President Richard Nixon had his infamous “Enemies List.” However, as pointed out by veterans of the Watergate scandal, Nixon never went as far as Donald Trump in subpoenaing the communications of members of the press and Democratic members of Congress. The Trump Justice Department, through Attorneys General Jeff Session and William Barr and acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, sought and received the private communications of reporters for CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, as well as the editor of WayneMadsenReport.com. Also sought were the emails and phone records of then-White House Counsel Don McGahn and his wife, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Intelligence Committee member Eric Swalwell (D-CA). In addition, before it decided to drop the subpoena, the Biden Justice Department sought the identities of the on-line readers of a particular February USA Today story on the killing of two FBI agents in Florida by a child pornography suspect. Continue reading →
As Peru’s Marxist presumptive president-elect, Pedro Castillo, stands on the verge of being named certified as the official victor of the president election, he is heading for a showdown with the interventionist Samantha Power, the former US ambassador to the United Nations under Barack Obama. While at the UN, Power was a major proponent of U.S. military intervention in the Syrian, Yemeni, and Libyan civil wars. Continue reading →
For those who believe that freedom of the press exists in the United States, here’s a news bulletin: Those days are long over!
The United States, Russia, Britain, and other countries are waging a war that pits think tank against think tank and criminalizes ideas and opinions. That war heated up on April 15 when the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed financial sanctions on the Moscow-based think tank, Strategic Culture Foundation (SCF), for whom I have written for over ten years. OFAC alleged, without much in the way of any hard evidence, that SCF was an arm of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR. Treasury’s sanctions came after a 2020 State Department Global Engagement Center (GEC) report that illustrated the opinions being expressed by SCF and other Russian think tanks and news organizations as similar to Covid-19 virus microbes. In any event, I’ve been compared to worse than a Covid microbe. Continue reading →
One major unsettling similarity between the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler and the Republican Party of Donald Trump is that both would resist an independent investigation of the attacks on the respective legislatures of the two nations: the February 27, 1933, Reichstag Fire in Berlin and the January 6, 2021, storming by Trump loyalists of the U.S. Capitol complex. Hitler and his Nazis falsely claimed the Reichstag arson was carried out by a mentally deranged Dutch Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, who was allegedly aided by German Communists. In the case of the U.S. Capitol attack, several far-right Republicans have claimed the attack was actually carried out by members of “antifa” (an acronym for “anti-fascist”) and Black Lives Matter (BLM). Using Nazi propaganda from 1933, some Republicans also falsely claim that BLM is a “communist” organization. Continue reading →
Across the United States, the Republican Party, through bills passed in state legislatures and signed by GOP governors, is adopting one of the central platforms of fascism, namely, the elimination of the powers of state officials, including secretaries of state, governors, and others. Continue reading →
Had the coup plotters of January 6, 2021, been successful, today the United States would have been under the rule of dictator Donald Trump. The traitorous retired General Michael Flynn would be vice president and be granted by Trump with unlimited powers to order arrests, seize private property, and rule states and cities by decree. Political purges of the armed forces, state and local governments, the courts, and corporations would be de rigueur. Continue reading →
Florida suffers from a problem greater than its infestation of Burmese pythons and bi-annual plague of love bugs. Right-wing Republican Cuban-Americans, whose Fulgencio Batista-supporting parents and grandparents were welcomed with open arms by the Central Intelligence Agency, have found the perfect home in the fascist Republican Party and, by default, Florida political power. Continue reading →
The sooner the nations of the world awake to the threat posed by fascists abusing electoral systems to gain dictatorial power, the possibility of a repeat of the fascist rise to power during the 1920s and 1930s can be snuffed out.
With the financial support of Mercer Family Foundation far-right heiress financier Rebekah Mercer, exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, U.S.-based Falun Gong cult leader Li Hongzhi, and the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, which is associated with the fascist Opus Dei Roman Catholic sect, Donald Trump’s sporadic political adviser, Steve Bannon, has implemented a multi-pronged approach to enabling fascist control of governments around the world. Bannon’s ideological approach to furthering fascism globally can be called “Bannonism.” Continue reading →
There are some key facts about the events of January 6, 2021, that must be made crystal clear as the fascist Republican Party embarks on a campaign of gaslighting America about the Donald Trump coup attempt against the government of the United States. Fascists are anathema to the historical record and attempts by Trump operatives and propagandists, particularly Steve Bannon, Dinesh D’Souza, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and others, to revise history are in full swing. On the eve of the annual neo-fascist love fest, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference, held this year in Orlando, irrefutable facts must be laid on the table. Continue reading →
The history of modern political era coups and coup plots provides a great deal of insight in forming a conclusion that what occurred at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was no mere “riot” or protest “gone wild.” Recent disclosures in federal charging documents of insurrection participants and leaders, as well as the feeble attempt by the Capitol’s three top law enforcement officials—who either resigned or were fired after the mêlée—to blame others for the lack of security all point to a coordinated operation involving the Trump White House, the political leadership of the Pentagon, far right extremist groups, and last, but not least, GOP congressional insiders, including senators and U.S. representatives and their staffs. Continue reading →
Who is at fault for the succession of major hacking events in the United States? “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
The U.S. Congress wants answers on what has been apparent foot-dragging by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in answering congressional questions about NSA forcing the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) into incorporating a NSA-engineered back door into the Dual_EC_DRBG encryption algorithm standard developed for use in federal government computer systems and networks. On January 28, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Cory Booker of New Jersey, along with eight of their Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives—Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, Ted Lieu of California, Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, Bill Foster of Illinois, Suzan DelBene of Washington, Yvette Clarke of New York, and Anna Eshoo of California—sent a letter to NSA director General Paul Nakasone requesting information on the forced introduction by NSA of the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm into the products of Juniper Networks that permitted a massive breach of its customers’ systems in 2015, five years before a similar breach occurred with the products of SolarWinds, another vendor reliant on the same NSA-manipulated encryption algorithm. Continue reading →
We should remain vigilant against the far-right, which continues to misappropriate the historical and traditional names of the parties of labor, the popular masses, equality, and progressivism
From 1920 to 1945, the formal name of the German Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, abbreviated NSDAP in German. Despite its name, there was nothing even remotely “socialist” or “workers” related about the Nazi Party. Its very foundation was to combat the influence of labor unions, particularly those closely-linked to the Socialists or Communists. Socialist ideology, whether it was of the social democratic or Marxist -Leninist version, was anathema to Nazi policy. Therefore, it was the height of hypocrisy that the Nazis, with their financial backing from Germany’s leading industrialists—Krupp, Thyssen, and Opel, to name a few—would appropriate the terms socialist and workers for their own designs. When “socialist” was added to the “National German Workers’ Party” in 1920, in a jaded attempt to appeal to lower middle class left-wing laborers, Adolf Hitler vehemently objected. The term “socialist” within the official name of the Nazi Party was more of a mockery of socialism than anything else. Continue reading →
The devastation left by the Trump administration makes it nearly impossible for the Biden State Department to achieve a pre-Trump status quo ante.
It might have come as a shock to the old Obama administration global interventionists who have landed top foreign policy positions in the Biden administration that the world has moved on from 2016. Whether it likes it or not, the Biden foreign policy team is dealing with a world that no longer reacts to every move made in Washington, DC. In fact, the U.S. capital city is now viewed as a place where a far-right insurrection nearly toppled constitutional rule and imposed a dictatorial regime rife with neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, private militias, and other societal nasties. So much for lectures from U.S. ambassadors about the need to maintain a civil society. Continue reading →
For many of the far-right insurrectionists who stormed and briefly occupied the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the day represented only their first battle in what they believe will be their successful quest of bringing down the U.S. government and replacing it with a nightmare dictatorship that would mix extreme libertarianism with white supremacy as its core doctrine. Facilitating this sedition is the Republican Party, which, in its present incarnation, has shown itself to be incapable of governing and a threat to the security, health, and welfare of the United States and its people. Continue reading →
Governments that rely on support from a minority of their nation’s population are doomed to fail.
The Republican Party of the United States has reconstructed itself as the party of Donald Trump and, as such, has become no different than the minority rule political parties of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. Continue reading →
Mainly as the result of the Trump administration’s U.S.-centric view of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American media has largely ignored the dire effects the disease has had in other countries, particularly developing nations in Africa and Asia. WMR has received a first-hand report of the virus taking the lives of a number of political leaders in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and other countries. South Africa’s dynamic Minister of the Presidency, Jackson Mthembu was the latest to fall victim to the virus. Mthembu was a stalwart of the governing African National Congress (ANC) who began fighting against the apartheid regime in the 1970s. Mthembu became ill from the virus on January 11 and he died on January 21, ten days later. A more dangerous mutation of COVID-19 has been discovered in South Africa. However, it is not known if that was what took Mthembu’s life. Continue reading →
Lying at the heart of the increasingly discredited ideology of Trumpism is the bankrupt politics of libertarianism. Like the old joke about the dog chasing the car and finally catching up with it, the seething crew of armed and deranged Donald Trump supporters who managed to temporarily seize control of the upper and lower chambers of the U.S. Congress on January 6 were unsure of what to do with their briefly captured prize. Some decided to rifle through Senate desks in search of some holy grail of secret documents. Others were content with snatching laptop computers from offices. A few felt encumbered to aim canisters of destructive caustic bear spray at priceless oil paintings of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. Continue reading →
America is just starting to discover that it came within a hair’s breadth of witnessing its Constitution upended and a fascist dictatorship declared by Donald Trump as a result of the January 6 insurrection targeting the U.S. Capitol. Indeed, it is all but certain that Trump was borrowing a page from Adolf Hitler’s playbook in ordering Brown Shirts to set fire to the Reichstag in Berlin in 1933 and blaming the arson attack on “Communists” as a reason to suspend the democratic guarantees contained in the Weimar Constitution. According to those few witnesses to Trump’s expletive-laden rants in the Oval Office, the would-be dictator continues to blame the non-existent “antifa” for the attack on the Capitol. Bogus “antifa” attackers in 2021 are as much a propaganda device for Trump as fake “Communists” were for Hitler in 1933. Continue reading →
Founded in 1844, the American “Know Nothing Party,” officially known as the Native American Party—not to be confused with the indigenous native Americans—rallied around the causes of anti-immigration, xenophobia, and anti-Catholicism. Its name derived from the party’s secretive membership list and political operations. When non-members of the party queried a member about specific details of the organization, they were to reply, “I know nothing.” Continue reading →
On early Christmas morning a vehicle bomb exploded in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. The target was the AT&T metropolitan area network hub “Batman” building, a 33-story structure—the tallest building in Tennessee—which resembles the fictional cape crusader’s cowl. The bomber turned out to be a 63-year-old white man. Anthony Quinn Warren, who blew himself up in the terrorist attack, apparently subscribed to the babble from the pro-Donald Trump “Qanon” group of far-right conspiracy advocates who believe that Fifth Generation (5G) wireless communications networks are linked to both the COVID pandemic and electronic surveillance. Continue reading →
The most tarnished legacy of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will be his introduction to U.S. foreign policy the racist dogma of the Christian Reconstructionist/Dominionist Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which, along with its sister Presbyterian denominations – the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARPC) and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) – are rife with warnings of a “yellow peril” endangering Western Christian “civilization.” Continue reading →
America’s first “Beer Hall Putsch” meeting may have been as early as July 17, 2016
Posted on June 21, 2021 by Wayne Madsen
On the evening of July 17, 2016, as delegates, media, and VIPs gathered for a Republican National Convention eve “Welcome to Cleveland” bash at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the shore of Lake Erie, Tucker Carlson, who is increasingly using his Fox News program to tout lunatic conspiracy theories, hosted a hush-hush strictly invitation-only dinner meeting at the downtown Hilton Hotel. Carlson recently brandished a new bit of lunacy by stating that this year’s January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was planned and carried out by the FBI. Continue reading →