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In overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court delivered the rights biggest single victory ever, and it may spell the end of the conservative movement as weve known it.

It was Ronald Reagan who popularized the notion that the conservative movement rested on a fusionist three-legged stool. In theory, the three legs were free market economics, national defense, and social conservatism. In practice, free market economics meant low taxes and pro-business policies. National defense meant anti-communism and, briefly, the war on terror. Social conservatism covered a lot of territory but the enduring core was opposition to Roe and abortion.

Like anti-communism, pro-life was a big tent all its own, including constitutionalists, religious activists, advocates of states rights, et al. While nearly everyone invoked the sanctity of life, as a policy matter, many argued merely for overturning Roe either to fix a jurisprudential error or to send the issue back to the states, to let the democratic process find a social compromise on abortion.

For other abortion opponents, however, overturning Roe was a first step on the road to enshrining a culture of life that protected the unborn from conception onward.

Think of it this way: If the court had banned abortion outright based on the right to life found in the 14th Amendment, the once-united opponents of Roe would be divided. Some would cheer a huge win for life, but others would see the same sort of judicial activism they decried in Roe. Well, the fallout from Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization has opened a similar rift between opponents of Roe and opponents of abortion. And its a mystery where these factions will go next, ideologically or politically.

While a lot attention is on states where abortion will be banned, its telling that two of the GOPs most popular governors, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, have stopped short of outlawing abortion, preferring a ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Georgias Republican Gov. Brian Kemp stands behind a six-week limit, while New Hampshires Chris Sununu says abortion will remain legal in his state.

Meanwhile, some House Republicans have called for a federal abortion ban. The Life at Conception Act has 160 co-sponsors, though one wonders how many it will lose now that it has a chance, however slim, of passage.

All of this political positioning surely has a lot to do with the role the GOP base plays in congressional elections compared with statewide races, where winning the more moderate middle is necessary.

One of the arguments for repealing Roe was that it fueled polarization by removing accountability on abortion policy. Politicians could take base-pleasing absolutist positions knowing that Roe barred any meaningful changes that reflected the more nuanced views of voters. For instance, while its true that large numbers of Americans were against repealing Roe, support for Roes actual guidelines was mixed. As of April, more Americans favored a ban on abortions after 15 weeks than opposed one, though the same survey also found a majority of voters say abortion should be legal in all or most cases (obviously, its complicated). Republicans generally benefited from polarization on abortion both financially and electorally. But they also benefited from the unity of purpose conservatives enjoyed pre-Dobbs. In the post-Roe era that unity is gone, at least for the foreseeable future.

Which brings me back to that three-legged stool.

The end of the Cold War spelled the end of anti-communisms role in galvanizing conservatives around a specific foreign and defense policy. Pat Buchanan, for instance, considered Cold War anti-communism the great exception to conservatisms natural tendency to isolationism, which he returned to in the 1990s. Donald Trumps America First rhetoric was a delayed victory for Buchananism.

As for economics, most on the right still reject tax hikes, but the war on woke capitalism is the hot new thing, and protectionism has lost its bad odor. Indeed, while traditional conservative opposition to a more generous welfare state has been eroding for some time, the Dobbs decision may hasten the process. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, hailed the courts decision. But, he added, we must not only continue to take steps to protect the unborn, we must also do more to support mothers and their babies.

He promised to soon introduce a bill to ensure we do everything we can to give every child the opportunity to fully access the promise of America.

I think the Supreme Court decided Dobbs correctly. But those who insist the majority acted out of partisan loyalty to the GOP or to the broader conservative movement miss the fact that neither may benefit over the long haul. The conservative justices ruled on principle, letting the chips fall where they may. Its going to be raining chips for quite a while.

Read more:
How Dobbs Might Shape the Future of Conservatism in Unexpected Ways - The Dispatch

For more than 100 days, the First Secretary of the Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine Mikhail Kononovich and his brother Aleksander, remain detained by the Ukrainian authorities. With a new question submitted to the EU High Commissioner Josep Borrell, the European Parliament Group of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) denounces the unjust and arbitrary persecution and detention of the two young communists.While the conflict in Ukraine is still raging with incalculable consequences for its people, the persecuted young communists are reportedly subject to unacceptable conditions of detention and blackmail. The two brothers have been appointed a lawyer by the Ukrainian authorities and now the dilemma they face is either to take responsibility for the accusations addressed to them under the 1st and 2nd part of Article 109 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine and to be sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, or to reject the accusations and remain in prison with life sentences! Utilizing its anti-communist laws and emergency decrees, but also the EU policy, the Ukrainian government escalates anti-communism and the persecution of communists.

Based on the above, the KKE MEP Lefteris Nikolaou-Alavanos submitted the following question to the Vice President of the EU Commission and High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell:

"Taking into account the upgraded relations between the EU and Ukraine as a candidate member, what is his stance on the urgent demand for the immediate release of the young communist prisoners and what responsibility the EU undertakes concerning the great dangers towards their life and health, as well as to assure that they will not suffer further torture and blackmails?

Given the fact that the Commission is aware of the persecution and their unacceptable detention and is closely following the case, why it hasn't done the slightest thing to date for their immediate release?"

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KKE: Question to EU's Josep Borrell about the detained young communists in Ukraine - In Defense of Communism

This morning as we again awaken to the realization that American women have lost their bodily autonomy, that five individuals can decide that States rights cant control guns, but that they do have the power to control womens bodies, we mourn the loss of 50 years of a right to an abortion. Yet, as we argue that this is returning us to a dark historical period, we must also look to how this decades-long battle by the Christian Right has made use of conspiracy theories, God, country, and a battle against communism, socialism, and humanism to disempower and manipulate those with the greatest power in elections: women.

These battles against the rights of women, people of color, and those in the LGBTQ2SA communities have never wavered. Erupting each time progress has been made, these groups have for decades pushed a cohesive message that activated an angry minority who interpret our world as infringing upon their rights, and who perceive injustice in every gain made for those who neither look like them nor believe as they do.

As many of us fought for rights, inclusivity, equality, and individuality, these individuals brought moral panics, conspiracy theories, and abject fear to the table to motivate their followers. To this way of thinking, behind every step forward, lay an evil cabal, a demon or minion of Satan, while they, as the soldiers on the side of the eternal, were commanded to battle in the streets and storm the voting booths.

In the 1960s, America saw the rise of a socio-political movement in the John Birch Society (JBS). Robert Welch and his National Council, a few members of which he dubbed Gods Angry Men, worked endlessly to marry free enterprise with religion. Armed with the knowledge that the three most influential groups in society were youth, women, and religious leaders, they created a three-pronged approach to inflict fear on their membership to mobilize them to battle for God, country, and family.

That motto alone articulates how their brand of nationalism was to be formed. In their monthly magazine American Opinion, best-selling author Taylor Caldwell (1900-1985) wrote articles to the women of the Society reinforcing the evils of feminism, of communism, and of free choice via conspiracy theory, Christian persecution, and an unwavering dedication to traditional gender roles. Replace communism with socialism and such an article would be right at home in todays National Review or in one of the larger legacy papersostensibly to ensure balanced coverage.

For Caldwell, the injustices of society were at the hands of the LGBTQ2SA community and feminists. Using a creative version of nostalgia, she perpetuated a scenario where sexual freedom and womens equality was the death knell to America. She wrote of the importance of women in raising manly men, where there was no blurring of the sexes, and a mans word was law in his house, no matter how shrewish his wife, as she wrote in her 1967 article, Love Thy Neighbor An Example of Divine Humor. In her words Papa had nights out with the Boys, and if he came home a little beery, and late, Mama knew enough to keep her mouth shut. That was the wondrous world that Caldwell and the JBS wanted to create.

As with most articulations of nationalism, women were portrayed as the ones who protected American values of family, gender roles, morality, and religion. In Caldwells articles, and in the rhetoric of much of todays conservative movement, it was Americas abandonment of God and embrace of LGBTQ2SA communities, feminism, and effeminate men, that opened the door for the communist/socialist infiltration. Caldwells advice was to treat your son, from the very bassinet, to be manly, as he wasnt an adorable baby, but rather an embryo man. Women were to respect his status as a man even while an infant.

This was in harmony with her direction on how a woman was to treat her husband as her dearest treasure above all else, whose children are secondary to her mate in all things, as she put it in a 1968 article On Manliness: So You Want to Raise A Boy? Those feminists who were not bearing children, not getting married, and were using their powers of seduction to dupe men into working for the communists, were at fault for the state of America.

These feminists and those perverts were being used by the Illuminati to destroy America, God, and all that was good in the world to create a New World Order, where Christians, capitalists, and true Americans would be enslaved. If you hope to shrug this off as ancient history take a look at Tucker Carlsons 2022 documentary The End of Men, about which Annika Brockschmidt writes, For Carlson, the alleged decline of conservative values, and thus the decline of America, can be explained directly by the effeminization of men.

A picture from White Lives Matter Telegram group.

Response to the John Birch Society has long been one of ridicule and dismissal (as is the case more recently regarding Tucker Carlsons documentary). Groups like the JBS, and influencers who spread disinformation and conspiracy theories have been perceived as a tinfoil-hat-wearing fringe with no influence. This response has culminated in the position we find ourselves in today. Weve ignored and mocked, while theyve gathered momentum and built a contemporary movement held together by conspiracy, moral panics, and fear.

The groomer panic we see today is a culmination of decades of adherence to conspiracy theories, that hold that women and feminists, are the ultimate weapon of the great replacement of white people. The seduction of sexuality is the downfall of God, country, and family.

In the social media posts of conspiracy theories, extremists, and white nationalists the morning after the ruling we saw a repeat of history:

Roe v. Wade has just been overturned. Millions of unborn White Children may now have their lives protected, protection that should have never been taken away in the first place. The pendulum that is our society is beginning to swing back in our direction. White Lives Matter!

The end of Roe v. Wade isnt celebrated as a constitutional victory, its reframed as attacks on LGBTQ2SA communities and women, and is celebrated as a win for God, country, and family. The enemy remains an evil cabal intent on ending a nation.

Comment from a Proud Boys Chat Group on Telegram

While we continue to ridicule those building a socio-political movement rooted in manufactured nostalgia, they continue to build on this perceived win for God, and for true patriots of the nationi.e., those who are heterosexual, Christian, patriarchal, and white. This SCOTUS decision is a return to an America where only traditional gender roles were acceptable, sex is a mans domain (and available on demand), and where God ruled the nationa very nostalgic return.

Nostalgia is a form of timekeeping thats rooted in politics. Its a lens through which to look at the contemporary world in which fear and anxiety are the catalyst for a longing for the past. In this context the past is envisioned as a period where the decline of society began; where a moral absence started creating the contemporary world; where theres a lack of true social relationships and personal authenticity.

Nostalgia isnt a need for or recollection of a past utopia but is instead a criticism of the present. It isnt a personal memory but is instead a collective one about the biography of groups or the nation; nostalgia lies in the plane between the personal and the collective memory. In this light MAGA was the perfect slogan for a figure like Donald Trump.

Comments from a Proud Boys Chat Group on Telegram

Using language and memes that promote the idea of the degeneration of the nation at the hands of feminism or gender rights, nationalists are positioned as the opposition to progress and create a stigmatization of groups who are on the margins of society, labelling them as degenerate classes. LGBTQ2SA groups, sex workers, criminals, feminists, and substance-addicted individuals are defined as racial deviants and at odds with the culture of the nation. The selective use and support of feminist issues, such as TERF ideologies, construct a narrative to reinforce traditional norms of femininity and masculinity and patriarchal and heteronormative values.

Its imperative that we acknowledge the power of conspiracyand of fear and how its a motivating factorwoven into the language of religion and Gods work, in order to stop the hemorrhaging of our rights. While the official framing of the removal of rights is constructed within the Constitution, or historical precedents, the truth is, the movement behind these decisions, is standing upon a revisionist history of nostalgia, hate, and fear.

Read more here:
Embryo Men Decades of Conspiracy, Christian Nationalism, and Fear Led Us to The End of Roe v. Wade - Religion Dispatches

Devised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, Operation Northwoods called for CIA agents to attack U.S. military personnel and civilians so they could blame it on Cuba's communist regime.

In the early 1960s, Americas leaders turned an increasingly nervous eye south, where communist leader Fidel Castro had risen to power in Cuba. Determined to end his reign, the U.S. government came up with several false flag attacks under the banner of Operation Northwoods.

The classified plan, organized under the umbrella of the anti-Castro Cuba Project, or Operation Mongoose, proposed a number of ways that the U.S. could fake a Cuban attack against America as a way to justify U.S. military intervention in Cuba. Military leaders suggested staging attacks at Guantanamo Bay, sinking ships full of Cuban refugees, and even staging the shooting down of a civilian aircraft.

And Operation Northwoods was more than just idle scheming. It was a concrete plan co-signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presented to the office of President John F. Kennedy. This is the story of Operation Northwoods.

By 1959, Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States were nearing a fever pitch, and it was at this moment that Fidel Castro came on the scene.

In 1959, the communist revolutionary Castro overthrew the U.S.-backed Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista and established Cuba as the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere. Americans, accustomed to worrying about the distant threat of the U.S.S.R., suddenly had a communist country just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The Cold War, it seemed, could get hot.

One should not forget, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev said in July 1960, driving the point home, that now the United States is no longer at an unreachable distance from the Soviet Union as it was before.

U.S. policymakers got the message. And as they publicly declared they would not tolerate international communism in the Western Hemisphere, intelligence organizations got to work behind the scenes.

American intelligence first set out to neutralize the Castro threat with the CIA-led Bay of Pigs attack in 1961, developed under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. When that plan failed, according to ABC, U.S. military leadership decided it was their turn.

In 1962, General Edward Lansdale, the chief of operations for the anti-Castro Cuba Project, or Operation Mongoose, asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a brief but precise description of pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.

In response, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, produced Operation Northwoods.

On March 13, 1962, Lemnitzer presented Operation Northwoods to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the document outlined a number of ways that the U.S. could incite a war with Cuba.

One plan suggested inventing well-coordinated incidents in and around Guantanamo to make it seem like the U.S. base was under attack. To make the attack seem credible, Operation Northwoods suggested using rumors, friendly Cubans, starting fires, and conducting mock funerals for victims.

Another proposed a Remember the Maine incident, referring to the U.S.S. Maine, which blew up under mysterious circumstances in Havana harbor in 1898 and gave the U.S. justification to go to war with Spain. The 1962 version of this plan, Operation Northwoods proposed, could be arranged in several forms.

The U.S. could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. Or, they could blow up an unmanned vessel, then conduct a fake rescue operation. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation, the report noted.

Other suggestions in Operation Northwoods involved developing a Communist Cuban terror campaign in Florida or perhaps Washington D.C., sinking a boat of Cuban refugees (real or simulated), plotting public attacks on Cuban refugees, exploding bombs, and planting evidence that suggested that Cuba was plotting an attack in South America.

But perhaps the most ambitious plot in Operation Northwoods involved a civilian airliner. This plan proposed creating an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner.

The airline in question could be charted by fake college students or any groupings of persons with a common interest and convincingly painted to make it seem real.

In the end, however, Operation Northwoods never got further than a memo. According to ABC, President John F. Kennedy told Lemnitzer directly on March 16, 1962, that he had no plans to use any sort of force to take Cuba.

Operation Northwoods, all the crazy schemes they devised to invade Cuba, shocked him, horrified him, Oliver Stone, who directed the 1991 movie JFK and produced the documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which suggested that the government killed the president, told Jacobin. Thats what he was dealing with a war-state mentality that came out of the 1950s.

For decades, according to James Bamford, who brought Operation Northwoods to light in his 2001 book Body of Secrets, the set of anti-Castro plots was stuffed into a drawer.

The reason these were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because they were so embarrassing, Bamford told ABC, calling Operation Northwoods one of the most corrupt [plans] ever created by the U.S. government.

He added, The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants.

Though most of the leading players in Operation Northwoods have since died Kennedy, of course, was assassinated in November 1963 those close to the president have flatly denied any knowledge of the anti-Castro plot.

Ive never heard of Operation Northwoods. Never heard of it and dont believe it, Theodore Sorenson, Kennedys White House special counsel, told The Baltimore Sun in 2001. Obviously, it would be totally illegal as well as totally unwise.

And Robert McNamara, who allegedly saw the plan before the president, also denied knowing about it. I never heard of it, he told The Baltimore Sun that same year. I cant believe the chiefs were talking about or engaged in what I would call CIA-type operations.

As such, the legacy of Operations Northwoods is an appropriately mysterious one. Though it reflects Cold War tensions and fears about Cuba, it also reveals what methods American military brass were willing to consider. Had the operation succeeded, Bamford noted, the U.S. would have imposed military rule over Cubans.

Thats what were supposed to be freeing them from, he told ABC.

The only way we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny, basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing.

After reading about Operation Northwoods, see how British intelligence hoodwinked the Nazis with an ambitious plot dubbed Operation Mincemeat. Or, look through these false flag conspiracy theories that are totally false.

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Operation Northwoods, The US False Flag Plot To Incite A War With Cuba - All That's Interesting

By Nikos Mottas.

The same old fairytale of left-progressive governments is back in the news following the electoral victory of social democrat Gustavo Petro in Colombia, as well as the performance of leftist Jean-Luc Mlenchon in French parliamentary elections.

As it happened last December with Gabriel Boric' victory in Chile, a number of left-wing, opportunist forces in Greece and abroad celebrate the recent results, presenting them as a triumph of the left which can allegedly bring positive developments for the working people.

Historical experience, both in Europe and Latin America, demonstrate that the so-called left governments cultivate and spread illusions about the humanization of capitalism. Nonetheless, the painful reality is that humane capitalism is like Santa Claus; it does not exist. The case of PSUV in Venezuela is an emblematic example of the failure of the opportunist theory of 21st Century Socialism. The examples of Lula-Rousseff in Brazil and Lopez Obrador in Mexico confirmed that no left or progressive government, no matter its intentions, can provide actual and radical solutions to the people's problems as long as the means of production remain in the hands of the capital. In the best of cases, these governments adopted some policies against extreme poverty, but even these measures were subsequently retracted as long as they were incompatible with capitalist economy. After all, the prosperity of the working class is by definition incompatible with the profitability of the monopolies.

Such political forces overlook or underestimate the laws governing capitalist economy, as well as the de facto reactionary character of the bourgeois state. The tragic outcome of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government in Chile must be a constant reminder that socialism is impossible to come through peaceful ways and parliamentary illusions, but only through the overthrow of the capitalist system and the eradication of monopolies' power.

Is there any particular reason for the working class in Colombia and France to celebrate the electoral achievements of Petro and Melenchon? For us, the answer is pretty clear. The working people must have no illusions. The real way out for the people's interests does not lie in the old and faded fairytales about left governments, but only in the intensification of the organized class struggle against the system of exploitation, capitalism.

* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.

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Gustavo Petro, Jean-Luc Mlenchon and the fairytale of left governments - In Defense of Communism