Majorityrights Central > Category: World Affairs

“We all want a country that is fairer so that everyone has the chance to succeed. We all want a nation that is safe and secure for our children and grandchildren. We all want to live in a truly Global Britain that gets out and builds relationships with old friends and new allies around the world.” — Rt Hon Theresa May MP

It’s happening

Today is really a day of vindication. Both the detractors on the Eurofederalist side, and the detractors on the disruptive Alt-Right ‘Big Europe’ Russophile side had said that this day would never come and that the United Kingdom would descend into either chaos on the one hand or compromise on the other. 

But to their manifest displeasure this day has indeed come.

The United Kingdom has formally given the EU notification that it intends to leave the bloc.

Sir Tim Barrow, UK ambassador to the EU, handed the written letter to European Council president Donald Tusk today.

The moment that the letter was accepted, the notification to leave was triggered.

The UK now has two years to negotiate an agreement with the 27 remaining EU countries over its future relationship with the bloc.

Theresa May told the House of Commons: “This is an historic moment from which there can be no turning back.”

She made the announcement as Article 50 was formally invoked when the letter Mrs May had signed was received by EU Council President Donald Tusk. She told MPs in the House of Commons this morning that she believes Britain’s “best days lie ahead”.

The Prime Minister said she would work for the “best possible deal” for Britain after Article 50 was formally triggered.

She added: “Now is the time for us to come together to be united across this House and across this country.”

A statement issued by the European Council said the talks would start by focusing on arrangements for an “orderly withdrawal” from the bloc.

The council, pledged to approach the talks constructively and hoped the UK would be a “close partner” after Brexit.

“We regret that the United Kingdom will leave the European Union, but we are ready for the process that we now will have to follow.

“Our first priority will be to minimise the uncertainty caused by the decision of the United Kingdom for our citizens, businesses and member states.”

Who will our key negotiators be?

Over the next two years the United Kingdom and the European Union will attempt to negotiate the details of a potential Brexit deal and shape the possible future of UK-European relations.

The main negotiators for the United Kingdom will be:

David Davis

Sir Tim ‘Deepstate’ Barrow

Oliver Robbins

Article 50 letter

These are the key sections of the Prime Minister’s letter which seem to warrant the most scrutiny:

Gov.uk, ‘Prime Minister’s letter to Donald Tusk triggering Article 50’, 29 Mar 2017:

As I have announced already, the Government will bring forward legislation that will repeal the Act of Parliament – the European Communities Act 1972 – that gives effect to EU law in our country. This legislation will, wherever practical and appropriate, in effect convert the body of existing European Union law (the “acquis”) into UK law. This means there will be certainty for UK citizens and for anybody from the European Union who does business in the United Kingdom. The Government will consult on how we design and implement this legislation, and we will publish a White Paper tomorrow. We also intend to bring forward several other pieces of legislation that address specific issues relating to our departure from the European Union, also with a view to ensuring continuity and certainty, in particular for businesses. We will of course continue to fulfil our responsibilities as a member state while we remain a member of the European Union, and the legislation we propose will not come into effect until we leave.

This is what is called colloquially, ‘swallowing the medicine in one gulp’. The acquis communautaire will be repatriated in full into the United Kingdom in one step. After that, it will then be possible for the British parliamentary system to begin to repeal or amend whatever elements of the repatriated acquis communautaire that they feel the need to. It also allows for a smoother exit because the elements of the body of law that do not need to be altered, can be kept in place in the exact way that they are written.

Gov.uk, ‘Prime Minister’s letter to Donald Tusk triggering Article 50’, 29 Mar 2017:

From the start and throughout the discussions, we will negotiate as one United Kingdom, taking due account of the specific interests of every nation and region of the UK as we do so. When it comes to the return of powers back to the United Kingdom, we will consult fully on which powers should reside in Westminster and which should be devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But it is the expectation of the Government that the outcome of this process will be a significant increase in the decision-making power of each devolved administration.

 In that section, Theresa May is signalling that she intends to move the United Kingdom toward a more federal structure. This is particularly for maintaining stability, as it is known that there are both internal and external pressures that will be brought to bear to try to break up the United Kingdom in this time of both opportunity and vulnerability.

To avert that possibility, offering greater federalism to the four nations of the United Kingdom will enable the central government to neutralise the soft middle in Scotland and in Northern Ireland.

It also supplies a black-and-white text counter argument which can be waved in the face of outside news organisations, for example RT, who have since 2014 been trying to promote Scottish independence in the hopes that they can weaken London. Scottish independence is something that will never be allowed to succeed.

Gov.uk, ‘Prime Minister’s letter to Donald Tusk triggering Article 50’, 29 Mar 2017:

The United Kingdom wants to agree with the European Union a deep and special partnership that takes in both economic and security cooperation. To achieve this, we believe it is necessary to agree the terms of our future partnership alongside those of our withdrawal from the EU. If, however, we leave the European Union without an agreement the default position is that we would have to trade on World Trade Organisation terms. In security terms a failure to reach agreement would mean our cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism would be weakened. In this kind of scenario, both the United Kingdom and the European Union would of course cope with the change, but it is not the outcome that either side should seek.

This is a key difference between her strategy and the strategy that had previously been taken by David Cameron. 

Cameron had made the crucial mistake of signalling that he wanted some kind of deal no matter what, and this emboldened the continental European negotiators on the other side of the table.

Theresa May is making no such mistake. Her statement plays game theory correctly. Theresa May is signalling here that while she would not want to leave the negotiations without a deal, she is actually willing to do so. 

In fact, this, coupled with the last few months of ‘hard Brexit’ media coverage and her statements to the media which reinforced this, place her in a perfect position. The fact that very little is publicly known about what goes on in the inner space of her thoughts also makes it more difficult for continental European negotiators to know how to approach her. She is ‘difficult’, as all students of Geography are, and that is a good thing.

Gov.uk, ‘Prime Minister’s letter to Donald Tusk triggering Article 50’, 29 Mar 2017:

Since I became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom I have listened carefully to you, to my fellow EU Heads of Government and the Presidents of the European Commission and Parliament. That is why the United Kingdom does not seek membership of the single market: we understand and respect your position that the four freedoms of the single market are indivisible and there can be no “cherry picking”.

The United Kingdom is maintaining that it will not seek membership of the European single market, because to do so would be to accept ‘freedom of movement’, which the precise thing that Brexit is being initated to escape from.

Gov.uk, ‘Prime Minister’s letter to Donald Tusk triggering Article 50’, 29 Mar 2017:

Investors, businesses and citizens in both the UK and across the remaining 27 member states – and those from third countries around the world – want to be able to plan. In order to avoid any cliff-edge as we move from our current relationship to our future partnership, people and businesses in both the UK and the EU would benefit from implementation periods to adjust in a smooth and orderly way to new arrangements. It would help both sides to minimise unnecessary disruption if we agree this principle early in the process.

The mention of ‘third countries around the world’ appears in the letter, and is a reference to what Theresa May called ‘the fastest growing export markets’, in her House of Commons statement.

House of Commons statement

The most salient elements of Theresa May’s House of Commons statement I would submit are the following:

Gov.uk, ‘Prime Minister’s Commons statement on triggering Article 50’, 29 Mar 2017:

Because European leaders have said many times that we cannot ‘cherry pick’ and remain members of the single market without accepting the 4 freedoms that are indivisible. We respect that position. And as accepting those freedoms is incompatible with the democratically expressed will of the British people, we will no longer be members of the single market.

We are going to make sure that we can strike trade agreements with countries from outside the European Union too. Because important though our trade with the EU is and will remain, it is clear that the UK needs to increase significantly its trade with the fastest growing export markets in the world.

The ‘fastest growing export markets in the world’ are ASEAN+3 and SAARC in Asia, and the Pacific Alliance in Central and South America.

Gov.uk, ‘Prime Minister’s Commons statement on triggering Article 50’, 29 Mar 2017:

At a time when the growth of global trade is slowing and there are signs that protectionist instincts are on the rise in many parts of the world, Europe has a responsibility to stand up for free trade in the interests of all our citizens.

With Europe’s security more fragile today than at any time since the end of the Cold War, weakening our cooperation and failing to stand up for European values would be a costly mistake.

This is a prelude of things to come. It means that what Theresa May is doing is flipping the script on the continental Europeans. Any hesitancy on their part to reach agreement during the economic element of the negotiations will be cast by the United Kingdom as “the European Union backsliding and regressing into protectionism.” It’s a good way to approach it, and it will be infuriating to the continental Europeans. Extra infuriation can be added by comparing the continental Europeans unfavourably to any of the non-European countries which the United Kingdom will also be trying to negotiate trade deals with.

That kind of talking point would take the form of “This other random country here is so eager to uphold the liberal free trade order which has prevailed since the mid-1970s, why aren’t you as agreeable as they are? Just do what we want you to do!”

Gov.uk, ‘Prime Minister’s Commons statement on triggering Article 50’, 29 Mar 2017:

We all want to see a Britain that is stronger than it is today. We all want a country that is fairer so that everyone has the chance to succeed. We all want a nation that is safe and secure for our children and grandchildren. We all want to live in a truly Global Britain that gets out and builds relationships with old friends and new allies around the world.

These are the ambitions of this government’s Plan for Britain. Ambitions that unite us, so that we are no longer defined by the vote we cast, but by our determination to make a success of the result.

We are one great union of people and nations with a proud history and a bright future. And now that the decision to leave has been made – and the process is underway – it is time to come together. For this great national moment needs a great national effort. An effort to shape a stronger future for Britain.

So let us do so together. Let us come together and work together. Let us together choose to believe in Britain with optimism and hope. For if we do, we can make the most of the opportunities ahead. We can together make a success of this moment. And we can together build a stronger, fairer, better Britain – a Britain our children and grandchildren are proud to call home.

I commend this statement to the House.

We’ve all been waiting for this moment for so long. Theresa May has always been by our side.

She’ll make it come true, like she always does.

The YouTube channel N.D.L has put out a new video today, which really captures the sadness of what policing in Sweden must be like now.

Progressive cultural manifestations flourish under the protection of the state, while at the same time the policymakers undermine that same protection by allowing a retrogressive demography to enter and replace the citizens of the country. Additionally, the Anarchist Bloc attacks the police at every turn, exacerbating the instability of the situation.

Sometimes video really does depict it better than text.

The government of Stefan Lofven really has the same kind of haplessness and incompetence that the government of Harold Wilson had. I’m sure that no one truly wishes for this in their heart of hearts—but I think that if the situation should deteriorate to an extent where governance is impossible in Sweden and the electoral system continues to deliver up the wrong result, in such a case I would hope that the Swedish security services have contingency plans on hand to fight the decline in the same way that British services had contingency plans in the 1970s.

Until the last moment.

Before you complain

An American once said to me that whenever they see me post an article about the United States now, they just have to brace for a total assault on their morale, and that “it is almost like seeing something like Tokyo Rose’s work in written form.”

I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not, since despite her best propaganda efforts, Iva Toguri D’Aquino was ultimately not able to convince the Americans to stop supporting the United States. Perhaps some of the Americans did have pause though, perhaps they did think occasionally, “You know, those things that Tokyo Rose is saying on the radio, could there be something to all that?”

But really, it’s not like I have to go out of my way to come up with these socio-economic angles against the ‘Make America Great Again’ concept. They present themselves to the world daily in such a high volume that it’s almost like trying to catch a cup of water from a firehose of negative developments. One has to be very selective about which part of the non-stop blast of negative news one is going to select, interpret, and develop a piece on, on any given day.

Today’s selection is going to really induce a feeling like when you’re sparring with someone and they forget to hold back, and next thing you know their foot is trying to tickle your kidneys or something, and it’s just like, “Oh wow, this pain is real.” It’s pretty bad. I apologise for the pain that you’re going to feel in advance.

True to the tradition I’ll get things started by putting the music on.

How things reached this stage

When Donald Trump was inaugurated on an overcast day about two months ago, he stood in front of the lectern and in a stern voice spoke the words that initiated a miserable new trade war:

TIME, ‘Trump Inauguration: Transcript of Donald Trump Speech’, 20 Jan 2017 (emphasis added):

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.

Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. I will fight for you with every breath in my body and I will never ever let you down.

America will start winning again, winning like never before.

We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.

It may seem on the face of it that Donald Trump was saying that all the decisions he would make would be based on whether they will benefit American workers and American families. His mouth said that somewhere in there, but is that what protectionism actually does in the longrun?

We know that it does not benefit ‘workers and families’ in the longrun. 

There is widely understood empirical evidence which shows that in the present era, free trade is what benefits the broad mass of the people, not protectionism. Free trade is what enables wider access to products at a cheaper price. Free trade enables this indirectly by facilitating regional division and specialisation of production to enhance productivity on a planetary basis. 

Broadly speaking, tariff and non-barrier barriers are mostly retrogressive, as it is low income consumers who spend a greater percentage of their income on food, clothing, consumer electronics and vehicles, which tend to be most highly protected under the kind of tariff regime proposed by Donald Trump’s White House and supported by his Alt-Lite and Alt-Right supporters.

So if American ‘workers and families’ do not really stand to benefit, does this mean that I am saying that Donald Trump is not putting America ‘first’? By no means. The misunderstanding that many have is that they conflate rhetoric about a country’s interest with the interest of the broad mass of the people. Trump essentially tailored his speech to exploit that misunderstanding.

In fact, America is indeed being ‘put first’ by Trump, but that is not a positive thing. The policies which he is advocating ensure that those who really stand to benefit are primarily the American financiers and the upper-bourgeoisie stratum of big and middle-sized manufacturers, who feel themselves to be under stiff competition from their counterparts in Europe and Asia. This scenario comes at the end of a long cycle of a widening pattern of global investment during and after the Cold War environment, which had led to the repair and economic rehabilitation of that section of the world that America had razed to the ground in the process of destroying Axis. 

The repair and rehabilitation was possible because the leaders of various European and Asian economies opted to play the longest of long games, accommodating the liberal global order that the American victors had maintained for their own diplomatic and geostrategic benefit (to economically contain their next opponent, the Soviet Union), but which were used by the former Axis countries and other Third World countries to build something again from the ashes of the Second World War and to take advantage of the mutual benefits that came from having the economic vitality and thus the military wherewithall to deter the Soviet Union. 

A hegemon’s dilemma

The flourishing of any world order in which a hegemon has to allow power to devolve into the hands of outsiders, is a world order which will eventually unravel itself as the hegemon will come to fear its own deputies. Much as the Greek Empire unravelled itself when each of the governors, tribes, and exarchates which had been permitted to accrue power so as to encircle common enemies, suddenly realised that they had reached a stage where they could bid for global power in their own right, so too the American liberal world order is coming to a close as this cycle of capital accumulation draws to a close.

The productive capacity which had been offshored from the United States and implanted into the European and Asian periphery so as to reinforce economic containment and encirclement against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, now becomes in 2017 the potential weapon which the American high-bourgeoisie fears will be turned against it in a multipolar world, the first chapter of which is now opening. America’s old Cold War gendarmes of capital, are now gendarmes that are increasingly operating autonomously, and the United States is struggling to chart a course to address that new reality.

The American high-bourgeoisie wants what it views as ‘its wealth’ back. But they are not the actual owners of it. The wealth, limited though it is, and not without imperfection in its distribution, which is presently enjoyed by the peoples of Europe and Asia was re-built through hard years of work by the generation of people who survived the Second World War, and who, seeing their ideals crushed by the Americans, resolved to build their countries again during the Cold War.

The American high-bourgeoisie knows that it cannot fight the world alone, since it is only a small class of people, and therefore it must assert leadership and bind the other American classes to itself. They do this by appealing to a form of populism, where people like Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, knowing that they cannot appeal to a class consciousness, instead appeal to a civic nationalist mantra: “Make America Great Again.”

What is America that anyone should want to make it ‘great’ again? That is the most astounding development in this whole sequence, particularly in the context of the Alt-Right and other nationalist opinion-formers such as David Duke, who largely made themselves responsible for having enabled all of this. For example, Hunter Wallace at Altright.com said late last month: 

Hunter Wallace / Altright.com, ‘We Are The Vanguard’, 24 Feb 2017 (emphasis added):

[...]

The primary reason the media is so interested in us is because it is our ideas that have entered the political mainstream. For years now, we have been the ones calling for an America First trade policy, an America First foreign policy, an American First immigration policy, rapprochement with Russia, scrapping the refugee resettlement program, stressing our interests as opposed to liberal ideology, strong borders and a crackdown on immigration, assaulting political correctness, making peace with the labor movement, etc., etc. [...] Now, we are living in the digital world of social media and young people are watching us on YouTube and Periscope. They are interacting with us on Twitter. We don’t need the “mainstream” to network or spread our ideas.

[...]

We are the vanguard now. The world has changed, the “mainstream” is dead and the media is trying to catch up with the times. Rich Lowry’s National Review and Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard are at the nadir of their influence over the Right. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if flyover country conservatives are familiar with Richard Spencer and the Alt-Right. If our ideas are triumphing over David Frum’s ideas and Bill Kristol’s ideas, it doesn’t matter. If our discourse triumphs over and displaces “mainstream” discourse, then we are having a massive impact whether the “mainstream” cartel acknowledges it or not.

The same kind of people who for years had operated under the suspicion that the United States was possibly falling under a ‘Zionist Occupation Government’, are now the very same kind of people who are actually trying in these days and hours to fight as hard as they can to attempt to defend and perpetuate the global reach of the United States government and its centrality as a manufacturing centre now that it is  transparently going into openly-verifiable overdrive in that regard. Now that the ‘occupation’ is openly parading itself in their faces from the White House in verifiable statements that have been reproduced in mainstream media outlets, they suddenly and magically cannot seem to see it.

Perhaps it may be that it is difficult to understand why that contradiction exists until you look at the socio-economic class dimension. Perhaps they choose not to notice the Zionism issue now, because it’s the case that it is inconvenient for them financially, given that most Trump voters are middle class and may believe that they stand to gain from the Trump administration’s budgetary, financial and economic policy direction. Or perhaps it is the case that they are just really bad at politics and aren’t paying attention to what is happening, and are more interested in identitarian form and signalling, than in actual policy. Or maybe it is the case that there is a kind of ongoing entryism which is usually not visible to the public but which only is revealed in short glimpses, such as, for example, when it emerged that Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine had actually been writing for the old AlternativeRight.com website in 2010. Or it could be some combination of all of these things.

Whatever the case happens to be, for all those who ever believed in anything that those people previously said, these present developments can only be seen as a betrayal. If they are ‘the vanguard’ and this is what they have produced, then they have a considerable amount of explaining to do.

Unfortunately with the situation as it is, I am not expecting that an explanation will be coming from them, but I am expecting that the Alt-Right and Alt-Lite opinion-formers will continue to act as a kind of grassroots support for the Trump administration, one which will have a high resilience and effectiveness because it couples a tacit support with a consistent pseudo-denial of actually being on the same side as the administration. We hear on the one hand the Alt-Right continually saying that they are ‘not Trump’, but then on the other hand they like the specific actions the administration is doing and its overall direction which they see as a ‘stepping stone’ (to where?), they just wish that that those actions would be done with more intensity.

The effective function of the Alt-Right internet presence is basically that they remain engaged on social media as a ‘grassroots’ presence which continually presents narratives and arguments that serve to socially legitimate Trump administration spokespersons, supporters and key cabinet figures and their policy preferences in a way that is completely independent of the state, as it is done at arms length, behind a veil of denial and disavowal by the White House itself. The bonus that the White House receives in all of this is that there is no-one who has to be paid or instructed to do this for them. The Alt-Right doesn’t need to be paid, they do it for free.

Introduction

Getting started: This article is about one facet in the process of the Trump administration making its programme operational. The first operational step that the American high-bourgeoisie are taking is that they are seeking to enhance their structural power, or to turn a phrase, they are seeking to make themselves great again, by weakening the efficacy of checks or dissents against their power domestically. This would place them in the best command position imaginable, which would allow them the ability to then turn their focus to foreign policy and trade policy as their second step, with minimal interference at home. That second step is outside the scope of this article and will be covered at a later date. The first step is what will now be described here today.

Enhanced dictatorship of the high-bourgeoisie

There are four major actions that the Trump administration is carrying out right now which would allow the American high-bourgeoisie to enhance their structural power domestically. These actions are as follows:

1. H.R.985 - Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act of 2017.
2. H.R.720 - Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act.
3. The appointment of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States.
4. The elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation.

Let’s go through them in the order I’ve listed them. And in case you are trying to guess what the four items have in common, yes, what all of these things have in common is that they pertain to the ability to form a class so as to bring a class action lawsuit against companies or government agencies, and to raise funds to carry out that endeavour.

H.R.985

When people are facing systemic abuse from companies or from government agencies, class action lawsuits are a vital tool that is used to bring a halt to their behaviour. By bringing about a class action lawsuit, a few people can stand in for a larger number of people in a lawsuit against a perpetrator and seek either injunctive relief (where the perpetrator must cease a bad practice) or compensation (monetary damages).

The bill, H.R.985 which passed in the US House of Representatives by recorded vote 220 - 201 on Thursday 09 March 2017, and will next be placed before the US Senate, is a bill that makes it more difficult for people to bring class action lawsuits.

Bill H.R.985 makes it harder for people to form a ‘class’ by further restricting and constraining the criteria under which people may come together to bring a case, and placing various hurdles in the way of the collection of lawyers’ fees, thus decreasing the incentive for lawyers to take on class action lawsuits.

The net effect of this is that it will sharply reduce the ability of people to seek injunctive relief or compensation in any scenario where they are being harmed by a company or a government agency.

The architects of the bill and its proponents, such as Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), have tried to mask their intentions by presenting it to the media as a bill that is designed to prevent supposedly-existent ‘lawyer-driven litigation’, by which they mean a kind of ‘trolling’ litigation which is designed to enrich lawyers rather than address any actual grievance of the plaintiffs. By masking their intentions with such a cover story, the lawmakers have sought to conceal the actual reality of the attack which they themselves are conducting against working people and families.

The factor which exposes their cover story as a lie, is the simple fact that if they really thought that they needed to write a bill to prevent ‘lawyer-driven litigation’, then they wouldn’t have written a bill that attacks people’s ability to seek injunctive relief, in which money is not awarded but practices are changed, as well as compensation. However, that is precisely what they have done, and in doing so, their motive was revealed along with the effect.

On the issue of the hurdles placed in the way of the collection of lawyers’ fees, the bill deliberately limits lawyers’ fees in injunctive relief cases to “a reasonable percentage of the value” of the relief. This of course makes no sense, by design, because it is quite impossible for a court to determine what the monetary worth of a non-monetary action is, so as to calculate such a percentage. The effect is that lawyers would be disincentivised from taking the risk of bringing an injunctive class action case.

Furthermore, the bill also places a condition on the timing of the payment of lawyers’ fees to the date of full monetary recovery. This could even sometimes deny lawyers the ability to be paid their fees altogether, since some cases have a term of settlement that is longer than the remaining lifespan of the lawyers who are working on the case. For example, in a case where full settlement is expected to take fifty years, it would mean that the lawyers would not be paid until the end of those fifty years. Even with that potentially disastrous scenario aside, with regards to the duration of the litigation itself, the condition incentivises defendants to drag out and prolong litigation.

The possibility of never receiving lawyers’ fees or having to wait years to receive them, will act as an enormous deterrent for any law firm that absolutely requires those fees to pay their staff and keep their business running.

H.R.720

H.R.720 the so-called ‘Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act’ is a cunningly named bill which will actually require all federal judges to penalise any lawyer who brings what they consider to be a ‘frivolous lawsuit’. Up until now, it has up to the judge’s discretion to decide whether to do this.

The interesting thing about this is that for a lawsuit to actually make it to the point where it has come before a jury, it means that a judge clearly already considers it to be a valid lawsuit. Legislation like H.R.720, simply incentivises the behaviour where a defendant can continually protest that everything that is happening is ‘frivolous’, and it disincentivises lawyers from trying to bring a lawsuit to find out how it will be regarded.

In practice, this means that the legislative and executive branches of US government are seeking to attack lawyers for trying to help people to seek relief or compensation through the court system. After all, a corporate defendant would likely start out from the stance that any lawsuit brought against their esteemed selves is definitely ‘frivolous’.

The appointment of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the SCOTUS

An ‘originalist’ Judge Neil Gorsuch, having previously been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit by George W. Bush on 08 August 2006, has been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Donald J. Trump. A decent summary of his background has been written at FiveThirtyEight.

Beltway conservatives immediately feted him as having come out of the mold of another now late ‘originalist’ Judge Antonin Scalia, or at least something close to that. Evangelicals celebrated Gorsuch’s statements about his belief in the ‘pro-life’ stance, as that is a pet issue of maximal all-consuming importance to them. 

The Alt-Lite and Alt-Right’s reaction to the nomination was in a sense no more sophisticated or diligent than that of any of the other groups. Hunter Wallace published a very strange article at Alt-Right.com which referred to Gorsuch as a “real American”, as though this were a reason for why he wanted to see Gorsuch nominated in and of itself. Richard Spencer produced an article which had a similarly strange central thrust, referring to Gorsuch as “America’s wise, WASPy dad—an avatar of the ruling class of days gone by.” Spencer’s view was echoed by James Edwards on the Political Cesspool, which carried Spencer’s article verbatim. 

In my view none of this matters anyway, but while ‘Gorsuch’ may be an old Anglo-Saxon name, the man himself is ancestrally Irish. Additionally, Gorsuch was raised as a Catholic, and then he converted to Episcopalianism later, so he is not a ‘WASP’. He’s also not America’s ‘dad’, he’s a nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States, for goodness sake.

Unfortunately no real analysis of Gorsuch’s views on class action lawsuits has been done by anyone in the nationalist sphere. If anyone had chosen to do so, then some extremely meaningful patterns, all of which are negative, would have emerged into view immediately.

SCOTUSblog gives us an interesting look in with the summary containing this excerpt:

Amy Howe / SCOTUSblog, ‘A closer look at Judge Neil Gorsuch and class actions’, 08 Mar 2017 (emphasis added):

[...]

Covering the Wal-Mart decision for this blog, Lyle Denniston described Scalia as the court’s “most dedicated skeptic about the class-action approach to litigation.” Whether Gorsuch, if confirmed, would follow in Scalia’s footsteps remains to be seen. During his decade on the bench, Gorsuch has participated in relatively few class action cases. In the cases involving class action issues in which he has participated, he has generally, but not always, ruled for the defense. Notably, both in cases in which he has ruled for the defense and those in which he has ruled for the plaintiffs, Gorsuch has emphasized the need for courts to stay in their lane, so to speak – that is, not to exceed their authority, particularly when it comes to decisions that are in his view best left to Congress.

[...]

The Bazelon Center has a review which also contains some example of cases that were not class action lawsuits, but seem to give some idea of how Gorsuch interprets civil rights law in general:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Hwang v. Kansas State University, 753 F.3d 1159 (10th Cir. 2014), Judge Gorsuch wrote an opinion ruling against a longtime professor at a state university who had taken a six-month leave of absence to recover from her cancer treatment. At the end of that period, she requested a short period of additional leave at the advice of her doctor in order to avoid a severe flu outbreak on campus that could endanger her already compromised immune system. The university refused to grant additional leave. Judge Gorsuch began his analysis of Professor Hwang’s claim by asking: “Must an employer allow employees more than six months’ sick leave or face liability under the Rehabilitation Act? Unsurprisingly, the answer is almost always no.” Although the ADA and Rehabilitation Act say nothing about the length of leaves granted by employers and specifically require that that such accommodation requests be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, Judge Gorsuch held that a leave of absence as long as six months would “turn employers into safety net providers for those who cannot work.” He also described Professor Hwang as “a problem other forms of social security aim to address”—even though the professor was willing and able to resume her duties through online classes immediately, or through in-class teaching after the additional short leave. Judge Gorsuch also rejected her argument that the university’s inflexible six-month leave policy was discriminatory, instead reasoning that applying the same leave policies to all employees, without providing reasonable accommodations for qualified employees with a disability, would protect employees with disabilities from being “secretly singled out for discriminatory treatment.” Judge Gorsuch thus concluded that the six-month leave policy was “more than sufficient to comply” with the Rehabilitation Act. [...]

I’m sure everyone can guess where these examples are going. Here’s another:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Wehrley v. American Family Mutual Insurance Company, 513 F. App’x 733 (10th Cir. 2013), a panel including Judge Gorsuch found that the plaintiff had not established that he had a disability that entitled him to the ADA’s protections. Wehrley, an insurance field claim adjuster, injured his knee and back in a workplace accident, and his employer fired him because of his inability to work on claims that involved going onto roofs. At trial, Wehrley introduced evidence of significant limitations in major life activities, including a medical report stating that he could not walk or stand for prolonged periods, that his pain disrupted his sleep, and that he had to change positions every 30 minutes while sitting. Judge Gorsuch and the panel concluded, however, that Wehrley had not shown that these impairments were substantial because the report did not say that he was unable to “walk or stand in the ordinary course of a day,” nor did it describe the extent or severity of the disruption to his sleep. Without sufficient evidence of a substantial impairment in a major life activity, the panel found that he did not meet the definition of a person with a disability.

And one more:

Bazelon Center, ‘Review of Disability Cases Involving Judge Neil Gorsuch’, 17 Feb 2017:

In Adair v. City of Muskogee, 823 F.3d 1297 (10th Cir. 2016), Judge Gorsuch joined an opinion affirming summary judgment against the plaintiff after finding that he was unable to perform an essential function of his position. The plaintiff, a firefighter who held the position of HazMat Director, injured his back during a training exercise. The city required that he complete a functional-capacity evaluation, which showed that he had some restrictions on his lifting ability. He sued the city under the ADA for disability discrimination, alleging that he was constructively discharged when the city encouraged him to retire rather than be terminated because it regarded him as disabled. The plaintiff argued that he was capable of performing the essential functions of the HazMat Director position even with the lifting restrictions, testifying that he did not need to lift in his position and had never performed regular firefighter duties during his four years as HazMat Director. However, Judge Gorsuch and the panel discounted the plaintiff’s testimony and instead deferred to a state law listing the ability to lift up to 200 pounds as an essential function for all firefighters, regardless of specialized roles. Since the plaintiff suggested no potential accommodations other than being relieved of the lifting duty, the panel concluded that he was not a qualified individual under the ADA.

Being an ‘originalist’ and a ‘textualist’ seems to involve being deliberately absurd in ways that happen to be generally convenient for the defence. The addition of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States meshes with the thrust of the pieces of legislation, H.R.985 and H.R.720, which were described earlier and which are presently making their way though the US Congress, in a way that enhances their effect.

The addition of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court returns it to the balance that existed when Judge Antonin Scalia was still alive. It is not beyond possibility that sometime in the next four years another judge will be replaced, and at that point Donald Trump may even be able to appoint an additional ‘originalist’ and ‘textualist’ to the court, such as for example Judge William Pryor.

But it is sad that no one is paying any attention to these developments. Choices made during the Trump administration will shape the character of the American system for a generation or longer.

The elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation

They suggested that it was going to happen, and now they are moving toward doing it. See here:

New York Times, ‘Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget’, 17 Feb 2017 (emphasis added):

WASHINGTON — The White House budget office has drafted a hit list of programs that President Trump could eliminate to trim domestic spending, including longstanding conservative targets like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Legal Services Corporation, AmeriCorps and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.

Work on the first Trump administration budget has been delayed as the budget office awaited Senate confirmation of former Representative Mick Mulvaney, a spending hard-liner, as budget director. Now that he is in place, his office is ready to move ahead with a list of nine programs to eliminate, an opening salvo in the Trump administration’s effort to reorder the government and increase spending on defense and infrastructure.

[...]

Eliminating all funding for the Legal Services Corporation is the same thing as abolishing it. Some people may be wondering what it does, and such people would now be wondering about that at a time when it is too late to make a difference. Although the United States Constitution contains language that promises equality in the provision of justice, the language is operationally meaningless unless it can also be said that all people have the ability to access legal services and legal remedies.

Defendants in criminal cases are guaranteed the right to have a lawyer because of the outcome of the United States Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), but the same right to a lawyer does not actually exist for civil cases.

The beginning of the United States government’s effort to provide legal assistance Americans with low-income for civil cases, emerged during Lyndon B. Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, which gave rise to the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964. In 1965, the office created the Legal Services Program, which provided assistance all over the United States.

However, the Legal Services Program was up for White House review in 1969, and the Office of Economic Opportunity itself was in existence because of the Economic Opportunity Act which was scheduled to expire in 1970.

President Richard M. Nixon, who took office in January 1969, asked the US Congress in February 1969 to extend appropriations for the Office of Economic Opportunity. The Ash Commission, headed by former United States Army Air Corps Captain Roy Ash, found “virtual unanimity that organizational improvement of the Executive Office of the President is needed.” Among the recommendations made on this issue, the Ash Commission advocated that Nixon ought to create an independent corporation which would receive funds from the US Congress to disburse to local legal aid organisations.

Nixon made the memo public in February 1971 and in May 1971 he sent a special message to the US Congress proposing the establishment of the Legal Services Corporation.

On 25 July 1974, Richard M. Nixon signed the Legal Services Corporation Act.

The Legal Services Corporation has not been without controversy during its existence, and several unsuccessful attempts to abolish it have been attempted over the years. The most recent unsuccessful attempt to abolish it was in 2005:

TexasLawyersHelp.org, ‘Eliminate LSC and Other Programs, Says Republican Study Committee in “Operation Offset” Budget Report’, 30 Sep 2005 (emphasis added):

A recent report issued by the Republican Study Committee (RSC), a group of nearly 100 conservative House members, calls for the elimination of all federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation. U.S. Representatives Mike Pence (R-IN), RSC’s chairman, and Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), RSC’s budget and spending task force chairman, issued the 23-page report on September 21, 2005. The report—called “Operation Offset: RSC Budget Options 2005”—urges Congress and the President to eliminate federal expenditures as far-ranging as Medicaid and Medicare, graduate school student loan subsidies, foreign aid, the National Endowment for the Arts, matching grants for presidential candidates, and LSC. [...]

Yes, that is the same Mike Pence who is presently the Vice-President of the United States. It’s interesting how that has happened to work out.

Another interesting fact is that the Heritage Foundation which submitted the list from which Donald Trump selected Judge Neil Gorsuch’s name to nominate him to the United States Supreme Court, is also visibly active in crafting and giving legitimation to the budget which will abolish the Legal Services Corporation:

New York Times, ‘Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget’, 17 Feb 2017:

[...]

Stephen Moore, another Heritage Foundation economist who advised Mr. Trump during his campaign, acknowledged that powerful constituencies were behind many of the programs that are on the chopping block. But he said now that Republicans are finally in control of the government, they must make a valiant effort to fulfill the promises they have been making to voters for years.

“I think it’s an important endeavor to try to get rid of things that are unnecessary,” Mr. Moore said. “The American public has a lot of contempt for how government is run in Washington, in no small part because there is so much waste.”

If you know anyone who seriously believes that the Heritage Foundation along with all the other personalities I’ve mentioned here are just innocently trying to ‘get rid of things that are unnecessary’, send that person to me, because I have a bridge to sell them — and it’s on the moon.

Conclusion

Particular factions among the American ruling class are seeking to enhance their structural power, or to turn a phrase, they are seeking to make themselves great again, by weakening the efficacy of checks or dissents against their power domestically in an environment in which they have total power over all branches of the government and are receiving virtually no criticism from their own constituency on any economic issues. This would place them in the best command position imaginable, which would allow them the ability to then turn their focus to foreign policy and trade policy.

Everything that the American ruling class is doing to pacify and constrict the power of their own constituents at home, is a preparation and a prerequisite for them being able to efficiently conduct a trade war against European, Asian, and Latin American states.

Enacting a tariff regime as a necessary centre-piece of the trade war is an action which will raise the cost of inputs for all American manufacturers. One of the ways that they will offset that cost will be to enable American companies to act in cost-cutting ways that disregard the interests of American workers and families without having to worry about being subjected to lawsuits brought by those workers and families.

Passing H.R.985 and H.R.720, as well as appointing Judge Neil Gorsuch to the United States Supreme Court and abolishing the Legal Services Corporation, are four key actions that are part of the process of them ‘moving the ball down the playing field’ in that regard.

Evidence has been presented here which illustrates that the entire edifice of ‘Make America Great Again’ is going to be constructed atop a foundation of socio-economic retrogression and misery.

An important distinction

An article by John Morgan called ‘Alt Right versus New Right’ appeared at Counter-Currents Publishing on 28 Feb 2017. I tend to agree with the things that are written at Counter-Currents more often than I agree with things that are written elsewhere in the European nationalist sphere, and in this case what John Morgan was presenting was a very good article which I think all Majorityrights.com readers should also read.

Here is what I think is the most important excerpt:

John Morgan / Counter-Currents Publishing, ‘Alt Right versus New Right’, 28 Feb 2017 (emphasis added):

[...]

I understand that, given all the media attention it’s been receiving lately, there’s a temptation to adopt the term “Alt Right” universally. I, however, insist on viewing the Alt Right as something exclusively American, and the New Right as something particularly European.  

One thing that the two movements certainly share is a difficulty in determining what exactly they are. Especially in the hands of the mainstream media, “New Right” and “Alt Right” are two terms that have been used to refer to everything ranging from Tea Party-style populism to outright neo-Nazism, and everything in between, a problem that was inevitable given that neither group has a central authority that can pronounce who is and who isn’t orthodox, we might say, nor even what exactly that orthodoxy is. For my own purposes today, by New Right I mean the current of thought centered upon Alain de Benoist’s GRECE movement in France and its various offshoots since 1968, which represents a towering edifice of thought unparalleled anywhere else on the Right since the Conservative Revolution in Germany of the Weimar era.

The Alt Right is a much trickier animal to pin down. The New Right has produced literally hundreds of books outlining its beliefs and positions over the past half-century. The Alt Right, on the other hand, is a culture primarily of blogs, memes, podcasts, and videos. It has yet to produce a single book or other statement of principles that everyone involved would agree is the quintessence of the Alt Right’s worldview. This is a natural outgrowth of the anti-intellectualism inherent in Anglo-American political and cultural discourse, as opposed to the more innovative and livelier – dare I say superior – Rightist political tradition that you have here on the Continent. In attempting to think of a book that could in any way lay claim to being the Alt Right manifesto, the only thing I could come up with is Greg Johnson’s New Right versus Old Right, which has fortunately been translated into Swedish as well. Otherwise, the shelves of the Alt Right library remain pretty bare, although hopefully that will soon be changing.

[...]

But while the Alt Right and the New Right are coming at the problem of liberalism from similar angles, they do remain divided by several fundamental issues. First and foremost is race. The American Right (just as the American Left, albeit in different ways) is absolutely obsessed with race: evolutionary theories, comparative IQ scores, crime statistics, and the like. In America, this has led to the development of the term “white” to refer to anyone of European descent. [...] However, I do believe that the attempt of some to import this idea of “White Nationalism” into Europe, and who in some cases have even called for political unification between America, Europe, and Russia, is a severe disservice to the diversity inherent in European civilization. The issue for Europe, as the New Right has always understood, is as much based in ethnicity, language, and culture as it is on race. We can’t pretend that an Irishman and a Russian are interchangeable.

[...]

What John Morgan says there about the divergence between the Alternative Right and the New Right strikes me as being completely true and is perfectly in line with the experiences that I’ve had in Europe. 

It is also something that Alain de Benoist has talked about quite a lot. The attempt by Americans to impose their understanding of ethno-racial politics and their propensity to try to effectively obliterate all intra-European differences through imposing their concept of ‘Whiteness’ onto other regions quickly becomes unworkable. It simply lacks the appropriate level of sophistication and that lack stems from the fact that many of the American White nationalists who are generating these ideas, have neither lived in a European country nor held any financial stake in the future of a European country.

Ted Sallis took exception to this in the Counter-Currents comments section, because he is precisely the kind of White nationalist that is being criticised. He responded by asking the following:

Ted Sallis, comment 1381496, 28 Feb 2017 wrote:

“We can’t pretend that an Irishman and a Russian are interchangeable. ”
 

That canard again. I want to know – who says that? Who believes it? Who advocates that? If ethnonationalists don’t want to be viewed as fundamentally dishonest then you guys really need to stop making the most absurd strawman arguments.

By asking those questions, he was basically trying to force John Morgan to either go around looking up examples of people who he knew were doing it but which he did not have ready to hand, or to retract his whole argument.

Morgan responded:

John Morgan, comment 1381497, 28 Feb 2017 wrote:
 

I’ve heard such rhetoric from many people on the Alt Right. Specifically here, however, I’m thinking particularly of ideas that Richard Spencer has outlined in the past.

To which Sallis fired back:

Ted Sallis, comment 1381545, 01 Mar 2017 wrote:

If Spencer ever advocated such interchangeability, I’d like a quote. In my 20+ years of activism, always with a strong pan-European focus, I’ve only encountered one – one! – person who advocated any sort of “homogenizing” of Europeans – that was Hoffmeister in the introduction to Lowell’s book (and I critiqued him for that on this blog). And even Hoffmeister (insofar as I know) doesn’t believe these groups are the same, he just advocated their intermarriage. If Spencer suggested that all Europeans are the same, I would denounce that also. But don’t pretend or imply that those all people who advocate for a “Big Europe” idea actually believe such nonsense. It is factually incorrect, and its offensive.

One could just as easily look at ethnonationalist squabbling among Slovaks, Hungarians, and Romanians, or the Balt animus toward Russia, and accuse ethnonationalists of all supporting intra-European conflict.

At this point I decided to jump in, because I actually had the answer to Sallis’ aggressive questioning. It’s a slightly lengthy comment but I’ll reproduce it in full nonetheless:

Kumiko Oumae, comment 1381582, 01 Mar 2017 wrote (emphasis added):

There are some people who are essentially doing that. I can think of two offhand, Richard Spencer has been doing it in a subtle way, and Constantin von Hoffmeister has also been doing it in a completely explicit way.

Here’s an example of Spencer doing it in a podcast on 19 Dec 2015: http://www.radixjournal.com/blog/2015/12/19/trump-putin-and-the-future-of-the-white-world

Again, Spencer doesn’t explicitly do it, he just establishes the kind of framework which could lead a person to arrive at those conclusions. He does acknowledge in the podcast that the ‘unity’ he is talking about is a long shot.

Here’s an example of Hoffmeister doing it in an interview on Stark Truth Radio on 28 Feb 2017: http://www.starktruthradio.com/?p=3913

In that interview Hoffmeister actually calls for ‘an alliance of Berlin, Moscow and Tel Aviv’. He repeats it three times and seems to have no self-awareness about how a large percentage of listeners will regard him and that savagely obscene idea with the utmost horror and revulsion.

And Hoffmeister had also appeared at Identitarian Ideas IX, on 25 Feb 2017: https://altright.com/2017/02/27/identitarian-ideas-ix-rising-from-the-ruins-2/

Hoffmeister’s appearance at that venue seems to show that he is no longer totally the half-joke and half-eccentric figure that he was apparently seen as in the 2006 – 2009 period. It wouldn’t be impossible that his ideas might have some currency with some people in the Alt-Right.

A scan of comments sections often will also show random commenters affirming those kinds of views, and they seem to have received a renewed – albeit still limited – push since the emergence of Russian Active Measures which strove to amplify certain aspects of the Alt-Right message that the Russian state assessed to be useful to cultivating a social support for their energy interests in Europe. By amplifying the parts of Alt-Right ideology they agree with, or inserting themselves into identitarian movements, or by simply funding organisations, Russia has been able to shape some of the contours of these social movements in ways that could be conducive to their interests.

John Morgan’s article was really good, I think, he is on to the truth. Morgan may or may not have had quotes or specific podcast links immediately to hand when he was writing his article – after all, not everyone has browser bookmarks as beautifully organised as myself – but his sense of the situation wasn’t wrong. This is a thing.

The people who believe in the ‘Big Europe’, often tend to also assert that anyone who disagrees with them is ‘in favour of intra-European conflict’ or something like that. But actually on a basic level the ideas propagated by those who believe in a so-called ‘Big Europe’ – by which it is understood as a ‘Lisbon to Vladivostok’ concept – are the ideas that really are promoting an intra-European conflict because the persons promoting them must know on some level that Britain specifically will be dramatically opposed to any such thing.

What do I mean by that? Well, no one ever tries to utter the phrase ‘London to Vladivostok’, and I think we all know why they do not say that. It’s because they know that they cannot. At the end of the day, people do quietly understand that Britain’s geostrategic and geoeconomic interests are to strive against allowing any single power to control access to the transit lanes and the mineral and energy resources of Central Asia, navigation across and around the Baltic area, the strategic depth of the Visegrad countries, or the natural resources of Siberia. The legacy of the Great Game, the Crimean War, and the First World War’s covert and semi-covert theatre in Central Asia trace the contours of that fascinating phenomenon.

Another factor which has not been considered by many people, is that the advent of ‘Brexit’ which will be implemented sometime in the next thirty days, will further unshackle Britain from the continent, and thus unshackle Britain from the (relatively speaking) moderating effect that European institutions suffused with Franco-German stakeholders have previously exerted on British policy toward Russia. In other words, Brexit will not herald a softening of British policy toward Russia, but rather it will herald a sharpening of British policy against Russia.

It is ironic that many of the same people who supported ‘Big Europe’ also gave moral support to ‘Brexit’ (and thus they accidentally supported #GlobalBritain!), because these things are totally opposed tendencies. Britain was asked to choose between the continent and the sea, and it chose the sea again, as it absolutely had to. And there’s nothing wrong with that, that is an integral part of the identity of the British people as a seafaring trading nation with ‘historical connections’ to Central, South and East Asia.

In summary: For people to call for ‘an imperium from Lisbon to Vladivostok’ or ‘a Euro-Siberian imperium’ as Hoffmeister does, is effectively the same as those persons announcing an intent to have conflict with a whole laundry list of countries who will of course disagree with it, namely, all the countries which would have to be unwillingly dragged into such an arrangement, as well as offshore balancers like the British who would rightly see their interests being threatened by any such suggestion.

‘Big Europe’ is also a maximum autistic LARP which is open for exploitation by Gazprom, because the concept doesn’t intersect with realities on the ground and ends up functioning as a mere cheerleading squad for the Kremlin. It additionally seems to want to include large swathes of land in the so-called ‘RFE’ that are not even inhabited by Europeans to begin with.

Greg Johnson told me it was a good response, saying:

Greg Johnson, comment 1381651, 02 Mar 2017 wrote:

Thank you. This is an excellent comment.

And it really is excellent, if I do say so myself.

Ted Sallis was of course having none of that. His rebuttal to the fact that his precious ‘Big Europe’ from ‘Lisbon to Vladivostok’ had just been been branded a ‘maximum autistic LARP’, was to respond with the absolute classic: “no, you!” It could be said that all of history’s best ethnic wars start this way:

Ted Sallis, comment 1381611, 01 Mar 2017 wrote:

No, your insane Asian imperialism of Silk Road White Nationalism is the LARP that we should all beware of, for autistic Asiaphiles selling out to the inscrutables of Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul. We do not need Russian-hating Japanese dictating to Europeans what our relationships to each other should be.

Britain’s “geostrategic” interests helped lead to two World Wars that lost them their empire, wrecked the White world, and led to the colonization of Britain and the rest of Europe by the Third World. It’s high time that the British stop applying 19th and early 20th century strategies to a 21st century world.

And, yes, by the way, I’m a Big Europe person who was enthusiastically in favor of Brexit, since the EU is the perfectly inverse mirror image of what a sane Big Europe would be like. The EU is monstrous, not because European cooperation and collegial feeling is bad, but because it is a vehicle for globalist aspiration (which the government of Britain and all other Western European nations also is).

“the British people as a seafaring trading nation with ‘historical connections’ to Central, South and East Asia.”

Right…Britain should make common cause with Asians against Europe so as to please Asian imperialists who covet the Russian Far East. Sorry, I do hope the British people don’t fall for that Asiatic swindle.

I suppose this is what the time period 1854 to 1917 was like, at least in terms of rhetoric. Some may see that time period as being a kind of hell, others may see it as heaven, but whichever it is, we are going there; it’s geographically predetermined.

Also, Ted Sallis obviously just hates me, doesn’t he? He seems to regard me with a special kind of hatred and I don’t even know where it’s coming from, because as far as I know I never actually did the things that he is constantly accusing me of all over the internet.

I’ll use this article as an opportunity to address a wide cross-section of the issues that he keeps raising. As such I’ll be responding not only to the specific comment that he made, but to a selection of things that he’s said about my stances over the past eighteen months on his site as well, since there is considerable overlap.

Not ‘dictating’ and not ‘seducing’

Ted Sallis, comment 1381611, 01 Mar 2017 wrote:

[...] We do not need Russian-hating Japanese dictating to Europeans what our relationships to each other should be.

[...]

I don’t have any desire to ‘dictate’ anything to any Europeans. I simply offer my ear in sympathy and solidarity and I make suggestions that I think are good suggestions. At no point do I demand anything. I don’t even take that tone. My views at their strongest are merely firm recommendations. Sallis has previously suggested – or at least strongly implied – on his blog that I go around ‘seducing’ people into doing or saying what I want them to. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no ‘Asian woman privilege’. To imagine that it is so would be completely delusional and paranoid. I know that popular media makes it look like we tend to gain automatic admittance to any venue on the basis of charm alone and then destroy the place, but I can assure you that in reality it doesn’t quite work that way. It would be fun if it did work that way, though.

So let’s dispel these fictions.

If Asians had the fantastically manipulative social powers that Sallis constantly claims we have on his blog, then either the Chaebol-preferred candidate Jeb Bush or the Keidanren-preferred candidate Marco Rubio would have attained the GOP nomination, whereas the Mossad-preferred candidate Donald Trump would have been blocked from entry. In such a scenario the GOP also would have somehow come under the sustained lobbying sway of what are actually weak Asian lobbies in the United States. And if either Jeb or Rubio then happened to fail against Hillary, then it would have simply been a Hillary Clinton presidency, in which the status quo would continue but at least the Iran JCPOA deal would not have come under threat, and existing global problems would somehow not have been made worse by Americans choosing to conform themselves to Israeli policy preferences on the subject of Iran.

There is no perfect solution because the United States is basically political hell, but one at least does what one can. Trump was the least-preferred candidate for Asian interests.

Some of course may be asking what right I have to say anything about American politics, a question that White nationalists like to hotly ask me whenever I give my opinion on anything that they have done. The answer is that what happens in America affects everyone.

All of the candidates were unacceptable in some way, but they existed and could not be wished out of existence or wished into a form that was different from what they were. Thus, it was necessary to prioritise what policy preferences were most important and do triage on that basis. This could not be done merely on the basis of statements uttered on the campaign trail, but rather, the network of institutions and people who the candidate is enmeshed with or beholden to, as well as the family and blood connections of the candidate also had to be seen as indicative of what that candidate may be likely to do if elected.

The priorities looked something like this:

1. Maintaining the Iran JCPOA Deal,
2. Passing the TPP,
3. Taking decisive moves against North Korea’s nuclear ambitions,
4. Attenuating and disrupting Russian/Gazprom gains in Eastern and Central Europe,
5. Incentivise the de-linking French industry from Russia by passing TTIP,
6. Stopping the construction of further Israeli settlements and thus disrupting the American-Israeli relationship,
7. Locking down Europe’s southern border and boxing in ISIL,
8. Disrupting Turkish-American cooperation,
9. Maintaining the US-imposed sanctions against Russia ‘until the Ukraine crisis is resolved’ (ie, until whenever), so as to alter the patterns of international investment in Russia in a way that forces sections of Russian territory to become economically reliant on China, and thus, structurally tame and subordinate Russia to China.

To focus in on the top priority, which is maintaining the Iran deal, the reasons for desiring that the deal be maintained are as follows:

1. It would allow Iran the ability to safely and reliably vend more of its gas to European countries, which offsets Russian energy preponderance. Since Russian energy preponderance is one of the key mechanisms that Russia uses for political leverage in Europe, having Iran on tap as the alternative would serve to erode Russian power in Europe.
2. Allowing Iran to trade with the rest of the world, allows the rest of the world to invest in sectors of the Iranian economy that are starved for cash and innovation, and could potentially have structural effects that empower local moderates as Iran shifts away from the isolated command model of economy over time.
3. Eases the economic relationships between Central and Eastern European countries, and Iran, which is a net good for trade because part of China’s OBOR will run through Iranian territory. The OBOR is the key link which offers a physical high speed connection between the East Asian supply chain network on the one hand, and the European market of consumers on the other.
4a. Enhancing Iranian energy exports would exert downward pressure on energy prices globally, which is good for consumers and bad for rent-seeking oil-despots.
4b. Long-term low prices forces energy services companies and extractors to streamline and innovate their shale operations even more, which reinforces the ‘price cap’, and thus disrupts the cohesion of the effectively Saudi-led OPEC cartel.

Needless to say, the ‘Donald J. Trump’ option would not satisfy any of those priorities.

Since total withdrawal from the scene would have been pointless, Asian and European lobbyists and donors had to remain engaged in that form of electoral triage and stay close to America during the 2016 election cycle in the hopes that the outcome could be shaped in a way that is least disadvantageous to the participants. 

It is possible to model projections on the basis of past signals at previous cycles, combined with the new inputs that had arisen in the 2016 cycle and from that, it could be possible to construct a strategy for that situation. The past signals come from polls and social sciences studies which give people insight into how different cohorts in American society respond to various stimuli when elections are on. Consider it a form of electoral bandlimiting.

But there’s a problem. The Heisenberg–Gabor limit. All real-world signals are timelimited.

Wikipedia, ‘Bandlimiting > Bandlimited versus timelimited’:

A bandlimited signal cannot be also timelimited. More precisely, a function and its Fourier transform cannot both have finite   support. This fact can be proved by using complex analysis and properties of Fourier transform. [...]

One important consequence of this result is that it is impossible to generate a truly bandlimited signal in any real-world situation, because a bandlimited signal would require infinite time to transmit. All real-world signals are, by necessity, timelimited, which means that they cannot be bandlimited. Nevertheless, the concept of a bandlimited signal is a useful idealization for theoretical and analytical purposes. Furthermore, it is possible to approximate a bandlimited signal to any arbitrary level of accuracy desired.

A similar relationship between duration in time and bandwidth in frequency also forms the mathematical basis for the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.

To make a long story short, there is an extent to which all of this is a form of gambling.

It was clear that Donald Trump’s network was the narrowest. Trump’s network was basically a collection of Israelis, real estate developers and construction companies, and former Goldman Sachs employees.

The other candidates were much more multifaceted in terms of who they were allowing to influence them, and this would mean that in the case of the other candidates, there would be a greater chance for more diverse donors and lobbyists to exert influence to counteract whatever Israeli influence might be aimed at them.

From that perspective, it made sense to throw as many resources as possible against Donald Trump’s campaign once it became apparent that he could be a serious contender, and to support others in their efforts to signal against Donald Trump’s candidacy.

But it didn’t work out.

What actually happened in the end of course was that no one, absolutely no one was able to prevent Trump from winning everything. As a result of Trump winning, Israel was able to walk away with basically all the prizes. More prizes than they’ve ever had before. It was the worst possible outcome.

So this gameplan that Sallis is accusing Asians of trying out on America, is a gameplan which didn’t even work, did it?

Asian state actors may or may not have literally come in and stacked Federal Reserve Notes to the roof at the US Chamber of Commerce, networked with the CATO Institute and many others on trade issues, while private citizens may or may not have gone around the other side of the right-spectrum and leveraged the ideological components of the HBD/ethnopluralist movement to raise Asian social status through repeatedly publicising the stories of academic high achievers – and then after all was said and done and spent, White Americans still got up, declared that Asian producer nations were somehow ‘the problem’, filed into the voting booths, and voted for the anti-Asian candidate: Donald Trump.

Misplaced emphasis?

The hyperventilating emphasis that Sallis places on exhorting White nationalists to combat Asian diaspora lobbies and the home nations, seems very strange to me, given that our primary opponent is not White people. The number one threat to the East Asian post-war success story is a United States and/or a Russian Federation which is controlled preponderantly by the state of Israel’s lobbyists.

Our number one opponent in actual reality is Israel.

Every time an Asian takes aim at the Israel lobby for whatever motive, people like Sallis end up jumping in the way to unintentionally shield the Israelis because some White nationalists tend to think it’s aimed at White people. For example, when someone engages in industrial targeting against companies which are controlled by people with blatantly Jewish names, people like Sallis who are in the anti-Asian camp always show up to sound the alarm by protesting about ‘the Asian takeover’. Americans and Russians inadvertently end up defending many of the existing Jewish Zionist oligarchs in their own countries from the machinations of everyone else’s oligarchs.

Everything really hinges around what people’s priorities are. Is your priority to defend the structural integrity of the propositional nation called ‘the United States’ or ‘the Russian Federation’ or whatever? Or is your priority to counteract the power of the Jewish lobby which is firmly entrenched in those two locations above all else? The answer cannot realistically be ‘both’. Choose one.

Or to put in the bluntest terms, are you primarily anti-Semitic, or are you primarily pro-‘Big Europe’ and pro-America?

At Sallis’ blog I have actually seen him claim that the outworking of Asian interests are – in his view – a ‘greater longterm threat’ to White people than the outworking of Jewish interests are.

It is frankly amazing to me that he could arrive at that conclusion.

Also, he has repeatedly mischaracterised what I have meant by ‘collaboration’. By ‘European and Asian collaboration’ I have only meant moving toward the kind of détente where we agree to maintain the presently-existing trade and investment arrangements and that ethnonationalists on both sides should refrain from taking up protectionist stances and that both sides should avoid stoking communal tensions in their publications. I have never asked for anything else. It’s a request that didn’t even require White people to do or change anything, since that is a status quo position anyway.

If someone said that it was anything beyond “don’t step on each other’s toes if you can help it”, then such a person is wrong, or is overly-enthusiastic.

At any rate, a lot of the ‘harder’ stuff that I say to people about geoeconomic issues is done low key and non-publicly (as those people who receive the occasional email from me could attest to), I only have to defend myself like this if I’m basically accused directly of something, as Sallis keeps doing.

So here we go!

Sallis refers to my stance as being effectively ‘Asian imperialism’, but it remains a mystery as to where this ‘imperialism’ actually is. Accusing me of ‘British imperialism’ would be a misnomer too, but at least that would sound a bit more coherent with respect to what I’ve actually been writing, given that what I’m saying is all cast within the already-presently-existing British framework anyway. Or is he accusing me of promoting both Asian and British ‘imperialism’ at the same time? I think he needs to define his terms, since I don’t know what definition of ‘imperialism’ he is using. ‘Imperialism’ as contrasted with what?

If I sell you a basket of products and then spend the money to improve our standing in the world, that is not ‘imperialism’. Also, even if it were ‘imperialism’, what difference at this point would it make? Next Sallis would be telling me that the fact that I continue to breathe oxygen is objectively bad in and of itself.

Obviously from my perspective, if my breathing oxygen is ‘imperialist’ and anti-Russian, then I had better keep being ‘imperialist’ and anti-Russian, because oxygen is pretty sweet! Obviously no one could reasonably expect that either myself or the Britons would feel any kind of guilt about that. We can only step over it. It would do nothing to change the present situation on the ground, which is what it is.

My stance simply boils down to speaking against economic protectionism, and guaranteeing the gains that were accrued after 1991 at the end of the Cold War and the economic defeat of the USSR. The new order which manifested after 1991, when the frontiers of Muscovy were mercifully rolled back on all sides by over fifteen thousand miles, became an order focussed on deepening global supply chains so as to cut costs while also battling the ‘loose ends’ of radical Islamic terror and migration crises.

It is possible to attend to those above issues while also being aware of the racial issue: which is that the nation-state is the richest and most developed repository of historical experience and governmental best-practices, and furthermore it is the surest source of inner motive energies (call it ‘EGI’) which motivate people to fight and to strive for a better seat at the table and a brighter day in the sun.

Sallis dislikes the supposed ‘inscrutables’ of ‘Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul’ (and presumably New Delhi and the rest too), but how inscrutable can it be? It’s transparent that people do not want to be subjected to trade policies and foreign policies that are crafted by people in North America who seem to want to pretend that all North America’s problems are coming from Asia in the form of molded plastic and semiconductors.

The idea that Britain should conform its foreign policy to satisfy those very American concerns also doesn’t make any sense, since European states have legitimate interests that do not mesh with those of the United States. It’s way past time that people should continue to pretend that the United States has identical geostrategic and geoeconomic interests as European states do, much less that the different European states all have identical interests.

A thing America actually now did

I mean let’s be real, the Americans just somehow non-ironically elected a guy who came out with a speech 120 hours ago where he advocated what? This hilarious list:

a. 54 billion more drunkenly spent on defence spending targeted at nothing,
b. 1 trillion more for infrastructure spending for inner city no-go zones which will have pitiable return on investment,
c. More o’ dem social programmes for the poor baby Trayvons in Detroit who lost their jobs – despite them never having had a job – to the allegedly ‘bad bad’ people in Manila or ‘bad bad’ people in Ho Chi Minh City who are apparently ‘ripping’ you, because why? Because of course. Apparently according to Hunter Wallace, African-Americans are now more valuable to the Alt-Right than trade with Asian states is, so what the hell.
d. Free cash-money for Israel. Because Trump just loves Israel. Because his family is married into it. All of them will continue to studiously ignore that tendency.

So there I was, watching that mortifying clown-car of super-horrible policies unpacking itself into the international arena and I was asking – while I was drinking white rum directly from the bottle – a single question. Only one question.

“But Bernie—I mean, Trump, how are you planning to actually pay for any of this stuff, fam?”

The answer arrived shortly thereafter! The ‘answer’ is apparently:

a. Doubling-down on protectionist tariffs and incoherent ‘buy American’ sloganeering to socially reinforce it, a move which depends on the absurd and not-ever-happening idea that Asian economies will passively allow the United States to subject them to a tariff regime designed by Gary Cohn which would literally grab money out of Asian financial centres and reroute it back into the treasury of the Zionist Occupation Government,
b. Lower taxes on American people, 
c. Lower taxes on American corporations, 
d. Every American gets a tax refund to pay for medical care to replace the ACA.

Hmm! But that’s okay perhaps, since certain commodities stocks have spiked up since 09 November 2016, and maybe if the markets reorder themselves around that, those positions can continue to grow. People can make instruments which tap into that expansion, and then people and the state itself can borrow against those instruments using some very fancy mathematical formulas to predict their performance. Detroit and other Rust Belt disaster zones will somehow magically be rebuilt, and the African-Americans will somehow crank out billions of widgets while somehow not being at all socially-dysfunctional, so that all of the big spending will totally somehow pay for itself. The formulas may or may not have documentation associated with them. The formulas may or may not even be based in any kind of rational thought. Your children can then repay the money to Goldman Sachs about 35 years from now. And all of that is to be done so that the allegedly heroic America can finally defeat the allegedly undead East Asia.

Wow, right? Really very much wow. I mean the whole Trump-style plan has literally never failed before except for like every single time ever.

I guess you could say that I disagree with the Israel-backed Trumpist manchild plan, because my geopolitical stances are all anti-Semitic in one way or another. You could say that I disagree with the Israel-backed Trumpist manchild plan because I am of course an Asian woman, which is another factor that makes me very scary and perhaps ‘evil’. But I’ve never lied or swindled about anything in that regard.

Separate destinies

Theresa May is the polar opposite of Donald Trump on those issues, and thank goodness she is the polar opposite. No false appeals by the usual suspects to ‘the White race’ and its supposed ‘unity’ are going to induce the British to make common cause with the American economic-protectionist suicide pact against their own interests, because – frankly – the British public are on average simply savvier than their American counterparts, just enough so to have deftly evaded the protectionism con-game, and to have correctly supported Brexit at the same time.

Of course, there are some Trump-supporters out there who would say that this entire article could be summarised as being ‘an example of what the siren-song of globalisation sounds like’, but those people are not even capable of rigor in their analysis of anything because they’ve become ensnared by Donald Trump’s cult of personality and cannot help but senselessly parrot every one of his forced memes.

I’m incredibly optimistic about Britain because everything the British people are doing recently is just great, and the interests being expressed in these isles are legitimate. 

I will therefore reiterate: Britain was forced to choose between the continent and the sea, and Britain chose the sea again. And there’s nothing wrong with that, that is an integral part of the identity of the British people as a seafaring trading nation with historical connections to Central, South and East Asia.

If people such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel don’t understand this, it is only because it is not in their national interest to try to understand it. But there is no reason why anyone should be held hostage to their trade preferences.

Those who continue to oppose Britain will continue to do so no matter what we say. But the ways in which they do so will become increasingly subtle. It is one thing to have continental European or American allies – alliances imply cooperation between distinct groups – but it is absolutely a different thing entirely to have these people actually as part of our own groups, browbeating us because we won’t bend our knee to the Kremlin, Berlin, or Washington DC. Letting opponents of Britain shape the contours of how Britain should express its national interests is not ‘European racial solidarity’, it is subversion by hostile foreign groups whose interests do not align with Britain’s.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Britain’s opponents are fully engaged in concern-trolling about supposed Asian ‘swindlers’ in Britain in the aftermath of Brexit, because Brexit is apparently not enough for the American and Russian concern-trolls. It is however quite enough for the British people who wisely voted to block the mass migration of Arabs and North Africans via the European Union into Britain, but are quite sensibly not willing to burn down the entire civil society and economy of Britain just to pointlessly antagonise Asians because some American or German or Russian enemy asked them to do so in the name of a non-existing ‘European solidarity’.

You have to wonder if these people even understand what Brexit means. Do they know? It means ‘British Citizens Politely Exiting From Your Actual Disaster Zone’. It is literally the opposite of ‘solidarity’. There is no solidarity, nor should there be any solidarity in the present circumstances.

Necessary trade

Free trade and the economic integration of Britain and the East is not an ‘Asiatic swindle’ as Sallis would allege, but rather, it is regions of the world exchanging goods and securing the world’s most important transit zones, for mutual benefit. It is a dividend arising from of forty years of work which was done by the previous generation of actors, and which we in the present have inherited.

Our motives can be expressed in the material realm in a transactional way, and as such this expression eliminates the uncertainty that would accompany idealistic or sentimental reasons.

For British Asians in the Brexit environment, our lives and our property are bound up with the fortunes and the flag of Great Britain, so it is only natural that we would stand with Britain against any and all opponents. We are not ‘loyal’ for just some kind of sentimental reasons alone. We are ‘loyal’ because everyone appreciates that Britain will now be well-placed in a secure position to participate more than ever in the ongoing process of global development in the places that need it most.

Furthermore, Brexit would not be economically viable for Britain without the maintenance and expansion of trade relationships with growth regions in Asia to fill the void left by Britain’s departure from the European Common Market. The precise way in which that will manifest is presently a ‘blank page’ with a title heading over it in the Brexit plan, but the correct way of looking at the concept of there being a ‘blank page’ with a title heading over it is to recognise that as an opportunity for people to write something mutually edifying there.

Whatcha doin’, Dahnald?

In my previous article I sarcastically included the following line:

Kumiko Oumae / Majorityrights.com, ‘What you should be looking for in Donald Trump’s address to the US Congress.’, 28 Feb 2017 (emphasis added):

[...] More crucially, it will be instructive to watch for how Donald Trump will address the accusations that he has not deterred supposed ‘anti-Semitic’ behaviour among his supporters. Trump may take this opportunity to respond by once again putting the Alt-Right under the bus, a move which again will come at no cost to himself, because the Alt-Right will still continue to support him after he does that.

[...]

At the very beginning of the speech, Donald Trump chose to do exactly that. He did that when he said:

US President Donald J. Trump, ‘Speech to Joint Session of Congress’, 01 Mar 2017 (emphasis added):

And citizens of America, tonight, as we were — as we mark the celebration of Black History Month, we are reminded of our nation’s path toward civil rights and the work that still remains to be done.

Recent threats targeting Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms.

That is a rather strange thing for him to say, given that at the time that he chose to say that, he would already have known about this investigation which was simultaneously taking place at the FBI:

Riverfront Times, ‘Juan Thompson, 31, Busted for JCC Bomb Threats; St. Louis Native Was Disgraced Journalist’, 03 Mar 2017 (emphasis added):

Disgraced former journalist Juan Thompson has been arrested on federal cyberstalking charges after the FBI traced multiple bomb threats against Jewish community centers and the Anti-Defamation League to the St. Louis native, authorities say.

Thompson, who was the subject of a Riverfront Times investigation last year, called in the threats as part of a bizarre scheme to frame an ex-girlfriend, according to the Justice Department.

“Today, we have charged Juan Thompson with allegedly stalking a former romantic interest by, among other things, making bomb threats in her name to Jewish Community Centers and to the Anti-Defamation League,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara said in a statement. “Threats of violence targeting people and places based on religion or race — whatever the motivation — are unacceptable, un-American, and criminal. We are committed to pursuing and prosecuting those who foment fear and hate through such criminal threats.”

Thompson, 31, was once a reporter for The Intercept, but he was fired after the New York City-based news site found he had been making up sources. Our investigation turned up even more journalistic problems dating back to his college days at Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Thompson later briefly surfaced at an online news site, but was fired after someone there learned of his background. He has blamed racism for his difficulties and self-published a piece on Medium blasting The Intercept and “the white liberal media.”

More recently, Thompson launched a GoFundMe campaign, claiming he was running for St. Louis mayor. (He never filed the necessary paperwork.)

“This election is all about people power,” he wrote. “Because only with your voices and your votes and your power can we fight back against Trumpian fascism and socio-economic terrorism.” He raised just $25 of his $5,000 goal.

See our latest update: Before Bomb Threats, Juan Thompson Unraveled — and Terrorized an RFT Reporter

Also, check out the federal complaint.

Juan Thompson Complaint on Scribd

The Conclusion

So it was basically an African-American man who was perpetrating an elaborate hoax so as to frame his White liberal ex-girlfriend as an anti-Semite.

You couldn’t make it up.

But think about this. If the federal complaint was formally raised the morning after Donald Trump gave his speech to the joint session of congress, is it beyond possibility that Trump in fact knew exactly what was going on before he gave the speech?

He is the President of the United States. This is not campaign mode anymore. The FBI would have made him aware of the fact that these bomb-threats were likely to be coming from Juan Thompson and that the motive was not political.

Why did Trump not just say with certainty that he knew that the bomb threats against Jewish community centres had in fact been a hoax all along?

I think everyone knows the answer to that question, right?

What is this?

Donald Trump’s increasingly roulette-like to-do list has now delivered up the latest ‘event’. Donald Trump will be addressing the US Congress today on Wednesday 0200 UTC (Tuesday 2100 EST). This is not a ‘State of Union Address’, because as a new president it is not expected that Donald Trump would yet know what the status of the United States is. For this reason it is customary that although a US President can call for a ‘State of the Union’ address at any time he wants, no president other than Dwight D. Eisenhower has ever called such an address in his first year.

As such, Trump’s address to the US Congress today should be understood as being an address, but not a ‘State of the Union’ address.

What should you look for?

When he addresses lawmakers from the Senate and the House, Trump will likely talk about tax cuts, and tax reform, regulatory adjustments, his plans for job creation, the construction of the border wall with Mexico, the abolition of the Affordable Care Act, and other issues, if White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is to be believed. Spicer also added that the supposed theme of the address is going to be “the renewal of the American spirit.”

I can’t wait to see the kind of vacuous nonsensical stream-of-conscious word-salad which will be deployed across the lectern in search of a meaning, once Trump actually starts ad-libbing in the middle of his own speech as he so often tends to do.

In terms of the substance of his speech, I’m expecting that it will be in the combined tradition of Madison Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower – which is to say, a crybully session in which people will be entreated to ‘discover’ that all of the problems of White and Jewish Americans and Israeli Jews, all the problems that they have, are somehow to be blamed on Asians and Mexicans.

Aside from that, I think there should be a short list of things to watch for in this speech.

1. Which pledges does he remember to mention, and which does he quietly drop?

The White House has said that the first half of the president’s speech should focus on his campaign promises, and which ones he has been able to honour so far. I’d suggest that you should keep on hand – which is to say, keep in right in your hand on your tablet – the Washington Post’s tracker of the 60 key promises which Trump made to his constituents. By looking at what makes it into the speech and what does not, you might be able to discern what his emphasis is, or perhaps promises he’s demoted to a lesser priority or even abandoned.

2. Does he appear under pressure and agitated, or is he calm and confident?

Donald Trump is strongly influenced by Norman Vincent Peale, and a key to understanding his psychology is to understand Peale. If you don’t already know of that horrendous individual, I’m sad to say that you won’t have the time to get all briefed up on it before the speech airs, because it’s a whole tangled mess of nonsense which takes at least six hours to get familiar with.

What to watch for is his facial expression in tandem with his ‘off script’ moments, since the key to understanding his ‘off script’ moments is that they are spoken to himself and not to the audience. The audience can either choose to opt in or not, but his little utterances like “so true”, and “we are going to win bigly”, are as much for his own autohypnotic benefit as they are for providing a repetitive touchstone for his audience to engage in the same autohypnotic self-reassurance.

Another pattern that is clearly observable is Trump’s willingness to transform personal disputes into grand narratives which are then inserted ad-lib into his speeches. Anyone or anything that he chooses to go off script to mention for criticism, is going to be something that he is actually worried about in some way.

US Presidents also often tend to use opportunities when addressing the US Congress to define and signal against state or non-state actors that they view as adversaries. The time is generally not used to define or confront domestic political targets. Yet it it likely that he will do so.

The thing therefore to watch for, is whether he gets pre-occupied on targeting domestic political targets and ends up constraining or limiting the time he spends describing or explaining his foreign policy stances. The ratio of time spent will tell us perhaps not a lot about the direction of the whole administration, but it will tell us more about where Trump’s mind as ‘Commander in Chief’ is most focussed.

3. Law and Order?

His attitude toward his own constituents will be most perceived through the stances he takes on law and order issues, which form a large part of why his supporters backed him during the electoral campaign. The question is whether he will dignify them with adult explanations of the challenges that lie ahead, or whether he will stick with the sloganeering he has used so far.

A big signal to watch for is if he devotes this time to attacking ‘the press’ in sweeping generalised terms. If he does this, it should be interpreted as a sign that he is still in campaign mode, and that in fact, he may be planning to keep doing that because he is already looking toward the election campaign of 2020.

Expect the topics – if he chooses to treat the audience as adults – to be ranging among counter-terrorism, his Muslim countries immigration ban which curiously omits Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates and which he is planning to reintroduce with new wording, his attempts to deport undocumented Mexican migrants, the border wall, increased military spending or an end to the sequester, supporting the ‘blue lives matter’ phenomenon, and so on.

4. Addressing divisions?

Will he try to placate the demographic groups who are opposed to his presidency? Or will he ignore them?

Crucially, watch for him to try to reach out to African-Americans. There is a real chance that he will do that, because that is a ‘safe’ move. African-Americans are the most disorganised and least politically coherent group in the United States and it would be seen as a ‘great PR’ move which he would be able to execute at no actual political cost to himself.

He’d simply be getting criticism from the Alt-Right for it, a demographic group which he knows will support him no matter how much he spits on their faces, because they made memes for him and campaigned for him for free. They did it for free.

More crucially, it will be instructive to watch for how Donald Trump will address the accusations that he has not deterred supposed ‘anti-Semitic’ behaviour among his supporters. Trump may take this opportunity to respond by once again putting the Alt-Right under the bus, a move which again will come at no cost to himself, because the Alt-Right will still continue to support him after he does that.

Watch Twitter if you begin to see this happening during the speech, and you might even be able to see the Alt-Right live-Tweeting its own shameful cuckholdry. You could also look at the live thread on Daily Stormer to see the same cuck phenomenon take place.

I’m not saying it’s guaranteed to happen. I’m just saying it’s very likely to happen. There are a lot of variables in play.

5. Nonsensical Anglo-Saxon outreach?

Trump may try to make some kind of absurd outreach to Britain by trying to once again make a verbal connection between the social phenomenon which got him elected in the United States, and the phenomena which led to ‘Vote Leave’ being the outcome in the EU referendum in Britain in 2016.

If he makes this outreach, it should be interpreted as a sign of his weakness, as it would be a signal that he feels that he need to lean on the existence of a non-existent ‘club’.

Brexit, which gave rise to #GlobalBritain, is economically the complete and total opposite of #MAGA, and that is the most important sphere of reality which decides almost everything. Any attempt to link the two is really just an attempt of the latter to grasp the coattails of the former.

They share nothing.

6. Paul Ryan’s face and hands?

It should be possible to watch Paul Ryan’s reactions in order to gauge to some extent how far – if at all – Trump strays ‘off script’, as the Speaker of the House has vacillated between sometimes voicing support for the President, sometimes openly disagreeing with him, and occasionally taking the position of refusing to comment when asked about the content of Trump’s tweets.

Any adverse expressions on his face – a face which he will of course be trying to keep as stony and placid as possible throughout the speech if he can possibly do so – and any moments at which he pointedly refuses to clap when the cue comes for him to clap, could be indicative of a serious split between the Republicans in Congress and the White House, or indicative that Trump has simply dived off script in a dramatic way.

Keep in mind that ‘Trump off script’, can also mean ‘Trump actually mouthing neoreactionary things that Steve Bannon gleaned from Curtis Yarvin and then mouthed into Trump’s ear at the last minute before the speech’.

7. Length of the speech?

White House sources indicate that they expect the speech to last between 65 and 80 minutes. If it ends up being significantly shorter or significantly longer than that, then it would signal that something unexpected has happened, and it’ll be up to observers to assess what precisely that was.

Cloudflare’s bufffer overrun was dubbed ‘Cloudbleed’ as a historical reference to ‘Heartbleed’.

Why am I talking about this?

Some interesting events have occurred surrounding Cloudflare, one of the largest global CDNs, and I’ll take the opportunity to put some opinions out there about what has happened.

What a CDN is

A Content Delivery Network is a system of strategically positioned servers. Those servers maintain and accelerate the delivery of content. The main goals of a CDN are about speed, scalability and high-availability. A request from a consumer will generally be routed to the nearest geographic point-of-presence. The consumer’s physical distance to these servers has an impact on loading time. A closer and highly performing point-of-presence significantly improves user experience as a result of reduced loading time, lower latency and minimised packet loss. A Content Delivery Network also cuts operational costs by allowing businesses to effectively outsource the logistics and maintenance of these servers. This allows companies the ability to benefit from global load balancing and leverage the cost-savings that accrue due to economy of scale, because CDN provisioning is structured in the economic domain as an oligopoly.

Sounds nice, so what’s the problem?

There isn’t a problem in principle. In practice however, sometimes really bad things happen. When you have an oligopoly, the effect of someone accidentally placing an “==” equal sign in their code when they actually meant to write an “>=” greater-than-or-equal sign, can have pretty dramatic effects in terms of the number of people who might be affected by whatever happens as a consequence. Which, incidentally, is how ‘Cloudbleed’ happened.

It’s all part of the advantages and disadvantages of the present infrastructure. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but it means that this is the way that internet has developed and people have to basically be prepared for this kind of incident.

The story

The unwanted behaviour at Cloudflare was coming from an HTML parser chain that is used to modify webpages as they pass through the service’s edge servers. The parser carries out a range of functions, such as inserting Google Analytics tags, converting HTTP links to HTTPS links, finding strings that look like email addresses and then obfuscating them, and preventing malicious web bots from accessing some parts of a page.

When the HTML parser was used in combination with three Cloudflare features – email obfuscation, server-side excludes and automatic HTTPS rewrites – and if an HTML page being served to a consumer by a Cloudflare proxy had a specific combination of unbalanced tags, then a pseudo-random leakage of memory pages outside the boundary of what was supposed to be served would also be interspersed into what was being served.

This means that encryption keys, cookies, passwords, sections of POST data, chat messages from some online chat services, online password manager data, and HTTPS requests from other Cloudflare-hosted websites were being leaked pseudo-randomly.

Because the structure of the system is such that the proxies are shared between all Cloudflare customers, all customers were affected, and leaked pages of memory for pages being served on behalf of any given customer, were being interspersed among the expected responses for any other given customer.

Cloudflare optimises the performance of more than 5 million websites, and as this story unfolded, it really has become clear to everyone just how significant that number is. The duration of the ‘bleed’ is also significant, since this ‘bleed’ may have been occurring since 22 September 2016, and the period of greatest impact was between 13 February 2017 and 18 February 2017.

Furthermore, web crawlers and archivers, search engine cache services, corporate squid proxy-cache networks, and browser caches on consumers’ workstations globally were all downloading and holding the pseudo-random data that was ‘bleeding’ for the entirety of the duration of this period. It was just that most people didn’t understand what it was that they were seeing or where it was coming from, or otherwise didn’t notice it.

At that stage, it is not known whether anyone had realised it was happening before 19 February 2017, or whether it was exploited in any way.

What’s the appropriate response?

In situations like this, you have to decide on how good you think your luck is, and how important you think that you and your organisation are, and how thorough you are willing to have your response be. What you or your organisation chooses to do in response may be different from what you might recommend on a wider level to others. On principle, given the scale of the ‘bleed’ and the possibility that passwords may have become exposed, many security professionals are advocating that it may be best for all consumers to change their passwords for basically everything on the internet as soon as possible.

Another way of looking at it however is that the internet – much like the feudal structure of pre-modern Japan, or Korea, or India – has a kind of informal rank system. Messaging has to be different for different groups, because not everyone performs the same function, or has the same time available to devote to a particular task, and some people and groups tend to be more in scope of hostile state and non-state actors than others.

Changing all passwords everywhere, while technically the correct response for the ‘Brahmins and Kshatriyas’ of the internet, may seem like a complete overblown response to a scenario where 0.00003% of HTTP requests were affected, if narrated from the perspective of the ‘Vaishyas and Shudras’ of the internet.

In other words, sounding the alarm as loudly as possible could induce a kind of security fatigue among the ‘normal people’, and may even incentivise bad behaviour from ‘normal people’, since when mass-changing their passwords, they may be more likely to repeat the usage of many similar passwords across the services they use, and they may – in their haste – be inclined to reduce the complexity of their newly-crafted passwords.

In other words, sounding the alarm in the loudest and most severe way possible will have the effect of inducing the correct and thorough response from the custodians of key infrastructure – who already were going to display that correct response anyway regardless of the words in the media – while in fact also having the unintended effect of inducing a wrong or inadequate response from ‘normal people’.

It also has the effect of creating a ‘morning after bounty’, since for people who are engaged in signals collections and tailored access operations, this would be a luxurious time since the percentage of transmissions which will be about the changing of passwords would be spiking over the next one or two weeks if every individual in the entire world were asked to change all their passwords. Such adversarial actors would be incentivised to mount subversive campaigns during this time because the possible cost-benefit ratio of carrying out the project just tilted a bit more toward the ‘benefit’ side of the equation.

Thus, paradoxically, the panicked response to the already-fixed problem could be what in fact creates the environment in which a technically unrelated but socially ‘subsequent’ actual array of attacks could occur which otherwise may not have occurred.

Similar to a problem that has been discussed in relation to CT

If all of this sounds similar to the problem of managing a population’s response to terrorist threats while also maintaining a strong counter-terrorism posture, you’d be correct. It is basically similar.

It also comes with the same danger faced in erring too much to the side of ‘downplaying’ while trying to avoid inducing ‘panic’. Downplaying an incident so as to avoid triggering inadequate or inappropriate responses from the ‘normal people’, deprives them of information and can make people become suspicious of the intentions of the system. It can make professionals look like they are ‘incompetent’ or even that they ‘have something to hide’.

In such a case, a panicked response in the general public as a result of the feeling that they are being lied to by authorities or that authorities do not appreciate the scope and scale of a threat, may inadvertently end up leading to the very same damaging outcomes that the authorities were attempting to avoid in the first place, with the additional downside being that distrust of the persons in authority and the proliferation of conspiracy theories become added to it.

This is why it’s vital to find ways to assess the mood of the general public and to model their responses in some way, in response to almost any issue in society. The messaging for different geographic, occupational, and socio-economic groups has to somehow be different without being completely contradictory between themselves. If people in authority in any given situation are unable to leverage the social domain with sufficient adeptness to do that, then they may lose control of the narrative which is something that can have potentially unpredictable or even disastrous consequences.

Mastering the social domain and producing outcomes that mesh with and evolve with operational necessities, is something that is vital to continuing effective governance, be it governance of a multinational company which controls one of the Content Delivery Networks, right the way up to, say, governance of a country or of a regional supra-state.

Additional thoughts on Cloudflare

I of course do have criticisms of Cloudflare, but they are criticisms which are not about criticising the concept of what a CDN is, and rather, are more specific to Cloudflare as a company.

I’ll cover two issues.

I’ll start with the less concrete and more speculative one. For dissident groups that are not tacitly supported or at least allowed by the states in the North Atlantic, Cloudflare might present a risk to such groups because Cloudflare is within the jurisdiction of the United States and they could conceivably respond to legal requests made within the United States. Another factor to consider is that Cloudflare has taken dark funding and may actually be ‘on side’ with FVEY-related collections since at least 2012. Admittedly, it is difficult to substantiate this claim, but it’s something worth considering.

The more concrete criticism which I can definitely substantiate is Tor-related. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, took to his blog on 30 March 2016 to make what appeared to be a rather nuanced argument in favour of anonymity but against Tor in its present form due to the issue of malicious abuse of the network.

Much of what he wrote was eminently reasonable.

For instance, Prince suggests that Cloudflare could become friendly toward Tor under the circumstances where onion addresses were to begin using stronger hashing algorithms than the presently-existing SHA-1 80 bit hashing algorithm. Under such a circumstance, Prince suggested that the stipulation that onion addresses only be issued certificates if such certificates are EV certificates – which require extended validation procedures, cannot be issued automatically, and undermine the very anonymity which Tor was intended to promote – could be relaxed, as CA/B Forum would likely be open to discussing the automatic issuance of certificates in such a circumstance. Cloudflare could then allow its customers to create onion sites in some kind of automated way, and the issuance of certificates for those onion sites could also be automated. Tor traffic could then be whitelisted when it is directed toward those onion sites, while blacklisting could continue for Tor traffic which is directed toward the non-onion sites.

The world described in Prince’s suggestion would certainly be an interesting world to live in. However, we don’t actually live in that world.

Instead, we live in a world where Cloudflare alleges that 94% of the traffic directed toward its customers across the Tor network is ‘malicious’, based on the data from the Cloudflare IP reputation system. That may or may not be true, but given that there are a lot of people using Tor and a limited number of Tor exit nodes, this means that Cloudflare is either CAPTCHA-challenging or blocking 80% of Tor IP addresses and this number is steadily growing. This has the effect of discouraging people who have legitimate intentions from using Tor to access sites that are protected by Cloudflare.

Prince’s explanation for this is that Cloudflare is forced to behave that way in order to protect their customers from abuse, and that they can only rely on IP reputation because there is no way to do browser fingerprinting to differentiate between different Tor browsers, because the Tor browser is specifically designed to lessen the ability to generate unique fingerprints. Cloudflare can in such a circumstance only evaluate the communication on the basis of the reputation of the IP and the content of the request. That is also true and is a reasonable explanation, but at the same time it is what it is.

While Cloudflare’s default behaviour is to CAPTCHA-challenge Tor, it is possible to add the country ‘T1’ to the Cloudflare firewall whitelist, which would exclude Tor users from having to complete CAPTCHA-challenges. This behaviour became possible in late 2016, and so ‘dissident’ sites that continue to present challenges to Tor users are responsible for choosing or not choosing that behaviour.

In a kind of funny irony, Prince also notes that 18% of all global spam begins with an automated bot harvesting publicly available email addresses through the Tor network. Given that a significant subset of this spam is phishing-related, it is an unintentionally hilarious statement by Prince because 40% of all phishing sites in 2015 were using certificates that were issued by Cloudflare’s ‘Universal SSL’ service.

Furthermore, Cloudflare’s ridiculous ‘Flexible SSL’ – billed by them as ‘the easiest secure sockets layer ever’ – provides what is essentially security theatre between Cloudflare’s proxy and the client, without any of the actual security that would be required between the client tier and the middleware, and has the damaging effect of giving consumers a false sense of security. The so-called ‘Flexible SSL’ is so ‘flexible’ in that scenario that it is essentially non-existent. Consumers have been trained to look for the padlock in the address bar before submitting sensitive information to any website. ‘Flexible SSL’ grants phishing sites and other malicious actors the ability present that padlock to users with minimal effort. ‘Easiest SSL ever’, indeed.

I tend to prefer actual, real, end-to-end SSL to be the only possible implementation. But hey, that’s just me, right?

But now I’m just bullying them, so I’ll dial it back a bit and bring this article to a close. It’s possible that the people at Cloudflare didn’t anticipate that their services would be abused in these ways, and they did get unlucky with the Cloudbleed buffer overrun incident, but in any case, those who are inside glass houses should be careful not to throw stones. Matthew Prince should reflect on the recent incident and refrain from throwing any stones at anyone for at least a couple months.

Was Majorityrights.com affected by Cloudbleed?

This should go without saying, but I will say it anyway.

We don’t use Cloudflare here. As such, Majorityrights.com was not affected by any of the events described in this article.

If we were to ever have a burning need to actually use a CDN here, for various reasons I would probably suggest using either Yottaa or KeyCDN anyway, and not Cloudflare.

Joint press conference

In a move that surprised no one other than the denizens of the American Alt-Right, Donald Trump has just handed Benjamin Netanyahu a collection of the largest diplomatic prizes that any Prime Minister of Israel could ever hope to attain.

Donald Trump highlighted the prospects for a “great peace deal” in the Middle East while at a joint press conference, as both Israel and the United States are signalling a change in the relationship compared to that of the preceding US administration. Whereas previously relations were fraught with issues on which the two countries did not see eye to eye, Donald Trump is reorienting the United States toward a stance where there will be virtually no daylight between the two countries.

Handing over the keys

Donald Trump simply walked into the room and began systematically undoing four decades of US diplomacy, with a completely casual air of confidence.

Speaking cordially alongside Netanyahu, Trump announced that he does not actually care whether the ‘solution’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be centred around negotiations of a two-state solution, or whether it should be some other kind of solution, nor was he concerned about the structural content of the solution.

“I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like,” Trump said.

In a single sentence, Donald Trump had just given Israel the green light to proceed ahead on course with its plan for ‘Greater Israel’.

Some may ask how that conclusion could be derived from the statement.

It’s easy, Gaza and the West Bank have no real leverage at a negotiating table with Israel, other than that which other countries wield on its behalf. Israel is the occupying power which holds de facto control over 100% of Palestinian natural resources and all the investment banks. Additionally, the system of checkpoints used by Israel have the net economic effect of dis-integrating the Palestinian economy to the point that greater than 40% of Palestinian GDP is wasted on dealing with the effects of the security infrastructure which is in place.

Therefore, when Donald Trump says that he is going to ‘be happy’ with whatever deal the Israelis and Palestinians reach between themselves, he is essentially saying that the United States will no longer utilise its power to cajole or corral Israel into actually having to sit at the table with the Palestinian Authority in any substantive way.

Starting the engine

Trump seemed to forget that Palestine even needed to be part of the conversation, as Israelis and their concerns remained firmly centred throughout the joint press conference. Trump touched on all the issues that were strategically important to Israel, the issue of Iran, anti-Zionist messaging in the Palestinian school system, and the Israeli desire to get Palestinians to acknowledge and recognise Israel as a ‘legitimate Jewish state’.

The United States also stopped being part of the conversation, effectively. Having cleared the United States of any actual obligation to do anything, and having alleviated the United States of having any part in the process, Trump was essentially indicating that the role of the United States would now be reduced to that of letting whatever happens, happen.

Driving away after a small caution

As Trump continued to basically give Israel everything it wanted, Benjamin Netanyahu began actually physically vibrating with pleasure at what he was hearing. The United States would no longer even play the limited role that it had been playing as a supposed peace-broker anymore. That responsibility has now passed into the hands of Netanyahu.

Much has been made in some quarters of the fact that Trump chose to say to Netanyahu, “I’d like to see you pull back on settlements for a little bit.”

Netanyahu absolutely did not care about being told that. Minutes later, Netanyahu dismissed the caution entirely by saying that settlements are “not the core of the conflict”, and that they would talk to each other more about it so as not to keep “bumping into each other.” He then made no commitment to halt the construction of settlements.

So Netanyahu accepted what was basically a small caution for him to hold back on building settlements for a little while, presumably because it was starting to look too brazen in the news cycle, a caution which he is free to ignore if he likes. In exchange he got Donald Trump to drag forty years of US diplomacy into the recycle bin.

‘Compromise’

During the joint press conference, Trump said that there would need to be “compromise from both sides.” There was no mention of precisely what that ‘compromise’ would look like, but I think that we just saw what it looks like. We saw it on live international television.

Basically, Netanyahu will agree to let Trump gently needle him on his state’s violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and in exchange, Netanyahu will continue to violate that very same convention while shaping the circumstances under which Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace negotiations’ will take place. The United States will simply let that happen. The United States will also at the same time completely adopt the foreign policy preferences of Israel with regards to Iran, and help Israeli commanders to achieve their objectives absolutely for free.

That’s the ‘compromise’.

It’s unprecedented, because prior to this moment no American president – not even Ronald Reagan – had budged on the basic commitment to the two-state solution, nor had any US president prior to Donald Trump entered into a dialogue with Israel in which the opening salvo of the diplomatic exchange was to constrain America’s role to that of a mere cheerleader on the sidelines. Donald Trump reversed both of those things in less than half an hour.

‘Strategic Cucking’

Over at the Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin non-ironically and non-sarcastically described the aforementioned ‘compromise’ in which Netanyahu gets 100% of what he wants, this way:

Daily Stormer / Andrew Anglin, ‘Trump Prods Bibi on Palestine Settlements’, 15 Feb 2017:

[...]

Very minimal cucking there.

And the cucking there was was strategic cucking.

[...]

Seriously. What the fuck.

What the actual fuck.

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