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“Now by coming in and being part of the cover-up, the Trump administration has become part of it. I mean, it’s just you cannot see it any other way.”—Alex Jones, InfoWars

Once again, the American police state is choosing to protect predators, not victims.

Jeffrey Epstein—the hedge fund billionaire/convicted serial pedophile and sex trafficker—may be dead, but the machinery that empowered and protected him is still very much alive.

You see, the Epstein case was never just about Epstein—it was about the entire edifice of power that shields the ruling class, silences victims, and erases accountability.

Thus, the latest about-face declarations from the Trump administration—that Epstein had no client list, that he did in fact kill himself, and that there’s nothing more to discuss or investigate so we should just move on—have only reinforced what many have suspected all along: the system is rigged in order to protect the power elite because the power elite are the system.

In this age of partisan politics and a deeply polarized populace, corruption—especially when it involves sexual debauchery, depravity and predatory behavior—has become the great equalizer.

With the reemergence of Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost in the public discourse, we are once again reminded of just how deep the rot goes.

Politics, religion, entertainment, business, law enforcement, the military—it doesn’t matter the arena or affiliation: all are riddled with the kind of seedy, depraved behavior that gets a free pass when it involves the powerful.

For years, the Epstein case has stood as a grotesque emblem of the depravity within America’s power elite: billionaires, politicians, and celebrities who allegedly trafficked in sex with young girls while insulated from accountability.

It is believed that Epstein, who died in jail after being arrested on charges of molesting, raping and sex trafficking dozens of young girls, operated a sex trafficking ring not only for his own personal pleasure but also for that of his friends and business associates.

According to The Washington Post, “several of the young women…say they were offered to the rich and famous as sex partners at Epstein’s parties.”

Despite the government’s insistence there’s nothing more to see, here’s what the public record already reveals:

• Epstein ferried his friends about on his private plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express” after the Nabokov novel, due to the presence of what appeared to be underage girls on board.
• Both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were counted among Epstein’s friends.
• Both Clinton and Trump were at one time passengers on the Lolita Express.
• Both Clinton and Trump are renowned womanizers who have been accused of sexual impropriety by a significant number of women over the years. In fact, The Rutherford Institute represented Paula Jones in her landmark sexual harassment lawsuit against then-President Clinton—a case that helped expose how far the political establishment will go to shield its own.

So you have to wonder… when President Trump, who has used his administration’s war on human trafficking to justify expanding the government’s police state powers, quietly dismantles the very government agencies tasked with investigating and exposing sex trafficking… what exactly is going on?

The message from the top is clear: there will be no accountability.

President Trump has flatly refused to appoint a special prosecutor. His allies in Congress have gone silent. And the same politicians who demand the harshest punishments for undocumented immigrants, protesters, or whistleblowers have nothing to say about the systematic abuse of minors by men in their own orbit.

This isn’t justice. It’s a double standard—one set of rules for the untouchables, and another for everyone else.

If it looks like a cover-up, smells like a cover-up, and appears to benefit all the usual suspects, is it so far-fetched to suspect that the government is once again closing ranks to protect the members of its power elite?

We’ve seen it before: from the CIA’s MK-Ultra experiments and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations to the Pentagon Papers, Iran-Contra, CIA black sites, and NSA mass surveillance.

Each time, secrecy protected the powerful and betrayed the people.

And it will keep happening—again and again—unless we confront the truth hiding in plain sight: that abuse of power is not an aberration of the system—it is the system.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the shadow economy of sex trafficking, where power, profit, and predation converge.

The trafficking of children, the shielding of perpetrators, the systematic silencing of victims—this isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a business model.

This is America’s seedy underbelly.

Child sex trafficking—the buying and selling of women, young girls and boys for sex, some as young as 9 years old—has become big business in America. It is the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either. Boys account for over a third of victims in the U.S. sex industry.

Who buys a child for sex?

Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

Ordinary men, yes. But then there are the so-called extraordinary men—like Jeffrey Epstein—with wealth, connections, and protection who are allowed to operate according to their own rules.

These men skate free of accountability because the criminal justice system panders to the powerful, the wealthy and the elite.

Over a decade ago, when Epstein was first charged with raping and molesting young girls, he was gifted a secret plea deal with then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, President Trump’s first term Labor Secretary, that allowed him to evade federal charges and be given the equivalent of a slap on the wrist: allowed to “work” at home six days a week before returning to jail to sleep.

That secret plea deal has since been ruled illegal by a federal judge.

Yet here’s the thing: Epstein did not act alone.

I refer not only to Epstein’s accomplices, who recruited and groomed the young girls he is accused of raping and molesting, but his circle of influential friends and colleagues that at one time included Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

As the Associated Press points out, “The arrest of the billionaire financier on child sex trafficking charges is raising questions about how much his high-powered associates knew about the hedge fund manager’s interactions with underage girls, and whether they turned a blind eye to potentially illegal conduct.”

In fact, a decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals allowing a 2,000-page document linked to the Epstein case to be unsealed references allegations of sexual abuse involving “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.”

This is not a minor incident involving minor players. Nor are these partisan missteps.

They are systemic betrayals. The predators wear red and blue alike, and the silence spans both aisles of power.

This is the darkness at the heart of the American police state: a system built to shield the powerful from justice.

Sex slaves. Sex trafficking. Secret societies. Powerful elites. Government corruption. Judicial cover-ups.

Once again, fact and fiction mirror each other.

Twenty years ago, Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut provided viewing audiences with a sordid glimpse into a secret sex society that indulged the basest urges of its affluent members while preying on vulnerable young women. It is not so different from the real world, where powerful men, insulated from accountability, indulge their base urges.

Kubrick suggested these secret societies flourish because the public chooses not to see what’s right in front of them, content to navigate life in denial about the ugly, obvious truths in our midst.

In so doing, we become accomplices to abusive behavior in our midst.

This is how corruption by the power elite flourishes.

For years, investigative journalists and survivors have documented how blackmail, intelligence agency ties, and financial leverage helped shield elite sexual predators—not just from prosecution, but from public scrutiny.

For every Epstein who is—finally—called to account for his illegal sexual exploits after years of being given a free pass by those in power, there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) more in the halls of power and wealth whose predation continues unabated.

While Epstein’s alleged crimes are heinous enough on their own, he is part of a larger narrative of how a culture of entitlement becomes a cesspool and a breeding ground for despots and predators.

Power corrupts. Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Give any one person—or government agency—too much power and allow them to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will be abused.

History proves it. The present moment confirms it.

We see this dynamic play out every day in communities across America.

A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses aspiring actresses and gets away with it. The U.S. military bombs a civilian hospital and gets away with it.

It’s no coincidence that the same administration dismantling offices tasked with fighting human trafficking is also defunding the few agencies left to hold law enforcement accountable.

Under President Trump, the Department of Justice has been restructured to prioritize loyalty over justice, protection over prosecution. Offices once dedicated to civil rights enforcement, police oversight, and public accountability have been gutted or quietly sidelined.

Consider the case of former Louisville officer Brett Hankison, who blindly fired ten rounds into Breonna Taylor’s apartment during a botched no-knock raid. Hankison was ultimately convicted—not for killing Taylor, but for depriving others of their civil rights. And yet Trump’s DOJ asked the court to sentence Hankison to one day in prison—the equivalent of time served during booking.

In other words, in Trump’s view, the powerful and their enforcers should walk free while the dead are buried and the public is told to move on.

And it’s not just trigger-happy policing that goes unpunished.

Across the country, law enforcement officers have repeatedly been caught running sex trafficking rings, abusing women and girls in their custody, or exploiting their badge to coerce sex—with little to no consequence.

From Louisiana to Ohio to New York, officers have been arrested for trafficking underage girls, assaulting vulnerable women, and raping detainees—often shielded by unions, prosecutors, or a blue wall of silence.

This isn’t a few bad apples. It’s a culture of impunity baked into the system.

This is how the system works, protecting the untouchables—not because they’re innocent, but because the system has made them immune.

Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sex crimes, government corruption, or the rule of law.

It’s the same old story all over again: man rises to power, man abuses power abominably, man intimidates and threatens anyone who challenges him with retaliation or worse, and man gets away with it because of a culture of compliance in which no one speaks up because they don’t want to lose their job or their money or their place among the elite.

Sexual predators aren’t the only threat.

For every Epstein or Clinton, every Weinstein, Ailes, Cosby, or Trump who eventually gets called out for his sexual misbehavior, there are hundreds—thousands—of others in the American police state who are getting away with murder—in many cases, literally—simply because they can.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

For too long now, Americans have tolerated an oligarchy in which a powerful, elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots.

We need to restore the rule of law for all people, no exceptions.

The rule of law means no one gets a free pass—no matter their wealth, status, or political connections.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the empowerment of petty tyrants and political gods must end.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The Untouchables: The Sexual Predators Within America’s Power Elite appeared first on LewRockwell.

With President Trump’s MAGA supporters in full rebellion over his refusal to release all the records relating to the Jeffrey Epstein pedophilia investigation, get ready for a big crisis in foreign affairs designed to distract attention from the Epstein scandal.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a ruler engaged in such a strategy. In fact, it’s a time-honored way to get people to set aside their rebellion and instead “rally ’round the flag.”

Consider the immortal words of James Madison, the father of the Constitution: “The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended.”

Madison was saying that in the old Roman Empire the populace would periodically go into rebellion mode, rebelling against things like exorbitant taxation or monetary debasement at the hands of their rulers.

Whenever that would happen, the emperor would simply instigate a war against some scary foreign enemy, which would stir up both fear and patriotism within the populace. People would forget their rebellion in order to be kept safe from the new official enemy with which they were now at war.

Recall that at the end of the Cold War, most Americans were calling for a “peace dividend.” What they meant was that they were protesting the enormously high amount of money that was still being spent on the national-security establishment. They were demanding a “peace dividend” that would entail a massive reduction in national-security-state spending, which would have meant an equally massive reduction in taxes.

But notice what happened as soon as the 9/11 attacks took place. Most everyone put their “peace-dividend” demands aside and, amidst a climate of great fear and patriotism, called on the federal government to do whatever was necessary to keep them safe. The demands for a “peace dividend” disappeared permanently. The national-security establishment has been flooded with taxpayer largess ever since.

Let’s not forget what brought about those 9/11 attacks. No, it wasn’t hatred for America’s “freedom and values,” as U.S. officials maintained. It was instead what Madison said. Faced with demands for a “peace dividend,” U.S. officials had gone into the Middle East on a spree of death, destruction and humiliation, which ultimately generated so much anger and hatred that it produced retaliation in the form of the 9/11 attacks.

What might U.S. officials do this time to distract people away from Jeffrey Epstein? The Ukraine-Russia war provides an excellent opportunity to do that. All that needs to be done is furnish Ukraine with long-range missiles that are used to attack Moscow, St. Petersburg, or other big Russian cities. In that case, Russia will be tempted to strike at NATO countries that are providing such missiles and obviously using Ukraine as a proxy to destroy Russia. What better way to create a diversion away from Jeffrey Epstein than producing the prospect of all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia?

Of course, there is also China, especially given the mindset of hatred for China that has been inculcated in the American people in the recent past. Ginning up a crisis with nuclear-armed China, say over Taiwan, would be another excellent way to cause people to stop thinking about Epstein.

There is also, of course, nuclear-armed North Korea. As we learned in the first Trump administration, it is fairly easy to stir up a crisis with that communist regime. Even if North Korea might not be able to strike the U.S. with its nuclear missiles, it can certainly strike South Korea and Japan. Would that prospect be enough to get people’s minds off Jeffrey Epstein? I would think so.

Needless to say, Iran is always available whenever a scary official enemy and a big foreign-policy crisis is needed. All that needs to be done is to proclaim that Iran is still producing nuclear weapons and plans to use them against Israel or the United States. Voilà! A big, scary official enemy and another big foreign crisis that would easily cause all those MAGA people to forget Jeffrey Epstein.

One thing is certain: Given the fact that Epstein obviously had very wealthy and very powerful clients — and, more important, given the very real likelihood that Epstein had connections to either Israeli or U.S. intelligence or both — there is no reasonable possibility that Trump is going to order the release of all the federal investigative files in the Epstein case. Will his MAGA supporters simply accept the inevitable and give up? If they don’t, then everyone should prepare himself for the prospect of a big foreign crisis in the near future.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Get Ready for a Big Foreign Crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Whenever I think of the behavior of the Democratic Party and the political left in general I can’t help but think of the philosophy of Batman’s nefarious arch-nemesis, The Joker. And yes, I’m saying that to understand leftists all you really need to do is read comic books.

Batman, of course, represents unflinching law, order and justice. He’s a vigilante, but a vigilante with more respect for the law than most police and politicians in his fictional realm of Gotham City. The Joker, on the other hand, represents pure chaos and the unhinged, unadulterated desire for power. Not traditional power (the means to control) but the archaic power to corrupt and destroy.

The Joker is a pure psychopath that believes his evil is a universal truth; that normal people hide behind “social constructs” to avoid admitting they want to burn down the world just like he does. He revels in the despair of calamity and the fall of moral righteousness.

I’m specifically reminded of Christopher Nolan’s film ‘Batman Begins’ in which Commissioner Gordon first warns Batman about “escalation” and reveals the calling card of the Joker:

“What about escalation? …We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor piercing rounds…And, you’re wearing a mask. Jumping off rooftops…”

In my past analysis of the political left and their habits I’ve noted many times that they seem random and unstable but they do follow some limited rules.

Rule #1 is: Leftists never admit they are wrong.

Rule #2 is: Leftists ALWAYS double down.

In other words, when they think they are losing the ability to disrupt public order and upend societal norms, they will escalate. Diplomacy is not in their nature.

The Republican Party, conservatives, moderates and even some liberals turned to Donald Trump because of his uncompromising stance on the chaos embraced by Democrats. This madness led us down a dark path of medical tyranny. It led us to woke indoctrination in public schools, race riots in American streets, trannies in the military, a stagflationary crisis and a president with a brain like cabbage.

This is not to say that Trump doesn’t have his failings; we all know he does. However, many people are willing to overlook those shortfalls as long as his administration continues to remove the leftist cancer from our fragile institutions.

When confronted with hard questions on why progressive activists do things that violate their own supposed code of ethics, invariably they will say that logic does not matter.  Their goal is to “burn it all down”. That’s it. There are no ethics. There is no other rationale (it’s the Joker philosophy incarnate).

Trump gained massive favor because he promised to bring the hammer down on these arsonists without remorse.

In the beginning the political left didn’t know what hit them. Federal funding was cut off and NGOs were throttled. Their historic sources of financial support are disappearing. Corporations that backed them a year ago are running in the other direction. They used to be able to operate nationally with impunity but now they’re relegated to petty mob actions in deep blue cities like LA, New York or Seattle where they can still find support among Democrat officials.

That said, I suspect what we are seeing the past month in New York with the rising success of Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is not desperation, but escalation.

Democrats as a party have rarely been grounded in moderation, but they have always been careful to hide their true intentions when it comes to their political goals. Socialism in the US is treated as a four-letter-word and most Dems have long sought to water down their association with the term. Whenever conservatives accuse Democrats of engaging in socialist or communist agendas they quickly accuse us of being “conspiracy theorists”.

But that tactic no longer works and instead of seeking to sterilize their image the Democrats are now doubling down and openly embracing the socialist/communist platform.  They are no longer compromising by trying to hide their true intent. They are going full bore hammer and sickle with no shame.

In other words, leftist insanity pushes moderates further to the right, and the further to the right people go, the more extreme leftists will become. Think they can’t get any worse than they are now? Think again…

Democrat leaders initially criticized Mamdani’s campaign as going too far, but his appeal among New York’s progressive population is undeniable. They claim it’s because he argues his ideas with clarity, but I would say that his policies are in fact a mish-mash of socialist and Marxist mechanics that have failed time and time again throughout history.

Mamdani will drive out most major businesses and wealthy taxpayers (who already provide around 50% of all tax revenues in NYC).  Jobs will disappear.  Government interference in housing markets, including rent freezes, will force property owners to sell instead of lease. Efforts to construct government funded housing will take a decade or longer and the cost to taxpayers would be immense. The housing supply will implode and lower income workers will not be able to find a home, so they will all leave.

It’s not difficult to predict how the situation will go if this guy becomes mayor. Yet, the progressive media is starting to court Mamdani and promote his campaign. Democrats are saying that the candidate represents a new path for their party. Keep in mind that Mamdani’s theories on society are built on the same woke nonsense that led to the complete obliteration of the Democrats in 2024. So, why are they doubling down?

Again, socialism/Marxism/communism are the archetypal counterpoints to the things leftists hate most:  Conservatives, Capitalism (free markets), Christian morality, law and order, western culture and nationalism at the expense of globalism. They might not realize it yet, but they are looking for a Joker to counter our Batman and they think they’ve found him in the costume of hardcore socialism.

They could admit they are wrong; that their ideals do not appeal to the public and that their efforts to “deconstruct” American social norms are rooted in malice rather than good intentions. They could accept that they do not represent the majority of the population as they originally assumed. They could apologize and promise to stop forcing their degenerate views on the masses.

But then again, that would require them to violate Rule #1.

And so, as “populism” continues to gain public favor and Americans focus more on America and less on globalism, Democrats and liberals will drift further and further from the shore into the frenzy of the socialist storm. They may even find some initial success there.

We saw this in Canada where liberal voters in that country chose to replace Justin Trudeau (an insufferable woke leftist that nearly destroyed their economy) with an even more militant leftist/globalist in the form of Mark Carney.

Leftists in the US will rally around uncompromising socialists like Mamdani because they’re tired of pretending that they care about “democracy”, free markets, property rights, moral codes or freedom in general. They need an all encompassing vision, even if it’s a monstrous and dystopian one. And, they want leadership that is transparent and unapologetic in its psychopathic intent. They don’t want to play the role of humanitarians anymore – They want to take the mask off and taste the flavors of blood and power.

They want to unleash their inner Joker.

For the rest of us this means there will be many more clashes, more mob actions, more violence and very little peace for the foreseeable future. Remember, the goal is to “burn everything down” so that the left (and the globalists) can rebuild the nation with their own agenda in mind. Democrats will welcome the most extreme leaders, because if they don’t they know they will be forced to do the worst thing imaginable: Self reflect and change their ways.

This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group

The post Batman vs The Joker: Democrats Will Double Down On Chaos To Save Their Party appeared first on LewRockwell.

A doctor in Gaza named Nick Maynard reports that Israeli snipers are now shooting starving civilians in different body parts on different days, based on the injuries people show up with for treatment. There’s a head day, a leg day, a genitals day, etc.

“The medical teams here have also been seeing a clear pattern of people being shot in certain body parts on different days, such as the head, legs or genitals, which seems to indicate deliberate targeting,” Maynard says.

I keep thinking there’s nothing Israel could do that would shock me anymore, but they keep finding ways.

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The Israeli military has attacked the residence of World Health Organization staff, detaining multiple medical workers. This comes as Israel’s Trade Envoy Fleur Hassan-Nahoum tells Channel 4 News that “most doctors in most hospitals in Gaza” are “involved in terrorist activities”.

Possibly the single dumbest thing Israel and its apologists ask us to believe is that Israel has been systematically demolishing Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure because the healthcare infrastructure is full of terrorists, and not because they want to commit genocide.

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The Gaza Health Ministry announced on Monday that among the 130 Palestinians killed in the daily death toll of Israel’s genocidal onslaught, 99 were killed while trying to obtain food from aid sites.

At some point you just run out of words for talking about how evil this shit is.

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If you want to find out who someone truly is, surrender fully to their will and give them everything they want. They’ll show you.

Zionism is showing us what it truly is right now. This is what it looks like when the Zionists are allowed to do exactly what they want to do.

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Hasbarists have been going nuts on social media lately. Whenever Israel is acting more evil than usual the online Israel apologia always kicks into high gear.

Words words words words words words words. They love their words. They think if they say enough words with enough feigned conviction people will go “Oh okay well maybe starving civilians to death is actually fine and normal after all.”

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I’ll never get used to the way I’m watching my own government and its allies support the most nightmarish shit I’ve ever seen in my life every single day in the middle east and yet people keep trying to convince me to be really fearful and hateful toward Muslims.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been having a public tantrum on Bluesky because of the leftist backlash from her vote against an amendment which would have blocked funding for Israel’s missile defense system and her garbage justification of that move, angrily proclaiming that her “record on Palestine speaks for itself” and claiming that the opposition has created a “threat environment” that is “scary”.

That AOC chose to throw this fit on Bluesky rather than Twitter is telling; she got so mad that she ran to the liberal echo chamber where she’s adored in order to complain about how the left won’t even let her support just a little bit of genocide as a treat.

This is just her yelling at people for not loving her when she does gross swamp monster things. But it doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to be the beloved leftist people’s champion and also be the person who votes against an amendment to withhold $500 million of military funding for a genocidal state and then justifies it with obnoxious lies. You don’t get to do the darling of the left thing and also do the weird Zionist swamp creature thing. You have to pick one, because you can’t be both. No amount of yelling at ordinary people is going to change that.

AOC and her supporters wouldn’t have to spend days frantically justifying her refusal to support Palestine and oppose genocide at every opportunity if she would simply support Palestine and oppose genocide at every opportunity. That’s normal. Just be normal. Do the normal thing.

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The post Israel’s Depravity Will Always Find New Ways To Shock You appeared first on LewRockwell.

First of Its Kind

In a landmark ruling, the Brussels Court of First Instance has ordered the Flemish government not only to block a specific container of military equipment bound for Israel, but also to ban any further transit of military material to the country.

The judge ruled that Flanders — a region in the north of Belgium — is systematically failing to meet its obligations under arms legislation and international treaties, and even imposed a penalty for each shipment that goes through despite the ruling.

The four Flemish NGOs that filed the case were granted full victory on all points.

The container at the center of the case is located in the port of Antwerp. It contains so-called tapered roller bearings, produced by Timken via a French branch, and destined for Ashot Ashkelon Industries, an Israeli defense company that supplies components for Merkava tanks and Namer armored vehicles.

According to the organizations, these systems are used daily in the genocide in Gaza.

In its ruling, the court immediately prohibits the Flemish government from authorizing any new arms transit to Israel. Since 2009, there has been an agreement not to export weapons to Israel that could reinforce its armed forces — a policy that has been seriously eroded in practice.

To enforce this, the court has imposed a penalty of 50,000 euros for each shipment that still leaves for Israel.

Containers may only be shipped to Israel if the Flemish government has written proof that the goods are intended for civilian use. According to lawyer Lies Michielsen of Progress Lawyers Network, who pleaded the case, the ruling implies that the government must actively verify the final destination of goods exported to Israel.

Significance

This ruling is highly significant because the court has confirmed that facilitating the delivery of weapons to a state committing war crimes or possible genocide is illegal.

“The court is stating what politics refuses to acknowledge,” says Fien De Meyer from the League for Human Rights.

This means an end to impunity: governments can no longer look away while their weapons are used for atrocities.

The ruling sets a legal precedent that forces European and other governments to take responsibility. Similar lawsuits in other countries are expected to follow.

In any case, it is a victory for peace and solidarity movements, showing that resistance works.

Follow-Up

Around the same time, another lawsuit was filed in Belgium — this time against the federal government. A group of Palestinian claimants and Belgian organizations sent a formal notice to the federal government, accusing Belgium of passive complicity in the genocide in Gaza.

If no satisfactory response is received, they will proceed to court — which would also be a global first.

The action is led by a Palestinian citizen, several Belgian NGOs, and a legal expert. They demand that Belgium halt all military deliveries to Israel, confiscate imports from occupied Palestinian territories, block investments in those areas, and suspend the EU-Israel association agreement.

According to them, Belgium’s passivity is both morally and legally unacceptable. The action is supported by a group of artists and intellectuals who are raising funds for legal costs.

There is also movement at the European level. The legal NGO JURDI is taking both the European Commission and the Council of the European Union to the Court of Justice for their “negligence” regarding the violence in Gaza. For the first time in history, these two powerful institutions are being sued for failing to uphold their own treaty obligations.

JURDI cites Article 265 of the EU Treaty, which makes institutional inaction punishable. According to them, EU institutions are applying double standards: Russia was heavily sanctioned, while Israel remains untouched despite clear human rights violations.

JURDI is demanding, among other things, the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the termination of subsidies, and sanctions against Israeli officials. The complaint argues that the EU is both legally and morally obligated to act and warns that even European leaders could be prosecuted for complicity in genocide.

Complicity

At the heart of these cases lies the question: does a country — or by extension, the European Commission — have a legal obligation, as a third party, to prevent genocide elsewhere? According to the Genocide Convention, it does. That treaty obliges every country not only to punish genocide but also to actively prevent it.

In January, the International Court of Justice already called on Israel to take all necessary measures to prevent genocide. But does that obligation also apply to countries like Belgium, which are not directly involved?

According to eighteen top Belgian jurists, the answer is yes. In a letter, they warn that a country like Belgium risks being brought before the International Court of Justice itself if it continues to remain silent about the situation in Gaza. Passivity can be legally interpreted as complicity.

The jurists are demanding sanctions against Israel and consider suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement as an absolute minimum. Countries too often hide behind diplomatic caution, but according to them, that attitude is legally and morally untenable. Only concrete actions — not words — can save the credibility of Belgium and the EU.

No Pause

The court victory in Flanders and other ongoing legal proceedings represent a qualitative leap in the fight against genocide. But that fight is far from over. Genocide does not pause. While politicians delay, people in Gaza suffer end die.

Now is the time to maintain and intensify pressure. Legal actions must be brought in other countries as well. Key demands include the immediate enforcement of the ban on arms deliveries, full transparency about the export of military equipment, and prosecution of those complicit in these crimes.

Lawsuits like this are very important, but certainly not sufficient to stop the killing in Gaza. Political leaders worldwide must be pressured through mass protests and acts of solidarity.

That is why the Palestinian resistance movements in Gaza have jointly issued a call for global mobilization starting on 20 July 2025 to save the population in Gaza from genocide, hunger, and thirst caused by the Israeli occupation.

They denounce the international silence and call on countries and citizens around the world to take to the streets and act to halt the genocide.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Historic First: Brussels Court Judge Orders Halt to Arms Transit to Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Sun Tzu, Art of War, III.18

I am always amazed how little western governments are aware of their own (lack of) capabilities as well as of the nature and capabilities of their ‘enemies’.

They tend to not know the basic economic and sociological facts about their opponents. They operate on whatever nonsense they have come to believe about their ‘enemies’. They overestimate their own position, miscalculate and are astonished when, as a result, the factual situation turns against them.

We may recount, as Tucker Carlson does here, that the U.S. was “assured by some of the dumbest people on the planet, who currently serve in the United States Senate, that Russia was merely ‘a gas station with nuclear weapons’.”

Sanctions were imposed on Russia but failed to trouble it. They hurt those who imposed them the most.

The Trump administration recently put a 50% tariff on all goods from Brazil (even though it has a trade surplus with that country). This was to punish its government and judiciary for pursuing charges against the former president Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup after he had lost the elections.

Brazil is a nationalistic, well developed country which is allergic to interference by foreign powers. Anyone knowing that fact could have anticipated this reaction:

For [President] Lula, whose left-wing allies face a tough 2026 election, the moment is a windfall. Polls show revived support for his administration in the face of Bolsonaro-provoked American bullying. The tariffs also harm the interests of business elites who are often the biggest boosters of Lula’s conservative opposition.

“What was meant as a show of strength by MAGA and its Brazilian franchise has turned into a political gift for Lula, who now gets to credibly present himself as a symbol of national resistance while leaving his opponents scrambling to choose between loyalty to Bolsonaro and the economic interests of their own base,” observed Brazil historian Andre Pagliarini.

the U.S. trade war against China is another point where the lack of knowledge about the opponent led to the loss of the battle:

When Mr. Trump raised tariffs on Chinese exports in April, some top Trump officials thought Beijing would quickly fold, given its recent economic weakness. Instead, Beijing called Mr. Trump’s bluff by restricting rare earths needed by American makers of cars, military equipment, medical devices and electronics.

As the flow of those materials stopped, Mr. Trump and other officials began receiving calls from chief executives saying their factories would soon shut down. Ford, Suzuki and other companies shuttered factories because of the lack of supply.

Mr. Trump and his top advisers were surprised by the threat that Beijing’s countermove posed, people familiar with the matter say. That brought the United States back to the negotiating table this spring to strike a fragile trade truce, which Trump officials are now wary of upsetting. That agreement dropped tariffs from a minimum 145 percent to 30 percent, with the Chinese agreeing to allow rare earths to flow as freely as before.

Trump and his advisor likely did not even know what rare earth were. They did not know that China has a monopoly of making them into magnets. They did not know that these magnets were needed to create U.S. high-tech products.

Moreover, China used the U.S. pretext of ‘national security’ to make its move stick:

Mr. Trump was the first to harness the power of U.S. export controls, by targeting Chinese tech giant Huawei and putting global restrictions on American technology in his first term. But the Biden administration expanded those rules. Concerned that China’s growing A.I. capacity would advance its military, Biden officials cracked down on exports of Nvidia chips, seeing them as the most effective choke point over Chinese A.I. capabilities.

Since then, when Chinese officials raised their objections to U.S. technology controls in meetings, U.S. officials had responded by insisting that the measures were national security matters and not up for debate.

But in the meeting in Geneva in May, China finally had a powerful counterargument. Beijing insisted that its minerals and magnets, some of which go to fighter jets, drones and weaponry, were a “dual-use” technology that could be used for the military as well as civilian industries, just like A.I. and chips. It demanded reciprocity: If the United States wanted a steady flow of rare earths, Washington should also be ready to lessen its technology controls.

China has regained access to Nvidia chips and Trump is seeking a meeting with China’s president Xi. Evidently, China has won this battle.

I am sure there are some specialists on China down in the bowels of the Commerce Department or State, who did know how China could hit back. They probably had gamed-out and predicted how China would hit back.

But U.S. politicians, be they Obama, Biden or Trump, are too full of themselves to doubt their own level of knowledge about their opponents. They do not know their ‘enemies’. The battles they plan out and launch do inevitably end in disasters.

As I have observed the U.S. losing one foreign policy battle after the other over the last 25 years I was waiting for the moment where sanity would set in. Where realistic assumptions would be made before launching this or that new adventure. I am no longer expecting that to happen.

Some say the U.S. is in a strong position and, despite creating chaos by losing such battles, does win from it. But in reality only some are profiting from fighting and losing these battles while the country as a whole is getting diminished by it.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Not Knowing The ‘Enemy’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

AI fails at tasks where accuracy must be absolute to create value.

In reviewing the on-going discussions about how many people will be replaced by AI, I find a severe lack of real-world examples. I’m remedying this deficiency with an example of AI’s failure in the kind of high-value work that many anticipate will soon be performed by AI.

Few things in life are more pervasively screechy than hype, which brings us to the current feeding-frenzy of AI hype. Since we all read the same breathless claims and have seen the videos of robots dancing, I’ll cut to the chase: Nobody posts videos of their robot falling off a ladder and crushing the roses because, well, the optics aren’t very warm and fuzzy.

For the same reason, nobody’s sharing the AI tool’s error that forfeited the lawsuit. The only way to really grasp the limits of these tools is to deploy them in the kinds of high-level, high-value work that they’re supposed to be able to do with ease, speed and accuracy, because nobody’s paying real money to watch robots dance or read a copycat AI-generated essay on Yeats that’s tossed moments after being submitted to the professor.

In the real world of value creation, optics don’t count, accuracy counts. Nobody cares if the AI chatbot that churned out the Yeats homework hallucinated mid-stream because nobody’s paying for AI output that has zero scarcity value: an AI-generated class paper, song or video joins 10 million similar copycat papers / songs / videos that nobody pays attention to because they can create their own in 30 seconds.

So let’s examine an actual example of AI being deployed to do the sort of high-level, high-value work that it’s going to need to nail perfectly to replace us all at work. My friend Ian Lind, whom I’ve known for 50 years, is an investigative reporter with an enviably lengthy record of the kind of journalism few have the experience or resources to do. (His blog is www.iLind.net, [email protected])

The judge’s letter recommending Ian for the award he received from the American Judges Association for distinguished reporting about the Judiciary ran for 18 pages, and that was just a summary of his work.

Ian’s reporting/blogging in the early 2000s inspired me to try my hand at it in 2005.

Ian has spent the last few years helping the public understand the most complex federal prosecution case in Hawaii’s recent history, and so the number of documents that have piled up is enormous. He’s been experimenting with AI tools (NotebookLM, Gemini, ChatGPT) for months on various projects, and he recently shared this account with me:

“My experience has definitely been mixed. On the one hand, sort of high level requests like ‘identify the major issues raised in the documents and sort by importance’ produced interesting and suggestive results. But attempts to find and pull together details on a person or topic almost always had noticeable errors or hallucinations. I would never be able to trust responses to even what I consider straightforward instructions. Too many errors. Looking for mentions of ‘drew’ in 150 warrants said he wasn’t mentioned. But he was, I’ve gone back and found those mentions. I think the bots read enough to give an answer and don’t keep incorporating data to the end. The shoot from the hip and, in my experience, have often produced mistakes. Sometimes it’s 25 answers and one glaring mistake, sometimes more basic.”

Let’s start with the context. This is similar to the kind of work performed by legal services. Ours is a rule-of-law advocacy system, so legal proceedings are consequential. They aren’t a ditty or a class paper, and Ian’s experience is mirrored by many other professionals.

Let’s summarize AI’s fundamental weaknesses:

1. AI doesn’t actually “read” the entire collection of texts. In human terms, it gets “bored” and stops once it has enough to generate a credible response.

2. AI has digital dementia. It doesn’t necessarily remember what you asked for in the past nor does it necessarily remember its previous responses to the same queries.

3. AI is fundamentally, irrevocably untrustworthy. It makes errors that it doesn’t detect (because it didn’t actually “read” the entire trove of text) and it generates responses that are “good enough,” meaning they’re not 100% accurate, but they have the superficial appearance of being comprehensive and therefore acceptable. This is the “shoot from the hip” response Ian described.

In other words, 90% is good enough, as who cares about the other 10% in a college paper, copycat song or cutesy video.

But in real work, the 10% of errors and hallucinations actually matter, because the entire value creation of the work depends on that 10% being right, not half-assed.

In the realm of LLM AI, getting Yeats’ date of birth wrong–an error without consequence–is the same as missing the defendant’s name in 150 warrants. These programs are text / content prediction engines; they don’t actually “know” or “understand” anything. They can’t tell the difference between a consequential error and a “who cares” error.

This goes back to the classic AI thought experiment The Chinese Room, which posits a person who doesn’t know the Chinese language in a sealed room shuffling symbols around that translate English words to Chinese characters.

From the outside, it appears that the black box (the sealed room) “knows Chinese” because it’s translating English to Chinese. But the person–or AI agent–doesn’t actually “know Chinese”, or understand any of what’s been translated. It has no awareness of languages, meanings or knowledge.

This describes AI agents in a nutshell.

Read the Whole Article

The post Maybe AI Isn’t Going to Replace You at Work After All appeared first on LewRockwell.

One hundred sixty years after the war for Southern independence, great confusion is still caused by the claim that the South fought for their independence and for “states’ rights.” What does the doctrine of “states’ rights” mean in this context? The dictionary definition is easily understood: “the rights and powers held by individual US states rather than by the federal government.”

However, confusion arises as to the substantive meaning of this doctrine, as the notion has now become entrenched that states only have such rights and powers as may be granted to them by the federal government in its mercy. That notion is entirely wrong-headed because the opposite is the case: the federal government only has such rights and powers as may be conferred upon it by the agreement of the people as delineated in the Constitution. As historian Clyde Wilson puts it, “The Constitution should be the instrument of society’s control of government, not vice versa.”

It is sometimes argued that the Constitution itself confers supremacy on the federal government to do whatever it considers appropriate in the discharge of its functions. Expressing that view, former President Barack Obama once said, “we have a supremacy clause in our constitution. When federal law is in conflict with state law, federal law wins out.” On the contrary, the doctrine of states’ rights, as explained by John C. Calhoun, holds federal law to be supreme only within the confines of its own sphere:

Calhoun pointed out that the [supremacy] clause itself stated that only laws “made in pursuance of the Constitution” were supreme. Thus, concluded Calhoun, federal and State laws were each supreme within their rightful spheres—a far cry from the claim that federal laws were categorically supreme over State laws.

The doctrine of states’ rights was widely understood in the nineteenth century as a constitutional doctrine denoting that sovereignty was vested in each state, as a means of resisting federal encroachment. States could exercise this sovereignty by, for example, the right of nullification or, ultimately, by the right to secede. The language of “rights” in this context means something done “rightfully” by the states under powers exercised as of right, rather than by the permission or grant of the federal authorities. Jefferson Davis wrote in the preface to The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government that this was the right the Southern states fought to defend:

The object of this work has been from historical data to show that the Southern States had rightfully the power to withdraw from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered; that the denial of that right was a violation of the letter and spirit of the compact between the States; and that the war waged by the Federal Government against the seceding States was in disregard of the limitations of the Constitution, and destructive of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Many libertarians are suspicious of the doctrine of states’ rights because it seems, on its face, to vest rights in the state as a collective entity. They reason that if all rights vest in individuals, then the state as a collective entity has no “rights.” This confusion is easily dispelled by recalling that the doctrine of states’ rights refers to the rights which sovereign states retained to themselves when forming the Union. As David Gordon explains, states retained “the right to do everything that free countries could do.” One might still ask, where do sovereign states, or countries, or nations, get their “rights”? In his article “Is Secession a Right?” Gordon traces the root of states’ right to the rights that vest in human beings:

Indeed, the right of secession follows at once from the basic rights defended by classical liberalism. As even Macaulay’s schoolboy knows, classical liberalism begins with the principle of self-ownership: each person is the rightful owner of his or her own body. Together with this right, according to classical liberals from Locke to Rothbard, goes the right to appropriate unowned property.

In this view, government occupies a strictly ancillary role. It exists to protect the rights that individuals possess independently — it is not the source of these rights. As the Declaration of Independence puts it, “to secure these rights [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from consent of the governed.

Viewed in that light, the doctrine of states’ rights does not denote rights that vest inherently in the state, but rights that vest in the individuals who together have formed the state for the defense and protection of their liberty. As Clyde Wilson explains, individual liberty lies at the heart of states’ rights: “for Jefferson, individual liberty and state sovereignty were indivisible.” Lew Rockwell also expands on this point:

Some libertarians object to [the doctrine of states’ rights]. They point out that only individuals have rights, not states. That’s true, but states’ rights aren’t in conflict with individual rights. The President of the Mises Institute, the great Tom DiLorenzo, explains why not: “The idea of states’ rights is most closely associated with the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and his political heirs. Jefferson himself never entertained the idea that ‘states have rights,’ as some of the less educated critics of the idea have claimed. Of course ‘states’ don’t have rights. The essence of Jefferson’s idea is that if the people are to be the masters rather than the servants of their own government, then they must have some vehicle with which to control that government. That vehicle, in the Jeffersonian tradition, is political communities organized at the state and local level. That is how the people were to monitor, control, discipline, and even abolish, if need be, their own government.

How then did the doctrine of states’ rights come to be shrouded in confusion? Clyde Wilson identifies the reasons for this as largely political:

States rights has fallen into disuse not because it is unsound in history, in constitutional law, or in democratic theory. It remains highly persuasive on all these grounds to any honest mind. It has fallen into disuse because it presented the most powerful obstacle to the consolidation of irresponsible power—that “consolidation” which our forefathers decried as the greatest single threat to liberty.

For that reason states rights had to be covered under a blanket of lies and usurpations by those who thought they could rule us better than we can rule ourselves. At the most critical time, the War Between the States, it was suppressed by force and the American idea of consent of the governed was replaced by the European idea of obedience. But force can only settle questions of power, not of right.

The doctrine of states’ rights is not quashed by the fact that the Southern states, which fought to defend the right to secede, lost the war. Hence Wilson echoes the prophetic words of John C. Calhoun: “Without a full practical recognition of the rights and sovereignty of the States, our union and liberty must perish.”

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

The post Understanding the Doctrine of States’ Rights appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Fed’s Beige Book shows a weakening economy

Please consider the Fed’s Beige Book for July 2025.

What is the Beige Book?

The Beige Book is a Federal Reserve System publication about current economic conditions across the 12 Federal Reserve Districts. It characterizes regional economic conditions and prospects based on a variety of mostly qualitative information, gathered directly from each District’s sources. Reports are published eight times per year.

What is the purpose of the Beige Book?

The Beige Book is intended to characterize the change in economic conditions since the last report. Outreach for the Beige Book is one of many ways the Federal Reserve System engages with businesses and other organizations about economic developments in their communities. Because this information is collected from a wide range of contacts through a variety of formal and informal methods, the Beige Book can complement other forms of regional information gathering. The Beige Book is not a commentary on the views of Federal Reserve officials.

By Fed Region

• Boston: Economic activity was flat or up slightly. Retail revenues decreased modestly, and tourism revenues edged lower, in part because of fewer visitors from Canada. Price increases were modest overall, although tariffs drove above-average price increases in a few cases. Home sales increased modestly. Hiring plans remained conservative amid a guardedly optimistic outlook.
• New York: Economic activity continued to decline modestly as heightened uncertainty hindered decision making. Employment was up slightly and wage growth was modest. Selling price increases remained moderate, while input prices rose steeply with widespread tariff-related cost increases.
• Philadelphia: Business activity continued to decline modestly in the current Beige Book period. Activity fell moderately for nonmanufacturers but edged up slightly for manufacturers. Employment declined slightly, while wages increased slightly. Prices rose modestly after moderate growth last period. Generally, firms expect slight growth over the next six months, although economic uncertainty remains.
• Cleveland: District business activity continued to be flat in recent weeks, but contacts expected activity to increase slightly in the months ahead. Several manufacturers reported softer orders, and transportation contacts reported a steep decline in demand. Contacts said that cost growth remained robust while their selling prices only increased modestly.
• Richmond: The regional economy grew moderately in recent weeks. Consumer spending on retail, leisure, and hospitality increased at a modest to moderate rate. Business conditions were largely unchanged as firms across most sectors reported steady sales and demand. However, manufacturing activity contracted slightly with firms citing higher prices curtailing demand in recent weeks. Employment rose modestly and price growth remained moderate this cycle.
• Atlanta: The economy of the Sixth District was little changed. Labor markets and wages were steady. Prices rose moderately. Consumer spending softened, but travel and tourism increased modestly. Residential and commercial real estate activity declined. Transportation activity grew modestly. Loan growth was flat. Manufacturing was flat, but energy activity rose moderately.
• Chicago: Economic activity increased slightly. Employment increased modestly; consumer spending, business spending, and construction and real estate activity were flat; manufacturing declined slightly; and nonbusiness contacts saw no change in activity. Prices rose moderately, wages rose modestly, and financial conditions loosened slightly. Prospects for 2025 farm income were unchanged.
• St. Louis Economic activity has remained unchanged. Employment levels were generally unchanged. Prices continued to increase moderately, and most contacts continued to expect higher nonlabor costs in the coming months as a result of tariffs. The outlook among contacts remains highly uncertain and slightly pessimistic.
• Minneapolis Economic activity was flat overall. Employment grew slightly and wage growth was moderate. Price growth eased but manufacturers felt more acute pressures. Overall consumer spending was down but tourism activity increased. Construction and energy activity decreased while manufacturing and vehicle sales were flat.
• Kansas City: Economic activity in the Tenth District was mostly unchanged, with some rebound in consumer spending and financial activities. Labor availability was reportedly much higher, which lowered expected wage pressures for the remainder of the year. Prices rose at a moderate pace.
• Dallas: Economic activity in the Eleventh District economy was up slightly over the reporting period. Nonfinancial services activity grew modestly, and manufacturing production held steady. Loan volumes expanded, while oil production was flat, retail sales declined, and the housing market weakened. Employment was unchanged and price pressures held steady. Outlooks remained pessimistic.
• San Francisco Economic activity was largely stable. Employment levels were slightly lower. Wages grew at a slight pace and prices increased modestly. Retail sales expanded modestly, and consumer and business services demand eased. Conditions in manufacturing, and residential real estate markets weakened somewhat. Lending activity and conditions in agriculture were largely unchanged.

Economy at Stall Speed

I count three Fed regions up, and a fourth if you count Boston listed as “flat or up slightly”. Richmond was the standout. The Richmond area grew “moderately.”

New York and Philadelphia declined “modestly”

Add it all up and you have an economy at stall speed.

This post originated on MishTalk.Com.

The post Only Three of 12 Fed Regions Are Growing, Two Slightly appeared first on LewRockwell.

For masterminding the “seditious coup” attempt known as the “Russia Hoax.”

The post Tulsi Gabbard Refers Obama to the DOJ for a Criminal Investigation appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

See here.

 

The post Is The CBDC Backdoor Still Open? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The new Israeli government policy toward American Evangelical Christians.  Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee is reportedly hurt by how his people are being treated.

The post “Send Us Your Money, Send Us Your Weapons, But Don’t Send US Your Christian Tour Groups” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Prognostications From the Future?

The post Prognostications From the Future? appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato “fuori controllo” negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa 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.

____________________________________________________________________________________

da The Epoch Times

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/la-ricchezza-mineraria-della-groenlandia)

Taatsi Olsen sa cosa serve per iniziare la ricerca di minerali in Groenlandia.

In un magazzino alla periferia della capitale Nuuk, ha esaminato i dettagli dell'esplorazione mineraria in un Paese freddo e scarsamente popolato: attrezzi, imbracature e piccoli rimorchi trasportati in elicottero verso siti remoti, essenziali in un luogo dove non ci sono strade che collegano le città.

Olsen ha sottolineato che il modello di insediamento unico della Groenlandia, costituito da villaggi di pescatori isolati sparsi su centinaia di chilometri di isole rocciose e fiordi, può presentare dei vantaggi per i minatori.

“Se vi trovate in una zona remota, ci sono buone probabilità che ci sia un piccolo villaggio nelle vicinanze”, ha detto a The Epoch Times.

Olsen è direttore operativo di X-Ploration Services Greenland. L'azienda, che supporta l'esplorazione mineraria sull'isola, potrebbe prosperare se i giacimenti di terre rare del territorio danese si rivelassero una vera e propria manna.

Conosce bene le difficoltà del successo individuale. Olsen stima che solo uno su mille progetti esplorativi in Groenlandia dia origine a una miniera.

“È semplicemente difficile trovare qualcosa che abbia senso dal punto di vista economico”, ha affermato.

Il presidente Donald Trump ha citato le terre rare della Groenlandia, stimate in 1,5 milioni di tonnellate, come una delle ragioni principali per incorporare questo Paese negli Stati Uniti.

I minerali essenziali sono utilizzati in molte tecnologie avanzate, tra cui telefoni cellulari e sistemi di difesa. Il settore è attualmente dominato dalla Cina.

Per ora in Groenlandia sono operative solo due miniere, nessuna delle quali estrae terre rare.

Eppure l'attività mineraria non è una novità per la Groenlandia. Fa parte di una lunga storia che lega l'isola più grande del mondo alla Danimarca e agli Stati Uniti.

I sostenitori dell'estrazione delle terre rare sperano che possa contribuire all'indipendenza della Groenlandia. Molti cercano fonti di reddito aggiuntive in un territorio dominato dall'esportazione di prodotti ittici, dall'impiego pubblico e da una sovvenzione annuale forfaittaria dalla Danimarca.

“Dobbiamo rafforzare l'economia”, ha detto a The Epoch Times Svend Hardenberg, un groenlandese coinvolto negli sforzi per sviluppare l'estrazione delle terre rare.

Estrazione mineraria, passato e futuro

L'attività mineraria in Groenlandia ha radici che risalgono al 1720, quando un pastore luterano, Hans Egede, giunse in Groenlandia alla ricerca dei Vichinghi scomparsi dopo essersi stabiliti lì più di mille anni fa. Il pioniere danese-norvegese fondò una nuova colonia sull'isola. Pochi decenni dopo iniziò l'attività mineraria su piccola scala.

Un sito risalente al 1850, la miniera di criolite di Ivittuut, si è rivelato di vitale importanza nel XX secolo.

La criolite era necessaria per la produzione di alluminio e Ivittuut era l'unica fonte commerciale.

Durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale Ivittuut si dimostrò cruciale per lo sforzo bellico alleato, tanto che gli Stati Uniti istituirono una base navale nelle vicinanze per proteggerla. Ancora oggi gli Stati Uniti mantengono una base militare nell'estremo nord di Pituffik.

L'estrazione di criolite a Ivittuut si esaurì con l'avvento della criolite sintetica e infine chiuse i battenti nel 1987. La base, allora danese, chiuse i battenti nel 2012. I cinesi tentarono di acquistare l'impianto abbandonato nel 2016, ma il governo danese glielo impedì.

Nel frattempo la società australiana Eclipse Metals ha acquisito una licenza per un sito che comprende l'ex-base e la miniera.

La promessa delle terre rare ha attirato l'attenzione anche sul progetto Tanbreez, un giacimento nei pressi della città di Narsaq, nella Groenlandia meridionale.

Nel 2024 i funzionari statunitensi fecero pressioni sull'azienda australiana Tanbreez Mining affinché negasse i permessi alle società legate alla Cina che cercavano di acquisirla.

A marzo la società di sviluppo minerario, Critical Metal Corp., ha stimato il valore dell'1% della roccia ospitante di Tanbreez a circa $3 miliardi.

La società, che detiene una quota di proprietà nel progetto, ha stretto una partnership per il progetto Tanbreez con GreenMet, un'azienda statunitense di minerali essenziali guidata da Drew Horn.

Horn ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times che Tanbreez ha suscitato l'interesse di una delegazione del settore privato da lui guidata. Il gruppo comprende dirigenti delle società minerarie Critical Metals Corp, American Renewable Metals, Refracture e Cogency Power.

Horn ha inoltre stretto una partnership con Hardenberg per un progetto di trattamento delle alghe, una sorta di operazione di proprietà statale sviluppata da Royal Greenland.

La guida turistica Pakkutannguaq Larsen ha affermato che, pur essendo favorevole all'indipendenza della Groenlandia, non è favorevole a un'ulteriore industria estrattiva.

“Vogliamo mantenere la natura così com'è”, ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times.

Olsen, il cui studio non è stato coinvolto in Tanbreez, ha affermato che l'attenzione di Trump verso il suo Paese d'origine ha alimentato sia entusiasmo che incertezza.

Le aziende statunitensi non si sono ancora messe in fila per collaborare con X-Ploration Services, specializzata in logistica, pianificazione e settori correlati.

“La maggior parte dei nostri clienti sono canadesi”, ha aggiunto Olsen.

Nikoline Ziemer, una biologa coinvolta nel progetto sulle alghe marine della Royal Greenland, ha affermato di sperare che il governo groenlandese non ritiri le licenze come ha fatto in passato.

“Dobbiamo avere una politica stabile in merito, perché ciò danneggia la credibilità della Groenlandia come potenziale fonte di estrazione mineraria”, ha affermato.

Nel 2021 il Paese ha revocato a un'azienda cinese la licenza per l'estrazione di ferro. Nello stesso anno il territorio ha smesso di offrire nuove licenze per l'esplorazione petrolifera.

Olsen ha affermato di ritenere che il governo groenlandese, ora sotto una guida diversa, potrebbe cambiare rotta su quest'ultima decisione.

Un'economia dipendente

Olsen, Hardenberg, Ziemer e Larsen non sono anomalie.

Quasi tutti i groenlandesi intervistati da The Epoch Times intravedono all'orizzonte una richiesta di indipendenza dalla Danimarca, sebbene i tempi siano incerti dopo le elezioni di marzo. L'indipendenza potrebbe anche aiutare i groenlandesi a stringere legami più stretti con gli Stati Uniti, se lo desiderassero.

Hardenberg ha affermato che le terre rare rappresentano uno dei mezzi per far avanzare il territorio verso una maggiore autonomia.

Ziemer concorda. Parlando a titolo personale, e non per Royal Greenland, ha affermato che la dipendenza del territorio dalla pesca “non è un modello economico sostenibile”.

Oggi gamberetti e pesce costituiscono oltre il 90% delle esportazioni del territorio. Più della metà del bilancio del governo groenlandese e un quinto del prodotto interno lordo della Groenlandia provengono dal governo danese. La Groenlandia riceve inoltre un contributo annuale a fondo perduto dalla Danimarca, pari a circa $500 milioni.

Questa concessione potrebbe intaccare le entrate minerarie per l'amministrazione locale. Se la Groenlandia generasse entrate superiori a 75 milioni di corone danesi (circa $11,3 milioni), metà di queste commissioni andrebbe a compensare la sopraccitata concessione.

Il settore pubblico ha un'influenza enorme sull'isola: i dipendenti pubblici rappresentano il 42% dell'occupazione, rispetto al 28% in Danimarca e al 13,4% negli Stati Uniti.

Hardenberg, che in passato ha ricoperto un incarico governativo, ha affermato di ritenere che la Groenlandia sarebbe più dinamica se “liberasse più persone dal settore pubblico per dedicarle a lavori più produttivi”.

Non tutte le attività legate al settore minerario si tradurranno in lavoro per la gente del posto.

Olsen ha affermato che la piccola popolazione della Groenlandia (meno di 60.000 persone) implica che l'esplorazione mineraria debba attingere a qualche talento straniero.

“Non ci sono molti geologi ed esperti [qui]”, ha detto.

Ha affermato che se l'attività mineraria passerà dall'esplorazione allo sfruttamento, ci saranno più posti di lavoro per i lavoratori groenlandesi.

A terra

A Nuuk, dove vivono circa 20.000 persone, il quadro economico appare eterogeneo.

Mentre alcune strade sono fiancheggiate da quartieri residenziali fatiscenti, altre brillano per le nuove costruzioni.

In città un aeroporto internazionale ospiterà presto voli della Scandinavian Airlines e della United Airlines, alimentando le speranze di turismo.

In un “Fight Club” finanziato dal governo, dove i giovani pugili si allenano davanti a una folla festante, Ethan Ingholt ha raccontato a The Epoch Times di essere arrivato a Nuuk dalla Danimarca.

In Danimarca lavorava come arboricoltore; ora, in una terra senza alberi, è direttore dei lavori.

“Se si è disposti a lavorare, il lavoro lo si trova sempre”, ha detto.

Inunnguaq Korneliussen, uno studente presente all'evento, ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times che l'economia “sta andando abbastanza bene in questo momento”, ma “è in continuo peggioramento”. Ha citato l'aumento dei prezzi dei generi alimentari.

A poche strade di distanza, Jens Smith vende pesce in una bancarella del mercato. Un prodotto molto popolare sono le uova di lompo, una prelibatezza simile al caviale di storione.

Mentre Smith parlava, un uomo è entrato e ha acquistato due sacchi di uova.

Smith ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times che molti clienti rivendono i suoi prodotti in Danimarca, dove i frutti di mare della Groenlandia possono essere venduti a prezzi elevati.

Ha detto che l'inverno è stato duro per la pesca.

“L'acqua è troppo fredda adesso”, ha affermato.

Larsen, contraria all'attività mineraria, ha dichiarato di sperare di aprire una propria agenzia di viaggi. Ha affermato che il turismo potrebbe aiutare la Groenlandia a seguire la propria strada, come accaduto con l'Islanda.

Ex-territorio danese divenuto indipendente, l'Islanda, un Paese con meno di 400.000 abitanti, ha attirato quasi 2,3 milioni di visitatori con pernottamento nel 2024, secondo l'Ente per il turismo islandese.

La Groenlandia, che dipende in larga parte dal turismo basato sulle crociere, ha accolto 76.477 crocieristi nel 2023, un numero record e il 640% in più rispetto al 2019, l'anno migliore precedente.

Hardenberg ha affermato che le recenti elezioni hanno rivelato un punto in comune in tutta la Groenlandia: “Tutti concordano sul fatto che dobbiamo creare il nostro futuro. Dobbiamo dirigere e controllare il nostro destino”.

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

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

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Price inflation is moving up again, in spite of President Trump’s repeated (and false) claims that prices are falling. The media isn’t right either, though, since much of the media consensus about June’s stubbornly high price inflation trend is that it was caused by tariffs. Tariffs however, are not inflationary. The price inflation we now see is the continued legacy of the monetary inflation of Trump-Biden efforts to embrace huge deficits and pressure the Federal Reserve to push interest rates downward with easy-money policies.

According to the latest price inflation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the consumer price index rose 2.7 percent year over year, and 0.3 percent month over month. That’s the largest year-over-year increase in four months, and the largest month-to-month increase since January 2025. June’s CPI increase also places CPI growth above of CPI growth rates experienced during September of last year. At that time, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell had declared that price inflation was rapidly moving back toward the Fed’s two-percent target. Nine months later, we can see the Fed’s forecasters were clearly wrong, as the CPI has increased by 2.1 percent in that period.

We find a similar trend if we look at so-called “core CPI” which removes volatile food and energy prices. Core CPI also hit a four-month high in June, measured year-over year. Measured month-to-month, core CPI hit a five month high in June.

Put into larger perspective, we find that ongoing price inflation continues to ensure that real wages have stagnated for years. For example, since January 2021, average hourly earnings have increased by 21 percent. During that same period, however, CPI inflation has increased by nearly 22 and a half percent. Put another way, the average hourly earnings increased from $29.92 from January 2021 to $36.30 in June 2025. In real, inflation-adjusted terms, however, average hourly earnings fell from $29.92 to $29.65 during that same period. Wages simply have not been keeping up with price increases.

In its comments on June’s CPI report, however, the Trump White House stated in a press release that “prices for everyday Americans continue to fall” and crows that core inflation “beat expectations.” First of all, “beating expectations” does not mean price inflation has improved. To “beat expectation” means simply to come in slightly less bad than what forecasters who were expecting. “Beating expectation” is something that investors follow, but the concept is irrelevant to the real economy. Moreover, it is absolutely not the case that prices “continue to fall” as the White House claims. Naturally, the White House public relations workers point to the few places in the report that show falling month-to-month prices, specifically, new and used vehicles. Virtually all other categories—including shelter, medical care, food, and energy, showed rising prices over the period, however. Year over year, shelter prices were up 3.6 percent, medical care was up 3.4 percent, and food was up 3 percent. This is not an economy in which basic expenses are becoming more affordable.

(Moreover, CPI core inflation has now been above the Fed’s two-percent target for 51 months. CPI has been above the target for 52 months. PCE, the Fed’s favored measure of price inflation, has been above the target for 51 months.)

In media coverage of the report and rising prices, most outlets take the position that rising prices are explained by new tariffs imposed by the administration. While it is true that tariffs will indeed increase prices in areas most directly impacted by tariffs, this is not “inflation” in the strict sense. The conventional definition of price inflation is that it is a general increase in prices. Tariffs—which are taxes—do not cause a general increase in prices because, in the absence of monetary inflation, rising prices in some areas will lead to falling prices in other areas.

For example, steel tariffs will indeed cause the price of steel to go up because the tariff will limit the supply of steel at the former non-tariffed price. Assuming that the demand for steel remains the same, the steel tariff will cause prices to rise. Unless the supply of money goes up, though, rising steel prices will leave less money available to purchase other goods, so prices in other areas will go down. Thus, the tariff by itself will not cause a general increase in prices. It will only cause prices to go up in some areas and down in others.

So, it is not accurate to say that tariffs cause inflation in any precise sense. We can only say that tariffs cause rising prices in some areas—assuming stable demand. Indeed we could argue that tariffs are deflationary in many cases because they raise the prices of important inputs for domestic production and thus force down labor demand and wages. Overall demand will then fall, and there will be deflation. This doesn’t mean tariffs improve the economic situation, of course. Tariffs are simply sales taxes on goods Americans wish to buy, and like all taxes, tariffs choke demand by leaving Americans will less disposable income.

If we wish to find the real cause of general price inflation, we need look no further than the monetary inflation that continues to be baked into the US economy. The US economy is still dogged by the more-than-five-trillion dollars that was created as a result of the Fed’s covid-era inflationist policies. This massive infusion of new money will continue to show up in unpredictable ways.

Notably, the bond markets today have signaled that bond investors are not convinced that price inflation is “solved,” regardless of what the Trump administration might claim. Noting that price inflation is likely to persist into the foreseeable future, longer bond yields surged in the wake of the CPI inflation report’s release, with the 30-year yield surging to over five percent by midday on Tuesday. The ten-year yield—which is key in setting mortgage rates—responded to the CPI report by rising from 4.4 percent to 4.48 percent.

According to MarketWatch today:

The U.S. bond market was in the process of selling off on Tuesday in a manner that tends to spell fresh trouble for many stock investors.

The selloff in Treasurys sent the yield on the 30-year bond above 5% and on its way toward its highest closing level since May. Back in May, the 30-year yield’s rise above 5% was accompanied by worries about the U.S.’s fiscal outlook. By contrast, Tuesday’s moves were largely about the outlook for inflation after June data showed consumer prices rose by the most on a monthly basis since the beginning of the year.

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

The post Price Inflation Rose in June to a Five Month High—But Don’t Blame Tariffs appeared first on LewRockwell.

Former British prime minister Liz Truss describes Britain, as I describe the United States, as a country ruled by an establishment that is stronger than the elected leader.  The brief interview with Truss is enlightening. 

Clearly Britain is no longer a free country.  It is not even a country in which ethnic British can complain about the lawlessness they suffer at the hands of immigrant invaders.

Here is the recent prime minister’s description of Great Britain:

“What has happened is an orthodoxy has taken over British institutions in the same way as it has taken over European institutions. That orthodoxy believes in mass migration, multiculturalism, toleration of Islamism. We have seen appalling coverups of grooming gangs in Britain with girls as young as 12  being systematically raped and no national inquiry. It’s been covered up. There is a group of people who have essentially taken over our institutions with a particular world view and they don’t want to be challenged, which is why we’re seeing free speech being suppressed because they don’t want people to know just how badly wrong it is going. I think all of these problems are connected. 

“So, mass migration is putting pressure on housing costs which means that Brits are not able to start a family. They are not able to buy a home because it is too expensive. That is creating a population crisis which then creates the demand for more migration. You’ve also got a left-wing ideology in terms of things like net zero which is making British energy very expensive. So, our energy costs in Britain are four times what they are in the United States. All of these things are compounded and people feel that things are getting worse and they cannot even say what is wrong. They can’t even complain about the grooming gangs or speak out about what happened in Southport because they are literally fearful of getting arrested.

“A similar thing has happened in Britain that also happened in the United States: The deep state, the unelected bureaucracy accumulated a lot of power, particularly under Tony Blair. He gave more power to judges; more power to so-called independent bodies. Those bodies have now been captured by woke ideology, by Islamic extreme Islamism, by a sort of multicultural human rights lobby. They said, ‘We don’t really care if you are British or Afghani, you have got the same rights in Britain.’ The British public do not agree with that. They believe that if you are British, those are the people the government should be prioritizing. So, all of that must be changed.

“The way to change it is to do what President Trump is doing in the United States. Win an election. What you have to do is first of all, restore justice and accountability to our justice system. At present, we have a two-tier system where if you tweet something, you could be put in jail, but if you’re found abusing children, you might not be put in jail.

“We have got a major problem with mass immigration, a major problem with de-industrialization, with stagnation. People’s incomes aren’t going up. Things are getting worse. But we have a very powerful establishment that doesn’t want the radical change that our country needs. So, it is a very serious situation we’re in at a very severe level. I believe unless there is change in the next few years, it could become irreversible.”

Dear Readers, We have the same situation in the United States.  Trump is finding it as hard to move against the establishment as PM Truss did in Britain.  Russiagate has been discredited, but now the establishment is coming for Trump with the Epstein documents.

Democracy only works when the people are motivated to be informed.  An insouciant people always succumb to tyranny.  

The post Freedom No Longer Characterizes the Western World appeared first on LewRockwell.

Richard Dawkins once quipped, “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid—or insane or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that.”

The seed of that sentiment was planted 100 years ago in July 1925, when John T. Scopes was tried and convicted in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching evolution in public schools in violation of the state’s Butler Act. The media coverage of the trial—coupled with Inherit the Wind, a 1960 Hollywood film depicting religion as an enemy of open inquiry, helped establish belief in evolution as a litmus test for sorting out science-deniers from the smart set.

In 2008, that test was put to 10 Republican presidential candidates in a debate when the moderator asked, “How many of you don’t believe in evolution?” Without any clarification of the term and restricted to respond with a simple show of hands, three of the hopefuls “failed.” However, their response revealed nothing of the candidates’ true attitudes about evolution, much less science. That’s because “evolution” spans a range of origin-of-life theories, a fact acknowledged by the late John Paul II in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Like the debate moderator, JPII didn’t define the term but called evolution “more than a hypothesis,” adding

…rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution. On the one hand, this plurality has to do with the different explanations advanced for the mechanism of evolution, and on the other, with the various philosophies on which it is based.

Those “several theories” are reflected in public attitudes.

In February 2025, the Pew Research Center reported that 80 percent of U.S. adults believe in evolution: 33 percent believing that God had no role in it and 47 percent believing that God or a “higher power” allowed it or guided it; only 17 percent discount evolution altogether. The PRC also found that over 75 percent of Protestants and Catholics accept some form of evolutionary theory, contradicting the modern view of religious belief as a science-stopper.

One form of the theory is the “macroevolution” of Darwinism—that is, the non-intelligent, non-teleological mechanism of random variation, adaptation, and natural selection, whereby new and increasingly complex organisms gradually emerge from a simple primordial life form. As to how “matter went live” in the first place to create something to evolve, well, that’s yet to be worked out.

Another form is “microevolution:” limited, small-scale changes in life forms adapting to environmental stresses through a process of genetic variation and inheritance. Microevolution explains why dogs, for example, even after millennia of intelligent intervention (dog breeding), are distinguishable from other life forms by their unique gene pool.

Imagine, after a century and a half of scientific “evidence” since the publication of Darwin’s theory and a century of inclusion in educational curricula since Scopes, mud-to-man Darwinian evolution is supported by scarcely one-third of adults. You might chalk that up to the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, the failure to empirically demonstrate the evolution of a one-celled organism into a two-celled one, or religious fundamentalism and science skepticism. Or maybe it is because of something more devastating.

In 1996, Bill Gates and a team of software engineers analyzed the chemical sequences of DNA and came away remarking, “Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.” Let that sink in for a moment.

If the most highly evolved thing on the planet, the human mind—using the collective imagination, creativity, and cognitive power of the brightest software engineers in the world—is unable to re-create the programming in DNA, then to conjecture it could have been cobbled together from a trial-and-error process of random variation and adaptation is nothing short of stupefying.

What we know, empirically, is that every computer code is the product of intelligence. So, if a code, or anything else, exhibits complexity far beyond the competency of human intelligence, the most reasonable assumption is a super intelligent origin. That’s the proposition of “intelligent design” (ID), an origin-of-life theory that aligns closest to the belief of up to two-thirds of adults, including the scientifically informed.

In a book review on Darwinism, evolution popularist Daniel Dennett lamented: “I was disconcerted to overhear some medical students talking in a bar recently. One exclaimed: ‘How could anybody believe in evolution after learning about the intricacies of the DNA replication machinery?’” When a scientific theory is rejected by scientifically trained individuals, that’s bad, very bad, and Dennett knows it. (I’ll bet he had another drink, or two, before leaving the bar that night.)

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George Carlin once cleverly noted, “That’s why they call it the American Dream- because you have to be asleep to believe it.” By the time he said that, it was a bleak but mostly true observation. But from the end of World War II, until the early 2000s, the American Dream was at least possible for most people to achieve.

I came from a lower middle-class family. No one graduated from college, and a few didn’t finish high school. I was born with bold fantasies, but little practical ambition. Clearly, I could have made a lot more money than I did. But I still managed to luck into a lovely version of the American Dream; loyal wife, a wonderful son and daughter, and a nice sized single family home in a very quiet neighborhood. And, of course, after I hit fifty, the sudden and unexpected fruition of my wildest dreams of becoming a published author. Ten books later, I realize just how fortunate I’ve been. I did little to deserve all the blessings I have. I’m sure I consistently fall short of being grateful enough for it all. But I can’t stop thinking of all those who didn’t have my luck. Who didn’t achieve the American Dream in any way, shape, or form. Now, things have deteriorated to such an extent that very few can hope to achieve it.

The American dream, as popularly expressed by politicians and media during the 1940s-1950s, meant owning your own home. Preferably with that white picket fence. A garden to tend to. A yard to mow, with no illegals around yet to do it. A faithful wife, who loved to cook for you, and didn’t mind housework. Who wanted as many children as you did. The larger the family the better. This Dream was much easier to achieve in the immediate postwar era. The girls would line up to marry you if you had served in the “good war.” It was kind of like being a doctor. And your job prospects were brighter as well, especially if you had won a medal or two. Every company liked to hire veterans. They were still everywhere you looked when I entered the workforce in the mid-1970s. Every one of those old timers I talked to had clearly experienced the American Dream. I don’t think I met any without a wife, kids, and a nice home.

So I understand the bitterness that many Millennials and Gen Zers feel toward the Boomers. We- especially the Boomers who are a decade or so older than me- were definitely the Luckiest Generation. We could pay for much more reasonable college tuition by working at a fast food place. Well, not me- as I’ve related far too many times, I was a community college dropout. Just about every job paid a living wage after World War II, up until maybe the early 1980s. Upward mobility was more possible than it ever had been before. It’s obviously very rare now. Unions were strong, and triggered higher wages, nicer benefits, and decent pensions. Even at non- union workplaces which wanted to be competitive. I knew a guy who was a cashier at Safeway in the early ‘80s. He was making $17 an hour, which translates to about $112,000 in today’s money. That same job at the same company pays less than $17 an hour to start. Today. Food prices in the ‘80s were much lower. Make that make sense.

Retired Boomers think the workplace is still the same as when they were seeking a job in the 1970s. Then, you really could walk into a place and be hired on the spot. Now, you have to apply online, take pointless tests, and compete often with hundreds of other applicants. For starting pay that won’t be enough for you live independently anywhere in this country. They think fast food jobs are for teenagers. Which they used to be. They seem oblivious to the impact from decades of outsourcing, disastrous trade deals, massive immigration and foreign visa workers. This is not your World War II veteran’s America any more. Trump’s accurate analysis of our trade policies attracted many to him. Tariffs are needed, but in typical Trump fashion, he’s doing things backward; domestic industry must be restored first, so there is some competition for foreign imports. I don’t see any new factories being built.

The destruction of the American Dream is reflected everywhere around us. The crumbling infrastructure, crying out for attention like a starving Palestinian. The rise in obesity, chronic illness, and slovenliness. “Smart” phones, which have helped to destroy eye to eye communication. Dwindling marriage rates and plummeting birth rates, especially for young Whites. Every poll shows that a clear majority of young girls have no interest in becoming mothers. This is a pure recipe for extinction. Dysfunctional families are the norm now. We have a loneliness phenomenon, which I wrote about and have pinned at the top of my Substack page. You can’t live the American Dream alone. It’s not the American Dream without a spouse and children, and a nice house in the suburbs, with or without a picket fence. I desperately want my children to experience an even better version of the American Dream than I have. But being realistic, I fear that just may not be possible.

None of this happened naturally. We didn’t “evolve” to a point where females no longer want to be feminine, and males have turned into submissive soy boys. Males didn’t lose their levels of testosterone because of nonsense like “Climate Change.” Females didn’t abruptly lose the maternal instinct because they became enlightened. Our odious culture was responsible for all of it. Beginning in the 1950s, when teenagers were conditioned to hate their parents for no reason, as represented in films like Rebel Without a Cause, and the best-selling book Catcher in the Rye, and television shows went from promoting unrealistic but socially desirable family harmony, to flooding the airwaves with single mothers, and fractured families where the children disrespected the parents, and the father figure went from Ward Cleaver to Al Bundy. Men were depicted as weak idiots. Housework and motherhood were discouraged. Cats and dogs were portrayed as apt replacements for that nagging maternal instinct.

As I detailed in my book Bullyocracy, there is evidence that teenagers were “invented” in the 1950s, as a hot new demographic to exploit. All those great films from the ‘50s directly targeted them; I was a Teenage Werewolf, Teenagers From Outer Space, etc. And the films increasingly portrayed a friction between parents and their pubescent children that doesn’t seem to have existed before. Somehow, I can’t picture teenage angst on the prairie. Do we really think Colonial era teenagers rolled their eyes at their parents, and screeched, “You just don’t understand me!” Family farms were the norm in this country for a very long time. They couldn’t have been productive with that kind of nonsensical bickering between parents and kids. Virtually all young people had the same goal; to meet the boy or girl of their dreams, get married and fruitfully multiply, and live happily ever after. Now a young woman gets cats and immerses herself in work. Young men satisfy themselves with video games and porn.

It wouldn’t have been possible to destroy the family unit, which is the foundation of the American Dream, without focusing on the fairer sex. Until the 1960s, men had little chance of being a “player,” and bedding different women. Females were raised to be “good girls,” and most of them were. Some slipped up a bit, but a “shotgun wedding” quickly ensued, and the American Dream could still be accomplished. Men aren’t naturally monogamous. Women were. That’s been altered through conditioning. By itself, feminism changed the landscape. In one fell swoop, women learned they didn’t need to be chained to their kitchens, and young girls discovered that you didn’t have to wait for marriage to have sex. This seemed a great victory for the young men of that era, but it opened the door to no fault divorces, latch key kids, and widespread abortions. Sex without deep feelings results in sex with dire consequences. By the 1980s, few brides and grooms were sexual strangers before their honeymoons.

The counterculture was antiwar. Well, at least the Vietnam War. Which was a good thing. But the hippies were also anti-nuclear family. Their American Dream was far different from the traditional one. More than a half century later, the American Dream has turned into a real nightmare for most people. Employees aren’t being paid enough, if they can even get a job, to pay rent on a small apartment, let alone buy a starter home. Middle-aged and older workers have been the victims of unspoken discrimination, and experienced layoffs and outsourcing. Many who formerly made a nice salary have been relegated to jobs like grocery store cashiers. Which now doesn’t pay enough to live independently. In the 1980s, the same job paid enough to qualify you to purchase a nice home. Reagan’s clash with the Air Traffic Controllers was the first blow to the power of unions. Big Labor is dead as a political force now. No Democrat courts them, as they once did the powerful George Meanys of the world.

The conservative response to the death of the American Dream is to deny that it’s dead. Because, of course, it isn’t dead for anyone in the fortunate top twenty percent of the population. This is the new managerial class, the ones who run the mess. They’ll call you snowflake, and advise you to become an entrepreneur. 90 percent of small businesses fold within a year or something, but conservatives act like it’s easy to start your own business in America 2.0. If over 70 percent of the public can’t save $500, how are they going to handle the startup costs? And we can’t all be small business owners. Someone has to do the grunt work. Both parties love to wax rhapsodic over “small business,” when they permitted untold numbers of small business owners to be decimated by the senseless COVID shutdown. In reality, both sides love cheap labor. Low wages, no benefits, and illegal immigrants, baby!

Financially, the American Dream was killed by an unprecedented consolidation of wealth, in the hands of fewer and fewer oligarchs. You can’t have a First World economy, let alone an American Dream, when the bottom half of your population has less than one percent of the total wealth collectively. Even if we started manufacturing things again, you’d have to pay those 150 million or more Americans much higher wages, if you want them to buy your new products. The billionaires have their gated, palatial estates. An increasing number of Americans are living in tents on the streets, where they now also freely defecate. And no one hurries to clean it up. Somehow, I don’t think that was ever intended to be a part of the American Dream. And it’s all happening in full view of tyrannical masters who watch our every move on security cameras. But aren’t proactive in the least about this glaring disparity of wealth.

Decades ago, it could be fairly said that if you found yourself homeless, it was because you didn’t want to work. That certainly isn’t the case now. Most polls claim that at least 10 percent of the homeless work, most of them full time. One of the best things Bernie Sanders ever said was that no one should be homeless when they’re working full time. The cost of housing, the cost of food, the cost of transportation, all contribute to this. Many blue collar workers have to Uber, thereby losing perhaps half their daily pay to transportation, because of the increased cost of automobiles. At jobs that don’t pay enough to live on your own to begin with. Another mainstream answer is to push the new minimalist nonsense, where young people can enjoy living in tiny boxes. That may be the Chinese reality, but it’s surely not the American Dream. As I’ve said many times- put the preschoolers in charge, and they’d do a much better job.

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“We’re going to win so much, you’re going to get tired of winning…I’ve always won, and I’m going to continue to win. And that’s the way it is.” – Pres. Donald J. Trump (note: fiat money-created inflation makes super billionaire winners at the expense of everyone else)

“Deflation creates a great number of losers…but also many winners…and (especially) punishes political entrepreneurs who thrived on their intimate connections and those who control the production of fiat money” – Jorg Guido Hulsmann, Deflation and Liberty (Von Mises Institute) p. 28.

In his definitive 1966 book on the world’s power structure, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, historian Carroll Quigley discusses the suppressed concept of global monopoly Capitalism and the parasitical fiat money system that is used as a scapegoat for the rise of authoritarian, militaristic fascism and unnecessary wars: the “Deflationary Gap”. Quigley emphasizes that the Deflationary Gap is the “key to the twentieth century economic crisis and one of the three central cores of the whole tragedy of the twentieth century” economics (i.e., “innovation, savings and investment”) p. 546.

In his book Grand Deception (2018), commodities economist Alex Krainer defines Deflationary Gap as an imbalance in the economy where there is a surplus of goods because of dearth of money supply for consumption of goods due to retention of household savings such as for retirement plans.

Fascist “austerity” policies during economic contraction are thus designed to reduce government spending from crowding out capital for unsold goods and services, curiously except for money spent on wars (see Clara Mattei: The Capital Order: Austerity as a Way to Fascism, 2022).  Deflation means prices are falling, often below the price a producer can recover his costs and make a profit.

The Deflationary Gap can be reduced by lowering supply, by increasing demand and/or by increasing natural resources and hard assets to serve as collateral for fractional interest lending. This last option can be accomplished by piracy wars to exploit natural resources of other countries by regime takeovers via color revolutions and getting mercenary proxy nations to fight banker’s wars for them (e.g., Israel vs. Gaza Palestinians and Ukraine as US proxy versus Russia on behalf of London Bank and the New York Federal Reserve Bank). All world wars since 1900 have been proxy wars fought by mercenary nations for the bank of London (see B. Woolfolk, Great Red Dragon, or London Money Power, 1890 and E.C. Knuth, The Empire of the City: The Secret History of British Financial Power, 1944).

Manifestations of the Fascist austerity policy to reduce the Deflationary Gap beginning in 2020 were:

• Corporate medicine suddenly morphed into a mass depopulation industry by vaccinations, quarantines, overkill drug dosages as the standard of care, continued medieval cancer treatments of debulking surgeries and chemotherapy with effectually zero cure rate, and deadly acute hospital care of anyone with any kind of respiratory issue (but stemming from root cause of autointoxication by sepsis blood poisoning from waste buildup – i.e., constipation from insoluble fiber that interferes with calcium metabolism).
• Mysterious fires of food processing plants serving luxury food markets disguised as accidents so that corporate agriculture could collect insurance before they eventually faced bankruptcy from the coming depression/recession.
• Militant Antifa, BLM mobs carried out riots, arson, and vandalism of minority-owned small business district in “Blue” cities with legal impunity, funded by 25 Silicon Valley corporations and scofflaw George Soros to capture the customer base of small businesses concurrently with COVID lockdowns of small businesses.
• Religious-based NGOs were funded by Soros and former presidents Bush and Obama to fund relocation of millions of South American un-naturalized, unskilled migrants to provide a cheap labor pool especially for apartment builders in California (displacing skilled American workers). But the apparent trick of fascism is to portray it as an organic worker’s revolt and insurrection, just as elitist-benefitting Communism was mis-portrayed as a proletarian movement.
• Under fascism a policy of privatization was also adopted to transfer wealth from the working class to new privateers to compete with socialized global Chinese corporations of the Communist Party. Ergo the public-private partnerships in the US such as Space X replacing NASA, electronic mail, Fed Ex, UPS, unconstitutionally replacing the post office, Amazon e-commerce replacing the mom-and-pop-stores and local niche businesses by selective COVID lockdowns targeted at small businesses.
• Government austerity was selectively targeted to reduce or eliminate non-essential jobs program bureaucracies such as the federal Education Department, EPA, FEMA and the infamous congressional USAID programs.
• Social Security and Medicare were adjusted upward for politically induced hyperinflation but with the proviso the entire programs would be phased out around 2035. Immigrants are being banned from using these programs, including hospital birthing and citizenship.
• However, Defense Department funding was increased to continue supporting regime changes and unnecessary wars in the Middle East designed to capture the natural resources of foreign countries, so that globalist London banks would have sufficient hard assets to continue collateralizing usurious fractional lending. Afghanistan was abandoned abruptly by the Biden administration to fight wars in Gaza and Ukraine. The US left behind an enormous amount of war equipment. Now it comes to light that the London bank possibly wants to use Afghani troops to fight insurrections in Britain and elsewhere. There was a method to the Afghanistan madness and, like everything else, it leads back to London.

Effectually, in 2020 the COVID crisis served as legitimate government cover for fascist economic civil war waged on the Working Class and Small Business Class by banking and the luxury high-tech industries. This was effectually an undeclared mass regulatory taking of private property to benefit private interests without paying just compensation to those plundered for their losses as provided under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Amazon made no profit in its early years but now makes a profit mainly by replacing goods and services of small and medium size small businesses with layers of luxury services. Cheaper kinetic-analogue retail services were replaced by more expensive e-commerce, web services, web advertising, surveillance capitalism, mass home drone delivery, etc. Consequently, the concept of Market Value shifted from the lowest priced product in a competitive open transactional market in contrast to the highest price good to benefit the digital middlemen and Silicon Valley oligarchs in a rigged monopoly market.

This is especially seen in non-market goods such as mandated rooftop solar power and e-vehicles that require massive tax subsidies to enrich stock-owning oligarchs. The so-called air quality health dividend from solar power is fraudulent as only California has topographical smog traps. Concurrent with the shift to solar and wind power, in California asthma rates have not declined, lung cancer rates have declined but due to fewer smokers, TB is a bacterial disease spread through intimate contact, and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is related to poverty not air quality. In California, smog is mainly a blight on the tourist industry. Income inequality also soared during the COVID crisis as the number of billionaires and Knowledge-Class jobs grew at the expense of the Working Class and small business.

But as of 2025 both London banks and Israel are about to fail as the Ponzi banking scheme they imposed on the entire world after WWII is crashing, leaving the US with a ginormous $31+ trillion debt for unnecessary wars that furthered no interests of the American people (Iraq War I, Iraq War II, 9/11 War on Terror, Afghanistan, Gaza, and Ukraine wars). Moreover, former HUD official Catherine Austin Fitts has revealed audits showing $21 trillion was stolen from the US Department of Defense Budget over a 15-year period and apparently diverted to the London banking system and spread to offshore tax havens. Included was a raid on the giant Cal-PERS retirement system which is only 75% funded. London bankers have been parasitically skimming 3% to 15% fees for international money exchange transfers since the end of WWII and the Bretton-Woods System.

Moreover, the London Bankers want to be paid back for the American artificial inflationary fiat money debt accrued from their unnecessary wars. Money deflation offers the prospect of freedom from London debt oppression (see Jorg Guido Hulsmann, Deflation and Liberty, Mises Institute, 2008, and Fox King, Cleanse Society of Governmental Parasites Through Monetary Deflation, 2025). “Bad” inflationary money has driven out “good” labor-based money, but the lenders of the bad money want paid back in sound money.  And the US Congress is willing to oblige them apparently partly through the passage of the Genius Act (aka Stable Coin Act) and a legislative system of bribery. The Genius Act will continue funding the national annual budget deficits to fill the gap of Japan and China no longer buying US T-bills to finance that debt. Stable Coins do nothing to stop out of control government fiscal profligacy or fighting more banker’s wars.

However, government combining bitcoins and artificial intelligence system to pay down the national debt potentially abrogates privacy provisions under the Constitution. Stable Coins have alarmed conservatives Catherine Austin Fitts, Mike Adams of Brighteon.com and the La Rouche Organizationas fraud and the potential start of a totalitarian surveillance system. Fitts says Trump was put in the presidency by the Silicon Valley AI lobby and can’t be depended on to bring about proper reforms.

However, Austrian economist Tom Luongo says Stable Coin under the Genius Act is not necessarily or principally designed for use by citizens but mainly by banks through a block chain to circumvent the charges of the intermediary London exchange bank and the requirement of banks to hold double reserves. This would free up a bank’s balance sheet to issue more loans and at a lower interest rate. Luongo says Pres. Trump’s advocacy of Stable Coin is an “ingenious system” that cuts out the central bank middleman.

Luongo says the old system was like buying dinner on your credit card at 21% interest every night without having any income, but having to put up 200% collateral of your car and home, as opposed to borrowing from the Fed Reserve at 4% under the new system with no collateral because Stable Coin will be backed by Treasury Bills, bitcoin, gold, etc. Mortgages under the new stabler Stable Coin system can also be underwritten with bitcoin and gold as well as savings.

This would reverse the old system of buying cheap imported goods and being left with debt with a new system that we will eventually be producing our own goods with debt backed by gold and stabilized bitcoin with debt we owe ourselves. But a Stable Coin system is no panacea as it would still be inflationary and would continue to fund unnecessary and illegitimate wars.

Alex Krainer says that despite Pres. Trump’s bombastic misdirection style of speech, he has an ad hoc strategy designed to abandon London’s totalitarian money dominance, pursue a multipolar world of many currencies with Russia, China and Iran (BRICS), and divorcing the dependency of Europe on the US for foreign aid the mercenary US military to fight proxy wars for the London bank.

In sum, domestic corporate fascism, contrived hyperinflation, domestic terrorism, weaponized immigration and medicine, and wars fought to reduce the “Deflation Gap” do not have to be inevitable. But the future cannot be predicted especially now that the London-Israel axis has been incentivized to deploy atomic weapons out of a desperation of last resort.

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