K. E. Benois is a political commentator specializing in metapolitics, history, and international relations. He holds a degree in economics and has been active in American and European political debate since 2016.
The deadline for Britain’s exit from the European Union, voted for by a solid majority in 2016, is about to pass. And yet, the status quo continues. You will remember that first in January and then again in February of this year, the parliament rejected the proposed deal set out by the Conservative government under Prime Minister Teresa May, a deal negotiated with the European Union which pleased neither side of the debate. Last week, the speaker of the House of Commons informed the government that the body would not debate what was, substantially, the same deal rerun a th...
It is now probable that a military intervention in Venezuela is being discussed at the highest levels of the US government. A rather bleak exclamation mark was placed on this fact when failed presidential candidate and Florida senator Marco Rubio tweeted out a none-too cryptic juxtaposition of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi alive and half-dead, a rather macabre window into the mind of the man who might have been president had 2015-16 gone differently. It may turn out to have mattered little however, since Donald Trump has little to lose politically from launching an...
For generations, Americans have been wedded to the idea of the free press. In fact, this idea has been seen as of such importance that various geopolitical projects carry it as a principle, i.e., having a free press is often a prerequisite to gaining the maximum benefits Uncle Sam can offer. While journalists have never held a premium social status in terms of respect, the public have generally seen them as a net social good, and this view has been largely based on the idea that journalists keep those in power honest. In the United States, the exposure of President Richard...
If you have been following developments across the Atlantic, you’ll know that the crisis surrounding Brexit has reached an impasse. After voters in 2016 voted to leave the European Union, leadership of the ruling Conservative Party passed to Theresa May, whose long negotiations with Brussels have yielded a deal months before the March deadline, at which point a so-called ‘hard Brexit’ will be triggered. Many have predicted economic catastrophe in such a scenario, underlining the importance of a deal with the European Union, particularly on the United Kingdom’s status as a...
American media seems to have taken painstaking effort to give the massive protests in Paris as little coverage as possible, but by now most people are aware of the facts. A protest over a hike in fuel prices by the exceedingly smarmy president Emmanuel Macron, has exploded into full scale civil disobedience relating to a number of grievances including mass migration and membership in NATO. This protest of men and women in yellow high visibility vests (leading to the name Gilets Jaunes) has gripped the country and brought its capital to a standstill as the president has du...
In looking at the important subject of American religiosity, the spectacular death spiral of the country’s once dominant Protestant culture is truly a feast for sociologists. In the post-WWII secular landscape of Europe, America was often regarded as the ‘outlier’ of irreligion’s somewhat exaggerated march. It was believed that Christianity in the United States had staying power for a number of reasons, the first being it was never subject to the catastrophe of WWI to any notable degree, but also because the establishment clause of the Constitution meant that it was a diff...
Any send-up of the conspiratorial mindset is incomplete without a reference to false flags. They are as indispensable as tinfoil hats and large stockpiles of canned goods in a musky fallout shelter. Properly defined, a false flag is any destructive action undertaken by an actor with the intent of making it appear the fault of another party. While it emerged from an old piracy practice of tricking target ships by flying national colours, today it refers almost exclusively to covert operations supposedly undertaken by governments in order to wilfully deceive a domestic audie...
Conservatives in America have long decried their blacklisting from popular media, in which liberal and progressive viewpoints predominate. One recalls the secretive Hollywood group ‘Friends of Abe’, where Republican voters who happened to be actors, directors and screenwriters could converse without fear of having their careers ruined by the fiercely petty and vengeful industry. This is understandable. When high profile actor Kelsey Grammer told a British television audience he would vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, the response was a mixture of fur...
Hugely popular radio host Alex Jones has been erased. He has neither been murdered nor quickly bundled away by the authorities for speaking to a crowd in Times Square. Erasure of this kind has disappeared from the most highly developed countries, not because it has fallen from favour within the evolving ‘moral’ and ‘humanitarian’ consensus, but because it is obsolete. However any rejoicing in light of this development would be ill-founded. We are all now faced with the threat not of a physical gulag, but a digital gulag, in a world where those outside of the digital domain...