Sunday, September 13, 2026

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Support for Zionism

Early Advocate: Churchill expressed sympathy for a Jewish homeland in Palestine as early as 1905–1908. Read more about this history in the analysis by the International Churchill Society. [1, 2, 3]

Strategic Ally: He viewed Zionism as a civilizing and modernizing force in the Middle East and saw European Jews as vital allies. [1, 2, 3]

Policy Influence: As a government minister and later prime minister, he helped shape British policy regarding a "Jewish National Home," though his stance also involved balancing complex regional tensions with Arab populations. You can read further commentary on these dynamics from the American Enterprise Institute. [1, 2, 3, 4]

When Did Churchill Become a Zionist?

By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
| May 19, 2025

Jerusalem, 29 March 1921. Colonial Secretary Churchill (r) escorted by British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel. (National Photo Collection of Israel, Wikimedia Commons)

Remembering Richard

This post is part of a series entitled “Remembering Richard.” With this series, The Churchill Project seeks to honor its late senior fellow, Richard Langworth (1941-2025), by republishing his writings on Churchill from his personal website, where he wrote about a great deal more than the Bulldog of Britain, all of it worth reading.

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Q: Zionist and Israel supporter

“Churchill, a Zionist, was first to call for the creation of Israel in 1905.” Where and when in 1905 did he say that? —G.H., New York City

A: Date undetermined

Churchill was probably a Zionist by 1905. Reader Gene Kopelson (Comments, below) notes Michael Makovsky’s evidence of young Winston’s early respect for Jews and many Jewish friends. This didn’t make him a Zionist per se, but he certainly had become one by the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. But I can find no public statement calling for an independent Israel until 1948. Until then he called for a “Jewish National Home.” With his characteristic optimism, he believed Arabs and Jews in Palestine could coexist. He pointed to the talent of the Arabs. And he praised the Jews for their horticulture and irrigation projects. Indeed in today’s Israel, Arabs comprise 20% of the population.

Cairo, 1921

Headed by Churchill in 1921, the Cairo Conference set the borders of the modern Middle East. There he opted for the Zionist idea, what he called a “Jewish National Home” within Britain’s Palestine Mandate, roughly coinciding with what is now Israel. The rest of the Palestine Mandate became the Arab state of Jordan. To a delegation of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem on 28 March 1921 Churchill declared for a Jewish National Home:

And where else could that be but in this land of Palestine, with which for more than 3000 years they have been intimately and profoundly associated? (Churchill by Himself, 175)

Churchill’s impressive achievement at that time was to convince two Arab potentates, King Abdullah in Jordan and King Feisal in Iraq, to tolerate a Jewish Homeland in their midst. This situation prevailed until Britain gave up the Palestine Mandate (without resolving the tensions) after World War II. In the 1948 war Israel secured independence.

A world war later…

…on 10 December 1948, Churchill spoke in the House of Commons. He regretted that Britain and the West had lost the opportunity to make a permanent settlement in the Middle East. This is the first admission that I can find that he accepted partition and an independent Zionist state:

I always had in my mind the hope that the whole question of the Middle East might have been settled on the largest scale on the morrow of victory and that an Arab Confederation, comprising three or four Arab States—Saudi-Arabia, Iraq, Transjordania, Syria and the Lebanon—however grouped, possibly united amongst themselves, and one Jewish State, might have been set up, which would have given peace and unity throughout the whole vast scene of the Middle East. As to whether so large a policy could have been carried into being I cannot be sure, but a settlement of the Palestine question on the basis of partition would certainly have been attempted, in the closest possible association with the United States and in personal contact with the President, by any Government of which I had been the head. But all this opportunity was lost. (Churchill by Himself, 176-77)

Hopes and regrets

Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann (wearing Arab headdress as a sign of friendship) with then-Emir Feisal in Syria. (Wikipedia Commons)

Churchill supported the Zionist state, declaring in the House of Commons in 1949: “…the coming into being of a Jewish State in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years.” (Churchill by Himself, 175)

But in 1951 he deplored British policies after the Second World War. These, he said, “led to the winding up of our affairs in Palestine in such a way as to earn almost in equal degree the hatred of the Arabs and the Jews.” (Churchill by Himself, 439).

Many who still have hope for Churchill’s optimism accept a “two state solution” for Palestine and Israel. But the two separate Palestinian entities, Gaza and the West Bank, subdivide the latter’s population. A solution with a chance of success might contemplate a shift of peoples to create a contiguous state. No one seems to want to grasp that nettle (which caused havoc in India in 1947). Even in 1948, Churchill recognized that it would not be easy.

The Trump 2.0 era has intensified a deeply entrenched pathology in the American media system: concentrated corporate ownership. During less perilous times, legitimate concerns about a few corporations capturing so much of our news and information have often been dismissed as conspiracy theories and paranoia. But

Constant controversies—from government and corporate censorship of television comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert to the algorithmic and editorial abuses of Elon Musk’s X and Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post—remind us why media ownership holds such high stakes for any semblance of democracy. Meanwhile, rightwing nepotistic dynasties like the Murdochs and the Ellisons hold inordinate influence over what millions of people can see, hear, and read in their daily media.

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Our current media system is simply incompatible with democracy, making structural media reform an urgent priority. This includes unwinding previously approved and pending mergers—exhibit A being Paramount Skydance’s potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (which owns CNN and HBO, among other key holdings)—as well as trust-busting corporate media behemoths by forcing them to divest major components of their sprawling conglomerates.

Undoing the wreckage will take time, but we must lay the groundwork now to launch necessary structural reforms the moment we dethrone Trump and his ilk. This project requires a clear analytical framework for understanding exactly why such run-amok media concentration is bad for democracy, and why breaking up media conglomerates is both necessary and insufficient for reconstructing the media we need from the ground up.

Big corporate media mergers are bad for everyone other than those few who stand to profit. They’re harmful for media workers, consumers, local communities, First Amendment freedoms, and democracy writ large. Over the years, the dangers for democracy posed by media concentration have been borne out by empirical evidence. Research shows that media conglomeration can lead to less local news, more advertising, and shifts toward conservative political commentary, especially under the ownership of rightwing companies such as Sinclair.

According to basic democratic theory, ensuring diverse voices, viewpoints, and stories in our media requires a pluralistic range of media owners. However, the hypercommercialized, corporate-dominated US media system wasn’t devised to privilege democracy. In fact, given its weak public media system, oligopolistic media markets, and light public interest regulations—many of which eroded over time or simply were ignored (or weaponized under Trump)—the US media system is almost perfectly designed to not serve democracy.

Within this hypercommercialized media structure, despite many individual journalists’ courageous work to the contrary, profit imperatives too often trump democracy (bad pun intended). Capitalist logics undercut and skew democratic discourse by encouraging clickbait, excluding low-income communities, and degrading the quality of journalism. Capitalist incentive structures also lead to pronounced deficits through sheer cost cutting, and by treating news and information as commodities, not public services, and audiences as passive consumers, not engaged citizens.

Even during the best of times, media corporations often maximize profits by ruthlessly cutting corners and forcing their media workers to do more for less. Too often, costly services like high-quality journalism are dismantled while content that’s cheaply produced and easily replicated—like shouting heads across ubiquitous screens, endlessly capturing our attention for advertisers—gets amplified.

Media conglomeration only intensifies these commercial logics. For example, cost cutting typically accelerates immediately following big mergers when companies take on tremendous debt. New corporate ownership has subjected CBS to such restructuring and would likely do the same to CNN if the pending merger goes through, for which Paramount Skydance is reportedly incurring $79 billion in debt. To compensate, media corporations often combine newsrooms and lay off reporters—or eliminate journalism altogether in favor of opinion and commentary.

In addition to decimating jobs, managing such debt tends to result in outsourcing costs to audiences by raising prices, offering lower-quality programming, and providing less creative cultural fare. This outcome is especially detrimental given a media landscape already riddled with news deserts, in which scarce original journalism and local media content are being produced.

The debasement of our news and entertainment media is bad enough. But media conglomeration also creates private tyrannies wherein oligarchs command broad swaths of our media. Driven by perverse incentives, these media barons wield dangerous control over public discourse, warping how important issues get framed and what stories get told.

Conferring such political economic power onto a small elite is itself a severe democratic threat. Whether through lobbying, campaign contributions, or preferential press coverage of politicians in exchange for regulatory favors, these media oligarchs almost always develop corrupt relationships with those in government, undercutting the press’s much-vaunted “watchdog function” of holding the powerful to account.

Moreover, media consolidation is a structural precondition for authoritarianism. We saw such patterns play out under Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who demonstrated how authoritarians needn’t control newsrooms by gunpoint. Rather, they can rely on chummy oligarchs to discipline the media for them, resulting in news feeds and media channels saturated with government-approved talking points and propagandistic narratives that brook little dissent toward those in power.

It shouldn’t surprise us that billionaires are likely to deploy their media assets to advance their class interests. This is especially prevalent in the United States, given devalued media properties and extreme concentrations of wealth. To provide one stark example: Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 for less than half of what he would later pay for his super yacht.

In the final analysis, such concentrated corporate ownership—whereby a tiny elite commands so much power over our media—is antithetical to democratic society. Even if today’s villainous oligarchs had the hearts of angels, it’s far too much power for any individual to wield over our news media. Just as every billionaire is a policy failure, every billionaire-owned media outlet is a profound threat to our democracy.

How did the United States fall under this media oligarchy? Many of our contemporary media failures trace back to specific policies and political decisions. One such inflection point occurred during the 1930s and 1940s, when policymakers established a privatized and highly commercialized broadcast media system tempered by relatively weak public interest protections. The latter included what became known as the Fairness Doctrine, which President Ronald Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) jettisoned in 1987.

The United States belatedly established a chronically underfunded public broadcasting system in the late 1960s. But after a period of modest progressive policymaking, we began rolling back media ownership restrictions and “deregulating” our media in the 1980s, leading up to the infamous Telecommunications Act of 1996, when media consolidation began to escalate. In many ways, our oligopolistic media landscape has only worsened since the merger mania of the Clinton-Bush neoliberal heyday.

Particularly alarming is the utter collapse of local journalism, in which more than 40 percent of our newspapers and three-quarters of our local journalists have vanished since the early 2000s. Meanwhile, FCC Chair Brendan Carr is a loyal apparatchik for bullying what’s left of our independent media into capitulation to Trump.

Combined with the federal defunding of our public media, few structural alternatives and countervailing forces can withstand a blasted media landscape dominated by profit imperatives and a handful of media moguls. What’s to be done?

Today we face a dangerous new terrain upon which an authoritarian government weaponizes a hypercommercialized corporate media system against democracy. Yet, the market libertarianism and policy failures over the decades that enabled media oligarchy weren’t inevitable or natural, nor must they be permanent. These were political choices, and politics are subject to human agency and change. But first we must denaturalize this hypercapitalistic system that turns our media against democracy.

To begin, we must recognize that our media pathologies run even deeper than bad billionaire media owners doing bad things. Ownership structures are only part of the problem—a key part, to be sure—downstream from the core root of our media polycrisis: capitalism. Confronting media monopolies requires us to reckon with the underlying conditions that made such concentration possible, specifically the hypercapitalist logics capturing our information and communication infrastructures from root to branch.

Indeed, our media’s systemic problems predate the recent spate of mergers under Trump. While today we must stop mega media mergers, tomorrow we must create an entirely new public media ecosystem in service to local communities. To combat the capitalist capture of the entire American media apparatus that produces various kinds of “market censorship” that would-be autocrats like Trump can exploit, we must create a non-capitalistic system—a truly public and independent media system—that’s owned and controlled by us all.

Fortunately, recent positive signs have already emerged at the state and local levels, ranging from contesting media mergers by state attorneys general to making public investments toward local journalism. Yet we must broaden our political imagination and plan for bold national policy interventions for the post-Trump moment. There’s a strong practical need to be utopian right now—to give us hope but to also provide clarity as to what we should be fighting for. We need a long-term vision firmly planted on our political horizons—we can dare to imagine a media system that privileges democracy over power and profit.

Victor Pickard

I am so damned sick and tired of this war on women. Stop blaming women because of men’s failures. Women stepped up to work in tobacco factories in the South during the war to keep the economy going. We learned espionage codes, took care of our wounded soldiers, piloted rickety bombers, and used our womanly wiles to get enemy secrets. Meanwhile back home we raised crops and gardens to feed ourselves and make profits during harvest. We kept the home fires burning and intact. We continued to have and raise children alone. Furthermore, we learned and did what we had to. When our country needed us, we rose to the occasion, and we did it well.

Now, under the Trump authoritarian regime of highly educated men who truthfully are unfit to work in a pie factory as tasters, we are going bankrupt. These so called scholarly men in Congress are nothing but cowards who have spit on our constitution for a convicted felon, and an adjudicated rapist. You men are despicable. When your country needed you, where were you? Writing stupid articles for your misogynist, heinous Heritage Foundation papers on how to blame women for your failures and how to have a society that caters to rich oligarch men. All the while destroying our country, and robbing the working class, the backbone of this country that made it great. You only see women as sex objects and birthing vessels to cater to and serve you like kings.

The only thing your mother and Trump's mother did wrong was they did not drown your ungrateful asses in the river after birth. You make me nauseous

Women are not your slaves. We are not going back to your puritan days. F~ck all of you misogynist

Cathy Martin

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OMG! This Heritage Foundation Sodomite is invoking the Telepathic, Unilateral, Preemptive, Irreversible, Declassification, (S.T.U.P.I.D.) DEFENSE! Ms. Cathy Martin's response burned his hut down; many thanks.

Saturday, September 12, 2026

They sold you scarcity like it was a law of nature.

Oil is “running out.”
Water is “running out.”
Land is “running out.”
Food is “running out.”

But look closer.

Oil reserves change as technology, exploration, economics, and extraction methods change. Water continuously cycles through the planet, yet access to clean freshwater remains uneven. Huge amounts of land exist, while ownership, infrastructure, climate, and policy determine how much can actually be used. And globally, enormous amounts of food are produced while millions still struggle to access it.

So maybe the deeper question isn’t simply:

“Do we have enough?”

Maybe it’s:

WHO CONTROLS THE ACCESS?

Because abundance means very little when the resources are concentrated, restricted, wasted, priced beyond reach, or controlled by institutions powerful enough to determine who gets what.

That’s where the conversation gets uncomfortable.

When something becomes scarce, or is perceived as scarce, its value rises.

Prices rise.
Dependence grows.
Competition increases.
And whoever controls the supply gains leverage.

That doesn’t prove every shortage is deliberately engineered. Droughts, geography, infrastructure, conflict, production costs, and real physical limits matter.

But artificial scarcity is real too.

Supply can be restricted.
Resources can be monopolized.
Food can be destroyed while people remain hungry.
Land can sit unused while housing becomes unaffordable.

THE RESOURCE AND YOUR ACCESS TO THE RESOURCE ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.

That distinction changes the entire conversation.

Once you understand that, you stop automatically asking, “Why isn’t there enough?”

And you start asking:

Who owns it?
Who distributes it?
Who sets the price?
Who benefits from the shortage?
And who benefits when you believe scarcity is inevitable?

QUESTION THE SYSTEM, BUT FOLLOW THE EVIDENCE.

The Awakening Compass was made for people willing to question the narratives they inherited and explore a different perspective.

Grab your copy through the link in our bio.

#ArtificialScarcity #ResourceControl #QuestionEverything #AwakeningCompass #RecommendedBooks

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California's about to make it stupid easy to slap a solar panel on your balcony and plug it straight into your wall. No utility company permission slip required. No months of bureaucratic theater. Just buy it, mount it, done.

The real problem was always the paperwork. Your utility wanted to run you through a full interconnection process designed for massive rooftop arrays—except you're just trying to power a fridge and some lights with a 300-watt panel. The cost in time and forms exceeded the cost of the actual equipment. It was absurd.

SB 868 cuts through that. Small systems get a fast track with actual safety built in—UL certification, automatic shutdown if the grid goes down (which keeps line workers from getting fried), and a 1,200-watt cap. This is how Germany's been doing it for years. Over a million balcony systems over there, sold at hardware stores like they're garden tools.

The catch? The exemption expires January 1, 2030 unless the legislature renews it. Four years to prove the market works. But here's why that matters: California is the solar market in this country. Manufacturers build for California. If it works here at scale, it spreads everywhere.

Ten states have already passed versions. New York's got the same bill waiting on the governor's desk right now. This isn't fringe stuff anymore—it's becoming the baseline for how renewable energy actually gets deployed in the real world.

Thursday, September 10, 2026

BREAKING: BIG BROTHER — Elon Musk’s voter registration site scandal exposes the CREEPY data exploitation machine behind the patriotic branding.

Elon Musk didn’t become the world’s richest man by ignoring opportunities. So, how could he pass up the chance to exploit you and your accompanying data into not just a profit center, but a propaganda tool to promote his fascistic worldview?

Elon Musk wants you to check your voter registration status by using a website that he built called votesafe.org. The less cynical among us may see that as an altruistic gesture that helps further democracy. But what Musk has actually done is build a data-mining operation disguised as civic engagement, and it's already being pushed to millions of Americans.

The federal government's real voter registration tool, vote.gov, collects virtually no personal information and doesn't track your activity. Musk's competing site, votesafe.org, run through his America PAC, does the exact opposite.

According to Popular Information's Judd Legum, the site harvests your full name, date of birth, home address, email, cell phone number, IP address, browser fingerprint, and even every single link and page you click while visiting.

And it gets worse.

On August 29th, votesafe.org quietly updated its privacy policy, stripping out previous language that limited how your data could be used. The new policy explicitly allows America PAC to "share" or "sell" your personal information, including your voter registration status and how you cast your ballot, to unnamed "business partners."

It can also sell "inferences" about your "psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitude" — essentially a psychological profile built from your browsing behavior, sold to whoever's buying.

As you use the site, your street address gets sent to Facebook and Google. Your contact information feeds directly into Facebook's ad-matching system. A scrambled version of your email gets sent to an ad-tracking firm that follows you across websites, apps, and streaming services. Your activity is shared with X, Musk's own social network, and yet another tracking company, Incrementdata. A device fingerprint is created so you can be tracked even after deleting cookies.

This isn't a rogue side project either. Musk has pledged over $100 million toward the midterms, with votesafe.org's data collection sitting at the center of that strategy. The platform is already being white-labeled by allied groups, including the Heritage Foundation's Sentinel Action Fund and an organization called Ready to Register, which North Carolina election officials say has mailed outdated registration forms, including some to deceased voters, using outdated data.

Voter registration should be simple, secure, and free from corporate surveillance. Instead, Musk has built a machine that turns your basic civic participation into a data goldmine, sold to the highest bidder, all wrapped in patriotic branding designed to look like it's helping you vote. Be forewarned!

Please like and share if you DON’T want to help make Elon Musk any richer!