W. Niederhut

Hey, leave champagne out of this, Mathew. Is nothing sacred anymore? 🤥

Chris, I've been to the Isle of Skye, but not Lewis. Did you know that Donald Trump's mother, Mary McLeod, was from the Isle of Lewis, northwest of Skye?

Not true. I posted Andy Stewart's Scottish song about Trump's sexual assault history, didn't I? Donald, Where's Your Trousers? 🤥

Newsflash, Mathew. Dry your tears. My Falun Gong comment was topically related to Kirk's comment about The Epoch Times.

Perhaps our transcontinental friend, Chris Barnard, is a member of the Falun Gong. 🤥

Chris, There's a difference between dissent, per se, and toxic disinformation which damages the public health and welfare. Can you give us any examples of JFK "welcoming" hate speech or deleterious medical disinformation? As for censorship, it has already been pervasive in U.S. society for decades. Just look at the 59-year censorship of the truth about the CIA/Joint Chiefs' conspiracy to murder President Kennedy!

Nice try, Mathew, but no cigar. I mentioned the targeting of Mexicans, et.al., only in the context of contemporary stochastic terrorism in Trump's MAGA-verse-- as in the case of the Trump/Fox inspired El Paso Walmart Massacre of Mexican Americans. I don't believe the targeting of any ethnic/cultural/religious/political group by demagogic stochastic terrorists is acceptable.

Yes, but in those totalitarian police states resistance was often futile. Solzhenitsyn described some rare instances of violent revolts in the Gulag Archipelago, but they were brutally repressed. So, in general, the issue of ethically appropriate "censorship" of incitement of violence hinges on the nature of the censors and the targets of violence. If an American demagogue is inciting violence against people who are black, Hispanic, Muslim, gay, liberal, etc., I believe that such stochastic terrorism should be censored. In other words, I believe Elon Musk is a horse's ass.

Yes, it is galling to read Michael Griffith's bogus sub-title on this thread, especially since the general public FINALLY got the definitive story about JFK and Vietnam in JFK-- Destiny Betrayed, after 58 years of mainstream media BS by Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Ken Burns, et.al.

I'm in favor of censoring; 1) False advertising. 2) Disinformation/advertising that damages the public health. 3) The incitement of violence against the citizenry, government, and/or law enforcement.

JFK Had Ordered Full Withdrawal from Vietnam: Solid Evidence - WhoWhatWhy by James K. Galbraith September 26, 2017

Mathew, You really need to educate yourself. Since you dodged the Congressional J6 hearings in 2022, I'm posting Congressman Adam Schiff's historic closing statement from June 21, 2022 for your edification. This is a rare example of high quality statesmanship in the 21st century U.S. Congress. Another bona fide statesman, IMO, is Rep. Jamie Raskin. Listen and learn.

Jeff, Putin and Gerasimov (and longtime Kremlin employee Paul Manafort) effectively used Trump to fracture U.S. society along racial and cultural fault lines after 2015. The fracture still hasn't healed. It was a clever Gerasimov strategy, and the KGB/FSB had targeted Trump for years as a potential Russian asset. Trump's longtime Russian mafia associate, Felix Sater, bragged in 2015 that Putin intended to put Trump in the White House. And, yes, the Russian military hacked U.S. voter registration databases in 2016-- a subject you assiduously avoid mentioning. Trump was the American Yanukovych. Putin's Trump strategy paid off in spades. Trump actively undermined U.S. NATO relations, undermined U.S. sanctions in response to the annexation of Crimea, and even threatened to withhold U.S. military aid to Ukraine, while trying to extort political favors from Zelensky.

This post is a good example of ad hominem garbage. Instead of discussing the specific issues that I raised-- about Trump's pseudo populism, healthcare and tax policy, and Russia's multi-faceted interference in our 2016 election-- Ben and Mathew resort to inaccurate ad hominem slurs.

If I recall the details correctly, Fletcher Prouty and Peter Dale Scott were among the first analysts to recognize that NSAM 273 was, in fact, a significant policy reversal of NSAM 263. The gist of it was the NSAM 273 called for the U.S. to do whatever was necessary to defeat communism in Vietnam, whereas JFK and Galbraith had concluded that defeating Ho Chi Minh was up to the South Vietnamese. Just when the American public is finally learning the truth about LBJ's well-disguised reversal of JFK's Vietnam policy, we get another "academic" snow job on the subject. My hunch is that this new snow job will get ample coverage in the Mockingbird M$M.

Ben, You don't seem to understand the meaning of ad hominem arguments or "abusive" commentary. If you take the time to read my detailed response your post, (and John's concurrence) you will learn that I specifically addressed the issues that you and John raised. I went to considerable lengths to address the erroneous claim that Trump is a populist, and the related claim that Democrats have abandoned the working class-- focusing, in particular, on the issues of health care and tax policy. I also referenced the facts about Russia's multi-faceted interference in our 2016 election. Russia's social media t-r-o-l-l-i-n-g was only one facet of the GRU cyber warfare on behalf of Trump and the right wing Trump cult.

John, You're a sharp guy, but you don't really understand American political history very well. And following Ben Cole on the subject brings to mind the old adage, "When the blind lead the blind, they both fall into the ditch." The truth is that Donald Trump was always a pseudo-populist-- a closet plutocrat. He beguiled poor whites in the U.S. by appealing to their bigotry and fear of immigrants. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump fraudulently sold himself to working class whites as a populist. It was a scam, like everything Donald Trump has ever done in his career as a snake oil salesman. He was, in reality, a plutocratic, Koch brother's Trojan Horse in the guise of a populist-- as some of us recognized at the time. Case in point. Trump repeatedly claimed in 2016 that he had "a terrific healthcare plan" for America, to replace Obamacare, that would "cover everyone and cost less." At the time, as a physician, I thought Trump was planning a single-payer system that would remove corporate insurance profiteers from the equation. Fast forward to March of 2017. Trump never had a healthcare plan. He lied bigly. Instead, he endorsed Paul Ryan's "no care" plan to gut Obamacare and cut funding for Medicare and Medicaid-- with no replacement plan! In effect, millions of working class Americans would have lost their health insurance under the Trump/Ryan No Care Plan. I was truly shocked in March of 2017 to realize that Trump had been telling a bald-faced lie in 2016 about having a "terrific healthcare plan." Trump's signature legislative "achievement" in 2017, with full control of a Republican Congress, was to pass a massive tax cut for billionaires and corporations, which included a rider to sabotage America's Obamacare system by abolishing the individual mandate. A policy disaster. The December 2017 bill also slashed funding for healthcare for the poor-- the Kennedy Medicare and Medicaid programs! The end result is that Trump and the Republican plutocrats added $8 trillion dollars to the U.S. debt in just 4 years-- just as Bush and Cheney had doubled the national debt from 2001-09 with their tax cuts for the wealthy (in 2001 and 2003.) As for Jeff Carter's Russia blurb, let's recall that Russian military intelligence meddling on behalf of Trump in the 2016 U.S. election went far beyond fake social media accounts by Russian xxxxx farms. It also involved systematic hacking of voter registration databases in multiple U.S. states, and the hacking and selective leaking of DNC and U.S. State Department Emails. Here's the definitive Republican-controlled U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 election on behalf of Putin's puppet, Donald Trump. I have urged Ben Cole and Mathew Koch to read this, without success. Publications | Intelligence Committee (senate.gov)

Winston Churchill discussed ordering nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union in 1951 | Daily Mail Online

I see, Mathew. So, you still haven't read the Mueller Report or the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian interference in our 2016 election, eh? Incidentally, that Senate Intel Committee was chaired by Trump ally, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC.) Nor have you studied the facts uncovered by the 2022 Congressional J6 Committee investigation.

I read somewhere that Churchill also wanted to nuke the Soviet Union after WWII. Can't recall the source.

Doug, I hope you're right about this one, because non-lawyer Jim Jordan, allegedly, plans to "investigate" the Biden documents case in the House Judiciary Committee. House Judiciary Committee launches probe into Biden’s handling of documents | The Hill

It's an interesting thread, and one that should provoke a lot of thought and critique about the course of the Cold War after WWII. Wallace was naively idealistic in the 1940s about Stalinism, but we can also speculate about how the post-WWII course of Soviet imperialism may have differed in the absence of Anglo-American Cold War hostility toward the Soviet Union. And let's be honest. The Anglo-American Cold Warriors-- including Churchill and the Wall Street lawyers who established the CIA-- were mainly concerned about controlling and exploiting the natural resources of the Third World (including those of Iran, Indonesia, Africa, and Latin America, et.al.) In the cases of Korea and Vietnam, did our military interventions against communism justify the eight million casualties we caused with our bombing campaigns, biological, and chemical weapons-- 3 million Koreans, 1 million Chinese, and 4 million Southeast Asians? Would the Korean Peninsula, like Vietnam, have eventually evolved into a prosperous economy, like that of Red China, in the absence of American military intervention? James DiEugenio has broached this subject in terms of the revised Domino Theory-- i.e., that people can now order Domino's Pizzas in Vietnam. "Not a Pax Americana imposed by American arms"-- Walter Lippman's American Century-- but as Henry Wallace said, "a century of the common man."

"Yes, we have no bananas," eh, Ben? The truth is that you and Mathew Koch didn't want to watch the proceedings of the historic, bipartisan Congressional J6 investigation of Trump's coup attempt, and neither of you ever recognized or understood the damning evidence presented under oath, by Cassidy Hutchinson, Cipollone, and other Trump staffers. That much has been quite clear from our daily discussions on the subject on the 56 Years thread. As for Jim Jordan, he was complicit in Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It would have been inappropriate for an accomplice in Trump's J6 crimes to participate in the investigation of those crimes-- which is why Jim Jordan's current role in "investigating" the J6 investigation is so absurd, as Adam Schiff stated yesterday in Congress.

Newsflash, Ben. The 2022 Congressional J6 Committee investigation was neither hyper-partisan, nor a gong show. But how could you know that? You never watched the proceedings, as we recommended. And I'll wager you haven't read the detailed Congressional J6 Report.

Well, I'm embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of Marie Muchmore until now. When I saw her name, I wondered at first if she was a dancer at Jack Ruby's Carousel Club. The name sounds like a character in one of Ian Fleming's old 007 novels.