Authored by Jack Montgomery via The National Pulse,

Business leaders are calling for as many as eight million non-Western migrants to be transplanted to Ukraine to mitigate the “demographic crisis” created by its three-year war with Russia. 

The news vindicates warnings from Raheem Kassam, Editor-in-Chief of The National Pulse, that the conflict would be used as an excuse to transform the country.

All-Ukrainian Association of Companies for International Employment chief Vasily Voskoboinik appeared on state television in February to push for mass migration, saying, “According to estimates by the International Organization for Migration”—a United Nations agency that preaches about immigration being “inevitable, desirable, and necessary”—” and the International Labour Organization, we will need 8.2 million workers.”

“We have a demographic catastrophe. Either we encourage our women to have more children, which would take 18–20 years to reflect in the labor market, or we must realistically seek labor migration from other countries,” Voskoboinik. He seeks to source the migrants from non-Western states and regions such as Bangladesh, Nepal, India, North Africa, and Central Asia—despite various studies showing that non-Western migrants are a massive net drain on the public finances in other European countries.

‘THE FIRST AFRICAN NATION IN EUROPE.’

Raheem Kassam warned that such a course would be pursued as long ago as May 2024, telling War Room host Stephen K. Bannon, “[C]learly, the plan isn’t to keep young Ukrainian men alive to rebuild the nation after all this is done… So, who do you think they intend to import into Ukraine to rebuild the country? If I can put it so bluntly, Ukraine will be the first African nation in Europe in 10 to 15 years’ time.”

“They’ve got a base for mass migration like you’ve never seen before, and they’ve got a ‘moral imperative’ for it as well: ‘We have to rebuild! Of course! We need all these people! Bring ’em in, they’re academics and doctors and so forth,’” Kassam predicted.

Migrants would account for around 17.5 percent of the Ukrainian population if 8.2 million were imported.

“What’s the plan for the future of Ukraine? Clearly the plan isn’t to keep young Ukrainian men alive to rebuild the nation… If I can put it so bluntly, Ukraine will be first African nation in Europe in 10-15 years time. They’re going to mass import…” —@RaheemKassam pic.twitter.com/IvMpOGyz7L

— Anne Luty (@anneluty) May 20, 2024

Switzerland ranks 1st, driven by high earning potential, career growth, and economic mobility. 

The country is also home to seven of the world’s top 250 universities.

In second, Singapore’s economy has consistently been ranked as the most open in the world. 

The country also offers a progressive education system and a vibrant urban environment.

The index, visualized in the table below by Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, ranks the top 46 migration destinations based on six parameters – earning potential, career advancement, employment prospects, education, economic mobility, and livability—each scored out of 100.

Data was collected between January and February 2025.

Top Migration Destinations

The Henley Opportunity Index measures how higher education, combined with investment-based residence or citizenship, helps preserve and grow wealth across generations.

In third place, the U.S. offers the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program, providing a streamlined path to permanent residency. Additionally, former President Trump recently proposed a “gold card” visa to attract wealthy investors by granting residency, work rights, and a pathway to citizenship in exchange for a $5 million investment.

Australia follows, boosted by its recently launched National Innovation Visa. One of the top destinations for immigrants over the last decade, Canada ranks fifth. However, the country is currently reviewing its immigration policies amid concerns over the affordability crisis in cities like Vancouver and Toronto.

The UK secures sixth place with its Innovator Founder Visa, which requires individuals to establish a scalable business in the country. In seventh place, the United Arab Emirates offers the Golden Residence visa, requiring a minimum investment of $550,000.

Still curious about the best places to live? Check out this graphic on billionaire migration over the last decade.

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

The European Commission has pledged financial assistance to projects supporting the clean energy transition in South Africa to the tune of €4.4 billion.

The move comes at a time of increased tensions between South Africa and the European Commission’s largest ally, the United States, following controversial legislation that permits land expropriation without compensation to address historical land ownership disparities, which critics say disproportionately targets White farmers.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the Global Gateway package on Thursday in a joint press conference with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

“It’s a significant first pledge in the context of the Scaling up Renewables in Africa campaign. I hope it will inspire many others to contribute!” von der Leyen posted on X.

€4.4 billion from the Global Gateway package will go to projects supporting a clean and just energy transition in South Africa.

It’s a significant first pledge in the context of the Scaling up Renewables in Africa campaign.

I hope it will inspire many others to contribute! pic.twitter.com/Xcv4gAZuZ5

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) March 13, 2025

“Europe values its partnership with South Africa, just as I value my friendship with President Ramaphosa. South Africa can count on Europe. And I know Europe can count on South Africa,” she said in a press release ahead of the visit.

“If ever there was a time when it was absolutely necessary for partners who share the same values to work together, it is now,” said President Ramaphosa.

“This is the time to stand together for what we believe in, democracy, the rule of law, including respect for international law and international humanitarian law,” he added, noting the “growing challenges and protectionism” around the world in a thinly-veiled attack on U.S. President Donald Trump.

Tensions between the United States and South Africa have intensified following the implementation of South Africa’s Expropriation Act of 2024, a controversial law that allows the government to seize land without compensating its owners. The policy, aimed at redistributing farmland to Black South Africans, has sparked concerns about its impact on White farmers, who still own a significant share of agricultural land.

Elon Musk says White genocide is being promoted in South Africa. pic.twitter.com/h2zYW72yOD

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) August 11, 2023

The South African government defends the law as a necessary step to correct historical injustices from the apartheid and colonial eras. The new legislation enables expropriation under specific conditions, with the goal of creating a more equitable land ownership structure.

However, the new administration in Washington D.C. has strongly opposed this move, with President Donald Trump responding by suspending $440 million in aid to South Africa in the first few days of his second term. His administration claims the law amounts to racial discrimination against White landowners, and he has even proposed offering asylum to South African farmers facing potential land seizures.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio subsequently announced a boycott of the G20 summit in Johannesburg last month, calling the land reform policy a violation of property rights and contrary to American values.

“South Africa is doing very bad things,” Rubio wrote on X. “Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, and sustainability.’ In other words: DEI and climate change. My job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism.”

The European Commission clearly sees things differently, committing billions in European taxpayers’ cash to the African nation.

Her announcement on X was met with considerable criticism from some quarters.

“You are giving €4.4 billion in European taxpayers’ money to a corrupt, incompetent and anti-White, genocidal regime that cannot even maintain its current energy infrastructure. Madness!” wrote Dries Van Langenhove, a Belgian national activist in Flanders.

Sure, why not give 4.4 billion euros of our taxpayers’ money to a genocidal anti-White regime for a useless “energy transition”?

This unelected tyrant is the single most dangerous person in Europe and I will not stop doing what I do till the EU is abolished and she’s in jail. https://t.co/0iFTxL3II4

— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) March 14, 2025

Dutch conservative commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek added: “Sure, why not give €4.4 billion of our taxpayers’ money to a genocidal anti-White regime for a useless ‘energy transition’? This unelected tyrant is the single most dangerous person in Europe and I will not stop doing what I do till the EU is abolished and she’s in jail.”

“Billions for the racist and thoroughly corrupt regime in South Africa,” noted Belgian MEP Tom Vandendriessche while Setiatia Stöteler, a Dutch MEP from Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV) added von der Leyen should be “ashamed of herself.”

Read more here…

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The “ceasefire” announced with trademark bombast by Team Trump 2.0 should be seen as a tawdry kabuki inside a cheap matryoshka.

As we peel off the successive masks, the last one standing inside the matryoshka is a woke transvestite tiny dancer: a Minsk 3 in drag.

Now cue to a “ceasefire” redux: President Putin in uniform only for the second time since the start of the SMO, dead serious, visiting the frontline in Kursk.

Finally, cue to the actual peel off operation: Putin’s press conference after his meeting with Lukashenko in Moscow.

Ceasefire? Of course. We support it. And then, methodically, diplomatically, the Russian President pulled a Caravaggio, and went all-out chiaroscuro on every geopolitical and military detail of the American gambit. A consumate artful deconstruction.

End result: the ball is now back in Donald Trump’s court. Incidentally the leader of the revamping-in-progress Empire of Chaos who does not (italics mine) have the cards.

The art of diplomatic nuance

That’s how diplomacy at the highest level works – something out of reach of American bumpkins of the Rubio variety.

Putin was gracious enough to thank “the President of the United States, Mr. Trump, for paying so much attention to resolving the conflict.”

After all the Americans also seem to be involved in “achieving a noble mission, a mission to stop hostilities and the loss of human lives.”

Then he went for the kill: “This ceasefire should lead to a long-term peace and eliminate the initial causes of this crisis.”

As in all Russian key imperatives – widely known since at least June 2024 – will have to be satisfied. After all, it’s Russia that’s winning the war in the battlefield, not the U.S., the – already fragmented – NATO, and much less Ukraine.

Putin was adamant on the ceasefire: “We are for it.”

But there are nuances; once again, it’s called diplomacy. Starting with verification – arguably the crux of Putin’s reasoning:

“These 30 days — how will they be used? To continue forced mobilization in Ukraine? To receive more arms supplies? To train newly mobilized units? Or will none of this happen?

How will the issues of control and verification be resolved? How can we be guaranteed that nothing like this will happen? How will the control be organized?

I hope that everyone understands this at the level of common sense. These are all serious issues.”

No: the collective EUrocracy, mired in demented Russophobia, does not understand “common sense”.

Once again Putin deferred, diplomatically, to the “need to work with our American partners. Maybe I will speak to President Trump.”

So there will be another phone call soon.

Trump, for his part, perennially floating on the clouds of bombast, already applied “leverage” on the negotiations – even before Putin’s detailed answer to the ceasefire kabuki.

He ramped up sanctions on Russia’s oil, gas and banking, allowing the waiver on Russian oil sales to expire this week.

That means in practice that the EUro-vassals and other assorted “allies” cannot buy Russian oil anymore without evading U.S. sanctions.

Even before that elements from Kiev criminal gang were begging for more sanctions on Russia as part of a “peace” plan. Trump obviously agreed by bypassing basic diplomacy once again. Only those with an IQ of less than zero can possibly believe that Moscow will support a ceasefire/’peace process” where it is sanctioned for attempting to end a war that it is actually winning in the battlefield – from Donbass to Kursk.

Sanctions will have to be at the heart of the possible U.S.-Russia negotiations. At least some of those thousands will have to go right from the start. Same for the $300 billion or so in Russian assets “seized” – as in stolen –, most of it parked in Brussels.

I annex, therefore I am

Putin’s Caravaggio ceasefire painting reveals that he has absolutely no interest in antagonizing the notoriously volcanic Trump, or to put in peril the possibility of a U.S.-Russia détente in the making.

As for Kiev and the EUro-chihuahuas, they remain on the menu, and not on the table.

Predictably, Western MSM, as a wave of toxic detritus hitting a pristine shore, is spinning that Putin said “Nyet” to the ceasefire gambit as a prelude to scotching any negotiations about it.

These specimens would not understand the meaning of “diplomacy” even if it was a comet piercing the skies.

As for the spin on the Brits “helping” the Americans and the Ukrainians to concoct the ceasefire gambit, that does not even qualify as a crappy Monty Python sketch.

The Brit ruling classes, MI6, their media and think tanks, simply abhor any negotiations. They are at direct, frontal war with Russia, and their plan A – no plan B – remains the same: inflict a “strategic defeat” on Moscow, as the SVR knows inside out.

The heart of the matter is the Black Sea. Vladimir Karasev’s analysis, as explained to TASS, is spot on: “The British have already entered the city of Odessa, which they view as a key location. Their special services are heavily involved there. The British do not conceal their desire to establish a naval base in Odessa.”

Odessa is part of the extensive menu of Ukraine’s resources already, in thesis, handed over to the Brits under the shady – and completely illegal – 100-year agreement signed between Starmer and the sweaty sweatshirt in Kiev.

According to the dodgy deal and its made in the shade footnotes, Zelensky already gave away to the Brits all sorts of control over minerals, nuclear power plants, underground gas storage facilities, key ports (including Odessa), and hydroelectric power plants.

On the ongoing minerals/rare earth saga in 404 – or what will be left of it – the Brits are in vicious, direct competition with the Americans. The CIA is obviously in the know. This whole thing will turn very ugly in no time.

A serious discussion running across informed circles in Moscow is that Putin by all means will never sacrifice Russia’s “indivisibility of security” demands posed to Washington in December 2021 – and met with a no-response response. NATO of course will never agree to it. The final decision will have to come from POTU.S..

And that brings us to the ultimately pathetic role of NATO, graphically illustrated by POTU.S., in the Oval Office, gleefully expanding on his drive to annex both Canada and Greenland – both part of NATO – right in front of the sorry Dutch patsy Tutti Frutti o-Rutti, NATO’s Secretary General.

That amorphous slab of stale Dutch gouda cheese not only did not emit a peep about the annexations: he was gleaming like a baby in front of Trump.

That was NATO stripped bare: His Master’s Voice rules the way he wants it, and whatever he decides, even the “security” and territorial integrity of member states may be in peril. So go back to playing in your sandbox. Onwards to the next Putin-Trump phone call.

Authored by David Samuels via TabletMag.com,

Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment

If anyone in the future cares enough to write an authentic history of the 2024 presidential campaign, they might begin by noting that American politics exists downstream of American culture, which is a deep and broad river. Like any river, American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies. In turn, these technologies, which redefine both space and time—canals and lakes, the postal system, the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.

Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.

The time was ripe, in other words, for a cultural revolution—which would, according to the established patterns of American history, in turn generate a political one.

I first became interested in the role of digital technology in reshaping American politics a decade ago, when I reported on the selling of Barack Obama’s Iran deal for The New York Times Magazine. By the time I became interested in the subject, the outcome of Obama’s campaign to sell the deal, which had become the policy cornerstone of his second term in office, was a fait accompli. The Deal seemed odd to me, not only because American Jews were historically a key player in the Democratic Party—providing outsized numbers of voters, party organizers and publicists, in addition to huge tranches of funding for its campaigns—but because the Deal seemed to actively undermine the core assumptions of U.S. security architecture in the Middle East, whose goals were to ensure the steady flow of Middle Eastern oil to global markets while keeping U.S. troops out of the region. A Middle East in which the U.S. actively “balanced” a revisionist anti-American power like Iran against traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel seemed guaranteed to become a more volatile region that would require exactly the kinds of active U.S. military intervention that Obama claimed to want to avoid. Nor did turning over major shipping lanes to Iran and its network of regional terror armies seem like a recipe for the steady flow of oil to global markets that in turn helped ensure the ability of U.S. trading partners in Europe and Asia to continue to buy U.S.-made goods. Seen through the lens of conventional American geopolitics, the Iran deal made little sense.

In the course of my reporting, though, I began to see Obama’s plans for the Middle East not simply as a geopolitical maneuver, but as a device to remake the Democratic Party—which it would do in part by rewiring the machinery that produced what a brilliant young political theorist named Walter Lippmann once identified, in his 1922 book, as “public opinion.”

Lippmann was a progressive Harvard-educated technocrat who believed in engineering society from the top down, and who understood the role of elites in engineering social change to be both positive and inevitable. It was Lippman, not Noam Chomsky, who coined the phrase “manufacturing consent,” and in doing so created the framework in which the American governing class would understand both its larger social role and the particular tools at its disposal. “We are told about the world before we see it,” Lippmann wrote. “We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.” Or as he put it even more succinctly: “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.”

The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid on which Lippmann’s assumptions rested, and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy—and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices—in new ways. In fact, as Obama’s chief speechwriter and national security aide Ben Rhodes, a fiction writer by vocation, argued to me more than once in our conversations, the collapse of the world of print left Obama with little choice but to forge a new reality online.

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.

To my mind, the point of the story I was reporting, in addition to being an interesting exploration of how the tools of fiction writing could be applied to political messaging on social media as an element of statecraft, was twofold. 

*  *  *

Flash Sale! Grab a complete 2-day emergency survival backpack at ZH Store…

*  *  *

First, it usefully warned of the potential distance between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged and managed from the White House, which suggested a new potential for a large-scale disaster like the war in Iraq, which I—like Rhodes and Obama—had opposed from its beginning.

Second, I wanted to show how the new messaging machinery actually operated—my theory being that it was probably a bad idea to allow young White House aides with MFA degrees to create “public opinion” from their iPhones and laptops, and to then present the results of that process as something akin to the outcome of the familiar 20th-century processes of reporting and analysis that had been entrusted to the so-called “fourth estate,” a set of institutions that was in the process of becoming captive to political verticals, which were in turn largely controlled by corporate interests like large pharmaceutical companies and weapons-makers. Hillary Clinton would soon inherit the machinery that Obama and his aides had built along with the keys to the White House. What would she do with it?

What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled.

During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image—and which, after Hillary’s loss, had officially supplanted the “centrist” Clinton neoliberal machine of the 1990s. The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation.

It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power. But control over digital platforms, and what appeared on those platforms, was a key element in signaling and exercising that power. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in which party operatives shanghaied 51 former high U.S. government intelligence and security officials to sign a letter that all but declared the laptop to be a fake, and part of a Russian disinformation plot—when most of those officials had very strong reasons to know or believe that the laptop and its contents were real—showed how the system worked. That letter was then used as the basis for restricting and banning factual reports about the laptop and its contents from digital platforms, with the implication that allowing readers to access those reports might be the basis for a future accusation of a crime. None of this censorship was official, of course: Trump was in the White House, not Obama or Biden. What that demonstrated was that the real power, including the power to control functions of the state, lay elsewhere.

Even more unusual, and alarming, was what followed Trump’s defeat in 2020. With the Democrats back in power, the new messaging apparatus could now formally include not just social and institutional pressure but the enforcement arms of the federal bureaucracy, from the Justice Department to the FBI to the SEC. As the machine ramped up, censoring dissenting opinions on everything from COVID, to DEI programs, to police conduct, to the prevalence and the effects of hormone therapies and surgeries on youth, large numbers of people began feeling pressured by an external force that they couldn’t always name; even greater numbers of people fell silent. In effect, large-scale changes in American mores and behavior were being legislated outside the familiar institutions and processes of representative democracy, through top-down social pressure machinery backed in many cases by the threat of law enforcement or federal action, in what soon became known as a “whole of society” effort.

At every turn over the next four years, it was like a fever was spreading, and no one was immune. Spouses, children, colleagues, and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week, and that they were very often powerless to provide the slightest real-world evidence for. These sudden, sometimes overnight, appearances of beliefs, phrases, tics, looked a lot like the mass social contagions of the 1950s—one episode after another of rapid-onset political enlightenment replacing the appearance of dance crazes or Hula-Hoops.

During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image.

Just as in those commercially fed crazes, there was nothing accidental, mystical or organic about these new thought-viruses. Catchphrases like “defund the police,” “structural racism,” “white privilege,” “children don’t belong in cages,” “assigned gender” or “stop the genocide in Gaza” would emerge and marinate in meme-generating pools like the academy or activist organizations, and then jump the fence—or be fed—into niche groups and threads on Twitter or Reddit. If they gained traction in those spaces, they would be adopted by constituencies and players higher up in the Democratic Party hierarchy, who used their control of larger messaging verticals on social media platforms to advance or suppress stories around these topics and phrases, and who would then treat these formerly fringe positions as public markers for what all “decent people” must universally believe; those who objected or stood in the way were portrayed as troglodytes and bigots. From there, causes could be messaged into reality by state and federal bureaucrats, NGOs, and large corporations, who flew banners, put signs on their bathrooms, gave new days off from work, and brought in freshly minted consultants to provide “trainings” for workers—all without any kind of formal legislative process or vote or backing by any significant number of voters.

What mattered here was no longer Lippmann’s version of “public opinion,” rooted in the mass audiences of radio and later television, which was assumed to correlate to the current or future preferences of large numbers of voters—thereby assuring, on a metaphoric level at least, the continuation of 19th-century ideas of American democracy, with its deliberate balance of popular and representational elements in turn mirroring the thrust of the Founders’ design. Rather, the newly minted digital variant of “public opinion” was rooted in the algorithms that determine how fads spread on social media, in which mass multiplied by speed equals momentum—speed being the key variable. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that necessarily privileges the opinions and beliefs of the self-appointed vanguard who control the machinery, and could therefore generate the velocity required to change the appearance of “what people believe” overnight.

The unspoken agreements that obscured the way this social messaging apparatus worked—including Obama’s role in directing the entire system from above—and how it came to supplant the normal relationships between public opinion and legislative process that generations of Americans had learned from their 20th-century poli-sci textbooks, made it easy to dismiss anyone who suggested that Joe Biden was visibly senile; that the American system of government, including its constitutional protections for individual liberties and its historical system of checks and balances, was going off the rails; that there was something visibly unhealthy about the merger of monopoly tech companies and national security agencies with the press that threatened the ability of Americans to speak and think freely; or that America’s large cultural systems, from education, to science and medicine, to the production of movies and books, were all visibly failing, as they fell under the control of this new apparatus. Millions of Americans began feeling increasingly exhausted by the effort involved in maintaining parallel thought-worlds in which they expressed degrees of fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment, while at the same time being privately baffled or aghast by the absence of any persuasive logic behind the changes they saw—from the breakdown of law and order in major cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the surge of perhaps 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants across the U.S. border, to widespread gender dysphoria among teenage girls, to sudden and shocking declines in public health, life expectancy, and birth rates.

Until the fever broke. Today, Donald Trump is victorious, and Obama is the loser. In fact, he looks physically awful—angry and gaunt, after a summer and fall spent lecturing Black men, and Americans in general, on their failure to vote enthusiastically enough for his chosen heir, Kamala Harris, the worst major party presidential candidate in modern American history. The totality of Obama’s failure left party donors feeling cheated. Even George Clooney now disavows him. Meanwhile, Trump and his party are in control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court.

But reducing the question of what happened to Barack Obama’s new American system to the results of a single election is in fact to trivialize the startling nature and ambition of what he built, as well as the shocking suddenness with which it has all gone up in smoke. The master political strategist of his era didn’t simply back a losing horse. Rather, the entire structure he had erected over more than a decade, and which was to have been his legacy, for good or ill, has collapsed entirely. At home and abroad, Obama’s grand vision has been decisively rejected by the people whose lives it was intended to reorder. The mystery is how and why neither Obama nor his army of technocratic operatives and retainers understood the fatal flaw in the new system—until it was too late.

The theory and practice on which the rapid-onset political enlightenment of our digital era was based did not, in fact, begin with Barack Obama. He was—at first, at least—the product being sold. Nor did it originate with the digital technology that has provided the mirror world with its startlingly speedy and effective and nearly universal circuitry.

The methodology on which our current universe of political persuasion is based was born before the internet or iPhones existed, in an attempt to do good and win elections while overcoming America’s historical legacy of slavery and racism. Its originator, David Axelrod, was born to be a great American advertising man—his father was a psychologist, and his mother was a top executive at the legendary Mad Men-era New York City ad agency of Young & Rubicam. Instead, following his father’s suicide, Axelrod left New York City for Chicago, where he attended the University of Chicago, and then became a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He then became a political consultant who specialized in electing Black mayoral candidates in white-majority cities. In 2008, Axelrod ran the successful insurgent campaigns that first got Barack Obama the Democratic Party nomination over Hillary Clinton, and then elevated him to the White House.

Axelrod first tested his unique understanding of the theory and practice of public opinion, which he called “permission structures,” in his successful 1989 campaign to elect a young Black state senator named Mike White as the mayor of Cleveland. Where Black mayoral candidates like Coleman Young in Detroit and Marion Barry in Washington had typically achieved power in the 1970s and 1980s by using racially charged symbols and language to turn out large numbers of Black voters in opposition to existing power structures, which they portrayed as inherently racist, White’s history-making campaign attempted to do the opposite: To win by convincing a mix of educated, higher-income white voters to vote for the Black candidate. In fact, White won 81% of the vote in the city’s predominantly white wards while capturing only 30% of the vote in the city’s Black majority wards, which favored his opponent and former mentor on the city council, George C. Forbes, a Black candidate who ran a more traditional “Black power” campaign.

Permission structures, a term taken from advertising, was Axelrod’s secret sauce, the organizing concept by which he strategized campaigns for his clients. Where most consultants built their campaigns around sets of positive and negative ads that promoted the positive qualities of their clients and highlighted unfavorable aspects of their opponents’ characters and records, Axelrod’s unique area of specialization required a more specific set of tools. To succeed, Axelrod needed to convince white voters to overcome their existing prejudices and vote for candidates whom they might define as “soft on crime” or “lacking competence.” As an excellent 2008 New Republic profile of Axelrod—surprisingly, the only good profile of Axelrod that appears to exist anywhere—put it: “‘David felt there almost had to be a permission structure set up for certain white voters to consider a black candidate,’ explains Ken Snyder, a Democratic consultant and Axelrod protégé. In Cleveland, that was the city’s daily newspaper, The Plain Dealer. Largely on the basis of The Plain Dealer’s endorsement and his personal story, White went on to defeat Forbes with 81 percent of the vote in the city’s white wards.”

In other words, while most political consultants worked to make their guy look good or the other guy look bad by appealing to voters’ existing values, Axelrod’s strategy required convincing voters to act against their own prior beliefs. In fact, it required replacing those beliefs, by appealing to “the type of person” that voters wanted to be in the eyes of others. While the academic social science and psychology literature on permission structures is surprisingly thin, given the real-world significance of Axelrod’s success and everything that has followed, it is most commonly defined as a means of providing “scaffolding for someone to embrace change they might otherwise reject.” This “scaffolding” is said to consist of providing “social proof” (“most people in your situation are now deciding to”) “new information,” “changed circumstances,” “compromise.” As one author put it, “with many applications to politics, one could argue that effective Permission Structures will shift the Overton Window, introducing new conversations into the mainstream that might previously have been considered marginal or fringe.”

By itself, the idea of uniting new theories of mass psychology with new technology in efforts of political persuasion was nothing new. Walter Lippmann based Public Opinion in part on the insights of the Vienna-born advertising genius Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the inventor of modern PR. The arrival of television brought political advertising and Madison Avenue even closer together, a fact noted by Norman Mailer in his classic essay “Superman in the Supermarket,” which channeled the insights of Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders. In 1968, the writer Joe McGinniss shocked at least some readers with The Selling of the President, his account of the making of Richard Nixon’s television commercials which showed Madison Avenue admen successfully selling the product of Nixon like dish soap. The title of “political consultant” was itself a creation and a consequence of the television age, signaling the triumph of the ad man over the old-fashioned backroom title of “campaign manager”—a function introduced to national politics by Martin Van Buren, the “Little Magician” from Kinderhook, New York, who built the Democratic Party and elected Andrew Jackson to the Presidency.

It is not surprising then, that following Axelrod’s 1993 success in electing Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago, Barack Obama—already imagining himself as a future president of the United States—would seek out the Chicago-based consulting wizard to run his campaigns. But Axelrod wasn’t interested. In fact, Obama would spend more than a decade chasing Axelrod—who was far better connected in Chicago than Obama was—in the hopes that he would provide the necessary magic for his political rise. The other Chicago kingmaker that Obama courted was Jesse Jackson Sr., whose Operation PUSH was the city’s most powerful Black political machine, and who liked Obama even less than Axelrod did. The reality was that Obama did best with rich whites, like the board members of the Joyce Foundation and the Pritzker family.

When Axelrod finally agreed to come onboard, he found that Obama was the perfect candidate to validate his theories of political salesmanship on a national scale. First, he engineered Obama’s successful 2004 Senate campaign—a victory made possible by the old-school maneuver of unsealing Republican candidate Jack Ryan’s divorce papers, on the request of Axelrod’s former colleagues at the Chicago Tribune—and then, very soon afterward, Obama’s campaigns for the presidency, which formally commenced in 2007.

It worked. Once in office, though, Axelrod and Obama found that the institutions of public opinion—namely the press, on which Axelrod’s permission structure framework depended—were decaying quickly in the face of the internet. Newspapers like the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as well as national television networks like CBS, which Axelrod relied on as validators, were now barely able to pay their bills, having lost their monopoly on viewers and advertisers to the internet and to newly emerging social media platforms.

With Obama’s reelection campaign on the horizon in 2012, the White House’s attention turned to selling Obamacare, which would become the signature initiative of the president’s first term in office. Without a healthy, well-functioning press corps that could command the attention and allegiance of voters, the White House would have to manufacture its own world of validators to sell the president’s plan on social media—which it successfully did. The White House sales effort successfully disguised the fact that the new health care program was in fact a new social welfare program that would lower rather than raise the standard of care for most Americans with preexisting health insurance, while providing tens of billions of dollars in guaranteed payments to large pharmaceutical companies and pushing those costs onto employers. Americans would continue to pay more for health care than citizens of any other first world country, while receiving less.

As a meeting of Axelrod’s theories with the mechanics of social media, though, the selling of Obamacare—which continued seamlessly into Obama’s reelection campaign against Mitt Romney—was a match made in heaven. So much so, that by 2013 it had become the Obama White House’s reigning theory of governance. A Reuters article from 2013 helpfully explained how the system worked: “In Obama’s jargon, getting to yes requires a permission structure.” Asked about the phrase, White House spokesman Jay Carney explained that it was “common usage” around the White House, dating back to Obama’s 2008 campaign. The occasion for the article was Obama’s use of the phrase permission structure at a press conference in order to explain how he hoped to break an impasse with congressional Republicans, for which he had been roundly mocked as an out-of-touch egghead by D.C. columnists including Maureen Dowd and Dana Milbank, and by staffers for Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell.

The joke was on them. What the White House understood, and which I came to understand through my reporting on the Iran deal, was that social media—which was now the larger context in which former prestige “legacy” outlets like The New York Times and NBC News now operated—could now be understood and also made to function as a gigantic automated permission structure machine. Which is to say that, with enough money, operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that had never believed or even heard of before were in fact not only plausible, but already widely accepted within their specific peer groups.

The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create.

The Iran deal proved that, with the collapse of the reality-establishing function of professional media, which could no longer afford to field teams of independent, experienced reporters, a talented politician in the White House could indeed stand up his own reality, and use the mechanisms of peer-group pressure and aspirational ambition to get others to adopt it. In fact, the higher one climbed on the social and professional ladder, the more vulnerable to such techniques people turned out to be—making it easy to flip entire echelons of professionals within the country’s increasingly brittle and insecure elite, whose status was now being threatened by the pace and scope of technologically driven change that threatened to make both their expertise and also their professions obsolete. As a test of the use of social media as a permission structure machine, the Iran deal was therefore a necessary prelude to Russiagate, which marked the moment in which the “mainstream media” was folded into the social media machinery that the party controlled, as formerly respected names like “NBC News” or “Harvard professor Lawrence Tribe” were regularly advertised spouting absurdities backed by “top national security sources” and other validators—all of which could be activated or invented on the spot by clever aides with laptops, playing the world’s greatest video game.

Yet the extent to which reality was being regularly manipulated through the techniques of social psychology applied to the internet was not immediately apparent to outside observers—especially those who wished to see, or had long been conditioned to see, something else. The collapse of the press and the acceptance by flagship outlets of a new role as a megaphone for the Democratic Party meant that there were many fewer actual “outside observers” to blow the whistle. And in any event, Obama was on his way out—and Donald Trump, aka Orange Man Hitler, was on his way in.

The conspiratorial messaging campaign targeting Trump as a Kremlin-controlled “asset” who had been elected on direct orders from Vladimir Putin himself seemed more like the plot of a dark satire than something that rational political observers might endorse as a remotely plausible real-world event. Having reported on the Iran deal made it easy to see that Russiagate was a political op, being run according to a similar playbook, by many of the same people. Familiarity with the Iran deal made it easy for reporters at Tablet, particularly Lee Smith, to see Russiagate as a fraud from the beginning, and to see through the methods by which the hallucination was being messaged by the mainstream press.

What surprised me was how alone my colleagues were, though. The existence of dedicated journalistic observers who saw their allegiance as being to readers and not to any political party was itself a feature of a 20th-century system that was quickly going the way of the dodo. Observers who proclaimed their fealty to objective reporting practices and refused to identify with either political party no longer worked in the press—not after Trump was elected. To the extent that rational analysts of claims that the U.S. president was controlled by the Kremlin still existed, they worked in academic political science departments at distant state universities, and their voices were buried under an avalanche of permission structure propaganda amplified often several times a day on the front pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times, which would win Pulitzer Prizes for publishing nonsense.

Needless to say, the model of politics in which operatives are constantly running permission structure games on the body politic, assisted by members of the press and think tankers eager to be of service to the party, has more in common with pyramid schemes and high-pressure network-marketing scams than it does with reasoned democratic deliberation and debate. At this point, it hardly seems controversial to point out that such a model of politics is socially toxic.

What’s important to note are the specific conditions that had been set, and which turned this from the narrow campaign it might have been to a society-wide mass event—and which is why those who argued in these years that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party had anything like equal power were either evil or delusional or both. In the wake of Obama’s reelection in 2012, the defection of large swaths of the Silicon Valley elite from the Republican to the Democratic Party led to a tremendous influx of cash into the coffers of the Democratic Party and its associated penumbra of billionaire-funded foundations and NGOs, along with a new willingness of Silicon Valley titans to work directly with the White House—which after all, retained the power, in theory, to regulate their quasi-monopolies out of existence. In field after field, from sex and gender, to church attitudes toward homosexuality, to formerly apolitical sources of public information, to voting practices, to the internal politics of religious groups, to race politics, to what films Americans would watch and how they would henceforth be entertained, the oligarchs would do their part, by helping buy up once independent social spaces and torque them to function as parts of the party’s permission structure machine. The FBI would then do its part, by adopting political categories like “white supremacy” as chief domestic targets, and puppet groups in the vertical, like the ADL and the ACLU, would pretend to be objective watchdogs who just happened to come to the same conclusion.

Obamacare was followed by the Iran deal, which was followed by Russiagate, which was followed by COVID. Messaging around the pandemic was the fourth and most far-reaching permission structure game that was run by small clusters of operatives on the American public, resulting in the revocation of the most basic social rights—like the right to go outside your own home, or visit a dying parent or child in the hospital. COVID also proved to be an excuse for the largest wealth transfer in American history, comprising hundreds of billions of dollars, from the middle and working classes to the top 1%. Most ominously, COVID proved to be a means for remaking the American electoral system, as well as providing a platform for a series of would-be social revolutions in whose favor restrictions on public gatherings and laws against looting and public violence were suspended, due to manifestations of “public opinion” on social media.

As COVID provided cover for increasingly extreme and rapid manifestations of rapid political enlightenment, numbers of formerly quiescent citizens began to rebel against the new order. Unable to locate where the instructions were coming from, they blamed elites, medical authorities, the deep state, Klaus Schwab, the leadership of Black Lives Matter, Bill Gates, and dozens of other more or less nefarious players, but without being able to identity the process that kept generating new thought-contagions and giving them the seeming force of law. The game was in fact new enough that Donald Trump didn’t get it before it was too late for his reelection chances, championing lockdowns and COVID vaccines while failing to pay attention to the Democratic lawyers who were changing election laws in key states. Once Joe Biden was safely installed in the White House, Obama’s Democratic Party could look forward to smooth sailing—protected by new election laws, the party’s control over major information platforms, the FBI, and the White House, and a government-led campaign of lawfare against Trump. It was hard to see how the party could lose for at least another generation, if ever again.

By this late date in Western cultural history, the modern is itself a notably dated category. Whether it is a person or a thing or a style, we know exactly how it behaves, and how we are supposed to react. The modern is a character in an early Evelyn Waugh novel, unflappable in the face of the new. Then there is the conservative, who rejects the new in favor of the ancient verities of the Greeks or the Church. Both figures are rightfully comic, with an accompanying tinge of the tragic, or else they appear to be the other way around. The verdict is in the eye of the beholder, meaning you and me.

The permission structure machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod built to replace the Democratic Party was in its essence neither modern nor conservative, though. Rather it is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator. The integrity of the individual is violated in order to further the superior interests of the superego of humanity, the party, which knows which beliefs are right and which are wrong. The party is the ghost in the machine, which appears to run on automatic pilot, using the human desire for companionship and social connection as fuel for an effort to detach individuals from their own desires and substitute the dictates of the party, which is granted the unlimited right to enforce its superior opinions on all of mankind.

Constructing a giant permission structure machine that would mechanize the formation of public opinion through social media was never David Axelrod’s intention. Axelrod wanted to help make society better by allowing white voters to obey the better angels of their nature and elect Black mayors, despite being racists. Everyone can agree that racism is bad, just like they can agree that poverty is bad, or disease is bad. The question is whether a given instance of racism or poverty or disease is so bad that, when it comes to eliminating or reducing their ill effects, all other human values, including the value of independent thought and feeling, should be trampled. If the answer is yes, you have placed your trust outside of the nexus of contingent human relationships into the hands of a larger, crushingly powerful machine that you believe might incarnate your idea of justice. That is totalitarianism, or as George Orwell put it in 1984, the image of “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Every form of totalitarianism is unique. Nazi fascism was unique in its racist animus toward the Jews, who were responsible for the opposing sins of capitalism and communism alike, and also for the industrial efficiency in which the Nazi program of mass slaughter was carried out. Soviet communism was unique in that it lasted much longer than Nazism did, and for the distinctive type of cynicism to which it gave rise. If the end product of Nazism was Auschwitz, then the end product of Soviet communism was the humor of the breadline. Soviet cynicism was a natural product of how the Soviets decided to rule, which was to demand absolute external compliance to party dictates in word and deed while at the same time allowing its subjects a separate space to think their own thoughts—provided that they never acted on those thoughts. The natural outcome of the Soviet system was compliance without belief.

Twitter was worth more to Elon Musk than it was to anyone else with the money to pay for it. He understood Twitter and the permission structure machinery better than its would-be operators did.

The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia, which is a term that had a deep hold over the 20th-century modern literary and social imagination, from popular works like I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and Sybil to theorizing by R.D. Laing (The Divided Self) and Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). Among the superior works of literature in this genre are Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind, the singular House of Leaves, Greg Bottoms’ memoir Angelhead and many dozens of other books. The expected reaction within the genre to hearing such voices is horror.

This was not always the case, though. Neither Greek nor Hebrew literature, which are the two great narrative streams out of which what we know today as Western culture was formed, appear to have any equivalent to what we identify today as internal monologue. Instead, they are filled with talking bushes, plants, and animals. Above all, they are filled with the voices of gods—including God—which talk to humans in nearly every physical location imaginable, from mountaintops to the Road to Damascus. Abraham, Moses, Ezekiel, Jesus, and Paul all heard voices. According to the Princeton University scholar Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, human consciousness did not arise as a chemical-biological byproduct of human evolution but is instead a learned process based on the recent development and elaboration of metaphorical language. Prior to the development of consciousness, Jaynes argues, humans operated under a previous mentality he called the bicameral (two-chambered) mind, where in place of an internal dialogue, bicameral people regularly experienced auditory hallucinations directing their actions.

What the permission structure machine seeks to do is to undo the millennia-long work of consciousness by once again locating consciousness outside of the self—but clothing it as an internal product via the mechanized propagation of what Marxists used to call “false consciousness.” But where the progenitors of “false consciousness” in the Marxist lexicon are villains, working on behalf of the capitalist order by preventing workers from being cognizant of their own interests, the mechanized permission structure machine offers the reverse: The “false consciousness” it seeks to propagate is a positive instrument of the party’s attempt to establish the reign of justice on earth. Which is why the natural outcome of the automation of permission structures is not humor, however cynical, but institutionalized schizophrenia, instantiated within the structure of the bicameral mind. No matter how the bots that animate the mechanism position themselves, for whatever low-end careerist purpose, the voices they listen to come from outside. They are incapable of being truth-tellers, because they have no truth to tell. They are creatures of the machine.

It took three powerful men, each of whom had the advantage of operating entirely in public, and with massive and obvious real-world consequences, to rupture the apparatus of false consciousness that Obama built. In doing so, they saved the world—for the moment, at least. While history will judge whether their achievements were lasting, it is clear that if they hadn’t acted as they did, we would still be living inside the machine.

The first of these men was Elon Musk, who is notable for having purchased Twitter in 2022, after Joe Biden had been safely installed in the White House, and the social media site appeared perhaps to be reaching the end of its usefulness, for what was presented at the time and since as the wildly overblown price of $44 billion. Twitter was hardly identical with the permission structure machine that Barack Obama, David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Dan Pfeiffer, Ben Rhodes, and the rest of Obama’s operatives constructed in their takeover of the Democratic Party. The machine they built was much, much bigger than any social media platform. However, due to its first mover advantage, and the role it played within the sociology of journalism and other alloyed professions, Twitter was positioned to play an obvious and key role in the work of social signaling and coordination by which the party’s permission structure machine functioned.

Twitter’s significance, as part of the party’s permission structure machinery, was key in part because, as the history of platforms and companies like Facebook, Google, Uber, Instagram. and TikTok shows, advantages of scale tend naturally toward localized monopolies. Twitter could play the signaling and coordinating function that it did in part because it was a monopoly, which is why Obama, Axelrod, Plouffe, etc. all had Twitter accounts. It’s why the FBI came on board Twitter, to ensure that the tilt of the platform was coordinated with the FBI’s role in the party’s “whole of society” censorship efforts—whether directed against “disinformation,” or COVID measures, or “white supremacy,” or Donald Trump, or “insurrectionists.” So why sell a key module in the permission structure machine to Elon Musk?

Part of the reason appears to be price. The $44 billion that Musk eventually paid appears to be at least twice what any other plausible team of bidders offered. It is certainly possible that having decided to sell Twitter, the company’s board was stuck—both practically and legally—when Musk decided that price was not an object, and that he was willing to massively outspend any other possible bidder. Twitter’s board, and whoever they consulted within the ODP vertical, may have imagined that Musk would find an excuse to pull out of the deal—which he appeared at several points to be doing, though his reluctance may well have been a negotiating tactic.

It is certainly plausible that someone in Obama’s universe saw the danger in selling Twitter to Musk. That it happened anyway suggests—as in the case of the lawfare campaign against Trump—that they hubristically believed in their own propagandistic accounts of their adversary as venal, corrupt, and weak, and of their own practical and moral superiority. Unable to think outside their own box, they may have reasonably expected that Musk could be constrained by the need to keep his advertisers by retaining the existing tilt of the platform’s algorithms for as long as the platform itself continued to matter. To keep Musk in line, the party could cut the platform’s advertising revenues by half or more at will by having its adjuncts in the censorship business label it a sinkhole of racism and depravity, and getting it banned from Europe and other global markets. As the reputational cost spread, Musk would have no choice but to eat a loss of tens of billions of dollars and sell, or else face the destruction of his other businesses—which the party could speed up by canceling contracts with NASA and other government agencies and opening multiple SEC and Justice Department investigations that would further augment his reputational risk—until he agreed to kiss the ring.

Where this analysis went wrong is the same place that the Obama team’s analysis of Trump went wrong: The wizards of the permission structure machine had become captives of the machinery that they built. Bullying large numbers of people into faddish hyperconformity by controlling the machinery of social approval may require both money and technique, but it is not art or thought. In fact, it is something like the opposite of thought. Lost in the hypercharged mirror world that they had created, they decided that having made themselves cool also made them right, and that evidence to the contrary could be safely dismissed as a “right-wing talking point.” Obama’s operatives shared the same character flaw as their master, a kind of brittle, Ivy League know-it-all-ness that demanded that they always be the smartest person in the room.

Musk, meanwhile, was entirely and sincerely his own man—a privilege that came in part from being the richest man in America, and in part from the nature of his businesses, which the Obama cadres appear to have misunderstood. Musk may have paid twice as much as the next-highest bidder for Twitter, if such a bidder actually ever existed. Except, it was also true that, as a business proposition, Twitter was worth more to Elon Musk than it was to anyone else with the money to pay for it. That’s because the value that Musk creates in his companies is a unique blend of high imagination and physical products which function as memes. In this area, at least, he understood Twitter and the permission structure machinery better than its would-be operators did. Buying a Tesla, or buying stock in Tesla, is different than buying a share of stock in GM or Daimler-Benz, or even Google and Facebook, because you are buying a share in Elon Musk—a 21st-century master technologist who is uniquely capable of imagining the very biggest things and turning them into physical realities. Musk’s companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars because of Elon Musk’s unique ability to incarnate dreams and make teams of talented people believe them, too. His investors are buying pieces of those dreams, which are magic—components of a self-validating belief system that puts its faith in the power of the individual believer.

Faced with the party’s regime of increasing direct censorship over social media, Musk was aware, in a way his adversaries were not, that the party’s ambitions to control content meant that he was coming perilously close to losing control over his own personal dream space, which provides a large share of the value of his companies. Once Donald Trump, a former president of the United States, was thrown off Twitter, the equation became quite obvious: Either the party would control Twitter, in which case Elon Musk was next up for shadow-banning, fact-checking, and eventual exile, at a cost of however many hundreds of billions of dollars to his personal brand, i.e., his companies, or else Musk could assert his own control over that space, by buying Twitter. When measured against the likely losses that would result from being silenced and thrown off the site, and his likely subsequent difficulties in raising public and private capital, $44 billion was therefore an entirely reasonable cost for Musk to pay. The hitch in Musk’s plan to buy Twitter was that it relied on the party being stupid enough to sell it to him. Luckily, unbelievably, they were that stupid—while crowing loudly that Musk was a sucker.

It is clear by now that the Obama party were the suckers—not Musk. In fact, the party’s belated war on Twitter’s new owner only served to convince other Silicon Valley oligarchs that whatever reputational risks they might incur by backing Donald Trump would be outweighed by the direct risks that party weaponization of federal regulatory structures, which gave it effective control of markets and banks, would pose to their businesses. By letting Twitter go, and then making war on its new owner, in a belated attempt to get him to do their bidding, the Obama party showed both the scope of its ambition and also its hubris—a combination that split the country’s oligarchy on the eve of the key election that would have allowed the party to consolidate its power.

With Musk’s X now open to all comers, the party’s censorship apparatus was effectively dead. A new counter-permission structure machine was now erected, licensing all kinds of views, some of which were novel and welcome, and others of which were noxious. Which is how opinion in a free society is supposed to operate.

Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter was in turn a necessary precondition for the election of Donald Trump, which was in turn made possible by Trump’s own split-second decision on July 13, 2024, to turn his head fractionally to the right while delivering a speech in a field in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Trump’s head turn was a perfect example of an event that has no explanation outside the favor of the gods, or whatever modern equivalent involving wind factors and directional probabilities you might prefer to the word “God.” Trump was fated to win, just as Achilles was fated to overcome Hector, because the gods, or if you prefer the forces of cosmic randomness, were on his side, on that day, at that moment. That move not only saved his life by allowing him to escape an assassin’s bullet; it revitalized his chi and set in motion a series of subsequent events that generated a reordering of the entire world.

Then there was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave the story a further epic dimension by returning to the original field of battle. Bibi, as you may recall, played the role of Obama’s piñata during the fight over the Iran deal, fated to go down to defeat by opposing the will of a sitting U.S. president on a foreign policy question that most Americans cared very little about. But this past summer, Netanyahu turned himself into the active party, with the means to reverse Obama’s achievement and unveil the origins of his power grab, by showing that the “peace deal” that he had sold to the American people—founded on the idea that Iran was itself a formidable adversary—was a mess of lies. Iran was not and never was a regional power, capable of “balancing” traditional American allies. It was a totalitarian shit hole regime that is deeply hated by its own people and throughout the region, entirely dependent on American backing in its efforts to gain a nuclear bomb.

Netanyahu’s decision to invade Rafah on May 6, 2024, was the culmination of two long and otherwise separate chains of events whose consequences will continue to reverberate throughout the Middle East, and also at home. Netanyahu had been promising to invade Rafah since February. The fact that he had not done so by May had become both a symbol of Israeli weakness and indecision in the face of a global onslaught of Jew-hatred, as well as the continuing solidity of the regional power structure established by Obama’s Iran deal. Within that structure, Israeli interests were held to be subordinate to those of Iran, which was allowed to finance, arm, and train large terrorist armies on Israel’s borders. Even when one of those armies decided to attack Israel in an orgy of murder and rape directed against civilians and recorded and broadcast live by the terrorists, Israel’s response was to be limited by its subordinate place in the regional hierarchy, underlining a reality in which Israel was fated to grovel before the whims of its American master—and would sooner or later most likely be ground into dust.

Israel could not strike Iran. Nor could it directly strike Hezbollah, the largest and most threatening of the Iranian-sponsored armies on its border, except to retaliate tit-for-tat for Hezbollah’s missile attacks on its civilian population. While it could invade Gaza, it could do so only while being publicly chided by U.S. officials from the president and the secretary of state for violating rules of wars that often appeared to be made up on the spot and were entirely divorced from common military practice and necessity. In particular, Israel was not to invade Rafah, a prohibition that ensured that Hamas could regularly bring in supplies and cash through the tunnels beneath its border with Egypt while ensuring the survival of its command-and-control structure, allowing it to reassume control of Gaza once the war was over, thereby assuring the success of U.S. policy, which was that Israel’s military invasion of Gaza must serve as the prelude to establishing a Palestinian state—an effort in which Hamas was a necessary partner, representing the Iranian interest, and must therefore be preserved in some part, even after being cut down to size.

Netanyahu’s decision to override the U.S. and take Rafah would turn out to be the prelude to a further series of stunning strategic moves which would enable Israel to smash the Iranian regional position and take full control of her own destiny. After conquering Rafah, in a campaign that the U.S. had said would be impossible without large-scale civilian casualties, Netanyahu proceeded to run the table in a series of rapid-fire blows whose only real point of comparison is Israel’s historic victory in the Six-Day War. In fact, given the odds he faced, and the magnitude of the victories he has won, that comparison may be unfair to Netanyahu, who has provided history with one of the very few examples of an isolated local client redrawing the strategic map of the region against the will of a dominant global power. Netanyahu killed terror chiefs Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah; spectacularly eliminated nearly the entire upper military and political echelons of both terror armies on his border, Hamas and Hezbollah; turned both Gaza and Hezbollah’s strongholds in southern Lebanon and Beirut into rubble; and finally, last week, took out the entire stock of modern tanks, aircraft, naval vessels and chemical weapons and missile factories accumulated over the past six decades by the Syrian military.

While the questions of how and when the Iranian regime might fall are for the moment unanswered, it seems clear that Obama’s imagined new regional order in the Middle East, centered on the imagined power of the ayatollahs, is now gone—having disintegrated on contact with Netanyahu’s unanticipated willingness and ability to aggressively defend his castle. What role Biden’s resentment of Obama, especially after the humiliation of his removal from the Democratic ticket, contributed to his continued public backing of Israel, and his repeated declarations of his own Zionism, can be left up to the individual imagination, and to the diligence of future historians. I doubt it was zero, though. Again, the fault in the Obama party’s scheme to use Biden as an empty figurehead was the same fault in his handling of Musk: hubris.

Parallel to the collapse of the new regional order that Obama decreed for the Middle East has been the collapse of the Obama-led domestic order at home. The coincidence marks the end of Obama’s pretensions to be a new kind of world leader, running a new world order of his own making from his iPhone, grounded in his own strange combination of nihilism and virtue-mongering.

In fact, it can be argued that there is no coincidence here at all, since the division between Obama’s program abroad and his role at home is largely artificial. At its core, Obama’s Iran deal was an attempt to remake the Democratic Party in his own image, by establishing fealty to the ayatollahs as a litmus test for the party faithful—thereby elevating third-worldist “progressive” POC elements within the party at the expense of Jews, who undermined the premises of DEI ideology by doing well on standardized tests and making money and who were annoyingly loyal to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Obama’s rivals for control of the party. Conversely, the recent disintegration of Obama’s world-building project in Middle East has helped to further collapse his mystique, by showing that his grand vision for America’s role in the world was founded on sand. If Obama the global strategist is clearly a failure, and his hand-picked successors at home were a senile old man and a babbling idiot, then the country’s corporate elite and tech oligarchy might rightly question the wisdom of continued payoffs to Obama’s Chicago-style Democratic machine and make peace with Donald Trump instead. Which they did.

The same warning still stands, though. Just as America was unlikely to become a better place by letting White House aides manufacture “public opinion” through their laptops and iPhones, and license fact-free virtue campaigns on nearly every subject under the sun, from the wisdom of “gender-affirming” surgeries for children to defunding the police, it is also unlikely to become a better place if the right uses the same machinery to advance its own wishful imaginings, by costuming themselves in the robes of foreign churches while trumpeting the wonders of secret alien space technology and bemoaning the evils of the Allied side in World War II. In fact, the two groups share a great deal in common with each other, starting with their visceral dislike for the idea of American uniqueness. Exceptionalism is the master narrative of American greatness, and today its only true defender seems to be Donald Trump.

At the end of the day, Elon Musk may take ketamine all day long while wandering the halls of his own mind in a purple silk caftan. Donald Trump may be an agent of chaos who destroys more than he saves. Benjamin Netanyahu may or may not make peace with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who may or may not turn out to be a good guy. Regardless of their faults, all three men shared a common trait at a critical moment in history—they trusted their own stubbornness against the mirror world of digitally based conformity. The human future rests on individuals in all walks of life and representing all parties and all currents of opinion being brave and independent-minded enough to make that same choice.

As for Barack Obama, I will admit that I wasn’t sure I’d ever see him face the consequences of his own arrogance, obsession with personal power, and efforts at vanquishing the exceptionalism that makes this country different from every other one. But I guess, as a wise man once explained: “Life’s a bitch.”

Days ago Yemen’s Houthis announced they are resuming attacks on Red Sea shipping over Israel’s failure to fully open humanitarian aid corridors into the Gaza Strip.

But President Trump has responded preemptively by on Saturday ordering a series of new airstrikes on Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. The US commander-in-chief was warned he’ll continuing using “overwhelming lethal force” until the Iranian-backed Houthi completely halt their attacks.

The Houthis, known officially as the Ansar Allah movement, said that 15 people died in an updated figure, as a result of Saturday’s wave of US airstrikes.

Huge explosions were heard and witnessed in the capital in the northern province of Saada. Black smoke was seen over the Sanaa airport complex, which reportedly also hosts a very large military site.

“Our brave Warfighters are right now carrying out aerial attacks on the terrorists’ bases, leaders, and missile defenses to protect American shipping, air, and naval assets, and to restore Navigational Freedom,” Trump had continued in a post on Truth Social.

“No terrorist force will stop American commercial and naval vessels from freely sailing the Waterways of the World.”

He used to opportunity to also put Iran on notice, saying it will be held “fully accountable” for any aggression of its proxy in Yemen.

Ansar Allah’s leader last just Friday had declared a four-day deadline before attacks on shipping would resume. That four day timeline had ended by close of Tuesday, which means the Red Sea could be soon fiery scene of drone and missile attacks out of Yemen once again.

Since 2023 over 100 missile and drone attacks on commercial vessels have occurred in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The Houthis have also downed several MQ-9 Reaper drones operated by the Pentagon.

CENTCOM Forces Launch Large Scale Operation Against Iran-Backed Houthis in Yemen

On March 15, U.S. Central Command initiated a series of operations consisting of precision strikes against Iran-backed Houthi targets across Yemen to defend American interests, deter enemies, and… pic.twitter.com/u5yx8WneoG

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 15, 2025

A US-led naval coalition which began under the Biden administration has been able to do nothing in terms of putting a dent in Houthi capabilities, even after several bombing raids on Yemen, also at times including Israeli and UK jets. The pattern has been that the Houthis have only upped their attacks after US and Israeli coalition raids.

Authored by James Varney via RealClearInvestigations,

When the Biden administration announced $27 billion in environmental grants last April, it set the clock ticking on a predicament: how to get the unprecedented sums for the President’s envisioned NetZero future out the door before the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30?

The task was complicated by the fact most of the money – $20 billion – would go to just eight nonprofits that, like the Environmental Protection Agency itself, had never handled such gargantuan grants.

In hindsight, it’s easy to suspect that corners were cut, or laws were broken, or, at the very least, extraordinary measures were taken.

Those possibilities are clearly on the mind of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as he tries to unravel what happened to Inflation Reduction Act spending that the Biden White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the EPA decided to expedite before the November election – an effort that included moving the roughly $20 billion to a private institution, Citibank, away from oversight of the Treasury Department. 

On Wednesday, Zeldin moved to terminate the arrangements as the enriched nonprofits have filed lawsuits looking to protect their grants. The battle has thrust into the spotlight what had been a rather quiet attempt by the Biden administration to spend the $27 billion.

The money was put into the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a new entity born in 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats pushed through Congress without any Republican support.  

“This bold investment will not only deploy clean energy and combat the climate crisis but also improve health outcomes, lower energy costs, and create high-quality jobs for Americans,” Biden’s EPA declared when seeking applications for the grants, “all while strengthening our country’s economic competitiveness and ensuring energy security.” 

The grants, unveiled April 4, 2024, came with its built-in deadline to push the money out just months away. So a political deal was struck between the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and EPA, current agency officials told RealClearInvestigations. As a hedge against future administration attempts to curb the program, the deal classified the now-suspect $20 billion in a novel way making it hard to track.

Zeldin has asked the EPA’s inspector general and the Department of Justice to investigate the unorthodox arrangement.

“I think it will be an uphill battle to recover the money, but it’s impressive to see Trump and Zeldin running with it,” said Daren Bakst of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has labeled the Greenhouse Gas money “slush funds.” 

“Even if you look past the entities that receive the money, or how they figured out how to get the money to them, this is a setup that is prone to corruption, abuse and cronyism regardless of party,” Bakst said. “The whole thing looks questionable.”

The process began before the April 4 announcement. In December 2022, Jahi Wise, an executive with the Coalition for Green Capital, joined EPA as a senior adviser. In July 2023, the EPA published a request for proposals from applicants to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

The fund was broken into three parts. The two largest, the National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF) and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA), received huge sums, totaling $20 billion. Notably, as RCI reported last October, grants went to nonprofits that had paltry assets, had been granted their nonprofit status only the month before, or had people associated with them who had previously served various federal or state Democratic administrations. For example, the Coalition for Green Capital, Wise’s former outfit, was awarded $5.1 billion.

Three weeks later, an arrangement was made between OMB and EPA in which the money was designated “non-exchange” rather than “exchange” – a first for EPA funds, according to current officials. That label allowed for the money to be moved to recipients in lump funds rather than parceled out over the length of the deals with the nonprofits, which in most cases were slated to run until 2029, 2030, or later, records show. It also called for an outside financial institution to manage the money, in part because the agency had zero experience in handling grants of this size. 

Although the language in the Inflation Reduction Act dealing with the Greenhouse Gas funds does not use “shall,” the word Congress usually employs to indicate that something is required, the law did impose a deadline of Sept. 30 – the end of the fiscal year – EPA officials and legal experts agree. 

On June 27, as the EPA was making its deals with the nonprofits, Biden had his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, and on July 21 Biden ended his re-election campaign and threw his support to then-Vice President Kamala Harris. The Greenhouse Gas fund money remained unobligated at that point, according to EPA officials.

The deals were finally completed and the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator money was obligated to the nonprofits on Aug. 16, according to a timeline provided to RCI. That left $7 billion, the portion that comprised the third component of the fund, Solar For All.

At that point, the $20 billion, though obligated, remained with the Treasury, officials said. A memorandum of understanding between EPA and the Treasury Department on moving the mountain of cash was not signed until Sept. 6. 

Two weeks later, the Republican-led House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee held a hearing to learn more about EPA funding oversight, calling the agency’s inspector general Sean O’Donnell to testify. O’Donnell made clear he had never seen the maneuvers the EPA was making with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and said neither he nor his staff would be able to stay on top of it.

“I can’t say enough about how complex this system will be,” O’Donnell testified. “It’s like they created an investment bank. It’s fantastically complex. I think it’s unusual.”

Yet it was not until Nov. 12, three working days after Trump beat Harris in the 2024 election, that the EPA began talks with Citibank about taking control of the $20 billion, Trump administration officials told RCI. During those negotiations, on Dec. 5, Project Veritas released an undercover video of an EPA official laughing about what he considered an extraordinary process, likening it to “throwing gold bars off the deck of the Titanic.”

The Citibank arrangement effectively removing direct EPA oversight, and with interest on the $20 billion going to the grant recipients, was signed on Dec. 27, agency officials told RCI. The deal thus represents a carve-out for the two aspects of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that accounted for the $20 billion; the $7 billion comprising Solar For All remains with Treasury. The Trump administration has frozen that money, although some of it has already been distributed, according to federal records.

Critics of the spending said the timeline smacks of shady politics.

Steve Milloy, a skeptic of apocalyptic global warming, said he has received a government grant and his experience was profoundly different than the one enjoyed by Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund winners. His process was an uncomfortable one that lasted 10 months, he said.

“They crawled up my ass, and that was for a small grant,” he said.

The contrast is striking, in his opinion.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “It is fishy … I think they thought they would win reelection and panicked when they lost. It seems like all of this is being done without due diligence or accountability.”

‘Tip of the Iceberg’

Picking up on the “gold bars off the deck of the Titanic” video, Zeldin cited the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund as a dubious operation during his confirmation hearing Jan. 17, and he has been outspoken against it since becoming administrator. On March 2, he wrote to the EPA inspector general, urging him to look into the deals. 

“These examples are the tip of the iceberg and suggest a deeply entrenched pattern of political favoritism, lack of qualifications, and other possibly unlawful allocation of taxpayer funds,” he wrote. “Disturbingly, these cases likely represent only a fraction of broader issues.”

Beyond questions about the money, questions also remain about the work it is meant to pay for, according to Zeldin and other EPA officials. None of the recipient nonprofits contacted by RCI, including the Climate United Fund, which got the biggest award of $7 billion, responded to requests for comment.

One stipulation of the Greenhouse Gas funds was that winners attract $7 of private investment for every $1 in federal money. The EPA told RCI that recipients submitted detailed plans in their applications, but could not say if that included specific financing arrangements. Former EPA Special Adviser Zealan Hoover told RCI last year that the goal was to create a market for these green banks through the size of the grants.

While it remains early in the process, it does not appear the groups will be able to hit that target. The Appalachian Community Credit Corporation, for instance, is supposed to get $500 million through the CCIA. On its website, however, it says it will use the money to create a $1.6 billion loan pool, which would be an investment ratio little better than 3-to-1.

The Virginia-based corporation did not respond to requests for comment.

It remains unclear how much money remains in the Citibank accounts and how successful Zeldin may be in recovering the money. Citibank declined comment.

‘The Whole Thing Seems Incestuous’

Some outside observers believe there are mechanisms to claw back the funds. An EPA official told RCI there is boilerplate language in agency contracts that allows “termination for a change in agency priorities,” and Milloy said federal agencies terminate contracts “all the time.”

In this particular case, while it does appear Zeldin could claw back money, the EPA may be legally bound to simply give it to another private financial institution rather than return it to the Treasury, said David Super, professor of law and economics at Georgetown University Law Center.

In addition, Super said, there is that deadline of Sept. 30, 2024.

“There, as here, there was both an appropriation and a deadline for getting the money out the door,” Super said, citing a 1975 Supreme Court ruling. “Any competent lawyer would have told EPA that, unless it wanted to go through the procedures of the Impoundment Control Act, it would be an unlawful impoundment of funds if it failed to spend all the money – and, if it was going to do that, it had to do so by September 30, 2024.”

Other groups that received enormous grants also did not respond to RCI’s questions or requests for comment, including the Climate United Fund, which got the single biggest award: $7 billion up front for an arrangement that is supposed to last through June 2029, federal records show.

Climate United Fund has announced spending $311 million of its grant, all of it on three projects last October and November. The largest of those was $250 million to buy electric trucks, according to the group’s website. 

Previously, RCI reported on ties between some of the nonprofits’ key figures and the Biden or Obama administrations, and more of those have come to light since Zeldin pushed the issue into the spotlight last month. Many outlets have zeroed in on failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who was lead counsel for a group known as Rewiring America. That group, in turn, is one of the main components of a new group known as Power Forward Communities, an outfit with listed assets of $100 that obtained its tax-exempt status last March, just weeks before it was named the winner of a $2 billion grant.

Trump mentioned Abrams and the EPA award in his congressional speech last week, and liberal “fact check” groups sprang to action to label his comment false because the money did not go directly to Abrams. Abrams acknowledged being a part of Rewiring America, however, and said the group bought energy-efficient appliances for people in Georgia.

Power Forward Communities, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment, lists scores of other partners. One of those, the Green Door Initiative in Michigan, is led by Donele Wilkins, whom Biden appointed as a member of his Environmental Justice Advisory Council last June. In other cases, Power Forward Communities is partnered with groups that also have other public revenue streams, such as the Nevada Clean Energy Fund, which is funded also by the Nevada governor’s office and has received nearly $850,000 of its separate $155.7 million grant via Solar For All. 

Similar ties have surfaced between the Biden administration and the Coalition for Green Capital. 

“The whole thing seems incestuous,” said Bakst of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “When you see these short deadlines it really makes everything questionable, because when you rush something like this there will almost certainly be problems with it.”

Cuba’s ongoing power crisis, plunging more than 10 million people into darkness, serves as a stark reminder of the systemic failures of the repressive communist dictatorship in the Caribbean island struggling with imploding infrastructure, economic turmoil, and natural disasters.

“At around 8:15 p.m. tonight, a failure at the Diezmero substation caused a significant loss of generation in the west of Cuba and with it the failure of the National Electric System,” Cuba’s Ministry of Energy and Mines wrote in a post on X late Friday night. 

Alrededor de las 20: 15 horas de esta noche , una avería en la subestación del Diezmero provocó la perdida importante de generación en el occidente de #Cuba y con ello la caída del Sistema Eléctrico Nacional, SEN, ya se trabaja en el proceso de recuperación.

— Ministerio de Energía y Minas de Cuba 🇨🇺 (@EnergiaMinasCub) March 15, 2025

By Saturday morning, Cuba’s grid operator, UNE, stated that only 225 MW—less than 10% of total demand—was available to supply critical infrastructure, such as hospitals, food centers, and water supply systems, leaving much of the island without power. UNE didn’t provide a timeline on when power generation capacity would return to 100%.

Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez wrote on X that government agencies are quickly working to restore power across the island. 

🚨🇨🇺CUBA SUFFERS NATIONWIDE POWER OUTAGE, 10 MILLION LEFT IN DARKNESS

Cuba’s power grid collapsed Friday night, leaving over 10 million people without electricity in yet another major blackout.

Footage from Havana shows streets and buildings completely dark, with residents… https://t.co/uyV3pKqex4 pic.twitter.com/oLWXMwpgA1

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) March 15, 2025

Most Cubans outside the capital, Havana, have been living under months and months of rolling power blackouts.

In October, November, and December, the island’s grid suffered a major blackout:

• October: Cuba Paralyzed By Massive Power Blackout

• December: Total Grid Collapse Strikes Cuba (Again)

UNE officials told Reuters that the latest grid failure originated from an aging transmission line at a substation in Havana, which shorted and triggered a series of failures that ultimately shut down power generation islandwide.

Cuba’s long list of problems—rolling blackouts, food, fuel, and medicine shortages, and the overall chaos plaguing the island—serves as a stark reality that America’s Democratic Party conveniently ignores when discussing the actual consequences of communism. 

CC AoC and the other socialists… 

Via Middle East Eye

The United States and Israel have asked three East African governments to accept forcibly displaced Palestinians from Gaza, according to US and Israeli officials who spoke to The Associated Press (AP).

On Friday, AP reported that the US and Israel began discussing the forced displacement of Palestinians last month with the governments of Sudan, Somalia and its breakaway region Somaliland.

This comes after US President Donald Trump suggested in February that the US could “take over” the Gaza Strip and expel Palestinians. His declaration prompted Egypt to draft an alternative plan for Gaza’s reconstruction, which has since been adopted by Arab leaders.

The $53bn Egyptian plan rejects the displacement of Palestinians and instead focuses on redeveloping the enclave without depopulating it. 

Earlier this week, Trump appeared to signal a retreat from the proposed mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. When asked about it during a meeting in the White House with Irish leader Micheal Martin, he said: “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians from Gaza.”

However, AP’s report suggests that the US may have responded to the rejection of its displacement plan by Arab governments last month by looking further afield.

The foreign ministers of Somalia and Somaliland denied on Friday that they had received any proposal from the US or Israel to resettle Palestinians in their countries.

Somalia’s foreign minister, Ahmed Moalim Fiqi, said his country rejected “any proposal or initiative, from any party, that would undermine the Palestinian people’s right to live peacefully on their ancestral land”.

A senior Sudanese official also denied that Sudan had received a proposal, telling Reuters that such a plan would be unacceptable. The denials from these African countries likely toward preventing outrage from their Muslim-majority populations.