By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 6/01/20

In November when Supreme Leader Khamenei learned that protesters had burned pictures of his image, along with destroying a statue of the Iranian Republic’s late founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, he ordered his senior cabinet officials:

“Do whatever it takes to end it. The Islamic Republic is in danger. You have my order.”

The Revolutionary Guard, ultimately overseen by arch-terrorist General Qassem Soleimani, quickly went to work and the protests were quelled.
 
The greatest threat to Iran’s medieval, theocratic regime still lies with Iranian citizens.  

Regime leaders know this and it’s precisely why they brutally cracked-down on the recent protests which resulted in the deaths of over 1500 Iranian citizens and saw many more “disappeared” and imprisoned. 

Now that Soleimani has been killed by a U.S drone strike in Baghdad, the regime shows itself to be even more fragile. 

Commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was also killed along with three other members of his militia – altogether representing a heavy loss for Iran’s military.  But no spontaneous outpouring of grief has been sighted in the streets of Iraq or Iran, in fact after Soleimani’s death was announced, we saw Iraqi citizens dancing out in the open.  Iran allows for only the usual stiffly, state-crafted images of forced mourners at the massive funeral to be shown. Iranians are commanded to solemnly grieve.  Soleimani was admired by the regime’s supporters, but despised by the Iranian masses, who also hate the terrorist regime he loyally served. 

Iran now faces a quandary. They long for a return to the American leadership of something which is closer to the Obama/Kerry style of appeasement, which afforded Iran billions of dollars that they used to foment terrorism and proxy wars.  Iranian citizens didn’t see a dime of this money used to improve their daily lives, but instead felt the brunt of harsh sanctions implemented by the U.S as soon as President Trump was elected. 

To save face, Iran needs to retaliate over the death of their top general – but if they hit any U.S citizens, diplomats or military personnel they know they will face an even harder hit back by the U.S. 

Their economy is in tatters, their oil is not traded on the world market, their military strength is dwindling and their regime is internally hated by their own citizens.  Even their state religion of Islam is dying in the hearts and minds of Iranians.  A documentary titled Sheep Among Wolves lays claim to a sweeping underground movement which is converting Iranians to Christianity in their droves. The biggest factor in this religious transformation is the Islamic regime itself that has made citizens deeply hate Islam. The documentary claims that inside Iran the mosques are actually empty. 

The Trump/Pompeo foreign policy doctrine of principled realism does not allow for the U.S to become embroiled in another “endless war” in the Middle East. So if and when Iran decides to retaliate, the U.S response may be heavily disproportionate – as Trump’s tweet to Democrats yesterday somewhat threatened:
 
“These Media Posts will serve as notification to the United States Congress that should Iran strike any U.S. person or target, the United States will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner. Such legal notice is not required, but is given nevertheless!”

The “endlessness” of recent wars in the Middle East has been caused by a commitment to altruism and nation building.  Trump has no designs on the American military being used in this way. His only objective is to force bad actors into thinking again before acting to harm U.S personnel or interests. That’s all. 

Iran grossly miscalculated since President Trump showed much restraint towards their frequent acts of aggression all throughout the year of 2019.

When Soleimani recently allowed for pro-Iranian militia to attack the U.S Embassy in Baghdad (as he also did in Benghazi 2012), Trump tweeted: 
 
“Iran will be held fully responsible for lives lost, or damage incurred, at any of our facilities. They will pay a very BIG PRICE! This is not a Warning, it is a Threat. Happy New Year!”

Amusingly, Khamenei responded with this foolish tweet:

“That guy has tweeted that we see Iran responsible for the events in Baghdad & we will respond to Iran. 
1st: You can’t do anything. 
2nd: If you were logical —which you’re not— you’d see that your crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan… have made nations hate you.”

Then reality bit hard in the form of a sky robot sending Soleimani to the same hell that bin Laden and al-Baghdadi now occupy.  

Despite the long list of Khamenei’s recent cock-ups, he remains correct on one important point –  his Islamic Republic is in danger from within. When Iranian citizens do make a serious attempt to throw off their oppressive tyrants, they will have the support of both Israel and the United States, whatever that may look like.  But neither of these two nations will do the overthrowing for them. The days of U.S-backed regime change and nation building are over. 


Edit: Since this article was written, Iran hit back with cruise missiles fired into two Iraqi military bases but no casualties were recorded.  One commercial Ukrainian airliner was downed however, killing 176 civilians.
Many Iranian people are currently out in the streets protesting the regime.  They are being murdered by their police.


If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"
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By Olivia Pierson
(First published on Insight@theBFD 19/12/19)


If anyone has watched the riveting HBO series Chernobyl, you’ll have experienced one of the most brutally powerful TV dramas about living under Soviet Socialism. As the worst nuclear accident in history unfolds in the town of Pripyat, Soviet Ukraine, the diabolical themes of manipulating misinformation and lies, aka ‘fake news,’ at the expense of human lives were vividly portrayed.  One received the message clearly that individuals must be sacrificed in cold service to an even colder state. Truth was an enemy that couldn’t be tolerated, thus showing that fake news really was, and remains, the enemy of any people.
 
“Disaster? What disaster? It’s just a small radiation leak, no more dangerous than a chest x-ray!”

“The reactor core can’t explode – that’s impossible – and you won’t damn-well say that again, do you hear me?!”

Of course, the point of all the deceit was to block the world, especially America, from knowing how poor, incompetent and backward the USSR actually was. The Soviets called this deceit “state-craft.” All of its nuclear power plants were constructed the same way as the one at Chernobyl had been, therefore they knew they were sitting on multiple time-bombs placing the whole of Europe and Asia at risk.

The Chernobyl disaster occurred in 1986.  Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand defected to the United States in 1926 and died in New York in 1982. Everything she ever wrote was to instruct people about the evils of communism – in particular, its central organising principle of collectivism over and above individualism, a “principle" which Rand considered to be morally evil because everywhere this was practised resulted in a complete disregard for individual human life and flourishing. Collectivism, according to Rand, also created a society devoid of individual accountability; an incompetent society without proper justice.

Chernobyl’s monumental, man-made catastrophe would have been no surprise to Rand. She knew the Soviet system intimately from its abstract philosophical premises right down to its concrete day-to-day practicalities (or lack thereof). In her magnum opus, the novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand described its overarching theme as: “the role of the mind in man’s existence.”

The book is a romantic, political, epic warning to America, rich in details of how the trends in the Washington swamp of 1957 (the date it was published) would negatively impact American businessmen and producers, whom Rand considered to be the driving creative force of a capitalist country. Despite how many people deeply hated Rand’s narrative – and still do – the insights of Atlas Shrugged were hard to ignore, not least because, being a Russian, Rand could spot a communist trend 100 miles out and write piercingly and ferociously to counteract it, but also because the book is still the most influential tome in America, second only to the Bible.

The book’s heroine is Dagny Taggart, who runs a transcontinental railroad which was the proud achievement of her tough-minded, industrialist grandfather, Nathaniel Taggart. 

One of Dagny’s greatest foes is her co-owner, her brother Jim, who constantly schmoozes with the “boys in Washington,” liking to keep all his options open with powerful people. Dagny despises any government meddling in her business, solely relying on her own smarts, competence and hard work, along with that of the thousands of men in Taggart Transcontinental employ. To Dagny, competence and accountability translate into safety, efficiency and good profits.  Her only wish from government is that it gets the hell out of the way to let her get on with the business of running a railroad to the best of her formidable abilities.

But her decisions are stymied under government Directive 10-289: from the purchase of Rearden metal – a revolutionary new hard steel for track upgrade – to the mass improvement of the railroad’s tired and unreliable signal system. Dagny constantly battles Jim and his power-hungry Washington friends as inch-by-inch they seek to wrest control of the family business. She resigns in fury.

Then disaster strikes heavily in the form of the Winston Tunnel tragedy, resulting in the deaths of 300 people inside Colorado’s Rocky Mountains on the new Taggart train, the Comet.  

Dagny always kept a spare diesel-electric locomotive ready to pull trains through the eight-mile tunnel, as the older coal-burning engines were not safe. But Jim had lent the spare diesel-electric to a Washington friend in order to get him around the country on a “morale boosting” tour to counteract the public’s discontent over Directive 10-289.  

When the Comet derails on a corner of track inside the tunnel, a treacherous corner that did not receive Dagny’s planned repair, an old coal burning engine was sent by her new replacement into the poorly ventilated tunnel to pull the Comet on its way.  All the passengers – men, women and children – asphyxiate before being annihilated in a crash by another oncoming train.

Rand completed this chapter by describing the beliefs of some of the passengers who died:

“It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it’s masses that count, not men.

The man in Roomette 7, Car No. 2, was a journalist who wrote that it is proper and moral to use compulsion ‘for a good cause’ who believed that he had the right to unleash physical force upon others – to wreck lives, throttle ambitions, strangle desires, violate convictions, to imprison, to despoil, to murder – for the sake of whatever he chose to consider as his own idea of ‘a good cause’,which did not even have to be an idea, since he had never defined what he regarded as the good, but had merely stated that he went by ‘a feeling’ -a feeling unrestrained by any knowledge, since he considered emotion superior to knowledge and relied solely on his own ‘good intentions’ and on the power of a gun.

The woman in Roomette 10, Car No.3, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, and that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing.

The man in Bedroom H, Car No. 5, was a businessman who had acquired his business, an ore mine, with the help of a government loan, under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.

The man in Drawing Room A, Car No 6, was a financier who had made a fortune by buying ‘frozen’ railway bonds and getting his friends in Washington to ‘defreeze’ them.
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The man in Seat 5, Car No.7, was a worker who believed that he had ‘a right’ to a job, whether his employer wanted him or not.

The woman in Roomette 6, Car no. 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had ‘a right’ to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not.

The man in Roomette 2, Car No. 9, was a professor of economics who advocated the abolition of private property, explaining that intelligence plays no part in industrial production, that man’s mind is conditioned by material tools, that anybody can run a factory or a railroad and it’s only a matter of seizing the machinery.

The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, ‘I don’t care, it’s only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.’

The man in Drawing Room B, Car No.15, was an heir who had inherited his fortune, and who had kept repeating, ‘Why should Rearden be the only one permitted to manufacture Rearden Metal?’

The man in Bedroom A, Car no. 16, was a humanitarian who had said, ‘The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer. They must be penalized in order to support the incompetent. Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not. I take pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able, where mercy to the needy is concerned.’ 

These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas. As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt’s Torch was the last thing they saw on earth.”  (Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged,” p566-568)

What Rand makes beautifully clear in this chapter is that the fashionably collectivist ideas of her day had been duly swallowed into every nook and cranny of the culture, from university professors to housewives.

At the end of 1957, Whittaker Chambers of the National Review wrote a strong essay condemning Rand’s bestseller. He titled it “Big Sister is Watching You.” It remains Chambers’ most famous essay. He wrote:

“From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” 

It is a most twisted and ungenerous summation of Rand’s work.  

Rand claimed that her only intellectual debt was to Aristotle. Chambers claimed that Rand's intellectual debt was primarily to Nietzsche, but this was to miss the point of her whole narrative. 

Aristotle advocated for the Great Souled Man; Nietzsche for the Ubermensch or Overlord.  Philosophically speaking, the Great Souled Man is morally superior to the Overlord because he does not require underlings to fuel his distinctive greatness – and he is highly conscious that he possesses a self-made “soul,” a sum total of selfhood profoundly grounded in his own conscience and experience. The much-deserved honour of this type of man is forged, not from any desire to lord-it over others, but instead from his virtues which make him a natural leader: courage, temperance, knowledge, wisdom, generosity, strength and justice.

It is these virtues in a man which inspired Rand’s philosophical narrative all throughout her writings and she knew deeply, viscerally and from experience that these virtues were totally absent the men of the Soviet Union – its overlords, its rank and file and its underlings.  That’s why she fled at first opportunity to the United States, for she had meticulously studied history all the way back to the ancient Greeks.
 
If such men had have existed in the USSR by the time 1986 rolled around, instead of being systematically squelched through the spirit-crushing system of unbridled collectivism, the Chernobyl disaster would not have even been possible.
 
And if Rand had not died by then, she would have written one of her frequent, piercingly powerful, journalistic essays on the disaster – and would’ve arrived at the same conclusion that the HBO drama writers arrived at: what causes a nuclear reactor core to explode?  Lies.


If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"

By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 12/12/19

One of the most enlightened acts that President Trump ever committed early on in his presidency was to unceremoniously fire former FBI director, James Comey.
 
After examining a million documents and interviewing over 100 witnesses, the DOJ’s report into the surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016 and beyond, written by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, shows that everything Republicans feared about corruption in the top tier of the U.S intelligence community was all true. In the 476-page report, the Inspector General drew attention to 51 violations and 9 false statements made by the FBI.

The report proves that the FBI shamelessly abused the FISA process under Commissar Comey.

A FISA warrant, which is the most intrusive level of surveillance allowed under the law, was issued in order to spy on Carter Page, a low-level associate of Trump’s 2016 election campaign.

FISA warrants allow not only for the person to be surveilled but also all of his/her contacts and the contacts of those contacts – which means that the FBI could have been surveilling every single person who worked on Trump’s campaign, including Trump himself. The FISA warrant on Page was renewed three more times.  The first warrant heavily relied on the fake Christopher Steele dossier which was compiled from information given to Steele by a discredited Russian contact connected to the Kremlin. The FBI knew it to be highly questionable and not corroborated, but they used it anyway.

The FBI also knew that the dossier was a dirt-digging escapade, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s DNC as “opposition research.” This incredibly important piece of information was willfully omitted from the official FISA applications, one of seventeen “significant errors or omissions” highlighted in the Inspector General’s report – and those pertain to Page’s case alone.
 
Carter Page worked for the CIA for years – and that exculpatory fact was also left out of the FISA application, as well as being edited out of an email (doctored) by a top FBI lawyer – which is a criminal offence. Page, who was monitored for a year, was never charged for anything, which, considering that each FISA application requires new evidence to justify its approval, begs the question: on what basis were they continually issued, the last one given out in June 2017?

Three other people were also surveilled according to the Inspector General’s report: Paul Manafort, General Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos. 

Bizarrely, Commissar Comey took a sanctimonious victory lap all over Twitter and CNN today, obviously feeling vindicated despite the chronic surveillance abuses he sanctioned. He tweeted: 

“So it was all lies. No treason. No spying on the campaign. No tapping Trumps wires. It was just good people trying to protect America.” 

No spying on the campaign?  What the hell is Commissar Comey smoking? Spying and leaking were his favourite tools of trade. The “no spying” narrative is just pure fake news and how he says it with a straight face is beyond the conscience of ordinary folks. He has offered no apology to Carter Page but is demanding one from President Trump.

Inspector General Horowitz has concluded that “no bias” is in evidence as a motive for the FBI’s conduct, but Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S attorney John Durham vehemently disagree. Durham, who is conducting a criminal investigation into these events that has much wider reach and power than the Inspector General, has come out publicly in an unprecedented reproach of the report’s conclusions.  I wonder what he knows that Horowitz doesn’t?

Attorney General Barr issued a damning statement today contradicting Horowitz’s conclusions:

The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.  It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.  Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration.  In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source.  The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory.  While most of the misconduct identified by the Inspector General was committed in 2016 and 2017 by a small group of now-former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process.

Remember, the investigation that Durham is now pursuing is not just some journalistic account of what took place, it’s a criminal investigation into the origins of what became Robert Mueller’s expensive, two-year Special Counsel investigation of the Trump/Russia collusion hoax, which yielded nothing on the president but had Flynn, Manafort and Stone convicted.

And so we find ourselves again waiting for some more detailed truth concerning Deep State corruption. The Inspector General just provided plenty for the FBI to be both nervous and ashamed about, despite Commissar Comey’s premature victory lap. Nobody seems to know what exactly to make of Horowitz, but given that he was President Obama’s Democrat appointee, he may be trying to protect the legacy of his former boss, since these stunning abuses of power happened under Obama’s administration and most likely with his permission. 

Then again, the report’s information that Horowitz just provided to the American public is overwhelmingly condemning of the FBI - who roundly mocked then President-elect Trump when he claimed three years ago that his campaign had been wire-tapped and spied upon.  We now know this to be a fact.

We are still not at the bottom of this swampy cesspool, but I get the feeling that soon we’re going to be.

Edit: today, one week after this article was written, a FISA court judge, one Rosemary Collyer, has ripped the FBI, saying: “your deceptive behavior calls into question all the warrants against Carter Page."
 
If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"
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