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Last week I published a long article exploring the history of Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, whose anti-Communist crusade dominated our politics of the early 1950s. His activities gave rise to “McCarthyism” as a term of abuse and despite the passage of three generations, that expression still seems so widely used today that it has its own 14,000 word Wikipedia article.

In February 1950 McCarthy received huge media attention when he began giving public speeches denouncing the alleged dangers our country faced from the subversive activities of Communists and Soviet agents. Based upon my mainstream history textbooks and the media coverage I’d absorbed, I’d always regarded those claims as wildly exaggerated, so I’d been greatly surprised to gradually discover that the domestic threat of Soviet Communist agents had once been at least as severe as McCarthy alleged.

However, although I became convinced that the menace of Communist infiltration had been very real, I still regarded the senator’s own behavior as erratic, with McCarthy prone to making wild accusations. As I wrote a dozen years ago:

In mid-March, the Wall Street Journal carried a long discussion of the origins of the Bretton Woods system, the international financial framework that governed the Western world for decades after World War II. A photo showed the two individuals who negotiated that agreement. Britain was represented by John Maynard Keynes, a towering economic figure of that era. America’s representative was Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and long a central architect of American economic policy, given that his nominal superior, Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., was a gentleman farmer with no background in finance. White was also a Communist agent.

Such a situation was hardly unique in American government during the 1930s and 1940s. For example, when a dying Franklin Roosevelt negotiated the outlines of postwar Europe with Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta summit, one of his important advisors was Alger Hiss, a State Department official whose primary loyalty was to the Soviet side. Over the last 20 years, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and other scholars have conclusively established that many dozens or even hundreds of Soviet agents once honeycombed the key policy staffs and nuclear research facilities of our federal government, constituting a total presence perhaps approaching the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose often unsubstantiated charges tended to damage the credibility of his position.

Some years later I’d read Blacklisted by History, a ringing 2007 defense of McCarthy and his activities by M. Stanton Evans, and last month I did the same with most of the other major books in the pro-McCarthy camp. These included Arthur Herman’s widely praised 1999 biography Joseph McCarthy, Ann Coulter’s 2003 bestseller Treason, the famous 1954 work McCarthy and His Enemies by William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell, and Buckley’s much later 1999 novel The Redhunter, a lightly fictionalized account of the Wisconsin senator’s career. To provide some balance, I also reread Richard Rovere’s short but highly influential 1959 work Senator Joe McCarthy, providing an account quite hostile to the senator.

With the exception of the Rovere book, all these other works had been written by McCarthy’s strongest defenders, but based upon the factual information they provided, my verdict of a dozen years ago was fully confirmed. McCarthy was right that America had faced a great threat from Soviet Communist subversion, but he was frequently wrong about almost everything else.

McCarthy often made wild, unsubstantiated accusations, and he was just as dishonest and careless with facts as his mainstream media critics had always claimed. So although he was hugely successful for several years, he ultimately did enormous damage to his own cause. Moreover, he was very much of a latecomer to the Communism issue and quite possibly merely an opportunist. So he became a public figure who permanently tainted the important work already done by his far more scrupulous and competent political allies.

The widely televised Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954 destroyed his credibility, and a few months later he was censured by an overwhelming vote of his fellow senators. After his political eclipse, he gradually drank himself to death over the next couple of years.

By the late 1950s, the self-destructive nature of McCarthy’s efforts were so widely recognized that they had become a theme of popular fiction. For example, Richard Condon published his Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate in 1959 and it was soon made into a famous movie of the same title. This work portrayed the extremely nefarious plots of Communist agents to seize control of our country, but ironically enough, the McCarthy-like political character was eventually revealed to be a Communist dupe, manipulated by our foreign enemies into destroying our society and its freedoms while capturing our government for the Communist conspirators who secretly controlled him.

• American Pravda: McCarthyism, Part I – The Man
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 28, 2025 • 12,700 Words

Towards the beginning of my long article I described how the 1990s declassification of the Venona Decrypts fully confirmed the enormous influence that agents of Soviet Communism had gained over our federal government during the 1930s and 1940s. By the late 1940s, the discovery of so many very high-ranking Soviet operatives such as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White easily explained the huge attention that McCarthy attracted when he launched his anti-Communist crusade with a public speech in February 1950, and the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg later that same year for nuclear weapons espionage seemed to further boost the credibility of his claims. So although McCarthy’s accusations were often bombastic and unsubstantiated, they resonated deeply with a fearful public grown suspicious that our elected officials were concealing the true extent of ongoing Communist subversion.

The documented existence of all those important Soviet agents was obviously the proximal factor behind the widespread popular support that McCarthy’s political crusade quickly attracted. But I think that there were also much deeper political roots to McCarthyism, roots that have almost always been ignored in our histories of that era, whether these were written by the senator’s many mainstream critics or by his small handful of committed defenders. This strange silence seems due to the controversial nature of that prior history, but an important clue to that hidden backstory may be found in an influential book from that era.

In 1955 Daniel Bell published The New American Right, a collection of essays by leading mainstream American academics, and in 1963 he reissued that same work in much expanded form as The Radical Right. McCarthyism was a major part of the analysis and the last two essays by sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset totaled more than 140 pages with both of these focused upon that subject. Lipset demonstrated that the political campaign of the Wisconsin senator shared many of its ideological roots and much of its social base with the earlier 1930s movement of Father Charles Coughlin, a hugely popular anti-Communist radio priest from neighboring Michigan.

Launched in the late 1920s, Coughlin’s syndicated weekly radio show eventually became political and grew tremendously popular. At his 1930s peak Coughlin had amassed an enormous national audience estimated at 30 million regular listeners, amounting to roughly one-quarter of the entire American population, probably making him the world’s most influential broadcaster. By 1934 the priest was receiving over 10,000 letters of support each day, considerably more than President Franklin Roosevelt or anyone else.

Coughlin began as a strong early supporter of FDR and his New Deal reforms, coining the popular phrases “Roosevelt or Ruin” and “The New Deal is Christ’s Deal.” But he gradually became disillusioned with FDR and his policies, viewing them as insufficiently bold and far too beholden to Wall Street financial interests. So Coughlin instead began encouraging the political ambitions of Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana, a populist figure who planned to challenge Roosevelt for reelection in 1936, running on a radical platform of “Share the Wealth.”

The twin stories of Coughlin and Long and their complex relationship are told in Voices of Protest, an award-winning 1982 book by the distinguished historian Alan Brinkley, who suggested that such a complementary Long-Coughlin political partnership might have given Roosevelt a very difficult race in 1936. But those plans suddenly collapsed in September 1935 when Long was assassinated by a crazed lone gunman, who himself was immediately shot dead. That fortuitous event allowed FDR to win a huge reelection landslide the following year against a weak Republican opponent whose traditional conservative policies offered little popular appeal.

Over the years that followed, Coughlin grew increasingly critical of Jews and Jewish influence, given their hugely disproportionate role as Wall Street bankers, whose activities he regarded as so damaging to the interests of the ordinary American workers whom he championed. In March 1936 he began publishing a weekly political newspaper called Social Justice and it eventually reached a peak circulation of about a million subscribers in the late 1930s, making it one of the most widely read publications in America, having more than ten times the combined circulation of the Nation and the New Republic, the leading liberal weeklies. The complete archives of Social Justice are conveniently available on this website.

Coughlin had always been hostile to Communism, and after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, he began strongly supporting the anti-Communist Nationalist forces, who were also backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Meanwhile, Jewish groups overwhelmingly supported the opposing Loyalist side, heavily backed both by foreign Communists and by Stalin’s Soviet Union. This further increased Coughlin’s suspicion of Jews.

During this same period, Jewish groups and most of the American mainstream media began harshly condemning Nazi Germany for the persecution of its tiny 1% Jewish minority, and these public attacks reached a crescendo after dozens of Jews were killed in the November 1938 Kristallnacht riots, probably orchestrated by some Nazi leaders.

But Coughlin claimed that Jewish bankers had played a crucial role in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that brought Soviet Communism to power, while the very heavily Jewish regime thereby established had been responsible for the deaths of many millions of Christians, easily explaining the Nazi hostility toward Jews and their influence. Coughlin was naturally outraged that our media focused so much of its attention upon the dozens of Jewish deaths at the hands of German Nazis rather than the millions of Christian deaths at the hands of Bolshevik Jews.

These sorts of matters have largely been excluded from our more recent mainstream historical narratives, but they widely circulated at the time. Although I neglected to mention Coughlin I discussed some of these controversial issues in one of my earliest American Pravda articles, published in 2018:

• American Pravda: The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 23, 2018 • 7,000 Words

In 1938 Coughlin established a new anti-Communist political organization called the Christian Front, and according to Wikipedia it soon attracted several thousand members, mostly Irish-American men in New York City and other East Coast urban centers. Around that same time, Coughlin was regularly vilified as a fascist sympathizer and the Roosevelt Administration began making efforts to remove him from the airwaves. These efforts intensified after World War II broke out in September 1939 and Coughlin become a leading opponent of American intervention in that military conflict.

In January 1940, the FBI raided the Brooklyn headquarters of the Christian Front and arrested 17 men on charges of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. But although one defendant committed suicide, the trials of all the others ended in acquittals or hung juries, thus humiliating the federal prosecutors.

But pressure continued and by September 1940 Coughlin was forced to end his radio broadcasts. Then in April 1942 the Espionage Act of 1917 was invoked to ban his Social Justice newspaper from the mails, effectively eliminating nearly all his national media influence. Thus, government action had been used to silence the voice of America’s leading broadcaster and also ban the distribution of one of our largest national newspapers, actions vastly more serious than anything done during the anti-Communist domestic campaigns of the Korean War era a decade later.

This extreme crackdown on Coughlin continued as FDR’s Attorney General Francis Biddle soon convened a federal grand jury to indict him and his publication on charges of sedition. Biddle then worked out a deal with Coughlin’s ecclesiastical superior Archbishop Edward Mooney, promising that the U.S. Justice Department would drop its prosecution of the priest if he closed Social Justice and permanently ceased all his political activities. With Mooney threatening to suspend his ministry, Coughlin agreed to those severe terms. Although he remained the pastor of his local church and lived until 1979, his political and media activities had come to a permanent end.

With Coughlin no longer having a media platform to publicly defend himself, his bitter enemies were able to construct an entirely one-sided narrative of his history and beliefs, and in the aftermath of the American victory in World War II, this official verdict on Coughlin’s political career became an extremely hostile one. Decades later, my history textbooks dismissed him in just a sentence or two as a popular antisemitic demagogue with strong fascist tendencies, someone who regularly promoted various implausible conspiratorial theories regarding Jews and Communism.

This huge stigma ensured that when a new generation of rising Republican leaders such as McCarthy and Richard Nixon entered Congress in the first postwar elections of 1946, they apparently never considered identifying themselves with a defeated and demonized figure such as Coughlin, who was already fast becoming a fading memory in elite DC circles. Also, many of these new elected officials had made their names and reputations in World War II, thus rendering Coughlin’s fierce opposition to that conflict especially toxic.

And this harsh dismissal of Coughlin grew even stronger over the generations that followed, after all direct memory of his once enormous national influence had been forgotten. All that remained was the very negative image inserted into our history books of a failed, antisemitic political demagogue who had supported our Axis enemies.

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The post McCarthyism – Political Payback appeared first on LewRockwell.

Presidents, like corporate CEOs and everyone else, have a limited span of control.  They can’t know everything or focus on everything.  Most presidential decisions are just acceptances of subordinate’s decisions. I know it.  I have been there.  I have seen it, both the President of the United States and the CEOs and boards of corporations are dependent on information that comes from below. And often in the case of government the information from below is from outside.

We are now witnessing this in the Trump regime. Real ID is a George W. Bush/Cheney regime measure from the fake “war on terror” that was used by Washington to remove Arab governments opposed to Greater Israel.  Until Trump, no president wanted the flack of imposing it on “free” American citizens, thus revealing to them how unfree they are.  But the police state crowd see Trump’s concern with illegals as an opportunity to finally get their old handiwork from the “war on terror” Implemented.  And Trump has obliged. 

We are also witnessing the ruling establishment’s success in removing Trump’s people in the hopes of replacing them with one of theirs.  Having learned nothing from failing to stand by General Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser for ten minutes in Trump’s first term, Trump has repeated his mistake.  He kicked his national security advisor upstairs to be US Ambassador to the UN.  Why?  Because someone mistakenly included the Jewish editor of the leftwing magazine, The Atlantic, in on a meeting about bombing Yemen.  

Clearly, the invitee list was a staff responsibility.  The real problem is that Atlantic editor Goldberg did not announce at the meeting that he doubted he was supposed to be present in a national security discussion.  Instead he kept silent, took notes, and published an article.  I do think that his dishonest behavior displaying a total lack of integrity is indictable.  Instead of kicking his national security advisor upstairs, Trump should have had AG Bondi arrest and prosecute Goldberg for revealing national security secrets. But Trump would be too afraid to treat an Israeli-protected person that way. So Trump sacrificed his national security advisor.

Trump’s failure signals weakness or inattention, and now they are after his Defense Secretary. Same kind of charge. Hegseth let some confidential information out via some communication service to the delight of the Israel Lobby, which is using the mistake to have Hegseth removed. 

People are confused about this, because Hegseth is a Zionist, a full-time supporter of Israel. What got Hegseth in trouble is that he listened to knowledgable Pentagon personnel who explained to him that a US war with Iran for Israel was fraught with danger. He was advised, correctly, that once the US ignited a war Washington had no ability to control it.  The consequence could be the destruction of Washington’s bases in the Middle East and loss of every Navy aircraft carrier in the vicinity.  Hegseth backed off, Israel hit the roof, and Hegseth had to fire the advisers who told him the truth.

According to the liberal/left, the Democrats, and the media, Trump is tyrannical strength itself, imposing dictatorship on America, but neither Trump nor his administration have the strength to stand up to Israel.

What Trump is going to do is to make Israel great, not America.

All over the Western world it is already the case in many countries, such as Great Britain and Germany that criticism of Israel or of Jews is a criminal offense, and it is becoming the same in every Western country, eventually even in Russia. In America the Trump regime is deporting students who protest Israel’s American-supported genocide of the Palestinians.  Long ago Israeli propagandists convinced Americans that every Palestinian, even 3-year old children, was a terrorist who wore bomb vests in order to kill Israelis.  All the while Israel killed Palestinians, 3-year olds included, by the bomb load.

Even in the Red State of Texas, if you protest Israel’s genocide of Palestine, you are ineligible to have a state contract.

America is totally owned by Israel.  So is Trump.  So how can America be “made great again”?

The post Trump Is Destroying America, but He Is Making Israel Great appeared first on LewRockwell.

I remember reading an October 2019 issue of Forbes about how Italy was already insolvent and would never get out of its debt trap.

A debt trap occurs when economic growth and population demographics—not enough young people to take care of retired people—become grossly insufficient to finance a society’s growing debt (private and public).

At the time I wondered how international banking institutions would deal with Italy’s pending debt crisis. Then along came COVID-19, which seemed to justify a fresh round of massive money creation.

Though not as crass as Italy, the U.S. was also, at the beginning of 2020, apparently giving up on the real economy growing sufficiently to balance increasing U.S. government debt financing of America’s standard of living.

Debt is a rational instrument when it is used to increase productivity—NOT when it used to create money out of thin air and disbursed to legions of unproductive people and activities. Debt is also unproductive when it is primarily used for inflating assets such as large homes and the price-to-earnings ratio of stocks.

At the beginning of 2020, it was the clear the Federal Reserve would eventually have to raise interest rates to slow down inflation, which would raise borrowing costs to an untenable level, which would put an end to the debt-financed party that had raged since 2009.

What could possibly justify a fresh round of money-creation out of thin air?

Along came COVID-19, and on March 27, 2020, the U.S. government passed the CARES Act—an instrument for bailing out the entire economy reminiscent of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 for bailing out Wall Street, only the amount of money created ($2.2 trillion) for the latter crisis was a much larger sum, equivalent to 10% of U.S. GDP.

At the time I wondered if the danger of COVID-19 to ALL of society, including young people, was being grossly exaggerated to justify this insanely extravagant money creation. About a year later I had a conversation with Ed Dowd in which he persuasively argued that this was indeed the case.

At the end of 2021, I had a conversation with New York state attorney named Beth Parlato. Beth had, during the pandemic, devoted her legal practice to suing hospitals to allow dying patients to take Ivermectin and other off-label drugs in an attempt to avoid being put to death on a ventilator.

At the end of our conversation, I asked her if she was still getting many calls from patients’ families who needed her help.

“No,” she replied. “The phone has fallen fairly silent. I think maybe the war is over.” In that instant, I had an eery thought that another “war” would soon arrive to take the pandemic’s place.

The situation in Ukraine had been heating up that fall, and it occurred to me that the Biden administration was not doing anything to avert it from turning into a full blown crisis. My perception was confirmed when the baleful Vice President Kamala Harris was sent to address the Munich Security Conference in February 2022.

Her bizarre and contradictory speech about Ukraine and NATO struck me as yet another provocation of Russia.

Yesterday I listened to an interview with a financial analyst and former hedge fund manager named Alex Krainer about the European Union’s untenable financial condition.

Apparently because the people who run the E.U. and Germany have lost their minds, they have severely damaged Germany’s economy by taking various measures against it (which Krainer elucidates).

The stunning irrationality of British and E.U. administrators is symbolically expressed in their recent talk about using aerosols to dim the sun after these same people spent billions in erecting gigantic, ugly, and inefficient solar panels.

All of this raises a provocative question — namely, is war with Russia now the EU’s only hope for avoiding financial collapse?

Krainer mentions the parallel of Alberta, Canada’s oil reserves being used as collateral for more debt issuance during the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Have the lunatics in Washington and Brussels fantasized about using Ukrainian and Russian mineral assets to collateralize yet more debt creation?

Krainer’s recollection of the Russian situation in the 1990s—when Boris Yeltin’s administration sold Russian mineral assets for pennies on the dollar—does indeed seem relevant.

Could it be that Vladimir Putin’s biggest sin—in the eyes of the West—was putting an end to the looting party that raged under Yeltsin? It wouldn’t surprise me if this is at least partly the case.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Pandemic & War Needed for Financial Reset? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Since their decisive losses across the board in the 2024 elections, the Democratic Party has been searching for a way forward and a way to fix its growing unpopularity.

The party has been dogged by continued negative polling figures, with an ABC News-Washington Post-Ipsos poll released last month showing 69% of people believe the Democratic Party is out of touch with most people’s concerns.

An NBC News Stay Tuned Poll released last month showed that when asked which party fights for people like you, 38% said neither party, while 24% said the Republican Party and only 23% said the Democratic Party.

While the party looks for answers and a leader to guide them to victory in the 2026 and 2028 elections, here are some of the reasons Democrats believe their party has lost its popularity.

Not progressive enough

Hard-left members of the Democratic Party have insisted the party’s attempted appeals to centrists during the 2024 campaign were unwise and that they should embrace progressive messages going forward.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have gone on a nationwide “Fight Oligarchy” tour directed against President Donald Trump and Republicans, with stops in Republican areas along with Democratic strongholds. The tour, led by two of the most well-known progressives in Congress, has been criticized by some Democrats like Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). Sanders has pushed back on those critiques.

“Geez, we had 36,000 people out in Los Angeles, 34,000 people in Colorado, we had 30,000 people in Folsom, California, which is kind of a rural area. I think the American people are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are. I think they understand very well that the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90%,” Sanders said on NBC News’s Meet the Press last month.

“If we don’t address that issue, the American people will continue to turn their backs on democracy because they’re looking around them saying, ‘Does anybody understand what I am going through?’ And unfortunately, right now to a large degree neither party does,” he said.

Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate and has run for the party’s presidential nomination twice, also took aim at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for saying the party was unified as the progressive and establishment wings of the party clash over its direction.

“United around what? Are we united around guaranteeing healthcare to all people? … Are we united in tackling a corrupt campaign finance system?” he questioned. “How do you deal with politics in America without understanding that billionaires play an enormously destructive role in both political parties?” Sanders said in an interview on CNN last week.

Bad messaging

Another criticism Sanders had in the CNN interview was the Democrats’ lack of clear messaging.

“You need an agenda,” Sanders said in the interview. “[What] the Democrats need to do right now is to have the courage to take on the very powerful special interests who, to a large degree, control the political process and the legislative process in the United States.”

A lack of clear messaging has been a constant item Democrats have pointed to when asked about the party’s unpopularity. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has been vocal about the party needing a clear message and policies, rather than focusing on candidates and personality.

“I’m not worried about [whether] we will find a great candidate,” he said. “But what do we stand for? What are we about? What are we going to fight for?” Newsom told NBC News.

“Who are we? And if we’re a bunch of dangling verbs and policy statements — I make this mistake often, too. I answer a question with 10 policy responses, as opposed to what do [I] stand for,” he added.

When asked about if she would consider a 2028 presidential run last week, former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo also pointed out that the party must figure out its direction and its message to be able to compete in the next presidential election.

“How will we overcome this impression that we’re elitist, we’re out of touch, we don’t have our sense on the culture?” Raimondo said. “There’s so much to do. I don’t know how many cycles it’s gonna take. There’s a reason there were a dozen years between Carter and Clinton. And I don’t know where we are in that cycle.”

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The post Who Are Democrats Blaming for Their Unpopularity? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Now that the papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio is behind us, it is worth not only assessing his papacy but also the papacy itself. While conservative Catholics criticized Francis’ doctrinal ambiguity, his watered-down moral teaching, and his support for compromised prelates, it is only fair to ask ourselves what his motivations were.

I think they can be summed up in his rejection of the mozzetta before his first appearance that evening of March 13, 2013. In rejecting the traditional red shoulder cape, he reportedly said to Msgr. Marini, “You put it on. The carnival is over.” This, however, is likely an urban legend. Another report has Francis simply saying, “I prefer not to.” Either way, the decision was symbolic.

Francis was signaling a shift away from what he considered an overly grandiose papacy. From his first appearance, saying “good evening” and asking for the people’s blessing, Francis aimed to shift away from a focus on the pope to a focus on the people. Coming from the social struggles of South America, Francis wanted a “poor Church for the poor.”

So, he set about displaying his vision for the Church: He eschewed papal trappings, rejecting ornate vestments and the apartment in the Apostolic Palace for simpler attire and the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse. He referred to himself as the “Bishop of Rome” rather than grander titles, signaling a return to service over splendor. He intended for his leadership style to prioritize dialogue and synodality, encouraging bishops and laypeople to share responsibility for the Church’s mission. He embraced non-Catholic Christians and members of other religions, chatted with atheists, and insisted that the Church was for everyone.

History will judge whether he succeeded in his aims. His critics soon lamented the ambiguity and watered-down Catholicism that invariably accompany attempts at accommodation. His pastoral flexibility undermined the clarity of Catholic moral standards while his ecumenical and interreligious outreach blurred the lines of doctrinal clarity.

All of these elements—both laudable and lamentable—are part of Francis’ legacy, but I doubt whether the Franciscan shift will be more than a blip in the venerable history of the papacy. There are signs that the Catholic Church, and the world in general, has had quite enough of the dialogue and openness that is too often a mask for relativism. There is a hunger for clarity, stability, and the beauty, truth, and goodness that can only be found in traditional Catholicism.

Perhaps instead of pastoral openness, flexibility, synodality, and easygoing ambiguity, Pope Francis’ more lasting legacy will be the fact that he helped Catholics to reassess the papacy itself. In so doing, he helped them regain a fresh understanding of the core of the Faith, what it really means to be a Catholic, and what a pope’s job really is.

The uncomfortable truth is that too many Catholics have a bloated understanding of and admiration for the person and role of the pope. In an age of global celebrity, the pope is right up there with the monarch of England as one of the most famous authority figures on the world stage. And for too many Catholics, the pope is the Catholic Faith. Like the crass Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, in their minds the pope really is an absolute and infallible monarch who cannot err even in the weather forecast. Pope Francis helped to correct that misapprehension. For that, I, for one, am grateful.

Ultramontanism Revisited

Someone quizzed me on social media some time ago, “Is ultramontanism a heresy like Montanism?” I answered, “Montanism is a heresy. Ultramontanism is a mistake.”

Ultramontanism is that 19th-century movement within Catholicism that emphasized the supreme authority of the pope over national churches and secular governments. It emerged as a response to liberalism and secular modernism. It championed centralized papal authority, culminating in the First Vatican Council (1869–1870), which defined papal infallibility; but, over time, a kind of broader ultramontanism became the default setting. One of the contributing factors is that through two world wars the popes provided strong, unified moral leadership—leadership that transcended the political and cultural chaos of the first half of the 20th century.

This centralization strengthened the Church’s unity but also created an image of the pope as an almost superhuman figure. So, by the second half of the 20th century, the stage was set for the larger-than-life papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

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It’s vain and futile to suppose that the disordered minds of Western Civ’s entrenched Wokester Jacobins might ever be subject to polite persuasion about anything they believe. They believe only in the power of pushing their fellow citizens around, and so, alas, the only persuasion that might conceivably work to stop their infantile assaults on liberty, truth, and decency is to push back harder until they suffer and break.

This is something that most parents with young children instinctively understand. You don’t negotiate with two-year-olds. You tell them how things are and what sort of behavior is required of them, as plainly and simply as possible. Mr. Trump, having been the father of many two-year-olds over time, appears to get this. It has been apparent for years that Mr. Trump’s symbolic role as a father figure is the most deeply resented feature of his role in US politics.

It also appears that many men in this country likewise get this, perhaps because nature conditions them early on to understand that some day they might have to play the role of father, meaning they will have to push back hard against emotional disorder, hysteria, illogic, and untruth, and violence.

Hence, you might see the peril of living in a land with so many fatherless households. This lamentable state of things defines the Democratic Party, where raging, inchoate, resentment-driven Jacobinism dwells, a party now with no leader, a household with no father, no one to regulate its frenzied, power-seeking behavior. This also tells you how the Democratic Party has become the party run by women, and by particular types of women — women who have traded the management of children and households for bureaucratic careerism, women too lacking in feminine appeal to attract mates, women attempting to become the men missing in their lives — and men wishing to become women, or pretending to be women.

And so you see how these disorders play out in the ongoing melodrama of men in women’s sports, a proposition so obviously insane that no healthy society has ever abided it for a moment until the American Jacobins ran with it as a cardinal political irritant to vex their opponents (and really for no other reason). The state of Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, clashed openly with Mr. Trump over his executive order to desist from allowing biological men in women’s sports. The matter is currently making its way through the courts.

This week, a “trans” athlete named Soren Stark-Chessa, beat the field of females in a Maine track-meet by a country mile in the 800-meter and 1600-meter runs. No one, except the political leadership of Maine, was fooled about the fairness of this, of course. Fairness is not the point. Intransigent defiance of reality was the point. It is always the point for Jacobin politicians.

What is most obviously insane in matters like this, is that the female governor is so eager to punish and humiliate her younger fellow females in order to merely press a political point — that she is the boss of Maine, and nobody can tell her what to do, even if she deranges the cultures of schooling and sports. This illustrates, by the way, a principal difference in the way men’s and women’s brains work. Men typically understand boundaries, where things begin and end. It is a necessary cognitive device for regulating behavior in the household and for acting in the face of danger when required.

Sports is just a microcosm of our politics. The whole gestalt of Woke-Jacobin politics is driven by the wish to dissolve boundaries. That is, it is driven by female minds, and what the Woke-Jacobins might call female-adjacent minds. That is why the open border fiasco was another point-of-principle for the Democratic Party — and why “Joe Biden” the phantom president (actually the shadowy figures behind him) pretended that nothing could be done about it.

Mr. Trump demonstrated that was a lie in a New York minute. The damage from four years of a wide-open border is immense, much worse than men running in girls’ races. The motive for it is also obvious: to jam as many illegal aliens as possible into the country so as 1) to disorder the next census count in swing states to keep congressional districts safe, and 2) to install a base of new “voters” — qualified to vote or not — who will be eternally grateful to the Democratic Party for letting them flood into the country and gifting them with housing, social services, transportation, free meals, and walking-around money.

And now, a Woke-Jacobin judiciary, assisted by an infrastructure of Lawfare ninjas, led by the outlaw Norm Eisen, and financed by George Soros, and what remains of Soros-adjacent NGOs, is using the courts to keep all those illegally-admitted aliens in place here at all costs. So, you see, they are attempting to dissolve a boundary crucial to the Republic’s survival: who is a citizen and who is not a citizen, and what are the privileges entailed? The objective is to keep this dispute alive in the courts long enough to affect the 2026 midterm elections in the hopes of winning Congress back.

You can also see how this will oblige Mr. Trump to marshal the most aggressive legal force possible to crush this seditious legal insurrection. He has executive powers and perquisites in reserve that he has not used yet, or even revealed. He will defeat these monsters in the end just as he is methodically disassembling their scaffold of psychopathic ideology and their pipelines of funding. It will really be something to see.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

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Tim McGraw wrote:

Hi Lew, Why we need nullification: Lew Rockwell

Great article on nullification. California pays $81.1 billion more to the federal government than the state gets back in funds from the federal government. The $81.1 billion is just about equal to California’s current budget deficit. If the California legislature in Sacramento nullified federal taxes (pigs would fly), the state’s budget deficit would go away.

Tim

PS: It does irritate me when citizens in the other states give us Californians a hard time. We support the country with $81.1 billion a year of our tax money to the federal government. We are the suckers. The rest of the country benefits from our lousy representatives in Congress and Sacramento.

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Waltz Is An Israeli Spy–What Does That Make Trump?

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See here.

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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/chi-controlla-lo-stato-amministrativo)

Il 20 marzo 2025 il Presidente Trump ha ordinato quanto segue: “Il Segretario dell'Istruzione dovrà, nella misura massima appropriata e consentita dalla legge, adottare tutte le misure necessarie per facilitare la chiusura del Dipartimento dell'Istruzione”.

È un linguaggio interessante: “Adottare tutte le misure necessarie per facilitare la chiusura” non equivale a chiuderlo. E ciò che è “permesso dalla legge” è esattamente ciò che è in discussione.

Dovrebbe sembrare un'abolizione e i media l'hanno riportata come tale, ma non lo è. Non è colpa di Trump. Il presunto dittatore ha le mani legate in tanti modi, persino riguardo alle agenzie che presumibilmente controlla, le cui azioni in ultima analisi deve essere lui ad assumersene la responsabilità.

Il Dipartimento dell'Istruzione è un'agenzia esecutiva, creata dal Congresso nel 1979. Trump la vuole chiusa per sempre. Così come i suoi elettori. Può farlo? No, ma può privare l'ente del personale e disperderne le funzioni? Nessuno lo sa con certezza. Chi deciderà? Presumibilmente la Corte Suprema, alla fine.

Il modo in cui ciò viene deciso – se il presidente sia effettivamente al comando o solo una figura simbolica come il re di Svezia – non riguarda solo questa singola agenzia, ma centinaia di altre. Infatti il destino della libertà e del funzionamento delle repubbliche costituzionali potrebbe dipendere dalla risposta.

Tutte le questioni politiche scottanti di oggi vertono su chi o cosa sia a capo dello Stato amministrativo. Nessuno conosce la risposta, e questo per una buona ragione: il funzionamento principale dello stato moderno ricade su una bestia che non esiste nella Costituzione.

L'opinione pubblica non ha mai nutrito grande amore per le burocrazie. In linea con la preoccupazione di Max Weber, esse hanno rinchiuso la società in un'impenetrabile “gabbia di ferro”, fatta di razionalismo asettico, editti inumani, corruzione corporativa e un'incessante costruzione di imperi, non frenata né da restrizioni di bilancio né da plebisciti.

La piena consapevolezza odierna dell'autorità e dell'ubiquità dello Stato amministrativo è piuttosto nuova. Il termine stesso è un'espressione lunga e non si avvicina minimamente a descrivere l'ampiezza e la profondità del problema, comprese le sue radici e le sue filiali commerciali. La nuova consapevolezza è che né il popolo né i suoi rappresentanti eletti sono realmente responsabili del sistema in cui viviamo, il che tradisce l'intera promessa politica dell'Illuminismo.

Questa nascente consapevolezza è probabilmente in ritardo di 100 anni. Il meccanismo di quello che è comunemente noto come “Stato profondo” – ritengo che ci siano strati profondi, intermedi e superficiali – è cresciuto negli Stati Uniti fin dalla nascita della pubblica amministrazione nel 1883 e si è saldamente radicato nel corso di due guerre mondiali e innumerevoli crisi in patria e all'estero.

L'edificio di coercizione e controllo è indescrivibilmente enorme. Nessuno riesce a stabilire con precisione quante agenzie ci siano o quante persone vi lavorino, tanto meno quante istituzioni e individui lavorino a contratto per loro, direttamente o indirettamente. E questa è solo la facciata pubblica; il ramo sotterraneo è molto più sfuggente.

La rivolta contro tutti loro è arrivata sulla scia della crisi sanitaria, quando tutti erano circondati da ogni lato da forze esterne al nostro controllo e di cui i politici sapevano ben poco. Poi quelle stesse forze istituzionali sono state coinvolte nel rovesciare il governo di un politico molto popolare, a cui avevano cercato di impedire di ottenere un secondo mandato.

La combinazione di questa serie di oltraggi – quella che Jefferson nella Dichiarazione d'indipendenza definì “una lunga serie di abusi e usurpazioni, che perseguivano invariabilmente lo stesso obiettivo” – ha portato a un'ondata di consapevolezza e si è tradotta in azione politica.

Un segno distintivo del secondo mandato di Trump è stato uno sforzo concertato per prendere il controllo e poi limitare il potere amministrativo dello Stato profondo, più di qualsiasi altro esecutivo a memoria d'uomo. A ogni passo di questi sforzi, si è incontrato qualche ostacolo, anche molti da tutte le parti.

Ci sono almeno 100 ricorsi legali in corso nei tribunali. I giudici distrettuali stanno criticando la capacità di Trump di licenziare dipendenti, ridistribuire i finanziamenti, limitare le responsabilità e modificare il loro modo di operare.

Persino il primo risultato del DOGE – la chiusura della USAID – è stato bloccato da un giudice nel tentativo di ribaltarlo. Un giudice ha persino osato dire all'amministrazione Trump chi può e chi non può essere assunto presso la USAID.

Non passa giorno senza che il New York Times non si cimenti in una qualche sdolcinata difesa dei servi oppressi della classe dirigente finanziata con i soldi dei contribuenti. In questa visione del mondo, le agenzie governative hanno sempre ragione, mentre qualsiasi persona eletta o nominata che cerchi di frenarle o licenziarle attacca l'interesse pubblico.

Dopotutto i media tradizionali e lo Stato amministrativo hanno collaborato per almeno un secolo per mettere insieme quella che convenzionalmente veniva chiamata “la notizia”. Dove sarebbero altrimenti il NYT o l'intera stampa tradizionale?

Tanto feroce è stata la resistenza ai primi successi e alle riforme spesso superficiali di MAGA/MAHA/DOGE che i vigilanti hanno compiuto atti di terrorismo contro le Tesla e i loro proprietari. Nemmeno gli astronauti di ritorno dallo spazio hanno riscattato Elon Musk dall'ira della classe dirigente. Odiare lui e le sue aziende è la “nuova tendenza” per i minion, in una lunga lista iniziata con mascherine, iniezioni, sostegno all'Ucraina e diritti chirurgici per la disforia di genere.

Ciò che è veramente in gioco, più di qualsiasi questione nella vita americana (e questo vale per gli stati di tutto il mondo) – molto più di qualsiasi battaglia ideologica su sinistra e destra, rosso e blu, razza e classe – è lo status, il potere e la sicurezza dello Stato amministrativo stesso e di tutte le sue opere.

Affermiamo di sostenere la democrazia, eppure imperi di comando e controllo sono sorti sotto i nostri occhi. Le vittime hanno un solo meccanismo a disposizione per reagire: il voto. Può funzionare? Non lo sappiamo ancora. Questa questione sarà probabilmente decisa dalla Corte suprema.

Tutto ciò è imbarazzante. È impossibile aggirare questo organigramma del governo statunitense. Tutte le agenzie, tranne una manciata, rientrano nella categoria del potere esecutivo. L'Articolo 2, Sezione 1, recita: “Il potere esecutivo è conferito a un Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America”.

Il Presidente controlla l'intero potere esecutivo? Si potrebbe pensare di sì. È impossibile capire come potrebbe essere altrimenti. Il capo dell'esecutivo è... il capo dell'esecutivo. È ritenuto responsabile di ciò che queste agenzie fanno. E se la responsabilità si ferma davvero alla scrivania dello Studio Ovale, il Presidente deve avere un minimo di controllo che vada oltre la capacità di etichettare una marionetta per ottenere il parcheggio migliore presso l'agenzia.

Qual è l'alternativa alla supervisione e alla gestione presidenziale delle agenzie elencate in questo ramo del governo? Si gestiscono da sole? Questa affermazione non significa nulla nella pratica.

Per un'agenzia governativa essere considerata “indipendente” significa codipendenza dalle industrie regolamentate, sovvenzionate, penalizzate o altrimenti influenzate dalle sue attività. L'HUD si occupa di sviluppo edilizio, la FDA di prodotti farmaceutici, il DOA di agricoltura, il DOL di sindacati, il DOE di petrolio e turbine, il DOD di carri armati e bombe, la FAA di compagnie aeree, e così via.

Questo è ciò che invece “indipendenza” significa nella pratica: totale acquiescenza a cartelli industriali, gruppi commerciali e sistemi nascosti di tangenti, ricatti e corruzione, mentre i più deboli convivono con i risultati. Questo è quanto abbiamo imparato e non possiamo disimparare.

Questo è esattamente il problema che reclama una soluzione. La soluzione delle elezioni sembra ragionevole solo se le persone che abbiamo eletto hanno effettivamente l'autorità su ciò che cercano di riformare.

Ci sono critiche all'idea del controllo esecutivo delle agenzie esecutive, che in realtà non è altro che il sistema istituito dai Padri Fondatori.

In primo luogo, concedere più potere al presidente solleva il timore che si comporti come un dittatore, un timore legittimo. I sostenitori di Trump non saranno contenti quando il precedente verrà citato per invertire le sue priorità politiche e le agenzie governative si rivolteranno contro gli elettori degli stati repubblicani per vendetta.

Questo problema si risolve smantellando il potere delle agenzie stesse, che, curiosamente, è ciò che gli ordini esecutivi di Trump hanno cercato di ottenere e che tribunali e media hanno cercato di fermare.

In secondo luogo, c'è da preoccuparsi del ritorno dello “spoil system”, il sistema presumibilmente corrotto con cui il presidente distribuisce favori agli amici sotto forma di emolumenti, una pratica che l'istituzione del civil service avrebbe dovuto terminare.

In realtà, il nuovo sistema di inizio XX secolo non ha risolto nulla, ma ha solo aggiunto un ulteriore livello, una classe dirigente permanente che partecipa a un nuovo tipo di spoil system che operava fino a poco tempo fa sotto il manto della scienza e dell'efficienza.

Onestamente, possiamo davvero paragonare i piccoli furti di Tammany Hall alle depredazioni globali della USAID?

In terzo luogo, si dice che il controllo presidenziale sulle agenzie minacci di erodere i sistemi di controllo e bilanciamento. La risposta ovvia è l'organigramma qui sopra. Ciò è accaduto molto tempo fa, quando il Congresso ha creato e finanziato un'agenzia dopo l'altra, dall'amministrazione Wilson a quella Biden, tutte sotto il controllo esecutivo.

Il Congresso forse voleva che lo Stato amministrativo fosse un quarto potere sotto traccia e senza responsabilità, ma nulla nei documenti fondativi mirava a creare o immaginava una cosa del genere.

Se temete di essere dominati e distrutti da una bestia vorace, l'approccio migliore non è adottarne una, nutrirla fino all'età adulta, addestrarla ad attaccare e mangiare le persone, e poi scatenarla.

Gli anni del Covid ci hanno insegnato a temere il potere delle agenzie governative e di coloro che le controllano non solo a livello nazionale ma globale. La domanda ora è duplice: cosa si può fare al riguardo e come arrivare da qui a lì?

L’ordine esecutivo di Trump sul Dipartimento dell’Istruzione illustra il punto. La sua amministrazione è così incerta su ciò che può controllare, persino agenzie che sono interamente esecutive ed elencate chiaramente sotto la voce “agenzie esecutive”, che deve schivare e costruire barriere pratiche e legali, persino nelle sue presunte dichiarazioni esecutive, solo per sollecitare quelle che potrebbero essere considerate riforme minori.

Chiunque sia responsabile di un tale sistema, non è il popolo.

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

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What can we do if Congress passes a bad law? For example, Congress mandates that billions of dollars be spent on aid programs to the Ukraine, the Middle East, and other troubled areas. Of course, we can protest or refuse to pay part of our taxes. But if you try that, the IRS will come after you. In this week’s column, I’m going to talk about a remedy for such bad laws. States have the power to nullify unconstitutional laws, so they do not apply within that state. If the Alabama legislature, for example, nullified foreign aid, the people of Alabama couldn’t be taxed for this purpose.

What is the evidence that a state can nullify an unconstitutional law? Let’s look at an actual nullification, the Kentucky Resolution of 1799, written by the most libertarian of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson: “RESOLVED, That this commonwealth considers the federal union, upon the terms and for the purposes specified in the late compact, as conducive to the liberty and happiness of the several states: That it does now unequivocally declare its attachment to the Union, and to that compact, agreeable to its obvious and real intention, and will be among the last to seek its dissolution: That if those who administer the general government be permitted to transgress the limits fixed by that compact, by a total disregard to the special delegations of power therein contained, annihilation of the state governments, and the erection upon their ruins, of a general consolidated government, will be the inevitable consequence: That the principle and construction contended for by sundry of the state legislatures, that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it, stop nothing short of despotism; since the discretion of those who adminster the government, and not the constitution, would be the measure of their powers: That the several states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy: That this commonwealth does upon the most deliberate reconsideration declare, that the said alien and sedition laws, are in their opinion, palpable violations of the said constitution; and however cheerfully it may be disposed to surrender its opinion to a majority of its sister states in matters of ordinary or doubtful policy; yet, in momentous regulations like the present, which so vitally wound the best rights of the citizen, it would consider a silent acquiescence as highly criminal: That although this commonwealth as a party to the federal compact; will bow to the laws of the Union, yet it does at the same time declare, that it will not now, nor ever hereafter, cease to oppose in a constitutional manner, every attempt from what quarter soever offered, to violate that compact.”

You might object that the Supreme Court, not the states, has the power to declare a law unconstitutional. This objection is wrong. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the Supreme Court the sole say on this matter. This objection is wrong as the great Tom DiLorenzo, the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, explains: “Thomas Jefferson was alarmed during his day of the threat of judicial tyranny. He feared that it could turn the Constitution into ‘a thing of wax’ that could be ‘twisted into any form’ (Letter to Judge Spencer Roane, Nov. 1819). Unlike congressmen and presidents, Jefferson noted, federal judges are ‘more dangerous [to liberty] as they are in office for life’ (Letter to a Mr. Jarvis, Sept. 1820). The federal judiciary, said Jefferson, was ‘the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working underground to undermine our Constitution . . .’ (Letter to Thomas Ritchie, Sept. 1820). Jefferson reminded anyone who inquired that the Constitution does not give the judiciary the sole right to interpret the Constitution. The executive and congressional branches, ‘in their own spheres,’ have equal rights, he said. As president, Jefferson freed everyone imprisoned by the Adams administration’s Sedition Act which made free political speech illegal. ‘I discharged every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition Law,” he said, “because I considered . . . that law to be a nullity.’ The ‘supreme’ court ‘Judges, believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a sentence of fine and imprisonment, because the power was placed in their hands . . . . But the executive, believing the law to be unconstitutional, was bound to remit the execution of it’ (The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson, p. 154). ‘The judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government’ (Letter to A. Coray, Oct. 31, 1823). Experience has shown, however, that ‘they were to become the most dangerous,’ especially because impeachment was so scarce. Yes, government lawyers with lifetime tenure did usurp powers not given to them by the Constitution when they began pretending that they somehow were given a monopoly of constitutional interpretation, but this idea was strongly opposed for generations by Americans in every state. The Jeffersonian position on judicial tyranny prevailed, in other words. In addition to the congress and the executive branch having the right and power to make constitutional interpretations, Jefferson said that ‘I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves,’ organized in political communities at the state and local levels (The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson, p. 154).”

James Jackson Kilpatrick published a great book on this topic The Sovereign States, back in the 1950s. In a review of the book written in 1957, the renowned Southern historian C. Vann Woodward, acknowledged that Kilpatrick had a strong case: “Mr. Kilpatrick has no difficulty in mustering great numbers of instances in which states have imposed a check or a veto upon Federal encroachments. These ‘interpositions’ range from mild remonstrance to stern nullification. It is also a simple matter for him to demonstrate that ‘States’ rights is not a doctrine peculiar to the South’ and to show that every region and just about every state in the Union has at one time or another challenged or vetoed Federal authority. He calls the roll of ‘fourteen respected and honored Northern States engaged in this prolonged and generally successful interposition of their sovereign powers’ against fugitive slave laws, and adds the names of twenty-two Northern states who took action against the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. His favorite argument is tu quoque: ‘This is what you said then, gentlemen,’ or ‘This is Massachusetts speaking,’ or Wisconsin or Ohio. It is true that Mr. Kilpatrick derives most of his comfort from the period before the Civil War. More than two-thirds of his book is devoted to that period and half of that to the 1790’s, when the great Virginia champions of state sovereignty were in full voice. But he will not agree with Chief Justice Chase that ‘the victory of the North killed State sovereignty’ nor concede that Lee surrendered the Tenth Amendment as well as his army at Appomattox. Thirty-five years ago Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger published an article on ‘The State Rights Fetish’ in which he demonstrated that every political party in our history has appealed to the doctrine when out of power and renounced it upon gaining power, and that states and regions have left the same record of inconsistency. He concluded that ‘The state rights doctrine has never had any real vitality independent of underlying conditions of vast social, economic or political significance.’ Of course this is true, but it is not really very helpful. The point is the doctrine demonstrably does have vitality when the ‘underlying conditions’ are right.”

We need only one step more in our argument. We may think that foreign aid programs are bad, but are they unconstitutional? Of course they are. There is nothing in the Constitution that gives Congress the power to spend money in this way. Let’s do everything we can to encourage nullification!

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