Arun Gupta – Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

Conspiracy Theories of the Left: 5G, Corona Virus, and Aliens

By Arun Gupta (April 10, 2020)

I am on a listserve of leftists who are debating the role of 5G and chemtrails in the pandemic, with some claiming there is no virus at all. One person is even trotting out anti-semite conspiracist David “lizard aliens rule us” Icke.

This isn’t coming out of thin air. These conspiracies on the Left are an updated version of JFK conspiracy theories (one person even raised that, “You no doubt believe the official story of the JFK assassination”).The same people think HIV does not cause AIDS, Lyme disease is a bioweapon gone amok, 9/11 was an inside job, the US invaded Iraq because they were no longer trading oil in dollars, the Bilderberg group runs the world. They also tend to be enthusiastic consumers of quackery, such as reiki, Hellerwork, cupping, craniosacral therapy, homeopathy, and so on.

This isn’t politics. It’s a cultish religion. These ideas take hold among people who are desperate to believe there are omnipotent, omnimalevolent forces who control all society, and indeed all of history. But they are the visionary prophets who can see the glorious truth and are trying to bring the good word that if we just eliminate the 5G chemtrails the coronavirus will disappear like magic. They want and need an all-powerful father figure to rage against and to overthrow, and only then can human potential be unleashed.

While I think it’s a mistake to see them as equivalent as Trumpkins, who are genuinely genocidal, there is a parallel with them in terms of lack of basic understanding of science. The pathologies of American society are not purely partisan. There are self-destructive and frankly moronic ideas that manifest themselves in different ways across the spectrum, among fascists, the right, the center, liberals, and the Left.

See below for some choice examples:

***

“If COVID-19 is not a virus and the cause of the ailment is 5G 60GHz, then wouldn’t it make sense to stay away from hospitals, other buildings, and cruise ships that have 5G installed? What possible vaccine could be developed for this except for another phony pharmaceutical prize, how could someene contract the ailment from droplets of fluid from someone who has it, and how could there be an incubation period? And is all this social distancing, hand washing, wearing face masks, and sheltering-in-place just distractions? Lots of unanswered questions.

“With the relatively recent roll out of 5G 60 GHz in various parts of the world, including near Wuhan, and all the damage it has and will be doing, one has to wonder if we humans are being used as guinea pigs for some nefarious forces. And what might they be up to going forward? What are they planning, building, putting in place right now, in plain sight (if only we were permitted to be outside and watch them)?

“This for me is about connecting the dots, the coronavirus/5G-60/chemtrails (the “aerosolized spraying” of “metallized particulates”)/bio-weapon connection. I appreciate all the contributions folks have been making to this issue”

***

“We may be looking at several different illnesses, some being caused by a virus, some by 5G and so on. But they’re all being called COVID19.”

***

David Icke presents interesting thorough discussion of why the tests are bullshit, false positives–in first 30 minutes.
https://londonreal.tv/the-coronavirus-conspiracy-how-covi…/…
A lot of leftists become furious whenever I post ICKE(he is NOT alt- right so I’m not sure why), so ignore this if you hate Icke.
Icke contradicts himself. Later he says people are getting VERY sick
but it’s from 5 G. Whether it is or not they are rolling out 5G while we are distracted

Welcome to the Great Pandemic Depression

By Arun Gupta (March 23, 2020)

I wrote this days ago saying an economic contraction of 10% or more and an unemployment rate of 20%. Only now are investment banks worth hundreds of billions of dollars considering we are in a depression. I haven’t seen anyone acknowledge what is obvious: The same economic denialism is going on now as in 2008. Then, as now, we were told, “No recession.” Then “soft landing.” Then “V-shaped downturn and recovery.” That’s the current line from the Nazi Carnival Barker. Except it’s delusional at best, and a flagrant lie at worst. We are looking at months of economic inactivity and tens of millions unemployed.

Welcome to the Great Pandemic Depression.

If you are feeling stunned and disoriented by what is happening with the Great Pandemic, that’s because we have become embroiled in a war in just days.

We may be looking at a death toll in the millions just in the United States. We are probably looking at an economic depression. We are certainly looking at a disruption and reordering of society and social relations in a way that hasn’t happened since World War Two. That had a profound effect by with 10% of the population being shipped off to war, re-tooling the entire economy, and upending social relations, particularly around gender and race, in ways that rippled through society for decades. We don’t know if this will be on that scale, but we are now in a war society and economy with a malignant narcissist in command.

In this post, I want to focus on the economy. The economic fallout will be as bad as the Great Recession, and we may be headed for a depression. A recession is defined as two out of three quarters of economic contraction, but there is no accepted definition for a depression. So I define a depression as an economic contraction of more than 10% and a peak unemployment rate of 20% or more. This article is informative on the economic impact, but like virtually all reporting on the pandemic, it is behind the curve.

Let’s get ahead of the curve. It is likely many if not most states and big cities will shut down all schools, bars, and restaurants this month. Even if many states, particularly reactionary Red States, don’t enact blanket quarantines, it’s likely a majority of the population will be living under state-imposed self-isolation within weeks as the big states and municipalities do this.

Even before such drastic measures, the airline, hospitality, music, sports, film and TV industry, the entire travel and leisure industry, were trapped between shutting down and collapsing. Global supply chains will be severely disrupted with most of the advanced economies shutting down as well.

Meanwhile, China’s attempts to get its economy up and running again were faltering even before other industrialized countries were hit hard.

There will both be a huge drop in consumption for all but basic goods — food, water, medicine, medical supplies, stay-at-home entertainment — and a huge drop in demand as tens of millions of workers are idled. This will become a feedback loop. People will hoard savings as they hoard toilet paper because they are unsure of how long they need to ride out the storm and hold onto savings, putting off all unnecessary purchases. Consumption will plummet for non-emergency goods, rippling through the supply chain from extraction to manufacturing to sales to shipping. We are talking apparel, electronics, furniture, cars and trucks, consumer durable goods (apart from things like freezers that have all sold out).

One example. In February, car sales in China were at 21% of levels the year before. Let me repeat that. China recorded only one-fifth of the car sales from a year ago. Their techno-authoritarian state

Auto manufacturing, parts, dealers, repairs, and so are about a $1 trillion industry in the U.S., nearly 5% of the nation’s GDP. The energy sector has crashed as well, anticipating an economic free-fall and because of the price war between the Saudis and Russia. Trump has been acting as if everything is great because gas will be cheap, while ignoring the carnage, but even by his murderous logic low gas prices are bad for the economy. High oil prices are more beneficial to the U.S. economy because of the domestic oil and gas production boom that has become a significant employer throughout the supply chain, from drilling and equipment to chemicals, transport, and storage. (I am not saying fracking is good; it should be banned. But this is another economic blow).

Auto insurance accident claims have already declined significantly, indicating people are driving much less. If they aren’t going to work, kids aren’t going to school, they aren’t leaving the house, and huge amounts of wealth are being destroyed in the stock market crash, how likely is it people will be buying houses?

So there goes another huge leg of the economy: home construction, home sales, moving, and goods to outfit homes. Then there is the restaurant industry, which employs around 15 million people. Who knows how many might eventually be laid off, but it’s likely to be enormous both from direct closures, self-isolation, social distancing, and knock-on effects of reduced employment and spending.

All of this will ripple through the financial sector, especially in terms of loans and corporate debt. The Fed has unleashed nearly all of its tools, both Zero Interest Rate Policy and Quantitative Easing, but it’s having little effect because it’s not a financial crisis. Interestingly, one former banking regulator, Sheila Blair, says the Fed is not using its tools to shore up entire industries, which she says would help businesses and consumers.

If this wasn’t bad enough, state and local governments will be hard hit by declining sales tax and income tax revenue. So will mass transit systems by declining ridership and revenue. Meanwhile healthcare systems will be overtaxed and may collapse in some areas. Manufacturing will suffer as well as inventories build up. Less production and consumption will also mean less material moving, so warehousing, shipping, and trucking will all be dealt blows.

This is already worry that weaknesses and breaks could eventually appear in food supply chains. What happens if supermarkets become hotbeds of infection? They are likely to given the enormous foot traffic and all the people handling goods. Imagine if workers start coming down sick and others are too afraid to show up to work. This is deeply worrisome for obvious reasons.

And the fact a murderous psychopath is running the show doesn’t provide any comfort.

Coronavirus Could Normalize Authoritarianism

By Arun Gupta (Feburary 25, 2020)

The coronavirus is an extremely dangerous moment.

Not really for the spread of the virus; there is nothing really that can be done to stop it at this point from becoming a pandemic. But from governments “locking down” entire cities, closing borders, and in effect using military and police to impose martial law.

The virus, sensationalistic media, and mass panic combine to normalize public-health authoritarianism. Blocking international travel and exchange will only make the situation worse by hindering the response, preventing shipments of vital medical supplies, and encouraging countries to conceal outbreaks as they don’t want to be the next one to have bans placed on them. It also encourages xenophobia and nativism.

If there is a silver lining, it’s the potential disruption of global supply chains could trigger a recession that would doom Trump.

Bernie is the Only Logical Choice

By Arun Gupta (February 12, 2020)

Last year I said, “If not Bernie then Warren.” Her campaign is finished, even if she tries to limp on to South Carolina. I am sad to see her go, but a fourth-place finish means it’s over for her. Biden is finished as well but will stick around until Super Tuesday.

Now watch as the “Never Bernie” elites come out in force and in desperation. They will try to herd voters behind Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and then Bloomberg. In effect, they are telling Democratic voters to beat Trump you need to nominate uninspiring, mendacious, vindictive candidates.

I’m not saying Bernie can beat Trump, but I argue he has a better chance than these tools and representatives of the ruling class. Bernie inspires people. He inspires young people, Latinos, the working class. He is the only one left who can draw working-class white men away from Trump and into the Democratic fold.

If you think that Bernie being a socialist will hurt him, do you really imagine Trump won’t use that against whoever might be the nominee, including Bloomberg? In his case, it will be a steady stream of explicit/veiled anti-semitism of Bloomberg being a globalist and part of an internationalist conspiracy to rob Americans of their guns and freedom. Or how about Buttigieg who is completely unvetted and untested and has a new scandal coming out about his past statements and actions every day. Or Klobuchar, who is about as inspiring as her salad comb.

When Trump says Bernie is coming for you, all he needs to say is that’s right, “I am coming to give you all healthcare and take away all your medical debt.”

In 2016, I said the Left needed to unite behind Clinton because Trump was such a danger. Now liberals need to unite behind Bernie. He’s the only logical choice going forward.

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History is a Weapon: Learn How to Use it

By Arun Gupta (July 23, 2019)

I have a little quiz for you. The questions are related, but by no means comprehensive. I could add many others. From memory only! No googling.

1) What do you know about the origins of American policing, in both the South and the North, particularly in the 19th century?
2) What was the Great Upheaval?
3) What is a Sundown town? Do you know if you grew up in a Sundown town
4) What do you know about the origins of the Texas Rangers and the role in served specifically during WWI
5) Which pogroms of African-Americans can you name from 1910s and 1920s?
6) What is eliminationism? What was the Rock Springs Massacre?
7) What is producerism?
8) How many U.S. citizens were deported to Mexico during the Great Depression?

I know many of you can answer most or even all these questions because you are scholars or have studied these subjects in depth. But otherwise very few Americans could answer even one of these questions.

I was a history nerd from a young age. I learned exactly zero of this by the time I graduated high school. I learned a little of this in college, where one of my majors was U.S. history. But only in the last decade have I learned about all these topics. Largely because I was interested in exploring the social and ideological construction of America as it happened, not the fantasy version spoon-fed in school, the media, and Hollywood.

If this was a college exam, I would add essay questions on Bacon’s Rebellion, the Dred Scott Case, Reconstruction, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Indian Removal Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act. And I haven’t even touched on the post-WWII era.

This brings me to the point I want to make: History is a weapon. Learn how to use it.

In America those who claim to love their country the most are the most profoundly ignorant of how it came to be. They live in a fantasy shrouded in myth cloaked in lies. They imagine themselves as avatars of goodness besieged by enemies all around them.

In reality, they hate everyone who isn’t part of their nativist, xenophobic, fundamentalist, murderous horde. They hate women, they hate Black people, they hate Mexicans, Muslims, the indigenous, Jews, immigrants, queers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists, free thinkers, and everyone who has ever fought for liberty and justice. They hate virtually everyone and everything decent that has happened in this land.

They revere rapists and murderers. The founding fathers were slave owners and massacred Indians.They were smugglers, tax evaders, and traitors. They were all hardened criminals. Nearly all of them idealize Confederates, too, every last one of which should have been shot for being traitors, among other crimes.

History is a weapon. Use it to beat back and shut down the racists and fascists rallying to Trump’s white nationalist order. When they talk about “law and order.” Make them own that legal history of slavery, genocide, lynchings, reservations, pogroms, Jim Crow, forced pregnancy, second-class status for women, the criminalization of LGBTQ people.

They hate the Constitution. They hate the free speech of Colin Kaepernick. They hate the free exercise of religion by Ilhan Omar and all Muslims. They hate the ideas of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

When they talk about “illegals” coming over the border, hit back hard. The only criminals are in the Trump administration. Under U.S. law, it’s illegal to deny asylum-seekers entry onto U.S. soil to present their claim and stay while it’s adjudicated. It’s illegal to return them to Mexico. It’s illegal to break up families. It’s illegal to kidnap children or hold them for more than 20 days. And it’s certainly illegal to torture them as the Trumpkins are doing now. All of this is illegal under U.S. law. Nearly all ICE raids are illegal because they use administrative warrants to violate people’s 4th Amendment rights.

And when they get worked up, anticipate their responses. If they say Democrats were responsible for Jim crow and the Klan say, “Sure, and the moment they abandoned that in the 1960s, the Republican Party welcomed all the racists with open arms.”

When they blame harsh immigration policy on Obama, tell them, “I opposed it then. I didn’t see you at any protests. I don’t support a party or a racist grifter for President like you. I support justice and liberation for all people, everywhere.

I don’t believe in reclaiming the flag or patriotism. The former is too blood-soaked, the latter too stepped in reactionary sentiments. But shutting down the Trumpkins can work. You don’t need to win them to your side. You just need to discourage and confuse them. To make them feel they can’t articulate their ideas, which are a jumble of rage, misogyny, authoritarianism, and racism more than coherent thoughts anyways.

Learn the history and learn how to shut them down.

No More Concentration Camps: A Movement Beginning

By Joseph Orosco (June 25, 2019)

Many people have responded in the last week to Arun Gupta’s call for a movement to end the mass detention of immigrants at the US/Mexico Border. He has created a Facebook social media presence to coordinate efforts:

https://www.facebook.com/NoConcCamps/

He adds the following:

“Hey Folks, I know many of you are eager to get involved in a national campaign against the concentration camps. We will be getting out a national call soon. This requires a lot of moving parts: lots of outreach to media, an interactive events website, fundraising, social media, design, and so on. Al of this is in motion and will happen very soon.
We are using a self-organizing model, as with Seattle and the Global Justice Movement and Occupy Wall Street.
You can get a head start by organizing your community. The goal is to get as many people down to a few key border cities this summer in the hopes it eventually takes off like Standing Rock.
But this will require extensive support on the ground as well as from afar. We aim to have coordinated days of action so everyone around the country can participate.
The first goal is simple: NO CONCENTRATION CAMPS!

There is a Facebook page you can join and start creating discussion threads. More social media and a website will be on the way very soon — within days!

WE CAN DO THIS!”

The Past Is Never Truly Past: We are Still Imprisoning Indigenous People in Deadly Conditions

By Arun Gupta (June 23, 2019)

Take a good look at these faces. What do you see?

They are all indigenous peoples.

527 years after the conquest of the Americas began, we are still penning, brutalizing, kidnapping, and killing indigenous people.
Asylum-seekers are 100% legal, protected by U.S. law as the signatory to international agreements such as the Fourth Geneva Convention protecting civilians in 1949 and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Yet 12,000 children of indigenous descent are in concentration camps in which the government is arguing before judges this week that denying children — children! — access to soap, dental hygiene, blankets, and even sleep are not needed to ensure the safe and sanitary conditions they are required by law to provide.

Deprivation of sleep is one of the cruelest forms of torture, yet children are being forced to sleep on cold cement floors under fluorescent lights on 24/7 with a thin aluminum blanket as their only bedding.
We have essentially recreated the 19th reservations for Native Americans that existed somewhere between concentration camps and death camps.

The conditions in these modern concentration camps are designed through malice and indifference to be hothouses of disease. Just today, officials from Central America who toured the concentration camps were warned they should wear surgical masks because of the prevalence of respiratory diseases.

The past is never truly past.

We need to stop this. It’s not going to happen through memes. It won’t happen through social media or online petitions.

We need to start organizing Caravans of Hope and flood the border cities with thousands of people to record, to witness, to vigil, to protest, to blockade, to force such an outcry that these camps are all shut down and that we give these people, our indigenous brothers and sisters, the compassion, care. and respect they deserve and that is long, long overdue.

Stay tuned for updates on what’s next.

We Need a March on the Concentration Camps

By Arun Gupta (June 19, 2019)

We need a massive march on the border, tens of thousands who will peacefully, nonviolently disrupt the machinery of ethnic cleansing, to give aid to migrants, to witness and record the concentration camps, the killings, the torture, the ethnic cleansing.

The Left is good at mobilizing in large-scale protest: the anti-globalization movement, the anti-Iraq War protests, immigrant rights, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock. All these mass mobilizations took place in the last couple of decades. All these movements helped shift the national debate.

The Left has the power to shift the national discourse. To make it clear we are not just going to let this happen in our name, we will use our bodies and brains and hearts to stop this and force everyone in this country to pick a side: either you’re with humanity or you’re with fascism.

If Trump wins again, full-blown fascism is a distinct possibility. This is about what path humanity takes. This is a moment where we need to stand up and stop what is happening. Whatever price we pay is nothing compared to that these migrants are already suffering.

There are far more of us than there are of them.

Keeping the Faith: Compassion, Understanding, and the Future of the Left

By Arun Gupta (May 21, 2019)

I am hearing a lot of despair lately, so I would like to share this story with you.

In the early 1990s, when I was international news editor at The Guardian Newsweekly, we hired a bookkeeper named Frances. Being a political newspaper run by the staff, our interviews were a mix of questions about competency and politics, as well as determining whether the person could really live on an annual salary of $13,000 in New York City. Frances was an old commie. She had joined the Communist Party USA during the World War Two era when it was a mass movement with hundreds of thousands of committed cadre and its influence was felt throughout society, particularly in theater, Hollywood, publishing, and all the arts.

When we asked Frances about her politics, about the crisis in the Left, about the failures of actually existing socialism, she gave the same response. Shaking a veiny fist in the air, Frances declared, “Socialism will win!” We chuckled, and we hired her. We desperately needed a bookkeeper, and she was willing to work for peanuts.

Frances would punctuate her sentences with “hoo-hahs!” picked up in New York’s tenements as a kid during the Great Depression. Frances said the boys used to fancy her back in the day, so she had a method to weed out the pretenders from the contenders. She would take them to a Communist Party meeting to see if they were worthy of her interest, but usually decided if she liked them by the time they finished walking over to the CP hall. At The Guardian, she kept a large mason jar of digestible fiber on her desk that looked like wood chips that she would prescribe for every ill real or imagined. “Really cleans you out!”, she would bellow in a raspy Brooklyn accent. Frances was bony, had enormous pendulous breasts, and would regularly dress and undress at her desk oblivious to coworkers in our open office.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, following the disastrous Communist Party coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, the entire cover of The Guardian was a photograph of a sewage drain with the Kremlin in the background. When Frances saw that she muttered all day, “Socialism down the drain. Hoo-hah!” To Frances, the idea that socialism was kaput made about as much sense as saying the sun wasn’t going to rise tomorrow.

That’s not what we were saying. We were saying the Soviet system was over. The Guardian, along with nearly all the American Left, had broken with the Soviet Union decades earlier. We saw the Soviet Union as a bastardization of what socialism can and should be, though we admired Gorbachev for bringing an end to the Cold War and trying to reform a failing system.

We supported Third World revolutions, the well-known ones, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, South Africa, and Palestine, and obscure ones from Western Sahara to East Timor. But as much as we opposed Soviet-style socialism and capitalism in equal measure, we didn’t realize how the collapse of the USSR would remove the last bulwark against American-led capitalism. The end of the Soviet Union quickly led nearly all the revolutionary post-colonial states to collapse or make deals with the devil to cling to power.

Frances never gave up the faith. She also didn’t work out as a bookkeeper. She was hiding the books from our business manager because they were a mess. Attempts to work out the conflict didn’t go anywhere. But one day, as two of us who were part of the elected leadership tried to mediate the conflict, she piped up, “Well, if you want me to resign, I’ll resign!” We were dumbfounded because we were used to threats and pleas and crying from incompetent staff. When you pay barely a thousand bucks a month, you don’t get the cream of the crop.

We weren’t stupid and immediately accepted her resignation. Frances was a good Communist to the end. She would sacrifice herself no questions asked because the collective struggle was all that mattered.

I’ve been thinking about Francis. We are in a time of profound despair. I know Francis would be keeping the faith. She lived through the long night of McCarthyism. It’s hard these days to understand how devastating that was. I’ve heard many stories from boomers about the lives of parents ruined and destroyed. McCarthyism was a society-wide purge. Thousands lost jobs as educators, professionals, union organizers, journalists, farmers. Many saw marriages crumble, lost homes, were forced into poverty, drank themselves to an early grave, and even committed suicide.

This was a time when the planet also stood on the brink of annihilation from the threat of nuclear war. But rays of light did appear, first with the civil rights movement. Then with the student and antiwar movements, followed by Black liberation, feminism, gay liberation, the environmental movement.

The heady feeling on the Left in the late sixties and early seventies is also hard to imagine these days One editor, who was involved in the leading student organization of the time, Students for a Democratic Society, summed it up as, “We had the bastards on the run.” The militarists, the CEOs, the politicians, the priests were all running scared and didn’t know what to make of this rebellion sweeping across their societies and the world.

Today it feels like the bastards are winning. America is scary: the rise of a strongman in the White House who is carrying out ethnic cleansing of undesirable religious and ethnic groups, encouraging rampant misogyny and violence by his followers, and pouring fracked gasoline on a world already on the funeral pyre.

But over many years of political involvement, I developed my own faith. I’m not sure socialism will win, even though I absolutely believe it’s the only hope for humanity. I know most species will not survive the next century, though fears of a total collapse misunderstand how evolution works. We can’t kill all life on the planet, though we can reduce it to pests and weeds such as jellyfish, rats, cockroaches, and invasive plants.

I know. That’s small comfort. But even after years of reporting on the worst of humanity. I still believe in the innate human capacity to do good. I don’t believe in a sky god. Not that I have an issue with that. As a young activist I got arrested as part of the Central American solidarity movement with radical Catholics like Daniel Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister. That gave me respect for people of spiritual faith even if it’s not my cup of tea. Of course, blind faith is dangerous. It’s led to some of the worst atrocities in human history.

Nor do I subscribe to the leftist belief that there is a design to history, such as what Francis believed. My faith stems from our nature as social animals. Even in a dog-eat-dog society like America, our lives are based on cooperation and sharing whether at home or work or even shopping or driving. We depend on cooperation in every facet of our lives. We just don’t think of it because we have a media that highlights competition and conflict because that’s how they make money, even though those moments are relatively rare in our lives.

Trump will pass soon from the stage, as horrifying as he is. How else to describe someone who has created concentration camps for children, demonizes an entire religion of more than one billion people, and decades ago paid for full-page ads calling for the lynching of innocent Black children, the Central Park 5? Though I am less sanguine about the quick passing of violent white nationalism Trump has brought into being.

I am seeing despair all around. Every day I log on to Facebook and Twitter, I see friends full of despair about the global turn towards fascism, the assaults on basic freedoms and dignity, and the deepening ecological crisis.

But keep the faith. Keep the faith in the human capacity for compassion and understanding and generosity, and we will get through this together.

Originally posted on Arun’s Patreon page. Posted by permission of author.

Putting Our Hopes in Mueller was Lazy Politics

By Arun Gupta (April 2, 2019)

While I stayed away from the Russia controversy because I thought it was overblown, I did write an article in December 2016 pointing out of course Russia would want to destabilize the U.S. Putin is a brutal authoritarian and Islamophobe who persecutes journalists and the LGBT community. He carried out a program of such intense ethnic cleansing in Chechnya it rose to the level of genocide. Plus, the U.S. has been trying to destabilize Russia and the Soviet Union before that for the last century, so why the hell wouldn’t he want to return the favor?

One of the vilest aspects of this whole mess is how many Leftists are willing idiots for Putin and Russian state media. Every time I see a post about Russia, I see dimwitted leftists defending RT despite the fact it promotes and defends white nationalists, the alt right, the Milos, the Alex Jones. They are enemies of liberation, equality, and social justice in every way that FOX News is. But harebrained Leftists screech, “But they are no worse than FOX News!” As if that is the standard we should aspire to.

One final note. I like many other journalists thought pinning the hopes on Mueller was always a bad move. It’s lazy politics. You have to organize for change. The system is the problem, not the solution.
Instead, other journalists and I have focused our energies on reporting. For the last two years, when I haven’t been working on my food book, I’ve been writing about the rise of violent white nationalists, the attacks on immigrants, refugees, and Muslims, climate change, labor reporting, the Occupy ICE movement, among other stories. Compare that to the shady Left journalists who spent all their time obsessing over the Russia obsession. They are now taking glee in the Mueller report despite the fact it’s clear that Barr is engaged in a cover-up. No one could come to the conclusion in two days there was no obstruction of justice by Trump. In 1992 Barr sabotaged the Iran-Contra investigation that was gearing up to indict George H.W. Bush. That’s why Trump installed him as AG, to sabotage the Mueller report. But some Left journalists have so lost their way they are dancing with glee, trying to act as if Trump did nothing wrong. Just to own the Libs.

The #Resistance Has No Vision

By Arun Gupta (November 8, 2018)

Everyone should be deeply disturbed what happened in the election. One seasoned electoral activist told me it was “A blue wavelet with a strong red undertow.” The Democrats lost crucial Senate and gubernatorial races, made only modest gains in state legislatures, and had a middling performance in the House. This election should have been a wave like 2010, 1994, or 1974.

History will ask, “This is the best Democrats can do?” After two years of Muslim bans, calls to shoot refugees, white nationalism, violent brownshirts, concentration camps for children, proposals to eliminate transgendered people, racist massacres, the elevation of sexual predators, rampant militarism, war crimes, trillions of dollars of theft, accelerating climate catastrophe, and the loathsome fascist slimeturd that is Trump, this is the best the Democrats can do?

They are not up to the task. They have no vision. It’s all anti-Trump. Given that and Trump standing for something — the fascist father — many will choose him. He controlled the narrative. He nationalized the Senate races. His relentless midterm campaigning is unprecedented. He made the elections all about him, turning every rally into dictator worship.

Despite his horrifying record, Trump still controls the show. Within 24 hours, he fired Sessions, he is barring journalists from the White House and he’s made Pelosi his fool. By calling for her to be the speaker, Trump is telling the world, “Watch as I use her as my springboard to re-election.”

What is clueless doddering simpering addled Pelosi’s response? “Bipartisanship.” What does that mean? Murder sprees at only half the synagogues? Shoot half the refugees? Incinerate half the planet? Impoverish half the working class?

Two years in liberals are like terrified peasants fleeing the four horseman of the apocalypse, frantically trying to claw their way into their holy cathedral of elections believing God will save them.

Your God has abandoned you. It’s time to get organized, get in the streets, not give an inch and fight relentlessly not because your life depends on it. But because everyone and everything you hold dear does.