But then, there also was another puzzle: How could their self-besotted visionary-in-chief, hobby philosopher (with a bent to sinister German stuff), and obviously mentally less than stable wanna-be-genius of a leader have gotten a whole nation of, apparently, reasonably educated people to go along? And not just go along, but go along to the very, very bitter end.

That question was all the more disturbing in view of the fact that Adolf Hitler had not been shy about displaying his insanity and extremely bad intentions well before conservative elites installed him in power in 1933. Hitler’s book-length – indeed two-volume – manifesto of German fascism (AKA Nazism) Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and 1926, sold more than 12 million copies and was translated into over a dozen languages.

And those ready to brave its pathological me-me-me-and-HISTORY narcissism, daft hodge-podge ramblings about the better and the lesser parts of humanity, and brownshirt-bro bombast to read it through could not say that the future Leader had been concealing where he intended to lead Germany and, really, the world.

Indeed, Hitler’s manifesto could have served as an all-alarms-howling, bright-red-lights-flashing-everywhere, get-the-strait-jackets-now warning. The main points of Nazi Germany’s evil to come were all there, laid out in general but with stunning honesty: empire building with industrial-strength brutality, extermination or at least slavery for those considered inferior and superfluous, and last but not least, eternal primacy of one master country – primacy, as we’d say now in American English – to be achieved and maintained by all and any means, because that country – in Hitler’s case Germany – was defined as superior to all others by definition and called upon to lead the world, forever.

It is one of those bitter ironies of history that Alex Karp, CEO of the very peculiar software company Palantir, who regularly refers to his Jewish family background and what it would have meant for him under the Nazis, has recently released a manifesto that also should serve as a warning to the rest of us. A summary of his longer tract “The Technological Republic” (co-authored with Nicholas Zamiska) – the second volume in the age of mass distraction and attention deficit, so to speak – the twenty-two point X post has provoked a great backlash.

Cas Mudde, well-known expert on the far right, has called it “Technofascism pure!” (with an exclamation mark in the original). Yanis Varoufakis feels that “if Evil could tweet, this is what it would!” (with another exclamation mark). Mudde has also called for a full stop to all cooperation with Palantir by European companies and government agencies. Even Eliot Higgins, founder of Cold-War re-enactment tool and Western information war front Bellingcat has been moved to – mild irony. How daring! (My exclamation mark.)

And these are not over-reactions. Karp’s Palantir Manifesto really is an astonishingly open self-exploration of a very sick mind’s vision for the future of humanity, arguing, in effect, for an open-ended AI arms race (a big Kaching! for Palantir, by the way), bringing back German and Japanese militarism, racism masked as realism about cultural backwardness (as it happens, also a Nazi “Kulturträger” move, which Karp should have heard about in his German years), and, last but not least, letting our brilliant billionaires and new elites in general off the hook when they mess up, such as with on private islands having fun with a serial child rapist - that sort of thing. How unselfish.

It is also painfully, criminally badly written – plus ça change… – in a style that combines mock-Oswald Spengler Götterdämmerung kitsch (“The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.”) with sheer non-sequitur inanity (Why, again, can’t we have economic growth and security without any of that “ruling class decadence”?).

There are passages that read like young Jordan Peterson – age 15 and on too much diet coke – trying to be deep, really, really deep for the first time: “Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed” and “our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.”

After the inimitable practice of America’s war idiot-in-chief Don Tzu of Hormuz, Alex and his Palantir friends are giving us their I Ching of the tech dim. Lucky us: So much American primacy and then we get Silicon Valley meta, too!

Yet farcical as Karp’s manifesto is, it is, of course, a deadly serious matter. After all, we live in a world where Palantir has already risen to far too much power. Founded as a CIA spin-off after the oh-so-unforeseen terror attacks of 11 September 2001, backed by totally normal Epstein-buddy, “transhumanist,” and antichrist-obsessive Peter Thiel, Palantir has grown into a bloody monster, combining, in true fascist style, the logics of efficiency and extermination with its software tools, such as Gotham, Foundry, or Maven, while mass-spying on everything and everyone it can, and systematically embedding itself in international business and government to become – or appear – indispensable.

Palantir – named after all-seeing magic stones used by the villains of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (again: don’t say you weren’t warned) has already produced so much evil that a short worst-of-the-worst sample must do: The company has officially denied being involved in genocidal Israel’s use of AI to mass-murder Palestinians faster. Curiously enough, Alex Karp has, however, smirkingly admitted the fact in public. Regarding the deployment of Palantir’s targeting software in the American-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, the company is not even denying it.

But Palantir never rests. While deeply and proudly involved in genocidal slaughters and imperialist warfare, it also subverts peacetime societies pervasively. In Britain, for instance, a backlash has set in against the state’s reckless handing over of police powers and extremely sensitive data (for instance, in the spheres of finance and health) to the American CIA-offshoot gone rogue. In Germany, Palantir systems are used for policing in at least three of its federal states, Hesse, North-Rhine Westphalia, and Bavaria. In the US, Palantir has, of course, already so deeply invaded the state that it does not only help it fight its criminal wars abroad but also, for instane, terrorize its migrants and some non-migrants, too, at home.

Indeed, Palantir is so evil that even its own employees are beginning to wonder if they might, actually, be the bad guys. Hint: Yes, you are. And we all know.

For the rest of us, that is, almost all of us on this planet afflicted by Silicon Valley: It’s time to believe them when they tell us to our faces that they are coming for us. Palantir is a clear and present danger to humanity. Its CEO is an extremely dangerous maniac, its mission is subversion, surveillance, and violence, and its only Achilles Heel may be that old nemesis of the wicked: hubris. The sort of hubris that makes you display your perverse mind and announce your horrible aims in a manifesto we should all call Alex Karp’s Mein AI.

Indeed, if you try to resist the killers and their accomplices, the police and state prosecutors will aggressively and relentlessly go not after them but you and, in effect, protect the criminals. Imagine, finally, that while you cannot strike the killers directly, you can make committing their heinous crimes harder for them by disrupting their business activities and alerting the public to their scandalously uninhibited activities and shocking power in your society.

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There are good reasons why this cooperation has raised eyebrows. For one thing, it reflects not only VW’s bad and growing problems but those of Germany’s vital automobile sector, and thus, really the German economy as a whole. As the Financial Times has noted, the VW-Rafael project would mark “the highest-profile example yet of the German car industry, where profits have plunged,” trying to save itself by entering the “booming defense sector.”

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Nowadays, though, we have proudly advanced. Now, we have a whole 27-member-450-million-people European Union that is run by an unelected German who really serves the US and has, a bit like Siegfried or Brunhilde, a special “shield” (about which more below) to protect a “democracy” (yes, scare quotes) administered and defined by an intransparent, privileged, and aloof nomenklatura of equally unelected bureaucrats.

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Instead, in the upside-down, white-is-black, Israel-is-defending-itself-and-Iran-is-just-so-damn-mean alternate universe of the EU, the space where policy debates should take place has long been fully clogged up by three pernicious weeds of swamp-á-la-Brussels: There are, first, those elaborately underhanded backroom deals that eliminate even the faintest remains of transparency and accountability. For a fresh – if also foul – example, just check out the recent double-dealing between the EU parliament’s oh-so-democratic Centrists and the at-least-not-so-hypocritical far right. A deal so obviously perfidious, even Berlin doesn’t like to be associated with it – in public, that is.

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Everything is different, however, in this case: Since Quentin Deranque, a 23-year old data science student, committed traditionalist Roman-Catholic, and New-Right (generically speaking) activist (or militant – take your pick) was beaten and kicked to death by a gang of self-appointed “antifascists,” France has gone through a “drama” as a “national community” (in the words of French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot).

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Case in point, their response to the fact that their US-Israeli masters have started a war to end if not strictly all then at least all (barely) affordable energy supplies to the EU’s economies, while its major players are already limping along on a spectrum between walking-wounded (for instance, France, maybe) to comatose (Germany, definitely).

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The expression of desperate exasperation was richly deserved. Factually misleading his national audience, Germany’s leader also clearly implied that the attack on Iran could be justified as a necessary form of prevention and argued – probably reflecting a residual awareness that preventive war is, actually, prohibited – that Iran had not observed international law. He then offered a short, demagogic, and breathtakingly unsound theory: International law “meets its limits,” he argued, when the opponent does not comply with it. As in: If they don’t play by the rules, we don’t have to do so either.

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This article has been published in full at New Global Politics. Please click here to continue.

Leave it to chancellor Friedrich Merz and company to achieve what seems almost impossible. For almost two-and-a-half years, not one but two German governments have been, in effect, complicit in Israel’s continuing Gaza Genocide. Under former chancellor Olaf Scholz from the Centrist Social-Democrats – otherwise remembered for gutless evasion when US ex-president Joe Biden announced, in essence, that he was going to blow up North Stream – as well as under his unusually dishonest successor Friedrich Merz from the Centrist Christian-Democrats, Berlin has supplied Israel with arms (and probably misled the International Court of Justice about it), diplomatic cover, legal support, media propaganda, and the often brutal suppression of protests against Israel’s crimes.

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With “highlights” including apartheid, ethnic cleansing, unlawful detention, torture, sexual violence, and genocide, Israel has such an extensive and constantly growing record of, literally, every crime under international law, including human-rights and humanitarian law (or the law of armed conflict), that one more or less hardly seems to matter anymore: This state is a monster, and monsters will monster as long as they can.

The US, of course, is no spring chicken either, when it comes to treating international law – really, any law – like a doormat and brutally, gleefully violating the most basic ethics, the kind of simple rules normal people intuitively recognize, such as “don’t murder, lie, or steal.”

Indeed, while Israel can easily claim to be the single most criminal, indeed evil country in the world, the US wins the most-powerful-rogue-state prize hands down. There is – empirically, quantifiably – no other country that combines such ingrained and increasingly explicit scorn for law and morality with such brute power and perpetual violence. Before the current assault on Iran, the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro was just the last proof of that fact, so glaringly obvious that it woke up even some Western commentators.

If some things are too obvious to merit further discussion, others are more intriguing. Let’s start with the greatest mystery: Why is the US joining – really, obeying – Israel and its powerful American lobby once again in going to war in the Middle East? Was Iraq 2003 not enough of a disaster? Are the American elites really congenitally unable to learn?

In terms of actual US interests, war against Iran makes no sense at all. Not even for a rapacious, ruthless empire as the US. Iran is not close to a nuclear bomb and, as a matter of fact, has a religiously and ethically based (hard to grasp in Washington, I know) explicit policy against acquiring one. And even if Iran were building such weapons or seeking a state of being “latently” able to do so as urgently needed reinsurance against permanent Israeli and US aggression, Washington would gain nothing and risk very much by going to war.

On the other hand, it was precisely the JCPOA agreement with Iran, destroyed by the US during the first Trump presidency, that proved empirically that the issue of Iranian nuclear energy use can be resolved well by compromise. As to recent, hysterical US claims about other types of WMDs and “intercontinental missiles,” it is time to no longer give such crude, dumb lies the time of day. Enough with the propaganda already.

Regime change? So, please could someone explain why installing a washed-out Pahlavi princeling – if it ever were to work, that is – in Tehran is good for Americans? Spoiler, no one can. At least not honestly. Do I hear someone say geopolitics? Oh, that would mean the “genius” geopolitics of risking a long war with great damage to the US and its regional vassals (Israel is not a “vassal,” alas)?

Regarding the ever-lasting struggle for geopolitical advantage, precisely that would - obviously - be better served by means short of war, even by policies of rapprochement with Iran which could be started easily by lifting the sanctions. The US, for instance, seeks influence over regional energy resources that China needs? Even in Washington, they must understand that war is the worst possible way to pursue such a strategy. No, geopolitics - not even of the most mean type - is not a convincing explanation in this case.

Then, perhaps it’s all about plunder? Yes, true, the US simply loves, loves, loves plundering. Historically speaking, the whole country is built on it, just like Israel. But even plunder on its own despicable terms only makes sense if you turn a profit. Good luck with that while sinking more gazillions into war-for-Israel.

And that brings us to the only explanation that does make sense, even if in a very grim way: The US - as in as a state and also as as almost all Americans - has zero interest in war with Iran. As little as, incidentally, in a proxy war with Russia and a Cold War with China, both strategies, by the way, doomed to fail. In all three cases, the vast majority of Americans would only stand to benefit from peaceful and cooperative relationships.

But Washington chooses permanent conflict and very high-risk war against Iran anyhow. The reason is that US policy in the Middle East – and not only – has been captured by Israel and its lobby. As John Mearsheimer, both doyen of explaining international relations by national interests (the theory of Realism) and co-author of the standard work on the Israel Lobby has long acknowledged, Israel’s influence on the US is real, contradicts American interests, and forms an exception to the theory of Realism in that Washington is constantly hurting its own country.

For reasonable observers, this case is closed: When devastating the Middle East, the US is acting not in its own genuine national interest but the perverse conception that Israel has of its national interest: subjugating and, if needed, destroying all sovereign states in its neighborhood so as to create and preserve Israeli domination and even “Greater Israel,” a nightmare of “Lebensraum” for Zionist settlers from, at least, Egypt to Iraq.

But, again, why? This is where the Epstein scandal makes a difference – or should do so – to unbiased minds. We must acknowledge that Jeffrey Epstein was not “merely” a very rich and perverse criminal with far too many friends in high places but an agent of Israel, whether with a direct affiliation to its dreaded Mossad service of spying, murder, and subversion or not. His core operation served to gather extremely compromising blackmail material on large swathes of the elites of the US and the West more generally. FBI agents, we now know, assessed that Donald Trump himself is among those trapped in this manner. If anything, frantic – and also, again, criminal efforts – by Trump’s Department of Justice and his head of the FBI to purge the files of references to the current president and his friends only provide further corroborating evidence that Trump is under Israel’s control.

Remember “Russiagate” (really, of course, Russia Rage)? The irony! Russia was never remotely close to (or even trying) to having a US president under its thumb. That was all BS. Yet, in the end, “Russiagate” did do two things: it made Trump even worse as an individual because it added a (fundamentally realistic if exaggerated) sense of having been a victim of a smear campaign to an already extremely narcissistic and vindictive character. And, among voters, it helped Trump make his furious come-back, without which he would not now be in power. The delusion and mass hysteria of “Russiagate” – which was that famous American thing, a nothing-burger – paved the way for the power that really controls Trump and really does enormous damage to America: Israel and its lobby.

Will Americans ever free themselves from the one state and network that have really run history’s most successful subversion and state-capture operation on them? Who knows? We know that it would take more than putting an end to Epstein-like blackmail. If anything, Trump’s bitter enemies, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have only recently shown us that the American “elite” is enthralled to Israel and its crimes also for reasons ranging from being bribed to sharing the vile insanity of Zionism. If the US ever wants its independence back from Israel, all of that will have to go.

Spiegel – to paraphrase the title of a Soviet television classic starring the immortal Viacheslav Tikhonov – has now been authorized to announce: From the spring of 2022 (at the latest) Ukrainian terrorists and CIA spies – already well-acquainted with each other “for years” (How did that happen, by the way? Never mind, we know.) – were meeting to develop the idea of launching the greatest single eco-terrorist attack in Europe’s history. On an “ally.”

You don’t say, Hauptmann Obvious! Honestly, what’s next from Hamburg’s brightest? “Gulf of Tonkin Incident – Did the US Lie?”; “Breaking: Gleiwitz Attack – a Nazi Black Op?”; “The Schlieffen Plan: Did it Fail?”; “Kaiser Wilhelm – Not so Bright after all?” Have all the cringo-meters really gone the way of Germany’s notoriously dysfunctional railways? Is there no one left at Spiegel with a basic sense of professional shame and elementary decency?

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Almost two decades ago now, while Russia was resurging from its post-Soviet time of troubles, the movers and shakers of the West chose to haughtily dismiss Moscow’s objections to the Western project of establishing a “unipolar world.” That was sheer hubris: such a world was never to be, but the obstinate Western attempt to impose it has proven highly destructive.

Which brings us to the present. This year the MSC has taken place under the odd motto “Under Destruction.” The phrase is both clumsy – the kind of sad things that happen when Germans try to sound original in English – and intriguingly pessimistic. Yet it could have had the advantage of signaling a growing willingness to face reality, in particular that of the West’s own mistakes over the last – roughly – third of a century. After the end of the original Cold War, the world has never been the West’s to remake, but the West did have a unique chance to improve it by practicing wise foresight (how hard was it to predict Russia would come back?), fairness (don’t kick a great power already down), and, last but not least, good faith (serial lying rots diplomacy from within - duh).

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Unduly platformed in the Western mainstream media once again, Zelensky used a conversation with American journalist Simon Shuster to hold forth on his unyielding will to fight to the very last Ukrainian, or, really, the last one who isn’t rich and connected. Because, in Zelensky’s cozy Kyiv office – nicely decorated with some of those Ukrainian unit insignia that look just like Nazi ones – Ukraine is not really losing the war. Just like Germany back then, I guess. And since Ukraine is not really losing the war in Zelensky-world, Russia, Zelensky seeks to persuade Trump, can be compelled into a peace that does not correspond to the fact that, in the real world, Russia is winning the war. See? Easy! If only Donald would finally get it, too.

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In essence, the House Judiciary report shows how the EU, in particular its happily unelected and power-grabbing apparatchik rulers in the European Commission, have used the pretext of fighting online “disinformation” and “hate speech” to suppress legitimate speech, information, and debate. The report also details how this policy of behind-the-scenes (so much for public accountability) manipulation and censorship has already been deployed to finagle six national elections (so much for sovereignty, democracy, and the rule-of-law).

And that is not counting the fiasco that ensued when former EU Commissar, pardon: Commissioner, of course, Thierry Breton tried to pressure X into suppressing an interview with Donald Trump. Or the less well-known scandal of another high-ranking EU bureaucrat – a Commission Vice President, no less – telling Tiktok representatives she wanted to discuss both EU-related matters (sort of her turf) and US elections (boundaries, please?).

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Impossible? Totally absurd? Absolutely delusional? Mais pas du tout (and pardon my French, please)! Because deep down, you see – You do see it? Right, right? – all of these things (and whatever is the appropriate category for Charlie) are the same. Namely, manifestations of Russia! Or, as we also say in the Bonkers West, RussiaRussiaRussia. And so was Jeffrey Epstein, at least according to a clearly coordinated, “the-memo-is-out” wave of desperate nonsense released by Western propaganda outlets, such as the British Telegraph, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and the Polish government. Ukrainian and Russian-exile info-warriors, meanwhile, are falling over themselves to jump on the bandwagon. Or, perhaps rather, the (evil) clown car.

The allegations about Russia are so ludicrous that their substance does not merit discussion. Because there is no substance: What we are really seeing is a squalid spectacle of propagandists clutching not at straws but pure nothing, recycling each other’s unfounded and evidence-free claims and resorting to sad, silly tricks so transparent they make you oscillate between laughing, weeping, and a pure unadulterated feeling of cringe. Meduza, for instance, click-baits with the headline “Who are the Russians named in the latest Epstein files? Vladimir Putin, for one” and then admits that “there’s no evidence in the released files that a meeting between Putin and Epstein ever took place.” That sort of beyond-despair BS.

What this fresh wave of foul play directed at Moscow really shows is that, now, when about half of the Epstein Files have been released – which means we certainly haven’t seen the worst yet, as counterintuitive and horrifying as that may be – the sordid (polite expression) “elites” of the West and their servile mainstream media are struggling to manage the fallout. They may even be panicking. That much is understandable.

Because everyone with an IQ above room temperature has long understood the essence of the Epstein phenomenon: The inexplicably successful, rich, and connected pedophile monster was working for Israel, as independent Western observers such as, for instance, Ana Kasparian and Tim Anderson openly acknowledge.

We do not yet know with certainty whether that means direct employment and training by the Mossad, as the FBI recorded a source stating clearly or a more informal but also very deep relationship. But that is beside the point. There is no doubt that his ties to Israel were central to his life and “work.”

While Epstein was busy with more than one kind of super-sleazy scheme and crime – insider trading, pandemic profiting, and arms trading, for instance – the core of his operation was a far-flung blackmail scheme in which sickeningly depraved perverts from the West’s movers and shakers indulged their criminal fantasies with real-live victims, compliments the House of Epstein. This, obviously, compromised them and made them pliable.

Those now publicly suspected of such behavior – due to prior accusations and opaque settlements but also fresh pictures and messages from the Epstein files – include former Prince Andrew, former Labour godfather Peter Mandelson, Israeli ex-prime minister Ehud Barak, the two Bills, Clinton and Gates. And there are so many more.

Others, it seems from the evidence available at this time, aren’t suspect of engaging in sex crimes but – with Epstein already convicted as a pedophile and a registered sex offender since 2009 – were perfectly willing to be, in effect, bought by (at least) hospitality, flattery, and access, give and take a private plane ride and some academic grants perhaps. This seems to have been the case of, for instance, Noam Chomsky.

And, of course, both the world’s richest man and its still unfortunately most powerful one are implicated as well. Elon Musk may not have been to Epstein’s rape-and-more island for the rich-and-evil but only because his begging for an invite seems never to have worked out. His brother Kimbal’s relationships with the pedo monster were far too close for comfort, in any case. And Donald Trump, president of the US and loyal servant of Israel, now faces claims that he was a co-conspirator in Epstein’s crimes.

The only person who has emerged with his reputation enhanced and not diminished by a mention in the Files is Norman Finkelstein, the long-standing and long-suffering critic and opponent of Israel’s crimes, from apartheid to genocide. Up until now, he is the only one who, the Files reflect, answered an approach by the Epstein network with a loud and clear – I will paraphrase here – go and eff yourself. As every decent person should have done; and yet no one except him did.

Obviously, the West’s attempt to make its own pervasive elite corruption by a pedophile multi-purpose criminal working for Israel a “Russia!” issue is not only stunningly daft and shameless – Who do they think we are? Idiots? – but also reminiscent of another, similar ploy: The tired conspiracy theory of “Russiagate” (better labeled Russia Rage) – in essence alleging that Trump has colluded with Russia or even served as its agent – was built on the same principle: a perfectly homemade, Western phenomenon was blamed on Russia.

Indeed, Russia Rage and the Epstein Files form a bizarre mirror image of Western double-think: Russia Rage was fiction, but it was long sold as sacred truth by Western mainstream media. The wide, deep rot marked by the Epstein Files is real and has long been denied or massively downplayed by the same media. How ironic.

The (still incomplete) Epstein Files have exposed the “elites” of the West as shot through with criminality, sadism, and moral nihilism. Many of those ruling us – not only politically – are not merely greedy, careerist, and power-hungry. They are evil, in the strict and terrifying sense of the term. The West’s institutions, meanwhile, have shown that they have nothing to set against that evil. On the contrary: even getting half of the Epstein Files released was a great struggle, resisted and delayed every step of the way. Redacting and purging are ongoing. Genuine accountability is not in sight.

The West has long had very severe credibility problems. The Epstein Files now provide conclusive evidence that substantial and enormously powerful parts of its “elites’” live in a form of depravity that exceeds even a pessimistic imagination. The real, it turns out, is worse than many so-called “conspiracy theories.”

We also live in a world where it so happens that this real-existing, evil West has helped Israel commit the Gaza Genocide, sending international law and basic ethics to hell in the process. But, surely, the fact that so many from the West’s “elites” are drowning in blackmail-grade dirt amassed by a pedophile criminal working for Israel has nothing to do with that historic and horrific failure. Just kidding. In reality, the dots don’t even need connecting. And Epstein has, of course, not been alone. What he stood for is not over.

The same Western “elites” and their media underlings want us to fear and even hate Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and last but not least, Palestine and whoever else is in their crosshairs at any given moment. They tell us we must bomb Iran to fight for the rights of Iranian women, while having made a habit of raping and – it is virtually certain – disappearing girls.

The West is the swamp. And everyone knows it.

And yet: Look closely, and – badly politicized as it is – Berlin’s Annual Economy Report and the way it was spun for the public can tell you a lot about Germany as it really is now, and why that is a rather sad picture with little hope for quick improvement. The report also – spoiler alert – demonstrates once again that the current hyper-Centrist coalition government of mainstream pseudo-conservatives (CDU/CSU) and mainstream pseudo-social-democrats (SPD) has no idea how to turn things around.

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What makes this particular Weidel speech, delivered in the city of Heilbronn while campaigning in state elections in the classically “West-German” Land of Baden-Württemberg, especially noteworthy is its unprecedently outspoken, bracingly combative, and – last but not least – stirringly logical and honest take on one specific topic, namely Germany’s masochistic relationship to Ukraine.

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But that, alas, is entirely untrue. In reality, Musk is a man of strong opinions: Not merely an uber-capitalist, he is also a very right-wing libertarian full of odd anxieties strong enough to produce plenty of posts about Whites and their “civilization” disappearing and, when in a really good mood, a greeting that looks like a perfect imitation of a fascist salute. That would all be bad enough.

But things are even worse: Musk, clearly driven by his very own messiah complex, has not had the smart humility, breadth of vision, or magnanimity of spirit to treat his personal obsessions as just that. Instead, he has unfairly promoted whom and what he personally likes politically and culturally, for instance those glorifying and lobbying and making excuses for Israel.

Some “town square” indeed. Think of it as a place where you need a micro to be heard, and that micro is under the control of an extremely biased and overbearing mayor and his buddies. Or, as Musk’s team has put it in a daft slogan indicating they consider their customers idiots, X users have “freedom of speech but not of reach.”

At least as bad, Musk’s X has also systematically suppressed whatever – and whoever – the owner and boss does not like. Much – but by no means all – of this de facto censorship is imposed by what X itself has euphemistically described as “a more reasonable, proportionate and effective moderation process,” that is, in reality, by often massive demotion (deboosting) rather than direct banning: If you say what Musk, his ideological chums, his business partners and financiers, and those whom he fears do not like, X is less likely to just kick you out – although that option is always there, too – than to quietly put you in a tight, soundproof box. You may think you are speaking to others, but X makes sure your voice reaches almost no one: Let freedom ring! But in silent mode, please.

There is no topic on X where all of the above – the blatant hypocrisy, the manipulation, and the power-hungry hubris – are more in evidence than Israel. Or to be more precise: Palestine and the endless – literally – series of crimes Israelis and their accomplices are committing against Palestinians, from violent, often murderous dispossession to apartheid to de facto mass kidnapping to mass torture (including rape) to ethnic cleansing by genocide.

Recently, Grok – X’s own in-house AI – has revealed that critics of Israeli crimes are being suppressed massively. Their reach is throttled by 80 to almost 100 percent of what it would be without foul play. Prompted with a specific phrase, which X users have shared widely, Grok has been delivering detailed insights into how the X algorithm censors those who mention – and protest against – Israel’s current Gaza Genocide, its all-purpose brutality and rogue-state wars of aggression against Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, its habit of state-terrorist assassinations, including of other countries’ scientific and political elites (as in Iran and Yemen) or the perverse influence it exerts on US and, in general, Western politics. According to at least one usually well-informed observer, this is a mass campaign, with Elon Musk “censoring hundreds of millions of people for a foreign [that is, Israeli] government.” In return, Musk’s own customers are calling him “a huge threat to freedom of speech” and “a traitor.”

Politically those targeted by this X repression campaign are as different as it gets: They include idiosyncratic very-right-wingers, such as Candace Ownes as well as generally left-wing voices, such as the journalists and dissidents Max Blumenthal and Ali Abunimah.

Full disclosure: They also include yours truly (on the left of the spectrum, too). And it’s a fairly representative case, too: The suppression of the X account “@TarikCyrilAmar,” as reported by Grok, is massive and comprehensive, including hiding it and its activity, and, in general reaching 78 to 85 percent. But what is most typical is the big fat lie used to justify this censorship: that somehow the account’s open and honest criticism of Israel and its crimes and explicit anti-Zionist/anti-fascist position overlaps with “antisemitism.” This is the core smear used by all defenders of Israel and its genocide: that to be against these crimes and the state committing them with no end in sight, indicates “antisemitism.”

This daft lie has long lost all credibility among those with at least half a brain. Except in Musk world, where it is still good enough to shape what X users are not only allowed to say but also to hear. Both active and passive freedom of speech are a joke there. And all that for genocidal Israel.

There are claims now surfacing on X that somehow this scandal is not quite real, that Grok wasn’t delivering real data but a mere simulation. That seems very, very far-fetched and is likely to turn out to have been yet another untruth. For one thing, X has a proven record of suppressing what Israel doesn’t like. Last year, for instance, Grok itself was suspended when it called the Gaza Genocide just that, a genocide. Clearly, Musk’s AI had gotten a little to perspicacious – and honest – for its masters. In October 2023, while Israel was launching its genocide – and speaking about it proudly – X purged hundreds of Palestinian accounts, depriving the victims of yet another way to reach out and, thus, contributing to Israel’s policy of siege, blockade, and black-out.

It is unclear why Musk is behaving like this: (Very nasty) Conviction? (Abject) Fear? Dogged by some (real) antisemitic signals of his own, Musk has repeatedly “done penance” by serving Israel and its propaganda. But then, perhaps, to be fair to him, maybe he is not just a coward but really, genuinely feels that siding with genociders and child killers is what he needs to do.

What is clear is that his motives are of decidedly secondary importance. What matters is his atrocious moral failure – not his only one, but his worst. And ironically, Musk, who prides himself on being a bit of a nonconformist and maverick, is all too representative of the West’s rotten elites as a whole. If only he were more exceptional!

You. Don’t. Say!

There’s cheating going on at the White House and among its hangers-on!

Now, let’s be realistic: Real-existing capitalism – not the Friedrich von Hayek-Milton Friedman fan fiction that still dulls all too many minds – has always been ruthless. Its modern history of about half a millennium includes stupendous scientific, technological, and cultural change, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels acknowledged in their Communist Manifesto, parts of which read almost as a panegyric to the bourgeoisie and the capitalist world it made.

But that world also began with the vicious impoverishment and exploitation of – literally – the masses, the plunder and devastation of whole continents and their original inhabitants, and a brisk international slave trade, vitiating and ending millions of lives. Marxists call this “primitive accumulation”; their master also used the term “original expropriation,” sardonically comparing its role in traditional political economy to man’s fall from divine grace in Christian mythology.

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That is the challenge posed by German chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent – and very unusual – talk about a “compromise” (“Ausgleich” in German) with Russia, which, he also stressed, is “a European country,” indeed “our greatest European neighbor.”

Outside the context of current Western and, in particular, German and EU politics, such a statement may seem almost a commonplace. Obviously, it would make sense for Berlin – and Brussels, too – to work toward a peaceful, productive, mutually beneficial relationship with Moscow. Equally obviously, this is not merely an option but, in reality, a vital necessity (as Merz may have been hinting at when emphasizing that Russia is Germany’s greatest European neighbor: Greatest as in indispensable?).

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