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Paging James Madison!

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 18:33

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Remember the great Justin Raimondo, critic of the warfare-welfare state

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 11:51

Thanks, John Smith.

Orange County Register

 

The post Remember the great Justin Raimondo, critic of the warfare-welfare state appeared first on LewRockwell.

Confermato l'Accordo di Mar-a-Lago: Miran porta la ristrutturazione di Trump alla FED

Freedonia - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 11:13

Ci sono due forze concorrenti oggi sul panorama economico: disinflazionistiche (es. IA che spazza via lavori da colletti bianchi inutili, tagli alla spesa pubblica, ecc.) e inflazionistiche (es. metalli preziosi per espandere la base di capitale disponibile). Ma, in questo contesto, non bisogna dimenticarsi dei venti di recessione che spireranno, soprattutto dall'Europa. Qual è la mossa anticiclica che metterà in campo l'amministrazione Trump? Ricordate, lo scopo dei NY Boys è quello di costringere alle trattative e alla sottomissione le altre parti in gioco, soprattutto quelle che fanno riferimento alla cricca di Davos. Prosciugare di liquidità i vari strati di gestione che sono sotto il controllo di quest'ultima è il modo più efficiente per farle spendere i PROPRI di capitali e quindi arrivare al risultato desiderato. La cricca di Davos, tramite gli stimoli Buld Back Better e la ZIRP degli anni passati, ne ha accumulata tanta di liquidità (soprattutto tramite il mercato degli eurodollari). Blackrock, uno degli strati inferiori al di sotto di essa, ha fatto faville nel mercato residenziale americano annientando così la capacità della classe media di emergere. Ha praticamente giocato al rialzo insieme a Blackstone per far aumentare artificialmente il prezzo delle case e gli unici che potevano permettersi uno stipendio decente con cui accendere un mutuo erano proprio i colletti bianchi (soprattutto quelli nella macchina burocratica). Immaginate ora gran parte di questi che vengono licenziati, i mutui non pagati e un crollo dei prezzi delle case, che all'occhio profano potrebbe sembrare una tragedia, mentre invece sono un'opportunità affinché la classe produttiva d'America possa permettersi di nuovo una casa a prezzi accessibili e accendere un mutuo trentennale (puntellato dall'IPO di Fannie/Freddie). E nel frattempo player come Blackrock/Blasckstone ne escono con un haircut, come minimo del 60%, e la necessità di coprire i loro bilanci con... (rullo di tamburi)... asset tangibili: oro, argento e Bitcoin. Questo è il modo in cui si batte la cricca di Davos al suo stesso gioco.

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di Lau Vegys

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/confermato-laccordo-di-mar-a-lago)

[Nota: questo pezzo è stato scritto prima che Trump licenziasse il governatore della FED, Lisa Cook, rafforzando ulteriormente i suoi nominati nel consiglio di amministrazione.]

La nomina di Stephen Miran alla Federal Reserve non è solo l'ennesima mossa che ricade nell'alveo “il personale rispecchia la linea di politica” (slogan degli anni di Reagan): è l'inserimento dell'architetto della riorganizzazione targata Trump all'interno dell'istituzione stessa che contribuirà a realizzare la riforma economica più ambiziosa degli Stati Uniti da generazioni.

Senza entrare troppo nei dettagli, Miran, la mente dietro quello che è stato soprannominato “Accordo di Mar-a-Lago” ha delineato un piano completo per trasformare lo status di riserva del dollaro da un semplice peso a una merce di scambio, in modo da trasformare l'enorme debito americano da un imbarazzo a una leva finanziaria e riorientare l'intera struttura economica globale a favore di Washington.

E naturalmente ciò che rende tutto questo particolarmente rilevante in questo momento, in particolare per chiunque abbia un'esposizione all'oro, è la tempistica.

Il metallo giallo ha seguito una marcia inarrestabile verso l'alto per tutto il 2025, raggiungendo diversi massimi storici e superando i $4000 l'oncia. Ora, con la nomina di Miran alla FED, stiamo capendo esattamente perché gli investitori più attenti hanno accumulato silenziosamente il metallo giallo per tutto l'anno.

Ma chiunque pensi che la nomina di Miran serva semplicemente a dare a Trump l'ennesimo voto accomodante a favore dei tagli dei tassi perde di vista il quadro più ampio. L'oro non sta salendo solo a causa dei previsti tagli dei tassi; sta salendo perché gli investitori informati hanno riconosciuto ciò che la strategia di Trump avrebbe alla fine richiesto: l'indebolimento sistematico del dominio del dollaro e una potenziale rivalutazione dell'oro.

Il risultato è che la nomina di Miran è solo l'ultima conferma che questo piano sta passando dalla teoria alla pratica. E una volta capito cosa questo implica sia per il dollaro che per l'oro, è più facile capire perché $4000 per l'oro potrebbero essere solo l'inizio.


La posizione di Miran alla FED cambia le carte in tavola

Non vorrei sembrare un disco rotto, ma non mi stancherò mai di ripeterlo.

Non si tratta solo di assicurarsi un altro voto accomodante per i tagli dei tassi – Trump avrebbe potuto scegliere qualsiasi yes-man per questo. Si tratta di insediare l'architetto del reset monetario americano direttamente all'interno della Federal Reserve.

La FED non stabilisce dazi, non negozia accordi commerciali, né firma patti di difesa, ma controlla la leva più importante della strategia di Trump: il costo e il flusso del denaro.

Dal suo incarico di governatore della FED, Miran avrà diritto di voto permanente nel Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), il che gli consentirà di esercitare un'influenza diretta sui tassi di interesse, sulla massa monetaria e, soprattutto, sulle operazioni di bilancio della FED. Ma, cosa ancora più importante, sarà in grado di coordinare la politica monetaria con la strategia da lui ideata.

Riflettiamo su cosa questo significhi in termini pratici e dal punto di vista di Trump. La strategia prevede una svalutazione coordinata del dollaro, ma ciò richiede la partecipazione della FED. Non è possibile orchestrare un aggiustamento monetario in stile Accordi del Plaza (ne parleremo più avanti) se la banca centrale si oppone a ogni passo. Con Miran alla FED, Trump si ritrova con qualcuno che comprende sia la teoria macroeconomica alla base della svalutazione del dollaro, sia i meccanismi pratici di come attuarla attraverso la politica monetaria.

Nota: il dollaro si è già indebolito di oltre il 10% negli ultimi sei mesi. Per mettere le cose in prospettiva, l'ultima volta che il dollaro è sceso così tanto all'inizio dell'anno è stato nel 1973, subito dopo che gli Stati Uniti avevano finalizzato la loro separazione dall'oro e l'avvento della moneta fiat.

La nomina di Miran segnala anche qualcosa di ancora più significativo: la presa di controllo istituzionale della politica monetaria. Alla scadenza del mandato di Jerome Powell, a maggio 2026, i presidenti della FED vengono solitamente scelti tra i governatori in carica. Insediando Miran, Trump ha posizionato il suo architetto monetario strategico a capo dell'intero sistema della Federal Reserve.

In breve, Trump sta facendo in modo che la FED stessa diventi lo strumento principale per attuare la sua riorganizzazione. E c'è una ragione ben precisa per questo fatto.


La strategia di Trump ha bisogno della FED dalla sua parte 

Ho menzionato prima gli Accordi del Plaza perché è il precedente storico più vicino a quello che chiamiamo Accordo di Mar-a-Lago.

Probabilmente ne avrete sentito parlare.

Il 22 settembre 1985 i ministri delle finanze delle maggiori economie mondiali si riunirono al Plaza Hotel di New York per coordinare una svalutazione del dollaro, innaturalmente forte.

Al di fuori degli Stati Uniti nessuno voleva un dollaro più debole: avrebbe reso le esportazioni più costose per gli acquirenti americani, ma, proprio come oggi, Washington esercitò pressioni con dazi, sovrapprezzi sulle importazioni, quote e accuse di “commercio sleale”.

E indovinate un po'? Funzionò. La Germania Ovest e il Giappone, le potenze economiche dell'epoca, cedettero.

Ma ecco cosa fece funzionare gli Accordi del Plaza: la Federal Reserve era pienamente a bordo. L'allora Presidente della FED, Paul Volcker, si coordinò a stretto contatto con il Segretario al Tesoro, James Baker, per garantire che la politica monetaria sostenesse la strategia di svalutazione del dollaro. Tagliò i tassi di interesse da circa il 12% al 6% tra la fine del 1984 e la fine del 1986, creando le condizioni per la discesa del dollaro. Senza quella cooperazione gli Accordi del Plaza sarebbero probabilmente rimasti solo l'ennesimo pezzo di carta.

Ecco perché la nomina di Miran è cruciale. Trump ha imparato dal copione di Reagan: per attuare una svalutazione monetaria coordinata, è meglio assicurarsi che la banca centrale remi nella stessa direzione. Insediando il suo uomo all'interno della FED, Trump garantisce che la politica monetaria si allinei alla sua strategia economica più ampia, anziché indebolirla.

E che fine fece l'oro in seguito agli Accordi del Plaza?

Salì vertiginosamente. Date un'occhiata al grafico qui sotto.

Dopo gli Accordi del Plaza del 1985, il prezzo dell'oro balzò da circa $320 l'oncia a oltre $370 tra settembre 1985 e marzo 1986... in soli sei mesi.

Considerando i prezzi odierni, sarebbe come vedere l'oro balzare a circa $5.000 l'oncia.

Ma ecco il punto: se la riorganizzazione di Trump si svolgerà nel modo in cui credo, non sarà solo una ripetizione degli Accordi del Plaza, ma sarà più verticale.

Nell'attuale economia globalizzata e sovraindebitata, gli effetti a catena potrebbero essere enormi. Non mi sorprenderebbe vedere l'oro salire a $6.000 o $8.000 l'oncia, mentre i mercati si affrettano ad adattarsi.


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


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


Remembering The November 22, 1963 Deep State Coup d’état

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 06:08

November 22, 2025, is the sixty-second anniversary of the brutal assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas and the subsequent regime change/cover-up of his murder. After six decades the final confrontation, repercussions, reconciliation, and resolution of this tragic event and its impact must be undertaken.

President Trump did fulfill his solemn promise to issue the appropriate executive order in compliance with the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, and direct all government agencies/entities to make public and unredacted all complete files and records pertaining to the assassination of John Kennedy as directed by this Act. This information shall be transmitted to the National Archives for full public disclosure to be included in the Archives’ Collection and made available for public inspection and copying.

There is an ever-growing scholarly consensus among presidential historians, distinguished political analysts, and JFK assassination researchers that on November 22, 1963, an insidious coup d’état by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and the highest echelons of the National Security State was accomplished with the brutal murder of President John F. Kennedy.

The official full 889-page report by the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, about the assassination of President John Kennedy on November 22, 1963, established the cover-up of this coup. Their landmark final report was presented to President Lyndon Johnson on September 24, 1964, and made public on September 27.

What happened on that fateful Friday in Dallas sixty-two years ago led to perhaps the single most important series of events affecting the subsequent history of our nation. It lies at the inner most depth, the dark clotted heart, of what observers now describe as the deep state.

Here are additional authoritative evidentiary resources to assist readers in examining this seminal event —

Thirty years after his landmark film JFK, filmmaker Oliver Stone takes viewers on a journey though recently declassified evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy — the most consequential American murder mystery of the twentieth century. Joined by Whoopi Goldberg and Donald Sutherland, as well as a distinguished team of forensics, medical and ballistics experts, historians, and witnesses, Stone presents compelling evidence that in the Kennedy case ‘conspiracy theory’ is now ‘conspiracy fact.’

This is the full length uncut version of Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane. Lane, one of the early critics of the preconceived conclusions of the Warren Commission, went to Dallas to do his own investigation and interview witnesses that were ignored by the Commission and others who expanded on their knowledge of the JFK assassination. Particularly crucial were the authoritative statements of eyewitnesses S. M. Holland, Lee E. Bowers, and Mrs. Acquila Clemons, What is portrayed in this short critique offers a different picture from the one presented by the US government to the world. This film is a brief for the defense of Lee Harvey Oswald. Mark Lane’s pioneering best-selling book, Rush to Judgment, challenged the Warren Commission Report relating to Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole assassin of President John Kennedy.

Andrew Gavin Marshall has written an exceptional online summary article, “The National Security State and the Assassination of JFK” which builds upon the path-breaking research of author James W. Douglass in his widely-acclaimed book, JFK and the Unspeakable:Why He Died and Why It Matters  These are the first analytical studies serious scholars should examine in depth, followed by the entire five volume series of Douglas P. Horne’s Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK.

Horne is the former Chief Analyst for Military Records for the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), established by the JFK Records Act of 1992, which was tasked with defining, locating, and ensuring the declassification (to the maximum extent possible under the JFK Act) of all Federal Records considered “reasonably related” to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Horne details the numerous anomalies and interrupted chain of custody and destruction of key evidence regarding the president’s body, in the autopsy report(s), the autopsy photo collection (particularly the JFK brain photographs), the deliberate alteration and forgery of the extant Zapruder film, and the supposed “magic bullet” found at Parkland Hospital in Dallas.

Watch Douglas P. Horne’s definitive five part video documentary series which summarizes his exceptional research, Altered History: Exposing Deceit and Deception in the JFK, Assassination Medical Evidence. Horne has also written the concise authoritative summary volume, JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated.

While serving as chief analyst of military records at the Assassination Records Review Board in 1997, Douglas P. Horne discovered that the Zapruder Film was examined by the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center two days after the assassination of President Kennedy. In this film, Horne interviews legendary NPIC photo interpreter Dino Brugioni, who speaks for the first time about another NPIC examination of the film the day after the assassination. Brugioni didn’t know about the second examination and believes the Zapruder Film in the archives today is not the film he saw the day after the assassination. Drawing on Volume 4 of his book “Inside the ARRB”, Horne introduces the subject and presents his conclusions.

Jeffrey Sachs – “JFK’s Quest for Peace;”

Stephen Kinzer – “Regime Change: Roots of the Imperial Temptation;”

Michael Glennon – “Double Government and the ‘Best Truth’ about the Assassination;”

Douglas Horne —  “The National Security Establishment’s Obsession with Invading Cuba;”

Michael Swanson – “What Is The Purpose of the National Security State?”

Peter Janney – “JFK & Mary Meyer: Relationship as Redemption;”

Ron Paul – “Enemies: Foreign and Domestic;”

Jefferson Morley – “Angleton, Cuba, and Assassination;”

James DiEugenio – “Vietnam Declassified: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon;”

Oliver Stone with James DiEugenio – “If JFK Were Alive Today;” and

Jacob G. Hornberger – “The National Security State: The Biggest Mistake in U.S. History”

The national-security establishment’s assassination of President John F. Kennedy was one of the pivotal events in our lifetime, and it continues to have an adverse impact on American life today. This conference was held in March and April of 2021 and was oriented toward people who are not well-versed in the assassination and who wish to gain a deeper understanding of it.

The conference presents an easy-to-understand introduction to what happened and why. Consider it a primer on the Kennedy assassination. Attendees learned about President Kennedy’s foreign policy and how it was so different from that of both his predecessors and successors — and why the Pentagon and the CIA considered it to be such a grave threat to national security. Attendees also learned about the fraudulent nature of the autopsy that the national-security establishment performed on the president’s body on the evening of the assassination and how it leads to an understanding of the assassination itself.

The conference consists of an astounding 31 hours of online presentations by various speakers, Viewers will have a good grasp of what happened on that fateful day in November 1963 and why it is so critically important today.

  • An excellent source of information on the JFK Assassination, the CIA, and much more is America’s Untold Stories-With Eric Hunley and Mark Groubert
  • The “smoking gun” in the cover-up of the assassination is found in CIA Dispatch #1035-960 . This was the crucial covert directive to the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird elite media assets to vigorously denounce critics of the Warren Commission Report as “conspiracy theorists.” This is when that particular derogatory term of denunciation and disinformation widely entered the national conversation in an attempt to marginalize, cut off and stifle informed debate on the president’s murder because the path of evidence would lead directly to those elements behind the sinister cover-up. These facts are discussed in detail in Lance deHaven-Smith’s authoritative Conspiracy Theory in America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press). Dr. Smith is a widely published scholar in peer-reviewed academic journals and is Professor in the Reubin O’ D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

This is an excellent and invaluable resource. Comprehensive, accessible and unprecedented, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination presents vital information on each of more than 1,400 individuals related in any noteworthy way to the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit and alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22 and 24, 1963. Based on years of research, a wealth of sources and a long study of the Warren Commission’s twenty-six volumes, this encyclopedic book includes: A-to-Z entries on virtually all the suspects, victims, witnesses, law enforcement officials and investigators.

Quick identification of each person followed by biographical facts, testimony, evidence and more. Detailed listings of sources. Explorations of the puzzling theories and countless sides of the case. Extensive cross-referencing of entries, allowing readers to follow their own investigations and construct their own conclusions. This all-new who’s who will prove an essential companion to the many best-selling books, documentaries and feature films about the JFK assassination.

Bound to be referred to again and again, it is the complete resource for anyone who wants to know more about– or wants to keep better track of– the key players involved in one of the most infamous chapters in American history.

This is the first of several high-level political analyses motivated by a need to better understand the politics that led to both the JFK assassination and the Nixon Watergate Affair. It deploys as the primary theoretical model, C. Wright Mills “Theory of the Power Elite” and the framework in Carroll Quigleys book Tragedy and Hope. With these tools, Carl Oglesby posits an interesting thesis: that JFK’s assassination, instead of being a random act by a lone nut was in fact a carefully planned and professional executed ongoing coup d’ état a la Americaine, a not so silent coup by the same forces responsible for the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X and possibly the demise and eventual destruction of the billionaire Howard Hughes.

What all of these events had in common was that they were links in a chain designed to replace one set of power elite (members of the old moneyed “peace promoting” Northeastern Yankee Establishment) with another (the Nuevo Riche and newly arrived, “progress through war” Western Cowboys). Thus, it is argued that the events connecting Dallas, Memphis, Watergate and the demise of the Hughes empire, are but threads in a common fabric, growing and evolving directly out of the systematic corruption of American politics and out of contemporary political realities.

The late Murray N. Rothbard was particularly enamored with this pioneering book, remarking:

Carl Oglesby’s new book is not only exciting and thoroughly researched, it presents the only analytic framework — originated by himself — which makes sense of the violent events of the last decade and a half our recent political history, and puts them all into a coherent framework: the Yankee vs. Cowboy analysis.

The important question looms: why is it that Oglesby has been alone in coming up with this framework? I think the answer is that the methodologies of other writers and researchers have led them astray: the free-market economists who are critical of government actions never bother to ask who benefited from those actions and who were likely to be responsible for them; the Marxists are anxious to indict an abstract, mythical and unified ‘capitalist class’ for all evils of government, and believe that detailed research into concrete divisions and conflicts among power elites detract from such an indictment; those sociologists who have engaged in concrete power elite analysis have only examined structures (who owns corporation X, who belongs to what social club?) rather than the dynamics of concrete historical events; the one writer who has treated Yankees and Cowboys has been so blinded by particular hostility to the Cowboys that he virtually includes everyone living in the Sunbelt as part of a vast Cowboy conspiracy; and the various doughty investigators and reporters of Dallas or Watergate have struck to surface events because they lacked the overall coherent framework.

Carl Oglesby has surmounted all of these defects, and has therefore been able to make a giant breakthrough in explaining our recent history.

The death of Mary Meyer left many Americans with questions. Who really killed her? Why did CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton rush to find and confiscate her diary? Had she discovered the plan to assassinate her lover, President Kennedy, with the trail of information ending at the steps of the CIA? Was it only coincidence that she was killed less than three weeks after the release of the Warren Commission Report?

Fans of The Murder of Mary Russell, JFK: A Vision for America, and other JFK books will love Mary’s Mosaic. Building and relying on years of interviews and painstaking research, author Peter Janney follows the key events and influences in Mary Pinchot Meyer’s life—her first meeting with Jack Kennedy; her support of her secret lover, President Kennedy, as he worked towards the pursuit of world peace and away from the Cold War; and her exploration of psychedelic drugs. Fifty years after the assassinations of President Kennedy and Mary Meyer, this book helps readers understand why both took place.

Author Peter Janney fought for two years to obtain documents from the National Personnel Records Center and the US Army to complete this third edition. It includes a final chapter about the mystery man who could be the missing piece to learn the truth behind Meyer’s murder.

Focuses upon the intimate relationship between JFK and Mary Pinchot Meyer and their brutal murders.

The late Dr. Cyril Wecht, for two decades the elected coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania (including Pittsburgh), was a nationally acclaimed forensic pathologist, and held both a medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh (1956), and a law degree from the University of Maryland (1962). Forensic pathologists specialize in medically determining how and why someone died.

In criminal murder cases this function is absolutely vital in helping to determine the guilt or innocence of a suspect — in no case more so than in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Dr. Wecht, a very early critic of the Warren Commission, testified at the HSCA. At the annual JFK Lancer assassination research conference in Dallas, held in November, Dr. Wecht summarized the medical evidence against the lone-gunman hypothesis. At the center of Dr. Wecht’s examination is what has become known as the “single-bullet theory” — or the “magic bullet,” as it is known to its detractors: the theory that one bullet can account for the multiple wounds (besides the headshot) of both JFK and Governor Connally.

According to Dr. Wecht, the conclusions of the Warren Commission rest entirely on the single-bullet theory. If that theory fails, then there had to be more than one gunman. This, in turn, leads to questions about the history of the United States since 1963 that many people would rather not pursue. With both passion and meticulous attention to detail, Wecht dissects the Warren Commission’s conclusions.

Moving beyond the medical evidence, he then utters words unexpected from any former American elected official, and particularly powerful coming from a person with his credentials: “What we witnessed…my friends, in plain, plain English — was [a] coup d’état in America. The overthrow of the government. That’s what this case was all about.”

Watch this classic eight minute YouTube clip of JFK Assassination researcher John Judge from the “JFK: Cinema as History” conference (January 1992) which appeared on C-SPAN. It reveals more about “the why” of the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the coup d’état following his murder than almost anything you have probably heard.

After quoting Thomas Jefferson on the importance of a free press to a republic, John Judge makes a disparaging reference to The Washington Post and The New York Times. He then pauses for a few seconds and is shown glaring at another panel member. This person (not shown in the clip) was Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, who had viciously attacked Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. The older man who is briefly shown in one momentary scene is the late Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty who served as chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff where he was in charge of the global system designed to provide military support for covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. In Oliver Stone’s highly acclaimed film, JFK, the mysterious character ‘X’ portrayed by Donald Sutherland was in fact Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who assisted director Stone in the production and scripting of this historical epic.

Prouty had relayed the shocking information detailed in the movie to the actual New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Cosner) in a series of communiques. Fletcher Prouty was the author of two excellent books, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World. and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy.

JFK: A President Betrayed
Narrated by Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman, “JFK: A President Betrayed” uncovers shocking evidence that reveals how President John F. Kennedy, early in his term as president in 1961, felt entrapment, that he had been misled by his military and intelligence advisors regarding the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Because of this betrayal he was determined to constantly be on guard regarding subsequent strategic advice issued to him.

After his confrontational June 1961 Vienna Summit meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, later that year in September Kennedy under took a bold initiative and introduced at the Sixteenth General Assembly of the United Nations a Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World.

Conversely the national security establishment (particularly the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA) believed, not in disarmament but in a nuclear first strike policy against the Soviet Union, and that JFK was naive and lacked determination and resolve in his opposition to this apocalyptic doomsday scenario. On March 13, 1962 the JCS submitted Operation Northwoods as a pretext for a Cuban Invasion.

This war between JFK and the military intensified following the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Pentagon leaders such as Air Force chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay believed the peaceful resolution of the Crisis was not Kennedy’s finest hour but had been appeasement of the Soviets and the worst disaster in American history.

JFK proceeded to embark on secret back channel peace efforts with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro and was determined to get out of Vietnam despite intense opposition inside his own government.

“The Peace Speech” — JFK Commencement Address at American University, June 10, 1963.

To the deep state, this was treason.

It all came to an end on November 22, 1963, when an insidious coup d’état by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and the highest echelons of the National Security State was accomplished with the brutal murder of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

The post Remembering The November 22, 1963 Deep State Coup d’état appeared first on LewRockwell.

Young MAGA Is Souring on Israel

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

When Vice President J.D. Vance spoke at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Mississippi two weeks ago, a young man in a red MAGA hat had a question for him: “I’m a Christian, man, and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something, or that they’re our greatest ally.”

He continued, “Or that we have to support this multi-billion dollar foreign aid package to Israel to cover this, to quote Charlie Kirk, ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Gaza.” (In his very last interview before his ​assassination in September, Kirk said to the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, “Ben, some people would want to accuse Israel of wanting to ethnically cleanse.”)

Vance sidestepped the young man’s question and instead promoted the administration’s Gaza peace plan and assured the audience that Israel was not “manipulating or controlling” the president.

The independent journalist Glenn Greenwald found Vance’s non-answer lacking and shared the clip, writing, “It’s pretty much 100% certain now that if a political or media figure goes to speak to young conservatives (including at Turning Point), they’re going to be questioned on why they give billions to Israel and so much more.”

“JD Vance needs a better answer,” Greenwald warned.

Greenwald’s certainty about what young conservatives might do manifested itself again last week, when Eric and Lara Trump appeared at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Alabama and were asked a similar question about Israel.

A young man said, “I’d like to ask about your father’s relationship with Israel. He’s taken over $230 million from pro-Israel groups… During the summer against Iran, even though he advised against it, Israel still attacked Iran, and the U.S. still bombed on behalf of Israel.”

“Israel has not been a great ally to the U.S. all the way since 1960 when they bombed the USS Liberty,” he noted.

That line got a big cheer from the student audience. The USS Liberty event actually happened in 1967, but apparently it was something many in the audience, most of whom were probably born in the 21st century, were aware of.

The young man continued, “Israel is a nation where Christians are constantly under attacks in both Gaza and the West Bank. We talk about ‘America First’ and defending Christians but how can we do this if we align ourselves with a nation that does not do that itself?”

More applause. Eric Trump replied by defending his father’s policies and insisting that “Iran wanted to destroy our way of life.” Lara Trump noted that, thanks to the president, a peace process was underway, and that received applause.

The young man had a follow-up. “It’s just sad to see because I’ve never seen the American president get treated the way he does by the Israeli government.”

These kinds of questions will probably be asked again and again by young people in conservative settings, as Greenwald observed. A September 29 POLITICO headline read “An Entire Generation Is Turning on Israel,” noting that according to a Pew Research poll released in April, “More than half of American adults — 53 percent — now have an unfavorable opinion of Israel and only 32 percent have confidence in Netanyahu… Democrats are more likely than Republicans to express unfavorable opinions of Israel, 69 percent versus 37 percent, but Republicans’ negative views are steadily ticking upward.”

“That’s particularly true of younger Republicans,” POLITICO observed. “In the last three years, the share of Republicans under 50 years old who have negative views of Israel jumped from 35 percent to 50 percent.”

The Pew poll is no outlier. An August 2025 University of Maryland Critical Issues survey found that only 24 percent of Republican voters 18–34 sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians. For Republicans 35 and older, that number jumps to 52 percent.

That’s a 28-point difference. Quite the age gap.

Trump has suffered a massive drop in approval with young Americans across the board. An Economist/YouGov poll taken in mid-October revealed that the president had gone from a plus-8 net approval rating in February to a minus-55 net approval rating in October.
 That’s a 63-point swing, downward.

The survey of voters under 30 showed 39 percent approved of Trump and 58 percent disapproved. The pollster noted, “This is the lowest net approval Trump has received in any Economist / YouGov Poll in Trump’s second term, and lower than all but one poll in his first term.”

Turning Point USA has another major event in December featuring speakers Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, among others. If there are question and answer sessions with the young attendees—a practice the organization is known for and which is very much in the spirit of its ​​late founder Charlie Kirk—expect Israel to come up.

Expect it to be negative.

This article was originally published on The American Conservative.

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Polish Railway ‘Sabotage’ Runs on Time for Europe’s Military Schengen Plan

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

The militarization of Europe and its “NATO-ization,” entails an unprecedented and mind-boggling shift in public money to military corporations.

The European Commission is proposing to make the European Union of 27 nations a seamless territory for NATO transport across national borders. The concept is to create a “military Schengen” in analogy to the free movement of civilians across the bloc.

The controversial idea is strongly advocated by pro-NATO European leaders. The proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and the escalating tensions of a wider war have helped push the sweeping militarization of the EU as a single bloc.

This week, as the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen makes her pitch for an EU-wide military Schengen zone, there were suspicious sabotage attacks on Poland’s railway network.

Von der Leyen is leading the calls for coordination of military forces to have free access to the EU’s transport links. The idea for a military Schengen-type arrangement for the EU has been around for several years, but there has been resistance from nations giving up control of their borders. The last time Von der Leyen’s German compatriots did that by marching across Europe did not go down too well.

What the proponents of the concept would like is for military forces from one country to be able to cross over several others with minimal inspection. The idea brings closer to realization the formation of an “EU army.” It also blurs the lines between NATO and the EU to the point where all 27 members of the EU become de facto members of the military alliance.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Von der Leyen were quick to blame Russia for “shocking sabotage” of Poland’s railway after trains were disrupted by an explosive attack on Sunday. No one was injured. And, as usual, no evidence was provided. Russia was not openly blamed by name, but the media reporting implicated Russian involvement. Moscow has previously denied accusations of carrying out hybrid war attacks on transport and communication infrastructure across Europe, including the use of drones to disrupt air traffic.

Questions arise about the latest railway incidents in Poland. The affected rail line was from Warsaw to Lublin, and onwards to Ukraine. Tusk described the rail link as “crucially important for aid to Ukraine.” Indeed, the rail line is a major vector for munitions flowing to Ukraine. If it is such a vital supply route for NATO military equipment to Ukraine, one wonders why the rail line was not better guarded.

The railway damage was reported by a train driver on Sunday morning, yet the government and security authorities did not act until Monday. The delay in response caused anger among Polish citizens who remonstrated with officials at public gatherings. Were the authorities deliberately being negligent in ensuring the rail line was made safe, to contrive an accident?

The BBC reported local people claiming that they heard a massive explosion whose impact could be felt several kilometers away. The strange thing is that the reported railway damage did not appear to be extensive. One would expect from such a powerful blast that whole sections of the rail would have been destroyed, making the line impassable. However, it was reported that several trains were able to traverse the damaged section on Monday before the authorities acted. The traversing trains incurred shattered windows. But if they were able to traverse, then the tracks could not have been blown apart.

We might reasonably speculate, therefore, that the explosion was not the actual cause of the relatively limited rail damage. Perhaps the blast was detonated to bring the public’s attention to a separate act of sabotage to derail the trains (without causing a calamitous loss of life). The purpose was to conflate the perception of explosion with railway sabotage. And as Tusk, Von der Leyen, and the media have all dutifully followed suit, the convenient upshot is to level accusations implicating Russian hybrid warfare.

Poland’s Army Chief of Staff, General Wieslaw Kukula, articulated the narrative as quoted by Euronews: “The adversary has started preparations for war. They are building a certain environment here to bring about an undermining of public confidence in the government and bodies such as the armed forces and the police… [creating] conditions that are convenient for the potential conduct of aggression on Polish territory.”

Week after week, European politicians, military, security, and bureaucratic chiefs are claiming with shrill rhetoric that Russia is preparing to attack member states imminently. Earlier this year, Poland’s Tusk even accused Russia of intending to blow up civilian cargo airplanes. How easy it is to plant incendiary devices to blame someone else and report “suspects” arrested without court cases. The European public is browbeaten into consenting to increased military budgets, air defenses, anti-drone walls, and tens of billions of Euros more to prop up the corrupt Kiev regime. All to “defend” Europe against an evil aggressor.

Moscow has repeatedly dismissed claims that it intends to attack European states. But the war propaganda continues relentlessly to project Russia as a drooling barbarian.

A cruel irony is that passenger trains have been sabotaged in Russia in recent months, with the loss of lives, acts which have been attributed to NATO and Ukrainian covert operations. The Western media hardly reports on those atrocities.

But an apparently contrived false-flag operation in Poland is given maximum Western media coverage with the choreographed narrative that Russia is the villain. As with the flurry of mysterious drones suddenly invading European airspaces.

The proposal for a European military Schengen is very much aimed at bringing rail networks across Europe under a seamless command to enable the rapid mass movement of NATO forces over national borders. No questions asked. Just do it.

A false-flag sabotage on Polish railways reinforces the messaging that Europe’s transport network has to be turned over for military logistical control.

The militarization of Europe and its “NATO-ization,” entails an unprecedented and mind-boggling shift in public money to military corporations, the financial elite, and their political puppets. The corruption in the Kiev regime is a microcosm of the bigger war racket that Europe has become. False flags to scare European citizens into passive acceptance of the rip-off are running like clockwork.

It used to be joked about Mussolini and Hitler that at least the old fascists made the trains run on time. The new fascists make the trains come off the rails on time.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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War With Everyone, Including Ourselves

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

You can’t fight what you can’t see.  So allow me to ask a blunt question: How blind are we?

Talk of war is everywhere.  A good number of military academics would tell you that WWIII began sometime between the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks and President Obama’s decision to use the international banking system to freeze out nations deemed insufficiently compliant with the West’s brand of “globalism.”  The more that Washington, London, and Brussels have insisted that the “rules-based international order” empowers Western officials to confiscate foreign assets or disrupt normal currency transactions whenever target nations refuse to do what Western officials demand, the faster that adversaries such as China and Russia have worked to build financial institutions beyond the West’s control.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved numerous players who called neither country home.  Islamic militants came from Africa, Europe, Asia, and across the Middle East.  Arms brokers from China, Russia, and South American narco-states made money from the prolonged conflicts.  After the Taliban effectively ended heroin production in Afghanistan, opium poppy cultivation spiked with the arrival of American troops.  Since 2001, Afghanistan has dominated the global market for illicit drugs, supplying more than 90% of the world’s heroin.

A lot of that heroin made its way back into the United States.  At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry hooked millions of Americans on legalized opioids.  Stepping in to take advantage of Americans’ growing addiction to illegal heroin and legal pain medications, China partnered with Central and South American cartels to flood fentanyl into the country.  China sees the drug-trade as a way to weaken American society while establishing both alliances and smuggling routes that allow its soldiers to penetrate the American heartland.

Nobody knows exactly how many illegal aliens from China now operate in the United States, but they are certainly doing more than just quietly spying on rural military bases.  Every time a core industrial factory or food production warehouse explodes, prudent people should wonder whether the incident was an accident or an act of sabotage.  Every time a cellular phone network gets hacked or a financial institution acknowledges the theft of millions of consumer records, Americans should understand those events as forms of hybrid warfare.  With human traffickers assisting the covert movements of America’s most formidable enemies, hybrid warfare can turn into kinetic warfare quickly.

President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth are hunting drug boats in international waters.  Killing narco-terrorists who kill Americans with fentanyl seems reasonable.  But what else is going on?  Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves — more than the United States, Mexico, and Canada combined — and has natural resources worth roughly fifteen trillion dollars.  When Marxist-socialist Hugo Chávez “nationalized” Venezuela’s most important industries at the beginning of the century, he stole hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure from American companies.  Do you think there might be a few people in Washington who believe it’s time to collect damages plus interest?

Speaking of “interest,” ever since Venezuela swung hard toward Chávez’s economy-crippling socialism, Russia and China have increased their presence on America’s southern porch.  Offering Venezuela scientific expertise and infrastructure in exchange for cheap energy and space for their espionage and military forces, Russia and China have greatly expanded their surveillance powers and lethal capabilities around the Caribbean these last two decades.  Should the West’s proxy war in Ukraine transform into a head-to-head conflict between Russia and the United States, it will become imperative for America to control everything from the Florida Keys to northern South America.  Should China follow through on its threats to invade Taiwan, it will simultaneously use its Venezuelan assets, alliances with narco-terrorists, and hibernating Chinese agents already inside the United States to attack critical American infrastructure and sow chaos.  Any prudent military planner seeking either to prevent or win WWIII knows that American forces must box out adversaries already staging operations in or near Venezuela.

The Venezuelan government has also spent the last twenty-five years cultivating ties with Hezbollah and other Iran-backed terrorist groups.  Islamic terrorists and Venezuela’s narco-terrorists have long shared intel, weapons systems, logistical expertise, banking resources, and both real and counterfeit documents to advance non-competing interests.  An interesting report recently republished on ZeroHedge notes that the U.S. military began blowing up Venezuelan drug boats within weeks of launching attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  There is credible evidence to suggest that Iran has been attempting to use Venezuela’s smuggling networks to infiltrate the U.S. with terrorist operatives.  What looks like a “war on drugs” may very well be a war on Islamic terrorists.  Either way, control over Venezuela becomes critical for American national security.

The Trump administration has made no secret of its intentions to reestablish dominant control over the Western Hemisphere and batten down the hatches of Fortress America.  It has designated North and South American drug cartels “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” and is going after Mexican and Canadian financial institutions that assist Chinese fentanyl sales and narco-terrorist money laundering.  President Trump seeks to project American power as far north as Greenland and as far south as the Panama Canal.  He is reorienting trade relations with Canada and Mexico in an effort to wean both nations’ economic reliance upon China.  The president’s message is clear: America must secure the hemisphere before ongoing hostilities with foreign adversaries metastasize from hybrid forms of economic warfare into overt forms of violent war.

While America works to secure its borders and local neighborhood, Western authorities continue to vilify Russia for attempting to do the same with regard to Ukraine.  For thirty years, Ukraine has been widely ridiculed within Europe’s elite political circles as being irredeemably corrupt.  Ever since the Western-backed coup d’état in 2014 and Russia’s renewed interest in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking Eastern territories, those same elite political circles have hailed Ukraine’s authoritarian government as Europe’s frontline in the “defense of democracy.”  It does not seem to matter to the Europeans that Ukraine has all but banned political dissent, free speech, and religious freedom or that Ukraine’s “President” Zelenskyy has remained in office eighteen months beyond the end of his elected term.  Europeans and Americans in favor of prolonging the war in Ukraine insist that military dictatorship is the sine qua non of “democracy” and that dissent is “Russian disinformation.”

For fifteen years, “Russian disinformation” has been the greatest fear of American and European politicians.  Powerful Western authorities worry so much about Russia’s almost supernatural ability to steer public opinion that they have decided to “save democracy” by killing free speech.  The corporate news media — revealing themselves to be subservient cogs of Western governments — have marshaled their resources to censor public dissent and brand anti-Establishment viewpoints as “Russian propaganda.”

Across the West nobody knows what’s real anymore.  Western governments accuse their geopolitical enemies of using social media platforms to engage in information warfare.  At the same time, Western governments direct information warfare against their own citizens.  Antifa terrorists riot against capitalism while Western capitalists bankroll Antifa’s mayhem.  Big Pharma makes money by making sure everyone is sick.  Big Tech defends free speech while censoring online accounts.  Big Banks defend free markets while offshoring industries and inflating paper currencies.  Western politicians divide the world between “democracies” and “dictatorships,” while monitoring all electronic communications and pushing for “vaccine” passports, digital IDs, facial recognition, mass surveillance, and central bank digital currencies.

Are we at war with foreign nations, or are our own nations at war with us?  Both seem to be true.  That sure makes it difficult to see what we’re fighting.  Perhaps that’s the point.  Shake us until we’re dizzy and confused and parade us into our jail cells as we proclaim our allegiance to the “coalition of the willing.”  Subjugation is a deadly cocktail of fear and chaos.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

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Is AI Overheating?

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

On November 17 Bloomberg reported that Peter Thiel’s hedge fund sold its 537,742 shares of Nvidia during the third quarter. This month SoftBank sold its stake in Nvidia reportedly worth $5.8 billion. Bloomberg sees the sales as a retreat from investments in Nvidia, the leading provider of artificial intelligence chips. However, SoftBank says it sold its Nvidia shares in order to increase its investments in OpenAI. These are large numbers, but small compared to Nvidia’s $4.6 trillion market capitalization. It is the size of the market capitalization and the large depreciation that might be the problem.

Michael Burry’s expressed uneasiness about problems resulting from very rapid developments in AI, especially as they relate to Nvidia and Palantir (Nvidia makes AI chips and Painter develops AI software) has focused some attention on the depreciation problem resulting from rapid change  that could bring down share prices in the AI arena, including Google and Microsoft.

Michael Burry was the only person who saw in advance the collapse of the mortgage derivative market. No one in the financial sector saw it coming, and neither did the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. These three stooges went to Congress and stopped Brooksley Born , Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, from regulating derivatives.

We can conclude from this that the people assumed to be smart are not.  The only smart people are the few who can get outside of the box and look at reality objectively.

Larry Sparano (On Target) recently interviewed me about the situation.

A Possible AI Collapse

The basic problem seems to be that AI investments rapidly depreciate because of the rapid rate of change, with the result that the rapidly rising depreciation requires ever more new investments into the industry.

Some of the financing seems to be circular. Here is a possible scenario. The company OpenAI contracts to spend more money than they have. The money is to go to Oracle. On the basis of expected incoming revenue from OpenAI, Oracle announces it is going to buy massive amounts of chips from Nvidia. Nvidia then makes a $100 billion investment in OpenAI. It other words it is a credit circle.

The massive data centers being built by Google and Microsoft are not a one-time investment, they are a huge recurring expense.  The data centers depreciate rapidly because of rapid developments such as the displacement of CPU processors by the faster GPU processors. If the companies underestimate the speed at which their investments are depreciating, they could be faced with a depreciation tsunami with depreciation write downs exceeding new investment inflows and cash flow. It is possible to have profits and no cash flow, because reported profit doesn’t include the capital spending necessary to keep up with rapid technological development. For now it seems that new investments into the companies are taking the place of profits, and it is new investments into AI that are creating the bubble. However, expenses cannot forever exceed profits without stock prices and high P/E ratios collapsing.

One way to hide the problem is to extend the expected life of the investments from, say, three years to six years. This gives a longer time to spread out the depreciation and thereby a less of a hit on cash flow. But if the life of the assets turns out to be three years, the company is in trouble.

Yet another problem is that rapidly depreciating computer units are being used as collateral to finance loans, and new businesses called neoclouds borrow money to use to offer computing units for rent. As the business is rapidly growing, there quickly will be hundreds of billions of dollars in loans based on rapidly expiring collateral.

If I have managed to understand the situation, the AI boom is dependent on new money entering the industry to provide the money to renew rapidly depreciating assets. If the inflow of new money reduces or halts, the bubble pops.

As my readers perhaps know, I am more interested in the societal affects of AI than in a market crash from an AI bubble. The societal effects are more deadly than a market crash.

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What We’ve Lost

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

What we’ve lost are the foundations of a healthy standard of living / quality of life.

Amidst the constant drumbeat of tech “progress” and grandiose “solutions,” it’s a useful exercise to ask: what have we lost in the past 40 years despite all the “progress” and “solutions”? Put another way: what did we have in 1985 that we no longer have, despite all the “progress”?

1. We no longer have affordable, functional healthcare. As I have documented, based on what I paid as an employer and self-employed worker, healthcare insurance was still affordable in 1985; this is no longer the case. By functional, I mean universally accessible and sustainable for those employed in healthcare.

Neither condition applies today. Financially marginalized Americans don’t have the same access to the care that is available to wealthy Americans and those with gold-plated insurance. For many Americans, their access to care is little better (or worse) than low-income, developed-nation standards.

As for those working in healthcare, burnout and changing jobs to increase pay and reduce overwork are now standard features of frontline employment in healthcare.

2. Our collective health is systemically worse. These charts from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) tell the story: in 1985, relatively few Americans were classified as obese (BMI of 30 or higher). While BMI is not an ideal measure, moderate BMI levels reflect a lifestyle of moderate activity and relatively healthy diet. By 2023, the situation had deteriorated to the point that by more recent metrics, almost 80% of adult Americans are overweight/obese, conditions that generate a spectrum of health risks.

3. Our public infrastructure has crumbled even as our private wealth soared. Maybe the roadways and highways are pothole-free and well-maintained in your area, and public transit is clean, reliable and cheap, but as a general rule, public infrastructure has decayed over the the past 40 years to the point that it’s often better in developing-world nations than in the US.

While our public infrastructure has decayed, private wealth has soared from $60 trillion in 2010 to $167 trillion in 2025. Measured by overall health and security, the top 10% are doing splendidly, having accumulated the majority of the $100 trillion in private wealth gains, while the bottom 60% are experiencing decay and decline.

4. Housing is no longer affordable. By any legitimate measure–for example, the number of hours of work needed to buy a median-priced house–housing is no longer affordable for the bottom 80% of the populace.

5. Moral decay has rotted the foundations of our society and economy. Self-interest is now the exclusive pursuit and measure of “success”: consequences have no bearing on decisions unless they detract from one’s private gains. Since a truthful accounting of consequences is detrimental to self-interest, artifice is now the norm. Authenticity has been replaced by curation–everything is gamed, massaged, managed to present a fake image or spectacle.

Here is a chart of healthcare insurance costs. This doesn’t reflect the erosion of value generated by the expansion of co-pays, deductions and exclusions.

Here is the CDC map of obesity from 1985:

Here is the CDC map of obesity for 2023:

Read the Whole Article

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Confessions of an Ex-Conspiracy Theorist

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

Sixty-two years ago President John F. Kennedy was killed while riding in an open motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Now either Kennedy was murdered by some “lone nut” (Lee Harvey Oswald) as the Warren Commission determined or there was an elaborate  conspiracy to assassinate JFK and cover up the crime.  It’s either one or the other. But which is it?

When I started my quest for truth many decades ago, l relied heavily on the research of Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg and David Lifton. All three wrote passionately of a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. For Lane, there must have been a conspiracy because there were shots from the front. For Weisberg, there must have been a conspiracy since Lee Oswald was the figure in the Book Depository doorway (in the famous James Altgens photo) and, therefore, he could NOT have been on the 6th floor of the Depository firing any shots.  And  for David Lifton, there must have been a conspiracy (and cover-up) since JFK’s head wounds appear markedly different at Parkland Hospital than they do at Bethesda; the wounds  must have been altered in pre-autopsy surgery at the Bethesda morgue to hide shots from the front.

As a life-long libertarian and Rothbardian, I found all of this conspiracy speculation fascinating since I knew there were strong incentives for governments and governmental “commissions”  (Warren Commission) to confabulate  and cover up incriminating facts. To say I was hooked is an understatement.

But after almost 60 years of intense curiosity and mountains of additional reading, I’ve now concluded that there is simply NO “best evidence” for any frontal shots; that Oswald was NOT the figure in the famous doorway photograph; and that David Lifton’s (and Douglas Horne’s) theory of  JFK “body snatching” and an “early entry” into the Bethesda morgue for wound alteration is, to be blunt, just plain NONSENSE. Ditto for several other other wacky conspiracy theories that continue to circulate on YouTube and mislead the uninformed.

In addition, I’ve also concluded that there is no smoking gun evidence that the killing was pre-planned by either Lyndon Johnson, the Russians, the Cubans, the Mafia or any of the various U.S. intelligence agencies– although the latter certainly withheld–and continues to hold–embarrassing information post-assassination.  They all may well have despised  JFK and some of his policies but they didn’t kill him.

Finally, I’ve concluded that there is no definitive evidence that the assassination was part of any regime-change operation–although modest changes in U. S. foreign policy  may well have been an unintended consequence of the murder.  Alternatively, I have also concluded–somewhat reluctantly I might add–that the best evidence is STILL that Lee Harvey Oswald–acting  alone–had the means, motive and opportunity to commit the crime (although Oswald’s real target may well have been Governor John Connally.) The most famous murder of the 20th century could have been a tragic accident caused by a poor shooter.

Sometimes–not always–the lone-nut explanation for some historical riddle turns out to be the correct one. I believe that’s the case with respect to the Kennedy killing. But unlike several of my less-gracious Warren Commission defenders and conspiracy acquaintances, I  remain open to any new best evidence that would fundamentally alter our understanding of the events of November 22, 1963. Until  and unless that evidence appears, however, there is a very high probability that the twice court-martialled ex-Marine with the “undesirable” military discharge and the cheap Italian-made rifle did the crime…and that he did it alone.

A closing note.  I’ve written multiple commentaries on the Kennedy assassination for this website.  Readers who require  additional support for what I conclude above should reference those articles.

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How the Fed Messes It All Up

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

“The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.”

—12 U.S. Code § 225a (emphases added)

Maximum employment, stable labor prices, and minimum risk premiums on long-term interest rates each actually require maintaining zero growth of the money quantity — that is, holding the money quantity constant.

Congressmen and presidents instead push the Fed people to undercut each of their statutory mandates — first by simply existing, next by also making the money quantity increase.

The Fed is a cartel that fixes the price of money

Banking sustainably takes skill and work.  Bankers collect depositors’ savings and lend out these savings.  In exchange for this skill and work, bankers earn interest.

The Fed is a cartel of bankers whom congressmen and presidents grant an unconstitutional privilege to instead unsustainably create government money and lend it out.  Freed from doing much work to collect savings from depositors, and freed to lend out money that they just create, these bankers rake in increased revenues.

To keep this privilege, Fed cartel bankers also create and lend government money that politicians borrow to spend.

Fed cartel bankers coordinate their actions by influencing government money’s prices, which are the money’s interest rates.

Fed cartel bankers won’t price money correctly or quickly

Fed cartel bankers set as their control setpoint that they will keep the price of government money low.  Politicians like the resulting unsustainable short-term growth.  Politicians also gain from the resulting crises by ratcheting up their control.

Fed cartel bankers’ control accuracy is unavoidably poor.  One cause is that since the bankers make the money quantity increase, prices increase.  At each link along supply chains, people end up having to make prices increase.  Since making prices increase will make customers seek alternatives, people tend to delay, hoping for the best, but congressmen, presidents, and the cartel bankers make sure that true relief never comes.

A second cause making the bankers’ control accuracy unavoidably poor is that after inputs like prices change or outputs like sales volumes change, people not only delay before they first act but also take time to then make their actions.  These lags occur in sequence along a supply chain.  Lags that occur in sequence add delay before changes first begin downstream of the sequence.

Delays reduce people’s solvency, making their subsequent adjustments wind up bigger, adding chaos.

So, then, the Fed cartel is unconstitutional, sets its money-price setpoints unsustainably low, and controls these setpoints poorly.  Increasing the money quantity leads people to add pure delay before adjusting, and each sequence of lags along a supply chain adds additional apparent delay.  People’s control relies on feedback, so delay in feedback means driving blind.  Control has to slow way down and gets unavoidably poor.

Until congressmen and presidents summarily repeal the unconstitutional privilege of creating government money to lend out, the sole lesser evil that a rights-securing Fed cartel could do would be to dampen the harm done creating money by modestly acting to keep the money quantity as close as possible to constant.

Instead, the Fed cartel bankers, with their lowballed prices, take away unalienable rights that congressmen and presidents were instituted and are required to secure.

Sustainable jobs create value that customers buy

When Fed cartel bankers push interest rates lower than are supported by current savings, this leads people to borrow and invest money they can’t sustainably earn back.  This funds jobs that aren’t sustainable.

The Fed cartel bankers claim that their lowball pricing is what’s needed to maximize jobs.  Actually, their lowball pricing is certain to reduce jobs soon, when the unsustainable borrowing fails.

Jobs are sustainable only when they create products that customers value highly enough to spend some of their current earnings or savings on.

Product prices naturally decrease as productivity increases

To drive interest rates lower than can be sustained by current savings, Fed cartel bankers create and loan government money, loaning most to people who pay it back, although also loaning nearly as much now to government people who never pay it back.

The created money gets added to the existing money.  Adding it dilutes the existing money’s value, starting wherever the created money enters supply chains, and from there blowing like a weather front across supply chains, changing prices in its wake.

People keep performing tasks better and inventing ways to add more value.  When bankers don’t dilute money, product prices keep getting decreased.

Meanwhile, labor prices — wages — hold steady or increase (other than in avoidable crises, when bankers have created and loaned out money but then failed, destroying money).

People don’t want product prices to stay the same.  People want product prices to keep decreasing so that the same labor buys more products.

A level playing field for all money-users is a fundamental freedom

Money is a product.  Congressmen and presidents have deprived customers of freedom to choose and use the money that provides the best value.

Future money will be stock-based.  Holding it will be investing in productive businesses.  Stock-based money will increase in value as stocks do, faster than any other large asset class.

In the past and up to now, the best money has been 100%-reserve gold.  Holding it has been conserving value, plus sharing in the average productivity gains throughout the economy.

Anything less than these good moneys unduly deprives people of property.

Smaller deprivations have led to revolutions being fought — and won.  Across the long arc of history, what has kept succeeding more and more has been freedom.

Freedom to choose and use good money is a fundamental freedom.

This article was originally published on American Thinker and was reprinted with the author’s permission.

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Please Keep the Government Closed

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

On Wednesday’s episode of The Peter Schiff Show, Peter lays out why recent market headlines—everything from the government shutdown to the wobble in crypto—point back to one theme: more easy money and bad policy. He connects the dots between Washington’s spending, tariff-driven price pressure, and risky mortgage fixes.

He starts by flipping the common narrative about the government shutdown and gold, and explains why reopening the government actually tends to be bullish for bullion because business-as-usual in Washington means more spending and money creation, not less:

Now a lot of people might have thought intuitively, well wouldn’t that be bad for gold? I mean, wasn’t gold going up because the government shutdown was bad for the economy, it was creating uncertainty and that was benefiting gold, and so that once that uncertainty was behind us, once the government reopened and that was good for the economy, that would hurt gold. That’s what a lot of people might have thought, but the opposite happened because the government reopening isn’t bad for gold; it’s the government staying open that’s bad for gold, because when the government is open it’s doing bad stuff.

From there he contrasts gold’s stability with the volatility in crypto, warning that the country leading in crypto exposure stands to suffer the most when that bubble deflates—and that those losses will be another tailwind for gold as malinvestment unwinds:

I also want to juxtapose what’s happening in gold and silver right now to what’s happening in crypto and Bitcoin and the whole crypto industry. … Soon we’re gonna be the laughing stock of the world; the last thing you want to be is number one in crypto because the crypto bubble is deflating and there’s a lot more air that’s gonna come out of this thing. The country that leads in crypto is the country that’s got the most to lose when the bubble pops, so because we’re the leader in crypto we’re gonna be the leader in economic damage done from the bursting of this bubble.  

Peter then shifts to housing policy and the push to rework Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, warning of the legal and economic contradictions in promising an implicit government guarantee while trying to privatize these government-sponsored entities:

Another of the Trump trades was the GSEs Fannie and Freddie, and a lot of people loaded up on shares. … The problem with the plan to privatize Fannie and Freddie was you couldn’t do it with a government guarantee because before they went bankrupt there was no government guarantee; the government went out of its way to warn everybody who bought Fannie and Freddie guaranteed debt that there was no government guarantee. Now Donald Trump stated that he wants to bring them public but revive the implicit guarantee; he says I want to bring them public with an implicit guarantee, but you can’t do that—the government can’t state yes we have an implicit guarantee because then that’s explicit. 

He argues the obvious market-friendly fix—make homes cheaper by increasing supply—gets ignored while tariffs on lumber and on steel make building materials more expensive, an example of policies that contradict their own stated goals of affordability:

One thing the federal government could do is get rid of the tariffs on lumber and on steel—these are things that you need to build houses and Trump has made those things more expensive—so you can’t complain about the high cost of homes when you are pursuing policies that increase the cost of building homes. … If Donald Trump understands that he can lower coffee prices by lowering coffee tariffs, that means he knows that his tariffs are raising prices, and so obviously if tariffs are raising coffee prices then tariffs are raising home prices because you need steel and you need lumber to build these houses.

Finally, Peter warns that making mortgages fully portable or assumable—the policy some politicians endorse to help homeowners—would lock in low rates, discourage turnover, and force banks into a squeeze that looks like more easy credit and ultimately more inflation, again a setup that benefits gold and silver as the currency weakens:

If the Trump administration does this and transforms all these mortgages and makes them assumable and portable, they may never get repaid; all of them are gonna be there until maturity. … All of this is great for gold and silver because what is all this? Easy money, lower lax lending standards—this is all gonna be more inflation, it’s gonna lead to more quantitative easing, money printing, a weaker dollar; all of this is bullish for gold and silver.

This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.

The post Please Keep the Government Closed appeared first on LewRockwell.

Zionists Are Freaking Out About Losing Control of the Narrative

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made some very revealing remarks during an appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly on Sunday, expressing frustration with the way younger Jews are dismissing pro-Israel arguments because of the carnage they’ve seen in Gaza.

“We are now wrestling with a new I think generational divide here, and I think that’s particularly true in that social media is now our source of media,” Hurwitz said. “It used to be that the news you got in America was American media, and it was pretty mainstream; you know it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media, which is the global medium; its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews. So while in the 1990s a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them; they find them on their phones.”

“It’s also this increasingly post-literate media; less and less text, more and more videos,” Hurwitz continued. “So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us cannot have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds: carnage. And I sound obscene.”

The most insane part of this clip is when she claims that Holocaust education is problematic because today it is failing to make young Jews blindly love Israel, and instead, they are sympathizing with victims of racism, be they Black or Palestinian. What a wretched witch. https://t.co/rFZxR5G4HQ

— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) November 18, 2025

Hurwitz went on to say that Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad.

“And you know I think unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism,” Hurwitz said. “Because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people. So, when on TikTok all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”

Hoo boy. Lots to unpack here.

It’s just so fascinating to see a former White House speechwriter making so many of the points that anti-Zionists have been making for years, but taking the exact opposite meaning from them:

  • The mainstream legacy media has always hidden anti-Israel views from the public — and that was a good thing.
  • Social media has now given Palestinians the ability to expose the truth about Israel’s abuses — and that’s a bad thing.
  • People aren’t falling for the Zionist spin and narrative-diddling anymore because they’ve seen the carnage in Gaza with their own eyes — and that’s a problem.
  • People who learned from Holocaust education that genocide is wrong have been applying those same lessons to the genocide in Gaza — and this means they’re “confused”.

Hurwitz isn’t denying Israel’s abuses or framing its genocidal atrocities as the problem, she’s just coming right out and saying that people obtaining information and moral clarity about those abuses is the problem. The atrocities aren’t wrong, what’s wrong is people seeing those atrocities and calling them what they are.

I love the way she complains that she looks “obscene” for trying to lay out arguments and narratives justifying the Gaza holocaust for people who’ve seen the “wall of carnage” from the genocide. I mean, yes. Yes obviously you’re going to look obscene if you try to tell someone why raw video footage of massacres, mutilated children and emaciated bodies is actually showing something that is justifiable and acceptable.

You can’t stand in front of a pile of child corpses justifying their murder and then whine when people ignore your spinmeistering and keep staring at the tiny bodies. That’s like murdering an entire family and then telling the cops, “But you’re not listening to my reasons for killing them!” They’re doing the normal thing while you are being obscene.

There’s a viral clip of this tirade going around Twitter and I was curious if Hurwitz had said anything after the video segment ended which might have made what she said sound less horrible, so I went to check out the original video on the Jewish Federations of North America’s Youtube channel, and nope. It didn’t get any better.

Hurwitz went on to say that people are wrong to carry the lessons of Holocaust education into opposition to Israel’s genocidal atrocities because the Holocaust was Nazi Germany blaming Jews for all their problems in the same way people think Israel is the source of all the world’s problems today.

She then mourned the way western Jews “re-imagined Judaism as a Protestant-style religion” in order to integrate into western society rather than retaining a strong identity that is loyal to the state of Israel.

“The problem is, we’re not just a religion,” Hurwitz said. “We’re a nation. Civilization. Tribe. Peoplehood. But most of all we’re a family. And so if you are a young person raised in America who thinks Judaism is a Protestant-style religion, then the seven million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists. So my co-religionists, if I look at them and they’re not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them?”

“But that’s a category error,” says Hurwitz. “The seven million people in Israel, they are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists, it’s easy to slide into anti-Zionism. You don’t necessarily have that connection to them.”

Hurwitz is saying here that Jews around the world should be loyal to Israel no matter what Israel does, not because that’s the moral or truthful position but because Israel is where their loyalties belong.

I don’t know about you, but if my siblings were murdering civilians I would immediately become their enemy. I wouldn’t defend my brother if he was going around shooting children in the head like IDF snipers have been doing in Gaza, in fact I would feel a special responsibility to stop him exactly because he is my brother. Genocide doesn’t magically become acceptable if the perpetrators are your “siblings”, unless you are a sociopath.

It’s just incredible how hard Zionists have been freaking out about the way Israel has lost control of the narrative these last two years. More and more often we’re seeing them say the quiet parts out loud as they frantically scramble to manage perceptions and manipulate minds around the world.

Many things which used to be hidden are finding their way into the light.

______________

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America’s Crime Syndicate Government: Profiteering, Protection Rackets & a Pay-To-Play Presidency

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”—Michael Corleone, The Godfather

Pay-to-play schemes. Protection rackets. Extortion. Corruption. Self-enrichment. Graft. Grift. Brutality. Roaming bands of thugs smashing car windows and terrorizing communities. Immunity for criminal behavior coupled with prosecutions of whistleblowers.

This is how a crime syndicate operates—not a constitutional republic.

What we are witnessing today is the steady transformation of the federal government—especially the executive branch—into a criminalized system of power in which justice is weaponized, law is selectively enforced, and crime becomes a form of political currency.

While the American police state has long marched in lockstep with the old truism that power corrupts—and absolute power corrupts absolutely—the Trump administration has ceased even the pretense of being bound by the Constitution.

Rather than abiding by the rule of law, this administration operates as if there are two separate legal systems: one for themselves and their cronies, and one for everyone else.

The corruption is off the charts, the conflicts of interest are in your face, and the brazenness is staggering.

For instance, President Trump wants his own Justice Department to put American taxpayers on the line to pay him $230 million in damages over FBI investigations into his alleged past misconduct.

Journalist David D. Kirkpatrick calculates that Donald Trump and his immediate family have made more than $3.4 billion from his time in the White House, including more than $2.3 billion from various cryptocurrency ventures alone.

In May 2025, Trump was accused of selling access to accumulate personal wealth when he hosted a private event for 220 crypto investors who had bought into his meme coin. News reports estimate that buyers spent about $148 million in total on the coin and associated perks, with some spending $1.8 million to attend.

The average American can’t get any kind of access to our elected representatives, but the wealthy can buy their way through the door.

Measured against this reality, Thomas Jefferson’s warning to bind government down “by the chains of the Constitution” sounds almost quaint.

How do you use the Constitution to guard against government misconduct when the government has effectively rendered the Constitution null and void?

It has become increasingly difficult to pretend that we are still dealing with a functioning republic.

What we have instead is a government that behaves like a criminal enterprise: rewarding loyalty, punishing dissent, monetizing public service, and enriching itself through favors, loopholes, and outright graft.

Consider the pay-to-play culture that now permeates the highest levels of power.

The Foreign Gifts and Decoration Act bars the president and federal officials from accepting gifts worth more than $480 from foreign governments (unless they’re accepted on behalf of the United States—meaning they would then belong to the American people—or purchased by the official). Yet congressional investigators have already documented more than a hundred foreign gifts to Trump and his family that went unreported for months in violation of disclosure rules.

The publicly-reported gifts being showered upon President Trump by foreign governments and politically connected foreign corporations include: a gold crown, a Rolex desk clock and a one-kilogram personalized gold bar worth $130,000, and a $400 million luxury Boeing 747.

These are not tokens of diplomacy; they are currency—investments in influence, access, and favorable policy.

As Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, explains, “It’s unconstitutional in the United States for the president or anyone else in a position of power to receive anything of value from a foreign government. That is unconstitutional. But if the gift is from a foreign corporation or a private interest, it’s not technically prohibited under the emoluments clause of the Constitution. But it’s still a very, very dangerous precedent to set that foreign interests can give gifts to the president and then get a concession on tariffs or anything else.”

In many cases, these gifts went unreported to the State Department, only coming to light through House investigations and watchdog reports—concealed from the public and from Congress until after the fact.

That secrecy was not accidental. It was strategic.

At the same time, the conflicts of interest just keep piling up.

Federal contracts, regulatory decisions, and diplomatic overtures increasingly appear correlated with the interests of those giving the gifts. A growing number of domestic and foreign business interests appear to be receiving preferential treatment from agencies whose regulatory decisions align suspiciously with Trump’s personal business deals advancing behind the scenes.

And then there are more obvious pay-to-play schemes like the White House Ballroom, a projected 90,000-square-foot monstrosity funded by tech and defense giants such as Apple, Google, Palantir and Lockheed Martin—corporate donors who now help underwrite the president’s vanity project even as their regulatory and contracting interests sit squarely in his hands.

This quid pro quo governance—private profit in exchange for public policy—does not resemble republican self-government. It resembles a protection racket, where the powerful exchange favors not for the public good but for personal gain—and access and immunity are available for purchase by those willing to pay.

Meanwhile, ordinary Americans are told that the system is blind, impartial, and committed to the “rule of law.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

According to a bombshell investigation by the New York Times, career attorneys inside the Department of Justice spent the first ten months of Trump’s second term documenting—often in real time—how the justice system was being hijacked to serve political priorities rather than legal ones.

Federal lawyers told the Times that they were instructed to drop cases for political reasons, to hunt for evidence to justify flimsy investigations, and to defend executive actions they believed had no legal basis or were plainly unlawful. They also detailed the work they were told to abandon—cases involving terrorism plots, corruption, and white-collar fraud—because those investigations did not serve the administration’s political priorities.

As Dena Robinson, a former Justice Department lawyer for the Civil Rights Division, remarked on Pam Bondi’s transformation of the department into a political tool, “One thing that stuck out to me was her insistence that we served at the pleasure of the president and that we were enforcing the president’s priorities. We swore an oath to uphold the Constitution.”

Prosecution for enemies, immunity for allies, and indifference toward actual crime: this is the Trump administration’s modus operandi.

The courts are also growing increasingly leery over the federal government’s casual relationship with the truth.

In case after case—from prosecutions tied to the politically-charged James Comey indictment, to challenges over Trump’s deployment of the National Guard, to lawsuits alleging the government is attempting to circumvent basic due process protections in immigration cases by shipping people to offshore detention facilities in third countries, often in partnership with private prison contractors, where legal safeguards are far weaker—courts have scolded federal lawyers for withholding records, mischaracterizing facts, or offering assertions that crumble under scrutiny.

When the government lies to the courts, it is not just lying to a judge but to the American people. We are the ultimate arbiters of justice. It is our rights that ultimately hang in the balance.

Unfortunately, the rot doesn’t stop there.

The presidential pardon—intended to be a mechanism for mercy—has become a political reward system.

The numbers speak volumes.

During Trump’s first term, he issued 238 pardons and commutations; less than a year into his second term, he has issued nearly 2,000 pardons, costing victims and taxpayers more than $1.3 billion.

According to The Marshall Project, among those pardoned by Trump, “One faced a four-year prison sentence in a $675 million fraud case for marketing an electric truck that wasn’t drivable. Another tried to overthrow the government. A tax cheat avoided prison and $4.4 million in restitution after his mom donated $1 million to the president.” Another pardon recipient was facing “charges of child pornography and the sexual assault of a preadolescent girl.”

Whether Trump pardons Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sex traffic teenaged girls, remains to be seen. However, since Trump has taken office, Maxwell has enjoyed dramatic improvements in her prison life: a transfer to a minimum-security federal prison, custom meals delivered to her cell, snacks and refreshments provided during private meetings with family and friends—even special access to a puppy and unlimited toilet paper.

As ProPublica details, Trump’s pardons overwhelmingly benefit political loyalists, donors, grifters, extremists, and individuals either convicted of crimes in pursuit of Trump’s ambitions or who might help to advance those ambitions in the future—or both.

A judiciary committee report found that “Trump’s pardons have made criminals $1.3 [billion] richer by allowing them to keep the money they stole from their victims and dodge their fines. The pardon power in Trump’s hands is a way to take a huge amount of wealth that is legally owed to victims and transfer it back to the criminals who stole it from them in the first place.”

These are not miscarriages of justice being corrected; they are protection payments, signals to future operatives: do what we need you to do, and we will take care of you.

The message is unmistakable: Commit crimes that benefit those in power, and those in power will absolve you.

The double standard is staggering.

Critics, journalists, students, and whistleblowers face investigations, surveillance, and in some cases arrest for constitutionally protected activities—while those charged with committing actual crimes in support of the administration are shielded, absolved, or financially rewarded.

That is not the rule of law. That is the rule of power.

In a constitutional government, the pardon power is meant to temper justice with mercy.

In an unrestrained government, the pardon power becomes a mechanism for shielding insiders, silencing potential witnesses, rewarding political operatives, and signaling to future enforcers that their loyalty will be repaid.

Once justice is weaponized—once the government becomes both the ultimate lawmaker and the ultimate lawbreaker—once the president decides that his own power, not the Constitution, is the highest authority—the distinction between governance and criminality collapses.

A government that can ignore transparency laws will hide its misconduct.

A government that can lie to the courts will lie to its people.

A government that can criminalize political opposition can criminalize anyone.

A government that can pardon loyal criminals can persecute those who expose them.

This is not hypothetical. It is happening now.

Look at the surveillance state: millions of Americans monitored through AI-powered tools, data-mined by private intelligence contractors, and flagged by opaque algorithms—while the government shields its own communications, decisions, and financial entanglements behind secrecy laws and executive privilege.

Look at policing: violent, militarized crackdowns on immigrants, journalists, and protesters—even as the administration dismisses, excuses, or encourages lawlessness among vigilantes, paramilitary groups, and politically aligned street militias.

Look at foreign policy: threats to bomb Venezuela—transparent attempts to distract from falling polling numbers and the widening Epstein scandal—being framed as “national security” rather than what they are: geopolitical aggression with no constitutional or moral grounding. This isn’t defensive war; it is a land grab masquerading as patriotism, no different in principle from Putin’s overreach in Ukraine or Israel’s expansionist aims in Gaza, except that the United States has even less pretense of legitimate territorial claim.

Look at governance: executive orders increasingly treated as substitutes for legislation, bypassing Congress, the courts, and constitutional checks. The president no longer requests authority; he assumes it.

Look at transparency: the administration’s refusal to release the October jobs numbers—an unprecedented hiding of core economic data—under the pretext that the government shutdown made the figures unusable. Former Labor Department officials warn that the missing report comes just as private data are flashing recession-level job losses. When a government refuses to share basic economic indicators with the public, it is no longer governing. It is manipulating.

This is not constitutionalism. This is consolidation—an executive branch absorbing the functions of lawmaking, law enforcement, and legal interpretation into a single, unaccountable center of power.

This is not “law and order.” This is the government redefining order in its own image and using law to enforce its will.

The Founders warned us about this.

Yet here we are, watching a government that no longer even pretends to fear the Constitution. A government that openly cultivates a culture of impunity, where criminality is not a hindrance to power but an asset—evidence of loyalty, aggression, and willingness to “do what needs to be done.”

A government like this does not serve the people—it rules them. It does not protect rights—it manages them. It does not uphold law—it deploys law as a weapon.

It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the actions of the American government and those of a cartel—one that wears suits instead of masks, but engages in the same core behaviors: loyalty above legality, retaliation against critics, protection for insiders, secrecy, intimidation, and the monetization of public office.

This is how nations fall—not through foreign invasion but through internal corruption.

When the government becomes the greatest violator of rights, the people lose faith in justice.

When the government becomes the greatest source of disinformation, the people lose faith in truth.

When the government becomes the greatest beneficiary of criminality, the people lose faith in democracy itself.

Democracy becomes theater. Elections become rituals. Rights become privileges granted or revoked at the discretion of those in power.

The Constitution is not a self-enforcing document. It has no army, no treasury, no enforcement bureau of its own. It binds only those who agree to be bound by its edicts. When officials refuse to be bound, the Constitution becomes a relic—a symbol invoked rhetorically but ignored in practice.

The only way out is the way the Founders intended: by rebinding government down with the chains of the Constitution. But those chains must be enforced by “We the People.” They must be tightened around those who wield power.

Without constitutional chains, the president becomes an imperial dictator.

Without oversight, the justice system becomes a political weapon.

Without accountability, government becomes a self-serving, money-laundering enterprise masquerading as legitimate authority.

If America is to remain a free nation, those chains must be tightened—not loosened, ignored, or replaced with partisan loyalty.

The rule of law must apply to the powerful, not just the powerless.

The justice system must serve the public, not the president.

And as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “We the people” must reclaim our role as the ultimate check on government misconduct.

For without constitutional restraints, there is no justice.

Without constitutional limits, there is no accountability.

And without accountability, there is no republic—only a crime syndicate masquerading as a government.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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War Against Humanity

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

This  GRTV video production addresses the complexity and diversity of modern warfare. 

Digital control over a World population of more than 8 Billion People is an instrument of modern warfare, in liason with NATO and the Pentagon.

It’s the “smartphonization” of humanity which repeals fundamental human rights Worldwide. 

“Economic Warfare” is carried out in coordination with the conduct of military operations. Its objective is to destabilize national economies, resulting in unemployment,  poverty and despair. 

The original source of this article is Global Research.

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What the Founders Feared

Lew Rockwell Institute - Gio, 20/11/2025 - 05:01

“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” — James Madison (1751-1836)

America today would terrify the Founding Fathers. Armed troops roam the streets of major cities, masked government agents arrest people without probable cause and disrupt the public speech that the president hates and fears, and the president kills foreigners on the high seas whom he says might commit crimes should their small speedboats miraculously make it 1,500 miles to the United States.

Here is the backstory.

Shortly after the Constitution was ratified and while the Bill of Rights was being crafted, the Federalists in Congress proposed the creation of a federal bank. James Madison, who had been the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention just four years earlier and who was chair of the House of Representatives committee drafting the Bill of Rights, argued forcefully against it.

In Madison’s famous Bank Speech, he articulated the views he offered when he wrote his portion of the Federalist Papers — namely, that the powers of the new federal government are few and limited and precisely written down, and a establishing a bank is not among them.

Madison lost the debate, as Congress approved the First National Bank of the United States. His argument, though, generally carried the day for the following 120 years, except for the Civil War era. That argument — known today as the Madisonian model — offers that the federal government may only govern in the 16 unique discrete areas of governance articulated in Article I of the Constitution.

The subtext of the Madisonian model was that the feds need the permission of the states or the people to do nearly anything. Safety was left to the states, and there’d be no troops in the streets as the colonists from Boston to Charleston had endured with British soldiers. And the Fourth Amendment — guaranteeing the right to be left alone — would apply to all persons and keep the government away from the peoples’ “persons, houses, papers, and effects” without search or arrest warrants.

By 120 years later, the Madisonian model had been discarded. The states lost their powers as checks on the federal government they had created, and the Wilsonian model — named after Woodrow Wilson — took effect. This model holds that the feds may govern in any area for which there is a national political will, except that which is expressly prohibited to them in the Constitution.

The subtext of the Wilsonian model is that the states and the people need the permission of the feds to do nearly everything. And those prohibitions — like “Congress shall make no law abridging … the freedom of speech” — well, they only apply to Congress, not to the president. Wilson actually made this legally erroneous and law-school-flunking argument when defending his arrests for speech he hated and feared.

Every president from Wilson to Donald Trump has wittingly or unwittingly embraced the Wilsonian model; and so has every Congress.

The growth of government and the diminution of personal freedom are often tied to wars and economic crises — real, created for this purpose and imagined. History teaches that personal liberty once lost does not come back, and government power once acquired remains.

The lessons of history, as instructive as they have been, are lost on Trump’s presidency. Three events which he triggered are instructive here. The first is killing noncombatants at sea, the second is disrupting lawful free speech, and the third is the arrest of persons and the acquisition of private data without judicially issued warrants.

The killings at sea will soon reach a federal court as the families of innocent murdered fishermen, and some survivors of botched killings, have signaled to the media their intention to bring actions against the government. Trump says the killings at sea are a war against foreign powers.

Meanwhile, the same office in the Department of Justice that told George W. Bush that he could torture people and Barack Obama that he could kill nonviolent Americans overseas has apparently told Trump just what he wants to hear — that he can wage an undeclared war on select foreign persons and keep secret the legal rationale for doing so. Where is that in Madison’s Constitution, which says only Congress can declare war?

Secondly, in September, Trump directed federal agents to disrupt speech that is anti-Christian, anti-capitalism or un-American, and to use their own judgment as to which speech to disrupt. Never mind that all political speech is protected from government interference and never mind that Trump took the same oath as Madsion and Wilson — to protect the same First Amendment rights.

Thirdly, last spring the Department of Homeland Security began arresting Americans and foreigners on suspicion of unlawful presence in the United States. They do this without arrest warrants based on probable cause of crime, and they wear masks so as to startle victims and retard identification in subsequent court proceedings.

Secretly, they have begun collecting biometric data on persons whom they encounter — facial structure, iris sizes and touchless fingerprints (all of which they can acquire from a distance with their mobile phones) — without warrants. The Fourth Amendment expressly prohibits searches and seizures without judicially issued warrants based on probable cause of crime.

As if all this is not enough to rouse Madison from his grave, there’s a new phenomenon in law called “The Kavanaugh Stop.” This is derived from a bizarre concurring Supreme Court opinion recently written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in which he argued that race, ethnicity and presence at a car wash are permissible characteristics upon which the government may stop and demand to see papers. And if the feds stop you, he opined, it’s no big deal. Just show them your papers; prove your citizenship.

In Justice Kavanaugh’s strange new world, East Germany has been reborn here. That’s just what the Founders feared most.

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Israeli Security Officials: Settler Violence Has West Bank on the ‘Brink of Explosion’

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 19/11/2025 - 19:38

Thanks, John Smith.

Antiwar.com

 

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As Israel’s image collapses, US billionaires move to silence dissent

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 19/11/2025 - 19:37

Thanks, John Smith.

Middle East Eye

 

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IDF chief in Dallas

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 19/11/2025 - 19:30

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A ‘Secret’ Peace Deal For Ukraine?

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 19/11/2025 - 18:38

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