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On January 24, President Trump fired 17 inspector generals working for a wide array of federal agencies. Trump’s action jolted Washington because most of those officials could supposedly only be removed for cause — specific misconduct or other abuses. Trump also scorned the federal law requiring giving Congress 30-days notice before terminating such officials.

Some of the inspector generals that Trump axed had done good work exposing government abuses while others had defaulted to the lap dog mode. A White House official justified the firings: “These rogue, partisan bureaucrats who have weaponized the justice system against their political enemies are no longer fit or deserve to serve in their appointed positions.” The official said the firings will “make room for qualified individuals who will uphold the rule of law and protect Democracy.”

Maybe the White House wanted inspector generals who could bring bigger brooms to sweep evidence under rugs? The controversy that erupted over Trump’s firings largely ignored the long history of inspector generals either being wrongfully terminated or being worse than useless.

Politicians create facades to make citizens believe that government automatically guards against waste, fraud, and abuse. The purpose of inspector generals is to create the illusion of honest government — to make people think that oversight is going on. While inspector generals are routinely portrayed as paragons of integrity, many are appointed by the chief of the federal agency they oversee. Their jobs and budgets depend directly on the political appointees they are supposed to investigate, and they grovel accordingly.

Bush and the IGs

The George W. Bush administration throttled inspector generals who exposed too much dirt. After CIA Inspector General John Helgerson investigated whether CIA officials were guilty of torture, CIA director Michael Hayden
responded by launching an investigation of the IG. Former CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz commented that Hayden’s investigation would be seen as an effort to sway the IG “to call off the dogs…. The rank and file will become aware of it, and it will undercut the inspector general’s ability to get the truth from them.”

Homeland Security Department Inspector General Clark Kent Irvin was pressured to downplay his findings of the failures of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and federal terrorist watch lists. But elbowing the IG failed to prevent the TSA from becoming a laughingstock and a public menace.

Federal agencies responsible for exposing abuses were neutered. During the Bush administration, the amount of Pentagon contracting skyrocketing thanks to Bush’s wars. At the same time, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the Pentagon’s front line watchdog against fraud and abuse, was gutted. The Government Accountability Office condemned the DCAA in 2008 for becoming a lapdog for military contractors. Auditors were threatened with retaliation if they did not rescind findings critical of contractors. Supervisors tampered with audit findings to exonerate companies. Reports revealing how contractors did shoddy work or overcharged the government were buried.

President Bush repeatedly revealed in signing statements that he viewed anticorruption efforts as a violation of his prerogative. After Congress created an inspector general in late 2003 to look into the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Bush decreed:

The CPA IG shall refrain from initiating, carrying out, or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing a subpoena, which requires access to sensitive operation plans, intelligence matters, counterintelligence matters, ongoing criminal investigations by other administrative units of the Department of Defense related to national security, or other matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat to national security.

And since Bush acted as if any criticism of his policies undermined national security, it was not surprising that the new IG was hogtied even before he started on the job. The White House in 2007 “specifically exempted U.S. contractors in Iraq from any obligation to report waste, fraud and abuse to the U.S. government.” U.S. government contractors at home and elsewhere in the world are obliged to file such reports.

In 2008, Bush declared in a signing statement that his administration would not cooperate with a “Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan” Congress created “to investigate allegations of waste, mismanagement, and excessive force by contractors.” Regardless of how many controversies had arisen over U.S. contractors wantonly shooting innocent Iraqis, or how many scandals had erupted over billions of U.S. tax dollars vanishing in Iraq, the president ruled that no one had a right to discover what happened under his command. Preserving the prerogatives of the president was far more important than protecting American taxpayers or Iraqi civilians.

New York University professor Paul Light observed, “Over the past seven years they [the Bush Administration] have systematically worked to undermine IG authority and chill audit and investigatory range.” But “hope and change” for IGs didn’t arrive with Obama’s inauguration. In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama cosponsored the Inspectors General Act of 2008, enacted to buttress the independence of agency watchdogs. That act required the president to give Congress 30-days notice and a statement of “sufficient cause” before firing an inspector general.

Obama and the IGs

But Obama wasted no time in trampling the new law after he took his presidential oath of office. In June 2009, he fired the IG for Ameri-Corps, Gerald Walpin, for refusing to back down from his criticisms of a prominent Obama supporter caught misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal subsidies. Walpin also spooked the White House because he courageously exposed how AmeriCorps had no legal justification for pouring tens of millions of dollars into the Teaching Fellows Program, one of the agency’s flagships. At the time, ABC News reported that a “source familiar with the president’s thinking” said that Obama wanted to replace Walpin with “someone who could effectively provide the kind of independent oversight that the president values.” The best way to ensure “independent oversight” is to remind all inspector generals that they will be axed if they embarrass the White House. A joint House-Senate investigation concluded that firing Walpin “undermines the Inspectors General Act.”

In the same month Walpin was fired, the administration unsuccessfully sought to obliterate the independence of the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Neil Barofsky. Some IGs who have not been fired have instead come under withering pressure. Russell George, the IG who exposed the IRS’s targeting of conservative nonprofit groups, was perennially hammered by Obama’s congressional allies.

For most of Obama’s first term, his administration refused to appoint permanent inspectors generals at several of the largest federal agencies. There was no inspector general for the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s entire reign. Instead, the position was filled on an acting basis by a retired Foreign Service officer who was close friends with Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy. The lack of a real IG at State might have helped “contain the facts” regarding Benghazi and enabled Hillary to help coverup her official emails — a scandal that tormented her 2016 presidential campaign. The Obama administration announced a permanent IG only after Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas announced that he would block all State Department nominations until the IG slot was filled.

At the Homeland Security Department, the acting IG repeatedly launched preemptive strikes against facts that could undermine Obama’s credibility. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin declared that a DHS IG report watered down many of the details on a 2012 alcohol-and-prostitute rampage by Secret Service agents in Colombia “in order to avoid embarrassing the administration in an election year.” The acting IG first delayed and then jiggled the classification status of a report on Transportation Security Administration screw-ups to minimize the number of officials who saw it. Charles Edwards, the acting IG from early 2011 till late 2013, toadied to Obama appointees at every opportunity — stifling reports, deleting damning findings, and boasting of his chumminess with agency chieftains. Unfortunately, torpedoing oversight of the federal government’s largest nonmilitary department fits the administration’s template of suppressing evidence of its debacles far and wide.

In October 2014, the Washington Post revealed that the Agency for International Development (AID), the largest foreign-aid bureaucracy, was massively suppressing audit reports revealing waste, fraud, and abuse. More than 400 negative findings were deleted from a sample of 12 draft audit reports. In one case, more than 90 percent of the negative findings were expunged before the report was publicly released. Acting Inspector General Michael Carroll buried the embarrassing audit findings because he “did not want to create controversy as he awaited Senate confirmation to become the permanent inspector general,” according to some AID auditors.

The most brazen case involved hushing up $4.6 million in illegal ransom money that AID paid in March 2012 to secure the release of the son of Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Sam LaHood and 15 other Americans had been arrested after they entered Egypt illegally and engaged in prohibited political activism. At the time, a State Department official brazenly lied, denying that the payoff came from the U.S. government. This novel use of foreign-aid money might have caused an uproar if it had been revealed prior to Obama’s 2012 reelection.

This is not the first time that AID’s inspector general has been caught trying to bury a scandal. John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), revealed in 2014 that AID had “covered up information” on U.S.-funded Afghan ministries’ potential links to terrorist organizations. Sopko was appalled at how the U.S. government was denying bitter realities in Afghanistan: “I was stunned when senior State Department officials on my first trip to Kabul suggested how we should write our reports. They even suggested changes to our report titles and proposed that we give them our press releases in advance so they could pre-approve them.”

Sopko set the gold standard for courageous, focused IGs that made sure that Americans learned of federal abuses. In 2016, Sopko declared that “U.S. policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption” in Afghanistan. A few weeks before President Biden was shocked by the collapse of the U.S. puppet regime in Kabul, Sopko publicly declared: “We basically forced our generals, forced our military, forced our ambassadors, forced the USAID to try to show success in short timelines, which they themselves knew were never going to work.” Sopko exposed the systemic fraud that had long shielded U.S. military intervention:

Every time we went in, the U.S. military changed the goalposts and made it easier to show success, and then finally, when they couldn’t even do that, they classified the assessment tool. So they knew how bad the Afghan military was, and if you had a clearance you could find out, but the average American … wouldn’t know how bad it was, and we were paying for it.

Biden and the IGs

The primary lesson that the Biden administration took from Sopko’s candor was to never ever allow a special inspector general to oversee the $100+ billion in military and other aid sent to Ukraine. Congress repeatedly kowtowed to the White House to block proposals to create a Ukraine IG modeled after the Afghanistan IG. Biden policymakers recognized that the only thing worse than wasting billions of dollars was permitting Americans to learn how their tax dollars were torched. Biden preferred to preserve deniability — “Waste? What waste? We didn’t hear about” — in lieu of efficacy. Biden’s White House issued a statement that there was no need for a special IG on Ukraine because the Pentagon inspector general and the Government Accountability Office “are currently undertaking multiple investigations regarding every aspect of this assistance.” But Biden appointees made sure to minimize any embarrassing disclosures.

Trump and the IGs

Trump’s firing of the inspector generals looks like an ominous sign for transparency and accountability in Washington. But the feds have belly-flopped on those scores going back far into the last century. Two years ago, Sopko declared, “The U.S. government, whether it’s USAID, or DOD, or State, have horrible records on effective monitoring and evaluation.” Unfortunately, there is no reason to expect the second Trump administration to be better on those scores than were the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations.

The article was originally published in the July 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.

The post Did Trump Expose the D.C. Sham on Waste and Fraud? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Clodovis Boff, the brother of the famous liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, recently wrote an open letter to the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (known as CELAM) in which he criticized what he called the same old music: “social, social, social.” He said the bishops neglected the basic religious message of Jesus. His words were very pointed: “Can’t you see that people are tired of the same old story?”

His message was a real example of pastoral theology, of how to preach the true Gospel. He asked,

When will we give the Good News of God, of Christ and His Spirit? Of Grace and Salvation? Of conversion of heart and meditation of God’s Word? Of prayer and adoration, of pious love of the Mother of the Lord and other such themes? In short, when are we going to send a truly religious message, one that is spiritual?

I wonder what his brother Leonardo thinks. Despite his leaving the clerical state, Leonardo Boff is probably the most prominent liberation theologian, a man who studied and sparred with his former professor Joseph Ratzinger and was considered personally close to Pope Francis from the time the latter was archbishop of Buenos Aires. The letter is outspokenly open about seeing the failure of liberation theology to gain hold of the bulk of the faithful in Latin America.

This is not the first time that the friar of the Servants of Mary has taken a different tack from the school of theology that made his brother famous. In 2007, Clodovis (I cannot just put his last name for fear of confusing him with his brother) wrote an essay called “The Theology of Liberation and the Return to the Fundamental.” In that publication, he declared that “the error of Liberation Theology as it exists today, is that it put the poor in the place of Christ, making them a fetish and reducing Christ to a kind of co-worker.”

Clodovis Boff wrote his latest letter as a response to the 40th General Assembly of CELAM at the end of May. Even the secular world “is fed up with secularism,” said the friar.

Souls beg for the supernatural and you insist in the natural. That paradox is seen even in parishes: as lay people tend to like to show signs of their Catholic identity (with crosses, medals, veils, shirts with holy pictures on them) the priests and religious sisters go against that trend and wear no distinctive signs of identity.  

The brother of the man who wrote so much liberation ecclesiology criticized the bishops—whose message concluding the 40th anniversary of the conference mentioned Jesus Christ only once in the context of the celebration of the anniversary of the Council of Nicaea—by affirming,

Your excellencies are correct saying that you desire a Church that is a “house and school of communion,” and in addition, “merciful, synodal and extending itself outward.” And who doesn’t? However, where is Christ in this ideal image of the Church? 

The Church in Latin America is “bleeding,” losing blood and vitality.

What is more evident here are empty churches, empty seminaries, empty convents—empty. Seven or eight Latin American countries are no longer majority Catholic. Even Brazil is on its way to being the greatest ex-Catholic country in the world…Nevertheless, this does not seem to worry our Venerable Brothers [the bishops] very much.

Friar Boff’s (his brother is no longer a religious) words reminded me of something that has greatly puzzled me in recent years. I saw the decline of the Catholic Church in El Salvador, where I worked for twenty years—but that seemed to be ignored by theologians and academics who were formed by an almost ideological approach to pastoral theology.

Clodovis lamented in his letter the lack of real eschatology in the preaching of the Church leaders. Their talk of hope is very general and seems to be limited to this world’s realities. “I don’t doubt, brothers, that heaven is also part of your ‘great hope,’ but why this diffidence to talk about [heaven] out loud and clearly.”

I remember being on a commission for a pastoral plan and having to appeal to the archbishop for the inclusion of the word “salvation” as a central theme. The ideologues of the Left who loved splicing words for major goals in the “five-year plans” of pastoral projection (and I intend the allusion to the Soviet plans) did not like eschatology. They were more worried about an eschatology that echoed the leftist intellectuals who were dominant in the universities of El Salvador. Their mantra of “see-judge-act” always seemed to end up sounding like position papers for a political party.

And what has been the result of all the pastoral theology of liberation. I know that we have to be careful of a “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” about extraordinarily complex social phenomenon, but the burgeoning Protestant sects did not worry about “social, social, social,” and they thrived. The latest study of religious identification in El Salvador shows an alarming growth of non-Catholic religious sensibility. What used to be a majority Catholic nation now approaches an evenly divided ecclesiastical panorama. What went wrong?

And this happened after the beatification and canonization of saints like Fr. Rutilio Grande and Archbishop Oscar Romero and after a pope from Latin America who clearly tried to revive liberation theology. When St. Oscar Romero was beatified, a massive number of people attended the open-air Mass celebrating the event. A woman who watched the swelling crowd from a nearby home said it was an apotheosis.

Read the Whole Article

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Sarepta Therapeutics is in hot water with the FDA and its stock has been hammered after three deaths were reportedly linked to its Elevidys muscular dystrophy gene therapy. As reported by Bloomberg:

Two teenage boys died of acute liver failure in recent months after taking Elevidys. They were being treated for Duchenne muscular dystrophy and weren’t able to walk because of the muscle-wasting disease. Separately, the company said Friday that a 51-year-old patient died of acute liver failure last month in an early-stage trial of a gene therapy to treat limb-girdle muscular dystrophy.

FDA leaders met with Sarepta, the agency said in a statement, and requested it voluntarily stop all shipments of the drug, which is its biggest product. “The company refused to do so,” the agency said.

This morning comes the news that the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) has announced it will halt the use of Elevidys, further pressuring the stock, which was already at a nine-year low.

The FDA’s response to Sarepta’s trouble with Elevidys starkly contrasts with its breathtaking leniency with Moderna and Pfizer in the matter of their COVID-19 mRNA gene therapy injections that have been misleadingly categorized as “vaccines.”

On August 1, 2022, thoughtful and attentive cardiologists were stunned by the publication of a report that two teenage boys had died within the first week after receiving the second Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 dose. Autopsies confirmed that both had died of vaccine-induced myocarditis.

As we note in Chapter 26 of our book Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality:

As of April 25, 2025, 19,403 American deaths have been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), mostly by healthcare professionals who believe these deaths are vaccine related. Approximately 1,134 deaths on the day of vaccination have been reported, and 1,266 on the day after vaccination. A study published in 2010 by principal investigator Lazarus Ross, MBBS, MPH for Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc. found that “fewer than 1 percent of vaccine adverse events are reported” to VAERS. Using the far more conservative estimate of 3.3 percent, or a 1 in 30 under-reporting factor, 19,403 yields a nationwide estimate of 582,090 US vaccine deaths.

Sarepta is not a vaccine producer. Its Elevidys therapy is categorized as a pharmaceutical product without the special liability protection granted to substances categorized as “vaccines.”

What is happening to Sarepta is evidence that companies such as Moderna and Pfizer—i.e., companies that have availed themselves with the mystical appellation of “Vaccine Producers”—have obtained a unique status in human affairs akin to an ancient and powerful religious institution.

Vaccine Producers have also succeeded in placing innumerable “friends” in federal agencies—including the DoD, CIA, and HHS—whose entrenched power supersedes the executive power of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The Sicilian Mafia calls itself the “Cosa Nostra,” which translates into English as “This Thing of Ours”—a sardonic and veiled reference to a secretive power structure erected over centuries that has proven remarkably immune to the reform efforts of honest law officers. Dedicated cops and prosecutors come and go and many die violently, but “This Thing of Ours” remains.

Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality will be published on July 29. Please click on the cover image below to see the book’s Amazon product page and consider ordering a copy.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post FDA Asks Sarepta To Halt Gene Therapy After Three Deaths appeared first on LewRockwell.

Market cycles have existed since the advent of lending institutions. As far back as 2,000 BC, in Assyria, merchants provided loans to farmers and traders. Often, this created prosperity, with greater amounts of money passing from hand to hand with greater frequency.

Not surprisingly, the interest paid to the merchants inspired them to increase the amounts they would lend, again increasing prosperity.

But periodically, hard times returned and those who borrowed were unable to pay back the loans, leading to recessions.

Since at least the 14th century, rather than lending out gold and silver, goldsmiths in Europe issued letters of credit. Then, in the 17th century, fractional reserve banking emerged as a common practice.

The concept was that a bank might lend out the majority of its deposits, retaining a small percentage for day-to-day business. But for many banks, at some point, the temptation to lend out more in promissory notes than the bank actually had on deposit became too great.

Periodically, there would be a market contraction and the banks would fail. Those who thought that they owned money found that they did not. It was gone.

Fast-forward to the 21st century and we see the fractional reserve concept as the norm, with banks having a host of means by which to lend out multiples of the money they actually have on deposit.

Naturally, this leads to bigger booms, but also bigger crashes.

At present, we’re at the end of the longest boom in history, and the debt levels and budget deficits of many of the world’s leading countries are far beyond anything the world has ever witnessed. Moreover, the greatly expanded level of currency creation is far beyond any level previously seen.

This is an end-run tactic, designed to buy a bit more time, but ensuring that, as the nascent collapse unfolds, it will be the greatest crash in history.

Historically, what happens in a crash is that most or all banks close. Some re-open at a later date; some do not. The lucky depositors are the ones who are told that a portion of their money still exists and that, at some point, they’ll be allowed to retrieve it. But for many others, total loss is the outcome. The amount of cash that was thought to be in circulation existed only as credits and most of it has literally vanished.

At such a time, cash becomes king. People still have assets, but find that those assets are unsaleable, as no one has the actual cash to purchase them, even if they wanted them.

There’s an old English saying that, “When no man has a farthing, the man with tuppence becomes a lord.” This sounds quite old-fashioned, but is nevertheless true.

Farthings are now gone from use in Britain, but tuppence coins (two pence – worth eight farthings) are still in circulation.

In essence, the saying means that when no one around you has any purchasing power, and you have even a small amount of cash, you are indeed a rich man, as you’re one of the very few who’s in a position to purchase assets.

And that leads us to the discussion of real money: gold and silver. They remain as real as they’ve always been. For over 5,000 years, people have returned to precious metals in times of economic crisis. Not surprisingly, the value of gold goes up at such times, sometimes dramatically.

At the same time, when the amount of available money contracts – and most people have far less of it than they did before the crisis – historically, the value of assets drops dramatically. This is due to the fact that, strapped for cash, people try to sell assets, and with the great majority of people attempting to do so, their value on the open market tends to drop dramatically.

It’s quite easy to drop to ten cents on the dollar, or even less. During the Weimar crisis in 1922–23, it was not uncommon for people to sell the treasured family piano for the price of a loaf of bread.

Most gold experts agree that, in a crisis, gold will rise to a minimum of $5,000. Should the crisis become prolonged and should a panic ensue, gold could rise to three times that number and beyond.

So, conservatively, gold at, say, $3,300 today could easily double, but in addition, if assets were to fall in price by, say, 50%, the resultant purchasing power of an ounce of gold would not be just $6,600, but double that, or $13,200. (And remember, that’s a conservative number.)

And here we see the meaning of the old English saying. The real measure of wealth is not the amount you possess, but the amount you possess compared to others. And by extension, what you are able to buy when you’re one of the very few who hold something of perennial worth.

In a crisis, such as the one that we’re now facing, promissory notes and bank credits will at some point tumble to the ground, as they invariably do. At that time – when no man has a farthing, the man with tuppence becomes a lord, as he’s one of the very few in a position to buy up assets that will, after the crisis has ended, once again be in demand.

The crisis period that we have just entered will be beyond anything we have seen in our lifetime.

How we emerge from it will depend upon whether we have converted our assets to real wealth whist there is still time.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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The post Charlie Kirk: How Debt Has Radicalized Young America and Why Boomers Deserve the Blame appeared first on LewRockwell.

Back in 1949 the world was still recovering from World War II. The Korean War wouldn’t start for another year, but George Orwell was already focused on the dangers of communism and the totalitarianist government it builds. World War II was started by totalitarian governments; but worse than that was how such governments treat the citizens living under their control.

In his book 1984, the government, encapsulated in the persona of “Big Brother,” knew everything about everyone; where they were, what they were doing and even what they were thinking much of the time. This was used to keep control of people to an extreme that even the now defunct Soviet Union couldn’t reach. Yet with modern technology, the reality of such a government could very well be forming around us and we don’t even see it happening.

As we know, the government is actively spying on every one of us. That’s the essence of Edward Snowden’s message, since he left the employ of the NSA. While that spying is intended to help prevent terrorism, we’ve seen some in government be awfully free in their use of that term. One can quickly find themselves labeled as a terrorist if the political winds blow the wrong way.

On top of the NSA, big tech is in cahoots with government in a number of ways, most especially with providing information to law enforcement officers, as they seek to solve crimes. But that same information which is being used for the good of tracking down and convicting criminals can very well be used against the rest of us. After all, any of us can become an instant felon, simply by Congress passing a law making something that has been legal, suddenly illegal.

An excellent case in point is the current push by Democrats to restrict our Second Amendment rights. Should they do that, then millions of law-abiding citizens will suddenly be faced with the option of turning in valuable firearms or hiding them from the government. Will the government hunt down those who haven’t turned in their guns, using the same tools they are currently using to track down criminals? Only time will tell.

So, what can we do to keep the government from having an idea where we are and what we are doing? To start with, we need to understand that the government has multiple means of tracking us, not just one or two. That means we’re going to have to defeat them all, if we expect to protect ourselves from electronic spying.

Here are a few places to start.

Use a Burner Phone

The easiest way for the government to track any of us is through our smartphone. We really don’t have a handle on everything that our phones are doing in the background, while we’re not looking.

Yet there’s nearly constant communication between our phones and the local cell phone tower.

It’s clear that the communications we have through our phones is readily available to the NSA and others.

You can even pay online services to do a little spying on family members, seeing their text messages, who they’ve talked to, what they’ve looked at online and where they’ve been. If you and I can do this, then you can be sure the government can do more.

Shut Off GPS Tracking

One of the most common ways our phones help the government keep track of us is through the phone’s GPS. Google and Apple keep track of our every move through that part of the phone.

If you go to Google Maps and click on your timeline in the menu, it will show you everywhere you’ve been, for the last several years.

This feature alone could put you in danger if you just happen to be in the same place that a crime was committed. While that alone wouldn’t be enough to convict you; it would be enough to make you a suspect.

And that’s just one example of how the GPs could be used against you. What if they want to track you down because it has been reported that you said something against the government; they’d have no trouble tracking you down.

Clean Out Internet Browsing Activity and Cookies

One of the big ways that companies use the internet to keep tabs on us is through our browsing history and the cookies downloaded to our computers by the various websites we visit.

A lot can be learned about who we are and what we do by looking at that. That’s why major corporations invest so much in data mining, looking for people to buy their products.

Haven’t you seen how you can look at something online, then find advertisements for the same sort of product showing up in your Facebook feed and just about any online article you read?

That information is also admissible in court as a means of defining your character. Government prosecutors could build a totally false narrative about you as a terrorist or planning mass murder, backed up by no more than the websites you have visited. Simple curiosity can and will be used against you, perhaps even in a court of law.

Get Rid of Alexa, Siri, and other Voice-recognition Assistants

One of the key elements of Orwell’s imaginary society in 1984 was that the government was tracking what everyone was doing through their television sets.

Yet today, rather than the government having to hide that capability in our TV sets, we buy devices and use them in our homes.

Those devices track everything we do, listening in on our conversations, so that they can “serve us” better.

Employees of those companies have come forth, confessing how employees at big tech companies listen in on people’s private lives.

If they’re doing it, then the government has access to it too. Remember, everything that device does goes over the internet and the NSA is tapped into that thoroughly.

Read the Whole Article

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Zvi Sukkot, a member of Israel’s Knesset or Parliament, declared in a televised debate several months ago, “Last night, almost 100 Gazans were killed.  And the question you asked me just now had nothing to do with Gaza.  Do you know why?  Because it doesn’t interest anyone.  Everyone has gotten used to [the fact] that [we can] kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody cares in the world.”

Fortunately for the United States and Israel, MK Sukkot is correct.  Few people care that the people of Gaza are starving to death if they are not gunned down by the Israeli military, while they wait in line to receive food.

Drop Site News reported, “Israel’s war of extermination in Gaza continues to plunge to new depths of horror.  Starving Palestinians have begun to collapse in the streets and die of hunger as a result of the siege.  Those who try to get food are gunned down in ever deadlier aid massacres.  The Israeli military issues frequent mass expulsion orders and further expands its ground operations, slicing up the enclave and forcibly displacing Palestinians into more concentrated zones.  All the while, the relentless aerial assault and ground attacks persist.”

According to Antiwar.com, Gaza’s Health Ministry on Sunday reported a total of 18 deaths from starvation within 24 hours due to the Israeli blockade of most aid into Gaza. Two people who starved to death were Razan Abu Zahe, a 4 year old girl, and a 3 month old baby, Yehia al-Najjar.  Babies are especially vulnerable because mothers suffering from malnutrition cannot produce breast milk, and Israel has restricted the import of baby formula.

We must remember that Israel’s President Isaac Herzog of the center-left The Democrats Party stated on October 12, 2024 that there is no distinction between Hamas militants and civilians in Gaza.  He declared, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.  It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved.  It’s absolutely not true.”

Last week, only 6 members of the US House of Representatives voted for a small reduction in US funding for the Israeli war machine.

Aaron Bushnell, a member of the US Air Force, who set himself on fire last year to protest this Shoah said, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery?  Or the Jim Crow South?  Or apartheid?  What would I do if my country was committing genocide?  The answer is, you’re doing it.  Right now.”

The United States and Israel are continuing to murder as many Gazans as possible, and they plan on expelling the remaining population to other countries to enable Israel’s puppet Donald Trump to develop a resort in Gaza.

Gaza is unfit for human life due to the unwavering support given to Israel by the US national-security state to destroy virtually all infrastructure in Gaza and its environment.  The international community must compel the United States and Israel to integrate the population of Gaza into Israel and to grant them equal rights in accordance with international law.

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Trump’s administration has just declassified a staggering 230,000 pages related to the MLK assassination—and we’re digging in. Eric Hunley and Mark Groubert explore what this massive release reveals, and how it connects to a broader push for transparency.

Plus, Tulsi Gabbard refers Obama officials to the DOJ for their alleged role in the Trump-Russia probe. From explosive DOJ dismissals to the LA blast that killed three deputies, we cover every corner of America’s untold stories.

Why is Colbert blaming Trump? What’s behind the WSJ press ban? Is UNESCO the latest battleground? Don’t miss Tuesday Newsday—it’s not what the mainstream will tell you.

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Join us November 21st–23rd, 2025 in Dallas at JFK Lancer Conference (or Virtually)

Tickets now available at https://assassinationconference.com/
Virtual tickets start at $75.99
In-person tickets start at $149.99

Discount Code: Use UNTOLD10 at checkout for 10% off
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The post America’s Untold Stories – Treason? Tulsi Gabbard Refers Obama Team to DOJ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Andy Thomas.

“Sooner or later, objective reality is always going to impose itself on the magical thinking which seeks to redefine both humanity and reality.”

See here.

The post 10 Civilizational Blind Spots appeared first on LewRockwell.

Jesse Trentadue wrote:

The Gateway Pundit

The post Upcoming Book Poised to Expose FBI’s Hidden Role in OKC Bombing on 30th Anniversary, Reveal Prison Murder Cover-Up, Says Victim’s Brother appeared first on LewRockwell.

Brian Dunaway wrote:

Well, to Christian Zionists, that would include intimidating Palestinian Bedouins by killing their livestock in order to force them to flee, so as to possess their land, as Israeli settlers have done.

Meanwhile, Christian Zionist ranchers in Texas, with the help of organizations like the Temple Institute and Boneh Yisrael (“Building Israel”), have delivered five red heifers to Israel to be used in priestly purification during rituals on The Temple Mount. (Just have to push off that pesky Dome of the Rock first, then re-build the temple. No worries – plans afoot to do all of this!)

Yeah, Jesus would do that too. He would definitely genetically modify cattle to produce red heifers for use in a temple ritual made utterly pointless by His crucifixion. Definitely.

The post WWJD? appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin wrote:

Latin American lawlessness and economic lunacy comes north.

I first encountered the squatter phenomenon living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the mid-1980s.  It was all over the island, and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it.  I don’t know if anything has changed, but the most outstanding example of it at the time was on Rt. 187, the Atlantic Ocean waterfront road that runs behind San Juan International Airport all the way to a ferry crossing at a river mouth that takes you to the small town of Loiza Aldea.  I used to go on weekend bike rides on the road because it was virtually free of traffic.  The government, I was told, owned the land, and only a few squatters’ houses were beside it here and there.  The value of that waterfront property so near to Puerto Rico’s population center is hard to overestimate, but the concept of opportunity costs (income foregone) seemed to be totally foreign to the island’s leadership.  A couple of prime examples of that phenomenon is that the old city airstrip in the heart of the port of San Juan had been taken over by some routine government administration buildings that could have been located anywhere in the city, such as the office for drivers license renewal, and a long stretch of waterfront property heading into San Juan from the international airport had been chosen as the site for a very large public housing project.

As a footnote on the story, an elementary school classmate of my oldest son, lived with his parents, a Cuban exile insurance executive and his younger German second wife, a few steps away from their appropriately named private school, San Juan School by the Sea, where English was the medium of instruction.  The parents and son lived rent free in a house that the government owned, but had lost track of.  The school and the house and much of the neighborhood were later destroyed by Hurricane Hugo, and the international trio moved to South Carolina.

The post Squatters Have Taken Over Lots in L.A. Fire Zones, and the Owners Can’t Remove Them appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Vicki Marzullo.

Zero Hedge.

The post Bessent: Get rid of Fed appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin wrote:

“Living on the petrodollar.”

Tangible gold has to be better backing for a currency than the political arrangement du jour.

The post Trump’s War on BRICS BACKFIRES as Putin & China SMASH US Dollar w/ Ben Norton appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Obama, Brennan, And The Deep State Coup appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer . 

The post Tim Dillon Emergency Podcast w/ Alex Jones: The Epstein Cover-Up appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Krall.   

The post 9/11 Pilot Whistleblower: Why These Hijackers Couldn’t Have Flown the Planes appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer

The Independent

The post Alan Dershowitz: Ghislaine Maxwell knows ‘everything’ and should get immunity to testify before Congress appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Tim McGraw.

Charles Burris

The post Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, Has Proof that Obama Authorized Killing of Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

The odious Rahm Emanuel, who reportedly wants to run for president, has “broken” with the Lunatic Left and has announced that he doesn’t believe that a man can become a woman (and vice versa).  The Dr. Mengeles of the “sex change surgery” industry must be very, very concerned.

The post News Flash: This Just In appeared first on LewRockwell.