2025 Is Off To A Wild Start

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The new year has kicked off with some truly bizarre and highly suspicious major news events. A US military veteran killed 14 people when he drove a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans early New Year’s Day and was then killed in a shootout with police. Hours later, another US military veteran reportedly blew himself up in a Tesla Cybertruck outside of the Trump International Hotel in Nevada.

Both men had worked at Fort Bragg (now called Fort Liberty), a large North Carolina military base which has become notorious for mysterious homicides, an epidemic of drug overdoses, and rampant child sex abuse. Both had also participated in the US occupation of Afghanistan, and both used the same app to rent their vehicles.

The New Orleans attacker Shamsud-Din Jabbar, pictured above, reportedly had an ISIS flag on his truck at the time of the incident. The Intercept has published an interesting report noting the high correlation between extremist crimes and past US military service.

One of the weirdest things about this case is the fact that a virulent Israel apologist named Jenny Taer was apparently allowed by the FBI to walk through Jabbar’s home and shoot footage for a New York Post report despite it being a crime scene in an active investigation. There Taer shows viewers Jabbar’s “bomb-making station”, along with multiple Qurans and Islamic literature. In her report the camera conspicuously pauses on a keffiyeh, a traditional Arab headdress which has become associated with support for Palestinian liberation.

I don’t pretend to know what’s going on with all this. All I know is that as the US prepares to inaugurate a new president whose cabinet has been packed full of Iran hawks, it’s probably a good idea to remain intensely skeptical of any and all narratives which might be used to manufacture consent for more aggression in the middle east.

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Another absolutely freakish story in the news today is the revelation from Axios that in recent weeks, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan presented President Biden with options for bombing Iranian nuclear facilities.

As it has now finally been accepted by the mainstream political/media class that the president’s cognitive abilities have been declining, the question obviously needs to be asked: why are they presenting a dementia patient with options for bombing Iran?

Like seriously what the hell is going on there? I mean, what if he’d said go ahead? Would they have done it? Would they have started a horrifying new war on the orders of a president whose brains are leaking out his ears? Did Sullivan just try to get a new war started in the final days of the Biden administration by exploiting the mental enfeeblement of a demented octogenarian? Why would you even do such a thing instead of letting the clock run out on the administration unless you were hoping you’d get the go ahead for airstrikes?

Anyway, it didn’t happen, so that’s good. But the fact that this idea was even floated under the current circumstances says so much about the kinds of people who are managing the US empire today.

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In other news, Trump supporters have been at each other’s throats as the Elon Musk techbro faction feuds with the white nationalist anti-immigrant faction over H-1B visas. Trump sided with Musk and declared that “We need a lot of people coming in” to the country, enraging his racist supporters who seriously believed their favorite oligarch was going to stop cheap immigrant labor from coming into the United States.

Yeah guys, big surprise there. I thought for sure the “we give billionaire corporations everything they want” party was going to take cheap immigrant labor away from the billionaire corporations this time.

When I tweeted about this earlier somebody asked me, “But after Bernie Sanders hasn’t it been the so-called left that’s been very open borders oriented? Many accusing others of being racist for not allowing cheap foreign labor or will this change now because Trump is for it?”

The Democratic Party supports immigration for the same reason the Trump does: it’s a cheap source of labor for their corporate owners. From the perspective of the authentic left the issue isn’t immigration in and of itself, it’s that it is always destructive and immoral to exploit the labor of people from impoverished countries at extortionate rates. This is true whether that exploitation is outsourced to other countries via globalization, or implemented at home via immigration.

Everyone loses under this model besides the capitalist class: both the foreign workers whose labor is being purchased at vastly reduced rates, and the workers at home whose labor is being undercut by this exploitation. The ones who win are those few who are reaping immense profits via the exploitation of foreign labor; they actually benefit from the impoverishment of the global south, and from ensuring that global wealth remains wildly unequal.

For the left the issue is the unjust exploitation of workers, while for the right the issue is not wanting a bunch of foreigners to come into the country. They both criticize the practice of giant corporations using H-1B visas to bring in droves of cheap labor, but for very different reasons. Rightists are fine with exploitation, they just find foreigners gross.

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I still get Israel supporters bleating “Release the hostages!” at me whenever I criticize the genocide in Gaza.

And it’s like, shut up, dipshit. Stop pretending to believe this has anything to do with hostages. Netanyahu has been actively sabotaging a hostage deal since this whole thing began and openly proclaiming that the killing will continue even after every hostage is freed. This has been public knowledge for a very long time.

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Capitalism isn’t the status quo because it’s the best system, it’s the status quo because it’s the easiest system to consolidate power around at this point in history. There’s enough convergence of interests at high levels for disparate factions to back the current model.

That can all change on a dime once the pitchforks and guillotines come out. Real power lies in the hands of the masses, and once enough of us get fed up with the status quo there won’t be anyone dumb enough to stand against us. And from there, creating a better system and a better world becomes very possible.

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Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army (Public Domain).