The Hebrew Myth Explained

According to the Torah itself, the story of the Hebrews was that they were NOT indigenous.   The Hebrews were outsiders, the word itself means "wanderers." 

Note, there is no actual evidence for most of this, but this is the foundational myth of Judaism which Jews themselves reference and largely believe in as proof of their prior residency in Palestine.  I've always held that there might be some truth to these Judaic myths, there could have been some guy named Abraham from Ur--there's no way we can prove or disprove it now, but even if not, then the Hebrews were simply a small sect among many other Canaanites and therefore the Hebrew descendants, if thats what the Jews actually are (and most are at best highly mixed with others especially Europeans), they have no exclusive ancestral claim to Palestine, only a very small and diluted one.  And it should be added that an ancient ancestral claim isn't worth a cup of coffee from present owners, especially a diluted one shared with millions of others.  So either by myth or by best available historical evidence, the Zionist Entity represents a murderous illegal invasion, theft, and occupation of Palestine, breaking many if not most of the laws of Judaism itself.

And even the myths say that the Jews were not the only descendants of Abraham either.  I hold that virtually everyone in the west has at least some Judean descent because of the many generations that have passed and the fact that the Judeans in diaspora intermarried more with white European elites than any other group.

Copied from Facebook written by Rashid Siddique

The Hebrews … the outsiders

If we trace the story as even the Hebrew Bible itself tells it, it becomes clear:

• Abraham was from Ur (Mesopotamia, today Iraq). His homeland was not Canaan, not “Israel,” but ancient Sumer.

• Isaac and Jacob — they only lived in Canaan temporarily. Altogether, that “stay” was less than a century. That hardly makes them native to the land.

• Jacob’s sons (the so-called “tribes of Israel”) were not born in Canaan at all — most of them were born in Mesopotamia, and later lived in Egypt.

• The whole “Israelite people” only entered Canaan from Egypt — meaning by their own book, they were outsiders, migrants, or if we put it bluntly: invaders.

So if someone shouts today: “We are indigenous to the land of Israel!” — even their own Torah disagrees. The roots are Mesopotamian and Egyptian. Canaan was someone else’s land.

The word “Hebrew” (Ivri / ʿApiru / Habiru) itself didn’t mean “chosen people” or “indigenous tribe” — it literally meant outsiders, wanderers, stateless people.

The Canaanites (and Egyptians too) used the term to describe roaming groups who came from outside the land. In other words, the name itself already admits: “We weren’t from here.”

Throughout history, nearly every group in the region—Ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans, British, Palestinians, and others—has at some point regarded the Hebrews as invaders or occupiers.

All names of the cities and places in Palestine are older than to be Hebrew words In Palestine all cities and places have Canaanite names and were built by the Canaanites; even long time before an Abraham and his gang fled there from Ur, in today Iraq.

The Hebrew slaves from Egypt never built any cities in the land of Canaan and the Philstines - the Hebrew tribes and thievs stole every thing from the Canaanites, even their language ...

"The Canaanites were first.

And when we speak of "Palestinians" or of the

"Arab" population, we bear in mind their Canaanite origin." -

"The Land of Canaan" by llene Beatty

Major urban centers were not built by Hebrews; they settled the hill country villages.

Archaeological evidence shows typical Hebrew settlements were small, walled villages, often built on previously unoccupied sites.

There is no evidence that the Hebrews founded major coastal cities or lowland Canaanite cities.

Archaeology shows Hebrews mostly settled in previously lightly populated hill country rather than building large new cities.

Even the Bible itself confirms it.

As it says in Joshua 24:13:

“I gave you a land on which you had NOT labored and cities you had NOT built, and you live in them; you eat from vineyards and olive trees you did NOT plant.”

"Democracy" promotion

 USAID backed Internews in Ukraine in 2001 was proping up 203 TV stations and 126 radio stations and training 1900 "journalists."

https://x.com/ricwe123/status/2105243331340943661

Staged Antisemitic Attacks

 Here is a list of alleged antisemitic attacks staged by Jewish Zionists themselves since 2004:

https://x.com/_ZachFoster/status/2105305474006409408

In one of the most recent incidents, a Jewish lady and her daughter were caught on security cameras vandalizing their own apartment building with swastikas which they had been complaining about for months.  In one of the more destructive ones, a Jewish man in Toronto Canada set his own synagogue on fire.  In one of the more amusing ones, a Jewish student group plastered campus with antisemitic stickers claiming to be from Palestinian supporters but actually commissioned by the Jewish student group themselves.

Many incidents like these go back to the Baghdad temple bombings in 1950-51 if not earlier.

Staged attacks are clearly illegal, immoral, and forbidden by the basic laws of Judaism including the one against bearing false witness.

Zionism is a perversion and negation of Judaism.  If there were the jealous God envisioned by Judaism, I would have thought He would have stopped it by now, as was said to have happened many times to Hebrews in the Torah.  Of course, Zionist idolatry of statehood, coveting the lands and homes of Palestinians, and murderous violence to get it, in clear violation of many of the laws of Judaism, had even preceded the Holocaust, so there is that.  But it didn't really get rolling like today until after the Holocaust, and God seems to have been relatively reserved after that, so reserved that Zionists have felt compelled to stage attacks on themselves.

Judaism is Plagiarism

Antoun Ananias makes the case for Judaism almost entirely being copied from other religions, with the exception of Isaiah, which was a supernatural revenge fantasy against the many conquerors and overlords of Judea,  and that Isaiah itself was written by several authors about 100 BCE.  The Hebrews were a minor tribal sect that emerged in Judea circa 1000 BCE and lasted about 200 years having Chieftains, not Kings, and about whose religion we have no evidence at all.  He concludes that Judaism and Christianity are competing irrationalist cults both following the narrative from Isaiah, [one saying the Messiah has come once and will come again later, and the other saying the Messiah hasn't come at all yet] and the world would and will eventually be better off without either.  If it hadn't been for Christianity's success is becoming a world religion, Judaism and all of its fantastical claims about what happened during the First Temple period--which lack any evidence in archeology--would have been long ago forgotten.  [Even at the start of the Hasmonean Kingdom, whose midpoint was when Isaiah was written according to Antoun Ananias, Judea proper was a rather small region surrounding Jerusalem and the original much smaller Second Temple which was later greatly expanded by the Roman vassal Herod the Great, whose father was an Idumean--a descendant of the Edomites to the southeast of Judea and whose land was one of many territories conquered by the Hasmonians.  The Hasmonean Kingdom lasted 103 years until it was conquered, this time by the Romans]. Commenters state that this was all common knowledge 50 years ago and seems to have been forgotten because of Zionism which attempts to revive the image of a mythical ancient world of Hebrews sprawling across the Levant which never existed.  In fact, I myself first heard these things about 50 years ago, from some guy I met in college (a White history major btw) and I couldn't believe it.

https://medium.com/@antounananias/why-judaism-is-plagiarism-cba5efb0c825

I see that others claim that Isaiah was written starting in the 8th century (by the actual "Prophet Isaiah") and ending in the 5th century.  I have not seen and I doubt there is any physical evidence for this.  In fact, the earliest known copy of the Book of Isaiah is from the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The Dead Sea Scrolls date from 250 to 125 BCE, and it seems like they also have the earliest known copies of the other books in the Torah or Old Testament, except for small fragments of blessings found in earlier writings.  According to legend, the rest of the Torah et all had been passed down verbally before that.

Recently I have been fond of the idea that the Torah was conceived and composed (if not written down) during or immediately after Babylonian captivity and the Persian release, written to create the myths that the Jews being "returned" to Judea would live by as a religious sect (explicitly not a country or nation) occupying the land near the country Egypt which Persia sought to conquer.  They were written so as to be compatible with monotheistic Persian Zoroastrianism, to indicate that the Jews had a glorious civilization long before, but it all had come to a bad end before, and that they must now wait for a Messiah from God to have another such kingdom again.  It also included a myth of Egyptian captivity to make the Jews hate the Egyptians.  It all fits so perfectly with the Persian intent to conquer Egypt, which they did not long after, I figured the Persians inspired or paid for these compositions to provide a faux history for the "returning" Jews to live by.  Though it is also said they were composed in Babylonian captivity to help preserve a nationalist sentiment.

But there is no evidence the books were written even that soon after the events they supposedly describe from 1400-800 BCE including the Egyptian captivity, for which there is no widely accepted evidence, though some claim there is (I found this link in a comment and am discouraged that it is just a video interview of dubious value rather than serious writing):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeI2-YPDTXk

If indeed the books of the Torah were actually composed and written from 300-125 BCE which was before, during or immediately before the Hasmonean Kingdom, it seems more like they were intended to glorify the new Judean priestly and warrior class, instill nationalism, and to motivate and justify the forthcoming Hasmonean* conquests, effectively claiming that the ancestors of the Jews had previously ruled over some of these same lands beyond Judea proper in a glorious ancient kingdom promised to them by God (ie, conquered and stolen by them way back then) that they were only seeking to "restore."  But there is no physical evidence at all of any of the conquests as described in the Torah.

*The Hasmonean dynasty was begun by military leaders within the Judean priestly class, the Maccabees, when Judea was a province of the Seleucid Empire--which itself was a spinoff of the earlier Greek empire.  Eventually the Hasmonians secured their sovereign independence, but for only 47 years before the Romans finished defeating and annexing them and other remaining Seleucid fragments.  The Hasmonean empire was hated by many of the peoples it conquered and ruled and was in the midst of a civil war between rival Hasmonean brothers when the Romans defeated them.  The Romans formally replaced the Hasmonean rulers with King Herod, an Idumean, in 37 BCE, though at first they gave the new Roman province which included Hasmonean conquests the name Judeah, now effectively the "greater Judea" that the Hasmoneans had conquered and were barely holding on to.

Antoun gives his better sourced and recounted version of the history of the Pentateuch, Tanakh, and Torah and related events here:

https://medium.com/@antounananias/the-aramaic-gospels-vs-the-fake-gospels-2ac1e9073067

The fact that the previous attempted restoration of the Torah's mythological past under the Hasmonean Kingdom lasted only 103 years (and only 47 years as a sovereign nation) gives some hope regarding the shortness of the continued existence of the current one, which is widely and justifiably hated except by most Ashkenazi "Jews" (who Antoun and others such as Shlomo Sand) claim have no descent from the original Judeans.  

I would characterize Ashkenazi descent from ancient Judeans not as nonexistant but rather as minimal and little more than other Europeans, noting that DNA doesn't actually provide a total record of descent because the original DNA can be almost entirely lost by genetic segregation after a few generations of mixing, and after 2000 years even slight mixing over time results in everyone being related somehow despite a lack of distinctive markers which may have been lost.  My maternal family of Jacobson (Christians) claims descent from Jerusalem through James the Just who was definitely a real historical figure, himself a Judean high priest in Jerusalem assassinated on orders of the highest priest Ananus ben Ananus, which was a critical historical event ultimately leading to the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans.  As the descendants of James the Just were Jewish Christians, they were likely spared by Rome, as well as allowed a free ticket to the empire, so this bloodline has a higher probability of having been preserved than others from Jerusalem at the time which may have been extinguished through war or slavery.  Since pretty much all Europeans are related going back 2000 years, I've decided there is most likely some truth in our descent from James the Just, but not exclusive to me and my immediate ancestral family but shared by nearly all Europeans now.  That is the way human descent actually works over a large number of generations, and it is on that basis that Ashkenazis are not excluded from Judean descent either even if their descent originated from only a handful of Judean founders mixed with Germans which would not be demonstrable with genetics at this point.

While all Europeans must have some Judean descent, the people with the most ancient Judean descent are the Palestinians and Samaritans of today.  They are close enough related to ancient Judeans that you can indeed usually find many of the distinctive genetic markers in them, despite two millennia of mixing and genetic segregation. 

So Jews have no exclusive claim to Judean ancestry, possibly minimal anyway, and "Jewishness" is a religious ethnicity not so much uniquely connected to Judean ancestry as connected to Judaism, a levantine cult whose foundations were written down between 300 and 100 BCE to create nationalistic fervor and to fuel regional conquests, but maintained and spread ever since by its sometimes antagonistic and sometimes synergistic relationship with the more popular levantine cult of Christianity.

In my youth, I found Judaism much more attractive than Christianity because it did not require me to believe in the Jesus divinity and resurrection story, which I detested having to memorize and recite.  I also often found Jewish people I knew to be more like minded and wanted to be part of their club instead of mine.  Judaism seemed based on largely reasonable behavioral rules, which I had largely imbibed anyway through Christianity, and enjoyable rituals, rather than professed beliefs which seemed fake to me.  I only became disenchanted about converting to Judaism when I learned about the Nakba when I was 13 and none of my Jewish friends could give me an adequate explanation of it.  (Though I didn't dump my Jewish friends because of that, and I continued having mostly Jewish or partly Jewish friends, and having fascinations and sometimes dates with Jewish or partly Jewish girls for the rest of my life.). Now I would not tie Judaism unequivocally to Israeli Apartheid and Genocide, I fully respect Jewish Antizionism and see that as the truest and best form of Judaism (Zionism just skips the Messiah requirement and turns state* worship into an idolatry above and negating all the other rules) but there just doesn't seem to be a good reason for me to be immersed in Judaism anyway anymore as opposed to religions or philosophies simply emphasizing care, love. and respect for others, like humanism, Freethinking, and Unitarian Universalism.  Such religions and philosophies can be quite clear about what religious traditions they are quoting from, and can freely pick and choose the best from all of them, and avoid the inhuman and inhumane parts, like Samuel's call for genociding the Amalek and their animals too, the very model of what Israeli Zionists are doing today.  (BTW, the genocide of Amalek never actually happened, but the genocide of Palestinians and the killing of their animals and trees today is very real and disgusting.)

*Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews say that even when the Messiah comes, even that doesn't mean all the Jews flock to and establish another state in Judea.  It simply means that God re-establishes His presence in Jerusalem, then ruling the entire world with goodness which is available to everyone.  I would add that Judaism is supposed to be a proselytizing religion (and once was far more so than today), just like Christianity (which has the same roots), so that by the time the Messiah comes most of the world is supposed to be Jewish anyway making a safe haven for Jews in Judea both unnecessary and an impossibility.  Meanwhile, Jews are supposed to be "healing" the entire world as well as converting everyone who can be converted to Judaism in preparation, and with the added belief that the coming of the Messiah will lead even more to adopt Judaism, so ultimately including almost everyone.  Zionism is the attempt to escape from the rest of the world, a negation of the basic concept in this and other ways.

What Actually Happened on October 7

Quoting Tony Hanania about October 7

https://x.com/AntounAnanias/status/2104272468345000105

 I was there on Oct 7th and could see clear as day what actually happened. I have posted extensively in the Arabic media on this. 

1. The initial response was entirely unprecedented. There was no resistance to 1000s of Gazans breaching what is normally a dangerous security perimeter just to approach 30 yards away.

2. The response that there was focused not on the breaches but on attacking Nova and that soon petered out.

3. The mass slaughter did not take place until after 2pm, 8 hours after the breakout. Two passes of 14 Apaches destroyed virtually everything on the ground indiscriminately. Any cars backed up were missiled. Anything moving was a target. At the same time the Kibbutzim came under attack from tanks 

There is nothing controversial about my account of what I witnessed as the leaked Apache cockpit footage is absolutely explicit. Oct 7th was an indiscriminate and savage war crime perpetrated principally by Israeli forces.

As for the accusations against Hamas, of which I am not a member, 27 of 27 have been proved false or have absolutely no evidence to back them up !!

Trita Parsi adds that while it appeared that Netanyahu didn't tell Israeli intelligence about his input, nevertheless an intelligence chief removed his daughter from the Nova gathering at 4:45 am, leaving the rest to die.

(My own belief is Netanyahu and key Israeli intelligence knew about the Hamas attack the whole time, in fact they were encouraging it.  They had spies in Hamas, they track Palestinian smart phones, and the border if not far beyond is full of Israeli cameras.  They wanted a big event to justify the following genocide.  It was why Netanyahu was behind some funding for Hamas in the first place, he wanted them to do things to justify harsh responses.  It's possible Netanyahu didn't realize how bad this would get, but I wouldn't count on that.) 

 

Zelenskyy's Former Press Secretary Begs Europe to Consider Peace

 She was banned by Zelenskyy, then by the European Parliament, but was able to give her speech anyway.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-216109300

The Origins of the War in Ukraine

 Ivan Katchanovski's latest masterpiece book on how the War in Ukraine began is available for free downloads from Springer:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-98724-3

The hardcover version is $59.99 on Amazon.

Katchanovski has impeccable academic credentials also indicated by his publication by Springer.  He identifies as Ukrainian and is anti-Putin (unlike me).  He was born in Ukraine, was an active supporter of Ukrainian separation from the Soviet Union, and believes in liberal democracy.*  He was prevented from graduate study in the Soviet Union because his undergraduate thesis concerned Max Weber and western economists.  So instead he got his PhD at George Mason University and held jobs at prestigious locations in US, including Harvard and the Library of Congress, before joining the University of Ottawa where he has become quite famous, most recently for questioning western narratives about the beginning of the War in Ukraine.  His book is the most serious scholarship on the topic.

 *I think it's always been fake, now it's a thin cover for hegemonic fascist imperialism. 

Theory and Revolution

 https://liberationschool.org/theory-and-revolution-addressing-the-break-of-ideological-continuity/

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) released a very insightful essay in 2016 on the importance of defining Socialism in terms of working class power.  Nothing permanent can be achieved until that is done, but rather than using the historical Marxist phrase "smash the bourgeois state," they propose this definition of socialism:

”Socialism is a society where political and economic power is in the hands of the working class and the oppressed. Socialism is a society where the basic needs of the population and the planet are planned for and guaranteed.”

 The key word here is power.  And PSL contrasts this with the proposals of Social Democrats like Bernie Sanders.

PSL recognizes the successful revolution of 1917 that created the Soviet Union, the first of its kind where the working class seized power, and that there is much to learn from the Marxism and Leninism that inspired it.  (PSL uses the phrase "Marxism and Leninism" instead of the typical "Marxism Leninism" that Communist Parties use, but they would also consider themselves communists in essentially that same tradition, which was active in the US from 1919 through the liberation movements of the 1960's, but subsequently snuffed out in the minds of activists and replaced with bourgeois Identity Politics.)

Limits to Growth vs Paul Ehrlich

Whenever I bring up Limits To Growth, the groundbreaking study based on Systems Dynamics modeling, critics respond about Paul Ehrlich, who made many predictions in his book Population Bomb and in many interviews which were incredibly wrong.  Noah Smith (an economist who I basically despise btw) has a good synopsis:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-paul-ehrlich-got-everything-wrong

But Paul Ehrlich was not an author of Limits to Growth, and he was not ever a member of the Club of Rome which commissioned it.  

The Club of Rome is still around today making annual report books.  They still say we need to transition to a sustainable society or it will be forced on us at some point in the future, still likely around 2050 (but the exact date is less important than the principle) with Buisness as Usual, with drastic consequences like a large die off of humans, not just demographic shifts.  A sustainable society will not have a growing population and resource use, because the earth is finite.  Our current society can't work like that, resource use growth is forced at every level, especially through the demand for higher profits.  All that seems incontrovertible to me, and it seems we are indeed continuing down the easy road to a catastrophic collapse of several kinds all at once.

Paul Ehrlich's predictions were based on what looks little better than extrapolating current trends.  He predicted catastrophes based on limited resources in the 1970's and 1980's.  These catastrophes never happened, largely because technological changes which at least kicked the can down the road if not solving them completely.

Meanwhile, Limits to Growth made arguments (they denied they were predictions) based on a Systems Dynamics Computer Model of the world called World3.  World3 was run with different scenarios, the Standard scenario represented Business as Usual and showed Growth (of population and material production) peaking in the Middle of the 21st Century.   The authors repeatedly reiterated in interviews that they did not predict catastrophes in the 20th Century, but somehow the confusion with Ehrlich persists.  Another scenario based on wider ecological consciousness, conservation, and reduced materialism showed peaking in the early 22nd Century (but a steeper decline thereafter).

There were several official updates to Limits to Growth, in 1992, 2004, and 2015.  In every update, the authors concluded our actual trajectory still seems closest to the original Standard scenario, which did not even include Global Warming, Endless Wars, and unforced declining Fertility.

Paul Ehrlich was a co-founder of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), which has always advocated for free birth control and abortion on demand, in the US and elsewhere.  I think there are no good arguments against these things, but I know some who make them.  Anyway, ZPG has rebranded itself as Population Connection.  And they are not to be confused with another organization, Negative Population Growth, which has several ideas including severely restricting immigration to USA because immigrants have more children than non-immigrants.  I oppose ideas like that in principle, I believe in as open borders as possible both for economic and fairness reasons.  So awhile after discovering that POV I stopped supporting NPG, but I have been a long time supporter of Population Connection.

How Many Gazans Killed by Israel

 Tony Hanania (@AntounHananias on X, Antoun Hananias on Medium) says a conservative estimate of the Gazans killed by Israel since 10/7 is 1.2 million, including those buried in rubble.  He points out that Francesca Albanese had estimated 680,000 in 2025.  He is a D.Phil (PhD) and says he is a member of the oldest Palestinian family dating to 1st Century CE, St. Ananias.*

https://medium.com/@antounananias/gaza-genocide-toll-exceeds-aushwitz-91e6405c961c

@MosabAbuToha gives the current count "slaughtered" (by direct gunfire) of 73,787 and estimates the total deaths now exceeds 200,000 (September 12, 2026).

https://x.com/MosabAbuToha/status/2098903369167385017

(*I would think the families of Canaanites and others in the region would go back millenia farther than that, if you accept the name Palestine for the region then, though that name was first applied to the region by Herodotus around 500 BCE, possibly because he was most impressed by the Philistines who had migrated there in the Second Millenium BCE.  But if you want to start when Romans renamed the province which they had previously called Judaea as Syria Palaestina, that was in the 135 CE--the Second Century CE.)

Truth vs antisemitism

 I've been investigating the claims that Israel was behind the assassination of JFK.  I myself firmly believe these claims, for many reasons, including that Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu confirmed them when he was released from Israeli prison in 2004.  He had been imprisoned for revealing the Israeli nuclear program, how it had been hidden from inspectors in 1964, and revealing that Israel did indeed have nukes--which has been denied both by Israel and the US government ever since--which is pretty amazing, since outside of those two government's denials, everyone else believes it completely, and veteran journalist Seymour Hirsch even wrote a book, The Sampson Option, spelling out the mad way Israel intends to use nukes not merely against threatening Arab nations but against its Western backers, the US and Europe, if they fail to come to Israel's defense when Israel needs it.  That whole book is based on the knowledge, which everyone has, that Israel has nukes.  Epstein friend, liberal Zionist, and highly regarded writer and lecturer Noam Chomsky has also many times presumed the existence of Israeli nukes in exclamations such as "and they have nukes!"  Still, I personally know a Zionist who settled in Israel in the past decade, now lives near Dimona, and continues to deny that Israel has nukes.  These denials are a pretty good indication of who cannot be believed in probably just about anything having to do with geopolitics anyway.

Anyway, the participation of Israel in the JFK assassination has a clear motive because it is very well known now that JFK and the Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, sparred over the US investigating Israel's nuclear program.  The letters they exchanged were long ago declassified and have been published in many places, including most recently by Palestinian American journalist (and now Congressional candidate) Sam Husseini based in Washington DC.  Ben-Gurion insisted that Israeli intentions were peaceful, but because the Israeli nuclear program was assisted by the French, he would not allow for US inspections.  But Kennedy was not backing down.  Kennedy was assassinated a short time later.  Just before that, Ben-Gurion resigned and was replaced with an even more hardline Prime Minister in Israel.  Finally, the US was allowed inspections in 1964 but the US investigators under LBJ were not very thorough, and Mordechi Vanunu later revealed how a fake nuclear control center was constructed to fool the US investigators.  BTW, De Gaulle had also wanted inspections that were being refused by Israel, so Ben-Gurion's claim that he would not allow US inspections because it was a French assisted operation were bogus.  Evidence has subsequently arisen that China was a partner with Israel in nuclear bomb development too.

Now it is curious that one of the first JFK Assassination conspiracy theorists to write a whole book about Israel being involved was Michael Collins Piper, whose first book Final Judgement: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy was first released in 1994.  It was sometimes banned, but today you can buy the last commemorative edition, from 2015, on Amazon.  It is Piper's most popular book and it went through 5 revisions.  He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2015 at the age of 55.  His last and previous editions can be also be obtained online at such places as Wikispooks and the Internet Archive.  Piper renounced copyright to his works.

https://www.amazon.com/Final-Judgment-Missing-Assassination-Conspiracy/dp/1937787370/

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Michael-Collins-Piper/author/B001KCGXU8?ref=ap_rdr&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&ccs_id=278859b5-4a12-4b95-b375-0bd6fb806bf1

https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Michael+Collins+Piper%22

Piper wrote a review of his own book, which gives a very illuminating summary of the key Mossad connections to many of the key players we have heard about in other theories.  This is like a very brief version of the very long book.

http://jfk-mossad.htmlplanet.com/piper.html

Now it is not at all surprising that Piper is called anti-Semitic and a Holocaust Denier by the likes of ADL and SPLC.  Piper himself said he was not a Holocaust Denier, and more often than not he praises jews such as Seymour Hirsch he says he relied on mostly for his work Final Judgement.  In his more careful writings such as that he clearly distinguishes Jews from Zionists, Israelis, Israeli-supporters, and Neocons.  But he was a prolific writer and and media personality and he was not always that careful.

And while he claimed not to be a Holocaust Denier, he could be categorized as a Holocaust Revisionist.  He wrote a book about the lawsuit of Mel Mermelstein against the Institute of Historical Review, a well known Holocaust revisionist organization that had offered a $50,000 reward to anyone that could prove that gas chambers were used at Auschwitz as part of an industrial scale killing program.  Piper tries to make the case that Mermelstein did not win his case on the merits of the arguments presented but instead on high powered legal tactics.  (That's not entirely implausible, not that I have the least doubt that Auschwitz had an industrial scale killing program that relied on gas chambers.  But the Nazis were pretty good at hiding their secrets.  You may need to combine multiple lines of evidence, including receipts and letters and engineering diagrams, as historians do, to prove the gas chambers.  In contrast, the Zionists boast and broadcast about their crimes.). Ultimately the judge ruled simply that the Holocaust was a fact which could not be denied, and IHR settled with Mermelstein for $90,000.

That book is out of print but is widely available used at mostly inflated prices.  Piper also wrote a book Confessions of an Anti-Semite, another book about the Rothchild banking and global influence operations, and a few others which could be dodgy.  And his books and media were generally printed by a well known self-described "Nationalist" organization (often labeled as White Supremacist) whose backer was one of his best friends.  Though Piper declared himself to be a "Progressive in the La Follette tradition" and he also wrote a book entitled Share the Wealth so he was not at all a traditional conservative.  He died before the rise of MAGA so we can't judge him on MAGA-ness.

In my brief reading of Piper so far I can sense that he is very intelligent and intellectual.  He is not your garden variety dumbass anti-semite.  His error, if there is one, which may be shared with many of the conspiracy writing set, is that he may be blind to items that don't fit the thesis.  This may be intentional or unintentional.  But from what I've read in Piper's JFK work so far, he seems like he may be the best of all in connecting all the dots, as well as critiquing earlier and later theories.  It's not surprising that Final Judgement is highly praised and often touted as the best exposition of a JFK assassination conspiracy theory ever.  And you may also learn quite a bit about the other conspiracy theories and their deniers by reading it.

So, should we discount the theory that Israel was a key player in the JFK assassination because the best known book about it was written by a Holocaust Revisionist and who was at least somewhat anti-semitic?

I don't think so, and I've made the general case in this blog that we can and should judge any ideas and/or writings based on their internal validity and not on the character of the persons who wrote about them.  I've critiqued Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein on this basis, even going so far as to call them Limited Hangouts, but nevertheless saying that we can still learn a great deal from their writings, which are essential reading, while always being aware of their biases (liberal Zionist and anti-China).

In fact, it's hard to find anyone at all that I agree with 100%, so I've quit trying.  The one person I trust the most about Zionism is Tony Greenstein, a jewish socialist anti-Zionist who critiques both Chomsky and Finkelstein as liberal Zionists.  But he can't possibly answer every question we can think of and agrees with me that people must read Finkelstein anyway.

In a similar vein, a more recent proponent of the Israel was a key player in the JFK assassination conspiracy theory is Ryan Dawson.  Not surprisingly, he has also been accused of being both antisemitic and a holocaust denier by the likes of ADL and SPLC. (Unlike with Piper, however, Google AI doesn't offer me a definitive opinion on it.  Dawson has not written books about Holocaust Revisionism or the Rothchilds.) Born in North Carolina and educated at the College of William and Mary, Dawson now lives in Japan as a prolific writer, media personality, and movie producer.  His recent hour and a half documentary NUMEC How Israel Stole the Atomic Bomb and killed JFK looks to be the best of its kind (we could still use better IMO).

https://rumble.com/v1a6xdr-numec-how-israel-stole-the-atomic-bomb.html?e9s=src_v1_upp_pl%2Csrc_v1_pl&playlist_id=QtQvO_cZvSw

Dawson's website is specifically aimed against Neocons, not Jews.  Dawson has appeared on mainstream TV programs and has featured many well known guests on his program, including Finkelstein, it's a quite an impressive list.

https://www.ancreport.com/ 

https://www.ancreport.com/ryan-dawson/

However, one clever Reddit poster clipped a 30 second segment which does make Dawson sound anti-semitic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VaushV/comments/fxp4hv/everything_you_need_to_know_about_ryan_dawson_in/

Others in that chat repeatedly ask the poster to show the rest of the monologue (which has since been deleted) and claim that Dawson is being taken out of context.  They claim that in the opening Dawson clearly distinguishes between Jews and Zionists, even though that distinction is not being made in these particular 30 seconds.  The original poster refused to show any more of the monologue.

I believe the critics of the poster, that Dawson is being taken out of context in these 30 seconds.  I think he must be starting this section with an additional prelude like this, "It's easy to see how people can become antisemitic when they see so many things, and come to think like this ..."  So he is describing how other people come to think like they do, not that he does.  His inflections seem to reinforce that interpretation, it seems like he is making little of some of the ideas.

I note that the original poster also reveals his biases in statements such as this:

Not like that other quote makes sense. Zionism does not mean Jewish supremacism. Zionism is the belief in the right to self determination for Jews in their homeland. Most countries in the world are based on the same idea, for their respective nations. Something like 90% of Jews are Zionist. It doesn't inherently involve "shooting children". In a parallel universe where the 1947 partition plan is accepted by the arab side Zionism is achieved without any conflict.

He is wrong, Zionism does mean Jewish Supremacism, as it exists today in genocidal apartheid Israel.  Wise jews like Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt and many others opposed the creation of the State of Israel from the beginning.  The 1947 Partition Plan was neither fair nor agreed to by the inhabitants of Palestine--who ought to have had the last word--nor implemented as written by Israel; Zionists chose to achieve facts on the ground through violence and terror rather than international agreement.  They grabbed all they could and are still doing so.  It was clear from 1898 onwards that Zionists intended to ethnically cleanse all of Palestine by whatever means necessary; they did not intend to stare the land with a rump Palestinian state or with any non-Jews.  Palestine was not ever the one or exclusive homeland of Jews, that would be like calling Germany the homeland of Lutherans.  There were always many other peoples living there, and many if not most Palestinians themselves have descent from First Century BCE Jews who simply changed religions over time.  (Tony Hanania is one example.). 90% of Jews being Zionist (which is wrong on the high side) means little when 90% of US citizens believe in US Exceptionalism.  That Zionists speak like the poster shows that they have become the genocide deniers of our time, and we should take great care in parsing the truth of their statements and agreeing to their claims of antisemitism.  And that even when antisemitism is true, it's only one of many dimensions in which nobody is right about everything.  Zionism can be just as bad, or worse, as antisemitism, and more than 90% of the political and media class in the US is Zionist.  We should denounce, but not necessarily ignore, all of them too even if not antisemitic.  Speaking with an antisemite is not uniquely evil.  

Most people of all ethnicities (not just Jews) are swept away by the political currents and propaganda of their times as well as self interest and approximate thinking.  Jews are not above all the others in these human weaknesses simply because they are Jews.  It just so happened that Zionists got their plan, to the disaster of all, because it aligned with western imperial interests and Zionists still have it, and vast support from Western governments, for the same reason.   

Zionism may even be, as believed by some Jews, among the worst antisemitism of all, since it presumes that all good jews are inherently Zionist (ie, supremacist and genocidal) and regards the others as scum, fake, or self-hating.  The truth is that anti-Zionist Jews are the minority (as it would be among any ethnicity) to buck the currents, propaganda, self-interest, and approximate thinking and see the truth past it.  And our job as anti-Zionists generally is to change those currents and debunk the propaganda.

The Reddit poster also points out how Dawson also blames Israelis for 9/11, on the basis of the widely debunked allegations that Building 7 was blown up with internal bombs.  I don't necessarily accept the bombing allegation, I can accept the official story that fire spread through the elevators.  However, these allegations are not required for the story of Israeli involvement to be possible, or even true.  CIA appears to have been involved in protecting the hijackers from FBI interference, if not actually guiding them.  And it also appears that over and over Al Qaeda has served CIA and Mossad interests, as has ISIS.  Somebodies had to be behind 9/11, and the way the US government failed to stop 9/11 despite many warnings it was going to happen.  Mossad has been at other times shown to work for CIA for deniability purposes, and that would have been useful here.  So while I don't accept that the case has been proven, there are some tantalizing bits of evidence and it's not at all implausible that Mossad was involved.  And thinking about these things does not necessarily embody antisemitism.  After all, the CIA, Bush Administration, and Saudi government are implicated too.  Are we supposed to think that Israel, who had the most to gain, would be above the fray and not involved because they are Jews?

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/04/18/9-11-hijackers-cia-recruits/

Hong Kong "Democracy" Movement

 Long read on the history and really existing democracy in Hong Kong and it's western backed discontents.

https://theescalatorhk.com/people-of-hong-kong-fight-for-hong-kong-democracy/

A much shorter version is possible and I've given it before, echoing MoonOfAlabama and other sources.  The supposed pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong was a western backed rioting hyper violent Color Revolution, much as has been seen in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Iran, Xinjiang, Ukraine, and many other places.  It was very violent in Hong Kong, with so-called "protestors" using flame throwers to torch police and innocent bystanders alike.  In Iran recently, hundreds of mosques and other buildings were burned by "protestors" before the Iranian government got control of the situation.  In some places, Color Revolutions succeeded in installing western backed tyranny, in others not.  China has been exceptionally good at repulsing it relatively peaceably.  When you add up all the ways countries are actually controlled, the West is no better than others in implementing the will of the people within resource and other limits, and China probably does it best of all these days.

Ms CIA, the story of Gloria Steinem

 I've made many posts about Gloria Steinem before, from her early (well documented, even admitted) career as CIA funded asset infiltrating spying on and subverting communist youth gatherings, to her middle career as undercover bunny defaming Hugh Hefner at the time Playboy was publishing Seymour Hersh on Mai Lai (Hefner moved to LA and Playboy became non-political after that), founding Ms Magazine to replace class based radical analysis with liberal identity politics--thereby coopting and subverting earlier feminist movements,  demonizing sex workers by promoting very punitive laws against their clients (now the law in Sweden and other places) for which she earned to acronym SWERF, pushing for anti-pornography laws that could hold publishers responsible for any violent crime regardless of whether a connection could be shown (which became law in Sweden, but was resisted in USA, notably by Larry Flynt), defaming Bernie Sanders supporters (as Bernie Bros...despite the fact many were women) in favor of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and promoting an misandric anti-porn and anti-sex ideology which suppressed sexual relations in leftist and liberal movements--thereby tilting reproductive success to the conservative side which ignored her (easily seen in surveys...liberals out-reproduced conservatives up to the 1960's, afterwards and ever since it has been the reverse).  

She may have said a few good things along the way, but such is always the case with controlled opposition and limited hangouts.  

Steinem's version of equality generally didn't mean flattening obscene income and power for everyone, it meant making a place for women at the top of it (this was Ellen Willis analysis of her).  She was pro-Capitalism and pro-Zionism and pro-Imperialism.  While being a claimed Democratic Socialist, and highly revered honorary member of the DSA board in 2009 when I attended the DSA National Convention in 2009, she was later chastised and dethroned from DSA after demonizing Bernie supporters in 2016.

I've felt like I was shouting into a closet until today, when the wraps are off and people with views similar to mine are contributing.  So now you do not need to try to find references to Steinem in the obscure works of radical Pro Sex Feminist Ellen Willis, who started deconstructing Steinem in the 1970's and passed away in the 2006), I can link directly to a pretty good synopsis direct from Redstockings, a radical feminist movement.

https://archive.org/details/001-radical-feminists-wont-be-msled

Steinem admitting her work for CIA and calling CIA liberal and non-violent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HRUEqyZ7p8&t=10s

An excellent thread on X, with both and many sides represented:

https://x.com/ProudSocialist/status/2095473040779796908

(Some think her work as anti-communism was noble, and that there's no proof she was boosted or connected with CIA later, however the initial funding of Ms Magazine looks interesting as described by Redstockings above.)

Jacobin Magazine weighs in:

https://jacobin.com/2026/09/steinem-feminism-ms-cia-socialism?fbclid=IwY2xjawUIg11wZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAGJyaWQRMTd5TnBkQmIwd2NjeW5hV3ZzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeP1kHpVpkLV4yvvv3UAuzyo0t-LVmBPYdRXX-JCfs0EY2kpnFQw5pGzayCZI_aem_5R2s65BbUyfaFR428bBodg

Michael Tracey remembers Steinem's vast contribution to the highly destructive allegations regarding ritual satanic abuse of children, which were never proven and now seem to be completely forgotten in the New York Times long and laudatory obituary of Steinem:

https://www.mtracey.net/p/gloria-steinem-leader-of-the-womens

Voting for System Change

#1 and #1

Recent reports of the IPCC have made it clear that neither Business as Usual (the path we are taking mostly, especially in the USA) nor modest efforts at decarbonization that have been seen globally (more in Europe and China than USA, especially under Trump) since the first IPCC report, are going to hinder the global climate catastrophe that is headed our way.  Such a catastrophe could end billions of human lives and cause untold destruction.  What's needed to prevent this now is fundamental System Change.

The exact kind of System Change required isn't spelled out.  But it's clear that one thing needs to go.  And not just for the climate, even more so for it's own sake, and that is Global Military Conflict.

This Global Military Conflict is driven more than anything else by Western Imperialism, which is primarily US and Israeli Imperialism.  Since Israeli Imperialism depends on US Imperialism, I'll refer to this as USrael Imperialism.

That actually is the #1 thing in the world which has to be changed.  Humanity could be vaporized in an instant with Nuclear War.  Our highest priority should be avoiding that.  Then comes the System Change required to spare us from catastrophic climate change, which is virtually impossible without #1 anyway.  #1 is where it has to start.

So, it turns out, the #1 and #2 most important things that need to be stopped in the world today are both USreal Imperialism.  It's #1 and #1.

Since Imperialism is an integral part of western Capitalism, and we live in an oligarchy which primarily answers to that Capitalism, it's no surprise that our nearly useless elections provide no direct way of ending it.  Both mainstream parties support USreal Imperialism to the hilt.  Just as George Carlin once quipped, "If voting made any real difference, we wouldn't be allowed to do it."  I don't entirely agree with Carlin on this, there are some real differences, just not in the most critical thing, #1 and #1, and not much in many other important dimensions.  We won't get where we need to go by voting "strategically" for a lesser evil, nor a greater evil either of course.  We need a system change.

The Bahktiari Professor

Back in 2005 I met a retired professor from California.  He often self identified as Iranian but it turned out he was actually from a seasonally migrating tribe that lives within the territory of Iran known as the Bahktiari.  

At my monthly movie and discussion party I showed a documentary about the Bahktiari which he came to discuss with us.

At the time, all of my party atendees were enraged by George W Bush's War on Iraq.  The professor said to me:

You live in a Democracy.  Therefore, the war in Iraq is Your Responsibility.

I disputed this claim.  Firstly with the argument that the American public was led into this war with the lies of George W. Bush.  If George W. Bush had not been elected President, we likely would not be having this war.  I voted against GWB.  Therefore, I am not responsible for his having been elected President.  Secondly, I participated in two very large protests preceding the war.  It should not be pinned on me.

It's true, I could have done more to try to stop it.  I could have lit myself on fire in Washington DC.  But such things have not proven effective either.  I did about all a person could be reasonably expected to do.  Therefore, I am not responsible for it.

He was not convinced.

The Election of 2024

I could not have made this argument in 2023 as President Biden was supporting the Israeli War Machine in its genocide on Palestinians in Gaza.  Because, in fact, I had voted for President Biden in 2020.  I was very angry at Biden in this AND his role in starting and continuing the War in Ukraine.  (I am even more angry--disgusted really--with Trump now.)

Thinking about what the Bahktiari professor said, though still somewhat differently, I have come to view voting as a kind of endorsement (among other things, see Reasons for Voting section below).  This is certainly the way many others are going to see it.  Others will impute responsibility for the actions of what someone I voted for did.  It's harder to impute responsibility for what didn't happen as a result of another person not getting elected--because they didn't happen.  And in this case, Trump got elected later anyway, resulting at least in part because of the fecklessness of Biden who I had voted for.

For 2024, there was no viable Democratic Primary process because Biden had (then) decided to re-run.  Not until the clock for Primaries had run out was it announced that Biden would not run again.  Instead, he chose Kamala Harris, and the Democratic National Convention simply ratified that choice, without any further input from voters or local conventions.

This deprived voters and alternative candidates to discuss the issues involved, including the Genocide in Gaza.  I believe this must have been the plan all along, to suppress open debate of the Biden's policies especially toward Israel (give them all the weapons they want).  Afterwards, Kamala Harris could have, she had every opportunity but chose not to, distance herself from this Biden's policy in even the slightest way.  It is now believed by many including those who have studied the election results in swing states, that Genocide in Gaza was one issue that cost Harris the Election.  (There was also an second issue wrt Inflation, which many analysts concluded was largely mistaken...there had been inflation previously, resulting from Covid and other things, but as a result of judicious Fed management and other things the last year's inflation rate had come way down...but voters typically can't make such fine distinctions, and in 2024 there was nothing more that could have been done about it--except for ending the wars and the excess military budget.  But distancing herself at least a little from the Gaza Genocide was one thing that Harris could have easily done, that is she could have done it if she was not owned and operated by AIPAC Zionists.)

I was infuriated at the effectively cancelled Primary process and disgusted by Biden's full support of the Genocide in Gaza and Harris's promise to continue supporting the Genocide.  While it's true I did not expect Trump to be any better, I did not vote for Trump either.  I voted for a decent human being, Cornel West, who would not have supported the Genocide.  If I had to do it over again, I would have chose the PSL candidate Claudia De La Cruz since the PSL was more organized than West's adhoc committee and I now know I agree with PSL positions on more issues, including the US provoked War in Ukraine, better than with Cornel West.  PSL is a true anti-Imperialist party whose victory could bring us to solving our top issues #1 and #1.

Harris has been the number one Democratic Party recipient of funds from AIPAC, receiving over $9 million.  By comparison, Lindsay Graham was cheap, he only got $1 million, and Trump is the king of them all, receiving over $230 million.  Of all the Democratic Party hopefuls for 2028, only two candidates, AOC and Ro Khanna, have received $0 and Ro has signed a pledge.  (I think Ro has more spine than AOC generally and is the best among the well known Democratic Party candidates for 2028, but also least likely to win the candidate selection process.)

Democratic friends, however, take my non-vote for Harris as making me responsible for Trump.  They sometimes see some of the faults with Democratic Party candidates but always say we must in effect vote for the lesser evil to prevent the greater evil from winning.

I have addressed these issues on both sides in earlier posts.  I strongly argued for voting for Biden in 2020 largely on the strategic voting and soundly Trump denunciating bases.  I argued these same points among left groups I was a member or organizer in, after Biden had (somewhat curiously) defeated Bernie.  But by 2024, Biden's record of genocide and war, which Harris vowed to continue, had reached the point of too much evil for me to accept anymore.  And apparently many others felt the same way.  I believe there is such a point of no return, where Principled and Disciplinary voting is absolutely required, and that Biden/Harris had reached it.

Reasons for Voting

Voting is a relatively easy thing to do.  I don't see it solving any of the most serious problems we face (see #1 and #1 above, in particular).  But still it's worth doing, because it's relatively easy to do, might change things enough to be worthwhile anyway, and it is one important way we can express ourselves politically.  It gives us a lot to talk about with other people too (which, ultimately, I think is the most important thing it does).

So lets go through these reasons.  The first thing people think of is that voting is our "opportunity" to change our leadership, our future, etc:

"Strategically" Electing a Government official

The only vote you could cast that changes the actual outcome of an election would be the deciding vote.  This would mean that if you had not cast your vote, the votes would be evenly split, and your one vote would tip the difference over to one side.

The probability of casting a deciding vote is astronomically small.  Many very smart mathematicians have worked on this issue using different assumptions and come up with different results.  Not being mathematicians, we can look at their results as bounding the high and the low probabilities.  The low probability is 1 in 10 raised to the 2,569 power, ie, far far far less than one in a google (10 raised to the 100 power).  The high probability analysis calculated that an "average" voter in a particular US presidential election (the one US citizens obsess most about), not knowing what state you are in or the politics in that state, would have a 1 in 60 million chance, which is something like 4 / N where N is the total number of voters.  I do know what state I live in (Texas) and that it is virtually certain to remain voting Republican for the forseeable future.

A fair minded study of these different results using only "random voting" assumptions puts the probability for an arbitrary simple election between 1 / N and 1/50N (for an election where the challenger has a 1% chance of winning) and that is if it is not already a foregone conclusion.   That means if there are 10 million voters, like a statewide election in Texas, with a highly skewed electorate, your highest probability of casting a deciding vote is less than 1/500 million.

https://www.tobyord.com/writing/decisive-vote

The above writer also pays tribute to the "intuitive" estimate, which I used in an earlier essay (from some other set based mathematical analysis, though it came up with the intuitive answer by some coincidence) and that is 1/N for N voters.  He concludes that 1/N is accurate for a race in which both candidates have an equal chance of winning. That would be true, for example, in Swing States where the election may be decided by a small number votes.  However, in most cases, 1/N will be an overestimate of your probability of actually making a change in an electoral result.

If you are unsatisfied by these probabilities, you can also check the results after an election, and I'm very confident you will always see that your vote made no consequential difference in who got elected.  You can point this out to your friends, though it is not likely that will satisfy them, because most people are so mathematically illiterate.  All this strategic voting stuff is really performative posturing dressed up as consequentialist.  

Strategic "lesser evil" voting is really just capitulation, essentially lining up for slaughter by the ruling class which mostly controls the selection of candidates, and reminiscent of a cartoon I once saw showing Austrians lining up under watchful Nazis to vote for unification, with the one and only choice on the ballot saying "Yes, give me a good kick in the pants."

And even these low probabilities don't include the full effect of ideological rigidities.  In the state where I live, Texas, it is basically a foregone conclusion that, for the foreseeable future, Republicans will win in any statewide election for national office, especially US President.*  A large majority of Texas voters are lifelong Republicans, and that is not likely to change in the next election.  Therefore we are back to looking at a probability of your vote changing the outcome which is far less than one in a google.

(*Even if the time of the world came to hand and the 64 disks of a tower of hanoi moved to another pole, and Democrats won the electors for US President in Texas, by that time many other states would have tipped first, making the Texas contribution of electors irrelevant to the final win.)

So voting with an intent to change the particular elected official, assuming you considered that important, is basically not worth doing, unless you live in a swing state, where it is only barely worth doing.

Furthermore, with regards to the paramount issues of our time,  #1 and #1, it would make not make any difference at all because neither a Democrat nor a Republican would be likely to enact the System Change we so desperately need.  And this may be true on a range of lesser issues as well, though I am not claiming, as some do, in general, that it makes no difference at all who is elected.  There may be differences that you or I might consider very important, but your chance of changing even that result is still astronomically small.

Principled and Disciplinary Voting

While it is virtually impossible to change the outcome of an election with your one vote, it may be possible for a large number of dissatisfied voters to cause their own party to lose an election, and we might well infer that was what happened in 2024.  Disciplining your party for pre-selecting awful candidates is one important thing you can do, and it's basically cost free in states where the other party is almost certainly going to win anyway.  In this case, if you are even the slightest bit unhappy with the candidate of the major party you dislike less, you should always vote for the third party candidate who most satisfies you, even if they have no chance of winning.  If the candidate is on the ballot it will show up in the results, and the larger the third party vote for such candidates the more it will irritate your party leaders possibly to the point of doing things better next time, though I wouldn't count on that.  Sufficient discipline is the only way things could be changed to be even measurably on the System Change dimension through electoral politics.  More likely, complete Collapse (which is what I consider most likely of all) or Revolution will be required.  But rather than wait for those things, vote to discipline your lesser hated party, as well as your more hated one.

Expressing your true feelings, making new friends, educating others, and building a new Party

This is the simplest version of voting, and how I would explain voting, especially to someone who is not satisfied with the candidates of either major party.  Learn as much as you can about the world and the candidates, especially in regards to the most critical issues of our times, then VOTE FOR WHOEVER YOU WANT MOST.   The rest is details, really.  

I personally came to this conclusion when I was about 14 years old, but then got sucked into political parties and all their nonsense.  When I was 14 years old, I correctly reasoned that if everyone chose to vote for whoever they wanted most, politicians would be more and more forced to go that way.  If people voted "strategically," that is for the lesser evils, politicians would become more and more decoupled from popular opinions and simply go the way of the powers that be, the ruling class, oligarchs, etc.  What I didn't think of then was that furthermore people would tend to reshape their opinions in the ways they HAD voted.  This is all exactly what has happened in my lifetime, as the Overton Window has shifted more and more rightwards.  When I was a small child, we still had a New Deal Democrat, JFK, who refused imperial military intervention in Cuba, was planning to shut down the cold war CIA operation in Vietnam, who proposed the Civil Rights Act (which he was killed before delivering), was seriously trying to stop Israel from getting (mostly stealing) the bomb, and was generally trying to resolve the Cold War diplomatically rather than "winning" it.  JFK was assassinated by a US/Israeli* intelligence/mob conspiracy before doing much of that and replaced by a President who killed millions in Southeast Asia in a vain "Cold War" attempt to prevent their political independence, and he let Israel get the bomb and carry out an epic aggression that foreclosed the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian State while not even giving Israel a slap on the wrist for killing US troops in the process.  In 2020-2024 we had a Democratic Party President, Genocide Joe, who refused an early easy settlement of the murderous and very dangerous US provoked proxy war in Ukraine and instead supported it with over a hundred billion dollars of destructive weapons and US intelligence, and fully supported Israel's Genocide in Gaza--sending Israel whatever they wanted to get the job done.  He was anything but visionary and let the Republican Party win on many issues, breaking promises to save Roe v Wade, etc.  This was largely the result of Democrats voting "strategically" time and time again in prior decades for lesser evils "in order to win."  Republicans had more spine, sometimes refused to vote except for what they wanted (or at least made a big show of it), and ultimately got what they wanted, to the horror of all thinking people.

(*It was famed Israeli Nuke whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu who revealed that Israel had also been behind the assassination of JFK.  He did so after being released from prison in Israel, and the good conspiracy theorists have incorporated this into their theories ever since, if not before.)

But do vote, because it feels good to express your true feelings, and this is the one and only opportunities most people have to make such a statement in a way that can get some widespread attention.  If you happen to vote for a listed candidate, your vote will show up in some (but not all) reports.  It will be seen by some people, especially those who are deeply into politics, everywhere.  It will get mindshare beyond your close circle of friends.

Expressing your true feelings is also a way to find your true friends, and new ones, though you might lose a lot of others.  It''s an opportunity to educate others.  It's a way to build a new party (I'm not holding my breath, but it's the only way System Change could arise through the electoral process).  I was going to make other categories for those ideas, but they don't really mean anything unless you are expressing your true feelings in the first place.  If you care about Palestinians, you might ask a Palestinian what they think about your voting choices.  Almost certainly they would prefer you not vote for a Zionist of either Democrat or Republican parties (for an example, see Sam Hussieni, an American Palestinian Christian who constantly rails against lesser evilism, and is now running as an independent candidate) and even if that results in a greater evil winning now, because for them, a lesser evil is still very evil.  Most of the destruction in Gaza occurred under a lesser evil "Democratic" Party President.  By the time we got Trump most of the physical damage in Gaza (and probably most of the deaths too, though the number is still increasing) was already done.  That was totally disgusting.

Expressing your true feelings diplomatically is generally the best path forwards in life.  (Voting is an inherently "diplomatic" process.) Continuously suppressing your true feelings is the path to madness, like the state we have now reached in USA.

Ultimately, it is the job of politicians, even in the "Party" we may most identify with, to win our vote.  It's not our job to be required to vote for whatever well connected liar and opportunistic tool of the oligarchy they foist on us.  If you'll accept any yellow dog, that's what they'll give you, and nothing more.  It's only reasonable for many people to be disgusted with both major parties.  That's not their fault.  We shouldn't try to shame people into voting for a lesser evil.  And it doesn't work anyway.  The only good thing is to encourage people to vote, even for good lesser parties or write-in candidates, to express their views most clearly (rather than merely appear "apathetic.") and help make the good parties and people more visible and competitive. It's one small thing that people can do without much effort to help the ball roll in the right direction.  At the same time, not voting at all is not unreasonable or conscionable either.  Nor is voting for a lesser evil, if that is what you feel inclined to do.

I never say such things as "both parties are the same" or "don't bother to vote."  Though never in our most important priority for saving human life on this planet, #1 and #1, where both parties are so similar they might as well be the same, there are still some differences between the two mainstream parties we might find significant.  I might or might not choose to vote for Democrats in lower races if they haven't as erred as disgustingly as Biden and Harris did.  I never say such things as "All Democrats are Evil" either.  I really liked Greg Casar, my current US Rep, and before him Lloyd Doggett, and my new likely Rep Joaquin Castro seems to be improving in that direction.  (Republicans have gerrymandered my district time and time again sometimes giving me less good choices.)  I often like Ro Khanna and AOC, and I'd likely vote for either one as President, despite their many faults.  In some cases, I view my vote as a bargaining chip, which I'm going to keep in the air, feeling the movement thereof, until the moment I vote.  If I think they're moving in the right direction, I may choose to give my vote to a lesser evil.  If they have thoroughly disgusted me, like Harris, I'll vote for a third party I like, even at the cost of throwing the election (which is an astronomically small chance anyway) to a greater evil.  Sadly, PSL isn't big enough to run in many races, or I might vote for them all the time, as they do pretty much represent "what I want." But generally I don't like the fact that Greens and PSL always say things which I never say about Democrats.  There are many differences between Democrats and Republicans, and often fairly important ones, just not the most critically important ones.  And Greens often aren't really Socialists either, though they often propose Social Democratic programs, and oppose USrael Imperialism in US.  Greens in other countries such as UK and Germany are absolutely terrible, just as committed to Western Imperialism and coddling Israel and suppressing anti-Zionism as other parties, if not more so, so I would never vote for Greens in those countries.  To win my vote, a third party should at least be pretty good, and much better than the major parties, even if not 100% perfect.

It's easy to see why we almost always end up with either very great evil or greatest possible evil Presidents.  This is a shitty country with mostly shitty people, founded by genocidaires, slavers, tycoons, and religious kooks, and mostly owned, run, and propagandized by the shittiest people ever since.  Whatever bad happens to us, like 9/11/2001, was richly deserved a hundred times over.  Your vote, any vote, is not going to change this very much.

If voting hardly moves the needle, donating small amounts to politicians doesn't either.  I've done some intuitive analysis to come up with the idea that it costs between $100 and $1000 to change one vote.  And it barely matters anyway.  And if you donate anything you will endlessly be texted and emailed by other candidates and causes begging you for money.  I wish I never had.  I donated to Bernie and had some fun with the Bernie movement, such as a Bernie appearance and door knocking with a friend, but it all came to naught as Bernie capitulated early to the mainstream candidates in both 2016 and 2020 and insisted his followers vote for those horrible mainstream candidates.  Now I learn that Bernie is a Liberal Zionist who insists we must "defend" Israel, can't imagine the apartheid/genocide state not existing and blames the Genocide on Netanyahu.  (The drive towards Genocide didn't start with Netanyahu.  It started with the First Zionist Conference in 1897, which established the clear goal of removing non-Jews from Palestine as was defended by Zionists in many later writings, and continued from and through the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and beyond.  The Gaza Genocide of 2023 and beyond under Netanyahu is simply the Final Solution phase of Zionism.) Bernie has shut down pro Palestinian protestors at his rallies.

Bottom Line

Sadly, it's hard to see how we are ever going to make much progress on the most pressing issue of our time, Imperialism, by any means.  And certainly not by voting in the kind of  elections we have today.  It's hard to imagine an anti-imperial party rising to power in the USA.  It certainly will not happen by robotically voting for either Democrats or Republicans.  And the others appear to have no chance of winning at present.  The best we can hope for is that anti-imperialists get more mind share even by losing.  Sometimes that may even require that the lesser evil loses, though that still seems to have minimal positive effect.  But then at least the lesser evil voters will notice, even though they will most likely draw the wrong conclusions, which will be further enforced by the oligarch owned media.

There are other ways of getting mind-share too, but that's also hard in a culture where mainstream media is owned and operated by the same ruling class which always gets what they want in elections, or with populist media which gain popularity through the social media and other systems that ruling class controls.  As Julian Assange quipped, in the US the censorship is outsourced to the private sector, and it results in the most systematically misinformed society the world has ever seen, the society that still believes in American Exceptionalism, that we are the good guys, the shining light upon the hill, and not the most murderous, destructive, and genocidal empire in history at a critical juncture where something entirely different is needed to save human civilization itself.

How can we hope for more when it appears at least 30% of US society are effectively worse than Nazis, and 98% of the ruling class too?  Just look at all the people who are uncritical of the actions of Israel (the 30%) let alone those that give weak and useless criticism if ut (68%).  Or those who blame what is wrong in USA on immigrants.

I often say the most important thing for improving USA would be better education, including the social and ethical dimensions in which so many people are clearly lacking.  My mother felt that ethical education came from upbringing, and our problem now is that it is so sorely lacking.  But ultimately, social and ethical education cannot really be pounded into people's heads.  They have to learn it mostly from firsthand experience*, and that's tough in a society that rewards sociopaths the most.

(*Some kinds of art can also be helpful.  But who funds the most art?)

 It seems the only way out, and the direction we are heading anyway, is total collapse.  That's probably the only way enough people will get the message.  And in that, it's not entirely clear that a few days later (with the smoother and longer ride of Democrats) will be better than sooner (with MAGA Republicans--straight into the abyss, with no apologies).  I generally like to think that later gives us more opportunities to reverse course, but if the course is not going to be reversed than sooner could even be better.  I once knew a kind of radical ecological doomer who thought that we...we should go petal to the metal and get human technological civilization over with before it can destroy more species all than otherwise.  To be clear, I am not myself advising that, but I still see a sad and likely truth in it.  Anyway, pedal to the metal is what we are now doing under Trump and may well continue the rest of the way to collapse.

I don't blame people anymore for not voting at all, though I try to let them know that there are choices that at least will not be endorsing evil at all, choices that might somehow have as much effect as anything else or more to deliver actual social good and not merely lesser evil.

I often look to FDR (despite his many grave errors) as our best President ever.  And he would not have done the New Deal unless he was very effectively running scared of socialists, communists, and left leaning populists threatening to grab the part of the electorate he hoped to hold on to.  That was a key part of how good things got done then, and probably what needs to be done now as well.

Links

I am repeating this link from above because it is important to read to get an overview of the mathematical analysis of casting a decisive vote as well as the best and most readable single analysis I've ever seen.  This essay by Toby Ord also gives a good history of previous analyses and provides many further links to them.

https://www.tobyord.com/writing/decisive-vote

You might be able to read some of the following paid post by Patrick Lawrence, who argues entirely on ethical principles rather than including the mathematics as I do.  I agree with him his primary case and conclusion and many of my non-mathematical arguments are similar to his.  Here or elsewhere he also says that Biden was one of the worst Presidents ever.  I don't quite agree with that, I think Trump and GWB were worse, though I'd put Biden in the lowest group, and it's a very low bar now anyway.*  I wouldn't expect Harris to be any better than Biden was.  I suspect Harris would have been drawn into war with Iran just like Trump, because of all her Zionist backing, friends, and history.  And she might have backed the US Provoked Proxy War in Ukraine even more than Trump, possibly to the horror of us all.

(*Biden's history as Senator is almost too awful to recount, he pushed for the "Crime" bill of 1994, the banking deregulations of the late 90's, the War in Iraq, and many other bad things...and his Presidency was fairly undistinguished also in that every time there was a partisan issue, he let Republicans walk away with victories rather than apply LBJ like pressure to members of his own party...this was true even when Democrats had technical majorities in both houses...the only thing we "got" from Biden was basically the Infrastructure Bill, which has resulted in huge highway construction near me that seems excessive and outdated and does not actually solve local transportation problems either, and I plan to continue taking surface streets rather then the intimidating new multilevel freeways near me even when the construction is completed.) 

https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/the-evils-of-lesser-evilism

Abby Martin and Chris Hedges discuss the terrible environmental record of the US military.  And not only that, US militarism forces other military to do likewise.  And finally, the whole military system is for propping up the endless fossil fuel capitalist imperialist system we have, essentially making the points I try to make in the opening section #1 and #1.  Meanwhile Democrats are doing nothing to demand we dismantle this whole system.  Not even Bernie Sanders or AOC.  We need to go beyond the box if humanity is to survive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKtDJcDPvjc

Transcript with links at Substack

https://substack.com/home/post/p-209018121

Abby Martin's latest film, Earth's Greatest Enemy, about the US Military and Imperialism is an even better exposition of the #1 and #1 section of this essay (I only saw it after writing most of this post).

https://earthsgreatestenemy.com/

Twitter thread on the unwise NATO expansion, possibly the #1 reason why Russia invaded Ukraine:

https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen/status/2094406298678788348

However this is only the beginning of the story.  A brief summary:  US had been meddling in Ukraine since 1948 (Operation Aerodynamic) supporting neonazi groups.  After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US engineered two coups, including the Maidan 2014 coup which installed a US centric government which immediately made the Russian language and favored symbols and icons illegal.  Madeleine Albright bragged that the US had spent $5 Billion in "influence" operations, that's probably just in recent times and through CIA cutout NED and not counting the rest.  Neonazi snipers are almost certain to have been the ones firing on the protestors, probably of Russian ethnicity.  Very much has been discovered and written about this, particularly by a well known Canadian academic. Ivan Katchanovski.  A very similar operation occurred in the 2002 coup in Venezuela, just that it didn't last long.  Neonazis in western parts of Ukraine have always wanted to drive the ethnic Russians in the eastern part out.   Neonazis attacked a government building in Odessa.  A civil war ensued.  While western media portrayed this from the start as heavy handed control by Russian "Green Men," in fact there was overwhelming local support for many forms of independence from Kiev in Crimea and Donbas, including unification with Russia.  It was Putin who was holding the Donbas at arms length by insisting on federation with Kiev instead at first, and Putin has been taking a similarly conservative approach all along, including in warfare.  Two agreements were signed (Minsk I and Minsk II) to resolve the conflict by making a federated republic, which permitted local authority in the east.  Terms required for Kiev government, including restoration of Russian language, were never implemented and barely even discussed among Ukrainian officials.  Instead, further destruction of eastern ideas and symbols and hopes occurred, including banning political parties and even the Russian Orthodox Church.  Europeans said later they only signed these agreements to buy time for Ukraine to arm up.  A new president promising peace with eastern Ukraine (Zelenskyy) was elected but he immediately turned around and made peace with the Russian hating neonazis instead.  NATO armed the Kiev government to repatriate Donbas, and it was massing on the border of Donbas and already firing new shots at the Donbas (not Russia) on the eve of the Russian invasion, so the Russian Special Military Operation was a true use of the Right to Protect doctrine the US falsely used in many other places including Yugoslavia and Libya.  Russia tried to get a new peace deal with Kiev in negotiations in Istanbul but Boris Johnson arrived and gave Zelenskyy assurances the west would back him up if he refused it and most likely threats if he did not.  Biden himself had always favored NATO expansion (as shown in link above) to the point of war with Russia, so his actions (and those of people such as Blinken) were easily forseeable.  Fake and misappropriated atrocities often dogged the Russians in western media.  In truth, the Russian have spared civilians in many ways the West refuses to do in the wars it imposes.  The Russians have held back on civilian destruction until Ukraine--with US help--goes first.  Former ambassador Craig Murray points out that 0.3% of the dead in the Ukraine war are children, whereas 37.7% of the dead in Gaza are children, showing the difference between the Russian and the USraeli ways of war.  All of this gets misreported in Western media.  Meanwhile, Democrats will always insist this is a just war, and necessary use of US resources and standing.  Most people outside the west see it differently, as Russia standing up to the US imperium and demanding some kind of local sovereignty for rival states called Multipolarity.  Non-westerners also see Russia resisting being broken up by the West, as some US officials, advisors, and popular opinionators have frequently called for, as was brought on to Yugslavia by the West starting with German recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, and later full destruction of Libya by NATO (one more proof of NATO not being the "defensive alliance" it claims to be, and instead an imperial brigade).  Breaking up Russia seems to be a motivating force behind the US backing in the minds of the most hawkish officials, along with the more modest goal of just kicking the Russians down a peg or two.  The reverse generally seems to be what is happening, though US failure in the Ukraine War is now overshadowed in mind share by even more obvious failures in the Middle East.  Biden let that get started too by supporting the genocide in Gaza, which got the attack dog, Israel, salivating for more.  It's doubtful either major pro-Imperial US political party could have resisted being drawn in further to either of these terrible conflicts after 2024, and continuing to initiate what looks like WW3.  That's not lesser but maximum evil.  And there's no hope for any other progress towards a better and sustainable human society as long as it persists.

After writing this post, I saw this latest post by Caitlyn Johnstone which also sums up "#1 and #1" very well.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/09/13/western-civilization-is-a-phony-pop-star/

I loved the opening paragraph:

Western liberal democracies are like a narcissistic wife beater who postures as a sensitive he/him feminist on social media. Like a pop star who makes a show of fighting the power and defending the marginalized while supporting Israel.

This brought to mind people I know.  Not wife beaters as such but control freaks who preach Feminism better than anyone but live by the one rule "me."  US society is fucked up on both conservative and liberal sides.  I wouldn't expect much different from a society owned by Oligarchs and operated by the CIA and Zionist mob, as the JFK assassination showed us that this is.  The best thing we can do is stand out of line whenever we can, and not let them take us away.