By Jeremy Salt
Oct 10, 2025
Israel-friendly oligarchs want to control the political parties, media, etc., in order to control the narrative.
Chaos abounds. In the US, the army is set into the streets of Chicago for no other reason than that Trump wants it to be there. He is picking out his enemies in the FBI and the judiciary and trying to destroy them, one by one. Masked ICE vigilantes roam the streets, beating and dragging poverty-stricken ‘aliens’ into the nearest dungeon.
The administration drowns in debt it can never repay, except by invading other countries and stealing their resources, as the US has always done to create the land of the brave and home of the free. Now, Trump has added bullying by raising tariffs to the level of highway robbery.
On September 30, the government actually ran out of money. In a country said to be the richest country in the world, more than 11 percent of the population – 37 million people – live in poverty.
Yet, since October 2023, it has delivered $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel, on top of the hundreds of billions it has delivered since 1948. It funds genocide, while remaining unable to meet the basic living costs of its own people. Can there be any argument that its priorities are not completely screwed up?
Trump and his cohort are clearly bent on the destruction of the old world and construction of a new one, in which more oligarchs will buy more yachts and more people will starve at home and abroad. Executive orders that once trickled out of the White House will turn into a flood as Trump decides what is best for the country.
‘The storm whispers to the warrior,’ deputy White House chief of staff, Stephen Miller, intoned recently. This would be more accurately expressed as the stormtrooper whispering to the vigilantes roaming American cities on the orders of the President.
The same kind of violent thugs set loose by the state roamed the streets of Berlin and Munich in the 1930s. They were not wearing masks, but they were wearing brown uniforms and armbands, so easy to see them coming.
Trump is now sending the army into cities as well. He is going to take all the trash away. America is going to be cleaned up. The gloves are off. There are no rules any longer, not domestically and not in foreign policy as Trump, Hegseth, Miller and others have made clear.
A rule is what they will decide when they want to decide it. Their rules float like paper boats on a pond, drifting this way and that, according to where the whispering wind blowing from the White House takes them.
The strictures extend to the country’s most senior commanders, whom Hegseth, striding up and down with the oiled confidence of the Fox News host he used to be, told them what they had to do.
They had been summoned at short notice from all over the world. They were not told what to expect. Was the US about to launch a surprise attack on Iran? Was an attack on the US imminent?
Something serious was up and Hegseth was about to tell them what it was: they had to lose weight. Fat troops, fat generals and fat admirals were unacceptable and all of them would have to take a physical fitness test and meet height and weight measurements twice a year to hold down their jobs. That was pretty much the serious content of what he had to say.
For those who disagree with the edicts streaming out of Trump’s social media account, violence, arbitrary arrest and prosecution is now the way, more openly than ever. No more playing around with evildoers, bad guys and illegals sleeping under railway bridges. Do not ask why they are here, do not give them a court hearing – just round them up and send them to where decent people will never have to see them.
In a country historically committed to its Constitution, this will lead to rising civil conflict and must surely end in impeachment of the President and grand jury prosecutions of others, if a ‘united’ United States is to survive.
The chaos extends from the national government to state governments, all the way down to even middle-class households trying to meet their bills. Yet, the oligarchs have vast, preposterous, offensive wealth because in this ‘democratic’ country, there has never been a rule book for them.
They have the freedom to accumulate veritable mountains of money, and too bad for hospitals and those living in rusting, decaying cities where the money is really needed.
The oligarchs’ wealth gives them unelected power.
Through the funding of political parties and individual politicians, they can dictate domestic and foreign policies. Their control extends to the mainstream media and now the social media. The main social platforms are all falling into their hands, adding to Google’s algorithmic exclusion zone.
Most recently, after Congressional legislation closed down TikTok to take it out of Chinese-owned (ByteDance) hands, it was sold to a consortium of US oligarchs that included Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch and Michael Dell.
Soon thereafter, Ellison bankrolled the purchase by his son, David, of the Paramount Global media conglomerate (CBS, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures) and, soon after that, David Ellison appointed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Ellison, Murdoch and Dell are all enthusiastic ‘supporters’ of Israel, which, nowadays, is code for supporting genocide. Ellison and Dell also contribute directly to the Israeli military.
‘Loyalty’ to Israel is a prerequisite for employment at Oracle, Ellison’s company, and it is not much different at Dell or in the Murdoch stable. Bari Weiss is an uncompromising hard-line Zionist whose appointment was naturally welcomed by Netanyahu, with the acquisition of X/Twitter now on his mind.
Having lost the American public, all these recent moves are signs of Israel’s determination to take back control of the narrative through the oligarchs’ billions.
The alleged connections of ByteDance to the Chinese government, feeding into alleged political censorship within TikTok, were the reason for the company being intimidated into selling to American investors.
Handing TikTok over to third-party control by Israel – not alleged but out in the open – is no different. The oligarchs will use TikTok in an attempt to restore Israel’s shattered image in the eyes of the American and global reading and viewing public. Weiss will have the same mission at CBS News.
The Soviet Union’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ has now been replaced in the US by the ‘dictatorship of the oligarchs.’
If the US is in a mess, Europe is not much better. Old political parties are collapsing under the weight of their own weaknesses. There is virtually no left remaining in the mainstream, and the extreme ‘patriotic’ right is rapidly filling the vacuum.
On the question of Palestine, a gulf as wide as the sea separating continents lies between the people and their politicians. Mainstream ‘liberal’, centrist, and right-wing parties continue to stand by Israel against the wishes of the people. Money, power, and not love have to be the reason for this.
In the past year, masses of people have taken to the streets around the world to let their governments know where they stand on Palestine. In Milan, police told to control the demonstrators ended up marching with them.
In London, police clearly do not like being told to break up demonstrations against genocide by a government supporting it. Hundreds have been arrested every time. This is not police work but political suppression and the police are justified in asking why they are being told to do Netanyahu’s dirty work through Starmer.
In Amsterdam, 250,000 demonstrators packed the streets. They looked more like Sana’a after Friday prayers, and, were they ever to meet, the natural human bond between demonstrators in Yemen and the Netherlands would be clear. It does not matter where they are; kinship among people responding to the greatest atrocities they have ever seen is the same. The differences of language, culture, and geography all fall away besides this deepest connection of all.
Governments that have betrayed their people are now moving away from their complicity in genocide to a ‘peace plan’ imposed on the Palestinians that will work only until Netanyahu sabotages it. Hamas has negotiated carefully and, in the short term, at least the flow of aid into Gaza will be resumed, and prisoners starved, beaten, tortured and raped in Israeli hell-holes will be released.
In the meantime, the US and Israel prepare for the next attack on Iran. In Europe, drone attacks across the Polish and Danish borders are an attempt to frighten Europeans into thinking that they are the first indications of a Russian attempt to take over the entire continent.
Crazed European and UK politicians may want war with Russia. Their governments are not equipped to fight it and their people do not want it, but that does not stop them from talking tough. They seemed to have lost their minds. No surprise that the spruikers of war with Russia and Israel’s genocide are one and the same.
As was the case in the 1930s, people in their mass demonstrations are doing their best to blunt this madness, but politicians, blind to the cataclysmic consequences, are forging ahead with their false flag ‘Russian’ missile attack on Poland and drone flights over Russia’s Nordic neighbors, Norway, Denmark and Sweden.
The interests of a genocidal state are a driving force in this mix. Against the total horror of what Israel has done in the past two years, why are governments still sticking with Israel when, against the atrocities it has committed over the last 80 years, it should have been abandoned long ago?
Put aside emotional support for the suffering Jewish people. That was the sales pitch as far back as Balfour. The real reason has always been self-interest. A ‘Jewish state’ at the heart of the Middle East was seen for a long time as a strategic asset, despite misgivings expressed by policymakers and military commanders.
Now, it is clearly a liability, domestically as well as in foreign policy. Palestine has become an electoral issue. The voters have let governments know what they want and political parties that refuse to respond are going to be kicked out of office.
Many of the answers as to why the entire ‘West’ got entangled in Zionism in the first place are already clear. They will be thrashed out endlessly by future historians. In the meantime, Israel’s erstwhile ‘allies’ and ‘friends’ now have the choice of sticking with this lawless enterprise or bailing out in their own self-interest before it drags them into even deeper waters.
Read also defenddemocracy.press
We remind our readers that publication of articles on our site does not mean that we agree with what is written. Our policy is to publish anything which we consider of interest, so as to assist our readers in forming their opinions. Sometimes we even publish articles with which we totally disagree, since we believe it is important for our readers to be informed on as wide a speCtrum of views as possible.
