"...the man that the media told us was Hitler nonstop has morphed into the people's president."

I think this election cycle President Trump won so handily, not only because his competition was grossly incompetent, but because it was far less taboo this time around to be a Trump supporter.

In 2016, before President Trump had a chance to establish a four-year record for himself in office, it wasn't popular to openly support him. His "Make America Great Again" hats were ridiculed as a cheap branding trick and the mainstream media was unrelenting in its quest to crucify not only Trump, but those who supported him.

Throughout the last four years of political lunacy, which included wide-open borders, rising inflation, squandering of taxpayer cash, and multiple geopolitical dust-ups, it became far less of a faux pas to support Trump publicly. This period culminated in an internal coup that subverted the primary process, further reinforcing this shift.

Today, there are still scores of Democrats who believe Trump is irredeemable and repugnant, just as there are still plenty of news organizations that spend 24 hours a day attempting to make him look bad. But this election go-round, there were just too many Americans on the center-left, center, and center-right who decided that the humiliation they would need to endure by supporting Trump publicly paled in comparison to how insulted they felt by the current administration's assumption that they would buy an entire campaign based on flip-flopping, outright lies, race hustling, and identity politics.

President-elect Donald Trump has picked senior GOP Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr to lead the agency, he announced Sunday night.

Calling him a "warrior for Free Speech," Trump enthusiastically praised Carr, 45, who he first nominated to serve as an FCC commissioner in 2017 during his first term in the White House.

"His current term runs through 2029 and, because of his great work, I will now be designating him as permanent Chairman," Trump, 78, said in a statement.

"Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that stifled Americans' Freedoms and held back our economy," he added. "He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America's Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America."

Turkey effectively stopped the Israeli president from attending the COP29 summit in Baku earlier this week by denying permission for his aircraft to enter Turkish airspace, according to several reports citing Azerbaijani and Turkish officials.

On Saturday Israeli President Isaac Herzog's office announced he was cancelling his planned visit to the climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan. The president's office cited "security considerations" as the reason, without elaborating further. But Ynet cited officials in Azerbaijan on Sunday saying the trip was cancelled because Turkey refused to allow the president's plane to enter its airspace.

An unnamed Azerbaijani official reportedly said that Israel and Turkey engaged in "intensive negotiations through diplomatic channels that lasted for several days but did not yield results".

The rest of the Israeli delegation to the conference arrived in Baku on 11 November, having travelled there on commercial flights through Georgia.

Al-Monitor reported that Turkish officials confirmed that the government denied an official Israeli request for Herzog's aircraft to fly through Turkish airspace.

Tulsi Gabbard can provide the necessary counsel to Trump upon which a lasting peace settlement can be made.

The nomination of Tulsi Gabbard as the United States intelligence supremo has sent shockwaves through the American and NATO establishments. The Western news media - always a dutiful echo chamber for deep-state policymakers - is reverberating with horror at her nomination by President-elect Donald Trump.

That reaction is a good sign that something significant has happened. The potential appointment of Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) could be the most consequential decision yet by Trump in forming his cabinet. If one move could signal the foreign policy direction under the 47th president, Gabbard's nomination is the most salient and potentially the most constructive on the key issue of world peace.

Time magazine headlined with the U.S. intelligence community's response to Gabbard's selection. "We are reeling," it was reported. Reuters reported that the Western "spy world is vexed." Meanwhile, in The Atlantic, an establishment mouthpiece, Gabbard was denounced as a "threat to the security of the United States."

That's a staggering charge to levy on the person who is going to be head of national security.

Three people have been charged in a series of alleged Iran-linked murder plots, with one of them accused of trying to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump, and others targeting an Iranian-American activist and two Jewish Americans living in New York, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Friday in New York.

Farhad Shakeri, Carlisle Rivera and Jonathan Loadholt are charged with murder-for-hire, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Rivera and Loadholt have been arrested, while Shakeri, who the FBI described as an "asset" of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is believed to be in Tehran.


The IRGC tasked Shakeri with surveilling and killing Trump to avenge the death of Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran's elite Quds Force, in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020, according to the complaint.

Leaked files show top UK military figures conspired to carry out the Kerch bridge bombing, covertly train "Gladio"-style stay-behind forces in Ukraine, and groom the British public for a drop in living standards caused by the proxy war against Russia.

Emails and internal documents reviewed by The Grayzone reveal details of a cabal of British military and intelligence veterans which plotted to escalate and prolong the Ukraine proxy war "at all costs." Convened under the direction of the British Ministry of Defense in the immediate aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the cell referred to itself as Project Alchemy. As British leadership sabotaged peace talks between Kiev and Moscow, the cell put forward an array of plans "to keep Ukraine fighting" by imposing "strategic dilemmas, costs and frictions upon Russia."

The leaks obtained by The Grayzone expose a hidden hand behind Britain's policy in Ukraine, showing in unusually granular detail how it aimed to engineer a long, grinding war through covert operations that stretched the bounds of legality.

Once upon a time, on a planet called Earth, there was born a global-capitalist empire. It was the first global empire in the history of empires. It dominated the entire planet.

No one knew what to call the empire, because there had never been anything like it in history. It had no external adversaries, so it had nothing left to do but "clear and hold," i.e., neutralize internal resistance and consolidate its domination of the planet.

So that is what it set about doing.

It did this first in the territories of its final ideological adversary, an empire called the Soviet Union, the ideology of which was known as "Communism."

This was known as the "Post-Cold-War Era."

It did this next in the Greater Middle East, where people were still trying to live their lives according to a religion known as "Islam."

This was known as the "Global War on Terror."

The Global War on Terror was originally intended to go on forever, and it would have, and it will, but it had to be temporarily suspended, and rebranded, because something unexpected happened.

One day, in the Summer of 2016 — theretofore officially "The Summer of Fear" — the global-capitalist empire noticed that a new form of resistance to its domination of the entire planet had risen up, not in the former Soviet Union, or the Greater Middle East, but throughout the West, right in the very heart of the empire.

And so the War on Terror was suspended, and the War on Populism began.

The War on Populism raged for four years, and culminated in the rollout of the New Normal, officially known as "the Covid pandemic."

The leader of France's Patriots party, Florian Philippot, has called on Paris to stop the "total madness" and quit NATO. He was reacting to reports that US President Joe Biden had given Ukraine the green light to use US-supplied long-range missiles to attack targets inside Russia's pre-2014 borders.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that Washington has authorized Ukrainian forces to use ATACMS missiles to hit targets in Kursk Region. However, the White House has made no official statements.

"The deep state and its puppet Biden are attempting to trigger World War III before the arrival of [Donald] Trump in power," the French politician wrote on Monday in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

"We expected this kind of thing, their madness knows no bounds! We're going to have to get the reasonable people to take over and get rid of NATO once and for all!" the politician added.

Horrifying testimony of scenes in a detention center for Palestinians appear to constitute an unprecedented public admission of torture by Israeli forces. The testimony was delivered by an Israeli reporter who served as an intel officer after October 7.

A well-known Israeli journalist and former soldier has offered the first apparent acknowledgement of wide-scale torture by his country's military, describing "masses" of Palestinians who were left "lying... in handcuffs" while subjected to never-ending Israeli music at the Hakirya military compound. He referred to the facility as "some kind of house of horrors, with screams coming from all directions."

The admission came during a Hebrew-language podcast appearance by Amichai Attali, who works as the Knesset correspondent for Israeli outlet Ynet, and moonlit as a reserve intelligence officer in the Israeli army. The journalist's confession adds a layer of irony to the Israeli army's allegation that an entire crew of Palestinian journalists working for Al Jazeera in the besieged northern Gaza Strip are, in fact, secret militants with roles in the armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The self-critical writer

As an analyst I have to be self-critical.

Yesterday, as I was proofreading my last post, rather late at night, I started to ask myself what bothered me so much about recent discussions among prominent figures in the Internet commentariat about peace negotiations with Russia, focusing on the future of Ukraine.

In Western-centric MSM and its derivative "MadM "(Mainstream Additional Media), the assumption seems to be that the Hegemon is still the Hegemon, when it is more like Rome in 400 AD after the center of power had shifted to the East.

In 400 AD, the Roman elites still thought themselves able to call the shots.

Today, the West thinks the same, assuming they can bend Russia to its will and force it to reverse itself on Ukraine - to leave an undemocratic, neo-Nazi regime in place in the Ukraine as an extension of Western control - to "win the peace", as Mercouris says, using Robert Orr's phrase.

But power has shifted once again...to... the East!

Most of the people still genuflecting before America seemed not to have read - or at least not to have understood Putin's Valdai Speech, not as I did anyway. Granted -the speech is long - four hours or more. But is one of the most important and articulate statements made by a world leader in a hundred years. IMO.

Putin's speech, while lengthy, is straightforward: the "world order" has changed -and that unstable, warmongering Hegemon sits on an increasingly shaky throne.

Which means that both each new president in this century has tried to emulate Canute and command the tide.

The tide is BRICS. The ocean is humanity. Putin explains all this.

From this speech, you can easily infer that the US has no concept of "peace" .

"Peace", as the Putin made clear at Valdai, depends on equality and respect and honesty and trust validated by keeping your word. These are things that the US has not demonstrated — nor its quasi-colonial vassal states in the G7 either.

Putin made all this clear to Scholz - who, of course, wasn't listening because his call was just to try to shore up support in an election he will hopefully lose.