Supporters of presidential candidate José Antonio Kast of Chile’s Republican Party celebrate with an image of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet following the 2025 presidential election on December 14, 2025, in Santiago, Chile. (Photo by Claudio Santana/Getty Images)
José Antonio Kast has described the dictator who ended democracy for nearly two decades and presided over the persecution of tens of thousands of dissidents as someone who brought “order” to Chile.
José Antonio Kast, a far-right former lawmaker, won over 58% of the vote in Chile’s runoff elections on Sunday over Jeannette Jara, the labor minister under outgoing left-wing President Gabriel Boric, to become the nation’s next president.
The win came despite Kast’s open admiration for General Augusto Pinochet, who ended civilian rule in Chile after taking power through a coup d’etat in 1973, overthrowing its democratically elected socialist leader in a US Central Intelligence Agency-backed plot and implementing a radical program of economic austerity.
Until he was ousted by a democratic referendum in 1990, Pinochet governed Chile as a military dictatorship rife with human rights abuses, resulting in his indictment by a Spanish court in 1996 for crimes against humanity. His regime assassinated or “disappeared” nearly 3,200 people, while tens of thousands were tortured and more forced into exile.
Human rights groups have accused Kast and his family—the patriarch of which was a member of the Nazi Party who fled to Chile in 1950—of collaboration with the Pinochet regime’s detention of opponents. The president-elect’s brother was a minister for Pinochet during the dictatorship.
Kast will be the first president of Chile since its return to democracy to have campaigned for and voted “Yes” in the 1988 plebiscite for the dictator to stay in power for another eight years despite his reign of terror.
But rather than distance himself from Pinochet’s legacy, Kast has described himself as his spiritual successor.
In 2017, during his first of three presidential campaigns, Kast told a local newspaper that “if he were alive,” Pinochet “would vote for me.” Kast later described Pinochet as someone who brought “order” to Chile, comments that the Buenos Aires Times wrote in 2021, “railed many who are still scarred by this dark period in the country’s history.”
But Kast’s nostalgia for that period of repression was not enough to hobble him this time around. At a time when the right is making gains across Latin America, Kast’s policy agenda sits at the nexus point between the free market fundamentalism of Argentina’s Javier Milei and the police state ambitions of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele.
He has pledged an economic program in the same vein as Pinochet’s and, later, Milei’s “shock therapy,” proposing an unprecedented cut of $21 billion in public spending over his term, paired with a reduction in taxes on the wealthy.
Kast has pledged that these cuts would only affect “waste” and “political” spending, but not impact social programs that benefit Chileans. But economic analysts, including Javiera Toro, Chile’s social development minister, have argued that a cut of that size would inevitably cut into the social safety net, including its popular state pension program and others related to health, housing, and education.
Kast successfully martialed fear of high crime (even though it actually fell under Boric’s tenure) into outrage toward the nation’s undocumented migrants—mainly from Venezuela—whom he has pledged to deport en masse. As in the US, where President Donald Trump is also spearheading a mass deportation operation, immigrants in Chile commit crimes at lower ratesthan those born in the country.
Last year, Kast visited the sprawling prison complex where Bukele has used emergency powers to detain tens of thousands of people as part of his sweeping war on gangs, often in punishing conditions where they’ve faced torture. Amnesty Internationaldescribed it as a “state policy of massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty.” Kast said he’d like to implement a similar policy in Chile.
Kast immediately raised fears for the future of Chile’s democracy in his victory speech, vowing to form an “emergency government” when he takes power in 2026. However, he will not command a majority in Chile’s legislature, which may make the delivery of his agenda more challenging.
🇨🇱 Far-right José Antonio Kast has defeated Communist Party candidate Jeannette Jara, who ran as part of the Unidad por Chile coalition, in Sunday’s presidential runoff with about 58% of the vote, ushering in Chile’s most right-wing leadership since the end of the Pinochet era.… https://t.co/dqDUrmsWUApic.twitter.com/9scqWwl7IO
Jenny Pribble, professor of political science and global studies at the University of Richmond, toldAl Jazeera: “It remains to be seen if Kast could or would pursue such an approach, but if Chile follows the Salvadoran model, it would constitute significant democratic backsliding.”
Operations Director of the National Security Branch at the Federal Bureau of Investigation Michael Glasheen testifies before the House Committee on Homeland Security on December 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“Just a complete admission here that the entire ‘antifa’ threat narrative is totally manufactured by this administration,” said one critic.
A top FBI official struggled on Thursday to answer basic questions about antifa, a loosely organized collective of anti-fascist activists that he labeled the top terrorist threat facing the US.
Michael Glasheen, operations director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, testified before the US House Committee on Homeland Security that antifa was “the most immediate violent threat” facing Americans today when it comes to domestic terrorism.
But when Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, asked Glasheen for specifics about this purportedly dire threat, he mostly came up empty.
“So where is antifa headquarters?” Thompson asked him.
Glasheen paused for several seconds and then said, “What we’re doing right now with the organization…” before Thompson interrupted him.
“Where in the United States does antifa exist?” asked Thompson.
“We are building out the infrastructure right now,” Glasheen replied.
“So what does that mean?” asked a bewildered Thompson. “I’m just, we’re trying to get information. You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that? Whether they exist, how many members do they have in the United States as of right now?”
“Well, that’s very fluid,” Glasheen said. “It’s ongoing for us to understand that… no different from al-Qaeda and ISIS.”
Thompson again interrupted and tried to make Glasheen answer his original question.
“If you said antifa is the No. 1 domestic terrorist organization operating in the United States,” he said, “I just need to know where they are, how many people. I don’t want a name, I don’t want anything like that. Just, how many people have you identified, with the FBI, that antifa is made of?”
“Well, the investigations are active…” Glasheen said.
Thompson then became incredulous.
“Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee and say something you can’t prove,” he said. “I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did.”
GLASHEEN: Antifa is our primary concern right now. That's the most immediate violent threat we're facing
BENNIE THOMPSON: Where is antifa headquartered?
GLASHEEN: … … … we are building out the infrastructure right now
Many observers were stunned that Glasheen appeared to know so little about what he proclaimed to be the top domestic terrorist threat facing the US.
“Total amateur hour in US law enforcement,” remarkedDemocracy Docket news editor Matthew Kupfer, “where the No. 1 terror threat is an organization that does not formally exist and a career FBI official is dancing around before a congressional committee trying to make the Trump strategy sound legit.”
Zeteo editor-in-chief Mehdi Hasan argued that Glasheen’s testimony was proof that the administration was simply concocting domestic terrorism threats with zero basis in reality.
“Wow,” Hasan marveled. “Just a complete admission here that the entire ‘antifa’ threat narrative is totally manufactured by this administration.”
Fred Wellman, a Democratic congressional candidate in Missouri, wondered how many actual dangerous criminals are running free while the FBI focuses on taking down an organization that it apparently knows nothing about.
“This would be comical if there wasn’t real world impact from this idiocy,” Wellman wrote. “We have real crimes and real threats and they are chasing a fake ‘organization’ for politics.”
Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee also piled on Glasheen, citing his testimony as evidence that the Trump administration is completely unserious about law enforcement.
“If your ‘top threat’ has no headquarters, no organization, and no definition then it’s not a top threat,” they posted on social media. “The Trump administration is ignoring real threats, and the American people see right through it.”
US President Donald Trump ‘dances’ to music after speaking at the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, Decembe 9, 2025
EVERYBODY gets it except Keir Starmer. Labour MPs, including those traditionally on the right, are clear that the basis for Britain’s alliance with the USA is collapsing.
The new US national security document — itself dismissive of Britain — is a manifesto for the advance of far-right and fascistic forces across Europe.
As Liam Byrne MP told the Commons, the strategy is saturated with far-right tropes from the 1930s. “The language of the US national security strategy was deeply regrettable and, frankly, it was not hard to see the rhymes with some extreme right-wing tropes that date back to the 1930s,” he said.
And Matt Western MP, chair of the joint committee on national security strategy, said the Commons “should be under no illusion, the United States consensus that has led the Western world since the second world war appears shattered.
“The prospect of United States interference in the democratic politics of Europe is chilling. Given certain UK dependencies on the United States, this leaves the United Kingdom especially vulnerable,” he added.
They are right. Alongside pursuing untrammelled hegemony through aggression in the western hemisphere, while seeking to pressure China economically, plunder Africa and centre the Middle East around Israel and the reactionary Gulf dictatorships, the Trump administration wants to impose its own far-right agenda on Europe.
And, as Washington’s strategy makes clear, it is willing to back far-right parties like Britain’s Reform UK in order to bring the continent into line, rhetoric about respect for national sovereignty notwithstanding.
This is a menace to democracy, an interference in our internal political affairs and a brazen plan to leverage the immense power of the US to gain advantage over its nominal “allies.”
Yet Starmer and the rest of the government profess that there is nothing to see here, that it is all business as usual. Hypocritically, they even praise Trump for “working for peace,” when Starmer is actually working might and main to obstruct the US push to end the war in Ukraine.
It seems that the government simply cannot acknowledge the enormity of what is happening, since the entire strategy of the British state has pivoted for the last 80 years on the purported ”special relationship” with Washington.
Indeed, there are core functions which might seize up without US support, so deeply embedded has Washington become in the British state.
Yet the global drive towards a 21st-century form of far-right authoritarianism, now powered from Washington, demands a clear rupture with Trump and all his works.
Starmer’s mealy-mouthed evasions demean our democracy and only invite further pressure from over the Atlantic. Trump should be called out as the proto-fascist he is, and the US told that it can rely on British support for its adventures no longer.
Enough with the fawning. It is time to stand up for democracy.
Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary David Lammy (left) and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer during the Labour Party Conference at the ACC Liverpool, September 28, 2025
LABOUR is failing to uphold basic rights, the new head of the official equalities watchdog has warned.
Protesters, migrant workers and disabled people have been particularly targeted by the government, Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) chairwoman Mary-Ann Stephenson has told ministers.
Dr Stephenson, who took up her role at the start of the month, urged the government to “ensure rights are protected across the nation.”
Her warning comes as PM Sir Keir Starmer is looking to persuade other European leaders to dilute the European Convention on Human Rights to make it easier to block refugees.
Dr Stephenson highlighted areas where “key human rights” are not being guaranteed.
She said: “The government has made commitments to protect everyone’s fundamental human rights.
“While there has been progress in some areas, it is failing to uphold basic rights in others — particularly by permitting heavy-handed responses to peaceful protests, failing to ensure disabled people can access healthcare on a level playing field with others, and allowing labour exploitation to go unchecked for certain workers.
“This failure to uphold key human rights is concerning for each and every one of us.
“That’s why we’ve written to ministers to urge them to review our new report and ensure rights are protected across the nation.”
The warning echoes complaints made by her predecessor, Kishwer Falkner, about “heavy-handed policing” of Gaza solidarity demonstrations which she said risked a “chilling effect” on protest rights.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy claims to be rooted in ‘America First’ principles, but it is really ‘Imperialism First.’ | AP
Imperialism has a new mission statement. With the release of the Trump administration’s updated National Security Strategy (NSS), the campaign to keep U.S. capitalism in the global driver’s seat is signaling that those at the helm are ready to pick up the gun.
Since he returned to office, the president’s effort to shore up American corporations’ slumping economic dominance has largely focused on roping in trading partners with tariff threats or shutting out market competitors via sanctions and export restrictions.
As aggressive as those moves have been, they may end up looking like the proverbial carrot compared to the stick which the capitalist state now appears prepared to wield for the sake of ruling class profits.
Over a century ago, Marxist political economist Rosa Luxemburg observed that militarism is not just aggression for aggression’s sake but rather the “pre-eminent means for the realization of surplus value.” The new NSS proves her point.
Whose “security”?
The NSS is not a plan for “national security,” as the White House is marketing it, but rather a ruthless strategy for securing the global dominance of U.S. monopoly capital. Its main push is to crush rival powers, slow China’s growing international influence, and maintain U.S. global hegemony.
When the document trumpets “America First,” it really means “Imperialism First,” defining the “national interest” solely as the interest of the ruling class.
This imperial blueprint arrives amid a dangerous U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean and brazen extrajudicial strikes, signaling a violent escalation in Washington’s regime-change campaign against Venezuela. The NSS leaves little doubt that this aggression is part of a broader design.
The document’s top priority, it declares, is to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere.” This so-called “Trump Corollary,” announced on the doctrine’s 202nd anniversary, is a prescription for renewed U.S. domination, disguised as protecting the region from outside actors, primarily China.
It vows to “deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability…to own or control strategically vital assets,” using coded language for a determination to block Latin American cooperation with China on infrastructure and development. It boasts, for instance, of restoring U.S. “privileged access” to the Panama Canal.
Dispensing with (everyone else’s) sovereignty
What this will mean in practice is escalated hostility toward geopolitical alliances that the U.S. sees as rivals, like BRICS, and regime-change operations against the peoples of any country asserting their own sovereignty.
Thus, the NSS’s fraudulent rhetoric of “Sovereignty and Respect” is laid bare in the document. In it, U.S. imperialism asserts its own sovereignty as absolute while explicitly planning to violate that of nations in its declared “sphere of influence.” Venezuela is clearly first in line, but the independence of every state in the region is under threat.
The NSS’s imperial vision extends further around the world, too. Its supposed “Predisposition to Non-Interventionism” is a complete farce. The entire document outlines a strategy for aggressive economic, political, and military intervention.
The document stresses preventing Chinese reunification with Taiwan due to the island’s significance to U.S. naval domination and calls on Indo-Pacific countries to grant the U.S. military greater access. It dwells extensively on maintaining an edge over China, the “near peer” rival.
Anti-communism, the go-to of capitalist ideologues, also shines through in the document’s call for “disciplined economic action” to hem in China and its socialist-oriented economic policies—which are derisively dismissed as “predatory, state-directed subsidies and industrial strategies.”
The NSS demand that NATO states spend 5% of their GDP on militarization and directly confront China and Russia is a reaffirmation of the military alliance’s function to serve as an imperialist spearhead for aggression.
In Europe, U.S. imperialism’s goal is to “cultivate resistance” to EU independence by bolstering far-right, pro-U.S. nationalist parties in order to ensure Europe remains a subservient tool for Washington. This aim pitched in terms of “helping Europe correct its current trajectory.”
The “healthy nations of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe”—i.e. those with right-wing governments friendly to the Trump administration—are to be built up “through commercial ties, weapons sales, political collaboration, and cultural and educational exchanges.”
Meanwhile, in a nod toward Moscow, the document says the Trump administration will work toward “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” This is a rhetorical tactic in the White House’s strategy of prying Russia loose from its ties with China—an effort to prevent cooperation between two countries seen as rivals.
The NSS aims for “energy dominance” and rejects the concept of “net zero” when it comes to fighting climate change. This of course signals a full, state-backed mobilization of U.S. fossil fuel capital to intensify extraction and sabotage global climate efforts.
Furthermore, the shift in Africa from “aid to investment” is explicitly about seizing the continent’s “critical minerals” for imperialist accumulation and plunder. The NSS favors partnerships with what it calls “capable, reliable states committed to opening their markets to U.S. goods and services.” Any countries who attempt to chart an independent path—like South Africa—earn themselves a place on Trump’s hit list.
Building a MAGA world
The document also reflects the administration’s domestic far-right politics, which of course serve its overall imperialist aims.
The call for “strong, traditional families,” pride in “past glories,” and rejection of “woke lunacy” is a right-wing cultural reaction designed to further split the working class along racial, gender, and national lines. It fosters the chauvinistic nationalism necessary to drum up support for impending imperialist wars.
The terroristic deportation campaign by ICE against immigrant workers is part and parcel of this project. It has its transatlantic reflection in the NSS’s declared goal of “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Adapting the white supremacist ideology long deployed by the far-right at home, Trump says Europe must also unite to defend against “civilizational erasure”—racist code for immigration.
Similarly, the NSS’s critique of “misguided bets on globalism” that hollowed out industry acknowledges the devastation wrought by neoliberalism but instead of pinpointing this as the result of unleashing free market capitalism, it frames de-industrialization as a mere “strategic error.” Of course, the real cause is the logic of capitalism, in its imperialist stage, which seeks maximum profit through outsourcing, financialization, and wage depression.
Thus, Trump’s turn toward protectionism and trade wars is not a rejection of this logic but an attempt to reconfigure it under conditions of systemic crisis and heightened global economic competition.
Therefore, the claim to be “pro-American worker” is a cynical ploy. Policies like Trump’s tariffs and “re-shoring” are designed to wed a section of the U.S. working class to “national” capital against other countries and immigrant workers. Their weaponized concept of “competence and merit” attacks affirmative action by presenting inequality as “natural” to mask the brutal antagonisms of capitalist society.
Partitioning the globe
The NSS presents U.S. assets—the world’s largest economy, financial system, and military—as “natural” blessings. These comparative advantages were not born “naturally,” however; they were built on centuries of domestic class exploitation, slavery, colonial plunder, and global extraction. The “world’s most dynamic economy” is dynamic precisely because of its ruthless exploitation of labor and nature both at home and abroad.
This imperial blueprint arrives amid a dangerous U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean and brazen extrajudicial strikes, signaling a violent escalation in Washington’s regime-change campaign against Venezuela. The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford heads up a military strike force currently being assembled off the coast of Venezuela. | AP
Beyond the U.S.’ largest immediate trading partners, Canada and Mexico, the nations of Latin America will be the first to find themselves in the crosshairs of this new strategy. Dominating this region is seen by the ruling class as the key in building a solid U.S. sphere of influence—a step toward holding onto global supremacy.
Building maximum resistance to U.S. aggression requires strengthening international solidarity campaigns with Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, and all countries facing the brunt of this offensive. It requires exposing the class essence of “America First” and uniting workers, and all forces for peace, against the common enemy: an imperialist system in crisis that is hurtling toward war and deeper exploitation in its desperate bid to maintain hegemony.
The document states quite clearly that the U.S. government’s objective must be “maintaining economic preeminence and consolidating our alliance system into an economic group.” On behalf of which sectors is this campaign to be waged? “AI, biotech, quantum computing,” “finance,” and “oil, gas, coal, and nuclear” are among the patron industries for whom the NSS was crafted.
So, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines when it comes to mapping the connections between Trump’s new NSS and the long-term decline of U.S. capitalism’s competitive advantage. Despite claims throughout of being “pro-worker,” the goal of this document—and the trade war that’s preceded its unveiling—is halting and reversing the erosion of U.S. monopoly corporate power via the construction of a U.S.-dominated bloc.
It has nothing to do with the real interests of the American people.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
US President Donald Trump ‘dances’ to music after speaking at the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, Decembe 9, 2025
