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Andy Thomas wrote:

Another sign that Britain is finished, or soon will be.

See here.

The post A Conquered People appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The American Conservative

The post The Betrayal of the Innocents by Ted Cruz Christians appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thank you, John Frahm.

FOX News

The post ISIS targets Christians in brutal Africa attacks, beheadings reported appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

The globalists hate Christianity. They want it destroyed. Nothing has really changed since they crucified Christ. America is becoming the last one standing in the way of the globalists.

While America Soul Searches, The Rest of the World is Falling Apart: Brandon Smith

The post While America Soul Searches, The Rest of the World is Falling Apart: Brandon Smith appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Congress Skips Epstein Files Vote For Trip To Israel 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 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/solo-bitcoin-e-oro-possono-impedire)

Permettetemi di ricordarvi alcune scomode verità.

La spesa pubblica è fuori controllo nei Paesi sviluppati. Inoltre, nessun governo interventista vuole tagliare la spesa o pareggiare il bilancio. La spesa pubblica conferisce potere ai politici e ridurla significa perdere il controllo sull'economia.

I governi interventisti non si preoccupano di debiti, deficit o inflazione. Quest'ultima è una linea di politica deliberata e i governi interventisti cercano di nazionalizzare l'economia imponendo il controllo totale sui settori produttivi attraverso l'emissione di valute costantemente svalutate.

La spesa pubblica equivale a stampare denaro. I politici sono felici di promettere più cose gratis spendendo all'infinito, perché sanno che non saranno loro a pagarle e che ciò renderà cittadini e imprese più dipendenti e sottomessi al potere politico. Nessuno stato può davvero ridurre il debito senza tagliare la spesa.

L'inflazione è la prova della perdita di solvibilità di chi emette denaro. Si tratta di un default lento e di fatto. L'inflazione funge da linea di politica che giustifica e perpetua squilibri importanti, spostando l'onere finanziario sui salari reali e sui risparmiatori.

L'errore di pareggiare il bilancio attraverso tasse più elevate porta alla stagnazione economica e a un aumento del debito. L'aumento delle tasse non è uno strumento per ridurre il debito, ma per giustificare un elevato indebitamento. Le entrate fiscali sono cicliche, mentre la spesa pubblica è consolidata e annua.

Nessun governo interventista agirà volontariamente per ridurre il debito e la spesa pubblica, perché può sempre aumentare le tasse e dare la colpa ad altri per i propri problemi. Inoltre le banche centrali hanno smesso di svolgere il ruolo di contenere gli eccessi fiscali, diventando fattori scatenanti di crescenti squilibri fiscali.

Le banche centrali svolgono un ruolo cruciale nel mondo fiat a causa dell'interconnessione tra politica monetaria e fiscale. Il sistema è destinato a collassare gradualmente se le banche centrali non bloccheranno la crescita degli squilibri fiscali dei relativi governi.

Tuttavia l'indipendenza delle banche centrali diminuisce ogni giorno e le loro linee di politica tendono a nascondere l'eccesso di spesa pubblica e di debito. Nel frattempo gli stati ignorano di aver superato i tre limiti del debito pubblico: economico, fiscale e inflazionistico. Un debito pubblico maggiore significa una crescita inferiore, più tasse generano entrate più basse e una maggiore spesa pubblica perpetua l'inflazione.

Ora che le banche centrali non rappresentano più il limite essenziale agli eccessi dello stato, restano solo due alternative: oro e Bitcoin.

L'oro ha già superato l'euro diventando il secondo asset più importante dopo il dollaro per le banche centrali globali. Tra pochi mesi diventerà l'asset più importante. Le banche centrali globali hanno perso fiducia nel debito sovrano dei Paesi sviluppati come asset di riserva, di conseguenza i rendimenti obbligazionari a lungo termine dei Paesi sviluppati supereranno le aspettative sul tasso d'inflazione.

Bitcoin, dall'altra parte, ha dimostrato a investitori e cittadini che una valuta decentralizzata può gradualmente trasformarsi in un asset di riserva a bassa volatilità, un mezzo di pagamento generalizzato e un'unità di misura. Poiché i cittadini di tutto il mondo vedono Bitcoin come un'alternativa sempre più valida alla moneta fiat, sempre più persone lo utilizzano per accumulare valore e proteggersi dall'inflazione.

Gli investitori non si fidano delle economie sviluppate per quanto riguarda il mantenimento della loro solvibilità. Oro e Bitcoin stanno ora svolgendo il ruolo che le banche centrali hanno abbandonato: ricordare agli stati che non possono spendere e stampare moneta per sempre. Bitcoin sarà anche un adolescente e più volatile, ma il messaggio potente al mondo è chiaro: gli anni della spesa pubblica incontrollata e della stampa di moneta sono finiti.

Ovviamente agli stati questo non piace e le banche centrali che hanno smesso di essere indipendenti come invece dovrebbero, come la BCE, stanno cercando di eliminare il rischio che le valute indipendenti eliminino il monopolio del denaro emettendo una CBDC imposta per legge. È interessante notare che l'amministrazione statunitense stia facendo il contrario, vietando le CBDC e abbracciando le crittovalute come la prossima rivoluzione monetaria.

La BCE, presa dal panico ormai, ha ammesso l'enorme perdita di utilizzo dell'euro nelle transazioni mondiali nel momento in cui ha annunciato di voler emettere uno strumento di sorveglianza camuffato da moneta: l'euro digitale. L'amministrazione statunitense vuole consolidare lo status di riserva del dollaro attraendo investimenti globali in crittovalute.

Bitcoin e oro stanno ora svolgendo il ruolo essenziale che le banche centrali indipendenti dovrebbero far rispettare. Esse sono inutilmente accomodanti e continuano a mascherare gli squilibri statali. Oro e Bitcoin sono componenti essenziali della risposta alle tentazioni inflazionistiche degli stati. Le uniche cose che ci salveranno dagli eccessi statali, infatti, sono la decentralizzazione e la moneta indipendente.

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

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

Scott Daniels wrote:

Hi Lew,

Why stop at the penny or even the nickel? We should drop everything less than a dollar. Based on silver value, a quarter is the new penny, and based on gold value, the two dollar is the new penny. Let’s make it simple – make the dollar the new penny.Personally, I would prefer a return to coins, best done by redenominating the dollar by 100x, making a penny the value of today’s dollar. Other countries do it, why can’t we? Is it too dangerous to point out the emperor has no clothes? Alas, I can dream can’t I?

The post The Happy Penny appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.”—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Power to the people.”—John Lennon

What on earth is happening to this country?

How, over the course of 250 years, did we go from prizing self-government to allowing a corrupt, self-serving ruling elite to dominate us with terror campaigns, brute force, and psychological warfare?

Don’t be fooled: the madness, mayhem and malice unfolding in America is not politics as usual. It’s not partisan hardball. It’s not bureaucratic overreach.

It’s theft in the gravest sense imaginable: the theft of our nation, the theft of our sovereignty as citizens, the theft of our constitutional republic.

This isn’t just corruption—it’s a betrayal of the very purpose for which governments are instituted. As John Locke warned, when those in power break the social contract by seizing rights they were appointed to protect, they no longer govern with the consent of the people—they rule by force, and the people are justified in resisting.

The Declaration of Independence echoed this principle: “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

What we face now is just such a train of abuses—systematic, strategic, and swift.

The government is seizing what does not belong to it: our voice, our rights, our power to choose and to resist. It is robbing us of the very tools of self-government—accountability, transparency, representation, free speech, bodily autonomy—and replacing them with coercion, propaganda, and force.

So when the White House threatens to withhold FEMA aid from states that won’t endorse its foreign policy? That’s theft.

When the president attacks the courts for calling out executive overreach? That’s theft.

When the media is muzzled, the police state expands, and new concentration camps rise? All of it—theft.

We are being robbed blind in broad daylight by the very individuals entrusted with safeguarding our rights and our republic.

Despite his assurances to the contrary, Donald Trump never had any intention of draining the swamp. He is the swamp.

Yet make no mistake: this didn’t start with Trump. The groundwork for this theft was laid long before—through successive administrations, both Republican and Democrat—that expanded executive power, hollowed out the Constitution, and normalized the rule of force over the rule of law.

What Trump has done is remove the mask, weaponize the tools of tyranny, and accelerate the dismantling of the republic in full view of the people.

Here are just a few of the many ways the Trump administration—no different than its predecessors in motive, yet far more brazen in execution—is stealing the birthright of the American people and cementing the transformation of the republic into a government of wolves.

• Police, once tasked with serving the people, now act as an occupying force—conducting no-knock raids in the dead of night, using military-grade weapons against civilians, and treating constitutional rights as optional.
• ICE agents, incentivized by massive $50,000 bonuses and shielded from accountability, behave more like mercenaries than law enforcement—disappearing immigrants, terrorizing families, and operating far outside the bounds of due process.
• Fourth Amendment protections, under constant assault, have become optional. Armed police raids—often executed without warrants or on faulty intelligence—are increasing in frequency and aggression. Constitution-free zones now extend well beyond the border, with entire communities living under constant threat of militarized home invasions and door-to-door sweeps.
• Elected representatives enrich themselves through insider trading, while the crises they help manufacture devastate the populace.
• Federal courts are being threatened or ignored outright when they attempt to check executive overreach. Judges who speak out are branded enemies of the state.
• Whistleblowers, journalists, and truth-tellers are prosecuted, surveilled, or silenced—treated as threats to national security. Journalism, once protected as a check on power, is under siege.
• Statisticians, public health experts, and government researchers are being purged or silenced when their data doesn’t support the administration’s narrative. We are living in the shadow of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, where facts are negotiable, history can be rewritten, and reality is whatever the Deep State says it is.
• Disaster relief, foreign policy, and executive authority have been weaponized to punish dissent.
• The Department of Justice has become a tool of loyalty enforcement—targeting dissenters while shielding cronies.
• Meanwhile, the Epstein files remain sealed. Despite public outcry and compelling evidence of elite involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking network, the Trump administration has refused to release the full client list or investigative records. In doing so, it continues the bipartisan pattern of shielding the powerful from scrutiny while everyday Americans face ever-expanding surveillance, suspicion, and punishment.
• Public lands are being auctioned off to corporate allies without oversight or accountability.
• Citizenship is no longer a birthright but a privilege granted or revoked by political fiat.
• Digital platforms, pressured by federal agencies, now censor views deemed “inconvenient” to the state.
• Education is being reshaped to discourage critical thought and enforce ideological conformity.
• Government services, once created to serve the public good, are now political weapons—used to reward loyalty, punish dissent, and control the masses through selective aid and ideological enforcement.
• Executive orders have become tools of rule-by-decree, bypassing Congress and obliterating checks and balances.
• Economic chaos is being weaponized strategically. By manufacturing crises, withholding aid, and destabilizing budgets, the Deep State has found a new way to consolidate power, transfer wealth upwards, and condition compliance.
• Corruption is not punished. It’s rewarded—so long as it serves the power elite.

And while all of this is happening, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to keep the citizenry distracted, divided, and demobilized—peddling outrage, manufacturing crises, stoking culture wars and threatening global wars.

Transparency is buried beneath spectacle. Accountability is drowned out by distraction. And by the time we look up from the latest scandal or political brawl, another piece of the republic has been carved away.

Bit by bit, freedom is being caged. And what is emerging in its place is a vast, inescapable prison—walled in not by bars, but by bureaucracy, deception, and brute force.

Aided and abetted by the Trump administration, the Deep State is turning the entire country into one sprawling, swampy, digitally surveilled Alligator Alcatraz: a carceral state in which every citizen is suspect, every movement is monitored, and escape routes are vanishing fast.

When “we the people” no longer have a say in how we’re governed—when we have no way to guard against our trust being abused and our rights violated—when we have no way to counter government efforts to silence our voices, manipulate our choices, and erase our rights—what remains is not a constitutional republic.

It’s a prison. A prison made of laws perverted, truths twisted, and power unchecked.

Yet the government—present and past—is stealing more than just power. It’s stealing the people’s ability to be the government.

This is not just about the loss of freedom. It is the systematic dismantling of self-government—of the people’s role as the final check on power. And it begins subtly. It begins with our right to know what is happening in our own government being blocked.

Transparency—the cornerstone of any functioning representative democracy—is vanishing behind a fortress of secrecy. Laws meant to hold power accountable are neutered by “national security” exemptions and stonewalled FOIA requests. The government issues secret executive orders, redacts critical information, and shields entire policy regimes from public view.

What we don’t know can and will hurt us.

Next goes the right to participate. Representation, once a sacred principle, has been reduced to a numbers game—rigged congressional maps, voter roll purges, and data-driven manipulation that keep incumbents entrenched and challengers out. The people are no longer choosing their representatives; representatives are choosing their people.

Dissent—an essential function of free government—is now pathologized, criminalized, or digitally erased. Protesters are surveilled, activists labeled extremists, and speech censored through backdoor collusion between federal agencies and tech platforms. The First Amendment is being gutted in real time.

Even physical sovereignty is under assault. The right to bodily autonomy has been quietly subverted by biometric tracking, mental health detentions, and proposed mandates for wearable surveillance devices. What was once science fiction is now federal policy. In the name of safety, every heartbeat, step, and biometric signal is being harvested, scored, and archived.

Meanwhile, civil liberties once considered foundational—due process, freedom from arbitrary detention, the presumption of innocence—are being erased by executive edict. With the stroke of a pen, entire populations (immigrants, homeless individuals, protest organizers) can be swept up, locked away, and denied basic constitutional protections.

Local communities, too, are being robbed of their self-governance. Cities that seek to set their own course—whether through sanctuary laws, public health rules, or environmental standards—are being overridden by federal command. Militarized police forces, far from acting like local peace officers, have become extensions of the government’s standing army.

Even the symbolism of the republic is being repurposed. The White House is daily becoming less a house of the people and more a gilded monument to imperial presidency.

This is not democracy.

This is the theft of a nation in real time by those entrusted with the highest offices of power, who use their power to strip “we the people” of our sovereignty and our rights.

The founders warned us against kings. What we face now is far more insidious: an executive branch that pays lip service to freedom while locking down the nation.

This is not how free people are governed.

This is how free people are ruled.

If the people are no longer allowed to check power, to criticize it, to reform it, to influence it, or even to see it—then we no longer have a government of the people, by the people, or for the people.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we have a government against the people.

The answer, as the Founders understood—and as poets from Percy Bysshe Shelley to John Lennon have urged—is that there is power in our numbers if only we would stand united against tyranny.

To quote Shelley:

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.”

Unless we wake up to what is being stolen from us—not just our rights, but our role as masters, not servants—we may find that the chains we refused to shake off have become impossible to break.

The post Theft of a Nation: How the Deep State Swamp Is Stealing the People’s Power appeared first on LewRockwell.

Founded by two Stanford University graduate students who were former smokers, Juul is the top-selling e-cigarette in the United States. According to the Juul website:

JUUL is a vaporizer, also known as an electronic cigarette or e-cigarette, unlike any other — designed to be convenient, easy-to-use, and familiarly enjoyable for adult smokers. Our proprietary nicotine-containing e-liquid formulation is the first of its kind, making innovative vapor technology a truly satisfying alternative.

The mission of Juul Labs is to transition the world’s billion adult smokers away from combustible cigarettes, eliminate their use, and combat underage usage of our products.

Juul has been demonized for years as being responsible for the supposed epidemic of teen vaping. For several years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tried to ban Juul products from the market. But now, the FDA has given Juul authorization to sell its products after determining that Juul products provide less exposure to deadly chemicals than traditional cigarettes.

The FDA actually maintains a list of e-cigarettes that it has authorized to be sold in the United States. In May of this year, the FDA, along with the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), seized nearly two million units of unauthorized e-cigarette products in Chicago.

“Today’s FDA authorization of JUUL products marks an important step toward making the cigarette obsolete,” said K.C. Crosthwaite, Juul Labs’s CEO. “Americans who use nicotine deserve an orderly, reliable market in which they can confidently choose from a wide array of smokefree nicotine products that are high-quality, innovative, backed by rigorous research, made in FDA-inspected manufacturing facilities, and marketed and sold responsibly,” he added.

However, Yolonda Richardson, president and CEO of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, had a different opinion: “It is a big step in the wrong direction to authorize sales of the product that was responsible for this public health crisis in the first place.” And so did Ranjana Caple, senior manager of federal advocacy for the American Lung Association (ALA): “Juul is responsible for the youth vaping epidemic, and its products have hooked a generation of kids on nicotine. Authorizing these products signal a stunning failure to protect public health.”

Juul products may be unhealthy, they may be addictive, and they may be harmful, but the vindication of Juul is good for individual liberty.

It is not the job of the government to prevent anyone from vaping, smoking, or ingesting dangerous, destructive, or even deadly products. This is because it is simply not the job of government to keep people from harming themselves with any substance.

It is the job of parents to keep their kids from vaping just like it is the job of parents to keep their kids from drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, becoming a couch potato, chewing tobacco, viewing pornography, reading raunchy literature, seeing bad movies, having premarital sex, eating junk food, surfing the Internet, taking drugs, watching too much television, staying on their phone too long, and hanging out with bad people. It is never the job of the government.

The Family Smoking and Tobacco Control, which gave the FDA authority to regulate the manufacture, marketing, sale, and distribution of tobacco products, should be repealed.

The FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) should be abolished, as should the FDA itself. All warning labels on tobacco and vaping products should be voluntary. All taxes on tobacco products should be eliminated. All bans and regulations regarding tobacco advertising should be ended. All government smoking bans in private businesses should be ended.

I don’t smoke or vape, and consider both to be unhealthy and harmful, but I much prefer to live in a free society than a nanny state.

The post Juul’s Vindication Good for Individual Liberty appeared first on LewRockwell.

Nathaniel Macon was one of the most significant figures during the first half century of American history. Yet Macon is basically unknown in the contemporary United States, and his role and importance in American history, so appreciated before the War Between the States, are largely ignored or glossed over. Mention the name “Nathaniel Macon” to a contemporary politician, and the response is usually a blank stare, betraying ignorance, a lack of basic familiarity.

Years ago, while researching Macon and his life, I was amazed to discover the incredible importance that “the Squire of Buck Spring” (his very modest plantation in northeastern North Carolina) had in the new American nation, and, more interestingly, the incredible influence he had on such later and much better-known figures as John C. Calhoun, President John Tyler, and other, more contemporary figures in our history. Think of the various towns, cities, and counties named in his honor. At one time in the American nation his name and renown were widely known and acknowledged.

Quite a bit of this contemporary ignorance must be attributed, certainly, to Macon’s philosophy. He was, to quote his contemporaries, “the father of states’ rights” and the figure most critical in the actual development and survival of the states’ rights philosophy that, still, in many ways, percolates in American politics. After the War Between the States Macon was largely identified with the defense of slavery. Although during his long tenure in Congress he stoutly defended the “peculiar institution,” his strictures were always based on a clear understanding of the Constitution and its provisions and that to abandon it on one major question was to in effect open the floodgates for other, often unforeseen or undesirable changes.  And such changes, he predicted, could well lead to civil war.

It was Macon’s probity of character and his steadfast devotion to principle that won him general admiration from across the entire spectrum of antebellum political opinion. Leaders as diverse as Presidents John Quincy Adams and John Tyler expressed great admiration for Macon; many attempted to tie in their own views, even those ideas that seemed at odds with Macon’s, to those of the Squire of Buck Spring.

Macon was first elected to the United States House of Representatives from North Carolina in 1790—at the very beginning of the new American nation—serving there until 1815. During the presidency of Thomas Jefferson he served as Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1801 until 1807. He quickly became known for his unbreakable “old republican” principles: individual liberty, local and state authority over matters closest to the citizens, strict economy and accountability in government expenditures, frequent elections, avoidance of debt, and a staunch adherence to a decentralist, originalist view of the nature of the new nation. These he stubbornly maintained even if it placed him in opposition at times to American presidents of his own political persuasion.

Along with John Randolph of Roanoke and a few other congressional representatives Macon represented undeviating allegiance to the fundamental principles enunciated during the American Revolution and inscribed in the Constitution. For him those principles did not—and must not—change. During the first fifty years of the nation’s history, it was Macon who incarnated them and in various ways ensured their survival. After leaving the U. S. House of Representatives in 1815 and being elevated to the United States Senate by the North Carolina General Assembly, Macon’s influence only grew and became more pervasive, especially in the South. It was his significant role during the debates over the Missouri Compromise (1819-1820) that signaled the actual emergence of a genuine states’ rights philosophy which would continue and influence significantly subsequent American history.

Although Macon is portrayed almost uniquely for his defense of slavery, it was not that hotly debated issue which dominated his attention. For his views and observations also ranged over topics such as government involvement in internal improvement programs which he considered to be in the purview of the respective states, the establishment of a national banking system (which he opposed), and the essential nature of the Federal union as intended by the Framers. For him all such issues, and not only the increasingly contentious issue of slavery, were a part of a larger question, that of how the Constitution was to be interpreted and applied.

As early as March 1818 he wrote to North Carolina congressman Bartlett Yancey as follows:

I must ask you to examine the Constitution of the United States….and tell me, if Congress can establish banks, make roads and canals, whether they cannot free all the slaves in the United States?….We have abolition, colonization and peace societies–their intentions cannot be known; but the character and spirit of one may without injustice be considered that of all. It is a character and spirit of perseverance bordering on enthusiasm, and if the general government shall continue to stretch its powers, these societies will undoubtedly push it to try the question of emancipation….

With the debate over Missouri looming, Macon wrote to Yancey again, in April 1818:

If Congress can make canals they can with more propriety emancipate. Be not deceived, I speak soberly in the fear of God and the love of the Constitution. Let not the love of improvement or a thirst for glory blind that sober discretion and sound sense, with which the Lord has blest you. Paul was not more anxious or sincere concerning Timothy, than I am for you. Your error in this will injure if not destroy our beloved mother, North Carolina, and all the South country. Add not to the Constitution nor take therefrom. Be not led astray by grand notions or magnificent opinions. Remember that you belong to a meek State and just people, who want nothing but to enjoy the fruits of their labor honestly and to lay out their profits in their own way.

In early 1819 the actual debate in the Senate over the admission of Missouri to the union commenced, and, as Missouri was a territory where slavery existed, that contentious question became central to the debate. A resolution–a compromise–put forward by Senator Jesse Thomas of Illinois proposed admitting Maine as a “free” state and Missouri as a “slave” state but prohibiting slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36 degrees, 30 minutes.

Many Southern leaders, including the then Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, were prepared to go along initially with the compromise, but Macon, singularly, rose to oppose it. And it was in his famous Senate speech on the question that heralded the birth of a full-fledged “states’ rights philosophy.” The speech deserves to be quoted at length:

All the states now have equal rights and are content. Deprive one of the least right which it now enjoys in common with the others and it will no longer be content….All the new states have the same rights that the old have; why make Missouri an exception? Why depart in her case from the great American principle that the people can govern themselves? All the country west of the Mississippi was acquired by the same treaty, and on the same terms and the people in every part have the same rights….The [Thomas] amendment will operate unjustly to the people who have gone there from other states. They carried with them property [slaves] guaranteed by their states, by the Constitution and treaty; they purchased lands and settled on them without molestation; but now, unfortunately for them, it is discovered that they ought not to have been permitted to carry a single slave….Let the United States abandon this new scheme; let their magnanimity, and not their power, be felt by the people of Missouri. The attempt to govern too much has produced every civil war that ever has been, and will, probably, every one that ever may be.

And finishing with a prescient vision of the future, Macon continued:

Why depart from the good old way? Why leave the road of experience to take this new one, of which we have no experience? This way leads to universal emancipation, of which we have no experience….A clause in the Declaration of Independence has been read, declaring “that all men are created equal.” Follow that sentiment, and does it not lead to universal emancipation? If it will justify putting an end to slavery in Missouri, will it not justify it in the old states? Suppose the plan followed…is it certain that the present Constitution would last long?

The debate over the Missouri Compromise marked a significant turning point in American history and, eventually, in the diverging views of the leaders of both the South and the North. Although Macon had been engaged in a losing effort to block the compromise, it was, above all, his forthright and clear-sighted defense of strict constructionism that singled him out as a prophet. In 1819 his view was nearly unique, even among his fellow Southerners. But not many years after his remarkable interventions in the Missouri debates, a whole generation of Southern congressmen and national political leaders would acknowledge him as the intellectual father of states’ rights. In 1821 a chastened Thomas Jefferson, who had also foreseen how the crisis would affect the nation—Jefferson, who termed the stark reality made visible by the debates as “a fire bell in the night”—called Macon “the Depositor of old & sound principles,” and wrote him: “God bless you & long continue your wholesome influence in public councils.” In a letter Jefferson addressed to Macon on March 26, 1826, a few months before his death, the former president declared that Macon was “Ultimus Romanorum”—“the last of the Romans”—“whom I consider as the strictest of models of genuine republicanism.”

Despite his staunch support for states’ rights and “old republicanism,” Macon was greatly esteemed by a wide variety of American political leaders. President John Quincy Adams, a man of opposite views, in his Memoirs described Macon as “…a stern republican…a man of stern parts and mean education, but of rigid integrity, and a blunt, though not offensive, deportment…one of the most influential members of the Senate. His integrity, his indefatigable attention to business, and his long experience give him a weight of character and consideration which few men of superior minds ever acquire.” In 1828 it was widely rumored that Adams, despite differences with Macon, considered him as his potential vice-presidential choice.

In 1824, after the illness of leading states’ rights presidential candidate, William H. Crawford, Governor George M. Troup of Georgia put forward Macon as a candidate for president: “I know of no person who would unite so extensively the public sentiment of the southern country…as yourself.” In 1825 Macon received twenty-four electoral votes for the vice-presidency. In 1826 and 1827 he was elected President Pro-Tempore of the United States Senate.

As he approached the end of his long career, recognition of his significant role in American history and political development came from some of the most significant voices of the time. From Calhoun, John Tyler, and Thomas Hart Benton came encomiums and words of admiration and the recognition that Macon had played a pivotal role in the history of the first sixty years of the American nation, as well as in the development of their own personal philosophies and political positions.

While many readers in our modern age may think that Macon’s most pointed comments deal with the institution of slavery, it was not defending the “peculiar institution” that was at the core of his philosophy. Indeed, his commentary on such important questions as the Federal bank and government support for internal improvements reflect a states’ rights consistency and integrity. Slavery, because Macon recognized it as a particularly dangerous lynchpin for the American nation, certainly occupied a salient part of his commentary. But the greater issue for him was the growing power and control of the Federal government and the eventual destruction of the older Constitutional system erected by the Framers.

In 1835, in his last major public role, Macon was elected to preside over the North Carolina Constitutional Convention. While he made few interventions, he generally opposed changes to the state constitution. For him, “all changes in government were from better to worse.”

In June 1837 Macon summoned his doctor and the undertaker and paid them in advance. He died on June 29 that year, at Buck Spring. In a simple ceremony on his plantation he was interred, attended by grieving slaves, with whom he had worked side-by-side in his fields. He instructed his executor and son-in-law, Congressman Weldon N. Edwards, that no monument mark his grave, but that a pile of smooth stones be placed upon the site.

His epitaph he spoke eighteen years earlier, in Congress: “The attempt to govern too much has produced every civil war that ever has been, and will, probably, every one that ever may be.” Macon understood and clearly foresaw the results of the destruction of liberties and the erosion of states’ rights and the emergence of an all-encompassing Federal government.

The pile of stones at his Buck Spring plantation site remains, as does the philosophy that Macon first enunciated, despite the completion of the shattering prophecy he foresaw. And, now, it is up to later generations to attempt to retrieve and recover the Framers’ vision.

The post Nathaniel Macon: The Forgotten Prophet of States’ Rights appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I began to think about what I would write about in this week’s column, my first thought was that I hoped everyone saw the gruesome photographs of the tiny five-month-old girl in Gaza who had starved to death.

She had weighed six pounds, six ounces at birth. Five months later, at her death, she was skin and bones with legs thinner than an ordinary pencil.

My second thought, though, was that I wished nobody had had to see those photos, because I wish neither she nor anyone else had starved to death in Gaza or any place else.

On July 27, the World Health Organization said there had been 63 deaths by starvation in Gaza so far that month, and 24 of those were children under the age of five years old.

Two days earlier, ABC News said 19 people had starved to death in the past 24 hours and that most were little children. That same day, the British newspaper, The Independent, reported that in recent weeks, 113 people had starved to death, and 82 were children.

Rep. Randy Fine of Florida, who is Jewish and the newest Republican in Congress, wrote in his official account on July 22 that he hoped Palestinians would “starve away.” A few days later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there is “no starvation in Gaza.”

Yet NBC News reported on July 28 (the day after Netanyahu’s claim) that there is “mounting global outrage over rising deaths and scenes of starvation under Israel’s military offensive.”

Almost every story about Gaza, whether in print, online, or TV or radio – with the exception of FOX News – referred to the “growing global outrage” against Israel’s starvation tactics.

Of course, the most glaring exception has been in the U.S. Congress, which the Israel Lobby controls because of its ability to direct campaign contributions either for or against any member. If any country other than Israel were carrying out such a cruel war – killing and starving thousands of women and children – the Congress would have long ago condemned it and stopped sending billions to support it.

No publication has been as supportive of Israel over the years as the New York Times. Yet, on July 26 the paper carried a story headlined “No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole UN Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say.”

Then on July 18, the Times carried another story headlined “Revenge Is Not A Policy: Israelis Voice Dissent Against War In Gaza.” The story said: “Now a growing number of Israelis are speaking out against what they describe as atrocities carried out in their name in the Palestinian enclave.”

The reporter, Isabel Kershner, added: “Israeli protesters are holding aloft portraits of Palestinian children killed in Gaza. Academics and authors, politicians and retired military leaders are accusing the Israeli government of indiscriminate killing and war crimes.”

An iPhone news report said: “Palestinians are beginning to resemble ‘walking corpses,’ a United Nations official said, as (British Prime Minister) Keir Starmer called the starvation unfolding in Gaza ‘unspeakable and indefensible.’ He added, ‘While the situation has been grave for some time, it has reached new depths and continues to worsen. We are witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe.’”

On July 21, the United Nations put out a statement which said, “We have recorded 1,054 people killed in Gaza while trying to get food … 288 near UN and other humanitarian organizations’ aid convoys.”

Two days earlier, the Doctors Without Borders organization published a release saying, “As the Israeli government’s siege starves the people of Gaza … just outside Gaza, in warehouses – and even within Gaza itself – tons of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items and fuel sit untouched with humanitarian organizations blocked from accessing or delivering it.”

That statement said Israel’s total siege has “created chaos, starvation, and death. An aid worker… spoke of the devastating impact on children: children tell their parents they want to go to heaven, because at least heaven has food.”

Sen. Ted Cruz said on Tucker Carlson’s podcast that he supported what Israel is doing because the Bible says to bless Israel. However, he became very flustered when Carlson asked him where it says that in the Bible, and Cruz obviously did not know.

The Bible does instruct people to bless Israel, but it does not say people should bless Israel’s government no matter what it does. There is a lot more to the United States than our federal government. People can love this country while at the same time criticizing things our federal government does.

In the same way, people can love and bless Israel while criticizing its slaughter of the Palestinian people. Hundreds of thousands of Jews – maybe even a few million – are now doing just that. It is time for Christians to condemn the starving and killing of little children.

There is a very old Christian song which says:

Jesus loves the little children,

All the children of the world;

Red and yellow, black and white,

They are precious in his sight.

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

It does not say He loves all the children except for the little children in Gaza.

This article was originally published on The Knoxville Focus.

The post Starving Little Children Creates Global Outrage appeared first on LewRockwell.

In his first address to the College of Cardinals, Leo XIV explained his choice of name was inspired by “Pope Leo XIII [who] in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”

I knew of Rerum Novarum as the foundation of Catholic Social Teaching, and I had accepted the common claim that it rejects both socialism and capitalism. But there was a certain dissatisfaction about this understanding, a sense that I must have been missing something. As the daughter of Cuban exiles, I could not fathom how the Church could reject these two systems to the same degree when one had lifted millions out of poverty while the other had slaughtered millions in the name of equality.

So, now that Leo XIV had given this encyclical a place of honor in his new pontificate, I stopped relying on secondhand interpretations and read it for myself.

What Does Rerum Novarum Really Say?

As I read it, disbelief gave way to outrage. How misled I had been! This was no evenhanded critique of socialism on the one hand and capitalism on the other! It was a strong condemnation of socialism backed by a vigorous, principled defense of private property and the family. And, even more radically for our day, it was an explanation of why socialism hurts the poor rather than helps them. Leo never once promotes government redistribution of wealth as a general policy, but he does say—several times!—that only when private property is held sacred (yes, sacred) can we truly help the needy.

I could hardly think of a more provocative statement these days, certain to make most modern social justice warriors uncomfortable.

And it seems others feel the same. The opening paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on Rerum Novarum (RN) contains what I now know are multiple misrepresentations:

It supports the rights of labor to form trade unions [true], and rejects both socialism and capitalism [false] while affirming the right to private property [true, though vastly understated] and to a living wage [misleading, given how the term is used today].

Does RN champion the right to form unions governed by Christian morality? Absolutely, and with good reason.

Does it critique the treatment of workers as means to an end, inhumane working conditions, defrauding workers of their wages, and other practices where the rich and powerful treat workers as slaves? Yes, strongly. But capitalism hardly has a monopoly on these—it’s got nothing on atheistic Communism. And as the horrors of Communism began to be made known two generations after Leo XIII wrote RN, the Church has left absolutely no doubt that Communism is evil and irreconcilable with Christianity.

What Is a “Living Wage”?

One point from the Wikipedia entry is especially salient today: the “living wage” claim. Does RN argue that workers have the right to a living wage? Yes, though it does not use that term. Here is how RN expresses the idea (emphasis added):

Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages should support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner…. If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. Nature itself would urge him to this. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners. Many excellent results will follow from this; and, first of all, property will certainly become more equitably divided…

Do you believe the average Wikipedia reader thinks this is what “living wage” means? Sadly, the term is often used by those aiming to stoke division and envy, and nothing will put that fire out more quickly than realizing Catholic Social Teaching emphasizes property ownership as a natural right, requires wages to reflect the individual’s situation, and places demands on how employees spend their earnings. And that, Leo XIII argues, is how you get a more equitable distribution of property. Equity!

Read the Whole Article

The post They Lied to You About Rerum Novarum appeared first on LewRockwell.

In terms of geopolitics one could argue that allies don’t have to like each other, they just have to provide a mutual benefit that serves the greater purposes of peace. One could also argue that through cultural exchange the good habits of one country could easily influence the bad habits of another, but that kind of influence can also happen in reverse.

Though we might think of American culture as the content driver of the planet, the reality is that our ideals are an exceedingly rare dynamic found in no other society. We provide sanctuary to a fragile ember of free thought in an otherwise gloomy world of globalist oppression. It is something that must be protected at all costs.

Over the years I’ve heard many arguments from ignorant liberals about the grand progressive accomplishments of the European experiment and its centralized system. I’ve been told many times about how much safer Canada and Australia are. How the UK has near zero gun crime and how socialism works so well in Norway and Sweden.

Leftists in the US have long embraced this messaging as gospel and for generations they have told us that we MUST join the rest of western civilization by sacrificing certain liberties for the sake of future generations. We must become more like our allies in “more civilized” and liberal nations, or be left behind and labeled an “embarrassment”.

In reality, progressive leaders have abandoned western civilization, forsaking it in exchange for the elitist “Great Reset”. The political landscape in the UK, Canada and Australia has turned decidedly sour. They are speed running into technocracy and communism and abandoning any semblance of “democratic” governance. The mask is coming off to reveal Orwell’s “Big Brother”.

Europe Is Now A Third World Cesspool

Western civilization has been a net positive for humanity over the centuries and the only people that deny this are those that don’t know history and those that refuse to look at what is happening in the EU today with any honesty.

When you truly study the history of third-world societies you will find that life in these environments is brutal, devoid of compassion and bereft of freedom. The majority of their conflicts are solved with violence, often to the point of barbarism.

No woke liberal today stands a chance living within these societies. They would be laughed at over their calls for “equity” and slaughtered for their activism. Yet, leftists aggressively lobby for open borders so the third-world can invade.

It’s important to understand that Multiculturalism is a weaponized ideology. It’s not about coexistence, or labor markets, or population decline; it’s about eliminating western culture. The goal of globalists is to destabilize the connective tissue of the west, to saturate and dilute our shared cultural principles and make us as weak as possible.

They hope to use migrants as enforcers. It’s a classic strategy implemented by many tyrannical regimes that prefer to recruit foreign mercenaries as leverage to control an otherwise rebellious peasantry. Third world migrants are creating an atmosphere of crime and decay that globalists think will terrorize native Europeans into submission and apathy.

If you’re afraid to walk the streets of your own country, then your country no longer belongs to you.

The Muslim/Leftist Alliance

It’s no coincidence that the EU is importing migrants primarily from Islamic societies: They have no intention of integrating and they openly brag about how they’re coming to Europe to plunder and conquer. As these groups enter the west they bring with them a philosophy of exploitation – Their religious rules only apply to believers; non-believers are fair game and can be freely targeted.

One might wonder how an alliance between the leftists and the Muslims is even possible. They seem to be diametrically opposed to each other on almost everything. But consider for a moment what they share: A parallel hatred of western civilization and a desire to destroy it. Muslims see atheist progressives as disgusting, but they also see them as useful for opening the gates to predominantly Christian nations. Leftists, being generally weak and unable to project physical power, see Muslims as much needed hired muscle.

Keep in mind that the Canadian government has been flooding the country with Muslim migrants over the past ten years and is allowing them extreme latitude to run their own communities. There has been no government effort to silence the anti-LGBT rhetoric of Islamic speakers.

Canada has been quickly sinking into authoritarianism with draconian censorship laws and woke indoctrination. The Carney government is currently implementing a mass gun ban with over 300 models of firearms abruptly prohibited. Conservative Canadians in provinces like Alberta believe that the Carney government is trying to disarm them to prevent secession, a serious possibility under the current conditions. Our conservative brothers to the north have a difficult path ahead of them.

The legal changes in Canada will leave the US as the only nation left in the west with widespread civilian gun ownership, not to mention the only nation left with legitimate free speech rights.

America Soul Searches At The Edge Of The “Great Reset”

Incrementally, the majority of the western world has been turned into a pit of dystopian despair. Australia, for now, is the only region not burying their population in hostile migrants but it’s enforcing all of the same speech and thought control laws. The US is the only country trying to reverse course, but our soul searching is, frankly, too slow.

The defeat of woke doctrine in the US is certainly a relief. Clearly most Americans are done with deconstructionism and liberal mental illness. Most people hate leftists and want nothing to do with them. However, there is a deep divide among populists, from conservatives to libertarians to moderates. Their isn’t a strong bond except for our opposition to wokeness, and this is a problem.

Loving freedom is not enough. Having a shared enemy is not enough. There needs to be more for a society to survive and thrive. There needs to be a greater purpose.

In the meantime, we still have millions of illegal migrants to deal with as well as a small army of unhinged woke militants that are roaming the streets when they should be locked up in padded rooms. The will to take necessary action is limited by a refusal among many people to accept that we are alone, and we are at war.

There are millions of patriots in the EU, the UK, Australia and Canada that want to join the fight. We’ll have to wait and see if their civil disobedience bears fruit. I believe that they are waiting for us to make a move. They’re hoping we spark a greater rebellion against globalism. This requires that we clean our own house first and rediscover the unifying ideals that make the west something worth fighting for.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post As America Soul Searches, the Rest of the West Is Falling Apart appeared first on LewRockwell.

“It will not be long before we are reduced to savagery. We are the barbarians within our own empire.”

—Russell Kirk

Eighty years ago today, the U.S. government committed one of the awful acts in human history. Three days later, it did it again.

Harry Truman insisted the decision to vaporize or fatally irradiate almost a quarter million civilians (plus a dozen American prisoners of war) was his and his alone.

Whether meant as acknowledgment or confession, this assertion was correct. The buck stopped with him. It was Harry Truman who (literally) “gave ‘em Hell”.

The president assured the world (and presumably his conscience) that he had no choice. Proud and stubborn, the Japanese would never surrender. Nuclear weapons were the only way to end the war.

In a sense, like an abortionist convincing himself his victims aren’t really human, Truman had to believe that. Otherwise, what would his actions say about him?

Most Americans seemed to accept his argument. Retroactive propaganda argued the destruction of two sizable cities saved up to “a million lives” that would’ve been lost by invading the islands. Besides, “the Japs” had it coming for bombing Pearl Harbor!

OK. But which “Japs”?

Leave aside FDR’s pre-war actions intended to entice a Japanese attack. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were filled with half a million civilians who had no say in what their government did. Were those “the Japs” who had it coming? Why?

Grasping for Straws

Almost four years earlier, 2,400 Americans died on the “date which will live in infamy”. Most were in the Navy… plus over 200 in the Army, about a hundred Marines, and 68 civilians. Nearly half the dead were on the USS Arizona.

Government officials (in Tokyo and DC) needed to answer for that. But did the mothers, infants, and elderly of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How many of them picked the fight, gave the orders, flew the planes, or dropped the bombs that killed Americans that morning in Hawaii?

Dastardly as Pearl Harbor was, the attack was obviously trained on a military target. Atomic bomb advocates, including Truman, suggested Hiroshima and Nagasaki were too. That’s preposterous… akin to wiping out Waikiki because Pearl Harbor was near Honolulu.

Truman grasped for more straws. On the day Nagasaki was obliterated, the president defended the first bombing by saying Hiroshima was “an industrial center”. But its major factories sat far from the bullseye at the center of the city, and “Little Boy” left those largely unscathed.

As historian Ralph Raico wondered, if Hiroshima were such a vital military target, why was it untouched by years of air raids, and excluded from Bomber Command’s list of thirty-three primary targets?

After the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden earlier that year, official angst over innocent life carries little credibility. The U.S. government clearly had few qualms about killing civilians. Truman was caught chuckling during his announcement of the Hiroshima bombing (at the 2:30 mark):

The president did acknowledge some compunction during an inadvertent confession. He’d contemplated a third bomb, but rejected the idea because (as he put it to his Cabinet the day after Nagasaki), “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people”… including “all those kids”… was “too horrible” to contemplate.

The president was well aware the number of innocents he was killing, including “all those kids”. But did the quarter million dead Japanese save half a million Americans (or “millions”, as President George HW Bush once ludicrously claimed)?

It’s astounding that anyone accepts this. But for decades it’s what Americans have been taught. They’re expected to believe that an invasion of Japan would’ve cost almost as many lives as the War Between the States, and more than America lost in every other theater of Second World War combined.

Worst-case scenarios for a Nipponese D-Day come to fewer than 50,000 American dead. This estimate (approaching the U.S. death toll in Vietnam) is obviously horrific. But it’s still unrealistic. An invasion was never necessary to compel Japan to give up.

“Barbarians of the Dark Ages”

As citizens of China, enemy prisoners of war, and the peoples of Pacific archipelagos will attest, the Japanese military was vicious and barbaric.

But by 1945, despite its persistent pride and notorious intransigence, it was on the cusp of defeat. The Imperial government knew it, and was prepared to capitulate.

As Stanford professor Barton Bernstein relayed in a New York Times article preceding a Smithsonian exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

“Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either of these events took place.”

These weren’t Barton’s words. He was quoting what Brigadier General Bonnie Fellers wrote to General Douglas MacArthur soon after V-J Day.

As John Denson relayed in his terrific anthology, The Cost of War, “other high ranking military expressed similar sentiments.”

Among them was Admiral William Leahy, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the war:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was no material success in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. … My own feeling was that in being the first to use [nuclear weapons] we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

Former President and retired Five-Star General Dwight Eisenhower chimed in with similar sentiment:

“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. … I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

Major General JFC Fuller described the bombings as “a type of war that would’ve disgraced Tamerlane.” He also dispensed with the common justification:

“Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.”

This isn’t the convenient clarity of 20/20 hindsight. Skeptics were wearing corrective lenses many months before the Enola Gay left the runway.

In January 1945, the Japanese offered to surrender on terms virtually identical to those they accepted after Nagasaki. MacArthur informed FDR of this two days before the president left for Yalta. Leahy provided the information, and Truman himself later corroborated the account.

Had the US accepted the overture, not only the devastation of the atomic bombs would’ve been avoided, but Iwo Jima and Okinawa wouldn’t have occurred, sparing 20,000 American lives.

Denson elaborates on the Japanese proposal:

“… the surrender terms of the Japanese government were specified in a 40-page memorandum from General MacArthur to President Roosevelt dated January 20, 1945, which has never been made public, acknowledged, or denied by the American government. It is reported that the information in the memo was secretly delivered by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy, to journalist Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune because the Admiral rightfully feared that the offer would be ignored by the president and he wanted history to record the truth. Furthermore, President Truman, who assumed office after Roosevelt’s death in April, 1945, is reported to have later admitted to former President Herbert Hoover that by early May, 1945, he was aware of the peace offer and that further fighting was unnecessary, yet he still authorized the bombing. It is further alleged that President Truman also discussed the specific terms of the peace offer with Stalin at Babelsberg prior to the bombing; and finally, that General MacArthur confirmed the existence of this memo and its contents after the war.”

Wartime censorship forced Trohan to withhold this vital information for seven months. As Denson notes, he “first published this information about the Japanese peace offer in the Chicago Tribune on August 19, 1945, after the bombs were dropped earlier that month causing the deaths of approximately 210,000 civilians.”

The Japanese kept fighting only because the U.S. required unconditional surrender. This destructive demand (which Truman reiterated at Potsdam) had prolonged the war in Europe, and extended fighting in the Pacific.

The Japanese assumed those terms included dethroning the Emperor, which they wouldn’t abide. Truman knew this, yet insisted the bombs be dropped. Not to end the war, which was happening anyway… but to send a message to someone else.

The bombs were less to subdue Japan than to signal the Soviets. British scientist P.M.S. Blackett, one of Churchill’s advisers, wrote that dropping the bombs was “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.” They were the opening shots of the Cold War, with a quarter million innocents lined against the wall.

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A “scientific” ideology banned raw milk and vilified mothers who chose it anyway. Behind this, was a wealthy philanthropist pushing his agenda and setting the stage for the demise of the small farmer and food security in America.

An age-old food

In the opening scenes of the famous musical Fiddler on The Roof, our hero–Tevye–arranges his milk cart.

As the overture plays, drawing us into the scene and his inner musings on “Tradition!” he and his horse drive through the village serving his community with the milk from his cows and the cheeses he makes from that milk.

He is a farmer. A milkman. He is central to his community.

He dips his ladle into his milk can and pours the liquid into the waiting pitchers of the women. The activity of feeding his community is a small detail almost lost in the background of the plot–an illustration of a challenging time in 1905 Imperial Russia. It is lost in the background because of its normalcy. In this illustration of a time long ago, there was nothing unusual about a milkman feeding his community. It was what happened in many civilizations for millenia. The drama of the story unfolds as a controlling ideology comes closer into village life, destroying what they treasured and leaving them to ruin.

This is not a story about imperialism. It is about raw milk. It is about how this life-giving food has become a villain in modern America.

What Happened To Change How We View Raw Milk?

Raw milk–it is a food that is obscure to many Americans. Do you fear it? Despise it? Are you curious about it? We’ve been told that raw milk is dangerous. Is it?

Forgotten details of American history allow us to explore the topic and untangle our societal prejudice against it. Perhaps understanding the facts of our history will help us to understand how we got here and how we can make better decisions for the future.

The history is a tangled web of greed, deceit, and control.

Raw Milk Is a Significant Food for Civilization

Raw dairy is a perfect food–one of the two foods designed by nature to nourish the young (honey is the other). It is rich in nutrients humans need–filled with protein, fats, and sugars. It contains vitamins and minerals. It has vital enzymes that help our bodies absorb and use these nutrients. For example, lactase helps us digest the lactose (sugars), while the phosphatase helps us absorb phosphorus. Raw milk is probiotic, containing bacteria that help our own microbiomes thrive and that allow milk to change into other desirable foods.

There is nothing more basic between a mother and child than milk. Historically, a mother nurtures her child on the milk she produces. For the first few months of life, the child gets all the nutrients he or she needs from this wonderful mechanism our creator bestowed on all mammals.

We humans are not special in this regard.

For millennia, human civilizations have relied on a relationship between us and other mammals–most notably cows, goats, sheep, camels, water buffalo, and horses.

Not every civilization developed these relationships. But in those civilizations that did, milk became a fundamental ingredient in their food security.

There were 2 things that were true across the cultures that had dairy:

It was local.

It was primarily consumed raw.

In some lands, because these were warm climates, there was no way to keep dairy cold. It would immediately begin its fermentation process. Cow and water buffalo milk turn to clabber (drinkable yogurt), goat and sheep milk become yogurt, while camel and horse milk transform to a sour kefir-like drink.

These fermented dairy products brought life to the cultures that depended on them. They were often revered.

In time, cheese became a way we learned to preserve milk. All types of milks could be crafted into cheeses specific to their regions.

What happened that changed raw milk from a staple of civilization to something obscure, scary, reviled, and even criminal?

It all started with whisky…

The Entangled Relationship Between War, Whisky, and Milk

You are probably asking “What does whisky have to do with milk?”

We must understand whisky production in America to understand our history with milk.

In 1800s America, high taxes (to pay for the Revolutionary War) on imported spirits led to the rise of whisky distilleries in America. American farmers said “We can do this!” and they did. American whisky skyrocketed in popularity and production.

Whisky distilleries popped up everywhere. Even in certain cities. Transportation was a big cost, so putting the distilleries near the people seemed like a good idea. Disposing of the spent grain used to make whisky was expensive and cumbersome. This led to the concept of putting dairies right next to the distilleries and feeding the cows the spent grain from the whisky-making process. Spent grain is not a cow’s native food. Her native food is a diversity of grasses, while she roams the fields in the sunshine.

For those profiting from both the whisky and the milk, this seemed like a great idea. However, these abominations on agriculture led to disastrous results for cows and humans.

What ensued from this situation was predictable. The cows spent most of their short miserable lives indoors, in filthy conditions, unhealthy and producing milk that was of terrifying quality. There were no closed milking systems at the time. Workers hand milked into open pails.

This milk became known as “swill milk.”

It is not shocking that infant mortality was unacceptably high during this period. Sanitation was poor, there were no closed milking systems and no refrigeration. Public voices began to implicate the milk from the distillery dairies as a factor in the infant mortality rate.

This tragic situation had an easy-enough solution: stop feeding cows spent grain. Return cows to their native diets. Give them adequate lives out on pasture, and provide clean milking conditions. Have healthy workers milking the animals. Bring clean milk to the cities from the surrounding countryside.

But that was not the proposed solution.

A Wealthy Philanthropist “Saves” The Children

By the late 1800s, Nathan Straus, a wealthy philanthropist and co-owner of Macy’s department store, advocated for and then subsidized the pasteurization of all milk in New York City.

Several doctors spoke out against this policy noting that clean raw milk was highly nutritious and great for children. Leading the campaign for clean raw milk was Dr. Henry Coit. He saw the terrible conditions of the “distillery dairies,” and the health consequences that were blamed on the raw milk. He proposed an entirely different solution: establishing a “Medical Milk Commission” that would have doctors certify raw dairies outside the city. These doctors would ensure the farms had clean practices and produced healthy, safe milk.

His approach was a decentralized approach to feeding communities. Farmers remained in control of their own farms, the Medical Milk Commission simply became a certifying agent.

Many doctors participated in this endeavor and they had great results.

These doctors advocated for proper nutrition for children and proper animal husbandry. The results were a win-win.

But Straus’ argument against this was that certified clean raw milk was more expensive than Straus’ subsidized, “efficient” pasteurized milk. It was often double or quadruple the cost of the swill milk or the subsidized, pasteurized milk that Straus offered.

The obvious solution is a dual approach. But that is not what happened.

The “public health” campaign, backed by Straus’ deep pockets, prevailed. Pasteurization won out on the better “efficiency” although most all players recognized that certified clean raw milk was the better option. (One can only wonder what types of influence Straus’ “philanthropy” led to.)

What ensued was a decades-long battle. Many doctors advocated for clean raw milk. Those in Straus’ camp campaigned for “public health” and compulsory pasteurization without focusing on the underlying quality of the product.

The doctors who advocated for clean, certified farms were vilified, ridiculed, and bullied. The “public health advocates” who spoke about the dangers of raw dairy and pushed for mandatory pasteurization shifted policy in many cities.

Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there.

Read the Whole Article

The post How The 1987 Ban Came About in America and What It Means to Your Food Security Today appeared first on LewRockwell.

U.S. President Donald Trump is now largely following his predecessors hostile policy towards Russia.

If the war in Ukraine continues on its current path Russia will end it with an outright victory. The U.S. and its European vassals are trying to impose a ceasefire to prevent that. It would give time to rebuild the Ukrainian army and to restart the war at a more convenient time. But Russia won’t budge until its war aims are met.

A hoped for countermeasure is to pressure Russia’s oil customers, to thereby decrease its income and prevent it from finishing the war in its favor.

When the war started in 2022 the European Union cut its own access to Russian oil and gas supplies. It started to buy more oil from Gulf countries and other producers. India and China were thus suddenly cut of from their traditional suppliers. They started to buy Russian oil. Then U.S. President Joe Biden encouraged that. He did not want global gas prices to rise. Global supplies continued on an unchanged level and the change in the routes of oil around the globe had only a minor effect on prices.

One side-effect though was noticeable in some European refineries. Several of them were specialized in processing heavy Ural oil. They eventually had to go idle. Their business were picked up by Indian refineries which processed Russian oil and exported the resulting diesel fuel to Europe.

But now the U.S., and its European vassals, are trying to impose sanctions and/or tariffs on China and India for their continued buying of Russian oil. This would disturb the new market balance and eventually lead to higher oil prices for everyone.

China has successfully rejected U.S. pressure. In response to tariff threads it withheld minerals the U.S. needs. Trump had to pull back.

India is Trump’s new target:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump – Aug 04, 2025, 14:50 UTC

India is not only buying massive amounts of Russian Oil, they are then, for much of the Oil purchased, selling it on the Open Market for big profits. They don’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine. Because of this, I will be substantially raising the Tariff paid by India to the USA. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!

India’s Ministry of External Affairs responded by pointing out the hypocrisy of demanding for it to end trade relations while continuing the U.S.’  own trade with Russia:

…

4. Europe-Russia trade includes not just energy, but also fertilizers, mining products, chemicals, iron and steel and machinery and transport equipment.

5. Where the United States is concerned, it continues to import from Russia uranium hexafluoride for its nuclear industry, palladium for its EV industry, fertilizers as well as chemicals.

6. In this background, the targeting of India is unjustified and unreasonable. Like any major economy, India will take all necessary measures to safeguard its national interests and economic security.

Seeing resistance Trump promptly upped his demands:

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he would increase the tariff charged on imports from India from the current rate of 25% “very substantially” over the next 24 hours, in view of New Delhi’s continued purchases of Russian oil.

He also said a “zero tariff” offer for imports of U.S. goods into India was not good enough, alleging that India was “fuelling the war” in Ukraine.
…
The latest comment followed a similar threat on Monday, which prompted India’s Foreign Ministry to say the country was being unfairly singled out over its purchases of Russian oil.

India ia a very large and proud country. It is likely willing to fight back. Over the last 25 years the U.S. has tried to win the formally neutral India, which was friendly with Russia, as an ally. Trump is ruining this attempt.

There are Indian products, like pharmaceuticals, for which it has near monopolies and which the U.S. needs. If it is smart it will play the same game as China did with rare earth: Withhold what the U.S. needs and wait for Trump to capitulate.

To compensate for eventual damage it will, at the same time, have to seek better relations with China and even cheaper oil from Russia.

The European Union, meanwhile, continues to hurt itself. Last months it sanctioned an Indian refinery for buying Russian oil which promptly led to higher diesel prices in Europe:

The recent EU sanctions on India’s Niara Energy refinery have removed approximately fifteen percent of European diesel imports overnight, sending prices higher and creating significant market volatility.
…
With alternative supplies needed from the Middle East, Asia, and the US, diesel prices have jumped from $2.40 to $2.47 per gallon, and gas oil has climbed from $700 to $725 per metric ton. The shift comes amid already tight global supply, with Europe now required to pay a premium to attract new barrels.

It is also planning new sanctions on China even as China has proven to have escalation dominance in trade and is certain to hit back.

The attempt to fight Russia by secondary sanctions against its customers is likely to fail.

We can thus expect more attacks on Russia related shipping.

This article was originally published on Moon of Alabama.

The post The Secondary Sanctions Squeeze appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s only a matter of time before the political West delivers previously banned missiles to its Neo-Nazi puppets in NATO-occupied Ukraine and then orders them to use it against Russia. This would effectively turn every M142 HIMARS and its tracked counterpart, the M270/MARS MLRS (multiple launch rocket system), into a ground-based platform for the PrSM. Thus, Moscow has no choice but to respond with the mass production and later deployment of far more dangerous weapons such as the now legendary “Oreshnik”, which will be complemented by upgraded “Iskanders”, “Kinzhals”, “Zircons” and a plethora of other Russian hypersonic weapons.

On August 4, Russia announced it’s ending the unilateral moratorium on the deployment of medium and intermediate-range missiles that were previously banned under the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty. Since August 2, 2019, when the United States made a unilateral decision to officially withdraw from the INF Treaty, Moscow respected the limitations of this defunct arms control agreement despite the fact that it was not required to do so. However, as per usual, the political West views the Eurasian giant’s desire to avoid escalation in Europe (and beyond) as nothing more than a “sign of weakness”.

It was only thanks to the growing incompetence of the American Military Industrial Complex (MIC) that the Pentagon never got the chance to deploy advanced medium and intermediate-range missiles, specifically hypersonic weapons, resulting in the adoption of far less capable land-based platforms. However, the mass deployment of such systems is now forcing Russia to react and utilize its much more advanced missiles, including a plethora of hypersonic weapons that nobody in the entire political West can match. The Kremlin’s goal is to use its massive advantage to deter mounting NATO aggression.

Despite Russia’s efforts to promote restraint in hopes of avoiding a new (First) Cold War-style arms race, this was met by total hostility in the political West. This also included attempts to prevent escalation in the increasingly contested Asia-Pacific region, but to no avail. The world’s most aggressive power pole had other ideas, particularly concerning its attempts to encircle both Russia and China. Multipolar superpowers tried their best to avoid tensions, but that’s extremely difficult (if possible at all) given the US/NATO’s determination to maintain the state of constant crawling conflict that could potentially degenerate into a real one.

For instance, Moscow has repeatedly suggested that Western countries declare a reciprocal moratorium on deploying previously banned missiles. However, this was met not only with silence, but open enmity and US/NATO’s support for prolonging its war in Ukraine. In a statement released on August 4, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned that the US, its vassals and satellite states openly declared their plans to deploy American ground-based, INF-banned missiles across various regions and made significant progress in their efforts to implement these plans. The Russian MFA stated they’re already well into the deployment phase.

The report further warns that, since 2023, Moscow observed instances of “US systems capable of ground-launched INF strikes being transferred to the European NATO countries for trial use during exercises that clearly have an anti-Russia slant”, such as those in Denmark which involved the use of a mobile Mk 70 Mod 1 launcher. This containerized four-cell VLS (vertical launching system) is a land-based derivative of the naval Mk 41 found on US Navy ships. Interestingly, the same VLS is used in the US/NATO so-called “missile shield” deployed in Romania and Poland (specifically in military bases in Deveselu and Redzikowo, respectively).

It was precisely the blatant lies about this that caused Russia to retain (albeit not yet deploy) the capability to promptly develop medium and intermediate-range weapons, such as the Novator’s 9M729 cruise missiles used by the “Iskander-K”. After decades of lying about its compliance with the INF Treaty, the US then unilaterally withdrew from it, citing precisely the 9M729 as the supposed reason. Such double standards are the common theme of the American/Western foreign policy approach. Now that the INF Treaty is history, the political West has zero formal constraints to even bother lying about its long-range strike capabilities.

The aforementioned Mk 41 can be used to deploy offensive missiles (such as the “Tomahawk”) and nobody except the people who installed them would know it. This gives the US/NATO unprecedented strike options against Russia while keeping it all concealed under the guise of “missile defense”. This is now being complemented by undisguised platforms, the most prominent of which is the “Typhon” Weapon System that can fire the land-based SM-6 multipurpose and “Tomahawk” cruise missiles. The latter can hit targets at ranges of approximately 1,600 km, putting nearly the entire territory of European Russia within striking distance.

Worse yet, the “Tomahawk” can be armed with the W80 thermonuclear warhead, meaning that the old (First) Cold War-era BGM-109G GLCM (Ground Launched Cruise Missile) “Gryphon” is effectively resurrected. In fact, the very usage of the name “Typhon” indicates that the missile is a successor to the “Gryphon”. The W80’s yield goes up to 150 kt, which is approximately ten times more powerful than the “Little Boy” (gun-type fission uranium bomb that obliterated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945). Hundreds of missiles armed with such nuclear warheads could soon be deployed all over Europe, prompting Russia to respond with its own equivalents.

However, the Kremlin is not nearly as alarmed by such missiles as it is by the potential deployment of much faster weapons that the US/NATO is still trying to develop. The Russian MFA noted that American military exercises in the Asia-Pacific region saw the deployment of officially still non-operational intermediate-range systems such as the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), better known as the “Dark Eagle”. The Pentagon openly bragged about “projecting power” and emphasized the system’s “rapid redeployment capability” (although the LRHW program is yet to produce an actual working hypersonic weapon).

However, the US has other systems that could serve as an interim solution. This was evident during the highly controversial “Talisman Sabre” exercises in April, when the Australian military used a US-made HIMARS platform to launch the PrSM (Precision Strike Missile). This weapon is a relatively compact SRBM (shorter-range ballistic missile) with a range of up to 1,000 km (depending on the variant) designed to compete with Russian systems such as the 9K720M “Iskander-M” and its more capable iterations that use hypersonic missiles like the latest 9M723-S (maximum range at least 1,000 km, speed up to 13,000 km/h).

It’s only a matter of time before the political West delivers the PrSM to its Neo-Nazi puppets in NATO-occupied Ukraine and then orders them to use it against Russia. This would effectively turn every M142 HIMARS and its tracked counterpart, the M270/MARS MLRS (multiple launch rocket system), into a ground-based platform previously banned by the INF Treaty. Thus, Moscow has no choice but to respond with the mass production and later deployment of far more dangerous weapons such as the now legendary “Oreshnik”, which will be complemented by upgraded “Iskanders”, “Kinzhals”, “Zircons” and a plethora of other Russian hypersonic weapons.

This article was originally published on Infobrics.org.

The post Russia Ends Unilateral INF Treaty Compliance Amid Escalating NATO Aggression appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Death of Civic Faith
I used to believe in the system. Not in unicorns or bipartisan kumbayas—just the notion that governance might still function behind the scenes. I believed elections mattered, debates had meaning, and somewhere in the bureaucratic swamp, a few frogs were still swimming toward something that looked like Integrity.

I graduated from Republican orthodoxy to Libertarian purity: self-ownership, private property, limited government, Constitutional sanctity, and the sacred Non-Aggression Principle. I evangelized on Talk Radio, spoke at conventions, hosted icons like Walter Williams, and truly believed we’d cracked the code to save the Republic. Turns out it was just another dialect of dysfunction as I watched the Party regularly implode under the weight of its own purity tests and amateur theatrics. Libertarians are just Republicans with better vocabulary and worse organizational skills.

But Belief has a shelf life. Mine expired after watching Republicans and Democrats re-enacting the same rituals, producing the same rot. Politics, politicians, and process—the holy trinity of American governance—had morphed into a taxpayer-funded escape room: rigged, performative, and absurdly expensive.

What I once saw as civic faith, I now recognize as institutional theater. And like any atheist who’s left the church, I traded reverence for ridicule, hope for a well-earned eye roll, and belief for the cold clarity of disillusionment.

The Political Atheist Defined

The political atheist isn’t an anarchist. He doesn’t reject order—he rejects sanctimony. He doesn’t burn the Constitution—he just stopped pretending anyone reads it. What he rejects is the civic religion: the quaint idea that politics is sacred, that politicians are high priests, and that the rituals of governance deserve obeisance simply because they exist.

Where the religious atheist walks away from divine authority, the political atheist walks away from institutional authority that demand reverence. He’s unmoved by phrases like “sacred duty,” “moral arc,” “soul of the nation,” or the ever-nauseating “for the greater good”—not because he lacks morality, but because he’s seen how those words are used to launder power. He doesn’t pray at the altar of party or process. Instead, he asks who built the altar, who profits from the sermon, and why the pews never change.

Political atheism isn’t nihilism. It’s clarity. It’s the refusal to genuflect before a system that rewards cowardice, punishes dissent, and cloaks dysfunction in ritualized jabberwocky. It’s not the absence of belief—it’s the presence of discernment. The political atheist doesn’t want chaos. He wants accountability. But he’s done imagining accountability lives in a government pulpit.

The Ritual of Cowardice

The system doesn’t demand courage; it requires choreography. Politicians don’t lead; they perform. They rehearse outrage, recite empathy, and bow to optics like altar boys afraid of excommunication. The brave are punished not for being wrong, but for being off-script. The coward is rewarded for staying in character.

Dissent isn’t crushed; it’s drowned in ceremony. The system doesn’t silence critics; it invites them to speak, then buries their words under process. A four-year, multi-million-dollar Special Prosecutor investigation ends with no indictments, no accountability, and no clarity—just a press conference and a shrug. Bipartisan panels promise truth but deliver theater. Hearings generate heat, not light; allegations, not facts. The rituals are elaborate, expensive, and exhausting. They simulate justice but demand nothing from the powerful.

The ritual of dysfunction is always followed by the illusion of reform. A scandal breaks, a committee forms, a bill is introduced with a name so noble it bows deeply—“The Accountability Act,” “The Truth in Governance Initiative,” “The Restoring Trust Commission.” Cameras roll, statements are made, and nothing changes. Reform becomes its own ceremony: a performance of contrition designed to preserve the status quo. Both parties play along, not to fix the system, but to protect it. They weaponize these rituals to shield their own, turning failure into virtue and outrage into a renewable resource. The result isn’t justice; it’s equilibrium. The system absorbs dissent, metabolizes scandal, and – just like that – emerges untouched.

The political atheist doesn’t reject politics because it’s flawed. He rejects it because it’s self-cleansing. Every failure is ritualized, every scandal sanctified, every betrayal rebranded as resilience. The system doesn’t collapse; it renews itself, like a church that canonizes its sinners or transfers a guilty priest, undisciplined, to a distant parish. The atheist has seen too many redemption arcs with no repentance, too many reforms that reform nothing, too many sermons about “for the children” while the rot remains untouched. He doesn’t walk away in anger. He walks away in clarity. Faith is for the pews. He’s looking for proof.

Vigilantism: The Illegality of Moral Urgency

The American colonists didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t petition the Crown for a more favorable interpretation of ‘tyranny’. They broke laws. They sabotaged supply lines. They fired on soldiers. To the British Crown, they weren’t patriots, they were insurgents. Their moral urgency didn’t make their actions legal; it made them dangerous. They declared authority where none had been granted. And we call it ‘founding’.

But strip away the marble and myth, and what remains is guerrilla warfare. Decentralized militias. Irregular tactics. A moral calculus that said: If justice won’t come from above, it must be seized from below.

This isn’t unique to America. Every revolution begins as vigilantism. The French stormed the Bastille. The Haitians burned the plantations. The Bolsheviks overran the Winter Palace. Legality was not the starting point—it was the aftermath. First came urgency. Then came rupture. Only later did the victors write laws to sanctify their defiance.

So what makes today different? Why is moral urgency now dismissed as extremism, while past insurgencies are enshrined as heroism? If colonists were justified in breaking laws to pursue justice, who gets to decide when that justification applies now?

If they could declare authority, why can’t we?

The political atheist doesn’t romanticize violence. He recognizes its inevitability when systems refuse to self-correct. He sees vigilantism not as a solution but as a warning; a sign that legitimacy isn’t a fixed state but a fragile agreement. Break the deal, and the governed will take control themselves.

The whistleblower is the system’s internal vigilante. He doesn’t plant bombs; he reveals truths. But the response is the same: prosecution, exile, character assassination. Edward Snowden didn’t sell secrets; he exposed surveillance. Reality Winner didn’t sabotage democracy; she revealed its vulnerabilities. Their crime wasn’t betrayal; it was impatience. They refused to wait for institutional reform that never came.

At the border, vigilantes patrol the desert with rifles and radios, convinced that the state has abdicated its duty. They aren’t sanctioned, but they are tolerated because their urgency aligns with the power’s narrative. Their illegality is quietly absorbed, even as it violates the same laws they claim to defend.

Then there’s January 6. A grotesque eruption of grievance, delusion, and performative patriotism with criminal government interference. But beneath the flags and fury lies a familiar psychology: the belief that the system has failed, and that moral urgency justifies illegal action. The political atheist doesn’t excuse it, but he recognizes the pattern. When institutions lose credibility, people don’t wait. They act. Often recklessly. Sometimes violently. Always urgently.

The system’s response is revealing. Snowden is exiled. Border vigilantes are ignored. January 6 rioters are prosecuted—but not uniformly. The message is clear: moral urgency is tolerated when it serves power, and criminalized when it threatens it.

Illegality vs. Illegitimacy: What Power Really Fears

Illegality is a nuisance. It can be prosecuted, pardoned, or ignored. It’s manageable. But illegitimacy is existential. It questions the very right to govern. That’s why the system tolerates certain crimes and panics at certain truths.

A corrupt senator can violate campaign finance laws and remain in office. A whistleblower can reveal mass surveillance and be exiled for life. The difference isn’t the crime, it’s the threat to the narrative. Power survives broken laws. It doesn’t survive broken myths.

This is why January 6 was prosecuted not just as a riot, but as a heresy. It wasn’t the violence, it was the symbolism. The breach of the Capitol was a breach of sanctity. It exposed the fragility of legitimacy, and that’s what had to be punished.

The Liberal Counterpart: Narrative as Narcotic

Liberals don’t patrol borders or storm buildings. Their vigilantism is rhetorical. They weaponize the narrative to preempt urgency, to anesthetize the public with stories of progress, process, and patience.

When institutions fail, the liberal instinct isn’t rupture, it’s reassurance. “Democracy is resilient.” “The arc of history bends toward justice.” These aren’t observations. They’re incantations designed not to describe reality, but to delay confrontation with it.

This is why the liberal media obsess over norms, decorum, and the “return to civility.” It’s not about truth; it’s about tempo. Keep the public calm. Keep the system intact. Keep the urgency at bay. Urgency is rebranded as extremism. Defiance becomes disinformation. The narrator becomes the gatekeeper.

The political atheist sees through this. He knows that a narrative without consequence is sedation. That reassurance without reform isn’t comfort, it’s betrayal. And that sometimes, the most radical act is refusing to wait.

The Collapse of Permission

In healthy systems, patience is a virtue; in broken ones, it’s a trap. The system doesn’t ask for obedience; it demands patience. The citizen is told to wait for the next election, the next investigation, the next reform. Wait for the ‘process’ to play out. But waiting is not passive; it’s performative. It signals belief in a system that no longer deserves it. And in a broken system, it’s complicity.

The political atheist has stopped waiting. He’s done mistaking delay for dignity. He’s watched whistleblowers punished, vigilantes tolerated, and narrators rewarded for keeping the public sedated. He’s seen urgency criminalized and illegality selectively enforced. And he’s reached the only conclusion left: permission is a myth. Because when the system no longer delivers justice, the refusal to act becomes an endorsement. The collapse of permission is not the collapse of order; it’s the collapse of the illusion that order ever ruled.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Rise of the Political Atheist appeared first on LewRockwell.

The CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla – who ought to be in prison – was instead at Trump’s  golf club in Bedminster, NJ recently – attending a fundraiser for MAGA, Inc. Wasn’t MAGA supposed to be opposed to creatures such as Bourla? Didn’t Trump get elected to a great extent by riding a popular wave of fury about creatures such as Bourla (and Fauci, et al)?

A pro-Trump web site explains this apparent incongruity as being in accordance with Don Corleone’s dictum, “keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”

This assumes, of course, that Bourla is Trump’s enemy rather than his collaborator. If not the latter, why hasn’t the Orange Don sicced his Just Us Department on Bourla or any other of the grifters who sicced the government on the American people, using its coercive powers to push them into getting jabbed else lose their jobs? Bourla is a criminal every bit as detestable as Epstein and arguably worse since Epstein only abused a relative handful of young people. Millions of young people – many of them absolutely children (as opposed to nearly of-age and of-age young women) who had no say in the matter because it was up to their parents, who were mightily pressured to have their children injected with whatever-it-was in those needles, because if they didn’t then the children weren’t allowed to attend school (and in some case, failure to inject was taken as tantamount to child abuse).

Not one indictment. Not one investigation, even. Instead, the creature that profited to the tune of billions off the misery (and damage done to the health of) millions is free to attend a gala, high-roller fundraiser for MAGA.

Res ipsa loquitur. It speaks for itself.

Bourla and other criminals of his ilk ought to be personas non grata at Trump/MAGA fundraisers. That they are welcomed (more finely, their money is welcomed) says all you need to know about MAGA or who controls it, at any rate. The run-of-the-mill Red Hat does not. People such as Miriam Adelson and Albert Bourla do. This is reflected by actions taken – and actions not taken – by the Orange Don, who isn’t really that since a Don is the one who runs things. The Orange Don does the bidding of things like Bourla and Adelson.

They got what they paid for.

Mass starvation in Gaza that goes officially unnoticed. The detestable CEO of the greatest legal crime syndicate in the country treated like royalty at a fund-raiser for the political movement that owes its popular support almost entirely to run-of-the-mill Red Hat fury over what was done to millions of Americans by creatures such as Bourla during the “pandemic.” And by Trump, too. Let’s never forget that – much as he’d like us to (just as he’d like us to forget about the Epstein Business now that it’s no longer politically useful to him).

Is it necessary to recap?

Trump declared the “emergency” that gave the legal green-light to Pfizer, Moderna and the rest of the “families” to not just peddle but push their poison on the entire population without even the minimal firewall of the usual and previously required safety-testing. Just trust us! It’s “safe” and “effective”! And it was Trump who did not end the “emergency” he declared – even on his way out the door – even though it was obvious by then that the “pandemic” was an orchestrated and extremely evil con. He was part of that. The fact is undeniable. Yet there are still Red Hats who not only deny it but j’ accuse those who have the temerity to mention it as being TDS sufferers. This is astounding as much as it is wilting. It does, however, give the still-sane among us a window into the insanity that walks among us.

If only Stalin knew, they cry!

The fulsome scurvy truth is this: Trump has no interest in seeing Bourla or Fauci or any of these things investigated and prosecuted or even being turned away from a MAGA fundraiser because it is not in his interest. The italics ought not to be necessary and yet they are. People – all too many – continue to believe that the interests of the ruling cabal and the people are sometimes congruent. Well, they sometimes are – in the way that the interests of a feed lot owner and the cattle therein are congruent. The cattle get fed. Eventually, so does the feed lot owner.

Trump is not even the feed lot owner. He works for the owners of the feed lot. This has become so obvious lately it is not possible to honestly say it’s otherwise. Unless, of course, you still want to believe otherwise.

This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.

The post Trump’s Pharma Fan appeared first on LewRockwell.

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