It has been a tumultuous week for Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters.

Winters appeared out of touch with the growing anxiety surrounding mounting white-collar AI-related job losses. He described the bank’s AI adoption push as “not cost-cutting,” but rather as “replacing lower-value human capital with financial and investment capital.”

Such language ignited a firestorm for the CEO and the bank, and by the end of the week, regulatory scrutiny had descended on the firm.

Reuters reports that authorities in Hong Kong and Singapore have pressed the bank for clarity on Winters’ comments and the scope of upcoming AI-related layoffs.

On Tuesday, StanChart began labor restructuring to cut 15% of its corporate roles (about 7,800 jobs) by 2030 as part of a broader efficiency push amid the adoption of AI.

Hong Kong authorities asked StanChart whether AI was being used as a pretext to reduce headcount.

By midweek, Winters scrambled into damage control following the “lower-value human capital” remarks. Early today, he apologized for his “choice of words” in a LinkedIn post.

“For that, I am sorry. I am therefore showing below a verbatim transcript of what I actually said, which I hope allows for a better understanding of the important point I was raising…”

Here’s the transcript:”

“For example, this new core banking system in Hong Kong, which is a major, major accomplishment. This is not an everyday thing. It happens once in 40 years. And when it goes wrong, it’s a disaster. It did not; it was practically perfect. That was a two and a half year programme, to get that right. The people that were gonna be affected, who were very important for helping us get to the right answer, knew that they were gonna be affected, and we began reskilling them at the earliest possibility. We’re not long on talent in the markets where we operate, because these markets are growing fast. So the people that want to reskill, that want to carry on, we’re giving every opportunity to reposition. And the people that say, yeah, you know, I’ve done my bit, I’m ready to do something else. I take a package at the end of the application migration. So this isn’t, it’s not cost cutting. It’s replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial and investment capital we’re putting in. But almost always, with good clear notice going forward.”

Beyond StanChart, corporate America is firing engineers and other white-collar workers as AI adoption accelerates. This era will likely be remembered as the great “white-collar purge,” and the response may be continued backlash toward data centers.

Meta Platforms began firing 8,000 workers earlier this week, while leaked audio of CEO Mark Zuckerberg described how AI is monitoring highly skilled employees. According to X user Official Layoff, who leaked the audio: “AI is replacing the contractor. Then the employee trains the AI. Then the AI replaces the employee.”

Take a look at Bloomberg story count data for “ChatGPT” and “layoffs” …

Labor-market disruption for white-collar workers has arrived with the rise of AI adoption. In 2023, Goldman detailed just how many jobs AI may eliminate. That number is absolutely alarming.

The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage climbed to its highest level since August, threatening to derail the spring selling season as higher Treasury yields and renewed inflation pressure push loan costs higher and freeze more prospective buyers out of the market.

Freddie Mac data released Thursday show the 30-year fixed mortgage rate for the week ending May 21 jumped to 6.51% from 6.36%, the highest rate since Aug. 28, 2025.

Soaring mortgage rates stem from turmoil in the Gulf region, with the U.S.-Iran war driving up oil prices, inflation, and bond yields over the last three months. Rates on 10-year Treasuries hit their highest level in one year, while 30-year yields neared 2007 highs. 

Mortgage rates fell to around 6% in early February, lifting hopes for a housing market rebound after three consecutive years of depressed activity. Yet hopes for a robust selling season were dashed because the conflict in the Middle East began in late February, and once the Hormuz chokepoint closed, energy prices surged, followed by rates.

“Each uptick in rates narrows the pool of buyers who can make the numbers work,” Realtor.com analyst Anthony Smith told News Corp.

The impact of higher rates is significant for buyers: Before the conflict, a buyer with a $2,500 monthly budget and 20% down could afford about a $400,000 home at a 6% mortgage rate, but only about $384,000 at a 6.5% rate.

Realtor.com analyst Jake Krimmel told Bloomberg, “We’ve been surprised so far that we haven’t seen deterioration like we did this time last year.” 

“May is where the rubber will meet the road because that’s when things tend to really start picking up,” Krimmel said. 

The end result of surging rates over the last few months was flat existing-home sales in April, well below Bloomberg Consensus expectations.

The continued housing market slowdown, which feels like an eternity for those in the industry, has pressured businesses tied to housing, such as furniture manufacturers, home builders, mortgage lenders, and real estate brokerages.

Home improvement retailers such as Home Depot and Lowe’s warned this week that consumers remain reluctant to splurge on big-ticket home improvement items, as elevated mortgage rates, high home prices, energy inflation, weakening sentiment, and broader macroeconomic uncertainty weigh on demand.

Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison warned analysts earlier this week that the housing market is the “most difficult” since the financial crisis. 

He continued:

I think overall this has been the most difficult housing market that I’ve faced in this business since the financial crisis. And as Brandon mentioned, it’s almost exclusively or disproportionately on the DIY customer.

That’s the majority of where our revenue comes from. And so I look at it from this perspective, you know, we’ve delivered four quarters of positive comps in an environment where the DIY has faced more economic pressure than I’ve ever seen before.

Housing affordability for first-time homebuyers remains at a four-decade low.

“Decisions made during the period of ultra-low interest rates coming out of the pandemic are still shaping behavior,” said Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo Global Management, citing the unwillingness of homebuyers with sub-4% rates to move. “The shift to higher rates has fundamentally changed the economics.”

“If you’re looking for relief on 30-year conventional mortgage rates, you’re not going to get it anytime soon,” said Kevin Flanagan, head of investment strategy at WisdomTree.

Nick Barta, a regional manager at Security First Financial, a Colorado-based mortgage company, told Bloomberg that the surge in rates because of the US-Iran war has had a chilling effect on the industry so far. 

“All you hear about is gas prices and higher interest rates,” said Barta, who has worked in the mortgage industry for nearly four decades. “It freaks people out.”

President Trump has directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to begin buying $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities to pressure mortgage rates lower.

“FHFA and the administration are actively evaluating a range of tools and policy options to improve affordability and expand access to homeownership for American families,” Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte said.

Sarah Wolfe, a senior economist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, warned that higher mortgage rates continue to leave an entire generation of homebuyers stuck in rentals.

“They want the same things as the generation before them,” Wolfe said, “and the bar to entry is getting higher and higher.”

Authored by Owen Evans via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The United States has removed U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese from its sanctions list, according to a May 20 notice posted by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The notice said Albanese, listed as Francesca Paola Albanese, had been deleted from the Specially Designated Nationals list under an International Criminal Court-related sanctions program.

The sanctions barred her from entering the United States and banking there.

The move came a week after a federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement of the sanctions, finding that the Trump administration likely violated Albanese’s free-speech rights by imposing the measures.

Albanese, an Italian lawyer based in Tunisia, serves as the “U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.”

She has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, allegations Israel has rejected.

The United States had placed Albanese under sanctions in July 2025 under an executive order targeting people accused of assisting International Criminal Court actions against the United States or its allies.

“The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to the biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur. Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote at the time.

The sanctions barred U.S. persons from doing business with her and blocked any property or interests in property under U.S. jurisdiction.

Albanese has denied any allegations of anti-Semitism.

Albanese’s husband and daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, sued the Trump administration in February this year, alleging that the U.S. sanctions are “effectively debanking her and making it nearly impossible to meet the needs of her daily life.”

In October 2024, Albanese published a U.N. report titled “Genocide as colonial erasure,” in which she argued that Israel’s campaign in Gaza should be viewed within a broader “settler-colonial” framework.

“Since its establishment, Israel has treated the occupied people as a hated encumbrance and threat to be eradicated, subjecting millions of Palestinians, for generations, to everyday indignities, mass killing, mass incarceration, forced displacement, racial segregation, and apartheid. Advancing its goal of ‘Greater Israel’ threatens to erase the Indigenous Palestinian population,” she wrote.

The “settler-colonial” framework is often associated with left-wing, postcolonial, and critical-theory scholarship.

Australian free-market think tank Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) explicitly calls settler-colonial theory an “unsettling Marxist ideology” as the academic field was founded by British-born prominent social anthropologist and historian Patrick Wolfe, who drew on Marxist theory.

In 2024, a United Nations watchdog called for an immediate probe into alleged ethical abuses by Albanese, which said that she had allegedly requested payments for work done in her official capacity, something it called illegal.

U.N. Watch filed a complaint with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, demanding that Albanese be removed from her role.

In a March 2025 response, the U.N. Coordination Committee did not remove Albanese or find a formal breach, but said the proposed honorarium arrangement was “inappropriate.”

“The Committee was also satisfied by the confirmation from the Special Rapporteur that she has not and will not accept payment or honoraria of any kind for work done in her official U.N. capacity,” it said.

In 2025, Israel withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), citing “ongoing and unrelenting institutional bias” against the Jewish state.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, in a social media post announcing the withdrawal, cited U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision announced the previous day to pull the United States out of the council.

“Israel joins the United States and will not participate in the UNHRC,” Sa’ar wrote.

Trump announced in February 2025 that the United States would withdraw from the Human Rights Council and also would not resume funding of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that addresses Palestinians and is the largest employer in the Gaza Strip.

The United States previously froze payments to UNRWA in 2018, during Trump’s first term. They were restored under the Biden administration but stopped again after it was alleged that at least 12 agency employees participated in terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch, told a House Foreign Affairs committee in January 2024 that 1,200 of UNRWA’s 13,000 Gaza employees belonged to Hamas and that 6,000 of them had family members in it.

Reuters, Dan M. Berger, and Aldgra Fredly contributed to this report.

Chinese EV companies are rapidly expanding overseas by snapping up unused factory space from struggling Western automakers, many of whom are downsizing traditional gasoline-car production, according to Nikkei.

Stellantis recently opened plants in France and Spain to partnerships with Dongfeng and Leapmotor. At the same time, Geely is expected to restart an idle production line at a Spanish factory owned by Ford Motor Company. The trend reflects a broader shift in the auto industry: Chinese EV makers are expanding aggressively while many legacy manufacturers are cutting capacity.

UBS analysts predict Chinese brands could control 35% of the global auto market by 2030, up from 25% this year, helped by China’s low-cost battery supply chain. Their report warned that foreign automakers face “structural market share loss” as competition intensifies.

Nikkei writes that building cars locally has become a practical way for Chinese companies to avoid tariffs and satisfy governments pushing for domestic manufacturing. BNP Paribas analyst James Kan said the strategy helps local economies “feel that they’re getting a cut,” making expansion politically easier.

Europe has become a key battleground. After facing steep EU tariffs, Leapmotor said it would source many components within Europe for production at Stellantis facilities. The company also plans to begin manufacturing in Brazil, where tariffs on imported EVs are set to increase again this summer.

But owning overseas factories brings new complications. Citigroup analyst Harald Hendrikse joked he was “a little amused” watching Chinese firms buy European plants because they are about to learn “how difficult it is to do business” there. Labor costs, regulations, and local sourcing rules could significantly raise expenses.

BYD has already faced setbacks abroad. After renovating a former Ford plant in Brazil, the company became embroiled in controversy over alleged “slavery-like” labor conditions tied to construction work. Even so, BYD is still exploring additional factories in Latin America and Europe.

Many Chinese automakers prefer acquiring dormant facilities instead of building new plants from scratch, which one industry executive described as requiring “tons of extra preparation work.” Companies are carefully comparing costs, efficiency, and demand before making investments.

Meanwhile, European manufacturers are struggling with underused factories. Volkswagen plans to reduce global production capacity by millions of vehicles this decade. CEO Oliver Blume acknowledged the company still has too much unused capacity in Europe, though he later said there are “currently no plans or discussions” with Chinese manufacturers.

For some executives, these partnerships could solve problems on both sides: Chinese EV makers gain faster access to foreign markets, while Western automakers find new uses for factories that would otherwise sit idle.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

The world’s most critical maritime energy chokepoint has now been closed for 12 weeks, leaving seaborne energy supply chains heavily disrupted. Still, one UBS analyst points out that the shock has yet to meaningfully spill over into broader global shipping outside the Gulf area, suggesting the disruption remains largely contained for now.

“It looks like non-energy related global shipping traffic is running just 4% below normal in May – a bit better than April,” UBS analyst Arend Kapteyn wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning titled “The State Of Global Shipping Disruption.”

Kapteyn continued:

Limited signs of spillovers to non-energy shipping (so far)

In our April 30 note, we showed how global oil/gas shipping traffic had fallen by 13% from pre-Middle East conflict levels—closely matching the disruption through the Strait of Hormuz—and how the various regions were trying to reroute ships to find alternative energy supplies. Today’s chart examines whether that energy shock is spilling over into broader shipping activity. A key question is whether fuel shortages are beginning to weigh on overall trade flows, providing an additional transmission channel to global supply chains. PMI delivery times have already lengthened by around 1¾ standard deviations, but it remains unclear how much reflects product shortages versus shipping constraints.

The chart shows our “momentum” measure of global shipping traffic—defined as tonnes of cargo multiplied by nautical miles traveled per day. We’ve aggregated the daily data at a monthly frequency (May is the average of the daily data month-to-date), and standardize using z-score over the full sample. Oil and gas shipping has continued to deteriorate, now around 4 standard deviations below normal. By contrast, non-energy shipping weakened through April (-2 standard deviations) but has partially recovered in May (now around -0.7 standard deviations). In level terms, non-energy related shipping/cargo traffic fell 5% in March (vs the prior 12m average) and 13% in April but is now back to just 4% below normal. In Asia—where energy shortages appear most acute—non-energy volumes were 10% below normal in April but are now running slightly above normal. In the Gulf, however, non-energy shipping remains severely disrupted (around 83% below normal), reflecting the broader impact of the Strait of Hormuz bottleneck on both energy and non-energy flows.

Meanwhile, Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc recently warned on CNBC that a “new wake-up call” for global trade nears if the Hormuz chokepoint remains shuttered through June.

Then there was a note from UBS analyst Pierre Lafourcade last week that said, “Supply chain stress is rising at its fastest pace since the early pandemic.”

The full note can be read by Professional subscribers here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal.

Signs that energy-flow disruptions are spreading into the broader shipping complex remain limited for now, with the stress still largely contained to the Gulf region.

Authored by Sam Lowry via dailysceptic.org,

Authoritarianism doesn’t usually arrive with a coup. It arrives with a login, a compliance form, a penalty notice for keeping records in the wrong format. It comes with a quietly extended electoral term, a cancelled bank account, a prison sentence for a social media post. Each measure has a reasonable-sounding justification. The problem is the direction — and how far it has already travelled.

Power is migrating from the visible arena of democratic politics to the less visible world of systems — compliance regimes, regulators with elastic mandates and an expanding mesh of rules governing more of daily life than most people have yet registered. No single measure looks like tyranny. The problem is the cumulative direction and the speed at which it is moving.

None of what follows was in any manifesto. All of it is happening.

Regulating what you may own, burn and keep

Consider what it now means to own a home in Britain. From 2030, landlords will be prohibited from letting properties that fail to meet the government’s Energy Performance Certificate band C standard, with fines of up to £30,000 for non-compliance. These are not derelict or dangerous buildings. They are perfectly habitable properties rendered unlettable not by any structural failure but by the Government moving the regulatory goalposts around them. The Government is consulting on extending the same requirements to owner-occupied homes by 2035, at which point the state would decide whether you may sell or mortgage your own home without first spending thousands on ‘improvements’ it has specified.

The reach does not stop at the front door. In Smoke Control Areas covering much of urban England, a council officer can issue you a £1,000 fine for burning the wrong fuel in your own fireplace. Since October 2024, keeping a single backyard chicken requires formal registration with the Animal and Plant Health Agency — home address, species, numbers, declared purpose — on pain of a £2,500 fine. The state now maintains a database of hen keepers and their motivations. The Government does not confiscate your property. It makes non-compliance progressively unaffordable until the choice becomes theoretical.

Regulating what you may drive, eat, drink and smoke

The same logic has been applied with equal enthusiasm to how you move and what you consume. The Zero Emission Vehicle mandate requires 80% of new car sales to be electric by 2030, transferring the cost of Net Zero directly onto buyers.

For those who cannot yet afford an electric vehicle, Ulez zones, congestion charges and Vehicle Excise Duty rates designed to penalise older vehicles have quietly converted a private choice into a regulated privilege — with the bill adjusted according to how closely your car aligns with current Government policy.

Food and drink have followed. The sugar levy compelled manufacturers to reformulate products using artificial sweeteners — aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame K — whose population-wide, long-term effects remain a matter of active scientific debate, the Government compelling the switch without accepting any liability for unintended consequences.

Calorie counts are now mandatory on menus, multi-buy promotions on unhealthy foods are restricted, alcohol duty has been reformed and the tobacco generation ban makes it illegal to sell cigarettes to anyone born after 2009. Each measure has a plausible justification in isolation. Together, they describe a state that has decided your lifestyle is a policy variable to be optimised without your consent.

Regulating what you may say, think, and joke about

Britain has no formal censorship, but it has developed something nearly as effective. The Worker Protection Act 2023, in force since October 2024, places a duty on employers to prevent harassment by third parties, including customers, producing a wave of conduct policies across the hospitality sector that effectively outlaw the kind of informal, occasionally ribald conversation that has characterised the British pub for centuries. The landlord must now consider whether his regulars’ banter creates a legal liability.

The Online Safety Act hands an unelected regulator the power to remove content deemed ‘legal but harmful’ — a category whose boundaries are left to Ofcom, an organisation that cannot be voted out. The same regulator’s approach to broadcast media tells you something about how it exercises that discretion. Ofcom has opened more than a dozen investigations into GB News since the channel launched, fining it £100,000 and placing it “on notice” for repeated impartiality breaches — including, in one instance, for failing to sufficiently challenge a guest who called climate change a hoax.

The BBC, by contrast, broadcast a Panorama documentary one week before the 2024 US Presidential election that edited Donald Trump’s January 6th speech in a way its own former editorial adviser later described as “a blatant distortion” — giving a wholly misleading impression of what Trump had actually said. The BBC’s internal standards committee was alerted in January 2025 and took no decisive action for 10 months. The director general and head of news eventually resigned. The BBC Chair issued an apology, describing the edit as “an error of judgement”. Ofcom opened no investigation. The regulator that pursues GB News across a dozen probes for technicalities around impartiality found nothing in the BBC’s year-long concealment of a deliberately misleading edit worth examining.

The Metropolitan Police’s Live Facial Recognition programme scans faces on public streets in real time. The Investigatory Powers Act requires internet providers to retain every subscriber’s full browsing history for 12 months, available to government agencies without a judicial warrant. You are observed when you walk down the street and when you go online — and what you say about either is subject to a speech regime that Freedom House formally downgraded in 2025 for the “proliferation of criminal charges and convictions concerning online speech, including speech protected under international human rights standards”.

According to Freedom of Information data from 39 of 45 police forces, cited by the Times in April 2025, police were making roughly 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages. Those arrested are not, for the most part, dangerous extremists — they are childminders, pensioners and tradesmen whose posts, in any previous decade, would have been considered unremarkable expressions of frustration. Some received prison sentences. Others were investigated for months before charges were quietly dropped, a process that served as its own punishment. As MPs noted in Parliament last November, Britain is now more willing to imprison someone for a social media post than for a rape — a remark that lands rather differently when you recall that the Prime Minister overseeing all this was, as director of public prosecutions, the man who declined to pursue the grooming gang cases later documented by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

This selective enforcement extends to political opponents with a consistency that is difficult to attribute to coincidence. Nigel Farage — leader of a party that received four million votes at the last election and has since topped every national opinion poll — was simultaneously debanked by Coutts and subjected to smears about foreign state funding made under Parliamentary privilege, beyond the reach of defamation law. An independent investigation found he had been treated unfairly.

This week, the Commons standards watchdog opened a formal investigation into a £5 million personal gift he says he received to fund private security — security he required because the Home Office, under the previous government, had cut his state protection by 75%, leaving the leader of a major political party to fund his own safety. Reform UK argues the payment, made before Farage became an MP and intended solely for personal protection, falls under the Parliamentary exemption for purely personal gifts. Both Labour and the Conservatives, whose own MPs and peers have faced a quiet succession of expenses investigations and misconduct probes that have attracted a fraction of this scrutiny, are pressing the investigation.

The pattern — exhaustive pursuit of the opposition leader, institutional indulgence of the establishment — is by now entirely familiar.

Meanwhile, a recent survey found one in five British teenagers avoids sharing political opinions for fear of being cancelled, and nearly a quarter said they had been asked to stop voicing their views at school. A democracy that teaches its young that silence is the safest course is not building citizens. It is building subjects.

The anti-democratic march goes on

Sitting beneath all of this is a surveillance infrastructure that no one was asked to approve. This week’s King’s Speech confirmed the Government is pressing ahead with legislation to support digital ID, with the stated intention of making it available to those who want it by 2029. This formulation papers over the fact that, as a condition of employment, it will in practice be unavoidable.

The scheme — a single Government database linking your right to work, immigration status, tax record, health data and right to rent — was opposed by Big Brother Watch and three million petitioners, and promoted most energetically by the Tony Blair Institute, whose principal backer, Oracle, holds over £1 billion in UK Government contracts and is considered the frontrunner for the infrastructure work itself.

The King’s Speech also confirmed the European Partnership Bill — legislation to realign parts of British law with EU standards across food regulation, energy trading and carbon emissions. The mechanism is ‘dynamic alignment’: the UK must transpose and implement EU law in relevant areas, while having no vote on that law and no seat in the legislative process that produces it. In other words, the Government intends to bind this country to rules made in Brussels by people we did not elect, in pursuit of a relationship the British public voted to leave. It was not in Labour’s manifesto, it has not been put to the country, it is simply being done.

When ministers then announced in May 2025 that they intended to postpone elections in around 30 councils — extending their own terms without a public vote — and were forced to reverse course only after a judicial review by Reform UK and legal advice that the plan would likely be ruled unlawful, the instinct being revealed felt consistent with everything else: that democratic constraints are inconveniences to be managed rather than principles to be upheld.

It would be tempting to lay all of this at Labour’s door, but that would be too easy and not entirely honest. The Investigatory Powers Act was Theresa May’s. Rishi Sunak introduced the Online Safety Act. Making Tax Digital, the ZEV mandate, minimum EPC standards, the sugar levy and the Covid surveillance infrastructure, including vaccine passports, were all Conservative creations. The party that styled itself as the guardian of British liberty spent 14 years building much of the machinery that a Left-wing Government is now operating at full throttle.

The lesson is not that the Tories were secret socialists. It is that expanding state power has become the default response of any government seeking to appear purposeful — and the machinery, once built, does not ask about the politics of whomever operates it next.

The collapse of institutional trust

This Government has proved itself neither cautious nor neutral. It has used lawfare against dissidents and opponents with a brazenness unthinkable under any previous administration, directing the apparatus of state — police, prosecutors, regulators, quangos — consistently against those who dissent from the approved programme. Trust in the institutions that were supposed to remain above politics — the courts, the civil service, the BBC, the police — has collapsed accordingly, and not without reason.

A foreign power has not captured them; they have been captured from within, by a professional class that regards the management of public behaviour as its primary function and the instincts of ordinary citizens as a problem to be corrected.

Systems outlast governments. The toolkit remains when the party changes — which is what makes the question of succession so consequential. Angela Rayner, widely regarded as a leading contender should a Labour leadership contest emerge, has spent her career to the Left of Starmer on every question that bears on the relationship between citizen and state. Starmer, for all his Government’s record, may yet prove to have been the restraining hand. The Conservatives built much of this machinery. Labour is operating it at full throttle. Whoever comes next may remove the restraints entirely.

Recovery looks a long way off. Whether it is possible at all depends on whether enough people recognise what is being lost before the machinery becomes too entrenched to reverse. Free societies are not lost in a single dramatic moment. They are lost in the accumulated weight of a thousand reasonable-sounding justifications for why, just this once, the state knows better than you do.

We are well past the thousandth.

Syria continues stepping out of the geopolitical wilderness, now apparently onto the highest-stakes stage in international finance. Or rather, the reality is that Washington’s post-Assad Al Qaeda in suits makeover of ‘former’ terror leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has reached its peak.

According to a Reuters report on Thursday, self-appointed Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa (Jolani) is set to lead a national delegation to the G7 summit in France next month.

The invitation marks the country’s first-ever participation in the summit since the elite forum was founded back in 1975.

Citing three sources familiar with the matter, the agency confirmed that an invitation was officially hand-delivered to Syrian Finance Minister Mohammed Yisr Barnieh while he was attending the group’s preparatory financial talks in Paris earlier this week. The main G7 summit is set to run mid-June, from the 15th through 17th in Évian-les-Bains, southeastern France.

A Syrian official speaking Reuters described that Damascus plans to heavily pitch its geography to the G7. This will likely center on leveraging the country’s role as a “potential strategic hub for supply chains” amid the Iran war and Hormuz Strait crisis. 

“After the closure of the Hormuz Strait, pretty much all the neighboring countries in the region knocked on our door to get access to our Syrian ports,” stated Mazen Alloush, the director of local and international relations for Syria’s borders and customs authority. “They are making Plan B’s in case the crisis goes on longer.”

The over decade-long proxy war to oust Assad, which heavily involved the CIA and Gulf states, as well as Israel, has long been discussed as part of the ‘pipeline wars’ theme, and has for years been an open secret.

President Trump, who helped put Sharaa in power, and vouched for him when they first met in Saudi Arabia, is expected to attend the G7 summit.

But despite Damascus under Sharaa now being a willing puppet of Washington, economic relief for the war-ravaged Syrian population has remained illusory, as one Middle East outlet underscores:

Because Syria had been under crushing sanctions since the start of the 14-year war that began in 2011, many expected the economic situation to improve after Sharaa toppled former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government and western nations began easing sanctions.

However, “attracting foreign investment and restoring normal banking ties ⁠have ​proven slower and more difficult than ​many officials had hoped,” Reuters noted. More than 90 percent of Syrians live below the poverty line and have suffered from major increases in the price of fuel, electricity, and food in recent months.

Gas prices have risen by nearly 50 percent in the past month, while the value of the Syrian currency has fallen against the dollar amid volatile price swings. In the past week, the Syrian pound depreciated from 13,400 liras per dollar to more than 14,700 liras per dollar, before ending at 14,000 liras per dollar.

The irony. Syria gets invited to the G7 while former member Russia is still banned. https://t.co/ca8rFPL1on

— David S. (@DavidS_Liberdad) May 21, 2026

All the while, looming large in the background is the fact that the Syrian government is now full of Sunni extremists, who have repeatedly targeted Alawites, Druze, and Christians for being “unbelievers”. 

Thousands have died at the hands of ISIS-style Syrian government-linked military members, who have sought to cleanse the country of its ancient Christian and Alawite communities. 

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Europe is the ‘jungle’ now. No garden left to speak of.

Josep Borrell is a Spanish socialist who held several high-ranking positions in the European Union.  Until 2024, he was a vice-president of the European Commission and the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy.  In that capacity, he ran Europe’s External Action Service, which is the diplomatic body that executes Europe’s foreign policy decisions around the world.  He remains a man with a great deal of influence over European perspectives.

In 2022, Borrell created a bit of an international incident when he described Europe as a “garden” and the rest of the world as a “jungle.”  

“We have built a garden,” he told aspiring European diplomats in Bruges, Belgium.  “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle.  The jungle could invade the garden.  The gardeners should take care of it.”

As the head of the European Defense Agency, Borrell’s comments made strategic sense.  As he said in that same speech, “The jungle has a strong growth capacity…Walls will never be high enough to protect the garden.  The gardeners have to go to the jungle, Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world.  Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.”

Borrell’s speech came seven years after German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open her country’s borders to millions of Islamic immigrants.  Originally touted as a humanitarian policy designed to temporarily shelter refugees from war-torn Syria, Germany’s generous welfare programs quickly became a magnet for young men across the Middle East and North Africa.  When Merkel declared on August 31, 2015, “We can do this,” she initiated an all-of-society “welcome culture” that quickly produced a full-blown migrant crisis for the whole continent.  Over ten years later, the influx of millions of Muslims into Europe has transformed school demographics and local politics, unleashed an explosion in sex crimes and anti-European violence, strained Europe’s hospital services and social safety nets, and exacerbated government debt.

Speaking after the “jungle” had already successfully invaded Europe’s “garden,” Borrell knew there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle.  Merkel’s fateful decision to “welcome” Middle Easterners to Europe transformed cities and towns across Europe into the Middle East.  Borrell also knew that the European Union’s patchwork defense agency did not have the requisite military and espionage assets to effectively protect the continent.  So he tried to fashion his corps of young diplomats into a network of information and persuasion agents who could do Europe’s bidding around the world.

Borrell’s message got lost in the ensuing international kerfuffle over his “garden” / “jungle” division of the world.  From Russia to Canada, Africa to Southeast Asia, every self-described “foreign policy expert” took umbrage at Borrell’s bluntness.  Perpetually offended virtue-signalers hadn’t gotten so worked-up since President Trump had called Haiti a “shithole country” four years earlier.  Just as Conan O’Brien felt compelled to white-knight for Haiti’s dystopian, cannibal gangland by visiting a heavily guarded resort in the Caribbean country and recklessly encouraging vacationers to join him, legions of politically correct snobs from around the planet recorded social media videos from their country estates in which they turned tsk-tsk-ing into a veritable lingua franca for the vicariously aggrieved.

All the “very best people” denounced Borrell for promoting a scarcely disguised restoration of European imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and genocide.  Young international students enjoying university scholarships and living in Europe for free made sure to remind Borrell that “diversity is our strength.”  Borrell’s socialist comrades beat him over the head with Europe’s prime directive: multiculturalism über alles.  Mohammadbagher Forough, a random research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, publicly reprimanded Europe’s foreign minister thusly: “This kind of comment puts a serious dent in the enterprise of European strategic autonomy.  It upsets, at the most profound level, countries in the rest of the world, because of the history of colonialism.”

In other words, Europe’s “ruling class” and auxiliary straphangers condemned Borrell for daring to defend the beneficiaries of Western civilization.  He was encouraged by threat of high-culture social banishment to follow Chancellor Merkel’s example in supplicating before the migrant hordes.  The message was clear: Europe’s minister of defense cannot properly “defend” Europe unless he allows non-Europeans to take over the continent.  It was further proof that Europe is irreparably lost.

Since his departure from the European Union’s foreign policy perch at the end of 2024, Borrell has spent most of his time in public lambasting President Trump’s global leadership.  A staunch supporter of Ukraine who once threatened to “annihilate” the Russian army, Borrell has frequently defended the honor of Volodymyr Zelenskyy by claiming that Ukraine’s holdover president is leading “the resistance” and “deserves respect.”  After President Trump described Zelenskyy as a “dictator without elections,” Borrell called the “accusation” the “height of dishonesty.”  When President Trump and Vice President Vance took offense to Zelenskyy’s sense of entitlement and disregard for American taxpayers who have paid the salaries and pensions of Ukraine’s government workforce, Borrell screamed on X, “Trump and Vance have put on a disgraceful show.  I am ashamed of that behavior.”

In response to Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last year during which the vice president excoriated Europe’s crackdown on free speech and political dissent, Borrell lectured his erstwhile colleagues: “This is a declaration of political war against the European Union.”  Going further, Europe’s former defense minister declared, “Europe must stop pretending that Trump is not an adversary and assert its technological, security, and political sovereignty with clarity and strength.”

As much as I find Borrell’s socialist-globalist politics abhorrent, I respect his impulse to defend his fellow Europeans.  The problem is that the European Union is a governmental monstrosity — bureaucratically lethargic, ideologically suffocating, foolishly regulatory, unmoored from its stated principles, opposed to public debate, enamored with its empires’ past glories, and increasingly oppressive.  Eurocrats such as Borrell believed they could reconstitute European centrality in the world by constructing a “rules-based international order” and forcing every other nation in the world to bend to Europe’s will.  Brussels has long desired to rule the world through rule-making.

It turns out that depending on the United States for security, the Russian Federation for energy, and communist China for critical imports is not a blueprint for European strength.  To his credit, Borrell understands Europe’s dilemma.  He knows that the European Union “was not designed for the world in which we live today.”  Forced to watch President Trump remake the world without showing any deference to Europe’s globalist prerogatives, Borrell openly laments, “We are not very relevant to international politics.”

Can you imagine how difficult of an admission that is for Borrell to make?  He has been weaned on the notion of European superiority all his life.  Even as parts of the European continent careen toward civil war, Borrell still believes that Europe is the world’s idyllic “garden” and everywhere else remains wild “jungle.”  From Borrell’s perspective, not only is Haiti a “shithole country” but also the United States is, too.

Borrell finally realizes, however, that Europe survives only because the rest of the world permits it to endure.  When you depend upon the United States, Japan, India, China, Russia, and the Middle East to produce everything that Europe’s dying empire needs, then you have no leverage or real power in the world.  European imperialism is dead because Europe has no armies or navies to enforce its “rules-based” edicts.  European imperialism is dead because sane nations refuse to impoverish themselves in the name of carbon credit tyranny.  European imperialism is dead because Europe opened its doors to an Islamic invasion.

Europe is the “jungle.”  The “garden” is gone.  European hubris sealed its fate.

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

The world is changing. The once dominant imperial power of the United States is faltering, hollowed out by corruption, over-extended by hubris, eaten away by the cancers of hatred, nationalism and greed.

Even according to its own propaganda outlets, America has “become the villain”, is “Officially an Empire in Decline”, and we are witnessing its “final act”.

And, as we await the titan’s inevitable fall, the world is considering the future. Everyone is talking about the “multipolar world order” just over the horizon.

From “Pax Americana to Pax Multipolaris”.

This “Multipolar World” has been a political talking point for a long time, but it has been building momentum over the last few years, and noticeably accelerating since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been calling for this multipolar order for years, and did so again last week. China’s Xi Jinping regularly does the same, most recently during his trip to South America in February. North Korea’s Kim Jung Il echoed these sentiments in April.

Xi and Putin signed a joint declaration on “building a multipolar world” this morning.

Two weeks ago, in a talk at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for “a post-imperial world [and] a resilient rules-based order in a new era of multipolarity”.

In a speech during his trip to China last month, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called for “embracing a multipolar world order”:

“What is happening today is not a transfer of hegemony, but an increase in multipolarity — in both power and prosperity,”

Outside of politicians speechifying, the multipolar world order has become the main focus of the international think-tank circuit as well.

“Multipolarization” was the main topic of the Munich Security Conference Report in February 2025.

In December, the Tony Blair Institute partnered with the JPMorgan Chase International Council to publish a report called “World Rewired: Navigating a Multi-Speed, Multipolar Order”, which concludes in the foreword (written by Blair himself and Jamie Dimon of JPMC):

The world still offers enormous potential for those willing to engage constructively—to build coalitions, invest in innovation, and help shape the rules of the next era rather than simply react to them.

And then in March, the World Economic Forum published an (exceedingly dull) report titled “The Future of Materials Systems: Cooperation Opportunities in a Multipolar World”, which uses sentences like this…

In a multipolar world, agile interest-based cooperation will be decisive in shaping resilient, productive and sustainable materials systems.

That’s the traditional circle in which “multipolarity” is most discussed. Reports for alphabet agencies and non-profits, market predictions and risk assessments. Academic language that camouflages meaning in layers of surplus verbiage.

But multipolarity is not just the pet subject of presidents and thinktanks, it is a regular talking point across the media landscape.

America Can’t Escape the Multipolar Order

…said Council on Foreign Relations publication Foreign Affairs, in December.

The European Times headlines “From unipolarity to multipolar reality – A new world order is fast emerging”, and is rather more measured:

Multipolarity itself is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently beneficial. Its ultimate impact will depend on how nations choose to exercise power, uphold international law, and cooperate in addressing common challenges.

In an interview with Politico titled “What the next world order looks like”, British author Rana Dasgupta says:

If we’re entering a multipolar world, that’s not very unusual. That’s the normal state of the world.

As you can see, the potential fall of our modern Rome isn’t terrifying to many of those who owe their money and position to that Empire, rather it is energizing or maybe “the normal state of the world”.

The US/Israeli war with Iran has been blamed for and/or credited with accelerating this long-awaited Imperial decline.

Two weeks ago, The Tehran Times headlines:

How the Iran conflict is catalyzing a multipolar world order

A report from The Middle East Council on Global Affairs frames the war in Iran as the US trying to stop the multipolar world from breaking free:

What is unfolding in Iran is not simply a war over the regional balance of power or nuclear containment. It is an attempt to rupture the geographic core of an emerging multipolar order designed to bypass Western dominance

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published this…

The Iran War Shows the Limits of U.S. Power – If Washington cannot adapt to the ongoing transformations of a multipolar world, its superiority will become a liability.

In many parts of the independent media there is an almost feverish anticipation.

America’s Empire will fall, and a shiny multipolar new world order will rise in its place, and it’s definitely going to be A Good Thing.

That’s the story.

But that’s all it is, a story.

What is the “multipolar world order”, really?

What multipolarity really means

The cultivated image of a multipolar world – minus the quotes – is that of global cooperation between free-and-equal sovereign nations, each pursuing the interests of their people without living under the cloud of Imperial hegemony.

“Equal and orderly […] inclusive, universally beneficial economic globalisation”, as Xi Jinping said in a February speech.

This was echoed, in greater depth, by Professor Wang Yiwei, who wrote a briefing titled “The Chinese Philosophy of an Equal and Orderly Multipolar World Order”, and describing how different the world would be under Chinese leadership – or rather, non-leadership:

China advocates an equal and orderly multipolar world and inclusive economic globalization. Among these, the core of an equal and orderly multipolar world is to adhere to the equality of all countries, big and small, oppose hegemonism and power politics, and effectively promote the democratization of international relations.

A less utopian view predicts a multipolar world districted into blocs or spheres of influence, but still more dynamic and potentially fair for being out of the Empire’s shadow. That was the original meaning of the phrase when it was first floated in the late 90s.

But neither of these reflect the looming reality, or the true intentions of the powerful people feeding the word to their talking heads.

That might be multipolarity, but it’s not “multipolarity”.

It’s amazing the difference a pair of quotation marks can make, isn’t it?

The powers-that-shouldn’t-be and their soulless meat puppets in the corporate, academic and political spheres have created an entirely euphemistic linguistic phraseology defined by the need for quotation marks.

Words and phrases that don’t mean what they pretend to mean.

“Climate change”, “hate speech”, “public health”.

“Terrorism”, “misinformation” and “sustainability”.

In our political landscape, these have ceased to be words with meanings and become both camouflage and conditioning.

A dishonest cross-breed of programming language and hypnotic suggestion; phrases designed to obfuscate reality on the one hand, and either mechanically call pre-programmed responses or elicit powerful conditioned emotional reactions on the other.

“Multipolarity” is one of those words. And it should always be put in quotes.

The truth behind the word is simple: A global franchise for an old system of control.

Party Politics Goes Global

Defenders of the “multipolar world order” narrative will often argue along the lines “surely a multipolar world is better than US Imperialism? Shouldn’t we welcome resistance to hegemony?”

That same argument has been deployed by climate change supporters, who claim “even if the climate isn’t changing, protecting the environment is still a good thing, isn’t it?”

The flaw in this argument is a failure to question the underlying assumptions and official definitions of these phrases.

Just because something adopts a nice-sounding name doesn’t mean that thing is nice.

Labour don’t support workers. The Democrats hate democracy.

State-backed corporate “environmentalism” is not about planting trees or saving animals, and globalist-backed corporate “multipolarity” is nothing to do with increasing national sovereignty or offering independence from a global authority.

The reality of a “multipolar world” will be a system of intertwining corporate and state institutions implementing authoritarian, anti-human policies and disguising an ideologically monolithic power structure behind an illusory veneer of “choice”.

We in the collective West are more than familiar with this model – it is the way our “democracies” function.

Two major teams, with near identical ideologies and taking orders from the same unelected powers, fiercely battling it out over the tiniest sliver of uncommon ground.

They pitch electoral battles over differences of iconography, phraseology or fractions of percentage points to distract from the fact they agree about everything that really matters, have no real power at all, and are at best replaceable widgets in a vast influence machine.

The point of these battles is to convince people that democracy exists, that they have a choice, and can affect change.

This lie works, and has done for decades.

“Mutlipolarity” is an expansion of that model – the control mechanism of fake binary left-right, red-blue, Coke-Pepsi partisan politics rolling out world-wide.

It’s the same exact method employed to the same exact end: Tribalism as a path to cognitive dissonance, thought termination and the death of objectivity.

Why This? Why now?

It’s worth remembering this faux-antagonistic version of “multipolarity” was not part of the long term plan.

It was obvious, almost from the very start, that the Covid “pandemic” was intended to be a great global unifying moment.

We were all supposed to realise how silly these disagreements across ethnic, national or religious lines were, and come together to beat back the common enemy. A threat to the world that untied the world, like in Independence Day.

We were meant to be using digital currency under a globally implemented social credit system by now. Owning nothing and being happy.

But it didn’t work.

The moment they attempted to remove the horizontal divisions created to control society, they only drew attention to the much greater vertical divisions. People suddenly became more aware of the centralized, unified nature of global power structures.

The grand plan to get Global Government through the gates inside the Covid trojan horse not only failed, but backfired spectacularly.

There was a need for a re-adjustment. A new approach.

International unity didn’t work and doesn’t sell, but an international binary might.

That’s the “multipolar world order”.

The Momentum of Real Division

None of this is to deny the existence of real divisions, or whitewash historic crimes. Obviously there are deeply felt, and entirely justified, anti-Imperial sentiments across the developing world, and within the dissenting circles of the developed world.

The USA has been an Imperial power for the best part of two centuries, and a global hegemon for almost forty years, and in that time it has carried out monstrous acts of colonial aggression, and destroyed millions of lives. We have covered many of them.

In pursuit of oil and gold they cut a bloody swathe across the Middle East, and churned South and Central America into political chaos over and over again.

Israel likewise – whether you consider them the power behind the US throne, or Washington’s catspaw in the Middle East – is a brutal apartheid state, that has torn up and spat out international law a thousand times over.

These are all true facts, and the multipolar narrative finds utility in them.

Just as domestic party politics parlays very real economic issues into shallow class-based resentments, or understandable concerns over uncontrolled immigration into reactionary xenophobia – so too does the “multipolar world” narrative prey on historical trauma and the desire for vengeance to embed partisan thought that erodes critical thinking.

The narrative harnesses the momentum of historical hatred to push itself forward.

Indeed, as I have previously said in interviews, the enthusiasm for this new model from the political classes in Russia, China et al. is entirely understandable. It is far better, from their point of view, to have a seat at the globalist table than be living with Uncle Sam’s nuclear gun at their temple.

It’s possible many of the people involved truly believe that a fake “multipolar world order” really does prevent a nuclear war, and is for the best.

Ironically, in their minds, “war” really does mean peace.

The Role of War

War is vital to the development of this multipolar model, in two main ways:

1. It disguises, discredits and/or distracts from, the revelation of globalist cooperation highlighted by the Pandemic.
2. It furthers, by other means, the “great reset” agenda.

It has other supplementary functions as well.

If “Multipolarity” is the global franchise of fake democracy, then war can be seen as a replacement for the ballot box.. We don’t have global elections (yet); so their role in the system is assumed by geopolitical struggles; trade deals or staged/limited “wars”.

Global unity government was and is a very unpopular idea, so its creeping implementation has to be disguised. Nothing disguises unity of purpose so well as armed conflict.

The sheer number of people who repeat some variant of the argument “how can they be on the same side, they’re shooting at each other!” is testament to the effectiveness of this strategy.

Nothing brings a populous together so well as a perceived external threat. History is replete with rulers who, faced with discontent at home, started a war to garner support. A state of being at war tends to unite people behind the government.

It’s the natural extension of this known tactic that two governments would agree to go to war in order to mutually benefit from this group-think dynamic.

This is international geo-political game theory, as explained in A Beautiful Mind. They both win if they agree not to truly compete.

Both sides have corrupt political classes, both sides have arms manufacturers keen to profit from chaos, both sides crave “emergency war-time powers” to crack down on domestic dissent.

So, we can see how the “war” individually benefits the rulers of each side in the short term. But, more importantly, the supra-national powers have a larger, longer-term agenda (see below) that is also served by the war.

War drives up prices, consumes resources, lowers the standard of living, justifies shortages and manufacturers scarcity.

These factors combine to a make a state of being – or appearing to be – at war vital to the planned breakdown and reconstruction of society.

This is not a new idea, the state has used the framing of war, or at least the threat of war, to boost national unity and increase state powers for centuries.

The new twist is that these “wars” are not real, they are – to one extent or another – staged.

All the wars a stage

We are living in the age of the unreal – The Perfidious Unreality of the New Normal – as we discussed with all those quotation marks.

We regularly live through “terrorism” that is no such thing, we hold “elections” where the voting is irrelevant, and we just had a worldwide “pandemic” without a disease.

It is only natural that warfare should be folded into a propaganda control system that increasingly relies on simply making stuff up.

Just as Western domestic “democracies” need “elections” to maintain the illusion of the system, so too does a “multipolar world” need “wars” to create the appearance of conflict.

These wars are not real.

Or perhaps “real” is not the best word to use – if you want we could say these wars are not honest, not true, not sincere.

But what does staged war mean?

Does it mean no bombs are being dropped or people killed?

No, as we have said many times: Be it in Ukraine or Gaza or Iran, there likely is death and destruction taking place – but that does not necessarily mean war.

As Catte says in her 2024 article:

Death isn’t the definition of war. Conflict is the definition of war.

Do a few air strikes or a thousand dead civilians mean the US and Iran are really enemies locked in an ideological struggle for survival? No. Of course not.

We know these governments and agencies do not care about their own people, let alone each other’s.

People were disposable when they were being nailed inside their houses, given illegal DNR orders or injected with toxic Pfizer goo, and they’re just as disposable when they’re being blown up.

It’s like a psychopathic, murderous sport. The players are real – maybe they’re playing to win or maybe paid to lose – but it doesn’t really matter, since the struggle is controlled by a league which sets the terms.

Numbers, times, places, rules and limitations are all agreed on beforehand.

And, just like sport, the fans cheering hate each other far more than the players playing do, everyone gets paid no matter who wins, and the whole thing is owned by a handful of billionaires who all go to the same parties.

What would a staged war look like?

Well, that’s a more complicated question.

The simple answer is “coordination”. Any kind of coordination – especially of scale or scope – means we can infer a certain amount of fakeness. After all, if the two sides can agree to have a limited war, they can agree not have a war at all.

There are a few more specific signs to look out for.

For example, both sides calling ahead to tell each other where they plan to bomb (or not bomb), so that people can be evacuated accordingly.

Or one army making it to the enemy capital inside a month, then turning around and leaving again for unknown reasons.

Or maybe pausing hostilities to carry out a polio vaccination drive.

Or perhaps vague or ever-changing victory conditions.

Or a pattern of airstrikes hitting empty or condemned buildings in such a way that aligns with pre-existing renovation plans.

Or repeated self-defeating or self-sabotaging behavior that seems to artificially halt progress or extend the conflict.

Or sudden, contradictory developments in the narrative that don’t logically follow.

Or apparent collaboration from combatants on strategies that further a globalist agenda.

…that kind of thing.

This is the logical extension of pre-existing modus operandi. The inevitable intersection of the war-for-profit model that is centuries old, and the age of simulacra described by Baudrillard in the 1980s.

What is the benefit of staged war?

The benefit of a staged war vs a real war is much the same as a fake pandemic vs a real pandemic – control.

A coordinated “war” can last as long as it needs to, pause or resume on command, kill as few or as many as necessary, and can’t ever accidentally result in nuclear annihilation.

George Orwell described it almost perfectly eighty years ago. Super-continents locked in eternal, and maybe even fictional, conflict. Warfare becoming “a purely internal affair”, not meant to be won but meant to be continuous.

An endless game and permanent chaos is how they win.

That’s our state of play, grumbling wars with vague victory conditions that neither army ever loses but both sides constantly claim to be winning.

Meanwhile, the price of energy is only going up, we’re being warned of fertilizer crises and food shortages and higher taxes.

Different Paths, Same Destination

Just as in domestic party politics, vociferous or violent disagreements between the parties belie a shared agenda pushed by the power that controls both sides of every apparent divide.

Even as their mutually-beneficial “wars” play out, reports and think-tanks talk up the need for “limited cooperation” or “regional multilateral projects”.

As they bash their soldiers together on one side of the world, they share technology, cooperate on environmental issues or buy gas and oil from each other.

And agree on major policy documents.

The whole world (minus the US, currently) has signed the Pandemic Treaty, or signed up to the United Nations “Pact for the Future”.

The BRICS nations all have globalist ties – recall BRICs was a term coined in a Goldman Sachs report in 2001 – and they all signed the Kazan Declaration in 2024. Supporting, among other things, the IMF, the WHO, Agenda 2030 and “sustainable development goals”. (Read Riley Waggaman’s great break down here)

The Kyoto Protocols, the Paris Climate Agreements, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are all backed by every one of our multiple poles.

Everyone on any of the supposed sides believes in the same things and shills the same foundational globalist lies such as climate change and Covid.

And, quirks of implementation or nomenclature aside, they all want the same things and push the same familiar shopping list of policies:

• Programmable Digital currency
• biometric Digital ID
• ending online anonymity
• Cashless society
• Censorship
• “Sustainable development goals”

The unspoken endgame of this collective horror show is easy to summarize: Techno-authoritarianism.

Hrvoje Moric has written about how multipolarity, as a model, is a form of global government.

A dystopian society where the state and mega corporations merge into a Thing-like monstrosity that has constant, real-time access to any and all data for pretty much everyone on the planet. That has the ability and facility to monitor – or control – every transaction, every journey, every message or phone call.

“Multipolarity” disguises this truth, and uses partisan thinking and ideology to draw fake or surface-level distinctions.

BRICS vs NATO, the US vs China, Israel vs Iran, Europe vs Russia, Belt and Road Initiative vs the India-Middle East-Europe Trade Corridor.

Pick a flag and wave it. Fake Wars & Higher Prices, all in the service of The Great Reset.

That is its purpose, and that is what “multipolarity” really means.