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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent complained last week that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are suffering from “mission creep.” But Bessent announced that Trump will be “doubling down” on supporting the largest foreign aid gushers on earth. “Far from stepping back, ‘America First’ seeks to expand U.S. leadership in international institutions like the I.M.F. and World Bank,” Bessent declared.

Bessent complained that the IMF “devotes disproportionate time and resources to work on climate change, gender, and social issues.” Unfortunately, Bessent said nothing about how the IMF and World Bank bankrolled many of the worst crony Covid crackdown policies.

But what should the US government expect when Congress and endless presidents give the World Bank and IMF billions of US tax dollars to play with? The US government is on the hook for $52 billion to the World Bank. The US has a financial commitment of $183 billion to the IMF.

The IMF was created in 1944 to shore up currencies and help nations with temporary balance-of-payment problems. In the decades since the IMF’s founding, global capital markets and fluctuating currency exchange rates have made the IMF a relic. But too many people have gotten rich from IMF largesse to permit the curtain to be closed on this institution.

The IMF enabled scores of governments that chose to pointlessly shut down their own economies after the outbreak of Covid-19. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva declared in April 2021, “While the recovery [from Covid] is underway, too many countries are falling behind and economic inequality is worsening. Strong policy action is needed to give everyone a fair shot—a shot in the arm to end the pandemic everywhere, and a shot at a better future for vulnerable people and countries.”

The IMF’s “fair shot” consisted of its international bureaucrats providing scores of billions of dollars in “emergency financing” to 80 governments, most of whom exploited Covid to stretch their own power. The IMF provided emergency relief via the Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust (CCRT) to 29 governments to supposedly help them “combat the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.” The IMF’s deluge of handouts to government helped fuel the worldwide inflation surge in recent years.

The World Bank President Ajay Banga “has sought to emphasize the bank’s focus on job creation…and to prioritize private sector involvement in projects around the world,” the New York Times reported. But the World Bank’s notion of the private sector has often been either a fraud or a political smokescreen. In the late 1980s, the World Bank touted its loans to Communist nations as private sector-oriented loans – one bait-and-switch too many, as I detailed in a 1988 Wall Street Journal article. And permitting the Bank to exonerate its handouts by counting illusory jobs created is a recipe for make-work scams.

The Covid pandemic provided the World Bank with the chance to play savior. In the first months of the pandemic, the Bank proudly announced that its “emergency operations to fight COVID-19 (coronavirus) have reached 100 developing countries – home to 70% of the world’s population.” From April 2020 to March 2021, the World Bank “committed over $200 billion, an unprecedented level of financial support, to public and private sector clients to fight the impacts of the pandemic.  Our support is tailored to the health, economic, and social shocks that countries are facing.” The fact that the World Bank was effectively financing governments to pointlessly shock their own nations was omitted from celebratory press releases.

The IMF and World Bank have helped turn many foreign nations into kleptocracies – governments of thieves. A 2002 American Economic Review analysis concluded that “increases in [foreign] aid are associated with contemporaneous increases in corruption,” and that “corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States.”

Most importantly, neither the IMF nor the World Bank has any qualms about bankrolling tyranny. A 2015 report of the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, concluded that the World Bank “now stands almost alone, along with the International Monetary Fund, in insisting that human rights are matters of politics which it must, as a matter of legal principle, avoid, rather than being an integral part of the international legal order.”

The Bank justifies this position by insisting that it cannot involve “itself in the partisan politics or ideological disputes that affect its member countries” by improper methods such as “favoring political factions, parties or candidates in elections,” or “endorsing or mandating a particular form of government, political bloc or political ideology.”

But any time an international organization financially bails out a regime, it bolsters its power. After the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon coined a term that perfectly captures the effect of foreign aid: “Money as a Weapon System.” The 2015 UN report noted that “the existing approach taken by the World Bank to human rights is incoherent, counterproductive and unsustainable. For most purposes, the World Bank is a human rights-free zone. In its operational policies, in particular, it treats human rights more like an infectious disease than universal values and obligations.”

The World Bank actively blindfolds itself to avoid hearing about atrocities in nations ruled by governments that it is bankrolling. The Special Rapporteur noted, “By refusing to take account of any information emanating from human rights sources, the Bank places itself in an artificial bubble.”

The Trump administration’s lust for “doubling down” on the IMF and World Bank is dicey to reconcile with their terminating 90% of foreign aid contracts from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Cynics across the land rejoiced that Washington policymakers finally recognized one of the biggest swindles of the past 80 years.

If the Trump team can’t even get sound policy on the World Bank, then what hope is there of them resolving any more complex challenges? I was briefly a consultant for the World Bank in the late 1980s, getting paid to co-author a report on the follies of farm subsidies. At that point, Reagan administration officials had periodically caterwauled about the Bank for almost a decade, and they were followed by sporadic howling by the US Treasury Department ever since. Secretary Bessent complained on Wednesday that the World Bank “should no longer expect blank checks for vapid, buzzword-centric marketing accompanied by halfhearted commitments to reform.” But after almost a half-century of failed US attempts to reform the Bank and IMF, there is no reason to expect any boondoggles to be left behind.

Or do Trump’s appointees believe that laundering U.S. tax dollars through international entities somehow makes them beneficent? Or maybe US Treasury Department honchos want to make sure they continue to get invited to the most lavish parties in D.C. and around the world. Regardless, the IMF and World Bank financing the worst Covid policies around the globe is another reminder of why those entities should be axed.

This article was originally published on Brownstone Institute.

The post IMF and World Bank: Crony Covid Crackdown Enablers appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Sunday night, Peter returned to the mic to analyze a volatile week on Wall Street. He unpacks the market’s recent surge, the political pressures buffeting the Federal Reserve, and the deeper consequences of unsound economic policy. From the opaque motives driving central bankers to the misleading optimism embedded in public statements about tariffs and trade, Peter reveals why investors should remain cautious, not complacent.

Peter opens the show with his signature skepticism toward market mood swings, reminding listeners that bear markets are notorious for sharp, misleading rallies:

This is another Sunday night podcast following what was a big turnaround week for the markets. It really started on turnaround Tuesday, but it lasted the entire week. Now, I don’t think it’s a permanent turnaround. I think it’s a bear market rally, a counter trend move in pretty much all of the markets. This is how bear markets work. You get some pretty big short-term counter movements that serve the purpose of creating a false sense of hope that the market is bottomed out.

He critiques Trump’s approach to monetary policy, noting that Trump only wants lower rates for political reasons:

He basically started calling Jerome Powell names, you know, like they’re at a playground, calling him ‘too late Powell.’And he said that Powell needs to cut rates and he can’t go soon enough. We got to get rid of Powell. He’s screwing up by not cutting rates. And so the markets didn’t like that type of pressure on Powell from the White House to not only cut rates but risk being fired if he didn’t.

Peter compares the post-2008 Fed policy to today. He argues that Janet Yellen, who led the Federal Reserve under President Obama, was motivated by politics rather than economics, just like Powell:

I’m sure that he’s not the only one. I’m sure Yellen was very much a team player for Obama. That’s why she never even raised rates once when Obama was president. She kept them at zero the whole time. She didn’t start hiking rates until Trump won. And then she started hiking rates. So she kept rates at zero. That was very political. And Trump was right when he ran against Hillary Clinton back in 2016 for pointing out that the Fed was political.

Turning to the week’s market rally, Peter calls out the engineered optimism around the trade war, warning listeners that it’s built on hollow promises rather than substantive breakthroughs:

But the big movers were in the stock market, and it wasn’t just because of the damage control that was done on Tuesday. We got more crafted statements from the Trump administration, especially, I think, from Scott Bessent, about the trade war and the tariffs, and some positive statements that I think the tariffs will come down soon. Things are going well, the negotiations are going good, so a lot of positive comments that I think were all a bunch of BS. I think these comments were deliberately floated out there to get the markets to rise, to get them to think, oh, okay, it’s almost over, we’re going to know the war is going to be over. And we got this big relief rally really on nothing.

Finally, Peter contends that China might ultimately benefit from disentangling itself from the U.S. financially, a view that breaks sharply with conventional wisdom on global trade. He argues China’s ongoing export relationship is propping up a debtor—one that pays with increasingly dubious U.S. IOUs:

And as far as I’m concerned, in the long run, it’s the best thing that could happen to China. Because China needs to stop trading with the United States to the degree that it does, because we’re screwing them over. Because we’re not paying; we’re just giving them IOUs that are basically not going to be worth anything. So their economy is getting all screwed up, maintaining this vendor financing of a customer that’s never going to pay. And it’s doing real damage to their economy, and the sooner they can repair that damage, the better for them.

This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.

The post The Bounce Is Just a Bear Market Rally appeared first on LewRockwell.

With today, April 30, 2025, being the 50th anniversary of North Vietnam’s defeat of the United States in the Vietnam War, it is worth revisiting the role that the U.S. national-security establishment’s assassination of President Kennedy played in that war.

The story begins with the war between JFK and the U.S. national-security establishment that broke out after the Bay of Pigs disaster soon after Kennedy assumed the presidency. The CIA was hoping to manipulate Kennedy into providing air support for the operation, but the scheme failed. Realizing what the CIA had done, Kennedy vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” For it’s part, the CIA was livid over what it believed was Kennedy’s cowardice, weakness, and incompetence for failing to come to the assistance of the Cuban exiles, all of whom were killed or captured by Cuba’s communist forces while invading the island.

Afterwards, the Pentagon began pressuring Kennedy into ordering a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. That’s what the Pentagon’s infamous false-flag Operation Northwoods was all about, which Kennedy, to his everlasting credit, rejected.

Then came the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Kennedy settled by committing that the U.S. would not invade Cuba — in return for the Russians removing their nuclear missiles from the island. That meant that Cuba would remain permanently under communist control, which the Pentagon and the CIA were convinced was a grave threat to “national security.” Kennedy was, once again, considered a weak, incompetent, and cowardly president who had now placed the United States in grave jeopardy of being taken over by the Reds. A member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff compared Kennedy’s agreement with the Russians to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich. Another said that the deal was “the greatest defeat in our history.”

It was the Cuban Missile Crisis that caused JFK to achieve a “breakthrough,” one that enabled him to see that the national-security establishment’s “Cold War” against Russia was one great big deadly, dangerous, and destructive racket. It was at that point that Kennedy decided to bring the racket to an end.

In June 1963, Kennedy delivered his famous Peace Speech at American University. It was essentially a declaration of war against the national-security establishment. In the speech, Kennedy made it clear that America was now moving in a totally different direction — one that was based on peace and mutual cooperation with the communist world, including Russia.

Kennedy then secured the approval of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, over the vehement objections of the Pentagon and the CIA.

And then he ordered a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, which, in the eyes of the national-security establishment, meant that the dominoes would start falling to the communists, with the final domino being the United States.

Given that the next presidential election wasn’t until late 1964 and given that JFK stood a good chance of winning reelection, the national-security establishment knew that it had to act now in order to save America. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, on the streets of Dallas elevated Vice-President Lyndon Johnson to the presidency. Since Johnson was on the same page as the national-security establishment, he immediately reversed the direction that Kennedy was taking America and restored the old Cold War racket of the U.S. national-security establishment.

While the national-security establishment wanted Johnson to invade Cuba, he refused to do so. While a full-scale invasion would easily have been successful in achieving regime change in Cuba, Johnson knew that the Russians could retaliate by taking West Berlin, which necessarily would have required a U.S. response. Thus, Johnson wisely refused to succumb to the Pentagon/CIA pressure to invade Cuba.

However, reversing JFK’s order to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam, Johnson decided to throw an anti-communist bone to the national-security establishment by giving it the war it wanted against the Reds in Vietnam. Soon after Johnson won election in 1964, he and the national-security establishment concocted the fake North Vietnamese attack on U.S. forces in the Gulf of Tonkin. That enabled them to secure the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution from Congress, which ultimately led to the needless sacrifice of more than 58,000 American soldiers, not to mention the killing of more than a million Vietnamese.

Since Johnson died in 1973, unfortunately he didn’t get to witness U.S. officials on April 30, 1975, on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon scrambling to get on U.S. military helicopters in the hope of avoiding capture by the victorious North Vietnamese forces.

See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Assassinating JFK Led to the Vietnam War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Does anybody in the hierarchy still believe that not all dogs and people go to Heaven…at least immediately?

Following the announcement of John Paul II’s death, apparently all Holy Fathers now go directly by courtesy line to “the home of the Father.” And there have already been murmurings of “santo subito” about Francis. In his funeral homily, Cardinal Re asked Francis to “bless the whole world from Heaven” (emphasis added), while Cardinal Parolin assured congregants April 27 that “Pope Francis extends his embrace from Heaven.”

Would it not be more truthful to say “X has died,” “X has gone to God,” or that “X has gone to the Judgment Seat of God?” without necessarily presaging the outcome? Hebrews 9:27 says, “it is appointed for men once to die, and after death the judgment.” It does not say, “it is appointed for men once to die and then Heaven!”

Many popes have warned about a “loss of the sense of sin.” Our current ways of speaking eschatologically arguably prove that. Yes, Scripture assures us of a loving God. It also assures us, “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31)—and not just if you are Hitler or Stalin.

When he saw God, Isaiah’s first reaction was to think himself “doomed” because of his sins, until his lips and heart are cleansed by the ember-bearing angel (Isaiah 6:1-7). Genuine sanctity does not stoke presumption. The greatest saints had the most refined sense of sin—not because they were scrupulous but because the nearer they approached being “perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48), the more they recognized how imperfect they were. That is the true humility of which saints are made.

I mention Isaiah because the episode of his prophetic vocation has been bowdlerized by Dan Schutte and sung with gusto Sundays at lots of Catholic parishes. Apart from the arrogance of singing in God’s name (the verses are all God speaking), the refrain selectively leaves Isaiah 6:1-7 on the cutting room floor, picking up at verse 8b: “Here I am, Lord!” In other words, “I’m ready and waiting!” omitting the sense of unworthiness before divine holiness.

Catholic eschatology recognizes that one must be “spotless and blameless” (2 Peter 3:14) to appear before the living God. We should be honest enough at least to give lip service to the confession we are all sinners (Romans 3:23). How one squares that admission with instant Beatific Vision remains unexplained.

Again, we hope all men are saved. But as we cannot be sure of that, our expressions ought not to suggest that.

We used to enumerate the “four last things always to be remembered” as death, judgment, Heaven, and Hell. It seems judgment now receives passing reflection from short-term memory, while Hell clearly succumbed to amnesia.

And there’s no doubt these issues work together. The rise in practical universalism—“we ‘hope’ (wink, wink) all men will be saved”—is not the result of enormous popularity of the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar or Wacław Hryniewicz. It is very much the new ecclesial “party line,” one advanced not so much by promotion as by omission, what’s not said when speaking of the “Global Entry” line to the “home of the Father.”

Such approaches betray evangelization, ostensibly the mission and task of the Church in contemporary times. Jesus’ Gospel does not promise a celestial rose garden. It repeatedly warns of judgment, of separation of grain from chaff, wheat from tares, fruitful fig trees from barren ones. The Last Day is not presented as a universal victory celebration but as a time of definitive division, when some “will go to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life” (Matthew 25:46). And Jesus warns against presuming we’re on the “right” side, because it is those on the left who are surprised their self-assessed goodness does not tally with the Lord’s assize.

Again, we hope all men are saved. But as we cannot be sure of that, our expressions ought not to suggest that.

We used to enumerate the “four last things always to be remembered” as death, judgment, Heaven, and Hell. It seems judgment now receives passing reflection from short-term memory, while Hell clearly succumbed to amnesia.

And there’s no doubt these issues work together. The rise in practical universalism—“we ‘hope’ (wink, wink) all men will be saved”—is not the result of enormous popularity of the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar or Wacław Hryniewicz. It is very much the new ecclesial “party line,” one advanced not so much by promotion as by omission, what’s not said when speaking of the “Global Entry” line to the “home of the Father.”

Such approaches betray evangelization, ostensibly the mission and task of the Church in contemporary times. Jesus’ Gospel does not promise a celestial rose garden. It repeatedly warns of judgment, of separation of grain from chaff, wheat from tares, fruitful fig trees from barren ones. The Last Day is not presented as a universal victory celebration but as a time of definitive division, when some “will go to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life” (Matthew 25:46). And Jesus warns against presuming we’re on the “right” side, because it is those on the left who are surprised their self-assessed goodness does not tally with the Lord’s assize.

Read the Whole Article

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[Editor’s Note: This month marks the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord. This selection is taken from Murray Rothbard’s extensive five-volume work on the American Revolution: from Conceived in Liberty, volume 3, part 69, “The Shot Heard Round the World: The Final Conflict Begins.”]

Despite the mounting tension in the South, the main focus of potential revolutionary conflict was still Massachusetts. The British authorities, ever more attracted to a hard line, were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the timorousness and caution of General Gage, who had actually asked for heavy reinforcements when everyone knew that the scurvy Americans could be routed by a mere show of force from the superb British army. Four hundred Royal Marines and several new regiments were sent to Gage, but the king, one of the leaders of coercion sentiment, seriously considered removing Gage from command.

There were a few voices of reason in the British government, but they were not listened to. The Whiggish secretary of war, Lord Barrington, urged reliance on the cheap and efficient method of naval blockade rather than on a land war in the large expanse and forests of America. And General Edward Harvey warned of any attempt to conquer America by a land army. But the cabinet was convinced that ten thousand British regulars, assisted by American Tories, could crush any conceivable American resistance. Underlying this conviction—and consequent British eagerness to wield armed force—was a chauvinist and quasi-racist contempt for the Americans. Thus, General James Grant sneered at the “skulking peasants” who dared to resist the Crown. Major John Pitcairn, stationed at Boston, was sure that “if he drew his sword but half out of the scabbard, the whole banditti of Massachusetts Bay would flee before him.” Particularly important was the speech in Parliament of the powerful Bedfordite, the Earl of Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, who sneeringly asked:

Suppose the colonies do abound in men, what does that signify? They are raw, undisciplined, cowardly men. I wish instead of…fifty thousand of these brave fellows, they would produce in the field at least two hundred thousand; the more the better; the easier would be the conquest…the very sound of a cannon would carry them off…as fast as their feet could carry them.

There was another reason, it should be noted, for Sandwich’s reluctance to use the fleet rather than the army against the enemy. While the army was to dispatch the Americans, Sandwich wished to use the fleet against France, with which he hoped and expected to be soon at war.

Accordingly, the Crown sent secret orders to Gage, reaching him on April 14. The Earl of Dartmouth rebuked Gage for being too moderate. The decision had been made; since the people of New England were clearly committed to “open rebellion” and independence of Britain, maximum and decisive force must be slammed down hard upon the Americans—immediately. While reinforcements were under way, it was important for the British troops to launch a preventive strike, by moving hard before an American revolution could be organized. Therefore, Gage decided to arrest the leaders of the Massachusetts provincial congress, especially Hancock and Sam Adams. As in so many other “preventive” first strikes in history, Great Britain itself precipitated the one thing it wished most to avoid: a successful revolution. Interestingly enough, the Massachusetts radicals were at the same time rejecting hotheaded plans for a first strike by rebel forces, who would thus be throwing away the hard-forged unity of the American colonists.

Adams and Hancock were out of town and out of reach, near Concord; so Gage decided to kill two birds with one stone by sending a military expedition to Concord to seize the large stores of rebel military supplies and to arrest the radical leaders. Gage determined to send out the force secretly, to catch the Americans by surprise; that way if armed conflict broke out, the onus for initiating the fray could be laid on the Americans. Gage also used a traitor high up in radical ranks. Dr. Benjamin Church, of Boston, whom the British supplied with funds to maintain an expensive mistress, informed on the location of the supplies and the rebel leaders. (Church’s perfidy remained undetected for many more months.) Gage learned from Church, furthermore, that the provincial congress, under the prodding of the frightened Joseph Hawley, had resolved on March 30 not to fight any armed British expedition unless it should also bring artillery. By not sending out artillery, Gage figured that the Americans would not resist the expedition.1

Gage, however, immediately encountered what would prove a major difficulty in fighting a counterinsurgency war by a minority ruling army against insurgent forces backed by the vast majority of the people. He found that, surrounded by a sullen and hostile people, he could not keep any of his troop or fleet movements hidden. The rebels would quickly discover these movements and spread the news.

On April 15, the day after receiving his orders, Gage relieved his best troops of duty, gathered his boats, and on the night of April 18 shipped seven hundred under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith to the mainland, from which they began to march northwest to Lexington and Concord. But the Americans quickly discovered what was happening. Someone, perhaps Dr. Joseph Warren, sent Paul Revere to Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock. Hancock, emotional, wanted to join the minutemen, springing to arms; but the sober intelligence of Sam Adams reminded Hancock of his revolutionary duty as a top leader of the American forces, and they both fled to safety. Revere was soon captured, but Dr. Samuel Prescott was able to speed to Concord and bring the news that the British were coming.

As news of the British march reached the Americans, the Lexington minutemen gathered under the command of Captain John Parker. Rather absurdly, Parker drew up his handful of seventy men in open formation across the British path. When Major Pitcairn, in charge of six companies of the British advance guard, came up to confront the militia, Pitcairn brusquely ordered the Americans to lay down their arms and disperse. Parker, seeing his error, was more than willing to disperse but not to disarm. In the midst of this tense confrontation, shots rang out. No one knows who fired first; the important thing is that the British, despite Pitcairn’s orders to stop, fired far longer and more heavily than necessary, mercilessly shooting at the fleeing Americans so long as they remained within range. Eight Americans were killed in the massacre (including the brave but foolish Parker, who refused to flee), and eight wounded, whereas only one British soldier was slightly wounded. The exuberant and trigger-happy British troops cheered their victory; but the victory at Lexington would prove Pyrrhic indeed. The blood shed at Lexington made the restraining resolution of Joseph Hawley obsolete. The Revolutionary War had begun! Sam Adams, upon hearing the shooting from some distance away, at once realized that the fact of the open clash was more significant than who would win the skirmish. Aware that the showdown had at last arrived, Adams exclaimed, “Oh! What a glorious morning is this!”

The British troops marched happily on to Concord. This time the Americans did not try any foolhardy open confrontation with the British forces. Instead, an infinitely wiser strategy was employed. In the first place, part of the military stores were carried off by the Americans. Second, no resistance was offered to the British entry into Concord, thus lulling the troops into a further sense of security. While the British were destroying the remaining stores, three to four hundred militiamen gathered at the bridge into Concord and advanced upon the British rear guard. The British shot first, but were forced to retreat across the bridge, having suffered three killed and nine wounded. The despised Americans were beginning to make up for the massacre at Lexington.

Heedless of the ominous signs of the gathering storm, Colonel Smith, commanding the expedition, kept his men around Concord for hours before beginning to march back to Boston. That march was to become one of the most famous in the annals of America. Along the way, beginning a mile out of Concord, at Meriam’s Corner, the embattled and neighboring farmers and militiamen employed the tactics of guerrilla warfare to devastating effect. Knowing their home terrain intimately, these undisciplined and individualistic Americans subjected the proud British troops to a continuous withering and overpowering fire from behind trees, walls, and houses. The march back soon became a nightmare of destruction for the buoyant British; their intended victory march, a headlong flight through a gauntlet. Colonel Smith was wounded and Pitcairn unhorsed. The British were saved from decimation only by a relief brigade of twelve hundred men under Earl Percy that reached them at Lexington. Still, Americans continued to join the fray and fire at the troops, despite heavy losses imposed by British flanking parties.

Despite the British reinforcements, the Americans might have slaughtered and conquered the British force if (a) they had not suffered from shortages of ammunition, (b) the British had not swerved into Charlestown and embarked for Boston under the protecting guns of the British fleet, and (c) excessive caution had not held the Americans back from a final blow at the troops on the road to Charlestown. Even so, the deadly march back to Boston was a glorious victory, physically and psychologically, for the Americans. Of some fifteen to eighteen hundred redcoats, ninety-nine were killed and missing, and 174 wounded. The exultant Americans, who numbered about four thousand irregular individuals that day, suffered ninety-three casualties. Insofar as these individuals were led that day, it was by Dr. Joseph Warren and William Heath, appointed a general by the Massachusetts provincial congress.

Events could not have gone better for the American cause: initial aggression and massacre by the arrogant redcoats, then turned to utter rout by the aroused and angry people of Massachusetts. It was truly a tale for song and story. As Willard Wallace writes,

Even now, the significance of Lexington and Concord awakens a response in Americans that goes far beyond the details of the day or the identity of the foe. An unmilitary people, at first overrun by trained might, had eventually risen in their wrath and won a hard but splendid triumph.2

Above all, as Sam Adams was quick to realize, the stirring events of April 19, 1775, touched off a general armed conflict: the American Revolution. In the immortal lines of Emerson, penned for the fiftieth anniversary of that day:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

—

1Knollenberg, Growth of the American Revolution, pp. 182, 190.

2Willard M. Wallace, Appeal to Arms: A Military History of the American Revolution (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), p. 26.

The post Refusing to Disarm: The Battle of Lexington and Concord appeared first on LewRockwell.

Republican Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Eric Burlison of Missouri broke with their party and voted against revenge porn legislation backed by First Lady Melania Trump.

The Take It Down Act criminalizes the promulgation of non-consensual sexual imagery on the internet, including AI-generated “deepfakes.” Now, while I certainly oppose porn, revenge porn, sexual imagery, and deepfakes, it is simply not the job of the federal government to concern itself with these things. And as Massie said: “I feel this is a slippery slope, ripe for abuse, with unintended consequences.”

The bill was introduced by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. The vote was by Unanimous Consent in the Senate so no record of individual votes was taken.

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Conservative writer David Horowitz died yesterday after a battle with cancer. He was 86.

The post David Horowitz R.I.P. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Andy Thomas wrote:

Vox Popoli

The post The Ports Shut Down appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Gail Appel.

Aish.com

The post Calling Charles Schumer a Traitor appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

Spot on!

The post Col Douglas Macgregor Response to Joe Biden. SOU Speech Is Profoundly Accurate and Important appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

It’s a very real , long time in the making plan.

The Post-1984 Brave New World

The post It’s Not a Conspiracy Theory appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm. 

Technocracy News

The post REAL ID: Ron Paul Gets Authoritarianism, Misses Technocracy appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin wrote:

James Forrestal, was president of Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. who later became the first Secretary of Defense under Harry Truman. He was assassinated by his enemies.

Fitts, as Burris notes, also worked for Dillon, Read. 

Book Review: The Assassination of James Forrestal by David Martin | Solari Report

Tucker Carlson – Catherine Fitts: Bankers vs. the West, Secret Underground Bases, and the Oncoming Extinction Event

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Click Here:

Eugyppius

The post Towards a Theory of Political Stupidity appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Jesse Trentadue.

Headline USA

The post Judge Orders FBI to Produce 2,000 Pages of OKC Bomb Records Per Month appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Grayzone

The post “The masters of the universe are Jews,” former Senator declares in Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Palestine Chronicle

The post ‘Weaponizing’ Food – Over 65,000 Gaza Children Hospitalized for Malnutrition appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The New Arab

The post Israeli mayor faces threats after decrying Gaza ‘atrocities’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Bankruptcy: House Republicans MASSIVELY Increase Military Spending Bill appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post “Demoralize the Enemy From Within by Surprise, Terror, Sabotage, Assassination. This is the War of the Future.” Adolf Hitler appeared first on LewRockwell.