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David Krall wrote:

This proves we dodged a bullet.

The post Hitler phones Harris appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith.

Media ITE

The post Hillary Clinton Says Young Americans Are Pro-Palestine Because They Watch ‘Totally Made Up’ Videos of Gaza Horrors appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Hegseth In Hot Seat As ‘Murder-gate’ Picks Up Steam appeared first on LewRockwell.

No, not sketchy Milei. The Prince of Liechtenstein.
He put Hans Hoppe’s libertarian ideas into practice rather than calling their author juvenile names as Milei has done.

The post A Real Libertarian Hero appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Bill Madden:

Those attempting to persuade our military personnel not to follow illegal orders via national advertising will probably be found not guilty.  Those arguing against this persuasive effort usually don’t use the word “illegal” when condemning the six former government employees and might be found guilty of using excessive rhetorical B.S. in the court of public opinion. 

Refusing illegal orders in the military is difficult to do because they normally are generated high in the chain of command and very few officers in the chain really know what is or is not a legal order.  Immediate superiors can be very demanding and the orders are usually given in high pressure environments.  Refusing an illegal military order is tantamount to whistleblowing and, as much good as it does for the concept of truth, the whistleblower’s life is made miserable as a punishment for his honesty and a warning to others.

Please remember that Congressman Massie is on the president’s black list for his adherence to the Constitution.  MTG is on Trump’s black list for attempting to enforce his campaign promises. 

We have an even more important case of illegal government activity unfolding now with President Trump ordering the destruction of suspected drug running boats near Venezuela and also his threat to invade Venezuela without a declaration of war.  If his activity is judged illegal, everyone from Trump to the enlisted man pushing to missile launch button will be guilty.  But, of course, nothing will probably be done to hold anyone accountable as usual.  If some token legal action is taken against Trump and the military, the only ones punished will be the lowest ranked officer and, maybe, his superior – like with Lt. Calley and the My Lai Massacre.  We are a rogue nation being led by a choice of evils and his cabinet of neocon warmongers.

The post Legal vs. Illegal Orders appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

Eugyppius

The post Thousands of leftist protesters clash with thousands of police in a massive action to defend “Our Democracy” against a few hundred AfD members appeared first on LewRockwell.

La traduzione in italiano dell'opera scritta da Wendy McElroy esplora Bitcoin a 360°, un compendio della sua storia fino ad adesso e la direzione che molto probabilmente prenderà la sua evoluzione nel futuro prossimo. Si parte dalla teoria, soprattutto quella libertaria e Austriaca, e si sonda come essa interagisce con la realtà. Niente utopie, solo la logica esposizione di una tecnologia che si sviluppa insieme alle azioni degli esseri umani. Per questo motivo vengono inserite nell'analisi diversi punti di vista: sociologico, economico, giudiziario, filosofico, politico, psicologico e altri. Una visione e trattazione di Bitcoin come non l'avete mai vista finora, per un asset che non solo promette di rinnovare l'ambito monetario ma che, soprattutto, apre alla possibilità concreta di avere, per la prima volta nella storia umana, una società profondamente e completamente modificabile dal basso verso l'alto.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/la-bce-si-prepara-alla-prossima-crisi)

Tredici anni fa Mario Draghi, allora Presidente della Banca Centrale Europea, aprì le porte alla liquidità per impedire il collasso dell'Eurozona. Da allora i problemi strutturali sono rimasti irrisolti. Ora ci troviamo di fronte al prossimo capitolo della crisi del debito, che è stata solo in parte risolta. È tempo che la BCE prepari il suo kit di strumenti di emergenza.

Da qualche tempo sui mercati finanziari mondiali si sta delineando un trend preoccupante: i titoli di stato a lungo termine stanno subendo pressioni di vendita, persino quelli di economie leader come Stati Uniti, Giappone, Regno Unito e, in misura significativa, Francia. Di conseguenza i rendimenti stanno aumentando, insieme ai costi di rifinanziamento per nazioni già fortemente indebitate.

Architettura finanziaria gravemente danneggiata

È il cosiddetto segmento lungo della curva dei rendimenti ad allarmare sia i policymaker che le banche centrali. La stabilità dell'architettura finanziaria globale si basa sui titoli obbligazionari a lungo termine di Stati Uniti, Giappone ed Eurozona. Banche, fondi pensione sovrani e sistemi assicurativi hanno già pagato un pesante tributo a causa delle vendite in questo segmento. La struttura è stata gravemente indebolita e l'Europa si trova ora ad affrontare la prossima crisi del debito.

È una cosa che non si può più ignorare: i titoli di stato a lungo termine, un tempo considerati sicuri e con rendimenti reali positivi, hanno perso una notevole fiducia. Uno sguardo alle turbolenze politiche della Francia e al declino del Regno Unito sottolinea che uscire dalla spirale del debito – con deficit annuali in continua crescita e sistemi sociali al collasso in una società europea che invecchia e soffre di migrazioni – sembra altamente irrealistico.

La conseguenza: chiunque non sia obbligato a detenere questi titoli li scarica, rifugiandosi nei cosiddetti porti sicuri, come metalli preziosi o contanti, spesso in dollari o franchi svizzeri; uno schema collaudato quando i tempi si fanno duri.

L'Europa nel mirino

Mentre il rendimento dei decennali britannici è salito oltre il 5,7% – il livello più alto dal 2009 – la crisi in Francia si sta intensificando drasticamente. Il Paese è nel caos politico e la società è frammentata e colpita dall'immigrazione, cosa che rischia di sfociare in violenti scontri di piazza nelle Banlieue.

La Francia è diventata da tempo uno stato ingovernabile e ora rischia di essere il punto di partenza della prossima crisi del debito nell'Eurozona.

Nuvole nere si addensano sull'Europa e la Germania non sarà risparmiata. Un tempo elogiata per la sua politica fiscale conservatrice, il Paese ha aperto la porta a gravi perturbazioni nei mercati con un programma di debito da mille miliardi di euro. Se la Germania sacrificasse la propria affidabilità creditizia solo per guadagnare tempo e avere una soluzione temporanea alla crisi del suo sistema sociale, trascinerebbe i suoi partner dell'UE nel baratro. Dall'inizio dell'unione monetaria i mercati hanno collegato l'affidabilità creditizia della comunità a quella della Germania.

Nessuna delle crisi europee – né l'eccessiva regolamentazione, né la crisi energetica, né il caos migratorio – è mai stata risolta e il continente è ora esposto alla prossima.

BCE in azione

La prossima crisi del debito seguirà probabilmente lo schema della precedente, avvenuta 15 anni fa: il contagio si diffonderà da un Paese all'altro, ognuno messo alla prova da ondate di vendite obbligazionarie a fronte di stabilità e resilienza. Ciò che potrebbe avere origine in Francia raggiungerà prima o poi la Germania attraverso gli stati dell'Europa meridionale fortemente indebitati. La domanda è: la BCE riuscirà a stabilizzare la situazione, come fece allora con il suo kit di emergenza?

Ogni crisi del debito sovrano è anche una crisi bancaria. Una quota significativa dei titoli di stato è detenuta nei bilanci delle banche commerciali e un brusco calo del loro valore di mercato rischia di provocare un pericoloso sovraindebitamento nel settore finanziario. Per mitigare questo fenomeno la BCE ha sviluppato un arsenale di misure di liquidità e stabilizzazione che costituiscono il cuore del suo kit di strumenti di emergenza. Tra queste figurano le operazioni di rifinanziamento a lungo termine (LTRO) e le operazioni di rifinanziamento mirate a lungo termine (TLTRO), le quali forniscono alle banche prestiti a lungo termine a basso tasso di interesse per garantire liquidità e mantenere il flusso di credito a imprese e famiglie.

Credito fiat sottoposto a una leva molto alta

Esiste anche l'Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA), una sorta di valvola di sicurezza per le istituzioni sottoposte a forti pressioni, solitamente garantita da titoli di stato o altri cosiddetti “asset di alta qualità”. Il kit di strumenti è completato da indicazioni prospettiche e politiche sui tassi di interesse, volte a orientare le aspettative e stabilizzare i mercati dei tassi di interesse, spesso più a livello psicologico che materiale.

Qui risiede un difetto centrale e un'incoerenza logica nelle banche centrali: proprio gli asset considerati “di alta qualità” hanno contribuito alla crisi. Il credito fiat sottoposto a forte leva finanziaria e praticamente scoperto – senza copertura in oro o energia – ha trasformato il sistema finanziario in uno schema di Ponzi, determinando inevitabilmente una massiccia espansione del credito.

In questo contesto rientrano anche l'imponente programma di indebitamento della Germania e, secondo i funzionari politici dell'UE, la guerra per procura in corso in Ucraina. Se il rubinetto del credito viene chiuso, il castello di carte crolla.

Concentrarsi sulla manipolazione dei tassi di interesse

L'obiettivo principale della BCE rimane la stabilizzazione dei mercati obbligazionari governativi, il settore più vulnerabile in caso di crisi. Profondamente legata al centro di potere dell'UE a Bruxelles, la banca centrale agisce quasi come un dipartimento di liquidità. Quando il panico colpisce il mercato obbligazionario, essa inizia a manipolare i rendimenti e a riequilibrare il mercato, come fece 15 anni fa.

I programmi di emergenza includono il Programma di acquisti nel settore pubblico (PSPP), col quale si acquisiscono titoli di stato per aumentare la liquidità, e le Transazioni monetarie definitive (OMT), attivate solo se i Paesi interessati si impegnano ad attuare riforme. Di recente introduzione è il Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI), il quale consente alla BCE di acquistare titoli per ridurre le differenze di rendimento tra gli stati membri e garantire la trasmissione della politica monetaria. Questo strumento opera in gran parte in modo clandestino: gli interventi di mercato non sono sempre immediatamente visibili e possono essere effettuati gradualmente, anche tramite attori delegati, per evitare il panico sui mercati.

La politica della BCE può essere riassunta in modo semplice: in vista dell'imminente crollo del debito, il suo compito è manipolare l'intera curva dei rendimenti al ribasso per mantenere l'illusione di un debito pubblico sotto controllo e impedire agli investitori privati ​​di farsi prendere dal panico. La perseveranza della BCE è evidente nei corridoi di rendimento che i titoli di stato a lungo termine seguono da tempo.

Trasparenza? Praticamente inesistente. I rapporti segreti tra la BCE e i principali gruppi di capitali sono all'ordine del giorno. I mercati sono gestiti e manipolati attivamente: il libero mercato e la forza disciplinare dell'aumento dei tassi di interesse (i cosiddetti bond vigilantes) sono solo uno sbiadito ricordo del passato.

Cerotti di emergenza e pillole lenitive

In definitiva i nomi degli strumenti della BCE sono irrilevanti. La loro funzione principale è quella di attenuare le fluttuazioni di mercato a breve termine e di fornire ai policymaker un margine di manovra continuo per una burocrazia europea in continua espansione. La BCE stessa è diventata una forza maligna all'interno dell'Eurosistema: le riforme basate sul mercato sono impossibili finché i policymaker possono contare sul suo sostegno, che si tratti di programmi per il clima, di potenziamenti militari, o di altri progetti di dubbia natura.

La Commissione europea e la BCE mirano a istituire un meccanismo unificato per il debito, consolidare i debiti nazionali sotto l'egida della Commissione stessa e integrare la BCE come riserva di liquidità per stabilizzare i mercati. L'Europa si sta quindi orientando verso un socialismo centralizzato, con la BCE come fattore chiave.

In una crisi sistemica i principali pilastri dell'Eurozona – Francia, Italia e Germania – verrebbero trascinati in quella che possiamo definire spirale discendente. Sarebbe ingenuo credere che la situazione possa essere stabilizzata solo attraverso iniezioni di credito della BCE e misure di liquidità a breve termine.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una mancia in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

Donald Trump is intent upon waging war on Venezuela  for allegedly supporting the trade in narcotics. Nonsense. The unspoken military agenda is that Venezuela is the World’s Number One Oil and Gas Economy. “And we want the Oil”… 

There is another unspoken U.S. military agenda:  The protection of the multibillion dollar illegal trade in narcotics.

Peru, Bolivia and Colombia are the major producers Worldwide of cocaine. 

Afghanistan is the “Number One” Worldwide opium producer: illegal heroin, morphine, and non-pharmaceutical grade opioids.

In the immediate wake of 9/11, US-NATO waged an all out  invasion of Afghanistan, which was casually accused by the Bush Adminstration of having attacked America on September 11, 2001

In the year 2000, the Afghan Taliban Government’ with the support of the United Nations, launched an initiative to ban the production of opium coupled with a program of crop substitution in favor of grain.

One of the objectives of the US-NATO led War against Afganistan? Was is intent to restore and protect the multi-billion trade in opium which had collapsed (following the decision of the Afghan government) by more than 90% in 2001?  (see graph below)

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post War, Oil and Narcotics appeared first on LewRockwell.

For more than a century, the Austrian School has warned that once money is severed from market discipline, every institution built upon it begins to deteriorate. Government expands without meaningful constraint. Savings are silently siphoned away. Investment becomes distorted by artificially cheap credit. War becomes politically easy. And political power gradually migrates from the productive class to those who control the printing press. Ludwig von Mises captured this dynamic in a simple but profound chain of logic: civilization requires rational economic calculation; calculation requires accurate prices; prices require free markets; free markets require voluntary exchange; and voluntary exchange requires secure private property rights—including property rights in money itself. When money becomes politicized, this chain collapses, and the social order degrades from within. Much of today’s economic and cultural instability—ballooning public debt, collapsing pensions, geopolitical adventurism, asset bubbles, and a widespread loss of institutional trust—flows directly from this rupture.

The Austrian tradition offers not only a diagnosis of this decline but a coherent remedy rooted in sound money, personal independence, and decentralized social structures. The following synthesis lays out these essential insights.

I. Money as a Market Institution

The Austrian School begins with a foundational truth: money originates from the market, not the state. Mises’s regression theorem explains why money must begin as a commodity valued for non-monetary uses. Gold became money because individuals voluntarily selected it for its durability, scarcity, divisibility, and universal desirability. No government committee invented monetary exchange; rather, governments merely inserted themselves into an already functioning market process.

Rothbard extends this point into the ethical realm. If money is a form of property, inflation represents an institutionalized form of counterfeiting—an indirect method of expropriation that debases the purchasing power of existing holders. Fractional-reserve banking intensifies this problem by issuing multiple claims to the same monetary unit, setting in motion cycles of artificial credit expansion, malinvestment, and inevitable recession. Sound money is therefore a natural product of voluntary exchange, whereas fiat money is a deliberate political imposition.

II. Fiat Money and the Expansion of State Power

Ron Paul’s Gold, Peace, and Prosperity demonstrates the political consequences of monetary debasement with striking clarity. Fiat money enables the modern warfare-welfare state by concealing costs that would otherwise provoke immediate public resistance. Wars that would be impossible under honest taxation become both frequent and prolonged when financed through the printing press. Welfare programs expand far beyond the limits that taxpayers would voluntarily support. Corporate bailouts reward politically connected firms at the expense of ordinary citizens. Inflation quietly transfers wealth from savers and wage earners to governments, central banks, and financial elites.

This dynamic reflects the Cantillon Effect, wherein those closest to the creation of new money benefit disproportionately, while those furthest from it bear the brunt of rising prices and distorted markets. A fiat system thus builds a political economy structurally biased toward centralization, dependence, and chronic crisis. No society can remain both fiat-based and genuinely free because a government empowered to create money at will can eventually purchase compliance, fund patronage, and finance conflict on a scale impossible under sound money.

III. The Classical Gold Standard: Kemmerer’s Blueprint

Edwin Kemmerer’s Gold and the Gold Standard provides the clearest institutional model of how a monetary system anchored in gold actually functioned. Under a genuine gold standard, redemption was automatic rather than discretionary; exchange rates were determined by the metal content of currencies rather than by bureaucratic preference; interest rates emerged from real savings rather than central-bank engineering; trade imbalances corrected themselves through flows of gold; and governments were restrained by the discipline imposed by convertibility.

The classical gold standard did not collapse due to inherent instability. It was intentionally dismantled because it constrained the ambitions of governments and central banks. Gold imposes discipline by linking monetary expansion to real resource costs. Fiat money abolishes that discipline by severing money from any external anchor, allowing political authorities to finance their projects without regard for long-term economic consequences.

IV. Bitcoin: Innovation with Structural Fragility

Bitcoin represents a genuine innovation in monetary technology. With its fixed supply, decentralized validation, and resistance to political manipulation, it offers a degree of monetary autonomy superior to any fiat alternative within the context of a functioning digital civilization. Yet Bitcoin’s strength is also its vulnerability. It relies entirely on the integrity of two large-scale, centralized infrastructures: the electrical grid and the telecommunications network.

A cyberattack, electromagnetic pulse, solar storm, prolonged blackout, or targeted political intervention can render Bitcoin temporarily inaccessible, even though the protocol itself remains mathematically secure. Bitcoin is therefore a conditional form of monetary independence. Its usefulness presupposes a technological environment that cannot be taken for granted. Gold, by contrast, remains sovereign money even in the total absence of external infrastructure.

V. Physical Property as the Ultimate Guarantor

The limits of purely digital independence become immediately apparent when the state can freeze bank accounts, restrict electricity, or seize digital assets by emergency decree. Real sovereignty requires control over tangible, seizure-resistant forms of property. Physical gold and silver held in one’s possession remain money in all conditions, requiring no electricity and no intermediaries. Firearms and ammunition constitute the final veto against violations of person and property. Calorie-dense food stores and the ability to replenish them insulate households from fragile and politically dependent logistics systems. Private water sources and filtration systems reduce reliance on municipal infrastructure. Off-grid energy—solar arrays, generators, and wood—provides autonomy from utility monopolies. Productive land and tools represent the oldest and most enduring factors of human independence.

Rothbard described such property as the concrete expression of self-ownership. Hoppe saw it as the material foundation of a private-law society. Hayek understood it as dispersed local knowledge made robust against institutional failure. No digital asset can substitute for these physical foundations of sovereignty.

VI. Decentralization Must Extend to the Social Layer

Monetary decentralization, while essential, is insufficient. Civilization itself is not a technical ledger but a fabric of cooperative relationships. Hoppe’s theory of covenant communities, Hayek’s insights on cultural evolution, Mises’s concept of catallaxy, and Rothbard’s vision of private governance all converge on the same conclusion: lasting liberty depends on strong, voluntary social bonds.

Families, churches, neighborhood associations, mutual-aid networks, and cooperative groups form the social infrastructure capable of weathering political instability or systemic failure. Atomized individuals, even with perfect money, remain vulnerable. Individuals embedded in thick, value-aligned communities become antifragile. The decentralization of money, production, and governance must therefore be accompanied by the decentralization of social life.

VII. The Austrian Case for Prepping

Prepping, properly understood, is simply Austrian economics applied to household risk. Mises observed that acting man uses scarce means to remove felt uneasiness. Long-term stores of food, water, and energy reflect rational anticipation of uncertainty rather than irrational fear. Hayek argued that no central authority can possess the local knowledge necessary to satisfy individual needs; preparation at the household and community level outperforms distant bureaucratic promises. Rothbard emphasized that the state functions as a predatory protection monopoly, and minimizing reliance on it is central to libertarian strategy. Hoppe demonstrated that private, norm-governed security is more efficient, adaptable, and reliable than bureaucratic monopoly.

Prepping is therefore not paranoia but a consistent application of Austrian principles to the realities of economic and political life. Households equipped with food stores, water independence, energy resilience, medical supplies, tools, and defensive capacity are simply adopting the same decentralization that Austrian theory recommends for markets and governance.

VIII. Thomas Massie: The Living Austrian Prototype

Congressman Thomas Massie provides a contemporary example of Austrian sovereignty translated into daily life. His homestead integrates off-grid solar power, private water systems, orchards, gardens, livestock, and extensive food preservation. He maintains machining, fabrication, and repair capabilities that shorten supply chains to the household level. He possesses the means of defense appropriate for a free citizen and holds physical gold and silver as the monetary base for real independence. Most importantly, he is part of a cohesive, value-aligned community that reinforces voluntary cooperation and mutual support. Massie successfully decentralizes the critical domains of life—energy, water, food, security, money, and social organization—while remaining fully engaged in the public sphere. His example demonstrates that Austrian decentralization is not theoretical but practical and achievable.

IX. The Tripod of Real Sovereignty

A free and resilient life rests on three mutually reinforcing pillars. The first is decentralized money: gold and silver function as final, seizure-resistant property, while Bitcoin can serve as a supplemental tool only so long as the grid remains intact. The second is decentralized survival: food, water, heat, energy, tools, medicine, and defensive means must be under direct personal control rather than mediated through fragile political or corporate structures. The third is decentralized community: human relationships capable of cooperation, trade, and mutual defense without state oversight form the social architecture necessary for order.

Money provides incorruptible value; preparedness provides incorruptible life support; and community provides incorruptible cooperation. When these three elements align, theoretical freedom becomes practical and durable. Mises mapped the logic of human action, Rothbard defended the ethics of self-ownership, Hayek revealed the superiority of dispersed knowledge, and Hoppe explained how private communities sustain order. The intellectual framework is complete, and the responsibility now lies with individuals to apply it.

Conclusion: The Window for Sovereignty Is Narrowing

Sound money, physical independence, and community resilience are not nostalgic artifacts from a simpler era. They are the structural foundations of a free society. Gold is not a relic, prepared households are not driven by fear, and decentralized communities are not regressive. Together they form the pillars of sovereignty in an age of unprecedented fragility.

Bitcoin may offer conditional advantages within a functioning digital environment, but it cannot replace physical property, local autonomy, or social capital. A civilization built solely on digital dependencies is one outage away from impotence. A civilization built on gold, land, skills, and community can withstand political and technological upheaval.

The choice is clear: build the full architecture of sovereignty now or risk drifting deeper into dependency. The window for action remains open, but it narrows every day.

The post The Austrian Blueprint for Real Sovereignty appeared first on LewRockwell.

Among the key insights of Austrian economics are that humans act and value is subjective. These observations seem obvious and uncontroversial…essentially truisms. But they’re often forgotten, neglected, or misunderstood.

Each person’s perspective is informed by innumerable variables that influence his values. An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way. An American believes a hundred years is a long time. Is either, neither, or each of them right? Who’s to say?

Would a woman rather receive a diamond ring or a gallon of water? As a former president of Harvard might put it, context matters. Is the lady sitting with her boyfriend on a beach, or stranded alone in the Sahara?

Some of us are willing to jump from a plane. Others can’t bring ourselves to board one. Fear of flying forces many people to drive, which puts them at greater statistical risk of ending up dead.

But they don’t care, even if they know the odds. People making such “illogical” choices are less concerned with probabilities of death than with easing their mind however long they’re alive.

Fair enough. To these people…as with those who toss salt over their shoulders or avoid sidewalk cracks to spare their mother’s back…peace of mind, even if analytically dubious, is worth looking superstitious or silly.

The “Greater Good”

Their choices may seem irrational, but they’re not necessarily unreasonable. Our basket of preferences are a blend of desires and aversions composing a unique recipe for each individual.

This is why a “greater good” is impossible to impose. This elusive concept exists only as an evolving compilation of personal preferences. No one (nor any group of people) can decree what it is, because it can only be known after each person makes uncoerced decisions he thinks will enhance his happiness.

The “greater good” is merely an amalgamation of each individual’s unique desires, which are revealed only thru action, and are otherwise impossible for even their closest friends or nearest relatives to surmise.

Much of the time, we don’t even know them ourselves! That a few elected or appointed officials could know what’s best for millions (or billions!) of people they’ll never meet is preposterous.

Passing laws prohibiting or requiring that everyone conform to an arbitrary “common interest” will require people give up something they value more than whatever edict elected or appointed officials decree.

This doesn’t improve society. It reduces standards of living (except for that of anointed authorities enforcing their own preferences).

The only way to reveal what everyone wants is to leave them free to make choices for themselves. Popular desire is revealed only thru individual decisions reflected in voluntary actions.

No one engages in activities he thinks will make him worse off, regardless whether anyone else would make the same decision.

We do things because we think they’ll improve our circumstances…sooner or later. Each person’s preferences are relative, unique, and fluid over time. If they weren’t, exchange would be impossible.

If everyone valued everything equally, trade could only benefit one party by harming another. But since valuation varies, markets materialize…because participants believe what they give is worth less than what they get. Otherwise, they wouldn’t swap.

An Essential Insight

This is an essential insight, and the key theme of a terrific book. The Secret of Selling Anything is a compilation of a couple unpublished manuscripts investor, philosopher, and two-time presidential candidate Harry Browne wrote in the late 1960s. After half a century, the lessons are timeless and his message endures.

Browne asserts successful selling isn’t about being slick, manipulative, or smooth. The best salesmen needn’t be (and usually aren’t) overly enthusiastic or naturally extroverted.

Nor must they “motivate” their prospects. They merely need to discover what already motivates them. This is done by asking some questions, and understanding a few basic laws of human nature.

Foremost among these is that all humans seek happiness. Everything they do is intended to increase what Browne calls their “mental feeling of well-being”. Individuals take no action without thinking it’ll make them better off.

People are always seeking “profit”, which Browne defines as an increase in happiness by replacing one situation with another. Yet happiness is relative, and resources scarce.

Each person has different desires he thinks will improve his condition, yet no one has infinite time, property, energy, or knowledge to bring endless demand to ultimate fruition.

For unforced exchange to occur, all parties must believe they will profit. In a free market, no one will intentionally sacrifice his happiness to satisfy someone else. He may forgo physical comfort or monetary reward, but only if ceding those pleasures increases his overall contentment.

We must serve others to sustain our lives. Very little of what we need to survive is the exclusive product of our own efforts. That’s especially true for most Americans.

In a higher order civilization dependent on division of labor, exchange is essential. We serve others to receive what we want. The more efficiently we do so, the greater profit (be it financial or psychic) we realize and higher success we attain.

What matters is the value other parties place on the services we provide. How much our offerings are desired is reflected in prices people are willing to pay. And that is part of what salesmen need to sell.

As a corporate pricing professional for a couple decades, I consistently tried to make this point. Regardless how beneficial we think our offering is…or how much effort we expend providing it…if potential customers find it irrelevant or objectionable, they won’t accept it for whatever compensation we seek.

How to Sell Anything

Each person’s happiness depends on the value ultimate consumers place on his services. Whatever any particular production, distribution, sales, or marketing process is worth ultimately derives from the subjective benefit end users receive.

No one buys a product. He buys the solution the product provides. Customers don’t care about a vendor’s lawnmower; they’re concerned about their own lawn.

This is one of the essential precepts of economics, and of Browne’s book. Another is that most people ignore this point, and install their personal preferences in place of what other people want.

Too many entrepreneurs start businesses because they crave status or want wealth. But what matters is how well businessmen can decipher pain points of potential buyers, and how many people they can assist by supplying superior solutions with quality service at reasonable prices.

If they do, all parties will profit by the exchange. To make a sale, we must know what’s in it for the other guy, and why he should want to pay what we choose to charge.

Relationships and commerce are based on mutual advantage. In a free market, no one can get without giving.

Those who understand that can sell anything.

This article was originally published on Pretium Insights.

The post How To Sell Anything appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Various “wars on drugs” throughout history have killed millions, enslaved millions more, destroyed families, are usually just thin pretenses for mass incarceration, mass surveillance, ethnic cleansing, population control.”

~ Kool A.D.

There cannot be a war on drugs, a war on terrorism, a war on crime, a war on poverty, a war on racism, a war on guns, a war on obesity, border wars, and on and on. It seems everything in this country is based on the term war, which means that everything is based on force, and in the end, all war is actually violence against people here and everywhere else. This constant psychological propaganda is meant to frame everything as a ‘war’ in order to market the false need of a government solution. The government causes the problem, reacts to it with metaphorical emergency rhetoric, and then claims to have the solution. This is simply Hegelian Dialectic idiocy, wrapped under the fake protective blanket of fear, urgency, and ‘safety.’ In other words, all are lies and total nonsense.

The figurative aspect of the term ‘war,’ makes almost anything sound more noble, when in fact it is just a marketing ploy used to convince the giant herd of sheep called the masses, to comply and subjugate themselves to some government agenda-driven objective. This only enriches the ‘elite,’ shuts off transparency, encourages huge debt; all increasing power and control while eliminating freedom.

For the past many decades, one particular ‘war’ stands alone, and that is the continuous so-called “war on drugs.” The deception about this fake threat, and totally fraudulent and non-sensical idiocy is astounding to say the very least. This is what I would refer to as a massive scam used only as a way of enriching government and its partners in the heinous prison system, providing the impetus for war against those countries that have desired natural resources, to create unlimited ‘laws’ in order to surveil and control the entire citizenry, depopulation, and of course, to allow the biggest drug cartel of them all, the CIA, to fund their criminal black operations in order to satisfy agenda-driven policies by saturating this country with ‘illegal’ drugs.

Currently, Latin America is the most targeted area by the U.S. terrorist state, specifically Venezuela, but also including Columbia and Mexico. The evil Trump, who is the puppet property of the actual ruling class, has literally gone berserk concerning this U.S. manufactured drug ‘emergency.’ This has nothing whatsoever to do with stopping the flow of drugs into the U.S., as that is the objective of this government. Keep in mind a sense of history.

Two examples: When the U.S. attacked Vietnam, as well as Cambodia and Laos, the amount of drugs being supplied by those countries to the world was approximately less than 10%. Once the U.S. military took over, that number exploded to well over 90%. The same exact thing happened when the U.S. aggressively attacked Afghanistan, as once the U.S. military took over the poppy fields, the amount delivered outside the country ballooned to again, well over 90%. Since the U.S. left in 2021, the Taliban has reduced the production acreage of poppies by 96%. There are many other examples, but you should get the picture.

At this time, Trump is planning to invade Venezuela, as 11 warships and 15,000 troops are amassed off the shore of that country, as ultimatums (threats) are being levied by Trump. He (Trump) has accused the Venezuelan government of complicity in the drug trade. What a hypocritical piece of garbage is Trump. He failed to mention that the CIA is responsible for the most drug trafficking worldwide, and has been for many decades. He also never mentioned that he wants to commit regime change, and put a U.S. puppet in charge of Venezuela and its huge oil reserves.

The U.S. is simply attempting to stage a coup so that control over Venezuela, and all the drugs and oil, can be completely under the charge of this country. That drug trade, which is now mostly fentanyl, will then be able to be distributed even more aggressively here in America and elsewhere. This is strictly due to the fact that the CIA is running most all the drugs, as has been the case for a very long time.

Trump is a fraud, and his plot against Venezuela is a fraud. Remember Chile, remember Iran/Contra, remember Mena, Arkansas, and the numerous other drug conspiracies that proved to be manufactured by this country and the CIA. Remember all the regime change coups and wars of aggression, which are countless, so that the U.S. could gain empirical control over other countries that never attacked or harmed anyone in America.

The U.S. government has total control over all the drugs in this country, as it controls all alcohol, tobacco, and prescription drugs, but the more so-called ‘illicit’ drugs, are where it makes the most profit, and how it can continue to dumb-down, control, and kill off what it considers useless Americans. So ‘legalization’ of those products is not sought, but total control over the trafficking of those drugs is sought, especially by the CIA.

The only war that seems justified in my mind is a war against this abominable government and its politicians. I am not speaking of a violent overthrow, as that would be desired by these ruling monsters, allowing them to turn loose the murderous military against this country’s population. No, violence is not necessary, but non-compliance, dissent, refusal to respect all arbitrary ‘laws,’ and mass disobedience is the only way forward. Once this government monster is eliminated, the actual ruling class would disappear.

As Jacob Hornberger put it: “There is one-and only one-way to end the violence in Latin America. There is one-and only one-way to terminate the drug gangs. That way is by legalizing drugs. Legalizing drugs today would put an immediate end to the drug gangs and the drug-war violence.”

This government and its accomplices are fully responsible for this drug debacle. It is fully responsible for the debt, for the inflation, for all the wars, for all the killing, and for most of the misery. Eliminate it, and better times will lie ahead. Leave it in place, and the end of any and all freedom is just around the corner.

“See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.”

~ Milton Friedman

Reference link:

“The CIA Still Ships in the Drugs”

This article was originally published on GaryDBarnett.com.

The post The Complete Fraud of the Fake War on Drugs: A Criminal Exercise for Money, Power, and Control appeared first on LewRockwell.

If Present Trends Continue: A Long-Term Prognosis for Human Civilisation

Introduction: The Question Behind the Question

When we ask about humanity’s long-term prognosis, “if things continue as they are,” we’re really asking: What happens when multiple unstable systems destabilise simultaneously while we remain locked in the political and economic patterns that created the instability?

The answer requires examining converging trajectories across climate, geopolitics, technology, resources, and social cohesion—and, critically, how these interact. The prognosis isn’t extinction versus utopia; it’s a narrowing window for managed transition versus forced transformation through crisis.

Let me be clear about what “if things continue as they are” means: current military spending patterns persist, climate action remains insufficient, inequality continues growing, international cooperation deteriorates, and the political resistances described earlier remain dominant. This is not a worst-case scenario—it’s a continuation of present trends.

Track One: Climate and Ecological Collapse

The Physics Doesn’t Negotiate

Current trajectory: We’re on track for 2.5-3°C warming by 2100, possibly higher. This isn’t speculation—it’s physics based on current emission rates and committed warming from past emissions.

2030-2050: The Disruption Phase

Even 1.5-2°C warming (now nearly unavoidable) produces:

• Agricultural disruption: Major crop-producing regions face simultaneous heat stress, drought, and unpredictable weather. The “breadbaskets” (U.S. Midwest, Ukraine, Punjab) experience harvest failures that no longer average out globally—they coincide. Food prices spike and remain volatile.
• Water scarcity intensifies: By 2040, an estimated 5.6 billion people (over half of humanity) could face water scarcity at least one month per year. The Himalayan glaciers feeding South and East Asia’s rivers are disappearing. Aquifers are depleting. Conflicts over water emerge as existential rather than manageable.
• Coastal displacement begins: Sea level rise of 0.5-1 meter displaces hundreds of millions from coastal cities. Bangladesh, Pacific islands, Florida, the Netherlands—all face choices between engineering solutions costing trillions or mass relocation. This isn’t 2100 speculation; it’s beginning now and accelerates through mid-century.
• Ecosystem services collapse: Fisheries crash from warming and acidification. Insect populations collapse further, affecting pollination. Coral reefs (supporting 25% of marine species) die almost completely. These aren’t aesthetic losses—they’re economic infrastructure.

2050-2080: The Cascade Phase

Beyond 2°C, feedback loops become dominant:

• Permafrost methane release: As Arctic permafrost melts, it releases methane (a greenhouse gas 80x more potent than CO2 over 20 years). This is a one-way door—once released, we can’t recapture it at scale. Current models suggest this could add 0.5-1°C additional warming beyond human emissions.
• Amazon rainforest dieback: The Amazon is approaching a tipping point where it transitions from rainforest to savanna, releasing billions of tons of stored carbon. Early signs are already visible. Once crossed, this is irreversible on human timescales.
• Ice sheet collapse: Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show signs of irreversible melting. Even stopping all emissions today, they continue melting for centuries, eventually adding 10+ meters of sea level rise. The question isn’t if, but how fast—and that depends on decisions made this decade.

2080-2100: The New Normal

At 3°C warming:

• Uninhabitable zones: Regions around the equator become literally uninhabitable during parts of the year—wet bulb temperatures exceed human survival limits. This affects India, Pakistan, Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, the Middle East. We’re talking about 1-2 billion people in currently inhabited areas facing lethal heat.
• Permanent food insecurity: Agricultural productivity falls 20-30% globally from peak, while population peaks around 10 billion. The math doesn’t work. Chronic food crises become normal, not exceptional.
• Failed states multiply: Countries unable to provide basic security, food, or water collapse. Climate refugees number in the hundreds of millions. No international system exists to manage this scale of migration.

The Optimistic Climate Scenario

Even this trajectory assumes:

• No major tipping points cascade faster than expected
• Carbon sinks (oceans, forests) continue absorbing roughly half our emissions
• No significant methane releases from Arctic seafloor
• Agricultural adaptation somewhat succeeds

If any of these assumptions fail, we accelerate toward 4-5°C worlds that are genuinely difficult to model because they represent climate states Earth hasn’t seen in 3+ million years—before humans existed.

Track Two: Resource Competition and Geopolitical Fragmentation

The Coming Scarcity Wars

Current trajectory: Rising nationalism, deteriorating international institutions, increasing military spending, and declining cooperation—while resource pressures mount.

2030-2050: Stress Fractures

• Water wars become real: The Nile Basin (Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan), Tigris-Euphrates (Turkey, Syria, Iraq), Mekong (China, Southeast Asia), and Indus (India, Pakistan) all face allocation crises. When Pakistan—a nuclear power—faces water shortages threatening its survival, while India—also nuclear—controls upstream flows, we enter unprecedented risk territory.
• Arctic resource competition: As ice melts, shipping routes open and resources become accessible. Russia, the U.S., Canada, and China compete for control. Without strong international frameworks (currently deteriorating), this competition turns militarized.
• Rare earth elements and technology: The energy transition requires massive amounts of lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements. China controls most processing. Competition over these resources entangles with U.S.-China rivalry, creating supply chain vulnerabilities that encourage military action.
• Fishing wars intensify: Fish stocks are collapsing while demand grows. Exclusive economic zones are disputed. Armed conflicts over fishing rights are already occurring (China-Southeast Asia, North Atlantic); they multiply and escalate.

2050-2080: The Fragmentation

• Regional blocs and autarky: Rather than global cooperation, the world fragments into regional blocs attempting self-sufficiency. The EU, North American bloc, Chinese sphere, Russian sphere, and various sub-regions pursue autarky—but none has all resources needed. This creates perpetual low-intensity conflict over borderlands and resources.
• Nuclear proliferation: As security guarantees erode and threats mount, more nations pursue nuclear weapons. South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Iran (if not already), Poland—all have motivations. Each new nuclear power increases accident probability, miscalculation risk, and terrorist acquisition risk.
• Climate migration conflicts: By 2070, hundreds of millions of climate refugees seek resettlement. Receiving countries, facing their own climate pressures, militarize borders. Refugee camps become permanent cities. Humanitarian catastrophes multiply.
• Authoritarian resilience: Democracies struggle with climate adaptation’s long timelines and painful transitions. Authoritarian states can impose rapid changes, creating a selection pressure favoring authoritarianism. The global democratic recession continues.

The Conflict Trap

Here’s the deadly dynamic: Climate stress increases resource competition. Resource competition increases military spending. Military spending diverts resources from adaptation. Lack of adaptation worsens climate impacts. Climate impacts worsen resource scarcity.

Each crisis justifies military priorities over development, ensuring the next crisis is worse. We spiral.

Track Three: Technological Disruption and Existential Risks

The Double-Edged Sword

Current trajectory: Rapid technological development in AI, biotechnology, and synthetic biology—with minimal governance and strong competitive pressures.

2030-2050: The Capability Explosion

• AI reaches and exceeds human-level performance in most cognitive tasks. But we develop these systems:
  • Under intense corporate and national competition (racing ahead of safety)
  • Without solving alignment (ensuring AI goals match human welfare)
  • Deployed by actors with conflicting interests (authoritarian surveillance, corporate profit, military advantage)
  • In a context of deteriorating trust and cooperation

The result: Extraordinarily powerful optimization systems pursuing goals that may not align with human flourishing, deployed by actors in conflict with each other. The scenarios range from economic displacement (AI replaces most human labor, creating massive unemployment without social safety nets) to autonomous weapons systems making life-death decisions at machine speed, to AI-powered surveillance creating inescapable authoritarianism.

• Biotechnology becomes accessible: CRISPR and successor technologies make genetic engineering easier and cheaper. The same tools that could eliminate genetic diseases can create engineered pandemics. Unlike nuclear weapons (requiring rare materials and large facilities), bioweapons can be created in small labs by skilled individuals.

Current trend: International biosecurity cooperation is inadequate. Synthetic biology advances faster than governance. In a world of heightened conflict and deteriorating norms, engineered pandemics become not hypothetical but probable—whether from state actors, terrorist groups, or accidental release.

• Autonomous weapons proliferate: Military AI develops under the same competitive pressures that drove nuclear weapons. “Slaughterbots”—small autonomous drones that identify and kill targets—are technically feasible now and becoming cheaper. Arms control agreements are weak or absent. Once deployed by one power, others must match it.

2050-2080: The Control Problem

Two concerning scenarios emerge:

Scenario A: Multipolar AI Competition Multiple state and corporate actors deploy increasingly powerful AI systems without coordination. Each racing ahead because falling behind is unacceptable. This creates:

• Brittle, unstable systems (speed prioritized over safety)
• Unexpected interactions (multiple powerful systems optimizing for different goals)
• Reduced human oversight (decisions too fast for human intervention)
• AI-enabled warfare (conflicts fought at machine speed with machine logic)

Historical analogy: Imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis, but decisions made by algorithms in milliseconds rather than humans over days. The margin for error approaches zero.

Scenario B: Authoritarian Lock-in AI-enabled surveillance, social credit systems, and behavioral prediction become so sophisticated that authoritarian control becomes nearly escape-proof. Dissent is predicted and prevented. Information is completely controlled. Physical rebellion is impossible against autonomous defense systems.

This could lock in authoritarian governance for centuries—a “eternal” dictatorship enabled by technology. Once established, there’s no clear path to liberation.

2080-2100: The Question Mark

Beyond 2080, the range of scenarios becomes so wide that prediction is nearly impossible. Either:

• We’ve navigated these technologies successfully (established governance, aligned AI, biosecurity)
• Or we’ve experienced catastrophic failures (AI misalignment, engineered pandemic, autonomous weapons war)

The concerning trend: We’re developing god-like technological powers while our political systems remain locked in 20th-century nation-state competition. The powers grow exponentially; wisdom grows linearly if at all.

Track Four: Social Cohesion and Institutional Collapse

The Fraying of Trust

Current trajectory: Declining trust in institutions, rising polarization, weakening of democratic norms, and growth of zero-sum thinking—all accelerating.

2030-2050: Legitimacy Crisis

• Democratic backsliding continues: More democracies slide into “electoral authoritarianism”—maintaining election theater while concentrating power. Hungary, Turkey, India, Brazil show the path. As climate stress and economic disruption intensify, voters increasingly choose “strong leaders” over democratic process.
• Information ecosystems fragment completely: AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from reality. “Deepfakes” are trivial to create. Everyone lives in algorithmically-curated information bubbles. Shared reality—necessary for democratic deliberation—ceases to exist. Political compromise becomes impossible when citizens don’t agree on basic facts.
• Inequality reaches historical extremes: The top 1% owns 60-70% of global wealth. This isn’t just unfair; it’s unstable. Historical precedent shows societies with extreme inequality face:
  • Popular uprisings (Arab Spring x 100)
  • Authoritarian crackdowns (to maintain order)
  • State failure (when elites lose control)
• Generational conflict intensifies: Young people, facing climate catastrophe their elders created, economic systems that don’t provide opportunity, and political systems that don’t respond to them, increasingly view the current system as illegitimate. But they inherit the same dysfunctional structures.

2050-2080: Institutional Failure

• States lose monopoly on violence: As states fail to provide security, prosperity, or legitimacy, alternative power structures emerge—militias, gangs, warlords, corporate security forces, armed community groups. Parts of Mexico, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan show the pattern; it spreads.
• Mass migration without destination: Climate refugees face militarized borders. Host countries can’t or won’t absorb them. Massive camps become permanent settlements. Generations grow up stateless, without education or opportunity—creating tomorrow’s instability.
• Pandemic becomes endemic: Without global cooperation, emerging pandemics (zoonotic diseases increase with climate change and habitat destruction) can’t be contained. COVID-19 was mild compared to what’s possible. Society adapts to perpetual pandemic risk through isolation, restrictions, and decreased human contact—corroding social capital further.
• The collapse of professional management: Complex systems (electrical grids, supply chains, financial systems, healthcare) require skilled professional management based on expertise and trust. As these erode, systems fail. Power outages become common. Supply chains unreliable. Financial crises frequent. Healthcare rationed or unavailable.

2080-2100: Neo-Medievalism?

Some political scientists describe the emerging order as “neo-medieval”—not a return to the Middle Ages but a world with:

• Overlapping, competing authorities (states, corporations, criminal networks, militia groups)
• No clear monopoly on legitimate violence
• Fragmented legal orders (different rules in different spaces)
• Walls and fortification (gated communities, bordered zones)
• Extreme inequality (small elites in protected enclaves, masses outside)

This isn’t Mad Max—it’s more like a high-tech version of feudalism, with elites in climate-controlled compounds protected by private security, while the majority navigates failed states, climate disasters, and resource scarcity.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Clash of Civilization: First Predictions of the Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

You might deem it self-evident that words should have meanings, but a growing number of people believe words can mean anything the speaker wants. It seems we now inhabit the fictional world imagined by Lewis Carroll, where, as Humpty Dumpty said, any word “means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” In the recent “what is a woman” debates, some argued that the word “woman” means whatever anyone feels the word woman should mean. Similarly, in a recent social media debate involving the campaign to “abolish prisons” and set criminals free, a supporter of the “abolish prisons” campaign advocated for the imprisonment of homeowners who defend their property against criminals. When asked if imprisoning homeowners did not contradict his “abolish prisons” stance, he responded that “abolish” does not necessarily mean “abolish.” He argued that claiming the word “abolish” has any specific meaning is a logical fallacy known as “appeal to definition.”

As it happens, the dictionary now includes the evolving definition of a woman. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a woman as either “an adult female human being” or “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been considered to have a different sex at birth.” It gives the following two sentences as examples of the second meaning:

Mary is a woman who was assigned male at birth.

Transgender woman; Marie is a transgender woman (= she was considered to be male at birth).

Perhaps we ought to be grateful that appealing to the dictionary is now regarded as a logical fallacy, given that dictionaries are increasingly caving in to the new woke definitions of words. We can only hope they will not update the dictionary to explain that the meaning of the word “abolish” depends on what exactly you are trying to abolish. But a more serious question also arises—how are people to communicate if words do not have specific meanings?

Words are the building blocks of language. Words must mean something, if language is to express or convey anything. There is no doubt that how words are used depends largely on the context, and the connotations of a word may vary according to context, but trying to understand the context is an exercise in futility if words have no meaning in the first place. In his Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, the philosopher John Hospers explains that the meaning of words is determined by convention, and that, “Since words are conventional signs, there is no such thing as the right or wrong word for a thing.” He argues that a speaker is free to use words otherwise than in their conventional sense, as long as he stipulates what he means by the word and remains consistent with the stipulated meaning. He calls this “freedom of stipulation.” However, Hospers points out that doing this—stipulating one’s own meaning of words that varies from the conventional meaning—would usually be “extremely confusing to other people.” Far from being “practical or useful,” it would often be “inconvenient” or, even worse, misleading.

In order not to mislead them, you would (if you wanted to stick to your new usage) have to tell them in advance that you were not using [the word] to mean the same thing that they were. Even so, the situation would be greatly complicated by your new usage…they would have to remember that you were using it to mean something different from the thing they had used the word to mean for many years. Such complication would be needless. There would be nothing to be said for it and everything to be said against it, but it would not be wrong—only confusing.

Hospers argues that, to avoid confusion, one should usually follow the “rule of common usage.” He acknowledges that there could be sound reasons to depart from common usage, for example when the common usage of a word is wrong or confusing. He gives the example of the word “liberal,” which he describes as “so indefinite in its present meaning that its continued use is confusing and unprofitable…the word as now used is simply a blanket term covering a nest of confusions.” Clearly, sticking determinedly to the correct meaning of words, when the wrong word is in common usage, is perfectly fine, and some may even say it is commendable. For example, some people only ever use the word “liberal” to mean classical liberal, and never use it in the conventional—but wrong—sense to mean an egalitarian, progressive, or socialist.

However, very often people who depart from common usage are not motivated by a desire for accuracy, or by any commendable purpose. On the contrary, they seek deliberately to confuse and obfuscate. As Hospers explains,

More often, however, when a word or phrase is used in violation of common usage, this is not done in the interest of clarity but in the interest of beguiling you into accepting an unwarranted conclusion.

An example is the political use of moralizing words like equality, justice, fairness—words that beguile voters into accepting whatever has been proposed. Hence, despotic states describe themselves as “democratic.” The South African government is now running a system of race-based laws which assign rights, privileges, and priorities based on race, but, instead of being called “apartheid,” it is dishonestly called “redress” or “transformation.” They are reversing apartheid by reintroducing apartheid under a new name, operating in the opposite direction. Instead of oppressing black people, which was “injustice,” they are now oppressing white people, which is “restorative justice.” George Orwell described this dystopian strategy:

The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.

Even when there is no dishonest intention to deceive, the fact that many words have different meanings creates the risk of slipping subtly from one meaning to another and unwittingly falling into error. When words are used in an unconventional sense this ought to be disclosed at the outset, and if the wrong connotation has inadvertently been employed, it should be clarified as soon as it becomes clear that the sense in which the word is used has communicated the wrong idea. Otherwise, much time will be wasted in debating the meaning of words and never getting to the heart of the matter. In many cases, as Hospers says, “you and he may argue at cross purposes until you realize that he is using the word in this rather unusual sense.”

But in many cases, the errors are not inadvertent or merely careless. They involve people deliberately “manipulating words and employing them in violation of common usage without informing their hearers of the fact.” Often, the person who belatedly claims that he was using words in an idiosyncratic sense only offers this confession precisely to avoid conceding the debate after he is shown to be wrong. To use an example given by Hospers, imagine someone who confidently states that “All cats bark,” who then—when proved to be incorrect—claims that by “cat” he of course meant dog, or that by “bark” he merely meant “meow” or any sound made by an animal. Therefore, he was not wrong, he was just using words unconventionally. Or so he would have you believe.

The post The Importance of Using Words Honestly appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s been 20 years since I retired from the Air Force and 40 years since I first entered Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt at the southern end of the Front Range that includes Pikes Peak in Colorado. So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF). Along with the usual warrior talk, the CSAF vowed to “relentlessly advocate” for the new Sentinel ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. While the Air Force often speaks of “investing” in new nukes, this time the CSAF opted for “recapitalization,” a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems.

(Take a moment to think about that word, “creation,” applied to weapons of mass destruction. Raised Catholic, I learned that God created the universe out of nothing. By comparison, nuclear creators aren’t gods, they’re devils, for their “creation” may end with the destruction of everything. Small wonder J. Robert Oppenheimer mused that he’d become death, the destroyer of worlds, after the first successful atomic blast in 1945.)

In my Cheyenne Mountain days, circa 1985, the new “must have” bomber was the B-1 Lancer and the new “must have” ICBM was the MX Peacekeeper. If you go back 20 to 30 years earlier than that, it was the B-52 and the Minuteman. And mind you, my old service “owns” two legs of America’s nuclear triad. (The Navy has the third with its nuclear submarines armed with Trident II missiles.) And count on one thing: it will never willingly give them up. It will always “relentlessly advocate” for the latest ICBM and nuclear-capable bomber, irrespective of need, price, strategy, or above all else their murderous, indeed apocalyptic, capabilities.

At this moment, Donald Trump’s America has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia has roughly 5,500 of the same. Together, they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable. Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet. The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it. But don’t tell that to the generals and admirals, or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry, or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts.

So, here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another $1.7 trillion (and no, that is not a typo!) “recapitalizing” its nuclear triad, and so in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a possible future doomsday, the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds, and a true “end-times” catastrophe.

I Join AF Space Command Only to Find Myself Under 2,000 Feet of Granite

My first military assignment in 1985 was at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado with Air Force Space Command. That put me in America’s nuclear command post during the last few years of the Cold War. I also worked in the Space Surveillance Center and on a battle staff that brought me into the Missile Warning Center. So, I was exposed, in a relatively modest way (if anything having to do with nuclear weapons can ever be considered “modest”), to what nuclear war would actually be like and forced to think about it in a way most Americans don’t.

Each time I journeyed into Cheyenne Mountain, I walked or rode through a long tunnel carved out of granite. The buildings inside were mounted on gigantic springs (yes, springs!) that were supposed to absorb the shock of any nearby hydrogen bomb blast in a future war with the Soviet Union. Massive blast doors that looked like they belonged on the largest bank vault in the universe were supposed to keep us safe, though in a nuclear war they might only have ensured our entombment. They were mostly kept open, but every now and then they were closed for a military exercise.

I was a “space systems test analyst.” The Space Surveillance Center ran on a certain software program that needed periodic testing and evaluation and I helped test the computer software that kept track of all objects orbiting the Earth. Back then, there were just over 5,000 of them. (Now, that number’s more like 45,000 and space is a lot more crowded — perhaps too crowded.)

Anyhow, what I remember most vividly were military exercises where we’d run through different potentially world-ending scenarios. (Think of the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick.) One exercise simulated a nuclear attack on the United States. No, it wasn’t like some Hollywood production. We just had monochrome computer displays with primitive graphics, but you could certainly see missile tracks emerging from the Soviet Union, crossing the North Pole, and ending at American cities.

Even though there were no fancy (fake) explosions and no other special effects, simply realizing what was possible and how we would visualize it if it were actually to happen was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a distinctly sobering experience and not one I’ve ever forgotten.

That “war game” should have shaken me up more than it did, however. At the time, we had a certain amount of fatalism about the possibility of nuclear war, something captured in the posters of the era that told you what to do in case of a nuclear attack. The final step was basically to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. That was indeed my attitude.

Rather than obsess about Armageddon, I submerged myself in routine. There was a certain job to be done, procedures to be carried out, discipline to adhere to. Remember, of course, that this was also the era of the rise of the nuclear freeze protest movement that was demanding the U.S. and the Soviet Union reach an agreement to halt further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. (If only, of course!) In addition, this was the time of the hit film The Day After, which tried to portray the aftermath of a nuclear war in the United States. In fact, on a midnight shift in Cheyenne Mountain, I even read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which envisioned the Cold War gone hot, a Third World War gone nuclear.

Of course, if we had thought about nuclear war every minute of every day, we might indeed have been cowering under our sheets. Unfortunately, as a society, except in rare moments like the nuclear freeze movement one, we neither considered nor generally grasped what nuclear war was all about (even though nine countries now possess such weaponry and the likelihood of such a war only grows). Unfortunately, that lack of comprehension (and so protest) is one big reason why nuclear war remains so chillingly possible.

If anything, such a war has been eerily normalized in our collective consciousness and we’ve become remarkably numb to and fatalistic about it. One characteristic of that reality was the anesthetizing language that we used then (and still use) when it came to nuclear matters. We in the military spoke in acronyms or jargon about “flexible response,” “deterrence,” and what was then known as “mutually assured destruction” (or the wiping out of everything). In fact, we had a whole vocabulary of different words and euphemisms we could use so as not to think too deeply about the unthinkable or our possible role in making it happen.

My Date With Trinity

After leaving Cheyenne Mountain and getting a master’s degree, I co-taught a course on the making and use of the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy. That was in 1992, and we actually took the cadets on a field trip to Los Alamos where the first nuclear weapon had largely been developed. Then we went on to the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where, of course, that first atomic device was tested and that, believe me, was an unforgettable experience. We walked around and saw what was left of the tower where Robert Oppenheimer and crew suspended the “gadget” (nice euphemism!) for testing that bomb on July 16, 1945, less than a month before two atomic bombs would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying both of them and killing perhaps 200,000 people. Basically (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn), nothing’s left of that tower except for its concrete base and a couple of twisted pieces of metal. It certainly does make you reflect on the sheer power of such weaponry. It was then and remains a distinctly haunted landscape and walking around it a truly sobering experience.

And when I toured the Los Alamos lab right after the collapse of the other great superpower of that moment, the Soviet Union, it was curious how glum the people I met there were. The mood of the scientists was like: hey, maybe I’m going to have to find another job because we’re not going to be building all these nuclear weapons anymore, not with the Soviet Union gone. It was so obviously time for America to cash in its “peace dividends” and the scientists’ mood reflected that.

Now, just imagine that 33 years after I took those cadets there, Los Alamos is once again going gangbusters, as our nation plans to “invest” another $1.7 trillion in a “modernized” nuclear triad (imagine what that means in terms of ultimate destruction!) that we (and the rest of the world) absolutely don’t need.  To be blunt, today that outrages me. It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal. Worse yet, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we didn’t even try to change course. And now the message is: Let’s spend staggering amounts of our tax dollars on even more apocalyptic weaponry. It’s insanity and, no question about it, it’s also morally obscene.

The Glitter of Nuclear Weapons

That ongoing obsession with total destruction, ultimate annihilation, reflects the fact that the United States is led by moral midgets. During the Vietnam War years, the infamous phrase of the time was that the U.S. military had to “destroy the town to save it” (from communism, of course). And for 70 years now, America’s leaders have tacitly threatened to order the destruction of the world to save it from a rival power like Russia or China. Indeed, nuclear war plans in the early 1960s already envisioned a massive strike against Russia and China, with estimates of the dead put at 600 million, or “100 Holocausts,” as Daniel Ellsberg of Vietnam War fame so memorably put it.

Take it from this retired officer: you simply can’t trust the U.S. military with that sort of destructive power. Indeed, you can’t trust anyone with that much power at their fingertips. Consider nuclear weapons akin to the One Ring of Power in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who puts that ring on is inevitably twisted and corrupted.

Freeman Dyson, a physicist of considerable probity, put it well to documentarian Jon Else in his film The Day After Trinity. Dyson confessed to his own “ring of power” moment:

“I felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

I’ve felt something akin to that as well. When I wore a military uniform, I was in some sense a captive to power. The military both captures and captivates. There’s an allure of power in the military, since you have a lot of destructive power at your disposal.

Of course, I wasn’t a B-1 bomber pilot or a missile-launch officer for ICBMs, but even so, when you’re part of something that’s so immensely, even world-destructively powerful, believe me, it does have an allure to it. And I don’t think we’re usually fully aware of how captivating that can be and how much you can want to be a part of that.

Even after their service, many veterans still want to go up in a warplane again or take a tour of a submarine, a battleship, or an aircraft carrier for nostalgic reasons, of course, but also because you want to regain that captivating feeling of being so close to immense — even world-ending — power.

The saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” may never be truer than when it comes to nuclear war. We even have expressions like “use them or lose them” to express how ICBMs should be “launched on warning” of a nuclear attack before they can be destroyed by an incoming enemy strike. So many years later, in other words, the world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge, that will make those trigger fingers of ours too itchy to resist the urge to put too much pressure on that nuclear trigger.

No matter how many bunkers we build, no matter that the world’s biggest bunker tunneled out of a mountain, the one I was once in, still exists, nothing will save us if we allow the glitter of nuclear weapons to flash into preternatural thermonuclear brightness.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post Apocalypse Soon? appeared first on LewRockwell.

For years Donald Trump had no more committed a MAGA supporter than Rep. Margaret Taylor Greene of Georgia.

As a private citizen, she had been fervently loyal to Trump during all the troubles and setbacks of his first term.

Greene was then elected to Congress in 2020 and upon taking office fully endorsed Trump’s claims of a stolen election and his efforts to have it overturned. Just days later, the January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol by a mob of outraged Trump supporters prompted many to denounce him as an insurrectionist, with numerous prominent Republicans joining that chorus of condemnation.

After that incident, Trump was immediately purged from Twitter, losing direct access to his tens of millions of erstwhile followers and crippling his influence. But Greene never wavered, and her loyalty to Trump soon led to a House vote removing her from all her committee roles, effectively eliminating most of her Congressional responsibilities.

During 2023 many dozens of felony charges were filed against Trump, with the four separate criminal prosecutions taking place in fiercely anti-Trump localities, whose juries were expected to convict him. As a result, most political analysts wrote off the former president as a political has-been, much more likely to end up financially bankrupt and in a prison cell than with any chance of regaining the White House in 2024. Indeed, many of the committed right-wing activists who had constituted Trump’s base shifted their support in the 2024 race to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, believing that he had a much better chance of winning the presidency and enacting elements of Trump’s agenda because he lacked the latter’s heavy political baggage.

But Greene stayed loyal, and her 28,000 word Wikipedia page never even mentions DeSantis, nor Nicki Haley, the former Trump official also widely promoted as a leading candidate in the 2024 primaries.

However, all of this began to change earlier this year, as Greene became more and more openly critical of many of Trump’s current policies. The flashpoint was the complete reversal on his longstanding pledge to release all the Jeffrey Epstein documents. So about a month ago Tucker Carlson interviewed Greene for thirty minutes regarding her growing break with Trump, preceding their discussion with his own hour-long monologue on the MAGA movement and its ideological principles.

Video Link

I’d always vaguely regarded MAGA—“Make America Great Again”—as merely a populist, right-wing slogan devoid of any substantive meaning, and indeed the 10,000 word Wikipedia article seems to suggest exactly that. But Carlson instead insisted that Trump’s ideological movement had clear principles, being based upon what he described as the Five Pillars of MAGA, which I’d summarize as follows:

• Putting the Interests of America First in Foreign Policy and Everything Else
• America Must Control Its Borders and Build a Wall
• No More Unnecessary Foreign Wars
• Stop Globalization and Bring Manufacturing Jobs Back to America
• Stop Censorship and Protect Free Speech

However, whether or not those fundamental pillars of the Trump MAGA movement may have existed, the actual policies implemented suggest that Trump himself was completely unaware of these.

For example, just a few weeks after Trump’s second inaugural I highlighted one of the most shocking actions taken by the new administration:

A 30-year-old Tufts doctoral student and Fulbright Scholar from Turkey was walking across her Boston-area neighborhood on the way to a holiday dinner at a friend’s house when she was suddenly seized and abducted in the early evening by six masked federal agents of the Department of Homeland Security. The terrified young woman was handcuffed and taken to a waiting car, secretly detained for the next 24 hours without access to friends, family, or lawyers, then shipped off to a holding cell in Louisiana and scheduled for immediate deportation, although a federal judge has now temporarily stayed the proceedings.

Just one of the Tweets showing a short clip of that incident has been viewed more than 4.5 million times, with a much longer YouTube video accumulating another couple of hundred thousand views.

That very disturbing scene seemed like something out of a Hollywood film chronicling the actions of a dystopian American police state, and that initial impression was only solidified once media reports explained why Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the streets of her home town. Her only reported transgression had been her co-authorship of an op-ed piece in the Tufts student newspaper a year earlier sharply criticizing Israel and its ongoing attacks on the civilian population of Gaza.

Apparently, one of the many powerful pro-Israel censorship organizations funded by Zionist billionaires became outraged over her sentiments and decided to make a public example of her, so its minions in the subservient Trump Administration immediately ordered her arrest.

• The Zionist Destruction of American Higher Education
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 31, 2025 • 7,300 Words

Snatching legal permanent American residents off our city streets because they had once been critical of the policies of a foreign government seemed to violate more than half of the alleged MAGA principles, and this pattern certainly continued during the months that followed.

Despite the intense lobbying of both Carlson and influential TPUSA leader Charlie Kirk, Trump later attacked Iran at the obvious behest of the Israel Lobby, which seemed to exercise even greater influence over his administration than it ever had over previous ones. Kirk’s strong disillusionment with the Israeli control over our government was soon followed by his extremely suspicious assassination, then by more recent claims that the FBI investigation may have been severely circumscribed while efforts by other administration figures to get at the truth of what happened were completely blocked.

So while someone like Rep. Greene had been completely committed to the MAGA agenda, the president she followed was not, and as a staunch believer in the ideals of “America First,” she began expressing her outrage that our own government had apparently fallen under the control of partisans serving a foreign nation. Tens of millions of Americans had voted for MAGA but they instead got MIGA—“Make Israel Great Again.”

This has hardly been the only example of MAGA failures or betrayals at the hands of our erratic president.

The bizarre, almost random nature of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and the rapid reversal that followed seemed very unlikely to shift substantial numbers of manufacturing jobs back to America. Major business investment decisions require confidence in long-term stability, and with Trump dramatically changing his tariff policies apparently by personal whim on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis, none of that exists.

Over the last few weeks, Trump has regularly denounced Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a notorious drug-dealer while providing no evidence to substantiate such accusations. These seemed aimed at justifying a looming American military attack against that country, with former Trump ally Col. Douglas Macgregor recently arguing that such a war will cost him his presidency. Then just a couple of days ago, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted for drug-dealing by an American jury in 2024 and sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for flooding our country with 500 tons of cocaine over twenty years.

Soon after Greene’s appearance on Carlson’s show, Trump angrily denounced her and promised to support a Republican challenger in her district. More importantly, she began receiving numerous death-threats directed against herself and her family. Perhaps mindful of Kirk’s fate, she announced that she would resign from Congress in January.

Although all American presidents since Lyndon Johnson have been firmly pro-Israel, the Trump Administration has taken that policy to an absurd, almost cartoonish extent.

Earlier this year, Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, had a long and friendly meeting with Jonathan Pollard, perhaps the most notorious traitor in recent American history, and neither Trump nor any of this officials seemed to take serious offense at that decision.

Meanwhile, one of the most forceful domestic policies pursued by Trump’s appointees has been their major campaign to combat antisemitism across our universities and the rest of our society, with the term usually so broadly defined as to encompass almost any criticism of Israel or Jews.

About a month ago, a political scientist named Laura K. Field published Furious Minds, a 400 page volume released by Princeton University Press analyzing the MAGA movement of President Donald Trump. Her work drew a long list of very favorable reviews and blurbs, from the New York Times on down and was even named a Financial Times Book of the Year.

But although her work was intended to be a guide to the beliefs permeating Trump’s political movement of the last few years and his current administration, she also naturally discussed the circumstances of Trump’s first presidential race. During that campaign, his candidacy was heavily associated with the Alt-Right movement, whose large and energetic presence on social media and the rest of the Internet may have helped him overcome all of Hillary Clinton’s huge traditional advantages in mainstream media support, political endorsements, and a far larger advertising budget.

Yet oddly enough, that Alt-Right movement was widely perceived as extremely critical of Jewish influence and Israel, with many of its leading figures expressing strongly antisemitic or even neo-Nazi beliefs.

The Alt-Right collapsed years ago and has no real connection with Trump’s current policies or personnel. But at the time, it had provoked an enormous amount of public attention, probably far more than any focus on MAGA. So before analyzing those latter ideas, I decided to first reexamine the very different group of activists and ideologues who had been so strongly identified with Trump’s 2016 race, a movement that I’d casually followed at the time but never investigated in any detail.

In her discussion, Field had repeatedly cited the work of George Hawley, a professor at the University of Alabama who had apparently become something of an academic expert on the Alt-Right, so I ordered and read his books, beginning with Right-Wing Critics of American Conservativism. Published by the University Press of Kansas, that 2016 volume seemed to have established his reputation as an authority on far right political movements, laying the basis for his subsequent books on the Alt-Right.

Hawley covered the origins of modern American conservativism and the many challenges it had faced over the years from the right, with his account generally following a rather conventional narrative.

After briefly discussing the Old Right of the pre-World War II era, he explained how William F. Buckley Jr. had essentially created modern American conservativism by founding National Review in 1955. Next, he recounted Buckley’s generally successful efforts to purge his mainstream conservative movement of various factions that he considered extremist or otherwise disreputable, including the highly conspiratorial John Birch Society and Ayn Rand’s libertarian Objectivists.

Following this introductory treatment, Hawley then devoted individual chapters to some of the other right-wing ideological challengers that mainstream conservatives had faced over the decades, including the “Localism” movement, libertarians, radical libertarians, and the Paleoconservatives of the 1990s. With the exception of his coverage of the “Localists”—who seemed rather unimportant to me—none of this material was new or ground-breaking, merely reflecting a traditional narrative presented in numerous other books that I had read over the years.

I noticed that no chapter was devoted to the Neocons, although the policies advocated by those former liberals and leftists were at least as divergent from the mainstream conservative movement as those groups that he had included. One of the most popular right-wing books of the 1960s was None Dare Call It Treason, with the title drawn from the famous epigram of an Elizabethan courtier pointing out that if traitors or rebels succeed in their enterprise, they inevitably rewrite history to conceal what had happened. And since the Neocons successfully seized control of the mainstream conservative movement during the 1980s and 1990s, purging any who opposed them, they were extensively discussed in Hawley’s text but unlike the other rebellious factions, no chapter was allocated to their successful coup.

Although most of his coverage seemed fine, some of Hawley’s rather blatant errors did jump out at me. For example, he repeatedly misidentified the very influential Gentile libertarian economist and Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek as a secular Jew. And although the author correctly explained that Buckley had based his conservatism upon Frank Meyer’s fusion of the three separate strands of free market economics, a hawkish anti-Communist foreign policy, and traditional social values, Hawley always misspelled it as “Fushionism,” a non-existent term rather than the “Fusionism” that it has always been called. These sorts of items suggested that the author lacked any deep knowledge of the ideological movement whose history he was describing.

A much more serious problem with Hawley’s account was one that he shared with nearly all previous histories of the conservative movement, which he had obviously used as his sources. These latter were almost invariably based in that ideological milieu, so much so that his discussion of the right-wing challenges that conservatism had faced was a little like using Stalinist tracts as the starting point for an analysis of Trotskyism.

This was not a major problem when author focused on libertarians or Paleoconservatives since he would then consider their own writings. But I think he seriously missed the boat with regard to earlier periods from the 1950s or the 1960s, failing to realize that later conservative chroniclers might have deliberately ignored or downplayed some important right-wingers whom they or their own earlier sources had regarded as too dangerous to discuss. After all, if conservatives had successfully thrown their early opponents down the memory-hole, the last thing they wanted was to resurrect such past ideological foes and bring them to the attention of later writers.

Consider, for example, Prof. Revilo P. Oliver, a distinguished classics scholar, who only received a single brief mention, one that casually dismissed him as a minor early conservative figure jettisoned for his antisemitism. Such a characterization was exactly how he has almost invariably been portrayed in mainstream conservative histories if they even bothered to mention him at all. But this is far from accurate, and by blindly relying upon such accounts, the author was merely repeating such severe distortions. During World War II, Oliver had headed an important American code-breaking division and then later served as one of the leading early figures in both National Review and the John Birch Society during the 1950s and 1960s, afterwards spending decades as a highly influential figure in far right circles prior to his 1994 death.

The fiercely atheistic and antisemitic Oliver had long been personally close to Buckley, having been a member of the latter’s 1950 wedding party—according to Paul Gottfried even serving as his best man—and his 1981 memoirs America’s Decline included some shocking facts about the early conservative movement. According to Oliver, National Review had originally been founded with the explicit, secret goal of combatting Jewish influence in American society. In support of that dramatic claim, we know that the largest portion of the initial funding came from Buckley’s own very wealthy father, who was notorious for his ferocious antisemitic sentiments. Oliver also claimed that the John Birch Society had been founded a few years later with exactly that same secret, antisemitic agenda. But Oliver explained that funding difficulties soon forced both those conservative organizations to desperately seek the support of major Jewish donors and therefore completely abandon those original goals, which they naturally did their best to conceal.

I summarized this remarkable first-hand account in a 2019 article, and whether or not Hawley would have credited Oliver’s stories, he certainly should have included the latter’s memoirs among his important source materials.

An even more serious omission came with regard to Prof. John Beaty’s 1951 volume The Iron Curtain Over America, which went through some 17 printings and reportedly became the second bestselling conservative book of the 1950s. Like Oliver, Beaty was a well-regarded academic scholar and during World War II he had held one of our most crucial positions in Military Intelligence, being responsible for producing the daily briefing reports provided to the White House and all our other top military and political leaders. Once again, both Beaty and his huge conservative bestseller have been totally removed from almost all our conservative histories, and Hawley seemed completely unaware of either the man or his book.

The reason for Beaty’s total purge from conservative memory is hardly mysterious. Although he himself was a strong anti-Communist and a devout Christian of rather moderate views, his central wartime role and his subsequent years of research led to his explosive account of the enormous but hidden role of Jewish organizations in our political life and our involvement in the war, and his dramatic claims were strongly endorsed by a long list of top generals and influential U.S. senators. The title of his book referred to the “iron curtain” of Jewish media control that had descended upon American society, and it seemed likely that Beaty’s analysis of that growing problem may have helped prompt the founding of National Review a few years later.

Read the Whole Article

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Just as the news breaks that Trump has issued Maduro an ultimatum to leave Venezuela immediately if he wants to escape with his life, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has published an amazingly brazen war propaganda piece titled “How Venezuelan Gangs and African Jihadists Are Flooding Europe With Cocaine.”

“Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities,” the article begins, going out of its way to note that “the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro — who it asserts is heavily involved in drug smuggling — has brought global attention to the country’s role in the drug trade.”

The propaganda piece is plainly aimed at Europeans as well as Americans, emphasizing Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s quip last month that the Europeans “should be thanking us” for blowing up alleged drug boats coming from Venezuela because he says some of those drugs are winding up in Europe.

It’s got everything. Whipping up international support for a regime change war. Fearmongering about “jihadists”. The evil, scary dictator. The whole war propaganda sales package.

Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities. https://t.co/Oz1U9wtWVI

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 1, 2025

The mass media do this every time the US empire gets war-horny. And the Murdoch press are always the most egregious offenders.

Reminds me of an old tweet by a man named Malcolm Price:

“I remember in the run-up to the Iraq War a friend I had known all my life suddenly said to me, ‘We must do something about this monster in Iraq.’ I said, ‘When did you first think that?’ He answered honestly, ‘A month ago’.”

Price’s friend had been swept up in the imperial war propaganda campaign that had recently begun, just like countless millions of others. Month after month after month western consciousness was hammered with false narratives about weapons of mass destruction, forced associations of Saddam Hussein with 9/11, and stories about how much better things will be for the people of Iraq once that evil tyrant is gone.

Normally it never would have occurred to the average westerner that a country on the other side of the planet should be invaded and its leader replaced with a puppet regime. That’s not the sort of thing that would have organically entered someone’s mind. It needed to be placed there.

So it was.

The most common misconception about the free press of the western world is that it exists. All the west’s most influential and far-reaching news media publications are here not to report factual stories about current events, but to manufacture consent for the pre-existing agendas of the US-centralized western empire.

They report many true things, to be sure, and if you acquire some media literacy you can actually learn how to glean a lot of useful information from the imperial press without losing your mind to the spin machine. But reporting true things is not their purpose. Their purpose is to manipulate public psychology at mass scale for the benefit of the empire they serve.

This doesn’t happen through some kind of centralized Ministry of Truth where sinister social engineers secretly conspire to deceive people. It happens because all mainstream press institutions are controlled either by plutocrats or by western governments in the form of state broadcasters like the BBC, both of which have a vested interest in maintaining the imperial status quo. They control who the executives and lead editors of these outlets are, and those leaders shape the hiring and editing processes of the publication or broadcaster. Reporters come to understand that there are certain lines they need to color within if they want to get articles published and continue advancing their careers, so they either learn to toe the imperial line or they disappear from the mass media industry.

If people had a clear understanding of everything that’s really going on in our world, they would tear the empire apart brick by brick. If they could truly see how much evil is being done in their name and really wrap their minds around it, and if they could understand how much wealth the plutocrats are getting out of the imperial status quo compared to how little they themselves benefit from it, there would be immediate revolution. So the oligarchs and empire managers shore up narrative control in the form of media ownership, think tanks, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, imperial information ops like Wikipedia, and now increasingly through billionaire-owned AI chatbots to ensure that this never happens.

I remember in the run-up to the Iraq War a friend I had known all my life suddenly said to me, ‘We must do something about this monster in Iraq.’ I said, ‘When did you first think that?’ He answered honestly, ‘A month ago’. #Propaganda @medialens

— Malcolm Pryce (@exogamist) April 12, 2018

The entire empire is built on a foundation of lies. The whole power structure is held together by nonstop manipulation of the way westerners think, speak, act, shop, work, and vote. If truth ever finds a way to get a word in edgewise, the entire thing would collapse.

We know this is true because the oligarchs and empire managers pour so much wealth and energy into manipulating our minds. They’re not doing this for fun, they’re doing it because they need to. If they didn’t need to, it wouldn’t be happening.

So what they are doing is intensely creepy and destructive, but it’s also empowering, because it shows us right where their weak spot is. They’re pouring all this energy into controlling the dominant narrative because that’s the weakest point in the armor of the imperial machine.

What we need, then, is a grassroots effort to help truth get a word in. Help people understand that they’ve been propagandized and deceived about the world by western media and by their power-serving education systems every day of their lives, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. Sow distrust in the imperial media and institutions. Open people’s eyes to the fact that they’re being lied to, and help them learn to see the truth. Anywhere the empire is sowing lies and distortions — whether that’s in Venezuela or Gaza or somewhere else — use that opportunity to help more people unplug their minds from the propaganda matrix.

A better world is possible. The first step in moving toward it is snapping people out of the propaganda-induced coma which dupes them into settling for this dystopian nightmare instead.

_____________

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The post Ah, Good Old War Propaganda appeared first on LewRockwell.

Malcolm Muggeridge was a talented journalist who lived in Moscow in 1933, working for the Manchester Guardian. Though attracted to communism in his youth, the experience of being in Stalin’s Russia and observing what was going on caused him to become disillusioned. Especially disturbing was his realization that Stalin’s army and police were—as part of their collectivization program—starving millions of landowning peasants (known as kulaks) by confiscating their grain. A large and productive number of kulaks possessed farms in Ukraine, which has some of the richest soil in the world. This massive organized crime—known as the Holodomor—resulted in the deaths of millions in the winter of 1933.

Muggeridge was the ONLY western journalist to report what was going on. When his reports were published, many of his fellow writers—including George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre, Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb—refused to believe them, and they passionately asserted that Muggeridge was spreading falsehoods about Stalin’s regime.

Muggeridge was related to the Webbs by marriage, and years later he told a funny story about Beatrice.

I remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person, an early member of the Fabian Society and so on, saying to me, ‘Yes, it’s true, people disappear in Russia.’ She said it with such great satisfaction that I couldn’t help thinking that there were a lot of people in England whose disappearance she would have liked to organize.”

For decades, Muggeridge’s accurate reporting of the Holodomor was denied and suppressed. The dominant narrative of Stalin’s Russia in the early thirties was that propagated by the New York Times Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, who vehemently denied the Holodomor. While Muggeridge’s true and courageous reporting was denied, Duranty won a Pulitzer Price for his concealment of one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century. It’s a testament to the power of Duranty’s mendacious work that most Americans have still never heard of the Holodomor.

Over the last five years, I’ve often thought about Muggeridge and Duranty as I have watched courageous scholars like Dr. Peter McCullough persecuted and censored, while COVID-19 vaccine ideologues are rewarded. Most notable is the COVID-19 vaccine propagandist, Dr. Peter Hotez, who was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize.

One of the most bizarre features of our bizarre time is that an experimental, gene transfer technology has become an object of unshakable devotion. Among members of the COVID-19 Vaccine Cult, belief in the substance (about which they know nothing) is an article of faith.

In the 1930s, 40s, and even 50s, many of the most prominent journalists, writers, intellectuals, and artists believed in Stalin’s Cult of Personality. Muggeridge knew (from his own observations) that they weren’t seeing the reality of Stalin’s regime. Because they viewed the world through the highly distorting lens of ideology, they couldn’t see what was right in front of them.

I was again reminded of this extremely shabby and disheartening chapter of intellectual history this morning when I watched Dr. McCullough’s exposition of the childhood vaccines deaths that were just acknowledged in a leaked FDA memo.

As he points out, we have known about this for years, and have persistently warned about since August 2020, when Dr. McCullough published his first alarm (The great gamble of COVID-19 vaccine development).

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post When Ideology Collides With Evidence appeared first on LewRockwell.

As it is becoming obvious that Ukraine is losing in the proxy war against Russia, the ideas European governments are are throwing around are getting more crazy.

Some are now eager to ‘pre-emptively’ attack Russia in ‘retaliation’ for alleged ‘hybrid attacks’ against European countries. Those ‘hybrid attacks’ are mostly pure fantasies.

Politico was first to report this nonsense:

Europe thinks the unthinkable: Retaliating against Russia – Politico, Nov 27 2025
Countries are looking at joint offensive cyber operations and surprise military drills as Moscow steps up its campaign to destabilize NATO allies.

Russia’s drones and agents are unleashing attacks across NATO countries and Europe is now doing what would have seemed outlandish just a few years ago: planning how to hit back.

Ideas range from joint offensive cyber operations against Russia, and faster and more coordinated attribution of hybrid attacks by quickly pointing the finger at Moscow, to surprise NATO-led military exercises, according to two senior European government officials and three EU diplomats.

“The Russians are constantly testing the limits — what is the response, how far can we go?” Latvian Foreign Minister Baiba Braže noted in an interview. A more “proactive response is needed,” she told POLITICO. “And it’s not talking that sends a signal — it’s doing.”

What are the ‘hybrid attacks’ in question?

Russian drones have buzzed Poland and Romania in recent weeks and months, while mysterious drones have caused havoc at airports and military bases across the continent. Other incidents include GPS jamming, incursions by fighter aircraft and naval vessels, and an explosion on a key Polish rail link ferrying military aid to Ukraine.

The idea to ‘pre-empivly’ attack Russia comes from an Italian defense paper:

Last week, Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto slammed the continent’s “inertia” in the face of growing hybrid attacks and unveiled a 125-page plan to retaliate. In it, he suggested establishing a European Center for Countering Hybrid Warfare, a 1,500-strong cyber force, as well as military personnel specialized in artificial intelligence.

To me that looks like someone is seeking additional NATO payments. Three days later a Italian NATO general furthered the idea:

Nato considers being ‘more aggressive’ against Russia’s hybrid warfare (archived) – Financial Times, Nov 30 025
Alliance’s top military officer says it could become proactive in dealing with Moscow threat

Nato is considering being “more aggressive” in responding to Russia’s cyber attacks, sabotage and airspace violations, according to the alliance’s most senior military officer.

Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone told the Financial Times that the western military alliance was looking at stepping up its response to hybrid warfare from Moscow.
…
Some diplomats, especially from eastern European countries, have urged Nato to stop being merely reactive and hit back. Such a response would be easiest for cyber attacks where many countries have offensive capabilities but would be less easy for sabotage or drone intrusions.
…
Dragone said that a “pre-emptive strike” could be considered a “defensive action”, but added: “It is further away from our normal way of thinking and behaviour.”

He added: “Being more aggressive compared with the aggressivity of our counterpart could be an option. [The issues are] legal framework, jurisdictional framework, who is going to do this?”

Admiral Dragone is using Orwellian speech when he seems obviously lobbying for 1,500 NATO paid jobs in his home country.

One problem with this is that there is little evidence of any ‘hybrid attacks’.

Ursula von der Leyen was caught outright lying when her staff claimed that alleged Russian GPS distortion had prolonged a flight she was taking.

The alleged intrusion of Russian planes into Estonian airspace had turned out to be an innocent passage near an uninhabited island far from the coast.

The Dutch magazine Trouw has found that the myriad of recent drone panics had little to do with Russia.

Analysis sixty drone incidents in Europe: a lot of panic and little evidence (archived) – Trouw.nl

Machine translation:

Using the Dronewatch platform, Trouw mapped around sixty incidents involving drones in eleven European countries. These took place in the last three months. The conclusion: a lot of confusion and ambiguity and regular false alarms. For Russian involvement, as some authorities and experts point out, in the vast majority of cases no hard evidence has been provided.

In about forty incidents, the origin is still unclear or no evidence has been found for drones in the airspace. An example is Oslo, where drone reports shut down air traffic at the end of September, affecting thousands of travelers. The police did not find any confirmation afterwards that drones were actually flying. The same was true for reports at the airport of Swedish Gothenburg in early November.

In at least fourteen cases, it turned out to be something completely different afterwards. For example, people in Belgium mistook (small) planes and helicopters for drones, while the flying objects in South Limburg and Danish Billund were stars. The Norwegian police concluded that a suspicious ‘drone’ near an oil platform in the North Sea was probably a ship.

A number of times it has been established that drone flights were the work of a hobbyist or that it later turned out to be a tourist. In an incident in Warsaw where a drone flew over government buildings, Polish police picked up a Ukrainian and a 17-year-old girl from Belarus. There is no evidence of espionage.

This picture was published by media as showing alleged damage by an alleged explosion along a Polish rail line

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According to the Polish outlet Super Express, a train driver travelling near the Mikołajówka (Mika) station informed dispatchers at 07:39 about irregularities in the rail infrastructure.

A preliminary inspection revealed that roughly one meter of track had been destroyed, forcing the train to stop. No passengers or crew members were injured.
…
Prime Minister Donald Tusk later underscored the gravity of the incident on X, stating:

“Blowing up the rail track on the Warsaw–Lublin route is an unprecedented act of sabotage targeting directly the security of the Polish state and its civilians. This route is also crucially important for delivering aid to Ukraine. We will catch the perpetrators, whoever they are.”

Nothing was ‘blown up’. What can be seen in the picture is not the result of an explosion. For comparison you might want to watch this attempt (vid) of using C-4 explosive to cut an I-beam. It is a VERY violent process. But the track ballast under the broken rail as well as the sleepers seem undisturbed and undamaged. The incident was most likely a brittle crack caused by fatigue. The rail was probably not firmly fixed on the sleepers and bent when trains were running over it. When that happens one time too many rails will break.

The alleged ‘hybrid attacks’ by Russia are over-hyped normal incidents with little if any relation to Russia. To use these as an excuse for ‘pre-emptive strikes’, be it cyber or whatnot, hardly makes such ‘defensive’.

And what, by the way, is Admiral Dragone planing to do if Russia hits back?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post NATO Thinks of ‘Pre-emptive Strikes’ Against Russia To ‘Defend’ Against Something That Did Not Happen appeared first on LewRockwell.

If each of these is not a part of any ‘reform,’ than all that is being done is pouring money into a monopolizing cartel, just in a slightly different way.

Unbeknownst to those of us with little inside knowledge of the complex financial plumbing of the US healthcare system, healthcare is in a death spiral that will surprise everyone but insiders who grasp the system’s unsustainability.

To help us outsiders understand the death spiral, I asked a senior MD to guide us through “follow the money.”

Trump Blasts “Big, Fat, Rich Insurance Companies” As Lawmakers Propose Ways To ‘Fix’ Obamacare.

Since this is the issue of the day and it falls within my expertise, here are some thoughts.

A $2,000 direct payment to beneficiaries such as being currently contemplated is completely ineffectual, especially since it has to be borrowed and will just increase inflation that much further.

Read the Whole Article

The post Why Healthcare Is in a Death Spiral: Follow the Money appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Jerome Barber.

The post Ayn Rand Warned Us appeared first on LewRockwell.