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Voters have always supported the politicians who they have recognized are offering the most freedom.

George Washington’s Federalist Party offered the force to keep the British government away. Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party offered continuing independence but also more freedom than the war-supporting Federalists. Andrew Jackson’s and Martin Van Buren’s Democratic Party offered smaller governments, no central banking, and no debt. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party offered freedom from slavery. Ronald Reagan offered freedom from 1970s inflation.

Voters have a system problem. Since the dawn of Progressive control, starting in 1894, the USA has not had a small-government major party. Fortunately for us, system design is a strong suit for Elon Musk.

Voters also have an off-the-shelf solution ready to use. The Constitution has rules to limit governments’ powers. The Constitution gives these rules force with elegant, multiple layers of sanctions: powers are separated and offsetting, so each separated power will limit others.

But from the founding of the nation until now, no party has been chartered to have an analogous constitution, so that at least one party and its representatives will be limited too. It’s high time that we create at least one such party.

A party that’s limited by a party constitution will be a major, credible advance.

A party constitution will be effective for limiting the party, and this in turn will make the Constitution effective for limiting the governments, because a party is a radically-smaller, much-more-controllable system. A party’s only appropriate power is to help its grassroots voters select good people to run for political offices. Good people will then turn and use their constitutional powers to limit others in governments.

Voters have been choosing between lesser evils, and what they’ve been getting left with has still been evil. Voters know that; voters live through that. Voters haven’t been able to see that they’ve had credible good options.

Elon Musk could easily get overpowered by donations from the cronies who are supported by our massive governments. Musk needs to spend well. Fighting it out in primaries—running cage matches to the political death, under the Republican Party’s rules of engagement, up against well-stocked cronies’ war chests—would be fighting at a severe disadvantage. It’s not desirable. And it’s not necessary. There’s a ready bypass.

A good party won’t need money to get people to hear about it. It won’t need money to smear opponents or scare voters.

Just underwrite the work of achieving and maintaining ballot access for a good party. Ballot access has been proven for years to be achievable, by various lightly-funded parties and independents in various races.

Voters are more than ready to vote for the candidates of a good party.

What voters need to see is that a party will be running candidates across the board in general elections, and that those candidates can be counted on to increase freedom.

Such a party won’t really be a third party; it will be the lynchpin of the second major party.

The dominant major party is the Progressives, who are made up of all Democrats and most Republicans. The second major party is the constitutionalists.

Currently, the constitutionalists’ ranks are being decimated by going along with Trump. Despite this, most Freedom Caucus members and allies would caucus with a constitutionalist party’s politicians. A new party need not fight for and take all the Republican-held territory at the outset. Most all of the people who have wavered would turn back and work seamlessly alongside a constitutionalist new party’s politicians.

The Constitution makes all the necessary actions legal, feasible, and ready to implement. Politicians who actually follow the Constitution will limit governments from day one, increasing freedom.

The Dutch Republic, and then the British Isles, and then the USA each proved spectacularly that an underdog’s resources can lead the world, given the right ideas and approaches.

Constitution support. Ballot access. The keys to a next surge up in freedom are well within reach for Elon Musk, and for we the people. Now, in our time, let’s get this done!

The post Elon Musk, Just Deliver Constitution Support and Ballot Access appeared first on LewRockwell.

Right next to our college in India stood a temple dedicated to Rani Sati, a woman who committed sati—ritual self-immolation—sometime between the 13th and 17th centuries. The vagueness of the date is telling: Indians—like much of the Third World—did not historically maintain systematic records. The British compiled much of what is known about India’s past, including the lives of its so-called great kings.

Civilizations such as Greece, Rome, and China preserved detailed historical records to extract moral lessons and maintain a sense of continuity. India, by contrast, relied on scattered oral traditions and myths, offering no stable chronology or critical framework.

Without the civilizational anchors of truth-seeking, introspection, and hence a shared moral vocabulary, society was fixated on short-term gain, blind to history’s causes and consequences. Change was viewed not as a moral necessity, but as a threat to the established order. It was Groundhog Day.

Avoiding Western terms—such as justice, truth, honor, fairness, honesty, and system—when explaining India is challenging. Yet, using these words clouds your understanding of its amorality. You are trying to judge an alien culture by Western standards—projecting rather than understanding. These Western concepts hold little meaning in the Indian context. Employing them traps the Western mind in dualities—good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice—while the Indian amoral mindset lacks such binary distinctions. It acts on what is expedient and what maximizes resource acquisition. There is no inner compass, only the shifting logic of the moment.

In such a culture, the abused does not seek redress but instead redirects the injury downward—toward someone weaker—to restore balance or secure advantage. Moral outrage is absent; in its place is a servile ingratiation. As Western ideals circulate today, this mindset stands in uneasy contradiction with imported, superficial notions of dignity and justice—values loudly professed but not internalized. The result is psychological fragmentation: the individual is unmoored, neither grounded in India’s past nor receptive to the ethical demands of the West. Whatever space once existed for moral growth, self-examination, or feedback has been buried beneath a polished, hollow modernity.

The amorality that characterizes Indian society can be traced to its religious landscape. Far from a coherent system of faith or values, Indian religiosity resists unified doctrine and clings to fragmented, local rituals and symbolic acts, divorced from introspection or ethical inquiry.

It is worth asking where Rani Sati fits within the so-called Hindu pantheon. Growing up, few people I knew identified as “Hindu.” Instead, they followed local deities, family gods, or regional traditions. The very idea of “Hinduism” as a unified religion was a colonial construction—an abstract category that was still slowly filtering into Indian consciousness. In reality, there was no singular pantheon, no coherent system. The transition to this manufactured identity met little resistance because Indian religions were not grounded in commandments, moral doctrines, or values comparable to those in the Abrahamic faiths or classical Western philosophy.

One casualty of this misguided fusion—based on the false assumption of a moral foundation—has been the widespread misunderstanding of Indian religiosity, both by outsiders and, increasingly, by Indians themselves. What remained became confused and performative: rituals were preserved, but their symbolic gestures were mistaken for signs of a moral system. Over time, people even projected a structure where none existed. Yet the defining feature of “Hinduism” has been precisely the absence of structure, consistency, or doctrine.

Every morning, at random intervals through the day, and again in the evening, the temple beside our college rang its high-pitched bells for hours, disrupting our studies. No one dared question the noise lest they offend the sanctity of Rani Sati. On the contrary, students regularly visited the temple to seek her blessings.

I urged my peers to report the disturbance, but none supported me. When I went to the police station alone, I was laughed at. This unquestioning reverence—untouched by moral reflection—reveals something deeper about Indian religiosity: a resistance to introspection, a total reliance on ritual, and a deliberate evasion of reason and ethical inquiry.

I bore no ill will toward Rani Sati, but I struggled to find virtue in worshipping someone whose defining act was self-immolation. It is hard to believe she acted out of love, for love, as an individual or moral sentiment, does not exist in India. Relationships are shaped not by emotional truth or duty but by transaction, hierarchy, and the pursuit of advantage. Devotion, in such a society, is not love but submission, driven by fear, conformity, and peer pressure.

This confusion between spirituality and cultural identity runs deep. What passes for religion in India is a tangled web of tribal loyalties, superstition, and spectacle. It does not elevate the soul or inquire into the good of society—it enforces obedience and chases personal, material reward. The temple is no sanctuary of truth but a stage for ego, display, and appeasement.

Spirituality requires stillness, solitude, and moral courage. But Indian religiosity, rooted in noise and fear, drowns out the possibility of self-examination. The divine is not encountered but outsourced to rituals, intermediaries, and idols that absolve the individual of responsibility.

Indian religions distract the individual with hierarchy and ritual. This externalized obedience bleeds into all domains of life. Cultural identity, mistaken for faith, creates an illusion of depth: one feels devout without honesty, righteous without wrestling with right and wrong. Belonging replaces belief. Ritual replaces revelation. To preserve itself, the system breaks the individual and infuses him—through the social process—with a deep and enduring inferiority complex.

By contrast, Western religious traditions—especially the Judeo-Christian legacy—emphasized moral accountability, truth, and the sanctity of individual conscience. Sin was internal, demanding confession, repentance, and reform, not mere performance. God was obeyed, not bribed. Prayer was a striving for alignment with the good, the true, and the just, not a transactional plea for worldly gain.

Regardless of belief, these traditions cultivated habits of self-reflection, ethical consistency, and justice. The Western individual, though imperfect, was trained to ask: Am I right? A mind shaped by expedience and shielded by relativism asks instead: Am I successful? Am I secure within my herd? This is not to deny Western failings, but their sins were, at least, subject to frameworks of truth and justice.

Without a metaphysical anchor, Indian religiosity is entirely instrumental and focused on outcomes, rather than ethics. And if one avoids projecting Western standards of objectivity or moral duality, it becomes clear that ethics is not even part of the framework. Education and careers are entangled with superstition and divine bargaining. Without a concept of sin, personal growth is impossible—only compliance, fear, and endless cycles of blame and appeasement.

Human beings need anchors. When the inner structure of reason, conscience, and moral imagination is absent, they reach for substitutes—idols, babas, celebrities, and rituals. But these are unstable external props. Lacking the stillness required for introspection, they drown in noise, distraction, chaos, and even overpowering smells and colors. There is no pause, no silence, no integration of experience.

The psyche is slippery—nothing sticks. He cannot process memory, reflect on meaning, or make principled decisions. He can only “learn” dos and don’ts—rules that, shaped by his subjective mental framework, are fleeting and must be continually reinforced through fear.

Identity clings to whatever is near: caste, crowd, religion, or trend. But these are themselves unstable, volatile, impersonal, and ever-shifting. The result is chronic instability, a kind of mass neurosis. What passes for religious fervor or national pride is only fear and disorientation in disguise.

Without inner substance, the human being is the perfect subject for manipulation by superstition, politics, and mass culture. He lives in a state of low-grade psychological panic yet lacks the language, tools, or quietude to name it. He suffers from chronic anxiety—and yet, having never examined causality or consequence, and shaped by fatalism, he can appear strangely confident, unbothered, even indifferent in situations that would drive future-oriented people to paranoia.

At a civilizational level, this absence of inner anchoring creates a gravitational pull toward the lowest common denominator. In the absence of a rational and moral fabric, nothing is sustainable. Financial and intellectual capital dissipate rather than accumulate. Forget building, inventing, or improving—what is received, even on a silver platter, cannot be maintained. Entropy becomes the only law.

But the irrationality of belief was only part of the decay. The social environment offered no refuge; it was a crucible of cruelty. In a culture governed by ritual and hierarchy, cruelty becomes casual—a way to assert dominance in a system that rewards submission and punishes integrity. This moral incoherence seeps into interpersonal life, where violence is not an aberration but a rite of passage, repeated without shame or memory of its origin.

I saw this most vividly at university.

Freshers were routinely subjected to physical and sexual abuse by senior students. They were forced to keep their eyes fixed on the ground in the presence of seniors and treated as subhuman. Often woken late at night and summoned to common areas, they endured humiliation and violence under the guise of “ragging.” The abusers—once victims themselves—perpetuated the violence without guilt. No internal compass told them they were wrong; only tradition assured them they were entitled.

The acts were degrading and brutal: some were made to urinate on live electric wires, fondle each other, or masturbate publicly. Forced anal sex was not unheard of. Many suffered lasting physical harm—one student lost an eye; others sustained permanent damage to their eardrums. Yet this cruelty was rationalized as a method of “mentally strengthening” the victims.

These were not isolated incidents of youthful sadism. They revealed something deeper: how violence, if normalized, is self-sustaining. When those same individuals became seniors, I appealed to them to break the cycle. I reminded them of their own humiliation and urged them not to inflict the same pain on others. They responded with blank stares—and the chilling rationale that they needed “an outlet” for their rage. When I suggested directing that rage toward the seniors who had once violated them, they couldn’t comprehend the idea.

Retaliation was never upward—it was always downward. Those who suffered did not seek justice, truth, or moral redress; they redirected the harm. Victims of scams or theft did not express righteous indignation. Instead, they focused on recouping their losses by scamming someone else. Being wronged was not a call to conscience but a cue to find someone weaker to exploit.

This was a civilizational absence of moral causality. Wrongdoing did not awaken the conscience; suffering did not lead to reflection. Pain taught nothing. It simply repeated itself.

This pattern—harm without introspection, pain without principle—permeated every stratum of Indian society. Injustice persisted not despite education and wealth, but often because of them. Trauma did not soften—it brutalized. Lacking moral frameworks, suffering did not ennoble; it degraded.

What remains is tribalism. In the university, the workplace, the village, or the slum—the same logic prevails: protect yourself, crush the weak, conform, or be cast out. Relationships are not governed by conscience but by group identity and fear. The dynamics I witnessed among elite students were indistinguishable from those in the most desperate corners of the country. Privilege did not civilize; it merely weaponized cruelty with greater sophistication.

People often define “karma” in poetic terms. But what I witnessed was a mechanical continuation of abuse, zero-sum thinking, and a complete absence of justice or fairness. It was the life of an automaton—reactive, unconscious, and morally vacant. Consciousness itself seemed to be missing.

The colonial institutions—bureaucracy, courts, police—meant to restrain such decay and structured to enforce the rule of law had been upended, hollowed out, and repurposed for ends precisely opposed to their original design. Shaped by and dependent on the same unjust, irrational, and amoral culture, they functioned not to deliver justice but to preserve appearances. Their goal was not resolution but equilibrium. Bribes replaced law; silence replaced accountability. Atomized and mistrustful, each person was left to fend for themselves in a society that rewarded conformity over conscience and cunning over truth.

Even in school, the rot was evident. If one student erred, the entire class was punished. Authority served not justice but domination. Teachers routinely abused their power, coercing students into taking private tuition or openly demanding bribes. This wasn’t in some obscure rural school, but my prestigious missionary institution. One teacher, whose home I visited for tuition, casually assigned us household chores. Trapped in her house, I would be asked to fetch her shoes.

Did the priests of the school—some of whom were decent men—truly not know? Or did they, like many others in India, turn away from the corruption beneath their roof?

In India, one quickly learns a harsh truth: anyone who can steal will. It doesn’t matter how much they are paid—or perhaps it does, since higher salaries often fuel greater greed. Bureaucrats began demanding larger bribes as their compensation increased. Dismissing someone for theft is rarely considered; doing so would make daily functioning impossible. In households and institutions alike, theft is not regarded as a moral failure—it is simply another cost of doing business.

By degrees, an image began to form in me: India as an amoral, materialistic society devoid of virtue. Immediate desire was all that mattered. The harm one’s actions caused others was irrelevant. No shared ethical language existed—no sense of justice, fairness, or moral repair. Animalistic instincts reigned, thinly veiled by a crumbling veneer of British formality and borrowed civility.

Living in the UK, I encountered a culture where institutions—however imperfectly—tried to protect the weak, where religion demanded personal transformation, and where truth was not a luxury but a duty. There was often someone, somewhere, who stood for what was right, anchored in fairness, truth, and a shared moral compass.

It became clear that without sane, rational, and ethical leadership, India would not merely stagnate—it would regress. Its institutions and society were already unraveling, slipping back into a pre-colonial wilderness where brute force and superstition replaced reason and law. India’s tragedy is not primarily economic or political but spiritual and moral. What haunts the country is not poverty but the normalization of vice: the ability to witness cruelty without protest, to steal without guilt, to obey without reflection, and to worship without love.

There is no shortage of temples, rituals, or gods, but the inner life is absent. Without a concept of sin, there is no redemption. Without truth, no justice. Without the courage to stand alone, no conscience. In such a society, neither reform nor revolution is possible—only repetition.

India’s thinkers and leaders often invoke the past with pride, but it is precisely the past they must be freed from. What is needed is not a return to some imagined cultural greatness but a civilizational break: a turn toward reason, truth, and moral introspection. India does not, for now, need more scientists or engineers; it requires an education in the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of truth, and the discipline of moral courage.

Alas, no one has yet found a path to this awakening—only a roulette wheel of centuries spinning in vain hope that suffering will, eventually, give rise to conscience. Perhaps India is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be accepted—a society shaped by the absence of inner anchors. It is what it is.

Contrary to what Christian missionaries once believed, nothing may be done. What the West often projects as dysfunction is, more precisely, the absence of the moral architecture it unconsciously takes for granted. When it ceases to project, it may begin to see more clearly—and recognize that India cannot be changed by top-down means. It may even begin to ask whether India needs to change at all.

To expect self-correction where no introspective mechanism exists or to demand progress where entropy reigns is to misread both India and the limits of cultural universality. Without inner transformation—without conscience, reason, and courage—even the systems cannot hold, however inherited or imposed.

The post India: Idols Without Conscience appeared first on LewRockwell.

Trump and his bosses in Tel Aviv has taken one step closer to World War III.  Although Trump has negotiated a ceasefire with Tehran, it is only a temporary solution, not an end to the war that the US and Israel have started themselves. The purpose of the ceasefire between Iran and Israel is to re-arm the Zionist state for another major attack in the coming weeks and months ahead and obviously, Iran knows this.  The Iranians don’t trust anything that comes from the Trump regime. Why would they?  Especially after Israel attacked Iran while Trump claimed that he was seeking a new deal on Iran’s nuclear program even though he pulled the US out of the previous deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal conducted by the Obama regime in 2015.

This is the moment in history that we all in the alternative media have been warning about for a long time that a global war will begin in the Middle East.  The world will remember Trump and the rest of his regime which is staffed with Zionists, neocons and globalists as war criminals who secretly greenlighted Israel’s attack on Iran.

The strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is no surprise given the fact that the US, Israel and their allies has been working on this war plan for years.  Once Trump was running to be the 47th president of the United States, a new war in the Middle East was guaranteed because Iran was the ultimate target.  Trump is a man with an extreme narcissistic ego who has claimed in the past that he is the chosen one, a man who would easily launch a war and be the one to stop “evil forces” in the Middle East from destroying the land of Israel. That’s why Zionists in the US and in Israel supported him from the start.

Keep in mind that Trump had dodged the draft for the Vietnam war five times, four times because he was in college and the fifth time was because he had “heel spurs” which is described as protrusions caused by calcium buildup on the heel bone.  However, there were always remedies to cure heel spurs such as stretching, orthotics and surgery, but according to the New York Times, Trump said that “over a period of time, it healed up.”  I would bet that it miraculously heeled right after the Vietnam war had ended.  Trump acts like a tough guy by sending other people’s kids to die in another war that has nothing to do with the US and its security, but everything to do with Israel’s expansionist plans which is called the ‘Greater Israel project.’ 

Trump’s God Complex

Trump claims that he is the chosen one by God because of lunatics like the former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, an American Zionist who is now the current US ambassador to Israel wrote to President Trump that he “will hear from heaven and that voice” of God. Since Huckabee heard the voice of God, he clearly must be on serious pharmaceutical drugs, but I digress, what Huckabee wrote to Trump is sort of the ‘end of the world’ prophecies, the coming apocalypse for Christian evangelicals.  By now the world sees that Washington is full of neocon warmongers and Zionist psychopaths who are ready to unleash World War III.  What the world is witnessing is an insane regime in the Whitehouse willing to risk an unwinnable war for the state of Israel.

Huckabee said that he is “your appointed servant in this land,” saying he was sent by Trump to Israel “to be your eyes, ears and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave. I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down!”

Although I am not a fan of ‘Politico,’ but they published an interesting story called, ‘Does Trump Actually Think He’s God?’ by Michael Kruse on why Trump thinks he is some sort of God’s chosen leader who was put on earth for a reason.  Trump has been mentioning God even though he is most likely an atheist, an absolute closet globalist and a crony capitalist at heart.  Trump is obviously on the Jeffrey Epstein list, so this is a man who has no morals, but he says that he is chosen by God:

I’m supposed to be dead,” Donald Trump said, the day after he got shot at his rally last summer in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he said four days after that. “But something very special happened. Let’s face it. Something happened,” he said two days after that. “It’s … an act of God,” he said the month after that. “God spared my life for a reason,” he said in his victory speech at Mar-a-Lago in November. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said in his inaugural address at the Capitol in January. “It changed something in me,” he said in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in February. “I feel even stronger”

The next thing that Kruse says is that Trump went from “nihilistic” to becoming “messianic”:

This is new. It’s not how he talked for most of his long and voluble life. He has always, it should be said, seen himself as special, and he has always, of course, been notably self-aggrandizing. But the longtime self-described “fatalist” invariably maintained a sort of shoulder-shrugging acceptance that whatever was going to happen was beyond his or anyone else’s control. Over the last 10 or so months since Butler, however, and especially since his reelection and the start of his second administration, Trump’s outlook has shifted in essence from stuff happens and nothing much matters to something happened and it couldn’t matter more. His rhetoric has gone from borderline nihilistic to messianic

There are videos on YouTube that suggest Trump is the “chosen one,” I wish this was a joke, a comedy, but unfortunately, it’s not, one of the videos is called the ‘7 BIBLICAL SIGNS THAT TRUMP IS GOD’S CHOSEN ONE’:

It is incredible to see how people believe this nonsense.  There are other videos avaliable with the same ‘Trump is the chosen one’ propaganda, in fact, a film produced by a retired firefighter Mark Taylor called ‘The Trump Prophecy’ (see video here) based on a supposedly true story of Taylor’s personal journey to healing, but everything changed in 2011, when he claims that he experienced a revelation from “God” that a new leadership even before the 2016 Presidential Election was going to take place and that will change the world.  Who was that leader?  You guessed it, Donald Trump.  You can’t make this up.  This is not only insane, but also disturbing.

The Associated Press published an article based on the same subject, ‘President Trump Offers Himself as the Chosen One’ as they quoted Trump as saying that he is “the best president for Israel in the history of the world” he continued, “like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he’s the second coming of God.”

All this talk and the people believing that Trump is the chosen one is dangerous.  This is a man who is backed by Israel and his Evangelical Christian’ base who support their president and would give their lives for the state of Israel.

These Evangelical Christians which many live in the US bible belt believe in biblical prophecies and the role of Israel in the “end times” when Jesus Christ returns to the Holyland. They believe that re-establishing the state Israel after thousands of years is in the ancient prophecies and that “Jewish people” which in this case is the Zionists who are not in any way semitic, are returning to the land and that this would bring about the second coming of Jesus.

Maybe the Christian Evangelicals or Christian Zionists should remember what the New Testament says in Revelation 2: verse 8–9 , “And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These are the words of the first and the last, who was dead and came to life: “I know your affliction and your poverty, even though you are rich. I know the slander on the part of those who say that they are Jews and are not but are a synagogue of Satan.”

Let’s hope, Trump, Israel and his Christian Zionist supporters wake up from their apocalyptic dreams and look at the reality that a world war is upon us and that Jesus Christ will not appear out of the skies and save humanity especially if nuclear warheads are used in the next global conflict.

This article was originally published on Silent Crow News.

The post Trump’s Apocalypse? The ‘Chosen One’ and the Prospects of World War III appeared first on LewRockwell.

Graham Dugas wrote:

Before in 2023

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/08/argentina-election-javier-milei-economists-warning

In between

https://x.com/laderechadiario/status/1941317561167249624

2025 reality

https://x.com/Bangershell11/status/1941388193070448878

The post Keynesian predictions and Misean realities appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

Interesting Engineering

The post 2,000-year-old Roman ‘Bigfoot’ mystery: 5,000 giant shoes unearthed in Britain appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes, Ryan McMaken:

Dan Bongino is exactly who you’d expect him to be: A Ted Cruz level Israel worshipper and servant of the warfare state: 

When recently asked what political issue is “near and dear to your heart” he states: “Israel and the defense of Israel”.

Bongino has now also totally reversed himself on the Epstein “client list” and says the official government position has always been true. 

The post Dan Bongino’s top political issue is “the defense of Israel” appeared first on LewRockwell.

After attorney general Pam Bondi claimed that she had Jeffrey Epstein’s client list on her desk, her FBI leaked a memo to Axios that says no such client list exists (and that Epstein did not commit suicide in prison).  I wonder what the Vegas odds are that the exact opposite is true?

The post Does This Prove that Trump is On Epstein’s “Client List” appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Do We Need ‘The America Party’? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks.  John Frahm.

The Gateway Pundit

The post Over the Past 24 Hours Eight Dormant Bitcoin Wallets Were Awakened for First Time in 14 Years on the 4th of July Withdrawing 80.009 Bitcoins Equaling $8.69 Billion appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

Hi Lew,

Great article! My Mom is 93. My Dad would be 93 as well, but he died at the age of 89. Yes, they had tough childhoods, but they sure were optimistic, hard workers. Mom still is. My parents came from nothing. Dad had to borrow a neighbor’s car in a snowstorm in Minneapolis to take Mom to the hospital when I was born. They worked hard and became millionaires. But they never lost their roots and common touch. They never got arrogant.

People like my parents won’t come again for a long time if ever.

The post Born between 1930-1946 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Maureen McKerracher.   

The post “Power’s Out! 7 MUST FOLLOW Survival Rules to Stay Alive” appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post The DARPA Connected “Health & Wellness” Companies On Rumble Posing As The Alt. Solution! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato "fuori controllo" negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa è una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa è la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso è accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-grande-accorciamento)

“Al giorno d'oggi nessuno riesce a concentrarsi a lungo su nulla e questo sta rovinando completamente la società”.

È un commento notevole da parte del mio autista Uber dalla mentalità filosofica e ha attirato la mia attenzione. Suonava come una verità, qualcosa su cui avevo riflettuto, ma mi ha sorpreso sentirlo dire da uno sconosciuto. Così gli ho chiesto di spiegarsi meglio.

“Sono i social media. Tutti passano le giornate a scorrerli per ottenere 3 o 4 secondi di gratificazione immediata da contenuti privi di significato. Abbiamo perso la pazienza per le narrazioni lunghe e significative”.

Si riferiva ai film lunghi?

“Non proprio. Intendo libri grandi e importanti, classici, libri ben costruiti, capolavori letterari assemblati con cura che hanno resistito alla prova del tempo”.

Incuriosito da questo approfondimento, ho riflettuto ulteriormente. Aveva un che di vero. Pensare che i social media abbiano avuto questo effetto su tutti, in varia misura, è piuttosto scioccante. Non mi escludo. Il tempo che dedico a lunghe narrazioni che si estendono su centinaia di pagine e richiedono una lettura di molti giorni è diventato sempre meno.

Ero entusiasta quando il ciclo delle notizie si è aperto e ha incluso sempre più voci e più aggiornamenti in tempo reale. Sembrava un mondo migliore di quello in cui ero nato, in cui tre conduttori leggevano copioni quasi identici sugli stessi grandi eventi. Tutti si fidavano di loro e andavamo avanti con le nostre vite.

Ora siamo tentati di credere che un aggiornamento costante delle pagine ci renderà più informati; ora possiamo scoprire la verità sulla vita pubblica. Non ci vengono più negate voci alternative e ci vengono offerti spunti sorprendenti su spiegazioni alternative. Questo è fantastico e naturalmente pensiamo che sia un miglioramento.

Forse lo è, sicuramente lo è, ma la domanda è: a quale prezzo? È fortemente allettante passare il tempo in eccesso che abbiamo a ossessionarci su questa o quella cosa con infinite opzioni di fonti, podcast, video, feed, argomenti di tendenza e raffiche di notizie dell'ultima ora senza alcun collegamento che ci stupiscono e probabilmente ci tribalizzano ulteriormente.

Qual è il costo? È ciò che faremmo altrimenti. Forse significa investire nelle relazioni personali e nella famiglia; forse significa prendere in mano un grosso libro e leggerlo dalla prima pagina, emozionandosi nel graduale dispiegarsi di una narrazione; forse significa pensare a una pianificazione finanziaria a lungo termine e imparare nuovi modi di pensare alla finanza e mettere in pratica gli insegnamenti.

Non c'è dubbio che questo accada sempre meno spesso. Un amico ventenne dice di conoscere solo due persone in diversi anni che abbiano letto un libro vero e proprio. Sappiamo tutti che è vero. Le prove empiriche in merito variano e il mercato librario stesso sembra andare bene. Se e in che misura le persone sotto i 30 anni trascorrano effettivamente del tempo prolungato e disciplinato con libri importanti è una domanda seria. I sondaggi da soli non forniranno la risposta.

Che importanza ha? Ho chiesto di nuovo al mio autista Uber.

“È un fenomeno che sta cambiando completamente le persone e anche la cultura. È tutta una questione di adesso, non di futuro. È tutta una questione di stimoli presenti senza pensare al lungo termine”.

E allora?

“Il problema è che questa prospettiva rende le persone egoiste. È tutta una questione di sé. Non si preoccupano degli altri, non li notano nemmeno. Le persone non sono minimamente consapevoli di ciò che le circonda e di come gli altri reagiscono nei loro confronti. I social media stanno trasformando tutti in sociopatici”.

È un'accusa seria, ma mi riesce difficile confutarla. Diverse esperienze nei miei viaggi lo hanno confermato: non grandi cose, ma piccoli gesti in cui le persone sono restie a rinunciare al loro temporaneo benessere per qualcosa di più grande di loro.

Forse è rendere disponibile il posto centrale a qualcuno su un aereo dove i posti non sono assegnati. Il primo pensiero, in questi giorni, è quello di concentrarsi sul numero uno e fare di tutto per tenere tutti lontani.

Quanto spesso le persone aiutano gli sconosciuti con i bagagli? Se ne accorgono? Che ne direste di lasciare che qualcun altro ordini cibo o bevande prima di voi? Che ne direste di lasciare che chi potrebbe perdere un volo si metta prima di voi in coda per lo sbarco?

Questi sono dettagli di poco conto, ma sembra certamente vero che concediamo meno rispetto sociale rispetto a un tempo. Infatti un tempo davamo per scontate le buone maniere; ora sembra che ognuno pensi per sé, in ogni circostanza.

Naturalmente ogni generazione deplora la corruzione del proprio tempo, pur guardando con nostalgia al passato. È un pregiudizio che deriva dalla selezione: è più facile ricordare il bene e dimenticare il male man mano che il tempo avanza, ed è più facile essere più consapevoli del male che scavare più a fondo per trovare il bene.

Ciononostante l'avvento dei social media, dei display tascabili universali, degli auricolari personalizzati e di una scelta infinita di contenuti è una novità assoluta. E non scompariranno. Se ci hanno cambiato come popolo e come cultura, sarà per sempre? Possiamo opporci a questo cambiamento?

La tesi di suddetto autista — ho imparato a prendere più seriamente le osservazioni di un comune lavoratore rispetto a quelle di un professore dell'Ivy League — mi ha portato a pensare a tutti gli altri modi in cui i nostri orizzonti temporali si sono accorciati.

È ampiamente documentato che elettrodomestici che un tempo duravano una generazione ora si rompono in due o tre anni; acquistiamo telefoni e computer – articoli molto costosi – senza la consapevolezza di investire per il futuro, sappiamo per certo che dureranno due o tre anni prima che ne dovremmo comprare un altro.

Le scarpe sono la stessa cosa: spendete $150 per un paio che vi sta benissimo, ma dopo sei mesi di utilizzo sembra già pronto per la spazzatura. È così con la maggior parte dei vestiti. Scordatatevi di passare un abito ai figli, si sfalda dopo pochi utilizzi; il maglione che sta benissimo in negozio ha qualche strappo qua e là a fine stagione.

La maggior parte degli abiti è diventata usa e getta. Quasi tutto nel mondo digitale è così, e più i nostri prodotti del mondo reale vengono digitalizzati, minore è la loro longevità. Quasi nulla è più riparabile; è quasi sempre meglio buttarlo via e comprarne uno nuovo.

Con l'inflazione che ci accompagna da anni, siamo incoraggiati a spendere ora piuttosto che risparmiare, perché il risparmio non viene ricompensato. Nella migliore delle ipotesi, andiamo in pareggio, quindi perché non indebitarci acquistando “esperienze” invece di pensare al futuro?

L'economista Irving Fisher introdusse il concetto di preferenza temporale per spiegare i tassi d'interesse, affermando che un tasso di preferenza temporale più basso significa che le persone sono disposte a sacrificare i consumi attuali risparmiando. Questo fa scendere il tasso d'interesse, rendendo disponibili maggiori fondi per i prestiti.

Anche il contrario è vero: un tasso più elevato nella preferenza temporale – il desiderio ardente di consumare ora piuttosto che pianificare il futuro – porta a minori risparmi e a un impoverimento del bacino per l'espansione del capitale. Questo si traduce in tassi d'interesse più elevati, a parità di altre condizioni.

È affascinante seguire il pensiero di Murray Rothbard che vedeva in questa teoria delle preferenze temporali una spiegazione fondamentale per l'ascesa e il declino delle società. Le civiltà più sviluppate sono il risultato di preferenze temporali più basse: investimenti, visione a lungo termine, frugalità e rinvio delle gioie di oggi a un domani migliore. Le società meno sviluppate fanno il contrario, spingendosi fino allo stato di natura in cui tutti si accontentano di sopravvivere per il presente.

È possibile che stiamo vivendo in quello che potremmo chiamare il Grande Accorciamento: le nostre preferenze temporali sono più elevate, la nostra capacità di attenzione è più breve, i nostri orizzonti e le nostre prospettive sul nostro posto nella società sono caratterizzati dall'ottenere ciò che è bene per sé stessi ora, piuttosto che pensare a ciò che è bene per la famiglia, la comunità e la società a lungo termine. La gratificazione immediata è il segno distintivo della vita culturale, lo si vede ovunque.

Per certi versi ciò che è successo cinque anni fa con i lockdown ha distrutto il senso di comunità e alimentato una sorta di egoismo a breve termine ed è stato rafforzato dalla tecnologia che ci fornisce esattamente ciò che desideriamo: un po' di slancio e vitalità nel presente piuttosto che edificazione e contemplazione del futuro. Meno fiduciosi siamo nel futuro, più ha senso vivere solo per il presente.

È questo il Grande Accorciamento? Forse sì, ma non c'è bisogno di assecondarlo. Di recente ho letto un libro fantastico, divorando ogni frase e ogni parola con attenzione rapita. Il libro in questione è Unshrunk di Laura Delano ed è meraviglioso proprio perché presenta un arco narrativo molto lungo, pur essendo un'autobiografia.

Il mio scopo non è quello di mettere in risalto quest'opera in particolare, ma di esortare tutti a prendere un libro qualsiasi, preferibilmente cartaceo. Un classico della letteratura vittoriana o uno dei grandi libri che sapevate di dover leggere ma non avete mai letto. Dedicategli tre lunghe giornate e capirete esattamente cosa intendo.

Potreste rimanere scioccati da ciò che questo comporta per la vostra mente e il vostro spirito. Non potete cambiare l'ordine sociale o la cultura, ma potete prendervi cura di voi stessi dicendo: “Non mi lascerò manipolare dai sistemi che mi incoraggiano a pensare solo al qui e ora”. Tutti noi possiamo fare la nostra parte, nel nostro interesse personale, per ricordare cosa serve per costruire grandi menti e vite.

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

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States Rights has been a dominant theme in American history. We all know about the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Tariff of Abominations, the War Between the States, the battle over the civil rights movement, and so on. But I’m not going to rehash American history in this week’s column. Instead, I’m going to ask a more fundamental question. What should Rothbardians think about states rights?

For Rothbard, the key question in all political issues is  how to promote freedom. As he says in The Ethics of Liberty, “Libertarianism, then, is a philosophy seeking a policy. But what else can a libertarian philosophy say about strategy, about ‘policy’? In the first place, surely-again in Acton’s words-it must say that liberty is the ‘highest political end,’ the overriding goal of libertarian philosophy. Highest political end, of course, does not mean ‘highest end’ for man in general. Indeed, every individual has a variety of personal ends and differing hierarchies of importance for these goals on his personal scale of values. Political philosophy is that subset of ethical philosophy which deals specifically with politics, that is, the proper role of violence in human life (and hence the explication of such concepts as crime and property). Indeed, a libertarian world would be one in which every individual would at last be free to seek and pursue his own ends-to ‘pursue happiness,’ in the felicitous Jeffersonian phrase.”

Keeping this basic principle in mind, we should then ask, what is the greatest enemy of liberty? The answer is clear. It is an all-powerful government, In the words of the great libertarian theorist Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy the State.

At this point, you might raise an obvious question. If our enemy is the state, how can there be any question about Rothbard’s position on states rights? Wouldn’t he have to be against them? But thinking about the issue this way is wrong. It rests on an ambiguity. When we talk about states rights in American history, we mean limits to an all-powerful central government. We aren’t talking about increasing the power of the central government but decreasing it.

With that in mind, let’s look at what Rothbard said about a powerful central government: “But, above all, the crucial monopoly is the State’s control of the use of violence: of the police and armed services, and of the courts—the locus of ultimate decision-making power in disputes over crimes and contracts. Control of the police and the army is particularly important in enforcing and assuring all of the State’s other powers, including the all-important power to extract its revenue by coercion. For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as ‘taxation,’ although in less regularized epochs it was often known as ‘tribute.’ Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects. It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.”

The United States Constitution is far from ideal. But the system of government it set up was not at all a powerful central state. It was a loose confederation with a very weak central government. As Mises Institute President Thomas DiLorenzo notes, discussing an important book by the historian Paul C. Graham, “‘Declaration of Independence’ is actually slang for the actual title of the document, ‘The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen united States of America.’  As in all the founding documents, “united States” is in the plural, signifying that the thirteen free and independent states were united in their desire to secede from the British empire.  That is why, at the end of the Revolution, King George III signed a peace treaty with each individual state, not something called ‘the United States government.’

Di Lorenzo goes on: “The first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, declared that each state ‘retained its sovereignty, freedom, and independence.’ They retained, not gained, their sovereignty as ‘free and independent states,’ as they are called in the Declaration.  States rights, state sovereignty, the right of secession, and the states delegating a few powers to the central government as their agent were the ideas of the founders, not creating ‘a new nation.’  There was no pledge of allegiance to ‘one nation, indivisible’; that was an invention of late nineteenth-century socialist and Lincoln worshipper Francis Bellamy. Graham describes the second Constitution as an attempted and failed coup by the nationalists in American politics to destroy state sovereignty and consolidate all political power in the national capitol.  At the constitutional convention Alexander Hamilton, for example, proposed a permanent president (aka a king) who would appoint all governors, with the central state having the right to veto any and all state legislation.  His plan for a centralized dictatorship of course failed, but the nationalists, including Lincoln, would never give up.”

Because of the importance of limiting the central government by means of states rights, Rothbard thought that as much as possible should be left to state and local control. Of course, he was an anarchist, who thought there should be no government at all; but if we did have a government, it should be limited in every way possible.

Here is an example of the way he applied this view. Rothbard says something few other people would think of. Even if you are “pro-choice,” you should still favor overturning Roe v. Wade. “But even apart from the funding issue, there are other arguments for a rapprochement with pro-lifers. There is a prudential consideration: a ban on something as murder is not going to be enforceable if only a minority considers it as murder. A national prohibition is simply not going to work, in addition to being politically impossible to get through in the first place. Pro-choice paleo-libertarians can tell the pro-lifers: ‘Look, a national prohibition is hopeless. Stop trying to pass a human life amendment to the Constitution. Instead, for this and many other reasons, we should radically decentralize political and judicial decisions in this country; we must end the despotism of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, and return political decisions to state and local levels.’ Pro-choice paleos should therefore hope that Roe v. Wade is someday overthrown, and abortion questions go back to the state and local levels—the more decentralized the better. Let Oklahoma and Missouri restrict or outlaw abortions, while California and New York retain abortion rights. Hopefully, some day we will have localities within each state making such decisions. Conflict will then be largely defused. Those who want to have, or to practice, abortions can move or travel to California (or Marin County) or New York (or the West Side of Manhattan.)”

Let’s do everything we can to promote states rights, in order to limit the Leviathan, “that coldest of all cold monsters.” That is what Murray Rothbard would want us to do.

The post What Rothbardians Should Think About States Rights appeared first on LewRockwell.

As a result of recent conversations, my life-long closest friend Diego wrote the following. If you’re lucky as we are, you have such a friend whose interests and thoughts match yours so closely that it seems that you were separated at birth in a dream. We both felt from the days of our youth when chance brought us together that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, it was not he, she, them, or it that we belonged to, or that we would ever gargle in the rat race choir for those who make the rules to terrorize humanity.

By Diego Sandoval

“Does anybody ever say anything?”

“Not really. Everybody talks all his life, and many write for many years, but nobody really says anything. It’s all right, though.”
– William Saroyan, Not Dying: A Memoir

Because I have nothing to say, I am writing this. It’s all right. I have nothing to say because I am disgusted by all the words I have written for deaf ears and by the news that just repeats itself like an endless Greek tragedy to the chorus of commentators of all persuasions echoing each other as if their words made a difference in the butcher’s bench world of ruthless actors with their motto: acta non verba. I’m just sighing, Ma, like another man of many words, Bob Dylan:

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

Life? Yes, Dylan is right: “If you’re not busy being born you’re busy dying.”

But what difference can words make? I don’t know. Quén sabe?

William Saroyan was a witty man, a Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winner, very famous in his day, and he didn’t know either. He claimed he wrote to ward off death and said he expected an exception to death would be made in his case. He was a man hiding in a house of words, always ready to bolt when death came knocking. But he never grasped the contradictory meanings of bolting, a common neurosis and a necrophiliac’s dilemma. He wanted to escape death’s clutches but wasn’t sure whether to run or hide. To bolt or bolt, that is the question he couldn’t answer unequivocally. He decided to obsessively accumulate stuff to barricade the entrance to his soul while writing the opposite. His monitory words insinuated the ineluctable nature of his rat packing.

I have spent my life shedding possessions – call it rat unpacking – having seen too many people possessed by them, and the nothingness of death that they represent. I always sensed that nothing is more real than nothing. Having grown up in Mexico – the country that Octavio Paz referred to as the land of the labyrinth of solitude, the country where death lays heavy on every heart, faithful or doubting, I became a poet, writer, and singer to somehow create a language that would lead me into the realm of silence where true language lives and death is exorcised. I took the stage name Mr. Z  to honor my heroes, Zapata and Zarathustra. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. Few who come to hear me perform know my name’s origins and I never explain. Explain to whom? Why?

I was drawn to William Saroyan’s writing at an early age, probably because of his early efforts to write musically and exorcise the death-themed experiences of his childhood with Armenian immigrant parents, his father being a preacher who died when William was three years-old and he was sent to an orphanage along with his sister and brother. When I was about seventeen years-old I read his first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and was mesmerized, especially by his story, “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8” – its free form musicality with its gaps of silence that tore out my heart. I identified with the story’s protagonist, who was lonely Saroyan at 19 years of age, and how a few chords in a piece of music, even bad music, transported him into ecstatic reveries, even during moments of silence when he wasn’t listening to the record. I memorized this sentence: “He stood over his phonograph, thinking of its silence, and his own silence, the fear in himself to make a noise, to declare his existence.” And then a string of few words came to me – “the music of forgetting” – which have haunted me ever since.

I too hear some secret music and don’t know why I am writing this.  I’m only sighing as I move to the music of forgetting.

For his part, Saroyan, in his abodes of death, eventually wrote many millions of words in maybe seventy-five published and unpublished books, saying nothing about something for someone. It was all right, though, I guess he too was only sighing. A kind of sighing that was a haunting.

Aren’t we all sighing? Isn’t the world news enough to haunt anyone with a heart?

Then he died in 1982 at the age of seventy-two. No exception was made for Billy Boy. He either was or wasn’t surprised, depending on what happens when one dies. He said that in everyone’s secret religion “the idea is to keep death at a distance by means of junk of all kinds, and this junk makes a shambles.” Money, possessions in general, the more junk one can surround oneself with the safer one feels, so that death will have a tough time getting through the clutter to reach you, and in a writer’s case, his most treasured junk – his writing – may be useful in buying death off. This Saroyan said.

When he died, he left two houses in Fresno, California stuffed with shambles. Possessions so junky that they rattle the mind: envelopes of his old mustache clippings, pebbles, rocks, used typewriter ribbons, broken clocks, boxes of junk mail, every piece of ephemera that passed through his grasping hands. He let go of nothing while writing words warning of its futility despite its seeming necessity. He created a foundation in his own name, devoted to the study of himself, to which he left all his junk and to which he bequeathed all future earnings, despite having two children. He thought he was immortalizing himself under the illusion that his shambling rambling words and ratty belongings would free him from the labyrinth of solitude he was leaving. It was not a fit ending for a man who was once the daring young man on the flying trapeze.

Without faith, daring ends in desperate measures. I think Saroyan lost faith in the living.

He forgot his own wise words in the preface to the first edition of his first book:

If you will remember that living people are as good as dead, you will be able to perceive much that is very funny in their conduct that you perhaps might never have thought of perceiving if you did not believe that they were as good as dead.

Isn’t it funny that he left a shambles at home?

Madre, I’m running out of words. Please take my sighs and make them prayers of resistance to the ruthless actors who make this earth our home a bloody shambles.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Nothing to Say, Ma appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump has claimed that American banks are not allowed to do business in Canada, which isn’t true, but the US banks would love to have a bigger piece of the financial pie in Canada, since commercial banks are some of the most profitable businesses in Canada.

And banks have an obvious advantage: it’s easier to be profitable when you can make money by making money.

As Mark Carney stated in his book Value(s), “In the modern financial system, the private sector creates most of the money in circulation. The principal way banks create money is by making loans. When the bank decides a borrower is creditworthy (that they are likely to pay the loan back), it credits their deposit account for the amount of the loan and new money enters circulation.”

The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the Swiss National Bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund have also pointed out that banks create money when they make loans.

Banks create state-sanctioned money with the click of a keyboard by allocating credit. Legal tender banknotes and coins are merely tangible tokens of credit.

There is a systemic shortage and artificial scarcity of state-sanctioned money because banks lend it into existence on the basis of interest-bearing debt. They create the principal amount of every so-called loan, but not the interest. Total aggregate debt, including principal and interest, is always more than the total amount of money in existence. And compound interest causes debt to grow exponentially.

Banks also misallocate credit by creating loans for unproductive and downright destructive purposes, which inflates the amount of money in circulation. Monetary inflation leads to price inflation, which erodes the value of savings and reduces the domestic purchasing power of the currency.

War is an obvious example of senseless destruction—but banks profit from the destruction and eventual reconstruction by collecting interest on loans that they create by allocating some of our collective credit for wars that most people probably oppose.

Banks essentially control the creation of so-called loans and decide who gets credit and who doesn’t. They can also expand and contract the allocation of credit, causing cycles of booms and busts.

In a conveniently collusive arrangement, governments allow banks to issue money so governments can receive credit to run deficits and spend more than they collect in taxes. It’s a win-win for banks and governments—at our expense. For them, money is power, and the monetary system is an instrument of control.

Unsurprisingly, the banks are raking in billions of dollars in interest every year from so-called loans that they create by making digital accounting entries (so-called deposits). The US banks can’t be blamed for wanting to do more business in Canada—and perhaps this is another reason why Trump has repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the 51st state (and the US banks might also be interested in accessing and liberalizing China’s financial markets).

It doesn’t really matter that some banks are “Canadian” and some are “American.” They are all part of the problem: a monetary system that is designed to extract value and wealth by keeping us in a collective state of perpetual debt servitude. And it certainly appears to be a global problem: every country (except perhaps Macau) has a national debt. In Canada, the federal government is in debt, the provincial governments are in debt, and the average Canadian household has a debt-to-income ratio of more than 170%.

But money does not need to be issued on the basis of interest-bearing debt, and credit does not need to be misallocated for unproductive and destructive purposes.

Money’s primary function is to facilitate exchange. Mutual credit clearing can serve that purpose and utilize the positive aspects of a credit system. It is essentially a bookkeeping system that keeps an ongoing record of members’ transactions (sales and purchases) and account balances (credits and debits). Membership within a network is entirely voluntary, and every member is both a producer and a consumer, a seller and a buyer. Members can receive short-term interest-free credit, which can reduce their expenses, and allows them to temporarily obtain more than they have provided if they are ready, willing and able to deliver an equal value of their own goods and services within a specified period of time. Goods and services simply pay for other goods and services. The allocation of credit for productive purposes preserves the value of the accounting unit within the network and prevents inflation. Longer-term financing can be provided from actual savings and saved credits, using equity financing or debt financing.

Precious metals and distributed ledger technology can still potentially play a role in a credit system. As Thomas Greco has suggested, a market basket of commodities (including gold and silver) can be used as a benchmark standard for defining an accounting unit to provide a more stable measure of value. He has mentioned that blockchain technology may have a useful role in a credit clearing network or private credit currency as a way to create exchangeable “token” vouchers that represent a claim upon goods and services that the issuer has promised to deliver.

Credit has been severely misused and abused by governments and banks, but the problem isn’t credit in itself. And mutual credit clearing might not change the entire monetary system, but it does provide an opportunity for the allocation of interest-free credit for productive purposes to facilitate the exchange of goods and services, which is a step in the right direction.

The post Stepping Out of the Debt Trap appeared first on LewRockwell.

So, then, what is Christian Culture? What does it look like? Are there certain defining features that distinguish it from what passes for culture these days? And if so, how are we to recognize them?

What it is, at the deepest level, is an answer to the question raised by the Hebrew psalmist in a time of unprecedented anguish and desolation, when the People of the Promise are forced to endure exile and captivity. They have lost their land, their freedom; the temple where they worship the living God is in ruins, while they, God’s beloved children, remain utterly prostrate beneath the Babylonian boot. “There by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion” (Psalm 137).

And as they hang their harps in sorrow upon the willows that mark the water’s edge, their captors demand of them yet another humiliation—that they should make music:

They that carried us away captive required of us a song; 
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying;
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” 

To which the voice of Israel, in the words of the Jewish psalmist, replies:

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?  

Now, to be sure, in the context of the Old Testament, amid the unhappy circumstances of a people held captive, it is unmistakably a cry of lamentation, of heartrending sorrow. A people in bondage are very likely to be candidates for despair. But since the coming of Christ, the Glory of the Lord, who brought eternity into time, grace into nature, Heaven into history, the world is no longer strange or menacing.

It has become, instead, a place of redeemed actuality, a setting made radiant by the presence of the One who vanquished all the darkness. The world has become a wedding, a sacrament, confected for the sanctification of men. And everywhere you turn, there stands the sign of our salvation, looming beneath the bright shadow of the Cross and Resurrection.

Here is the birthplace of Christian Culture, of the true marriage of Heaven and earth, of the happy convergence of vertical and horizontal perspectives. An incarnational humanism, no less, in which the world is accepted and affirmed as a good place to be. Why would God stoop to enter a world He felt so little affection for? How different this is from an eschatological humanism so fixated upon dreams of flight from a world steeped in corruption and death that immediate escape from its coils becomes the only imperative.

So, what then is Christian Culture? It is what happens when enough men and women wedded to Christ, spousal recipients of His love, undertake in a decisive and public way to profess their common faith and devotion by soaking everything in the grace of the Gospel. All that they are and know and do—including their institutions, civil arrangements, arts, education, family life, work and play—immersed in the Blood of the Lamb.

The question, therefore, is not How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? But rather, it is how shall we render our experience of a land that, owing to Christ’s sudden appearance among us, ought no longer to be strange, and thus sing the Lord’s song with ease and felicity, with joy and delight?

Why not make a world where it is easier for men and women to be good? Even to try and do so, never mind the numbers of good men falling short, is enough to sound the great theme of fraternal love and solidarity amid an otherwise rampant and atomized individualism. Not the cry of the self-centered self, the solipsistic self, but the self both steeped in God and solicitous of neighbor. The self for whom solidarity with others becomes the informing principle of the public life.

“Let us,” as Eric Gill used to say, “create a cell of good living amid the chaos of our world.” A world whose prototype ought not to be the ant hill or the rat race but the Mystical Body. Not the beehive, where everyone is a drone, but the Blessed Trinity, where the logic of the gift prevails and people discover themselves precisely in giving themselves away.

Let me put it this way. In order for the life of faith to succeed in a more than haphazard or private way, it really has got to penetrate the public life, which is that larger space where culture puts down its roots. Otherwise, the generality of men may find it well-nigh impossible, amid so many secular and profane distractions, to find genuine and palpable evidence of the sacred.

Not the least rumor of God could survive in a world where no one ever spoke of God. And the reason they don’t is because—educated opinion having convinced men of His irrelevance—they no longer turn to Him for counsel or consolation. Not to mention those primordial reasons men have lifted their eyes on high, to give praise and adoration to the God who made them and the universe.

We have lost, as a dear friend and mentor used to say, “the poetry of the transcendent.” And when a people live in a world made suddenly flat as a map, they no longer look up at the stars.

This is not what the architects of Christian Culture had in mind when they sought to configure all things to Christ. They did not aim to leave anything out of account, free to shape itself without reference to Him. Why should we not build a society in such a way as to heighten and augment the natural tendency we have for the true and the good and the beautiful? To allow our natural gravitation for God, who remains the deepest longing of all, to be shored up by a society whose institutions conspire to draw all things to God? Isn’t that the most logical and obvious outcome of a society for whom most members are already Christian?

And doesn’t this happen when, at the very least, impediments are not put in the way of the search for God, the delight one feels in the discovery of God? Why must it be such a great trial and tribulation to get to Heaven? Or even to get to Mass in the morning? Why must there be roadblocks thrown up to challenge and frustrate the effort simply to practice the virtue of piety? It is a matter of justice that God be given His due, to which end the two orders of the sacred and the profane, society and the Church, need not cross swords but rather harmonize their efforts in helping man fulfill himself both in this world and the world to come.

If the meaning of life is that it becomes “a vale of soul-making,” as the poet Keats liked to say, then statecraft becomes nothing other than a matter of soulcraft—of helping to shape the soul—not just for time but for eternity as well.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post Configuring All Things to Christ appeared first on LewRockwell.

A typical example is the Politico article, on July 3rd, “Three reasons why Republicans cut Medicaid”, which at its opening asks and answers the question: “why did the GOP slash deeply into the health insurance program in its megabill? Three reasons: [1] Republicans desperately needed money to avoid a big tax increase next year, [2] they wanted to claw back Biden-era policies GOP lawmakers say led to lax eligibility checks and more fraudulent benefit claims and [3] they wanted to curb the Medicaid expansion enacted by then-President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in the Affordable Care Act.”

Here’s the far-more-basic and decisive truth, which all of the ‘news’-media — both of Democratic Party billionaires, and of Republican Party billionaires — hide:

Almost all of the “waste, fraud and abuse” in the U.S. federal Government is in the U.S. military, which consumes over half of all of the funds that the Presdent and Congress each year authorize to and do spend — and even only the Defense Department’s portion of that, which constitutes around two-thirds of America’s annual military spending, wastes (by means of fraud and abuse but especially corruption, which enormusly inflates the costs of America’s weaponry), the vast majority of the waste in the U.S. Government’s annually allocated funds. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency DOGE virtually ignored it, though the U.S. Defense Department is the ONLY federal Department that is SO corrupt that it has NEVER BEEN AUDITED. Instead of Musk (and Trump) focusing on that, they just ignored it and concentrated instead upon ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ in the spending that DOES serve the public (instead of serve merely the investors in firms such as Lockheed Martin, which sell only to the U.S. Government and its allied Governments (such as in NATO and in the Gulf Arab kingdoms and Israel). Those firms know that in order to control their markets they need to control their own Government, the U.S. Government — which they DO control, which is why over half of U.S. federal discretionary spending now is for the military. Only this way can their sales-volumes and the prices of their goods and services continue soaring far higher than for the firms in the rest of the stock market — as they have been doing ever since the Soviet Union ended in 1991 and ‘terrorism’ and other propaganda points became the new focus so as to produce the constant and forever-war American economy that we have had ever since 1991 — the military-industrial complex (MIC) unleashed and running wild and eating up the America that serves the other people, the ones who DON’t own and control those firms (the firms that PROFIT from wars).

Unlike in countries such as Russia and China, which refused to privatise their armaments-manufacturers (the Government owns them by more than 50%), our armaments firms are PRIVATELY owned and controlled — for profit, NOT for the public; for the billionaires, and not to protect the nation against actual enemies.

For a typical example of how this works, a study published in 2022 by Bernstein Research found (as reported on its page 75) that, for one typical ‘defense’ corporation, Northrop Grumman, its “stock has outperformed the S&P 500 by 451% over the last 10 years.” Furthermore, “Defense stocks … also tend to outperform through recessions and are uncorrelated with inflation.” That’s the type of extraordinary profitability that a corporation which controls its own market normally achieves; and, in the U.S., ‘defense’ stocks started taking off like a rocket in 1991 and have been continuing that astounding growth ever since. The less necessary that a capitalist nation’s military is for protecting the nation, like in the U.S. since 1991 when the Soviet Union ended, the more profitable its military manufacturers are, because the corruption then becomes virtually unlimited (see this and this for the evidence). Right now, the U.S. Government spends 65% — almost two-thirds — of the entire world’s military expenditures — almost twice what all of the world’s 200 other nations together spend. Now, THAT’S corruption, on a massive scale! It’s shown right there, in those numbers.

Right now, the Trump Administration (just like Biden’s had done) has been and is pressuring their colonies (‘allies’) to increase their military expenditures, in order to keep this soaring wealth for their billionaires going. On June 25th, Reuters headlined “NATO commits to spending hike sought by Trump” and reported: “NATO leaders on Wednesday backed the big increase in defence spending that U.S. President Donald Trump had demanded, and restated their commitment to defend each other from attack after a brief summit in the Netherlands.” Continuation of the current U.S.-backed wars and perhaps starting some new ones, will be needed in order to make this happen; and, so, as the U.S. Government has been doing ever since 1945 and especially after 1991 (when the Soviet Union ended), what’s needed is creating international chaos, civil wars, and failed states. But this also means that existing wars must be continued as long as possible. Furthermore, on 8 January 2025, the President-elect Donald Trump indicated that if his previously announced intention for the U.S. to buy Greenland, and the Panama Canal, gets rejected in the negotiations, then he will seize them militarily, because “We need them for economic security.” This means that he uses the military not ONLY for national security (which is the defensive use of it) but ALSO for “economic security” (which is the aggressive use of it — as being an additional tool in order to gain economic advantage against other countries — to use the military in order to acquire new colonies or else to cement one’s rule over existing colonies). And he said there that the same thing might apply also to Canada. So: Denmark, Greenland, Canada, and America’s other colonies, could soon find themselves at war against America — no longer is it only such countries as Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, that the U.S. regime targets. It would mean the utter destruction of international law.

How evil is this? On 22 October 2024, I headlined “How the U.S. Government Became Plain Evil in 1980”, and said of an early U.S. advocate for replacing the purely defensive geostrategy of America’s nuclear weapons (“M.A.D.” to prevent a WW3) by instead an aggressive global-supremacist strategy to ‘win’ such a nuclear war by destroying ‘the enemy’ even more than the U.S. would be destroyed, such as now is the U.S. plan, for its nukes (“Nuclear Primacy” to ‘win’ WW3) — actually for the U.S. Government to take over the entire world:

Advocates of the view that nuclear weapons exist only in order to prevent any need to use them were consequently presented, by him, implicitly, as being now either fools or traitors. He said that MAD simply “ignores the intensely ideological nature of modern international relations. In a world dominated by two such ideological foes as the United States and Soviet Union,” winning is the only moral option. In other words: his neoconservative (purely zero-sum or win-lose no win-win — it’s instead a supremacist) view took seriously ONLY win-lose games, no win-win ones. He was assuming that this was a war between communism versus capitalism, and not a war by the United States rulers in order to win control over the entire planet (as has actually been the case ever since President Truman started the Cold War on 25 July 1945). Then, after the end of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991 and America’s refusal to end its NATO anti-Soviet military alliance but instead to expand that alliance right up to Russia’s border and to take up again Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa aim to conquer Russia, something extremely heinous became blatantly apparent about prior U.S. allegations that America’s rulers weren’t, in fact, insanely imperialistic (the ‘anti-communist’ excuse for the Cold War had now clearly been shown to have been just that: an excuse), but no U.S.-and-allied newsmedia called attention to this by-now-(after-1991)-amply-proven fact of the lying U.S. regime’s heinous character; and, so, this nation is, by now, definitely a dictatorship that has effectively controlled all of its newsmedia, too, in order to hide from the public what it was actually trying to achieve — the global dictatorship that America’s rulers have, in fact, been aiming to achieve. Other than in a few small-audience far-outside-the-mainstream newsmedia (such as this one), nobody at all was calling attention to the fact that (and why) NATO is intensely evil and must be abolished immediately. Neoconservatism — advocacy for an all-encompassing U.S. global empire — has virtually 100% control in The West. Western publics have been so surrounded by neoconservative media, they cannot think outside that box, of hatred against ’the enemy’ that America’s billionaires have targeted to ‘regime-change’, whatever that might happen to be at the given moment — but ESPECIALLY now concerning both Russia and China (though capitalism now predominates in both of those U.S.-targeted countries). The evil is, and has always been, imperialism (never really capitalism or communism), but no one in Western media is allowed to call attention to this brute fact, that imperialism is always the enemy, which fact explains international relations today.

All recent American Presidents and Congresses have been purely win-lose, zero-sum, not at all win-win, leaders. It’s now clearly the character of the U.S. Government. Short of there being a Second American Revolution (a domestic U.S. uprising to overthrow and replace it with a win-win one), it will remain America’s Government until its end. It certainly is that way today.

On January 1st, I headlined “UK, Germany, Italy, France, Japan — Likeliest for Economic Crash This Year”, and documented that the 2023 average electricity prices for industrial users ($ per MWh) was $266 in Germany, $63 in Russia, and $60 in China. In U.S., it was $85. The highest price of all was in UK: $420. Germany’s $266 price was the second-highest. In terms of economic competitiveness, China and Russia are the best, and UK and Germany are the worst, of all major countries. How can a country such as Germany compete economically against China, Russia, and U.S.? It can’t. Why? Is it because Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022? Definitely not! It is because the U.S. Government (followed by its obedient colonies in Europe) placed sanctions against Russian energy imports, which were by far the least expensive energy-sources for Europe, because pipelined-in from Russia instead of containerized and then sent by ship (such as from across the Atlantic in America) and rail and truck. In addition, the U.S. Government blew up the Nord Stream pipelines that were to expand gas-imports to Germany from Russia (and that were partially owned by Germany — a supposed ‘ally’ of Germany).

On January 6th, I headlined “The Hidden Lies Behind America’s Destruction of Europe” and described how the U.S. regime had forced its colonies to do this — to commit economic suicide.

And now the American people, with Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (which the American public loathe), the American people OURSELVES will be swallowed-up by this voracious monster, our billionaires, which is actually bipartisan in America, BOTH of its political Parties. This is the opposite of democracy: Polling proves that vast majorities of the U.S. public detest Trump’s budget-and-tax priorities. Furthermore, an extraordinarily extensive Yale poll of nearly 5,000 Americans, published on June 27th, found that when respondents are informed of what is in Trump’s budget-and-tax bill, only 11% approve, 78% disapprove of it. Would it become law in a democracy? Of course not! This recent polling simply confirms what prior polling has already shown.

On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (those latter five being the functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut — but those 5 were the most-favored by the American public). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds. Furthermore, the U.S. Defense Department is the only Department of the federal Government so corrupt, so intensely corrupt, that it has never been audited.

Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies). This Government’s policy-priorities are like the public’s turned upside-down — in other words: are the REVERSE of the public’s — and therefore the U.S. Government right now is a perfect example of a dictatorship. One might say that this is so in only the Executive branch, but it’s not necessarily true: Trump’s bill passed in BOTH houses of the U.S. Congress.

Every national Government that includes public elections between competing politicians has degenerated into control by the richest, because the richest donate more than half of all of the money that is donated to political campaigns, and they can and do aways spend enough on politics to deceive enough voters to vote against any candidate who refuses to be bought, so that only the candidates who are willing to do what their megadonors say — obedient candidates (obedient to the billionaires especially) — will have any real chance to win a major public office. So, if a democracy is to be defined as ONLY a system that includes public elections between competing politicians, then it will always degenerate into an aristocracy of the super-rich, which is a type of dictatorship (sometimes called by such names as “aristocracy,” “oligarchy,” “plutocracy,” etc.), NOT a democracy.

So, that is a phony definition of “democracy” (though it’s the normal way that “democracy” is defined), because a democracy is instead a Government by representatives of each citizen equally, without regard for wealth, religion, ethnicity, or any other attribute — it is (and the term “democracy” can realistically be applied ONLY to) “Equal Justice Under Law” — and it CAN exist but never yet HAS existed (because of that false common definition for it*). A TRUE definition of “democracy” is instead: A democracy is a Government whose policy-priorities are the same as its public’s policy-priorities are. On June 6th, I headlined “How to Create an Authentic Democracy” and described the only type of way that it can even possibly be achieved. I welcome any inputs regarding my proposal, and you can reach me about this definition and associated system via email by clicking here.

——

* Documentation of the falsity of the common definition of “democracy” can be found here. Given that the common definition (the one that necessitates public elections by competing politicians) for it is empirically false, the need exists for a true definition of democracy. I have provided in this article what I believe that to be: a Government whose policy-priorities are the same as the public’s policy-priorities are. And I have described here how that could be instituted.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post How the ‘News’ Media Distort About the Cuts to Medicaid appeared first on LewRockwell.

From 2024 into 2025, over roughly 9-10 months, I worked with journalist Margaret Roberts on her upcoming book, titled Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing. My role was that of a research consultant—a friendly resource available to help with a project that I viewed as significant and a righteous undertaking. It was both a pleasure and an honor to collaborate on this project.

Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue connected me with Roberts, whom he knew for years (read all about that in the book), to help with the book: reading, fact-checking, providing sources and documents, answering questions—I’d be her “foxhole buddy” in what we saw as a mammoth battle not unlike David versus Goliath: after all, the full power of the federal government has been used, over the years, to stop and silence investigation into Kenneth Trentadue’s murder and any probing of America’s deadliest domestic terror attack.

Over the years, investigations that were supposed to be conducted went by the wayside—the Senate Judiciary Committee’s proposed hearings on Kenneth’s murder were sabotaged; Bombing-related stories set to air on ABC News 20/20 were canceled after DOJ pressure, and witnesses in the case suddenly went missing or became reluctant to speak after visits from the FBI.

We knew it would be an uphill battle. Knowing this to be true, I had no reservations: from the moment Jesse called me in February 2024 and told me about the project, I said “count me in.”

After that phone call, I was introduced to the author, and we started having weekly discussions. I went into it excited, having just finished serving in a similar capacity for HBO/Max’s Emmy-nominated documentary film “An American Bombing: the Road to April 19th” where I was a research consultant—providing documents, questions to ask witnesses, and detailed information that the documentary filmmakers needed to tell the story right.

I was eager to jump right into the fray and do it again, because if anything, I’m all about collaboration and sharing material if it will advance the mutual struggle to bring truth to the forefront.

America’s Most Wanted Alumnus Tackles The Story

Margaret Roberts is an award-winning journalist. One of her early stories for the Chicago Lawyer detailed the case of a man wrongly convicted of abducting and murdering a couple, along with three other men. They were called the ‘Ford Heights Four,’ and Roberts’ initial story focused on one of them, Dennis Williams, who was sentenced to death.

Roberts and editor Rob Warden’s reporting on the case uncovered the truth and helped ensure justice was achieved — a challenging feat, especially after a man is condemned to death by the justice system. With the stakes as high as they were—a man’s life in the balance—the man’s only recourse turned out to be not our judicial system, but the combined efforts of dedicated investigative journalists.

Roberts’ story, co-bylined with editor Rob Warden, “Will We Execute an Innocent Man?” won journalism awards in Chicago, and later Newsweek featured it as a cover story on the death penalty. Thanks to Margaret Roberts’s reporting, an innocent man was exonerated along with his three co-defendants. Cook County, Illinois, ended up paying $36 million to the four wrongfully imprisoned men, the highest settlement ever paid at that time for such a case.

Following her time in print media, Roberts went on to become News Director for America’s Most Wanted — a TV show all about capturing the bad guys. As a reporter, and a news junkie, it was a perfect fit for Roberts. The very first episode of the show led to the apprehension of a violent criminal, and she knew a thing or two about broadcasting leads to the public—and covering the facts to help pursue the guilty.

By 1995, Roberts had moved on from America’s Most Wanted and was working on other projects, but the bombing story caught her attention as an avid news junkie—especially the unknown and unidentified suspect “John Doe #2,” something that she and I both shared a fascination with. We had both independently investigated this case for over 15 years when we were introduced, diligently following it with determination.

Working on The Book

I would like to share some of my thoughts about the process of writing the book, working with Margaret Roberts, and how our successful partnership was personally fulfilling for me. I did not see it as ‘work’—to me, it was ‘fun’!

Like the fictional characters from TV’s ‘The X-Files’ called “The Lone Gunmen” (pictured below), I saw this as an opportunity to bring a really “out there” truth into the mainstream, even though the odds were against us, just like the fictional muckrakers. Margaret Roberts was exactly what we needed to bring the truth to a new audience.

One of my tasks during the writing process was to keep track of the endnotes for the book. Margaret (or ‘Mars’ as I’d call her) would identify passages she wanted citations for, and I would add and keep track of our sources. Many times, she knew the source for the citation, and other times, I would go look it up in my archive (consisting of thousands of news clippings, magazine articles, transcripts, FBI documents, etc.) The Archive proved to be useful when working on the book both by making it easy to locate source materials, but also in allowing us to incorporate previously unknown (or forgotten) details found in related clippings.

As we worked on the book, I came across instances where I believed we could document a little-known or underreported fact that was directly related to the text. To that end, some items in the book are there because I brought them to Mars’s attention, and we worked together to capture the essence: after informing Mars of one thing or another, I would explain why I thought certain details were relevant and essential—and, doing her due diligence, Roberts required me to prove the authenticity of whatever I was saying.

I’d provide the background documentation and my overview, but basically, I needed to ‘prove’ my case to her, which shows just how careful and analytical she was being. Everything I introduced had to be solid and provable—no theories. As Roberts wrote on X, our collaboration involved “the careful process of weighing the evidence” — and getting it right.

Additionally, I also learned many new facts from Roberts’ investigation—in no small part because she is the only journalist to have ever interviewed Terry Nichols—one of McVeigh’s co-conspirators in the bombing—and possessed many letters, writings, and documents given to her by Terry Nichols’s attorney, Jesse Trentadue.

I had not seen this material before, and reviewing it added significant context to information that was, in some cases, entirely new for me. We called this material “The Nichols Dossier.” It was a sizable collection of Terry Nichols’s writings, where he details various aspects of the bombing plot, and the material is central to one of the book’s chapters.

Through Terry Nichols’s writings, Roberts uncovered a wealth of material that sheds new light on the case — at least to the public — and for the first time in print.

Roberts also interviewed Aryan Republican Army founder Peter Langan in prison, as well as McVeigh’s death row cellmate, David Paul Hammer.

This collection of exclusive prison interviews is just one component among several compelling pieces that are woven together to reveal a bigger picture, one that has largely remained untold until now.

Read the Whole Article

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We’re one year away from the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It remains one of the most impactful and revolutionary documents ever written. While our horrific leaders still pay infrequent lip service to it, they obviously don’t remotely believe in the sentiments expressed by Thomas Jefferson.

The delineation of God-given rights, as opposed to any granted by a government, was a literary nuclear bomb. This resonated with the American colonists, who almost all believed strongly in God. Now, of course, since probably half of present day Americans at least doubt the existence of God, it becomes a much harder proposition to sell. God-given rights mean nothing to those who don’t believe in God. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would eventually translate into the Bill of Rights, which made the Constitution palatable to anti-statists like Jefferson. I still don’t know why two of my other revolutionary era heroes, Patrick Henry and George Mason, didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence. Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights greatly influenced Jefferson. Mason would lose his friendship with George Washington later when he refused to sign the Constitution, because it hadn’t added the Bill of Rights.

I’ve detailed a lot of hidden history about the Founding of this republic in my books Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963 and American Memory Hole. Thomas Paine stoked the sentiments of the average colonist with his remarkable little fifty page pamphlet Common Sense. He would be jailed during the French Revolution for opposing the violence of the revolutionaries, and grew bitter at Washington when he refused to ask for his release. Paine eventually became so obscure that only six people attended his funeral, and it is still unknown where his human remains are. James Otis, who came up with that whole “no taxation without representation” thing, was struck dead by lightning as he stood in a doorway. Remarkably, he had expressed a desire to exit the world in such an unlikely manner. The list of hardships those who signed the Declaration experienced makes their vow to sacrifice their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor all the more chillingly impressive.

These were the One Percenters of their day. No revolution could ever be possible without some great power behind it. In this case, it was the immense wealth of those like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and John Hancock, which made it possible. Much as we’d like to believe it, the common people simply are never going to overthrow their masters, no matter how tyrannical they become, unless they are ordered to. Crumbling, Third World shithole America 2.0 proves that. They’ve demonstrated quite clearly that they have no tipping point. Just picture Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and the like, meeting surreptitiously in dimly lit taverns, discussing how to devise a government that grants liberty to its people. A nation without a king or queen, with an armed citizenry. Where you’re free to express your opinion, and have the right to peaceably assemble in protest.

The language in the Declaration of Independence is such that those who misrule us must consider it “hate speech.” This passage, for example: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” How does that equate to what happened to the Confederates, who no longer consented in 1860? Or to the January 6 Stop the Steal Rally protesters, who even if they had been “insurrectionists,” had the right to be, according to Thomas Jefferson? The fact is, our government is so powerful that it’s never going to let anyone “alter or abolish” it.

Consider what the Founders would think, if they could see the embarrassing mess we’ve made of their bright and shining republic. If Patrick Henry refused to go to the Constitutional Convention because he “smelled a rat,” then what would he be smelling today as he walked through the crumbling streets of America 2.0? The human excrement from illegal migrants and homeless U.S. citizens? I don’t know, maybe they shit in the streets in Colonial times. I wasn’t there, and there were no rest rooms. George Mason was most responsible for writing what became the Bill of Rights. What would his response be to Orwellian terms like “hate speech?” I’m sure he, Thomas Jefferson, and other liberty-minded patriots would have been outraged over the asterisk that Oliver Wendell Holmes’s WWI admonition that “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater” represented. What would any of them think of transgender reassignment surgery? They sacrificed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for that?

I doubt if Donald Trump, or any other politician, mentions George Washington’s Farewell Address today. You know, the one that stands in start contrast to our official foreign policy for over a century now? Whether or not the legend about him trying to ban Jews from America is true, Ben Franklin would certainly not look favorably on our intense “entangling alliance” with Israel. But then, if they were alive today, no one in power would care what they had to say about anything. They surely wouldn’t be able to attain any power themselves. They’d be relegated to alt media podcasts, where half of the hosts would claim they were disinformation agents or limited hangouts. I’d be happy to welcome them on “I Protest.” Even Alexander Hamilton. The dead White banker’s favorite, not the hip Black Broadway star. I’d like his thoughts on the Federal Reserve, and if he had any reservations now about creating the national debt.

It’s understandable why our culture pays such little attention to the Founding Fathers. As I’ve pointed out, not a single biopic was made during the Golden Age of Hollywood, about Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Henry, Mason, or even an overview of the War for Independence itself. Cary Grant in The Howards of Virginia was about the best you got. The last thing absolute tyrants want to do is to remind their docile sheeple about how their country was formed by overthrowing tyranny. And given the oppressive taxation we face today, and the failure of our political representatives to act on behalf of their constituents, “no taxation without representation” is not an issue they want to focus on. The entire Declaration of Independence, which is our founding document after all, is subversive by today’s standards. Our political leaders don’t agree with any of it.

Our Founders are denigrated, like the founders of no other nation on earth have ever been. Without a Revolution taking place, that is. You’d expect the Casanovas and Cagliostros to depict the French monarchy in the worst possible light. But we have had no second Revolution here. You saw what the response was to a bunch of angry voters protesting what they believed was electoral fraud on January 6, 2021. So any potential new Sons of Liberty must plan on meeting in even dimmer lit places, with no smart devices or security cameras around. What other country has its leaders regularly violate the Constitution they swear allegiance to? Even the most lecherous adulterer has a bit more respect for oaths than that. As George W. Bush said, it is just a piece of paper, after all. Even Ilhan Omar, who clearly favors Somalia over the U.S., and Rep. Brian Mast, who wore his IDF uniform to congress, swore the oath.

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