In 1976 the French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd predicted the down fall of the Soviet Union. In After The Empire, first published in French in 2001, he predicted the (relative) decline of the United States. 

In his latest (and last) book, La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), he laments the West’s inability to distinguish facts from wishes, as seen in its behavior during the war in Ukraine. Nihilism, a lack of values and of acceptance of reality, has infested western thinking:

Trans ideology is therefore, in my opinion, one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy not just things and people but reality.

Todd recently opened a substack where he is posting speeches and talks he has given.

Two of those, a recent talk given in Russia (in French) and one given in Hungary (in English) make (mostly) similar points.

The downfall of the Soviet Union led to deep psychological and societal dislocations in Russia. The defeat of the West, or ‘liberal democracy’,  is leading to similar consequences in Western societies.

While Todd had predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, he had not anticipated the consequences it would have for Russia:

But the collapse of Russia in the 1990s is something I would never have anticipated. The fundamental reason why I was unable to understand or anticipate the dislocation of Russia itself is that I had not understood that communism was not simply a means of organising economic activity in Russia, but also a kind of religion. It was belief that allowed the system to exist and the dissolution of that belief represented, of course, something at least as damaging as the dislocation of the economic system.

It took three decades for Russia to overcome the psychological dislocation that was the result of the destruction of its political and economical system.

Todd is suspecting that a similar process is currently happening in the West:

All of this has a bearing upon what is happening today. I will talk about two things in my lecture. I will talk about the defeat of the West, by which I mean something quite technical and specific, which is not very complex and has not surprised me. I had anticipated it, and to a certain extent it’s already under way in Ukraine. But we are now in the next phase, which is the dislocation of the West, and I have to say that, just as in the dislocation of communism, of the Soviet system, I am unable to understand exactly what is going on. The fundamental attitude that we need to have now is, I would say, an attitude of humility. Everything that’s happening, especially since the election of Donald Trump, surprises me.

I have been surprised by the violence with which Trump has turned against his Ukrainian and Europeans allies – or rather his vassals. The will of the Europeans to continue or restart the war – even though Europe is certainly the region of the world which would be most advantaged by a peace agreement – has also been a great surprise to me. We have to start from these surprises if we want to think properly about what’s going on.

I will discuss those surprises, some of which concern me a lot, in a later piece.

The defeat of the Soviet Union (and Russia) came after it had lost the economic war with the West. It had also lost a war in Afghanistan. The Soviet system had turned out to be a failure.

The West, or as Mearsheimer is arguing (vid), ‘liberal hegemony’, has been routed in Afghanistan. The attempts to ‘liberate’ Libya and Syria have failed to the point where the Western ‘war on terror’ launched against al-Qaeda has led to the installation of an al-Qaeda bigwig as the new president of Syria. The economic decline of the West is demonstrated by the rise of China. The West’s moral self-defeat of its ‘values’ can be daily witnessed in Gaza.

‘Liberal democracy’, the system of ideas that has for decades been the leading light of the West, has failed.

Like communism in Russia, ‘liberal democracy’ has not only an economic side but is also a kind of religion. The failure of this belief system is upon us.

The accumulation of defeat after defeat by the ‘liberal democracy’ system has led to a psychological breakdown, an internal dislocation of the West. This is now leading to irrational acts and to seeking refuge in wishful thinking.

Or, as Alastair Crooke is summarizing the phenomenon and warns:

The psychological dislocation caused by ‘defeat’ may explain (but not justify) the West’s ‘curious’ inability to understand world events: The almost pathological dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and actions: It’s blindness – for example, to the Russian experience of history and to the long history behind Shi’a defiance in Iran. Yet, even as the political situation deteriorates … there is no sign of the West becoming more reality-based in its understanding – and it is very likely that it will continue to live in its alternative construction of reality – until it is forcibly expelled.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

Call it what it is: a panopticon presidency.

President Trump’s plan to fuse government power with private surveillance tech to build a centralized, national citizen database is the final step in transforming America from a constitutional republic into a digital dictatorship armed with algorithms and powered by unaccountable, all-seeing artificial intelligence.

This isn’t about national security. It’s about control.

According to news reports, the Trump administration is quietly collaborating with Palantir Technologies—the data-mining behemoth co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel—to construct a centralized, government-wide surveillance system that would consolidate biometric, behavioral, and geolocation data into a single, weaponized database of Americans’ private information.

This isn’t about protecting freedom. It’s about rendering freedom obsolete.

What we’re witnessing is the transformation of America into a digital prison—one where the inmates are told we’re free while every move, every word, every thought is monitored, recorded, and used to assign a “threat score” that determines our place in the new hierarchy of obedience.

The tools enabling this all-seeing surveillance regime are not new, but under Trump’s direction, they are being fused together in unprecedented ways—with Palantir at the center of this digital dragnet.

Palantir, long criticized for its role in powering ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids and predictive policing, is now poised to become the brain of Trump’s surveillance regime.

Under the guise of “data integration” and “public safety,” this public-private partnership would deploy AI-enhanced systems to comb through everything from facial recognition feeds and license plate readers to social media posts and cellphone metadata—cross-referencing it all to assess a person’s risk to the state.

This isn’t speculative. It’s already happening.

Palantir’s Gotham platform, used by law enforcement and military agencies, has long been the backbone of real-time tracking and predictive analysis. Now, with Trump’s backing, it threatens to become the central nervous system of a digitally enforced authoritarianism.

As Palantir itself admits, its mission is to “augment human decision-making.” In practice, that means replacing probable cause with probability scores, courtrooms with code, and due process with data pipelines.

In this new regime, your innocence will be irrelevant. The algorithm will decide who you are.

To understand the full danger of this moment, we must trace the long arc of government surveillance—from secret intelligence programs like COINTELPRO and the USA PATRIOT Act to today’s AI-driven digital dragnet embodied by data fusion centers.

Building on this foundation of historical abuse, the government has evolved its tactics, replacing human informants with algorithms and wiretaps with metadata, ushering in an age where pre-crime prediction is treated as prosecution.

Every smartphone ping, GPS coordinate, facial scan, online purchase, and social media like becomes part of your “digital exhaust”—a breadcrumb trail of metadata that the government now uses to build behavioral profiles. The FBI calls it “open-source intelligence.” But make no mistake: this is dragnet surveillance, and it is fundamentally unconstitutional.

Already, government agencies are mining this data to generate “pattern of life” analyses, flag “radicalized” individuals, and preemptively investigate those who merely share anti-government views.

This is not law enforcement. This is thought-policing by machine, the logical outcome of a system that criminalizes dissent and deputizes algorithms to do the targeting.

Nor is this entirely new.

For decades, the federal government has reportedly maintained a highly classified database known as Main Core, designed to collect and store information on Americans deemed potential threats to national security.

As Tim Shorrock reported for Salon, “One former intelligence official described Main Core as ‘an emergency internal security database system’ designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.”

Trump’s embrace of Palantir, and its unparalleled ability to fuse surveillance feeds, social media metadata, public records, and AI-driven predictions, marks a dangerous evolution: a modern-day resurrection of Main Core, digitized, centralized, and fully automated.

What was once covert contingency planning is now becoming active policy.

What has emerged is a surveillance model more vast than anything dreamed up by past regimes—a digital panopticon in which every citizen is watched constantly, and every move is logged in a government database—not by humans, but by machines without conscience, without compassion, and without constitutional limits.

This is not science fiction. This is America—now.

As this technological tyranny expands, the foundational safeguards of the Constitution—those supposed bulwarks against arbitrary power—are quietly being nullified and its protections rendered meaningless.

What does the Fourth Amendment mean in a world where your entire life can be searched, sorted, and scored without a warrant? What does the First Amendment mean when expressing dissent gets you flagged as an extremist? What does the presumption of innocence mean when algorithms determine guilt?

The Constitution was written for humans—not for machine rule. It cannot compete with predictive analytics trained to bypass rights, sidestep accountability, and automate tyranny.

And that is the endgame: the automation of authoritarianism. An unblinking, AI-powered surveillance regime that renders due process obsolete and dissent fatal.

Still, it is not too late to resist—but doing so requires awareness, courage, and a willingness to confront the machinery of our own captivity.

Make no mistake: the government is not your friend in this. Neither are the corporations building this digital prison. They thrive on your data, your fear, and your silence.

To resist, we must first understand the weaponized AI tools being used against us.

We must demand transparency, enforce limits on data collection, ban predictive profiling, and dismantle the fusion centers feeding this machine.

We must treat AI surveillance with the same suspicion we once reserved for secret police. Because that is what AI-powered governance has become—secret police—only smarter, faster, and less accountable.

We don’t have much time.

Trump’s alliance with Palantir is a warning sign—not just of where we are, but of where we’re headed. A place where freedom is conditional, rights are revocable, and justice is decided by code.

The question is no longer whether we’re being watched—that is now a given—but whether we will meekly accept it. Will we dismantle this electronic concentration camp, or will we continue building the infrastructure of our own enslavement?

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we trade liberty for convenience and privacy for security, we will find ourselves locked in a prison we helped build, and the bars won’t be made of steel. They will be made of data.

Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

There are few things more “Catholic” in Catholicism than the pope, especially regarding the dogma of papal infallibility. Unfortunately, it’s also widely misunderstood.

Here are five common myths about papal infallibility:

Myth 1: Papal infallibility means the pope is never wrong.

Truth: Papal infallibility means the pope can be infallible when he teaches a certain way, not that he is always infallible in everything he teaches all the time. He is only infallible when he, in exercising his Petrine office, intentionally teaches something definitively for the whole Church. It’s rare for popes to invoke this authority.

Myth 2: It means the pope never sins.

Truth: Papal infallibility only regards doctrine, not the holiness of the pope. As our former pontiff, Pope Francis, humbly admitted, the pope is a sinful person who is in need of God’s grace and goes to confession like everyone else.

Myth 3: It means the pope can make up new doctrines.

Truth: It’s actually the teaching of the Catholic Church that divine revelation ceased with the death of the last apostle. The only thing the Church’s magisterium, which includes the pope, can do is defend, explain, and clarify the Word of God. The pope is not capable of revealing “new” truths, only correctly interpreting what God has already revealed.

Myth 4: It’s a modern invention.

Truth: Yes, papal infallibility was made a dogma in the 19th century – but it had always been believed by the Church. You can see it in the Church fathers, even as early as the second century, in the writings of Saint Irenaeus (Against Heresies, III.3).

Myth 5: It’s not in the Bible.

Truth: Jesus told Peter that he was the “rock” on which He would build His Church, and that the “gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” (Mt. 16) If the Church is built on Peter (the successor of whom is the pope), and the Church can’t fail, then that means the Holy Spirit will not let the papacy fail. That’s the essence of papal infallibility.

Would you add anything to the list?

California has earned a reputation for high taxes. Yet, this week there is a sign of hope for tax resistance in the state legislature. On Monday, the California Assembly voted unanimously to delay by five years a tax increase that had been set to go into effect on July 1.

AB 564 — the legislation approved by the Assembly — deals with delaying the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration’s impending increase of a state-imposed special tax on marijuana sales from 15 percent to 19 percent. The state tax is in addition to special marijuana taxes that local governments impose.

A March press release from Assembly member Matt Haney, the bill’s sponsor, presented several arguments supporting the stopping, or at least delaying, of the impending tax increase. The press release noted that “the licensed cannabis market” in California that “has been in a sharp decline as evidenced by plummeting sales and tax revenue” is at a disadvantage because of marijuana taxes already being lower in other states such as Michigan and Colorado. The press release further argued that the expected tax increase would cause marijuana businesses across the state to fail and could even significantly hinder tourism in California.

I January of 2019, I wrote about the threat high taxes in California posed to the then one year old legal recreational marijuana market in the state. HR 564, which still has to be considered by the state’s Senate and governor before it can become law, is a starting place for addressing this problem.

Delaying a marijuana tax increase does some good. But, ultimately, to enhance respect for freedom and increase wealth, the special marijuana “sin taxes” imposed by governments in California and across America should be eliminated.

This website relies on its readers’ support

How Well Does Russia Understand the West?

Paul Craig Roberts.

I raise the question in the title because the Russian media looks askance at what it labels “a rise in the popularity of right-wing forces” in “recent elections in three EU countries.”  The Russian media describes as “right-wing” the awakened ethnic nationalities–the French of France, the Germans of Germany–as “right-wing.”  But President Putin of Russia describes Russia as Russian, even though the Federation is comprised of different nationalities.  Putin stresses that whatever the ethnicities of the Russian Federation, all are Russian.  This is likely the case as the non-Russian ethnicities have been part of Russia for a very long time, whereas in the West the newly-arriving immigrant-invaders are proving to be unassimilable hostiles.

Putin doesn’t regard Russian ethnicity, an ethnicity extended to the Muslim provinces of the Federation such as Chechnya, as right-wing. So why does Russia regard European ethnic nationality “right-wing?”

The answer, I think, is that the American, European and British left-wing have conflated an ethnic consciousness that constitutes a national state with Nazism.  The Nazis were a socialist party, not a right-wing one.  But they were National Socialists which the left-wing contrasted with approved international socialism associated with the Soviet Union. Right-wing became anything to the right  of  Trotskyist International Communism. Nationalism was seen as a barrier to the spread of Communism, and thus it was evil.

Do Russians comprehend that European ethnic states are being over run by non-European ethniticies and that France is ceasing to be France, that Britain is ceasing to be British, that Germany is ceasing to be German?

The efforts of European peoples to defend their ethnicities is not right-wing. If Marine Le Pen is a Nazi because she speaks for the ethnic French people, so is Putin who describes Russia as Russian.

Russians should understand that the reappearance of ethnic nationalism in Europe is a demand for sovereignty and is compatible with Putin’s demand for Russian sovereignty.  Instead of falling into the narrative that ethnic nationalism is right-wing, hence Nazi, Russians should realize that ethnic European national states are allies who wish to be free of open borders that are overwhelming Europe with immigrant-invaders.

French President General Charles de Gaulle was the last independent European leader.  He refused Franch’s entry into the American empire and refused to submit France to NATO.  If European ethnic nationalism can be revived, it means the end of Washington’s European empire.  

Israel Is So Powerful That Israel Can Prevent MIT Class President from Attending Graduation Ceremony

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jun/02/mit-commencement-speech-gaza?CMP=share_btn_url 

Comment by PCR:

Israel also determines who is allowed tenure in US universities. Remember the case of Steven Salaita. Salaita, a tenured professor at  Virginia Tech, was hired away by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Salaita resigned from Virginia Tech and moved to Illinois. The Israel Lobby objected, and apparently on Israel’s orders, the University of Illinois chancellor cancelled the appointment of Salaita, who, last I heard, was employed driving a school bus.

The is also the case of Norman Finkelstein. Israel was able to reach inside a US Catholic University and rescind Finkelstein’s tenure. The Israel Lobby’s power has prevented Finkelstein, an acknowledged scholar, from obtaining another university appointment.

Israel’s power over what Americans are permitted to say has grown under the Trump regime.  American students who dare to criticize Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people are expelled from their universities, and foreign students who object to Israel’s genocide are branded “terrorists” and deported.

What more evidence do you need that America is the punk two-bit puppet of Israel?  When Israel gives the order to its punk puppet:  “Cancel Free Speech and Academic Freedom,”  the American puppet does as it is ordered.

The Ever-widening War

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/waiting-for-the-oreshniks-while-the-istanbul-kabuki-proceeds-not-negatively/ 

Comment by PCR:

Few comprehend the seriousness of this strike on Russia’s strategic bombing fleet.  Putin invited the attack by doing nothing about a prior attack on Russia’s strategic warning radar.  Putin’s never-ending war which sacrifices Russian soldiers for little gain will eventually erupt into a big war.

Another dangerous implication lies in the answer to the question:  Did Trump give the green light for what is in effect a declaration of war against Russia?  If not, it means Trump is not in the loop.  So who is making decisions that will result in war between the US and Russia?

A person would think this would be a matter of serious concern and discussion.  But it is not.  So how can a devastating war be avoided?

Why does the Kremlin attend peace talks while Russia’s strategic air force is undergoing attack?  How can Russia expect to be taken seriously when it constantly sends signals of weakness?  Little wonder Zelensky and the West give Putin the finger.

The Ever-Widening War

UK preparing for war 

https://www.rt.com/news/618511-uk-war-readiness-plans/ 

UK must prepare for direct conflict with Russia 

https://www.rt.com/news/618465-uk-preparing-for-direct-conflict/ 

Elite Western universities form a corrupt and parasitic empire

https://www.rt.com/news/618349-elite-universities-corrupt-empire/ 

“Marriage is not an ideal, but the canon of true love between a man and a woman: a love that is total, faithful and fruitful”. This is what Leo XIV said on 31 May 2025, in the homily of the Mass for the Jubilee of Families, emphasising that this love “enables you, in the image […]

The post Leo XIV: Marriage is not an ideal, but the canon of true love between man and woman appeared first on Voice of the Family.

“The Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things.” At the Last Supper, on the last night of our Lord’s mortal life, we find mention of two gifts. One of these gifts is given, and the other is promised. The gift that is given is […]

The post He will abide with you: sermon on Whitsunday appeared first on Voice of the Family.