Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

“Socialism, this is the path to save the planet, I don’t have the least doubt. Capitalism is the road to hell," Venezuela's Hugo Chavez told the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. Rhetoric like that won the socialist dictator the admiration of socialists from Barack Obama to Noam Chomsky. But the dirty little secret of the socialist revolution in Venezuela was that it was a front for a massive drug smuggling operation. Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, gutted Venezuela's rich oil resources and turned the country into a socialist drug cartel. “Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president Maduro,” Sean Penn promised. The population has fled or is starving, but the revolution endures. In 2020, Maduro and top officials of his regime were indicted in the United States as leaders of the Cartel de los Soles for conspiring with FARC to smuggle tons of cocaine to the United States. Venezuela’s biggest asset was its border with Colo

Luftmensch meant a 'man of air' who lived detached from the real world, had no income or any way to pay his bills, and yet here he was. With the internet, we're all cloud people now. Our economy is dominated by companies with unclear business plans except that they somehow involve the cloud.   Facebook, which despite its recent downturn, still has a stock price twice the value of GE, unveiled its big achievement, ' Legs ' which will allow its avatars to enjoy the appearance of feet in the metaverse. Netflix's stock price is double that of IBM, even though it suffered some reverses when investors realized that its plan to continue growing forever while spending $17 billion a year on creating bad movies and TV shows was not actually sustainable. Good thing there's solar panel and wind turbine companies to bet on. Beyond cryptocurrencies (just imagine if your money were even more intangible, less secure and backed by even less in the way of assets than it is n

 Live from Manhattan, where the World Economic Forum boasts comfortable digs in a luxurious midtown tower on Madison Avenue, the WEF’s Tackling Disinformation forum began. “With increasing fears about the cost of living – exacerbated by the pandemic and the energy crisis – it is now more critical than ever to tackle disinformation head-on,” the WEF explained. What do costs of living have to do with state and corporate censorship? As prices rise and standards of living drop, and the WEF’s slogan of “I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better” will only have been proven two-thirds true, the peasants may get restless. Peasants like Uncle Bob whom the WEF is deeply concerned about. Very deeply. “We need to take certain actions there to prevent Uncle Bob from sharing misleading information at the Thanksgiving table,” Claire Wardle (She/Her) PhD explicated in a chummy Brit accent over Zoom. Wardle sits on the WEF’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Information and he

 “It is our lowest income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions,” Kamala Harris told the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum during the recovery effort for the victims of Hurricane Ian. “We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity.” That is what FEMA is already doing. FEMA uses something called the National Risk Index to calculate the risk to any area. The NRI can then be used to determine which communities should get how much funding to cope with natural disasters. Armed with an NRI evaluation, cities, counties and towns can apply for Hazard Mitigation Assistance grants. Billions in these grants have been handed out. The trouble with the NRI is that it’s less science and more sociology. And very leftist sociology at that. The Index is made up of three components, the actual natural hazard, “community resilience” and “social vulnerability”. The last is really affirmative actio

It's a cool dark night in California and all the lights are out. Sloping rooftops dotted with solar panels gleam even more darkly than usual. The air is still and not a single breeze would stir even the lightest wind turbine. Somewhere out in the darkness Diablo Canyon, the aging nuclear plant, still running, is keeping what power there is on. The Northern Chumash or as the media insists on calling them, the Yak Titu Titu Yak Tiłhini, are demanding the territory which would make them California's second only power.  They might prove to be better guardians of keeping the state's power on than the Democrats. The great westward drive that began with Lewis and Clark has been steadily rolling backward. Southern California is filled with moving trucks headed to Arizona, Texas and Nevada. Those who can afford it, fly to Florida. The Russians were here once and then the Spanish. The American presence in California was more comprehensive and lasted longer, but may one day leave sagg

 In an annual propaganda ritual, the heads of foreign governments and media operatives marked the anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s death by tweeting condemnations of the killing of the old friend of Osama bin Laden who had been recruited by an Al Qaeda financier to promote Jihad. It is a testament to the unchallenged power of the Islamic tyranny of Qatar that everyone in Washington D.C. unquestioningly takes a knee and pays tribute to its martyred operative. “Jamal Khashoggi’s murder 4 years ago was also an attack on freedom of expression everywhere,” Secretary of State Blinken tweeted. There’s no such thing as “freedom of expression” among Khashoggi’s Qatari employees. Khashoggi was not fighting for any kind of freedom, but for an Islamist tyranny of the kind practiced by Qatar’s fellow Islamists in Iran. Had he gotten his way, liberals in Saudi Arabia would be the ones being brutally murdered. As they are in Iran. Western elites have spent far less time expressing outrage about the t

Biden’s Secretary of Defense sponsored a Rand paper which claims abortion is vital to national security. The paper, “How the Dobbs Decision Could Affect U.S. National Security”, warns that the inability to promptly kill children due to the Supreme Court’s decision will lead to “higher health care, child care, and education costs”. If you don’t kill ’em, you’ll have to teach ’em. While lefties loved attacking Rand, a think tank created by a defense contractor that is now a subsidiary of Boeing, only when lefties fully took it over did it become capable of this level of sociopathy. Civilized societies didn’t send women into front line combat except as an act of total  desperation. The Biden administration has financed a survey arguing that not only should we send women into combat, but that we’ll have deployment issues if we don’t kill their babies. Moloch wept. The Rand survey argues that, “Women play an integral role in the U.S. military. A threat to their health and well-being is a po

 Ken Burns, whose name decorates assorted PBS documentaries like Ken Burns’ Civil War, Ken Burns’ Baseball, and Ken Burns’ Prohibition, now brings us Ken Burns’ The Holocaust. Timed to extract maximum donations from liberal Jews around the High Holy Days, PBS is airing “The U.S. and the Holocaust” not to set the record straight, but to cover it up yet again by whitewashing the FDR administration and exploiting the Holocaust to call for open borders. Jews and the Holocaust are nothing but useful talking points to Burns. His interest begins with the “slave trade” and concludes with the Capitol Riot. The message of the “The U.S. and the Holocaust” is that Republicans are the new Nazis, Burns is one of the heroes calling them out and Stephen Miller, Trump’s Jewish adviser, is the new  Breckinridge Long, a Democrat Nazi sympathizer who used his position as an FDR crony to keep Jews out of America. Not that Burns is willing to indict FDR. Instead, he fashionably blames Long and other staffer

In New York City, world leaders dodged traffic, deranged panhandlers and the city’s unique fall funk, to lecture the planet about their views at the United Nations General Assembly. Their theme was the threat that “misinformation” or “disinformation” poses to their power. “Hate speech, misinformation and abuse — targeted especially at women and vulnerable groups — are proliferating,” UN Secretary-General Guterres claimed. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov blamed his country’s PR problems on, “disinformation, crude staging, and provocations”. “Today I have listened to further instalments of Russia’s catalogues of distortions, dishonesty, and disinformation,” UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly retorted. Catherine Colonna, minister for Europe, countered that, “Where Russia employs disinformation and propaganda, justice must be grounded in facts.” The one thing the Russians and Europeans can agree on is that the whole matter of the war can be reduced to “disinformation”: bad speech that we

 ‘Clean’, like ‘smart’, has become the prerequisite for all technology. Both are myths. Smart technology is surveillance technology. It is not smarter because of its inherent qualities, but because it sends and receives data that allows it to be ‘smarter’ in manipulating users. The smart part of smart technology comes from human beings. So does the stupid part when people sacrifice their privacy and independence for the benefits of technology being shaped to them. Clean energy is even more of a myth. The Inflation Increase Act doles out another stream of billions toward the inefficient forms of energy generation that the government has been subsidizing for over 50 years because some Madison Avenue ad agency branded them ‘clean’. Energy is inherently clean and dirty. Making the inherent forces of the universe useful requires mining metal, cutting down trees, and turning fossil fuels into plastic to assemble machines. Once those machines are running, they will shed heat because ‘clean’ o

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, President Trump approved a major disaster declaration a day faster than Biden did for the island after Hurricane Fiona hit. Trump’s alacrity went unrewarded when local Democrats and the media blamed him for the hurricane. CNN, which has been much slower to provide coverage of Fiona on the island, flew Anderson Cooper out there to wade uncomfortably around and do interviews with leftist politicians wearing custom-printed, “Help Us, We Are Dying” t-shirts in between posing for glamor shots. Instead, Cooper is currently promoting a podcast with leftist hack Stephen Colbert. The dramatic difference in coverage can be summed up with two Reuters headlines, five years apart, “Puerto Ricans say Trump’s disaster response was too slow” and “Puerto Rico power grid no match for Fiona; residents unsurprised.” The New York Times went even further blaming President Trump for Puerto Rico’s power grid going down in 2022. According to the leftist paper, the number o