Direct Democracy:
The Alternative to Globalist Plutocracy? Part 2

4,702 words

“It records the sorry chronicle of Majority reverses on all the important battlegrounds—cultural, religious, political, economic, and diplomatic. Since the liberal-minority coalition has emerged victorious on all fronts, it is not an overstatement to describe the losers as the Dispossessed Majority.”

—Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority

“We have no real democracy at the present time, because again and again the people have voted for decisive action, yet again and again their will has been thwarted by obstruction in the talking shop at Westminster. Democracy only begins when the will of the people is carried out.”

—Oswald Mosley

“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

—1 Timothy 6:10

“I think the only way you could get out of this conundrum is direct democracy, which Alain de Benoist on behalf of GRECE and the New Right has often advocated. This is closer to the type of democracy that exists in cantonal Switzerland . . . there is something to be said for direct democracies. Certainly, the elitist liberalism that you have in the West now on all sorts of things, such as multiculturalism and who you go to war with and certain federal things such as the European Union in the Western European context, are decided for by tiny elites and the population is largely excluded and popular wishes in these matters are regarded as ignorant and ill-informed and are often . . . swept to one side.”

—Jonathan Bowden

Liberal democracies are, quite revealingly, viciously hostile toward referendums which are, quite ironically, the most authentic expression of democracy.

In American, the courts have overturned dozens of state referendums restricting same-sex marriage or prohibiting illegal immigrants from using non-emergency public services as unconstitutional. British elites detest referendums, having only held three nationwide referendums in Britain’s history. Referendums are banned under the German Constitution due to their association with the NSDAP, which regularly consulted Germans in referendums.

The most cherished policy of Western neoliberal elites these past two decades has been massive third-world migration into Western nations. Many western elites have been entirely candid about how they are forcing these policies on their hapless populations and will not tolerate any dissent or opposition to this agenda.

France’s former Jewish president Nicolas Sarkozy openly stated: “This will get people talking, but the goal is to take up the challenge of métissage [racial mixing]. . . It is not a choice, it is an obligation, it is an imperative. . . If this republican volunteerism does not work, then the Republic will have to turn to even more coercive methods.”

American NATO general Wesley Clark, who led the NATO bombing campaign of Kosovo, similarly stated that “there is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th-century idea and we are trying to transition it into the 21st-century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.”

Former Goldman Sachs banker, director of the WTO and WEF, Bilderberg member, and Trilateral Commission chair European Union official and UN migration chief Peter Sutherland, who urged the EU to embrace mass immigration to “undermine the national homogeneity of its member states,”[1] also recommended that migration policy in Europe be transferred to unelected policymaking bodies like the EU Commission, so that issues like immigration policy would be put outside of the national political debate.[2] “[M]ainstream politicians, held hostage by xenophobic parties, adopt anti-immigrant rhetoric to win over fearful publics,” complained Sutherland, which is “leading to the growth of movements like UKIP, Le Pen and Geert Wilders and so on across Europe.”

Sutherland’s remarks reflect the broader 20th-century liberal agenda to transfer national decision-making to supranational bodies like the EU Commission, the WTO, the BIS, and the IMF, which are largely insulated against public opinion, unlike elected representatives who are at least nominally accountable to their constituents and must pretend to pander to their constituents.

For the time being, liberal internationalists still need to tolerate elections. However, they are doing incredibly well through public relations and perception management—i.e., lying to and manipulating the public. Very few politicians are honest with their voters about who they are and what they plan to do when in office, because they’d never win an election if they were. Many of these globalist parties have even co-opted Right-wing talking points. This is obviously a problem because it splits the vote and inhibits the growth of authentic nationalist parties, while keeping power in the hands of globalist assets. Donald Trump himself is basically a Zionist operative who was able to cobble together a powerful coalition of white Americans by branding himself as a sort of nationalist. However, his priority is ultimately not white America but promoting Jewish power and interests worldwide.

Governments in England, Australia, and throughout Europe have also exploited anti-immigration talking points during elections to secure the vote and then immediately betrayed their constituents after getting into office. As Keith Woods documents, mass immigration in Britain was introduced to mollify big business and rentier elites, despite general opposition from the public.[3] “From 1964 to 2017 over 65% of the British public opposed immigration according to the British Election Study,” and yet while British politicians have been shamelessly exploiting these anti-immigration sentiments as a “public position” electioneering strategy, they never privately intended to fulfill any of these policy promises. As Chancellor George Osborne admitted, “despite having pledged to reduce immigration in both its 2010 and 2015 general election manifestos, the Tory leadership secretly abandoned this ambition long ago.”[4] Former Labour advisors have since testified to a literal “conspiracy” in the government to silently impose mass immigration and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity” out of spite, while keeping this out of public discussion for fear of losing their “core working class vote.”[5]

Two-tier Keir has himself stated that Britain’s “open borders experiment” was an “unforgivable” disaster. “Failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck,” he stated. “This happened by design, not accident.”[6]

This policy led to the horrific grooming gang crisis, where tens of thousands of white British girls have been sexually assaulted, groomed, and exploited by Pakistani rape gangs.[7] According to police investigations, it is believed that the body of one victim who was raped to death was fed into a meatgrinder and served as kebab.[8] The victims, some of which were raped by hundreds of men, have been targeted for their race, with attackers calling their victims “white slags” and “white cunts.”[9]

British police organizations have been reluctant to crack down on the grooming gangs which have been operating for more than 30 years. At times, police have even facilitated the victimization of these girls and made efforts to coverup the crisis, because they were afraid of creating a racist backlash against the offending minority communities.[10] As child abuse investigator Maggie Oliver explains, this scandal was allowed to happen because of the contempt British elites hold for their working-class constituents:

Attitudes towards these kids seemed to be ingrained and widespread. They were widely viewed by fellow officers, senior officers and politicians as ‘white trash’ or the “underclass.” In this new millennium, they were seen as “losers.” As a result, they were left to fend for themselves, which they clearly couldn’t do. [11] One Labour council leader even described the victims as “white trash.”[12]

Elites may pander to their constituents during elections, but they otherwise fundamentally reject accountability to their constituents. When confronted by a voter over tax cuts and Labour’s hypocrisy on immigration policy, former PM Gordon Brown was recorded saying in private: “That was a disaster—they should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? Ridiculous.” When asked with what was wrong with what she said, he replied: “Everything, she was just a bigoted woman.”[13]

As Lord Glasman admitted in 2011:

In many ways [Labour] viewed working-class voters as an obstacle to progress. [Labour’s] commitment to various civil rights, anti-racism, meant that often working-class voters . . . were seen as racist, resistant to change, homophobic and generally reactionary. So in many ways you had a terrible situation where a Labour government was hostile to the English working class.[14]

As another journalist writes about the disconnect between the masses and policy making elites on immigration:

The fault lies with our leaders, not with the people who came for a better life. There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximize global welfare not national welfare’. . . I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.” The ruling classes therefore “failed to control the inflow more overtly in the interests of existing citizens. . . [because] the idea that immigration should be unambiguously in the interests of existing citizens was blurred from the start.”[15]

It is the same in Western Europe, particularly since 2016, when European leaders opened the floodgates to tens of millions of nonwhite invaders to enter and spread throughout the European continent. Elites have since doubled and tripled down on open borders policies despite their unpopularity with the general population. As a French Prime Minister said in 2016, in response to widespread protests and riots throughout the country, “our course is the right one, and we’re not going to change it just because the wind is blowing.” The “migrant chancellor” Angela Merkel was willing to sacrifice her party’s comfortable near majority and commit electoral suicide in 2016 by remaining dogmatically committed to an open borders policy during the migrant crisis.[16]

In Australia, 8 in 10 Australians want immigration cut, and most feel their views are ignored by the mainstream political parties. Exploiting this sentiment, Labor in Australia recently campaigned on reducing immigration. However, after securing a majority government in recent elections, the Australian Labor government immediately began raising Australian immigration rates to their highest levels ever during the middle of an unprecedented housing crisis.[17]

Despite war on the European continent, the threat of Russia and China, and widespread economic instability, 50% of Germans believe that “Germany’s biggest problem” is migration.

Meanwhile, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is not popularly elected, just signed a mobility agreement with East India that establishes the “first EU Legal Gateway Office in India” to allow hundreds of thousands of Indian seasonal workers into Europe. Not a single European citizen voted on the measure.

In Spain, the government in Madrid just began a fast-track process to give legal status to more than 500,000 undocumented migrants without any public consultation whatsoever, to allow them to work “in any sector and anywhere” in the country. The government literally stated that it is doing this “to fight against the advance of this far-Right wave that is trying to gain ground” and to dismantle “institutional racism that only fuels exploitation and racist hatred.”[18] Irene Montero, Spain’s former Minister of Equality and leader of Podemos, celebrated the motion: “Of course I hope for replacement theory, I hope we can sweep this country of fascists and racists with immigrants.”

During the looming onset of automation, robotics, and AI, a historically unprecedented housing crisis, and skyrocketing homelessness, youth unemployment, and deaths of despair/suicides, Western elites are holding open the immigration floodgates, which is decimating the working class, driving down wages, straining an inadequate housing supply, and destroying the traditional cultures and demographics of Western nations. And they are literally saying that they are doing this to punish and harm their native populations.

So-called “liberal democracy” is obviously not actually democratic at all. People in the West are not given a choice.

• We are not allowed to vote against globalism.
• We are not allowed to vote out the corruption, the special interest groups, the lobbies, or the deep state.
• We are not allowed to vote against mass migration and the replacement of Europeans. Like greatest ally and shapeshifter Andrew Gold recently told Steve Laws, while respectfully informing us that there is frankly nothing we can do to stop this from happening: “at some point, unfortunately, white people, and I count myself among them, will become a minority and will probably go extinct.”

Elections do not give the population a choice. Elections decide which particular globalist stooge administers globalism for the next four years. But the people do not get to choose the policies. The people do not get to choose their cabinet picks. The people do not get to choose how their representatives decide to use their power.

Representative democracy just gives politicians incredible leverage to manipulate the public. The party organizations can present themselves as something they are not during elections and then turn around and arbitrarily impose all manner of wretched policies on their victimized publics. Republicans will literally go out and throw up roman salutes because their political consultants advised them that this will increase their popularity amongst certain hardline constituencies on the internet, and then get elected into office and appoint an antisemitism czar to monitor and persecute ordinary people making $30,000 a year for criticizing an Israeli child sex trafficking intelligence sting that has compromised almost the entirety of the American government on Facebook.

People were sick of neocon wars, and so Trump literally promised voters—“I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars”—to get elected.[19] Then after getting elected on an anti-war mandate, Trump bombs Iran, kidnaps the president of Venezuela, and starts saber rattling with Europe over Greenland. Candidate Trump promised “no new wars,” and elected President Trump delivers the most outrageous war presidency in living memory, with Trump essentially serving as an international hitman for Zionist interests. Jews are describing Trump as the new Cyrus the Great.[20]

These politicians are all con artists and fraudsters. They’re all hardline vindictive, ideological liberal globalists who either want white people replaced and killed, or they are cowardly ladder-climbers that are unwilling to risk their careers by speaking out against the former. Almost every single person elected to office is a judas goat pied piper that shamelessly co-opts popular rhetoric into their campaign promises to temporarily outmaneuver their competition and dupe the public into tolerating the system for four more years until the next system shill repeats the populist pantomime and tricks people into enduring another four years. . .

This has been the script since 1916. They have been conning people for generations:

• George W. Bush deliberately lied Americans into the Iraq War, claiming that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs);
• George Herbert Walker Bush manipulated Americans into the Gulf War with manipulative atrocity propaganda, like claims that Iraqi soldiers were killing babies in incubators;
• Lyndon Baines Johnson and most of the Congressmen who drafted, sponsored, and promoted the Hart-Celler Act lied about its consequences to the American people, promising that it would not change the demographic composition of America. Johnson also promised in his 1964 campaign to keep Americans out of Vietnam, and then after his election led Americans into the war where 58,281 Americans were killed and another 150,332 seriously maimed and wounded;
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt co-opt the rhetoric of his rivals and anti-war critics by pretending to be an anti-war candidate during the 1940 election, promising Americans that he would keep them out of the Second World War. This deceit allowed him to outmaneuver his isolationist opponents and absorb the anti-war vote from his rivals. Then, after he won the election, FDR dragged Americans into the Second World War which claimed the lives of more than 418,000 American boys;
• Woodrow Wilson also ran as an isolationist during the 1916 election, promising to keep America out of the First World War. Shortly after his Wilson declared war on Germany and drafted American boys to fight in the war, which claimed the lives of more than 116,500 American boys. Wilson’s government also viciously persecuted and imprisoned anti-war protesters like Eugene Debs.

No matter who wins, the people lose. Fool us once, shame on them. Fool us two dozen times, shame on us. . .

Elections are a façade that legitimizes a system that consistently produces outcomes that are inherently unjust and otherwise indefensible. And this is built into the logic of the system.

Large elections severely penalize the vast majority of people, ensuring that the electoral process is dominated by a particular class of sycophants with ties to powerful economic and special interests that can thrust themselves into the headlines and gain the name recognition required to win an election. Without the party system and donor backing, nobody would be listening to people like Lindsay Graham or Mike Huckabee. These people have no natural constituency. However, the nepotistic capitalist system regularly propels the most despicable liars and charlatans into office, while marginalizing and excluding people like Pat Buchanan, Peter Brimelow, Steve Sailer, and the thousands of other nationalists that have been shadow banned by the media and internet platforms into irrelevancy. Certain voices are promoted, while the vast majority of people are systematically excluded from the debate and meaningful political participation.

The process of elections advantages highly politically motivated economic elites, and this class of people often tends to have a natural anti-populist, liberal internationalist bias. As Christopher Lasch famously noted, modern elites “have lost touch with the people.” Their “loyalties . . . are international rather than regional, national, or local. They have more in common with their counterparts in Brussels or Hong Kong than with the masses of Americans not yet plugged into the network of global communications.” Characterized by membership within “privileged communities—Cambridge, the Silicon Valley, Hollywood,” they are at home both anywhere and nowhere.[21] This class of people has a natural globalist bias, because as Dr. Sam Francis explained, “it is in the interests of the new elite. . . to destroy and eradicate the older society and the racial and cultural identities and consciousness associated with it. . . [along with] virtually any distinctive traditional group identity or bond, cultural, biological, or political” that imposes barriers on the internationalized elite’s freedom of movement and freedom to purchase and control industries and assets around the world.

Today’s economic elites see the nation as an outdated concept, a relic of a backwards era, containing masses of consumers and a collection of manipulable legal institutions. They wield hundreds of millions of dollars behind SuperPACs and lobby organizations to push their special interest agendas on public institutions. They do not care if nation states and ethnicities cease to exist; in fact, they desire to eliminate the nation state, because as Christopher Lasch notes, they wish to be free from the accountability and “the obligations that citizenship in a polity normally implies.”

This class of people ruthlessly pushes their vision onto the hapless mass of ordinary people. Elon Musk told critics of the H-1B program to “F— YOURSELF in the face” and promised to “go to war” against the American people on a scale “the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend” to guarantee the rights of tech oligarchs to give millions of high-paying American tech jobs to foreign wage-slaves.

The class interests of these oligarchs are entirely divergent from those of ordinary people. However, insofar as liberal democracy guarantees that this class of people controls all public institutions, then liberal democracy will promote globalization and replacement migration. There is no alternative until somebody removes this class from power, and this class cannot be removed from power without radical institutional change.

Representative democracy is effectively an elaborate wealth redistribution mechanism for extracting wealth from taxpaying white Americans and transferring white wealth to the legions of special interest termites that have captured and infested the legislative process. The political class is inherently beholden to plutocrats. According to the logic of the separation of powers and the rule of law, no single politician will ever have the power to transform the system. And unfortunately, the political class as a whole will never confront the special interest process that enriches them and gives them access. It’s a classic “fox guarding the henhouse” scenario. The system is going to remain captured by special interest parasites that weasel themselves into the process and lobby, bribe and manipulate the intermediaries elected by the people, until there is radical change. This is an organizational and political crisis of apocalyptic magnitude, and our system needs to be replaced at any and all costs or else European civilization will not survive the century.

Rather than giving voters control over their destinies, representative democracy merely obfuscates and launders the identity of power, providing the rulers with some plausible deniability to pretend that we are not just the slaves of the special interest groups that have captured the state and are robbing our posterity from beneath our feet. It prevents the formation of genuinely radical opposition, allowing the system to co-opt and absorb popular outrage and channel this popular energy into further mandates for the corrupt system. Elections act as a pressure release valve, providing the illusion of freedom and choice while lulling people into complicity with a system that is hellbent on our annihilation.

You can order Alain de Benoist’s The Populist Moment here

Liberal democracies are effectively resource colonies, where international banks and corporations are organized into party organizations that appoint candidates who compete to attract the endorsement of the unorganized masses, yet in practice simply manage their markets and carry out policies determined in corporate boardrooms behind the scenes. Liberal democratic institutions ensure our countries remain controlled by a small minority of plutocratic opinion makers and civil society organizations funded by the multinational corporations that have developed a stranglehold over the policy process and seem impossible to dislodge by mere elections. Every four years without fail, the masses are forced to vote for and be represented by a selection of cynical manipulators, actors, and reality television narcissists like Donald Trump, who lie themselves into office just to break all their populist campaign promises. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” in 2016 and Obama’s “Hope” in 2008 were just reruns of America’s oldest spectacle, the great quadrennial American political tradition that reaches back into time immemorial. Like some sort of demon from pagan mythological prehistory, liberal democracy thrives on the shattered hopes and dreams of its victims.

As under literally any other authoritarian regime, the people are subjects of this system. The people have no control over their destiny. The people do not have the ability to choose where their leaders are bringing them. However, this dishonest and insidious system hides this fact through the illusion of choice that renders the people passive cooperators in their dispossession.

We are desperately in need of a genuinely radical alternative, one that gives ordinary people a voice in politics. And we are not going to get this through representative democracy, because the system is not broken—it is working as intended. The purpose of a system is what it does.

Even the representative component of liberal democracy—the idea that people supposedly choose policies by voting in elections, which is the concept paradigmatically associated with democracy in the West—has very little to do with democracy.

The word “election” comes to us from the word eligere, which is Latin for “to choose.” This is also the Latin root of the English word “elite.” As Bernard Manin explains, prior to the 19th century, elections were universally recognized in very explicit terms by figures from Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli and Guicciardini to be “intrinsically aristocratic. . . [an] effect [which was not] derived from the circumstances and conditions in which the elective method was employed. . . [but rather] resulted from the very nature of election.” Electoral government is anti-democratic by definition, because it is the rule of the elected over the electors. “Representative democracy,” notes Paul Friedland, “was from its very inception a contradiction in terms.”

This distinction is acknowledged by essentially every serious political theorist and is essential to Carl Schmitt and Alain de Benoist’s critiques of liberalism. Schmitt called electoral politics the “antidemocratic theory of the representation of the people’s will,” for the simple and obvious reason that “the people cannot be represented without democracy transforming itself into an aristocracy.” As Alain de Benoist once noted, “We live in an oligarchic society where everybody pretends to be a democrat—but where there is no democracy.”

In 1913, the sociologist Robert Michels stated:

Under representative government the difference between democracy and monarchy, which are both rooted in the representative system, is altogether insignificant — a difference not in substance but in form. The sovereign people elects, in place of a king, a number of kinglets. Not possessing sufficient freedom and independence to direct the life of the state, it [the people] tamely allows itself to be despoiled of its fundamental right. The one right which the people reserves is the ‘ridiculous privilege’ of choosing from time to time a new set of masters.

Notes

[1] Guillaume Durocher, “Project Syndicate: Judeo-Globalism in a Nutshell,” The Occidental Observer, Jun 2016. Brian Wheeler, “EU should ‘undermine national homogeneity’ says UN migration chief,” BBC News, Jun 2012.

Dr. Lasha Darkmoon, “Rape Jihad: Dark Days for Europe (Part 2 of 2),” The Occidental Observer, Feb 2016.

[2] Peter D Sutherland and Cecilia Malmstrom, “Europe’s immigration challenge,” The Guardian, 2012.

[3] https://keithwoods.pub/p/britains-demographic-transformation

https://keithwoods.pub/p/the-great-british-betrayal

[4] Jack Montgomery, “Osborne Boasts Tories Never Intended to Keep Immigration Promises in Shock Editorial,” Breitbart, May 2017. Tobias Langdon, “A Fascist Fun-Day: Enrichment for Whites, Ethnocentrism for Jews,” The Occidental Observer, 2022.

[5] Tom Whitehead, “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser,” The Telegraph, Oct 2009.

[6] Rajeev Syal, “Starmer: record net migration shows Tories ran ‘open borders experiment’,” The Guardian, Nov 2024.

[7] Lucy Thornton, “EXCLUSIVE: Child sex abuse gangs could have assaulted ONE MILLION youngsters in the UK,” Mirror, Feb 2015.

[8] Bryony Jewell, “Kebab shop owner who was suspected of disposing of schoolgirl Charlene Downes’ body reveals he doesn’t care ‘whether she’s alive or dead’ in a shocking new documentary,” The Guardian, May 2019.

[9] Ella Hill, “As a Rotherham grooming gang survivor, I want people to know about the religious extremism which inspired my abusers,” The Independent, Mar 2018. Bethany Minelle, “Sex abuse gangs view white girls as ‘worthless’ and ‘trash’,” SkyNews, Aug 2017.

[10] Sam Courtney-Guy, “Rotherham police chief ‘admits to ignoring child abuse over race fears’,” Metro, Jan 2020. Tobias Langdon, “Much Worse than Rotherham: How British Politicians, Police and Feminists Are Guilty of Systemic Rapism,” The Occidental Observer, Nov 2020.

[11] Tobias Langdon, “Labour’s Shame: How The British Labour Party Betrayed Its Founding Principles,” The Occidental Observer, Nov 2020.

[12] Joe Griffin and Shariqua Ahmed, “Council leader suspended for grooming gang comment,” BBC, Sep 2020.

[13] Polly Curtis, “Gordon Brown calls Labour supporter a ‘bigoted woman’,” The Guardian, Apr 2010.

[14] Tobias Langdon, ““Vote for Us, You Miserable Scum”: Mammon, Marx and Miliband,” The Occidental Observer, Nov 2014.

[15] David Goodhart, “SATURDAY ESSAY: Why we on the Left made an epic mistake on immigration,” The Daily Mail, Mar 2013.

[16] Madeleine Ngo, “A nasty immigration fight could cost German Chancellor Angela Merkel her job,” Vox, 2018. Steve Visser and Elizabeth Roberts, “Angela Merkel admits immigration policy hurt party in elections,” CNN, 2016. Madeleine Ngo, “Germany used to be a champion of open borders in Europe. Not anymore,” Vox, 2018.

[17] David Crowe, “Voters reveal population concerns ahead of border reopening,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 2021. Ashley Nickel, “Australia to be hit by a record population explosion with 650,000 immigrants to arrive in just two years,” Daily Mail, 2023. Jesse Hyland, “Pauline Hanson calls out Anthony Albanese as migration to Australia is set to soar past 300,000 despite the nation facing a housing crisis,” Daily Mail, 2023. See also Jordan H Knight, https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1597883992950202368.html, Nov 2022.

[18] Imogen Garfinkel, “Huge numbers of migrants queue along the street to collect paperwork after socialist Spain announced it would grant legal status to 500,000 – sparking row between PM and Elon Musk over rigging elections,” The Daily Mail, Jan 2026. Kieran Kelly, “Spain gives half a million migrants legal status to ‘defeat the far-Right’,” The Telegraph, Jan 2026.

[19] Jacob Magid, “Trump: ‘I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars’,” The Times of Israel, Nov 2024.

[20] Andrew Lapin, “Trump earns fresh comparisons to Cyrus the Great as last living hostages return home,” The Times of Israel, Oct 2025.

[21] Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (W.W. Norton, 1995), 3, 35, 37.