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The Shroud of Turin has fascinated believers and skeptics for centuries. This linen cloth bears the faint image of a man who appears to have been crucified – complete with wounds that match the Gospel accounts of Jesus Christ’s death. For some, it is the most sacred object in Christianity as it marks the exact moment that Jesus was resurrected. Others have insisted that the shroud is a medieval forgery. Until recently, there was no definitive evidence either way. That changed this year.

First a bit of history. In 1988, three laboratories in Oxford, Zurich, and Arizona used radiocarbon dating on a small strip from one corner of the shroud, and they concluded that the cloth dated to between AD 1260 and 1390. Western media immediately pounced on the story, eager to declare the Shroud a forgery.

But the science has not turned out to be quite as solid as they hoped, and recent work by Italian physicist Professor Liberato De Caro has thrown that medieval date out the window.

Cracks in the Carbon-14

The first problem with the 1988 test was its sample location: all the material came from a single corner, right next to a seam. This area had been handled frequently over the centuries and appeared to have been repaired with different threads after fire damage in 1532.

In 2013, statisticians Marco Riani and Anthony Atkinson re-examined the original Carbon-14 data and found that the dates varied along the strip in a way that suggested the dating of the corner was not a reliable estimate for the date of the entire cloth. In 2019, researcher Tristan Casabianca from the University of Hamburg obtained the raw lab data and confirmed these inconsistencies.

Historian, Jean-Christian Petitfils, who has studied the Shroud for more than 40 years, discussed the post-1988 findings in his new book, ‘The Shroud of Turin: The Definitive Investigation’. “Traces of fungus and calcium carbonate were found. The sample area corresponded to a sewn area: modern threads were inserted in the 16th century in order to repair this area that had been worn away.” He concluded “ The Carbon-14 experiment of 1988 is null and void.”

Trust The Science

Since Carbon-14 dating could not be relied upon to provide a valid date for the Shroud, Professor De Caro approached the dating problem differently. Instead of measuring radioactive carbon, he used wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS), which examines the microscopic structure of cellulose in linen fibers.

Over time, the crystalline regions in cellulose break down in predictable ways. By measuring this structural change and comparing it to samples of known age, WAXS can estimate very accurately how long the fibers have been aging since they were woven. Unlike carbon dating, this method is unaffected by surface contamination because it probes the fiber’s internal structure itself.

De Caro Findings

In 2022, De Caro’s team analyzed a fiber from the Shroud and compared it to linen samples from various periods, including cloth from Masada in Israel dated to the first century AD. When the fiber was analyzed by a powerful X-ray machine, the scientists were astounded at the result that emerged. The Shroud did not originate, as has long been thought, in the 13th century, but from the 1st century AD.

In age, it matched a similar shred of linen that came from the siege of Masada in 73 AD, when a band of Jews who had sought sanctuary on a sheer-sided outcrop in the desert were besieged by the Roman army. Rather than wait to be killed by the advancing legions, they took their own lives en masse. The scrap of cloth from Masada has been dated to 55–74 AD.

“There was a sense of joy, of shock,” says Prof De Caro. “Why? Because we had verified that it could be authentic. We know for sure that the sample from the fortress of Masada is 2,000 years old. The results from the Turin Shroud sample were almost identical. The direct comparison verified that the Turin Shroud sample is 2,000 years old.”

The Image That Science Can’t Explain

Even before De Caro’s work, the Shroud’s image posed a puzzle. In 1978, the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) studied it directly and concluded:

• The image is not paint, dye, or scorch.
• Discoloration is confined to the outermost fibrils of each thread—less than a thousandth of a millimeter deep.
• The image lies above the bloodstains, meaning the blood was deposited before the image.
• The light-dark shading in the image encodes precise 3D information, unlike any known art technique.

Blood chemistry tests determined that the stains were Type AB human blood with hemoglobin breakdown products and high bilirubin which would be expected from an individual who had undergone severe trauma.

Above??

One of these findings is worth further comment. The researchers in 1978 determined that the image on the Shroud was formed above the blood stains, meaning that the image was formed ‘after’ the blood stains on the cloth had been deposited. This means that, for the Shroud to be considered a forgery, the forger would have had to apply human blood in over 700 locations across the Shroud first, and then later somehow fit the image of the body to the cloth in perfect correspondence with the of blood stains already applied, some of which were smaller than a millimeter in size.

Light on the Subject

So what did form the image of the body on the cloth? The hypothesis that best matches the findings of the 1978 study is that that the image was formed by a brief burst of high-energy radiation from the body onto the cloth. This would account for the fact that the image is only on the top surface of the fibers, not extending further into the cloth as paints or stains would have done. Physicist Paulo Delazo at ENEA Laboratories outside Rome spent five years attempting to duplicate the chemical changes seen in the Shroud on linen fibers using radiation. He concluded that a radiation burst of 34 billion watts of energy at 1/40 of a billionth of a second could create an image on linen similar to the one seen on the Shroud.

Other researchers noted that such a radiation event would also have altered the cloth’s carbon isotope ratio, further skewing the 1988 dating results.

Threads of Time

Additional evidence further points to the authenticity of the shroud. The Shroud’s weave is a fine herringbone twill unknown in Medieval Europe. Textile expert Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, who oversaw a 2002 conservation project, noted that the seam along one edge is similar to first-century Jewish burial cloths from Masada near the Dead Sea in Israel. In addition, recent image-enhancement technology revealed that there were coins placed over the eyes of the subject on the Shroud that were identified as first-century Roman lepton coins, minted under Pontius Pilate between 29 and 32 AD.

An Emerging Picture

Put the evidence together and a consistent story begins to emerge:

• Dating – WAXS points to the first century; the 1988 carbon date is undermined by sampling flaws.
• Image formation – The properties of the image fit a high-energy event that cannot be duplicated, even with today’s technology.
• Textile details – Weave and seam construction match first-century examples.
• Pollen deposits – Pollen species from the Levant area of Israel that are not present in any part of Europe.

The only explanation that matches all the scientific and historical evidence is that the Shroud is, in fact, the burial cloth of Jesus Christ and that the image documents the very moment of his resurrection.

Not an Unfamiliar Concept

While the notion of Jesus’ body lighting up with high energy radiation may seem difficult for many to believe in this modern age, it is actually a familiar concept to Christians. A similar event is recorded in the Gospels:

Matthew 17:

1 After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves.

2 There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.

3 Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.

4 Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”

5 While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

6 When the disciples heard this, they fell facedown to the ground, terrified.

7 But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

8 When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.

The Meaning of The Shroud

The word ‘miracle’ is tossed about so commonly today that it has pretty much lost any meaning. To many, the Mets winning the 1969 World Series is still considered the most astonishing miracle of our time.

But the word does have a meaning. It is an event that is impossible according to the laws of physics but nevertheless does happen. Can any other artifact in history claim such a convincing right to this word after generations of scientific study and scrutiny?

Why Then?

During the ministry of Jesus his focus was on communicating the word of God to the Jews to whom Jesus had been sent. In order to demonstrate his credibility as a messenger of God, Jesus performed many miracles in front of the people. The miracles established his authority to speak for God as well as the validity of his message to the Jewish people. This is clearly expressed in John 14:11:

“Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.”

Toward the end of his three year ministry, Jesus expressed astonishment that the Jews of his day did not respond to his teachings.

But a more fundamental question needs to be asked. Why was Jesus sent to the Jews at that particular time in their history? Stand back a bit, view the larger context, and the story becomes clear.

Following the crucifixion of Jesus (ca. 33 AD), Jews in Judea lived under increasingly harsh Roman rule. Tensions escalated as Roman authorities suppressed Jewish religious practices and imposed heavy taxes, while Jewish resistance movements grew. This culminated in the First Jewish–Roman War (66–70 AD), during which Jerusalem was besieged and the Second Temple destroyed in 70 AD. A later revolt, the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–135 AD), was crushed with extraordinary brutality by Emperor Hadrian’s forces. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed, survivors enslaved, and Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina to erase its Jewish identity. Jews were banned from entering Jerusalem except on one day a year (Tisha B’Av), marking the effective expulsion and dispersion (Diaspora) of the Jewish people from their homeland.

When viewed within the context of history it becomes clear why God sent his son to the Jewish people at that moment in time. It was an attempt to save them from the horrific tragedy that God knew awaited them at the hands of the Romans. God saw what was in the future for the Jewish people and he sent his son to guide them toward a path that would have spared them from that tragic fate.

Would the Jews have been spared the wrath of the Romans had they accepted the message of Jesus? An entire book could be written (and probably has been) on that subject alone. But a central pillar of the teachings of Jesus was clearly his instruction that they should avoid confrontation, aggression, hatred, revenge, and violence, and express a willingness to pursue peace and forgiveness:

“If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them”. Luke 6:29.

If the Jews had responded to Roman aggression as Jesus taught, would they not have escaped the genocide that the Romans eventually inflicted on them?

This message is perfectly encapsulated in a well known passage in the Gospels:

But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus executed. ‘Which of the two do you want me to release to you?’ asked the governor. ‘Barabbas,’ they answered. ‘What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called the Messiah?’ Pilate asked. They all shouted, ‘Crucify him.’ Matthew 27:20–22

Who was Barabbas? Why was he a prisoner of Pilate? Barabbas was an insurrectionist fighting Roman rule. As such, there can be little doubt that when he was released by Pilate he went right back to his battle against the Romans. Barabbas would have certainly taken part in the Jewish resistance during the 33 years between the crucifixion and the first Jewish-Roman war of 66 AD.

Would there have been a Jewish-Roman war had Barabbas not been released? How large a part did Barabbas play in the Jewish resistance that led up to that war? No one will ever know. That information is lost to history.

So, what does any of this have to do with the Shroud of Turin?

Back up and examine the story from a broader perspective. God sent his Son to the Jewish people in an effort to save them from the catastrophe that awaited them. Since that time, no one has performed a single miracle on earth, at least not one that has been scientifically scrutinized and proven to be real. And yet today, this year, Jesus has given the world one more miracle in the form of scientific proof that the Shroud and the image on it are authentic.

Why now?

God is giving us this miracle today for the same reason he gave the Jews the miracles performed by Jesus long ago. Just as in the time of Jesus, the world today sits at the precipice of an apocalyptic catastrophe, worse than anything humanity has ever endured in its history. Nuclear war could break out at any moment, and if it did it would mean the end of the human race itself.

The message is clear for those who are willing to understand it. In a very real sense, God sent his son to us a second time. The message to us is, ‘Here, I gave you a miracle that you may believe. Now hear my words and follow them’.

The question is, will we listen this time?

This article was originally published on Trust The Science.

The post The Message of the Shroud appeared first on LewRockwell.

To understand how the Western world lost its confidence—how we became a civilization weakened and confused about morality, gender, and even reality itself—we must look back to one of modernity’s most influential and corrosive figures: Sigmund Freud.

Freud’s psychological doctrines reshaped how the West views desire, virtue, and identity. His ideas helped lay the groundwork for the sexual revolution and the new gender politics that now dominate our schools, media, and institutions. The result is a culture hyper-sexualized, guilt-ridden, and detached from the moral roots that once sustained Western civilization.

Freud: Prophet of Desire

Born in 1856, Freud presented himself as a scientist but operated more like a prophet of the flesh. His theories were built on personal obsession, not empirical truth. He admitted harboring sexual feelings toward his own mother and from that created his notorious Oedipus complex, claiming, without any proof whatsoever, that all men secretly desire their mothers and resent their fathers. It was an extraordinary act of projection—and a case study in how one man’s neuroses became a cultural epidemic.

For thousands of years, Western civilization taught that human beings are moral creatures capable of self-control, that desire must be disciplined by reason, and that virtue—not pleasure—is the mark of maturity. Freud turned this on its head. He recast repression as sickness and indulgence as health. Lust was no longer a temptation to be resisted but a psychological need to be fulfilled.

As critic Frederick Crews put it, “The entire system of classical psycho-analytical thought rests on nothing more substantial than Freud’s word that it is true.” Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar went further, calling psychoanalysis “a stupendous intellectual confidence trick.”

The Fraud Behind the Father of Psychology

Freud’s defenders like to portray him as a brave explorer of the mind. In reality, he was a deeply troubled man. Historians have documented his cocaine addiction, his self-diagnosed neuroses, and his ruthless treatment of patients—whom he reportedly called “rabble… only good for money-earning.”

His own granddaughter, Dr. Sophie Freud, dismissed his theories as “narcissistic indulgence.” Psychiatrist Edward R. Pinckney called psychoanalysis “the biggest hoax ever played on humanity.” Modern scholars have shown that his central claims were invented interpretations, never verified by real evidence.

Even Freud’s contemporaries noticed his hostility toward Christianity. Stanley Rothman described psychoanalysis as a secular substitute for religion—a way to dethrone the moral authority of faith and replace it with psychological relativism.

The Moral Inversion of the West

Freud’s legacy was not confined to the consulting room. His ideas filtered into education, the arts, and eventually politics. Behaviors once seen as moral choices—infidelity, promiscuity, homosexuality—were reclassified as psychological conditions or mere “lifestyle preferences.” As Dr. Tim LaHaye observed, Freud helped shift the West from moral judgment to moral neutrality.

This shift set the stage for the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the gender revolution of our own time. Once you accept Freud’s premise—that sexual expression is central to human health—it becomes easy to claim that any restraint is repressive and any boundary oppressive. Today’s ideology of gender fluidity is simply Freud’s obsession with sexuality carried to its logical extreme: the belief that identity itself is defined by desire.

Where original Christianity — and indeed many ancient cultures world-wide — taught mastery of the self through devotion to the divine, Freudianism taught that freedom means surrender to every indulgence and desire, no matter how misguided. In that reversal, the moral backbone of Western civilization began to dissolve.

The Cult of Liberation and the Cost of Chaos

Freud’s followers promoted the idea that sexual release was essential for health, a myth that fueled modern hedonism. Yet history and science suggest the opposite.

“Freud’s followers claimed sexual release was essential for health — a myth that fueled modern hedonism, though history and science suggest the opposite.”

Great thinkers—from Pythagoras and Plato to Newton and Tesla—understood that discipline and celibacy could heighten creativity and focus. Traditional faiths taught that chastity refines the spirit and strengthens the intellect.

Ancient scripture warns that indulgence weakens the soul: “Flee fornication… he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:18). Saint Augustine wrote that those who misuse sex “use it bestially.” The great saints and sages across cultures—from Saint Francis to Srila Prabhupada—saw mastery of desire as the highest test of wisdom.

Freud dismissed all this as repression. Yet look around: the societies that embraced his creed of liberation now suffer record levels of loneliness, addiction, broken families, and mental illness. What Freud dismissed as “repression” was in truth restraint — the self-control and respect for God’s laws that form the very foundation of a just and enduring civilization.

From Psychoanalysis to Gender Ideology

Freud’s intellectual descendants extended his logic. If all desire is natural, then all distinctions—male and female, sacred and profane—must be artificial. The modern gender theorist simply continues Freud’s rebellion against moral order.

Today’s “gender-affirming” movement takes his premise to its final absurdity: the belief that biology can be rewritten by feelings. Where Freud dethroned morality, gender ideology dethrones reality itself.

In the post-Freudian West, traditional masculinity has been recast as a social disease, leaving countless men—especially straight white men—alienated in the very civilizations their fathers built. Where once patriarchy meant duty, protection, and order, today it is smeared as oppression—yet the absence of that structure has produced a generation adrift, confused about manhood, family, and purpose.

Both deny the existence of a higher order to which human beings are accountable. Both reduce the soul to the libido. And both have produced generations unmoored from truth, tradition, and meaning.

A Civilization of Self-Destruction

What began as speculative therapy has become a cultural operating system. The Freudian worldview teaches that the highest good is pleasure and the highest sin is guilt. Yet guilt is the conscience’s alarm bell—the signal that our actions matter. A society that silences that bell soon loses the ability to distinguish right from wrong.

Freud’s doctrines helped convert Western man from a moral agent into a psychological patient—an early victory for the managerial state and its army of ‘experts’ who claim to heal the soul while quietly governing it. The confessional was replaced by the therapist’s couch; repentance by self-expression. The result is what the philosopher Srila Prabhupada called “pig civilization”—a culture that mistakes appetite for happiness.

The consequences are visible everywhere: collapsing birth rates, epidemic loneliness, a generation medicated for despair. A civilization that worships desire cannot sustain duty; a nation that mocks virtue cannot defend freedom.

Recovering the Higher Path

In today’s Western cities, ideology hangs thick in the air — feminism elevated to dogma, masculinity treated as a crime, consumerism replacing character, and state-engineered mass immigration introducing cultures often at odds with the very values that built the West.

Everywhere the marks of decay are visible: families fragmented, men feminized, and citizens numbed by propaganda that preaches equality but breeds resentment and confusion. The farther a man steps from that chaos — into self-discipline, simplicity, and the awareness that sooner or later he must answer to God — the clearer he sees that strength and sanity endure only where tradition still holds.

To rebuild what was lost, the West must recover its ancient understanding of human nature—that we are not slaves to instinct but stewards of the soul. The answer is not repression but redirection: channeling passion into purpose and creativity.

The same energies that destroy can elevate. As Auguste Comte wrote, “To control the sexual impulse efficiently has always been and ever will be regarded as the highest test of human wisdom.” The men and women who built the West—saints, scholars, soldiers, and parents—understood this. They believed in duty before desire, honor before indulgence, and truth before comfort.

Freud promised liberation and the new gender politics promised compassion — both delivered confusion and bondage. The cure for both is the same timeless prescription: self-discipline, moral courage, and an understanding that we are all children of God, called to follow His instructions given for our good.

The West can recover its strength only when free men and women reject the false gospel of Freud and rebuild their lives on the virtues that once made civilization possible—faith, family, chastity, truth, and reverence for God above the state.

The post How Freudian Psychology and Gender Politics Weakened the West appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Born: June 21, 1788

Residence: Washington, D.C. and elsewhere

Education: Niccolo Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz, John Maynard Keynes

Experience (partial list): Revolutionary War, Northwest Indian War, First Barbary War, War of 1812, Second Barbary War, Mexican-American War, Civil War, Indian Wars, Spanish-American War, Philippine-American War, Banana Wars, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, Somalia Intervention, Afghanistan War, Iraq War, ISIS War, Global “War on Terror,” Ukraine Proxy War on Russia.

***

Interviewer: I must admit, in all my experience being a regular person, I’ve never interviewed a state before, or anything close to a state, unless you count the Kiwanis Club.

US State: Yeah, yeah.  Let’s get on with it.  I’ve got a lot on my plate.

Interviewer: So, why do you wish to become a global hegemon?

US State: Didn’t you go to school?  It’s my Manifest Destiny.  It was ordained by Providence from day one.

Interviewer: The original doctrine covered only the two oceans, from the Atlantic to the Pacific  You’re talking about everything.

US State: Well, consider yourself updated.  It’s what progress is all about.  We knocked out the Mexicans, relocated the aboriginals and let human nature take its course.  We spread democracy then and we’re spreading it now.

Interviewer: Is that why we have a nearly trillion dollar military budget?  To spread democracy?

US State: Of course.  I’m not talking about a pure democracy.  That’s idiotic.  I think it was Madison who wrote that pure democracies are

spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.

As you know — I hope — he and the rest of the convention developed a constitutional republic.  Popular sovereignty — you guys elect leaders who represent your interests.  And they carry out your will.

Interviewer: Right.  So the word “democracy” is just shorthand for what you’re spreading.  Damn the costs, full-speed ahead.

US State: And you guys love it.  “Democracy” sounds so anti-authoritarian.  By definition you can’t have tyrants in a democracy, and that’s what the Revolution was about, right?  You called the king a “royal brute.” When people talk about a constitutional republic they get confused.  We never want a confused electorate.  “Democracy” means freedom.  Keep it simple.

Interviewer: A lot of people, myself included, think the words of John Quincy Adams, delivered on the Fourth of July in 1821 to the House of Representatives, should define our foreign relations, especially today.  It’s a long speech, some 8500 words, but here is the relevant passage:

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

US State: Seriously, what bearing to reality do those words have?  Today, none.  Yesterday, none.  It has a feel-good message but that’s not the world we live in.  It never has been.  Political life is about power.  Period.  All the other stuff is for the masses.  I guess Quincy was a good Secretary of State but when he became president he was kicked out after one term, like his father, and the country made way for Andrew Jackson, the bank killer.

Quincy was a nationalist and very much at home with a national bank.  During his presidency he got along well with Nicholas Biddle, the bank’s president.  Jackson vetoed the bank bill in 1832.  In that sense Jackson was the freedom fighter, not Quincy.  In 1819 McCulloch v. Maryland upheld Congress’s power to establish a national bank and thereby regulate the value of the nation’s currency.  Chief Justice Marshall said, “there is no phrase in the [Constitution] which, like the articles of confederation, excludes incidental or implied powers.”  There you have it.  Quincy didn’t blink.  He approved the bank.  His essay was hypocrisy.

Interviewer: Regulating the dollar is what the Fed has done since 1914, and it’s lost 98% of its value.  In 1914 a good annual income was $10,000.  Today it would mean $300,000.  How many people make that much?  But a dollar in 1800 still had roughly the same value in 1900.  Quincy was wrong about a national bank, but his thoughts on foreign entanglements are valid for all time.

US State:  Not in this world. That’s why we have the Fed, to fund our foreign affairs.  Without it we would be at the mercy of nuclear-powered Russians or Chinese, and our allies would sink into oblivion.

Interviewer: The world is at the mercy of any country with a nuclear arsenal.  That’s insane.

US State:  Our enemies will blink first, we guarantee it.  And people learned to get along with inflation long ago.  Wait and see.  We might have to spill a little blood, but we’ll reach a point where the world will answer to us.  Safety and liberty — what good is one without the other?

Well?

Interviewer: Well, if it were up to me you wouldn’t get the job.

US state: Which is why we’ve taken it out of your hands.

The post Interview With the US State appeared first on LewRockwell.

One wonders how much longer Putin and Lavrov will take it or even if they comprehend the situation.  

For four years Putin and Lavrov have demonstrated enormous interest in ending the conflict by resolving the basic cause. 

The West has never bothered to understand that the basis of the conflict is Washington’s hegemonic foreign policy and NATO and US missile bases on Russia’s borders in Poland and Romania. The Kremlin has been reluctant to see this and provocations, such as the conflict in Ukraine created by US Zionist Neoconservatives, as a declaration of war on Russia.

The Kremlin mistakenly has relied on the West coming to its senses and realizing that profits from economic interaction are preferable to war, especially nuclear war.  This reliance on common sense by the Kremlin has proven to be wrong. Putin made a very bad bet.

John Helmer has pointed out that no Western government wants an end to the conflict because of the large rake-off in commissions from weapons sales.  

Gilbert Doctorow and myself have pointed out that the war under Putin’s direction has widened far beyond Putin’s uninforced “red lines” and now consists of drone attacks deep inside Russia.  These attacks are causing GPS disruptions, airline delays, internet inaccessibility and delays in payments processing, as well as some Russian civilian deaths.  

Russians are tiring of it, and they are tiring of Putin’s endless toleration of it.  Increasing numbers of ordinary people and elites want the conflict finished with the destruction of Ukraine.  Conventional weapons suffice.  Nuclear means are not needed.

By never enforcing Russia’s declared “red lines,” Putin created a picture of Russia unwilling and unable to fight for its sovereignty.  

The West has noticed this, and Trump, having again abandoned the peace role and returned as bully has ordered the President of Russia to agree to a cease fire in place without addressing the root cause of the conflict.  

If Putin agrees, Russia will have lost her sovereignty.  Whether this simple fact has occurred to Putin and Lavrov I do not know. Alexander Dugin, Russia’s famous philosopher has tried to tell them.

The White House has declared that Trump’s meeting with Putin is off for now.  Trump has again rolled out the “punishments.”  The US Treasury has imposed additional sanctions on the Russian’s oil companies, Lukoil and Rosneft.  The US Treasury’s excuse is: “Russia’s lack of serious commitment to a peace process to end the war in Ukraine.” 

“Russia’s lack of serious commitment to a peace process to end the war in Ukraine” means Putin’s unwillingness to accept orders from bully Trump.

Trump’s sanctions have no adverse effect on Russia.  Following Trump’s oil sanctions, the oil price spiked.  Given the inelastic demand for oil, the higher oil price will offset any decline in the amount sold.  Trump’s foolish oil sanctions do dispossess Americans and Europeans who invested in the two Russian oil companies and now have huge gains that they cannot access because their accounts have been frozen by the buffoon’s previous sanctions.  American investors’ accounts in Russian oil companies are valued at zero despite the high value of the stocks.  The American investors are pressured by their account providers to write off their Russian holdings.  In other words Trump’s “sanctions on Russia” dispossesses Americans and Europeans.

The only effect of the White House Buffoon’s Russian sanctions has been to ruin European and American investors.

Not content with Russia, China, and Iran as America’s chosen enemies, Trump creates more enemies for America with his preposterous order to India not to buy Russian oil.

How is Trump going to enforce his order? Is the buffoon going to start bombing India?  Is there not one ounce of intelligence anywhere in the Trump regime?

Here is what Trump has done.  It is the worst possible.  He has driven up the price of oil which will affect Western economies adversely including his own, and bring more revenues to Russia.  He has finally destroyed Russian illusions about a reconciliation with the West.  Putin is being pressured to give up his groundless hopes and win the war.

The war, or course is now much wider than Ukraine.

The post There Will Be No Ukraine Peace Deal: Putin Should Quickly Win the Conflict Before It Leaves His Control appeared first on LewRockwell.

A month ago I discussed a new hair-brained scheme by which the EU would confiscate Russian government money parked in Belgium.

The Russian money would be used to finance a EU ‘reparation loan’ to Ukraine which would only have to be paid back when Russia would pay war reparations to Ukraine. That at least was the official pronunciation which turned out to be a quote obvious fake.

Another Crazy Idea On How To Steal Russia’s Assets: Make EU Taxpayers Pay For It

A look into the details left many question which no one had answered:

Why would this scheme, as [German Chancellor] Merz say, ‘require budgetary guarantees from member states’? Doesn’t that mean that the tax-payers of those member state will eventually have to pay it? Who’s money is at risk when Russia wins its litigation? Who pays if something goes wrong?

Russia will of course never pay reparations to Ukraine. Nor would the loan be spend on repair or rebuild things in Ukraine. Instead the money would be used to buy weapons from Europe to continue the war for another two years.

The whole idea was a scam. Merz or others did no say so directly but in the end it would obviously be EU taxpayers who have to pay for the ‘loan’.

Earlier this week a Financial Times column confirmed (archived) my interpretation of the deal:

This week, EU leaders will discuss a “reparation loan” to Ukraine, tied to Russia’s obligation to pay for the devastation President Vladimir Putin has wrought.
…
Around €140bn would be lent to Kyiv and only repaid out of any reparations from Moscow. Without them, the EU as the lender would not get its money back. The EU would itself fund the loan by requiring Euroclear, the Belgian securities depository where most of Russia’s hard-currency reserves are blocked, to lend it cash built up as sanctioned Russian investments have matured. In return, Brussels would post what amounts to an IOU, backed by member states and later the next EU budget.

The plan suffers from contradictions. The proposal does not actually touch Russia’s assets, in spite of efforts to depict it as making Moscow pay. In fact, it explicitly rules out changing Russia’s legal claims. It is only an EU private financial institution (Euroclear) that will be strong-armed here — although other G7 countries are looking for ways to join in, and Brussels is hinting that more European banks with some Russian assets could be added.

But any new burden will fall only on European taxpayers. If Russia never pays reparations, the EU forgives Ukraine’s loan but still has to shoulder its own obligation incurred to fund it.

To finance the $140 billion would bring additional pressure on the already over-extended budgets of EU member states. EU leaders would not admit that but tried to fudge the issue by pressing Belgium to carry the risk. But the sum in question exceeds the Belgium government’s yearly spending.

The Belgium Prime Minister Bart De Wever rejected the scam and set out conditions:

First, Belgium wants a full sharing of legal risk across EU member states. Mr De Wever warned that Belgium could face “giant lawsuits” given Euroclear’s role, and said any decision must ensure the burden is not borne by a single jurisdiction. “If you want to do this, we must do it together,” he said.

Second, Belgium is seeking explicit guarantees that, if funds were ever required to be returned—for example following litigation or a settlement—every member state would contribute to any repayments. The Prime Minister said consequences “must not end up entirely on Belgium” because the assets are booked through a Belgian-based financial market infrastructure.

Third, he called for parallel action by other jurisdictions where Russian state assets are immobilised. Belgium, he said, is aware of “large sums” located in other countries and wants coordinated steps so that implementation is not concentrated on one venue. “If we move on this, let us move together,” he added.

The third point was a deal killer as the U.S. had already rejected to take part in the scheme.

Any further discussion was moot and yesterday the whole idea, first proposed by EU commission President Ursula von der Leyen, was canceled (archived):

EU leaders have failed to back a €140bn loan to Kyiv using frozen Russian state assets following opposition from Belgium, dashing Ukraine’s hopes of accessing funds at the beginning of next year to stave off Russia’s aggression.

Belgium demanded cast-iron guarantees it would not suffer financially, fearing legal and financial repercussions should Russia retaliate against the plan. The assets are held at the Brussels-based Euroclear central securities depository.

Leaders of 26 EU countries — Hungary abstained — asked the European Commission to “present, as soon as possible, options for financial support based on an assessment of Ukraine’s financing needs” but did not formally back a loan based on Russia’s immobilised assets.

They agreed to return to the discussion at their next meeting in December.
…
The failure to back the scheme could delay the commission’s goal of having financial support for Ukraine approved by the end of the year, and could complicate funding plans for Kyiv’s weapons purchases.

It seems that other countries, not only Belgium, had woken up to the risk:

[Slovak Prime Minister] Robert Fico requests that “the European Commission propose other options for financing Ukraine in the next two years,” claiming that his proposal was accepted. “Whatever decision is made, I want us to be completely clear about this in Slovakia. The government I lead will never, I emphasize, never, sign any loan guarantee for Ukraine for military expenditures. We will also not allocate a single cent from our state budget for this purpose,” Fico clarified. According to him, Slovakia is ready to help Ukraine, but only humanitarianly.

The Prime Minister considers it a mistake that the initiative to use frozen Russian assets for a loan to Ukraine was made public before the European Commission provided answers to all possible stated risks. The plan “may encounter reality and end in failure at the next European Council in December, when a decision is to be made,” he added.

With that statement the utterly stupid idea ended with another slap in Ursula von der Leyen’s face.

The Ukrainian president claims he needs $140 billion to finance the war over the next two years. The EU’s attempt to steal Russian assets for that purpose has failed. It is unlikely to find an unanimous vote for any solution that will support a loan of that size.

Which brings us nearer to the point where Ukraine and the West will have to file for peace because they run out of money.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post EU Commission Plan of ‘Russian Assets’ Loan to Ukraine Ends in Defeat appeared first on LewRockwell.

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• TM May June 2025.pdf

It’s not physicians that are running public health. Maybe I have a vested interest in making that statement, but it’s true.

It’s the master of public health awardees who are running public health. An MPH is a two-year degree which does not require you to have any prior training in health, in biology, or in medicine. It’s primarily focused on the use of big data and statistical analysis, often to optimize single variables, which is consistent with the idea that we have narrow—I would use the term siloed—sectors within the federal bureaucracy.

These bureaucratic structures tend to drive toward optimization of those parameters that they believe are within their domain to the exclusion of impacts on other domains and other parameters. As a matter of fact, this is one of the big challenges in bureaucracy. They’re often fighting over the boundaries between their silo and adjacent silos, and who has the right to control those boundaries and how those resources are allocated across those silos.

The practice of medicine has a centuries-long history of rejecting and ridiculing innovators and dissenters. It’s no surprise that all of this follows a narrative that we have seen played out over the centuries, where physicians, who are taught to assimilate a set of truths without question, and to implement and regurgitate those truths, are extremely resistant to change. They view change as heresy. In many ways, what we have in modern public health and medicine more closely resembles a religion than it resembles anything that we might call science. In our books, we refer to this as scientism, and we assert that scientism has been substituted for religion in modern political action and thought. So, this religion of belief in a set of endorsed scientific truths, or pseudoscientific truths, is scientism, and it has a high priesthood.

MAHA and MAGA

Now I’d like to talk and specifically focus on this new dialectic that exists between Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) as a movement and Make America Great Again (MAGA) as a movement.

They’re actually two separate things, and they have different constituencies and different drivers. In many ways, they resolve into proregulatory big government initiatives versus promotion of deregulation and small government. In theory, Make America Great Again is more aligned with libertarian principles. Make America Healthy Again, in my opinion, is much more aligned with big government and regulation.

Within that, we can discern some real tensions that are playing out in real time, and will continue to play out over the next four years. And I can’t predict what the outcome is going to be.

It’s worth noting that the MAHA movement exists outside of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the government, and encompasses many societal issues outside of the focus of the Trump administration. For example, homesteading, medical and personal sovereignty, and personal responsibility for healthcare choices. These may all be outside of the MAHA whole-of-government approach. Remember, this is a presidential directive now, the MAHA Commission. It has specific objectives, goals, requirements, and deliverables that are separate from MAHA as a movement.

For this discussion, I’m primarily concerned with the MAHA directives within the government, but MAHA is much bigger than that. I just want to make that key point: it’s bigger than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s been going on for years. And in many ways, it was Calley and Casey Means, through a series of interviews, including, I think, four hits on Tucker and one on Rogan, that really brought this to the fore. In their logic, for example, Big Food and Big Ag have been contaminated with the money from Philip Morris that was required to be moved out of Big Tobacco and was moved into Big Food. And in Calley and Casey Means’s thesis, Big Food and Big Ag applied the marketing strategies and approach that had characterized Big Tobacco, making for an addicted consumer base, as a great business model. When you see a lot of the activities that are associated with Big Food and Big Ag, it’s hard to escape the underlying truth of that metaphor.

The Origins of MAHA

Now, MAHA as we know it now has emerged mainly from the left out of frustration with the Democratic Party’s corruption and rejection, and it has embraced the center-right.

Bobby wasn’t originally talking about making America healthy again. He assimilated that agenda as it began to build momentum during the election and made it his own. But in so doing, he was coming from the left. Remember, Kennedy’s thesis was that there existed a population of what he called Kennedy Democrats that we could really call New Deal Democrats. They are the Democrat Party of the ’60s—pre-Reagan, pre-Carter, pre-Clinton. Those are the people that Bobby thought would come back to him within the Democratic Party. That thesis failed for a variety of different reasons.

So MAHA has emerged mainly from the left, out of frustration, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by MAGA center-right populists, including many formerly associated with the Tea Party movement, in part because MAHA was rejected by the Left.

Bobby’s inability to gain any traction within the Democratic primaries, where he was locked out, kind of forced him into this position. And at one point, some of you may be aware, there was active outreach to Bobby from the Libertarian Party, which could have enabled Bobby to be on the ballot in all 50 states without having to have this enormous campaign funded by Nicole Shanahan. But Bobby didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to position himself as a libertarian. In the end, he ran as an independent. That failed.

The arc of the presidential campaign of RFK Jr. closely adheres to this narrative. Bobby started out seeking the Democratic Party nomination representing Kennedy Democrats, but the Democratic Party of today bears little resemblance to that of his father and uncle’s time.

There were the changes in national political thought on both left and right wrought by Carter and Reagan. And then there was the succession of the military-industrial corporatist Bushes, the Clintons, Obama, and Biden on the left, and to no one’s surprise, apparently other than Bobby and his team, today’s Democratic Party makes it abundantly clear that there’s no room for a Kennedy—this Kennedy—in this tent.

So he decided to make a run as an independent. Nicole Shanahan stepped up to bankroll it, and amazingly, they managed to get on the ballot in all 50 states. But it became clear that, once again, an independent run would primarily function as a spoiler. Now I know this because I was very close to the campaign at this point in time and was very aware of all the discussions that were going on. What should Bobby do? What are his options?

The pivotal moment was when RFK Jr. placed a sympathetic phone call to Donald Trump after the assassination attempt, which still reeks of a deep state operation, much like what happened to Bobby’s uncle and father. And Bobby did so in a spectacular manner, with a ringing endorsement, a speech that will live on through the ages. I think many of you have heard and seen this.

So, MAHA originates from the left, but the appeal crosses all party lines. Who does not want to be more healthy? The MAHA mandate from President Trump is to demonstrate measurable improvements in the health of US citizens within 12 to 18 months, with a particular focus on chronic disease and children’s health. One aspect of this effort will involve refocusing Health and Human Services on health promotion and deemphasizing disease-specific treatment. It’s the largest branch of the US government, by the way, and exceeds the size of the DOD by budget, at least the visible budget.

At its core, MAHA is predominantly proregulation. Let that sink in. The logic is that we must use regulatory authority to improve transparency and eliminate that which leads to unhealthy outcomes. Examples include drugs with side effects that, when considered in whole, do not have a strongly favorable risk-benefit ratio, an example being glyphosate (or Roundup) contamination of our grain and soybeans. Of course, recently, we have the removal of food dyes. However, there’s also a deregulatory aspect to the MAHA movement. For example, is unpasteurized milk really a health risk? What health-promoting properties are associated with unpasteurized milk?

Similarly, there is the move toward backyard poultry and eating locally slaughtered grass-fed beef, and reexamination of the widespread US policy of fluoridating municipal water supplies. These are all pushes against big government mandates. There’s also an investigational research aspect. For example, what are the drivers behind the explosion of autism, obesity, and other childhood chronic diseases? This is the explicit mandate coming from Donald Trump through the MAHA Commission. To date, the MAHA movement has primarily focused on things that big government can do to promote improved health. This is where MAHA is going currently.

Who isn’t for improved children’s health? Who isn’t for improved food purity? There are 10,000 petroleum-based compounds that are authorized by the FDA for inclusion in our food supply right now. And there has been absolutely no investigation, long term, of any of these because the way the system works is once the bureaucracy makes a decision, they rarely, if ever, go back and revisit that decision. And that is rampant through the entire HHS structure. It is the reason why these food dyes took so long to be banned. The data have been there for decades. The information about the role of these dyes in ADHD in children has been known for a very long period of time, is exceedingly well documented, and yet the FDA did nothing because their policy is that once a decision is made, they never go back and look at it. The CDC and FDA tend to not set up any processes where they revisit past decisions.

And this also, by the way, can be seen in the vaccine enterprise.

Short-term data was acquired, in the case of many of the pediatric vaccines, during the ’60s using rules, regulations, policies, and clinical trial research norms that are long since obsolete.

But those limited data from back then allowed the FDA at that point in time to make a “go” decision on authorizing those vaccines for the pediatric vaccine schedule, and they’ve never gone back and revisited that with new data. It’s just not in the structure. The whole structure of the approval process is driven by approving the thing in front of them right now, not going back and looking at whether or not there’ve been interactions between any of these drugs or compounds or vaccines, whether or not that decision was a good decision, or whether or not they missed some long-term safety signal because they were only looking at short-term data. It’s not done because that is kind of fundamental to the nature of bureaucracy. Once they make a decision, they don’t ever want to revisit it. It becomes locked in stone, and they move forward from that.

A derivative of this is that behind the potential of the MAHA initiative to improve our lives, and, importantly, improve childhood chronic disease, is the threat that if this gets institutionalized and bureaucratized, it will morph into another overbearing set of state mandates. There is no way to avoid that.

The Regulatory Impulse Behind MAHA

And, basically, my talk here is a plea to you folks, who are kind of at the tip of the spear concerning bureaucracy and the administrative state. We need you. We need your intellectual input to help set the boundaries and parameters around the MAHA initiative. It’s not being done right now. Nobody’s talking about what the proper boundary should be. We seem to have a consensus that this is necessary. That actually is debatable, but that is the current consensus. But no one is talking about what happens once the administrative state gets its teeth into this initiative.

Let’s say there’s a person who loves McDonald’s hamburgers, consumed with sugary Coca-Cola. Should the state mandate that such a person not eat these things with clear-cut health risks? Should the state outlaw cigars? What about regulating foods? Where should MAHA draw the line? What principles should guide these decisions? What is the proper role of small government in food and drug regulation? This is unexplored territory as far as I’m concerned, and it needs intellectual input. It needs guidance. It needs informed discussion. Where are the boundaries? And if we don’t set those boundaries, I guarantee that the administrative state will continue to just expand and run rampant as it assimilates the MAHA initiative and begins to institutionalize it and exploit it. This really involves the boundaries between individual sovereignty, libertarianism, Murray Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism, and the utilitarian socialist logic of modern public health.

The modern “public health enterprise” seeks the greatest good for the greatest number and is driven by narrow analysis of large data sets to identify, regulate, promote, and mandate specific healthcare interventions, such as vaccines, while often disregarding other related issues, including long-term unanticipated or difficultto- predict consequences. It is a “public health enterprise” that seeks to optimize collective health outcomes rather than optimizing health opportunities coupled with respect for individual autonomy and choice—which is what I advocate. It is a “public health enterprise” that has repeatedly used top-down management via government, insurers, and health management organizations to require and deploy preapproved treatment protocols rather than to promote individually optimized healthcare management and promotion reflecting each patient’s complexities. In other words, what I’m saying is the practice of modern medicine, particularly under Obamacare, has come down to protocoldriven application of modules.

If you are tested and answer questions that can now be interpreted by AI quite efficiently, you will be binned into one of these categories, and then you will be subjected to a preapproved protocol.

Modern physicians—I’m not defending my caste; it’s just a fact—don’t have a lot of operational latitude under the current structure. They have to implement the policies, procedures, and protocols that they’re given; otherwise they lose their jobs.

And when you’re sitting with the chains of a quarter, a half, or three-quarters of a million dollars in debt at high interest rates—so you basically have a couple of mortgages—you don’t have any choice.

Consider seat belt mandates. Like many big government initiatives that stand on the top of slippery slopes, there’s a general consensus that it’s right and proper for government to mandate that seat belts be installed on cars. But is it right to legally require their use when driving?

Next comes motorcycle helmets. Same issues, slightly less clear. Cigarette smoking.

In all three cases, the argument is made that irresponsible health behaviors by individuals cost all of society due to increased healthcare and insurance costs, including publicly subsidized costs and loss of person years. The same logic can then be applied all the way down to whether or not the state should mandate your dietary choices, which is why I used the McDonald’s hamburger example.

Should we allow citizens to experiment with nutraceuticals and health supplements that are not officially endorsed by the FDA? What rights do they have to do that? They may be costing the public health enterprise money.

They may be costing us tax dollars that are avoidable. This is the logic that we confront. This is where we risk going with the MAHA initiative. And there we go, straight to nanny state medical fascism.

But seat belts save lives. Air traffic controllers save lives most of the time. You get my point. The greatest good for the greatest number has become a logical fallacy. For a while, it seemed to work, but when you look at the twenty-first-century incarnation in particular, it has become badly corrupted. The history and reality behind vaccines is perhaps the best example in modern times, but the entire edifice of “public health” as it’s practiced today needs to be deconstructed.

Public health is good when the objectives are clear, they make sense to everyone, and their implementation is transparent and their results measurable. We have wonderful examples: clean water, sanitation, modern sewers, sewage treatment, waste management (which, by the way, has had the biggest impact on the decline in infectious disease. It’s not vaccines. Credit where credit’s due), clean air in places with local air pollution, antibiotics, advanced surgical procedures. We can go on and on and on.

This is the history of public health in the twentieth century, but things seem to go downhill from there, particularly with allopathic Western medicine. It’s morphed into monetized “sick care” and then monetized sickness in all its aspects.

If MAHA is to transition from merely a populist uprising and a set of immediate grievances to a new and sustainable set of public health policies, we need to take some time to think—to think about and define acceptable limits on the role of the state in promoting and advancing public health, and in some cases, mandating limits on the infringement of individual sovereignty and autonomy.

Immediate short-term interventions are absolutely necessary, and I applaud the use of both the bully pulpit as well as executive orders. But if MAHA is to become more than just a populist uprising, if it’s to result in sustainable, positive, long-term policy changes, it’s also important to take the time required to examine, define, and develop public support for the boundaries between the proper role of a constitutional republic–based federal government and the constitutional role of individual states— which are structurally responsible for regulating the practice of medicine, not the federal government—and both the sovereign rights of the individual and the global right to truly informed consent to medical interventions.

I’m going to close with this to drive home this final point. As a component of his commitment to no longer, “walk on eggshells,” the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth—I think it was two days ago—recently stated that the covid genetic “vaccines” were experimental products, that the vaccine mandates were illegal. These mandated experimental products were associated with severe adverse events, including myocarditis, stroke, and death. They were mandated, and the US bureaucracy actively suppressed the ability of those who either were forced to accept or willingly accepted these products to obtain informed consent.

These actions were violations of the Nuremberg accords. You cannot shirk that anymore. It’s in your face. With Pete Hegseth’s statement, this is now out in the open. There must be accountability and consequences. In close, I challenge the Mises Institute to work to help establish appropriate limits on the federal bureaucracy and to insist that these limits, like the Nuremberg accords, be enforced. If we don’t have enforcement, we will see the same things recapitulated because, as was eloquently said in the prior talk, this is the nature of bureaucracy.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post MAGA, MAHA, and Our Growing Health Bureaucracy appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the universe of alternative media, the immense size and influence of the Science/Medicine Industrial Complex (including “Big Pharma”) is well-known and commonly accepted.

However, this massive network of organizations might be better understood as Big Research.

A recent investigation dealing with UAB football (too embarrassing to cancel) led me to perform further research into the key source of funding for this university, the largest employer in the state of Alabama.

The revenue UAB derives from scientific “research grants” awarded by the federal government is of a scale that boggles the mind of this citizen researcher.

This examination of UAB funding sources should illustrate the massive amounts of money flowing from Washington D.C. – as well as various other medical foundations and private sources – into the coffers of certain higher education institutions that have leveraged allocations labeled “scientific research” into money-printing factories.

In the past seven years, UAB – a public college of 23,000 students and 24,000 (!) employees – generated at least $5 billion in revenue from government grants, most coming from the federal government and most from grants bestowed by the National institutes of Health (NIH).

In Fiscal Year 2022, UAB was the recipient of a “record” $774.5 million in federal grants and funding (source: al.com Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist John Archibald).

From 2018 through 2022, UAB received $3.178 billion in science research grants. Assuming annual funding levels were similar in 2023, 2024 and 2025, UAB has pocketed more than $5 billion in “research” money.

According to an analysis published by the The Urban Institute in 2022, 37 percent of UAB’s operating revenues came from federal funding. Only two colleges in America – MIT (48 percent) and Johns Hopkins (42 percent) – received a larger percentage of their total income from the federal government.

For context, every year UAB makes approximately twice the amount of revenue from federal grants as the university does from student tuition and fees.

According to the school’s financial report from 2020, the school netted $244.93 million in tuition and fees in Fiscal 2020 and $484 million from “grants and contracts.” (Even tuition is federally subsidized, as nation-wide, 31.6 percent of students receive Pell Grants. I also learned that graduate students who help perform medical research are paid with federal dollars.)

It pays to be a “research” university

In 2022, UAB received $774 million in federal funding, more than double the $332.4 million it received as a legislative approproriation from the State of Alabama.

The vast majority of UAB’s federal funding comes from the NIH, the parent agency of the NIAID, the sub-agency headed by Anthony Fauci through 2023.

According to various sources, UAB received $413 million from the NIH in 2023 and $407 million in 2022. Indeed, the Alabama college is in the “top 1 percent” of colleges that receive grants from this agency.

Also, the NIH is not the only “public health agency” that showers money on UAB. The same year the college received more than $20 million from the CDC and $11.5 million from the National Science Foundation.

The college also benefits from “private grants and contracts,” which presumably come from “partners” in Big Pharma like Pfizer, NGOs and various foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2019, the University received $81.2 million from “private” grants, according to the 2020 CPA financial report.

The school also derives income from patents and royalties on drugs and vaccines its faculty helped create.

According to a UAB press release, “other growth areas include industry and clinical trials. Total industry awards, which include grants, funded trials and services, more than doubled (106 percent) since 2018 to exceed $150 million in 2022.”

For further context, the amount of revenue UAB derives every year from federal funding and federal grants is at least $550 million more than the entire operating budget of Jacksonville State University, a four-year Alabama college with approximately 9,000 students.

According to a Google AI query, 88 percent of the “medical research money” distributed to Alabama’s 34 four-year colleges went to just one university – UAB.

The key to the operation/scam …

The justification for the vast amounts of “research money” flowing into UAB coffers is that these investments “save lives” and improve the health of Alabamians and Americans.

Indeed, earlier this year, an RFK, Jr. initiative at the HHS threatened to make “huge cuts to biomedical research grants” distributed to “research colleges” like UAB.

According al.com columnist John Archibald, “several (UAB) professors and doctors privately were close to panic … wondering if they should pack their bags.”

According to the all-important authorized narrative, possible cuts in medical research would result in horrific spikes in future deaths and unfathomable medical misery.

To emphasize the requisite scare-mongering point, Archibald quoted Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin.

“…You’re either pro-Alabamian and American health or you’re not,” said Mayor Woodfin. “There’s no in-between here. And when you cut funding, you hurt not just employers, but you hurt the people who voted for you as it relates to the ability for life-saving medicine, period.”

In one column, Archibald urged Alabama Republican senator Katie Britt to fight to protect “life-saving research” being conducted at UAB.

Not surprisingly, Britt did just this, writing a letter to President Trump to “speed up the release of NIH funds to UAB.”

According to Sen. Britt’s spokesperson Grace Evans:

“Senator Britt has been a strong advocate for ensuring the NIH remains the gold-standard of research and innovation across the nation and the world. She has continued to express the need for taxpayer dollars … which includes funding life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions like those in Alabama.”

According to Sen. Britt’s letter, “withholding or delaying these funds could undermine critical research; risk jobs supported by scientific research and delay Americans’ access to life-saving treatments.”

Segueing to my editorial comments …

As a jaded, skeptical contrarian, I’m happy to challenge the entire “life-saving research” narrative.

For starters, it should be noted for the record that every phD and medical researcher at UAB (like all “research” universities) was spectacularly wrong about Covid and the Covid response, including the necessity for “life-saving” vaccines.

I recently published an article about a UAB faculty member who spent 400 words in a guest column telling citizens the novel coronavirus was largely spread from physical surfaces.

My long-time readers also know that Anthony Fauci’s successor at the NIAID was Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who graduated to this job after serving for years as the director of UAB’s highly-acclaimed Infectious Disease Department.

While a revered and honored Birmingham resident, Dr. Marrazzo, like 99.9 percent of higher education experts, was wrong about everything Covid.

Furthermore, she helped lead the safety trials for remdesivir (nicknamed “Run, Death is Near!”), a formerly FDA-rejected drug which was “researched” and “developed” by UAB and the NIH.

According to many contrarians and ignored hospital whistleblowers, this “ground-breaking, life-saving” Covid “treatment” has killed thousands of American citizens. (One of UAB’s grants – for $37.5 million – was awarded to administer safety trials for this life-taking drug.)

In researching this story, I found an article about another esteemed UAB faculty expert, Dr. Paul Goepfert, a “UAB vaccine expert.”

In November 2020, Yellowhammer News ran a big story on this vaccine expert after Pfizer (a regular benefactor of UAB), reported its vaccine was “90 percent effective.”

“That’s tremendous news,’ said Dr. Goepfert. “… The most optimistic of us were thinking about 70% effective, so 90% effectiveness is fantastic.”

Goepfert advised … “if the Pfizer vaccine is indeed 90% effective, around 60% of the population would need to take the vaccine to achieve herd immunity.”

Applying “follow-up journalism” to Yellow Hammer News’ glowing report, at least 60 percent of the population did get two doses of these “vaccines” and “herd immunity” did not happen. In fact, the vaccinated become much more likely to be infected once, twice or four times than the unvaccinated.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Medical Research Scam appeared first on LewRockwell.

If you were alive to witness the events of 9/11, you probably remember the sudden emergence of the “Coexist” bumper stickers and t-shirts across the US after the tragedy. The intended message being that different cultures must be “tolerant” of each other and live in harmony. If you caught yourself with a twinge of visible pain in your face every time you saw this slogan, you were not alone.

Maybe it’s a subconscious aversion to hippies and their body odor, but I think the distaste for the message goes much deeper. It’s built into the DNA of every human being – It’s a part of our genetic memory. Every culture has an inherent drive to protect itself from competing cultures and ideologies.

We have learned over thousands of generations that culture is not just social expression, it is a carefully crafted fortress protecting us from being invaded and destroyed by hostile forces seeking to take what we have created. Homogeneous culture helps to maintain the values that keep our societies safe, industrious and stable.

Interestingly, the person who first created the “Coexist” artwork, a Polish man named Piotr Młodożeniec, was a staunch proponent of Polish Independence from the Soviet Union. The guy promoted Coexistence, but even he couldn’t tolerate the communists. It would seem that some ideals are mutually exclusive. Some spaces cannot be shared by certain beliefs.

This reality runs contrary to the propaganda we have been bombarded with in the west for decades. Americans have been regaled with “Melting Pot” narratives since childhood. We are told that our country was built on open immigration. Even the Statue of Liberty says we must accept with open arms the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” wherever they may travel from.

Of course, the woman who wrote that poem in 1883 (called “The New Colossus”) was Emma Lazarus, a feminist socialist. Early socialists viewed workers as a global class, a weapon that could be exploited to disrupt nation states and further the spread of what would eventually become communism.

Keep in mind that this time period was the beginning of the melting pot narrative in the US, and it was widely supported by industrialists seeking cheap labor to fill their factories. The motives of the robber barons and the motives of the socialists coincided. And this is where we find the roots of our modern-day crisis. Though they pretend to be at odds, the collusion between ultra-rich elites and the political left has existed for well over a century.

Today, far-left movements have completely merged with the institutions of the mega-rich. We call this partnership “globalism” and a key pillar of their agenda is STILL mass immigration, on a scale that dwarfs anything the west saw in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The mass immigration of the “Gilded Age” was largely from nations in Europe with western heritage – But in our era, the migrants are coming from third-world enclaves, places where socialism is the norm or Islam is the dominant religion. We have seen the ideological ravages of this program in Europe where liberals and Christians alike face a social brutality that they have not dealt with in decades.

Furthermore, it is a brutality we are not allowed to defend ourselves against. For if we do fight back, we become the villains. This is what makes multiculturalism the perfect weapon: It is a method of attack that uses our own ingrained sense of empathy and fairness against us. In order to stop the invasion, we have to abandon certain ideals of the liberal epoch – We have to embrace intolerance, because it’s the only way we can survive.

That is to say, tolerant liberalism must die, at least until globalism is defeated. I’m not denouncing “democracy” and its original tenets. However, I will not deny the fact that the west, in its quest for ultimate individual freedom and ultimate fairness, has foolishly abandoned its survival instincts for the sake of a naive pie-in-the-sky vision.

Most third-world cultures despise our progressive notions and laugh at our ideas of fairness. They only see us as an easy target to be ransacked. They see us as rubes, as easy marks. Their ideologies center on taking what can be taken from anyone outside of their tribal circles. They consider us a fat lamb ready for slaughter.

When I see events like those in Ireland this week, where riots have erupted after an African migrant sexually assaulted a 10-year-old Irish girl, I have to accept the basic tenets of tribalism which tell me that it is better to err on the side of caution and avoid integration with other cultures outside of the west as much as possible. It’s not about skin color, it’s about principles. It’s not about racism, it’s about self preservation.

Globalists have painted “tribalism” and “nationalism” as grotesque remnants of the barbaric past, and they have done this for strategic reasons.

Leftists and globalists desire the erasure of national boundaries; specifically, they’ve targeted western nations for subjugation. Why? Because the west is the fount of liberty and Christianity. In order to construct a global “new world order” based on Marxist atheism, luciferianism, moral relativism, etc., the west must be weakened or destroyed first.

The elites have determined that the most convenient weakness of the west is our liberal willingness to share our culture and its riches with outsiders. What better way to bring down a society than to flood it with ideologically opposed masses of people, and then attack anyone who complains as if they are not living up to their historic values of liberty.

This goes well beyond the Cloward-Piven Strategy, it’s not just about buying votes with welfare subsidies and open borders. No, this is about erasing the soul of western civilization forever.

Multiculturalism asks us to forsake our common sense and our instincts. It demands that we offer ourselves up as a sacrifice for the “greater good” of integration and coexistence. But there is no such thing as coexistence.

Third world migrants have no intention of tolerating our ideals; they would put us under their boot heel if they could. Leftists and globalists view patriots and conservatives and Christians with rabid disdain. They want us dead and gone because we are an obstacle to their power. They tell us this on a daily basis. Maybe we should start believing them and act accordingly?

There is no reason for us to tolerate them. We’re not taking the high road, we’re committing suicide.

Thomas Jefferson, a man keenly aware of the plight of migrants and the oppression taking place across the European world, was still highly reticent to accept the idea of mass immigration. He noted:

“They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its directions, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”

In other words, Jefferson warned that migrants living most of their lives being indoctrinated by foreign beliefs might not have the capacity to understand the nuances of American life and liberty. They will instead take what they like from American culture while disregarding important factors of assimilation and responsibility. This is exactly what we are witnessing across the western world today in the face of mass immigration programs designed by globalists and administered by leftist politicians.

We might have a brief reprieve over the next few years with Donald Trump in office, but a permanent solution is not in place. Leftists have no intention of setting aside their open border efforts. Hell, the “No Kings” protests were basically an attempt to co-opt American patriotism in the name of open borders.

Woke leftists who hate America tried to pretend as if it’s the patriotic duty of Americans to support illegal immigration. If you love America, you have to be willing to destroy America.

Like I said, this is the essence of multiculturalism: Using our sense of fairness against us and weaponizing our empathy so that we are too scared to protect ourselves from the attack. The answer is to stop caring about fairness. The answer is to rediscover our tribalism, to reject multiculturalism, socialism and globalism and refuse to compromise any longer. The answer is to leave liberal concepts of tolerance behind.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Multiculturalism Is a Globalist Weapon and You’re Not Allowed To Protect Yourself appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Every boat we strike saves the lives of 25,000 Americans,” says Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.  Wouldn’t that be something if it were true! How simple the problems of our post-imperial US world would be!

The White House press conference of October 23rd centered on the President, sitting on a golden chair between Ken and Barbie.  His staff of beautiful women and slightly eggheaded men all articulately competing to flatter the President for his brilliance, his boldness, his courage, his caretaking commitment to the United States. He commended his staff as “most talented” at what they do, “naturals,” he said, reading my mind when I had assumed they were made of plastic.

I personally like to watch and listen to President Trump, his tenor, his expository confidence and an accent that mixes New York City with something else I can’t explain.  The content of what he says is also a lot of fun, and he has wholly rejuvenated the world of adjectives and fish stories.  I love the many Trump impersonators who recognize this, and use it to entertain us around the world.

Trump took a moment to lecture a Democrat legislator for using the F-word seven times in one sentence. Trump advised that Democrats do what he does: Use the word only in every seventh contact with the press.  Using the F-word is a tool, like all things, to be leveraged, as Trump sees fit.

Nixon’s War on Drugs melded long ago with Bush’s War on Terror, and with this, the latest half century of American empire is cemented by this collective understanding of the US state, and its only purpose.  A flexible, seamless bodysuit of war, designed by the Military Industrial complex and their equity and bankster partners, has been sewn up by a Congress of miseducated seamstresses, and delivered to the Executive Branch for a pittance and a pat on the head.

American visionary Randolph Bourne understood that war is the health of the state.  Americans tend to assume the question was settled by Bourne’s Columbia University professor John “we are all pacifists who just need one more war” Dewey.  War has become the health of America specifically, war is now America’s special power, and we the people today demand only that it be more deadly, and more efficient, that it benefit us more rather than less.

When asked if he would request a Declaration of War from Congress for his ongoing war for Venezuelan oil and regional supremacy, Trump answered in the negative.  He said, no, we are just going to kill people.  Trump – speaking for the executive branch and Americans in general – is simply going to kill people.  That’ll work, right? As Dewey and the war for peace crowd would say a century ago – and as Bourne would correctly reject and counter today – it’s just the pragmatic thing to do.

Later in the same press conference, Trump actually brought up the unacceptability of politicians threatening to kill people, whether political enemies or not.  Trump ridiculed and condemned threats to kill opposition leaders, and their wives and children, made by American politicians, bringing up the Jay Jones situation in the Virginia Attorney General’s race.

Jay’s problem, and the problem for many on the left, is that only the king is allowed to kill his enemies.  Thus, their challenge is to find another Obama-like figure to charm and inspire the “democracy” in order to gain the Executive branch and rule at will.

The brutalist Obama Library, opening soon, offers the true architectural face of the State.  Obama, the master of illusion, must have preferred this design in an odd transparent moment.  His true self, his very Peace Prize-winning soul, always vibed to brutalism.  Self-awareness in humans, in families, in businesses, and in states, tends to create self-doubt, and reduce confidence.  The possibility of being wrong, immoral, or evil, if recognized, can raise good questions, that in turn shape decisions in a way that goes beyond mere pragmatism and short-lived emotion.

Yet, to pose as the President of the United States, and to exercise empire on behalf of that monstrous government, demands an overly confident front man, vulnerable to flattery, desirous of unearned advantage, trusting blindly in his own dark soul, in high hopes of staying on top – not boldly pursuing truth and justice.  Men and women who can and will naturally obfuscate, who can view the ethical and moral chasms within and around them as modern art rather than warning signs, who enjoy the power to kill any enemy they choose by right, on no other authority than rage or envy – these are the Presidents of the United States.

This executive progression is so normalized today that Trump increasingly says the quiet part out loud. For this we are indeed blessed, as younger generations will be well equipped to challenge the sclerotic state with the innocent wisdom of youth, as Randolph Bourne did in 1918, or as Etienne de la Boetie did in 1552.  Both died at age 32, and yet both are vividly alive today, their observations and perceptions educating the planet that the state’s necessary evolution, its incessant march to mass murder and tyranny, exists solely to be exposed, ridiculed, disobeyed, and ultimately altered or abolished, to use the words of Thomas Jefferson in 1776, age 33.

The state has little use for men like Bourne, Del La Boetie, or Jefferson, but the people do.

Today, Trump threatens, tariffs, embargoes, insults and bombs the world, for the good of the state. His ally Netanyahu, with the shortsighted support of 80% of Israelis, seeks to physically and spiritually erase his enemies – within and beyond Israel’s legal borders as popular and pragmatic policy.  Trump’s vassal Zelensky and a band of NATO bureaucrats and other accidental comedians seek war for the sake of killing people, within and beyond their borders, to solve the political crisis of elite rule among European substates, something the US itself chose Trump to address at home, thus far being gravely disappointed.

Some critique what they claim is a rise of death cults, as if somehow these cults have taken over the state, around the world, making them warlike, unreasonable, immoral, and bent on slaughter.  Instead, we can increasingly see that the state itself is the cult, parked on the sixth sigma of nature’s norm.  Self-aware only to the degree of knowing it holds but a minority stake of society, economy, and faith; jealous and enraged if even one person remains uncowed and unwowed by its ridiculousness.

Well, that’s what I got from the latest White House press event.  How about you?

The post What I Learned at This Week’s White House Press Conference appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump has decided that it’s “Empire First” rather than “America First.” The two are not the same at all. “Empire First” means continuing the endless wars that have nothing to do with America. It means bailing out Argentina at the expense of American farmers and taxpayers. It means, trying to keep the idea alive that every inch of the planet must be under the thumb of the U.S. federal government. That ideology has been running on fumes for decades. The question was Can we pivot back to “America First” before total bankruptcy hits? That was the promise and hope of electing Trump. He has broken that promise.

The post Trump The Keynesian: Bails Out Argentina While U.S. Farmers Suffer appeared first on LewRockwell.

Excellent, concise and on-target.

Thomas Massie is a serious principled constitutionalist and devoted true populist, devoted to the people he serves who he sees him and regards him as their neighbor.

The Uni-Party establishment regards him as an iconoclast, troublemaker and hopeless romantic Don Quixote, hopelessly following his Impossible Dream of honesty, integrity, and public service to his fellow citizens.

He doesn’t have that lean hungry look of a craven pol grasping for power or pelf. He is the polar opposite of an egomaniacal poseur like Donald Trump in every possible way.

The post Thomas Massie’s America First : A Documentary by Tom Woods & Dan Smotz appeared first on LewRockwell.

Trump claims that an anonymous donor sent the federal government a $130 million check to cover the shortfall in military troop pay during the ongoing shutdown because he loves the military. “He called us the other day.” Can this possibly be true?

The post Can This Possibly Be True? appeared first on LewRockwell.

 

 

di Francesco Simoncelli

(Versione audio dell'articolo disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-mondo-dietro-di-voi)

Come si suol dire, “a furor di popolo” quello di oggi sarà una sorta di pezzo riepilogativo di quanto successo finora nel panorama geopolitico ed economico. Andremo a vagliare il contesto reale, quello che a livello generalistico è contorno mentre invece è la vera sostanza di quanto accade sotto i nostri occhi. Capiremo soprattutto come l'incompetenza, in verità, è meno diffusa di quanto si possa credere nelle aule della politica, abilmente mascherata dalla malizia sottostante. La vendita alla popolazione osservante dell'incompetenza delle figure sotto i riflettori è un attenuante di gran lunga più digeribile rispetto alla piena consapevolezza delle loro azioni. In questo modo si scambiano anche “tenenti”, “colonnelli” e “generali” per i veri governanti. Ogni strato in piena vista compie azioni che fanno riferimento a uno strato superiore costituito da altri individui che conoscono le informazioni dello strato inferiore più le loro e così via fino a salire fino in cima a questa catena di comando dove la “cupola mafiosa” fatta di famiglie e interessi antichi, molto antichi, tirano le stringhe delle marionette. Ovviamente non hanno tutte le informazioni del mondo, impossibile per un semplice essere umano, ciò che hanno invece è l'esperienza della storia e la capacità di influenzare pesantemente l'ambiente al di sotto del loro raggio d'azione. E come in ogni cupola mafiosa che si rispetti, ci sono alleanze e tradimenti, interessi circostanziali ed esistenziali. Nessuno è amico di nessun altro, ma la coincidenza d'intenti quella sì che investe di una patina superficiale di amicizia la fugacità di una alleanza.

Se immaginate il caos, vi sbagliate. Esiste un “codice di condotta” e come in qualsiasi gioco esistono delle regole. Certo, possono essere stiracchiate fino alla quasi rottura, ma non possono essere infrante. Il sopraccitato codice è il Diritto marittimo, il quale regola e imposta le relazioni tra gli “uomini” sulla “terra”. Per quanto la Legge naturale dovrebbe essere il faro guida al di sotto del quale tutti dovrebbero sottostare, artifici semantici e capovolgimenti giuridico/religiosi hanno portato al di sopra della stessa il Diritto marittimo. In questo senso la cupola mafiosa risponde certamente a una sorta di “diritto” e regole, ma non sono le stesse cui è sottoposta la gente comune (la formula la “Legge è uguale per tutti” è la legge del più forte, coniata per la prima volta in quella che fu la Battaglia di Milo). La scena della riunione tra le varie bande criminali nel film, Il Padrino, è utile in questo senso per capire meglio quanto detto finora.

È qualcosa di nuovo? No. Vi basta osservare qualsiasi chiesa, ad esempio, e noterete che gli affreschi a sfondo religioso saranno caratterizzati anche da stemmi di casate nobiliari. La propaganda dell'epoca la potremmo definire, sostituita oggi dall'intrattenimento di massa, ciononostante la storia è una cronologia di battaglie, alleanze e tradimenti di famiglie che si sono godute il privilegio di poter “gestire” le persone (inconsapevoli) al di sotto di esse. L'Unione Europea, per fare un esempio contemporaneo, è una tecnocrazia oligarchica dove famiglie di potere (come quella della Von der Leyen) usano un impianto tecnocratico per governare. La guida occulta che sto descrivendo avviene tramite il cosiddetto “sottobosco statale”, lo Stato profondo, e questo si riverbera sugli apparati amministrativi “alla luce del sole” che subiscono pesantemente questa influenza. È una saldatura che permette a suddette famiglie di insinuare i propri sodali e, come in uno schema piramidale, così riesce a sostenersi nel tempo e proiettare maggiore potere.

L'epoca storica moderna non permette più l'imposizione del potere politico tramite quello economico, bensì tramite la tecnocrazia. “Lo dice la scienza” è l'eggregora per eccellenza che, come un grimaldello, apre le coscienze della maggior parte delle persone ed esse diventano disponibili (acconsentono) a sottostare alla direzionalità impostata dall'alto. In tutta Europa, al giorno d'oggi, la politica è stata sostituita dalla tecnica e la magistratura è un braccio armato di quest'ultima. In questo mondo fatto di famiglie/fazioni/bande mafiose e retto da tecnocrati facenti funzione, la popolazione è convinta che tutto sia fatto di tecnica e pensa altresì che le varie “macroaree” (economia, geopolitica, politica estera, ecc.) siano fatte di decisioni tecniche. Lasciare tutto nelle mani dei tecnici, affidarsi ai tecnici che applicano i principi studiati, delegare: la ricetta perfetta per l'assenza di contestazioni o indagini.

L'era moderna della geopolitica è indubbiamente iniziata con la Brexit. Ripensate al giugno del 2016: Trump stava correndo contro la Clinton per la presidenza degli USA e le piazze inglesi erano infervorate da gente come Farage che spingevano per un voto contro l'UE. Alla luce di quanto detto finora, è chiaro come il giorno che anche quest'ultimo non era affatto mosso da scopi individuali e questo a sua volta significa che il movimento di chi voleva lasciare l'UE non era affatto “populista”. Stiamo parlando di quegli oligarchi, quell'aristocrazia inglese, che gravitano intorno alla City di Londra e che hanno “tradito” la Thatcher e venduto l'Inghilterra all'Unione Europea (cfr. The Rotten Heart of Europe). C'è stata la Brexit perché Trump non era quello che doveva vincere la carica di presidente e, col senno di poi, essa s'è dimostrata una lotta su chi avrebbe dovuto controllare le istituzioni post-Seconda guerra mondiale dopo il sacco completo degli Stati Uniti.

La vittoria della Clinton avrebbe dovuto impantanare ancora di più il Paese e permettere alle fazioni globaliste all'estero di prenderne il controllo. Così sarebbe stata una faida su chi avrebbe esercitato il diritto di sedere a “capotavola” ed essere il decisore più influente: l'aristocrazia inglese, i vecchi neoconservatori inglesi, i vecchi membri dell'Impero inglese, o i globalisti continentali (olandesi/tedeschi/francesi). Tony Blair e Jacob Rees-Mogg non “giocano” nella stessa squadra; per quanto siano entrambi globalisti il primo fa riferimento all'UE, ad esempio. Così come Obama... e così come Farage fa riferimento al vecchio conglomerato dell'Impero inglese nella City di Londra. Quest'ultima gente è “l'eredità” di coloro che ci hanno dato la Dichiarazione di Balfour, tanto per far capire i legami. Detto in termini più sintetici, le fazioni e le famiglie che costellano il mondo della geopolitica, della politica e della finanza si preparavano a banchettare sul cadavere degli Stati Uniti e spolpare ciò che ne rimaneva. A quest'ora, infatti, l'UE, l'ONU, l'FMI e la BRI avrebbero dovuto essere i riferimenti cardine del “nuovo mondo”. A tal proposito, cosa pensate che sia la recente linea di swap in dollari con l'Argentina se non l'applicazione della Dottrina Monroe da parte degli Stati Uniti e lo sganciamento della nazione dai prestiti FMI/Banca mondiale?

The $20 billion swap line to Argentina is not a bailout—it's a currency swap with political motives. Washington doesn't want Argentina to look toward non-dollar (China). China provides more in loans to emerging economies than the World Bank.

— Martin A. Armstrong (@ArmstrongEcon) October 16, 2025

Quindi la Brexit era il classico “coltello nella schiena” piantato dagli inglesi nella schiena dell'UE. Si sarebbero alleati con la “nuova” America e avrebbero pienamente riconquistato la colonia fuggita. Sin da allora si è trattato di una lotta ai vertici della cupola mafiosa che governa le persone e chiunque prevalga alla fine non equivale alla “salvezza” della popolazione in generale. Nella migliore delle ipotesi si tratta di una qualità di vita lievemente migliore. La maggior parte delle persone cadrà vittima della divisione tra presunti buoni e cattivi, schierandosi con i primi. Non esistono né i primi, né i secondi; esistono solo opportunità per la gente comune di trarre vantaggio da lotte al vertice come questa, se non altro per non finire schiacciata come formiche da giganti che si prendono a randellate sulla testa. Schierarsi significa perire.

Cos'è successo nel novembre del 2016 poi? Donald Trump è stato eletto e non doveva accadere. Queste due cose hanno richiesto una revisione dei piani in corsa, dato che il tabellone di gioco non era più quello che si credeva dovesse essere. Inutile dire che l'errore è spesso il figlio dell'improvvisazione.

E qui facciamo un passo indietro introducendo nell'analisi la componente economica. Partiamo dal LIBOR.

LIBOR ED EURODOLLARI

Questo è un tema ancora oscuro per la maggior parte delle persone. Addirittura c'è chi crede erroneamente che l'eurodollaro sia il tasso di cambio tra euro e dollaro. Prima del mio ultimo libro, Il Grande Default, c'era scarsa narrativa in italiano a riguardo; dopo di esso, però, non ci sono scusanti. Il background storico di questo mercato l'ho dato in una recente serie che potete recuperare qui, quindi adesso mi limiterò ad affermare che gli eurodollari sono essenzialmente dollari offshore detenuti da banche estere. Come accaduto con l'oro, possedere una cosa passivamente non è redditizio quindi nel corso del tempo si sono studiati modi per rendere queste riserve “attive”. Il problema con i prestiti, ovviamente, era che non esisteva un tasso d'interesse di riferimento in grado di determinare l'ammontare che poteva essere richiesto all'atto di elargizione del credito. Non esistendo un tasso di riferimento che coordinasse il sistema bancario mondiale, permettendo alle singole banche in una nazione di prestare dollari a un'altra di un'altra nazione, emerse una necessità che non tardò a essere soddisfatta.

Così come venne creato il gold fix a Londra per intermediare a livello internazionale i contratti sintetici legati al metallo giallo, nel 1968 una banca greca fece sapere che avrebbe prestato le sue riserve in dollari a un tasso d'interesse tra il 4.5% e il 5%. Il precedente crea il caso e nel 1984 la storia arrivò a mostrare 18 banche della City di Londra che, alla fine della giornata, si riunivano in teleconferenza per determinare il prezzo a cui sarebbero stati concessi i prestiti in dollari tra di esse. A cascata questo avrebbe permesso di adottare un tale riferimento per mutui, titoli garantiti da ipoteca, ecc. Nel mondo di oggi, dove i computer imperversano e le comunicazioni digitali sono più veloci, sarebbe stato meno macchinoso il processo, allora, invece, ci si doveva accontentare di un “giro di telefonate”. E fu così che il LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) sarebbe stato preso come modello mondiale per i dollari circolanti all'estero.

L'anno successivo, il 1985, gli Accordi del Plaza resetteranno le valute fiat dopo lo scisma dall'oro del 1971 e le collegarono alla determinazione del LIBOR. Per allora il sottobosco dei prestiti in dollari al di fuori degli Stati Uniti era andato già fuori controllo e fu esattamente ciò che portò alla crisi economica degli anni '70, la quale non fu risolta da Volcker ma dall'introduzione del LIBOR. La Francia di De Gaulle diede solo una spintarella al sistema finché venisse riformato lungo questi binari e il mio sospetto è che ci fosse un accordo sottobanco con gli inglesi per premere sull'acceleratore: nonostante l'odio tra i due Paesi, esso fu scavalcato dal desiderio di ottenere pasti gratis tramite finanziamenti in dollari offshore a riserva frazionaria e la possibilità di riconquistare la colonia sfuggita al loro controllo. Ricordiamoci che la Francia lavorò insieme all'Inghilterra per fomentare la guerra civile americana.

Il LIBOR, quindi, divenne il tasso d'interesse a cui sarebbero stati indicizzati tutti i debiti mondiali denominati in dollari, inclusi anche quelli negli Stati Uniti. Per esempio, quando una banca doveva impostare l'interesse da far pagare a un qualsiasi mutuatario, gli chiedeva il tasso del LIBOR + n (dove n era un qualsiasi numero che permetteva all'istituto di credito di guadagnare dal prestito). Lo stesso accadeva con le carte di credito. Quando si prendevano questi due fatti insieme, ovvero il LIBOR che indicizzava tutti i debiti del mondo e il mercato dei dollari offshore che era di ordini di grandezza più grande di quello interno, la Federal Reserve non era affatto l'istituto che determinava la politica monetaria americana.

Facciamo un altro passo avanti adesso. L'economia degli Stati Uniti è di gran lunga la più forte del mondo, dato che può mandare dollari fuori e far entrare beni (Dilemma di Triffin), di conseguenza può permettersi un costo del capitale più alto rispetto al resto del mondo. I mercati esteri, nonostante le loro riserve in dollari, sono molto più suscettibili a una variazione del tasso di riferimento americano (Federal fund rate). Per dirla in altro modo, l'economia americana è più dinamica e capace di assorbire un costo del capitale più elevato per la fabbricazione dello stesso prodotto che potrebbe essere fabbricato in Vietnam. Se, ad esempio, uno volesse costruire una casa in Vietnam ciò sarebbe accessibile a un tasso Fed Fund del 3%; se uno volesse fare la stessa cosa negli USA, ciò sarebbe ancora accessibile al 5,5%. Perché? Perché l'economia statunitense è migliore, più profittevole e più efficiente. Gli americani sono in grado di usare il capitale a loro disposizione in modo più efficiente rispetto ai vietnamiti. Questo è un vantaggio non indifferente quando, ad esempio, la FED, facendo ricorso al suo keynesismo, afferma di dover “rialzare” i tassi d'interesse per “raffreddare” la creazione di credito nell'economia.

Gli Austriaci hanno sempre avuto ragione a criticare la FED perché capitolava “troppo in fretta” nel suo ciclo di rialzo dei tassi e tornava a tagliarli. Con le informazioni che avete a disposizione adesso e la mia ricerca in tal direzione, cari lettori, adesso sapete il perché: non perché la FED fosse stupida o incapace, bensì a causa del LIBOR. Per 40 anni questa giostra ha continuato a girare: la FED vedeva “surriscaldarsi” l'economia americana a causa di un'enorme espansione dei mercati dell'eurodollaro, quei dollari tornavano in patria, svalutavano il biglietto verde ed essa rialzava i tassi d'interesse. Ma qui arrivavano i guai: il Vietnam, come nell'esempio precedente, non poteva gestire tassi d'interesse al 7%, solo al 3%, e i debiti iniziavano ad “andare a male”. Il LIBOR, di conseguenza, esplodeva al rialzo ben al di sopra del Fed fund rate americano, dato che c'era un fuggi-fuggi per accaparrarsi il denaro con cui servire il debito. In particolare esplodevano i tassi sul front-end della curva del LIBOR (la domanda di dollari era più impellente nel breve termine ovviamente) e, superando quelli sul back-end, essi segnalavano inversione e quindi pericolo di recessione.

Le economie meno efficienti, quindi, affrontavano lo spauracchio dell'inadempienza, cosa che accadde, ad esempio, con Long-Term Capital Management quando andò in default a causa della crisi che dapprima scoppiò in Thailandia e poi si diffuse in Russia. La leva finanziaria, infatti, è un'arma a doppio taglio; può dare soddisfazioni, ma piramidarci sopra progetti a lungo termine significa esporsi a un volo da un burrone assicurato. Il LIBOR e la riserva frazionaria nel mercato degli eurodollari alimentavano la sconsideratezza e l'azzardo morale perché si supponeva che sarebbe stato un sistema sempre a disposizione del resto del mondo. Certo, ci sarebbero stati agnelli sacrificali qua e là ogni tanto (es. crisi argentina, crisi asiatica, bolla dotcom, LTCM, ecc.), però poi si sarebbe acceduto alla stessa fonte che aveva causato la crisi per inondare la stessa di dollari e prenotarsi per il giro di giostra successivo.

Il meccanismo era sempre lo stesso: necessità di dollari, prestiti nei mercati pronti contro termine per raccattare qualsiasi finanziamento rapido possibile, esplosione al rialzo del LIBOR. Ma cosa succedeva negli Stati Uniti? Esplodevano al rialzo anche i tassi variabili dei mutui, ma non dell'ammontare equivalente al rialzo dei Fud fund (diciamo da 2% al 5%) bensì di quello del LIBOR (diciamo dal 2% al 9%). D'improvviso le carte di credito passavano da tassi al 12% a tassi al 21%, ad esempio, e così anche per i tassi per i prestiti automobilistici, i mutui immobiliari, il credito revolving, ecc. Cosa succedeva all'economia americana quindi? Iniziava a rallentare ben prima che gli investimenti improduttivi del precedente ciclo potessero essere eliminati, come recita correttamente la teoria Austriaca del ciclo economico, e la FED era costretta a tagliare i tassi ben prima che tale processo potesse concludersi efficacemente. In sintesi, era la City di Londra a controllare l'economia e il sistema bancario americani.

Mentre la stampa generalista veicolava l'idea che la FED fosse gestita da incompetenti, gli Austriaci fungevano da cassa di risonanza e amplificavano il messaggio fraudolento: “End the FED”! Obiettivo legittimo, ma perché non “End the BOE” la fonte primaria di tutti i mali economici? A causa del loro ego: il (presunto) riconoscimento a livello mainstream li ha accecati e ha gonfiato il loro orgoglio, facendoli trincerare nella teoria e abiurando la pratica di ciò accade nella realtà. La teoria è valida, e anche una guida per obiettivi di lungo termine, ma nel frattempo viviamo il presente e i fatti che lo costellano non andranno via chiudendo semplicemente gli occhi di fronte a essi.

Nel 2022, però, tutto questo è cambiato. Per capirlo, riprendiamo la storia dove l'avevamo lasciata quando Trump è stato eletto presidente nel 2017. La prima cosa che fa è nominare un nuovo presidente alla Federal Rserve: Jerome Powell. Janet Yellen stava per lasciare la carica e si rifiutava di rialzare i tassi quando ce n'era bisogno, Wall Street quindi consegna nelle mani di Trump il nome di Powell. Sì, Wall Street, perché non dimentichiamoci delle fazioni di cui abbiamo parlato all'inizio di questo saggio: una di queste negli USA è quella facente riferimento ai cosiddetti New York Boys, ovvero quel gruppo di pressione rappresentato dal sistema bancario commerciale americano la cui capillarizzazione sul territorio è ben radicata. Powell è stato per anni un membro del FOMC e uno di quelli che, sin dall'epoca Bernanke, è stato un fermo sostenitore della necessità di rialzare i tassi e fermo critico dell'obiettivo d'inflazione al 2%. Come seconda mossa, Trump sposta John Williams dalla FED di Atlanta alla FED di New York. Per chi non avesse contezza di come è strutturata la Federal Reserve, esiste la sede principale a Washington DC e poi le 12 Federal Reserve regionali. Quella di Atlanta non ha tanto potere, quella di New York invece organizza l'overnight repo desk (mercato dei prestiti rapidi, linee di swap in dollari, ecc.) e le altre strutture della branca principale.

Perché è importante Williams nella nostra storia? Perché è l'architetto del SOFR (Security Overnight Financing Rate), un tasso interbancario tra la Federal Reserve e le banche americane che comprano dollari nel mercato pronti contro termine americano. Quel che è importante assimilare è che la domanda di denaro nel breve termine viene gestita egregiamente e lo scompenso tra domanda/offerta di denaro viene gestito esclusivamente dal mercato pronti contro termine americano. Se, ad esempio, una banca deve pagare dividendi o stipendi domani, ma ha solo titoli del Tesoro americani e poca liquidità dato che avrebbe ricevuto una grossa somma due settimane dopo, essa può rivolgersi a una sua controparte e farsi prestare dollari ponendo come garanzia i titoli a sua disposizione. Il contratto pronti contro termine è il privilegio di usare dollari di altri, o liquidità di altri, per un breve lasso di tempo in cambio di un interesse pattuito tra le parti.

Quindi il SOFR è una tasso a cui vengono indicizzati i debiti interni degli Stati Uniti e nel momento in cui gli americani richiederanno un finanziamento o un mutuo verrà caricato loro come interesse SOFR + n, non più LIBOR + n. Ma ecco il punto: il SOFR non è dipendente dall'opinione di 18 banche nella City di Londra. Se in passato l'impostazione del LIBOR per i dollari offshore influenzava pesantemente i mercati americani, e quindi le condizioni economiche estere, soprattutto quelle di Europa e Inghilterra, influenzavano pesantemente i mercati americani, ora questi ultimi rispondono esclusivamente alle condizioni economiche interne tramite il SOFR. Sono le differenze più piccole a fare la vera differenza: ora i mercati del dollaro interni controllano il prezzo del dollaro a livello internazionale. Questo mi porta a concludere che gli USA hanno dichiarato la loro, vera e propria, indipendenza dall'Europa quando Powell è diventato presidente della Federal Reserve e John Williams ha avviato i lavori per implementare il SOFR al posto del LIBOR. A fronte di un periodo di test della durata di 4 anni, sarebbe diventato attivo il primo gennaio 2022.

Si capisce che Powell è un alfiere dei NY Boys, la fazione opposta a quella della cricca di Davos/inglese/olandese, quando nel 2021 l'amministrazione Biden ritarda/ostacola la sua rielezione a presidente per oltre 6 mesi e lui stesso viene accusato di insider trading. Quest'ultimo era un tentativo raffazzonato dell'UE di contrastare la stretta monetaria ombra della Federal Reserve che stava iniziando a prosciugare il mercato degli eurodollari: a giugno di quell'anno Powell aveva rialzato di 5 punti base il reverse repo facility della FED. L'obiettivo quindi era quello di liberarsi di Powell, visto che dal lato politico/fiscale l'amministrazione Biden era corrotta, e riguadagnare il controllo anche sulla politica monetaria insediando la Brainard. Infatti fu quest'ultima che fece trapelare ad Axios e Politico i trading sull'indice S&P 500 che apparentemente incriminavano la condotta di Powell e Clarida. Saltò fuori poi che addirittura tali trade passavano sotto la sua firma... a dir poco imbarazzante. La presidenza della FED fu promessa alla Brainard da Obama. L'attacco riuscì ad affondare tre dei membri più fedeli a Powell nell'FOMC (Clarida, Rosengren e Kaplan), ma non lui stesso. Alla fine, come ci si poteva aspettare, tutto si risolse in una bolla di sapone. Ciononostante l'FOMC dovette affrontare lo stesso l'attacco sferrato dalla cricca di Davos per mezzo dell'amministrazione Biden, e lo fece dichiarando Powell presidente fino a riconferma o scelta di un sostituto. Questa indecisione, riconferma o no, è durata 4 mesi, tempo in cui l'amministrazione Biden smosse mari e monti per impedire la continuazione di Powell a guida della FED... fino a quando il Senato non lo riconfermò (non sarebbe potuto passare nessun altro).

La prima cosa che fece una volta riconfermato fu rialzare i tassi a marzo 2022. Voleva farlo già a Jackson Hole l'anno precedente ma non poteva, dato che vennero votati il Build Back Better e l'Infrastructure Bill i quali avevano lo scopo di incatenare le mani della FED con $8.000 miliardi in nuova spesa da monetizzare; col favore del SOFR, entrato ufficialmente in vigore il primo gennaio 2022, il suo compito fu semplificato. Nell'esatto momento in cui Powell ha spinto sull'acceleratore nel drenaggio del mercato degli eurodollari, tutti i profeti di sventura sono stati smentiti... per loro anche solo l'arrivo all'1% avrebbe significato recessione automatica. Non avevano idea di cosa fosse stato architettato dai NY Boys per salvare i loro interessi: infatti i rialzi sono andati avanti, addirittura nel bel mezzo di una crisi bancaria quando nel 2023 sono saltate in aria 3 banche del circuito FED di San Francisco! Ulteriore conferma, questa, che la tesi finora descritta qui riguardo il LIBOR è corretta e che la FED, come pronosticato dal sottoscritto, poteva addirittura arrivare al 6% coi Fed Fund e non sarebbe stata scatenata alcuna recessione. In soli 4 mesi la FED è riuscita a drenare da M0 mondiale $2.000 miliardi!

E questo senza che il mercato dei titoli di stato americani diventasse bidless, come invece accaduto nel marzo 2020. All'epoca il SOFR era ancora in fase di test e praticamente illiquido, quindi un qualsiasi attacco nei suoi confronti sarebbe stato vittorioso. E così fu. Powell fu ricattato costretto a tornare a zero coi tassi di riferimento e inondare i mercati, interni ed esteri, di liquidità in dollari a basso costo.

CONCLUSIONE

Gli esseri umani hanno le stesse pulsioni ataviche alla fin fine: vivere al massimo col minimo sforzo quando si presenta l'opportunità. Ciò non è diverso quando si parla di fazioni e famiglie al vertice della piramide sociale. Anzi, vale ancora di più. I contribuenti sono il collaterale col quale avanzare le proprie richiesta al tavolo delle decisioni, ma potere e ricchezze nascono dalle spoglie dei pari che riescono a sottomettere. Gli inglesi, la City di Londra, s'è dimostrato l'Impero più longevo e influente nel corso della storia, usando come proxy gli Stati Uniti la cui indipendenza non è stata una realtà sino al 2022 quando è entrato in vigore il SOFR e il LIBOR, insieme all'influenza finanziaria proveniente da Londra, è stato sostituito. Infatti gli stessi USA sono stati vittime del sovvertimento dall'interno che ha caratterizzato da sempre il modus operandi degli inglesi:

1. Ottenere l'accesso alle risorse naturali come garanzia;
2. Trasformare tale garanzia in un asset 20 volte superiore attraverso la finanziarizzazione;
3. Aumentare il valore degli asset e creare una crisi economica;
4. Ottenere un salvataggio diventando troppo grandi per fallire, a livello sistemico;
5. Impoverire e indebitare quattro generazioni di cittadini per ripagare un salvataggio che è 3-5 volte superiore al valore degli asset finanziarizzati.

Un caso eclatante di come scorrono i fiumi di dollari offshore e come si perda la loro traccia (leverage) nel momento in cui passano tramite il sistema bancario ombra, è la biblioteca di Obama di recente costruzione. È così che l'eurodollaro ha funzionato per decenni ed è così che Bruxelles e City di Londra si sono sostenuti a scapito degli USA. I soldi dei contribuenti americani venivano sottoposti a leva e gonfiati tramite l'eurodollaro. I finanziamenti alle ONG erano pressoché infiniti. La “golden power” e la Guarda nazionale applicati adesso da Trump sono propedeutici alla guerra contro la cricca di Davos. È così che ad esempio Putin ha messo in riga gli oligarchi e scacciato l'influenza delle ONG. La stessa cosa ha fatto la Georgia. La stessa cosa non ha potuto farla l'Ucraina dato che la politica estera degli USA, nel 2022, era ancora appaltata a Londra e Bruxelles. L'ascendente di Washington su Tbilisi, ad esempio, era una propaggine dell'impero inglese. Ecco perché i disordini recenti nella nazione sfoggiando bandiere europee e sfilate di politici europei. Con il prosciugamento del mercato degli eurodollari e la riorganizzazione di Washington lontano dalle influenze geopolitiche estere, nonché la pulizia di quelle aree nel mondo in cui gli inglesi avevano ascendente, viene smantellata una piovra sotterranea vecchia di decenni.

White House releases names funding Antifa, protests and violence in America

We paid for our own protests with over $100 million laundered by Democrats

"We found a network of NGOs”

- George Soros, the Open Society Network
- Arabella Funding Network
- The Tides FIShing Network
-… pic.twitter.com/93FZsh9qnv

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) October 8, 2025

Inizia a bussare al proverbiale “dominio pubblico” la selva di ONG che nel corso del tempo ha funzionato da veicolo di riciclaggio di denaro nel sottobosco finanziario e finanziamento occulto di intere nazioni (principalmente UE e UK). Smantellare questa piovra tentacolare, che aveva come nutrimento il mercato degli eurodollari controllato a Londra e come cinghia di trasmissione il settore bancario ombra americano abilitato da traditori nel Congresso che hanno approvato leggi criminali come la Dodd-Frank, sarà arduo ma il processo sta andando avanti piuttosto bene. Per chi ha letto il mio libro, Il Grande Default, tutto questo non è niente di nuovo.

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

Thanks, John Frahm.

The Federalist

 

The post Importing Argentinian Beef Will Destroy American Ranchers appeared first on LewRockwell.

The air is crisp, the temperature cool, and coffee warm. Around us are Paleozoic ridges, adorned with discolored leaves disembarking their boughs as they slowly drift to terrestrial tombs.

Atop our peaceful plateau we pause and reflect. While dew glistens and dawn breaks, we review the recipe for the stew that bubbles in the cauldron below.

Pitchforks and Torches

Last month, we recounted the military and monetary misadventures that marred the first decade of this century. But what may be a more consequential event occurred as the second one approached.

Just before the financial crisis, the initial iPhone was unveiled… enabling unprecedented transmission and tracking of public messaging and private correspondence.

Like many “advances”, smartphones are a mixed blessing. They offer unrivaled flexibility on an electronic leash, and unparalleled convenience under an omnipresent eye.

Few devices save and waste as much time. None so easily enable us to interact with anyone while ignoring those sitting beside us.

No invention has connected so many globally while isolating them locally. It captures events for all time, at the expense of appreciating them as they occur.

Information has never been so accessible, nor more easy to manipulate. The smartphone transformed and catapulted social media, which was instrumental making Barack Obama president.

In most ways that matter (and many that were worse), the Obama Administration was an extension of the one it followed.

The corporate grift, foreign bombings, domestic surveillance, and illegal torture continued. The president created “kill lists” that included American citizens, and unilaterally ordered the elimination of names.

The administration of “hope and change” was also instrumental reigniting racial antagonism and ratcheting up the Culture War.

As connected corporations benefited from bailouts, “Cap and Trade” schemes, the Obamacare boondoggle, and infinitesimal interest rates that enriched the wealthy while pulverizing savers, Americans Left and Right started recognizing who was ripping them off.

As “Occupy Wall Street” grabbed torches, the “Tea Party” picked up pitchforks. Each cast aspersions at the Fed, politicians, and crony corporations. To those in power, this wouldn’t do.

Division has always been a tactic of control, which people in power maintain by convincing the pitchfork people that their enemies are those carrying torches. Better the sheep shear each other while bleating for the wolves to protect the flock.

It’s fine for the rubes to bicker about abortion, homosexuality, racial grievances, women’s rights, or transgender bathrooms. In fact, it’s preferable that they do. But it’s unacceptable for the peons to make waves about their pockets being picked.

Frayed Fabric

It’s no coincidence “social justice warriors” and “wokeness” zealots arose as bailouts, ZIRP, and legal larceny ran riot. “Black Lives Matter” and other purveyors of mayhem weren’t grassroots uprisings or organic accidents.

Suddenly, big corporations and giant financial institutions adopted the “diversity” dogma. “Equity” and “inclusion” became part of the C-Suite catechism.

“Pride” sponsorships proliferated, sex became “fluid”, and homosexual “marriage” went from an obvious absurdity to something only a bigot could oppose. “Toleration” was no longer enough. Only active “allies” were welcome in “respectable” society.

Does anyone honestly believe Bank of America, Lockheed Martin, or the CIA (this recruiting ad was classic) could care less about reducing racial injustice or protecting bizarre sexual preferences? Or was their newfound “awareness” a pacifying diversion while the rails under the gravy train stayed greased?

The questions answer themselves.

After decades of fading social tension as people increasingly got along, angry Americans were urged to distrust or despise each other. Whites were presumed to be “racist” because of their ancestry. Men were vilified as “toxic” because of their sex. Opposing political opinions weren’t merely to be defeated. They had to be vanquished.

Historian Brion McClanahan observed that our recent animosity is the 1850s phase of our ongoing upheaval. But in many ways, division is worse now than in the run-up to Lincoln’s war.

Antebellum angst roiled a common culture. At the time, almost every American descended from western Europe. More than 90% were Christian. Fewer than 10% were abolitionists, and a fifth of that number owned slaves.

Intense as arguments were, the range was relatively narrow. They mostly touched on constitutional topics. Today, the Constitution is among the few things we don’t debate… because nobody cares about it.

The social fabric seems irreparably frayed. Amid distractive squabbles over lunacy almost everyone would’ve considered absurd a decade earlier, castigation of the Fed, wars, and other rip-offs largely subsided.

That was the intent.

“Danger to Democracy”

But most Westerners knew something wasn’t right. For years, standards of living declined, and societal decay increased as liberty receded.

Urban elites openly disdained most Americans. Tradition was ridiculed, Christianity was mocked, and majority populations were portrayed as bigoted oppressors with ancestors unworthy of honor.

Meanwhile, political pilfering continued. For most of the decade, the Fed funds rate stayed stapled to the floor… siphoning wealth from productive citizens to “public servants” and connected cronies.

Beneath the surface, resentment simmered. In 2016, it boiled over. That June, impudent Britons gave eurocrats the bird. Five months later, a more emphatic middle finger rose across the pond.

“Democracy” is the opiate of the administrative state, providing the plebs the illusion of power while Establishment Elites call the shots.

It works well for people in power, but only if the peasants vote the way they’re told. If they don’t, then their decision is “a danger to democracy”.

As when the people choose incorrectly in other countries, the results must be reversed. Before Donald Trump was even inaugurated, the attempted “color revolution” was well underway.

Its most obvious manifestation was the accusation of “Russia collusion” to benefit Trump’s campaign, and that the president remained a “puppet” of Putin after taking office. An impeachment followed over a phone call to the Ukraine. Being devoid of reasonable evidence, these absurdities ultimately failed. But the effort persisted.

Hiroshima and Detroit

With legacy media increasingly discredited, Big Tech consolidated control. Thru them, censorship was enabled and enforced, allowing the State to circumvent the First Amendment.

Amazon removed dissident books, YouTube deleted videos, Google gamed search, and social media erased or squelched contrarian accounts. The sitting president was booted from Twitter.

As always, it started innocuously, with presumed bigots, loudmouths, or ne’er-do-wells whose banishment wouldn’t be perceived as a threat. With obvious coordination among companies and the government, dissidents were simultaneously eliminated from several platforms.

Meanwhile, real menaces multiplied. Unlike Beirut, Baghdad, or Dresden, Americans didn’t need foreign foes to destroy their cities. They’ve done that themselves.

Looking at Hiroshima and Detroit in 1945, then glancing at each today, something in the States went terribly wrong. The roots delve deeper than the 21st century.

In the 1970s, the asylums were emptied. Deranged vagrants and drug-addled derelicts were let loose on law-abiding citizens. Sidewalks and public parks became campgrounds for crackheads.

Some argue that “public” property is open to anyone. If so, should winos, druggies, and bums be allowed to wander into local libraries and public schools? Why should taxpayers endure major cities that are veritable cesspools?

The problem could be alleviated by privatizing everything. Owners would prohibit or police anyone trying to enter their property. This would also mitigate the immigration issue.

But since that wasn’t realistic, the situation kept getting worse.

Urban Decay

I lived in San Francisco most of the ‘90s. My last visit was to officiate my brother’s wedding seven years ago. The decline was evident.

Tenderloin bums encroached on Union Square. Tents sprouted on O’Farrell Street sidewalks. As if they were in Lima thirty years earlier, my parents were warned about leaving their hotel.

Since they were married, they’d loved San Francisco and visited often. After this experience, they pledged not to go back. And they didn’t. Who could blame them?

During the next year, urban uprisings would increase. Donald Trump remained a lightning rod. Bolsonaro was elected in Brazil. Les Gilets Jaune erupted in France, and protesters swamped Hong Kong.

One again, authorities needed a way to crack down. When the new decade dawned, they found it.

This article was originally published on Premium Insights.

The post A Brief History of the 21st Century appeared first on LewRockwell.

As often happens with the most portentous and far-reaching events, the learned and the clever will be the last to know. Something undeniably huge and seismic took place in a tiny town in the Eastern Mediterranean more than two millennia ago, and scarcely anyone took notice. “A star shone forth in the heavens,” wrote St. Ignatius, bishop and martyr, recalling the event near the end of the first century, “and its light was unutterable. Its strangeness caused amazement, and all the rest of the constellations with the sun and the moon formed themselves into a chorus about the star. But the star itself outshone them all.”

It was the great secret, he said, “crying out to be told, but wrought in God’s silence,” and so it escaped “the notice of the prince of this world.” What was this secret? Only that salvation would come through a Virgin giving birth to a Son who would die upon a Cross.

Thus it all began with the coming of a Child in the first century, then ratified in the public life by the Emperor Constantine following his conversion in the early fourth century. And now, of course, no honest historian will dare deny that it was this that Providence intended to be the decisive turning point in all human history. Nothing less than a complete eruption of eternity into time, causing the very Logos of God to assume the flesh and blood of the human being Jesus.

“The hint half guessed,” says T.S. Eliot,

the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union 
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled…

It was, hands down, the single greatest game-changer in the history of the universe. In a book written back in the late 1930s called The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church, Charles Williams, friend and fellow Inkling to C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, provides a precise outline of the event and its profound and far-reaching impact. Something truly momentous, he suggests, transpired during the time between the missionary voyages of St. Paul—who, instructed by the Holy Spirit, will leave Asia behind and thus enter the soft underbelly of Europe—and the arrival of St. Augustine who, fresh from his own conversion, enters the cities of Carthage and Hippo to become their bishop.

“When St. Paul preached in Athens,” recounts Williams,

the world was thronged with crosses, rooted outside cities, bearing all of them the bodies of slowly dying men. When Augustine preached in Carthage, the world was also thronged with crosses, but now in the very center of cities, lifted in processions and above altars, decorated and bejeweled, and bearing all of them the image of the Identity of dying Man…There was offered everywhere “the clean sacrifice.” Men were no longer to die, for Man had died…

There will be no more duels to the death fought out in the Colosseum among gladiators, gaudily staged to amuse the Roman mob; or the sight of Christians being torn to shreds by ravenous beasts. Bloodlust had long been the dark underside of pagan Rome. It broods over every account of the city, like the face of the Emperor Caracalla, who once received the leading citizens of Alexandria, summoning them to a sumptuous banquet, only to have them all summarily butchered. Only Romans would allow themselves to be so brutalized by habitual displays of torture and sadism and still argue, as did Cicero, that such spectacles inspired manly disdain for suffering.

Yes, something truly tremendous, horizon-shattering even, has taken place. And the world will never be the same again. Pope St. John Paul II, standing before the Colosseum 20 centuries following the birth of Christ, spoke of it as a place “once consecrated to triumphs, entertainments, and the impious worship of the pagan gods, but now dedicated to the sufferings of the martyrs purified from impious superstitions.”

The blood that had so freely flowed, soaked for so long into a pagan soil, has since seeded an entirely new world. This was not the result or the flowering of some juridic theory but the fruit of a myriad or more acts of love, gestures of sacrifice, all anchored to a God whose Name is Love and whose life is a Blessed Company—or Family—in the very image and likeness of whom we have all been graced to grow. Christus totam novitatem attulit, semetipsum afferns, announced the martyred bishop of Lyons, Irenaeus, back in the second century. Christ brought all things new by bringing Himself.

Here is the real heart and center of Christian Culture: that Christ, who having entered fully and irrevocably into the human condition, elevating our story to become His-story, has put all the idols to flight. A humanism without Christ, a world shorn of every trace of the sacred, was never intended as a scenario permanently written into the script of history. It is God’s Word that is to be written—and on pages that will never be effaced. He who wedded Himself to our world, pitching the very tent of Heaven into our history, has come to urge us to anneal ourselves at once, and the institutions we form, into the very fire of divine love.

That said, what can only follow but a series of marching orders given to a Church who sees herself as Christ’s Bride and Body, enjoined by no less an authority than God Himself, to carry the Good News of Christ’s Gospel to the very ends of the earth, baptizing everyone in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit—knowing that God will be with us, more present even than the Church is present to herself, until the end of time, the final trumps, the consummation of the world itself.

The only question, then, that matters is this: Is the Church to give the world a Christian shape, or must she instead shape Christianity to the world? Everything turns on the answer we give to that question.

Is she truly an extension of Christ Himself, configured to God in such a way as to lead the world back to Him? And if she is not, if her ambitions have been so circumscribed as to fit the size of the straightjacket the world has designed for her, then we are in a state of despair and nothing good can ever come of our continuing to belong to a Church that has given up on herself and on God. Then she is no longer moved by love—not for God, or herself, or for the world God has given her to help redeem. A whole world awaits us, therefore, whose conquest will depend not only on our prayers but our politics as well.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post Giving the World a Christian Shape appeared first on LewRockwell.

In this video production, Michel Chossudovsky and Drago Bosnic focus on an analysis of the main differences between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China. The latter underwent a dramatic transformation over the last 40 years, shifting away from a purely socialist system toward a hybrid form typically referred to as “state capitalism”.

And yet, despite this change, China never degenerated into the practice of aggressive expansionism and/or imperialism, instead opting to develop peacefully.

Its massive infrastructure projects on a global scale serve as a testament to this and stand in stark contrast to the US/NATO’s practice of armed aggression against virtually the entire world.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post The West vs China – Economy – Society appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: Recently, the State Bank of Vietnam deactivated more than 86 million bank accounts as part of its shift toward a new national digital ID system.

Officials call it a ‘security upgrade,’ but it effectively cut off millions from their own money overnight.

In Thailand, we’ve seen a similar push to tie financial and online activity to state-issued digital IDs.

Is this part of a coordinated global push toward centralized control through digital ID systems?

Doug Casey: Without doubt.

Money is a primary manifestation of personal freedom. Money isn’t just an economic good; it’s a moral good. It represents the hours of your life you spent earning it, and all that you hope to provide for yourself and others in the future. It is, in effect, congealed or crystallized life.

Those who want to control other people—collectivists, statists, Marxists, the Woke, socialists, and the like—naturally want to limit the uses and the value of money. Enforcing the use of fiat currencies issued by central banks is the ideal way of doing that. It amounts to a giant fraud. But the average person stupidly accepts it as part of the cosmic firmament.

People have been told that in a democracy, they’re the rulers. In reality, democracy in today’s world is just mob rule dressed up in a coat and tie. It amounts to a secular religion, where the State is a god, and politicians are its priests. When it comes to financial matters, the public has become accustomed to doing what they’re told.

This is nothing new. Few remember that when Roosevelt confiscated gold in 1933, he used an Executive Order—the same vehicle that Trump uses for so many things today. You’d have thought that, almost a hundred years ago, Americans would have resisted the president’s wholesale theft. But they were already used to the Federal Reserve issuing currency, and the government collecting income tax. When ordered to turn in their gold, they acted like obedient little lambs.

The average American is even more supine and indoctrinated now than he was then. So I expect little resistance to digital currency, which will be a final nail in the coffin of economic freedom.

I’m not a religious person, but it may yet turn out that the New Testament, Revelation 13, is correct where it says: “He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

That verse is quite predictive.

International Man: In the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently said people won’t be able to work without a digital ID.

What does it tell you when access to employment becomes the leverage point for forcing digital ID adoption—and could we see the same tactic used in the US?

Doug Casey: Absolutely. Governments would prefer everybody to be an employee. They don’t like entrepreneurs because they have too independent a mentality. Entrepreneurs and independently employed people are in a much better position to avoid or evade taxes and regulations. Employees have taxes extracted from their paycheck before they even see it. Then, when they file their tax return and get a refund for overpayment, they stupidly see it as a gift from the government.

Furthermore, big government likes big corporations partly because government employees can easily move laterally into a big corporation to cash in on favors done. This doesn’t happen with small entrepreneurial corporations. Only big corporations can act effectively in a highly politicized environment, because only big corporations can afford the lawyers and accountants to interpret the regulations, and subtly bribe the politicians to have laws passed in their favor.

Having every individual use a digital ID helps to pigeonhole them, make them less independent, and easier to control. In a bureaucratic world where everything is computerized, if you don’t have a number, you don’t exist.

International Man: In the US, we’re also seeing early steps—things like digital driver’s licenses, biometric airport programs, and proposals tied to central bank digital currencies.

How close are we to a comprehensive digital ID system? How could that unfold?

Doug Casey: Everybody already uses their iPhone for everything— scanning their airline tickets, digitizing their credit cards, keeping their bank records, and so forth. People are quite used to being totally computerized.

I have a question. Is this simply a natural progression because technology can make things smoother, cheaper, and more accurate? Or is it a conspiracy of the elite to better control their subjects? It’s both. I’m not sure that we can avoid this trend, especially as computers become ever more powerful, cameras are everywhere, and everyone has their personal iPhone with them everywhere. Storage capacity is nearing almost infinite levels, and the developing quantum computer will accelerate the trend. It seems unstoppable now.

In a dystopian science fiction book, “This Perfect Day,” written in 1969, all citizens were required—for their own safety, of course—to flash their tattoos whenever they passed numerous identification kiosks. The government always knew where they were. The iPhone does that and acts as a listening device as well.

Technology has been both a friend and an enemy of the average person since Day One. The problem is that the “powers that be”—the State—always get the technology first. Gunpowder is the perfect example of this. The elite of the 14th century got it first and used it to control the plebs. But it wasn’t long before the technology filtered down, so the plebs could use gunpowder to take armored knights off their horses and destroy their castles.

Hopefully, all of these dystopian digital developments will have more silver linings than subtle chains. But things are likely to get worse before they get better. Much worse, as the Greater Depression becomes more evident, and the hoi polloi stupidly beg the State to kiss everything and make it “better.”

International Man: What’s your take on whether digital IDs will become required for financial access, travel, or even internet use?

Doug Casey: For the “good of society” and your own good, you’ll have to identify yourself. To fight crime, drugs, climate change, racism, or whatever the flavor of the day might be. But the question is, with controls becoming more onerous, how do you insulate yourself?

Probably the most important thing you can do is to grow your personal wealth. In all areas of life, strive for the equivalent of flying private as opposed to flying commercial—who wants to be herded like a bovine and inspected by the TSA?

Money can’t completely insulate you from government, but there are bright spots emerging, such as the BRIC countries, who are dumping the dollar because they can see that it’s something the US Government uses to control them. Other countries are following suit, since the dollar and the international commercial banking system are the easiest and simplest ways for the elite to control us plebs. The ongoing death of the dollar can be a good thing.

Things happening in places like El Salvador—where Bitcoin is a national currency—give me hope. I expect that other countries will arise in the future to act as replacements for what Switzerland used to be: a haven for financial freedom. Switzerland has mostly lost its old status. But with any luck, others will emerge, especially as World War III develops.

I expect that many of the current nation-states will break up into smaller ones, and many currently oppressive governments will disappear and, at least for a while, be replaced by smaller ones. When it comes to transferring money, I hate using the SWIFT system, the dollar, or the conventional banking system at all. Perhaps the hawala system that the Islamic world uses—or equivalents of it—will arise to move money privately and outside the conventional system. Gold or Bitcoin—not the dollar—will be the numeraire.

With any luck, unregulated private banks will appear that aren’t members of the Federal Reserve System and don’t rely on conventional credit or dollars. In the 19th century, when rich people traveled, if you had an account with a substantial bank, correspondents in major cities around the world would offer you a letter of credit. It was strictly between you and the bank, with no intermediary and no interference from the government.

There was no necessity for Visa or MasterCard, both of which used to be your friends but, like most things in the commercial banking system, are now just arms of the State. Hopefully, the market will come up with informal solutions, especially since most of today’s commercial banks, as well as governments, are actually bankrupt. As they fall apart, there will be a void in the market, and new things can grow up.

International Man: What can the average person do about this growing trend?

Doug Casey: One important thing is to become crypto- and Bitcoin-competent, so that you don’t have to use the corrupt and controlled conventional system and the dollar.

Also, own lots of gold and silver coins for cash—not paper gold or paper silver, but the actual coins in your possession. You should also own them abroad, such as with SWP in the Cayman Islands, the Perth Mint, or other similar outfits.

But most important of all is to make sure that you have as many skills and abilities as possible, so you can prosper no matter what happens in the world. Intellectual and moral wealth trumps physical wealth.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Global Push for a Digital ID—and Its Threat to Freedom appeared first on LewRockwell.

While the Trump administration has a duty to arrest immigrants who arrived in the country by illegal means, it is failing to enforce the law in a respectable and civilized way.

The United States is increasingly playing out scenes reminiscent of a brutal fascist regime as officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) show an absolute disregard for human rights as they hunt down illegal immigrants.

In the small California town of Campo, which sits less than a mile from the U.S.-Mexico border, witnesses described the terror they experienced as they watched masked men round up agricultural workers employed on farms – young and old alike – and force them into unmarked cars.

In most cases, the officials wear plain clothes and refuse to identify themselves, thus making it impossible to distinguish between immigration agents and imposters. And with no number to call to track down their loved ones, people have no choice but to report the disappearances as potential kidnappings.

One young man asked as his friend was shoved into an unmarked van, “What kind of police go around in masks without uniforms and identification badges?”

Citizens feel desperate as there is nothing that can be done to rein in the power of the ICE troops. Filing complaints with the Department of Homeland Security is a futile gesture because the office that once handled them has been dismantled. There is little hope of holding individual agents accountable for alleged abuses because there is simply no way to reliably learn their identities. This has led to a situation where people are afraid to venture onto the street to perform simple chores, like go grocery shopping or pick up their children from school.

Across the nation, people must accept the grim reality that there are virtually no limits on what federal agents can do to achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of mass deportations. The town of Campo has proven to be a testing ground for much larger raids and even more violent arrests in places like Portland, Oregon and Chicago, Illinois and elsewhere.

Last month, the Supreme Court cleared the way to permit racial profiling by a local ICE facility in Los Angeles. Earlier this month, a raid on a Chicago tenement building, in which young children were reportedly pulled from their homes at night without clothes, sparked public outrage.

Meanwhile, Trump has warned that he may invoke the centuries-old Insurrection Act that empowers presidents to deploy troops on U.S. soil.

“Don’t forget I can use the Insurrection Act,” he told Fox News. “Fifty percent of the presidents…have used that. And that’s unquestioned power.”

In the view of Trump’s opponents, ICE is worse than having members of the U.S. military patrolling urban areas. It has become an unaccountable secret police force, which is making the United States resemble a third world country.

One retired high-ranking official with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it was a “sad day in America” as he provided his personal views on the situation. Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the official described the new realities ever since Trump became president: “I’ve seen people outside of their immigration court hearings dragged off to prison where they can’t contact relatives or speak to a lawyer. Groups of masked men nabbing people off the street in broad daylight and sending them to some country – like Ecuador – where there exists torture and severe human rights abuses. This is what America has become in the year 2025.”

Meanwhile, ICE is enjoying a bonanza in financial resources. In addition to its annual operating budget of $10 billion a year, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill included an added $7.5 billion a year for the next four years for recruiting alone. As part of its hiring efforts, the agency has reduced age, training and education standards and has offered recruits signing bonuses as high as $100,000.

“Moving forward without vetting new recruits is creating a dystopian reality on the streets of America,” the former DHS official said. “This is very frightening.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson praised ICE conduct and accused their political opponents of making “dangerous, untrue smears.”

“ICE officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism,” Jackson said in a statement. “Anyone pointing the finger at law enforcement officers instead of the criminals are simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens and fueling false narratives that lead to violence.”

Meanwhile, the White House eliminated the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, which was charged with reporting inhumane conditions at ICE detention facilities where many of immigrants are held. The office was brought back after a lawsuit and court order, though it’s meagerly staffed.

The weakening of the office comes as Trump moves to build detention sites with names that do nothing to conceal the harsh conditions inside: “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades, built by the state and operated in partnership with DHS, or the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska.

On April 1, ICE storm troopers showed up at a birthday party in Hays County, Texas, not far from Austin, where they apprehended 47 people, including nine children. The agency’s only disclosure about the raid was that they were searching for members believed to be part of the Venezuelan transnational gang, Tren de Aragua.

Six months later and the government refuses to provide answers as the fate of the arrested.

“We’re not told why they took them, and we’re not told where they took them,” said a neighbor of the family. “By definition that’s kidnapping.”

The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.

While the Trump administration has a duty to arrest immigrants who arrived in the country by illegal means, it is failing to enforce the law in a respectable and civilized way. Bands of unmarked vehicles grabbing people off the streets in broad daylight sets a dangerous precedent and only encourages acts of further violence against innocent people. It makes the United States look like a banana republic with no respect for the law or human rights.

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

The post Trump’s ICE Troopers Are Making America Resemble a Third World Dictatorship appeared first on LewRockwell.