Richard Balzano

by Richard M. Balzano This complicated nation celebrates its 250th birthday on July 4th. Despite, or perhaps because of, the tragic state of affairs at present, semiquincentennial celebrations will likely see a spike in a particular American brand—toxic nationalism cosplaying as patriotism, built on a profound and tactfully curated misunderstanding of both the present state of geopolitical affairs and historical events, in this case reducing the American Revolution to an anti-colonial common man’s war inspired by enlightened ideals. The American origin story, set in the context of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution™, could use a touch of decolonization, because these revolutions were not …

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by Richard M. Balzano After another anniversary of the June 4th Tiananmen Square “massacre”—an event enshrined in the Western imagination as the defining symbol of Chinese authoritarianism—it is worth revisiting how the story was originally reported, amplified, mythologized, and then quietly redacted and corrected by many of the same Western journalists who helped turn it into political scripture. The Tiananmen story entered American political mythology in June 1989 as media coverage saturated audiences with claims that thousands of peaceful Chinese protesters had been massacred by tanks and machine-gun fire inside Tiananmen Square. Deathcounts snowballed from 2,600 to 8,000 and beyond, and NBC’s Tim Russert claimed …

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by Richard Balzano The United States kidnapped Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in January 2026* on now-crumbling allegations that he headed the fictional “Cartel of the Suns.” Washington framed Maduro as a narco-terrorist kingpin to justify what was effectively an act of war disguised as law enforcement, but prosecutors are now quietly backing away from the bolder claims used to rationalize his abduction. The irony, of course, is that the United States has spent decades enabling narcotrafficking in the name of democracy. For 40+ years Washington waged its unsuccessful War on Drugs alongside its oft-illegal Cold War pursuits. In the American hierarchy of foreign-policy values, anticommunism …

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by Richard Balzano The United States is often called the “world police,” and with reason. Washington tries to police the globe with decreasing success and a brutality that mirrors its own police state, yet framing U.S. foreign policy in legal terms implies, absurdly, that those subjected to “justice the American way” are criminals. Western media backs this up across a spectrum from overt jingoism to reluctant nuance, but the hyperbolic accusations railed against our caricatured adversaries almost always include the charge of human rights violations. Hypocrisy abounds, and the U.S.’s relationship with human rights casts an irony so dark it may yet kill us all. …

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by Richard Balzano 2026 will mark a steep drop-off in functioning American adults who still believe in American exceptionalism, American innocence, and the altruistic fairytales and moral gymnastics used to justify U.S. foreign policy for the last 100+ years. It’s been standard practice for the U.S. to disregard international law with impunity, but U.S. and Western imperialism at large has historically been framed in moral packaging. The troglodytic brazenness with which the Trump regime violates international law and projects towards the international community has exposed a dark imperial wizard behind the moral curtain, amplifying the chasm between feel-good myth and reality. Canadian Prime Minister Mark …

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