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The high was nice while it lasted. But False Hopium is an ephemeral drug.

In the first few weeks, we were maddened – but also gladdened – by the disclosures regarding how our money (which is forcibly extracted from us) was “wasted” on various execrable things by USAID and the subsequent closing of USAID. How grand! But the high caused us to forget about our money – which of course has never been given back. What does it matter to a man who has been mugged how the mugger spends the money he’s stolen?

This is the DOGE dodge – and it worked, for awhile. People – especially people who wear the Red Hat – were cheered by the thought that Elon Musk, that arch rent-seeker and endorser of carbon taxes – was making the mugger (government) more “efficient.” This being of a piece with “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Not less government – or lower taxes. Just more efficient government. Including a more efficient (AI driven) system of income extraction. Instead of some wiggle room to “get away” with paying something less than “your fair share,” a more efficient system that knows exactly how much you earned so as to assure you are forced to pay precisely what the government says you “owe.”

Is it not astounding? The inheritors of 1776 now generally accept that they owe a large portion of what they worked to earn to the state. And do not object, provided their money is spent efficiently. How long before they stop objecting to penetrative rape, provided the rapist is skilled and makes sure the victim orgasms?

Back to DOGE. It is interesting to note that none of its attentions were focused on the most wasteful and extravagant expenditures of our money – on what is ludicrously styled “defense” spending. This country not having had to defend itself since December the 7th, 1941.

Interestingly, that was around the time the War Department became the Defense Department and – since that time – has gobbled up about 15 percent of the money we’re forced to pay to the mugger (government). This goes to pay for such things as several aircraft carrier battle groups and an estimated arsenal of 10,000 nuclear weapons – which are as needed for “defense” as traffic cops need full Fallujah kit to hand out speeding tickets.

If we were actually talking about defense – as opposed to offense – the amount of money that is sluiced to Boeing and Raytheon and various other “defense contractors” (some of which is then sluiced to purchase the politicians who vote to continue the sluicing) could probably be reduced by two-thirds and every American taxpayer (a term that is obnoxious in that it suggests the paying was done voluntarily) could be issued a refund much larger than the $5,000 payment that was briefly, tantalizingly dangled in front of the dupes – who’ve already forgotten all about it. Just as they appear to have forgotten all about Epstein’s list and the “COVID” criminals who have not and likely never will pay for their crimes.

There has been no attempt by DOGE to make “defense” spending more efficient. Probably because Musk is very much in the process of transitioning to his new grift, which involves getting the government to subsidize rockets rather than electric vehicles.

It’ll be very efficient, of course.

But there won’t be less of it. Except insofar as what’s left in our pockets. And of the freedom we’ll never get back by expecting those who’ve taken it from us to give it back to us.

This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.

The post What DOGE Didn’t Touch appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

Right, Bernie?

The post You know what they say about those who scream the loudest.. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Jesse Trentadue.

OKC Facts

The post OKC Bombing Book Signing Is a Month Late, and Three Decades Short On The Truth appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

Hi Lew,

Well, obviously, our ancestors made it through Medieval Times. Mine survived on whisky and beer with the odd animal and vegetable thrown into a stew. That’s pretty much my diet today. Pizza is just some flat dough with some mystery ingredients on top. Some dried apples were around for Vitamin C.

It was probably a healthier diet back then than the frozen food we eat today.  The beer was better, too.

The post Why You Wouldn’t Last 24 Hours in Medieval Times appeared first on LewRockwell.

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1. Treason From Within: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy 
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The New York Times this week reports that the Trump administration has canceled many grants that were to fund “research” on “misinformation.” This is being presented by the media as a dastardly deed that will supposedly allow the spread of misleading or false information through various media channels.

Of course, if there were any genuine interest in studying the most egregious efforts to spread misinformation, media outlets like the Times would study themselves and their friends in the regime. After all, few organizations have been more complicit than the national American media and the US foreign policy establishment when it comes to spreading much of the worst propaganda in American history. I say “worst” because this propaganda has often been used in service to the worst ends: to gin up support for a variety of wars resulting in the deaths of thousands—sometimes even hundreds of thousands—of innocents.

Relatively recent media-regime partnerships in propagandistic misinformation include the “Russiagate” hoax, various efforts to obscure US meddling in Ukraine, and the nearly nonstop drumbeat of “news” stories over the past twenty years designed to push for regime change in various countries from Venezuela to Russia to Libya and to Syria—where the Assad regime, according to US design, was recently replaced by Islamist terrorists. And then, of course, there is the nonstop stream of misinformation designed to prop up the State of Israel and obscure its many war crimes. And let’s not forget the fictional “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq which the US presented to the United Nations as established fact.

Throughout all this, the interventionist “foreign policy blob” in Washington received near universal support from its friends at publications like the Times and the Washington Post.

The United States did not invent these tactics. Over the past 100-plus years, however, perhaps no regime was more innovative than the British when it came to inventing “facts” designed to manufacture popular consent for wars and more foreign intervention. The United States has done its best to adopt similar methods, however, and creating invented narratives in service to the regime’s foreign policy goals is now standard operating procedure for the American state as well.

The Great War: The Turning Point

Throughout history, most great powers world have long lied to buttress their war efforts, but these efforts greatly increased in magnitude and sophistication during the twentieth century, mostly with the assistance of increasingly centralized organs of mass media.

For an insightful narrative on how this new “propaganda state” developed, we can consult the works of historian Ralph Raico, who suggests that the true turning point came with the First World War when the British regime, with the help of the media, engaged in a propaganda campaign of impressive effectiveness. Specifically, Raico posits that modern wartime propaganda began with “the Belgian atrocity stories of 1914, which was maybe the first great propaganda success in modern times.”

The stories of which Raico speaks were part of a concerted British campaign to wildly exaggerate German aggression in Belgium and to send the message that the Germans were a barbaric race unlike the civilized French and British people of Europe. It was mostly based on an official British government report known as the Bryce Report. The report made countless unsubstantiated claims about mass rapes, children with their hands cut off, violated nuns, and Canadian soldiers crucified on barn doors. This produced horror and anti-German zealotry around much of the world.

But there was one problem: it was nearly all based on lies. Raico writes:

What is the story of the Belgian atrocities? The story of the Belgian atrocities is that they were faked. They were fabricated. They were phony. The pictures were photographed in particular buildings which are known in Paris. Th stage sets were designed by designers for the Parisian opera. The stories were made up out of … whole cloth and spread by British propaganda as another weapon in the war—especially in the war for the minds of the neutral countries. …[T]his turns a good deal of public opinion against the Germans.

Raico adds one especially ironical note, and quotes historian Thomas Fleming, who according to Raico,

to his credit, mentions that the real cases of people, including children, with their hands cut off occurred in the Congo beginning in the 1880s, at the behest of the Belgian king Leopold II. Because of their great extent and nearly incredible cruelty, it’s those that deserve to be called “the Belgian atrocities.”

Chief among those neutral countries that were targets of British propaganda, of course, was the United States.

The British regime was desperate to have the Americans enter the war on the American side, and the British almost spared no trouble or expense convincing the Americans that the British were fighting against an enemy of untrammeled malice. The program was very successful. Raico notes that an

ingrained bias of the American political class and social elite was galvanized by British propaganda. On August 5, 1914, the Royal Navy cut the cables linking the United States and Germany. Now news for America had to be funneled through London, where the censors shaped and trimmed reports for the benefit of their government. Eventually, the British propaganda apparatus in the First World War became the greatest the world had seen to that time; later it was a model for the Nazi Propaganda Minster Josef Goebbels. Philip Knightley noted:

British efforts to bring the United States into the war on the Allied side penetrated every phase of American life. . . . It was one of the major propaganda efforts of history, and it was conducted so well and so secretly that little about it emerged until the eve of the Second World War, and the full story is yet to be told.

The Americans Adopt British Methods

Ultimately, the British propaganda effort worked and the United States government enthusiastically entered the war on the side of Britain. This went against what was still a very large portion of the American public’s antiwar preferences, but the British had won the American elites over to their side.

After all, as the British effort mounted, even the Republican party’s leadership began pressuring Woodrow Wilson to take a more hardline anti-German stance. As Raico puts it “Americans, who devoutly wished to avoid war, had no spokesmen within the leadership of either of the major parties.”

Once the US entered the war, the US’s implemented its own propaganda barrage, and now it took on an additional dimension of outright censorship. For this, the media and the nation’s intellectuals were enlisted to push the war message, and, as Raico writes

public schools and the universities were turned into conduits for the government line. Postmaster General Albert Burleson censored and prohibited the circulation of newspapers critical of Wilson, the conduct of the war, or the Allies. The nation-wide campaign of repression was spurred on by the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, the U.S. government’s first propaganda agency.

Just one example of the regime’s capture of educational institutions could be found in how The New York Times praised the President of Columbia University for dismissing faculty members who opposed the regime on conscription.

American Propaganda After the Great War

The Second World War brought another resurgence in war propaganda, and this time, American cooperation with British forces was virtually guaranteed ahead of time. By 1939, Roosevelt was comfortable promising King George VI “full support for Britain in case of war,” as Raico puts it.

By 1940, even before the US entered the war, The US government was working hand in glove with the British government to convince Americans of the necessity of US involvement in the war. As Raico notes, the full extent of this collaboration was covered up for decades, although,

In 1976, the public finally learned the story of William Stephenson, the British agent code named “Intrepid,” sent by Churchill to the United States in 1940. Stephenson set up headquarters in Rockefeller Center, with orders to use any means necessary to bring the United States into the war. With the full knowledge and cooperation of Roosevelt and the collaboration of federal agencies, Stephenson and his 300 or so agents “intercepted mail, tapped wires, cracked safes, kidnapped, . . . rumor mongered” and incessantly smeared their favorite targets, the “isolationists.” Through Stephenson, Churchill was virtually in control of William Donovan’s organization, the embryonic U.S. intelligence service. Churchill even had a hand in the barrage of pro-British, anti-German propaganda that issued from Hollywood in the years before the United States entered the war. Gore Vidal, in Screening History, perceptively notes that starting around 1937, Americans were subjected to one film after another glorifying England and the warrior heroes who built the Empire. As spectators of these productions, Vidal says: “We served neither Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis; we served the Crown.”

Vidal was so impressed—in a bad way—by the continued success of British propagandists in this effort that he remarked:

For those who find disagreeable today’s Zionist propaganda, I can only say that gallant little Israel of today must have learned a great deal from the gallant little Englanders of the 1930s. The English kept up a propaganda barrage that was to permeate our entire culture…. Hollywood was subtly and not so subtly infiltrated by British propagandists.

Raico describes how closely the US and the UK collaborated in these efforts, and how successfully. By 1941, there was no doubt where the US regime would come down on the war issue. The primary question by then was how much Roosevelt would be able to drum up American hostility against Japan. In this respect, of course, he succeeded quite well.

A general worldview favoring endless international intervention was supplemented and cemented in the American mind for decades afterward by the ultimate purveyors of propaganda: the government schools. First and foremost was an effort to ensure that executive power was unlimited in international affairs claimed by Roosevelt and his successors. Raico writes:

Back in 1948, Charles Beard already noted the dismal ignorance among our people of the principles of our republican government: American education from the universities down to the grade schools is permeated with, if not dominated by, the theory of presidential supremacy in foreign affairs. Coupled with the flagrant neglect of instruction in constitutional government, this propaganda . . . has deeply implanted in the minds of rising generations the doctrine that the power of the president over international relations is, for all practical purposes, illimitable.

The US propaganda apparatus became less focused on British concerns after the war, but was deftly turned toward promoting US regime interests during the Cold War. In his work on the Truman years, Raico notes that by the late 1940s, Truman was also pressing for fresh hostilities, including open warfare, against the new enemy, the Soviet Union. Those who resisted, especially Republicans form the Taft wing of the party, were accused of being Stalin apologists.

In this, Truman, in what had become a well established pattern of American life, was assisted by elite journalists at media outlets. Raico notes:

Truman’s campaign could not have succeeded without the enthusiastic cooperation of the American media. Led by the Times, the Herald Tribune, and Henry Luce’s magazines, the press acted as volunteer propagandists for the interventionist agenda, with all its calculated deceptions. (Thee principal exceptions were the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times–Herald, in the days of Colonel McCormick and Cissy Paterson.) In time, such subservience in foreign affairs became routine for the “fourth estate,” …. Overwhelmed by the propaganda blitz from the administration and the press, a Republican majority in Congress heeded the Secretary of State’s high-minded call to keep foreign policy “above politics” and voted full funding for the Marshall Plan.

Voices in favor of peace were shouted down and banished from public discourse. Historian Steven Ambrose sums up the Truman-media victory:

When Truman became president he led a nation anxious to return to traditional civil-military relations and the historic American foreign policy of noninvolvement. When he left the White House his legacy was an American presence on every continent of the world and an enormously expanded armament industry. Yet so successfully had he scared hell out of the American people, the only critics to receive any attention in the mass media were those who thought Truman had not gone far enough in standing up to the communists. For all his troubles, Truman had triumphed.

By the end of the Truman years, the pattern was well established, based largely on the earlier efforts of British propaganda that was developed years earlier. Here were all the elements of manufacturing consent that would be employed during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the arms wars of the 1960s and 1980s, and the new “regime change” wars of the post-Cold War world.

In this, we perhaps find the answer to a question posed by Raico during one of his lectures:

Isn’t it funny how, with the possible exception of Vietnam, all of America’s wars have been justified and have been right and good? I mean, what are the odds of something like that? A major power’s every war has been good, and the enemy has always been unbelievably horrible?

He already knew the answer. It was the state’s propaganda that made it possible for Americans to believe that virtually every new war is some kind of crusade against evil. Thanks to propaganda, the American thinking on foreign policy—which, in an earlier age had been more pragmatic and less moralistic—had taken on its modern tone of quasi-religious righteousness.

Indeed, in this contrast with America prior to the twentieth century, and the concomitant degeneration into an era of total war, we get some hint of just how much a century of relentless propaganda has fashioned the American mind.  Only in examining its history can we hope to fully understand the insidiousness and effectiveness of these methods. It is necessary to also have knowledge of their origins and this allows us to better understand the transformation that took place in the first third of the twentieth century as the American mind became accustomed to a nonstop and creeping propaganda that is still so present in American foreign policy today.

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

The post How War Propaganda Has Fueled American Foreign Policy for a Century appeared first on LewRockwell.

During my life, I’ve been involved with numerous marginalized groups opposed to something horrific being done by the establishment (including many that had nothing to do with medicine). Throughout that, I’ve seen those groups (many of which I deeply believed in) fragment and fracture again and again. As such, I’ve put a lot of thought into why this always happens and became much more selective about confronting these conflicts since it’s rarely productive to engage with them.

One of the few things that still gets to me is when I see people I know are remarkably dedicated to a cause (and frequently made significant sacrifices for it) be torn apart by the people they’re trying to help. This is in part because I feel its unjust, but more because I know so many instances of idealistic leaders who genuinely wanted to do the right thing, but gradually had their hearts close down (hence becoming like typical politicians) because of all of the attacks they’d received over the years. As such, while there have been a lot of people I’ve wanted to defend due to the vitriol they’ve received, the only people I’ve directly spoken up for were Calley Means and Robert Malone.

Note: years ago, I knew someone who worked in Libya’s government for decades with Gadaffi (a highly eccentric dictator who was known for diverting Libya’s oil wealth to its people and creating one of the highest standards of living in the region until NATO took him out in 2011). One of the things he shared with me was that in his younger years, Gadaffi was very idealistic and eager to do all he could for Libya, but after surviving numerous failed assassination attempts, gradually became much more bitter and closed down.

Recently, an unexpected announcement shook the MAHA community—Trump’s November Surgeon General nominee Nesheiwat (who MAHA briefly protested for a few days due to her past COVID vaccine promotion and then forgot about) was replaced with Casey Means. After hearing about this, my first thought was a huge sigh of a relief which was immediately followed by “oh dear, this going this is going to stir up a lot of drama.”

Note: everyone I’ve spoken to who’s directly connected to the HHS wants Casey Means as the Surgeon General (due to her ability to communicate to the public and her genuine interest in MAHA) and feels that she is the best candidate they have that can pass a Senate confirmation.

The Origins of Evil

One of the main debates throughout human history has been where evil comes from and if humans are intrinsically good or evil. My own conclusions from decades of considering this are as follows:

• Many of the detestable things I see play out on the national stage I’ve seen very similar variants of occur in many smaller groups I’ve belonged to.

• Most of the horrific things we see happen have occurred throughout history in many different societies, suggesting evil is an intrinsic aspect of humanity.

• While many things we are seeing now are appalling, the degree of cruelty and depravity we witnessing now is much less than it was earlier in recorded history. However, while this general evolution of human consciousness and regard for ethics is profound, it is counterbalanced by the fact modern technology has made it possible for small numbers of people to commit cruelty and destruction on a scale that never before was possible.

• Many of the worst things people do are not due to malevolence but rather strong emotions, egos never wanting to be wrong and deeply ingrained fixations.

• In many cases, you can link a horrific action someone does to an unresolved trauma in the past (or in some cases a neurological injury such as those caused by the DPT vaccine). In many others, you can see how media propaganda or spiritual forces (both on an individual or societal level) can precipitate evil in those who are unbalanced enough to be susceptible to these subtle influences.

• In many cases, people are not fully conscious of their actions, and due to outside influences or retained patterning, will frequently force themselves to say or do things they are internally conflicted about.
Note: years ago, I read an excellent body language book on detecting deceit and then began gently asking people who displayed clear signs they were conflicted about what they’d just said to see if they actually believed it, and found in most cases, they did not (but frequently did not realize until I pointed it out).

• Some of the worst things which have happened throughout history were well-intended but ended up being catastrophic because their advocates could not see the full picture (e.g., why the action was a bad idea) and refused to change course once their peers or real-world results showed them they were causing more harm than good.

• Generally speaking, most people want to do the right thing and help others, but due either to their circumstances or the difficulty of doing the right thing, most won’t. Likewise, the majority of people I observe do “evil” things I do not deem to be evil people who wish to harm others.

• In most cases, evil follows a slippery slope, so once people acclimatize themselves to doing something wrong (e.g., for the “greater good” or to protect a “vital” institution), their resistance to doing it again gradually each time they repeat the act.

• It is very easy to design social systems which uses some combination of the previous to force well-intentioned people to do bad things and many institutions do just that.

• A small portion of the population does not have this resistance to hurting others, commonly characterized with labels such as “sociopaths” or “psychopaths” which for context are defined as:

Psychopath (0.5-1% of the population): A person with a severe form of personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy, shallow emotions, manipulativeness, and a tendency to engage in calculated, predatory behavior. Psychopathy is often considered to have a biological or genetic basis, with traits present from an early age.

Sociopath (1-4% of the population): A person who exhibits similar antisocial behaviors but whose traits are thought to be more environmentally influenced, often developing due to trauma, abuse, or social factors. Sociopathy is often less severe than psychopathy and may involve more impulsivity.

Note: psychopathy often goes hand in hand with narcissism and Machiavellianism.

• While some people take joy in hurting others (e.g., masochists) I find most of these monsters don’t wish to hurt others, they just have no concerns if others need to suffer for them to get want, hence making apathy far more destructive than malice.

• One of the major flaws in government is that its structure is extremely vulnerable to psychopathic individuals grabbing the reins of power and then forcing everyone else to go along with their prerogative. Because of this, I believe the best form of government humanity has developed is one of checks and balances where those individuals are continually forced to compete with each other for power (hence preventing any one of them from going to far off the deep end).

Note: the major problem with a bureaucracy full of robust checks and balances designed to impede government abuse, is that it also ofter prevents anything from getting done (which in turn begets corruption as that is often the only way to move things through the bureaucracy).

Black Pills

“Taking The Red Pill” is a cultural idiom from the Matrix where the main character was given the choice to fully awaken to the nightmare around him everyone had lied about or lull himself back into a complacent reality which ignored all of it.

Once people become aware of the scale of problems around them, it frequently leads to a sense of despair, and in time, this hopeless realization began being referred to as “being black-pilled.”

One of the recurring themes in any alternative movement is there will be a black-pilled subset of the group which shoots down any proposal to make things better under the logic such as “it’s futile to ever make things better so if you try to, you’re just getting scammed,” “all the things being proposed are actually distractions to keep us from fixing the real problem,” or “the person proposing this terrible proposal is actually an enemy trying to sabotage the movement.”
Note: a key point often missed by this crowd is that there are a lot of people within the system who want to help and in many cases have spent years waiting for the chance to.

In turn, while initially I was immensely intrigued by understanding the full scale of how twisted the world was, as time went on, I got more and more frustrated by people who only wanted to complain about things but never fix them, so like many others I know who wanted to make things better eventually parted ways with many of those overly black-pilled groups. Likewise, over the years, I’ve known many black-pilled people who’ve complained about everything in the world for decades as their personal life, in tandem, fell apart (despite the issues in it being easily addressable).

Presently, I believe the black-pill is incredibly seductive because it:

• Gives you a way to feel in control of your environment (by declaring it’s hopeless to do anything) and superior to others (by knowing a secret truth they don’t know). Likewise, I believe this validation explains why individuals who believe in a black-pill (or outlandish interpretation of existing data) will so aggressive in trying to get others to submit to adopting their perspective.

• Emotional and mental patterns are self-sustaining and much more comfortable to repeat than repattern. As such, black-pills have a strong subconscious appeals to individuals with pre-existing trauma or longstanding marginalization (hence causing them to accumulate in marginalized groups).

• Since they rely upon speculative inferences (e.g., that someone we’ve trusted is actually our secret enemy), black pills are essentially impossible to disprove, and as such, always provide an endless stream of attention grabbing content for those who need it even if they’ve repeatedly make false allegations in the past.
Note: since this “works” tabloid media (and in some cases the MSM) also often does it.

For all of these reasons, I try to avoid diving into most black-pills, and when I catch myself starting to, I take a step back and inevitably find that tendency is simply an expression of my own current frustration with the world. As such, I instead try to focus on (truthful) things that give people hope and actionable steps to make things better.

Note: people will often be the meanest to those they are the closest to, as it’s a safe space for them to displace their unresolved frustrations without fear of being retaliated against for their hostile behavior (and likewise they can expect to be listened to). In parallel, I find something similar often occurs to leaders in groups.

Wedging

One of the most reliable methods to handicap an opposing side is to split it into two (or more) factions and have those factions fight against each other over the split rather than having everyone focus on the bigger issue they all share. This tactic has been used again and again throughout history (e.g., a strong case can be made that much of the white-black animosity in America originated from a 1676 rebellion where both poor white indentured servants [essentially slaves] and black slaves united against the colonial elite, after which the plantation owners passed a variety of laws to create divisions against whites and blacks so they would never join together again to rebel).

A variety of terms exist for this process, and in the last few years, many have noted that this splintering has plagued the medical freedom movement. Robert Malone for example recently wrote a detailed piece on it (using the terminology Balkanization in reference to the perpetual armed conflict which followed splitting up the Balkan peninsula into smaller rival states).

See: Cyber Balkanization- Welcome to the Splinternet

Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said to them…

Read more

In politics, wedge issues are contentious one which divide a political base (e.g., transgenderism on the left), and then much like a wedge against wood, will split the base along its fault lines into rival factions once enough force is applied to the wedge.

In turn, one of the recurring themes I’ve run into ever since this newsletter started getting traction was people demanding I take sides on a highly divisive issue, either of which would divide and alienate many of the people here.

Note: a common “double” wedge, is that salacious gossip about someone’s target (e.g., a leader) that sows doubt will first be seeded throughout a group and then once it’s entrenched, be followed by attempts to force everyone to pick a side on that person. What’s fascinating to me is how many different scales I’ve seen this same dynamic play out on (e.g., I knew two people in a small group I belonged to who were friends, then had a falling out, after which the psychologically imbalanced one spent months doing this in an increasingly extreme fashion to the other person [e.g., they repeatedly tried to drag me into it] before moving onto something else).

Unfortunately, once these rumors are planted, people often forget how they started, so even if the original lie is refuted, the emotional impression it created persists. For example, a few months ago “to help RFK” a large influencer, citing unnamed sources, broke a nonsensical story (based off an already debunked story) about how RFK was being sexually blackmailed into silence by Israel that would be proven by a media firestorm over in the next few days (causing it to go viral). We called it out at the time and the predicted firestorm (the proof for these allegations) never happened, leading to the lie quickly being forgotten. However, the emotion behind it stuck and as a result, many in the black pill crowd are still attributing all of RFK’s “treasonous” actions (e.g., not immediately banning all vaccines) to him being blackmailed by some unspecified party.

From engaging with the people who tried to tried to “wedge” me, I’ve noticed three common subsets of them:

1. There were those who seemed to be acting in good faith, but had a force and rigidity to their mind akin to the edge of a blunt axe (hence why I prefer the term “wedging”).

2. A portion of the people were engaging in bad faith and seemed to be primarily motivated to tear people down (e.g., to build themselves up or attract monetizable followers to their brand).

3. A portion seemed to be bots that were there to split people apart.

Note: black-pilled people and people who try to wedge groups tend be a very vocal minority. As such, they create the impression far more feel that way than actually do (which, in turn, leads to content producers feeling pressured to appease that audience and hence creates a self-reinforcing cycle of negativity you often see in the alternative genre).

Read the Whole Article

The post Building Coalitions and Overcoming Division appeared first on LewRockwell.

The title is a bit crude and is deliberately mocking in tone. But it has to be because there is a deeply-entrenched, almost sacred presumption embedded in the nation’s foreign policy catechism that “allies”, “alliances” and “coalitions of the willing” are the be-all-and-end-all of enlightened, necessary and effective foreign policy.

American policy-makers and diplomats perforce should therefore never leave these shores for the wider world without them. This dogma perhaps reached its epitome in Secretary of State James Baker’s “coalition of the willing” during the utterly pointless first Gulf War of 1991 and has plagued us ever since. Unfortunately.

In fact, the truth is more nearly the opposite–so it needs to be stated coarsely, almost defiantly. To wit, allies in today’s world are mostly an albatross, completely irrelevant to the military security of the American homeland and a major source of unnecessary friction and even outright conflict among the nations.

In a word, America is such an outsized economic and military Hegemon that all the little and mid-sized nation’s it has lined-up in formal and de facto alliances are inherently incentivized to pursue policies that minimize their own defense investments—even as they are also encouraged to throw diplomatic caution to the winds. That is, Washington’s “alliances” enable the domestic politicians or elected governments of these small allies to be more aggressive or confrontational vis-a-vis the “bad guys” designated by Washington than they surely would be if operating only upon their own steam.

For instance, the former Estonian prime minister between 2021 and 2024, Kaja Kallas, and now foreign affairs chief for the EU has been a loud-mouthed, vitriolic critic of Russia and hardline supporter of sending other people’s money [i.e. yours] to the support of the equally pointless proxy war against Russia on the Ukrainian steppes.

Of course, with a population of just 1.3 million, GDP of barely $40 billion and armed force of 8,000, Estonia amounts to a cipher of an ally in the scheme of things. So it does absolutely nothing for America’s homeland security, even as it has emboldened Kallas to become a loud irritant to the Big Bear of a country next door.

Then again, if there were no such thing as NATO and the Article 5 military shield of the US, do you think Kallas would be noisily whooping it up for Zelensky? Would her people have tolerated her posturing as little David waving a sling-shot at the Goliath next door?

We dare say the very opposite would have prevailed. Estonia and its leader would have taken care to make nice to their extra large sized neighbor—as small countries have done from times immemorial.

And if making diplomatic nice and conducting mutually beneficial economic commerce wasn’t working for some reason, although it almost always does, they would have been obligated to arm themselves to the hilt. That is, mobilize 10-25% of GDP for defense, if necessary, rather than the pittance of 2.9% of GDP that Estonia actually spends. In turn, that would establish deterrence—the standing up to a potential aggressor the heavy cost in blood and treasure it would be obligated to face in breaching the borders and sovereignty of a smaller neighbor.

And, no, for crying out loud, the 21st century world is not unique when it comes to the relationships between big, small and middle sized nations. What we described above as making nice in diplomacy and economics and making deterrence clear is actually the way the world of nations is supposed to work, and, prior to the rise of the Hegemon on the Potomac, actually usually did.

Most certainly the gods of history have not conferred upon Washington’s politicians and apparatchiks a mandate to befriend and safeguard  from one end of the planet to the other every Little Guy from the heavy breathing of nearby Big Guys.

Indeed, in a world not dislocated by the Hegemon on the Potomac no one would think to describe the reckless foolishness of Kiev in militarily attacking and brutalizing the Russian speaking populations of the Donbas after the Maidan Coup of February 2014 as an “inspiration”. It was actually stupid beyond belief—something that neighbors not addled by the Hegemon’s military shield or egged on by the CIA, NED, USAID, the State Department and Pentagon would have no problem recognizing and observing.

Indeed that observation applies to the whole passel of little countries that have been admitted to NATO since the turn of the century.  For instance, when it comes to the five  small Balkan countries that do not even share the Black Sea shorelines with Russia, here is the pitiful military capacity and defense heft (measured as % of GDP) that they bring to America’s homeland security.

In order to put this pittance of military manpower in perspective, moreover, we first note by way of comparison the size of police forces in major US cities. While these domestic police men, women and theys may eat too many donuts on the job and thereby fail any combat readiness tests, when it comes to sheer human muscle the city police forces listed here outrank most of what these Balkan “allies” bring to the table.

Size of Police Forces In Major US Cities:

• New York City: 36,000.
• Chicago: 13,100.
• Los Angeles: 10,000.
• Philadelphia: 6,500.

This is by way of saying that all of the above cities have bigger forces of men in blue than do most of the small the NATO allies depicted below, where we show their active military manpower and their defense spending as a % of GDP.

• Croatia: 14,300/1.8% of GDP.
• North Macedonia: 8,000/1.7% of GDP.
• Slovenia: 7,300/1.5% of GDP.
• Albania: 6,600/1.7% of GDP.
• Montenegro: 2,350/1.6% of GDP.

Clearly, these countries are not shaking in their boots about the Russian Bear. In the most recent year of red hot proxy war between NATO and Russia on the hapless steppes of the Ukraine, none of these five even bothered to spend 2% of GDP on defense!

Indeed, even the bigger fry positioned cheek-by-jowl with Russia on the Black Sea didn’t evince any greater fear of the Bear. Romania spends only 2.2% of GDP on defense and its voters just elected a president who wanted to make friendly with Putin—which democratic chosen leader was, of course, ixnayed by Romania’s “allies” in Brussels and Washington.

Likewise, Bulgaria spends but 2.2% on defense, as well. And, understandably, Serbia has not even seen fit to join NATO. Well, not since its capital was bombed to smithereens in 1999 by NATO war planes, owing to its insistence that Kosovo not be severed from its sovereign territory owing to the writ of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Even then as Russia’s firm ally in the region, Serbia spends about 2.3% of GDP on defense and has about 28,000 active men in uniform in its armed forces. That is, Serbia’s neutral forces total about the same as the combined military might of the five small fry on the Adriatic side of the Balkans.

Moreover, it also turns out that these five wee NATO members actually spend about the same pittance for military capabilities as is hoovered-up by Ukraine-bordering Hungary and Slovakia. The former spends about 2.0% of GDP on defense while the latter’s military spending is 2.1% of GDP. Yet both governments next door to the  Russian Bear are militantly opposed to the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and successfully get along with Moscow quite well!

In short, none of these countries really seem to fear the Russian Bear or they would be spending double digit percentages of their GDP making themselves so well armed as to make a unappetizing meal for the alleged aggressor in Moscow. To the contrary, they have either joined NATO to get into the Atlantic Club or have simply eschewed the opportunity (Serbia) or gone along for the ride (Hungary and Slovakia).

The point is, extending NATO to the Balkans was a stupid joke perpetrated by Warfare State apparatchiks in Washington and Brussels. It does absolutely nothing for America’s homeland defense militarily, while enabling Russia’s small next door neighbors to spend a pittance for defense and from time to time squeak-up to the Bear in a provocative manner that they would not dream of doing on the strength of 8,000 lightly armed soldiers of their own.

Of course, the same thing is true up north on the Baltic. The three Baltic republics both experienced and do remember their decades of Soviet occupation. Yet their present day budgetary statements make abundantly clear that they do not really perceive post-communist Russia to be the same existential same threat at all. That’s why they spend nickels and dimes on make-pretend militaries, even as their politicians like Kallas demagogue about Putin in order to stir up the home voters and incur the favor of the warmongering neocon apparatchiks who dominate the NATO and the EU.

Still, no countries with the wafer-thin military capacities depicted in the numbers below truly fear their Russian neighbor. If they did, with or without NATO, they’d put their budgetary dollars where the unfortunate rhetoric of some of the loud-mouthed politicians lies.

Armed Forces Size and Defense % of GDP:

• Lithuania: 14,100/2.8% of GDP.
• Estonia: 7,700/2.9% of GDP.
• Latvia: 6,750/2.4% of GDP.

In short, the Donald’s observations about the state of the world usually amount to a random collection of the true, the false and the foolish. But in the case of all these pipsqueak NATO allies he surely hit the nail on the head.

Washington’s “Allies” in The Baltics

That is to say, all of these allies are far more trouble than they are worth. The military security of the American homeland can be secured by an invincible strategic nuclear triad based on bombers, land-based ICBMs and its deep sea nuclear subs–none of which require foreign bases or foreign “allies”. That, and a powerful conventional Fortress America defense of its shorelines and air space would more than do the job of maintaining the military security of the American homeland in today’s world.

Neither of these military capabilities are enhanced in the slightest by the pipsqueak allies that have been drafted into NATO since 1999. Nor in today’s world is there any risk that a larger power as economically lame as Russia or Ponzi-based as Red China could attack, conquer and roll-up tens of trillions of GDP, military age manpower and defense production capacities among large numbers of their small fry neighbors.

Indeed, both Russia and China well know that the cost of invasion, conquest and pacification in today’s world would not remotely be worth the candle. That’s perhaps why the answer to the question as to how many countries Red China has conquered in the last four decades is, well,  zero!

To the contrary, what America’s 750 bases and 160,000 servicemen positioned abroad from Japan to Germany, Italy and the UK actually amount to are dangerous “trip wires”designed to:

• Provide an excuse for US defense contractors to sell weapons to the allied nations where US forces are based.
• Create an excuse to meddle in foreign conflicts owing to the fact that American servicemen are in harms’ way.

Suffice it here to note that during the heyday of America’s development as the greatest nation on earth—from the cancellation of the treaty with France in 1797 to the ratification of the NATO Treaty in 1949—America had no alliances, no military treaties and no allies empowered to provoke conflicts with their neighbors on the understanding that Uncle Sam had their backs.

He didn’t and during those 152 years everything worked out for America as well as any nation in history before or since. And absolutely nothing has changed to alter the wisdom of Washington and Jefferson about avoidance of Entangling Alliances.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

The post Why America Doesn’t Need ‘Allies’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” Jim Comey, former FBI Director wrote on Instagram about the message “86 47” laid out in seashells on the sand that he came across, innocently. You’d have to ask yourself: what was “cool” about that, exactly? Especially if, as Mr. Comey claimed on X soon after, that he didn’t know what it meant. Are things that you don’t understand “cool”? Is it just “cool” to learn that you can spell stuff out with seashells? (Who knew?)

Maybe he was surprised to learn that people other than Jim Comey fans might see his cute coded clip and conclude that it wasn’t such an innocent little gag. “47,” of course, refers to Donald Trump in the cavalcade of US presidents. Among the not-strrictly-fans was DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who went on TV hours later and said that Mr. Comey should go to prison for it — in so many words. You must suppose she meant after the appropriate procedures: an FBI deposition, a grand jury, an indictment, a trial. After all that, we’d probably get to the bottom of what JC meant by “cool.”

Now, it happens that in this new milieu of memes flying around every which way, the code “86 47” is not a complete mystery. It is apparently employed casually in settings where angry citizens gather to denounce the president. “86” is a term in restaurant kitchens when there is no more of an item that a waiter just brought in an order for. “Eighty-six on the monkfish, Carla,” the line-cook might yell. Apparently, mobsters like the phrase, too, for its pithiness: “Ay, somebody, go eighty-six that stronzo Rocco Vaselino, already! He ain’t paid da vig in a munt.” Soon, there will be no more of Rocco, you see. He will be food for the hellgrammites in the soil of the Jersey pine barrens. . . .

As DNI Gabbard pointed out — in case no one noticed — there have been two recent assassination attempts on Mr. Trump. It is a fact well-known to police psychologists that would-be assassins are curiously suggestible to prompts floating around in the zeitgeist. They tend to take them as commands. Go do this. And if anyone was a commanding figure, it would be Jim Comey, towering hero of the early anti-Trump resistance. Thus, it appears that Mr. Comey called for there to be no more of Mr. Trump. Not cool.

Also, not so cool, in the grand annals of the resistance, is the new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by journalists (cough cough) Jake Tapper (of CNN) and Alex Thompson (Axios). The book purports to explain how the entire governance apparatus of the USA hid the mental decline of “Joe Biden,” the phantom president. Realize, please, that the news media is a vital part of that apparatus, and has been since the invention of the printing press, with its crucial role (until lately) as a regulating mechanism on the engine of public affairs.

In fact, it is precisely the role of the news media to notice things that public officials try to hide, so as to keep citizens apprised of what is really going on. And that is exactly what the news media intentionally declined to do during the four years of “Joe Biden.” But then, at least half the country, seeing “Joe Biden” in action on video, did not fail to notice his ever-worsening feeble bewilderment. Tapper and Thompson seek to shift the blame for this game of Pretend onto the gremlins behind the scenes in the White House who ran the “Joe Biden” show.

Tapper and Thompson are lying, of course, and in exactly the same brazen way as the bigwigs in the Democratic Party who sponsored this treasonous fraud. Jake Tapper, for one, stated repeatedly on-the-air from 2021 onward that “Joe Biden” was a capable and effective chief executive and denounced anybody who tried to argue otherwise. Just as Thompson, while accepting the Award for Overall Excellence at the White House Correspondents’ Annual Dinner in April, lied saying, “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story.” Really? Then what, exactly, was “excellent” about his reporting? See this.

They also missed the story as to how the White House gremlins behind “Joe Biden” were wrecking the country with open borders, election fraud, drag queens in kindergarten, censorship, lawfare, and a colossal stream of secret grift from taxpayers through USAID-linked NGO’s to Democratic Party foot-soldiers like Stacey Abrams. The more plausible story — the truth, actually — is that the companies many reporters worked for, the old big newspapers like The New York Times and the WashPo, and the cable-news channels such as (especially) CNN and MSNBC were losing their audiences until they discovered that Trump Derangement was the only way to stave off complete failure.

Once they got going with that business model in 2016, they wrecked the news media’s credibility. And virtually everything after that has been an ongoing cover-up for their dishonorable malfeasance and the crimes of the party they fronted for. But the levers of power are in other hands now. There will be consequences for government officials who go to war against the people of this land, committing sedition and treason. Suggesting the murder of a president on social media is no light matter. By the time this blog is up, officers of the Secret Service may be visiting Mr. Comey at home. No need to batter down the front door with guns drawn, though. That would be so un-cool.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Cool? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Conservative movements are often depicted as unyielding and uncompromising; dangerously incapable of adaptation when new ideas come to light. This image of the political right is rooted in a number of misconceptions. In reality, modern conservatives are often far too compromising – Far too willing to go along to get along. None of us wants to be seen as a dictator.

Perhaps the most important and defining characteristic of conservatives (at least in the US) is a regard for freedom, but ONLY freedom that is tempered by responsibility. When leftists (or libertarians) scrutinize the conservative ideal they usually reach back around 50 years to the days of evangelical censorship – The attempts to shut down the porn industry, temper the gay agenda in media, warn about satanic references in movies and violence in video games.

This was the era of the Christian “busybody” and a lot of people made fun of them for it. To be clear, they were wrong in some instances, but as our current predicament in the west proves, they were right about many things, too.

The supposed balance to the evangelicals was Liberalism. Most liberals today are certainly not the staunchly individualist and freedom minded people they once were. In fact, the majority of them joined woke activists without question or kept their mouths shut while the far-left pulled a speed run into Orwell’s 1984.

Perhaps in a desperate attempt to save their ideology from losing all relevancy, some liberals slipped over to the center and criticized the woke mob. Most of them didn’t have the balls to jump into the culture war until a few years ago. Those of us in the conservative sphere had already been exposing the existential dangers of post-modernism, futurism and luciferianism for decades.

Centrist liberals say they want to temper the political left’s addiction to Marxism and Communism. As recent events have proven, they are simply not up to the task of controlling their political cousins. The woke movement spread like a cancer throughout the entire liberal body and they bowed in fealty. The only thing that stopped the rot was the right wing finally taking a stand and going on the offensive.

With conservative principles currently gaining momentum there is a chance that America could actually turn back the clock on mores and social cohesion to a time when traditional values were held in much higher regard. This can only be a good thing in my opinion, but it requires a reconsideration of our concept of personal liberty. Maybe some behavior needs to be reined in? Maybe total unchecked chaos and limitless individualism is a bad thing?

Liberals warn that conservatives are gaining too much power after the success of MAGA in last year’s elections and therefore we must be kept in check. Their argument? The woke left is beaten, but now the world must put a leash on the “woke right”.

The “woke right” label in itself is a rather remedial and silly attempt to divert popular discussion away from traditional values (a development that hasn’t taken place in the US in a long time). Morals, nobility and responsibility might become “cool” again, and liberals simply can’t have that.

They argue that their way (a continued idealization of individualism without taking inherent narcissism, psychopathy and the mentality of mobs into account) is the best way. However, we have seen where liberalism without boundaries ends. The cult of chaos (wokeness) is simply a natural extension of the liberal ideal. They demand an end to ALL restrictions, even the restrictions of objective truth.

They want total open multicultural expansion, unfettered freedom to interpret biology and morality according to subjective preference, unchecked sexual deviancy, no consequences whatsoever for their actions. Liberals are not as far from this end of the spectrum as they pretend. They don’t like cultural structures and rules either. They don’t like collective limitations (unless they control those limitations). They don’t even believe in evil; they only believe in circumstances.

Conservatives now stand atop the fray of the culture war and many of us are suggesting that, in order to prevent the nightmare of wokeness (or something even worse) from ever happening again, we might need to instill some enduring rules of social conduct. The liberals in turn are freaking out. They especially seem to despise Christian Nationalists who want to bring America back to an era of carefully defined moral order.

A decade ago I might have agreed with this concern, at least in part. I’m not fond of the idea of a theocracy in which the church rules the state. I also agree that most people have a conscience outside of biblical teaching (If we didn’t then humanity would have gone extinct long ago).

That said, Christian Nationalism does not require theocracy, and if you do have a conscience then you should already be in agreement with most Christian fundamentals anyway. Living in a society where Christianity is more widely embraced wouldn’t make any difference for you. It would only be incompatible if a person harbors post-modern delusions that view Christianity as the enemy. If that’s the case, you shouldn’t be living in America anyway. All you have to do is go elsewhere.

I think liberals need to acknowledge that they are a product of a very narrow moment in time and that time is fading. For most of American history Christianity was the preeminent cultural compass. The US was always Christian and nearly all of our leaders were Christian. America has in fact always been a Christian nation and Christian Nationalism was the norm. Christians are still the majority today (62%) despite the endless negative campaign to shut them down.

As recently as the 1990s, over 90% of all Americans identified as Christian. Things have only changed in the past 30 years, and they have done so dramatically to the negative.

In light of the unfettered horrors of wokism I’m increasingly convinced that Christian doctrine is a necessary firewall designed to filter out otherwise malicious ideological malware. If the progressives (and their liberal counterparts) are not kept in check by someone, then the woke march could repeat by the next generation.

So, what is to be done?

The underlying debate is this – Should one group define western culture above all others and defend it against existential threats. Are Christian Nationalists that group? I would say yes to both questions, because of America’s spiritual history and the fact that there’s no other viable alternative. Do we continue to allow liberals to anoint themselves the arbiters of American culture? Or, do we try something different?

Is this hard-right position also “woke right”? The term “woke right” is often linked back to Kevin DeYoung’s 2022 review of Stephen Wolfe’s book The Case for Christian Nationalism. In his article entitled “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism” he argues that:

“Besides trafficking in sweeping and unsubstantiated claims about the totalizing control of the Globalist American Empire and the gynocracy, Wolfe’s apocalyptic vision—for all of its vitriol toward the secular elites—borrows liberally from the playbook of the left.

He not only redefines the nature of oppression as psychological oppression (making it easier to justify extreme measures and harder to argue things aren’t as bad as they seem), he also rallies the troops (figuratively, but perhaps also literally?) by reminding them they’re victims. “The world is out to get you, and people out there hate you” is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed…”

“…If critical race theory teaches that America has failed, that the existing order is irredeemable, that Western liberalism was a mistake from the beginning, that the current system is rigged against our tribe, and that we ought to make ethnic consciousness more important—it seems to me that Wolfe’s project is the right-wing version of these same impulses.”

While DeYoung’s analysis seems to be coming from a sincere place and he does defend Christian culture as an important part of American life, his analysis requires a certain level of ignorance to stay afloat. Liberals and left leaning Christians refuse to consider one important factor:

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

The entire premise behind the notion of the “woke right” requires that none of the threats above prove to be real. That there is no globalist conspiracy to destroy the west and Christianity. That the subversion of conservative principles is imagined. That there is no white replacement in the US and Europe. That conservatives are not being oppressed and that tribal organization against our attackers is unwarranted or impractical.

DeYoung (and most liberals) prefer passive Christianity. If Christians had thought like DeYoung in the Middle Ages, the entire west would have been wiped off the face of the Earth by Muslim invaders centuries ago. Instead, they took direct action to save themselves. The issue is not even particularly nationalist in origin, it’s only that nations are the easiest barrier to rally and defend. At bottom, Christians must at times act to prevent their own erasure.

Wokeness is largely about false witness – Leftists claim they are being oppressed when they are provably not. The political right cannot be woke because the western world and Christianity are indeed under constant attack. This is not debatable.

In Europe today, the war on Christians and conservatives (or populists) is evident and it is undeniably systemic. Europeans have been under siege by engineered mass immigration from the third-world. Most of the migrants come from places (Islamic) that despise Christianity and view personal liberty as an aberration or heresy. The governments of France, Germany, England and Romania are actively imprisoning right leaning political opponents and silencing them online, all in the name of liberal democracy.

In the US, woke zealots and the global elites have used everything from mass censorship to medical tyranny to mob violence to shut down and terrorize the political right. The Biden Administration made multiple public proclamations declaring conservatives a domestic threat to democracy. We were accused of being insurrectionists. We were painted as terrorists, and all we did was ask questions and demand truthful answers. This isn’t an exaggerated tale of victimhood conjured up for sympathy, it’s just the facts.

The debate over Christians and conservatives taking direct action instead of waiting around for the next crisis reminds me of a fascinating film directed by Bill Paxton called ‘Frailty’. If you haven’t seen it then I recommend doing so before I spoil it for you here.

In the movie, Bill Paxton plays a father with two sons living a relatively normal life as a devout man with a good heart. One day, he approaches his sons with a terrifying tale: He was visited by an angel from heaven that told him he has been chosen for a mission to destroy evil. The evil, he says, is enacted by demons that take the form of human beings. He claims that God has demanded that he and his sons remove these demons before they do anymore harm.

The youngest son believes his father without question and in full faith. The older son does not and asserts that the man might be going dangerously insane.

What follows is an escalating conflict between father and son as Bill Paxton begins to kill the people he believes are demonic. When he touches them, he says he can see the crimes they’ve committed. The older son refuses to participate in the murders and tries to sabotage Paxton’s efforts. Finally, Paxton accuses his oldest of being a demon as well. The boy eventually kills his father in order to stop the murders.

Plot Twist: Bill Paxton really did receive a vision from God. He really was killing demons, and his eldest son was also a demon the whole time.

Liberals who perpetuate the woke right narrative remind me of the oldest son in Frailty. They play at being even handed, fighting to keep the scales of power from tipping in either direction. In truth, they are blinded by their own self righteousness and their belief that there is no such thing as evil. The rest of us see it, but if we try to do something about it these same people obstruct and sabotage and accuse us of “becoming monsters to defeat the monsters”. They allow the sparks of woke chaos to survive.

Should western civilization be allowed to discriminate? Should we be able to refuse to associate? Should we have the right to be tribal (like everyone else) and deny entry to malicious cultures and ideologies? Is our heritage valid and enduring? Is Christian Nationalism the solution to the woke luciferian agenda? It seems to me that the elites want conservatism dead so badly that it must be a threat to them.

We ARE fighting demons, and a culture without a spiritual consensus is a dying culture. Christian Nationalism was the natural default of American society for centuries. Many people who are not Christians are still perfectly capable of living and thriving within such a society as long as they don’t try to tear it down. The Overton Window has merely been rigged so far to the left that any return to the old standard sounds like madness; it is in fact the most sane thing we could possibly do to save our country.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Is Christian Nationalism the Solution to the Frailty of Liberalism? appeared first on LewRockwell.

I think the following image from yesterday’s hearing of the House Appropriations Committee—where HHS Secretary Kennedy was questioned about his budget cuts— is worth a thousand words.

It’s long been observed that “clothes make the man” (or woman) in the sense that one’s choices for producing an outward appearance are an expression of one’s judgement about what is fitting and appropriate.

I know that New Haven isn’t exactly a fashionable place, but her outfit and coiffure are suitable for a 13-year-old girl going through a Cyndi Lauper phase, and not an 82-year-old Congresswoman.

The Committee understands the NIH has been running a taxpayer money-sucking racket for disbursing hundreds of billions to all manner of beneficiaries and interest groups that have little to do with promoting public health.

These assorted crooks are upset about Kennedy shutting off the spigot, so they’ve sicced the sartorial horror show, Rep. DeLauro, on the unfortunate Secretary. As I write the above sentence, I think it would work better in verse:

The assorted crooks are super upset,

About Secretary Kennedy shutting off the spigot,

So they’ve sicced the sartorial horror show,

Rep. DeLauro,

On the unfortunate Secretary,

To his sorrow and woe.

After facing the psycho clowns in the House, Kennedy attended an afternoon hearing before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee to face the insufferable chairmen, Bill Cassidy from Louisiana,—i.e., the “Vaccine Cartel’s Man in the Senate.”

Senator Cassidy demonstrated his expert knowledge by proclaiming;

The Secretary said no vaccines, except for COVID, have been evaluated against placebo. For the record, that’s not true. Coronavirus, measles, and HPV vaccines have been, and some vaccines are tested against previous versions, just for the record.

What the Senator didn’t mention—and what very few people understand—is that vaccine trials do NOT include experiments in which those who receive the vaccine and those who receive the placebo are challenged with the pathogen to see if the vaccine actually works.

Efficacy of the vaccine is estimated by whether or not the trial participant contracts the illness while going about his business in the world in which the pathogen is thought to be prevalent.

As the reader may sense, this leaves enormous room for manipulation and chicanery, especially if the disease in question—such as COVID-19—is frequently mild and even sub-clinical among vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.

The last challenge experiments were conducted by Drs. Thomas Francis and Jonas Salk while testing the first influenza vaccine on residents of the Eloise Mental Hospital and Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan in the winter of 1942-43.

Democratic Senator Christopher Murphy of Connecticut proclaimed that Kennedy had not lived up to his commitment to Cassidy and the committee during his confirmation hearing.

As soon as you were sworn in, you announced new standards for vaccine approvals that you proudly referred to in your own press release as a radical departure from current practice, and experts say that departure will delay approvals. You also said, specific to the measles vaccine, that you support the measles vaccine, but you have consistently been undermining the measles vaccine. You told the public that the vaccine wanes very quickly… and said that the measles vaccine was never properly tested for safety. You said there’s fetal debris in the measles vaccine.

“All true,” Kennedy shouted back. “I’m not going to just tell people everything is safe and effective if I know that there’s issues.”

Many in the medical freedom movement have expressed impatience with Secretary Kennedy and suggested that he isn’t moving fast enough to counter the Vaccine Cartel. They should always bear in mind that the Cartel is the most powerful mafia organization in history.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Kennedy Faces Insufferable Congressmen appeared first on LewRockwell.

People all over the world are worried about the future.  While regional wars continue to fester, the prospect of global war weighs heavily on many.  However, likely belligerents are not all foreign aggressors.  Nearly a century of globalization has erected a web of clunky international institutions that wield tremendous power while disregarding sovereign borders.  Concomitantly, mass immigration has transformed once-homogenous national populations into stews of many competing cultures and religions.  Battle lines forming inside nations are more serious than those forming among them.

Self-described “futurists” such as Bill Gates and Yuval Harari believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace most humans in the workforce and that a small cadre of global “elites” must centrally manage humanity’s transition to general “uselessness.”  With A.I. entities independently running machines and becoming exponentially smarter and more competent in their tasks, entire industries will transition from human to synthetic labor until all industry surrenders to A.I.

As emerging robotics programs have demonstrated, no profession will be immune to the next generations of A.I.-equipped machines.  Robots will pick the fields, police the streets, and perform complex medical surgeries.  A.I. can already write legal briefs that pass muster and screenplays that are at least as interesting as anything Hollywood produces these days.  Engineers, architects, and chemists are competing against machines that can process a thousand lifetimes of computations before their human counterparts finish morning coffee.

Men such as Gates and Harari see this future galloping toward us and view its implications as self-evident.  As human producers are replaced, human “value” will dwindle.  No longer sustaining even a fraction of their cost through their own labor, human beings will become extraneous to the creation of wealth and permanent drains on the global State.

The task of the global State, in turn, will be to construct a system capable of selecting a small number of “elites” to oversee the system from one generation to the next, while maintaining control over a rump of “useless eaters” permitted to live in State-designed shelters and survive on State-allocated rations.  For those parts of the population not chosen to live as wards of the State, life will be hard.  War, famine, and disease will make survival difficult.  Those struggles, combined with global programs discouraging childbirth and exacerbating infertility, will induce a Malthusian “solution,” in which much of the world simply dies off.

This is a dark vision.  No matter how much globalist “elites” paint this future as “progress,” it is nothing less than a carefully planned planetary genocide.  As with all terrible genocides, it targets not just the human body, but also the human mind and soul.  It means to wear down the “useless eaters” until they hate themselves and pity their tormentors for having to put up with them.

Have you read about any of the heartbreaking stories involving vulnerable individuals who have been encouraged to commit suicide by taking advantage of Canada’s legalized “Medical Assistance in Dying”?  Often patients’ only ailments are loneliness and depression.  Before they die, many apologize for being burdens on society.  The Canadian government has the gall to applaud victims for their selflessness!  Eighty years after the Nazis summarily executed the physically and mentally disabled for being “drains” on the State, the Canadian government lacks the requisite historical literacy to feel shame!

Yet the Canadian government is hardly alone in embracing policies that deny the innate value of human life.  All Western nations have been busy cultivating a culture of death.  Abortion, once considered the unlawful taking of a life and morally condemnable, is celebrated as some kind of twisted civil right that empowers the strong to kill the weak.  Transgenderism, a mental illness that indulges self-hatred, has mutated from a rare psychological condition into a euphoric movement with fashionable promoters intent on silencing worried parents, hypnotizing medical professionals, and grooming children toward a depressing future involving castration and bodily mutilation.  Young people — particularly women — are encouraged to forgo families and concentrate on professional careers.

Marriage is demeaned as a “patriarchal” and “homophobic” institution of the past.  Monogamy is ridiculed as unnatural, while promiscuity is encouraged.  Having children is criticized as a “selfish” act that will only exacerbate man-made (i.e., fake) “climate change.”  Central bank–engineered inflation has made the cost of rearing a child so exorbitant that even healthy married couples often put off parenthood until it’s too late.

Under the mutually reinforcing guises of protecting civil rights, advancing feminism, protecting the environment, and dismantling forms of oppression, the West has ushered in a disorienting era in which biological reality, marriage, motherhood, parenthood, and the family unit are under sustained attack.

The devastating results of such policies were entirely predictable.  Birth rates have plummeted.  The Sexual Revolution fundamentally reoriented Western culture away from values that promote and cherish life.  Government welfare programs are now insolvent and headed toward total financial ruin because the youngest generations are too small to support the oldest.  If planetary depopulation was the goal, post-WWII Western globalists mostly succeeded in crippling their own nations.

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The US House of Representatives Has Passed the MEGOBARI Act (HR 36) that places Georgia, now an independent country and once a province of the Soviet Union, under American protection.  Washington has to protect free and fair elections in Georgia from Russia and protect Georgia’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity from further Russian aggression.”

There has been NO Russian aggression against Georgia.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union caused by the Politburo’s house arrest of Russian President Gorbachev, Russia under Yeltsin accepted Washington’s dismemberment of the Soviet Empire.  Soviet republics, some of which had not ever been independent states, such as Ukraine, were turned by Washington into New Countries.  

In 2008 a Georgian Army trained and equipped by Washington invaded South Ossetia, a Russian protectorate and a part of Georgia that did not want to exit Russia.  Russian peacekeepers were killed, and this brought Putin, inattentive as always, back from the Chinese Olympics to send in the Russian Army. The American equipped and trained Georgian Army was totally defeated within a few hours, and Georgia was in Putin’s hands.  What did he do?  He released Georgia to themselves and took his army home.

How is this Russian aggression?

As is obvious the members of the US House of Representatives are completely ignorant and uninformed morons.  America, as Mark Twain said, elects morons to represent them. And that is what Americans have. We are governed by morons.

Protecting Georgia from Russia is the excuse for Washington to take over Georgia, and, of course, bags full of money will facilitate the process by being handed over to key members of the Georgian government.

So what we have here is Washington’s effort to open a second war front against Russia.  Adam Dick with the Ron Paul Institute gives us a reliable indiction of what is happening.  See this.

So, what do we make of this?  On the one hand Trump is pursuing peace negotiations in Ukraine with Russia.  On the other hand, Washington is preparing another Maidan, this time in Georgia.

How stupid are the Russians?  Did they learn nothing from the Minsk Agreement?  Is the Kremlin blind to the obvious fact that Washington is sequencing its wars with Russia and China by pulling out of Ukraine, turning it over to Europe, so that Washington can focus on China. This is the policy described  by West Mitchell in Foreign Affairs.  Why has no one but myself and John Helmer commented on this revealing article?

The post While Trump Speaks of Ukraine Peace, Washington Opens a Second Front Against Putin appeared first on LewRockwell.

The worst mistake you can make when reading the news is to assume there’s a good reason why the mass media report on something in the way that they do. That there’s a good reason why Israel-Palestine gets framed as a complex and morally ambiguous issue with no clear path forward, even though it all looks pretty self-evident to you. That there must be a valid and legitimate reason why one story gets more coverage than a seemingly far more important story, like how the release of one Israeli-American hostage is currently getting far more news media coverage than the deliberate starvation of an entire enclave full of civilians.

In reality there is no valid and legitimate reason why such things are covered the way they are. The coverage happens in the way that it happens because it serves the information interests of Israel and the western empire, and for no other reason.

So much western ignorance is facilitated by the manipulative way the imperial media report on what’s going on in the world. People assume that because they’re not hearing about a given issue all the time or in a particularly urgent tone of reporting, it must not be an especially important matter that needs their attention. They assume that if one side of a conflict isn’t framed as being clearly in the wrong, then it must not be.

Westerners assume that if the world were experiencing another Holocaust, another Transatlantic Slave Trade, another Cuban Missile Crisis, they would hear about it in the news at an appropriate level of urgency. But that simply isn’t how it works. The only reason the western public is ever told about anything bad that happens at a high level of frequency and urgency is when it is convenient for the western empire, like when Russia invaded Ukraine. When that happened it was the main story in every western outlet for ages, and Russia was clearly framed as the evil aggressor, with all the NATO aggressions which provoked the invasion going completely unmentioned.

When people hear the word “propaganda” they tend to think it means the same thing as “lies”, but that’s not accurate. The domestic propaganda that westerners are fed by the powerful does not typically consist of whole-cloth fabrications, but rather of distortions, half-truths, manipulated emphasis, and lies by omission.

Most of the worst things the US and its allies are doing in the world are reported accurately by the western press at certain times and in certain publications, but they simply are not given any emphasis and amplification after those brief mentions. If you look at the hyperlinks I cite in my articles to describe the criminality of the empire it’s usually either straight out of the mainstream press or some other independent author who’s citing mainstream news reporting. The difference is that I regularly spotlight those admissions, while the imperial media will mention them once halfway down an article somewhere and then let the daily news churn carry it away down the memory hole.

Western propaganda doesn’t consist so much of manipulating what gets reported but how it gets reported. How often something gets mentioned. How often the perpetrator of an abuse is explicitly named. The type of language used to describe a given offense. These adjustments might sound insignificant when they are described, but when put into practice across the board they are extremely effective at shaping public perception of world affairs.

The only way to get around this is to maintain an acute awareness of what’s being reported while ignoring distorting factors like frequency, emphasis and tone. You have to just focus on the raw data of what’s being reported about what the empire is up to from day to day without allowing your perception to be colored by the way in which that data is reported. If you come across a key piece of information about the empire’s criminality you’ve got to hold onto it and remember its significance for yourself, because the imperial press sure aren’t going to remind you. They’re going to be acting like it never happened by next week.

It’s bizarre once you start noticing how much of a disconnect there is between reality and the mass media’s reporting on world events. They’ll occasionally mention actual important things, but there’s no accurate sense of proportionality to any of it. It’s like if you were at a restaurant with a friend and a waiter’s uniform caught fire, and your friend just casually mentioned “Oh that guy’s on fire” before going back to talking about the meal for the rest of the conversation while the guy burned to death at the other end of the room. It is utterly surreal.

So one of the most important things you need to do to maintain a truth-based worldview is to take complete control over your own understanding of the importance of the pieces of information which come across your field of vision. You can’t rely on others to tell you how important they are, because all the most amplified and influential voices in our society are working to manipulate your understanding of their importance, and most ordinary people you’ll interact with are being manipulated by those voices to some extent. Public political discourse is overwhelmingly dominated by these distortions.

You’ve got to interpret the urgency and importance of information for yourself. By standing on your own two feet and looking at the raw data with fresh eyes before it gets jumbled around by the imperial spin machine, you make your mind much harder to bend to the will of the empire.

_______________

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

The post How To Make Your Mind Harder for the Propagandists To Manipulate appeared first on LewRockwell.

The leader of the free world just announced that America’s long-standing interventionist foreign policy hasn’t done the world any favors.

President Donald Trump’s Middle Eastern tour through Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates has generated a lot of headlines, mainly for the hundreds of billions of dollars in business it’s generating. But something else significant happened this week. Tuesday, during his address in in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the president lambasted the neoconservative-prescribed foreign policy that has put American taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars and destabilized entire regions of the world.

Wrecking Rather Than Building

Trump said on Tuesday:

The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions … failing to develop Kabul and Baghdad. … In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built — and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.

Trump also suggested it’s been bad policy to try to take out every tin-pot despot and tyrant who poses no threat to the U.S., saying:

In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins. … I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment. My job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.

Moreover, the American president suggested it is time to end America’s long-standing obsession with turning Middle Eastern countries into Western-style “democracies” and let them flourish as they are — whether they be theocracies, monarchies, or dictatorships disguised as monarchies.

A Vibrant Middle East

Trump views an economically vibrant Middle East as one the U.S. can do business with, instead of one in which America’s military ends up mired in unwinnable conflicts. He told the audience:

A generation of new leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together — not bombing each other out of existence.

In addition to securing hundreds of billions of dollars in business deals with the three nations he visited, the president backed up his sentiment with the announcement that he planned to lift the sanctions on Syria. He admitted that his decision was influenced by his “good friend,” the prince of Saudi Arabia. The news was met with a standing ovation.

This is not the first time Trump has indicated a desire to dial back America’s presence around the world. At the very beginning of his presidency, only a few months ago, he sent shock waves through the international world when he announced that America would no longer serve as Europe’s bodyguard. He and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said it was time for Europe’s rich nations to learn once again how to protect themselves. Since then, major European nations — including Germany and a coalition of Nordic nations — have begun making moves to boost their defense systems.

The Founders’ Noninterventionism

What Trump is describing, and hopefully follows through with, sounds more like the foreign policy America’s founding generation prescribed than the one practiced over the last century. The first U.S. president dedicated the final portion of his farewell address to warning the American people about foreign intervention. In his September 19, 1796, address, George Washington highlighted Europe’s propensity for conflict and cautioned against getting involved in it. He said America should avoid permanent, entangling alliances, and should strive to always remain neutral. Prescribing a foreign policy in which the U.S. lives in peace with all nations, a policy in which America conducts business with any country that’s willing without regard for its politics, he said:

Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and Morality enjoin this conduct. … It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a People always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. … The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little Political connection as possible.

Nearly 25 years later, on July 4, 1821, John Quincy Adams, the son of the second president and who would become president himself four years later, reiterated the importance of a noninterventionist foreign policy. He said:

[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. … She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own … she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. … She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

What Washington and Adams advocated is obviously not what the U.S. has practiced, at least not since the 19th century. After World War II, the United States emerged as the undisputed most-powerful nation in the world. Unlike Europe, its landscape and economy were unscathed by the ravages of war. In fact, the war so greatly disturbed the industrial capabilities of Europe’s most advanced nations that it opened up massive opportunities for America to fill the gap.

Read the Whole Article

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“It’s not my war.” —Donald Trump (on board Air Force One on April 25)

President Donald Trump has said repeatedly that the Ukraine War is Joe Biden’s, not his. But now the Ukraine war belongs to Trump. He can no longer deny ownership.

From Defence-blog.com:

President Donald Trump’s administration has reportedly approved its first weapons sale to Ukraine since the start of his second term, with plans to authorize direct commercial exports valued at $50 million or more.

The move was first reported by Kyiv Post, citing diplomatic sources, and later confirmed through congressional records.

According to the report, the U.S. administration formally notified Congress on April 30 of its intention to allow the sale of military goods to Ukraine under the Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) program. This mechanism permits U.S. defense companies to negotiate arms exports directly with foreign governments, pending approval from the State Department.

Kyiv Post said the proposed sale would include military-designated goods, technical data, and related defense services. The approval was made under the Arms Export Control Act, which mandates notification to Congress for defense sales exceeding certain thresholds.

Additional confirmation came from European Pravda, which cited documentation available on the official U.S. Congress website. A record listed an entry dated April 29, cataloged as EC-859, referencing a memo from the State Department’s legal office to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The memo notifies Congress of “a proposed license for the export of defense articles, including technical data, and defense services to Ukraine for an amount of $50 million or more,” in compliance with U.S. export control laws.

This transaction represents the first defense-related export authorization to Ukraine under President Trump’s current administration.

While details of the specific equipment or systems involved have not been disclosed, the timing suggests a shift toward greater military support amid ongoing regional instability.

By the same token, the Israeli genocide in Gaza is now Trump’s genocide. This man who was elected president on the promise of ending America’s “stupid wars” (his words) is neck-deep in the continuation and escalation of these wars.

Per Trump’s wars on behalf of Israel comes this report:

The Israeli military is set to receive a “major new weapons shipment” from the US in the coming weeks to help prepare it for continued operations in Gaza and a potential attack on Iran, the Israeli news site Ynet reported on Monday.

The details of the arms shipment are unclear, but Ynet said it would include 3,000 munitions for Israel’s Air Force. The report said the bomb shipment was recently approved by the Trump administration.

The Pentagon’s Defense Cooperation Agency said on Monday that the State Department approved a $180 million arms deal for Eitan Powerpack Engines that will go to Israel, but it did not announce any new bomb shipments.

The Ynet report said the new weapons shipment will help prepare the Israeli military for a new “large-scale campaign” in Gaza and that it comes in addition to over 10,000 munitions that are expected to replenish Israeli stockpiles soon.

The Trump administration has approved a series of arms deals and weapons shipments for Israel, totaling more than $12 billion, including tens of thousands of 2,000-pound bombs, which Israel has dropped on densely populated civilian areas of Gaza.

Besides fueling Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, US military aid to Israel also supports Israel’s stepped-up military operations in the West Bank and its occupations of southern Lebanon and southern Syria.

Beyond that, Trump extended the U.S. wars in the Middle East to include Yemen. However, after spending over one billion dollars in bombs and military operations and losing three F/A-18 jet fighters surrounding our attacks on the Houthis, with the result of doing NOTHING to dismantle their ability to continue launching missiles against Israel in defense of the Palestinian people—but killing scores of innocent Yemeni civilians—our Navy warships were forced to leave harm’s way, giving Yemen a HUGE victory and utterly humiliating Trump and his Neocon Zionists in D.C.

Renowned international journalist Pepe Escobar explained the details of this humiliating defeat for Donald Trump’s war in Yemen in this interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Afterward, Trump does what he always does: LIE, telling America that he “cut a deal” with Yemen after that country “begged” him to stop shelling them and promised to stop launching their missile attacks against Israeli targets.

The truth is, Yemen said no such thing. The U.S. Navy was getting its tail whipped and was forced to leave the area or risk suffering much greater death and damage. This is seen by the fact that the Houthis continue launching missiles against Israeli targets.

And the only reason the Houthis are attacking Israel is due to the genocide in Gaza and the blockade of food and medicine put in place by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). During the brief ceasefire negotiated between the U.S. and Israel, Yemen STOPPED its missile attacks. The missile attacks resumed AFTER Israel broke the ceasefire and resumed the genocide and also broke its promise to allow food and medicine into Gaza.

As with every president of this century, Trump is just another lying, two-faced, duplicitous conman who tells the American people what they want to hear but, at the end of the day, is just another bought-and-paid-for lackey of Israel and the military-industrial complex—and now add the Musk/Thiel technocracy.

If Trump was sincere in his bodacious, bellicose blabber about wanting to be a “peace” president and ending the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, he could have done so within weeks of taking office. All he needed to do was turn off the spigot, stop sending military support to both Ukraine and Israel, and both wars would have ended almost immediately.

But what does Trump do? He continues the flow of military assistance to both countries unabated.

Neither Ukraine nor Israel could last a week on the battlefield without America’s military support. Both wars are AMERICA’S WARS. The warmongering Zionist Neocons in Washington, D.C., fight their perpetual wars around the world using proxy nations such as Ukraine and Israel—and now even ISIS in Syria—to do the bleeding and dying for them.

Remember ISIS? G.W. Bush launched two wars resulting in thousands of dead Americans and trillions of taxpayer dollars to destroy our great “enemy,” ISIS. Now, Donald Trump is using billions of taxpayer dollars, the CIA, the U.S. Navy and Air Force to provide cover, intelligence, training and equipment to underwrite our “allies” in Syria, ISIS.

Reports are now saying that Trump intends to finance and provide military assistance for ISIS to invade Yemen. Yet another proxy war for America.

How many times have I said it? There are not two parties in Washington, D.C. There is only one party in Washington: the WAR PARTY, also known as the ZIONIST PARTY.

And how long will the American people not catch on?

My fellow peace advocates in the alt-media continue to scratch their heads as to how the American people can continue to be blinded to the death grip that Israel and the defense contractors have on our politicians (of both parties) inside the Beltway. But there is a single tube of glue that holds this calamitous chicanery together: evangelical pastors and churches.

Without the constant, never-ending, continual, repeated, recurring (get the idea?) Dispensationalist/Prophetic Futurist/Scofieldist/Rapturist propaganda that is regurgitated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year by America’s evangelicals regarding “end-times” prophecy, the entire charade would be seen for the fraud that it is, and the entire Neocon/Zionist/War agenda would come crashing down.

It really is that simple.

Plus, there is another by-product of the “end-times” cult, a spiritual one—perhaps the most damaging one. All this Dispensational “end-times” teaching resulting in the unconditional support of tens of millions of evangelical Christians for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, the unconditional support for the war in Ukraine (because they say Russia is Ezekiel’s “Gog and Magog”) and the enthusiastic unconditional support for U.S. foreign wars in general are driving millions of people AWAY from Christianity.

Fewer people in America today are associated with establishment churches than at any time in our country’s history. And more people in America today identify themselves as “non-religious” or identify themselves with non-Christian religions than at any time in our country’s history.

In other words, the Rapture cult, with all its accompanying heretical tentacles, is doing more to paganize America than all the atheists and agnostics combined.

Mr. Trump can no longer say that the war in Ukraine is not his. He owns it (along with the wars in the Middle East) lock, stock and barrel—and so do America’s “end-times” evangelicals.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

The post Donald Trump Now Owns the Ukraine War appeared first on LewRockwell.

di Francesco Simoncelli

(Versione audio dell'articolo disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/la-grande-riorganizzazione-degli)

Il motivo principale per cui ho pubblicato il mio ultimo libro, Il Grande Default, è stato quello di mettere in evidenza due punti sostanzialmente. Il primo: nessuna autorità è amica del contribuente o del cittadino medio, possono essere alleati temporanei o “cospiratori”, ma questo è un matrimonio che è destinato a finire non appena il “nemico” (che più di tanto non lo è) viene ridimensionato e condotto al tavolo delle trattative. Si tratta pur sempre di bande mafiose che sopravvivono grazie all'estorsione di risorse. Il secondo: distinguere tra l'eurodollaro e il sistema dell'eurodollaro. Il primo esisterà sempre dato che si tratta di liquidità che serve a saldare le transazioni internazionali e la domanda di dollari, soprattutto in questo frangente, è più viva che mai. Il secondo, invece, è quello a cui si stanno indirizzando le attenzione di questa amministrazione e prima di lei della FED. Infatti l'entrata in scena del SOFR non ha fatto altro che cambiare il modo in cui il dollaro viene prezzato al margine all'estero, dato che gli USA non sono mai stati in grado di controllarlo direttamente in passato.

Non essendo in grado di controllare la “stampante” dell'eurodollaro, l'offerta è andata fuori controllo ed è stato quello che ha condotto in ultima analisi alla demonetizzazione dell'oro e alla crisi del 2008. In sintesi, quando c'era bisogno di socializzare le perdite derivanti dall'azzardo morale nel sistema dell'eurodollaro, gli Stati Uniti venivano tirati per la proverbiale giacchetta affinché intervenissero. Il colonialismo franco-inglese non è mai terminato, in verità, ed è stato riciclato fino ai giorni nostri tramite il sistema finanziario: la capacità di controllare il prezzo offshore del dollaro. Non è un caso che il LIBOR era impostato da 18 banche nella City di Londra, 17 delle quali europee e una sola americana. In passato, quindi, se si vedeva un'inversione nella curva dei futures dell'eurodollaro ciò avrebbe innalzato spauracchi di recessione e condotto la FED a intervenire sui mercati per fornire liquidità reale in modo da coprire quella fittizia. Questo sistema era stato trasformato per andare a beneficio del dollaro offshore e di chi era in grado di prezzarlo al margine, facendo sanguinare il capitale americano (industriale, energetico, manifatturiero) oltreoceano.

Tenete sempre una cosa a mente, però, questo testo non viene scritto per assolvere gli USA. Non c'è dubbio che anch'essi abbiano i loro scheletri nell'armadio sin da Bretton Woods, stiamo pur sempre parlando di bande mafiose vorrei ricordarvi. Ciononostante bisogna anche ponderare il fatto che gli USA non sono mai stati veramente in controllo della politica interna, della politica estera e della politica monetaria sin dai tempi di Woodrow Wilson. Per tutto il XVIII e XIX secolo gli Stati Uniti hanno costruito un gigantesco stock di capitale e ai tempi delle guerre mondiali erano già la destinazione preferita dal resto del mondo per quanto riguardava gli investimenti esteri. Non era affatto nel miglior interesse della nazione scialacquare questa fortuna, sia in termini umani che non, per ricostruire il resto del mondo che bruciava e cercare di “diffondere la democrazia”. L'impero risultante dalla Pax Americana non era nel miglior interesse della nazione, soprattutto in un contesto in cui per mantenere questa enorme macchina di guerra avrebbe significato lasciare che il prezzo del dollaro all'estero venisse impostato dalla City di Londra. Quando si riflette su questi punti si comprende che tutte le strade conducono a Londra e alla Banca d'Inghilterra.

L'amministrazione Trump, e i NY Boys dietro di essa, hanno detto basta. Il loro compito, adesso, è quello di invertire la tendenza e cercare di riparare a decenni di malgoverno e, soprattutto, all'erosione del bacino americano della ricchezza reale. Gli USA sono una fonte non indifferente di capitale umano e di risorse, il solo stato dell'Alaska vale più di tutta l'UE messa insieme in termini di ricchezza del sottosuolo. Ed ecco perché tutti vogliono continuare a fare affari con lo zio Sam, malgrado i dazi: non possono permettersi di vendere l'output a un prezzo inferiore rispetto a quello ideato originalmente per il mercato americano, soprattutto la Cina. La guerra commerciale è solo una costola di una guerra più grande a livello finanziario, da come avrete capito. Infatti serve a distinguere tra “amici” e “nemici” degli USA; i primi otterranno linee di swap tramite la FED in caso di stress finanziario, i secondi no.

La cosiddetta cricca di Davos è costituita da tenenti, le persone che fanno parte del WEF sono facenti funzione di figure che rimangono nell'ombra. Quindi la strategia primaria è quella di farli venire a galla e vedere fin dove si spingono le loro trame, soprattutto sul proprio territorio. Poi si passa a togliere loro le fonti di finanziamento e di influenza. Solo dopo ci si sposta a livello internazionale. Ora, se si distilla tutto il rumore, il minimo comun denominatore è solo uno: smantellare il sistema dell'eurodollaro. Per essere più precisi, bloccare tutte le scappatoie all'euro e all'accesso al collaterale (finanziario, energetico, industriale). In questo contesto Tether serve a bypassare l'intermediazione non collateralizzata della City di Londra per soddisfare la domanda di dollari nel mondo (collateralizzata grazie ai titoli sovrani americani comprati da Tether) e prezzare al margine il sistema dell'eurodollaro secondo il volere di Washington, non altrui. La tokenizzazione degli hard asset e la possibilità di diffondere capillarmente nel resto del mondo una valuta coperta da oro e Bitcoin è quanto di più vicino ci possa essere a una garanzia che il dollaro resterà la divisa preferita nel commercio mondiale. Ed è solo l'inizio, viste le implementazioni con IA che possono essere applicate al denaro catapulteranno anni in avanti gli USA rispetto a una Unione Europea che ancora deve lanciare l'euro digitale che, oltre a dimostrarsi un fallimento, è già obsoleto alla luce di tutte queste innovazioni in ambito stablecoin e Bitcoin.

I titoli del Tesoro americani rappresenteranno il collaterale di qualità alla base di questo ecosistema. E, a proposito, le aste dei bond statunitensi continuano a far registrare numeri incoraggianti come dimostrato dall'ultima riguardante i decennali, mentre, dall'altra parte dell'Atlantico, i Bund prendono una sonora sberla. Ancora una volta possiamo accogliere con una vibrante pernacchia i titoli dei giornali secondo cui i titoli tedeschi sarebbero presto diventati la nuova frontiera degli asset di riserva. Non solo, ma sarà molto probabilmente la BCE a guardare in alto per vedere fin dove schizzeranno i rendimenti dei titoli sovrani europei. Lo stesso discorso vale per la Cina, dove si chiacchiera tanto di come possa usare lo yuan per sostituire il dollaro nel commercio internazionale e di come possa vendere il biglietto verde per arginare/contrastare la potenza dello zio Sam. Notizia per voi: un calo del dollaro significa ri-dollarizzazione. Negli ultimi 20 anni solo la Cina ha creato $60.000 miliardi in nuovi prestiti. Attualmente gli NPL (es. prestiti non performanti) sono il 5% di tale cifra. Ha $2.500 miliardi in debiti esteri ($1.100 miliardi solo in dollari) e riserve monetarie estere per $3.000 miliardi (2.000 miliardi in dollari). Se volesse ripagare il suo debito estero, rimarrebbe solo con $1.000 miliardi in riserve estere e un monte di NPL ancora in crescita. Senza contare la necessità di pagare per le importazioni (nessuno vuole yuan per davvero). Alla luce di tutto ciò, che fine farebbe il peg dello yuan col dollaro? Chi è, quindi, che verrebbe realmente travolto da una vendita di dollari e asset denominati in dollari? Ah, e l'economia cinese è in crisi già adesso.

Contro l'amministrazione Trump, quindi, è stata lanciata una gigantesca campagna di caos, confusione e corruzione. Molto probabilmente si evolverà di nuovo in violenza per le strade con BLM 2.0, tra Dem, infiltrati e cricca di Davos oltreoceano il mantra rimane quello di lanciare contro il proprio “nemico” tutti ciò che si è in possesso. O per essere più precisi, per avere un vantaggio negoziale decente al tavolo delle trattative alla fine della guerra commerciale/finanziaria. Quanti asset sono stati bruciati ultimamente per cercare di tirare giù Hegseth? Quando Politico, Axios, o il Wall Street Journal parlano di “fonti interne alla Casa Bianca” che vorrebbero Hegseth, ad esempio, messo alla porta, non esiste niente del genere. È confusione; Trump sa benissimo che l'attuale gabinetto rimarrà in carica come minimo per un altro anno. È caos quanto accaduto circa un mese fa dopo il “Liberation Day” nei mercati obbligazionari e azionari americani quando la cricca di Davos, tramite il proxy di Inghilterra ed Europa, ha venduto asset americani per sostenere i mercati monetari e obbligazionari europei.

Questi spasmi sono tutti la conseguenza dello smantellamento del sistema dell'eurodollaro e il SOFR ha resistito finora a degli attacchi inauditi contro di esso riuscendone indenne. Nel mio ultimo libro, Il Grande Default, descrivo gli avvenimenti del settembre 2019 quando il SOFR esplose al 10-11% intraday a causa di una corsa agli sportelli dei mercati pronti contro termine americani e una forte domanda di denaro. Diverse banche finirono sotto pressione e la FED fu costretta a intervenire affinché creasse liquidità temporanea e puntellasse i mercati. Il problema di allora era che il SOFR era ancora in “fase beta”, tanto per usare un termine preso in prestito dall'informatica, e molto illiquido, di conseguenza molto sensibile a sbalzi improvvisi. Avanti veloce fino al 2023, durante il crollo di Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank e Signature, la sua maturazione l'avrebbe portato ad assorbire il colpo permettendo al contempo a Powell di continuare a rialzare i tassi. Se ci pensate, qualcosa di inaudito per un banchiere centrale, ovvero rialzare i tassi durante una crisi bancaria. Avanti veloce fino al mese scorso quando, la seconda settimana di aprile, il SOFR mostra movimenti al rialzo nelle singole ore ordini di grandezza superiori rispetto ai movimenti giornalieri. Detto in termini semplici, era sotto attacco. Gli spike che vedete nel grafico del CME non dovrebbero accadere nemmeno nelle sessioni giornaliere “normali”.

Tutte le chiacchiere secondo cui la Cina stava scaricando i bond americani, i fondi pensione che scoppiavano in Giappone, o il “basis trade” erano una distrazione. Era invece un attacco al SOFR usando i titoli di stato americani a lungo termine per creare un avvallamento nella curva dei rendimenti nel medio termine e far gridare “recessione!” ai titoli dei giornali. L'obiettivo della cricca di Davos è sempre stato uno sin da quando il SOFR è entrato in gioco: delegittimarlo come meccanismo di prezzo del dollaro a livello internazionale. In passato era il LIBOR, un tasso non collateralizzato, dove i vari player si passavano tra loro le stesse passività per creare dal nulla liquidità temporanea e uno stock praticamente infinito di eurodollari con cui sommergere i loro problemi; ciò, a sua volta, avrebbe avuto ricadute sugli USA e sulla FED che sarebbe stata costretta a monetizzare questo mondo e quell'altro. Oggi devono attaccare il SOFR perché si tratta invece di un tasso collateralizzato a livello interno, basato sui mercati monetari interni agli Stati Uniti: niente più azzardo morale a spese del bacino della ricchezza reale statunitense, se si vuole accedere ai mercati pronti contro termine americani bisogna avere garanzie collaterali solide (solo titoli di stato USA). Oggi, quindi, sono necessari ingenti capitali per cercare di sovvertire un tale assetto e se tali attacchi vanno a vuoto chi li svolge perde molto rispetto al passato. Non possono essere reiterati ad libitum.

Il punto qui rimane solo uno: il sistema SOFR non si è rotto e la FED non è dovuta intervenire. Per quanto la stampa cerchi di fuorviare i lettori parlando di PIL in calo negli Stati Uniti, esso non misura né la crescita né la creazione di ricchezza reale, e il suo recente calo non è segno di debolezza bensì di forza: sono i tagli alla spesa pubblicano che lo stanno facendo scendere ed essi rafforzano l'economia. Dal punto di vista strategico è così che vengono portati allo scoperto i “nemici” ed è possibile individuarli. Trump ha davvero ricevuto tutte le telefonate che ha detto di aver ricevuto nel momento in cui ha approvato i dazi reciproci per tutti? Probabilmente no, probabilmente nessuno “ha chiamato”. Si tratta di avere la comunicazione strategica giusta per evidenziare i “nemici”. E ovviamente continuare a mettere pressione su di essi, perché la mancanza di accesso a finanziamenti facili come accadeva in passato significa altresì una ri-ponderazione del rischio su tutto lo spettro economico/finanziario mondiale.

Questo il motivo, in sostanza, per cui l'oro sale e continuerà a salire. Il metallo giallo è la forma definitiva di garanzia collaterale e c'è una corsa per accaparrarlo. Anche qui la City di Londra sta subendo altri duri colpi, perché l'oro adesso viene acquistato a New York e venduto a Londra. La LBMA è sotto corsa agli sportelli. In passato l'intermediazione dell'oro sintetico a Londra permetteva di tenere un tetto sul prezzo dell'oro fisico e veicolare l'idea che tutto fosse sotto controllo, che le crisi fossero sotto il controllo delle banche centrali. All'apertura di New York venivano scaricati i contratti e ricomprati alla chiusura, per poi continuare il gioco con apertura/chiusura in Europa. La presenza del LIBOR permetteva anche queste deformazioni. La credibilità/affidabilità degli Stati Uniti passa anche da un mercato dell'oro in ascesa in grado di stabilizzare e ripagare l'enorme debito pubblico della nazione. Ecco perché quel tetto adesso è stato smantellato e gli USA, rispetto ai loro avversari, sono la nazione con le riserve d'oro più grandi. Una volta rotto il gioco del LIBOR, a cascata tutte le distorsioni dei mercati sono venute al pettine.

Happy to tell Fox News about my proposal for a gold-backed Treasury bond as America enters its new Golden Age. Let’s restore monetary integrity to our currency as we increase productive output. Trump's economy is 'ready, willing and able': Judy Sheltonhttps://t.co/4e6gBVKby4

BACKGROUND STORICO

Ma facciamo un passo indietro. Quando si tratta di analisi macroeconomica, ci sono sempre innumerevoli pezzi in movimento e possiamo immaginarli come punti su una scacchiera. Per capire cosa sta succedendo nel mondo dobbiamo vedere quei punti per quello che sono nel miglior modo possibile e poi dobbiamo collegarli tra loro in un modo che abbia senso. Se ci riusciamo, scopriremo che raccontano una storia. Come qualsiasi altra storia, però, può essere vera o falsa. Per determinarlo, dobbiamo continuare a valutare i pezzi in movimento e capire se nuovi dati e sviluppi supportano o invalidano la nostra storia.

Dopo tre anni trascorsi a seguire questa storia e a valutare i pezzi in movimento, credo che la mia versione sia accurata, oltre al fatto che i nuovi sviluppi sembrano supportarla. Questa storia rappresenta la natura dell'attuale lotta di potere: non è una lotta fisica, ma finanziaria. È ormai chiaro che le potenze europee del vecchio mondo hanno influenzato la politica e l'economia americana da molti anni. La realtà è molto più sfumata, ma mi piace usare il termine “cricca di Davos” per descrivere queste potenze europee. Stiamo parlando di quelle potenze che stanno alla base di istituzioni globaliste come l'Unione Europea, la Banca centrale europea, le Nazioni unite, la Banca mondiale, il Fondo monetario internazionale, la Banca dei regolamenti internazionali, l'Organizzazione per la Cooperazione e lo Sviluppo Economico, il Forum economico mondiale (WEF) e entità simili. Queste istituzioni sono allineate nella visione del mondo e promuovono un programma simile: una governance globale centralizzata rispetto alla sovranità nazionale, e soprattutto rispetto alla governance localizzata.

Il WEF ha sviluppato un quadro politico per quantificare questo programma: “capitalismo degli stakeholder”. Klaus Schwab ha confezionato questo quadro come “Il Grande Reset” e lo ha pubblicizzato al mondo nel giugno 2020, nel mezzo dell'isteria per la crisi sanitaria. È chiaro che anche alcune grandi istituzioni americane si sono allineate a questo programma globalista ormai da anni e alcune lo fanno ancora. Bank of America, ad esempio, parla dell'implementazione del capitalismo degli stakeholder ogni anno nella sua lettera annuale agli azionisti. Tuttavia, è altrettanto evidente che altre importanti istituzioni americane hanno rotto i ranghi rispetto al programma globalista. Infatti si è verificata una frattura ai vertici della struttura di potere.

LA CONTRORIVOLUZIONE AMERICANA

Coloro che sono al centro del sistema finanziario americano sono ora in modalità autoconservazione: stanno portando avanti un piano per salvare il sistema finanziario basato sul dollaro, fondamentale per la loro ricchezza, il loro potere e la loro influenza. Questa dinamica ha iniziato a manifestarsi platealmente nell'ottobre 2022. La Federal Reserve aveva già rialzato il suo tasso di riferimento di 300 punti base dall'inizio di quell'anno e la cricca di Davos non ne era entusiasta. La campagna di rialzo dei tassi della FED spinse le Nazioni Unite a pubblicare un annuncio quello stesso ottobre, supportato da una relazione accademica intitolata Trade and Development Report 2022. La relazione delle Nazioni Unite chiedeva a tutte le banche centrali di interrompere immediatamente i rialzi dei tassi. Gli autori affermarono che sarebbe stato irresponsabile rialzarli ulteriormente, insinuando che ciò sarebbe stato paragonabile a un attacco ai Paesi in via di sviluppo.

Questa relazione era chiaramente rivolta alla FED: era un messaggio proveniente dal quartier generale globalista e proclamava che la FED aveva superato i limiti. All'epoca mi aspettavo che Jerome Powell facesse marcia indietro, dopotutto la FED aveva coordinato apertamente la politica monetaria con la BCE e altre banche centrali per anni dopo la crisi finanziaria del 2008. Sembrava proprio che fossero tutti dalla stessa parte. La settimana successiva Powell rialzò il tasso di riferimento della FED di altri 75 punti base e avrebbe continuato a farlo nei mesi successivi (+150 punti base). Inutile dire che attirò la mia attenzione: Powell non solo stava sfidando gli ordini di marcia globalisti, ma si stava muovendo contro di essi in modo aggressivo e senza scuse. Powell iniziò a parlare della necessità di una riforma fiscale all'interno del governo statunitense. In una riunione del Federal Open Market Committee, affermò esplicitamente di non ritenere che fosse compito della FED monetizzare il debito pubblico.

Nel frattempo, nel settembre 2023, l'allora Segretario al Tesoro, Janet Yellen, annunciò quello che definì un “piano di riacquisto di titoli del Tesoro”: il Dipartimento del Tesoro americano avrebbe acquistato regolarmente titoli di stato statunitensi per tutto il 2024. Si trattava ovviamente di un'operazione volta ad avviare quello che in gergo finanziario viene chiamato “controllo della curva dei rendimenti”. Si tratta di un'operazione in cui un'entità – in genere una banca centrale – acquista titoli di stato di determinate scadenze per impedire che i tassi d'interesse superino un certo livello. Il piano della Yellen assomigliava a una nuova “Operazione Twist”.

Quest'ultima era ciò che la FED aveva già implementato nel 2011. Fu allora che Ben Bernanke acquistò titoli del Tesoro a lungo termine e contemporaneamente vendette titoli a breve termine in grandi quantità. Ciò contribuì a spingere i tassi d'interesse a lungo termine più in basso di quanto sarebbero stati altrimenti. La Yellen si propose di applicare la stessa strategia l'anno scorso, ma c'era una sfumatura: il Dipartimento del Tesoro non può creare denaro dal nulla come la FED. L'unica cosa che può fare è emettere nuovi titoli di stato per finanziare la propria spesa. Ciononostante ha bisogno di investitori disposti ad acquistarli. Questo è il motivo per cui i programmi di controllo della curva dei rendimenti sono sempre gestiti da una banca centrale. Non funziona molto bene se non si possono stampare ingenti quantità di denaro per acquistare i titoli che si desidera comprare.

Perché la Yellen stava cercando di controllare la curva dei rendimenti? Non era Powell che avrebbe dovuto gestire questa operazione? La risposta è diventata chiara col tempo: la Yellen e Powell erano in squadre diverse.

La Yellen è una fedele sostenitrice della fazione globalista. Ha assecondato l'agenda globalista quando ha presieduto la FED dal 2014 al 2018 e ha fatto lo stesso dal suo incarico di Segretario al Tesoro durante l'amministrazione Biden. Powell, invece, lavora per la fazione americana, ovvero i NY Boys, che hanno rotto i ranghi con i globalisti. Powell, infatti, ha supervisionato il ciclo di rialzo dei tassi più aggressivo della storia, nonostante la struttura di potere globalista gli urlasse di fermarsi. E, come vedremo, ha avuto un ruolo fondamentale nel liberare la politica monetaria statunitense dalle influenze globaliste.

Per quanto io e altri abbiamo considerato la FED inetta e incapace, aveva messo in atto un piano da diversi anni: un tasso chiamato Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR).

RIPRISTINARE LA SOVRANITÀ FINANZIARIA STATUNITENSE

Il SOFR è ora il tasso d'interesse di riferimento per prestiti e derivati ​​denominati in dollari. Si basa esclusivamente sulle transazioni del mercato pronti contro termine del Tesoro statunitense. Il SOFR è stato creato nel 2018 e implementato gradualmente nel corso degli anni successivi. Ha poi sostituito il London Interbank Offered Rate nel gennaio 2022 ed è ora il tasso d'interesse di riferimento esclusivo negli Stati Uniti. Le istituzioni finanziarie utilizzano i tassi d'interesse di riferimento per determinare il prezzo dei prestiti. Prima del 2022, per i prestiti denominati in dollari si usava il LIBOR; ora si usa il SOFR. Ricordate, la Federal Reserve non può “impostare i tassi d'interesse”, tutto ciò che può fare è modificare il tasso Fed Fund (si tratta del tasso al quale le banche si prestano denaro overnight). Con il SOFR, il tasso Fed Fund ha un impatto diretto: stabilisce un limite minimo al di sotto del quale è improbabile che il SOFR scenda.

Invece il tasso Fed Fund non ha avuto un impatto diretto sul LIBOR; ha avuto solo un'influenza indiretta. Questo perché il LIBOR era calcolato sulla base di stime giornaliere fornite da un consorzio di 16 banche: 11 banche con sede in Europa, 3 banche americane, 1 banca giapponese e 1 banca canadese. Per questo motivo il tasso Fed Fund non poteva stabilire un limite minimo con il LIBOR, perché quel consorzio poteva sempre presentare stime inferiori per abbassare i tassi. Ed è esattamente quello che facevano. Nel 2012, quando è scoppiato lo “scandalo LIBOR”, abbiamo appreso che alcune banche del consorzio avevano presentato stime di tassi artificialmente basse per manipolare il LIBOR al ribasso.

Quando il LIBOR era il tasso di riferimento per i prestiti denominati in dollari, l'economia statunitense era vincolata ai programmi stabiliti dalle fazioni al potere che controllavano l'Unione Europea: quelle 11 banche del consorzio in Europa potevano manipolare i tassi d'interesse tramite il LIBOR, se ciò fosse stato favorevole ai loro programmi. Di conseguenza la differenza tra SOFR e LIBOR è fondamentale.

Il SOFR si basa esclusivamente sulle transazioni nel mercato dei pronti contro termine. Si tratta di transazioni reali che sono accadute. Al contrario il LIBOR, che si basava su stime presentate da un consorzio di banche, non faceva affidamento su transazioni effettive. Ciò significa che il SOFR consente al mercato di avere un impatto diretto sui tassi d'interesse a lungo termine. Questo è fondamentale per determinare il prezzo del credito con ragionevole accuratezza. Con il SOFR ora in vigore, le banche europee non hanno alcuna influenza sui tassi d'interesse denominati in dollari. Non è esagerato affermare che il SOFR ha liberato la politica monetaria statunitense dall'influenza globalista.

Questo ha aperto la strada a quella che chiamo la Grande Riorganizzazione americana.

NORMALIZZAZIONE, MERCATI E TASSI

Non è un caso che il presidente della Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, abbia iniziato a rialzare i tassi nel 2022, dopo quattro anni dal suo mandato. Powell ha dovuto aspettare finché il SOFR non avesse sostituito il LIBOR come indice di riferimento statunitense, altrimenti gli interessi finanziari legati all'UE avrebbero potuto vanificare i suoi sforzi manipolando il LIBOR al ribasso. In altre parole il SOFR ha permesso a Powell di rompere i ranghi con il cartello globale delle banche centrali. Ovviamente i media finanziari non ne hanno parlato in questo modo e molti analisti finanziari non si rendono ancora conto di cosa stia succedendo.

Quello a cui stiamo assistendo è un tentativo di “normalizzare” il sistema finanziario statunitense e la politica dei tassi d'interesse è una parte importante di questa normalizzazione.

La FED ha tagliato il tasso di riferimento di 50 punti base a settembre 2024 e secondo i media finanziari siamo tornati in piena corsa per tagli sempre più aggressivi. Infatti hanno affermato che la FED ha “cambiato rotta”. Non è affatto così. Powell ha dichiarato pubblicamente di volere che il tasso Fed Fund torni a essere “neutrale”. In altre parole, vuole che tali tassi siano determinati dal mercato, come consentito dal SOFR. È stato schietto e diretto a tal proposito fin da quando ha iniziato a rialzare i tassi dal 2022. Anche allora i media continuavano a dire che avrebbe “cambiato rotta”, ma non lo ha mai fatto. Se prendiamo Powell in parola, intende normalizzare i tassi d'interesse e ciò imporrebbe una massiccia riorganizzazione dell'economia americana.

Il fatto è che ogni aspetto dell'economia è stato “finanziarizzato” negli ultimi 50 anni: la società americana è stata rimodellata per favorire gli asset finanziari rispetto alla produzione di beni e servizi. Sebbene questo abbia rappresentato un grande vantaggio per Wall Street e il mercato azionario, ha anche svuotato la classe media americana e la piccola imprenditoria. Gli Stati Uniti sono risultati effettivamente in recessione per gran parte del decennio precedente, questo perché la politica monetaria allentata e la ZIRP svalutano tutto. Quando sono stati portati i tassi a zero e stampato migliaia di miliardi di dollari dal nulla, è stata incoraggiata la finanziarizzazione, la speculazione e gli sprechi.

Quello di cui sto parlando è una trasfigurazione della società americana: milioni di piccole attività commerciali nelle vie principali di tutta l'America sono state spazzate via. È così che sono spuntate fuori ville in periferia e auto di lusso che nessuno sa come riparare quando qualcosa va storto; è così che sono spuntati fuori centri commerciali e grandi magazzini ovunque e vie principali deserte; è così che sono spuntate fuori legioni di laureati in sociologia e studi sulla diversità e poche persone che sanno davvero come funziona qualcosa. Ma non dimentichiamocelo: c'è un tempo per ogni cosa e una stagione per ogni attività sotto il cielo.

Il SOFR che sostituisce il LIBOR e la rottura della FED con l'agenda globalista segnalano che è in corso una controrivoluzione americana e le briciole di pane iniziano ad allinearsi...

AFFRONTARE LO STATO PROFONDO

Questo significa, in sostanza, che l'era del denaro facile e dei tassi d'interesse artificialmente bassi sono alle nostre spalle. Ciò che è stato sostenuto da questi due meccanismi finirà con essi. E adesso ci spostiamo sul Congresso e sulla politica fiscale. Per decenni il Congresso degli Stati Uniti ha operato partendo dal presupposto di poter spendere denaro senza conseguenze. I tassi d'interesse a zero, favoriti da politiche monetarie ultra lassiste, hanno permesso deficit progressivamente crescenti senza ripercussioni immediate. Eravamo arrivati al punto in cui il Congresso sarebbe stato destinato ad aggiungere oltre $2.000 miliardi al debito nazionale ogni anno e questa era solo la punta dell'iceberg. Il livello di debito del governo degli Stati Uniti era diventato insostenibile. La spesa per interessi aveva superato i $1.100 miliardi nell'ultimo anno fiscale, rendendo il pagamento degli interessi la seconda voce nel bilancio federale. Per illustrare quanto fosse estrema questa situazione, diamo un'occhiata alle spese federali principali per l'anno fiscale 2024:

• Previdenza sociale: $1.500 miliardi

• Pagamento degli interessi: $1.100 miliardi

• Medicare: $869 miliardi

• Difesa: $826 miliardi

Il fatto che Elon Musk e Vivek Ramaswamy si siano uniti per formare il Dipartimento per l'Efficienza del Governo (DOGE) suggerisce che potenti figure abbiano capito la necessità di tagliare drasticamente la spesa federale ora, in modo da evitare una crisi del debito sovrano. Anche perché nei prossimi 4 anni arriveranno a scadenza circa $17.000 miliardi di debiti negli USA. Il team DOGE si è impegnato a pareggiare il bilancio tagliando quasi $2.000 miliardi in spesa federale. Ciò sta comportando l'eliminazione di ingenti somme di denaro dallo Stato sociale e una drastica riduzione del personale nel governo federale. Inutile dire che non mancano le resistenze. Inoltre il team DOGE sta intervenendo anche contro la regolamentazione, eliminando decine di norme e ingessando lo Stato amministrativo statunitense che opera come un governo ombra.

Questa è la lotta che sta impervesando e imperverserà per i prossimi anni: DOGE contro lo Stato profondo.

Il direttore dell'Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, ha articolato quello che ritengo un piano molto ben ponderato nella sua intervista con Tucker Carlson poco prima del Giorno del Ringraziamento. Mi è chiaro che comprendono il funzionamento interno del sistema e ciò che stanno affrontando: se non si ferma la spesa incontrollata del governo federale, ci sarà una crisi del debito sovrano entro i prossimi quattro anni. E poiché il dollaro e i titoli del Tesoro USA sono fondamentali per l'intero sistema finanziario globale, una crisi del genere porterebbe a qualcosa di ben peggiore di quanto visto nel 2008.

Inutile dire che la cricca di Davos consideri un tale evento come un'opportunità. I globalisti hanno già gettato le basi per il loro “Grande Reset” durante l'isteria del Covid, una crisi finanziaria globale di proporzioni epiche offrirebbe loro una finestra di caos attraverso la quale inaugurare il resto del loro programma.

La buona notizia per chi non vuole vivere sotto una grottesca forma di neofeudalesimo e tecnocomunismo è che l'America può ancora essere salvata.

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

???? Qui il link alla Seconda Parte: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/2025/05/la-grande-riorganizzazione-degli-usa_01519109095.html

Most of us who studied philosophy when we were young think of Socrates as the guy who questions everything in Plato’s Dialogues. For a long time I suspected that if I had attended a dinner party in Athens at which he was present, I would have found him annoying.

During the dark days of the pandemic, I read about the plague that struck Athens in 430 BC, when the city state was under siege by Sparta during the Peloponnesian War.

Over the following three years, most of the population was infected, and perhaps as many as 75,000 to 100,000 people died. The Athenian general and historian Thucydides left an eye-witness account. The symptoms he described are non-specific and could be present in multiple diseases. The best clue he offered was his description of a blistering rash, which seems to be consistent with smallpox.

During both the plague and the war with Sparta, literary observers marveled at the extraordinary equanimity of Socrates. While so many around him were losing their heads, he always remained calm and cheerful. He was an excellent soldier of whom Epictetus observed: “He was the first to go out as a soldier, when it was necessary, and in war he exposed himself to danger most unsparingly.”

During the plague, Diogenes Laertius observed, “Socrates was so well-disciplined in his way of life that when plague broke out in Athens he was the only man who escaped infection.”

I doubt he was the only man who escaped infection, but I still find the remark very interesting. By numerous accounts, even under the greatest pressure, Socrates was unflappable, and it seemed to give him enormous reserves of strength and resilience.

Toward the end of his life, when the war with Sparta was going badly for Athens, Socrates developed a strong reverence for Asklepios, the physician god, whom he regarded as a healer of all man’s afflictions—spiritual as well as physical.

As Socrates understood Asklepios, the god embodied the virtues of patience, diligence, caring, gentleness, and helpfulness. Asklepios was not interested in money, power, or self-aggrandizement.

Socrates perceived the war with Sparta to be a calamity resulting from Athens’s desire for money, power, and control—vices that he perceived to be embodied by the archaic gods of the Homeric era that were still worshipped in Athens. His lack of reverence for the old gods is apparently what brought upon him the charge of impiety.

It seems to me that Americans—and especially American men—could learn a great deal from Socrates.

For some time I have observed a childish emotionality in public affairs. Lashing out and using intemperate language—including the “F” word—is now commonplace, even in public discourse.

Such angry and aggressive outbursts are not merely a matter of poor taste or a sign of ill-breeding. They are expressions that many people who work in public affairs are not in control of themselves, and one who cannot master himself has no business being the master of others.

Socrates emphasized that many of the misfortunes that befall a man are the result of his own vices, weaknesses, and poor decisions. This being the case, he thought it childish for a man to blame his misfortunes on the perfidy of others.

He believed that war—including the war with Sparta—arises primarily as a result of mankind’s excessive love of money.

Socrates was married to a woman named Xanthippe, who was the mother of their three sons: Lamprocles, Sophroniscus, and Menexenus. In Xenophon’s Symposium, Antisthenes describes Xanthippe as “the most difficult, harshest, painful, and ill-tempered” wife. As Xenephon tells it, Socrates deliberately chose her as his wife because she was so difficult.

It is the example of the rider who wishes to become an expert horseman: “None of your soft-mouthed, docile animals for me,” he says; “the horse for me to own must show some spirit” in the belief, no doubt, if he can manage such an animal, it will be easy enough to deal with every other horse besides. And that is just my case. I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being.

Nietzsche doubted this telling, and imagined that Xanthippe drove him to become a street philosopher.

Socrates found the sort of wife that he needed — but even he would not have sought her had he known her well enough: the heroism of even this free spirit would not have gone that far.

Xanthippe drove him more and more into his characteristic profession by making his house and home inhospitable for him: she taught him to live in the streets and everywhere that one could chat and be idle and thus shaped him into the greatest Athenian street dia­lectician : who finally had to compare himself to an obtrusive gadfly that some god had placed upon the neck of that beautiful horse, Athens, in order to keep it from finding any peace.

The following image simultaneously depicts Xanthippe dragging Socrates home from the agora and pouring water on his head, to which he quipped, “Did I not tell you that the thundering Xanthippe can also make water?”

One of the most lamentable results of America’s execrable education system is that it has deprived young people from learning about fascinating figures like Socrates and gleaning their wisdom. The point of education is to equip young people with wisdom so that they can avoid the pitfalls and ditches of life instead of stumbling into every one of them.

For the American Republic today, the example of Socrates is more relevant than ever.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Americans Could Learn From Socrates appeared first on LewRockwell.

Just last year in California, a federal court declared a first grader’s crayon drawing may constitute “impermissible harassment.” Ironic, perhaps, that such a decision was made in nation where—starting in elementary school—talk about the founding principle of liberty and the sanctity of an individual’s rights are drummed into the people daily.

Are such lessons serious? Were they ever?

This crayon drawing episode and its aftermath is not some dystopian fiction but came as a heavy dose of reality in an Orange County elementary school, where the phrase “Black Lives Mater” (sic), accompanied by the words “any life,” was deemed a punishable offense.

The case, B.B. v. Capistrano Unified School Dist., reads like a parody of modern American life. Yet it is all too real, and all too indicative of the country’s present trajectory. The simplicity of the facts, however, makes this episode noticeably chilling.

Reflect. Has venerable Orange County, long a bastion of conservativism and the last Republican stronghold within the Golden State, become a place where the freedom to think (or doodle) is subject to the whims of those styling themselves as arbiters of acceptable opinion?

For this is the same county that helped deliver California to Nixon three times in presidential elections, Reagan twice, Ford and Bush 41 once. In 1964, it was one of only five California counties to vote for Barry Goldwater, author of The Conscience of a Conservative. Today, a Republican only holds one of the six congressional districts serving Orange County residents.

Today, progressives and liberals dominate both the political and cultural landscape. Take the B.B. case where, in her first grade class, a six-year-old girl, referred to in court documents as “B.B.,” drew a picture. On it, she wrote “Black Lives Mater” in bold black marker. Beneath it, in lighter colors, the phrase “any life.”

She gave this drawing to a classmate.

For B.B.’s audacity, the principal summoned her to the office, accused the girl of racism, and forced her to apologize. B.B.’s other artistic endeavors were summarily banned, and she was barred from recess for two weeks.

Recall. This was the first grade.

Has the schoolhouse not become simply another battleground in the culture war, but the frontline in the theater of operations?

No longer are blackboards allowed. They’ve been replaced by an ideological whiteboard.

Within the classroom, the teaching profession has metamorphosed from those who deliver curricula to students to those serving as commissars of an aberrant culture.

Furthermore, the District Court’s decision was a masterclass in the art of abdication—abandoning reason, constitutional principle, and basic common sense. The court, in all its wisdom, determined that the First Amendment does not protect a first grader’s drawing if a teacher or administrator deems it “harassing” or “harmful.”

The reasoning, if we can call it that, states: “deference to schoolteachers is especially appropriate today, where, increasingly, what is harmful or innocent speech is in the eye of the beholder.”

The court openly admits that the standard is subjective. “Harm” is up to the school authorities to determine. The First Amendment, once a bulwark against tyranny, is now a mere suggestion, one that is easily discarded whenever it proves inconvenient to the reigning orthodoxy.

Justifying its constitutional vandalism, the court leaned on the Supreme Court decision, Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), which held that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Yet, the Tinker standard permits schools to limit speech only when it “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.”

Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile.

Search the record for any evidence that B.B.’s drawing caused a riot in the lunchroom or even a murmur of discontent in the classroom and it will be in vain. We should also safely assume that classroom competitions of Heads Up, Seven Up still went on without a hitch.

Yes, the first graders merely went on about their days. The supposed adults were the ones throwing fits and tantrums.

The only “disruption” was that of the school administration’s ideological tranquility. Put in the hands of the District Court, Tinker also twists into a license for censorship when the claim becomes protecting someone’s feelings.

This case is not an isolated incident. It is the logical culmination of a decades-long campaign to transform American schools from places of learning into laboratories of ideological conformity.

To wit: The phrase “Black Lives Matter” has attained the status of secular scripture. Try to contextualize, qualify, or even gently expand upon it—like B.B. did by adding the words “any life” —and you’re branded a heretic.

The court’s opinion made this explicit. In a Reason.com article from March 2024 discussing B.B. v. Capistrano, Eugene Volokh writes, “The ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan is accepted as the one orthodoxy, and any perceived dissent from the view that black lives should be specially stressed in this context can be forbidden.”

Thus, the child who dares to suggest that all lives have value is branded a bigot, and the machinery of the state is brought to bear against her.

Volokh correctly identifies the danger posed by the court’s decision. He notes that the ruling “seems to be that this viewpoint is stripped of First Amendment protection,” and that “any perceived dissent from the view that black lives should be specially stressed in this context can be forbidden.”

Read the Whole Article

The post The Thought Police Arrive appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the most disastrous elements of the post-World War II conservative movement in America has been its commitment to severing the ideology of “classical liberalism” from its historical roots in antiwar and anti-interventionist foreign policy. What we now call classical liberalism—the ideology of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Frederic Bastiat, Richard Cobden, and Herbert Spencer—was consistent in opposing state power in all spheres, both international and domestic.

This was true in the United States up until the early twentieth century when the people called liberals—now known as “classical liberals” or “libertarians”—were characterized by anti-imperialism, restraint in military spending, and a general philosophy that is now maligned with the term “isolationism.”

After the Second World War, however, the new so-called conservative movement succeeded in neutralizing the old laissez-faire liberal opposition to foreign intervention in the name of fighting communists. The conservatives replaced the old laissez-faire factions with a new incoherent ideology that claimed it favored “freedom and free markets” while also promoting runaway military spending and endless foreign interventionism. This, of course, was all to be done in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.”

Many American conservatives who consider themselves to be “classical liberals,” or in some other way the ideological heirs of laissez-faire, have fallen for this historical bait and switch for many decades now.

The Real History of Classical Liberalism: Opposing the State and Its Wars

To better understand how immense this turnabout really was—and what a victory it was for the forces of militarism—we need to first consider just how closely the ideology of laissez-faire liberalism was associated with antiwar sentiment during the formative years of liberalism.

In his history of political thought, historian Ralph Raico notes that the ideology we now call classical liberalism considered opposition to war and foreign intervention as central to the ideology. Even the milquetoast liberals like British Prime Minister William Gladstone put peace up front and center in their political programs. Raico writes:

Extolling peace has characterized the classical liberal movement from the eighteenth century, at least from Turgot, on through the nineteenth century to even Gladstone, who wasn’t, frankly, that much of a liberal. His slogan in mid-Victorian Britain was, “Peace, retrenchment, and reform.”

This propeace liberalism was the standard form of liberalism in Britain through Richard Cobden’s Manchester School, and also in France through popularizers and scholars such as the radical liberal editors of the political journal Le censeur européen. At the top of every issue of the journal was the phrase “paix et liberté”—peace and freedom.

Among the journal’s editors were Charles Dunoyer, a leading figure of the French liberal school—and the close ally of Charles Comte, the son-in-law of Jean Baptiste-Say. Like most liberals of his time, including those of both the United States and Britain, Dunoyer opposed standing armies. He wrote:

“What is the production of the standing armies of Europe? It is consisted in massacres, rapes, pillages, conflagrations, vices and crimes, the deprivation, ruin and enslavement of the peoples. The standing armies have been the shame and the scourge of civilization.

Similarly, Dunoyer’s views were reflected in the writings of Frederic Bastiat who sought to abolish France’s standing army. In an 1847 pamphlet titled “The Utopian,” Bastiat reminded his readers that military expenditure is generally an enormous waste of money, and that the exploitation of the taxpayers could be greatly reduced were the size of the French military drastically lessened. Specifically, Bastiat sought to abolish “the entire army” with the exception of “some specialized divisions” which would have to be staffed with volunteers since Bastiat, of course, also sought to abolish conscription altogether. Bastiat sought to replace the state’s army with a militia of private citizens in possession of private arms. As Bastiat put it: “Every citizen must know two things: how to provide for his own existence and how to defend his country.”

In this, Bastiat was echoing American sentiments. In the United States, of course, opposition to militarism took the form of vehement opposition to a centralized military force and an American standing army. The lack of direct taxation made funding a large military difficult as well.

As liberals like George Mason made clear, the military power of the US was to reside principally in the private ownership of arms and in the locally controlled militias of the several states. Culturally, Americans of the nineteenth century regarded federal troops with high levels of suspicion. While it was considered laudable to serve a stint in the volunteer militias, Americans regarded full-time federal troops as shirkers living off the government dole. (The modern culture of fawning over government employees—at least the military variety—and thanking them for their “service” would have been considered bizarre in classical liberal nineteenth-century America.) These reviews reflected those of many of the founding generation of Americans, including James Madiason, who according to Raico: “wrote of war as perhaps the greatest of all enemies of public liberty, producing armies, debts, and taxes, ‘the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.’”

Moreover, Raico shows that Dunoyer’s views were typical of the liberals of the “industrialist school” which pioneered liberal exploitation theory. Contrary to the modern-day myth that classical liberals rejected notions of class conflict, it was actually the liberals who pioneered the idea. In this view, the “tax-eating” class exploits the “tax-paying” class which is forced to support the regime. In the classical liberal view of the industrialist school, war was a central means by which the regime and its allies exploited the productive classes.

Raico notes that “A propeace position was central to the industrialist point of view … their attack on militarism and standing armies was savage and relentless.” Herbert Spencer—a British liberal who was also highly influential in the United States in the late nineteenth century—can also be included among those who subscribed to the industrialist school’s exploitation theory. With Spencer, state warfare remanent of the past, and destructive of both freedom and economic progress. Or, as Raico sums up Spencer’s view:

Spencer believed … that warfare was suitable only to mankind’s primitive stage. The Western world, however, had long since left the stage of militancy and entered the stage of industrialism. … War in the contemporary world was retrograde and destructive of all higher values. Early in his career, back in 1848, Spencer maintained, as the Manchester school did, that wars were caused by the uncurbed ambition of the aristocracy.

The reference to the aristocracy was also a common sentiment among the classical liberals who saw the state’s obsession with war as a characteristic of the absolutist and anti-liberal states of Europe.

Raico shared this view, noting that in the pre-liberal world, most people were simply pawns to be manipulated for the benefit of the central state and its agents. According to Raico:

In 1740 Frederick II of Prussia— called “the Great,” probably …. because he was a mass murderer— plunged the world into war. Afterwards, when they asked him why, he said “because I wanted to be talked of.” It was possible in this world before liberalism and capitalism to talk of war in those terms because liberalism and the liberal ideology had not yet made war into an awful thing.

The tradition of the ruling classes treating war with a capricious attitude was the norm before the rise of liberalism in the eighteenth century. The great French liberal Benjamin Constant notes this attitude among the rulers of the ancient world. As Raico puts it, Constant believed that “the ancients, the Greeks, and the Romans, for all their achievements, were basically societies that were founded on war and on constant war making, which included, of course, imperialism and plunder of other societies.” These societies did not understand the value of markets and voluntary exchange as the liberals do, and thus these societies constructed their value systems around war, conflict, and force. As Constant put it:

War therefore predates trade. One is wild impulse, the other is civilized calculation. . . . The Roman Republic, without trade, without letters, without articles, having no internal occupation other than agriculture . . . and always threatened or threatening, engag[ed] in the business of uninterrupted military operations.

Ludwig von Mises also identified the ancient preoccupation with war when, in his book Liberalism, Mises directly contradicts the Greek Heraclitus who had declared that “War is father of all and king of all.” Rather, Mises writes that “Not war, but peace is the father of all things.”

Murray Rothbard echoed these sentiments. In his history of the post-war American right wing, Rothbard remembers his realization at the time that that ideology of warmongering was not hardly a modern invention. Rather, the modern militarist consensus of the social democrats and conservatives after the Second World War “was a reversion to the old despotic ancien régime.” He continues:

This ancien régime was the Old Order against which the libertarian and laissez-faire movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had emerged as a revolutionary opposition: an opposition on behalf of economic freedom and individual liberty. Jefferson, Cobden, and Thoreau as our forbears were ancestors in more ways than one; for both we and they were battling against a mercantilist statism that established bureaucratic despot ism and corporate monopolies at home and waged imperial wars abroad.

By “we,” Rothbard meant the libertarians—the true heirs of the classical liberals—and not the conservatives of the “New Right.”

In this, Rothbard was also echoing the anti-imperialists of America in the late nineteenth century who sought to rein in America’s drift toward militarism and European-style global intervention. Raico notes that the anti-imperialist drive was centered around the classical liberals Edward Atkinson—a follower of the Manchester School—and E.L. Godkin of The Nation, which Raico describes as “the flagship classical liberal publication” in the United States at the time.

But perhaps the most famous strike against America’s turn toward global militarism—as illustrated by the US’s war against Spain in 1898—was the work of William Graham Sumner. Sumner, an influential classical liberal and Yale sociologist delivered a lecture at Yale in 1899 titled “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.” The title was a play on words, given that the US had, in military terms, easily defeated the Spanish military. Yet, Sumner feared that it was actually the US—or at least the quickly expiring antiwar sentiments of republican America—that had been defeated in the war. Rather, Sumner contends that the Americans had abandoned the restraint of laissez-faire liberalism in favor of, as Raico puts it “the grandeur of empire.” This would be attractive to those who delight in state power and prestige, of course, but, Sumner notes, it comes with a price: “war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditures, political jobbery — in a word, imperialism.”

The Post-War Defeat of the Anti-Interventionist Classical Liberals

Needless to say, most modern day Americans—of both left and right—would consider these ideas of the nineteenth century liberals to be quaint.

The modern mindset, however, represents the triumph of the forces of militarism and anti-interventionism over the spirit of laissez-faire.

How and when did this happen? On the Left, the old spirit of peace and anti-intervention was destroyed first by Woodrow Wilson’s war efforts in the Great War. The final nail in the coffin came with the Roosevelt administration’s enthusiasm for war in both Asia and Europe.

On the Right, however, the end of liberal antiwar sentiment was more gradual. On the Right, the classical liberal impulse in favor of peace was destroyed by the rise of the conservative movement.

Murray Rothbard describes this process in The Betrayal of the American Right. Rothbard shows that while the so-called New Right contained the old anti-interventionist, free-market libertarian coalitions—the people most connected to historical classical liberalism—this was not the dominant faction. Rather, this New Right, in contrast to the Old Right, came to be dominated by an “increasingly powerful gaggle of ex-Communists and ex-leftists.” This new conservatism was premised primarily on red-baiting and building up state power to fight Communists (both real and imagined) at both home and abroad. This was all eventually confirmed and solidified by the rise of William F. Buckley, Jr. as the preeminent theorist of the so-called conservative movement. For Buckley—who called for totalitarianism in the name of waging the Cold War—laissez-faire was little more than a convenient and cynical bone to throw to the remnants of the old laissez-faire liberals in order to keep them within the political right wing.

This served to neutralize the laissez-faire movement during the Cold War, and this new ideology of conservatism served to divorce the old laissez-faire liberalism from its historical antiwar roots.

This shift can still be seen today in how the conservative movement, and its political arm, the Republican Party, has successfully grafted a patina of “freedom and free markets” onto what remains essentially a pro-government, militarist movement in favor of “spreading democracy” through a robust military establishment and surveillance state. Its origins are in the pro-government, militant anti-communism of the 1950s. This continues to be reflected in today’s conservative movement.

For decades, as ever more federal power was defended by this conservative coalition in the name of beating the communists. This same impulse then seamlessly transferred to the “global war on terror” and its new spy apparatus deployed against Americans in the wake of 9/11. Even today’s “MAGA” coalition, which is relatively less bad than the Bushian and Nixonian warmongering coalitions of the past, promises ever more military spending and even more federal surveillance in the name of “homeland security.” After all, a federal security and spy state is presumably necessary to round up people who write op-eds in support of Hamas or aliens who might get a job without the proper federal paperwork.

The Left, of course, has been lost almost entirely in this respect. What antiwar movement occasionally exists on the Left tends to completely disappear whenever there is a Democrat in the White House. Even worse, the Left now tries to beat the Right at its own game—the Left now routinely accuses its ideological enemies of being foreign agents to a degree that might even make Joseph McCarthy hesitate.

Among conservatives, however, there appears to be no corner of the globe which does not require US intervention. This attitude continues in spite of the fact that many “America First” advocates claim to be for a minimalist foreign policy. There is nothing minimalist, however, about continued intervention in both the Middle East and in Ukraine where the “America First” candidate has inked a new minerals deal that will keep the US government engaged there indefinitely. There is nothing “America First” about open-ended military aid to an Israeli state that never tires of efforts to draw the United States ever further into Israel’s regional wars. There is nothing “America First” about the Trump administration’s efforts to secure a trillion-dollar military budget and to keep funding an archipelago of hundreds of American military bases across Europe and Asia.

Of course, any true classical liberal—any true opponent of untrammeled state power—from Spencer to Jefferson to Cobden and to Bastiat—would denounce the standing army, the crippling military expense, and the de facto imperialism of endless global intervention. Were they here to do this, of course, they would likely be themselves denounced by conservatives, who would call the pioneers of laissez-faire “naïve pacifists” and perhaps even “traitors” for not embracing a strong American state.

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

The post The Classical Liberals Were Radical Opponents of War and Militarism appeared first on LewRockwell.