About Restoring Our Industrial Base; Plus

Yesterday a commenter took issue with my assessment of Marco Rubio’s clarion call for former Euro imperial powers to join the US in a neocolonial campaign to make the world safe again for Western dominance. That Rubio really called for that is manifestly clear. I do what I can but horses can be led to the water, not made to drink. For skeptics I can only recommend a full rereading of my two posts on Rubio’s address:

Rubio In Munich Calls For A New Age Of ... Colonialism?

What’s Really Disturbing About Rubio’s Crazy-Ass Speech

However, here is a key passage, in which Rubio clearly states that the Trump regime’s real agenda is a return to the colonial past—using different means, perhaps, but with the same goal of exploitation:

For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.

But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.

Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.

The commenter in question swallowed—hook, line, and sinker—Rubio’s invocation of Trumpian gaslighting, including the notion that Trump’s tariff shock and awe campaign is somehow designed to reshore America’s industrial base—which was basically given away in the move to establish a hyper-financialized economy to enrich the ruling class. As I’ve explained in the past, the meat cleaver fashion in which the tariff’s were imposed—including in pursuit of personal vendettas—made it clear from the start that reshoring was never the point. The point was always to shakedown the rest of the world to force capital to flow to the US to relieve our out of control debt. Today the WSJ confirms that, far from reshoring industry to the US, Trump’s tariffs are furthering the implosion of our manufacturing sector:

U.S. Manufacturing Is in Retreat and Trump’s Tariffs Aren’t Helping

Levies on imports were supposed to bring back a golden age of U.S. manufacturing. They haven’t worked, so far.

The manufacturing boom President Trump promised would usher in a golden age for America is going in reverse. After years of economic interventions by the Trump and Biden administrations, fewer Americans work in manufacturing than any point since the pandemic ended.

Manufacturers shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to federal figures, extending a contraction that has seen more than 200,000 roles disappear since 2023.

This does not come as a surprise—it was evident that, since tariffs are taxes on American businesses and individuals, this would be the result. That alone should have told anyone with any basic understanding to realize that the rhetoric was simply gaslighting. What’s even worse is that the shakedown of the rest of the world is not guaranteed to work. The commitments to invest in the US are verbal and can be walked back. This is a huge gamble. It’s part of the neocolonial agenda.

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As Trump builds up to a full blown American war on Iran, Russia continues to support Iran:

Megatron @Megatron_ron

13h

NEW:

 Russia is intensively supplying weapons to Iran

Over the past three days, three flights of Russian Il-76TDs from Mineralnye Vody to the Iranian city of Karaj (Kerej) have been recorded.

Previously, Mi-28NE helicopters were delivered to Iran in a similar manner, so it is assumed that these flights are transporting new batches of strike machines produced for the Iranian army.

Yeah, this is what we actually voted for:

Lindsey!: “The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel.”

Danny Davis today, referring to Rubio’s speech, decries America’s lack of true leadership, lack of intellectual rigor, and certainly lack of wisdom—and a lack of any moral code. Exactly what I was arguing. “There are many who wanna say ‘Christianity this, Christianity that!’ Those are mere words.” Cover for moral depravity.