John Lewis died in 2020. At his eulogy, Barack Obama dubbed Lewis "a founding father" of a "fuller, fairer, better America". In that most tumultuous of years, statues of America's real founding fathers had been pulled from their pedestals. Of the "relentless young people" responsible for widespread rioting, looting, and arson, Obama said, "John, those are your children". The new fuller fairer America demands new symbols. According to one poll, many liberals would like to replace the stars and stripes with a flag that "better reflects our diversity as a people". In many ways, that's already happened: the rainbow ensign flies on military vehicles, on embassy buildings, and every redoubt of American domination. Secretary of State Antony Blinken authorized diplomatic outposts to fly the Pride flag on the same flagpole as the U.S. flag - not just for pride month, but all year round. Blinken also authorized U.S. embassies to fly BLM flags and banners.
Latinx girlboss imperialism
"I can change a diaper with one hand and console a crying toddler with the other...I am a woman of color. I am a cisgender millenial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional... I am a walking declaration... I refuse to internalise misguided patriarchal ideas about what a woman can or should be."This is the face of the modern CIA. Significantly, this video series was a recruitment drive — these are the sort of people the CIA actively wants to hire. After proudly stating her race, sex, gender identity and psychological disorders, she claims to be "more than a box-checking exercise". This proud "daughter of immigrants" wears a T-shirt emblazoned with a raised fist. It was but one in a series of such videos entitled Humans of the CIA. In another video from the series a man of indeterminate racial origin tells the camera that his experience as a "chief of corporate strategy and education for diversity and inclusion" was great preparation for his career in the CIA. The CIA recruitment drive has heavily targeted people of color. The official CIA Instagram account features a black recruit wearing a hoody emblazoned with the words "WE ARE BLACK HISTORY" above an image of the African continent.
White males are now entirely absent from recruitment material. That's hardly surprising, given that John Brennan, former Director of the CIA, told MSNBC "I'm increasingly embarrassed to be a white male these days". Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence in the Biden administration, has referred to "diversity, inclusion, equity" as "mission imperatives" that are "quickly emerging as one of the top national security issues of our time". If the case of Jonathan Pollard is anything to go by, the total opposite is the case. Minorities are liable to leak classified information to their co-religionists or to their ancestral country of origin in a way that non-hyphenated Americans aren't.
Woke washing?
Many view the adoption of woke rhetoric as a charade, as little more than a shallow PR exercise. Glenn Greenwald, talking on the Zero Books podcast, referred to it as "an incredibly cynical branding weapon":
"In 2015 the British spy agency GCHQ announced LGBT day. Their headquarters were bathed in the colors of the rainbow flag, trying to put this pretty liberal-left face on this militaristic institution. You see this over and over now where every major authoritarian institution of militarism and corporatism now drapes themselves in identity politics and woke ideology... Its all about deceiving you into believing that these institutions are kind and gentle and noble and loving and fair because their weaponising identity politics to distract you from the reality of what neoliberalism and imperialism are."
Twenty years later, a CNN headline ran, "Concerns mount that US withdrawal from Afghanistan could risk progress on women's rights". According to a report by Vox, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley made an "emotional" case for keeping troops in Aghanistan, arguing that women's right would "go back to the Stone Age" if America withdrew. Milley himself has acknowledged that "We have been in a condition of strategic stalemate where the government of Afghanistan was never going to militarily defeat the Taliban", so assumably wants to keeps troops on the ground forever.
The American media has picked up the talking point. The Washington Post editorial board acknowledge that withdrawal "may spare the United States further costs and lives" but still objected on the grounds that it would be a disaster for the countries women and a reversal of "social progress". Writing in that same paper, Max Boot asked readers to think of "all the women in the workforce". The United States must drop cluster bombs on the heads of female civilians in Afghanistan in order to protect their human rights. Shrapnel from NATO munitions will rip through female flesh, spreading female empowerment in its wake. After the invasion, American media outlets celebrated such achievements as the first female tattoo artist opening a studio in Kabul. That, apparently, is what we were fighting for.
Israel pioneered what's been deemed 'pink-washing', using homosexual libertinism as a weird marker of civilized values as opposed to the barbarism of Muslim Arabs. Black faces in high places have been rather effective at minimising criticism of US foreign policy. War hawks have long wielded charges of anti-Americanism as a cudgel. Now their critics can be deemed anti-American and racist. Even Muammar Gaddafi was won over by Barack Obama, whom he designated "an exceptional case...being a black African his mentality is different to that of the Yankees." Soon after that comment Gaddafi would be sodomised to death with a bayonet after a U.S. military intervention. Obama and Susan Rice were a black face for the same old militarism. The anarchy they unleashed on Libya remains to this day.
Politically correct rhetoric is often deployed to advance pre-existing American foreign policy. As Darren Beattie has pointed out, what he terms the Globalist American Empire has used minority groups "to advance its power objectives geopolitically (Uiguhrs, Rohinga) - and women and gays to mobilize color revolution protests in Eastern Europe and Thailand". Warmongering is now often wrapped in a rainbow flag. Richard Grenell was the first openly gay person to serve at Cabinet level, appointed by Trump as Director of National Intelligence. In a campaign ad Grenell bragged that the then-President "fully supported our fight to crush the homophobic and barbaric Islamic terrorist organization Hezbollah and the Iranian regime that supports them." One imagines the recipients of military-industrial largesse would latch onto any pretext for war. Wokeness may just be a handy way to propagandize for wars they would want to fight regardless.
It's easy to be cynical about the American elites self-proclaimed values. This is the same elite that maintains the closest of ties with Saudi Arabia. One could dismiss the rhetoric as hot air, as disingenuous marketing spin. The high-minded moral indignation might ring rather hollow but do not underestimate the human capacity to truly and deeply believe our own self-serving bullshit. Human beings are fully capable of sincere inconsistency. Rank hypocrisy doesn't disprove underlying values.
For a growing number of Americans though, wokeness isn't a cynical and insincere means to an end, its a fanatical cult. What's going on here is more than the adoption of some silly neologisms. This is not just a matter of style. It is not just performative. It is far more than a branding exercise. Every facet of American power has signed-on to the woke agenda. Critical race theory is the new governing ideology of the American empire and the implications of that are profound. Anybody with any sense of history will be aware of just how harshly America treats its ideological enemies. In Indonesia, up to one million civilians were slaughtered for communist sympathies with the full support of the United States. The vast security apparatus set up to fight the Cold War was never disbanded, it just found new targets. In 2021 the budget for the Department of Defense is 705.4 billion dollars. What happens when the influence of that money meets the influence of woke dogma?
The CIA and the Cultural Cold War
Far from cynically co-opting wokeness, the CIA were early investors. In 1950's the CIA established the International Organisations Division. It's cultural influence was huge. Looking back after the end of the Cold War, Tom Braden, chief of the IOD, described it as "the most important division that the agency had". Some of the best-known publications of the Democratic Left (Encounter, New Leader, Partisan Review), were funded by the CIA. The goal of the Agency was to reorientate the left around anti-Soviet liberalism, and in that, they wholly succeeded. The Agency also funded influential feminist Gloria Steinem. Steinem described the Agency as, "completely different from its image". She was "amazed to discover" that the CIA was full of "enlightened liberal non-partisan activists of the sort who characterized the Kennedy administration". According to the ex-director of the CIA William Colby, the covert nature of the programme was necessitated by the "very retrograde people" in Congress.
What Michael Hayden himself termed "the permanent government" has made patriotic white people the new Muslims. When Michael Hayden isn't fantasizing about adding Edward Snowden to a drone kill list he's on Twitter calling Tucker Carlson "a dirty pig!", "white supremacist", "asshole" watched by "Nazis" on "Der Sturmer TV", comparing the Georgia GOP to the KKK and claiming the economy would collapse without "undocumented workers". While a legitimate critique of Trump and Trumpism could be voluminous, the Never Trump movement of former Republicans — which has always included the most fervent supporters of war, many of whom remain closely tied the National Security State — has so often expressed opposition to Trump as opposition to fascism.
A video from the Department of Defense explains how the Army prepared a young black woman "for a career as a beauty influencer and diversity activist with millions of social media followers". Rather than recruiting strong young men who might be useful in a war, the American military is desperate to recruit people obsessed with nail varnish, hair extensions, and racism. Women in the military can now wear nail polish, lipstick and earings in the name of "diversity, equity, and inclusion". An army recruitment video features a gay rights march and a lesbian wedding. A young female soldier "who operates your nations patriot missile defense systems" narrates her story: "It begins in California with a little girl raised by two moms...I also marched for equality. I've been defending freedom from a young age." This tells us what the America army is fighting for: first she defended freedom by marching at a gay rights parade, now she defends that same freedom with patriot missiles.
The best way to predict the future of American military is to look at West Point, the elite military academy that has produced such prominent figures as Ulysses S Grant, Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower. In 2016, sixteen black female cadets at West Point took a graduation photo with raised fists — a gesture commonly associated with the Black Power movement. In 2017 Ta-Nehisi Coates was invited to give a lecture to 800 cadets. Coates ouvre is defined by unbridled racial paranoia expressed in the fruitiest of language: he has severe doubts about whether white Americans can "erect a democracy independent of cannibalism". Cadets and faculty met on multiple occasions "to consider the implication of Coates's contributions for future Army officers".
In 2020, in the wake of George Floyds death, a group of students at the academy created an extensive policy proposal titled An Anti-Racist West Point. Notable in their demands: "demolish Reconciliation Plaza". Wanting to tear down statues that celebrate the confederacy is one thing, but wanting to tear down a monument to peace is telling: these people will brook no dissent — enemies must be wholly destroyed. These are literal social justice warriors, ready to kill and maim for the cause.
Mike Waltz, who sits on the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, has brought to light workshops about "racist dogwhistles" and lectures with titles like "Understanding White Rage". This sort of diversity training is nothing new. David Cole recounts his experiences with the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI), which teaches that you're a racist if you believe, regarding violent crime, "people of color attack white people too."
Where America goes, its allies follow. NATO released a video advertising their belief that "diversity is our strength." The Permanent Secretary of Britain's Ministry of Defence sent emails to staff that claimed "systemic racial inequality is not unique to America but also has deep roots within UK society, including Defence" before signing off with #BlackLivesMatter.
The purge
The Capitol protest was a Reichstag fire moment - an event blown out of all proportion to justify the seizure of power. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a 60-day stand-down to "address extremism across DoD". The term "extremism" is a useful one - it sounds politically neutral and non-partisan. But what counts as an extremist? In a report by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), alongside the typical groups - the KKK, Aryan Nations - sat more benign examples. Signs of extremism used to purge the ranks included depictions of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character used by Donald Trump in his 2016 election campaign. A flag with the words "Come and take it" — used by second amendment activists — was another marker of extremism.
According to a report in The Intercept, the Pentagon is launching a pilot program to "continuously" monitor the social media of military personal for non-PC sentiments. The man in charge of the ideological vetting operation is Bishop Garrison, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense for Diversity and Inclusion. In a bout of catastrophizing paranoia, Garrison referred to racism and white nationalism as a "nation-ending" threat to America and an "existential threat to our country". His definition of white nationalism is broad enough to include Jewish Trump aide Stephen Miller, of whom he claimed "we're being destroyed without a single round being fired". By redefining political opponents as a national security threat, radicals can then purge and capture previously moderate institutions.
So-called experts invited to consult on the alleged problem of extremism included several members of the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC is incredibly well funded but has lost legitimacy even among liberal media outlets. The New York Times asked "Why is the SPLC targeting liberals?", so you can only imagine what they think of conservatives. For the President of the SPLC, the use of the word "extremism" is explicitly used not to denote promotion of violence, but as a tool to defeat political enemies:
"Obviously the hate label is a blunt one. It's one of the things that gives it power...Someone might say, 'Oh, it's without nuance.' ... But we've always thought that hate in the mainstream is much more dangerous than hate outside of it. The fact that a group like the FRC or a group like FAIR can have congressional allies and can testify before congressional committees, the fact that a group like ADF can get in front of the Supreme Court — to me that makes them more dangerous, not less so... It's the hate in the business suit that is a greater danger to our country than the hate in a Klan robe".They've even called the tediously milquetoast Ben Carson an extremist. And now they're helping to purge the military. The inquisitors don't need to expel every deplorable — their campaign is so demoralizing to melanin-deprived troops that they will leave voluntarily.
PSYOP
The United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) hired a man named Richard Torres-Estrada as Chief of Diversity & Inclusion. Such people oversee hiring, administer training and dictate the culture at military institutions. Estrada posted a photograph of President Trump next to one of Adolf Hitler in a crude attempt to draw parallels between the two leaders. USSOCOM's Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan calls for the organization to "ruthlessly self-assess" its cultural norms and narratives. The norms and narratives of USSOCOM may well become the norms of the world. Under the umbrella of USSOCOM sit's MISO (Military Information Support Operations), formerly known as Psychological Operations. The purpose of MISO is to "influence the behavior of selected foreign target audiences by disseminating messages that are consistent with national objectives".
Once the purge of the military is complete, the people in charge of brainwashing foreign populations will be woke ideologues. Once the military has been captured and subverted by the most fanatical ideology since communism, the almost unlimited resources of the security apparatus can be deployed. The official journal of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center describes MISO as USSOCOM's primary means to counter "extremist ideologies". What happens when this capacity is turned inwards? Or when "white supremacy" is declared not just the biggest security threat inside America, but in the world? What if the largest military industrial complex and intelligence apparatus the world has ever seen is put into the service of people who get their news from Joy Reid and their worldview from Robin DiAngelo?
Manufacturing dissent
Grievance-driven identity politics has become America's primary cultural export. This ideological encroachment hasn't gone unnoticed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the United States of spreading "a cultural revolution" around the world that consisted of anti-white aggression and political correctness "taken to the extreme". Even Emmanuel Macron, a centrist liberal, has complained of social theories "entirely imported from the United States, with their problems... which are just added to ours". Mr. Macron's education minister talked similarly of "a struggle against an intellectual matrix from American universities" that was in danger of causing the "fragmentation" of French society. "Liberal imperialism reigns in western Europe", Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told one radio station, "they are trying to force their world-view on countries that think differently". Much of this influence is independent of the American government, functioning primarily through global media networks and academia. The American state does, however, utilise and direct its soft power by funding a network of NGOs.
Masha Gessen is the perfect embodiment of the globalist American empire. A they/them non-binary trans lesbian and frothing at the mouth Putin critic, Gessen was Director of the Russian section of the U.S. government funded Radio Liberty and has been a speaker at the State Department's Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies Pride Day. Responding to the year-long BLM riots in 2020, Gessen asked "Why would you expect protests against state-sanctioned racist murder to be peaceful?" Gessen has said of marriage:
"Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we're going to do with marriage when we get there, because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change, and again, I don't think it should exist."This is what America is pushing in Russia. Gessen has said wistfully "Bombing Moscow does not seem to be an option." While launching World War Three in support of trans rights in Siberia is currently off the cards, Gessen promotes another option: "helping the Russian opposition in the same committed, involved, and even meddling manner as the U.S. once helped the Serbian opposition." For Gessen and the State Department, the perfectly apt vehicle for such meddling was Pussy Riot, a wanton group of juvenile delinquents for whom protest mainly involved desecrating cathedrals.
Western powers like to present NGOs as a fundamental part of civil society and liberal democracy. They summon the image of conscientious local citizens banding together for noble causes. In reality, the most powerful NGO's act as the de facto regime change arm of Western governments. Some of the most prominent NGO's are "Non-Governmental" in name only. Freedom House, for example, shares a revolving door of employees with the federal government, and receives much of its funding from the American state. In 2019, Freedom House raised $48 million, $45 of which came from the US government. Former Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, Michael Chertoff, is Chair of the Board. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a propagandist for the Iraq war, also served as Chairman.
Freedom House is best known for its annual reports quantifying the level of democracy of different nations. Far from a neutral arbiter, Freedom House marks countries down for, among other things, a lack of same-sex marriage. Poland was downgraded for "mobilizing its base" (i.e. gaining a popular democratic mandate among the electorate) against "gender ideology". While still contentious issues inside the US, promoting gender dysphoria and smashing heteronormativity have become objectives of the American empire. Trump was democratically elected on the promise of building a wall and reducing immigration. In spite of the popularity of such policies Freedom House downgraded America's democracy score during Trump's Presidency for what it termed "harsh" and "punitive" immigration and asylum policies.
One Resident Fellow is Jared Holt, a man whose entire working life has been spent getting conversatives fired from their jobs and deplatformed from the internet. A sort of cancel culture commissar, Holt has managed to build a career out of calling conservatives racist at the Soros-funded Right Wing Watch. Another Atlantic Fellow is Terrell Jermaine Starr. Starr is pictured on the Atlantic Council's website wearing an Angela Davis T-shirt. In 1969 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared that "without question" the Black Panther Party "represents the greatest threat to internal security of the country". Today, their supporters are the foreign policy elite. Such people powwow with the ghouls of the Bush administration. In 2018 George W. accepted the Council's Distinguished International Leadership Award and used his acceptance speech to warn against isolationism. The hegemonic ideology of America is now a mutant symbiosis of the thought of Dick Cheney and Ibram X. Kendi.
Early in his presidency, Joe Biden spoke of America's place in the world, explicitly stating that internal anti-white policies would also be applied abroad:
"We've taken steps to acknowledge and address systemic racism and the scourge of white supremacy in our own country. Racial equity will not just be an issue for one department in our administration, it has to be the business of the whole of government in all our federal policies and institutions. All this matters to foreign policy".Speaking on the first anniversary of George Floyd's overdose, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan tweeted "the fight for racial justice at home and abroad is foundational to our future". Karen Bass is Chair of a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and had been a top contender to be Joe Biden's vice-presidential running mate. She has worked with BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors "for years" and is "proud to continue to call on her for advice". BLM nearly had a direct line to the White House. Bass has been loudly calling for increased diversity in the State Department to spread this influence. Opal Tometi, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, gave a speech on behalf of the US Mission to the United Nations in March of 2021 entitled "Addressing Racism as a U.S. Foreign Policy Imperative". The agenda of BLM is now American foreign policy. In Washington D.C., the heart of the American empire, the words "BLACK LIVES MATTER" are permanently painted in 35-foot lettering in the newly renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza. Let's be in no doubt that this is the official ideology of the U.S. state.
Diplomacy is the art of managing a country's reputation, of trying to foster a positive public image, of cultivating soft power. America's ambassador to the UN, by contrast, has pioneered what she terms "gumbo diplomacy". Speaking in an address to the United Nation, Linda Thomas-Greenfield lambasted America: "I have seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles." But it was not just America she would harangue for racism, but every country on earth, for "producing the racist". Thomas-Greenfield uses the UN as a platform to take America's local and historically specific culture wars and proselytize them to the world:
"It's the white supremacy that led to the senseless killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many other black Americans...That's why the Biden administration has made racial equity a top priority across the entire government. And I'm making it a real focus of my tenure at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations."America's own diplomats are now decrying the country they're meant to be promoting. Yet this does not imply a more modest USA. When it comes to events that happened hundreds of years ago, or the phantasm of alleged racism today, America is deeply and irrationally self-critical. When it comes to ruinous wars, less so. In a curious and deranged combo, the American elite will trash America's own reputation while maintaining enough arrogance to push "democracy" and human rights across the world. The American ruling class has perfected the language of white guilt while still claiming the legitimacy to overturn foreign governments.
We will not have wokeness in one country — this is an ideology with global ambitions. Jalina says the USA will "expose and take action against the racism and racial discrimination endemic in every society across the world." Once again proving that America is no longer a serious country Porter led a "Wakanda Forever" salute (a symbol of black nationalism taken from a children's comic book movie) while recruiting students from HBCUs to enter the State Department. Speaking to a Diversity Career Symposium, Jalina told potential recruits "President Bidens bedrock principle is that diversity is one of our country's greatest strengths. And we know that eliminating inequity both at home and abroad is hard to do without pioneers like you".
America's ruinous race relations are purposefully and explicitly being spread throughout the world. An official State Department video positively referenced the violent BLM protests of 2020: "the global racial justice protests" the speaker says, "made me realise that the fight for racial justice is unified across borders, languages and cultures". Diplomat Linda Thomas Greenfield declares that she is "determined to harness that global solidarity" seen during the year of rioting "to advance racial justice everywhere".
Anne-Marie Slaughter, preeminent intellectual propagandist of humanitarian-driven bloodshed has asked "why not start imagining what a foreign policy with racial equity at its core would look like?" Anne-Marie has played a key role in undermining sovereignty and normalising "humanitarian intervention". These aren't idle words. The "responsibility to protect" doctrine Anne-Marie advocated led to the disastrous war in Libya. Dispassionate realism in foreign policy is wholly replaced by a militarized moralizing hysteria. America has long had it's goal as the imposition of multiculturalism in all nations, leaving a cosmopolitan dystopia in its wake.
General Wesley Clark, speaking in Kosovo in the aftermath of NATO's bombing campaign, made this explicit: "That's what the fighting was about. That it wasn't going to be a purely Serb place. Its not going to be a purely Albanian place. It is going to be multi-ethnic in the future. People have to have tolerance, have to move out of the past, out of the nineteenth century". Targets of the NATO's 'humanitarian' aerial bombardment included a Serb TV station in which sixteen civilian staff members were killed. Kosovo should stand as a stark warning. If America was willing to launch a blood-soaked military campaign in the name of tolerance and diversity back in the comparatively moderate 1990s, what does that bode for the future? The French Revolution begets Napoleon — this time with nukes.
Joe Biden, the man that told us that "Antifa is an idea", told Congress "white supremacy is terrorism". White supremacy is an ideology with a miniscule number of adherents. Its a mantle almost nobody uses as a self-descriptor, and which is now defined so loosely that it includes just about anything. The New York Times ran the headline 'White Supremacy' Once Meant David Duke and the Klan. Now It Refers to Much More. Biden was using the phrase to refer to MAGA supporters. Given that America launches drone strikes against terrorists (with their families as collateral damage) and starts incredibly bloody wars to purportedly fight terrorism, its a pretty alarming choice of words. America is adopting an inverted "White Man's Burden" where enlightened multicultural liberal policy-makers will conduct a civilizing mission to wipe out the last vestige of what Ta-Nehisi Coates terms the "demon religion" of "whiteness".
Meanwhile on MSNBC, Frank Figliuzzi, former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI argued that sitting members of Congress should be arrested in connection with the 1/6 Capitol protest, branding them the "command and control element of a terrorist group". Writing in The Root, aforementioned Terrell Jermaine Starr goes further, enthusiastically quoting a deluded self-declared black national security expert: "the Republican Party is functioning like a terror cell", "If they we're in Afghanistan, we would've hit them. Either a raid, drop a bomb on them".
Bullshit!