The case of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year old who allegedly assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the streets of Manhattan, has become a major public issue in the United States. While many details remain to be explained, the response from different layers of society raises fundamental class questions.
Purge at the Pentagon! Reuters reports that the incoming Trump administration is drawing up a list of generals to be fired. These are generals associated with former Chairman of the JCS Mark Milley and anyone else branded with a scarlet “W” for woke. The current Chairman, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, may also be fired, as some within the Trump camp suspect he may have been a DEI hire.
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As Army officer Paul Yingling famously wrote (“A Failure in Generalship”), a private is severely punished for losing a rifle but generals get promoted for losing wars. I doubt this is going to change. Instead, under Trump it appears the firing of generals is another leg of his vengeance tour, a purge of those who are perceived as disloyal.
A journalist reportedly working with CBS News has lit himself on fire to protest the biased US media coverage of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza which has killed tens of thousands of people including women and children.
…We can expect more of this when the war against the “deep state” begins in earnest. According to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), there is a whole cabal determined to undermine American security, a “Uniparty” of elites made up of “neoconservatives on the right” and “liberal globalists on the left” who are not true Americans and therefore do not have the true interests of America at heart. Can such “anti-American” behavior be criminalized? It has in the past and can be again.
So, the Trump administration will have many avenues to persecute its enemies, real and perceived. Think of all the laws now on the books that give the federal government enormous power to surveil people for possible links to terrorism, a dangerously flexible term, not to mention all the usual opportunities to investigate people for alleged tax evasion or violation of foreign agent registration laws. The IRS under both parties has occasionally looked at depriving think tanks of their tax-exempt status because they espouse policies that align with the views of the political parties. What will happen to the think-tanker in a second Trump term who argues that the United States should ease pressure on China? Or the government official rash enough to commit such thoughts to official paper? It didn’t take more than that to ruin careers in the 1950s.
Their panic just shows how out of touch they are with the working class! As for Kagan, there’s so much more that I could say, but for now I’ll just roll my eyes! 🙄
Prefatory Note: A modified version of this interview conducted by Daniel Falcone, with a long introduction was published online in Truthout on October 29, 2023, The situation in Gaza and its increasingly regional implications grow more humanly distressing and politically menacing with each passing day. Israel has succeeded in influencing the Global West and its corporate main media platforms to accept two interpretations of events following the Oct 7 Hamas attack that are at best highly contentious and controversial and, in my understanding, deeply misleading and distorting: (1) that Hamas is nothing other than a group of terrorists engaged in barbaric crimes, and should be addressed in the same manner as ISIS and Al-Qaeda; (2) that it is legitimate in such a conflict to override normal rules of international law, even to the extent of engaging in genocidal means of ethnic cleansing.
The Biden administration thought the Palestine question could be downplayed in pursuit of other objectives. And here we are.
Twenty-six. That is the number of times Wadea Al Fayoume, a Palestinian American child living in the Chicago area, was stabbed in a murderous rampage committed by his landlord. The picture of Wadea in a birthday hat that has gone viral since the attack that killed him and severely injured his mother was taken eight days earlier, when he turned 6.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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