Peace is made by those who fight wars in the correct order and at the right time

Peace is made by those who fight wars in the correct order and at the right time. By Flat White in The Spectator.

Let’s talk about world war three, and how some of the most intelligent military minds in the world are preventing it on our behalf.

If Tehran switches allegiance, and leans West instead of East, China’s ability to wage war in the Pacific, centred on Taiwan, is severely hindered. …

America has the military strength to deter a full-scale war from either China, Russia, or the Middle East. It cannot fight a war on three fronts simultaneously.

And as for its allies, they are woefully unprepared so we may presume the US bases its predictions largely on military assets it controls.

Ukraine:

This predicament is one of the uncomfortable reasons why the US is dragging its feet on Ukraine. Not only is the European conflict not really America’s responsibility, America benefits strategically from every asset Russia pours into Ukraine. Putin is currently weakening himself as a partner for China even though an eventual victory would translate into strength (after a lengthy recovery). The longer this takes, the better. This calculation infuriates Europe, but Europe made a mistake neglecting its collective military responsibility whilst having full knowledge of Russia’s intention. With the money paid by the UK alone into the European Union, they had more than enough resources to take care of their military needs. They spent it on bureaucrats. …

Iran:

Iran’s funding and spreading of Islamic terror, regionally and into the West, was merely one part of its plan to destroy Western nations such as Australia. Even considering this alone, Iran presents a major risk factor in a future global conflict that could weaken America internally with attacks while it is trying to fight an external war.

Khamenei made this mission very clear and repeated his violent intentions frequently. Iran was not a stable entity. It was an expansionist force in the worst possible way.

Now!

Crucially, Iran was not ready for a full-scale war.

America forced it into one prematurely with the assassination of Khamenei and at least a dozen of the leadership’s officials. … By the end of the week, the military assets of Iran will be of little strategic use to China or Russia. …

Soon:

As the dust settles, the US is looking at a situation with Russia partially exhausted from its war against Ukraine, Iran in a tailspin, and China facing a logistic nightmare.

China is in more of a bind than originally thought. As a large, complex, and energy-hungry entity, it will have to do a lot of reshuffling to keep itself functioning internally, let alone contemplating a military offensive on Taiwan. It is dealing with the very real possibility that its oil and gas supplies from the Middle East could be destroyed, delayed, or flipped over into Western control. All of this shortly after it lost its power in Venezuela.

Trump and the AI money:

Everyone thought I was crazy when I said Trump bestowed almost a trillion dollars on the Middle East under the heading of ‘AI’ to keep them onside in any potential conflict with Iran. They sat on their hands with Trump’s first anti-nuclear strike, and now they’re actively sheltering US forces. It was a deal that most people missed. …

A passive peace with insufficient preparation is the road to extinction:

The truth of human civilisation is that peace is not determined by the peacemakers. It is set out by those nations bent on war and expansion, and those who successfully thwart them.

Leaders like Trump know that a war will be fought. No matter how much money is used to pad the conversation. War is certain.

The question Trump and the West had to ask itself is … what sort of war do they want to fight?

A true third world war with a full-strength Iran, China, and Russia allied with a network of dangerous friends (such as the ‘stans’ and North Korea)?

That’s a war the West loses. That’s a war that sees even Australia, pretending to be Switzerland, overrun. That’s a war that manifests when pacifists and wets are left in charge. It’s the marble tiling of ‘good intentions’ lining the foyer of hell. …

Nations that sit on their hands, close their eyes, and hum quietly to themselves are not smart, modern, civilised, or sensible. They are placing their citizens in danger by failing to acknowledge military reality. And commentators who refuse to accept the approach to war by Islamic and communist regimes do themselves a major disservice.

Glenn Reynolds:

This isn’t war, but collective self-defense on the part of the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, and several other countries, which is explicitly allowed by Article 51 of the UN Charter.

David Archibald:

Iran had a plan. It was to make a lot of ballistic missiles and then one day fire a whole lot of them off at Israel.

Amongst the conventional warheads would be 20 or so nuclear warheads. If each nuclear warhead killed 20,000 people, that would be 400,000 dead-odd.

Lefties reflexively oppose any improvement in the world.

Possible related, but funny in any case:

Trump has launched an unprecedented assault on the climate gravy train. Where’s the pushback?

Trump has launched an unprecedented assault on the climate gravy train. Where’s the pushback? By Rei Takver at The Guardian.

As Donald Trump assaults the legal foundation of America’s ability to regulate global warming emissions, climate deniers have been privately celebrating what they claim is the “silent” acquiescence of billionaires, Democrats, climate activists and even reporters to the president’s aggressive pro-fossil-fuel agenda. …

“The Trump administration just marched in and destroyed the crown jewel of climate science in the United States,” Robert Brulle, a professor of environment and society at Brown University, told me, referring to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the country’s premier climate research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in December.

“And nothing happened. There wasn’t even a whimper.” …

“I think the climate movement in the United States has failed. It has flat failed, and that means we need to rebuild this movement in a completely different manner,” he said. …

Instead of pushing back on this blitz, many Democratic party representatives have retreated from talking directly about the climate crisis across social media, podcasts, speeches, and in Congress. …

The growing “climate hush” is not limited to the US — a silence about the climate crisis has expanded across the globe.

At Davos in January, world leaders across business and government talked noticeably less about addressing climate change than in previous years.

Joanne Nova:

Donald Trump has driven a poleaxe through the Climate Voodoo Machine — destroying the legal basis for climate activism, pulling out of 66 Globalist agencies, setting the dogs of DOGE onto the climate cheerleaders and threatening the cabal of Banksters. Yet, despite all that, there are no hordes in the streets begging for carbon credit schemes.

Could it be that no one really ever cared?

Even the devoted billionaires can’t manage a press conference from a private yacht to “save the world”.

The people have figured out that climate change was a scam and The Democrats know it. They don’t want to talk about climate change in case they turn off the voters. …

The Guardian has no idea, but Climate Change is dying for all the right reasons. The public figured out that their electricity bills would never go down, and the believers were always wrong. So in the US the voters voted for Trump, and the firestorm that unleashed was exactly what they wanted.

Instead of protesting, Bill Gates dropped everything he used to say and suddenly said we should worry about other environmental issues. And BlackRock and the bankers are more interested in AI. Everyone was more interested in AI, and the datacenters ate the business case for unreliable energy for breakfast.

The climate scare is dying because people have noticed:

  1. The climate predictions have failed to come true. (Yes the planet s warming, but not even as much as the minimum warming rates originally predicted — even according to their dodgy temperature measurements that exaggerate the warming).
  2. The temperature and climate data prior to 1990 was thrown out and completely revised by the CO2 people. History was flatly contradicted and changed.
  3. The temperature measurements of today are made in opaque fashion by the CO2 people. Self-interested, what?

I could tell you precisely what is wrong with the climate models and why they are wrong (but basically unfixable, given today’s state of knowledge), but no one is interested and I’d rather stay out of trouble.

I could also point you to my study using advanced maths of the relationship between the Sun and temperatures on the Earth’s surface, which accounts for the warming since 1650, the little ice age before that, and the medieval warm period before that. In 2015, I predicted a temperature peak in about 2017 then mild cooling for the next decade. That prediction is coming to pass, with the notable caveat that in 2022 an underwater volcano called Hunga Tonga threw up a lot of water vapor high into the stratosphere, which warned the planet dramatically but is now fading as the water vapor gradually falls out of the stratosphere — which will take about five years. (Water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. It is most potent when in the stratosphere, but normally the stratosphere is basically free of water vapor. By the way, jet aircraft emit water vapor in the lower stratosphere where they cruise, and global warming is mainly a northern hemispheric phenomenon.)

Wikilaundering

Wikilaundering. By X Freeze.

The “Wikilaundering” scandal is finally blowing wide open and it’s worse than we thought …

You do not get information. You get propaganda…. articles manipulated by the highest bidder, billionaires, PR firms, and woke activists …

📍 Shadow Network: London-based PR firms like Portland Communications run secret “black hat” editors and middlemen to bypass every rule

📍 Reputation Scrubbing on Steroids: They delete scandals, human rights abuses, and even controversial Epstein files for powerful politicians…… while scrubbing migrant worker deaths and slave labor scandals for Qatar, covering up ties to terrorists, and burying corporate crimes for billionaire clients

📍 The Price of Truth: Billionaires and corporations pay huge money to bury failures and push lies while their “achievements” sit at the top

📍 Gatekeeping at Scale: A tiny insider group controls what billions see as “fact”

Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It’s a bought-and-paid-for propaganda brochure run for the elite and woke activists

This is exactly why Elon was hell-bent on creating Grokipedia…….the exact opposite: information that can’t be corrupted, altered by price, and is written by real AI that delivers raw data and unfiltered truth instead of the sanitized woke lies sold to the highest bidder

 

By Claire Wilmot.

Wikipedia has been subject to shady, paid-for edits ordered by partners at an elite London PR firm with links to Downing Street. And the clients who benefitted from this “wikilaundering” are some of the world’s richest and most powerful people.

The firm in question is Portland Communications, whose founder Tim Allan is now the director of communications for Keir Starmer. And it has been busted once already for this practice, which is in breach of the British PR professionals’ code of conduct.

But after the firm was exposed, former employees told us, it simply started hiring middlemen instead. As one of them put it: “No one said, ‘We should stop doing this.’ The question was how we could keep doing it without getting caught.”

  • Portland’s subcontractors have polished the public image of Qatar by burying references to critical reporting ahead of the 2022 World Cup, according to the firm’s insiders.
  • They have also obscured mentions of a major terrorist-financing case involving Qatari businessmen
  • Scrubbed evidence that a billion-dollar Gates-funded project failed in its mission; and
  • Promoted one side of Libya’s post-Gaddafi government over the other.

Often, however, their changes were more subtle: burying bad press under descriptions of a client’s philanthropic work or swapping out critical news references with something more positive. …

With the rich and powerful ever more eager for their pages to cast them in the best possible light, the demand for Wikipedia editing has never been higher. And that demand is being met by a thriving cottage industry of illicit editors.

Is there nothing money or ideology cannot corrupt? Thank Heavens for X.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump are effective politically because they are so rich. They cannot be bought off, but can do what they think is right without being influenced by offers of payments.

John Cleese Declares “I’m Afraid They Are Going To Have To Arrest Me”

John Cleese Declares “I’m Afraid They Are Going To Have To Arrest Me”. By Jonathon Turley.

In a recent interview, Cleese [now 86] observed that the government’s new speech standards would classify many citizens, including himself, as presumptive criminals for criticizing certain policies.

He observed that: ”As I am an Islamosceptic, I’m now worried that the Labour government may categorise me as a terrorist…”

The government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer has continued its headlong plunge into the criminalization of speech. The guidelines include a section on cultural nationalism, stating that such views are now the subject of government crackdowns. To even argue that Western culture is under threat from mass migration or a lack of integration by certain groups is being treated as a dangerous ideology.

Cleese responded by saying, “I’m clearly a terrorist, so I’m afraid they are going to have to arrest me.” …

The United Kingdom has eviscerated free speech in the name of social cohesion and order. …

Yo can be sent to prison in the UK just for having illegal views:

Last year, Nicholas Brock, 52, was convicted of a thought crime in Maidenhead, Berkshire. The neo-Nazi was given a four-year sentence for what the court called his “toxic ideology” based on the contents of the home he shared with his mother in Maidenhead, Berkshire.

While most of us find Brock’s views repellent and hateful, they were confined to his head and his room.

Yet, Judge Peter Lodder QC dismissed free speech or free thought concerns with a truly Orwellian statement:

“I do not sentence you for your political views, but the extremity of those views informs the assessment of dangerousness.” …

Even though Lodder agreed that the defendant was older, had limited mobility, and “there was no evidence of disseminating to others,” he still sent him to prison for holding extremist views.

After the sentencing, Detective Chief Superintendent Kath Barnes, Head of Counter Terrorism Policing South East (CTPSE), warned others that he was going to prison because he “showed a clear right-wing ideology with the evidence seized from his possessions during the investigation….We are committed to tackling all forms of toxic ideology which has the potential to threaten public safety and security.”

Now apply the same standard to the Koran.

In the UK, words that disagree with the globalist narrative are now increasingly being treated like kiddie porn.

That school in Iran that got hit? Iranian rocket. The media and left lied,

That school in Iran that got hit? Iranian rocket. The media and left lied. By Chaya’s Clan.

A failed missile launch in Iran caused the projectile to fall on a school. Images captured the moment it failed, fell back to ground, and struck.

The Iranians — just like the Palestinians in Gaza at the beginning of that war — immediately claimed it was a missile fired by the United States or Israel.

And the Western media ran with it without checking, because it suited their narrative. Girls (and still some guys), how about carefully reporting just all the relevant the facts, or is that too boring or difficult now?

The elementary school is attached to an IRGC naval base.

And here’s a leftist politician retelling what he almost certainly knows is not true:

 

Mark Twain? Winston Churchill? —  A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.

 

Is College Making People Stupider?

Is College Making People Stupider? By Rob Jenkins at Minding the Campus.

Recently, I overheard my granddaughter reciting this old rhyme:

Girls go to college
To get more knowledge
Boys go to Jupiter
To get more stupider.

The obvious anti-male bias aside, this is a clever little ditty, at least to a nine-year-old. But I fear she may have it wrong. From what I see on campus and in the country at large, too many people who go to college these days — boys and girls both — do not, in fact, acquire more useful knowledge; they just get stupider. And the worst part is, they don’t even know it.

The poster person for this phenomenon is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has a degree in economics and politics yet doesn’t know the first thing about either. Her monumental ignorance, which is exceeded only by her smug confidence in her own intellectual superiority, was on full display last week at the Munich Security Conference, where, among other things, she claimed that Venezuela is south of the Equator and disputed Marco Rubio’s observation that Spanish explorers introduced horses to the American Southwest.

As the great Thomas Sowell put it, “There have always been ignorant people, but they haven’t always had college degrees to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well-informed because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes.” …

These days, it appears that for many people, having a degree — or multiple degrees — is counterproductive: they literally become stupider as a result, or at least more ignorant. Perhaps that is because, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, they “know” so much that isn’t true.

Example:

Consider the COVID-19 “pandemic,” when tens of thousands of college students were convinced that the virus was a deadly threat to them, that wearing a cloth mask could protect them from it, and that the mRNA “vaccines” would end the pandemic. None of those things turned out to be true, and at least the first two were known to be false as early as the spring of 2020. But college kids believed the lies they were told not just by the media but by faculty and administrators at their institutions.

Of course, they weren’t the only ones. Millions of Americans were fooled. But you would think people with college degrees, or at least pursuing degrees, would be better at finding information, thinking critically, and reaching logical conclusions. Apparently not. If anything, the more “education” a person had, the more likely they were to buy into the nonsense.

Example:

Then there were the pro-Palestinian “protests” that erupted on campuses across the nation during the spring and summer of 2024. Numerous “man-on-the-street” interviews, like this one, revealed that many of the students chanting “from the river to the sea” could not identify either the river or the sea in question. Nor did they realize they were calling for the eradication of the Jewish state. They didn’t know that there was no such country called Palestine or that Jews had lived in that region for thousands of years. They also had no idea how the modern nation of Israel was formed.

And keep in mind, these protests took place mostly on “elite” campuses, supposedly reserved for the best and brightest among us.

It’s not what you know, it’s signaling your virtue and oppressed status that counts. Such a change in the last few decades, from what made the West so successful.

Making men low-status and artificially inflating the status of women

Making men low-status and artificially inflating the status of women. By Fugitive Caesar.

Women are attracted to high-status men and our whole society is arranged around making men low-status and artificially inflating the status of women. Hence the decline in birth rates.

A third of the economy is just fake high-paid jobs for women.

 

 

 

You hear all kinds of cope about how men are resilient, or genius will persist in all circumstances, or it can’t be as bad as it seems, but the reality is that we have completely destroyed generations of men in pursuit of egalitarian religious delusions.

Commenters:

Nothing like a high paid easy job for a woman to ensure she won’t reproduce. Women don’t date men who earn less, so it instantly disqualifies huge % of men. It also ensures she does not have all that much need for a man, and won’t get pregnant for fear of losing her easy money. …

Men will date down. Women will not. A man who makes 500k a year will date a woman who makes 40k a year. A woman who makes 500k a year will maybe consider dating a man who makes 300k a year but will spend time finding a man that makes 800k a year.

 

Hired for DEI?

Commenter:

Every company (tech) I’ve ever worked at, it’s exactly this, but the difference is, 95% of new hires are Indians. I’ve probably only seen a white guy hired one, ever.

The part where the female literally doesn’t know how to code, yea, that’s happened too.

I worked in IT in Canberra for a few years in the 1990s. Most of my contract jobs were rescuing failed projects originally given to women  programmers.

Young adults are walking from LGBTQ+ identity; it was more of a social contagion than an orientation

Young adults are walking from LGBTQ+ identity; it was more of a social contagion than an orientation. By Vittorio.

We built a system where identifying as LGBT gave you protected status, social capital, media representation, and institutional preference. The superior class par excellence.

No one in American history had more unearned systemic privilege than the alphabet people. It’s not a shock that teenagers adopted it. They were adapting to the incentives.

What we are seeing now is a return to normalcy since the incentives have been removed.

 

 

And for those who went trans and had bits lopped off? You went too far on the virtue signalling and the quest for unearned privilege — if you were pushed into it, sue those who pushed you.

 

The fine print:

Jean M. Twenge has concluded that non-heterosexual identity is in free fall among U.S. young adults, based on newly available nationally representative data. Her analysis, published on November 5, 2025, and updated in a follow-up post on March 3, 2026, shows a significant decline in self-identification as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) among young adults, with bisexual women showing the largest drop.

This trend appears to be part of a broader shift, as Twenge also found sharp declines in transgender and nonbinary identity among 18- to 22-year-olds and teens as young as 13.

She attributes the drop to possible changes in social acceptance, mental health improvements, or a fading of social trends, though she cautions that long-term patterns will only be clear with future data.

My shocked face is numb with surprise.

Peak LGB+ was 20% in 2022. Sex researchers says the long term rate of gayness in men is about 3% (prevented from rising by disease), and less than 1% for lesbianism.

It’s about 47 years of accumulated pain

It’s about 47 years of accumulated pain. By Ali Ansari in The Australian.

To paraphrase Trump, it’s about 47 years of accumulated pain. Over the past year, the Islamic Republic has found itself confronted by a US with a grievance to match its own, and with a growing political will to do something about it.

Moreover, in Trump the regime’s leaders were disturbed to find someone with about as much respect for the international rules-based order as they had. For Iran’s people, who have been at the sharp end of the Islamic Republic’s disdain for rules and rights of any nature, Trump’s approach seemed refreshing. This is why, to the apparent bewilderment of some commentators, many Iranians in Iran were thrilled by the US attack.

Gerard Baker in The Australian:

From its outset in 1979, the Islamic Republic has made murdering Americans among its highest priorities. From the more than 200 Marines killed by Hezbollah in the 1983 Beirut bombing and the 600 or so American service members killed by Iran-backed militias in Iraq to the many US citizens terrorised, captured and killed by Hamas and other Iranian-sponsored entities in Gaza and around the world, Tehran has repeatedly bathed in American blood.

Under the principle of self-defence, action taken against a regime that has killed so many of our own citizens is legitimate, not simply for retributive justice, but to prevent further killings. It would have been preferable if Mr Trump had spent more time in the past few weeks explaining that case to the American people and, ideally, securing a political mandate from congress for it. But the failure to do so doesn’t make the cause an illegitimate one.

Here’s a big list of terrorist attacks and military actions against US Persons carried out by Iran and Iranian-backed terrorist groups since 1979.

 

Only George HW Bush’s war to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 can be counted as a clear success, and then only because its objective was tightly circumscribed. Ronald Reagan’s effort to stabilise Lebanon in the early 1980s ended in the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, while his later efforts to extricate US hostages resulted in the self-inflicted wound of Iran-Contra, and George W. Bush’s war with Iraq in 2003 cost intolerable loss of life and untold damage to America’s strategic capabilities and stature.

Democratic presidents’ less ambitious efforts have fared no better. Bill Clinton’s standoff bombing campaign failed to arrest the rise of al-Qa’ida and led more or less directly to the September 11 attacks; Barack Obama “led from behind”, unleashing chaos in Libya, and permitted Syria to cross his chemical weapons red line. Joe Biden’s catastrophic exit from Afghanistan (part of the Greater Middle East for these purposes) was a humiliation.

Kurt Schlicter:

I reject any allegedly right-coded ideology that requires that we allow seventh century Third World savages to murder our people and not pay for it.

There is no expiration date for righteous retribution.

If you believe that seventh century Third World savages can murder our people and not pay for it, then we are not the same.

It’s the Arab way of war. Surprise attacks, needling, attacks calibrated not to draw a full-blooded response, outbreed and out-fanatic the non-Muslims. Given how Islam has 2 billion people, you have to respect the methodology — it works in the long run.

Rest in Pieces: Ali Khamenei, Demure Progressive Stalwart Who Inspired Democrats, Bombed to Death at 86

Rest in Pieces: Ali Khamenei, Demure Progressive Stalwart Who Inspired Democrats, Bombed to Death at 86. By Andrew Stiles in The Washington Free Beacon.

Ali Khamenei, the “Black Lives Matter” advocate and long-serving supreme leader of Iran, was a guiding light to Democratic lawmakers, Ivy League professors, and other progressive ideologues who endorsed his intellectual appraisal of America’s evil and the treachery of Jews.

In darkness they must now persist. …

 

“Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. He was 86.

The Iranian people cheered a tyrant’s demise and hoped for what could be. You could tell their joy was real and not the Kamala Harris kind. The ayatollah’s left-wing comrades sobbed like sloppy seventh graders. They shook their fists at mushroom clouds and wept for what had been. The revolution. The hostages. The oil nonsense. Decades of degenerate behavior and the targeting of American soldiers. The homespun hipster in his button-down shirt (also killed). The slow death of the Iranian economy, which even the Obama nuclear shake-down couldn’t stop.

They had to hand it to the supreme leader. Fans commended him for dying honorably — on his own terms, mid-resistance, cowering in a bunker, surrounded by his closest friends and military commanders. They touted his progressive bona fides — he understood that decolonization was more than vibes and essays. In May 2020, he penned an eloquent clapback against white supremacy after the death of George Floyd. He never took Trump’s calls or laughed at a misogynistic joke, which in some ways made him even more of a winner than the USA men’s hockey team. He inspired a generation of Ivy League losers to hate Jews even more than they hate themselves.

Khamenei’s death was a crippling blow to America’s elite institutions, many of which had presumably shortlisted the supreme leader in their search for a commencement speaker. It was basically the last remaining option to forestall a shrieking walkout. Now what? The students and faculty who supported Iran’s proxy, Hamas, and its “anti-colonial insurgency,” are naturally devastated. Their terrorist allies have been crushed. They must endure the moral indignity of mourning a tyrant who murdered thousands and repressed millions. It remains to be seen which campus chapters of Feminist Fatties for Palestine will issue statements denouncing Iranian women for burning their hijabs. …

Rest in pieces, thug.

Footage of Kuwaiti locals approaching one of the shot down American pilots this morning

Footage of Kuwaiti locals approaching one of the shot down American pilots this morning. Via OSINTtechnical.

“Are you OK? Thank you for helping us.”

 

Related:

They didn’t want to show the Venezuelan people celebrating and waving US flags.

They don’t want to show the Iranian people celebrating and thanking Trump.

 

 

Obama was droning American citizens and the left didn’t bat an eye but Trump takes out one of the worst regimes in the world and they act like he stomped a kitten.

 

The Left’s nonsense about Iran 1953

The Left’s nonsense about Iran 1953.

The leftist talking point:

Iran was a democracy from 1923-1953. The PM Mohammad Mosaddegh wanted to save his national resources from exploitation from UK/US Oil companies. He nationaled the OIL wells.

MI6/CIA did coup, removed him and put puppet Shah on throne.

Technically true, sort of, but it’s lying by omission. Eli Lake:

This is an ignorant talking point repeated by people who want to sound like they know the history.

Mossedegh had dissolved the Majles [the Iranian parliament], replaced the army leadership and Supreme Court and closed newspapers by the time the Shah used his constitutional authority to fire him.

Commenters:

This convenient historical myth has become a staple of the populist left. Its roots lie in Marxist historiographical revisionism, and many scholars shaped by that tradition appear as sources in major media. Notably, even outlets as different as The Free Press and Al Jazeera rely on the same intellectual lineage when convenient. …

Mossadegh was wildly unpopular with the Iranian people by the time of his removal, a fact that always seems to get ignored in popular mythology …

And the CIA didn’t do anything. They tried to claim responsibility, but Eisenhower saw through it and called their report little better than a dime store spy novel.

Oh, let’s not forget: the mullahs actually supported the removal of Mossadegh.

More:

On July 25, 1953, Mossadegh’s government decreed a referendum to dissolve the Majlis entirely. The vote (August 3–10) was non-secret and widely criticized as rigged. Official result: ~99.9% approval (over 2 million “yes” votes). Mossadegh then ruled by decree, declaring “the will of the people is above law.” This directly violated the 1906 Constitution, which reserved dissolution power to the Shah.

Bob Reisner:

There are three things about the post WW2 Iran -USA relationship that needs to be understood:

  1. Post WW2 Iran exists because Truman threatened to nuke the USSR in 1947 if the didn’t stop their invasion of Iran. They did.
  2. Under Eisenhower, the world was to be populated by small and medium sized countries run by people supporting the USA. And some of them would be selected to be regional powers that kept their area mostly peaceful. And that includes the first shah.
  3. President Carter was a smart idiot. He was offended by the fact that the Shah would kill as many as a thousand people each year to keep control. Carter could not understand that the replacement for the Shah would be a regime killing millions. If he [had] supported the Shah, the entire Mideast would have been pretty peaceful for the last 45 years. The Shah understood his role to be the USA supporter and be the regional power to keep the neighborhood relatively quiet. Carter directly caused the Shah to run by not acting as his backstop.

All Trump is trying to do is to get Iran back to 1955. Iran continues to be the best alternative for the regional power who sides with the USA and keeps the neighborhood peace.

The last 45 years shows us that Trump needs to succeed.

Fascinating. And entirely omitted from the breathless war coverage.

How leftism emerged from the French and German versions of the Enlightenment

How leftism emerged from the French and German versions of the Enlightenment. By Stehen Soukop in American Greatness.

In truth, the Enlightenment can be divided into four segments:

  1. the English Enlightenment, led by men like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Isaac Newton;
  2. the French Enlightenment, which featured Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau;
  3. the Scottish Enlightenment, highlighting Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Dugald Stewart; and
  4. the German Enlightenment, the irresistible force of which was Immanuel Kant.

All segments of the Enlightenment shared certain characteristics — a break (of varying extremities) from the moral foundations of civilizational history up to that point, a preoccupation with reason as a guiding moral and intellectual force, and a belief in the authority of carefully ordered empiricism.

Differences:

  • The English and the Scottish Enlightenments focused on reform, gradualism, and the advancement of existing institutions.
  • The French Enlightenment and the Kantian-led German Enlightenment, by contrast, were radical, focused on universalism, and on the destruction rather than the reform of institutions. …

Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Conference two weeks ago pretended that the Entitlement was a single thing, and overlooked their common origin:

In the micro sense, Rubio was … mistaken about Europe being the site where “the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born.” Those ideas were, in fact, born thousands of years previously, not in Europe, but in ancient Israel.

The English and the Scottish Enlightenments, which influenced many aspects of the American Revolution and its founding documents, did not break entirely from these historical influences. They updated them and modified their language, adding additional flair, but they nevertheless maintained the moral and political ideas that had animated the West for millennia. For example, one can draw a fairly straight line from Jeremiah 1:5—“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you”—through Sophocles’s Antigone to Cicero’s De Legibus; through Augustine’s De Trinitate to Aquinas’s Summa; through Locke’s Two Treatises of Government to Jefferson’s declaration that it is self-evident “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The seeds of liberty that changed the world, in short, were not planted in Europe. They were planted in the ancient Middle East, cultivated in the Mediterranean, harvested in Britain, and shipped to the nascent United States. This sequence of moral and intellectual stewardship matters immeasurably. …

Europe lost the seed of liberty because it’s version of the Enlightenment went left:

The principal philosophical and political influence on the continental branch of Western civilization was and is inarguably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual godfather of “the Left” and, in my estimation, the designer of the “modern world.” …

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and political theorist. He introduced the concept of the general will — a collective will aimed at the common good. He argued that legitimate political authority arises from a social contract where individuals collectively agree to surrender some freedoms in exchange for protection and equality. Rousseau claimed that humans are naturally good and free, but society — particularly the institution of private property — corrupts them, fostering competition, pride, and inequality. This breaks with the Christian notion of original sin (which expresses the biological truth that we are a human cortex on top of a mammalian brain on top of a selfish reptilian ancient brain) and the empirical observation that societies that don’t respect private property are always poor.

 

In brief: Rousseau offered “the West” a social contract that was almost entirely opposite to that synthesized by Locke and favored by the American Founders. Rousseau’s Social Contract rests on the idea that the state exists to guarantee the liberty of the individual, and that this liberty can only be expressed and understood within the context of something called the “general will” of the people. … It empowers small and radical factions to govern as if they represent the will of the entire people, as if the “general will” and nothing more guides their actions. Additionally — and, perhaps, more importantly — it allows them to do whatever they want in defense of this general will, as Rousseau himself recommended …

When French president Emmanuel Macron declares that “free speech is pure bullsh*t,” he is articulating, in his own puerile way, the Rousseauian influence on the continental understanding of freedom. Similarly, German law mandates Sozialpflichtigkeit (that property ownership be tempered by a social obligation), which is Rousseau’s “general will” and disdain for private property, filtered through Hegel and historicist economists like Gustav von Schmoller. And most tragically, when Keir Starmer’s government arrests grannies for tweeting unacceptable memes, it is demonstrating Britain’s loss of faith in its intellectual traditions and its acceptance of continental influences in their stead.

There lies exposed the leftist trick: A small radical group claims it is implementing the “general will” of the people, and in the traditions of the French and German Enlightenment that is sufficient to justify leadership — and whatever it takes to gain and retain power.

But Christain and the Anglo traditions says no, individuals and private property must be respected, and you need elections to ratify policy.