“This is a sham trial, built on political persecution and ideological attacks coming from the top.”

Paulo Kirk

Mar 15, 2026

Oh, yeah, under fucking House Nigger Obama:

A federal jury handed prosecutors a mixed victory in the trial of nine protesters for their roles during or after a chaotic demonstration outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility last July, convicting eight defendants of terrorism charges but sparing some of them on attempted murder counts.

The widely watched trial could serve as a bellwether as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to crack down on left-wing groups — and the convictions could encourage prosecutors to bring more such charges. A top FBI official said in December that the agency is now treating “antifa” as a major domestic terror threat.

Another significant witness was a researcher at a right-wing think tank who said the tactics used by the demonstrators that night, including “black bloc” clothing and the encrypted messaging app Signal — the latter of which the witness said he also used — were typical of antifa.

Long arm of the law, lawfare, as in war=fare.

The Justice Department has moved to dismiss charges against an Army veteran who set fire to an American flag near the White House last year to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order on flag burning.

Jay Carey, 55, of Arden, North Carolina, who has said he served in the Army from 1989 to 2012 and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, was arrested on Aug. 25 after he set fire to a flag in Lafayette Park, which the National Park Service oversees. Earlier that day, Trump signed an executive order requiring the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute people for burning the American flag.

Carey was charged with two misdemeanors that aren’t focused on the act of burning a flag: igniting a fire in an undesignated area and lighting a fire causing damage to property or park resources. He pleaded not guilty in September. Friday’s filing did not explain the decision to move to dismiss and the U.S Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia did not immediately respond on Saturday to an email seeking comment.

The cunts of the fascist tech bro’s are just saying it out in the open: Luckey says Pentagon could have been “more forceful” against Anthropic.

The fucking queen of AI,

Mark Zuckerberg Is Said to Have Made a Record Florida Home Purchase

The Meta C.E.O. bought a waterfront compound for $170 million, The Wall Street Journal reported. Ivana Trump’s townhouse and a “Breaking Bad” house also sold.

Which circle of hell would he be in? His own fucking AI:

Based on the structure of Dante’s Inferno, Mark Zuckerberg is most often jokingly (or pointedly) assigned to the Eighth Circle, specifically the Tenth Bolgia (the Falsifiers) or the Ninth Bolgia (the Sowers of Discord).

In Dante’s view, this circle is reserved for those who used their intelligence to deceive others or split communities apart. Since Facebook has been criticized for its role in spreading misinformation and polarizing society, he fits the “Sower of Discord” archetype—someone whose actions created deep rifts in the “human fabric.”

Alternatively, some might place him in the Fourth Circle (Greed) for the relentless monetization of personal data.

Hell, uh?

To Address Farm Labor Shortage, Trump Administration Turns to Migrant Workers

As the president’s immigration policies squeeze an already tight supply of farm labor, the Trump administration is making it cheaper to hire foreign farmworkers.

Scholars and literary critics who have analyzed Donald Trump’s public life and legal record often suggest he would fit into multiple circles, primarily focusing on Circle Eight (Fraud) and Circle Nine (Treachery).

Top Candidates for Trump’s Circle

• Circle Eight: Fraud (Malebolge)
  The most common placement by critics, as this circle is reserved for those who use intellect to deceive others.
  • Pouch 5 (Grafters): For corrupt politicians who sell political influence or offices.
  • Pouch 9 (Sowers of Discord): For those who sow scandal and split unified groups. Critics point to his divisive rhetoric as a potential fit for this “body-splitting” punishment.
  • Pouch 10 (Falsifiers): For “falsifiers of words” and liars.
• Circle Nine: Treachery
  The deepest circle, reserved for the betrayal of fundamental trust.
  • Antenora: A sub-sector of the ninth circle for traitors to their country or party. Analysts argue his actions regarding the 2020 election and the U.S. Constitution would land him here, frozen in the ice of Lake Cocytus.
• Circle Four: Greed
  Reserved for those who hoard or squander wealth. Critics cite his business history and focus on personal brand as reasons he might be condemned to push heavy weights against other hoarders for eternity.

[Jim Shaw, Donald and Melania Trump descending the escalator into the 9th circle of hell reserved for traitors frozen in a sea of ice]

Other Potential Placements

• Circle Two (Lust): Some point to his documented history of infidelity and comments about women.
• Circle Three (Gluttony): His well-known penchant for fast food and excess is occasionally mentioned.
• Circle Six (Heresy): Scholars from the magazine Commonweal suggest that if he only “pretends” to be religious for political gain, he might reside here with the atheists and materialists.

Ultimately, Dante’s moral framework places the most weight on sins of the “intellect” (Fraud and Treachery) rather than “incontinence” (Lust or Greed), suggesting he would be placed in the deeper, colder levels of the Inferno.

These articles analyze the specific sins and circles of hell that Donald Trump might occupy based on Dante Alighieri’s Inferno:

Which circle of hell for the entire fucking America?

The distress call came in to Sri Lanka’s maritime rescue coordination centre just after 5 am. The ship in trouble, they determined, was well within Sri Lanka’s obligation for rescue, being just over 19 nautical miles off the coast of the southern city of Galle.

The navy swiftly mobilised and, by 6 am, the first search and rescue boat was on its way, another soon close behind. It was hard to see through the thick morning mist but officers on board kept their eyes peeled for a ship in the distance.

Instead, they found a spooling slick of oil on the sea’s surface. Dozens of survivors held on to life rafts, and bodies bobbed in the waves, but the vessel was nowhere to be seen. IRIS Dena, an Iranian warship on its way to a friendly port call in Sri Lanka, already sat on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

[The IRIS Dena in the Bay of Bengal during the international fleet review held at Visakhapatnam, India, in February]

The retired Indian V Adm Shekhar Sinha had been particularly shaken by the demise of Dena. Sinha attended the international fleet review in Visakhapatnam, saw Iran’s cadets line up proudly on Dena, and exchanged a conversation of niceties with the Iranian naval commander, who had said how much he was enjoying being in India.

“All’s fair in love and war,” said Sinha. “But it’s very upsetting to think that a week later, many of them were dead.” [Cuntology 101 == All Uniformed Cunts are devils!!! All’s fair in love and war. Die, Sinha, DIE.]

He too said the incident had troubling implications for India and the security of the Indian Ocean. “It’s clear we need to relook at Indian Ocean security and underwater surveillance,” he said. “If an American submarine is floating in the Indian Ocean so close by and we did not know, then we’d better buck up.”

All is fair in a time of art and fucking genocide?

Simply by invoking those people and places — without ever leaving Hujar’s apartment in the legendary Westbeth Artists Community — the film evokes the essence of New York in the era of Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. Hujar was a master portraitist, and both his photographs and the film’s dialogue reveal why: he drew meaning from every second spent with someone.

“His work is poetry,” says Sachs. “His photograph Orgasmic Man? It represents an art and an artist who was honest and different, the kind of art you don’t see that much anymore.”

This is so fucking fucked up, Western Civilization (NOT) while people are bombed: Rebecca Hall: ‘We lost counterculture somewhere along the way.’

The painter, actress, and director works from a very personal, and at the same time communal place, saying, ‘when you paint a face, that creates an exchange.’

Counter-culture? FUCK.

UK complicit in desecration of international law in Gaza, says Corbyn-led tribunal

Unofficial body co-chaired by ex-Labour leader says Britain failed to meet its duty to seek to prevent a genocide

THese cunts on Wall Street, in banking, in Fink and Schwartzman’s game, in war dag murder cartels, the lot of them, fucking need to be just murdered any which way.

Goodbye to water as we know it: a study warns that 74% of regions could experience unprecedented shortages by 2100

“This is not about being involved in operations. We are not at war with Iran,” Zelenskyy said.

Earlier this week, Ukraine’s leader announced military teams were sent to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and a US military base in Jordan.

Here is the transactional pathology of JEWS: Zelenskiy says Ukraine wants money, technology in return for Middle East drone help… Ukraine’s leader previously said advisers were sent to Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia to help thwart Iranian drone attacks

No news from the dildo and cloud server surveillance seller: How Jeff Bezos Upended The Washington Post

The billionaire newspaper owner, dissatisfied by years of losses, wants the newsroom to double productivity with half its budget.

Christ, a one-in-a-million story: The Quapaw Nation is the only US Native community to carry out a cleanup of one of the country’s worst sites of environmental contamination

They call this land the Laue. In the late 1800s, part of these 200 acres of grassland inside the Quapaw Nation was allotted to tribal citizen Charley Quapaw Blackhawk. After forcing dozens of tribes into Indian territory before the Civil War, the US government then parceled out reservations and property to individual members. It was part of the government’s attempt to “civilize” Native Americans by turning them into private, not communal, landholders and yeoman farmers in the model of Thomas Jefferson’s ideal citizen.

Yet, for the last century, little grew on the Laue. Half of it was buried beneath towering mounds of toxic rock known as chat piles. The waste rock, laced with chemicals, was left after miners extracted millions of tons of lead and zinc from the Tri-State Mining District, where the valuable ores stretched across Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma between 1891 and the 1970s. By 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had designated 40 sq miles that include nearly all the Quapaw Nation as the Tar Creek Superfund site, joining the EPA’s list of the most contaminated places in the country. Informally called a “megasite”, Tar Creek remains one of the largest and most complex environmental disasters in the country.

+—+

• Total Time Served: 21 months.
• Release Date: April 21, 2013 (one day before Earth Day).
• Custody Locations: He served time in federal prisons in Herlong, California, and Littleton, Colorado, and completed the final portion of his sentence in a halfway house in Salt Lake City.
• Post-Release: Following his release, he began three years of supervised probation.

Tim’s statement: Before being sentenced to two years in prison and slapped with a $10,000 fine, Tim DeChristopher made this statement to the prosecution and the judge:

Thank you for the opportunity to speak before the court. When I first met Mr. Manross, the sentencing officer who prepared the presentence report, he explained that it was essentially his job to “get to know me.” He said he had to get to know who I really was and why I did what I did in order to decide what kind of sentence was appropriate. I was struck by the fact that he was the first person in this courthouse to call me by my first name, or even really look me in the eye. I appreciate this opportunity to speak openly to you for the first time. I’m not here asking for your mercy, but I am here asking that you know me.

Mr. Huber has leveled a lot of character attacks at me, many of which are contrary to Mr. Manross’s report. While reading Mr. Huber’s critiques of my character and my integrity, as well as his assumptions about my motivations, I was reminded that Mr. Huber and I have never had a conversation. Over the two and half years of this prosecution, he has never asked me any of the questions that he makes assumptions about in the government’s report. Apparently, Mr. Huber has never considered it his job to get to know me, and yet he is quite willing to disregard the opinions of the one person who does see that as his job.

There are alternating characterizations that Mr. Huber would like you to believe about me. In one paragraph, the government claims I “played out the parts of accuser, jury, and judge as he determined the fate of the oil and gas lease auction and its intended participants that day.” In the very next paragraph, they claim, “It was not the defendant’s crimes that effected such a change.” Mr. Huber would lead you to believe that I’m either a dangerous criminal who holds the oil and gas industry in the palm of my hand, or I’m just an incompetent child who didn’t affect the outcome of anything. As evidenced by the continued back and forth of contradictory arguments in the government’s memorandum, they’re not quite sure which of those extreme caricatures I am, but they are certain that I am nothing in between. Rather than the job of getting to know me, it seems Mr. Huber prefers the job of fitting me into whatever extreme characterization is most politically expedient at the moment.

In nearly every paragraph, the government’s memorandum uses the words lie, lied, lying, liar. It makes me want to thank whatever clerk edited out the words “pants on fire.” Their report doesn’t mention the fact that at the auction in question, the first person who asked me what I was doing there was Agent Dan Love. And I told him very clearly that I was there to stand in the way of an illegitimate auction that threatened my future. I proceeded to answer all of his questions openly and honestly, and have done so to this day when speaking about that auction in any forum, including this courtroom. The entire basis for the false statements charge that I was convicted of was the fact that I wrote my real name and address on a form that included the words “bona fide bidder.” When I sat there on the witness stand, Mr. Romney asked me if I ever had any intention of being a bona fide bidder. I responded by asking Mr. Romney to clarify what “bona fide bidder” meant in this context. Mr. Romney then withdrew the question and moved on to the next subject. On that right there is the entire basis for the government’s repeated attacks on my integrity. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff, your honor.

Mr. Huber also makes grand assumptions about my level of respect for the rule of law. The government claims a long prison sentence is necessary to counteract the political statements I’ve made and promote a respect for the law. The only evidence provided for my lack of respect for the law is political statements that I’ve made in public forums. Again, the government doesn’t mention my actions in regard to the drastic restrictions that were put upon my defense in this courtroom. My political disagreements with the court about the proper role of a jury in the legal system are probably well known. I’ve given several public speeches and interviews about how the jury system was established and how it has evolved to its current state. Outside of this courtroom, I’ve made my views clear that I agree with the founding fathers that juries should be the conscience of the community and a defense against legislative tyranny. I even went so far as to organize a book study group that read about the history of jury nullification. Some of the participants in that book group later began passing out leaflets to the public about jury rights, as is their right. Mr. Huber was apparently so outraged by this that he made the slanderous accusations that I tried to taint the jury. He didn’t specify the extra number of months that I should spend in prison for the heinous activity of holding a book group at the Unitarian Church and quoting Thomas Jefferson in public, but he says you should have “little tolerance for this behavior.”

But here is the important point that Mr. Huber would rather ignore. Despite my strong disagreements with the court about the Constitutional basis for the limits on my defense, while I was in this courtroom I respected the authority of the court. Whether I agreed with them or not, I abided by the restrictions that you put on me and my legal team. I never attempted to “taint” the jury, as Mr. Huber claimed, by sharing any of the relevant facts about the auction in question that the court had decided were off limits. I didn’t burst out and tell the jury that I successfully raised the down payment and offered it to the BLM. I didn’t let the jury know that the auction was later reversed because it was illegitimate in the first place. To this day I still think I should have had the right to do so, but disagreement with the law should not be confused with disrespect for the law.

My public statements about jury nullification were not the only political statements that Mr. Huber thinks I should be punished for. As the government’s memorandum points out, I have also made public statements about the value of civil disobedience in bringing the rule of law closer to our shared sense of justice. In fact, I have openly and explicitly called for nonviolent civil disobedience against mountaintop removal coal mining in my home state of West Virginia. Mountaintop removal is itself an illegal activity, which has always been in violation of the Clean Water Act, and it is an illegal activity that kills people. A West Virginia state investigation found that Massey Energy had been cited with 62,923 violations of the law in the ten years preceding the disaster that killed 29 people last year. The investigation also revealed that Massey paid for almost none of those violations because the company provided millions of dollars worth of campaign contributions that elected most of the appeals court judges in the state. When I was growing up in West Virginia, my mother was one of many who pursued every legal avenue for making the coal industry follow the law. She commented at hearings, wrote petitions and filed lawsuits, and many have continued to do ever since, to no avail. I actually have great respect for the rule of law, because I see what happens when it doesn’t exist, as is the case with the fossil-fuel industry. Those crimes committed by Massey Energy led not only to the deaths of their own workers, but to the deaths of countless local residents, such as Joshua McCormick, who died of kidney cancer at age 22 because he was unlucky enough to live downstream from a coal mine. When a corrupted government is no longer willing to uphold the rule of law, I advocate that citizens step up to that responsibility.

This is really the heart of what this case is about. The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law. Disrespect for the rule of law begins when the government believes itself and its corporate sponsors to be above the law.

Mr. Huber claims that the seriousness of my offense was that I “obstructed lawful government proceedings.” But the auction in question was not a lawful proceeding. I know you’ve heard another case about some of the irregularities for which the auction was overturned. But that case did not involve the BLM’s blatant violation of Secretarial Order 3226, which was a law that went into effect in 2001 and required the BLM to weigh the impacts on climate change for all its major decisions, particularly resource development. A federal judge in Montana ruled last year that the BLM was in constant violation of this law throughout the Bush administration. In all the proceedings and debates about this auction, no apologist for the government or the BLM has ever even tried to claim that the BLM followed this law. In both the December 2008 auction and the creation of the Resource Management Plan on which this auction was based, the BLM did not even attempt to follow this law.

And this law is not a trivial regulation about crossing t’s or dotting i’s to make some government accountant’s job easier. This law was put into effect to mitigate the impacts of catastrophic climate change and defend a livable future on this planet. This law was about protecting the survival of young generations. That’s kind of a big deal. It’s a very big deal to me. If the government is going to refuse to step up to that responsibility to defend a livable future, I believe that creates a moral imperative for me and other citizens. My future, and the future of everyone I care about, is being traded for short term profits. I take that very personally. Until our leaders take seriously their responsibility to pass on a healthy and just world to the next generation, I will continue this fight.

The government has made the claim that there were legal alternatives to standing in the way of this auction. Particularly, I could have filed a written protest against certain parcels. The government does not mention, however, that two months prior to this auction, in October 2008, a Congressional report was released that looked into those protests. The report, by the House committee on public lands, stated that it had become common practice for the BLM to take volunteers from the oil and gas industry to process those permits. The oil industry was paying people specifically to volunteer for the industry that was supposed to be regulating it, and it was to those industry staff that I would have been appealing. Moreover, this auction was just three months after The New York Times reported on a major scandal involving Department of the Interior regulators who were taking bribes of sex and drugs from the oil companies that they were supposed to be regulating. In 2008, this was the condition of the rule of law, for which Mr Huber says I lacked respect. Just as the legal avenues which people in West Virginia have been pursuing for 30 years, the legal avenues in this case were constructed precisely to protect the corporations who control the government.

The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it’s that I have greater respect for justice. Where there is a conflict between the law and the higher moral code that we all share, my loyalty is to that higher moral code. I know Mr. Huber disagrees with me on this. He wrote that “the rule of law is the bedrock of our civilized society, not acts of ‘civil disobedience’ committed in the name of the cause of the day.” That’s an especially ironic statement when he is representing the United States of America, a place where the rule of law was created through acts of civil disobedience. Since those bedrock acts of civil disobedience by our founding fathers, the rule of law in this country has continued to grow closer to our shared higher moral code through the civil disobedience that drew attention to legalized injustice. The authority of the government exists to the degree that the rule of law reflects the higher moral code of the citizens, and throughout American history, it has been civil disobedience that has bound them together.

This philosophical difference is serious enough that Mr. Huber thinks I should be imprisoned to discourage the spread of this idea. Much of the government’s memorandum focuses on the political statements that I’ve made in public. But it hasn’t always been this way. When Mr. Huber was arguing that my defense should be limited, he addressed my views this way: “The public square is the proper stage for the defendant’s message, not criminal proceedings in federal court.” But now that the jury is gone, Mr. Huber wants to take my message from the public square and make it a central part of these federal court proceedings. I have no problem with that. I’m just as willing to have those views on display as I’ve ever been.

The government’s memorandum states, “As opposed to preventing this particular defendant from committing further crimes, the sentence should be crafted ‘to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct’ by others.” Their concern is not the danger that I present, but the danger presented by my ideas and words that might lead others to action. Perhaps Mr. Huber is right to be concerned. He represents the United States Government. His job is to protect those currently in power, and by extension, their corporate sponsors. After months of no action after the auction, the way I found out about my indictment was the day before it happened, Pat Shea got a call from an Associated Press reporter who said, “I just wanted to let you know that tomorrow Tim is going to be indicted, and this is what the charges are going to be.” That reporter had gotten that information two weeks earlier from an oil industry lobbyist. Our request for disclosure of what role that lobbyist played in the U.S. Attorney’s office was denied, but we know that she apparently holds sway and that the government feels the need to protect the industry’s interests.

The things that I’ve been publicly saying may indeed be threatening to that power structure. There have been several references to the speech I gave after the conviction, but I’ve only ever seen half of one sentence of that speech quoted. In the government’s report, they actually had to add their own words to that one sentence to make it sound more threatening. But the speech was about empowerment. It was about recognizing our interconnectedness rather than viewing ourselves as isolated individuals. The message of the speech was that when people stand together, they no longer have to be exploited by powerful corporations. Alienation is perhaps the most effective tool of control in America, and every reminder of our real connectedness weakens that tool.

But the sentencing guidelines don’t mention the need to protect corporations or politicians from ideas that threaten their control. The guidelines say “protect the public.” The question is whether the public is helped or harmed by my actions. The easiest way to answer that question is with the direct impacts of my action. As the oil executive stated in his testimony, the parcels I didn’t bid on averaged $12 per acre, but the ones I did bid on averaged $125. Those are the prices paid for public property to the public trust. The industry admits very openly that they were getting those parcels for an order of magnitude less than what they were worth. Not only did those oil companies drive up the prices to $125 during the bidding, they were then given an opportunity to withdraw their bids once my actions were explained. They kept the parcels, presumably because they knew they were still a good deal at $125. The oil companies knew they were getting a steal from the American people, and now they’re crying because they had to pay a little closer to what those parcels were actually worth. The government claims I should be held accountable for the steal the oil companies didn’t get. The government’s report demands $600,000 worth of financial impacts for the amount which the oil industry wasn’t able to steal from the public.

That extra revenue for the public became almost irrelevant, though, once most of those parcels were revoked by Secretary Salazar. Most of the parcels I won were later deemed inappropriate for drilling. In other words, the highest and best value to the public for those particular lands was not for oil and gas drilling. Had the auction gone off without a hitch, it would have been a loss for the public. The fact that the auction was delayed, extra attention was brought to the process, and the parcels were ultimately revoked was a good thing for the public.

More generally, the question of whether civil disobedience is good for the public is a matter of perspective. Civil disobedience is inherently an attempt at change. Those in power, whom Mr. Huber represents, are those for whom the status quo is working, so they always see civil disobedience as a bad thing. The decision you are making today, your honor, is what segment of the public you are meant to protect. Mr. Huber clearly has cast his lot with that segment who wishes to preserve the status quo. But the majority of the public is exploited by the status quo far more than they are benefited by it. The young are the most obvious group who is exploited and condemned to an ugly future by letting the fossil fuel industry call the shots. There is an overwhelming amount of scientific research, some of which you received as part of our proffer on the necessity defense, that reveals the catastrophic consequences which the young will have to deal with over the coming decades.

But just as real is the exploitation of the communities where fossil fuels are extracted. As a native of West Virginia, I have seen from a young age that the exploitation of fossil fuels has always gone hand in hand with the exploitation of local people. In West Virginia, we’ve been extracting coal longer than anyone else. And after 150 years of making other people rich, West Virginia is almost dead last among the states in per capita income, education rates and life expectancy. And it’s not an anomaly. The areas with the richest fossil fuel resources, whether coal in West Virginia and Kentucky, or oil in Louisiana and Mississippi, are the areas with the lowest standards of living. In part, this is a necessity of the industry. The only way to convince someone to blow up their backyard or poison their water is to make sure they are so desperate that they have no other option. But it is also the nature of the economic model. Since fossil fuels are a limited resources, whoever controls access to that resource in the beginning gets to set all the terms. They set the terms for their workers, for the local communities, and apparently even for the regulatory agencies. A renewable energy economy is a threat to that model. Since no one can control access to the sun or the wind, the wealth is more likely to flow to whoever does the work of harnessing that energy, and therefore to create a more distributed economic system, which leads to a more distributed political system. It threatens the profits of the handful of corporations for whom the current system works, but our question is which segment of the public are you tasked with protecting. I am here today because I have chosen to protect the people locked out of the system over the profits of the corporations running the system. I say this not because I want your mercy, but because I want you to join me.

After this difference of political philosophies, the rest of the sentencing debate has been based on the financial loss from my actions. The government has suggested a variety of numbers loosely associated with my actions, but as of yet has yet to establish any causality between my actions and any of those figures. The most commonly discussed figure is perhaps the most easily debunked. This is the figure of roughly $140,000, which is the amount the BLM originally spent to hold the December 2008 auction. By definition, this number is the amount of money the BLM spent before I ever got involved. The relevant question is what the BLM spent because of my actions, but apparently that question has yet to be asked. The only logic that relates the $140,000 figure to my actions is if I caused the entire auction to be null and void and the BLM had to start from scratch to redo the entire auction. But that of course is not the case. First is the prosecution’s on-again-off-again argument that I didn’t have any impact on the auction being overturned. More importantly, the BLM never did redo the auction because it was decided that many of those parcels should never have been auctioned in the first place. Rather than this arbitrary figure of $140,000, it would have been easy to ask the BLM how much money they spent or will spend on redoing the auction. But the government never asked this question, probably because they knew they wouldn’t like the answer.

The other number suggested in the government’s memorandum is the $166,000 that was the total price of the three parcels I won which were not invalidated. Strangely, the government wants me to pay for these parcels, but has never offered to actually give them to me. When I offered the BLM the money a couple weeks after the auction, they refused to take it. Aside from that history, this figure is still not a valid financial loss from my actions. When we wrote there was no loss from my actions, we actually meant that rather literally. Those three parcels were not evaporated or blasted into space because of my actions, not was the oil underneath them sucked dry by my bid card. They’re still there, and in fact the BLM has already issued public notice of their intent to re-auction those parcels in February of 2012.

The final figure suggested as a financial loss is the $600,000 that the oil company wasn’t able to steal from the public. That completely unsubstantiated number is supposedly the extra amount the BLM received because of my actions. This is when things get tricky. The government’s report takes that $600,000 positive for the BLM and adds it to that roughly $300,000 negative for the BLM, and comes up with a $900,000 negative. With math like that, it’s obvious that Mr. Huber works for the federal government.

After most of those figures were disputed in the presentence report, the government claimed in their most recent objection that I should be punished according to the intended financial impact that I intended to cause. The government tries to assume my intentions and then claims, “This is consistent with the testimony that Mr. DeChristopher provided at trial, admitting that his intention was to cause financial harm to others with whom he disagreed.” Now I didn’t get to say a whole lot at the trial, so it was pretty easy to look back through the transcripts. The statement claimed by the government never happened. There was nothing even close enough to make their statement a paraphrase or artistic license. This statement in the government’s objection is a complete fiction. Mr. Huber’s inability to judge my intent is revealed in this case by the degree to which he underestimates my ambition. The truth is that my intention, then as now, was to expose, embarrass, and hold accountable the oil industry to the extent that it cuts into the $100 billion in annual profits that it makes through exploitation. I actually intended for my actions to play a role in the wide variety of actions that steer the country toward a clean energy economy where those $100 billion in oil profits are completely eliminated. When I read Mr. Huber’s new logic, I was terrified to consider that my slightly unrealistic intention to have a $100 billion impact will fetch me several consecutive life sentences. Luckily, this reasoning is as unrealistic as it is silly.

A more serious look at my intentions is found in Mr. Huber’s attempt to find contradictions in my statements. Mr. Huber points out that in public I acted proud of my actions and treated it like a success, while in our sentencing memorandum we claimed that my actions led to “no loss.” On the one hand I think it was a success, and yet I claim it there was no loss. Success, but no loss. Mr. Huber presents these ideas as mutually contradictory and obvious proof that I was either dishonest or backing down from my convictions. But for success to be contradictory to no loss, there has to be another assumption. One has to assume that my intent was to cause a loss. But the only loss that I intended to cause was the loss of secrecy by which the government gave away public property for private profit. As I actually stated in the trial, my intent was to shine a light on a corrupt process and get the government to take a second look at how this auction was conducted. The success of that intent is not dependent on any loss. I knew that if I was completely off base, and the government took that second look and decided that nothing was wrong with that auction, the cost of my action would be another day’s salary for the auctioneer and some minor costs of re-auctioning the parcels. But if I was right about the irregularities of the auction, I knew that allowing the auction to proceed would mean the permanent loss of lands better suited for other purposes and the permanent loss of a safe climate. The intent was to prevent loss, but again that is a matter of perspective.

Mr. Huber wants you to weigh the loss for the corporations that expected to get public property for pennies on the dollar, but I believe the important factor is the loss to the public which I helped prevent. Again, we come back to this philosophical difference. From any perspective, this is a case about the right of citizens to challenge the government. The U.S. Attorney’s office makes clear that their interest is not only to punish me for doing so, but to discourage others from challenging the government, even when the government is acting inappropriately. Their memorandum states, “To be sure, a federal prison term here will deter others from entering a path of criminal behavior.” The certainty of this statement not only ignores the history of political prisoners, it ignores the severity of the present situation. Those who are inspired to follow my actions are those who understand that we are on a path toward catastrophic consequences of climate change. They know their future, and the future of their loved ones, is on the line. And they know were are running out of time to turn things around. The closer we get to that point where it’s too late, the less people have to lose by fighting back. The power of the Justice Department is based on its ability to take things away from people. The more that people feel that they have nothing to lose, the more that power begins to shrivel. The people who are committed to fighting for a livable future will not be discouraged or intimidated by anything that happens here today. And neither will I. I will continue to confront the system that threatens our future. Given the destruction of our democratic institutions that once gave citizens access to power, my future will likely involve civil disobedience. Nothing that happens here today will change that. I don’t mean that in any sort of disrespectful way at all, but you don’t have that authority. You have authority over my life, but not my principles. Those are mine alone.

I’m not saying any of this to ask you for mercy, but to ask you to join me. If you side with Mr. Huber and believe that your role is to discourage citizens from holding their government accountable, then you should follow his recommendations and lock me away. I certainly don’t want that. I have no desire to go to prison, and any assertion that I want to be even a temporary martyr is false. I want you to join me in standing up for the right and responsibility of citizens to challenge their government. I want you to join me in valuing this country’s rich history of nonviolent civil disobedience. If you share those values but think my tactics are mistaken, you have the power to redirect them. You can sentence me to a wide range of community service efforts that would point my commitment to a healthy and just world down a different path. You can have me work with troubled teens, as I spent most of my career doing. You can have me help disadvantaged communities or even just pull weeds for the BLM. You can steer that commitment if you agree with it, but you can’t kill it. This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow. The choice you are making today is what side are you on.

In that respect, Debs’ campaign might appear to parallel Trump’s. The only time Trump has posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) since he was kicked off of the platform in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection has been to share a photo of his defiant mug shot. Polling indicates that Trump’s base is unfazed by his indictments — and perhaps even more likely to rally on his behalf because of them.

But the similarities end there. Trump’s legal troubles are primarily tied to his attempts to subvert democracy; Debs was imprisoned for anti-war rhetoric on behalf of the working class. Trump commands the support of an authoritarian mass movement; Debs represented a small but influential sector of the far left that called for the expansion of democracy into economic life. While Trump uses his rhetoric to gin up a cult of self, Debs called for “the Christ-like practice of solidarity” with his fellow citizens.

Still, Debs’ run provides a fascinating example of how imprisonment can code politically to the electorate, and the awkward logistics of running for president while stuck in a prison cell. To learn more about his run, I called up Ernest Freeman, a professor at the University of Tennessee and author of “Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent.” Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Ernest Freeberg: Eugene Debs was one of the founders and the longtime leader of the Socialist Party in the United States. He came up through the labor movement and first went to prison in 1895 for being the leader of the American Railway Union in the Pullman Strike, the largest strike in the 19th century. The fact that he was put in jail for leading that strike led him to the conclusion that the two major political parties were both in the hands of what he would consider to be the corporate plutocracy. He believed that the only way forward was to convince workers to vote in their own interests — and that would be embodied in the Socialist Party platform.

He was really a charismatic speaker who barnstormed across the country and made his fifth run for president as leader of the Socialist Party in 1920. Even though the Socialists were never close to winning a presidential campaign, they had quite a number of state-level and city-level offices. His high watermark was 6% of the presidential vote in 1912. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, called Debs one of America’s “most undesirable citizens,” an apostle of “bloodshed, anarchy, and riot.” Roosevelt also urged his fellow progressives to borrow some of the moderate parts of the Socialist message in order to head off the really revolutionary parts. Some ideas — such as old age pensions, support for health benefits, women’s suffrage, a ban on child labor, and state support for kindergarten — were part of the Socialist Party platform long before they were adopted by the main parties.

What was unique about Debs was that he was able to take what many considered to be a radical, foreign idea, like socialism, and present it in the American vein. He was comfortable talking about socialism in the context of the Declaration of Independence and Tom Paine, Walt Whitman, and John Brown. His argument was: We completed the war against chattel slavery, and the next step was wage slavery.

Freeberg: When the war broke out in 1914, the vast majority of Americans from all different political persuasions favored American neutrality. The gradual escalation of the war eventually led Woodrow Wilson to enter the war in 1917, and there had to be a major draft right away. The government decided that it would do two things: First, it would seize the loudest microphone in the marketplace of ideas by creating a massive propaganda campaign to stir up hatred of the Germans and to rally support for the allies. Second, Congress very quickly passed the Espionage Act, which made it illegal to give comfort to the enemy, essentially. This law was not used to prosecute spies, but in fact became a powerful weapon for silencing dissent.

Debs was strongly anti-war, and he was well aware that if he went onto the stump and gave a speech about the war that he would, along with his fellow comrades, end up going to jail. In June of 1918 he gave a speech at a Socialist picnic in Canton, Ohio, knowing that there were government agents in the audience who were taking down his every word. He says things like, “You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder,” making the argument he’s made all along, which is that this was, as the saying goes, “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

Debs was put on trial in Cleveland, and he used that as an opportunity to speak against the war again and to defend his right to free speech. The government argued that what he was really doing at that Socialist picnic was trying to incite young men in the crowd to resist the draft. One of the long-standing exceptions to First Amendment rights is that you’re not allowed to use speech to incite others to crime. Nobody in the audience was found to not have their draft registration; there was no evidence that anybody was moved to not participate in the draft because of hearing Debs speak. But given the way the law was applied in 1918, he was very quickly convicted.

Debs wasn’t the only one convicted — over 1,200 socialists, anarchists, religious pacifists, and some people who just said some cranky thing about the war effort in the wrong place were prosecuted, and many were jailed. Few people knew or cared about most of these people, but Debs was the visible one, a significant voice in American political life for decades. The sight of him in prison garb galvanized many who decided the government had gone too far in silencing dissent. So an amnesty movement around these prisoners centered on getting him out of prison. Part of the amnesty movement strategy to get Debs out of prison — or at least to help people remember that he was in jail — was to nominate him for president in 1920. While the Socialist Party was in disarray in 1920, thanks in large part to government persecution, almost a million Americans voted for Debs, considering it a protest vote for freedom of speech.

“The master class has always declared the wars. The subject class has always fought the battles.”

“The master class has always declared the wars. The subject class has always fought the battles,” Debs said. “The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose–especially their lives.”

“They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.”

Debs added:

“And here let me emphasize the fact–and it cannot be repeated too often–that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.”

“Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.” I.F. Stone

Paulo Kirk

Mar 13, 2026

Hunter — Now, mostly 345 million used car and AI addicted and mostly lobotomized dealers and grifters

Fucking Epstein and Zorro Ranch!1!

New Mexico Didn’t Have to Stop Investigating Zorro Rancho in 2019 Just Because Federal Prosecutors Requested It. But Former NM Attorney General Hector Balderas Seems to Want Us to Think It Did.

The boots, the fucking smirk, and the eyes, a face only a group of pedophiles could love?

In the piece I published earlier today (Alisa), I laid out what the somewhat-newly released Epstein files reveal about Zorro Ranch and how reports of serious crimes there went largely uninvestigated for decades. The documents also show something else that deserves much closer scrutiny: New Mexico halted its investigation in 2019 after federal prosecutors asked the state to stand down and transfer its materials.

That detail has circulated widely as if it explains the entire mystery. Former New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, who complied with those requests from federal prosecutors, has spoken to reporters in the past couple of weeks to blame-shift the them his decision to halt investigations. Federal prosecutors were building a larger case, the thinking goes, so the state stepped aside.

But when you look at how American law actually works, that explanation doesn’t hold up very well. The federal government does not have the authority to order a state to stop investigating potential violations of state law. New Mexico’s investigation did not have to end simply because federal prosecutors asked it to.

Pete — The Patriotic Press

Pete Hegseth just confirmed what the Ellison takeover of CNN is actually for.Hegseth held a press briefing at the Pentagon on Friday morning, and he had some thoughts about CNN.

He was responding to a CNN report published Thursday that cited multiple sources saying the administration had misjudged Iran’s willingness to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. The New York Times had published similar reporting days earlier. Hegseth called CNN’s story “fake news” and “fundamentally unserious.”

And then: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

He kept going. He complained about CNN’s chyrons (“Mideast War Intensifies”), then offered his own alternatives for what he called “an actual patriotic press.” His version of “War widening” was “Iran shrinking, going underground.” A former Fox News host, now running the Pentagon, told reporters he knew how headlines worked because “I used to be in that business.” The Defense Secretary was writing chyrons from the podium. Six American service members had been confirmed killed in a refueling aircraft crash in western Iraq that same morning.

CNN’s response was five words: “We stand by our reporting.”

I wrote about this administration’s contradictory war framing earlier this week, so none of the bluster surprises me anymore. But a sitting Defense Secretary, during an active war, publicly endorsing a specific corporate acquisition of a specific news outlet because it published a specific story he didn’t like? That’s worth stopping on. Because Hegseth didn’t just bash CNN. He told you what the Ellison deal is for.

Why do the cunts in the media even report on this, without jamming down the fucking White Man’s House Minyan curated press corps and any chance they can have speaking with Trump and Hegseth and Company calling them out on their shite?

Murdered civilians, carpet bombing, girls raped by a Tomahawk, and more?

In recent days, President Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to his illegal war on Iran – in which American troops are dying – as an “excursion,” a term generally reserved for describing pleasant little family sojourns or brief, fun vacations.

This is, according to sources in and close to the administration, because the president is confusing the term “military incursion” with a “military excursion,” a phrase typically used only to ridicule foreign adventurism and warmongering. Some of these sources say that they or their colleagues have used the term “incursion” in front of Trump lately, but then the president just… did his own thing.

“We took a little excursion because we felt we had to, to get rid of some evil, and I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion,” Trump said Tuesday, as he addressed Republican lawmakers at an event in Florida. Speaking at a business in Ohio on Wednesday, Trump said, “We did a little excursion, we had to take this couple weeks, few weeks of excursion.”

[Retired Army four-star General David Petraeus and former head of the CIA — whose greatest strategic victory was either marrying the daughter of a four-star general or avoiding jail time after leaking classified information to his mistress — has become one of cable news’s most sought-after Iran analysts.]

Note: I left my fucking precious cell phone in a friend’s car, and he told me, before I realized it was there, that he was going to an Episcopalian Church to do the stations of the cross. He’s a fun Latino who doesn’t speak much Spanish and just lost his husband of 40 years to cancer. And alas, I had no idea where this religious joint is, and alas, I did not have his phone number, so, alas, I went to one church I knew about, and there were two cars parked out front, and then I approached the porch area where they distribute food boxes. It was way past that time.

Old guy, bundled up, playing with his phone, so I asked him to look up the Newport Episcopal Church. He couldn’t spell the word, and he told me he had gotten hit by a car in Seaside, and that he was at the shelter in town, but that the kiddos there were too loud. He was bundled up, rain whipping around, and then, he handed me his fucking phone:

His phone screen with the word “Proud Republican” and then Semen Drip Trump’s face he was scrolling upon. This guy is using homeless shelters, probably got ER services and medical care for the accident, ambulance ride, all expenses paid because he’s indigent, and he has that cunt on his phone, and on an Obama phone, no less.

At 83, retired Army four-star General Jack Keane resembles a wax mannequin. His analysis does too.

[Then there’s Mark Hertling, the retired Army three-star who resembles a more handsome Mike Pence, with a spray tan — exactly the kind of airbrushed, authoritative-looking screen presence television news loves. The imposing general (he says he’s 6’4”) holds forth in a sonorous tone with an air of complete command.

There’s just one problem: he has nothing to say.]

Pressed on what the actual U.S. objectives are, he had this to say on CNN:

“I can’t answer that question… what I’ve seen is multiple end states that keep switching back and forth… I don’t see where it’s going and that’s the part that concerns me.”

Ten years at CNN, a doctorate in leadership, a career culminating in commanding U.S. Army Europe — and when asked the most basic question about a war, his answer is: I don’t know.

And this fucking guy, Sack of Sachs Shit, again and again, the Jew Jew Jew show.

After Pete Hegseth Claims Iranian Leadership Was ‘Cowering’,Political Leaders Appear At Massive Rally

Al Jazeera reported , “Thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets of the capital Tehran for a mass protest in support of Palestinians, as the death toll from United States and Israeli attacks on the country continues to mount,” adding,:

Reporting from the demonstration in Tehran, Al Jazeera’s Tohid Asadi said Iranians hoped to both show their support for Palestinians and express “defiance and resilience” amid the US-Israeli attacks.

“They think that by killing us, we will be afraid, that by dropping bombs on our heads, we will be afraid. No, we stand by our country,” a female demonstrator told Al Jazeera.

Another protester said Iranians have shown in their confrontation with the US and Israel that “the wall of oppression can be broken”.

“Today, with their presence in different squares, the people showed that it is possible to overcome injustice and break the wall of oppression,” he told Al Jazeera.

Iranian heroes versus . . . There you have the great American cook-off with the Department of War Crimes with Cap’n Crunch Hegseth….The Brief

• A government watchdog report reveals the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, spent $6.9 million on lobster tails during a single month in late 2025.
• The expenditure was part of a record-breaking $93.4 billion “use-it-or-lose-it” spree in September that included ribeye steaks, king crab, and luxury furniture.
• Critics and lawmakers are slamming the optics of the spending, contrasting the “surf and turf” budget with the administration’s public push for federal efficiency.

Beyond the $6.9 million for lobster, the Pentagon spent:

• $15.1 million on ribeye steaks
• $2 million on Alaskan king crab
• Nearly $140,000 on doughnuts
• Over $124,000 on ice cream machines

High-end non-food items were also on the list, including:

• $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for an Air Force residence
• $225 million in furniture, featuring individual chairs costing nearly $1,900
• $12,540 for fruit basket stands
• $5.3 million on Apple devices

Open the Books called the spending “completely unacceptable,” noting that the $93 billion total was the highest month-of-September spend since at least 2008.

RE: Trump SHOCKED As G7 Leaders Just PUBLICLY EXPOSE HIM

A Big, Beautiful Week of War: Trump’s Guide to Spiking Gas Prices and Hitting Schools Tee Ashby

Trump’s Big, Beautiful Week of War: A Scheduling Preview

In what can only be described as a social media teaser for Armageddon, President Trump has announced that the U.S. has penciled in some good old-fashioned bombing for sometime in the next seven days. Mark your calendars, Iran—the boss is planning to hit you “very hard” before brunch next Sunday.

The ‘Oops, Gas is Expensive’ Pivot

Of course, flexing on the Ayatollahs has a pesky side effect: it makes gas prices spike so hard your wallet starts hyperventilating. To fix this, Trump has graciously allowed the purchase of sanctioned Russian oil for the next 30 days. That’s right—we’re buying gas from the guy we’re supposedly sanctioning so we can afford to bomb the other guy. It’s fiscal responsibility, folks.

Navy Seals: Now Offering Convoy Services

Meanwhile, in the Strait of Hormuz—a waterway so narrow and important it makes the Suez Canal look like a garden hose—Iran keeps poking holes in oil tankers. Trump has promised to “guarantee the safety” of shipping vessels. Translation: if your oil tanker gets a flat tire out there, the U.S. Navy will come give you a jumpstart.

$4 Gas On Average is the New Normal

According to commodities gurus, Brent crude has jumped 40% since this whole thing started. Gas prices are now creeping toward that terrifying $4-per-gallon threshold nationwide average, which is the only number that actually makes voters care about foreign policy.

The Supreme Leader Is Having a Rough Week

Over at the Pentagon, Pentagon Pete dropped some juicy gossip: Iran’s new Supreme Leader is apparently “wounded, disfigured, and hiding.” While the Pentagon didn’t release photos (yet), sources say he currently looks like the final scene of *Scarface* and is probably not taking meetings.

Oops, We Hit a School (Again)

In a plot twist that surprises absolutely no one, the U.S. military is currently investigating itself for bombing an Iranian girls’ school. Early indications suggest that, yes, it was probably us. The investigation is expected to conclude that war is messy and that apologies will be issued if we run out of bombs, or not, depending on Trump’s morality or lack thereof …

+—+

Why do SNAP recipients vote for and back Trump?

• Belief in an “America First” agenda: Some low-income voters believe Trump’s policies will prioritize American citizens and improve their economic prospects, a core message of his campaign.
• Cultural and social identity: Shared cultural values, including religious beliefs, social issues (like abortion), or a sense of “perceived racial status,” can outweigh economic considerations for some voters. Research from the London School of Economics suggests a commitment to racial hierarchy or prejudice can blind some white voters to their own economic self-interest.
• Misunderstanding of policies: Some voters may not be aware of the specific details of Trump’s proposals or how they could impact social safety nets like SNAP. In some cases, Republicans have started pivoting to defending SNAP as key to helping the “vulnerable,” which may confuse the issue for some voters.
• Focus on private charity over government programs: Some Trump supporters believe that charity should be handled by the private sector rather than the government, aligning with a broader conservative ideology that favors limited government intervention in social issues.
• Skepticism of government efficiency/waste: Some voters are drawn to a platform of reducing government spending, believing that federal programs are inefficient or that their tax dollars are being misused (e.g., to support illegal immigrants), even if they personally rely on the benefits.
• Hope for personal economic improvement: Voters may hope to improve their economic situation to a point where they no longer need government assistance and thus vote for a candidate they believe will create jobs and lower costs.
• Geographic factors: Notably, 76% of counties that receive food stamps voted for President Trump, indicating a significant overlap between recipients and his voter base in specific geographic areas, often rural or in “red states”.

It’s the fucking Costco bill, the Amazon order, what’s still available at Walmart, and, gasoline, how much is that shit now? Do not believe this paragraph below! Support for him is high, high, high. Where’s VD Vance? Hmm, waiting in the wings?

“MAGA Republican” is a very specific designation. How many among the original MAGA base, at this stage within the turbulent Trump 2.0, would still relate to a label like this? And why do these analyses only discuss public opinion on the Iran strikes, while not focusing on how the masses will react to the repercussions from the Iran war? When Americans have been faced with the reality of how much the war will impact gas and food prices, support for the war drops, including among Trump voters.

If you don’t want most of the cunt AmeriKKKan white males in the Trump Brigade, as well as members of the uniformed and ununiformed mercenary corps, to be fried to a crisp, then go sign up and be all that you will never fucking be!

On September 20, 2025, in the Simon Pelé neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, children gathered at a sports complex. A local gang leader was handing out gifts — food, toys.

Then a quadcopter drone armed with an explosive device detonated overhead. Nine of the ten people killed were children aged three to twelve. One resident told investigators the blast “ripped both feet off a baby.”

The drone belonged to Erik Prince.

In January 1804, the West Indian island of Saint-Domingue became the world’s first black republic. The Africans toiling on the sugar-rich plantations overthrew their French masters and declared independence. The name Saint-Domingue was replaced by the aboriginal Taíno Indian word Haiti (meaning “mountainous land”), and the Haitian flag was created when the white band was ceremonially ripped from the French tricolour. Two hundred years on, Haiti is the only successful slave revolution in history. It was led by Toussaint Louverture, a Haitian former slave and emblem of slavery’s hoped-for abolition throughout the Americas.

This superb new history of Louverture and his legacy portrays Saint-Domingue as the most profitable slave colony the world had ever known. The glittering prosperity of Nantes and Bordeaux, Marseilles and Dieppe, derived from commerce with the Caribbean island in coffee, indigo, cocoa, and cotton; Saint- Domingue’s sugar plantations alone produced more cane than all the British West Indian islands together.

Whipped, chained, and branded with the French fleur-de-lis, the slaves took up arms under Louverture – in the words of Napoleon Bonaparte, a “gilded African”–and burned down plantation homes. The prospect of a free black state founded on the expulsion of its white community horrified the western world – this was half a century before the Civil War liberated the enslaved peoples of the United States.

Sudhir Hazareesingh, a Mauritian-born historian, conducted much of his research in the French archives, where so many revolutionary-era documents are preserved. He has scrutinised letters from Louverture to a vast number of French officials and revolutionary republican organisations. Black Spartacus is not a dry academic work, though; with rare narrative verve, Hazareesingh conjures his subject’s extraordinary life.

Born in the north of Saint-Domingue in 1743 as the grandson of a captured African chieftain, Louverture was taught to read and write by French Jesuit missionaries and from an early age was familiar with the polemics of French abolitionist the Abbé Raynal. Like the majority of Haitians today, Louverture was most likely an adept of vodou (or voodoo, in the old, discredited orthography). Vodou, a New World religion that married elements of Catholicism with African animism-mysticism, disconcerted and sometimes frightened the French.

Most historians agree that Saint-Domingue first rose up under a Jamaican vodou priest named Dutty “Zamba” Boukman. One August night in 1791, Boukman called on the spirits of ancestral Africa to avenge the French. Reportedly, Louverture was present at the ceremony, and within six weeks, the island’s rebel armies had begun the 12-year Louverturian struggle for freedom. What made the struggle possible?

Politically adroit, Louverture set the enemies of the French Republic against each other and spread rumour among them

The French Revolution of 1789-91 proclaimed equality among all men: slavery was an intolerable injury to human nature. Unsurprisingly, the planters of Saint-Domingue refused to relinquish their privileges. Politically adroit, Louverture set the enemies of the new French Republic against each other and spread misinformation and rumour among them. To his allies, he became the “Black Spartacus”, after the slave-gladiator who defied imperial Rome.

In concisely written pages, Hazareesingh rescues Louverture from the ideological and political aggrandisements that so often misrepresented him in the past. In 1936, in Harlem, Orson Welles staged an Afro-Caribbean Macbeth extravaganza in which Macduff was portrayed as an implausibly princely Louverture. Much later, in the 1970s, the Latino rock band Santana dedicated a frantic electric guitar workout to Louverture. Such tributes pale beside the work of the Marxist Trinidadian historian CLR James, whose pioneering 1938 account of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, elevated Louverture to near-saintly status but ignored his monarchist leanings and occasional dictatorial tendencies. Hazareesingh, by contrast, is careful to return Louverture to the primary sources.

In May 1801, having acted as Napoleon’s faithful envoy for 10 years, Louverture declared himself governor for life of Saint-Domingue and called for the execution of all known or merely suspected “enemies”. Napoleon promptly abandoned his support of Louverture and organised an expedition to destroy the “new Algiers in the Caribbean”. Louverture ought to be clapped in irons or perhaps exhibited in a cage in Paris at the newly opened Jardin des Plantes, Napoleon reckoned.

Abducted by Napoleon, Louverture was imprisoned for five months in a dungeon-fortress in the Jura mountains of France. News of his imprisonment reached William Wordsworth in Calais in the summer of 1802; moved by the fate of the “most unhappy” revolutionary who had placed his trust in the French Republic, Wordsworth addressed a famous sonnet to Louverture.

From his snow-bound captivity, Louverture pleaded with Napoleon for his release, but he was found dead in his cell on 7 April 1803: “the Black Napoleon”, observed a caustic Chateaubriand, “imitated and killed by the White Napoleon”. Louverture did not live to see the proclamation of the Haitian Republic the following year. He was 60. The man Hazareesingh calls the “first black superhero of the modern age” had, apparently, died of pneumonia.

Julian Ku is a professor of constitutional law at Hofstra University.

When Yale law professor Oona Hathaway calls U.S. strikes on Iran “blatantly illegal,” she speaks for a large segment of the international legal academy. For many scholars, the analysis is straightforward: The U.N. Charter prohibits the use of force except in self-defense against an armed attack or with Security Council authorization. Neither condition, they argue, is satisfied. Case closed.

There are plausible counterarguments.

Source: As Grasp on Power and Narrative Slips, West Re-Imagines Old Norms

The piece attempts to describe a new conception of moral equivalency for the post-GWOT age wherein international law is dismissed as an inflexibly rigid and obsolete antique. In its place, the ‘expert’ argues, should be built a system which adjusts for nuanced interpretations of more abstracted concepts like ‘self defense’. He absurdly argues that the US’s unilateral acts of aggression of the past several decades would not violate any ‘international law’ under the new framework, because they are justified for a variety of hair-splitting reasons. Russia’s “aggression” against Ukraine, naturally, falls under the previously understood framework as an illegal and criminal act of international law.

The article is chiefly an apologia for Trump’s criminal attacks against Iran. The author argues that many ‘counter-arguments’ can be made for why the US is justified in these attacks despite “international law”—or more specifically, UN Article 51—stating that only attacks in self-defense are deemed legitimate. Iran’s “militias” have been attacking US forces, the author concludes, which should be construed as US exercising self-defense.

International law governing the use of force has ossified into a formal binary. A strike is either lawful or unlawful.

Well, generally legal code is designed to be clear-cut for a reason: precisely so that duplicitous individuals like the author here do not have the power to corrupt the law with their “creative” re-interpretations.

But Ku goes on:

There is little space in the doctrine to distinguish among profoundly different uses of force. Under a strict reading, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a limited U.S. strike aimed at deterring Syria’s use of chemical weapons are both illegal. NATO’s intervention in Kosovo — undertaken to halt ethnic cleansing — is likewise condemned as a Charter violation. Meanwhile, the Charter has strikingly little to say about catastrophic internal wars in Sudan or Myanmar. And its application to a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan would turn on technical questions of recognition and statehood that might even favor China’s aggression.

Note his conveniently arbitrary recharacterizations of events: NATO’s barbaric attacks against Serbia’s civilian population are styled “intervention”; China’s hypothetical retaking of Taiwan is “invasion”. Russia’s actions in Ukraine bear the regime media style-guide issued stenographic qualifier of “full-scale” invasion, while the US’s actions in Syria are “limited”. Convenient cherry-picking leaves out the “limited” Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya operations, for some reason.

The problem is not that governments ignore international law. It is that international lawyers have too often retreated into a rigid formalism that refuses to grapple with moral and strategic differences everyone else can see.

But our moral authority here believes that he alone bears peremptory judgment on these matters. In such a deluded propagandist’s mind, Israel’s horrific post-October 7 genocide of Gaza would be classified as an act of “defense” because it was responding to Hamas’s laughably tiny operation. But Hamas’s operation itself—surprise, surprise—would not fall under “self-defense” despite years of unjustified Israeli aggression against Palestine. These are the types of heinously arbitrary moral equivalence games imperial stooges like the author play to manufacture the consensus necessary for the Empire’s continued barbarism around the globe.

The problem with such “stretching” of definitions is that it allows you to effectively sell any justification at all. The US’s illegal kidnapping of a sovereign nation’s legally elected sitting president in Venezuela? Justified under “self-defense” because some made-up drug cartel can be used to argue that Venezuela was indirectly “attacking” the US. In that way, any nation on earth can easily manufacture its own ad hoc justifications for war against neighbors. Maybe Ukraine and Taiwan were likewise smuggling drugs into Russia and China, etc.

Ku digs the hole deeper:

A more honest approach would acknowledge that the jus ad bellum — conditions under which states may resort to war — already rests on moral judgments. We distinguish instinctively between Russia’s attempt to erase Ukrainian sovereignty and other, more limited uses of force such as last summer’s U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. We distinguish between humanitarian interventions and wars of conquest, between defensive necessity and strategic opportunism. The law should be capable of articulating those differences rather than pretending they do not matter.

So, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was to “erase Ukrainian sovereignty”, but Israel’s invasion of Gaza—which openly revolves around erasing the Palestinian people’s culture, nationality, existence, etc., and outright ethnically cleansing them into a different land—would be totally justified under the author’s dishonest remaking of international law.

That’s not even to mention that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was officially done for the very same reasons as the US’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the author mentions: both were to neutralize an imminent threat. Except in Russia’s case, that threat was immediate and directly to the homeland, which actually borders the nation from which the threat is emanating. The US lies on the other side of the globe from Iran, and Iran verifiably does not possess weapons that can reach the US homeland. The author gets his equivalency completely backwards: it’s clear that Russia possesses the far more definitive case of jus ad bellum than the US, which is actually acting under the aegis of a different foreign power—in this case, Israel.

His article closes with a lament that the US and Israel’s illegal and unprovoked attacks against Iran “fall on the wrong side” of international law’s interpretative spectrum. Ku pleads for the system to be reworked such that it becomes easier to arbitrarily bend interpretations and redefine long-established norms so that the US and Israel’s criminality can continue getting rubber-stamped, while the lawful actions of their enemies are blanketly condemned as “illegal”:

The U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran arguably falls on the wrong side of the Charter’s traditional interpretation. But if that conclusion leaves the law unable to differentiate meaningfully between the Ukraine and Iran conflicts, the problem runs deeper than any single episode.

International law’s authority ultimately depends on its ability to align legal judgment with widely shared moral intuitions about war and peace. If it cannot do that — if it insists on treating profoundly different conflicts as doctrinally interchangeable — it will not meaningfully constrain powerful states. Nor will it command the moral clarity needed to condemn genuine aggression when it occurs.

This kind of thinking has become emblematic of the recent trend in the West to increasingly bastardize the ‘rule of law’ or reinterpret key civil understandings of norms to favor the imperial expression.

The EU, for instance, is allegedly floating a new initiative to establish a “multi-tier” system for EU membership, which would administratively erode the so-called “democratic” nature of the bloc by allowing different countries to operate at different membership levels:

The Federalist Society Ku is happy to speak at.