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We assume that Player One in the White House is having fun.  Between moments of boredom with the whole thing he appears to enjoy time playing a video game, one like SimCity in which players build their own communities.  But the game Donald Trump plays allows him to build his very own TrumpWorld.

So far, his world includes global mapmaking.  Nobody serious much cares or thinks that America is elevated and Mexico diminished by renaming the Gulf of Mexico, but for a dedicated gamer it is like calling out other players online.  It thrills Player One in TrumpWorld since it represents unilateral might.  Then there are the options of making Canada a state, taking Greenland and the Panama Canal by force, or displacing millions of people to create the Gaza Riveria Resort, a luxurious playground for the rich and famous.  And this is only the first level!

Trump, who we are told simply doesn’t read much of anything that’s not on a teleprompter, is so completely mesmerized by video that he appoints people to office based on their appearance on TV.  It bestows a reality on them that others lack and in TrumpWorld it is a major qualification for high office:  Pete Hegseth, Dan Bongino, Sean Duffy… you get the idea.  His Kennedy Center board appointees include Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiroma.   Being a Fox News host or contributor is best, but others on TV can get the presidential nod, and even become ambassadors, too.

For a former reality TV star, it is the most fun ever to have your own global reality video game.  You can upend all of world trade, commerce that makes greater prosperity possible, with nothing more than a notion and the push of a button.  On a whim Player One can threaten one tariff rate one day and another the next, changing frantically from day to day.  This makes planning and production virtually impossible for anyone engaged in business.  But it’s okay since it’s only a video game.  It’s his world. Any inconvenience or cost digital beings suffer in the changing gamescape is not really real in a reality video game reality.

Trump World should have been carried a warning for extreme violence. It was packaged as peaceful, but it’s clear now that thundered threats of bombardment are major tools of fun and play.  “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before!”  Wow!  That’s awesome!  “Your country gets blown to smithereens,” Cool!  “Hell will rain down upon you like nothing you have ever seen before!”  Boys playing games online talk like that.  Normal people in the real world, people with healthy human consciousness don’t.  But TrumpWorld is just a hyper-exciting game, one that now features fresh new images of people being incinerated right before our eyes.  “Oops!”  So realistic! So exhilarating!

As you would expect of a serious gamer, even before his first go-around Trump showed himself to be uncommonly interested in wielding deadly power. He repeatedly pressed a foreign policy adviser during the 2016 campaign to explain why the US couldn’t use its nuclear weapons. Like so many other role-playing and real time strategy games – Fallout, and Command and Conquer – TrumpWorld now includes the thrilling prospect of carnage by nuclear weapons.

What if things go amiss?  No worries.  TrumpWorld’s Player One can always take a break and play some golf.  One game is as good as another.  If everything gets broken down or blown up in TrumpWorld, he can pause and reset.

Can’t he?

The post Trumpworld: Ready Player One! appeared first on LewRockwell.

In an amusing display of British pride and solipsism, the venerable Times of London once ran the headline “Fog in Channel – Continent Cut Off.”

Overly arrogant individuals sometimes find it difficult to recognize that they are not the center of the universe, and that instead they might actually be considerably less large and powerful than those they intend to overawe, cut off, or isolate.

This sort of notion was also famously expressed in a Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoon I remember seeing during my childhood. One of the Looney Tunes characters—I forget which one—was perched on the branch of a tree and idiotically decided to destroy his adversary by sawing it off. Since cartoons may easily defy physical laws, his ridiculous plan actually succeeded and that branch remained suspended in mid-air while the rest of the tree suddenly plummeted to the ground. But real life is considerably different than what was portrayed by Warner Brothers cartoonists.

Some may disagree. I’ve sometimes wondered whether the surprising trade policies that President Donald Trump announced over the last couple of weeks might have been inspired by those Bugs Bunny cartoons of the 1950s. Perhaps he assumed that they accurately portrayed real life events and decided to apply that same strategy to America’s international trade problems.

Certainly the sudden, unilateral application of new tariffs against every other country in the world—ranging from a stiff minimum of 10% against the entire human race to a China rate that ultimately reached an absurd 145%—seemed more like something out of a cartoon than normal economic policy planning.

The initial tariff rates shown in the chart that Trump held up at his April 2nd announcement produced a jaw-dropping reaction by nearly all economic observers. I suspect that many of them may have wondered if he’d somehow gotten his dates confused and the whole exercise had actually been intended as an April Fools’ joke.

I was recently interviewed by a right-wing British podcaster named Mark Collett, and he suggested that Trump’s erratic and mercurial political decisions reminded him of the Roman Emperor Caligula, leading me to concur with his historical analogy.

Caligula is probably best known for announcing that he would appoint his horse Incitatus to the consulship, the highest political office of the Roman government, and also for declaring himself to be a living god. But I think that if Trump had given his favorite dog or cat a Cabinet post and even Tweeted out a few fanciful claims regarding his own divinity, the negative impact upon America’s position in the world might have been considerably less damaging than what was caused by his outrageously bizarre tariff proposal.

Tariffs are just a type of tax levied on imports, and America annually imports well over $3 trillion dollars worth of foreign goods, so tariff taxes obviously have a huge economic impact. But Trump suddenly raised those taxes by more than a factor of ten, taking them from around 2.5% to 29%, rates far, far beyond those of the notorious 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and reaching the levels of more than 100 years ago. This certainly amounted to one of the largest tax increases in all of human history.

According to our Constitution, tariffs and other tax changes must be enacted by Congressional legislation. But Trump ignored those requirements, instead claiming that he had the power to unilaterally set tariff tax rates under the emergency provisions of a 1977 law that no one had ever previously believed could be used for that purpose.

Across our 235 year national history, all our past changes in tariff, trade, or tax policy—including Smoot-Hawley, NAFTA, the WTO, and Trump 45’s own USMCA—had always been the result of months or years of political negotiations, and then ultimately approved or rejected by Congress. But now these multi-trillion-dollar decisions were being made at the personal whim of someone who had seemingly proclaimed himself a reigning, empowered American autocrat.

As might be expected, Trump’s huge tax increase on $3 trillion of imports quickly led to a very sharp drop in stock prices, but Trump declared that he was unbending and would never waver. China had prepared for exactly such an economic attack, and when it soon retaliated with similar tariffs on American products, Trump counter-retaliated, with several days of those tit-for-tat exchanges eventually raising tariff rates against China to an astonishing 145%, essentially banning almost all Chinese goods. Many other countries and the EU also threatened similar retaliatory tariffs, but since their tax rates were governed by law rather than autocratic whim, their responses were necessarily much slower.

However, just a week after he announced those gigantic tariffs against the entire world and repeatedly promised to maintain or even further raise them, Trump suddenly changed his mind. Although he kept the Chinese rates at those ridiculous levels, he declared that tariffs on all other countries would suddenly be reduced to a very high but rational 10% rate for the next 90 days while he decided what to do.

Thus, during the course of a single week, Trump had raised American tariffs by more than a factor of ten, then dropped them by a factor of two, representing exactly the sort of tax policy we might expect to see in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Trump’s totally unexpected reversal naturally produced a huge rebound in stock prices, which recovered much of the ground that they had previously lost, and Trump boasted about all the money that his friends had made from that unprecedented market rebound. This led to some dark suspicions that our unfortunate country had just witnessed one of the most outrageously blatant examples of insider trading in all of human history.

Across thousands of years, the world has seen many important countries ruled by absolute monarchs or all-powerful dictators, with some of these leaders even considered deranged. But I can’t recall any past example in which a major nation’s tax, tariff, or tribute policies have undergone such rapid and sudden changes, moving up and down by huge amounts apparently based upon personal whim. Certainly Caligula never did anything so peculiar, nor Louis XIV nor Genghis Khan nor anyone else who comes to mind. Lopping off the heads of a few random government officials was one thing, but drastic changes in national financial policies were generally taken much more seriously. I don’t think that Tamerlane ever suddenly raised the tribute he demanded from his terrified subjects by a factor of ten, then a few days later lowered it back down by a factor of two.

What will our tariff rates on $3 trillion of imports be like in a few months? I doubt that anyone can say, even including the current occupant of the Oval Office. For example, late Friday night the Trump Administration apparently exempted smartphones, computer equipment, and other electronics from his Chinese tariffs, hoping that the timing would help hide that further abject surrender from the American population.

Consider America’s major business corporations or even its small mom-and-pop operations. Nearly all of these have some substantial connection to international trade, even if they merely rely upon ordinary products that they buy at Costco or Walmart. On April 2nd, Trump announced his huge new tariffs that would greatly raise the price of those products or possibly lead to their disappearance, then on April 9th he changed his mind and suspended those tariffs for 90 days, but still proposed to afterward enact them, while essentially banning nearly all Chinese imported goods with a 145% tariff that may or may not continue.

Under those circumstances, how could any rational corporate planner—or even sensible small-businessman—formulate any long-term investment plans? For at least the next 90 days, virtually all business investment will surely remain frozen, except perhaps for a little panic-buying. It’s hardly surprising that consumer sentiment quickly reached the worst levels since record-keeping began.

Read the Whole Article

The post Donald Trump’s Looney Tunes Trade Policy appeared first on LewRockwell.

I’ve often thought that the UK hasn’t had any good leaders since Lord Salisbury, the last prime minister of Queen Victoria’s reign, who died in 1902.

Lord Salisbury (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil) was a prudent and sensible man who understood that most ambitious schemes undertaken by people in government are likely to be ruinous. Recognizing the folly of getting into alliances with Europe’s Continental powers, he maintained the policy of “splendid isolation.” His pessimistic view of government scheming was encapsulated in the credo:

Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.

I am certain that Lord Salisbury would have been appalled by pretty much every major decision made by the British government since his death, especially its gross mismanagement of affairs on the European continent in the first decade of the 20th century. The British government’s unnecessary alliances with France and Russia and its needlessly unfriendly posture towards Germany were, it seems to me, foolish at best, and more likely bloody-minded, especially when one considers that the British Royal family was from Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II was Victoria’s grandson.

The British government’s treatment of its young men during World War I—herding millions of them into cold, muddy, water-filled, rat infested trenches, where they were subjected to round-the-clock artillery barrages—strikes me as one of the most outrageous abuses of human beings ever perpetrated.

While Churchill is often idolized as Britain’s great 20th century leader because of his rousing speeches during World War II, it’s not clear to me that any of his decisions arose out of any sort of special prescience or judgement. After Neville Chamberlain declared war on Nazi Germany on Sept. 3, 1939, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty—a position he was holding when the Royal Navy attempted to defend Norway from the German navy. This operation ended in disaster on June 8, 1940, when the German battle-cruisers Scharnhost and Gneisenau caught the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her two escorting destroyers Acasta and Ardent in the Norwegian Sea, sinking all three ships, with the loss of 1,519 British sailors. Even though Churchill was head of the Navy, it was Prime Minister Chamberlain who took the flak for the incident and resigned, leaving his office open to Churchill.

Chamberlain declared war on Germany because it invaded Poland, which it intended to use as a staging ground for its invasion of the Soviet Union. The paradox of this decision was that Britain’s ally, the Soviet Union, invaded Poland sixteen days after the German invasion. At the Yalta Conference in Feb. 1945, Churchill agreed to leave Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe under the de facto control of Joseph Stalin.

It seems to me that Britain’s awful leadership reached a new summit with Tony Blair and has become steadily more dreadful ever since. It may have reached its Grotesque Globalist Apotheosis with Rishi Sunak. After working at Goldman Sachs, Sunak co-founded a hedge fund registered in the Cayman Islands (to avoid paying taxes) called Theleme Partners.

He and his French co-founder, Patrick Degorce, apparently named the fund after the Abbey of Thélème—a fictional institution featured in the books of the 16th century monk François Rabelais. The inhabitants of the Abbey follow the motto “Do what thou wilt.” This motto was adopted the 20th century English occultist Aleister Crowley, who called his philosophical system Thelema.

Theleme Partners was one of the earliest investors in the pharmaceutical company Moderna (when it only had ten employees). One wonders if Degorce received the investment tip from his fellow Frenchman, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel.

When Sunak left Theleme Partners in 2013 to go into politics, his interest in the fund was placed in a blind trust, but it’s hard to believe he didn’t know that the fund retained its huge ($500 million) position in Moderna.

While he was serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer, his government signed a deal for 5 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine. Shortly after Sunak became Prime Minister in 2022, his government signed a 10-year-investment partnership with Moderna “to build a state-of-the-art vaccine manufacturing centre with the ability to produce up to 250 million vaccines a year.”

In other words, Sunak is the poster boy for the sort of “young globalist leader” who benefits from “public-private partnerships” between guys who control the public purse strings and their financial-pharmaceutical industry cronies.

Between 2020-2022, mRNA vaccines were all the rage in British government circles. Now it’s sending billions to Ukraine’s unelected oligarchy that has a well-documented history of money-laundering and other gangster racketeering.

A decisive factor in making this kind of chicanery possible is the conspicuous dumbing down of the British public, which may now be even more ignorant and brainwashed than the American public. The results in London are plain to see. Guys like Rishi Sunak and his globalist cronies make millions doing dodgy deals with Moderna, the beneficiaries of Britain’s “Net Zero” policy, and Ukrainian oligarchs. They live in the posh parts of town, dine in the fabulous restaurants, and visit the splendid shops of Mayfair.

Most taxpaying Londoners—people who don’t have hedge funds domiciled in the Cayman Islands— struggle to pay for their housing in neighborhoods that are dreary and dystopian.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Why Is the UK Government So Awful? appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Donald Trump wants to be a modern ‘Stupor Mundi or wonder of the world. The last ‘stupor mundi’ was the celebrated German Holy Roman Emperor and crusader, Federick II, known as ‘Barbarossa.’

It appears that President Trump seems determined to become the most important and commented upon person on earth. So far, he has succeeded brilliantly. So far, that is. As of this writing, Trump’s tariff crusade has become a debacle, making him and the United States the objects of hatred and fury around the plant – except for farm regions in the US and among Israel’s supporters. Now even the farmers in the Dakotas are mad as hornets at the president from Queens, New York for wrecking the soya bean market with new tariffs.

To many professional money men, it appears that Trump’s Russian roulette with tariffs threatens to bring a serious recession or worse. One of America’s smartest, most successful money managers, Ray Dalio, just warned that Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff proclamations and other economic policies threaten an eventual global meltdown. Dalio is a noted financial pessimist, but we are unwise to ignore his jeremiads now that America is up to its ears in too much debt.

As a historian, my mind goes quickly back to another financial miracle-worker, the infamous Scot, John Philip Law. He was a gambler who somehow convinced the bankrupt French king Louis XIV to replace gold coins with new paper money. Law created a paper company, the Mississippi Company, that was supposed to mind vast caches of gold.
Law became the richest man in Europe.

In 1720, Law’s company collapsed when it was unable to pay out gold for paper money. He fled to Venice. French state finances have never been the same since. Two other major get rich fast financial scams followed: the South Sea Island fraud and the great Tulip disaster.

We may be seeing a modern version of the Great Mississippi financial fiasco as scoundrels get their hands on the levers of state finance. Trump’s goals in his tariff jihad may be legit – to make America very rich for a short while before the rest of the world gangs up on the unloved USA.

But Trump’s methodology has been calamitous. He and his minions have ignited a worldwide panic, damaged US allies, enraged much of the globe and caused massive damage to world finance and business. And for what? To make President Trump the Stupor Mundi of the moment. Ego on steroids.

What all this betokens is the opening salvo of a coming US-China war. The 17th and 18th century trade wars offer ample evidence of how trade rivalries lead to wars. We are doing it again. We are wildly unwise to revert to the mercantilism of past eras during the nuclear era.

Even at the very end of his life, King Louis XIV knew his warlike, mercantilist policies were wrong. He urged his successor, Louis XV, to eschew expensive wars and to study peace. Young Louis followed this excellent advice and devoted himself to conquests of the boudoir.

The post Stupor Mundi appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s a marvelous scene in the 1984 movie, This Is Spinal Tap, in which guitarist Nigel Tufnel points out to an interviewer that he chooses Marshall amplifiers because, unlike most amplifiers (with volume knobs that go from one to ten), “These go to eleven… It’s one louder, innit?”

The interviewer tries to explain that they’re only numbers, stamped into plastic knobs and don’t represent actual decibels of sound in any way.

Nigel tries to take this information in for several seconds, but fails to understand the obvious logic. When his mind draws a blank, he reverts back to his previous statement and says, again, “These go to eleven.”

Poor Nigel. He’s made up his mind to believe a false premise, because the thought is so appealing.

We can all laugh at Nigel’s inability to understand that his amplifiers are actually no louder than other amplifiers, yet, when we see the same lack of logic in investment circles, we often regard it as not only normal, but correct.

Of course, investment philosophy can be made highly complex, or it can be disarmingly simple: what goes up, must come down. If we accept the validity of this comment, we might also reason that the higher the market goes, the harder it will fall when the bubble bursts, and, of course, the greater the damage it will do to investors when it does.

In the run-up to the 2008 market crash, I frequently suggested to friends and associates who were heavily invested in the market that a crash was on the horizon. In most cases, the reaction I received was, “All my investments are in high-return stocks. If I got out of them, I couldn’t live as well as I do.” “Yes,” I would reply, “but if you don’t get out in time, you’ll lose far more. Your loss will be equal to the depth of the retrenchment. Then, you’d have to live on far less than if you simply got out now.”

I’m sorry to say that the great majority of those with whom I spoke remained in the market… and lost a major portion of their wealth as a result. Worse, when they recovered (with much-diminished lifestyles) they went right back to high-return (and therefore high-risk) stocks. Ipso facto, they’re once again primed for another major loss with the next crash.

In each of the above cases, the investors pursued whatever investment would give them the greatest immediate return. Unfortunately, they put no further thought into their investments than that one short-sighted objective.

It should be mentioned that, back in 2007–2008, when the above discussions were taking place, the investors in question would say, “Everybody agrees that these stocks have a long way to go before there’s a correction. I’d be stupid if I didn’t cash in on that ride.”

By “everybody,” they meant their brokers and all the pundits from Wall Street who appeared on television news programmes—each of whom stood to gain from over-investment and malinvestment in the markets. Indeed, at the time, they all predicted that the market was “going to the moon.”

And this was not the first time that such a prediction occurred. In fact, such predictions have become the byword of every bull market. It’s for this reason that no bull market ends with a whimper, but with a major upside spike. Investors dive in most heavily in the final days of a major bull market.

When warned of a crash, investors generally say, “I’ll wait until I see the turn downward, then I’ll get out.” But, in fact, there’s no “aha moment” to signal them to exit the market. Quite the contrary. If the market does take a sharp dip, the brokers and television pundits describe the drop as a correction and advise investors to “buy on the dip.”

If we consider all the above, it’s no wonder that major bull markets end with an upside spike. And it’s no wonder that crashes are so massive in their destruction. Investors are all-in just prior to the crash.

The astonishing fact is that such a large percentage of investors believe the “going to the moon” story, and that a crash takes out the vast majority of them. Like Nigel Tufnel, their desire to believe that, “these go up to eleven” overrides what should be their common sense and reason that, in fact, there is no real eleven; there is no ride to the moon.

Does this mean that investment is inherently a “dog’s breakfast” and that you should avoid it? Not at all.

But rather than “chasing the trends,” which more often than not end in heartbreak, a very simple philosophy toward investment can prove quite successful.

• Be prepared to do your homework. Seek out investments that you feel have real promise, but, as yet, are not popular and are therefore priced very low. (Warning: this can at times be quite a lot of work, as you’ll reject the great majority of investments you investigate.)
• Buy low, when conventional wisdom says that the investment in question is going nowhere. (If you find that you’d missed a sleeper and it’s now shooting upward, be prepared to let it pass you by—there are other sleepers that you can still buy low.)
• Take profits off the table at intervals. If for any reason you don’t get out in time, you’ll want to have regained your original capital outlay.
• Get out when it becomes clear that everybody and his dog is buying the investment. (Don’t try to guess the crash date. It’s virtually impossible to squeeze out the last dollar before a crash, and sell at precisely the right moment.)
• Don’t regret getting out a year (or more) early. You have your wealth intact and are poised to get back in when the crash has bottomed. (In this regard, you’ll be in a small group, which will make your position that much stronger when it’s time to reinvest.)

It should be said that there are those rare investments that enjoy a meteoric rise, and they’re just as prevalent now as in other eras; however, even those investments are subject to the same natural laws of economics. They, too, tend to get oversold at some point and when they do—when the brokers and television pundits are saying that they are now headed to the moon—that’s the moment at which you might wish to remind yourself that “there’s no eleven,” and sell.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post These Amps Go Up to Eleven appeared first on LewRockwell.

Holy Week is no mere ritual rehearsal for Christians; it’s a political dynamite keg, detonating the myth of human order built on blood. Jesus’ trial, crucifixion, and resurrection expose the scaffolding of power—then and now—as a rickety structure held together by scapegoats and silenced victims. As we navigate our fractured polis in 2025, the Passion narrative demands we confront the same temptations: to cheer for Barabbas, to wash our hands with Pilate, or to abandon the One who reveals the stones crying out for justice.

The Gospels unravel the political with surgical precision. Jesus enters Jerusalem to Hosannas, a king on a donkey, mocking the pomp of empire. Days later, the crowd—fickle as any mob—trades him for Barabbas, a man whose name in the earliest texts is Jesus Barabbas, a violent revolutionary mirroring the establishment’s own brutality. The symmetry is no accident. Barabbas represents the allure of might-makes-right, the seductive promise of force to bind us against a villain. Sound familiar? Our politics thrives on this old magic trick: rally the crowd against a demonized other—be it a marginalized group or a foreign foe in some proxy war. Yet the cross exposes this as a lie. The knowledge of the Lord, as Habakkuk 2 foretold, fills the earth like water, not through conquest but through the slain Lamb who unmasks the guilt we project onto scapegoats.

Habakkuk’s warning haunts Jesus’ words. The prophet condemns cities founded on bloodshed, their walls built with “unjust gain” (Hab. 2:12). In ancient practice, this wasn’t metaphor—immurement, the ritual sacrifice of victims sealed in foundations, was the cornerstone of many societies. Jesus alludes to this when he predicts the stones will cry out if the crowd falls silent (Luke 19:40). And silent they became, abandoning him to the cross. Yet the stones did cry out—not just in the temple’s rubble in 70 AD, but in the resurrection’s seismic ripple. The Passion revealed Israel’s hypocrisy: a nation claiming purity while rejecting prophets, excluding lepers, and mirroring the pagan sacrifices it condemned. Jesus, the cornerstone, becomes both the first victim buried under the city’s weight and the capstone lifted high on the cross, exposing the violence propping up every polis—Jewish, Roman, and ours.

Consider Caiaphas’ chilling logic: “It is better that one man die than the whole nation perish” (John 11:50). This is the scapegoat mechanism laid bare, the crowd’s dispersion of guilt onto a single figure to preserve order. Gentile societies did the same, projecting violence onto mythological gods to obscure their shame. The cross dismantles this. Jesus, numbered among the transgressors, reveals the victim’s innocence, shattering the unanimous fervor that binds societies against a “guilty” other. Pilate and Herod, rivals united in his persecution (Luke 23:12), show how power aligns to excise the misfit who disturbs the status quo. The Sanhedrin fears the crowd; Pilate fears revolt; Herod plays the sycophant. Politicians, then as now, are weak before the mob’s volatility.

This politically charged Gospels texts didn’t just expose politics, it transformed it. Jesus’ followers, emboldened by the resurrection, cared for plague-stricken pagans when Rome’s elite fled. Their nonviolent witness won hearts, forcing the empire to adapt. By the fourth century, Rome adorned itself with the cross—a scandal we can scarcely grasp today. Imagine a meek libertarian dissident like Ron Paul becoming the rallying symbol for both our parties; even that falls short of this historical scandal. A tortured, abandoned God, forgiving his killers, was no mere mascot. Yet Rome’s conversion was half-baked. It abandoned gladiatorial games and overt sacrifice but clung to slavery and war. Christianity’s demystification of guilt-projection clashed with sacrificial violence like oil and water, leaving Rome ripe for schism and collapse.

Today, the stones still cry out. Every story of victims—whether nonviolent prisoners like those Steve Bannon met in jail, or casualties of wars we fuel in Israel-Gaza or Ukraine-Russia—haunts our collective conscience. Jesus tied the stones’ cries to Jerusalem’s fall in 70 AD, when Israel’s zeal for violence mirrored Rome’s and left both exposed as complicit in the same sin. America stands at a similar crossroads. Our politics, like Caiaphas’, justifies flesh-and-blood victims for “national security” or “progress.” We cheer Barabbas-types—leaders promising strength through exclusion or war—while ignoring the Lamb who redefines polis not as the victors’ club but as the refuge for the least of these.

The Passion’s political implications are radical. It reveals power as a house of cards, sustained by silencing victims. The resurrection vindicates those victims, proving that no empire, no mob, can bury the truth. Jesus’ movement upended history toward the marginalized, as he predicted. But it also warns us: clinging to sacrificial violence—be it cultural scapegoating or global wars—dooms us to Rome’s fate. The cross haunts every nation, breaking us into rivalry and schism until we repent.

America must choose now. Nonviolence and repentance are not moral platitudes; they are political necessities. The alternative is more rubble, more cries from the stones we’ve buried. Holy Week is not a call to nostalgia and private religion but to revolution—a revolution of the heart that dismantles the altars of might-makes-right. The Lamb has spoken. Will we listen, or will we keep building on blood?

The post The Stones Still Cry Out: Holy Week’s Political Reckoning appeared first on LewRockwell.

Americans have become so accustomed to living under tyranny that they are probably incapable of recognizing tyranny.  Once upon a time, April 15 was the annual day of infamy.  It was the day you had to pay your income taxes. 

Americans have been subjected to a tax on their working lives for less than half of their existence as a free people, or, to correct myself, as a former free people.  With the gradual long-term demise of American education, helped along by the US Department of Education, the content of what Americans know has dramatically changed.  Once they knew who they are and the principles on which their liberty rested.  Today they know how to play video games, write software for programs that regulate their lives from instructions their cars give them to how the NSA and businesses spy on them. They know movie trivia, the affairs of celebrities, the standings of their college football teams, their golf scores, and the expense of their wives’ remodeling of kitchens and baths. 

But they don’t know much else, except the Democrats know that Trump is evil. And America and white people are racist and evil. And there are many genders.  And illegal immigrant-invaders have the same, or greater, rights as American citizens.  Just ask any Democrat federal district judge.  And still  Americans vote for Democrats.  In other words, the question is:  Are the American people capable of self-government?

The historical definition of a free person was a person who owned his own labor.  Historically most people were not free.  They were either slaves of serfs.

A slave did not own his own labor.  His owner did.  His owner purchased the slave’s labor when he purchased the slave. He purchased the slave in order to acquire his labor which was needed as there was no available labor force to hire. Instead, producers had to acquire a work force by making a capital investment, not by paying a wage. In place of a wage, producers had to purchase labor by purchasing slaves, often warriors who were captured in the black King of Dahomey’s slave wars.  Many black Africans who became slaves in the New World, were the defeated black warriors in Dahomey’s slave wars. Those who themselves were fighting for slaves became, in defeat, slaves.  

The fact that a black warrior class, which constituted a percentage the slaves on 19th Southern cotton and tobacco plantations, never revolted, not even when provoked by Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” when no while male adult  presence was on the plantations, is proof that the Northern propaganda against the South had hatred of Southerners as its purpose.  It is amazing but a fact that the world view of every person on planet Earth is contaminated by propaganda accepted as fact.  Almost every narrative people believe is false.

A Medieval serf owned the largest part of his labor. The lord of the manor on which the serf lived had use rights to no more than one-third of the serf’s labor, and serfs had use rights to a portion of the land.  

We can look at the lords use rights in the serf’s labor as a form of taxation. A system of use rights predates and is different from a system of alienable rights, rights that can be bought and sold.  But if we ignore the exchange, which involved the serfs rights to use the land in exchange for the rights of the lords to use the serfs’ labor, we have the fact that serfs did not own the full portion of their labor.  This is the identical position of all peoples who today labor under an income tax.  

In other words, the medieval era was brought back to Americans with the income tax in the second decade of the 20th Century.

From their inception until 1913–really until 1918–Americans were still a free people.  The income tax introduced in 1913, along with the Federal Reserve–two disastrous events in American history–turned free Americans into the serfs of the government.  Your labor, and the income from it, no longer belongs to you.  Your feudal lord, your “constitutional democratic” government, has the same claim to your labor as a feudal lord had on a serf’s labor in the medieval era.

The handful of conspirators who snuck a medieval fiscal policy into free America were far more clever than the American population and legislative leaders.  They brought the income tax in at such a high threshold and such a low tax rate that no threat was perceived.  

Some decades ago I wrote the story.  When the constitutional amendment to pass what was an unconstitutional income tax was presented to states for ratification, few states had citizens with sufficient incomes to be subject to income tax.  I remember that the Georgia legislature said it had no objection to the income tax, because there was no one in the state with an income large enough to be subject to the tax.

What the state legislatures overlooked is that once an income tax is in place, all that is needed is a “crisis” and down go the thresholds and up go the tax rates.  This happened to Americans with the First World War.

Instead of seeing April 15 as the day Americans turn over to a master a share of their year’s working time, Americans experience a bonanza.  They get a “tax refund,” a gift from the government in time for their summer vacation. For them, income tax withholding is a form of forced saving. They are overwithheld and denied the use of their money all year and then receive it as a “refund.”

Imagine their view toward the income tax if they had to pay the full amount annually on April 15. If you hadn’t been withheld, you would be faced with an income tax payment the size of a mortgage payment, car payment, and credit card payment combined. Your view toward the government would not be the same as the view that results from being handed a refund.

From the government’s standpoint, this is the advantage of the withholding tax.  You never see the money in the first place. Your salary is the take-home amount.  The employer pays the tax for you.  You file a  tax form, and money from the government appears.  

Government regards it as wonderful how stupid Americans are, and  stupid Americans regard it as wonderful that the government sends them money every year for their summer vacations.

How exactly do you make a government this corrupt and a people this stupid great again?

Prior to the income tax the work force received weekly pay envelops with cash.  What workers earned was not recorded in order that it could be taxed by withholding.  No one needed a bank.  The income tax turned your work time into a criminal offense should you misstate it on your income tax return. Thus, for the first time among a free people a workers work and how he reported it became a possible criminal offense leading to the imprisonment of the “free” worker.   If truth be known American taxpayers have been subject to worst punishment than slaves on 19th century cotton plantations.

Yet, after 100 years there are no protests. Serfdom is so institutionalized that it is not recognized.

Taxation has many inequities.  I will point out one of them–the narrative of a capital gain.  Let’s take the example of a home.  Over time house and land prices rise with inflation.  For example, when I was in high school the price of an upper middle class house in the city in which I lived was $20,000 – 25,000.  After decades of life in the house its value would be much higher.  If the property is sold, the government will say you have a capital gain in the price rise. But the price you receive is the replacement cost of the house.  You have no gain.  Indeed, after closing costs and real estate commission, you cannot replace the property with your net receipts.  So where is the gain?  The same holds for financial instruments.  There is no such thing as a long-term capital gain.

For investment properties you can avoid the capital gains tax by reinvesting the sale proceeds into another investment property, but this avenue is not open to homes used for residence.

There are short-term capital gains from, for example, financial market participants conducting arbitrage or front-running stock trades and making a penny or fraction of a penny per share in large volumes.  In reality this is ordinary income from a day’s work.

Americans are accustomed to thinking of inequities in the tax laws in terms of loopholes for the rich, but the worst inequities go beyond the special pleading and lobbying successes of organized interests.

For most of our history the US government was financed by tariffs.  If we could return to tariffs as the basis for government revenue, we could regain our freedom.

The post April 15 Provides a Wonderful Lesson on How Government Conditioned Americans to Tyranny appeared first on LewRockwell.

Peter returned to the mic Friday to examine the latest fallout from Trump’s trade policy. He decodes the so-called “Liberation Day” rhetoric used by the administration, reiterates the unintended economic consequences of protectionist measures, and warns that the United States might soon face an unprecedented financial crisis. Peter also discusses practical financial strategies, urging listeners toward safe haven assets like gold as a critical hedge in these uncertain economic times.

Peter starts off by questioning the surprise expressed by mainstream analysts when confronted with recent market shifts, noting that what seems unexpected to many aligns with his long-standing predictions:

I’m watching in the financial media, and people are talking about all the moves in the market that nobody expected. Everybody is talking about how nobody thought that the dollar would go down or that bonds would go down and rates would go up with tariffs. Everybody was surprised by the markets because everybody’s been saying it’s counterintuitive. Well, it’s only counterintuitive if your intuition is wrong. Everything that has happened since Liberation Day is exactly what I said would happen before Liberation Day as a response to the liberation.

Peter challenges Trump’s triumphant portrayal of reciprocal tariffs, pointing out the hidden realities beneath the surface. Instead of a victorious economic policy, he sees a misguided and harmful tax on the American people:

When Trump announced these reciprocal tariffs, he was so proud. All this fanfare, this is liberation day: ‘Hey, I got great news for you, I’m going to make everything you buy way more expensive. I’m going to hit you with the biggest tax increase ever, but he doesn’t put it in those terms.’ He’s like, ‘This is great, I’m hitting them, America is fighting back, we’ve been screwed over, we’ve been taken advantage of, now we’re fighting back, this is our Independence Day, this is our liberation.’ It was all BS. What I said at the time on my podcast is he’s liberating us from our standard of living, from all of our low-cost goods. He’s liberating us from low interest rates, he’s liberating us from our stock portfolios and our equity in those portfolios.

Furthermore, Peter exposes the deeper strategic failure of Trump’s trade policy. He argues that the president’s leverage has evaporated, noting the credibility damage caused by tariff flip-flopping:

If he actually wanted to use tariffs as a negotiation leverage, he’s lost it. He can’t negotiate anymore with the threat of tariffs because now the world knows that it’s an empty threat. He’s a paper tiger. Because if Trump puts back on those high tariffs, the markets are going to crash. The markets rallied massively because he removed those reciprocal tariffs that aren’t even reciprocal. So how is he going to put them back? Who is he fooling, right? He’s exposed himself.

Peter doesn’t mince words about where the economic situation could lead. He warns we’re standing at the brink of a severe financial crisis—one potentially far worse than the 2008 housing collapse—precisely because the next crisis will lie in sovereign debt and the Treasury market itself:

We are on the precipice of the worst financial crisis that we’ve seen, and there’s not going to be any bailouts because when the financial crisis was about the mortgage market, the government could bail out the mortgage market because the government was able to buy up the toxic assets and replace it with its own credit, so people wanted treasuries. But if the treasuries are the epicenter of the crisis, it’s a sovereign debt crisis. Who’s going to bail out the United States? The only ones that could have are China and Japan, but we’ve alienated them, so they’re not coming to our rescue. All you got is the Fed, but when the Fed bails us out, it’s massive inflation.

With inflation looming large, Peter reiterates his strong conviction in gold and gold mining stocks as reliable protection against the brewing storm within the financial system. He points out that the sector will continue to benefit from central banks adding to their gold reserves for the foreseeable future:

The primary reserve asset all around the world is going to be gold, right? I don’t think the rest of the central banks would be buying European debt. Certainly the European central banks aren’t going to be buying it, so they’re going to be in gold, right? And so these gold mining companies have huge customers. Central banks are going to be great customers, because they’re going to be price takers. Whatever the price is, they’ll buy it, because they need it.

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post Tariffs Trigger Looming Financial Crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Donald Trump is acting faster than any other politician of his generation. In a dozen weeks, he has already overturned “American imperialism” in favor of his “exceptionalism.” This is still not the end of the problem, but it represents a considerable step forward for both the United States and the rest of the world.
Simultaneously, he has slashed the federal bureaucracy by eliminating agencies outside his purview and laying off 230,000 federal employees.

It’s been more than three months since Donald Trump began his second term in the White House. He’s issued a staggering number of executive orders of all kinds, giving the impression of a muddled personality. However, despite the short time he’s had, his first results are beginning to show.

Decolonizing the “American Empire”

He initially sought to decolonize the “American empire.” However, after his 2017 attempt failed resoundingly, he changed his approach. On his eighth day in office, he removed the permanent seats of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA Director from the National Security Council by executive order.  [ 1 ] This led to a revolt in the senior administration, which led him, sixteen days later, to dismiss his National Security Advisor, General Michael Flynn.

This affair left its mark, as the National Security Administration intervened during the last election campaign to falsely assure that Hunter Biden’s computer did not exist and that those who claimed to have seen it were Russian disinformation agents  [ 2 ] . Donald Trump also stripped them of their top secret clearance in the first days of his second term  [ 3 ] .

This time, Donald Trump took the bull by the horns: he forced early retirement of all the civil servants who had fought against him during his first administration and dissolved the Federal Executive Institute that trained them  [ 4 ] . Once this level of personalities was purged, he also withdrew the security clearances of 15 politicians (including former President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) to make sure they would not stand in his way again  [ 5 ] . “Never two without three,” they say: so he fired six more civil servants from his National Security Council  [ 6 ] on April 2, because they were still working with their Straussian friends  [ 7 ] .

With those people out of the way, President Donald Trump began peace talks on Ukraine, Palestine, and Iran. Each responded when he put the unelected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in his place, but he also put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his place twice .  [ 8 ] The first time, he responded to his plan to annex Gaza by telling him he would rather build a new Riviera than see him occupy it; the second time, he told him he could do nothing to divide Syria, and he could not attack Iran either.

Certainly, for the moment, none of these three hot spots are at peace, but things are moving quickly:
• In Ukraine, he has made it clear that Crimea, Donbass, and part of Novorossia are indeed Russian. Furthermore, it is clear that a presidential election will have to be held. The “integral nationalists”  [ 9 ] already know that they have lost. On the territories to be divided, the only two Ukrainian demands are, on the one hand, to recover the civilian nuclear power plant in Zaporozhye (something to which Russia is firmly opposed  [ 10 ] ) and whether or not Moscow will be allowed to annex Odessa without having to conquer it.
• In Palestine, he has made almost all the actors admit that Hamas could not return to power in Gaza, but he cannot find an alternative to the “revisionist Zionists” (that is, the disciples of the fascist Vladymyr Jabotinky  [ 11 ] ) in Israel. Donald Trump has failed to stop the massacre of Palestinians, who are still starving in Gaza, or to end the sectarian massacres in Syria, which is still dominated by jihadists, but he has forced Israel to abandon its ambitions in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.
• In Iran, he is only just beginning and has not yet made the Islamic Republic admit that it cannot safely arm the Shiite minorities in the region, but he has not yet offered to guarantee their security by any other means. The situation here is more difficult because he has threatened Iran, as he did with Ukraine and with the Palestinians, prompting an immediate hardening of Tehran’s stance  [ 12 ] .

In all three cases, President Trump used his armies without fighting: he briefly suspended the intelligence that the Pentagon was providing to the Ukrainian armies  [ 13 ] causing a military collapse; he also briefly suspended the delivery of arms to Israel, even if this point was not publicized, but caused very serious concern within the Israeli general staff. Conversely, he is accumulating forces in Diego Garcia to threaten Iran  [ 14 ] . His only military action will have been to attack Ansar Allah in Yemen; a murderous and tactically useless action, the Yemenis being prepared for it, but useful to get his message across to Iran.

Clean up the federal bureaucracy

Alongside his reorganization of US foreign relations, President Donald Trump has begun to “trim the mammoth,” that is, to prune the useless branches of the US federal state. This is the other major project of the “Jacksonians,” that is, the disciples of President Andrew Jackson  [ 15 ] . To do this, he relies on the oligarch Elon Musk. However, the richest man in the world is not a Jacksonian, but a libertarian. His concern is not to destroy the unconstitutional attributes of the federal state for the benefit of the federated states, but to reduce its weight. In this case, these two distinct objectives are served by the same actions, at least so far.

In twelve weeks, Elon Musk has managed to register the resignations or dismiss 230,000 federal agents. While we certainly view this approach as savage, the fact remains that he is not questioning their competence, but their usefulness, which is quite different. Most of them were ensuring the application of rules that should not have existed. This does not mean that they are bad, but that they are not part of the function of the federal government and should therefore not be implemented with taxpayers’ money. This downsizing has accidentally brought to light numerous cases of corruption, for example, a $900,000 grant awarded by the Small and Medium Enterprises Agency to a nine-month-old baby. However, the real issue is not yet there. $6 billion in Pentagon grants have just been canceled, notably those offered to universities, with no connection whatsoever to the defense of the United States. Once DOGE has access to the nation’s accounts, it will be able to see what each transfer made by the federal government is used for, such as the salaries paid to numerous foreign leaders. It is therefore understandable why the legal battle is underway to keep all this secret.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) projects $150 billion in savings over the year from these cuts to bureaucracy and the fight against fraud, a gain of $931.68 per taxpayer. It’s small compared to what was projected, but absolutely substantial.

No comparison should be made between the United States and other states, only with the European Union, whose federal bureaucracy is equally opaque, as the current scandal of hidden subsidies to NGOs shows  [ 16 ] .

(…To be continued)

—

[ 1 ]  “  Donald Trump dissolves the organization of US imperialism  ,” by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , January 30, 2017.

[ 2 ]  “ Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails ”, Voltaire Network , October 19, 2020.

[ 3 ]  “2721 Donald Trump strips intelligence officials involved in political falsification of their clearances”, Voltaire, international news – No. 117 – January 24, 2025.

[ 4 ]  “2872 Donald Trump dissolves the American ENA”, Voltaire, international news – No. 120 – February 14, 2025.

[ 5 ]  “3138 Donald Trump withdraws the security clearances of 15 opposition figures.”, Voltaire, international news – No. 126 – March 28, 2025.

[ 6 ]  “  Trump Fires 6 NSC Officials After Oval Office Meeting With Laura Loomer  ”, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan & Ken Bensinger, The New York Times , April 3, 2025.

[ 7 ]  “  Vladimir Putin declares war on the Straussians  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , March 5, 2022.

[ 8 ]  “2228 Benjamin Netanyahu cooled by his visit to the White House  ”, Voltaire, international news – No. 128 – April 11, 2025.

[ 9 ]  “  Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists?  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , November 15, 2022.

[ 10 ]  “  Statement by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant  ”, Voltaire Network , March 26, 2025.

[ 11 ]  “  The veil is torn: the hidden truths of Jabotinsky and Netanyahu  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , January 23, 2024.

[ 12 ]  “  Iran denounces US threats to peace  ,” by Amir Saeid Iravani, Voltaire Network , March 31, 2025.

[ 13 ]  “  The West against CRINK  ”, by Manlio Dinucci, Translation M.-A., Voltaire Network , April 5, 2025.

[ 14 ]  “3185 The Pentagon is preparing for a possible war against Iran”, Voltaire, international news – No. 127 – April 4, 2025.

[ 15 ]  “  Donald Trump, an Andrew Jackson 2.0?  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , November 19, 2024.

[ 16 ]  “3249 The scandal of the opaque financing of certain NGOs by the European Commission”, Voltaire, international news – No. 128 – April 11, 2025.

The post Donald Trump’s Projects appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Sunday Israel bombed the al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, which readers may remember as the hospital that Israel ferociously insisted it didn’t bomb in October 2023 and accused anyone who said otherwise of antisemitic blood libel. According to a statement from the Episcopal Church’s Diocese of Jerusalem, this is now the fifth time this hospital has been bombed since the beginning of the Gaza onslaught.

The IDF is predictably claiming there was a Hamas base in the hospital, because that’s what they always do. The hospitals are Hamas, the ambulances are Hamas, the journalists are Hamas, the UN is Hamas, the schools are Hamas, the children are Hamas, every building in Gaza is Hamas, and anyone who disputes this is also Hamas.

God this gets old.

❖

Israel, October 2023: How dare you say we bombed Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital? We would never bomb a hospital!

Israel, 2023–2025: *bombs all hospitals in Gaza*

Israel, April 2025: We just bombed Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital again.

❖

Saying that opposing genocide is hateful toward Jews is like saying that opposing child molestation is hateful toward Catholics.

❖

Western Zionists will be like, “All this hate for Israel makes me feel anxious and unsafe!”

Really? Are you sure that’s what you’re feeling? Are you sure it’s not guilt? Gut-wrenching guilt about all those dead kids in the genocide you support? Or cognitive dissonance, because your entire worldview is wrong?

❖

People often say I hate Israel, but what’s weird is they say it like it’s a bad thing.

❖

So far the “President of Peace” has started a relentless bombing campaign in Yemen, reignited the Gaza holocaust, and shifted more US war machinery to west Asia in preparation for war with Iran, all while getting ready to announce the first ever trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.

Trump is just as awful a warmonger as Biden. If there’s a war with Iran he’ll be far worse. He hasn’t even gotten a Ukraine ceasefire.

❖

The western political faction that’s doing the most to help murder children in Gaza are not the “Yeehaw kill them Arabs” fanatics of the far right, but the “Gosh it’s so complicated, both sides hate each other and they’ve been at war for millennia” fence-sitting of the so-called moderate.

The latter is far more destructive because it’s much more widespread and accepted in mainstream western discourse. You can’t be a good talkshow liberal if you’re saying you want to exterminate every living organism in Gaza, but if you hem and haw about ancient unresolvable conflicts and how complicated it all is, you can maintain your vaguely progressivish self-image while still encouraging everyone to allow the western empire to continue backing an active genocide.

And it’s just complete nonsense. This isn’t complicated; it’s exactly what it looks like. A military force backed by the most powerful empire in history is waging a campaign of extermination and ethnic cleansing to eliminate an undesirable population by raining military explosives onto a giant concentration camp full of children. There are two sides to most conflicts. There are not two sides to this one.

And this isn’t an ancient conflict, it’s the culmination of abuses which were initiated by western powers dropping a brand new settler-colonialist ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization after the second world war. There was no reason to believe the middle east would not have joined the rest of the world in settling into a more peaceful status quo after WWII without western imperialists forcefully inserting an artificial apartheid state into the region like a shard of glass into a foot and then keeping it there by any amount of violence necessary.

Sure the middle east had plenty of violence prior to the world wars, but if you’ve ever read American and European history you’ll know this wasn’t anything unique to the middle east; it was the norm around the world. It wasn’t until after WWII that things settled down a bit and westerners grew accustomed to a more peaceful status quo; the only reason the middle east wasn’t allowed to join in that movement was because of aggressive western intervention.

By just shrugging saying “Yeah the Israelis hate the Palestinians and the Palestinians hate the Israelis, who’s to say who’s right,” this mainstream line tacitly promotes the notion that we should just let things play out as they are rather than doing everything we can to stop an active genocide that’s being backed by our own leaders. And this is the position put forward by most of the people with prominent voices in our society. They’re not just not helping, they’re discouraging everyone else from helping too.

___________________

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The post Saying It’s Antisemitic To Oppose Genocide Is Like Saying It’s Anti-Catholic To Oppose Pedophilia appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump might have inadvertently come up with the perfect solution to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis. That solution entails making America so ugly that foreigners will no longer want to come here.

After all, that’s what North Korea did. Like the United States, North Korea militarized and sealed its southern border, established a police state, and isolated itself from the rest of the world. Today, no one is striving to get into North Korea because the government has made the country so ugly.

Many foreigners are cancelling vacation plans to the United States. Others are selling American vacation homes. They are wise to do so. Otherwise, they could suddenly find themselves on a U.S. military transport plane carting them to the maximum-security, anti-terrorist torture and brutality camp in El Salvador. As U.S. Justice Department officials are telling federal judges, once people have been delivered to El Salvador, as compared to the Pentagon/CIA torture and brutality camp at Gitmo, U.S. officials are powerless to get them released. What foreigner wants to take that chance by coming to the United States, legally or illegally?

Of course, the ugliness does not just extend to the mistreatment of people here in the United States. With Trump’s tariffs and trade-war antics, it now extends to harming people all over the world by bankrupting and impoverishing foreign citizens. The victims include extremely poor people who supposedly have been taking advantage of college-educated Americans by selling goods and services to them. Who wants to visit a country that adopts economic policies that wreak destruction among innocent foreigners who aren’t even trying to get into the United States?

No doubt operating under a deportation quota, U.S. immigration officials are now revoking student visas for foreigners studying in colleges and universities across the land. The reason? They are foreigners. Some of them are college seniors, which means they don’t get to graduate. That’s ugly.

But the fact is that President Trump is not the root cause of America the ugly. He’s just a manifestation of the very bad, rotten systems under which Americans live today. It’s those systems that have made America ugly. There are nine systems to which I am referring, all of which work in tandem:

1. The welfare-state system;
2. The regulated/managed economy system;
3. The income tax/IRS system;
4. The paper-money/Federal Reserve system;
5. The national-security state system;
6. The drug-war system;
7. The immigration-control system;
8. The foreign empire/intervention system; and
9. The public (i.e., government) school system.

America has not always had these nine systems. For example, if we consider the period 1880-1910, which is my favorite time in all of history, Americans living at that time had none of these systems. In fact, those Americans hated and rejected everything Americans today stand for and favor. Interestingly and not coincidentally, it was in the year 1893 that the song “America the Beautiful” was written.

When 20th-century Americans rejected those nine founding systems of our nation in favor of statist systems, they thought they were ushering in a “great society,” to use President Lyndon Johnson’s term, or, to use Trump’s phrase, a “golden era.”

In fact, those nine systems converted America into an ugly nation, one that is clearly being destroyed from within. Financially, the federal government is now $36.7 trillion in debt, an amount that climbs ever year, including during Trump’s first term as president. It will continue increasing during Trump’s second term in office. That debt now amounts to $330,000 per taxpayer. How many taxpayers can pay their share of this massive debt?

But far worse than the financial mess is the moral rot at the center of the American empire. With the welfare state, Americans do their best to use the IRS to take money from whom it belongs in order to give it to people to whom it does not belong. They call that coercion “care and compassion.” At the same time, they scramble desperately every April 15 to find as many income-tax deductions as possible in an effort to keep their own money from being looted. It is a system in which Americans are at constant war against each other, including intergenerational war with such socialist programs as Social Security and Medicare.

To help finance the ever-growing expenditure of these nine systems, the Federal Reserve has been inflating and debasing its paper money ever since its inception in 1913, a monetary phenomenon that current-day Americans falsely blame on private-sector “greed.”

In the name of keeping us “safe,” the national-security state has been given omnipotent, totalitarian powers over the citizenry, including state-sponsored assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, or rendition to Gitmo or El Salvador as accused “terrorists.” It also wreaks massive death and destruction around the world with invasions, occupations, coups, provocations, sanctions, and embargoes.

Today, an increasing number of American are choosing to live in foreign countries rather than here in the United States. In fact, it is ironic that more than a million Americans have chosen to live in Mexico, the country that is supposedly filled with murderers, rapists, and robbers who are supposedly trying to get into the United States to kill, rape, and rob us.

The drug war, which just happens to be the most racist government program since segregation, has given us a society of massive violence, not to mention that it has destroyed our liberty and privacy in the never-ending effort to “win” it. Of course, no one bothers to notice that the entire drug war is devoted to preventing countless Americans from getting their hands on the drugs that they wish to ingest. It’s just another way that America the ugly manifests itself.

But it’s clearly not the only way. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death for teens and young adults aged 10-34. That’s what America the ugly has produced — young people checking out of life early.

It’s also worth mentioning the irrational mass killings that have become a normal and integral part of all this the ugliness.

The problem is that thanks to America’s state-controlled educational system, 21st-century Americans, in the name of “freedom,” remain as wedded to these nine statist systems as their 20-century predecessors. The last thing they want to do is acknowledge that these systems have not only failed to achieve the “great society” or the “golden era” but instead are the root cause of America’s ugliness. And so Americans do two things: (1) Elect a man on the white horse who will be the one who finally — finally! — makes their beloved nine systems work, even if he has to make America uglier in the process, and (2) do what totalitarian regimes have done throughout history — target unpopular scapegoats who can be blamed for the ugliness arising from bad systems, such as illegal immigrants, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Muslims, or whoever.

America the Ugly. Why not make that our new national anthem?

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post America the Ugly appeared first on LewRockwell.

On today’s Tuesday Newsday episode of America’s Untold Stories, Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley dive into a chilling, developing story: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s mansion was set ablaze while his family slept inside. Shocking new details reveal the suspect intended to physically harm the governor, turning this case from political unrest into an attempted assassination plot.

We also examine Harvard’s fiery public response to Trump’s demands, setting the stage for what could become a billion-dollar battle between academia and the White House. Plus, Hollywood reels as China officially retaliates against Trump’s tariffs by reducing U.S. film imports, shaking the entertainment industry to its core.

Taylor Lorenz is under fire for her bizarre praise of alleged killer Luigi Mangione. Meanwhile, a deportation mix-up forces the Trump administration to address wrongful removal—and punt responsibility.

Closing out the show, we look at how Trump’s endorsement is turbocharging Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ohio gubernatorial campaign.

Don’t miss this explosive, headline-packed Tuesday Newsday.

The post America’s Untold Stories – Governor Josh Shapiro’s Mansion Torched in Midnight Arson Plot appeared first on LewRockwell.

FOX commentator Charles Payne recently repeated Pat Buchanan’s old post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy (After this, therefore because of this) about tariffs in a Breitbart column.  The fallacy goes like this: 1).  Economic growth occurred during the post Civil War period up to the turn of the century.  2).  High protectionist tariffs were imposed during the Lincoln regime and lasted for some fifty years.  3).  Therefore, the protectionist tariffs caused the economic growth.  Yes, and the rooster crows in the morning, then the sun comes up, therefore the rooster crowing causes the sun to come up.

It was the absence of income taxation and a hardly noticeable regulatory regime that were the most important policy issues related to post Civil War growth, along with the existence of the gold standard (in various forms).  International trade was a small fraction of the entire economy, so tariff taxes on imports could not possibly have been the One Cause of post-war prosperity as Buchanan and now Payne argue.  In addition, many of the tariff taxes were imposed on inputs used in the manufacturing process by American corporations, hindering economic growth.  This period of protectionist tariff plunder was especially harmful to American farmers because a tax on imports eventually becomes a de facto tax on exports, and farmers exported huge amounts of their produce.  This is because impoverishing America’s trading partners by blocking them from selling here results in the fact that they then have fewer dollars with which to buy American goods.  At the time that was overwhelmingly American farm produce.  Tariff taxes also reduced the disposable income of the American working class during that period, as all taxation does.

Furthermore, if what these two cheerleaders for the quintessentially anti-populist policy of protectionist plunder of average Americans were true, then there should have been hardly any economic growth at all from the end of World War II until today, when the average tariff rate declined for 78 years from about 11 percent to 2.5 percent last year as shown in this graph.   That was before President Trump proposed an almost sixfold increase in the average tariff tax rate last week.

No one ever created prosperity by raising taxes and as Ron Unz recently wrote, President Trump’s tariff tax increase proposal could well turn out to be the biggest one-time tax increase in world history.

The post The Tariff Tax Statistic the Trump Fanboys Don’t Want You to Know About appeared first on LewRockwell.

Oscar Garu forwards this message about Milei’s “end of the CEPO”:

“This is a joke.  The common people, who would have exchanged pesos in cash for dollars are substantially prevented from doing so with the ridiculous limit of $100 U.S. per month.  Caputo’s [the Argentinian Minister of Economy] and Milei’s friends, who are in to take advantage of the carry trade, and who keep their pesos in the banks will have the golden opportunity to exchange their pesos, acquired while the exchange rate with the Dollar was kept artificially low by the government, and to drain a big part of the new dollars flowing in through the IMF’s new credits for Argentina.  Anyway, how you can claim to lift the exchange controls when there is a new and stifling limit for cash is a big mystery.”

The post “Another Scam”: The Supposed End of Argentinian Currency Controls (The “CEPO”) by Milei appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lysander Spooner on the difference between a government and a highwayman (1870)
Found in: No Treason. No. VI. The Constitution of No Authority (1870)

The constitutional lawyer, legal theorist, abolitionist, and radical individualist Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) applied the same moral principles to the actions of an organization as he did to a single individual. This led him to make some harsh criticisms of the government as this powerful quotation reveals:

“But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.

“The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.

“The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes men’s money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful “sovereign,” on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.”

The post Taxation Is Theft appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Gail Appel wrote:

Biden’s “ success” in Afghanistan. And wait ‘til you see Syria and Bangladesh! Every fashionista knows that black burkas with the entire face and head covered are sizzling hot( literally) compared to those frumpy saris that wrap snugly around the hips and rear, leaving  6 “ of bare midriff.

See here.

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Thanks, John Smith. 

The Hill.

The post Memo says no terrorism or antisemitism link in case of Tufts’s Rumeysa Ozturk appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

A hermaphroditic Fauci/Duby symbiosis.

See here.

The post What would be the be the hybrid chimera outcome of Hannibal Lechter,Mengele,DeSade,Moreau,Dahmer,Gates,Frankenstein and Ed Gein? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

New Republic

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