Tuesday Morning Breakfast For The Brain

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Younger Americans Abandoning Capitalism, Embracing Socialism

Via True Pundit

A new Axios/Momentive poll shows younger Americans are viewing capitalism in a more negative light and finding socialism more appealing.

In a stunning new Axios/Momentive poll, younger Americans are viewing capitalism in a more negative light and finding socialism more appealing.

According to the new poll, this move towards the left for young people is being driven in large part by African-Americans and women.

Axios maintains that the pandemic has been a big driver of the shift.

While there are almost as many theories and opinions on COVID-19 as there are actual cases, the pandemic has effected society in ways no one could have ever imagined.

In fact, chief research officer for Momentive, Jon Cohen, says what many already know, “The pandemic is sure to have lasting impact for decades to come.”

In the pre-pandemic days of 2019, just 39% of American adults held a positive view of socialism. That has gone up to 41%.

In this latest Axios/Momentive poll, the numbers from the 18-34 age group are startling ones. In 2019, 58% of Americans in this age group had a positive reaction to the word capitalism. Today it is down to 49%. MORE.

Political Establishment and Antifa Launch Manhunt for Men Who Spray Painted George Floyd Statues 

Via The Unz Review

For years, anarchists and black grievance groups have been smashing, vandalizing and defacing statues and monuments dedicated to white people, who they dislike for racial reasons. Politicians and law enforcement have either expressed support for the criminal behavior or refused to prosecute it.

Now, statues and murals dedicated to George Floyd are, according to the media, being tagged with “PatriotFront.us” by a nationalist group of the same name. This act of tit-for-tat civil disobedience has stirred anti-white groups and politicians into an uncontrolled rage.

In New York, the city’s presumptive next Mayor Eric Adams is demanding the FBI investigate who splashed paint on a bust of Floyd in Brooklyn. The physical ode to Black Lives Matter that has come to symbolize institutional anti-white hatred and exploding black crime rates to much of the public is not federal property. If the law is applied as it is meant to, the FBI would be out of its jurisdiction.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose political career is collapsing under accusations of incompetence that killed numerous elderly people from COVID and a slew of sexual harassment complaints, roared on Twitter that he was unleashing the NYPD Hate Crimes unit to find the men or man who painted the Floyd monument.

He ended the message by spewing that people who politically disagree with him should “Get the hell out of our state.”

Selective Prosecution

New York state has been the site of some of the most egregious yet officially tolerated hate crimes and acts of vandalism for the past year. Some of the targets anarchist and Jewish groups hit were Church property, such as numerous instances of Virgin Mary statues being smashed and spray painted, while figurative displays of a variety of white men were also regularly brazenly destroyed. Nobody was ever arrested for these attacks nor was much of an effort ever made to find them.

Over the past year, numerous officials have gone so far as to express support for the attackers. Last year in Boston, when a statue of Christopher Columbus — a symbol representing the Italian-American heritage — had its head removed by anarchists, Mayor Marty Walsh expressed support for the hate crime and subsequently permanently removed the remains of the sculpture.

The scramble to utilize an all-hands-on-deck law enforcement response to find the culprits behind the sprayed protests against George Floyd monuments represents an ideological double standard to people in the country who have looked on with dismay as police tolerate or even help violent anti-white hate groups destroy public property. MORE.

Geopolitics, Profit, and Poppies: How the CIA Turned Afghanistan into a Failed Narco-State

Via Zero Hedge

The war in Afghanistan has looked a lot like the war on drugs in Latin America and previous colonial campaigns in Asia, with a rapid militarization of the area and the empowerment of pliant local elites

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a death knell to so many industries in Afghanistan. Charities and aid agencies have even warned that the economic dislocation could spark widespread famine. But one sector is still booming: the illicit opium trade. Last year saw Afghan opium poppy cultivation grow by over a third while counter-narcotics operations dropped off a cliff. The country is said to be the source of over 90% of all the world’s illicit opium, from which heroin and other opioids are made. More land is under cultivation for opium in Afghanistan than is used for coca production across all of Latin America, with the creation of the drug said to directly employ around half a million people.

This is a far cry from the 1970s, when poppy production was minimal, and largely for domestic consumption. But this changed in 1979 when the CIA launched Operation Cyclone, the widespread funding of Afghan Mujahideen militias in an attempt to bleed dry the then-recent Soviet invasion. Over the next decade, the CIA worked closely with its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI, to funnel $2 billion worth of arms and assistance to these groups, including the now infamous Osama Bin Laden and other warlords known for such atrocities as throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women.

“From statements by U.S. Ambassador [to Iran] Richard Helms, there was little heroin production in Central Asia by the mid 1970s,” Professor Alfred McCoy, author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” told MintPress. But with the start of the CIA secret war, opium production along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border surged and refineries soon dotted the landscape. Trucks loaded with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons would travel from Pakistan into its neighbor to the west, returning filled to the brim with opium for the new refineries, their deadly product ending up on streets worldwide. With the influx of Afghan opium in the 1980s — Jeffrey St. Clair, co-author of “Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press,” alleges — heroin addiction more than doubled in the United States.

“In order to finance the resistance for a protracted period, the Mujahideen had to come up with a livelihood beyond the weapons that the CIA was providing,” McCoy said, noting that the weapons issued could not feed the fighters’ families, nor reimburse them for lost labor:

So what the resistance fighters did was they turned to opium. Afghanistan had about 100 tons of opium produced every year in the 1970s. By 1989-1990, at the end of that 10-year CIA operation, that minimal amount of opium — 100 tons per annum — had turned into a major amount, 2,000 tons a year, and was already about 75% of the world’s illicit opium trade.”

The CIA achieved its goal of giving the U.S.S.R. its Vietnam, the Soviets failing to quash the Mujahideen rebellion by the time they finally pulled out in 1989. But American money and weapons also turned Afghanistan into a dangerously unstable place full of warring factions that used opium to fund their battles for internal supremacy. By 1999, annual production had risen to 4,600 tons. The Taliban eventually emerged as the dominant force in the country and attempted to gain international legitimacy by stamping out the trade.

In this, they were remarkably successful. A 2000 ban on opium cultivation by the Taliban-led government led to an almost overnight drop to just 185 tons harvested the following year, as frightened farmers chose not to risk attracting their wrath.

The Taliban had hoped that the eradication program would win favor in Washington and entice the United States to provide humanitarian aid. But unfortunately, history had other ideas. On September 11, 2001, the U.S. experienced a massive case of blowback, as Bin Laden’s forces launched attacks on New York and Washington. The U.S. ignored the Taliban’s offer to hand him over to a third party, instead opting to invade the country. Less than a month after the planes hit the World Trade Center, U.S. troops were patrolling the fields of Afghanistan. MORE.

How Trump Ally Michael Flynn Nurtured – And Profited From – The QAnon Conspiracy

Via The Intercept

Of the mysteries surrounding the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, few have been more confounding than the connections between former national security adviser Michael Flynn, the QAnon conspiracy theory, and Trump’s #StoptheSteal campaign.

Most media outlets treated Flynn’s videotaped oath last summer, in which he uttered a well-known QAnon slogan, as a sort of coming-out story about a onetime Trump insider who had gone off the rails. The video has since become the subject of a lawsuit by members of Flynn’s family who claim that “left-wing media outlets began to spread false narratives” about the Flynn family’s connections to QAnon. An Intercept investigation has found that Flynn’s ties to the QAnon phenomenon stretch back much further than the July 4 weekend last year when the video first appeared, however, to the days immediately following Trump’s 2016 election victory.

That November, nearly a year before the first cryptic clue from QAnon’s organizers – known as a “Q drop” — appeared on the online message board 4chan, Flynn told a roomful of Trump supporters that the president-elect had been borne into office by an “army of digital soldiers.” The phrase “digital soldiers,” which Flynn later trademarked, has become a central QAnon rallying cry and a key indicator of the movement’s growing turn toward violent extremism and insurrection.

Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who once oversaw military intelligence in Afghanistan and led a sprawling intelligence agency in Washington, would go on to become a central hero in QAnon’s conspiratorial narrative. But his move to trademark the term “digital soldiers” — ensuring that only he and others who obtain his express permission can profit from the sale of “Digital Soldiers”-branded merchandise — hints at his attempt to capitalize on a marketing and communication strategy that resonates with the Q community.

Flynn hitched his financial fortunes to QAnon at least as early as the summer of 2019, when he was facing a mountain of legal costs, The Intercept’s investigation found. His push to leverage QAnon’s viral popularity with the far-right coincided with his efforts to reverse his guilty plea for lying to the FBI in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. MORE.

NFL Proudly Declares That ‘Football is Gay,’ ‘Queer,’ and ‘Transgender

Via The National File

In a new video, the NFL has proudly declared that football is not only “gay,” but also “lesbian,” “transgender,” “queer,” and accepting of everyone.

The 30 second advert produced by the NFL, which was described by TMZ as being a “powerful video,” declares in white text on a black background that “football is gay,” in a move apparently designed to show solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community. Further descriptors of what the NFL claim football is then pop up on screen, including “lesbian,” “queer,” “exciting,” “transgender,” “heart,” “power,” “bisexual,” and finishes by saying that football is “for everyone.”

“I am proud of the clear message this spot sends to the NFL’s LGBTQ+ fans: This game is unquestionably for you,” said Sam Rapoport, the diversity director for the NFL, to gay sports outlet Outsports. “I will be playing its first line over and over in my head all season,” he added. “This spot is about celebrating Pride, and the importance of inclusion,” Tim Ellis, the NFL’s chief marking officer also noted. “It’s imperative that we use our voice and leverage the NFL platform to drive positive change, which includes supporting what our players care about and what they stand for.”

The advertisment, put together with LGBTQ+ youth organisation, The Trevor Project, was created in direct response to Carl Nassib, the pass-rusher for the Las Vegas Raiders, coming out as gay last week, an NFL spokesman confirmed. “I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now, but I finally feel comfortable to get this off my chest,” Nassib said in a video posted to Instagram. “I’m going to do my best and do my part to cultivate a culture that’s accepting and passionate,” he continued, further announcing he would be donating $100K to the Trevor Project. MORE.

Nike Announces Partnership With Chinese Communist Party With New Slogan ‘Just Obey It’

Via The Babylon Bee

QINGDAO, CHINA—On the heels of the CEO proudly declaring Nike is a brand “of China, and for China,” the company has unveiled a new marketing campaign honoring the glorious Chinese Communist Party with the inspiring slogan “Just Obey It.”

“The idea of obedience to brutal and murderous regimes really encapsulates the ethos Nike is going for as a brand,” said Chief Marketing Officer Bingbong Van Hummus. “The People’s Republic of China represents our highest ideals, and we hope to inspire athletes around the world to join us in the most important thing any high-performer can do: Just Obey.”

New apparel featuring the “Just Obey It” slogan is already being produced in Uyghur concentration camps by slaves, and Nike is optimistic about having their new products in the hands of progressive American athletes in the next few weeks.

“As long as we don’t run into any delays– you know, from our slaves refusing to obey, we’ll be shipping from the beautiful and powerful country of China very soon!” said Van Hummus.

Nike also announced they wi

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