Although unknown to almost all present-day Americans, Emperor Henry IV was one of the most powerful European monarchs of his day. Under his twenty year reign, the Holy Roman Empire of the High Middle Ages governed Germany, the Low Countries, much of Italy, and other important lands, with many considering him heir to the fabled Charlemagne.

With the arrogance that came from holding such enormous temporal power and commanding large armies, he challenged the authority of Pope Gregory VII, but the Pontiff quickly brought him low, excommunicating him from the Catholic Church and declaring that Henry’s powerful feudal vassal lords no longer owed him any allegiance. Faced with the very real prospect that he might lose his throne, the emperor traveled to Canossa in hopes of seeing the Holy Father and gaining his forgiveness, then waited three long days outside the castle walls despite the bitter cold, clad in an uncomfortable hair-shirt, and according to some accounts wearing no shoes in the frozen snow. The Pope finally allowed him to enter and granted him an audience, then accepted his capitulation and lifted the religious penalty that had been imposed. In the centuries since that famous incident, the phrase “going to Canossa” has meant the surrender of a proud, powerful figure who does penance and begs forgiveness, submitting to the forces that had humbled him.

Given this history, it’s hardly surprising that the phrase was widely circulated a couple of weeks ago when Elon Musk traveled to Auschwitz to offer his abject submission to Jewish power, donning a skullcap, promising to root out “antisemitism” on the platform he controlled, and even declaring that he regarded himself as “aspirationally Jewish.”

The two most powerful and influential figures in today’s world are surely Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. But I think a reasonable case can be made that Elon Musk should be placed third on that global list.

Our current Western era is dominated by oligarchic wealth and Musk has ranked as the richest man in the world for much of the last few years. The technology industry carries enormous prestige and influence, and Musk is the owner of Tesla, the pioneering electric vehicle company, whose market value is greater than that of the world’s next five car companies combined. His very innovative SpaceX rocket company has become the central pillar of the West’s entire space program, crucial for American national security, while his equally innovative Starlink satellite company has proven itself absolutely vital to Ukraine in its NATO-backed war with Russia, inspiring imitators in China and other countries. More than a year ago, Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and took the company private, giving him a media empire far greater than that of any American television network and perhaps as powerful as most of them combined. Meanwhile his own 170 million Twitter Followers provide him a personal megaphone that would be envied by any American president or top Hollywood celebrity.

What other world figure could match Musk in such global power and influence? President Joseph Biden is elderly and doddering and widely despised, very much a Brezhnevian figure from the last days of the decaying USSR and obviously someone totally controlled by his nervous aides. Although former President Donald Trump is the all-but-certain 2024 Republican Presidential nominee and stands a better than even chance of recapturing the White House, he is facing 91 felony charges in court and is detested by nearly half the American population, including an overwhelming majority of our elites; his likely victory this November would be almost entirely due to Biden’s unpopularity. Indeed, given such glaring weakness at the top of the American political hierarchy, some shrewd observers have argued that Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu probably commands greater influence in our own Congress than either Biden or Trump; but in his own country, Netanyahu’s support is at 15%, and he faces a sea of corruption charges, so he might easily end his life in a prison cell.

In our deeply-polarized society, nearly all our other politicians are admired by small devoted followings, but usually despised by many, many more, and I can’t think of any private citizen who can remotely match Musk’s wealth, technological prestige, and media reach.

Meanwhile, traditional spiritual authorities have been reduced to mere shadows of their predecessors. Some nine hundred years ago, Pope Gregory VII humbled a German emperor and even a generation or two ago, Pope John Paul II wielded great international authority, but these days our current Pope Francis only commands a tiny sliver of such influence, and no other religious leader of greater weight comes to mind. So perhaps by default, I think Musk is the most powerful figure in the Western world, and his willingness to humble himself before pro-Israel Jews at Auschwitz amidst the ongoing slaughter in Gaza provides a striking indication of the true balance of temporal and spiritual power in today’s Western world, while also demonstrating which group commands the latter.

Just a few months earlier, Musk had been riding high, having successfully dismantled Twitter’s large censorship department even as he granted an amnesty to most of the banned voices of the previous few years, notably including former President Donald Trump. Under his direction, secret documents were provided to Matt Taibbi and other investigative journalists that produced bombshell revelations of a nefarious government role in orchestrating Twitter censorship. Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter-based interview show had racked up enormous ratings, with his August Trump interview outdrawing the viewership of the official 2024 Republican Presidential debates shown on broadcast television. Musk seemed to be successfully resurrecting Twitter’s old motto that it represented “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

Most remarkably, he’d apparently seen off the challenge of the very formidable ADL, which for decades had terrified so many of the powerful. When that widely-feared censorship organization accused him of allowing “antisemitism” and “racism” to flourish on his platform and sought to intimidate his advertisers, Musk threatened to sue them for business interference, turning that weapon of “lawfare” against one of its most prolific wielders even as a #BanTheADL hashtag went viral on Twitter. The ADL had financial assets of $500 million and enormous media influence, but for the first time its leaders realized that they faced an opponent who greatly outmatched them in such resources, and fearing the risk of a multi-billion-dollar legal judgement, its leaders quickly settled, abandoning their attacks against Musk and Twitter.

However, the sudden, unexpected Hamas attacks of October 7th changed everything. Well over a thousand Israelis died, and the anger and agitation of Jewish activists in America reached an unprecedented fever-pitch. Israel soon began a merciless bombardment of Gaza in retaliation, eventually killing tens of thousands of helpless civilians, and those horrific scenes of death and devastation reached the entire world on social media, bypassing the traditional pro-Israel gatekeepers who controlled Western broadcast television and newspapers. As a result, polls shockingly revealed that younger Americans—whose information on world events came from the Internet—were quite evenly divided between Israel and Hamas or even actually favored the latter. So Jewish and pro-Israel organizations began an all-out mobilization to suppress such “antisemitic” material.

Cities and college campuses across the Western world saw large demonstrations against Israel’s televised slaughter of women and children, with Muslim immigrants naturally becoming an important element of these, causing Jewish activists to fiercely denounce those groups as “antisemitic.” For generations, Jews had overwhelmingly supported non-European immigrants, while widely praising and promoting all attacks by non-whites against white Gentile society. Most recently they had been the primary backers of the massive 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, triggered when a black lifelong career criminal died of a drug overdose while in police custody. But with “Jewish privilege” and “Israeli privilege” now suddenly coming under such hostile criticism, Jewish groups turned on a dime and demanded total censorship and suppression. Anti-immigrant right-wingers noted this rank hypocrisy in their social media posts, and in mid-November one such Tweet caught Musk’s eye, prompting him to endorse it: “You have said the actual truth” he wrote.

Those simple six words probably took Musk merely seconds to type but they may have shifted the trajectory of American history. Almost immediately, waves of Jewish and pro-Israel activists swarmed to denounce him, and many leading corporations pulled their advertising from Twitter, threatening its financial viability. Faced with such an enormous backlash, Musk traveled abroad to meet with Israel’s president, pledging to combat “antisemitism.” On that same visit, he also posed for a photo-op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, solemnly eyeing an empty crib, which presumably symbolized the forty Israeli babies allegedly beheaded by Hamas, one of the many outrageous atrocity-hoaxes promoted by Israel and its dishonest propagandists.

In the years following Donald Trump’s upset 2016 victory, right-wingers had been heavily censored on many social media platforms, while progressives were free to run wild, but now the latter began suffering the same fate for criticizing Israel’s massacres. Since the early years of the twentieth century, Israel’s ruling Likud party and its Irgun predecessor had always used the slogan “From the River to the Sea,” promising a Greater Israel under total Jewish control and domination. But over the last couple of decades, anti-Zionist progressives had embraced those same words, advocating a unified secular democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians. Musk now declared that latter phrase “genocidal” and warned that it would trigger an immediate ban from Twitter, even as Netanyahu continued publicly using it in its original Jewish-supremacist meaning.

A few weeks later, Musk traveled to Auschwitz, accompanied by his companion and guide, a young pro-Israel pundit named Ben Shapiro, whose own right-wing media empire had been lavishly funded by Zionist donors. This widely-covered quasi-religious pilgrimage seemingly marked Musk’s complete capitulation to the awesome power of Organized Jewry.

Musk was hardly the only prominent figure to bow down before the Jewish forces of Zionism, now fully mobilized by the Hamas attack and the ensuing Israel/Gaza conflict. When Musk bought Twitter in late 2022 and first began to draw fire from the ADL, another prominent public figure was also facing that organization’s wrath. As I wrote at the time:

Perhaps by coincidence, a somewhat similar controversy had recently played out in the case of a different high-profile individual, the billionaire black rapper and fashion designer Kanye West. Although I’d previously had only the vaguest impression of him, he was apparently a towering international celebrity, as well as being among the wealthiest black Americans who had ever lived, while having tens of millions of followers on Twitter and other networks.

Apparently for some reason or other, he became angry and agitated over what he saw as the overwhelming Jewish influence in the worlds of business and media, and began loudly saying so in various venues and on his social networks. As might be expected, the media reaction was swift and devastating, portraying him as a moral leper, and thereby forcing most of his business partners to cut their ties, often at enormous financial cost. Apparently 25% of the profits of footware giant Adidas came from West’s line of sneakers, but they abandoned the longtime deal at a total cost of almost $650 million when their media masters proclaimed it as a fundamental issue of morality. At the other end of the spectrum, Goodwill Industries announced that they would no longer offer their impoverished clientele the donated cast-offs associated with such a vile anti-Semite. The rapper’s longtime bank even closed his accounts and would no longer provide a haven for his money.

The immediate result of all these coordinated blows was that the bulk of West’s large fortune suddenly evaporated, while his (Jewish) personal trainer publicly declared that if he continued his bad behavior the erstwhile billionaire might end up spending the rest of his life heavily drugged and imprisoned in a mental institution. Almost none of his fellow black celebrities rallied to his side, or if they did, I didn’t hear about it. The story soon dropped from the media, perhaps permanently taking with it the once-iconic global black celebrity.

While Musk overcame his ADL challengers, West had quickly abandoned the fight and disappeared from public attention. But the black rapper now had a new album ready for release, so he and his advisors apparently decided that only the most abject sort of public surrender to Jewish power could safeguard his music sales. Even as Israel was clearly committing the greatest televised massacre of defenseless women and children in the history of the world, outraging much of his youthful rap following, West declared his boundless love and admiration for Jews and the Jewish State, recording a 40-minute video apologizing for his past antisemitic statements and Tweeting out a shorter, similar message written in Hebrew.

Back in late 2022 I’d expressed considerable skepticism that either Musk or West would succeed in their separate challenges to Jewish power, and readers can judge for themselves the extent to which my predictions proved correct.

• American Pravda: Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Much Riskier Targets
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 21, 2022 • 3,800 Words

Although Musk has now bent his knee to the broader Zionist coalition, I’ll have to admit that he actually did surprising well against his initial ADL tormentors, even without utilizing the secret history of that nefarious organization that I’d offered him during his battle.

• Elon Musk and the True History of the ADL
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 13, 2023 • 6,900 Words

The capitulations of Musk and West hardly surprised me. But far more noteworthy has been the case of independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose total surrender to Zionism over the last several months has deeply disappointed so many of his erstwhile admirers, certainly including myself.

Although I’d only been very vaguely aware of Kennedy until 2021 and remained deeply skeptical of much of his notorious anti-vaxxing advocacy, I’d greatly admired his vocal positions on many other important issues, especially including our disastrous Ukraine proxy-war against Russia and therefore expected to give him my vote in November.

I was particularly impressed by his remarkable courage on certain historical matters of a personal nature. Several years ago, he had publicly declared that Sirhan Sirhan, the alleged assassin of his father, was innocent of the crime and should be released after more than a half-century in prison, and he further proclaimed that his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, had also died at the hands of a conspiracy. I noted that although the mainstream media ferociously vilified him on numerous other grounds, they tended to carefully avoid these sorts of “great unmentionables” because the facts were so strongly on Kennedy’s side.

• American Pravda: Why the Media Fears RFK Jr.
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 14, 2023 • 8,200 Words

And once anyone recognized that Sirhan had not fired the fatal shot, I argued that important elements of the conspiracy would have immediately suggested the true culprits behind the crime:

David Talbot’s influential 2007 book Brothers revealed that Robert F. Kennedy had been convinced almost from the first that his brother had been struck down in a conspiracy, but he held his tongue, telling his circle of friends that he stood little chance of tracking down and punishing the guilty parties until he himself reached the White House. By June 1968, he seemed on the threshold of achieving that goal, but was felled by an assassin’s bullet just moments after winning the crucial California presidential primary. The logical assumption is that his death was engineered by the same elements as that of his elder brother, who were now acting to protect themselves from the consequences of their earlier crime.

A young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan had fired a pistol at the scene and was quickly arrested and convicted for the murder. But Talbot emphasizes that the coroner’s report revealed that the fatal bullet came from a completely different direction, while the acoustical record proves that far more shots were fired than the capacity of the alleged killer’s gun. Such hard evidence demonstrates a conspiracy.

Sirhan himself seemed dazed and confused, later claiming to have no memory of events, and Talbot mentions that various assassination researchers have long argued that he was merely a convenient patsy in the plot, perhaps acting under some form of hypnosis or conditioning. Nearly all these writers are usually reluctant to note that the selection of a Palestinian as scapegoat in the killing points in a certain obvious direction, but Bergman’s recent book also includes a major new revelation. At exactly the same moment that Sirhan was being wrestled to the floor of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, another young Palestinian was undergoing intensive rounds of hypnotic conditioning at the hands of Mossad in Israel, being programmed to assassinate PLO leader Yasir Arafat; and although that effort ultimately failed, such a coincidence seems to stretch the bounds of plausibility.

Kennedy seemed like an intelligent, thoughtful individual, and if he had concluded years ago that Sirhan was innocent, I assumed that the remainder of this chain of reasoning would have fallen into place, producing a high-profile Presidential candidate willing to stand up for American interests against those of Israel. But instead Kennedy recently moved in exactly the opposite direction, becoming the most egregiously pro-Zionist candidate in the race and heavily relying upon his ultra-Zionist advisors Morton Klein and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. In a recent public interview, he shockingly declared that the Palestinians were “the most pampered people in the world” even as hundreds of thousands of them were currently facing death by starvation at Israel’s hands.

“Palestinian people are the most pampered in the world” — RFK Jr.

The most disappointing politician in the US.

pic.twitter.com/zcvmEbK6Zs

— S.L. Kanthan (@Kanthan2030) December 17, 2023

Kennedy’s apparent willingness to betray his principles—and the memories of his martyred father and uncle—was hugely disheartening to me. Moreover, with both Biden and Trump known as fervent supporters of Israel, a contrary position emphasizing a ceasefire and sympathy towards the suffering Palestinians might have provided a political home for the substantial minority of voters and activists taking that position, certainly attracting huge support among college students and other youthful Americans. But it was not to be. Imagine if Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had run in 1968 as the fiercest Vietnam War hawk in the race.

Unfortunately, the total political submission of Musk, West, and Kennedy to the massed power of Jews and Zionism is hardly a new development. Indeed, they constitute merely the latest examples in a long series of such Gentile defeats and surrenders, as I had noted at the beginning of my original 2018 article on the ADL:

Mel Gibson had long been one of the most popular stars in Hollywood and his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ became among the most profitable in world history, yet the ADL and its allies destroyed his career, and he eventually donated millions of dollars to Jewish groups in desperate hopes of regaining some of his public standing. When the ADL criticized a cartoon that had appeared in one of his newspapers, media titan Rupert Murdoch provided his personal apology to that organization, and the editors of The Economist quickly retracted a different cartoon once it came under ADL fire. Billionaire Tom Perkins, a famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, was forced to issue a heartfelt apology after coming under ADL criticism for his choice of words in a Wall Street Journal column. These were all proud, powerful individ