Better in their words…

Butler II rally breaks records as Trump finishes what he started; CDC sets low bar for flu jabs; UK high court to make complicated decision; secret military plans explain much recent insanity; more.

Source: HEGEMONIC ☙ Sunday, October 6, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥🔥 Yesterday, twelve fast-paced weeks after being shot there, President Trump dramatically concluded his rudely interrupted rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He began his remarks standing next to his now-historic immigration chart and spectacularly pronouncing, to wild applause, “so, as I was saying.”

In other words, yesterday President Trump finished what he started.

But this time, President Trump enjoyed company. Photo from backstage:

The Hill ran one of several Butler II stories headlined, “Elon Musk: Voting for Trump ‘only way’ to ‘save’ democracy.” Indeed. More on that in a minute.

NBC’s Jake Taylor, who covered Butler II live, tweeted that the crowd “might be the largest I’ve ever seen.” Estimates suggest over 100,000 Trump supporters attended. Scads of conservative luminaries were also in attendance, along with a star-studded lineup of speakers.

In one of the rally’s most moving moments, the late Corey Comperatore —the firefighter killed by an assassin’s bullet at Butler I— was memorialized first by having his jacket and helmet installed in a special reserved section of the stands where he was slain, a heartbreaking reminder that precluded media from minimizing the seriousness of the attack:

CLIP: ‘How Great Thou Art’ sung before Comperatore’s jacket and helmet in the stands (1:28).

Comperatore was also honored through song and rhetoric. Exactly at 6:11pm, the moment of Corey Comperatore’s death, President Trump called for a moment of respectful silence, followed by a haunting rendition of the Ave Maria.

Many moments honored the fallen firefighter. In another, a painter thrillingly completed his patriotic portrait of Corey Comperatore during the rally:

CLIP: Painter Scott Lobaido finishes Comperatore painting at Butler II (0:19).

Elon’s appearance occupied much of the coverage. The New York Times ran its Butler II story yesterday headlined, “Elon Musk Leaps to Trump’s Side in Rally Appearance.” The world’s richest man donned a custom black MAGA cap with the words “Never Surrender” stitched into the side. During his comments, Elon referred to himself as “Dark MAGA,” a dig at the Democrats’ ridiculous “Dark Brandon” meme.

The billionaire was really feeling it. Words cannot adequately describe this image:

CLIP: Elon Musk’s full comments at Butler II (6:04).

Musk badly triggered corporate media when he commented that voting for Trump is necessary to save democracy, this time co-opting the Democrats’ silly campaign theme. But in Elon’s case, he was right, and he explained exactly how the Democrats’ immigration policy will end our democratic republic and install permanent one-party rule.

Several outraged media platforms labeled Elon’s undeniable logic “overheated rhetoric,” completely missing the irony.

Security at Butler II was markedly improved over round one. This time, the Secret Service overcame its fears of a mildly-pitched roof and staffed the shooter’s position atop the now infamous warehouse. They also, apparently, figured out how to use their drones.

Following the rally last night, Elon Musk finally changed his awkward profile pic (thank heavens) to a patriotic, user-supplied image from Butler II:

Musk is clearly all-in. How this will financially affect his companies remains to be seen, but he will surely pay a price.

Senator and VP candidate JD Vance also spoke eloquently, creating another stark contrast with his older, China-loving, truth-stretching competitor Tim Walz.

CLIP: JD Vance comments at Butler II (0:52).

And, of course, the rally ended with a rousing performance of Trump’s now-trademark opera, Nessum Dorma (“None Shall Sleep”). Here is a handy link to a version with the lyrics sung in English by Samantha Rose, the Cottage Singer. It’s quite moving.

💉💉 Uh-oh. CBS ran a distressing story this week under this headline:

That’s called setting the bar low. According to the CDC’s early report, this year’s flu jabs are only 34.5% effective against hospitalization. That’s well below the 50% that once was the minimum required efficacy for vaccine approval, and hovers right around the generic placebo rate of one-third.

The article did its very best to speculate that the limp efficacy is not any problems with jabs per se; it’s just this year’s strain is more vaccine-resistant, whatever that means. Plus, it’s still better than a needle in the eye, so you should definitely go get one.

Unmentioned by the article was the possibility that it’s not the limp jabs misfired, but perhaps that people’s injured immune systems are, somehow, depressed.

Whichever! As for me, hard pass.

🔥🔥 Great Britain’s Sunday Times ran an astonishing story Friday headlined. “Lord Reed: How we will decide what constitutes a woman.” How did we get here?

The UK’s highest court will wrestle with its most difficult decision yet thanks to a courageous lawsuit brought by an activist group called For Women Scotland, who sued over how women’s rights under Great Britain’s 2010 Equality Act have been expanded to protect hairy, bearded men wearing sundresses.

It’s a conundrum! As Matt Walsh famously asked, What Is a Woman? Until recently, regular citizens in the British Isles had no trouble whatsoever answering that question. But Scotland’s Supreme Court recently held that transsexual men are also women for all purposes under the law. An appeal to  London’s High Court followed.

Lord Reed of Allermuir, 68, is president of the court and the United Kingdom’s most senior judge. “I think,” he explained in the hagiographic article, “it’s very important to keep the law up to date so that it fits the needs of society as it develops.”

Uh huh. But who determines what society needs?

In case you were wondering where this social insanity began, in 2004 Great Britain passed the “Gender Recognition Act,” which allows people experiencing gender dysphoria to get a “Gender Recognition Certificate.” The Certificate lets citizens who’ve undergone some medical transitioning legally change their gender, similar to how they can change their names. Once they get their Gender Certificate, the official records are “corrected,” and transsexuals can get things like new birth certificates consistent with their current delusion.

So get ready, Britain. The High Court is about to tell you what a woman is, and I’m guessing it will have very little to do with genes, chromosomes, secondary sexual characteristics, child-bearing capability, or default genital equipment. We shall see.

🚀🚀 As the world madly accelerates toward a nuclear showdown, it is worth taking a quick glance backwards, to figure out where things first went off the rails. In 1992, the euphoric world celebrated the collapse of the aggressive, communist Soviet Union and its iconic Berlin Wall. Peace, it seemed, was here to stay. Peace provided dividends. The world of the 90’s seemed fresh, optimistic, and renewed; anything was possible.

But storm clouds began darkening the horizon of peace. On March 8, 1992, the New York Times ran a history-setting story headlined, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No Rivals Develop.” The sub-headline added, “A One-Superpower World: Pentagon Document Outlines Ways to Thwart Challenges to Primacy of America.”

And so neoconism was born, a tortured mutant baby, the unlikely union of hawkish anti-communist Democrats and hawkish globalist conservatives. The Deep State received its most critical national security mission: preserving American hegemony at all costs.

The Times article reported receiving a leaked Pentagon brief outlining a military strategy “to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union.”  The goal was to use U.S. military and intelligence might “to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”

The Pentagon’s brief aimed to avoid direct military conflict by using American economic might to impose costs on competitive nations, and to politically destabilize them wherever possible. But it also provided for preemptivemilitary action if needed to ensure America’s global dominance.

The last 32 years make much more sense viewed through the lens of this leaked Pentagon brief. For example, also in 1992, Russia, newly freed from the yoke of tyrannical communism, sought to form a new, more productive alliance with the West. Russia’s then-president Boris Yeltsin made strong overtures seeking to join NATO.

NATO coldly refused. It never called back.

This America-dominant policy answers many otherwise inexplicable questions. For instance, why would the US destroy the Nordstream pipeline in 2022 when Germany —Europe’s industrial powerhouse— relied on that natural gas to support its now-depressed economy? Who knows, but the Pentagon’s 1992 brief explicitly identified Germany as a rival potential superpower that must be contained.

Nordstream’s destruction did not wreck Russia’s economy. But it did wreck Germany’s. Just saying.

The most significant problem with the military-industrial complex’s hegemonic, American-dominant strategy was its secretive nature. Nevermind America’s citizens, even Congress was not permitted to participate in making that fateful decision, which instantly turned every other developed and developing nation, especially Russia and China, into America’s enemies.

In a sense, what became known as the “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” was America’s declaration of war on the rest of the entire world. In doing so, we invited all our better-resourced competitors to try to weaken and undermine us through decades of asymmetric warfare.

I have neither time nor space to develop the history of the Wolfowitz Doctrine’s hideous development between 1992 and 2019, but it’s there for you to find. (I could write a whole post about the Patriot Act, for instance.)  However, in April, 2019, the influential RAND Corporation —a military-industrial think-tank— quietly published a memo titled “Extending Russia: Competing for Advantageous Ground.”

The RAND report outlined various strategies the U.S. could adopt to provoke Russia into overextending its resources, both economically and militarily, by exploiting its vulnerabilities, primarily by punishing its developing economy. The strategies focused on several domains, including economic sanctions, policies to drive down global oil prices (to hurt Russia’s GDP), and giving more military aid to Ukraine, which would “escalate costs” for Russia.

The Ukraine Proxy War followed RAND Corporation’s 2019 suggestions to a “T.” Russia was drawn into an unimaginably expensive war in Ukraine. In a moment of rare honesty in May, 2023, Senator Lindsay Graham infamously gloated that “the Russians are dying,” and described U.S. military aid to Ukraine as “the best money we’ve ever spent.”

In case it’s not self-evident how diligently the U.S. has worked to provoke the Ukraine war, consider this February’s astonishing limited hangout article in the New York Times headlined, “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin.

The sub-headline revealed, “For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.”

In the long-form, magazine-style article, the Times reported how, over the previous ten years, the CIA built out a subterranean network of underground military bases in Ukraine, and trained a secret army of sabotage, assassination, and reconnaissance special forces (SAR). One of those CIA-trained soldiers, Kyrylo Budanov, now heads Ukraine’s military intelligence.

In other words, NATO’s relentless, inch-by-inch, creeping expansion toward Russia, and the U.S.’s covert military occupation of  Ukraine, were part of a decades-long strategy of ensuring that Russia could never challenge America’s position as the world’s lone superpower under the Wolfowitz Doctrine.

One can argue about the wisdom of the Wolfowitz Doctrine. But the essential problem is that such a momentous policy could be effected solely by the Executive Branch —the President— without any public debate or even a single vote in Congress. In 2024, we suffer from the harvest of rotten fruit of Executive overreach, a disturbing phenomenon over which many hands have been wrung over the years, but no effective action has ever been taken.

The implications for U.S. citizens are mind-boggling. The covert but undeniable existence of the Wolfowitz Doctrine invokes domestic national security interests about which citizens remain clueless. For example, once free speech —like tweets and social media posts critical of U.S. foreign policy— can threaten America’s hegemonic dominance and potentially breach U.S. national security.

Paging former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, as Exhibit A.

Drawing that line just a little further, how should the U.S. national security state  respond to the potential election of a populist U.S. President who disagrees with the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Should such a President also be viewed as a national security threat?

Here’s something to consider: since the Wolfowitz Doctrine was effected through Executive powers, it could be just as quickly be dismantled through the very same Executive powers — even though for decades vast amounts of American treasure have been invested in ensuring American supremacy.

Can the security state tolerate tossing away all that covert investment?

Or would the security state resist, act in self-defense, viewing itself as an antibody to an uninformed electorate unaware of the potential ‘costs’ of electing a President who rejects the Wolfowitz philosophy?

When you think about it this way, it’s much easier to understand the bizarre allegations that President Trump was in bed with the Russians. To the security state, if Trump made some “win-win” deal with Russia that would allow the Russian economy to grow, it would breach the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and thus potentially be seen as a national security betrayal. Even if Trump wasn’t actually promoting Russian interests, in the gimlet eyes of the security state he would be betraying America’s security interests.

Thus, the gushing fountain of intelligence leaks, captured media narratives, unprecedented criminal prosecutions, historic homestead raids, Operation Crossfire Hurricane, and the uniform opposition from within the defense community during and after Trump’s presidency can be recognized not merely as reactions to specific Trump policies, but as a form of institutional self-defense. The security state sees itself as the noble guardian of American strategic interests, which would even justify undermining an elected president’s anti-hegemony agenda.

As the 1992 Pentagon brief suggested, through any means necessary. Like, say, promoting controllable presidential candidates who will comply with the security state’s aggressive benevolence.

We see but through a glass darkly. We can connect the dots all we want, but the security state isn’t talking. Still, understanding this history helps us make sense of the chaotic world in which we find ourselves in 2024. Forewarned is forearmed.

Have a blessed Sunday! C&C shall return tomorrow morning, to help kick off the week with a fresh new roundup of essential news and commentary.

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