In this post we’re going to take a look at a series of articles that, when taken together, raise the possibility of a grimly fascinating new dimension to the West’s regime change campaign against China that is now playing out in the middle of a global COVID-19 pandemic that threatens to strangle virtually all major economies and raise the following question: Is collapsing the global economy and bankrupting major world powers for the purpose of pushing the world to the gold standard one of the objectives at work here too in addition to fomenting regime change in China?
So why might we suspect that returning to the gold standard is an objective of not just the Trump administration but perhaps governments around the world? Well, for starters...
1. Returning the gold standard is a long-standing far right goal and we are living in a moment when almost all governments around the globe are either overtly or covertly run by the far right. It’s a moment that may not last so this is a grand opportunity for achieving that far right goal. If a gold stand is to be adopted, it realistically would need to be adopted by all major economies roughly at the same time and there would have to be no existing fiat currencies that are poised to replace the dollar as the reigning safe haven. Having the far right running almost all the major economies of the world right is like the stars aligning for the gold standard advocates or those who simply want to see the dollar dethroned. All they have to do is all f*ck up at the same time repeatedly when it comes to fixing the situation and force a massive collective explosion of debt across all major currencies without any real results. That seems like something far right should be highly adept at accomplishing.
2. Trump has been surrounding himself with gold standard advocates from the very beginning of his 2016 campaign and continues to elevate gold standard advocates within his administration. He’s nominated gold bugs three time to the Federal Reserve board of governors — Herman Cain, Stephen Moore, and Judy Shelton — and while Cain and Moore’s nominations were rejected by the Senate, Shelton appears to be on track to getting full Republican support on the Senate Banking committee. Unless one of the Republican Senators on the committee is willing to oppose Trump over this, she’s on the board of governors.
3. Judy Shelton hasn’t just advocated for the US to return the gold standard. She wants to see a global Bretton Woods-style conference that has all of the major economies adopt it at the same time. She even suggested holding the conference at Mar-a-Lago.
4. If Judy Shelton is indeed allowed to join the Fed’s board of governors she’s seen as a top candidate for replacing Jerome Powell as the chair of the Fed when Powell’s term is up in 2022.
5. Judy Shelton has been the chair of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) since January of 2017. As we’ll see in the Gray Zone article below, the NED has long been sponsoring and working closely with the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), the Uyghur movement in China that has regime change in China as one of its primary objects, whether that change comes politically or through military intervention. So Shelton is undoubtedly deeply involved the NED’s regime change efforts in China.
6. As we’ll see in the second article below, Robert Mercer is a long-time gold standard advocate. Given his current status as one of the leading billionaire Nazis with a profound influence over the Trump administration and figures like Steve Bannon, we shouldn’t at all be surprised if Mercer is quietly pushing for the kind of global economic collapse that could so damage the major currencies of the world simultaneously. Also recall the Mercer has expressed extreme social Darwinism views, like how he views people on welfare as having “negative value” and less value than a house cat which at least provides people pleasure. In other words, Mercer probably isn’t the kind of person who would flinch at the idea of using a global pandemic (or starting it) to destroy the lives of billions to achieve his goals. He’s basically a super-rich sociopath.
7. As we’ll see in the third, fourth, and fifth articles below, J. Kyle Bass — the billionaire hedge fund investor who has been working closely with Steve Bannon’s regime change operation targeting China — appears to be some sort of doomsday prepper who advocates the stockpiling of gold and guns. And platinum. And explosives.
8. If returning to the gold standard really is the end result of period of massive economic turmoil, the far right would LOVE Trump and completely forgive him for that economic turmoil. Sure, elderly Republicans who will lose their social security might not like Trump under those circumstances, but they’ll presumably be dead soon anyway. Either COVID-19 will get them or the suddenly lack of a safety and collapsed health care system will do the job. But the younger ‘Alt Right’ conservatives who will define the movement in coming decades will love Trump forever for destroying entitlements and bringing back the gold standard.
9. The socioeconomic turmoil that could result from a sustained economic collapse is a perfect excuse to deputize all the far right militias (like the Oath Keepers) that have been pining to be granted law enforcement powers. These are the kinds of groups that dream of a time when everything has collapsed and gold is suddenly the coin of the realm.
10. The conservative eurozone member states would probably also be especially excited about returning to the gold standard, whether that involves holding the eurozone together or not. Don’t forget that the conservative eurozone member states have long wanted to see the eurozone effectively operate like a virtual gold standard between member states. Ordoliberalism — the German economic ideology — more or less demands that nations operate as if they were on the gold standard anyway, i.e. when there’s recession, cut back on government spending and allow the ensuing recession to kill off the weakest companies. This was a significant ideological motivator for the austerity policies the eurozone pursued over the past decade following the eurozone financial crisis. Germany, in particular, would likely find an extremely receptive audience for a gold standard. Also recall how Germany repatriated large amounts of its global overseas gold holdings in 2017, three years ahead of schedule.
11. If the word did shift to a gold standard, almost all social spending would have to radically curtailed permanently as minimizing national debt loads become the top priority. Which, again, is a far right dream.
12. Finally, if some group knew this was part of a secret far right agenda they could make A LOT by knowing that in advance, but from shorting markets and buy gold relatively cheaply. Or if they happened to have large stores of looted gold hidden away from, say WWII, those stores would suddenly become the dominant sources of wealth on the planet.
Is it possible that we’re looking at a simultaneous push to collapse China by collapsing the global economy, with a grand final prize of achieving that long-held far right dream of returning the world to a gold standard? We probably shouldn’t rule it out. It’s a long-standing far right goal and we really are looking at a globe currently dominated by fascists and cryptofascists so now would be when we should expect something like this. There are a lot of fascist goals that could be accomplished by returning to the gold standard. It wouldn’t even have to be a permanent return. Just a temporary shift back to a gold standard that could help completely reorient the political and economic power of the globe away from the US and give governments around the world an excuse for a generation of mass global austerity. They could return to some some of fiat global reserve currency (or basket of reserve currencies) later. If the euro survives it would probably be a in good position to become the new ‘king’ currency, but there are plenty of other candidates.
What Unites The National Endownment for Democracy and Turkish Fascist? The World Uyghur Congress
Ok, first, here’s that Gray Zone article describe the deep historic ties between the NED and World Uyghur Congress (WUC). The article makes it clear that that the WUC and it’s many offshoot groups are essentially extensions of the US’s foreign policy and intelligence establishment, going back to WWII. The article also describes the long-stand ties between the WUC’s leaders and the Turkish far right, who view the Xinjiang region of Northwest China where the Uyghur’s primarily located as part of “East Turkistan”. Alarmingly, it sounds like the WUC leadership would like to see Turkey play a role in China similar to the role Turkey has played in Libya and Syria, which is basically a call for fomenting a civil war and balkanizing the country. So at a time what the far right is in power in almost every major country on the planet, we’re seeing a group with extensive far right ties making a big push destabilize China which should be raising the question of what else is on the far right destabilization agenda:
The Gray Zone
Inside the World Uyghur Congress: The US-backed right-wing regime change network seeking the ‘fall of China’
While posing as a grassroots human rights organization, the World Uyghur Congress is a US-funded and directed separatist network that has forged alliances with far-right ethno-nationalist groups. The goal spelled out by its founders is clear: the destabilization of China and regime change in Beijing.
By Ajit Singh
March 5, 2020In recent years, few stories have generated as much outrage in the West as the condition of Uyghur Muslims in China. Reporting on the issue is typically represented through seemingly spontaneous leaks of information and expressions of resistance by Uyghur human rights activists struggling to be heard against a tyrannical Chinese government.
True or not, nearly everything that appears in Western media accounts of China’s Uyghur Muslims is the product of a carefully conceived media campaign generated by an apparatus of right-wing, anti-communist Uyghur separatists funded and trained by the US government.
A central gear in Washington’s new Cold War against China, this network has a long history of relationships with the US national security state and far-right ultra-nationalists.
At the heart of this movement is the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), an international Uyghur organization that claims to be engaged in a “peaceful, nonviolent, and democratic” struggle for “human rights.” The WUC considers China’s northwestern Xinjiang region to be East Turkestan, and sees its Uyghur Muslim inhabitants not as Chinese citizens but instead as members of a pan-Turkic nation stretching from Central Asia to Turkey.
As this investigation establishes, the WUC is not a grassroots movement, but a US government-backed umbrella for several Washington-based outfits that also rely heavily on US funding and direction. Today, it is the main face and voice of a separatist operation dedicated to destabilizing the Xinjiang region of China and ultimately toppling the Chinese government.
While seeking to orchestrate a color revolution with the aim of regime change in Beijing, the WUC and its offshoots have forged ties with the Grey Wolves, a far-right Turkish organization that has been actively engaged in sectarian violence from Syria to East Asia.
None of these links seem to have troubled the WUC’s sponsors in Washington. If anything, they have added to the network’s appeal, consolidating it as one of the most potent political weapons the US wields in its new Cold War against China.
The World Uyghur Congress, brought to you by the US government’s regime change arm
The WUC promotes itself as an “opposition movement against Chinese occupation of East Turkistan [sic]” that “represent[s] the collective interests” and is “the sole legitimate organization of the Uyghur people both in East Turkistan and abroad.”
Headquartered in Munich, Germany, the WUC is an international umbrella organization with a network of 33 affiliates in 18 countries around the world. The WUC and its affiliates — particularly the Uyghur American Association, Uyghur Human Rights Project, and Campaign for Uyghurs — are cited in nearly every Western media report on China’s Uyghur Muslims.
From its inception, the WUC has been backed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). With millions in US taxpayer money, the NED and its subsidiaries have backed opposition parties, “civil society” groups, and media organizations in countries targeted by the US for regime change.
Philip Agee, the late CIA whistleblower, described the work of the NED as a more sophisticated version of the old-fashioned covert operations that Langley used to engineer. “Nowadays,” Agee explained, “instead of having the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process by inserting money here and giving instructions secretly and so forth, they have now a sidekick, which is this National Endowment for Democracy, NED.”
Agee’s assessment was confirmed by Allen Weinstein, a former Trotskyist and founding member of the NED. Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
When the WUC was founded in 2004, the NED’s then-senior Asia program officer, Louisa Coan Greve, praised the move as a “great accomplishment.”
The NED has provided the WUC with millions of dollars in funding, including $1,284,000 since 2016 alone, and millions of dollars in additional funding to WUC-affiliate organizations. The grants are earmarked for training Uyghur activists and youth in media advocacy and lobbying “to raise awareness of and support for Uyghur human rights,” with a particular focus on US Congress, European Parliament, and the United Nations.
In 2018, the NED provided the WUC and its offshoots with close to $665,000, according to the former organization’s website.
The NED has played a direct role in molding the direction and politics of the WUC. Besides honeycombing WUC-affiliated organizations with NED operatives like Coan Greve, the NED has sponsored and organized annual “Leadership Training Seminars” for the WUC since 2007.
Many leading members of the WUC have also worked in senior positions for Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). These US government-run news agencies were created by the CIA during the Cold War to project propaganda into China and the Soviet Union, and to stir up opposition to communism on these countries’ frontiers.
Unsurprisingly, the WUC is tightly aligned with Washington’s foreign policy agenda and hostile new Cold War strategy which seeks to contain and impede the rise of China. The WUC regularly meets with and lobbies US and Western politicians, urging them to isolate and “increase the pressure on China”; ratchet up economic sanctions; curb ties with China, and withdraw Western companies from the region.
The WUC celebrated the passage of The Uighur Act of 2019 by the US House of Representatives, in December 2019. The bill, which called on the Trump administration to enact sanctions against the Chinese government, was the latest in a string of anti-China achievements.
This regime change apparatus has made its strongest impact through the media, providing a constant source of self-styled Uyghur dissidents and human rights horror stories to eager Western reporters. The exposure the WUC and its affiliates receive extends well beyond corporate media outlets known for echoing Washington’s foreign policy talking points; even ostensibly adversarial, progressive, and left-wing media such as The Intercept, Democracy Now! and Jacobin Magazine have provided them with an uncritical platform.
While adopting the WUC’s narrative, these self-styled alternative outlets never seem to mention the close bonds the organization and its offshoots have forged with the US national security state and right-wing ethno-nationalist movements abroad. But the relationships are no secret. In fact, they appear to be a source of pride for WUC leadership.
The Far-Right Roots of the Uyghur “Human Rights” Movement
Behind its carefully constructed human rights brand, the Uyghur separatist movement emerged from elements in Xinjiang which view socialism as “the enemy of Islam,” and which sought Washington’s support from the outset, presenting themselves as eager foot-soldiers for US hegemony.
The founding father of this separatist movement was Isa Yusuf Alptekin. His son, Erkin Alptekin, founded the WUC and served as the organization’s inaugural president. The senior Alptekin is referred to as “our late leader” by the WUC and current President Dolkun Isa.
Born at the turn of the 20th century, Alptekin was the son of a local government Xinjiang official. He received a largely Islamic education as a youth, as his family intended for him to be a religious scholar.
During the Chinese Civil War that raged between the nationalists and communists from 1945 to ’49, Alptekin served under the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) administration in Xinjiang. Throughout this period, the KMT received massive military and economic backing from the United States — including billions of dollars in cash and military hardware, along with the deployment of tens of thousands of US marines — in an effort to quash the Chinese revolution.
At the same time, according to historian Linda Benson, Alptekin “became more active in both the Guomindang [sic] and national level politics … and met several times with [KMT leader] Chiang Kai-shek personally.” For Alptekin and fellow travelers advancing Turkic nationalism and the region’s eventual independence, “equally important was the necessity of protecting the land they called East Turkestan from Soviet and Chinese communism, both of which were viewed as real and present dangers to Islamic peoples.”
For the KMT, Uyghur activists like Alptekin made prime candidates for Xinjiang’s provincial administration. As Benson explained, “[t]he essential qualification for such appointees… was that they be anti-Communist and anti-Soviet.” In his memoirs, Alptekin revealed that he “sought to eliminate all Russians and leftists in the government,” and said that “schools were also encouraged to include religious instruction in their curriculum.”
A fervent opponent of miscegenation, Alptekin worked to prevent intermarriage between Han Chinese and Uyghur Muslims. During his time in government, religious fundamentalists “attacked the houses of Han Chinese who were married to Moslem [sic] women […] The mob abducted the Moslem wives, and in some cases the unfortunate women were forced to marry old Moslem men.” Though the violence killed numerous Han Chinese, it proceeded without any government response during Alptekin’s tenure.
As the civil war wore on, Alptekin grew frustrated with the declining power of the nationalists and met with US and British Consuls in Xinjiang, beseeching the twin powers to deepen their intervention in China and the region. With the coming victory of the Chinese Revolution, Alptekin went into exile in 1949.
Alptekin eventually settled in Turkey, emerging as the pre-eminent leader of the Uyghur separatist movement throughout the latter half of the 20th century. He set out to enlist international support for the cause of East Turkestan independence, courting leading US officials and far-right, neo-Ottomanist ideologues in Turkey.
The Uyghur separatist leader wrote to then-US President Richard Nixon on several occasions, pleading for him to support East Turkestan separatism. In a 1969 missive to the president, Alptekin declared full-throated support for the US war on Vietnam: “We are hopeful and pleased that the US, as a fortress of liberty, is protecting captive nations,” he stated. Altepkin then pleaded for his “Excellency” Nixon and the US, “the most imminent protector of captive nations”, to support East Turkestan independence.
Alptekin wrote Nixon the following year to warn of the evils of “Red China.” He branded the country “a great menace which the whole world as led by the United States of America is confronting. This menace is now in the process of evolution to engulf the earth. If time is allowed it can upset the balance of the world to disadvantage the free nations.”
“The whole world has reason to be apprehensive of Red China,” Alptekin insisted to Nixon, “for it is likely to be an irresistible [sic] threat on earth… China today is one of the biggest nations in the world where the Marxist teach has been implemented… China may prove to be a greater menace to all the world, and this menace is likely to cause a total destruction to the free nations if they are not prudent and fore-sighted.”
Alptekin advised Nixon to combat the “Chinese war of world conquest” by supporting separatist movements, namely that of East Turkestan nationalists, and by “speeding up the process of the dismemberment of the Chinese empire.”
Mapping out a detailed regime change strategy for Washington, Alptekin urged the US to generate support for his cause among the “free world,” set up an academic institute to study “every aspect” of minority nationalities living within China, develop media propaganda targeting minority nationalities by operating “a radio network beaming at these peoples in their respective languages”; “devise a plan to secure [the] collaboration” of minority nationalities and “train the children of the non-Chinese exiles abroad.”
In 1970, Alptekin travelled to Washington to meet with members of US Congress and address the House of Representatives.
Forging bonds with fascistic, ethno-supremacist Turkish nationalists
While appealing for Washington’s support, Alptekin developed strong ties with the Turkish far-right. Their bonds rested on a solid foundation of anti-communist zeal and pan-Turkic, neo-Ottomanist nationalism.
On numerous occasions, Alptekin met with Alparslan Türkes a fascistic, ultra-nationalist who believed ardently in Turkish ethnic superiority over minorities like Kurds and Armenians, and for whom the eradication of communism among the Turkic populations of Soviet Central Asia and Xinjiang was “the dream he had most cherished”.
Türkes was long-time leader of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP) and its paramilitary arm, the Grey Wolves. According to the Washington Post, he headed a murderous group of “right-wing terrorists” who are “blindly nationalist, fascist or nearly so, and bent on the extermination of the Communists.” The fascistic militant group killed numerous left-wing activists, students, Kurds, and notoriously attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II.
With military training from the US, Türkes co-founded the Turkish cell of Operation Gladio, the US and NATO-backed network of “stay behind” anti-communist paramilitary groups that carried out numerous acts of terror and sabotage across Europe.
Alptekin appears to have shared the hateful politics of Türkes and the Turkish far-right, often expressing anti-Armenian views including denial of the Armenian genocide and claims that Armenians were murderers of innocent Turks.
The Turkish right-wing has embraced the East Turkestan separatist movement with open arms, appealing to them as a key base of political support. “The martyrs of East Turkestan are our martyrs,” stated Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then mayor of Istanbul, as he inaugurated a park named in honor of Alptekin, following the death of the Uyghur nationalist in 1995.
In recent decades, the Uyghur separatist movement has deepened its connections with Washington and the US national security state. The WUC and its affiliate organizations — including the Uyghur American Association, Uyghur Human Rights Project, and Campaign for Uyghurs — are made up of individuals with direct ties to the US government, military, and regime change establishment.
Inspired by pro-free market color revolutions spawned by the US government in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, the WUC’s regime change network has set out a clear goal of destabilizing China and toppling its government.
With vow to destroy China, WUC leaders earn Western adulation and support
In 2004, Erkin Alptekin was named the inaugural president of the WUC. He is the son of the far-right, ultra-nationalist father figure of the Uyghur separatist movement, Isa Yusuf Alptekin, whose background is explored later in this article. From 1971 to 1995, Erkin Alptekin worked for the US government-funded RFE/RL media network.
Speaking at the funeral of his father, in 1995, the junior Alptekin outlined his anti-communist, separatist views and articulated his desire to destroy China: “Ten years ago no one believed that the USSR would fall apart now you can see that. Many Turkic countries have their freedom now. Today the same situation applies to China. We believed in the not too distant future we will see the fall of China and the independence of East Turkestan.”
The WUC describes Alptekin as “close friend” of the Dalai Lama, the U.S‑backed, CIA-funded figurehead for Tibetan separatism. “We are working very closely with the Dalai Lama,” Alptekin told The Washington Post in 1999. “He is a very good example for us.”
In 2006, Erkin Alptekin was succeeded as WUC President by Rebiya Kadeer, a self-described multi-millionaire real estate and trading entrepreneur who profited off of China’s economic reforms of the 1980s and claims to have once been the seventh wealthiest individual in the country. According to The New York Times, Kadeer’s “[d]issidence brought the end of her Audi, her three villas and her far-flung business empire”. Kadeer’s husband, SIdik Rouzi, worked for US government media outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.
During her tenure as WUC President, Kadeer met with then-US President George W. Bush on several occasions. As Bush waged his illegal war on Iraq and persecuted Muslim American leadership under the auspices of his so-called “war on terror,” Kadeer appealed to the US head of state to take up the cause of Uyghur Muslims. “I was deeply honored to meet with the President,” Kadeer stated.. She “expressed gratitude for President Bush’s demonstrated commitment to promoting freedom and democratic reform in the PRC.”
At the 2007 Democracy & Security International Conference in Prague, Bush praised Kadeer as a human rights defender in his address before the gathering. The conference was organized by the Prague Security Studies Institute, a think tank that aims to advance free-market societies in post-communist states, and the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, an Israeli outfit named for ultra-Zionist Republican casino baron Sheldon Adelson. Conference partners included the US government and NATO.
Kadeer kept close relationships with the Dalai Lama and Vaclav Havel, the leader of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ which brought down Czechoslovakia’s communist government. Havel was a “major proponent of NATO” and instrumental to the Western military alliance’s eastward expansion. Kadeer described Havel as “an uncompromising advocate for truth, justice and peace” and pointed to his political accomplishments as an example to be emulated for China. “Mr. Havel’s vision for the Czech people […] speaks to Chinese democrats today”, wrote Kadeer, following Havel’s death, and “contains […] the seeds of a new era for political reform in China.”
The current President of WUC is Dolkun Isa, winner of the 2019 Democracy Award from the NED. In 2016, Isa received a human rights award from the far-right Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by the US government in 1993. In his acceptance speech, Isa emphasized “the Uyghurs’ resistance to communism” and that “we will not stop our work until we consign this destructive ideology, in the words of Ronald Reagan, to ‘the ash heap of history.’”
Isa regularly lobbies US and Western politicians to intensify their new Cold War agenda by enacting economic sanctions and curbing ties with China.. Among those he has met with in recent years are Trump administration White House officials, right-wing Republican Senator Ted Cruz, and the fervently anti-China acting Director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell.
The @UyghurCongress president @Dolkun_Isa met with the American Ambassador to Germany @RichardGrenell in Berlin to brief him on current crisis in East Turkistan & discussed ways that the WUC could work with him in the future. pic.twitter.com/yottOysIj6
— WorldUyghurCongress (@UyghurCongress) July 5, 2019
In November 2019, Isa attended the Halifax International Security Forum, a gathering convened by NATO and the Canadian Department of National Defence. There, he met with leading Western political and military figures.
In January 2020, Isa was hosted at an event organized by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, a right-wing British Israeli lobby group. At the event, Isa met with with the ultra-Zionist organization Bnei Akiva, whose leader called for the Israeli Army “to take the foreskins of 300 Palestinians” amid Israel’s punishing 2014 assault on the besieged Gaza Strip.
Omer Kanat serves as the WUC’s Chairman of the Executive Committee. Kanat helped found the WUC and has been a permanent fixture in its executive leadership. The veteran operative has a lengthy history of work with the US government, from serving as senior editor of Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service from 1999 to 2009 to covering the US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan and interviewing the Dalai Lama for the network.
In an interview with The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal at a 2018 NED awards ceremony in the US Capitol building, Kanat took credit for furnishing many of the claims about internment camps in Xinjiang to Western media. He conceded, however, that the WUC did not know how the oft-repeated “millions detained” claim was arrived at aside from “Western media estimates.”
Preparing for a color revolution, WUC offshoots staff up with national security state operatives
Established in 1998, the Uyghur American Association (UAA) is a Washington D.C.-based affiliate of the WUC. A long time grantee of the NED, the UAA has received millions of dollars in funding. According to its publicly available tax filings, the group works closely with the US government, particularly the US State Department, Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), and US Congress’s Human Rights Commission.
“The National Endowment for Democracy has been exceptionally supportive of UAA,” stated Nury Turkel, former UAA President, “providing us with invaluable guidance and assistance” along with “essential funding.”
Turkel credited the NED with enabling the UAA increase its credibility and expand its influence. Among the top achievements he cited was a meeting with the new Krygyzstan government “within weeks of [the former government’s] fall from power” following the US-engineered Tulip “color revolution” which brought a pro-Western regime to power.
Speaking at the 5th Congress of the UAA, in 2006, Turkel confirmed the regime change agenda of the UAA, UHRP and broader Uyghur separatist movement, stating that “as we witnessed the ‘Tulip Revolution’ and the toppling the former government of Kyrgyzstan, our hopes were again reinforced.”
The UAA’s leadership consists of US national security state operators including employees of the US government, Radio Free Asia, and military-industrial complex.
Kuzzat Altay, the nephew of Reibya Kadeer, is the current president of the UAA. Altay is also the founder of the Uyghur Entrepreneurs Network, which claims to offer Uyghur Americans with guidance to “start their own business”.
In 2019, his business network has organized an event in collaboration with the FBI, the federal law enforcement agency notorious for its surveillance of Muslim Americans and ensnaring countless mentally troubled young Muslim American men in manufactured terror plots.
Past presidents of UAA include Kadeer; Alim Seytoff, a former Radio Free Asia correspondent and current Director of RFA’s Uyghur Service; and Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, who has worked at Booz Allen Hamilton since 2008.
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The main project spun out of the UAA and the NED is the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP). The UHRP was founded by the UAA in 2004 with the NED as the principal source of funding. The NED granted the UHRP a whopping $1,244,698 between 2016 and ’19.
The UHRP is staffed by WUC leaders like Omer Kanat and Nury Turkel, along with former US government officials and senior members of the NED.
Dr. Elise Anderson serves as UHRP’s Senior Program Office for Research and Advocacy. In 2019, Anderson served as the Liu Xiaobo Fellow, occupying a position at the Congressional-Executive Commission on China named for the far-right Chinese dissident who supported colonialism, US militarism and the “Westernisation” of China.
Anderson states that from 2012 to 2016, she was “based out of Ürümchi, the regional capital of Xinjiang,” conducting research for her doctorate. The extent of her activities in the region are unclear, as Anderson’s CV indicates that during this time she was also working for the US government as “Ürümchi Warden for the US Embassy in Beijing, China, 2014–16.”
Louisa Coan Greve, the former vice president of NED, today serves as UHRP’s Director of Global Advocacy. Greve formerly worked as Vice President of the NED.
Rushan Abbas, the US national security state’s favorite “human rights activist”
Another influential organization spun out of the WUC network is the Campaign for Uyghurs. This group is headed by Rushan Abbas, the former Vice President of the UAA. Promoted simply as a Uyghur “human rights activist” by Western media outlets including the supposedly adversarial Democracy Now!, Abbas is, in fact, a longtime US government and military operative.
Abbas boasts in her bio of her “extensive experience working with US government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of State, and various US intelligence agencies.”
While working for the military contractor L3 Technologies, Abbas served the US government and the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror as a “consultant at Guantanamo Bay supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Abbas “also worked as a linguist and translator for several federal agencies including work for the US State Department in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and for President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush”. Like so many of her colleagues, Abbas enjoyed a stint at Radio Free Asia.
While Abbas once shared her history of collaboration with the US government in the open, she has attempted to scrub biographic information from her online presence following a disastrous publicity appearance in December 2019. During a Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” question and answer forum, participants blasted Abbas as a “CIA asset” and frequent US government collaborator, prompting her attempt to disappear her bio from the internet.
Besides collaborating with the US government, Abbas’ professional experience consists of aiding the expansion of US capitalism in the global south. She boasts work with consulting firms such as ISI Consultants which “assists US companies to grow their business in Middle East and African markets.” Abbas claims to have “over 15 years of experience in global business development, strategic business analysis, business consultancy and government affairs throughout the Middle East, Africa, CIS regions, Europe, Asia, Australia, North America and Latin America.”
Celebrating the Gray Wolves, proposing US and Turkish military intervention
Along with their extensive ties to Washington, the WUC and Uyghur separatist movement has maintained close connections with the Turkish far-right.
In 2015, members of the MHP-affiliated Grey Wolves formerly led by Alparslan Türkes attacked South Korean tourists in Turkey, mistaking them for Chinese citizens, in protest of the situation in Xinjiang.
Turkish MHP party leader Devlet Bahçeli defended the attacks. “How are you going to differentiate between Korean and Chinese?” the rightist politician questioned. “They both have slanted eyes. Does it really matter?” Bahceli’s racist remarks coincided with the display of a Grey Wolves banner at party’s Istanbul headquarters reading, “We crave Chinese blood.”
The Grey Wolves and Uyghur militants were blamed by Thailand’s national police and an IHS-Jane’s analyst of carrying out a 2015 bombing of a religious shrine in Thailand that killed 20 people. The attack was intended as revenge against the Thai government’s decision to repatriate a group of Uyghur Muslims to China. Beijing had claimed the Uyghurs were en route to Turkey, Syria or Iraq to join extremist groups fighting in the region such as the al-Qaeda-affiliated East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), or Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP).
Months before the bombing, a group of 200 protesters waving East Turkestan flags attacked the Thai consulate in Istanbul in response to the Uyghur repatriation. The group was reportedly led by the Grey Wolves and East Turkestan Culture and Solidarity Association.. The latter organization was headed by Seyit Tümturk, who served as WUC Vice President from 2008 to 2016 and belonged to the organization’s founding pantheon.
The WUC continues to publish articles on its website that praise and celebrate Alparslan Türkes, the far-right, ultra-nationalist founder of the Grey Wolves and long-time MHP party leader. Its website also promotes endorsements of East Turkestan separatism by current leaders of the MHP and Grey Wolves.
While building links with the Turkish far-right, leading WUC representatives have appealed to Turkish President Erdogan to take an interventionist role in China akin to Turkey’s actions in Libya and Syria, where it supported the regime change efforts of the US, West and an array of extremist proxy groups.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2012, Nury Turkel argued that Turkey can play a leading role in “rallying democracies” to pressure China on Xinjiang: “As a longstanding ally of the US and a neighbor of Europe, Turkey is uniquely well-situated to do this.”
As a first step in this strategy, Turkel proposed that Turkey “should organize a ‘friends of Uighurs’ conference with democratic allies – similar to the ones organized for Libya and Syria – discussing Ankara’s vision and policy objectives with respect to the Uighur people in China.”
A Turkish soldier of the occupying force in NW Syria town of Atareb flashes the ‘Grey Wolves’ hand sign to an AFP photographer. Grey Wolves are an openly fascist Turkish ultra nationalist movement in Turkey who hold deeply racist hatred towards the Kurds. #TwitterKurds pic.twitter.com/j2G61DQVYO
— @Hevallo (@Hevallo) February 19, 2020
Other leading representatives of WUC have vocally endorsed Turkish military interventionism. The political statements of Seyit Tümturk, who served as WUC Vice President, underscore the extremist and militant politics behind WUC’s carefully cultivated image as a “peaceful and nonviolent” human rights organization.
In 2018, Tümturk declared that Chinese Uyghurs view Turkish “state requests as orders.” He then proclaimed that hundreds of thousands of Chinese Uyghurs were ready to enlist in the Turkish army and join Turkey’s illegal and brutal invasion of Northern Syria “to fight for God” – if ordered to do so by Erdogan.
Hundreds of thousands Uyghurs from #China’s Xinjiang region are ready to enlist Turkish army and join #Syria’s Afrin battle to fight for God with an order from Commander #Erdogan, says Seyit Tümtürk, head of Association for East Turkishtan Culture and Solidarity in #Turkey. pic.twitter.com/ElgslclOLS
— Abdullah Bozkurt (@abdbozkurt) March 11, 2018
Seyit Tümtürk, Uyghur leader in #Turkey, talks to Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu directly on the phone when he wanted to lead a rally before #China embassy in Ankara. He says Uyghurs consider Turkish state requests as orders and moves rally nearby Kugulu Park after talk pic.twitter.com/jsZIhEjfrg
— Abdullah Bozkurt (@abdbozkurt) December 6, 2018
Shortly after Tumturk’s comments, Uyghur militants dressed in Turkish military fatigues and on the Turkish side of the Syrian border released a video in which they threatened to wage war against China:
“Listen you dog bastards, do you see this? We will triumph!” one fighter exclaimed. “We will kill you all. Listen up Chinese civilians, get out of our East Turkestan. I am warning you. We shall return and we will be victorious.”
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“As this investigation establishes, the WUC is not a grassroots movement, but a US government-backed umbrella for several Washington-based outfits that also rely heavily on US funding and direction. Today, it is the main face and voice of a separatist operation dedicated to destabilizing the Xinjiang region of China and ultimately toppling the Chinese government.”
Yep, the WUC isn’t just some grassroots movement. It’s a regime-change umbrella organization that appears to be working as an extension of US foreign policy with the NED, an organization that has assumed the role the CIA played in covert operations years ago. And it appears that the NED’s work with the WUC has been accelerating in recent years, with over $1.284 million in funding for the WUC from the NED since 2016 alone. $1.2 million can go a lot way when it’s simply funding a propaganda outfit. And don’t forget: Judy Shelton has been the chair of the NED since 2017, so she is almost certainly deeply involved in these WUC operations:
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At the heart of this movement is the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), an international Uyghur organization that claims to be engaged in a “peaceful, nonviolent, and democratic” struggle for “human rights.” The WUC considers China’s northwestern Xinjiang region to be East Turkestan, and sees its Uyghur Muslim inhabitants not as Chinese citizens but instead as members of a pan-Turkic nation stretching from Central Asia to Turkey....
From its inception, the WUC has been backed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). With millions in US taxpayer money, the NED and its subsidiaries have backed opposition parties, “civil society” groups, and media organizations in countries targeted by the US for regime change.
Philip Agee, the late CIA whistleblower, described the work of the NED as a more sophisticated version of the old-fashioned covert operations that Langley used to engineer. “Nowadays,” Agee explained, “instead of having the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process by inserting money here and giving instructions secretly and so forth, they have now a sidekick, which is this National Endowment for Democracy, NED.”
Agee’s assessment was confirmed by Allen Weinstein, a former Trotskyist and founding member of the NED. Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
When the WUC was founded in 2004, the NED’s then-senior Asia program officer, Louisa Coan Greve, praised the move as a “great accomplishment.”
The NED has provided the WUC with millions of dollars in funding, including $1,284,000 since 2016 alone, and millions of dollars in additional funding to WUC-affiliate organizations. The grants are earmarked for training Uyghur activists and youth in media advocacy and lobbying “to raise awareness of and support for Uyghur human rights,” with a particular focus on US Congress, European Parliament, and the United Nations.
In 2018, the NED provided the WUC and its offshoots with close to $665,000, according to the former organization’s website.
The NED has played a direct role in molding the direction and politics of the WUC. Besides honeycombing WUC-affiliated organizations with NED operatives like Coan Greve, the NED has sponsored and organized annual “Leadership Training Seminars” for the WUC since 2007.
Many leading members of the WUC have also worked in senior positions for Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). These US government-run news agencies were created by the CIA during the Cold War to project propaganda into China and the Soviet Union, and to stir up opposition to communism on these countries’ frontiers.
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One of the organizations in the WUC umbrella is the Uyghur American Association (UAA), which works with NED on the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP). The UHRP has received $1.244 million from the NED from 2016–2019 alone and a former VP of the NED, Louis Coan Greve, currently serves as UHRP’s Director of Global Advocacy:
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Preparing for a color revolution, WUC offshoots staff up with national security state operativesEstablished in 1998, the Uyghur American Association (UAA) is a Washington D.C.-based affiliate of the WUC. A long time grantee of the NED, the UAA has received millions of dollars in funding. According to its publicly available tax filings, the group works closely with the US government, particularly the US State Department, Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), and US Congress’s Human Rights Commission.
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The UAA’s leadership consists of US national security state operators including employees of the US government, Radio Free Asia, and military-industrial complex.
Kuzzat Altay, the nephew of Reibya Kadeer, is the current president of the UAA. Altay is also the founder of the Uyghur Entrepreneurs Network, which claims to offer Uyghur Americans with guidance to “start their own business”.
In 2019, his business network has organized an event in collaboration with the FBI, the federal law enforcement agency notorious for its surveillance of Muslim Americans and ensnaring countless mentally troubled young Muslim American men in manufactured terror plots.
Past presidents of UAA include Kadeer; Alim Seytoff, a former Radio Free Asia correspondent and current Director of RFA’s Uyghur Service; and Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, who has worked at Booz Allen Hamilton since 2008.
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The main project spun out of the UAA and the NED is the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP). The UHRP was founded by the UAA in 2004 with the NED as the principal source of funding. The NED granted the UHRP a whopping $1,244,698 between 2016 and ’19.
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Louisa Coan Greve, the former vice president of NED, today serves as UHRP’s Director of Global Advocacy. Greve formerly worked as Vice President of the NED.
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There’s also the Campaign for Uyghurs, headed by Rushan Abbas, a figure who literally worked as a consultant for the US’s Guantanamo Bay operations during the Bush administration:
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Rushan Abbas, the US national security state’s favorite “human rights activist”Another influential organization spun out of the WUC network is the Campaign for Uyghurs. This group is headed by Rushan Abbas, the former Vice President of the UAA. Promoted simply as a Uyghur “human rights activist” by Western media outlets including the supposedly adversarial Democracy Now!, Abbas is, in fact, a longtime US government and military operative.
Abbas boasts in her bio of her “extensive experience working with US government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of State, and various US intelligence agencies.”
While working for the military contractor L3 Technologies, Abbas served the US government and the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror as a “consultant at Guantanamo Bay supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.” Abbas “also worked as a linguist and translator for several federal agencies including work for the US State Department in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and for President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush”. Like so many of her colleagues, Abbas enjoyed a stint at Radio Free Asia.
While Abbas once shared her history of collaboration with the US government in the open, she has attempted to scrub biographic information from her online presence following a disastrous publicity appearance in December 2019. During a Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” question and answer forum, participants blasted Abbas as a “CIA asset” and frequent US government collaborator, prompting her attempt to disappear her bio from the internet.
Besides collaborating with the US government, Abbas’ professional experience consists of aiding the expansion of US capitalism in the global south. She boasts work with consulting firms such as ISI Consultants which “assists US companies to grow their business in Middle East and African markets.” Abbas claims to have “over 15 years of experience in global business development, strategic business analysis, business consultancy and government affairs throughout the Middle East, Africa, CIS regions, Europe, Asia, Australia, North America and Latin America.”
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Anothe past WUC presdient, Rebiya Kadeer, is married to a former employee of the US government media outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. And the current presidenct, Dolkun ISA, is the winner of the NED’s 2019 Democracy Award:
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In 2006, Erkin Alptekin was succeeded as WUC President by Rebiya Kadeer, a self-described multi-millionaire real estate and trading entrepreneur who profited off of China’s economic reforms of the 1980s and claims to have once been the seventh wealthiest individual in the country. According to The New York Times, Kadeer’s “[d]issidence brought the end of her Audi, her three villas and her far-flung business empire”. Kadeer’s husband, SIdik Rouzi, worked for US government media outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia....
The current President of WUC is Dolkun Isa, winner of the 2019 Democracy Award from the NED. In 2016, Isa received a human rights award from the far-right Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by the US government in 1993. In his acceptance speech, Isa emphasized “the Uyghurs’ resistance to communism” and that “we will not stop our work until we consign this destructive ideology, in the words of Ronald Reagan, to ‘the ash heap of history.’”
Isa regularly lobbies US and Western politicians to intensify their new Cold War agenda by enacting economic sanctions and curbing ties with China.. Among those he has met with in recent years are Trump administration White House officials, right-wing Republican Senator Ted Cruz, and the fervently anti-China acting Director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell.
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But the WUC and its umbrella groups don’t just have deep ties to the US national security state. The founder of the Uyghur separatist movement, Isa Yusuf Alptekin, was an ally of the Chinese nationalists who received US support during WWII and seen as prime candidates for Xinjiang’s provincial administration:
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The Far-Right Roots of the Uyghur “Human Rights” MovementBehind its carefully constructed human rights brand, the Uyghur separatist movement emerged from elements in Xinjiang which view socialism as “the enemy of Islam,” and which sought Washington’s support from the outset, presenting themselves as eager foot-soldiers for US hegemony.
The founding father of this separatist movement was Isa Yusuf Alptekin. His son, Erkin Alptekin, founded the WUC and served as the organization’s inaugural president. The senior Alptekin is referred to as “our late leader” by the WUC and current President Dolkun Isa.
Born at the turn of the 20th century, Alptekin was the son of a local government Xinjiang official. He received a largely Islamic education as a youth, as his family intended for him to be a religious scholar.
During the Chinese Civil War that raged between the nationalists and communists from 1945 to ’49, Alptekin served under the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) administration in Xinjiang. Throughout this period, the KMT received massive military and economic backing from the United States — including billions of dollars in cash and military hardware, along with the deployment of tens of thousands of US marines — in an effort to quash the Chinese revolution.
At the same time, according to historian Linda Benson, Alptekin “became more active in both the Guomindang [sic] and national level politics … and met several times with [KMT leader] Chiang Kai-shek personally.” For Alptekin and fellow travelers advancing Turkic nationalism and the region’s eventual independence, “equally important was the necessity of protecting the land they called East Turkestan from Soviet and Chinese communism, both of which were viewed as real and present dangers to Islamic peoples.”
For the KMT, Uyghur activists like Alptekin made prime candidates for Xinjiang’s provincial administration. As Benson explained, “[t]he essential qualification for such appointees… was that they be anti-Communist and anti-Soviet.” In his memoirs, Alptekin revealed that he “sought to eliminate all Russians and leftists in the government,” and said that “schools were also encouraged to include religious instruction in their curriculum.”
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Alptekin went on to develop deep ties to the Turkish far right, in part because he shares their pan-Turkic, neo-Ottomanist ideology. An ideology that calls for breaking Xinjiang province off of China and making it part of some sort of pan-Turkic empire. Given that the ideological foundations of Erodogan’s government is rooted in this pan-Turkic, neo-Ottomanist ideology, it’s a reminder that Turkey is going to inevitably be involved in the current China destablization push:
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Forging bonds with fascistic, ethno-supremacist Turkish nationalistsWhile appealing for Washington’s support, Alptekin developed strong ties with the Turkish far-right. Their bonds rested on a solid foundation of anti-communist zeal and pan-Turkic, neo-Ottomanist nationalism.
On numerous occasions, Alptekin met with Alparslan Türkes a fascistic, ultra-nationalist who believed ardently in Turkish ethnic superiority over minorities like Kurds and Armenians, and for whom the eradication of communism among the Turkic populations of Soviet Central Asia and Xinjiang was “the dream he had most cherished”.
Türkes was long-time leader of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP) and its paramilitary arm, the Grey Wolves. According to the Washington Post, he headed a murderous group of “right-wing terrorists” who are “blindly nationalist, fascist or nearly so, and bent on the extermination of the Communists.” The fascistic militant group killed numerous left-wing activists, students, Kurds, and notoriously attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II.
With military training from the US, Türkes co-founded the Turkish cell of Operation Gladio, the US and NATO-backed network of “stay behind” anti-communist paramilitary groups that carried out numerous acts of terror and sabotage across Europe.
Alptekin appears to have shared the hateful politics of Türkes and the Turkish far-right, often expressing anti-Armenian views including denial of the Armenian genocide and claims that Armenians were murderers of innocent Turks.
The Turkish right-wing has embraced the East Turkestan separatist movement with open arms, appealing to them as a key base of political support. “The martyrs of East Turkestan are our martyrs,” stated Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then mayor of Istanbul, as he inaugurated a park named in honor of Alptekin, following the death of the Uyghur nationalist in 1995.
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Perhaps the most chilling part of this history in the current context is the celebration by the WUC of Alparslan Türkes, the founder of the fascist Grey Wolves, and what appears to be a drive to militarize the Uygar separatist movement, in part by sending Uygar’s to fight in places like Syria and calls for Turkey to play a similar role in Xinjiang that it played in Syria and Libya. It’s like a call for civil war:
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Celebrating the Gray Wolves, proposing US and Turkish military interventionAlong with their extensive ties to Washington, the WUC and Uyghur separatist movement has maintained close connections with the Turkish far-right.
In 2015, members of the MHP-affiliated Grey Wolves formerly led by Alparslan Türkes attacked South Korean tourists in Turkey, mistaking them for Chinese citizens, in protest of the situation in Xinjiang.
Turkish MHP party leader Devlet Bahçeli defended the attacks. “How are you going to differentiate between Korean and Chinese?” the rightist politician questioned. “They both have slanted eyes. Does it really matter?” Bahceli’s racist remarks coincided with the display of a Grey Wolves banner at party’s Istanbul headquarters reading, “We crave Chinese blood.”
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The WUC continues to publish articles on its website that praise and celebrate Alparslan Türkes, the far-right, ultra-nationalist founder of the Grey Wolves and long-time MHP party leader. Its website also promotes endorsements of East Turkestan separatism by current leaders of the MHP and Grey Wolves.
While building links with the Turkish far-right, leading WUC representatives have appealed to Turkish President Erdogan to take an interventionist role in China akin to Turkey’s actions in Libya and Syria, where it supported the regime change efforts of the US, West and an array of extremist proxy groups.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2012, Nury Turkel argued that Turkey can play a leading role in “rallying democracies” to pressure China on Xinjiang: “As a longstanding ally of the US and a neighbor of Europe, Turkey is uniquely well-situated to do this.”
As a first step in this strategy, Turkel proposed that Turkey “should organize a ‘friends of Uighurs’ conference with democratic allies – similar to the ones organized for Libya and Syria – discussing Ankara’s vision and policy objectives with respect to the Uighur people in China.”
...
Other leading representatives of WUC have vocally endorsed Turkish military interventionism. The political statements of Seyit Tümturk, who served as WUC Vice President, underscore the extremist and militant politics behind WUC’s carefully cultivated image as a “peaceful and nonviolent” human rights organization.
In 2018, Tümturk declared that Chinese Uyghurs view Turkish “state requests as orders.” He then proclaimed that hundreds of thousands of Chinese Uyghurs were ready to enlist in the Turkish army and join Turkey’s illegal and brutal invasion of Northern Syria “to fight for God” – if ordered to do so by Erdogan.
...
Shortly after Tumturk’s comments, Uyghur militants dressed in Turkish military fatigues and on the Turkish side of the Syrian border released a video in which they threatened to wage war against China:
“Listen you dog bastards, do you see this? We will triumph!” one fighter exclaimed. “We will kill you all. Listen up Chinese civilians, get out of our East Turkestan. I am warning you. We shall return and we will be victorious.”
...
So that was our look at how the NED is really the chief sponsor of the WUC and its offshoots. It’s part of a a relationship with the US national security state that goes back decades and appears to have deepened in recent years with significant funding from the NED since 2016. And, again, it was none other than Judy Shelton — the gold bug who is poised to ascend to the Federal Reserve board of governors and will then become a top candidate to chair the Fed ‑who was appointed to be chair of the NED in January of 2017. Was Shelton selected for that role with the destabilization campaign in mind? And in the context of this global pandemic and self-inflicted global economic shock, is the China destabilization campaign now part of a broad far global economic destabilization campaign that could transform the global economy and societies? These are the kinds of disturbing questions we have to ask given that we’re living in an era when the far right dominates governments across the planet.
Robert Mercer’s Anti-Fed/pro-Gold Standard Conference. Featuring Judy Shelton
Now here’s a Bloomberg article from 2016 about Robert Mercer’s background and beliefs. Part of what jumps out about Mercer in the article is that he’s so secretive the profile had to be largely based on anonymous insights by the people who know him and even those insights are somewhat contradictory. In other words, even Mercer’s friends and associates don’t really know his beliefs. But one consistent picture that emerges is that Mercer is a hard core far right ideologue when it comes to economics and finance and he appears to have developed a deep loathing of modern finance. The guy even opposes fractional reserve banking. And not only is he an advocate of returning to the gold standard but he’s also the chief sponsor of the “Jackson Hole Summit”, an ‘counter-conference’ held in 2015 at the same time the Federal Reserve held its annual gathering in Jackson Hole Wyoming. Mercer’s ‘counter-conference’ was dedicated to attacking the existence of the Fed and promoting a return to the gold standard. So, of course, we find that Judy Shelton was one of the speakers.
So while Robert Mercer’s beliefs might be somewhat obscured by his extreme secrecy, it’s unambiguous clear that he seriously wants to see the current financial system collapse and be replaced with a gold standard:
Bloomberg
What Kind of Man Spends Millions to Elect Ted Cruz?
Robert Mercer is one of the wealthiest, most secretive, influential, and reactionary Republicans in the country.By Zachary Mider
January 20, 2016, 4:45 AM CSTIn 2010, Arthur Robinson, a research chemist, decided to run for Congress in southern Oregon. Robinson, now 73, was not your average candidate. In a lab on a sheep ranch in the Siskiyou Mountains, he’s spent the last couple of years collecting thousands of vials of human urine. Funded by private donors, he claims his work holds the key to extending the human life span and wresting control of medicine from what he calls the “medical-industrial-government complex.” He has some unusual ideas. According to his monthly newsletter, nuclear radiation can be good for you and climate science is a hoax. In his spare time, he buys unwanted pipe organs from churches and reassembles them on his property.
Robinson was new to politics and had little money of his own. The Democratic incumbent, Peter DeFazio, had held office for more than 20 years and easily outspent him. But six weeks before the election, a barrage of ads hit the airwaves, portraying DeFazio as a puppet of the Democratic leadership. Robinson lost, but the $600,000 in ads helped him turn in the best performance by a Republican in the district in decades.
When the ads first appeared, Robinson says he had no idea who’d paid for them. Eventually the Washington operatives who bought them revealed they were working for Robert Mercer, a computer programmer and hedge fund manager in New York. Robinson knew Mercer slightly, as a donor to his research projects and a subscriber to his newsletter. Once, he’d even visited Mercer at his extravagant mansion on Long Island Sound. He says they’ve never discussed politics.
Mercer is one of the most enigmatic and powerful forces in U.S. politics. Beginning around the time of Robinson’s race, Mercer has put at least $32 million behind conservative candidates for office, including $11 million for a group supporting Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. So far, Mercer is the biggest single donor in the race. Working with his daughter Rebekah, he’s spent tens of millions more to advance a conservative agenda, investing in think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the media outlet Breitbart.com, and Cambridge Analytica, a data company that builds psychological profiles of voters. Groups he funds have attacked the science of global warming, published a book critical of Hillary Clinton, and bankrolled a documentary celebrating Ayn Rand.
Mercer, 69, has never spoken publicly about his political priorities and declined a request to be interviewed for this story. This account is based on interviews with more than two dozen people who have spent time with Mercer or worked on his political efforts, very few of whom were willing to speak on the record. He’s tight-lipped even with his friends. That’s made him an object of intense speculation. Some allies privately say they think he’s pro-life and opposed to gay marriage, and others say the opposite. Republican operatives gossip about what little scraps of information they can glean—his theatrical Christmas galas, his habit of whistling to himself during business meetings. Other powerful conservatives court him: Freedom Partners, the network overseen by the brothers Charles and David Koch, sometimes caters events with cookies from Ruby et Violette, a bakery owned by Rebekah and her two sisters.
Mercer is the co-chief executive officer of one of the country’s largest and most secretive hedge funds, Renaissance Technologies, but people who’ve spent time with him say he hasn’t shown any interest in advancing its agenda in Washington. They say he disdains the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which he sees as too cozy with Big Business and Wall Street. Unlike many of his peers in New York financial circles, he doesn’t shrink from the culture wars. He’s supported a campaign for the death penalty in Nebraska and funded ads in New York critical of the so-called ground-zero mosque. He and Rebekah have also directed money to an anti-abortion group and a Christian college, though people who know the father and daughter say they don’t talk about religion.
A surprising amount of Mercer’s attention and money finds its way to some of the most unusual fringes of the right wing. He’s attended and funded an annual conference organized by Jane Orient, an Arizona physician and activist who recently suggested in an opinion article that elements in the U.S. government might have taken part in the San Bernardino massacre. Mercer money also found its way to an Idaho activist named Fred Kelly Grant, who travels the country encouraging legal challenges to environmental laws, which he says are part of a sinister plot by the United Nations to depopulate rural America.
“He’s a very independent thinker,” says Sean Fieler, a conservative donor in New Jersey who’s worked with Mercer on advocating a return to the gold standard. “He’s a guy with his own ideas, and very developed ideas, and I wouldn’t want to speak on his behalf.”
Four people who’ve discussed the matter with him say Mercer is preoccupied with the country’s monetary and banking systems, which he sees as hopelessly compromised by government meddling. He was the main financial backer of the Jackson Hole Summit, a conference that took place in Wyoming last August to advocate for the gold standard, two of these people said. His name wasn’t anywhere on the agenda. According to video shot at the event, he sat with Rebekah toward the back of the audience, an unobtrusive, silver-haired gentleman with dark brows, wire-rimmed glasses, a navy suit, and a red tie. At dinner that night, he sat at a table while other guests chattered around him, softly whistling to himself.
Mercer’s rapid emergence as a political force was helped along by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held in Citizens United v. FEC in January 2010 that independent political spending is protected by the First Amendment. The ruling opened the door for unlimited election spending by individuals and corporations, most of which ended up being funneled through the groups that have become known as super PACs. Eight months after Citizens United, Mercer funded one of the country’s first super-PACs to support Robinson’s bid in Oregon.
Critics warned that Citizens United would bring about a new era of corporate influence in politics, with companies and businesspeople buying elections to promote their financial interests. So far, that hasn’t happened much; big corporations, for instance, still play a negligible role in presidential election spending. Instead, a small group of billionaires has flooded races with ideologically tinged contributions. The result has been a shift in power away from the political parties and toward the whims of the donors themselves. In part, this explains the large number and variety of candidates fielded by the Republicans in 2016.
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A month after the California conference, the Mercers headed to Jackson Hole. Every summer top officials at the Federal Reserve gather in the Wyoming resort community with many of the world’s top economists to discuss monetary policy. But the Mercers went instead to the Jackson Hole Summit, a “counter-conference” they funded through a nonprofit group called the American Principles Project. The summit’s purpose was to question the very purpose of the Fed, calling for an end to government involvement in the money supply and a return to the gold standard. Steve Lonegan, an APP activist from New Jersey, opened the event by waving a dollar bill in the air. “Today, my friends, this little piece of paper in our pocket is manipulated, its value determined, and undermined routinely, by a bunch of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who are meeting right now a few miles away,” he said. “America needs to wake up to this threat!”
The U.S. turned away from the gold standard during the Great Depression and dropped its last links in 1971. It’s difficult to find a mainstream economist who advocates for it; a 2012 survey of economists at top U.S. universities failed to turn up a single supporter. Yet it’s a particular interest of Mercer’s, say several people who’ve discussed the matter with him.
Mercer is also a passionate critic of a central element of the modern financial system known as fractional reserve banking, these people said. Essentially, it’s the practice of banks lending out their depositors’ money to others. Banks have been doing this for hundreds of years, but a few out-of-the-mainstream economists consider it a form of fraud—akin to conjuring currency out of thin air. According to one associate, a thinker said to be influential with Mercer is Murray Rothbard, the late economist who called the modern banking system “a shell game, a Ponzi scheme.” It’s unclear how Mercer’s views on the banking system square with his hedge fund activities; it emerged in the Senate tax investigation that Renaissance, to boost returns, sometimes sought leverage of as much as 20 times the value of its assets from giant banks such as Barclays.
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“What Kind of Man Spends Millions to Elect Ted Cruz?” by Zachary Mider; Bloomberg; 01/20/2016
“Four people who’ve discussed the matter with him say Mercer is preoccupied with the country’s monetary and banking systems, which he sees as hopelessly compromised by government meddling. He was the main financial backer of the Jackson Hole Summit, a conference that took place in Wyoming last August to advocate for the gold standard, two of these people said. His name wasn’t anywhere on the agenda. According to video shot at the event, he sat with Rebekah toward the back of the audience, an unobtrusive, silver-haired gentleman with dark brows, wire-rimmed glasses, a navy suit, and a red tie. At dinner that night, he sat at a table while other guests chattered around him, softly whistling to himself.”
Robert Mercer literally paid for an whole ‘counter-summit’ to troll the Fed and call for a return to the abolition of the Fed and a return to the gold standard. He hides a lot about himself but there’s no hiding the fact that he really does want to see this happen:
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A month after the California conference, the Mercers headed to Jackson Hole. Every summer top officials at the Federal Reserve gather in the Wyoming resort community with many of the world’s top economists to discuss monetary policy. But the Mercers went instead to the Jackson Hole Summit, a “counter-conference” they funded through a nonprofit group called the American Principles Project. The summit’s purpose was to question the very purpose of the Fed, calling for an end to government involvement in the money supply and a return to the gold standard. Steve Lonegan, an APP activist from New Jersey, opened the event by waving a dollar bill in the air. “Today, my friends, this little piece of paper in our pocket is manipulated, its value determined, and undermined routinely, by a bunch of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who are meeting right now a few miles away,” he said. “America needs to wake up to this threat!”The U.S. turned away from the gold standard during the Great Depression and dropped its last links in 1971. It’s difficult to find a mainstream economist who advocates for it; a 2012 survey of economists at top U.S. universities failed to turn up a single supporter. Yet it’s a particular interest of Mercer’s, say several people who’ve discussed the matter with him.
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And note how none other than the godfather of anarcho-capitalism — Murray Rothbard — is said to be influential with Mercer:
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Mercer is also a passionate critic of a central element of the modern financial system known as fractional reserve banking, these people said. Essentially, it’s the practice of banks lending out their depositors’ money to others. Banks have been doing this for hundreds of years, but a few out-of-the-mainstream economists consider it a form of fraud—akin to conjuring currency out of thin air. According to one associate, a thinker said to be influential with Mercer is Murray Rothbard, the late economist who called the modern banking system “a shell game, a Ponzi scheme.” It’s unclear how Mercer’s views on the banking system square with his hedge fund activities; it emerged in the Senate tax investigation that Renaissance, to boost returns, sometimes sought leverage of as much as 20 times the value of its assets from giant banks such as Barclays....
It’s worth recalling someone else who was deeply influenced by Rothbard: Hans Hermann Hoppe, an advocate of “voluntary slavery” contracts and a return to the monarchy. Anarcho-capitalists for monarchy. That’s the kind of fanaticism we’re dealing with and these are the people with the hands on the levers of power. And in the case of Shelton, she’s poised to dramatically increase her grip on the levers of power once the Republicans give her the green light to join the Fed board of governors.
Also keep in mind that the fact that Shelton spoke at this ‘anti-Fed’ event wasn’t a secret when she was made the chair of the NED in 2017. It highlights the reality that there’s probably A LOT more support than is publicly acknowledged within the GOP for blowing up the Fed and returning to the gold standard. And never forget: when we are talking about ending the Federal returning to the gold standard we are implicitly talking about bringing about a massive financial and economic collapse. So if he seems like Trump and the GOP are trying to blow up the economy, well, maybe they are literally trying to do exactly that.
J. Kyle Bass: The Billionaire Prepper Who Has Mixed Feelings About the Gold Standard But Strong Feelings about the Collapse of Society
Ok, now here’s a piece from August of 2019 about J. Kyle Bass encouraging investors to buy gold and real estate in preparation for what he expected to be a major economic war between the Trump administration in China and his ongoing prediction of the collapse of China’s economy.
Now, as we’ll see in the fourth article, Bass isn’t necessarily an advocate of returning to the gold standard. In 2012, when he was also encouraging investors to buy gold, he came out and said he didn’t think a gold standard practical. But he went on to suggest that economies should instead be linked to a basket of goods and services. Now, that could be interpreted in a lot of ways. But it’s not hard to imagine that he’s envisioning something like a ‘gold or silver or copper or [insert commodity here]’ standard, which could easily become just a new version of gold standard. At a minimum, it sounds like a call to reject fiat currencies and return to the old way of doing things, just without gold being the sole standard. But, again, that’s a hard statement to interpret.
But as we’ll see in the fifth article below, Bass also appears to be a kind of billionaire doomsday prepper, with a large stockpile of weapons, explosives, gold, platinum, and even millions of nickels. It sounds like he expects nickels to eventually be worth more than 5 cents, which is basically a doomsday bet. He even has a Humvee with a button he can push that will drop a bunch of tacks on the road behind him. These are all classic traits of rich gold bugs who are expecting the end of civilization.
So when we hear Bass advising investors to buy gold in anticipation of a deepening trade war between the US and China, it’s important to keep in mind that this is someone who has been actively preparing for some sort of doomsday scenario and who might want to want to see some sort of fundamental shift in the economy that back to something very analogous to the gold standard.
The following article also notes that Bass’s investment firm, Hayman Capital Management, is a hedge fund that specializes in “global event-driven opportunities”. So it’s a hedge fund that makes big bets about geopolitical possibilities, which makes it the kind of hedge fund that groups that want to make those geopolitical possibilities a reality might want to partner with:
MarketWatch
Kyle Bass says Wall Street investors should ignore G‑20 and brace for a fresh round of Trump tariffs
Exclusive: Bass says ‘I don’t imagine anything getting done,’ and tells investors to buy gold, real estate
By Chris Matthews
Published: June 26, 2019 at 4:58 p.m. ETInvestors are laser-focused on this weekend’s G‑20 meeting in Japan, but famed hedge-fund manager Kyle Bass predicted that nothing of importance will be achieved there, and that investors should prepare for President Donald Trump to slap tariffs on every last dollar of Chinese imports.
President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet on the sidelines of the G‑20 gathering, set to kick off Friday in Osaka, and investors are increasingly hopeful that it will result in an easing of U.S.-China trade tensions and the resumption of negotiations to roll back existing import duties.
“I don’t imagine anything getting done,” Kyle Bass, managing director of Hayman Capital Partners told MarketWatch in an exclusive interview. While both parties may agree to schedule new talks, in an effort to boost investor sentiment, Bass said it’s in neither Trump’s nor Xi’s interest to actually reach a deal.
“Xi believes he can wait out Trump’s tenure,” with the idea that he won’t be re-elected in 2020 and Xi does not face an election. Meanwhile, it’s in Trump interest to avoid any deal unless it includes Beijing agreeing to robust enforcement mechanisms and changes to Chinese law that would give a trade deal real teeth. “If Trump agrees to an imperfect deal he’ll be attacked from both the left and the right,” a situation the president will seek to avoid heading into his reelection campaign, Bass said.
Both sides, however, will see benefit in issuing communiqués that create the appearance of progress, to boost stock markets and buy time, he said.
Bass said he expects President Trump to ultimately place tariffs on the remaining $300 billion in goods imported annually that aren’t yet taxed, as the president will be forced to follow through on this threat once its apparent that progress isn’t being made.
However, Bass is sanguine about the effects of these tariffs on the U.S. economy and stock market, pointing out that the $100 to $150 billion would be raised annually from 25% levies on all Chinese imports is just a fraction of the size of both the U.S. and Chinese economies.
Despite a consistent ratcheting up of tariff levels over the past 18 months, the S&P 500 index reached record highs last week, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average is roughly 1% from its record high reached last October.
Bass is the founder and principal of Hayman Capital Management, a hedge fund focused on global event-driven opportunities and is based in Dallas, Texas. In 2008 Bass successfully bet against the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis by purchasing credit default swaps which increased in value as the real estate bubble burst.
What should worry investors, however, Bass said, is a Chinese economy that will continue to slow as rising wages, insurance and shipping costs are robbing China of its longtime advantage as the world’s cheapest source of manufactured goods. “It’s cheaper to make products in Mexico,” and ship them to the United States in many cases, he said.
As this advantage has all but disappeared, so has the Chinese government’s ability to continue to prop up growth with government-directed lending and infrastructure spending. He said that when you combine central and local government spending, China is running budget deficits of 10% of its gross domestic product, or GDP, at the same time that it is evolving into an economy with a trade deficit, rather than the surpluses that marked China’s economic rise.
He said China’s growth has created massive demand for foreign oil, basic materials and food, which must be purchased with U.S. dollars, turning it into a “twin deficit” country, where any further government stimulus will put significant downward pressure on the value of the renminbi while encouraging wealthy Chinese to do whatever they can to move their wealth to more stable economies.
China’s fossil fuel imports, for instance, have risen from $27.9 billion in 2015 to $46.5 billion last year, an increase of 67%, according to FactSet.
A hamstrung and dollar-thirsty Chinese government, therefore, will be forced to preside over an ever slowing economy, and this downturn will help drag the U.S. into a mild recession by the middle of 2020, Bass predicted.
He advised average investors to prepare for this downturn by adding to their gold and real estate holdings. “It’s no secret why bitcoin which I don’t own, and gold are starting to do well again,” he said. “Everyone sees the writing on the wall.”
“You have to own real assets, and the best thing is to be levered in real assets, like apartment buildings,” arguing that it’s an investment that will provide both steady income and will have the chance to appreciate in value as the Fed moves to lower interest rates in response.
Lower interest rates tend to be good for real estate, as it reduces the cost of borrowing to finance purchases, and Bass predicted the Federal Reserve will be forced to lower interest rates to near zero by the middle of next year.
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“Bass is the founder and principal of Hayman Capital Management, a hedge fund focused on global event-driven opportunities and is based in Dallas, Texas. In 2008 Bass successfully bet against the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis by purchasing credit default swaps which increased in value as the real estate bubble burst.”
A hedge fund focused on global event-driven opportunities. It’s certainly an interesting approach to investing and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But it does become a lot more questionable when the big global even-driven opportunity your hedge fund is betting on is the collapse of China and the head of your fund is coordinating with figures like Steve Bannon to help make that happen. Nonetheless, he was predicting a big downturn in China (as he had been predicting for years) and would make gold and real estate good investments going forward. So while Bass may not be an overt gold standard advocate, his investment strategy is certainly poised to profit massively from the kind of economic turmoil and collapse the gold standard advocates would love to see:
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What should worry investors, however, Bass said, is a Chinese economy that will continue to slow as rising wages, insurance and shipping costs are robbing China of its longtime advantage as the world’s cheapest source of manufactured goods. “It’s cheaper to make products in Mexico,” and ship them to the United States in many cases, he said.As this advantage has all but disappeared, so has the Chinese government’s ability to continue to prop up growth with government-directed lending and infrastructure spending. He said that when you combine central and local government spending, China is running budget deficits of 10% of its gross domestic product, or GDP, at the same time that it is evolving into an economy with a trade deficit, rather than the surpluses that marked China’s economic rise.
He said China’s growth has created massive demand for foreign oil, basic materials and food, which must be purchased with U.S. dollars, turning it into a “twin deficit” country, where any further government stimulus will put significant downward pressure on the value of the renminbi while encouraging wealthy Chinese to do whatever they can to move their wealth to more stable economies.
China’s fossil fuel imports, for instance, have risen from $27.9 billion in 2015 to $46.5 billion last year, an increase of 67%, according to FactSet.
A hamstrung and dollar-thirsty Chinese government, therefore, will be forced to preside over an ever slowing economy, and this downturn will help drag the U.S. into a mild recession by the middle of 2020, Bass predicted.
He advised average investors to prepare for this downturn by adding to their gold and real estate holdings. “It’s no secret why bitcoin which I don’t own, and gold are starting to do well again,” he said. “Everyone sees the writing on the wall.”
“You have to own real assets, and the best thing is to be levered in real assets, like apartment buildings,” arguing that it’s an investment that will provide both steady income and will have the chance to appreciate in value as the Fed moves to lower interest rates in response.
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Now here’s a 2012 piece about Bass — who sits on the board of the University of Texas — encouraging the university to take physical posession of $1 billion in gold coins sitting in its endowment fund. The rationale is that it’s cheaper to hold it themselves than pay for storage. And it’s during an interview where he discusses this advice that he gave to the university where he mentions that, while he’s not in favor of returning the the gold standard, he is an advocate of tying economies to a basket of goods and services. Is that a call for ending fiat currency and modern finance? It’s unclear, but everything else about the guy certainly points in that direction:
Business Insider
Kyle Bass Explains Why He Had The University Of Texas Take Physical Delivery Of $1 Billion In Solid Gold
Linette Lopez
Mar 12, 2012, 2:30 PMWe already know that Hayman Capital’s Kyle Bass is getting ready for the worst. Case in point, he keeps all kinds of weapons on his Texas compound and he’s buying up nickels because he believes the coins will eventually be worth more than 5 cents. (Learn more about Bass’ fascinating quirks here).
He’s also bullish on gold, and he reminded CNBC why in an interview today:
“The pattern is set, we’re going to continue to monetize fiscal deficits by expanding central bank balance sheets... I call it creating money out of thin air.”
He believes this so fully that while he was on the board of the University of Texas, he had them take physical delivery of $1 billion in gold. You can watch him explain why in the video below (via CNBC), but in a nutshell, he figured out that it would be much cheaper to store it.
And for the record, Bass doesn’t advocate going back to the gold standard, he thinks that’s impractical. Instead, he believes our economy should be tied to a basket of goods and services.
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“And for the record, Bass doesn’t advocate going back to the gold standard, he thinks that’s impractical. Instead, he believes our economy should be tied to a basket of goods and services.”
He’s not in favor of a gold standard. But is he in favor of a not-only-gold standard of a basket of commodities instead? If so, that’s still largely the same principle. And that makes him essentially in line with figures like Robert Mercer and Judy Shelton. It also raises the question of what other commodities he would like to see in the basket of goods and services. Especially since he appears to have stockpiles of gold, platinum, tens of millions of nickels, explosives, and guns:
Business Insider
10 Fascinating Facts About The Fabulous Life Of Hedge Funder Kyle Bass
Linette Lopez Nov 23, 2011, 10:10 AM
Michael Lewis’ book, Boomerang starts at the home of Texas hedge fund manager, Kyle Bass.
If you don’t know about Bass, you should. He manages Hayman Capital, and made a ton of money predicting the subprime mortgage crises. Now he’s betting all of his money that sovereign debt will be the next big thing to take down the world.He started off betting against Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland and Greece back in 2008 (not bad a bad call, obviously).
Today, he’s having an excellent day. That’s because since then, he bet a ton of money against France. And you know what ratings agencies are saying about France today.
That aside though, Kyle Bass’s worst day is still a great day for most people anyway. Let’s just put it this way, he’s an interesting man with a lot of toys.
Kyle Bass learned to love trading by playing Risk as a child.
Michael Lewis wondered how a Texan who had barely left the country could be so interested in the debt of foreign countries, especially Iceland— which was Bass’ first obsession.
Very simple. Bass loves Risk, and Iceland was his favorite place to put troops because they’re easy to defend there.
Source: Boomerang, by Michael Lewis
He has a plan for when every thing crashes — buy guns and gold.
He even told his mom:
“You need physical gold.” He explained that when the next crisis struck, the gold futures market was likely to seize up, as there were more outstanding futures contracts than available gold. People who thought they owned gold would find they owned pieces of paper instead.
Source: Boomerang, by Michael Lewis
Aside from gold bricks, he also keeps platinum bars.
Some is in his desk at Hayman, some is in vaults in Houston.
Source: Boomerang, by Michael Lewis
Some things he collects are a little strange— like nickels.
Yes. Nickels. The coins (From Boomerang):
“The value of the metal in a nickel is worth six point eight cents,” he said. “Did you know that?..I just bought a million dollars’ worth of them,” he said, and then, perhaps sensing I couldn’t do the math: “twenty million nickels.”...
“How do you buy twenty million nickels?”
“Actually, it’s very difficult,” he said, and then explained that he had to call his bank and talk them into ordering him twenty million nickels. The bank had finally done it, but the Federal Reserve had its own questions. “The Fed apparently called my guy at the bank,” he says. “They asked him, ‘Why do you want all these nickels?’ So he called me and asked, ‘Why do you want all these nickels?’ And I said, ‘I just like nickels.’”
He pulled out a photograph of his nickels and handed it to me. There they were, piled up on giant wooden pallets in a Brink’s vault in downtown Dallas.
Source: Boomerang, by Michael Lewis
This is less strange— Bass also has a ton of semi-automatic weapons.
Latest issue U.S. Army sniper rifle with infared scopes.
Source: Boomerang, by Michael Lewis
Also explosives that he buys online and has Fed-Exed to his house.
He blows up beaver dams on his property with them sometimes.
Source: Boomerang, by Michael Lewis
Speaking of his property, he has a 41,000 square foot ranch house outside Dallas.
With thousands of acres of land attached.
Source: Boomerang, by Michael Lewis
And how does he get around that land? With a U.S. Army Jeep!
To match the guns, naturally.
Source: Boomerang, by Michael Lewis
But the jeep isn’t his only vehicle. He goes to work in a tricked out Hummer.
Lewis says that there’s a button you can push in the car that will automatically coat the road behind it with giant tacks...cartoon style.
Source: Boomerang, by Michael Lewis
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“He has a plan for when every thing crashes — buy guns and gold.”
And that appears to be the meta-theme here: Bass is expecting a day when everything crashes and planning for it. That was back in 2011. And here we are in 2020, with Bass teamed up with Steve Bannon in pushing for the collapse of China.
Again, we have to ask: are we looking a plan to collapse a lot more than just China? The grand collapse the far right has been predicting and dreaming of for decades? A collapse of the whole financial system that wipes out the value of almost everything that isn’t a physical item like gold or real estate or guns and forces an collapse in public spending and the possible deputization of far right militias to keep order? Let’s hope that’s not the case. But we can’t ignore the gross incompetence on display by the Trump administration in addressing the COVID-19 epidemic, where one mistake after another has taken place that can only end up extending the economic crisis. The incredible bungling of the development of test kits. The lack of preparedness for basic medical supplies like masks or ventilators. It’s as if the Trump administration would like to see the pandemic go for as long as possible. Considering that the world is right now run by the kind of people who have been predicting and hoping for a giant collapse for decades and the stars have aligned with them being in power across the globe, this is their big chance to make that collapse happen. And make a lot of money doing it. Well, ‘money’ in the form of gold. And guns. And explosives, etc. All of the stuff that will have value after they screw up the economy so much that money has no value. While the idea of a planned global economic and social collapse might seem like an unthinkable scenario to most people, the far right has been thinking about little else for decades and right now is their big chance to make that happen. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic governments are being essentially forced to shutter their economies. It’s the kind of situation that requires sound, sane leadership to make it through this which means all the far right needs to do to bring about a sustained global economic collapse is just to a so-so half-assed job at managing the situation. In other words, governments right now have the perfect cover for letting everything collapse. Just blame it on the virus when everything goes to hell. So if the worst case scenario really does pan out and we end up with a collapsed and frozen global economy heading into 2021, don’t forget that the far right is running the show right now and they would consider that worst case scenario a best case scenario.
The Political Implications of the UFO Phenomenon and the "ET" Myth
The dollar is on a tear. Here’s why that’s troubling
By Paul R. La Monica, CNN Business
Updated 11:17 AM EDT, Fri March 20, 2020
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/03/20/investing/strong-dollar-coronavirus/index.html
@RobertoMaldonado: That’s actually a great article for highlighting the current stress on the system and why the current fiat-based system — where the dollar plays a gold-like global safe-haven role and medium for international commerce — really is a functional upgrade from the gold standard. It also indirectly underscores the incredible financial prize that could be gained by those in possession of large stores of gold if a return to the gold standard was ever achieved. Instead of the world flocking to dollars it would be flocking to gold right now. With the current system, the dollar’s safe-haven status is driven in part by a collective faith/assumption that the US, as the world’s prevailing economic super-power, will act in a relatively competent and responsible manner to keep its economy afloat, an assumption that is being increasingly upended by the nihilistic governing ideology of the Republican Party and their billionaire donor base. And, yes, the dollar’s prevailing safe-haven status is also maintained in large part by the fact that the US has a global military supremacy. But faith in the relative competence of the US system of government and leadership — or rather, faith that the US government won’t f*ck things up so badly as to debase the system or result in some sort of national default — is a big factor playing the dollar’s prevailing status because maintaining momentum and not have an ultra‑f*ck up moment is kind of key to maintaining a safe-haven currency. You don’t have to do great all the time, just don’t supremely mess up at all ever. Do that and your safe-haven status will probably remain intact. There’s a big psychological element to this aspect of the economy and that’s why we have to be on guard for a strategic ultra‑f*ck up right now because this is as good of an excuse as the far right will ever have and inducing big psychological shocks is a far right specialty.
But again, note how the article describes a situation that demonstrates the relative utility of a fiat-based ‘gold standard’ compared to an actual gold standard: right now, in this period of global financial tumult, the world is fleeing to the safe haven of the dollar resulting in a sharp rise in dollar demand and the value of the dollar. In turn, there’s now a shortage of dollars for international needs needs dollars to conduct international commerce because that’s the norm that everyone uses and people trust dollars more than everything else. That dollar shortage is threatening to lock up international commerce and, ta-da!, the Fed is magically printing more dollars and loaning them out to five major central banks via swap lines.
Yes, such a magical money creation move by the Fed is the kind of thing gold bugs decry. It increases the amount of dollars in circulation and therefore increases inflationary pressure on the dollar. But when there’s a shortage of dollars locking up international finance and the safe-haven currency is spiking in value, creating inflationary pressure on that safe-haven currency by increasing its supply is exactly what you want to do to hold the system together and something you can’t do with a gold standard:
“The value of the greenback is surging, up more than 7% against a basket of other currencies — such as the euro, British pound and Swiss franc — since hitting the lowest point of 2020 on March 9.”
A 7% surge over a week and a half. It’s is a massive move for something like the dollar but also a reflection of the extreme stress on the global financial system. That’s part of why the dollar’s surge shouldn’t be solely seen as a sign of the dollar’s reigning safe-haven status. It’s a sign of both that safe-haven status and the extreme financial stress on the system at the moment. A stress-induced safe-haven surge that threatens to artificially exacerbate that stress by inducing a shortage of dollars available for international commerce. If we were still using the gold standard there wouldn’t really be a solution to this situation. Letting everything grind a halt would be the solution:
If we were on the gold standard right now, we would just have to watch while nations slash spending to buy up gold so they can conduct international commerce and all join in an collective demand-death spiral. But in this case, the Fed can just create and print out as many dollars as it deems necessary and loans it out to other central banks. The money can be paid back later and international commerce can avoid a dollar crunch. It’s just a better more flexible system. Or, at least, it’s better for the general public. The gold standard is obviously great for the people who already have the gold. Especially during a time a this.
This example of the Fed just printing the necessary money as needed is just one example of the superiority of the fiat-based system we’re seeing on display. The other major example is the big proposed fiscal stimulus programs under consideration. Just print up the money and give it to people. This is exactly the kind of emergency where you want that kind of capability and you can’t do that with gold.
But there are limits to the magic money printing abilities. Psychological limits. If the US printed up trillions and trillions of dollars over and over and things didn’t really improve, that’s when we might cross that psychological limit. And that’s the kind of situation we need to be on guard against right now. The Trump administration is talking about some sort of limited direct-to-public cash handouts which would be great policy at the moment. But if we end up with a sustained global depression that’s the kind of situation where we should expect a GOP-led government to be blowing trillions on bailouts for the rich while doing everything they can to ultimately minimize the financial assistance for the general public beyond some minimal amount. And that’s exactly the kind of situation where we could see them crossing those psychological limits and debasing the perceived safe-haven status of the dollar. All they need to do is waste massive amounts of money by bailout out the wrong groups — like just bailout out the banks without bailing out the public and small businesses, etc — and just f*ck up massively without getting any economic traction. If they do thagtin a big enough way we’re going to hit a tipping point where investors looking for something they perceive to be safer. More importantly, we could hit a situation where the dollar is no longer the default currency of international commerce and that’s when its safe haven status will really be over, especially if someone like Judy Shelton is on the Fed board of governors.
Also keep in mind that if Joe Biden wins in 2020 the GOP will almost switch back to sabotaging the economy just like they did to Barack Obama’s administration after the 2008 financial crisis. We already know how they’ll act in the middle of a massive historic economic emergency if there’s a Democrat in office. There is a very recent precedent we can learn from and the only reasonable lesson to take from that precedent is that the GOP really will be out to cause as deep a depression as possible if Biden wins. They literally tried to do exactly that just a decade ago and today’s GOP is even crazier than the GOP of 2009. People like Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller are now highly influential figures in the GOP and crafting White House policy. Somehow the GOP got even crazier.
So if Trump wins reelection, we’re looking at a high likelihood of someone like Judy Shelton not just joining the Fed board of governors but actually becoming the Chair of the Fed. In the middle of what could be a very deep recession or depression. And if Biden wins we get to watch the GOP go into economic sabotage mode. Again.
On the plus side, if the dollar’s safe-haven status can survive a time like this, well, that’s going to be one powerful example of why it’s relatively safe that should help during future crises. It will have survived COVID-Trump. That’ll be a pretty solid track record.
Here’s a pair of articles that underscore just how wildly popular and mainstream the idea of ending the Federal Reserve and returning to the gold standard is within the conservative movement. It’s not just for fringe cranks like Robert Mercer. Mainstream cranks are supporters too:
First, here’s a politico article from August of 2015 about the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole Summit, an annual gathering started in 1982 that’s described as the ‘Davos’ of the central banking world. The article mentions other counter-conferences taking place in Jackson Hole at the same time, including the summit paid for by Robert Mercer dedicated to challenging the very idea of central banking and calling for a return to the gold standard.
As we’ve seen, Judy Shelton was one of the speakers at this 2015 counter-conference, which is less than two years before she was made the head of the National Endowment for Democracy. But it’s worth noting the keynote speaker at the conference: It was none other than former Republican Senator Jim DeMint, who was at the time the head of Heritage Foundation. That’s who gave the keynote speech at Robert Mercer’s gold standard conference. The president of the premier US conservative movement think-tank that’s basically the mouthpiece of the GOP’s billionaire mega-donor cranks. Like the Koch brother(s). Jim DeMint’s words in 2015 had the weight of the oligarchy behind them. And they sound a lot like Robert Mercer when it comes to whether or not the Fed should exist at all. No, according to DeMint. Just return to the gold standard.
Oh, but it turns out DeMint wasn’t the original keynote speaker. No, that role was originally scheduled for Alan Greenspan. Yes, the long-time and much-celebrated head of the Fed was going to be the keynote speaker at Robert Mercer’s gold-standard counter-conference and when he had to pull out they found the president of the premier conservative think-tank instead. That’s how mainstream these ideas are for the GOP’s billionaire mega-donor cranks:
“The APP had originally signed on former Fed chief Alan Greenspan as their main speaker. Greenspan pulled out, Lonegan said, so now former Sen. Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation, is the keynote speaker.”
You almost couldn’t find more credentialed figures within the American conservative movement to speek at an anti-Fed conference than the president of the Heritage Foudnation and Alan Greenspan. It’s a reminder that having top notch right-wing credentials these days is mostly about sending signals about one’s willingness and ability to irresponsibly promote far right ideological garbage with a smile.
So what did Jim DeMint talk about during his keynote address? Well, based on this column he wrote for the Daily Signal published during conference, it sounds like he talked about exactly what we would expect him to talk about during a keynote address at Robert Mercer’s anti-Fed conference: DeMint talked about how we should and the Fed entirely and return to the gold standard, calling America’s monetary system the “Achilles heel” of the world’s economic system.
DeMint attempts to make an argument that historical evidence suggests the Fed has actually made recessions in US longer and worse. He argues there’s no evidenece the Fed has actually helped stem recessions or stimulate the economy. His arguments appeared to hinge on the idea that it was unfair not to factor in the Fed’s first 30 years up through WWII when comparing the boom/bust cycles of the pre and post-Fed periods. DeMint, of course, doesn’t mention that that the Fed had a much more limited role until it embraced Keynsianism years into the Great Depression after first taking a limited role so it’s kind of garbage analysis to group the first 30 years of the Fed’s existence with its post-WWII existence. But that’s to be expected because the push to end central banking and return to the gold standard isn’t a push driven by high quality economic ideas or historical analysis. It’s based on garbage analysis.
DeMint also tries to somehow dismiss the argument that Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan’s tenures as Fed president — a period of 1979–2013 known as the “Great Moderation” — involved Volcker’s aggressive war on inflation and Greenspan’s embrace of Milton Friedman-style monetarism and that therefore the instituation of the Federal Reserve isn’t some radical entity that will inevitably lead to hyper-inflation. DeMint scoffs and points out that while the variability in the inflation rate may have been lower during this period than the preceding 1948–1979 period, the average inflation rate during the “Great Moderation” was 3.74% compared to 3.56% during the preceding 30 years. It was 0.18% higher. That’s DeMint’s rebuttal in the piece below that presumably reflected what he talked about during his Jackson Hole counter-conference keynote address. A trivial nudge in inflation.
And don’t forget that the 1979–2012 period reflects the era when the US’s debt levels just exploded almost entirely as a result of the US’s decision to go down the path fo Reaganomic and right-wing economic theories. Supply-side economics failed and debt exploded as a consequence. Letting organizations like the Heritage Foundation write tax policy and enact massive tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations at the same time there was a massive flow of wealth to the top didn’t pay for itself. And when debt explodes the money supply explodes. That’s what the monetary theories espoused by people like Jim DeMint or Milton Friedman tell us must happen. But it didn’t happen Because those economic theories are wrong. And we’ve known these economic ideas are wrong for quite some time. That’s why DeMInt is relying on garbage arguments in his keynote address.
And if that garbage analysis is taken seriously we will no longer treat the money supply as a public utility but instead return control of the money supply into the hands of the billionaire crank class. Especially those with major stakes in gold. It’s ironic that nationalism is often the rallying cry for returning to the gold standard since it’s actually a system that basically hands control of the money supply to the global super-rich (the real ‘Globalists’ who are largely very right-wing) instead of treating the money supply like a public utility like it should be treated. But ironic or not, the billionaire cranks behind the modern conservative movement clearly want a return to the gold standard which is why we really have to be on guard for schemes to accomplish that now that an administration run by and for those billionaire cranks is overseeing the managed collapse of the global economy:
“The common assumption—in financial as well as political circles—is that America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve—not only can manipulate monetary policy to keep the economy rolling, but that it must, if we are to avoid economic ruin. But ample evidence suggests that this assumption is dead wrong.”
Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation which is kind of the top of the heap of right-wing ‘think’-tanks, wants to question the basic assumptions that led to the creation of central banking. That was the topic of this column he published at the same time of his keynote speech. It’s pretty clear that this was the message of his keynote address. A message that was largely an ahistorical attempt to argue that historic data showed the era of central banking was actually less stable than its gold-standard predecessor. Because that’s the kind of garbage keynote address one should expect from a gold-standard conference financed by Robert Mercer:
And note the perverse nature of the the fundamental message of DeMint’s rant: that the centralization of monetary power — via the creation of a central bank — is as damaging to our freedoms as the centralization of political power. Central banks are like political dictatorships. That was Jim DeMint’s fundamental message as president of the Heritage Foundation:
And this bizarre 2015 column published in the Daily Signal by the president of the Heritage Foundation in the last week of August 2015 is now terrifyingly relevant. It’s relevant because it’s a reflection of what Jim DeMint talked about during the keynote of address of Robert Mercer’s gold-standard conference and we are now looking at a managed economic collapse of the global economy by the same people who brought us that conference. The Trump administration is the culmination of the rise of the overt Nazi wing of the GOP. The Mercer/Bannon/Trump era. And months into the Trump campaign, Jim DeMint spoke on behalf the think-tank of the GOP’s mega-donor base. The very people who are going to bring us out of this historic mess as long as the GOP is in control. And DeMint called for an end to central banking and a return to the gold standard. The Mercer/Bannon wing and Koch/mega-donor wing are largely on the same page. Break and privatize the money supply, hand it back to the global super-rich entirely, and sell it as nationalism. That’s the plan the powers that be had heading into this mess so hopefully they came up with a new plan. A new plan that wasn’t concocted by the powers that be like Steve Bannon or Charles Koch.
Health experts’ real fear is that this SARs-like virus will devastate the poor, developing world particularly africa.
What if the UR were about a longer-term goal of discrediting china in the eyes of African peoples? This is particularly relevant given the inroads that Chinese capital has made in Africa particularly in the past 2 decades and the increased tension in US imperialist circles over this fact, which has been evinced since at least 2012 and the KONY fiasco.
By placing this at the doorstep of “China” and then letting the MSM do its thing, they create a trail of “evidence” that will later be used in a massive propaganda campaign aimed at China, once this thing really takes hold in Africa.
This would fit your own scenarios as well as the UR would not hesitate to “scratch two itches” — African genocide and the discrediting (if not destabilization) of China on a massive scale.
If this plays out as I think it will, the Chinese will take a huge hit in Africa in terms of that country’s outreach efforts and attempts to build soft-power structures there.
Keep up the good work and the good fight.
This global economic collapse/pandemic is the fractal love litter of the Fourth Reich and the Flight Capital Nephews of the Third Reich. Dave has been calling this for decades.
@TGWE: That’s definitely an interesting topic to bring up that’s been largely ignored in much of the coverage: what is going to happen to continent of Africa as this plays out? It’s not simply a basic humanitarian question. It’s also pretty fundamental to the whole global response to this outbreak. If civilization is going to lock itself down for the purpose of halting the spread of this virus that plan isn’t going to work very well if the virus ends up raging across the continent.
But if the Underground Reich or Steve Bannon or some other elite Nazi fascist had a plan of releasing the virus in China with the full expectation that it would sweep Africa and get blamed on China, it may not be playing out as expected. Why? Because at this point, now that China appears to be past the worst of the outbreak and is reopening itself back up China is now the best positioned country to provide assistance to the rest of the world, including its many African client states. This is happening at the same to Europe continues to be heavily hit and the US appears to be on track to eclipsing Europe soon in terms of the number of cases. But while things appear to be on track to get worse before they get better in the US, the situation is ready to explode in Africa. Will we see a form of goodwill competition between China and the West in terms of racing to be the most helpful for Africa? We’ll see, but if that goodwill race is going happen it better happen soon because Africa is poised to be the new global epicenter:
“The stakes are high for Africa. In making his national disaster declaration, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said, “Never before in the history of our democracy have we been confronted by such a severe situation.” But the stakes are also high for the world. If the coronavirus isn’t contained there, Africa could be the source of future outbreaks, and any hope that this pandemic will be eradicated anytime soon will likely fade. As demonstrated by earlier outbreaks of HIV/AIDS, Zika and Ebola, what happens in Africa can have a global impact. By strengthening Africa’s health-care systems, we can mitigate the impact of this pandemic, and help ward off future pandemics as well.”
Yep, there’s no containing the coronavirus if the world just let’s it burn out of control in Africa. So are we going to see a big push by the developed world to help African countries when they inevitably succumb to the virus? Hopefully, but it probably won’t include much help from the US if the Trump administration’s general shunning of Africa thus far is a sign of what to expect:
And with Europe engulfed in its own lockdown at the moment, it’s possible we’re going to see China as the one country that’s actually well positioned to provide substantial assistance to African nations. Sure, the WHO and other international organizations that will be providing assistance in Africa do indirectly count as the West providing Africa assistance, but in terms of direct assistance from, say, the US to the African nations to help deal with the coronavirus outbreak it remains very unclear if the Trump administration is going to have any interest in providing that assistance at all. After all, Trump’s political brand is literally based on acts of wanton disregard and cruelty towards other nations, especially African nations. So it’s kind of hard to imagine there’s going to be a big round of US assistance for African nations in the near future.
China, on the other, is already making a very big deal about its assistance to Africa to help fight the virus:
“Jack Ma, Chinese tech billionaire and co-founder of the Alibaba online shopping platform, promised to donate, via his foundations, 20,000 test kits, 100,000 masks and 1,000 protective suits to each of the 54 African states.”
As we can see, Jack Ma, is making significant donations to African nations that actually exceed what the Chinese government itself is donating. And Ma isn’t limiting the offer to Africa. He’s even made offer to donate equipment to pretty much every nation, including Europe and the US:
If China plays its cards right, it could end up being the chief global assistant to the rest of the world. It’s the kind of scenario that would drive the ffar right insane.
So that’s a significant dynamic that’s unfolding at the moment: China is poised to be the world’s chief helper while cases grow in Europe and the US continues to erratically follow Trump’s latest whims. We now have Trump calling for sending the US back to work by Easter Sunday in a couple of weeks. Is that call by Trump primarily driven by economic concerns or is the fact that China is now ‘leading’ the world in responding to the epidemic a motivating factor too? It’s unclear at this point, but it will probably become clearer as we see China embrace the role of the world corona-savior as the US continues to struggle just to get ventilators and test kits:
“If China can avoid a second wave of outbreaks, it will probably become the first large country to recover from the pandemic. Most economists are now forecasting an unprecedented contraction in gross domestic product during the first quarter of the year, followed by a sharp snapback in the second quarter.”
China is leading the world! At least in the area of recovering from the coronavirus. It’s a reality that must have the staunch China opponents livid, especially if China uses this opportunity to establish itself as an economic safe-haven. But that’s what appears to be happening, with foreign investors now flooding into Chinese bonds, bringing foreign ownership of Chinese sovereign bonds to record highs:
Then there was the President of Serbia making public appeals specifically to China for help. And when Italy appealed to its EU neighbors for help, it was China who responded first with actual assistance. China had an opportunity and clearly embraced it:
Might we be in store for months of the US and Europe being locked down and largely paralyzed at the same time China is running around globe offering everyone assistance? That sure looks like a likely scenario. Unless, of course, Trump has the US just abandon the social-isolation approach and go with the ‘herd immunity’ strategy to get the US economy up and running again. But that’s a strategy that risks overwhelming hospitals and leading to a wave of early deaths. It’s the kind of situation that doesn’t exactly make US assistance to other nations any easier. Will the US being offering major assistance to African nations at the same time US hospitals are collapsing under the weight of a surge in cases? That seems unlikely. It’s extremely hard to imagine Trump sending any resources for overseas charity in Africa at the same time US emergency rooms are overflowing.
It’s an example why it’s unclear what could possibly prevent China from using the upcoming months to essentially rebrand itself as a global helper for those in need, especially for the developing world. Unless, of course, China suffers a second wave that requires the country to shut itself down again. Hopefully that doesn’t happen, although we can be pretty confident the Trump administration is very much hoping that second wave happens and crushes China. So hopefully the Trump administration or anyone else doesn’t take steps to ensure a second wave happens but that’s also going to be a dynamic to watch for as this ‘race to recover’ plays out. One way to win that race is to just keep reinfecting the competition. And vice versa. It’s all an example of why the ‘herd immunity’ approach might be the one we end up taking. Not intentionally but simply by nation repeatedly reinfecting rival nations until we’re all exposed. It definitely won’t be an idea approach but perhaps that most likely.
The Trump administration floated an idea today for reopening the COVID-19-shuttered US economy and — true to form — it left a lot of observers slack jawed and wondering if he is possibly serious:
President Trump hinted during a press conference that the administration has a plan for lifting the national “social distancing” policy that’s resulted in an economic shutdown. Lifting it county by county. The idea is that with enough testing of COVID-19 cases it will be possible to assess the level of the outbreak in each county and assign counties a “high”, “medium”, or “low” risk level. The “low” risk countries would then be allowed to loosen their social distancing policies, which presumably means bars and restuarants and other public gatherings could resume.
The idea of pooling testing data and assigning risk levels for each county isn’t a bad idea. That kind of information would probably be very useful during a situation like this. But if the US is going to remain in a situation where areas will be economically shut down as long as the number of COVID-19 cases exceeds some threshold than creating a system where the “low risk” areas can resume precisely the kind of group activities that are known to spread this highly infectious virus is basically a system for ensuring that the “low risk” counties don’t remain “low risk” as people from the “high risk” counties learn where the bars have reopened and the parties restarted and decide to make a trip there. We’ve already seen that happen when New Yorkers flocked to Florida, turning the state into the latest “hot spot” and prompting the Florida government to require all New Yorkers to self-quarantine for two weeks.
When asked about that obvious complication of people traveling from “high risk” to “low risk” counties, the head of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, Deborah Birx, said that decision to restriction travel would be left up to local governments. More generally, Birx appeared to describe a plan where, by making this county-level risk information available, people would just collectively act responsibly and that’s how the spread from high risk to low risk counties could be contained.
Keep in mind that one of the key features of this virus that makes it so infectious is how people can become contagious while remaining asymptomatic for up to two weeks after infection. So even if someone is trying being responsible by only traveling to the “low risk” counties if they don’t feel ill, they could still be contagious. It’s not really possible for people to responsibly travel from high risk to low risk counties unless there’s some reason to believe they’re immune to infection. Now, if there’s suddenly widespread testing of people using a test that picks up the presence of COVID-19 antibodies then this system could actually kind of sort of work...assuming everyone decides to be responsible. Which is obviously an insane assumption.
When asked if there would be ways of preventing people from traveling from high risk counties to low risk counties, Birx replied that, “These are dialogues that the federal government has to have with state and local governments, because state and local governments make those decisions.” So it sounds like it might be possible for local governments to basically bar travel from high risk counties into their counties. And since the high risk counties are invariably going to be major cities and low risk counties rural areas, it’s a plan that could effectively prevent travel between rural America and large cities.
So that’s the latest proposal from one of the most irresponsible administrations in history for moving the US out of this historic economic and public health emergency: a scheme that relies on everyone being collectively responsible and maybe also creates a travel ban between rural and urban America:
“Based on that data, the administration would categorize counties as “high risk, medium risk and low risk.” This would allow areas less affected by the virus to put in place looser restrictions than ones that have been ravaged by the illness.”
Where’s the party at? It’s just a county or two away. That appears to be the plan. At least the plan they’re thinking about. It’s unclear how serious this was but it clearly wasn’t just something Trump made up on the spot because Deborah Birx was the one defending it during the press conference. It’s also extremely unclear why this plan wouldn’t result in exactly the kind of spreading from “hot spots” to “cold spots” like we’ve already seen happen, but Birx brushed aside those concerns and assured us that people would be responsible once they have testing information available:
And if it turns out Americans aren’t acting responsibly and are instead flooding into low risk counties from high risk counties, the plan would potentially allow local governments to make the decision of whether to ban people from those high risk counties:
How many rural counties might be inclined to ban travelers from the big city? We’ll find out if this plan comes into effect.
And note the remarkably absurd assurances Birx gave about why she is confident this plan could work: a similar plan was put in place in sub-Saharan African to control the AIDS epidemic was positive results. The reality that HIV is actually very difficult to spread and isn’t remotely contagious from casual contact or over the air doesn’t appear to have registered with Birx. If HIV was as infectious as COVID-19 there probably wouldn’t be any people left in sub-Saharan Africa or most of the rest of the world:
So that was the Trump administration’s highly questionable plan. Again, a plan to pool information and rate counties sounds like a great plan. That would indeed be useful. But a plan for selectively ‘reopening’ the low risk countries is either a plan to basically tell all of the irresponsible people from high risk counties to go an infect the low risk counties or a plan have rural America basically ban travel from urban centers.
And let’s not forget that this is an election year in the US. And that, perversely, means that’s a horrible political incentive to ensure the big cities remain high risk with lots of infections while rural areas remain low risk and relatively open. Why? Because political orientation in the US isn’t geographically homogeneous. The big cities are where the Democratic voters are concentrated and rural areas where Republican voters are concentrated. So if this public health emergency is still ongoing as we approach the election in November and large cities remain locked down while rural areas are opened back up it’s hard to imagine that isn’t going to be a boon for Republicans at the polls. People aren’t going to want to be standing in line waiting to vote in “high risk” counties on election day if there’s still a large number of COVID-19 cases locally and those high risk counties are going to strongly skew towards Democratic counties.
Might we see the strategic spreading of COVID-19 if this kind of scheme was put in place? Well, as the following article reminds us, there are already groups out there planning on exploiting the virus for politically strategic reasons. Although in this case it involves the politics of burning society down. Yep, neo-Nazis are reportedly already talking to each other about strategically spreading the virus, targeting cops and Jews:
“The FBI alert, which went out on Thursday, told local police agencies that extremists want their followers to try to use spray bottles to spread bodily fluids to cops on the street. The extremists are also directing followers to spread the disease to Jews by going “any place they may be congregated, to include markets, political offices, businesses and places of worship.””
The weaponization of COVID-19 by neo-Nazis: It’s another reason to hope that this virus’s case fatality rate is being systematically undercounted by asymptomatic cases. Not that we needed another reason to hope for that. So how might a plan that would encourage rural counties to block travel from urban areas as long as those urban areas have elevate numbers of infections play into that agenda? The urban centers are hopefully going to transition to “low risk” areas eventually. Are the neo-Nazis going to be doing what they can to ensure they remain high risk for as long as possible? That seems like a certainty.
And as the following SPLC piece points it, the far right isn’t just hoping to use the SARS-CoV‑2 virus that causes COVID-19 to target their perceived enemies like cops, Jews, or big cities. The “accelerationst” wing of the far right — which includes groups like Atomwaffen — is hoping COVID-19 brings about the collapse of society entirely. Because of course they are. That’s literally been the prime goal of this wing of the far right for as long as its existed. And in the mean time, they’re hoping that all of this stress not only radicalizes average whites but also radicalizes the non-accelerationist neo-Nazis into accelerationists. Radicalizing the radicals. That’s a thing. So if we’re wondering who might have an interest in spreading this virus around and keeping the current economic and public health emergency going for as long as possible, the neo-Nazis who have long called for the collapse of society would be a good place to start:
“Accelerationists hope the government botches their response to the virus. They hope the chaos will drive more people to become frustrated by the status quo and begin pushing for more extreme political positions, spark political unrest or even begin agitating for more revolutionary measures to upend the current political system. While they do hope to bring new people into their movement, they are also looking to further radicalize those already on the far right into accepting their more militant tactics.”
They’re hoping the government botches its response and botches it so badly that society collapses. It’s what we should have expected from the “accelerationists” and sure enough that’s exactly what we see. And tragically, it’s not like they’re hopes are entirely rooted in insanity. Major crises really do historically increase the appeal of the far right. That’s why the accelerationists want to collapse society. They’re convinced it will make them more popular and history suggests they might be correct:
And it’s worth noting the political background of one of these accelerationsts: Paul Nehlen. Recall how Nehlen was openly embraced by the Steven Bannon/Trump wing of the GOP in 2016 and was at one point the leading candidate in 2018 to win the GOP primary in then-House Speaker Paul Ryan’s district after Ryan announced his retirement. But then Nehlen eventually dropped the mask too much and the GOP was forced to push him out. That’s the guy who is now appearing on accelerationist neo-Nazi podocasts. A recent GOP rising star:
So it’s going to be interesting to hear what the “accelerationist” take is on this Trump administration proposal to start lifting the lockdown county-by-county based on the levels of infection: it’s a plan that might have a lot of appeal for those who want to see this economic crisis lifted as soon as possible. But due to the weird incentives created by the plan for strategic chaos, it’s also a plan with immense appeal to those who would like to see the crisis go on for as long as possible with the hope of collapsing society.
It’s also another reminder that while the COVID-19 virus might be seen as ‘public enemy #1’ the moment, the mind virus that deranges people and turns them into neo-Nazis who want to burn down the world remains a much greater danger viral to the general public. Especially when the people infected by this mind virus are planning on using a very real virus to further their ‘burn down the world’ cause.
@Pterrafractyl–
By the way, in the context of recombinant DNA and the Covid-19 virus, it might be worth considering that the Nazi takeover in “Serpent’s Walk” takes place after a BW attack using recombinant DNA in the weaponized viruses.
Although the host is different, the malady–as they way–remains, well, similar!
Serpent’s Walk by “Randolph D. Calverhall;” Copyright 1991 [SC]; National Vanguard Books; 0–937944-05‑X; p. 89.
. . . . “Yes. Well. ‘Pacov’ stands for ‘Pandemic Communicable Virus,’ one of the uglier results of military experimentation with recombinant DNA. Do you know what that is?” . . .
. . . . “Very well, let me tell you in layman’s terms.” Mulder extended a hand to shush Wrench, who had started to speak. “Pacov consists of two separate re-workings of two DNA chains of existing viruses. It’s a piggy-back weapon, a two-stage operation. You send in the first stage. The vectors . . . agents of transmission . . . for Pacov‑1 are extensive. It travels through the air, the water, or directly from person-to-person and is highly contagious. It spreads for hundreds of miles, if conditions are optimal. Pacov‑1 produces only a mild, flu-like infection that disappears within a day or two. Public health authorities would overlook it, never consider it a serious epidemic, and even if they did they’d have to look carefully to isolate it. Once a victim is over the ‘flu,’ Pacov‑1 becomes dormant and almost undetectable. A month or two later, you send in the second stage: Pacov‑2 is also a virus, just as contagious as the first, and just as harmless by itself. It reacts with Pacov‑1 to produce a powerful coagulant. . . . you die within three minutes. No warning, no vaccine, no cure. Those not exposed to both stages remain unharmed. . . . Pacov‑2 goes inert, like Pacov‑1 within a week or two. Then you get your victim’s country, all his property, in undamaged condition. . . . and a lot of corpses to bury.” . . . .
Of course, I’m just a crazy conspiracy theorist from California, “Serpent’s Walk” is just a novel and we all know that couldn’t happen in real life, could it?!
Best,
Dave
Oh look at that: just a couple days ago we had the Trump administration float the idea of a creating county-level COVID-19 risk levels and allowing low risk counties to be loosen up their lockdowns but also potentially restrict travel from the high risk counties. High risk counties that would almost certainly be the major urban centers of every state. It was basically a recipe for selectively quarantining large cities. And now we have Trump himself floating the idea of a federally enforced quarantine of the New York metro area, along with New Jersey and parts of Connecticut. A federally enforced quarantine. It sure sounded like Trump was proposing using the military to ensure no one leaves New York City, something that would require suspending the Posse Comitatus Act. That was what he tweeted about earlier on Saturday and later talked about during a press conference on the White House lawn and reiterated that it was under considering during a speech on the Naval hospital ship the USNS Comfort. So Trump decided to make a big point to the public on a military ship that he was considering sending in the military to quarantine the tri-state area. That’s where we are.
He declared later on Saturday that he decided a quarantine wasn’t necessary and issued a “severe travel advisory” instead. But the idea is now out there. Federally quarantining large cities with the military is now going to be one of things Trump is considering in order to seem like a ‘strong wartime leader’. Going ‘to war’ against New York City’s spread of the Chinese virus. That’s now part of his ‘being a wartime president’ theatrical repertoire.
And the push for enforceably quarantining large (predominantly Democrat-controlled) metro areas won’t be limited to Trump. It was apparently Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis who put the idea of a federal quarantine for New York City in Trump’s head. DeSantis — who is now infamous for deciding to allow Florida’s beaches to remain open as Spring Break partiers filled Florida’s beaches before scattering back across the world — has apparently decided to make New York City residents the main villain as his state becomes the new national ‘hot spot’ for COVID-19 cases. So when Trump pushed this idea, he was implicitly running political cover or DeSantis as Florida becomes a global COVID-19 infection vector.
And this political necessity to deflect political outrage over the COVID-19 outbreaks in ‘Red states’ is going to manifest in every state to some extent which is only going to create a nationwide GOP call for quarantining New York and California. The American far right finally has an excuse to use the military to turn US cities into giant prisons and act like they’re defending against a foreign invader. All of the ‘Patriot’ personalities that dominate modern right-wing American discourse like Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson can explain to their growing audiences why suspending Posse Comitatus is required to defend against the New World Order’s viral invasion and this isn’t at all like the martial law scenarios they’ve spent decades warning their audiences against. “Blame it on New York (and/or California) and the Chinese virus” can become the rallying cry of GOP officials for the rest of the election season. The higher the number of COVID-19 cases in ‘Red state’ America, the greater the calls for calling in the army to quarantine New York and eventually California. It’s like some sort of alternative Serpent’s Walk Nazi dream scenario playing out. So when Trump floated this idea it wasn’t just the random musings of an addled mind. It was the strategic musings of an addled mind that warns of many more musings about federal quarantines of large cities because a fascist dream scenario is taking shape:
“Earlier Saturday, Mr. Trump said that he is considering declaring an “enforceable” quarantine affecting some residents of the New York metropolitan area, possibly including New Jersey and Connecticut. He called the region a “hot spot” of the coronavirus outbreak sweeping the country.”
Send in the troops. To protect us from those big city folks. That’s literally the political angle Trump is now trying to hustle. And it appears to be part of an attempt to make the exploding COVID-19 outbreak in Florida the fault of fleeing New Yorkers (and New Jersey and Connecticut areas). And then Trump talked about this idea again on a Navy hospital ship. This was his big talking point of the day. Military quarantines of the the tri-state area. He clearly sees this as a political winner:
And, yes, this would involve suspending Posse Comitatus. But this will no doubt be justified by Trump’s ‘Patriot’ backers by framing it as some sort of patriotic action to stop the Chinese liberal viral conspiracy to destroy Trump and decent Americans. At least that appears to be the political bet Trump is making:
And note how New York’s Governor Cuomo hadn’t heard about this idea and reacted with dismay. Trump is behaving like he’s dealing with an unruly Democratic-run state that needs to have the military called in to contain it. That’s literally the political framing we’re seeing unfold with how Trump went about this on Saturday. No warning to any of the (Democratic) governors. Delivered like a threat. That’s how he’s framing it which more or less guaranteed a dismayed and pissed response from those governors. It’s being framed by Trump as a conflict:
And as Josh Marshall makes clear in the following post, this isn’t going to be limited to Trump. Or Trump and Ron DeSantis. We are seeing the opening of a rhetorical argument that makes New York and California the big villains in what GOP political psychodrama narrative they deploy to best exploit this mega-crisis and the whole GOP is going to be exploiting it:
“The heart of the issue is the tightly wrapped connection between incompetence, leadership failure and scapegoating. This is neither anomaly or paradox. It is the norm. Gov. Raimondo’s plan to search homes for New Yorkers seems more a product of panic and rash thinking. DeSantis’s gambit seems more political and forward looking, a fact underlined by the interplay between his and the President’s statements on a regional quarantine. Just as President Trump now blames China for hiding from him the escalating threat he ignored and denied for eight weeks DeSantis now seeks to shift blame for his failure to take the most basic preventative actions onto fleeing New Yorkers.”
It’s a winning political formula. A winning formula for profiting from failure. Screw up, scapegoat to deflect, and politically profit from the scapegoating as the consequences of the screw up play out. That’s what Florida’s Republican Governor is trying to pull off by framing Florida’s exploding COVID-19 problem as a threat from New York. And by apparently convincing Trump to make this a national issue that involves calling in the military to save the US from the threat of New York, Ron DeSantis has managed to export his diabolical political formula to the rest of the US.
As Josh Marshall noted, it’s understandable for states to potentially want to stop New York City residents from fleeing to their state. There are going to be circumstances when you really might want to quarantine a major metropolitan area and this might be one of those circumstances. If the governor decides to call for federal help in enforcing a quarantine of their own state that’s one thing. But this was a case of a governor asking the federal government to quarantine a different state. That’s literally what happened. And Trump openly considered that request. In public. Three times on Saturday. He made a HUUUUGE deal of the idea and wanted to make it clear it’s something he might consider. One of those ‘Trump just did something incredibly dangerous’ moments just happened again. And this one was a biggie.
Tangentially, for fans of Escape From New York, its worth noting that the hoped-for Escape from New York remake was looking entirely stalled as of last month. It was “on the shelf” according to the remake’s screenwriter Leigh Whannell. So that wasn’t sounding very promising. A month is a long time ago these days, especially when it comes to remakes of movies about escaping From New York. Right now seems like exactly the time you would want to be filming an Escape From New York remake. Well, except for all the corona. New York is presumably off limits for making films. Or maybe it’s like a one-way job. Everyone traveling to New York to film the remake will have to stay there until the corona is clear. Or until society collapses inside the quarantine zone and warlords rule. At that point escape is really the only option for the film crew. It would be a different kind of remake.
Here’s a quick update on the current projections of how bad the job losses could be in the US from the COVID-19 economic lockdown: According to projections by economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the unemployment rate could peak at around 32%, well about record 24.9% hit during the Great Depression. That’s not an estimate from some doomsday crank economist. That’s from the Fed. That estimate was arrived at based on the numbers of people employed in the industries that are presumably being shut down or extremely curtailed right now: 66.8 million workers in “occupations with high risk of layoff,” like sales, production, food preparation and services. If you make some simple and very plausible assumptions about the layoff rates for that group — that about 47 million of them will lose their job — that gets us to a 32% unemployment level:
“Economists at the Fed’s St. Louis district project total employment reductions of 47 million, which would translate to a 32.1% unemployment rate, according to a recent analysis of how bad things could get.”
47 million layoffs. That’s the estimated job loss from this economic freeze and almost all of those lost jobs are going to concentrated in 66 million people working in the “occupations with high risk of layoff” like food services. While the economic pain is being felt nationally, it’s still concentrated in certain areas:
And note that the 32% estimate doesn’t include people who literally just drop out of the workforce entirely as a result of this:
How many people are just going to give up on working as a result of this? Well, that’s obviously going to depend heavily on how rapidly things bounce back and whether or not there are jobs available for them when this all over. And that ability to bounce back rapidly is going to depend heavily on how well national leaders can hold things together in the mean time. That’s part of the ‘good-ish news’ message from this Fed research: this depression-level event can be brief...if we play our cards right:
And that points to perhaps the biggest challenge facing the US in the middle of this crisis: playing our cards right. That’s going to be a challenge during emergencies in more under normal times, but when you have the Trump administration in control of the executive branch and Republicans in charge of the Senate, ‘playing our cards right’ is some sort of fever dream fantasy. The GOP doesn’t do ‘playing our cards right’. At least not unless it’s playing for billionaire mega-donors. We literally saw GOP Senators trying to ensure bailed out corporations could still fire as many workers as they want when crafting the COVID-19 economic support package. And then they bragged about the unemployment benefits they tried to strip out of the bill. That’s how the GOP plays its hand: Like a deceptive Scrooge. And if this situation requires that the party actually act in the best interests of the nation, and not just in the interest of billionaire mega-donors, well that’s going to require something from the GOP we’ve never seen before.
So as the Fed research make clear, we are in uncharted territory here. This is unprecedented and an unprecedented response is going to be required if we’re going to avoid a worst case scenario. And part of that unprecedented response requires the GOP to enter uncharted territory too. The uncharted territory of actually being responsible and not just selling the country off to the party’s mega-donors. Letting everything go to hell would create quite a fire-sale for those mega-donors. Will the GOP be a able to resist? History says ‘no way, the GOP doesn’t play that way’ and so far the GOP’s response isn’t looking very unprecedented but we’ll see if the GOP can find its inner non-pirate. Scary times.
Here’s a pair of stories that highlight how tempting the current coronavirus pandemic is going to make power grabs for every authoritarian and aspiring-authoritarian government on the planet. It also highlights how when governments do engage in these power grabs they aren’t going to get much international push back, in large part because so many governments these days are authoritarian or aspiring-authoritarian governments:
Viktor Orban’s far right Hungarian government pulled off the ultimate coronavirus-power grab. The Hungarian parliament just passed a bill that gives Orban effective rule-by-decree powers. No elections and no rallies can be held and there is no sunset clause on these powers. Orban can rule by decree indefinitely. That really happened. In an EU member state.
So what is the rest of the EU doing in response? There’s been some limited outcry and warnings and that’s about it. It’s what we should expect based on the EU’s treatment of Orban’s increasingly authoritarian government leading up to this point. And there hasn’t been much more response from elsewhere in the world. Orban’s power grab was basically given the world’s blessing in the form of relative silence. And now that’s probably what we should probably expect if we see future power grabs as the COVID-19 pandemic plays out based on this precedent
“The nature of extraordinary legal measures is that they are easy to introduce, but hard to undo. The “rally around the flag” effect won’t last for ever. And as the economic consequences of the pandemic become worse, Orbán may become increasingly unpopular – and the situation more desperate. The temptation to keep the emergency measures in place may become even stronger as the 2022 elections approach.”
Yep, it’s not just a power grab. It’s a power grab in the context of a collapsing global economy which is exactly the kind of scenario that makes power grabs super extra dangerous. And it’s not like the Hungarian opposition was supportive of the parliament indefinitely handing over this power to Orban. A majority of opposition MPs opposed it. We’ll see how many opposition MPs are left in parliament after this is over. Or whether or not there even will be a parliament now that elections have been suspending and Orban can rule by decree:
And don’t forget that Hungary isn’t just a member of the EU. Orban’s Fidesz party is a member of the conservative European People’s Party (EPP) within the EU parliament. So how did the rest of the EPP parties across the EU respond to the power grab? Don’t forget that the EPP has been threatening to throw out Fidesz for years now due to all of the previous anti-democratic actions by the party and yet it never actually gets thrown out because Fidesz’s support for the EPP is still seen as necessary. But there’s no doubt the EPP has put Fidesz on thin ice. At least officially. So how did the EPP respond to this? With an oblique message about the need to respect democracy that didn’t mention Hungary at all:
“While reaction piled up from around the world following the Hungarian parliament’s decision to hand broad powers to Orbán’s government to handle the coronavirus crisis without an end date, the top officials in the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) were conspicuously silent.”
As we can see, it’s not that there wasn’t outcry within Europe’s political establishment. There was a lot of outcry. Just conspicuously not from the EPP’s leadership. EPP President Donald Tusk issued a tweet that didn’t condemn Fidesz. Tusk used to be the European Council president and he still couldn’t bring himself to condemn this.
The EPP’s leader within the EU parliament, Manfred Weber of Angela’s Merkel’s CDU, made no comment at all. But the twitter account for the EPP group in the parliament did eventually issue a tweet. A tweet that didn’t Orban or Fidesz or Hungary:
And then there’s European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, also from Merkel’s CDU. She issued a statement. It didn’t mention Hungary. Von Der Leyen is one of the top officials in the entire EU and that was her response:
Now, there were some EPP members or former officials who did come out and condemn Orban and Fidesz. But they happen to be from the same EPP group that already wanted to kick Fidesz out of the EPP. So it’s not exactly an act of political courage. It would be like the never-Trumpers calling for a repudiation of Trump for the umpteenth time after he acts like a wannabe dictator. But at least there was that. The EPP at least wasn’t 100% fine with it. Just all of its top leaders:
And note the response to that anti-Fidesz EPP bloc from an anonymous EPP insider who warns that condemning Orban and Fidesz would only play into Orban’s hands. Don’t condemn to Orban’s power grabs because he’ll only use that condemnation to grab more:
And that anonymous EPP insider’s view is clearly the dominant EPP view when it comes to Fidesz. At least within the leadership. CDU-dominated leadership. That’s the precedent being established here by the EPP’s CDU-dominated leadership: far right power grabs will be responded to with strategic silence by Europe’s conservative leadership. Strategic silence predicated on the nation that these power grabs are intended to provoke a response that will allow for an even great power grab. That’s the politically strategy we are seeing play out right before our eyes. A literal fascist strategic appeasement strategy. Don’t oppose fascist power grabs because they’ll just grab more. It’s the kind of anti-fascist strategy only a fascist could love.
Finally, don’t forget that this is all happening in the context of a global moment where the far right is in charge almost everyone on the planet. If the EU’s top leadership starts tolerating openly fascist suspensions of democracy that’s going to get some generic outcry (if that) from other world powers and that’s about it.
So it’s going to be important to keep in mind that when the EPP openly appeases this suspension of democracy by Orban and Fidesz they might be appeasing their future selves too. We’re posed to see one EU economy collapse after another as the whole globe is forced to halt in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s going to create a lot of situation for potential power grabs. How many of the EU’s supposedly ‘centrist’ right-wing politicians would jump at the chance to follow in Orban’s footsteps if the crisis conditions were just right? We’ll find out because the whole EU is going to vulnerable to right-wing power grabs as this corona crisis plays out now that the EPP leadership — some of whom are top EU leaders like the EU Commissioner — just made clear that coronavirus power grabs are going to be strategically tolerated.
Here’s an article that might be grimly appropriate for an Easter Sunday. It’s by Benjamin Teitelbaum, the author of the upcoming book War for Eternity about the far right Traditionalist movement. A movement that happens to include key fascist theoreticians past and present like Julius Evola, Alexandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon. It worships strongmen and militarism like all fascist strains, but Traditionalism hates modernity with extra zealousness and has a strong tendency to infuse its dogma with religious apocalytpic overtones. It’s like the fascist id of different societies manifesting with creative flair.
Teitelbaum managed to interview both Dugin and Bannon for his book and those interviews were recent enough to get their opinions on the meaning and implications of the COVID-19 global crisis. As we should expect, both Bannon and Dugin have embraced the idea that the crisis is revealing the dangers of “globalization”. By “globalism”, both Bannon and Dugin would be using a definition of “globalism” routinely used by the far right that manages to intertwine the obvious gross downside of globalized neoliberalism and multinational corporatism that destroys societies with ‘liberal’ progressive values like equality for women or religious minorities and secularism that actually makes society better for everyone (everyone but fascists). It’s the ol’ far right bait and switch. The bait and switch that devastated local economies that are a result of globalism and the offshoring of jobs are somehow the fault of leftists fighting for greater equality and secularism. It’s a bait and switch at the core of Trump’s appeal and with COVID-19 there’s the potential for extending this trick to apocalyptic levels. Traditionalist fascists like Bannon and Dugin have a seemingly apocalyptic crisis that foretells the coming of a new age. A new fascist Traditionalist age. And every new age needs a huge crisis. That makes the Traditionalist fascists extra dangerous right now.
So it’s at least nice to hear that Teitelbaum found that significant differences still existed between Bannon and Dugin. Dugin views the US as irredeemably a force for corrupting liberalism that must be weakened and the coronavirus is like a “divine reprimand” that will force the US to choose between “liberalism and life”. Bannon, on the other hand, sees the global pandemic as an affirmation of his war on China that includes a push to disentangle the US and Chinese economies as fast as possible as part of his envisioned existential war between the West and China. Bannon’s desired full spectrum war on China is a much easier sell when returning as much manufacturing to the US from China as possible takes on a new public health dimension. And Bannon is convinced there’s a Traditionalist core to the US that can be awakened and take over the country and he’s apparently made various outreach attempts in recent years to Dugin to sell him on the idea, including a meeting in 2018. Dugin views the collapse of the US as inevitable. So that’s apparently the current schism within Traditionalist fascism exemplified by Bannon and Dugin’s big disagreement: whether or not there is any hope of the US becoming an openly fascist Traditionalist society to help usher in the collapse of the current age and the fascist new Golden Age:
“Traditionalism is a radical doctrine—so radical that scholars of the far right like myself had often dismissed it as an obscure curiosity devoid of high-level political consequence. Some of its early right-wing adherents believed a race of ethereal Aryans once lived in the North Pole, and advocated establishing a celibate patriarchy of warrior-priests in place of democracy. It often sounds more like make-believe than politics; Dungeons and Dragons for racists, as a former student of mine once put it.”
Dungeons and Dragons for racists. That’s one way to describe Traditionalism, where the brutalities of fascism get merged with fantasies about a glorious hyper-authoritarian past returning again as part of some grand cosmic cycle. It’s a fascist religion that portrays progressivism as the last gasps of a decaying corrupt liberal order that’s about to collapse and usher in a new far right Golden Age. A vision where this fascist Golden Age is inevitable. It has to happen and we’re just waiting for to see the signs. Signs of that Golden Age cosmic turning event that double as a grand opportunity to promote fascism. Bannon calls it the Kali Yuga. The end of globalism — by which he means global trade and secularism — and the dawn of a new fascist far right Traditionalist Golden Age. Medieval techno-Nazi futurism. That’s Dungeons and Dragons for racists and it’s already the dominant philosophy in the major governments of the world in one form or another. Uniting those different forms of Traditionalist Dungeons and Dragons for racists is one of Bannon’s challenges to help bring about that new fascist Golden Age. He’s like a rich Bizarro-Frodo. Bizarro-Frodo Bannon working for Sauron to bring about an age when the nations of the world are united by a where societies are held together by an Traditionalist philosophy. A Traditionalist philosophy that’s rooted in a deeply held ‘Us against the World’ tribalism, which isn’t exactly amenable for turning into a global uniting force. But that’s Bannon’s challenge which is why he’s kind of an Alt-Frodo:
And winning over Dugin to a worldview where a fascist MAGA America is leading a Traditionalist force in the world is one of Bannon’s top goals. It would allow for a the marriage of the apocalyptic visions of the East and West Traditionalist fascist schools working to bring about a fascist Golden Age:
And note that when the article mentions Jair Bolsonaro’s advisor Olavo de Carvalho as another example of a Traditionalist fascist philosopher having the ear of the major world leader, it’s worth noting that there was a video of de Carvalho released on Twitter on March 23 where he talked about COVID-19 in terms of the Book of Revelations of the Lady of Fatima prophecy and described it as a fake hoax epidemic being perpetrated by Putin’s Russia. So when the article talks about Bannon trying to bridge an East-West Traditionalist divide with Dugin, de Carvalho’s comments are an example of that divide. A divide Alt-Frodo Bannon is trying to heal, so a ‘united we stand separately (under crypto-fascist authoritarian rule)’ philosophy can reign supreme:
Note that Olavo de Carvalho and Dugin held a debate back in 2011 (audio here and great overview by Professor Michael Millerman here) that fleshed out this divide between de Carvalho and Dugin and it’s in that debate where de Carvalho makes clear that Bannon’s quest to unite the Traditionalists will require winning out the Western Traditionalist chauvinists like de Carvalho who are not very interested in finding common cause with Russian fascists. Overall, the episode highlights how fascism is a force that both unites the Western far right with the Russian far right at the same time there’s a real enduring divide. A real enduring divide that endures because the Western and Russian far right both have worldviews that are rooted in the assumption that the other side is plotting to destroy it. A global community of movements rooted in deep seated ‘us against the world’ irrational paranoia is what Steve Bannon is out to unite. He hasn’t done it so far but the coronavirus is only going to make it easier for Steve to pull it off. Nothing like a big global emergency to unite the pathologically fractious powermongers.
And that’s part of what makes this both a terrifying story and a great story for Easter: Steven Bannon, someone closely aligned with the fascist faction of the Vatican hierarchy hasn’t yet united the Traditionalist fascists. He’s working on it but he hasn’t yet won over Aleksandr Dugin, the chief Traditionalist fascist theoretician of the Orthodox Christian far right. They have differing views of how progressive secularism and the spirit of equality and seeing our common humanity need to be crushed to usher in a new Golden Age of far right techno mystical fascism. Alt-Frodo hasn’t yet succeeded in uniting these dark forces. It’s 2020 so this is as good as the good news gets. Happy Easter.
Oh look at that: Ammon Bundy held a special Easter service designed to be in defiance of Idaho’s social distancing orders. He even livestreamed it:
“There were no signs on the livestream of anyone attempting to challenge or interrupt the service. Wayne Hoffman with the conservative Idaho Freedom Foundation – a group that has called the ban on gatherings unconstitutional – also was invited to speak.”
There were no signs of anyone attempting to challenge or interrupt the service. Because of course there wasn’t. Ammon Bundy can clearly do whatever he wants. That’s basically an established legal precedent at this point. He has some sort of special militia protected privileges that he invokes by threatening violence. Ammon declares something to be unconstitutional and then gets a bunch of people together who declare their willingness to shoot any authorities who get in their way and they’re allowed to just keep doing what they’re doing. That’s literally how it works. Over and over. And this time was no different. As the following piece notes, Ammon has been bragging about how he’s received the contact information of hundreds of people who are willing to — physically, if necessary — stand up for those committed to violating the state’s “stay-at-home” orders:
“Bundy, who lives in the small town of Emmett, Idaho, said he’d received the contact information of hundreds of people who were willing to — physically, if necessary — stand up for those committed to violating the state’s “stay-at-home” orders, which Little announced late last month.”
Hundreds of volunteers to physically stand up for those committed to violating Idaho’s “stay-at-home” order. That sure sounds like Ammon is angling for another armed stand-off. The Easter gathering was just like dangling bait. It raises the question of just how many guns were at that Easter service. Was it a special Easter sermon for the hundreds of volunteers who contacted Ammon? Who knows, but as Ammon makes clear in the following article from a few weeks ago, he’s perfectly willing to engage in another armed standoff over this issue. He really
does view these stay-at-home orders as some sort of egregious constitutional violation and he’s willing to have a shootout over it. It’s a point/threat he’s been reiterating for weeks now:
“A 19-minute video of Thursday’s two-hour meeting, recorded live and posted on a public Facebook account, shows Bundy pledging to help provide legal, political and physical defense to people who are pressured by the “authorities” or anybody else to comply with the order.”
Surprise! The guy who never found a situation that couldn’t be solved with the threat of deadly force just found a new situation requiring the threat of deadly force. Or rather, a situation requiring the offer of the threat of deadly force. An offer to anyone who wants armed protection from authorities while they defy the governor’s stay-at-home order:
But the offer isn’t limited to armed protection from authorities. Ammon is also apparently offering to take his group to protest the homes of “bad actors”. Who exactly would fall under the “bad actor” category remains unclear but it presumably the local officials with the temerity of expecting people to actually adhere to stay-at-home orders:
Yes, a few weeks ago we had Ammon Bundy first make this new pledge of armed standoffs and we’re already had a blatant livestreamed Easter provocation intended to taunt authorities into taking some sort of action. So as we can see, Ammon is clearly in the mood for a new armed standoff. And why not? He’s Ammon Bundy. Consequence-free armed standoffs with authorities are what he does.
Those were three of the declarations President Trump decided to tweet out on Friday. These three states, which all just happen to have Democratic governors, suddenly became the target of calls for “liberation” by the President. Virginia’s governor just issued a state-wide stay-at-home order. It was just another day in the middle of the Trump pandemic response. A response that varies wildly from day to day but is consistently crazy. Don’t forget that it was just on Monday when Trump declared he had “total authority” over decisions of whether or not states reopen their economies, only to acknowledge the next day that it’s state governors that actually have the authority over reopening their states. So this call for the “liberation” of states took place at the end of a week that started off with Trump vacillating over whether or not he has “total authority” over the coronavirus pandemic response. It’s like he was saving face for failing to assert total authority.
But as the following article makes clear, another part of what made Trump’s “liberation” comments to disturbing is that these “liberation” comments were taking place at the same time a series of right-wing protests were cropping up in states around the US. Right-wing protests that appear to be coordinated by the Republican Party and wealthy donors. Basically the Tea Party for Coronavirus.
White House economic advisor Stephen Moore is also openly backing these protests and is offering the the protest groups advice and legal support should protesters be arrested and prosecuted. Recall that Trump nominated Moore for a position on the Federal Reserve board of governors last year as part of his drive to get a Gold Standard supporter on the board before Moore withdrew his nomination and Trump nominated gold bug Judy Shelton in his place. Moore is on the White House’s council for reopening the economy and referred to these lockdown protestors as “modern day Rosa Parks”. Yep.
Also recall how groups financed by the GOP mega-donors — like FreedomWorks, ALEC, and the US Chamber of Commerce — are already putting together initiatives calling for the reopening of the US economy. Measures back by these groups for encouraging the reopening including lifting liabilities for companies if employees catch the coronavirus while at work.
So one of Trump’s top economic crank advisors is helping to orchestrate these protests in coordination with state level Republican party organizations and mega-donor think-tanks. Just like the Tea Party. It’s the kind convergence of bad actors that suggests we’re looking at the contours of a likely nationalized GOP campaign for the elections in November based around channeling the public anger over the virus. A GOP campaign to run on the idea of reopening economies regardless of the public health risks. That decision will be effectively put up to voters. In other words, if Trump wins reelection his win will be portrayed as a public mandate to reopen economies whether or not there’s an ongoing COVID-19 public health risk. It’s the key subtext of Trump’s “liberation” tweets: It’s really about liberating the politicians and their backers who want to reopen the economy regardless of the public health risks from the consequences of that decision:
“Trump’s tweets come as the right-wing media has amplified the protests and conservative groups have formed plans to jointly press for a reopening of the economy. The groups include several veterans of the tea party era, activism that was powered by a network of right-wing and corporate financiers interested in reducing taxes and regulations on industry.”
Tea Party veterans are behind these ‘spontaneous’ protests that all suddenly cropped in multiple states at the same time. One of the groups is the “Michigan Trump Republicans” and one of the directors for this group just happens to include Marian Sheridan, the state Republican Party’s vice chair of “grass roots” efforts. What a coincidence:
And look at that: the social media accounts of the Michigan Trump Republicans straight up made clear that the purpose of the protest was to damage Governor Whitmer’s chances of becoming Joe Biden’s VP pick. It’s exactly the kind of political calculation you expect from a GOP mega-donor financed astroturf group. As the governor of the crucial swing state of Michigan, Whitmer is clearly a tempting pick for VP:
And then there’s White House economic advisor (and economic crank) Stephen Moore, who happens to be a member of the White House council to reopen the country and a member of a coalition of conservative leaders nad activists seeking to push government officials to relax stay-at-home policies. He’s offering advice and legal assistance for protestors facing prosecution and refers to these protestors as modern day Rosa Parks. Far right paid shills doing their mega-donors’ bidding are like Rosa Parks. Typical far right trolling:
And note how these protests could resist including the occasional overt far right symbolism, like a Confederate flag. A Confederate flag at a protest in Michigan. Now that is some serious trolling:
And note how these protests against he economic lockdowns now include lawsuits by business owners over damages caused by the protests. In Michigan, we have Michael Lackomar filing a suit. Technically Lackomar and his wife are two of the four one of four Michigan residents who just filed suit against Whitmer’s office threatening damages unless. Don’t forget that we have already seen how Koch front groups like FreedomWorks, ALEC, and the US Chamber of Commerce are already working on schemes for reopening the economy that like lifting employer liability for workers catching COVID at work. So when we see seemingly ‘grass roots’ drives to sue the government for damages from the COVID lockdowns by small business and property owners we should keep in mind that the billionaires are going to be the most interested in those kinds of legal precedents. If the owners of the US economy and property get to sue for damages over this lockdown guess who gets most of those damages: the millionaires and billionaires who own almost everything, of course:
And as an example of how we’re looking at a fusion of mega-donor astroturf groups with the far right and militias, here’s an AP article from 2010 about the arrest of members of Hutaree militia over a plot to ambush and assassinate law enforcement. A person named Michael Lackomar was the spokesman (and county leader) for the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia (SMVM). Lackomar told reporters at the time that the Hutaree members contacted his group when the arrests started taking place asking for a place to hide. Hutaree members had previously trained with SMVM. Lackomar claimed his team leader rejected the plea and the militia was cooperating with authorities. It’s a sign of how close SMVM must have been to the Hutaree militia that they literally contacted them for a place to hide.
So is the Michigan militia leader Michael Lackomar from Michigan in 2010 the same Michael Lackomar suing Michigan for damages in 2020? That seems highly probable based on the enormous overlap between GOP activism and far right groups likes militias. And that’s why it looks like one of the figures now leading the way on this ‘grass roots’ movement to open up the lockdowns no matter what by trying to set a legal precedent for suing the government for economic damages over it is also a leader in a far right militia:
“Lackomar said none of the raids focused on his group. Lackomar said about eight to 10 members of Hutaree trained with SMVM twice in the past three years. SMVM holds monthly training sessions focusing on survival training and shooting practice, Lackomar said.”
It was just a few training sessions with the Hutaree militia in the past three years. No biggie. There’s no reason to suspect the SMVM might share Hutaree’s far right views. That’s what Michael Lackomar and the militia movement were hoping we would believe in 2010. And if that Michael Lackomar from 2010 is the same one suing for lockdown damages today we’re presumably also all expected to ignore his militia ties and the extensive ties between the far right and GOP ‘grass roots’ activism that happens to activism highly aligned with the GOP’s mega-donor oligarchs. We’re just supposed to ignore all that.
Just as we’re all supposed to ignore how Stephen Moore is part of the White House council on reopening the economy and actively encouraging these ‘grass roots’ protest. Offering advice and legal help is pretty seriously encouragement. And as the following TPM piece describes, Moore has been actively posting on social media this week how he is assisting in these protests. In a video posted on YouTube page on Tuesday, Moore indicated that he’s assisting a “drive-in” protest in Wisconsin. It’s not just the GOP mega-donors behind this. It’s the White House:
“Moore also told CBS in a Friday interview that the Trump administration should have begun the process to reopen the economy “a week or two ago.””
Trump should have begun reopening the economy a week or two ago. That’s what Stephen Moore is clearly advocating on the White House council. And now he’s directly working with various conservative groups holding these protests. Protests that appears to be orchestrated by the GOP’s mega-donor network. And Rosa Parks’s civil rights protest is apparently going to be the historical event they’re going to use to brand the ‘grass roots’ protests:
Rosa Parks brand anti-lockdown movement brought to you by the militias and right-wing billionaires. That’s the political posture we’re seeing develop across the GOP. The billionaires and ‘grass roots’ far right have found a common ground on how to best exploit the economic devastation of the lockdown and it’s poised to be one of the signature reelection themes of the entire GOP. At least assuming we have a COVID election. A COVID election that, as we saw in Wisconsin’s primary last week, would systematically help Republicans win elections as long as people had to vote in person as a result of the GOP’s war on mail-in voting. The asymmetry of the danger of catching the virus in an urban (Democratic-leaning) vs rural (Republican-leaning) district makes voting during a pandemic highly advantageous for Republicans and all signs are pointing to that becoming a national GOP strategy if COVID exists into November.
Trump and the GOP have a degree of the control over whether or not the economy is opened but they can’t control the virus. Well, they can through stay-at-home orders and listening to the epidemiologists. But they can’t reopen the economy and control the virus and that makes the prospects of a COVID-election in November a real possibility. The GOP wants and its donors all want to open things up ASAP.
So it sounds like part of the US’s national strategic planning around the COVID-19 response has to include the distinct possibility that we’re going to see a big spike in coronavirus cases following the election. The odds are roughly aligned with the odds of Trump winning reelection because he’s kind of running on the idea of just reopening things no matter what the public health experts recommend if he wins. Or at least he will be running on that once these ‘grass root’ campaigns finish building support for the idea.
At the same time, let’s not forget that November is still quite a long time away in out new corona-timeline, where every month is like a year’s worth of emergencies and our sense of what to expect is in constant hyper-flux. If the US economy is still in lockdown mode in November a huge swathe of the public is going to be going stir-crazy. Especially right-wing talk radio listeners. They’re going to be going extra stir-crazy. Plus, most Americans have no financial safety-net. They can’t be out of work for another seven months until November. Not without substantial government support for that entire period. Monthly wage/salary subsidies from the government for at least seven months. That has to absolutely happen for the lockdown to realistically continue until November because the vast majority of Americans can’t afford be out of work for more than a month.
And it’s already been a month out of work for many people. There has to be government subsidies for unemployed Americans soon and for an indefinite period for the lockdown to work without mass poverty and hunger. There’s basically no savings for most households. The single $1200 checks sent out by the government in the Phase III corona-stimulus will buy a few weeks of time for the Trump administration and Congress to determine what to do about the reality that most of the US public can’t afford to be out of work for many months because the American economy has been transformed into a wage slave economy over the past forty years of Reaganomics and the victory of the right-wing billionaire network of shill policy think-tanks has resulted in a labor force that is largely lacking a union and powerless without an effective real raise (exceeding inflation) for decades. The longer this lockdown goes the closer we get to seeing the suddenly laid-off just run out of savings. That can’t be very far off.
So there’s a fascinating dynamic at work here where the lack of general personal savings that has become a feature of the US economy over the last generation is creating ticking-time-bomb of national emergency in the form of mass personal bankruptcy that could hit any month now unless the government pays the unemployed. And paying the unemployed in a mass manner like this is like some sort of nightmare for the GOP mega-donors who are ultimately calling the shots on this. Seven months of just sitting at home until November could financially devastate a huge percent of the US public without a government subsidy and the GOP doesn’t do government subsidies for the public. Ideologically. That’s like existential pain for the GOP. Subsidies for the masses. Yuck. Blasphemy. The very idea probably gives Charles Koch hives. But the Trump administration and GOP in Congress have to at least commit to providing public subsidies to the public for at least seven months if the mass bankruptcies will be avoided before November. Or really six months since the on-time $1,200 checks are just going out. That buys a few weeks for the GOP to decide if they’ll commit to paying the general public monthly quarantine-checks until at least through November if need be or if the plan is to force the economy open and just let the virus take down the vulnerable. They clearly want to just open things up. That’s where they’re heading. And as we saw, groups like FreedomWorks and the Chamber of Commerce are fully behind it and behind ideas like raising legal liability for employers over employee covid-related liabilities.
The mega-donors want to open things up to get their business empires back up and running and they desperately hate things like paying government subsidies to the public. That’s why they bought the GOP in the first place. To ensure it would oppose things like robust public support for the unemployed peasants. So the GOP’s pay-masters really do have a strong ideological bias when it comes to opening things up now and letting the public health chips fall where they may vs keeping things locked down for as long as it takes even in the fall by paying the bulk of the public monthly checks that roughly cover their previous income. A giant expensive new pay-everyone system that pays everyone a government stipend that goes on for months on end until the virus that will take an unknown amount of time is extinguished through social distancing shutdowns. The GOP’s ultimate nightmare. Either approve that giant new open-ended safety-net system for months on end right now or force the reopening of the economy and watch the pandemic flare up again. It’s the kind of the decision the GOP will only make after deep consultation with the mega-donors. That’s why they’re mega-donors. So it’s really a question of what the GOP mega-donors will decide when it comes to the choice between allowing the mega-donor’s GOP puppets to embark in an unprecedented large-scale open-ended public support program at least through the end of 2020 vs just opening up the economy now and letting the virus run its course. A question that the mega-donors have answered with these fake ‘grass roots’ far right anti-lockdown protests.
So from a public health perspective we have compelling reasons to suspect we could be looking at a COVID-election in November where the virus is still slowing making its way through a largely locked down society. That’s just how the pandemic could pan out epidemiologically. It could end sooner but there’s no reason to assume so. Especially since it looks like the GOP and the mega-donors are fully on board with just reopening the economy soon no matter what. Who knows what the infection levels could look like in November under a near-term politically-driven reopening scenario. It could be much more widespread in November than currently.
And that’s part of what makes a premature lifting of the corona-lockdown by the GOP so potentially Machiavellian: the more premature the reopening is that results in the spread of the virus the more scary the pandemic will ultimately be on election day in November when the GOP is hoping the threat of the virus will keep more Democrats at home than Republicans. Every public health f#ck up by Congress and the Trump administration now, like reopening too sonn, will only result in an extra scary election day in November when the virus is ubiquitous. An extra scary election day that’s super extra scary in the more densely packed Democratic urban cores.
And sure, one might argue that having an even worse pandemic on election day as a result of prematurely reopening is going to net-hurt the GOP as they get punished at the ballot box, the GOP’s plan is clearly to run a base election that depends on base turnout, not winning over new voters and the base will follow Trump off a cliff. It doesn’t really matter that much if the GOP has pissed off much of the electorate in the November from there being an ongoing widespread pandemic as long as the GOP’s rural base is revved up and out to vote in maximum strength for Trump like in 2016. If that happens, the asymmetric threat the virus poses to the Democratic urban cores compared to rural voters can carry the day for the GOP. The worse the pandemic is on election day the more angry voters will probably be at Trump but the more scared they will be to go out and vote. We don’t know for certain that the mega-donors are actively planning on exploiting a greater pandemic on election day to help Trump and the GOP win but we do know for certain that they are actively planning on inviting that greater pandemic. That’s what all the astroturf protests and lawsuits are all about.
Following up on the story of the sudden emergence of Tea Party-style astroturf ‘grassroots’ anti-COVID-lockdown protests in state capitals across the US last week and the fact that White House economic advisor Stephen Moore is actively working with and encouraging the protests, here’s a pair of articles that underscore how these protests really are being jointly orchestrated by the Trump White House and the GOP mega-donor network of think-tanks like FreedomWorks and ALEC:
If it seems like all these groups are following the same template, it turns out the group behind the protests in Michigan admitted to providing that template.
Matt Seely, a spokesperson for the Michigan Conservative Coalition which organized the protests told BuzzFeed a couple of days ago that he’s distributed his groups template plan of action to dozens of groups in other states. A template they’ve clearly been following based on the identical language used on social media by the different protest groups that suddenly popped up this week.
But the Michigan Conservative Coalition has a partner in organizing the anti-lockdown protests this week and that partner organization, the Michigan Freedom Fund, just happens to be one of the outfits financed by the DeVos Family. Michigan Freedom Fund is run by Greg McNeilly, an employee of Dick DeVos’ Windquest Group financial investment firm. He also previously served as campaign manager for Dick DeVos’s gubernatorial candidate. So while we’re going to hear denials from Republican operatives in the first article below that the Michigan Freedom Fund isn’t run by the DeVos family, that’s implausible spin. McNeilly is also a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party so, at best, we can suspect that the Michigan Freedom Fund is more a tool of the Michigan Republican Party an than the DeVos family. Except we can’t really say that because the DeVos family kind of owns the Michigan Republican Party so even that spin isn’t available. The Michigan Freedom Fund is a DeVos front group and it helped develop the template that’s being used by astroturf ‘grassroots’ groups across the nation in what appears to be a reincarnation of the Tea Party.
And Betsy DeVos is, of course, the wife of Dick DeVos and President Trump’s education secretary. So the far right billionaire oligarch education secretary’s front group co-organized the Michigan anti-corona-lockdown protests and shared that as a template to the rest of the states:
““You’re going to see some massive protesting going on,” Matt Seely, a spokesperson for the Michigan Conservative Coalition, told BuzzFeed News. “We’ve been asked to basically share our template with other groups to do the same thing, and we’ve done that.””
Michigan’s astroturf protests become a template. That’s according to Matt Seely of the Michigan Conservative Coalition. And it’s clear that some sort of template is at work since all the different groups that suddenly popped up are using the exact same language to describe themselves. Just like the Tea Party:
And Seely’s Michigan Conservative Coalition had a partner in organizing these template protests: The DeVos family’s Michigan Freedom Fund, started by DeVos family advisor Greg McNeilly. The President’s education secretary’s front group is providing the template for these ‘grassroots’ protests:
The Michigan Freedom Fund is independent of the DeVos family. Lol! That’s like saying FreedomWorks is independent of Charles Koch. Only in the strictest, dumbest technical sense. The Michigan Freedom Fund is unambiguously a DeVos family entity and the fact that Matt Seely wanted to hide is an example of how this is a billionaire-financed operation that isn’t supposed to look like a billionaire financed operation.
Next, here’s a 2012 MLive article about the creation of the Michigan Freedom Fund. It was to run an ad campaign in support of anti-union ‘right to work’ legislation working through the state legislature. The piece describes how Greg McNeilly was the new fund’s president and how McNeilly previously served as executive director of the Michigan Republican Party and was the campaign manager for Dick DeVos gubernatorial run. He also worked for Windquest Group, Dick DeVos’s investment company. In other words, he’s a long-time top trust DeVos family political operative. So when McNeilly started the Michigan Freedom Fund in 2012, that can’t really can’t be realistically seen as anything other McNeilly starting that fund on behalf of the DeVos political empire:
“McNeilly previously served as executive director of the Michigan Republican Party and campaign manager for gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos. He also works for The Windquest Group, an investment firm founded by DeVos.”
That’s the kind of resume you get when you’re the long-time trusted political advisor of a family that owns a state’s Republican Party. If you run Dick DeVos’s gubernatorial campaign you’re a foundational figure in Michigan’s Republican circles. That’s who set up the Michigan Freedom Fund in 2012 to run anti-union ‘right to work’ ads and that’s who is now at the center of the Michigan ‘grassroots’ astroturf anti-corona-lockdown protests. ‘Grassroots’ protests that appear to be following the Tea Party model and financed and orchestrated by the same Tea Party oligarchs. A template where those protests become the rallying cry for Republicans running across the country. Overnight nearly all of the GOP candidates started running as Tea Party candidates when the Tea Party got rolled out as the new un-Bush GOP brand in the Obama era. A whole bunch of astroturf Tea Party protests suddenly pop up everywhere that got used by the GOP candidates to rebrand themselves as insurgent anti-establishment populists. That was the template we saw with the Tea Party and the people behind that have a new astroturf protest movement.
A big difference between the astroturf rise of the Tea Party and anti-corona-lockdown protests of today is that it’s a Republican in the White House. It’s a lot easier to run a faux anti-establishment billionaire-financed reactionary political movement when there’s a Democrat in the office. Trump is the establishment at this point. And that points to one of the big likely reasons for Trump’s trio of “LIBERATE” tweets on Friday: the big GOP plan hatched by the GOP billionaire mega-donors is to have the GOP run on a ‘reopen the economy...for Freedom!’ platform across the nation. A nationalized GOP campaign that portrays the entire party, including Trump, as insurgents who are rebellion against an oppressive (liberal) medical establishment that is choking America’s future. That is such a classic sleazy GOP move and all signs are that they are planning on exactly that kind of campaign heading into the fall if the pandemic is still ongoing. Make reopening the economy the big partisan divide, with the GOP squarely in the ‘reopen now’ camp. Creating a big hyper-partisan idiotic wedge-issue psychodrama around reopening the economy that defines the contours of the national debate and turns it into a national question of whether or not people want to reopen the economy (a debate that grows more and more in Trump’s direction the closer we get to November as people get exhausted) is exactly the kind of thing we should expect from the GOP. A bunch of cynically planned theatrics involving real lives and tragedy. Classic GOP.
And that’s part of what makes the involvement of both Stephen Moore and the DeVos family in the orchestration of these protests so disturbing: Trump really is planning on running as an insurgent against ‘Big Science and Public Health’ and leading the whole GOP on a national campaign against the medical establishment advising against a premature reopening. A political psy-op designed to make the scientific and medical community the bad guys in the mind of the GOP base. Well, more so. They were already the bad guys with that bad. But as this campaign plays out we’re poised to see an insane demonization of the public health establishment if there’s still a general stay-at-home status heading into the fall. That’s just how today’s GOP operates. A non-stop flood of ‘they are coming to get you’ stories to keep the base riled up. This year they are going to be doctors and public health officials who will be public enemy number one in the minds of Republican voters by the time this election is over.
It all points to one big argument for taking the risk of reopening the economy sooner rather than later: if we don’t reopen soon and placate the mega-donors who own most of the economy, Trump and the GOP are going to demonize science and public health to try to win the 2020 elections. That’s really going to happen. The whole party is getting ready for this from the ‘grassroots’ to the mega-donors to the White House. The writing is on the wall and some of it is written by the education secretary. If we’re still looking at a viral pandemic that keeps the economy largely shut down heading into the fall we really are going to see the GOP run in a “LIBERATE” theme that makes the public health establishment the new top enemy.
Plus, don’t forget that Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, owns his own private intelligence organization that was training James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas undercover operatives in intelligence methods. So we should probably expect some sort of BS selectively edited Project Veritas video before the end of this that somehow portrays a public health conspiracy in the government that Trump doesn’t know about. A Trumpian war against corrupt bureaucrats, this time bureaucrat doctors and scientists. That, again, would be such a classic GOP move and the kind of script Steve Bannon would write. And Steven Bannon is actually writing the script. Or at least part of the script. That’s how dirty tricks work. They’re generally proactive.
So when we look at what we’re seeing from the GOP and how that ties into the designs of the billionaire mega-donors who want to see their business reopened ASAP it becomes clear that reopening things ASAP is going to be a theme that the GOP crafts its 2020 messaging around. The goal really is to reopen ASAP. These billionaires own the economy and they sure as hell don’t want the government to pay the rabble for months on end just to live and eat. So we really going to see the GOP make this a central message for the campaign. We really do have to add ‘the politically opportunistic demonization of science and public health’ to the ‘costs of not reopening the economy soon’ column in our cost/benefits analysis of how to best proceed forward on this pandemic.
Although the GOP has long attacked science and the public health establishment so in that sense this election probably won’t be anything new. Except for the dangerous pandemic that requires sound science and public health decisions.
Here’s a set of articles about what appears to be the latest attempt by Betsy DeVos to defund public schools and shift public money towards private schools, in particular the kind of private religious schools that indoctrinate students into the far right fascist-friendly forms of Christian theology the DeVos family has long championed. It’s also a story about the latest apparent attempt to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to enact the kind of radical change that wouldn’t have been possible under normal conditions:
First, here’s a piece about the Trump administration’s new policy of threatening to withhold federal funds for public schools unless those schools are reopened this fall. It sounds like Education Secretary Betsy is particularly interested in this threat to withholding funds. Why? Because the threat isn’t just to withhold federal funds for public schools. It’s a threat to instead take that money and give it to parents to send their kids to private schools that reopened instead. It’s unclear if the Trump administration can actually carry out this policy without Congressional approval so it seems unlikely that this can unilaterally become the federal policy this fall. But it’s still a threat that can impact the decisions made by local schools. And not just a threat that’s intended to encourage public schools to open prematurely but also a threat designed to encourage private schools to reopen even more aggressively, with minimal distancing, so they can make space for all the new public school students that will be redirected towards them:
““If schools aren’t going to reopen, we’re not suggesting pulling funding from education but instead allowing families ... (to) take that money and figure out where their kids can get educated if their schools are going to refuse to open,” Betsy DeVos told Fox News in an interview.”
If the public schools won’t open just send your kids to one of the private schools that did decide to open under the banner of “school choice”. That’s Betsy DeVos’s plan. And while it remains unclear if this plan can be implemented by the Trump administration alone without congressional approval, the fact that local school districts are going to be desperate for that federal funding implicitly gives the Trump administration’s threat real teeth even if it can’t legally carry out this threat:
And as the following article describes, this “pandemic school choice” plan is a plan that happens to coincide with Betsy DeVos’s long-standing championing of private schools and public vouchers to subsidize those private schools under the banner of “school choice”. It also happens to be a long-standing goal of DeVos that hasn’t been all that widely popular outside of the Christian conservative core voting base and even the GOP failed to implement these kinds of education funding schemes when the GOP had complete control of the White House and Congress during Trump’s first two years in office. As the article puts it, the Trump administration’s push for this new policy this past week wasn’t just a retread of a conservative education policy idea: It was also a standard, familiar political play of never letting a good crisis go to waste:
“But the push this past week wasn’t just a retread of a conservative education policy idea: It was also a standard, familiar political play of never letting a good crisis go to waste. Before becoming secretary of education, DeVos spent much of her career exploring ways to divert public education dollars toward private schools that avoid public accountability — for students’ academic performance, for civil rights oversight or for maintaining the separation of church and state.”
Yep, getting as many kids as possible educated in unaccountable private schools — private schools that often indoctrinate children into a far right theocratic world view — is kind of Betsy DeVos’s life quest. That’s the major reason she was such a profoundly disturbing choice for Education Secretary in the first place. It wasn’t just that she was an unqualified billionaire who was only considered for the position because of her family’s long-standing major patronage of the GOP, which made her a generally disturbing Education Secretary. It was the fact that she’s comes from a far right oligarchic dynasty and is a dedicated religious zealot with a passion for turning the US education system into a religious indoctrination engine that made her selection so profoundly disturbing. Well, that and the fact that her selection seemed like payback to her brother, Eric Prince, for his role as the intermediary for foreign election assistance in 2016 (the PsyGroup Saudi/UAE/Israeli help offer).
But even with DeVos as Education Secretary and the GOP in complete control of the White House and Congress in after Trump’s ‘win’ in 2016, the GOP still couldn’t muster the support to enact the kind of sweeping federal and state financial support for private schools that DeVos has long envisioned. It was just too unpopular. That’s what makes this a rare opportunity for DeVos and the broader network of hard right oligarchs and theocrats she represents: the pandemic is an opportunity for passing policies that couldn’t get passed even with the GOP’s complete control of Congress and the White House:
So that’s the Trump administration’s new pandemic education policy: give public schools to choice of reopening this fall or risk having the federal government subsidize their students leaving to go to the private schools that decide to reopen. But as the following article from the end of June — a week and a half before the Trump administration announced the new education funding threat — about a new Supreme Court ruling describes, the issue of public financing of private schools suddenly has a new level of constitutional clarity from the Supreme Court and it’s the kind of clarity that must have made the Trump administration’s move irresistible: The Supreme Court’s 5–4 vote conservative majority ruling in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue just made it effectively constitutionally impossible for state governments to subsidize private education in general and discriminate at all based on the content, including religious content, of the private curriculum. In other words, if a private religious school has content that teaches that LGBTQ students are morally wrong the state can say that the school’s content invalidates it from participating in the subsidy program. All schools have to be subsidized by the public if any schools are subsidized by the public. That’s what the Supreme Court just ruled and a week and a half later the Trump administration announced a policy that’s going to use the pandemic to drive public school students into the private schools that are willing to reopen this fall:
“The government could effectively lose its ability to tell schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students, students with disabilities, or other marginalized groups that they may not participate in state-run scholarship programs.”
Any private school must be allowed to participate in all state-run scholorship programs. That’s what the Supreme Court’s conservative majority basically ruled at the end of June and then a week and a half later the Trump administration declares a scheme to push public school students into private schools this fall. That seems like a red flag.
So when we’re trying to assess what the Trump administration, and Betsy DeVos in particular, have in mind with last week’s ‘open the public schools or send them off to private schools’ threat, the fact that the Supreme Court just removed the issue of ideologically extreme schools off the table from a constitutionality standpoint surely looms large in their thinking. And that means the Trump administration, and Betsy DeVos in particular, would probably prefer to see a bunch of public schools not reopen and have all those kids go to private schools instead. Trump might see it as good politics. And that’s part of what makes this pandemic moment so dangerous for the US’s public education system: the fight over whether or not to reopen the schools in the middle of the pandemic might create a situation that makes the kind of radical visions of widespread privatization via voucherization of public education that the right-wing has wanted to do for decades but could never politically justify suddenly seem justifiable.
Also keep in mind that even if the Trump administration doesn’t not have the authority to enact this policy at the national level without Congress’s approval, there’s still state-level funding which can be redirected towards widespread private school vouchers and by announcing this national plan the Trump administration may be trying to give GOP governors the political cover to actually enact such policies at the state-level. And it was a state-level program that the Supreme Court just ruled on so the ruling would certainly apply to any new state education voucher programs. That’s why it’s going to be very interesting to see if Republican-run states start enacting the DeVos policy of mass vouchers where the public schools don’t open in coming months. If they’re going to do so they have better start putting those plans in motion soon but the pandemic happens to be surging at the moment. The Trump administration has signaled that’s what it would wants states do and do it so soon.
Winds of sudden change are in the air for the US educational system. Sudden highly-profitable rotten change that the privatization industry has desired for decades. The stars have finally aligned for the education privatization industry. Stars like a giant pandemic that shut down the public schools. But at least Betsy DeVos isn’t using the pandemic to bring back child labor so it could be worse.