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You’ve probably read that it is now common for people to sign up for seven years of payments – because this is the only way many people can afford to drive a new vehicle. More payments being more manageable than fewer – but higher – payments. This works – for awhile.

But it can’t work for too much longer, because depreciation catches up – and passes – you right around the seven year mark. By this time, you are likely to find that you owe more (the remaining loan balance) than the car is worth by then and that makes it not worth making those payments any longer. People walk away. The “under water” vehicle gets repossessed. Lenders know that car loans can’t be extended much beyond seven years and that will limit the number of loans written that are for longer than seven years. This, in turn, is going to limit new vehicle sales (or at least, limit the financing of them, which amounts to the same thing).

What then?

The vehicle manufacturers could try to reduce the cost of new vehicles so that people could afford to pay them off in five years or less, but that will be difficult because they have bought into the costs of compliance. It is no longer legally possible to manufacture for sale a vehicle not equipped with multiple airs bags, which entails the cost of designing the car’s structure and dashboard around the air bags – in addition to the cost of the air bags themselves. Many new vehicles have air bags built into the seats as well as the door panels and dash and steering wheel. This alone has added thousands in compliance costs to the window sticker of every new car.

Additional compliance costs include the mandatory back-up cameras and screens that display the images as well hidden/added drivetrain compliance costs such as direct injection and automatic transmissions with eight, nine and ten speeds when four or five are plenty (in terms of any meaningful benefit to the vehicle’s owner).

There are also the transferred compliance costs of EVs the manufacturers are effectively forced to make that can’t be sold for what they actually cost to make, plus a profit. The manufacturers “sell” EVs for less than it costs them to manufacture the things and make the money back by upping the cost of the vehicles that do sell because they’re not EVs.

All of these costs are invisible to the buyer because they are not line-item’d on the window sticker. That would have been the smart move for the manufacturers in that it would have made it clear why the cost of a new vehicle has gone up so much over just the past ten years, let alone the past 50 . It was about 50 years ago that the federal government got seriously into the business of imposing compliance costs on vehicle manufacturers, who passed them on to buyers who didn’t know what they were being made to pay for them and were encouraged to blame it all on “inflation.”

How many know  – to cite just one example – that convertibles all-but-disappeared from the market (which was no longer that because of government interfering with it) by the mid-1970s because of a federal diktat that a car’s roof had to be capable of supporting the car’s entire weight if it rolled over? Instead of convertibles – available, mind you, for those who wanted to buy one – everyone got a government-mandated hard-top with thick “A,” “B” and especially “C” pillars that kept the roof from crushing if the vehicle rolled but also made a wreck more likely because of the blind spots created by those thick, visibility impairing (and government-mandated) structural pillars.

The manufacturers could have simply told car buyers why the cost of vehicles was going up so dramatically by line-iteming each compliance cost. Just a statement of fact, which can serve as a very powerful argument. For example:

5 MPH bumpers – as required by Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard ( FMVSS) 215, “Exterior Protection”: $500

Air bags – as required per FMVSS 208 (Supplemental Restraint System): $3,500.

Back-up camera system (per FMVSS 111): $500.

These are just a few of the readily identifiable specific compliance costs. There are also costs that aren’t specific in the each-new-vehicle-must have (insert here) but which they are effectively required to have, such as fragile plastic and very thin metal exterior panels, which help a manufacturer comply with federal fuel economy and “emissions” diktats via lowering the vehicle’s weight (which is perversely increased by other diktats pertaining to “safety”). Also in this category are the already-mentioned direct injection and automatic transmissions with eight, nine and ten speeds. The only reason for the proliferation of these things is compliance; they eke out slight gains in gas mileage and slight reductions in gaseous (C02) “emissions.”

They confer no meaningful benefit to the buyer who gets to pay for them. And nothing meaningful otherwise, either – except for the costs.

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The post Hitting The Wall appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Aussies just trashed their relations with Iran based on nothing but obscure say-so.

Australia throws out Iran ambassador over alleged antisemitic attacks

Canberra expelled Tehran’s ambassador after accusing Iran of masterminding at least two antisemitic attacks on Australian soil.

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the country’s intelligence services had linked Iran’s military to arson attacks in Sydney and Melbourne, throwing out an ambassador for the first time since World War II, a move The Sydney Morning Herald’s national affairs editor dubbed “the diplomatic equivalent of the nuclear option.”

Iran rejected the charge.

I have searched and read several news pieces on this issue and have found no mention of any fact that would connect two months ago arson incidents in Australia with Iran.

The whole thing came out of nowhere based solely on the say-so from the Australian spy service ASIO:

What Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called ASIO’s “deeply disturbing conclusion” is that the Iranian government was involved in these “extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil”, identified as the activities of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

There is no mentioning on what, if anything, ASIO’s alleged conclusions are based on. There are guesses:

No doubt “protecting sources” will mean that the detail of these “links” will never see the light of day [despite curiosity as to why Iranian security would have even the slightest interest in attacks on Jewish businesses in Australia] but recent history tells us that Mossad and the CIA are almost certainly responsible. These are the same agencies, after all, that fed us a steady stream of fake war propaganda including the supposed WMDs in Iraq, claims of Hamas bases under Gaza hospitals and fake stories about Iran being on the verge of producing nuclear weapons.

Canberra’s diplomatic attack on Iran comes as the Israelis prepare for a second round of aggression against Iran and while the Australian public, through huge rallies, has been expressing its outrage at the Albanese government’s collaboration with the Gaza genocide and demanding punishment of the Israelis.

How is Iran supposed to profit from arranging criminal arson attempts against some random synagogues in Australia?

One might assume that the whole thing is coming up now to calm Zionist anger at Australia which has become more aggressive after ten-thousands of Australians had expressed outraged over Israels ongoing genocide of Palestinians:

Albanese was just last week labeled “weak” by his Israeli counterpart after he said Australia would recognize a Palestinian state: The two countries have seen relations nosedive, with Canberra barring an Israeli far-right politician from entering Australia and Israel revoking the visas of Australian representatives to the Palestinian Authority.

There may also be a larger context to this:

chinahand @chinahand – 8:01 UTC · Aug 26, 2025Seems as tell that another attack on Iran spearheaded by Israel and backed by g7 is forthcoming

That another round of Israeli aggression against Iran is coming has been predicted for some time:

[W]ith its June attacks, Israel achieved a partial victory at best. Its preferred outcome was for Trump to fully engage, targeting both Iran’s conventional forces and economic infrastructure. But while Trump favors swift, decisive military action, he fears full-scale war. His strategy in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities was thus designed to limit escalation rather than expand it. In the short term, Trump succeeded—much to Israel’s chagrin—but in the long run, he has allowed Israel to trap him in an escalatory cycle.

His refusal to escalate beyond a limited bombing campaign was a key reason that Israel agreed to a cease-fire.
…
Regardless of whether Iran resumes uranium enrichment, Israel is determined to deny it time to replenish its missile arsenal, restore air defenses, or deploy improved systems. That logic is central to Israel’s “mowing the grass” strategy: strike preventively and repeatedly to prohibit adversaries from developing capabilities that could challenge Israeli military dominance.

This means that, with Iran already rebuilding its military resources, Israel has an incentive to strike sooner rather than later. What’s more, the political calculus around another attack becomes much more complicated once the United States enters its midterm election season. As a result, a strike could very well take place within the coming months.

This, of course, is the outcome that Iranian leaders want to deter. To dispel any illusion that Israel’s “mowing the grass” strategy works, Iran is likely to strike hard and fast at the outset of the next war.

If Israel decides to again attack Iran the question is when, and to what extend, the Trump administration will again jump in.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Australia Breaks With Iran – Sign of a New War Coming? appeared first on LewRockwell.

For many Catholics, the Covid era was regarded as an illumination of sorts. Churches were shuttered, government slipped on an iron glove, and separations began to ensue. These could be seen as contractions, if you will, prior to the more serious birth pangs foretold in Matthew 24: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me” (Matthew 24:7, 9).

We also saw, in relation to the issue of Covid vaccination, a kind of secular division among friends, coworkers, and family. Some took the government and health authorities at their word. Others were more skeptical. “They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” (Luke 12:53).

Although it may make me an outlier in my orthodox/traditionalist Catholic circles, I am not arguing that the refusal to “take the jab” during this particular time period merits a particular virtue in and of itself. (My own views are more in line with that of philosopher Edward Feser on a Catholic “middle ground,” lest anyone accuse me of not putting my cards on the table. Like Feser, I did not regard Covid vaccination specifically as “a hill to die on.”) To this I would draw a contemporary parallel to St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians:

So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and that “There is no God but one.” But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do. (1 Corinthians 8:4, 7-8)

A similar parallel may be found in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, chapter 2, over the issue of circumcision.

And yet, though I would not consider myself an “anti-vaxxer” (and I do not use that as a pejorative, but simply for the sake of argument) or a vaccine skeptic, there are certain traits that I have found in many of my friends who refused the Covid vaccine that I find enviable because I do not possess them myself.

Stubbornness

During Covid, most of my friends unwilling to vaccinate were what I would charitably call “stubborn.” I used to think of stubbornness, or “hard-headedness” as a character flaw, something “reasonable” people would find incorrigible. But when I read many of the lives of the saints and martyrs, I find that this trait actually aids them in the realm of perseverance—which is necessary for salvation.

One inspiring saint in this regard is St. Eulalia, who was born in the third century in Spain. At 12 years old, stubborn and bull-headed, she would sneak out of her parents’ house in the middle of the night in search of pagans to defy. She would spit at their idols and defy their threats of torture in order to gain the red crown. There was also St. Crispina, who refused to sacrifice to idols, was called stubborn and insolent by the proconsul, and was martyred.

When St. Felicitas was brought before the prefect of Rome for being a Christian and refusing to worship foreign gods, she admonished him. “Do not think to frighten me by threats, or to win me by fair speeches. The spirit of God within me will not suffer me to be overcome by Satan, and will make me victorious over all your assaults.” He urged her to think of her seven sons, who were being lined up to be tortured, but still she refused. “You are insolent indeed,” he said in exacerbation.

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In his speech on the occasion of the so-called “Independence Day” on August 24, the Neo-Nazi junta frontman Volodymyr Zelensky made numerous promises. He started out by praising the infamous Maidan coup that brought NATO’s Nazi puppets to power in former Ukraine. His following line was the “unwavering determination to restore 1991 borders”, where he mentioned “our Donetsk, our Lugansk, our Crimea” and “reminded everyone that all of this is Ukraine”. Zelensky stated that he believes “Ukraine can achieve this — achieve peace, peace across all its land”. The Kiev regime frontman praised his forces, bragging about “truly stopping the second army of the world” and supposedly “destroying the myth of the invincible Russian army”.

These ludicrous claims come at a time when leaked data shows that the actual ratio of losses for the Neo-Nazi junta forces is now worse than 13:1 and that they’ve lost close to two million men, most of whom are forcibly conscripted. Worse yet, they’re now even being killed by the most radical Nazi units whose sole raison d’être is to prevent their retreat “by any means necessary” in unwinnable firefights with the advancing Russian military. Mind you, the personnel in these so-called “barrier detachments” aren’t even fighting the “evil Russians”, but are only waiting to see who’s trying to retreat among forcibly conscripted Ukrainians and then proceed to shoot them, as evidenced by verified combat footage. Is this really a “struggle for freedom”?

Well, Zelensky claims it is. Interestingly, he also mentioned the failed Kursk oblast (region) incursion as if it were something positive. Even more interestingly, Zelensky stated that “no one can forbid us [long-range] strikes [deep within Russia], “because they deliver justice”. He also mentioned the so-called “Operation Spider Web”, which was a series of sabotage attacks on Russian strategic aviation. The Trump administration just decided to send ERAMs (Extended Range Attack Munitions) that should be delivered in the next six weeks. The United States insists that they’ve “put limitations in place” on how these weapons would be used, supposedly “to prevent uncontrollable escalation”. Well, how does one reconcile that with the promises Zelensky made in his speech?

In fact, he also stated that “this is Ukraine now” and that “this Ukraine will never again in history be forced into the shame that the ‘Russians’ call a ‘compromise'”. In other words, the talks between President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump were all “for nothing”, according to Zelensky. This comes after Vice President JD Vance stated that Moscow supposedly “made significant concessions” during these talks. Obviously, both of these things cannot be true at once. If Zelensky’s idea of a “just peace” is to “completely defeat” Russia, this isn’t a concession, but a demand that the Kremlin capitulates. What reason would the latter have to accept such terms? Is the Russian military losing 13:1 and with nearly two million casualties?

However, while he keeps talking about the so-called “just peace”, Zelensky is only promising more war (obviously, not for himself, but for hundreds of thousands of forcibly conscripted Ukrainians). He also insisted that “our future will be up to us alone” and that “the world knows it and respects it, respects Ukraine, and accepts Ukraine as an equal”. Zelensky is a comedian and this would certainly be a laughing matter if millions of lives weren’t at stake (possibly billions if we consider the fact that the chances of uncontrollable escalation are still there, precisely thanks to extremist regimes such as the Neo-Nazi junta). And yet, he continued with nonsensical statements about the supposed “respect for Ukraine” and its alleged “rightful place at the table”.

“Ukraine can truly gather and unite the world’s leaders in a single day. Ukraine, with which America and the whole world want to jointly produce drones. Ukraine, which restored unity between Europe and the US and is now the foundation of this alliance. Ukraine, which stands firm and can defend itself. Therefore, Ukraine is heard, Ukraine is counted, Ukraine is listened to. Its place is at the table; it is not told, ‘Wait outside.’ It is told, ‘The decision is yours alone,'” Zelensky said with a straight face.

He also claimed that “both the US and Europe agree: Ukraine has not yet won, but it certainly will not lose” and that “Ukraine is recognized — not as a poor relative, but as a strong ally”. Zelensky is insistent that “this is what the ‘coalition of the willing’ is about” and that “Ukraine will achieve lasting peace because it will receive security guarantees so strong that no one in the world will ever again even think of attacking Ukraine”. He never revealed who would (or could) give such guarantees, but given his previous statements about nuclear weapons, this should certainly be taken as a potentially serious threat. The main takeaway of this year’s “Independence Day” speech is that Zelensky just raised the stakes and effectively declared total war on Russia.

It should be noted that these statements aren’t mere rhetoric. On August 25, only a day after his speech, the Neo-Nazi junta unveiled a new, longer-range, land-attack version of the R-360 “Neptune” cruise missile, itself a copy of the Soviet-era turbojet-powered Kh-35. Colloquially known as the “Long Neptune”, the upgraded missile reportedly has a range of around 1,000 km, with no information on other specifications. Just like the Kh-35, the original R-360 “Neptune” is a subsonic anti-ship cruise missile with a range of approximately 200 km. In 2023, the Kiev regime revealed it fired a land-attack version of the missile, dubbed the “Neptune-MD” by some analysts. Its range was also reportedly 1,000 km (it’s possible this is the same missile).

This comes approximately a week after the Neo-Nazi junta revealed the FP-5 “Flamingo”, another land-based cruise missile which is effectively a crossover between the Nazi German V-1 flying bomb (essentially an early cruise missile concept) and the Soviet-era Tu-141/143 turbojet-powered drone. It allegedly has a range of 3,000 km and a massive warhead weighing around 1,150 kg. Albeit a very rudimentary design that could easily be picked up by Russian air defenses, it could give the Kiev regime means of mass terror strikes on Russian cities (after all, this was Nazi Germany’s concept of total war Zelensky is now threatening to unleash). The Russian military already destroyed most of the “Sapsan” program precisely for this reason.

Source Infobrics.org

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Trans shooter Robert Westman, 23, who goes by the name of Robin Westman, murdered two children and injured at least 17 others at a Catholic school in Minneapolis today, the same school he once attended.

The post Another Trans Shooter appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Can Tulsi Defeat The Deep State? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Bill Madden:

This book, is difficult reading but it reinforces the point that the USA has been a plutocracy since the beginning.  Plundering by our wealthiest families is on display during the 1800s with the construction of the railroads.  Huge areas of land on either side of the proposed rights of way were given to the early Robber Barons to use, lease or sell as they wished.  It is almost certain that some of the revenue derived from this excess land found its way back to the politicians and bureaucrats making it all happen.

The Civil War destroyed states rights as the central government became increasingly more powerful in relation to the states which, according to the Constitution, were supposed to retain all power except for the Enumerated Powers granted the federal government by the Constitution.  It has become understood by many that: “States rights died at Appomattox”.

The implementation of the income tax in 1913 gave the central government the financial clout to oppress the people and dispense tax revenue as bribes to control the states.  During that same year, the Federal Reserve was created to loot the masses by charging interest (currently, one trillion dollars a year) on money that the Constitution directs Congress to coin for free.  Tax free foundations were also created to insulate the wealth of the super-rich from the planned ravages of the income tax.

My feeling is that the super-rich have always had the power in our country and that the noose around the necks of the American people has, over the years, only grown tighter.

—

From: Bob Avery

Speak the truth about the military rule of the United States

Speak out about what really happened now

The United States has been under military rule since January 2001. That is when the Bush administration used the military and intelligence to shut down all discussion of the rigged election that brought them to power and they took over the federal government by force.

We have continued to be under military rule under Obama, under Trump, under Biden and now, even more so, under Trump again. He has not aged well and this dictatorship has not aged well either.

We are ruled by a totalitarian military government that is dressed up in democratic clothing.

It is fascism in participatory drag. A brutal and parasitic wolf in empathetic sheep’s clothing.

 

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Ricordo a tutti i lettori che su Amazon potete acquistare il mio nuovo libro, “Il Grande Default”: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0DJK1J4K9 

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

____________________________________________________________________________________

di Guy Milliére

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/tirannia-sotto-mentite-spoglie-la)

14 febbraio 2025. Il vicepresidente degli Stati Uniti, J. D. Vance, tiene un discorso in Germania alla Conferenza sulla sicurezza di Monaco.

Il pubblico si aspetta che parli di politica estera, geopolitica e minacce che gravano sul mondo.

Afferma invece che la minaccia più preoccupante oggi è “la minaccia interna, il ritiro dell'Europa da alcuni dei suoi valori più fondamentali”.

Aggiunge che i Paesi e le istituzioni europee stanno minando la democrazia e la libertà di parola, e ne fornisce degli esempi.

“Un ex-commissario europeo”, afferma Vance, “è apparso di recente in televisione e si è detto entusiasta del fatto che il governo rumeno avesse appena annullato un'intera elezione”.

Infatti Thierry Breton, ex-commissario europeo per il mercato interno, ha ammesso in un'intervista per un'emittente televisiva francese che la Corte costituzionale rumena si è piegata alle pressioni dell'UE e ha annullato le elezioni presidenziali del Paese perché il candidato di destra, Călin Georgescu, aveva buone probabilità di vincere. “Lo abbiamo fatto in Romania”, ha detto Breton, “e ovviamente dovremo farlo, se necessario, anche in Germania”.

Il 26 febbraio, quando Georgescu si è presentato per registrarsi come candidato per la ripetizione delle elezioni presidenziali, organizzata pochi mesi dopo le elezioni annullate, è stato arrestato dalla polizia e accusato di “tentativo di sovvertire l'ordine costituzionale”. Ad oggi le autorità rumene non hanno fornito  alcuna prova a sostegno di tale accusa.

“La stessa cosa potrebbe accadere anche in Germania”, ha affermato Vance nel suo discorso di Monaco.

Il partito di destra Alternativa per la Germania (AfD), che ha partecipato alle elezioni parlamentari tedesche del 23 febbraio, è arrivato secondo con il 20,8% dei voti. L'Unione Cristiano-Democratica (CDU), di centro-destra, che ha ottenuto la maggioranza dei voti (28,5%), ha invece scelto di boicottare AfD e di formare un governo con il Partito Socialdemocratico (SPD), di centro-sinistra, che aveva formato il precedente governo e che i tedeschi avevano appena respinto, ottenendo solo il 16,4% dei voti.

Il nuovo cancelliere tedesco, il leader della CDU Friedrich Merz, aveva dichiarato durante la campagna elettorale: “Non collaboreremo con il partito che si definisce Alternativa per la Germania, né prima [delle elezioni], né dopo, mai”.

Merz ha mantenuto la parola data. Subito dopo le elezioni l'intelligence interna tedesca ha definito AfD “organizzazione estremista” e “minaccia per la democrazia”. La motivazione addotta è stata che AfD è “anti-immigrazione e anti-musulmana”. Potrebbe addirittura essere messa al bando dal governo.

Vance ha continuato:

Guardo a Bruxelles, dove i commissari dell'UE avvertono i cittadini che intendono chiudere i social media in periodi di disordini civili, nel momento in cui individuano ciò che ritengono essere un “contenuto d'odio”.

Infatti, nel 2022, l'Unione Europea ha adottato il Digital Services Act (DSA) che dovrebbe “proteggere i diritti degli utenti dei social media” e “fornire un ambiente online più sicuro” “limitando la diffusione di  contenuti illegali e dannosi”. Non è stato definito cosa costituisca “contenuto illegale e dannoso” e potrebbe essere qualsiasi cosa la Commissione Europea definisca come tale, insieme al diritto di imporre multe e chiudere i siti web.

Sebbene le affermazioni di Vance fossero inconfutabili, i funzionari presenti hanno immediatamente espresso il loro sgomento.

L'ex-cancelliere tedesco, Olaf Scholz, ha affermato che le osservazioni di Vance “non erano appropriate”,  aggiungendo:

Mai più fascismo, mai più razzismo, mai più guerra d'aggressione [...]. Le democrazie odierne in Germania e in Europa si fondano sulla consapevolezza storica che le democrazie possono essere distrutte da antidemocratici radicali [...] abbiamo creato istituzioni che garantiscono che le nostre democrazie possano difendersi dai loro nemici e regole che non restringono o limitano la nostra libertà, ma la proteggono.

Il Ministro degli esteri francese, Jean-Noël Barrot, ha dichiarato che “la libertà di parola è garantita in Europa”.

Il primo ministro britannico, Keir Starmer, ha osservato:

Nel Regno Unito abbiamo avuto libertà di parola per moltissimo tempo e durerà per moltissimo tempo [...] per quanto riguarda la libertà di parola nel Regno Unito ne sono davvero orgoglioso.

Christoph Heusgen, presidente della Conferenza sulla sicurezza di Monaco, al termine della stessa  ha affermato che le osservazioni di Vance avevano raffigurato l'Europa come “un incubo a occhi aperti [...]. Dobbiamo temere che la nostra base comune di valori non sia più comune”. Poi è scoppiato a piangere.

È possibile che la “base comune di valori” che un tempo legava Europa e Stati Uniti non sia più comune. Se ciò è vero, è per le ragioni elencate da Vance: i leader e i governi europei si sono allontanati da ciò che un tempo legava Europa e Stati Uniti, come la libertà di parola e le elezioni libere ed eque, i cui risultati vengono effettivamente sanciti ad hoc.

L'argomentazione di Scholz sul fascismo, il razzismo e la minaccia alla democrazia è infondata, se non addirittura un'inversione dei fatti. Georgescu non ha rilasciato dichiarazioni fasciste o razziste e non ha mai minacciato la democrazia. Al contrario, ha affermato la sua volontà di difendere la sovranità nazionale e la civiltà occidentale, e si è dichiarato vicino alle posizioni dell'amministrazione Trump che non sono né fasciste né razziste.

Nel 2018 il politico dell'AfD, Alexander Gauland, affermò che “Hitler e i nazisti sono solo un granello di polvere in più di 1.000 anni di storia tedesca”.

Nel 2017 Björn Höcke, leader dell'AfD nel Land tedesco della Turingia, definì il Memoriale dell'Olocausto di Berlino un “memoriale della vergogna”.

Ma le parole di Gauland e Höcke non rappresentano la linea del partito AfD. Gauland chiarì le sue osservazioni solo pochi giorni dopo, affermando:

Molti hanno visto l'espressione come una banalizzazione inappropriata [...] niente potrebbe essere più lontano dalla realtà e mi rammarico si sia creata una simile impressione [...]. Mi rammarico dell'impressione che ne è derivata. Non è mai stata mia intenzione banalizzare o deridere le vittime di quel sistema criminale.

La motivazione fornita dall'intelligence interna tedesca per definire l'AfD come “organizzazione estremista” non è né fascismo né razzismo. Infatti nessun leader dell'AfD sostiene posizioni fasciste o razziste e, ciò che in realtà potrebbe risultare discutibile per molti europei, è che l'AfD è “il partito più filo-israeliano e filo-semita” in Germania.

“Questa non è democrazia”, ha affermato il Segretario di Stato Marco Rubio a proposito della decisione dell'agenzia di intelligence interna tedesca, “è tirannia mascherata”.

Ironia della sorte negli Stati Uniti il Comitato Nazionale Democratico (DNC) ha annullato l'elezione di David Hogg e Malcolm Kenyatta come vicepresidenti del DNC, apparentemente per “motivi procedurali”. Dopo la sua elezione Hogg ha dichiarato di voler raccogliere fondi per sostenere gli sfidanti alle primarie dei democratici in carica. A giugno il DNC prenderà  in considerazione una ripetizione delle elezioni, presumibilmente nella speranza di ottenere un risultato predeterminato. Nel frattempo molti democratici criticano senza sosta il Partito Repubblicano per “aver distrutto la democrazia”.

Contrariamente a quanto affermato dal ministro degli Esteri francese, la libertà di parola è in declino in Europa, in particolare in Francia. L'ex-giornalista e candidato alla presidenza, Éric Zemmour, è stato  condannato innumerevoli volte e multato pesantemente per aver criticato l'Islam e l'immigrazione musulmana. La sua condanna più recente è stata emessa il 26 marzo 2025. Dopo l'omicidio di un giovane francese da parte di una banda di musulmani, Zemmour ha parlato della presenza in Francia di criminali che sono “feccia arabo-musulmana”. È stato riconosciuto colpevole di aver pronunciato un “insulto razzista”.

Nel 2014 lo scrittore Renaud Camus è stato condannato per incitamento all'odio per aver affermato che la Francia era stata “invasa” da immigrati musulmani.

Il canale televisivo francese C8 è stato chiuso dall'Autorità di regolamentazione dell'audiovisivo e della comunicazione digitale (Arcom) per “mancanza di diversità e pluralismo”. CNews, un altro canale televisivo francese, è stato multato pesantemente dall'Arcom per lo stesso “reato” e continua a rischiare la chiusura. Qualsiasi canale televisivo simile all'americana Fox News non sarebbe autorizzato a esistere in Francia.

La libertà di parola nel Regno Unito, contrariamente a quanto affermato da Starmer, è seriamente in pericolo. Negli ultimi mesi cittadini britannici sono stati condannati al carcere per aver pubblicato  messaggi critici nei confronti dell'Islam sui social media e persino per aver pregato vicino a una clinica per l'aborto.

Questa deriva antidemocratica ha preso piede in diversi Paesi europei. Politici e partiti che non condividono la visione del mondo dei funzionari al potere vengono sempre più esclusi da ogni possibilità di candidarsi a una carica ufficiale.

In Germania, come detto, Merz ha scelto di escludere l'AfD.

In Francia Marine Le Pen, che secondo i sondaggi è in testa alle elezioni presidenziali del 2027, è stata  condannata a cinque anni di ineleggibilità e quattro anni di carcere per presunta appropriazione indebita di fondi pubblici. La sentenza avrebbe dovuto entrare in vigore immediatamente, senza una sospensione temporanea della condanna in attesa dell'appello. Dopo che la decisione ha suscitato scandalo, la Corte d'Appello di Parigi ha dichiarato che avrebbe esaminato il caso e avrebbe emesso una sentenza definitiva nell'estate del 2026.

La Le Pen non si è appropriata indebitamente di fondi pubblici. Il giudice ha definito reato il fatto che gli assistenti dei deputati europei di Rassemblement National che lavoravano a Strasburgo lavorassero anche a Parigi per il partito. Il Movimento Democratico, un partito centrista guidato dal Primo Ministro francese François Bayrou, ha fatto esattamente la stessa cosa con gli assistenti dei suoi deputati europei, ma Bayrou è stato assolto.

Nei Paesi Bassi, quando il Partito per la Libertà (PVV) ha vinto con la maggioranza dei voti alle elezioni parlamentari del novembre 2023 e il suo leader, Geert Wilders, ha tentato di formare un governo, tutti gli altri partiti politici hanno unito le forze per impedirglielo, finché non è stato costretto a ritirarsi.

In Austria, nel settembre 2024, il Partito della Libertà d'Austria (FPÖ) ha vinto con la maggioranza dei voti alle elezioni parlamentari e al suo leader, Herbert Kickl, è stato impedito di formare un governo.

In Italia, invece, quando Fratelli d'Italia (FdI) – un partito con politiche simili a quelle di Rassemblement National, del PVV olandese e dell'FPÖ austriaco – ha vinto alle elezioni parlamentari italiane del 2022, la sua leader, Giorgia Meloni, è riuscita a formare un governo ed è ora Primo ministro. Il motivo? FdI faceva parte di un'alleanza con altri partiti di centro-destra. Ora la Meloni è l'unico politico etichettato in modo sprezzante dai media generalisti europei come “estrema destra” e in grado di godere del risultato della sua elezione.

La maggior parte dei leader europei oggi si riferisce ai partiti e ai politici che desidera escludere come “estrema destra”. Il termine è usato per riferirsi a partiti razzisti, xenofobi e autoritari. Nessuno di quelli sopra menzionati mostra la minima tendenza al razzismo, alla xenofobia e all'autoritarismo, nemmeno la metà di quanto facciano i loro avversari. I partiti estromessi, secondo lo storico e scrittore Daniel Pipes, non sono “nazionalisti”, ma patriottici, “difensivi, non aggressivi”. Pipes li descrive come “civilizzazionisti”:

Hanno a cuore la cultura tradizionale dell'Europa e dell'Occidente, e vogliono difenderla dagli attacchi degli immigrati aiutati dalla sinistra [...]. I partiti civilizzatori sono populisti, anti-immigrazione e anti-islamizzazione. Populista significa nutrire rancori contro il sistema e nutrire sospetti nei confronti di un'élite che ignora o denigra tali preoccupazioni.

Gli attacchi alla libertà di parola prendono di mira dichiarazioni che avvertono che un'immigrazione di massa e non controllata potrebbe portare a una “grande sostituzione” demografica degli europei nativi, i cui valori sono giudaico-cristiani, con migranti provenienti dal Medio Oriente, i cui valori sono fondamentalmente islamici. La generale apprensione circa la possibilità che i valori islamici finiscano per sopraffare quelli europei è un'opinione condannata dalla maggior parte dei politici, dei media e della magistratura in Europa, nonostante il tasso di natalità musulmano sia di gran lunga superiore a quello europeo. Questa apprensione deriva anche dal fatto che la maggior parte dei musulmani che vive in Europa non si integra né sembra desiderarlo, e che la percentuale di musulmani tra i criminali in Europa oggi è di gran lunga superiore alla loro quota nella popolazione generale.

Molti leader europei oggi sembrano ciechi di fronte alle conseguenze dell'immigrazione in continua crescita e della crescente presenza musulmana in Europa. Minimizzano la continua migrazione di massa dei musulmani, l'entusiastico tasso di natalità e rimangono ostinatamente sordi di fronte alle preoccupazioni espresse a gran voce dai loro cittadini non musulmani.

Questi leader sembrano rifiutarsi di vedere che è in atto un profondo cambiamento demografico, sebbene sia ampiamente visibile. Sembrano anche rifiutarsi di vedere che questo cambiamento demografico sta rapidamente erodendo le culture tradizionali europee.

L'immigrazione incontrollata dal mondo musulmano continua anno dopo anno in tutta l'Europa occidentale, mentre il tasso di natalità in Germania è di 1,35 per donna. Il dato per l'Austria è di 1,58; per  l'Italia è di 1,31; per la Spagna è di 1,41. Il dato per la Francia è di 1,85. Tutti questi valori sono significativamente lontani dal livello di sostituzione, che è di 2,1 per donna.

In tutti i Paesi dell'Europa occidentale il tasso di natalità dei musulmani è significativamente più alto rispetto a quello della popolazione generale.

Anche se molti europei non sono a conoscenza dei dati statistici, possono vedere con i loro occhi che è in atto un cambiamento demografico, insieme alla distruzione dei loro valori e delle loro tradizioni. Votare per i partiti “civilizzazionisti”, ha detto Zemmour, è la “reazione di persone che non vogliono morire”.

La domanda chiave per il futuro dell'Europa è: i partiti “civilizzazionisti” rimarranno esclusi da qualsiasi accesso al potere, o riusciranno a superare gli ostacoli che si frappongono sul loro cammino?

In Romania George Simion, candidato alla presidenza le cui idee sono vicine a quelle di Georgescu, ha ottenuto oltre il 40% dei voti al primo turno delle elezioni presidenziali e aveva ottime possibilità di essere eletto il 18 maggio. Inaspettatamente ha perso. Il vincitore, che godeva del pieno sostegno dell'Unione Europea, è passato dal 21% al primo turno al 53,6% al secondo turno, una performance straordinaria che probabilmente merita di essere analizzata.

In Germania AfD è ormai diventato il partito più popolare del Paese. L'agenzia di intelligence tedesca ha misteriosamente deciso di ritirare l'etichetta di estremista attribuita ad AfD. In Francia i sondaggi mostrano che se Marine Le Pen non potrà candidarsi, Jordan Bardella, il presidente di Rassemblement National, ha buone probabilità di essere eletto nel 2027 nonostante abbia solo 29 anni. Nel Regno Unito il partito Reform UK di Nigel Farage ha di recente ottenuto ampi consensi alle elezioni locali inglesi. Se le elezioni generali britanniche si tenessero presto, probabilmente vincerebbe.

La domanda al centro di queste questioni è: è possibile fermare la deriva antidemocratica che ha attanagliato diversi grandi Paesi europei?

“Le élite europee”, ha scritto il giornalista americano Michael Barone, “sembrano essersi convinte di dover distruggere la democrazia per salvarla”.

Sarà possibile salvare la democrazia in Europa?

In un recente articolo Heather Mac Donald, membro del Manhattan Institute, ha scritto:

In tutto l'Occidente i cittadini si stanno ribellando al ricambio demografico. È in corso una battaglia tra la loro volontà e quella delle élite. Se i leader tedeschi continuano a dire a un quarto della popolazione tedesca – individui perbene e rispettosi della legge – che sono, nella migliore delle ipotesi, sostenitori di Hitler e, nella peggiore, adoratori di Hitler, perché vogliono preservare l'identità culturale tedesca, se questi leader continuano a reprimere voci e voti, o ci sarà un enorme sconvolgimento nei palazzi del potere e il popolo verrà liberato, oppure i meccanismi di repressione diventeranno più radicali.

Gli americani dovrebbero sperare nella prima soluzione.

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

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

 Murray Sabrin writes:

Lew:

Trump should change his name to Fidel Trump.  He is making FDR look like a free market conservative.

CNBC News

 

The post Trump’s socialist agenda appeared first on LewRockwell.

The bold new Cracker Barrel logo is everything modern branding should be: ditch the past, erase tradition, and marginalise farmers. After all, every time that’s been tried around the world, it’s been a roaring success, right?

So hop aboard this AI Parody celebration of yet another rebrand that proudly tosses heritage straight into the trash. Kill the past, if you have to.

The post The New Cracker Barrel Logo is Great! – AI Parody appeared first on LewRockwell.

It seems that Putin has indeed succeeded in finding an exit out from the imposed western cordon sanitaire.

Trump’s ascent to a portion of the ‘Mythic’ has become only too evident. As John Greer has observed:

“It’s becoming difficult even for the most dyed-in-the-wool rationalist to go on believing that Trump’s political career can be understood in the prosaic terms of ‘politics as usual’”.

Trump the man, of course, is in no way mythic. He’s an elderly, slightly infirm, American real estate oligarch, with lowbrow tastes and an unusually robust ego.

“The ancient Greek word muthos originally meant ‘story’. As the philosopher Sallust wrote, myths are things that never happen but always are”.

Later, myth came to mean stories hinting at a kernel of inner meaning. This doesn’t imply a requirement to be factual; yet it is this latter dimension that gives Trump “his extraordinary grip on the collective imagination of our time”, Greer suggests. He comes back literally from everything thrown to destroy him.

He becomes what Carl Jung called ‘the Shadow’. As Greer writes:

“Rationalists in Hitler’s day were consistently confounded by the way the latter brushed aside obstacles and followed his trajectory to the bitter end. Jung pointed out in his prescient 1936 essay Wotan, that much of Hitler’s power over the collective mind of Europe came boiling up out of the realms of myth and archetype”

Wotan in myth is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife – now here, now there – and works magic. Jung thought it piquant to a degree that an ancient God of storm and frenzy – the long quiescent Wotan – should come to life in the German Youth Movement.

What has this to do with the Alaska summit with President Putin?

Well, Putin seemingly paid due attention to the psychology underlying Trump’s sudden request to meet. The Russians treated Trump in a very respectful, courteous and friendly fashion. They implicitly acknowledged Trump’s sense of an inner mythic quality – which Steve Witkoff, his longstanding friend, has described as Trump’s deep conviction that his ‘commanding presence’ alone can bend people to his will (and to America’s interests). Witkoff added that he agreed with this assessment.

As just one example, the White House meeting with Zelensky and his European fans produced some of the most remarkable political optics perhaps in history. As Simplicius notes,

“Has there ever been anything like this? The entire pantheon of the European ruling class reduced to snivelling children in their school principal’s office. No one can deny that Trump has succeeded in veritably ‘breaking Europe over his knee’. There is no coming back from this turning point moment, the optics simply cannot be redeemed. The EU’s claim to being a geopolitical power is exposed as sham”.

Less noticed perhaps – but psychologically crucial – is that Trump seems to recognise in Putin a ‘mythic peer’. Despite the two being poles apart in character, nonetheless, Trump seemed to recognise a fellow from the pantheon of putative ‘mythic beings’. Watch again the scenes from Anchorage: Trump treats Putin with huge deference and respect. How unlike Trump’s disdainful treatment of the Euros.

In Anchorage however, it was Putin who displayed the calm, composed, dominating presence.

Yet what is plain is that Trump’s respectful conduct towards Putin has exploded the West’s radical demonisation of Russia and the cordon sanitaire erected versus all things Russian. There is no coming back from this other turning point moment – “the optics simply cannot be redeemed”. Russia was treated as a peer global power.

What was it all about? A pivot: Kellogg’s frozen conflict paradigm is out; the Putin long-term peace plan is in; and tariffs are nowhere mentioned.

What is clear is that Trump has decided – after some reluctance – that he has to do “do Ukraine”.

The cold reality is that Trump faces huge pressures: The Epstein Affair stubbornly refuses to fade away. It is set to rear up again after Labor Day in the U.S.

The western Security State narrative of “we are winning”, or at least, “they are losing”, has been so powerful – and so universally accepted for so long – that it, of itself, creates a huge dynamic, pressing for Trump to persist with the Ukraine war. Facts regularly are twisted to fit this narrative. This dynamic has not yet been broken.

And Trump is trapped too, into supporting the Israeli slaughter – with the images of massacred and starved women and children turning the stomach of the younger, under 35, electoral demographic in the U.S.

These dynamics – and the economic blowback from the ‘Shock and Awe’ tariff attack to fracture BRICS – together threaten Trump’s MAGA base more directly. It is becoming existential. Epstein; the Gaza massacre; the threat of ‘more war’, and job worries is roiling not just the MAGA faction, but American young voters more generally. They ask, is Trump still one of ‘us’, or was he always with ‘them’.

Without the base behind him, Trump likely will lose the Midterm Congressional elections. Ultra rich donors pay, but cannot substitute.

What emerged from Anchorage therefore is a meagre intellectual framework. Trump minimally decided to no longer stand in the way of a Russian-imposed solution for Ukraine, which is, in any case, really the only solution there can be.

This framework is not a road map to any ultimate solution. It is delusional therefore, as Aurelien outlines, to expect that Trump and Putin were going to ‘negotiate’ an end to the war in Ukraine, “as though Mr Putin were to pull out a text from his pocket and the two of the them were then to work through it”. Trump anyway is not strong on details, and is wont to meander discursively and inconclusively.

“As we get closer to the endgame, the important action is elsewhere, and much of it will be hidden from public view. The broad outlines of the end of the military part of the Ukraine crisis have been visible for a while, even if the details could still change. By contrast, the extremely complex political endgame has only just started, the players are not really sure of the rules, nobody is really sure how many players there are anyway, and the outcome is at the moment as clear as mud”, Aurelien opines.

Then why did Trump suddenly ‘pivot’? Well it was not because he has had some ‘Damascene conversion’. Trump remains a committed Israeli Firster; and secondly, he can’t resile from his pursuit of dollar hegemony because that aim, too, is becoming problematic – as the American ‘bubble economy’ begins to unravel, and the under-30s fidget, living in their parents’ basement.

It is to Trump’s advantage (for now) to let Russia to ‘bring’ the EU and Zelensky to some negotiated ‘peace’ – through force. The U.S. ‘China hawks’ are increasingly agitating that China is close to an exponential lift-off – both economically and in tech – after which, the U.S. will lose its ability to contain China from global pre-eminence. (It is however probably already too late to stop this).

Putin too, is taking a big risk in offering Trump an off-ramp, through accepting to work towards a stable long-term relationship with the U.S. It is not Finland of 1944, where the Soviet army did force an Armistice.

In Europe, the élite believe that Trump’s peace outreach to Putin will fail. Their plan is to ensure it fails by playing along, whilst ensuring through their conditionalities, that no such agreement materialises. Thus proving to Trump that ‘Putin is not serious about ending the war’. Thus impelling American escalation.

Trump’s part of the bargain with Putin clearly is that he will shoulder managing the European ruling strata (mainly by flooding the info-sphere with contradictory noise), and through containing the American hawks (by pretending he is wooing Russia away from China). Really? Yes, really.

Putin too, faces internal pressures: From Russians convinced that ultimately he will be forced to enter into some form of interim Minsk 3-type outcome (a series of limited ceasefires that would only exacerbate the conflict) rather than achieve ‘victory’. Some Russians fear that the blood that has been spent so far may prove to be but a down-payment on more blood to be expended in a few years ahead, as the West rearms Ukraine.

And Putin faces too, the hurdle of Trump viewing his relationship with him through narrow New York real estate ‘lense’. He still does not seem to understand that the key question is not so much Ukrainian territories as it is about geo-strategic security. His enthusiasm for a trilateral summit seems to rest on the image of two real estate tycoons playing the board at Monopoly and swapping properties. But it is not like that.

It seems however, that Putin has indeed succeeded in finding an exit out from the imposed western cordon sanitaire. Russia is acknowledged as a great power again, and Ukraine will be settled on the battlefield. The two great nuclear weapons powers are talking to each other. That is important, in itself. Will Trump be able to secure his base? Will ‘game over’ in Ukraine (if it happens) be enough for MAGA? Will Netanyahu’s next genocidal rampage in Gaza explode the Trump ‘cope’ vis-à-vis MAGA? Very possibly, yes.

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

The post Trump as ‘Myth’ Is Understood in Moscow. They Reciprocate appeared first on LewRockwell.

History does not always conform to what the dominant scholarly theories of court historians may lead us to expect. In his essay “The Task of the Modern Historian,” Thomas Babington Macaulay observes that historians may formulate valid theories of what they would logically expect to have happened in a particular era, but unfortunately their theories soon displace any interest in the truth about what did in fact happen. They have been “seduced from truth, not by their imagination, but by their reason.”

In today’s context, the dominant narratives explain history by reference to theories of race relations. Historical explanations which do not fit comfortably within these theories are treated with skepticism or dismissed as false. For example, in light of the moral consensus that slavery is wrong, we would not logically expect black men to stand with slaveowners, and so we presume that no black men in fact did so. Any reports of black men having done precisely that must then surely be fanciful, commonly dismissed as part of a “lost cause myth” that romanticizes the Old South. By reasoning that the facts should conform to what we would logically expect to have occurred, we are “distorting narrative into a conformity with theory.” The theory matters most, and that in turn dictates the narrative arc into which we insert those facts that we deem to be relevant. The reasoning is circular. We regard as “fact” only that which fits the narrative and adjudge that fact to be “true” because it fits the narrative. Macaulay observes:

…unhappily, [historians] have fallen into the error of distorting facts to suit general principles. They arrive at the theory from looking at some of the phenomena, and the remaining phenomena they strain or curtail to suit the theory.

One indicator of historians being less interested in truth than in their pet theories is their dismissal of any author who is not a “historian.” Whether the author’s claims are true or not is almost irrelevant—what matters most is whether his credentials qualify him to write about history. Commenting on The Tragic Era, a book by Claude G. Bowers on the Reconstruction Era, one reviewer wrote: “The book is written by an historically untrained politician with a cause to advance or an ax to grind.” He dismissed the book as “downright propaganda.” Bowers had set out to cover an aspect of history that had been overlooked, namely, the views of “the able leaders of the minority in Congress” and the “brilliant and colourful leaders and spokesmen of the South.” For following a path that departed from the established history profession who were almost united in praising the winners of the war, his book was deemed to be unprofessional. The reviewer added that,

From the point of view of the historian the book is without any particular value…the book contains no facts which have local or national significance; and most of the facts presented are intentionally distorted… Internationally this work can serve only to discredit the nation.

Are historians not interested in learning what the minority in Congress thought of the events in question? The reviewer who derides Bowers for being partisan argues that Bowers was supporting the wrong side because “in 1866 the Negroes were reduced to a state as deplorable as slavery itself,” and therefore needed “the protection of the ballot by which their re-enslavement was prevented.” Given that free black people could not vote in the North in 1866, and neither could women, it could be said that this reviewer, too, is promoting “downright propaganda” by supporting the Radical Republican claim that lack of voting rights was just as deplorable as the slavery which had just been abolished. The reviewer’s comment that Bowers’s book might “discredit the nation” could equally well be treated, using his own approach, as evidence that his concern was more with Bowers discrediting the “righteous cause myth” of the war than with the historical veracity of Bowers’s arguments. In other words, the reviewer himself could be accused of that which he accuses Bowers. The reviewer adds:

While Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens made mistakes which require exposure they should at the same time be lauded for assisting in the preservation of the Union, for the defense of that flag at which most of the author’s ideal Americans shot at for four years.

Are we to assume that Bowers’s partisan defense of the South is “downright propaganda” while the reviewer’s partisan defense of the Union is not propaganda? Another review, titled “history as present politics” argues that The Tragic Era was “perhaps the single most widely read history of Reconstruction and therefore a work of considerable influence,” which he sees as very unfortunate because he views Claude Bowers as motivated by politics. Bowers wrote, “The Constitution was treated as a doormat on which politicians and army officers wiped their feet after wading in the muck.” While that is indeed an overtly political comment, one would hope a historian would at least be interested to ascertain whether it was true. Is it true that the Radical Republicans treated the Constitution with contempt? What does “truth” mean in the context of politically-contested history?

It is important to note that in these debates, it is not the facts themselves that are disputed, but the interpretation of those facts. As Macauly notes, the debates concern questions of “comparison and degree,” with disputes over the emphasis that ought to be accorded to various facts:

For this purpose it is not necessary that [historians] should assert what is absolutely false, for all questions in morals and politics are questions of comparison and degree. Any proposition which does not involve a contradiction in terms may, by possibility, be true; and if all the circumstances which raise a probability in its favor be stated and enforced, and those which lead to an opposite conclusion be omitted or lightly passed over, it may appear to be demonstrated. In every human character and transaction there is a mixture of good and evil; — a little exaggeration, a little suppression, a judicious use of epithets, a watchful and searching skepticism with respect to the evidence on one side, a convenient credulity with respect to every report or tradition on the other, may easily make a saint of Laud, or a tyrant of Henry the Fourth. (emphasis added)

In the example of the “myth of black Confederates,” the establishment view is that black Confederates are mythical because, while they did exist, they were so few that any reference to their existence should be dismissed as an attempt to minimize the moral repugnance of slavery. Similarly, the establishment view is that while the South indeed had grievances about states’ rights, the Constitution, or unjust tariffs that punished the South while favoring the North, these grievances pale into such insignificance when compared to the institution of slavery that they should be dismissed as an attempt to “whitewash slavery.”

As Macaulay says, when disputes concern questions of comparison and degree, or when the only subject of debate concerns the motives of the historian or value judgments about his ideological beliefs, readers may acquire a false view of history even though neither side has technically asserted any false facts. Without “lying” about the facts, the conclusions they draw may nevertheless be false: “A history in which every particular incident may be true, may on the whole be false.” False conclusions are easily derived when historians fall into the error pointed out by Macaulay, namely, “distorting facts to suit general principles.”

Without positively asserting much more than he can prove, he gives prominence to all the circumstances which support his case; he glides lightly over those which are unfavorable to it; his own witnesses are applauded and encouraged; the statements which seem to throw discredit on them are controverted; the contradictions into which they fall are explained away; a clear and connected abstract of their evidence is given. Every thing that is offered on the other side is scrutinized with the utmost severity; every suspicious circumstance is a ground for comment and invective; what cannot be denied is extenuated, or passed by without notice; concessions even are sometimes made; but this insidious candor only increases the effect of the vast mass of sophistry.

The historians of slavery are now caught in a hopeless debate over whether it was brutal or benign, as each side “gives prominence” to favorable examples and asserts them with “unhesitating confidence.” They cannot accept that the actual facts may support one or the other side in specific cases, because the debate is not about the facts but about whose narrative should be dominant. The establishment historians get to dismiss any opposing narrative as a “myth.” Cancel culture steps in, and the search for truth is forgotten. Facts that undermine the dominant narrative are then easily “glided lightly” over, “sifted with the utmost care” and treated “with the utmost bitterness of language.” Hypocrisies and double standards are explained away as merely incidental to the overarching narrative.

If it cannot be denied, some palliating supposition is suggested, or we are at least reminded that some circumstance now unknown may have justified what at present appears unjustifiable. Two events are reported by the same author in the same sentence; their truth rests on the same testimony; but the one supports the darling hypothesis, and the other seems inconsistent with it. The one is taken and the other is left.

Macaulay is right to observe that when both sides of a debate are prone to such distortion, the impartial observer or the reader who consults opposing interpretations is likely to gain some insight into the truth. This is why cancel culture is such a destructive trend. Those who cancel their scholarly opponents for supporting the “wrong” ideology are themselves guilty of supporting ideologies that their opponents would regard as “wrong.” The difference is that when those who happen to control the reins of power shut down all opposing views, impartial observers are less likely to have the opportunity to ascertain the truth about history.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post How Scholarly Theories Impede the Search for Historical Truth appeared first on LewRockwell.

With speculation mounting that Trump could pardon her, MintPress profiles the family of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. From her media baron father, who acted as a high-level spy for Israel, her sister, working to push Tel Aviv’s interests in Silicon Valley, her brothers, who founded a dubious but highly influential anti-Islamic extremism think tank, and nephews in influential roles at the State Department and White House, the Maxwell clan have wide-ranging ties to U.S. and Israeli state power. This is their story.

Releasing Ghislaine, Burying the Epstein Files

Speculation is growing that Ghislaine Maxwell could soon be freed. Despite campaigning on the promise to release the Epstein Files, there are increasing signs that the Trump administration is considering pardoning the world’s most notorious convicted sex trafficker.

Last month, Trump (who contemplated the idea in his first term in office) repeatedly refused to rule out a pardon, stating to journalists that “I’m allowed to do it.” Just days later, Maxwell was transferred across states to a minimum-security facility in Bryan, Texas—a highly unusual practice. Neither women convicted of sex crimes nor those with more than 10 years remaining on their sentences are generally permitted to be transferred to such facilities. The move sparked equal measures of speculation and outrage.

The decision to relocate Maxwell came after somebody—potentially a source within her team itself—began leaking incriminating and embarrassing evidence linking Trump to Epstein. This included a birthday card Trump sent Epstein, featuring a hand-drawn nude woman, accompanied by the text: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

For years, Maxwell aided her partner Jeffrey Epstein in trafficking and raping girls and young women, creating a giant sex crime ring in the process. Epstein’s associates included billionaires, scientists, celebrities, and politicians, including President Trump, whom he considered his “closest friend.”

In 2021, two years after Epstein’s mysterious death in a Manhattan prison, Maxwell was found guilty of child sex trafficking offenses and was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The news that Trump may soon free such an infamous criminal sent shockwaves through his base and drew charges of blatant corruption from the media. “Is there any reason to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell except to buy her silence?” ran the headline of one article in The Hill. Meanwhile, Tim Hogan, senior Democratic National Committee adviser, denounced what he claimed was a “government cover-up in real time.” “Donald Trump’s FBI, run by loyalist Kash Patel, redacted Trump’s name from the Epstein files—which have still not been released,” he said.

Robert Maxwell: Media Tycoon and Israeli Operative

While many of Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes have come to light, less well-known are her family’s myriad connections to both the U.S. and Israeli national security states. Chief among these are those of her father, disgraced media baron and early tech entrepreneur, Robert Maxwell.

A Jewish refugee fleeing Hitler’s occupation of his native Czechoslovakia, Maxwell fought for Britain against Germany. After World War II, he used his Czech connections to help funnel arms to the nascent State of Israel, weapons that helped them win the 1948 war and carry out the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of nearly 800,000 Palestinians.

Maxwell’s biographers, Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, write that he was first recruited by Israeli intelligence in the 1960s and began buying up Israeli tech corporations. Israel used these companies and their software to carry out spying and other clandestine operations around the globe.

Maxwell amassed a vast business empire of 350 companies, employing 16,000 people. He owned an array of newspapers, including The New York Daily News, Britain’s Daily Mirror, and Maariv of Israel, in addition to some of the world’s most influential book and scientific publishing houses.

With business power came political power. He was elected to the U.K. parliament in 1964 and counted U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev among his closest friends.

He used this influence to advance Israeli interests, selling Israeli intelligence-gathering software to Russia, the U.S., the U.K., and many other countries. This software included a secret Israeli backdoor that allowed the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, to tap into classified information gathered by governments and intelligence agencies around the world.

At the same time, it was expanding its espionage capabilities, Israel was developing a secret nuclear weapons program. This project was exposed by Israeli peace activist Mordechai Vanunu, who, in 1986, leaked evidence to the British press. Maxwell—one of Britain’s most powerful press barons—spied on Vanunu, passing photographs and other information to the Israeli Embassy—intelligence that led to Vanunu’s international abduction by Mossad, and his subsequent imprisonment.

His death was also surrounded by controversy, similar to Epstein’s. In 1991, his lifeless body was found in the ocean, in what authorities ruled a bizarre accident whereby the tycoon had fallen from his luxury yacht. To this day, his children are split on whether they think he was murdered.

The rumors that Maxwell had, for decades, been acting as an Israeli “superspy” were all but confirmed by the lavish state funeral he received in Jerusalem. His body was interred at the Mount of Olives, one of the holiest sites in Judaism, the spot from which Jesus is said to have ascended to heaven.

Virtually the entirety of elite Israeli society–both government and opposition–attended the event, including no fewer than six living heads of Israeli intelligence organizations. President Chaim Herzog himself performed the eulogy. Also speaking at the event was Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who stated that “Robert Maxwell has done more for Israel than can today be said.”

In the United Kingdom, however, he is remembered less fondly. A man with a fearsome reputation, Maxwell ruled his media business with an iron fist, in a similar vein to Rupert Murdoch (another individual with extremely close links to Israel). After his death, it transpired that he had stolen more than $500 million from his employees’ pension fund to bail out other failing companies in his empire, leaving many of his workforce’s retirement plans in tatters. As the newspaper, The Scotsman, remarked ten years later in 2001:

If [Maxwell] was despised in life, he was hated in death when it emerged he had stolen 440 million [pounds] from the pension fund of Mirror Group Newspapers. He was, officially, the biggest thief in British criminal history.”

Isabel Maxwell: Israel’s Woman in Silicon Valley

Even before it had been published, Isabel Maxwell– Robert’s daughter and Ghislaine’s older sister– managed to obtain a copy of Thomas and Dillon’s biography. She immediately flew to Israel, The Times of London reported, where she showed it to a “family friend” and deputy director of Mossad, David Kimche. These actions did little to beat the book’s central allegation that her father was indeed a high-level Israeli “superspy.”

Isabel has enjoyed a long and successful career in the tech industry. In 1992, along with her twin sister, Christine, she founded a company that developed one of the internet’s first search engines.

After the pension scandal, however, she and her siblings shifted their focus to rebuilding every facet of their father’s collapsed business empire. The sisters sold the search engine, netting enormous profits.

As Israeli outlet Haaretz noted, in 2001, Isabel decided to dedicate her life to advancing the Jewish State’s interests, vowing to “work only on things involving Israel” as she “believes in Israel.” Described by former MintPress journalist and investigative reporter Whitney Webb as “Israel’s back door into Silicon Valley,” she has transformed herself into a key ambassador for the country in the tech world.

“Maxwell created a unique niche for herself in [tech] as a liaison between Israeli companies in the initial development stages and private angel investors in the U.S. At the same time, she helps U.S. companies interested in opening development centers in Israel,” wrote local business newspaper, Globes. “She lives intensively, including innumerable flights back and forth between Tel Aviv and San Francisco,” it added.

Israel is known to be the source of much of the world’s most controversial spyware and hacking tools, used by repressive governments the world over to surveil, harass, and even kill political opponents. This includes the notorious Pegasus software, used by the government of Saudi Arabia to track Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, before assassinating him in Türkiye.

Isabel built on her father’s political connections. “My father was most influential in my life. He was a very accomplished man and achieved many of his goals during his life. I learned very much from him and have made many of his ways my own,” she said. This included developing intimate ties to a myriad of Israeli leaders, including Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest associates.

During the 2000s, she was a regular participant at the Herzliya Conference, an annual, closed-door gathering of the West’s most senior political, security and intelligence officials, in addition to being a “technology pioneer” at the World Economic Forum.

She was also placed on the board of the Israeli government-funded Shimon Peres Center for Peace and Innovation and the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies, two organizations closely associated with those former Israeli prime ministers.

In 2001, she became the CEO of iCognito, taking the job, in her words, “because it [the company] is in Israel, and because of its technology.” The technology in question was aimed at keeping children safe online—highly ironic, given that her sister was actively trafficking and abusing minors throughout that period.

Isabel was a much more serious and accomplished individual than Ghislaine. As Haaretz noted:

While her younger sister, Ghislaine, makes the gossip columns after breakfasting with Bill Clinton or because of her ties with another close friend, Britain’s Prince Andrew, Isabel wants to show photos taken of herself with the grand mufti of Egypt, or with Bedouin in a tent, or of visits to a Gaza refugee camp.”

In 1997, Isabel was appointed president of the Israeli tech security firm, Commtouch. Thanks to her connections, Commtouch was able to secure investment from many of the most prominent players in Silicon Valley, including Bill Gates, a close associate of both the Maxwell family and Jeffrey Epstein himself.

Christine Maxwell: Funded by Israel?

Isabel’s twin sister, Christine, is no less accomplished. A veteran of the publishing and tech industries, she co-founded data analytics firm Chiliad. As CEO, she helped oversee the production of a massive “counterterrorism” database that the company sold to the FBI during the height of the War on Terror. The software helped the Bush administration crack down on Muslim Americans and tear down domestic civil liberties in the wake of 9/11 and the PATRIOT Act. Today, she is the leader and co-founder of another big data corporation, Techtonic Insight.

Like her sister and father, Christine has a close relationship with the State of Israel. She is currently a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), where, her biography states,

She works to promote innovative academic research that leverages enabling technologies to empower proactive understanding and combatting the great dangers of contemporary antisemitism, and enhancing the ongoing relevance of the Holocaust for the 21st century and beyond.”

ISGAP’s board is a who’s who of Israeli national security state officials. This includes Natan Sharansky, former Minister of Internal Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, and Brigadier General Sima Vaknin-Gil, the former Chief Censor for the IDF and Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Diplomacy. Also on the board is Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.

The think tank was a key player in the U.S. government’s decision to repress the 2024 Gaza protests on university campuses nationwide. The group produced reports linking student leaders with foreign terrorist organizations and promoted dubious claims about a wave of anti-Semitism washing over American colleges. It met frequently with both Democratic and Republican leaders, and urged them to “investigate” (i.e., repress) the leaders of the demonstrations.

ISGAP has continually warned of foreign influence on American campuses, producing reports and holding seminars detailing Qatar’s supposed stranglehold over the U.S. higher education system, and linking that with growing anti-Israel sentiment among America’s youth.

Yet if ISGAP wished to investigate other foreign government influence operations, it would not have to look far, as its own funds overwhelmingly come from a single source: the Israeli state. In 2018, an investigation found that Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs (then headed by Brigadier General Vaknin-Gil herself) channeled $445,000 to ISGAP, a sum representing nearly 80% of its entire revenues for that year. ISGAP failed to disclose that information to either the public or the federal government.

At the height of the concern over foreign interference in American politics, the news barely registered. Since then, the Israeli government has continued to bankroll the group to the tune of millions. In 2019, for example, it approved a grant of over $1.3 million to ISGAP. Thus, in her role as a fellow at the organization, Christine Maxwell is the direct beneficiary of Israeli government cash.

Third Generation Maxwells: Working In the US Government

While Robert Maxwell’s daughters were close to state power, some of the family’s third generation have taken up positions within the U.S. government itself. Shortly after graduating from college, Alex Djerassi (Isabel Maxwell’s only son) was employed by Hillary Clinton on her 2007-2008 presidential campaign. Djerassi drafted memos, briefings, and policy papers for the Clinton team and helped prepare her for more than 20 debates.

The Clinton and Maxwell families are closely intertwined. Ghislaine vacationed with Hillary’s daughter, Chelsea, and appeared prominently at her wedding. Both she and Jeffrey Epstein were invited multiple times to the Clinton White House. Long after Epstein was jailed, President Bill Clinton invited Ghislaine to an intimate dinner with him at an exclusive Los Angeles restaurant.

Although she failed in her bid for the White House, President Obama named Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, and one of her first actions was to appoint Djerassi to her team. He quickly rose in the ranks, becoming Chief of Staff at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. In this role, he specialized in developing the United States’ policy towards Israel and Iran, although he also worked on the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and accompanied Clinton on visits to Israel and the Arab world.

While at the State Department, he served as the U.S. government representative to the Friends of Libya and the Friends of the Syrian People Conferences. These were two organizations of hardline, hawkish groups working towards the overthrow of those two governments, and their replacement with U.S.-friendly regimes. Washington got what it wanted. In 2011, Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi was overthrown, killed and replaced by Islamist warlords. And last December, longtime Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, fled to Russia and was replaced by the founder of al-Qaeda in Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.

Djerassi was later appointed an associate at the U.S.-government-funded think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. While there, he again specialized in Middle East policy, his bio noting that he “worked on matters relating to democratization and civil society in the Arab world, the Arab uprisings, and Israeli-Palestinian peace.” Today, he works in Silicon Valley.

While Djerassi’s fortunes were tied to the Clinton faction of the Democratic Party, his cousin Xavier Malina (Christine Maxwell’s eldest son) backed the right horse, working on the Obama-Biden 2008 presidential run.

He was rewarded for his good work with a position in the White House itself, where he became a Staff Assistant at the Executive Office of the President. Like his cousin, once his time in office was over, Malina also secured a position at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace before pursuing a career in the tech world, working for many years at Google in the Bay Area. He currently works for Disney.

While the actions of parents and grandparents should not determine the careers of later generations, the fact that two individuals who come from a multi-generational family of unrepentant spies and operatives of a foreign power secured positions at the center of the U.S. State is at least worthy of note.

The Maxwell Brothers: From Bankruptcy to Counterterrorism

Much of the Maxwell clan is most influential in American and Israeli politics. However, brothers Ian and Kevin also hold considerable sway over affairs in their native Great Britain. Although being acquitted of charges over widespread allegations that they helped their father, Robert, plunder over $160 million from his employees’ pension fund, the brothers kept a low profile for many years. Kevin, in particular, was known for little more than being Britain’s largest-ever bankrupt, with debts exceeding half a billion dollars.

However, in 2018, they launched Combating Jihadist Terrorism and Extremism (CoJiT), a controversial think tank pushing for a far more invasive and heavy-handed government approach to the question of radical Islam.

In his organization’s book, “Jihadist Terror: New Threats, New Responses,” Ian writes that CoJiT was set up to play a “catalyzing role in the national conversation,” and to answer “difficult questions” arising from the issue. Judging by the content of the rest of the book, this means pushing for even more extensive surveillance of Muslim communities.

Within Britain, CoJiT was a highly influential organization. Its editorial board and contributors are a who’s who of high state officials. Individuals participating in its inaugural conference in London in 2018 included Sara Khan, the government’s Lead Commissioner for Countering Extremism, and Jonathan Evans, the former Director General of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency.

Like so many Maxwell projects, CoJiT appears to have wrapped up its affairs. The organization has not updated its website or posted anything on its social media channels since 2022.

In fairness, in the past few years, the brothers have had other priorities, leading the campaign to free their sister Ghislaine from prison, insisting that she is entirely innocent. In a manner reminiscent of Robert Maxwell, however, it appears that Kevin may have failed to pay the defense team; in 2022, Maxwell’s lawyers sued him, seeking unpaid fees of nearly $900,000.

The Infamous Mr. Epstein

For years, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein ran a sex trafficking ring that exploited hundreds of girls and young women. They were also connected to vast networks of the global elite, including billionaire business owners, royalty, star academics, and foreign leaders, among their closest acquaintances, leading to intense speculation about the extent of their involvement in their many crimes.

It is still unclear when Epstein first met with the Maxwells, with some alleging that he was recruited into Israeli intelligence by Robert Maxwell. Others state the relationship only began after Robert’s death, when he saved the family from penury following its financial problems.

Only one month after his 2019 arrest, Epstein was found dead in his New York City prison cell. His death was officially ruled a suicide, although his family has rejected this interpretation.

Perhaps the two most powerful individuals in Epstein’s circle of confidants were Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Clinton, already infamous for the numerous accusations of sexual misconduct against him, is known to have flown at least 17 times on Epstein’s private jet, nicknamed the “Lolita Express,” and was accused by Epstein victim, Virginia Giuffre, of visiting Little St. James Island, the multimillionaire’s private Caribbean residence, where many of his worst crimes took place.

Trump, arguably, was even closer to the disgraced financier. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” he said in 2002, “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it.” Like Clinton, Trump flew on the Lolita Express. Epstein attended his wedding to Marla Maples in 1993, and claimed to have introduced him to his third wife, Melania.

Unfortunately, while Epstein’s ties incriminate the entire political spectrum, coverage has often been framed as a partisan issue. A MintPress study of over one year of Epstein coverage on MSNBC and Fox News found that each network downplayed his connections to their preferred president, while emphasizing and highlighting the links to the leader of the other major party. As a result, many in the United States see the affair as an indictment of their political rivals, rather than of the political system as a whole.

There also remains the question of Epstein’s links to intelligence, something that has been openly speculated about in the media for decades, even years before any allegations against him were made public. Throughout the 1990s, Epstein’s biographer Julie K. Brown noted, he openly boasted about working for both the CIA and Mossad, although the veracity of his claims remains in doubt. As Britain’s Sunday Times wrote in 2000, “He’s Mr. Enigmatic. Nobody knows whether he’s a concert pianist, property developer, a CIA agent, a math teacher or a member of Mossad.” It is possible that there is at least a grain of truth to all of these identities.

Epstein met with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns three times in 2014. Burns would later be named director of the CIA. Burns’ proximity to Epstein, however, pales in comparison to that of former Israeli Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Between 2013 and 2017 alone, Barak is known to have traveled to New York City and met with the convicted criminal at least 30 times, sometimes arriving at his Manhattan mansion incognito or wearing a mask to hide his identity.

Numerous sources have commented on Epstein’s connections to Israeli intelligence. A previous girlfriend and victim of his, referred in court documents as Jane Doe 200 to hide her identity, testified that Epstein boasted about being a Mossad operative and that, after he raped her, she could not go to the police because his position as a spy made her fear for her life.

“Doe genuinely believed that any reporting of the rape by what she believed to be a Mossad agent with some of the most unique connections in the world would result in significant bodily harm or death to her,” reads the court filing.

Ari Ben-Menashe, a former senior official in Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, claimed that Epstein was a spy and that he and Ghislaine Maxwell were running a honeytrap operation on behalf of Israel. Four (anonymous) sources told Rolling Stone that Epstein had directly worked with the Israeli government.

Unlike much of the Maxwell family, however, his Israel and intelligence connections are based largely on testimony and unverified accounts. His only known trip to the country was in April 2008, just before his sentencing, a move that sparked fears he would seek refuge there.

Nevertheless, there has been intense public speculation that he could have been working for Tel Aviv. At the Turning Points USA Student Action Summit 2025, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson stated that there is nothing wrong, hateful or anti-Semitic about asking questions about Epstein’s foreign connections. “No one’s allowed to say that the foreign government is Israel, because we’ve been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty,” he said, before expressing his exasperation about the media’s silence on the issue.

What the hell is this? You have the former Israeli prime minister living in your house, you have had all this contact with a foreign government, were you working on behalf of the Mossad? Were you running a blackmail operation on behalf of a foreign government?”

Carlson’s comments drew harsh condemnation from former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. “The accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false. Epstein’s conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the State of Israel,” he wrote.

“This accusation is a lie being peddled by prominent online personalities such as Tucker Carlson pretending they know things they don’t,” he added, concluding that Israel was under attack from a “vicious wave of slander and lies.”

Whatever the truth about Epstein, it is indisputable that the powerful Maxwell family holds wide-ranging connections to U.S., British and Israeli state power. It is also beyond doubt that if the full story of their activities were ever to reach the public, it would incriminate a significant number of the world’s most powerful people and organizations. Perhaps that is why Trump has, in short order, gone from promising to release the Epstein Files to potentially releasing his accomplice.

This article was originally published on MintPress News.

The post The CIA, Mossad, and Epstein: Unraveling the Intelligence Ties of the Maxwell Family appeared first on LewRockwell.

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”—Ray Bradbury

Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than President Trump’s latest executive order calling for criminal charges for anyone who burns the American flag—a symbolic act long upheld by the Supreme Court as protected political expression.

This push is not about patriotism—it is political theater.

For an administration under fire—from the Epstein cover-up to tanking approval ratings and mounting constitutional crises—flag burning serves as symbolic outrage staged as political cover, a culture-war diversion to distract from more serious abuses of power.

Consider the timing: on the very same day Trump announced penalties for flag burning, he also signed an executive order establishing “specialized” National Guard units to patrol American cities under the guise of addressing crime.

This is the real bait-and-switch: cloak military policing in patriotic theater and hope no one notices the deeper constitutional violations taking root.

In other words, Trump’s flag fight is a decoy.

Yet in today’s climate, where mobs on the left and censors on the right compete to silence speech they dislike, even this form of protest is under fire.

In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Texas v. Johnson that burning the flag of the United States in protest is an act of protected free speech under the First Amendment.

Today, that ruling matters more than ever, yet there is an important distinction: the First Amendment protects the right to burn your own flag as political expression but not to vandalize public property in the process.

That distinction matters: the Constitution protects dissent, not destruction.

And it’s exactly that distinction—between lawful protest and punished expression—that makes the flag-burning debate so important.

Although the courts have held that symbolic acts of protest deserve the highest protection, the culture wars have turned those protections into battlegrounds. For decades, mobs, politicians, and bureaucrats alike have worked to silence unpopular or politically incorrect opinions.

Whether it’s a student disciplined for refusing to recite the Pledge, an athlete demonized for kneeling during the National Anthem, or a dissenter deplatformed for expressing views outside the mainstream, the message is the same: toe the line or be punished.

This new Age of Intolerance is not limited to the cultural left.

President Trump has been waging his own right-wing brand of cancel culture: sanitizing museums, scrubbing exhibits of “unpatriotic” narratives, renaming anything that doesn’t fit his preferred version of history, and punishing dissenters with executive orders and loyalty oaths.

What the left enforces with trigger warnings and deplatforming, Trump enforces with prosecutions, cultural re-branding and militarization.

They are snowflakes of a different political persuasion, but the result is the same: dissent is silenced, history is rewritten, and only the approved narrative remains.

And here’s the danger: when symbolic outrage is used as a political smokescreen for militarization and constitutional erosion, it distracts Americans from the machinery of control being built in real time. The fight over flags and museums is not just about culture—it is the smokescreen for expanding surveillance, militarization, and police-state powers.

That is why the sudden outrage over disrespect for the country’s patriotic symbols rings so hollow. In a culture where the flag is already plastered on bikinis, beer koozies, and billboards—with little outcry—it’s not reverence that’s driving this crackdown. It’s control.

Worse, it divides the nation and distracts us from the steady rise of the police state.

So, what do the courts actually say about patriotic symbols and protest?

As the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear, Americans have a right to abstain from patriotic demonstrations (West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette, 1943) and/or actively protest that demonstration, for example, by raising one’s fist during the Pledge of Allegiance (Holloman ex rel. Holloman v. Harland, 2004). These First Amendment protections also extend to military uniforms (worn to criticize the military) and military funeral protests (Snyder v. Phelps, 2011).

Likewise, Americans have a First Amendment right to display, alter or destroy the U.S. flag as acts of symbolic protest speech.

In fact, in Street v. New York (1969), the Supreme Court held that the government may not punish a person for uttering words critical of the flag, writing that “the constitutionally guaranteed ‘freedom to be intellectually . . . diverse or even contrary,’ and the ‘right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order,’ encompass the freedom to express publicly one’s opinions about our flag, including those opinions which are defiant or contemptuous.”

The case arose after Sidney Street, hearing about the attempted murder of civil rights leader James Meredith in Mississippi, burned a 48-star American flag on a New York City street corner to protest what he saw as the government’s failure to protect Meredith. Upon being questioned about the flag, Street responded, “Yes; that is my flag; I burned it. If they let that happen to Meredith, we don’t need an American flag.”

In Spence v. Washington (1974), the Court ruled that the right to display the American flag with any mark or design upon it is a protected act of expression. The case involved a college student who had placed a peace symbol on a three by five foot American flag using removable black tape and displayed it upside down from his apartment window.

Finally, in Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Court held that flag burning was protected speech under the First Amendment. The case arose from a demonstration near the site of the Republican National Convention in Dallas during which protesters marched through the streets, chanted political slogans, staged “die-ins” in front of several corporate offices to dramatize the consequences of nuclear war, and burned the flag as a means of political protest.

In other words, it is precisely the unpopular, controversial, and even offensive expression that the First Amendment exists to protect. As Justice William Brennan wrote in Texas v. Johnson, “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.”

More three decades later, that principle is constantly betrayed in practice.

In today’s climate, both political tribes are eager to wield censorship as a weapon. One side shouts down speakers; the other side bans books, rewrites curricula, and prosecutes symbolic dissent like flag burning.

The battlegrounds may differ—college campuses versus classrooms, corporate platforms versus government edicts—but the impulse is the same: to punish those who dare to disagree.

It’s all part of the same authoritarian playbook.

Seen in this light, censorship creep in the name of tolerance becomes even more dangerous.

Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive—provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.

This is why unpopular political protests such as flag burning matter so much: they are the test case for whether we still believe in freedom “for the thought that we hate.”

If freedom means anything, it means that those exercising their right to protest are showing the greatest respect for the principles on which this nation was founded: the right to free speech and the right to dissent.

Frankly, the First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty.

Let’s not confuse patriotism (love for or devotion to one’s country) with blind obedience to the government’s dictates. That is the first step towards creating an authoritarian regime.

One can be patriotic and love one’s country while at the same time disagreeing with the government or protesting government misconduct. As journalist Barbara Ehrenreich recognizes, “Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”

That spirit is disappearing. Instead, Americans now rush to silence those they dislike.

This selective tolerance—the essence of cancel culture—is exactly what my late friend and First Amendment champion Nat Hentoff used to denounce as “Free speech for me but not for thee.”

Once that mindset takes root, the First Amendment is already half-lost.

That double standard lies at the heart of our present crisis.

Indeed, I would venture to say that if you’re not speaking out or taking a stand against government wrongdoing—if you’re marching in lockstep with anything the government and its agents dole out—and if you’re prioritizing partisan politics over the principles enshrined in the Constitution, then you’re not a true patriot.

Real patriots care enough to take a stand, speak out, protest and challenge the government whenever it steps out of line.

There is nothing patriotic about the lengths to which Americans have allowed the government to go in its efforts to dismantle our constitutional republic and shift the country into a police state.

The irony is this: it’s not anti-American to be anti-war or anti-police misconduct or anti-racial discrimination—but it is anti-American to be anti-freedom.

What we are witnessing, in the flag-burning debate and far beyond, is a culture war in which political tribes police thought, speech, and even symbolic protest. Those who refuse to conform—whether they burn a flag, take a knee, question authority, or simply refuse to parrot the official line—are demonized, deplatformed, and sometimes even criminalized.

The upshot of all this editing, parsing, banning and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state. Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.

And while Orwell imagined it as dystopian fiction, we are living its early chapters now.

The First Amendment is being whittled down not just by government decree but by a culture that rewards conformity and punishes divergence.

In such an environment, burning a flag is not the real danger. The real danger is a society that no longer tolerates free thought at all.

The First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world. When there is no steam valve to release the pressure, frustration builds, anger grows, and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.

The lesson is clear: America requires more than voters inclined to pay lip service to a false sense of patriotism. It requires doers—a well-informed and very active group of doers—if we are to have any chance of holding the government accountable and maintaining our freedoms.

We need to stop acting as if showing “respect” for the country, flag and national anthem is more important than the freedoms they represent.

Listen: I served in the Army. I lived through the Civil Rights era. I came of age during the Sixties, when activists took to the streets to protest war and economic and racial injustice. As a constitutional lawyer, I defend people daily whose civil liberties are being violated, including high school students prohibited from wearing American flag t-shirts to school, allegedly out of a fear that it might be disruptive.

I understand the price that must be paid for freedom.

None of the people I served with or marched with or represented put our lives or our liberties on the line for a piece of star-spangled cloth: we took our stands and made our sacrifices because we believed we were fighting to maintain our freedoms and bring about justice for all Americans.

Responsible citizenship means being outraged at the loss of others’ freedoms, even when our own are not directly threatened.

The Framers of the Constitution knew very well that whenever and wherever democratic governments had failed, it was because the people had abdicated their responsibility as guardians of freedom. They also knew that whenever in history the people denied this responsibility, an authoritarian regime arose which eventually denied the people the right to govern themselves.

Citizens must be willing to stand and fight to protect their freedoms. And if need be, it will entail criticizing the government.

This is true patriotism in action.

Love of country will sometimes entail carrying a picket sign or going to jail or taking a knee or burning a flag, if necessary, to challenge injustice.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the real danger isn’t someone burning the flag.

The greatest danger we face is the U.S. government torching the Constitution.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post Burning the Flag or Torching the Constitution: Only One Destroys Freedom appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is nothing more tragic than a life devoid of purpose.  Without meaning, souls wither away.  Anybody who has interacted with drug addicts whose only “purpose” is to secure another “fix” knows this to be true.  The human part of those so afflicted steadily disappears as the body is overtaken by a desperate need to remain in a sedated state of oblivion.

Almost every city in America has a “no-go” zone of hardcore homeless addicts who shuffle along the streets like zombies from a horror movie.  The sight is surreal and a shocking reminder that even the most powerful country in the world regularly fails to beat back the advances of Hell.

As a society, we used to at least pretend to care about the drug epidemic in America.  We declared “war on drugs,” but the drugs won.  The Reagan administration produced some effective public health campaigns, but the drug cartels south of the border became only more powerful over time.

As Democrats and some libertarians pushed for the legalization of serious narcotics this century, state governments and federal agencies not only stopped enforcing drug laws, but also accepted that sizable populations across America would be permitted to suicide while the rest of us disinterestedly watched.  From urban streets to abandoned houses in forgotten rural towns, drug-addled zombies pursue one “purpose”: to die.

Some might say “to each his own” or “it’s none of my business.”  Adulthood, after all, is about taking responsibility for your own actions.  And it is almost impossible to talk someone out of destroying himself.  With every breath we take, glass of water we drink, and bowl of food we eat, staying alive is a choice.  Those who reach for the needle, it is often said, are making a “choice,” too.

Still, if Americans understood how many of the zombie homeless are veterans, formerly stable people whose lives spiraled out of control, or neglected citizens who have lived on and off the streets since childhood, maybe more people would offer a helping hand.  Sometimes we invite Hell into our lives, and sometimes Hell swallows us whole.  Blessed are those with the strength to drag lost souls back home.

Why do Democrat mayors in cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore carve out entire neighborhoods for homeless zombies to prowl?  It’s not some “libertarian” embrace of the supposed “freedom” to do drugs.  It’s certainly not some “compassionate” policy meant to “accept” people as they are.  Within one hour of walking the streets of zombieland, no rational person could conclude that these dens of squalor, violence, indignity, and wretchedness are anything other than the outstretched tentacles of Hell.

I think Democrats protect these hellish spaces because they serve an evil purpose: As zombielands grow, they swallow up more and more of society.  The bigger they become, the more attractive they are for damaged souls and malcontents chasing death.  Like abortion on demand up to (and sometimes after) a baby’s birth, municipally sanctioned drug lairs exist to churn out dead bodies.  They operate as both depopulation machines and as blaring foghorns spewing out hopelessness in all directions.

Something that conservatives generally understand and that leftists do not is that “government” and “society” are two different things.  Government is a blunt instrument that claims to act on behalf of society but really acts according to its own institutional interests.  Society is a much broader concept that includes all of the cultural, religious, intellectual, and personal relationships that bind a people together.  Should the federal government ever fall, American society might persevere and rebuild.  Should our society collapse, no government can glue the pieces back together.  Government is coercion; society is choice.  Strong societies create strong countries; strong governments often destroy countries.

When Democrat politicians defend the propagation of zombielands across America, they advance the government’s interests, not society’s.  How could deadly drug zones possibly advance government interests?  That question brings us back to an essential ingredient of every human soul: purpose.

As far as governments are concerned, people lacking purpose are either useful or dangerous.  How are they useful?  Militaries, law enforcement agencies, and vast bureaucracies are built with people seeking purpose.  It is comforting to believe that government institutions are innately patriotic.  In reality, governments use patriotism to achieve institutional objectives.  They say, “Do this for your country.”  What they mean is, “Do this for your government.”  Governments feed on people who need purpose.  They provide purpose in exchange for obedience.

This kind of arrangement exists whether the government in question rules Baltimore’s streets or a superpower nation.  Gang life flourishes because boys who are desperate to find purpose in life are offered a gun and a street corner to defend.  Since the putative conclusion of WWII, war has continually raged somewhere on the African continent.  While the rest of the world does what it can to ignore the carnage, one generation of child soldiers after the next finds purpose with a rifle.  All that “purpose” ensures short, violent lives.

When people without purpose cannot be corralled into government service, they are potentially dangerous.  Such people might just find that their purpose is to oppose the government.  Government bureaucracies’ most important function is to coerce people into submission.  When possible, this coercion is done quietly, if not invisibly.  Police forces keep order.  Credit scores encourage timely payment.  Banks require the use of government money.  Public pensions ensure that government workers and retirees obey.  Public shaming and the rise of “cancel culture” are effective government tools for controlling citizens.

When government coercion fails to control citizens, society begins to realize that its interests are not identical to the government’s.  Consider the mass resistance movements now forming throughout the United Kingdom.  After decades of flooding the country with illegal aliens who have gone on to commit heinous crimes and undermine social unity in the U.K., government authorities are now contending with the reality that the British people have found a purpose that threatens government supremacy.  The government’s failure to protect society has given society a pressing reason to seize control of the country from the government.  No matter how many new censorship laws parliament passes to silence citizens, the British government will not be able to suppress the public’s newfound purpose to defend itself.

Now consider this: The people who are right now building an artificial intelligence structure to manage the world believe that A.I. will replace all human workers.  Elon Musk told a technology conference just last year that there will soon “come a point where no job is needed.”  He predicts that everyone will be living on government-provided income.

Musk paints this future as a rosy one but recognizes that “the question will be one of meaning.  Does your life have meaning?”  Whether he is being honest about his optimism or not, he at least understands that the question of human purpose will come to the forefront in the next few years.

Governments around the world are obviously much less optimistic.  Growing censorship in the West, mass digital surveillance, plans for “vaccine passports,” and the rollout of central bank digital currencies all suggest that governments ostensibly supportive of “human liberty” are actually constructing totalitarian systems of control.  They are investing heavily in an infrastructure meant to ensure that society’s purpose strictly mirrors the government’s objectives.

Freethinkers who refuse to comply should take a hard look at the zombielands across the United States.  Governments don’t care if purposeless people kill themselves.  They will do everything they can, however, to make sure that people don’t find purpose in opposing government policy.

For those agnostics who have yet to see that the coming battle is ultimately a spiritual one, think again.  We are in a war between good and evil.  Be careful where you stand.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Human Purpose Threatens Government Control appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israeli news outlet Haaretz has published a harrowing report on starvation in Gaza which further discredits the Israeli narrative that the photos of skeletal children we’ve been seeing are antisemitic Hamas propaganda, for anyone who’s still clinging to delusions about such things.

Haaretz reporters were taken by doctors on video tours of hospitals in Gaza, conducting interviews with numerous medical personnel and obtaining many photos of civilians showing signs of extreme starvation. Throughout the report we encounter story after story of severely emaciated children, mothers unable to breastfeed starving babies because of their own starvation, people with preexisting conditions severely exacerbated by malnutrition, diseases spreading due to crippled healthcare infrastructure and ruined immune systems, and wounds failing to heal due to inadequate food intake.

The article is one of the more uncomfortable things I’ve seen throughout the entirety of this genocide, and that’s saying something.

“What we saw there left no room for doubt about the scale of the horror,” write Haaretz reporters Yarden Michaeli and Nir Hasson.

“Seventeen youngsters had deteriorated into a state of severe malnutrition without preexisting health conditions; 10 suffered from previous illnesses,” they write, saying “Anyone who claims that the images of starvation in the Gaza Strip are a result of acute genetic or other diseases, and not due to a grave shortage of food, are lying to themselves.”

The tour of Nasser Hospital lasted about an hour. Dr. Ahmed al-Farra went from bed to bed, while another member of the hospital staff held the camera. We saw children whose bodies were blighted by hunger, with bones jutting out @YardenMichaeli & @nirhasson https://t.co/gBTGdvjLea

— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) August 23, 2025

This comes as the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) formally declares that the people of Gaza are suffering from a famine that “is entirely man-made”, which must be halted and reversed with extreme urgency.

Israel has of course denounced the IPC’s findings as antisemitic Hamas propaganda, with the Israeli Foreign Ministry saying that “The entire IPC document is based on Hamas lies laundered through organizations with vested interests,” and Benjamin Netanyahu branding the report “a modern blood libel, spreading like wildfire through prejudice.”

You might find this response ridiculous, and of course it is, but really, what else does Israel have left? When all major human rights institutions are accusing you of horrific crimes, your only options are either (A) admit the obvious fact that there’s no way every single mainstream humanitarian organization is lying about your actions, or (B) claim that they’re all in on a giant globe-spanning conspiracy because of a nefarious prejudice against your religion.

Of course they’re going to go with (B). This is Israel we’re talking about, after all.

When a nation keeps having to publish denials that it is intentionally starving civilians, you can safely assume it’s because that nation is intentionally starving civilians. If you saw someone on social media loudly denying the latest allegations that they are a child molester over and over again for two years, you probably wouldn’t let them babysit your kids.

I have never once felt the need to publish a denial that I am intentionally starving people, because I have never intentionally starved anyone. It’s not something I’ve ever found myself needing to say even one time, let alone many many times constantly.

You don’t see the government of Ireland constantly denying that Ireland is intentionally starving civilians, because Ireland is not intentionally starving civilians.

You don’t see pro-China spinmeisters frantically churning out propaganda denying that China is intentionally starving civilians, because China is not intentionally starving civilians.

You don’t see Brazilian internet trolls aggressively swarming the comments of anyone who says Brazil is intentionally starving civilians, because Brazil is not intentionally starving civilians.

You don’t see the Pakistani government paying social media influencers to assert on their platforms that Pakistan is not intentionally starving civilians, because Pakistan is not intentionally starving civilians.

You see an intense campaign of narrative management aimed at denying that Israel has been intentionally starving civilians because Israel is intentionally starving civilians. That’s why all the constant government denials, the endless propaganda and spin pieces and PR stunts, and relentless online trolling operations have been necessary.

Most Israel apologia at this point is just people pretending to believe things they don’t really believe. Palestinians aren’t really being starved. Gaza looks like a gravel parking lot because Hamas put explosives in all the buildings. The IDF has a low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio. Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure was destroyed because Hamas was hiding under all the hospitals. Nobody actually believes these things. They’re just pretending to believe them in order to justify genocidal atrocities and help ensure that they continue.

They’re really the worst people in the world.

_________________

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The post Only Liars And Manipulators Say Gaza Isn’t Starving appeared first on LewRockwell.

A friend and supporter of this newsletter just sent me a report “that the Trump administration is reportedly negotiating to turn Intel’s $10.9 billion CHIPS Act subsidies into a 10 percent equity stake in the company.” If finalized, Washington would be among Intel’s largest shareholders.

Reporter Vance Ginn at the Daily Economy does a fine job of enumerating why this is a bad idea for U.S. citizens and taxpayers, and I recommend reading his report.

The contemplated U.S.-Intel deal is, it seems to me, an example of yielding to the siren song of Fascist Corporatism.

Nowadays, we think of “Fascism” as a doctrine exemplified by the German police and military state during the Third Reich. However, the roots of this doctrine lie in the writings of the Italian philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, who postulated that the optimal political and economic system is akin to a Merger of State and Corporate Power.

Gentile postulated that this was not only a doctrine of great economic utility, but also the best arrangement for promoting the moral and spiritual health of the modern nation state.

Gentile was probably being sincere when he theorized about this. Nowadays, the primary temptation of Corporatism lies not in its purported utility for forging a strong national identity and allegiance, but in its utility for clever and ambitious money-grubbers.

During the pandemic, we saw companies like Pfizer and Moderna form a symbiotic relationship with officers of various U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Defense — so symbiotic that it became very difficult to delineate the corporations from the U.S. government agencies that extravagantly supported them.

Since the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex during the 1940s and 50s, U.S. industrial corporations have been inextricably linked to U.S. government agencies. To give just one of many examples, Robert McNamara began his career in the military working for General Curtis LeMay. Later he worked for the Ford Motor Company and ultimately became its president, and then he became the Secretary of Defense for Kennedy and Johnson.

Senior officers and directors of the industrial services company, Brown & Root, were key supporters of Lyndon Johnson’s political career, and he rewarded the company handsomely after escalating the war in Vietnam, thereby helping the company to win the moniker “Burn & Loot.”

Donald Rumseld and Dick Cheney enjoyed similar careers, moving back and forth between the private and public sectors. Shortly before Cheney became a key figure in America’s Iraq War fiasco, he was the CEO of Halliburton, whose stock price enjoyed a 5X return between March 2003 and June 2008.

During the bird flu scare of 2005, President Bush asked Congress to allocate $7 billion in emergency funding to prepare for the possibility of the bird flu mutating into a human epidemic. He specifically asked for $1 billion to be allocated for the purchase of Tamiflu, jointly developed by Gilead Sciences and Roche. It just so happened that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a major shareholder who made millions from the trade.

All of these clever and ambitious money-grubbers teach us that fastest way to get rich is to persuade the U.S. government that you are selling a strategic asset.

2005 was a windfall year for the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, whose lobbyists worked closely with the Bush Administration to pass the PREP Act. This radical piece of legislation has served as a key instrument for giving U.S. government agencies emergency power and for enriching the pharmaceutical industry in the event of a pandemic—real, perceived, exaggerated, or fabricated.

One of the most powerful supporters of Theranos—the fraudulent blood testing company started by Elizabeth Holmes—was former Secretary of State, George Schultz. He still had cronies in the Pentagon who were keen to purchase Holmes’s bogus machines for the military.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the blossoming of similar cozy relationships. FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb was appointed to Pfizer’s Board of Directors shortly after he left the agency. Likewise, six months after he gave approval to Moderna’s new COVID-19 vaccine, FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn was offered a position at the venture capital firm that was one of Moderna’s primary backers. Among major media players, Jim Smith, the CEO of Reuters, was appointed to Pfizer’s Board of Directors in 2014 and is also on the international business council of the World Economic Forum.

Moncef Slaoui was head of vaccine development at GlaxoSmithKline until 2017. At the time President Trump appointed him to lead Operation Warp Speed, he was a board member of both CEPI and Moderna, a primary candidate for Warp Speed funds. Though he resigned from the Moderna board to avoid a conflict of interest, he retained his stock options, which gained $2.4 million in value on the day the company announced favorable preliminary results of its Phase I trials. This raised concerns about his neutrality in judging its vaccine’s safety and efficacy data, so he agreed to divest his shares of Moderna stock.

Like Krupp and I.G. Farben during the Third Reich, U.S. corporations are bound to U.S. government institutions like the DoD, DARPA, NIH, HHS, and BARDA in an arrangement that strongly resembles Fascist Corporatism.

It seems to me that in trying to understand these relationships, it is useful to consider President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address in 1961. His warning to Americans about the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex is now more relevant than ever, and all Americans should be throughly acquainted with this speech.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse – Focal Points.

The post Fascist Corporatist Temptations appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Something happened in 2021” that has jeopardized air travel safety, according to a disturbing report by Dr. Kevin Stillwagon, a retired airline pilot and immunology expert.

Mounting evidence points to the COVID-19 vaccinations that airlines, acting under pressure from the U.S. government, mandated or otherwise coerced their cockpit, cabin, and ground crews into taking.

Since 2021, there has been a marked increase in deaths of “younger” airline pilots while long-term disabilities for pilots have skyrocketed. All of this has been accompanied by an astronomical increase of near-miss incidents at the nation’s airports.

“Incapacitations of pilots are definitely increasing, especially in younger pilots,” Stillwagon said in a video discussion with Nicolas Hulscher, an epidemiologist and administrator at the McCullough Foundation.

“There was a 40% increase in pilots dying early – before mandatory retirement age of 65 – in 2021,” Stillwagon said.

“Starting in 2021, pilot long-term disabilities have tripled,” he noted. “Prior to 2021, there was only one near-miss at the Washington National Airport (DCA).  But after 2021, there were 28 near-misses per year.”

Airline Pilot Incapacitation Crisis After Illegal mRNA Shot Mandates — With Dr. Kevin Stillwagon and Nicolas Hulscher https://t.co/Cps1jGvK42

— Nicolas Hulscher, MPH (@NicHulscher) August 15, 2025

The mRNA COVID-19 jab was illegally forced on airline pilots

Stillwagon maintains that from the outset, the mRNA COVID-19 shots were illegally forced upon the nation’s airline pilots.

“They were illegal because you cannot put an experimental product into a pilot, as found in the ‘Aeromedical Advice Manual,’ given to all aeromedical examiners,” he pointed out.

Commercial pilots are legally prohibited from taking experimental medicines and face losing their medical certification for taking anything other than FAA-approved drugs.

If a pilot takes an unapproved medical product, flight surgeons must take administrative measures to revoke or deny issuance of the pilot’s flight physical certificate until the FAA rules on the safety of that product. Yet UAL encouraged, coerced and even paid pilots to violate this federal law.

Pilots who were forced into submitting to the experimental jabs found themselves trapped in a horrific catch-22, with their careers hanging in the balance. Those who accepted the COVID-19 jab under duress were not only strong-armed into violating their religious beliefs, they were forced to choose between abiding by FAA safety rules or breaching those rules, putting their health and the safety of their passengers at risk.

“This is exactly why we are seeing sudden heart failure in younger and younger people,” Stillwagon said. “We’re also seeing brain fog in pilots and air traffic controllers which can result in their ability to think properly (and) their reaction times.”

The COVID-19 mRNA jab can also induce seizures that, if experienced by an airline pilot during a flight, can produce disastrous results. 

“This is a big deal,” Stillwagon declared. “This is huge.”

mRNA vaccines ‘were never safe nor effective’

mRNA-based injections instruct human cells to produce a genetically engineered version of coronavirus “spike protein” in order to trigger an immune system response.

Developers of the mRNA vaccines failed to foresee that once inside the body, the repeated development of the spike proteins can’t be controlled. For some recipients of the vaccines, their bodies became a human factory for the production of the spike protein, able to travel via the bloodstream from the injection site to their entire body, including major organs, the brain, liver, spleen, bone marrow, and reproductive organs.

As the immune system does its job attacking the cells it recognizes as “infected” due to the presence of the spike proteins, it attacks those organs and tissues, causing inflammation, myocarditis, and grotesque blood clots.

“The spike protein is directly toxic, and can directly damage tissues,” Stillwagon said.

‘Airline pilots are the ‘least monitored component in the cockpit’

Stillwagon said that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has failed to sufficiently collect data on the health of pilots since the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines.

While aviation authorities and airline management focus a great deal of attention on how well pilots comply with general operating procedures while behind the controls in the cockpit – proper maintenance of airspeed, flaps usage, etc. – glaring pilot “data gaps” remain.

For instance, the FAA reportedly keeps no record of pilot injection history, and for some unknown reason, the agency discontinued its centralized pilot incapacitation database in 2022. Stillwagon suspects it’s because aviation authorities didn’t want information contained in the database to be seen by the public.

“The data silence that the FAA has created is preventing systemic trends from being detected,” he said.

“We monitor aircraft oil temperature to within a tenth of a degree centigrade, but we don’t track whether the pilot has the potential for cardiac or cerebrovascular events,” Stillwagon said.

“The pilot is the least monitored component in the cockpit,” he declared. “In modern aviation, we treat the jet like a data-rich spacecraft – and the pilot like a black box.”

“Science has gotten confused over the years,” Stillwagon said. “The problem with vaccines is mainly ideology. It’s almost like a religion.”

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post Sudden Deaths, Incapacitations Soar Among COVID-Jabbed Airline Pilots appeared first on LewRockwell.

Introduction

In an August 1 interview, Tucker Carlson and his guest, Candace Owens, verbally attacked Nick Fuentes. Owens had claimed that after having a very successful interview with Fuentes, who was given free rein on the show to talk about whatever he liked, but had suddenly become “triggered” and continually insulted her after the interview was released for reasons unbeknownst to her. She continues by claiming that Fuentes had attacked the notion of marriage, that he had attacked “non-crazy” right voices like Dave Smith to discredit them, and that he had told Tucker that Fuentes had “little boy insecurity.” Tucker Carlson was incredibly receptive to her claims and added that Fuentes may actually be involved in the American intelligence community because Fuentes knew that Tucker’s dad was CIA before he even did; he ended by claiming that Nick was working on behalf of the CIA to disrupt the election of Joe Kent, whom the CIA supposedly hated, Tucker claimed:

“Nick Fuentes, this child, this little weird gay kid in his basement in Chicago, is participating in a super PAC to bump off Joe Kent. Like, I’ve been around that my whole life, I know what that is.”

Since that interview, this dispute has spread to nearly every major right-wing talking head and organization, which is leading to everyone tearing each other apart. Nick Fuentes has responded to Owens and Carlon on his podcast called “America First.” He claims that it was a well-known fact that Tucker Carlson’s father, Richard Carlson, was heavily involved in CIA activities. This included being appointed the associate director of the United States Information Agency and director of the Voice of America, an organization that was considered to be the “voice of the American government.” Even President Putin, during their one-on-one interview, mocked Carlson for being rejected by the CIA back in his twenties. There are many more accusations and attacks being flung around, including Elon Musk and Milo Yiannopoulos accusing Fuentes of being an FBI asset during January 6th, with Fuentes responding by using text messages by Milo that incriminate him of being an FBI asset. This internal war among these right-wing talking heads is not only ridiculous, but also plays into the hands of the state. Instead of becoming an organized minority and being an effective coalition, they split into factions and destroy each other.

Divide and Conquer

It is not unusual for governments to break the power of rival castles within their sphere of influence, whether this is done by force, by defamation, or through sly tactics, depending on the characteristics of that state. But no matter its character, the organized minority, as prescribed by the elite theorist Gaetano Mosca, will work to lead the disorganized mass but also actively break the power of any attempted coalition. He explains:

“In reality the dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority. A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one.

This sort of containment is done to both right and left-wing groups; the post-war liberal order had sought to maintain its power through these means. During the Cold War, communists throughout Europe were defanged and their leaders split into factions of pacifists, parliamentarians, and a small shunned faction of idealists and militants. In a 1985 documentary, “The Mayor of Montellimone,” the communist mayor, Dino Labriola, faces this exact problem of complacency and infighting. When a northern company comes to build a dam near the small southern village, Labriola hopes that they will employ some of the many unemployed youths in the village. When the company shuts down his demands, the mayor makes a plea to the Ministry of Labor and the Communist Party Headquarters in Rome, in which he receives no support. Finally, Dino assembles the town’s socialist councilors to organize a strike; the meeting went terribly. Dino begins:

“We tell the provincial employment office that if they don’t meet our demands we’ll start a strike and occupy the site. The battle of the dam is not just about employment, it’s about everything. It’s an historic occasion: if we don’t win now, we never will.

The meeting fell apart; many of the socialist councilors felt as if Dino had cut them out of the loop and was being undemocratic and confrontational, wishing only to make the council into yes-men. These splits were common after CIA attempts to break the power of the Italian Communist Party in Italy. Revealed in the National Security Archives, the US Ambassador to Italy, Clare Boothe, oversaw financial support to centrist Italian parties and awarded union contracts to loyal members to weaken the communist hold on labor unions. By divide and conquer, the communists had lost complete control over Italy, and the end result was ineffective, non-confrontational councils in small towns.

Shattering Organization

In regard to the modern American right, a similar result has occurred in the sheer number of factions and deviations over the past decade. Some of the most popular conservative talking heads of the last decade, such as Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, are seen increasingly as neocons who have a paid interest in keeping Israel first. Other right-wing figures are now facing defamation of character, usually from members of the same political orientation. Carlson and Fuentes accusing each other of being CIA assets or FBI informants will be stains on their reputations where neither can really be trusted. But it seems that these two figures are considered prominent leaders of the America First movement after President Trump had betrayed his campaign promise of peace by backing Israel against Iran and by protecting pedophiles by not releasing the Epstein list, going as far as to say Epstein even stole a girl from Mar-a-lago, putting Trump’s knowledge of Epstein’s activities in question.

Why are these two figures being elevated into leadership positions in the American right? For Nick, online rhetoric places him in a position equivalent to a chosen one, that he is the de facto leader of America First and the future leader of America. This propped-up position of leadership will only cause deeper divides in the American right; one user even claimed that Fuentes was the leader of all white people, but when confronted by a police officer about being a white supremacist, Fuentes had no problem pulling out his Mexican ethnicity to pull the conversation away from there. While he has done impressive research into Tucker Carlson and has been a vocal opponent of Israel, he eventually devolves into ranting and raving. Perhaps this says something about his personality and emotional stability that will make for disastrous leadership, and this is exactly why some may want him as leader of the right.

If Tucker Carlson really is a CIA asset, this opens up a secret aspect about the American government that is anti-Israel. Doing an interview with the Iranian president in the immediate aftermath of the 12 Day War and creating spheres where men and women can come in and talk about the crimes of Israel: segregation in Gaza, war crimes, Mossad and Epstein, and genocide are just some of Tucker’s work within the last two months. John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower, had claimed in interviews that the CIA has a deep-seated hatred for Israel and has a deep mistrust of the Israeli intelligence agencies, going as far as even banning the Mossad from Langley. While the CIA can never be trusted, they do have an interest in maintaining power and stability, something Israel has threatened both directly by attempting to draw America into war with Iran and undermining negotiations, and indirectly by creating a large anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States.

You Killed Us, Dave

The system will deal with Israel in its own way; multiple G7 nations, including Italy and France, have already set plans to recognize Palestine as a state as early as September; the pushback from America has been minimal. Since October 7th, Israel has revealed a nature about itself that will never be cleared. By butchering innocent people and asserting control over foreign governments, it seemingly modeled its image off of Dave Kleinfeld. Israel has crossed lines a nation can never come back from and took America along for the ride; the only question is if America will sink with Israel or leave it to its own “beautiful future.”

The post The Fuentes-Carlson Dispute Reveals the Containment of the Right appeared first on LewRockwell.

“They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.  It’s hard to explain.”
–  J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

With all the hullabaloo about President Donald Trump’s “peace” gestures toward Russia over Ukraine and the resetting of U.S.-Russia bi-lateral relations, it is worth remembering the “pivot to Asia” announced by the Obama administration in 2011 and the coup d’état it carried out in Ukraine in 2014.  For those who might not remember, I would recommend two films: John Pilger’s The Coming War on China and Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire.

They are two prongs of a long-term U.S. strategy to maintain American preeminence throughout the world by countering Russia and China simultaneously, if not equally at once. Such strategy is not determined by someone like President Donald Trump speaking or acting impulsively, as is his wont, but by bankers, financiers, éminences grises, and pale-faced scholarly guns-for-hire in stately buildings reserved for such deliberations.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, there is a consistent foundational foreign policy strategy from one American presidential administration to the next with necessary little detours here and there, and arguments within the ruling class about tactics. Long-term strategy is capacious enough to include sudden seeming shifts in policies that are couched in cover stories that beguile even the smartest people. Wishes fuddle the minds of the most astute. They serve to obscure the interests of U.S. dominance of the world, a dominance that is now threatened, and one that Trump is not abandoning, even as he adjusts American tactics on the fly.

The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and its magazine, Foreign Affairs are where the ruling elites of the United States debate and determine American foreign policies from administration to administration, regardless of political party. The CFR is the preeminent U.S. think tank; it is over one hundred years old, financed by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations and its members have included former CIA Director Allen Dulles, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and many other high government and financial figures, including David Rockefeller, who served as  chairman between 1970-1985.

“Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US media outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).” It is evidence of why the corporate mainstream media is an adjunct of the U.S. propaganda system. To become a member is to be baptized into the U.S. ruling establishment and its vast propaganda network that includes, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern describes it: the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, MICIMATT.

Donald Trump is a headline grabber who ultimately follows orders. He is not, as claimed, an outlier. Unusual he may be – bizarre in many ways – but he has his supporters within the dueling factions of the ruling elites. Nothing could clarify this more than the events of the past weeks, from his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska to his meeting in the White House with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenski, his fellow entertainer, and his European entourage of jugglers and clowns. They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.

“Whenever I take up a newspaper,” the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote in his play Ghosts, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”

Such is what I see when I read today’s press about Trump, the peacemaker. Having been around a few years, his actions strike no shock of the new in me, but rather bring to mind a walk down a city street where old ghosts meet to whisper a description I once read of most corporate mainstream journalists – “No ideas and the ability to express them.” Or to put it another way – only ideas they have been fed and the ability to regurgitate them. So Trump is either described as a traitor who has been manipulated by Putin or a man genuinely seeking the end of America’s efforts to surround and crush Russia.

Neither is true. We are captives in a contronymal game (a contronym being a word having contradictory meanings, such as “refrain”: to desist from doing something or to repeat).

Someone is playing someone. Who is playing whom and why I will leave as a question for readers’ research. See, for example, the work of another key think tank – the Rand Corporation’s 2019 study, “Extending Russia,” – that cooly sets out various options for the U.S. to use in undermining Russia as if it were suggesting possible menu items at a restaurant. Without a knowledge of history, Donald Trump appears to be a radical departure from past American presidents. That he opened a dialogue when he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska seems significant. It is true that talking is better than walking away, but only when the intentions that underlie it are honorable, and in this case, I find that doubtful.

Let me use an analogy that may at first seem “by the way” and therefore not apt. I think it is. When it came to the assassination of President Kennedy, the CIA and its media mouthpieces weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” to besmirch the names of those who questioned the Warren Commission Report. The corporate mainstream media (MSM) have echoed this ever since and thus the term came to be one applied to dissenters of all sorts, even those who believe the most outlandish things, such as Elvis didn’t die but was taken up by aliens where he now commands a spaceship called Suspicious Minds, named for one of his hit songs.

Conspiracists were those who had these insane thoughts that there were elements within the government, notably within the CIA, FBI and Pentagon, who would assassinate their own leaders and those devoted to peace. Over the years this term came to be mixed with that of “the deep state,” shadow government, rogue network, etc. The “official” position was that such conspiratorial thinking was undermining the official good government and was the work of lunatics; it assumed that the government didn’t conspire to commit crimes, only lone nuts did, and then crazier nuts tried to pin it on elements within the government such as the CIA. These people were said to be paranoid.

But over the decades scholars have clearly shown that many of the claims of the “conspiracy theorists” were correct despite the best efforts of MICIMATT to create fantastically absurd “conspiracy” stories that they have used to ridicule serious thinkers and researchers. This mode of attack was weakening and along popped Donald Trump “straight” out of the TV screen. A larger than life big mouth who appealed to voters who felt that they were being screwed by the elite elites, which they were and are (Trump, after all, is a super-rich New York City real estate tycoon that no one except the most astute propagandist would choose to run for the presidency). Trump promised he would get to the bottom of many of the “conspiracy theories” – such as the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and the events of September 11, 2001, etc. – but he never will. He was going to expose the crooks, clean out the swamp, and make government as pellucid as a pristine mountain stream. Like all the charlatan presidents, he campaigned as a peacemaker and then waged war directly or through barely concealed proxies (war being the lifeblood of the U.S. economy) – Ukraine, Israel, Syrian “rebels” (i.e. terrorists), etc. The charade of his “peacemaking,” although weakening, still casts a spell over many people who fail to understand who formulates American foreign policy strategy.

If there is a so-called deep state responsible for the aforementioned assassinations, etc. and it controls U.S. presidents, then it controls Donald Trump. If Trump is truly trying to end the U.S. proxy war via Ukraine against Russia and establish good relations with its long-term arch-enemy, either the “deep state” has decided this is the best long-term strategy to try to maintain world dominance and it has tricks up its sleeve to attempt to do so, or else it will prevent Trump from carrying out his ostensible intent.

However, if there is no hidden “deep state,” just the official U.S. public state whose policies are largely determined in the dens of the aforementioned think tanks whose works are openly available, a government that does what it wants under various cover stories – two most significant ones being “the deep state” and “conspiracy theory” – then Trump may be its most fantastic contronymal creation, the epitome in his person of what Orwell meant by Doublethink:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

It is important to remember how all the rhetoric surrounding the term “deep state” has been so craftily used and mixed with that of “conspiracy theory” that it is worth considering it part of a very sophisticated propaganda campaign to scramble minds.

Few would dispute the fact that there is a ruling class in the United States and that its interests are not those of ordinary Americans. This is so obvious I will elide further comments about it. Everyone knows how wealth controls the electoral system; that it has corrupted it beyond repair.

Logic suggests that if a “deep state” is posited opposed to the official “open” government, and if it can be eliminated by a “good” politician, then the good guys will be back in charge and a return to the status quo effected.

So we must ask the question: What is the opposite of a contronym?

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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