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 Johnny Kramer wrote:

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International Man: Gold has seen a dramatic rise recently. What do you think is driving this surge—inflation, geopolitical instability, loss of faith in fiat currency like the US dollar?

Doug Casey: The answer is all of the above.

First, inflation is not retail price rises, as most people think. The rise in prices is a consequence of inflation, not inflation itself. Inflation is the creation of excess purchasing media above the creation of real wealth. Inflation is caused by two things: the Federal Reserve buying assets and increasing its balance sheet, financing government debt by creating currency and credit. And the banking system creating money via commercial loans facilitated by fractional reserve banking.

Short answer: inflation has been a primary cause for gold’s moving up not just over the last few years, but over the last 50 years.

Geopolitical instability? Absolutely. All the world’s currencies, including the US dollar, are fiat instruments. If a government falls, historically, its currency goes with it. People are increasingly looking for some place to put their wealth and savings other than a fiat currency.

And this leads to the last thing you mentioned—a loss of faith in fiat currency itself. The cat is out of the bag at this point, and all over the world, there’s a loss of faith not just in currencies, but governments themselves.

What can you do? You can buy real estate, of course, or you can invest in a productive business—but gold, and more recently Bitcoin, have been the big beneficiaries of this loss of faith.

International Man: Do you believe the dollar’s global reserve status is at risk? If so, what could replace it—a gold-backed system, or something else entirely?

Doug Casey: There’s no question that the dollar’s reserve status is at risk.

Governments recognize each other’s fiat currencies for what they are: the unbacked liabilities of bankrupt entities. And most world governments are, in point of fact, bankrupt.

That’s most dangerously the case of the US dollar, the world’s long-time numeraire. Why should the Chinese, or any other government, hold the currency of its adversary? The currency might be blocked, as it was for the Russians. It will certainly be inflated. Or might suffer an outright default. Governments don’t trust each other, and they certainly don’t want to use the unbacked liability of an often antagonistic or even hostile government.

The major export of the US since about 1980 has not been computers, or Boeings, or soybeans. It’s been dollars. Every year, the trade deficit—the export of dollars—runs in the hundreds of billions. More recently, close to a trillion dollars per year. Those dollars outside of the US amount to liabilities of the US.

If foreigners want to dump those dollars, they’re going to come back home to the US to buy real goods—shares of businesses, buildings, farmlands, what have you. When that happens, the amount of real wealth owned by Americans will plummet, and the amount of fiat dollars inside the country will explode.

A digital currency will aggravate the situation. At that point, money becomes just a computer digit controlled by the central authorities. If you think the situation is unstable now, it’s going to become much more unstable as the world’s governments go to centrally controlled digital currencies.

International Man: You’ve often said, “The dollar is an IOU nothing.” Has that moment of reckoning finally arrived?

Doug Casey: Just because something is inevitable doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily imminent. But at this point, the government has really gone on tilt. It’s completely out of control. I believe we’re now at the edge of the precipice.

DOGE was just a bit of electioneering and marketing on the part of Trump. The interest on the $38 trillion acknowledged US debt will keep rising along with the debt itself. Regardless of what may happen with interest rates over the next year or two, in the long run, they’re headed much, much higher.

Military spending isn’t being cut. As we get deeper into World War III, it will go much higher. Welfare payments are the same. As the standard of living goes down, people will demand more from the government.

The situation is completely out of control. The US has become quite unstable. I was talking about a civil war ten years ago; now they’re making movies about the prospect.

International Man: Some investors think gold’s rally is overextended. You’ve said this is “only the beginning.” What makes you so confident?

Doug Casey: As near as we can tell, there are about 7 billion ounces of gold in existence. The amount of gold is increasing by about 100 million or so ounces per year, or roughly one and a half percent per year.

There are 8 billion people in the world. If the amount of gold in the world were to be distributed equally among them, each person would only have three-quarters of an ounce of gold. As for the number of dollars in the world today—of course, it’s very hard to say how many dollars there really are, depending on which measure of the money supply we’re talking about (M1, M3, and others), or just dollars that are outside the US—in order to back the dollar with a fixed amount of gold and make it redeemable with a fixed number of dollars, it’s probably going to take $25,000 to $30,000 per ounce of gold at present.

In fact, I suspect the next ploy of the government will be to raise the gold price to $15,000 or $20,000 an ounce, much as Roosevelt did in 1934, or Nixon in 1971. I don’t doubt that they’ll package a lot of BLM land into publicly traded stock and sell it, as well.

In the recent past, I’ve said that gold was reasonably priced relative to the price of food, clothes, and houses. It’s about where it “should be.” However, if the dollar is to be once again redeemable with a fixed amount of gold, it has to be much, much higher.

I don’t think we have to worry about the gold market being overextended. The average person doesn’t think about gold, doesn’t own much of it, and is uninterested in it. The public is completely uninvolved in gold. One piece of evidence for this is that the premium of gold coins above the bullion price is still close to the lowest levels in history. But moving up.

Brief story: yes, gold has gone up a lot, but we’re far from a mania in it—and it’s going higher.

International Man: For the average investor, how should one position themselves in this environment—physical gold, mining stocks, royalties, or something else?

Doug Casey: Your savings should be in physical gold, preferably smaller gold coins in your own possession. That should be your foundation for savings—cash gold. Secondarily, you should have a good supply of gold stored reliably offshore.

The two things that we recommend are SWP in the Cayman Islands and the Perth Mint. There are others. But foreign exchange controls around the world are on the way, so it’s very important that you get a significant amount of your wealth outside of your home country.

Mining stocks, relative to the price of gold—and relative to the price of other securities from every point of view—are very cheap right now. With all-in sustaining costs of mining about $1,500 per ounce industry-wide, and gold at around $4,000, companies that are in production are coining money.

Although the market doesn’t seem to care, for reasons we’ve talked about in the past. Mining stocks are speculations that should play a major role in your portfolio. The safest way to capitalize on the success of mining stocks is through gold royalty companies, which are typically paid 0.5%, 1%, or even 2% of every ounce of gold that comes out of the ground—whether the company is profitable or not.

International Man: If we’re truly entering what you’ve called “The Greater Depression,” what role does gold play in surviving—and even profiting from it?

Doug Casey: The whole world is over-financialized today. That’s indicated by the gigantic amount of debt that all entities carry. The average American is buried under mortgage debt, credit card debt, automobile debt, and student debt. Local, state, and federal governments all owe huge amounts of money. The same is true for many corporations.

Most of the money that’s been made for the last couple of generations has been in the financial markets, not by creating real industry and real wealth the way Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller did. Notwithstanding the great advances in high tech, the real money is in financial engineering, not electrical, civil, or chemical engineering.

The whole world is over-financialized. You want to own real wealth as opposed to paper wealth.

As far as the Greater Depression is concerned, yes, we’ve been slip-sliding downhill for the last 50 years. It’s been disguised by increases in technology and by taking on more debt, which amounts to consuming capital from the past and mortgaging the future.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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A couple of recent stories relating to the utter bestiality of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians have exposed the criminality of successive US governments in supporting the Jewish state no matter what it does. Observers of the lopsided relationship understand very clearly that Israel’s lobby in the United States, backed up by Jewish billionaires who are willing to spend whatever it takes to corrupt the political system and buy up the media, has succeeded in making Washington a totally controlled client state manipulated by extreme war criminals like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is rewarded by the near complete loyalty of Congress and the White House. The one sided relationship dominates both Republicans and Democrats and has been most evident in the Presidencies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who have chosen to ignore the reality of the Israeli slaughter of some hundreds of thousands of Palestinians using US weapons and Washington’s political protection in international fora. For what it is worth, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump has spoken out effectively on the murder and torture of the Palestinians by Israel.

The irony of it all is that Washington’s subjugation by Israel, far from being politically neutral, does terrible damage to the United States, both in terms of actual costs and the fact that the US is now reviled by much of the world as it continues to protect and enable Israel as it continues it program to turn the Middle East into a region that it dominates by dint of perpetual slaughter of the original inhabitants. Beyond that, one of the costs of loving Israel so much is the lack of any consequences when it comes to protection of American citizens who find themselves on the wrong end of the Israeli police state. Citizens like Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by an Israeli Army sniper in May 2022, but the US Embassy did nothing to establish responsibility for the murder, leaving it up the Israeli judiciary, which did nothing and may even have rewarded the soldier. Abu Akleh was one of 276 journalists targeted deliberately and murdered by Israeli forces in the past two years.

Going back a bit, the most egregious case of the US abandoning its own to Israeli connivance was the attack on the USS Liberty intelligence ship in international waters in June 1967. Thirty-four crewmen were killed and 174 more wounded and the clear intention was to sink the ship using planes and torpedo boats with their identifications covered to blame the incident on the Egyptians. A cover-up engineered by President Lyndon B Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara followed and repeated attempts by surviving crewmen to open an investigation have been blocked in Congress, most notably by Senator John McCain, whose father was the Admiral that chaired the inquiry held in Malta that decided that it was all a case of mistaken identity, which was a lie. LBJ called back planes that were sent to aid the stricken Liberty and was heard to explain that he would be satisfied if all those “sailor-boys were to go to the bottom of the sea” rather than offend “our good friend” Israel.

Inevitably, stories about Israeli inhumanity are either completely suppressed or substantially modified to make the Jews involved appear to be victims of whatever takes place, what one might refer to as the “holocaust syndrome,” but sometimes the reality is just so horrific, including systematic torture and even the removal of organs from prisoners, that it manages to leak through the damage control and censorship.

Last week, there surfaced a bizarre tale involving the Chief Legal Officer of the Israeli Army, a Major General named Yifat Tomer-Yeralshami. Yeralshami is a woman who was highly respected by her peers though it should be assumed that she was constrained by the policies towards the Israel Defense Force (IDF) as dictated by the Netanyahu regime and its extreme right winger chief National Security officer Itamar Ben-Gvir. Tomer-Yeralshami had been involved in the case of a Palestinian prisoner who had been serially raped in the notorious Sde Terman prison.

Terman was the best known IDF torture center. In October 2024, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel issued a report examining the treatment of thousands of Palestinian detainees after October 7th, 2023. In the report, the commission determined that detainees from Gaza held in Israeli military prisons, including children, were “subjected to widespread and systematic abuse, physical and psychological violence, and sexual and gender-based violence amounting to the war crime and crime against humanity of torture and the war crime of rape and other forms of sexual violence.”

Israeli soldiers were reportedly creative in their rape techniques. Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish-American orthopedic surgeon who was a volunteer medic in Gaza last year, reported how one Palestinian prisoner was treated. “He was raped by female IDF soldiers with a zucchini placed up his rectum and the zucchini was soaked in pork blood” the pork used specifically because pork is forbidden to Muslims, as it is to Jews.

The rape in question being investigated by Tomer-Yeralshami had been carried out by five Israeli soldiers. The incident occurred in July 2024 and the soldiers had been detained after the Palestinian proved to be so seriously injured that he had to be hospitalized. The IDF soldiers raped the man so violently, using in one instance a knife in his rectum, that his intestines exploded and his rectum was ruptured. He has undergone 20 surgeries since what happened to him. The facility where the soldiers were detained was subsequently stormed by a group consisting mostly of Israeli armed settlers led by Ben-Gvir and the men were later released and have reportedly been waiting on a military hearing to determine their possible guilt. They not only claim to be innocent, they believe that they should be rewarded and have even appeared before the press wearing black uniforms and head covers to make their case that comes down to soldiers not being held accountable if they torture or kill Palestinian prisoners.

In this case, the story of the savage rape in the prison would have died in an Israel court but for the fact that the rape was videoed and was leaked to Israeli news network Channel 12, apparently by the General and possibly others in her office, and the story subsequently developed that she had resigned her commission and disappeared. In her resignation letter, she apparently admitted that she had approved the release of a video revealing institutionalized acts of torture committed by the IDF against Palestinian prisoners of war that took place in the Sde Teiman detention camp in July 2024.

Shortly after the footage was aired, Tomer-Yerushalmi was placed on forced leave by the Israeli Defense Ministry after a criminal probe was launched to investigate the origins of the leak. In the months that followed her being placed on leave, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that Tomer-Yerushalmi would not be permitted to return to her post, forcing her resignation. In her resignation letter, Tomer-Yerushalmi stated that “To my regret, this basic understanding—that there are acts to which even the most vile of detainees must not be subjected—is no longer convincing to all,” a tacit admission of the institutionalized abuse sanctioned by Israeli officials within the IDF and Netanyahu government.

Tomer-Yerushalmi disappeared from sight and it was subsequently rumored that she might have killed herself, but she was found subsequently and arrested. The Netanyahu government and its right-wing supporters have tried to benefit from the developing story, claiming that the general’s arrest confirms that the soldiers were “innocent” and that the leaked videos were “fake.” However, the trial of the soldiers is reportedly proceeding, and the videos have been confirmed as genuine. General Tomer-Yerushalmi is now being accused of “treason” for her role in the leak.

This affair could have been a classic case of silencing the messenger who was bearing bad news but it has become clear that the General was not operating alone. The Israeli police claim to possess WhatsApp group communications involving other high-ranking officers connected to the leaked information. The Israeli press has cited eight top officers within the IDF prosecution command headed by Tomer-Yerushalmi. The video and related documents were reportedly actually physically leaked by a junior officer within the military prosecutor’s command, who also confessed to his behavior before the Israeli General Security Organization (Shabak). Some believe that it is unconceivable that General Tomer-Yerushalmi would have made the decision to expose the IDF’s conduct without a green light from up above. Who could give such a green light? Her direct commander, the Israeli chief of staff (Herzi Halevi), or even the defense minister (Yoav Gallant), which would place then at odds with Netanyahu.

Some suspect that the actual objective by the army high command may have been to prove that Israel “has the legal means to prosecute its war criminals”—a message to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague that it should stay away from the case. If this theory is correct, General Tomer-Yerushalmi and those who authorized her were driven by “patriotic sentiments” to protect the behavior of the army soldiers. It may have been an attempt to defuse possible court cases by presenting a false image of ethical accountability. In short, the image of “ethical behavior” replaces any actual concern for ethical conduct, something that is absent from the nation that calls itself the Jewish State with an army that calls itself the world’s “most moral.”

Predictably, as a response to Tomer-Yerushalmi’s admitting she was behind the release of the video from Sde Teiman, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to shift the blame. He characterized the leak as the worst public relations disaster that Israel has ever faced saying “It is perhaps the most serious public relations attack Israel has experienced since its founding—I cannot recall one so concentrated and intense. This requires an independent and impartial inquiry, and I expect that such an investigation will indeed take place.” What Netanyahu was really demanding was a cover-up of what crimes have become systematic in Israel’s torture and killing of Palestinian prisoners.

Another story, equally hideous, concerns the activity of the so-called Israeli settlers, who have been armed by the Israeli government and have been systematically attacking the Palestinians remaining on the West Bank by beating and even killing the Arabs and destroying their livelihoods. It was again a case of a video having surfaced that showed a raid on a Palestinian farm, revealing how the settlers raided a barn containing the farmer’s sheep and lambs. Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone describes the scene and what it means: “Israeli settlers were filmed torturing lambs which belonged to Palestinians in the West Bank. Gouged their eyes out. Smashed them with cinder blocks. Beat them to death in front of their mothers. Lambs. It’s not the most evil thing the Israelis have done. Not by a long shot. Hell, all of human civilization subjects animals to cruel abuses every minute of every day through the horrors of factory farming. But this particular incident shines a special sort of light into exactly what’s going on behind Israeli eyes over there in that sadistic society. Think about the hatred and savagery you’d need to summon up within yourself to gouge the eyes out of a living baby sheep. Think about the kind of person you’d have to become to do something like that to an innocent creature. Those lambs didn’t know they were Palestinian. They didn’t know anything about Hamas or October 7 or the Nazi Holocaust, or any of the other reasons Israelis generally cite for their abuses of human beings. They were just sitting there, doing absolutely nothing that could possibly be construed as harmful by even the most talented hasbarist. And those settlers went in there and inflicted completely gratuitous suffering upon them. This, to me anyway, just says so much about the level of vitriolic hatred by which the state of Israel is sustained. It’s baked in to the way the whole state.”

I rest my case about what is wrong with Israel to include its criminal relationship with the United States. So Mr. Trump, I already know you hate animals just as you hate and seek revenge on anyone who does not agree with you, but what is your response to the murders of children and rapes of prisoners as well as the torture of baby creatures who have done no wrong? Just what is your justification for making the United States a partner and even enabler in the crimes?

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

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Medicine is strongly biased towards adopting biochemical models of disease as this facilitates costly therapeutics being developed for each disease and hence sustains the medical industry. Unfortunately, in many cases, the biochemical approach to disease, at best can manage symptoms, and as a result, many conditions remain “incurable” while non-patentable natural therapies that can cure them languish in obscurity.

That’s why, despite spending an ever increasing amount of money on Alzheimer’s research (e.g., the NIH spent 2.9 billion in 2020 and 3.9 billion in 2024), we’ve still failed to make any real progress on the disease. This is particularly remarkable given the vast costs to the country (e.g., last year Alzheimer’s was estimated to cost the United States 360 billion dollars) and the even greater social costs that accompany it.

The Amyloid Juggernaut

In 1906, plaques (of amyloid) in the brain were identified as the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. As the years have gone by, the majority of research for treating Alzheimer’s disease has been targeted at eliminating these plaques. Unfortunately, to quote a 2022 article:

Hundreds of clinical trials of amyloid-targeted therapies have yielded few glimmers of promise, however; only the underwhelming Aduhelm has gained FDA approval. Yet Aβ still dominates research and drug development. NIH spent about $1.6 billion on projects that mention amyloids in this fiscal year, about half its overall Alzheimer’s funding. Scientists who advance other potential Alzheimer’s causes, such as immune dysfunction or inflammation, complain they have been sidelined by the “amyloid mafia.” Forsayeth says the amyloid hypothesis became “the scientific equivalent of the Ptolemaic model of the Solar System,” in which the Sun and planets rotate around Earth.

Note: frequently, when a faulty paradigm fails to explain the disease it claims to address, rather than admit the paradigm is flawed, its adherents will label each conflicting piece of evidence as a paradox (e.g., the French “paradox” disproves the notion cholesterol causes heart disease4) and dig deeper and deeper until they can find something to continue propping up their ideology (e.g., cholesterol reducing statins provide almost no benefit for heart disease while having significant side effects yet continue being pushed on patients).

The consistent failure of the amyloid model to cure Alzheimer’s gradually invited increasing skepticism towards it, which resulted in more and more scientists studying alternative models of the disease. Before long, they found other factors played a far more significant role in causing the disease (e.g., chronic inflammation), and by 2006, this perspective appeared poised to change the direction of Alzheimer’s research.

In response, the amyloid proponents pivoted to defending their failed hypothesis was due not to amyloid clumps, bath rather toxic parts of it (oligomers) and a Nature 2006 paper appeared which identified a previously unknown toxic oligomer, Aβ*56, and provided proof that it caused dementia in rats.

This paper cemented both the amyloid beta and toxic oligomer hypotheses (as it provided the proof many adherents to the theory had been waiting for) and rapidly became one of the most cited works in the field of Alzheimer’s research. Its authors rose to academic stardom, produced further papers validating their initial hypothesis, and billions more were invested by both the NIH and the pharmaceutical industry in research of the amyloid and toxic oligomer hypothesis.

It should be noted that some were skeptical of their findings and likewise were unable to replicate this data, but rarely had a voice in the debate:

The spotty evidence that Aβ*56 plays a role in Alzheimer’s had [long] raised eyebrows. Wilcock has long doubted studies that claim to use “purified” Aβ*56. Such oligomers are notoriously unstable, converting to other oligomer types spontaneously. Multiple types can be present in a sample even after purification efforts, making it hard to say any cognitive effects are due to Aβ*56 alone, she notes—assuming it exists. In fact, Wilcock and others say, several labs have tried and failed to find Aβ*56, although few have published those findings. Journals are often uninterested in negative results, and researchers can be reluctant to contradict a famous investigator.

The Amyloid Scandal

At the end of 2021, a neuroscientist physician was hired by investors to evaluate an experimental Alzheimer’s drug and discovered signs that its data consisted of doctored Western Blots (and therefore erroneous assessments of what oligomers were present within research subjects’ brains). As he explored the topic further, he discovered other papers within the Alzheimer’s literature had been flagged for containing doctored Western Blots.
Note: Western blots, used to test for proteins, are one of the few easily detectable forms of research fraud (e.g., we discovered Pfizer submitted fake Western blots to regulators to “prove” their vaccine worked). Regrettably, far more undetectable fraud exists throughout the scientific literature (e.g., independent researchers comparing regulatory submissions discovered Pfizer also submitted doctored data on where the COVID vaccine is distributed in the body).

Before long, the neuroscientist noticed three of those suspect papers had been published by the same author and decided to investigate the author’s other publications. This led him to the seminal 2006 Alzheimer’s publication, which contained clear signs of fraud.

As investigation then uncovered 20 doctored papers written by the author, 10 of which pertained to Aβ*56 (along with a co-researcher attesting to earlier scientific misconduct by the author).

The Amyloid Industry

One of the remarkable things about this monumental fraud was how little was done about it. For example, the NIH was notified in January 2022, yet in May 2022, beyond nothing being done, the NIH gave the suspect researcher a coveted $764,792 research grant (signed off by another one of the authors of the 2006 paper).

In July 2022, Science published an article exposing the incident and the clear fraud that had occurred. Despite this, the researcher was allowed to remain in his position as a tenured medical school professor. It was not until June 2024 that the 2006 article was retracted at the request of the authors—all of whom denied being at fault and insisted the doctored images had not affected the article’s conclusions. Eventually, on January 29, 2025, during his confirmation hearing, RFK cited the paper as an example of the institutional fraud and wasted tax dollars within the NIH, and a few days later, the suspect researcher announced his resignation from the medical school professorship (while still maintaining his innocence).

This odd behavior (e.g., the medical field continues to insist the proven fraud has not disproven the Amyloid hypothesis) likely results from how much money is at stake—beyond the research dollars, roughly 7 million adults have Alzheimer’s—equating to hundreds of billions in potential (Medicare funded) sales each year.

The Failed Amyloid Drugs

Recently, a monoclonal antibody that made immune cells target amyloid demonstrated limited success in treating Alzheimer’s—which was embraced as revolutionary by the medical community, the pharmaceutical industry, and drug regulators. In turn, the first new drug received accelerated approval (which the FDA proudly announced). The second then received a quiet backdoor approval (due to the immense controversy surrounding the first), and the third was partially approved a year and a half later.

Each year, JP Morgan (Chase Bank) hosts a private conference for pharmaceutical investors that sets the tone for the entire industry. In 2023, its focus (covered in detail here) was on the incredible profitability of the new Alzheimer’s drugs and the GLP-1s like Ozempic (which the FDA has also relentlessly promoted). Most remarkably, the (widely viewed as corrupt) FDA commissioner was a keynote speaker, and a few days before the conference, had enacted the second backdoor approval.

However, despite the rosy pictures painted around the drugs (which each attacked different aspects of amyloids), they were highly controversial as:

• The FDA’s independent advisory panel, in a very unusual move, voted 10-0 (with one abstaining) against approving Aduhelm, the first amyloid drug (which targeted amyloid plaques), but the FDA approved it anyways. In a highly unprecedented move, three of the advisors then resigned, calling it “probably the worst drug approval decision in recent U.S. history.”

• That drug was priced at $56,000 a year—making it sufficient to bankrupt Medicare, (which attracted a Congressional investigation).

• Brain swelling or brain bleeding was found in 41% of patients enrolled in its studies. Additionally, headaches (including migraines and occipital neuralgia), falls, diarrhea, confusion, and delirium were also notably elevated compared to placebo.

• No improvement in Alzheimer’s was noted; rather one analysis found it slowed the progression of Alzheimer’s by 20% (although this could have been a protocol artifact rather than a real effect).

The second monoclonal antibody (which targeted amyloid precursors) had a somewhat better risk benefit profile (only 21% experienced brain bleeding and swelling due to reduced targeting of stable amyloid plaques), and 26.4% reduction in the progression of Alzheimer’s was detected in the trail (which for context, translated to a 0.45 reduction on a scale where a reduction of at least 1-2 points is needed to create an impact which is in anyway meaningful for a patient).

The third monoclonal (which targeted amyloid plaques thought to be more pathologic) was also contested as it caused 36.8% of recipients to develop brain bleeding or swelling, like the other amyloid medications, frequently caused headaches and infusion reactions (e.g., nausea, vomiting, changes in blood pressure, hypersensitive reactions or anaphylaxis) and there were reasons to suspect the trial had greatly overstated its minimal benefits.

Remarkably, despite widespread protest against the third drug, the FDA’s new advisory panel voted unanimously in favor of it, even though it had a very similar mechanism, efficacy, and toxicity to the previously unanimously rejected amyloid drug. It should therefore come as no surprise that, when the British Medical Journal conducted an independent investigation, it found that, within publicly available databases, 9 out of 9 (assessable) members of the advisory committee had significant financial conflicts of interest.

Fortunately, despite the aggressive promotion of amyloid drugs and the industry’s best attempts to promote the sector, the market somewhat recognized how bad they were. The first drug had its price halved (then was withdrawn as no one wanted it—making around 5 million dollars total), while the other two have had very modest sales (e.g., 290 million for the most popular one).

Read the Whole Article

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US President Donald Trump presented the agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping as a great success. The United States will reduce tariffs on Chinese imports by 10 percentage points to 47%. In return, China will resume purchasing US soybeans and postpone restrictions on rare earth exports to the US for one year. In reality, this is a limited and precarious trade truce.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made a significant statement before Xi Jinping’s meeting with Donald Trump. Wang Yi warned that ‘a multipolar world is coming,’ urging an end to ‘the politicisation of economic and trade issues, the artificial fragmentation of global markets, and the use of trade wars and tariff battles.’

‘Frequent withdrawal from agreements and failure to honour commitments, while enthusiastically forming blocs and cliques, has subjected multilateralism to unprecedented challenges,’ Wang said, without naming specific countries but clearly referring to the United States.

During the meeting, President Xi Jinping emphasised:

‘China and the United States should be partners and friends. This is what history has taught us and what reality requires.’

The position of the United States is demonstrated by the fact that, a few minutes before the meeting with Xi Jinping, Trump declared that he had ordered the Pentagon to begin nuclear weapons testing ‘on an equal footing’ with China and Russia. In reality, China has not tested nuclear weapons since 1996 and Russia has not tested them since 1990. And although the United States has never ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits the detonation of such weapons, past presidents complied with the Treaty.

On Truth Social, Trump claimed that, in terms of nuclear weapons, Beijing currently ranks third compared to Russia and the United States, but that “within five years, it will be on par with us”. However, Trump failed to mention that China has maintained a limited nuclear arsenal for decades, consisting mostly of medium-range defensive weapons incapable of reaching the United States. Furthermore, it only began producing long-range nuclear weapons after the United States deployed nuclear weapons close to its territory.

At the same time, Trump gave South Korea the green light to build a nuclear-powered submarine, which could be armed with nuclear missiles. The submarine will be built in the United States at a shipyard purchased by a South Korean company in 2024. Australia, through the AUKUS agreement with the United States and Britain, will also be able to acquire nuclear attack submarines clearly directed against China and Russia. In Europe, Ukraine is receiving, through NATO under US command, weapons with ever-increasing range capable of striking targets deep inside Russian territory. Before long, weapons of this type will be manufactured directly in Ukraine through “joint production” agreements with NATO defence industries. Ukraine will thus have weapons with dual conventional and nuclear capabilities directed against Russia.

It is no surprise that, in this situation, Russia is producing and testing new types of nuclear delivery systems: the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, capable of striking highly protected targets at any distance, and the Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater vehicle, capable of autonomously reaching enemy coasts and causing a radioactive tsunami with the underwater explosion of a high-powered nuclear warhead. China is also likely to be producing a weapon similar to the Russian Poseidon.

This article was originally published in Italian on Grandangolo, Byoblu TV.

The post The Policy of Nuclear Gunships. The U.S. War Department Begins Nuclear Weapons Testing appeared first on LewRockwell.

With every Western country experiencing social collapse from a variety of unaddressed causes, such as the rapid loss of jobs to Artificial Intelligence, exhaustion of environmental and natural resources, feminization’s replacement of the male role with sentiment and destruction of the male/female relationship, the loss of integrity and moral behavior to money, and the aggression inherent in the Zionist Neoconservative doctrine of hegemony, I am going to skip writing for today’s posting another dire assessment of our multitude of unaddressed challenges. 

Instead, remembering my previous essay some time ago about English murder mysteries and the authors, I am returning for this morning’s posting to a civilized time in which all was in control.  In the 1920s and 1930s, Great Britain, despite Sir Edward Grey stupidly involving Britain in World War I, Britain was still a great power in control of the seas and international trade. The British pound was the world currency.  The American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, looked upon British power with envy.

Perhaps Wilkie Collins with his books The Moonstone and The Woman In White was the first English mystery novelist.  But it was Agatha Christie’s 66 murder mysteries, most solved not by the British police but by private detective Hercule Poirot and private citizen, Miss Marple.  With Agatha Christie you get a murder mystery, not a novel full of character development and psychological theories of crime. 

 In my view, Christie’s only rival is Dorothy Sayers.  Her sleuth, Lord Peter Whimsey, is one up on Christie’s super sleuths. Sayers only wrote a few murder mysteries before moving on to serious work. A couple are simply murder mysteries, but a love interest appears.  Lord Peter sees injustice in  the case of Harriet Vane, an Oxford University educated woman living  in sin with a disreputable character who is murdered, for which Harriet is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death by hanging. Lord Peter takes up her case, proves her innocence, secures her release and spends five years over, if memory serves, two books, until she finally accepts him to the disgust of his sister-in-law the Duchess of Denver.  

Lord Peter, the second son of the Duke of Denver, the richest aristocrat in Britain, is rich by his own ability.  Lord Peter is a favorite of the Foreign Office and is sent everywhere in the world to maintain the British position.  He is the most desirable batchelor in the realm, and he marries what is perceived as an Oxford educated slut.  Remember, this was a century ago before female sexual liberation.

I have always been puzzled by accounts of male promiscuity.  Sexual intercourse between heterosexuals requires a male and a female.  If only males are libertines, who do they have affairs with?

But to get back on track. Once Harriet Vane appears, Sayers’ murder mysteries become also the development of the relationship between Lord Peter and Harriet.  And more subject matter enters.  Whey Sayers places a murder in an advertising, or perhaps it was a publishing, corporation, she first goes to the trouble of learning how these businesses operate.  In what I think is her mystery masterpiece, The Nine Tailors, she first masters the art of bell ringing.  So, a Sayers mystery can be more rewarding that a Christie mystery as it is a richer tale, not just a murder mystery.

My delight in the books is not the murders.  Indeed, I can reread many times Christe’s mysteries, because I don’t remember the plots.  Wondering about my memory, I realized that I don’t read the books for the mysteries.  I read them in order to escape current reality into a civilize time.  

One wonders if the picture of police behavior in the mystery novels is correct.  I assume it is, because the writers are addressing audiences in their own time and cannot present them with a fantasy.  The police are very restrained not only by their own behavior but by what the suspects will accept from the police. Politeness and respect for privacy rule.  Police have to be very careful in their questioning not to be impertinent. When have you last heard that word used?  Do you know what it means?  It means not showing proper respect. The police do not merely want a suspect with which, guilty or innocent, to close the case.  The police only want the one who is guilty. Today they could not care less.  They just want cases closed. The prosecutor just wants another conviction. The judge just wants a clear docket.

It is so different from today when suspects are browbeat both by their attorney and by the prosecutor to accept a plea bargain, whether innocent or guilty, that quickly disposes of the case, gives the prosecutor another conviction, and keeps the judge’s court docket free.

The limits on the police in the British mystery novels of the 1920s and 1930s are unbelievable today.  So is the behavior of characters in the story who refuse to help the police because it would require them to diverge a confidence.  Imagine the contrast with today when no one can wait to incriminate someone else.

My conclusion is that I wish I had been born long ago and had passed on before our uncivilized time.  Sitting at night reading before bed, I wonder at the civilized world that is lost to us.

The post The World That Was appeared first on LewRockwell.

Revolutions are funny things. They start out almost imperceptible. The final straw itself may be as inconsequential as a single voice in the crowd whose words unleash a tidal wave that sweeps aside the seemingly intractable old order forever.

Even as the cracks in the Eastern Bloc began to materialize in 1989, starting in June in Hungary, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s Romania seemed impervious to the winds of change. They maintained a cult-like grip on power aided by the notorious and ubiquitous Securitate, the secret police.

On 21 December 1989 Ceausescu decided that the best way to quell a bubbling cauldron of unrest in Transylvania over the past several weeks was to appear, himself, with his wife Elena, above Bucharest’s Palace Square. Workers were bussed in and given red banners to wave in support of the regime. It was to be a show of force that would solidify the existing order.

After all, no one would dare challenge Ceausescu to his face.

As he confidently approached the microphone from the balcony and began mechanically repeating the tired old slogans of communism, suddenly a voice broke through with a high pitched scream, followed by an increasing din. The discordant sounds of protest rendered Ceausescu speechless and confused.

That second, when the false edifice of his rule was punctured and the impossibility of his position exposed, communist rule died in Romania.

America’s foreign policy has been a lot like the rule of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Since President Reagan opened the door to the gang of “former” Trotskyites from New York who were hell bent on worldwide revolution while being ideologically driven by their absolute devotion to the state of Israel, US foreign policy has been dominated by an equivalent of Ceausescu’s Partidul Comunist Român.

Anyone who attempted to challenge the neocon dominance over US foreign policy was drummed out of society by the equivalent of Ceausescu’s Securitate. One by one, Pat Buchanan, Joseph Sobran, Sam Francis, the John Birch Society, Ron Paul, and any voice raised in opposition to neocon dominance over foreign policy was brutally attacked by the likes of William F. Buckley, Jr. and his minions of enforcers in the media and the think tanks, and the corridors of power and influence.

Trotsky is reputed – perhaps apocryphally – to have said that, “to oppose the state is to die a slow starvation,” and that is certainly true for any foreign policy analyst over the past 40-plus years who has spoken out against neocon dominance. No jobs, no publications, no way to be heard or even exist.

But suddenly that Berlin Wall has fallen.

Future history may record America’s “Ceausescu Moment” as November 6th, 2025.

The same mainstream/”alt” media and conservatism-industrial-complex that has refused to acknowledge Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s sharp turn against neocon, pro-Israel foreign policy have done their best to harness and re-direct the Charlie-less TPUSA back onto the foreign policy reservation. With a doubting Charlie conveniently gone, they assumed they could ascend the “Palace Square Bucharest” balcony, grab the microphone, and return America’s conservative youth to the “wisdom” of Bill Kristol, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Mark Levin, and the rest of the blood-soaked dinosaurs.

However our own “high-pitched scream” that deflated Ceausescu came on November 6th not from a Mamdani “communist,” or from an “America-hating,” Muslim, nor Hamas-devoted foreign student, nor tortured trans-genderist or even a generic leftist.

No, it came from a corn-fed, conservative, earnest, American student at Auburn University in Alabama with the slow drawl of our great country’s 250 year history. In other words, the epitome of the Red, White, and Blue that burns in the soul of every American patriot.

The young man approached the open microphone and addressed President Trump’s son Eric and his wife Laura – ambassadors of the President’s claim to be the most pro-Israel Administration in US history – with a respectful set of questions.

I’d like to ask about your father’s relationship with Israel. He’s taken over $230 million from pro-Israel groups. In the summer even though the US advised against it, Israel attacked Iran and the US still bombed on behalf of Israel…Israel has not been a good ally to the US since the 1960s when they bombed the USS Liberty.

The crowd of CONSERVATIVE young Americans erupted into wild applause.

Israel is a nation where Christians are constantly under attack… We talk about America first and defending Christians, but how can we do this if we align ourselves with a nation that does not do that itself?

At this point the applause among TPUSA’s conservative youth was deafening.

Deer-in-the-headlights Eric Trump does a Ceaucescu, repeating the slogans of the old order and hoping their magic will still quell the restive population.

You have a nation chanting ‘death to America’ every single day on the streets of Tehran. You have a nation that will develop a nuclear weapon and that will use that nuclear weapon.

These are standard Benjamin Netanyahu talking points from 30 years ago. Laura looked like Elena. Arranging her perfect hair as the crowd remained silent at Eric Trump’s well-rehearsed applause lines. Silence. They’ve heard it all before and they have done their own research and know that these are neocon lies.

Guys: Iran wanted to destroy our way of live they wanted to hurt us they wanted to inflict real pain.

Silence. They’ve done their own research.

Eric then repeats the absurd claim that his father solved eight wars (involving countries whose names he cannot pronounce) and the silence continued. The bumper sticker slogans no longer worked with Charlie Kirk’s kids just as Ceaucescu’s slogans no longer worked with a Romania sick to death with it’s subservience to a dying Communist bloc.

This is a genie that can no longer be put back into the bottle. Toothpaste out of the tube. The same social media harnessed early on by the US “regime change” operatives seeking to fulfil the neocon project has been captured by young American conservatives who are revolting against the destructive “Israel-first” party line of their boomer forebears and no underhanded sale of TikTok to pro-Israel fanatics will change the fact.

From this point on, like Ceaucescu, Trump’s people dare not address openly the number one youth movement of their ideological base. They dare not risk stop after stop being questioned by earnest young conservatives about America’s toxic and self-destructive supplication to the state of Israel. They will go back into Nicolae Ceaucescu’s bunker. Terrified of the very “America First” movement they have launched.

Student to Eric and Lara Trump at TPUSA event in Auburn: “I’d like to ask about your father’s relationship with Israel. He’s taken over $230m from pro-Israel groups… Israel hasn’t been a great ally to the US…they bombed the USS Liberty.”

*Crowd erupts in rapturous applause* pic.twitter.com/kDxXuO1Jbm

— Chris Menahan (@infolibnews) November 6, 2025

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post America’s ‘Ceausescu Moment’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

My younger brother, who lives on Maui, once told me a story about a man from the mainland who had made an astronomical sum of money in the virtual, internet economy. His enormous wealth apparently went to his head, because after becoming a modestly competent surfer, he decided that he wanted to go tow surfing on JAWS—one of the biggest waves on earth.

Tow surfing involves using a surfboard with foot straps and being pulled onto the swell by a wave runner equipped with a waterski tow rope. While top expert surfers have developed the skill and conditioning to paddle onto Jaws, this is extremely difficult due to the enormous swell size and speed.

The “virtual economy” wizard finally persuaded a good wave runner driver to tow him onto a swell at Jaws. The result was catastrophic. Instead of surfing “down the line” of the breaking wave, he ran from it and onto the relatively flat, impact zone in front of the wave. Bad move.

Dead in the water, he then received the full power of the wave’s energy unloading on him, which inflicted catastrophic injuries, including tearing his pectoral muscles. His automatically inflating life vest, plus the great skill of the wave runner driver, saved him from drowning, but his body was beaten to hell.

Greek mythology relates multiple heroes making trips to the Underworld to rescue fathers and friends. In the Christian tradition there is the story of Jesus making a descent to hell to rescue righteous souls. Addicts often speak about “hitting rock bottom” before developing the true resolve to kick their addictions.

Must humans experience great pain to gain a full understanding of their limits and shortcomings?

I recently spent a few hours reviewing the transcripts of President Lyndon Johnson talking with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara about the situation in Vietnam. To a careful reader, it quickly becomes apparent that neither man has the foggiest notion about the country, or what exactly the U.S. military was going to achieve by killing its people.

The following recording of one of their conversations gives a good sense of how totally lost they were.

McNamara is an eggheaded technocrat who isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, and Johnson is a cunning Texas redneck who is accustomed to things going his way. I find it astonishing that these fools had at their disposal the power to send the U.S. military to Vietnam to kill people.

To his credit, McNamara was apparently chastened by the failure of Vietnam. He later became a vocal critic of the war and expressed regret in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. He spent the rest of his life writing and speaking on nuclear disarmament, and was the protagonist of the documentary The Fog of War.

George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, John Bolton and other “chickenhawks” were able to avoid military service in Vietnam and therefore the “harrowing of hell” that McNamara experienced, They also didn’t heed the wisdom that McNamara acquired and tried to share with them.

The Washington foreign policy establishment remains infested with the same breed of arrogant nitwits. A bit of time on the front line of combat would do wonders for their hubristic souls.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post The Harrowing of Hell appeared first on LewRockwell.

He wasn’t just aiming to score soft power points but to hint at creative ways in which recent US-endorsed Levantine solutions could be applied to Ukraine in the interests of consistency.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave an informative interview to Kommersant in mid-October. Russian international media mostly focused on his remarks about ties with the US, concerns about its potential transfer of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, and the special operation, but he also importantly exposed the US’ double standards towards resolving the Levantine and Ukrainian Conflicts. Here’s exactly what he said, which will then be analyzed in terms of its practical relevance:

“[The Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace and Prosperity] emphasizes that the protection of human rights, ensuring security, respect for the dignity of both Israelis and Palestinians, as well as tolerance and equal opportunities for all regions, are the keys to the sustainability of the agreement (this declaration). The declaration calls for the eradication of extremism and radicalism in all forms. Golden words. But for some reason, this applies to Palestinians and Israelis, but not to Russians in Ukraine.

More recently, regarding another part of the Middle East, Syria, US Special Representative for Syria (and also US Ambassador to Turkey) Thomas Barrack said that the Syrian Arab Republic needs a system close to a federation that would preserve the culture and language of all ethnic and religious groups in society. This is precisely what the Minsk agreements were about. For some reason, the West is ready to apply these principles everywhere, but in Ukraine, it is ‘not ready.’”

Beginning with the first part, Russia demands Ukraine’s denazification, which requires “the eradication of extremism and radicalism” in all forms there through hybrid kinetic-legal means. The kinetic ones are being advanced through attacks against fascist-inspired Ukrainian militiamen like the Azov Brigade while the legal ones are envisaged as part of the lasting political solution that Putin wants. A similarly symbolic multilateral call as Trump’s declaration could be the first step to that end amidst ongoing negotiations.

As for the second part, Russia won’t cede to Ukraine the disputed regions under its control after their people voted to join Russia in September 2022, but it could demand sub-federative cultural-linguistic rights for the Russians who remain in the Ukrainian-controlled parts if the frontline freezes. To be clear, Russia officially insists that it’ll liberate the entirety of the disputed regions, but the aforesaid Minsk- and Syrian-inspired proposal could facilitate a grand compromise if all sides have the political will.

The relevance of exposing the US’ double standards towards resolving the Levantine and Ukrainian Conflicts therefore isn’t just to score soft power points, but to hint at creative ways in which the aforesaid US-endorsed Levantine solutions could be applied to Ukraine in the interests of consistency. This assumes that the US is interested in policy consistency, but whether right or wrong, it doesn’t detract from Lavrov’s motives in bringing up the policy precedents that the US itself just established.

Realistically speaking, Trump doesn’t seem interested over half a year since the start of his talks with Putin in suddenly acceding to Russia’s proposals on Ukraine since he would have already pressured Zelensky if he was, not escalated his rhetoric and contemplated a military escalation too. Nevertheless, Russia’s continued on-the-ground gains and the predictable failure of Ukraine’s next potential US-backed offensive might get him to reconsider, in which case Lavrov’s implied proposals would become relevant.

This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

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On November 5th, the strategic analyst Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis headlined “America’s Next Civil War: Update #4 (the Blue Wave)” and he documented that when Trump’s psychopathic instruction to Texas to redistrict so as to get more Republicans in Congress broke the American tradition of independent redistricting commissions that were structured to include an even number of members from each of the two largest political parties, it set U.S. politics spiraling out of control, so that when Trump was then asked how many more congressional seats he wanted, he said (at 28:00 in Davis’s video) “5, I think we’ll get 5,” and then when the reporter asked “what if California, New York and other [Democratic] states —“ and he answered (assuming that Democrats are bad and Republicans are good), “Yeah, that’s what they do,” but “there could be other states [on our side], I think that we will get another 3 or 4 or 5 in addition. Texas would be the biggest one.” Then, Davis presented California’s Governor Gavin Newsom saying that because of Republicans now doing redistricting in their states without the fairness-rules that have been traditional, California’s redistricting will likewise be done without rules — just to win regardess of how it will be done, like Trump. It becomes a contest in how psychopathic one can go. Davis’ analysis is that because of the sheer boldness of Trump’s psychopathy, “this kind of behavior is just driving people on either side farther apart.” The result is that more and more Americans think that “there’s no point in following the rule of law,” or custom and tradition — following the established rules. Winning is all that counts now; losers will just be forced to comply with winners. The ‘social contract’ that held society together is gone when such a bold psychopath rules and drives things toward a contest in psychopathy. The state thus becomes privatized, no longer controlled by laws but instead by ‘leaders’ — individual persons — rulers who become rulers by being psychopaths and punishing the losers as much as they want to, since there really are no laws that are then being objectively written and enforced — there is increasingly force used, instead of mutual agreement.

Davis argues convincingly that if Trump keeps failing to such an extent that Democrats defeat him electorily, “it’s only a matter of time before a spark sets something off” even worse than happened on 6 January 2020, when Biden won the White House.

This is coming from Daniel Davis, a retired Lt. Colonel who used to be a Republican but now detests BOTH Parties.

On 6 November 2018, Sarah Pruitt at history dot com headlined “The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart: The Constitution’s framers viewed political parties as a necessary evil.” The Founders condemned political Parties because in all existing governmental systems including that of America’s enemy, Britain, Parties were associated with corruption and represented different factions of the aristocracy, not the public — not any sort of democracy. This was all that they knew; and, so, they thought that it is a necessary evil, but it actually isn’t necessary; it is instead necessary only in governmental systems that are structured as contests between clubs (political clubs in this case). In fact, in the United States, political Parties are precisely that: they (both the DNC and the RNC) are private members-only clubs — NOT any part of the public. They are technically IRS Section 527 nonprofit corporations that are composed of their Committee Members who are appointed by their other Committee Members and are consequently a type of self-sustaining private club. Party politics is private, not (as they pretend to be) public, and not technically a part of the government. Not until the 2017 court case Wilding v. DNC Services Corp., dba Democratic National Committee and Deborah Wassrman Schultz, in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, was it decided that nothing that a political Party does can be legally challenged by any voters — the people who vote have no legal right to have their votes counted even by ‘their own’ Party; they don’t own it — only its Members do; and ONLY the MEMBERS of the club (in that instance, the DNC or Democratic National Committee) have the power to select that Party’s nominees for public offices — caucuses and political primary elections are merely for show, to pretend to be ‘democratic’ or “republican’. And, in fact, the members of the club represent only that club’s megadonors, who constitute the vast majority of the club’s fundraising. Political Parties are only money-raising organizations and represent only the donors — no voters, none at all — this is what the judge in that landmark case ruled; and a Party may even blatantly violate its own rules, when and if they wish to do so. That judge’s ruling was then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which finally ruled on 28 October 2019 that the lower Court had ruled correctly. This is how American Party politics actually functions, nd now we know it for a certainty. So, America’s Founders were right that Parties are associated with corruption, but were wrong that they are necessary in politics. They aren’t. Parties aren’t necessary except in election-based political systems, which inevitably represent only the richest; by contrast, a purely lottery-based political system is totally differant, and is far likelier to produce a Government that actually has the same policy-priorities that the nation’s public do — far likelier to actually represent the public. That’s the answer, but nobody seems interested in it. Maybe if things get even worse as Davis warns could very likely happen, the situation will get sufficiently desperate for people to start looking for an alternative. This one would require only one Amendment to the U.S. Constitutiion. It could be the most important Constitutional Amendment in history.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post America’s Founders Warned Against Political Parties. They Were Right. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Escape from New York is the name of a 1981 film. Now it’s also, many fear, going to be a reality with Mayor-elect Zohran Kwame Mamdani’s impending socialist makeover of NYC. Why, commentator Bill O’Reilly has predicted that his ascendancy will spark an exodus of 765,000-one million Big Apple residents. This, of course, would involve the loss of significant capital.

Yet this is all predicated on the idea that Mamdani’s promises reflect principles more than positions of convenience. And while he is a radical, he’s also a power seeker who surely aspires to higher office. So questions arise:

Will Mamdani go the full socialist monty and risk crashing NYC?

Or will he, being the consummate politician he was on the campaign trail, practice some Machiavellian moderation?

Should he pursue the latter route, he not only will survive politically, but will certainly have a good excuse. “Tyrant Trump and the establishment are standing in the way of progress!” Mamdani will be able to say. “They’re stymieing the people’s agenda!”

(“So I need even more power,” would be the message — “‘governor’ comes to mind.”)

Won’t Lives on Can’t Street?

Mamdani can’t actually build a wall around NYC to keep people in, as was done in the “escape” movie. (It was only around Manhattan in the film.) And unlike Cold War communists, who also kept people captive via a wall, he won’t enjoy absolute power. He’s going to have to play well with others to get things done.

So while USA Today laments that “[n]ow we get to see full-blown socialism in action,” well, maybe, maybe not. Just consider five obstacles confronting Mamdani, according to New York insiders. Politico lists them in this order:

1. “Donald Trump and the Federal Government.”
2. “Legislative Wrangling in Albany.”
3. “Campaign Fatigue” — Democratic NYC mayors usually have leisurely general election campaigns. But Mamdani had to work hard to get elected and now will have to hit the ground running. (Personally, I’m not so sure this matters much.)
4. “Democratic Rifts.”
5. “Plus — No Big Deal — the Job.”

As to the last point, Emperor Tiberius once said that governing Rome was like “holding a wolf by the ears.” If true, well, then managing the Big Apple may at least be like holding a coyote by the ears. Politico elaborates:

The NYC mayor immediately becomes a manager of 300,000 cops, teachers, social workers and so many more. Mamdani will be faced with constant, complex choices — not to mention weathering the controversies and challenges that no one can anticipate, from police shootings to hurricanes to acts of mayhem that fill tabloids.

Promises, Promises — and Realities

Then there’s that legislative wrangling. Mamdani outlined 10 to 12 policy proposals while campaigning, yet he’ll lack the power to effectuate about half of them. As to specificity, here’s a list (according to a Grok AI analysis):

• Proposal — “increase corporate tax rate from 8.85 percent to 11.5 percent.” Reality — set by state law; mayor proposes but can’t enact alone.
• Proposal — “two percent flat tax on millionaires.” Reality — state jurisdiction.
• Proposal — “free buses citywide.” Reality — Metropolitan Transportation Authority (a state entity) controls fares; requires state funding/approval.
• Proposal — “end mayoral control of schools.” Reality — mayoral control is state-granted (expires 2026); changes need legislative renewal.
• Proposal — “free CUNY (City University of NY) tuition for all.” Reality — CUNY funding is state-controlled; city covers approximately 30 percent, but full free tuition requires state match.
• Proposal — “creation of Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA). Reality — involves state capital/financing; mayor can advocate but not establish alone.

In other words, to get any or all of these things done, Mamdani will have to go through the state Legislature and Governor Kathy Hochul. He’ll have to deal with an entrenched political establishment.

Human Wrecking Ball?

This said, Mamdani can still do much damage. First, it appears that some NYC residents will leave just over the threat he poses. Wealthy rapper 50 Cent has reportedly already done so.

Second, Mamdani could spike crime by hamstringing the police (he has promised in the past to defund them). He has vowed to intensify NYC’s “sanctuary” (read: illegal-alien enabling) status. And his rent-freeze plans could actually cause apartments to be taken off the market and thus ultimately increase housing costs. As U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) put it, encapsulating the danger:

He’s called to DEFUND police, ABOLISH prisons, LEGALIZE prostitution, and even attacked Jewish people and American law enforcement in the same breath.

This isn’t just New York’s problem — it’s spreading to cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, and even Congress.

The radical Marxist wing is taking over the Democrat Party — and EVERY American should be alarmed.

The question is again, though: Will Mamdani be socialist or sly? Or will he be both to an extent?

Will He or Won’t He?

For sure, Mamdani is a radical man. He has expressed belief in “seizing the means of production,” a communist tenet. He has paraphrased Karl Marx, saying, “Each according to their need, each according to their ability.” He has also been seen giving the middle finger to a Christopher Columbus statue. And he has threatened to arrest ICE agents and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should they enter NYC’s jurisdiction.

Then there’s the group backing Mamdani and of which he’s a member, the Democratic Socialists of America. It will put pressure on him to deliver on his radical promises. It’s also true that during his victory speech, the mayor-elect didn’t exactly extend an olive branch to foes.

Then again, there’s that power lust. Mamdani is not a dumb man. As mentioned earlier, too, he certainly should realize that crashing NYC would crash his political fortunes.

And he’d have built-in excuses for not implementing his entire agenda. President Donald Trump has, after all, threatened to cut off funding to NYC in response to a Mamdani victory. And then there is that state Democratic machine to contend with. So we can hear it now: “The oligarchs are standing in the way of the revolution!”

For this reason, there’s an argument to be made that perhaps Trump shouldn’t take action against NYC. Make sure the responsibility is all on Mamdani, is the idea.

So what will the socialist mayor do? He is intelligent enough to understand his policies’ risks. Yet as Professor Thomas Sowell has noted, “It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you don’t think.”

If Mamdani’s radicalism-shaped emotional foundation and lack of virtue hold sway, he may crash as he ascended: meteorically. And while this would involve short-term pain, it’s likely the best outcome for NYC and America.

This article was originally published on The New American.

The post In Power, Will Mamdani Be Socialist — or Sly? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Back in 2023, all orthodox Catholics of good will heard the news of His Excellency, Bishop Paprocki’s condemnation of heresy in one of the most prominent American journals, First Things. This was ostensibly a condemnation of Cardinal McElroy’s brazen challenge to Catholic moral theology in two pieces (here and here) at America—a connection underlined by Bishop Paprocki’s quoting verbatim from the cardinal’s first article. Nevertheless, His Excellency did say shortly thereafter (on Raymond Arroyo) that he did not want to name names, but had European cardinals also in mind.

Faithful Catholics compare today’s bishops with the saintly bishops of old and they find the former woefully lacking in manly courage. They do not seem to act like men of God should – with zeal, filled with faith and charity.

I am willing to hazard that there are many orthodox bishops out there. But it seems to me that most of those orthodox bishops are cowardly. They think of themselves as “vicars of the Roman Pontiff” (a concept that Vatican II condemned in Lumen Gentium 27), and they are afraid to excommunicate and issue the anathema, as did the saintly bishops of old.

Thanks be to God, this crisis has had one silver lining – it is separating the men from the boys in the episcopate. We thank God for Bishop Paprocki, as well as for Archbishop Cordileone who excommunicated the aiders and abetters of child murder and who was supported by over sixteen other bishops, and for Bishop Strickland of Tyler, Texas, who has been continually willing to act like a man of God – with courage and conviction – despite being unceremoniously sacked by Pope Francis.

Less Words, More Action

But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the Vatican II crisis it’s this: more talking, statements, and documents do almost nothing to stop the heretic wolves from scattering the flock.

Therefore, I respectfully propose to all bishops the same proposal that the Trad movement has been asking for since 1965: the charitable anathema.

At OnePeterFive we aim to resource and promote the work of our Trad godfathers in the Faith. It was Cardinal Ottaviani who asked all bishops to condemn heresy in 1966, heartily cheered by Archbishop Lefebvre. When Dietrich von Hildebrand met with Paul VI in the summer of 1965 – even before the Council ended – he begged Paul VI for the same thing – the charitable anathema. But the Pontiff thought it “was a bit harsh” and decided against it.[1]

The Case of Notre Dame

One of the worst cases of this fear of taking appropriate action concerned the bishop of South Bend, Indiana, after Notre Dame went into revolt against the Magisterium in the 1960s. The bishop wanted to place the whole university under interdict, but hesitated, waiting for Rome to back him up.

Rome never did, and thousands of American Catholics (and worldwide) were led into heresy by joining in the revolt against Humanae Vitae (and other dogmas of the Faith), led by the heretic wolves at Notre Dame and other so-called “Catholic” institutions.

Indeed, at the judgment day, the bishops of these generations will be judged by Christ, the Good Shepherd, about whether they laid down their life for their sheep, or if they let the heretic wolves destroy the faith of little children, as we have seen happen. For these heretic wolves have torn out altars, held Catholic universities hostage to heresy, and have done nothing less than scourged Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament by their liturgical abuse.

As our contributing editor, Dr. Michael Sirilla shows, St. Thomas himself strongly defended the bishop’s responsibility of excommunicating heretics.[2] This was understood as obligation of charity for the flock.

The sheep cry out, How long, O Lord, wilt thou forget me forever? and the Prophet cries out, Woe to you, Shepherds!

The Only Way Forward: the Charitable Anathema

But let me return to my point: more talking and documents will do nothing. Only action – the action of a man of God – will have any effect.

And that action, we assert – with the whole history of the Church – is the charitable anathema.

As Hildebrand said acutely, pointing to the root of the problem decades ago:

The valuing of unity over truth plays a central role in the crisis of the Church; for the Church of Christ—the Holy, Roman, Catholic, Apostolic Church—is based on this fundamental principle: the absolute primacy of divine truth, which is the very primacy of God.[3]

This proven solution has always been the answer in times of heretical depravity. Critics of this solution ultimately value unity above truth. They are scared of schism more than they are of error and falsehood. Hildebrand refutes the critics of the anathema with these words, proclaiming that the anathema is itself an act of charity:

… The anathema excludes the one who professes heresies from the communion of the Church, if he does not retract his errors. But for precisely this reason, it is an act of the greatest charity toward all the faithful, comparable to preventing a dangerous disease from infecting innumerable people. By isolating the bearer of infection, we protect the bodily health of others; by the anathema, we protect their spiritual health[.] …

And more: a rupture of communion with the heretic in no way implies that our obligation of charity toward him ceases. No, the Church prays also for heretics [as we see in the traditional orations of Good Friday]; the true Catholic who knows a heretic personally prays ardently for him and would never cease to impart all kinds of help to him. But he should not have any communion with him. Thus St. John, the great apostle of charity, said: “If any man say, I love God, and hateth his brother; he is a liar” (I Jn. 4:20). But he also said: “If any man come to you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into the house[.]” (2 Jn. 1:10).[4]

Therefore we exhort every cleric, theologian, and diocesan official of any kind: examine yourself, and consider speaking to your bishop about this solution. The words that have been spoken by Bishop Paprocki are obviously good, but we ask for less talking and more action.

Read the Whole Article

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There’s a stark disconnect between the Trump Administration’s description of the economy and the economy that we all live in. There are some things that can’t be faked. We pay our bills. We see our bank accounts, and credit card accounts. We don’t need the president, or the media, to tell us that “inflation is dead.” Inflation is not dead! Yesterday, it was reported that monthly layoffs from October were the highest total in 22 years! President Trump was elected to deliver a smaller government with less spending and debt, and an end to the wars. He has done the opposite on all fronts, and the battered economy is reflecting his decisions.

The post Highest Monthly Layoffs In 22 Years — America’s New Golden Age? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dick Cheney is dead. But what does it mean? The lying corporate dinosaur media will tell you that America has just lost a dear, selfless, civic-minded patriot. But as we shall see, Dick Cheney has left behind him a very dark legacy of cover ups, coups, false flags, torture and death.

SHOW NOTES AND COMMENTS: https://corbettreport.com/the-dark-le…

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR SHOW NOTES WITH LINKS TO ALL OF THE ARTICLES, VIDEOS AND WEBSITES MENTIONED? HOW ABOUT COMMENTS? THEY’RE AT THE CORBETT REPORT WEBSITE! JUST FOLLOW THE “SHOW NOTES AND COMMENTS” LINK ABOVE TO GO THERE DIRECTLY.

DEEP State and Continuity of Government (COG)

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld

Conspiracy Theory

The post The Dark Legacy of Dick Cheney appeared first on LewRockwell.

La traduzione in italiano dell'opera scritta da Wendy McElroy esplora Bitcoin a 360°, un compendio della sua storia fino ad adesso e la direzione che molto ptobabilmente prenderà la sua evoluzione nel futuro prossimo. Si parte dalla teoria, soprattutto quella libertaria e Austriaca, e si sonda come essa interagisce con la realtà. Niente utopie, solo la logica esposizione di una tecnologia che si sviluppa insieme alle azioni degli esseri umani. Per questo motivo vengono inserite nell'analisi diversi punti di vista: sociologico, economico, giudiziario, filosofico, politico, psicologico e altri. Una visione e trattazione di Bitcoin come non l'avete mai vista finora, per un asset che non solo promette di rinnovare l'ambito monetario ma che, soprattutto, apre alla possibilità concreta di avere, per la prima volta nella storia umana, una società profondamente e completamente modificabile dal basso verso l'alto.

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/agenti-politici-inglesi-con-denaro)

Qualche anno fa mi imbattevo ripetutamente in “esperti di disinformazione” spuntati come funghi su un tronco marcio dopo una notte di pioggia battente. Non avevo idea di chi fosse Imran Ahmed, né del suo Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), ma la Casa Bianca di Biden lo ha tirato fuori dall'oscurità per consacrarlo esperto di vaccini COVID e per censurare i propri critici.

La portavoce della Casa Bianca, Jen Psaki, citò un rapporto del CCDH, durante una conferenza stampa del luglio 2021, accusando Facebook di minare le politiche federali di Biden sui vaccini. “Ci sono circa 12 persone che producono il 65% della disinformazione anti-vaccino sui social”, affermò la Psaki, avvertendo i social di chiudere questi account di “disinformazione”. Una delle persone prese di mira era una minaccia diretta al presidente Biden: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., il quale stava pianificando di candidarsi per il Partito Democratico alle successive elezioni presidenziali.

“Stanno uccidendo persone”, disse Biden a un giornalista, accusando Facebook di omicidio per aver fornito una piattaforma a persone come Kennedy.

Incuriosito, iniziai a indagare sul Center for Countering Digital Hate. In un'inchiesta di 3.300 parole per Tablet, denunciai il CCDH, non come fonte attendibile sui vaccini, ma come un'operazione politica fraudolenta creata da due membri dello staff del Partito Laburista britannico: Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed. Questi due personaggi hanno creato il CCDH e diverse altre organizzazioni non profit che riciclano denaro sporco, insediando, tra le altre azioni, Keir Starmer a capo del Partito Laburista. Starmer è ora Primo Ministro d'Inghilterra e Morgan McSweeney è il suo capo di gabinetto. Dopo il successo nel Regno Unito, il CCDH ha iniziato a operare a Washington e a coordinarsi con i Democratici per attaccare i critici dell'amministrazione Biden.

Poco prima delle elezioni statunitensi ho pubblicato dei documenti interni fornitimi da un informatore che lavorava al CCDH, i quali dimostravano che l'obiettivo del gruppo era “uccidere Twitter di Musk”. Scritto in collaborazione con Matt Taibbi, l'articolo ha spopolato su Internet, con articoli successivi apparsi su The Spectator, Guardian, The Express Tribune, The Telegraph, UnHerd e il Washington Post.

Anche il giornalista investigativo londinese, Paul Holden, ha iniziato a indagare sul Center for Countering Digital Hate a partire dal 2021, quando è entrato in possesso di una serie di documenti interni del Partito Laburista e che stavano circolando sui media britannici. Esaminando attentamente le email, si è imbattuto nei nomi di Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed e ha iniziato a ricostruire la loro campagna segreta per estromettere il leader di sinistra del partito, Jeremy Corbyn, e insediare Keir Starmer come suo sostituto.

Dopo aver approfondito questi documenti con tre anni di reportage, Holden ha pubblicato le sue scoperte in un nuovo libro intitolato, The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy. La notizia del libro di Holden è trapelata alla stampa britannica, scatenando la richiesta di indagare Morgan McSweeney per attività criminali nell'ambito dello scandalo ora noto come “McSweeneygate”. Per promuovere la sua campagna per Starmer, McSweeney ha mentito alla Commissione Elettorale Britannica sulle donazioni che hanno finanziato il suo lavoro con Ahmed. McSweeney e Ahmed hanno anche assunto investigatori privati ​​per indagare sul passato di Holden e bloccare i suoi reportage.

Holden proviene dal Sudafrica, dove tre dei suoi sei libri sono stati bestseller investigativi e l'ultimo è stato inserito nell'elenco del Sunday Times Literary Prize per la saggistica. Dal 2019 Holden ha guidato il lavoro di Shadow World Investigation sulla corruzione statale, indagando su come la famiglia Gupta abbia saccheggiato il Sudafrica con l'aiuto di multinazionali negli Stati Uniti, in Germania, Svizzera, Regno Unito e Cina.

“È una storia piuttosto shakespeariana”, mi ha detto Holden, seduto su un divano di pelle nel suo soggiorno a nord di Londra. La storia inizia nel 2017, con Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed che complottano per prendere il controllo del governo britannico. McSweeney è ora al centro di quel governo e Ahmed ha reso il CCDH un attore di spicco negli Stati Uniti. Il loro obiettivo generale: censurare chiunque non condivida le loro convinzioni.

“Non sono a favore di un'organizzazione che cerca di convincere il governo a censurare il dibattito pubblico”, ha aggiunto Holden.

Questa intervista è stata condensata e modificata per maggiore chiarezza.

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THACKER: Ho iniziato a studiare il Center for Countering Digital Hate quando venne pubblicato il rapporto “Disinformation Dozen” che la Casa Bianca di Biden avrebbe amplificato per attaccare chiunque criticasse l'obbligo di vaccinazione. Ho indagato sul loro background e ho scoperto che sono un gruppo britannico guidato da un tizio di nome Imran Ahmed, membro dello staff del Partito Laburista al Parlamento del Regno Unito.

Ho iniziato a pensare: “Come fa un tizio di Londra ad arrivare a Washington e a spuntare fuori alla Casa Bianca? È innaturale”. Invece lei come ha iniziato a indagare? Chi sono Imran Ahmed e Morgan McSweeney?

HOLDEN: Mi trovavo più o meno nella sua stessa situazione. Non avevo mai sentito parlare di queste persone prima, o perlomeno non fino al 2021. Poi ho avuto accesso a questa fenomenale fuga di documenti dal Partito Laburista. Inizialmente non c'era molto, ma poi mi sono imbattuto in queste email su Morgan McSweeney e questa organizzazione chiamata Labour Together.

All'epoca pensavo che fosse un think tank noioso, perché era così che si presentavano in pubblico.

THACKER: Giusto per far sapere ai lettori, il Partito Laburista è come la sinistra in politica, un po' come i Democratici negli Stati Uniti. Dall'altra parte ci sono i Conservatori, o “Tories”, che sarebbero l'equivalente dei Repubblicani.

HOLDEN: Sì, quindi il partito laburista è il più progressista, ma la cosa importante è che Morgan McSweeney e Iman Ahmed rappresentano la componente più centrista.

THACKER: Sarebbe l'ala democratica di Hillary Clinton e Joe Biden.

HOLDEN: Sì. In realtà fanno parte di un establishment centrista e sono in guerra costante e incessante con le correnti più di sinistra del Partito Laburista.

Imran Ahmed ha una storia un po' strana. Viene da Manchester. Ha lavorato in banca per un po' e poi, stando alle sue biografie personali, l'11 settembre gli ha cambiato il modo di pensare, gli ha fatto capire che il bullismo militare è sbagliato. Poi è tornato all'università e ha studiato scienze politiche a Cambridge, per poi sparire, per circa sei o sette anni. Non sappiamo esattamente cosa abbia fatto in questo periodo. Ha dichiarato in un'intervista di aver lavorato come consulente aziendale in Medio Oriente.

Riemerge nel 2011 e inizia a lavorare gratuitamente per un parlamentare. Inizia così una carriera di cinque, sei, sette anni nel Partito Laburista. Collabora anche un po', per quanto ne so, alla campagna elettorale di Sadiq Khan per la carica di sindaco di Londra, intorno al 2015.

Poi inizia a lavorare per questa parlamentare di nome Hilary Benn. Ed è qui che la cosa diventa importante, perché nel 2015 Jeremy Corbyn viene eletto leader del Partito Laburista.

THACKER: Imran ha una storia bizzarra alle spalle. Ho scritto su Tablet che egli aveva detto a un caro amico di aver fatto domanda per lavorare nell'intelligence britannica, ma Imran non ha voluto parlare dei suoi legami con essa.

Quindi Jeremy Corbyn a capo del Partito Laburista sarebbe come se Bernie Sanders diventasse capo del Partito Democratico.

HOLDEN: Esatto. Corbyn diventò il candidato del Partito Laburista alla carica di Primo Ministro. Quando Bernie Sanders era vicino a diventare il candidato alla presidenza, l'establishment democratico si assicurò che non potesse vincere.

È successa più o meno la stessa cosa anche a Jeremy Corbyn.

THACKER: C'è stato un momento folle in cui Bernie Sanders fu addirittura accusato di essere antisemita, e lui è ebreo. È stato assurdo.

HOLDEN: Per qualcuno come Imran Ahmed, la vittoria di Corbyn era un anatema. Non appartiene a quella fazione e non gli piace Jeremy Corbyn. Inoltre quest'ultimo avrebbe rappresentato una minaccia per le sue ambizioni politiche e di carriera nel Partito Laburista.

Ho parlato con molte persone nel Partito Laburista e tutti sospettano che Imran Ahmed sia la fonte delle fughe di notizie contro Jeremy Corbyn. Nei documenti trapelati iniziai a vedere email di Ahmed che collaborava con i giornalisti. Era chiaro che aveva una certa predisposizione per questo tipo di cose.

Nel periodo in cui Corbyn vinse, andò a lavorare per un'altra parlamentare laburista, Angela Eagle, anch'essa contraria a Corbyn. Per un breve periodo è parso che Angela Eagle avesse potuto persino sfidarlo alla guida del Partito Laburista.

I documenti che ho visto mostrano che Imran Ahmed stava cercando di proteggere Angela Eagle dalla possibilità che i suoi stessi elettori la escludessero. Stava cercando di far apparire la sinistra estrema come un branco di delinquenti. Si scagliava anche contro i piccoli... giornalisti indipendenti e le piccole testate indipendenti che verificavano le affermazioni che lui diffondeva sulla stampa.

THACKER: Quindi a Imran non piacciono le persone come me.

HOLDEN: Non gli piacciono le persone come noi. Ha lavorato con i grandi media, diffondendo storie sul mainstream che poi venivano verificate dai media più piccoli.

Tutti credevano che Jeremy Corbyn fosse destinato a crollare, ma nel 2017 ci furono le elezioni generali e invece ottenne il miglior voto del Partito Laburista dai tempi di Tony Blair. Improvvisamente era come dire: “Oh cavolo, Corbyn è davvero eleggibile!”

Per persone come Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed, quello era il momento in cui si sentono più deboli e devono fare qualcosa al riguardo.

THACKER: Quando Corbyn stava per diventare Primo Ministro, uno dei suoi sostenitori era l'attore Mark Ruffalo. Ora Ruffalo sui social sostiene Imran Ahmed, il quale ha contribuito a uccidere politicamente Corbyn, perché forse è troppo stupido per capire chi sia veramente Imran Ahmed.

HOLDEN: Provo sincero dispiacere per Mark Ruffalo. Non mi sembra uno in malafede, ma credo che se sapesse cosa stava facendo Imran Ahmed allora e cosa sta facendo dietro le quinte ora, ne sarebbe profondamente turbato.

THACKER: Molte persone non sanno chi sia veramente Imran Ahmed.

HOLDEN: Esatto. Quindi nel 2017 entrò in gioco Morgan McSweeney. Originario dell'Irlanda, iniziò a lavorare per il Partito Laburista nel 2003-2004. Il suo primo incarico fu sotto la guida di Peter Mandelson come confutatore rapido, ma poi strinse una profonda amicizia con Steve Reed, che ora ricopre una posizione di rilievo nel governo laburista.

All'epoca l'attenzione principale di McSweeney era rivolta alla politica locale, come quella del Sud di Londra. Nel 2015 era il responsabile della campagna elettorale di una parlamentare di nome Liz Kendall, che si era candidata contro Jeremy Corbyn. Beh, venne sconfitta.

McSweeney fa parte di una fazione del Partito Laburista piuttosto marginale in termini di elettori, ma piuttosto potente in termini di accesso ai media. Nel 2017 McSweeney si lasciò alle spalle le questioni relative all'amministrazione locale e si unì a Labour Together. È stato creato per unire le fazioni conservatrice e progressista in modo che il partito potesse concentrarsi sulla sconfitta dei conservatori.

THACKER: Quindi l'idea originale di Labour Together era quella di fermare le fazioni di destra e di sinistra, di porre fine ai litigi. Ma poi McSweeney ha cambiato le cose?

HOLDEN: Esatto. McSweeney si propose di fare esattamente l'opposto. Jeremy Corbyn e il Partito Laburista ottennero circa il 40% dei voti nel 2017. Una cifra enorme.

McSweeney disse: “Ok, dobbiamo fare qualcosa per indebolirlo, indebolire le possibilità di successo di Jeremy Corbyn”. McSweeney scrisse un documento informativo per Labour Together, il quale tracciava un percorso per distruggere il corbynismo dall'interno del Partito Laburista e, in secondo luogo, identificare qualcuno che sostituissse Jeremy Corbyn, che alla fine sarebbe stato Keir Starmer, ora Primo Ministro.

Solo quest'anno abbiamo saputo del documento redatto da McSweeney nel 2017 e lui è essenzialmente il motivo per cui abbiamo Keir Starmer come Primo Ministro.

Uno degli aspetti che McSweeney identificò nel 2017 è che il movimento di Corbyn produsse un ecosistema mediatico di sinistra davvero vivace, piuttosto potente ed economicamente di successo. Addirittura indipendente dai media generalisti e al di fuori della capacità di controllo di McSweeney e Ahmed. Non potevano controllare la narrazione.

Dal 2018 in poi McSweeney e Ahmed iniziarono a lavorare insieme a tempo pieno. Secondo una recente ricostruzione, solo quattro persone erano ammesse nell'ufficio di Labour Together: due giovani collaboratori, Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed.

Uno degli obiettivi principali era distruggere i media allineati con Jeremy Corbyn.

THACKER: Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed fornirono notizie al Jewish Chronicle, al Guardian, al Telegraph e ad altri grandi media. So che hanno contribuito a far naufragare il Canary. Chi altro li minacciava?

HOLDEN: La loro minaccia principale era The Canary, mentre l'altra, leggermente più piccola, era Evolve Politics. La cosa più importante è che esisteva un'enorme rete sui social che supportava Corbyn e molti di quei contenuti erano generati dai reportage del Canary. Nel 2019 The Canary aveva pubblicato migliaia di articoli e aveva circa 25 dipendenti a tempo pieno.

Aveva una linea editoriale fondamentalmente di sinistra e un tono un po' scandalistico, ma era un'organizzazione giornalistica seria con ottimi giornalisti investigativi. E stavano verificando i fatti di altri giornali che sostanzialmente pubblicavano notizie probabilmente piazzate da Ahmed e McSweeney.

Si è scritto di come, nel 2018 o nel 2019, Morgan McSweeney fosse ossessionato da questa testata giornalistica. Non smetteva mai di parlarne. C'è una citazione pubblicata in un libro di un ex-direttore del Guardian in cui McSweeney disse: “Se non distruggiamo il Canary, esso distruggerà noi”.

Ed è questo che trovo molto interessante in tutta questa storia. Quel documento di McSweeney del 2017 di cui vi ho parlato, su come volesse distruggere il partito laburista dall'interno, non poteva farlo apertamente. Doveva farlo in segreto. Fece apparire Labour Together in pubblico come una fazione amichevole e trasversale: “Incontriamoci tutti e discutiamo delle nostre divergenze...”. In realtà si trattava di un'organizzazione ferocemente faziosa, la quale avrebbe condotto una campagna di disinformazione.

THACKER: Fin dall'inizio McSweeney e Ahmed hanno gestito il Labour Together con tutti questi gruppi nascosti per attaccare qualsiasi cosa minacciasse la loro idea di ciò che è vero. Ciononostante la loro tattica era dire: “Voi altri siete disinformazione! Vi sbagliate!”

Il loro gioco era fingere di voler fermare la disinformazione; in realtà ciò che facevano era diffondere disinformazione per attaccare chiunque avesse un pensiero indipendente e diverso dal loro.

HOLDEN: È una situazione davvero complicata. C'è voluto molto tempo anche per me affinché me ne rendessi conto, per fare un passo indietro e iniziare a capire. Dal 2017 hanno avviato una campagna di disinformazione su chi sono e cosa stanno facendo. C'è anche la questione dei soldi.

Hanno incassato un sacco di soldi e non li hanno dichiarati alla Commissione Elettorale. In realtà sono finanziati da quasi un milione di sterline in donazioni da parte di personaggi politici di primo piano. Anche questo, al momento, non è noto al pubblico.

Inaugurarono la campagna “Stop Funding Fake News” su SFFN nel marzo 2019, fingendo di essere solo un gruppo di attivisti di base. Il motto era: “Non vogliamo rivelare la nostra identità, siamo solo persone impegnate per la verità e la lotta all'odio”. Ma nessuno sapeva all'epoca che in realtà si trattava di Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed, spin doctor del Partito Laburista. Né che questa campagna era sostenuta da Steve Reed, che all'epoca era parlamentare e ora fa parte del gabinetto di Starmer.

Si presentavano come un movimento popolare. In realtà sono un gruppo di personaggi politici molto influenti, finanziati con enormi quantità di denaro da donatori non dichiarati.

THACKER: Se la prendevano anche con Breitbart nel Regno Unito. Breitbart è un'agenzia di stampa conservatrice americana, un tempo affiliata a Steve Bannon. Nel frattempo “Stop Funding Fake News” stava dicendo ai media: “Abbiamo paura di dirvi chi siamo, perché poi verremmo attaccati”.

Eppure attaccavano e condannavano a piacimento, in forma anonima – senza rivelare chi li finanziava – chiunque osasse esprimere opinioni che non gradivano. Non c'era bisogno di apprezzare un Breitbart conservatore o un Canary liberal per sapere che le persone hanno il diritto di avere quel particolare punto di vista senza essere attaccate incessantemente da qualche gruppo con interessi particolari come Imran Ahmed e Morgan McSweeney.

HOLDEN: La questione fondamentale è la trasparenza. Facevano pressione sulle testate giornalistiche affinché riportassero le loro opinioni e idee, per poi distruggerle senza alcuna possibilità di replica. McSweeney e Ahmed hanno avuto successo contro il Canary, tagliando i suoi introiti pubblicitari.

Ma mentre accadeva il Canary non poteva farci niente perché non sapeva chi lo stesse attaccando. Se i redattori avessero potuto far notare: “Guardate, sono Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed, non gli piacciamo”. Sarebbe finito tutto in quel momento.

Ma c'è anche una dimensione legale. Se non sapete che sono McSweeney e Ahmed a diffamarvi con account anonimi, non potete far loro causa. Sui social ci sono stati momenti in cui Evolve Politics chiedeva: “Chi siete? Smettetela. Vogliamo inviarvi una lettera di diffida, perché state mentendo su di noi e state compromettendo la nostra capacità di guadagnarci da vivere”.

Non c'era modo di intraprendere azioni legali del genere.

“Stop Funding Fake News” non era una campagna eroica per porre fine alla disinformazione e all'odio, perché se fossero state vere le sue affermazioni fattuali, non avrebbero affatto retto alla prova della realtà. Si è trattato fondamentalmente di una campagna di disinformazione non diversa da quella incentrata sulla Russia. Soldi nascosti per scopi politici non dichiarati, attacchi alla gente per creare caos.

Morgan McSweeney ha distrutto il Canary per distruggere anche il corbynismo, in modo da poter poi scegliere la persona successiva alla guida del Partito Laburista, in modo che quella stessa persona potesse diventare il prossimo Primo Ministro. Era una campagna di disinformazione che ha avuto talmente tanto successo che probabilmente nessun'altra campagna di disinformazione avrebbe mai avuto.

THACKER: Perché l'ecosistema mediatico nel Regno Unito è così strano? Perché è stato così poco curioso quando è stato contattato da McSweeney e Ahmed? Perché avrebbe dovuto citare le sciocchezze che McSweeney e Ahmed stavano snocciolando, senza rivelare da chi veniva contattato? I media britannici sono stati complici di questa campagna di disinformazione.

HOLDEN: È una domanda incredibilmente pertinente da porre all'ecosistema mediatico britannico. È davvero assurdo che, in alcuni casi, abbiamo scoperto solo quest'anno articoli pubblicati da Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed già nel 2018. È una situazione assurda.

Sto generalizzando molto, perché ci sono delle precisazioni da fare, ma in generale i principali quotidiani britannici dettano l'agenda dell'informazione ed erano piuttosto ostili alla politica di Jeremy Corbyn. Erano piuttosto contenti di prendere spunto da una campagna che lo stava indebolendo.

C'era anche un conflitto di interessi. Il Canary aveva successo e attirava lettori da altre piattaforme. E aveva spesso un approccio molto aggressivo e conflittuale nei confronti dei media generalisti. Se la BBC pubblicava qualcosa e pensava che contenesse degli errori, lo segnalava: “Ehi BBC, hai commesso un errore. La BBC è di parte”.

THACKER: I media britannici sono stati complici di questa campagna di disinformazione. E lo hanno fatto per motivi politici e finanziari, per eliminare concorrenti importanti.

HOLDEN: Inoltre il 2019 è stato un periodo folle per il giornalismo nel Regno Unito. C'era isterismo intorno alla possibilità che Jeremy Corbyn potesse diventare primo ministro. Immaginate se Bernie Sanders avesse avuto una reale possibilità di essere il candidato democratico alla presidenza. Sarebbero successe un sacco di cose, proprio come quando Trump è diventato il candidato repubblicano.

THACKER: Questa isteria attorno a Trump c'è ancora oggi. Metà delle volte che si leggono cose su Trump... non so se siano vere o no. Come se fosse proprio questo il problema. Non mi dispiace leggere cose negative su Trump, se sono vere, ma così tante volte...

Abbiamo avuto anni di storie assurde su un possibile incontro tra Trump e delle prostitute in Russia. Roba assurda, con Trump e Putin che complottano per conquistare l'America. I giornalisti del New York Times che hanno scritto gran parte di queste assurdità hanno poi vinto un premio Pulitzer.

Viene chiamata sindrome da disturbo bipolare su Trump. Voi nel Regno Unito avete la sindrome da disturbo bipolare su Corbyn?

HOLDEN: È un modo piuttosto efficace di dirlo. Ciò che mi ha insegnato, e che dovrebbe insegnare a tutti se si vuole trarne un qualche insegnamento: bisogna leggere tutti i media controcorrente. Bisogna controllare costantemente. Bisogna avere una vasta gamma di fonti perché tutti commettono errori.

Spesso i resoconti presentati come fatti accertati dai media generalisti si rivelano infondati anni dopo.

THACKER: Leggere con saggezza, leggere molto.

HOLDEN: Giusto. L'approccio corretto è essere scettici su tutto ciò che si legge. La gente dovrebbe essere scettica nei miei confronti e dovrebbe essere scettica nei suoi confronti. La gente dovrebbe essere scettica anche nei confronti del Time e del New York Times. Avrebbe dovuto essere scettica anche nei confronti del Canary. Leggere attentamente.

Ci sono momenti in cui si dà per scontato che un fatto sia stato stabilito dai media generalisti e se si contesta quel fatto, o lo si mette in discussione, si viene immediatamente considerati estranei ai normali argomenti di discussione.

Eppure sono spesso i media indipendenti a insistere su un argomento e poi a rivelare la verità.

THACKER: C'è un modo per definire queste persone che accettano qualsiasi cosa leggano sul New York Times, sul Washington Post, o sul New Yorker: liberal in piena regola.

Proprio nel periodo in cui Imran Ahmed e Morgan McSweeney hanno iniziato a lavorare sulle fake news per fingere di attaccare la disinformazione, è nato il fenomeno dei fact-checker negli Stati Uniti.

Ebbi un botta e risposta con uno dei fact-checker della BBC che si occupava sempre di verificare i dati sui vaccini. Le scrissi anche una mail: “Ha mai verificato i dati di un produttore di vaccini? Continua a trovare tutti questi problemi con le informazioni sui vaccini, ma non riguardano mai chi li produce. E sono stati colti a mentire più e più volte”.

E lei mi rispose: “Beh, ci lavoreremo”. Non l'ha mai fatto, ovviamente. Non credo che la BBC abbia mai effettuato un fact-checking su Pfizer, e quest'ultima ha mentito ripetutamente sul suo vaccino contro il COVID.

I fact-checker sono molto utili per testate come il New York Times e il Washington Post perché non attaccano mai questi giornali, anche se commettono errori e poi devono apportare correzioni. Non sono sicuro che Politifact, diretto da Poynter, abbia mai fatto un fact-checking sul New York Times. Verificano i fatti di una casalinga di Peoria che va su Facebook e dice ai suoi 2.000 follower: “Penso che i vaccini COVID stiano uccidendo i cani”. Attenzionano sempre stupidaggini del genere.

Così, dopo che Imran Ahmed e Morgan McSweeney hanno cacciato Corbyn dalla leadership laburista ed eliminato il Canary, Ahmed porta il Center for Countering Digital Hate negli Stati Uniti ed esso viene improvvisamente citato dalla Casa Bianca.

HOLDEN: Alla fine del 2019 crearono il CCDH con Morgan McSweeney nel consiglio di amministrazione e Imran Ahmed come amministratore delegato. Era molto piccolo e nessuno sapeva che Stop Funding Fake News era fondamentalmente la stessa cosa e che McSweeney e Ahmed erano dietro di essi.

Kier Starmer è diventato capo del Partito Laburista e McSweeney il suo capo di gabinetto. Parallelamente Imran Ahmed si recò negli Stati Uniti all'inizio del 2020, inserendosi immediatamente nell'establishment del Partito Democratico. Simon Clark entrò nel consiglio di amministrazione del CCDH e fa parte dell'Atlantic Council.

THACKER: Beh, Simon Clark era stato al Center for American Progress, il think tank del Partito Democratico che ha guidato la campagna presidenziale di Hillary Clinton nel 2016.

HOLDEN: Ahmed arrivò negli Stati Uniti inserendosi immediatamente nell'establishment e riuscendo a raccogliere fondi abbastanza rapidamente. Ho ricevuto dei documenti dall'IRS e ho scoperto che Ahmed aveva fornito informazioni errate per ottenere lo status di organizzazione non profit. E prevedeva di ricevere donazioni per quasi un milione di dollari. Se siete una ONG e ricevete un milione di dollari nel primo anno, quelle sono cifre importanti.

THACKER: Ho chiesto a diversi amici a Washington, persone con decenni di esperienza: “Se lasciassi il tuo lavoro e fondassi un'organizzazione no-profit domani, riusciresti a raccogliere un milione di dollari nel primo anno?”. Chiunque abbia contattato ha iniziato a ridere.

HOLDEN: Il Center for Countering Digital Hate era praticamente sconosciuto finché Imran Ahmed non l'ha portato negli Stati Uniti. Con tutti questi discorsi su vaccini, obblighi vari, quarantene e COVID, ha trovato terreno fertile.

Quello era un periodo in cui negli Stati Uniti si parlava in buona fede, ma forse in modo fuorviante, di emergenze sanitarie pubbliche e libertà di parola. Si sentiva anche dire che la libertà di parola aveva un impatto sulla salute pubblica, quindi alcune cose non dovevano essere dette. Nel mezzo di questa emergenza, Imran Ahmed e il CCDH entrano in scena e si insinuano nella Casa Bianca di Biden e nel Partito Democratico.

Aveva già dimostrato di avere questa straordinaria capacità di scovare le fake news e di convincere il governo ad agire, e il lavoro del CCDH si adattava perfettamente a quel momento. Ahmed spunta dal nulla e appare come un'organizzazione legittima, anti-disinformazione e anti-odio.

THACKER: Mentre è negli Stati Uniti a dirigere il CCDH, sappiamo da dove provengono i suoi soldi? Sappiamo che ha un'organizzazione no-profit negli Stati Uniti e che parte del denaro proviene dal Regno Unito. Ho documenti interni che mi sono stati trasmessi da un informatore: ha personale a Londra, personale a Washington e ha anche una società privata collegata con sede legale nel Delaware. Imran Ahmed aveva anche una società di consulenza nel Regno Unito.

I finanziamenti sono tanti, ma se si considerano solo quelli no-profit, non c'è modo di finanziare tutte queste persone con gli $1,5 milioni dichiarati all'IRS. Quindi da dove provengono tutti questi soldi? Ancora oggi non lo sappiamo.

HOLDEN: Non lo sappiamo. A un certo punto ha dichiarato alcuni donatori sul suo sito web, ma non potevano essere più di centomila sterline. Non abbiamo idea da dove provengano i soldi ed è pazzesco perché questa organizzazione ha svolto un ruolo piuttosto importante negli Stati Uniti.

THACKER: Ahmed ha anche avuto un ruolo fondamentale nel disegno di legge sulla sicurezza online del Regno Unito. È stata la prima persona a testimoniarvi a favore davanti al Parlamento. Questa legge ha ora attirato l'attenzione dell'amministrazione Trump, la quale afferma che essa peggiora i diritti umani nel Regno Unito. Voglio dire, lui ha contribuito, da quanto ho capito, a scrivere e far approvare quella legge, che può potenzialmente essere usata per multare o incarcerare gli inglesi che mettono qualcosa online.

È una follia. Di cosa si trattava?

HOLDEN: Il presidente della commissione che ha tenuto le udienze sul disegno di legge sulla sicurezza online è un politico conservatore di nome Damian Collins. Fa parte del consiglio di amministrazione del CCDH di Ahmed e la prima persona che Collins chiama a testimoniare a favore del disegno di legge è lo stesso Imran Ahmed.

La cosa sorprendente della testimonianza di Ahmed è che la bozza originale del disegno di legge sulla sicurezza online è un incubo. Un inferno. Ciò che è stato approvato è ancora problematico, ma la prima versione era completamente folle. La minaccia alla libertà di parola era così profonda nella prima versione che la maggior parte dei gruppi della società civile si è opposta. Avevano intenzione di censurare cose che erano legali ma dannose perché avrebbero potuto causare disagio psicologico.

THACKER: Gli inglesi sono molto più a loro agio con il governo che dice loro cosa fare. Credo che la maggior parte delle persone dimentichi che quando George Orwell scrisse in 1984 del controllo del governo su ciò che tutti pensavano, si riferiva al governo britannico.

In America abbiamo codici sul linguaggio, ma questo accade solo in posti folli, come nei campus universitari, dove c'è la follia della sinistra, dove le persone cercano di zittirvi perché non usate i pronomi corretti.

HOLDEN: Il punto cruciale della democrazia è che le persone dibattono su chi può e chi non può dire qualcosa. E va bene. Ho un problema quando lo Stato interviene, come ha fatto il CCDH ed è qui che traccio il limite. Ad esempio, i boicottaggi per me vanno bene. Vengo dal Sudafrica, dove il boicottaggio ha contribuito a porre fine all'apartheid. Non ho problemi con il boicottaggio di aziende cattive che fanno cose davvero cattive. A volte questo può apportare un cambiamento positivo nel mondo.

Non sono a favore di un'organizzazione che cerca di convincere il governo a censurare il dibattito pubblico. È assolutamente inaccettabile perché non ci vuole un genio per capire il motivo... Lo dirò apertamente. Sono di sinistra in politica. Oggi, nella politica britannica, capisco perché il Segretario di Stato affermi che “Free Palestine” sia un incitamento all'odio che deve essere censurato su Internet.

Ma capisco anche come, se siete di destra, potreste avere paura, perché alcuni potrebbero dire che altre forme di espressione sono altrettanto dannose. Basta un attimo per pensare a quanto folle possa diventare lo stato nel controllare la libertà di parola.

La cosa assurda è quando Imran Ahmed si presentò davanti a quella commissione e affermò che la versione originale dell'Online Safety Bill non era sufficiente. Doveva essere più restrittiva. Non stavano facendo abbastanza per limitare la libertà di parola. Una follia totale.

Sosteneva anche che doveva esserci una deroga per i media, che essi avrebbero dovuto avere più diritti alla libertà di parola di chiunque altro. Che approccio incasinato. Non capisco perché i media avrebbero dovuto avere più diritti dell'utente medio sui social. Poi affermò che la definizione di media è troppo ampia e avrebbe dovuto includere solo testate come il Washington Post, il New York Times e la CNN. Assicurarsi che la definizione di media non riguardasse testate come il Canary e persone come Paul Thacker.

THACKER: Beh, se non si censurano persone come me e lei, ci ritroveremo a parlare in un'intervista che la gente leggerà. Come questa.

HOLDEN: Non voglio essere presuntuoso, ma se non fossi stato in grado di scrivere questo libro, gran parte di ciò che è successo per decretare Keir Starmer Primo Ministro non sarebbe stato riportato.

THACKER: Uno dei tizi di cui parla si chiama Mike Heaver. Ha fondato questo sito di notizie online chiamato Westmonster, una sorta di sito di notizie conservatore e anti-establishment. Perché è importante per i lettori americani?

HOLDEN: Heaver ha fondato un sito di notizie conservatore chiamato Westmonster, finanziato da Aaron Banks, un personaggio di spicco della scena pro-Brexit. Banks sosteneva l'uscita del Regno Unito dall'Unione Europea ed è strettamente associato a Nigel Farage, così come Michael Heaver. Westmonster nasce nel... 2017, 2018 come piattaforma per il movimento per la Brexit. Ahmed e McSweeney iniziarono a prendere di mira Westmonster contemporaneamente al Canary e a Breitbart, un sito di notizie conservatore americano.

Lo fecero per spaventare gli inserzionisti, sostenendo che era pieno di odio e che doveva essere demonetizzato. Una delle immagini che pubblicarono per sostenere questa affermazione di odio era una foto di Nigel Farage con Donald Trump. Questa era la loro affermazione: Farage è odio, Trump è odio, entrambi bigotti pieni di odio che diffondono disinformazione e notizie false.

A maggio 2016 si tennero le elezioni per decidere chi avrebbe rappresentato la Gran Bretagna al Parlamento europeo. Questo avvenne prima della Brexit, quando il Regno Unito faceva ancora parte dell'Unione Europea. Michael Heaver si candidò nel Brexit Party e Stop Funding Fake News condusse una campagna mediatica contro di lui.

Quindi Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed definirono i loro rivali politici come disinformazione, e lo fecero con denaro ombra e nascondendo i loro veri nomi. È così che operano McSweeney e Ahmed. È totalmente folle.

Chiunque legga il mio libro, chiunque mi conosca, sa che gente come Nigel Farage non fa per me. Non sono la mia politica. Ma io la vedo così ed è totalmente inaccettabile. Non si tratta di politica di partito. Si tratta di democrazia. Non si può fare tutto questo e avere una democrazia sana.

THACKER: Imran Ahmed ora vive a Washington e finge di essere un esperto di disinformazione, anche se mente e diffonde disinformazione. Ha cercato di far cadere RFK Jr. e se la prende con Trump.

Qual sarà la sua prossima mossa? Pensa che cercherà ancora di mimetizzarsi nel pessimo ecosistema mediatico degli Stati Uniti? Pensa che tornerà nel Regno Unito?

HOLDEN: In pratica gli ha rovinato i piani. Dovrebbe congratularsi con sé stesso. Sì. La vittoria di Trump è un problema per lui perché non avrà più l'attenzione della Casa Bianca. È ancora al centro dell'attenzione della CNN, del New York Times e di queste testate che non si preoccupano molto del suo oscuro passato, ma non avrà necessariamente lo stesso impatto politico.

Ahmed stava aspettando che Keir Starmer diventasse Primo Ministro, cosa che è avvenuta alla fine del 2024, così lui e il CCDH potevano essere chiamati direttamente a fornire consulenza al governo inglese. Ed è esattamente quello che è successo. Ahmed e il CCDH sono stati immediatamente chiamati a fornire consulenza sul disegno di legge sulla sicurezza online e su come il governo del Regno Unito avrebbe dovuto rispondere alle informazioni diffuse sui social.

Ciò che li manda in tilt, almeno secondo i documenti che ho visto, è quando si pubblicano articoli come abbiamo fatto noi. Improvvisamente tutti iniziano a chiedersi chi siano il CCDH e Imran Ahmed, e ci sono molti media sulla stampa britannica.

I documenti che ho visto suggeriscono che, nel governo Starmer, c'è la sensazione di dover prendere un po' le distanze dal CCDH. Una delle cose che questo governo laburista farà prima di essere bocciato, a mani basse, è tornare ad alcune delle disposizioni originali del disegno di legge sulla sicurezza online. Vogliono renderlo più draconiano e più censorio. Penso che sia probabile che accada.

Ahmed si vanta anche di avere un impatto sulla politica dell'UE e di aver fornito consulenza per il disegno di legge dell'UE per censurare gli europei.

Tutto inizia nel 2017 con Morgan McSweeney e Imran Ahmed che complottano insieme, e nel corso di sette anni Morgan McSweeney è diventato Capo di Gabinetto del Primo Ministro. È il cuore del governo inglese. Nel frattempo Imran Ahmed avrebbe reso il CCDH un attore importante negli Stati Uniti e i due stanno sostanzialmente tornando insieme. Ora sperano di raccogliere i frutti di questa campagna durata quasi un decennio.

È una storia piuttosto shakespeariana, perché poi vieni coinvolto e si pubblicano articoli come quello su Twitter con tutti i documenti interni del CCDH, mettendo in luce chi sono e cosa stavano realmente facendo.

Almeno ora la vita è molto più dura per loro. 

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

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una mancia in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

John Leo Keenan wrote:

He makes very clear points.  And the same can be said of Thomas Mathew Crooks.  He learned too soon before the event that there would be the event.  How could he get the rifle up there is not known!  One or two saw him climbing up with the rifle, but we see him without a rifle before the event.  How could he get the rifle from the car without being seen?  Must have placed it up there when there was no one there?  It raises questions of timing and motive.  How does a “municipal agent” of all agents climb up with a gun, sees him with a rifle, and then quickly descends to run away (to tell others).  Why is a “municipal” one the one in that situation?  I focused on what his helmet/head video showed.  I froze the image of the roof top.  There is no person there and it’s another roof, with a low wall on the opposite side (believe it or not).  I wrote about this in an LRC article.

One ignores some important details if there are others that point to something being impossible.  We can discard any possibility that Thomas Matthew Crooks was the shooter by pointing out that the Butler videos released had to be pre-arranged for this crime because we see him on top of a building that only at first sight is the AGR building.  It’s certainly not the AGR building, as can be readily ascertained from the details of the image(s).  They are like the false video of James Copenhaver – the AGR building cannot be right behind the stands, where we know there’s grass.  Everybody knows the AGR building is more than 100 meters behind.  Even this isn’t being noticed or discussed.   

With such facts, one concludes that terrorism is above all a spiritual attack, and only after that a physical attack.  The TV channels play Copenhaver’s film again whenever it’s suitable.  There should not just be one or two that sound the alert about this video and the others.  So many should recognize its obviously fake image that eventually no one can ignore it.  The investigation could begin with any of the false videos because the one who arranged them is the real culprit.  (Crooks appears to have been manipulated by someone.)   

The biggest difference with Tyler’s case would be that Thomas fired at the president.  

The post The Charile Kirk Assassination FBI Official Narrative Demolished in 10 Minutes appeared first on LewRockwell.

Why are the French different from Americans? One reason, for good or ill, is that in their senior year in high school (called términale) French kids must take a course in philosophy. My daughter has just started reading the Pensées (Thoughts) of Pascal. My response to Pascal and his Pensées is given below in an essay I wrote for myself when I read it more than 35 years ago. But before that consider why I read this old book through the following dialogue from another, very different, French writer Marcel Proust; In the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past (in French À la recherche du temps perdue, In Search of Lost Time) , (translated by Moncrieff, Random House, v.1, p. 20).

“I say!” exclaimed Swann to my grandfather, “what I was going to tell you has more to do than you might think with what you were asking me just now, for in some respects there has been very little change. I came across a passage in Saint-Simon this morning which would have amused you. It is in the volume which covers his mission to Spain; not one of the best, little more in fact than a journal, but at least it is a journal wonderfully well written, which fairly distinguishes it from the devastating (sic) journalism that we feel bound to read these days, morning, noon and night.”

“I do not agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the papers very pleasant indeed!” my aunt Flora broke in, to show Swann that she had read the note about his Corot in the ‘Figaro.’

“Yes,” aunt Celine went one better. “When they write things about people whom we are interested.”

“I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it – oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s ‘Pensees?’”

Even more so today than in Proust’s time, it is important to find the signal in the noise. Get off your Twitter (I should write X) feed and read a great, old book.

On the Pensées of Pascal

“It might seem that about Blaise Pascal, and about the two works on which his fame is founded everything that there is to say had been said. . . . But Pascal is one who must be studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change.”

T. S. Eliot

Upon reading these lines of Eliot, as is my habit, I studied afresh the Pensées of Pascal. The man who was to become one of the great Christian apologists of his age, or any age, I knew only as the man for whom a unit of pressure is named. Here I shall inform you of what little I have learned of his life and my feeling of the Pensées.

Blaise Pascal was born June 19, 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, France. His mother having died as an infant, his father raised the boy and his sisters, personally undertaking the task of their education. Pascal was a precocious student. At sixteen he published a paper on solid geometry that Descartes could not believe was written by one so young. Pascal collaborated with his father on experiments that proved a vacuum was possible, which once again brought him into contention with Descartes. With these and other inventions and discoveries the great mathematician and physicist was known as the most brilliant man of his time. A celebrity himself, he knew all the best and brightest in Paris.

At the height of his renown on November 23, 1654 Pascal had a religious revelation. He recorded the event in a note that was sewn into the overcoat that he was wearing when he died. While he was always a Christian he came to feel that his religious attitude had not been fervent enough. He left the social life of Paris to join his sister in the Jansenist convent at Port-Royal. On his choice of faith over fame Pascal wrote:

“Vanity is so firmly anchored in man¹s heart that a soldier, a rough, a cook or a porter will boast and expect admirers, and even philosophers want them; those who write against them want to enjoy the prestige of having read them, and perhaps I who wrote this want the same thing, perhaps my readers.” . .

The Jansenists were a Catholic sect, who at that time were at odds with the Jesuits. Pascal wrote the Provincial Letters (1656-57) in defense of the Jansenist cause. This series of anonymous pamphlets is a masterpiece of French prose. Pascal lived his life in religious and scientific reflection until his death in 1662.

Pascal¹s Pensées (thoughts) were published posthumously in 1669. They are a compilation of notes intended for a Christian apology. Pascal intended to make the argument for Christian truths through reason. In spite of the fact that a Christian truth is that faith can not be deduced by reason. “Either God is or he is not.”

“But to which view shall we be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong.”

Thus, Pascal argues, even if your reason prevents your faith, shouldn¹t

prudential reason move you to search for faith.

Pascal’s fundamental view of the world is of fallen man. That while

“man has god-like qualities he also displays the savageness of a beast. The two truths of the Christian religion are “that there is a God, of whom men are capable, and that there is a corruption in nature which makes them unworthy. It is of equal importance to men to know each of these points: and it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness as to know his own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can cure him. Knowing only one of these points leads either to the arrogance of the philosophers, who have known God but not their own wretchedness, or to the despair of the atheists, who know their own wretchedness without knowing their Redeemer.”

When man acts with the arrogance of a god to remake man or the world the results are disastrous. The French and Russian revolutions are testimonies to this truth. I can testify to the wretchedness of life in this world when God is not known with the example of my mother. Her life has no joy for as we all have failures, sickness and eventually death in our lives, she cannot see the light of the Redeemer which gives hope in the face of despair. Unfortunately I see no way to help her so I can only pray for her and grieve for her.

So what is it of Pascal that I have learned afresh, that I will keep with me for the rest of my days. In the words of Pascal:

“Thus I stretch out my arms to my saviour, who, after being foretold for four thousand years, came on earth to die and suffer for me at the time and the circumstances foretold. By his grace I peaceably await death, in the hope of being eternally united, and meanwhile I live joyfully, whether in the blessings which he is pleased to bestow on me or in the afflictions which he sends me for my own good and taught me how to endure by his example.”

Amen.

The post Pascal appeared first on LewRockwell.

The federal government shutdown in recent weeks has highlighted the full cost of many government programs, including the food stamp program. Many people—especially the kind who don’t spend their time tracking federal spending—have been shocked by the fact that one in eight Americans—12 percent of the population—receives food stamps. That’s about 42 million people. Moreover, most food stamp recipients receive other forms of government “welfare” as well.

For many, these statistics flying around social media and among podcasters have served to highlight the sheer size of the American population that receives government money as a substantial portion of their income.

This raises an important question: if a sizable portion of a person’s income comes from tax dollars, should that person be eligible to vote himself access to even more tax dollars?

Some think not. This woman, for instance, received 64K likes when she stated: “I don’t think these people should vote. Honestly, how can you vote freely, when you’re being bought?”

She’s right.

This is a controversial take, to say the least. Yet, many people who act aghast at the idea would also surely regard it as a bad thing if a politician voted “yes” to awarding a government contract to his own company. This is because many people understand that being in a position to vote to send yourself more taxpayer money involves a conflict of interest. Historically, a member of a city council or legislature has often been expected to refrain from voting when he can personally benefit financially from his own vote. It is understood that anyone voting in this situation is not voting “freely” but is biased in favor of enriching himself at the expense of others.

Yet, few people think twice when a voter casts his ballot for a politician who has promised to give that voter more taxpayer money. Sometimes, at the state level, voters will cast their ballot to directly enrich themselves through ballot initiatives and referenda. This, we are told is all perfectly fine because voting is allegedly some kind of sacred right.

How Many People Live off Taxpayer Funds? 

How many voters—or at least potential voters—are using the taxpayers as their personal piggy banks?

Although recent controversies over food stamps have highlighted that particular program, food stamps are just the tip of the iceberg. The number of Americans who receive monthly taxpayer-funded income goes far beyond the 41 million on food stamps. For example, 72 million Americans receive Social Security, and 65 million of those also receive tax-funded health services through Medicare. Yes, recipients of Social Security like to claim that they “paid in” to the system and now receive their payments out of some kind of imagined trust fund. The reality, of course, is that Social Security and Medicare are 100% funded by current workers. That is, the programs are nothing more than a wealth transfer from workers to retirees. In every way except the rhetoric, Social Security and Medicare are just welfare programs, and every politician knows that his elderly voters expect him to keep ripping off current taxpayers to keep the elderly voters happy.

There are also 70 million Americans on Medicaid. In many cases, Medicaid services amount to the equivalent of thousands of dollars per month for recipients.

We can’t just add these numbers up, however, as there is a lot of overlap in the programs. For example, 78 percent of food stamp recipients are also eligible for Medicaid. Moreover, since we’re talking about all of this in the context of voting, we should remove children—who cannot vote—from the counts.1

Medicare recipients are nearly all on Social Security, so the “Social Security and/or Medicare” group totals about 72 million adults. To this we can add the adult Medicaid recipients who total about 60 percent of total recipients. That’s about 42 million adults. But we must also remove the 12 million Medicaid recipients who are also on Medicare and so are already counted in the Medicare category. That means we can add 30 million adult Medicaid recipients to the 72 million on Social Security. Then, we can add the adult food-stamp recipients who are not already counted under the Medicaid category. That’s another 5.4 million adults. That brings us to a total of about 107 million adult US residents on some form or welfare—and we’re not even counting TANF, rental assistance (Section 8), or other smaller programs here.

Don’t Forget Taxpayer Funded Government Employees and Contractors

Of course, people receiving so-called “social benefits” are not the only people who life off the largesse of the taxpayers. There are at least 10 million others whose paychecks come from the taxpayers. For example, there are 2.2 million federal civilian workers, 1.3 million military “service” members, 400,000 postal workers, 1.8 million workers funded by federal grants, and more than 5 million federal contractors. That latter category, of course, includes those well-paid engineers and white collar workers who make weapons for the Pentagon or “consult” for the departments of Agriculture, State, and other agencies.2

Source: Brookings Institution, (in millions of employees).

Sure, many contractors and federal employees will tell you that they aren’t in the same category as welfare recipients because they “work.” But from the point of view of tax transfers and fiscal policy, there is no difference at all. The issue here isn’t morality or virtue or whether or not someone “deserves” his tax-funded check. We’re simply pointing out the millions of Americans whose income is based on a forcible transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to the recipients’ pocket.

In this, federal contractors and other federal workers are often similar to all recipients of taxpayer money: they all have reasons as to why they have some sort of right to the taxpayer’s dime. Trying to convince these people otherwise is often a lost cause for the reasons that Upton Sinclair suggested long ago: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

But whatever justification is given by the 117 million or so Americans living off the taxpayer’s “generosity,” the fact remains that at least a third of the population in the United States—nearly 45 percent of the adult population—receives a lot of money from the taxpayers. What’s worse, I’m not even including here all the local-government workers funded by federal dollars, students and faculty at federally funded colleges, or the users of smaller federal programs like LIHEAP. And yet we still find nearly half the US population is receiving taxpayer-funded salaries or “benefits.”

When the Bureaucrats/Welfare Recipients/Government Contractors Outnumber the Taxpayers

So, are we to seriously believe that these people would ever vote to substantially cut government spending? Every politician knows the answer to this. He knows that those millions of government contractors and military employees are simply not going to support a candidate who prioritizes any substantial cuts to military spending. Politicians know that opposing Social Security is political suicide. Nowadays, even opposing Medicaid has become a politically dangerous endeavor because so many millions of voters depend on the program’s taxpayer-funded services.

Even if only half of these 116 million taxpayer-funded adults actually vote, that’s a pretty big chunk of the 150 million who voted in the 2024 election. The entire US adult population, after all, is only about 258 million.

This all illustrates why the United States government will never rein in spending or seriously engage the problem of mounting debt and deficits short of an acute sovereign debt crisis or a (probably violent) coup-like event. The hundred-million or so Americans who rely on federal spending for their incomes won’t allow any real reform to ever occur. Runaway debt and spending is now baked into the system. These is no orderly or legal way out of this.

The political dynamic at work was explained by Ludwig von Mises long ago. In his short book Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises examined this problem in the context of government employees. In a section titled “The Bureaucrat as a Voter” Mises explains:

The bureaucrat is not only a government employee. He is, under a democratic constitution, at the same time a voter and as such a part of the sovereign, his employer. He is in a peculiar position: he is both employer and employee. And his pecuniary interest as employee towers above his interest as employer, as he gets much more from the public funds than he contributes to them.

This double relationship becomes more important as the people on the government’s pay roll increase. The bureaucrat as voter is more eager to get a raise than to keep the budget balanced. His main concern is to swell the pay roll.

Mises went on to examine the rise of powerful interest groups in France and Germany in the years before “the fall of their democratic constitutions.” He explained:

There were not only the hosts of public employees, and those employed in the nationalized branches of business (e.g., railroad, post, telegraph, and telephone), there were the receivers of the unemployment dole and of social security benefits, as well as the farmers and some other groups which the government directly or indirectly subsidized. Their main concern was to get more out of the public funds. They did not care for “ideal” issues like liberty, justice, the supremacy of the law, and good government. They asked for more money, that was all. No candidate for parliament, provincial diets, or town councils could risk opposing the appetite of the public employees for a raise. The various political parties were eager to outdo one another in munificence.

Mises concluded:

Representative democracy cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government pay roll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.

The logic of this position is simple. If the voting taxpayers (specifically, those who actually pay the bills) are outnumbered or outcompeted by the tax receivers, then, inevitably, the economic system will tend more and more toward economic profligacy, leading eventually to bankruptcy.

America is already a long way down this road.

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1 Various sources show that about 40 percent of Medicaid and food stamp recipients are children. Medicare and Social Security, of course, are directed at elderly voters.

2 One could also argue that we should also include the 2.1 million military retirees to this category along with the 2.6 million retired federal workers who receive federal pensions. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll leave those out since many are already included in the Social Security category.

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