Category: Power Page 8 of 15

Why QAnon Resonates

On August 25, 2020

QAnon posits that there is a conspiracy of pedophiles in the deep state, including celebrities, politicians, and bureaucrats who oppose Donald Trump. Supposedly, Trump is in a struggle with them.

The specific QAnon allegations have, so far, turned out to be false.

But it still resonates, and the reason why isn’t complicated.

It’s because, while it’s wrong in the specifics, it’s right in the generality.

Jeffrey Epstein ran an island where underage girls (not pre-pubescent, but below the age of consent) were procured for important men. I haven’t been able to find a full list of visitors, but a partial list includes Trump himself, Bill Clinton, Thomas Pritzker (the executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels), Kevin Spacey (unlikely to have slept with underage girls, I’d think), comedian Chris Tucker, Prince Andrew, Les Wexner (ex CEO of LBrands, worth over $7 billion), modeling executive Jean-Luc Brunel (a modeling exec, not a customer, but claimed to be a procurer), ex-New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former Maine Senator George Mitchel, Harvard physicist Lawrence Krause, Woody Allen, Kenneth Star (attorney), and Alan Dershowitz. (Source one, Source 2.)

The current US attorney general represented Epstein in 2007 and got him a plea deal.

What’s interesting about that plea deal is that it happened because Jim Acosta, the prosecutor was told he belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.

Sounds pretty deep state to me.

There are also strong claims that Epstein also worked for Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.

What’s shocking about Epstein isn’t that he got away with it so long, but that with a blackmail list like the one he must have had, that he was ever taken down.

It is clear is that some of the most powerful people in the world (and the full list must be much, much longer) were in Epstein and his handlers’ power; he had the goods on them.

What also seems almost certain is that at least a part of the deep state was running Epstein and using him to blackmail important people.

Now, the idea that Donald J. “Grab Them by the Pussy” Trump is crusading against pedophiles is ludicrous. But is it far-fetched to think that many of his opponents in the deep state (and many of his supporters) are deeply dirty, and are involved in blackmailing powerful people after setting them up with underage girls?

Close to a sure thing.

QAnon is wrong on the details, wrong on the “sides,” but right that the state is deeply corrupt, deeply evil, and involved in deeply disturbing acts. And, of course intelligence agencies are blackmailing politicians–including politicians in their own countries.

As the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies, and yes, Virginia, the deep state was, in at least one case we know of, apparently protecting a ring for providing men with underage women and then (almost certainly) blackmailing them.

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Understanding Leadership Responsibility For Death, Harm & Welfare

By Ian Welsh

On August 5, 2020

41 Comments

In the law there is a crime known as criminal negligence.

Criminal negligence is the failure on the part of a person on whom a duty is placed to take reasonable steps to prevent a certain bad outcome from happening. Duties may or may not be specifically known to you. For instance, as a driver, you have a duty not to hurt others with your vehicle. You may or may not have known that.

Other examples of people who have duties to others include: parents owing a protective duty to their children, or employers/supervisors at work owing a duty to their workers.

Let’s extend this. When you have authority, if you do something a reasonable person should know would cause harm, you are responsible for that harm.

All positions of power come with duties. American Presidents like to whinge on about how they have a duty to protect Americans, but the actual sworn duty is to uphold the Constitution. All leaders in any sane system are broadly responsible for the welfare of the people they rule and for the consequences of the actions they take, even on non-citizens.

If you go to war, like George W. Bush did, you know that a lot of bad things will happen: deaths, injuries, rapes, property destruction and so on. So you are responsible for all of those deaths. Therefore if you go to war without sufficient reason, you are a criminal. This is true for Obama (Libya, Yemen) and Trump as well (all the ongoing wars he could stop but hasn’t.) It is true of drone murders, both because they kill innocents and because they violate any reasonable reading of the Constitution (due process of law.)

It is also true of creating a medical system that kills tens of thousands of people a year. If you raise the price of drugs so that people can’t afford them without sufficient justification (aka. production and distribution costs have gone up that much), you know people will die. You are guilty of negligent mass murder.

Politicians and bureaucrats have positive duties: to see to the welfare of the people they oversee.

The same is true of corporate officers, or should be. Corporations are bundles of very valuable rights, given to corporations by the people, in the expectation that corporations will increase public welfare. A corporation which does not increase public welfare has broken that bargain and the officers have failed in their positive duty. Likewise the expectation is that the corporation will not actively do harm, certainly not harm that outweighs the good it does.

When you analyze various leaders in society thru this lens it becomes quickly clear who is doing their job and who isn’t. The Federal Reserve deliberately crushed wages for decades. That was deliberate harm, and they knew it. They deliberately made sure that full employment was not reached, which is in direct violation of the explicit aims of their institution.

Trump swore to uphold the constitution and repeatedly violated the prohibitions against profitting from public office. All Presidents of the past decades have supported laws that violate the first and fourth amendments, and do so very clearly.

And so on and so forth.

If a reasonable person, with the knowledge expected of someone in the role (aka. a drug executive should know the result of price increases of drugs, that’s a basic competency of the job) are responsible for the affects of their decisions. Since all of them exist to increase, at the least, the welfare of society, if they do things they know will decrease that welfare, then they have, at best, been negligent, and probably criminally negligent.

This the floor for how leaders in society, whether private or public, should be judged. This doesn’t mean they can never do anything to hurt anyone, many public decisions involve trade-offs, and sometimes harming a few is required to aid the many. A simple example would be a wealth tax. Bezos and Gates would squeal and feel badly done by, but many people would be better off as a result.

If a result of an action or policy is what a reasonable person in that role would expect to happen, leaders can be judged by it. Going to war has obvious consequences. Drone murders with big explosions have obvious consequences. Helping Saudi Arabia keep food out of Yemen has obvious consequences. Keeping life-saving drugs from Iran and Iraq has obvious consequences. Dropping progressive taxes thru the floor and taxing capital gains lower than earned income has obvious consequences. Massively raising insulin prices has obvious consequences. Treating warehouse workers like automata has obvious consequences (acknowledged in at least one case by keeping an ambulance outside an Amazon warehouse.)

When we fail to hold our leadership to “you are responsible for the obvious consequences of your decisions” our leadership no longer serves the people or their welfare, but only the welfare of the very few they decide to care about. At that point they become not leaders, but rulers, and we their subject and in all but name: serfs. Disposable assets to be used up as they see fit, for their benefit, not ours.

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Understanding American Elites Means Understanding Predators

By Ian Welsh

On July 30, 2020

66 Comments

American elites are not incompetent at what matters to them.

People constantly make ridiculous statements like, “The American government has been incompetent in its handling of Covid-19.”

Anyone who makes such a statement reveals that they do not understand how the US operates.

Fact: According the Princeton oligarchy study, almost the only thing that matters in what policies government pursues in the US is what elite factions want.

Fact: Covid-19 has made the rich in the US much, much richer.

US billionaires saw their wealth increase by 20 percent, or $584 billion, roughly since the beginning of the pandemic.

Covid-19 is enabling the consolidation of US industry. Small businesses have to shut down, large businesses keep running. The oncoming tsunami of renters being evicted (depending on state, 25 percent to over 50 percent of renters are in danger of eviction) will wipe out landlords, allowing the richest Americans to buy up rental properties on the cheap, consolidating them. They will then charge, not market clearing rental rates, but profit maximization rents, leaving many people permanently homeless.

If you’ve ever researched how to make money, you know the standard advice virtually always includes one thing: You must have other people work for you or passive income, or both. You must be making money when you, personally, aren’t doing a thing. Your money must make money for you, and so must other people. Any person worth employing makes more money for you than you pay them. You take the difference.

In kinder capitalist epochs, this is kept under control by wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, high progressive taxation, and aggressive anti-trust policy, along with a monetary policy intended to raise wages and prices, not crush them.

But our era is built on three ideological assertions.

There is no such thing as society.
Greed is good.
There is no alternative (TINA).

Whatever makes a profit, according to this assertion, is good. There is no society, and no social goals. There are only competing people and whatever they get is fair. And this is the only way to run society, there is no alternative. Thatcher noted that her victory was not sealed by Conservative party elections, rather it was Tony Blair’s Labour party adopting neoliberalism that meant that TINA went from assertion to fact; no matter who was elected, the same basic policies would be followed, Labour would just try to thinly mitigate the effects of so many rich people and so many poor people.

In the US, the victory of Reagan was when Bill Clinton helped create the “Third Way,” which was an adoption of neoliberal principle. Again, it would not matter if Republicans or Democrats were in power, the rich would get richer and the social state would be defunded.

Our elites are predators. They are taught that they have no obligation to other people. Greed is good, and whatever makes money is good. If someone else has less money, that’s because they deserve less money, and because they create less good.

In their daily lives, the rich become rich through passive income and exploiting other people; paying the lowest wage or price possible (Walmart and Amazon both famously fuck suppliers over, though in different ways), getting as much government money as possible, and making sure that they don’t have to work to make money, and that the stock market always goes up in the long run, along with other asset prices–no matter what’s actually happening in the economy.

Neoliberal elites are predators. This is true in every neoliberal country. It is simply most advanced in the United States. They view ordinary people as prey or useful tools. After the 2007/8 financial crisis, banks set up assembly lines to sign false paperwork so they could seize people’s homes. The Federal government knew, aided them, and later immunized them by making them pay fines far less than the value of what they stole.

You are food or a money-producing asset to elites.

You are not human, you do not have a right to anything. Not due process of the law. Not food. Not housing. Not affordable medicine or health care. Those things are for people with enough money, and if that’s not you, you don’t deserve them.

This is THE most important thing you can understand about society today. You can’t count on US elites to care about you at all. If it is in their best financial interest to impoverish you, kill you or any other thing, they will do so.

This may seem hyperbolic, but it meets the most important test of truth: It predicts their actions with far more accuracy than any other hypothesis.

If it was just incompetence, like for example, the favorite excuse of liberals, “Never assume malice when incompetence will explain something,” then they wouldn’t keep getting more and more money.

Somehow their “incompetence” just makes them richer. Even the financial crisis made the elites richer overall–the drop was a blip which allowed them to control more of the economy than before.

Neoliberal elites are predators. Their food is ordinary citizens and anything else (animals, plants, the ecosystem which allows human life to exist).

And yes, it’s true, all neoliberal nations are not as far gone. But this is where neoliberalism leads, this is what its internal logic demands.

It’s not an accident that the best Covid-19 performance on the planet was probably in Vietnam, right next to China, with huge trade ties.

Zero deaths.

Anyone who tells you it was hard to avoid Covid-19 deaths is lying. All it required was seeing that a pandemic was underway and doing what the epidemiology textbooks tell you to. The introductory textbooks.

Nor is this all on one person. No one rules alone. Without a huge supporting apparatus, including Congress, Trump could not have done what he did (and didn’t). If his incompetence had been costing elites, you can be sure it would have been brought to an end.

It wasn’t. It was making them richer and furthering their plans. At the end of this, US elites will control a larger percentage of the US economy than before. They will be richer and more powerful. And if that means tens of millions of Americans are homeless and hungry, then that is a price US elites are willing for you to pay.

If you deserved better, you’d be rich. You aren’t, so you don’t.

Your lords and masters kill you for money. That’s their function.

Act on this knowledge, or don’t.

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Feeling and Acting Powerful in Catastrophic Times

By Ian Welsh

On July 15, 2020

24 Comments

The United States is moving into a time of catastrophe. Thirty-two percent of people were unable to make either their rent or mortgage payments in July. Twenty-two percent of small businesses seem likely to go bankrupt. One-third of small independent farms are on the verge of bankruptcy. When these people lose their homes and wind up on the street, there will be tens of millions of homeless Americans, with widespread hunger.

All this and the pandemic is reaching new highs.

It is natural to feel powerless in times like these. Indeed it is natural to feel powerless in most times.

As I wrote on Monday, “being weak and only one person, to you the system feels like a force of nature or God, given, not a man-made construction.”

Compared to the system, as an individual, you are weak. There are a few exceptions, but I doubt any of my readers are in that .0001 percent bucket.

But that assumes you act directly against the system, to change it.

You can’t fight a hurricane, but you can prepare for it. You can build your house in ways that mean it will hardly be damaged. You can flee before it arrives, perhaps, or at least take shelter. You can store food, make friends, and be ready.

In the 1930s, many people in Germany tried to stop the Nazis from taking power. They failed. Some stuck around, they wound up in camps and dead (and it wasn’t just Jews, they killed left-wingers, their direct opponents, first). Others said, “Woah, we lost that fight,” and left.

Those people survived, and they have descendants.

Now, I am not telling you to leave the United States. Right now, only about 20 countries will even let Americans in. I’ve been telling you for years, over a decade, to get the fuck out if you could (I know many people can’t). You either did that, or didn’t, and it’s too late now–at least for this catastrophe cycle.

What I am saying, instead, is this:

You can’t always stop history, but you can always decide how you act and react to history, and to catastrophe.

Martial arts instructors, the good ones, tell their students that the best thing to do in a fight is often to run or de-escalate. Fights are risky, and if you can run faster than the other guy, you don’t get hurt. Now, of course, there are times when you have to fight, but the point is, sometimes you don’t, and sometimes fighting is really, really stupid.

This is not counsel to not do what you can to change large forces. By all means demonstrate, organize, vote, and so on. But recognize that as one person, while you must contribute, you cannot determine the end result. You can only do your part, hope others do their part, and that it is enough. If it isn’t, it isn’t on you, unless perhaps you are leading the movement or are very senior in it.

When it comes to opposing large historical events, you should not put your ego or happiness on the line. You are not the determining factor, and feeling as if you are is foolishness.

The key to feeling powerful in bad times is determining what you control, and doing that. Perhaps you can stock up food. Perhaps you can move. Perhaps you can make friends with your neighbours so there is mutual aid right next door. Perhaps you can start a garden. Perhaps you can stockpile food and other essentials. Perhaps you have enough resources to go partially or full off grid. Perhaps you can create a bug-out bag and practice the route you intend to use if you need to leave. Perhaps you can get a new job in another part of the country. Perhaps you and some friends can live together and be safer and stronger and better prepared together. Perhaps you can learn practical skills which will help when things go bad.

Perhaps you can come up with many actions, unique to your situation, which I will never think of.

When you concentrate on what you can do, and what you can control, instead of what you can’t control, you increase your odds of survival, prosperity, and happiness, and you cut away hard at the feeling of powerlessness.

The great forces of history are not yours to control, but if you understand them (or listen to those who do, and that may not be me, but others) then you can prepare. You can outwit them and prosper or at least survive well despite them.

In WWII, there were places which were untouched. During the Bubonic plagues, there were places that lost no one or very few people. There were people who looked at the circumstances and used them to not only prosper but to take care of others.

Look at your current situation and ask yourself, “What can I do to prepare?” Make a list. Do something on the list.

Measure yourself and your power against what you do that you can do, not in fighting history.

And remember, those who survive and prosper in a crisis are those who have power afterwards and can support a better world.

With rare exceptions (and they do exist), you don’t need to feel powerless, or be powerless.

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Truly, Truly Good News as Americans Get Serious

By Ian Welsh

On June 9, 2020

53 Comments

The first really good news of the uprising was the burning of an entire police station.

This is the second really good news:

https://twitter.com/Vicky_ACAB/status/1270249798273204225

Now this has been done, fairly often, in other countries, but to see Americans do it? This is all good. This shows people getting serious, “We don’t want cops and we will keep them out.”

The assholes who like driving cars into protestors (which Republican lawmakers want to make legal) are partially responsible, but this is a big deal because it shows planning, and forethought, and a rejection of police legitimacy.

One main piece of why cops have been rioting is that they believe that because they are guys who “protect” everyone else, and because they feel the job is dangerous (it’s less dangerous than many other jobs, but that’s now how they feel), that they have the right to go anywhere, tell anyone what to do, and be obeyed, and to hurt or kill anyone at their discretion.

They feel they’re the people doing the hard work, the “sheepdogs,” and that the sheep just don’t understand. They make the hard decisions, and the sheep should just obey.

And most of American discourse around cops is, “Don’t resist, obey any order, and pray they don’t hurt you too bad.” That’s reasonable when it’s just you and a bunch of cops, but it’s not reasonable as a group, or a society.

So giving cops the finger, saying, “We don’t need you, or want you, and we are going to keep you out,” is a psychological break.

I’m very pleased to see this. For decades, I’ve wondered if Americans would just take anything, no matter what, lying down. The last couple weeks have begun an answer in the negative.

Keep it up. You don’t need cops who run like the ones you have.

And, the next step? You don’t need politicians or executives like the ones you have now, either.

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Power Concedes Nothing Without a Credible Threat: Riots Work Edition

By Ian Welsh

On June 8, 2020

28 Comments

So…

… a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s embattled police department

This doesn’t mean “no police” it means get rid of the current bunch, and create a new police department. This was done by Camden, New Jersey, for example…

By the department’s account, reports of excessive force complaints in Camden have dropped 95 percent since 2014.

There’s some stuff about how they did it that I don’t like, but the point that it can be done matters.

More important is something which wasn’t going to happen, disbanding Minneapolis’s police department, is now probably going to happen. Without riots, it wouldn’t have.

Riots are, actually, one of the most effective ways to create change. Politely worded letters don’t work. Completely non-violent protest only works if it shuts things down. Voting doesn’t work if the political system is entrenched, because entrenched political systems know how to co-opt or marginalize actual radicals.

If you want something from powerful people, you have to show you have power of your own. If you don’t have enough power to at least scare them, to show them the limits of their power, why should they give you anything?

Americans are showing the rich and powerful the limits of their power; of what their violent lackeys can do, and the powerful are making concessions. (And they are just that–concessions. They wouldn’t have done these things without the riots. They didn’t want to do them.)

This is also a result of the weakness the US’s current elites; in-touch, wise elites would have given much more to the poor and middle class during the Covid-19 bailouts, instead of letting tens of millions lose their jobs and worry about their rent.

Elites thought Americans were completely whipped. They had reason to believe that, admittedly, but they overplayed their hand.

Always boil the frog slowly, smart evil elites know that.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Who Gets to Be Violent and Why?

By Ian Welsh

On June 4, 2020

46 Comments

The people who need to a good shit-kicking are most politicians, CEOs, and senior civilians.

Well, and cops, obviously.

And they need to know the cops can’t protect them from another one.

The President, the mayor of New York, the Governor of New York, almost everyone who works for the Federal Reserve, all senior Wall Street Executives, every senior executive at Google and Facebook, every executive at a private equity firm is on that list. (Even if they are personally “good,” they work to make evil more powerful.)

Yeah, this is the Rubicon, shit we’re not supposed to actually say. Powerful people routinely arrange to have weak people (98 percent of the population) killed, beaten, impoverished, and effectively enslaved by debt and fear of debt.

But the weak are told that if they resist all the things done to them under the threat of violence (and it’s all under the threat of violence), they must never be violent.

It’s the logic of the bully, of the coward: “My victims must not fight back, they must lie there and take their beating, and not resist. My violence is legitimate because I am powerful, but the weak must not use violence. If they do, we’ll escalate and escalate and escalate. We won’t just kill them, we’ll take everything, rape and torture; lock them up for years, deny them healthcare. There is nothing we will not do to those who resist us.”

So, for your own sake, understand in your bones that the violence your lords and masters (and they are your masters, and you are their slaves) do is legitimate, and that you have no right to resist.

If you do resist, and, worse, if you dare be violent, you are a bad slave, a bad peasant. Violence is reserved for the master class and their enforcers; it is something that they have the right to do. It is good when they do it, and it is bad when you do it.

This is a social fact: It is true because it is made true.

Be violent to the master class or their lackeys and the penalties are huge. It’s better to just sit there, and become homeless, go into debt, spend your entire life at a job you hate, doing what a petty tyrant tells you to, until you’re too old to work.

Because as bad as all those things are, they are better than what they’ll do to you if you really fight; if you do to them what they give themselves the right to do to you.

The only time you have the right to be violent is if you are violent against their enemies: domestic or foreign. Angry? Full of hate? You can get it out. Put on a uniform, or just play vigilante against a mutual enemy.

But never, ever, strike at the actual masters. The lords. The people making your life hell.

Because they control violence, they control money, and they will hurt you. If somehow they can’t get you under the rules, well, they’ll hunt you down like a dog, like they did the Ferguson protesters, killing them over years.

Who gets to use violence is a social fact.

You don’t.

The people who rule your life and make it hell do.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Why Armed Right-wingers Were Able to Shut Down Michigan’s Legislature

By Ian Welsh

On May 15, 2020

49 Comments

As you may have heard, Michigan has canceled its legislative session:

Michigan closed down its capitol in Lansing on Thursday and canceled its legislative session rather than face the possibility of an armed protest and death threats against Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer…

The gathering, meant to advocate opening the state for business despite the coronavirus pandemic, followed one April 30 that resulted in pictures of protesters clad in military-style gear and carrying long guns crowding the statehouse. They confronted police and taunted lawmakers…

…For the past week, lawmakers have been debating how to safely enable lawmakers to work and vote in session while the state’s laws allow people to bring firearms into the capitol building. The debate grew more tense in recent days as some lawmakers read about threats to the governor’s life on social media, which were published in the Detroit Metro Times.

Let us understand the context: Protesters from the left-wing in legislatures are routinely arrested. The charge is generally something like “disturbing the peace.” Police can always find a way and an excuse to clear protesters if they want to.

The police have SWAT teams, they can call in the national guard if necessary. They could wait for the next time the armed protesters come and arrest them. There’s a chance of violence, of course, but there are ways to do this that protect legislators.

This is clearly intimidation of elected officials. It would not be tolerated from the left, but it has not only been tolerated from the right, it has been allowed to succeed.

Now there’s an argument, and one for which I have sympathy, that politicians should be scared of the people, rather than the other way around. One can cavil, and note that the majority of the public supports isolation orders, so this is a case of intimidation from an armed minority.

But what’s more interesting to me is that it has been allowed. The protesters could be shut down if the government wanted. There might be some violence, but the US is routinely willing to be violent, so that’s not what’s stopping the government.

Violence and threats from the right are seen as legitimate; they are seen as having the right to be violent. “God, Guns, and ‘Merica.” The right has arrogated to themselves glory and right and violence. They say that violence is ethical and moral in defense of freedom, and that people who are violent and defenders of America and goodness are right-wingers.

Violence is a right-wing thing in the US and it is a good thing. Right-wing violence is legitimate to Americans; they have a right to be violent.

The left are godless, communist hippies who don’t have a right to be violent. They don’t join the cops or the military, they are not associated with legitimate violence. Most left-wingers have spent 60 years, since the 60s, explicitly saying that violence is always bad and never justified. Much of the left rejected Antifa, the people willing to fight fascists, because violence can never either be moral, or according to most left-wingers, even effective. The majority of the US left believes that violence is always bad and doesn’t work as well as non-violence.

This wasn’t always the belief. Unions fought from their earliest history right through the 70s; they would take on the police and union busters. The left fought. In the early 70s, the left was setting off multiple bombs a day; they ran rings around the FBI, who could not stop them. The 60s left-wing insurrection didn’t end because the cops won, it ended because the left itself decided to stop using violence.

A sea change happened in the 60s and 70s, one where the legitimacy of violence was rejected by the left, and violence was gifted to the right. The end of the draft and the left-wing hatred of all violence meant that the left gave the military to the right-wing. Cops have always been right-wing, of course, but the draft had meant that the rank and file military included many left-wingers. It also meant that people on the left had violent skills, taught courtesy of the military.

That ended. Meanwhile, the right, including the most far-right, encouraged their people to join the military and the police, to learn the skills and to make sure those institutions were run by right-wingers from top to bottom.

So there are two likely reasons the Michigan legislature gave into violence: (1) They think that right-wing violence is legitimate, and; (2) They don’t trust the police or national guard to stop the right-wingers, with whom they sympathize and whom they support.

Meanwhile, only two parts of the left believe they have a right to be violent: Antifa and the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers have taken to being armed escorts for those legislators they support.

Those who disarm, those who believe fanatically in non-violence, always exist at the whim of those who believe in violence and are good at it.

This is the position the left has put itself in in the US and many other countries: disarmed, bad at violence, with no influence over the violent organs of the state and almost no tradition or skill in violence in the few organs it still has influence over (like some unions).

Some of this weakness was caused by the right–as with their gutting of unions in the 80s. But much of it is because the left both believes that violence is always wrong and that it is ineffective.

Michigan is the fruit of those beliefs.

And, children, history is a record of violence often working. Sometimes non-violence works, yes, sometimes it even works very well. But effective violence, especially if it is perceived as legitimate, is also a winning strategy.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.