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The events of the past few days should have convinced any remaining doubters; our government is insufferably, indubitably corrupt. Tip of the hat to Leo Gorcey’s “Mugs” character on the old East Side Kids films for popularizing “indubitably.” It’s a good word. At any rate, these are real monsters, with less principles than mob bosses.

When Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, looking like terrified schoolboys in the principal’s office, insisted that Jeffrey Epstein actually did kill himself, Donald Trump lost a significant portion of his base. I think. Bongino muttered, like a witness trying to avoid a torture-induced confession, that “I’ve seen the file.” And now, to the shock of his remaining MAGA faithful, Trump’s Justice Department announced in an unsigned memo, that “This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.” So, exactly what “file” did Bongino see? The evidence that the government explains was “lost” after it was found in a safe at Epstein’s sprawling New York pad? The one that contained lots of videotapes?

Attorney General Pam Bondi had assured us, a few months ago, that the Epstein List was “on her desk.” More chillingly, Bondi claimed that the FBI was reviewing the Epstein Files, and “There are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn, and there are hundreds of victims.” Wow. Tens of thousands? That Bondi sure has an active imagination. Now, it’s a bit surrealistic hearing this from someone who has the persona of a 59 year old cheerleader, if any high school would permit such a thing. She also famously stated that she had received a “truckload” of documents on the Epstein case, after she’d been “misled” by the FBI. Truckloads. Hundreds of victims. “No credible evidence.” FBI director Kash Patel had vowed to release everything related to Jeffrey Epstein. He also promised to revamp the FBI, and move it away from Washington, calling it a part of the Deep State. Instead, he’s building a new shiny headquarters in D.C. Welcome to the Deep State, Kash.

Jeffrey Epstein is one of the more shadowy characters in recent history. His path to billionaire/sex trafficker status began with a job as a math teacher at the private Dalton School in New York. He was hired by school president Donald Barr, father of the Bush crime family loyalist and Trump’s second Attorney General. As with many of the rich and famous, there is a huge, unexplained gap in Epstein’s resume here. I detailed some of these gaps in my book Survival of the Richest. Epstein went from math teacher to billionaire very quickly. He was fast tracked by someone. “Installed,” as Jason Whitlock calls it. You can’t really blame him for switching careers. Flying celebrities on a Lolita Express to a Lolita Island has to be more exciting than algebra and trigonometry. Hobnobbing with the likes of Trump, Bill Clinton, Oprah, and Prince Andrew, to name just a few glittering names from the now non-list.

The List that does not exist. I asked before, just what kind of “list” is this? Did Epstein write down all the famous names who had sought his services, and by that I mean his status as a high class pimp for underage girls, to satisfy his ego? Frank Sinatra supposedly kept a list of his famous female conquests in his dressing room, to entertain his show biz pals. Or, more likely, was the list related to Epstein blackmailing these rich and famous comrades? Is this what was on those “lost” videos from Epstein’s safe? One rarely mentioned close confidante of Epstein’s was former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was a frequent visitor at properties owned by Epstein, including those where his stable of underage girls was housed. Barak’s name was on the Epstein Lists that appeared online. Remember, last year a judge ordered that this List be released. The one that we are now told doesn’t exist. Never existed.

One of Epstein’s many girlfriends alleged that he boasted of working for the Mossad. Their alleged “handler” claimed that both Epstein and his Girl Friday Ghislaine Maxwell worked for the Israeli spy agency. Ari Ben-Menashe made the allegations in his book Epstein: Dead Men Tell no Tales. Ben-Menashe had supposedly been the Mossad handler for Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell, a powerful publisher who would be found floating naked and dead in the ocean. As Ben-Menashe colorfully put it, “fucking a fourteen-year-old girl is a crime. And he was taking photos of politicians fucking fourteen-year-old girls—if you want to get it straight. They [Epstein and Maxwell] would just blackmail people, they would just blackmail people like that.” Ben-Menashe was charged in the U.S. for arms dealing, but a jury acquitted him in 1990, after accepting his defense that he was acting on behalf of Israel.

Not that long ago, I wrote a Substack article, lamenting the sudden death of Virginia Giuffre, perhaps the most vocal of all of Epstein’s trafficking victims. If you recall, within less than a month, she went from being photographed with a very bruised face, reporting that she only had a brief time to live after being involved in an auto accident with a school bus, to speculation that the injuries couldn’t have come from what was described as a minor fender bender, to allegations that she was mentally disturbed, to her purported suicide. I quoted her tweet to Elon Musk, just before the 2024 election, expressing her desire to talk to him about everything she knew regarding Epstein and his list of now imaginary clients. Orwellian unpersons. At the start of their recent feud, Musk charged that the Epstein List hadn’t been released because Trump’s name was on it. Musk tweeted yesterday, “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?” Good question.

Probably 99% of the MAGA faithful believe that Epstein was providing “services” to the likes of Bill Clinton and half of Hollywood. But only a few think that Trump could have partaken of this Lolita for Hire business. There are many pictures of Trump, sometimes with Melania, laughing it up with Epstein. They sure look like they’re close chums. Trump once said as much, and noted how Epstein likes women almost as much as he does, and “some of them are on the younger side.” But the MAGA faithful believes that a morally outraged Trump threw Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago once he found out what he was up to. Apparently all those females “on the younger side” didn’t arouse his suspicions. I imagine if you went to a private island, and there were a preponderance of underage, scantily clad girls romping about, you might at least question it. There are no Chuckie Cheeses for nubile teens. With no parents allowed.

Along with the unsigned memo, the government now suddenly produced video footage taken from outside Epstein’s cell, on the night he supposedly killed himself. It’s from an odd angle, and one minute is strangely missing. Of course, it shows no one entering his cell. What else could it show? Nothing to see here. What needs to be explained is the fact that we had been previously told the security cameras weren’t working the night Epstein left this vale of tears. You know, like they weren’t working at Sandy Hook Elementary, or Parkland High School, or at any other mass shooting event. It was reported many times that these cameras weren’t recording on the night in question. And, in addition, the two guards assigned to watch Epstein, fell asleep on the job. Well, it’s stressful to keep lookout over someone that everyone suspects will be murdered. It’s better just to get some rest. I’m sure some intrepid reporter will bring this contradiction up. That’s the beauty of having a free and independent press.

Going full Trumpenstein, our president responded to a softball question about Epstein by angrily saying, “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable. I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, when we’re having some of the greatest success, and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.” At the same press conference, Pam Bondi stated that some of the video would never be released because it was child pornography. “Never going to be released,” she declared, without specifying whether this was the same child pornography she’d mentioned earlier, that included Jeffrey Epstein, or some other garden variety style child pornography that is curiously often found in the Pentagon, Microsoft, and presumably the Justice Department.

With this ridiculous answer, on top of his Justice Department’s Oceana-style proclamation that “there never was an Epstein List,” Trumpenstein may well have ended the movement he was assigned to lead. I read a bunch of comments on X, and while a surprising number of blind loyalists remain, the majority of the people understand the message behind this. We are not going to hold anyone in the Big Club responsible for anything. We are all above the law. Keep peddling your conspiracy theories. We’ll keep silencing witnesses. Already, the Trump bots are out there, chanting, “It was never about the Epstein List!” Mark Levin, with his yarmulke worn tighter than ever, angrily snorted, “Those people aren’t MAGA!” He meant those of us who wanted to see the truth exposed about this mysterious math teacher turned billionaire sex trafficker, and his illustrious clientele. That’s probably “anti-Semitic.”

At this point, after going down these rabbit holes for some fifty years, nothing should surprise me. But the outright brazen nature of this does. If my premise about Trump being an actor wasn’t right, then how else do we explain this? This is Oceana-has-always-been-at-war-with-Eurasia territory. A real politician would at least feign concern over his voting base. And, of course, some of his sycophants are trotting out theories as absurd as the “Russiagate” nonsense devised by Hillary to take down Trump. For which no one has been prosecuted. Alex Jones shed tears of disbelief, and had Judge Joe Brown on air to concoct a Q-style theory that Trump himself had possession of the Epstein List and was holding it back for well…4D chess reasons. Every single supporter of Trump should be irate over this. The Democrats are supposedly demanding the List. Which does not exist, of course.

There are so many powerful people who were friends with Epstein. Bill Gates’s marriage may well have broken up over Melinda Gates’s very belated negative reaction to all that jailbait consorting with the billionaires. I suspect the only interest the Democrats have in the List which does not exist is in seeing Trump’s name there. If Bill Clinton’s name is there, which by all rights it should be, then they will insist it’s a fake List. If the List doesn’t exist, you must acquit. Just ask Diddy about that. If all those names on the nonexistent List were prosecuted, you’d have to re-populate the movie industry. With more gentiles and less Satanists, preferably. Just imagine the perp walks we would treated to! It would be the biggest blockbuster since Barbie. A Thought Criminal can dream, can’t he? If we can just somehow get Trump a third term, then this time he will mean business. Swamp drained. Promises kept.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Epstein List Is Dead- Long Live the Epstein List appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Iranians have proven beyond dispute that they are capable of delivering large-warhead hypersonic strikes with high accuracy. And while it remains to be seen how many of these top-shelf missiles they truly possess and what their rate of production is, the bottom line is that Iran has achieved a major strategic victory which carries a strong deterrence effect in its wake. With each passing month, the Iranians will grow stronger – and the Israelis will become more desperate to try to do something about it. I doubt making peace will be on their agenda. Will Schryver, military analyst, Substack

If Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel would never have launched its attack on June 13. That is the one irrefutable fact that should guide Iranian decision-making in the future. Nukes equal security. It’s that simple.

Iranian leaders still oppose the development of nukes for religious reasons. They think that any weapon that unavoidably kills millions of innocent people cannot be morally justified. But this is not the right way to look at the issue. The reason Iran needs nukes is to save lives not to end them. Iran is not looking to expand its borders or invade other countries, but to ensure the safety of its people and the continuation of its civilization. With that in mind, it needs an arsenal that will deter foreign aggressors who use their access to nuclear weapons to advance their own foreign policy objectives.

Israel can only be deterred by superior firepower, that should be clear by now. Had Israel known that Iran had a stockpile of nukes at its disposal, they never would have launched their decapitation operation that assassinated numerous scientists, military leaders and politicians. By failing to develop nuclear weapons, Iran invited Israel’s aggression. Iran’s leaders must accept responsibility for that failure. Had they acted differently and developed the weaponry required for the country’s defense, there would have been no 12-day war. Iran’s perceived vulnerability prompted Israeli adventurism. This is from an article by Reuters on Wednesday:

Netanyahu wants to use more force, a source familiar with the Israeli leader’s thinking said, compelling Tehran—to the point of government collapse if necessary…. Netanyahu wants nothing less than the Libya model for Iran, the source said. That means Iran fully dismantling its nuclear and missile facilities under strict oversight, and renouncing uranium enrichment on its soil even for civilian needs.

Israel is seeking not diplomacy but regime change, Western and regional officials have said. And Netanyahu knows he needs at least a green light from the White House—if not direct backing—to carry out further operations if Tehran refuses to relinquish its nuclear ambitions, they said…..

For Israel, the fallback option is clear, the person familiar with Netanyahu’s thinking said: a policy of sustained containment through periodic strikes to prevent any nuclear resurgence. In the wake of its air war against Iran, Israel has reasserted itself as the region’s unrivaled military power, more willing than ever to use force and more capable of doing so with precision and relative impunity….

Netanyahu sees a fleeting strategic opportunity, one that demands acceleration, not hesitation, the source close to him said. In his calculus, the time to strike harder is now, before Iran regains its footing, the source said. US, Israel diverge on how to pursue Iran endgame after strikes, diplomats say, Reuters

Iran represents the last obstacle blocking the Zionist dream of a Greater Israel expanding across the Middle East with Jerusalem as its Capitol. Netanyahu will not be deterred from his lifelong ambition of defeating Iran and bringing the resource-rich country under his control.

The current ceasefire is a temporary pause in the hostilities that Israel is using to rebuild his defenses and prepare for the next phase of the war. As you can see from the excerpt above, Netanyahu and his war cabinet are still focused on disarming Iran, toppling its government and obliterating the country the same way they did in Iraq, Syria and Libya. This, in fact, is why Bibi traveled to Washington DC this week, to tell Trump about the changes to his strategy and to request “a green light from the White House to carry out further operations if Tehran refuses to relinquish its nuclear ambitions.” Israel wants to be able to bomb Iran whenever it chooses (as it does in Lebanon and Syria) and wants to make sure that Trump “has its back”. Bibi believes that if he provokes Tehran with more air strikes, Iran will shower Israel with ballistic missiles forcing Uncle Sam to ride to the rescue. This is Israel’s operational strategy, to get the US to fight Israel’s war.

What the article doesn’t mention, is that Israel will not engage Iran in another slugfest unless it is sure that Iran’s ability to retaliate is curtailed. Netanyahu has repeatedly said that he is not going to “get into a war of attrition with Iran”. Iran is too well-armed for that. Thus, we must assume that Bibi plans to up-the-ante by either goading Trump into entering the war or by using low-yield, nuclear bunker buster bombs with the intention of scaring Iran into submission. Either way, Round 2 of the conflict is going to be much more destructive and lethal than Round 1. This is from Iran’s Deputy Assistant Coordinator of the Revolutionary Guard Ali Fazli:

For many years we have been waiting for the enemy’s attack and we were prepared to defend. The “Sejil” missile was unexpected for the enemy. We only used 25% of our missile capability in the recent war. We are today in our best condition in 45 years. We are prepared for long-term defense. We possess knowledge related to nuclear weapons, but our ideological principles do not permit us to use them. Armed forces decisions are not made momentarily, we are working on designing our files and plans. The Zionist entity focused its attacks on security centers in the last day of the war. We have not yet opened the door to any of the missile cities.@ME_Observer_

Bottom line: Iran has not yet used its best and most powerful ballistic missiles. It is patiently awaiting Israel’s next attack when it will unload the full force of its state-of-the-art hypersonic missile capability. We should not expect this confrontation to be a gradual tit-for-tat face-off in which both participants exchange blows like prize fighters in a boxing match. We are likely to see swarms of ballistic missiles screeching across the night-sky destroying all manner of military and civilian infrastructure including desalination plants, oil depots, hydroelectric plants, ammonia storage tanks, deep-water ports, international airports and perhaps even Dimona.

The damage could be so widespread and severe, that Israel will no longer survive as a “functioning, modern state”. Israel’s existence depends entirely on US support.

We’re surprised that the media has focused so little attention on Iran’s cutting-edge ballistic missiles. After all, it was these projectiles that compelled Israel to seek a ceasefire, so, you’d think, they would attract a little more interest than they have. As we have said before, Iran is a ballistic missile superpower that would undoubtedly prevail in any one-on-one conventional war with Israel. In order to appreciate the technological advances they have made in the last few years, I’ve posted a few links of You Tube presentations that provide a window into Tehran’s impressive capability. (There are many more of these videos)

Iran Uses Its Most Powerful Weapon Sejjil – Iran’s Unstoppable Missile, You Tube

Video Link

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The post Memo to Iran: The Only Thing That Will Stop Bibi Is a Nuclear Bomb appeared first on LewRockwell.

“You think we’re arresting people now? You wait till we get the funding to do what we got to do.”—Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar

America is rapidly becoming a nation of prisons.

Having figured out how to parlay presidential authority in foreign affairs in order to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump is using his immigration enforcement powers to lock up—and lock down—the nation.

After all, a police state requires a prison state. And no one is cheering louder than the private prison corporations making money hand over fist from Trump’s expansion of federal detention.

Under the guise of national security and public safety, the Trump administration is engineering the largest federal expansion of incarceration and detention powers in U.S. history.

At the center of this campaign is Alligator Alcatraz, a federal detention facility built in the Florida Everglades and hailed by the White House as a model for the future of federal incarceration. But this is more than a new prison—it is the architectural symbol of a carceral state being quietly constructed in plain sight.

With over $170 billion allocated through Trump’s megabill, we are witnessing the creation of a vast, permanent enforcement infrastructure aimed at turning the American police state into a prison state.

The scope of this expansion is staggering.

The bill allocates $45 billion just to expand immigrant detention—a move that will make ICE the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history, with more money than the FBI, the DEA, and the Bureau of Prisons combined.

Yet be warned: what begins with ICE rarely ends with ICE.

Trump’s initial promise to crack down on “violent illegal criminals” has evolved into a sweeping mandate: a mass, quota-driven roundup campaign that detains anyone the administration deems a threat, regardless of legal status and at significant expense to the American taxpayer: immigrants, activists, journalists, business owners, military veterans, and even spouses of American citizens.

What’s more, the vast majority of those being detained are not violent criminals.

According to analyst Robert Reich, 71.7 percent of ICE detainees have no criminal record. Many are longtime residents, laborers, and small business owners—people who have contributed to the economy for years.

Removing these individuals from the workforce and imprisoning them not only devastates families and communities—it burdens taxpayers and weakens the economy.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, it costs more than $150 a day to detain a single immigrant—totaling over $3 billion annually for ICE detention alone. Meanwhile, undocumented workers contribute an estimated $96 billion in federal, state and local taxes each year, and billions more in Social Security and Medicare taxes that they can never claim.

These are the workers who keep industries running—doing the jobs many Americans refuse. Locking them up doesn’t save money; it dismantles the very labor force that sustains the economy.

Like so many of the Trump administration’s grandiose plans, the math doesn’t add up.

Just as Trump’s tariffs have failed to revive American manufacturing and instead raised consumer prices, this detention-state spending spree will cost taxpayers far more than it saves.

It’s not just authoritarian—it’s bad economics, funneling tax dollars into a bureaucracy that grows government while delivering no real public benefit.

We’re being told it’s about public safety and border control—but in reality, it’s a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy that shifts billions from productive parts of the economy into a black hole of surveillance, cement, and razor wire.

Making matters worse, many of these detained immigrants are then exploited as a pool of cheap labor inside the very facilities where they’re held.

In other words, this isn’t just a prison expansion—it’s a taxpayer-funded machine that extracts labor from the very people it imprisons, while draining billions from the economy and undermining the industries it claims to protect in order to help corporations make a larger profit.

According to The New York Times, at least 60,000 immigrants were put to work in ICE detention centers in 2013—more than were employed by any single private employer in the country at the time. Paid as little as 13 cents an hour—or nothing at all—these civil detainees were used to prepare meals, clean facilities, and even provide services to other government institutions.

Unlike convicted criminals, these individuals are not serving sentences. Most are civil detainees awaiting immigration hearings, and roughly half are ultimately allowed to stay in the country. Yet while they await due process, they are locked up, stripped of their rights, and forced to work for pennies on the dollar—all while the government and its contractors avoid paying minimum wage and save tens of millions a year in labor costs.

This isn’t just about cutting corners. It’s a taxpayer-subsidized racket—a corporatist scheme where politically connected companies profit from government largesse, growing the very bureaucratic state that so-called fiscal conservatives once claimed to oppose.

This kind of exploitation is not limited to immigration detention.

An investigation by the Associated Press found that prisoners in the United States—many held in private or underregulated facilities—are part of a multibillion-dollar empire that supplies a hidden labor supply chain linked to hundreds of popular food brands and supply companies.

As the Associated Press reports, “The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.”

It’s no coincidence that 90 percent of people in immigration detention are held in privately run facilities. These corporations profit from every additional body behind bars—and have lobbied aggressively for the policies that keep the beds full. Their contracts often guarantee minimum occupancy levels, creating perverse incentives to detain more people, for longer periods, at the expense of justice and human rights.

The implications for Trump’s detention empire are chilling.

At a time when the administration is promising mass deportations to appease anti-immigrant hardliners, it is simultaneously constructing a parallel economy in which detained migrants can be pressed into near-free labor to satisfy the needs of industries that depend on migrant work.

What Trump is building isn’t just a prison state—it’s a forced labor regime, where confinement and exploitation go hand in hand. And it’s a high price to pay for a policy that creates more problems than it solves.

As the enforcement dragnet expands, so too does the definition of who qualifies as an enemy of the state.

Erected under the banner of law and order, this permanent infrastructure of incarceration and enforcement is being put in place now for use tomorrow—not just against violent criminals who happen to be undocumented immigrants, but against whoever the government deems undesirable.

Increasingly, not even citizenship is a safeguard against the carceral state—as one recent case involving a legal U.S. resident arrested for his political views makes chillingly clear.

The Trump administration is now pushing to review and revoke the citizenship of Americans it deems national security risks—targeting them for arrest, detention, and deportation.

Unfortunately, the government’s definition of “national security threat” is so broad, vague and unconstitutional that it could encompass anyone engaged in peaceful, nonviolent, constitutionally protected activities—including criticism of government policy or the policies of allied governments like Israel.

In Trump’s prison state, no one is beyond the government’s reach.

Just ask Mahmoud Khalil, a legal U.S. resident married to a U.S. citizen who was detained for months by ICE for daring to peacefully oppose Israel’s war efforts in Gaza. Khalil’s arrest was not based on any crime—but on his political views, which the government labeled a national security concern under a little-used statute that allows the Secretary of State to deport non-citizens for expressing views deemed contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests.

A federal judge ultimately ordered Khalil’s release, finding that the detention likely violates due process rights when coupled with First Amendment protections. As the judge warned, if such a law can be used against Khalil, “then other, similar statutes can also one day be made to apply. Not just in the removal context, as to foreign nationals. But also in the criminal context, as to everyone.”

In other words, exercising your First Amendment rights can land you in a cell—citizen or not.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to criminalize dissent and expand the machinery needed to enforce it, this is not a partisan expansion—it’s a structural one and it is being built to outlast any single presidency.

Look closer and you’ll see the outlines of a system built not for justice, but for mass containment and control.

This isn’t speculation. We’ve seen this trajectory before.

Critics of the post-9/11 security state—left, right, and libertarian alike—have long warned that the powers granted to fight terrorism and control immigration would eventually be turned inward, used against dissidents, protestors, and ordinary citizens.

That moment has arrived.

Power, once granted, rarely shrinks. It merely changes hands.

That’s why the Founders placed limits on federal power in the first place—because they knew that even well-meaning government programs would metastasize into tyranny if left unchecked.

Yet Trump’s most vocal supporters remain dangerously convinced they have nothing to fear from this expanding enforcement machine. But history—and the Constitution—say otherwise.

Our founders understood that unchecked government power, especially in the name of public safety, is the most dangerous threat to liberty. That’s why they enshrined rights like due process, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches.

Those safeguards are now being hollowed out.

Immigration courts already operate without juries and allow indefinite detention. Civil liberties have been eroded by predictive policing, no-knock raids, and dragnet surveillance. Asset forfeiture laws allow the government to seize property without charges.

Now, with billions more in detention funding, these tactics are being scaled up and normalized for broader use.

And the public is being conditioned to accept it.

The pageantry surrounding Alligator Alcatraz isn’t just about capacity—it’s about spectacle. The prison, which was built in eight days, features more than 200 security cameras, 28,000-plus feet of barbed wire and 400 security personnel.

This is not a correctional facility. It’s a warning.

A government that rules by fear must maintain that fear.

Trump’s detention expansion—like the mass surveillance programs before it—is not about making America safe. It’s about following the blueprints for authoritarian control in order to lock down the country.

The Trump administration claims its expanding detention regime is aimed at curbing illegal immigration and violent crime. In reality, the new federal budget significantly broadens ICE’s mandate and resources, supercharges its reach through private-public surveillance partnerships, and grants it sweeping policing powers to investigate so-called domestic threats, operate pretrial detention centers, and detain individuals without formal charges under emergency powers.

These are not the tools of a free society. They are the instruments of a permanent security state.

We’re told we must trade liberty for security. But whose security, and at what cost?

With this expansion, we are moving from a nation of laws to a nation of executive decrees, predictive enforcement, and pre-crime detention. Already, courtrooms have become conveyor belts to prison, designed to serve the state, not justice.

The government’s targets may be the vulnerable today—but the infrastructure is built for everyone: Trump’s administration is laying the legal groundwork for indefinite detention of citizens and noncitizens alike.

Executive power during a declared emergency knows few bounds. And those bounds are becoming looser with every new bill, every new detention center, every new algorithm.

This is not just about building prisons. It’s about dismantling the constitutional protections that make us free.

A nation cannot remain free while operating as a security state. And a government that treats liberty as a threat will soon treat the people as enemies.

This is not a partisan warning. It is a constitutional one.

Trump’s supporters may cheer the crackdown now, but what happens when these powers are turned inward?

What happens when a future administration—left, right, or otherwise—decides that your political speech, your religious views, or your refusal to comply with a federal mandate constitutes a threat to order?

What happens when you’re arrested under suspicion, held without trial, and processed through a court system designed for speed, not fairness?

What happens when Alligator Alcatraz becomes the model for every state?

We are dangerously close to losing the constitutional guardrails that keep power in check.

The very people who once warned against Big Government—the ones who decried the surveillance state, the IRS, and federal overreach—are now cheering for the most dangerous part of it: the unchecked power to surveil, detain, and disappear citizens without full due process.

Limited government, not mass incarceration, is the backbone of liberty.

The Founders warned that the greatest threat to liberty was not a foreign enemy, but domestic power left unchecked. That’s exactly what we’re up against now. A nation cannot claim to defend freedom while building a surveillance-fueled, prison-industrial empire.

Trump’s prison state is not a defense of America. It’s the destruction of everything America was meant to defend.

We can pursue justice without abandoning the Constitution. We can secure our borders and our communities without turning every American into a suspect and building a federal gulag.

But we must act now.

History has shown us where this road leads. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once the machinery of tyranny is built, it rarely stays idle.

If we continue down this path, cheering on bigger prisons, broader police powers, and unchecked executive authority—if we fail to reject the dangerous notion that more prisons, more power, and fewer rights will somehow make us safer—if we fail to restore the foundational limits that protect us from government overreach before those limits are gone for good—we may wake up to find that the prisons and concentration camps the police state is building won’t just hold others.

One day, they may hold us all.

Reprinted with permission from The Rutherford Institute.

The post The Rise of the Prison State: Trump’s Push for Megaprisons Could Lock Us All Up appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump attracted massive political support–the most we have seen any candidate attract in many years–because he said his aim was to restore America on its traditional values, the values that had made the United States a successful country. Instead of foreign wars, Trump promised restoration at home.

But everywhere we look Trump is enmeshed in foreign, not domestic, affairs.  Netanyahu is leading Trump into war with Iran. Trump sends Zelensky, not himself, to meet with Putin despite the fact that Zelensky cannot deliver the mutual security agreement that Putin wants from the West.  And now Trump is interfering in Brazilian domestic politics threatening a 50 percent tariff on imports from Brazil unless the current government drops charges against former president Bolsonaro.

I have no knowledge whether the charges against Bolsonaro are legitimate, any more than I know if the former charges against the current President Lula da Silva that resulted in his imprisonment were legitimate.  The question is: what business is it of Trump’s?

Does it ever occur to Trump and his government that it is incongruous to protect Bolsonaro but not the Palestinians, whose oppressor Trump has hosted in the White House three times in six months and plied with money, weapons, and diplomatic cover for a genocide?

One would think that it is Putin, Xi, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Trump would have at the white house, and Netanyahu the one under US sanctions and threats for Israel’s genocide of Palestine and war-mongering in the Middle East.  

Has it ever occurred to Trump and his government that they are seen as nothing but the two-bit punk puppets of Israel led around by Netanyahu with an Israeli ring in their nose?  How are we supposed to be proud Americans when we are ruled by Zionist Israel?

Will ever again Americans have a president who represents America?

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Clownishness reached new depths several months ago in the Philippines. Not the Bozo kind, the Catholic kind. Cardinal Antonio Tagle took to the stage, donning a chorus line outfit, microphone in hand, bobbing and swaying as he crooned John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

For those fortunate to have escaped the cultural junk-littered demi-monde of the ’60s and early ’70s, this song was a paean to the consolations of atheism. His Eminence held the Filipino Catholic crowd in thrall as they, too, swayed to this spectral reinvention of Catholicism. Yes, this was in the Philippines, where Roman Catholics reach 78.8 percent of the population.

Disturbing as this should be to grounded Catholics, it should not be considered heretical. Heresy is far too respectable to descend to such redoubts of vaudeville religion. Heresy takes the Faith in great earnest, enough to understand its central dogmas and to calculate fatal substitutes. Heresy is a serious business, and it requires serious thinking.

No, what we have in Cardinal Tagle’s nightclub gig is making the Faith nothing more than a joke. More menacing, it is an embalming of religion, making it a shadow of itself.

For Catholicism’s approved cognoscenti, this approach has become their preferred line of attack for tweaking of the Old Faith. Its ground plan is to infantilize religion to such a degree that it becomes no more demanding than a sandbox exercise. Trying to critique it is rather like attempting to nail down raindrops. Its purpose: that all feel well, all be smiling, no one be unwelcome, and bonhomie fill the room.

Aborning here is no-fault Catholicism, where no one is banned from the reception of the “bread,” God loves everybody, and “love is love.”

Nightmare? Yes, to most Credal Catholics. But isn’t that the aim of most parishes today? In these religious deserts, nothing bespeaks the majesty of God. Every detail is self-referential, viz., the saccharine music along with the swagger of the priest as he descends the middle aisle glad-handing and waving to his fans.

But there is more. The platoons of “ministers” settling in their roles like vendors at a state fair. Not to be overlooked is the modernist design of the new churches which remind one of laundromats. Their sterility would embarrass even Bauhaus and Le Corbusier.

For this comedic enterprise, no detail is neglected. Even the vestments of the priest advertise the message of the banal, the pedestrian, the ordinary, the fatuous. This clowning reaches its peak in the reception of Holy Communion (an expression quite unknown to a deprogrammed laity), where all take a casual stride to the minister to take the bread and drink the cup in a display of good feeling and nonthreatening “connecting.”

But beware, vice makes a furtive entrance in the priest as clown. Where the heretic priest might raise the defenses of alert Catholics, the priest of oozing affections is nonthreatening, leaving most Catholics disarmed. Then what enters the soul is religion as a no-threat zone, easily falling victim to the joking priest with his cloying winks and “have a good day” send-off. Along with his studied casualness at the altar, all of this conspires to be a totalizing reconfiguration of Catholicism. Who cannot love the priest as Mr. Rogers and the makeover of God that he peddles?

The priest as clown shrinks the souls of Catholics by making them content with merely the trivial and meretricious. Then the fatal switch. No longer God demanding obedience but a stroking god, bidding all to be themselves. Belloc’s ominous warning chills the soul:

We sit by and watch the barbarian, we tolerate him. In the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence. His cosmic inversion of our old certitudes, and fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. 

But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces, there is no smile.

A similar Taglian performance was conducted by the good Cardinal Cupich at a stadium Mass several weeks ago hailing Chicago’s native son as pope. He repeated, like a metronome, the all too familiar, “Jesus loves you just the way you are.” Spliced into that incantation was the obligatory “all are welcome,” especially those who break the law as illegal immigrants. Add to that the swinging mariachi band and you have the big-top feel of a Barnum and Bailey circus.

Witness here the victory of Man over God. The Secular over the Sacred. The Clown over the Consecrated Priest. The Entertainer over Alter Christus.

St. Paul describes priests as the “dispensatores mysteriorum Dei” (1 Corinthians 4:1), an exalted title of transcendent proportions. This sacerdotal status embodies the whole man, body and soul. It would be a truncated Catholicism that sees the indelible mark of Holy Orders as merely interior. This would be a denial of the metaphysical unity of the human person. This unity most surely manifests itself in a kind of resonance, where the soul manifests its highest purposes in the body.

This is why symbols bear such weight in the life of man: they radiate the interior mystery of the human person. So obvious is this truth that the most common man adheres to it reflexively and without question, objecting to its absence. Evidence is ubiquitous: the wedding ring, the policeman’s uniform, the salute to a superior, the erect walk of The Old Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown soldier, or a nation’s flag.

Abandoning any of them would cause protest, if not a riot—and for good reason. The symbol embodies a truth that lies deep in the soul of man. Setting it aside is eclipsing the truth itself, and man finds himself capsized.

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One of my longstanding curiosities has been what universal laws govern the reality we inhabit, and I have gradually concluded one is “the law of equilibrium,” which states:

•Any process we observe is the product of competing forces balancing each other out to an equilibrium point.
•While it is sometimes possible to shift the equilibrium point (e.g., by mass poisoning the world with COVID vaccines), in most cases, systems will typically return to their equilibrium point.
•While the equilibrium sometimes rapidly re-establishes itself, it can often take decades, if not centuries, to do so. When viewed over time, these forces propagate across generations and eventually return to their equilibrium.

Furthermore:

•Humans throughout history continually overestimate their ability to suppress the equilibrium’s restoration and engage in a variety of extreme but ultimately futile tactics to prevent it.
•The internet has rapidly accelerated the speed at which at which societal equilibria reassert themselves, and as the speed of the internet increases, so does the speed of the “reequilibration.”

COVID Distorts The Equilibrium

Throughout my life, I have watched a gradually increasing encroachment on our health by predatory entities that prioritize profits over people (e.g., synthetic agriculture, processed foods, chemical manufacturing, and the pharmaceutical industry). Each of these follows the same pattern—something new gets introduced as “safe and effective,” people notice the issues and object to it, science, media and the government conspire to suppress those objections, and then once it’s normalized, something even more egregious is done the next time.

In turn, I’ve tried to show here that the unbelievable things we saw with the COVID vaccines were, in truth, simple repetitions of an existing pattern, that began over a century ago with the smallpox vaccine (which arguably were worse and whose mandates more widely protested than the COVID vaccines). Sadly, while healthy skepticism existed towards vaccines and the media to varying degrees called out the government’s disastrous vaccines programs (e.g., the hot polio lots they released or the rushed and unnecessary swine flu vaccines), in 1997, the FDA legalized direct to consumer drug advertising, allowing the pharmaceutical industry through the mass media to dominate the narrative, at which point the only places these objections could be aired were the alternative media, where they in turn were dismissed as “fringe conspiracy theories that no credible outlet would touch.”
Note: the HPV vaccine (approved in 2006) had many of the same issues the COVID vaccine had and when the injuries piled up, the FDA and the CDC simply did everything they could to sweep them under the rug just like COVID. Likewise, this issue is not unique to vaccines. For example, the SSRIs had serious issues with mind-altering suicidal and homicidal behaviors and rapidly became the most complained about drugs in America, but the FDA instead fought all efforts to give a basic safety warning on them and gagged their scientist who confirmed they caused children to kill themselves.

Depending on how you look at it, the good or bad thing about COVID was that it was the most extreme version we’ve seen of the previous pattern (e.g., ridiculous, over-the-top, and hateful vaccine marketing coupled with the first adult vaccine mandates our generation had experienced), and it happened to be both an incredibly dangerous, unneeded and ineffective vaccine.

Because of this, it was a shock that woke a lot of people up to something being seriously wrong with our medical system, and created a loss of trust in our institutions and medicine which has never been seen before in my lifetime—best demonstrated by a recent large JAMA study of 443,445 Americans, which found that in April 2020, 71.5% of them trusted doctors and hospitals, while in January 2024, only 40.1% did.

In short, I would argue, the medical industry got “too greedy” and effectively killed their “goose that laid the golden eggs” through their conduct during COVID, which was further worsened by leading Trump to go all-in on a vaccine before the election and then delaying it at the last moment, as Biden was presumably a more profitable president for the industry—an approach that worked until Trump was re-elected.

As such, I would argue the above illustrates how a distorted equilibrium will reassert itself, and the major mistake the COVID cartel made, like many before them, was thinking that with enough force, intimidation, and suppression, that they could stop it from happening, particularly since they had already planted so many seeds from earlier campaigns that they were able to sprout into a full-fledged resistance against them once the soil was right.

Questioning Doctors

Calley Means recently shared something quite noteworthy about the loss of trust in medicine that I felt merited further discussion.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who runs a clinic network of 1,000+ MDs.

She said the main conversation among doctors is frustration that patients are asking about the “root cause” and “more natural cures” for their conditions.

She said 0% of patients asked these questions five years ago, and now 80% of patients do.

Her doctors see this trend as a negative thing, and spend their time deriding the MAHA movement and social media personalities in the break room.

These clinics focus on dermatology and make money selling drugs and procedures. Many dermatological issues are tied to root cause issues (diet/lifestyle) and not a lack of cream or injection.

On Reddit boards, countless medical professionals are decrying these “root cause” questions.

I think this represents a major shift/dynamic happening in medicine that should be openly discussed. Are patients right to be asking more questions about the root cause, or are the doctors right to be deriding Americans for taking health into their own hands? To be asking about food, exercise, over-medicalization, and lifestyle habits…

Should patients trust their doctors on chronic disease management? Can patients actually reverse their conditions and thrive if they explore the root cause? Are the answers simpler and more under our control than we believe?

I think the answer is clearly yes. I hope the trend of patients asking doctors for the root cause doesn’t slow down, and it not only changes how we practice medicine, but also changes our culture to be more empowered.

If you have an acute condition that will kill you right away, see your doctor and listen to them. Our system is a miracle at addressing these acute issues. But that’s less than 10% of our spending.

Our system’s failure at chronic disease management has economic, national defense, and spiritual effects that are existential.

We need to have respect for our food and our soil. We need to cherish breastfeeding and natural food… We need to ensure kids are away from their phones and outside running around… We need to rejuvenate a grounding in the spiritual…

These are the messages our healthcare leaders should be repeating again and again – and that light is starting to shine through, despite aggressive resistance from hard-working doctors whose income and identity are undeniably tied to the broken status quo.

Beyond the fact this again represents the equilibrium reestablishing itself, it also raises many important points I felt merit discussion.

One of the major dilemmas in healthcare has been how to appropriately reimburse for it, as:

• If it pays too little, healthcare workers will not be willing to do it, particularly society’s “cream of the crop” who, based on academic merit, are selected to enter our medical schools, and in turn, they help establish medicine’s credibility by having the most (academically) talented members of society lead the profession.
Note: since most of the “humanistic” aspects of a medical application are very easy to fake by saying all the standard buzzwords, the medical school process tends to select for high performers who are too “in their heads” (rather than their hearts), some of whom are only going into medicine for the money.

• If it costs too much, many people (or eventually the government) will not be able to pay for it.

• If specific services are reimbursed for at a high rate, physicians will inevitably gravitate their practices towards doing as much of them as possible to increase their incomes (e.g., here I showed how numerous neurosurgeons at one hospital each billed over 50 million dollars in 2015—something which can only be done by rushing and majorly cutting corners on surgeries which often were not needed in the first place).
Note: another field this is a huge problem is in orthopedics, as orthopedic surgeons make their money off their surgeries, and in many cases will operate when the surgery is not appropriate. In contrast, the most ethical ones I know tend to work for HMOs like Kaiser where their salary is set rather than being dependent on how many surgeries they perform.

• Likewise, many medical specialties have bread and butter procedures (e.g., pelvic exams in gynecology or vaccinations in pediatrics) which are routinely done at visits to support the practice’s income. While some of these are relatively benign and have some value (e.g., ENTs cleaning a patient’s ears) others often cause more harm than the benefit they provide. In the case of
Note: In many studies I’ve reviewed, the benefit of these routine screening exams or treatments is far less than portrayed (to the point the justification of paying for them is highly suspect), but at the same time, they are arguably justified as they subsidize the doctor staying in practice (and providing care to the area) and more importantly, noticing if something else is significantly wrong with the patient which would not have been recognized had they not seen the doctor.

Over the decades, I’ve seen various attempts and debates to address this conundrum, but in my eyes, they’ve essentially made things worse. For example:

• They’ve let the American Medical Association have a committee that effectively sets the government reimbursement rates for specialities. To some extent, this is a valid approach, since every speciality needs adequate reimbursement to be sustained, and specialities which require more training (e.g., becoming a neurosurgeon requires 11 or more years of medical training)—all of which the government would be unlikely to do correctly. Unfortunately, this process is also ripe for exploitation and conflicts of interest, so not surprisingly it has led to massive increases in speciality reimbursements.
Note: one of the many important policies RFK has advocated for is reforming this process so the medical profession cannot set their reimbursement rates.

• Switching from paper charts to electronic medical records (EMRs) was touted as the solution which would address all the problems in healthcare, but in reality, it just made doctors take way longer to write their notes rather than spending it on care (hence why doctors spend so much of their visits with you in front of the computer), and often they would copy paste the same thing into each one.
Note: per my understanding, the government push for EMRs (despite them harming patient care) came from them taking longer for doctors to fill out, and hence reduced their ability to submit insurance charges (saving the government money), a trend that may change as AI makes it possible to rapidly generate generic medical notes.

• Numerous regulations and requirements designed to make medical care ‘better’ have led to increasingly onerous practice requirements for doctors to comply with, making more and more medical spending to go to things besides healthcare (e.g., administrative compliance) and it has become nearly impossible for many doctors to maintain their own private practices. Because of this, more and more of them have been shifted to corporate employment where they have far less autonomy in what they can do (e.g., most knew they could not object to the COVID vaccines as they risked termination or being reported to the medical boards) and those employed are constantly under pressure to see more and more patients in shorter times—making patients “who want the root causes” non-functional for their practices as it takes up too much time.

Unfortunately, as we all know, these attempts have not been successful, and as time goes on, healthcare consumes an increasing share of the economy (currently 17.6% of GDP) as our population becomes sicker.

Standard Medicine

No matter how you dice it, medical education is quite challenging as there is simply too much to learn, and even the “brightest” students adopt a triage mentality where they cut out things that aren’t necessary (or low-yield) for exams so they can pass and get a degree. Because of this medical education typically:

• Covers many aspects in a superficial manner (e.g., just learn the classic indications, simple mechanisms of action and commonly recognized side effects of drugs).
Note: this is quite problematic as many of those simplistic facts students memorize aren’t always entirely correct (or become evidently contradictory once you take the time to understand them). However, since students are under such pressure to memorize them, they take the facts as verbatim facts they don’t question and become quite haughty towards those who do.

• Focuses on the key medical products (e.g., how to use pharmaceutical drugs along with the key microbes and their pharmaceutical treatments, understanding what aspects of the body each speciality is responsible for, how to interpret imaging studies, and how to understand surgery well enough to want to go into it or refer patients to it) along with basic skills necessary for being a doctor (e.g., being able to recognize potentially life-threatening conditions, conducting a physical exam with enough details to complete a medical note and writing billable medical notes).
Note: there is also a strong focus on anatomy and physiology, which along with recognizing key diseases and medical emergencies, in my eyes represent some of the most valuable aspects of conventional medical training.

• Cuts out a lot of the subtle aspects of medical science and doctoring that make you an effective clinician (e.g., medical ethics). Because of this, there is always a subset of medical students who have that inherent capacity and excel at being clinicians but very few learn it through their training. Put differently, standard medical training doesn’t really cover what is needed to make people healthy as there is never enough time for that and again and again, I hear stories of medical educators who try to incorporate it but get pushed to the side due to limited curriculum time.

Additionally, while I can’t prove this, I also strongly suspect a key reason why they aren’t lifestyle treatments and natural therapies aren’t focused on is because they aren’t possible to monetize, whereas endless prescriptions and referrals for medical services feed the industry. This point is commonly referenced in regards to most medical schools for having minimal training in nutrition (which is actually arguably a good thing since what’s done tends to focus on processed food dogmas, such as cholesterol being bad for you). However, it extends to far more, and is often encapsulated by the concept “Western Medicine is the only medical system in human history that does not recognize an innate health within the body that facilitates healing.

Note: I believe one of the major reasons the medical community has had such a great focus on DEI is because it gives them an easy scapegoat (the reason our medical system is abjectly failing America, particularly the poor, is because we don’t have enough diversity in our doctors, rather than any of the actual issues the system does not want to discuss).

In contrast, many natural schools of medicine put a much greater focus on training doctors to facilitate actual healing in their patients. Unfortunately, I find graduates from these programs often can’t recognize critical medical conditions (as their training doesn’t focus on it) and in many cases, their training tends to be fairly linear and reductionistic (much like conventional medicine) so, while they are more equipped to heal, the same problem tends to emerge where the practitioners have the same things they do over and over and won’t go outside their box to try and have a broader understanding as to how heal the patient.

Additionally, in many cases, to earn acceptance from mainstream medicine (and access to reimbursements) these professions sometimes shift to a much more conventional model (e.g., many of the leading naturopathic medical schools were not willing to criticize the vaccines and even mandated them despite the founders of naturopathy being vehemently against vaccination).

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In light of the recent revelations regarding the decades-long secrecy, deception, and lies of the CIA regarding its relationship with the anti-Castro group the DRE both before and after the JFK assassination, I believe it would be helpful to recap the essential aspects of the national-security state’s plot to assassinate President Kennedy and then cover it up.

I fully realize that there are still many Americans who do not wish to confront this ugly aspect of our nation’s history, preferring to settle for the old lone-nut theory of the assassination or the “I guess we’ll never really know what happened” theory. I contend that if we are ever going to get this nation back on the right track, it is essential for Americans to confront the dark side of the national-security state governmental structure that was foisted upon our nation in the 1940s and that continues to inflict massive damage on our liberty and well-being today. In fact, that’s why the JFK assassination is still so relevant today — because the entity that orchestrated and then covered up its role in that state-sponsored murder remains with us to this very day in a very big, destructive way.

When the U.S. government was converted into a national-security state in the 1940s, the conversion fundamentally altered America’s governmental structure. Unlike the limited-government republic that the Constitution brought into existence and that had been America’s governmental structure for more than a century, the national-security state immediately acquired omnipotent powers — powers that clearly violated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Among these powers was assassination, which is essentially legalized murder — that is, the taking of life by federal officials without due process of law, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. No one cared about the constitutional violation because what mattered was keeping people “safe” from the supposed international communist conspiracy to take over the world, including the United States. Since the Reds wielded the power of assassination (and other omnipotent dark-side powers), it was necessary, it was believed, that the U.S. government wield the same dark-side powers in order to win the Cold War against the Reds.

Almost from the very beginning, the CIA focused on perfecting its power of assassination. (See an early version of its eery assassination manual here.) But it did more than that. It also focused on ways to hide its role in state-sponsored assassinations. For example, “suiciding” someone by throwing him out of a high-storied building was considered one of the best ways to kill two birds with one stone — the murder and covering up that it was the CIA that carried it out.

Once it was decided that Kennedy needed to be removed from office, on grounds of “national security” (see FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne), the objective was not only to succeed in killing JFK but also to cover up the fact that the national-security establishment had carried out the assassination.

But this was going to be the assassination of a president of the United States. Everyone knows that when someone kills any federal official, government officials are going to pull out all stops to investigate everyone who could have possibly been involved in the murder. Such an investigation would be doubly fierce given that the victim would be the president.

Thus, the CIA knew that such a fierce, no-holds-barred investigation would almost certainly lead to the national-security establishment — i.e, the military and the CIA. Therefore, the only way to avoid that possibility would be to figure out a way to get that investigation stopped before it even got started. And therein lies the sheer dark-side genius of the national-security plot to kill Kennedy.

The plot entailed having shooters from both the front and the back of Kennedy. Firing from the back would be a “communist.” Firing from the front would be his confederates, who would presumably be fellow communist agents.

There was a big problem, however. How could the CIA make certain that a real died-in-the-wool communist would be situated in Kennedy’s rear and firing from that direction? That would be an impossible task. So, the CIA did the next-best thing: It selected a U.S. intelligence operative — Oswald, who was a former U.S. Marine — to unwittingly serve as the “patsy” — that is, a U.S. intelligence operative who would be being positioned to take the fall as a “lone nut.” The real shooter would be located in the same building or an adjacent building.

That’s where the CIA-controlled DRE comes into play. Oswald had been directed to move from Dallas, where he was associating with right-wing people with ties to U.S. intelligence, to New Orleans, where he immediately began making a big public hullabaloo about being a “communist.” The CIA-controlled DRE was helping him do that, especially with a big public altercation, followed by a recorded radio debate that advertised Oswald’s communist bona fides.

Intelligence operative Oswald was then directed to Mexico City, where he made another big public hullabaloo by contacting the Soviet and Cuban embassies.

Thus, Oswald had now been “sheep-dipped” with a big public persona of being a “communist” but not just any communist. Oswald was now a “communist” with connections to Russia and Cuba, which would obviously implicate those two communist regimes in the upcoming assassination.

Here’s the $64,000 question: If one is going to frame someone as a “lone nut” who is purportedly firing from the rear, why in the world would one have shooters also firing from the front? Dumb, right? No, actually ingenious because that’s the way they could ensure that the investigation would be shut down immediately. That’s where their dark-side ingenuity comes into play.

Establishing that Russia and Cuba had assassinated Kennedy as part of the worldwide communist conspiracy would mean World War III because the U.S. would have to retaliate. Matters would quickly escalate to all-out nuclear war.  Thus, the only way to avoid World War III and all-out nuclear war would be to quickly shut down the investigation and just settle on Oswald (who was now dead and silenced) as a lone-nut assassin.

But what if someone were to say, “But we can’t let the Reds get away with initiating a war against us by assassinating our president”? New President Lyndon Johnson would have had a very persuasive response ready to go: “The Kennedy boys started this assassination game by trying to assassinate Castro. They got burned with it. I’ll be damned if I’m going to destroy the world to save their reputation. Shut this investigation down now.”

So, the investigation was shut down immediately. When Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade charged that Oswald had assassinated Kennedy as part of an international communist conspiracy, Johnson telephoned him and told him to eliminate that charge at once, citing the risk of World War III. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach issued a memo on the Monday following the Friday assassination stating that it was imperative that the American people be convinced that this was nothing more than just a lone-nut assassination.

Meanwhile, Johnson was cojoling mainstream public officials — that is, officials who would never dream of accusing the military and the CIA of killing the president –into joining his official commission to “investigate” the crime. In the process of doing that, he pulled the World War III card – -telling them that he needed them to serve on his commission in order to avoid the prospect of World War III.

At that point, under the terms of the plot, it was necessary to hide evidence of shots having been fired from the front, so as to convince the American people that this was just a “lone nut” assassination, not a communist conspiracy. That’s what forcibly getting Kennedy’s body out of Dallas without an autopsy (in violation of state law) and into the hands of the military at Bethesda National Naval Medical Center was all about. A fraudulent autopsy wrapped in military secrecy conducted by military officials would be used to convince people that there was no forensic evidence of shots having been fired from the front.

Thus, after landing at Andrews Air Force Base, the military sneaked Kennedy’s body into the Bethesda morgue about 1 1/2 hours before the official start of the autopsy. During that period of time, the Navy pathologists conducted pre-autopsy surgery to make it look like the only shots had come from the rear — that is, no international communist conspiracy.

This darkly ingenious plot succeeded for many years, especially given the tight veil of “classified” secrecy that was imposed on the autopsy participants. Ultimately, however, as ever-increasing amounts of evidence of the fraudulent autopsy continued surfacing over the years and decades, the evidence of autopsy fraud finally reached a critical mass in the 1990s during the term of the Assassination Records Review Board. That “beyond a reasonable doubt” circumstantial evidence of autopsy fraud ended up sealing the fate of the plotters, given that there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. See my book The Kennedy Autopsy and Douglas Horne’s five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.

And now we have the long-secret files of CIA official George Joannides, which establish that the CIA has been lying the entire time about its role with the DRE in New Orleans. It turns out that it was the CIA, operating through its front organization the DRE, that was helping Oswald create his public persona of being a “communist,” one who had supposedly killed the president. It was CIA operative Joannides who was running the DRE operation. It was also CIA operative Joannides who had served as an obstructor of justice during the investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations during the 1970s. The files also established that the CIA had awarded CIA operative Joannides a medal for his faithful service.

Finally, it’s worth noting that even if the cover-up had failed, no one would have been convicted and punished of assassinating Kennedy anyway. That’s because under U.S. national-security law, Pentagon and CIA official officials who carry out state-sponsored assassinations based on grounds of “national security” are immune from criminal prosecution. As soon as Texas officials brought criminal charges against military and CIA officials, the Justice Department lawyers would have had the case removed to federal district court, where they would have shown that the assassination was carried out to protect America from a president whose policies ostensibly constituted a grave threat to “national security.” Since under our system of government, it is the national-security branch that has the final say in what constitutes a threat to “national security,” the judge would have had no choice but to dismiss the charges.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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We’ve all heard the argument before – “Liberals are the ‘creatives’ in western culture and conservatives have no imagination”. And, if you only use venues like the Hollywood film industry or maybe the New York art and literature scenes as examples, then this claim might appear to have validity. After all, the vast majority of filmmakers, writers, actors and artists today are rabidly progressive. It’s hard to find a single conservative among them.

Of course, the argument falls apart when we look back to the artists and musical geniuses of the Renaissance, or the great writers and poets of the early industrial age. In fact, for centuries the creative world was dominated by conservative and Christian powerhouses. It wasn’t until the quiet leftist invasion of media starting in the 1940s (which was stalled by McCarthy) and the eventual takeover in the 1970s that “art” became the exclusive domain of progressives.

How did this happen? How did conservatives get pushed out of the creative world?

Well, they’re still around; thousands upon thousands of them. However, the art world and the realm of entertainment are largely dictated by corporate dollars. Wealthy benefactors used to PAY conservative artists and commissioned great works. Now, they don’t. Whoever gets the money gets the exposure, and liberal artists get the money. It’s not about merit, it’s about ideology and politics.

Try to be a new talent with openly conservative views in mainstream film, television, fiction writing, comic books, painting, music, etc. Watch how quickly you are added to the blacklist and how quickly you disappear regardless of how brilliant your work is. It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s observable fact.

There are numerous case studies of conservatives in Hollywood being buried by the industry. In literature the progressives learned how to control the bottleneck – Nearly all literary agencies are run by leftists (and women), and if you can’t get representation for your book then it won’t get nationally published.

A common argument among leftists (or idiots) is that women simply read far more and so books that cater to female consumers get the green light. It’s the “free market” – Don’t you support the free market?

In reality, the woke takeover of literature came first. And, now that books are rarely written by men for men, male readers have no market to tap into. The problem has become so epidemic that a literary company in Britain called Conduit Books announced that they are going to focus on male writers for the foreseeable future. And guess what happened? Mobs of leftists and the corporate media attacked them, arguing that men had their time and now is the time for women to “have a voice”.

In other words, male writers (let alone male conservative writers) aren’t even allowed to have ONE company that supports their work.

As the Gamergate movement exposed, woke activists hijacked gaming by extorting companies with threats of cancellation. They then organized “consultation” groups (like Sweet Baby Inc.) that invaded the industry and injected woke narratives into every new product. Conservatives are persona non grata in the AAA game development space.

Comic books have been utterly destroyed by the political left. An army of feminists and LGBT activists now control every aspect of the comic industry and American comics no longer sell because of woke politics. Did the market die? No, customers simply moved on to the alternatives. Japanese Manga dominates the comic market today with sales that dwarf American comics. In 2021, total US comic sales hit $2.07 billion, with $1.47 billion of that being manga.

These are just a few examples of how leftists act as gatekeepers in creative markets. For decades they have dictated who gets exposure and who doesn’t. And you know whose fault it is? It’s ours.

For many years I have listened to conservatives dismiss pop culture as “kids stuff” and not important compared to politics. Meanwhile, woke saboteurs were slithering into every corner of the entertainment world and planting their degenerate notions into every movie, every show, every song, every book, everywhere you look their cultism is rampant. You can’t get away from it and we allowed this to happen because we weren’t paying attention.

Luckily, a counter-movement has formed and the vast effort to stop wokeness in media has been largely successful in organizing boycotts. In the past few years nearly every entertainment platform that produces woke material is dying.

In movies, production companies are forced to reduce or completely cut out woke messaging in order to draw an audience. The problem is, the leftists still stand guard at the gates. Conservatives still aren’t getting access to media markets, which means all we are going to get for years to come is progressive slop, or productions that avoid wokeness but remain mediocre.

My fear is that audiences will simply settle for mediocre as a replacement for woke; that people will throw up their hands and give up on quality in art and entertainment as long as they’re no longer bombarded with DEI. It basically means the the death of creativity in the west.

So what’s the solution?

It seems so obvious to me that it’s painful, but maybe conservative creators are so despondent that they’ve given up. The internet and social media offer immense opportunities for independent content creation, but this is not enough. Audiences and investors need to put cash and support behind the alternative content industry.

Just as great Christian artists were once given the ability to conjure historic works of grandeur because of commissions, there needs to be a movement to focus production and distribution back into conservative hands.

The crisis in liberal entertainment cannot be allowed to go to waste. Never before has the progressive media juggernaut been as weak as it has been in the last few years. Now is the time to take the culture back. Not necessarily by forcing conservative politics into movies and books, but by creating meaningful and powerful art again; art that removes the stains of wokeness.

Films and short form fictional content are incredibly cheap to make and distribute compared to 20 years ago. I have always loved the artform of film but when I started writing in the early 2000s the field was prohibitively expensive and digital cameras were in their infancy. Even making a short film could bankrupt the average twenty-something artist with a tight budget.

Today, you can get near Hollywood quality digital cameras, lighting, editing, sound, etc, for well under $10,000. Maybe half that price if you buy used. All you need is a good idea and the will to make it happen. Price is no longer a factor like it once was.

I will say, though, that conservative filmmakers need some kind of venue to tap into – Maybe a yearly short film contest or a screenplay competition. Someone needs to step up and provide an arena where conservative creators can compete for greater opportunities beyond some cash from YouTube.

In literature I suspect the crusade will be much more difficult, unless companies with weight and money step in to launch a conservative renaissance in fiction. Self publishing is definitely an option but reach without marketing is limited. The most successful creators will be those with a preexisting audience. A lot of brilliant writers will fall by the wayside because they don’t already have an online presence.

Indie video games are in the wild west phase and there are some incredible success stories out there.  As the technology becomes more accessible I suspect leftists will lose their hold on development.  It may take another few years, though.

I believe comic books is one area that is BEGGING for revitalization and new blood. As noted, the market is huge. American readers are hungry for good stories, they just aren’t finding them at Marvel and DC because of the woke takeover. No one wants to buy leftist drivel.

American comic creators like Eric July have proved that the industry can be saved. His libertarian/conservative “Rippaverse” project has garnered a lot of attention (and a lot of hate) for offering non-woke comic books and he has shown that there is a steady audience for this kind of content.

I’m adding my own limited contribution to the fight with my action/horror graphic novel ‘Mountain Hollow’ which is now in print. A story about a survivalist who fights a guerrilla war against an interdimensional evil. Here’s a promo video for my book:

Anyone interested in purchasing a copy can BUY ONE HERE.

I think most people accept the prevailing theory that the political left, with the help of NGOs and even governments, has steamrolled into the cultural zeitgeist with the goal of saturating our media with as much propaganda as possible. Perhaps they thought we would be so overwhelmed that we would give up and embrace their ideology as the “new normal”.

However, I would suggest that this was only part of their plan. Their secondary goal was to deconstruct western pop-culture should they fail to control it. In other words, if they can’t have it, they would rather burn it all down to the ground so that no one else can have it. And I have to admit that they are winning when it comes to destroying what remains of our entertainment. The options today look bleak.

Stories and art are not simply about fantasy and escapism – They are the catalyst by which a civilization passes on its principles, its ideas, its dreams, its lessons and its morals. Leftists understand this all too well. For some reason conservatives are late to the party. There is still time to save our culture from being cast into the pit of despair.

We only require an organized effort that provides support to conservative art; a new Renaissance which resurrects the values of merit, talent, hard work and conscience.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Conservative Creators: Don’t Let the Liberal Entertainment Crisis Go To Waste appeared first on LewRockwell.

This week, President Trump delivered shocking blows to his loyal supporters. After promising to get out of Biden’s failed Ukraine war “on day one,” we are now 6 months into Trump’s presidency and he’s continuing to arm Ukraine. Trump is turning Biden’s failed war into his very own failed war.

The Trump Administration also gave “full approval” for Moderna’s Covid jabs for children 6 months and older.

President Trump endorsed Lindsey Graham for re-election saying Lindsey “is always there when I need him.” Meanwhile, the President wants to primary Thomas Massie?

And finally, the biggest betrayal of them all; one that even the most ardent Trump supporters can’t accept — Epstein.

The post A Week Filled With Terrible Decisions By President Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

WSJ News

The post Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Circle appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer . 

Pureblood Potter on X: “Devon man has had enough.

The post Devon man has had enough appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

‘Global War on Terror is Over’…Terror Won: Daniel McAdams

This is a very good article by Daniel McAdams about the hypocrisy and lack of morality by those in charge of the American Empire. All that the powerful in D.C. care about is power/money. Why Americans keep voting for these immoral lying murderers amazes me.

The post ”Global War on Terror is Over”…Terror Won: Daniel McAdams appeared first on LewRockwell.

That seems to be the opinion of Auburn University basketball coach Bruce Pearl who is considering quitting his job and running to replace Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville.  The former Auburn football coach is retiring to run for governor.

Pearl is an uber neocon whose political pronouncements would be more appropriate for a candidate for the Knesset  than the U.S. senate.

The post Poor, Powerless, Defenseless Israel Has No Friends in the U.S. Congress Already? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Ben Bartee

The post Watch Ben Shapiro Declare Epstein Case CLOSED: ‘Facts on the Ground Have Changed’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lew,

I thought the Roman “Bigfoot” mystery (https://www.lewrockwell.com/political-theatre/2000-year-old-roman-bigfoot-mystery-5000-giant-shoes-unearthed-in-britain/) was fascinating, but not for the shoe sizes—really not that crazy.

It was indeed fascinating how dumb the analysis was by the article’s author.

It got me thinking more about it, though:

https://x.com/BrianDOLeary/status/1943035793150480826 Also on Substack:

https://briandoleary.substack.com/p/giant-roman-boots-to-nba-behemoths

The post In reply to 7/9 Political Theatre topic appeared first on LewRockwell.

di Francesco Simoncelli

(Versione audio dell'articolo disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/la-radice-di-tutte-le-tensioni-in)

Mettiamo un po' di cose in prospettiva per non perdere la bussola. L'amministrazione Trump sta cercando di rimuovere incrostazioni burocratiche negli Stati Uniti che vanno indietro di centinaia di anni. Più del Congresso, il suo compito è quello di convincere l'elettorato (come sta facendo Alberta in Canada affinché non vengano etichettati “separatisti”, o peggio dalla stampa). Portarlo dalla sua, che abbia fiducia è cruciale affinché non si debba improvvisare. La maggior parte delle affermazioni fatte sulla stampa sono fuorvianti, perché fino a ora i nemici lungo la strada non hanno fatto che moltiplicarsi... tutti quelli che nel precedente sistema dell'eurodollaro avevano privilegi. La stampa è uno di questi nemici e Trump piuttosto che dire apertamente le sue reali intenzioni deve sparare tutta una serie di bizzarrie prima di arrivare davvero al punto. Questo, a sua volta, significa dover accettare un certo livello di ambiguità e incertezza in questo momento storico di transizione. Transizione degli Stati Uniti da cosa? Dal sistema di “libero scambio” inglese al sistema americano di politica economica. La ricostruzione della credibilità passa anche da qui.

E questo ci porta altresì al motivo per cui ci sono tanti venti contrari contro la Big Beautiful Bill e perché ci sono tante menzogne a riguardo. Nell'alveo della Reconciliation Bill solo le spese non discrezionali possono essere toccate. Si può discutere del lato entrate e tasse, ma i tagli del DOGE alla spesa non possono essere approvati subito perché gran parte di essi riguardano la spesa discrezionale e vengono approvati nella Rescission Bill. La legge, quindi, è stata tenuta ostaggio dal Senato dai “soliti noti” affinché gli aiuti all'Ucraina, e quindi i dollari all'estero, continuassero a scorrere. Rand Paul e Massie, opponendosi, dato che non hanno mai affrontato una Reconciliation Bill, hanno fatto il gioco di neocon come Murkowski, Collins, Graham, ecc. (senza contare che molti senatori affrontano le elezioni l'anno prossimo, quindi è “comprensibile” un'opposizione da falchi sul lato fiscale dell'equazione). La cricca di Davos, quindi, non sta facendo altro che mettere pressione sui suoi infiltrati al Congresso affinché rallentino questo processo e si possa vendere la narrativa “l'amministrazione Trump non sta facendo niente” oppure “la legge aumenta il deficit”. Davvero? Ci siamo scordati della USAID? Senza contare che le proiezioni del CBO considerano erroneamente i tagli delle tasse come un aumento automatico delle spese.

Non solo, ma il momento era diventato più impellente perché a fine giugno terminavano gli ultimi aiuti all'Ucraina approvati dall'amministrazione Biden. Non solo, ma questa settimana scattano i dazi contro l'UE. Una crisi, quindi, di qualunque natura è necessaria per spostare questi eventi ancora più avanti nel tempo e farli coincidere inoltre con il rollover del debito ($7.000 miliardi) previsto per questa estate. Occasione che non mancherà di essere sfruttata dalla stampa e dagli utili idioti al seguito per far passare l'idea, erronea, che nessuno voglia i titoli di stato americani (ignorando comodamente il gioco portato avanti dalla cricca di Davos di vendere il back-end della curva dei rendimenti e comprare il front-end in modo da dare l'idea di un'inversione della stessa).

Infatti il front-end della curva dei rendimenti americana continua a mostrare un'inversione sempre più pronunciata, questo significa che i possessori esteri stanno vendendo per tenere liquidi i loro mercati e saldare i debiti denominati in dollari. Secondo gli ultimi dati TIC il Canada è stato il venditore più accanito di recente, questo soprattutto grazie al carry trade che è stato impostato da Carney tra la curva dei rendimenti canadese e quella americana tramite l'emissione a marzo di una tranche di bond denominati in dollari americani. Ecco perché Powell, tra l'altro, s'è ostinato a tenere alti i tassi e a tenere il DXY in una banda di prezzo definita facendo in modo che non cadesse al di sotto dei 90 punti: ha semplificato la vita agli esportatori, ha continuato a contrarre l'offerta di dollari ombra e, al contempo, ha reso la vita difficile a chi voleva ancora sfruttare il mercato dell'eurodollaro.

Tra gli altri venditori importanti è risultato Hong Kong che di recente ha visto una severa svalutazione del dollaro honkonghense rispetto a quello americano perdendo il “peg”. Due delle valute più importanti al mondo per il loro “peg” col dollaro americano sono il dollaro di Hong Kong e il riyal saudita. Quest'ultimo non sta mostrando nessun segno di stress, invece. Anche Singapore s'è mostrato un venditore di titoli di stato ad aprile e questo mi fa pensare che c'è canalizzazione di biglietti verdi, da queste “succursali”, laddove servono di più: a Londra. Se mettiamo le due cose insieme, ovvero fame di dollari a livello internazionale e i guai emergenti a Hong Kong, la scena potrebbe essere pronta per una nuova crisi sovrana con epicentro la città cinese e riverberarsi subito a Londra e Bruxelles. Per quanto anche gli USA possano essere travolti da una crisi del genere, la loro condizione economica è nettamente superiore rispetto a quella del resto del mondo. Infatti la maggior parte della salita dell'indice S&P500 è stata dovuta alle Mag 7 negli ultimi dieci anni o giù di lì. Una rotazione della liquidità da queste, e quindi una correzione degli indici azionari principali, all'economia generale significherebbe un buon periodo di consolidamento. Nel frattempo la fuga di capitali dall'Europa attenuerebbe la correzione delle azioni americane facendole tornare, meno traumaticamente, a una media storica sostenibile. Nel secondo trimestre l'Eurostoxx è già inferiore in quanto a performance rispetto al Dow Jones. Una crisi del debito sovrano seguirà a ruota, così come una monetaria. Ricordate, se l'euro e la sterlina sono riuscite a rimbalzare dal fosso in cui stavano finendo è perché hanno venduto (e continuano a vendere) asset denominati in dollari e dollari per ripagare i propri debiti in una valuta la cui offerta è in contrazione.

Per quanto Trump possa voler un dollaro relativamente “basso”, il DXY non può scendere oltre una certa soglia altrimenti ciò significherebbe importare inflazione in eccesso. Questo significa che il DXY tornerà a salire, rimanendo nel range dei 100-105. Più in alto significa che il mondo sta implodendo. Infatti i livelli attuali nei mercati dei cambi da parte di sterlina ed euro sono artificialmente gonfiati, considerando come Ripple sia destinato a disintermediare Londra dal Forex e dallo Swift (Bitcoin è un'altra cosa invece, più collaterale e asset al portatore digitale che fornitore di liquidità).

Nel momento in cui il dollaro risalirà, seguito dal Dow Jones e dal back-end dei titoli di stato americani, insieme a una moderazione dell'inflazione, una crescita solida in generale e una riorganizzazione industriale degli USA, quello sarà anche il momento in cui la FED taglierà i tassi. Molto probabilmente già da questo mese e altre 3 volte durante gli ultimi 6 mesi di quest'anno. L'eccezione a questo percorso è un prezzo del petrolio sui $90 al barile, dato che un'inflazione spinta dalle materie prime più virulenta impedirà a Powell di tagliare i tassi. Se invece ci sarà moderazione nelle vicende geopolitiche, l'oro lateralizzerà e il dollaro salirà insieme al mercato azionario e quello obbligazionario americano, allora avrà le giustificazioni politiche per tagliare i tassi (al di là delle richieste di Trump). 

Il duplice mandato della FED, adesso, al di là dell'Humprey-Hawkins Act, è quello di stabilizzare i prezzi interni dopo la più grande botta d'inflazione mai vista dagli USA sulla scia del Build Back Better di Biden; l'altro punto è prosciugare l'offerta di dollari ombra all'estero. Il lavoro di Powell, da questo punto di vista, è stato tanto arduo quanto egregio... e continuerà a esserlo fintato che riduce il bilancio della FED, toglie il conservatorship da Fannie/Freddie e stabilizza i prezzi immobiliari e ci si sbarazza del SLR permettendo alle banche americane di usare il loro bilancio per rendere più efficiente il mercato dei mutui coprendolo coi titoli di stato statunitensi. I prezzi del 2010 non torneranno, troppe distorsioni monetarie sono accadute sin da allora; l'unica cosa che si può fare è stabilizzare l'economia. E un ulteriore modo di farlo è il processo di snellimento fiscale e taglio delle tasse.

Parecchi fronti sono aperti adesso ma quello fiscale è decisamente più importante. Più verrà ritardata la sua risoluzione, per qualunque motivo, più la cricca di Davos avrà leva nel sabotare gli USA. Non scordatevi le recenti parole di Dimon.

Poi c'è la politica estera. Infatti ho aperto questo pezzo parlando della Big Beautiful Bill perché parte tutto da essa. Inutile dire che nella maggioranza erpubblicana al Congresso ci sono franchi tiratori, come hanno dimostrato ad esempio Pompeo e Graham volati a Kiev per mandare un messaggio; oppure Massie e Paul che avrebbero voluto spacchettare la legge e farla approvare a pezzi... ma questo avrebbe significato una maggioranza di 60, non di 51, al Senato. Quindi piuttosto che continuare ad attenzionare un luogo su cui Trump ha, molto probabilmente, un dialogo con Putin, meglio dirottare il focus altrove e, in questo modo, accontentare i falchi neocon. I fronti aperti sono tanti e il tempo passa, e questa è una situazione che va a vantaggio della cricca di Davos.

Il Medio Oriente è uno di questi fronti, visto che il governo di Israele è facile da agitare. Anche qui, gli inglesi c'hanno messo lo zampino visto che “consigliano” entrambe le fazioni (Hamas in Qatar) e il loro gioco, come hanno sempre fatto, è tradire una di esse per creare una faida. Ed è quello che ha fatto l'MI6 il famoso 7 ottobre scatenando il vespaio a Gaza che vediamo ancora oggi. Gli Stati Uniti, con Trump, hanno lavorato per gettare le basi di una pacificazione nell'area, ecco perché gli arabi in Oman, Arabia Saudita, Emirati Arabi Uniti, Siria, Turchia, Kuwait sono rimasti, all'atto pratico, in silenzio quando l'aviazione americana ha effettuato la sua operazione in Iran. Così come sono rimasti in silenzio Russia e Cina.

Francia e Inghilterra vedono cosa accade e gonfiano l'isterismo di Israele, perché vogliono continuare ad avere influenza nella regione e fare in modo che continui a essere instabile: va a loro vantaggio e tiene impantanati gli USA, con potenziale di intervento diretto e quindi spesa di dollari all'estero. Inutile dire che francesi e inglesi cercheranno altresì di approfittare della confusione nel governo iraniano per insinuarsi. È un gioco pericoloso e più si andrà avanti diventerà ancor più pericoloso, visto che c'è la sopravvivenza della cricca di Davos in gioco. L'azzardo americano è stato quello di lasciar scatenare Israele il giorno dopo la scadenza dei 60 giorni per un accordo sul nucleare: in questo modo si manda un messaggio che le deadline devono essere rispettate (power politics) e il mancato rispetto porta conseguenze per la parte attenzionata... che sono progressivamente più severe in proporzione alla sua reticenza a trattare (si veda la pronta capitolazione dell'UE sui dazi al 10%).

Come si inserisce in questo contesto l'attacco americano sul suolo iraniano? Ha spostato l'attenzione in Medio Oriente dalla Russia e accontentato i neocon (tutti in festa) affinché votassero per la Big Beautiful Bill; ha indispettito l'Iran al punto da voler chiudere lo Stretto di Hormuz (cosa che farà male solo all'UE in termini energetici); è stato un indispettimento mirato visto che gli USA hanno avvertito l'Iran per tempo prima di attaccare (e chissà se prima della deadline una bozza d'accordo sottobanco non sia stata raggiunta); ha accontentato Israele nella sua richiesta di intervento americano; quest'ultima è stata una soddisfazione, però, che ha fatto continuare lo scontro tra Iran e Israele, i due agitatori più pronunciati in quella zona. Con il ridimensionamento dell'Iran andranno a morire tutti quei gruppi terroristici che hanno messo a ferro e fuoco il Medio Oriente (Houthi, Hezbollah, Hamas); con il ridimensionamento di Israele potrebbe cadere l'attuale governo in carica di cui l'amministrazione Trump non si fida.

Il “vero” tradimento del MAGA sarebbe stato se il 30 giugno, alla scadenza degli aiuti in Ucraina, essi fossero stati rinnovati; il tradimento assoluto del MAGA sarebbe se venisse salvata la City di Londra. Fino ad allora si tratta solo di muovere la prossima tessera sul tavolo del GO.

Circa due settimane fa parlavo di come in Iran ci fossero fazioni così come in tutti gli altri Paesi del mondo. La fonte di destabilizzazione nell'aerea è sempre stata la sua possibilità di avere armi nucleari, cosa che ha dato a Israele la motivazione per essere costantemente agitato e opporsi a questa eventualità. Non è necessario che fosse reale adesso o in passato, il solo fatto che pendesse questa spada di Damocle nella regione era sufficiente per creare tensioni. E Israele aveva tutte le ragioni per opporsi; la power politics funziona così, bisogna farsene una ragione.

Torniamo un attimo indietro nel tempo. L'accordo JCPOA stretto da Obama con l'Iran serviva a far arrivare gas e petrolio in Europa a prezzi più convenienti. Di contro l'Iran ci guadagnava la possibilità di accedere a fonti di uranio per scopi civili. Gli USA non ci guadagnavano niente e servivano solo da garanti dell'accordo. Anzi, ci avrebbero rimesso solamente in caso di guai, ma sappiamo che l'amministrazione Obama non lavorava nell'interesse della nazione. C'è da aggiungere, anche, che gli inglesi sono i responsabili dietro le quinte per le tensioni nella regione dato che il loro obiettivo, oltre che controllare indirettamente l'Iran tramite un governo fantoccio, è quello di impedire alla Russia di collegarsi con l'Oceano indiano bypassando così il Mar Nero. Iran e Russia sono due vecchi pallini inglesi. Questi ultimi si sono garantiti che una ferrovia da San Pietroburgo fino a Chabahar non venisse mai costruita (così come si sono assicurati che non fosse costruita dall'Alaska alla Russia). Anche il fermento in Georgia si inserisce in questo contesto.

Comunque, sin dall'accordo Sykes-Picot e dalla Dichiarazione di Balfour (anche perché la Prima guerra mondiale è stata scatenata per smantellare definitivamente l'impero ottomano), gli inglesi hanno continuato a manovrare nell'ombra in Medio Oriente per estendere e conservare la loro impronta colonialista. Questo significa tramite Israele e anche attraverso il proxy Stati Uniti. Quando questi ultimi, però, hanno iniziato a emanciparsi dall'influenza della City di Londra, principalmente con l'abbandono del LIBOR, ciò ha sparigliato le carte anche a livello geopolitico. Il caos è stata una conseguenza, soprattutto a livello bellico col moltiplicarsi dei conflitti a livello mondiale sulla scia di un riassestamento delle alleanze a immagine e somiglianza di suddetta indipendenza americana. Uno di questi conflitti è stato ovviamente quello tra Israele e Palestina, dove entrambi i popoli sono stati traditi dagli inglesi per accendere la miccia e far continuare poi ad ardere il fuoco della guerra. Ecco perché è saltata fuori adesso la storia che Israele ha finanziato per anni Hamas. Ecco perché, da due anni a questa parte, è diventato legittimo criticare aspramente gli israeliani. Il 7 ottobre è stata un'operazione palesemente portata avanti dai servizi segreti inglesi dell'MI6, i quali hanno ha usato il proxy di Hamas in Qatar per attivare la falange in Palestina e quindi “tradire” Israele.

Ecco perché Netanyahu è stato messo da parte durante i negoziati di Trump in Medio Oriente con gli altri stati arabi ed è stato pronto ad attaccare l'Iran senza esitazione per conto degli USA. Questi ultimi avevano bisogno di una dimostrazione di forza per pacificare l'Iran, mandare un segnale agli altri player mondiali che l'amministrazione Trump fa sul serio quando imposta delle deadline (messaggio rivolto a Bruxelles e Ottawa) e accontentare i neocon al Senato affinché togliessero il “veto” alla Big Beautiful Bill. In questo contesto Netanyahu rimane uno strumento di persuasione, come ha potuto constatare lui stesso avendo dovuto combattere da solo contro l'Iran. Ritengo che il suo ascendente sul resto del mondo fosse dovuto all'affiliazione con gli inglesi, ma adesso quei tempi sono andati e, ciononostante, rimane comunque inaffidabile visto che s'è fatto terra bruciata intornio a lui a livello politico. Altresì, per quanto l'AIPAC abbia finanziato la campagna di Trump, non ha la stessa influenza che aveva durante il suo primo mandato.

E questo ci porta al momento attuale, dove le fazioni all'interno dell'Iran si stanno dando battaglia per determinare chi emergerà come classe dirigente. Sono dell'idea che gli inglesi non si lasceranno scappare l'opportunità creata dagli USA per intrufolarsi finalmente nel Paese, come leggiamo dalla seguente notizia. È un modus operandi già conosciuto ai lettori del mio blog. Credo altresì che l'amministrazione Trump abbia staccato il proprio accordo una delle fazioni in Iran affinché emerga come vincitrice in quella che adesso è una guerra civile sotterranea nel Paese mediorientale. Ecco perché ha dichiarato la scorsa settimana che “otterremo ciò che vogliamo in Iran”. Questa partita ancora non è finita e gli inglesi, per quanto ridimensionati a ogni livello (sociale, finanziario, geopolitico), non sono sconfitti. La loro rete d'influenza va indietro di centinaia di anni e non sarà affatto facile incrinarla. Sta di fatto, però, che Russia e Cina sono rimasti a bordo campo, e questo mi fa pensare che sottobanco Putin e Xi siano d'accordo con la riorganizzazione della regione mediorientale portata avanti da Trump. Così come gli altri stati arabi che hanno stretto accordi commerciali con l'amministrazione Trump.

È un gioco ricco di azzardi e qualunque cosa potrebbe andare storta da adesso in poi. Ad esempio, tra Israele e Iran c'è la Siria ed essa è un punto di pressione nell'area. Inutile dire che gli inglesi sono molto presenti anche lì, attraverso di essa sarebbe relativamente facile far deragliare la pace di Trump. In aggiunta a ciò ci sono anche i Balcani, dove ci sono i serbi che sono cristiani ortodossi, i croati che sono cattolici e i musulmani. Di conseguenza è relativamente facile che “qualcosa vada storto” da quelle parti, ma non perché quelle persone si odino a vicenda bensì attraverso il solito modo di fomentare attriti attraverso eventi terroristici che attizzano un odio artificiale tra i vari gruppi religosi/etnici. Ho già descritto il meccanismo in un altro pezzo e ciò avviene tramite ONG, lavoratori dell'ONU, organizzazioni filantropiche, media generalisti, organizzazioni di relazioni pubbliche, ecc. Poi uno si ricorda dei legami rafforzati a livello di intelligence tra Bosnia e Inghilterra e il quadro diventa più chiaro. A tutti questi punti di pressione dobbiamo aggiungere anche l'area del Baltico, dove anche qui gli inglesi stanno avendo influenza in particolar modo sull'Estonia. Insomma il minimo comun denominatore è che le aree menzionate sono state riempite di dinamite e il “divide et impera” per gli inglesi è una passeggiata nel parco; sono maestri nell'agitare, scuotere e destabilizzare.

Purtroppo non sarà un percorso in linea retta e sarà irto di ostacoli. Ma badate bene sempre a un fattore per capire chi vuole cosa: fate caso a coloro che parlano di accordi e coloro che invece vogliono alimentare il conflitto per il proprio tornaconto. 

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

In a new report, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Analysis explains that senior leaders of the agency’s center on Russia “strongly opposed” the now-infamous Steele dossier, which was advanced by former British spy Christopher Steele and deployed as the backbone of the agency’s investigation of so-called Russian collusion in the 2016 election. Officials with the CIA’s center on Russia said of the dossier that it “did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards” and contended that its inclusion in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of the 2016 election would “jeopardize the credibility of the entire paper.”

According to the declassified CIA report released last week, John Brennan, who was the CIA director from 2013 to 2017:

showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness. When confronted with specific flaws in the Dossier by the two mission center leaders—one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background—he appeared more swayed by the Dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns. Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that “my bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”

Former CIA analyst Bryan Dean Wright, who served under Brennan, opined at Fox News that the CIA report shows that his former boss lied about his use of the dossier, manipulated who would write the ICA, interfered in its drafting, rushed the document to completion, and shared it with more than 200 U.S. officials to ensure that it would be leaked. Wright concluded that based on the information in the report, Brennan, who is 69 years old and retired, should be in prison.

To those who have been paying attention for the last several years, none of what the report reveals should come as a surprise.

“Vladimir Putin personally ordered the influence campaign to boost Donald Trump’s election prospects,” Brennan contended in his 2020 book Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad. By then, the Russia hoax had been fully exposed as a Clinton campaign operation. Brennan repeats the hoax’s narrative many times in his book, which serves as a confession of the CIA’s aggressive partisanship under his leadership, and its abject failure to fulfill its appointed duties.

For a better chronicle of the agency’s downfall, readers can tap an insider who had more intel experience than either Brennan, Wright, or the unnamed author of the new CIA report. Angelo Codevilla received his first security clearance at age 23, when he worked for Bendix Aerospace Systems Division on Air Force contracts to study Soviet military tactics. Three years later Codevilla served as U.S. Navy officer assigned to military intelligence. That involved training in counterintelligence investigations and a tour of duty as an intelligence briefer for the chief of naval operations.

In the U.S. Foreign Service, Codevilla served as a regional analyst in Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Service on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, gave the intel vet “a unique bird’s-eye view,” as he explained in his 1992 book Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century.

As a staffer for Sen. Malcolm Wallop on the subcommittee on budget from 1977 to 1985, Codevilla was asked to scrutinize “a two-foot-high stack of justifications for all U.S. intelligence agencies’ requests for money.” Codevilla was also principal author of a report to CIA director designate William Casey, classified “above top secret.” According to books such as John Ranelagh’s The Agency: The Rise and Fall of the CIA, and Bob Woodward’s Veil, agency bureaucrats felt threatened by Codevilla’s report.

In 1974, the CIA fired Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA. After that, “the primacy of social and bureaucratic considerations” took over, and “this hurt American CI [counterintelligence] badly,” Codevilla wrote.

Breaches followed. From 1968 until 1984, John Walker, his brother, his son, and his associate Jerry Whitworth, sold to the Soviet Union the operating manuals of the U.S. Navy’s best code machines, together with volumes of daily settings. “Yet for 16 years,” Codevilla recalled, “U.S. counterintelligence had not a hint of this potentially mortal hemorrhage.” In similar style, CIA officer William Kampiles, sold to the USSR for $3000 the entire operating manual of the KH-11satellite.

Those who wanted to win the Cold War “lost out to those who wanted to manage a perpetual competitive-cooperative relationship with the USSR,” Codevilla wrote in Informing Statecraft. President Gerald Ford, briefed daily by the CIA, in 1975 told the world Poland was “free” and in 1976 proclaimed “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” The captive peoples knew better but, as Codevilla showed, the CIA had no clue:

The revolution that swept Eastern Europe in 1989, an event that ranks in importance with WWI, was wholly unheralded by technical intelligence. Antennas sensitive to millionths of amps, and orbiting cameras that could detect mice on the earth’s surface, did not see hundreds of millions of people ready to overthrow the communist world. (italics original)

The CIA line on East Germany, Codevilla noted, “had not deviated far from East German propaganda.” The “bureaucratically unchallengeable” CIA “might not always be right. But it would never be wrong.” True to form, the agency was unprepared for a new century characterized by jihadists screaming “death to America.”

In 1980, four years after the CIA fired James Angleton, the CIA hired Fordham University grad John Brennan, who in 1976 voted to elect the Stalinist Gus Hall, a candidate of the Communist Party USA, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. As Brennan explains in Undaunted, he voted for Hall “on a lark,” a confession of poor judgment, at minimum. Instead of showing him the door, the CIA hired Brennan, who then rose through the ranks with lightning speed. The Undaunted author describes the scene at the CIA on Sept. 11, 2001:

We learned that the Pentagon had been attacked and that a plane had crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania … George [Tenet] called his senior staff back into the room to coordinate actions that the CIA would need to take as the attack against our homeland was unfolding.

In other words, the mighty CIA knew nothing in advance about the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. As a leftist, Brennan believed in “the Islamic teaching that jihad is a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal,” and “violence and jihad not necessarily synonymous.” As the jihadist threats mounted, Brennan had his eye on domestic politics instead.

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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem held a press conference Tuesday at Ronald Reagan National Airport where she stood before flags, banners, and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees. Starting off her prepared statement, Noem declared right after introducing herself: “We have some very exciting news to announce.” But, when the announcement came, informed individuals would be justified in responding: “Really? You are way too easily excited.”

Noem continued her prepared statement, revealing that the “very exciting news” and the reason for having the press conference was that “TSA will no longer require travelers to remove their shoes when they go through our security checkpoints.” As Porky Pig would say, “That’s all folks.”

Noem went on to relate that TSA had enforced since 2006 a policy that people must take off their shoes at TSA checkpoints. However, people who traveled now and then by commercial flights over the nearly 20 years she says this policy was in place know that the policy had disappeared and reappeared off and on. Travelers did not always hear TSA agents demanding people take shoes off. Some times travelers would hear TSA agents instead saying that people could keep shoes on.

So, from Noem’s announcement, it looks like TSA is back on the you can keep your shoes on track — for now at least. That is kind of nice, sort of. You see, if you do leave your shoes on, that may, like many other aspects of clothing, create an alert to cause TSA agents to subject you to “enhanced” screening, with “enhanced” here meaning you will be subjected to additional harassment and abuse. So, make your call. You may find it preferable to just take shoes off each time, despite it not being demanded.

Additionally, the TSA demanding passengers take off shoes has been just one small part of the harassment it metes out on travelers. Noem is leaving in place the rest — waits in line, demanded production of identification documentation in violation of the right to travel anonymously, zero privacy in regard to what is in bags or pockets, confiscation of nonthreatening though verboten items, subjection to potential harm from never properly safety tested “full-body scanners,” “pat downs” that are pretty much the same as friskings by police and that without special governmental protection would be regarded as assaults or sexual assaults, etc.

Noem’s announced change in TSA policy is a pittance. If she wants to make a change that is in reality “very exciting” and would bring major benefit to travelers, she should move forward with the elimination of TSA and the harassment to which it subjects travelers in America each day.

Reprinted with permission from The Ron Paul Institute.

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International Man: During the recent Iran–Israel war, the US used up to 20% of its global stockpile of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile interceptors, each costing over $18 million. THAAD isn’t effective against hypersonic missiles, which both Iran and even Yemen’s Houthis now possess.

What do you make of this?

Doug Casey: War, in the long run, is a matter of economics. If you can’t afford to fight a war, you’ll lose the war. Missiles are now the preferred weapon for taking out enemy targets, and the only effective counter is anti-missile missiles. The problem is that both are brutally expensive. Can the costs be kept down, so war is more… affordable?

Generals, politicians, and “defense” contractors, however, love expensive high-tech toys. But if you’re going to afford a war, the most cost-effective weapon is an ignorant teenage boy—something the Third World, especially the Muslim world, is awash in. They’re cheap and stealthy delivery systems, far more effective than multi-million-dollar missiles. There’s an endless supply of them, and they can be employed in a myriad of ways. From an economic point of view, it makes no sense for technologically advanced countries (like the US) to use ultra-expensive weapons to attack primitive countries, as we’ve done for the last 75 years.

Regardless of the weapons used, the thing to remember is that war amounts to setting wealth on fire. Missiles are about taking real goods, manufactured at great expense, and using them to blow up other real wealth; there can be a perverse logic to it. However, despite their rhetoric to the contrary, I’m not sure governments are too concerned about lots of young men dying. A surplus of unemployed young males is destabilizing, especially in poor countries.

Even a large country like the US will eventually collapse under the weight of war. That’s much more true of the Ukraine. And vastly truer of Israel. Israel will further bankrupt itself shooting down missiles with ultra-expensive anti-missiles. With a gigantic debt load, enormous war expenditures and losses, living on welfare from the US, and no prospect of things getting better, the prognosis isn’t good. About a million (it’s said) of Israel’s seven million Jewish citizens have recently made the chicken run, and those who remain aren’t allowed to leave. I think Israel has a near-insoluble problem. Giving them more money and missiles won’t help.

International Man: President Trump recently unveiled a plan to build a “Golden Dome” missile defense shield over the US, modeled loosely on Israel’s Iron Dome. Critics question its feasibility, effectiveness, and cost. Independent analysts estimate the long-term price tag could reach $800 billion.

What’s your take?

Doug Casey: Almost every major weapons system ends up fighting the last war, and that will be true of the so-called Golden Dome. It strikes me as a criminally stupid idea, further ensuring the bankruptcy of the US government and the US itself, while serving no real useful purpose. If you want to attack the US, you don’t want to use missiles.

First, we don’t have a major military threat. The US is insulated from hostile powers by two very large oceans. Should someone launch a nuclear missile attack—which is what the Golden Dome is supposed to defend against—we would know exactly where those missiles came from. The enemy could expect massive retaliation from the American nuclear triad, which makes the attack pointless. That alone makes the Golden Dome redundant and unnecessary. Apart from that, if an enemy wanted to launch a nuclear attack, it would be more effective with pre-positioned nukes, or nukes delivered surreptitiously with cargo ships and planes.

Nuclear war via missiles scared everybody 70 years ago. But today it’s not a practical threat. The likely threats, I think, are from more subtle areas—cyber war, bio war, or a new type of guerrilla war.

WW3 will have a huge cyber element. Everything runs on computers: the banking system, the monetary system, the electrical grid, the communications grid, the transportation grid, and utilities. A successful cyber-attack would turn almost everything we use or need into a brick overnight. It would be cheap and effective, cause widespread chaos and mass casualties, without kinetically destroying very much.

If the enemy is really serious, though, they’ll use bioweapons. Viruses and bacteria can zero in on, or exclude, certain populations. Why have a nuclear war when you can neatly kill the people who are the real problem? And both cyber and biowar offer a great deal of plausible deniability.

The third option was demonstrated on September 11, 2001. The attack with commercial airliners was ultra cheap, super effective, and hard to counter. I suspect we’ll see numerous mutations of that theme. It’s a new type of guerrilla war. Millions of military-age males—cheap teenagers—have infiltrated the US over the last decade or so. For all we know, many may be organized as informal guerrilla armies to be activated whenever. They could surreptitiously wreak havoc.

There’s no real defense against these types of attacks.

But the real enemy is not some foreign power, but the fact that the US has turned into a dysfunctional multicultural domestic empire, which is likely to suffer serious financial, economic, social, and political problems over the next years.

Spending a trillion dollars on a useless Golden Dome is an insane distraction. Who comes up with these idiotic ideas?

International Man: The F-35 is the most expensive weapon system in human history, with lifetime costs projected at over $1.7 trillion, according to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Is the F-35 worth the price tag—or is it a military-industrial complex boondoggle?

Doug Casey: The F-35 is a perfect example of fighting the last war, like having cavalry regiments before World War 1 or battleships before World War 2. Aircraft carriers and high-tech fighter planes are their WW3 equivalents.

What is the F-35 built to fight? Other fighter planes? But the next generation of fighter planes will be pilotless, highly sophisticated, and much cheaper. They’ll be drones run by artificial intelligence, which won’t need to drag around a heavy, expensive, and limiting pilot. The F-35 is a dinosaur.

The real enemy here, however, isn’t Russian or Chinese fighters. The real enemy is US military contractors—the so-called defense companies. They’ve learned to fight wars by hiring lobbyists instead of engineers. They take decades to build planes like the F-35, which are already obsolete by the time they’re in production.

It amazes me that during World War 2, the P-51—one of the most effective fighters of the war—went from blank paper to production in six months and was turned out at $50,000 per copy, which is about $600,000 or so in today’s money. The F-35 has taken 30 years to put into production; it got underway in 1995. And it costs—who knows, because the numbers are floating abstractions, buried under mountains of phony accounting and corruption. But somewhere between $100 and $200 million per plane. Enough money that you almost can’t afford to lose one. And that doesn’t count the huge direct and indirect maintenance costs.

International Man: Recently, Israel and Ukraine used relatively cheap drones smuggled into Iran and Russia to bypass advanced air defenses and hit strategic targets with ease.

How are drones changing warfare and its economics?

Doug Casey: Drones are totally changing the entire nature of warfare. The next generation of drones—which are already being manufactured—are the size of bumblebees or even houseflies. They can be produced by the millions and released onto a battlefield or into a city.

Moving up from there, you’ll have quadruped drones like the BigDog, and of course, real, true-to-life Terminators. Tesla anticipates manufacturing AI-powered bipedal robots for as little as $10,000 apiece. Oscar Wilde didn’t know how right he was when he said that life imitates art.

I would not want to be a soldier fighting drones of all descriptions. Human soldiers are dead meat on the battlefield in the next generation of military technology, which is already here.

International Man: It seems the US military-industrial complex is more focused on producing ultra-expensive hardware than on building systems that actually win wars.

What are the investment and geopolitical implications of this trend?

Doug Casey: Everybody’s familiar with Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex. That was 65 years ago—a lifetime—and it’s mutated and grown like a cancer since then. Today, any movie with a modern military theme is probably propaganda for the government or the companies that manufacture its weapons. Anyway, Congressmen don’t think in terms of the effectiveness of weapons; they think in terms of the number of dollars that will be spent in their home district and the number of people that weapons manufacturers can employ.

Innovations, however, are made by small companies or individual inventors, not by giant companies run by administrators and suits. You don’t want to own the Lockheeds or General Dynamics. You want to own small outfits, run by innovators, not suits.

It’s funny that after World War 2, the War Department changed its name to the Defense Department. It’s odd because the Defense Department has nothing to do with defense. It’s a complete misnomer. The US hasn’t had any wars defending the US, or “freedom”, a word they always throw in there, in living memory. As America transformed into an empire, very much like ancient Athens in many regards, its many wars have been offensive, not defensive. They’ve been wars of words and lies as well as wars of weapons.

In any event, the best defense for the US, or any country, is economic strength and liberty, not a giant military/industrial bureaucracy.

In addition to economic strength, successful countries have a citizenry that shares common values and loves their culture. Those things pretty much disappeared as the US mutated into a welfare-warfare state.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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Helping people with eating disorders is a laudable goal, but there remain unknown health risks associated with a clutch of new weight loss drugs – and significant costs.

Ozempic was developed initially (and FDA-approved in 2005) for the treatment of life-threatening diabetes. Wegovy was approved by the FDA on March 8, 2024, to treat obese or “overweight” patients. Both use the same medication, glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1) agonists, but differ in dosage. Medicaid and Medicare are more likely to cover the use of Ozempic for diabetes than they are Wegovy for obesity, depending on state standards administered under these federal programs. Controversy centers on their use for weight loss because it is less urgent than diabetes.

GLP-1 was initially created using the Gila Monster after researchers identified a hormone in the lizard’s toxic venom that closely resembled the GLP-1 found in the human gut. Human GLP-1 regulates appetite and blood sugar; the reptilian form is longer-lasting. Subsequent research led to the development of the synthetic version used in Ozempic and Wegovy, which is manufactured through recombinant DNA technology by genetically engineering bacteria or yeast cells to produce proteins that mimic human GLP-1. GLP-1 drugs stimulate patients’ pancreases to secrete more insulin and signal their brains to feel fuller with less food.

Ironically, this effect essentially counters food additives designed to stimulate people’s appetites – perhaps Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the FDA will eventually ban such substances. In the interim, concerns about cost, ethics, and safety abound.

Ozempic and Wegovy are taken by weekly injection, and cost in excess of $1,000/month. Their long-term safety is unknown, and most patients who discontinue use quickly regain lost weight. These drugs yield hundreds of billions of dollars in Big Pharma profits by creating a dependency in patients to “cure” them from the harms of ultra-processed foods and a sedentary lifestyle, as documented in the MAHA Commission Report.

Wegovy’s manufacturer concedes on its webpage that the regulatory approval of Wegovy involved “a relatively short duration of follow-up, limiting the assessment of long-term outcomes….” Synthetic GLP-1 frequently causes vomiting and nausea, and may induce more serious complications, including intestinal blockage and pancreatitis. One study found patients prescribed GLP-1 were at 9.09 times higher risk of pancreatitis, 4.22 times higher risk of intestinal obstruction, and 3.67 times higher risk of gastroparesis (stomach paralysis). UK officials recently announced plans to study links between GLP-1 use and acute pancreatitis after hundreds of recorded incidents, including over 100 in 2025 alone.

It may not be shocking that a recombinant-DNA hormone synthesized from Gila Monster venom poses health risks to patients seeking weight loss. Alarms have sounded for years in the US that weight loss drugs threaten serious, life-changing side effects. A leading lawsuit is pending by a Louisiana woman who claims “she suffered vomiting so severe it caused her to lose teeth.” Her attorneys are reportedly investigating over 10,000 claims related to these drugs. The firm alleges on its website other possible harms, including gallbladder issues, vision loss, encephalopathy, and death.

Kennedy was an outspoken critic of weight loss drugs prior to his appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Biden administration opened the door for Medicare and Medicaid to provide coverage for these costly drugs; RFK Jr. criticized them and the companies that manufacture them. The downsides of popular medications like Wegovy and Ozempic underscore why Mr. Kennedy is rightly skeptical.

The potential healthcare savings of an effective weight loss intervention are astronomical, but the benefits of these drugs vanish when they are discontinued.

The potential for long-term health risks coupled with extraordinarily high costs to taxpayers suggest this is a devil’s bargain leading to lifelong dependency. What is the difference between public funding for a pharmaceutical techno-teat to counterbalance gluttony and sloth and lifelong methadone to rescue people from poor decisions relating to illegal drug use? Financial analysts forecast that profits from this class of drugs could easily exceed $100-$150 billion annually very shortly.

The ever-present modern consumer desire for a quick fix (in this case, literally a jab in the belly) for complex health challenges circles back to Kennedy’s preferred prescription for obesity: improved diets and exercise.

Kennedy has emphasized that the U.S.is authorizing the rampant use of these insufficiently tested drugs while Denmark restricts their approval. The human body can shed weight with exercise and wholesome foods without the dubious aid of Big Pharma on the taxpayer’s dime.

Such drugs also create a sort of split personality for the social justice movement – is obesity to be “affirmed” as beautiful, while those who take weight loss drugs are derided as self-stigmatizing? Which is more unhealthy – being fat, or taking potentially harmful pharmaceuticals to combat obesity? How much should the government be involved in personal weight loss and its economic costs?

The scientific jury is still out on the long-term health risks of these drugs. Manufacturers, meanwhile, hide behind FDA approval to advertise their fat-preventing wares as “safe and effective.” Robert F Kennedy, Jr. is right to encourage people toward the middle road of exercise and a conscientious diet – the safest route, albeit less traveled.

This article was originally published on The MAHA Report.

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