Rafferty Rao

There is a lot of talk on X today about Professional Military Education. Nobody mentions that when the National War College opened in 1946, the first man brought in to teach foreign affairs was George Kennan — the same officer who, months earlier, had sent a 5,000-word cable from Moscow that became the intellectual foundation for winning the Cold War without fighting one. Kennan closed that telegram with the observation that the Soviet threat was "within our power to solve—and that without recourse to any general military conflict." I submit that an equivalent clarity is now required regarding the Chinese Communist Partyand globalist Marxist penetration of Canada. The situation to our north exhibits features familiar to any student of Soviet methods in 1946. A hostile power has identified a democratic society whose institutional openness, ideological confusion, and political irresolution render it uniquely susceptible to influence operations. Stalin made no secret of how he intended to break our alliance with the UK and it's commonwealth: "The point is that the uneven development of capitalist countries usually leads, in the course of time, to a sharp disturbance of the equilibrium within the world system of capitalism, and that group of capitalist countries regards itself as being less securely provides with raw materials and markets usually attempts to change the situation and to redistribute "spheres of influence" in its own favour -- by employing armed force. As a result of this, the capitalsit world is split into two hostile camps, and war breaks out between them," he said in his Bolshoi Theatre speech in 1946. What he didn't mention, but Keenan did, is he would use marxists around the world to infiltarate western institutions and create cracks in our foundation. The USSR would place wedges in each crack and use the hammer of communism to open them. Beijing has cultivated assets within Canadian political life, suborned the Chinese-language press, established networks of organizational control through the United Front Work Department, and exploited the democratic world's reluctance to name what is plainly visible. Canadian intelligence has documented these activities with commendable professionalism. The Canadian political class has received these warnings with characteristic indifference. Communist in China and Marxists groups in the United States and Europe have fostered ideological conditions within Canada have prepared the ground for foreign exploitation in a manner the Soviet Union could only have envied. A generation of institutional leadership, trained in doctrines that regard Western civilization as an instrument of oppression and national sovereignty as a species of racism, has rendered Canada's educated class incapable of recognizing subversion much less resisting it. The CCP did not construct this intellectual architecture. Canadian progressives did. Beijing merely occupies the structure they built. The CCP and its allied Marxist influences drive wedges into every fissure of the American-Canadian relationship because a unified North America is the one configuration of power they cannot overcome. This convergence of external pressure and internal dissolution presents the United States with a problem that sentimentality will not resolve. Canada is not a hostile state. It is a deeply compromised ally. The distinction is essential, for it determines the character of the appropriate response. One does not confront a compromised ally. One contains the compromise. One does not punish weakness. One imposes standards. One does not isolate a neighbor. One conditions the partnership upon the neighbor's willingness to address the vulnerabilities that make the partnership dangerous. The hour is late. America's strategic position is fundamentally stronger than China's. Our alliances, when they function, are force multipliers that Beijing cannot match. But an ally whose government networks are breached, whose military has been dismantled, whose elections are subverted, whose parliamentarians wittingly assist foreign state actors, and whose institutional culture treats national security as a euphemism for racism that is not a force multiplier. It is a vulnerability. Fix it, or close the border. Those are the options. Pretending Canada is still a functioning ally does not serve the national interest. The suggestion that Republicans or President Trump created this fracture is not analysis. It is evasion. The fracture was not caused by the party that demanded standards. It was caused by the decades in which no standards were enforced. Those who counsel patience, who urge that we await a friendlier Democrat administration to restore the old arrangement, counsel, in effect, that we let the rot deepen while the forces that caused it keep working. We all have friends in Canada. Keenan had close friends in the USSR and loved and thought very highly of the Russian people. That's why he knew containment would work... because he trusted, when elbows come down, that goodness of the people prevails. Maybe a friendlier, more liberal, congress or adminsitration could mend bruised feelings but Democrats can not stop the marxists wedges being driven into every fracture between America and Canada The status quo is not restoration. It is an invitation to further penetration. It has been said that had Kennan's telegram arrived six months earlier, it would have been dismissed by a government that still regarded the Soviet Union as a partner. Six months later, it would have been redundant and Keenan would not have had the influence to drive the war college to tackle the hard strategy and policy decision that eventually won the west the Cold War. @PeteHegseth says our War Colleges have already been comprimised by woke marxists ideology.... and without them and men like Keenan who will save us from WW3 this time? The interval in which warning can still alter the course of events is never long. We are in such an interval now. We must act accordingly. Containment and rectification or mutual destruction. Those are the choices.

1/2 🧵 My response to some interesting question on my Divided line essay: open.substack.com/pub/correspond… Great discussion here, and I appreciate the depth you’re both bringing to the Divided Line. But I’d be remiss not to point something out that bears directly on this conversation. We’ve been talking about how figures at the dianoia level present themselves as guides to noesis — offering hypothetical symbolic frameworks as if they were the Forms themselves. This is not merely an abstract philosophical problem. It is operationally active right now. Jordan Peterson is perhaps the most visible contemporary example. I want to be fair: he has genuinely helped many young men find a sense of order, responsibility, and meaning. That is real, and I won’t dismiss it. But that is also precisely what makes the deeper issue so dangerous. A shepherd who leads the flock part of the way up the mountain — and then into a different cave — does more damage than a shepherd who never got anyone moving at all. His entire framework is Jungian archetypal psychology dressed in Platonic clothing. The archetypes function as his Forms. He is asking you to ascend through his symbolic interpretive system. That is not noesis. That is a closed dialectical circle — what I’d call the Wizard’s Circle — where all reasoning is permitted only within the pre-established frame. Question the frame and you’re accused of retreating to the shadows. This conversation is getting to something really important, and I want to push it one level further, because I think it’s the crux of everything. We tend to treat noesis as the unambiguous goal — the summit of the Divided Line, direct apprehension of the Forms, the philosopher finally free of the cave. And within Plato’s framework, yes, that’s the highest epistemic state. But here’s what I’d ask you to sit with: noesis, as a structural concept, does something very dangerous. It creates a permanently two-tiered epistemic class. There are those who have achieved direct apprehension of ultimate truth — and there are those who haven’t. And crucially, the ones who haven’t cannot evaluate the claim of those who have. You cannot verify noesis from outside noesis. That’s not a bug in Gnosticism. That is Gnosticism. The pneumatics, the psychics, the hylics — it’s the same ladder. The initiated and the uninitiated. And the initiated get to speak for reality in a way the uninitiated are structurally prohibited from challenging. Plato arguably planted that seed, and the Neoplatonists — Plotinus, Ficino, Pico — watered it into full esoteric bloom. Now bring it forward to today. What is “the science” as wielded by the expert class? It is a secular noesis claim. “We have accessed a level of understanding you cannot follow without our credentials, our models, our methodologies. Trust the experts.” The epistemological structure is identical. It doesn’t matter whether you dress it in Jungian archetypes, Integral Theory, climate modeling, or public health consensus — the move is always the same: I have seen the Forms. You have not. Defer to me. Peterson does this with Jungian depth psychology. He implies he has intuited the deep archetypal structures of the psyche — the things beneath the things — in a way that grants him interpretive authority. And I’ve done a deep dive on how this connects directly to ARC, because ARC is selling the same epistemological product with a traditionalist label on it. The “better story” they’re offering is still a story that requires their initiated narrators to tell it. The Christian answer to this (and you don’t have to be Christian to recognize it metaphysically) — and I think this is decisive — is the Incarnation. Logos made flesh. Truth that became publicly visible, touchable, falsifiable by anyone present, not accessible only through an esoteric method mastered by a natural elite. That’s not just a theological claim. It’s an epistemological revolution. It’s the direct counter-structure to both Platonic

@owl_elc Enslaved thinking/thought bondage is what you're seeing. They're not describing the farmers - they're describing the lens they see the farmers through (a Marxist lens). The entire post is "lens reinforcement" not a criticism, an exchange of ideas or a light shining on truth.

“A gallon of jet fuel contains 34 kilowatt-hours of energy in a package weighing six pounds. A lithium-ion battery storing the same energy weighs 250 pounds. That density gap is why every military on earth runs on liquid hydrocarbons, why every container ship crossing the Pacific burns bunker fuel, why every combine harvester in Iowa runs on diesel, and why every 747 landing at Heathrow runs on kerosene. The fact that nobody wages war over solar panels is evidence of their limitations not superiority.” —@Shellenberger open.substack.com/pub/public/p/2…

@ColinBrazierTV Yes. x.com/aidanlean/stat…