observed that some were getting through the border and so continued to head north. That led 30,000 mostly Haitians at the border to try and cross into Del Rio Texas with 15,000 getting through and setting up a camp under a bridge, hoping to apply for asylum. As the world witnessed, Biden treated them with callous brutality.

To stop the next wave of Haitian migrants, he has deputized Mexico to deport Haiti from the northern border region, relocate others to Tapachula, Chiapas, and deploy its National Guard there to block Haitian and other migrants’ passage up from Latin America. The Northern Triangle states have similarly started to crack down on migrant’s passage.

Biden has also ordered the Coast Guard to intercept migrants fleeing Haiti in boats, detaining hundreds in recent days. Ominously, he has also sought out a contractor to establish a camp for migrants in Guantanamo staffed with Haitian creole speakers. Joining the quarantining of people in Haiti, the Bahamas and even Cuba has started seizing and repatriating Haitians in the Caribbean.

Time to Rebuild Protest Against the Border Regime

With Biden breaking his promises of reform, deporting Haitians and other migrants, and enforcing a closed border policy, the migrant justice movement must rebuild independent mass struggle with a program of immediate reforms and long-term border abolitionist goals.

Without protests against Biden’s attack on Haitians and all migrants, he will only face pressure from xenophobic Democrats and racist Republicans. Already, Republican Governors led by Texas’ Abbott and his Operation Lone Star have started to encroach on federal authority and implement their own rogue border policy.

The GOP plans to make immigration a central issue in the midterm elections, portraying Biden as soft on border enforcement, even though the administration is overseeing a closed border. Without protest from the migrant justice movement, Biden will double down on racist, border enforcement to neutralize Republican attacks, selling out migrants in the process.

Already there are positive signs of protests emerging, demanding justice for Haitians and all migrants. There are demonstrations calling for Biden and Senate Democrats to override the parliamentarian and include legalization in the reconciliation bill. And the Haitian Bridge Alliance has called for a national day of action on October 14th for Haitians.

In these protests it is vital that we demand justice for Haitians and all migrants, and not allow our enemies to divide us, pitting different migrant groups against one another. For Haitians, we should demand that Biden extend TPS to all in the country and grant them unconditional, permanent legalization.

For Haitians arriving at the border, we must demand that they all be let in, granted asylum, and provided any assistance they need to rebuild their lives. We must also call on Biden to stop all deportations of Haitians back to their country amidst the full-scale political, social, and economic crisis the U.S. has caused. Instead, the U.S. should pay reparations to Haiti and its people and allow them to determine their own destiny without interference from Washington or any other imperial power.

We must force Biden to scrap Title 42 and open the border immediately. If the U.S. is concerned about COVID-19, then it should end its vaccine apartheid and provide the shots and the capacity to make them to governments in Mexico, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the rest of the Global South.

The border regime, capitalist patents on life-saving medicine, and hoarding of vaccines are the problem, not migrants. For all those migrants, we must demand unconditional legalization.

In the fight for these immediate reforms, we must raise the guiding goals for the whole movement—the defunding and abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol, and the entire border regime. Only when we win open borders can we establish a society where no human being is illegal.

The Tempest Magazine via counterpunch.org

The African Union and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) condemn the state of Denmark and its Social Democrat government for xenophobia. An Uncle Tom, “integration” minister Mattias Tesfaye (Ethiopian-Danish), is used as a leading promoter of racist neo-colonialism. 

Mattias Tesfave, Minister for Immigration and Integration (sic), is leading a crusade to deport to one or more African countries asylum-seekers in Denmark. His ministry has rejected their status as refugees, but cannot return them to their land of origin as their lives could be in danger.

The African Union (AU) has strongly condemned Denmark for practicing “xenophobia”, i.e. racism, for its treatment of refugees, most of whom do not come from Africa but rather the Middle East. AU is a continental union consisting of 55 member states of Africa, founded May 26, 2001. Its headquarters is in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The bloc encompasses 1.3 billion people.

In a news release (August 2), the African Union “condemns in the strongest terms possible, Denmark’s Aliens Act, which was passed recently [June 2021], and which provides for Denmark to relocate asylum seekers to countries outside the European Union while their cases are being processed. This law effectively externalizes and exports the asylum process beyond the borders of Denmark.” Press Statement On Denmark’s Alien Act provision to Externalize Asylum procedures to third countries | African Union (au.int)

“African Union notes with concern attempts…to establish…an extension of the borders of [Denmark]…to the African shores. Such attempts [are] xenophobic and completely unacceptable.”

“The African Union views this [Danish] law with the gravest of concerns and wishes to remind Denmark of its responsibility towards international protection for persons in need of that protection as provided for in the 1951 UN Convention on refugees, to which Denmark is a state party.”

The Refugee Convention sets out the rights of individuals who are granted asylum and the responsibilities of nations that grant asylum. 4ca34be29.pdf (unhcr.org)

Less than a year ago, Denmark was strongly criticized by the European committee against torture, European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) (coe.int).

CPT found that many refugees in Denmark’s Ellebaek “Immigration Center” are met with violence and racism by “immigration” personnel and police. CPT also criticized refugee’s lack of access to healthcare, and that refugee detainees are jailed in police stations, sometimes for many hours without access to light and proper ventilation.

Conditions at the Ellebaek Alien Center protested. (Foto: Niels Christian Vilmann © Scanpix)

These refugees are among those that Denmark is attempting to bury in “reception centers”, which it will create in poverty-stricken Africa still under the foot of Western neo-colonialism. Danmark afviser torturkomités kritik om vold og racisme på udlændingecenter | Indland | DR. See also: 09000016809f65d6 (coe.int)

Many of these homeless refugees were denied asylum by the Tesfave-party led government, Social Democrats. Denmark, however, must not return them to the country from which they fled due to their being in risk for punishment or death, because the country is at war. Many are from Syria, which the Danish government has bombed and sent volunteer mercenary soldiers to kill patriots fighting for their country’s sovereignty. Denmark’s aggression is illegal by national and all international laws. Its’ actions are motivated to please USA’s imperial plans of global domination and to confiscate natural resources.

Denmark is Still a Colonialist

BT, a conservative daily, interviewed Stig Jensen, on August 6, 2021, a Copenhagen University African Studies associate professor, regarding the significance of the Refugee Convention and African Union’s statement. Jensen considered that Denmark is willing to be “strategic enough to go down and ask who is hungry enough to take on this task.”

Regarding African Union’s critique: “It’s a bump in the government’s desire to implement the plans,” but Denmark will not change coarse, Jensen mused.

Tesfaye and Development Minister Flemming Moeller Mortensen went to Rwanda offering bribes—“carrots”, Jensen calls them—to pressed government officials to accept Denmark’s unwanted foreigners, most not Africans, to a timeless existence in “reception centers”.

Denmark’s counterpart to USA’s secretary of state, Jeppe Kofod, was sent to Ethiopia to see if it could be so bribed. However, Tesfaye’s fatherland is engaged in a brutal civil war brought on by Denmark’s friendly government of Abiy Ahmed. Several ethnic groups, separated and pit against one another by European colonialists, are now in conflict with the government. A civil war in the northern area of Tigray is so devastating—the government forbids any food/medicine to reach the area—that even Uncle Tom Tesfaye has taken Ethiopia off the list. U.S. Paves Way for Intervention in Ethiopia, Horn of Africa — Strategic Culture (strategic-culture.org)

Tesfaye was born in Denmark. His mother was Jytte Svensson, a Dane with Swedish roots. She was a social-health worker. His father is not even named on wikipedia, only that he was from Ethiopia.
Mattias Tesfaye – Wikipedia, den frie encyklopædi.

Teenager Tesfaye joined Denmark’s Communist Party Marxist-Leninist (Stalinist) where he made a name for himself in Denmark’s small radical circle for 15 years. He quit for a more acceptable, wishy-washy leftist party, and moved his way up to the former worker’s party, Social Democrats. He was rewarded with a seat in parliament and now disintegration minister.

With Ethiopia out of the running, Tesfaye prefers Rwanda, despite decades of mass murder—majority Hutus against minority Tutsi’s, culminating in the genocide of 1994. In later years, Tutsi’s murdering Hutu’s and peoples in the Congo over who gets control of selling the world’s richest minerals (uranium, coltan, copper, tin, tungsten, diamonds, gold…) to Western countries with the ships waiting at African ports. Europe/US then use these minerals to make weapons with which they invade and murder peoples of color, like Tesfaye’s father.

thiscantbehappening.net

Describing the atmosphere in 10 Downing Street last summer, Sir Jeremy Farrar, the infectious disease expert who heads the Wellcome Trust, speaks of a government “vulnerable to what looked like racketeering”. When he sat down at a meeting chaired by Boris Johnson, he was struck by the presence of snake oil salesmen looking for contracts for Covid-19 rapid testing that everybody knew was useless.

“It sometimes felt,” he writes in his memoir Spike, “as if I had strayed on a set for The Third Man, that fantastic Carol Reed film of a Graham Greene novel, which features a black market for penicillin.”

The analogy is telling because Greene’s post-war Vienna and the Johnson government convey the same sense of pervasive sleaze. Furthermore, Johnson’s personality has much in common with that of Harry Lime, the anti-hero played by Orson Welles, who exudes bonhomie but is entirely egocentric and dangerous to anybody who gets in his way.

Optimists may convince themselves that the racketeers and the snake oil salesmen saw their opportunity to profit from the chaos at the height of the pandemic, but hope the same will not necessarily happen in more normal times. But, as scandal has succeeded scandal over the last two years, I wonder if we are not entering a more corrupt era in British political life. The situation feels more and more like that in 18th century Britain or in the resource-rich states of the Middle East, where those without the right connections know that they stand no chance of doing profitable business.

My impression was confirmed by the revelations over the last week about the secretive “Advisory Board” within the Conservative Party that brings together wealthy donors in an exclusive club that some members have paid £250,000 a year to join. The club, which is acknowledged nowhere in party publications, brings with it the advantage of regular meetings with Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

What these super-rich donors reportedly have in common is that they are Thatcherite free marketeers, hostile to regulation and state intervention. They include the people who have long supported Johnson during his rise to power and presumably expect their money to win them access and influence. Denials by the Tories that the donors benefit in any material way from their largesse is incredible.

As with everything else done by Johnson’s government and the Tory party, such furtive fundraising from the super-rich has its farcical side. It is orchestrated by Ben Elliot, who was given the job by the prime minister because of his high society links. Elliott is famous for running a “concierge” company called Quintessentially, which caters for the most eccentric needs of celebrities, such as sending a dozen albino peacocks to a party for Jennifer Lopez.

But as Johnson cultivates the plutocrats and puts their minds at rest about his populist pledges, he is also promising the exact opposite to former Labour voters in the Midlands and North of England. All politicians make promises they cannot keep, but there is a new shamelessness about the process: Johnson boasts of “tearing up” the town and country planning regulations, just as property interests donate £17.9m to the Conservative party in the two years he has been prime minister.

The rising power of the plutocrats, the contradictory promises to all, and the increasing smell of corruption is scarcely surprising. This pattern prevailed in the US during Donald Trump’s presidency and still does in India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The so-called pluto-populist regimes tend to behave in similar ways because they all rely on an uneasy alliance between plutocrats, nationalists and social conservatives.

The interests of the members of this coalition are very different, so it can only be kept together by promising everything to everybody, while giving special privileges to party loyalists. This requires breaking down the division between political parties and government by reducing the independence of the civil service and the judiciary, and bringing them under political control .

The danger inherent in pluto-populism is that the glue that holds it together is rejection of a status quo that many people find unacceptable for quite opposite reasons. Members of the “Advisory Board” do not want more state intervention, but voters in Hartlepool and Sunderland do. Trump won the White House by promising to help de-industrialised America, but in practice he gave priority to the traditional Republican programme of tax reductions for the wealthy and deregulation for business. Populist pledges, like rebuilding the US infrastructure, were swiftly forgotten.

The essential glue for pluto-populist nationalist governments is anger, usually directed against a minority such as Black people in the US or Muslims in India. In Britain, the need for this glue is the motive for the “culture wars”, most of which are imported from the US or spring from an exaggerated or fabricated domestic threat. A piece of graffiti on a statue of Winston Churchill is inflated into a wholesale assault on the totems of British nationalism.

In Britain racism tends to be half-concealed, as with the government’s confused attack on taking the knee, but in the US it is now startlingly open, as shown by the Republican governor of Missouri this week pardoning the couple who pointed guns at a Black Lives Matter demonstration.

Pluto-populist regimes are by definition unstable because they rely on stirring up division and they cannot make good on their promises to their different constituencies. Though demanding law and order, they tend, once in office, to show a contempt for the law and an intolerance of media criticism, combined with measures to suppress it.

All this creates the sort of generalised instability in which racketeers flourish. The pandemic created optimum conditions for snake oil salesmen who could use the panic last year as a means to make vast profits. Those who handed out huge contracts to companies with no means to fulfil them could blame the pressures of the crisis.

What makes the revelations about the donors’ club ominous is that it is only the latest in a series of scandals that predate Johnson and the pandemic. David Cameron was only mildly criticised by MPs for showing “lack of judgment” in the vigour with which he lobbied for Greensill in its bid to access government finance.

Overall, I have a sense that the Covid-19 emergency has only served to accelerate the impulse towards a sleazier and more corrupt Britain, one in which Harry Lime and his racketeers would have felt very much at home.

counterpunch.org

Here’s a tale of two cops and two murders, Derek Chauvin and George Floyd, and John Doe* and Ashli Babbitt. Two cops, two unarmed citizens killed. One you care about, one you don’t. Even murder is politicized these days.

It is hard to imagine anyone needs much of a recap on Chauvin-Floyd. George Floyd, a black man, tried to pass off a counterfeit $20 bill while messed up on drugs. Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and other cops responded, and in the process of restraining Floyd, killed him. Everyone has seen the video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, and as if it was a civic duty, judged for themselves whether it was appropriate, necessary, and the cause of Floyd’s death.

A jury judged those things, too, and the result was a 22.5 year sentence for Chauvin (in handing down the sentence the judge said it was justified in part because Chauvin “committed his crime in the presence of children,” who of course had gathered to help jeer at the cops.) The woman who shot the snuff video won a Pulitzer prize.

Floyd’s death set off an angry summer of violence under the rubric Black Lives Matter, as progressives shut down opposing voices and several downtowns to insist Chauvin’s actions were part of something called systemic racism reaching back as far as 1619 in unbroken lineage. Celebrities, politicians, and academics jostled each other for camera time to demand the police be defunded. You might have seen something about all this on the teevee?

There’s video of Ashli Babbitt being killed by law enforcement but it has been played by the MSM maybe 1/10,000 as often as the Floyd murder porn. Babbitt, wearing a Trump flag like a cape, was one of the rioters who smashing the glass on the door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby of the Capitol. A plain clothes Capitol Police officer without warning fired a shot and Babbitt fell into the crowd and died. It was the only shot fired in the riot. A SWAT team just behind Babbitt saw the situation differently and never fired on her or those with her.

Like Floyd, Babbitt was unarmed. Like Floyd resisting, Babbitt was committing a crime when she was killed by a cop. Unlike Floyd, there is no question of whether she was resisting arrest because the cop never got that far. He just shot her.

In Floyd’s case, we know everything about Derek Chauvin, and saw him convicted in open court. Not so with Babbitt’s killer. Almost all police departments nationwide are required to release an officer’s name after a fatal shooting. Not the U.S. Capitol Police, which answers only to Congress. Even as Congress demands nationwide police reforms (ironically, the new, lower standards of proof proposed by H.R.1280 — George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 — would condemn the Capitol cop) they have steadfastly refused to release the name of Babbitt’s killer. In February, the Capitol Police stated they would “share additional information once an investigation is complete.” Investigators closed the case in April, cleared the unnamed officer of wrongdoing in Babbitt’s death without addressing the fact that the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, and left it at that. Stuff happens, ya know?

No trial, no public accounting, not even a name for the Babbitt family to use in filing a wrongful death suit. Because Congress exempts the Capitol Police from Freedom of Information Act requests, the family is forced to sue “for documents that identify the officer who shot Babbitt… as well as notes and summaries of what the officer said regarding the shooting and the reasons he discharged his weapon.”

They’d like more information on Babbitt’s death than the “investigation” provided. The Department of Justice simply wrote there was “insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.” DOJ did not hide its legal fudge, which had its investigators look narrowly on a Constitutional question, not the homicide.

Without shame DOJ said it focused on 18 U.S.C. § 242, a federal criminal civil rights statute. This requires prosecutors prove the officer acted willfully to deprive Babbitt of a right protected by the Constitution, here the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable seizure.  Prosecutors would have to prove not only that the officer used force that was constitutionally unreasonable, but that the officer did so “willfully” to deprive Babbitt of her 4A rights. That meant evidence an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent required. In lay terms, that’s called a set-up enroute to a cover-up.

Contrast that with the Chauvin prosecution, where prosecutors charged manslaughter, second-degree murder, and third-degree murder in the one death of George Floyd, leaving the civil rights question which saved the Capitol cop as a separate matter. That allowed prosecutors to instruct the jury (there of course was no jury in Babbitt’s case) to decide on emotion, saying “Use your common sense. Believe your eyes. What you saw, you saw.” Imagine a jury in Babbitt’s case, exposed to a looping video of her killing, acting on the same instructions. But that never happened.

No one had much to say during the Babbitt investigation. In Floyd’s case, Joe Biden said he was praying the jury would reach the “right verdict,” calling the evidence “overwhelming in my view.” Maxine Waters demanded protesters become “more confrontational” if Chauvin was acquitted. That was so blatantly inflammatory it was almost grounds for a mistrial.

The president cheers on one prosecution, remaining silent while another murder is made to go away. Cities erect monuments to George Floyd while the NYT runs gossipy articles on Babbitt’s marriage problems. Asking for justice in Floyd’s case is a duty, even if it means burning down stores. Those who want the same justice for Babbitt are mocked as QAnon cultists. Did she not also bleed?

Oh, there’s more. Floyd was only on drugs passing fake money because of racism whereas Babbitt was a seditionist, a vandal, who asked for it as certain as if she wore a mini skirt down a dark alley to taunt her rapist. Floyd’s death created a movement for change. Candidate Trump’s embrace of Ashli Babbitt as a martyr anointed “January 6 a heroic uprising” for white supremacists seeking to overthrow democracy. Absolutely no one would write of Floyd, as one MSM outlet did of Babbitt, “her death, while tragic, occurred for a very good reason. The Air Force veteran, who had been fully converted into the most dangerous and fantastical pro-Trump conspiracy theories, had joined the aggressive vanguard of the January 6 insurrection.” Bitch deserved it. The article went on to compare Babbitt’s martyrdom to “Horst Wessel, a German storm trooper killed by communists in 1930, who inspired the eponymous Nazi anthem.

Others claim Trump is liable for the death, that the answer to Who Killed Ashli Babbitt? is Trump. WaPo wrote “The death of Ashli Babbitt offers the purest distillation of Donald Trump’s view of justice,” which apparently means to them Trump supported George Floyd’s killing while mourning Babbitt’s. Daily Beast frets “If the base believes they are being prosecuted and even ‘assassinated’ [like Babbitt] they will justify anything to reject Democratic rule and future elections that deprive them of power.” Sears and Kmart apologized and pulled from sale T-shirts reading “Ashli Babbitt American Patriot” after an outcry on social media. Headlines read “Marjorie Taylor Greene provokes outrage by comparing Ashli Babbitt’s death to George Floyd’s” because Babbitt was OK-shot “while actively participating in a violent riot” and Floyd was murdered by racists.

It is difficult in the face of so much hypocrisy to find the air to comment on the state of our country. Some murders are more equal than others. Dead bodies only matter when they can be used for your sides’ political purposes. How many white conservative deaths does it take to equal one black death? Why are some cops murderers and others protected with anonymity and a free-pass investigation?

The absolute craven transparency of the progressive argument is what gives me hope. Hope that at some point enough Americans will set aside their blind Trump rage, look past the 24/7 propaganda directed at them, and come to realize even murder now only matters for the clicks it generates. Our media is happy to justify Babbitt’s death, seeing it almost in biblical terms for supporting Trump. Floyd, always just a victim of an unjust society.

Ashli Babbitt was put down for our political sins, and her killer escaped justice with the government’s help. Now ain’t that the Democratic vision of America?

*

*The Capitol Police and the Congress which controls them refuse to name the officer who shot Ashli Babbitt to death on January 6. RealClearInvestigations, however, has identified the shooter as Lieutenant Michael Byrd, a black man. Since then, CNN and others have “voluntarily” removed Byrd’s name from hearing transcripts, and his social media has been scrubbed.

wemeantwell.com

Parents across the country are fighting to stop government schools from indoctrinating their children with Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory is a form of Marxism that focuses on the “oppression” of racial minorities. Central to Critical Race Theory is the belief that free markets are a tool of racial oppression that must be abolished and replaced with socialism.

This is dangerous nonsense. History shows that governments, not free markets, are and always have been the instruments of racial oppression. For example, legislators passed Jim Crow laws because private businesses refused to voluntarily segregate their customers.

Numerous scholars have documented how the welfare state and the war on drugs, as well as minimum wage laws, occupational licensing laws, and other anti-liberty laws, disproportionately harm minorities. Some of these laws were passed with the explicit goal of protecting white workers from competition with minorities.

Public outrage over teaching children that the only way to overcome racism is to sacrifice liberty helped build efforts to pass laws banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory. Some of these efforts are accompanied by advancing mandates that schools promote a “positive” or “patriotic” view of America. This can replace one form of indoctrination with another.

A “patriotic” curriculum could teach children that the change from a constitutional republic to a welfare-warfare state was a victory for liberty. It could also teach that the American government is morally justified in, and capable of, managing the economy at home and spreading democracy abroad. It could teach children lies like capitalism caused the Great Depression.

Instead of arguing over what form of statism government schools should indoctrinate children in, liberty activists should work to replace government control of education with parental control.

The key to this is to restore parental control of education dollars though education tax credits and tax-free education savings accounts. This can enable parents to afford to “ed-exit” from government schools by sending their children to private schools. It can also help parents afford the costs associated with homeschooling. Increased charitable deductions can help fund private education for low-income families. Tax credits can be implementing without increasing the deficit by tying them to legislation closing the Department of Education.

Homeschooling is an increasingly attractive option for many parents. Parents interested in providing their children with a quality education should consider my homeschooling curriculum. The Ron Paul Curriculum provides students with a well-rounded education that includes rigorous programs in history, mathematics, and the physical and natural sciences. The curriculum also provides instruction in personal finance. Students can develop superior communication skills via intensive writing and public speaking courses. Another feature of my curriculum is that it provides students the opportunity to create and run their own businesses.

The government and history sections of the curriculum emphasize Austrian economics, libertarian political theory, and the history of liberty. However, unlike government schools, my curriculum never puts ideological indoctrination ahead of education.

Interactive forums ensure students are engaged in their education and that they have the opportunity to interact with their peers outside of a formal setting.

I encourage all parents looking at alternatives to government schools — alternatives that provide children with a well-rounded education that introduces them to the history and ideas of liberty without sacrificing education for indoctrination — to go to RonPaulCurriculum.com for more information about my homeschooling program.

ronpaulinstitute.org