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With every Western country experiencing social collapse from a variety of unaddressed causes, such as the rapid loss of jobs to Artificial Intelligence, exhaustion of environmental and natural resources, feminization’s replacement of the male role with sentiment and destruction of the male/female relationship, the loss of integrity and moral behavior to money, and the aggression inherent in the Zionist Neoconservative doctrine of hegemony, I am going to skip writing for today’s posting another dire assessment of our multitude of unaddressed challenges. 

Instead, remembering my previous essay some time ago about English murder mysteries and the authors, I am returning for this morning’s posting to a civilized time in which all was in control.  In the 1920s and 1930s, Great Britain, despite Sir Edward Grey stupidly involving Britain in World War I, Britain was still a great power in control of the seas and international trade. The British pound was the world currency.  The American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, looked upon British power with envy.

Perhaps Wilkie Collins with his books The Moonstone and The Woman In White was the first English mystery novelist.  But it was Agatha Christie’s 66 murder mysteries, most solved not by the British police but by private detective Hercule Poirot and private citizen, Miss Marple.  With Agatha Christie you get a murder mystery, not a novel full of character development and psychological theories of crime. 

 In my view, Christie’s only rival is Dorothy Sayers.  Her sleuth, Lord Peter Whimsey, is one up on Christie’s super sleuths. Sayers only wrote a few murder mysteries before moving on to serious work. A couple are simply murder mysteries, but a love interest appears.  Lord Peter sees injustice in  the case of Harriet Vane, an Oxford University educated woman living  in sin with a disreputable character who is murdered, for which Harriet is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death by hanging. Lord Peter takes up her case, proves her innocence, secures her release and spends five years over, if memory serves, two books, until she finally accepts him to the disgust of his sister-in-law the Duchess of Denver.  

Lord Peter, the second son of the Duke of Denver, the richest aristocrat in Britain, is rich by his own ability.  Lord Peter is a favorite of the Foreign Office and is sent everywhere in the world to maintain the British position.  He is the most desirable batchelor in the realm, and he marries what is perceived as an Oxford educated slut.  Remember, this was a century ago before female sexual liberation.

I have always been puzzled by accounts of male promiscuity.  Sexual intercourse between heterosexuals requires a male and a female.  If only males are libertines, who do they have affairs with?

But to get back on track. Once Harriet Vane appears, Sayers’ murder mysteries become also the development of the relationship between Lord Peter and Harriet.  And more subject matter enters.  Whey Sayers places a murder in an advertising, or perhaps it was a publishing, corporation, she first goes to the trouble of learning how these businesses operate.  In what I think is her mystery masterpiece, The Nine Tailors, she first masters the art of bell ringing.  So, a Sayers mystery can be more rewarding that a Christie mystery as it is a richer tale, not just a murder mystery.

My delight in the books is not the murders.  Indeed, I can reread many times Christe’s mysteries, because I don’t remember the plots.  Wondering about my memory, I realized that I don’t read the books for the mysteries.  I read them in order to escape current reality into a civilize time.  

One wonders if the picture of police behavior in the mystery novels is correct.  I assume it is, because the writers are addressing audiences in their own time and cannot present them with a fantasy.  The police are very restrained not only by their own behavior but by what the suspects will accept from the police. Politeness and respect for privacy rule.  Police have to be very careful in their questioning not to be impertinent. When have you last heard that word used?  Do you know what it means?  It means not showing proper respect. The police do not merely want a suspect with which, guilty or innocent, to close the case.  The police only want the one who is guilty. Today they could not care less.  They just want cases closed. The prosecutor just wants another conviction. The judge just wants a clear docket.

It is so different from today when suspects are browbeat both by their attorney and by the prosecutor to accept a plea bargain, whether innocent or guilty, that quickly disposes of the case, gives the prosecutor another conviction, and keeps the judge’s court docket free.

The limits on the police in the British mystery novels of the 1920s and 1930s are unbelievable today.  So is the behavior of characters in the story who refuse to help the police because it would require them to diverge a confidence.  Imagine the contrast with today when no one can wait to incriminate someone else.

My conclusion is that I wish I had been born long ago and had passed on before our uncivilized time.  Sitting at night reading before bed, I wonder at the civilized world that is lost to us.

The post The World That Was appeared first on LewRockwell.

Revolutions are funny things. They start out almost imperceptible. The final straw itself may be as inconsequential as a single voice in the crowd whose words unleash a tidal wave that sweeps aside the seemingly intractable old order forever.

Even as the cracks in the Eastern Bloc began to materialize in 1989, starting in June in Hungary, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s Romania seemed impervious to the winds of change. They maintained a cult-like grip on power aided by the notorious and ubiquitous Securitate, the secret police.

On 21 December 1989 Ceausescu decided that the best way to quell a bubbling cauldron of unrest in Transylvania over the past several weeks was to appear, himself, with his wife Elena, above Bucharest’s Palace Square. Workers were bussed in and given red banners to wave in support of the regime. It was to be a show of force that would solidify the existing order.

After all, no one would dare challenge Ceausescu to his face.

As he confidently approached the microphone from the balcony and began mechanically repeating the tired old slogans of communism, suddenly a voice broke through with a high pitched scream, followed by an increasing din. The discordant sounds of protest rendered Ceausescu speechless and confused.

That second, when the false edifice of his rule was punctured and the impossibility of his position exposed, communist rule died in Romania.

America’s foreign policy has been a lot like the rule of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Since President Reagan opened the door to the gang of “former” Trotskyites from New York who were hell bent on worldwide revolution while being ideologically driven by their absolute devotion to the state of Israel, US foreign policy has been dominated by an equivalent of Ceausescu’s Partidul Comunist Român.

Anyone who attempted to challenge the neocon dominance over US foreign policy was drummed out of society by the equivalent of Ceausescu’s Securitate. One by one, Pat Buchanan, Joseph Sobran, Sam Francis, the John Birch Society, Ron Paul, and any voice raised in opposition to neocon dominance over foreign policy was brutally attacked by the likes of William F. Buckley, Jr. and his minions of enforcers in the media and the think tanks, and the corridors of power and influence.

Trotsky is reputed – perhaps apocryphally – to have said that, “to oppose the state is to die a slow starvation,” and that is certainly true for any foreign policy analyst over the past 40-plus years who has spoken out against neocon dominance. No jobs, no publications, no way to be heard or even exist.

But suddenly that Berlin Wall has fallen.

Future history may record America’s “Ceausescu Moment” as November 6th, 2025.

The same mainstream/”alt” media and conservatism-industrial-complex that has refused to acknowledge Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s sharp turn against neocon, pro-Israel foreign policy have done their best to harness and re-direct the Charlie-less TPUSA back onto the foreign policy reservation. With a doubting Charlie conveniently gone, they assumed they could ascend the “Palace Square Bucharest” balcony, grab the microphone, and return America’s conservative youth to the “wisdom” of Bill Kristol, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Mark Levin, and the rest of the blood-soaked dinosaurs.

However our own “high-pitched scream” that deflated Ceausescu came on November 6th not from a Mamdani “communist,” or from an “America-hating,” Muslim, nor Hamas-devoted foreign student, nor tortured trans-genderist or even a generic leftist.

No, it came from a corn-fed, conservative, earnest, American student at Auburn University in Alabama with the slow drawl of our great country’s 250 year history. In other words, the epitome of the Red, White, and Blue that burns in the soul of every American patriot.

The young man approached the open microphone and addressed President Trump’s son Eric and his wife Laura – ambassadors of the President’s claim to be the most pro-Israel Administration in US history – with a respectful set of questions.

I’d like to ask about your father’s relationship with Israel. He’s taken over $230 million from pro-Israel groups. In the summer even though the US advised against it, Israel attacked Iran and the US still bombed on behalf of Israel…Israel has not been a good ally to the US since the 1960s when they bombed the USS Liberty.

The crowd of CONSERVATIVE young Americans erupted into wild applause.

Israel is a nation where Christians are constantly under attack… We talk about America first and defending Christians, but how can we do this if we align ourselves with a nation that does not do that itself?

At this point the applause among TPUSA’s conservative youth was deafening.

Deer-in-the-headlights Eric Trump does a Ceaucescu, repeating the slogans of the old order and hoping their magic will still quell the restive population.

You have a nation chanting ‘death to America’ every single day on the streets of Tehran. You have a nation that will develop a nuclear weapon and that will use that nuclear weapon.

These are standard Benjamin Netanyahu talking points from 30 years ago. Laura looked like Elena. Arranging her perfect hair as the crowd remained silent at Eric Trump’s well-rehearsed applause lines. Silence. They’ve heard it all before and they have done their own research and know that these are neocon lies.

Guys: Iran wanted to destroy our way of live they wanted to hurt us they wanted to inflict real pain.

Silence. They’ve done their own research.

Eric then repeats the absurd claim that his father solved eight wars (involving countries whose names he cannot pronounce) and the silence continued. The bumper sticker slogans no longer worked with Charlie Kirk’s kids just as Ceaucescu’s slogans no longer worked with a Romania sick to death with it’s subservience to a dying Communist bloc.

This is a genie that can no longer be put back into the bottle. Toothpaste out of the tube. The same social media harnessed early on by the US “regime change” operatives seeking to fulfil the neocon project has been captured by young American conservatives who are revolting against the destructive “Israel-first” party line of their boomer forebears and no underhanded sale of TikTok to pro-Israel fanatics will change the fact.

From this point on, like Ceaucescu, Trump’s people dare not address openly the number one youth movement of their ideological base. They dare not risk stop after stop being questioned by earnest young conservatives about America’s toxic and self-destructive supplication to the state of Israel. They will go back into Nicolae Ceaucescu’s bunker. Terrified of the very “America First” movement they have launched.

Student to Eric and Lara Trump at TPUSA event in Auburn: “I’d like to ask about your father’s relationship with Israel. He’s taken over $230m from pro-Israel groups… Israel hasn’t been a great ally to the US…they bombed the USS Liberty.”

*Crowd erupts in rapturous applause* pic.twitter.com/kDxXuO1Jbm

— Chris Menahan (@infolibnews) November 6, 2025

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post America’s ‘Ceausescu Moment’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

My younger brother, who lives on Maui, once told me a story about a man from the mainland who had made an astronomical sum of money in the virtual, internet economy. His enormous wealth apparently went to his head, because after becoming a modestly competent surfer, he decided that he wanted to go tow surfing on JAWS—one of the biggest waves on earth.

Tow surfing involves using a surfboard with foot straps and being pulled onto the swell by a wave runner equipped with a waterski tow rope. While top expert surfers have developed the skill and conditioning to paddle onto Jaws, this is extremely difficult due to the enormous swell size and speed.

The “virtual economy” wizard finally persuaded a good wave runner driver to tow him onto a swell at Jaws. The result was catastrophic. Instead of surfing “down the line” of the breaking wave, he ran from it and onto the relatively flat, impact zone in front of the wave. Bad move.

Dead in the water, he then received the full power of the wave’s energy unloading on him, which inflicted catastrophic injuries, including tearing his pectoral muscles. His automatically inflating life vest, plus the great skill of the wave runner driver, saved him from drowning, but his body was beaten to hell.

Greek mythology relates multiple heroes making trips to the Underworld to rescue fathers and friends. In the Christian tradition there is the story of Jesus making a descent to hell to rescue righteous souls. Addicts often speak about “hitting rock bottom” before developing the true resolve to kick their addictions.

Must humans experience great pain to gain a full understanding of their limits and shortcomings?

I recently spent a few hours reviewing the transcripts of President Lyndon Johnson talking with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara about the situation in Vietnam. To a careful reader, it quickly becomes apparent that neither man has the foggiest notion about the country, or what exactly the U.S. military was going to achieve by killing its people.

The following recording of one of their conversations gives a good sense of how totally lost they were.

McNamara is an eggheaded technocrat who isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, and Johnson is a cunning Texas redneck who is accustomed to things going his way. I find it astonishing that these fools had at their disposal the power to send the U.S. military to Vietnam to kill people.

To his credit, McNamara was apparently chastened by the failure of Vietnam. He later became a vocal critic of the war and expressed regret in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. He spent the rest of his life writing and speaking on nuclear disarmament, and was the protagonist of the documentary The Fog of War.

George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, John Bolton and other “chickenhawks” were able to avoid military service in Vietnam and therefore the “harrowing of hell” that McNamara experienced, They also didn’t heed the wisdom that McNamara acquired and tried to share with them.

The Washington foreign policy establishment remains infested with the same breed of arrogant nitwits. A bit of time on the front line of combat would do wonders for their hubristic souls.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post The Harrowing of Hell appeared first on LewRockwell.

He wasn’t just aiming to score soft power points but to hint at creative ways in which recent US-endorsed Levantine solutions could be applied to Ukraine in the interests of consistency.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave an informative interview to Kommersant in mid-October. Russian international media mostly focused on his remarks about ties with the US, concerns about its potential transfer of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, and the special operation, but he also importantly exposed the US’ double standards towards resolving the Levantine and Ukrainian Conflicts. Here’s exactly what he said, which will then be analyzed in terms of its practical relevance:

“[The Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity] emphasizes that the protection of human rights, ensuring security, respect for the dignity of both Israelis and Palestinians, as well as tolerance and equal opportunities for all regions, are the keys to the sustainability of the agreement (this declaration). The declaration calls for the eradication of extremism and radicalism in all forms. Golden words. But for some reason, this applies to Palestinians and Israelis, but not to Russians in Ukraine.

More recently, regarding another part of the Middle East, Syria, US Special Representative for Syria (and also US Ambassador to Turkey) Thomas Barrack said that the Syrian Arab Republic needs a system close to a federation that would preserve the culture and language of all ethnic and religious groups in society. This is precisely what the Minsk agreements were about. For some reason, the West is ready to apply these principles everywhere, but in Ukraine, it is ‘not ready.’”

Beginning with the first part, Russia demands Ukraine’s denazification, which requires “the eradication of extremism and radicalism” in all forms there through hybrid kinetic-legal means. The kinetic ones are being advanced through attacks against fascist-inspired Ukrainian militiamen like the Azov Brigade while the legal ones are envisaged as part of the lasting political solution that Putin wants. A similarly symbolic multilateral call as Trump’s declaration could be the first step to that end amidst ongoing negotiations.

As for the second part, Russia won’t cede to Ukraine the disputed regions under its control after their people voted to join Russia in September 2022, but it could demand sub-federative cultural-linguistic rights for the Russians who remain in the Ukrainian-controlled parts if the frontline freezes. To be clear, Russia officially insists that it’ll liberate the entirety of the disputed regions, but the aforesaid Minsk- and Syrian-inspired proposal could facilitate a grand compromise if all sides have the political will.

The relevance of exposing the US’ double standards towards resolving the Levantine and Ukrainian Conflicts therefore isn’t just to score soft power points, but to hint at creative ways in which the aforesaid US-endorsed Levantine solutions could be applied to Ukraine in the interests of consistency. This assumes that the US is interested in policy consistency, but whether right or wrong, it doesn’t detract from Lavrov’s motives in bringing up the policy precedents that the US itself just established.

Realistically speaking, Trump doesn’t seem interested over half a year since the start of his talks with Putin in suddenly acceding to Russia’s proposals on Ukraine since he would have already pressured Zelensky if he was, not escalated his rhetoric and contemplated a military escalation too. Nevertheless, Russia’s continued on-the-ground gains and the predictable failure of Ukraine’s next potential US-backed offensive might get him to reconsider, in which case Lavrov’s implied proposals would become relevant.

This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

The post Lavrov Exposed the US’ Double Standards Towards Resolving the Levantine & Ukrainian Conflicts appeared first on LewRockwell.

On November 5th, the strategic analyst Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis headlined “America’s Next Civil War: Update #4 (the Blue Wave)” and he documented that when Trump’s psychopathic instruction to Texas to redistrict so as to get more Republicans in Congress broke the American tradition of independent redistricting commissions that were structured to include an even number of members from each of the two largest political parties, it set U.S. politics spiraling out of control, so that when Trump was then asked how many more congressional seats he wanted, he said (at 28:00 in Davis’s video) “5, I think we’ll get 5,” and then when the reporter asked “what if California, New York and other [Democratic] states —“ and he answered (assuming that Democrats are bad and Republicans are good), “Yeah, that’s what they do,” but “there could be other states [on our side], I think that we will get another 3 or 4 or 5 in addition. Texas would be the biggest one.” Then, Davis presented California’s Governor Gavin Newsom saying that because of Republicans now doing redistricting in their states without the fairness-rules that have been traditional, California’s redistricting will likewise be done without rules — just to win regardess of how it will be done, like Trump. It becomes a contest in how psychopathic one can go. Davis’ analysis is that because of the sheer boldness of Trump’s psychopathy, “this kind of behavior is just driving people on either side farther apart.” The result is that more and more Americans think that “there’s no point in following the rule of law,” or custom and tradition — following the established rules. Winning is all that counts now; losers will just be forced to comply with winners. The ‘social contract’ that held society together is gone when such a bold psychopath rules and drives things toward a contest in psychopathy. The state thus becomes privatized, no longer controlled by laws but instead by ‘leaders’ — individual persons — rulers who become rulers by being psychopaths and punishing the losers as much as they want to, since there really are no laws that are then being objectively written and enforced — there is increasingly force used, instead of mutual agreement.

Davis argues convincingly that if Trump keeps failing to such an extent that Democrats defeat him electorily, “it’s only a matter of time before a spark sets something off” even worse than happened on 6 January 2020, when Biden won the White House.

This is coming from Daniel Davis, a retired Lt. Colonel who used to be a Republican but now detests BOTH Parties.

On 6 November 2018, Sarah Pruitt at history dot com headlined “The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart: The Constitution’s framers viewed political parties as a necessary evil.” The Founders condemned political Parties because in all existing governmental systems including that of America’s enemy, Britain, Parties were associated with corruption and represented different factions of the aristocracy, not the public — not any sort of democracy. This was all that they knew; and, so, they thought that it is a necessary evil, but it actually isn’t necessary; it is instead necessary only in governmental systems that are structured as contests between clubs (political clubs in this case). In fact, in the United States, political Parties are precisely that: they (both the DNC and the RNC) are private members-only clubs — NOT any part of the public. They are technically IRS Section 527 nonprofit corporations that are composed of their Committee Members who are appointed by their other Committee Members and are consequently a type of self-sustaining private club. Party politics is private, not (as they pretend to be) public, and not technically a part of the government. Not until the 2017 court case Wilding v. DNC Services Corp., dba Democratic National Committee and Deborah Wassrman Schultz, in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, was it decided that nothing that a political Party does can be legally challenged by any voters — the people who vote have no legal right to have their votes counted even by ‘their own’ Party; they don’t own it — only its Members do; and ONLY the MEMBERS of the club (in that instance, the DNC or Democratic National Committee) have the power to select that Party’s nominees for public offices — caucuses and political primary elections are merely for show, to pretend to be ‘democratic’ or “republican’. And, in fact, the members of the club represent only that club’s megadonors, who constitute the vast majority of the club’s fundraising. Political Parties are only money-raising organizations and represent only the donors — no voters, none at all — this is what the judge in that landmark case ruled; and a Party may even blatantly violate its own rules, when and if they wish to do so. That judge’s ruling was then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which finally ruled on 28 October 2019 that the lower Court had ruled correctly. This is how American Party politics actually functions, nd now we know it for a certainty. So, America’s Founders were right that Parties are associated with corruption, but were wrong that they are necessary in politics. They aren’t. Parties aren’t necessary except in election-based political systems, which inevitably represent only the richest; by contrast, a purely lottery-based political system is totally differant, and is far likelier to produce a Government that actually has the same policy-priorities that the nation’s public do — far likelier to actually represent the public. That’s the answer, but nobody seems interested in it. Maybe if things get even worse as Davis warns could very likely happen, the situation will get sufficiently desperate for people to start looking for an alternative. This one would require only one Amendment to the U.S. Constitutiion. It could be the most important Constitutional Amendment in history.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post America’s Founders Warned Against Political Parties. They Were Right. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Escape from New York is the name of a 1981 film. Now it’s also, many fear, going to be a reality with Mayor-elect Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s impending socialist makeover of NYC. Why, commentator Bill O’Reilly has predicted that his ascendancy will spark an exodus of 765,000-one million Big Apple residents. This, of course, would involve the loss of significant capital.

Yet this is all predicated on the idea that Mamdani’s promises reflect principles more than positions of convenience. And while he is a radical, he’s also a power seeker who surely aspires to higher office. So questions arise:

Will Mamdani go the full socialist monty and risk crashing NYC?

Or will he, being the consummate politician he was on the campaign trail, practice some Machiavellian moderation?

Should he pursue the latter route, he not only will survive politically, but will certainly have a good excuse. “Tyrant Trump and the establishment are standing in the way of progress!” Mamdani will be able to say. “They’re stymieing the people’s agenda!”

(“So I need even more power,” would be the message — “‘governor’ comes to mind.”)

Won’t Lives on Can’t Street?

Mamdani can’t actually build a wall around NYC to keep people in, as was done in the “escape” movie. (It was only around Manhattan in the film.) And unlike Cold War communists, who also kept people captive via a wall, he won’t enjoy absolute power. He’s going to have to play well with others to get things done.

So while USA Today laments that “[n]ow we get to see full-blown socialism in action,” well, maybe, maybe not. Just consider five obstacles confronting Mamdani, according to New York insiders. Politico lists them in this order:

1. “Donald Trump and the Federal Government.”
2. “Legislative Wrangling in Albany.”
3. “Campaign Fatigue” — Democratic NYC mayors usually have leisurely general election campaigns. But Mamdani had to work hard to get elected and now will have to hit the ground running. (Personally, I’m not so sure this matters much.)
4. “Democratic Rifts.”
5. “Plus — No Big Deal — the Job.”

As to the last point, Emperor Tiberius once said that governing Rome was like “holding a wolf by the ears.” If true, well, then managing the Big Apple may at least be like holding a coyote by the ears. Politico elaborates:

The NYC mayor immediately becomes a manager of 300,000 cops, teachers, social workers and so many more. Mamdani will be faced with constant, complex choices — not to mention weathering the controversies and challenges that no one can anticipate, from police shootings to hurricanes to acts of mayhem that fill tabloids.

Promises, Promises — and Realities

Then there’s that legislative wrangling. Mamdani outlined 10 to 12 policy proposals while campaigning, yet he’ll lack the power to effectuate about half of them. As to specificity, here’s a list (according to a Grok AI analysis):

• Proposal — “increase corporate tax rate from 8.85 percent to 11.5 percent.” Reality — set by state law; mayor proposes but can’t enact alone.
• Proposal — “two percent flat tax on millionaires.” Reality — state jurisdiction.
• Proposal — “free buses citywide.” Reality — Metropolitan Transportation Authority (a state entity) controls fares; requires state funding/approval.
• Proposal — “end mayoral control of schools.” Reality — mayoral control is state-granted (expires 2026); changes need legislative renewal.
• Proposal — “free CUNY (City University of NY) tuition for all.” Reality — CUNY funding is state-controlled; city covers approximately 30 percent, but full free tuition requires state match.
• Proposal — “creation of Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA). Reality — involves state capital/financing; mayor can advocate but not establish alone.

In other words, to get any or all of these things done, Mamdani will have to go through the state Legislature and Governor Kathy Hochul. He’ll have to deal with an entrenched political establishment.

Human Wrecking Ball?

This said, Mamdani can still do much damage. First, it appears that some NYC residents will leave just over the threat he poses. Wealthy rapper 50 Cent has reportedly already done so.

Second, Mamdani could spike crime by hamstringing the police (he has promised in the past to defund them). He has vowed to intensify NYC’s “sanctuary” (read: illegal-alien enabling) status. And his rent-freeze plans could actually cause apartments to be taken off the market and thus ultimately increase housing costs. As U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) put it, encapsulating the danger:

He’s called to DEFUND police, ABOLISH prisons, LEGALIZE prostitution, and even attacked Jewish people and American law enforcement in the same breath.

This isn’t just New York’s problem — it’s spreading to cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, and even Congress.

The radical Marxist wing is taking over the Democrat Party — and EVERY American should be alarmed.

The question is again, though: Will Mamdani be socialist or sly? Or will he be both to an extent?

Will He or Won’t He?

For sure, Mamdani is a radical man. He has expressed belief in “seizing the means of production,” a communist tenet. He has paraphrased Karl Marx, saying, “Each according to their need, each according to their ability.” He has also been seen giving the middle finger to a Christopher Columbus statue. And he has threatened to arrest ICE agents and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should they enter NYC’s jurisdiction.

Then there’s the group backing Mamdani and of which he’s a member, the Democratic Socialists of America. It will put pressure on him to deliver on his radical promises. It’s also true that during his victory speech, the mayor-elect didn’t exactly extend an olive branch to foes.

Then again, there’s that power lust. Mamdani is not a dumb man. As mentioned earlier, too, he certainly should realize that crashing NYC would crash his political fortunes.

And he’d have built-in excuses for not implementing his entire agenda. President Donald Trump has, after all, threatened to cut off funding to NYC in response to a Mamdani victory. And then there is that state Democratic machine to contend with. So we can hear it now: “The oligarchs are standing in the way of the revolution!”

For this reason, there’s an argument to be made that perhaps Trump shouldn’t take action against NYC. Make sure the responsibility is all on Mamdani, is the idea.

So what will the socialist mayor do? He is intelligent enough to understand his policies’ risks. Yet as Professor Thomas Sowell has noted, “It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you don’t think.”

If Mamdani’s radicalism-shaped emotional foundation and lack of virtue hold sway, he may crash as he ascended: meteorically. And while this would involve short-term pain, it’s likely the best outcome for NYC and America.

This article was originally published on The New American.

The post In Power, Will Mamdani Be Socialist — or Sly? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Back in 2023, all orthodox Catholics of good will heard the news of His Excellency, Bishop Paprocki’s condemnation of heresy in one of the most prominent American journals, First Things. This was ostensibly a condemnation of Cardinal McElroy’s brazen challenge to Catholic moral theology in two pieces (here and here) at America—a connection underlined by Bishop Paprocki’s quoting verbatim from the cardinal’s first article. Nevertheless, His Excellency did say shortly thereafter (on Raymond Arroyo) that he did not want to name names, but had European cardinals also in mind.

Faithful Catholics compare today’s bishops with the saintly bishops of old and they find the former woefully lacking in manly courage. They do not seem to act like men of God should – with zeal, filled with faith and charity.

I am willing to hazard that there are many orthodox bishops out there. But it seems to me that most of those orthodox bishops are cowardly. They think of themselves as “vicars of the Roman Pontiff” (a concept that Vatican II condemned in Lumen Gentium 27), and they are afraid to excommunicate and issue the anathema, as did the saintly bishops of old.

Thanks be to God, this crisis has had one silver lining – it is separating the men from the boys in the episcopate. We thank God for Bishop Paprocki, as well as for Archbishop Cordileone who excommunicated the aiders and abetters of child murder and who was supported by over sixteen other bishops, and for Bishop Strickland of Tyler, Texas, who has been continually willing to act like a man of God – with courage and conviction – despite being unceremoniously sacked by Pope Francis.

Less Words, More Action

But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the Vatican II crisis it’s this: more talking, statements, and documents do almost nothing to stop the heretic wolves from scattering the flock.

Therefore, I respectfully propose to all bishops the same proposal that the Trad movement has been asking for since 1965: the charitable anathema.

At OnePeterFive we aim to resource and promote the work of our Trad godfathers in the Faith. It was Cardinal Ottaviani who asked all bishops to condemn heresy in 1966, heartily cheered by Archbishop Lefebvre. When Dietrich von Hildebrand met with Paul VI in the summer of 1965 – even before the Council ended – he begged Paul VI for the same thing – the charitable anathema. But the Pontiff thought it “was a bit harsh” and decided against it.[1]

The Case of Notre Dame

One of the worst cases of this fear of taking appropriate action concerned the bishop of South Bend, Indiana, after Notre Dame went into revolt against the Magisterium in the 1960s. The bishop wanted to place the whole university under interdict, but hesitated, waiting for Rome to back him up.

Rome never did, and thousands of American Catholics (and worldwide) were led into heresy by joining in the revolt against Humanae Vitae (and other dogmas of the Faith), led by the heretic wolves at Notre Dame and other so-called “Catholic” institutions.

Indeed, at the judgment day, the bishops of these generations will be judged by Christ, the Good Shepherd, about whether they laid down their life for their sheep, or if they let the heretic wolves destroy the faith of little children, as we have seen happen. For these heretic wolves have torn out altars, held Catholic universities hostage to heresy, and have done nothing less than scourged Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament by their liturgical abuse.

As our contributing editor, Dr. Michael Sirilla shows, St. Thomas himself strongly defended the bishop’s responsibility of excommunicating heretics.[2] This was understood as obligation of charity for the flock.

The sheep cry out, How long, O Lord, wilt thou forget me forever? and the Prophet cries out, Woe to you, Shepherds!

The Only Way Forward: the Charitable Anathema

But let me return to my point: more talking and documents will do nothing. Only action – the action of a man of God – will have any effect.

And that action, we assert – with the whole history of the Church – is the charitable anathema.

As Hildebrand said acutely, pointing to the root of the problem decades ago:

The valuing of unity over truth plays a central role in the crisis of the Church; for the Church of Christ—the Holy, Roman, Catholic, Apostolic Church—is based on this fundamental principle: the absolute primacy of divine truth, which is the very primacy of God.[3]

This proven solution has always been the answer in times of heretical depravity. Critics of this solution ultimately value unity above truth. They are scared of schism more than they are of error and falsehood. Hildebrand refutes the critics of the anathema with these words, proclaiming that the anathema is itself an act of charity:

… The anathema excludes the one who professes heresies from the communion of the Church, if he does not retract his errors. But for precisely this reason, it is an act of the greatest charity toward all the faithful, comparable to preventing a dangerous disease from infecting innumerable people. By isolating the bearer of infection, we protect the bodily health of others; by the anathema, we protect their spiritual health[.] …

And more: a rupture of communion with the heretic in no way implies that our obligation of charity toward him ceases. No, the Church prays also for heretics [as we see in the traditional orations of Good Friday]; the true Catholic who knows a heretic personally prays ardently for him and would never cease to impart all kinds of help to him. But he should not have any communion with him. Thus St. John, the great apostle of charity, said: “If any man say, I love God, and hateth his brother; he is a liar” (I Jn. 4:20). But he also said: “If any man come to you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into the house[.]” (2 Jn. 1:10).[4]

Therefore we exhort every cleric, theologian, and diocesan official of any kind: examine yourself, and consider speaking to your bishop about this solution. The words that have been spoken by Bishop Paprocki are obviously good, but we ask for less talking and more action.

Read the Whole Article

The post Bishops Against Bishops: the Proven Solution appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s a stark disconnect between the Trump Administration’s description of the economy and the economy that we all live in. There are some things that can’t be faked. We pay our bills. We see our bank accounts, and credit card accounts. We don’t need the president, or the media, to tell us that “inflation is dead.” Inflation is not dead! Yesterday, it was reported that monthly layoffs from October were the highest total in 22 years! President Trump was elected to deliver a smaller government with less spending and debt, and an end to the wars. He has done the opposite on all fronts, and the battered economy is reflecting his decisions.

The post Highest Monthly Layoffs In 22 Years — America’s New Golden Age? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dick Cheney is dead. But what does it mean? The lying corporate dinosaur media will tell you that America has just lost a dear, selfless, civic-minded patriot. But as we shall see, Dick Cheney has left behind him a very dark legacy of cover ups, coups, false flags, torture and death.

SHOW NOTES AND COMMENTS: https://corbettreport.com/the-dark-le…

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR SHOW NOTES WITH LINKS TO ALL OF THE ARTICLES, VIDEOS AND WEBSITES MENTIONED? HOW ABOUT COMMENTS? THEY’RE AT THE CORBETT REPORT WEBSITE! JUST FOLLOW THE “SHOW NOTES AND COMMENTS” LINK ABOVE TO GO THERE DIRECTLY.

DEEP State and Continuity of Government (COG)

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld

Conspiracy Theory

The post The Dark Legacy of Dick Cheney appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/agenti-politici-inglesi-con-denaro)

Qualche anno fa mi imbattevo ripetutamente in “esperti di disinformazione” spuntati come funghi su un tronco marcio dopo una notte di pioggia battente. Non avevo idea di chi fosse Imran Ahmed, né del suo Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), ma la Casa Bianca di Biden lo ha tirato fuori dall'oscurità per consacrarlo esperto di vaccini COVID e per censurare i propri critici.

La portavoce della Casa Bianca, Jen Psaki, citò un rapporto del CCDH, durante una conferenza stampa del luglio 2021, accusando Facebook di minare le politiche federali di Biden sui vaccini. “Ci sono circa 12 persone che producono il 65% della disinformazione anti-vaccino sui social”, affermò la Psaki, avvertendo i social di chiudere questi account di “disinformazione”. Una delle persone prese di mira era una minaccia diretta al presidente Biden: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., il quale stava pianificando di candidarsi per il Partito Democratico alle successive elezioni presidenziali.

“Stanno uccidendo persone”, disse Biden a un giornalista, accusando Facebook di omicidio per aver fornito una piattaforma a persone come Kennedy.

Incuriosito, iniziai a indagare sul Center for Countering Digital Hate. In un'inchiesta di 3.300 parole per Tablet, denunciai il CCDH, non come fonte attendibile sui vaccini, ma come un'operazione politica fraudolenta creata da due membri dello staff del Partito Laburista britannico: Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed. Questi due personaggi hanno creato il CCDH e diverse altre organizzazioni non profit che riciclano denaro sporco, insediando, tra le altre azioni, Keir Starmer a capo del Partito Laburista. Starmer è ora Primo Ministro d'Inghilterra e Morgan McSweeney è il suo capo di gabinetto. Dopo il successo nel Regno Unito, il CCDH ha iniziato a operare a Washington e a coordinarsi con i Democratici per attaccare i critici dell'amministrazione Biden.

Poco prima delle elezioni statunitensi ho pubblicato dei documenti interni fornitimi da un informatore che lavorava al CCDH, i quali dimostravano che l'obiettivo del gruppo era “uccidere Twitter di Musk”. Scritto in collaborazione con Matt Taibbi, l'articolo ha spopolato su Internet, con articoli successivi apparsi su The Spectator, Guardian, The Express Tribune, The Telegraph, UnHerd e il Washington Post.

Anche il giornalista investigativo londinese, Paul Holden, ha iniziato a indagare sul Center for Countering Digital Hate a partire dal 2021, quando è entrato in possesso di una serie di documenti interni del Partito Laburista e che stavano circolando sui media britannici. Esaminando attentamente le email, si è imbattuto nei nomi di Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed e ha iniziato a ricostruire la loro campagna segreta per estromettere il leader di sinistra del partito, Jeremy Corbyn, e insediare Keir Starmer come suo sostituto.

Dopo aver approfondito questi documenti con tre anni di reportage, Holden ha pubblicato le sue scoperte in un nuovo libro intitolato, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy. La notizia del libro di Holden è trapelata alla stampa britannica, scatenando la richiesta di indagare Morgan McSweeney per attività criminali nell'ambito dello scandalo ora noto come “McSweeneygate”. Per promuovere la sua campagna per Starmer, McSweeney ha mentito alla Commissione Elettorale Britannica sulle donazioni che hanno finanziato il suo lavoro con Ahmed. McSweeney e Ahmed hanno anche assunto investigatori privati ​​per indagare sul passato di Holden e bloccare i suoi reportage.

Holden proviene dal Sudafrica, dove tre dei suoi sei libri sono stati bestseller investigativi e l'ultimo è stato inserito nell'elenco del Sunday Times Literary Prize per la saggistica. Dal 2019 Holden ha guidato il lavoro di Shadow World Investigation sulla corruzione statale, indagando su come la famiglia Gupta abbia saccheggiato il Sudafrica con l'aiuto di multinazionali negli Stati Uniti, in Germania, Svizzera, Regno Unito e Cina.

“È una storia piuttosto shakespeariana”, mi ha detto Holden, seduto su un divano di pelle nel suo soggiorno a nord di Londra. La storia inizia nel 2017, con Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed che complottano per prendere il controllo del governo britannico. McSweeney è ora al centro di quel governo e Ahmed ha reso il CCDH un attore di spicco negli Stati Uniti. Il loro obiettivo generale: censurare chiunque non condivida le loro convinzioni.

“Non sono a favore di un'organizzazione che cerca di convincere il governo a censurare il dibattito pubblico”, ha aggiunto Holden.

Questa intervista è stata condensata e modificata per maggiore chiarezza.

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THACKER: Ho iniziato a studiare il Center for Countering Digital Hate quando venne pubblicato il rapporto “Disinformation Dozen” che la Casa Bianca di Biden avrebbe amplificato per attaccare chiunque criticasse l'obbligo di vaccinazione. Ho indagato sul loro background e ho scoperto che sono un gruppo britannico guidato da un tizio di nome Imran Ahmed, membro dello staff del Partito Laburista al Parlamento del Regno Unito.

Ho iniziato a pensare: “Come fa un tizio di Londra ad arrivare a Washington e a spuntare fuori alla Casa Bianca? È innaturale”. Invece lei come ha iniziato a indagare? Chi sono Imran Ahmed e Morgan McSweeney?

HOLDEN: Mi trovavo più o meno nella sua stessa situazione. Non avevo mai sentito parlare di queste persone prima, o perlomeno non fino al 2021. Poi ho avuto accesso a questa fenomenale fuga di documenti dal Partito Laburista. Inizialmente non c'era molto, ma poi mi sono imbattuto in queste email su Morgan McSweeney e questa organizzazione chiamata Labour Together.

All'epoca pensavo che fosse un think tank noioso, perché era così che si presentavano in pubblico.

THACKER: Giusto per far sapere ai lettori, il Partito Laburista è come la sinistra in politica, un po' come i Democratici negli Stati Uniti. Dall'altra parte ci sono i Conservatori, o “Tories”, che sarebbero l'equivalente dei Repubblicani.

HOLDEN: Sì, quindi il partito laburista è il più progressista, ma la cosa importante è che Morgan McSweeney e Iman Ahmed rappresentano la componente più centrista.

THACKER: Sarebbe l'ala democratica di Hillary Clinton e Joe Biden.

HOLDEN: Sì. In realtà fanno parte di un establishment centrista e sono in guerra costante e incessante con le correnti più di sinistra del Partito Laburista.

Imran Ahmed ha una storia un po' strana. Viene da Manchester. Ha lavorato in banca per un po' e poi, stando alle sue biografie personali, l'11 settembre gli ha cambiato il modo di pensare, gli ha fatto capire che il bullismo militare è sbagliato. Poi è tornato all'università e ha studiato scienze politiche a Cambridge, per poi sparire, per circa sei o sette anni. Non sappiamo esattamente cosa abbia fatto in questo periodo. Ha dichiarato in un'intervista di aver lavorato come consulente aziendale in Medio Oriente.

Riemerge nel 2011 e inizia a lavorare gratuitamente per un parlamentare. Inizia così una carriera di cinque, sei, sette anni nel Partito Laburista. Collabora anche un po', per quanto ne so, alla campagna elettorale di Sadiq Khan per la carica di sindaco di Londra, intorno al 2015.

Poi inizia a lavorare per questa parlamentare di nome Hilary Benn. Ed è qui che la cosa diventa importante, perché nel 2015 Jeremy Corbyn viene eletto leader del Partito Laburista.

THACKER: Imran ha una storia bizzarra alle spalle. Ho scritto su Tablet che egli aveva detto a un caro amico di aver fatto domanda per lavorare nell'intelligence britannica, ma Imran non ha voluto parlare dei suoi legami con essa.

Quindi Jeremy Corbyn a capo del Partito Laburista sarebbe come se Bernie Sanders diventasse capo del Partito Democratico.

HOLDEN: Esatto. Corbyn diventò il candidato del Partito Laburista alla carica di Primo Ministro. Quando Bernie Sanders era vicino a diventare il candidato alla presidenza, l'establishment democratico si assicurò che non potesse vincere.

È successa più o meno la stessa cosa anche a Jeremy Corbyn.

THACKER: C'è stato un momento folle in cui Bernie Sanders fu addirittura accusato di essere antisemita, e lui è ebreo. È stato assurdo.

HOLDEN: Per qualcuno come Imran Ahmed, la vittoria di Corbyn era un anatema. Non appartiene a quella fazione e non gli piace Jeremy Corbyn. Inoltre quest'ultimo avrebbe rappresentato una minaccia per le sue ambizioni politiche e di carriera nel Partito Laburista.

Ho parlato con molte persone nel Partito Laburista e tutti sospettano che Imran Ahmed sia la fonte delle fughe di notizie contro Jeremy Corbyn. Nei documenti trapelati iniziai a vedere email di Ahmed che collaborava con i giornalisti. Era chiaro che aveva una certa predisposizione per questo tipo di cose.

Nel periodo in cui Corbyn vinse, andò a lavorare per un'altra parlamentare laburista, Angela Eagle, anch'essa contraria a Corbyn. Per un breve periodo è parso che Angela Eagle avesse potuto persino sfidarlo alla guida del Partito Laburista.

I documenti che ho visto mostrano che Imran Ahmed stava cercando di proteggere Angela Eagle dalla possibilità che i suoi stessi elettori la escludessero. Stava cercando di far apparire la sinistra estrema come un branco di delinquenti. Si scagliava anche contro i piccoli... giornalisti indipendenti e le piccole testate indipendenti che verificavano le affermazioni che lui diffondeva sulla stampa.

THACKER: Quindi a Imran non piacciono le persone come me.

HOLDEN: Non gli piacciono le persone come noi. Ha lavorato con i grandi media, diffondendo storie sul mainstream che poi venivano verificate dai media più piccoli.

Tutti credevano che Jeremy Corbyn fosse destinato a crollare, ma nel 2017 ci furono le elezioni generali e invece ottenne il miglior voto del Partito Laburista dai tempi di Tony Blair. Improvvisamente era come dire: “Oh cavolo, Corbyn è davvero eleggibile!”

Per persone come Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed, quello era il momento in cui si sentono più deboli e devono fare qualcosa al riguardo.

THACKER: Quando Corbyn stava per diventare Primo Ministro, uno dei suoi sostenitori era l'attore Mark Ruffalo. Ora Ruffalo sui social sostiene Imran Ahmed, il quale ha contribuito a uccidere politicamente Corbyn, perché forse è troppo stupido per capire chi sia veramente Imran Ahmed.

HOLDEN: Provo sincero dispiacere per Mark Ruffalo. Non mi sembra uno in malafede, ma credo che se sapesse cosa stava facendo Imran Ahmed allora e cosa sta facendo dietro le quinte ora, ne sarebbe profondamente turbato.

THACKER: Molte persone non sanno chi sia veramente Imran Ahmed.

HOLDEN: Esatto. Quindi nel 2017 entrò in gioco Morgan McSweeney. Originario dell'Irlanda, iniziò a lavorare per il Partito Laburista nel 2003-2004. Il suo primo incarico fu sotto la guida di Peter Mandelson come confutatore rapido, ma poi strinse una profonda amicizia con Steve Reed, che ora ricopre una posizione di rilievo nel governo laburista.

All'epoca l'attenzione principale di McSweeney era rivolta alla politica locale, come quella del Sud di Londra. Nel 2015 era il responsabile della campagna elettorale di una parlamentare di nome Liz Kendall, che si era candidata contro Jeremy Corbyn. Beh, venne sconfitta.

McSweeney fa parte di una fazione del Partito Laburista piuttosto marginale in termini di elettori, ma piuttosto potente in termini di accesso ai media. Nel 2017 McSweeney si lasciò alle spalle le questioni relative all'amministrazione locale e si unì a Labour Together. È stato creato per unire le fazioni conservatrice e progressista in modo che il partito potesse concentrarsi sulla sconfitta dei conservatori.

THACKER: Quindi l'idea originale di Labour Together era quella di fermare le fazioni di destra e di sinistra, di porre fine ai litigi. Ma poi McSweeney ha cambiato le cose?

HOLDEN: Esatto. McSweeney si propose di fare esattamente l'opposto. Jeremy Corbyn e il Partito Laburista ottennero circa il 40% dei voti nel 2017. Una cifra enorme.

McSweeney disse: “Ok, dobbiamo fare qualcosa per indebolirlo, indebolire le possibilità di successo di Jeremy Corbyn”. McSweeney scrisse un documento informativo per Labour Together, il quale tracciava un percorso per distruggere il corbynismo dall'interno del Partito Laburista e, in secondo luogo, identificare qualcuno che sostituissse Jeremy Corbyn, che alla fine sarebbe stato Keir Starmer, ora Primo Ministro.

Solo quest'anno abbiamo saputo del documento redatto da McSweeney nel 2017 e lui è essenzialmente il motivo per cui abbiamo Keir Starmer come Primo Ministro.

Uno degli aspetti che McSweeney identificò nel 2017 è che il movimento di Corbyn produsse un ecosistema mediatico di sinistra davvero vivace, piuttosto potente ed economicamente di successo. Addirittura indipendente dai media generalisti e al di fuori della capacità di controllo di McSweeney e Ahmed. Non potevano controllare la narrazione.

Dal 2018 in poi McSweeney e Ahmed iniziarono a lavorare insieme a tempo pieno. Secondo una recente ricostruzione, solo quattro persone erano ammesse nell'ufficio di Labour Together: due giovani collaboratori, Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed.

Uno degli obiettivi principali era distruggere i media allineati con Jeremy Corbyn.

THACKER: Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed fornirono notizie al Jewish Chronicle, al Guardian, al Telegraph e ad altri grandi media. So che hanno contribuito a far naufragare il Canary. Chi altro li minacciava?

HOLDEN: La loro minaccia principale era The Canary, mentre l'altra, leggermente più piccola, era Evolve Politics. La cosa più importante è che esisteva un'enorme rete sui social che supportava Corbyn e molti di quei contenuti erano generati dai reportage del Canary. Nel 2019 The Canary aveva pubblicato migliaia di articoli e aveva circa 25 dipendenti a tempo pieno.

Aveva una linea editoriale fondamentalmente di sinistra e un tono un po' scandalistico, ma era un'organizzazione giornalistica seria con ottimi giornalisti investigativi. E stavano verificando i fatti di altri giornali che sostanzialmente pubblicavano notizie probabilmente piazzate da Ahmed e McSweeney.

Si è scritto di come, nel 2018 o nel 2019, Morgan McSweeney fosse ossessionato da questa testata giornalistica. Non smetteva mai di parlarne. C'è una citazione pubblicata in un libro di un ex-direttore del Guardian in cui McSweeney disse: “Se non distruggiamo il Canary, esso distruggerà noi”.

Ed è questo che trovo molto interessante in tutta questa storia. Quel documento di McSweeney del 2017 di cui vi ho parlato, su come volesse distruggere il partito laburista dall'interno, non poteva farlo apertamente. Doveva farlo in segreto. Fece apparire Labour Together in pubblico come una fazione amichevole e trasversale: “Incontriamoci tutti e discutiamo delle nostre divergenze...”. In realtà si trattava di un'organizzazione ferocemente faziosa, la quale avrebbe condotto una campagna di disinformazione.

THACKER: Fin dall'inizio McSweeney e Ahmed hanno gestito il Labour Together con tutti questi gruppi nascosti per attaccare qualsiasi cosa minacciasse la loro idea di ciò che è vero. Ciononostante la loro tattica era dire: “Voi altri siete disinformazione! Vi sbagliate!”

Il loro gioco era fingere di voler fermare la disinformazione; in realtà ciò che facevano era diffondere disinformazione per attaccare chiunque avesse un pensiero indipendente e diverso dal loro.

HOLDEN: È una situazione davvero complicata. C'è voluto molto tempo anche per me affinché me ne rendessi conto, per fare un passo indietro e iniziare a capire. Dal 2017 hanno avviato una campagna di disinformazione su chi sono e cosa stanno facendo. C'è anche la questione dei soldi.

Hanno incassato un sacco di soldi e non li hanno dichiarati alla Commissione Elettorale. In realtà sono finanziati da quasi un milione di sterline in donazioni da parte di personaggi politici di primo piano. Anche questo, al momento, non è noto al pubblico.

Inaugurarono la campagna “Stop Funding Fake News” su SFFN nel marzo 2019, fingendo di essere solo un gruppo di attivisti di base. Il motto era: “Non vogliamo rivelare la nostra identità, siamo solo persone impegnate per la verità e la lotta all'odio”. Ma nessuno sapeva all'epoca che in realtà si trattava di Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed, spin doctor del Partito Laburista. Né che questa campagna era sostenuta da Steve Reed, che all'epoca era parlamentare e ora fa parte del gabinetto di Starmer.

Si presentavano come un movimento popolare. In realtà sono un gruppo di personaggi politici molto influenti, finanziati con enormi quantità di denaro da donatori non dichiarati.

THACKER: Se la prendevano anche con Breitbart nel Regno Unito. Breitbart è un'agenzia di stampa conservatrice americana, un tempo affiliata a Steve Bannon. Nel frattempo “Stop Funding Fake News” stava dicendo ai media: “Abbiamo paura di dirvi chi siamo, perché poi verremmo attaccati”.

Eppure attaccavano e condannavano a piacimento, in forma anonima – senza rivelare chi li finanziava – chiunque osasse esprimere opinioni che non gradivano. Non c'era bisogno di apprezzare un Breitbart conservatore o un Canary liberal per sapere che le persone hanno il diritto di avere quel particolare punto di vista senza essere attaccate incessantemente da qualche gruppo con interessi particolari come Imran Ahmed e Morgan McSweeney.

HOLDEN: La questione fondamentale è la trasparenza. Facevano pressione sulle testate giornalistiche affinché riportassero le loro opinioni e idee, per poi distruggerle senza alcuna possibilità di replica. McSweeney e Ahmed hanno avuto successo contro il Canary, tagliando i suoi introiti pubblicitari.

Ma mentre accadeva il Canary non poteva farci niente perché non sapeva chi lo stesse attaccando. Se i redattori avessero potuto far notare: “Guardate, sono Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed, non gli piacciamo”. Sarebbe finito tutto in quel momento.

Ma c'è anche una dimensione legale. Se non sapete che sono McSweeney e Ahmed a diffamarvi con account anonimi, non potete far loro causa. Sui social ci sono stati momenti in cui Evolve Politics chiedeva: “Chi siete? Smettetela. Vogliamo inviarvi una lettera di diffida, perché state mentendo su di noi e state compromettendo la nostra capacità di guadagnarci da vivere”.

Non c'era modo di intraprendere azioni legali del genere.

“Stop Funding Fake News” non era una campagna eroica per porre fine alla disinformazione e all'odio, perché se fossero state vere le sue affermazioni fattuali, non avrebbero affatto retto alla prova della realtà. Si è trattato fondamentalmente di una campagna di disinformazione non diversa da quella incentrata sulla Russia. Soldi nascosti per scopi politici non dichiarati, attacchi alla gente per creare caos.

Morgan McSweeney ha distrutto il Canary per distruggere anche il corbynismo, in modo da poter poi scegliere la persona successiva alla guida del Partito Laburista, in modo che quella stessa persona potesse diventare il prossimo Primo Ministro. Era una campagna di disinformazione che ha avuto talmente tanto successo che probabilmente nessun'altra campagna di disinformazione avrebbe mai avuto.

THACKER: Perché l'ecosistema mediatico nel Regno Unito è così strano? Perché è stato così poco curioso quando è stato contattato da McSweeney e Ahmed? Perché avrebbe dovuto citare le sciocchezze che McSweeney e Ahmed stavano snocciolando, senza rivelare da chi veniva contattato? I media britannici sono stati complici di questa campagna di disinformazione.

HOLDEN: È una domanda incredibilmente pertinente da porre all'ecosistema mediatico britannico. È davvero assurdo che, in alcuni casi, abbiamo scoperto solo quest'anno articoli pubblicati da Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed già nel 2018. È una situazione assurda.

Sto generalizzando molto, perché ci sono delle precisazioni da fare, ma in generale i principali quotidiani britannici dettano l'agenda dell'informazione ed erano piuttosto ostili alla politica di Jeremy Corbyn. Erano piuttosto contenti di prendere spunto da una campagna che lo stava indebolendo.

C'era anche un conflitto di interessi. Il Canary aveva successo e attirava lettori da altre piattaforme. E aveva spesso un approccio molto aggressivo e conflittuale nei confronti dei media generalisti. Se la BBC pubblicava qualcosa e pensava che contenesse degli errori, lo segnalava: “Ehi BBC, hai commesso un errore. La BBC è di parte”.

THACKER: I media britannici sono stati complici di questa campagna di disinformazione. E lo hanno fatto per motivi politici e finanziari, per eliminare concorrenti importanti.

HOLDEN: Inoltre il 2019 è stato un periodo folle per il giornalismo nel Regno Unito. C'era isterismo intorno alla possibilità che Jeremy Corbyn potesse diventare primo ministro. Immaginate se Bernie Sanders avesse avuto una reale possibilità di essere il candidato democratico alla presidenza. Sarebbero successe un sacco di cose, proprio come quando Trump è diventato il candidato repubblicano.

THACKER: Questa isteria attorno a Trump c'è ancora oggi. Metà delle volte che si leggono cose su Trump... non so se siano vere o no. Come se fosse proprio questo il problema. Non mi dispiace leggere cose negative su Trump, se sono vere, ma così tante volte...

Abbiamo avuto anni di storie assurde su un possibile incontro tra Trump e delle prostitute in Russia. Roba assurda, con Trump e Putin che complottano per conquistare l'America. I giornalisti del New York Times che hanno scritto gran parte di queste assurdità hanno poi vinto un premio Pulitzer.

Viene chiamata sindrome da disturbo bipolare su Trump. Voi nel Regno Unito avete la sindrome da disturbo bipolare su Corbyn?

HOLDEN: È un modo piuttosto efficace di dirlo. Ciò che mi ha insegnato, e che dovrebbe insegnare a tutti se si vuole trarne un qualche insegnamento: bisogna leggere tutti i media controcorrente. Bisogna controllare costantemente. Bisogna avere una vasta gamma di fonti perché tutti commettono errori.

Spesso i resoconti presentati come fatti accertati dai media generalisti si rivelano infondati anni dopo.

THACKER: Leggere con saggezza, leggere molto.

HOLDEN: Giusto. L'approccio corretto è essere scettici su tutto ciò che si legge. La gente dovrebbe essere scettica nei miei confronti e dovrebbe essere scettica nei suoi confronti. La gente dovrebbe essere scettica anche nei confronti del Time e del New York Times. Avrebbe dovuto essere scettica anche nei confronti del Canary. Leggere attentamente.

Ci sono momenti in cui si dà per scontato che un fatto sia stato stabilito dai media generalisti e se si contesta quel fatto, o lo si mette in discussione, si viene immediatamente considerati estranei ai normali argomenti di discussione.

Eppure sono spesso i media indipendenti a insistere su un argomento e poi a rivelare la verità.

THACKER: C'è un modo per definire queste persone che accettano qualsiasi cosa leggano sul New York Times, sul Washington Post, o sul New Yorker: liberal in piena regola.

Proprio nel periodo in cui Imran Ahmed e Morgan McSweeney hanno iniziato a lavorare sulle fake news per fingere di attaccare la disinformazione, è nato il fenomeno dei fact-checker negli Stati Uniti.

Ebbi un botta e risposta con uno dei fact-checker della BBC che si occupava sempre di verificare i dati sui vaccini. Le scrissi anche una mail: “Ha mai verificato i dati di un produttore di vaccini? Continua a trovare tutti questi problemi con le informazioni sui vaccini, ma non riguardano mai chi li produce. E sono stati colti a mentire più e più volte”.

E lei mi rispose: “Beh, ci lavoreremo”. Non l'ha mai fatto, ovviamente. Non credo che la BBC abbia mai effettuato un fact-checking su Pfizer, e quest'ultima ha mentito ripetutamente sul suo vaccino contro il COVID.

I fact-checker sono molto utili per testate come il New York Times e il Washington Post perché non attaccano mai questi giornali, anche se commettono errori e poi devono apportare correzioni. Non sono sicuro che Politifact, diretto da Poynter, abbia mai fatto un fact-checking sul New York Times. Verificano i fatti di una casalinga di Peoria che va su Facebook e dice ai suoi 2.000 follower: “Penso che i vaccini COVID stiano uccidendo i cani”. Attenzionano sempre stupidaggini del genere.

Così, dopo che Imran Ahmed e Morgan McSweeney hanno cacciato Corbyn dalla leadership laburista ed eliminato il Canary, Ahmed porta il Center for Countering Digital Hate negli Stati Uniti ed esso viene improvvisamente citato dalla Casa Bianca.

HOLDEN: Alla fine del 2019 crearono il CCDH con Morgan McSweeney nel consiglio di amministrazione e Imran Ahmed come amministratore delegato. Era molto piccolo e nessuno sapeva che Stop Funding Fake News era fondamentalmente la stessa cosa e che McSweeney e Ahmed erano dietro di essi.

Kier Starmer è diventato capo del Partito Laburista e McSweeney il suo capo di gabinetto. Parallelamente Imran Ahmed si recò negli Stati Uniti all'inizio del 2020, inserendosi immediatamente nell'establishment del Partito Democratico. Simon Clark entrò nel consiglio di amministrazione del CCDH e fa parte dell'Atlantic Council.

THACKER: Beh, Simon Clark era stato al Center for American Progress, il think tank del Partito Democratico che ha guidato la campagna presidenziale di Hillary Clinton nel 2016.

HOLDEN: Ahmed arrivò negli Stati Uniti inserendosi immediatamente nell'establishment e riuscendo a raccogliere fondi abbastanza rapidamente. Ho ricevuto dei documenti dall'IRS e ho scoperto che Ahmed aveva fornito informazioni errate per ottenere lo status di organizzazione non profit. E prevedeva di ricevere donazioni per quasi un milione di dollari. Se siete una ONG e ricevete un milione di dollari nel primo anno, quelle sono cifre importanti.

THACKER: Ho chiesto a diversi amici a Washington, persone con decenni di esperienza: “Se lasciassi il tuo lavoro e fondassi un'organizzazione no-profit domani, riusciresti a raccogliere un milione di dollari nel primo anno?”. Chiunque abbia contattato ha iniziato a ridere.

HOLDEN: Il Center for Countering Digital Hate era praticamente sconosciuto finché Imran Ahmed non l'ha portato negli Stati Uniti. Con tutti questi discorsi su vaccini, obblighi vari, quarantene e COVID, ha trovato terreno fertile.

Quello era un periodo in cui negli Stati Uniti si parlava in buona fede, ma forse in modo fuorviante, di emergenze sanitarie pubbliche e libertà di parola. Si sentiva anche dire che la libertà di parola aveva un impatto sulla salute pubblica, quindi alcune cose non dovevano essere dette. Nel mezzo di questa emergenza, Imran Ahmed e il CCDH entrano in scena e si insinuano nella Casa Bianca di Biden e nel Partito Democratico.

Aveva già dimostrato di avere questa straordinaria capacità di scovare le fake news e di convincere il governo ad agire, e il lavoro del CCDH si adattava perfettamente a quel momento. Ahmed spunta dal nulla e appare come un'organizzazione legittima, anti-disinformazione e anti-odio.

THACKER: Mentre è negli Stati Uniti a dirigere il CCDH, sappiamo da dove provengono i suoi soldi? Sappiamo che ha un'organizzazione no-profit negli Stati Uniti e che parte del denaro proviene dal Regno Unito. Ho documenti interni che mi sono stati trasmessi da un informatore: ha personale a Londra, personale a Washington e ha anche una società privata collegata con sede legale nel Delaware. Imran Ahmed aveva anche una società di consulenza nel Regno Unito.

I finanziamenti sono tanti, ma se si considerano solo quelli no-profit, non c'è modo di finanziare tutte queste persone con gli $1,5 milioni dichiarati all'IRS. Quindi da dove provengono tutti questi soldi? Ancora oggi non lo sappiamo.

HOLDEN: Non lo sappiamo. A un certo punto ha dichiarato alcuni donatori sul suo sito web, ma non potevano essere più di centomila sterline. Non abbiamo idea da dove provengano i soldi ed è pazzesco perché questa organizzazione ha svolto un ruolo piuttosto importante negli Stati Uniti.

THACKER: Ahmed ha anche avuto un ruolo fondamentale nel disegno di legge sulla sicurezza online del Regno Unito. È stata la prima persona a testimoniarvi a favore davanti al Parlamento. Questa legge ha ora attirato l'attenzione dell'amministrazione Trump, la quale afferma che essa peggiora i diritti umani nel Regno Unito. Voglio dire, lui ha contribuito, da quanto ho capito, a scrivere e far approvare quella legge, che può potenzialmente essere usata per multare o incarcerare gli inglesi che mettono qualcosa online.

È una follia. Di cosa si trattava?

HOLDEN: Il presidente della commissione che ha tenuto le udienze sul disegno di legge sulla sicurezza online è un politico conservatore di nome Damian Collins. Fa parte del consiglio di amministrazione del CCDH di Ahmed e la prima persona che Collins chiama a testimoniare a favore del disegno di legge è lo stesso Imran Ahmed.

La cosa sorprendente della testimonianza di Ahmed è che la bozza originale del disegno di legge sulla sicurezza online è un incubo. Un inferno. Ciò che è stato approvato è ancora problematico, ma la prima versione era completamente folle. La minaccia alla libertà di parola era così profonda nella prima versione che la maggior parte dei gruppi della società civile si è opposta. Avevano intenzione di censurare cose che erano legali ma dannose perché avrebbero potuto causare disagio psicologico.

THACKER: Gli inglesi sono molto più a loro agio con il governo che dice loro cosa fare. Credo che la maggior parte delle persone dimentichi che quando George Orwell scrisse in 1984 del controllo del governo su ciò che tutti pensavano, si riferiva al governo britannico.

In America abbiamo codici sul linguaggio, ma questo accade solo in posti folli, come nei campus universitari, dove c'è la follia della sinistra, dove le persone cercano di zittirvi perché non usate i pronomi corretti.

HOLDEN: Il punto cruciale della democrazia è che le persone dibattono su chi può e chi non può dire qualcosa. E va bene. Ho un problema quando lo Stato interviene, come ha fatto il CCDH ed è qui che traccio il limite. Ad esempio, i boicottaggi per me vanno bene. Vengo dal Sudafrica, dove il boicottaggio ha contribuito a porre fine all'apartheid. Non ho problemi con il boicottaggio di aziende cattive che fanno cose davvero cattive. A volte questo può apportare un cambiamento positivo nel mondo.

Non sono a favore di un'organizzazione che cerca di convincere il governo a censurare il dibattito pubblico. È assolutamente inaccettabile perché non ci vuole un genio per capire il motivo... Lo dirò apertamente. Sono di sinistra in politica. Oggi, nella politica britannica, capisco perché il Segretario di Stato affermi che “Free Palestine” sia un incitamento all'odio che deve essere censurato su Internet.

Ma capisco anche come, se siete di destra, potreste avere paura, perché alcuni potrebbero dire che altre forme di espressione sono altrettanto dannose. Basta un attimo per pensare a quanto folle possa diventare lo stato nel controllare la libertà di parola.

La cosa assurda è quando Imran Ahmed si presentò davanti a quella commissione e affermò che la versione originale dell'Online Safety Bill non era sufficiente. Doveva essere più restrittiva. Non stavano facendo abbastanza per limitare la libertà di parola. Una follia totale.

Sosteneva anche che doveva esserci una deroga per i media, che essi avrebbero dovuto avere più diritti alla libertà di parola di chiunque altro. Che approccio incasinato. Non capisco perché i media avrebbero dovuto avere più diritti dell'utente medio sui social. Poi affermò che la definizione di media è troppo ampia e avrebbe dovuto includere solo testate come il Washington Post, il New York Times e la CNN. Assicurarsi che la definizione di media non riguardasse testate come il Canary e persone come Paul Thacker.

THACKER: Beh, se non si censurano persone come me e lei, ci ritroveremo a parlare in un'intervista che la gente leggerà. Come questa.

HOLDEN: Non voglio essere presuntuoso, ma se non fossi stato in grado di scrivere questo libro, gran parte di ciò che è successo per decretare Keir Starmer Primo Ministro non sarebbe stato riportato.

THACKER: Uno dei tizi di cui parla si chiama Mike Heaver. Ha fondato questo sito di notizie online chiamato Westmonster, una sorta di sito di notizie conservatore e anti-establishment. Perché è importante per i lettori americani?

HOLDEN: Heaver ha fondato un sito di notizie conservatore chiamato Westmonster, finanziato da Aaron Banks, un personaggio di spicco della scena pro-Brexit. Banks sosteneva l'uscita del Regno Unito dall'Unione Europea ed è strettamente associato a Nigel Farage, così come Michael Heaver. Westmonster nasce nel... 2017, 2018 come piattaforma per il movimento per la Brexit. Ahmed e McSweeney iniziarono a prendere di mira Westmonster contemporaneamente al Canary e a Breitbart, un sito di notizie conservatore americano.

Lo fecero per spaventare gli inserzionisti, sostenendo che era pieno di odio e che doveva essere demonetizzato. Una delle immagini che pubblicarono per sostenere questa affermazione di odio era una foto di Nigel Farage con Donald Trump. Questa era la loro affermazione: Farage è odio, Trump è odio, entrambi bigotti pieni di odio che diffondono disinformazione e notizie false.

A maggio 2016 si tennero le elezioni per decidere chi avrebbe rappresentato la Gran Bretagna al Parlamento europeo. Questo avvenne prima della Brexit, quando il Regno Unito faceva ancora parte dell'Unione Europea. Michael Heaver si candidò nel Brexit Party e Stop Funding Fake News condusse una campagna mediatica contro di lui.

Quindi Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed definirono i loro rivali politici come disinformazione, e lo fecero con denaro ombra e nascondendo i loro veri nomi. È così che operano McSweeney e Ahmed. È totalmente folle.

Chiunque legga il mio libro, chiunque mi conosca, sa che gente come Nigel Farage non fa per me. Non sono la mia politica. Ma io la vedo così ed è totalmente inaccettabile. Non si tratta di politica di partito. Si tratta di democrazia. Non si può fare tutto questo e avere una democrazia sana.

THACKER: Imran Ahmed ora vive a Washington e finge di essere un esperto di disinformazione, anche se mente e diffonde disinformazione. Ha cercato di far cadere RFK Jr. e se la prende con Trump.

Qual sarà la sua prossima mossa? Pensa che cercherà ancora di mimetizzarsi nel pessimo ecosistema mediatico degli Stati Uniti? Pensa che tornerà nel Regno Unito?

HOLDEN: In pratica gli ha rovinato i piani. Dovrebbe congratularsi con sé stesso. Sì. La vittoria di Trump è un problema per lui perché non avrà più l'attenzione della Casa Bianca. È ancora al centro dell'attenzione della CNN, del New York Times e di queste testate che non si preoccupano molto del suo oscuro passato, ma non avrà necessariamente lo stesso impatto politico.

Ahmed stava aspettando che Keir Starmer diventasse Primo Ministro, cosa che è avvenuta alla fine del 2024, così lui e il CCDH potevano essere chiamati direttamente a fornire consulenza al governo inglese. Ed è esattamente quello che è successo. Ahmed e il CCDH sono stati immediatamente chiamati a fornire consulenza sul disegno di legge sulla sicurezza online e su come il governo del Regno Unito avrebbe dovuto rispondere alle informazioni diffuse sui social.

Ciò che li manda in tilt, almeno secondo i documenti che ho visto, è quando si pubblicano articoli come abbiamo fatto noi. Improvvisamente tutti iniziano a chiedersi chi siano il CCDH e Imran Ahmed, e ci sono molti media sulla stampa britannica.

I documenti che ho visto suggeriscono che, nel governo Starmer, c'è la sensazione di dover prendere un po' le distanze dal CCDH. Una delle cose che questo governo laburista farà prima di essere bocciato, a mani basse, è tornare ad alcune delle disposizioni originali del disegno di legge sulla sicurezza online. Vogliono renderlo più draconiano e più censorio. Penso che sia probabile che accada.

Ahmed si vanta anche di avere un impatto sulla politica dell'UE e di aver fornito consulenza per il disegno di legge dell'UE per censurare gli europei.

Tutto inizia nel 2017 con Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed che complottano insieme, e nel corso di sette anni Morgan McSweeney è diventato Capo di Gabinetto del Primo Ministro. È il cuore del governo inglese. Nel frattempo Imran Ahmed avrebbe reso il CCDH un attore importante negli Stati Uniti e i due stanno sostanzialmente tornando insieme. Ora sperano di raccogliere i frutti di questa campagna durata quasi un decennio.

È una storia piuttosto shakespeariana, perché poi vieni coinvolto e si pubblicano articoli come quello su Twitter con tutti i documenti interni del CCDH, mettendo in luce chi sono e cosa stavano realmente facendo.

Almeno ora la vita è molto più dura per loro. 

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

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

John Leo Keenan wrote:

He makes very clear points.  And the same can be said of Thomas Mathew Crooks.  He learned too soon before the event that there would be the event.  How could he get the rifle up there is not known!  One or two saw him climbing up with the rifle, but we see him without a rifle before the event.  How could he get the rifle from the car without being seen?  Must have placed it up there when there was no one there?  It raises questions of timing and motive.  How does a “municipal agent” of all agents climb up with a gun, sees him with a rifle, and then quickly descends to run away (to tell others).  Why is a “municipal” one the one in that situation?  I focused on what his helmet/head video showed.  I froze the image of the roof top.  There is no person there and it’s another roof, with a low wall on the opposite side (believe it or not).  I wrote about this in an LRC article.

One ignores some important details if there are others that point to something being impossible.  We can discard any possibility that Thomas Matthew Crooks was the shooter by pointing out that the Butler videos released had to be pre-arranged for this crime because we see him on top of a building that only at first sight is the AGR building.  It’s certainly not the AGR building, as can be readily ascertained from the details of the image(s).  They are like the false video of James Copenhaver – the AGR building cannot be right behind the stands, where we know there’s grass.  Everybody knows the AGR building is more than 100 meters behind.  Even this isn’t being noticed or discussed.   

With such facts, one concludes that terrorism is above all a spiritual attack, and only after that a physical attack.  The TV channels play Copenhaver’s film again whenever it’s suitable.  There should not just be one or two that sound the alert about this video and the others.  So many should recognize its obviously fake image that eventually no one can ignore it.  The investigation could begin with any of the false videos because the one who arranged them is the real culprit.  (Crooks appears to have been manipulated by someone.)   

The biggest difference with Tyler’s case would be that Thomas fired at the president.  

The post The Charile Kirk Assassination FBI Official Narrative Demolished in 10 Minutes appeared first on LewRockwell.

Why are the French different from Americans? One reason, for good or ill, is that in their senior year in high school (called términale) French kids must take a course in philosophy. My daughter has just started reading the Pensées (Thoughts) of Pascal. My response to Pascal and his Pensées is given below in an essay I wrote for myself when I read it more than 35 years ago. But before that consider why I read this old book through the following dialogue from another, very different, French writer Marcel Proust; In the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past (in French À la recherche du temps perdue, In Search of Lost Time) , (translated by Moncrieff, Random House, v.1, p. 20).

“I say!” exclaimed Swann to my grandfather, “what I was going to tell you has more to do than you might think with what you were asking me just now, for in some respects there has been very little change. I came across a passage in Saint-Simon this morning which would have amused you. It is in the volume which covers his mission to Spain; not one of the best, little more in fact than a journal, but at least it is a journal wonderfully well written, which fairly distinguishes it from the devastating (sic) journalism that we feel bound to read these days, morning, noon and night.”

“I do not agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the papers very pleasant indeed!” my aunt Flora broke in, to show Swann that she had read the note about his Corot in the ‘Figaro.’

“Yes,” aunt Celine went one better. “When they write things about people whom we are interested.”

“I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it – oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s ‘Pensees?’”

Even more so today than in Proust’s time, it is important to find the signal in the noise. Get off your Twitter (I should write X) feed and read a great, old book.

On the Pensées of Pascal

“It might seem that about Blaise Pascal, and about the two works on which his fame is founded everything that there is to say had been said. . . . But Pascal is one who must be studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change.”

T. S. Eliot

Upon reading these lines of Eliot, as is my habit, I studied afresh the Pensées of Pascal. The man who was to become one of the great Christian apologists of his age, or any age, I knew only as the man for whom a unit of pressure is named. Here I shall inform you of what little I have learned of his life and my feeling of the Pensées.

Blaise Pascal was born June 19, 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, France. His mother having died as an infant, his father raised the boy and his sisters, personally undertaking the task of their education. Pascal was a precocious student. At sixteen he published a paper on solid geometry that Descartes could not believe was written by one so young. Pascal collaborated with his father on experiments that proved a vacuum was possible, which once again brought him into contention with Descartes. With these and other inventions and discoveries the great mathematician and physicist was known as the most brilliant man of his time. A celebrity himself, he knew all the best and brightest in Paris.

At the height of his renown on November 23, 1654 Pascal had a religious revelation. He recorded the event in a note that was sewn into the overcoat that he was wearing when he died. While he was always a Christian he came to feel that his religious attitude had not been fervent enough. He left the social life of Paris to join his sister in the Jansenist convent at Port-Royal. On his choice of faith over fame Pascal wrote:

“Vanity is so firmly anchored in man¹s heart that a soldier, a rough, a cook or a porter will boast and expect admirers, and even philosophers want them; those who write against them want to enjoy the prestige of having read them, and perhaps I who wrote this want the same thing, perhaps my readers.” . .

The Jansenists were a Catholic sect, who at that time were at odds with the Jesuits. Pascal wrote the Provincial Letters (1656-57) in defense of the Jansenist cause. This series of anonymous pamphlets is a masterpiece of French prose. Pascal lived his life in religious and scientific reflection until his death in 1662.

Pascal¹s Pensées (thoughts) were published posthumously in 1669. They are a compilation of notes intended for a Christian apology. Pascal intended to make the argument for Christian truths through reason. In spite of the fact that a Christian truth is that faith can not be deduced by reason. “Either God is or he is not.”

“But to which view shall we be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong.”

Thus, Pascal argues, even if your reason prevents your faith, shouldn¹t

prudential reason move you to search for faith.

Pascal’s fundamental view of the world is of fallen man. That while

“man has god-like qualities he also displays the savageness of a beast. The two truths of the Christian religion are “that there is a God, of whom men are capable, and that there is a corruption in nature which makes them unworthy. It is of equal importance to men to know each of these points: and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness as to know his own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can cure him. Knowing only one of these points leads either to the arrogance of the philosophers, who have known God but not their own wretchedness, or to the despair of the atheists, who know their own wretchedness without knowing their Redeemer.”

When man acts with the arrogance of a god to remake man or the world the results are disastrous. The French and Russian revolutions are testimonies to this truth. I can testify to the wretchedness of life in this world when God is not known with the example of my mother. Her life has no joy for as we all have failures, sickness and eventually death in our lives, she cannot see the light of the Redeemer which gives hope in the face of despair. Unfortunately I see no way to help her so I can only pray for her and grieve for her.

So what is it of Pascal that I have learned afresh, that I will keep with me for the rest of my days. In the words of Pascal:

“Thus I stretch out my arms to my saviour, who, after being foretold for four thousand years, came on earth to die and suffer for me at the time and the circumstances foretold. By his grace I peaceably await death, in the hope of being eternally united, and meanwhile I live joyfully, whether in the blessings which he is pleased to bestow on me or in the afflictions which he sends me for my own good and taught me how to endure by his example.”

Amen.

The post Pascal appeared first on LewRockwell.

The federal government shutdown in recent weeks has highlighted the full cost of many government programs, including the food stamp program. Many people—especially the kind who don’t spend their time tracking federal spending—have been shocked by the fact that one in eight Americans—12 percent of the population—receives food stamps. That’s about 42 million people. Moreover, most food stamp recipients receive other forms of government “welfare” as well.

For many, these statistics flying around social media and among podcasters have served to highlight the sheer size of the American population that receives government money as a substantial portion of their income.

This raises an important question: if a sizable portion of a person’s income comes from tax dollars, should that person be eligible to vote himself access to even more tax dollars?

Some think not. This woman, for instance, received 64K likes when she stated: “I don’t think these people should vote. Honestly, how can you vote freely, when you’re being bought?”

She’s right.

This is a controversial take, to say the least. Yet, many people who act aghast at the idea would also surely regard it as a bad thing if a politician voted “yes” to awarding a government contract to his own company. This is because many people understand that being in a position to vote to send yourself more taxpayer money involves a conflict of interest. Historically, a member of a city council or legislature has often been expected to refrain from voting when he can personally benefit financially from his own vote. It is understood that anyone voting in this situation is not voting “freely” but is biased in favor of enriching himself at the expense of others.

Yet, few people think twice when a voter casts his ballot for a politician who has promised to give that voter more taxpayer money. Sometimes, at the state level, voters will cast their ballot to directly enrich themselves through ballot initiatives and referenda. This, we are told is all perfectly fine because voting is allegedly some kind of sacred right.

How Many People Live off Taxpayer Funds? 

How many voters—or at least potential voters—are using the taxpayers as their personal piggy banks?

Although recent controversies over food stamps have highlighted that particular program, food stamps are just the tip of the iceberg. The number of Americans who receive monthly taxpayer-funded income goes far beyond the 41 million on food stamps. For example, 72 million Americans receive Social Security, and 65 million of those also receive tax-funded health services through Medicare. Yes, recipients of Social Security like to claim that they “paid in” to the system and now receive their payments out of some kind of imagined trust fund. The reality, of course, is that Social Security and Medicare are 100% funded by current workers. That is, the programs are nothing more than a wealth transfer from workers to retirees. In every way except the rhetoric, Social Security and Medicare are just welfare programs, and every politician knows that his elderly voters expect him to keep ripping off current taxpayers to keep the elderly voters happy.

There are also 70 million Americans on Medicaid. In many cases, Medicaid services amount to the equivalent of thousands of dollars per month for recipients.

We can’t just add these numbers up, however, as there is a lot of overlap in the programs. For example, 78 percent of food stamp recipients are also eligible for Medicaid. Moreover, since we’re talking about all of this in the context of voting, we should remove children—who cannot vote—from the counts.1

Medicare recipients are nearly all on Social Security, so the “Social Security and/or Medicare” group totals about 72 million adults. To this we can add the adult Medicaid recipients who total about 60 percent of total recipients. That’s about 42 million adults. But we must also remove the 12 million Medicaid recipients who are also on Medicare and so are already counted in the Medicare category. That means we can add 30 million adult Medicaid recipients to the 72 million on Social Security. Then, we can add the adult food-stamp recipients who are not already counted under the Medicaid category. That’s another 5.4 million adults. That brings us to a total of about 107 million adult US residents on some form or welfare—and we’re not even counting TANF, rental assistance (Section 8), or other smaller programs here.

Don’t Forget Taxpayer Funded Government Employees and Contractors

Of course, people receiving so-called “social benefits” are not the only people who life off the largesse of the taxpayers. There are at least 10 million others whose paychecks come from the taxpayers. For example, there are 2.2 million federal civilian workers, 1.3 million military “service” members, 400,000 postal workers, 1.8 million workers funded by federal grants, and more than 5 million federal contractors. That latter category, of course, includes those well-paid engineers and white collar workers who make weapons for the Pentagon or “consult” for the departments of Agriculture, State, and other agencies.2

Source: Brookings Institution, (in millions of employees).

Sure, many contractors and federal employees will tell you that they aren’t in the same category as welfare recipients because they “work.” But from the point of view of tax transfers and fiscal policy, there is no difference at all. The issue here isn’t morality or virtue or whether or not someone “deserves” his tax-funded check. We’re simply pointing out the millions of Americans whose income is based on a forcible transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to the recipients’ pocket.

In this, federal contractors and other federal workers are often similar to all recipients of taxpayer money: they all have reasons as to why they have some sort of right to the taxpayer’s dime. Trying to convince these people otherwise is often a lost cause for the reasons that Upton Sinclair suggested long ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

But whatever justification is given by the 117 million or so Americans living off the taxpayer’s “generosity,” the fact remains that at least a third of the population in the United States—nearly 45 percent of the adult population—receives a lot of money from the taxpayers. What’s worse, I’m not even including here all the local-government workers funded by federal dollars, students and faculty at federally funded colleges, or the users of smaller federal programs like LIHEAP. And yet we still find nearly half the US population is receiving taxpayer-funded salaries or “benefits.”

When the Bureaucrats/Welfare Recipients/Government Contractors Outnumber the Taxpayers

So, are we to seriously believe that these people would ever vote to substantially cut government spending? Every politician knows the answer to this. He knows that those millions of government contractors and military employees are simply not going to support a candidate who prioritizes any substantial cuts to military spending. Politicians know that opposing Social Security is political suicide. Nowadays, even opposing Medicaid has become a politically dangerous endeavor because so many millions of voters depend on the program’s taxpayer-funded services.

Even if only half of these 116 million taxpayer-funded adults actually vote, that’s a pretty big chunk of the 150 million who voted in the 2024 election. The entire US adult population, after all, is only about 258 million.

This all illustrates why the United States government will never rein in spending or seriously engage the problem of mounting debt and deficits short of an acute sovereign debt crisis or a (probably violent) coup-like event. The hundred-million or so Americans who rely on federal spending for their incomes won’t allow any real reform to ever occur. Runaway debt and spending is now baked into the system. These is no orderly or legal way out of this.

The political dynamic at work was explained by Ludwig von Mises long ago. In his short book Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises examined this problem in the context of government employees. In a section titled “The Bureaucrat as a Voter” Mises explains:

The bureaucrat is not only a government employee. He is, under a democratic constitution, at the same time a voter and as such a part of the sovereign, his employer. He is in a peculiar position: he is both employer and employee. And his pecuniary interest as employee towers above his interest as employer, as he gets much more from the public funds than he contributes to them.

This double relationship becomes more important as the people on the government’s pay roll increase. The bureaucrat as voter is more eager to get a raise than to keep the budget balanced. His main concern is to swell the pay roll.

Mises went on to examine the rise of powerful interest groups in France and Germany in the years before “the fall of their democratic constitutions.” He explained:

There were not only the hosts of public employees, and those employed in the nationalized branches of business (e.g., railroad, post, telegraph, and telephone), there were the receivers of the unemployment dole and of social security benefits, as well as the farmers and some other groups which the government directly or indirectly subsidized. Their main concern was to get more out of the public funds. They did not care for “ideal” issues like liberty, justice, the supremacy of the law, and good government. They asked for more money, that was all. No candidate for parliament, provincial diets, or town councils could risk opposing the appetite of the public employees for a raise. The various political parties were eager to outdo one another in munificence.

Mises concluded:

Representative democracy cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government pay roll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.

The logic of this position is simple. If the voting taxpayers (specifically, those who actually pay the bills) are outnumbered or outcompeted by the tax receivers, then, inevitably, the economic system will tend more and more toward economic profligacy, leading eventually to bankruptcy.

America is already a long way down this road.

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1 Various sources show that about 40 percent of Medicaid and food stamp recipients are children. Medicare and Social Security, of course, are directed at elderly voters.

2 One could also argue that we should also include the 2.1 million military retirees to this category along with the 2.6 million retired federal workers who receive federal pensions. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll leave those out since many are already included in the Social Security category.

The post Why Food Stamp Recipients (and Government Contractors) Should Not Be Allowed To Vote appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dick Cheney died this week. He leaves behind a wretched legacy.

Cheney reached the pinnacle of his influence as George W. Bush’s vice president, a position from which he orchestrated the Iraq War and helped bring about one of the most intrusive pieces of legislation ever to have been leveled against the American people.

Democrats reflexively abhorred Cheney as veep, but as GOP voters became more averse to foreign intervention, he became a symbol of everything that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy. As Jack Kenny said in 2011, “[Cheney’s] impact on and, to a large extent, direction of foreign policy during the Bush presidency suggests that if he was and is a conservative, his is the kind of conservatism George Will described as believing that ‘government can’t run Amtrak, but it can run the Middle East.’”

Iraq Intervention: Why?

As vice president, Cheney was the loudest voice to advocate the invasion of Iraq. He broadcast the false narrative that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction with great zeal. But that wasn’t his first foray into Iraq, or the first time he led an invasion under a Bush. Cheney oversaw Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush. And in between Bush presidencies, when he wasn’t busy planning invasions into Iraq, Cheney worked as the CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil companies.

It just so happens that Iraq is considered one of the top five oil-rich countries. And if it were up to Cheney, American soldiers would’ve been sent into other oil-rich Middle Eastern nations. According to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Cheney had grand plans to deploy American soldiers all over the Middle East. Kenny writes:

In his new book, A Journey: My Political Life, Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalls that Cheney wanted the United States to go to war not only with Afghanistan and Iraq, but with a number of other countries in the Middle East, as he believed the world must be “made anew.” “He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair wrote. “In other words, [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”

Journalist and author Robert Parry also suspected these wider ambitions, which had been kept out of earshot of the American public. He wrote:

There have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s — and Israel’s — “enemies” starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.

“Agency of the President”

Cheney once said, “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It’s a nice way to operate, actually.” This is related to the common perception that he was more powerful than the president. “At the minimum, Cheney was a co-equal to Bush and is widely understood to be perhaps the most effective vice president in history,” renowned left-wing journalist Seymour Hersh recently wrote. Kenny pointed out that one of the nicknames Cheney acquired as veep was “’Management,’ as in ‘Better check with management first.’” He wrote:

Former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) described the free hand Cheney appeared to have in his dealings with Congress. “Dick could make a deal,” Gramm told [Barton Gellman], author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. “He didn’t have to check with the president, not as far as I could tell. I’m sure at the end of the day, he would fill the president in on what happened. But Dick had the agency of the president.”

CFR Ties

While Cheney is rightly recognized, even by mainstream standards, as a negative influence on American policies, one important element that’s been widely overlooked in his ties to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a subversive foreign-policy think tank that we like to refer to as the “Deep State nervous system.” Cheney was a CFR life member. He served on its board of directors from 1987 to 1989 and again from 1993 to 1995, and was also its director at one point. Interestingly, he mentioned none of this in his 500-plus-page memoir, In My Time. In 2011, the former Wyoming lawmaker admitted during a visit to CFR headquarters that he had intentionally kept his ties to the organization a secret:

It’s good to be back at the Council on Foreign Relations. I’ve been a member for a long time, and was actually a director for some period of time. I never mentioned that when I was campaigning for reelection back home in Wyoming, but it stood me in good stead.

After his death, the CFR posted a warm tribute to him:

A steadfast steward of the Council, Cheney brought to our community the same seriousness of purpose, strategic insight, and commitment to public service that defined his distinguished career in government and the private sector. Cheney’s decades of leadership — as vice president of the United States, secretary of defense, member of Congress, and senior White House official — reflected a lifetime devoted to strengthening the United States’ national security and its role in the world. The Council is grateful to have counted Cheney as a member, director, and friend. We extend our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones.

Many would disagree with the CFR’s characterization. It’s difficult to see how sacrificing thousands of American lives and racking up debt to pay for overseas wars and fueling legislation that allows the government to spy on Americans have made the country stronger. Cheney was a key architect of the post-9/11 response. And as such, he helped finagle congressional approval for the PATRIOT Act, a wholly un-American piece of legislation that has greatly expanded the government’s ability to surveil Americans. He coordinated amendments with administration officials and reconciled the House and Senate versions. His chief of staff,  Scooter Libby, was also involved in high-level meetings about the act.

Helping Trump?

But there might be one contribution by Cheney that is — for now — still considered a plus. As the folks at The Spectator observed, “Cheney was more responsible for [Donald] Trump’s rise than almost anyone else in the Republican establishment.” How so? Explained The Spectator:

Recall that it was during the 2016 South Carolina primary that Trump first showed his real independence from the folderol surrounding the Iraq War. Trump created shock and awe by denouncing it. “The war in Iraq,” he said, “was a big, fat mistake.” Until then, Republicans had marched in lockstep beneath the George W. Bush banner.

But as much as Cheney did for Trump, the president never returned the favor. In fact, he was instrumental in ousting Cheney’s daughter Liz out of Congress. Before she disappeared into the void of irrelevancy, Liz Cheney had essentially become a Democrat. She eventually showed her true colors and endorsed the Uniparty’s empty vessel, Kamala Harris.

The silver lining is that Dick Cheney’s foreign policy was so disastrous that it turned a massive portion of the American people against neoconservatism. The Cheney effect is still playing out today. Donald Trump is taking a lot of fire from his base for for failing to fully deliver on his campaign promises to not get involved in any foreign wars.

Thank you, Dick Cheney, for showing the American people the repulsiveness of meddling in foreign affairs.

This article was originally published on The New American.

The post History Will Not Be Kind to Dick Cheney appeared first on LewRockwell.

The only hope to save ourselves from Trump’s authoritarianism is mass movements. We must build alternative centers of power — including political parties, media, labor unions and universities — to give a voice and agency to those who have been disempowered by our two ruling parties, especially the working class and working poor. We must carry out strikes to cripple and thwart the abuses carried out by the emerging police state. We must champion a radical socialism, which includes slashing the $1 trillion spent on the war industry and ending our suicidal addiction to fossil fuels, and lift up the lives of Americans cast aside in the wreckage of industrialization, declining wages, a decaying infrastructure and crippling austerity programs.

The Democratic Party and its liberal allies decry the consolidation of absolute power by the Trump White House, the repeated constitutional violations, the flagrant corruption and the deformation of federal agencies— including the Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — into attack dogs to persecute Trump’s opponents and dissidents. It warns that time is running out. But at the same time, it steadfastly refuses to call for mass mobilizations that can disrupt the machinery of commerce and state. It treats the handful of Democratic Party politicians who address social inequality and abuses by the billionaire class — including Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani — as lepers. It blithely ignores the concerns and demands of ordinary Democratic Party voters reducing them to disposable props at rallies, town halls and conventions.

The Democratic Party and the liberal class are terrified of mass movements, fearing, correctly, that they too will be swept aside. They delude themselves that they can save us from despotism as they cling to a dead political formula — mounting vapid, corporate indentured candidates such as Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party candidate and formal naval officer running for Governor in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill. They cling to the vain hope that being against Trump fills the void left by their lack of a vision and abject subservience to the billionaire class.

A Washington Post-ABC News/Ipsos poll, summarized by the Washington Post under the headline, “Voters broadly disapprove of Trump but remain divided on midterms, poll finds” — found that 68 percent of those polled believe the Democrats are out of touch with the aspirations of voters, with 63 percent saying that about Trump.

A “year out from the 2026 midterm elections, there is little evidence that negative impressions of Trump’s performance have accrued to the benefit of the Democratic Party, with voters split almost evenly in their support for Democrats and Republicans,” the Washington Post summary reads.

The liberal class in a capitalist democracy is designed to function as a safety valve. It makes possible incremental reform. But, at the same time, it does not challenge or question the foundations of power. The quid-pro-quo sees the liberal class serve as an attack dog to discredit radical social movements. The liberal class, for this reason, is a useful tool. It gives the system legitimacy. It keeps alive the belief that reform is possible.

The oligarchs and corporations, terrified by the mobilization of the left in the 1960s and 1970s — what political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called America’s “excess of democracy” — set out to build counter-institutions to delegitimize and marginalize critics of capitalism and imperialism. They bought the allegiances of the two ruling political parties. They imposed obedience to neoliberalism within academia, government agencies and the press. They neutered the liberal class and crushed popular movements. They unleashed the FBI on anti-war protestors, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords and other groups that empowered the disempowered. They broke labor unions, leaving 90 percent of the American workforce without union protections. Critics of capitalism and imperialism, such as Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, were blacklisted. The campaign, laid out by Lewis F. Powell Jr. in his 1971 memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” set into motion the creeping corporate coup d’etat, which five decades later, is complete.

The differences between the two ruling parties on substantive issues — such as war, tax cuts, trade deals and austerity — became indistinguishable. Politics was reduced to burlesque, popularity contests between manufactured personalities and acrimonious battles over culture wars. Workers lost protections. Wages stagnated. Debt peonage soared. Constitutional rights were revoked by judicial fiat. The Pentagon consumed half of all discretionary spending.

The liberal class, rather than stand up against the onslaught, retreated into the boutique activism of political correctness. It ignored the vicious class war that would see, under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, around one million workers lose their jobs in mass layoffs linked to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), on top of the estimated 32 million jobs lost due to deindustrialization during the 1970s and 1980s. It ignored blanket government surveillance set up in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. It ignored the kidnapping and torture — “extraordinary rendition” — and imprisoning of terrorism suspects into black sites, along with assassinations, even of U.S. citizens. It ignored the austerity programs that saw social services slashed. It ignored the social inequality that has reached its most extreme levels of disparity in over 200 years, surpassing the rapacious greed of the robber barons.

Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, threw six million people, many of them single mothers, off the welfare rolls within four years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year. But they were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton also slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $14 billion in Medicaid funding. The overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as the abandoned mentally ill.

The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, assured the public it was prudent to entrust life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. In the meltdown of 2008, life savings were gutted. And then these media organizations, catering to corporate advertisers and sponsors, rendered invisible those whose misery, poverty, and grievances should be the principal focus of journalism.

Barack Obama, who raised more than $745 million — much of it corporate money — to run for president, facilitated the looting of the U.S. Treasury by corporations and big banks following the 2008 crash. He turned his back on millions of Americans who lost their homes because of bank repossessions or foreclosures. He expanded the wars begun by his predecessor George W. Bush. He killed the public option — universal health care — and forced the public to buy his defective for-profit ObamaCare — the Affordable Care Act — a bonanza for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

If the Democratic Party was fighting to defend universal health care during the government shutdown, rather than the half measure of preventing premiums from rising for ObamaCare, millions would take to the streets.

The Democratic Party throws scraps to the serfs. It congratulates itself for allowing unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on for-profit health care policies. It passes a jobs bill that gives tax credits to corporations as a response to an unemployment rate that — if one includes all those who are stuck in part-time or lower skilled jobs but are capable and want to do more — is arguably, closer to 20 percent. It forces taxpayers, one in eight of whom depend on food stamps to eat, to fork over trillions to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and endless war, including the genocide in Gaza.

The defenestration of the liberal class reduced it to courtiers mouthing empty platitudes. The safety valve shut down. The assault on the working class and working poor accelerated. So too did very legitimate rage.

This rage gave us Trump.

The historian Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, wrote that fascism is the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism. He saw in our spiritual and political alienation — given expression through cultural hatreds, racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, a demonization of immigrants, misogyny and despair — the seeds of an American fascism.

“They attacked liberalism,” Stern wrote of the supporters of German fascists in his book “The Politics of Cultural Despair,” “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism [laissez-faire capitalism], materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”

Richard Rorty in his last book in 1999, “Achieving Our Country,” also knew where we were headed. He writes:

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words nigger and kike will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

The democratic tools for change — running for office, campaigning, voting, lobbying and petitions — no longer work. Corporate forces and oligarchs have seized control of our political, educational, media and economic systems. They cannot be removed from within.

The Democratic Party is a hollow appendage.

Our captured institutions, subservient to the rich and the powerful, are capitulating to Trump’s authoritarianism. All we have left is sustained non-violent, disruptive civil disobedience. Mass movements. Radical politics. Rebellion. A socialist vision that counters the poison of unfettered capitalism. This alone can thwart Trump’s police state and rid us of the feckless liberal class that sustains it.

This article was originally published on ScheerPost.

The post Trump’s Greatest Ally Is the Democratic Party appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israel is still blocking humanitarian groups from delivering the aid necessary to alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

In an article titled “Not enough tents, food reaching Gaza as winter comes, aid agencies say,” Reuters reports that “Far too little aid is reaching Gaza nearly four weeks after a ceasefire” due to Israeli restrictions preventing aid trucks from getting to their destinations, and that according to an OSHA report last week “a tenth of children screened in Gaza were still acutely malnourished.”

A report from the UK’s Channel 4 News shows warehouses full of food that aid groups say isn’t being allowed into Gaza nearly as rapidly as needed.

In an article titled “‘Under the Guise of Bureaucracy’ — Israel Blocks Humanitarian Groups From Delivering Essential Aid Despite Calm in Gaza,” Israeli outlet Haaretz reports that “Israel has implemented a new procedure requiring all humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza and the West Bank to reapply for official approval, with many denied, despite the relative calm in Gaza following the cease-fire.”

They’re using bureaucratic red tape and arbitrary restrictions to put as much inertia on the effort to rush aid into Gaza as possible. As Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah put it, Israel has “successfully rebranded its genocide as a ‘ceasefire.’”

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Still can’t wrap my head around the fact that internationally renowned activist Greta Thunberg said she was tortured and sexually humiliated by Israeli soldiers when she was abducted for trying to bring aid to starving civilians, and the world just shrugged and moved on.

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It’s so silly when US empire apologists cite “the Monroe Doctrine” to defend US warmongering in Latin America, as though “the entire western hemisphere is our property” is a perfectly legitimate policy to have.

The Monroe Doctrine was just American imperialists telling Europe, “You see all these brown people over here south of our border? These are our brown people. You can do whatever you want to those brown people over there in Africa and Asia, but these brown people over here belong to us. Only we get to dominate and exploit them.”

That’s all it has ever been, and people cite it to justify warmongering toward Venezuela or wherever as though saying “yeah well that’s the Monroe Doctrine” is a complete argument in and of itself. It’s bat shit insane nonsense and it should be rejected in its entirety.

US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous wherever it happens. It always causes immense suffering and instability, it’s always justified by lies, and it never accomplishes what its proponents claim it will accomplish. No amount of bleating the words “Monroe Doctrine” will ever change that.

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The US empire backs genocidal Gulf state monarchies like the UAE and Saudi Arabia because if those states were democratically governed their people would prioritize their own interests over the agendas of the west. They wouldn’t permit US military bases on their territory, and they never would have tolerated Israel and its abuses in the region. Fossil fuel policy would be set without regard for western interests. The entire region could long ago have united into a superpower bloc which rivaled or outmuscled the western power structure using its critical resources and trade routes.

That’s why you see the US and its allies preaching about the values of Freedom and Democracy to the public while privately telling these tyrannical monarchies they can do whatever they want and receive the backing of the imperial machine. Not until their pet tyrant fails to sufficiently kowtow to the interests of the empire does the west suddenly get interested in advancing Freedom and Democracy in their nation.

This is one of the major dynamics at play in Sudan. The United Arab Emirates has been backing the genocidal atrocities of the RSF and the US empire is placing no pressure on them to stop, because that’s part of the deal. As long as the UAE plays along with the agendas of the empire, the empire will tolerate or actively facilitate its abuses.

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I saw a clip of Joe Rogan telling Elon Musk that AI music is his “favorite music now,” gushing about how soulful and moving it is.

Imagine admitting this about yourself in public. AI art is shallow, vapid sensory stimulation made for shallow, vapid people who don’t have enough depth and dimensionality in their consciousness to be moved by profound arisings from the human spirit. They’re just stimulus-response amoebas.

If you tell me you love AI art I won’t try to convince you, I’ll just side-eye you, because while you may not realize it, you are telling me something very revealing about yourself.

People who think AI art is awesome are the AI art of people.

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We’ve all known someone like Israel. Someone who lies and manipulates all the time. Someone who’s always stirring up conflict and acting like the victim. Someone who’s obtained everything they have by stepping on top of others.

Healthy people avoid such individuals like the plague. We have labels that we use to warn others to stay clear of them. Drama queen. Narcissist. Compulsive liar. Sociopath. Manipulator.

Under ordinary circumstances such people gradually find themselves socially alienated by all but the most gullible and malleable codependents, because normal people can’t stand being around them.

Israel is like if everyone was being forced to be that person’s friend at gunpoint. Say nice things to the sociopath and pretend to believe their lies or you’re getting your head blown off.

Nations who oppose Israel’s crimes find themselves in the crosshairs of the imperial war machine. Organizations who oppose Israel’s abuses find themselves smeared, targeted, and proscribed as terrorist groups. Individuals who oppose Israel’s atrocities get fired, slandered, marginalized, censored, and silenced.

The healthy impulse we all have in ourselves to pull away from such loathsome entities is being overridden by brute force. All normal people want to turn against Israel and do whatever is necessary to end its tyranny and abuse, but the imperial institutions are doing everything in their power to coerce them to comply.

That’s the only reason Israel has any remaining support at all. Hopefully someday they won’t even have that.

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The post Israel Is Still Starving Gaza appeared first on LewRockwell.

While the government shutdown continues and health-care reform remains gridlocked, Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) burdens taxpayers with out-of-control costs. For more than a decade, Obamacare has been riddled with systemic fraud that has been denied by Democratic Party bureaucrats, ignored by much of the media, and paid for by weary taxpayers.

Built on lies including “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” Catholics continue to bitterly recall the duplicitous role that Sr. Carol Keehan, CEO of the Catholic Healthcare Association, played in passing Obamacare—despite the pushback by the Catholic bishops because of its inclusion of abortion funding and the contraception mandate. Sr. Keehan’s mendacious shepherding of the health-care program was rewarded with a silver signing pen from President Obama.

Intensifying the pressure today on an already overburdened health-care system, the influx of several million undocumented immigrants has pushed government-funded health care to a breaking point. According to an October 2024 CBO report to Rep. Jodey Arrington, federal and state governments spent $27 billion on Emergency Medicaid for noncitizens ineligible for full Medicaid coverage between 2017 and 2023. In 2023, the estimated cost of health care for undocumented immigrants in the United States was approximately $3.8 billion, specifically for Emergency Medicaid services.

Hospitals are bound by law to provide emergency services to undocumented patients under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), enacted in 1986. This is a federal law that requires hospitals to provide emergency medical care to all individuals, regardless of immigration status or ability to pay. Under EMTALA, any hospital that receives Medicare funding must conduct a medical screening exam for anyone who arrives at the emergency department and must provide stabilizing treatment for emergency medical conditions, including active labor. This mandate applies to undocumented immigrants as well as uninsured citizens and legal residents—and most of us strongly support the provision of this care to all on an emergency basis.

Unfortunately, such care is costly. According to the Trump administration, the estimated cost of emergency health care in 2024—including labor and delivery and postnatal care of the mothers and newborn babies—of undocumented immigrants in the United States rose 142 percent from the year before to an astonishing 9.1 billion dollars of taxpayer funds to pay for the emergency health care of those in the country illegally. Between 2020 to 2024, Medicaid taxpayer health-care dollars provided to illegal immigrants tripled.

Though critics argue that the Trump administration’s numbers are inflated, few challenge the fact that the nation’s hospitals are facing a fiscal crisis. In January 2024, Dr. Donna Lynne, CEO of Denver Health, publicly voiced concern over the financial strain caused by uncompensated care for undocumented individuals. Speaking at a finance and governance committee meeting, she stated, “Where do you think the migrants are getting care? They are getting care at Denver Health…It’s going to break Denver Health in a way that we didn’t even anticipate.” Her remarks highlighted the hospital system’s mounting fiscal challenges, noting that Denver Health treated over 8,000 undocumented immigrants in 2023, accounting for approximately 20,000 visits. Uncompensated care costs surged from $60 million in 2020 to $136 million in 2023.

These expenses will continue to grow even though, according to the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Public Law 104-193), eligibility for Medicaid was intended to be limited to “qualified aliens.” That includes lawful permanent residents (also known as green-card holders), asylum seekers, refugees, and people who are paroled into the United States for one year or more. By designating millions of undocumented illegal immigrants as “paroled into the United States,” the Biden administration effectively redefined the legal status of undocumented immigrants, making them eligible for enrollment in the government-sponsored, taxpayer-funded Affordable Care Act. Illegal immigrants with parole status can choose to enroll in ACA Marketplace plans and can receive premium tax credits and cost-sharing reductions if they meet income requirements—all at the taxpayers’ expense.

This latest “illegal” immigrant health-care scam to gain access to taxpayer-funded ACA Marketplace plans follows one that was exposed by Bloomberg in June 2025, which revealed yet another under-reported Obamacare frontier in health-care fraud. This fraud encouraged deceptive ACA enrollments driven by AI-generated deepfakes of celebrities like Taylor Swift, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Tate. The way the scam worked was to use social media to draw on celebrity deepfakes to promote cash giveaways and ACA-related offers on social media simply for “signing up” for Obamacare. Viewers of the ads were invited to call telemarketing centers where commissions were paid on a per-lead model. The centers then redirected callers to insurance brokers who enrolled them in ACA plans, replete with premium tax credits and taxpayer-subsidized health care well beyond emergency room care—often without their consent or understanding.

Enhance Health was one of the largest brokers enrolling consumers in ACA Marketplace plans, reportedly registering over one million individuals in 2023. Many of the callers to Enhance and other such brokers were enrolled in fully subsidized ACA plans without even realizing they were signing up for health care. According to Georgetown University’s “litigation tracker, Turner et al v. Enhance, LLC et al. was a class action complaint alleging that certain fraudulent and misleading practices by insurance call centers to enroll people into Marketplace plans or switch their coverage constituted violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The fact that many of these “registered” insured individuals did not even exist has recently come to light. A report called “Unpacking the Great Obamacare Enrollment Fraud,” by the Paragon Health Institute, revealed that four to five million fraudulent enrollments occurred in 2024 alone, costing taxpayers $15–26 billion.

As the government shutdown continues, Senate Democrats are using the Working Families Tax Credit and broader Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies as leverage in negotiations. Rejecting stopgap funding bills, the Democrats want a guarantee that the corrupt-ridden ACA health insurance subsidies will be extended—and continue to support the health-care needs of the undocumented immigrants who have been illegally paroled into the country. In contrast, Republicans view the Democrats’ demands as a form of political hostage-taking—holding up government funding in order to push through what they believe are expensive, partisan priorities.  For the Republicans, the recalcitrant Democrats are prioritizing health-care handouts that will deepen the deficit and reward those who refuse to work.

It is clear that the Affordable Care Act is riddled with subsidies, political spin, and outright fraud, but even Republicans acknowledge that the system is cracking. Whether Democrats call it compassion or Republicans call it corruption, the reckoning is here, and reform is no longer a choice—it’s a necessity.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post The Fraud That Won’t Die: Obamacare’s Endless Deceptions appeared first on LewRockwell.

Crazed with resentment after Trump’s win last November, they decided nothing less than the term “Nazi” would do. You know who “they” are: The New York Times, The New Yorker, protesters funded by George Soros like Antifa, furious left-wing types, Hollywood lefties, and other such kinds. Enough said about these people. They’re the types who always look unhappy.

The Nazis are referred to as the greatest killers of all time. This is universally acknowledged but factually untrue; they are far down the list of great killers after Mao, Stalin (adored by the left), and a few Mongol chiefs. This is how I picture it in my mind: A roomful of ugly men and very homely women are meeting and are desperate to invent a crime committed by The Donald. “Eureka,” cries out a trans freak, “he’s a Nazi.” The room goes quiet, and then all hell breaks loose. It’s perfect, and everyone agrees that from now on Trump will be referred to as a Nazi. The meeting ends with smiles and congratulations all around.

“The fact that The Donald won an election and both houses plus the popular vote keeps him jolly while the anti-Trumpers seethe.”

Vilified by the left as an Epstein-like monster, but also a Nazi, The Donald does not seem to give a damn. The fact that he won an election and both houses plus the popular vote keeps him jolly while the anti-Trumpers seethe. The Nazi label, however, has worked, especially among those in the media whose dyslexia with originality is well-known. Capitalism has also come under attack, simply because The Donald is the quintessential capitalist. And so they cry and wail that the blond Nazi has reduced our values to financial ones alone. This is news to me, a naive young Greek who all these years believed that America was a socialist haven that became the richest country in the world because it forced people to be equal where wealth was concerned.

Never mind. All this is caused by desperation by those who do not believe in freedom. The fact that Trump won fair and square is unacceptable to them, because they know better, just like Stalin and Lenin and Mao did. All those unfunny but overpaid TV late-night comedians and those dumb gel-haired men and women who read the news over the networks know better than John Q. Public, and they resent that their opinions were ignored by the great unwashed last November. They are those who write editorials in papers like the Times and for the networks that preach to us, the stupid, that a man can become a woman and vice versa. But now we are living in an era of backlash against DEI; thus calling anyone we disagree with a Nazi is starting to feel very old hat. Actually it sounds childish, the kind of thing some black career criminal calls the cop who’s arresting him for mugging and injuring a very old lady. Nazi has become disposable.

But enough said about the lefty media. Normal, Democrat voting folk are flummoxed that The Donald keeps winning when they find his views so despicable. And it’s happening all over the place. Javier Milei has just won big in his midterms down Argentine way, a great surprise after he had squeezed them until they cried, while conservative populists have won in Poland and Czechia. The globalist elite who meet in Davos and Brussels and know that they know better than the rest of us have not only failed to bring prosperity with their programs; they have also failed miserably to invest in cultural harmony among the voters. Poles and Hungarians are proud of their legacy and culture, and resent the fact that the global elite consider them and some Nigerian wife-beater to be one and the same. In rainy old Britain the fact that you can say anything as long as you’re brown or black, but you go straight to the pokey if you say something against the government and you’re white, has the newly formed Reform party under the great Nigel Farage way up in front in the polls. The trouble is there are four years to go before an election, and as the saying goes, two weeks is a long time in politics.

Ever since the 1940s, institutional arrangements were designed to ensure the voters have no say in what they really want. The administrative state knew better, and to hell with those dumb voters. Europe and the European Union started it, and America followed. No longer, thanks to Donald Trump. This is the real reason why so many elites are going bonkers. A dumb blond from Queens with a long red necktie is curtailing their power. What they don’t see or admit is that finally democracy is working, but they’re not about to take it lying down. I’ll keep you posted.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post Like It or Nazi appeared first on LewRockwell.

As we related in our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19, just before Dr. McCullough departed to Washington D.C. for his Senate testimony on November 19, 2020, he had a disturbing conversation with his church pastor, Andrew Forrest.

“We don’t understand what’s happening in our world,” McCullough explained. “My YouTube videos about early treatment were taken down, and then my planned WebEx conference with an Australian MP about treatment was hacked. Now my hospital administrators are acting like I’m out of line for accepting a U.S. Senator’s invitation to testify about the disease. It’s as though, for the first time in history, our medical system is opposed to caring for the sick. What on earth is going on?”

Andrew wasn’t at all surprised.

“There are times when evil prevails over good in a large way,” he said. “We know from the dark periods of history that this has happened before, and now it’s happening again. What you describe is Satan working in the hearts and minds of people, sowing fear, confusion, and anger. All you can do is keep trying to do good until it turns the tide. For your Senate speech, your message must be joyous and happy and clear, uncluttered by negative emotion. That way you will let the light of God shine forth in this darkness.

At the time Dr. McCullough told me this story, I thought that Pastor Forrest was being melodramatic. Surely, I thought, what he was describing was ordinary human fear and stupidity, and not the work of a supernatural being—a malevolent spirit called “Satan.”

Since then, I have been increasingly drawn to the conclusion that Pastor Forrest was onto something.

Even if one rejects the idea of the devil as a supernatural spirit that actually exists, a rational and impartial observer will still marvel at how large masses of humans will suddenly—as if infected with a spiritual contagion—participate in an irrational and highly destructive enterprise.

In researching my forthcoming book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions, I examined how the “Devil” has been depicted in literature going back to the Bible.

The Greek word for devil, diábolos, means “the one who divides.” The English word “diabolic” comes from the Greek verb diabollein, which means “to tear apart.”

In addition to “tearing apart,” the devil is also often portrayed as a “destroyer.” In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles famously introduces himself as follows:

Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint!
Und das mit Recht; denn alles was entsteht
Ist werth daß es zu Grunde geht;

I am the spirit that constantly negates!
And rightly so; for everything that comes into being,
Deserves to be destroyed;

This morning, I thought of this famous German play when I read the news that Germany has rejected Russia’s offer of a non-aggression guarantee for EU & NATO. The German government wants to escalate.

In recent years, ranking members of the U.S. and E.U. governments have asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin is hellbent on reconstituting something like the old Soviet empire in Eastern and Central Europe. We are told that Putin aspires to occupy Berlin just like the Red Army did with the fall of the Third Reich in 1945.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov refuted this claim last week at the Third Minsk International Conference in Belarus. He stated that Russia would be happy to enter into a non-aggression pact. As he put it.

We have repeatedly said that we had, and have, no intention to attack any current NATO or EU member. We are ready to enshrine this position in future security guarantees for this part of Eurasia.

Germany rejected Lavrov’s offer out of hand. This was in keeping with NATO’s rejection in the fall of 2021 of Russia’s proposal for a Ukrainian neutrality deal. As NATO secretary Jens Stoltenberg told the EU Parliament in a video-recorded statement.

In the autumn of 2021, Russia actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what they sent us, and that was a precondition for not invading Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

Given the resounding success of the Austrian neutrality deal of 1955, which resulted in Red Army withdrawing from the country and respecting Austrian neutrality ever since, it was obvious to me that an Austrian-style neutrality deal was by far the best arrangement for Ukraine.

I know about Austrian neutrality because I lived in the country for a total of fifteen years. Neutrality has been an enormous blessing for Austria and was a key reason for Vienna’s cosmopolitan, open, laid back atmosphere until 2020, when the Austrian government was captured by the globalist gangsters who ran the pandemic response.

If the West had accepted the Russian proposal for a Ukrainian neutrality deal, and the Russians subsequently violated it, then the West would have had a clear casus belli. Consider the extreme irrationality of what was implied in the rejection of Ukrainian neutrality, which can be expressed as follows.

We cannot accept Russia’s proposal for Ukrainian neutrality because if Russia later violates it, we will have to go to war with Russia. It’s better to go to war with Russia now instead of risking the possibility of having to go to war with Russia later.

This was the same diabolic “logic” that was applied during the pandemic, when hospitalized COVID-19 patients were denied ivermectin because—according to hospital administrators—taking ivermectin could be “dangerous.” As one brave nurse put it in a video about this atrocity,

How could trying ivermectin be worse than dying of COVID-19?

The assertion “Vladimir Putin aspires to conquer Europe” resembles the following false and contradictory propositions that have long been a feature of public discourse in the West.

• The Earth is burning up from human induced climate change, even though there is much evidence that the earth has, at various times in the past, been much hotter than it is today. After insisting for decades that the earth would become uninhabitable due to human-induced climate change, Bill Gates recently proclaimed that it wouldn’t. This may have something to do with the fact that he is going to need a hell of a lot more electrical power to get a return on his recent, massive investments in A.I.
• Race is an essential feature of one’s identity, and racism is systemic. This became evident to millions during the U.S. presidency of Barack Obama, a black man who somehow persuaded racist America to elect him president.
• White Nationalists pose a major threat to American society, even though though they have no money and occupy no notable positions in the government, military, media, education, the entertainment industry, or the financial industry.
• American society contains many minority victim groups. Individuals who identify with these groups should be given preferential treatment and be promoted to positions of power so that the powerful people who appointed them can signal their virtue.
• Sexual ‘orientation’ is an essential feature of one’s identity, and one should express this in public—unless one is ‘cisgender’ and ‘heteronormative’ in one’s sexual ‘orientation.’
• Donald Trump is a fascist in league with Vladimir Putin. A U.S. president must seek war with Russia instead of seeking peaceful and cooperative endeavors that would benefit both the American and Russian people. Peace is war.
• SARS-CoV-2 must be contained with lockdowns, masks, and social distancing, even though—as Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell correctly pointed out in March 2020—the virus had already spread far beyond being contained.
• Early treatment for COVID-19 must be suppressed at all costs. It’s better for patients to die in hospital instead of taking FDA-approved drugs for early home treatment to avoid dying in hospital.
• Policemen are agents of systemic racism; George Floyd was martyred by one. Everyone must stay at home to prevent the spread of Covid unless they wish to participate in a BLM riot.
• Everyone must get the COVID-19 vaccine, even if they have already had the illness, and even though the vaccine doesn’t stop infection and transmission. Adolescent males are not at a significant risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis, even though thousands have been diagnosed with vaccine-induced myocarditis—a side effect officially acknowledged by the CDC.
• Gender dysphoria is common among minors and should be medically treated with hormones and surgery, even though it is has long been generally recognized that minors do not have sufficient awareness and judgement to make major irrevocable decisions, and are not allowed to consume alcohol until they are 21-years old.
• Though modern medicine can ‘transition’ or ‘reassign’ a human from one sex to the other, there is no such thing as ‘biological’ sex. That said, ‘transitioning’ from one’s ‘assigned’ sex to the other requires receiving high doses of hormones and surgeries that cost millions of dollars.

All of the above assertions—which are Articles of Faith among tens of millions in the West—are false. In my forthcoming book Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions—I examine the origins of these false propositions and the powerful people who have propagated them.

In the case of Russia, it is the U.S. government that has sought a military confrontation, and not the other way around. While the U.S. government continues to insist it is forbidden for Russia to deploy military forces against Ukraine to protect Russian national security, the U.S. government is currently preparing for possible military action against Venezuela on the grounds that the Venezuelan government is injuring U.S. national security.

This kind of conduct recalls the famous rhetorical question, “Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the plank in your own eye?”

Since 2014 at the latest, U.S. military-intelligence complex has systematically baited Russia to invade Ukraine with the aspiration that Russia would sink into an Afghanistan-style quagmire. As Hillary Clinton put it in a Feb. 2022 MSNBC interview with Rachel Maddow.

Remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980. It didn’t end well for the Russians…but the fact is, that a very motivated, and then funded, and armed insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan.

Clinton didn’t stop to think that the collateral damage to the Ukrainian people would be astronomical. She also didn’t stop to think that the U.S. funded and armed Mujahideen—guys like Osama bin Laden who didn’t serve the U.S. very well after their adventure in Afghanistan.

As for what would happen to the Ukrainian people and Ukrainian soldiers, it was clear from Clinton’s interview that she hadn’t given them the slightest thought. Her affect and statements reminded me of how Edmund Burke characterized the Jacobins in his essay, Reflections on the Revolution in France:

They have perverted in themselves and in those who listen to them all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.

The hard-hearted lunatics who run U.S. and E.U. foreign policy are delighted for the Ukrainians to fight Russia to the death of every Ukrainian man. Some Ukrainian soldiers have realized that this is happening, and they have recorded videos of themselves expressing despair as they are sent to a certain death on the front. Yesterday I saw such a video and it instantly brought me to tears.

Another conspicuous feature of the guys who run the U.S. and E.U. is their habit of accusing people of doing what they themselves are doing and aspiring to do. Psychologists call this “projection,” and it is a common habit among psychopaths.

A historical irony—perhaps even a paradox—lies at the heart of our current state of affairs in the West. When I was in graduate school I read a lot of literature about Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Dostoevsky’s Demons and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita depict the devil visiting Russia and possessing its spirit. The latter novel inspired Mick Jagger to write “Sympathy for the Devil,” with the sinister lines.

Stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Tsar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain

I rode a tank, held a general’s rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank

I wonder if, after destroying Russia between 1917-1991, the Devil departed that ruined country and took up residence in the West, which he found easy to possess because our Cold War victory resulted in us becoming arrogant, ignorant, and complacent.

We in the West have long been in the habit of assuming that we are the good guys, but are we really?

Is it possible that—for all their faults—the Russians are now the defenders of Western Civilization, while our leaders in the West are its destroyers?

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Are the U.S. and E.U. Governments Satanic? appeared first on LewRockwell.

On the surface Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York supports my contention that American democracy  has become  riven with faction and left-wing ideology and has become dysfunctional.  See this.

Mamdani’s agenda of rent freezes, city-run non-profit grocery stores, more taxes on the rich, free subways, reduced police presence, and the rest of his promised handouts to the unproductive brings the redistributive character of US democracy to the breaking point at which the productive leave a city where public safety is declining along with the rewards to work and responsible behavior.

Will we see “Escape from New York” or on the other hand, perhaps Mamdani is just a political opportunist riding the rise of the woke era to personal riches from the kickbacks from the New York building trades’ profits from building his affordable public housing to fill the role of private-supplied housing blocked by Mamdani’s rent controls.

America’s founding fathers were aware of the dangers of faction that democracy brings, and they were aware of the tendency of mobs to seize property and of the tendency of females to make emotive instead of rational decisions.  To hinder and to delay the impact of these destabilizing tendencies, the founding fathers restricted democracy to the judgment of male property owners.

As years passed the protective shields that made democracy functional were removed.  The appointment of US senators by state legislators to insure that the senators represented their states and not the interests of national lobbies that provide campaign funds was removed, and the Senate, like the House, became subject to demagogic elections often determined by slander, fraud, and vote-buying.  Weak men gave in and bestowed the vote on women.  It made little difference for a long time, because men still predominated in societal institutions.  But as Helen Andrews reports, in the US all societal institutions have now been feminized. See here.

The goal of excluding “toxic males” from societal decision-making has largely succeeded.  The replacement of men by women has dramatically reduced the birth rate in all Western societies. As women choose career over motherhood, calls intensify for more non-white immigration to fill the gap from the declining white birth rate.  If this trend continues, white ethnicities will disappear, as Jean Raspail predicted they would.  It seems that my generation and perhaps the one that followed are the last to experience life in the context of Western civilization.

Over the course of my life I have watched the decline in the legal protections of defendants, and I have watched the rise of status-based privileges push aside equality under law.  See, for example, my books, The Tyranny of Good Intentions and The New Color Line.  These books had enthusiastic reviews from the right people and places, but failed to slow down, much less halt, the collapse of American society into disunity and status-based law.

New York, once the financial capital of the world, has fallen, according to the narrative, to the communist agenda of an immigrant-invader from Kampala, Uganda.  But perhaps that is only Mamdani’s pose assumed in our woke era to gain  access to wealth that comes from the political award of contracts.  Regardless, the electorate’s choice of Mamdani shows a complete change in outlook and a Democrat Party that has moved outside the American tradition.

I remember when the Democrats’ political constituency consisted of the poor and the working class, now disparaged as “the Trump deplorables.”  Today the Democrats’ political constituency is college-educated women and weak men who have accepted their subordination in the interest of a career.  Whereas once Democrats focused on confiscating income and wealth from the successful (who were referred to as “fortunate”) and redistributing it to the unsuccessful (called “less fortunate”), they now confiscate the earnings and wealth of citizens to support immigrant-invaders.   This and other such word tricks pushed the questions of merit and citizenship out of the picture.  For women the issue was one of the caring against the hard-hearted. See here. 

Today Democrat political constituencies are focused on redistributing the incomes of American citizens to illegal aliens.  Not only do Americans who support themselves also support 42 million Americans who do not or who are gaming the system, they also support the 14 million immigrant-invaders that the Obama and Biden regimes policy of open borders imported into America.

While these devastating trends were developing, Wall Street and corporate executives exported American manufacturing jobs to Asia and Mexico, thereby dismantling the ladders of upward mobility that had made the US an opportunity society.  Today the focus of the Democrat Party is on opportunity for immigrant-invaders.  Democrats fight tooth and nail to prevent the federal government from deporting illegals.  Indeed, Democrats want illegals to have voting rights, and Democrat judges have ruled that proof of citizenship is unnecessary in order to vote.  Essentially, Democrats have no conception of the United States as a nation.  Indeed, they are hostile to those who think that citizenship and the US Constitution have meaning, dismissing both as tools of white supremacists.

Where liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and leftists went horribly wrong was in assuming that government was an independent institution.  The liberal-left imagined government as a moral institution that redistributed ill-gotten wealth from those who stole it to the deserving poor from whom it was stolen.  The conservative-libertarian contingent saw government as a threat to private property, merit, and individual freedom.  No one saw if for what it is:  an instrument for political and material interests to use to further their agendas and their fortunes.

The “public interest” is a false narrative.  No one serves any such interest.  Government is a privatized institution that serves private interests.  It is fought over because it can bestow on favored factions the incomes of others.  The Party in control gets to hand out the money.  That is the only important issue.

Today in America the welfare class supported by the work force is 25% of the size of the work force. If the Democrats win the battle over illegals, and Obama and Biden’s 14 million illegals are added to the 42 million welfare class, those dependent on the incomes of the work force rise to one-third the size of the work force.

With the advent of AI and robotics, the outlook for working Americans seems bleak.  If the unemployment from AI predicted by experts is accurate, most of the US work force will be without jobs.  Who then supports the welfare class enlarged by illegal immigration?

Elon Musk said that the advent of AI brings with it communism as the earnings of AI will have to be redistributed to the population in order that people will have the money to sustain their lives by purchasing the products of AI produced goods and services.

What we seem to be facing is a social revolution brought by technology.  There is very little awareness and discussion of this massive challenge to human society.  If it comes upon unprepared populations, the result will be chaotic, especially in the Western World where white ethnicities are demonized as racists and exploiters of people of color.  The white populations will be the first to be exterminated in order to reduce the claim on resources.

In the Democrat mind, freedom today means the suppression of freedom.  Freedom of speech is racist and hurtful. Freedom of protest and association is a plot for insurrection if it is done by aversive racists.  Family values are suppressive of women.  Citizenship is non-inclusive.  A common language, mores, and history are suppressive of multiculturalism and diversity.  Nothing that once defined an American is acceptable in the era of wokeness.

For all practical purposes, the USA is being erased.

The post The Times They Are a-Changin appeared first on LewRockwell.