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According to- Anthony Hernandez: U.S. farmers are under siege, but these attacks are also happening worldwide. The first farmers to receive governmental interference in the Amish community, a self-sustaining pioneer-type community, grow their food, make their foods, make furniture, and other products. They are Bible-believing people who stay on their own but also sell their products to stores and sell foods at farmer’s markets and roadside stands. –Full report…

If the society broke down into city states because of one of the many risk facing us came to fruition, why assume this would end farmer markets? The farms at risk for extreme weather and Global Warming, higher heat and drought and floods are large maga-farms with mono-crops that do not grow sustainably. They lack the soil depth and health and risk another dust bowl in the least.

Organic farms and permaculture farms are resistant to weather extreme and bounce back more easily. This is because they grow many crops along side perennials, have strong soils because the emphasize sustainability over profit. Many small farms though monocrop of annuals are small enough, surrounded by trees and other small farms growing different crops which helps yield stronger soils mostly because they cannot afford so many herbicides and fertilizers so most fall back on manure which is usually plentiful and cheap at least out here.

So most small farms are somewhat sustainable, even alley, and roof top ones are. And though a few also will likely fail for many reasons (economics ironically is the likest), most will survive. Yet many potential crisis we face today as they faced last time we were in a like Gilded Age or oligarchy, Its the jobs that fail and this includes banks and supermarkets.

But farmers market might if those farms that survive have enough to sell and people they want to sell to have money or can barter for food instead and the government just doesn’t seize this. Of course this assumes the crisis is that the capitalistic system collapsed again as it did a century ago. If this was worse likely governments would collapse at the federal level of loose control of most of the states.

How state governments survive depends on, how close they were to the event. Martial law might follow and this scenario is the seizing risk. Another risk is roving bands taking food before it can be sold and killing farmers.

Yet farm communities likely would build community in the chaos and have protection from neighbors who do not farm and are job less (likely for part of harvest). Still the farmers markets in this scenario would be insulated and limited to those in those communities.

This didn’t happen during the great depression yet farms food stayed out in the farm areas and fed people there mostly as transpiration broke down. This is why so many people in cities starved. Those in the country did far better. So farmer’s markets might still exist, yet can you afford them or if bartering offer something they can use living so far away?

Additional:

What would happen if there was no farmers markets in the United States?

If there were, for no good reason, no farmers markets, then farmers and their consumers would get together and create them!

Because that is where they came from; fulfilling a need.

With the end of the petroleum age facing us in the next decade or two, expect farmers markets to become more and more popular. The growing uncertainty about the quality and healthfulness of industrially-produced food is creating a growing “know your food producer” movement.

The forces arrayed against farmers markets are formidable. Basically, the entire industrial food industry has absolutely no interest in being cut out of consumers’ lives, which is what farmers markets do, by fostering direct-to-consumer relationships with food producers. In fact, they are spending lots of lobbying money to put an end to farmers markets.

Case in point: a dozen or so years ago, the BC Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Rory McAlpine, barnstormed the province, warning consumers about how dangerous the meat supply was, because, y’know, just any farmer could slaughter, butcher, and sell meat to just any consumer. Heaven forbid!

Forget for a moment that not a single case of farm-butchered food poisoning had been reported to the BC Centre for Disease Control. Not. A. Single. One. People who eat their own food tend to have safe food, unlike the guy who would never eat in the burger joint that he had worked at. But the politicians and their industrial-farming buddies had to protect the public!

So McAlpine put a system into place whereby all meat was required to go through provincially-licensed and inspected abattoirs. (That’s Canuck for “slaughterhouse.”) Our small island, once renown for its lamb, saw our meat production slashed by about 70% over the next few years. We held bake sales and other fund raisers and raised $700,000 to put an abattoir on the island in an attempt to stop the economic drain — money that could have been spent on schools, hospitals, libraries, or perhaps even a four-season farmers market structure.

Having accomplished his master’s bidding, McAlpine left politics and got a cushy, newly-minted job as “Head of Government Relations” for Maple Leaf Meats. Less than two months later, Maple Leaf killed two dozen meat consumers with tainted meat!

You could not make this stuff up. Any editor or publisher would say, “Not credible.” But it happened.

Consumers are increasingly dissatisfied and untrustful of the industrial food system. If there were no farmers markets, you would be forced to eat whatever the industrial food system and their government pansies allow you to eat.

This originally appeared on EarlKing56.family.blog.

The post U.S. Farmers Are Under Siege? Food Security Crises Going on in the U.S appeared first on LewRockwell.

Remember in The Dark Knight when we all applauded the Joker for heroically blowing up a hospital?

Or remember when we watched Star Wars and cheered for the protagonist Darth Vader as he destroyed a planet to punish the rebel scum for daring to resist him?

How about when we watched Schindler’s List anxiously hoping the Nazis would be able to thwart the diabolical scheming of the villain Oskar Schindler to prevent them from committing genocide?

Or when we watched Avatar and cheered for the interstellar megacorporation and its army of mercenaries to displace the indigenous people of Pandora to steal their land?

Israel just blew up Gaza’s only cancer hospital (the Joker style).

The IDF has been occupying this hospital for over a year, using it as a military post, & now shamelessly claims it was a “Hamas compound”

How can any sane person trust Israel when they always lie so blatantly? pic.twitter.com/LRtSycyoJN

— Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) March 21, 2025

Or when we watched The Pelican Brief hoping the heroes would find some way to kill Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington to stop them from reporting the truth about their crimes?

Or when we watched The Pianist and wept at the evil Jews attacking innocent Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising?

Or when we watched The Lord of the Rings and booed the villainous men, elves and dwarves fighting to survive a siege by Saruman’s heroic army of orcs?

Or when we watched V for Vendetta on the edge of our seats worried that the government would fail to stomp out the rebellion, suppress the truth from coming out, and impose more authoritarian measures on the people?

Or when we watched Revenge of the Sith and cheered for the hero Anakin Skywalker mass murdering children in order to wipe the Jedi out of existence?

This order is clear-cut evidence of a crime against humanity: https://t.co/LzTPYkD6qb

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 22, 2025

Yeah, I don’t remember that either.

Nobody seems to have trouble figuring out who the real villains are when it’s happening in the movies. The narrative managers and spinmeisters make it a lot harder to sort out the villains from the victims in real life.

Normally it’s misguided to view any conflict as simply evil villains murdering innocent victims, but not with Israel and Gaza. It’s an apartheid state that’s backed by a globe-spanning empire, raining bombs onto a giant concentration camp packed full of children because they’re the wrong ethnicity.

It’s pretty black and white, actually.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post In Movies We Understand That the Genocidal Child Murderers Who Blow Up Hospitals Are the Villains appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Wayne Goodfellow:

A good start by Robert Kennedy Jr, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. 

The post Transparency on what is in the food we eat appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

It’s a beautiful day!

See here.

The post DOGE Blocks 52 Million Earmarked For WEF appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was protesting for a free Palestine and against the end to genocide in Gaza when he was arrested. He was a negotiator for Columbia United Apartheid Divest demanding the university divest from any company that does business with the Israeli military. Khalil has written an article from his detention facility in Louisiana. 

See here.

The post Arrested Columbia University Says He is a Political Prisoner appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Johnny Kramer:

This may be the best two-minute ad against government schools that I’ve ever seen; imagine sending your child to be “educated” by someone like this.

The post Wisconsin “teacher” comments on Trump disallowing biological men in women’s sports appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

The post Larry David vs The World appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Ginny Garner. 

Need to Know News

The post Conspiracy Theorists Were Right About Israel’s Ties to JFK Assassination appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Ginny Garner. 

Need to Know News

The post Huge Structures Discovered Over 1.5 Miles Below Great Pyramid of Giza appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Jon Rappoport

The post The medical Nazis of New Zealand versus the brilliant Dr. Sam Bailey appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Stephen Mack:

Lew,

Hegseth may front some chump change savings initiatives, but in reality not Trump, not Hegseth, not Congress and not Musk are friends of the taxpayers.

See here.

The post DOGE Delusion? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Life News

The post Kash Patel Releases New Records Exposing How FBI Under Biden Targeted Pro-Life Christians appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The American Conservative

The post War on Iran Would Be No Cakewalk appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com

The post Perilous Times for Personal Liberty appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Legacy of Carroll Quigley

The Professor and the President

“As a teenager I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship. And as a student at Georgetown, I heard the call clarified by a professor I had named Carroll Quigley, who said America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two great ideas: first, that tomorrow can be better than today, and second, that each of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.”

When Bill Clinton spoke these stirring words to millions of Americans during his 1992 acceptance address before the Democratic National Convention upon receiving his party’s nomination for President of the United States, the vast multitude of his television audience paused for a micro-second to reflect: Who is Carroll Quigley and why did he have such a dramatic effect on this young man before us who may become our country’s leader?

Carroll Quigley was a legendary professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University, and a former instructor at Princeton and Harvard.

He was a lecturer at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, the Brookings Institution, the U. S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, and the Naval College.

Quigley was a closely connected elite “insider” to the American Establishment, with impeccable credentials and trappings of respectability.

But Carroll Quigley’s most notable achievement was the authorship of one of the most important books of the 20th Century: Tragedy and Hope – A History of the World in Our Time.

No one can truly be cognizant of the intricate evolution of networks of power and influence which have played a crucial role in determining who and what we are as a civilization without being familiar with the contents of this 1,348-page tome.

It is the “Ur-text” of Establishment Studies, earning Quigley the epithet of “the professor who knew too much” in a Washington Post article published shortly after his 1977 death.

In Tragedy and Hope, as well as the posthumous The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, Quigley traces this network, in both its overt and covert manifestations, back to British racial imperialist and financial magnate Cecil Rhodes and his secret wills, outlining the clandestine master plan through seven decades of intrigue, spanning two world wars, to the assassination of John Kennedy.

Through an elaborate structure of banks, foundations, trusts, public-policy research groups, and publishing concerns (in addition to the prestigious scholarship program at Oxford), the initiates of what are described as the Round Table groups (and its offshoots such as the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations) came to dominate the political and financial affairs of the world.

For the ambitious young man from Hope, Arkansas, his mentor’s visionary observations would provide the blueprint of how the world really worked as he made his ascendancy via Oxford through the elite corridors of power to the Oval Office.

The Conservatives Discover Carroll Quigley

Published in 1966, Tragedy and Hope lay virtually unnoticed by academic reviewers and the mainstream media establishment. Then Dr. W. Cleon Skousen, the noted conservative author of the 1961 national best-seller, The Naked Communist, discovered Quigley, and the serious implications of what Quigley had revealed. In 1970, Skousen published The Naked Capitalist: A Review and Commentary on Dr. Carroll Quigley’s Book Tragedy and Hope.

This was soon followed by None Dare Call It Conspiracy. This slim volume by Gary Allen (and Larry Abraham) provided the massive paradigm shift of grassroots, populist conservatives from mere anti-Communism to a much larger anti-elitist world-view.

Millions of copies of these books came into print, and the conservative movement changed forever.

Copies of Tragedy and Hope began disappearing from library shelves. A pirate edition was printed. Quigley came to believe that his publisher Macmillan had suppressed his book. Dr. Gary North, the esteemed writer well known to readers of LewRockwell.com, has an interesting discussion of these curious facts in the chapter, “Maverick ‘Insider’ Historians,” in his book, Conspiracy: A Biblical View, available on-line.

However some persons believe Carroll Quigley was simply amplifying earlier research in conservative authors Emanuel Josephson’s Rockefeller ‘Internationalist’: The Man Who Misrules The World, and Dan Smoot’s The Invisible Government, or that of the radical sociologist C. Wright Mill’s The Power Elite, which had outlined these same elite networks of power.

I disagree with that narrow assessment. Although there is much to disagree with in interpretation in Quigley’s book, the originality and titanic scope of the work cannot be doubted or disparaged.

In a book much praised by Murray Rothbard, author Carl Oglesby’s The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies From Dallas To Watergate, has a fascinating discussion of Quigley within a wider framework of American power politics and subterranean intrigue.

And in a volume hailed by Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, before he morphed from Trotskyist man of letters to Neocon mouthpiece, had some insightful musings along the line of Quigley in his Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies.

In the Preface to his book, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, Quigley noted:

“I have been told that the story I relate here would be better left untold, since it would provide ammunition for the enemies of what I admire. I do not share this view. The last thing I should wish is that anything I write could be used by the Anglophobes and isolationists of the Chicago Tribune. But I feel that the truth has a right to be told, and once told, can be an injury to no men of good will. Only by a knowledge of the errors of the past is it possible to correct the tactics of the future.”

Although his book was written in 1949 it was not published until after his death in 1981. Ironically Quigley was correct concerning the contents of his expose’. As Murray N. Rothbard pointed out in his semi-autobiographical masterwork, The Betrayal of the American Right, the Midwestern voice of Old Right non-interventionism, Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, published a contemporaneous series of hard-hitting muckraking articles in 1951 attacking what Rothbard described as “the Wall Street-Anglophile Establishment”: “Rhodes’ Goal: Return U.S. to British Empire,” “Rhodes Ideals Slant State Department Policies,” “Rhodes’ Wards Hawk Global Scheme in U.S.,” “Rhodes Grads Influential in Eastern Press — Aid British, Global Propaganda,” “Even Congress Not Immune to Rhodes’ Ideas,” and “OWI Propaganda Linked to Rhodes Men.”

And now President Donald Trump has publicly stated, on the record, his desire to fulfill the long-term, century old insidious goal of the globalist Anglo-American Elite Establishment, to become members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

The US joining the Commonwealth of Nations is the ULTIMATE BETRAYAL of an American First foreign policy.

The oldest goal of the Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table (the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House) in London and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York composing the Anglo-American Establishment in the UK and the USA is for the American government to join the Commonwealth of Nations. This was the birth of the “Special Relationship” of the modern New World Order globalist concept.

Donald Trump Suggests US Could Join British CommonwealthDonald Trump agrees to make US part of Commonwealth because he ‘loves King Charles’

President Donald Trump has suggested that he might accept an offer from King Charles to join the British Commonwealth. It comes after he said he ‘loves’ the monarch

So who composes the Commonwealth of Nations?

While you are perusing this list think of these nations’ totalitarian attitudes and egregious policies during the COVID-19 lockdowns and today regarding attacks upon freedom of speech, the rule of law, and lack of constitutional restraint toward respecting individual rights and liberties of their citizens.

What, in the name of God, is Trump thinking?

In The Old Days Life Was So Much Simpler

The “Special Relationship” (book list)

The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carrol Quigley

Tragedy and Hope: A History of Our World in Our Time, by Carrol Quigley

UNION NOW / UNION NOW WITH BRITAIN (2 Vols) by Clarence K. Streit

Union Now, by Clarence K. Streit

The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda, by Michael Rectenwald (Author), Lew Rockwell (Foreword)

The post Trump Voices the ULTIMATE BETRAYAL of an American First Foreign Policy appeared first on LewRockwell.

A few weeks ago I published a long article on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, reviewing the available evidence on that notorious document of the very early twentieth century and attempting to evaluate its credibility and provenance.

My ultimate verdict was rather hum-drum. I concluded that the work was likely fictional, but probably reflected a widespread quiet understanding of the enormous hidden influence of Jewish groups across Europe, whether as bankers, political advisors, or revolutionaries.

A couple of generations earlier, the popular novels of Benjamin Disraeli, the very influential Jewish-born British Prime Minister, had made exactly that sort of claim, with a character representing Lord Rothschild explaining that a network of Jews operating from behind the scenes secretly dominated most of Europe’s major governments. These notions probably served as an important inspiration for the Protocols.

Around the time that the Protocols came to light, similar sentiments were widespread in even the most reputable circles. For example, Dr. David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University and one of America’s foremost public intellectuals, published Unseen Empire in 1913. In that work, favorably reviewed in the influential Literary Digest, he argued that a network of intermarried Jewish banking families had quietly gained financial control over all of Europe’s major countries and therefore exercised greater real influence over their government policies than did any of their various elected legislatures, kings, or emperors.

Indeed, the Protocols only began to attract widespread international attention after the top leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution was recognized as being overwhelmingly Jewish. That radical movement had seized control of the mighty Russian Empire in 1917, and then unsuccessfully attempted to do the same in the rest of Europe, with failed uprisings in Germany, Hungary, and other locations.

Although I thought that the Protocols had probably been fabricated, I noted that many very highly regarded contemporaneous sources had at least initially regarded it as the factual record of a Jewish conspiracy seeking to overthrow all of Europe’s Christian governments and ultimately seize control of the world. For example, I passed along the account of Douglas Reed, a leading Times of London correspondent of that era:

As Reed told the story, the Protocols first gained attention in 1920 when the document was translated into English by one of Britain’s top Russia correspondents, who died soon afterward. His employer, the Morning Post, was one of the oldest and most sober British newspapers, and its editor then drew upon his entire staff to publish twenty-three articles on the document, calling for a thorough investigation. The Times of London then ranked as the world’s most influential media outlet and it took a similar position in a long May 8, 1920 article, while Lord Sydenham, a foremost authority of that day, later did the same in the pages of the Spectator.

The series of Morning Post articles was entitled “The Jewish Peril,” and later that same year it was collected together and published as The Cause of World Unrest. This book was released in both Britain and America and included a very lengthy introduction by the editor, with the contents now easily available online. As I explained:

These articles repeatedly cited the works of Nesta Webster, a British writer who had published a lengthy historical analysis of the French Revolution a year earlier, and two of her personal contributions to the Morning Post series on the Protocols were also included at the end of the volume, while she may have more heavily contributed to the entire anonymous series…

The following year, Webster published World Revolution, her own much longer work on closely-related themes, describing the appearance and growth of secret, conspiratorial movements aimed at overthrowing all of Europe’s established Christian monarchies and replacing them with radical, socialistic governments. The author traced all of this back to the 18th century Illuminati movement of Adam Weishaupt, claiming that this project had gradually subverted the existing Masonic lodges of France and the rest of Continental Europe, then afterward used Freemasonry as the vehicle for its dangerous revolutionary plotting.

Although Webster argued that Jews had only been an insignificant early element of this conspiratorial movement, by the mid-nineteenth century they deployed their huge wealth to gain enormous influence in that project, probably becoming its leading force. She devoted much of the last chapter of her book to the Protocols, regarding its contents as an excellent summary of the secret plans of those subversive movements, whether or not the document itself was actually what it purported to be.

Based upon my own very mainstream historical reading, I’d always regarded talk of secret revolutionary plotting by the Illuminati, Freemasons, or any such similar groups as almost the epitome of crackpot lunacy, and I’d scarcely even heard of Webster, who had been the leading writer on such matters. However, I discovered that some of Webster’s prominent contemporaries had been very impressed with her scholarship and had reached somewhat similar conclusions.

The most notable example of such support for Webster’s research came from British Cabinet Minister Winston Churchill. Around the same time that the Morning Post was beginning its long series on the Protocols, Churchill published a major article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald that seemed to take a similar position on the dangerous plots of subversive international Jews, while singling out Webster for praise, especially noting her important research on the French Revolution.

• American Pravda: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 20, 2025 • 12,800 Words

Although I’d barely heard of Webster, during the early decades of the twentieth century she seemed to have been a far more influential figure than I’d ever imagined, with her research apparently becoming an important source for the views and writing of Winston Churchill, Douglas Reed, and others. I also discovered that she came from a very elite background, given that her father had been a top figure at Barclays Bank, one of Britain’s leading financial institutions.

In 1924 she published Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, apparently summarizing her accumulated research on that controversial subject, and it included an Appendix sharply disputing the allegations of plagiarism in the Protocols that had appeared in the media during the previous couple of years. According to her Wikipedia entry, by then Hilaire Belloc, a leading British literary figure himself widely accused of antisemitism, had begun privately denouncing her as “antisemitic” and her work as “lunatic,” and she later became an active supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

I carefully read her 1924 book and found many of its theories to be outlandish and very doubtful. She argued for the existence of a centuries old conspiratorial movement dedicated to the destruction of Christian civilization, with its earliest roots stretching back to the infamous Order of Assassins of the Middle East. According to Webster, some of the doctrines of that notorious Muslim cult had been absorbed by the Knights Templar, the very wealthy and powerful organization founded during the Crusades.

In 1307 King Philip IV of France had suppressed the Templars, arresting many of their top leaders, torturing them into confessions of Satanism, and then burning them at the stake, with the Pope officially disbanding the order a few years later. My history books had always claimed that Philip’s motive had probably been to cancel the large financial debts he owed to that organization while also eliminating a powerful political rival. But Webster argued that the charges of the French king were true, and the top leadership of the Templars had indeed become secret worshippers of Satan.

Furthermore, following the killing of its leaders and its general suppression, the surviving secret society had eventually become a founding element of the later Freemasonry movement in Continental Europe, retaining a distorted legend of the betrayal and murder of its top leader and a bitter antipathy towards both the Catholic Church and the French monarchy.

According to Webster, another very important strand in these secret societies dedicated to subverting established European order was Jewish Cabalism, which was a major root of the support for magic and supernatural rituals often found in those organizations.

Webster’s book included nearly 900 footnotes referencing various Medieval texts and scholarly histories of that era written in English, French, and German, as well as works on the origins of Freemasonry. But I lacked the knowledge and inclination to investigate any of that material. And although the Masonic movement was indeed quite influential during the 18th and 19th centuries, its 16,000 word Wikipedia article only contained a single brief reference to Webster as an anti-Masonic writer. There were also related articles on Masonic conspiracy theories and Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory that covered such topics in greater detail, but these failed to include any mention of Webster or her works.

So based upon present-day evidence, Webster came across as very much a fringe crackpot, someone whose research would hardly be taken seriously in respectable circles, with the favorable if very brief mention by Churchill being merely a puzzling anomaly. However, I discovered that this was actually not the case.

During the early 2000s, I’d spent a number of years building a content-archiving system that contained the near-complete archives of a couple of hundred of our leading publications of the last 150 years, and it proved very useful in obtaining a much more balanced evaluation of Webster and her works.

I discovered that a long list of her books were in that system, together with their contemporaneous reviews, and the latter demonstrated that although quite controversial, she had hardly been regarded as a fringe figure at that point. The New York Times, the Nation, and Commonweal had reviewed her books, as had such very influential publications of that era as the Saturday Review of Literature, the Bookman, and the Outlook. Leading academic journals such as the American Historical Review and Political Science Quarterly had done the same, while Foreign Affairs had noted and briefly described a couple of her books.

Some of these reviews, especially those appearing in liberal or leftist periodicals, had been sharply critical, challenging her “conspiratorial” reading of historical events in much the same way that modern day writers almost uniformly did. But she had also had her strong defenders as well.

For example, Wilbur Cortez Abbott, the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History of Harvard University, published a long and highly favorable 1920 review of her book on the French Revolution, which he characterized as “extraordinarily interesting” in his very first sentence. Although he went on to admit that her thesis was “not wholly new,” he emphasized that it had never “been worked out in such detail,” nor with such completeness. As a result, he said that the book must “be reckoned with by anyone who wishes to recognize and understand the springs of popular movements, then or now.” The long review in the New York Times also certainly accepted all of her research on the true history of that event as important and correct.

Academic periodicals were similarly mixed. The fairly brief review in Political Science Quarterly emphasized the “immense amount of contemporary material” she had brought to bear in support of her “most novel and astonishing interpretation of the great event of the eighteenth century. ” And although the discussion in the American Historical Review was rather negative, it still admitted that English publications had been “much impressed” by her book, explaining that the Spectator had declared it “a veritable revelation.”

This very wide divergence of verdicts on Webster and her works was emphasized several years later by Prof. Abbott, who opened his 1925 review on her Secret Societies book in the prestigious Saturday Review by declaring:

There is no person now engaged in writing history concerning whose work there is such sharp divergence of opinion as there is in regard to Mrs. Webster…she has been the object of more praise and of much more attack than almost any one since Macaulay. That circumstance is due alike to her choice of subject, her point of view, and her method of approach. Revolution is always an extraordinarily difficult topic for historical treatment. Its passions long outlive its events…the publisher who warned Mrs. Webster of the probable results of her labors observed to her, “Remember that if you take an anti-revolutionary line you will have the whole literary world against you.”

Thus, one hundred years ago a top Harvard historian writing in one of America’s most influential publications had repeatedly praised Webster’s research. But a century of relentless ideological pressure had subsequently marginalized her and her books to such an extent that they had become dismissed and almost forgotten as the conspiracy-nonsense of a fringe crackpot. This remarkable transformation has probably gone unrecognized by almost all of today’s mainstream academics , for whom Webster remained invisible.

Taken together, these appraisals by leading past scholars persuaded me to take her work seriously, especially her lengthy volume on the French Revolution that had so impressed Churchill.

Read the Whole Article

The post Political Conspiracies and the French Revolution appeared first on LewRockwell.

While the financial press is attempting to cover Trump’s frenetic bipolar tariff policy, the ponderous commercial real estate market continues to deteriorate. Bisnow.com reports, citing CoStar, “US banks reported delinquencies hit 1.57 percent at the end of last year, a rate not seen since the fourth quarter of 2014.”

Putting a number to the percentage, “The 1.57 percent delinquency percentage means more than $47.1B of loans would have been delinquent at the end of the year,” writes Billy Wadsack for Bisnow’s Dallas-Fort Worth bureau. That’s an 88 percent increase from a decade ago.

Delinquencies in CMBS (Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities) are setting multi-year highs with $38B in arrears at year-end 2024, a 41 percent increase from the previous year end.

In the face of troubling news, those who work in real estate are taking a rosy view, as usual. James Robertson, Jr. writes in the latest Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, “Optimism in the industry is the highest it has been in eight years.” This industry he calls “illiquid and slow-moving” with cycles that can “drag on for years.”

There has been little transaction volume and sellers have held tightly to the valuations and cap rates experienced during days of ZIRP. Likewise, bankers have extended and pretended, hoping the never-before-seen low rates will miraculously return to lift all boats (and buildings).

Fitch Ratings’s Melissa Che told Robertson, “As more lower-quality assets, some of which have significantly deteriorated in performance, come to market and trade at relatively low prices, this may trigger an overall reset and further price discovery across various property quality segments.”

Distressed market sales nearly doubled to 6 percent in last year’s fourth quarter, according to Newmark Group, Inc. Banks are growing more impatient with loan extensions and modifications raising the amount of 2025 debt maturities to $957 billion from $659 billion from 2022. Newmark believes a third of CMBS loans fail to cover debt services.

Robertson focuses on bridge loans (REBLs) whose issuance ballooned in 2021 to $45 billion from less than $9 billion the year prior. Artis Shepherd of Patterson Capital, LLC told Robertson, “Bridge lending shifted around this time into a fairly aggressive product. Some lenders were offering credit at 80 percent-85 percent loan-to-value ratios and underwriting loans based upon proforma rather than actual net operating income.”

Shepherd goes on to explain that 2021 bridge lender’s loose underwriting included debt service coverage of just 1.0 or 1.05 to pro forma numbers rather than the traditional 1.25 DCR (Debt Service Coverage Ratio). This has come back to bite lenders and REITs.

Borrowers whose loans are maturing must confront interest rates which are 300 bps higher than what they are paying. If they are paying at all. In Robertson’s piece he gives the example of the Starbucks Seattle HQ building. The current rate is 2.3 percent. However, the loan matures in August and Harsh Hemnani of Greenstreet told Robertson “If spreads and rates stay the same, it’s going to be somewhere around 5.5 percent. The owners will have to eat the difference. I think that pain is definitely going to happen.”

If Starbucks is your tenant, you take the hit. Owners with lesser quality tenants (or none at all) will likely walk away. Office properties are not the only problem. Overbuilding of multi-family projects has put pressure on rents. Community banks hold $629.7 billion in apartment loans with $6.1 billion being 30 days or more delinquent. This is the most since 2012 the tail-end of the Great Financial Crisis.

Researchers at the NY Fed are on high alert concerning the coming CRE maturity wall, believing banks are undercapitalized. “For example, regulators, credit rating agencies and providers of funding might scrutinize bank maturity extensions more closely, thus forcing banks to accept defaults rather than granting more maturity extensions.”

These defaults could lead to deposit runs and/or “trigger a wave of foreclosures or sales of loans in secondary markets, imposing fire-sale externalities on other intermediaries by depressing the market valuations of CRE debt and underlying CRE properties.”

Wall Street has a close eye on the banks with the Regional Bank ETF (KRE) having fallen 18 percent since hitting a high around last Thanksgiving. The President says his favorite word is “tariff.” As an ex-real estate developer, his least favorite is likely “maturity.”

The post Commercial Real Estate Is in Serious Trouble appeared first on LewRockwell.

In this incandescent juncture, what matters is off the record.

Let’s start with that phone call. The Kremlin readout is quite sober – but it does reveal a few nuggets. There is no comprehensive deal – yet – between Moscow and Washington. Far from it: we are just in the initial tentative stage of talking and talking about several interconnected dossiers.

President Putin gave absolutely nothing away. The agreed-upon pause on attacks on energy infrastructure – not energy and (italics mine) infrastructure – spells out as Putin imposing a stop on dangerous Ukrainian hits on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.

That may be lost among all the Western hysteria; but there are two absolute conditions expressed by Moscow for anything in this riddle to start complying with objective reality – and not muddle along as a reality show narrative trainwreck:

1.“The settlement in Ukraine must take into account the unconditional need to eliminate the root causes of the crisis, Russia’s legitimate security interests.”

2.“The key condition for preventing the escalation of the conflict should be a complete cessation of foreign military aid and the provision of intelligence information to Kiev.”

US special envoy Witkoff is spinning that ceasefire “details” will be ironed out on Sunday in Saudi Arabia. No matter the amount of shrieking, Kiev will have to accept it.

Putin-Trump did not spend over 2 hours just talking hockey, hazy Black Sea navigation prospects and a quite limited energy infrastructure missile strike one-month pause.

In this incandescent juncture, what matters is off the record. And that might as well have been Iran. And the prospect of serious Hard Rain fallin’.

I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

A certain psychopathological entity in West Asia is obsessed to ram all its opponents through the mouth of a graveyard. Putin must have had the chance to explain to Trump that Russia respects the UN Charter and abides by international law. Russia and Iran – top BRICS members – signed a comprehensive strategic partnership last January in Moscow. Russia provides detailed ISR/air defense/EW intel to Tehran.

A proverbially hysterical narrative now imprints the notion that Tel Aviv – courting Trump 2.0 backing – is ready to inflict airstrikes on Iran to “prevent it from going nuclear”. Tehran, as detailed by Ayatollah Khamenei, has no interest whatsoever in building a nuclear weapon.

There’s no way Russia will allow Israel – with crucial American backing – to wreak havoc on Iran. Even as Tehran is already capable to react to any attack, with devastating consequences. Without nuclear weapons – and even without Russian direct help.

Operation True Promise 2 – True Promise 3 is still on hold – had already demonstrated that Israel is absolutely defenseless against wave after wave of sophisticated Iranian missiles. Were the US under Trump 2.0 to be involved in a direct attack, all US military bases in West Asia would be incinerated, plus severe punishment to vassals hosting these bases. End result: oil prices skyrocketing, massive global economic crisis.

I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken

While the self-proclaimed peacemaker was on the phone polishing the newest iteration of his Art of the Deal, genocidal psychopathological Zionists with hammers a-bleedin’ were unleashing wild wolves on displaced newborn babies – huddling in tents ablaze in Khan Yunis.

And ten thousand EUrotrash talkers with their tongues all broken were mute on genocide but ready to erupt in shrieking delight pledging loyalty – and billions in funds – to the envoy of the former self-proclaimed Emir of Al-Nusra, a moderate head-chopper turned Hugo Boss-clad President.

All yelled a Eurovision-tinged Sieg Heil to the protégé’s mercenary “army”, duly backed by Qatari, British and European masters: ISIS-clad Salafi-jihadis, al-Qaeda remnants, assorted takfiris, Chechens, Uzbeks, Uighurs, a movable Terror Inc. on tour slashing Alawites, Christians, Shi’ites and even moderate Sunnis, facilitating the evisceration of Syria and the “donation” of large swathes of Syrian sovereign territory to Tel Aviv.

The Zionist SS Brussels Medusa von den Lugen gleefully showered the moderate head-chopper gangs – al-Qaeda R Us – with 2.5 billion euros. It was Qatar that pressured the European Commission (EC) to invite Jolani’s henchman turned Foreign Minister, Asaad al-Shaibani to the 9th Brussels Conference for Donors on Syria – even as at least 7,000 Alawites and Christians were being “slaughtered” by his goons, according to a Greek Member of the European Parliament, Nikolas Farantouris, who visited Damascus on March 8-9 and met, among others, with the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch and the Near East.

In parallel the Exceptionalist “peace through strength” circus ringmaster – dubbed across vast swathes of the Arab street as “The Marmalade Moron” – brutally started bombing Ansarallah in Yemen, to force unbowed warriors to ditch their unwavering support for Palestine and wallow in submission.

Additionally, “Bomb, bomb, bomb – bomb bomb Iran” was back as the crypto-Beach Boys theme song, because in the end Tehran must by all means be turned into Syria, Jordan, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, South Yemen: a pitiful Quisling Zionist regime.

The destabilized but not broken Axis of Resistance is fighting titanic, simultaneous battles against the Axis of Genocidal Zion on several fronts: the psycho-killers in Tel Aviv; the Jolani mercenary army in Syria, de facto ground troops of Israel, simultaneously supported, ideologically, by Zionist Arab regimes and assorted Salafi/takfiri Islamic outfits blessing the massacre against Palestinians; the Eurotrash liberal totalitarians, who are financing Jolani; and Washington/Pentagon-bombed Ansarallah in Yemen.

Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, leader of Ansarallah, made it all very clear in his March 16 speech:

“Our decision to support the Palestinian people, including our move to block Israeli maritime navigation, that clearly targets the Israeli enemy and no one else, is aimed solely at pressuring Israel to open the crossings, allow the entry of humanitarian aid, and put an end to the starvation of Gaza.”

So Ansarallah will not be broken – whatever the Empire of Chaos throws against them:

“The US is the one turning the sea into a battlefield, thereby directly impacting maritime navigation and global trade. Our decision was only targeting Israeli ships, and will now extend to US ships, but they are the ones who turn the sea into a battlefield and threaten maritime navigation. It is essential that all nations recognize who truly threatens international waters and the movement of ships.”

I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’

Compared to Yemeni courage, EUrotrash cowards might yearn, in their wildest dreams, to sound like thunder but are more likely to drown under a massive wave of irrelevance – to the sound of drummers whose hands are a-blazin’, bangin’ the Syria jihadi song. They shouldn’t even bother to whisper – because nobody is listenin’.

The batshit crazy Estonian chick with the IQ of an undernourished worm, masquerading as EU foreign policy chief, wants no less that 40 billion euros for “military aid” to country 404. Hungary, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal emitted a resounding “No”: after all none have even a sliver of that kind of money.

Even Germany hasn’t signed off on its own €3 billion pledge – although the accumulated dementia never stops: the future BlackRock chancellor is convinced that “Putin has declared war on all of Europe.”

No one on Trump 2.0 even bothers to address a word to the Estonian worm: yes, “nobody is listenin’.” Batshit crazy – and irrelevant.

For Trump 2.0, the whole EUro trash Cage aux Folles spectacle is irrelevant: from the €800 billion ReArm Europe military scam to the Macron-Starmer Dumb and Dumber politico double down, both clowns so eager to deploy 30,000 unsuspecting cannon-fodder items to country 404 when their “security” simply will not be guaranteed by Mama Pentagon.

The message is as stark as Hard Rain: you may not even qualify as a convenient tool for us anymore. At best you may be repositioned as a – rotten – basket of resources. You’re on the menu. Like the former Global South in the previous century. Now it’s your turn.

The imperial projections of a bunch of Hollow Men

The possibility remains that bombastic “peace through strength” Trump is trying to weave a web of deceit facing chess-master Putin while the EUrotrash set up a Syrian-style buffer – with European troops securing Ukraine’s most sensitive zones. All that would be masking the Zio-con axis, once again, revamping their obsession on “eliminating” Iran from the new Primakov triangle in BRICS (Russia-Iran-China instead of Russia-India-China).

According to this purely wishful thinking script, profiting from a “weak” Iran the Empire of Chaos would once again be reigning supreme in West Asia, manipulating energy prices to undermine Russia’s economy while compromising China’s energy security.

The key spanner in these proverbially childish works – a mere imperial projection – is that Putin is not trying to be part of the imperial club. Putin and several of the Security Council members in Moscow have accumulated piles of doctorates on Western deceit, coups, outright lies, blatant betrayals and hardcore geoeconomic sabotage.

Putin, Medvedev, Patrushev, Naryshkin, Lavrov, they all know that this war the current, breathless circus ringmaster is trying to end was always about breaking Russia, as well as containing China, and designed mostly as a Hail Mary pass to salvage the fast-declining Empire of Chaos.

And all that brings us to Spengler, as re-examined in this superb analysis, and to where Hard Rain is mostly gonna fall with no mercy.

When it comes to Europe, we are now dealing with Faustian men that don’t even qualify as T. S. Eliot’s hollow men, as “Europe has forgotten how to breed conquerors.” The Spenglerian metaphor for “the suffocation of a young civilization by the corpse of an old one” does apply. Yet Russian was never Faustian: more like Tolstoyan.

All of us who have been spending quality time in Russia after the start of the SMO do carry the feeling that it’s as if “the Third Rome was always waiting, biding its time, watching as Europe gutted itself on the altar of its own hubris.”

Now Russia seems to have shed “its Western skin”, turning to “its own roots – Eurasian, Orthodox, steppe-born.” I was personally overcome by this cultural/spiritual illumination not only in white nights in Moscow, Kazan or Vladivostok, but mostly while traveling in the black soil of Novorossiya – where the “rules-based international order” came to die.

The fragmented West is indeed trapped in a Baudrillard-style total simulation of its own making – while Russia is operating full tilt in objective reality. And indeed “this is why the West cannot win in Ukraine. It fights as a bureaucratic entity, not as a people. And Russia, for all its flaws, fights as a people.”

The current Hollow Men masquerading as Europe’s political “leaders” tough should not be underestimated. They will get their revenge – over their own European fellow citizens.

Cue to Christine “Vuitton” Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank (ECB): “The digital euro is more crucial than ever.”

Translation: all European bank accounts will eventually be transferred to the ECB. Now couple that with the proclamation by the Toxic Medusa in Brussels: “This month [March 2025] the European Commission will present the Savings and Investment Union. We will turn private savings (italics mine) into much-needed investments.”

Extra translation: it’s the private savings of European citizens that will be stolen and invested in 800 billion warmongering euros for Europe’s “defense” against the perennial “Russian threat”. Hard Rain – on each and every European citizen.

You may be asking why a beat poem structured as a psalm, composed on a typewriter in Greenwich Village in New York City in 1962, slightly before the Cuban missile crisis, by a 21-year old recently arrived from an industrial belt in Minnesota is telling our big story today of hubris and deceit. That’s the unconquerable power of Art.

I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number

Pellets of poison will be flooding the waters; souls may be forgotten – especially those of the Hollow Men; some – across the Global Majority – may be even resourceful enough to emerge from the depths of the deepest black forest; but most of all, as the executioner’s face remains quite well hidden, many will finally be able to see who he really is.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall – From the West Down to the East appeared first on LewRockwell.

Impeachment would be too mild for the claque of Woke-activist federal judges attempting to nullify the executive branch with hectoring writs against any and all sorts of executive actions. If simply bounced off their benches, they could just take up new careers as NPR legal commentators or transsexual pole-dancers. Rather, what you’ve got here is an obvious seditious conspiracy, plain for all to see, orchestrated by the same legal Nosferatus as RussiaGate, the 2020 election, and the J-6 witch hunt.

The catch is, this time it is discoverable and subject to prosecution because the party running this legal insurrection no longer has its hands on the levers of power in the DOJ and the FBI as it did when they ran the aforementioned ops. And so, the mighty silence emanating from those two agencies just now should tell you something: namely, that cases are being carefully constructed to finally bring these despicable caitiffs to real and chastening law.

If you want to know one paramount reason for institutional failure in our country, look to the evil enterprise that calls itself “Lawfare.” It originated as a blog launched on September 1, 2010, founded by three key figures: Benjamin Wittes, Jack Goldsmith, and Robert Chesney. Over time it evolved into an activist operation, The Lawfare Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to (cough cough) “Hard National Security Choices,” and run under the shady umbrella of the Brookings Institution.

The point of Lawfare is self-evident in its name: it is an instrument of warfare against a perceived enemy which, for the past decade, has been the political faction led by Mr. Trump, the once-and-current chief executive of the federal government. Mr. Trump is a danger to the bureaucratic arm of the federal government because he has defined it as a racketeering operation and moved decisively to end its depredations. Lawfare is the praetorian guard of the permanent DC bureaucracy, including especially its rogue intel actors, who function as enforcers for the Democratic party that largely staffs the bureaucracy.

Norm Eisen, a Brookings senior fellow, is the chief operational strategist for the Lawfare enterprise. He has been active in all its ops, capers, and mind-fucks since Mr. Trump came on the scene in 2015 vowing to “drain the swamp” (i.e., end the racketeering). Norm Eisen holds leadership roles in two subsidiary Lawfare orgs: States United Democracy Center and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Eisen’s broader connection stems from his history of orchestrating legal challenges against Mr. Trump — advising the Mueller investigation, drafting impeachment articles, and leading CREW’s 200-plus lawsuits in Mr. Trump’s first term.

Now, following the Biden interregnum, Norm Eisen leverages a network of nonprofits (ACLU, Public Citizen, etc.) and left-leaning judges to file hundreds of new lawsuits to thwart the MAGA clean-up effort under Elon Musk’s DOGE. Tax filings show that CREW’s funding, in part, comes from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Item: during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, CREW received $432,000 in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans from Newtek Small Business, which evolved into a financial holding company after acquiring National Bank of New York City in January 2023, rebranded as Newtek Bank.

The money-laundering through multitudinous foundations, NGOs, and “non-profits” is the essence of the Democratic Party’s racketeering mode in league with federal bureaucracies such as USAID that dispensed billions of dollars to a vast network of activist recipients. Translation: it provides salaries (often six-figures) to party foot-soldiers whose only duties are to move the money through the organizational layers and to be available for such party tasks as ballot harvesting, vote-counting, and organizing riots.

This is the mischief that Mr. Trump seeks to put an end to, and so he must be thwarted at all costs by those whose lifeblood depends on the ongoing rackets. The so-called “Resistance” alliance between the Democratic Party and the bureaucracy seeks to prevent reform by any means necessary. Since they no longer control potent executive agencies such as the DOJ and the FBI for intimidating and punishing their enemies, their only recourse is the federal judiciary and its officers of the courts, that is, lawyers and judges practicing Lawfare.

The federal judges are political appointees, such as John J. McConnell from the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, who was a personal injury lawyer (i.e., “ambulance chaser”) and major Democratic Party doner, giving nearly $700,000 to party causes, and serving as Rhode Island Democratic State Committee treasurer. Judge McConnell issued a wide-ranging restraining order against the DOGE-advised freeze of federal funding launched in February of this year. McConnell’s daughter, Catherine, is a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education, appointed by President Joe Biden in 2022. See how that works?

Similarly, James Boasberg, a RussiaGate cast member, and as a presiding judge in the DC federal court in sixty J-6 cases. Independent journalist Laura Loomer alleges that Judge Boasberg’s daughter, Katherine, works for Partners for Justice (PFJ), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that is dedicated to defending “criminal illegal aliens and gang members,” including opposing their deportation, and that it receives significant funding from U.S. government grants, such as those from USAID. Judge Boasberg notoriously issued a restraining order last week against the deportation of Tren de Aragua gang members labeled by the DOJ as a terrorist organization. See how that works?

Now, the difference between Lawfare and the practice of law is that Lawfare trafficks lavishly in lies to do its business in the courts and actual law practice is supposed to be dedicated to ascertaining the truth in matters that come before the courts. Lawfare is grounded in dishonesty — as is its main client, the Democratic Party. That is exactly why Judge James Boasberg went along with FBI Director James Comey’s false warrant applications in the FISA court that enabled the RussiaGate operation to do its dirty business. Thus, the grand orchestrator of the Lawfare enterprise as a whole, Norm Eisen, is a sort of Father-of-Lies.

Remember beyond all this sturm and drang stands an essential principle: the truth is sturdy and untruth is fragile. Like you, I am standing by to see what eventually comes out of the Trump DOJ in the way of cases that might definitively settle this mighty battle between Lawfare and the law.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Judgepocalypse Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week Peter joined Tom Clougherty, Executive Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, to discuss his unwavering view of free-market economics, the enduring threats from misguided government policies, and the urgent need for economic reform. Throughout the conversation, Peter and Tom highlight the consequences of central bank intervention, the artificial distortion of markets, and the serious risks posed by escalating reliance on speculative assets like cryptocurrencies.

Peter starts by explaining that his skepticism of government intervention stems from correctly anticipating the 2008 financial crisis. Peter foresaw how reckless monetary policy by the Federal Reserve and the moral hazards created by entities like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae inflated an unsustainable housing bubble:

I could see that we had a huge housing bubble that was unsustainable. But I also saw how the housing wealth was impacting the economy and how people were consuming more and saving less. And the whole economy was distorted based on the illusion of wealth that didn’t really exist. And I knew that there was a lot of fraud inherent in the mortgage market and the housing market based on the government’s involvement. And that I knew that eventually rates would rise, teaser rates would reset, housing prices would crash, and it would bring down the banks that financed it.

He emphasizes how mainstream explanations for the crisis wrongly blamed capitalism and private-sector greed. Instead, he squarely identifies central banks and loose monetary policy as the root cause of market distortions:

And the main reason was all the people that the government brought on to explain why we had a financial crisis, and of course they had no idea that it was coming until after the fact, they all blamed a lack of regulation, too much greed on Wall Street, not enough capitalism. My blame was the government itself. When George Bush made a speech early on, he said, ‘Wall Street got drunk.’ That was his rec, and I said, ‘Yeah, they were drunk, but where did they get the liquor?’ They got it from the Fed.

While Peter predicted the crash, he admits he underestimated the government’s willingness and ability to delay the inevitable crisis by inflating even larger bubbles. The result today, he warns, is a far more threatening economic situation that will dwarf the 2008 downturn:

The only thing I got wrong really was in my assessment of what would happen after the government made that mistake. I assumed that the attempts to reflate the bubbles would fail and that instead we would have a big drop in the dollar and a surge in inflation. That didn’t happen and we went on many, many years and the bubbles got so much bigger and not just real estate, stocks, bonds, cryptocurrencies. I mean we inflated just this massive bubble and the debt rose to enormous levels way beyond anything that brought us down in 2008. The fact that we were able to kick the can down the road up until now and we’re still kicking it just means that the crisis that’s coming is going to be so much worse than the one that we had in 2008 because we didn’t get to solve the problems.

While appreciative of efforts to streamline the government, Peter challenges the notion that government can ever operate efficiently. Peter illustrates how only private businesses, driven by market competition and self-interest, can achieve true economic efficiency:

You can’t have a government that is efficient; efficiency is only found in the free market. If I own a business, I will be efficient because if I’m not, I’m wasting my own money. I have a lot of incentives not to waste my money. Plus, if I have competition and my competitors are efficient and I’m being wasteful, then they’re going to undercut me and I’m going to go out of business. You have market forces and self-interest that keep you from wasting resources.

He concludes by criticizing contemporary enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies, calling out the current administration’s promotion of digital assets as a misguided distraction from genuinely productive economic activities. He argues that promoting crypto merely props up what he sees as a digital Ponzi scheme:

The worst thing about it is he’s [Trump’s] been completely hijacked by the cryptocurrency industry. I mean this is a farce that his administration now pumps and dumps crypto and everybody is trading on insider information and making a fortune off of this. Meanwhile, he wants to make America great again, but he wants us to be the leaders in crypto. Why would we want to be the leaders in a digital Ponzi scheme or digital pyramid? Whatever money we waste on the crypto industry is money we can invest in productive investments, in real wealth creation.

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post 2008 Set the Stage for 2025 appeared first on LewRockwell.