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This newsletter was created with the goal of helping others, and over time, I’ve received many messages from people with important questions I’d love to answer. However, writing each article takes a considerable amount of time—just as an example, I’ve spent the past month working on the final installment of the DMSO series, and it’s still not quite finished. Because of this, I’m not always able to respond individually to every inquiry I get.

While I truly wish I could, the most practical solution I’ve found is to host monthly open threads. These provide readers with a space to ask any outstanding questions—especially those left over from previous content—and I make it a priority to respond. Having all the questions in one place also makes it easier for others to benefit from those answers as well.

For each of these open threads, I like to tie in a topic I’ve been meaning to discuss—usually something I’ve been thinking about but haven’t felt warrants a full-length article. This time, I want to focus on a topic near and dear to my heart, healthy children.

The Chronic Disease Epidemic

One of RFK’s rallying cries has been that our children are being stricken by an onslaught of chronic diseases and that this is undermining the strength that is our future, and his organization, the Children’s Health Defense frequently references this chart:

Note: that data comes from this study and this study.

Since trends in motion tend to persist unless significant measures are taken to shift them, as a recently published study confirmed, this problem has continued to worsen.

Nearly half of all children receiving care in the PEDSnet multicenter network had a chronic health condition, while one-third of children in the general population experience from 1 to 15 parent-reported chronic conditions. Furthermore, obesity now affects 20% of children, and early puberty is increasingly common among girls, with 1 in 7 beginning menstruation before age 12 years. Temporal trends also showed deterioration in sleep health and increasing limitations in activity, alongside worsening of an extensive range of physical and emotional symptoms.

In turn, the study’s data shows that the rates of these conditions have roughly doubled over the last 12 years.

Likewise, many other things have rapidly gone awry

Note: this study also highlighted a myriad of other issues, such as our children being more likely to die than other developed nations, in large part due to sudden infant death syndrome (a condition strongly linked to vaccination).

The Other Half of The Picture

While I agree with the gravity of these findings and the urgency to re-evaluate our vaccination program, I feel they only tell half of the story. That is because:
• There are many other factors besides vaccines that also adversely affect children’s health.
• All illnesses (particularly those which result from being poisoned) tend to distribute on a bell curve, so that the severe, easy to spot reactions are only a minority, whereas less severe (and harder to spot) reactions are much more common.

To some extent this is recognized, as autoimmune disorders (a frequent complication of vaccination) are much more common than vaccine sudden deaths—but in most cases it’s missed.

On the one hand, this is due to the “measurement” problem in science, where scientific studies can generally only be conducted if they have a clear metric by which to measure things, thereby creating clear, reproducible data. This becomes an issue when an agent has so many different symptoms that it can make (many of which are quite subtle), they typically will be written off as anecdotal unless they are deliberately traced, and as a result, many common side effects of vaccines are never formally associated with them.
Note: the most recent glaring example of this happened with the COVID vaccines where trial participants were only given a small list of (relatively benign) symptoms they could check off (e.g., fevers or fatigue) so as a result, those were the side-effects that appeared in the published trial reports. Likewise, V-Safe, the CDC program designed to monitor vaccine side effects, did the same; however fortunately, it also included a free text field where participants could enter other symptoms—most of which were never publicly analyzed (and which the government fought in court to avoid disclosing). Because of all of this, the majority of the medical field assumed most of the side effects patients reported from the vaccines (despite many others experiencing the same symptoms) were anecdotal and had nothing to do with the vaccines).

On the other hand, it’s because many of these pathological changes are more subtle and more complex to spot, so since people aren’t trained to notice them, and have gradually become habituated to all of it “being normal” they don’t realize how much things have changed.
Note: doctors are virtually never trained to recognize the subtle neurological injuries which follow vaccination (which indicate damage has also occurred within the brain).

The Hidden Chronic Disease Epidemic

For as long as I can remember, many natural healers have told me that they can normally spot the unvaccinated children as they are much healthier and vibrant than their peers. For example, after I explained some of the ways this can be identified, two readers shared:

Thanks to this substack, I am now the unofficial medical godfather of 4 unvaccinated babies across several families. All are incredibly healthy with none of the typical problems associated with the microstrokes. All have been described by strangers and family as, “wow, your baby is really aware and paying attention. It’s like they’re sentient, I don’t know how else to say it”. And I am sad when I see those other people’s babies because I know they were supposed to be more, undergo less suffering when I hear their random high pitched shrieks.

Last year I attended a fundraiser auction to raise money for local Mennonite schools. Many families, many children. I was struck by the fact that there was a light, a brightness, in these children’s eyes that I had not seen for decades in other children. The Mennonites here do not vaccinate. Now I understand. It hurts my heart.

Likewise, I received this email a few weeks ago from a mother who followed all of my suggestions for a healthy child:

Other than a minor rash, my daughter has never had any health issues. She’s been ahead on all her developmental milestones, and from the very beginning, she’s been incredibly alert and engaged with her surroundings. She’s always exploring, and only cries when there’s a clear reason—if she’s hungry, tired, hurt, or not getting the attention she wants.

When we’re out in public, she smiles at everyone and tries to make friends. People constantly stop us to comment on how beautiful and full of life she is—some even ask if they can hold her. It wasn’t until I had her that I realized how unusual that kind of energy is in a baby. So many infants I see seem withdrawn, like they’re in a kind of daze, avoiding eye contact, and often looking genuinely sickly.

I’m incredibly grateful we were spared that, but at the same time, I’ve started to feel increasingly unsettled by what I see around me. I think a lot about what other parents must be going through—especially single mothers trying to raise kids on limited incomes—and I honestly don’t know how they manage.

One of the most challenging things when you “step out of the matrix” is becoming able to see (fairly disturbing) things all around you, and one of the key reasons why I appreciate stories like these three is because they illustrate that’s what’s been hidden right in front of us is at last becoming more and more visible.

Screens and Children

As cell phones and tablets became widely available, I would see more and more parents (who had their children with them) at medical visits using devices to keep their children content. In many cases, if a device was withdrawn, the children would have a fit (at which point the device was returned to them).

This greatly concerned me, as I could see that the way the screens pulled them in was not having a healthy effect on the child’s developing nervous system (which is why I advise parents to use audio-only media, such as small devices that play children’s songs).

Note: quite a few social media executives have said they have tremendous regret about what their products (intentionally designed to be addictive) have neurologically done to our children. Likewise, many articles have been written about how Silicon Valley tech executives send their kids to an alternative school where phones and screens are banned.1,2,3,4,5

In this publication, I’ve written numerous articles on the mass neurological damage being caused by vaccination.

In one, I showed that neurologic damage from vaccination has been a well-known problem for over a century (that previously was widely reported in the medical literature) and that conditions like autism used to be widely referred to as “mentally retarded,” a change I strongly suspect was done to obfuscate the issue (as autism exists on a wide spectrum, so hearing that someone “became autistic” is much easier to push into the back of one’s mind than if a child rapidly “becomes retarded” after a vaccine).

In the other, I highlighted that the original pertussis (DPwT) vaccine was particularly problematic as it would often cause encephalitis (which was often accompanied by piercing screams) and then leave the child with lasting brain damage. One author who studied this extensively made the fascinating observation that after the DPwT vaccine entered the market in the 1940s, a variety of societal changes followed which matched when the initial cohort who received the DPwT vaccine reached each age bracket.

For example, in the 1950s, a condition termed “minimal brain damage” [MBD] was coined (with the defining characteristic of it being hyperactivity), which before long became “perhaps the most common, and certainly one of the most time-consuming problems in current pediatric practice”. The symptoms of MBD (as defined by America’s Public Health Service and the American Psychiatric Association) had a significant overlap with what was seen after encephalitis, DPT injuries, and what was associated with autism.

In the 1960s, Ritalin came into use for treating attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity, and minimal brain damage was gradually phased out and replaced with ADHD (a condition independent studies show a 3-20 fold increase from vaccination).

I mention all of this because I have had a nagging suspicion that something similar is happening with screens, as they both draw in and pacify neurologically injured children. Furthermore, patterns set in childhood are very difficult to shake for life, and as we are now starting to see a variety of signs the first generation raised on technology has a variety of mental health issues linked to their technology exposure, which further argues for avoiding screens at an early age.

Note: the mother I mentioned above said one of their major challenges with her daughter has been keeping her away from screens (as she is drawn to them whenever they are left open), and as a result they are using screens less now.

Read the Whole Article

The post Raising Healthy Children appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post VivaBarnesLaw – Epstein Debacle Continues! Robert Barnes Rant! Federal Courts Still Going Rogue! Russia-Gate Exposed & MORE! appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post “In a Time of Universal Deceit – Telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act.” – George Orwell appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post The Uniparty appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Mike Sanders.

The post We Tracked Every Visitor To Epstein Island appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, 19th

The planet’s eighth largest economy (excl. US, incl. CA) makes another move toward sound currency. “[Texas] House Bill 1056, cleared by both chambers in late May, designates properly marked gold and silver ‘specie’ as legal tender in the Lone Star State starting September 1, 2026.  A second phase – launching no later than May 1, 2027—authorizes an electronic payment rail fully backed by bullion stored in the Texas Bullion Depository.”

And not a moment too soon. “Fifty years after Nixon defaulted on gold convertibility, the dollar faces a new reckoning. But this time, there’s no Saudi oil deal, no Volcker rate hike, and no geopolitical consensus to save it. The DXY just posted its worst start to the year since 1973. Central banks are ditching Treasurys for gold. And BRICS nations are building a parallel system to kill dollar dependence.”

Regarding the latter, the weaponization of the dollar seems to have been the last nail in the coffin. For perspective on proportion, 2024 US GDP was $30.51T, for BRICS, $27.94T. If one includes the BRICS+ countries (Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, UAE), $30.72T. Of course, this does not include other nations in the BRICS+ orbit.

The BRICS strategy has teeth. Gold reserves are currently (if one believes any of these data – sources differ wildly) 8,133 metric tons for the US, 5,757 for BRICS, and 6,618 for BRICS+. (Personal holdings in India are estimated to be 25,000 metric tons, currently valued at $2.7T. The annual consumption in India is estimated to be 800 metric tons.)

BRICS+ also has the corner on gold production with 1033 metric tons per annum, compared to 158 for the US (2024 estimates).

And a quick examination of a world map reveals added leverage to this system, as the BRICS++ community (getting more linked with the OPEC+ community by the minute) controls most of the world’s oil production, as well as vital sea gates.

The post Texas Greenlights Gold And Silver As Legal Tender appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Matt Taibbi

The post Transcript – America This Week, The Case Against Brennan and Comey appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Frahm. 

Activist Post

The post If RFK Gets the MAHA Resistance to Line Up behTind His “Compromises,” There Will Be No Resistance appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Action Institute

The post Pope Leo’s Crusade Against AI appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

John Leake

The post Is the Swamp Prevailing? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm. 

Daily Mail.

The post Michelle Pfeiffer launches extraordinary attack on Bill Gates and suggests he’ll contaminate America’s food supply appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

Tucker Carlson’s speech at Turning Point USA on June 11 has upset Laura Loomer and many others. Tucker said you can’t be loyal to both Israel and the US; you cannot work for the US government if you are a citizen of any other nation; we need deportation not amnesty for the 60 million illegals; people are getting angry and going insane because their concerns are not being addressed; and the real concern of Americans is the economy and not Iran. And he takes unscripted questions from the audience. Starts at 4:11.

The post Tucker’s TPUSA Speech Upsets Dual Loyalists appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny- Garner wrote:

Lew,

Jimmy Dore interviewed geoengineering expert Dane Wigington about the horrific Texas flooding that killed 161 including Christian girls; 161 are still missing.

The post There was Nothing Natural About the Texas Floods appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

Focal Points

The post DOJ Drops Pfizer Corruption Case appeared first on LewRockwell.

Constitutional Lawyer Robert Barnes Weighs In On The Epstein Case History & Why Trump’s Approval Rating / Agenda Are Being Tanked

https://banned.video/watch?id=68719bd91103eef89f21bcdf

The post Constitutional Lawyer Robert Barnes Weighs In On The Epstein Case History & Why Trump’s Approval Rating / Agenda Are Being Tanked appeared first on LewRockwell.

Bruce McLane wrote:

I can’t believe Epstein killed himself right before he was about to be acquitted due to a complete lack of evidence.

The post Odd happenings appeared first on LewRockwell.

The failure of the Republican Party is now so obvious that all intelligent analysts see it as disastrously harming not only the American people but publics throughout the world. The key reasons why I say this have already been stated by others, and here they are; I think they made the case very well:

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/07/trump-caves-again-over-tariffs-uncertainty-increases.html

https://archive.ph/P8BmL

July 07, 2025

“Trump Caves Again Over Tariffs – Uncertainty Increases”

On April 2 U.S. President Donald Trump declared a ‘Liberation Day’ by introducing tariffs on nearly all imports to the United States.

I adred [dared] to predict:

The ‘invisible hand’ of the markets will respond to Trump’s moves by showing him a very visible finger.

The following days confirmed my take.

The tariff rates Trump announced were basically picked from hot air. The whole idea behind them were [was] based on the weird theories of Steve Miran, the Chairman of Trump’s President Council of Economic Advisors. They did not make sense.

By April 9 the markets hit back:

Treasury yields spiked on Wednesday as investors bailed out of what has been perceived as the world’s safest instrument on expectations of crumbling foreign demand as tariffs take effect. …

Yields settled down after China called for dialogue with the U.S. on trade, and then moved right back near the highs of the day after China said it was increasing its tariffs on the U.S. to 84%. …

“Something has broken tonight in the bond market. We are seeing a disorderly liquidation,” said Jim Bianco, president and macro strategist at Bianco Research.

Shortly thereafter Trump had to pull back (archived):

The economic turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields, caused Mr. Trump to blink on Wednesday afternoon and pause his “reciprocal” tariffs for most countries for the next 90 days, according to four people with direct knowledge of the president’s decision.

Trump’s unsteadiness on tariffs increased the uncertainty of economic decisions. Uncertainty is a poison, suppressing real economic activities.

The Federal Reserve Bank St. Louis produces hundreds of economic statistics. It includes several which are measuring uncertainty:

bigger

That FRED graph included only February. The doubt about Trump’s economic policies had pushed it that high. The consequences of his tariff games were not yet visible.

Here is the current FRED overview graph of economic uncertainty. The index has reached a new record high:

bigger

When Trump had pulled back and announced his 90 days pause on tariffs, he and his advisors were hopeful that other countries would come to negotiate:

PETER NAVARRO:

… So that’s what we set, knowing full well, knowing full well that a lot of countries would come right to us and want a bargain. We’ve got 90 deals in 90 days possibly pending here.

Up to today, two days before the 90 day pause on tariffs expires, no trade deal was done. There are three new ‘framework agreements’ – with the UK, Vietnam, and China – which are more or less just letter’s [letters] of intent but not agreements.

With the tariff pause ending, and no trade deals done, the Trump administration is forced to extend its tariff pause:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that the U.S. will revert to steep country-by-country tariff rates at the beginning of August, weeks after the tariff rate pause is set to expire. …

CNN host Dana Bash responded to Bessent on Sunday, saying, “There’s basically a new deadline,” prompting Bessent to push back.

“It’s not a new deadline. We are saying this is when it’s happening,” Bessent said. “If you want to speed things up, have at it. If you want to go back to the old rate, that’s your choice.”

On Friday, Trump, too, referred to an Aug. 1 deadline, raising questions about whether the July 9 deadline still stands.

The Trump administration is also moving the goalposts. Instead of negotiating trade agreements with individual countries the administration will just send out letters of, so far, unknown content:

Trump said Friday that the administration would start sending letters to countries, adding, “I think by the 9th they’ll be fully covered.”

“They’ll range in value from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs, but they’re going to be starting to go out sometime tomorrow,” Trump said overnight on Friday. “We’ve done the final form, and it’s basically going to explain what the countries are going to be paying in tariffs.”

Trump said in a Truth Social post late Sunday evening that tariff letters would be delivered starting at noon on Monday.

There is only one country who’s [whose] people will have to pay those tariffs and the [that] is the U.S. itself.

There is little reason for other countries to react in any other way to the U.S. than by imposing symmetrical tariff measures. For many of them U.S. markets are no longer important enough. That is why most countries have simply ignored the matter:

Bessent also said Sunday that “many of these countries never even contacted us.”

The whole Trump strategy of imposing tariffs to regain industrial activity and to impose its political aims on other countries have [has] failed. China and the EU, the U.S. biggest trade partners, have not flinched. Others have followed their example.

Meanwhile the damage imposed by heightened trade uncertainty continues to accumulate. People are already paying higher prices.

A year from now, when the 2026 midterm elections come up, the damage from tariffs will be what really matters.

——

Thie following is a 1,394-word abbreviation of the 3,000-word July 4th MR Online article “The Empire’s Strategic Failure: How the US-Israeli Assault on Iran Accelerated Imperial Decline” by two scholars at the University of Tehran, Taha Zeinali and Sara Larijani:

The June 2025 US-Israeli military assault on Iran …, despite achieving short-term tactical victories, represents a profound strategic failure that has accelerated the US-led imperial decline and strengthened global anti-imperialist forces. Rather than cementing Western hegemony, this illegal act of aggression has exposed … a declining empire desperate to maintain unipolar control [which, I, Eric Zuesse, might add, had also been Hitler’s goal — achievement of the world’s first all-encompassing global empire or “hegemony,” control over the world by one “pole” — and which goal Truman then adopted for the U.S. on 25 July 1945 and has been the U.S. Government’s top goal ever since] through increasingly aggressive military adventures.

The Unmasking of the ‘Rules-Based Order’

The weaponization of diplomacy as cover for military aggression represents a fundamental breach in the international order’s trust architecture. By launching the aggression after announcing the sixth round of US-Iran talks in Muscat — with full prior coordination between Trump and Netanyahu — the West transformed diplomatic engagement from a tool of conflict resolution into a tactical deception for pre-planned strikes. …

Furthermore, the fraudulent nature of the Western “rules-based order” stands fully exposed in the diplomatic theater that followed the attacks. In a spectacle of Orwellian inversion, European powers rushed to blame the victim while exonerating the aggressor. France’s Foreign Ministry condemned “Iran’s ongoing nuclear program” and reaffirmed “Israel’s right to defend itself,” while the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary called on “all parties, especially Iran, to exercise restraint” — conspicuously omitting any criticism of Israel’s illegal strikes. Germany’s response proved most revealing: the foreign minister “strongly condemned the Iranian attack on Israeli territory” even before Iran’s initial retaliation, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz later declared, “This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us. … I can only say, I have the greatest respect for the fact that the Israeli army had the courage to do this.”

This diplomatic reversal — where victims become perpetrators — exemplifies Edward Said’s concept of Orientalist logic in Western discourse: Muslims must always appear as irrational aggressors, even when defending themselves from unprovoked attacks. The United Nations Secretary-General’s weak call for “all sides to avoid escalation” without condemning the aggression and attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is striking, showing how international institutions … [are now] using false neutrality to legitimize imperial violence. Notably, in 1981, UN Security Council Resolution 487 “condemned the military attack by Israel on the Iraqi nuclear installation as a clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations” and demanded Israel “refrain from such acts or threats of aggression in the future.”

This [new] blatant double standard crystallized a permanent rupture in Iranian consciousness. …

Nuclear Proliferation: The Empire’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The weaponization of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s technical assessments represents a masterclass in imperial manipulation. The IAEA director’s June report became a strategic weapon for Israeli and Western aggression. One day after the IAEA’s politically motivated comprehensive report accusing “Iran of failing to meet obligations,” the United States and Israel launched their long-planned assault. In this regard, [IAEA head] Grossi’s biased verification became stage-setting for military treachery, as Israel and the US used IAEA processes to justify pre-planned aggression, demonstrating how UN institutional and technical bodies become complicit when US-led imperialism weaponizes their “findings.”

Consequently, by allowing its reports to trigger violence instead of preventing it, the IAEA demonstrated that its assessments serve hegemonic interests rather than non-proliferation. …

The US-Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, while achieving short-term tactical gains, paradoxically accelerate the very proliferation they claim to prevent through three reinforcing mechanisms. First, by targeting peaceful facilities under IAEA monitoring, the attacks transform a transparent, internationally supervised program into an opaque one beyond Western control. …

Normalizing Catastrophe: The West’s Moral Numbness

The Western public’s complicity in normalizing attacks on nuclear facilities — acts explicitly prohibited under international law — represents a catastrophic moral failure that will inevitably boomerang against Western interests. This ethical numbness, which is already evident in the silence regarding Gaza’s genocide, has set precedents that fundamentally compromise global nuclear security. By legitimizing strikes on safeguarded nuclear infrastructure, Western states have created a playbook that any actor can invoke, transforming their own nuclear facilities into legitimate targets under the logic they themselves have normalized. …

This boomerang effect extends beyond tactics to fundamental security vulnerabilities. Western support for indiscriminate quadcopter attacks that kill civilians alongside intended targets has legitimized a form of warfare where the distinction between combatants and non-combatants dissolves. The precedent of attacking nuclear facilities—once considered the ultimate taboo — means Western nuclear infrastructure now operates under the constant threat of similar strikes, justified by the very logic Western states championed. The complicity of Western publics in endorsing these violations of international law has not merely eroded moral authority but created tangible security risks that will haunt their societies for generations. …

The Boomerang of Regime-Change Strategy

Beyond targeting Iran’s nuclear capabilities, Israel and the US pursued regime change through targeted assassinations of military commanders and systematic attacks on civilian infrastructure. …

Israel then deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, particularly IRIB’s television studios, seeking to create chaos that would trigger popular uprising. This calculated terrorism altogether killed over 600 civilians but produced the opposite effect: unprecedented national unity transcending political divisions. …

Political Suicide of the Opposition

The opposition’s support for foreign military attacks ultimately proved to be politically fatal. Pro regime-change figures who backed the US-Israeli assault — explicitly or implicitly — found themselves utterly isolated from Iranian public opinion. Their alignment with forces bombing Iranian civilians was widely viewed as treason. Opposition figures who had cultivated international profiles through Western media and funding, Nobel prizes, and cultural awards saw decades of credibility vanish overnight. By calling for regime overthrow while foreign bombs fell on their countrymen, they committed what analysts termed “political suicide,” permanently destroying their viability as political alternatives.

Iran Transformed

The civilian casualties and infrastructure damage also intensified anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment across Iranian society, gaining renewed emotional resonance as direct responses to military aggression. This emotional shift strengthened pro-resistance elements within Iran while discrediting those who had advocated for diplomatic engagement with the West with the hope of normalization of relations.

The regime change strategy thus achieved the inverse of its intended effects. …

The Myth of Israel’s Impenetrable Air Defense

The US-Israeli war on Iran exposed the economic unsustainability of imperial military dominance. Israel expended interceptor missiles faster than production capacity, forcing reliance on increasingly expensive US munitions. Iran’s asymmetric response using relatively cheap drones and missiles demonstrated how “the cost-benefit curve is upside down” when “$10,000 one-way drones” threaten “$2 million missiles.” The economic arithmetic of imperial decline manifested starkly in the conflict’s cost dynamics. Israel expended interceptor missiles faster than production capacity, each $3 million Arrow interceptor defeating a $10,000 Iranian drone — what one analyst called an “upside-down cost curve” that guarantees bankruptcy through victory. This mirrors historical patterns of empires exhausting themselves through military overextension, from Rome to Britain.

Iran’s missile offensive revealed three critical realities: sophisticated tactics penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow systems, proving that even the most advanced and expensive air defense systems leave critical infrastructure exposed to residual strikes. Iran has weaponized cost asymmetry, as Iran’s inexpensive drones and missiles forced Israel to expend multimillion-dollar interceptors at unsustainable rates. …

Catalyst of Multipolarity

While providing limited direct military support, China and Russia’s diplomatic solidarity signaled hardening geopolitical divisions. China’s condemnation of “violations of Iran’s sovereignty” and Russia’s denunciation of “absolutely unprovoked aggression” marked the consolidation of alternative power structures. …

The war of aggression represents what critical analysts identify as the “desperate phase” of imperial decline. …

The aggression definitively confirmed that the West seeks Iran’s destruction, not accommodation. No diplomatic engagement or restraint could shield Iran from US-led imperial violence. This brutal clarity accelerates Iran’s pivot toward comprehensive integration with China, Russia, and North Korea — forging an Eastern bloc united against US hegemony. …

Iran as Vanguard of Global Resistance

Rather than isolating Iran, the attacks enhanced its credibility as the primary force resisting Western domination. The act of aggression validated Iran’s consistent argument that accommodation with imperial powers remains impossible, strengthening anti-imperialist factions throughout the region. …

Strategic Implications for Forces

The June 2025 aggression, like previous imperial adventures, has accelerated rather than arrested processes of imperial decline. By choosing military confrontation over diplomatic engagement, the US and Israel validated arguments that Western imperialism respects only strength. The attacks have proven nuclear deterrence remains the ultimate sovereignty guarantee; air supremacy cannot achieve political transformation; high-tech militarism has inherent limitations; and imperial violence represents weakness, not strength.

——

The implications of all this (and of Trump’s and Congress’s slashing all federal Departments except greatly expanding both the Defense Department and the Homeland Security Department though those are the two federal Departments that Americans show in polls to the most want to be CUT) are that probably by the time of next year’s mid-term U.S. elections, when all of the U.S. House members and one third of the U.S. Senators will be again facing the voters, the Democratic Party will be swept back into power in the House and maybe also in the Senate, so that Trump will again be impeached but this time on valid grounds, which wasn’t the case last time, and so Trump will face a much higher probability than he did last time of being actually removed from office and replaced by his Vice President, J.D. Vance, who, in the following 2028 Presidential election will — as having been a loyal follower of Trump — be an easy mark for the Democrats to defeat so as to install another Democrat as President. But this would not solve the problem for the American people and for the peoples of the world, because BOTH Parties are controlled by their respective megadonors, all of whom are among the approximately 1,000 U.S. billionaires; and, so, all U.S. Administrations and Congresses — regardless of Party — continue the neoconservative, internationally hyper-aggressive foreign policies, and the neooliberal or “libertarian” domestic polices, that are bipartisan among the billionaires and are destroying America and increasingly endangering the entire world. Replacing the personnel in the Government is no solution when the rot runs throughout the Government, including the President, the Congress, and the Courts. The change needs to be far more fundamental, and I have made here a proposal of what I think it would need to be.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post The Trump-led Republican Party Is Crashing Into a Wall, Which Will Probably End That Party. appeared first on LewRockwell.

The good news is that tons of people—especially under the age of 50—are awakening to the hellish barbarism being committed by the Israelis against the Palestinian people. Count Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon—and even Piers Morgan (can you believe it?)—in the list of the enlightened.

The bad news is that protestant evangelicals remain in a deep state of denial. This is due, of course, to the preponderance of the false prophecy doctrines of Scofield Dispensationalism among most evangelical pastors.

I invite readers to order the newest book in our online store entitled The Incredible Scofield and His Book by Joseph Canfield. This is the most exhaustively researched biography of Scofield ever written. Canfield clears up the myths and clarifies the man C.I. Scofield. His book is objective and factual, and his research is unassailable. The book is selling so fast, we are having difficulty keeping it in stock. I urge you to read the book and discover the real Cyrus Scofield.

Order The Incredible Scofield and His Book here.

The Israel deception among evangelicals is so great that they cannot even condemn the Zionist state when it deliberately, recklessly and cold-bloodedly murders tens of thousands of innocent women and children. Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the holocaust of the twenty-first century, and because Israel is the perpetrator, evangelicals support it.

Amazing, isn’t it? People who claim to be the disciples of the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6) and who claim to preach the gospel of peace (Romans 10:15; Ephesians 6:15) are among the most ardent supporters of the world’s most unlawful and immoral war: Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Of course, Israel’s war in Palestine is not confined to Gaza. The West Bank is also under Israeli assault. And now we learn that the Israelis are besieging the last entirely Christian town in Palestine: Taybeh, Ramallah.

Zero Hedge has the report:

The last entirely-Christian town in the Israeli-controlled West Bank is enduring a wave of attacks by violent Jewish settlers, a local church leader says, prompting families to flee and leading clergy to declare the town is “no longer safe” for its inhabitants. Ominously, settlers have also set up an “outpost” on the fringe of that town — Taybeh, Ramallah — a 4,500-year-old community with huge significance in the story of Jesus Christ.

“The town, which the Gospel of John (11:54) refers to as ‘Ephraim’ — the place Jesus withdrew to before his passion — is no longer safe for its people today,” Father Bashar Fawadleh, parish priest of Taybeh’s Church of Christ the Redeemer, told the Catholic, Arabic-language ACI MENA news service. “We do not live in peace but in daily fear and siege.

This is only the latest in an ongoing pattern of aggression directed toward Taybeh’s inhabitants, a pattern that has also included stealing farm equipment, and destroying crops with fire or by releasing settlers’ cattle to devour them, Catholic News Agency reports.

Settlers have established an outpost on the town’s eastern edge, on the remains of a farmhouse abandoned by Christians who’d fled about a year ago under the growing settler campaign of violence and intimidation. An “outpost” is a Jewish settlement on Palestinian land that’s not authorized by the Israeli government. Outposts typically begin with something as small as a tent or a van, and are frequently situated on hilltops or agricultural land. In the case of “herding outposts,” settlers will bring livestock that they allow to graze over a wide area with the goal of establishing a larger claim. Despite outposts’ lack of government permission at the outset, the Israeli government often legalizes them retroactively, cementing the Palestinians’ loss of the land. (Note, there are both Christian and Muslim Palestinians, and both varieties experience the iniquities associated with being non-Jewish in the West Bank.)

The terrible treatment of Taybeh’s Christians helps explain why Israel-catering Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was booed off a stage in 2014 as he delivered a tin-eared keynote address at a gala hosted by In Defense of Christians (IDC), a nonprofit that seeks to counter persecution and mistreatment of Christians throughout the Middle East — including Israel. Video of the incident went viral again last week in the wake of Cruz’s disastrous interview with Tucker Carlson — in which Cruz insisted the Bible commands Christians to support the modern political entity that is the State of Israel.

At that 2014 IDC event, things quickly went south when Cruz dished out the Israel-pandering rhetoric that reliably draws applause when he’s addressing crowds with no knowledge of the plight of Christian Palestinians in Israel-controlled territory, in Taybeh and elsewhere. “In 1948, Jews throughout the Middle East faced murder and extermination and fled to the nation of Israel,” said Cruz. “And today, Christians have no better ally than the Jewish state,” he added — triggering murmurs and boos. Cruz attempted to plow on, saying, “Let me say this: those who hate Israel hate America. And those who hate Jews hate Christians.” The booing and heckling endured, forcing Cruz to abandon the event, saying, “If you will not stand with Israel and Jews, then I will not stand with you.”

One thing is certain: Ted Cruz and groups like Christians United For Israel won’t be speaking out on behalf of Taybeh’s besieged [Christian] residents anytime soon.  

By now, any perceptive person knows that Ted Cruz is merely a bought-and-paid-for lackey of the Israel lobby, who has no regard for truth and no respect for human life. Cruz has it entirely backwards. When he said, “Those who hate Israel hate America. And those who hate Jews hate Christians,” he either didn’t know one iota what he was talking about or he was lying through his teeth—probably a mixture of both.

The only hate coming out of Palestine is from the Israelis. To be sure, the Palestinians hate what the Israelis are doing to them. Who wouldn’t? But I’ve been to Palestine. I’ve met hundreds of Palestinian Christians. I’ve spoken in their churches; I’ve broken bread with them in their homes; I’ve spoken to gatherings of them, large and small. And I can attest to the fact that the Palestinian Christians are the most gentle, kindest, most compassionate, loving, gracious people I have ever met. They don’t hate anyone, Muslim or Jew. Palestinian Christians lived in peace with their fellow Palestinian Muslims and Jews for over 1,000 years before 1948.

Zionist Israel has been a blight in the global community of nations since it was conceived. It is—and always has been—a belligerent, aggressor state that seeks the destruction of its neighbors—neighbors that had lived together in peace and tranquility centuries before the Rothschild bankers orchestrated Israel’s creation.

A much more accurate statement of the situation in Palestine would be, “Those who support the Zionist state hate Christians—Palestinian Christians.”

Jesus commands His disciples to love all people—even their enemies. (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27, 35) That includes Muslim people. And I must add, most Muslims do NOT hate America and are NOT our enemies.

While I was in the Middle East, I also traveled to Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, and, as an American, I was treated with dignity and respect by every Muslim I met. The only hatred I experienced was in Jerusalem when I got away from the tourist areas and mingled with the Jewish people. There I was cursed and threatened by young and old alike.

The incessant venom against Islamists emanating from FOX News (the evangelical news channel of choice) and evangelical pulpits has brainwashed millions of Christians into becoming nothing less than crass promoters of unjust, perpetual wars of aggression, which have taken America to the precipice of economic collapse and global nuclear war—not to mention have seared the conscience of Christian people to what is right and wrong.

And for the benefit of any FOX News zombies who might happen across this column, I have some real news for you: In the recent “Twelve-Day War” (in which Israel was the aggressor), Israel got its tail beaten. There has been a blackout in the Western media about the truth of those twelve days, but the reality is, had the war continued for an additional week or ten days, Israel would have been totally and utterly defeated. It wasn’t Iran that came begging to Donald Trump to intervene (as Trump lied and said it was); it was Netanyahu that came crawling to daddy for help before Israel completely collapsed.

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson wrote a very thorough and descriptive report (complete with photos and videos) of the mass devastation that was inflicted upon Israel by Iran.

Johnson wrote:

Despite the arduous efforts of Israeli censors to hide the devastation Iran inflicted on Israel with its barrage of ballistic missiles during the 12-Day War, information is emerging that destroys the myth that Israel had an impregnable air defense. The map at the head of this article reveals the sites targeted by Iran. Based on the videos of strikes in Haifa and Tel Aviv, I think this map accurately portrays the massive scale of the Iranian attack. For the first time in its history, Israel took a major beating.

According to various Israeli media reports, damage spanned residential buildings, scientific infrastructure (e.g., labs at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot), the Israeli Defense Ministry complex, and commercial hubs like the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Iran also struck a military target near the Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva. The medical center was hit by the blast wave, which caused extensive structural damage, a chemical leak, and dozens of injuries. The Israeli press claimed this was a direct strike on Soroka, but the fact that no one was killed undermines that claim.

Iran also struck the following residential areas, reportedly targeting Israeli military and intelligence officials:

Bat Yam: 9 killed, ~200 wounded; high-rise apartments destroyed.
Ramat Gan: Nine buildings destroyed, hundreds displaced.
Haifa and Tel Aviv: Strikes near military HQs (“Kirya”) and civilian neighborhoods.

Iran also caused extensive damage to the Port of Haifa and the Port of Ashdod (Note, I had no information on the latter when I posted yesterday.), as well as the refineries at Haifa and Ashdod. Israel has maintained a complete blackout on the damage to its military and intelligence facilities, but the sites identified on the map above indicate that Iran likely enjoyed similar success as that observed in Haifa and Tel Aviv.

Read the rest of Johnson’s report and see the maps and videos for yourself.

And remember that all of this damage was accomplished against the BEST missile defense capabilities of both Israel and the United States. It was a humiliating loss for both Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C.

No doubt, Netanyahu’s third visit to the Trump White House (in less than six months) was an emergency meeting to beg Trump for more weapons (perhaps even using nuclear weapons?) and MORE U.S. involvement in the conflict.

Anyone who thinks that this war is over is deluded. The war has only begun. The only reason Israel agreed to a ceasefire was that it was being crushed and needed the U.S. to help stop the hemorrhaging.

The next sixty to ninety days will be devoted to restocking and buttressing Israel’s munitions and defenses. But never forget that China and Russia are doing the same thing in Iran.

But the thing I find most (nauseatingly) incredible is the fact that we have the world’s most notorious international gangster, the global leader in genocide, the murderous madman of a generation, Benjamin Netanyahu, nominating Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. The hypocrisy, duplicity and utter gall of this international mobster is absolutely astounding!

In the meantime, Israel continues its genocide in Gaza, except now it’s even worse. Netanyahu and Trump are collaborating on the idea of forcing Palestinians into concentration camps (that’s right, concentration camps) and proceeding with Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East.

All the while, evangelicals continue to sit back in abject apathy even to Israel’s attempt to destroy the last entirely Christian town in Palestine. But at the same time, these evangelicals like to quote Biblical passages about how Christians are supposed to love their brothers and sisters in Christ.

I guess somewhere in their Scofield bibles, those verses exempt Christians who happen to be Palestinians.

The post Evangelical Support for Israel’s Genocide in Gaza Includes Its Attack Against the Last Entirely Christian Town in Palestine appeared first on LewRockwell.

We bombed Iran and, despite a temporary cessation of hostilities, it’s likely that President Donald Trump and his counterpart in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, intend to drag the United States into yet another destabilizing effort in the Middle East, perhaps the most dangerous one yet. As an Iranian American, I feel as if my greatest fears are now being realized.

Like many Iranian Americans, I love this country and the many blessings that it’s provided my family — so much so that I proudly chose to wear the uniform of its Navy. I’ll never forget the immense sense of pride I felt, on July 31st, 1996, when I was sworn into the United States Navy, or the unparalleled sense of responsibility I experienced when I wore my uniform for the first time as an American sailor graduating from boot camp at the Recruit Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, in 1997. I then had the honor of being selected as the first Iranian American to serve as a member of the United States Navy Presidential Honor Guard in Washington, D.C. And on every one of those occasions, my loved ones, Iranian immigrants all, proudly stood by my side, beaming with joy as I embarked on what I viewed as a sacred commitment to serve the nation that I love.

We Have to Remember Who We’re Meant to Be

Like many immigrant families, mine came to the United States in search of peace, prosperity, and the possibility of becoming part of the fabric of the country that had given the world the Bill of Rights and the sacred tenet of “equal justice under the law”; the country that had given history George Washington, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others; the nation that had served as a safe harbor for German refugees like Albert Einstein and Hollywood film director Billy Wilder fleeing Nazi persecution; the great nation that did indeed free the world from the scourge of Hitler and the Third Reich in World War II, and later landed the first men on the surface of the moon. No nation has had so much potential to do good in the world as we do in the United States of America. Our Founding Fathers, imperfect as they might have been, passed on to us the proposition that liberty and human dignity are anything but idle words — that they are, in fact, fundamental human values written in the very hearts of every person. In short, they passed on to us a promise: that all men, every soul, in fact, is endowed by our Creator with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Nor did those founders suggest that such sacrosanct, if now seemingly self-evident, values stopped at American shores. They were all too aware that, for centuries, imperial forces had pillaged and wreaked havoc globally on smaller, defenseless countries and on civilizations virtually everywhere. Throughout the centuries, such imperial powers had risen by way of their strength, if not their virtue, and fallen thanks to their global misadventures. And let’s be clear, by any metric you want to mention, the United States is indeed a global imperial force at an all-too-critical crossroads. The question is: Will we allow parasitic and nefarious entities and interests to drain us of our resources, cajole us into breaking yet more international laws, and turn us into a global pariah while betraying the great founding promise of our republic?

With Donald Trump at the helm of state, the answer is likely to be a resounding yes.

Why the Con, Don?

In order to understand the peril in which we find ourselves as a nation, we need look no further than Trump’s recent betrayal of his own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Just three months ago, she testified before Congress that, according to the assessment of the intelligence community, Iran had not made the decision to weaponize its nuclear program.

When asked about Gabbard’s assessment recently, Trump quipped, “I don’t care what she said,” as if she had merely been offering an opinion of her own, not testifying about a multi-agency conclusion that Iran was not a nuclear threat. In fact, as a matter of religious edict, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had declared a “fatwa,” ruling that the potential global devastation of nuclear weapons violated the very tenets of the Islamic faith and that his country was forbidden to develop such weaponry.

For my part, more than 25 years ago, as a young sailor on active duty, I found myself recruited by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense HUMINT Service (now the Defense Clandestine Service) specifically because of my Persian-Farsi skills and cultural knowledge. Even then, it was widely reported that our government had a wealth of intelligence capabilities when it came to determining the exact scale, scope, and goals, not to speak of mindset and shoe sizes of the Iranian leadership, especially when it came to their military and nuclear capabilities.

It’s Never Actually Been About Nukes or Regime Change

To be clear, I’m no fan of the repressive Iranian regime and wholeheartedly reject its fundamentalist ideology. At the same time, since my country’s leaders and its intelligence community have regularly reaffirmed that Iran is not a nuclear threat, why would Donald Trump, as well as Republican Senators like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, so casually betray that community and the trust of the American people?

Why would the Trump administration allow itself to appear to be so schizophrenic by moving the goalposts on what has often seemed like a daily basis? The answer: such head fakes and confusion are part of their strategy. Chaos is the point, a crucial aspect of the psychological tactics deployed against the American public to distract us from their end game. My guess is that, not unlike Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain worm, Donald Trump and many of the corporate oligarchs who support him suffer from a parasitic infection — a murderous devotion to Israeli Prime Minister (and International Criminal Court-charged war criminal) Benjamin Netanyahu’s master plan for the Middle East. He, of course, seeks to destabilize that entire region and expand the borders of Israel into countries like Lebanon, Syria, and even possibly the Iranian peripheries. That scheme, called “The Greater Israel Plan,” has been the decades-long aim of radical right-wing elements in the Israeli government.

The modern iteration of that strategy was commissioned by Netanyahu himself. As Jonathan Granoff asks at The Hill:

“Why does [Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party] make no credible effort at building a better future for Palestinian people, knowing it serves only to align their interests more closely with Hamas? And why amid all the chaos strike Iran and aggravate the risk of wider war? Where does Israel’s policy of violent coercion rather than cooperation and an ever-widening reliance on military force come from?”

And he answers those questions this way: “It actually has an identifiable source. In 1996, Netanyahu, then Likud party leader, commissioned the policy document ‘A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,’ whose lead drafters were neoconservatives Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, co-architects of the disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.”

The desire to implement just that end-game scenario by hardline members of the Israeli government is the only reasonable way to explain the otherwise confounding actions of both the Trump and Netanyahu governments. A rational person could argue that the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Trump campaign in 2024 by pro-Israel billionaires like Miriam Adelson were a mere pittance when compared with the possibility of stealing so much in the way of land and resources in the Middle East. You could also be forgiven for imagining Benjamin Netanyahu, seduced by the wicked wiles of that infamous crew, considering the constricted borders of Israel and thinking: Why not? Why shouldn’t I take it?

Of course, I’m hardly the first person to notice the strange, almost cultish loyalty of so many of our elected officials to his dangerous way of thinking. For instance, in his book Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed The World, investigative journalist Christopher Lee Bollyn wrote: “Today, the United States of America is by all appearances an Israeli-occupied state. The U.S. Congress dutifully authorizes the annual payment of an immense tribute to Israel, some three thousand million dollars a year.”

Bollyn certainly offers a striking explanation for the events now taking place before our eyes, the voluntary death spiral into which we, as a nation, have been thrust at least in part by the radical Netanyahu government and his death-cult devotees led by the current American president.

Blowback: It’s Not Good for Israel Either

In the same way that Donald Trump’s greed-fueled ambitions far outweigh any desire to do right by the United States, Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychopathic schemes in pursuit of his end game have only served to degrade the international reputation of Israel, making it (outside of the United States) essentially a pariah nation. Even within this country, the Trump administration’s kowtowing to the whims of Netanyahu’s regime, from an unprecedented crackdown on free speech (supposedly to quell “anti-semitism”) to defunding major universities, has earned a massive backlash from both the left and the right.

What makes all of this so tragic is that the state of Israel, through its citizenry, has the capacity to do so much good in this world of ours. My Jewish friends all have a keen sense of justice and a deep sense of compassion towards the plight of the oppressed, values that have been handed down to them, particularly from Holocaust survivors who witnessed the abject evil wrought upon humanity by men with messiah complexes who were without honor or virtue. And that’s exactly why Israelis should, in the end, reject the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, so that their country can indeed once again become a cherished safe haven for the Jewish people living alongside the future nation of Palestine.

In that regard, one could easily make the case that the greatest threat to the nation of Israel is Benjamin Netanyahu. In his years of public life, due to his unrepentant acts of horror and violence, especially in his latest tenure as prime minister, even American support for Israel has cratered. And the global decline is starker yet, with European nations like Ireland, Luxembourg, and Spain now considering massive embargoes of the Israeli state.

Freedom Is Not Free, Can America Survive?

In 1997, when I was stationed in Washington D.C., my friend Jeff (Smitty) Smith’s little brother came to visit him from Missouri. Smitty and I took him around D.C. and finally came to the then-newly-built Korean War Memorial. If you’ve been there, then you know that the stark and hallowed message of that memorial is: “Freedom Is Not Free,” words chiseled in stone. On seeing this, Smitty’s brother was taken aback, and asked, “What does that mean?” Then 19 years old, I hadn’t really thought about that, but it hit me instantly. “I think it means,” I told him, “that our American soldiers are willing to pay the ultimate price for our freedom.”

I thought of that day again as I was writing this, how in the age of Donald Trump we’ve betrayed the sacrifices of all those generations and how far we’ve fallen as a nation. After I reached out to my editor, Tom Engelhardt, with my ideas for this piece, my mom asked me if it was “safe” to write such an article while Trump was president. After all, he and his goon squad, to their everlasting shame, have gone to the ends of the earth to crush free speech, especially any criticism of Israel or the administration’s nefarious deeds writ large. (Just ask Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who dared coauthor an op-ed questioning the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Netanyahu regime, only to quickly find herself disappeared off the street by masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security and imprisoned by the American government.)

In truth, that such thoughts even entered my mother’s mind or mine made me first sad and then ticked off. But certain patterns of history seem all too tragically repetitive. When an imperial power is in peril, unless there is a significant course correction, potential tyrants can take control, with the urge to destroy sovereign nations abroad and crush sacred freedoms at home.

In truth, though, it doesn’t have to be that way for us. Yes, we are now governed by wildly lesser men than the great ones of our past. Which is why none of us should cede any ground, when it comes to patriotism or the very idea of national security, to the likes of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth who mistake violence and jingoism for love of country. Such lesser men have the urge to manipulate the immense levers of power in their own favor while using those same levers to crush the righteous dissent of the American people.

This is no longer a matter of right versus left, but of uniting all people of peace and goodwill to reclaim the promise of our founding, ensuring that the precious future aspirations of all peoples, be they Americans, Israelis, or Iranians, not be crushed within the grip of a death cult of End Times fundamentalists who, like Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Batman film The Dark Knight, would happily engulf human civilization in flames and laugh as the world around them burns.

The post I Love America appeared first on LewRockwell.

Is there a pernicious plot to depopulate the planet?

I don’t know.

But among global “elites”, political opportunists, and weather wackos, there’s a general consensus that there are too many people. Yet while much of “the West” frets about an influx of foreigners, most countries are culling themselves.

Around the globe…behind the scenes in plain sight…people are pruning their progeny. In ways subtle and sly, overt and obvious, we’re consistently nudged to reduce reproduction.

The propaganda is thick. A drumbeat of popular culture and major media pounds home the high cost of kids and how tough they are to raise. But we rarely hear about the immense joy they bring, which usually lasts a lifetime… and lingers long after the challenges of their childhood slip from memory.

Why? Cui bono?

Phenomenon of Fruitlessness

Family (which is prioritized before government) and religion (which lies above it) are the two great obstacles to an all-encompassing State. For more than a century, ruling regimes have implemented policies that undermine both.

Contraception, abortion, no-fault divorce, same-sex “marriage”, and an alphabet soup of aggrieved deviants are among the relentless brigades suppressing births.

From central banks, diluted dollars diminish future-orientation. Flabby with the empty calories of fiat money, few in the West plan beyond next Wednesday. Insecurity rises as savings suffer and wealth erodes. Reduced purchasing power delays marriage and defers maternity, perhaps permanently.

Potential parents are urged to “wait till they’re ready”, as if that moment ever really arrives. There’s almost always some reason to postpone having kids. As often as not, the best time is “now”.

Additionally, under the warped influences of our narcissistic age, couples are discouraged from (or chastised for) wanting to bring children into this “rotten world”… as if we weren’t living in the easiest era to ever be alive.

Much of the phenomenon of fruitlessness derives from our high time-preference society. Family and faith, Church and children, are intrinsically long-term, low time-preference endeavors reaching beyond the realm of our earthly lives.

Multi-generational families were once required not only to help raise infants, but to care for elders. With the advent of state-run medical “insurance” and Ponzi “pension” schemes, children are perceived as less necessary to prospective parents who now expect to be supported by frayed nets until they die.

For decades, women have been subtly coaxed to have fewer kids. And many men are urged to avoid marriage as a pointless endeavor doomed to fail.

Artificial contraception…once broadly considered abhorrent…is now taken for granted, and actively encouraged. The pill, initially lauded as a capsule of “liberation”, has become the suicide tablet of a decadent West.

Abortion, universally reviled till late last century, is widely accepted as a licit way to “terminate a pregnancy.” Meanwhile, most countries that once comprised Christendom have legitimized relationships from which conception is impossible.

Unplanned Childlessness

Reduced fertility doesn’t derive primarily from more people wanting smaller families. It comes mostly from fewer women having kids. But it’s not that they don’t want children. They just don’t want them yet.

The percentage of “childless by choice” women is rising. Almost half of Millennial women will exit their fertile years without giving birth. But regret often sneaks up on them.

How?

Materialistically, many of them find it hard to justify having kids. Education is among the strongest correlates with reduced fertility. Statistically, going to college pushes women below replacement.

Women with degrees tend to participate in the two-income system, especially if they’ve racked up debt. Working women (and the childcare workers they require) also benefit the State by increasing the number of taxpayers.

Female careers consume time and displace other interests. Which may be fine. But many women won’t realize what they’ve lost till it’s gone. Yet the proportion of them who (say they) don’t want kids… or “want children, but not now”… continues to rise.

For various reasons they don’t anticipate, many will regret waiting. According to some demographers, most childless women didn’t plan (or want) to be without kids.

The most common cause of unplanned childlessness is lack of a “suitable” husband. Women tend to want guys who make more money and are better educated than they are. But such men are harder to find as female incomes rise.

Although it’s happening later in that decade, their twenties is still when most women get married and have kids. But that’s also the time they launch their careers. Even into their mid-30s, many ambitious women still want to wait five years to start a family.

This is possible. But often unrealistic. Socially and physiologically, it’s usually too late. Meeting the right man takes time (especially as women get older). Getting to know him takes longer. And female fertility declines with age. If a woman is childless at 30, it’s as likely as not she always will be.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Birth Dearth appeared first on LewRockwell.