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What apparently riles the credentialed political Left — the “gay / race communists” in the apt new phrase — more than anything, is that most of the country has opted to not be insane. This follows a decade-long attempt to drive the country insane, of course, to believe in things that are patently untrue and absurd, and to utilize falsehood and absurdity to garishly destroy the nation.

So, it fits that Donald Trump, the uber-realist of political game-playing, pushes what remains of the Democratic Party into a rapture of impotent rage. They’ve got nothing left but the empty acting-out of lunatics in an asylum of their own making. The wrathful grass-widows choking on their chardonnay in Martha’s Vineyard, the furious nose-rings steaming under their keffiyehs in the summer heat, the “Transtifas” storming police lines with their ridiculous umbrellas, the doddering Boomer-hippies reenacting the festive protest marches of 1968, minus a single coherent principle, the wigged-out congresspersons storming the ICE detention centers, the Covid vaccine victims duped into multiple organ failure (their hearts and brains especially), the “allies” of every loser group from Bangor to Brentwood in a frenzy of baffled grievance — these poor, lost wretches so far gone that even the likes of David Axelrod, James Carville, and Frank Luntz can’t stand to be associated with them anymore, is all the Democrats have left in their manure-stuffed donkey stable.

The abiding mystery remains: what exactly set in motion this fantastic cascade of political madness, especially among the highly educated demographic. The seemingly obvious answer is higher education itself, infested since the 1960s with Marxist zealots, sexual malcontents, and resentment-filled diversity hires. And while that has surely played its part, it doesn’t sufficiently explain the ugly dynamic.

Another explanation runs toward a plot by international “oligarchical” corruptniks to corner all the goodies of the world and either turn the rest of us into their slaves, or just kill us off — and to do it in such a way as to rub it in our faces, so as to provide the corruptniks with some mirthful entertainment as they go about their dastardly business. For instance, the recent weekend wedding of Huma Abedin and Alex Soros on the very day that the moiling minions whom they sponsor held their nationwide “No Kings” rallies inn the streets.

Huma, the bride, you recall, was Hillary Clinton’s sidekick back in Hillary’s glory days, especially the time of her glorious and inevitable rise (her regal “turn”) to occupy the White House, thwarted inconceivably by the preposterous showman, Mr. Trump. Hillary, you also might recall, left the White House broke-ass-broke in 2001 only to agglomerate a stupendous multi-hundred-million-dollar fortune working as a US Senator and then Secretary of State (salaries $170,000 and $260,600 respectively). That is, Hillary acquired her great fortune in about the same way that the royalty-of-old acquired theirs — by grift and theft.

And Huma, former wife of disgraced congressman and convicted Internet pervert Anthony Weiner, is now wed to decade-younger financial royalist Alex Soros, son of George, who made the bulk of his fortune (estimated $7.2-billion) shorting the British pound sterling in 1992 and went on to found a vast array of NGOs and so-called philanthropies (the Open Society Foundations) that specialize in influencing elections worldwide, conducting regime-change campaigns, and lately financing seditious movements within the United States. Heir-apparent Alex is reported to have taken over the day-to-day operations of that network — but, we must have no kings, you understand.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has actually tried, against all odds and endless threats, to represent the interests of common US citizens, that is, most of us, the non-royal, and to navigate the collective consciousness of this human mass away from the long-creeping, imposed insanity. He was blind-sided and sandbagged by enemies in his naïve first term. But Trump has returned — after an astonishing exhibition of spiteful incompetence by his adversaries — much-chastened by previous failure and injury with a far-better crew, much better-prepared with a program for redeeming a spavined economy, reinstating common sense in the daily life of the nation (i.e., resistance to absurd propositions), and reform of a dangerous rogue bureaucracy.

The remnant Left is reeling now, most recently from last week’s SCOTUS decision foreclosing the universal injunction nonsense sponsored by Norm Eisen and Mary McCord’s lawfare corps. That campaign, which raged for five months, might prove to be their last gasp. You know, though, that they are plotting another round of election fraud for the 2026 midterms. But it looks like their previous frauds are on the verge of being uncovered — finally, after years of evasion and no help from a treasonous news media — and there’s a fair chance that they can’t pull off more fraud next time. Passage of a proof-of-citizenship law for national elections could seal that deal.

But first, the massive hurdle of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Whatever its virtues and defects, it must be gotten over for this larger effort of a journey back to civilizational sanity to continue. Hazards lurk at every turn. The awesome national debt hangs ominously over the whole enterprise and might sink it yet. Certain players in Europe steer deeper into their own insanity and look more and more like true enemies of the USA — far more than Russia does now — and then there is China: powerful, still rising, plotting cunningly. Plenty of travail awaits, but we’ll be better able to get through it with our minds right and our aim true. Aim to stay sane.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Stay Sane appeared first on LewRockwell.

A lot of the misunderstanding U.S. policy makers have of foreign countries is caused by the lousy reporting in U.S. media.

Here is just one of many examples:

After War With Israel and U.S., Iran Rests on a Knife Edge (archived) – NY Times, Jun 29 2025
The Islamic Republic limps on after the 12-day conflict. Where will the nation go from here?

The piece was filled by Roger Cohen – the ‘Paris Bureau chief for The Times’ – from Dubai.

The opener is somewhat weird:

Roxana Saberi felt like she was back behind bars in Tehran. As she watched Israel’s bombing of Evin prison, the notorious detention facility at the core of Iran’s political repression, she shuddered at memories of solitary confinement, relentless interrogation, fabricated espionage charges and a sham trial during her 100-day incarceration in 2009.

Like many Iranians in the diaspora and at home, Ms. Saberi wavered, torn between her dreams of a government collapse that would free the country’s immense potential and her concern for family and friends as the civilian death toll mounted. Longings for liberation and for a cease-fire vied with each other.

That ‘longings’ language would fit the opener for some soft-porn essay. But it has nothing to do with the question the piece is supposed to (but does not) answer.

Roxana Saberi is U.S. born to an Iranian mother and a Japanese father. She lives with her parents in North Dakota. Only six out of her 48 years were spent in Iran where she worked until 2009 as a reporter for various western propaganda outlets. After she had been found in possession of secret documents she was jailed and later kicked out of country.

How can she be expected to tell us where Iran will go from here? She can’t.

Neither can any of the other persons quoted in the too long piece:

… said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London think tank.

And who is that?

At Chatham House, Sanam directs a diverse portfolio of research and policy initiatives, addressing critical issues such as Gulf Arab security and economic transitions, Iran’s regional ambitions, governance and political reform, women’s empowerment, and the intersection of climate and socio-economic challenges.

Another source of the NY Times:

… said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent political scientist in the United Arab Emirates. “A weak Islamic Republic could hang on four or five years.”

Looking at Abdulkhaleq Abdulla vita I wonder how he is prominent ‘in the UAE’:

Dr. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla is a Senior Fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He is a United Arab Emirates national, …

Professor Abdulla was a Fulbright Scholar, a Visiting Professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics. He holds PhD in political science from Georgetown University and master’s degree from American University.

I see a lot of U.S. academia merits but not much Gulf experience in there.

Another of the NY Times ‘experts’:

… said Jeffrey Feltman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington

Feltman is a former U.S. diplomat who has spent years in Tel Aviv but none in Iran. The Brookings Institute where he resides is the publisher of the Which Path To Persia pamphlet which is the still current manual for regime change in Tehran.

And last but not least one at least somewhat local ‘expert’:

“The people of Iran are fed up with being pariahs, and some were more saddened by the cease-fire than the war itself,” said Dherar Belhoul al-Falasi, a former member of the United Arab Emirates’ Federal National Council

‘Saddened by the cease-fire’? Falesi would know that how? He was quoted in Zionist media when he rejected to give UAE money to Hamas or the Palestinian Authority because ‘are corrupt’. Sure. How could they not be. But what does he know of Iranians?

There you have it. A New York Times piece which diagnoses Iran to be on a ‘knife edge’ based on five ‘experts’ none of whom is in Iran or has recently (if ever) been there. But all of them are from the very same swamp of U.S. foreign policy academics or ‘think tanks’ that live off and digest such pieces.

It feels like an outside look on some mysterious object with random guesses of what may be inside.

It is just a remix of the very same opinions that have been blubbered for years.

How is any policy maker supposed to get some understanding of Iran from it?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post NYT – Guessing About Iran With ‘Experts’ Who Lack Knowledge of It appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Vatican is set to publish a new Mass text called the Mass “for the care of creation.”

In a press note issued June 30, the Holy See Press Office announced details of a press conference on Thursday which will be the launch pad for a new Mass.

“There will be a press conference to present the new form of the Mass ‘pro custodia creationis,’ which will be added to the Masses ‘pro variis necessitatibus vel ad diversa’ of the Roman Missal,” the note read.

The Mass is believed to be joining the list of votive Masses in the Roman Missal.

Presenting the new Mass text will be two notable Vatican officials from the relevant dicasteries:

• Cardinal Michael Czerny, S.J., prefect of the Dicastery for Service of Integral Human Development.
• Archbishop Vittorio Viola, OFM, secretary of the Dicastery for Divine Worship.

At the moment, it is not yet known how long the Mass has been in preparation, though it is highly likely to have originated under the pontificate of Pope Francis.

It will be of key significance to examine the text upon its release, given another high-profile liturgical case that is currently underway – namely the three-year “experimental phase” of the Amazon rite, which seeks to draw from local Amazonian customs.

Alongside this is the pagan-linked, inculturated Mayan rite, which the Vatican is currently considering for the “indigenous” inculturation of people in Mexico.

Where the Mayan and Amazon “rite” differ to the expected Mass “for the care of creation” is that the former have been posited as inculturated rites, while the latter is understood to be more akin to a votive Mass.

Francis made the “care of creation” a prominent theme throughout his pontificate, dedicating numerous speeches and addresses to it.

His 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si’ became the reference text for a number of Vatican and papal initiatives focused on the so-called “green” agenda. In it, Francis spoke about a “true ecological approach” which listens to “both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” The document later gave rise to the Laudato Si’ Movement, which aims to “turn Pope Francis’ encyclical letter Laudato Si’ into action for climate and ecological justice,” as the mass divestment from “fossil fuels” finds inspiration in the late pontiff’s environmental writings.

In October 2023, Francis published a second part to Laudato Si’ in the form of an apostolic exhortation named Laudate Deum.

The late pope also made numerous calls to action for global leaders to implement the pro-abortion Paris Climate Agreement, citing the “negative effects of climate change” and an “ecological debt” which required “climate finance, decarbonization in the economic system and in people’s lives.”

Cardinal Czerny’s Dicastery for Service of Integral Human Development is the Roman office charged with the practical implications of Pope Francis’ ecological concerns, along with his focus on the topic of migrants.

Recently, the dicastery recalled the 10th anniversary of of Laudato Si’, calling it “a unique opportunity to relaunch the commitment to our common home, a mission in which we are all called to actively participate.”

Archbishop Viola of the Dicastery for Divine Worship is better known for his opposition to the traditional Mass – a campaign which has been in full swing with increased pace in recent years, following Pope Francis’ Traditionis Custodes. Expanding even on those restrictions, Viola was believed to be writing a new document last summer which would have seen Pope Francis attempt to implement a new sweeping ban on the traditional Mass. That document never emerged; it is believed the text made it to Francis’ desk but that he never signed it.

As LifeSiteNews’ Jeanne Smits documented, Viola is a known admirer of one of the main architects of the Novus Ordo in 1969: Archbishop Annibale Bugnigni. Viola has chosen to wear Bugnini’s episcopal ring.

No official meeting between Pope Leo XIV and Viola has been recorded in the Pope’s public diary. One meeting has been documented between Leo and Viola’s superior, Cardinal Arthur Roche, which took place on June 3.

Czerny has been received on two official occasions, although it is quite possible that Pope Leo met with Czerny and Viola privately to discuss the new Mass text.

The text will be released on Thursday morning.

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post Vatican Announces New Votive Mass ‘for the Care of Creation’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Do something every day to help undermine public perception of the empire.

Draw attention to its abuses in places like Gaza.

Get people laughing at its absurdities and hypocrisies.

Spread distrust in the imperial propaganda services known as the western press by spotlighting their deceptions and manipulations.

Help people to recognize all the ways their government is screwing them over for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

Facilitate the collective dawning of the realization that everything westerners have been taught about their society and their world is a lie.

Help people to understand that it really, truly does not need to be this way.

Use every means at your disposal to help open up the next pair of eyelids to the ugly reality of the empire.

Cultivate a habit of daily acts of sabotage against the imperial machine. There is always something you can do.

You cannot defeat the machine by yourself, but you can do something every day to help tilt our society’s collective consciousness toward tearing it down together.

❖

Everyone keep pushing. It’s working. https://t.co/4Enf7GejNl

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 29, 2025

❖

I still can’t get over how we’re being asked to pretend “Death, death to the IDF” is some kind of hate crime at the exact same time IDF soldiers are telling the Israeli press they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians at aid sites.

I’ve been seeing a number of people arguing that it’s wrong to say “death to the IDF” because soldiers aren’t to be blamed for the criminality of their government. This framing is only accepted in the west because western soldiers also do evil things that our society needs to make up excuses for.

As an aside, “Death, death to the IDF” is an insanely catchy earworm. Been dancing around in my mind all day.

❖

Deliberately starving a civilian population and then setting up aid sites as a death trap to massacre starving people trying to get food is too evil to wrap your mind around. If we saw a supervillain doing this in a movie we’d think it was dumb, because it wouldn’t be believable.

❖

It’s like everyone’s standing around watching a man beat a small child to death at a restaurant.

“Should we do something?” someone asks.

“You saw the kid throw food at the guy,” someone replies. “The man has a right to defend himself.”

“But he’s killing him!”

“It’s a fight. Bad things happen in a fight.”

“Yeah, the boy shouldn’t have started a fight he can’t win.”

“You’re actually being quite hateful right now.”

And sure, maybe it’s true the child did set the man off by throwing food at him.

Maybe the child did so fully knowing that it would send the man into a murderous rage, because the man had been horrifically abusing the child his entire life.

Maybe instigating a physical confrontation in full view of the public was the child’s last desperate attempt to expose the man’s depravity, in the hope that everyone would finally see what’s happening and do something to stop the abuse.

But nobody’s stopping it, because the man has spent years charming and befriending everyone in town — or frightening and intimidating them if that’s easier.

So now everyone’s watching a grown man beat a child to death and pretending they’re watching a fight, when they all know deep down what they’re really watching is a cold-blooded murder by a cold-hearted man, who should have been stopped and locked away a long time ago.

❖

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency is saying that Iran could probably start enriching uranium again within a few months, which Iran has said it plans to do, and which Trump has said will result in another US bombing assault.

Trumpers tried to argue that the bombing of Iran was a brilliant strategic maneuver to avoid full-scale war, when it appears to have only made such a war much more likely. Now the president is saying he’ll bomb Iran again if it resumes enriching uranium, something it will probably be able to do quite soon, after giving Iran every reason to start actively seeking a nuclear weapon.

When Iran hawks were arguing against the JCPOA (the Iran nuclear deal laid out during the Obama administration), one of their most common talking points was that it was “kicking the can down the road” to a nuclear-armed Iran in the future. In reality the JCPOA was a remarkable feat of international diplomacy that could have avoided all these needless escalations, and it is Trump and the Iran hawks who have been kicking the can down the road to full-scale war with Iran (if Iran doesn’t get nukes first).

There’s a lot to despise Trump for, but spending both of his terms setting the US on a trajectory toward war with Iran ranks right up around the top of the list. The JCPOA was working fine, but Trump shredded it in 2018 to set us on this path that is only getting darker and darker at a faster and faster pace. Trump chose that course of action to implement his “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran. Trump chose to assassinate Soleimani. Trump chose to bomb Iran. Everything that happens from here on out is Trump’s fault.

_____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my mailing list, social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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“He who saves his country violates no law,” tweeted President Trump in February. He was echoing a line often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. His supporters were electrified by Trump’s tacit invocation of a right to boundless power.

The Trump presidency is already spurring legal battles across the nation. It is far too soon to speculate on Trump’s final win/loss record in federal courts. But Americans should be aware of how the entire judicial process is skewed against holding officialdom liable for its crimes.

Whitewashing torture

The most stunning example of federal impunity is the whitewashing of the Bush administration torture scandal. President George W. Bush unleashed a worldwide torture regime that left victims dead and maimed around the globe. But federal officials and federal judges made sure that not a single torture policymaker or CIA torturer faced any penalty for their barbarity.

Torture policymakers seemed to recognize only one possible adverse consequence from getting rough with their targets. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong,” wrote Jonathan Fredman, the top lawyer for the CIA Counterterrorist Center in 2002. A congressional hearing in June 2008 revealed that “C.I.A. lawyers believed they had found a legal loophole permitting the agency to use ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading’ methods overseas as long as they did not amount to torture,” the New York Times reported. Fredman warned other federal lawyers involved with sanctifying the interrogation regime: “If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental.”

The official attitude toward killing detainees was stark early on in the case of Gul Rahman. He was captured by U.S. agents in October 2002 and was suspected of being a militant. The CIA subjected Rahman to “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower and rough treatment.” Rahman died in November 2002 after effectively freezing to death “after being stripped naked from the waist down and shackled to a cold cement wall in the Salt Pit, where temperatures were approximately 36°F.” Rather than face prosecution for killing Rahman, the primary CIA interrogator was recommended for a $2,500 cash award for his “consistently superior work,” according to a 2014 Senate report.

For government officials, the decisive legal question is not what federal law prohibits but what behavior will be punished. What happens when feds violate the law of the land?

Today’s legal system allows presumed good intentions to almost always exonerate the worst abuses by government officials. As long as they deny criminal intent, they will almost always be absolved by their fellow government employees.

The Intentions Test for government officials becomes almost a tautology. People work for the government because they want to help other people. Therefore, when some government official violated some legal technicality, did he intend to do something bad?

The Bush administration exploited this presumption to argue in secret memos that U.S. government agents could not be found guilty of torture regardless of their conduct. Bush-appointed lawyers showed how easily even the most aggressive interrogators could be free of a torturous intent:

Because Section 2340 [of the federal Anti-Torture Act] requires that a defendant act with the specific intent to inflict severe pain, the infliction of such pain must be the defendant’s precise objective. If the defendant acted knowing that severe pain or suffering was reasonably likely to result from his actions, but no more, he would have acted only with general intent. As a theoretical matter, therefore, knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not constitute specific intent…. Thus, even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith.

The memo offered the following illustration: “In the context of mail fraud, if an individual honestly believes that the material transmitted is truthful, he has not acted with the required intent to deceive or mislead.” Mailing brochures on bogus cholesterol cures helped set the standard for government employees who maimed detainees who did not confess quickly enough. The memo assured would-be torturers and torture supervisors: “A good faith belief need not be a reasonable one.”

Good-faith torture

Such legal reasoning spawned a world-wide epidemic of “good-faith torture.”

The Justice Department memo recited the damage of 9/11 in order to justify the presumption that torture would prevent similar carnage: “Given the massive destruction and loss of life caused by the September 11 attacks, it is reasonable to believe that information gained from al Qaeda personnel could prevent attacks of a similar (if not greater) magnitude from occurring in the United States.” But a 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report finally released in 2014 concluded that the torture failed to produce any information that prevented terror attacks or saved American lives.

In one of the most stunning assertions, the Justice Department stressed that even intentionally killing people during an interrogation might be okay:

The necessity defense may prove especially relevant in the current circumstances. First, the defense is not limited to certain types of harms. Therefore, the harm inflicted by necessity may include intentional homicide, so long as the harm avoided is greater (i.e., preventing more deaths).

Second, it must actually be the defendant’s intention to avoid the greater harm….

Third, if the defendant reasonably believed that the lesser harm was necessary, even if, unknown to him, it was not, he may still avail himself of the defense….

Clearly, any harm that might occur during an interrogation would pale to insignificance compared to the harm avoided by preventing such an attack, which could take hundreds or thousands of lives.

The Justice Department preemptively exonerated U.S. government officials who violate the Anti-Torture Act: “If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate Section 2340A, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network.” The Justice Department did not explain why preventing a catastrophic attack is the only reason why a suspect might be maimed during interrogation.

The memo sanctified boundless power by stressing the uniqueness of the post–9/11 world: “The situation in which these issues arise is unprecedented in recent American history…. [These] attacks aimed at critical Government buildings in the nation’s capital and landmark buildings in its financial center.” But President James Madison did not announce that the U.S. government was obliged to start torturing people after the British burned down Washington in 1814.

After the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Bush continually stressed America’s good intentions as proof that the U.S. government did not torture. On June 22, 2004, Bush responded to criticism: “Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country…. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.” Bush continually recited his praise about American values whenever he was challenged about the torture he authorized.

Justifying torture

In late 2005, 18 months after leaked memos revealed the Bush administration’s belief that the
Anti-Torture Act was null, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibited the use of “cruel, inhumane, or degrading” interrogation methods. Top Justice Department officials responded to the new law with a secret internal memo declaring that all the interrogation methods currently being used — head slapping, waterboarding, frigid temperatures, and blasting with loud music to assure sleep deprivation — were not “cruel, inhumane or degrading.” The secret torture memos, written by assistant attorney general Steven Bradbury, relied on “a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that ‘shocks the conscience’” would go too far.

Other administration officials used the same standard to exonerate themselves. Vice President Dick Cheney, who largely dictated the Bush policy, was asked in a television interview, “What’s the president’s prerogative in the cruel treatment of prisoners?” Cheney invoked the “shocks the conscience” standard, and then mentioned that “what shocks the conscience” is to some extent “in the eye of the beholder.” This standard leaves it up to government officials to decide whether they are personally offended about how they are using their power. If a policy does not shock a politicians’ conscience, it must be okay.

The “shock the conscience” test becomes a slippery slope. The more abuses government commits, the more numb people become. What would have been condemned one year evokes shrugs and yawns a few years later. This becomes Barbarism on the Installment Plan. Cheney publicly declared his approval for simulated drowning of detainees, even though the U.S. government had considered this a war crime for over a century.

In 2007, the New York Times detailed how, after 9/11, the CIA constructed an interrogation program by “consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture.” For decades, the U.S. government condemned Soviet, Egyptian, and Saudi torture. But interrogation systems designed to compel victims to sign false confessions supposedly provided the model for protecting America in the new millennium.

In a July 2007 executive order, Bush offered a “good intention” definition of torture. Bush stressed that interrogators are prohibited from “intentionally causing serious bodily injury” and “acts intended to denigrate the religion, religious practices, or religious objects of the individual.” Bush banned “willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual in a manner so serious that any reasonable person … would deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency, such as sexual or sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation.”

Former Marine Corps Commandant Paul X. Kelley condemned the new guidelines for encouraging abuses: “As long as the intent of the abuse is to gather intelligence or to prevent future attacks, and the abuse is not ‘done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual’ — even if that is an inevitable consequence — the president has given the CIA carte blanche to engage in ‘willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse.’” Georgetown University law professor David Cole noted that Bush’s order “appears to permit cutting or bruising a suspect so long as the injury does not risk death, significant functional impairment or ‘extreme physical pain,’ an entirely subjective term.” The key portion of the executive order — the list of approved interrogation techniques — was kept secret. Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch observed, “All the order really does is to have the president say, ‘Everything in that other document that I’m not showing you is legal — trust me.’”

Thanks to this legal framework, none of the deaths that occurred during interrogations by U.S. government agents were homicides. Instead, they were simply accidents, regardless of how much force was used or how many bones were broken. The CIA made tapes of its vigorous interrogations but destroyed them, even though a federal court had ordered their preservation. Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible crimes because “certifications were given” by the Justice Department which absolved the CIA agents “who permissibly relied on it.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) derided this position “as the Nuremberg defense…. I had authorization and therefore I’m immune from prosecution.”

But the Bush torture policymakers got away with their crimes — thanks in part to President Obama betraying a campaign promise and issuing a blanket exoneration for interrogation abuses.

A license for tyranny

Freedom cannot survive such impunity. The government uses strict liability to judge companies and industries that deal with hazardous substances. With this standard, an individual can be found liable even without proof of negligence or reckless behavior. The more force a government official uses, the more he should be judged by a strict liability standard.

The more power a person seeks, the less credit his unverifiable intentions deserve. Politicians and the media encourage people to judge rulers by the same standard used for aunts and uncles. But good intentions are far more dispositive in private life than in political life. This is especially true of high-ranking government officials, who almost always avoid vigorous courtroom and congressional examinations of their conduct — much less depositions.

“Meant well” is sufficient apology for bone-headed birthday presents but not for the destruction of rights and liberties. The Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution to protect Americans against politicians who claimed good intentions. Nothing has happened in the subsequent centuries to justify giving any politician a good intention license for tyranny.

This article was originally published in the June 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.

The post The Good Intentions License for Tyranny appeared first on LewRockwell.

“It is one thing merely to believe in a reality beyond the senses and another to have experience of it also; it is one thing to have ideas of ‘the holy’ and another to become consciously aware of it as an operative reality, intervening actively in the phenomenal world.” — Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

The rock is the color of sand, and unevenly flat, like a scale model of a vast but low mountain range worn down by ancient glaciers. Or, here, by human touch and the gravity of what people carry in their depths to this hallowed ground.

It’s a square that measures roughly 10 feet by 10 feet. It is in the floor of what is called the Church of All Nations, also known as the Church of Gethsemane or the Basilica of Agony, in Jerusalem. It is next to the Garden of Gethsemane and the rock is traditionally believed to be the place where Jesus prayed to God for the last time—Father, take this cup, yet not as I will, but as you will—before he was betrayed by Judas, as he knew he would be, and arrested. The rock is alive. It resonates with the profound history of the Christian faith, takes you back 2,000 years to when and where it all began.

I am standing nearby, a learned and curious observer. The lighting is dim and the sounds are hushed. I watch people approach the rock with what I imagine to be awe, reverence, and most likely some inarticulable blend of many other emotions. Everyone is respectfully silent or speaking in whispered tones. Some people stand and gaze at it, others kneel beside it and for a moment remain there in an attitude of prayer.

The solemnity is occasionally broken. Some people pose to have their pictures taken with the rock behind them, fixing their hair just so for the sake of posterity. Others video the place, their camera lights piercing the dimness like police searchlights, rending the contemplative air. I wonder: What do these people hope to capture. Or remember? Taking photos or videos can project you into the future. You’re hoping to remember a place and time in which you were never really present to begin with. And if you aren’t present in this place, you miss the whole point of being here, which is to affix yourself to the passion of Jesus and pay homage to the life and death of a man who changed the course of humanity by showing us the direct way to God.

This is what I’m thinking when, above the din of the traffic outside and the hushed voices inside, comes the faint and mournful cry of a woman kneeling by the rock. She is dark-skinned and dressed in a bright green sari. There are a few others with her, also with dark skin and in saris of other bright colors, each one standing or kneeling by the rock, some bowing down to kiss it and to lay their foreheads on it. The woman in the green sari lets out a wail, like she’s just learned about the death of her only child, pulls back, then collapses on the marble floor, and is consoled by her companions. Then another woman collapses nearby and is held in the arms of yet another as she gazes up at the vaulted ceiling, painted a deep blue and filled with stars and olive branches, reminiscent of the nearby Garden of Gethsemane at night. Another from the group steps close to the rock, kneels, bows, and lays her forehead upon it, and begins to cry—a little at first, then in big, heaving sobs.

At the time, I was a fledgling theologian. It was June 1999, the summer before my final year as a seminarian in New York City. I took my studies seriously and at one point in those inspiring but difficult years, I concluded that any Christian theologian worth his or her salt had to make a pilgrimage to the place on earth where Jesus Christ lived and died. To sidestep that part of my education felt like someone learning how to cook by studying recipes but never setting foot in a kitchen and making anything. Or learning how to love another by reading about it.

No doubt, the academy was filling my head with new knowledge and the wisdom of the ages, which is an important component of any theological education. But I felt there was no substitute for immersing myself in the geography of where Christianity began. We are all born of a place; we all come from somewhere. And so does religious faith. We can learn a lot about ourselves and others by tracing our historical roots. So too when it comes to religious faith. At the time, this was important to me. And it remains important to me now.

As I watch these women sob at the site of Jesus’ final hours before his crucifixion, I have to admit that all the years up to then, learning from wise professors and from hefty tomes and fragments of primary sources found in the seminary’s catacomb-like library stacks, had done nothing to impress upon me an undeniable feeling for the Christian faith—its complete embodiment—that I was witnessing in these women.

The memory has stayed with me for all these years. I am writing about this now because I’m coming to understand that without feeling rooted—not only to place, but also to an inexpugnable transcendent vision of human existence—we become easy prey for the manipulative whims and dark, shifting winds of certain overlords who have always been with us and who have aspired to nothing else but to render us all into human chattel. They did it during Jesus’ time. And they’re doing it now.

Rudolf Otto (September 25, 1869 – March 6, 1937) was a renowned German theologian and historian of religion. His book, The Idea of the Holy, drawing upon a variety of Western and Eastern sages and informed by personal experience, was one of the defining works of the 20th century. Although his work is inspired by a handful of prominent German thinkers, particularly Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Jakob Fries, and Karl Barth, The Idea of the Holy stood out from the theological orthodoxy of that time and foreshadowed the religious explorations that would follow and continue up to the present day.

First published in German in 1917 and in English in 1923, the book has never gone out of print and is now available in some 20 languages. Its full title is The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. Consider this title a warning that with this book you’re not getting any “lite” beach reading. To be sure, when I first read sections of it at the seminary, I found much of it impenetrable. I recently read the entire book and still found sections of it, if not impenetrable, then at the very least difficult to understand and absorb. I found myself having to re-read many sentences, and even entire pages, to fully comprehend what Otto was describing. And I really wanted to understand it all because I knew deep in my heart that it was of great value and importance, perhaps now more than ever.

I think part of the reason the book is difficult to understand is due to its origin in the German language and its grammar, which do not always translate easily into English. But another reason is simply because of the subject matter itself. The holy—the entire idea of it that Otto tries to pinpoint and dissect as though under a kind of intellectual microscope—is both simple and complicated. That is, the experience of it, while profound, is simple; writing about it is quite another matter. In other words, Otto claims that we know the holy when we encounter it like we know our own face when we see it reflected back at us, like those women did kneeling at the rock in that church in Jerusalem. But it can be nearly impossible to describe because, as even Otto himself admits, the personal experience of it is almost beyond words. It is, in a word, ineffable.

We may experience the holy but once in our lifetimes or we may have many such experiences, but, in either case, they are always fleeting. Yet, they stay with us. We are changed. Otto calls these fleeting experiences encounters with the “numinous”, a word that Otto coined from the Latin word numen, or divine power, in a similar way that we get the word “ominous” from the Latin word “omen.” Otto described it as a “creature-feeling” or creature-consciousness. Here are Otto’s own words to define this divine power:

“The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its ‘profane,’ non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”

Individual experiences such as these are invaluable because they reveal to us where we stand in the universal and eternal scheme of things: that we are small and insignificant; that we think we know so much but actually know so little. This is an inescapable conundrum of the human condition for those of us with the insight and courage to admit it. Yet, at the same time, these encounters of the holy also impress upon us the capacity to sense and cooperate with a divine authority above all others. We might call this a process of discernment. And it is both liberating and troubling. Once we have had an experience of the divine it should come as no surprise that we can then recognize evil.

And it’s these powers of discernment and divine authority that the contemporary transhumanists stalking the world—just like all dictators throughout history—want to eradicate from us so they can manipulate us and capture us in the physical and virtual web—think of 5G and 6G technology and AI for starters—of their satanic malfeasance. If we lose our connection to the holy, we lose an essential feature of our human nature—our capacity for discernment and our connection to that which is transcendent. Otto himself says as much: “Its disappearance would indeed be an essential loss.” But not only that. Without the holy as a constant presence in our lives we put ourselves at the mercy of those who want to control us, and they are closing in.

Sadly, I think a lot of people have either forsaken this capacity in themselves or have never even known it and, as a result, have unwittingly or enthusiastically given themselves over to the long-running takedown of Western civilization, the final assault of which got underway in 2020 with the COVID-19 psyop, and which is continuing in a myriad of ways today, right up to the recent and fraudulent “No Kings” demonstration that spilled out into streets all over America, funded by—unbeknownst to the riled up participants—as James Howard Kunstler points out, “Shanghai-based software billionaire Neville Roy Singham, Walmart heiress Christy Walton, Paypal partner (and Linked-in founder) Reid Hoffman, and father-and son team, George and Alex Soros.” The demonstrators and their backers are much the same coterie who badgered us to “trust the science” and line up to get injected with a so-called vaccine that, as it turned out—and as many of us knew from the get-go—is a bioweapon designed to control and maim and kill us.

I am loathe to give any globalist a fraction of an inch of this column, but we need to know their agenda, and it’s been stated in no uncertain terms by Yuval Noah Harari, a key advisor of that demonic alliance, the World Economic Forum:

“Some governments and corporations, for the first time in history have the power to basically hack human beings. There is a lot of talk about hacking computers and hacking smart phones and hacking bank accounts, but the big story of our era is the ability to hack human beings. And by this I mean, if you have enough data, and computing power, you can understand people better than they understand themselves, and then you can manipulate them in ways which were previously impossible. And in such a situation, the old democratic systems stop functioning. We need to reinvent democracy for this new era in which humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have a soul and spirit and they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening inside me so whatever I chose, whether in the election or whether in the supermarket, this my free will, that’s over.”

It’s not over, I’m here to say, and it will never be over as long as we summon the strength from within to not only turn off in every way possible the globalist’s attempts at “hacking” our minds and bodies and souls, but also by developing and maintaining our capacity to remember the holy. The holy is the foremost antidote to the transhumanist toxicity. But the holy is not something we do. It is something we experience; it’s something that happens to us. It cannot be taught. It cannot be bought. It can only be awakened in the mind, Otto insists, as “everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.” Perhaps most important, according to Otto, it is something that is felt. And this feeling for the numinous is an experience of the divine that, Otto maintains, eludes comprehension in rational terms. We can set out to find it. But more often than not, the transcendent finds us. And it goes way, way back. Otto writes:

“It first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny’, ‘eerie’, or ‘weird’. It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point, for the entire religious development in history…. And all ostensible explanations of the origin of religion in terms of animism or folk-psychology are doomed from the outset to wander astray and miss the real goal of their inquiry, unless they recognize this fact of our nature—primary, unique, underivable from anything else—to be the basic factor and the basic impulse underlying the entire process of religious evolution.”

Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane perfectly encapsulates this holy awe. It is in light of this ancient numinous experience that we can begin to comprehend the import of this agony. Otto writes: “Can it be ordinary fear of death in the case of one who had had death before his eyes for weeks past and who had just celebrated with clear intent his death-feast with his disciples? No, there is more here than the fear of death; there is the awe of the creature before the mysterium tremendum, before the shuddering secret of the numen.” The women I saw weeping at the stone in the Basilica of Agony seemed to me to have felt this essential and ungovernable “awe of the creature” that Christ must have felt 2000 years ago.

As I watched those women, I felt a little envious of them. I longed to feel what I believed they felt, to trade in the critical and exegetical machinations of my mind for the simple yet profound embodiment of Christ’s passion. When we recall that agony, either there at the rock where Jesus prayed, like those women, or at the altar of the holy feast of the transubstantiated bread and wine, or anywhere else for that matter—when we recall those final hours of the earthly life of Jesus, as he commended us to do during what we call the Last Supper, we unite his agony with our own. It is the agony experienced by anyone who stands up to despots and their evil diktats in the struggle for the individual human sovereignty divinely bestowed upon each of us at birth, nay, even at the moment of our conception.

The Idea of the Holy has had many admirers over the years, including from the very outset the prominent Swiss psychologist, C.G. Jung; the renowned Romanian historian of religion and philosopher, Mircea Eliade; and the celebrated British Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis. Other prominent figures who claim to have been influenced by Otto’s work include Mohandas Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, Martin Heidegger, and Ernst Jünger.

In his 1938 book, Psychology and Religion, Jung defines the numinous as “a dynamic existence or affect, not caused by an arbitrary act of will.” He goes on to say, “On the contrary, it seizes and controls the human subject, which is always its victim than its creator. The numinosum is an involuntary condition of the subject, whatever its cause may be…. The numinosum is either a quality of a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence causing a peculiar alteration of consciousness.” All told, for Jung, the solution to all our dilemmas is found through an encounter with the numinous. Jungian analyst James Hollis writes in his book, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times: “Until we can find that which links us to that which transcends us, in whatever arena we may find it, we will be torn apart… until then, our conflicts have brought us only suffering without meaning.”

In the opening paragraph of Eliade’s notable 1957 book, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, he praises the original point of view that Otto offers:

“Instead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious experience…. Passing over the rational and speculative side of religion, he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect. For Otto has read Luther and had understood what the ‘living God’ meant to a believer. It was not the God of the philosophers…. it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in the divine wrath.”

In his 1940 book, The Problem of Pain, Lewis offers an extensive depiction of the numinous:

“Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room,’ and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the room’, and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it…. This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.”

Not all encounters with the numinous are dreadful and disturbing; not all are, as Eliade writes, “manifested in the divine wrath.” They can also be serene and sublime. Otto writes of such encounters:

“The awe or ‘dread’ may indeed be so overwhelmingly great that it seems to penetrate to the very marrow, making the man’s hair bristle and his limbs quake. But it may also steal upon him almost unobserved as the gentlest of agitations, a mere fleeting shadow passing across his mood. It has therefore nothing to do with intensity, and no natural fear passes over into it merely by being intensified. I may be beyond all measure afraid and terrified without there being even a trace of the feeling of uncanniness in my emotion.”

In The Problem of Pain, Lewis offers what he believes to be the finest example of just such an encounter from the English Romantic-era poet, William Wordsworth, who describes in the first book of his “Prelude” a scene of rowing on a lake one evening in a stolen boat. In the middle of the lake in the quiet of the night, Wordsworth writes:

There’s another scene in the fourth book of that “Prelude” that to me speaks of the numinous as an experience not of dread—not “a trouble to my dreams”—but of sublime beauty. It reads thus:

I took a seminar in college on the English Romantic poets and it was one of my favorites. I still have the textbook, a thick volume, underlined (of course) in many places and whose spine is cracking from all the use I’ve made of the book over all these years, and from which I copied the lines above. One of the lines from the second example that struck me then and still strikes me today is this:

Numinous moments—always unexpected yet sometimes invited or evoked or sought after—change us, set us off in directions we had not previously anticipated. They come and they go. Yet, as Wordsworth knows—and we who have had such encounters know—they yet survive. They live within us and guide us through the rest of our days, help us discern between right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Or, in the first example of Wordsworth’s poem, they haunt us. In either case, they become encoded within us and shape who we are in such a way that they cannot be taken from us. And that’s a good thing.

I’ve begun to wonder if these authoritative powers of self-knowledge and discernment and divine authority—what we read in the Letter to the Ephesians as the “armor of God”—can intuitively alert us to the tempting but heinous provocations of illusion and false promises of those wolves in sheep’s clothing that Jesus warns us about, of which the profane realm is chockfull at every turn. And of which we most recently endured in spades during the COVID-19 psyop: Two weeks to stop the spread; masks protect you and those around you; social distancing keeps everyone safe; the school closures, the shutting down of businesses (although, curiously, big box stores and liquor stores were allowed to remain open); the closing of public parks and beaches was for the common good; the COVID-19 vaccines (which were not vaccines) are safe and effective.

Truly, never has there been a greater and more destructive payload of lies rained down upon the human race. I did not fall for these lies and I know many others who did not. And I wonder if having had an initiatory experience of the numinous at some point in our lives—and being attuned to the transcendent as a result—helps us see through the lies of those trying to sell us false promises, be it concerning a used car, a so-called vaccine, or even a way to God. Which is to say that we know Kool-Aid when we see it. And we refuse that cup knowing it is a sham. Or, worse, poison. And perhaps this explains why it’s been so hard for us to get through to others who bought and embraced the lies—and continue to do so. They simply don’t know what the rest of us know. Which gives us no reason to gloat but rather an opportunity to understand.

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The Feast of Corpus Christi, with its traditional public processions, is a call to all people to turn away from worldly cares and worship Christ as a mystical body.

Political obsession is a reality we all have to live with. On any given day, even when we intentionally avoid the news, it seems that we hear Trump’s name at least three times a day. If only people would speak as passionately about our Blessed Lord! Perhaps then we would all be just as Jesus-focused as we currently are Trump-focused. A personal anecdote from the Feast of Corpus Christi highlights this fixation on political disagreements.

In my local Latin Mass church, we have a great devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and every year we are blessed to celebrate Corpus Christi with a solemn procession. Starting from our TLM church, we process to two other Catholic churches that are within walking distance. It’s a beautiful coordination between three Catholic communities that synchronize their Mass times to participate in a shared procession. We arrive with the Blessed Sacrament to each church as they end their Mass. Then we spend time with the Blessed Sacrament, placed on an altar prepared outside of each church. The procession ends back at the first church, and all participants can spend time afterward in fellowship.

Note that only one of these churches celebrates the Latin Mass. The second church celebrates the Novus Ordo in English while the third church celebrates the Novus Ordo in Spanish. Because of this, our Corpus Christi procession is a beautiful celebration exemplifying what true unity inside the Catholic Church should look like. Diversity of race, language, or liturgical preference have no importance when it is time to adore our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, for whom we all prepare a special place of honor in our churches.

Nevertheless, the diversity of race is precisely where the political friction was trying to disrupt our prayer. The third church, as noted above, celebrates Mass in Spanish for a large Hispanic community. As the procession was approaching this church, we began singing prayerful songs in Spanish in admiration of their patron saint. As we arrived, the Hispanic community was joyfully waiting outside for the Blessed Sacrament. The monstrance was placed on their prepared altar, which was generously decorated with flowers. The small children from their community stood behind the altar and threw rose petals beside the altar.

In the middle of adoring the Blessed Sacrament, as rose petals gently flew from the hands of the little ones and hundreds joined in praising God with Spanish songs, we heard a shout from behind us: “ICE is coming!” Many of us did not notice the shout, as it was muffled by the voices singing. However, the same shout was heard a second time from the same voice: “ICE is coming!” And then a third time: “ICE is coming!”

The truth of the matter was ICE was not coming. ICE was nowhere in sight. An actual arrest by an ICE official in our town is practically unheard of, despite the frequent talk about Trump trying to deport every single Hispanic immigrant. Nonsense, of course, and unfounded exaggerations from propagandists. Nonetheless, it still came up in one of the most sacred moments of worship on the Feast of Corpus Christi. In the midst of what should have been an intimate moment of experiencing Heaven on Earth, encouraged by the beautiful assembly of hundreds from different Catholic church communities, someone had to raise political frictions.

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The post Big Beautiful Bankruptcy appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Krall wrote:

“to be the greatest president in American history.”

Sorry, that ship has already sailed.

The post President Trump: Seize Your Opportunity… appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

Hi Lew,

I enjoyed reading your latest article on the Libertarian (Rothbard’s) position on nuclear weapons. It’s interesting that so many nuclear bombs have been set off in the Northern Hemisphere vs. the Southern Hemisphere that the Northern Hemisphere has more background radiation than the Southern Hemisphere. There is no safe level of radiation.

After Fukushima, one almost feels like they need a Geiger Counter to buy fish from the Pacific at the market. Odd that no one tested nuclear weapons in the Atlantic Ocean. Gee, I wonder why.

“Mommy! Why is the salmon in the fridge glowing?”

Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate and shouldn’t be allowed. Poison gas has been outlawed, as has germ warfare. Why not ban nuclear weapons?

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Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

My News

The post Mammals could regenerate damaged tissue by turning on ‘genetic switch’: Chinese team appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

See here.

The post Zohran Mamdani: ‘I don’t think we should have billionaires’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/la-tassa-canadese-sul-digitale-smaschera)

Ora le carte sono sul tavolo. Nel mezzo della fase accesa dei negoziati commerciali con gli Stati Uniti, il Canada sta introducendo una tassa digitale che graverà sulle spalle dei giganti tecnologici americani con miliardi di dollari di costi. In risposta il presidente Trump ha interrotto i colloqui con Ottawa e ha annunciato nuovi dazi.

Tra i giocatori di poker, c'è il giocatore che è freddamente calcolatore: calcola le probabilità, soppesa i rischi e gioca le sue carte con sobria precisione. Accanto a lui c'è il giocatore d'azzardo: impulsivo ma non sconsiderato; agisce in modo spettacolare, ma all'interno di una struttura strategica che padroneggia con virtuosismo. Ora immaginate un'eccezione patologica accanto a questi archetipi: un giocatore che rivela le sue carte prima ancora che il round inizi, per poi andare all-in subito dopo. Il Primo Ministro canadese Mark Carney rientra in questa categoria.

Il governatore di Bruxelles in Nord America

L'ex-governatore della Banca d'Inghilterra, convinto globalista e crociato per il clima, e in seguito al clamoroso fallimento di Justin Trudeau nuovo garante dell'agenda europea in Nord America, si è trovato invischiato in un gioco geopolitico più grande di lui con l'annuncio di una tassa digitale sulle aziende tecnologiche straniere.

L'imposta entrerà in vigore il 1° luglio, con effetto retroattivo al 1° gennaio 2022, e colpirà le aziende tecnologiche straniere con un fatturato superiore a $20 milioni con un'aliquota del 3%. Ottawa ne chiede il pagamento, puntando la sua freccia al cuore della potenza economica americana, la Silicon Valley. Giganti statunitensi come Apple, Meta e X dovranno pagare sanzioni per oltre due miliardi di dollari.

Un affronto nel peggior momento possibile (o l'escalation era pianificata?), messo in atto da un primo ministro che giocava una mano debole da una posizione di debolezza. Proprio come in Germania, la produttività e il reddito pro-capite sono diminuiti dopo i lockdown: il programma di regolamentazione climatica, il caos migratorio e uno stato socialista di redistribuzione, ispirato dall'UE, sta aprendo una nuova strada alla paralisi economica nella società.

Carney si dimostra il candidato ideale per quell'élite globalista che sta guidando il Canada, ricco di risorse, verso la prossima fase del suo declino. Nei negoziati con Donald Trump, agisce in piena conformità con la scuola negoziale di Bruxelles: avanza richieste sconclusionate, rifiuta qualsiasi forma di compromesso e dà pubblicamente priorità ai principi ideologici rispetto a un percorso negoziale razionale.

Non aver capito il punto di svolta

Ma questa volta il copione sembra prevedere una svolta: la risposta di Washington è stata rapida e decisamente brusca. Trump ha definito la leadership politica canadese una “copia dell'UE” in risposta alla tassa digitale di Carney, avvertendo che presto seguiranno nuovi dazi statunitensi.

Infatti Ottawa sta seguendo fedelmente la linea di Bruxelles: leggi sulla censura, regolamentazione delle piattaforme mediatiche, pressioni fiscali sulle aziende statunitensi, il tutto volto a spezzare il dominio americano nel mondo digitale e, come beneficio collaterale, ad alleviare un po' il bilancio statale già in difficoltà. Cosa spinga un primo ministro, in questa fase dei negoziati commerciali, ad andare al massimo diventa chiaro se si segue la linea suggerita da Trump e si considera il Canada come un satellite dell'UE (che diversamente da quest'ultima è ricco di risorse invece). Carney ha familiarità solo con la strategia della terra bruciata.

Pertanto la risposta intransigente di Trump invia un segnale inequivocabile a Bruxelles: l'era della diplomazia è finita. Bisogna muoversi.

Trump smaschera la macchina delle bugie di Bruxelles

In quanto europei che rivendicano la libera autodeterminazione e la sovranità individuale, dovremmo essere grati a Donald Trump. Come all'inizio della controversia commerciale con l'UE, egli punta un'enfasi sfacciata sul protezionismo di Ottawa nel caso del Canada. L'opinione pubblica ha bisogno di maggiori prove di questo protezionismo, spesso abilmente mascherato, di Bruxelles e della sua filiale canadese. Trump ha menzionato esplicitamente nella sua risposta a Carney la barriera tariffaria fino al 400% imposta dal Canada all'agricoltura americana ben prima che iniziasse questa partita.

Menzogne, manipolazione moralizzatrice dell'opinione pubblica e protezionismo a sangue freddo: ecco come si può descrivere in modo più chiaro la linea di Bruxelles.

Nel discorso pubblico l'Unione Europea si presenta sempre come la paladina del libero scambio, come una potenza liberale e aperta agli occhi dell'ordine pubblico. Dietro le quinte travolge i concorrenti extraeuropei con una rete di obblighi di armonizzazione, normative climatiche e codici di condotta che uccidono la concorrenza leale fin dalla nascita. Un libero scambio con barriere all'ingresso integrate e un campo minato per scoraggiare i nuovi arrivati: tecnicamente ben confezionato, moralmente giustificato, economicamente devastante.

La linea dura di Trump nei confronti di Bruxelles e del Canada mette in luce la realtà geopolitica. È prevedibile che nella disputa commerciale con Bruxelles incontreremo altri strumenti, finora non rivelati, del protezionismo europeo. Come già detto: le carte sono ora sul tavolo.

Segnale di avvertimento ai “Five Eyes”

Il goffo tentativo di escalation del primo ministro canadese ha messo in luce una faglia geopolitica: da un lato gli Stati Uniti e i suoi partner, fedeli ai valori della libertà (si pensi al presidente argentino Javier Milei); dall'altro si sta formando un cartello globalista, guidato da Bruxelles, l'Unione Europea e dai suoi satelliti come Ottawa. Grazie alla svolta politica interna dell'amministrazione Trump, questa differenza è ormai lampante. Mentre in Europa la politica, i sindacati, le chiese e il “cordone sanitario” dell'agenda verde-socialista – composto da una miriade di ONG e media statali – difendono ciecamente l'agenda woke sul clima e sulla ridistribuzione, negli Stati Uniti il ​​vento è già cambiato.

I violenti scontri nelle roccaforti della California, fortemente influenzate dagli europei, sottolineano la crescente pressione esercitata dalla nuova amministrazione statunitense su questi contesti. Lo stesso vale per la politica migratoria. Qui il divario tra Stati Uniti e Unione Europea è così ampio che persino l'occhio allenato, che guarda attraverso le lenti della propaganda europea, non può più ignorare la realtà: gli Stati Uniti stanno finalmente gestendo come si deve la crisi migratoria e stanno tornando alla serietà politica interna.

Trump invia un segnale chiaro al mondo occidentale: chiunque tenti di appropriarsi della forza innovativa americana, o di bloccarla attraverso la regolamentazione, verrà dichiarato un paria senza esitazione. Diffuso tramite la piattaforma social di Trump, Truth Social, questo messaggio di ieri è rivolto all'UE, al Canada, all'Australia, al Regno Unito e all'industria tecnologica della Silicon Valley, che ora può contare sul sostegno della Casa Bianca.

“Faremo sapere al Canada quali dazi dovrà pagare per fare affari con gli Stati Uniti d'America”, ha dichiarato Trump. Il presidente degli Stati Uniti non sta solo imponendo una sanzione economica: sta mettendo in luce i veri rapporti di forza, visibili ormai a tutti. Chiunque voglia fare affari col più grande mercato unico del mondo dovrà accettare le regole del Paese ospitante. Questo è il nuovo sistema a cui la gente dovrà abituarsi, e in fretta.

Il nuovo ruolo dell'America

Proprio come nella politica monetaria, dove gli Stati Uniti sono riusciti ad abbandonare la City di Londra e il meccanismo LIBOR controllato dalle banche europee introducendo il sistema SOFR, un nuovo corso americano sta emergendo geopoliticamente. Anche il viaggio di Trump in Medio Oriente a maggio ha segnato un nuovo tono: gli affari sono diventati centrali e stanno emergendo i primi tentativi di un nuovo ordine mercantile nella regione. Che si tratti di Arabia Saudita, Qatar o Emirati Arabi Uniti, Trump li ha convinti tutti a investire centinaia di miliardi di dollari nella reindustrializzazione degli Stati Uniti.

Nessuna moralizzazione europea, nessuna politica divisiva volta a consolidare il potere a livello locale: Trump osa riorganizzare il Medio Oriente.

Settimane frenetiche in arrivo

E l'Europa? Proprio come nel caso dell'eliminazione del programma nucleare iraniano da parte dell'esercito statunitense, o dell'accordo sulle terre rare che coinvolge l'Ucraina, la politica europea non svolge più nemmeno un ruolo di supporto. È diventata irrilevante. Ci sono battaglie di ritirata e distrazioni, come la tassa digitale del Canada, che rivelano la debolezza geopolitica del Vecchio Continente. L'Europa è bloccata sulla difensiva, dipendente dai flussi energetici di terze parti, invischiata nel conflitto ucraino e impotente nella gestione del commercio globale.

Trasferendo questa perdita di rilevanza geopolitica degli europei ai prossimi negoziati commerciali con gli Stati Uniti, possiamo aspettarci spettacolari capovolgimenti di fronte a Bruxelles, battibecchi mediatici e la consueta diffamazione del presidente degli Stati Uniti da parte dei media generalisti. L'Eurocartello e i suoi alleati devono ancora compiere il balzo in avanti, intellettualmente o politicamente.

Proprio come Bruxelles presume erroneamente di averla fatta franca con Trump, che accetta l'obiettivo NATO del 2% come sufficiente per ora, sperando di ricadere in schemi comportamentali e tattiche di perdita di tempo ormai familiari, un'amara verità incombe su questa disputa commerciale: gli Stati Uniti fanno sul serio e risolveranno i loro problemi interni tornando ai valori americani di economia di libero mercato, stato minimo e responsabilità personale. E questi valori saranno difesi all'estero con la massima severità.

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

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Americans have, of late, heard a lot about “common good” capitalism. However, as with most political adjectives and modifiers, the term is misleading, and as a result, a false premise on which to build one’s understanding.

As Donald Boudreaux has recently written, “If all that ‘common good capitalism” means is capitalism as understood and championed over the past 250 years by liberal scholars… this new name serves no good purpose…it suggests (what I’ll call) ‘true capitalism’…doesn’t promote the common good…Yet…advocates of true capitalism (including me), do indeed believe that true capitalism promotes the common good. And to back our case, we’ve got lots of sound theory and solid evidence.”

Leonard Read, founder and guiding light of the Foundation for Economic Education, “the granddaddy of all libertarian organizations,” was one of the strongest voices for there being no difference between true capitalism and capitalism that advances the common good for decades. He most directly addressed such issues in his “Exalting the Common Good,” Chapter 13 in his 1982 The Path of Duty, the last book he published.

Read started with an inspirational quote, at least for those who believe in freedom, from George Sutherland, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1922 to 1938:

To sustain the individual freedom of action contemplated by the Constitution is not to strike down the common good, but to exalt it; for surely the good of society as a whole cannot be better served than by the preservation against arbitrary restraint of the liberties of its constituent members.

Unfortunately, Justice Sutherland’s wisdom is a far cry from what most people today, or when Read wrote, seem to believe.

Most citizens in today’s U.S.A. haven’t the slightest understanding of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Sutherland, on the other hand, understood these writings as well as did the authors of these politico-economic, spiritual documents: the greatest in all history! The basic premise that separates the American experiment in Man-Government relationships from all others is contained in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

So how much did those who signed that document believe in the freedoms it enshrined? What were they willing to put on the line as a result?

Reflect on the fact that these signers were, for the most part, men of means…signing their own death warrant, so contrary to popular opinion were their glorious intentions!

They were willing to trade their well-being to bring about, at best, the birth of a nation with unprecedented freedom principles; or a dangerous hangman’s rope, at worse!

Almost to a man, they paid a heavy price…Few survived to live out natural lives. They pledged–and they paid–and in doing so they gave birth to your and my freedom. Would you have signed the Declaration? Your answer is affirmative—provided that you are trying, regardless of opposition and unpopularity, to regain the liberty our Founding Fathers bequeathed to us Americans. Hail to their wisdom, courage and exemplarity.

But what has that got to do with “common good” capitalism?

Justice Sutherland insisted that we should exalt the common good, his reference being the good set forth in our Constitution.

Why do so few approve, accept and abide by the freedom way of life?…The truth as I now see it? No one can or ever will be able to explain the miracle of freedom. Were clear, lucid and persuasive explanation a requirement, some one or more of us would need to understand and explain every facet of human action–creativity at the human level. No individual is or ever has been graced with such wisdom. Nor is such omniscience necessary for a belief in freedom.

Many individuals have looked upon freedom, not as a miracle, but as an explainable way of life. Being unable to explain it themselves and knowing of no one who can, they hold it in far less esteem than socialism which they find easier to explain.

[Consequently] All but a few are blind to freedom’s miracles…[because] the more one knows the more awareness of how little he knows…is the beginning of such wisdom as is within mortal man’s domain.

There are reasons galore as to why freedom is not believed to be a miracle. Here is one: Our everyday life is crowded with miracles, so many that they have become commonplace…taken for granted.

Does the inability of anyone to recognize and explain the entirety of the miracle of freedom, which is the miracle of the private property and voluntary relationships of “ordinary” capitalism (not common good capitalism nor crony capitalism nor dog-eat-dog capitalism) mean freedom, clearly in many ways in retreat today, is beyond recovery?

Is it practical to believe in the unexplainable miracle, freedom?

The answer is an unequivocal “Yes.” Why? Because the individual’s freedom to act creatively as he pleases is materially, morally and spiritually sound.

At our down-to-earth level, more miracles than anyone can count result from freedom, the greatest demonstration in all history being the American miracle..[resulting because] When our tiny bits of expertise are free to flow, they configurate…these bits make the miracle.

Some nations have freedom in the blood and are ready to face the greatest perils and hardships in its defense…Other nations, once they have grown prosperous, lose interest in freedom and let it be snatched away from them without lifting a hand to defend it, lest they should endanger thus the comforts that, in fact, they owe to it alone. It is easy to see that what is lacking in such nations is a genuine love of freedom, that lofty aspiration which, I confess, defies analysis. For it is something one must feel.

Let us then believe that the miracle of freedom will rise again!

*Excerpted from Freedom in One Lesson: The Best of Leonard Read (2025), Edited with Commentary by Gary Galles.

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The bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran by the United States makes more salient than usual a vital issue. What is an appropriate libertarian policy for libertarians regarding these weapons? Is it all right for nations to possess them? If they do possess them, is it all right to threaten to use them or even to use them?

In seeking guidance on these issues, we should consult the work of our greatest libertarian theorist, who was thoroughly familiar with the just war tradition and also had a vast knowledge of contemporary events. I refer of course, to Murray Rothbard, and in today’s article, I’m going to discuss a part of his epochal essay “Two Just Wars” that deals with the issues I’ve mentioned.

Murray first discusses a point that would derail his whole analysis if it was accepted. Some people, such as the CIA agent William F. Buckley Jr., argue that killing millions of people isn’t morally worse than killing one person. Thus, if you argue that nuclear weapons kill people indiscriminately, it doesn’t matter.  That of course is a terrible argument. Even if its premise that killing millions of people isn’t morally worse than killing one person is accepted—which of course it shouldn’t be—it wouldn’t follow that it is morally no worse to kill noncombatants than combatants. And nuclear weapons can’t discriminate between these two groups. But Murray takes the argument on his own terms and pulverizes the premise: “William Buckley and other conservatives have propounded the curious moral doctrine that it is no worse to kill millions than it is to kill one man. The man who does either is, to be sure, a murderer; but surely it makes a huge difference how many people he kills. We may see this by phrasing the problem thus: after a man has already killed one person, does it make any difference whether he stops killing now or goes on a further rampage and kills many dozen more people? Obviously, it does.”

For Murray, whether a weapon can discriminate between combatants and noncombatants is the key issue in assessing the morality of using the weapon. He explains this point here: “It has often been maintained, and especially by conservatives, that the development of the horrendous modern weapons of mass murder (nuclear weapons, rockets, germ warfare, etc.) is only a difference of degree rather than kind from the simpler weapons of an earlier era. Of course, one answer to this is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one, But another answer that the libertarian is particularly equipped to give is that while the bow and arrow and even the rifle can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even ‘conventional’ aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a sin and a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.”

Because these weapons cannot discriminate, it is wrong to use or possess them. Moreover, getting rid of them should have the highest priority for libertarians. Doing this is much more important than privatizing the economy, even though that is also very important: “This is why the old cliché no longer holds that it is not the arms but the will to use them that is significant in judging matters of war and peace. For it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, cannot be used in a libertarian manner. Therefore, their very existence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake. And if we will indeed use our strategic intelligence, we will see that such disarmament is not only a good, but the highest political good that we can pursue in the modern world. For just as murder is a more heinous crime against another man than larceny, so mass murder—indeed murder so widespread as to threaten human civilization and human survival itself—is the worst crime that any man could possibly commit. And that crime is now imminent. And the forestalling of massive annihilation is far more important, in truth, than the demunicipalization of garbage disposal, as worthwhile as that may be. Or are libertarians going to wax properly indignant about price control or the income tax, and yet shrug their shoulders at or even positively advocate the ultimate crime of mass murder?”

Murray was always alert to objections, as long as they were serious objections, and one objection he took very seriously indeed is that his views are inconsistent. He opposes wars between nations because he thinks they will almost inevitably lead to nuclear war, but he sometimes supports revolutions within a state. He answers that his views are perfectly consistent: “Now there are crucial and vital differences between inter-State warfare on the one hand and revolutions against the State or conflicts between private individuals on the other. One vital difference is the shift in geography. In a revolution, the conflict takes place within the same geographical area: both the minions of the State and the revolutionaries inhabit the same territory. Inter-State warfare, on the other hand, takes place between two groups, each having a monopoly over its own geographical area; that is, it takes place between inhabitants of different territories. From this difference there flow several important consequences: (1) in inter-State war the scope for the use of modern weapons of destruction is far greater. For if the “escalation” of weaponry in an intra-territorial conflict becomes too great, each side will blow itself up with the weapons directed against the other. Neither a revolutionary group nor a State combating revolution, for example, can use nuclear weapons against the other. But, on the other hand, when the warring parties inhabit different territorial areas, the scope for modern weaponry becomes enormous, and the entire arsenal of mass devastation can come into play. A second consequence (2) is that while it is possible for revolutionaries to pinpoint their targets and confine them to their State enemies, and thus avoid aggressing against innocent people, pinpointing is far less possible in an inter-State war. This is true even with older weapons; and, of course, with modern weapons there can be no pinpointing whatever. Furthermore, (3) since each State can mobilize all the people and resources in its territory, the other State comes to regard all the citizens of the opposing country as at least temporarily its enemies and to treat them accordingly by extending the war to them. Thus, all of the consequences of inter-territorial war make it almost inevitable that inter-State war will involve aggression by each side against the innocent civilians—the private individuals—of the other. This inevitability becomes absolute with modern weapons of mass destruction.”

Let’s do everything we can to get rid of nuclear weapons. A good way to do this is to go all out to distribute Murray article “Two Just Wars.”

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