The 9/11 Files: From Tragedy to Tyranny
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Why Only Idiots Will Negotiate With the Trump Administration Ever Again
On October 20th, the Washington Post headlined “EXCLUSIVE: Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal: To secure Washington’s access to El Salvador’s most notorious prison, the secretary of state made an extraordinary offer to President Nayib Bukele.”, and reported:
In the days before the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, the president of that country demanded something for himself: the return of nine MS-13 gang leaders in U.S. custody.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a March 13 phone call with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, promised the request would be fulfilled, according to officials familiar with the conversation. But there was one obstacle: Some of the MS-13 members Bukele wanted were “informants” under the protection of the U.S. government, Rubio told him.
To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to betray MS-13 informants in exchange for access to El Salvador’s most notorious prison.
Rubio’s extraordinary pledge illustrates the extent to which the Trump administration was willing to meet Bukele’s demands as it negotiated what would become one of the signature agreements of President Donald Trump’s early months in office. While the outlines of the quid pro quo have been public for months, the Trump administration’s willingness to renege on secret arrangements made with informants who had aided U.S. investigations has not been previously reported. …
In promising to terminate the informant arrangements, current and former Justice Department officials say Rubio threatened to undercut years of work by U.S. law enforcement to apprehend and secure the cooperation of high-ranking members of one of the world’s most deadly gangs.
“The deal is a deep betrayal of U.S. law enforcement, whose agents risked their lives to apprehend the gang members,” said Douglas Farah, a U.S. contractor who worked with federal officials to investigate and help dismantle the MS-13 gang.
Nixing the agreements also threatens to damage the credibility of the Justice Department, which routinely relies on informants to build cases against high-level criminals, officials said. …
At least three of the MS-13 leaders Bukele requested had divulged incriminating information about members of his government. … The others remain in the United States, waiting to learn whether they, too, will be handed over to the very government they were cooperating against. …
“The Trump Administration’s results speak for themselves,” said Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman. “Hardened TdA gang members are back in Venezuela … MS-13 gang members are being prosecuted in the U.S. and El Salvador. And Americans are safer as a result of these incredible efforts.” ….
It is reasonable to presume that the one of the three which Bukele has who had “divulged incriminating information about members of his government” is now dead, missing, or otherwise being treated worse than the other tens of thousands in El Salvador’s mega-prison are being treated.
Why would any Government trust a Government like America’s, enough to negotiate with it?
And why should any Government that has already negotiated an agreement with this Government continue abiding by its terms? Would it be fair and reasonable for all such Governments to make continued compliance by them conditional upon Washington’s agreeing in clear terms to Washington’s now making additional concessions? If Washington then declines to provide any such, then should the other country take action to separate itself from its alliance with this rogue regime that sells-out even its allies?
To be a friend of the U.S. Government is an extremely dangerous situation to be in. This has aleady been amply proven by the enormous harms that Europe’s alliance with it, after the U.S. regime in 2014 perpetrated an extremely bloody coup that overthrew the democratically elected neutralist head-of-state in Ukraine and installed there a rabidly anti-Russian regime that since has drained over $400 billion from America’s European ‘allies’ in order to sustain on Russia’s border this rabidly anti-Russian government there (installed BY the U.S. regime), have done to Europe. It’s causing a severe recession — perhaps ultimately a depression — in Europe. WHY should they continue this? The actual question is: SHOULD they continue this?
After all: This problem didn’t really START with Trump.
This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.
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Is The Gaza Ceasefire Falling Apart?
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Post from Dave DeCamp
Saleh Abdullah wrote:
Check out the full segment from The Matt Gaetz Show with @ryangrim, @mattgaetz, and me discussing Israel’s attempts to blow up the Gaza ceasefire deal
https://x.com/DecampDave/status/1980464313036079321
https://x.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1980093028040687814
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Chess Master Not Smart Enough to Avoid the Jab?
President Trump’s Ultimate Intent
‘If we do not stop this, society will explode’
New Georgetown University president: ‘I reject the Church’s teachings on homosexuality’
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STUDY: Childhood Vaccines Contain Trillions of Human Fetal DNA Fragments Capable of Genomic Integration
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The $20 Billion Question: Why Is Washington Backing Argentina’s Milei?
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Nessun salvataggio centrale: Milei fa sul serio con il federalismo
Ricordo a tutti i lettori che su Amazon potete acquistare il mio nuovo libro, “Il Grande Default”: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0DJK1J4K9
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 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 la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.
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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/nessun-salvataggio-centrale-milei)
Poche regioni in Argentina simboleggiano il crollo del modello peronista in modo così chiaro come La Rioja. Questa provincia remota e povera ha fatto affidamento per decenni sui sussidi distribuiti dal governo federale per mantenere in funzione un'economia fortemente statalista. A La Rioja due lavoratori su tre sono dipendenti pubblici, l'attività privata è scarsa e il settore produttivo è dominato da aziende controllate dallo stesso governo provinciale.
Fino all'elezione di Javier Milei, il governo centrale argentino trasferiva regolarmente fondi alle province attraverso i cosiddetti “trasferimenti discrezionali”, fondi non obbligatori assegnati per motivi politici, che a loro volta alimentavano reti clientelari.
Con l'elezione di Milei questa dinamica si è interrotta bruscamente. La sua politica di aggiustamento fiscale, incentrata sull'eliminazione del deficit e sul ripristino dell'equilibrio di bilancio, ha portato a un taglio del 98% dei trasferimenti discrezionali alle province. Privata di fondi e senza accesso ai mercati del debito, La Rioja è diventata insolvente nel febbraio 2024.
In risposta, il governatore Ricardo Quintela, fedele al peronismo e acceso oppositore delle riforme liberali di Milei, ha lanciato una misura disperata: la creazione di una quasi-valuta locale, emessa con il nome tecnico di Bono de Cancelación de Deuda (BOCADE), comunemente nota come Chacho, in onore del caudillo locale Ángel Vicente “Chacho” Peñaloza. Con una parità ufficiale di 1:1 con il peso argentino, il Chacho doveva formalmente avere lo stesso valore di un peso.
A partire da agosto 2024 il Chacho è stato utilizzato per pagare circa il 30% degli stipendi dei dipendenti pubblici e poteva essere utilizzato nelle attività commerciali aderenti e per pagare le tasse locali. Il governo non ha obbligato i commercianti ad accettarlo, ma ha offerto loro degli incentivi.
Sebbene la misura abbia inizialmente innescato un picco nella domanda, con circa la metà degli acquisti in alcuni negozi effettuati in Chachos durante la prima settimana, la sua accettazione è rapidamente diminuita e il valore della valuta si è ulteriormente deteriorato al di fuori della provincia. Sono emerse restrizioni all'uso, insieme a mercati paralleli e negozi che accettavano Chachos solo per una percentuale dell'acquisto totale o che davano credito al negozio invece del resto. Entro la fine del 2024 la circolazione del Chacho è stata progressivamente ridotta, con il governatore Quintela che lamentava il fatto che la maggior parte dei commercianti non lo accettasse.
Pur considerando la moneta una misura “ingannevole e dannosa”, Javier Milei si è rifiutato di intervenire, poiché il presidente argentino crede fermamente nel federalismo competitivo. L'idea di Milei è che le province debbano essere libere di determinare le proprie politiche fiscali, di bilancio e persino monetarie, e allo stesso tempo farsi carico delle conseguenze di tali decisioni. Lo stato non dovrebbe essere paternalistico, anche se ciò significa lasciare che i comuni non paghino i propri debiti.
Milei immagina una struttura in cui le giurisdizioni subnazionali competano tra loro, adeguando tasse, normative e servizi pubblici per attrarre investimenti di capitale e talenti.
L'Argentina aveva già sperimentato un'ondata di quasi-valute negli anni '80 e nei primi anni 2000, quando più di una dozzina di province, tra cui La Rioja, fecero ricorso a emissioni locali di quasi-valute durante le crisi. All'epoca i titoli provinciali finirono per essere assorbiti dal governo federale e scambiati con pesos, una pratica che Milei ha giurato di non ripetere.
Si teme che il Chacho possa avere effetti inflazionistici, diretti o indiretti. Secondo l'economista Marcelo Capello della Fundación Mediterránea, se altre province seguissero l'esempio di La Rioja e queste quasi-valute venissero emesse in quantità superiori alla capacità di gettito fiscale della provincia, il rischio sarebbe critico.
Inoltre Capello mette in guardia dal rischio di una “guerra fiscale” tra le province e il governo nazionale se questo tipo di emissione dovesse diffondersi, andando a indebolire lo sforzo nazionale di contenere l’inflazione, consentendo alle province di aggirare l’aggiustamento fiscale ed emettere moneta.
Quintela sta portando fino all'ultimo respiro un modello sopravvissuto per decenni, mentre Milei si sta scontrando con la realtà: o le province effettuano riforme, o crollano senza una rete di sicurezza.
L'esperienza del Chacho riapre un dibattito ricorrente negli Stati Uniti sui salvataggi centrali. Come hanno avvertito nel corso degli anni gli economisti Thomas Sowell e Milton Friedman, il governo federale non dovrebbe salvare gli stati dai loro debiti, poiché ciò distorce il mercato e incoraggia l'irresponsabilità.
Nell'ultimo decennio gli stati americani con finanze cronicamente sbilanciate – in particolare Illinois, California e New York – hanno beneficiato dei meccanismi di sostegno federale impliciti o espliciti, soprattutto durante la pandemia. Tali interventi diluiscono gli incentivi per una sana governance attenuando l'impatto di una cattiva gestione locale.
Il caso di La Rioja ci ricorda che una federazione funzionale richiede la competizione tra giurisdizioni, non la mutualizzazione delle perdite.
I salvataggi federali per gli stati non salvano le economie. Non fanno altro che distruggere gli incentivi e addormentare il problema, offrendo una soluzione “tampone” pagata da tutti i contribuenti.
L'Argentina sta ora cercando di invertire questa logica, eliminando la rete di sicurezza federale per la scarsa pianificazione locale. Gli Stati Uniti dovrebbero seguire la stessa strada.
[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/
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Five Years Until War With Russia? The EU Is Already at War
The Russophobic Euro elites are trying to railroad the continent to war.
The 27-nation European Union this week unveiled a five-year plan “to get ready for war” with Russia.
The so-called “Roadmap on European Defense Readiness 2030” sounds like a war manifesto and a self-fulfilling prophecy, putting the EU on a disastrous collision course with Russia.
It is incredible that such an ominous direction is being blatantly dictated by an unaccountable elite in Brussels. Eighty-five years ago, the Third Reich had a plan to rule over Europe by dominating the Soviet Union. The EU elite are carrying on the plan.
As for the “defense readiness” (that is, “war readiness”) roadmap, the future is already here, not in five years. The EU is presently on a disastrous collision course with Russia.
Like the United States, the European Union has been at war with Russia through its proxy regime in Ukraine since February 2022, and before that, going back to the 2014 coup in Kiev.
Over the past four years, the EU has supplied nearly €180 billion of taxpayer money to weaponize a NeoNazi regime in Kiev. As we noted in last week’s editorial, that vast allocation (and waste) of resources is far greater than the EU’s own member nations have received for developing their economies and societies. When has the European public had a chance to vote on that? Decisions are being made by an elite cabal.
Unlike the Trump administration, the European Union under the influence of arch-Russophobes like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, has shown absolutely no will for finding a diplomatic resolution to the conflict in Ukraine. With honorable exceptions, most of the European governments are pushing the war hysteria. So, too, are the European media, as are the American mainstream media. Russia is the evil aggressor, no diplomacy, no dialogue with Moscow, no surrender, and so on. It’s war-on-autopilot.
The European bloc, at least at the official level, is completely dominated by NATO and intelligence agencies’ propaganda portraying Russia as the enemy. The CIA and Britain’s MI6 are no doubt pulling the strings and Europe is dancing like a pathetic puppet.
President Donald Trump held a two-hour phone call with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Thursday during which the two leaders agreed to meet in Budapest in the next two weeks. The meeting is a follow-up to their summit in Anchorage on August 15, to try to end the hostilities in Ukraine.
The EU leadership is implacably opposed to any such diplomacy. They were disconcerted by the meeting in Alaska because Trump treated Putin with respectful diplomacy. The latest news about a summit in Budapest is also peeving EU leaders. They are clamoring for Trump to deliver Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, which they will pay for. This is aimed at ensuring that diplomacy gets blown up.
Since the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, the European Union has undergone a retrograde transformation to become a militarized bloc defined by obsessive hostility towards Russia. The EU is increasingly a clone of the NATO military alliance. Historically, the European Union stood for peace through neighborly trade and commerce. It was intended to have evolved from the ashes of the Second World War, ensuring that war would never happen again on the continent. In 2012, the bloc was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Not that that award means much, but it serves to illustrate the absurdity.
Over recent months, the EU has become fixated on a feverish war mentality. The economies of the 27 nations are increasingly marshaled by military production and spending. The whole purpose of the bloc is being defined as an existential confrontation with Russia. It seems significant that Von der Leyen and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have Nazi skeletons in their family wardrobes. The Baltic states, too, which have emerged as belligerent influences on EU policy, have nefarious links to the Nazi past.
The war mentality reached fever pitch in Von der Leyen’s State of the Union address on September 10. She opened by declaring that “Europe is in a fight” with Russia. She said it was a fight for “freedom and independence,” and she united the cause of the EU with Ukraine against Russia.
“Europe must fight… because Ukraine’s freedom is Europe’s freedom,” she claimed.
Von der Leyen, the former German military minister, and the European Union’s most senior official, who is unelected, was declaring that the bloc was at war. Now, not in five years.
In recent months with intensifying emphasis, the EU’s intelligence agencies (CIA, MI6 clones) have been warning of war with Russia as imminent, and there has been a suspicious surge in drone incursions in Poland, Estonia, Romania and Denmark, which have been blamed on Russia without any evidence.
All the while, European leaders and NATO chief Mark Rutte (a former Dutch prime minister, and an abject clone if ever there was one) have been calling for massive increases in military spending to “counter the Russia threat”. In March, Von der Leyen floated the figure at €800 billion for the bloc to spend on “defense”.
In 2014, the combined EU military spend was less than €200 billion. It now stands at €340 billion. That is an increase by 70 percent over a decade.
The roadmap unveiled this week sure enough delivers on Von der Leyen’s earlier astronomical figure. It is planning a total EU spend on military of €800 billion – more than double the current level and four times the level the EU spent 10 years ago.
This is insane and unsustainable. If it doesn’t escalate into an all-out war in Europe, the least damaging effect of such wanton militarism will destroy European nations from economic and political collapse.
It is clear that major decisions have been made behind closed doors to take the EU in a direction towards increased militarism where the civilian economies are transformed into war economies. That’s great news for military corporations and politicians who are sponsored (bribed) by lobbyists. European citizens are the losers and they are not being consulted about their fate. Their societies are being drained of vital resources, which are being sucked up by militarism and corporate investors.
To pull off this grand theft and deception, the EU relies on unelected bureaucrats like Von der Leyen, Kallas and Rutte to whip up Russophobia and “war fears”. The mainstream media plays its part by peddling intelligence propaganda to manufacture public acquiescence.
However, there is pushback to the craziness. The rise of populist (that is, more representative and democratic) parties is demonstrating contempt for the undemocratic EU ruling class. The protests in France throwing the government into chaos are motivated by disgust at the economic cutbacks for public services and workers’ rights while Paris throws billions of euros propping up the proxy war in Ukraine.
To their credit, governments in Hungary and Slovakia are speaking out against the warmongering of the EU towards Russia. Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico have criticized the militarization of Europe and are consistently calling for diplomacy with Moscow.
It is significant that Trump chose to meet Putin in the Hungarian capital for their next meeting, chaired by Orbán who described the event as “great news for people who want peace”.
The European-NATO leadership is displeased by the Budapest venue because it suggests following a diplomatic option instead of a policy of war-on-autopilot.
The Russophobic Euro elites are trying to railroad the continent to war. They can see no other way of doing international relations. They have committed the EU to war and dictatorial war spending that is criminal. They, therefore, cannot allow peace and diplomacy to succeed because that would be an admission of their criminal warmongering.
But their way is leading to the abyss.
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.
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Trump Unleashes the CIA on Venezuela
It is particularly difficult to pick out the most idiotic comments made by President Donald Trump over the past week as there is so much to choose from. There were the memorable doodle-headed speeches before the Israeli Knesset and the so-called Peace gathering in Sharm el-Sheikh Egypt and the threats against Hamas over the failure to come up with the bodies of Israeli hostages that were killed by American government provided bombs dropped by Israel and are now buried beneath piles of rubble. And then there is the Insurrection Act, cited nearly every day by Trump or one of his cabinet, which, if it is successfully called for and passes through judicial review, will truly turn the United States into a police state ruled by a leader that clearly is mentally incompetent as well as providing all the signs that he is a narcissistic psychopath whose goal in holding the presidency is to be surrounded by folks who tell him constantly how great he is! And let’s not forget the bloviation regarding the “Triumphal” Arch being planned for the Arlington National Cemetery end of Memorial Bridge leading to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
What the often-garrulous if incoherent Trump never said in the context of conflict in the Middle East was that a “GENOCIDE conducted by Israel is taking place in Gaza” as that is a word that is strictly verboten in the circle that surrounds him even though nearly all of the rest of the world sees it otherwise. He nevertheless frequently expressed his pain at the thought of 20 Israeli “hostages” with little to spare for an estimated 20,000 dead Palestinian children. To mention Gazan suffering would presumably would cut off the $100 million plus loose change that comes his way from donors like Israeli Las Vegas casino multi-billionaire Miriam Adelson, who flew with Trump on Air Force One and grinned when he announced publicly how she was worth $60 billion and posited how she is more loyal to Israel than she is to the United States. It was what some might regard as a genuine national security issue that did not seem to bother the president in the least. The Knesset audience cheered however, particularly when Trump related how Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights had been secured through a bribe he had received from the Adelsons during his first term in office.
Beyond all that entertainment, however, as a former intelligence officer, my favorite Trump bit of chatter last week was his somewhat odd revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is now operating in Venezuela. That is in addition to the deployment of eight warships, a nuclear-powered submarine, B-52 bombers and fighter jets to the region as part of what the Administration has described as an operation to combat drug smuggling and illegal migration into the United States. There are reportedly a total of about 10,000 US military personnel, as a possible sea-air-and ground invasion force, assembled in the Caribbean area either on ships or in US territory on Puerto Rico. The recent resignation of the SOUTHCOM commanding Navy Admiral Alvin Holsey, who may have had reservations about the legality of what was afoot, is not expected to slow the troop build- up.
On Tuesday, Trump said that the Navy had struck another small boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing six people. It was the fifth such strike in the Caribbean, where the Trump administration has asserted its presumed authority to treat alleged drug traffickers as unlawful combatants who may be attacked with military force. At least 27 people have been killed in the five strikes, according to figures released by the administration, and a sixth strike on Thursday reportedly was the first to result in “survivors” who apparently have been picked up by a US warship. There are also reports about a “drug submarine” which was intercepted and destroyed by the US Navy.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday alongside FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump was questioned about the reported Justice Department opinion which forms the basis of the administration’s ramped up campaign against Latin American drug cartels. It includes expanded authorities for the CIA to conduct lethal targeting and carry out covert action in the region. President Donald Trump reportedly had updated CIA’s authorities when he also signed a secret directive ordering the military to begin hitting Latin American drug cartels earlier in the summer.
Before that, in April, the CIA had begun reviewing its existing authorities to use lethal force against Latin American drug cartels, as the Trump administration made confronting the cartels a major priority for the intelligence agency. At that time, the CIA was already flying surveillance drones that are capable of being armed over Mexico to begin to take out the Mexican cartels if ordered to do so by the White House.
Interestingly, there already exists a presidential directive, known as a “finding,” for CIA covert action related to the counternarcotics mission that dated back to the 1980s. The Trump administration has been working to update that finding to provide further clarity to CIA on the specific actions the agency is allowed to take in the Latin American region. The basic problem is that Latin America is in America’s backyard. The expansion of CIA’s authorities has included lethal targeting against cartel actors, an authority that is fraught with risk as in Latin America, there are, comparatively, many US-born citizens and green card holders — people who might have the legal standing to sue the US government if they are somehow targeted or harmed.
President Donald Trump explained on Wednesday that he had indeed authorized the CIA to operate inside Venezuela to clamp down on illegal flows of migrants and drugs from the South American nation, but stopped short of saying it would have authority to remove current Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro which clearly is also a major policy objective. Trump explained how “We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela, and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea, so you get to see that, but we’re going to stop them by land also. I think Venezuela is feeling heat. But I think a lot of other countries are feeling heat too. We’re not going to let this country, our country, be ruined because other people want to drop, as you say, their worst,” he also said, referring to his questionable claim that countries emptied their prisons and mental institutions to dump such illegal and marginal people in the United States.
Trump’s statement was remarkable because presidents don’t normally acknowledge directives, the “findings,” that allow spies to accomplish a secret mission. The whole idea of having a CIA is to allow the United States to operate in the shadows and conduct “deniable” operations, which is the key feature of “covert action,” i.e. that it should remain covert. Trump, always capable of acting impulsively, might, on the contrary, have been sending a message to the Venezuelan government about his seriousness over the drug and migrant issues. Phony warnings about boats allegedly filled with “narcoterrorists” might be considered psychological warfare, with Trump hoping to scare Maduro into resigning office and going into exile. The fact is that Venezuela plays a relatively minor role in the region’s drug trade, with Colombia and Ecuador being the prime suppliers. The president would not respond to questions regarding whether the CIA’s goal was to topple Maduro, for whom the US has offered a $50 million bounty. “Wouldn’t it be a ridiculous question for me to answer?” he said.
Another issue raised by Trump’s exposure of what should not have been exposed is the endangering of CIA officers operating in Venezuela. What have they been doing there? Well, this is just speculation, but they might have been funding and advising anti-government politicians like the woman who just won the Nobel Peace Prize Maria Corina Machado. She is reportedly a great fan of Trump and MAGA and also of the Israeli government, both of which she has called on to bring about regime change in her own country!
Real vulnerability for running such operations comes because CIA officers generally have two types of “cover” when they operate overseas. One is official, which would be working out of a US Embassy or Military Assistance office, but, thanks to Trump’s interference in the Venezuelan election in 2019 which preceded the breaking off of diplomatic and other relations, “official” does not exist in Venezuela which means there is no official or diplomatic protection. That means that officers must operate under “non official cover” (NOCs) which is normally as a businessman or student, or even using a forged passport, as an unalarming national of a country friendly to Caracas. In none of those cases will the officer have any protection if he or she is caught and you can bet that due to Trump’s overt and one might say lethal pressure the Venezuelan counterintelligence and police services are now looking very hard for American spies. Which contributes to the raising of the obvious question of whether what is being proposed for Venezuela is in any way due to an actual threat or desirable relative to what might be gained. Based on the evidence provided by the White House up until now, the answer would have to be “No!”
Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.
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John Charmley and the Story of Winston Churchill
For more than thirty years, I’d occasionally come across harsh attacks against a British historian named John Charmley for writing a highly-critical biography of Winston Churchill, the famed British leader, and that was about the only thing I knew of that author. I’d always vaguely wondered exactly what he’d said about Churchill that had infuriated so many others, and whether his criticism had been warranted, but never had enough of an interest in the topic to investigate it.
Then a year or two ago, I finally got around to ordering Churchill: The End of Glory from Amazon, with a mint copy of his original hardcover edition offered at an extremely attractive price, less than half that of the subsequent paperback version. Unfortunately, the doorstop-sized 750 page tome hardly struck me as casual reading, so it just ended up in a pile of my other books, where it quietly sat for the next eighteen months.
But with those book-piles growing disturbingly high, I finally decided to whittle them down a bit, and a book as thick as Charmley’s seemed like a good contribution to that effort. So I finally got around to reading it a few days ago, along with more than a dozen of the reviews and other articles it had generated, all of which helped refresh my memory of the half-forgotten controversy provoked by its 1993 release.
As Charmley explained on the first page of his text, he devoted 15 years to the book and since he was only 37 when it was released, he must have embarked upon that the massive research project near the very beginning of his scholarly career, although he also published four other academic books on related subjects along the way.
The bulk of the massive text was a very detailed and solid presentation of Churchill’s political career prior to his 1940 elevation to Number 10 Downing Street, and I found its material quite informative in that regard though sometimes a bit dull.
I’d certainly known that in 1915 Churchill had been driven from the British Cabinet for the terrible Gallipoli disaster that he’d engineered, but I’d had the mistaken impression that his political career had been blighted during the many years that followed. Instead, I discovered that he’d soon returned to office in 1917, and then spent nearly all of the next dozen years in government, holding a variety of highly important positions, many of them near the very top of the political ladder, though his record in these posts was often regarded as less than successful.
Ironically enough, it was instead Prime Minister David Lloyd George—Britain’s victorious leader of the First World War—who was forced out in 1922 and never once regained a government position during the remaining two decades of his life.
The reason for Lloyd George’s political eclipse was the complete collapse of his British Liberal Party, reduced to a mere shadow of its previous standing. Its place on the political spectrum was largely usurped by Britain’s newly risen socialists of the Labour Party, which held power alone or in coalition during most of the 1920s.
The key factor behind the replacement of the Liberals had been the massive expansion of the British franchise in early 1918, removing property qualifications for voting and therefore tripling the size of the electorate, allowing the large working-class to finally play a central role in elections. Much of that working-class voted Labour, and the Liberals disappeared as a result.
Another important factor was the severe political backlash against the horrific human losses that Britain had suffered during the war, with most of the electorate now considering Britain’s involvement to have been a disatrous mistake that they blamed upon the Liberals who had governed during those years. It’s certainly more than coincidental that some of the most important early Labour leaders such as E.D. Morel had been ardent anti-war activists, even suffering years of harsh wartime imprisonment for their views. As a Cabinet member, Churchill had been notorious for his bellicosity, and in the 1922 elections he lost his parliamentary seat to Morel, with Churchill forced to spend the next couple of years out of politics.
The Charmley biography was tremendously rich in detail, and if I’d read it a decade ago, I surely would have missed many of its most telling and almost hidden elements, items that seemed to similarly escape the notice of all the many distinguished reviewers.
For example, on p. 383 the author devoted two half-sentences to a somewhat cryptic reference to what was almost certainly the central turning point of World War II. But since that story has suffered near-total suppression for 85 years by virtually all Western historians, I doubt if even one reader in a hundred picked up on that item:
At the Supreme War Council on 28 March…Chamberlain had put forward a number of plans for offensive operations. These included a scheme of Churchill’s…and a plan for attacking the Baku oilfields in Russia from which Germany obtained much of her oil…attacking the Baku fields, although a more attractive prospect, involved the risk of war with Russia.
That extremely brief mention refers to the very serious plans that the Allies—the British and French—made during the early months of 1940 to launch a massive attack against Stalin’s Soviet Union. Code named “Operation Pike,” they intended to use their Middle Eastern airbases to unleash the largest strategic bombing offensive in the history of the world against the Soviet oil fields of Baku, while they also made diplomatic efforts to enlist the Turks and perhaps the Iranians into joining the Allied attack against the USSR.
As the declassified documents eventually showed, the Allies mistakenly regarded the Soviets as Hitler’s weak and vulnerable ally, constituting the “soft underbelly” of the powerful German war machine. They incorrectly believed that several weeks of aerial bombardment would be sufficient to totally destroy the Soviet oil facilities, thereby cutting Germany off from its main supply of that vital commodity. Furthermore, the heavily mechanized nature of Soviet agriculture would mean that the loss of those oil supplies might well produce a huge Soviet famine, perhaps leading to the political collapse of Stalin’s regime.
However, all these supposed facts were entirely wrong. Little if any of Germany’s oil came from the USSR, and as the world would quickly discover the following year, Soviet military might was enormously strong and resilient rather than feeble. Moreover, vastly larger and more advanced strategic bombing attacks against oil fields later in the war eventually demonstrated that those facilities were far less fragile and easily destroyed than the Allied leaders had originally believed.
But wartime military decisions are taken based upon existing beliefs rather than produced in 20-20 hindsight. Not only would an all-out Allied attack against the USSR during the first few months of 1940 have certainly failed, but it would have had catastrophic strategic consequences, bringing the Soviets directly into the war as Hitler’s outright military ally and thereby almost certainly ensuring a rapid Allied defeat.
By the end of this preparatory period, unmarked Allied spotter-planes were regularly violating Soviet airspace, drawing up the last-minute list of targets for the bombing offensive that was about to be unleashed, while the attack was only canceled after Hitler’s panzer divisions swept through France in May 1940 and knocked that country out of the war. Thus, as I explained in a 2019 article, Hitler’s attack had inadvertently saved the Allies from a monumental strategic disaster.
Once the victorious Germans occupied the Paris area, they were fortunate enough to capture all the secret documents, and achieved a major propaganda coup by publishing these in facsimile and translation, so that all knowledgeable individuals soon knew that the Allies had been on the very verge of attacking the Soviets. This crucial fact, omitted from virtually all subsequent Western histories, also helps to explain why Stalin remained so distrustful of Churchill’s diplomatic efforts the following year in the months preceding Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa.
Furthermore, some of the most far-reaching political consequences of a 1940 Allied attack upon the Soviet Union would have been totally unknown to the British and French leaders then planning it. Although they were certainly aware of the powerful Soviet-aligned Communist movements present in their own countries, only many years later did it become clear that the top leadership of the Roosevelt Administration was honeycombed by numerous agents fully loyal to Stalin, with the final proof awaiting the release of the Venona Decrypts in the 1990s. So if the Allies had suddenly gone to war against the Soviets, the fierce opposition of those influential individuals would have greatly reduced any future prospects of substantial American military assistance, let alone eventual intervention in the European conflict on the Allied side.
By any measure, the notion of a 1940 Allied attack against the neutral USSR would have been such a monumental blunder that it probably represented the single most embarrassing element of World War II, and a near-absolute blanket of silence quickly descended upon those facts, excluding them from virtually all subsequent Western histories. The first detailed coverage of that pivotal wartime turning point came in 2000 when historian Patrick Osborn published Operation Pike, an academic monograph based upon declassified government archives that appeared in a respected military history series.
Prior to that, I think the most extensive coverage in any Western book had been found in the 1955 wartime memoirs of prominent Anglo-French journalist Sisley Huddleston, which had causally mentioned the story in a couple of pages, whence I happened to discover it. The whole notion that the Allies had planned to attack the USSR in 1940 and that historical facts of such astonishing importance could have remained totally concealed for generations struck me as so implausible that I assumed the elderly Huddleston was merely delusional until I carefully investigated the issue and confirmed the reality of his remarkable claims.
Charmley only devoted about fifty words to this important topic, but I think that is fifty words more than the vast majority of other Western historians have allocated during the last eighty years, and his extremely brief mention convinced me of a couple of things. First, he was obviously aware of Operation Pike and its importance, but deliberately chose to completely downplay it, seeking to avoid academic controversy. And by absurdly stating that a massive Allied bombing offensive against the USSR “involved the risk of war with Russia” he seemed equally confident that virtually none of his readers were aware of the true facts, or would criticize such a ridiculous characterization of the situation.
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Women Warriors for Life
Of all the many dark centuries in the history of Christendom, there is no denying that the 20th century was one of the darkest. It was also the deadliest. In terms of the sheer body count, the last century, with its wars of irreligion, fought with industrialized weapons of mass destruction, was the most murderous in human history—and among the most tyrannous. New secular fundamentalist ideologies, such as communism and Nazism, ushered in a culture of death in which millions perished on the altar of “political correctness.”
Having celebrated the heroic witness of Anna Abrikosova (Mother Catherine of Siena) against communist tyranny, let’s now celebrate women who bore witness to the culture of life in the midst of the death culture of the Nazis.
When we think of Catholics who were martyred by the Nazis, our minds will turn immediately to St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), both of whom were murdered in the infamous Auschwitz death camp. The former was deprived of food and water for two weeks and was then killed with a lethal injection of carbolic acid; the latter was exterminated in the concentration camp’s infamous gas chamber. Both were canonized by St. John Paul II.
Edith Stein is not, however, the only woman to be honored by the Church for resisting the tyranny of the Nazis. Eleven Polish nuns of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth were murdered by machine gun fire by the Nazis in August 1943 and have been beatified by the Church. Another Polish woman, Blessed Marianna Biernacka, was shot by German soldiers after she asked to be killed in the place of her pregnant daughter, unborn grandchild, and son-in-law.
A Hungarian woman, Blessed Sára Salkaházi, was murdered by Nazi collaborators in December 1944 for her leadership of the Catholic Women’s Association, which helped to hide hundreds of Jews in Budapest. A young devout Italian woman, Blessed Teresa of Savona, was strangled and shot to death in August 1944 for resisting a German soldier who was trying to rape her, emulating the example of the better-known St. Maria Goretti, who had been stabbed to death for resisting an attempted rape in 1902.
Blessed Maria Antonina Kratochwil, a religious sister imprisoned by the Nazis in occupied Poland, was brutally attacked by a member of the Gestapo after she had tried to protect Jewish women from being abused by the Nazis. She died from her injuries in October 1942. Another religious sister, Blessed Maria Restituta Kafka, was a Franciscan who worked as a surgical nurse in Austria. In defiance of the Nazi authorities, she maintained overt Christian practices in her hospital, including the displaying of crucifixes on the walls. She was arrested for her anti-Nazi stance and was guillotined in March 1943. Prior to her execution, she wrote the following:
It does not matter how far we are separated from everything, no matter what is taken from us: the faith that we carry in our hearts is something no one can take from us. In this way we build an altar in our own hearts.
Among the heroic women warriors who fought the Nazis, some were destined to survive the war, outliving Hitler’s self-proclaimed “Thousand-Year Reich” which was destroyed after only 12 ignominious years. Blessed Enrichetta Alfieri, an Italian Sister of Charity, worked for the resistance in Milan, and Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, was active in the resistance in Poland, editing an underground newspaper and founding the Front for the Rebirth of Poland, an anti-Nazi Catholic organization.
Kossak-Szczucka was a famous writer and had been elected to the Polish Academy of Literature on the eve of the war. She was arrested for helping Jews escape the clutches of the Nazis and was sentenced to death, a fate she escaped, thanks to the Polish underground, during the Warsaw Uprising. Having survived the war, she continued to resist tyranny as a dissident voice against the new totalitarian regime of the communists. She died in 1968, at the age of 78.
We will conclude by returning to Auschwitz concentration camp and to the prolife witness of Stanisława Leszczyńska, a wife and mother who had worked for many years as a midwife prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. With her husband and children, she began to assist local Jews by delivering food and false documents. In February 1943, she was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, along with her daughter and two of her sons. Her husband escaped. She would never see him again because he would subsequently be killed fighting in the Warsaw Uprising. The two sons were sent as slave laborers to the stone quarries of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.
Leszczyńska and her 24-year-old daughter Sylwia were transported to Auschwitz in April 1943. Due to her experience as a midwife, she was assigned to work in the women’s camp infirmary along with her daughter, who had been a medical student prior to the war. She was under the supervision of the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, later dubbed the “Angel of Death” for his medical experiments on prisoners, who ordered her to write reports about birth defects and problems associated with childbirth.
Leszczyńska’s experience at Auschwitz would be recorded in The Report of a Midwife from Auschwitz (Raport położnej z Oświęcimia). Of the 3,000 babies that she delivered, approximately 2,500 perished, many through cold-blooded murder. Horrifically, she described how the newborn children were snatched away and taken to another room to be drowned in a barrel by someone whom she named as “Sister Klara,” who had apparently been imprisoned at Auschwitz for infanticide. Others, who were lucky enough to be born with blue eyes, were sent away to become Germanized. Only about 30 infants survived in the care of their mothers. Heartbreakingly, many expectant mothers had no idea what was going to happen to their babies and traded their meager food rations for fabric to be used for diapers.
Leszczyńska remained the camp’s midwife until Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945. Continuing to work as a midwife after the war, she prayed over every newborn baby that she delivered in remembrance of those who had died in the death camp. In January 1970, on the 25th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Leszczyńska met the women prisoners of Auschwitz and their grown-up children who had been born in the camp and whom she had helped to deliver.
Eighteen months earlier, Pope Paul VI had issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae, in defense of human life in the wake of the new culture of death emerging after the so-called sexual revolution had led to demands for the legalization of infanticide. As the fight against the death-culture continues, it is right and just that we should remember these women warriors of the culture of life.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.
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How Vaccine Brain Injuries Were Rebranded and Erased From Memory
I’ve long believed that public relations (propaganda) is one of the most powerful but invisible forces in our society. Again and again, I’ve watched professional PR firms create narratives that most of the country believes, regardless of how much it goes against their self-interests. What’s most remarkable is that despite the exact same tactics being used repeatedly on the public, most people simply can’t see it. When you try to point out exactly how they’re being bamboozled by yet another PR campaign, they often can’t recognize it—instead insisting you’re paranoid or delusional.
That’s why one of my major goals in this publication has been to expose this industry. Once you understand their playbook—having “independent” experts push sculpted language that media outlets then repeat—it becomes very easy to spot, and saves you from falling into the traps most people do. The COVID-19 vaccines, for instance, were facilitated by the largest PR campaign of our lifetime.
One of the least appreciated consequences of this industry is that many of our cultural beliefs ultimately originate from PR campaigns. This explains why so many widely believed things are “wrong”—if a belief were actually true, it wouldn’t require a massive PR investment to instill in society. Due to PR’s power, the viewpoints it instills tend to crowd out other cultural beliefs.
In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at what’s behind one of those implanted beliefs: “vaccines don’t cause autism.”
The Frequency of Vaccine Injuries
When vaccinated and unvaccinated children are compared, chronic illnesses are 3-7X as common in the vaccinated individuals. Because of this, there is a longstanding embargo on ever conducting this type of research (allowing the status quo to remain that “no evidence exists” between the vaccine and the injury).
Recently, Senator Ron Johnson revealed that a robust study comparing vaccinated children to unvaccinated had been conducted at a premier medical institution in 2020, but due to the results it showed, despite previously committing to publishing the paper, its authors chose not to, due to how much it violated the medical orthodoxy.
It’s important to note that beyond these results being earth-shattering, they are also entirely in line with every other long-term comparative study that has ever been done on vaccines—all of which I synopsized here (along with the characteristic signs that allow one to identify the frightfully frequent vaccine-injured children).
Erasing Encephalitis
A key theme of George Orwell’s book 1984 is that language defines a culture. If ideas aren’t present in language, the populace can’t conceive of them (which is why 1984’s ruling party eliminated words like ‘freedom’, ‘rebellion’, and ‘justice’ from the new language).
Another way language controls the public consciousness is through the use of ambiguous term which are not clearly defined, so that depending on the needs of the situation, the audience can be steered towards the desired interpretation of it, even if those interpretations sometimes overtly contradict each other (effectively allowing the PR firm’s client to “have their cake and eat it).
For example, Fauci was a master of using slippery language to constantly get whatever he wanted with no accountability through implying but never explicitly stating his desired conclusion (which the media would then run with). A classic example is having everyone in lockstep assert vaccines are “safe and effective” without ever defining what that actually means, thereby allowing that meaningless statement to be treated as “vaccines are 100% safe and effective,” yet simultaneously, having no accountability for lying as those who repeat it never actually said that. This was best demonstrated when Fauci (who continually told us the vaccine would definitely prevent us from getting COVID) was grilled at a recent Congressional hearing, where in response to:
But we knew from the trials that people who got vaccinated still were subject to getting COVID, so was the COVID-19 vaccine 100% effective?
Fauci stated:
I don’t believe any vaccine is 100% effective.
Note: in a recent article I also highlighted how the ambiguous phrase “brain death” was created to make people believe unresponsive individuals were in fact dead, thereby both removing the societal cost of perpetually caring for them and securing a reliable supply of donor organs.
One of the most widely recognized side effects of vaccination is neurological damage (particularly to the cranial nerves and brain). Prior to the censorship which took over our medical journals, reports of vaccine brain and nerve injuries (e.g., encephalitis) were extensively reported throughout the medical literature—including many identical to what are seen in modern-day autism.
Furthermore, it used to be widely recognized that vaccines could make you “mentally retarded” or “severely retarded.”
Given the taboo around “retarded” that exists now, it quite noteworthy how nonchalantly it was used there. This shift resulted from disability groups in the late 1990s and early 2000’s campaigning against “retarded,” an extensive 2008 campaign (ending the “r-word”) and in 2010, Obama signing a law which effectively outlawed the term by removing “mentally retarded” from all federal laws and statutes and replacing it with “intellectual disability” (something which has never been done with any other word).
As such, the vaccine brain injuries, which made children mentally retarded were re-labeled as “autism,” while in tandem, autism was given an extremely broad and vague definition that swept over all the concurrently occurring neurological injuries.
Because of this, the stark and unmistakable impression of a severe vaccine brain injury (e.g., “you know Sue’s son became severely retarded after their 2 month vaccines”) was displaced with a much more amorphous term that was easy to write off because it was too complex and vague to think about—hence providing easy mental escapes from this uncomfortable topic, thereby making it easy to write off and close one’s mind to.
Note: the mechanisms through which vaccines cause autism are explained here. Recently, I saw one of the most compelling proofs of this theory—where triplets who all regressed within hours of receiving a hot pneumococcal vaccine lot—and immediately prior to the regression, all had a total loss of cranial reflexes, demonstrating the vaccine-induced microstrokes indeed cause autism (along with many other forms of brain damage).
Mild Autism
Anytime something injures human beings (unless it’s highly lethal), less severe reactions will be much more common than severe injuries (e.g., far more were disabled than killed by the COVID vaccines).5
As such, individuals with minor neurological injuries from vaccination have changes that lightly overlap with those seen in severe injuries.
Because of this, “autism exists on a spectrum” with many of its characteristic changes being seen to lesser extents in individuals who are not severely disabled (e.g., Elon Musk has characteristic autistic traits and has admitted as such).
Yet, rather than recognizing that the rise in autistic-like traits signals something is profoundly changing in the population — and that a smaller group may be developing severe brain damage and more extreme versions of these traits — the prevailing narrative claims the autism surge is simply due to people who were otherwise basically normal (aside from a few “autistic quirks”) being re-diagnosed as autistic.
As such, the autism epidemic is dismissed as an illusion, attributed to “selective data interpretation by anti-vaxxers” — a convenient explanation that allows many to avoid grappling with an uncomfortable possibility.
Likewise, whenever “autism” is equated to brain damage, a large chorus of people can be relied upon to denounce them by saying their (highly functional) autistic child is not brain damaged, thereby silencing and ending the actual debate (e.g., Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly done this to RFK). Similarly, once the societal conception of vaccine brain injuries was shifted from “mentally retarded” or “autism,” a push began to normalize autism (e.g., with terms like neurodiversity), thereby making it even more taboo to criticize the complications of this illness.
Fortunately, independent voices are beginning to sound the alarm over this issue. Gavin DeBecker (a longtime advocate for vaccine safety), in an excellent newly released book points out that:
1. There is no clear definition for autism or a definitive way to diagnose much of it.
2. The same people who whitewashed the link between autism and vaccines by claiming there is “no evidence” also did the same for many other controversies, such as:
•Agent Orange being safe—when in reality (due to faulty production by Monsanto) it was extremely dangerous
•Vaccines causing SIDS (something there actually is a century of evidence for)
•Vaccines causing Gulf War Syndrome (a devastating military illness Congress’s GAO admitted was likely due to a poorly manufactured anthrax vaccine).
The book has many poignant quotes like this one:
Promoting their work on vaccine safety, an IOM spokesperson said, “We looked very hard and found very little evidence of serious adverse harms from vaccines. The message I would want parents to have is one of reassurance.”
Since that’s the same “very little evidence” the Government found with Agent Orange, burn pits, the anthrax vaccine, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, breast implants, and Gulf War Syndrome, I’m not sure how reassuring it ought to be to parents.
Likewise, in his book, DeBecker highlights that thanks to a leaker, we learned that the IOM decided at the start their report would not acknowledge vaccines caused autism (or any other injury) and bent over backwards to find wording which implied this without explicitly stating it a patent lie. All of that in turn is exposed within an excellent interview Del Bigtree did with DeBecker.
Note: at this point, one of the primary obstacles we are facing in ending detrimental vaccine mandates is not a lack of data, but rather finding a way to reach people who are resistant to the idea that vaccines could be harmful. Debecker’s book (Forbidden Facts) was specifically written to provide the rhetorical tools that could bring about this shift.
Autism Data
Given all of this, there are two critical, but almost never discussed data points to consider.
First, one of the primary studies cited to support the argument that the rise in autism actually is due to diagnostic reclassification is a 2009 study from California (conducted when the word retarded was being banned). Rather than show minor traits were being relabeled as autism, it showed 26.4% of children who had previously been diagnosed as “mentally retarded” became “autistic” (as did another commonly cited study).
Second, while the general public has been conditioned to believe in the amorphous autism label, since this is untenable for those actually working with severely disabled children (vs. those on the spectrum), within the autism field, the two are differentiated by the terms “profound autism” and the far less severe “non-profound” autism. CDC data in turn, shows that roughly 26.7% of autistic children have “profound autism,” and that it is continually increasing (although at a much slower rate than non-profound autism):
However, since clarifying what autism is defeats the purpose of the label (having it be an ambiguous term that ultimately sweeps everything under the rug), this distinction is rarely if ever mentioned, and folks outside the autism community are seldom even aware of the term “profound autism” — they simply know “vaccines do not cause autism.”
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It Didn’t Start With Trump
“What do you expect when you sue the president?” Hearing that comment, some people may guess the comment was made by someone addressing one of President Trump’s political opponents who has been targeted for federal prosecution. That quote, though, is much older. It is from an IRS agent addressing officials of a conservative organization that was being audited during Bill Clinton’s presidency. This illustrates that the use of federal agencies to punish presidents’ enemies did not start with President Trump.
The administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used tax investigations against political opponents. Targeted individuals included publishers of newspapers that were highly critical of Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies.
President John F. Kennedy used the IRS and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to drive his conservative critics off the radio. President Lyndon Johnson also used the IRS and the FCC to silence conservative critics. One tool that was used to silence conservatives was to accuse broadcasters of violating the “fairness doctrine” by favoring conservative commentators.
President Richard Nixon used the IRS to target political enemies. The Nixon administration also threatened television and radio companies with revocation of their broadcast licenses unless they provided favorable coverage of the administration.
During the Clinton administration, the IRS not only targeted conservative and libertarian organizations it audited Paula Jones after she sued President Clinton for sexual harassment.
During the George W. Bush years, the IRS targeted organizations critical of the Iraq War. When Barack Obama assumed the presidency, the tax agency turned its attention back to conservative and libertarian groups, with a focus on organizations associated with the Tea Party. The Department of Homeland Security also issued a warning that those with pro-liberty bumper stickers — including supporting the Libertarian Party or my presidential campaign — might be violent extremists.
During the Biden administration, many Americans received harsh sentences for being present at the Capitol on January 6 even if they did not commit any violent acts.
Federal agencies can also target presidents’ political enemies without a presidential order to do so being issued. Some ambitious and unscrupulous individuals will target a president’s enemies believing that this is an effective way to curry favor with the president or high-level administration officials. Others will use the power of the government against the president’s political enemies or those involved with political movements seeking to change the direction of the government out of a belief that these people or groups constitute a threat to the federal government that justifies violating constitutional rights.
This history suggests that abuse of power is an inevitable feature of the modern welfare-warfare-regulatory state. Therefore, instead of focusing just on electing the “right” president, we should focus on shrinking the size and scope of the federal government to its constitutional limitations. This will ensure that Americans can exercise their right to criticize the government without fear of reprisal. As Thomas Jefferson said, “in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”
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The Crisis and Revolution Hidden in Plain Sight
While we focus on AI and finance, society is crumbling beneath our feet.
According to both the mainstream media and social media, the forces that will shape the future are:
1) AI (i.e. technology’s impact on jobs and growth),
2) geopolitical competition for AI dominance, energy, resources, trade, military and financial power,
3) finance, which includes cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), federal deficits, hyperinflation / currency devaluation and precious metals –all of which boil down to “what can I do to ensure that my wealth will remain intact whatever happens.”
The key issues are technology, finance and market forces–the core drivers of the global economy. Society isn’t on the menu other than as a quickly dismissed source of dutiful hand-wringing.
While all these will be influential, no one seems to see the domestic crisis hidden in plain sight or the revolution it makes inevitable. In my analysis, these will be the dominant forces shaping the coming decade.
As I have documented in recent posts– If We Measured the Economy by Quality-of-Life Instead of GDP, We’d Be In a Depression, For Many, This Recession Will Feel Like a Depression and Crunch Time for Cities, Counties and States—the system has reached its limits and is coming apart.
What is the crisis? There are three self-reinforcing dynamics in play.
The first is the imbalance of the economy and society: the economy now dominates society, and historically this leads to disorder. Everyone looking at technology and finance as the solutions has it backwards: technology and finance are the problems, not the solutions, as they are the primary drivers of the imbalance between society and the economy.
As I explain in my new book’s Introduction (free), society and the market forces that drive the economy have different timelines, tasks and priorities.
Market forces are focused on expanding new markets, heedless of consequences beyond profit and market share; the future consequences fall on society, which must take the long view and absorb the impacts on the workforce, social stability and the nation’s commons, i.e. the environment.
The second is that inequality–of wealth, income, opportunity and power–has reached extremes that can be visualized as a pendulum: pushed to an extreme, the pendulum will swing to the opposite extreme.
It’s not just inequality that’s reached an extreme–so has exploitation, artifice and moral decay.
The average income of the bottom 60% households is $38,000 annually, while to qualify as a top 10% household requires about $250,000 annually.
As I have documented here, insecurity can’t be measured solely by income–the other dynamic is precarity: the income of many households is variable, and unexpected expenses such as auto repairs or health emergencies (both of which have reached insane heights) can throw the household into a financial hole.
Those ignoring society to focus on the economy assume the bottom 60% of Americans–200 million people, 80 million households who own so little of the nation’s financial wealth that their share is a rounding error–will just uncomplainingly accept their accelerating impoverishment as prices for essential soar and wages don’t keep pace.
The problem with this assumption is this cohort is making too little money (even with increases in minimum wages) to afford the essentials of shelter, food, healthcare, childcare and transport.
Inflation is not dead; it’s already changed the landscape permanently. Lower-cost alternatives have dried up: even old cars and apartments in seedy neighborhoods cost a fortune now.
Those between the bottom 60% and the top 10%–the 30% who self-identify as “middle class”— may feel immune to precarity, but much of their financial stability rests on sands that will collapse in a recession / asset-bubble pop.
Their financial stability is fragile because it now rests on three fragile economic structures:
1) credit-asset bubbles that have increased “wealth” without increasing use-value;
2) the transfer of risk from corporations and the government to households,
3) the “trickledown economy” where the wealthiest 10% now collect virtually all the non-wage income from income-producing assets and account for 50% of all spending–wealth and income that’s supposed to “trickle down” to the bottom 90%.
Once the asset bubbles pop and even the top 10% start experiencing job losses and declining income, the layoffs in the bottom 90% will cascade as spending dries up and stock portfolios and home values return to Earth.
Only those 62 and older were in the workforce in a “real recession,” i.e. one that can’t be reversed by the Federal Reserve lowering short-term interest rates and the federal government borrowing and spending more to “spend our way out of recession.” The last real recession was 43 years ago, 1981-82.
There is also a demographic dynamic in play globally: Gen Z is no longer accepting that massive inequality between generations is “the way it has to be.”
The second dynamic is the buffers that enabled people to hang on through recessions have all thinned: where debt was a modest percentage of GDP in the 1970s and 1980s recessions, now it’s at historic highs. Households have already tapped credit cards and so borrowing more money to get by is not an option.
So when push comes to shove–when hours are cut or a job is lost–the only choice is what not to pay: student loan, car payment, rent, as food and utilities take precedence.
The buffers are already thinned and we haven’t even slipped into recession yet.
The third dynamic is the least recognized: the moral decay that has pushed exploitation, profiteering and artifice to extremes, undermining the foundations of the economy and society.
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US Politics Is Just Nonstop Fake Revolutions Now
It’s so silly how American politics is just nonstop fake revolutions now.
Millions flooded the US streets for the “No Kings” protests over the weekend to oppose a monarchy which does not exist without making a single tangible demand. Power was not challenged in any meaningful way. The status quo wasn’t disrupted in the slightest. People held up some signs saying the president is orange and that if Kamala were president they would be at brunch, and then went home.
The whole thing was just one big pep rally for the Democratic Party, designed to accomplish nothing beyond getting American liberals excited about the prospect of someday voting for Gavin Newsom. A bunch of boomers showed up to dance around and hold signs and feel as though they are fighting the power in their feely bits, while drumming up support for the same status quo which gave rise to Trump in the first place.
Liberals are openly telling you how they don’t care about the issues American people face so they can go back to brunch.
Demand better opposition than Orange man bad. https://t.co/bZOuSG2rge
— Modern Rome in Freefall (@ljmontello) October 18, 2025
You see the same fake revolutionary astroturf zeitgeist on the Republican side. American rightists are constantly pretending they’re fighting some kind of populist rebellion against an oppressive establishment even while their party controls every branch of the US government. They act like Trump is ending the wars and fighting the Deep State even as he stomps out free speech on behalf of Israel, rolls out a Palantir surveillance system, pours weapons into facilitating Israel’s genocidal atrocities, bombs Iran and Yemen, ramps up for war with Venezuela, and perpetuates the horrific proxy war in Ukraine.
It’s two plutocrat-owned warmongering imperialist parties whipping their respective bases into the mass delusion that they are participating in a heroic act of revolutionary defiance by voting Democrat or Republican. They get everyone fighting a fake revolution so that nobody thinks about fighting a real one.
It didn’t used to be this way, for the record. The US has been a murderous and tyrannical oligarchic bloodbath for its entire existence as a nation, but up until fairly recently its politics looked more or less like the politics of other western nations. Politicians had campaigns where they’d try to argue that they have the best policies, there’d be an election, and then they’d spend their time in office philandering and pretending to make themselves useful. There wasn’t this constant LARPing about how voting for one of the two mainstream parties is participating some kind of a courageous insurgency against monarchy or communism or the Deep State or whatever.
#NoKings pic.twitter.com/biroZ9oyLE
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 18, 2025
That’s changing because public discontent with the status quo is soaring to all-time highs as Americans get poorer and everything gets shittier. The establishment order is no longer accepted and people are starting to push for real change, so their outrage needs to be harnessed and corralled into politically safe directions.
Donald Trump’s entire political career has been all about this. He introduced a new WWE-style kayfabe theatrics into American politics where both Democrats and Republicans feel as though they are fighting the power in a very important and relevant way — Republicans because they believe Trump is a populist rebel and Democrats because they believe Trump is an unprecedented threat to freedom and democracy. Really his whole thing is about protecting the status quo of the US empire, but both mainstream factions are duped into seeing the exact opposite.
Now you’ve got the two main strands of American political thought falling all over themselves to be the first in line to support the establishment, all while being told that they are fighting the power. They remain mollified because they think they are doing something, and the powerful get to keep everything they’ve stolen.
It’s truly a brilliant scam. Evil, destructive and tyrannical, to be sure, but you’ve got to admire the skill with which this psyop has been pulled off.
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The post US Politics Is Just Nonstop Fake Revolutions Now appeared first on LewRockwell.
Israeli Manifest Destiny
“The American pioneer spirit [was] characterized by a relentless pursuit of new opportunities, a willingness to face challenges, and a commitment to building a better future.” This spirit was propounded in “Manifest Destiny, in U.S. history, the supposed inevitability of the continued territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States westward to the Pacific and beyond.” This sense of inevitability could be applied at any time and anywhere a resilient, ambitious, and even desperate and ruthless people come to a relatively sparsely populated region where the inhabitants do not have the wherewithal to resist their military, economic and cultural power. A corollary to this inevitability is the likely ethnic cleansing and/or genocide of the natives.
I was triggered (in a purely intellectual sense, not emotionally) to contemplate the European experience in America in comparison with Israel today by one of my favorite podcasters when he described Hamas, and I think more generally the Palestinians, as “savages.”
Europeans arrived in North America to a relatively sparsely populated continent full of potential. The Zionist Jews arrived in Palestine to a relatively sparsely populated territory that was a part of the sickly Ottoman Empire. By the 19th century the Manifest Destiny to control the continent from ocean to ocean was fixed in culture and was official policy. “The term “Greater Israel“ has been a contentious and debated concept related to the State of Israel and its territorial boundaries.” The concept of Greater Israel is certainly in their culture and seems to drive many policy decisions.
Relations with the indigenous peoples were mixed in North America. But there is no doubt that the native Americans were often very savage. Many tribes lived in constant warfare, committing murder and torture while making slaves of their victims, especially women and children. The European Americans could be vicious in turn. Perhaps the capstone event of Manifest Destiny and the ethnic cleansing that went with it was the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. While 90 Indian braves were killed, the killing of about 200 women and children made this a massacre. The following quote found at the Wikipedia page is illuminating of the mindset in the 19th century American west and, I think, the mindset today in Israel.
“In an editorial response to the event, the young newspaper editor L. Frank Baum, later the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, wrote in The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer on January 3, 1891:”
“The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.”
I will never think of the Wizard of Oz in the same way. But Baum is insightful enough to recognize the tragedy inherent in his conclusion. I believe similar comments are commonly expressed by Israelis (for example).
This post is not a moral judgement, but an exercise in empathy for both Israelis and Palestinians. We Americans, especially young people, might say “we would never destroy Gaza like Israel has done,” and would be neglecting the fact that we have already done so to native Americans.
In the real world, might makes right. Furthermore, who are indigenous peoples itself is a complex topic as elucidated recently by Ryan McMaken, Are Any Peoples Truly Indigenous?. This is especially true in Palestine where there is an unarguable connection between Jewish people and this territory. But I wonder, in 100 years will most Israelis be ashamed of their ferocious ancestors’ actions as most Americans are today of our own?
The similarity between the history of the American West and Israel today breaks down in at least one important way. As Europeans swept the continent of Native Americans there were no similar relatives to sustain and support them. Thus their end did become inevitable. However, as Israel sweeps Arab Muslims out of Greater Israel there are hundreds of millions more Arabs and Muslims that could support them and eventually take revenge. Thus there is a different historical analogy to consider.
“The Crusader states, or Outremer, were four Christian states established in the Levant region and southeastern Anatolia from 1098 to 1291. Following the principles of feudalism, the foundation for these polities was laid by the First Crusade, which was proclaimed by the Latin Church in 1095 in order to reclaim the Holy Land after it was lost to the 7th-century Muslim conquest. From north to south, they were: the County of Edessa (1098–1150), the Principality of Antioch (1098–1268), the County of Tripoli (1102–1289), and the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291).”
For me this is the more probable outcome for Israel if they continue on their current path of military conquest, a 200 year blip in history. If Israelis would understand this historical example perhaps they would explore peaceful solutions with their neighbors instead of a victory in total war.
The post Israeli Manifest Destiny appeared first on LewRockwell.
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