Now masked thugs routinely snatching innocent people off the street, or just murdering them in front of a dozen witnesses, is the official policy of the Trump regime.
Step out of line or just get in the way and they’ll not only blow your head off, they’ll slander you from the highest offices in the land before your body grows cold.
The Times explained the significance of disguising the plane and the legal implications such an action carries, noting, “the laws of armed conflict prohibit combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called ‘perfidy.’”
Fortunately, after years of inaction, reagulators are stepping in. The European Union just opened an investigation into the spread of child sexual abuse material on Grok. This follows its first enforcement action in December, when it fined X €120 million ($140 million) under the Digital Services Act (DSA). While this hardly makes a dent in Musk’s vast fortune, the fine is not the point. More important is what the EU ordered X to do: redesign its scam-ridden blue-check system, tackle ad fraud, and restore researcher access so the public can understand the platform’s effects on the information landscape. These probes set the stage for a confrontation. US President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy illustrates the stakes of the coming slop war. Released on the same day the X fine was announced, the NSS makes clear the administration’s intention: to back social-media moguls as they spread lies, amplify hate, bolster authoritarians, and destabilize Europe from within.
Despite the predictable protests from Musk and Trump, the EU’s regulatory actions have nothing to do with attacking “free speech.” (The fine targeted economic scams; the probe targets child abuse.) Instead, these measures mark the start of what is likely to become a bitter struggle to rein in X and, more broadly, to curb the spread of AI-driven slop. What Musk and Trump portray as a fight over who has the right to speak is really a fight over who has the power to force others to listen.
According to the publication’s assessment, the Chinese Navy currently operates 32 active nuclear-powered submarines. In comparison, Russia is estimated to possess between 25 and 28 such vessels. The magazine emphasizes that China now trails only the United States in total nuclear submarine strength.
This development reflects Beijing’s long-term investment in naval modernization, with a particular focus on undersea capabilities designed to enhance strategic deterrence and power projection.
Thompson played up this aspect of his legacy more than anyone else. Look at the cover photo for Gonzo Papers, Volume 3: Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream (1990): he crouches, pointing a handgun at a typewriter. It’s his cynicism – admittedly, an exquisite, formidable cynicism – which is celebrated today.
That hazy Thompsonian surface, that blurring of truth and fiction, helped create the media landscape that produced a leader like Donald Trump. Though there is no explicit relationship between them – and Thompson would likely have weighed Trump as contemptuously as he did Nixon – the Maga pyrotechnics of visceral communication, liberal provocation, and a willingness to bend reality to fit their presentation of facts aren’t all that far from gonzo – gonzo as a “spirit” that broadcasts varnished truths. This has also allowed Maga to colonise Thompson’s freak vote. If in 1972 those alienated youths, conspiracy theorists and dissenters from authority pulled themselves on to electoral rolls for the “far out” ideas of McGovern, that same demographic now follows Trump. And from their pockets of the internet they arbitrate the new age of the crank.
Yet Hunter S Thompson’s diagnosis of the psychology of America also allows us to understand today’s US administration in a longer national context – a country that, as we know in the age of Trump, swerves erratically between deal-making, sabre-rattling and regime-changing, that is as susceptible to imperialism as it is to isolationism. His work shows us that, rather than a bronze aberration in the otherwise unblemished advancement of US liberal democracy, the current president and his Maga-world are just another little punt further up the field to the goal line of American extremism.
The UN Office of Human Rights, headed by Volker Türk, on Wednesday issued an extensive report on the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank in which it for the first time described Israeli policies there as Apartheid. The executive summary says, “The report warns that Israel is violating international law requiring States to prohibit and eradicate racial segregation and apartheid.”
Türk told the UN, “There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank. Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends, or harvesting olives – every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies and practices.”
“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation, that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before.” He is referring to racial discrimination in Apartheid South Africa from the late 1940s through the early 1990s.
Ben-Gvir has also previously suggested the building of a synagogue on the mount, which drew condemnation from Washington, albeit under the Biden administration.
Then-State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at the time: “The ongoing reckless statements and actions of this minister only sow chaos and exacerbate tensions at a moment when Israel must stand united against threats from Iran and its proxy terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah.
“They directly undermine Israel’s security.”
Netanyahu’s comments came after he reportedly clashed with Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon during a cabinet meeting on Sunday after the legal official demanded Ben-Gvir be sacked over alleged interference in police matters – a claim Ben-Gvir has strongly denied.
Sequence of induction based on age
“The first to receive induction orders are those whose 20th birthday falls during the year of the lottery,” outlines the chain of events for the Selective Service.
Should extra lotteries become necessary, the order would kick off with individuals celebrating their 21st birthday during that year, then climb progressively through ages up to 25. Subsequently, a lottery for those turning 19 would take place, followed finally by 18.5 year-olds.
Reporting such secrets is akin to the Necessity Defense. (The CIA’s secret wars in Latin America became so egregious that activists eventually found a legal weapon to expose them: the necessity defense, a legal doctrine that allows defendants to argue they broke the law to prevent a greater harm. In the 1980s, Abbie Hoffman successfully used this defense in his trial as an anti-CIA activist on the campus of UMass-Amherst, transforming the courtroom into a forum where evidence of CIA atrocities in Latin America was presented to the jury, effectively putting the Agency itself on trial for its crimes against democracy.)
This formulation is crucial. The point of a classification violation is accountability. Hersh operates according to a higher law than the state’s obsession with secrecy. He identifies what he calls “self-censorship by the press” the greater threat: “I think what you have in America is not so much censorship but self-censorship by the press.” It is the internalization of the state’s priorities by journalists themselves that makes stenography so effective.
Realpolitik and the 40 Committee
The meat of the film concerns the “Kissinger Doctrine.” Poitras uses archival snippets to bring us into the heart of the 40 Committee, the secret body that oversaw the subversion of foreign democracies. Here, we discover the soul of American Realpolitik: Kissinger’s infamous 1970 proclamation regarding the election of Salvador Allende (and its wider implication about democracy, in general):
“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”This doctrine remains the definitive modus operandi of modern foreign policy. (One can see how it functions today in the destabilization of the Venezuelan government and the subsequent kidnapping of its leadership). It is the “Abyss” that Senator Frank Church warned of in 1975—a surveillance apparatus so powerful that it creates a tyranny from which there is “nowhere to hide.”
His fear of dissent, people of color, and the very idea of law is not merely rhetorical; it is visceral. It surfaces in his permanent war mentality, his embrace of imperial aggression, and his eagerness to militarize both domestic governance and foreign policy. His unhinged defenses of the invasion and political abduction in Venezuela, along with his casual assertion that Greenland “rightfully” belongs to the United States, reveal a fascist worldview in which legality is meaningless and sovereignty collapses before brute force. For him, law does not restrain power; it sanctifies it. This contempt for ethical and political responsibility is laid bare in his declaration on CNN that the world is governed not by justice or rights but by “strength,” “force,” and “power,” which he calls, with totalitarian assurance, the “iron laws” of history.
Taken together, these claims form not only the language of realism; they also constitute the creed of an emerging fascist politics. It echoes the vocabulary of Hitler and the Third Reich, where politics was reduced to struggle, morality dismissed as weakness, and domination elevated to destiny. In this worldview, force turns out to be truth, violence becomes virtue, and the rule of law is replaced by the racialized mythology of survival through conquest. In Orwell’s warning that when the clock strikes thirteen, something has gone terribly wrong, Miller’s language marks precisely that moment—when power openly declares itself the only truth, domination becomes common sense, and fascist lies no longer bother to disguise themselves as reality.
Miller’s hatred of dissent is most fully revealed in his relentless effort to seize control of public culture, not as a secondary battlefield but as the central terrain on which authoritarian power is forged and sustained. He operates with the clear understanding that domination requires more than repression, it demands the production of compliant fascist subjects and the systematic erosion of the cultural institutions capable of nurturing critique. As the chief architect of book bans, the hollowing out of schools and universities, and the destruction of culture as a site of democratic possibility, Miller wages war on the very conditions that make resistance thinkable and culture a vital sources of social change. His assault on critical consciousness, historical memory, and critical pedagogy reproduces the racial logic of colonial rule, a politics designed to manufacture terminal zones of exclusion, enforce the violence of organized forgetting, and cultivate a colonized imagination trained to mistake obedience for order and silence for civic virtue.