Iraq: Invasion And Occupation. A Case Study In Destabilization.

When we look back at the history of US intervention in Iraq, what we have is arguably the most well documented case of imperialist destabilization seen in real time.

A river of blood running red down the streets of Mosul, buildings completely leveled to the foundation in Fallujah, neighborhoods devastated with depleted uranium in Baghdad. Estimates of over a million dead, nine million displaced, generations born with birth defects, countless lives forever destroyed. A once vibrant nation, rich in history and culture tracing back to the foundation of human civilization now the site of unimaginable catastrophe, forever transformed in only twenty three years into an eternal scar of carnage. This is the story of Iraq.

On September 30th, 2026, news broke that after over two decades the last of US forces in Iraq had finally withdrawn. It seems, finally, that this bloody chapter in American history has come to a close. The war, it appears, is over. The lasting consequences, however, will remain a fixture in the American psyche and the geopolitics of the world likely for many more generations to come.

The US presence in Iraq serves as the American empire’s longest perpetual occupation and military conflict in its history, lasting over twice as long as the Vietnam war, and surpassing the occupation of Afghanistan by three and a half years.

But while the current conflict in Iraq has lasted just over two decades, US-lead destabilization in the region has lasted considerably longer.

Western aggression against Iraq began relatively early in the Cold War, in response to the 1958 uprising that ousted the Hashemite monarchy which had served to the benefit of Anglo-American corporate interests. The Iraqi nationalist Abd al-Karim Qasim, the leading figure of the revolution, quickly seized power as Prime Minister and declared that Iraq would be a republic, instituting sweeping programs to the benefit of the Iraqi people ― including agrarian reforms, women’s rights laws (among the first of their kind in the Arab world), housing development, the expansion of education, and seizing control of the Iraqi oil reserves which had for decades been controlled by American and British companies.

Iraq was declared to be sovereign, and this didn’t sit well with the Western political hegemon that had already hedged itself financially upon controlling the flow of oil throughout the Middle East. 

As such, American and British intelligence began covertly lending their support to what was at the time a little known political faction within Iraq, the Ba’ath party, to be the primary driver behind a regime change plot.

One of the primary figures of the Ba’ath party at the time, Saddam Hussein, would become an asset of the CIA, and, in October of 1959, Saddam along with five other hitmen would undertake a CIA sanctioned assassination attempt against Qasim on the streets of Baghdad. The attempt failed miserably, and Saddam was forced to flee to Egypt in exile under the care of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service to avoid capture and execution for his role in the conspiracy.

During Saddam’s time in Cairo he would make frequent visits to the American embassy and deepen his ties with the CIA.

The agency would also continue strengthening the Ba’ath Party from the shadows in Saddam’s absence, fomenting reactionary hostility which relied heavily on the manufactured propaganda of exaggerated communist threats as a pretext for regime change, and in 1963 would carry out a bloody coup d’etat culminating with the assassination of Abd al-Karim Qasim. Following the Baathist coup, Saddam would return to Iraq as one of the party’s top enforcers charged with overseeing a bloody campaign of targeted executions of anyone suspected of being a communist or a sympathizer of Karim Qasim.

In the months that followed, Baathist death squads, utilizing kill lists provided by the CIA, would routinely carry out house-to-house raids, mass arrests, arbitrary detentions, and summary executions. Estimated casualty rates place the number of dead at nearly 10,000, with an additional approximate 100,000 arrested.

This bloodbath gave rise to the Iraq that we know today. Saddam came to power riding a wave of state sanctioned terror with American approval that set into motion a chain of events we are still facing the ramifications of decades later.

Fast forward to 1979 and Saddam is officially installed as the president of Iraq. Therein begins the next stage of destabilization at the behest of American imperialist interests. 

That same year, the people of neighboring Iran had risen up to overthrow the brutal US-backed dictatorship of the Shah. Not keen on allowing the Iranian people to have any say in their own self determination, the Western powers would once again intervene and ensure the installation of the Ayatollah’s Islamic fundamentalist regime. With this piece of the chess board in place, previously flaring tensions between Iraq and Iran would reach a fever pitch, all while the US played puppet master.

By 1980 Saddam was given the green light by his US handlers to go to war with Iran, supplied with chemical weapons courtesy of the CIA. The US empire, eager to play both sides of the conflict for their own benefit, would at the same time supply arms shipments to Iran through Israel. The goal was to allow the two nations to battle each other to a stalemate, substantially diminishing the influence of either in the region to the benefit of the West. After eight years of brutal war that claimed roughly two million lives the conflict would conclude with an armistice in August of 1988.

Just a couple of years later the hammer would finally begin to drop on Saddam Hussein. As tensions once again flared with Iraq’s southern neighbor Kuwait, and with Iraq in desperate need to recoup its financial losses from its eight year war with Iran, Saddam would once again meet with his US handlers in the form of US Ambassador to Baghdad April Galspie.

The actual nature of that meeting is still debatable, with some scholars asserting that Saddam was directly given the green light by the US to invade Kuwait, while others contend that a miscommunication had lead Saddam to believe that such a green light was given. In either case, on August 2, 1990, Hussein would roll tanks into Kuwait, and in either case the response by the United States was certainly premeditated.

In response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Western press quickly orchestrated and amplified what would become one of the most infamous examples of atrocity propaganda in modern history. In October of 1990 a 15 year old Kuwaiti girl identified only as “Nayirah” would provide testimony to Congress of crimes against humanity committed by the Iraqi military. Through sobs, she claimed to have worked as a nurse’s aide at Al-Addan Hospital in Kuwait City when she witnessed Iraqi soldiers storming in, remove babies from their incubators in the prenatal unit, taking the medical equipment and leaving the babies to die on the floor. But it was all a lie.

Nayirah was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasser al-Sabah. And she had never been in Kuwait at the time of the invasion. It was later revealed in an investigation by the New York Times that her entire testimony was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton on behalf of the US based lobbying group Citizens for a Free Kuwait, strictly as a form of propaganda to encourage the US to make war on Iraq. And so they did.

In the mid 1990s another seismic shift took place in Mid Eastern politics that seemingly hammered the final nail in Saddam’s coffin. In late 1995 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, largely due to the culture of violence incited against him by Benjamin Netanyahu who would come to power as the next Prime Minister a year later.

With Netanyahu and the far-right Likud Party in power in Israel, American neocons seized the opportunity once again. In 1996 neocons that would later hold prominent positions within the George W. Bush administration and the push for war with Iraq would come together in an established think tank to publish a document known as A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing The Realm. A hawkish strategy which ultimately sought to help Israel “weaken, contain, and rollback Syria” by way of using regime change in Iraq as a stepping stone, thus prioritizing the ouster of Saddam Hussein as the first domino to fall in an ambitious plan to topple the governments of Syria, Iran, and Lebanon.

The widely unknown to the general public Clean Brake Strategy is still one of the primary driving factors of American foreign policy in the Middle East today.

Many of the same individuals responsible for crafting the Clean Brake Strategy — David Wurmser, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and others, would all go on to be key players in the neocon think tank Project for A New American Century (PNAC), and heavily embedded within the George W. Bush administration. PNAC, as The Free Thought Project has previously noted, played a significant role in crafting the pre-emptive strategy for expanding American hegemony in the Middle East which the September 11th false flag attack was later used as a pretext to justify.

As we have also previously reported, according to George W. Bush’s former ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz, the would-be president was dreaming of invading Iraq as early as 1999. While leaked emails have shown the then President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair laying plans for the invasion of Iraq a year in advance.

A 2004 investigation by Mother Jones extensively documented how, starting at the outset of the Bush administration in January of 2001, figures the likes of Wurmser, Feith, and Perle, along with other notable names such as Paul Wolfowitz and Harold Rhode, established what was essentially an “unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon” effectively serving as the nucleus for disinformation on Iraq to manufacture the consent for war.

After much pressure and copious amounts of disinformation to justify their cause, US forces undertook a shock and awe invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, and as the years dragged on the truth came to light. There were no biological or chemical weapons, there wasn’t a nuclear threat, there were no connections between Saddam and al Qaeda. Just a mountain of lies fabricated as a pretext to facilitate a decision that had been made long ago in the halls of imperial power.

The war on Iraq saw scores of atrocities take place at the hands of American invaders against an innocent population that had nothing to do with the crimes, real or imagined, of their CIA installed dictator. Violence against the people of Iraq was the standard for the occupiers.

Horrific massacres such as those that took place in Haditha, the Mahmudiyah gang rape massacre, the Ishaqi massacre, the Blackwater killings in Nisour Square, or the atrocities at detention facilities such as Abu Ghraib, and any of the other countless crimes against humanity inflicted upon the Iraqi people by US forces documented in works such as Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians by journalist Chris Hedges, or the numerous revelations released by Wikileaks in the Iraq War Logs, including the now infamous Collateral Murder footage — All make one thing crystal clear. The violence against the occupied peoples of Iraq was the norm, not an aberration.

On the financial side, the Iraqi economy was devastated, in part due to the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, and in part due to the theft of resources claimed as ill gotten gains by the occupying forces. Documentaries such as Robert Greenwald’s Iraq For Sale detail how corruption by corporate war profiteers such as Halliburton, Blackwater, CACI, and Titan pillaged the Iraqi economy for maximum profits.

Throughout the 20 year occupation, the US did not cease its efforts to maintain destabilization, either. After the fall of Saddam the imperialist war planners needed a new boogeyman, and it didn’t take them long to invent one.

Investigations have since revealed that Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq and arguably the second most infamous terrorist in recent memory next to Osama bin Laden was, much like Bin Laden himself, an asset of the Central Intelligence Agency who’s history traces all the way back to those notorious days of CIA sponsored jihadists in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Beyond secretly facilitating Zarqawi, US Intelligence would continue its destabilization mission by building a new jihadist proxy, capitalizing on the power vacuum left in Iraq following the overthrow of Saddam and the eruption of sectarian violence in the region, which began to encompass a shift towards Syria as well, just as the aforementioned Clean Break Strategy had intended.

As a new generation of Islamic fundamentalist militants took to the streets of Iraq and Syria, Western intelligence in the early 2010s would begin a clandestine arm and equip program known as Operation Timber Sycamore. With funding from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the CIA would run point on the decision to funnel weapons to jihadist fighters, later referred to as “moderate rebels” in Iraq and Syria, culminating in the creation of the terror group known as ISIS.

This is the story of American intervention the world over. Disinformation, destabilization, regime change coups, covertly sponsored dictatorships, and clandestine created terrorist organizations. Iraq is not unique to this method, but it is arguably the clearest example of it documented in real time. A pristine exemplification of the scourge of imperialism across the world and the devastation that it wreaks upon average people.

The occupation may finally be over. The people of Iraq may finally perhaps be able to take in a breath of relief, collect themselves, and attempt to begin to rebuild their lives. But Iraq is forever changed, the world is forever changed with it, the agendas that have left these lasting scars on a nation that was once the cradle of civilization are still at play, the destabilization of Iraq simply being one piece on a much larger chess board in a game of global dominance. And sadly, with conflicts still raging all around it, it is unlikely that Iraq will experience much of a genuine reprieve for some time to come.

As the last American troops leave Baghdad, the lessons learned from this travesty should not fade quietly into the night. They should serve as a rallying cry for all of us to strive for this to never happen again. Whether or not that will materialize is yet to be seen. But for now, we can hope against hope that perhaps for just a moment the people of Iraq can experience a small semblance of momentary peace.

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Podcast – Shannon Joy – From Deplatformed to Defiant: Building Local Resistance Networks

Independent broadcaster Shannon Joy joins the show to dismantle the bipartisan illusion of political saviors and expose the unchecked weaponization of smart city infrastructure.

Matt and Jason sat down with independent broadcaster and liberty activist Shannon Joy for a powerful conversation about ideological consistency and the cost of telling the truth. Utilizing her background in advertising and media, Shannon built a highly successful syndicated radio show, only to face severe backlash and deplatforming when she refused to capitulate to the MAGA movement. Recognizing Donald Trump as a Trojan horse for establishment interests from day one, she charted her own course. She overcame corporate rug pulls to build an independent media network that reaches a million listeners a month and recently ran for Lieutenant Governor of New York alongside Larry Sharpe to challenge and expose the fraudulent political apparatus.

The conversation breaks down the illusion of political saviors and the reality of the bipartisan corporate-state nexus. The discussion explores how institutional capital is funding a rapid expansion of the surveillance state, turning everyday public utilities—like municipal streetlights—into high-speed, unconstitutional tracking nodes via Axon light posts and Flock cameras. Beyond the physical dragnet, the dialogue uncovers the insidious nature of “signature reduction,” a government strategy deploying private fronts and civilian operations to manipulate local communities and social media narratives. It is a stark warning about the technocratic panopticon being built in our backyards under the guise of public safety.

The ultimate defense against a digitized, omnipresent surveillance state is hyper-localization and parallel institutions. The episode concludes with a deep dive into actionable countermeasures, emphasizing that human “relationships of trust” will soon become the most valuable commodity we possess. By actively adopting privacy-focused technologies, utilizing physical cash and precious metals, and intentionally building local supply chains, individuals can effectively starve the uniparty apparatus. The true white pill is a fearless return to localized human connection—rendering the corporate-state dragnet obsolete through unyielding, decentralized non-compliance. (Length: 1:12:49)

Guest Links & Resources:

• Shannon Joy’s Website: shannonjoy.com

Support The Free Thought Project

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81 Years of Annihilation: We Must Demand An End to U.S. Militarism Once And For All

The vastness of the American Empire is built upon a mountain of civilian corpses and an ocean of innocent blood. Despite historical revisionism to the contrary, US imperialism remains the greatest threat to world peace.

It is an anniversary that almost goes unacknowledged in today’s day and age. One that, at nearly a century old, is fading further into memory while the consequences of it have left lasting scars on human history. 81 years ago this week, on August 6th and 9th of 1945, the United States government would carry out the most heinous and life altering act of terrorism the world has ever seen, dropping two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The immediate explosions resulted in the instantaneous death of approximately 80,000 people in Hiroshima. Days later the second bombing, this time targeting Nagasaki, would vaporize approximately 40,000 civilians, for a grand total of an estimated 120,000 people dead between the two cities combined, with tens of thousands more dying as a result of the aftermath.

In previous reporting, The Free Thought Project has directly addressed the prevailing false narratives regarding the atomic bombing of Japan, with articles such as Hiroshima At 80: Setting The Abhorrent Precedent For Atomic Warfare deconstructing the fabricated belief that such an attack was the only way to end the war without suffering excessive casualties. The analysis relies heavily on the testimony of top military officials of the time, including Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy, 1st Supreme Allied Commander of Europe and later 34th President of the United States General Dwight Eisenhower, Commander of the Pacific Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, and Commander of the Southwest Pacific Fleet General Douglas MacArthur, all of whom expressed disgust at the use of such weapons, insisting that doing so was not necessary to bring about an end to the war.

Likewise, in other reporting such as Justifying Evil: How Roosevelt Used The Pearl Harbor Myth As A Pretext For Atrocity, the disingenuous distortions surrounding the attacks of Pearl Harbor are similarly dissected and debunked, conclusively demonstrating how the narrative surrounding the incident was a carefully curated facade obstructing the fact that the Roosevelt administration deliberately provoked the attack as a manufactured pretext to enter the conflict, rather than the fairy tale of the Japanese “surprise attack” recounted in American textbooks.

Historical records also indicate that despite the myth of “saving lives”, in actuality the densely packed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were deliberately identified by the Targeting Committee to maximize civilian casualties as a means of fully demonstrating the deadly capabilities of America’s new weapon of mass destruction.

While the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are certainly the most well known instances of American mass murder against Japanese civilians, it is not the first of its kind. Only months earlier in March of 1945, under what is known as Operation Meetinghouse, the U.S. would carry out one of the most murderous and horrifying bombing campaigns in the history of the world. Hundreds of B-29 bombers descended over Tokyo, dropping more than 1,600 tons of incendiary bombs including napalm and white phosphorus over densely populated civilian areas, raining a terrifying hell fire from above that would kill over 100,000 civilians and displace over a million more from their homes as more than a quarter of the city was burned to the ground.

Just this attack alone resulted in a number of casualties almost equal to that of the annihilation of Hiroshima. But this campaign didn’t stop with Tokyo, over the course of the next several weeks the US would continue to carry out a ruthless carpet bombing campaign against nearly 60 Japanese cities, predominantly consisting of civilians, with many of them resulting in similar casualty rates. Ultimately, this terroristic firebombing of the Japanese mainland, often referred to as The Forgotten Holocaust, took exponentially more lives than the atomic bombings that took place only months later, exacerbating the nauseating body count by several magnitudes.

Of course, it hardly goes without mentioning that the horrors of American imperialism certainly did not start with the atrocities of the Second World War, with the very foundation of the nation itself built on the back of an indigenous genocide that took the lives of over 100 million native peoples, and four centuries of brutal slavery whose impacts can still be felt in American society today with the lingering shadow of institutionalized white supremacy.

The Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century, in all of its expansionist colonialist fervor wreaking havoc in Central America, is perhaps among the best examples of American imperialism predating the Second World War.

Even World War II itself, it can be argued, can be seen as a result of the ruthless tendencies of American exceptionalism when one considers that Adolf Hitler’s political career and the rise of the Third Reich was covertly funded and encouraged by Anglo-American financial elites and intelligence assets. Or that the psychotic dictator himself directly credited the American eugenics movement as his main inspiration for the Nazi extermination campaign that would lead to the Holocaust. A Holocaust, mind you, that Allied leaders were fully aware of years before publicly acknowledging it, and allowed to continue unabated.

But the kind of American imperialism that would come out of “The Last Great War” amid the creation of the military-industrial complex, the establishment of the United States as a global superpower at gunpoint, and the initiation of the surreptitious Cold War as a means to subvert any opposition to the emerging corporatist world order under the American unipolar hegemon, ushered in an era of unbridled brutality the likes of which the human species has never seen before.

As documented by author William Blum in his seminal book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, the decades since the Second World War were shaped by what amounts to a campaign of global conquest and terrorism on behalf of the American Empire, characterized by military interventions justified on false pretexts, and clandestine regime change operations the world over, all with the intentions of maintaining US global dominance.

Similarly, journalist Vincent Bevins documents in The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, the expansive history of American state backed terrorism employed to subdue any movement that would arise to challenge US dominance, whether they be leftist socialist / communist, or sovereign conservative nationalist in nature.

Beginning with a terror campaign of mass killings committed by US backed fascist paramilitaries in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1965 which resulted in the deaths of nearly a million people, “The Jakarta Method” would then be utilized throughout the world by the American government providing support to right-wing death squads acting as hired jackals for US imperialism ― Seen everywhere, from the backing of anti-Soviet jihadists in Afghanistan, to the heinous regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the horrific crimes of Operation Condor that led to the mass murder of thousands throughout South America.

Since systematizing mass murder as a staple of foreign policy at the tail end of World War II, large scale civilian deaths have become the accepted norm of US military interventionism, rather than an aberration.

Perhaps is this nowhere better documented than in the case of the Vietnam War, where not only the Vietnamese but the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia experienced the life altering brutality first hand. Under Operation Menu, Cambodia alone was turned into a destitute killing field beneath the death rain of 500,000 tons of explosive ordnance, resulting in an estimated body count in the hundreds of thousands, far surpassing the victims of the atomic bombs in Japan only two decades earlier.

Journalist and historian Nick Turse details in Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam utilizing declassified documents and extensive testimonies from veterans and survivors, how the mass targeting of civilians in Vietnam was a pervasive policy decision. Demonstrating that instances of mass murder such as the infamous My Lai massacre were far from rare, and sickeningly standard.

Atrocities in subsequent decades would follow a similar pattern, with drone bombings becoming a preferred method of civilian extermination, and ground forces including proxy armies under the control of US client regimes still carrying out indiscriminate death campaigns; such as the infamous 2017 Mosul massacre which saw the city pulverized to ruins and the streets literally running red with the blood of 40,000 dead civilians.

In Iraq alone, following two decades of illegal occupation, the death toll exceeds 2.4 million.

Even now, as the US maintains its unjust and illegal war against Iran, it continues to deliberately target civilian infrastructure again and again, with the most egregious of these attacks taking place in February of this year as American forces would bomb an Iranian elementary school, leading to the death of 168 children in the worst single civilian massacre committed by the US military since the Vietnam War.

The true extent of the body count due to American imperialism around the globe in all of its forms, from direct military interventions, to destabilization campaigns, regime change operations, proxy conflicts, and the mass suffering of economic warfare and ecocide attributed to US militarism is truly on such a vast scale, so astronomical, that it is quite literally impossible to accurately calculate, though we can rest assured that the death toll resides in the millions.

Yet despite this atrocious anniversary of annihilation against the people of Japan and the birth of the American military mass murder machine, there is another anniversary only recently passed that offers us an outlook to oppose perpetual death and destruction. The anniversary of JFK’s Peace Speech.

On June 10th, 1963 president John F. Kennedy gave what was one of his administrations defining speeches. Speaking to the graduating class of American University in Washington DC, the President would emphasize the utmost importance of a foreign policy rooted in peace, non aggression, understanding, and mutual cooperation.

The president would remark in part:

“I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”

Kennedy’s words are just as relevant today as they were 63 years ago. As a people, as a species, we have a choice, to either vehemently opposed the ravages of imperialism with all of our might and put our efforts towards creating a better future, or to sit back and wait for our very civilization to be destroyed by the maniacal machinations of mad men.

I, for one, choose peace.

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ICE: From A Rogue Agency To A Murderous Terrorist Organization

The wave of violence committed by ICE officers only continues to increase, while the agency implements new changes against transparency and accountability, and top officials blatantly threaten more bloodshed on American streets.

Here at The Free Thought Project, since January of 2025 we have been tracking the progression of abuses committed by agents of the Immigration and Custom Enforcement across the United States amid the agency’s weaponization by the Trump administration.

Part one of this series documented how Trump’s immigration crackdown served to empower the police state, using immigration enforcement as a false pretext advancing a campaign to target and intimidate ethnic communities, erode domestic civil liberties, constitutional protections, and erect a biometric surveillance panopticon under the guise of border security.

Our follow up piece in October, ICE: The Rogue Agency Terrorizing America’s Streets illlustrated several instances of brutality and rights violations committed by ICE officials, including raids on civilian apartment blocks utilizing Black Hawk helicopters, the brutalization of citizens, and the deployment of chemical agents on nonviolent civilian observers.

In ICE: The Rogue Agency’s Wave of Terror Continues, we subsequently exemplified a slew of even more abuses that took place in the months following the previous report, including the summary execution of an American citizen, Renee Nicole Good, as well as various other attacks against schoolchildren, teenagers, and the elderly as the agents would deliberately target vulnerable populations.

The escalations of brutality would only continue, and not long after Good’s murder another American citizen, 37-year-old Alex Pretti, would be executed in the streets of Minneapolis after attempting to protect a female peaceful protester being assaulted by ICE officers.

The deaths of Good, Pretti, and countless others constitute a new normal taking shape in Trump’s America, one where these hyperviolent agents of the state are given carte blanche to brutalize with impunity, and the Department of Homeland Security will retroactively rewrite the narrative to place blame on the deceased.

Meanwhile, more recent reporting from TFTP has also documented the scope of abuse and human rights violations taking place within ICE detention facilities across the country, most of which have a predominant inmate population with no criminal record. Specifically, investigations found high rates of inmate abuse, excessive force, cruel and inhumane treatment, and a skyrocketing suicide rate among detainees primarily driven by mistreatment and neglect.

On June 15th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a new set of guidelines rolling back standards for their detention facilities that empowers even further exploitation by the private prison industry behind the recent expansion of ICE camps.

Dishearteningly, the bloodshed has not stopped, and the agency only appears to be brazenly emboldened to continue their vicious rampage throughout American communities.

In recent weeks, two more individuals have been senselessly killed only days apart from one another.

On July 7th, ICE agents in Houston, Texas, fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52 year old father of three who had been living in the United States for 35 years with no criminal record, after conducting a traffic stop following an increased surge of street opperations prompted by the Trump administration’s demand for a higher quota of arrests.

The agents claim that upon the stop Salgado Araujo attempted to use his vehicle as a deadly weapon and ram into them. One of the officers fired through his passenger side window, hitting him in the torso. They would then drag the wounded man from his vehicle, placing him in handcuffs as he lay dying and bleeding out in the street.

Three other men who were passengers in the van at the time of the killing were also taken into custody and are now being held in a detention facility awaiting deportation proceedings.

According to the Texas Tribune, witness statements from two of the three passengers dispute DHS’s claim that Araujo attempted to ram the agents with his vehicle. In fact, all witness statements indicate that there were no agents in front or behind the van at the time of the killing, instead the officers fired into the passenger side window after it had been put in park. There was never any risk to the agent’s safety.

DHS has a documented history of lying and fabricating details following shootings by ICE agents.

Only days later on July 13th in Biddeford, Maine, ICE agents shot and killed 26 year old Joan Sebastian Guerrero. After initially claiming that Guerrero attempted to weaponize his vehicle against agents who then fired in self defense, DHS has since shifted the narrative, drastically changing the story to instead claim Guerrero was attempting to flee and agents fired into the vehicle “fearing for public safety”.

One may be forgiven for logically assuming that discharging a firearm on a public street at a moving vehicle in and of itself constitutes a threat to public safety.

Reports have confirmed that neither Lorenzo Salgado Araujo or Joan Sebastian Guerrero were the intended targets of ICE operations, making their murders at the hands of ICE officials that much more damning.

What’s more, an exclusive investigation by The Associated Press found that the agent identified as the gunman responsible for the death of Guerrero, David Brouillette, has a lifelong history of violent behavior that should have disqualified him from employment with the agency.

According to court documents and statements from relatives, Brouillette, a 37 year old Army veteran, has a history of psychiatric issues accompanied with multiple instances of physical violence and abuse, including against his two ex wives and teenage daughter. Another family member confirmed that Brouillette was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a child, describing him as “extremely mentally ill”.

Brouillette served in the United States Army deployed to Afghanistan from May 2012 to February 2013 as a Human Intelligence Collector, an MOS commonly associated with acts of torture and mistreatment of detainees.

Speaking to the AP, Brouillette’s relative stated:

“Afghanistan destroyed him — trained him to be a killing monster, a machine. They took someone who was extremely mentally ill and turned him into a killing machine.”

These recent incidents following a rapid surge of hirings at ICE raise legitimate concerns of just how many of these trigger happy lunatics have been recruited into the agency.

But rather than simply being an issue of poorly vetted gunmen on the streets, recent statements from agency officials demonstrate that ICE’s violent nature is systemic to the highest reaches of the institution.

Following increased criticisms, “Border Czar” Tom Homan would take it upon himself to make what some could characterize as terroristic threats against the American public, and marginalized communities specifically.

Speaking with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Homan would brazenly declare that unless critics of ICE’s tactics “shut their mouths” there would be more bloodshed.

While Holman’s comments can be seen as deflecting blame for the actions of his agents to the constitutionally protected speech of those who criticize their heavy handed tactics, the implied threat is clear: Either submit to these armed agents terrorizing your community, or even more will die.

It is not the place for enforcers of the state to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It is worth reminding that even in the event that an individual targeted by these agents is in the country illegally, being undocumented is a civil misdemeanor, not a capital crime worthy of a death sentence.

Homan’s threat and the continued escalations of violence by ICE on America’s streets is only further compounded by an increasing lack of transparency and accountability, as reports allege that a new guidance issued to Immigration and Customs Enforcement claims the FBI will no longer investigate confrontations involving ICE agents. While DHS and the DOJ released a joint statement claiming that the change would not take place, it begs the question why then the guidance was issued at all?

This comes amid a new report from the ACLU documenting over 1200 instances of actions by ICE that demonstrate a large scale of civil rights violations committed by ICE officers and the police forces it has deputized, ranging from racial profiling to school lockdowns.

Naureen Shah, one of the authors of the report, commented saying that these killings were part of a “much, much bigger pattern, where ICE agents and the agents who are working with them have threatened to use force and used force in a way we’ve never seen from these agencies, in their history.”

The report concluded that the use of violence and force has now become the new default tool for ICE officers.

When armed agents of the state act with reckless impunity, using violence as a tool of intimidation and repression against peaceful communities, there is only one word to describe such actions. Terrorism.

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Out-Building the Control Grid: How Privacy Infrastructure Is Neutralizing the State

While politicians and central bankers scramble to deploy total financial control grid mechanisms, a parallel network of uncompromised, privacy-first infrastructure is quietly rendering their coercion obsolete.

The global surveillance state is expanding at a terrifying pace, but beneath the surface of their algorithmic control grid, a quiet mutiny is brewing. For years, the narrative has been intentionally bleak—central bank digital currencies looming on the horizon, cash being systematically criminalized, and every transaction scrutinized by unease-inducing government bureaucracies. Yet, the counter-surveillance movement is experiencing an unprecedented surge of momentum, arming peaceful individuals with the technological weaponry needed to make state coercion completely obsolete. We are not just resisting; we are out-building them, creating a parallel economy that operates entirely outside the boundaries of their permission-based systems.

The urgency of this shift becomes glaringly obvious when you look at how the establishment has poisoned the current crypto landscape. The primary battleground for everyday people seeking stability has been stablecoins, assets marketed as decentralized escape hatches but built as weaponized corporate honeypots. According to the latest figures, a staggering 9,649 addresses have been frozen, locking up over $4.53 billion in assets without a single judicial warrant. The exponential surge in these bans since October 2017 proves that centralized stablecoins are merely an extension of the legacy banking system, allowing the state to freeze your life savings with a keystroke if you express the wrong political opinion.

The solution to this vulnerability is already operational within the Zano privacy ecosystem through fUSD, a confidential asset engineered specifically to be completely immune to being frozen. Because it lacks a central authority or an intentional corporate backdoor, no bureaucrat can blacklist a user’s funds or halt a transaction. It functions as true digital cash, honoring the non-aggression principle by ensuring that your wealth cannot be stolen or manipulated by third parties.

Beyond protecting static wealth, the movement is actively tackling the structural vulnerabilities of blockchain networks themselves. Proof of Work mining, while foundational, has inadvertently created a centralized dependency on the industrial energy grid. Miners are perpetually forced to liquidate their block rewards just to cover massive monthly utility bills, creating a continuous source of downward market pressure. Zano is systematically eliminating this structural weakness by transitioning to Zenith, a pure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism built on the privacy architecture of Zarcanum.

When Zenith goes live on the mainnet, it will entirely dismantle the necessity for industrial mining and the forced selling that accompanies it. Zenith obliterates the current dynamic by completely axing the computational arms race in favor of pure Proof of Stake. Network security becomes mathematically anchored by the participants who actually hold the asset, dropping energy consumption to near zero. This eliminates the structural necessity to liquidate roughly 262,800 ZANO annually just to pay the electric company, keeping the value secured within the privacy ecosystem.

What’s more, Zenith keeps staking balances and histories completely confidential. Impressively, it also simultaneously slashes block times to 15 seconds, delivering secure confirmations in under a minute and a half without sacrificing security.

As authoritarian regulators attempt to enforce a financial quarantine by forcing centralized exchanges to delist privacy-centric assets, the counter-surveillance movement is deploying infrastructure designed to bypass these choke points entirely. Zano’s upcoming Hard Fork 6 introduces Gateway Addresses, an account-based address type specifically designed to let decentralized exchanges and bridges integrate seamlessly without the heavy engineering friction that previously blocked them. This milestone enables the launch of Bridgeless, a completely non-custodial mechanism allowing native ZANO to move to chains like Ethereum, Solana, and TON without relying on a centralized intermediary or creating a single point of failure.

But interacting with decentralized finance on transparent chains like Ethereum still exposes your financial history to the world. Every swap, loan, and yield strategy is broadcasted to chain analysis firms and three-letter agencies. Zano’s upcoming Execution Layer dismantles this surveillance apparatus by bringing an EVM sidechain directly into their privacy ecosystem. Standard Solidity contracts will run unmodified, meaning developers can launch lending markets and automated market makers using bridged ZANO for gas, shielding decentralized finance from the prying eyes of the State.

In other words, standard smart contract platforms act like a public glass bank where any government agent can watch exactly how you invest, borrow, or trade your money. Zano’s Execution Layer pulls a heavy curtain over that glass bank. It allows developers to build the exact same popular financial tools—like lending platforms or automated trading pools—but keeps all the details completely hidden from public view, using ZANO to fuel the system privately.

This war for individual sovereignty extends far beyond the financial ledger and into the digital spaces where we communicate. Public forums and crypto communities are heavily targeted by state-sponsored actors, bots, and sophisticated phishing campaigns engineered to erode trust and derail voluntary organization. To neutralize this psychological warfare, the ecosystem has launched the official Zano Forum, utilizing a secure on-chain alias verification system. Members can definitively prove their authenticity with a verified badge tied directly to their blockchain identity without revealing a single shred of real-world personal data. 

The state relies entirely on coercion, deception, and the weaponization of financial architecture to maintain control, but through the deliberate deployment of uncompromised, privacy-first technology, the tools to opt out completely are officially in our hands.

There are two paths you can take: stay on the same path and march off a cliff into a total surveillance and control grid, or choose freedom and privacy. Which will it be?

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As the Right Panics Over ‘Marxists,’ Their Own Leaders Are Openly Seizing the Means of Production

Politicians are using the engineered threat of a Marxist takeover to keep Americans paralyzed with fear, effectively blinding the public to the bipartisan corporate-state cabal that is actively seizing equity in private industries, throttling the free market, and executing top-down central planning.

House Speaker Mike Johnson recently took to social media to broadcast an apocalyptic warning, screaming that “the barbarians are inside the gate” and claiming Congress is locked in a life-or-death battle to stop America from sliding down a “dark road of death to communism.” It is the classic, time-tested political playbook used by the establishment for decades to keep the populace paralyzed and compliant. They invent a terrifying, existential boogeyman, claim they are the only thing standing between the voters and total destruction, and hope nobody notices that their own team is running the exact same racket.

This latest iteration of the Red Scare, spearheaded by Donald Trump and his neoconservative cheerleaders, is a masterclass in psychological projection designed to keep the masses blind to a deeply uncomfortable truth. The real threat to economic freedom in America isn’t some foreign Marxist vanguard hiding in the shadows. It is the bipartisan, corporate-state cabal that has already replaced voluntary exchange with top-down central planning while wrapping it tightly in an American flag.

While the political Right whips its base into a frenzy over the creeping threat of left-wing Marxism, the very same “America First” politicians are quietly executing a hostile takeover of the free market. The State operates on an inherent double standard, unapologetically claiming that it is illegal for you to commit murder or theft, while it continuously wages wars that slaughter tens of thousands of innocents and extorts half your income through taxation. That staggering hypocrisy is currently on full display in the realm of economics, where the establishment campaigns on capitalism while ruling as command-economy despots.

During his first term, Trump frequently bypassed market mechanisms entirely, using protectionist tariffs to pick economic winners and losers before doling out a staggering $23 billion in taxpayer-funded farm bailouts to clean up the resulting economic carnage. A comprehensive study by the Cato Institute reveals that the federal government now spends over $181 billion annually on corporate welfare. This massive redistribution of wealth has only grown exponentially under both the Biden and Trump 2.0 administrations, forcing everyday taxpayers to underwrite corporate failures and subsidize favored industries.

The reality of the current administration is a clear line toward what can only be described as corporatism — the merger of corporate and state — marking a radical break from any semblance of a free market. Since taking office in 2025, the administration has weaponized the federal government to directly insert itself into corporate boardrooms. In a move that would make Benito Mussolini jealous, they have abandoned temporary bailouts for proactive, creeping socialism, using taxpayer funds to acquire financial equity stakes in 28 private companies over the past year and a half.

In June 2025, Trump issued an executive order allowing Japan’s Nippon Steel to purchase U.S. Steel, but only in exchange for a “golden share” that gave the president extensive, centralized veto power over the company’s strategic operations. By August, the administration went even further, funneling billions in CHIPS Act funding to take a massive 10 percent equity stake in Intel. This unprecedented move made the federal government the single largest shareholder of the storied American semiconductor giant.

They pulled the exact same maneuver with MP Materials in July and Lithium America in September, forging a chilling alliance between the State and private oligopolists. When a government seizes partial ownership of private industry to dictate its operations, that is not economic freedom. It is the textbook definition of a centrally planned, state-run economy, engineered by the very people claiming to fight it.

This egregious federal intervention is compounded by the administration’s disastrous trade policies, which function as nothing more than a massive, hidden tax on the working class. In April 2025, Trump celebrated his self-proclaimed “Liberation Day” by jacking up tariffs to historic highs, imposing unilateral import taxes on dozens of countries. The Federal Reserve’s own data reveals that these tariffs have been particularly devastating for small businesses, forcing them to raise prices on consumers while facing brutal revenue declines.

Because the entire American working class has been methodically crushed by this exact brand of bipartisan corporatism, many of them are running into the arms of what they think is the opposition. They are finding refuge in places like the Democratic Socialists Party. And who can blame them?

When people look at a rigged economy plagued by runaway inflation, unpayable housing costs, and artificial monopolies protected by the state, they are repeatedly gaslit by corporate media that lies to them, saying that this nightmare is “free-market capitalism.” Because the establishment has so thoroughly conflated state-sponsored cronyism with actual freedom, struggling Americans of all ages are tragically lured by left-wing socialists who promise to punish the corrupt elites. They are completely unaware that the socialist solution of expanding government power simply feeds the very beast that destroyed their prosperity in the first place.

The hard truth that both the Left and Right refuse to admit is that state worship is the ultimate religion of Washington, regardless of which party holds the precious. We have to stop waiting for a political savior who campaigns on liberty but governs through executive coercion, massive taxation, and aggressive central planning. True freedom does not look like politicians hoarding equity in tech companies or taxing the populace into submission under the guise of national security.

It looks like voluntaryism, where peaceful individuals interact, trade, and build communities entirely free from state coercion and the implicit threat of violence. Instead of participating in this rigged, two-party game of state worship, the path forward requires us to systematically opt out and build parallel structures. You can read more at The Free Thought Project about how to utilize decentralized tools to starve the State of its illegitimate power and finally reclaim your independence.

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Paramedics Who Fatally Injected Elijah McClain Have Their Convictions Overturned

In yet another example of systemic corruption, the former EMTs responsible for administering a fatal dose of ketamine to Elijah McClain face no real accountability.

Aurora, CO — In August of 2019, 23 year old Elijah McClain was walking home in his neighborhood after just purchasing a bottle of iced tea. He had committed no crime. Despite this, one of his neighbors called the police due to the fact that he was wearing a mask, which he reportedly regularly did due to being anemic. Shortly thereafter, Aurora police arrived on the scene and initiated contact with McClain, claiming that he “matched the description” of a suspect.

Within moments the officers unjustly initiated force against McClain, later attempting to justify their actions by claiming he attempted to reach for one of their guns although this is disputed by body camera evidence. As the scuffle ensued officers took McClain to the ground, placing him in an illegal chokehold maneuver restricting his air flow. As McClain struggled under the strangulation of his assailants, violently vomiting, he attempted multiple times to inform them that he couldn’t breathe, yet still they persisted. Eventually, officers called the Aurora Fire Department to the scene, where upon arrival two paramedics, Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec, injected McClain with 500mg of ketamine, a strong sedative.

After being choked out and forcibly drugged for committing no crime, McClain went into cardiac arrest twice while on the way to the hospital, leading to his death.

By all accounts Elijah McClain was an upstanding member of his community, a massage therapist and self taught violinist who volunteered at animal shelters playing music for adoptive dogs and cats. He had never even received a speeding ticket in his life. 

In his last few words on this planet, McClain could be heard saying, “I’m an introvert. I’m just different. That’s all. I’m so sorry. I have no gun. I don’t do that stuff. I don’t do any fighting. Why are you attacking me? I don’t even kill flies! I don’t eat meat! But I don’t judge people, I don’t judge people who do eat meat. Forgive me … I’m so sorry.”

In 2021, nearly a year and a half after his murder, an independent investigation commissioned by the city of Aurora found that police had no legal basis to stop McClain, much less choke and drug him to death. Furthermore, the investigation found police deliberately defrauded initial inquiries in an attempt to exonerate the officers.

Now, it has been reported that Cooper and Cichuniec, the two paramedics responsible for giving McClain the lethal injection, have had their convictions overturned.

According to the Atlanta Black Star, the two former paramedics had their homicide convictions overturned last week over a legal technicality.

The report states:

The technicality that led to the reversal may seem minor on the surface. It centered on the judge’s instructions to the jury, which directed them to evaluate the paramedics’ actions based on what a “reasonable person” would have done.

The appellate court ruled the jury should instead have been instructed to consider what a “reasonable paramedic” would have done in the same situation.

The paramedics injected McClain with 500 milligrams of ketamine without checking his pulse or vital signs, relying on police claims that he was experiencing “excited delirium.”

That raises a key question: Would a reasonable paramedic have been more cautious than an average person with no medical training?

Would a reasonable paramedic have conducted a more thorough evaluation, especially considering police officers are not medically trained to diagnose conditions like excited delirium — a term that several medical associations have since rejected as pseudoscience?

Cooper and Cichuniec were initially sentenced for criminally negligent homicide in 2023, with Cooper being sentenced to a mere 14 months under a work release program that allowed him to leave during the day, and Cichuniec, who administered the fatal dose receiving a five year prison sentence only to have it reduced to 10 months by a lower court judge in 2024. Cichuniec’s conviction of second-degree assault remains in place.

In a statement on Instagram McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, wrote of the decision:

“The Colorado Court of Appeals has made a decision concerning the former paramedics who injected my son Elijah McClain with a tranquilizer and who also helped the Aurora Police Department kill my son on August 24, 2019.

I am not surprised by the overwhelming lack of accountability in the court systems. I am not surprised by the disregard for human rights in the American States. I am not surprised by the denial of true justice for American citizens at the hands of government institutions that allow criminal behavior in their police agencies. They are corrupt and cowardly.

Unfortunately the murder of Elijah McClain serves as one of the prime examples of the systemic abuse of present day policing led by racial profiling, the disproportionate targeting and treatment that African Americans face in the American police state, and the lack of accountability for police violence enabled by a corrupt justice system that is so frequently the arbiter of injustice.

This is further exemplified by the sadistic behavior of the Aurora police. Shortly after McClain’s murder, officers would return to the scene of his death, taking photos of themselves reenacting the incident for their own sick entertainment.

In June of 2020, Aurora riot police violently attacked a peaceful protest held in the memory of Elijah McClain.

The three officers who murdered Elijah McClain faced hardly no accountability for their actions. Officers Nathan Woodyard and Jason Rosenblatt were acquitted on all charges, while officer Randy Roedema was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and third-degree assault, sentenced to only 14 months in jail with work release eligibility and four years probation.

As the officers who murdered McClain walked free, the activists who organized protests seeking accountability would face decades in prison for daring to challenge the institutional corruption of the American police state.

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Three Stories You Missed While The White House Parades The UFC On The Front Lawn

While the public’s attention is drawn towards pointless theatrics, here are three important stories that actually deserve attention.

The second century Roman satirical poet Decimus Junius Juvenalus once famously said “Give them bread and circuses, and they will never revolt”. An astute observation of how the Roman populace became complacent in the face of abuses by their government, placated with free grain and spectacles rather than exercising their civic duties.

This phrase has been oft repeated in the centuries since, applied to numerous governments across the world. But perhaps nowhere is it more prevalent than in present-day America.

In the lead up to the much anticipated 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation, and in the midst of a wave of the worst presidential scandals in over 100 years, the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to shift attention away from the disastrous Iran War and the fact that The sitting president of the United States is implicated hundreds of times in the sexual exploitation and abuse of minors.

Whether it be by continuing the limited hangout of selective UFO disclosure, or by hosting the Ultimate Fighting Championship on the White House front lawn in some sort of weird hyper-masculine MAGA charade, the political theatrics only continue to intensify.

That being said, here are a few worthwhile stories that actually matter.

Pro-2A Pushback In Virginia

In March, the Free Thought Project reported on a massive anti gun crusade being pushed by legislators in Virginia under the new Democrat administration of former CIA analyst Abigail Spanberger. Among the myriad of infringements to Virginia’s Second Amendment rights were proposals seeking civil liability for firearms manufacturers, expansions of the already blatantly unconstitutional red flag laws, attempts to prohibit 3D printed firearms, the implementation of gun buyback programs, ending the right to open carry, and an outright ban on so-called “assault weapons”.

The most egregious of these, the “assault weapons” ban, was signed into law on May 14th, 2026. 

Thankfully, however, this callous disregard for the Constitution was immediately challenged, with several gun rights groups including the Second Amendment Foundation as well as the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and the Virginia Citizens Defense League have all filed lawsuits in response to the new legislation.

Additionally, at least four Virginia prosecutors have publicly come out in opposition to the new legislation, signaling their intent to refuse to enforce the law. According to the Washington Times:

Prosecutors in Spotsylvania, Smyth, Powhatan and Pulaski counties argued that it violates Second Amendment protections, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022.

Religious Liberty Remains Under Threat

Under the current administration, spearheading their particular brand of technocratic techno-fascism, Christian nationalist ideology promoted by the evangelical right has intensified exponentially. The extremists of this administration, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others, continue to push a version of Christianity that insists upon ahistorical biblical literalism and a kind of theocratic influence over government policy that presents a persistent threat to civil rights.

In October, The Free Thought Project authored a report on the rise of Christian nationalism highlighting a series of recent instances of attacks or harassment against individuals and groups of other faiths. 

Unfortunately in the months since, the sentiment has only grown. The recent Rededicate 250 rally in Washington DC, attended by aforementioned figures the likes of Speaker Johnson, Secretary Hegseth, Secretary Rubio and others continued to assert blatantly pseudohistorical narratives of the nation’s founding, promoting the false claim of an exclusively Christian fundamentalist national foundation — Despite founding fathers the likes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison expressly stating the opposite in their own words during their lifetime.

Other speakers at the rally would continue to promote the idea of “spiritual warfare”, a concept within the evangelical right that positions Judeo-Christian fundamentalism as the one and only faith of America, at odds with all other religious beliefs and determined to suppress any other such beliefs to establish cultural dominance. The fact that so many members of this administration openly espouse such views hostile to individual liberty and the principles of pluralism should be considered a great concern.

ICE Abuses Skyrocket

Since the Trump administration began using Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the broader Department of Homeland Security as his political attack dogs to chill political dissent and enact a campaign of racial and ethnic cleansing through American cities, The Free Thought Project has remained vigilant in documenting the abuses of ICE/CBP officers.

Our two previous reports, the first from October 2025 (ICE: The Rogue Agency Terrorizing America’s Streets) and the latter from January 2026 (ICE: The Rogue Agency’s Wave of Terror Continues) highlighted dozens of accounts of abuse committed against American citizens and immigrants alike by heavy handed agents enacting a campaign of brutality against America’s marginalized communities.

Despite the harsh rhetoric and aggressive approach against America’s immigrant population, official data reveals that the overwhelming majority of those detained have no criminal record.

Recent reports have shed light on escalations of abuses and inhumane treatment inside ICE detention centers. Data shows that 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE in two decades as 32 people died in custody. Notably, a new investigation from the Associated Press has revealed suicide rates among detainees are rising at an alarming rate, primarily driven by mistreatment or neglect in the facilities.

Numerous instances of abuse have been reported taking place in facilities throughout the country. A recent report from The Intercept exposed excessive uses of force and cruelty against detainees in Newark New Jersey’s Delaney Hall Detention Facility as a retribution for ongoing hunger strikes protesting the facilities inhumane treatment.

Elsewhere, several detainees and rights groups have filed lawsuits against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security and other relevant bodies for rampant human rights violations at Camp East Montana, the nation’s largest ICE detention facility converted from a World War II concentration camp on the grounds of Fort Bliss, Texas.

Meanwhile, in California, inspections found that numerous facilities in the state were in violation of basic standards of care, guilty of cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable conditions.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, a watchdog office intended to safeguard detainees from abuse and address grievances, was abolished by the Trump administration earlier this year.

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Get the FLOCK Out! — How and Why You Should Resist the AI-Powered Cameras that are Destroying Our Privacy

As corporate profiteers rake in billions under the guise of public safety, their vast network of automated license plate readers is quietly transforming the basic right to peaceful travel into an inescapable, taxpayer-funded surveillance dragnet.

Every time you pull out of your driveway, you probably still harbor the illusion that you are a free individual going about your business. The reality is far more grim: your vehicle is bleeding data into a massive, unregulated dragnet the moment you pass the neighborhood entrance. Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) and Flock cameras have infested our communities, quietly transforming the American landscape into an open-air panopticon.

You are no longer just a traveler; you are a heavily tracked data point in a system designed to treat every peaceful citizen as a suspect. The apologists for the police state are always quick to play the devil’s advocate when these surveillance grids face public scrutiny. They will breathlessly point out that ALPRs do sometimes help law enforcement track the plates of a stolen car or a violent suspect.

Police departments and the corporate salesmen hawking this gear parade these isolated victories in front of gullible city councils to justify millions in taxpayer funding. We are constantly told that solving a fraction of property crimes requires us to surrender our basic human dignity and privacy. But this statist narrative entirely ignores the tyrannical caveat that makes the whole operation illegitimate.

For every single actual criminal apprehended, the daily movements of tens of thousands of peaceful, innocent individuals are meticulously logged, tracked, and stored in massive databases. You have committed no crime, yet the State knows exactly when you dropped your kids off at school, which doctor you visited, and what political rally you attended. It is a preemptive strike by a paranoid ruling class against the very people they claim to serve.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, these automated systems do much more than just read numbers on a bumper. They capture the time, date, and precise coordinates of every passing vehicle, storing this highly sensitive location data for months or even years. This allows law enforcement to retroactively hit “rewind” on anyone’s life without ever setting foot inside a courtroom to obtain a warrant.

The ACLU has thoroughly documented how this dragnet operates, revealing that the overwhelming majority of people swept up in these databases are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Despite this glaring fact, the data is pooled and shared across thousands of jurisdictions, essentially creating a national tracking system operated by private entities.

Taxpayers are literally being extorted to fund the infrastructure of their own surveillance. Nefarious corporate groups like Flock Safety are getting extraordinarily wealthy off this unconstitutional model. They sell fear to local politicians and walk away with lucrative contracts, deepening their network of unlawful data collection as we have consistently covered here at The Free Thought Project. The public is forced at gunpoint to foot the bill for a corporate-state partnership that actively violates their inherent rights.

This panopticon is being built piecemeal through thousands of localized contracts quietly approved by city councils, police departments, and even private homeowner associations. Flock Safety alone has embedded itself in over 6,000 municipalities, operating a staggering network of more than 80,000 cameras nationwide to indiscriminately log the movements of peaceful individuals.

The financial windfall generated by this unconstitutional dragnet is nothing short of extortionary. Weaponizing the public’s fear of crime, Flock Safety has ballooned into an $8.4 billion empire, siphoning massive amounts of wealth directly from the taxpayers they are constantly monitoring. With local governments shelling out up to $3,500 per camera annually, this corporate-state partnership raked in over $300 million in recurring revenue by early 2025. The public is literally being forced under the threat of state violence to finance their own digital incarceration, enriching corporate entities while fundamental rights are casually discarded.

To grasp the true, dystopian scale of this operation, consider that these private systems are performing over 20 billion scans of vehicles across the country every single month. They have successfully privatized the police state, transforming the basic, unalienable right to travel into an endless and highly profitable data extraction industry. We are witnessing the systematic abolition of privacy in real-time, orchestrated by corporate profiteers and rubber-stamped by local politicians who view citizens as nothing more than trackable data points. No wonder these people want to build hundreds more data centers despite already having more data centers than the next 14 top countries combined.

As with any tyrannical measure ostensibly designed for your safety but in reality a giant dragnet to enslave you, the state must resort to any means to justify it. The standard defense from the establishment is always the same: you have no legal expectation or perception of privacy in public. It is true that if you walk outside, a neighbor or a passing police officer can plainly see you. However, the idea that the State possesses the legitimate authority to constantly keep us under their watchful eye should shock the conscience of any free person.

There is a monumental difference between being casually observed in passing and being subjected to algorithmic, permanent surveillance by a government apparatus. Under even the most basic principles of liberty, tracking and building a digital dossier on a peaceful individual who has harmed no one is an inherently aggressive, hostile act. It violates the core tenets of a voluntary society by treating existence itself as a suspicious activity requiring constant monitoring.

The state only exists through coercion, and this pervasive camera network is just the latest technological weapon used to enforce absolute compliance. We do not have to accept this digital cage as a permanent condition of modern life. Communities across the country are finally waking up to the fact that the power to dismantle this infrastructure lies in local, decentralized pushback.

Resistance requires dragging this information into the light and targeting the local politicians who blindly approve these insidious contracts. We have the ability to demand the removal of these cameras and to flatly refuse compliance with a system that treats peaceful travel as a crime waiting to happen. To take real action against this creeping tyranny, citizens are currently organizing the National Week of Action Against ALPRs, providing the exact blueprint needed to help push this dystopian technology out of our neighborhoods for good.

It’s high time we deflock these tyrants. Visit Deflock.org to see just how massive this network of privacy-destroying digital snoops has become and learn how you can stop them.

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The Great “Red Hat” Psyop: How the Establishment Co-Opted MAGA

They promised to “Drain the Swamp” and end the “Forever Wars,” but from cabinet picks to new military interventions, the MAGA movement has been successfully co-opted by the neoconservative uniparty, with the help of a spineless influencer class that convinced the base to love the boot simply because it was painted red.

The official narrative spoon-fed to the masses is that the MAGA movement is a grassroots, anti-establishment rebellion aimed at dismantling the uniparty, ending forever wars, and draining the swamp. We are told day in and day out that the system is terrified of this populist uprising, but when we strip away the partisan cheerleading, we are witnessing one of the most successful psychological operations in modern political history. The establishment didn’t defeat the populist uprising; they bought it, rebranded it with a red hat, and used it to manufacture consent for the exact neoconservative, state-expanding policies the movement initially swore to destroy.

If a Democrat had expanded the surveillance state, spiked the national debt, unilaterally banned firearms accessories, and filled their cabinet with Wall Street mega-donors and war hawks, the right would have revolted in the streets. Because there is an “R” next to the name, however, they cheer and beg for more. The state is not shrinking in the slightest. It is merely under new management, and the boot on your neck has simply been painted a different color.

If you want to understand how a purportedly anti-war movement was so easily hijacked by the establishment, look no further than the grifter class of MAGA influencers who actively manufactured consent for the pivot. Social media personalities like Catturd and Gunther Eagleman—alongside prominent digital operatives like Benny Johnson and Jack Posobiec—spent the entirety of the campaign posturing as staunch non-interventionists. They loudly decried the military-industrial complex and the endless funding of foreign proxy wars. Yet, the moment the administration changed hands and the military crosshairs shifted toward sovereign nations like Iran, these same influencers entirely abandoned their supposed principles. They are now openly salivating over the prospect of flattening a sovereign nation, cheering on the exact same neoconservative warmongering they built their alternative-media brands opposing. It raises a glaring, uncomfortable question: are these digital operatives simply spineless sycophants, or are they quietly being paid to parrot the uniparty’s new, blood-soaked marching orders?

The sheer hypocrisy of this digital vanguard is especially sickening when contrasted with those who actually held the line. Before his brutal assassination, Charlie Kirk was one of the most outspoken voices against the neoconservative push for a war with Iran. Regardless of where one stood on his broader politics, Kirk used his massive platform to fiercely oppose the very foreign entanglements the current administration is now aggressively pursuing. Had he not been killed, there is little doubt he would be standing firmly against this blatant betrayal of the anti-war platform today. Instead, the influencers who rushed to fill the void have chosen the path of least resistance. They now operate as state-sanctioned PR firms for an aggressive military agenda simply because the bombs are authorized by a president wearing a red tie. By transforming genuine anti-interventionist sentiment into rabid partisan cheerleading, these grifters provided the ideological cover necessary for the state to march the country right back into the endless wars the base initially voted to escape.

Consider the campaign promise to end the forever wars, pull out of foreign entanglements, and put “America First.” The empirical reality of the administration’s foreign policy is a direct continuation of the military-industrial complex’s most aggressive ambitions. The administration has stacked its ranks with hawkish neoconservatives and previous “never-Trumpers,” such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and even Lindsey Graham, all of whom prioritize regime change and unyielding military support for Israel over domestic liberty.

Dropping bombs and violently coercing the US taxpayer to fund a global military empire in the name of a foreign country is a blatant violation of human freedom and constitutional limits. The state continues to extort the working class to fund foreign militaries and interventions, regardless of the populist rhetoric spilling from Trump’s podium. This is not America First; it is the empire first, Israel first, Lockheed Martin first, and it is funded by the silent theft of the American citizen.

Then there is the great financial illusion sold to the public: the promise of prying the country back from the donor class, creating a “Department of Government Efficiency,” and reversing the debt crisis. The donor class hasn’t been ousted; they are literally running the administration. The appointment of Wall Street insiders like hedge fund CEO Scott Bessent as Secretary of the Treasury and Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick as Commerce Secretary proves the system is functioning exactly as intended for the corporate elite.

You cannot reverse a debt crisis while simultaneously increasing defense budgets and proposing massive federal subsidy programs. The national debt has now surged past $38.9 trillion, increasing by trillions in just the last year, while the supposed fiscally conservative administration holds the reins. Bureaucratic theater like government efficiency commissions completely ignores the root cause of the financial rot, which is the Federal Reserve’s fiat currency printing press and the unabated spending of the uniparty.

Domestically, the promises of prosecuting corrupt intelligence officials and restoring the rule of law have morphed into the construction of a domestic panopticon. The “Deep State” isn’t being arrested; they are being given new directives and increased funding to operate under a different partisan banner. You cannot execute the promised mass deportations without constructing a massive, militarized domestic police state that operates with zero regard for constitutional due process.

Giving the executive branch the unconstitutional authority to mobilize militarized forces domestically violates the basic tenets of liberty. It fundamentally bolsters the very federal law enforcement agencies that spy on, harass, and coerce American citizens daily. The intelligence apparatus isn’t being dismantled; its crosshairs are simply being shifted to target the administration’s new political enemies while the surveillance state grows stronger.

This regulatory theater extends into the administration’s domestic policies, like the push to “Make America Healthy Again” while leaving the FDA, CDC, and EPA completely intact. Merely changing the vanguard of regulatory capture does nothing to end the state’s monopoly on health directives or protect medical freedom. Bemoaning a rigged voting system while actively participating in a rigged, two-party theater only serves to validate the state’s illegitimate authority over peaceful individuals.

The ultimate empirical proof of this grand betrayal is the systematic purge of actual liberty advocates from within the movement. When Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie—one of the only consistently anti-establishment, constitutionally-minded politicians in Washington—stood up for the movement’s supposed principles, the MAGA machine collaborated with the swamp to crush him. Massie was targeted explicitly by the administration and defeated in the May 2026 primary by Ed Gallrein, a loyalist foot soldier handpicked and heavily funded by the establishment.

Massie spearheaded the effort to release the Epstein files, voted against deficit-exploding fiscal legislation, and fiercely opposed aggressive war footing and blank-check foreign aid. For strictly adhering to the constitution and the principles of liberty, he was branded an enemy of the state and purged by the very people claiming to drain the swamp. The millions used to unseat Massie didn’t come from grassroots populists; it came from Wall Street hedge fund managers, Zionist megadonors, and dark money heavily aligned with AIPAC, proving the MAGA apparatus actively weaponized the establishment to eliminate the only man trying to stop the state’s aggression.

Massie’s defeat is the glaring, unavoidable proof that the system cannot be reformed from within, and the political savior complex is nothing but a deadly pacifier. The ones who remain in this corpse of a movement have been tricked into loving the boot simply because it was painted red, abandoning all pretense of liberty for partisan cheerleading. True anti-war action, financial sovereignty, and domestic freedom require abandoning the illusion of political saviors. We must stop trusting the state to fix the state and instead focus on building parallel, voluntary systems of trade and mutual aid. Real solutions mean exiting the central bank’s control grid by utilizing untraceable privacy coins like Monero or Zano, engaging in agorist counter-economics, physically holding your own precious metals, and using encrypted communications to organize locally. Freedom is built by peaceful individuals taking action, not voted for in a rigged system.

The post The Great “Red Hat” Psyop: How the Establishment Co-Opted MAGA appeared first on Activist Post.

Rampant Kleptocracy Feeds Wealth Inequality In A Crumbling American Empire

Government spending is out of control, robbing the American people blind to fund the endless excess of a ruling class drunk on power.

Kleptocracy: [klep-tok-ruh-see] / klɛpˈtɒk rə si / – noun – “A government or state in which those in power exploit national resources and steal; rule by a thief or thieves.”

The state of the American economy is something that is increasingly on the minds of Americans these days. With life getting more expensive millions of Americans are feeling the squeeze getting tighter and tighter. And it seems with every passing day that the so called “leaders” of the American empire further demonstrate their disconnect from the fiscal reality of the average citizen.

The Grand-Canyon-sized wealth gap in this nation is staggering, with a classism characterized by despotic decadence on the one hand and dire desperation on the other, with most people falling into the latter category while the former flaunt their obscene opulence.

This of course isn’t just prevalent among the political predators, but throughout the entirety of the parasitic one percent, political and cultural elitists stretching from the halls of Congress to corporate power centers, to the Hollywood Hills.

A prime example of this being the annual Met Gala earlier this month. While politically unimportant, the cult of celebrity was on full display as these supercilious snobs laud over themselves for the world to see in grandiose fashion, grandstanding with multimillion dollar outfits and accessories. Meanwhile much of the population struggle to make ends meet. 

And let us be clear, this is not a condemnation of the rich for the sake of being rich. Rather, it is a condemnation of a society in which self proclaimed elitists enrich themselves through the institutionalized exploitation of the average person, profiting from systems deliberately designed to oppress the many for the benefit of the few.

This permeates throughout the entirety of America’s power structure, observable on federal, state, and even local levels, as demonstrated by The Free Thought Project’s recent reporting on the continued criminalization of homelessness.

Fiscal recklessness is running rampant through American legislature. As recently reported by The Daily Economy, the US debt has now crossed 100% of GDP for the first time since the end of World War II.

In 1946, the United States emerged from a global war with high debt, but also with a young population, strong growth prospects, and a political commitment to fiscal restraint. Today, America faces the opposite: an aging population, structurally rising entitlement spending, and persistent deficits with no credible plan to rein them in. 

Recently, resurfaced video has gone viral on social media of comments made last May by Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson asserting that the six figure salary enjoyed by lawmakers simply isn’t enough for them to live on. According to Johnson, due to inflation it’s a struggle to get by on $175,000 a year, which is more than double that of the average American household, according to Newsweek, even with taxpayer funded perks like top notch healthcare and paid for travel expenses. Therefore, says Johnson, Congress members should be allowed to partake in some insider trading on the stock market to further line their pockets.

The audacity is palpable.

What’s more, Johnson himself, as Speaker of the House, enjoys an exorbitantly higher salary than the rest of Congress, receiving $223,500 dollars a year.

Ironically, as Johnson complains about the stagnant wages of lawmakers, he has been at the forefront of the campaign to block any increases to the federal minimum wage. Granted, in an economy built on debt based fiat currency and the scam of fractional reserve banking, an increase to the minimum wage while the currency itself still lacks any tangible value will only provide a temporary reprieve before ultimately exacerbating economic instability further. Still, with the trajectory of this nation’s mismanaged monetary policy, we’re headed downhill either way.

We have a government that spends with wonton disregard, with a national debt rapidly approaching $40,000,000,000,000 at the time of this writing, and a president that maliciously enriches himself through citizens expense who openly admits he doesn’t care about the financial struggles of the American people, largely caused by the foolish imperialist war that he started. A war that the overwhelming majority of Americans are against.

On Tuesday’s episode of The Liberty Report, Dr Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams discussed the burgeoning consequences of Trump’s war on Iran and the impact of rising fuel costs.

This was further elaborated in a recent piece by the Mises Institute: Price Inflation Accelerates As Wars and Deficits Expand ―

Not only is the Iran war causing a decline in global output, but the world’s central banks continue to embrace easy-money policies. This will result in more dollars (or sterling, euros, or yen, etc.) chasing fewer goods. This will further fuel rising prices. This is why we continue to see a general rise on prices. If rising prices were merely a result of falling output in Persian Gulf related goods, then we’d see rising prices in some areas result in falling prices in other areas. In other words, if the money supply were reasonably stable, consumers would respond to rising prices in some areas by cutting spending in other areas. But the CPI suggests that’s not happening. Thanks to continual infusions of new money through loose monetary policy, consumers are able to continue bidding up prices in all areas, even as price increases in the energy sector rise to multi-year highs. 

And while the consequences of said war are only just beginning to be felt, the spending isn’t slowing down. In fact, in spite of all of this, the warmongers of the military industrial complex continue to demand more and more. Insisting upon a $1.5 Trillion military budget that the Secretary of Defense can’t even justify as it tries desperately to cling to a dying unipolar hegemon established on ailing hard power and a deteriorating petrodollar.

As Ron Paul recently wrote,

This is the business of transferring massive amounts of wealth from the struggling middle and working classes to the well-connected Beltway elite based on lies and scare tactics.

Meanwhile, these same political entities work continuously to enrich themselves by siphoning wealth and resources off of the working class. Gutting social safety net programs and slashing benefits relied upon by hundreds of thousands of disabled adults, while creating a nearly two billion dollar presidential slush fund plundered from taxpayer dollars in what is one of the most egregious acts of corruption in modern American history.

And while some may call for reform as the solution, it should be painfully obvious by this point that attempts to reform the welfare-warfare state do not bring about optimal conditions for liberty.

In an ideal world the problems can be solved with the right people in the right positions, with policy changes such as ending the income tax and the personal property tax thus allowing Americans to retain the full fruits of their labor and gain true ownership over what is theirs; simultaneously taxing mega-corporations such as Palantir which has paid no federal income tax and has effectively taken over the US government; a tax on churches since Christian nationalist movements have so deeply embedded themselves in right wing politics; and increased taxes on billionaires who acquired their hoarded wealth not through voluntary free market exchanges but via government subsidized and monopolized coercive corporatist exploitation.

But we do not live in an ideal world. Such concepts are idealistic but largely unrealistic. We cannot ask the state to fix the problems that the state caused. Such a concept is oxymoronic. And moronic in general. Statism is the cancer from which all other societal diseases fester.

And as Tuesday’s AIPAC funded coup in the Kentucky Congressional primary ousting Thomas Massie demonstrates, electoral politics will never provide legitimate solutions to the issues that we face. The state is a leviathan, a ravenous vampire that sucks the lifeblood from the people that cannot, will never, be reformed from within ― as any who challenge the power structure are removed. 

We must recognize that political saviors will never be the answer. Deferring your individual power to someone else will never be the answer. Coercive systems of control will never be the answer. The very existence of the state, in any form, is predicated upon systemic oppression and institutionalized exploitation. It is what feeds kleptocracy, it is what feeds imperialism, it is the essence of everything that is wrong with our civilization.

The only way that liberty and liberation is realized is through revolutionary action that renders the state obsolete, a refusal to participate within the system, engagement with counter economics and agorist markets, the incentivization of voluntary cooperation and mutual aid systems, the development of parallel alternative societies based on non-coercive non-hierarchical organization, and ultimately the abolition of the state itself.

The post Rampant Kleptocracy Feeds Wealth Inequality In A Crumbling American Empire appeared first on Activist Post.

Pot Brothers At Law – Shut the F Up: The 29-Word Script That Saves Lives

This is why you should never talk to the police.

In this episode of The Free Thought Project podcast, Jason and Matt sit down with Marc and Craig Wasserman, better known to the world as the Pot Brothers at Law. Quick note before diving in: you may notice some brief audio issues in the opening minutes. We cleaned up everything we could, and while a little roughness remains, the conversation is absolutely worth sticking through.

Practicing law in California for decades, Marc and Craig specialize in criminal defense and cannabis business licensing, compliance, and regulations. They skyrocketed to internet fame in 2015 and now boast over 3 million followers across social media. They are most famous for teaching the public their signature 29-word “Shut the F Up” (STFU) script—a practical, bulletproof guide designed to help citizens peacefully engage with law enforcement while fiercely protecting their constitutional rights.

The conversation dives deep into the realities of the modern justice system and the psychological traps police use to trick individuals into waiving their rights. The discussion dismantles the dangerous myth of having “nothing to hide,” detailing how even innocent people can accidentally talk themselves into a cage, and clarifies what legal “cooperation” actually looks like during a traffic stop. The episode also tackles the perverse, revenue-driven incentives of modern policing, the reality that cops are legally allowed to lie to secure an arrest, and how the recent federal rescheduling of cannabis to Schedule III is less about freedom and more about protecting state-enforced corporate monopolies. Ultimately, the show serves as a powerful masterclass in legal self-defense, offering listeners a massive “white pill” on how to outsmart the system, maintain their sovereignty, and use the sound of silence to take their power back. (Length: 1:01:36)

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Podcast – Dr. Andrew Kaufman – Inside the Medical Machine, MAHA, AI & Reclaiming Autonomy

Matt, Jason, and Don sit down with Dr. Andrew Kaufman to expose the rise of the medical surveillance state, the corrupting influence of AI and Palantir, and how to reclaim your health sovereignty from a system designed for control.

In this episode, Matt Agorist, Jason Bassler, and Don Via, Jr. sit down with Dr. Andrew Kaufman, a forensic psychiatrist and natural healing consultant who gained international recognition for his bold departure from the mainstream medical establishment to advocate for health sovereignty and the root-cause resolution of illness. We start off the podcast with Dr. Kaufman explaining how the things he saw inside the current medical establishment were causing harm, leading him to question the corrupt relationship between insurance companies and the medical industry that effectively makes the insurer the boss of the doctor rather than the patient.

Dr. Kaufman discusses how AI is set to play a major role in the near future by enforcing questionable clinical guidelines, predicting that AI will become a central pillar of a burgeoning medical surveillance state. We move into the impact of environmental pollutants and the various dangerous effects of SSRIs, including their role in shortening life spans and creating suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The conversation shifts gears into the AI surveillance state and the role of Palantir, as well as how CBDCs are being implemented globally alongside the rollout of stablecoins in the US. We also discuss how this surveillance infrastructure could be used to control the population via the medical establishment, get Dr. Kaufman’s thoughts on the legitimacy of the MAHA movement, and touch on the dangers of glyphosate. We end the show on a “White Pill” note as Dr. Kaufman provides many resources for how we can fight this system and reclaim our autonomy. (Length: 59:45)

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War Against The Homeless Continues As Louisiana Cruelly Criminalizes The Unhoused

Aggressive anti-homeless legislation only serves to further exacerbate an increasingly inhumane approach to the homeless crisis.

There’s an old saying that says “you are always closer to being homeless than you are to being a millionaire”, meant to emphasize the rampant wealth inequality and deteriorating quality of life for most Americans. That statement is becoming truer by the day. The economic downturn is worsening, the value of the dollar continues to deteriorate, inflation increasing, goods becoming more expensive. According to Consumer Affairs home affordability has hit record lows. It is simply getting harder for Americans to afford to live, and to make matters worse we have a president that openly admits he simply doesn’t care “not even a little bit” about the financial woes of American citizens.

With this being the case it is no surprise that the homelessness crisis in the United States is still quite dire despite a slight decline in early 2026 from the record high of 2024.

One state hit particularly hard by increasing poverty rates is Louisiana, and one would think as this crisis worsens that elected officials would be hard at work to lessen its impact on vulnerable citizens. However, in The Pelican State, the opposite has proven to be true.

Louisiana legislature has recently advanced an anti-homeless bill that advocates of the unhoused have called one of the cruelest In the country.

House Bill 211, passed the Louisiana House of Representatives by a vote of 70 to 28 in April, aims to bring criminal charges against the homeless for the newly invented crime of “public camping”, defined as “lodging or residing overnight in an outdoor space” not designated for that use, with penalties consisting of a fine up to $500, imprisonment up to six months or both, according to NOLA.com.

Repeat offenders could face one to two years in prison with hard labor and a $1,000 fine.

In a gross and blatantly Orwellian application of doublespeak the bill is referred to as the “Streets to Success Act”, with its author Rep. Debbie Villio claiming that the bill is meant to “create opportunities” for the unhoused and insisting that it “does not criminalize homelessness” despite the fact that that is exactly what it does in plain english.

Additionally, the new legislation presents a potential boon for the prison-industrial complex, a provision within the bill provides the “option” for the penalized homeless to avoid incarceration by opting in to a mandatory treatment program for at least twelve months. But there’s a catch, as reported by Common Dreams ―

The bill requires homeless defendants to pay “all or part of the cost of the treatment program to which he is assigned,” a steep cost for many, as the average cost for residential drug and alcohol rehab treatment in Louisiana is more than $4,400 per week, according to the addiction referral service directory Addicted.org.

According to the bill, those who cannot afford this steep cost would be required to perform unpaid labor for the state or a local community center in lieu of payment.

“Unpaid labor” is, of course, just a sugar coated term for slavery. Especially when those engaging in it were coerced to do so with no real alternative.

Just as concerning, the bill allows for the creation of government run semi-permanent homeless encampments, which would have to be established in remote areas to abide by residential property guidelines. New Orleans City Councilmember Lesli Harris has likened the bill to “internment camps”, saying it would produce “no lasting housing, no services, and no real path forward for the people involved.”

The National Homelessness Law Center referred to the bill as “one of the cruelest anti homeless bills in the country.” while the homeless advocacy group Housing Not Handcuffs said in a press release the bill “clearly evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow.”

Congressman Troy Carter said in a statement:

“House Bill 211 does not solve homelessness. It relocates it. It hides it. It pushes people from one block to the next, from one parish to another, from one jail cell to the next. This is not policy. This is avoidance,” … “What this bill risks doing is deepening the very crisis it claims to address.”

Heinous Treatment Toward The Unhoused

As The Free Thought Project has previously reported, in recent years several states are increasingly moving to penalize and criminalize homelessness, largely facilitated by the Cicero Institute, a CIA backed right wing think tank dedicated to addressing the issue of homelessness headed by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

As evident by their advocacy for a heavy handed approach to the issue, Lonsdale and the Cicero Institute do not view homelessness as a humanitarian crisis to be solved, but rather as a nuisance to be eliminated.

At the insistence of the Cicero Institute, the Trump administration has gone all in on waging war against America’s homeless population, leading to increases of mass incarceration much to the benefit of the for profit prison industry.

Even prior to these most recent escalations of inhumanity, many localities across the country had taken to enacting harsh treatment towards the vulnerable unhoused population. The implementation of hostile architecture quickly became a popular choice for city planners who just wanted to make the homeless “go away”. The installation of street spikes, awkwardly curved or slanted public benches, strategically placed large boulders and more have all become methods of deliberately displacing the homeless population.

Using such designs to make life even more difficult for people who already have next to nothing is unimaginably evil.

Despite this, some locations have gone further, beyond passive anti homeless architecture to deliberate state sponsored attacks on the unhoused. In 2016, as TFTP reported, musician Elvis Summers crowdfunded over $100,000 through his nonprofit to build several tiny homes for the homeless of Los Angeles County. This grand gesture of charity was met with ire and indignation from the local government who promptly evicted those staying in them, seized the homes, and demolished them.

Similar incidents occurred in 2020 and 2022 in Las Vegas after two non profit organizations, Food Not Bombs and the Sidewalk Project, crowdsourced funding and volunteers to build several tiny homes to help some of the local homeless. The city took the same approach as Los Angeles, having local police raid the private property the homes were built on and destroyed them on site.

In 2018, another particularly egregious assault against the homeless population occurred in Kansas City, Missouri, when local police raided a charity picnic designed to feed the homeless and promptly destroyed all of the food by dousing it with bleach.

Criminalization As A Predatory Policy Choice

Studies have consistently shown again and again that criminalizing homelessness and displacing the unhoused does not in fact reduce homelessness. Instead exacerbating the problem as individuals with criminal records experience greater challenges when attempting to receive assistance and gain employment.

Research published by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2025 outlined concisely what it would take to effectively tackle the homeless crisis in America, the primary solution being the simplest and most obvious ― A Housing First initiative. The school explains:

Housing First solves the immediate and foundational need of giving people a safe, permanent place to live with no preconditions. Once that basic need is met, people can opt to use supportive services that meet other needs, such as access to health care, employment assistance, or programs to treat substance use disorders.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities further elaborates how the decisions made by policymakers only serve to exacerbate the homeless crisis by not addressing the fundamental causes of it. The center goes on to illustrate the ways in which Housing First initiatives, as well as adequate access to supportive services and sustained rental assistance programs prove to be the most cost effective and viable approach to consistently reducing homelessness.

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Podcast — Allan Paul Roberts — The Globalist Strategy to Collapse Systems and Reshape the World

Is the collapse of the West being engineered? Allan Paul Roberts breaks down the 11 pillars of planned demolition and why the reclamation of individual faith and privacy is the ultimate act of rebellion.

In this episode of the TFTP Podcast, Jason Bassler and Matt Agorist sit down with Allan Paul Roberts. Allan is an author and researcher dedicated to exposing the globalist agenda to deconstruct society. In his latest work, The Globalist Plan to Collapse Everything to Usher in a New World Order—In Their Own Words, he utilizes an innovative multimedia approach—including over 170 QR codes—to provide readers with direct evidence of the strategies being used to centralize global power.

The conversation explores the origins of Allan’s work, specifically the “revelation” that led him to identify the pillars of American society currently under systematic attack. The conversation pulls no punches, moving from the psychological warfare of “state-as-God” idolatry found in both political parties to the hard reality of the corporate-state panopticon. Roberts provides a “Liberty Perspective” on why the state is obsessed with replacing spiritual sovereignty with political loyalty, particularly in how it manufactures consent for global conflicts. We delve into the mechanics of the modern surveillance state, highlighting the massive 62-square-mile data center and power facility recently approved in Box Elder County, Utah, and its implications for national security and individual privacy. The discussion further examines the dual nature of Artificial Intelligence, weighing its potential for innovation against the risks of ethical erosion and mass surveillance.

Turning toward solutions, we discuss the growing “privacy-focused” movement among the younger generation, including the rise of Layer-1 privacy blockchains like Zano, the use of VPNs, and the importance of “tokenization” in a digital economy. Practical steps for personal sovereignty are also covered, such as transitioning to non-tracking mobile devices and using physical privacy safeguards like camera covers. The episode concludes with a powerful call to action for listeners to reclaim their digital and physical independence through informed resistance and community-building. (Length: 1:06:21)

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The Invisible Occupation: How Palantir and AI Built a Financial Prison the Masses Cheered For

As the state unleashes AI to police your bank account, starving the beast with decentralized privacy networks is the ultimate act of peaceful defiance.

We are living in an occupied nation, but the occupying force didn’t arrive in tanks or uniform. They arrived in server racks and boardrooms, selling our enslavement back to us under the guise of convenience and national security. The creeping surveillance state isn’t being forced upon a resistant public; it is being welcomed with open arms by a populace asleep at the wheel.

Palantir is the Lockheed Martin of the domestic data war, acting as the defense contractor for an invisible battlefield, but their depravity extends far beyond American borders. They don’t merely sit on the sidelines building the overarching dragnet that seamlessly ingests the Ring camera footage oblivious citizens hand over to local police. They are active participants in global slaughter. This is the very same company supplying the algorithmic targeting systems and AI intelligence used by the Israeli military to facilitate the genocide in Palestine. They test and refine their digital kill chains on the bodies of innocents abroad, only to package those exact same mass-surveillance weapons and turn them inward against the American public. And to feed this beast domestically, Palantir relies on far more than voluntary home surveillance. They aggregate billions of data points involuntarily harvested from your daily life—sucking up automated license plate reader data, scraped social media, purchased cell phone location pings, and even medical records—creating an inescapable digital panopticon you never consented to.

This infrastructure wasn’t built by well-meaning public servants, but rather by the darkest elements of the global elite. According to leaked audio, Jeffrey Epstein explicitly advised former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to “look at” Palantir back in 2013 to monitor citizens. Furthermore, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel shows up extensively in the infamous Epstein files, with Wired reporting his name appearing over two thousand times in the disgraced financier’s records.

These are the individuals constructing the systems designed to monitor your every move, and their reach is now absolute. As we have documented extensively at The Free Thought Project, whistleblowers are screaming from the rooftops that Palantir has effectively taken over the US government data infrastructure from the inside out.

The most terrifying aspect of this takeover is how the two-party paradigm is utilized to manufacture consent for our own subjugation. The political Left, who now decries Palantir for its contracts with ICE, suddenly cheered for the surveillance apparatus when it served their biomedical agenda during the COVID-19 panic. Palantir built the Tiberius software platform for the Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC, serving as the backbone for vaccine tracking and distribution while harvesting immense amounts of demographic and health data. They learned to love the surveillance state the moment it enforced their mandates.

Now that the political pendulum has swung, the “small government” Right is enthusiastically applauding the exact same corporate behemoth. Palantir recently secured massive contracts to build AI-driven platforms like ImmigrationOS, pulling data from IRS records, license plate readers, and private-sector sources to track and monitor populations for mass deportations. The conservatives who correctly recognized the danger of biomedical surveillance are completely silent when a defense contractor builds a domestic tracking database, simply because it targets a group they currently despise. The state grows larger, and partisans on both sides applaud their own chains.

And if you think it’s only going to be used on illegal immigrants, think again. This algorithmic dragnet is now being weaponized against your financial life. The Small Business Administration is working with Palantir to ostensibly root out fraud, establishing a dangerous precedent for the algorithmic oversight of Main Street commerce. This financial stranglehold extends to the IRS, which is utilizing Palantir’s data-mining contracts to scour unstructured data, including bank transactions, asset moves, and even social media. The state is compensating for its lack of human auditors with a ruthless AI dragnet designed to target citizens automatically.

The traditional banking sector is rushing to deploy the very same pre-crime technology. The financial technology giant FIS is now deploying agentic AI in partnership with Anthropic to autonomously police bank transactions for alleged financial crimes in real-time. This entirely bypasses the need for human due process, allowing algorithms to freeze your life on a whim.

This nightmare extends directly into the cryptocurrency space, effectively birthing the Central Bank Digital Currency we have spent years warning you about. Centralized stablecoins like Tether have become a de facto arm of law enforcement, adding thousands of addresses to their USDT blacklist and freezing hundreds of millions of dollars without a single trial. Take note of the exponential rate at which these technocrats are stealing people’s money.

As we’ve reported, centralized stablecoins are a trap, offering the illusion of crypto freedom while holding a backdoor key for the state to seize your funds the moment you step out of line. You cannot fight a technologically advanced surveillance grid using their fiat currency or their permissioned digital ledgers. The way to defeat a machine built on total surveillance and centralized control is to stop funding it and completely opt out of their systems. We must transition to decentralized, privacy-focused alternatives that cannot be frozen by an executive order or flagged by a rogue AI algorithm.

This is exactly why we continually highlight networks like Zano, a project that aligns perfectly with the voluntaryist ethos. Zano offers a confidential layer that makes transactions entirely invisible to the Palantir and IRS dragnet, stripping authorities of their ability to track your peaceful, voluntary exchanges. By utilizing their ecosystem, you can trade private stablecoins like fUSD, providing the necessary price stability of the dollar without the backdoor kill switch built into Tether.

Combining assets like fUSD on the Zano network with proven, decentralized privacy coins like DASH gives you the uncompromised ability to transact securely. Your financial life belongs to you, not corrupt defense contractors and AI algorithms, and the only way to win is to starve their machine.

The architects of this digital prison rely entirely on your compliance and your capital to fund their atrocities. Whether it is deploying algorithmic targeting to slaughter families in the Middle East or unleashing autonomous AI to freeze your bank account in America, the state’s apparatus of coercion is fueled by the wealth they systematically siphon from your labor. Participating in their fiat matrix or holding their permissioned stablecoins is no longer just a poor financial choice—it is the active subsidization of your own enslavement. We finally have the cryptographic tools to starve the beast and walk away. Shifting your wealth into invisible, immutable networks like Zano and transacting in private assets like fUSD is the ultimate act of peaceful defiance. It is time to sever the financial arteries of the surveillance state, strip them of their power, and build a parallel economy that operates entirely outside the reach of their bloodstained hands.

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There is Nothing Social About Your Social Contract: Why Coercion Can Never Create Harmony

From vaporizing schools abroad to shielding elite predators at home, the state relies entirely on violence. True prosperity begins the moment we stop funding our own destruction.

The concept of the “social contract” is perhaps the most successfully marketed lie in modern history, a phantom agreement you never signed that is violently enforced upon you from birth. To understand the sheer, unadulterated ruthlessness of the people who enforce this contract, you only have to look at how they initiate their geopolitical conflicts. On the very first day of the 2026 war with Iran, the United States military launched a “triple-tap” missile strike that vaporized the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, slaughtering over 150 innocent civilians—the vast majority of them young girls crushed under a collapsing roof. The state demands a monopoly on violence, extorting your wealth to fund these atrocities, all while promising to act as your ultimate protector.

When you strip away the patriotic pageantry and the political theater, you are left with a massive, parasitic entity that claims the right to mass murder children abroad while aggressively shielding the most heinous predators within its own ranks. Every time the political class initiates physical harm or steals your property to fund their empire, your quality of life is degraded. It is a mathematical certainty of human interaction that coercion breeds suffering, yet the masses are continuously conditioned to cheer for their own subjugation.

To understand the sheer psychosis required to maintain this centralized authority, one only needs to look at the unhinged escalation currently unfolding in the Middle East. Following the initial strikes, the executive branch dropped all pretense of measured diplomacy and openly threatened the complete eradication of millions more innocent lives. Following a dispute over the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump issued a terrifyingly casual ultimatum, warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if his economic demands were not met. This is not foreign policy; it is textbook terrorism broadcast from the world’s most heavily armed podium.

We are forced to watch as a single politician, sitting in a fortified office funded entirely by the stolen wages of the working class, wields the coercive power to wipe out 90 million people in a single evening. Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have rightfully sounded the alarm, but the fundamental issue runs much deeper than any single president’s rhetoric. Forcing civilians to live under the constant, looming threat of nuclear or conventional annihilation is the absolute antithesis of human flourishing. It is the ultimate violation of the non-aggression principle, proving that the state views human life not as inherently valuable, but as collateral damage in its quest for geopolitical dominance.

The state’s dependency on this violence is so absolute that genuine, voluntary peace is viewed as a direct, existential threat to its power. When Pope Leo XIV recently called for an end to this global “delusion of omnipotence” and accurately stated that the world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, the US executive branch immediately went on the offensive. Instead of embracing a call for de-escalation, Trump took to social media to blast the Pope as being “terrible for foreign policy,” an absurd spectacle indeed. But then it got even worse, as an unhinged Trump escalated it, going so far as to accuse the Pope of supporting Iran having nukes!

This reaction tells you everything you need to know about the nature of the empire. When an international figure advocates for persuasion over force, the political class attacks them because the military-industrial complex requires perpetual conflict to justify its massive theft of public wealth. Peace does not secure trillion-dollar defense contracts, and harmony does not justify the expansion of the domestic surveillance state.

While these political elites are eager to vaporize innocent families in foreign lands over trade routes, they will simultaneously move heaven and earth to protect the worst predators within their own exclusive social circles. As the Free Thought Project has reported time and again, the justice system is notoriously efficient at locking peaceful people in cages for victimless crimes, yet it suddenly becomes paralyzed when investigating its own. We are currently witnessing an agonizingly slow, highly manipulated release of the Epstein files that began under recently fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, where the Department of Justice constantly runs interference for high-level politicians and billionaires.

Documents surrounding the most prolific child trafficking ring in modern history are routinely labeled as “mistakenly withheld,” heavily redacted, or “incorrectly coded” by the very agencies tasked with investigating them. This deliberate shielding of elite predators from public scrutiny exposes the glaring reality of a two-tiered society. The justice system is not broken; it is functioning exactly as designed, acting as an impenetrable shield for the ruling class and a brutal, unforgiving sword against the masses.

You cannot possibly build a community on mutual respect when the ruling class is wholly exempt from the laws they violently enforce on the peasantry. We are living under a non-consensual authority that forces you, under the threat of imprisonment, to fund the bombs dropped on foreign bridges, and forces you to fund the DOJ that actively redacts the names of elite child abusers. This forced participation is a direct, undeniable violation of the fundamental realities of human interaction.

Initiating violence or stealing property will always result in a measurable decrease in human happiness, harmony, and prosperity. It is a natural law, as predictable as gravity, yet we are told we must rely on this very same coercive apparatus to fix the societal rot it created. Fortunately, folks are already working toward a definitive, philosophical solution to this systemic extraction, moving far beyond the rigged game of partisan politics.

The Foundation for Harmony and Prosperity is actively shedding light on how these constant breaches of human respect destroy society, while building a cultural framework based entirely on voluntary relationships. They understand that to dismantle the coercive empire, we have to stop validating its authority and completely reject the initiation of force in all aspects of our lives. True harmony only exists in a society that relies exclusively on persuasion, mutual consent, and a categorical refusal to endorse any agent who initiates physical force on our behalf.

When we replace the state’s violent, non-consensual structures with the Moral Principle of Human Respect, the entire paradigm shifts. We stop funding our own destruction, we stop empowering the predators who hide behind badges and titles, and we begin the actual work of building a prosperous, voluntary world.

The state’s entire existence relies on the cynical illusion that humanity is inherently savage and requires a violent overseer to maintain order, when in reality, the overseer is the primary source of the chaos. By shifting our cultural norm to one that values persuasion over force and voluntary exchange over coercion, we drain the lifeblood from the military-industrial complex and the corrupt institutions that shield the elite. The path to genuine harmony does not run through ballot boxes or the halls of a captured justice system; it is forged by individuals who recognize their inherent self-ownership and categorically refuse to surrender their moral agency to an empire built on violence.

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Palantir Manifesto Shows The Clear Convergence Of Technofascism With Technocracy

A 22 point manifesto recently published by tech giant Palantir reads like a villainous plot for dystopian domination.

At this point it has become abundantly clear for those paying even the slightest bit of attention that tech giant Palantir is becoming one of the most pervasive entities influencing the growing plutocratic dystopia.

While other giants of the big tech industry such as Amazon, Meta, Google, and even Oracle have indeed spread their tentacles far and wide throughout the upper echelons of government, Palantir, not to be outdone, remains at the forefront of this technocratic takeover.

We have previously reported on the ways in which this company’s founders such as Peter Thiel and Alex karp have effectively dedicated their lives to promoting technocracy, having their autocratic ideologies molded by the far right philosophies of technofascists the likes of Curtis Yarvin. And how the acolytes of this ideology have effectively embedded themselves within the Trump Administration. As well as how MAGA in its entirety has become, likely always was, infused with this ideology.

Previous reports have revealed the numerous ways in which the big tech AI firm has become embedded in the highest reaches of the federal government.

From being tapped by the White House to build a government-wide surveillance database;

To embedding Palantir AI across the entirety of the US Military, with Silicon Valley firms including Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI now even having their own extension in the US Army in the form of Detachment 201.

Palantir’s infection of the US government has also spread into the police state, building the technological infrastructure for the modern day Gestapo as Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations rely heavily on assistance provided by Palantir.

The firms reach has also extended into the Education Department, using data analytics to monitor academic institutions at a time when the administration’s attacks on academia in line with Project 2025 and the authoritarian playbook of the Heritage Foundation — another institution who’s neo-fascist ideology is influencing government policy — seeks to dismantle and reshape American education within the framework of a technocratic vision.

Additionally, Palantir has extended its reach into healthcare, promoting a technocratic agenda that merges artificial intelligence and biotechnology in accordance with the aims of the 4th Industrial Revolution. A development which is particularly alarming considering the overlap of technocracy with the eugenicist ideology of transhumanism and the embrace of transhumanism within the inner circle of the Trump administration.

The tech firm has also in recent days expanded its reach even further, sinking its fangs into the agriculture industry, inking a $300 million contract with the USDA which will see Palantir use its software to assist in the management of US farmland. Which by no coincidence underpins the technocratic agenda of consolidating control over the food supply with centralized agribusiness and genetically edited crops.

It is abundantly clear that the tentacles of this monolithic mega-corporation reach far and wide throughout the halls of power. Indeed, a former Palantir executive turned whistleblower recently confirmed what was already quite apparent — that Palantir has for all intents and purposes taken over the US government, stating matter-of-factly that the corporation, which he refers to as a terrorist organization, has effectively embedded itself in the United States government, merging the American empire, Zionist military infrastructure, surveillance capitalism, and technofascist ideology into a single architecture of control.

For those who at this point still may believe that the usage of terms like “technofascist” are hyperbolic, it is worth reiterating our recent report which revealed very clearly the Neo-Nazi network that was used to spread Peter Thiel’s online influence. As well as our previous reporting exposing the seedy underbelly of self-admitted fascists working behind the scenes to influence global right-wing politics.

It should be no question at this juncture that Palantir represents a veritable Fourth Reich of the modern day, establishing the infrastructure of a technocratic agenda deeply rooted in technofascist ideology.

However, now, you no longer just have to take our word for it. The company itself has seemingly pulled off the mask, if there was any left by this point, and blatantly said the quiet part out loud.

In recent days Palantir has posted to social media a 1000-word manifesto, outlining 22 key points of their vision for the world, a summarization of palantir co-founder Alex Karp’s 2025 book titled The Technological Republic in what some critics have referred to as “the ramblings of a comic book villain”.

In it, the company blatantly calls for the United States to implement universal mandatory military service and the establishment of “hard power” to maintain the US unipolar hegemon on the back of an all-encompassing AI infrastructure.

Insisting on the establishment of a strong Western national identity, the manifesto would also denigrate subcultures in what was clearly a racist dog whistle, condemning inclusivity and diversity in what the post refers to as “hollow pluralism”.

On religion, it insists that the intolerance of religious beliefs within certain circles of the political elite must be resisted. On its surface, a seemingly harmless declaration, however given the infestation of accelerationist Christian nationalist influence throughout the administration and the far right as a whole, and subsequent rabid intolerance for any belief outside of that purview, it can be seen as an endorsement of even more fervent theocratic ideology.

The manifesto also insists on Silicon Valley’s involvement in “combating violent crime” which would see Palantier’s already extensive involvement in mass surveillance, biometric data collection, and pre-crime analytics extend even further.

Perhaps most shocking, yet unsurprising, the manifesto openly insists that civilizations such as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan should be returned to power, lamenting what the company refers to as the “neutering” of post World War II Germany and Japan, referring to the restraint of the Axis powers as an “overcorrection” which “must be undone”.

Such overtly fascist ambitions can’t get any clearer than that.

The entirety of the 22 Point Manifesto reads in full as follows —

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

Several people have called out the blatantly authoritarian rhetoric of the Palantir Manifesto. Belgian philosopher of technology and University of Vienna professor Mark Coeckelbergh referred to it as an “example of technofascism”.

Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist and expert on authoritarian tendencies described the manifesto as “one of the scariest things I have seen in a while. It is a call for a world dominated by an authoritarian U.S., generated by AI (both the statement and the world), run by tech-surveillance companies. Technofascism pure!”

University of Michigan political scientist Don Moynihan published an analysis of the Palantir manifesto, concluding “on the whole, the manifesto’s vision… is that of a US government and its tech allies as dominant players, unconstrained by accountability.”

Palantir has quickly become the new face of the empire. The backbone of a New World Order and the gravest threat to liberty both domestically and abroad. Populations must rise up against this deeply entrenched technological leviathan and work to rip its insidious influence out by the root.

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With Class Consciousness On The Rise, It Must Be Accompanied With An Embrace of Anti-Statism

While many are undergoing a mass awakening of class politics, opposition to the coercive control of statism must remain the central focus of any successful revolution.

In recent days conversations about working class struggles and the state of the economy, particularly in regard to the affordability crisis, have been occurring with increasing regularity. This has largely been spurred by the viral reporting of a warehouse fire in Ontario, California in which an employee, identified as 29 year old Chamel Abdulkarim, filmed himself lighting pallets of toilet paper on fire, stating “if you’re not going to pay us enough to live at least pay us enough not to do this.”

In the days since, the phrase “All You Had To Do Was Pay Us Enough To Live”, uttered by Abdulkarim in the video, has gone viral as a working class rallying cry acknowledging the increasingly desperate financial circumstances of many average working Americans struggling to get by.

These sentiments are becoming more commonplace as the value and purchasing power of the US dollar continues to deteriorate as a result of debt based fiat currency and a lack of intrinsic value combined with skyrocketing debt and inflation. For many, the cost of living is becoming unbearable.

This, combined with the increasingly transparent despotic decadence and lack of accountability for the abhorrent crimes of the ultra wealthy political and financial “elite”, aptly referred to as the predator class (or more recently the Epstein class), has resulted in a growing class consciousness among everyday citizens.

Recently, I read an article from an author by the name of JP Hill discussing what he described as a wave of attacks against the ruling class, citing the Ontario warehouse fire, a molotov attack and shooting against the house of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and gunfire directed at the home of an Indianapolis City Council member, wherein Hill made several relevant points discussing class antagonisms and the growing discontentment among average Americans struggling to afford gas and groceries while corporations rake in record profits and politicians stay the course with reckless endless spending for wars abroad.

One sentence in particular stood out.

What’s happening right now is that a vague sense of dissatisfaction, a simmering anger at a declining quality of life, is morphing into class politics for millions of Americans.

Class consciousness, in the modern socio-political vernacular, is a concept that is more often than not relegated to socialist and Marxist-Leninist ideological leanings. Though upon a more critical analysis it becomes abundantly clear that this concept permeates throughout the entirety of political identity. The working class is comprised of the overwhelming vast majority of people from all walks of life, while the ruling class is comprised of a small minority who through hoarded wealth and centralized power attempt to exert their will to control the rest of society. No matter one’s political leanings nobody likes some ultra-rich jerk trying to dictate how everyone should live their lives. That’s just as true today as it was thousands of years ago.

The problem we typically face, particularly in the West, is that whenever there begins to be serious conversations about class consciousness it ultimately runs up against the age old clash between capitalism and socialism, thus diverting the entire conversation concerning real world present day struggles into an endless cyclical debate of 19th century ideological semantics.

And while this clash makes up a significant portion of the modern identity politics psyop and political divide and conquer of the last century, it appears that there has been a severe and deliberate misattribution of the actual fundamental issue attributed to either ideology that has been seized upon by the propagandists of the predator class to continue to perpetuate this divisive rhetoric.

Most people when discussing the concepts of either capitalism or socialism, do so within the context of statism, that is to say what they’re actually discussing are state-capitalism and state-socialism. And when taking an outside view of said debate it becomes clear that the critiques of the capitalists against the socialists, and the critiques of the socialists against the capitalists, are in actuality both critiques of statism and the impact with which centralized state power has had on morphing either ideology into a repressive corruption of its intended purpose.

Most people, it seems, view these concepts through this lens and as such have a profound misunderstanding of the definition of these terms and the historical context behind the development of such ideologies.

A good example of this was elaborated upon by esteemed libertarian economist Murray Rothbard in his 1971 essay Capitalism versus Statism, Rothbard stated thusly:

If we are to keep the term “capitalism” at all, then, we must distinguish between “free-market capitalism” on the one hand, and “state capitalism” on the other. The two are as different as day and night in their nature and consequences. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government — the State — to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence.

Indeed, even the very word “capitalism” as being conflated with the practice of free enterprise and voluntary exchange is an inversion of its original definition and was an invention of industrial robber barons of the early 20th century.

Pioneer of early anarchist philosophy Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is largely credited with firmly establishing an understanding of the word “capitalism” in his 1846 work System of Economic Contradictions shortly after it came into common usage, using the term derisively and referring to it as “the theory of misfortune and the organization of misery” characterized by the appropriation of property and resources by the few to generate profit by the exploitation of the many.

Early American anarchists that played an influential role in the development of political theory, particularly libertarianism, define capitalism with a similar view. For instance, Benjamin Tucker described capitalism in his 1893 work Instead of a Book: A Realistic Picture of the Future as a “state-protected monopoly that enabled the exploitation of labor”.

Similarly, Lysander Spooner in his book Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Legal Cure and other works would describe capitalism as a state enforced monopoly over land, money, and banking that enabled the exploitation of labor.

Likewise, Emma Goldman in Anarchism: What it Really Stands For would refer to capitalism as “man being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative”.

This is what we today know as crony-capitalism or corporatism. But originally, they all meant the same thing. In actuality, the more realistic and accurate terminology to refer to genuine free market practicies and voluntary enterprise is what is known as agorism ― A concept popularized by anarchist philosopher and author Samuel Edward Konkin III in his 1980 work The New Libertarian Manifesto.

Many may find it shocking to learn that it was at the turn of the 20th century that the term capitalism underwent a metamorphosis from its original derisive deffinition describing wealth consolidation and labor exploitation to being conflated with the concepts of the free market under false pretenses.

Industrialist robber barons like the Rockefeller and DuPont families, when their monopolies of consolidated wealth were threatened by actual free market competition, would undertake an effort to rig the system in their favor and reshape the ideological framework, publicly espousing the rhetoric of “free market enterprise”, while privately advocating state interference of market economics to secure their financial interests. Through organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers (est 1895), and the American Liberty League (est 1934), these industrial tycoons would position themselves as seemingly champions of free market principles, while behind the scenes lobbying heavily for anti-free market practices such as protectionist tariffs, government contracts, and regulations favorable to big business monopolies.

Thus, the term “capitalism” would come to be associated with free markets in concept, but state-corporate intervention in practice, leading to the discrepancy of its usage in the modern American economic rhetoric.

Due to this inversion, modern socialists and Marxist-Leninists have a similar misunderstanding of the word capitalism. Just as capitalists conflate the word in a positive sense with free market economics, socialists conflate the word in a negative sense with what they belive the free market to be. As such, when socialists blame the woes of the proletariat on “the free market of capitalism”, what they are in fact primarily criticizing in most cases without realizing it is the centralization of wealth and power against the free market, not for it.

Socialists themselves often advocate their own version of anti-state voluntary exchange and community building through what is known as mutual aid, wherein communities and individuals operating under a principle of solidarity voluntarily and reciprocally exchange resources, services, and support to meet community needs. This concept garnered popularity via the 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution authored by prominent political theorist and anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin, whose work and ideals influenced the development of anarchist, socialist, and partially even early libertarian ideology.

It must be understood that the state, acting in its belligerent capacity, is the primary driving force behind all class antagonisms. It exists exclusively as a monopoly on violence, with the centralization of power into a coercive bureaucratic hierarchy using force, oppression, and exploitation to impose the ideals of a plutocratic aristocracy among the unconsenting masses.

It is this centralization of power into a hierarchical coercive bureaucracy that leads to the inevitable downfall of any and all class revolutions. A prime historical example of this being the Bolshevik revolution.

Vladimir Lenin espoused in his 1917 book State and Revolution that the uprising of the Bolsheviks was intended to establish what Lenin referred to as a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, the purpose of which was to seize control of the state apparatus from the oppressive bourgeoisie and, utilizing the machinery of the state, suppress any potential anti-proletarian uprisings of the ruling class while implementing equitable socialist reforms. The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was, in theory, according to Lenin, a transitional phase in which the state itself would wither away gradualy with the implementation of these ideals into a classsless, stateless egalitarian society.

This, of course, did not happen, and was always destined to fail. Not only because, as revealed by historian and economics professor Antony C Sutton, the Bolshevik Revolution was secretly financially backed by Western capitalists ― but as observed by Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, a contemporary and staunch critic of Karl Marx, the state is inherently oppressive, and by its very nature of power centralization, expansionist and militaristic. Bakunin accurately predicted decades before the Bolshevik Revolution that even a state comprised of the working class would concentrate authority into a “Red Bureaucracy” simply resulting in the creation of a new ruling elite just as oppressive as the previous.

Indeed, toward the end of his life even Vladimir Lenin himself, while not disavowing Marxism in its entirety, began to see the cracks in the Soviet system. In his Final Testament dictated between 1922 and 1923, Lenin heavily criticized what he saw as the bureaucratization of Soviet leadership under Joseph Stalin as general secretary, becoming increasingly concerned with Stalin’s ambition and authoritarian tactics undermining what was intended to be a voluntary union of Soviet republics.

Vladimir Lenin would die in January of 1924 at the age of 53, due to a combination of genetic predispositions, and likely an added dose of poison provided by Joseph Stalin.

With the rise of state backed communism came countless atrocities. Regimes such as those of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot resulted in the deaths of millions and the suffering of countless more. Yet, rather than being unique to the communist system, these mass abuses, just as with those of other contemporary governments, capitalist or otherwise, can squarely be seen as a result of the innately violent nature of the state and forced collectivization.

Ultimately, it is clear, as Bakunin outlined, that any successful revolution must prioritize the abolition of the state. It is likewise demonstrable that any successful economic system must be rooted in voluntary exchange and non-coercion. It can be observed then, that it is the corruption of the state, not inherently the ideologies of either capitalism in the free market sense or socialism that is the biggest contributing factor to the failure of such ideals, and, with the subtraction of the state, either are capable of producing effective and prosperous forms of social organization.

Free Thought Project colleague and contributor and co-founder of The Conscious Resistance Network Neil ‘Liberty’ Radimaker expanded in depth upon this very concept in his article titled Voluntary Systems vs. Authoritarian Control: Rethinking The Clash Between Socialism and Capitalism.

In it, he concludes:

The debate between socialism and capitalism is often reduced to a false binary, where proponents of each ideology accuse the other of immorality. However, the real divide is not between left and right but between authoritarianism and liberty—between coercion and voluntarism. Both socialism and capitalism can be moral systems, as long as they operate voluntarily and respect the Non-Aggression Principle.

R.J. Rummel’s concept of democide reminds us that state power, regardless of ideology, leads to mass murder and oppression when unrestrained by moral principles. The lesson is clear: no system, whether socialist or capitalist, should rely on force or coercion to achieve its goals.

And so, as class consciousness in America rises with the recognition of living under the yoke of a plutocratic oligarchy, and the urge for revolution and liberation from this oppressive exploitative system continues to fester, it is not enough to simply advocate for working class solidarity or the implementation of more equitable systems. For as we can see, regardless of the reform, should it be affixed to the apparatus of the state it will inevitably mutate into a ravenous beast that devours the rights and liberties of everyone.

Any class revolution must embrace the abolition of statism, lest it be doomed from the start to repeat the mistakes of history.

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New US Congress Bill Proposal Requires All Operating System Providers To Verify Ages

Enshrining age verification laws nationwide presents a series of perilous privacy concerns.

(Liam Dawe) We’ve covered here before on individual US states setting up their own age verification laws, and now a new US Congress bill has been proposed for it. If passed, this would then potentially set it all up to be nation-wide across the entirety of the US.

The bill was introduced on April 13th and has been referred to the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce. It’s being sponsored by the Democratic party’s Josh Gottheimer, with it being co-sponsored by Republican Elise M. Stefanik so it has bipartisan support.

The current concerning thing – is that the actual bill text doesn’t seem to have been provided yet. All we know is the main introduction title of: “To require operating system providers to verify the age of any user of an operating system, and for other purposes”.

It could go either way with it simply asking for people to enter their date of birth or more concerning is actual proper verification using some form of ID. The other bit about it being for “other purposes” also leaves me with a rather uneasy feeling. These types of bills we’ve seen elsewhere are always a first step towards something worse. They all mean less privacy, less freedom, more tracking and a potential for more security problems when things inevitably get leaked somewhere.

This appears to be part of the “Parents Decide Act” announced earlier in April by Gottheimer, as just one step in the process. So expect a lot more to come. Some bullet point plans from it:

• Require operating system developers like Apple and Google to verify users’ ages when setting up a new device, rather than relying on self-reported ages.
• Allow parents to set age-appropriate content controls from the start, including limiting access to social media, apps, and AI platforms.
• Ensure that age and parental settings securely flow to apps and AI platforms, so content is tailored appropriately for children.
• Prevent children from accessing harmful or explicit content — including inappropriate AI chatbot interactions — by creating a consistent, trusted standard across platforms.

Currently, the bill is only in the introductory stage so it hasn’t yet passed and become law, so if this is important to you in the US you may want to speak to your representatives.

The post New US Congress Bill Proposal Requires All Operating System Providers To Verify Ages appeared first on Activist Post.

La présidente de la Commission plaide pour une « projection de puissance »…

Le 9 mars, tous les diplomates de l’Union européenne en poste aux quatre coins de la planète ont été conviés pour une réunion annuelle. L’UE tente ainsi d’imiter les « conférences des ambassadeurs » que certains Etats – la France, par exemple – organisent régulièrement pour leur compte.

L’événement avait bien sûr été planifié avant le déclenchement de la guerre contre l’Iran lancée conjointement par les Etats-Unis et Israël le 28 février. Il était donc intéressant de savoir comment la présidente de la Commission européenne, qui a prononcé le discours d’ouverture, allait intégrer dans sa rhétorique cette agression caractérisée.

Sans surprise, Ursula von der Leyen (photo, ici au centre, en visite en Israël en octobre 2023) a débuté son discours en accablant la victime, Téhéran, et sans énoncer la moindre condamnation, ni même la plus petite réserve, contre Washington et Tel-Aviv. Donald Trump est épargné notamment parce que Bruxelles ne veut surtout pas l’éloigner encore un peu plus de la croisade que l’UE entend poursuivre contre la Russie ; quant à l’Etat hébreux, il bénéficie d’une indulgence de principe, quelles que soient les atrocités qu’il commet et assume.

Dès les premiers instants de son intervention, Mme von der Leyen martèle donc : « disons les choses clairement : aucune larme ne devrait être versée pour le régime iranien qui a infligé la mort et imposé la répression à son propre peuple (…) ce régime a provoqué la dévastation et la déstabilisation de toute la région au moyen de ses auxiliaires armés de missiles et de drones ». Bref, pour l’oratrice, si l’Iran n’existait pas, le Moyen-Orient serait sans doute un paradis de paix et de sérénité.

Certains pourraient s’étonner du silence de la cheffe de la Commission sur la violation aussi brutale du droit international de la part de MM. Trump et Netanyahou. L’UE n’est en effet jamais en reste pour se présenter comme un parangon de vertu, et pour distribuer mauvais points et sanctions à ceux qu’elle juge l’enfreindre.

En réalité, ce 9 mars, au-delà de l’actualité immédiate, Ursula von der Leyen a amorcé un changement de ton que d’aucuns ont interprété comme un virage. Si elle n’a pas mis clairement en cause le sacro-saint « ordre international fondé sur des règles », elle a explicitement assumé un changement de priorités. Faire prévaloir « les intérêts de l’Europe » devient désormais le premier objectif proclamé.

… La suite de l’article est réservée aux abonnés…

Cet article La présidente de la Commission plaide pour une « projection de puissance »… est apparu en premier sur Ruptures.

La présidente de la Commission plaide pour une « projection de puissance »

Le 9 mars, tous les diplomates de l’Union européenne en poste aux quatre coins de la planète ont été conviés pour une réunion annuelle. L’UE tente ainsi d’imiter les « conférences des ambassadeurs » que certains Etats – la France, par exemple – organisent régulièrement pour leur compte.

L’événement avait bien sûr été planifié avant le déclenchement de la guerre contre l’Iran lancée conjointement par les Etats-Unis et Israël le 28 février. Il était donc intéressant de savoir comment la présidente de la Commission européenne, qui a prononcé le discours d’ouverture, allait intégrer dans sa rhétorique cette agression caractérisée.

Sans surprise, Ursula von der Leyen (photo, ici au centre, en visite en Israël en octobre 2023) a débuté son discours en accablant la victime, Téhéran, et sans énoncer la moindre condamnation, ni même la plus petite réserve, contre Washington et Tel-Aviv. Donald Trump est épargné notamment parce que Bruxelles ne veut surtout pas l’éloigner encore un peu plus de la croisade que l’UE entend poursuivre contre la Russie ; quant à l’Etat hébreux, il bénéficie d’une indulgence de principe, quelles que soient les atrocités qu’il commet et assume.

Dès les premiers instants de son intervention, Mme von der Leyen martèle donc : « disons les choses clairement : aucune larme ne devrait être versée pour le régime iranien qui a infligé la mort et imposé la répression à son propre peuple (…) ce régime a provoqué la dévastation et la déstabilisation de toute la région au moyen de ses auxiliaires armés de missiles et de drones ». Bref, pour l’oratrice, si l’Iran n’existait pas, le Moyen-Orient serait sans doute un paradis de paix et de sérénité.

Certains pourraient s’étonner du silence de la cheffe de la Commission sur la violation aussi brutale du droit international de la part de MM. Trump et Netanyahou. L’UE n’est en effet jamais en reste pour se présenter comme un parangon de vertu, et pour distribuer mauvais points et sanctions à ceux qu’elle juge l’enfreindre.

Ursula von der Leyen a amorcé un changement de ton que d’aucuns ont interprété comme un virage

En réalité, ce 9 mars, au-delà de l’actualité immédiate, Ursula von der Leyen a amorcé un changement de ton que d’aucuns ont interprété comme un virage. Si elle n’a pas mis clairement en cause le sacro-saint « ordre international fondé sur des règles », elle a explicitement assumé un changement de priorités. Faire prévaloir « les intérêts de l’Europe » devient désormais le premier objectif proclamé.

Ainsi, pour la patronne de Bruxelles, « nous défendrons et maintiendrons toujours le système fondé sur des règles (…) mais nous ne pouvons plus compter sur ce système comme le seul moyen de défendre nos intérêts ni partir du principe que ses règles nous protégeront des menaces ».

Et pour ceux qui n’auraient pas entendu le message, elle insiste : « nous devons déterminer si le système que nous avons construit – avec toutes ses tentatives bien intentionnées de consensus et de compromis – est plutôt une aide ou une entrave à notre crédibilité en tant qu’acteur géopolitique ». Admettant que c’est « un message dur à entendre », elle appelle de ses vœux « une politique étrangère plus réaliste et axée sur les intérêts ».

Dès lors, les conséquences politiques s’imposent : « notre objectif est de devenir plus résilients, plus souverains et plus puissants (…) nous devons être prêts à projeter notre puissance de manière plus affirmée ».

En outre, il faut trouver des alliances face à la Chine et aux Etats-Unis : « de l’Asie centrale au cœur de l’Afrique, de l’Amérique latine à l’Asie du Sud-Est, de vastes régions du monde recherchent la stabilité et des partenaires de confiance ».

Ursula von der Leyen indique dès lors trois priorités : la sécurité et la défense, les échanges commerciaux, et la diplomatie.

Au titre de la première priorité, « l’Europe doit être capable de projeter sa puissance – d’exercer ses capacités de dissuasion et de défense et d’accroître son influence ». Et ce, d’autant que « nous ne partons pas de zéro. Nous avons fait plus pour la défense l’année passée que pendant les décennies qui ont précédé. Nous avons amorcé une montée en puissance des dépenses de défense, qui atteindront 800 milliards d’euros d’ici à 2030 ». Inévitablement suit un développement autour du thème « l’Europe se tiendra toujours aux côtés de l’Ukraine ».

Quant à la deuxième priorité, elle implique de développer « les investissements et les échanges commerciaux avec le monde » car ces derniers « ne sont pas qu’une question d’économie, mais une question de pouvoir ». La Commissaire en chef cite dans ce contexte l’initiative « Global Gateway », qui vise à associer capitaux privés et publics pour investir dans des infrastructures logistiques, de transport et de commerce à travers le monde, sur le modèle des « routes de la soie » promues par Pékin. Est ainsi évoqué l’exemple du corridor à travers la Mer Caspienne, reliant l’Europe à l’Asie centrale.

Et de poursuivre : « Ce que je veux dire est très simple : dans cette région, ainsi qu’en Afrique ou au Moyen-Orient, nos investissements signifient que nous disposons de moyens de pression et d’influence ». Voilà au moins qui est clair.

Les querelles n’opposent pas seulement les Vingt-sept pays entre eux, mais mettent aux prises les différentes institutions de l’UE

Qu’un Etat affiche sa volonté de défendre ses intérêts n’a rien de condamnable. Mais dès lors qu’il s’agit de l’Union européenne, un problème fondamental se pose : il n’existe pas d’« intérêts européens », il n’y a en réalité que des intérêts nationaux, souvent différents, parfois divergents voire contradictoires. En outre, les histoires, géographies et économies nationales ont déterminé des cultures politiques qui ne se ressemblent pas, et forgé des intérêts qui sont parfois incompatibles. Les exemples ne manquent pas.

Ainsi, de nombreux gouvernements nationaux se sont ainsi rangés du côté des agresseurs contre l’Iran. Mais, fidèle à une certaine tradition espagnole, à Madrid, le chef du gouvernement de ce pays s’est dissocié de l’aventure guerrière.

Par ailleurs, la plupart des capitales soutiennent Kiev sans états d’âme. Mais le Hongrois Viktor Orban, ainsi que quelques uns de ses homologues d’Europe centrale plaident pour dédiaboliser Moscou.

D’autre part, les positions des chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement sont extrêmement diverses quant à l’adoption finale du traité de libre échange avec le Mercosur (quatre pays latino-américains).

Autre exemple, les attitudes face à un emprunt européen massif ont dessiné un autre clivage particulièrement vif. Enfin, que dire du « couple franco-allemand », longtemps décrit comme le moteur indispensable de l’Europe, et qui hoquette désormais sur de nombreux thèmes, dont le futur avion de combat commun.

Il est à noter que les lignes de fracture varient d’une problématique à l’autre. Ce n’est jamais « les mêmes contre les mêmes ». Cela condamne le concept même d’« intérêts européens ».

En outre, les querelles n’opposent pas seulement les Vingt-sept pays entre eux, mais mettent aux prises les différentes institutions de l’UE. Dernier exemple en date, l’inimitié notoire qui oppose la présidente de la Commission européenne et la cheffe du Service européen d’action extérieure, l’Estonienne Kaja Kallas, qui est également, selon les traités, vice-présidente de la Commission.

Au-delà des rivalités personnelles, le fond de la querelle concerne la responsabilité de la politique extérieure de l’UE. Théoriquement, celle-ci relève du Conseil (les Etats membres). Mais Ursula von der Leyen ambitionne de s’en emparer dans la pratique, une arrogance qui agace de plus en plus dans la bulle bruxelloise.

Du reste, les discours qu’ont prononcés les deux femmes devant les diplomates étaient fort différents. Là où l’Allemande a insisté sur les intérêts géopolitiques, l’Estonienne a dépeint, de manière très idéologique, l’Europe comme une « force mondiale au service du bien ». « Intérêts » d’un côté, injonction morale de l’autre…

Dans les deux cas cependant pointe en arrière-plan, encore plus nettement qu’auparavant, une ambition planétaire impériale, comme en témoigne l’appel répété à une « projection de puissance ». Une arrogance en réalité impuissante, hors-sol, mais qui risque d’éloigner encore plus les peuples de la « merveilleuse aventure européenne ».

Cet article La présidente de la Commission plaide pour une « projection de puissance » est apparu en premier sur Ruptures.

Evolutions de la présence militaire russe en Syrie et des dynamiques régionales

A moyen terme, la Syrie devrait rester la plaque tournante de la projection de force et d'influence russe vers l'Afrique même si, à plus long terme, la présence militaire russe pourrait être remise en question par les autorités syriennes ou ses soutiens.

- Moyen-Orient / Russie , Iran , Syrie , Cartes géopolitiques, Géopolitique, Influence, Afrique, Bases militaires, 2025, Projections, Stratégie, Transition politique , 2024, 2026

Syria is becoming a clash zone for three geopolitical projects

Elena Panina on https://cont.ws/@fruct/3084924

In Syria, as in other countries in the Middle East, Israel is guided by the Begin Doctrine: “The State of Israel must prevent an enemy country from developing the capacity to destroy it.” Tel Aviv does not want to live next to an Islamist state under the patronage of Turkey, where the new ruling elite is made up of militants from terrorist organizations, even if they are officially sanctioned by the EU and the United States.

It should be borne in mind that the project “Greater Israel” involves the expansion of the territory of the current Jewish state at the expense of Palestinian lands, part of the territories of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, as well as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. If we take Syria, then Tel Aviv is at least interested in a buffer zone on its territory adjacent to its current borders. Although the appetite comes with eating. And already heard statements from Israeli officials that they will not tolerate any armed groups south of Damascus.

In the interests of Israel-and the promotion of the Greater Kurdistan project at the expense of part of the territories of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Obviously, it would be convenient for Tel Aviv to use this project in order to hack the sovereignty and territorial integrity of these countries. Under the current circumstances, Syrian Kurdistan can serve as the basis for a”Greater Kurdistan”.

> In this case, Tel Aviv is interested in cutting a corridor to the northeast to the Syrian Kurds, whom Trump decided to throw off the American balance sheet and transfer to the balance sheet of the Turks. This, however, does not guarantee that the next US president will not change Washington’s position on the Kurds… As for Israel, it has even previously supplied weapons to the People’s Self-Defense Units of the Syrian Kurds. And Turkey was extremely dissatisfied with this.

But on the same lands, a third project is gradually unfolding — “Great Turan“, tied to Ankara’s interests. At the same time, the plans of certain Turkish circles, including those around the “sultan” Erdogan, extend much further than the other two projects — up to the territories of Central Asia and Southern Siberia.

> But it is Syria that seems destined to become the point of collision for all three geopolitical projects: “Greater Israel,” “Greater Kurdistan,” and “Greater Turan.” Thus, this state is turning into a proxy war zone between Israel and Turkey.

The Trump administration will try to play the role of a peacemaker, but it is unlikely that Israel will listen to it. Rather, it is Trump who will be forced to change his mind under pressure from the Israeli lobby, to which he made certain commitments during the election campaign.

[Ed Note:  I believe there is a 4th one and that would be the ambitions of the current self-appointed president, Al Jolani or Al-Sharaa]

 

Map 3/3 Tectonics of the European Geopolitical Plate. When the Fracture of Geographical Europe Accelerates : The Consequences of the War in Ukraine (February 24, 2022 - April 2024)

An arc of fracture extends from Finland, where Moscow attempts destabilization maneuvers since the country joined NATO, to the Caucasus, passing through the Baltic States bordering Russia and, of course, Ukraine, and even Moldova.

- Union européenne / Ukraine, NATO, Russia, Moldavie, Map, Geopolitics, Georgia, War, Strategy, European project, Estonia, Lithuania, Belarus, Azerbaijan, 2024

« Si Paris entend jouer un rôle majeur dans les crises de demain, cela passe nécessairement par un outil de projection aérienne de premier ordre ». Entretien avec I. Sand

Quelles sont les relations de dépendance entre l'armée de l'air et de l'espace d'une part et le rang de la France à l'échelle mondiale d'autre part ? Que penser de la prolifération de drones et de l'évolution de la conflictualité ?

- États membres / France , Afrique et Moyen-Orient , Cartes géopolitiques, Défense, Diplomatie, Géopolitique, Géostratégie, Conflit, Puissance, Union soviétique (URSS), Guerre, Opérations, Projections, 1945, Stratégie, Doctrine stratégique, Dissuasion nucléaire , Nucléaire militaire, 2022