Lew Rockwell Institute

A 23 year old transgender freak fired into a church killing two children and wounding many. The concern expressed by Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis?  “The shooting should not be an excuse for people to direct hate at our trans community.”

The unexamined question is why did random shootings of strangers appear for the first time in 1966? There was no such thing in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. At Georgia Tech students had guns in their dorm rooms and fraternity houses. At UVa students had guns and whiskey in their dorm rooms. No one was shot. Today guns are prohibited on campuses, and there are constant shootings that have spread to work places, shopping malls, and churches.

Clearly, something has changed to cause behavior, which my generation never would have considered, to become increasingly common. What is the cause?

Is it the endless number of vaccinations? The antidepressants needed? My generation did not have the vaccinations and antidepressants and did not need them. Is it the distancing from God caused by endless liberal attacks on Christianity? Is it the milieu of hatred created by endless denunciations? Is it the lack of restraint and self-control that modern child raising produces?

It doesn’t help to understand what has happened to blame guns. Karl Marx would scoff at the reification of inanimate objects by liberals. As long as causes, such as gun control, use the shootings for their agenda, we will not obtain insight into what has produced a 23 year old person who can fire away at children in a church.

The replacement of moral and responsible behavior with irrational murder for no visible purpose desperately needs explanation. Has Satan taken over, thereby removing morality as a constraint on imperfect humans?

This is an interesting question. Is it a question of pills, vaccinations, broken homes, the 2nd Amendment, or any other stock explanation, or are we, weakened as we are by the decline in religious belief, faced with the triumph of evil over good?

Watching the world’s indifference to the Israeli extermination of the Palestinian people, has Satan decided that now is his time?

Has Satan made a good decision? Is there any moral strength anywhere in the world capable of resisting Evil?

Where is the effort to abolish nuclear weapons which can abolish Earth?

Is the traditional alliance of Israel with Satan taking us into The End Times?

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“Today, many people use psychology as a new form of mysticism: as a substitute for reason, cognition and objectivity, as an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment, both in the role of judge and judged. Psychologizing is condemning or excusing specific individuals on the grounds of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of, or contrary to, factual evidence.” – Ayn Rand, The Psychology of Psychologizing, 1971.

The professional cognoscenti class can’t seem to figure out Donald Trump’s “personality”, as if every world and domestic conflict is implausibly a consequence of Trump’s psychological dynamics, bombastic speech outbursts on “X” and his frequent use of the working-class word for horse dung. Even the highly educated commentariat at libertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom”online forum have joined the fashionable trend of attributing their perception of Trump’s moral failings to his personality. What follows is an attempt at understanding Trump, not a defense of Trump. (Disclosure: I did not vote for Trump in 2024).

Trump’s Knowledge Class Psychologizing Critics

One of the most recent attempts to explain Trump comes from former British intelligence officer and diplomat, Alastair Crooke who asserts Trump is not a self-made man but has a magnetic “Jungian” personality. By “Jungian” (from psychologist Carl Jung) Crooke means motivated by mythical archetypes, but not in the same authoritarian mold of Hitler or bombastic Mussolini. But no one is self-made, least of all presidents. The most un-self-made US president was the mentally normal university president Woodrow Wilson who gained office by an election rigged by the Bank of London, proceeded to abolish constitutional government by the people, established the Federal Reserve and forced isolationist America into the unnecessary WW1, entirely fought to keep the Germans from aligning with Russia against Britain (see Gerry Docherty, Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, 2014 and John Maxwell Hamilton, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda, 2024).

Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar, apparently echoing his BRIC’s sentiments, says Trump is an ‘incendiary’ self-absorbed all-powerful god-like Roman emperor who is a moral failure (BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China new world order).

Eminent former US Army officer and conservative Douglas MacGregor asserts Trump is impulsive and is not the person we voted for and is controlled by the oligarchs he surrounded himself with as well as London and New York banks. MacGregor asserts that what Trump promised during the 2024 election is all myth. Moreover, MacGregor says Trump is deluded to think that he must sell 1,000 US cruise missiles to Ukraine to attack civilian targets in cities in Russia to bring an end to the war (i.e., war crimes). But Trump can only go so far in gainsaying powerful senator Lindsey Graham, Congress and the Military Industrial Complex.  MacGregor says Trump is coerced by Britain’s delusions of grandeur that they can exert the same power they had as a Neo-Colonial Empire pre-1945.  But Trump rudely left Europe’s top leaders standing in a hallway for 45 minutes outside his office before he held court over the future of NATO with them. Was it theater?

Nuclear weapons inspector Scott Ritter says Trump is a pretend tough-guy bluffer and a narcissistic Neocon war hawk who continues to indirectly fund the Ukraine War despite his campaign promises to end it.  Ritter sees Trump as Netanyahu’s lackey, but Netanyahu secretly takes orders from the Bank of London. Israel is not a self-made sovereign nation but was formed by London banks to control and plunder oil-producing states in the Middle East. Ritter says Trump doesn’t understand Russia, but does Ritter understand Israel is synthetic and weaponized?  Israel is like the scapegoat child in a dysfunctional family who must do the “acting out” (behave badly) for European family elites and banks. Ritter is aware, but doesn’t mention, that should Trump refuse to countenance Britain he may end up like the other US presidents removed by British banks: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and JFK (witness the US Civil War, see Xavient Haze, The Suppressed History of American Banking: How Big Banks Fought Jackson, Killed Lincoln and Caused the Civil War, 2016).

Obama Pentagon advisor Col. Larry Wilkerson says Israel is “our tool but we make it look like we are their tool”.  He says this deceptive role reversal is insanity. According to Wilkerson, Trump is poorly informed and has no independent advisors outside the Deep State (like himself) and follows junk advice. But Wilkerson acknowledges Trump’s instincts are to force Britain to fight its own wars. Wilkerson says Britain is living out its imperial dreams through the US as if it were still an empire.

Ayn Rand’s Psychology of Psychologizing and Trump’s Role Conflicts

One might think Trump must have a split or multiple personality disorder to garner all these critical psychological caricatures. To get a more accurate Polaroid-like real time picture of Trump we must abandon the American-Freudian tendency to describe politicians using psychoanalytic cliches.  This is why libertarian Ayn Rand opposed evaluating politicians by psychologizing and mythologizing, preferring  ‘objectivism’ instead in her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

A conflicting social role framework is better than pop psychology from which to understand Trump in the circumstances he finds himself in circa 2025. The Big Picture circumstances involve the weaning of America off its alliances with the former European Colonial World Order (Britain, Netherlands, France, Germany) who are faced with bankruptcy and have instigated wars to capture the spoils of Russia, Ukraine and Gaza to rescue themselves.

One need not embrace the notions that Trump “trumps” his opponents with superior 4-D Chess skills, is a religious messiah, or has an ingrained pathological personality.  Rather, Trump’s self, like our own selves, is not solid or fixed and moves from one expected situation and audience to another, called role alternation. If one wants to clearly understand Trump, they must enumerate the situations in which there is role conflict between all the roles he must play. But this isn’t done in modern journalism. Instead, short-hand psychological cliches often prevail (see Anton Zijderveld, On Cliches: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity (1979).

Unlike the roles most people must fulfill, the role of president is chock full of political opponents, vested interest groups, the deep state and murderous enemies that result in seemingly inconsistent and confusing role behaviors to outsiders and critics. The irreconcilable moral conflicts of the presidency does not necessarily mean that Trump lacks “character”, necessarily has a split personality, or is a psychopath (see sociologist Peter L. Berger on the inconsistency between social roles in his Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, 1963). It means he is all too human. But he is in the proverbial situation of having to serve two-or-more masters at any one time.

This is why even the master teacher of how one sometimes must do evil, Niccolo Machiavelli, asserted that rulers must do religious penance for their evil actions in necessary emergency situations. But rulers should also avoid gratuitous public confessions or dramatic displays of their moral guilt. Nonetheless Machiavelli held that penance does not annul ultimate moral culpability for doing evil for which one may lose their soul.  Machiavelli said that evil cannot be wished away or denied, because one can never get away with doing evil under cover of doing good (Niccolo Machiavelli, An Exhortation to Penitence, 1523 and Discourses I:6). However, I rather doubt anyone, outside devout Christians or Muslims, do private penance or confession with respect to the Gaza-Ukraine Wars. Trump may not be a psychopath with no conscience, but he has made it clear he wants to be the “winner”, which opens the door to moral dilemmas.  However, Trump’s ridiculous proposal to develop Gaza as a resort is interpreted to be a nonserious political diversion to assuage Israel. Same with his pretend bombing of Iran. Ayn Rand’s ethic of “objectivity” offers clarity in such situations but no resolution to the moral dilemma involved.

Trump’s Situation Box and Split Speech

Moreover, Trump is subtly re-aligning the US with the new economic order of BRICS by condemning Russia and China in public while otherwise ingratiating himself with Putin and Jinping. Does speaking tough to appease the military and industrial complex while speaking backstage with Russia and China reflect a “multiple personality disorder”, impulsivity, idiocy or realpolitik? I tend to believe Trump’s contradicting speech is pragmatic but often uses bombastic diversion from his real behind the scenes dealings. Trump’s speech for domestic consumption is not the same as his emissarial discussions.

The charges of Trump being a psychological sock puppet oddly comes at a time when:

• Trump successfully pulled off an ice-breaking summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
• Has temporarily mobilized the National Guard to cut off any repeat of the staged race riots and arson in Blue Cities financed by 25 high tech corporations centered in San Francisco in 2020-2022.
• Has requested the DOJ to pursue RICO anti-racketeering charges against George Soros who used US AID funds to weaponize city prosecutors against the safety of the citizenry.
• Has taken moves to capture control of the Federal Reserve Bank.
• Has exercised his power to rescind $4.9 billion in foreign aid under the USAID program for “woke, weaponized and wasteful” spending authorized by Congress on the grounds it contradicts US interests.
• Trump’s HHS Director Robert Kennedy Jr. fired the new CDC director after which the CDC staff spilled into the street to protest under the rationale of a threat to public health. No AI replacement at CDC.

No, the Ukraine War is not solely about NATO incursions and threats to Russia’s safety. Rather, the war is an attempt by bankrupt Monopoly Capitalist Globalists centered in London to steal and plunder the resources and oil of East Asia and the Southern hemisphere with threats of proxy wars fought by the US and Israel, while threatening nuclear war (see Alex Krainer, The Coming Collapse of Britain, August 2024). Nor is the US-Israel proxy war with Russia in Ukraine a war against “Communism”, as the British manufactured Russian Gulags never happened (see Solzhenit-SPIN: Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag was a Deep State British Lie, Aug. 19) and the Cold War was a hoax (Richard Poe, How the British Invented Communism (and Blamed It on the Jews, 2024). And after 1991, Russia abandoned Soviet style Communism, only to have their markets plundered by Wall Street.

Facetiously, at least Trump has plenty of experience with bankruptcies and turning around money losing casinos!  I’m not a Trump promoter, but psychologizing and mythologizing indicates to me such writers don’t know whether the binds that Trump finds himself in would stand the test of morality or not; they can only psychologize or mythologize it.

Even former advisor to President Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, in his article “Can Trump Find a Way Out of the Box He is In?” wrongly believes NATO incursions on Russia are the sole blame for the wars when it is more likely they are wars of extraction, piracy and kleptocracy between two systems of world governance: the fast-declining globalist European former colonialist British (American) empire and the emerging BRICs New World Order of cooperation, sovereignty, sound money, and the prospect of peace. Trump apparently wants to eventually transition the US to the BRIC’s bandwagon. My guess is that Rand would find that objectively more virtuous than psychologizing about Trump’s personality.

Is Trump His Own Court Jester?

Ancient Greece and Rome institutionalized the role of the court jesters, satirists and poets such as Juvenal, Horace, Homer and Aesop who had the freedom to talk and mock princes candidly, albeit comically, without punishment. In medieval Britain, there were street jesters such as Punch and Judy that used puppetry and comedy to exercise their license to free speech. The Roman emperor Commodus was his own jester, which may explain the so-called insanity of other Roman rulers such as Caligula and Nero who attempted to transcend the invisible chains that bind rulers from telling the truth. But the French Revolution ended the institutionalized role of the court jester. And Jeffrey Epstein was no court jester!

In his book The History of Court Fools by Dr. John Doran (1858), stories are told of princes who have had to play the role of fool or their own jester.  One such ruler was Nassir of the Netherlands who took delight in puppet shows. At one such puppet show, the king encroached close to the stage and using a pair of scissors cut the strings to the puppets, adding some comedy to the presentation.  Perhaps Trump’s sometimes “unpredictable” actions, bullyism, and crude speech should be understood in the same context of cutting the puppet strings with its “Perfidious Albion” of parasitical and war mongering Great Britain and Western Europe rather than some nebulous clichés of psychological moral failures.

Psychologizing Trump is Useless: Or is Trump His Own Court Jester? Judge Andrew Napolitano, Alastair Crooke, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Col. Douglas MacGregor, Col. Larry Wilkerson, Ayn Rand The Psychology of Psychologizing, Paul Craig Roberts, Wayne Lusvardi

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Thanks, Tim McGraw.

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Eric Zuesse

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Thanks, Tim McGraw.

See here.

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Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

MintPress News

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Writes Patrick Foy:

Here’s an especially important and informative update by Professor Mearsheimer on the two outstanding Washington-generated and enabled conflicts, the war over Palestine and the war in Ukraine. Many facts and insights. Both wars I regard as evidence of U.S. foreign policy failure. American neocons and neoliberals, on the other hand, regard them as successes because they demonstrate Washington’s world leadership. As usual, I ask, to what end? The so-called leadership is clearly misguided.

The clips [starting at 17:20 on the video] of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich addressing his domestic audience about the true nature of Israel’s actions in Gaza support what Mearsheimer and a handful of others have been saying all along. Mearsheimer notes that Smotrich’s, “honest description…stands in marked contrast to what Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel’s supporters in the United States are saying about Israeli policy. Smotrich’s remarks are both sickening and illuminating.”

True to form, when it comes to Israel and Ukraine, America is being used by the Washington foreign policy elite to further hidden agendas.

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Vicki Marzullo wrote:

I always said Trump sucks on foreign affairs.

See here

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Chris Sullivan wrote:

Hamas might be a really bad outfit, but what does anybody actually know about it?

If I’m not mistaken, Israel and the US helped it get going and it carried the election when the US was so concerned about “democracy.”

I know that the major “news” organizations never report anything accurately or truthfully, so I have no way to decide what Hamas is. The October 7th account has been shown to be largely false and that’s probably the case with everything we’re told.

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Writes Christopher Mosley:

May Hayek’s works peck out the eyes of Chinkcock Musk’s LarkinLink. The gays are cool but feudalists are foo foos.

I’m working on a reworking of the Gadsden Flag. I despise Thomas Hobbes more than Ayn Rand despised Kant. I’m thinking maybe a sword with Mason’s compass as the hilt wielded by eagle claws beheading the figure on the cover of Leviathan.

Btw, I’m willing to donate funds to the Mises Institute for purchasing copies of Society Against The State by Pierre Clastres. May campuses far and wide wield the spirit of freedom with strength against Leviathan!

I fear no lesser beast!

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Writes Christopher Mosley:

He’s trying to hijack the Time Machine that is Universe. 

Now you understand his motives. I offer an alternative model that better aligns with anarchocapitalism, free will and true will.

Every event is infinite but not every event is meaningful to every God. Some have compromised with the pessimistic assumption only one universe or timeline exists, i.e, to build a Time Machine one must accept an entire timeline. I say physics allows for being multiple places simultaneously. Skip the songs you choose not to hear. Wills will coexist. 

Robert Anton Wilson’s Irish Bronx accent emphasizing the word THOU might be the greatest Thelemic commentary ever given.

You ready to save the world? Let the adventures begin!

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Christopher Mosley wrote:

Here’s another thought experiment.

The Federal Hemp Farm Act specifies that no U.S. state, U.S. territory, nor Indian reservation may interfere with the interstate commerce of federally compliant hemp products. Suppose Trump’s golf course sells Alabamians federally compliant hemp products either in Florida or via postal services and Itchy Cooch Ivy is advised by a lower court that HB445 does not interfere with The Commerce Clause. Would this not be a flagrant violation of The Commerce Clause, the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, and the lasez faire of Mar A Lago?

Tell her to piss on Goat Hill’s burning of Bob Marley vinyls please.

Thank you.

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John Leake

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Whenever I get the infrequent opportunity to walk the wild deserted Cape Cod outer Atlantic beach in the early morning, I exult in the sea’s silent roar. It extinguishes the cacophonous dreck that fills the air of everyday life in a society whose depravity accelerates faster than shore birds can fly.

This morning, because there was a little rain and rough surf the beach was deserted except for the usual assortment of birds. So we sauntered the long strand for an hour until we finally encountered a person as the sun flashed from behind the clouds. Inside the cocoon of the crashing waves and the whistling of the wind, with the clouds blowing fast, the seals just voiceless heads bobbing in the shallow water, and the birds hushed by the waves’ wild roar, a strange silence settled over me. I felt cloistered in a place of peace, similar to William Butler Yeats’ sentiment in his poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning . . . .”

Silence. Without it, we are bereft of meaningful words and end up talking repetitive gibberish, small talk. There are many people who can’t shut up; their jabbering is a disease. Tranquilized with trivia, they lose their ability to communicate.

Silence is a word gravid with multiple meanings: for many a threat; for others a nostalgic evocation of a time rendered obsolete by technology; for others still a sentence to boredom; and for some, devotees of the ancient arts of reading, writing, and contemplation, a word of profound, even sacred importance. As the ancient Greeks knew so well, musing is the music of the artist’s heart.

Writing is at first, like an imaginary friend, a silent companion. Conceived by its author in silence, it asks to be received in the same spirit. And silence – contrary to the popular notion that it, like nothing, is nothing, a void, a lack of something – is the receptive spirit that encompasses all the meanings words can give. That silence is golden is an aphorism we have all heard but rarely heed. Nevertheless, it is out of that great unknown that words are born; great writing is the child of silence.

So too reading should be a venture into that unknown, an adventure upon which one embarks with eyes and ears wide open and the constant chatter of one’s private “thoughts” silenced.

But silence, like so much else in today’s world, including human beings, is on the endangered-species list . Another rare bird of flamboyant plumage and very like a black swan – “Rara avis in terris nigroque similima cyno” in Juvenal’s words – is slowly disappearing from our midst. The poison of noise is killing it.

And out of this lack of silence comes the silence of lack, the inability to use words to communicate meaningfully. As sung so wonderfully by Simon and Garfunkel in The Sounds of Silence:

And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Ironically, as books have become more plentiful, silence has become scarcer. Most books now arrive with the clatter and bombast of the same advertising hype used to sell laxatives and pain-killing drugs. And they are received in the same spirit, often producing similar results. These loud arrivals often make the so-called best seller lists (as if number seven on that list could be the “best” seller along with number one), a curious place where quality is measured by quantity and the noise of publicity pays off handsomely. Many of these books are what D. H. Lawrence called “printed toys,” loud little devices that spin and spin and always seem to end up where they started – nowhere.

When I speak of noise I am not primarily speaking of the din we associate with city life: cars, trucks, sirens, etc. Such noise, alas, is heard even in small towns where birdsong often disappears behind the grinding of gears. That kind of noise is hard to completely avoid and it is in any case the least disruptive of the silence I have in mind. There is another kind of noise that is self-imposed, and whose purpose, consciously or not, is to make sure one is not “caught” by silence. That, as those who flee from silence know, can be dangerous to one’s reigning assumptions about self and the world. They prefer the comfort of noise because it silences the imagination, and imagination, as William Blake has told us, is the world of eternity, and to the eyes of the person of imagination, nature is imagination itself. It is only through the eyes of imagination that one can slip away and hope to break loose from the mind-forg’d manacles of convention and propaganda that society places on us all from birth.

Just this morning, very early, I read an essay that brought this home to me once again. In “Psychic Treason,” Curtis White begins by telling us that he is living in a world that no longer exists, a sentiment that should ring true for most people in this chaos of everything world. He tells us how his world changed:

I once lived in a vital world whose only limit was no-limit, ‘free frame of reference,’ as the Haight Street Diggers thought. It was a world of beatniks, Buddhists, hippies, free-jazz poets, pacifists, wandering guitar soloists, postmodern fabulists, soulful anarchists, and collaborative maunderers. It was also a world of close readers, deconstructors, and afficionados of the beautiful, all performing in the heady atmosphere of refusal, a general strike of the Imagination.

This world and its open assumptions about possibility slowly dissipated over a thirty-year period. As the late Sly Stone put it, ‘The possibility of possibility was leaking out.’ It seemed quite dead by the millennium, our collective mind aspirated into glass pipettes by techno-oligarchs and assorted others who bore us no love. We were left with Data World, the Great American Smartphone Society. We have been priced out of cities, so there are no avenues to barricade, no ‘scenes’ where artists and musicians can hang out, and our universities are in ruin, occupied by ‘ indentured students,’ in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s telling phrase, studying only what the boss wants. And what the boss wants has nothing to do with poets. Even at Canterbury’s Christ Church University, the destination for Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, poetry is ‘no longer viable in the current climate.’

White’s world is not the world everyone once inhabited, as others can attest. Everyone’s world of yesterday is somewhat different, but each contains nostalgic images that not just draw us back but forward – an imaginative nostalgia for a future that sustains the heart, even when the past one remembers never existed in pure form. White writes:

Happily, it will always be possible to create stories that liberate us from the stories of our masters. This is what William Blake called for when he wrote in Jerusalem (1815), ‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.’

. . . . Blake’s quote is “heavy,” as hippies used to say, because it asks, as Tolstoy put it, “What is to be done?” The answer to that question might simply be “tell better stories.” Live through better stories. Live through stories that will be understood in an as yet unimagined world, just past the next bend in the river, where the Imagination lives in all its inherited riches. So, let us be Nietzschean, all too Nietzschean, without fear or giddiness, and seek liberation for ourselves and others.

We all know people who go from morning till night, day in and day out without ever pausing to enter the sounds of silence. One doesn’t have to look for them; technology has made them the rule. They move like techno-ghosts up and down the lanes and byways, seashells stuck in their ears (“And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind,” Ray Bradbury writes in Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953) or rectangular vibrators sticking out of their back pockets, proud symbols of the manacles that hold them captive to their minds’ bedlam. They drift through their lives in the cocoon of technological noise  They are informed, with it, tuned in – to everything but the life of their own souls. The real world passes them by. Always ready to photograph something that they do not see, they ignore that rare bird of flamboyant plumage that sits on their heads, singing plaintively. They may even read books, those candy-colored non-book books filled with millions of meaningless words, distracting little noises that allow them to avoid the silence that might force then to confront self-knowledge that is the stuff of great books, true art.

For the art of writing implies the art of reading. The writer creates and the reader recreates; both demand silence, the cessation of all noise that serves to prevent true thought. The machines must be turned off. “Our inventions,” Thoreau noted, “are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”

It is not hard to turn a switch or pull a plug; the hard part is wanting to. Harder still, but equally necessary, is the quieting of the mind, the silencing of the incessant internal chatterboxes that accompany us everywhere and prevent us from experiencing the world.

For in the end one cannot hear or see the world or the penetrating truths of great writing unless, like the artists who create in silence, we turn off the noise of the social world and enter the silence. Only then, will one’s imaginary silent companion begin to sing.

In her bittersweet memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s girlfriend in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, echoes Curtis White’s point about how the past is as much about the imagination and the future as the past. Her book is equally about the plight of young women in those days and the vibrancy of the Village’s creative community as about her relationship with Dylan. Writing in the early 2000s before her untimely death, she notes:

Greenwich Village bohemia exists no more. It was the public square of the twentieth century for the outsiders, the mad ones, and the misfits. Today all that remains are the posters, fliers, and signs preserved on the walls as a reminder of that bygone era when rents were cheap and New York replaced Paris as the destination for the creative crowd.

Those who feel they are not part of the mainstream are always somewhere, however. Greenwich Village is a calling. Though it is now priced out of its physical space, as a state of mind, it will never be out of bounds. . . . The creative spirit finds a way.

That way is found whenever and wherever one enters the cocoon of silence to hear the rare bird of flamboyant plumage sing. It is then we can live through better stories as we tell them.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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The U.S. federal debt has now passed $37 trillion and is growing at the rate of $1 trillion every five months. Interest on the debt exceeds $1 trillion annually, second only to Social Security in the federal budget. The military outlay is also close to $1 trillion, consuming nearly half of the discretionary budget.

As a sovereign nation, the United States could avoid debt altogether by simply paying for the budget deficit with Treasury-issued “Greenbacks,” as Abraham Lincoln’s government did. But I have written on that before (see here and here), so this article will focus on that other elephant in the room, the Department of Defense.

Under the Constitution, the military budget should not be paid at all, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Expenditures of public funds without a public accounting violate Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7of the Constitution, which provides:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

The Pentagon failed its seventh financial audit in 2024, with 63% of its $4.1 trillion in assets—approximately $2.58 trillion—untracked. From 1998 to 2015, it failed to account for $21 trillion in spending.

As concerning today as the financial burden is the wielding of secret power. Pres. Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Pres. John F. Kennedy echoed that concern, warning in 1961 that “secret societies” and excessive secrecy are “repugnant in a free and open society,” threatening democracy by withholding truth from the public. He warned that excessive concealment, even for national security, undermines democracy by denying citizens the facts needed to hold power accountable. “No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed,” he said.  If untracked billions fund classified programs, citizens are left powerless, governed by a shadow entity answerable to no one.

Those concerns persist today. On Aug. 13, 2025, Joe Rogan interviewed U.S. Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who leads a House Oversight Committee focused on government transparency regarding various topics, including UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, formerly UFOs). Luna said the committee had been formed after she and two other congressmen were denied access at Eglin Air Force Base to information on UAPs provided by whistleblowers. The problem, she said, was that Congress was supposed to represent the public and be an investigative body for it, “and you have unelected people operating basically in secrecy. … I think this goes all the way back even to JFK, with how they basically have operated outside of the purview of Congress and basically… have gone rogue ….”

A Behemoth Without Oversight

The Department of Defense’s $885.7 billion budget for 2025, approved by the House of Representatives, dwarfs the military spending of China ($296 billion), Russia ($84 billion), and the next eight nations combined. Managing $4.1 trillion in assets—from aircraft carriers to secret drones—along with $4.3 trillion in liabilities (e.g. personnel costs and pensions), the federal government’s largest agency oversees a military empire spanning over 4,790 sites worldwide. Yet it operates with minimal oversight.

The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 mandated audits for all federal agencies, but the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018 delayed the Pentagon’s first department-wide audit to 2018 due to its unwieldy size, its decentralized systems, and its outdated software. The DOD has failed every audit since that time. In 2024, it could not account for its $824 billion FY 2024 budget, with 2,500 new audit issues identified. Of 24 reporting entities, only nine received clean opinions, while 15 received disclaimers due to insufficient data. In fact the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has flagged DoD financial management as high-risk for waste, fraud, and abuse ever since 1995.

As observed in a January 2019 article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi, openly secret budgets were first legalized in 1949 with the passage of the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted that newly created agency from public financial disclosure. The Act stated, “The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations related to the expenditure of Government funds.”

The aim of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 was to curb billions of dollars said to be lost each year through fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of public budgets. Despite the mandated audits for all federal agencies, the DoD – the only major agency without a clean audit – has received $3.9 trillion in congressionally approved funding since 2018. “Every year that members of Congress vote to boost Pentagon spending with no strings attached,” observed federal budgeting expert Lindsay Kosgharian, “they choose to spend untold billions on weapons and war with no accountability.”

The Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023, backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Grassley, proposes docking 0.5–1% of budgets for audit failures, but the measure has not received a vote.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched with promises to strip waste, fraud, and abuse from federal agencies, has conspicuously sidestepped the Pentagon. A June 2025 article titled “Why DOGE Was Always Doomed: The Pentagon Problem,” points out that the DOGE mission was seriously hampered by the Pentagon’s exemption from auditing:

In FY 2024, total discretionary spending was about $1.6 trillion. Of that, the Pentagon alone received $842 billion. In other words, it got more funding than all other departments combined. You read that right: one (very special) department received more than all the rest put together.

Funds that are not accounted for divert resources from critical needs like troop readiness, healthcare, and infrastructure. Overbilling by contractors enriches corporations while taxpayers foot the bill. And the lack of transparency erodes public confidence, as Americans struggle with domestic priorities.

The Missing $21 Trillion: Fraud, Waste or Something Worse?

The Pentagon’s audit failures mask not just inefficiency and waste but pervasive fraud and corruption. Between 1998 and 2015, Inspector General reports show that the DoD could not account for $21 trillion in spending—65% of federal spending during that period. For perspective, the entire U.S. GDP in 2015 was $18.2 trillion. In 2023, the agency failed to document 63% of its $3.8 trillion in assets, up from 61% the prior year. A 2015 DoD report identifying $125 billion in administrative waste was suppressed to protect budget increases.

There is plenty of verified waste to support the case for mismanagement. Military contractors, who receive over half of the Pentagon’s budget, are a major culprit. The F-35 program, managed by Lockheed Martin, was reported in 2021 to be $165 billion over budget, with $220 billion in spare parts poorly tracked. A 2023 CBS News investigation found that contractors routinely overcharged by 40–50%, with some markups reaching 4,451%. A 2016 report in the Nation highlighted $640 for a toilet seat and $7,600 for a coffee pot.

It is no longer even necessary to cover up fraud and corruption by wildly inflated prices. In 2017, former HUD official Catherine Austin Fitts collaborated with Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University, to document the missing $21 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments at the DoD and HUD. In a June 2025 article published in Fitts’ journal The Solari Report titled “Should We Care about Secrecy in Financial Reporting?,” Dr. Skidmore discussed how the government responded to the publication of his research with Fitts. Its response was to immediately eliminate the paper trail leading to its covert financial operations. In particular, “Pentagon officials turned to the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) for advice. Several months later, FASAB posted a new document (FASAB 56), which recommended that the government be allowed to misstate and move funds to conceal expenditures if it is deemed necessary to protect national security interests.”

Fitts remarked, “The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury, and announced to every private army, mercenary and thug in the world that we are open for business.”

Speculation Run Rampant

In a widely-viewed interview by Tucker Carlson on April 28, 2025, Fitts expressed her belief that the missing trillions had been funneled into classified projects involving advanced technologies, including massive underground bunkers to protect elites from a “near-extinction event;” and that they were using advanced energy systems and hidden transit networks possibly linked to extraterrestrial tech. She discussed “interdimensional intelligence” and a secret space program linked to a “breakaway civilization.” The latter term was coined by UFO researcher Richard Dolan and is defined by Google as “a theoretical, hidden society that operates outside of mainstream civilization with advanced technology, often linked to UFO phenomena and secret space programs.”

In a Danny Jones interview in May 2025, Fitts alluded to Deep Underground Military Bases (“DUMBs”), perhaps used for “advanced technology or off-world operations.” Existence of these bases was confirmed two decades earlier by whistleblower Philip Schneider, a U.S. government geologist and engineer involved in their construction. In his last presentation in 1995, Schneider said there were 131 of these cities connected underground by mag-lev rail, built at a cost of $17-26 billion each. According to his biographer, Schneider was assassinated in 1996 by a U.S. intelligence agency for disclosing the government cover-up of UFOs and aliens.

Too over the top? Perhaps, but the Pentagon is so secretive that the public is left to speculate. Are we dealing with a scenario like that in such Hollywood movies as the 1997 film Men in Black, in which hidden forces—human or alien—control our fate?

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contends that no verifiable evidence supports extraterrestrial activity. But other prominent figures support the UFO/UAP narrative. In 2017, the New York Times exposed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), said to be a $22 million DoD initiative run by Luis Elizondo investigating UAPs from 2007–2012.

According to BBC News, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s space security program, claimed in a 2020 interview with the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that the U.S. government has an “agreement” with a “Galactic Federation” of extraterrestrials. He alleged aliens have been in contact with the U.S. and Israel, with secret underground bases where they collaborate on experiments. Eshed claimed the United States was on the verge of disclosing this under President Trump but withheld it to avoid “mass hysteria.” The claims were unverified but provocative.

In recent years, Congress has increased its focus on UAPs, with high-profile hearings in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2023, whistleblower David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified that the U.S. possesses “non-human origin” craft and “dead pilots,” based on classified briefings. On November 13, 2024, the House Oversight Committee’s hearing, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” featured testimony from Luis Elizondo, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, journalist Michael Shellenberger, and former NASA official Michael Gold, who claimed the U.S. possesses UAP technologies and has harmed personnel in secret retrieval programs. Shellenberger alleged that a covert “Immaculate Constellation” program hides UAP data from Congress.

Some lawmakers, including Rep. Luna and Rep. Tim Burchett, continue to criticize Pentagon secrecy and to push for transparency. In May 2024, Burchett introduced the UAP Transparency Act, requiring the declassification of all UAP-related documents within 270 days. He stated:

This bill isn’t all about finding little green men or flying saucers, it’s about forcing the Pentagon and federal agencies to be transparent with the American people. I’m sick of hearing bureaucrats telling me these things don’t exist while we’ve spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studying them for decades.

Secrecy Undermines Democracy

With $21 trillion unaccounted for historically, $165 billion in F-35 overruns, and $125 billion in buried waste, the DoD’s financial mismanagement needs urgent reform. Congress is primarily responsible for overseeing the DoD budget, exercising its constitutional “power of the purse” under Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. So why isn’t it enforcing this mandate?

The chief excuse given is the need for secrecy for security reasons, but a congressional committee could be given access to the Pentagon’s financial data in closed session in order to exercise public oversight and enforce accountability. Other factors are obviously at play, including political influence, lobbying, campaign contributions from the defense sector, and a lack of penalties for noncompliance.

To restore accountability, Congress needs to enforce the Audit the Pentagon Act, modernize DoD systems, and investigate contractors profiting from lax oversight. UAP transparency is also critical, whether to debunk myths or uncover truths.

As taxpayers footing the bill, we are entitled to know not only where our money is being spent but who is really in charge of our government. The Pentagon’s secrecy and lack of accountability could be shielding anything from contractor fraud to UAP programs and alien alliances. If there is information so secret that even our elected representatives don’t have access to it, who does have access? Is there a secret government above the government we know? Without fiscal transparency and accountability, we can no longer call ourselves a democracy, as JFK warned.

This article was originally published on ScheerPost.com.

The post Unaudited Power: The U.S. Military Budget Nobody Controls appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” — Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, writing on his opposition to the inclusion of a Bill of Rights in the Constitution

“The Bill of Rights would never have been necessary . . . if so much power had not been granted to the central government by the constitution of 1787 in the first place.” —  Ryan McMaken

History tells us that a condition for ratifying the Constitution was a section detailing how the proposed document would protect people from government aggression.  Even New York, with a Bill of Rights existing as a statute and not part of its constitution, found their absence unsettling in a federal constitution.  Along with Virginia and Massachusetts, New York’s delegates wanted an explicit statement of rights the newly-expanded government could never trample.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution wherein Congress would have the power “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States” established individual rights as contingent rather than inalienable — contingent on the decisions of government.  Those who supported the Constitution, especially Federalist writers Hamilton and Madison, essentially said that money is needed to run any government effectively and asking for it was unreliable.  Revenue was to be extorted from those who had it, made legitimate by the concurrence of state delegates and made tolerable by “the prudence and firmness of the people,” as Hamilton wrote in Federalist 31.

The government was picking a fight with those under its jurisdiction.  How would these people fight back?

Since taking property from another person without their permission is theft, the victims might start by engaging in verbal or written protests.  If government had the legal power to restrict or forbid such protests, the people could not express their “prudence or firmness” without penalty.  From this caveat and the desire on the part of nationalists to get the Constitution ratified, James Madison proposed a Bill of Rights consisting of 17, then 12, then finally 10 amendments, the first one stating, in part:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .

The Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791.

Rock covers paper

Benjamin Franklin had died the previous year in Philadelphia at age 84.  Earlier, the polymath Franklin and his common-law wife, Deborah Read, had two children, one of whom was Sally Franklin, born in 1743, who eventually married Richard Bache (“Beech”).  Bache had a son, Benjamin Franklin Bache, who “followed in the journalistic footsteps of his famous grandfather.”  As a youngster Bache traveled with his grandfather to France, where he learned French and the printing trade.

Upon returning to the United States in 1785, Bache worked as a printer in his grandfather’s shop in Philadelphia. After Franklin’s death in 1790, Bache inherited the printing house. The same year, he established the General Advertiser (later the Aurora), becoming an active participant in the partisan journalism common during the early years of the nation.

Sixty years earlier, in 1731, Franklin, editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, wrote:  “. . . when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter . . . That if all Printers were determin’d not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”

His grandson took those words to heart.  He printed articles saying George Washington wasn’t really the “father of his country.”  Benjamin Franklin was the rightful father, being the only one to have signed the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Treaty of Alliance with France (1778), the Treaty of Paris (1783), and the federal Constitution (1787).  Without France’s aid, Bache claimed, we would still be British colonies.

In continuing to hammer away at the Federalist takeover of government and the president’s near-religious stature, Bache published a long Thomas Paine philippic called “Letter to George Washington” (July 1796).  Paine had been in Paris awaiting execution under Robespierre and had expected the intervention of Ambassador Gouverneur Morris for his release, but after seven months of incarceration he decided his fate was a reflection of Washington’s indifference.

Keep in mind Paine was one of the most recognized and reviled authors in the Western world.  His popularity with commoners was so strong governments feared prosecuting him.  His words, whatever their merit, carried far and wide.:

And as to you, sir, [Paine wrote] treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide, whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.

Federalists took note of Paine’s letter — as if they could avoid it.  The federal government itself was in Philadelphia, with both Congress and the Executive House of the President within walking distance of Bache’s Aurora, along with two Federalist newspapers defending the administration and attacking Bache.  William Corbett, federalist editor of the Porcupine Political Censor, declared: “Your brutal attempt to blacken this character [GW’s] was all that was wanted to crown his honour and your infamy.”

In a letter to his wife Abigail, Vice President John Adams, who regarded Paine as no more than an effective propagandist and who increasingly hated Paine the longer he lived, wrote:

I think, of all Paines Productions it is the weakest and at the Sametime the most malicious.—The Man appears to me to be mad—not drunk—He has the Vanity of the Lunatick who believed himself to be Jupiter the Father of Gods & Men.

The Sedition Act of 1798

Bache applauded the victory of John Adams in the election of 1796, with Adams’s opponent Thomas Jefferson becoming Vice President.  He viewed Washington’s decision not to run for a third term coming from “a consciousness that he would not be re-elected” and “to save himself the mortification and disgrace of being superceded.”  Adams was a “professed aristocrat” only in theory, Bache wrote, while “Washington was one in practice.”

His appraisal did an abrupt one-eighty when Adams condemned the French for raiding American shipping in a special session of Congress, while ignoring British “depredations.”   The three-man commission (the XYZ Affair) Adams sent to France to work out a diplomatic solution was rejected by the corrupt Talleyrand, the French Foreign Minister.

In June 1798, ten days after publishing a letter from Talleyrand, Bache was arrested under the yet-to-be passed Sedition Act of July 14 and was released on bail on 29 June with a trial scheduled for October.  The Aurora editor had been accused of libeling the president and the Executive Government “in a manner tending to excite sedition and opposition to the laws, by sundry publication and re-publications.”   The charge of libel came from Bache’s depiction of Adams as “blind, bald, crippled, toothless, and querulous.”  Bache, though, died from yellow fever at age 29 before his trial began.

Others were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, including Democratic-Republican congressman from Vermont, Mathew Lyon, who wrote an essay in 1800 accusing Adams of “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.”

Luther Baldwin, national hero

On a sunny day in July of 1798, after passage of the Sedition Act, John and Abigail Adams were returning to Massachusetts when they stopped in Newark, New Jersey for a celebration in his honor that included a 16-gun cannon salute.

Men were drinking at a tavern nearby.  One of them was the pilot of a garbage scow and a former member of the Continental army, Luther Baldwin.  Allegedly drunk, Luther uttered something to the effect that he didn’t care if they fired the cannon up Adams’s “arse.”  The tavern owner heard the remark and reported him.  “Baldwin was indicted and convicted in federal court for speaking ‘seditious words’ that defamed President Adams. He was fined $150, assessed court costs, and jailed until he paid the fine and fees.”

His arrest became a turning point in American politics.  Arresting journalists and politicians was bad enough, but throwing everyday citizens in jail for an offhand remark was intolerable.  His plight became the focus of articles published throughout the country, and the influence on public opinion helped elect Jefferson to the presidency a year and a half later.

The Sedition Act expired on March 3, 1801, the last day of Adams’s term. One of Jefferson’s first acts upon taking office on March 4 was to pardon Luther Baldwin and others imprisoned under the law.  Included with the pardons was an apology and the canceling of any imposed fines.

Conclusion

Parchments are no match for illicit government acts unless people get behind them, as they did for Luther.

The post Rock Paper Scissors, Government-Style appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week Donald J Trump declared that as president of the United States, he believes he has the “right to do anything I want to do.” The assertion explains a lot in terms of how an unhinged Trump regards himself and his office and it should serve as a warning that more ego driven inanity is yet to come. Trump’s most heinous crimes are related to foreign policy, most particularly his complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians as well as his continued arming of Ukraine to prolong the slaughter in its war with Russia. It now appears that Trump might be arranging to arm Kiev with US manufactured “extended range” cruise missiles capable of hitting targets deep inside Russia, to include both Moscow and St Petersburg. In a typically bizarre outburst Trump has opined that Ukraine is losing because it has been on “defense” and needs to shift its thinking of taking the “offensive” which the US will apparently assist. And Trump continues to throw threats about sanctions and military action at virtually everyone in the world that he encounters. Can World War 3 be creeping ever nearer, replete with nuclear weapons on the front line?

And then there is stink of unprovoked aggression elsewhere in world, to include the bombing of Iran and the recent dispatch of three warships toward Venezuela. Has either country threatened the United States? And relations with India and Brazil have also taken a dive due to pressure and insults from Washington. And there is always arch competitor China waiting in the wings for a shift of US military might in its direction while even little Greenland is not safe as Trump has stated that he is seeking to acquire it. Last week the Danish Foreign Ministry called in the US Ambassador to complain about Washington’s efforts to destabilize Greenland, which is a Danish possession. How utterly appropriate is it that Trump wants to rename the Defense Department, calling it by its old name the War Department!

Given Trump’s track record, astonishingly, while speaking at a Cabinet meeting, Trump’s special envoy and business associate Steve Witkoff actually said to the president and those assembled with regards to the upcoming Nobel Peace Prize: “There’s only one thing I wish for—that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since this Nobel award was ever talked about. Your success is game-changing out in the world today, and I hope everybody wakes up and realizes that.”

Good point Steve, so why stop there in your flattering of a lunkhead? Why not expand that accolade for the Trump War Department to go along with the already suggested renaming of the Kennedy Center in his honor as well as Dulles International Airport. And the Smithsonian is under the gun from Trump as it has displays on slavery that he disapproves of. Why not rename that too? President Trump does not seem aware that these are all public institutions and he has no right to slap his name on them to enhance his own ego. And look at the White House, where the Oval Office has been gilded, reflecting Trump’s bad and extremely tacky taste, turning it into a version of Mar-a-Lago. The portraits of preceding presidents have even been removed from sight to be replaced by even worse bad taste painting showing a warlike and aggressive President Trump in all his glory. Federal buildings in Washington also now feature huge banners hanging from their facades featuring Donald Trump’s scowling face. And he has further messed with the so-called People’s House, where he is a temporary resident at best, by destroying the Rose Garden and building a $300 million dollar ballroom monstrosity that will dwarf the size of the original historic White House building.

To be sure, Donald J Trump is an ignorant monster who will do his best to shred the US Constitution and destroy our republic before he is finished. Yes, he can do anything, including sending federal troops to occupy our cities on the pretext that there is too much crime going on.

There is only one exception to the general impression that Trump is running around Washington and the country, when he is not playing golf with his business buddies, with a chain saw prepared to tear down and cut to pieces everything in his path. That exception is how he treats Israel, deferring constantly to the interests of the Jewish state and to the domestic exhortations by the Israel Lobby. The flow of US supplies weapons to Israel has been constant while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu carries out a genocide that seeks nothing less than the extermination of the Palestinian people. Last week, Israel slaughtered five international journalists and fifteen medical workers in a phased attack on a hospital that was one of the few health facilities remaining in Gaza. Trump and his choice ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee did nothing in response. Huckabee in fact has made it clear that he believes that Jews are “Chosen by God” and are free to do whatever they want to the helpless Palestinians. Once upon a time, US Ambassadors were chosen based on their ability to represent American interests. No longer under Donald Trump!

Another recent ambassador tale linked personally to Trump comes from France, where Trump appointed his son-in-law’s father Charles Kushner to the ambassadorial post in Paris. Kushner is a convicted felon with only one thing in his favor, which is, of course, that he is inevitably Jewish and an Israel Firster in his political orientation. It is clear that Kushner shouldn’t even have this job to begin with—he spent two years in jail for tax evasion, illegal campaign donations to the Democratic Party, and witness tampering. He even attacked his own sister—who was a cooperating witness against him—by paying a sex worker to seduce her husband and film it for blackmail material. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie investigated Charles Kushner as district attorney and described the case as “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he’d ever encountered. Kushner was pardoned by Trump in 2020.

Last week Ambassador Kushner outraged the French government by publicly denouncing what he chose to describe as the surging antisemitism in France. Kushner published “A Letter to Emmanuel Macron” in The Wall Street Journal on August 24th. It included “I write out of deep concern over the dramatic rise of antisemitism in France and the lack of sufficient action by your government to confront it. Antisemitism has long scarred French life, but it has exploded since Hamas’s barbaric assault on Oct. 7, 2023. Since then, pro-Hamas extremists and radical activists have waged a campaign of intimidation and violence across Europe. In France, not a day passes without Jews assaulted in the street, synagogues or schools defaced, or Jewish-owned businesses vandalized. In today’s world, anti-Zionism is antisemitism—plain and simple. President Trump and I have Jewish children and share Jewish grandchildren. I know how he feels about antisemitism, as do all Americans…. I urge you to act decisively: enforce hate-crime laws without exception; ensure the safety of Jewish schools, synagogues and businesses, prosecute offenders to the fullest extent; and abandon steps that give legitimacy to Hamas and its allies.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Kushner’s letter appeared a few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote something similar to Macron, condemning him for declaring that France would recognize Palestinian statehood. France refuted Kushner’s allegations immediately and summoned him to appear before Macron and the French foreign ministry, but he did not show up and refused to apologize. “France firmly refutes these latest allegations,” the foreign ministry had stated adding that “The Ambassador’s allegations are unacceptable.”

Donald Trump and the US Senate, which approved the appointment of Kushner, might ask themselves why is the American ambassador to France more focused on lobbying on Israel’s behalf than protecting the interests of the United States? It is a question that needs to be asked regarding both Kushner and Huckabee in Israel.

A final story hopefully will make many readers upset over new evidence of just how deep the Israeli hooks are into the US government and all that pertains to it. Several American soldiers have gone on record reporting how they have been harassed and punished for sharing their views with friends criticizing the hideous slaughter of the Palestinians taking place in Gaza. It has been observed that First Amendment free speech only exists in the United States as long as one is not criticizing Israel, but it is disgusting to see that soldiers who have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution are themselves being denied fundamental civil rights.

One of the soldiers, Jonathan Estridge, an army sergeant with twenty years of service, was summoned into an officer’s room and advised that he was being investigated as a threat to national security because he had posted on social media criticism of Israel. As he observed, he was being denied the right to criticize a foreign nation’s policies solely because that nation happens to be Israel. A second soldier who has been subjected to punishment was a Green Beret who is part of the elite Special Forces parachute team. He described how he was phone called by an officer and told that he could no longer be a member of the group because he had spoken out against Israel. He was interviewed regarding his claims by Greyzone journalist Max Blumenthal.

And if that is not enough to shock you, how about the latest news from a Federal Judge Trevor McFadden here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. McFadden, who presides over a Washington DC court, has ruled that burning a US flag is free speech but burning an Israeli flag is “racial discrimination” which is a “hate crime.” The judge declared that the Star of David on Israel’s flag represents a “racial heritage,” elevating a political symbol of a foreign state into a sacred racial identity — putting it on the same level as America’s civil rights laws. The decision means that what would normally be political protest against Israel can now be branded as racism in the United States and made illegal, free speech and the First Amendment be damned. Ironically, Donald Trump has just signed an executive order making conviction for US flag burning a crime that automatically mandates one year in prison. It seems the various components of the US government just cannot agree on anything beyond protecting Israel and its estimable Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post Trump Makes Israel Great appeared first on LewRockwell.

Since RFK Jr. became H.H.S. Secretary, my contacts have shared that the CDC (one branch of the H.H.S.) has been the primary government agency sabotaging attempts to Make America Healthy Again. In July, I thus wrote an article on the CDC’s pervasive corruption that highlighted the CDC’s scientific misconduct at a recent ACIP meeting to help create support for controversial changes RFK Jr. would need to enact at the CDC.

Yesterday, that all came to a head as the CDC’s director was fired a month into her job, briefly refused to leave, four other top CDC officials resigned (which coupled with five earlier retirements in March comprised a loss of about a quarter of the CDC’s senior leadership). These actions prompted a media uproar and a hearing to “hold RFK accountable” has already been scheduled for next week.

This is a pivotal moment where RFK needs the public’s support for restoring America’s health, so I believe it is critical to understand the complete context behind what happened, particularly since many of these CDC holdouts have been directly responsible for the mass gaslighting against the vaccine-injured.

The Roots of Evil

One of my major questions in life is if the bad things that happen are a result of a secretive group of bad actors or are simply a naturally emergent phenomenon that would occur regardless of which group was in power behind the scenes.

On one hand, I frequently see policies be enacted in a coordinated fashion that lead to a clear outcome, and then watch as the years play out, that every institution works in unison to ensure that outcome eventually comes to pass. As such, given how repetitive (and hence predictable) this process is, I tend to suspect each one is a deliberate “conspiracy” by a specific group of bad actors.

On the other hand, when I speak to the most informed people I know within the government, I hear things like this:

You can always point a finger at a specific agency or person, but the reality is that as the government gets bigger and bigger, more and more fiefdoms will emerge within it, and those groups will fight for their own interests at the expense of everyone else.

Note: many Federal agencies depend on obtaining congressional funding and, therefore, will engage in stunts to ensure that funding is allocated to them. For example, the CDC will routinely hype up inconsequential “pandemics” each year, as this nationwide drama allows them to obtain more funding. Beyond this motivating the CDC to lie, the need to maintain a guaranteed stream of public and private funding also boxes the CDC into repeating the same (risk-free) narratives ad-nauseam so they do not offend their sponsors. This tendency to habitually repeat industry canards (e.g., that water fluoridation is one of the greatest public health achievements besides vaccines, that chronic Lyme disease doesn’t exist, or that all vaccines are 1000% safe and effective) in turn explains why more and more people are tuning out the CDC.

CDC Corruption

The CDC has enormous credibility among physicians, in no small part because the agency is generally thought to be free of industry bias. Financial dealings with bio-pharmaceutical companies threaten that reputation.—Marcia Angell MD, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

In reality, CDC corruption is so pervasive, it’s effectively been legalized. For example, a 1983 law authorized the CDC to accept gifts “made unconditionally…for the benefit of the [Public Health] Service or for the carrying out of any of its function,” and in 1992 Congress established A National CDC Foundation which was quickly incorporated to “mobilize philanthropic and private-sector resources.”

Note: other Federal agencies, including the CIA and the NIH, have similar “non-profit” foundations.1,2,3

Since inception, the CDC Foundation has been accused of egregious conduct and has received nearly 1 billion dollars from corporate “donors” (criticisms include a scathing editorial in one of the world’s top medical journals). For example, to quote a 2019 investigation:

In 2011….a firm that performs research for the pesticide industry, gave $60,000 to the CDC Foundation for a study to prove the safety of two pesticides. “We have a professional money-laundering facility at the CDC Foundation….They accept projects from anyone on the outside.”

Between 2010 and 2015, Coca-Cola contributed more than $1 million to the CDC Foundation. It also received significant benefits from the CDC, including collaborative meetings and advice from a top CDC staffer on how to lobby the World Health Organization to curtail its efforts to reduce consumption of added sugars.

The BMJ also reported on contributions from Roche to the CDC Foundation in support of the CDC’s Take 3 flu campaign, which encourages people to “take antiviral medicine if a doctor prescribes it.” Roche manufactures Tamiflu, an antiviral medication for the flu [for reference, Roche was able to convince governments around the world to stockpile hundreds of millions of dollars of Tamiflu (an ineffective drug that was never proven to work).

These “donations” in turn often shape the “impartial” guidelines we are expected to follow. For example, in 2010 the CDC foundation created a coalition which received over $26 million from major pharmaceutical companies producing hepatitis C treatments. Shortly after, a committee was created to create new CDC hepatitis C treatment recommendations, and an Inspector General report found many of its members had direct ties to those pharmaceutical companies.

Note: key funders of the CDC foundation (detailed here) include key Democratic political advocacy groups, vaccine organizations such as GAVI and the Gates Foundation, the major vaccine manufacturers (e.g., Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and J&J), and tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal.

In 2016 CDC employees anonymously complained about this corruption:

It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests…What concerns us most, is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception. Some senior management officials at CDC are clearly aware and even condone these behaviors. Others see it and turn the other way. Some staff are intimidated and pressed to do things they know are not right. We have representatives across the agency that witness this unacceptable behavior. It occurs at all levels and in all of our respective units.

Recently, the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP) has been implicated in a “cover up” of inaccurate screening data for the Wise Woman (WW) Program. There was a coordinated effort by that Center to “bury” the fact that screening numbers for the WW program were misrepresented in documents sent to Congress; screening numbers for 2014 and 2015 did not meet expectations despite a multi­million dollar investment; and definitions were changed and data “cooked” to make the results look better than they were. Data were clearly manipulated in irregular ways. An “internal review” that involved staff across CDC occurred and its findings were essentially suppressed so media and/or Congressional staff would not become aware of the problems.

Finally, most of the scientists at CDC operate with the utmost integrity and ethics. However, this “climate of disregard” puts many of us in difficult positions. We are often directed to do things we know are not right. For example, Congress has made it very clear that domestic funding for NCCDPHP (and other CIOs) should be used for domestic work and that the bulk of NCCDPHP funding should be allocated to program (not research).

Why in FY17 is NCCDPHP diverting money away from program priorities that directly benefit the public to support an expensive [global health] research that may not yield anything that benefits the [American] public?

In February 2019, two Democrat Congresswomen provided the evidence to request a formal investigation of CDC’s interactions with Coca-Cola and its broader corruption. Unfortunately, due to the politicization surrounding COVID, all of this was swept under the rug and forgotten.

Ideology or Corruption?

I also frequently wonder to what degree conduct I find reprehensible is due to corruption or simply ideological fixation.

In the case of vaccines, while clear financial conflicts of interest can be shown in certain cases (e.g., the CDC Foundation), I find the zealous adherence to all vaccines being “safe and effective” tends to be ideological in nature, as believing in vaccines has been instilled as a core belief of anyone affiliated with “science” or “medicine.”

Initially this can be quite subtle, but in time, that ideological bias quickly adds up. This is because most things aren’t clear cut, so depending on what one is biased to notice vs. filter out, one can rapidly be left with a world view where all “the evidence” supports their position, even if a great deal of it does not (which is a major reason why “rational” people can have such diametrically opposed belief systems).

This is a critical to understand as evaluating the actual risks and benefits of a routine vaccine requires you to assess:

• What percent of the unvaccinated population is likely to get the infection.
• What percent of those infected will have a moderate or severe illness.
• How effectively the vaccine prevents those vaccinated from catching the illness or developing moderate or severe complications from it.
• How long the vaccine’s effectiveness lasts.
• How long does it take the infection to become resistant to the vaccine (making it useless).
• What are the consequences of the vaccine triggering a population-wide mutation in the infection.
• Is there a viable alternative to vaccination?
• How likely the vaccine is to cause an acute moderate or acute severe reaction.
• How likely the vaccine is to cause a chronic moderate or chronic severe reaction.
• Who is at risk of having a more severe reaction to the vaccine?

Each of these, let alone all of them, is quite a task to figure out, and as a result most of the relevant points for each of the above simply are not taken into account when deciding upon a vaccine recommendation. Instead, a few marketable points are highlighted and the assessment of the vaccine’s risks and benefits are seen through their lens (e.g., “cervical cancer is deadly” and “the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer”), while pieces of evidence which challenge the predetermined conclusion (e.g., evidence of vaccine harm) are dismissed and filtered away.

As a result, many vaccines are on the market where their risks clearly and unambiguously outweigh their benefits, while in parallel, vaccines are viewed as a homogenous entity despite some (e.g., COVID or the HPV vaccines) being much more dangerous and unnecessary than many others. As many people have requested, I have provided a concise summary of the risks and benefits of each childhood vaccine here.

Note: while adherence to abhorrent policies is typically ideological, my sense is that as one goes higher in the hierarchy, the more leaders within the public health field (e.g., the CDC) are consciously aware of what they are complicit in, but nonetheless perpetuate it to protect their power base (whereas those lower in the power structure accede to the dominant narrative as doing anything else often ends careers).

Read the Whole Article

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Western civilization is not worth saving. I think that’s been pretty well established by now.

That’s one of the silliest things about the way rightists are always babbling about how we need to protect our way of life from immigrants or Islam or “the trans agenda” or whatever. They’re beginning with the assumption that this train wreck of a society is worth saving at all.

I am not saying that westerners should die. I am not saying that all the ideals and values that westerners purport to hold are worthless. I am saying that this civilization, as it actually exists, is an indefensible disaster. Clearly.

Our way of living on this planet. The way we treat one another. The way we treat people on other continents. All the systems and social structures that give rise to the way things are. These things should not exist. We should not be the way that we are.

This civilization is genocidal. Ecocidal. Omnicidal. Imperialist. Racist. Dehumanizing. Degrading. Dystopian. Emotionally stunted. Culturally vapid. Spiritually impoverished. Intellectually enslaved. Why would any sane person want this to continue?

We don’t need to rescue western civilization from outside forces, we need to rescue ourselves from western civilization.

If we listen to our hearts we can understand that the call isn’t to save western civilization from corruption by foreign cultures or new ways of thinking, but to radically transform it from the murderous, tyrannical and oppressive nightmare that it has always been.

The western way of life doesn’t need to be preserved, it needs to end. We cannot keep doing this. We cannot go on this way. We cannot keep poisoning our planet, our minds, our hearts and our souls with the McGenocide ideology of the western empire. We are headed somewhere dark, somewhere none of us want to go, and we need to turn around.

Nothing about our old way of doing things has worked out for us. Everything we were doing before wound up bringing us to this terrible point. We don’t need to go backwards, and we don’t need to stay still. We need to evolve.

Gaza is a mirror. It’s showing us what we are. What we have always been.

It’s time to be real about what we are seeing.

________________

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