Quotes

[quyotes]

There is nothing the Politically Correct fear more than open defiance, and for good reason; it is their chief vulnerability. That should lead cultural conservatives to defy cultural Marxism at every turn.

The manifesto of Anders Breivik, a mass murderer

Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.

The title of a book by Ted Cruz, a US senator

[quyotes]

Nissan earned its second-to-last spot for collecting some of the creepiest categories of data we have ever seen. It’s worth reading the review in full, but you should know it includes your “sexual activity.” Not to be out done, Kia also mentions they can collect information about your “sex life” in their privacy policy. Oh, and six car companies say they can collect your “genetic information” or “genetic characteristics.”

Mozilla Foundation, It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

[quyotes]

[The] opposition between the merchant right and the « Brahmin » left is largely artificial. It enables both nationalist and liberal elites to share power and consolidate rule over the working class, all while preventing any real popular alternative. Whatever either side claims, Trumpists also depend on hundreds of experts and academics gathered in powerful think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. The hyper-capitalist agenda they champion – a visceral defense of social hierarchies, glorification of an extreme concentration of power and wealth, and the pro-rich tax policies that support it – is hardly different from that of liberal economists. During the golden age of the liberal order, when George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, the level of military brutality was comparable to what we see today.

Thomas Piketty - Trump, a Warrior without Brahmin

[quyotes]

The world and we already know Ahmadinejad. If the reformist candidate Mousavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat, since Mousavi is perceived internationally arena as a moderate element...

Meir Dagan, director of the Mossad, on hardliner Ahmadinejad winning the Iranian presidential election.

[quyotes]

In March, 2000, as the merger was under way, Musk was driving his new McLaren, with Thiel in the passenger seat. The two were on Sand Hill Road, an artery that cuts through Silicon Valley. Thiel asked Musk, “So what can this do?” Musk replied, “Watch this,” then floored the gas pedal, hit an embankment, and sent the car airborne and spinning before it slammed back onto the pavement, blowing out its suspension and its windows.

Elon Musk's Shadow Rule

[quyotes]

After the 11 September attack, [...] amid all that chaos and confusion, a hole quietly opened up in American history, a vacuum of accountability, into which assets human and financial begin to vanish. Back in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame ‘the CIA’ or ‘a secret rogue operation.’ But this is a new enemy, unnamable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line—who knows, maybe even the CIA’s scared of them.

Thomas Pynchon, "Bleeding Edge"

[quyotes]

The amount of Afghan land under poppy cultivation more than tripled from 2003 to 2004. By 2005, heroin production in Afghanistan had increased a mind-blowing 7,514 percent. [...] The superabundance of highly potent product inundated Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia, all of Europe, Australia, and the whole world. In the United States, street prices went down, purity went up, and opioid addiction took hold in a population primed for it by a decade of loose prescribing practices around pharmaceutical painkillers. “Heroin from Afghanistan is our biggest rising threat,” the Orange County Sheriff’s Office told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. [...] Yet curiously, in 2008, after years of reporting that heroin from southwest Asia was increasingly available in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and Boston at lower prices than ever before, the DEA began asserting in its annual National Drug Threat Assessment that Mexico was to blame.

Seth Harp, The Fort Bragg Cartel

[quyotes]

President Obama expressed concern over the release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai, who had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.

Readout of the President's Call with President Saleh of Yemen, February 03, 2011.

Abdulelah Haider Shaye was jailed for covering the aftermath of a secret US air strike that killed 41 civilians, including 5 pregnant women and 21 children.

[quyotes]

As counterinsurgency is domesticated, it is our hearts and minds that are daily being assuaged, numbed, pacified—and blissfully satisfied. We, the vast majority of us, are reassured daily: there are threats everywhere and color-coded terror alerts, but counterinsurgency strategies are protecting us. We are made to feel that everything’s under control, that the threat is exterior, that we can continue with our daily existence. Even more, that these counterinsurgency strategies will prevail. That our government is stronger and better equipped, prepared to do everything necessary to win, and will win. That the guardians are protecting us.

Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution

[quyotes]

we have not simply created an internal colony, we have turned the nation itself into a colony. We govern ourselves through modern counterinsurgency warfare as if the entire United States was now a colonial dominion like Algeria, Malaya, or Vietnam.

Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution

[quyotes]

This is perhaps the greatest paradox of the brutality of counterinsurgency: to be civilized is to torture judiciously.

Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution

[quyotes]

The United States spent $113 billion in Afghanistan between 2001 and early 2016 for reconstruction, which represented far more than the Marshall Plan in postwar Europe. [...] The result was a dizzying distribution of cash, marked by extreme corruption. With very little oversight of procurement bidding and with the strategic need to rely on apparent friends and allies, contracts were dished out in ways that created instant fortunes for the lucky and the connected. From 2007 to 2014 alone, the United States gave out $89 billion in contracted moneys in Afghanistan. [...] The Center for Public Integrity published a study in May 2015 that found that “at least a hundred and fifteen US service members who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been convicted of bribery, theft, and contract-rigging charges since 2005.” [...] A forensic audit conducted in 2010 by the military, Task Force 2010, discovered for instance that, of about $31 billion in contracts inspected, about $360 million ended up in the hands of the Taliban, corrupt officials, or criminals; and that was only what could be directly accounted for.

Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution

[quyotes]

It is the model of counterinsurgency warfare [...] that has pushed the military into these traditionally civilian domains, including total surveillance, rule-of-law projects, artificial intelligence, entertainment, etc. In effect, it is the counterinsurgency paradigm of government that has become everything, and everything that has become counterinsurgency. The blurring of boundaries between war and peaceful governance is not merely the contingent result of 9/11, it is instead the culmination of a long and deliberate process of modernizing warfare.

Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution

[quyotes]

regardless which [disposition] option we follow however, and especially in light of the planned psychological pressure techniques to be implemented, we need to get reasonable assurances that [Abu Zubaydah] will remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.

CIA cable, U.S. Senate report on CIA torture.

Zubaydah was first interrogated by the FBI, to whom he provided useful information. He was then turned over to the CIA. He has been waterboarded 83 times and subjected to numerous other torture techniques. No further information was ever obtained. He is still a prisoner. The United States government has never officially charged him with any crime.

[quyotes]

Waterboarding and coffin-sized confinement boxes. Drone strikes outside conventional war zones—alongside indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay and special military commissions. Total NSA surveillance. The secret infiltration of American mosques and Muslim student groups—without any evidence of wrongdoing. A hypermilitarized police force on American streets. Some observers view these incidents as isolated, improvised, or unrelated excesses, or even as necessary but temporary deviations from our core American values during times of global terrorism and domestic turmoil post-9/11. Other commentators suggest that they constitute a new “state of exception”—a provisional radical mode of governing outside the rule of law. But far from exceptional or aberrant or isolated—or temporary—these measures exemplify a new way that we, in the United States, govern ourselves abroad and at home: a new model of government inspired by the theory and practice of counterinsurgency warfare.

Bernard E. Harcourt, The Counterrevolution

[quyotes]

The 9/11 attacks were, among other things, a species of blowback from a covert war that President Reagan and Poppy Bush had waged in the 1980s in Afghanistan. The purpose of the CIA-led campaign in Afghanistan, made famous in the book Charlie Wilson’s War and the film of the same title, was to drive out Russian occupiers who had invaded to prop up a communist regime in the waning days of the Cold War. […] The Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and for the next five years the country suffered under the chaotic misrule of disputatious warlords. Once in control of Afghanistan’s major population centers, the formerly CIA-backed mujahideen, chief among them Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Nasim Akhundzada, turned Afghanistan into a giant plantation for the cultivation of the opium poppy plant, which is perfectly suited to certain hot and dry but well-irrigated regions of the country, notably a vast endorheic basin known as the Helmand. Infighting between the narco-warlords over control of lucrative trafficking routes made them unpopular with the Afghan people, who chafed at being forced into conditions of narco-serfdom in which they were obligated to grow poppy instead of food crops, as well as other systematic abuses, including the kidnapping and rape of children, especially little boys, whom the pederastic warlords kept as cross-dressed sex slaves. The Taliban, a puritanical movement of Islamic scholars and students of religion, emerged in 1994 as a reaction to the fractious and iniquitous mujahideen, many of whom hailed from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. After consolidating power over all but the heavily Tajik north of Afghanistan, the primarily Pashtun Taliban implemented a severely intolerant brand of sharia law. The Taliban are rightly condemned worldwide for their restrictions on women’s freedoms, but their popularity in Afghanistan mainly stemmed from their tough-on-crime policies. The Taliban forbade poppy cultivation; bacha bazi, or boy play; suppressed kidnapping; and in the summer of 2001 completed a countrywide eradication campaign that radically reduced the world supply of heroin.

Seth Harp, The Fort Bragg Cartel

[quyotes]

Ali Mohamed, born in 1952, was an Egyptian special forces officer. In 1980, while attending a program for foreign army officers at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, he was approached by the CIA, and soon became an asset of the agency. The following year, he joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a radical fundamentalist group led by an Egyptian doctor named Ayman al-Zawahiri. Ali Mohamed would remain a close associate of al-Zawahiri, an infamous terrorist mastermind, for the next seventeen years. In 1984, with CIA sponsorship, Ali Mohamed moved to the United States on a type of national security visa reserved for aliens whose admission into the country is “essential to the furtherance of the national intelligence mission,” […] He then returned to Fayetteville and joined the Special Forces […] Ali Mohamed repeatedly traveled to Afghanistan to fight the Russians alongside anticommunist Afghan resistance fighters known as mujahideen, who were armed and funded by the CIA through Saudi and Pakistani cutouts. He also associated with the al-Kifah Refugee Center at the Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn, which recruited Muslim immigrants to serve in the CIA’s war […]

Seth Harp, The Fort Bragg Cartel