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Republicans hold only slim majorities in Congress, particularly in the House.

Midterm elections typically shift control to the party not in the White House. Democrats need only a few more House seats to hinder President Trump’s final two years in office and will seek to impeach him daily until he leaves in January 2029.

Trump’s first month in office has been like a wrecking ball, disastrous for the entrenched ruling class and administrative state. The unavoidable chaos resulting from dismantling a massive bureaucracy, exacerbated by corporate media gaslighting, could tilt enough midterm votes to flip at least one house of Congress to the Democrats.

That’s the likely scenario, assuming Democrats present a compelling and attractive alternative agenda to MAGA and DOGE. Since Trump’s landslide (at least by modern standards) election in November 2024, Democrats have offered American voters nothing but hatred, petulance, and nastiness.

They aim only to obstruct and undermine his administration and supporters, resorting to the same inept and destructive policies that characterized President Joe Biden’s four years.

The Democrats’ behavior at Trump’s optimistic and forceful speech before a joint session of Congress last week leads one to conclude that they hate America.

Republicans stood and applauded many times. This was a president who accomplished more in a month than many of his predecessors achieved in years. This was a president who kept his campaign promises and more.

Instead, Democrats sat and sulked. Rep. Al Green’s initial churlish behavior resulted in his expulsion from the House chamber. Democrats displayed placards reading “Musk steals” or “false,” as if they were at an auction or a sporting event.

They could neither stand nor applaud Trump’s accomplishments, which include closing the border, identifying billions in government waste, fraud, and abuse, and a potential peace deal for Ukraine. Instead, they sat and mumbled, staring at their hands or their phones as Trump honored the families of fallen heroes and those killed by illegal aliens.

They found no joy in a child with brain cancer being named an honorary member of the U.S. Secret Service or in a teenager receiving an acceptance letter to West Point. While these scenes brought tears to many Americans’ eyes, the Democrats merely sat and smirked.

Yet they all “stand for Ukraine,” at least for endless war, not for peace and an end to the death and destruction of millions of young Ukrainians and Russians.

When not sitting and pouting, they dance and shadow-box in cringeworthy fashion, saying, “Choose your fighter.” Sorry, Dems, we chose our fighter last Nov. 5.

What does it mean when Democrats wear their pins and proclaim loudly on social media, “I stand with Ukraine” or “Slava Ukraini”?

Are they planning to provide their own funds to support Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his wartime efforts? Or do they expect others to contribute their money, thereby supporting “the lavish lifestyles of Ukrainian elites”?

Are they volunteering themselves, their children, or their grandchildren to take up arms in Ukraine as part of the security guarantees that Zelensky and the EU leadership insisted upon? Or do they expect other children to fight in the war? When EU President Ursula von der Leyen was asked if her children were in the military, she laughed and replied, “Nein, nein.“

Regardless of one’s stance on the Russia-Ukraine war and its origins, what will “Glory to Ukraine” mean in early 2025?

Did Russia invade Ukraine without provocation? Or has the West been provoking Russia since 1990, when U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would expand, “not one inch eastward,” if Gorbachev complied with Ronald Reagan’s demand to “tear down that wall”?

Here we are, three years into what seems like an endless war. Trump claims that America has spent $350 billion on it, while others suggest a lower figure. Regardless, it remains a significant sum for a country facing $2 trillion annual budget deficits.

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The post Democrats Stand for Ukraine but Sit for America appeared first on LewRockwell.

There they go again. The latest missive from the Convention of States (COS) echo chamber reeks of recycled rhetoric and shallow sloganeering, wrapped in a false piety toward the Constitution they purport to defend but so plainly misunderstand. Their tired attacks on the John Birch Society — the last line of principled defense against the gutting of our constitutional republic — are not only dishonest, but profoundly dangerous.

Let us dispense with their clumsy propaganda and expose the COS scheme for what it is: a Trojan horse dressed in constitutional garb, promising “reform” while preparing the kindling for a political inferno that could consume the Constitution entirely.

A Permanent Fix or a Permanent Fraud?

The article opens with a back-patting paean to the Trump administration’s limited steps toward trimming bureaucracy — as if temporary political appointments are a substitute for real constitutional fidelity. But then comes the COS bait-and-switch: “We need a Convention of States,” they say, “to make these reforms permanent.” What they mean, of course, is a permanent rewrite of the Constitution, conducted not by the Founding Fathers but by modern politicians, academics, and activists who possess neither the virtue nor the vision of the men who gave us the greatest charter of liberty ever conceived.

Let me say this plainly: There is nothing “constitutional” about using Article V to do what the Constitution never authorized — open itself to revision at the hands of ambitious reformers operating under the illusion of control.

The “Runaway Convention” Myth Myth

COS mouthpieces love to scoff at the phrase “runaway convention,” as if sneering makes it untrue. Their rebuttal hinges almost entirely on an article by Michael Farris — a man who would do well to remember that publishing in a law journal does not render one’s opinion scripture.

Farris claims that the 1787 convention wasn’t a runaway because the Confederation Congress didn’t technically call it. But this is sophistry. The undeniable fact — recorded by the framers themselves — is that the delegates exceeded their commissions, abandoned the Articles of Confederation, and drafted an entirely new system of government. Whether that was good or bad is beside the point; the fact of it is indisputable. To pretend otherwise is historical malpractice.

Farris and his fellow COS salesmen dismiss this reality because it inconveniently highlights the very danger Article V critics have warned of: A convention, once convened, cannot be constrained — not by theory, not by wishful thinking, and certainly not by Michael Farris’s footnotes.

“Just Proposing Amendments?” Don’t Be Naive.

The COS crowd insists that because Article V says a convention “proposes amendments,” it cannot exceed that function. But that claim reveals a dangerous ignorance of constitutional history. Proposing amendments sounds harmless — until one remembers that every radical restructuring of government in history began with “mere amendments.” The 1787 Convention itself began as a mission to revise the Articles — and ended with a brand-new government. History laughs at those who believe they can uncap a volcano and control the lava.

Moreover, Article V does not prescribe the procedures, delegate selection, voting rules, or scope-enforcement mechanisms for such a convention. The COS movement is asking Americans to jump into constitutional quicksand based on speculative “assurances” and half-remembered precedents from 200 years ago.

On Interstate Convention Precedents: A Shell Game

The COS defenders point to “scores of historical state conventions” as proof that conventions stay within their limits. But this is sleight of hand. The state conventions of the past were not held under the auspices of Article V, and most importantly, none of them held the power to alter the national Constitution. The stakes were incomparable. To pretend these minor meetings are reliable templates for a 21st-century constitutional convention is to compare a campfire to an atomic bomb.

The Declaration of Independence: Misquoted or Misunderstood?

The COS team sneers at the JBS’s invocation of the Declaration’s affirmation of the people’s right to alter or abolish government. But their smug dismissal only reveals their unfamiliarity with the principles they claim to uphold. The Declaration affirms the inalienable right of a free people to remake their government — convention or no convention. That’s the very danger: Once you call a convention, you don’t control the participants; you don’t control the scope; you don’t control the outcome. The COS camp pretends otherwise because the truth would send shivers down the spine of any constitutionally literate American.

On Voting Rules and Undefined Terms: A Lawyer’s Ruse

The COS argument that “one state, one vote” will prevail simply because “it always has” is laughably naive. Article V says nothing about voting procedures, delegate limits, or enforcement. The Constitution does not define these terms because the Founders never intended for this path to be trodden lightly. To treat these gaping ambiguities as harmless is to play Russian roulette with our republican form of government.

Opening the Constitution Is Exactly What They’re Doing

The final and most absurd claim is that a convention wouldn’t “open the Constitution” or “rewrite” it. Nonsense. Once a convention convenes, there is no constitutional clause that prevents delegates from proposing sweeping rewrites, consolidations, or redefinitions of liberty. And if you doubt that, just read the proposals already floating in COS circles: term limits, federal marriage definitions, balanced budget amendments that constitutionalize debt ceilings, and more. That’s not reform. That’s reengineering.

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The post Convention of States: The False-hope Hucksters appeared first on LewRockwell.

A friend just sent me a New York Post report from 2022 introducing Europe’s “tough women leaders taking on Vladimir Putin,” replete with this illustration.

Ursula von der Leyen is the EU Commission President, Annalena Baerbock is the German Foreign Minister, Sanna Marin is the former Finnish Prime Minister, now a “strategic advisor” of the Tony Blair Institute. Kaja Kallas is the former Estonian Prime Minister and now Vice President of the European Commission.

The trouble with such “tough women,” it seems to me, is that may often be lulled into thinking that they have something to prove. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy remarked to a confidante that the trouble with General Curtis LeMay, who wanted to commence hostilities with the Russians, was that he allowed his decision-making to be governed by his fear of seeming weak.

I sometimes wonder if John Kennedy was the last man of any real sophistication to hold high office in the West. Since he was assassinated, we have, it seems to me, witnessed a steady decline of intellect in our leaders.

It reminds me of the great opening scene of Patrick O’Brian’s novel, HMS Surprise, set during the Napoleonic Wars. Sir Joseph Blain, the head of British naval intelligence, attends a meeting of the Admiralty and assesses the men who staff it.

[Sir Joseph] leant back in his chair, watching the speakers, assessing their abilities. Poor, on the whole; and the new First Lord was a fool, a mere politician. Sir Joseph had served under Chatham, Spencer, St Vincent and Melville, and this man made a pitiful figure beside them: they had had their failings, particularly Chatham, but not one would so have missed the point…

I once heard a story about a man whose inner ear was ruptured while big wave surfing on Maui, which induced chronic vertigo so severe that he was violently nauseated at all times. I sometimes think about this man’s unfathomable suffering, especially when I hear relatively inexperienced surfers express the desire to go tow-surfing on Jaws—one of the biggest waves in the world.

The less you know about something dangerous, the more you are at liberty to fantasize about it. I fear the “tough women leaders of Europe who wish to take on Vladimir Putin” know little about the reality of war.

I have heard that, in the run-up to the First World War, the German general staff carefully studied the character and the strategy of the American Union General, William Sherman. They found him a fascinating study, though it’s not clear that they learned much from him.

Because “the tough women of Europe” have apparently learned nothing from their own recent history, maybe they could learn something from William Sherman’s warning to Southern men in 1860 when he was at the Louisiana Seminary. In a conversation with David Boyd, one of his professors, about South Carolina’s secession, Sherman is reported to have said the following about the forthcoming war.

This country will be drenched in blood. God only knows how it will end. Perhaps the liberties of the whole country, of every section and every man will be destroyed. … Oh, it is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization. … You people speak so lightly of war. You don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing. I know you are a brave, fighting people, but for every day of actual fighting, there are months of marching, exposure and suffering. More men die in war from sickness than are killed in battle. At best war is a frightful loss of life and property, and worse still is the demoralization of the people.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Europe’s Female Leaders Want War appeared first on LewRockwell.

This isn’t just a temporary slowdown—it’s a broad-based economic breakdown. Here’s how we got here and why things are getting worse.

1. Labor Market Breakdown

The labor market has deteriorated significantly, contradicting official narratives of economic strength. Key indicators signal a deep freeze, if not an outright contraction.

• Declining Job Openings: Openings tumbled by over 400,000 in late 2024, falling to their lowest level since January 2021.
• Low Hiring Rates: Hiring remains subdued, with numbers well below healthy economic levels.
• Rising Layoffs & Attrition: Companies are avoiding outright firings but are cutting hours, clawing back bonuses, and offering voluntary buyouts (e.g., Nissan, Chevron).
• Declining Full-Time Employment: In February 2025 alone, full-time jobs plunged by 1.2 million while part-time employment rose, signaling weaker job stability.
• Decreasing Work Hours: The average workweek fell to 34.1 hours—levels not seen since the Great Recession.
• Consumer Fear of Job Losses: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s latest survey found rising anxiety over job security, leading to increased savings and reduced discretionary spending.

The “Forgot How to Grow” Economy

This labor market freeze aligns with the broader trend of companies and governments struggling to create sustainable economic growth beyond the sugar rush of stimulus.

2. The Stimulus Hangover & Demand Collapse

What looked like a post-pandemic economic recovery was a mirage fueled by artificial stimulus.

• COVID Stimulus Distorted Demand: Incomes surged by 20%, sending false signals to businesses, who overexpanded in response to what seemed like a demand boom.
• “Sugar Rush” Reversal: As stimulus dried up, consumers and businesses were left with inflated costs but no sustained demand to support higher prices.
• Artificially High Consumer Spending (2024 Tariff-Beating): Many purchases were front-loaded to avoid future price hikes, creating a temporary demand surge. The payback period has now arrived.
• Plunging Consumer Confidence: After the artificial highs of 2024, confidence tanked, hitting its lowest levels in over two years.
• Savings Rate Increasing: Households are pulling back spending and hoarding cash in anticipation of job losses.

3. Collapsing Corporate Earnings & Business Investment

Businesses miscalculated demand, and now they’re scrambling to cut costs.

• Massive Corporate Layoffs: Chevron announced job cuts affecting 15-20% of its workforce, citing collapsing demand.
• Automotive Sector in Crisis: Nissan, Bridgestone, and others are cutting shifts and offering buyouts as car inventories pile up.
• Tech & AI Bubble Cracking: The hype cycle for AI investments appears to be stalling, with companies failing to generate profits from heavy investments.
• No Risk-Taking in Banking: The world’s largest banks are hoarding safe assets and avoiding lending—essentially preparing for a downturn.

4. Market Red Flags: Credit, Bonds, and Recession Signals

Financial markets are finally waking up to the economic reality.

Bond Market

• Yields Collapsing: The 10-year Treasury yield fell below 4.2%, and the 2-year Treasury is near 3.9%, signaling severe growth fears.
• Steepening Yield Curve: Historically, this happens before a recession as investors anticipate rate cuts.
• Swap Spreads Compressing & Then Plunging: Wild swings suggest markets are pricing in economic distress.

Credit Market

• Credit Spreads at Dangerous Levels: Corporate bond spreads are at their lowest since 2007, just before the last financial crisis.
• Complacency Before the Crash: Investors are piling into risky debt despite warning signs.
• Lack of Bank Lending: Instead of lending, banks are buying government bonds—just like they did in past economic crises.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Economy in Crisis: How We Got Here and What’s Happening Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump’s announcement, which followed a dramatic live confrontation in the White House on Feb 28, 2025 with Ukrainian Prime Minister Vladimir Zelenskyy, that the American President would suspend all aid to Ukraine, caused shock waves around the world.

This was followed by President Trump’s declaration that the United States would no longer pay disproportionately for Europe’s defense in NATO, and that he would not defend his NATO allies if they did not pay their fair share. “‘”It’s common sense, right,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “If they don’t pay, I’m not going to defend them. No, I’m not going to defend them.”‘

The President’s supporters, especially those in the United States, cheered these moves. They object to what looks at times like a global shell game that enriches all who collude with it, with this collusion coming at the cost, as the President pointed out, of two thousand Russian and Ukrainian soldiers’ lives a week. These Americans see our refusal to overpay for our role in NATO as being a long-overdue stop to a multi-billion-dollar, decades-long gravy train that has sustained, since 1949, what are in fact, now, wealthy societies.

NATO’s founding origins in the misery, fear and rubble of post-World War II Europe, made sense at that time. How did the agreement start?

“The result of these extensive [1949] negotiations was the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949. In this agreement, the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom agreed to consider attack against one an attack against all, along with consultations about threats and defense matters. This collective defense arrangement only formally applied to attacks against the signatories that occurred in Europe or North America; it did not include conflicts in colonial territories. … Later in 1949, President Truman proposed a military assistance program, and the Mutual Defense Assistance Program passed the U.S. Congress in October, appropriating some $1.4 billion dollars for the purpose of building Western European defenses.”

But that was then.

The conditions that led us to consider it useful to join forces with Europe, and to agree for us to defend one another, still apply, in a world full of threats and anti-Western sentiment. But I’ll argue that the conditions that led the US to assume a disproportionate share of the financial burden, do not exist any longer, and that President Trump is right to course-correct on our disproportionate payments to Europe.

President Trump says that the US has spent $300-350 billion dollars on defense of Ukraine. The BBC argues that it is much less — $119.7 billion. But still, the outsize amount that America has provided is stunning to consider, in relation to Europe’s far more limited contributions. The BBC’s chart below shows that our $119.7 billion contrasts sharply with France’s $5.1 billion and the EU’s $51.3 billion. Add to this disparity the fact that the vast majority of Europe’s funds heading to Ukraine, arrive in the form of loans, not grants, as opposed to the outright wealth transfers made by the United States. In other words, in theory at least, the money with which Europe is parting, is not meant to be lost to European lender nations forever.

European elites, of course, see these moves on the part of President Trump very differently than do President Trump’s supporters, as does European media. European elites and press commentators are, at the very thought that the disproportionate US money spigot for NATO, and for Ukraine in particular, may be turned off, sustaining an existential crisis. I was in Europe as much of this started to play out, and the expressions of shock — but, more significantly, entitled shock — were audible everywhere one turned.

The reaction was not an adult one: “Well, that’s over; it’s time to figure out how we will manage without the outsized commitment of the United States.” One dis not even hear many mature, thoughtful arguments aimed at America, that this withdrawal is bad for all of us.

One heard, rather, a range of crude coping mechanisms from European thought leaders: they mocked the President and his decisions, or they expressed flustered outrage. Some actually suggest that the President acts as he does because Prime Minister Vladimir Putin “has something on him.” The hostility was unremitting.

I am not a psychologist, but this reaction is fascinating to me because it is so defensive, irrational and so, well, adolescent. These howls were emitted in the tone of people against whom a crime is being committed.

This reaction begs the question: why?

Did Europe think that the status quo — an unaccountable American money spigot, paying for the defense of Europe — would last forever? Did Europe’s elites and media imagine that American Presidents would change but that the policy related to our paying for European defense, one initiated under one US President decades ago, would stay the same throughout all time under every President?

Did the leaders of these nations, and their spokespeople and media, never have, or even imagine, a Plan B?

Some commentators slowly started dealing with the fact that Europe will have to step up in its own defense:

“The message is clear – an ‘electroshock’, as French President Emmanuel Macron called it: European countries will have to step up defence spending if they intend to protect themselves from Russian aggression.”

As European leaders come to terms with the new reality, the incredible military emasculation of Europe that has been allowed to develop during 75 years of reliance on the US for defense, grows painfully clear.

Britain has not quite three days’ worth of ammo: Chatham House.org, otherwise known as The Royal Institute of International Affairs, a UK foreign policy think tank, warns that Europe may simply be unable to close the gap opened by the withdrawal of the United States: “Lord Robertson’s review of UK defence is expected to make clear how strained British armed forces are; it is thought to say that the entire UK forces have less than three days’ worth of ammunition.” ChathamHouse.org warns that for Europe to defend itself without help from the US, the task would absorb almost all of the UK’s military power:

“It remains to be seen if Europe’s leaders can unify to shore up defence, at a time of political uncertainty in France and Germany. Even if they can, it is far from clear that will be enough to deter an aggressive, badly mauled Russia, absent the might of the United States.”

While Europe cries aloud at being forced to come up with funds if President Trump follows through on his threat — it’s not that Europe does not have the money at all. It is, rather, that in scraping together the funds, European nations would have to cut into their more politically popular expenditures, and also perhaps go into debt.

President Trump asked Europe to spend 5% of its GDP on defense, which would double the amount it currently spends:

“To [raise the money], European countries may have to consider loosening the fiscal rules that have governed their borrowing for more than a decade.

Beyond that, they face unpalatable political choices: whether to pare back welfare, health and pension benefits to pay for defence – a hard message to give to voters.

For the UK, the choice is similar. Politicians of all parties have been steadfast behind Ukraine. But now they have to work out how to step up defence spending. The government has pledged to commit 2.5 per cent of GDP, up from the current 2.3 per cent – but not said by when.”

The bottom line is that Europe and Britain have standards of living that are now higher than Americans,’ in many metrics. This is possible because European countries don’t spend 5% of their GDP on defense.

Europeans live better, in many ways, these days, than do Americans — we who pay for 40% of the defense spending around the world, though our population is just 4.22 of the total world’s population.

I learned while I was in Europe, that European elites’ sense of what America is, vis a vis Europe, is out of date, and unrealistic. It was clear to me that the emotional, the conceptual, relationship, between Europe and the US, is oddly frozen in time.

To Europe, in relation to America, it is always 1949.

John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn imagines a scenario in which lovers are frozen in time; in which time has stood still: “Forever wilt though love, and she be fair!” Historical consciousness seems to have frozen in a similar way for European-American relations. Forever, America is seen by the older nations as the bouncing, thoughtless, insanely wealthy young nation of the end of the war, and the start of the post-World War 2 period: America always will have so much more money than Europe, and Europe will always desperately need America’s money. Europe’s sense of America is stuck in a moment when Italy and Germany were reduced to rubble, and starving; when France was struggling with black-market scarcity; and when British cities were blown to bits and the population reduced to grey austerity.

Desperate Europeans postwar saw then, in film reels, Hollywood stars and starlets emerging in furs from limousines; they saw American tables laden with every kind of abundance; they saw golden sunbathers in Malibu and dashing skiiers in Maine; and endless Leavittowns, complete with ample one-parent incomes. They saw teenagers with rec rooms in basements, middle-class homes with swimming pools and two cars, and modern appliances in every kitchen. Add to that a Socialist influence on the continent, that combines a sense of entitlement to wealth redistribution: because America is so rich, therefore Europe is entitled to her funding in perpetuity.

Well, that sense of who Europe is vis a vis America, is just no longer accurate. President Trump, in my view, is trying to adjust our foreign policy to suit our actual fiscal and social reality in 2025, and Europe does not want to come along into the present.

America is broke. We can’t pay for our existing debt. We are no longer the robust, wealthy adolescent nation of the 1950s, in contrast to desperate, starveling late 1940s Europe. America’s middle class is not expanding, as in the postwar period, but contracting.

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The post Europe’s Own Wars appeared first on LewRockwell.

There are five compelling arguments for either scenario.

Ukraine just agreed to a month-long ceasefire after talks with the US in Jeddah, but it’s conditional on Russia agreeing to the same, which remains uncertain. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to pay his second trip to Moscow in just as many months later this week, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz plans to speak to Russian officials soon, while Trump said that he hopes to talk to Putin by Friday. All three will try to convince Putin to silence the guns. Here’s why he might not agree to do that:

———-

1. Russia Wants To Liberate All The Occupied Territories

Putin declared last June that he’d only agree to a ceasefire if Ukraine withdrew from the entirety of the four regions that voted to join Russia in September 2022 and publicly abandoned its plans to join NATO. That was shortly before Ukraine invaded Russia’s universally recognized Kursk Region. Agreeing to a ceasefire now with no guarantee that it’ll lead to the liberation of those five regions could result in the indefinite occupation of at least some of them if the front lines harden into a Korean-DMZ.

2. The Front Lines Might Soon Collapse To Russia’s Benefit

It’s obvious that one of the primary reasons why Ukraine agreed to a month-long ceasefire conditional on Russia agreeing to the same, apart from resuming the US’ previously cut military and intelligence aid, is to prevent the front lines from soon collapsing to Russia’s benefit. Aware of this, Russia might decide to carry on – perhaps advancing while negotiating additional terms to the proposed ceasefire – in order to take full advantage of this, thus raising the chances of speedily liberating all the occupied territories.

3. Russia Wants To Scare Away Western Peacekeepers

European peacekeepers might enter Ukraine during the month-long ceasefire, or some of their “mercenaries” who are already there might simply switch uniforms to then take on this role instead, which Russia already said would be absolutely unacceptable and make them legitimate targets. Keeping the conflict going might therefore scare them away from this and thus ensure that de facto NATO forces are kept as far away from Russia’s western border as possible.

4. Some Of The Russian Public Don’t Want A Ceasefire

A significant share of the Russian public, including veterans of the special operation, are thought to be against any ceasefire since they’d consider it to be stopping halfway instead of finishing the job after all the sacrifices that were paid to get this far. The authorities are sensitive to public opinion on the conflict, especially from veterans, so their opposition to this might be taken into consideration more than outside observers expect and could thus push Putin a lot closer to rejecting a ceasefire than most other factors.

5. Putin Might Really Believe That Trump Is Bluffing

And finally, the most decisive factor might be that Putin truly believes that Trump is bluffing about “escalating to de-escalate”, whether economically-financially through the strict enforcement of secondary sanctions against India, China, etc., and/or militarily by going all-in backing Ukraine. If that’s the case, then it follows that Putin only entertained negotiations to see whether he could achieve his maximum goals through diplomatic means, absent which he’d continue pursuing them militarily.

—–

There’s also the chance that Putin agrees to a ceasefire, which could be explained in the following ways:

1. Russia Wants To Avert Disproportionate Dependence On China

Trump’s tweet last Friday suggested that he plans strict secondary sanctions enforcement against India and China if Putin rejects a ceasefire, which could lead to the first complying and thus placing Russia in the position where it would become much more dependent on the second. Russia has thus far relied on India as its friendly counterbalance vis-a-vis China, but if Putin is informed that this might no longer be the case if Russia keeps fighting, then he might opt for peace to avoid becoming China’s junior partner.

2. It Also Wants To Beat China To The Chase With The “New Détente”

Putin wouldn’t just be rejecting a ceasefire, but also a “New Détente” with the US, which could lead to China replacing Russia in this arrangement if Trump travels to China next month like the latest reports claim and then negotiates a deal for ending their trade war. The recalibrated triangulation that might follow wouldn’t be in Russia’s interests, especially if the US gets China to comply with sanctions in order to coerce Russia into peace, so Putin might agree to a ceasefire in order to avert this scenario as well.

3. The “New Détente” Could Geopolitically Revolutionize The World

Putin might calculate that beating China to the chase with the “New Détente” and becoming more of a strategic partner to the US than the EU are worth pragmatic compromises on Ukraine since these two outcomes could geopolitically revolutionize the world to Russia’s grand strategic advantage. If that’s what he’s thinking, then he might defy popular expectations to boldly agree to a ceasefire, after which publicly financed media would explain the rationale to Russia’s supporters at home and abroad.

4. Additional (& Even Secret) Terms Might Be Attached To The Ceasefire

Building upon the above, additional (and even secret) terms might be attached to the ceasefire for guaranteeing that Western peacekeepers won’t enter Ukraine and that the US won’t maximally rearm it during that period, which Russia could get the US to agree to via creative resource diplomacy. Giving the US privileged access to Russian energy and minerals, especially the rare earth ones that it needs for competing with China, might be all that it takes for Trump to put the kibosh on those two aforesaid fears.

5. Putin Might Really Believe That Trump Is Serious

And finally, the most decisive factor might be that Putin truly believes that Trump is serious about “escalating to de-escalate”, in which case he might prefer not to risk a Cuban-like brinksmanship crisis that could hypothetically end with Russia compromising on much more than if it agreed to a ceasefire. Putin is a pragmatist who prefers managing tensions instead of exacerbating them, with the only recent exception being the decision to use the Oreshniks as explained here, so he might take Trump up on this.

———-

Everyone will soon find out whether or not Putin agrees to a ceasefire, but whichever decision he makes, the five reasons that were shared for each scenario would compellingly explain his choice. It’s anyone’s guess what he’ll do since each scenario’s arguments are persuasive and he knows that this is his most fateful decision since the special operation. Putin might therefore ask their respective Kremlin proponents to debate amongst themselves in front of him one last time before making up his mind.

This originally appeared on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

The post Will Putin Agree to a Ceasefire? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The divine liturgy accompanies us through the solar year as in a mirror, in which we see the history of the redemption summarized and represented.

The time of Advent takes us back to the expectation of the Messiah in the ancient law; the time of Christmas celebrates His most holy Incarnation; Holy Lent and Passiontide take us back to the times that preceded the Sacrifice of the Cross; the time of Easter celebrates the Resurrection and the Ascension of the Lord into heaven; the time of Pentecost retraces the earthly life of the Savior, His miracles, and His teachings; and at the end of the liturgical cycle – just as at its beginning – we are projected to the End Times, to the Universal Judgment, to the reward or condemnation of each and every person.

In a certain way the seasons of the year themselves accompany this sacred summary of salvation history, so that during the rigors of winter we understand the pains of the Child King born in a manger, and then as nature awakens during springtime we are able to see the homage of creation to the Lord who rises again and triumphs over death.

On Ash Wednesday, we entered into a time of penance and purification to prepare ourselves in body and spirit for this triumph of Our Lord: a real, historical triumph, witnessed by those who were its contemporaries, and celebrated by Christians of every age and place. To accompany us in this purification, the holy liturgy shows us what our fathers did in the Old Testament and points out to us the need to be ready in turn to face the great persecution of the End Times. Because one cannot fight without preparation, nor line up for a race without training for it.

In the Old Testament, the priests invoke mercy for the people: Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo! – “Spare your people, O Lord.” In the New Testament, it is Christ Himself, raised on the wood of the Cross, who intercedes for us: Forgive them, O Father! And together with Him, the Most Holy Virgin, all the saints, and the souls in purgatory also intercede before the throne of the divine majesty.

We ourselves, members of the communion of saints, offer our sacrifices to atone for our sins and those of our brothers and sisters. We pay a debt contracted with the infernal usurer: not with his false money, but with the purest gold of the Passion of Christ. That debt that each of us, in Adam, took on against the will of God and despite having received from Him true wealth, the most inestimable treasure.

This Holy Lent, which we begin by sprinkling ashes on our heads and fasting, occurs at a time of great social, political, and ecclesial upheavals. With each passing day new truths are coming to light, showing us an apostate society, a corrupt and perverted political class, and a sold-out and treacherous ecclesiastical hierarchy. Those whom we believed were taking care of the common good are now revealed as our enemies and the enemies of God.

Those whom we thought should defend the truth and proclaim the Gospel of Christ are now revealed as the followers of error and lies. And the authority that Our Lord, King and High Priest, has granted to our rulers – both civil and religious – has been used for the very opposite purpose of that for which He established it.

In the face of this global rebellion, and especially in the face of the betrayal of those who hold authority, we must return with greater conviction to clothing our souls in ashes and sackcloth, to prostrating ourselves before the Lord and repeating the cry of our fathers:

Flectamus iram vindicem, ploremus ante Judicem; clamemus ore supplici, dicamus omnes cernui: Parce, Domine; parce populo tuo: ne in æternum irascaris nobis. — “Let us appease the vengeful wrath, let us weep before the Judge; let us call upon Him with a supplicating voice, let us prostrate ourselves and say all together: Forgive, Lord, forgive Your people, and do not remain forever angry with us.”

However, precisely because of the enormity of our sins and the horror of the public sins of nations and of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, our penance must be accompanied – and preceded, I would say – by the proclamation of the truth against lies. Because the truth is of God; indeed, the truth is God; and lies are the cursed mark of Satan.

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For some time now, I’ve wanted to catalogue in one place all the ways that CDU Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz is screwing up. His strategic failures are really a thing to behold; I’ve never seen anybody screw up this frequently and this dramatically before. Yet I have delayed writing this post, above all because I wanted Merz to reach the end of his present streak and stop screwing up for a while. I wanted to have a complete unit – a full collection of screwups – to present to my readers for analysis. I now accept that this is never going to happen, and that the coming months and years are going to provide nothing but an unending parade of screwups, one after the other, each more inexplicable and baffling than the last. We must begin the tiresome work of trying to understand Merz’s screwing up now, because there will only ever be more of this.

As with all deeply rooted phenomena, it is hard to tell where the present parade of screwing up began. There was the lacklustre CDU election campaign and Merz’s ill-advised flirtations with the Greens that began last autumn, which cost the Union parties precious points in the polls. None of that looked auspicious, but the screwing up did not begin in earnest until January, in the wake of Aschaffenburg – when Merz decided to violate the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland. For the first time in history, the CDU, the CSU and the FDP voted with AfD in the Bundestag, first in a successful attempt to pass a meaningless if sternly worded anti-migration resolution, and then in a failed attempt to pass an actual piece of legislation that would take real steps to stem the influx of asylees from the developing world.

This manoeuvre had the real glimmerings of strategy, and so we would do well to ascribe it to Merz’s underlings rather than to Merz himself. It was only superficially an attempt to stop the tide of voter defections to the AfD. Above all, it was an effort to gain leverage over the Greens and the Social Democrats in any future coalition negotiations. Merz and his CDU, sobered by polls showing a left so weakened that they feared having to govern in a nightmare Kenya coalition with the SPD and the Greens both, wanted to send a clear message: “We’re not afraid to achieve parliamentary majorities with the AfD if you won’t go along with our programme.” Had Merz stuck to this line, he’d be in a far better place than he is today. Alas, the man chose to screw up instead. Spooked by yet another wave of leftist protests “against the right” – a “right” which now included not only the AfD but also the CDU and the CSU – Merz lost himself in a string of disavowals. A minority government with AfD support would be unthinkable, he and his lieutenants said. The Union parties would never work with the AfD, he and his lieutenants said.

In this way, Merz’s firewall gambit succeeded only in outraging and energising his future coalition partners, while achieving nothing for himself or his own party. A lot of CDU voters would like to see some measure of cooperation between the Union parties and the AfD, and for his constant never-again-with-the-AfD rhetoric Merz paid a price. The CDU underperformed the polls, crossing the finish line with a catastrophic 28.5% of the vote on 23 February. The Greens whom Merz had spent months courting – at the cost of alienating his own base! – emerged from the vote too weak to give his party a majority, and so the man was left to deal with the Social Democrats, newly radicalised not only by their own dim showing but also by Merz’s firewall trickery.

Thus it came to be that Merz ceded the high ground in negotiations to the SPD, the biggest losers in the 2025 German elections. That is itself remarkable, the kind of thing you could not be certain of achieving even if you tried. And yet it is only the beginning!

The second screwup, it turns out, was in the making for a long time. Merz and his CDU, you will remember, used the constitutionally-anchored German debt brake to destroy the traffic light in 2023. They brought suit with the constitutional court in Karlsruhe against Chancellor Scholz’s budgetary chicanery, and secured a ruling that effectively killed traffic light spending plans. It took a full year for the traffic light to finally die, but it was dead in spirit long before.

After Scholz’s government folded last November, Merz and his party capitalised on their win to present themselves as beacons of fiscal responsibility. They pledged to construct carefully prioritised budgets; the SPD and the Greens might want to max out government credit cards, but not the CDU. They were the farsighted and mature ones. Merz and his party said this over and over, and they even inscribed the message in their party programme – in bold! Meanwhile, behind the scenes, that had begun to wonder whether increasing deficit spending might not be such a bad idea after all. They could have raised this matter with their own voters; it would hardly have cost them more support than their flirtations with the Greens had done. But no, the one party with by far the greatest credibility problem in all of German politics – the party that felt itself forced to step across the firewall to demonstrate sincerity to voters, after decades of Merkelian reversals – decided that the best path would be to promise fiscal responsibility in public while plotting to overturn the debt brake in private.

This brings us to the sad spectacle of coalition negotiations with the SPD, a disgraced party empowered precisely by Merz’s powerful screwups. Now I am not a politician, and still less am I a clever negotiator, but even I know that the key point of all negotiations is to extract concessions from the other party – even if those concessions happen to be things that you secretly desire yourself. The SPD love deficit spending; they are a party that exists entirely to give their constituents money. In these negotiations, Merz ought to have presented his party’s secret plans to overhaul the debt brake and borrow billions of Euros as a concession – something the SPD could have in return for supporting a hard Union line against migration, for example.

Everything we know about these negotiations, however, suggests that Merz entered them determined to convince the SPD of the singular point on which they required no convincing. Perhaps encouraged by the false panic over the prospect of an American withdrawal from Europe, or perhaps just using the Trump freakout du jour as an opportunity, Merz gravely told the SPD that they would have to agree to emend the constitution and blow massive holes in the debt brake. This is like telling your young child over dinner that not only will he not be allowed his vegetables, but that he will also have to eat an extra slice of cake. The CDU and SPD eventually agreed on a 500 billion-Euro “special fund” for infrastructure, and also on a scheme to exempt hundreds of billions in defence spending from deficit limits. The SPD were happy to acquiesce, and they were even happy to write a few stern if broadly meaningless words on migration into their preliminary negotiation paper. Afterwards, leading SPD politician Boris Pistorius, who was involved in the negotiations, told his comrades not to worry – the SPD had succeeded in defanging Merz’s migration restrictionism entirely. All that remained of Merz’s ambitions was a “placebo,” Pistorius said – a few brave words that will have “no effect whatsoever.”

That is bad enough, but actually it is only the beginning of Merz’s screwup on this front, which is so thoroughly bizarre as to enjoy fractal qualities. By this I mean that the more you focus upon it, the more screwed up it appears. Overhauling the debt brake requires a two-thirds majority of the Bundestag, and in the new twenty-first Bundestag Die Linke (the Left Party) and the AfD will be in a position to block any proposed revisions. Thus Merz’s grand and profoundly idiotic plan was to use the old twentieth Bundestag – the one elected in 2021 – to create his “special fund” for infrastructure and to exempt 400 billion Euros to pour into our profoundly dysfunctional Bundeswehr. In the twentieth Bundestag, which still has a few weeks left to live, the AfD and Die Linke are too weak to cause problems.

This is the kind of plan that sounds tactically brilliant at first but that, upon a few seconds of reflection, ought to have revealed itself to all concerned as really, really stupid. There are reasons incipient German governments have never tried to do anything like this before. To begin with, you have to get all kinds of people who have been voted out of parliament to support your plan. Fifty CDU/CSU representatives in the current Bundestag, for example, are not returning. Why should they go along with this train wreck and make their final political act one of complicity in an unprecedented programme of voter deception? I still have yet to read a good explanation anywhere of how this is supposed to work.

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Columbia University student and legal US resident, Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested last week by federal agents. Although Khalil is a legal resident with a green card, and has not even been accused of any immigration-related infraction, he is being held at an immigration detention center.

The Trump administration has hinted that Khalil is guilty of some sort of non-specific “terrorist” activity, but Khalil has yet to be charged with any crime at all. Indeed, when House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked at a recent press conference what crime Khalil had committed, he couldn’t name one.

Rather, as the AP reported yesterday, “The Department of Homeland Security said Khalil was taken into custody as a result of Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.” So specific act of violence, theft, vandalism, or fraud is named.

So, here’s the situation: a legal resident of the United States, who has not been convicted of any crime, or even facing any charges, is now in a holding cell until government agents can come up with a “crime” that they think they can get past a federal judge.

Do Non-Citizens Have Constitutional Rights?

Whatever one may conclude in the recent debate over illegal aliens—and whether or not those people have a right of due process—no one disputes that Khalil is a legal resident. Moreover, he’s a green card holder and permanent resident, and not just a visa holder.

So, does Khalil have a legal right to due process in the United States? Can the administration simply pack him off to jail because the president wishes it?

The Trump administration and its supporters have long labored under the false notion that non-citizens do not have full legal rights under the US constitution. In this, they reflect the views of Dick Cheney and other politicians of the era of the “Global War on Terror” when the executive state was forever searching for new ways to justify spying on American citizens and expanding the police state.

This idea, however, has no grounding in text of the Bill of Rights or in the thinking of American “founders” influenced by Thomas Jefferson and other opponents of a strong central American state. David Cole writes in the Thomas Jefferson Law Review:

The Constitution does distinguish in some respects between the rights of citizens and noncitizens: the right not to be discriminatorily denied the vote and the right to run for federal elective office are expressly restricted to citizens. All other rights, however, are written without such a limitation. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment due process and equal protection guarantees extend to all “persons.” The rights attaching to criminal trials, including the right to a public trial, a trial by jury, the assistance of a lawyer, and the right to confront adverse witnesses, all apply to “the accused.” And both the First Amendment’s protections of political and religious freedoms and the Fourth Amendment’s protection of privacy and liberty apply to “the people.” The fact that the Framers chose to limit to citizens only the rights to vote and to run for federal office is one indication that they did not intend other constitutional rights to be so limited. The Court has repeatedly stated that “the Due Process Clause applies to all ‘persons’ within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent. …

When noncitizens, no matter what their status, are tried for crimes, they are entitled to all of the rights that attach to the criminal process, without any distinction based on their nationality. There are strong normative reasons for the uniform extension of these fundamental rights. As James Madison himself argued, those subject to the obligations of our legal system ought to be entitled to its protections.

This idea is clearly represented in the text of the Bill of Rights itself. Historian Wang Xi notes:

It is also important to note that the word “citizen” or “citizens” was not used at all in the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments added to the Constitution in 1791. The Bill of Rights used “people” five times and “person”/“persons” four times. The implication is clear: the fundamental rights to be protected here were not the rights to be granted to citizens but rights that had belonged to people before citizenship was created. These rights were beyond the reach of the (federal) government.

This last sentence is key and illustrates an important philosophical and ideological reason why the Bill of Rights rightly applies to all persons, and not only to citizens. Rights can only truly be “beyond the reach” of the federal government if they are assumed to not be voidable by the US government. If rights can be voided by revoking or denying citizenship, then federal government enjoys a big loophole when it comes to the Bill of Rights.

The early framers recognized this, and since the Bill of Rights was designed specifically by the anti-federalists to limit federal power, this disconnect between rights and citizenship helped ensure that the federal government could not do an end run around rights by simply declaring that a person was not a citizen. (Notably, in the early decades of the constitution, it was the states, not the federal government, that determined citizenship, further limiting federal power.)

This all makes perfect sense when we recognize that citizenship and natural rights are two completely different things. Citizenship is an administrative status that has no meaning outside of administrative government. “Rights,” understood as property rights or natural rights, pre-date the state and exist separate from it. True property rights are natural, and if rights are natural in their origin—i.e., people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”, to use Jefferson’s phrase—then rights cannot be denied based on one’s citizenship status.

The Current Hysteria Mirrors that behind the Alien and Sedition Acts

In the centuries since the Bill of Rights was written, however, the federal government has become far more powerful than it was in the 1790s. The federal government—usually motivated by fears over “insurrectionists” and foreign threats—has invented for itself many ways that it can get around the Bill of Rights.

Indeed, those who favored an expanded federal state almost immediately set to work giving the federal government new powers to be used against resident aliens. This can be seen in the Federalist Party’s support of the Alien and Sedition Acts during the John Adams administration. The Federalists routinely played up domestic fears about French revolutionary involvement in the United States, and used this as justification for new laws allowing the President vast new powers to deport alleged enemies of the state and to silence critics. This was justified on the idea that foreign agents were undermining the United States government somehow, and therefore resident aliens ought to be stripped of their natural rights. As a result, many enemies of the Adams regime were arrested and deported, Some were even imprisoned in the United States.

Fortunately, the Jeffersonians came to power in 1801 and allowed most of the provisions of the acts to expire. For decades afterward, the federal government remained extremely limited in its powers to deny property rights based on citizenship or claims of “insurrection.” It was not until the aftermath of the US Civil War, with newly invented political crimes like “sedition,” that the Federal government was again able to significantly expand its prosecutions of alleged foreign agents. These federal powers were again greatly expanded with the widespread xenophobia that prevailed during the two World Wars.

Property Rights versus the Fake “Crime” of Federally Defined Antisemitism

The current administration’s efforts to void property rights for non-citizens is especially troubling given the political nature of the alleged crimes of Khalil. On Monday, federal official claimed Khalil was arrested to enforce the White House’s new order on “antisemitism.” On Tuesday, however, officials were claiming that Khalil was arrested for some sort of terrorism because Khalil had facilitated the distribution of “pro-Hamas propaganda.”

Either way, it seems the federal government plans to charge Khalil with some vague antisemitism charge or with the “crime” of saying pro-Hamas things. It’s hard to imagine two “crimes” that are less permissible under an honest reading of the First Amendment.

First of all, the new “crime” of antisemitism, invented by the president’s recent executive order, is nothing more than the sort of “hate crime” law that Conservatives used to revile. The president’s order says that discriminating against Jews or engaging in crimes that target Jews are a special kind of crime. Conservatives used to mock this sort of thing and rightly so. First of all, if Jewish students on campuses have been physically assaulted or their property vandalized, then the people who commit those crimes should be prosecuted for assault and vandalism. Vandalism and assault are already illegal. Moreover, “discrimination” isn’t a real crime if it doesn’t involve some sort of physical violence, fraud, or theft. Not liking a person because he or she is a member of a certain group is illogical and distasteful, but it has never been an actual violation of property rights. Non-violent “discrimination” is simply another term for “free association.”

Specific threats against the safety of any person—whether Jewish or not—are already crimes. There is no need of a special antisemitism law. Of course, the administration knows that acts of violence and vandalism are already illegal. The real purpose of the executive order is to crack down on protests against the State of Israel and virtually everyone knows this. It is clear that Khalil’s real “crime” is criticizing the State of Israel, and Trump has said as much, singling out anti-Israel protests as the only sort of protest for targeting in his executive order. If Khalil had protested anything other than the State of Israel, he’d be a free man right now.

Nor is it a real crime—i.e., a violation of property rights—to say things in support of some alleged terrorist organization. The very idea of such a thing would have struck most conscientious Americans as despotic in the extreme throughout most of the nineteenth century.

For many supporters of the administration, the fact that federal agents have arrested Khalil is enough to establish his guilt and revoke his rights. No due process is necessary. And, apparently, its not even necessary that Khalil commit any actual crimes against person or property. It’s enough that he’s a person the administration doesn’t like. So deportation awaits.

The spirit of the Alien and Sedition acts is alive and well.

The post Do Non-Citizens Have Constitutional Rights? The Founding Fathers Thought So. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Told you so!

Donald Trump doesn’t give two hoots about the true agenda that might actually make America freer and more prosperous again. We are referring to the principles of—-

• peaceful commerce with every nation, entangling alliances with none.
• minimalist, solvent, constitutional government at home.
• sound money and market-driven interest rates and asset prices.
• maximum scope for personal liberty and free markets.
• decentralized, Federalist arrangements for any necessary functions of the state.

Now, if there is one politicians in all of the Washington Swamp besides Senator Rand Paul who stands four-square for these essential principles, it is Congressman Thomas Massie, also of Kentucky. In fact, Tom Massie is so steadfast, learned and consistent on these matters as to be the very living embodiment of libertarian principles on the great stage of national politics.

And yet, and yet. In the face of what is a hugely debatable issue with respect to the latest continuing resolution (CR) tabled by Speaker Johnson, which is another total capitulation to Washington spending as usual, the Donald has now unleashed a vicious, bully-boy attack on Rep. Massie.

But for crying out loud, Donald, Congressman Massie has actually read every line of this 110 page abomination and knows that it provides spending authority of $1.658 trillion, which is 47% more than Big Spender Obama’s last budget. It will virtually cancel every dime DOGE has allegedly saved.

And, besides, enough with the clownish ALL CAPS sloganeering already. Instead, how about you give Rep. Massie the apology he deserves.

Thank you to the House Freedom Caucus for just delivering a big blow to the Radical Left Democrats and their desire to raise Taxes and SHUT OUR COUNTRY DOWN! They hate America and all it stands for. That’s why they allowed MILLIONS of Criminals to invade our Nation. Sometimes it takes great courage to do the right thing. Congressman Thomas Massie, of beautiful Kentucky, is an automatic “NO” vote on just about everything, despite the fact that he has always voted for Continuing Resolutions in the past. HE SHOULD BE PRIMARIED, and I will lead the charge against him. He’s just another GRANDSTANDER, who’s too much trouble, and not worth the fight. He reminds me of Liz Chaney before her historic, record breaking fall (loss!). The people of Kentucky won’t stand for it, just watch. DO I HAVE ANY TAKERS??? Anyway, thank you again to the House Freedom Caucus for your very important vote. We need to buy some time in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. Unite and Win!!!

Based on the above rant, however, we are not sure what they put in the Donald’s orange juice this morning because it appears he was just getting cranked up when he took off after Rep. Massie. Since then he’s come out swinging against Canada, and ordered his Secy of Commerce to raise the tariff on steel and aluminum to 50% in response to a threat from the equally loud-mouthed premier of Ontario that Canada might tax electricity exports to the US.

Needless to say, the social media rant below conveying this intention was surely posted by the Donald himself. It is full of the ALL CAPS hyperbole, factual exaggerations and outright nonsense that are the trademark evidence of unfiltered conveyance straight from the Donald’s brain to the worldwide web.

The one good thing you can say here is that there is no staff intermediation, scripting or spinning in the bluster, blather and bile posted below. Indeed, after four long years of anonymous staff ventriloquists talking through Teleprompter Joe, it’s actually refreshing to know that what you get from the Donald is pure Trump-thought.

Unfortunately, what we also have is a classic case of Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates:

You never know what you are going to get!

And not just the good stuff like his order to stop the insanity in Ukraine or wondering out loud whether he could convene a summit with Putin and Xi aimed at a global agreement to cut defense spending by 50%. Or knocking the DEI, woke and Climate Change Scam out of the park like he did in his SOTU speech to Congress and the American people. That’s all marvelous!

Still, today’s social media eruption should be an off-setting cause for concern because it shows that on the large matter of global trade and the strategy for returning America to capitalist prosperity, the Donald is just as off-base, uninformed and ill-tempered, as he was this morning regarding Rep. Massie’s principled stand to vote “nay” on the CR.

Moreover, we are not just referring to the utter nonsense in the second column below about Canada as the 51st state. By now the Canucks are not remotely interested in the proposition, of course, but, more importantly, if Trump were even a lukewarm conservative, to say nothing of being semi-sane, he’d recognize that annexing Canada is not even a joke.

To the contrary, it’s an absolutely awful idea because the United States, like the EC, is already way too big to be governed honestly and effectively. That is to say, anyone truly worried about constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity today would be advocating for defunding, dismantling and devolution of the Leviathan on the Potomac, not vastly expanding the territory from which it can suck revenues and resources.

Moreover, annexation of Canada aside, the Donald’s madcap posting today shows that he is hopelessly ill-informed factually and also analytically out to lunch on the matter of global trade. In that arena, in fact, the very last thing he ought to be attacking—even as a wanna be protectionist—-is Canada.

After all, Canada was a party to the NAFTA free trade area, and now, by virtue of the Donald’s bigger and better USMCA arrangement after his phony redo of NAFTA in 2020, is even more blameless when it comes to the “unfair” trade file.

As we will show below, Canada actually has a lower tariff barrier to trade than the United States and most certainly is not remotely “ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS IN THE WORLD”.

Consider his point above about Canada’s anti-farmer tariffs, which he claims rise to 250% to 390% of various US dairy products.

Well, no, in 2024 Canada did not collect one single Canadian dollar or US dollar or even plug nickel of tariff revenue from US dairy exporters of the four leading dairy export products—fluid milk, butter, cheese and skim milk powder. That’s right, the tariff on US dairy exports of these four products was zero, nichts, nada and nothing, respectively.

And the reason for that lies in the so-called TRQs (tariff rate quota) that the Donald himself negotiated with the Canadians in the course of attaining his ballyhooed USMCA deal in 2020.

These TRQ arrangements, of course, are Rube Goldberg devices of the kind that anti-free market government bureaucrats love to tinker with, and the Donald’s were no exception. So what they negotiated was a “tariff free” amount of US dairy exports up to a specified quota level, after which the huge Canadian dairy tariffs the Donald referenced in his rant would become effective.

These TRQs, in turn, were to be phased in over six year—so as of 2024 we were almost there. Yet on the four leading dairy products listed in the table below, US exports did not reach the quota level in any of them. Therefore, no tariff was applied to nearly 71 million pounds of US dairy exports to Canada, meaning that the Donald was ranting this morning about a problem he had already fixed!

For instance, consider the largest category, which is fluid milk right off the cows’ teats: The Trump quota was 91.9 million pounds but US exports in 2024 amounted to only 34.7 million pounds or 37.7% of the allowable amount that can come in tariff-free. And in the case of cheese, the ratio was much closer at 95.6%, but still no tariff cigar; and so on for butter and skim milk powder, as well.

In all, the Donald’s own quota amounted to 136.9 pounds in 2024, but US exports only reached 70.5 million pounds or half of the quota on these four products. So the remaining headroom under the quota for Wisconsin or New York state dairy farmer supporters, as the case may be, is considerable.

2024 Application of Trump’s TRQ Deal To Four Leading US Dairy Exports to Canada

And yet, this isn’t even the half of it. As it happens, the average value of these US dairy exports in 2024 ranged between $0.50 per pound for fluid milk, to $1.20/lbs for SMP, $2.00/lbs for cheese and $2.50/lbs. for butter. The long and short of the math, therefore, is that America’s tariff-free dairy exports to Canada in these four categories amounted to $83.7 million in 2024, which, in the scheme of things, is not even a fly on old Bessy’s ass.

As it happens, during 2024 total US goods exports to Canada totaled $349 billion and goods imports from Canada were $413 billion, leaving a merchandise trade deficit of $63 billion. So the dairy piece of the picture is a mere pimple. The export figure for the four products analyzed above amounted to just 0.02% of total US exports to Canada.

Moreover, on the services side of the trade ledger it was the opposite. US exports of $90 billion exceeded services imports of $65 billion, thereby generating a surplus on services of +$25 billion. So the net deficit on the goods and services account of stuff flowing north and south across the border was a tiny $38 billion.

In other words, even if you think the trade surplus or deficit with any single country is the end all and be all of policy, which it surely isn’t, the US does not remotely have a “trade problem” with Canada. The actual shortfall or cash difference to the US amounted to just 2.7% of two-way trade in goods and services and just 0.1% of GDP.

Stated differently, total trade turnover in goods and services with Canada in 2024 amounted to $917 billion. That figure captures a huge flow of business activity north and south across the 5,525 mile border with Canada—the longest border in the world. And yet we have the Donald ranting about phantom dairy tariffs on a tiny $84 million chunk of dairy exports to Canada, which amounts to 0.01% of America’s trade flows with Canada.

And, yes, even when you add in branded dairy-based manufactures like yogurt, ice cream and whey products, which also have not been constrained by TRQs, total dairy related US exports to Canada of about $1.1 billion are still a tiny fraction of 1% of the aggregate trade turnover with America’s partner to the north.

Finally, the Donald’s bombast today about Canada was rooted in his huge misconception that unfair tariffs and other trade barriers abroad are the reason why we have massive trade deficits and have seen huge parts of America’s industrial base 0ff-shored along with the good jobs and middle class incomes which went with it.

So as highlighted in the Donald’s rant above, we have the familiar Trumpian claim that Canada is “ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS IN THE WORLD”.

Well, no, here are ten major categories of imports into Canada in 2023 and the applicable tariff rate on each category. Together they comprise Canada’s $559 billion of imports from all worldwide partners.

As is evident from the second column total at the bottom, Canada is the very opposite of a big time tariff collector. In fact, the average tariff on all products in 2023 was, well, 0.8%.

Table: 2023 Imports to Canada, Tariff Rates And Tariff Collections

Indeed, the above not only proves that the Donald is out to lunch on the matter, but also that he probably shouldn’t by throwing stones from a glass house. As we will amplify more fully later this week, the weighted average effective tariff on imports into the USA is considerably higher at 2.0%.

So were the Donald to actually impose some kind of reciprocal tariff, the 2.00% tariff average for the USA less the 0.80% average for Canada would generate a receipt of – 1.20%. That is, to equalize the two countries’ import duties, the Donald would owe Canada about $5 billion per year in tariff equalization rebates!

In short, the last three things that Donald Trump should be attacking are Congressman Massie, Canada’s trade policies and the dairy TRQs of the USMCA.

In the lingo of sports, the first two of these amount to “unforced errors” and the latter consists of scoring an “own goal”, if there ever was one.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

The post Three Cheers For Rep.Tom Massie! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith .

For this mission, UG Solutions is offering a daily rate of at least $1,100 to personnel (at least 100) it sends to the enclave — along with a $10,000 advance. Contractors have reportedly already been deployed.

See here.

The post American security contractors walking thin line in Gaza appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Flip-Flop! Trump Restores Weapons And Intelligence To Ukraine! appeared first on LewRockwell.

____________________________________________________________________________________

di David Stockman

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-ridimensionamento-del-fenomeno)

Inutile dire che Donald non ne ha mai abbastanza delle luci della ribalta. Ma venerdì scorso, in una trasmissione in diretta dallo Studio Ovale vista in tutto il mondo, quella sete di attenzione pubblica potrebbe aver effettivamente cambiato il corso della storia. E in meglio, anche se il grilletto è stato premuto da un comico di terza categoria che non è nemmeno riuscito a capire come leccare il deretano a uno degli ego più grandi del pianeta.

Pertanto la malata avventura di Washington nella distruzione di una nazione tenuta insieme col nastro isolante, insieme alle morti inutili di decine di migliaia di persone reali che abitano il territorio ucraino, è ormai finita.

Zelensky se ne andrà presto in un nascondiglio in Costa Rica, o in una tomba senza nome, a seconda dei casi. Dopodiché un reggente ad interim, per quella che è una nazione costruita ad hoc da Lenin, Stalin e Krusciov con sangue e armi bolsceviche, sottoscriverà un cessate il fuoco e un accordo di spartizione, quest'ultimo in divenire da quando il giogo del comunismo è stato sollevato nel 1991.

Infatti la frammentazione dell'Ucraina smaschererà la farsa che è stata la guerra per procura della NATO contro la Russia nelle sue stesse “zone di confine”. Quest'ultimo termine, ovviamente, è il significato della parola “Ucraina” in russo.

E non esagero quando scrivo farsa monumentale. Mentre il capitolo più recente e desolante si è svolto da febbraio 2022, gli Stati Uniti e l'UE insieme hanno speso la sbalorditiva cifra di quasi $400 miliardi per organizzare un'opera di demolizione alle porte della Russia... per cosa?

Apparentemente per deliziare i mercanti d'armi degli Stati Uniti e dell'Europa con una grande occasione per la vendita di un sacco di nuove armi e rimpinguare gli arsenali NATO esauriti. E tutto in nome di altre vecchie sciocchezze sulla sicurezza collettiva e un “ordine internazionale basato sulle regole”.

Ma sono tutte cazzate di Washington. Non c'è stata una briciola della sicurezza nazionale americana implicata nel destino dell'ex-Repubblica Socialista Sovietica Ucraina dopo che si è separata dal cadavere estinto dell'Unione Sovietica nel 1991. E poiché l'Ucraina era un simulacro di una nazione costruita dai comunisti, non era destinata a durare, né la sua fine sarebbe stata minimamente notata o ricordata dal mondo in generale.

Vale a dire, lo stato artificiale dell'Ucraina incarna i territori di confine che la Russia aveva acquisito, conquistato, popolato e sviluppato alla fine del XVIII secolo sotto la guida di Grigory Potemkin. Quest'ultimo era il primo ministro della nazione, il quale aveva letteralmente una relazione intima con l'imperatrice russa, Caterina la Grande.

Dopo l'acquisizione della Crimea dall'Impero ottomano da parte di Caterina nel 1783 e la liquidazione di un piccolo principato cosacco lungo il corso meridionale del fiume Dnepr chiamato Zaporozhian Sich, che aveva governato i territori adiacenti per oltre 200 anni, Potemkin divenne governatore della regione. Chiamò questi nuovi territori Novorossiya, o “Nuova Russia” in onore della sua amante/sovrana. Alla fine il popolo russo, il capitale e il commercio si riversarono nelle steppe fino ad allora in gran parte deserte.

I compiti principali di Potemkin erano pacificare e ricostruire quella che era stata una regione dilaniata dalla guerra, portandovi coloni russi e gettando le basi per nuove fattorie, industrie, città e commercio. Nel 1787, mentre stava per scoppiare una nuova guerra tra la Russia e l'Impero ottomano, Caterina II, con la sua corte e diversi ambasciatori, fece un tour di sei mesi nella Nuova Russia, navigando lungo il fiume Dnepr (linea blu sulla mappa sotto) per ispezionare le sue nuove colonie.

Uno degli scopi di questo viaggio era quello di impressionare gli alleati della Russia prima della guerra. Per raggiungere questo obiettivo, si diceva che Potemkin avesse creato dei “villaggi mobili” sulle rive del fiume Dnepr. Non appena arrivava la chiatta che trasportava l'imperatrice e gli ambasciatori, gli uomini di Potemkin, vestiti da contadini, popolavano il villaggio. Una volta che la chiatta se ne andava, il villaggio veniva smontato, quindi ricostruito a valle durante la notte.

Qualunque sia il grado di apocrifia della storia, la metafora di fondo non potrebbe essere più appropriata: l'intero territorio da Lugansk e Donetsk (vale a dire il Donbass) fino a Mariupol sul Mar d'Azov e su entrambe le rive del Dnepr, fino a Odessa sulla costa del Mar Nero, fu da allora in poi noto come Nuova Russia ed era etichettato come tale secondo la mappa del 1897 raffigurata di seguito.

Inoltre cercate altre mappe dell'era pre-1917 come volete, ma non troverete nessun Paese chiamato Ucraina perché quest'ultimo era un toponimo, non uno stato. E il toponimo prese vita come una società moderna organizzata solo come regione di confine in espansione dell'Impero zarista.

L'Ucraina divenne uno stato, quindi, solo dopo il crollo dell'Impero russo indotto dalla prima guerra mondiale e la presa del potere da parte di Lenin e dei suoi brutali eredi. Come mostrato nella mappa qui sotto, l'unità amministrativa comunista che divenne nota come Repubblica Socialista Sovietica Ucraina fu messa insieme dalla Nuova Russia (area blu) e da altre parti e pezzi dell'Impero zarista strappati a vari vicini (area gialla), insieme alla storica Galizia (area verde) incentrata su Leopoli, che fu sequestrata da Stalin quando la Polonia fu smembrata nella seconda guerra mondiale.

Alla fine la Crimea (area viola), che era completamente russa fin dal momento del suo acquisto da parte di Caterina la Grande nel 1783, fu ceduta ai compatrioti ucraini di Krusciov nel 1954 come premio in cambio del loro sostegno nella lotta per la successione dopo Stalin.

L'ultima cosa che si può dire sui “confini” ucraini che delineano i cinque componenti codificati a colori mostrati sopra, quindi, è che erano sacrosanti. Non rappresentavano l'evoluzione organica di popoli, identità nazionali e stati, ma il pugno di ferro del politburo sovietico e dei tiranni assetati di sangue che lo governavano.

Ciò a sua volta significò che quando l'Unione Sovietica finì nella pattumierà della storia della storia nel 1991, i giorni dell'Ucraina come stato unitario erano contati.

Inutile dire che non c'era alcuna identità linguistica e religiosa comune. Anche 40 anni dopo che i governanti sovietici avevano finito di assemblare l'Ucraina, questa mappa del 1991 dell'uso della lingua vi dice tutto ciò che dovete sapere: c'erano schiaccianti maggioranze di lingua russa nel Donbass e nella fascia del Mar Nero (aree rosse), che in alcuni oblast, tra cui la Crimea, erano di lingua russa per oltre il 75%. Al contrario, il centro e l'ovest erano popolati da ucraini, polacchi, bulgari, ungheresi e altri, dove i russofoni rappresentavano appena il 5% della popolazione.

E no, una volta che l’entità governata dai comunisti nota come Repubblica Socialista Sovietica Ucraina si separò dal cadavere della defunta Unione Sovietica, i confini casuali che ha ereditato non sono stati “garantiti” dagli Stati Uniti nel cosiddetto Memorandum di Budapest del 1994 in cambio della rinuncia alle armi nucleari.

Infatti l'Ucraina non ha mai avuto armi nucleari! Queste armi erano state immagazzinate sul suo territorio dai sovietici ed erano ancora sotto il controllo di Mosca quando quest'ultima firmò il Memorandum insieme agli Stati Uniti e al Regno Unito. Ma nessun confine era “garantito” perché sarebbe stato un trattato che avrebbe richiesto la conferma del Senato e il sostegno del popolo americano, qualcosa che Bill Clinton e i suoi agenti non erano disposti a testare.

Invece, al nuovo governo ucraino vennero date delle “assicurazioni”. Ma qualunque definizione esile che quel termine implicasse fu presto resa abbastanza chiara dagli agenti dello Stato profondo presso il Dipartimento di Stato, la NED e la CIA, che si erano impegnati a fomentare rivoluzioni colorate in Ucraina non molto tempo dopo che Putin era salito al potere il 1° gennaio 2000.

In ogni caso, una volta che il meccanismo delle elezioni e della democrazia fu istituito dopo il 1991, le mappe elettorali risultanti chiarirono una cosa in modo estremamente chiaro: le persone votavano in base a come parlavano.

Ciò è chiaramente evidente nelle tre mappe qui sotto. La democrazia ucraina è iniziata, è maturata e si è conclusa sulla stessa nota: con un elettorato molto più nettamente diviso persino rispetto alla politica Red State contro Blue State negli Stati Uniti.

Nel 1994 Leonid Kuchma, un ex-dirigente industriale originario dell'est russofono e fortemente industrializzato (Dnipropetrovsk), fece campagna elettorale su un programma che sottolineava i legami economici con la Russia e fece un forte appello alle popolazioni russofone dell'Ucraina orientale e della Crimea.

Nel secondo turno delle elezioni Kuchma vinse circa due terzi dei voti nell'Ucraina orientale, dove predominavano i russi etnici e i russofoni, e quasi il 90% in Crimea, una regione con una popolazione di etnia russa al 70%.

Dall'altro lato, Leonid Kravchuk, il primo presidente e in carica nel 1994, era una figura chiave nel movimento per l'indipendenza dell'Ucraina. Si era posizionato come garante della sovranità ucraina e dell'identità nazionale. Ottenne forte sostegno dall'Ucraina occidentale, dove chi parlava ucraino e aveva sentimenti nazionalisti era dominante, ottenendo dal 70% all'80% dei voti in quelle regioni.

Questa profonda divisione nell'elettorato non è mai cambiata. A differenza degli Stati Uniti, dove un candidato repubblicano a governatore ha ottenuto il 47% nello stato profondamente blu di New York nel 2022, la divisione del voto nel nucleo più duro delle rispettive regioni (rosso scuro e blu scuro) è stata superiore al 90/10 in molte località.

Così, nelle elezioni del 2004, il candidato filorusso Viktor Yanukovych perse di misura il conteggio complessivo, pur avendo dominato in modo schiacciante nell'est e nel sud con margini del 70% contro il 90%.

Al contrario, nel 2010 Yanukovych ripercorse lo stesso dominio nelle sue regioni di lingua russa a est e a sud, mentre affondava a ovest. Ma quella volta ricevette un aiuto per la sua campagna elettorale da consulenti con sede a Washington (vale a dire il famigerato Paul Manafort, il quale gestì temporaneamente la campagna di Donald Trump nel 2016, finché non fu inchiodato dai russofobi nello Stato profondo). Di conseguenza il filo-russo Yanukovych riuscì ad accumulare abbastanza voti per scavalcare la nazionalista ucraina, Yulia Tymoshenko, nel conteggio nazionale.

Inutile dire che, secondo Washington, le elezioni ucraine del 2010 non avevano nulla di sacrosanto perché, beh, gli elettori avevano eletto il candidato sbagliato!

In breve tempo, quindi, i neocon guidati da Victoria Nuland, che faceva parte dello staff dell'allora vicepresidente Joe Biden, fomentarono il colpo di stato contro Yanukovych nel febbraio 2014. Anche mentre lo cacciavano dal potere e lo costringevano a fuggire a Mosca, non avevano idea del tenue equilibrio politico che stavano sovvertendo.

Ma non ci volle molto per accendere la miccia. In breve tempo i seguaci dell'alleato di Hitler nella seconda guerra mondiale, Stephan Bandera, che dominavano il governo non eletto e insediato da Washington a Kiev, fecero due mosse distruttive che equivalevano a un segnale per “lasciate che la divisione abbia inizio”.

La prima di queste fu l'abolizione del russo come lingua ufficiale nel Donbass e altrove; la seconda fu la strage di oltre 50 sindacalisti filorussi in un edificio a Odessa da parte di sostenitori del governo di Kiev.

Era solo questione di tempo, quindi, prima che la maggior parte dei territori colorati di rosso sulle mappe sopra dichiarassero la propria indipendenza. Fu anche in breve tempo che la popolazione di quella che era stata la provincia russa della Crimea votò a stragrande maggioranza (80%+) per rientrare nella Federazione Russa. Ciò pose fine al loro breve soggiorno nello stato ucraino, il regalo di Krusciov del 1954 ai delinquenti comunisti di Kiev che lo avevano aiutato a prendere il potere dopo la morte di Stalin.

In breve tempo il nuovo governo proto-fascista di Kiev si mosse per inimicarsi il suo vicino storico ed ex-signore di Mosca, cercando di unirsi alla NATO e lanciando una guerra brutale e implacabile contro le repubbliche separatiste del Donbass. Questo assalto finì per uccidere più di 15.000 civili durante gli otto anni che precedettero l'invasione russa nel febbraio 2022.

Inutile dire che Putin non era affatto interessato a far piazzare missili nucleari ancora più vicino al suo confine, come non lo era il presidente John Kennedy nell'ottobre del 1962. Né era sul punto di tollerare il continuo massacro di russofoni nel Donbass dopo che Kiev aveva lanciato una campagna di bombardamenti su queste aree assediate una settimana prima dell'invasione del 24 febbraio 2022.

Vale a dire, la storia era tutt'altro che una divisione netta tra bianco e nero. Infatti Donald sa che la bufala dell'invasione “non provocata” è una prevaricazione dello Stato profondo. Quindi venerdì scorso non era intenzionato a farsi istruire sulla questione dall'incompetente comico che è stato mandato nello Studio Ovale dalla folla di guerrafondai dell'Unipartito raffigurati di seguito allo scopo di estorcere denaro all'attuale inquilino della Casa Bianca.

Quindi, in risposta alle urla di Zelensky su Putin, Donald non si è fatto problemi a rivelare la verità.

Nella foto sotto, il consiglio di amministrazione del Senato.

Naturalmente ora che la verità è stata fatta uscire in diretta TV, ci sarà sicuramente una fine alle uccisioni inutili e una guerra per procura della NATO contro la Russia. E con essa arriverà un ripudio ancora più importante dell'intera perpetuazione neocon post-1991 di un impero americano che non avrebbe mai dovuto essere sostenuto in primo luogo.

Vale a dire che la falsa demonizzazione di Putin e della Russia verrà ripudiata in modo ancora più deciso. Questo perché, a parte l'imminente accordo tra Trump e Putin sull'Ucraina, la mappa dell'Europa orientale non cambierà tanto presto.

L'idea che Putin intenda resuscitare il vecchio impero sovietico e che Polonia, Lituania, Lettonia, Estonia, Moldavia e destinazioni occidentali siano le prossime in linea per l'invasione è stata inventata di sana pianta. Il suo scopo era quello di dare alla NATO una ragione per espandersi ancora più a est, fino alle porte della Russia, e di giustificare la chiamata di Washington alla guerra in un territorio che non fa la minima differenza per la sicurezza interna dell'America.

Anche gli archivi della diplomazia post-sovietica americana sono cristallini su questo argomento. Bush senior e il suo Segretario di Stato, James Baker, promisero esplicitamente a Gorbaciov che in cambio dello smantellamento del Patto di Varsavia e dell'unificazione della Germania la NATO non si sarebbe mossa “di un pollice” verso est.

E quella promessa fu fatta per ragioni ovvie: l'Impero Sovietico era scomparso e la minaccia della massiccia Armata Rossa era svanita. Le sue truppe non venivano nemmeno pagate e i suoi carri armati e la sua artiglieria venivano fusi e venduti come rottami. Quindi l'ex-paracadutista George H. W. Bush avrebbe dovuto paracadutarsi nella base aerea di Ramstein in Germania nel 1992, dichiarare vittoria e relegare la NATO a un museo sulla pace mondiale.

Infatti all'epoca il “padre” della dottrina del contenimento e dell'alleanza NATO, il professor George F. Kennan, avvertì che la perpetuazione e l'espansione della NATO in queste circostanze sarebbero state una follia. Quando nel 1998 il Senato votò comunque per estendere la NATO a Polonia, Ungheria e Repubblica Ceca, egli osservò:

“Penso che sia l'inizio di una nuova guerra fredda”, ha detto Kennan dalla sua casa di Princeton. “Penso che i russi reagiranno gradualmente in modo piuttosto avverso e ciò influenzerà le loro linee di politica. Penso che sia un tragico errore. Non c'era alcuna ragione per questo”. [...]

“Dimostra così poca comprensione della storia russa e sovietica. Ovviamente ci sarà una brutta reazione da parte della Russia, e poi [gli espansionisti della NATO] diranno che vi abbiamo sempre detto che i russi sono così, ma questo è semplicemente sbagliato”.

In parole povere, rischiare tutto per far entrare l’Ucraina in un’obsoleta alleanza che era e rimane ben oltre la sua data di scadenza è sicuramente uno degli atti di politica estera più stupidi di tutta la storia americana.

E ora, sulla scia degli eventi epocali dello scorso fine settimana, è finalmente arrivata l'opportunità: nominare, biasimare, svergognare e cacciare dai seggi del potere i distruttori dell'Unipartito della democrazia, della prosperità e della libertà americana che hanno portato la nazione alla sua attuale situazione pericolosa.

Quindi la missione del Presidente Trump che cambierà la storia in questo momento è cristallina. Deve fare di Guerra e Pace la questione preponderante sulle rive del Potomac e mandare i resti dell'Unipartito in uno spasmodico stato di apoplessia vincendo il Premio Nobel per la Pace per aver posto fine a questa guerra inutile con la stessa rapidità con cui Eisenhower fece con la Corea nel 1953.

Così facendo, può portare a termine la grande missione per la quale è stato scelto: frammentare l'Unipartito riunendo così rifugiati da entrambe le parti in una forza politica rivitalizzata che può consentire alla gente dell'entroterra americano di reclamare la propria democrazia dalla classe dirigente corrotta sorta sul Potomac.

Inutile dire che Donald sembra aver centrato la sua missione. Quando Zelensky ha rilasciato la seguente replica alla sua cacciata dalla Casa Bianca, Donald non è rimasto indietro con una risposta perfettamente appropriata.

L'Ucraina “non riconoscerà mai” alcuna annessione russa del territorio che occupa, anche se ciò avvenisse per cercare di garantire un accordo di pace, ha aggiunto Zelensky, e ha ripetuto che accetterebbe un cessate il fuoco solo se fosse seguito da solide garanzie di sicurezza per il suo Paese.

Sebbene la Russia abbia affermato che insisterà per incorporare i territori che occupa, per l'Ucraina si tratterebbe sempre di “un'occupazione temporanea”, ha insistito Zelensky, anche se al momento il suo Paese non ha la forza militare per espellere la Russia da tutta la sua nazione.

Zelensky ha detto che ciò che voleva “dai partner” – un chiaro riferimento alla Casa Bianca – era che ricordassero che la Russia ha lanciato una guerra d’invasione su vasta scala tre anni fa. Non voleva che i politici riscrivessero la storia, ha detto, per suggerire “che ci sono due parti in questa guerra e che non è chiaro chi sia l’aggressore”.

Ebbene sì, in questa guerra c'erano due parti in causa e il vero aggressore aveva sede sulle rive del Potomac, non sulla Moscova/Oka/Volga.

Trump ha risposto con un avvertimento che non si sentiva più nello Studio Ovale dal giugno 1963, quando JFK lanciò il suo breve appello per porre fine alla Guerra Fredda all'American University.

“Questa è la peggiore affermazione che Zelensky potesse fare, e l'America non sopporterà ancora per molto”. Ha aggiunto, riferendosi a Zelensky, che “questo tizio non vuole che ci sia la pace finché avrà il sostegno dell'America [...]”.

“Deve dire che vuole fare la pace”, ha detto Trump prima di lasciare la Casa Bianca venerdì. “Non deve stare lì a dire 'Putin questo, Putin quello', e tutte le altre cose negative. Deve dire che vuole fare la pace. Non deve volere più combattere una guerra”.

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

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The intellectual and moral level of European elites is shockingly low. I say shockingly because as an American I found the European (and British) accents gave a very sophisticated quality to their discourse. Now, after living in France for almost twenty years, they sound as idiotic as the typical US senator. See the recent Macron and Baerbock speeches as prime examples of this descent. Or maybe it is just that I understand the world a bit better now.

I put the current generation in contrast to the generation that came of age in the first-half of the 20the century. It has been over three decades since I read Arthur Koestler’s anti-communist novel Darkness at Noon. Just the other day I finished his memoir of the first months of the Second World War (written after his escape to England in 1941), ironically titled Scum of the Earth, referring to himself and the other refugees that the French government rounded up, put into concentration camps, and in many cases subsequently handed over to the Gestapo after the debacle.

Here is a brief description of his life from the Afterward:

Kœstler, like so many of the seminal writers of modern English – Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot – first came to these shores as a mature immigrant. In Koestler’s case, he fled imprisonment in Nazi-occupied France, as you will just have read in Scum of the Earth. When he was arrested as an undesirable and dangerous alien in Paris on October 4, 1939, he was thirty-four years old and had already made a name for himself as a talented and politically engaged journalist. Kœstler was born in Budapest into a Hungarian Jewish family. As a young man he studied pure science in Vienna, an environment that led him to become a keen Zionist. He was a follower of Vladimir Jobotinsky, the talented right-wing Zionist leader, though once he landed in Palestine he joined a left-wing kibbutz. His stay in the kibbutz lasted only a few weeks; he was too much of an individualist to fit in and not a natural agricultural worker. He spent the next year as a loafer in Haifa and Tel Aviv, drawn to all sorts of unlikely pursuits, such as selling advertising for a new Hebrew-language newspaper, surveying, and writing fairy tales. He was an unlikely citizen of the new nation for he never mastered Hebrew and had only a very limited interest in Jewish tradition, history and culture. He often starved and slept on the floor of offices belonging to friends. Then came a sudden breakthrough – an offer to write for leading German and Austrian newspapers. Within a couple of years he became what he wanted to be – a star journalist. In 1929 he left Palestine for Paris, gradually abandoning Zionism for the world-inclusive creed of Communism. He travelled a great deal, flying in a Zeppelin over the North Pole and making a long stay in the Soviet Union. He became a formal member of the Communist Party in 1931 and a committed activist. His experience of the Spanish Civil War (1936–7) was as a columnist for the London News Chronicle, though it seems that he also had political duties through his position within the Communist International. The confusing ethics of this period, and his experience of imprisonment by the Fascists under sentence of death in Seville, were described in Spanish Testament (1938) which was later reshaped into Dialogue with Death (1942). He formally broke allegiance with the Communist Party in 1938, after the Moscow purges and show trials reached their bizarre conclusion, leaving the Russian army critically weakened at the start of the Second World War. In Paris, after war was declared in 1939, another sort of purge was unleashed. Kœstler along with other liberal free-thinkers, communists and socialist exiles – the ironical ‘scum of the earth’ of the book’s title – were targeted by right-wing elements within the French regime even before the Nazi victory and the swift emergence of French ‘Vichy’ fascism. Hundreds of writers and political figures were arrested. Some managed to escape but many were caught in the internment camps, committed suicide or were deported to Germany where they were murdered. There was of course no logical reason why Kœstler should have been arrested. As a Jew and a man of the left, his and-Nazi credentials were above suspicion while as a Hungarian (Hungary was a neutral country at the time) he should also have been outside the police dragnet. It is ironic that Darkness at Noon was written in this period, between Koestler’s first arrest in Paris and his second in the spring of 1940. His hair-raising escape across the breadth of German-occupied France, to the safety of England, provides the narrative background for Scum of the Earth, which also reveals his mature reflections on the unwritten civil war within European society that was waged through out the ’20s and ’30s.

Scum of the Earth was Interesting to me, in part, because it is a veritable tour de France, a country that I now call my home. But more so because Koestler epitomized the erudite men and women of action living in the first half of the twentieth century.

Given below are two more passages from Scum of the Earth that recount the horrible and incredible outcomes of the Scum.

On the third day of our stay in the Stadium, the arrival of Fuhrmann, a German Liberal journalist, created some hilarity. Fuhrmann, a man of forty and quite a well-known figure in the Weimar Republic, had been put in a concentration camp by the Gestapo and had escaped a few years ago to Austria. When the Nazi marched into Austria, he escaped to Eger. When Eger was attached to Germany after Munich, he escaped to Prague. When the Nazis occupied Prague, he escaped to Italy. When the war broke out and Italian non-belligerency began, he escaped to France by means of a fishing boat, which took him by night from San Remo to some lonely spot on the French shore near Nice. He had arrived in Paris forty-eight hours ago by train, and gone straight from the railway station to see P., a German refugee and fellow journalist, whose address he knew. He found Mrs. P. at home, who nearly fainted when he walked in. Then she told him that P. was in a concentration camp, that all German refugees had been interned, and that he must get himself interned at once, else he would get into a frightful mess with the police and be put in jail. The best thing he could do was to drive at once to the Stadium at Colombes, the clearing-camp for German internees. She was so panicky that poor Fuhrmann also got the wind up and told the taxi-driver, who had been waiting downstairs with his luggage, to take him at once to Colombes.

We sat around on the bed of the little hotel room, and they told me the news. Feuchtwanger had succeeded in getting to America in some adventurous way. Ernst Weiss, the novelist, had committed suicide by taking veronal in Paris. Walter Hasenclever, the playwright, had committed suicide by opening his veins in a concentration camp near Avignon. Kayser, of the editorial staff of the Pariser Tageszeitung, had swallowed strychnine in another camp. Willi Muenzenberg, one-time head of the Comintern’s West-European propaganda section, later enemy No. 1 of the Third International, virtual leader of the German exiles, had disappeared from a concentration camp in Savoy during the German advance and nothing had been heard of him since. (News came a few months later. Muenzenberg was found dead in a forest near Grenoble, with a rope round his neck. Whether he was killed by the German Gestapo, the Russian O.G.P.U., or by his own despair, will probably never be established.)

I have written about J. B. Matthews previously. He is a bit older than Koestler, but also lived an eventful life including his stint as the Director of Research for the Committee on Un-American Activities. In that role he took the testimony of Richard Krebs, better known as Jan Valtin – Wikipedia.

Matthews’ widow, Ruth Inglis Matthews, gave me a copy of Valtin’s memoir Out of the Night. I was captivated, what a story!

He was born in Germany in 1905. As a teenager in 1923 he joined the Communist Party. He was involved in many street battles. He then began a career as an agent for the Commintern (Communist International). “In 1926, working as a courier, he stowawayed to Victoria, British Columbia and then hitchhiked to San Francisco and made contact with the Comintern. Valtin was assigned to execute someone in Los Angeles, but failed in the attempt, was caught, and sentenced to San Quentin State Prison. During the 1000 days he spent there, he studied Bowditch’s American Practical Navigator, astronomy, journalism, map making, English, French, and Spanish. After being released in December 1929, he returned to Europe.

“In January 1931, while in Germany, he participated in the “United action of the Communist Party and the Hitler movement to accelerate the disintegration of the crumbling democratic bloc which governs Germany.” After graduating with a navigator’s certificate, he was assigned as the Soviet skipper transporting the Pioner from the Bremer Vulkan shipyard to Murmansk.”

He returned to Germany in 1933 to participate in street battles against the Nazis. But he also described the tacit pact of the Communists with them to disrupt all of the democratic parties. Valtin also explained the following treachery of Stalin, dealing with the Gestapo to eliminate his potential Communist German rivals.

Krebs was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and was psychologically broken by them in 1934. While still in the hands of the Gestapo, the Soviets ordered him to turn his allegiance and work for the Gestapo, in effect to become a double agent.

In 1938 he was able to leave Germany and the Gestapo behind. But then he was arrested by the Soviet GPU in Copenhagen. When he learned that his wife had died in a German concentration camp he became disenchanted with communism. He was able to escape from the GPU and returned to the US where he then wrote and published Out of the Night which became a big success.

In 1941 he gave his testimony to the HUAC; but In 1942 he was arrested in the US, though later acquitted, for being a Gestapo agent. Krebs was drafted as an infantryman and deployed in February 1944 to the Philippines and saw combat in fighting the Japanese in the Pacific War.

After all of these adventures Richard Krebs/Jan Valtin died of natural causes in 1951.

Le Vengeur: À la poursuite des criminels nazis by Emiré Kovacs is one of the first books I read in French as there is no English translation. My French journalist wife is a friend of Kovacs’ journalist son who only found the transcript after his father’s death.

An Amazon reviewer sums up his life very well, as translated by Google with my notes in square brackets:

. . . Imré Kovacs recounts an absolutely incredible destiny. Born in Hungary to a non-practicing Jewish family, forced to fend for himself as an adult from the age of 10 after the death of his father, still a teenager at the start of the war, Kovacs would survive the Holocaust, enlist under a false name in the Waffen SS on behalf of a Zionist organization [recruited because he looked Aryan], be arrested [rather taken as a POW] by the Russians and deported to a labor camp, then escape clandestinely to Palestine. After serving in the Stern Group and surviving the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (he vividly recalls that many immigrants from Eastern Europe had landed by boat at night, had been given a rifle and had died “before seeing the sun rise over Israel”), he refused to remain in the Israeli army. Many after these events would have sought respite. Kovacs, himself, went to Marseille to join the Foreign Legion, which led him to fight in Indochina (up to Điện Biên Phủ) and in Algeria [see Algerian War – Wikipedia or my article The Battle of Algiers – LewRockwell] for another 5 years. It was only after returning from Algeria that he married and became a waiter for 30 years at the Lipp brasserie in Paris [a famous restaurant on Boulevard St. Germain, it was frequented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir]!

The reviewer adds:

The subtitle of the book is “Chasing Nazi Criminals.” Kovacs had been tasked by the Russians to report to them on the other prisoners if he succeeded in hearing confessions about their Nazi past. In the Foreign Legion, Kovacs signed up to hunt the Nazis: he had to bring the legionaries closer to a list given to him by an organization whose aim was to track down hidden Nazis. In his labor camp in the USSR, all the prisoners died except a handful (120 out of 3000 if I remember correctly) died. In Indochina, legionaries died in incredible numbers during the time Kovacs served there. In the USSR, Kovacs himself states that he spent his time writing reports on men who had already died of cold, malnutrition and diseases; in the Foreign Legion, Kovacs crossed off the list of men who died in combat. The justice that Kovacs was looking for strikes me as being totally absent because everyone would die, former Nazis or not.

When I was in graduate school in the 80s at Duke University there was an associate professor emeritus in mechanical engineering named Ernest Elsevier. He was from another era in many ways. He came to the US from Holland as a teenager in the 1930s (I believe by himself). He never had a PhD, but had great experience as a working engineer, very unusual then and more so today. He was loved by the undergraduates and often was very helpful in finding them jobs.

I never had him in a class, nonetheless we became friends. One day I spent the afternoon with him at his cottage on a small lake (or a pond, I don’t remember) to go “fishing.” I put fishing in quotes because we had gear and bait, we even threw our lines in the water. But for a couple of hours I didn’t bother to bait the hook, I just listened and drank beer as for the only time he told me about his experiences in World War II. This was very rare, more than 40 years after the events he was still emotional about them. He served in the Navy as an aviation chief’s machinist mate on the USS Enterprise for the full length of the US conflict with Japan.

Enterprise participated in more major actions of the war against Japan than any other United States ship. These actions included the attack on Pearl Harbor — 18 Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers of her air group arrived over the harbor during the attack; seven were shot down with eight airmen killed and two wounded, making her the only American aircraft carrier with men at Pearl Harbor during the attack and the first to sustain casualties during the Pacific War[3] — the Battle of Midway, the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, various other air-sea engagements during the Guadalcanal Campaign, the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Enterprise earned 20 battle stars, the most for any U.S. warship in World War II, and was the most decorated U.S. ship of World War II. She was also the first American ship to sink a full-sized enemy warship after the Pacific War had been declared when her aircraft sank the Japanese submarine I-70 on 10 December 1941.[4] On three occasions during the war, the Japanese announced that she had been sunk in battle, inspiring her nickname “The Grey Ghost”. By the end of the war, her planes and guns had downed 911 enemy planes, sunk 71 ships, and damaged or destroyed 192 more.[5]

Ernie had an extended stay on Guadalcanal, where he saw combat and was decorated for valor. Of all the hair razing experiences he had, what made him the most upset had to do with a clever mechanical mechanism. That is, fighter aircraft used a synchronizer to fire bullets through propeller gaps without hitting the blades. This mechanism used gears and linkages to connect the machine gun and propeller shaft to ensure perfectly timed firing. As pilots returned to the Enterprise they were instructed to empty any ammunition in the gun because the flight crew, Ernie’s crew, were required to turn the propeller into a locked position. If the gun were loaded it would fire. More than one of his men had their heads blown off due to this negligence.

After learning stories like these I cannot take today’s discourse seriously.

Epilogue
Life Imitates Art: Starmer is Widmerpool

Kenneth Widmerpool, depicted by Mark Boxer on the cover of At Lady Molly’s, Fontana 1977 and Sir Keir Starmer today.

One Of the notable characters in Anthony Powell‘s novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, a 12-volume account of upper-class and bohemian life in Britain between 1920 and 1970, is called Kenneth Widmerpool – Wikipedia. You can read about his character in some detail in the Wikipedia article. My short summation is that Widmerpool is a pompous boob with a will to power.

Postscript

This short vignette ( a diary entry) from Koestler is so out of character from what we think we know about the war that I thought it would be interesting to readers.

Walking across Navarrenx bridge, suddenly heard my name called—the real one. It was hunch-backed Dr. Pollak; told him for Heaven’s sake to shut up, but couldn’t get rid of him. Told me he had wondered all the time how I had managed to get out of the Buffalo Camp. He had been sent a few days later to a camp in Brittany; when Germans advanced, the commandant and his staff disappeared over-night; the internees scattered in all directions. Pollak and a group of other old men, all over fifty, mainly Jews, set out and followed the road southward. And on the second day ran into a German column. The German C.O. asked what sort of funny procession they were; they had to explain. C.O. said: ‘Don’t be scared; we in the Reichswehr are soldiers and don’t care about race; camp here, be all of you at the Mairie of M. (nearby village) at five p.m., and I’ll see what I can do for you; but five p.m. sharp, mind.’ There were about sixty of them, old Jews, émigrés, scared to death, but disciplined Germans: at 5 p.m. they were at the Mairie of M., all complete. Waited quarter of an hour in the midst of astonished German soldiers staring at them, but were not molested; then C.O. turned up, said he had requisitioned a lorry with a French driver, who would take them to unoccupied territory; and so it happened.

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We all rely on metaphors to make the present more understandable. I did the same when I compared Trump’s presidency to the era of Khrushchev.

The widely accepted narrative is that the historical parallel for Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine lies in the political events preceding the outbreak of the Second World War. According to this view, Nazi Germany’s successful aggressive moves to seize Austria and the predominantly German-populated territories of Czechoslovakia—facilitated by the West’s appeasement policy—only emboldened Hitler’s plans for world conquest. From this perspective, any appeasement of an authoritarian ruler is seen as a fundamental mistake, especially when the aggressor claims to be protecting an ethnic minority in a neighboring state. Compromise is deemed unacceptable, and only absolute victory is considered permissible over a reincarnation of the evil dictator seeking to revise borders.

This position has taken on the status of a moral absolute—one further reinforced by its indirect connection to the Holocaust. Anyone who thinks differently is marginalized. This othering is intensified by the perception that outcast politicians, such as Trump, are modern-day reincarnations of Chamberlain, mere puppets of Putin—today’s Hitler—while their adversaries are cast in the role of Churchill.

A new parallel has emerged following President Trump’s recent attempts to shut down the war: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Poland between Hitler and Stalin.

There are three problems with these widely used historical metaphors for understanding today’s events.

1) First, while every politician possesses a certain degree of ruthlessness, ambition, and willingness to gain an advantage, not everyone is Stalin or Hitler. This is a crucial distinction.

2) Second, the infamous Munich Agreement was made before war had actually broken out. Chamberlain flew to Munich in 1938 to prevent another world war. For this reason, he made a concession to Hitler, agreeing that Hitler could occupy the part of Czechoslovakia that was predominantly populated by ethnic Germans. If there were any situation truly comparable to the Munich Agreement, it would have been if Biden had agreed to declare that NATO would not seek to expand eastward and had ended Ukraine’s application process, while the European powers—the signatories of the Minsk Agreement—had forced Ukraine to implement the agreement with U.S. support in late autumn 2021, or, alternatively, if NATO had reached an agreement with Russia on the issues it demanded in the winter of 2021. However, both the U.S. and its European allies refused to make any concessions. They refused to appease Russia.

3) Third, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was also signed before the war broke out. In fact, the purpose of the pact was to prearrange the launch of a joint war against a third country, Poland, and to divide it between the signatories.

But in the case of Ukraine in 2025, we are in the third year of a war in which the U.S. has been supporting Ukraine against Russia. Therefore, the situation is entirely different from that of 1838–39.

Any agreement between the U.S. and Russia now is aimed at shutting down a war, not at preventing or starting a new one.

If one wants to find a better metaphor for understanding the Trump administration’s position, even when compared to the period of World War II, a more fitting example is the negotiation process between Stalin and Churchill in 1944, which led to the infamous Yalta Accord. The Western alliance—Churchill and FDR—had to confront the realities of the front lines: much of Eastern and Central Europe had been liberated (and simultaneously occupied) by the Red Army. Churchill and FDR opted to avoid a new war—this time against the Soviet Union—and accepted that Poland, Czechoslovakia, and several other Eastern and Central European countries would fall within the Soviet sphere, while Western and Mediterranean Europe would remain in the Western sphere of influence. It was a bitter compromise that abandoned the very two countries—Poland and Czechoslovakia—that had been central to the outbreak of World War II.

Churchill followed ‘realpolitik’ both in 1938–39 and in 1944. In 1938–39, it was reasonable to think that the combined forces of the British and French empires could win a war against Germany, while in 1944, realpolitik dictated not entering into a new world war, this time with the Soviet Union.

This time, Trump faces the fact that after three years of war, both Ukraine’s human resources and the West’s military resources are depleted. Despite a wall of sanctions, the Russian economy has not collapsed, and there is little appetite in the US or Europe to shift to a full-scale war economy, much less to escalate the conflict and risk provoking a new world war.

In this situation, the metaphor of the compromises of 1944 serves us better than the misleading claims of ‘appeasement’ or references to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Moreover, there are three key differences compared to 1944. First, Putin is not Stalin. Second, Russia is not the Soviet Union—a communist state that fully militarized itself to conquer the world following the dictates of a materialistic quasi-religion. Russia is a market economy whose population’s well-being depends on commerce and good relations with as many countries as possible. Finally, the known Russian demands do not entail the complete submission of Ukraine but rather allow for the existence of a sovereign and neutral Ukrainian state. Although Ukraine would lose some territories under Russian demands, mostly populated by ethnic Russians or Russian speaking Ukrainians sympathetic to Russia, it would retain those mostly populated by ethnic Ukrainians and remain a large country, comparable in size to France or Spain.

War is the most destructive means of achieving human goals, and its effects go beyond mere destruction, poisoning human relations for generations. The best approach is to avoid war by seeking compromises whenever possible. Any compromise is bitter, involving the sacrifice of dreams and the perception of injustice.

Even more bitter are the compromises after three years of brutal war. Still, the key to any successful postwar reconstruction is ensuring free commerce as much as possible and avoiding a slide into a new cold war. My experience in Croatia offers an illuminating example. Croatia fought a bitter civil war with Serbia, yet today many tourists are Serbian. Last summer, on the way to the airport, a taxi driver told me that whatever happened in the past, Serbian tourists are welcomed today.

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It has now been two months since Donald Trump assumed the presidency. The question naturally arises: Where are those long-secret JFK Records that he repeatedly promised to release to the American people? Or to be more precise, why are those long-secret JFK records still secret? What’s up with the delay, President Trump?

After all, it takes about one minute to write and sign an executive order that states as follows: “I, President Donald Trump, hereby order the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the National Archives, the Secret Service, and all other federal entities to immediately disclose all records, files, documents, films, and other matters relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including, but not limited to, the disclosure of all files and records relating to CIA official George Joannides, as well as the elimination of all redactions in JFK-related documents.”

It’s not as if Trump doesn’t know how to issue and sign an executive order. He’s issued more than 53 since he took office this time around. The first time he was president he issued 220 executive orders.

It’s worth pointing out that Trump did issue one executive order relating to those long-secret JFK records. On January 23, he ordered his Director of National Intelligence and his Attorney General to present Trump with a plan for the full and complete release of those long-secret JFK records.

A “plan”? Why a “plan”? Calling for a plan for disclosure and release is not exactly the same thing as ordering disclosure. What next? A committee to study the plan and make recommendations on modifying the plan? Why not just order disclosure? Why order a plan for disclosure?

As it turns out, that plan for releasing those long-secret JFK records was submitted to Trump on February 7, more than a month ago.

What did the plan say? We don’t know! The reason we don’t know is that Trump, for some unknown reason, has chosen to keep the plan secret from the American people.

What? A secret plan under the Trump administration for releasing those long-secret JFK records? Does that even make any sense? We now have secrecy piled onto secrecy under Trump! Trump hasn’t even explained why the plan has to be kept secret, but my hunch is that it has something to do with protecting “national security,” the two most important (and meaningless) words in the American political lexicon.

What’s really going on here? My hunch is what I’ve been saying the whole time about those long-secret JFK records, which is that the CIA simply will not permit Trump to release those long-secret records. The CIA has succeeded in keeping those long-secret records secret for more than 60 years. That includes an 11-year battle in federal court with former Washington Post reporter and current JFKfacts.org host Jefferson Morley over the continued secrecy of the CIA’s George Joannides records. (See FFF’s book Morley v. CIA: My Unfinished JFK Investigation by Jefferson Morley.) The CIA prevailed over Morley by convincing federal judges to keep the Joannides records secret. The CIA’s thirst for secrecy is also reflected by the CIA’s fierce opposition to a current lawsuit in federal district court over enforcement of the JFK Records Act of 1992.

Does anyone really think that after more than half-a-century of fiercely and successfully keeping those long-secret JFK-assassination-related records secret that the CIA is now now going to roll over and passively permit Trump to undo the CIA’s long-time success in keeping those records secret?

Let’s not forget that during Trump’s first term as president, he proudly announced that he was going to release those long-secret records. He repeatedly made that announcement up to the week of the statutory deadline. Then the CIA stepped in and had a conversation with Trump. After that conversation, Trump buckled and acceded to the CIA’s demand that those long-secret records continue to be kept secret.

My hunch is that this time around, the CIA has again informed Trump that it will not permit him to release those long-secret JFK records. That includes the records that were ordered to be released by the JFK Records Act back in 1992 and it also includes the CIA’s files relating to its officer George Joannides. My hunch is that Trump is too embarrassed to let people know that it is the national-security establishment (e.g., the CIA), not the president, that is ultimately in charge of running the federal government. But how long can Trump remain paralyzed over what to do before more people begin asking him about what he intends to do about those long-secret JFK assassination-related records?

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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If Europe pretends to replace the U.S., it is going to be extremely expensive, very politically costly, and it will fail.

President Trump wants Ukraine settled, full stop. This is so that he can move ahead quickly – to normalise with Russia, and begin the ‘big picture’ project of setting a new World Order, one that will end wars and facilitate business ties.

The point here – which Europe feigns to not understand – is that the end to the Ukraine conflict simply is Trump’s ‘gateway’ to the entire rationale and platform on which he stood: The Great Reset of the Geo-Political landscape. Ukraine, simply said, is the obstacle to Trump’s pursuit of his primordial objective: The Global Reset.

Starmer, Macron and the eastern wing of the Euro-élites are blind to the sheer scale of the global vibe-shift towards traditionalist U.S. politics and ethics. They miss too, the barely concealed fury in the Trump world that exists behind this nascent revolution. “The Maga Right has none of the inhibitions of its predecessors. It is planning to leverage the power of a recaptured state to annihilate its enemies”, Allister Heath writes.

The European Ruling Class is in desperate trouble and increasingly isolated, in a world shifting ‘Rightward’ at breakneck speed. “The U.S. is now the enemy of the West”, the FT proclaims. European leaders wantonly won’t understand.

The reality is that the U.S. is engaged now in rolling up Europe’s foreign policy. And, is about to start exporting U.S. traditional Republican values to roll up the European wokeist belief-system. The European Ruling strata – far removed from its base – has failed to grasp the threat to its own interests (a scenario outlined here).

The Trump administration is trying to rebuild the ailing Republic, and Americans in this new era do not care for the European obsession with ancient feuds and their entailing wars.

Trump reportedly views with utter disdain the UK and European boast that should the U.S. not do it, then Europe will. The Brussels class claims to be able still – after three years of losing in Ukraine – to be able to inflict a humiliating defeat on President Putin.

More profoundly, however, Team Trump – committed to the task of taking down the American Deep State as the ‘inexorable enemy’ – perceives (rightly) the British security state to be co-joined at the hip with their American counterparts, as a part of its global meta-structure. And its oldest and deepest component has always been the destruction of Russia, and its dismemberment.

So when Macron, in an address to the nation this week, rejected a ceasefire in Ukraine and declared that “peace in Europe is only possible with a weakened Russia”, calling the country a direct threat to France and the continent, many in ‘Trump world’ will interpret this defiant declaration (that ‘Ukraine defeating Russia is preferable to ‘peace’’) is nothing more than Macron and Starmer ventriloquising the aims of the Meta Deep State.

This notion is lent substance by the sudden plethora of articles appearing in the European-(managed) MSM to the effect that Russia’s economy is much weaker than it appears and might collapse in the next year. Of course it is nonsense. This is about managing the European public to believe that keeping the war going in Ukraine is a ‘good idea’.

The absurdity of the European position was perhaps best captured, as Wolfgang Münchau notes, in its full hubris last year by the historian and writer Anne Applebaum when she won a prestigious German peace prize. During her acceptance speech, she maintained that victory was more important than peace, asserting that the West’s ultimate goal should be regime change in Russia: “We must help Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine,” she said.

Zelensky and his European fans want ‘to negotiate’ – though later, rather than sooner (perhaps in a year, as one European Foreign Minister reportedly told Marco Rubio privately).

“This”, Münchau writes, “is what the very public disagreement in the Oval Office [last week] was all about. Peace through untrammelled victory — essentially the Second World War model — as the lens through which virtually all European leaders, and most commentators view the Russia-Ukraine conflict”.

America sees things differently: It views almost certainly the European Deep State to be putting a spoke into Trump’s ‘normalisation with Russia’ wheel – a normalisation to which they are viscerally opposed. Or, at the very least, as the Europeans chasing a “mirage that no longer exists, stubbornly hiking ‘tax and spend’, whilst doubling down on mass immigration and overpriced energy, oblivious to the flashing red lights in the [financial markets] as government debt yields rocket to their highest levels since 1998”, as Allister Heath outlines.

In other words, the suggestion is that Friedrich Merz, Macron and Starmer are talking about how they are going to turn around their countries – via a massive infusion of debt – into defence superstates. Yet, at some level of consciousness, they must realise that it is not doable, so they settle instead for presenting themselves as ‘world leaders on the international stage’.

The European élites are deeply unstable ‘leaders’ who are risking the prosperity and stability of the continent. It is clear these countries do not have the military capacity to intervene in any concerted manner. More than anything, it is the European economy circling the drain that is the reality at the gates.

Zelensky is accomplice to the European insistence that defeating Russia takes priority over achieving peace in Ukraine, in spite of lacking any strategic rationale as to how it may be achieved after three years of a worsening military situation. Both plans – crushing the Russian economy with sanctions and attrition of the Russian military to the point of collapse – have failed. Why then does Zelensky resist Trump’s peace proposals? On the surface, it makes no sense.

The explanation likely goes back to the post-Maidan era when the western ‘Meta Security State’ (principally, the British and the Americans) entrenched hardline Banderites (then a tiny minority) into the Ukrainian Police, Intelligence and Security State. They are still today the controlling force. Even were this faction to acknowledge that their war cannot be won, they understand what happens if they lose:

Russia will not deal with them. They view them as extremists (if not war criminals) who are in no way ‘agreement capable’ and must be replaced by a leadership who is actually capable of compromise. Russia would likely pursue and bring these men to trial. Zelensky has to be frightened at what the Banderites might do to him (despite his British team of bodyguards).

Well, Trump is not entertaining these European ‘games’: He is administering a slap-down to Zelensky and European leaders, perhaps bringing Zelensky into line; or perhaps not … Team Trump, Politico reports, has now entered into direct talks with the Ukrainian opposition on holding early elections to unseat Zelensky – who is on his way to being removed, members of Team Trump say.

Zelensky may be finished, but interestingly Zaluzhniy wasn’t discussed either. He is being groomed by the British as a replacement – it looks like the Americans are going to make this decision independently of the British, too.

President Trump has ordered intelligence sharing with Ukraine stopped. What he technically did was to stop allowing Ukraine to use exclusive U.S. targeting systems controlled by U.S. Intelligence, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office and the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. What has been suspended is the exchange of so-called ‘lethal’ data, including information for HIMARS targeting. However, the defensive information needed for protection is still being provided to Ukraine.

“The extent of the intelligence-sharing freeze, which appears to have been imposed alongside the halt in military aid Mr Trump announced on Monday, initially appeared to be somewhat limited … But by Wednesday afternoon it became clear that the Trump administration, ignoring overtures from Mr Zelensky the previous evening, had gone much further. A military intelligence officer in Kyiv told The Telegraph that the freeze amounted to “more or less a total blackout””.

Put bluntly, the earlier munitions freeze will undoubtedly affect Ukraine’s military abilities over time, however the impact might not be felt for some weeks. The loss of vital intelligence, however, will make its mark immediately. It will – simply put – blind Ukraine. In Ukrainian command posts, the battle tracking and satellite online feeds on tablets and TV screens have indeed been disconnected.

What Trump’s slap-down has done is to puncture the fiction that Ukraine is able to defend itself with a little substitute of European support. That has always been nonsensical bravado. NATO, the CIA and the global Intelligence Community have been in control of the war fighting from the outset. And that, for now, has been switched off.

So, Europe wants to shoulder the U.S. burden? Bloomberg reports that European bond markets are in meltdown. If Europe pretends to replace the U.S., it is going to be extremely expensive, very politically costly, and it will fail.

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

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We’re prone to addiction, and addiction is highly profitable. They know it, and we know it.

We inhabit an Addiction Economy. We all know the cure for addiction is to go Cold Turkey: drop the denial and delusion of control, and excise the source of the addiction from one’s life.

This is of course not easy; it’s agony on multiple fronts, for we’ve come to depend on the source of addiction for dopamine hits, pain management, and distraction from our troubles and travails.

Sources of addiction that tie into our identity and need to be recognized and valued are especially pernicious, as these are what make us feel that we exist in a meaningful way.

We’re talking of course about social media as the source of our most compelling and tenacious addiction, for social media is the means by which we say “I exist, my opinion matters, I matter, and here is the tangible evidence, everyone can see my selfie, photo, tweet, post, note or comment, and since everyone has a device to access my opinion, I can imagine multitudes seeing it, for I can see it.”

In a physical world where we’re invisible and don’t matter, the universal, tangible visibility of social media is addictive, for there is no substitute for it in the real world in which we’re anonymous and invisible. Try getting your photo or opinion in the Mainstream Media, on network TV or in a mass media publication. Unlike these rigorously gated forms of media, social media is open to all, an irresistible opportunity to stake a claim to becoming visible.

There is nowhere in the real world to express oneself with such ease. Shouting on a street corner will get attention, but not the sort most desire. Standing up in a public hearing will provide three minutes of public exposure, but this only whets the appetite for a wider audience and a more substantial self-confirmation.

But this confirmation of selfhood is a chimera. That others see our selfie, photo, opinion or post is no substitute for relationships in the real world, and the relationship we have with ourself, in which our integrity and actions earn our self-respect, regardless of what others see or don’t see and what they think or don’t think about us. Our worth has nothing to do with visibility, and neither does our identity.

Let’s stipulate that the phone is a mechanism of addiction, but it can be used sparingly for non-addictive practicalities. Sales people may well spend much of their day on their phone communicating with clients and making cold calls. Brief SMS texts serve as efficient communications, as do quick emails and phone calls.

The iPhone software identifies this communication as social, which confuses it with social media. Practical communication isn’t social, it’s communicating essential information in the most efficient manner.

The mobile phone also serves as a business tool–doing a bit of online banking, mapping a route, etc.–and as a modest platform for creating content: recording an idea or melody, sharing an idea for a podcast, etc.

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