Ranking first this last week was the Saker’s article focusing on the strange dominance of “Wokeism” in today’s America, an ideological/racial doctrine that would have seemed totally bizarre to most of us just a few years ago, yet which has received almost no effective opposition in our political elites, and has now become the reigning political dogma of such unlikely establishmentarian organizations as the State Department, the military, and the CIA.  The contrast between the military requirement videos of countries such as China and Russia, and that of the Woke USA is quite telling, with the latter being a cartoon featuring a young girl raised by two moms, indicating that rightwing satires of fifteen or twenty years ago have become today’s accepted reality.  This topic quickly provoked more than 300 comments totaling nearly 40,000 words.

The current outbreak of fighting in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, primarily involving Hamas-controlled Gaza was the topic of the next four most popular articles, all closely clustered together and all sharply critical of the heavy Israeli bombardment of that impoverished, densely-populated urban area, as well as America’s support for those actions.  Pepe Escobar, Philip Giraldi, Israel Shamir, and Taxi of Plato’s Guns all provided a variety of different perspectives on the situation, drawing a heated response, totaling almost 1,500 combined comments, totaling over 170,000 words, with over 100,000 of those coming from Taxi’s piece, the earliest of the group.

Rounding out our most popular featured articles was a column by John Derbyshire discussing the growing belief that the Covid-19 virus was probably created in a laboratory, focusing primarily on the long recent article by long-time science journalist Nicholas Wade that suggests a lab-leak, but also providing respectful discussion of my own writings that have argued for the likelihood of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).  This analysis quickly drew nearly 350 comments totaling almost 50,000 words.  And although my own latest article on this same issue has now dropped out of the top group, it continues to generate heated debate, with more than 900 comments totaling almost 150,000 words.

Finally, Laurent Guyénot’s long discussion last week of a new book by historian Sean McMeekin supporting the Suvorov Hypothesis that Stalin’s planned invasion and conquest of Europe was forestalled by Barbarossa has also dropped out of the top spot but continues to draw heated debate, now totaling over 1,100 comments and more than 200,000 words.