The all-knowing folk at BofA expect a hotter than consensus print for retail sales this morning, as seasonal distortions play a factor (there were two shifts in the December calendar relative to 2023. First, a late Thanksgiving pushed Cyber Monday into December. Second, there were four weekends in December 2024, vs. five in 2023. On balance, these factors led to a slightly more favorable seasonal factor (SF) in December 2024 than December 2023)

For once, BofA was wrong with the headline retail sales print disappointing (+0.4% MoM vs +0.6% exp). which dragged the YoY sales growth down a little to +3.9%…

Source: Bloomberg

Building Materials and Food Services saw the biggest declines MoM while Auto sales advanced 0.7% after robust gains in the prior two months, bolstered by President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to end tax credits for electric vehicles, as well as lower interest rates and greater manufacturer incentives. Receipts at gasoline service stations increased, reflecting higher prices at the pump.

On the other side of things, the Control Group – which feeds into the GDP calculation – saw a big beat, rising 0.7% MoM (vs +0.4% exp)…

Source: Bloomberg

As a reminder, retail sales data is nominal, so adjusting for inflation (admittedly very roughly) we see real retail sales rose just 1.0% YoY…

Source: Bloomberg

Overall, this data is a positive sign for the consumer still who continues to increase spending (to afford higher cost items due to inflation)

Authored by Matthew Kirtley via TheCritic.co.uk,

Britain needs growth. More urgently, Labour needs to reassure the markets that growth is coming. With the dust settling in the wake of the 2024 Budget, Reeves has presided over a surge in gilt yields that has by far surpassed the much-decried heights achieved under Truss and Kwarteng.  

The government needs to balance the books. And unless Reeves reneges on her promise to follow her fiscal rules — likely tanking Britain’s remaining credibility on global bond markets — then tax rises or spending cuts must come. Unless we discover growth.

To that end, Reeves and Starmer have launched a growth blitzkrieg (“growkrieg”). Reeves has yanked the chains of regulators to discover growth opportunities, pried from China a whopping £600m of investment (around 1.2 days of NHS spending), and launched an all-new Industrial Strategy Council. The growkrieg’s latest action came this week, with Starmer taking point to announce its latest wunderwaffe: the AI Opportunities Action Plan.

The AI action plan comes courtesy of Matt Clifford, a darling of the UK tech scene. A former McKinsey consultant, Clifford has successfully spun out the quantitative parts of his MIT political science masters into a position of tech guruship. After establishing the Entrepreneur First startup incubator in 2011, Clifford has leveraged his exposure to the technology ecosystem to become an influential voice on AI policy — albeit one that has never worked as an engineer or within a tech company.

That is, Clifford is incredibly impressive in the Starmerite sense. He’s clearly good at impressing the professional managerial class by throwing platitudes at them. And he also has racked up plenty of credentials and is incredibly well-network. He completes the full package by also being the co-founder of Code First Girls. In the eyes of many policymakers, this makes Clifford eminently qualified to be the lead adviser on what’s supposed to be a critical growth lever.

But what of the growth itself? Clifford claims AI can create £400bn in value for the UK by 2030 through greater innovation and productivity — a boost to the annual growth rate of 2.6 per cent.

This figure comes from a 2023 report by lobbying and strategy firm Public First, commissioned by Google. Their methodology is a black box, relying on AI to rank the likelihood of how much particular occupations would be automated away and the consequent productivity gains. And it’s also countered by just as many credible parties who are far more bearish on AI: for example, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu argued last year that AI will only grow US GDP by 0.9 per cent — 1.16 per cent cumulatively by 2034.

At this stage, guesses as to productivity gains from AI are extremely speculative. But let’s remain bullish and assume there is a potential £400bn value unlock from AI, as the government clearly hopes. How exactly does Starmer hope to capture it?

For the most part, Clifford’s recommendations mostly concern liberalising data sharing and datasets, expanding “skills” and training, encouraging regulators and government departments to use AI, and encouraging public-private partnerships around AI. Some concessions are made to infrastructure investments and theoretically dedicating money to UKRI’s AI Research Resource, and establishing “AI growth zones” to build out AI data centres.

Their overarching purpose is to encourage the development of the next generation of foundation models — that is, the huge AI models like GPT that use tens of billions of parameters to classify vast quantities of training data which can be used in a range of contexts. To that end, Clifford’s report calls for the creation of a UK Sovereign AI unit to encourage the creation of AI models that are trained and operated in Britain — with the idea being that we would benefit first and foremost from the innovations enabled by these best-in-breed models if domiciled at home.

It’s a £400bn gambit, in Starmer’s eyes. But there are major challenges.

First, we’re already seeing cracks appear in the idea foundation models are governed by “scaling laws” — or, very roughly, they may not get noticeably better as we pump more training data into them. 

However, even assuming such scaling laws do hold, there’s an even more existential problem for Starmer. Computing power for AI demands energy. A lot. Even if we were to overcome planning and regulatory hurdles to building the data centres, those data centres would be at a fundamental economic disadvantage to those operating virtually anywhere else in the globe.

Let’s take GPT-4, which consumed over 50 gigawatt-hours of power in its training run. In the US, energy prices are at 12.9 cents per kilowatt-hour — so we can roughly assume that GPT-4’s training run cost $6.5Mn in electricity. In Britain, our industrial energy prices are 24.2 pence per kilowatt-hour, or around 29.5 cents. That means the same GPT-4 training run would have cost $14.8Mn in electricity.

This 2.3-fold greater cost to train foundation models in Britain may seem tolerable while they “only” mean a $10mn premium. After all, OpenAI claims GPT-4 cost over $100mn total to train. But those very scaling laws that the optimism of foundation models is predicated on means that they’re hungry for more power. 

Commentators such as Scott Alexander have observed that every GPT generation needs roughly 30x the amount of compute and energy for a training run. So, a hypothetical GPT-5 would need 1,500 gigawatt-hours of electricity. For the US, that’s around $200Mn in electricity. For Britain, that same run would cost around $450Mn. At this point, a $200Mn price premium just makes it impossible for any sane private investor to justify a model’s training run and its inferences being based in Britain.

This all assumes that foundation model scaling laws will hold, which is dubious. If they don’t hold, a lot of the optimism for AI’s transformative productivity benefits will come to nought. But if they do hold, that means that Britain has an unassailable structural disadvantage in attracting any private capital in domestically based AI. And that’s just the up-front cost of a training run, never mind the ongoing energy cost of the actual ‘inference’ work of subjecting a model to prompts and queries.

Even if we ignore that many data centres have to wait 13 years for a new grid connection, or that our planning system already means that new data centre projects have to wait the best part of a decade to get built, the fundamental economics of British energy costs make the problem unassailable. Any foundation model will be considerably costlier to train and operate in Britain than just about anywhere else just because of our energy prices.

… it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re divorced from the material fundamentals of the technology they’re relying on as a crutch

This runs directly into Labour’s own commitments and aspirations. Industrial energy prices are not going to go down without significant new baseload generation capacity, which entails new nuclear or fossil fuel plants. And just last month, Ed Miliband’s own Department for Energy Security and Net Zero announced that it was still doubling down on its commitment to fully powering Britain with clean energy by 2030. 

Even if we were to adopt the boosterism around AI and believe £400Bn in value stands to be unlocked if we seize the opportunity, it’s an opportunity the government is poised to miss. Our current energy system virtually guarantees that foundation models and their putative benefits — at least as we know them — aren’t going to stay domesticated in Britain.

Do Starmer and Reeves know this? Probably not. But it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re divorced from the material fundamentals of the technology they’re relying on as a crutch. After all, their goal isn’t to deliver growth — it’s to try to reassure us that growth is coming.

With four days remaining until TikTok is either sold or banned in the United States, hundreds of thousands of users have gravitated toward a Chinese app called RedNote, which some users call “China’s TikTok.” 

On Wednesday morning, RedNote was the top free-to-download app on the Apple App Store, followed by TikTok’s sister app Lemon8.

RedNote is a Shanghai-based social media app that allows users to share videos, post pictures, make text posts, and access shopping features, basically a clone of TikTok to some degree. 

“The last 48 hours marks a historical moment for the global social media platforms, as well as for a heavy user like me on a China social media platform called Xiaohongshu/little red book (小红书), now more popularly known in the US as the “Red Note,” Goldman’s Boya Yang wrote in a note to clients on the looming US TikTok ban. 

Yang noted that the shift by TikTok users toward other video-sharing apps has become a global phenomenon in recent days.

“While there are many other choice, such as Meta’s Reels, or Tiktok’s own Lemon 8, according to some posts from American users, there is a bit of rebel spirit that they look for something authentic China and locates in China, now that Tiktok is banned being owned by Chinese. And the trend starts to reinforce itself, in the US, and globally,” she said. 

Here’s additional color on the shift from the analyst working on the Hong Kong desk:

People start to notice this by seeing posts claiming themselves “Tiktok refugee“, sent by users with IP labeled “US” (yes there is always a label of location for either posts of comments on the app). In PM of Jan 13th, the tag of #tiktokrefugee had about 2k posts with 400k viewership, but as of writing, just two days after by now, the tag now has 310m viewership, with over 7m posts. There are similar tags like #tiktokban #AmericansAssemble it’s way more than these now – millions of posts flourishing from global locations without such a topic and with various content.

Yang noted while “Red Note being a private company, the related listcos incl platform tools and e-commerce suppliers, have been best performers for the past 48 hours, +8% the best-performing theme in China” this week. 

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Officials who are involved in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party will be removed from service with the federal police, according to an internal memo leaked to the German newspaper Junge Freiheit.

The memo refers to a decree issued by Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, of the Social Democrats (SPD). Faeser has warned federal police officers against sympathizing with the AfD and also stated that they should not join the party as members.

“They should expect to be fired,” said Faeser.

The federal police have 54,000 employees, of whom 45,000 are police officers. It is unclear how many officers are currently members of the party, however, many police are members of other parties, which means the decree and threats from Faeser are not about maintaining political neutrality.

For example, the president of the federal police, Dieter Romann, is a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). A screenshot taken from the police intranet was shared exclusively with Junge Freiheit, which reads:

“If membership in such a party becomes known, there are sufficient actual indications that justify the suspicion of a disciplinary offense, at least if the officer is actively involved in such a party.”

Finally, there is an open threat of termination for officers found to be members of the party.

“If disciplinary proceedings are initiated in these cases, officers must expect disciplinary consequences up to and including dismissal,” the intranet site reads.

To underline the threat, the words “disciplinary consequences up to and including dismissal” are marked in bold in the text.

The police source who spoke to Junge Freiheit, and wishes to remain anonymous, told the paper:

“For me, this represents a significant restriction on the free formation of my own will as a police officer. In my opinion, making involvement with a party that represents more than a fifth of the population a criminal offense is an unacceptable curtailment of the basic rights of civil servants — even taking into account the obligation of neutrality. Any activity for the AfD is prohibited.”

The internal memo is entitled:

“Candidacy for a confirmed right-wing extremist party? Not a good idea as a federal civil servant!”

It is clear, therefore, that this does not only apply to the police but a range of civil service professions.

Dismissal from the civil service is not only sought in the case of candidacy but also for “other behavior that requires a targeted adoption of the political content of such a party.” This is “to be regarded as activism in this sense.”

The memo reads that the constitutional state “cannot tolerate” this because “the free democratic basic order is rather endangered if the constitutional state remains inactive and allows officials who are entrusted with state tasks and who are obliged to stand up for the free democratic basic order to question the constitutional order in its absolute core.”

In this internal warning, the German Federal Police explicitly refers to a decree of the Federal Ministry of the Interior dated Aug. 29, 2024. This provides for the “mandatory initiation of disciplinary proceedings” if one runs for the AfD, which is classified as “certainly right-wing extremist” in the German states of Saxony and Thuringia.

Furthermore, the provision applies not only to membership in the AfD but also to membership in “right-wing extremist groups such as the ‘Free Saxons’ or the AfD’s youth organization, ‘Young Alternative.’

In order to enable the new disciplinary measures against politically undesirable officials, according to the memo, Police Service Regulation 100 (“Leadership and deployment of the police”) was amended. The Federal Police informs its officers that section 1.5 “Leadership and Cooperation” has been revised.

The AfD is expected to become the second largest party in the Bundestag after the federal elections on Feb. 23 with polls currently placing them on 22 percent — its highest level of support for over a year.

Read more here…

Moscow has this week made a big and provocative accusation, saying that the United States is seeking to sabotage the last pipeline transporting Russian gas exports into Europe, the TurkStream.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov alleged in a Tuesday press briefing that Washington is encouraging “terrorist” attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure. He specifically cited plans to target TurkStream, following a recent large-scale drone attack.

“The US does not tolerate competition in any sphere, including energy. They are recklessly endorsing terrorist activities aimed at undermining the energy stability of the European Union,” Lavrov said as quoted in Turkey’s Anadolu news agency.

“They are encouraging their Ukrainian proxies to disable TurkStream following the sabotage of Nord Stream,” he followed with.

He described that Russia’s anti-air defenses were able to down nine Ukrainian drones during the attack which targeted part of TurkStream’s infrastructure.

On Wednesday regional media quoted Turkey’s top energy official as confirming there was an attempted attack out of Ukraine, but that gas is still flowing uninterrupted:

Following an attempted attack on the TurkStream natural gas pipeline on Jan. 11, Türkiye’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Alparslan Bayraktar, confirmed the attack took place but assured the public that the incident did not disrupt the gas flow.

Responding to questions from journalists in the Turkish Parliament, Bayraktar stated: “There was no interruption in gas flow after the attack. The pipeline continues to deliver gas at the same capacity.”

Following Ukraine’s refusal to renew a key transit contract with Moscow which expired by close of 2024, the TurkStream pipeline remains the only route carrying Russian gas into the European Union.

Russia’s RT news has summarized the geography and significance of TurkStream as follows:

TurkStream is a critical energy corridor, transporting natural gas from Russia to Türkiye under the Black Sea. It also remains the sole route supplying Russian natural gas to southern and southeastern Europe after Ukraine refused to extend a gas transit agreement with Moscow this year.

In 2024, gas shipments via the pipeline increased by 23%, reaching 16.7 billion cubic meters (bcm). The pipeline comprises two sections: one serving Türkiye’s domestic needs, while the other transits gas to Bulgaria through the Strandzha station. This Balkan route extends through Bulgaria and Serbia to Hungary, with connections facilitating the distribution of Russian gas to other EU states. With a total capacity of 31.5 bcm annually, TurkStream plays a vital role in regional energy security.

As for Lavrov’s initial accusation Tuesday, which Washington rejects, he also stated: “I have a firm belief that the US needs no competitor in any fields, starting with energy.”

We reported earlier that Tuesday saw one of the single biggest cross-border aerial attacks on Russia from Ukraine since the war began. Several fires broke out at numerous industrial sites, including gas sites in remote Tatarstan. 

Russian gas via TurkStream are delivered to locations including Serbia, Hungary, Romania, Greece, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina pic.twitter.com/xEmeCpTwf9

— Stephen Stapczynski (@SStapczynski) January 13, 2025

Some of the energy hubs hit were hundreds of miles from the front line. Crucially multiple US-supplied ATACMS and British Storm Shadow missiles were used.

“Ukraine’s military said Tuesday that it also hit points in Bryansk, Tula and Tatarstan, with a chemical factory that makes rocket fuel and ammunition for Russia’s army among the targets,” reports indicated.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

A battle for freedom of speech is underway. The US, led by Musk, X, and Trump will crush those who get in the way.

Europe Fears Free Speech

The EU and UK fear they are under attack by Musk and Trump. But the Nannycrats need to look in the mirror to see the real problem.

This has come to a head with objections to Musk lending support to AfD, an alleged “far right” German political party, and also with Musk putting a well-deserved spotlight on gang rapes in the UK.

Instead of tackling the real issues, EU and UK politicians seek to silence Musk, control AI, and suppress freedom of speech. But every time they do, opposition grows.

A War of Repression Is Underway

Wolfgang Munchau, Eurointelkligence founder and UnHeard author, brilliantly explains Why Europe Fears Free Speech.

We all know the old joke: when a European referendum delivers the “wrong” outcome, the country votes again until they get it “right”. The EU thought this would be the case after Brexit. But so far, no one’s laughing.

If anything, things have got worse. Take Romania, which recently cancelled its presidential election when Călin Georgescu, leader of a nationalist Right coalition, won the first round. Thierry Breton, former French European Commissioner, revealed the EU’s mindset during a damning recent TV interview. “We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary,” he said. In other words, if you can’t beat the far-Right, ban them.

I disagree with almost everything Breton has ever said, but I am grateful to him for stating his case with such revealing clarity. During his time as industry commissioner in Brussels, from 2019 until last summer, when Emmanuel Macron replaced him with a more compliant figure, he was the driving force behind a series of laws designed to keep Europe in the digital dark ages. The most extreme of which is the Digital Services Act (DSA) which compels “very large online platforms”, such as X and Meta, to check facts and filter out fake news.

But, thanks to Breton, the truth is out there. Europe’s ultimate aim isn’t to save public discourse, it is to suffocate far-Right parties by depriving them of the oxygen of information.

MEPs found it hard enough to stomach Nigel Farage’s brutal outbursts when he was a member of the European Parliament. Now they have Musk breathing down their neck, endorsing candidates from the AfD, a party that sits on the far-Right in the European Parliament’s benches and which supports German withdrawal from the EU.

The German media had a collective breakdown when Musk tweeted an endorsement for the AfD, interviewed Alice Weidel, the party’s co-leader, on X, and then endorsed her in an article for Die Welt. The op-ed editor of the German daily resigned in protest. 

The Romanian case demonstrates how these restrictions on freedom of speech are the first salvos in a greater war of repression. Let’s be clear, there was no suggestion of any vote rigging. Georgescu won the first round of the election fair and square. Georgescu is still the most likely candidate to win according to opinion polls, but the Romanian political establishment is still determined to find ways to disbar him, the most promising of which is the hope that he may have received undeclared funds.

There are similar patterns elsewhere. Marine Le Pen faces potential disqualification from the 2027 presidential elections following accusations of irregularities regarding her assistants in the European Parliament. More recently, Brussels was spooked by the victory in Austria of the Freedom Party, which managed to obtain 28.8% of the vote in the September general election. It surpassed a threshold at which point it became politically impossible for the other parties to form coalitions. 

Surely, though, the sensible approach to the rise of the AfD, the FPÖ and other parties of the Right is not to censor them, but to address the underlying problem that has made them so strong: persistent economic uncertainty, loss of purchasing power, and dysfunctional policies on migration. Failing that, why not co-opt parties of the far-Right as junior coalition partners as they did in Sweden and Finland? 

It’s an approach that will inevitably backfire. A banned Le Pen would be far more dangerous for the centrist establishment, and possibly even more extreme when she eventually gets to power. Likewise the AfD would surely be radicalised after a ban.

Like the creatures in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, I am struggling to spot the difference between the extremists of the Right, and those who are trying to fight them.

Why Did Trump Win?

One reason Trump won is the Left-wing media made a martyr out of him.

Biden clearly has dementia and the Media hid that too, until suddenly they couldn’t anymore.

Still, had the economy been much better or Democrats fielded a better candidate they might have won. But they sorely misjudged how much their own lawfare aided Trump.

Unlike the UK, Canada, and the EU, we still have freedom of speech here.

One may dislike Musk or Trump but everyone should be happy that people have freedom of speech here. And like it or not X provides a platform.

Speech Suppression in the UK

I had been struggling to find a good way to describe what’s happening in the UK with gang rapes that occurred for a decade, but this tie on repression fits in.

Some of what follows is very graphic and disturbing. Musk brought it to everyone’s attention and the UK is desperately trying to hide it, even threatening US citizens with its asinine laws.

I lost sleep over this for two days. That’s my warning for what follows.

From Dominic Frisby on X

Today I am playing the judge in a court case from 2013 passing sentence on a Pakistani rape gang, using only dialogue from the actual hearing. Reading the transcripts you cannot believe one human being would do this to another. Some of the stuff that went on is indescribably horrible. Arranging the gang rape of 11 year old girls (not one girl – many) for groups of men (often more than 10) every orifice penetrated while putting out cigarettes on her … I hope the perpetrators, and those that turned a blind eye to it in the name of multi-culturalism, get everything that’s coming to them.

Here is one example. Branded with his initials near her butt hole at the age of 12

BrusselsSignal reports

Keir Starmer, the current prime minister who was chief crown prosecutor when gangs of Muslim men across England were unmolestedly grooming and raping tens of thousands of white underage girls. As The Daily Telegraph reported on Monday, in Oxford, a Mohammed Karrar had prepared his victim “for gang anal rape by using a pump… At one point she had four men inside her. A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet.” Anna from Bradford at the age of 14 had made repeated reports of rape, abuse, and coercion. When she “married” her abuser in a traditional Islamic wedding, her social worker attended the ceremony. …In Telford, Lucy Lowe died at 16 alongside her mother and sister when her abuser set fire to her home in 2000. She had given birth to Azhar Ali Mahmood’s child when she was just 14, and was again pregnant when she was killed.”

When Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, vigorously followed up complaints about the white serial rapist and television personality Jimmy Savile. However, the same cannot be said of his reaction to the rape of thousands of girls, no doubt because to pursue the rapists might have been perceived as racist. When Elon Musk recently added his voice to calls for a national enquiry into the grooming gangs, Starmer said he was “jumping on the bandwagon of the far right.” And very possibly, Starmer really does believe that protecting little white girls from rapists is the diseased pre-occupation of racist bigots. 

Social Media Posts and Rape

Under Investigation

Please note that the UK has Elon Musk under investigation for commenting on this.

Why does UK have the resources to investigate an American calling attention to the kingdom’s Pakistani rape gang crisis but not the resources to stop the raping?

The Truth About ‘Grooming Gangs’

The Telegraph, via Yahoo!News says The truth about ‘grooming gangs’ is finally coming out

Hillsborough, Windrush, Grenfell: all appalling national scandals that are listed whenever gross institutional failures are discussed. But there is another that is usually conspicuously absent: the deep moral stain of “grooming gangs”. It is perhaps the greatest racially motivated crime in modern Britain, perpetrated predominantly by men of Pakistani heritage against vulnerable white girls.

Even those who mention it tend to tiptoe around the subject. The “grooming gang” label is deployed euphemistically to sanitise depraved crimes and make them acceptable for public consumption. So we should start by calling it what it truly is. If you read the testimony of the victims – and believe me, it’s tough – it’s clear they were rape torture gangs, perpetrating the most heinous sexual crimes imaginable on an industrial scale.

For two decades, the plight of thousands of young girls, barely teenagers, was swept under the carpet. Police forces, councils, charities, and politicians elevated community relations over protecting vulnerable women from monstrous sexual violence. They allowed little girls to be raped rather than risk being accused of racism by highlighting their abuse. Their cowardice should haunt them.

But the scandal is now back with a vengeance. Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ decision to reject Oldham Council’s calls for a government-led inquiry has sparked outrage. On Wednesday, Elon Musk alighted on the scandal, shaming the establishment by taking more interest in bringing these rape gangs to justice in one evening than most of the British establishment has for decades.

The impunity has ended because the unvarnished truth is coming out. 

To protect “community relations”, the British state has gone to immense lengths to cover it up. Reports have been blocked and deliberately kept out of the public eye. Any connection with ethnicity, immigration, or Islam was downplayed. The reports that have been published have been whitewashed – the evidence that British Pakistani men were over-represented among the perpetrators was spiked to avoid uncomfortable truths. But a recent study showed that, in Telford, one in 126 Muslim men were prosecuted between 1997 and 2017, and in Rotherham the figure was one in 73.

I am certain that, after all these years, these rape gangs are still destroying lives. Somewhere, as you read this, a girl may be being abused just as despicably as the ones whose fate we now know of. Why? Because the institutions that failed these vulnerable girls are still contaminated with cowardice. Many perpetrators evaded arrest and remain on the streets. Those who were jailed received shockingly lax sentences and are now being released, free to walk the same streets as their victims.

And the individuals complicit in cover-up have felt no consequences. In fact, they’ve risen even higher in public life. In 2016, Shaun Davies was leader of Telford Council where he signed a letter opposing a further inquiry into the child rape gangs – now he is a Labour MP sitting on the Home Affairs Select Committee, tasked with scrutinising the Home Office. In Rotherham, where there were 265 allegations of misconduct involving 47 police officers, not one has been fired.

Kemi Badenoch is rightly demanding a full national inquiry. Those complicit in gross misconduct should be publicly disgraced, and prosecutions brought. Jail time and a ban on ever holding public office – of any kind – should be a bare minimum. But a national inquiry is just the start: we need justice for the victims.

We also need the automatic deportation of foreign nationals found to have carried out these shocking crimes – no ifs, no buts. One of the victims of Rochdale came face-to-face with her abuser in Asda, despite him losing an appeal against deportation to Pakistan two years previously. They should not be here.

For decades, some of the most vulnerable people in society have been betrayed by people in positions of power. Never again can political correctness be allowed to get in the way of justice.

No Deportations

“Muslim Child Rape Gangs Not Deported: Adil Khan, 51, and Qari Abdul Rauf, 52, Rochdale child gang rape members still lives alongside victims despite deportation order, it’s been nine years. Up to 47 girls as young as 12 were plied with alcohol and drugs and gang-raped in Rochdale during a two-year reign of terror. Rauf and Adil Khan, who also got a 13 year old girl pregnant, fought their deportation orders and despite a recent Judge ordering their deportation, they still live alongside the victims they brutally raped.”

Men Habib @benhabib6 explains in an Excellent Video “The Pakistani government would be absolutely delighted to take them back and face full force of punishment in Pakistan. Give me a call Keir Starmer”

What the Hell Is Going On?

What the actual hell is going on in Britain? A 12-year old girl was raped by multiple groups of Pakistani men, one after the other, while she was escaping from the previous men. How many times has this happened, and to how many young British girls?

I bookmarked dozens of cases like this, in multiple UK cities. The above link is another graphic one.

New Inquiry Blocked

January 8: The Labour Party voted against opening up an inquiry into child rape gangs in the UK.

The vote was 364-111.

The BBC Tries to Defend Starmer

If you want the other side of the story, the BBC Defends Starmer

Mr Musk has published a series of posts on X suggesting Starmer failed to deal with the grooming gang scandal while head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) between 2008 and 2013.

In response, Sir Keir has accused critics of “spreading lies and misinformation” and claims he tackled prosecutions “head on”.

A 2013 report from the Home Affairs Committee said that “unlike many other official agencies implicated in this issue”, the CPS had “readily admitted that victims had been let down by them and have attempted both to discover the cause of this systematic failure and to improve the way things are done so as to avoid a repetition of such events”.

It added: “Mr Starmer has striven to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his term as Director of Public Prosecution (DPP).”

Maggie Oliver, a former Manchester detective who now campaigns for victims of child sex abuse, told BBC Verify that the CPS “bear a great deal of responsibility for the failures around this issue”, including bringing inadequate charges and blaming victims.

The prime minister has robustly defended his record as the former head of the CPS, telling journalists he:

• Changed the prosecution approach to “challenge myths and stereotypes” that had stopped victims from being heard
• Left office when the CPS had the highest number of child sex abuse prosecutions on record
• Reopened cases that had been closed
• Brought the first prosecution of an Asian grooming gang

How many child grooming cases were prosecuted under Starmer?

Information on child grooming-related prosecutions appear in Prof Jay’s 2022 report into child sexual exploitation by organised networks – a government-commissioned report into institutional child abuse failings published in 2022.

The report mentions several “significant prosecutions” between 2010 and 2014, including 35 convictions which took place while Sir Keir was DPP.

35 convictions out of thousands of cases. And we are supposed to be impressed?

How many complicit police officers have been prosecuted?

How many criminals have been deported?

An Act of Cowardness

The EuropeanConservative comments on “Act of Cowardice”: Labour MPs Vote Down Rape Gangs Inquiry

The Times reports that in 2019, the party adopted a definition of Islamophobia that discourages discussions linking ethnicity to rape gangs. Critics argue that this has hindered the ability to tackle the issue head-on. Ann Cryer, a former Labour MP who raised early concerns about these abuses, was vilified as a racist for her efforts. On Monday, Keir Starmer also accused advocates of an inquiry of jumping on a “far-Right bandwagon.”

The debate has exposed deep divisions within Labour. Foreign secretary David Lammy asserted that a national inquiry has been “ruled out” after Wednesday’s vote while safeguarding minister Jess Phillips maintains that “nothing is off the table” if victims demand it. Such contradictions have only fuelled accusations of Labour’s opportunistic handling of the crisis.

Until political leaders confront these uncomfortable truths, the victims of these heinous acts will remain voiceless, and the fragile underpinnings of Britain’s multiculturalism will continue to erode. The vote against the inquiry represents, for many, a betrayal of justice in favour of ideological convenience.

Gang Rape Map

Here’s a Gang Rape Map of Over 30 Cities where these atrocities occurred.

Margaret Oliver – Former Constable & Whistleblower directly accusing Kier Starmer of instructing not to act against Pakistani Grooming Gangs when he was Director of Public Prosecutions.

If you can stomach another video here’s one of Chief Constable David Crompton retired on a £2,000,000 pension in 2016. His police force arrested an 11 year girl in a house for being “drunk & disorderly” for being gang raped.

In other instances “Fathers had tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to find THEMSELVES arrested, when police were called to the scene.”

Here’s an Amusing Tweet

‘There is absolute horror at the highest levels of government at the incendiary language we have seen from Elon Musk.’

This thin-skinned, morally bankrupt Labour gov’t are more concerned about Elon Musk’s social media posts than they are about actual Pakistani r*pe gangs.

Hate Crimes

Instead of going after rapists and police protecting rapists, this is who the UK goes after.

• On 13 October 2001, Harry Hammond, an evangelist, was arrested and charged under section 5 of the Public Order Act (1986) because he had displayed to people in Bournemouth a large sign bearing the words “Jesus Gives Peace, Jesus is Alive, Stop Immorality, Stop Homosexuality, Stop Lesbianism, Jesus is Lord”. In April 2002, a magistrate convicted Hammond, fined him £300, and ordered him to pay costs of £395
• On 23 April 2018, Scottish YouTuber Mark Meechan of Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire was fined £800 after being found “grossly offensive” for posting a YouTube video that was viewed over 3 million times depicting him training his girlfriend’s pug to respond to the phrase “Sieg Heil” by lifting his paw in a Nazi salute.
• In 2017, 19-year old Croxteth resident Chelsea Russell quoted a line from Snap Dogg’s song “I’m Trippin’” on her Instagram page. The line, which read “Kill a snitch nigga, rob a rich nigga”, was copied from a friend’s page as part of a tribute to Frankie Murphy who was killed in a car accident at age 13. Hate crime investigators were alerted to the presence of the slur and charged Russell with “sending a grossly offensive message by means of a public electronic communications network”. Defence lawyer Carole Clarke stated that she received a request from one of the arresting officers that the word “nigga”, the subject of the trial, not be used in court. In April 2018, District Judge Jack McGarva found Russell guilty and delivered a sentence which included a £585 fine, a curfew and an ankle monitoring bracelet. However, Russell’s conviction was overturned by Liverpool Crown Court on 21 February 2019.

The above examples from Wikipedia UK Hate Crimes.

And please note that using the term “Grooming Gang” is now considered a “Hate Crime”.

UK’s ruling Labour Party adopted document that ‘broadened’ the definition of Islamophobia, claimed terms like ‘grooming gang’ are anti-Muslim racism.

PM Starmer not only rejected the demands of a national inquiry into the historical child sexual exploitation but also deemed demands for a national inquiry into Pakistani rape gangs a “far-right” position. Amidst backlash over dismissing a burning demand for a national inquiry into grooming gangs, the Labour Party’s adoption of a definition of Islamophobia which essentially implied that criticising Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs/rape gangs is ‘racist’ against Muslims, has sparked criticism.

The outrage stems from the Labour Party’s adoption of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims (APPG) definition of Islamophobia in 2019. The APPG’s definition of Islamophobia suggesting that talking about grooming gangs is racist and exposes Muslims to the possibility of ‘hate crimes’ hints at why the Labour government is reluctant to address the issue of grooming gangs. No wonder the Labour Party’s political correctness has suppressed discussions, criticism and actions against such Islamist crimes.

Hate Crimes Against Jews Is OK

The UK police refuse to look into a swastika sent to a Jewish Group.

The UK’s “crackdown” on hate speech has nothing to do with addressing actual hate and everything to do with censorship of anti-migration voices. What could possibly be a better example of a hate crime than sending a swastika sent to Jews.

However, sharing a video of a protest or riot is a hate crime.

Teams of UK officials are scouring the internet to stamp out hate crimes.

And Scotland has introduced hate crime laws where the ‘victim’ decides whether or not what someone said is a hate crime.

Gang Rapes in Austria

A 12-year-old girl was raped by 19 (!) migrants in a parking garage near Vienna Central Station, Austria. The first migrant on trial, a 17-year-old Syrian national, was acquitted, even though he had already confessed. The court ruled there was no evidence to prove the schoolgirl did not consent. He left the girl €100 as a ‘gesture of goodwill’ before leaving the courtroom.

What the Flying F?

This is why AfD is on the rise in Germany, Marine le Pen in France, Călin Georgescu in Romania, Nigel Farage in the UK, and the Freedom Party in Austria.

You can be arrested in Austria, Germany, the UK, and even Canada for “hate speech” while rapists go free. They covered up for gang rapes to protect DEI.

If Starmer was serious, he would be demanding prosecution of police officers involved and demanding deportation of rapists.

Heck, I think anyone convicted of gang rape should be sentenced to death. Is that a hate crime? How about calling Starmer an assh*le?

Dear UK and EU assh*les come get me. I will say what I want on my blog and say what I want on X.

And f*you Keir Starmer for sweeping this all under the rug for the sake of DEI while pretending not to. If that is insufficient F*DEI too.

Now come get me.

By the way, don’t give any free speech credit to the Meta CEO. For discussion, please see Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Is a Coward Opportunist Who Deserves No Credit

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

It’s the greatest show on earth – unleashing a double bill of New Paradigm and Manifest Destiny on crack. We are the greatest. We will rock you – in every sense. We will crush you. We will take whatever we want because we can.

And if you wanna walk away from the U.S. dollar, we will destroy you. BRICS, we’re coming to get ya.

Trump 2.0 – a mix of professional wrestling and MMA played in a giant planetary cage – is in da house starting next Monday.

Trump 2.0 aims to be on the driving seat on the global financial system; on control of the world’s oil trade and LNG supply; and on strategic media platforms. Trump 2.0 is gearing up to be an extended exercise in the capacity to hurt The Other. Any Other. Hostile takeovers – and blood on the tracks. That’s how we “negotiate”.

Under Trump 2.0, global tech infrastructure must run on U.S. software, not just on the profit front but also on the spy front. AI data chips must be American only. AI data centers must be controlled by America only.

“Free trade” and “globalization”? That’s for losers. Welcome to neo-imperial, techno-feudal mercantilism – powered by U.S. tech supremacy.

Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has named a few of the targets ahead: Greenland; Canada; assorted cartels; the Arctic; the Gulf of “America”; oil and gas; rare earth minerals. All in the name of strengthening “national security”.

A key plank: total control of the “Western Hemisphere”. Monroe Doctrine 2.0 – actually the Donroe Doctrine. America First, Last and Always.

Why the chessboard needs to be rejigged

Well, let’s delve a bit on pesky material imperatives. The Empire of Chaos faces a humongous debt, owed to usual suspect loan sharks, that may only be – partially – repaid by selected export surpluses. That would imply re-industrialization – a long, costly affair – and securing smooth military supply chains.

Where the resource base will be for this Sisyphean task? Washington simply cannot rely on Chinese exports and rare earths. The chessboard needs to be rejigged – with trade and tech unified under U.S. unilateral, monopoly control.

Plan A, so far, was to simultaneously confront Russia and China: the two top BRICS, and key vectors of Eurasia integration. China’s strategy, since the start of the millennium, has been to trade resources for infrastructure, developing Global South markets as China itself keeps developing.

Russia’s strategy has been to help nations recover their sovereignty; actually helping nations to help themselves on the sustainable development front.

Plan A against the concerted geoeconomic and geostrategic strategies of the Russia-China strategic partnership miserably failed.

What has been attempted by the ghastly, exiting U.S. administration generated serial, massive blowbacks.

So it’s time for Plan B: Looting the allies. They are already dominated chihuahuas anyway. The – exploitation – show must go on. And there are plenty of chihuahuas available to be exploited.

Canada has loads of fresh water plus oil and mining wealth. The Canadian business class in fact has always dreamed of deep integration with the Empire of Chaos.

Trump 2.0 and his team have been careful not to name names. When it comes to the Arctic as a crucial, evolving battlefield, there may be a vague allusion to the Northwest Passage. But never a mention of what really matters; the Northern Sea Route – the Russian denomination; the Chinese call it the Arctic Silk Road. That’s one of the key connectivity corridors of the future.

The Northern Sea Route encompasses at least 15% of the world’s unexplored oil and 30% of the world’s unexplored natural gas. Greenland is smack in the middle of this New Great Game – capable of supplying years of uranium, as much oil as Alaska (bought from Russia in 1867), plus rare earths – not to mention providing useful real state for missile defense and offense.

Washington has been trying to grab Greenland from Denmark since 1946. There’s a deal with Copenhagen in place guaranteeing military control – mostly naval. Now Greenland is being revamped as the ideal U.S. entry point into the Arctic Great Game against Russia.

At the St. Petersburg forum last June, I had the privilege to follow an exceptional round table on the Northern Sea Route: that’s an integral part of Russia’s 21st century development project, focused on commercial navigation – “We need more icebreakers!” – and bound to surpass Suez and Gibraltar in the near future.

Slightly over 50,000 Greenland residents – which already enjoy autonomy, especially vis a vis the EU – would more than accept a full Danish exit; Copenhagen actually abandoned them since 1951. Greenlanders will love to profit from vast U.S. investments.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went straight to the point: “The first step is to listen to the Greenlanders” – comparing it to how Russia listened to the residents of Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya vis a vis Kiev.

What Trump 2.0 actually wants from Greenland is crystal clear: total militarization; privileged access to rare earths; and commercially excluding Russia and Chinese companies.

Chinese military expert Yu Chun noted that “soon, the long-desired ‘golden waterway’ of the Arctic Ocean is expected to open, allowing ships to traverse the Pacific Ocean and sail along the northern coasts of North America and Eurasia into the Atlantic Ocean.”

As the Northern Sea Route is “a key element of Sino-Russian cooperation”, it’s inevitable that the U.S.’s “strategic vision is to prevent the establishment of a ‘golden waterway’ between China, Russia, and Europe by controlling Greenland.”

Freak out in the chihuahua front

On the wider chihuahua front, activity is frantic. Assorted Davos/ Deep State-linked elites across NATOstan – from Europe to Canada – are in the process of being replaced by new, Trump 2.0-affiliated elites.

That’s indissociably linked to the Looting the Allies strategy: the further destruction of the vassal EU economy to strengthen the heart of the Empire.

In Germany, the Afd’s Alice Weidel – pragmatic, intellectually capable – offers a quite intriguing perspective. She is stressing on the record that Germany needs to restart importing raw materials and cheap natural gas – let’s reopen Nord Stream – from Russia.

That opens the tantalizing possibility that Trump and his factotum Elon Musk fully realize that Germany is worthless to the U.S. as a de-industrialized backwater – even under the overall framework of a hardcore neoliberal asset stripping offensive. Of course Trump 2.0 will extract a hefty price for Germans to get a revitalized nation back.

Trump 2.0 at least holds the – dubious – merit of a relatively realistic reading of the chessboard; Russia, India, China – the Primakov triangle – as well as Iran have become too powerful to be looted. So the next best option is Plunder the Chihuahuas. The blowing up of Nord Stream as ordered by the Biden crime family – as detailed by Sy Hersh – was a gleaming starter.

The future of NATO in the Great America project is now up for grabs. Gotta pay up – or else: contribution of each member nation should go up to 5% of GDP instead of the current 2%.

Talk about a 150% price hike. Incidentally, Trump so far has not even muttered the nonsensical expression “Indo-Pacific”. For all practical purposes, Trump is telling NATO to take a hike.

In the event of a double NATOstan annexation of Canada and Greenland, the U.S. may be even able to match Russia’s resource base. Arguably that’s the key rationale for unleashing this New Great Game. Forget “multipolarity”. BRICS, take note.

The most intriguing side plot is, of course, Elon Musk. Trump badly needs Musk’s massive social media/propaganda digital megaphone. Simultaneously, on the chihuahua front, the platinum sidekick wants to profit from a Europe capable of assessing enough energy, raw materials and loads of consumers with solid purchasing power.

The facts on the ground already spell out the “rules-based international order” being replaced in a flash by a no-rules international disorder. After all, international law has already been abolished by the Empire of Chaos itself (that’s bipartisan) – when it comes to illegal, unilateral sanctions, theft of financial assets or legitimization of genocide and head-chopping “moderate rebels”.

Trump 2.0 will be nothing but enforcing a de facto phenomenon: a post-historical disorder. End of History – that was always for suckers.

All of this incendiary chain of events is on a roll essentially because of one single reason: the Empire of Chaos lost the proxy war in Ukraine. What remains to be discussed is the modality of the surrender. So it’s no wonder Trump had to come up with a seductive, but still fraught with danger, larger than life psy op to imperatively change the narrative.

*  *  *

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

“Orwell is here, and he’s living large, man!” 

Police nationwide are misusing facial recognition software, relying on it to arrest suspects without additional evidence, according to a new investigation by the Washington Post.

Most departments aren’t required to disclose or document its use. Among 23 departments with available records, 15 across 12 states arrested suspects based solely on AI matches, often violating internal policies requiring corroboration.

One report called an unverified AI match a “100% match,” while another claimed the technology “unquestionably” identified a suspect. At least eight people have been wrongfully arrested in the U.S. due to AI matches, two of which were previously unreported.

All cases were dismissed, but basic police work—such as checking alibis or comparing physical evidence—could have prevented these arrests. The true scale of AI-fueled false arrests remains unknown, as most departments lack disclosure requirements and rarely reveal AI use.

The Post identified 75 departments using facial recognition, with records from 40 showing arrests tied to AI matches. Of these, 23 provided sufficient detail, revealing that nearly two-thirds made arrests without corroborating evidence. Departments often refused to discuss their practices or claimed officers relied on visual judgment to confirm matches.

In Florence, Kentucky, police used uncorroborated AI matches in at least four cases, with mixed outcomes. Local prosecutor Louis Kelly defended officers’ judgment in identifying suspects, including those flagged by AI.

For its report, the Washington Post reviewed facial recognition use by 75 police departments, with detailed records from 23. It found 15 departments, including Austin, Detroit, and Miami, made arrests based solely on AI matches without independent evidence.

Some lacked records or transparency, while others relied on questionable practices like showing AI-identified photos to witnesses. Interviews clarified some cases, but reliance on uncorroborated AI remains widespread.

You can read the full investigation here. 

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

– George Orwell, Animal Farm

It cost the American taxpayer $24 million to find out what we knew all along: politics is corrupt.

After four years of being subjected to special prosecutor Jack Smith’s dogged investigation into alleged election interference by Donald Trump, the Justice Department has concluded that Trump would have been convicted of breaking the law if only he hadn’t gotten re-elected.

In other words, the Deep State wins again.

The revelation here is not that Trump broke the law but the extent to which sitting presidents get a free pass when it comes to misconduct.

None of this is news.

The Deep State has been operating from this exact same playbook for decades, regardless of which party has occupied the White House.

Indeed, Richard Nixon let the cat out of the bag when he explained that the very act of being president places one beyond the rule of law (“when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal”).

This is how we ended up with an imperial president—empowered to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability—and why “we the people” keep finding ourselves mired in a political swamp of lies, graft, cronyism and corruption.

George Orwell, who died 75 years ago on Jan. 21, 1950, must be rolling in his grave.

In the 75 years since George Orwell died, his works of dystopian fiction—which warn against rampant abuse of power, mind control and mass manipulation coupled with the rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism—have become operation manuals for power-hungry political regimes wedded to the corporate state.

While Orwell’s novel 1984 foreshadowed the rise of an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state, his novel Animal Farm aptly sums up the state of politics today, propped up by a two-party system designed to maintain the illusion that voting matters.

Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people—even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs.

As Orwell explains:

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

No doubt about it: the revolution was successful.

That January 6, 2021 attempt by President Trump and his followers to overturn the election results was not the revolution, however.

Those who answered President Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State – a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to amass even greater powers.

It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned.

It was a set-up, folks.

The Justice Department’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president was the tell.

The only coup d’etat to undermine the will of the people happened when our government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in cahoots with a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations.”

This swamp is of the Deep State’s making to such an extent that every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State’s  tune.

Beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.

Donald Trump, the candidate who swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC, merely paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.

Joe Biden was no different: his job was to keep the Deep State in power.

Trump’s return to the White House has already thrown wide the gates to all manner of swampiness.

Follow the money.  It always points the way.

As Bertram Gross noted in Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, “evil now wears a friendlier face than ever before in American history.”
Writing in 1980, Gross predicted a future in which he saw:

“…a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion…”

This stealthy, creeping, silent coup that Gross prophesied is the same danger that writer Rod Serling envisioned in the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, a clear warning to beware of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

Incredibly enough, more than 60 years later, we find ourselves hostages to a government run more by military doctrine and corporate greed than by the rule of law established in the Constitution. Indeed, proving once again that fact and fiction are not dissimilar, today’s current events could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May, which takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain.

The premise is straightforward.

With the Cold War at its height, an unpopular U.S. President signs a momentous nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Believing that the treaty constitutes an unacceptable threat to the security of the United States and certain that he knows what is best for the nation, General James Mattoon Scott (played by Burt Lancaster), the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidential hopeful, plans a military takeover of the national government.  When Gen. Scott’s aide, Col. Casey (Kirk Douglas), discovers the planned military coup, he goes to the President with the information. The race for command of the U.S. government begins, with the clock ticking off the hours until the military plotters plan to overthrow the President.

Needless to say, while on the big screen, the military coup is foiled and the republic is saved in a matter of hours, in the real world, the plot thickens and spreads out over the past half century.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by the military industrial complex. That’s a done deal, but martial law disguised as national security is only one small part of the greater deception we’ve been fooled into believing is for our own good.

How do you get a nation to docilely accept a police state? How do you persuade a populace to accept metal detectors and pat downs in their schools, bag searches in their train stations, tanks and military weaponry used by their small-town police forces, surveillance cameras in their traffic lights, police strip searches on their public roads, unwarranted blood draws at drunk driving checkpoints, whole body scanners in their airports, and government agents monitoring their communications?

Try to ram such a state of affairs down the throats of the populace, and you might find yourself with a rebellion on your hands. Instead, you bombard them with constant color-coded alerts, terrorize them with shootings and bomb threats in malls, schools, and sports arenas, desensitize them with a steady diet of police violence, and sell the whole package to them as being for their best interests.

The 2021 military occupation of the nation’s capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called “peaceful” transfer of power from one administration to the next is telling.

That was not the language of a free people. This is the language of force.

January 6, 2021, and its aftermath merely provided the government and its corporate technocrats the perfect excuse to show off all of the powers they’ve been amassing so assiduously over the years.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

This brings us back to Orwell’s Animal Farm, which turns 80 this year.

Originally titled a fairy story, the satirical allegory recounts the revolutionary struggle of a group of farm animals living in squalor and neglect on a poorly run farm managed by a derelict farmer.

Hoping to create a society where all animals are equal, the farm animals mount a revolution, ejecting the farmer, taking control of the farm, establishing their own Bill of Rights, and operating under the mantra “four legs good, two legs bad.” Not surprisingly, as is the case with most revolutions, the new boss—a pig named Napoleon—turns out to be no different from their old human oppressor. Over time, a ruling class of pigs comes to dominate on the farm, which is policed by dogs, with the pigs starting to dress, walk and talk like their human counterparts. Eventually, the pigs forge an alliance with their former two-legged adversaries in order to maintain their power over the rest of the farm animals. Before long, the pigs’ transformation into two-legged overlords is complete: “they were all alike.”

Much like the gullible, easily led creatures of Animal Farm, we find ourselves being brainwashed into believing that the tyrannies meted out against us are for our own good; that the trials are tribulations we experience at the hands of the ruling elite are privileges for which we should feel grateful; and that our bondage to the Deep State is actually, appearances to the contrary, freedom.

Over time, without their realizing it, the Seven Commandments of liberation and equality that were so central to Animal Farm’s revolutionary movement are whittled down to a single commandment: “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”

And that, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is the lesson for all of us in the American Police State as we prepare for yet another changing of the guard in Washington, DC.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Marc Andreessen, the billionaire investor and co-founder of the influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, joined the host of Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson (former Reagan speechwriter), to discuss his pivotal role in shaping Silicon Valley and politics. 

For decades, Andreessen has supported Democrats, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. However, a troubling 2024 spring meeting with Biden administration officials spooked the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He said Biden officials explained their plan to control AI through government regulatory capture—a strategy reminiscent of Communist policies in China. 

Andreessen told Robinson that President-elect Donald Trump’s knowledge about problem-solving in business and energy is “extremely sophisticated” and “world-class on real estate and communications.” 

💯 https://t.co/7T8T4CSPs2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2025

“My analysis would be he is world-class in real estate and on communications … and he’s world-class on both which is like probably the first person in the world to be world-class on both of those things, right? The real estate industry is not historically known for its great communicators,” Andreessen continued. 

Robinson and Andreessen also discussed Silicon Valley’s technological and political evolution, Andreessen’s shifting political alliances from Clinton, Obama, and Biden to MAGA, and his vision for harnessing cutting-edge technology to advance societal progress. They also addressed energy challenges, border security, and national defense. 

In particular, Robinson and Andreessen spoke about China’s manufacturing dominance. 

Andreessen explained: 

And I’ll just tell you where I’m worried right now, where the problem is compounding. So you mentioned the, sort of, iPhone assembly, and that’s a big deal. But basically, there’s three industries that sort of follow phones that are kicking in right now.

So, one is drones. And it’s sort of in a bizarre turn of events, the Chinese basically own the global drone market for all, basically, the consumer drones, all the cheap drones. Which by the way, numerically then are the drones that all the militarys also use in overwhelming numbers. And something over 90% of all drones used by the US military are made in China.

No, no, it gets worse, it gets worse, it gets worse, it gets worse before it gets. So the drone thing is not just a company, it’s an entire ecosystem. It’s all of the componentry.

He continued: 

We have a drone company that’s been trying to compete with the Chinese company. Number one, the Biden FAA has been trying to kill us this entire time, trying to do all kinds of things to make sure that American drone companies can’t succeed as part of their war on tech. It’s literally just another in the long list of ways that they’ve been just trying to absolutely kill us.

But two is, China has figured this out. And so, the US has been sanctioning AI chips going to China, China is now sanctioning, they sanction our drone company for the battery, [LAUGH] cuz the battery is made in China, right? And so they have like significant leverage, not just for the drones, but for the entire supply chain.

By the way, the drone supply chain is very analogous to the car supply chain. A self driving electric car is very similar to a drone, or for that matter, to an iPhone. It’s an electrical mechanical device, but it’s a lot of the same kind of battery technology, chip technology, sensor technology.

So they now have their version of what the Germans used to have, which is sort of, the thousands of mid market companies that make all the parts that go into a car. But the German ecosystem is still making them for old internal combustion cars, the Chinese ecosystem is making them for electric cars and self driving cars.

And of course, that means the new Chinese cars that are coming out are really good and they have a giant advantage on cost. And they are starting to bring to market cars that are equivalent in quality to western cars at a third or a fourth of price. So that’s coming. And then the big one that follows phones, drones, and cars, logically, is robots.

Robinson asked Andreessen:

And the Chinese are ahead of us there?

Andreessen responded: 

100%, now, we have the leading, this is important, we have the leading software,like we have the leading R&D.

Like, we have the smartest, I’m convinced we have like the smartest robotics AI people. We have the best people, specifically for the design of the systems, but we don’t have anything resembling the manufacturing capability at all.

Andreessen noted that these technologies are upstream from all the military applications because they are intertwined in the same supply chains. He said the US must confront this and reverse the fragmented approach, where the Biden administration would “hate the domestic American technology industry and is trying to kill it” one day and then, on other days, “thinks we’re gonna somehow develop some sort of competitive response to China on cars or on weapons in the future.” 

🚨 NEW: Marc Andreessen on China’s manufacturing dominance

“There’s three industries that follow phones that the Chinese own the global market at:

1) Drones
Something over 90% of all the consumer drones are made in China. Which is what the US Military also uses. It’s the whole… pic.twitter.com/e94C927MMU

— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) January 15, 2025

The takeaway from the interview is clear: Trump 2.0 must craft a coherent, competitive response to advancing technology under an ‘America First’ agenda. This is in contrast to the radicals in the Biden-Harris regime, who focused on de-growth policies (under the guise of climate change) that have allowed China to advance ahead of the US. 

“What’s the whole of government strategy on China? Zero, right? It turns out the president matters,” Andreessen concluded. 

Watch the full interview here: 

Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) is a prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor, technologist, and co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. In this @UncKnowledge discussion, Andreessen reflects on his journey—from growing up in rural Wisconsin to founding Netscape… pic.twitter.com/10fgVlqpW8

— Hoover Institution (@HooverInst) January 14, 2025

One must ask: whose team was the Biden-Harris administration on? It doesn’t appear they prioritized an ‘America First’ agenda. This will change under Trump.