we live in age of great moral panics about things that don’t matter and zero moral outrage over some of the most egregious societal sins we’ve ever seen

Ukraine tries really hard to pretend it's ancient. And the Western media plays along like it's totally normal. Kievan Rus? Obviously Ukrainian. The Cossacks? Ukrainian. The Orthodox Church? Also Ukrainian, apparently. At this point, if they could claim the dinosaurs, they would. But if you actually go to the archives – the real ones, not the Wikipedia summary backed by the CIA – the story looks very different. Modern Ukrainian identity has a mom, a dad, and a whole extended family of geopolitical interests behind it. And they left receipts. Actual financial records, diplomatic correspondence, military diaries, and constitutional documents. The kind of stuff that doesn't care about your feelings. So let's talk about where Ukrainian national identity actually comes from. Because the real story is way more interesting than what you've been told. 🧵 #1

An intellectual pause that is difficult to untangle in public discourse Part of it is simply an epistemic blindspot: a vast number of commentators lack class analysis in their mental repertoire, leaving them unable to see the world through anything other than state-centric lenses. But another, more insidious part is a form of moral hardening and secularized eschatology. It functions simiar to the post-modern identitarianism of the liberal left. It is deeply ironic, because this specific social mechanic—with its rigid categories of the clean and the unclean, of total veneration and total demonization—is rooted in US puritanical and Christian political traditions. These social dynamics are devastating to analysis. And yet the irony is that in every one of these countries—in Iran, in China, in Russia,…etc.—there are analysts, journalists, and intellectuals who do analyze social classes. They study the factions within the ruling elite. They trace which fractions are integrated into which markets, which are aligned with the West, which are pushing for autonomy. This work exists. But somehow, in the English‑language multipolar media space, it becomes increasingly difficult to simply point out these same things without being called a defeatist. At bottom, this points us to the same problem as always. How difficult it is to organize. How tempting the shortcuts are. How much easier it is to attach your hopes to a distant state than to build something in your own. Most dangerously, this blind spot protects the empire. The US-led security, financial, and intelligence establishment knows or at least observes how the world order is shifting. They are assessing these foreign ruling elites and adapting their strategies of infrastructural capture and denial accordingly. And the fact that this awareness is so absent from the spaces that should be most attentive to it is, I think, a strategic vulnerability of the highest order. The moment anyone points out that the empire is not stupid—one is accused of attributing omnipotence to it, and of being a defeatist. But seeing and understanding the imperialist structure of the world is simply the precondition for any serious strategy. Ultimately, the challenge should not be to deny its adaptive capacity. The challenge should be to meet it with a better analysis, a clearer assessment, and a more honest engagement with the actual dynamics of class and power in the world we actually inhabit.

Good take by @adam_tooze in the FT. I think a good analogy to use is this: imagine Saudi Arabia offered to sell their oil wells at 80% off, and you could somehow ship them home. You'd call any leader who refused that deal a complete fool. Well that's pretty much what China is doing with solar panels. That's what people fail to understand: there's such intense competition and so much supply in China - the so-called "involution" phenomenon - that it's YOU, as a customer, who's getting subsidized when you buy solar panels. This is literally China paying your energy bill. And it's like oil wells because, once it's installed, there's no dependency. You buy it once, and for three decades (the average lifespan of a solar panel) you're extracting energy from your own sun, just like an oil well extracts from your own ground. It's one of the most sovereign energy asset you can buy. The rational response when you see this is to buy as many as you can, as fast as you can. All the more when you're Europe and you have massive energy supply problems (and no solar industry of your own to protect). But no, we scream "overcapacity" and put up tariffs. We're so deep into geopolitical brainworms that we can't recognize the best deal in the history of energy. Src for the article: ft.com/content/b6cac184-75a4…

Y’all are on an endless loop of reinfections with a neuroinvasive virus proven to damage the area of the brain responsible for empathy and critical thinking, so good luck with that.

Here is a quick hypothetical question for you. A friend calls you: "So there's this guy in my neighborhood. He keeps insulting me in public, slapped me around a few times, and told everyone he might take my garage. Last month he tried to annex my neighbor's yard. He now wants me to join his "club" where I can only buy groceries from his store, even if the shop across the street sells the same thing for half the price. He named the club "The I Want to Dominate This Block Association." I hate this guy and desperately want to get away from him... Should I join the club?" Well, your friend pretty much described the EU joining America's "Pax Silica" - which they apparently just committed to (x.com/BertuzLuca/status/2062…) Starting with the name. Typically, when great powers set up an initiative that is imperialistic in nature, they pick a name that says the opposite: “alliance for progress,” “partnership for peace,” etc. This time, evidently in no mood for euphemism, the US straight up called their initiative the most imperialistic name conceivable, directly inspired by the Roman Empire (Pax Romana). Literally the equivalent of naming your neighborhood club "The I Want to Dominate This Block Association." And it's exactly what it, quite explicitly, sets out to do. It's written right on the tin (state.gov/pax-silica): countries sign up, align their supply chains with Washington, shut out Chinese products - however good or cheap - and buy American. The neighborhood bully grocery store clause, basically, except it's for the most strategic technology of the century: the entire AI stack. Worse still, as I explain in my article, not only is the EU voluntarily locking itself into even further dependency on the very power it keeps saying it needs to break free from, but it's doing so in a way that will make it all the more difficult for them to compete in the layer of AI that will matter most - the application layer, where the actual value of AI will get built. That’s the fundamental con behind “Pax Silica”: on the one hand the declaration they wrote (state.gov/pax-silica) affirms that “the 21st century will run on compute” just like “the 20th century ran on oil and steel,” yet on the other hand they’re building a system that makes that very resource scarcer and more expensive for every member of the club - everyone, that is, except for themselves who get to sell it. On top of ensuring, if we keep using their "oil and steel" analogy, that members of the club don’t drill their own oil wells or build their own steel mills. In short Pax Silica is not a wall against China, it's really a cage to keep America's "partners" in - dependent on American tech, and unable to build their own. To understand the full argument and how Europe is making - yet again - another massive strategic mistake that will set it back immensely for the most consequential technology of the future, it's all in my latest article titled "The Pax Silica Con": open.substack.com/pub/arnaud…

Not exactly true. Elon Musk did not actually dismantle USAID, the agency which allegedly supports some of the poorest countries in the world. The program was absolutely not dismantled. The 20 billion dollar annual funding for USAID still flows freely out of American taxpayers' pockets, with the only difference being that the program now operates under a brand new name, a highly sanitized new office, and the disbursement channels for the funds are heavily restructured. However, the ruthless imperial and operational doctrine of the program remains entirely intact. Understand that this symbolic change of name and account details was absolutely necessary because the old USAID infrastructure has been repeatedly exposed globally not as a charitable humanitarian organization, but as a heavily weaponized tool used by Washington to project soft-power imperialism across the Global South. Indeed, through the old USAID model, the CIA maliciously sent young Latin American travelers to Cuba under the deceptive guise of civic health and HIV prevention programs to covertly recruit political activists in a desperate effort to topple the sovereign communist government. USAID extensively funded anti-government NGOs, fake human rights organizations, and compromised media outlets to actively undermine the administration of Hugo Chavez and later Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Furthermore, they heavily financed the structural adjustment propaganda in Africa that forced the massive privatization of state assets, they funneled millions of dollars into right-wing opposition groups in Bolivia to facilitate the 2019 coup against Evo Morales, and they actively bankrolled subversive civil society groups in Nicaragua to orchestrate violent, coordinated regime change campaigns against Daniel Ortega. So, since the true nature of the program was completely exposed to the global public, it was politically necessary to change the name to preserve the fraudulent myth of America as a benevolent, shining city on a hill sending selfless foreign aid to poor nations. Also, its total integration directly into the US State Department allows American imperialism to pivot aggressively toward modern technological warfare. Notice that ever since the program was allegedly "scrapped", the American government has been aggressively negotiating bilateral health and infrastructure programs with sovereign countries in Africa and Latin America. They are actively forcing these desperate nations to hand over their citizens' highly sensitive genomic and biometric health data, and demanding they grant exclusive, uncontested mining rights to their rich mineral fields in exchange for tens of billions of dollars in direct health and structural funding. The mass harvesting of this localized health data is absolutely necessary for the empire to train its predictive AI models, to develop advanced bioweapons, and to build the global biometric surveillance grids required to win the technological arms race against China. Also, the massive Silicon Valley research labs, the gigawatt-scale AI data centers, the modern military equipment, the autonomous drone swarms, and the F-35 stealth fighter jets all desperately need key critical minerals like raw lithium, cobalt, neodymium, gallium, germanium, antimony, and weapons-grade uranium. It is completely clear now that these massive, extortionate mineral and biometric data deals would be absolutely impossible for the old, decentralized NGO model to secure for the empire. The exact same strategic case can be made for the US government unilaterally pulling out of the World Health Organization. The empire is merely shedding off multilateral diplomatic institutions they know they can no longer fully control or manipulate. Instead, they are choosing to aggressively channel their massive resources strictly into the bilateral strong-arming, technological extraction, and resource hoarding that genuinely matters to remain globally dominant in this newly emerging multipolar world.

It always astonishes me how there is virtually ZERO public debate - or even public awareness - in Europe about the decisions that will most shape ordinary people's lives. These days, the EU is drafting a new anti-China legal framework where - quite literally - the more affordable and competitive Chinese products are, the more illegal they'd become. You'd think EU citizens would want to be informed about such things - as it couldn't be more consequential for their prosperity. Yet I bet virtually no EU citizen is even aware of it, beyond a vague sense that there is some sort of trade dispute going on. So what's going on exactly? It all centers around a new legal instrument the EU is drafting called the "overcapacity instrument" (euobserver.com/218003/china-…). First of all, the very notion of "overcapacity" is pretty ridiculous to begin with, especially the way it's being defined by the EU, as it basically means being competitive enough to export. By this definition of "overcapacity," pretty much every European industry that's ever run a trade surplus - German cars, French wine, Italian fashion - has been guilty of "overcapacity." I'm not even exaggerating: if you read this study by the EU Parliament on "Industrial overcapacities, with a focus on China" (europarl.europa.eu/RegData/e…), they define "overcapacity" as building more capacity than your domestic market can absorb. So the moment you build capacity to export abroad, you're in "overcapacity." Utterly ridiculous. And what this "overcapacity instrument" is about is creating a permanent legal mechanism for the EU to block Chinese competition across whole sectors of the economy, if they happen to be in "overcapacity." In effect, this means that if China is competitive globally in a given sector in such a way that it exports a lot, that's proof of overcapacity, and legally it'd mean that the entire sector can be restricted from the EU market. Which means it really, factually, is a legal framework where the more affordable and competitive your products are, the more illegal they become. Which is a CRAZY economic concept! 🤦‍♂️ Please note that it's different from the anti-subsidy legal instrument, which the EU has already put in place in 2023 (the "Foreign Subsidies Regulation": competition-policy.ec.europa…). This "overcapacity instrument" would be above and beyond this: it wouldn't even matter if a particular sector was subsidized by the Chinese government or not, the mere fact of its competitiveness in exports would be grounds for restrictions in the EU. It doesn't take a genius to understand how badly this could impact everyday people: this is European consumers being forced to pay more for worse products by law, so that uncompetitive European firms don't have to improve. Politicians frame it as avoiding a "China shock 2.0" but really this is choosing an even steeper self-inflicted decline than is already the case, where EU citizens would subsidize mediocre EU companies that would have even less pressure to catch up. It's a hidden tax: subsidies for uncompetitive firms paid by consumers instead of governments, which in turn makes them less incentivized to become competitive. The first "China shock" did de-industrialize Europe somewhat, but at least it made things cheaper for European consumers. If this becomes Europe's response to a second "China shock" not only it'd make everything more expensive but it'd do nothing for EU industry: you don't become competitive by banning the competition... Look at China itself: the way it industrialized was NOT by banning Western firms but on the contrary by welcoming them strategically and learning from them. You learn to compete by... competing, duh! What I find most shocking in all of this isn't even the policy itself - you can make arguments for and against protectionism, and reasonable people can disagree. What's shocking is that virtually no European media outlet is explaining any of this to the public. This is unarguably one of the single most consequential economic decisions the EU will make this decade, affecting the price of everything, and it's being drafted in near-total silence. No newspaper is running the headline "EU plans to make Chinese goods illegal if they're too affordable" - even though that's essentially what's happening. But that's what you call a "democracy" with "freedom of expression" these days apparently...

Reading books is dangerous because books slow the mind down enough to notice how unnatural modern society actually is.

Citizens of EU countries, You should realize your authorities have unilaterally entered into a war with Russia. So be vigilant and don't be surprised by anything. The peaceful sleep is over. But you know who to ask why!

I'm not a fan of the guy but this is a genuinely fascinating insight on European politics, by a key insider. This is Florian Philippot, who used to be Vice President of Le Pen's Front National, and had since left to create his own party, Les Patriotes. He is asked why the Rassemblement National (the name of Le Pen's party) doesn't want to leave NATO and the EU anymore. He says there were 3 key mechanisms. The first one is sheer intellectual laziness. He recalls senior party figures, including vice-president Louis Aliot, simply admitting they didn't understand the topic and therefore couldn't defend it. It might sound comical but I think Philippot is probably right: so many political positions get quietly dropped simply because actually mastering and defending them is hard work, and people are just lazy. I'm seeing this on China a lot: it's an immensely complex subject that's extremely hard to understand and on which there are so many clichés and ignorance. Fighting this, grasping the subject and countering the clichés is exhausting and thankless, while parroting the clichés costs nothing and makes you sound perfectly reasonable. Guess which one people pick? 🤷 The second mechanism is what he calls "the comfort that corrupts." As he puts it: "the more we give up, the better we are treated in the media... by business... in embassies," because all of a sudden "we're part of the club." Drop your heresies and the doors open, the tone softens, the invitations arrive - "day after day without even realizing it." This is basically another name for the Overton window, a range of acceptable opinions that simply exists. It's not policed by force but simply by belonging, which is a very powerful force in and of itself: step outside of the window and you're a pariah, step back in and you feel the comfortable sense of belonging, of being accepted. The third is just careerism. A seat in the European Parliament is a comfortable, well-paid job that keeps renewing itself. It's basically the quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." When your livelihood depends on the very institutions you came to dismantle, suddenly you're not very convinced by your convictions anymore... All in all, those are pretty universal mechanisms but it's particularly true in contemporary liberal democracies, and even more true in those in Europe. It's basically the equation "extreme demonization vs warm embrace." No-one wants to be demonized, everyone wants to belong - and since defending difficult ideas is real work while belonging takes none, laziness settles the contest.

My initial plan after sharing this post was to write a highly detailed, comprehensive article exposing how Chinese communism actually started on the Peking University campus. It was pioneered by two radical professors, Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, who organized intense Marxist study groups, coordinated militant student unions, and focused on rigorous philosophical readings of the works of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels, and other revolutionary theoreticians. Mao Zedong was merely a struggling library assistant there, earning a meager wage because he could not afford the expensive tuition, but his absolute, desperate passion to enact systemic change in China pushed him to join the study group. My draft documented how Communism rapidly evolved from being a sterile, academic topic debated by comfortable students on college campuses, and metamorphosed into a fearless, militant political organization that established secret operational offices, ran underground print shops, and built aggressive recruiting cells across various Chinese cities. This rapid mobilization prompted the reactionary Kuomintang government to launch a brutal, bloody crackdown, executing communists in the streets of Shanghai and Guangzhou. The desperate survivors, including Mao Zedong, fled into the rugged mountains of Jiangxi and Yan'an to regroup, launching a relentless, full-scale civil war that raged for over twenty years, eventually forcing the defeated Kuomintang government to retreat to Taiwan, while Mao Zedong established the Communist Party of China as the absolute, sovereign ruler of a unified, revolutionary mainland. That historical article is complete, but I will not share it publicly on social media. There is absolutely no point. The vast majority of people online are not looking for objective facts, they are merely looking to defend their fragile emotions, and I have zero interest in pandering to your emotional needs. If I were to publish my essay explaining how the Gang of Four, a highly toxic political personality cult set up by Mao that included his own wife, Jiang Qing, was eventually arrested by the Chinese people, put on televised trial, and faced public condemnation, thereby shattering the Maoist movement across the globe, you would instantly dismiss me as a Western propagandist. If I wrote to you exposing how Marxist and Socialist groups in America protested heavily in 1979 when Deng Xiaoping came to Washington to normalize trade relations, thereby betraying the core anti-imperialist principles of Mao and his legacy of fighting Western hegemony, you would call me a China hater. If I detailed in my essays how China immediately invaded Vietnam right after that historic US visit, adding to the devastating war crimes, chemical bombings, and massacres committed by the US military just years prior, you would rebuke me. If I pointed out that America actively provided China with highly classified military satellite feeds, logistical coordination, and absolute diplomatic cover to justify their three-week invasion of Vietnam, shielding them from global public outrage, you would claim I am citing corrupted Western sources. If I told you that China and America actively trained, funded, and weaponized the Afghan Mujahideen rebels to fight the Soviets in the Middle East, a joint covert operation that ultimately granted Washington total geopolitical hegemony over Middle Eastern oil reserves, you would unfollow me and mute me into oblivion. Even though all of these are declassified, publicly available historical facts, you would still attack me. You know that China was once under severe Western sanctions, but I am positive you have never asked yourself why America suddenly removed those embargoes. You have never bothered to study what dark geopolitical concessions Beijing made, or what prompted Washington to forgive China while refusing to ever extend that same hand of forgiveness to Cuba, Iran, or North Korea. You have never studied how the CIA literally mounted joint intelligence listening stations in Xinjiang to spy on Soviet missile telemetry. You have no idea how Beijing systematically punished its own local industries with high taxes and heavy regulations, while spreading red carpets for Western multinational corporations like Apple, Nike, and General Motors to open factories and operate at virtually tax-free rates. You know that trade unions and strikes are strictly illegal in China, but you probably have no idea that this constitutional right was deliberately stripped in 1982 to assure American capital that they could relocate their factories without any fear of labor strikes, political instability, or rising production costs. The Chinese state guaranteed that their domestic workers would accept whatever miserable pittance they were paid because they had no legal right to organize, a betrayal of the proletariat that translated into trillion-dollar profits for Western corporations. You know that China joined the World Trade Organisation, but you have no idea what shameful, humiliating economic concessions they made to receive that entry card, opening their domestic markets to global capitalist exploitation. The tragic, painful part of this is that I speak highly of China and the Russian Federation in almost all of my geopolitical analyses because I understand that these compromises are part of the past. Today, Russia and China are on excellent terms, sharing highly advanced intelligence, military hardware, and strategic logistics because they are actively fighting to dismantle American imperial hegemony, which is the most critical task of our time. Russia is in the Sahel today, actively helping the Alliance of Sahel States to wipe out Western-backed terrorist groups, while Chinese satellites provide them with real-time tactical intelligence, and this is an incredibly positive development for Africa. But this strategic partnership does not mean I am going to deny historical facts in the name of a blind, uncritical alliance to the Multipolar Order. I have always maintained that China remains deeply integrated into the US-dominated global capitalist system. In fact, by buying massive volumes of US Treasury bonds, China provides the cheap credit and financial capital that makes American militarism possible. I have written about this repeatedly, without a single apology. China cannot simply unplug from this global capitalistic system today, because doing so would trigger their own domestic economic devastation, considering how deeply their industrial supply chains are tethered to the transatlantic empire. I am sorry if my cold, analytical approach does not sit well with your fragile sensibilities, but I am not here to cater to your emotions. My academic training in mathematics and philosophy forces me to lean strictly toward objective, material facts rather than comfortable "isms". I am here to analyze global events through a purely objective, realist lens. My consistent position is that American imperial interests are actively undermining the sovereignty of nations, destroying human rights, and suffocating the Global South, and they must be stopped. China and Russia have been an immense, irreplaceable help to the rest of humanity, especially in Africa, but this does not mean we should dismiss every historical failure or modern compromise they make as mere Western propaganda. To me, such a blind, religious devotion to any empire is childish, intellectually lazy, and completely senseless.

URGENT: Germany’s collective punishment of my family continues. They’ve now frozen my pensioner mother’s bank account, claiming I somehow “control” it too. Her savings are inaccessible — yet she has received no official notice from any German authority. No charges no due process

Wow, this is rare (in fact it might be a first): South Korea's president personally debunks anti-China fake news in local media, calling it a "deliberately fabricated fake news article intended to be used as material for anti-China agitation." He asks: "how on earth does stirring up Sinophobia help the country and its people?" This is true leadership. I've made this case more times than I care to remember with regards to France, my country, where fake news on China are pretty much a daily occurrence. I've never understood why the government lets it happen without ever pushing back: why would you knowingly let your own population be whipped into hatred based on fabrications and distortions, all the more when it goes against your national interests? Heck it's even worse than this in France and many other Western countries: there are several instances of media fabrications actually dictating government policy in a way that harmed the national interest. The clearest example is years of unchallenged media hysteria over an alleged "Uyghur genocide" that created such political pressure that the French National Assembly voted to recognize it near-unanimously (169 to 1) - without a shred of a serious and independent French investigation. This in turn helped kill the EU-China investment agreement (CAI) back in 2021, which had been negotiated over seven years and would have given European companies unprecedented access to the Chinese market. In other words, the very agreement designed to fix the trade imbalance that Europe now endlessly complains about was killed by its own media-manufactured hysteria. And now those same politicians blame China for a lopsided trade relationship that they let their own media's fabrications destroy. That's NOT leadership.

The United States will no longer have a safe haven for its mischief and for establishing military bases in West Asia.

I finished @weizman_eyal's Ungrounding last night and it has left me overwhelmed & speechless. I'll have a lot more to say about it but suffice it to say for now that, while some extraordinary books have been written about Gaza, this one for me is the most important. Here's why: