/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

reminder that the average "normal" American has absolutely insane retarded incoherent politics so you should approach all strategies with that in mind

archives.

>>2519559
wait until you find out about people in the past, in so called "normal countries"

>>2519582
Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg. Hitler was not voted in.

>>2519585
his party did have a majority, but it should be noted that it was more complicated than it might seem, and the support was primarily from protestants in the north of germany whereas catholics typically voted for the standard conservative parties

>>2519589
plurality =/= majority

zohran status?

>>2519605
A filthy fucking democrat

>>2519550
Okay lumpen

doesn't this mean that we're kinda looking at the biggest ugliest shakeup of world trade ever?

the world is ending tomorrow. how you feeling?

>>2519605
>zohran status?
This is a real campaign flyer from zohran mamdani's campaign that he himself posted on his own twitter account.

https://xcancel.com/ZohranKMamdani/status/1975550702056538512#m

He is

1. calling self defense against genocide a war crime
2. mourning the real war criminals
3. downplaying the number killed from 680,000 to 67,000, which is over ten times lower.

Some say this is "smart politics" and that you're "scaring the normies" to not do this. But zohran will get ratfucked and slandered by zios no matter how much he sucks up to them. So this wasn't smart.

Zohran would have been doing infinitely better "politics" to not release a statement calling hamas war criminals. any time a zionist (but let's be real, he's one of them) tried to troll him by demanding he "condemn hamas" he could have said something like "this is not relevant to NYC, whose mayor position I am running for."

but instead he went out of his way to have his campaign planting flyers declaring his "mourning" of zionist settlers that were actually mostly killed by the IDF, and calling people defending themselves from genocide "war criminals."

What political benefit did this have? Alienating all the people who may have liked him, while trying and failing to appease all the bloodthristy zionists who treat him as the second coming of yasser arafat despite the fact that he's a milquetoast liberal zionist anyway.

What was the point?

Not exactly the Machiavellian 11-Dimensional chess some in the previous thread were making it out to be.

>>2519617
>Lenin
Amazing. A lumpen leninist. How astounding.
>>2519614
I am simultaneously stoked and feelin pretty shit.

>>2519614
Same as always. I still have to go to work tomorrow.

>>2519614
Why? is it the rapture agian?

>>2519626
>I can keep going all day.
And I would still be astounded by the existence of a lumpen Leninist.
>This is all Lenin wrote about in his books
I can see that

>>2519625
the market will crash. 2008 2.

>>2519613
It's strange seeing a coherent industrial policy be executed. On that note I don't know what pressure points are left to be used against the Chinese, going to be a painful problem for all future admins

>>2519637
There are in fact some pressure points left. But there won’t be any exiting admins in the future to begin with. They have, in all their stupidity, already doomed themselves. Even if there were future admins, they couldn’t use said pressure points anyways.

What are you doing to evade the drones palantir will send after you

>>2519648
Animorphing into a human gun

>>2519633
>the market will crash. 2008 2.
How do you know?

>>2519620
libs will still vote bl00 no mater wh0 so it doesn't really matter

>>2519633
The 2008 crash wouldnt even make the headlines if it happened today

>>2519620
>But zohran will get ratfucked and slandered by zios no matter how much he sucks up to them.
this this this this this this this this
Stop conceding anything to these people it makes you look WEAK on top of not actually doing anything for you. Instead the posture should be to ATTACK your opponents. The left and libs seem to forget this one weird trick that is key to the right's success: identifying a clear enemy. The politically correct (lol) strategy is to mark your opponent as an enemy of the people.

>"There are a lot of reasons why [the cease-fire] is going to hold, but people are tired of it. It's been centuries,"
<it's been centuries
i love how illiterate your people are, it makes i laugh.

We /nightgang/ or not tonight

>>2519550
I'm not serious

I get more truth watching Iran state media than American TV

https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/10/11/756711/TikTok,-Larry-Ellison-and-Tony-Blair

>>2519620
Fuck Mamdani. Never trust a "Democratic" Socialist again.

>>2519664
trhis leads to civil war, anon….but maybe that is needed

>>2519683
Never trust any American under any circumstance

>>2519684
Civil war in America is not possible

>>2519686
when the treats go down, it will be possible

>>2519687
If that were true COVID would have been the turning point, it wasn’t, there is no turning point because we’re destined to live the exact same way every day except it gets slightly worse

>>2519687
Do you think every 300 pound lardass is gonna pick up the gun to get McDonald’s back? Nah man, if McDonald’s goes, he lies in his house and waits to die, that’s every American

>>2519689
covid wasnt bad enough. If america reaches great depression levels then you will see conflict.

>>2519683
uygha you will never win without us and the economy wont work without markets
YIMBYgang

>>2519683
Why trust a demsoc in the first place?

>>2519662
Partly because the government changed what was considered a recession

>>2519694
In the third world they sometimes get things done (Evo Morales, Hafez al Assad). People make the mistake of thinking the first world has democracies or politics, they don’t

>>2519695
If you close your eyes for long enough, the rest of the world dissolves

>>2519694
Many communists have humiliation fetishes

>>2519699
That’s liberals

>>2519699
They’re desperate to believe that Euro and American history didn’t effectively end with 1918

>>2519693
what are you talking about

>>2519704
Clueless

>>2519710
awwww cute little Trumpy :3

>>2519710
trump's inner dialogue be like

>>2519683
>the US has two identical right wing parties that just accuse each other of being communist
at least he didn't say that trump is the communist.

Hot take: I feel like Oct. 7th is a net loss for the Palestinian resistance. I really don't know what they expected to accomplish.
That's not to say Israel isn't a genocidal terror state mind you.

>>2519716
You went from having 2 permanent members of the security council nominally recognizing a Palestinian state to 4 of the 5, it derailed the normalization between Israel and the gulf monarchies, and it brought the cause back to world public attention. The available options were to die slowly under the blockade or die fast, all things considered it was an act of desperation

>>2519716
Pissrael has completely destroyed its reputation. Five years ago, you would have been shamed, blacklisted, or even imprisoned for daring to question Pissraelis. What has happened in the last two years has been horrendous for Palestinians, but it has also brought us closer to a point where Pissrael's influence is waning. Someday, it may fall apart completely if journalists can reveal the full extent of their crimes. One can only hope.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

Thiel’s talks, which began on 15 September and ended on Monday, were long and sweeping, mingling biblical passages, recent history and philosophy and sometimes deviating into conspiracy theories. He peppered them with references to video games and TV shows along with musings on JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He likewise recalled conversations with Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu and spoke at length about how he thinks Bill Gates is “a very, very awful person”.

The Silicon Valley heavyweight drew on a wide swath of religious thinkers, including the French-American theorist René Girard, whom Thiel knew at Stanford University, and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose work he said helped create the core of his own beliefs. He credited the English Catholic theologian John Henry Newman as the inspiration for his four-part series, saying: “Newman did four, so I’m doing four. I’m happy about it.”

The venture capitalist has hosted and attended events and lectured on the topic for decades, going back to the 1990s, according to a report by Wired. In recent months, he has spoken to theologians and podcasters about the antichrist both publicly and in private. His beliefs are diffuse, meandering and often confusing, but one tenet he’s steadfastly maintained over the years is that the unification of the world under one global state is essentially identical to the antichrist. In his talks, he uses the term “antichrist” almost interchangeably with “one-world state”.

“One world or not, in a sense is the same as the question antichrist or Armageddon. So in one sense, it’s completely the same question,” he said.

His version of history, and its potential end, posits technology as a central driver of societal change and takes a Christianity-focused, Eurocentric view that declines to engage much with other religious movements or parts of the world.

What do Thiel’s lectures say

He believes the Armageddon will be ushered in by an antichrist-type figure who cultivates a fear of existential threats such as climate change, AI and nuclear war to amass inordinate power. The idea is this figure will convince people to do everything they can to avoid something like a third world war, including accepting a one-world order charged with protecting everyone from the apocalypse that implements a complete restriction of technological progress. In his mind, this is already happening. Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: “It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money.”

How does Thiel think Armageddon will happen

<There’s all sorts of different ways, one world or none, antichrist or Armageddon, that I’m tempted to think about this, and here’s one sort of application. In terms of how does one think about the current geopolitical moment. How does one think about the nature of the conflict between the United States and China, the west and China. You don’t really know how it’s going to go. You can ask, are we heading for world war three or cold war two? And if you sort of reflect on the history of the two world wars and the first cold war. But first, if there ever was an unjust war, world war one is an unjust war. If there ever was a just war, world war two was probably a just war, with certain caveats. World war one is really insane. World war two was about as justified as a war can be. I think we can say that if you had an all-out world war three or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world. So world war three will be an unjust war. But then if you have a cold war, you have to distinguish between – can you have a just peace and an unjust peace?

<Somehow, it’s very strange how the first cold war from ‘49 to ‘89 ended. But it ended with roughly what I think of as a just peace, where somehow you didn’t have a nuclear war. And somehow our side, which I think was more the good side, basically won. And you ended up not with a perfect peace, but more or less a just peace. And so if we have world war three, it will be an unjust war. If we have cold war two, maybe it can end in a just peace or an unjust peace. Reflecting on this material and thinking about it, it’s obviously not written in stone and there’s a lot of different ways this stuff can go. But I keep thinking that, if you had to put odds on it, aren’t the odds that we’re trending towards the fourth quadrant this time. The fourth possibility that cold war two will end an unjust peace.

Thiel devotes a large section of his second lecture to a quote from the Book of Daniel that involves a prophecy about the end times, which he equates to modern advances in technology and globalization.

As the antichrist is synonymous with a one-world state for Thiel, he also believes that international bodies including the United Nations and the international criminal court (ICC) hasten the coming of Armageddon. Throughout his lectures, he warns of what he sees as the danger of these bodies and the harms they have already caused. In the following quotes, he’s lamenting the actions of the ICC:

<They’ve started arresting more and more people. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was arrested this year. They had arrest warrants out for Netanyahu and Gallant.
<When I met Netanyahu early in 2024, about a year and a half ago, we talked about what he’s doing in Gaza, and the one-liner he had was: ‘I can’t just Dresdenize Gaza – you can’t just firebomb them.’ So it’s like, come on, ‘I’m less of a war criminal than Winston Churchill. Why am I in so much trouble?

During a Q&A portion of one of the lectures, an attender asked specifically about Thiel’s thoughts on abolishing the ICC, saying: “If we get rid of the ICC or other organizations that exist to bring, in theory, justice, how can we right crimes? Should we not have prosecuted Nazi criminals?” Thiel responded:

<I think there was certainly a lot of different perspectives on what should be done with the Nuremberg trials. It was sort of the US that pushed for the Nuremberg trials. The Soviet Union just wanted to have show trials. I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. And I don’t like the Soviet approach, but I wonder if the Churchill one would have actually been healthier than the American one.

>>2519728
Who could be Thiel’s antichrist?

Thiel believes that the antichrist would be a single evil tyrant. He mentions several figures he believes are particularly dangerous and, while he never definitively says who the antichrist is, he makes suggestions about how some people could be antichrist-type figures.

Specifically, he suggests the antichrist would be a “luddite who wants to stop all science”, referencing Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Marc Andreessen.

<My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.
<It’s not Andreessen, by the way. I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because you know, the antichrist is popular. I’m trying to say some good things about Andreessen here, come on.

During a question-and-answer session, Thiel was asked to respond to a quote from fellow investor Andreessen – a name he audibly bristled at. He said Andreessen was engaged in hyperbole and “gobbledygook propaganda” when it comes to the promises of AI.
>why does thiel dislike andreessen? and how's he a luddite at all? didn't he publish that techno-optimist manifesto that was half-copied from some italian fascist last year?

<Where should I start? I’m tempted to be triggered in some nasty ad hominem argument, but I can’t resist so I’ll do that. I don’t know, this is just pure Silicon Valley gobbledygook propaganda. I wouldn’t give someone who said things like that too much money to invest.

Later, he returns to these “legionnaires of the antichrist”.

<In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic, and the legionnaires of the antichrist like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom and Greta Thunberg argue for world government to stop science, the antichrist has somehow become anti-science.

Gates, the philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft, is high on the list of people Thiel does not like.

<One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type character. The public Mr Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop, Tourette’s, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on.

Ultimately, Thiel concedes Gates cannot be the antichrist, bringing up the topic more than once:

<He’s not a political leader, he’s not broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates’s credit, he’s still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.
<I don’t think even someone like Bill Gates, who I think is a very, very awful person, is remotely able to be the antichrist.

When asked about the slain far-right commentator Charlie Kirk’s memorial in reference to the role of Christianity in American politics, Thiel initially demurred saying it was “above his pay grade”. When further prompted, he described what he saw as two versions of Christianity on display at the event:

<I think, um – what to say – I was thinking about, you know, I had the chart: the katechon pagan Christianity versus the eschaton – the Christianity of Constantine versus that of Mother Teresa. We had an illustration of that with Kirk’s wife saying that she forgave the murderers because that’s what Christ would do. This was an incredibly saintly form of Christianity. And then, you know, President Trump – I don’t know, I forget the language exactly – but, you know, Charlie was into forgiving, being nice to his enemies. He doesn’t believe in being nice to his enemies; he wants to hurt his enemies. And that’s sort of the pagan Christian view. And the problem – the naive view – is: there has to be something somewhere in between, right? But how do you concretize that? What’s the thing that’s in between Mother Teresa and Constantine – between forgiving the murderer and delighting in punishing your enemies?
<Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps the in-between thing I thought was that maybe Trump and Elon were able to forgive each other.

Thiel argues that, in order for the antichrist to be able to pull off the Armageddon in one lifetime, they need to be young today – he points to 33 as an auspicious number. In these quotes, he draws parallels to powerful figures who died at the age of 33, including Jesus, Buddha and some literary characters:

<Christ only lived to age 33 and became history’s greatest man. The antichrist has to somehow outdo this. I don’t want to be way too literal on the 33 number – I’d rather stress the antichrist will be a youthful conqueror; maybe in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33. But something like these numbers do occur almost mystically through a number of different contexts.
<Buddha begins his travels at age 30 and experiences Nirvana, ego death, at age 33. But I had to be ecumenical and say something nice about Islam. One idea that’s pretty cool is, when you’re reborn into your afterlife, you’re born into your 33-year-old self. Your 33-year-old self is your best self. Livy’s – the Roman historian’s 33rd chapter of the 33rd book – it announces this 33-year-old conqueror. It’s like Alexander at the peak of his power. Or even in Tolkien, the hobbits have a coming-of-age ceremony at 33. That’s how old Frodo is when he inherits the ring.

By the same token, people who are older cannot be Thiel’s antichrist. Here Thiel gives some examples:

<Trajan, a Roman emperor, wept when he reached the Persian Gulf in AD115 at the age of 65. He’s too old to beat Alexander the Great’s achievements in India. He died two years later. Hitler is 50 by the time world war two starts – he mimetically loses to Napoleon, who’s only 30 when he became first consul of the French Republic. That goes on to the same problem for a seventysomething Xi Jinping. Racist, sexist, nationalist, maybe the second coming of Hitler. But not even the second coming of Genghis Khan. Past the sell-by date.

He frequently oscillates between talking about the antichrist and the katechon – a term very briefly used in the Bible that refers to something holding back the coming of the antichrist. In one example, he describes a post-cold war shift to embracing neoliberalism and bureaucracy as an example of antichrist-like government.

<Of course, you have all these examples where it’s one toggle switch from katechon to the antichristic thing. Claudius to Nero, Charlemagne to Napoleon, anti-communism after the Berlin Wall comes down, it gets replaced by neoliberalism. Which is, you know, the Bush 41 new world order, which you can think of as anti-communism where there’s no communists left. Or Christian democracy, which is sort of the European form of the katechontic, transnational anti-communism. Once the communists are gone, it sort of decays into the Brussels bureaucracy. All kinds of different riffs one could do with this. Or to go even further, if something is not powerful enough to potentially become the antichrist, it probably isn’t that good as a katechon.

In his last lecture, Thiel also responds during the Q&A portion to a question about potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they are antichrist or katechon. When asked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Thiel says that he worries about there being a “woke American pope”– Pope Leo XIV – and a “woke American president”, creating a “Caesar-Papist fusion”. He goes on to talk about Ocasio-Cortez in relation to Thunberg:

<One of the ways these things always get reported is, I denounce Greta as an antichrist. And I want to be very clear: Greta is, I mean she’s maybe sort of a type or a shadow of an antichrist of a sort that would be tempting. But I don’t want to flatter her too much. So with Greta, you shouldn’t take her as the antichrist for sure. With AOC, you can choose whether or not you want to believe this disclaimer that I just gave.

>>2519729
What does he say about Trump and politics?

Thiel is asked several times about Trump and how he fits into his imagination of what form Armageddon might take. In one instance, he is asked whether Trump’s opposition to global governance makes Thiel feel any relief about the hastening of a one-world order.

<At the very best, you shouldn’t have even the most fanatical Trump supporter. You know, no politician, not even Reagan, will solve all problems for all time. Maybe we both were sort of delusional about Reagan in the 80s. There was some moment in the 1980s when we thought that Reagan had permanently solved the deepest problems in the world for all time. And that’s too high a bar. That was too high a bar for Reagan. That’s an unfairly high bar you’re giving to Mr Trump. You’re just trying to make a subtle anti-Trump argument and I’m not going to let you do that.

One of Thiel’s longstanding political affiliations has been anti-communism, and in his fourth lecture, he suggests that opposition to communism following the second world war is something that held back the antichrist. At other times, he is critical of post-cold war presidents and government order.

< I always sort of wonder what functions as the katechon in the world after 1945. This is Schmitt’s 1947 diary. ‘I believe in the katechons, for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and find it meaningful. The katechon needs to be named for every epoch for the past 1948 years.’ The way I interpret this is that sotto voce, Schmitt is saying he has no idea what the katechon is. And maybe, the New Dealers are running the whole planet. Then of course, 1949 the Soviets get the bomb, and my sort of provisional answer is that the katechon for 40 years, from ’49 to ’89, is anti-communism. Which is in some ways is somewhat violent, not purely Christian but very, very powerful.
<I’ve argued that the katechon, or something like this, is necessary but not sufficient. And I want to finish by stressing where one goes wrong with it. If we forget its essential role, which is to restrain the antichrist, the antichrist might even present himself or itself or herself as the katechon, or hijack the katechon. This is almost a memetic version. A similarity between the antichrist and the katechon, they’re both sort of political figures. The katechon is tied in with empire and politics. If the antichrist is going to take over the world, you need something very powerful to stop it.

Thiel also opines on modern-day Russia and offers his views on Vladimir Putin:

<In some sense, there are perhaps two candidates for the successors to Rome. For all sorts of reasons, I don’t particularly like the Russian theories of all these ways where you have Putin describing himself as the katechon and the last Christian leader in the world. It’s hard to look into someone’s heart. I always suspect he’s more of a KGB agent than a Christian. And then, of course, to be a katechon, you have to be strong enough to possibly become the antichrist. And Russia is not nearly powerful enough to take over the world. It cannot simply be the katechon or the new Rome.

Thiel also comments on the relation between Jewish people and the antichrist. He argued against medieval theologians’ idea that the antichrist would be Jewish.

<There’s probably a lot I can say about the relation of the Jews to the antichrist. The philo-semitic rebuttal, just to get it on the table, is that the Jews in the Bible are described as a stubborn and stiff-necked people. Which is mostly a bug, but maybe in the end times, it is a feature because – this is sort of the way [Vladimir] Solovyov phrased it – that they’re too stubborn to accept Christ, they will be too stubborn to be charmed by the antichrist. And so, they become the center of resistance to the antichrist in the Solovyov narrative.

Thiel’s final lecture dedicates a large portion of its time to talking about empires and what role the US government plays in holding back or advancing the antichrist. He is characteristically noncommittal, describing the country as having characteristics of a one-world government and also being outside it:

<Now this is not meant to be an anti-British or anti-American lecture. It’s just that America is, at this point, the natural candidate for katechon and antichrist, ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state. The US world police is the one truly sovereign country. They always say the president is the mayor of the US and the dictator of the world. International law gets defined by the US. That’s sort of Nato’s prime, to see in some ways, coordination of the world’s intelligence agencies.
<Then of course, the global financial architecture we discussed is not really run by shadowy international organizations, it’s basically American. And perhaps always a very important feature is the reserve currency status of the dollar, where it’s sort of the backstop for all the money. The petrodollar regime, there’s sort of crazy ways you have trade deficits, current account deficits, but then in all these ways, the money gets recycled into the US.
<Then of course, there’s sort of a way where from a certain perspective, the US is also the place that’s the most outside the world state. In many ways, it’s probably one of the best tax havens, at least if you’re not a US citizen. And then there are all these ways the US is a kind of ideological superpower. Christian, ultra-Christian, anti-Christian sense, woke Protestant liberation theology, social gospel, social justice. City on a hill, this institution serves as a beacon of light for other nations and honor.

At another point in his final lecture, he seems to suggest that when things are codified or formalized they tend to lose their power or ability to operate. He selects Guantánamo Bay detention camp as an example:

<By 2005 in Guantánamo, you were way better off as a Muslim terrorist in Guantánamo, the liberal lawyers had taken it over by 2005, than as a suspected cop killer in Manhattan. In Manhattan if you were a suspected cop killer back in 2005, you know, there was some informal process they had for dealing with you. Guantánamo, it was formalized. Initially, they did some bad things and then very quickly, they weren’t able to do anything, any more. And this is again a sort of revelatory unraveling process.

In his final lecture, Thiel was asked to comment on various potential 2028 presidential candidates and whether they’d be more of an antichrist figure or a katechon.

Thiel says he is “very pro-JD Vance”. But he has some concerns about his allegiance to the pope.

<“The place that I would worry about is that he’s too close to the pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the pope. I hope there are a lot more. It’s the Caesar-Papist fusion that I always worry about. By the way, I’ve given him this feedback over time. And you know with the sort of … I don’t like his popeism, but there’s sort of a way if I steel manned it. It’s always, you have to think about whether if you say you’re doing something good, whether it’s a command, a standard or a limit, or whether in philosophical language, is it necessary or sufficient. And so when JD Vance said that he was praying for Pope Francis’s health, it’s as a command, as a necessary thing. OK, that’s … if you’re a lot more if you’re a good Catholic. But what I hope it really means is that it’s sufficient, and that he’s setting a good example for conservative Catholics like you, Peter, who listen to the pope too much. And perhaps all you have to do to be a really good Catholic is pray for the pope. You don’t really need to listen to him on anything else. And if that’s what JD Vance is doing, that’s really good. I’m worried about the Caesar-Papist fusion.

Why is he fixated on stagnation?

Chief among Thiel’s concerns about how quickly the world is hurtling toward an Armageddon is what he describes as a stagnation or slowing down of technological and scientific progress. He attributes part of that to the use of science and technology – once largely seen as a force for good, in his telling – for harm.

During the Q&A portion of the first lecture, Thiel is asked about how artificial intelligence (AI) – the much-hyped darling of his fellow Silicon Valley investors – fits into this larger narrative of technological stagnation. Thiel said AI was a symptom of the larger tech stagnation and that people including Andreessen needed to boost its promises because there’s nothing else going on.

<If we’re going to not have this sort of crazed corporate utopianism versus effective altruist luddism, luddite thing. If you try to have some more nuanced version of this, you try to quantify it. How big is the AI revolution? How much is it going to add to GDP? Add to living standards? Things like that. My placeholder is, it’s looking probably on roughly the scale of the internet from 1990 to the late 90s. Maybe it can add 1% a year to GDP. There are big error bars around that. And I think the internet was quite significant. People talked about the internet in very similar terms in 1999. That’s another way where it sounds like roughly the right scale.
<The place where it’s very different, where it feels both true of the internet and maybe it’s true of AI, maybe a place where I would agree with Andreessen. The negative part of the statement is: ‘But for AI, nothing else is going on.’ He’s not talking about going to Mars, so it doesn’t sound like he believes Elon’s about to go to Mars. I think there’s a negative part, if AI was not happening, wow, we are really stuck. Things are really stagnant. And maybe that’s why people have to be so excited about this one specific vector of technological progress. Because outside of that, to a first approximation, things are totally, totally stagnant. Maybe even the internet has run out of steam but for AI. So that’s another framing. Now, the thing that strikes me is very different from ’99, if I had to give a difference, again I’m too anchored and rooted in the late 90s. But the late 90s, it was broadly optimistic. And there were a lot of people who thought about it just like Andreessen does. Nobody feels that personally. You can’t start a dotcom company from your basement in Sacramento. You can’t start an AI company, you have to do it in San Francisco. You have to do it in Silicon Valley. It has to be at an enormous scale. Most things aren’t big enough. And then there are layers and layers and layers where it feels incredibly non-inclusive. Maybe people just updated from the internet because maybe the internet turned out to have a lot of winner-take-all dynamics.

In one of the lectures, Thiel plays a video of a 60 Minutes segment about a German law that cracks down on online hate speech. He’s trying to show an example of where tech regulation goes too far – hence giving power to the antichrist:

<This kind of video is ridiculous but, of course, indicative of this larger trend. There is this crazy judge in Brazil who is arresting everybody. Australia has more or less ended internet anonymity with age verification required for all social media. The UK is arresting 30 people a day for offensive speech. I’m sort of always in favor of maximal free speech, but my one concrete test is whether I can talk about the antichrist. If I can’t, that’s too restrictive.

References to pop culture and literature

Thiel peppered his lectures with references to pop culture, calling out YouTube influencers like MrBeast and throwing out terms like “libtard” – a rightwing slur for people with progressive political views.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

<In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

>>2519728
>>2519729
I tried reading this but he's just so cringey. I can't take this fucker seriously. Did people pay for his lectures? I'd demand my money back but he might have you killed so maybe not.

>>2519633
No. Black ops moon zombies is today. rockets from the moon base will destroy the earth today

>>2519710
that's honestly one of the most shocking things I've ever heard him say

>>2519683
>Fuck Mamdani. Never trust a "Democratic" Socialist again.
That's why I'm glad I never fell for Mamdani-mania. If you don't have any positive expectations, you'll never be disappointed.

>>2519738
yep.

when an optimist is proven wrong, their worldview falls apart.

when a pessimist is proven wrong, they are pleasantly surprised.

so be a pessimist.

>>2519738
what a sad way to live

>>2519686
>Civil war in America is not possible
reminder that the reason slaveowners beat Charles Sumner was that he dared call out their Jeffrey Epstein slave rape culture

>>2519734
there's likely no shortage of techfascist wanna be's that want to get close to him

>>2519741
That was a time when America had politics and conflicting interests, it doesn’t now

>>2519738
>>2519683
Israeli bot spotted

>>2519745
You are the liberal zionist zohranite bot. Lots of them everywhere. Zohran called hamas "war criminals."
Bernie sanders called hamas "terrorist" and he endorses zohran
Zohran is a zionist who is praised by liberal zionists.

>>2519738
you can always get more disappointed.

>>2519630
you're an idiot and have nothing to say. the other anon is correct and you just keep screeching lumpen.

>>2519770
All my bits gone…

>>2519770
poor guy

>>2519770
He died 4 our sins

Social media and porn are designed to keep us up until early morning, thus keeping us tired, inducing cognitive decline and an early grave.

Is this in purpose? I feel the anxiety and hopelessness fuel this self-destructive behavior

>>2519789
I think that's a you problem.

>>2519739
>when a pessimist is proven wrong, they are pleasantly surprised.
Nah, whenever something good starts having the the pessimists have a freakout about it as evidenced by the reaction to Mamdani.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDATIMkVhrc

All 20 hostages released and our Glorious Leader is about to give his report to his masters.

>>2519748
They have to
Even mtg cant say gas the russian saboteurs. Bernie please give me the kword pass.

>>2519789
It aint porn, it's procrastination.
That is the only thing that has ever made me pull an all nighter

>>2519716
just saying "hot take" is not a free pass to be mentally retarded, anon-kun

>>2519720
>Pissrael has completely destroyed its reputation
If your weapon of choice is clout and only clout, prepare for the media businesses from whence it flows, to take your weapon away.

>>2519855
This is exactly the kind of international pressure that lead to the fall of South African apartheid in time. The question of Palestinian resistance is not to live in subjugation or to die for freedom - Israel's agenda and continued existence ensures their deaths without intervention - and anyone who insists otherwise should be shot -, and so they fight for time. With time comes change of circumstance - the weakening of the US, the outrage of European nations at Israel's actions, the souring of Russian and Israeli relations, the expanding of Chinese power and diplomatic pull in MENA, all things which aid their continued survival until they can triumph.

>>2519857
do you think trump regrets the ceasefire after he found out he wouldnt get the peace prize?

>>2519859
if a person was at that wall and didn't take a picture, did it ever happen?

>>2519710
based and honestpilled

>>2519620
Even assuming in good faith that Zohran is trying to do “smart politics”. Then he’s a retard, there’s no mythical normie voter that’s moderate on Israel. The only reason Israel even maintained such high support for decades is because what was your mythical normie israel support. Only knew about israel as some vague homeland for holocaust survivors. Now they see Israel as these bleary eyed psychos that get on T.V and brag about murdering children with U.S tax payer money. All Zohran is doing to carrying water for a narrative that Israel itselfs barely cares to push at this point.

>>2519879
>Even assuming in good faith that Zohran is trying to do “smart politics”. Then he’s a retard, there’s no mythical normie voter that’s moderate on Israel.
Liberal Jews in New York

This could be us but y'all playin

welcome to the age of the military dictatorship
>In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. United States that a president is absolutely immune from prosecution for acts within the scope of his core constitutional authority. In the military context, what this could mean is that the other branches of government – Congress and the Judiciary – may not make or enforce any law that would make him criminally liable for any act performed, decision made, or order given in his capacity as commander-in-chief. Although the contours of the Supreme Court’s decision have yet to be fully tested or defined, what is already clear is that – impeachment aside – it effectively places a president above the law and eliminates any legal incentive for him to exercise restraint. This becomes even more dangerous when, as now, a president is ineligible for re-election, since the ballot box does not serve as a check.

<The Supreme Court majority’s rationale was that if a president is subject to prosecution for exercising his exclusive constitutional authority – authority widely understood to include at least some aspects of his role as commander-in-chief – he might be “unduly cautious in the discharge of his official duties.” In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered a couple of military examples – “nightmare scenarios” such as staging a military coup or ordering SEAL Team Six to execute a political rival – to illustrate her conviction that, as a result of the majority’s decision, “the President is now a king above the law.”

>The majority focused on the president’s authority and prerogatives; the dissenters focused on the potential havoc an unrestrained president might wreak. It’s understandable that no one examined the impact of this decision on military personnel who might be ordered to carry out orders for which a president can no longer be held accountable. Understandable because, other than Justice Samuel Alito (who served on active duty in the Army for three months following his law school graduation) no Justice has any military experience. Unfortunately, by failing to consider the impact of its decision on the military, the Court placed the entire burden of dealing with an unbounded commander-in-chief upon those serving in uniform and other federal employees who are subject to his orders.
https://www.justsecurity.org/121919/military-law-despite-presidential-immunity/

i hope blumpf invades canada so putler is forced to come to their aid to make sure access to the arctic doesnt fall into american hands

the evil Chinese social credit….
scratch that
wholesome USAnian social credit system.

>>2519559
been trying to explain this for what seems likes years to the board. ppl who regularly vote and actually like one of the two parties are in the minority and vastly overwhelmed by non-voters with completely incoherent vibes based politics with a random smorgasbord of policies that contradict eachother. Voters basically represent the more well off and most annoying sections of the population and will always skew that way.

>>2519981
I feel like them introducing a national ID card is more realistic than a digital ID which would be just as bad

>>2519582
source? iirc the highest that got in a election was 42%

>>2519589
in HS I wrote a history report on weimar germany and the catholic p much all voted for the catholic center party while rural peasants and craftsman were the section of the working class most likely to vote NSDAP. urban blue collar workers in manufacturing and skilled trades typically voted SPD and the unemployed, day-laborers and other forms of less skilled labor voted KPD.

>>2519630
>ooo scurry lUmPeN
your sheltered and whiny lmao

employers want serville dogs and they know that they can demand that more than ever now with the labor market being so shit. fuck this, I am just gonna rip porkies and do cybercr*me.

>>2519714
Trump's kinda saying the opposite of Frollo tbh, Trump's saying "yeah, I'm going to hell lol" while Frollo is like "damn I'm so virtuous but the brown skin gypsy girl gets me so hot. it's her fault lol."

not the same thing

>>2520013
That Romani pussy got me actin strange tho

Stanford University, DEA are trying to create new kind of yeast which can turn sugar into opiates via genetic engineering.

Please think of the poor defenseless American consooooomer

>>2519901
even in NYC is it going to win him many votes to pander to people who hate him for being Muslim anyway? Just stick to the script of "The rent is too damn high" and "I care about the working class New Yorker" and don't even comment on Israel. That remains a way better strategy than this civility fetishism and kowtowing to the ratfuckers.

>>2520025
from the country that brought you the Kunduz hospital air strike…

>>2520025
good, do it again

>>2519861
ayy poos…. she even really exist?

>>2519789
people used to drive to get their pointless drunk arguing on social media. It was called going to a bar.

burgerpunk burgerpunk
oh burger, burger-burger
burger punk
Duh-dum, dum, dum

Call my baby burgerpunk, tell you why
His reich is dying, he can't grapple why
And when he doesn't shake, he rock and dance
Man, I haven't got a chance
I call him

burgerpunk burgerpunk
oh burger, burger-burger
burger punk
Duh-dum, dum, dum

>>2520046
Gave me a thing for girls with hoop earrings

>>2520021
>>2520046
I'd also burn down all of Paris just to get a sniff of her pussy

>>2520052
>I'd also burn down all of Paris
say no more fam

>>2519705
Our scientists must study this specimen

>>2520027
Well he mostly does stick to that script. He doesn't usually talk about Israel. The press has asked him about Israel constantly because he's a Muslim so he's treated with greater scrutiny, which is a ridiculous situation. But he avoids unnecessary arguments. Leftists are often not effective at politics because they talk too much and don't listen.

>>2519981
>digital ID
Pisses me off how convenient having a "smart card" government ID is. But you can't have any tech without some liberal tunnel visioning the most dystopic application into policy.

>>2519705
This apple launched into space from the tree.

Bold move to openly come out as pro-king, let's see if it pays off

Netanyahu today: "Trump is the greatest friend in the White House Israel has ever had"

>>2520073
>>2519981
The government is already planning to implement it here in the UK, despite never mentioning it in any electoral campaigns and despite mass public opposition.
They claim digital ID necessary to prevent illegal immigrants from working in illegal jobs. Which ignores the fact that if you work and illegal job they aren't going to need to see legal ID, and also ignores they want to role it out to people as young as 13.
And of course, the leading candidate to manage the digital ID scheme? Tony Blair's son.

It's only a matter of time before the same happens to you in the US under a similar nonsense pretext.

>>2519705
that stuff must taste like heaven. it's a shame it looks exactly how it would come out.
>>2519710
>burger evangelicals face when they've been praising someone as if he were a godsend, only for him to admit he won't be going to heaven.

John kiriakou, CIA whistleblower on the torture program, on joe rogan podcast.

>>2519730
>Thiel peppered his lectures with references to pop culture, calling out YouTube influencers like MrBeast and throwing out terms like “libtard” – a rightwing slur for people with progressive political views.

>Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

When will the nightmare end

>>2520091
>>2520083
trump today did two or three tipsy little thingies:
>1) asked the president of israel to pardon satanyahoo
>2) admits that miriam adelson is the person who visits the most the white house, "more than anyone else"
>3) that he moved the embassy of the us at the adelson's request to jerusalem
>4) asked to miriam adelson if she loves Israel or America more and she refused to answer

>>2520107
>burger evangelicals face when they've been praising someone as if he were a godsend, only for him to admit he won't be going to heaven.
they just see him as an old testament character like Absalom or something.

>>2520115
he's got to be trolling us with this shit right? there's no way someone could be this unironically retarded

>>2520130
no i can believe that at some point these bougs are surrounded by yes-men, lackeys, and sychophants, so they think any random brain fart is profound

>>2520113
Who cares he's going to tell the same lib-imperialist narrative he's been telling anyone else who'll listen for over a decade.
Worst thing about him is that he didn't get ACK–'d by N17 on the way to work instead of the brit. If only they'd put in the effort they'd have spared us this drivel.

>>2520127
>Absalom
who? What did he do? that's a crazy name it has to be something mad-cap he was famous for.
Didn't know people still read that old testament shit, is that a thing in the USA?

>>2520083
I think it was Lindsey Graham that did some tweet or something where he talked about how bad the French Revolution was for killing King Louis.

>>2520136
evangelical protestants love their fire and brimstone old testament verses.

>who? What did he do?

Well I gave an example from 2 Samuel 16:22 where he takes his father's 10 concubines and rapes them on a roof in front of everyone to prove a point. But anyway he's King David's son who rebelled against David and lost. But he did a lot of fucked up shit first which, in Evangelical and Jewish scriptural interpretations, is God's punishments on David for some things that he did.

>>2520157
David never got punished though, that was Solomon who was punished for refusing YHWH’s orders to commit total genocide (he saved the animals and added them to Israel’s flock)

>>2520157
>evangelical protestants love their fire and brimstone old testament verses.
Why? All my experiences with priests and that shit is they just say things along the lines of 'yea be nice to people and have empathy', it's the kind of feel-good message that appeals to the average westerner (even if no intention to act upon) and can make them think it is a valuable thing to subject their children to. I could not see them retaining any memberships if they got frothing at the mouth screaming about doing rapes on the roof.
>where he takes his father's 10 concubines and rapes them on a roof in front of everyone to prove a point.
madcap. but in a bad way. no bantz. not ladpilled. :(

>>2520160
Let me guess, they were removed for the beard thing?

>>2520161
a popular interpretation given by evangelical preachers is that David was "punished tenfold" for his affair with Batsheba by God who allowed his son Absalom to briefly coup him and rape all his concubines.

>>2520163
I have read that black men and people with curlier hair in general are more likely to get ingrown hairs when they shave frequently so a lot of them have lobbied in the past to be allowed to keep their beards long so they don't have to deal with frequent infections of ingrown hairs.

>>2519729
So he's using the label to dehumanize and slander his perceived opponents… This is how innocent people end up dead after being made a target. He'll inspire the unhinged to do more violence, and the instability of the unhinged is from the absence of peace. Maybe the billionaire is projecting a little, but his obsession has nothing to do with the Christ who warned against worshipping wealth. He's literally 'building larger barns' for his surplus wealth so I doubt the warning that his 'life will be demanded' (Luke 12) will ever be heard. Thiel is a lost cause opportunist.

>>2520160
no more gravy seals :(

>>2519683
You just know this scumbag is only popular for his socdem treat policies, because his shit eating grin and talking points are fucking repellent.

Look! you have to support regime change in Venezuela! Don't you want a chance at a rent freeze for NYC tech workers?

Tomorrow is Charlie Kirk Memorial Day, as mandated by the government. How are you celebrating?

>>2520190
I'm not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PTuf2E8hl8

https://archive.is/ZdXIS#selection-6710.0-6710.1

Thirty years ago, a peace-loving Austrian theologian spoke to Peter Thiel about the apocalyptic theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. They’ve been a road map for the billionaire ever since.

…to really grasp Thiel’s katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major lecture of his doomsday road show—which took place on an unusually hot day in Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it, but I’ve been able to reconstruct it by talking to people who were there.

The venue was a yearly conference of scholars devoted to Thiel’s chief intellectual influence, the late French-American theorist René Girard. (Thiel identifies as a “hardcore Girardian.”) On the evening of the unpublicized lecture, dozens of Girardian philosophers and theologians from around the world filed into a modest lecture hall at the Catholic University of Paris. And from the dais, Thiel delivered a nearly hourlong account of his thoughts on Armageddon—and all the things he believed were “not enough” to prevent it.

By Thiel’s telling, the modern world is scared, way too scared, of its own technology. Our “listless” and “zombie” age, he said, is marked by a growing hostility to innovation, plummeting fertility rates, too much yoga, and a culture mired in the “endless Groundhog Day of the worldwide web.” But in its neurotic desperation to avoid technological Armageddon—the real threats of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, runaway AI—modern civilization has become susceptible to something even more dangerous: the Antichrist.

According to some Christian traditions, the Antichrist is a figure that will unify humanity under one rule before delivering us to the apocalypse. For Thiel, its evil is pretty much synonymous with any attempt to unite the world. “How might such an Antichrist rise to power?” Thiel asked. “By playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist's slogan: peace and safety.” In other words: It would yoke together a terrified species by promising to rescue it from the apocalypse.

By way of illustration, Thiel suggested that the Antichrist might appear in the form of someone like the philosopher Nick Bostrom—an AI doomer who wrote a paper in 2019 proposing to erect an emergency system of global governance, predictive policing, and restrictions on technology. But it wasn’t just Bostrom. Thiel saw potential Antichrists in a whole zeitgeist of people and institutions “focused single-mindedly on saving us from progress, at any cost.”

So humanity is doubly screwed: It has to avoid both technological calamity and the reign of the Antichrist. But the latter was far more terrifying for the billionaire at the podium. For reasons grounded in Girardian theory, Thiel believed that such a regime could only—after decades of sickly, pent-up energy—set off an all-out explosion of vicious, civilization-ending violence. And he wasn’t sure whether any katechons could hold it off.

When Thiel was finished, a moderator kicked off the Q&A session by noting, in so many words, that the speech had been a huge bummer. If the world was hurtling toward an apocalyptic crisis, he asked, what might the billionaire suggest we do?

Fend off the Antichrist, came the reply. But beyond that, Thiel said that he—like Girard—wasn’t really in the business of offering practical advice.

A few moments later, someone in the audience stood and offered a correction. “It’s not true what you said about Girard,” a man’s voice said.

Thiel—who often has a tendency to stonewall or steamroll his interlocutors—squinted in the speaker’s direction, trying to determine exactly who was pushing back. The voice had the rounded vowels and soft Rs of a recognizably Austrian accent and conveyed a quiet, familiar authority. “On many occasions,” the speaker went on, “young people asked Girard, ‘What should we do?’ And Girard told them to go to church.”

Thiel finally seemed to recognize who was speaking. He leaned in toward the microphone: “Wolfgang?”

The voice belonged to Wolfgang Palaver, a 64-year old theologian from Innsbruck, Austria, whom Thiel had last seen in 2016, the year they both delivered eulogies at Girard’s funeral. Palaver has a round face, a bookish white mustache, and eyes permanently crinkled at the corners by laugh lines. But that night in Paris, there was no trace of humor in his voice. And he evidently commanded the billionaire’s respect.

Six months later, Thiel delivered his Armageddon lecture again, now at The Catholic University of America. According to a recap posted by one attendee, Thiel’s argument was pretty much the same. Except this time Thiel told his listeners how they might personally navigate the slender path between Armageddon and the Antichrist: “Go to church.”

In an October interview at the Hoover Institution, Thiel echoed the line again: “Girard always said you just need to go to church, and I try to go to church.” This spring, during one of the podcaster Jordan Peterson’s many failed attempts to interject, Thiel cut him off: “Girard’s answer would still be something like: You should just go to church.”

It’s not just that line. Although Thiel has never publicly acknowledged Wolfgang Palaver, the Austrian theologian’s influence arguably runs through nearly everything Thiel has ever said or written about the Antichrist and the katechon. In the 1990s, Palaver wrote a series of papers about Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist tapped by the Nazis to justify Germany’s slip from democracy to dictatorship. Palaver’s papers critiqued a lesser-known, theological, and apocalyptic line of Schmitt’s thinking—and they seem to have fascinated Thiel ever since the two men first met in 1996. In his recent doomsday lectures and interviews, Thiel’s language often mirrors Palaver’s scholarship directly, sometimes closely paraphrasing it.

For the past year or so, the two men have been in regular touch, meeting together once at Thiel’s home and debating with each other over text and email. In August, Palaver even hosted Thiel at the University of Innsbruck for a two-day, closed-door “dress rehearsal” of the billionaire’s four-part San Francisco Antichrist lecture series. In an interview with the Austrian news outlet Falter, Palaver said he’d agreed to the event with Thiel “in the hope of getting him to reconsider his positions.” In my own months of conversation with Palaver, he has said he fears that the investor has arrived at a potentially catastrophic interpretation of Schmitt.

From a young age, Palaver was a peace activist, registering as a conscientious objector at 18 and then organizing against nuclear weapons in college. It was in a class about the roots of human violence where he came to study the work of Rene Girard—whose unusual theories were generating buzz in parts of Europe.

Girard’s core insight, Palaver would learn, is that all humans are imitators, beginning with their wants. “Once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely,” Girard wrote, “but they don’t know exactly what they desire.” So people mimic the aspirations of their most impressive neighbors—“thus ensuring for themselves lives of perpetual strife and rivalry with those they simultaneously hate and admire.”

According to Girard, this “mimesis”—this relentless copying—builds as it ricochets across relationships. In groups, everyone starts to look alike as they converge on a few models, ape the same desires, and furiously compete for the same objects. And the only reason this “mimetic rivalry” ever fails to break out into omnidirectional warfare is that, at some point, it tends to get channeled into a war of all against one. Via something Girard called the “scapegoat mechanism,” everyone aligns against an unfortunate target who is held responsible for the group’s ills. This mechanism is so essential to cultural cohesion, Girard wrote, that scapegoat narratives are the founding myths of every archaic culture.

But the arrival of Christianity, Girard believed, marked a turning point in human consciousness—because it revealed, once and for all, that scapegoats are actually innocent and mobs are depraved. In the crucifixion narrative, Jesus is murdered in a heinous act of collective violence. But unlike nearly every other sacrificial myth, this one is told from the perspective of the scapegoat, and the audience cannot help but understand the injustice.

With this epiphany, Girard wrote, the old scapegoating rituals instantly started to lose their effectiveness, having been unmasked and discredited. Humanity no longer gets the same relief from collective acts of violence. Communities still scapegoat all the time, but with less and less unifying cohesion to show for it. What awaits us at the end of history, then, is the unchecked, contagious, and ultimately apocalyptic violence of mimetic rivalry.

The upside of the crucifixion narrative, however, is that it offers humanity moral redemption. For Girard, the conclusion was clear: No matter the endgame, one must wholly reject scapegoating. Imitation remains inescapable, but we can choose our models. And the sound path forward, as he saw it, is to mimic Jesus—the one model who will never become a “fascinating rival”—in leading lives of Christian non-violence.

In 1983—the same year as that first class on Girard—the bishop of Innsbruck tried to stop Palaver from rallying a group of young Catholics to join the largest-ever protest against American missiles in Europe. Dismissing Palaver’s views as geopolitical naivete, the bishop told him to read a German essay collection called Illusions of Brotherhood: The Necessity of Having Enemies. The book, Palaver realized, was full of references to an idea—coined by Carl Schmitt—that politics is grounded in distinguishing friends from enemies. Reading the book, Palaver realized he was “more or less against every sentence.”

So as a doctoral candidate, the young Austrian decided to write a Girardian critique of Schmitt. He would use Girardian theory against a legal architect of Europe’s last great calamity, who was now inspiring the Cold Warriors stoking its next. “Focusing upon Schmitt,” he explained, “meant for me turning against the archenemy of my pacifist attitude.”

When Thiel arrived at Stanford in the mid 1980s, he was a teen libertarian with a zeal for Reagan-era anti-communism, a hatred for conformity stemming from his time in a draconian South African prep school, and a drive, as he has described it, to win “one competition after another.” He quickly filled the role of a classic overachieving conservative campus gadfly. He played on the Stanford chess team, maintained excellent grades, and was the founding editor of The Stanford Review, a right-wing student publication—which heaped scorn on the trendy politics of diversity and multiculturalism at a time when mass student demonstrations were railing against the Western canon and South African apartheid.

>>2520242
So it’s not surprising that Thiel found himself drawn to Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a cantankerous, theologically conservative Stanford campus minister who once referred to himself as a “bumpkin from South Africa armed with fascist boarding school education.” Hamerton-Kelly taught classes on Western Civilization and, according to the school newspaper, was booed on at least one occasion by anti-Apartheid audiences on campus. According to several people who knew them both, Thiel came to see Hamerton-Kelly as a mentor. And it was through him that Thiel got to know Girard personally.

As a theorist, Schmitt is best remembered for two things: his incisive Weimar-era critique of liberalism and his decision to join the Nazi party in the run-up to the Second World War (before being cast aside by the Reich in 1936). Schmitt’s embrace of the Nazis, Palaver told his audience, stemmed from his fear of “the satanic unification of the world” under a global state, which Schmitt treated as synonymous with the reign of the Antichrist.

During the Second World War, Schmitt saw the globalist ambitions of the USSR as presenting precisely this kind of apocalyptic risk, according to Palaver. Schmitt, he said, was desperate to locate a katechon—the shadowy figure, referenced in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, who stands in the way of the Antichrist in order to hold off the end of the world. Schmitt’s “greatest failure,” Palaver told his audience, “had been to think that Hitler was a katechon able to prevent the coming of a destructive world state.”

According to Girard’s mimetic theory, Schmitt was trying to solve an unsolvable political problem. Schmitt’s support of Hitler was effectively a bet that cranking up the volume on the scapegoat mechanism could work—that Germany would achieve social stability by channeling all of its fury toward Jews, the Roma, foreign powers, and all the other enemies that the Nazis designated as poisonous to the Reich. But Schmitt’s katechon, Palaver said, was doomed from the start.

“Far too late did Schmitt realize that his support of Hitler was actually serving the Antichrist,” Palaver told the Girardians. Schmitt was correct to warn against “the totalitarian dangers of a unified world,” but the old scapegoating rituals were no longer sustainable. Schmitt relied on a brutal nationalist ethos that saw countrymen as friends and everyone else as vile enemies. Girard had proved the world was evolving beyond the workability of such a scheme. So ultimately, Schmitt’s plan backfired. The atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi party had been so revolting, they’d prompted the spontaneous formation of the first truly global institution in human history. The Holocaust paved the way for the United Nations. His katechon had been an Antichrist all along.

This is the Girardian conundrum. If the old structures for containing violence no longer work, a violent world-ending apocalypse seems all but inevitable. For anyone who wants to shape history, Palaver suggested, there are two available courses of action: Follow in the footsteps of Schmitt or follow in the footsteps of Jesus. To follow Schmitt would be to invest in the katechon. By creating systems that permit violence against scapegoats, one might be able to postpone the far greater violence of the apocalypse. But for Palaver, the only morally acceptable answer was clear. Even if scapegoating could hold off the apocalypse for a time, we should not scapegoat. He ended his paper by quoting Girard’s call for “the definitive renunciation of violence.”

After the presentation ended, Thiel rushed to introduce himself to Palaver. “He was familiar with Schmitt,” Palaver told me, because he knew Schmitt had been important to Leo Strauss, a key intellectual influence among conservatives around the time Thiel was running the Stanford Review. But much of Schmitt’s writing, taboo as it was, had never been translated into English. Now here was Palaver’s scholarship, bridging the gap between Thiel’s interest in conservative political theory and the work of René Girard, and Thiel was eager to discuss it.

In the summer of 2004, Thiel and his old mentor Hamerton-Kelly organized a weeklong Girardian seminar at Stanford and invited Girard and Palaver to take part. The gathering was a small, closed symposium with only eight participants and served as Thiel’s self-orchestrated debut as a Girardian intellectual. Newly wealthy after having sold PayPal in a deal valued at $1.5 billion, he footed the bill for the week and also helped underwrite the publication of a book that would collect all the papers presented at the seminar.

At Palaver’s suggestion, the theme of the conference was “Politics and Apocalypse.” It had been three years since 9/11, and mimetic theorists were still processing whether the terror attacks augured history’s final explosion of “planetary mimetic rivalry.” But for Thiel—who sat at the head of the seminar table—the attacks mainly exposed the West’s deep and pathetic inability to protect itself.

“The brute facts of September 11 demand a reexamination of the foundations of modern politics,” Thiel wrote in the paper he presented that July. “Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment.”

It would quickly become apparent that Thiel had spent some time considering the paper Palaver presented the day the two men met in 1996. The “strange new thoughts” Thiel wanted his audience to entertain were, it turned out, largely those of Carl Schmitt.

Where Palaver had been repulsed, Thiel extolled Schmitt’s “robust conception of the political,” in which “humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies,” and everything else is delusion. “The high points of politics,” he quotes Schmitt as saying, “are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.” In Thiel’s mind, Osama bin Laden was capable of this kind of politics. The West, with its fetish for individual rights and procedures, was not.

Schmitt, Thiel conjectured, would have responded to 9/11 by calling for a holy crusade against Islam. But the West was instead slipping beyond politics altogether, Thiel seemed to fear, toward the creation of a bland “world-embracing economic and technical organization.” This was Schmitt’s nightmare scenario. In such a world, Thiel said, “a representation of reality might appear to replace reality: Instead of violent wars, there could be violent video games; instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides; instead of serious thought, there could be ‘intrigues of all sorts,’ as in a soap opera.” But that counterfeit reality, Thiel argued, would just be the “brief harmony that prefigures the final catastrophe of the Apocalypse”—the harmony, in Schmitt’s telling, of the Antichrist.

Then, about halfway through his paper, Thiel switched gears completely. As if having second thoughts, he ruled out Schmitt’s “drastic solutions” as “fraught with far too much violence” in an age of nuclear weapons. Then he shifted toward imagining “a way to fortify the modern West” that involved working around democratic institutions via misdirection, hidden meanings, and a lack of transparency—an approach he identified with the theorist Leo Strauss. (He titled his paper “The Straussian Moment.”)

“A direct path forward is prevented by America’s constitutional machinery,” Thiel said. “Still, there are more possibilities for action than first appear.” Strangely for someone so suspicious of global unity, Thiel saw one such possibility for action in the creation of a worldwide surveillance network. “Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots,” Thiel said, “we should consider … the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.” This surveillance supersystem, Thiel wrote, could act as “a political framework that operates outside the checks and balances of representative democracy as described in high school textbooks.”

After World War II, according to Palaver, Schmitt himself eventually soured on the idea that Hitler was the katechon. Clearly, the Führer had been a bad bet.

In Schmitt’s postwar book The Nomos of the Earth, he pitched a new kind of katechon. This would be a world order “based on the equilibrium of several independent large blocs,” as Palaver summarized it in 1996. In Schmitt’s multipolar world order, each hegemonic power would have its own distinct “culture, race, language, and national heritage.” The world would be disunified by design. There would be no global regulatory bodies and no global enforcement mechanisms—no United Nations, no International Criminal Court.

In July of 2019, Thiel went onstage to present a keynote lecture at the inaugural US conference of a new international political force: the National Conservatism movement. Established that year by the Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, National Conservatives are opposed to “universalist ideologies” and want to “see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative.”

Thiel has presented a lecture at all but two US-based conferences of the National Conservatives, where illiberal world leaders meet with their international counterparts and where right-leaning intellectuals from across the globe gather to give talks on the failures of liberalism, the necessity of reevaluating the separation of church and state, and the virtues of closed borders and self-interested, soil-deep nationalism. In 2021, Thiel was listed among the conference’s biggest donors of $50,000 or more.

Almost since the beginning, observers have noted that Hazony’s theories—and those of the National Conservatives in general—appear to be “suffused with the ideas of the German jurist Carl Schmitt,” though Hazony has disavowed the connection. Among the relatively few people associated with National Conservatism who do cite Schmitt openly in their own work are Thiel and Michael Anton, the essayist and sometime Trump administration official.

As the National Conservatism movement picked up steam, its members began angling to have a man in the White House by 2024. They pinned their early hopes on Ron DeSantis, but when his campaign fizzled out, all eyes turned toward Ohio senator JD Vance.

It’s no secret that Vance is largely a product of Thiel—the billionaire has helped architect nearly every professional endeavor of Vance’s adult life, including his meteoric political rise. After Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, he published an essay in the Catholic magazine The Lamp, partly attributing his conversion to the influence of two men: Peter Thiel (“he was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met”) and the late René Girard.

As Vance put it, “Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.” In applying this to his own life, Vance focused mainly on his generation’s petty online habits in the 2010s. “Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced,” he wrote. “We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems.”

It was a fairly shallow gloss on Girard’s theory. But to many Girardians, it suggested Vance knew exactly what he was doing when—two months after Donald Trump selected him as a running mate—the nominee began tweeting that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating domestic pets. And when, on the campaign trail and in televised debates, he contorted himself to blame nearly every American crisis on immigrants.

For some Girardians, this was a breaking point. The mimetic theorist Bernard Perret lambasted Vance and his billionaire mentor in a French political journal, accusing them of “casting a shadow over Girard’s legacy.” Within months, several more prominent Girardians followed suit. “It’s difficult to claim Girard, who fundamentally believes that violence is linked to exclusion, and at the same time to accuse Haitians of eating dogs,” Girardian scholar Paul Dumouchel told a Canadian newspaper. “Either you didn’t understand Girard, or you’re a liar.”

It’s possible that Vance may have genuinely misunderstood the scapegoat mechanism. Or he may have been familiar enough with Girardian mimetic theory to recognize that, while the old sacred rituals might not work perfectly, they aren’t entirely broken yet. Collective acts of violence still bind people together somewhat—perhaps enough to win an election. “They feel relieved of their tensions and they coalesce into a more harmonious group,” Girard wrote. “They now have a single purpose, which is to prevent the scapegoat from harming them by expelling and destroying him.”

By February of 2025, Thiel’s Armageddon tour had gotten to the point where he was handing out T-shirts that said “Don’t Immanentize the Katechon.” (This was a nerdy Thielian play on the anti-utopian quote, “Don’t immanentize the eschaton”—meaning don’t try to manifest heaven on Earth.) In a recent interview, Thiel was asked whether or not Donald Trump might be the katechon, and he refused to answer. His reticence to name a katechon is a lesson he seems to take directly from Palaver’s account of Schmitt and Hitler. “If you identify too much as one thing, that can go very wrong,” Thiel told Cowen. “There’s always a risk that the katechon becomes the Antichrist,” he said, echoing Palaver’s 1996 paper.

Less than a month before Douthat spoke with Thiel, I posed the exact same question to Palaver, and it elicited more of a response. Why was Thiel, given his fixation on preventing a one-world state, building surveillance tools that a totalitarian dictator could use to seize power? Was he on the side of the katechon or the Antichrist?

Palaver told me he wasn’t entirely sure. “There’s a tension between those two things, and in some ways he goes along with both of them,” he told me. “It’s a good strategy, if you have the means—to have something at stake on all the sides.” In other words, maybe the billionaire is hedging his bets—investing heavily in both the katechon and the one-world, totalitarian Antichrist.

But to understand why Thiel may be willing to take that risk, Palaver says you need to first understand that he’s human. “What I’ve observed are traces of deep fear,” he told me. “Fear of death, fear of terrorism.” It all comes down to a lack of trust and a craving for security, Palaver suspects. “There are so many cases where he expresses fears and concerns and a need for protection,” Palaver says. “And if your main thing is seeking protection, you play with fire.”

Palaver has decided that he has to pick his battles with Thiel. “We have different political views of the world. That's quite clear for him and for me,” he says. But matters of religion are different. “That’s where I hopefully can have an influence on him,” Palaver says. Ultimately, Thiel needs to choose who he is going to imitate. “In the end, you have to decide: Are you really going to be a Christian in a proper sense? Or are you a Schmittian?”

>>2520243
>>2520242
This is fascinating I'm bouta read this when I get home

Is there any leftist dissection of the pizza gate scandal out there? Is there any actual evidence that the Clinton family was actually doing something or was that whole thing just typical American conservative schizoing? I still see it referenced in right wing spaces today but never looked into it much.

>>2520247
It's a reflection of something real but it's mixed up with tons of stupid schizo shit.

>>2520163
>Let me guess, they were removed for the beard thing?
Oh fuck, another dumb white liberal simping for blacks when they aren't even part of the conversation. No, dumb-dumb, it's not cause of beards (which your own screenshot proves that if you could read). There was a photo that got shared by everyone of a bunch of fat soldiers that got deployed to Chicago or wherever. The standards they failed to meet are height and weight standards. Why would they kick out blacks anyways? You're a dumbfuck. They make up a large chunk of the US military.

>>2520250
you're so angry. i feel like i'm in 2015

>>2520247
There's nothing real in pizzagate beyond the fact politicians are pedophiles. The entire thing was 100% fiction. There's zero evidence John Podesta was a pedophile or that pizza place trafficked children. It's mostly just rightoids trying to take things we already know to be true(high profile politicians being connected to child sex rings) and applying it exclusively to Democrats in the most convoluted way they could think of because it creates misdirection to distract conspiracy-oriented people.

>>2520253
I'm angry that I share oxygen with you and the rest of the dumbfuck white libs, yeah.

>>2520250
Ah yes, the US military. Renowned among the people as "not racist"

Miga

>>2520257
That wasn't my point, dumbfuck.

>>2520259
Hey, you shitstain cum eating twink sucker, why don't you calm down!

>>2520243
>katechon
Hahaha
When St. Paul wrote that in Greek, he was referring to the Church. The Roman term is magisterium.

>>2520260
Make me, you trip fagging, attention whoring dumbfuck.

>>2520264
I'm going to track down your IP address and eat your ass if you don't show me some respect

Some dumbfuck's tripcode fell into my filter list. Whoopsie!

apparently im not woke enough and I'm ripoff slammer

mass day trader suicides?

honkoid status?

Any updates on the ongoing sieges of Chicago and Portland?

>>2520267
You're so hardcore

guys, I just heard about what america is doing… very concerning, as someone who just started paying attention to politics 20 minutes ago, what should I do?

jeffries just endorsed cuomo lol

>>2520271
Trump chickened out at the last minute and the market is up lol

>>2520262
Also, the 'lawless one' who is 'restrained' is none other than Satan, so it isn't meant as a one-off manifestation but an inevitable consequence of mass apostasy among professed believers. He is revealed, then, when the magisterium addresses the error and this has already occurred.

>>2520288
shoulda bought the dip

>>2520286
Go to church

>>2520271
it was another pump and dump scheme by trump

>>2520269
>there are russian neo nazi
yep it's a NAFO post

They Helped Topple Roe v. Wade. Now Their Sights Are Set on Britain.

For nearly three hours, Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s once-fringe populist Reform U.K. Party, commanded an audience in Congress on Sept. 3 as he testified against his own country’s free-speech rules.

The presence of Mr. Farage was the result of a discreet, monthslong campaign by one of America’s most influential conservative Christian groups, famous for being an architect of the effort that helped overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion.

The group, Alliance Defending Freedom, has taken its playbook to Britain and has rapidly established itself as a power broker between the country’s rising populist movement and President Trump’s Washington. They are catalyzing Reform U.K., Britain’s fastest growing political party that is seeking to upend the Conservative Party with an agenda centered on anti-establishment and anti-immigration sentiments. The A.D.F. is guiding its leadership even further to the right, on a conservative Christian agenda similar to the one that is sweeping through the United States.

The A.D.F.’s British arm orchestrated Mr. Farage’s appearance in Congress, reaching out to ask if he would like to give evidence on censorship and passing on his interest to the House Judiciary Committee, which formally invited him, according to both a Reform U.K. and a Republican official. An A.D.F. lawyer testified alongside Mr. Farage in the hearing, together building a case against what they saw as growing government censorship in Europe. A.D.F. officials have also quietly arranged briefings in Britain with visiting congressional leaders. They brokered a secret meeting between Mr. Farage and top State Department officials in London. And in private briefings, they have supplied the Trump administration with attack lines that cast the British government as hostile to free speech.

Britain is, in many ways, an unlikely place for an American anti-abortion organization to build a base and leverage influence. Abortion rights hold overwhelming cross-partisan support and, unlike in the United States, religion plays little role in national politics.

But the A.D.F. believes that British politicians, and the public, can be swayed and wants abortion rights to be rolled back, its lawyers said in an interview. More broadly, the group wants to empower conservative Christianity in Europe, and it sees Britain as a key bridgehead.

The A.D.F. has begun its effort with a topic it believes will resonate with British voters: free speech. The group is spearheading an alliance of organizations that argues that Britain’s """"""""""center-left"""""""""" government is too restrictive on political and religious speech.

For the A.D.F., freedom of speech is intrinsically tied to religious freedom. Its task force of lawyers in Britain has challenged the prosecutions of Christians who were arrested for praying silently outside abortion clinics, and taken up the case of a student midwife who was suspended after making anti-abortion comments on social media. Abortion “buffer zones” — protected areas around clinics designed to prevent harassment — have been cited by conservative groups like the A.D.F. to declare a free speech crisis in Britain.

Despite its growing presence in Britain, the A.D.F. has remained relatively obscure, unlike in America, where it has grown powerful through high-profile Supreme Court cases that have carved out more space for Christianity in public life. The group has represented clients in the United States who are opposed to abortion, gay and transgender rights and contraception coverage in health care. Its allies include Vice President JD Vance and Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, who is a former A.D.F. lawyer.

Britain has no similarly prominent political figures who push for the Christian faith to have a central role in government. The A.D.F. has cultivated an unlikely ally in Mr. Farage, who has previously described himself as a supporter of abortion rights and does not attend church, following a high-profile spat with the Church of England, which he described as “woke.”

As the A.D.F.’s influence in Britain has grown since Mr. Trump’s re-election, Mr. Farage has suddenly started speaking out against abortion. The New York Times could find no previous record of him campaigning against abortion during his 31-year political career — in fact, in 2019, as the leader of the Brexit Party, Mr. Farage stated he had no official party stance on abortion. In November, he called for British lawmakers to debate rolling back the abortion limit. He went further in May, calling the current limit of 24 weeks “utterly ludicrous.”

Until now, public knowledge about the relationship between Reform U.K. and the A.D.F. was limited to a single quote Mr. Farage gave to the group, which they pushed out in a press statement. But the A.D.F. has quietly been courting the party since at least 2024.

The A.D.F. and other American anti-abortion groups used the argument of incrementally rolling back the cutoff on abortion from about 24 weeks to earlier gestational limits to ultimately end the constitutional right to abortion.

For the A.D.F., the relationship with Mr. Farage appears to be a pragmatic one, similar to its dynamic with Mr. Trump. A disrupter with no consistent personal stance on abortion, Mr. Trump provided critical support for the A.D.F. and its broader conservative Christian alliance to win their half-century-long campaign to topple Roe v. Wade.

“Our primary objective is to try and ensure that the human-rights framework applies as robustly as possible to Christians. And then the wider society,” Mr. Price said.

In the United States, the A.D.F. worked with conservative lawmakers and strategically used the courts to eventually overthrow the right to abortion. But in England, abortion access is legislated through Parliament and cannot be overturned through a judicial decision.

To succeed in Britain, the A.D.F. would have to adapt its playbook.

Shaping Public Opinion

Since 2020, the A.D.F. has quietly added more staff to its British operation. It increased the size of its team fourfold to 12 employees and quadrupled the money it sends to its British arm to more than 1 million pounds, or $1.35 million.

Its lawyers tried to get officials to notice free speech issues through clients it called “victims of censorship,” but were largely unsuccessful.

That changed when Mr. Vance, a Catholic who shares similar values as the A.D.F., became vice president. Almost immediately the organization’s message reached a global audience.

At the Munich Security Conference in February, one of the biggest international stages in politics, Mr. Vance used his platform to criticize an ally.

“In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” he said. He highlighted the case of Adam Smith-Connor, an A.D.F. client who had been convicted after silently praying within an abortion clinic buffer zone in southwest England.

Mr. Price, the A.D.F. lawyer, privately credited the A.D.F. for getting Mr. Vance to mention the case in his speech, according to two British and U.S. officials he briefed. Mr. Price told the Times that he did not personally speak to anyone from Mr. Vance’s team and was “as surprised as anyone” by the mention in Munich.

Such a diplomatic and publicity win was important for the A.D.F. Drawing attention to cases like Mr. Smith-Connor’s is part of a long-term strategy to shift public opinion around abortion. In the United States, more than a decade ago, anti-abortion activists challenged similar buffer-zone laws as part of their long-term strategy to shift political discourse with the goal of rolling back abortion rights.

“The debate is in Parliament,” Mr. Price said. “And the parliamentarians are elected by the people, and so their priorities will only change when the public mood changes. And the public mood is changing.”

The A.D.F. is also focusing its efforts on raising support on university campuses and social media platforms, like X, which can magnify fringe views. Mr. Price said that Elon Musk, X’s owner, has personally posted about some of A.D.F.’s cases, and that X was amplifying the group’s concerns about Britain and freedom of speech in a “way that probably didn’t attract the same amount of attention in the past.”

It has achieved such success through deliberately framing its cases as being about protecting free speech, rather than restricting abortion.

A.D.F. employees, who are not registered lobbyists in Britain, don’t lobby but do “offer briefings to anybody who wishes to access it,” Mr. Price said. Until recently, the group was a stakeholder of one of the biggest interest groups of cross-party lawmakers in Westminster, the All-Parliamentary Group on International Freedom of Religion or Belief. It provided the A.D.F. with access to Parliament and politicians like Fiona Bruce, a former Conservative lawmaker who was the prime minister’s special envoy on religion until 2024.

The A.D.F. is not focused on Britain only because of its free speech issues. It also recognizes the political and legal influence that Britain holds abroad.

“What the U.K. says matters internationally,” Mr. Price said. “If things change for the better here, it has an effect more widely.”

A Secret Meeting

A private area for members of the Old Queen Street Cafe, a brasserie steps away from Parliament that’s often abuzz with lunching politicians, was usually closed at 8:15 in the morning. But a manager had been persuaded to open early for a confidential, high-level meeting in March that, messages show, the A.D.F. had brokered.

The group’s aim was to get Mr. Farage in a room with Samuel Samson, a young Trump political appointee and senior adviser for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, a U.S. official with knowledge of the events said. Mr. Price wanted the American right to forge its relationship with Britain through Reform U.K., as he believed they were the only credible party taking censorship in Britain seriously, according to the U.S. official and a Reform U.K. source.

Mr. Samson was in Britain as part of a State Department delegation he was leading that addressed free speech, following concerns that Mr. Vance raised. The U.S. Embassy in London oversaw the visit, but at that point its diplomats did not have a significant relationship with Reform U.K. Back in March, Mr. Farage’s party did not have a single elected council member in municipalities and also was not yet topping public opinion polls. (Today, it is consistently leading the Labour Party in the polls, had 677 council members elected in May’s local elections, but still has only five elected national lawmakers).

Over breakfast, Mr. Farage and Mr. Samson discussed abortion buffer zones, censorship cases and online safety laws, according to the officials. Also present were aides and two of the embassy’s top diplomats, who had joined for oversight of the issues, which were high priorities for the new Trump administration, one of the officials said.

On two occasions this summer, the A.D.F. was invited to brief senior U.S. officials. In May, they provided the State Department with a private briefing of examples of government efforts to restrict free speech in Britain, communications show.

And in June, Mr. Price and a colleague met with Mr. Trump’s new ambassador to Britain, Warren Stephens, a wealthy investment banker from Arkansas with longtime ties to anti-abortion politicians like Mike Huckabee.

Shortly afterward, U.S. officials asked for Mr. Price’s help organizing a second meeting between officials and free speech organizations to discuss censorship issues they felt were pertinent for the Trump administration to be pressing the British government on.

On July 29, the congressional delegation from the House Judiciary Committee, led by Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican, filed into the Grand Committee Room inside Westminster Hall. The lawmakers were there for a “Civil Society Round Table,” as it was listed on the delegation schedule, as part of their fact-finding mission on free speech and censorship in Europe.

In his opening remarks, Farage said that the United States and Britain shared a commitment to not only free speech, but also the promotion of ==“Judeo-Christian values,” according to six people present.

It was a phrase foreign in British politics, but common in the United States, where the Christian right has sought for years to elevate America as a Christian nation. Yet Mr. Farage has occasionally cited a need to return to Judeo-Christian values as a way to promote his populist message.

Two days after testifying to Congress in Washington on Sept. 3, Mr. Farage was back in Britain for his first Reform U.K. party conference as leader, telling a rapturous audience in Birmingham, “We are the party on the rise.”

A British MAGA undercurrent ran through the event, as seen in the “Make Britain Great Again” baseball caps, and heard in Mr. Farage’s nationalistic speech, in which he railed against mass immigration, “society breakdown with law and order” and “sky high” taxes.

Mr. Farage made no mention of abortion, as he had in Congress, to his British audience. But he did attack the government for doing “everything they can to crush free speech online,” and claimed that Britain refuses “to acknowledge publicly the Judeo-Christian culture and heritage that we have and that underpins everything that we are.”

This is how US-Israel relations actually work

This is fucking GOLD

Last minute Netanyahu summit invitation denied by Erdogan

>>2520286
Do? You want to fucking DO something!? Fuck you you treatlerite succdem trash. REAL communists don't DO anything, we COMPLAIN on the internet about other communists

>>2520300
I think they set their sights on the UK long ago. I figure old wasp money was behind brexit among other opportunists. It's Soviet style active measures but conservatives are the ones doing it.

>>2520160
too fat?

>>2520022
this is kind of old. I did a whole pharmaceutical thesis on opioids and opiates, focusing on difelikefalin (for pruritus and non-narcotic opiod), and I remember many universities across the US have tried to produce the same type of opioids found in poppies, with no significant yield in price.
I am convinced that the reason the US withdrew from Afghanistan is because the US managed to produce fentanyl in large quantities, and you can check this with the first dates where the first high-ranking US officials, in congress and senate started to call for a withdraw from Afghanistan, and matches very closely with the dates when the fentanyl became economically viable. it's a conspiracy theory of mine, but I am convinced and there's nothing that will change my mind.
now, the problem has been that fentanyl is too addictive, causing the fentanyl epidemic across the US, thus the US establishment are urged to find a substitute to poppies or invade Afghanistan again, to cure the egregious problem caused by themselves.

new flags have been added

>>2520339
that's not a sound theory. what stops them getting poppies from literally anywhere else? Even growing internally? What stops them from simply using another synthetic opiate?

>>2520247
Maybe try True Anon I dunno no one has ever explained all the weird code shit they were talking about. And the pizza place was weird as hell. Then a guy goes in there and shoots up the computer? Normal stuff right.

what if instead of marco rubio he was macro rubio

>>2520353
he shot at just random shit in the basement

>>2520354
also he's chinese and gay

>>2520247
if there was anything to it, it has been so thoroughly obscured by bullshit that it's unrecognizable compared to the conspiratorial nonsense

>>2520344
>what stops them getting poppies from literally anywhere else?
climatic conditions. Afghanistan kinda meets the most ideal climate, soil, sun time over the year, rain water, and humidity that makes poppies grow like very few other places on earth, and with a government the US ruling elites deemed easy to overthrow. and despite they could overthrow it easily and increase the poppy production through the roof and obrain very cheap poppy seeds, they never gained full control not even with their green-beret/CIA trained puppet government, so it became a cumbersome task to keep alive that government: once fentanyl became cheaper, the price to keep alive that government wasn't economically viable.
I remember I did a graph, before DeepSeek and ChatGPT was a thing, illustrating the prices of poppy seeds and opiods derived from poppy seeds, and I specifically remember that the prices declined with the US invasion of Afghanistan, by a lot. once they left, opiods regained a lot of its price.
but you can ask ChatGPT and DeepSeek to graph the prices, if you want. Also illustrate the number of withdraws from Afghanistan by dates as a dispersion graph overlapping the historical prices of poppy, and fentanyl.
and ok, correlation=/=causation, but I bet no one on earth will find a better correlation.
I did the thesis around 2021.

>>2519902
brother I'm naked right now.

What are the ethics of gooning to nude protesters?
Girl in the El Místico mask has such a nice rack…

>>2520360 (me)
>Also illustrate the number of withdraws from Afghanistan
withdraw calls* (from congressmen, senators, other top US officials)

>>2520310
Rare Watermelon seller W. Now if only he had anything to actually fight the Zionists…

>>2520247
I mean I'm not gonna lie, the whole email where it was "We found a map in the hotel room and think it's pizza related" if true is sketchy as shit. Though I'd guess drugs first.

>>2520353
Was there a basement or wasn't there? Like the guy who ran the place said they didn't even have one and then people found an article talking about how he stores tomatoes in the basement or something.

This feels very relevant right now:
>The imperial boomerang is the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens. This concept originates with Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) where it is called the terrific boomerang to explain the origins of European fascism in the first half of the 20th century. Hannah Arendt agreed with this usage, calling it the boomerang effect in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). According to both writers, the methods of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were not exceptional from a world-wide view because European colonial empires had been killing millions of people worldwide as part of the process of colonization for a very long time. Rather, they were exceptional in that they were applied to Europeans within Europe, rather than to colonized populations in the Global South. It is sometimes called Foucault's boomerang even though Michel Foucault did not originate the term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

>>2520383
The US is now going through what they forced every Latinx American country to be: extremely corrupt hellhole full of nepotism, political assassinations, persecution against dissidents, shock therapy, etc.

>>2520375
well i mean you can probably ask the guy who shot the walls up that question

>>2520366
tfw no big titty protesting luchador gf

>>2520384
The rest of the U.S. is becoming like Texas which is a corrupt Latin American single-party state from the 1970s, we just fooled everyone by pretending to speak English.

>>2520366
Protect your identity when going to protests!

actually, no wait, just fully expose your entire fucking body and make spectacle everyone can see.

>>2520366
>>2520419
america is a joke man

>>2520417
Texas, and much of the south in general

>>2519559
The working class is often incapable of focusing on deeper issues because of the cultural molestation that bourg commit in daily life

>>2520427
One has to learn how to ignore the shattering of the vases so they may punch the bull in the throat

>>2520366
nice cock bro

>>2520366
certified Portland moment

So did Trump achieve peace in da middle east?

>>2520422
Jokes are supposed to funny. At the very least amusing.

>>2520449
America is a bad joke

>>2520446
Yahweh be like "I was about to send you to the eternal torture dungeon but you spun some chickens over your head so all is forgiven."

>>2520366
Aaaaaand it's all over the screen. ✌️🤤

>>2520366
I can not wait until the economy collapses. These “professional protesters” would rather be exhibitionists on the streets to show more bullshit liberal symbolism than do anything useful. I’m no doomer, but this is upsetting.

>>2520360
The problem is that it's such a cheap and easy to grow crop with almost all it's value coming from refinement and synthesis. the kind of money that's saved by growing it in Afghanistan compared to anywhere else is marginal.
Also why would they simply not skim off of medical crops?

How the fuck are leftists winning on twitter right now? Elon really is that stupid.

>>2520532
Winning what? What metrics did you use to come to this conclusion?
>Elon really is that stupid.
Sounds more like the algorithm is working to feed you what you want to see. That's smart.

>>2520532
what are they winning?

>>2520027
BTW, speaking of Zohran and the Jews, he showed up to answer questions at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn which is a very liberal Reform synagogue (they invited him, also they have a female rabbi so you know that's pretty liberal), and some turbo-Zionist zombies showed up to protest him. Those people Loomered out. And then he went to a meeting with Satmar who are a fairly large ultra-Orthodox community and the rabbis were like "congratulations, mayor! I don't know why we have to wait a few weeks to say that."

Satmar doesn't recognize Israel btw:
https://www.jta.org/2025/10/10/politics/why-do-we-have-to-waste-a-few-weeks-satmar-rabbi-congratulates-mamdani-during-williamsburg-sukkah-hop

>>2520539
They got a Canadian banned for doxxing

>>2520540
Anyhow, play the angles. Get with the liberal Reform Jews and also make nice with Satmar, and freeze out the Conservative and "Modern Orthodox" (or whatever) muh Israel ones who zombiefied themselves after 10/7. Also this whole prisoner transfer / cease fire thing is coming at just the right time for Mr. Mamdani.

>>2520538
>>2520539
>what are they winning?
>Winning what? What metrics did you use to come to this conclusion?
Some rightoid dipshits apparently started doxing leftists and getting huffy. Elon committed friendly fire (banhammer) on them, and now irony poisoned leftists are celebrating in mass.
>Sounds more like the algorithm is working to feed you what you want to see
The algorithm hates me because of Elon. This is in spite of that.
>>2520541
A canadian and others.

>>2520541
oh so its just /isg/ stupidity
when are leftists gonna do something cool already im bored of this era of nudist "protests" and uh…reporting people to the mods

>>2520558
When the economy collapses.

>>2520560
I check /biz/ periodically and they seem to be having a meltdown today so maybe the economy already collapsed and the media is just downplaying until the bourgeois can get their money out.

>>2520545
How is that winning. It's just a few doxxers

>>2519738
Had a small amount of hopium during his debate with Cuomo but since then it's been downhill.

>>2520562
>they seem to be having a meltdown today
Normal enough to be honest. They usually freak out when even the slightest oddity occurs.
>the economy already collapsed and the media is just downplaying until the bourgeois can get their money out.
The media is definitely downplaying the collapsing economy. It hasn’t fully given away yet, but much of the real economy already has. Won’t be too long now.
>>2520563
I would consider the doxxers and only the doxxers getting banned to be a small win.

>>2519683
>>2519738
Lmao this is old AF. Also why would anyone here expect a succ dem to call themselves a commie on live TV? Sanders wouldn't even do that.

>>2520569
>Sanders wouldn't even do that.
Of course Sanders wouldn't do it since he is a settler and liberal zionist.

>>2520564
We uphold Sliwa thought in this house.

>>2520570
Also the most popular DSA adjacent dem. Lmao theres prob not a single DSA type that'd call themselves a commie in an election cycle.

>>2520417
>corrupt petro-state
so Texas is basically what Venezuela is smeared as? lol

>>2520576
Of course they wouldnt. They all kill Communists

>>2520366
US so puritan even the "communists" amerilards ITT are malding lmao, I'd say proceed.

>>2520582
Ok. Write in Cuomo or vote Eric Adams then.

>>2520589
I'm also mad that they're fat but if they weren't fat they wouldn't have to go to a protest to force people to see them naked.

>>2520589
That one guy has a fat ass goddamn

>>2520586
Would be better. Amerikkkans deserve the worst.

>>2520586
The Dem leadership literally all endorsed Cuomo despite Mamdani winning the primary. I don't give a FUCK that he's a "secret Zionist" if it makes the Dems and Reps both mad it's good for America to vote Mamdani.

>>2520594
Ya exactly. Putting someone like him through these ridiculous purity test is sad AF.

>>2520593
Yes. But not while I live here still.

>>2520594
Ziohran is a democrat, dumbass

>>2520597
Reminder that purity testing is one of the oldest demoralization tricks in the book. Hes far from perfect but the alternative is Cuomo who is even worse in every metric, including the Palestine issue these people pretend to care about. There is a LOT of money being thrown around by scared porkies in NY, don't let them win ✌️😉👍

>>2520586
You speak as if i were a pig. nearly all workers and peasants do not vote in new york elections.

>>2520579
Absolutely

>>2520574
I saw him on here the other day and I was like:
> why is that dude dressed like that new york vigilante group from the 70s?
> is he retarded?
googled it again today and he founded that vigilante group. even better every time fox news makes up a crime wave to manufacture consent he trots them out for the press. last time they bashed a random immigrant on live TV.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/07/guardian-angels-curtis-sliwa-sean-hannity-fox-news-live-tv

time is a flat circle.

reminder every time you demoralize Mamdani support this is who you're working for. and I bet you aren't even getting paid.

zohran status?

>>2520366
What is the point in doing this naked

>>2520614
Ridin'

>>2520622
It gets the people going

>>2520622
clothes are bourgeois

>>2520622
it makes white women feel like they're achieving something while doing nothing

>>2520613
we should be using this opportunity to educate people on why electoralism doesn't produce reform. this is not demoralization.

NYC went bankrupt in 1975 and a corporation was founded that superseded the authority of council governance on most budgetary matters and handed control of the purse-strings to a bunch of bankers representing the city's creditors.

In light of this I don't get how a mayor is this big of a fucken deal: all he does is sign off on votes and contracts and chair city council meetings.

realistically any progressive agenda he brings is going to be up against:
>the structure of the political machine
>the rest of the city's legislative assembly
>contracts that were signed years in advance
>the entrenched rent seeking landlord class that determine what projects are submitted and what tenders go out

mamdani is going to be a hip cool lame duck that does raps on tiktok and nothing more. it's cool that he's the frontrunner. it's lame that he's going turncoat on the people that delivered him the primary.

>>2520623
this kind of popcorn shit is more important than policy because spectacle has fully eclipsed material reality.

>>2520622
people ask why they're doing it and argue about it being pointless, which is more engagement than a normal protest gets

>>2520589
himba people are extremely kino

>>2520632
this is where himbos come from??

>>2520366
I love how people on here are butthurt about this

>>2520630
>we should be using this opportunity to educate people on why electoralism doesn't produce reform. this is not demoralization.
That doesn't mean you ignore electoralism tho. It doesn't produce reform because you need material power to achieve reform and winning an election doesn't give you any powers. But it DOES sabotage the interests of the bourgeois and further accelerate the collapse of "consent of the governed" in America that leads to other means of change becoming viable. I don't expect Zohran will change anything materially beyond being at odds with the Zionists that rule NYC and forcing them to delay their plans by a few years, but that's still better than Cuomo's corrupt ass.

The fact Zohran makes the bourgeois shit themselves in fear of what will come after is enough reason to provide him with critical support. It doesn't matter if he wins or loses the general, but maintaining the pressure for a Left-wing alternative and keeping Socialism in the public consciousness until 2028 is what matters. Don't let the Dems just downplay and demoralize the American Left for another 4 years and continue being the controlled opposition because "nothing ever happens". Doing whatever is possible to shake up the system and disrupt the bourgeois' plans is your duty as a Leftist.

>>2520633
They are an ethnic group from Namibia. They wear a special ocher paste that gives their bodies a reddish coloration, although men are now wearing it less due to contact with the South African occupation. Apparently it's very good as sunscreen and insect repellent.

The women often have this hairstyle where they arrange their hair in braids covered in the otjize paste than then flare out.

>>2520635
why

>>2519730
>>2519729
>>2519728
bruh look at the people who own the world, they're TV Tropes-tier midwits writing fanfiction over the armageddon

this is the dumbest timeline

>>2519729
The "thiel's antichrist" thing is beyond inane. Like we are all behooved to understand the mysteries of this one fucking burnt-out gay catholic loon's syncretic heresy.

There is NO antichrist, shut the fuck up!

>>2520647
Dude is fucking nuts and needs attention.

>>2519728
>>2519729
>>2519730
Utter derangement. The elites have lost all their marbles. His spiel about luddites is completely hypocritical.

>>2520651
The tech sphere has been riding high on clinical mania for couple decades at least now, this isn't anything particularly new. Conditions have just deteriorated to the point where their psychosis is slightly worsening and slipping out into the real world.

are zoomer men still chudmaxxing?

>>2520669
Most zoomer men weren’t chudmaxxing to begin with

>>2520613
you are a fascist. every time you support zohran, you support the CIA for free
https://www.bronxantiwar.org/statements/zohran-mamdani-venzuela-cuba

>>2520676
Oh I am aware of that astroturfed dump. Another shining example of how reddit fails as a platform for digital communities.

So I had a literal shower thought and I figured I'd throw it out here to gauge peoples' opinion, but I think the biggest roadblocks to electoral success for Socialists in the United States is what I'd call "inherited institutions", y'know places with a lot of political sway and authority not because of what they've done in the now but that they've coasted on momentum that's been built up over decades.

Take Bernie Sanders' campaign. I don't believe he lost because of some inherent hostility from the Black community, but rather the Democrats built up over the years a quid-pro-quo relationship with "leaders" within the community. I remember reading some comments from younger Black men supporting Bernie that you'd have some parishes that bussed their elderly parishioners to the voting booth and give them cards containing exactly what they wanted them to vote for. Historically you've had something similar with labor unions (hence why purging socialists from union leadership was such a coup for business) but we've seen a historic weakening of unions over the years so I imagine its mostly church groups that serve this function.

It got me to thinking: well what about a political campaign where "getting elected" is secondary? The primary goal would be creating kinds of alternative institutions which would hopefully exist after the campaign has ended. So instead of a candidate introducing themselves as "I'm so-and-so and I'm running for this-or-that, they become a kind of living advertisement to try and direct people away from these establishment institutions: "I'm so-and-so, and I'd like to thank this-or-that for inviting me here to speak." I don't really think you can attack them from the "outside" because an outsider talking down to other groups only builds antipathy among them. Rather you create a kind of exit channel, something that directs people away from institutions that have been captured by liberal politicos.

Now this isn't to say you take a trade union and say "well we're splitting off and we're making a NEW union" as that'd just weaken the union as a whole, rather you take the form of a caucus within existing institutions. Then the goal of that caucus, while avoiding outright hostility to the institution in question, would be to become indispensable. You do the work first, and then you invite the right speakers to talk about the right issues, and in cases where it's just purely machine politics ("here's a card with who you vote for") you volunteer to be the ones bussing people to the polls, then you say at the last moment: "well we wont bus people if you're gonna tell them to vote for X"

And the candidate in question can sort of create a feedback loop. Getting elected would be a small positive, but their real job would be more like the coach of a football team. You're coordinating all the different parts of this political machine you've built so that even if you lose, it exists and remains in contact with itself. Your volunteers in one town retain contact with volunteers in another. These localized caucuses that were built up to support you can coalesce into a greater whole: you're not the youth group of St. Joseph anymore, but "The National Church Youth Association" or what have you.

Like Bernie built up a lot of goodwill himself. He became a kind of minor celebrity and his touring the country with his "stop oligarchy" stuff has been good, but I think the real important thing is coordinating these different groups together. And where groups don't exist, make them. You can start off by simply saying: "I want to speak to young people for a moment, can all of you take a few minutes to come up with a list of questions to ask me?" And you've planted the seeds there.

Just figured it was a thought worth sharing.

>>2520678
Every dollar you spend to feed and clothe your family is taxed, therefore funding the CIA, therefore makes you a fascist. Every step forward, every breath you take, every blink is one more potential fascist murder rape dollar. The only way to not be fascist is kill yourself.

Only pure perfect leftists KILL THEMSELVES to make sure fascist amerikkka never sees a penny from their labor

>>2520687
>Every dollar you spend to feed and clothe your family is taxed, therefore funding the CIA, therefore makes you a fascist. Every step forward, every breath you take, every blink is one more potential fascist murder rape dollar. The only way to not be fascist is kill yourself.

Yeah that's pretty much become the standard talking point of the most annoying people.

>>2519729
>Thiel suggests the antichrist would be a “luddite who wants to stop all science”
As recent research into Charles Babbage shows, computers have always been satanic PMC tools used to surveil and police plantation slaves, the "dark Satanic mills" which William Blake prophesied. In typical Marxist fashion, now everyone, even CEOs are being proletarianized with their workflow also being scrutinized and fed to data analysis to attempt to "objectively prove" they are maximizing shareholder value for Porky. In reality, value can only be understood through Marxist critiques of social relations, of course Silicon Valley neoliberals are all atomized bugmen who want to live alone in pods, so that's not going to happen!

https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/

https://www.economist.com/babbage/2012/08/20/difference-engine-competition-at-the-pump

https://xcancel.com/mer__edith/status/1661749939461046272
>New article where I connect Charles Babbage & his 19th c. blueprints for digital computation to proto-Taylorist industrial labor control & the creation of a regime of denigrated, disciplined "free" labor. All of which has its roots in plantation slavery
>Labor division, worker surveillance & record keeping are techniques that emerged on plantations as ways to extract as much labor from enslaved workers as possible. Well before they were deployed in industrial factories
>Babbage was both the early co-designer of digital computing & an influential theorist of labor discipline. Both Babbage's "engines" & his labor theories repackage, expand on, and encode plantation techniques, particularly labor division and worker surveillance.
>With this in mind, we can understand Babbage's work in total as striving to maintain British empire–itself reliant on the industrial mass-production–in the face of the 1833 abolition of West Indian slavery & sustained worker uprising in Britain
>How to get workers to shut up & produce was the question. Applying plantation techniques of labor discipline & control, modified a white British workforce, can be seen as Babbage's answer. An answer he provided in the form of his computational designs and in his labor theo
>This is not a thin connection. His "engines" were shaped to directly encode templates for labor division, and were themselves tools for worker automation & surveillance, whose architectures assumed they would be applied in contexts of a divided, rationalized workplace.

>>2520366
going out naked wearing a raincoat is the bizarro version of religious modesty lmao
>>2520622
There is no teleology, nothing is by design. There is only dialectical evolutionary contradictions and syntheses

>>2520679
Reddit seems like CIA turf which always seems to be the more democratic leaning faction of the alphabet soup gang. The FBI on the other hand are more chudded up.

>>2520366
silly libs.

>>2520366
>>2520589
bro I was going to say how is it that with all those naked people none of them are fit

>>2520366
>>2520703
clothing should be optional but only if you work out. like a card you hand in that gets punched out. 1 hr gym time = 1 hr naked time

>>2520703
there's a few fit people in there but tbh this is just the US.

>>2520622
It makes reactionaries mad

>>2520703
"Why are the ppl in the country with the highest obesity rate not fit?" I wonder if this topic has been explored 10 million times in 10 million ways in maybe the last 30 years

>>2520638
if you think he's a lesser evil then critical support is worse than ignoring the cunt. the normies look to radicals for guidance like:
>I can't feed my kids and pay my rent
>should I vote for this guy that says he's socialist?
<I gueeeesssssssss
let people that give a fuck do his messaging.

https://archive.iww.org/history/library/misc/JBekken1191/


If Voting Could Change Things … The Labor Party Illusion

By Jon Bekken - Industrial Worker (November 1991)

Growing numbers of our fellow workers have understandably concluded that the Democratic and Republican parties both serve the same interests­that there's not a dime's worth of difference between them.

The evidence for this is overwhelming. Democrats have controlled the Congress (and most of the states) for decades, during which living standards have been eroded, our unions busted, our health undermined, our taxes raised, and our rights curtailed. The Democrats share the Republicans' bloodthirsty foreign policy. And it was the Democratic Congress that outlawed the railroad workers' strike a few months ago.

So it's long past time to give up on the Democrats-they have nothing to offer but blood, sweat and tears (for us), and tax breaks and subsidies for the bosses.

New political parties are springing up like weeds. Many unionists have signed up with Tony Mazzochi's Labor Party Advocates, which hopes to build a labor party based on local and national union piecards. (Trotskyists are trying to form labor parties as well.) The National Organization For Women has announced that it is organizing a women's party.

And environmentalists are diverting their energies from educational and direct action campaigns to organizing a Green Party.

So why should we care? The Industrial Workers of the World, after all, has always refrained from supporting political parties and candidates. Individual members are free to join whatever party (or none) they choose, so long as they keep their political affiliations out of the union. But the solution to unemployment, war, hunger and other social problems does not lie in politics; direct action 'offers a more effective, simpler, more empowering way to build a better world.

U.S. workers have been afflicted by dozens of labor parties in the last century – none of which have done us any good. The American Socialist Party elected two congressmen, dozens of state legislators and several city administrations earlier in the century. This presented the edifying spectacle of socialist constables throwing striking workers in jail.

After the first world war, the Chicago Federation of Labor threw its substantial resources into organizing a local and national labor party. Several union members got their start in politics as a result, but the working class gained nothing.

And a great many politicians (including former union members such as Ronald Reagan) have been elected as "friends of labor" to this day, only to reward their union supporters with betrayals-as during the recent Hormel and Phelps-Dodge strikes.

In 1935 the AFL Convention nearly voted to establish a Labor Party. In the debate AFL Vice-President Matthew Wohl, himself a first-rate conniver, argued: "I have watched these politicians in our movement. … Regardless of how they talk of their trade union loyalty, my experience has been that when they enter the political arena they begin to talk like politicians, and very soon thinking like politicians, to the desertion of every trade union activity they pledged them­selves to become part of."
Labor parties have never governed the u.s. But their counterparts have had ample opportunity around the world to demonstrate their true colors.

New Zealanders recently voted their Labour Party out of government after years of austerity for workers, give-aways and tax breaks for the rich, and soaring unemployment. In Australia, Labour and conservative provincial governments compete to prove which has the most heartless policies towards government workers, the unemployed and the poor.

Local British Labour administrations evict unemployed workers who refused (or were unable) to pay the recently repealed Poll Tax. When the Labour Party was in power it sent troops to break strikes, froze wages, allowed nuclear weapons to be stationed in Britain, and generally toadied to the capitalists.

Spanish workers are fighting against austerity programs developed by their "Socialist" government. The "socialist" Sandinistas outlawed strikes and used thugs to take over independent unions. The French Socialists briefly flirted with pro-labor policies, but quickly capitulated when the corporations threatened to move to more congenial shores.

The political arena is a swamp. It is impossible for any political "labor" party to gain power without concessions to business and the middle class (even if the piecards upon whom this party is to be built were not thoroughly reactionary). Political action can only serve to divide our forces, and to divert our efforts from more productive efforts.

The eight-hour day, for example, was not won by legislation. It had been established decades before it was signed into law by union organization. Unemployment insurance was established as a sop to block unions' efforts to win the six-hour day. Minimum wage rates have always lagged far behind the average wages workers have won through our own efforts.

Labor's strength lies in our economic power-in the fact that we do all the work that keeps this society operating. Electioneering diverts our energies away from militant, direct-action struggles into essentially counter-revolutionary channels. It undermines confidence in our most effective weapon, our economic power.

An unorganized working class, determined to use its power, can compel an end to the destruction of our planet and the impoverishment of our fellow workers through its own efforts, without any reliance on political action. A U.S. labor party will merely increase the numbers of parasites in our movement, and help the piecards divert attention from their bankrupt policies. So long as we remain unorganized we will continue to lose ground to the bosses. Next time someone asks you to help build the labor party, suggest they consider revolutionary industrial unionism instead. The new society can be built only through our own efforts.

>>2520731
No offense but I don’t think anyone looks to leftist radicals for guidance, it’s presuming a credibility we don’t really have.

>>2519770
sad

>>2520687
Not the anon you are responding to but this is a real campaign flyer from Zohran mamdani's campaign that he himself posted on his own twitter account.

https://xcancel.com/ZohranKMamdani/status/1975550702056538512#m

He is

1. calling self defense against genocide a war crime
2. mourning the real war criminals
3. downplaying the number killed from 680,000 to 67,000, which is over ten times lower.

Some say this is "smart politics" and that you're "scaring the normies" to not do this. But zohran will get ratfucked and slandered by zios no matter how much he sucks up to them. So this wasn't smart.

Zohran would have been doing infinitely better "politics" to not release a statement calling hamas war criminals. any time a zionist (but let's be real, he's one of them) tried to troll him by demanding he "condemn hamas" he could have said something like "this is not relevant to NYC, whose mayor position I am running for."

but instead he went out of his way to have his campaign planting flyers declaring his "mourning" of zionist settlers that were actually mostly killed by the IDF, and calling people defending themselves from genocide "war criminals."

What political benefit did this have? Alienating all the people who may have liked him, while trying and failing to appease all the bloodthristy zionists who treat him as the second coming of yasser arafat despite the fact that he's a milquetoast liberal zionist anyway.

What was the point?

Not exactly the Machiavellian 11-Dimensional chess some in the previous thread were making it out to be.

>>2519770
>>2519789
Remarkably similar images in color palette and theme

>>2520681
you have to do both otherwise you're really not accomplishing anything. after the post-new left collapse, "socialists" basically had zero impact on anything despite doing exactly what you're doing. you do need a formal group to put together a coherent program for ppl to clearly understand the difference between you and the mainstream.

>>2520746
>3. downplaying the number killed from 680,000 to 67,000, which is over ten times lower.
Isn't the number of 67,000 from the Gaza Health Ministry?

>any time a zionist (but let's be real, he's one of them) tried to troll him by demanding he "condemn hamas" he could have said something like "this is not relevant to NYC, whose mayor position I am running for.
He's seem evasive. What's he hiding anyhow? But yeah I probably think he does believe Hamas did a bad thing. A lot of people do!

>What political benefit did this have? Alienating all the people who may have liked him, while trying and failing to appease all the bloodthristy zionists who treat him as the second coming of yasser arafat despite the fact that he's a milquetoast liberal zionist anyway.
I think he's probably going to win in a landslide?

>>2520754
680,000 is correct. I don't care if it comes directly from the Health ministry or not. Outside observers can actually see satellite imagery and other indicators of the huge death toll. 34% of Gazans have been killed. Not 3.3%. Do you really think leveling every building in Gaza city, constantly starving people to death, slaughtering them when they gather for aid, bombing schools and hospitals, would only result in 3.3% of the city dead? 67,000 might be the number you get if you don't count the DELIBERATE starvation and other indirect deaths and ONLY count direct kills from bullets and bombs.

https://arena.org.au/politics-of-counting-gazas-dead/

<When deaths resulting from imposed deprivation (indirect deaths) are factored into mortality data, the total figures will be higher than those from only violent deaths (direct deaths). Eminent epidemiologist Professor Devi Sridhar (chair of Global Health, University of Edinburgh) reported in an article in The Guardian a ‘conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death’. Assuming that deaths from deprivation were four times the violent deaths, then the 136,000 violent deaths after 15.5 months of killing (25 April 2025) would imply 544,000 Gaza deaths from imposed deprivation, and that the total Gazan death toll would accordingly be 136,000 violent deaths plus 544,000 from imposed deprivation, leading to a staggering total of 680,000 deaths by 25 April 2025. Most of these victims, as indicated in earlier counts by the Ministry of Health are women and children.

clown world

>>2520754
>But yeah I probably think he does believe Hamas did a bad thing. A lot of people do!
Americans commit genocide even when they dont' benefit in any direct way (I have yet to receive a single "treat" from Palestinian toddlers being turned into red mist) but at the same time they think you are "doing a bad thing" when you finally fight back after being locked in an open air prison.

Zohran Mamdani would have denounced the Warsaw Ghetto Uprsing as going too far.

>>2520768
>Church named zion

Should have been banned a long time ago

A new level of Israel humiliation has been achieved

https://x.com/infolibnews/status/1977940120645869970

>>2520766
>I don't care if it comes directly from the Health ministry or not.
Well he said "far exceeds 67,000." To be perfectly honest it sounds like you want Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad to run New York City and anything short of that is unacceptable, which is fine but that's not an option on the ballot.

>>2520773
i'm so tired of this shit

>>2520772
>unregistered
it was never legal

>>2520774
> it sounds like you want Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad to run New York City and anything short of that is unacceptable
Yes. and I want Shariah Law too.

Seriously though, all Zohran had to do was not cave to the reactionaries and keep talking about working class NYC, but apparently expecting this bare minimum of him gets me this Senator Holden Bloodfeast ass response.

Btw If someone killed 10 people in your family and then someone else said "more than 1 was killed" that would still be rhetorically downplaying even though it's mathematically true.

>>2520779
There is nobody he can cite saying more were killed man. There are only very loose speculations by the Lancet with huge guesses. Those numbers will come, once people return. This specifically is not a good point to attack him on. When people say 67,000 people, those are people with names to put to the dead.

>>2520810
https://web.archive.org/web/20250624173345/https://thecradle.co/articles-id/31546

>Harvard Study Finds Gaza Death Toll at Least 400,000

This has been linked on my homepage since it dropped in June. There's no excuse

>>2520773
Whenever I see things like this I makes me feel better. I may be a mentally ill loser but at least I'm not a cuck like these guys

>>2520366
>this is le resistance in Portland
The U.S. is so cooked.
Might as well form a que for the camps at this point.

>>2520366
Dumb as shit, if you're naked and you crash your bike because its raining you'll get ripped up by the road.

america needs its fiume. I will be its anzuino

Hair status?

>>2520855
>he's only worried about the hair
You think he'd be concerned about how his neckgina looks.

>>2520846
holy shit red flood reference???????

>>2520846
this fiume of course, being tijuana, mexico

>>2520811
Those are extrapolations, and while likely accurate, aren't those given by the gaza health ministry. Those verified deaths are those that have bodies and names. He shouldn't use unverified numbers. You can, and many people should.

>>2520769
Wrong. You receive tokens in the mail when they do

>>2520768
China caught red handed doing base shit again

>>2520746
Are you really autistic enough to spend days on end wasting our time bitching that a demsoc mayoral candidate did not speak like a communist regarding an issue over which has he zero leverage

>no he totally does leverage
What the fuck is he gonna do, send NYPD supersoldiers

>>2520703
in the us, city people like that ARE the fit ones. The chuds you see posting on 4chan? Even less athletic.

>>2520907
>a demsoc mayoral candidate did not speak like a communist
wrong goalpost, there is zero reason to downplay the genocide and mourn the settlers when it is entirely irrelevant to the city he is running for mayor in. It caves to zionist bullies in exchange for nothing. he would have done better not talking about it at all (as has been pointed out several times by several people)
>bitching
it's not bitching it's just the truth. where else are people supposed to talk about this? There's no strategic benefit he derived from caving like that. Nobody here is actually sabotaging his campaign by pointing out the truth on a small imageboard. Yet people get so defensive of him and characterize any criticism of his caving to bullies (which lacks any strategic benefit) as "bitching."

And it is strange that you found >>2520746 more objectionable than the unfunny passive aggressive strawman in >>2520687 which it was responding to.

Why does >>2520687 get no comment from you but >>2520746 is objectionable? Why can't a consistent line like >>2520746 be repeated in response to the tiresome passive aggressive baiting of >>2520687?

unidentified men on new york subway pose as police officers attempting to get passenger to come with them

>>2520810
>There is nobody he can cite saying more were killed man.

Bullshit. Plenty of sources are citing figures way higher than 67,000, and not just "Hamas" sources. The UN has higher figures than that.

By citing the 67,000 statistic Zohran (and you) are effectively said only 3% of Gazans have been killed and that 97% remain alive, in a situation where, according to The Irish Times,

<The latest UN assessment, based on satellite imagery published on August 6th, shows that 78 per cent of buildings in the Gaza Strip have been damaged and more than half of them completely destroyed.

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/middle-east/2025/10/05/after-two-years-of-israeli-bombardment-what-is-left-of-gaza/

If the IDF not only has destroyed 78% of buildings, but regularly kills Gazans at refugee camps, regularly bombs people waiting in tents in hospital courtyards, regularly bombs people gathered for food aid, and is using a policy of mass stravation where the vast majority of people, including vulnerable and weak people the disabled, the elderly and the infants are starving… what does that tell you? You really think only 3% of the city of 2 million people have died since Oct 7 2023?

>You're just EXTRAPOOLATING

Anon, when a genocide is actively happening and the war criminals aren't letting aid in that's all you can fucking do. It's completely reasonable to extrapolate that 34% of the people are dead when over 78% of the buildings are destroyed and the people in the refugee camps are starving to death. Do you really wait until the genocide is over before you start sounding the alarm? Do you really keep holding off from admitting about 34% of the city is dead and keepand saying "umm we only confirmed 3% of the city were killed" which is btw a statistic that DELIBERATELY IGNORES indirect forms of killing like mass starvation?

>>2520811
If an American zionist-friendly source like Harvard can admit 400,000 are dead, Zohran can do better than saying 67,000 while caving to zionist bullies in exchange for zero votes and calling the modern equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising a war crime.

>>2520907


it's really funny how dishonest you are. Anon said:

>Zohran would have been doing infinitely better "politics" to not release a statement calling hamas war criminals. any time a zionist (but let's be real, he's one of them) tried to troll him by demanding he "condemn hamas" he could have said something like "this is not relevant to NYC, whose mayor position I am running for."

And you (and gay nazi anon) deliberately misinterpreted this as something more like

>Zohran should praise hamas and call them heroes on live TV

or something.

Anon is saying: just don't mourn israel and call self defense a war crime. it's especially pathetic because zionist new yorkers aren't going to vote for him just because he sucked up to them with statements like the one in the screenshot in >>2520746

>>2520962
what were they going to do to him?

>>2520983
who knows?
just dont go with them.

>>2520996
how do you know if they are real or fake cops?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/14/magazine/zohran-mamdani-mayor-new-york.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tU8.rbJS.knSeqvfkfntB&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
>The conversations have allowed Mamdani to reframe his previous positions, tweaking the us-versus-them language of his democratic-socialist values to be a tad less punitive. He has made it clear that he wants to support renters, not punish landlords. He wants to support public education, not take a hammer to specialized schools with elite admissions. He supports Palestinian rights; he’s not anti-Zionist. He made key concessions when it comes to policing. Importantly, he made clear that he was open to compromise when it came to his proposed millionaires’ tax. Call it Mamdani 2.0.
Oh. Great.

>>2520999
you dont.
when the lynch mob comes for you, you just run.

They're targeting gamers. Gamers.

>>2520926
The American left is too divided to ever accomplish anything. For the next 100 years at least. American communists are completely opposed to any kind of outreach, organizing, or activism to bring others over to their side. There exists a thousand bridges from mainstream politics to the far right and we insist on burning the few bridges that lead over to our side.

>>2520969
>>2520951
>>2520746
Rent free

>>2521034
A lot of people on the left treats communism as more of a music scene and less like an actual political project. The purity culture I see on the left reminds me more of how black metalheads will shit on death metal ones and vice versa. Despite even the nordic countries just viewing black metal as nerd music.

>>2521038
>A lot of people on the left treats communism as more of a music scene and less like an actual political project.
@Houdini callout?

I have question for ameriƙans. How many of you support social fascists who affirm "the zionist entity right to exist" and also demand regime change in every leftist nation if they promise you healthcare?
>inb4 vote against fascism then
The workers and peasants do not vote in america. Worker peasants are most unfettered by this vooting pathology. Worker peasant can call bad things what they are and not defend them suicidally

>>2521034
>>2521038
Inb4 "communism isn't the left"

>>2521041
They’re the uppies, the uppers, the ups

>>2521038
The left in the US outside of handful of figures and orgs IS basically a subculture. It’s why it attracts nihilists who are into stuff like accelerationism or third-worldism, they’re not serious people, they’re just misanthropic nerds choosing their LARP. see for example this board

a jew, an indian, and a puerto rican walk into a bar

>>2520951
>missing the point entirely
I ask again: are you going to continue bitching and moaning that a horse is not a zebra

>>2520974
I swear to fuck TikTok has ruined this board’s reading comprehension.

No shit he’s pandering and trying to PR this issue. He is running as a democrat in NYC, how the fuck are you surprised?

Stop sperging out and moralizing over the obvious, it’s a waste of time that does nothing.

look at the end of the day they are not communists, they are democratic socialists, they will ultimately disappoint, but its still better than the old clinton third way neoliberlism.
leftypol talks big but you know full well you would vote for president AOC over vance

>>2521037
>heheheh i'm going to mock your opposition to genocide denial and make it about me me me
disgusting but to be expected in this shithole

>>2521048
Stupid libtard.

>>2521062
Yes, I know you feel attacked. You should

>>2521056
>>2521058
The lib corner is down the hall, to the left

>>2521053
Nobody "missed" your "point." Nobody is "bitching" that succdem Zohran is not a Marxist-Leninist guerilla. They're saying that even within the very limited scope of what can be expected of a succdem mayoral candidate, caving to zionist bullies and repeating their talking points in exchange for zero VOOTS from them is strategically bankrupt. This is the real point you are not only "missing" but deliberately ignoring to repeat "haha you just want zohran to act like a communist" which is very similar to the mocking gay nazi anon made which was "haha you just want zohran to say hamas good"

That's not the point.

The point is that he went out of his way to print a campaign flyer downplaying the genocide death count by 10x in exchange for zero voots from the zionists he pandered to. None of them are going to go "ah yes. he has pandered to me. now I am going to vote for him." he will continue to be denounced by them and attacked by them "LITERALLY HAMAS" and "LITERALLY COMMUNIST" even though he is neither of those things as you repeatedly point out. So what is the point of pandering to their prejudices when he could have just done nothing in exchange for the same result? That result being: endless scare mongering about him from the zionazis.

>>2521056
nobody's surprised it's just that the pandering does nothing for his campaign because the people he is pandering to would never vote for him anyway

welcome to nepotism.

>>2521064
Idk about that, just stop being a libtard

>>2521071
Yes yes libtard is when you’re mad

>>2521070
We’re multiple modes of production past the welcome already.

>>2521073
the goalpost has moved from
>hahaha you idiots expected zohran to be communist
<no we are just saying that even by succdem standards this caving to zionists is strategically retarded
>my new goalpost is that you're angry at genocide denial
yes and?

>>2521070
this is the sort of headline meant to be read in a 1920s radio voice

>>2521070
this is just what prezzies do bro

>>2520907
b8 used to be better.

>>2521074
Yes libtards make me mad, so stop being one so I can calm down.

>>2521078
me ne fregoism is the ideology of the proletariat, chuddier-than-thou

https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-shakes-contain-high-levels-of-lead-a4206364640/

> Protein supplements are wildly popular, but CR’s tests of 23 products found that more than two-thirds of them contain more lead in a single serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day

> For more than two-thirds of the products we analyzed, a single serving contained more lead than CR’s food safety experts say is safe to consume in a day—some by more than 10 times.

> The lead levels in plant-based products were, on average, nine times the amount found in those made with dairy proteins like whey, and twice as great as beef-based ones. Dairy-based protein powders and shakes generally had the lowest amounts of lead, but half of the products we tested still had high enough levels of contamination that CR’s experts advise against daily use.

>There’s no reason to panic if you’ve been using any of the products we tested, or if you take protein supplements generally. Many of these powders are fine to have occasionally, and even those with the highest lead levels are far below the concentration needed to cause immediate harm. That said, because most people don’t actually need protein supplements—nutrition experts say the average American already gets plenty—it makes sense to ask whether these products are worth the added exposure.

Why do I feel like this explains a lot

>>2521091
this isn't really a shock as a lot of plants (like coffee, chocolate, etc) just leech lead from the ground into the plants

>>2521085
>me ne fregoism
so fascism
>is the ideology of the proletariat
nope