Free Republic

Kalle Lasn, the Adbusters writer who called for an Occupation of Wall Street, has now called for a tactical retreat. This is in part a reaction to the onset of winter, but it’s clear Lasn’s real concern is that the occupations are out of control. Even more striking, Lasn admits conservative media now owns the narrative about OWS: Kalle Lasn, the editor-in-chief of Adbusters, said it was considering declaring victory in an attempt to regain the initiative after a series of negative headlines about the encampment. “We are talking about it with all our people,” said Lasn. “The other side...

Imagine a world without McDonald’s, Nike, or Kraft Foods. A world where the budget-conscious and time-strapped have nowhere to grab a quick bite, where almost no one drives a car, where television is extinct. Sound pretty bleak? This is the utopian vision of the Adbusters Media Foundation. “We will wreck this world,” Kalle Lasn declares in his book Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge -- and Why We Must. That, quite simply, is the goal of the Vancouver-based organization he founded and runs. A self-described group of “anarchists” and “neo-Luddites,” Adbusters are not merely environmentalists, animal-rights activists,...

Back in July, an idea by Kalle Lasn and his colleagues at Adbusters, a nonprofit magazine run by social activists, had started to come together. For months, Lasn had noticed among his 120,000 readers an unresolved anger that wasn’t finding expression. He observed that young people were starting to say they worried about having a “black hole future” ahead of them, and it suddenly felt, he said, “like a Tahrir moment in America was eminently possible.” So the Adbusters team tried something out. They put out feelers for a small protest on Wall Street on Sept. 17. They started a...

"I am not a bigot but we have to face facts. Working on my readers' behalf I have come up with a carefully researched list of the four most influential foreign policy advisers to President Bush. What they share in common is the belief the U.S. has the right to protect itself from its enemies. And half of them are black…" Now, no matter where a writer goes from there, unless it is some sort of lame observation about how President Bush has embraced diversity, he is going to look like a wanker. Why? Because, whatever a writer has to...

Friends help each other out. That’s why the US sends billions of dollars every year to Israel. In return, Israel advances US strategic interests in the Middle East. But despite this mutual back scratching, Israeli-American relations are enduring a rough patch. Last December, a senior State Department official blasted Israel for having “done too little for far too long” to resolve the conflict with its Palestinian neighbors. Indeed, President Bush himself had scolded Israel a month earlier with his demand that “Israel should freeze settlement construction, dismantle unauthorized outposts, end the daily humiliation of the Palestinian people and not prejudice...