When the Biden administration came into office it had promised to reenter into the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran. Under Trump the US had left the deal and had reissued sanctions against Iran. Tehran followed up by increasing its enrichment capabilities and by accumulating more enriched Uranium. It would have been easy for Biden to immediately eliminate the sanctions and to rejoin the deal. Iran would surely have followed up by returning to the enrichment levels the deal allows for. But Biden...

The US military has been showering CNN's retiring Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr with effusive thanks and praise for her lifetime of service, giving some insight into the cozy working relationship between the media and the war machine inside the US empire. "Today closes a remarkable career for CNN's Barbara Starr, a leader in the Pentagon Press Corps," reads a post by the Twitter account for US Central Command. "Her aggressive reporting and tireless commitment to the truth brought this...

Consider just how fortunate we are to have the Twitter Files. Every few days, we are seeing dumps of documents from the operations of Twitter before Elon Musk took over. This weekend’s release was especially shocking. It revealed a close and symbiotic relationship between the company’s management and the FBI, which employs 80 people to police social networks and flag posts. They aren’t looking for crime. They were focused on wrongthink on matters of politics.  In other words, all our worst...

Truthout has a recent article titled "The Left Can Support Protesters in China Without Shilling for US Imperialism" with a subtitle asserting that "Chinese workers and Uyghurs need solidarity from leftists worldwide," and it at no point attempts to defend either one of those titular claims. The article features comments from New York University's Rebecca E Karl and is replete with leftist-sounding phraseology like "heteronormative patriarchy" and "the hegemonic hold of white power," but what...

As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022....

With the restoration of free speech protections on Twitter, panic has grown on the left that its control over social media could come to an end. Now, some of the greatest advocates of censorship in Congress are specifically warning Facebook not to follow Twitter in restoring free speech to its platform. In a chilling letter from Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), André Carson (D-Ind.), Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Facebook was given a not-so-subtle threat that...

Despite my support for Elon Musk’s continuing efforts to reduce censorship and restore free speech protections on Twitter, I have been critical of some of his moves from his use of polls on restoring certain posters to the suspensions of media figures this week. However, this morning, I was struck by the European Union (EU) rushing into the controversy to threaten, again, sanctions against Musk. The EU is apparently aghast that Twitter could suspend media even temporarily after ignoring the...

If Congress has its way, funding for the Department of Defense and related work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy will reach more than $850 billion in Fiscal Year 2023, far higher than spending at the height of the Cold War or the peak years of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. While advocates of spending these enormous sums often argue that the money is needed to “support the troops,” more than half of the Pentagon’s yearly budget goes to private contractors, many of whom are...

New material Musk released over the weekend confirms the very worst. The banal boys and girls previously ensconced in Twitter’s top echelons were not only having a jolly time attempting to steer the nation’s news narrative; these executives were actually meeting weekly with FBI, Homeland Security and national intelligence officials to discuss “disinformation” they wanted removed from the site, including the notorious suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. That’s just one step removed...

The New York Times has just discovered that some Americans are no longer wearing masks. Welcome to life in the mainstream-media bubble. The Times sent its reporters last week across Los Angeles County to assess the state of Covid precautions. Los Angeles is at the epicentre of a national movement among blue-state health officials and their press allies to scare the public back into Covid submissiveness. The director of Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health, Barbara Ferrer, has...

Among realists who don't accept the Kiew siegt an allen Fronten! narrative it is widely assumed that Russia will soon begin, perhaps in dramatic and decisive fashion, a winter offensive. This would come just as Kiev is hitting "empty" on all key manpower and materiel indicators, exacerbated by the Zelensky regime’s continued insistence on squandering them on strategically meaningless attacks on hardened Russian positions. The assumption of a bold Russian shift to the offensive may not be...

It looks like things are about to get a lot more serious in Ukraine. NEW: The US is poised to send Patriot air and missile defense batteries to Ukraine pending final approval from President Joe Biden https://t.co/yNTO1vXLOt — Bloomberg (@business) December 13, 2022 This provocative move is a direct and deliberate violation of a primary Russian red line. Russia has warned it will not tolerate USG and NATO offensive missiles on its border in Ukraine. It considers any such move a threat to its...

You’d better watch out—you’d better not pout—you’d better not cry—‘cos I’m telling you why: this Christmas, it’s the Surveillance State that’s making a list and checking it twice, and it won’t matter whether you’ve been bad or good. You’ll be on this list whether you like it or not. Mass surveillance is the Deep State’s version of a “gift” that keeps on giving…back to the Deep State. Consider just a small sampling of the tools being used to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff...

On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde from her job at Twitter where she was general counsel and the head of legal, policy, and trust. It became quickly obvious to him and others on his team that it was she who drove the censorship policy within the company, including that which blocked all information about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election and otherwise shut down critics of government Covid policy.  Her termination from Twitter did not leave her unemployed and...

I have previously written of my pride as an alumnus of The University of Chicago in how the school has led the fight for free speech in higher education. It is also ranked as the number one free speech school in the country. The “Chicago statement” has become the rallying point for schools resisting the anti-free speech movement sweeping over our university and college campuses. Now both the University of Oklahoma and entire University of Texas system have joined almost 100 schools in signing...