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“Currency” only has meaning when there is the luxury of a marketplace. If the world is in survival mode then there is no marketplace, there is only survival.

A reasonable example of this was the Pilgrims in Massachusetts between 1620 and 1660.

When the Pilgrims arrived here, they did not use “currency”. There was no marketplace. They were too busy doing what it took to survive to buy and sell. The few tools and small amount of food they had was parceled out according to rules that they had: if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, unless there were extenuating circumstances. That was, for example, the mother of Peregrine White, the first child born in America, on the Mayflower while it was anchored in Plymouth. Although she wasn’t “idle” she certainly wasn’t doing the kind of heavy labor the others did.

And it was a lot like the apocalypse: 45 of the 102 passengers died the first year, just like they would in an apocalypse and the biggest cause was scurvy and malnutrition. They simply couldn’t find enough to eat and enough of the right foods to eat, just like any apocalypse survivors.

And like survivors of the end of the war, they suffered attacks by roving bands of outsiders who wanted their guns and metal tools and the little livestock they had. Otherwise, the Pilgrims had nothing the Indians wanted. And like any real apocalypse, disease was rampant, particularly Smallpox which wiped out the Indians at a much greater rate than the Pilgrims, but they died too over the ensuing years, at a 30 percent rate annually (The Indians died at a 70 percent rate; by the time of the King Philips War, 3/4s of all the Indians in New England were dead). The only thing that kept the colony from collapsing was the arrival of new ships with more people – and more food.

Over the next 10 years the Pilgrims moved from merely survival to building a society. Unlike the notional drawings we have of them, they did not live in houses. They lived in mud huts made of coppiced branches built into a dome. Sometimes they dug into the hard packed sand and made multi-room caves with wooden doors. Only one actual building existed those first years, and it was a crude meeting house surrounded by a pallisade. The last of the Pilgrim caves was bulldozed away in 1920 because no one thought those things were worth keeping then, a hole in the ground, and bums were by then living in them. Everything they needed was passed around, especially axes and adzes and iron tools used to dig or work wood. Nothing was “owned”. No one could say, “That axe is mine, you can’t use it.” We know exactly, to the number of nails, how many iron tools arrived on the Mayflower.

This is the Peak House in Medfield, Ma, built in 1651, the only example of Medieval Elizabethan architecture left in the US. This tiny house had a huge number of people living in it and includes one room and a loft. Most of the house is taken up by the fireplace. By the time this house was being built, the diamond shaped glass windows were going out of style and being replaced by single pane on a hinge or 6 over 6 panes. Glass was incredibly expensive as the Pilgrims couldn’t find the right kind of sand to make it (Eventually, the sand of Sandwich was discovered to be the right kind and a massive glass works was built there. Side note: any town with the word “wich” at the end was a place where salt was made. Salt was the most important industry in the area at the time). Most houses couldn’t afford or find glass and instead used oiled, white paper to cover the window and let in light which is why tiny panes were needed.

The Pilgrims figured out that surviving through the winter was the key to survival so they had to put enough away to be self-sufficient for a year; that is, until the crops came in. As time went on, they made and grew everything they needed. They didn’t have iron or the ability to make it, so everything they made was from wood or clay. In those days, owning a Pewter tankard or spoon was so important that sometimes the only possession willed to a child or family member was the metal spoon. The Pewter tankard was reserved for the Elder or a guest. Otherwise, spoons and plates and cups were carved out of wood and considered of no real value. When wooden buildings were made, they consisted of one room with a massive stone fireplace – and no chimney. The chimneys were added later or made of wood covered with mud and houses burned down a lot. This is because building “up” required contributed manpower and everyone was busy. If another room was added, it was used as the “storeroom and manger” because otherwise your animals lived with you and all your possessions. The houses were never painted and it wasn’t until the 1700s that painting – on the trim only – came into being, and when paint did start, every house was painted red because “Indian Red” ochre was the most common dye substance available. Eventually, the interiors were painted with lime wash and made white. When wallpaper finally made it’s way here it was a big, big deal but that was later, after “Apocalypse Time” was over.

The most important thing people could get were apples. Apples were the savior of the colonies, and fish. A family went through eight barrels of apple cider a year and at least one barrel of vinegar. Vinegar was precious. The pilgrims noticed within 15 years that they were overfishing the rivers and oceans and that they had to move further and further away from home to find any deer. Just like in an apocalypse, there were no restrictions on hunting or fishing and within 15 years, they had to put restrictions because they were hunting and fishing the stock out of existence. On the other hand, apples could be stored for a year in barrels filled with sand as long as they didn’t touch each other. (“One bad apple ruins the whole bunch”) and were separated by layers of beach sand.

In those days, other trade goods were blankets. Blankets were precious items. To make a single blanket could take a 100 hours of labor, if you had the sheep to shear. You had to shear the sheep, card the wood, wash the wool, spin it into yarn and then hand knit or loom it into something usable. A man’s coat took a minimum of 60 hours to make – and that was between all other tasks. It wasn’t 60 hours straight out. Clothes made out of linen were even harder (but wore better) because linen was an incredibly labor intensive operation to create, even before it was spun into cloth. Many times, worn out ship sails were made into clothing, called “duck pants”.

The other precious currency was salt. Salt was so precious that it was one of the first things people looked for when they came, brine pits and springs. But they didn’t find any so they had to make it from seawater. The first patent in America was to a Salem man who invented a way of making salt from sea water, a process that takes considerable time. The word “salary” comes from salt because salt was so important that it was often used as currency and it was re-used over and over. Salt was the main way that meat and fish was preserved for winter and it required considerable amounts. (When Lewis and Clark were sent off on their peripatetic journey across America later in 1805, one of Jefferson’s three goals to them was to find salt. If there was no salt, there would be no westward expansion). You cannot live a hand-to-mouth existence forever and there is no guarantee that deer is going to come along when you’re hungry so you can shoot it and eat it. And there is no guarantee you will STILL have ammunition left when it does come by. So storing up carcasses, preserved in brine or salt rubs was the only way to make sure you had food for the winter.

As time went on, things made of steel, such as knives, were of high value. The first mill in America was the Saugus Iron Works (still there in Saugus as a museum) which made pig iron, rolled iron and some nails. It went out of business in 1670 or so because it was badly run and because the Puritans hated the hard drinking, hard swearing, whoring Swedes and Finns who worked there and who refused to go to church. The only reason they weren’t hanged was because the settlers were desperate for iron.

By 1640 or so, or within 20 years of landing, Pilgrims began using “real” currency. It started with colored beads, called “wampum” after the Indian way and worked until a Dutch concern came in and started manufacturing beads in secret in Duxbury and flooded the marked and wiped out the value of the currency. After that, the Pilgrims used real money, but there was damned little of it. It created was was known as “The Great Currency Shortage”. It was English currency most of the time, but by the Pilgrims were trading with New Amsterdam/New York and other coastal communities in America. The problem was that there were five or more different currencies being used, five different monetary systems, no banks, no authority other it than the leaders who could say how many guilders were worth a shilling and so on. And there were few people who could determine exactly how many sheep were worth a barrel of cider. But then, everyone knew everyone else and the trade had to be mutually amicable or eventually, someone would condemn the other of being a witch and they would be hanged in the town common.

In a modern day apocalypse the currency would be the decision of the moment, what you need versus what you have. As Ben Franklin once said, “Necessity never made a good bargain”. I would guess that in an apocalypse, which is a world much like the Pilgrims in 1620, your main needs would be shelter, warmth, food and tools. I would guess the most fungible currency, easily carried and whose value was immediately apparent, and one that lasted a long time would be bullets.

Read the Whole Article

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Ask any federal health official—whether from the FDA, CDC, NIH, or National Cancer Institute—if vaccines contribute to neurological damage or autism, and their response will be unequivocal: No, there is no evidence of any association. In fact, they might find the very question offensive. After all, these agencies have access to unlimited resources, the brightest scientific minds, and cutting-edge research facilities at institutions like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford. If there were any credible link between vaccines and neurological harm, surely, they would have found it by now.

And yet, despite decades of investigation and countless opportunities, their stance remains unchanged: vaccines are safe and effective. Any claim to the contrary is dismissed as conspiracy theory and an assault on the very foundations of modern medicine. This has been the dominant narrative for the past forty years. Federal health officials and policymakers have long prioritized private pharmaceutical industry interests and upheld the belief that vaccination is the single most important tool for eradicating infectious diseases. Dissent is neither tolerated nor entertained. The agencies responsible for vaccine safety, such as HHS, FDA, NIAID and the CDC, are ruled by a rigid scientific orthodoxy that allows no room for alternative perspectives.

But now, for the first time in modern history, an outsider has entered the room. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new head of the Department of Health and Human Services, is neither a scientist nor a physician. Unlike his predecessors, he has no allegiance to the status quo. His appointment signals a possible turning point to usher a new opportunity for a truly independent investigation into whether vaccines, either individually or collectively, contribute to neurological damage. If pursued earnestly, this could be one of the most consequential moments in American medical history.

The stakes could not be higher. Over the past few decades, childhood chronic illnesses have skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. The rise in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), ADHD, autoimmune conditions, and other neurological and developmental disorders has been explained away as the result of better diagnostic tools or genetic predispositions. But are these explanations sufficient? What if something more fundamental has changed in children’s health over the past 30 years? Federal health agencies continue to dismiss environmental factors, including vaccines, as a potential cause. But if we truly care about children’s well-being, it is time to ask the hard questions. And we must ask without fear, without bias, and without ideological blinders.

The dramatic increase in neurological disorders, including autism spectrum disorders that is now diagnosed in 1 in every 36 children, has often been attributed to improved definitions for ASD and diagnostic tools. However, a closer look at government statistics reveals alarming trends in children’s health that go far beyond better diagnostics. Since the early 1990s, there has been a staggering increase in several chronic conditions: ADHD rates have risen by 890 percent, autism diagnoses by 2,094 percent, bipolar disease in youth by 10,833 percent, and celiac disease by 1,011 percent. These numbers beg the question—what has fundamentally changed in our children’s health over the past three decades?

The media plays a crucial role in reinforcing the official vaccine narrative while systematically silencing dissenting voices. This lack of transparency allows federal health agencies like the CDC, NIAID, and HHS to evade accountability. Instead of safeguarding public health, these institutions have become politically and ideologically entangled with private pharmaceutical interests. Their close ties to the industry have led to the approval of insufficiently tested vaccines, the medicalization of normal childhood behaviors, and the delivery of subpar healthcare—all at a staggering cost of $5 trillion annually.

Medical authorities insist that vaccines, even when administered in multiple doses on a single day, are safe and do not cause chronic health problems. They claim that vaccine ingredients are either harmless or present in amounts too small to pose any risk. Any attempt to challenge these assertions is met with ridicule. Despite a sharp rise in childhood neurological disorders, there has been no significant push for reform or independent long-term safety studies on the effects of vaccines.

For decades, concerns about vaccine safety have not only come from parents and advocacy groups but also from government investigations. A three-year congressional investigation led by Rep. Dan Burton strongly criticized the CDC, FDA, and HHS for their failure to conduct proper vaccine safety studies. The committee found that federal agencies systematically downplayed risks, ignored growing evidence of vaccine-related neurological disorders, and relied on poorly designed epidemiological studies rather than clinical research. The report also exposed the failure of vaccine manufacturers to conduct adequate safety testing, highlighting decades of negligence. Despite these damning conclusions, little has changed, and concerns about vaccine safety remain unaddressed. While thimerosal has been largely removed from childhood vaccines, it remains in some flu shots and multi-dose vials, and broader concerns about vaccine ingredients and neurological damage continue to grow.

One of the most alarming revelations came from the secretive 2000 Simpsonwood meeting, where top CDC officials and vaccine industry representatives discussed an internal study linking thimerosal exposure to increased risks of tics, ADHD, speech delays, and developmental disorders. Instead of alerting the public, the attendees decided to suppress the findings and rework the data to obscure any association. This manipulation, later exposed by Robert Kennedy Jr. through a Freedom of Information Act request, exemplifies the CDC’s ongoing pattern of data suppression and scientific misconduct when vaccine safety is called into question. The congressional committee later confirmed that many participants in the vaccine debate “allowed their standards to be dictated by their desire to disprove an unpleasant theory.” Rather than conducting thorough biological studies to assess vaccine safety, federal agencies have deflected scrutiny by blaming autism and other neurological conditions on genetic factors, despite a lack of conclusive evidence supporting this theory.

Today’s CDC childhood immunization schedule recommends over 27 vaccines by the age of two, with some visits involving up to six shots at once. Parents are expected to trust that these vaccines are rigorously tested and proven safe. However, a review of hundreds of toxicology and immunology studies fails to reveal a gold standard of long-term, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials proving vaccine safety. There is also no comprehensive epidemiological study comparing the long-term health outcomes of fully vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. Without this research, public health officials rely on inconclusive data, which is shaped more by policy than by science.

Humans possess unique biochemical makeups that make them more or less susceptible to toxins. While one child may experience minor effects from environmental toxins, another may develop autoimmune disorders, learning disabilities, or neurological impairments. Vaccine safety cannot be proven simply by stating that not every vaccinated child has autism. Given the dramatic rise in autoimmune diseases, food allergies, encephalitis, and conditions like Crohn’s disease, it is imperative to investigate environmental toxins’ role in childhood health. Independent research suggests that ingredients in vaccines, even in small amounts, may contribute to these illnesses, particularly as the number of required vaccines continues to grow.

Ironically, the U.S. government’s own Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) has awarded settlements to families whose children developed autism-like symptoms following vaccination. High-profile cases such as Hannah Poling, who developed ASD after receiving nine vaccines in one day, Ryan Mojabi, whose vaccines caused severe brain inflammation, and Bailey Banks, who suffered vaccine-induced brain inflammation leading to developmental delays, demonstrate that vaccine injury can, in some cases, result in autism spectrum disorders. A broader analysis of VICP cases revealed that 83 children with autism were compensated for vaccine-related brain injuries, primarily involving encephalopathy or seizure disorders with developmental regression. These cases contradict federal health agencies’ claims that no connection between vaccines and autism has ever been recognized.

The National Library of Medicine lists over 3,000 studies on aluminum’s toxicity to human biochemistry. Its dangers have been known for over a century. Early FDA director Dr. Harvey Wiley resigned in protest over aluminum’s commercial use in food canning as early as 1912. Today, aluminum compounds, such as aluminum hydroxide and aluminum phosphate, are found in many vaccines, including hepatitis A and B, DTP, Hib, Pneumococcus, and the HPV vaccine (Gardasil).

In the 1980s, a fully vaccinated child would have received 1,250 mcg of aluminum by adulthood. Today, that number has risen to over 4,900 mcg, a nearly fourfold increase. Aluminum exposure is further compounded by its presence in municipal drinking water due to aluminum sulfate used in purification. A 1997 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that premature infants receiving aluminum-containing intravenous feeding solutions developed learning problems at a significantly higher rate than those who received aluminum-free solutions.

Dr. James Lyons-Weiler at the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge has criticized vaccine aluminum levels, pointing out that dosage guidelines are based on immune response rather than body weight safety. Alarmingly, aluminum exposure standards for children are based on dietary intake studies in rodents rather than human infants. He notes that on Day 1 of life, newborns receive 17 times more aluminum than would be permitted if doses were adjusted per body weight.

Despite these findings, federal agencies continue to dismiss concerns over aluminum toxicity in vaccines. The refusal to conduct comprehensive long-term safety studies, coupled with regulatory agencies’ deep entanglement with the pharmaceutical industry, has led to a public health crisis. The growing prevalence of neurological and autoimmune disorders in children demands urgent, unbiased investigation into environmental and vaccine-related factors. Until federal health agencies commit to transparency and rigorous scientific inquiry, parents will be left to navigate vaccine safety decisions without the full picture of potential risks.

Christopher Exley at Keele University analyzed brain tissue from children and teenagers diagnosed with ASD and found consistently high aluminum levels, among the highest recorded in human brain tissue. The aluminum was concentrated in inflammatory non-neuronal cells across various brain regions, supporting its role in ASD neuropathology. In a systematic review of 59 studies, Exley found significant associations between aluminum, cadmium, mercury, and ASD, further underscoring aluminum’s neurotoxic impact. His research strongly advocates for reducing vaccine-derived aluminum exposure in pregnant women and children to help mitigate the rise in autism.

Despite the CDC’s consistent denials, researchers at Imperial College London found a significant correlation between rising ASD rates and increased vaccination. Their 2017 study in Metabolic Brain Disease showed that a 1% increase in vaccination rates correlated with 680 additional ASD cases, raising urgent concerns over vaccine components as environmental triggers.

CDC whistleblower Dr. William Thompson provided thousands of pages of internal research revealing a cover-up of vaccine-autism links. His documents proved the CDC had prior knowledge that African American boys under 36 months had a significantly higher autism risk following the MMR vaccineand that neurological tics—indicators of brain disturbances—were linked to thimerosal-containing vaccines like the flu shot. Yet, instead of acknowledging this risk, federal agencies buried, in fact shredded, the findings, ensuring that vaccine safety concerns were dismissed as conspiracy theories rather than investigated as public health imperatives.

The official denial of a vaccine-autism connection has become entrenched dogma, unsupported by a single gold-standard study definitively disproving such a link. Meanwhile, the health of American children continues to decline, ranking among the worst in the developed world. Neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and ADHD are at crisis levels, yet federal agencies remain unwilling to conduct the comprehensive safety studies that could expose the full impact of mass vaccination on childhood health.

Now, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services, a long-overdue reckoning may finally be at hand. Unlike his predecessors, Kennedy is an advocate for transparency and accountability. If pursued earnestly, Kennedy’s leadership could potentially reshape public health policies and exposing the truth about vaccines’ role in the rise of neurological disorders, including autism. The question now is: Will the truth finally be allowed to come to light?

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Do Vaccines Cause Autism? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The X account of one Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10) comments on the ills of immigration. He refers to his homeland of the United Kingdom. (emphasis added)

I look at what uncontrolled mass immigration has done to our country, and I just get so very depressed.

It’s THE root cause of almost every issue.

Put simply, there are far too many low-skilled migrants who take FAR more than they give.

That’s an awkward, but undeniable fact.

Mr. Lowe makes a great point about immigration being problematic. Massive migration changes the character of a place. The things one likes about America are unlikely to exist there if one replaces the people there with let’s say, the people of rural Uganda or the people of downtown Beijing.

Immigration Has Led To Some Vile Things In America

Borderless immigration is not a tool of freedom. It is a weapon the globalist and Marxist alike can use to destroy communities, families, lives, cultures, languages, and countries in ways that make a local population easier to control.

Immigration has come to be used as a tool to bring death and destruction upon a place. All but the most savvy political observers 1.) do not see that, 2.) refuse to see that, 3,) and/or refuse to comment on that detail. I entirely appreciate that Mr. Lowe places a high level of importance on stopping immigration as we are presently seeing it take place.

He also, however, retains the air of a central planner — one who knows the exact right numbers to use, one who thinks there is probably some perfect number that will make societal ills go away. And if we tweak that number just enough, everything will work out.

Who could possibly disagree with his suggestion that there is a moderate path that will lead to wiser immigration policy?

I do.

It is hardly about immigration. It is about artificially created incentives to immigration. It is about getting the right incentive to remove a person (a would-be immigrant) from the place he is needed and wanted and transplanting him to a different place where he is not needed and not wanted and to do so with massive incentives meant to distort reality for all people involved.

Seldom talked about, great ill is created for immigrants in the process of immigration. This detail is often overlooked. Seldom is the first generation anything but a massive loss for the immigrant family. The tremendous downside to leaving one’s homeland and heading west is seldom considered rationally in our era of relatively easy global travel.

Despite all this, there are far more important fundamental concerns that need addressing when speaking about societal ills.

There at two great ills that have most terrorized Western culture and America. When they are ignored you are dealing with cowardice or lack of understanding. Neither are desirable in a trusted figure. I would caution against aligning yourself closely with anyone who does not speak often and openly of these two ills.

Central Banking Impoverishes A Land — Both Spiritually and Materially

Guido Hulsmann in his book The Ethics of Money Production paints a picture of the vast moral harm caused to a society that welcomes a state-sanctioned monopoly on money creation. This includes tyranny, war, the debt burden of a society, moral hazard, business cycles, hyperinflation, regulation, and all manner of other perversion of a individual values and societal standards take place. The family has been replaced with the welfare state.

Do you hate tranny reading time for children? Roman Catholic Jose and Maria and their eight kids coming across the border from the rural hinterlands to the south are not the source of the problem. However, the unlimited funding of the Federal Reserve Bank is, as it provides limitless resources for the most perverse pet projects of politicians and bureaucrats alike. The easy money policy that leave a culture unoccupied and wealthy lends itself to it. The inflationary policy that perverts the idea of time preference does as well. While Jose and Maria and their eight children cannot be blamed for that, a generation from now, America may have led their children down that same perverse path.

On that concept of time preference, Ludwig von Mises writes that the effects of inflation are “especially strong among the youth. They learn to live in the present and scorn those who try to teach them ‘old-fashioned morality and thrift.’ Inflation thereby encourages a mentality of immediate gratification that is plainly at variance with the discipline and eternal perspective required to exercise principles of biblical stewardship — such as long-term investment for the benefit of future generations.”

The US central bank is the greatest pariah institution on American life. This is especially the case with the status of the Federal Reserve Note as world reserve currency, which can seemingly endlessly export inflation. It gives it vast resources to destroy American culture. The great cultural and spiritual harm done through this institution dwarfs the economic harm done by this institution.

Divorce From God Impoverishes A Land

More fundamentally problematic for a land than central banking is a Christian country that has ceased to be Christian. Central banking is not at the heart of all evil in a place. Turning away from God is at the heart of all evil in a place.

David Aikman, former Beijing Bureau Chief for Time Magazine starts his book Jesus in Beijing with this insightful quote that hits at the heart of something too few Westerners and too few Americans understand. Aikman refers to it as “an enthusiastic observation of Christianity by a member of China’s academic elite.” (emphasis added)

The eighteen American tourists visiting China weren’t expecting much from the evening’s scheduled lecture. They were already exhausted from a day of touring Beijing. But what the speaker had to say astonished them.

‘One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world,’ he said. ‘We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economics and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focussed on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.’

This was not coming from some ultra-conservative at a think tank in Orange County, California or from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. The was a scholar from China’s premier academic research institute, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, in 2002. Though CASS has had a reputation since its inception for gently pushing the envelope of acceptable areas of research in China, it is hardly a viper’s nest of liberal dissent.

In the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, Constantin Gutberlet defines materialism as “a philosophical system which regards matter as the only reality in the world, which undertakes to explain every event in the universe as resulting from the conditions and activity of matter, and which thus denies the existence of God and the soul.”

Some Chinese thinkers recognize Christianity as little more than a materialist shortcut that outperforms any materialist thinker. We could call it Christian materialism, which to rely on Gutberlet’s definition would be the opposite of Christianity. This Chinese professor’s thought process is a predictable thought process from a Marxist-influenced thinker. It is also a predictable thought process from a sober pragmatist of any political stripe.

Unfortunately, many in the West have been blinded to this thought process. The Bible can change a person for the better. Being around a Christian faith community can change a person for the better. Even going through the motions of worship can change a person for the better. I would rather have a Christian who seeks God for materialist reasons do so, rather than ignore the desire that God has to provide.

Christians of one thousand theological views will read this piece as will non-Christians. Please forgive my oversimplification of Christian views. There is power in the serving the Lord, that goes beyond the simple benefit that comes from mimicking the daily practices of Christians. Knowing Jesus is bigger than following some behaviors.

Not only have Americans stopped following those behaviors, but many have resolutely determined that they have no desire to know Jesus. I write this as a former atheist.

The Root Cause Of Everything Is Not Immigration

The root cause of everything is not immigration. Immigration is a symptom of a nation in tremendous moral decline.

Mass migration happens to a people who do not consider themselves made in the likeness of God (Genesis 1:26), who perhaps do not even consider God. Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:28) mean nothing to them, for they are now having tiny families (if at all) and being convinced of why a million migrants a month are a great thing to support the government social system upheld by theft. The radical Somalis that George Soros, the Lutheran church, and the Catholic church help enter America are a problem, but pointing to them as anything but a symptom misses that fact that they are not the source of any Western country’s problem.

Many social problems seem to accompany immigration: crime, strained safety net, cultural division, malfunctioning educational system, increased unemployment, deceased pay, strained communities. That so many social problems accompany immigration is not because of immigration. There are many interrelated symptoms of social decline that take place all at once.

Overcrowded classrooms and strained budgets are the norm in areas with high immigration rates. That is true. Hardly can such dynamics be considered the cause of a educational system that has been producing illiterates for decades.

Thousands of Amish communities in America educate their children in the Bible and end formal education after eighth grade. If you watch an Amish have a discussion with an “English,” the remaining decade of education that is common among the English is proven ridiculous. One sounds wise (the one with the eighth grade education), while one sounds like a fool (that one with the advanced degree).

America has divorced itself from wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). It has ceased to teach its children wisdom. 18 year olds exist who have less sense than 18 month olds. The sense has been educated out of them. The more time spent in school, the less wise a person becomes.

High immigration rates strain welfare budgets. Where there are high immigration rates, there is less welfare money available for native born hispanic, black, and white families. Hardly can immigration be deemed the key problem for a Great Society program that has been destructive to families since the 1960s, and a New Deal program that’s been destructive to communities since the 1930s.

You were born into a land of plenty, a land largely dedicated to God, a land full of prosperity and wisdom, and precisely because you have been fooled into distraction about so many topics, you are so prone to leave your descendants a far more economically impoverished land and a far more spiritually impoverished land. Immigration is one of those distractions.

The existence of the Federal Reserve Bank is the underlying political and governmental issue afflicting America. It touches all areas of government and culture. But even that requires a deeper dive, for a greater problem underlies it. The parting of ways from God is the all-encompassing, underlying issue afflicting America that is at the root of all societal problems we today face.

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“The left became hideously, ostentatiously, unapologetically corrupt (as ruling parties tend to do). They sold out bigtime and got bigtime rich. You want to know why none of them want to cut waste anymore? because they’re the ones stealing it.” — El Gato Malo on Substack

In my quiet backwater of the Hudson Valley, an early spring drives all creation violently. The peaceful sleep of winter ends in twitches and spasms. The ground breaks open like one big egg and all living things emerge: green shafts of the crocus, scuttling sowbugs, slithering snakes, sleek garlic shoots, ‘possums in the compost bucket, ticks are back on the cat’s face, the ice in the river cracks in frightening booms, hungry songbirds infest the bare roadside lilacs, tiny voices trill darkly in the woods, a lone early moth in its first rapture of flight meets the pitiless windshield.

You can feel it. The northern hemisphere of this planet shudders, rattles, and rolls into the most tumultuous spring in memory. Everything is in play, turning, turning, while forgotten consequence rises on vengeful wings like an aggrieved god of yore. Nothing will be as it was. A most wicked spell has been broken. What does it feel like to be able to think again?

Messrs Trump and Putin sincerely seek to end the age’s stupidest war in Europe’s dumbest country, while the European Union and its outlier Great Britain go ostentatiously more insane every week. They bethink themselves storybook conquerors out of some retrograde history written by gibbering globalists. Macron and Friedrich Merz propose a grand invasion of Russia, as if Napoleon and Hitler had never existed, and they aim to get it done on about three days’ worth of ammunition. You first, Emmanuel, Merz insists. Non, non, pas de tout, Macron demurs with a deep bow.

Keir Starmer, Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, and PM of an empire in late-stage sclerosis, does jumping jacks with pom-poms across the channel to cheer on France and Germany in their quixotic quest to conquer of Russia. “Go get’um lads!” he cries. Think of Sir Keir as a Monty Python archbishop as written by George Orwell under the direction of Franz Kafka — there’s what’s left of your jolly old England!

Meanwhile Ursula von der Leyen rehearses her part as the wannabe Joan of Arc in this political psychodrama. Her sweet grandmother’s face will smile placidly as the flames tickle her penitent’s robe. She was born for this. A million deracinated Congolese perform the twerk mazurka around her flaming pyre while the muezzins sing out the call to prayer from every minaret around Brussels. Her Hanoverian ancestors weep for Ursula through the mists of the centuries. Was Satan himself behind the contract she signed with Pfizer for as much as 4.6 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine at a cost of €71-billion? Where did the money come from and where exactly did it go, and what did Ursula finally have to show for it? The European Court of Auditors had a look at this tangled web and blew their lunches all over the rue Alcide De Gasperi in Luxembourg City. Snails, champignon, and shards of puff pastry on the ancient stone steps. A disgrace.

You are not compelled to understand all these occult machinations roiling Europe at the moment, except to see that the continent wants to turn itself into the world’s premiere slaughterhouse once again after a seventy-year hiatus from the exciting frolics of World War Two. Almost everyone who lived through that episode is dead now. The cultural memory has faded. Europe is sick of lollygagging in the café, nibbling effete palmier and tartelette. They apparently want to wade across the chilly Vistula River and race to the east, like berserkers, hacking off Slavic limbs and heads along the way.

No, it is not true that Donald Trump’s ancestors invented the trumpet, but shrill brassy notes resound all over America these days as his enemies ululate and rend their garments. Liz Warren is yelling from streetcorners like her head’s going to blow plumb off her shoulders. Randi Weingarten was keening on MSNBC like an oboe with a broken reed. The entire two month-long spectacle has been a musical extravaganza. The President and his sidekick, Elon, keep coming at the country’s resident blob-of-evil like pit-bulls on a pack of wild hogs. Shreds of bacon have been flying all over the Beltway. I could have told you years ago that the blob was mostly lard and little meat. Now you know. It’s a sight to behold for the ages.

Yet, strange things keep happening day by day. The Democratic Party’s main grifting engine, the USAID, was deconstructed weeks ago, yet we hear that just this week USAID workers were ordered to go back into their offices to shred all their documents. Did they have anything to hide, ya think?

Questions: 1) federal janitors pried the nameplate off the building back in February, and we must suppose that somebody also locked the joint up, or what?. 2.) How did these former USAID workers propose to get in the building and do their dirty-work? 3.) Why have we not heard that the FBI or the US Marshals Service was dispatched to prevent such a document shredding party?

I wouldn’t worry too much about those cheeky federal judges around the country declaring and ordering this-and-that on Mr. Trump’s campaign to fire federal workers and close down useless agencies. This is a last-gasp ultimate lawfare operation. Let’s assume that Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, Marc Elias, and associates of theirs are the ringmasters in that circus. They will eventually be indicted for all manner of lawbreaking, possibly up to treason. And the SCOTUS will eventually put a sharp end to the judges’ monkeyshines. Judges do not administer executive action out of the executive branch. And Guess what: lawfare is not law. It’s just dirty-fighting dressed up in abstruse ceremonial language.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Spring’s Frightful Awakening appeared first on LewRockwell.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) ordered a temporary halt to federal funding to the University of Maine System (UMS) over Democrat Gov. Janet Mills’ defiance of new federal rules conditioning such funds on reserving female-specific school athletic programs to actual women.

Last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring school athletic programs to limit female-specific teams to actual females in order to continue receiving Title IX funds.

Maine was thrust into the spotlight of the issue when Trump told Mills at a White House event, “you better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.” His Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights subsequently opened an investigation into Maine’s compliance with the administration’s take on Title IX, citing the case of a “transgender” pole vaulter who gained a competitive advantage by switching to the girls’ team.

Now, the Daily Caller reported that on March 10 USM received an email from USDA informing them, “(t)his pause is temporary in nature while USDA evaluates if it should take any follow-on actions related to prospective Title VI or Title IX violations. Please take any necessary actions to effectuate this direction from leadership. This pause will remain in effect until further notice.”

UMS maintains that its athletic programs are “in compliance with relevant State and Federal laws,” and that it has received no further update from USDA since communicating about the initial compliance review on February 26. USDA has not yet publicly commented on the situation.

Mandatory inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.

There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.

In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men (do) not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks,” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen (biological men) afforded by the (International Olympic Committee) guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”

Critics also argue that forcing girls to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, or changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives potential male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status.

Even the left-wing United Nations has acknowledged as much via an October 2024 report by Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem that found that more than 600 female athletes around the world have lost more than 890 medals to men in 29 sports as of March 2024. “To avoid the loss of a fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories of sport,” the report concluded.

This originally appeared on Lifesite News.

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President Trump’s argument for starting an international trade war is based on a socialistic-sounding plea for “fairness” and equality. Some foreign governments plunder their citizens with high tariff taxes on American imports, thereby forcing them to pay higher prices for those or competing domestic goods. The reason they are called “protective” tariffs is that they “protect” consumers from lower prices. When your foreign competitor is forced to pay a 50 percent tax on his products and you do not, you can increase your price by say, 40 percent and still underprice him. Politically connected corporations pocket this loot at the expense of their hapless, politically unorganized fellow citizens. Tariff taxes are legalized theft for the benefit of already-rich corporations and their unions (if they are unionized). They have never been anything more than yet another vote-buying scheme that empowers the politically powerful and screws the common consumer, clouded by phony rhetoric about patriotism and nationalism.

President Trump’s demand of “fairness” is as follows: Whatever tariff taxes foreign governments place on American imports, an equivalent tariff tax will be imposed on their imports into the U.S. It’s only fair, he says. This is his justification for higher – much higher – tariff taxes on imports into the U.S.

The end result of this will be an even larger degree of legalized theft as American consumers – and American corporations that use imported parts for their own manufactured products (i.e, American auto companies that import auto parts from Canada) are plundered with higher prices paid for the same (or worse quality) products. Political theft by tariff tax has always been a rob-Peter-to-pay Paul racket. How, then, is it “fair” to American consumers, automakers, and myriad other American businesses to be forced to pay higher prices? Of course it is not; it is quintessentially unfair.

There’s a saying in economics that a tax on imports is also a tax on exports. This is because if America’s foreign trading partners are impoverished by protectionist tariffs they will then have fewer dollars with which to purchase American goods in international trade, especially agricultural products. This will obviously harm American exporters and their employees and communities, This is also patently unfair. There is nothing more anti-populist than protectionist tariff taxes.

President Trump has repeatedly stated with great excitement that with his impending huge tariff tax increases “we,” meaning the federal government, are “going to take in A LOT of money.” Well now. Since when has it been the priority of the Trump administration to drain the pockets of American consumers and businesses with tariff taxes so that the federal bureaucracy can become even more enlarged and bloated than it already is. Isn’t that a flat contradiction of all of President Trump’s campaign promises, not to mention the professed goal of the DOGE?

The president can never resist boasting of his negotiating prowess and he obviously intends to use the threat of tariff taxes as his primary negotiating tool. If he really was a master negotiator who was genuinely interested in justice and fairness, he would propose the following deal to foreign governments: “We will eliminate all tariff taxes on your imports into the United States if you eliminate all tariff taxes on American imports into your country.” Just depriving the federal bureaucracy of all that tariff tax revenue alone makes this a far superior negotiating tactic than his Quixotic call for a 1930s-style international trade war.

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Click Here:

John Leake

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Writes Greg Privette:

Hi Lew,

Maybe Rep. Massie has done this already. I am not sure as I don’t follow any social media. If I were him I would just continually make the point to Trump, what is the purpose of all the DOGE efforts if you aren’t going to actually cut the budget?

The post Rep. Thomas Massie appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

Remember what Huxley said about overpopulation in third world countries and transhumanism?

Larry Fink, Bill Gates, Schwab, Kissinger, Gergen, Rockefeller, Soros, Bloomberg have all parroted these exact same talking points.

They are using Brave New World and Huxley’s warnings as a play book. There is no alternative explanation.

The post Transhumanism? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

Lew, it is literally EXACTLY what Huxley laid out in the 1958 Mike Wallace interview and in greater detail, the 1961 French interview. In that one, he told the journalist he was certain Brave New World had been used as a playbook.

We were right, though I never doubted it.

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The post Man Of The House – With Special Guest Rep.Thomas Massie! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks to the friend  who shared this. 

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Thanks, Andy Thomas.

James Perloff 

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Kevin Duffy writes:

… But Brandon Smith’s article, “Trade War: Tariffs Are Needed To Defeat Globalism But They Come With a Cost,” brought about a visceral reaction.

Smith claimed that “Austrian economists in their opposition to tariffs operate on the assumption that large corporations are ‘free market’ entities. They also assume that globalism is a product of free markets.”  Not true.  It’s actually an absurd parody of the true Austrian position.  We assume two parties voluntary exchange for mutual gain.  That’s it.

Consider the argument Smith is making: “It’s not a free market, therefore more government intervention is justified.”  Such thinking can only pave the way for endless interventions.

Btw, are Lululemon, Shake Shack, Crocs and Skechers horrible creatures of globalism or simply companies serving consumers and trying to make a buck?  These companies all do business in China, rewarding shareholders and Chinese consumers while creating interdependence between two countries that can’t seem to get along thanks to their governments (actually, thanks almost entirely to the U.S. government).  I call that heroic.  We should be thanking them, not subjecting them to the whims of a self-defeating trade war.

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This month marks the fifth anniversary of America’s dissent into Soviet-style totalitarian tyranny under the phony baloney guise of “fighting the COVID pandemic.”  In light of the fact that I never took any of the shots and only ever wore a mask in order to be allowed into the grocery store (until Governor DeSantis dropped that idiotic policy in September of 2020) I am amazed that I am still alive.

The post How is it Possible that I’m Still Alive? appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/lindustria-dellinformazione)

“Siamo governati, le nostre menti sono plasmate, i nostri gusti formati, le nostre idee suggerite, in gran parte da uomini di cui non abbiamo mai sentito parlare”, scrisse Edward Bernays. “Le persone accettano i fatti che giungono loro attraverso canali esistenti. Amano sentire delle cose nuove nei modi abituali. Non hanno né il tempo né la voglia di cercare fatti che non sono prontamente disponibili alle loro orecchie”.

Nella precedente esplorazione abbiamo esposto come la competenza istituzionale spesso mascheri il pensiero di gruppo piuttosto che la conoscenza. Ora tiriamo ancor più su il sipario per rivelare qualcosa di più fondamentale: il sofisticato meccanismo che crea questi esperti, mantiene la loro autorità e plasma non solo ciò che pensiamo, ma ciò che crediamo sia possibile pensare. Comprendere questo meccanismo è essenziale per chiunque cerchi di orientarsi nel panorama informativo odierno.

Questi meccanismi, un tempo oscuri, ora operano in bella vista. Dalle linee di politica pandemiche alle iniziative sul clima, dalla propaganda di guerra alle narrazioni economiche, stiamo assistendo a un coordinamento senza precedenti tra istituzioni, esperti e media, rendendo questa comprensione più cruciale che mai.

L'architettura della conformità

Nel 1852 l'America importò più di un semplice sistema educativo dalla Prussia: importò un modello per il condizionamento sociale. Il modello prussiano, progettato per produrre cittadini sottomessi e lavoratori docili, rimane il nostro fondamento. La sua struttura è stata creata esplicitamente per promuovere l'obbedienza all'autorità statale: test standardizzati, classi basate sull'età, rigidi orari governati da campanelle e, soprattutto, la formazione sistematica delle menti per accettare informazioni da fonti autorizzate senza fare domande. I prussiani capirono che regolamentare il modo in cui le persone imparano, plasma ciò che possono concepire. Addestrando i bambini a stare seduti in silenzio, seguire le istruzioni e memorizzare le informazioni ufficiali, crearono popolazioni che si sarebbero sottomesse istintivamente all'autorità istituzionale.

Horace Mann, che sostenne questo sistema in America, fu esplicito riguardo al suo scopo: “Una forma di governo repubblicana, senza intelligenza nel popolo, deve essere, su vasta scala, ciò che un manicomio, senza sovrintendente o custodi, sarebbe su piccola scala”. La sua missione non era l'istruzione, ma la standardizzazione, ovvero trasformare menti indipendenti in cittadini sottomessi.

Questo modello si diffuse a livello globale non perché fosse il modo migliore per istruire, ma perché era il modo più efficiente per plasmare la coscienza di massa. Visitate qualsiasi campus universitario oggi e il modello prussiano rimane inconfondibile, tutto camuffato da istruzione superiore. Le scuole odierne seguono ancora questo modello: premi per la conformità, punizioni per aver messo in discussione l'autorità e successo misurato dalla capacità di riprodurre informazioni ufficialmente sanzionate. Il genio non sta nella forza bruta, ma nel creare popolazioni che controllano i propri pensieri, persone talmente condizionate a sottomettersi all'autorità che scambiano la loro formazione per comportamento naturale.

Progettare la realtà sociale

Edward Bernays trasformò questa popolazione compiacente nel sogno di un addetto al marketing, sviluppando tecniche pionieristiche per far sì che i mercati razionali si comportassero in modo irrazionale. La sua campagna più famosa illustra la potenza di questo approccio: quando le aziende del tabacco vollero espandere il loro mercato alle donne negli anni '20, Bernays non si limitò a pubblicizzare le sigarette, ma le ribattezzò “Torce della libertà”, collegando il fumo all'emancipazione femminile. Facendo accendere sigarette alle giovani debuttanti durante la parata della domenica di Pasqua a New York City, trasformò un tabù sociale in un simbolo di liberazione. Questa campagna, sebbene incentrata su New York, ebbe risonanza in tutto il Paese, attingendo a movimenti culturali più ampi e preparando il terreno per l'adozione nazionale dei suoi metodi. Le sigarette in sé erano irrilevanti; stava vendendo l'idea confezionata come emancipazione.

L'intuizione di Bernays andò oltre la promozione del prodotto; comprese il potere di progettare l'accettazione sociale stessa. Collegando i prodotti a bisogni psicologici profondi e alle aspirazioni sociali, Bernays creò il modello per manipolare non solo ciò che le persone acquistano, ma anche ciò che ritengono accettabile pensare. Questa tecnica, avvolgendo i programmi istituzionali nel linguaggio della liberazione personale, è diventata il modello per l'ingegneria sociale moderna. Dalla ridefinizione della guerra come intervento umanitario al marketing della sorveglianza come sicurezza, i metodi di Bernays guidano ancora il modo in cui il potere plasma la percezione pubblica. Queste tecniche ora plasmano tutto, dalle risposte alle pandemie ai conflitti geopolitici, evolvendosi in quella che gli scienziati comportamentali e i consulenti politici oggi chiamano “teoria dei nudge”: sofisticate operazioni psicologiche che guidano il comportamento pubblico mantenendo l'illusione della libera scelta.

Il modello Rockefeller

La medicina Rockefeller dimostrò quanto un settore potesse essere infiltrato e rimodellato. Nel 1910 la relazione Flexner non solo eliminò la concorrenza, ma ridefinì anche ciò che costituiva una conoscenza medica legittima. Rockefeller sfruttò il suo impero petrolifero per conquistare l'industria farmaceutica, rendendosi conto che i sintetici a base di petrolio potevano sostituire le medicine naturali e creare un vasto mercato per i prodotti petroliferi. Per consolidare questa trasformazione, offrì massicci finanziamenti solo alle scuole di medicina che insegnavano medicina allopatica, trattando i sintomi con farmaci anziché affrontarne le cause profonde. Questo modello di medicina rivoluzionò la nostra comprensione del corpo umano: da un sistema di autoguarigione a una macchina chimica che richiedeva un intervento farmaceutico. Questo stesso manuale è stato da allora utilizzato in tutte le principali istituzioni:

• Controllare l'istruzione e le credenziali;

• Definire limiti accettabili del dibattito;

• Etichettare le alternative come pericolose o non scientifiche;

• Creare un inquadramento normativo;

• Controllare i finanziamenti per la ricerca e lo sviluppo.

Ad esempio, Pfizer ha fornito sovvenzioni sostanziali a istituzioni come Yale, finanziando programmi di ricerca e istruzione che rafforzano i modelli di trattamento incentrati sui farmaci. Allo stesso modo i finanziamenti federali presso le università della Ivy League modellano i programmi di ricerca, spesso allineando gli studi con le politiche e le narrazioni sostenute dal governo.

Questo modello ha trasformato praticamente ogni campo importante. In agricoltura aziende come Monsanto ora dominano gli istituti di ricerca che studiano la sicurezza alimentare, finanziano i propri regolatori e plasmano i programmi universitari. Nel campo dell'energia i finanziamenti istituzionali e le nomine accademiche marginalizzano sistematicamente la ricerca che mette in discussione le politiche climatiche, mentre gli interessi aziendali traggono profitto sia dai combustibili fossili che dalle soluzioni tecnologiche verdi, controllando entrambi i lati del dibattito. In psichiatria, le aziende farmaceutiche hanno ridefinito la salute mentale stessa, delegittimando approcci che vanno dalla nutrizione alla terapia della parola a favore di modelli basati sui farmaci.

Lo schema è coerente: prima catturare le istituzioni che generano conoscenza, poi quelle che la legittimano e infine quelle che la diffondono. Orchestrando questi tre livelli, creazione, autorizzazione e distribuzione, le prospettive alternative non devono essere censurate attivamente; diventano semplicemente “impensabili” all'interno del quadro ufficiale.

L'industria diventa digitale

La tecnologia non ci ha liberati da questa orchestrazione, l'ha perfezionata. Gli algoritmi curano bolle di realtà personalizzate mentre i guardiani delle informazioni impongono la conformità con punti di vista approvati. I sistemi automatizzati prevedono e prevengono il dissenso prima che si diffonda. A differenza della censura tradizionale, che blocca le informazioni, la cura algoritmica guida invisibilmente ciò che vediamo, creando cicli di credenze auto-rinforzanti che diventano sempre più difficili da interrompere.

L'importanza del flusso di informazioni senza restrizioni è diventata evidente quando X si è allontanato dalla censura, creando crepe nel sistema di controllo. Mentre permangono dubbi sulla libertà di raggiungere in modo genuino il pubblico rispetto alla libertà di parola, la trasformazione di questa piattaforma ha dimostrato quanto rapidamente le narrazioni ufficiali possano sgretolarsi quando le persone hanno accesso diretto alle informazioni e al dibattito aperto.

Aldous Huxley aveva previsto questa trasformazione quando aveva avvertito che “nell'era della tecnologia avanzata, è più probabile che la devastazione spirituale provenga da un nemico con un volto sorridente piuttosto che da uno il cui aspetto trasuda sospetto e odio”. Infatti le catene digitali odierne sono comode, sono avvolte nella praticità e nella personalizzazione. “La grande quantità di informazioni prodotte”, scrisse Huxley, “agisce per distrarre e sopraffare, rendendo la verità indistinguibile dalla falsità”.

Questa sottomissione volontaria alla tecnologia avrebbe affascinato Bernays. Come ha osservato in seguito Neil Postman: “Le persone arriveranno ad adorare le tecnologie che annullano le loro capacità di pensare”. La logica è chiara: la nostra cultura ha imparato a esternalizzare la cucina, le pulizie, la spesa e i trasporti, perché il pensiero non dovrebbe far parte di questa stessa tendenza? La rivoluzione digitale è diventata un paradiso di ingegneria sociale proprio perché rende la gabbia invisibile, persino confortevole.

I due pilastri: esperti e influencer

L'attuale sistema di orchestrazione della realtà opera attraverso una sofisticata partnership tra autorità istituzionali e influenza delle celebrità. Questa fusione ha raggiunto il suo apice durante il COVID-19, dove i presunti esperti hanno fornito le basi mentre le celebrità hanno amplificato il messaggio. I dottori sono diventati influencer sui social media, con i loro video su TikTok che esercitavano più influenza della ricerca tra pari, mentre esperti affermati che mettevano in discussione i protocolli ufficiali sono stati sistematicamente rimossi dalle piattaforme. Con l'Ucraina, attori e musicisti hanno fatto visite di alto profilo a Zelensky, mentre i miliardari nel mondo della tecnologia hanno promosso la narrativa ufficiale riguardo il conflitto. Durante le ultime elezioni è emerso lo stesso schema: artisti e influencer sono diventati sostenitori appassionati di candidati o linee di politica specifiche, sempre allineati con le posizioni istituzionali.

In un'epoca di attenzione ridotta e alfabetizzazione in calo, questa partnership diventa essenziale per l'influenza di massa. Mentre le istituzioni forniscono le basi intellettuali, pochi leggeranno i loro lunghi rapporti o documenti politici. Entrano in scena celebrità e influencer: traducono complessi dettami istituzionali in contenuti di intrattenimento per un pubblico formato su TikTok e Instagram. Questa non è solo la kardashianizzazione della cultura, è la fusione deliberata di intrattenimento e propaganda. Quando lo stesso influencer passa dai prodotti di bellezza alla promozione di interventi farmaceutici alla difesa di candidati politici, non sta solo condividendo opinioni, sta trasmettendo messaggi istituzionali attentamente elaborati e confezionati come intrattenimento.

La genialità di questo sistema risiede nella sua efficienza: mentre veniamo intrattenuti, veniamo anche programmati. Più la nostra capacità di attenzione si accorcia, più efficace diventa questo meccanismo di trasmissione. Le questioni complesse si riducono a frammenti sonori facilmente memorizzabili, le linee di politica istituzionali diventano hashtag di tendenza e i dibattiti seri si trasformano in momenti virali, il tutto mantenendo l'illusione di un discorso culturale organico.

Meccanismi di controllo moderno

Il sistema moderno mantiene l'influenza attraverso meccanismi interconnessi che creano una rete di potere senza soluzione di continuità. Gli algoritmi di content curation modellano le informazioni che incontriamo mentre la messaggistica coordinata crea l'illusione di un consenso spontaneo. I media sono di proprietà di aziende dipendenti da contratti governativi. Ad esempio, il Washington Post, di proprietà del fondatore di Amazon, Jeff Bezos, esemplifica questa connessione. Amazon Web Services (AWS) detiene diversi contratti governativi, tra cui un accordo da $10 miliardi con la National Security Agency (NSA) per servizi di cloud computing. Questi media sono regolamentati dalle agenzie a cui fanno riferimento e sono gestiti da giornalisti che hanno abbandonato il loro ruolo di controllori per diventare partner nella produzione della percezione pubblica.

La gestione delle informazioni odierna opera attraverso due distinti rami di applicazione: i tradizionali “esperti” nei media generalisti (spesso ex-agenti dell'intelligence) che modellano la percezione pubblica attraverso televisione e giornali e i “fact-checker” online, organizzazioni finanziate dalle stesse aziende tecnologiche, giganti farmaceutici e fondazioni che traggono vantaggio dalla direzione del dibattito pubblico. Durante il COVID-19 questo meccanismo è stato completamente esposto: quando gli scienziati della Great Barrington Declaration, tra cui il dott. Jay Bhattacharya della Stanford, esperto di politica sanitaria con esperienza di ricerca sulle malattie infettive, e il dott. Martin Kulldorff di Harvard, rinomato epidemiologo con decenni di esperienza nella sorveglianza delle malattie e nella sicurezza dei vaccini, hanno contestato i lockdown, la loro prospettiva è stata simultaneamente denunciata su importanti piattaforme e istituzioni accademiche. Nonostante le loro illustri carriere e posizioni in istituzioni d'élite, sono stati etichettati come “epidemiologi marginali” dai media generalisti e le loro stesse università ne hanno preso le distanze.

Lo schema era inequivocabile: nel giro di poche ore dalle principali pubblicazioni che pubblicavano articoli diffamatori, i social media avrebbero limitato la portata di suddetta Dichiarazione, i “fact-checker” l'avrebbero etichettata come fuorviante e gli esperti in TV sarebbero emersi per screditarla. Quando i medici hanno segnalato il successo di protocolli di trattamento precoci, i loro video sono stati rimossi da ogni piattaforma nel giro di poche ore. La testimonianza al Senato da parte di medici esperti è stata eliminata da YouTube. Quando i dati hanno mostrato rischi e calo di efficacia dei vaccini, il dibattito è stato sistematicamente soppresso. Le riviste mediche hanno ritirato articoli pubblicati da tempo su trattamenti alternativi. La risposta coordinata non riguardava solo la rimozione dei contenuti, ma anche l'insabbiamento delle narrazioni contrarie, la soppressione algoritmica e lo shadow ban sui social media. Persino i premi Nobel e gli inventori della tecnologia mRNA si sono ritrovati cancellati dal dibattito pubblico per aver messo in discussione l'ortodossia ufficiale.

Questo copione non era nuovo, lo avevamo già visto prima. Dopo l'11 settembre la sorveglianza è stata trasformata da qualcosa di sinistro in un simbolo di patriottismo.

L'opposizione alla guerra divenne “antipatriottica”, lo scetticismo verso le agenzie di intelligence divenne “complottismo” e le preoccupazioni sulla privacy divennero “avere qualcosa da nascondere”. Lo stesso schema si ripete ancora oggi: la crisi fornisce un pretesto, gli esperti istituzionali definiscono un dibattito accettabile, i media generalisti modellano la percezione e il dissenso diventa inaccettabile. Ciò che inizia come misure di emergenza diventa la norma, quindi permanente.

Il sistema non censura solo le informazioni, modella la percezione stessa. Coloro che si allineano con gli interessi istituzionali ricevono finanziamenti, pubblicità e piattaforme per plasmare l'opinione pubblica. Coloro che mettono in discussione l'ortodossia ufficiale, indipendentemente dalle loro credenziali o prove, si ritrovano sistematicamente esclusi dal dibattito. Questo meccanismo non determina solo cosa possono dire gli esperti, ma anche chi può essere considerato un esperto.

Il gatekeeping accademico determina quali domande possono essere poste, mentre le conseguenze professionali e sociali attendono coloro che escono dai limiti accettabili. La pressione finanziaria garantisce la conformità laddove i metodi più soft falliscono. Questa rete di influenza è così efficace proprio perché è invisibile a chi si trova al suo interno, come i pesci ignari dell'acqua in cui nuotano. La forma più potente di censura non è la soppressione di fatti specifici, ma la definizione dei limiti accettabili del dibattito. Come ha osservato Chomsky, il vero potere dei media moderni non risiede in ciò che ci dicono di pensare, ma in ciò che rendono inaccettabile mettere in discussione.

Il mondo sommerso

La vera misura del controllo non sta in ciò che fa notizia, ma in ciò che non vede mai la luce. Le decisioni della Federal Reserve che riguardano milioni di persone non vengono riportate, mentre gli scandali sulle celebrità dominano i titoli dei giornali. Gli interventi militari procedono senza controllo. Le scoperte scientifiche che sfidano paradigmi redditizi scompaiono nei buchi neri accademici. Quando storie identiche dominano ogni canale mentre eventi significativi vengono completamente ignorati, state guardando una realtà orchestrata ad hoc. Il sistema non vi dice solo cosa pensare, ma determina anche cosa entra nella vostra coscienza.

Capire come viene creata la nostra realtà è solo il primo passo. La vera sfida sta nello sviluppare gli strumenti per vedere chiaramente oltre un panorama progettato per oscurare la verità.

Liberarsi: oltre il consenso creato artificialmente

Per liberarsi dalla realtà artificiale non basta la consapevolezza: servono nuove competenze e pratiche. Il percorso inizia con il riconoscimento dei modelli: identificare messaggi coordinati tra le istituzioni, riconoscere quando punti di vista divergenti vengono sistematicamente soppressi e comprendere i più ampi sistemi di manipolazione in atto.

La convalida delle informazioni richiede di andare oltre la semplice fiducia nella fonte. Invece di chiedersi “Questa fonte è affidabile?”, dobbiamo chiederci “cui bono?”, ovvero chi ne trae vantaggio? Tracciando le connessioni tra denaro, potere e media, possiamo scoprire le strutture che governano la percezione pubblica. Non si tratta solo di scetticismo, ma di sviluppare una posizione informata e proattiva che riveli interessi nascosti.

Mentre i fact-checker e gli esperti interpretano la realtà per noi, l'accesso diretto al materiale originale, che si tratti di dichiarazioni pubbliche, documenti originali o video non modificati, aggira completamente questa inquadratura. Quando vediamo filmati grezzi di eventi, leggiamo studi scientifici reali, o esaminiamo citazioni originali nel contesto, la narrativa artificiale spesso crolla. Questo coinvolgimento diretto con fonti primarie, piuttosto che interpretazioni predigerite, è fondamentale per una comprensione indipendente.

Imparate a identificare quei momenti in cui le istituzioni sembrano esporre la propria cattiva condotta, ma in realtà controllano la narrazione di quella stessa esposizione. Quando fonti ufficiali “rivelano” un illecito, chiedetevi: quale storia più grande sta oscurando questa confessione? Quali confini del dibattito stabilisce questa “rivelazione”? Spesso la trasparenza apparente serve a mantenere un'opacità più profonda.

Come ha osservato Walter Lippmann: “La manipolazione consapevole e intelligente delle abitudini e delle opinioni organizzate delle masse è un elemento importante nella società democratica [...]. Sono loro che tirano i fili che controllano la mente pubblica”. Il nostro compito non è solo vedere questi fili, ma sviluppare le competenze per reciderli.

Costruire reti resilienti diventa fondamentale in questo ambiente. Non si tratta di creare camere di risonanza fatte di opinioni alternative, ma di stabilire canali diretti per la condivisione di informazioni e l'analisi collaborativa. Supportare la ricerca indipendente, proteggere le voci dissenzienti e condividere metodi di scoperta si dimostrano più preziosi della semplice condivisione di conclusioni.

La sovranità personale emerge attraverso la pratica consapevole. Liberarsi dalla dipendenza dalla fonte significa sviluppare la nostra capacità di analisi e comprensione. Ciò richiede di studiare modelli storici, riconoscere tecniche di manipolazione emotiva e tracciare come le narrazioni ufficiali si evolvono nel tempo. L'obiettivo non è diventare impermeabili all'influenza, ma impegnarsi con le informazioni in modo più consapevole.

Andare avanti richiede di comprendere che la ricerca della verità è una pratica piuttosto che una destinazione. L'obiettivo non è una conoscenza perfetta ma domande migliori; non una certezza completa ma una percezione più chiara. La libertà non deriva dal trovare fonti perfette ma dallo sviluppo della nostra capacità di discernimento.

La comunità crea resilienza quando è fondata su indagini condivise piuttosto che su convinzioni condivise.

L'abilità più cruciale non è sapere di chi fidarsi, ma imparare a pensare in modo indipendente pur rimanendo abbastanza umili da adattare la nostra comprensione man mano che emergono nuove informazioni. Il più grande atto di resistenza non è combattere entro i confini del discorso approvato, ma riscoprire la nostra capacità di vedere oltre. In un mondo di consenso artificiale, l'atto più rivoluzionario è rivendicare la nostra capacità di percepire.

Comprendere questi meccanismi non è motivo di disperazione, è una fonte di potere. Proprio come il sistema prussiano richiedeva la fede per funzionare, i sistemi di controllo odierni si basano sulla nostra partecipazione inconscia. Diventando consapevoli di questi meccanismi, iniziamo a spezzarne il potere. Il fatto stesso che questi sistemi richiedano una manutenzione così elaborata rivela la loro debolezza critica: dipendono interamente dalla nostra accettazione collettiva.

Quando un numero sufficiente di persone impara a vedere i fili, lo spettacolo di marionette perde la sua magia.

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

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“Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters… officials will use it to silence opposition broadly.”—Heather Cox Richardson, historian

You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.

You can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.

You can’t expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

There’s always a boomerang effect.

Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

Arresting political activists engaged in lawful, nonviolent protest activities is merely the shot across the bow.

The chilling of political speech and suppression of dissident voices are usually among the first signs that you’re in the midst of a hostile takeover by forces that are not friendly to freedom.

This is how it begins.

Consider that Mahmoud Khalil, an anti-war protester and recent graduate of Columbia University, was arrested on a Saturday night by ICE agents who appeared ignorant of his status as a legal U.S. resident and his rights thereof. That these very same ICE agents also threatened to arrest Mahmoud’s eight-months-pregnant wife, an American citizen, is also telling.

This does not seem to be a regime that respects the rights of the people.

Indeed, these ICE agents, who were “just following orders” from on high, showed no concern that the orders they had been given were trumped up, politically motivated and unconstitutional.

If this is indeed the first of many arrests to come, what’s next? Or more to the point, who’s next?

We are all at risk.

History shows that when governments claim the power to silence dissent—whether in the name of national security, border protection, or law and order—that power rarely remains limited. What starts as a crackdown on so-called “threats” quickly expands to include anyone who challenges those in power.

President Trump has made it clear that Mahmoud’s arrest is just “the first arrest of many to come.” He has openly stated his intent to target noncitizens who engage in activities he deems contrary to U.S. interests—an alarmingly vague standard that seems to change at his whim, the First Amendment be damned.

If history is any guide, the next targets will not just be immigrants or foreign-born activists. They will be American citizens who dare to speak out.

If you need further proof of Trump’s disregard for constitutional rights, look no further than his recent declaration that boycotting Tesla is illegal—a chilling statement that reveals his fundamental misunderstanding of both free speech and the rule of law.

For the record, there is nothing illegal about exercising one’s First Amendment right of speech, assembly, and protest in a nonviolent way to bring about social change by boycotting private businesses. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-0 in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982) that nonviolent boycotts are a form of political speech which are entitled to First Amendment protection.

The problem, unfortunately, when you’re dealing with a president who believes that he can do whatever he wants because he is the law is that anyone and anything can become a target.

Mahmoud is the test case.

As journalists Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine Rowley, and Maya Sulkin point out, Mahmoud’s arrest for being a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States” (note: he is not actually accused of breaking any laws) is being used as a blueprint for other arrests to come.

What this means is that anyone who dares to disagree with the government and its foreign policy and express that disagreement could be considered a threat to the country’s “national security interests.”

Yet the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

Indeed, the First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty. Certainly, if there is one freedom among the many spelled out in the Bill of Rights that is especially patriotic, it is the right to criticize the government.

Unfortunately, the Deep State doesn’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

Throughout history, U.S. presidents have used their power to suppress dissent. The Biden administration equated the spread of “misinformation” with terrorism. Trump called the press “the enemy of the people” and suggested protesting should be illegal. Obama expanded anti-protest laws and cracked down on whistleblowers. Bush’s Patriot Act made it a crime to support organizations the government deemed terrorist, even in lawful ways. This pattern stretches back centuries—FDR censored news after Pearl Harbor, Woodrow Wilson outlawed criticism of war efforts, and John Adams criminalized speaking against the government.

Regardless of party, those in power have repeatedly sought to limit free speech. What’s new is the growing willingness to criminalize political dissent under the guise of national security.

Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now, but Trump’s antagonism towards free speech is taking this hostility to new heights.

The government has a history of using crises—real or manufactured—to expand its power.

Once dissent is labeled a threat, it’s only a matter of time before laws meant for so-called extremists are used against ordinary citizens. Criticizing policy, protesting, or even refusing to conform could be enough to put someone on a watchlist.

We’ve seen this before.

The government has a long list of “suspicious” ideologies and behaviors it uses to justify surveillance and suppression. Today’s justification may be immigration; tomorrow, it could be any form of opposition.

This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

It’s just a matter of time.

It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

The groundwork has already been laid.

Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government could get you labeled as a terrorist.

After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.

Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.

This is not just about one administration or one set of policies. This is a broader pattern of governmental overreach that has been allowed to unfold, unchecked and unchallenged. And at the heart of this loss of freedom is a fundamental misunderstanding—or even a deliberate abandonment—of what sovereignty really means in America.

Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.

In other words, as the preamble to the Constitution states, in America, “we the people”—sovereign citizens—call the shots.

So, when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.

That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?

In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.

The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.”

This is how far our republic has fallen and how desensitized “we the people” have become to this constant undermining of our freedoms.

If we are to put an end to this steady slide into totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none, we must begin by refusing to allow the politics of fear to shackle us to a dictatorship.

President Trump wants us to believe that the menace we face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.

Don’t believe it. That argument has been tried before.

The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence and illegal immigration have all been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.

We are walking a dangerous path right now.

Political arrests. Harassment. Suppression of dissident voices. Retaliation. Detention centers for political prisoners.

These are a harbinger of what’s to come if the Trump administration carries through on its threats to crack down on any and all who exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech and protest.

We are being acclimated to bolder power grabs, acts of lawlessness, and a pattern of intimidation, harassment, and human rights violations by government officials. And yet, in the midst of this relentless erosion of our freedoms, the very concept of sovereignty—the foundational idea that the people, not the government, hold ultimate power—has been all but forgotten.

“Sovereignty” used to mean something fundamental in America: the idea that the government serves at the will of the people, that “we the people” are the rightful rulers of this land, and that no one, not even the president, is above the law. But today, that notion is scarcely discussed, as the government continues its unchecked expansion.

We have lost sight of the fact that our power is meant to restrain the government, not the other way around.

Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, derailed or desensitized.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the moment these acts of aggression becomes the new normal, authoritarianism won’t be a distant threat; it will be reality.

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

The post When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: For decades, mainstream financial commentators have dismissed gold as a “barbarous relic.” Federal Reserve officials and policymakers routinely downplay its importance, insisting that fiat currency and central banking make gold obsolete.

Yet, despite this public stance, the US government still holds one of the world’s largest gold reserves.

So, what’s really going on here? If gold is truly irrelevant, why does the government still treat it as a strategic asset?

Doug Casey: Governments hate gold because it’s a discipline on the amount of currency they can create. Gold is money. Governments can’t create it out of thin air. You might say that gold needs the government about as much as a fish needs a bicycle.

Gold is not a strategic asset. It shouldn’t be viewed as something to buy or sell, like land, copper, or a factory. You don’t buy or sell money; that’s almost a contradictory concept. Gold is money itself, although fiat currencies are treated as money in today’s world. Confusing gold with fiat currency is one of the terrible notions created by Keynesian economists. It’s allowed mainstream financial commentators to dismiss gold as a pet rock.

As you said, the Federal Reserve officials and policy makers routinely downplay the importance of gold. They believe that fiat currency and central banking have made gold obsolete. They’re 100% wrong.

Despite their theories and stated beliefs, governments around the world have been buying massive amounts of gold in recent years. They’re dumping dollars. For 25 years after World War II, the major asset of other central banks has been US dollars.

It made sense at the time because the dollars were convenient and guaranteed to be redeemed at $35 for an ounce of gold up to 1971. Now, however, the US government backs its dollars by nothing. Foreign governments can see that the US government is fiscally and monetarily totally out of control. They’ve seen the US arbitrarily confiscate assets, impose sanctions, and levy duties. They’re dumping dollars because it’s increasingly obvious they’re the unsecured liability of a bankrupt and unreliable government. They’re accumulating gold.

The only solution to today’s massive monetary problems is to go back to classical banking practices. What that means is gold and only gold is used as money. US Government debt should not be monetized. And fractional reserve banking has to be abolished.

There used to be a distinction between the two types of bank accounts—demand deposits (i.e., checking accounts) and time deposits (i.e., savings accounts). Banks have typically offered both, but they’re two totally separate and very different businesses.

With demand deposits, you pay the bank to store your gold securely. You have the right to withdraw it at a moment’s notice and write checks against it, making it simple to transfer it on the bank’s books to another person.

Time deposits are a totally different business. With these, you deposit money with the bank for X number of months. It must be for a fixed period of time to allow the bank to lend that money out for X number of months. The banks may pay you 3% and charge the borrower 7%, the 400 basis point difference covering overhead, risk of loss, and profit.

Today, however, there’s no longer any distinction between time and demand deposits. Banks lend demand deposits, which is a fraud. It’s as if you paid the Allied Van Company to store your furniture, and they then rented it to someone else.

Worse, when banks lend money today, it’s redeposited within the system. They lend it out again, it’s redeposited, they lend it out again, ad infinitum. It’s a giant daisy chain, an inverted pyramid of debt. It’s why banking is such a profitable business—until the inevitable happens. If any significant borrower goes bust, or if depositors want more than a minimum of cash, any given bank would be shown to be bankrupt.

That’s why Central Banks like the Fed are critical to maintaining the fraud. They stand ready to create fiat to maintain confidence in the system. And regulate commercial banks to keep them from abusing the system too badly.

Almost every bank in the world engages in fractional reserve practices. That practice puts them all in danger of bankruptcy. Sorry for the overly brief explanation. But the bottom line is that the entire system must be, and will be, reset.

International Man: Given the secrecy surrounding Fort Knox, do you think the US government still possesses the 261 million ounces of gold it claims to have?

Do you think the reluctance to conduct a full, independent audit is due to mismanagement, deception, or something more sinister?

Doug Casey: Chris Weber recently did an essay about that in his March 3 letter. His publication is one of my favorites; I suggest you subscribe.

You’ll see why I say that. In any event, go to weberglobal.net to get that letter, gratis. You should take advantage of a two-month trial for $60 as well.

In fact, there’s never been a formal audit of Ft Knox. I doubt that the US government has anything like 261 million ounces of gold that it says it owns. In fact, most of the gold in Fort Knox is not even in good delivery .999 form; it’s what we call coin melt.

The US government confiscated gold coins from the public in 1933. They were in wide circulation and everyday use. The government then melted them down—they’re 90% gold and 10% copper. There’s never been an actual audit of how much gold, of what purity, there is in Fort Knox. FWIW, the vault itself was inaugurated in 1936.

We don’t know who owns whatever gold there is in Ft Knox, ostensibly 147 million ounces, because any amount of it may have been hypothecated for who knows what reasons. For that matter, the same is true of the gold stored with the New York Fed, another 110 million ounces.

No one knows exactly how much there is, who owns what, or how much may have been loaned out. It impresses me as a dog’s breakfast. For many years, Ron Paul has fought to get an audit, but they’ve disregarded him.

Hopefully, DOGE will be the impetus to dig into it so we can find out exactly how much is there and exactly who owns it.

International Man: US citizens have virtually no financial privacy, facing severe penalties if they fail to disclose every detail of their financial lives to the government.

Why is financial disclosure a one-way street where citizens are forced to comply while the government operates behind closed doors?

Doug Casey: It’s naïve to believe that, just because some people call it “our democracy,” that we’re anything more than the capite censi—the “head count,” as the Romans termed the mob. The people who control the government, the Deep State, are the boss. I recognize that it’s very politically incorrect to say so, but the government is an entity onto itself with its own interests.

Even though America is unique in world history for having been founded on the principles of personal freedom and a strictly limited State, it’s degraded over time. That’s natural, I suppose; the Second Law of Thermodynamics operates in absolutely every sphere. But today, it’s a fiction, a myth, that citizens no longer democratically control the State. We’ve devolved into an unstable multicultural domestic empire. In fact, you’re a subject, a veritable serf—albeit one with a high standard of living.

At this point, the government is very much like The Wizard of Oz, hiding behind the curtain. The Wizard, you’ll recall, was not the friend of Dorothy and her companions.

International Man: President Trump recently stated, “We’re going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold is there.” If it isn’t, he warned, “we’re going to be very upset.”

What do you make of Trump’s comments? Do they signal genuine concern about US gold reserves, or are they just political posturing with no real intention of follow-through?

Doug Casey: If it’s true that something has happened to the gold, it will trigger a genuine earthquake which will echo around the world.

I’m afraid that if DOGE digs into the gold holdings in Fort Knox and the NY Fed, there won’t be anything near 261 million unhypothecated ounces of gold.

If that’s the case, it would create such an upset that I’m not sure they’d dare disclose it. It would overthrow the world’s financial system because it would show that no figures are reliable and that it’s all a sham. This is potentially a very big deal.

International Man: What are the investment implications of renewed scrutiny on US gold reserves—both in general and with the potential for a full audit of Fort Knox?

Doug Casey: As I’ve said many times before, at approximately $3,000, gold is reasonably valued relative to the historical cost of everything else—clothes, food, houses, cars. But because the world’s financial situation is so shaky at this point and gold is, in fact, the only financial asset that’s not simultaneously somebody else’s liability, it seems to me that you should continue buying gold. It’s much better to own gold coins than it is to own dollars, which are just the accounting fiction of an unsound bank.

As Matt Smith has pointed out recently—he explains all this in (LINK)—if gold was reinstituted as money, whether just between governments or in general society, it would probably have to be revalued at 25, 30, or $40,000 an ounce.

At this point, continue buying gold even at $3,000 an ounce. The general public is still totally uninterested in it. That’s going to change when panic breaks upon the economic world in the near future.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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I get into too many conversations with family and friends regarding the Ukraine war. Too many because they are so tiresome. Often my interlocutors base their opinions solely on facts learned from only CNN, BBC, etc. I ask, do you believe Zelensky that Ukraine has 1/10th the casualties of Russia when Russia has extreme advantages in air power, air defense, artillery, etc.? They tell me Russia can’t be trusted, they broke the Minsk accords. I ask them if they had heard the interviews of Merkle, Holland, and Poroshenko admitting that Ukraine broke the accords to rearm? On and on it goes.

Finally, if I am not frazzled, I come to the ultimate point of the discussion. What exactly is the strategy of Russia’s adversaries? Those brainiacs of the rules based order located in Washington, Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin, not to mention those northern countries that seem to be suffering from winter madness, have an idea. Because Ukraine has lost the war, the final denouement to occur in one day or one month or one year,  the next move in their 4D chess game to keep the conflict going is a particular idea. The idea is to get the US military into a direct conflict with Russia over Ukraine.

This idea is dumb. It is dumber than dumb. In fact, it is the dumbest idea ever conceived. In a display of an incredibly steep inverse relationship between arrogance and intelligence, they will pit the two countries with enough nuclear arms to totally destroy human civilization directly against each other. It takes a certain type of dimwit to argue that Putin would never use his enormous investment in nuclear weapons to protect what he considers vital to Russia, e.g., Crimea. And if not Putin, some oligarch much more prone to violence. He has said this directly. Any fool with even the most basic understanding of risk analysis would not do this. That is, to greatly increase the most dangerous event that could ever occur for an intermediate move to achieve the highly unlikely (and immoral) goal of ruling the world. Why not play hopscotch on an interstate highway at night wearing dark clothes.

You can listen to Pepe Escobar explain it all here.

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Postscript and Clarification: I originally wrote the following post in an ironic tone. Reviewing reader comments, I realize that I should have made this clearer. To clarify: I believe that Byron, Travis, Roosevelt, and Ambrose Bierce were all suffering from 19th century romantic nationalism. As Byron himself ultimately understood, his misadventure in Greece was comically absurd. Travis obviously should have ditched the Alamo and lived to fight another day with Houston. William Randolph Hearst produced the worst kind of jingoistic Yellow Journalism, and Teddy Roosevelt was being a ridiculous showman. The character Peyton Farquhar in “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” was a fool who hanged for it. The author of the story, Ambrose Bierce, “went to Mexico to die,” just like Fuentes wrote. Obviously, Americans have no real interest in who governs Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts. Please read my original post below in light of this clarification.

As a proud native Texan, my heart swelled with pride the first time I read William Barret Travis’s letter that he wrote from the Alamo Mission in San Antonio, addressed to “the People of Texas and All Americans in the World.”

Commandancy of the The Alamo

Bejar, Feby. 24th. 1836

To the People of Texas & All Americans in the World-

Fellow Citizens & compatriots-

I am besieged, by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna – I have sustained a continual Bombardment & cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man – The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken – I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls – I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch – The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country – Victory or Death.

William Barret Travis.

Lt. Col.comdt.

P. S. The Lord is on our side – When the enemy appeared in sight we had not three bushels of corn – We have since found in deserted houses 80 or 90 bushels and got into the walls 20 or 30 head of Beeves.

Travis

At the time Travis sent his letter, the commander-in-chief of the Texas Republican Army, Sam Houston, was negotiating a treaty with Cherokee Indians who inhabited the northeast region of the territory and was unable to respond in time with reinforcements.

When I was a kid visiting the Alamo for the first time, I wondered if, had I been of fighting age at the time, I would have gone to the Alamo to join Travis. He, a young man of 26, knew that his refusal to surrender meant certain death. Would I have been prepared to die for the Alamo to keep it out of the hands of the vainglorious Santa Anna?

On a recent visit to San Antonio, I was surprised by how desolate the downtown area was at night. I drifted over to the Hotel Menger for a drink at the bar where Teddy Roosevelt recruited local cowboys for his valiant expedition to liberate Cuba from the Spanish in 1898. I found the place strangely empty.

The following photo is of Teddy and his Rough Riders at the top of San Juan Hill, which they had just successfully stormed.

Teddy was inspired by the reporting from Cuba of William Randolph Hearst’s New York World. Hearst’s crack reporters told “horrific tales of female prisoners, executions, valiant rebels fighting, and starving women and children.” Hearst then blamed the Spanish for sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor without presenting any evidence. Indications that the vessel exploded from accidental fire in the coal bunker were ignored.

Going back in time, another great adventure was Lord Byron’s attempt to liberate Greece from Ottoman rule in 1824. Wikipedia provides a pretty good summary:

By the end of March 1824, the so-called “Byron brigade” of 30 philhellene officers and about 200 men had been formed, paid for entirely by Byron. Leadership of the Greek cause in the Roumeli region was divided between two rival leaders: a former Klepht (bandit), Odysseas Androutsos; and a wealthy Phanariot Prince, Alexandros Mavrokordatos. Byron used his prestige to attempt to persuade the two rival leaders to come together to focus on defeating the Ottomans..

At the same time, other leaders of the Greek factions like Petrobey Mavromichalis and Theodoros Kolokotronis wrote letters to Byron telling him to disregard all of the Roumeliot leaders and to come to their respective areas in the Peloponnese. This drove Byron to distraction; he complained that the Greeks were hopelessly disunited and spent more time feuding with each other than trying to win independence.

Byron’s friend Edward John Trelawny had aligned himself with Androutsos, who ruled Athens, and was now pressing for Byron to break with Mavrokordatos in favour of backing the rival Androutsos. Androutsos, having won over Trelawny to his cause, was now anxious to persuade Byron to put his wealth behind his claim to be the leader of Greece. Byron wrote with disgust about how one of the Greek captains, former Klepht Georgios Karaiskakis, attacked Missolonghi on 3 April 1824 with some 150 men supported by the Souliotes as he was unhappy with Mavrokordatos’s leadership, which led to a brief bout of inter-Greek fighting before Karaiskakis was chased away by 6 April.

While Greece was ultimately liberated from the Ottomans by the combined forces of Great Britain, Russia, and France, the “Byron brigade” achieved nothing and Byron died of a fever in Missolonghi at the age of thirty-six. The concluding lines of his poem about swimming across the Hellespont captured the spirit of his young and romantic death.

Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you!

He lost his labour, I my jest;

For he was drown’d, and I’ve the ague.

Another great story is that of the American writer Ambrose Bierce going to Mexico, perhaps to join Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army, in 1913. Especially stylish was the fact that Bierce was 71-years-old.

The adventure inspired Carlos Fuentes to write his novel The Old Gringo with its refrain, “The old gringo came to Mexico to die.” The pointless, romantic death of Peyton Farquhar in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” seemed to presage Bierce’s death 24 years later.

Read the Whole Article

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