Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Israel and/or Palestine Page 2 of 15

Israel, Nukes and Armageddon For Real

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On March 20, 2026

24 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

I planned on writing a post about how the Russians were the ultimate winners of the Iran War, what with all that petroleum and natural gas they have. Truly, the Russian’s have got God by the balls (Как бога за яйца поймал).Windfall after windfall is accreting in an economy that is supposed to be in the doldrums. The reverse is true: Trump’s witless pursuit of war against Iran is effecting the collapse of the entire global economic order, except those nations trading with, well, you guessed it: Russia. I can’t fathom right now. How does one convey the stupendous amount of boomerangishness happening? It’s like karma grew a pair of balls and teabagged the entire Western order.

That said, I failed to write the post. Instead I got profoundly distracted by Col. Larry Wilkerson’s disturbing prediction that Israel will more than likely use up to 15 nukes on Iran to settle the conflict. Watch the video yourself. It’s a mercifully brief 7:03 minutes of terror. It’s the stuff of nightmares. I ain’t kidding. I’m dumbfounded. Dismayed because he makes a plausible case for Israel’s use of nukes.

If Israel opts for nukes the entire calculus of war changes. Nukes virtually guarantee the inclusion of other great powers in the war. I’ve taken to joking lately that we’re watching Armageddon. I didn’t mean literally, but now? I’m really at a lack for words.

We’re all going to die.

Afterthought : Before we all perish in flames, some more shitty news: sales of newly built houses fell a full 17.6% nationwide. In the Northeast it was a rout: down 44%. Adding insult to injury, McDonald’s, Pepsi and Dollar Tree are all racing to the bottom by reducing prices. Not goody, vewwy baddy.

Afterthought : The spread between home-sellers and home-buyers in San Antonio, my town, has widened to an astonishing 114%. That’s absolute brutality to home-builders. So, the end of this credit cycle is going to include the following macro events: housing crash, credit crisis, energy shock and at least one Too Big To Fail will fail, just as Lehman Bros and AIG did in 2008. Oh, and the AI bubble will unravel. Wow, that’s almost a perfect storm.

Donald Trump and the Apotheosis of Chimpanzee Politics

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On March 19, 2026

15 Comments

The most salient observation in Lawrence Freedman’s book Strategy: A History, comes early, paraphrasing Frans De Waal’s seminal study Chimpanzee Politics, Freedman writes, “De Waal concluded that rather than changing the social relationships, the fights [to become or overthrow and alpha or to wage war] tended to reflect the changes that had already taken place.”

This “Chimpanzee Framework” is a useful way of understanding the catastrophe unfolding in the Persian Gulf today and the accelerating collapse of American power globally. The “Chimpanzee framework” clarifies just how and why American foreign and economic policy actions resemble a honey drenched giant fighting off an hungry sleuth of bears more than a smart, historically informed nation. American policy and its actions are uncoordinated, moored in shared delusion and filled with several metric shit-tons of hopium. (See, more proof ‘Muricans can do Metric!)

Why would American actions be otherwise? America inhabits a fundamentally different world than it did a decade ago. The unipolar moment is gone; multipolarity is fact, not wishful thinking. BRICS grow faster every day, searching for the perfect red-pill of knocking the dollar off its hegemony throne. Meanwhile, the United States cannot affect international policy change to its liking regardless where it acts. Not in the Ukraine. Not in Iran. Worse, the inevitable defeat in Iran will cascade into Venezuelan and Cuban failure as the small shrug off the rotten shackles of a wounded giant.

America’s inept inefficacy is not limited to international policy: economic policy vis-a-vis tariffs is an abject failure as it was under Biden. The United States will find re-industrializing an impossible adjustment when the reality of a nationwide collapse of its standard of living happens. Reindustrializing starts with a vigorous textile industry, not more computer and AI chip plants.

So, just how many Americans are willing to work for peanuts in sweat-shops? How many machinists can we realistically turn out in five, ten, even fifteen years? Do Americans even know what machinists do? How many high school graduates can use a lathe, much less know what one is? Our domestic reality is as equally grim as our international one, except our international collapse will compound already enormous burdens pervading an economy of misaligned priorities and a poorly performing one at that.

In Strategy, Freedman also discusses the utility and efficacy of coalition building among chimpanzees, their alphas and those tribes they war against. In his most striking note, he describes the political complexities, violence and the necessity of building stronger, effective coalitions, be they to wage war for a nearby fig tree or to install a new alpha. His conclusion is counterintuitive and profound: chimpanzee violence doesn’t represent an overthrow or revolution. It confirms a preexisting reality.

Henry Kissinger made the same argument in his doctoral dissertation, later published as A World Restored, not regarding chimpanzees, but in the context of Metternich’s formation of the Sixth Coalition against Bonaparte. The Befreiungskriege, as it was called in Metternich’s native German, confirmed the reality on the ground that Bonaparte’s 1812 invasion of Russia was a mortal own goal for the French; the War of the Sixth Coalition merely confirmed it; and the subsequent peace codified it for almost a hundred years.

The same argument can be made regarding the United States and its quickly deteriorating Western coalition of the unwilling. Not to mention its Far East allies who are quickly tiring of American shenanigans, outright betrayal and economic, tariff-related fuckery. That this coalition, a coalition that dominated the post-Cold War world, cannot now manufacture more artillery shells than a single nation, the Russian Federation, is proof positive of a deeply misunderstood alignment of power and an pre-existing altered reality is met with blank stares and outright denial.

That this coalition is blindly following a great power lead by the nose by a tiny, recalcitrant and criminal regime running Israel has historical precedent. Think Serbia and Russia in the days before August 1914. The Serbs were deeply complicit in the assassination of the Austrian Archduke (read Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark for proof). And Russian mobilization in support of their little Slav Brothers (or if you really need me to spell it out in today’s terms, those who we share Judeo-Christian values with) guaranteed German entry into the war.

Freedman’s “Chimpanzee framework” goes far in explaining the escalating devastation of petroleum related infrastructure and targeting of natural gas fields in the Persian Gulf. The world desperately needs to move away from fossil fuels. And many nations have made great efforts to do so. Thus, the destruction in the Persian Gulf of petroleum assets, refineries, gas wells, LNG and oil terminals, represents a symptom of a larger global reality: the world has turned an epoch making corner on fossil fuels. The day of fossil fuels is far from over, but this is the beginning of the end. There will be winners and losers, cliché I know, and yet countries that have made strong investments in renewable energy will make the inevitable and painful adjustments successfully. The losers like the USA, are those who will maintain their reliance on petroleum, come hell or high-water.

Most Americans dispute the idea that we higher primates and chimpanzees have a common ancestor or share any commonalities for that matter. They are in need of a rethink. Our politics are too similar, our warmaking just as brutal and our collective decision-making is too catastrophe prone to deny.

So, anyone got a fig? Or know where a fig tree is?

Iran Is Winning & It’s Not Close

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On March 12, 2026

37 Comments

Yes, the Americans and Israelis are inflicting a lot of damage. But that damage does not appear to be degrading the military enough to really matter. It’s mostly hitting civilians. There is zero possibility of stopping Shahed drone production, they are made with fiberglass bodies, there are hundreds if not thousands of facilities which can make them. The US can’t interdict ground supplies from China and Russia, either, meaning that everything Iran needs to build more missiles, it can get.

And if you think China, especially, won’t send Iran everything it needs you’re whistling past the graveyard. China is winning big time from this war: its ships are allowed into the Strait and every single America ally in the East is seeing that the US not only can’t protect its allies, it can’t even protect its own bases.

Every major US base in the Gulf has been hit and as far as I can tell they’re evacuated. US forces in Iraq are being hit hard and can’t evactuate. Hezbollah is slamming the North of Israel hard, and so far they’re doing very well against Israeli ground forces (as expected, Israel ground forces are crap because they’re occupation troops used to beating up people who, at most, have some homemade weapons.)

The Strait is closed. It cannot be opened till Iran allows it. Period. Iran is hitting oil infrastructure across the Gulf and despite propaganda otherwise, no Gulf interceptors cannot stop Iranian missiles enough to matter, and they WILL run out of interceptors before Iran runs out of missiles, if they haven’t already:

I see zero prospect of America and Israel winning this war, and if Iran has any sense they won’t allow a ceasefire till they have done enough damage that the US and Israel will be scared to start a new war.

Nukes? Tactical nukes won’t win the war. They’d have to hit Iran with the strategic nukes. All tac-nukes would do is turn the entire world against Israel and the US. Strategic nukes would be a war crime even Europe couldn’t ignore and turn both states into complete pariahs. They might win the war, but they’d lose the peace. And, again, Iran has everything it needs to make a few dirty nukes, and one hit on Israel renders the entire country uninhabitable.

Invasion? Impossible. Iran has a large military and perfect terrain. Any forces sent will be slaughtered. It won’t even be close, it will be a massacre, the worst US loss in generations.

The new leader of Iran is a hard liner and he had most of his family killed by America. The leadership in general knows their lives are on the line. If they don’t win in a way which makes it so Israel and the US aren’t scared to tangle with them again, the assassinations will start up again and there will be a third war. That’s unacceptable and their pain tolerance is FAR higher than America or Israel’s is. Trump is scared about midterm losses. Iran’s leaders’ lives are on the line and the lives of everyone they care about.

This war is a long way from over, but the math I pointed out at the start, that it was a race between Iran’s missile/drone levels and US/Israeli interceptor stocks is happening as I expected: Iran can go longer than the US can.

As Iran I would accept nothing less than all Gulf States and Saudi Arabia kicking out all US bases and the US withdrawing entirely from Iraq. That’s the very least I would tolerate.

In the larger strategic position, this is genuinely the end of the American global Empire. The US had a “one shot” military, to use Will Schryer’s term, and this is the shot. It has proved that the US can’t defend itself or its allies and it will take at least a decade to restock interceptors, if China allows that, which, if they’re smart (and they’re usually smart) they won’t. Remember, the US can’t make ANY advanced weapons without supplies from China.

I’ve lived a long time now and I’ve seen a lot of stupidity from America, but this war is the stupidest thing I’ve seen America do other than making the original decision to send its industrial base to China.

Empires die ugly, but America’s is dying. After this it will be a regional power.

 

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Khamenei Is Responsible For Every Single Iranian Death

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On March 3, 2026

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There’s a lot to admire about Khameini. He was personally brave (fought in the Iran/Iraq war on the front lines), he was well educated, and within the limits of his religious beliefs quite humane. He was entirely opposed to nuclear weapons.

And that last bit was his greatest failure. North Korea is fine. No North Koreans are dead because of American attacks.

Iran could have had nuclear weapons any time in the last twenty years, at least. Iran was attacked, twice, because it didn’t have nukes, not because it did.

The lesson of Israeli and American actions makes it clear that every nation in the world needs nukes. Every single one.

This is what the NPT regime and the taboo against using nukes was meant to make unnecessary. But every time. Every time I talk about the possibility of Iran winning the war someone says “well then Israel or America will nuke them.”

If this is true, it means that Iran needs and needed nukes and so does everyone else.

If nukes aren’t “off the table” for pre-emptive use, everyone needs to have them.

This is what America has wrought.

(Secondary note: as a Canadian it is in my self interest for the US to take the largest losses possible. Every hit America takes makes me and my country safer. There is only one country in the world which has threatened to annex Canada, after all, and unfortunately, no one paid attention to me over the last 30 years when I said the US wasn’t trustworthy and we needed a deterrent.)

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Short Take on Iran, Russia and the Ukraine: Cui Bono?

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On March 3, 2026

41 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

Cui bono? (From the Latin, who stands to gain?) Who benefits from our war on Iran, internationally speaking? And who loses?

First, the Ukraine loses bad the longer the attack on Iran continues, as all the oxygen is sucked into a vortext surrounding the Persian Gulf. All the weapon systems the Ukraine desperately needs are being consumed rapidly over the skies of Iran and the Gulf States. This will undoubtedly hasten the Ukrainian Armed Forces collapse as a meaningful battlefield foe. Score one for Russia.

Second, energy prices will rise, and if the Straits of Hormuz get shut the Europeans will have to re-evaluate their energy supplies vis-a-vis Russia. Score two for Russia. Also, score one for Texas oilmen, who have watched WTI rise from $58 a barrel a month ago to $73.78. Royalty checks be getting phat!

Third, diplomatic pressure will decrease on Pootie-poot and Lavrov due to European energy desperation and all the diplo-oxygen being sucked out of the UN and other multi-lateral forumns, as if a thermobaric bomb went off. This widens Putin’s and Lavrov’s room to manuever even more. It also increases the chance Russia delivers a devastating denouement to the ‘Rules Based Order’ with an unmistakable battlefield victory. As my teachers said about school-yard fights when I was growing up (I went to an all boys school most of my life): you get your ass whooped, you probably deserved it. Score three for Russia.

Fourth, with the US murder/assassination of Iran’s Surpreme leader the precedent has been set, nay, locked the fuck in, for Russia to lob an Oreshnik or two Zelensky’s way and damn the consequences. The US could hardly protest. Not with a straight face. Score four for the Russkis.

Not to beat a frog at the bottom of a well, as the Chinese proverb goes, but the Ukraine is the biggest loser thus far and Russia the biggest winner as of today. The Euros are losing as well, but seem determined to snatch fantasy from the maw of reality. Israel is also on the losing end. Have you seen some of the explosions in Tel Aviv? This Iranian strike is positively surreal. Looks like that Israeli Iron Dome has turned into an Iranian Golden Shower.

Then again, if Bibi pops off a nuke or two, all bets are off.

Commentary On The Iran War, March 2, 2026

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On March 2, 2026

24 Comments

If you didn’t read my two previous piece, the second is about the math of missiles/drones vs. Interceptors. (Spoiler: Iran, if it keeps going, will run the US/Israel and Gulf States out of interceptors long before it runs out of missiles and drones.) The first was a general overview from day one.

I’m going to hit a bunch of different points in this post. First, Trump and Hegseth have said they are considering a ground invasion. This is beyond stupid. First, where will they stage the troops? There’s nowhere near that Iran can’t hit.

Second, have they looked at a topographical map of Iran?

Notice the mountains? Imagine trying to invade that.

The sheer stupid is beyond comprehension by anyone with a room temperature IQ. There is a hangover of people thinking this is 1991 and Iran is Iraq. Iran has better missiles than the US does. It’s larger than Iraq was, it has more people, it has allies. (China appears to be sharing real time satellite intelligence with Iran and has a land route which lets it ship in whatever Iran needs to build more missiles and drones.)

Americans seem to think they still have all the advantages they had in 1991: a military which is more advanced than anyone else’s (no), a much larger military than now, NATO allies who still have their Cold War sized armies, an enemy who will sit still for 6 months while they build up forces, etc… America then and America now are not the same, America is FAR weaker than it was and its allies are virtually disarmed. Only France is at all credible, and even they have a very small military.

A good summary of this is provided by Lee Slusher, writing before the war.

The Gulf States and Saudi Arabia are all being hit hard and the US is not protecting them. The UAE claims a 100% shootdown rate and Qatar over 80%. I believe neither, but even if true, irrelevant, because they will soon run out of interceptor missiles.

BREAKING: The UAE is projected to exhaust its interceptor missile stock within one week at the current rate of fire, and Qatar within four days; both are urgently seeking additional military support from the United States – Bloomberg

(Spoiler: no additional interceptors will be arriving. If there are any extra, they go to Israel.)

A Saudi analyst sums up what I suspect all of them are thinking:

America has abandoned us, and focused its defense systems on protecting Israel, leaving the Gulf states that host its military bases at the mercy of Iranian missiles and drones

Lie down with the devil, get up buggered, as the saying goes.

What the Gulf States, especially, are recognizing is that US bases don’t protect them, they make them a target and that the US doesn’t actually care about them and won’t bother to defend them. They’ve gone from satrapies under US protection (which they were, remember that Gulf 1 was to save Kuwait) to expendable meat shields for the Empire. They have to be thinking they’d be better off without the bases.

There have been hits on energy infrastructure. Iran says they didn’t do it, America says they did. My feeling is that Iran is telling the truth, not because I believe they wouldn’t lie, but because attacking oil infrastructure means their infrastructure becomes a target as well and that’s not in their self-interest. I suspect this is a false flag attack to try and get Saudi Arabia, in particular, to join fully in the war.

Germany, France and Britain have said that they will help America militarily. I think the best response to this is Alemanno’s:

The most baffling thing about Europe’s support for regime change in Iran is that it contradicts its own interests. American war leads to: – higher energy price – influx of refugees – ensuing far-right surge – further damage rule-based order

Note also that Germany has almost no interceptors left (they went to Ukraine) and are within range of Iranian missiles. I doubt Iran will attack them, but they can. Germany might want to think hard about that.

Many people are saying this is 12 dimensional chess. The idea is to hurt China’s oil imports. Maybe (no), but it won’t matter much in the middle term:

Around 90% of Iran’s crude exports go to China, but the country is well prepared for disruption. Small independent refineries hold ample near-term supply, while Iranian oil already in transit could cover roughly five months of demand. China has also built large reserves—about 200 days of import cover—helped by discounted crude from Iran and Russia. Bottom line: even if Iranian flows are disrupted, the impact on China is likely manageable.

This also doesn’t make sense because the war with Iran, if goes on even another few days, means war with China is impossible. The interceptor stockpiles will take years to replenish, and China has way more missiles and drones (and the ability to manufacture them at scale) than Iran. By the time they are replenished, China will be so much stronger than the US that even American supremacists will not be able to pretend there is the least chance America could win.

The war, in the end, comes down to math. The US/Israel and whatever pathetic forces European allies commit are in a race: they have to take out launchers and missile suppliers faster than Iran depletes interceptor stocks. My bet is they lose that race, but that’s the race and if you think it comes down to anything else, you are mistaken, leaving aside the possibility of using nukes.

If the US loses this war it is America’s last great hurrah. Everyone will move away from them: they can’t defend their allies, they can’t be trusted to negotiate or keep agreements, and their military will be defenseless for years against the signature weapons of modern warfare: drones and missiles.

Empires die ugly. But America’s empire is dying.

And finally, Iran is in the right here, morally. We all know it.

Update:

Update 2: I forgot to factor in that hits on US airbases reduce the US ability to sortie planes. The number of US attacks on Iran is also dropping.

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The Second Iran War Is On

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On February 28, 2026

37 Comments

The US and Israel claim to have killed Khameini. Iran says they missed. Either way it doesn’t matter much, the Iranian response of hitting US bases and Israel hasn’t been effected. They’ve also declared the Straits of Hormuz closed. If Khameini was killed, he is far more likely to be replaced by hawk than a dove. It’s his refusal to fight, over and over again, and his willingness to let Iranian proxies like Syria and Hezbollah be defeated in detail that lead to Israel and the US thinking they could keep attacking whenever they wanted because Iran was run by people who weren’t really willing to fight.

That and his refusal to get nuclear weapons, which Iran could have had years ago. If Iran had nukes, a lot of Iranians would still be alive.

That said, Iran seems (seems) to have learned their lesson. Before this war they said that if attacked they would hit everywhere the US attacked from, and not let up. They’ve started doing that.

They have hit radars, military bases and even some Trump associated businesses.

This is going to be a long slog, especially if Iran has finally learned its lesson. They should not quit until they’ve destroyed every US and Israeli base in the region. During the 12 day war they quit when Israel was about a week to ten days from running out of interceptors. Iran has more missiles and drones than the US and Israel have interceptor missiles. Keep attacking till they run out, then pound them into the dirt.

It is also good to see that collaborating regimes like the UAE, Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait getting hit. Hosting a US base in your country should come with risks.

If the Iranians don’t wimp out, my prediction is they’ll win this war, and do so decisively. The main risk is when Israel starts losing decisively they may wish to use nukes. I don’t think even Trump would allow that, and if Israel does anyway, remember that even with nukes Iran can create a dirty nuclear missile. One hit on Israel (which is postage stamp sized) and the country becomes uninhabitable.

We’ll keep an eye on this as it goes on. If the US loses decisively here, the America Empire takes a huge hit to its ability to inspire terror and compliance. Oh sure, they can still strangle weak nearby countries, but genuine middle powers with real militaries will know they can fight the US and win.

Update: Iran has confirmed Khameini is dead. Absolutely stupid of the US and Israel. He is most likely to be replaced by someone more hardline than him, and his fatwa against nuclear weapons can be revoked by his successor. Notice that his death had zero effect on the Iranian military command. Assassination doesn’t matter to real states.

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Genocide & Brown Shirts Are Being Normalized

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On February 19, 2026

31 Comments

So we have an ongoing genocide in Gaza. The death toll, as estimated by scientists, is probably north of half a million. (The official toll is laughable and obviously wrong, growth slowing over time.)

Trump was able to use oil piracy and a kidnapping to bend Venezuela to his will.

Now he’s cut off oil to Cuba, and because of how modern economies work, that means famine.

Deliberately causing a famine is genocidal.

This genocide creep. America could have done this to Cuba any time after the fall of the USSR. Sanctions were nasty and caused a lot of suffering and even deaths, but they didn’t rise to the level of “let’s just starve them to death. They’ll give in.”

Mind you, they tried to do this to Yemen, engineering a low-grade famine. Deaths were in the low to mid hundreds of thousands. Genocide. It was intentional, everyone knew that’s what was the intention.

In Israel a lot were killed by arms, but the cutting off of medical supplies, fuel and food I’m sure will have killed even more people.

Multiple times the US and/or its allies has engineered a famine. In Yemen with Saudi Arabian help. Israel with Israelis taking the lead, but the US supporting it all along the way, as when it cut funding to the primary aid agency, UNWRA.

Now Cuba.

This is the way it works. Whenever something evil is done by the powerful to the weak, they look to see if there were consequences. If not, they expand, moving inwards. Yemen is a place no one cares about in the West: there wasn’t a lot of coverage. Palestine got tons of coverage and even law cases, but in the end no one powerful suffered, and the genocide was and is pushed thru. Opponents lost their jobs, went to prison and were deported or lost their banking access (Albanese, for example.)

Since those responsible for the genocide got away with it twice, they’re now doing it a third time.

Everything the powerful do to someone else is something they are willing to do to you if they think it’s in their interest, or just fun.

In the US we have the ICE crackdowns. I wrote for years that if Trump went wild, ICE would be his brown shirts, and here we are. Substantially we have masked men in unmarked cars without badges or in most cases judicial warrants, terrorizing Americans. Not as bad as what Israelis do to Palestinians or America and NATO did in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the same sort of thing. Just call everyone an immigrant or a terrorist and do what you want to them. Refuse to obey the law, ignore judges (what can they do) and on your way.

Start internally with “immigrants” but sweep up lots of citizens and treat them abusively, without reference to their rights.

Set those precedents. And if you get away with it: if no one important winds up punished, then you can expand it. Go after the citizens next. Kick out native Americans. Keep people locked up for months on end without any real judge even knowing about it. Ignore health care problems, let them suffer and die.

Every time the elites of any country get away with abusing regular people, whether foreign or domestic, the line moves on what is acceptable.

We fight for other people to be treated well not just because we aren’t monsters, but because we know that it could be us. Every time we fail to make sure other people are treated fairly and well, we make ourselves less secure. What was done to them can now be done to us. It is for this reasons that even people accused of the worst crimes, like pedophilia and rape have rights, because an accusation isn’t proof and the government and police often get things wrong or lie.

The precedents are now firm that anyone who isn’t in the elite has limited rights: no free speech, no right to see an attorney, no right to security against search and seizure, and so on.

Genocide and ignoring the rule of law, even ignoring judicial rulings, are now the norm.

And the goal isn’t genocide of foreigners. The goal is to get to the point where they can lock up or kill anyone they want domestically.

That’s what American elites want. If an election is going to be lost, fix it. If a person is against a genocide, lock them up or deport them or de-bank them. Anyone who is inconvenient because they oppose what the elite group in power find the rule of law is increasingly no shield. It’s been broken too often, elites know they can mass murder, rape and traffic children and teens with few or no consequences.

What has been done to outsiders will increasingly be done to us, core Western citizens. By failing to protect others, we set the precedents that we were no longer protected.

Never think “it’s OK to do monstrous things to outsiders” because everyone who isn’t an elite eventually becomes an outsider.

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