The deadly terror attack in a concert hall outside Moscow was immediately claimed by ISIS-K, the Islamic State network's Afghanistan franchise. But just as quickly, the Russian and Ukrainian intelligence services accused each other of being behind it—the latter saying it was organized as a "provocation" to expand Moscow's war in Ukraine. Putin's rise to power, including his recent rise to outright autocratic power, as well as his various military adventures, have indeed been lubricated every step of the way by terror attacks. But who was actually behind the Crocus City Center attack may not really matter overmuch. If 9-11 was a "Reichstag Fire" for the hyper-interventionist aims of Dubya Bush, that analogy may prove to apply even more closely to the concert hall carnage serving the war aims and totalitarian domestic agenda of Vladimir Putin. Bill Weinberg discusses in Episode 219 of the CounterVortex podcast.

Calling out the "Blood Libel" rhetoric and imagery in anti-Israel invective would certainly be a lot easier if Israel were not actually killing children, in large numbers, with leading voices openly calling for genocide of the Palestinians. And if pro-Israel (and MAGA) propaganda did not cynically conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Yet from Manhattan to Cincinnati to Dallas to Berkeley and Santa Barbara, slogans and graffiti have tarred Jews as Zionists and "baby-killers"—playing into the hands of Israel's propagandists. Bill Weinberg discusses the dilemma in Episode 218 of the CounterVortex podcast.

This week's Meta outage plunged millions around the world into panic. No sooner did Bill Weinberg get back on Facebook than its robots slapped restrictions on his account for supposedly promoting "dangerous organizations"—precisely in response to his protests against online stanning for extremist groups! Apart from subjection to such Orwellian diktats from Meta's robotocracy, Facebook has tweaked its algorithm to sideline links to news articles and instead boost "reels" and "memes," with high entertainment value but little informational content. This has tanked hits for news outlets and resulted in ominous layoffs across the news industry. In Episode 216 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill reiterates his call for a meme moratorium, as the only means of consumer resistance to Meta's profiteering, anti-social agenda—but also asks what can be done about the more fundamental question of this corporate Borg's assimilation of every sphere of human reality.

In Episode 210 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg traces the paradoxical trajectory from medieval heresies to the Protestant Reformation, proto-anarchist movements of the English Civil War, fights for religious freedom in colonial America (with an emphasis on the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657), Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad (e.g. at the Quaker homestead of Bowne House in Flushing, NY)—to evangelical Protestantism as a pillar of Christian fascism in the impending MAGA order. How did we get here, and what elements of American political culture can we look to as a source of resistance today?

Raoul Vaneigem, famous as a key figure in the Situationist International and author of The Revolution of Everyday Life, a tract associated with the May 1968 uprising in Paris, traces Gnostic and millenarian movements of ancient and medieval times as critical precursors of the revolutions of the modern age. In Episode 208 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses his book Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century, newly translated from the French by Bill Brown and released by Eris imprint of Columbia University Press.

Meta has tweaked the Facebook algorithm to sideline links to news articles and boost "memes"—precisely the format most subject to the fabrications and distortions being aggressively peddled by both sides (yes) in the Gaza conflict. Such propaganda has already been implicated in genocide in Burma and Ethiopia. But even apart from such egregious abuses, memes are dumbing down discourse and entrenching groupthink and dogmatism—and are being pushed by Meta as part of its sinister corporate design to enclose the internet. In Episode 207 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg calls for a total moratorium on posting or sharing memes as a means of pressure on Meta to re-emphasize actual news articles, and deep-six the war propaganda.

Countries that approved the first-ever United Nations General Assembly resolution on "killer robots" should promote negotiations on a new international treaty to ban and regulate these weapons, Human Rights Watch said Jan. 3. These so-called "autonomous weapons" systems select and apply force to targets based on sensor processing rather than human inputs.

In Episode 188 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg deconstructs the accusation of "red-baiting" employed by the tankie pseudo-left to deflect criticism of funding sources directly linked to Chinese and Russian state propaganda networks. Before such revelations made the New York Times, they were reported by bloggers and researchers themselves on the radical left. And some progressive voices and international socialists have repudiated the smear that any such examination of money networks linked to authoritarian regimes is "red-baiting." Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.