Majorityrights Central > Category: U.S. Politics

Jason Jay Smart of Kiev Post talks to Ken Harbaugh, former US Navy pilot and the President of Meidas Studios and leader of Valor Media, about asymmetric drone warfare, Ukraine, and the Islamic Republic.

Ken has just released his illuminating film The Drone Hunters of Kherson, a must-see for anyone whe wants to understand the arrogant unpreparedness of the US federal government, Pentagon, and armed forces for modern drone warfare, as it has developed in Ukraine and as it awaits US forces deployed in the Straits of Hormuz.  Arrogant because Volodymyr Zelensky made a presentation of drone counter-measures on his visit to Washington a few months ago, offering the Trump administration the innovation and expertise which the Ukrainian forces have developed over the last four years.  He was rebuffed according to one insider because they thought it was “just Zelensky being Zelensky”.

Smart’s on-line preamble includes the following:

Western military leaders are dangerously unprepared for the mass deployment of these autonomous swarm tactics. The growing strategic alliance between Russia and Iran is accelerating the production of cheap precision weapons while providing the satellite intelligence needed to target vulnerable American assets. A massive institutional reckoning is required because relying on outdated concepts of air superiority leaves major bases completely defenseless. Understanding this brutal new paradigm is the essential key to comprehending the terrifying future of global security.

Here is Ken’s film:

Drone Hunters of Kherson

The southern nations of Donald Trump’s New American Empire

Muscovy in Ukraine.  America in Venezuela (seemingly permanently).  Next: Beijing in Taiwan.  Trump has opened the door.  The pieces of the new world order are falling into place.  The authoritarian world ... the world of empires foretold by Sergei Glazyev ... is coming into view.  There is no one to defend the old order.  The dynastics of the Money Power (aka the investor class), the asset managers, the central bankers, the hedge funders beneath them will take note.  The initialled institutions of globalism ... the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the WEF will take note.  The dateline banks and corporations will take note.  The technocrats and managers and ambitious politicians will take note.  Globalism will not be at all inconvenienced.  Why should it be?  China is the WEF’s preferred model for public-private partnership and social control, and the western corporations are Chinese corporations.  The powerful, therefore, have been given a shot in the arm.  Force, as the standard for national, political and social organisation, has been advanced, and sovereignty, freedom, and law have been pushed down.

Nationalist or liberal, we’re on our own.  Looking ahead, it’s probably up to Canada to hold the sovereign line.

Where the great appetite for Russian empire began.

It is now clear that Vladimir Putin has been forced by the British, German, French and Polish leaders’ combined visit to Kiev, and their drive for a 30-day ceasefire, to cobble together a response, which came at 2.00 am this morning.  Putin avoided all mention of a ceasefire.  In fact, his proposal of picking up the talks in Istanbul that took place during the months immediately following the invasion also avoids the all-too-solid reason that Kiev shut them down, namely that the Russian Army’s Kiev offensive had been defeated.  The Russians retreated on 7th April 2022.  The gravest threat was past.  Istanbul was rendered unnecessary, even unhelpful; and Kiev duly withdrew in May.

The subsequent Russian retreats from Kharkiv, Kherson, and Sumi reduced the area under occupation by the Russian Army from 25% to 18% today.  The situation is completely different from Spring 2022 - but apparently not for Putin.  He wants to return to Istanbul next Thursday, 15th May for direct talks about what he perceives as “the root causes” of his invasion.  He said:

The point of such talks is to eliminate the root causes of the conflict and to establish a long-term, durable peace that will stand the test of time. We don’t rule out the possibility that, in the course of these negotiations, it might be possible to agree on new ceasefires — on a real truce

He is saying that the war must continue while, diplomatically, the Ukrainian democratic will to independence and autonomy is suppressed and the Russian will to empire is affirmed.  Istanbul served this purpose before, and Putin wants to return to it now.  By way of a reminder, this is ISW’s summation of the Istanbul Communiqué:

The draft agreement was never completed, and published versions contain Russian demands and Ukrainian counterproposals. The conditions below reflect the Russian demands, which stipulated that:

• Russia be treated as a neutral security “guarantor state” of Ukraine along with the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, repeating the premise of the Minsk II Accords that did not treat Russia as a belligerent in the war.
• Ukraine be forbidden to invite partner forces to conduct military exercises in Ukrainian territory, airspace, territorial waters, and exclusive economic zone without the consent of China and Russia.
• China and Russia have a veto over the mechanism for responding to future armed conflict in Ukraine by making China and Russia Ukraine’s security guarantors and granting the United Nations Security Council the authority to take “measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.” China and Russia are permanent members of the UNSC and can use their veto power to block responses to future Russian aggression under these conditions.
• Ukraine amend its constitution to make Russian an official state language in Ukraine on an equal footing with the Ukrainian language and change a number of its internal laws, including Ukraine’s decommunization laws.
• Ukraine lift all Ukrainian sanctions against Russia imposed since 2014 and withdraw criminal cases against Russia in the International Criminal Court for war crimes against Ukraine.
• Ukraine amend its constitution to remove the provision committing Ukraine to NATO membership and to add a neutrality provision that would ban Ukraine from joining any military alliances, concluding military agreements, or hosting foreign military personnel, trainers, or weapon systems in Ukraine. Ukraine disarm almost completely and commit never to fielding a military capable of defending the country. The draft agreement specifically imposed the following caps on the Ukrainian Armed Forces:
[the ISW pdf then details the full scale of the neutering of the Ukrainian armed forces which Putin required - Ed.]

Emmanuel Macron has already said that, although a step in the right direction, Putin’s proposal is “not enough”.  Donald Tusk has said, “the world is waiting for a clear decision on an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.”  Zelensky, emboldened by his growing influence on Donald Trump, has stated that Ukraine expects the Russian Federation to confirm the ceasefire from 12th May.  The European and Ukrainian fix is in.  Putin is striving to persist with his line, but he has been losing traction internationally; and is surely fearful of pushing Trump further into Zelensky’s embrace.  It gets worse.  According to Jade McGlynn, even if there is a ceasefire it cannot lead to peace for structural reasons inside Russia:

even if Putin were to seek peace, it is far from clear that the Russian state, economy, or social fabric could withstand it.

Over the past two years, the Russian economy has become militarised and sanctioned into dependency on war. Military production now drives GDP. Defence-sector employment, direct budget subsidies, and sanctioned parallel markets all hinge on continued conflict. A halt in military spending would risk mass unemployment, inflationary collapse, and the exposure of long-suppressed structural vulnerabilities in banking, logistics, and industrial supply chains.

The Russian security apparatus, already expanded and emboldened, would have no credible peacetime role. Hundreds of thousands of demobilised soldiers—many traumatised, others radicalised—would return to a society that neither values nor accommodates them. Veterans are not treated as heroes by a society that has tried its hardest to ignore the horror of a war conducted in their name and with their acquiescence. For many Russian soldiers, continued war would offer more meaning, stability, and income than any peacetime future.

Put simply, Russia is not ready for peace—economically, politically, or psychologically. Any ceasefire would be used not to end the war, but to reconstitute the means to continue it.

If Dr McGlynn is right, Trump will eventually be forced to institute secondary sanctions against customers for Russian oil and gas.  Down the line from there is not just Russian military and economic failure but the collapse of the Russian Federation itself, and a messy and dangerous series of internal political and ethnic struggles.  But perhaps that is what it would take to cleanse Muscovy of its centuries-old addiction to empire.

Trump in an age of innocence, when a deal would be done in a day.

“Peace” is a versatile concept.  It has a spiritual context, of course, and a funereal and memorial one.  Then since the sixties it has had a vee-signed, marijuana-driven usage originally followed by the word “man” but these days by “bro”, which more or less sums up the depth of consideration thus far given it by Donald Trump.

Not everyone on the international stage is so blasé.  The honest ones, of whom there are far too few, employ it in the proper humanistic sense of a just deliverance from conflict into a longed-for and enduring state of safety and such concord as is possible when the guns have fallen silent but there is still a lot of hatred in the air.  As the hatred subsides so the meaning of peace matures into the one given generally to civic life in times of ease and gentility, which is only what all peoples expect and deserve from life.

But there are individuals in the charmed circles of power … liars and ambitious men, “men of force” ... who hold the expectations of the common man in contempt, and who talk of peace as something quite other than his expectation.  Their meanings tend to be party to the same struggle as the wars they also engage in when they can.  Thus in the Kremlin’s case peace is as much a weapon as any rocket or gun:

During a telephone conversation with US President Donald Trump on March 18, Russian leader Vladimir Putin put forward a number of conditions for the introduction of a 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine. In particular, to stop mobilization in Ukraine and the rearmament of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Kremlin reported.

Trump seems to have been blissfully unaware that Putin’s peace is not at all a shallow and instant thing like his.  It is ideological, public, formal, structured, and purposive.  Its purpose is the expansion of Russia:

“Russkiy Mir” is a Russian quasi-ideology aimed at the expansion of influence abroad and uniting the states considered by the Kremlin as its backyard on the basis of Russian language common history in the Moscow’s perception and Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). As a political concept it gained some importance in 2000s, particularly after Vladimir Putin started using it in his public speeches, making an appeal to the “compatriots” abroad.
...
With “Russkiy Mir” Putin’s Russia attempts to establish itself as a civilization-forming state and as a leading geopolitical actor.
...
It is also worth mentioning that as the concept, first of all, serves political interests of the Russian authorities, it is populist and adaptive. In such a way under the umbrella of “Russkiy Mir” a number of cultural and historical narratives are united, even though they initially may seem to have no relation to it. Still, in the end, rewriting history with the focus on whitewashing the image of USSR, appropriating the victory over Nazism, labeling every attempt to critically evaluate history as “fascist” also work in favor of “Russkiy Mir”. Putin’s Russia grants itself with the messianic title of the vanquisher of absolute evil – and with the opportunity to fight against what it considers fascism again. Systemic cultural appropriation also adds to the picture. It enables the portrayal of formerly colonized states as having a poor culture, with is partially appropriated and partially discredited, while “Russkiy Mir” is pictured as a culturally rich opposite. The Kremlin consistently discredits pro-democratic policies in target societies, employing disinformation and promotion of destructive narratives, then attempting to offer “Russkiy Mir” as an appealing alternative to such policies.

This is the “peace” which, within the framework of Russia’s war on the Ukrainian people’s will to independence and autonomy, is Vladimir Putin’s guiding light.  Even allowing that the Americans are providing him with a helping hand, nothing Donald Trump can say would steer him away from it.  But does Trump want to say anything anyway?  What evidence is there that he and his government are moved to defend the all too western moralities of the post-1945 settlement?  His denial last week of intelligence and satellite imagery to the Ukrainian military – shocking in its suddenness and effect – was perfectly timed for the Russian and North Korean push in Kursk.  It removed Zelensky’s hard-won bargaining chip and cost hundreds of Ukrainian lives.  Taken with the shameful staged assault on the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office it speaks of “right-wing” America’s near-total moral collapse.

It was on display again in Tuesday’s 90 minute telephone call between Trump and Putin, summarised thus by David Blair in the Telegraph:

Putin has played his familiar trick of agreeing to something that binds Ukraine’s hands much more tightly than his own.

But the relative lack of substance in the readout must itself raise suspicions. Two presidents do not need to talk for 90 minutes to serve up the thin gruel in the public account of their call. What else did Mr Trump and Putin discuss and what private agreements might they have made? Ukraine and the rest of Europe are not party to these talks: they can only guess at what could be happening behind the scenes.

The only certainty is that the dismal pattern whereby Putin concedes nothing and offers nothing, while Trump declines to respond with any hint of steel, remains the order of the day.

If the Americans continue in this vein, disavowing any firm, suppressive action to raise the ante against Russia, one will have to conclude that they, too, mouth words of peace when they really only mean conquest, and do so because they believe that the global contest of power requires such immorality.

In that belief Donald Trump’s America will have friends besides Putin: others with visions of a similarly “peaceful” dominion.  For example, as a counterpoint to Putin’s Russkiy mir, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government are advancing the doctrine of Mavi Vatan.  Should Putin achieve his maximalist aims in Ukraine one then waits to see if Viktor Orban can pull together an integralist cohort from among Hungary’s six other neighbours in Middle Europe and the Balkans.  I think it quite likely, given the level of pro-Russian sentiment there, as well as the desire to annex parts of Ukraine that Putin may deign to gift them for the purpose of dividing Europe.  I think humanity is moving ... being pushed, actually ... ever further from the nationalist desideratum of an age of the people’s will, which is a will to peace, yes, but not at the cost of national dissolution and foreign dominion.  It is doing so because it is moving further from democratisation’s fatal, very 20th century transformation of that people into a bloodless demos, a mere electorate governed by a permanent political class.  We are moving once again into an age when “greatness” is sought among the nations of men; but it is a greatness expressed in power over other nations when power is the possession of an untouchable and imperial, authoritarian few.

If that view of the historical process is wrong then we should now see Donald Trump understand the complete humiliation he has suffered at Putin’s hands.  Being useful to Putin only makes him Putin’s idiot - an idiot whom Putin is, of course, pleased to parade before the dictators and big men of the southern hemisphere.  The situation has clarified, perhaps even for Trump.  The debasement of America is fundamental to Putin and Xi’s global Great Game, and no American president can play it and win.  American greatness will not come via American humiliation, but Putin’s and Xi’s greatness will.  They know it, and they will not be separated in their pursuit of it.  Trump’s vanity alone ought to provoke the necessary reaction.  We should then see him double-down on his determination that peace shall prevail, but only if he switches tack to bring Putin to heel before turning to face Xi’s challenge in the Pacific.  That means a full-hearted and massive re-arming of the Ukrainians with the best equipment the American arsenal possesses.  Then, perhaps, another kind of negotiation will be possible.

But, of course, for that to become a reality Trump and his administration must grasp that Ukraine’s strength is America’s strength, and it is first and foremost a moral strength.

It would be charitable to conclude that the 45th and 47th president of the United States of America is a regular if inordinately successful guy and a great and fearless patriot with an instinct for the wants and interests of the common man.  OK, he’s not a very subtle person.  He can deliver himself of some quite surprising, not to say shocking, public statements.  His dedication to the security of Israel is fawning and slavish if politically necessary, probably.  But he’s the first US president in decades to speak the language of ordinary Americans.  So in the vernacular, cut the guy some slack while he blows away the whole friggin’ mess that is Dems in federal government, right?

But with Trump we are not just talking about pulling down the progressive order in federal government.  He is seeking a new order internationally as well as domestically.  It turns out that his new international order has nothing to do with “peace”, and is not directly concerned with Ukraine at all.  It turns out that his vaunted economic nationalism, always assumed to be just a domestic, blue-collar cause, is also economic imperialism.  It is, from a Russian imperialist perspective, also an opportunity to throw Trump a hydro-carbon or two to bind him to his and Xi’s grand strategy, and not the other way round.  Which would make this less Nixon and Mao than Molotov and Ribbentrop, with Putin playing the role of Ribbentrop.  As of today Beijing is plainly betting on that, because it has given its support to the “peace negotiations”.

The big reveal

From Day 1 of his second term the reborn Donald Trump has been pursuing a politics for the world which, it seems, none outside his own circle in the Republican Party saw coming, and very few if any have fully grasped even now.  This politics has three broad goals:

i) To put a stop to the decades of progressive marxisation and malaise in American life, especially economically, and thereby to ring in a new dawn of American power, prestige, and prosperity.

ii) To force the European states to address their post-Berlin Wall political, moral, and fiscal decadence and weakness, so that they may shift from that same destructive trajectory of mass immigration and marxisation to one of political self-rediscovery and self-preservation (crucially, the “self” here being the state, not the natives of the state).

Thus freeing Washington to pivot towards ...

iii) Ending China’s long march towards global military, economic, and political hegemony, principally by confronting it in the Indo-Pacific Ocean.

The start-point for the Trump administration is Ukraine.  Hence the unwelcome energy with which it has distanced itself from the expectations of the European democracies and NATO, while showering Putin with outrageous largesse under the rubric of peace negotiations.  It was the big reveal.  The deceit and childishness which has characterised the campaigns of Trump and Musk against the Ukrainians is pure theatre, but in the scheme of things they’re nothing more important than positioning.  Ukraine itself is not important except as a bargaining chip, its sacrifice a clear signal to Putin that he could even create his fourth Russian empire in the West if he can defeat the Europeans and keep the American military quiet.  BUT ... he can’t have his new world order with himself and Beijing at the apex.  America will remain the hegemon in a force-based Glazyevian system of empires.  The post-war rules-based order is dead.  Starmer’s love object of international law is without a point.  Democracy is no longer the international standard for good and just government.  A force-based system doesn’t have to care about good or justice.  It’s just the wrong metric.  NATO, meanwhile, will be left without the American guarantee, which effectively guts it and leaves Europe militarily defenceless.  Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference now makes perfect sense, warning the European political elites that their three decades of spending the so-called peace dividend on weak and sickly liberal-universalist causes has to change, and change now.  Virtue signalling elitism is done for.  Universalism has drained European politics of all moral authority.  The old values will have to be rediscovered if self-defence is to mean anything or to have any hope of success on a future battlefield.

Likewise, Trump’s alarming expansionist talk about annexing Canada and Greenland, and sending the military to take control of the Panama Canal, also now makes sense.  The global order of an empire of empires isn’t a fanciful confection of a few Russian dreamers like Glazyev.  It is the alternative order to the west’s model, and as the once and future hegemon America, too, must have its empire, albeit principally an empire of corporate expansion.  Nixon’s week in China also had a pay-off for corporate America (if at a terrible cost to the American working man).  Eventually it led via neoliberalism to the Davosian technocracy we encounter today.  The Trump administration, mindful that it is weaker than the people and must maintain the institutions of democracy, will hope that Americans actually benefit this time.  But any such good will be incidental.  The politics are fatally vested in the maintenance of American corporate and hegemonic power, not in Americans per se.  Trump is not a real nationalist.  The Republican Party cannot encompass real nationalism because the liberal project which is America is wholly antithetical to it.

Further, the eastern imperial model is oligarchic and elitist, intending state dictate and socialism for the masses of the world.  It is also worth emphasising that it does not at all preclude the Davos corporate and financial elites from its Great Game.  The dissenting right, in its lumpen way, has assumed that Davos is western, and its globalism with it.  No, it is only the politicians who are western.  The rest is worldwide because the Money Power behind it is worldwide.  With the one exception of Israel, it will adapt itself to any polity provided racial universalism obtains or could obtain therein.

All that said, there are points of potential push-back against the Trump agenda. Ukrainian fighters for one (the Ukrainian media is already relaying intelligence reports that Putin plans to announce his victory over NATO on the 24th February anniversary of his invasion).  American voters for another.  Resistance in the established order for another, and from anyone else who does not relish a political betrayal which benefits the murderers of Moscow.  Perhaps the Russophile civic nationalists in Germany and elsewhere will not be able to show their faces once Moscow’s gaze falls on Ukraine’s fellow Europeans to the north and west; and we might get some real nationalism in Europe.

“It’s not just taking every precinct and applying one ratio to it.  It’s taking multiple sets of precincts and applying multiple ratios such that when they all come back to a certain number they add up to the total number that is required to flip the margin.”
- Edward Solomon

https://rumble.com/vbas2t-smoking-gun-dominion-transferring-vote-ratios-between-precincts-in-pa.-by-e.html?mref=6tc17&mc=9kez7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOKFZeZ6y5g&feature=youtu.be

Within days I will set up a website to advance the best in White advocacy/nationalism as it is known to be - a place for the resource brought to bear, for its cultivation by those who recognize the crucial value of this resource.

I will endeavor to maintain a presence at Majorityrights in order to correct any misrepresentations of my positions and to challenge any perfidy which might make its way back, hoping for my riddance.

Some may think that I might be disheartened with the marketing campaign and those beholden to it having held sway over me thus far, but it is not the case.

Some will mock me as having spent my time in futility, but I think not; especially as compared to the likes of those who spend $10,000 only to die on the side of Mt. Everest.

I have achieved what I set out to do, which is to summit (what I am satisfied to be) the most vital and necessary in theory for the advocacy of European peoples. Similar as those not understood for having undertaken a quest of Mount Everest, it was my objective. Something that I had to do. But unlike their project, mine was not so personal or futile; rather it was in service to my broad understanding and to our people (and, ok, if I am to be most honest, perhaps as much against antagonists and those who do not care - their practices which are objectionable for the destructive impact they are having upon us), and against those who time and again mislead the theoretical trail; by contrast, I have left clear maps on trail for the sovereignty of European peoples: I know that I have brought the best in truth and in depth; while some may be determined to deny this truth out of custom, habit, tradition, their prejudices or vanity - or in red caped misdirection, as I have particularly shown - all one has to do is take a look honestly at my efforts which I will carry over to the new site to be disabused of pseudo justification for antagonism to the platform which I bring to bear.

Whether the new site achieves popularity or not right away is not an issue; any more than popular approval might not be first in mind for the guy who dies on the side of Mt. Everest, singularly focused in his aim, irrespective of how futile and impractical popular opinion may deem his quest to be; however, by contrast, the objective of the new site is not vain nor impractical, nor destined to be unpopular or out of the mainstream as those who do take a look will see; as the perspicuous overview from this summit has shown what is most relevant; a manifestation of the most necessary resource for our people.

Healing that confusion, the lack of wherewithal that comes from a family with crazy and hostile communicative patterns has a price which one is not particularly aware of when still in the midst or recovering from its throes…

As one heals, regains their natural emergent form, the poise of its perspective, one is suddenly confronted with the myriad of one’s own culpability in not negotiating these family and friend circumstances better; one is somewhat braced for the fact in that one is now essentially healed, but the memories of one’s own interactive failings, i.e., to negotiate relations better for one’s own sake and to make one’s way better with them, are on constant offer to the consciousness, really too many examples and presenting from any given day that one might reflect upon.

One thematizes, taking examples, and tries to empathize with oneself as having done the best they could in the circumstance and remember that the person that you view failure with can bear some joint responsibility.

I’m thinking of my father, specifically.

Confusing, could not effectively and respectfully communicate his thoughts; questions about his confusing statements were treated like an affront, volcanic temper like you can’t believe, otherwise largely catatonic TV-watcher - infuriating the way he’d smile along with it…. but might turn away momentarily to literally paraphrase his WWII generation mantras - “you can’t fight city hall” and the liberal, “anything goes when the whistle blows”... he would say this with a smile on his face, like you were supposed to relate.

His worst characteristic, however, was his penchant to attack vulnerability - made it near impossible to trust him. This did-in my mother’s psyche; and having to deal with her broken psyche is another can of worms that we don’t need to talk about. Psychologically, intellectually, bad situation all around.

Materially, I’d be a jerk to complain. Weren’t rich, but had what we needed and a modest bit more…and that does, indeed, spill over into some opportunity to heal the psychological and intellectual deficit.

But as harrowing as my father could be and the fights that he had with my mother were (you could hear them around the block from our house), I eventually gained enough perspective to see how I might have done better as well.

First of all, a working class family without advanced education and four kids.

I could not have done better than my parents ...oh maybe a little better in some ways, but overall, probably worse…

READ MORE...