Lew Rockwell Institute

A few weeks ago I urged President Trump to make a deal with Iran that would satisfy his stated goal of no nuclear weapons production and would allow Iran to continue its lawful pursuit of civilian nuclear energy. The deal on the table, as described by the Iranian foreign minister himself, was a win-win “update” of Obama’s JCPOA “nuclear deal” that he could have avoided a costly and counter-productive war with Iran.

Unfortunately, the negotiations were cut short by an Israeli sneak-attack on Iran that led to a 12-day war that did not turn out as Israel imagined. This often happens in war, especially wars of aggression. After a day or so, Israel found itself overwhelmed by an Iran that proved to be more than capable of defending itself and Netanyahu called up Uncle Sam begging for assistance.

The resulting US bombing run on Iran’s nuclear sites did not lead to the end of that country’s capabilities, but to the expulsion of the UN monitoring organization and the emergence of Iranian “strategic ambiguity” regarding its program. In short, the bombing has blinded the world to what Iran may do in the future. That is not a win for Trump.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, the Iranian president confirmed what most people understood at the time: President Trump promised Iran that while they were engaged in negotiations the United States would not allow Israel to attack the country. With the sixth round of negotiations just two days away, however, Israel thumbed its nose at the United States and launched an attack on Iran anyway.

Considering that Israel’s “military capabilities” are almost entirely provided by the United States, this betrayal of its benefactor will surely go down as one of the most brazen acts of ingratitude of all time.

This week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington DC for the third time in Trump’s short second term in office. While we do not know what President Trump is telling him this time around, this might be the time to finally give Israel some “tough love” that many parents practice with their teenagers.

Donald Trump may be the most “pro-Israel” president we’ve ever had, but if he really wanted to help Israel he would make clear to Netanyahu that US support does Israel no favors. Continuing to spend tens of billions of dollars a year financing Israel’s war machine and backing up Israel’s attacks on its neighbors has not produced peace or security – much less prosperity – for Israel.

In fact, as soon as Israel attacked Iran so many Israelis tried to leave the country that Tel Aviv forbade its own citizens from leaving the country. Israelis are desperate to escape the wars of their own government’s making.

If President Trump really wanted to help Israel he would inform Netanyahu this week that not another US dollar would be sent to prop up his government. Not another missile or bomb would be sent. Not another American bullet would be available for Israeli soldiers to attack their neighbors or to shoot Palestinian civilians.

If Israel had to face the hard reality that it must learn to live with its neighbors instead of attacking them, the country may actually start seeing some peace and prosperity. Whatever the case, it is not our responsibility to finance the war machine of any foreign country. Time to put America first.

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Elon is upset with Trump and has decided to form his own party, the America Party. Trump responded the other day by suggesting it might be time to look into Elon’s rent-seeking over the years.

Just desserts couldn’t be sweeter.

Musk has made billions off the government. More finely, off of government spending and now he has the audacity to complain about government spending, a la the Big Beautiful Bill just passed by Congress. Perhaps because it does not contain enough spending that will benefit him. He certainly never complained about such spending before.

How much has the government spent on Space X? Whether one thinks it is worth spending money on rockets and such is not the issue. The issue is whether it is proper to spend other people’s money on it. More finely, whether it is morally justifiable to rob millions of Americans of their money in order to “fund” (note the bland terminology government uses that an honest mugger would never have the audacity to use) some project that puts billions into the pockets of a privately owned, for-profit company such as Space X. Musk is a billionaire and – supposedly a whiz at business. Well then, why doesn’t Musk use his own money to launch his rockets? Instead of using the government to force millions of Americans to “fund” his operations, why doesn’t he persuade investors to back them? If they are worth backing, why wouldn’t they?

Legitimate businesses do not need to rent-seek because they don’t have to.

This can be expressed another way. Illegitimate businesses rent-seek because they have to. Because if they didn’t rent-seek, they’d be out of business.

Tesla comes to mind. Elon built his business using government to extract rent from legitimate businesses, most especially the established car companies. They were effectively forced to buy what are styled “carbon credits” from Tesla because it was either do that or manufacture “zero emissions” electric vehicles that they knew they could not sell except at a loss. It cost them less to buy “credits” from Tesla, which the government counted in their favor, insofar as complying with the regulations that effectively required them to either manufacture “zero emissions” EVs themselves or get (that is, buy) “credit” for handing money over to Tesla for manufacturing them.

A lot of spending there, all of it forced by the government for the benefit of Tesla (and so, Elon Musk).

Tesla built its business in the same way that the larvae of a certain wasp feeds on the paralyzed but still living body of the “donor” insect that the parent wasp stung before laying its egg on the victim. The legitimate vehicle manufacturers – whose legitimacy derives from the fact that they sold what people wanted at a price that earned an honest profit – were thus forced to finance Tesla and the EV force-feeding generally.

Further feeding came in the form of tax kickbacks that greatly advantaged Tesla for many years because for many years, Tesla was the only major manufacturer of EVs. The government dangled tax kickbacks up to $7,500 to induce people to buy EVs and – for many years – that essentially meant Tesla EVs. Now, there is nothing evil about returning a portion of the money stolen from what are styled “taxpayers” (once again, note the deliberately bland terminology; as if paying taxes were like paying rent; i.e., as if it were a voluntary transaction). That is not the issue. The issue is that only some taxpayers got some of their money back – but only if they bought an EV, which for many years meant they bought a Tesla.

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Those who have claimed that there is no smoking-gun evidence in the CIA’s long-secret records relating to the JFK assassination can no longer make that claim. That’s because the CIA was just forced to release its records relating to CIA official George Joannides. For more than 60 years, the CIA, with the help of deferential U.S. federal courts, had succeeded in keeping its Joannides files secret. Until now.

No, I’m not referring to some videotaped confession by former CIA head Allen Dulles or any other CIA official confessing to having participated in the orchestration and carrying out of the assassination or the resulting cover-up. As I have long maintained, there is no reasonable possibility whatsoever that anyone within the national-security state would put something directly incriminatory into writing. That would be dumb, and one thing is certain — CIA officials back in the 1960s were not dumb. In fact, they were brilliant people and very good at engaging in their expertise of state-sponsored assassinations, cover-ups, and regime change.

What I’m instead referring to is circumstantial evidence, which, as every judge in the land will instruct juries, is just as valid and credible as direct evidence. It is circumstantial evidence, such as the fraudulent autopsy that the U.S. military establishment carried out on President Kennedy’s body, or the fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film that the CIA produced on the weekend of the assassination, that have convicted the national-security state of the Kennedy murder. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.)

Thanks to the release of the Joannides files, we now have more smoking-gun circumstantial evidence to add on top of the circumstantial evidence establishing the fraudulent autopsy and the fraudulent film.

The release of the Joannides records was reported this past Friday on Axios in an article entitled “CIA Admits Shadowy Officer Monitored Oswald Before JFK Assassination, New Records Reveal” by Marc Cavuto. It’s worth taking a pause in reading my article and going over to read Cavuto’s article to get an overall context of these particular long-secret records that have just been released.

It’s first necessary to put things into the overall context of the assassination plot. As I set forth in my books An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story and Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, central to the plot was the framing of Lee Harvey Oswald for the crime. That’s what Oswald meant when he stated that he was “a patsy.”

As the years and decades passed, it became increasingly clear that Oswald, who served in the U.S. Marines, was recruited to be an operative for U.S. intelligence, one who was trained to work under the cover of being a communist. That would explain why Oswald was not subjected to arrest, torture, indictment, prosecution, or even just an interrogation after he ostensibly defected to the Soviet Union and then returned to the United States with a Russian wife.

In October 1962, President Kennedy settled the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which he promised that the U.S. would not invade Cuba. This was almost certainly the point at which the national-security establishment decided that Kennedy posed a grave threat to national security and needed to be removed from office, given the Pentagon’s and CIA’s conviction that the Cuban communist regime posed a grave threat to U.S. national security.

Six months later, in April 1963, Oswald moved to New Orleans, where he made a big public hullabaloo to establish that he was a “communist.” Notice something important: Oswald had lived in Dallas for five months before moving to New Orleans and had made no big public hullabaloo in Dallas about being a communist. On the contrary, he hung out with rightwing people who had direct or indirect ties to U.S. intelligence or to the U.S. military-industrial complex.

While in New Orleans, Oswald went to work for the Reily Coffee Company, which was owned by a fierce anti-communist conservative. What are the chances that a fierce anti-communist conservative would hire a died-in-the-wool communist at the height of the Cold War? No chance at all!

While in New Orleans, Oswald made contact with an organization of fierce anti-Castro Cuban exiles called the DRE. While passing out pamphlets promoting a national pro-Cuba organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which the CIA and FBI were trying to destroy, Oswald got into a big public altercation with the head of the DRE. The altercation had the appearance of being a staged event designed to publicize Oswald’s communist bona fides.

Oswald was arrested for disorderly conduct and put into jail . While incarcerated, he requested to speak to a FBI agent. The request was granted and the FBI agent came to visit him in jail. How many regular people are able to pull off something like that?

Later, Oswald and the head of the DRE appeared on a public radio broadcast that publicized Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Union and his ostensible commitment to communism.

Two months after Oswald moved to New Orleans, in June 1963, while Oswald was still in New Orleans, Kennedy delivered his famous Peace Speech at American University, which essentially was a declaration of war against the national-security branch of the federal government. In that speech, JFK effectively declared an end to the Cold War and an intent to move America in a totally different direction — one that was based on establishing peaceful and friendly relations with Russia, Cuba, and the communist world. That, of course, was anathema to the U.S. national security establishment. JFK’s Peace Speech undoubtedly solidified the decision to remove JFK from office.

Four months after JFK’s Peace Speech, in September 1963 Oswald went to Mexico City, where he engaged in a big public hullabaloo in which he made contact with the Soviet and Cuban embassies. For those who are still convinced that the Russians or Cubans employed Oswald to assassinate Kennedy, it’s worth asking: If that’s really true, would they really want to advertise their connection to the assassin in such a big way?

After Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, the DRE immediately put out a press release stating that the president had been killed by a communist and detailing Oswald’s communist bona fides. The information in the press release was spread across the nation in the mainstream press.

But there was one significant thing that people didn’t know: The DRE was being supervised and generously funded by the CIA, specifically by CIA official George Joannides. For all practical purposes, the DRE was one of the CIA’s infamous front organizations.

It was former Washington Post reporter Jeff Morley who discovered in the 1990s Joannides’s role with the DRE. Morley sought Joannides’s records from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. The CIA refused to comply with the act. Morley sued the CIA in federal court for the records. The CIA fiercely opposed the lawsuit for more ten years. Ultimately, the U.S. federal courts, not surprisingly, deferred to the CIA by letting the CIA keep its Joannides records secret. The entire saga of Morley’s fight against the CIA for the release of the Joannides records is set forth in FFF’s book Morley v. CIA: My Unfinished JFK Investigation.

For decades, the CIA did its best to keep its role with the DRE secret. It also lied about Joannides’s role with the DRE to the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), and the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).

Oh, but it gets worse. During the HSCA investigation, the CIA called Joannides out of retirement to ostensibly serve as an innocent, good-faith liaison between committee investigators and the CIA. In reality, he served as an obstacle to the investigation of the CIA’s possible role in the JFK assassination.  Moreover, the CIA never revealed Joannides’ role in the DRE to the HSCA or, for that matter, to the ARRB.

It gets even worse. It turns out that the CIA awarded a medal to Joannides for his role with the DRE, his role as an obstacle with the HSCA, and for his lies and deception to official investigatory commissions.

So, what was going on here? Why did the CIA fight so fiercely for so long to cover all this up? Because the last thing the CIA wanted was for people to find out its role in setting up Oswald to take the fall for the assassination. Knowing the deeply seated Cold War fear of communists and communism that had been inculcated in the American people, the national-security state knew that the best thing it could ever do was to frame a “communist.” But obviously it would not be beneficial to the plot for people to know the role that the CIA had played in establishing the “communist” that was being framed.

With the fraudulent autopsy, the fraudulent Zapruder film, and now the incriminating Joannides files, the national-security establishment is guilty as charged beyond a reasonable doubt of the assassination of President Kennedy. There is no way around it, not even for the U.S. mainstream press, which, needless to say, continues hewing to the ludicrous lone-nut theory of the assassination.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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

I adred to predict:

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

The following days confirmed my take.

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

By April 9 the markets hit back:

Treasury yields spiked on Wednesday as investors bailed out of what has been perceived as the world’s safest instrument on expectations of crumbling foreign demand as tariffs take effect.
…
Yields settled down after China called for dialogue with the U.S. on trade, and then moved right back near the highs of the day after China said it was increasing its tariffs on the U.S. to 84%.
…
“Something has broken tonight in the bond market. We are seeing a disorderly liquidation,” said Jim Bianco, president and macro strategist at Bianco Research.

Shortly thereafter Trump had to pull back (archived):

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

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

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

bigger

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that the U.S. will revert to steep country-by-country tariff rates at the beginning of August, weeks after the tariff rate pause is set to expire.
…
CNN host Dana Bash responded to Bessent on Sunday, saying, “There’s basically a new deadline,” prompting Bessent to push back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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Few (if any) people who served in the Kiev regime are as controversial as Oleksiy Arestovych (or Alexey Arestovich, depending on his rather unstable mood). He served as an advisor to the Neo-Nazi junta frontman Volodymyr Zelensky for around three years and became quite notorious due to his extremely inconsistent and rather “colorful” statements (euphemistically speaking). Arestovich is known (or should we say, infamous) for his highly charged rhetoric, ranging from outright deranged and extremist (such as his admiration for ISIS) to surprisingly realistic (such as the admission that the pathologically Russophobic United Kingdom sabotaged a peace deal in early 2022). The latter has become somewhat more prevalent in recent years, particularly after Arestovich left his position in the Kiev regime.

At some point, he even called Zelensky a delusional dictator (talk about an understatement), although this could be attributed to the neverending political power struggle in NATO-occupied Ukraine. Interestingly, while he’s seen as an extremist in Russia and is even prosecuted as such by the Russian legal system (for good reason, obviously), he’s also seen as a “traitor” by the Neo-Nazi junta, which has accused him of undermining “the constitutional order” and imposed sanctions on him as a result. Arestovich now resides in the United States, in what could be described as a “comfortable political exile”. However, what’s certainly “uncomfortable” are his statements (for the Kiev regime, obviously). Namely, he recently stated that Russia is using just 5% of its power and that “it could easily crush us, but chooses not to”.

Arestovich then went on to explain that the Kremlin is fighting on “easy mode” because it wants to “avoid overheating the Russian society”. He also stated that the idea of “a surprisingly strong Ukraine” comes from the fact that “Moscow is simply not fighting a real war, but a special military operation (SMO)”. Arestovich pointed out that the Russian military has only announced partial mobilization once and that its troops have regular rotation, unlike the Neo-Nazi junta forces, where soldiers are forced to fight for years. He also contrasted Russia’s “5% effort” with the Kiev regime’s use of 40% of its budget to wage the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict, clearly implying that “Moscow isn’t even trying yet” and pointing out that “700,000 Russian soldiers are fighting a million Ukrainians” (and still advancing on all fronts).

Arestovich then explained that if the Kremlin wanted to, it could “easily mobilize two million troops, ramp up military spending to full wartime levels and erase Ukraine from the map in three months”. His exact words include a rather colorful analogy, as he stated that the Neo-Nazi junta would be “crushed like a rotten walnut”. Arestovich admitted that “it’s clear Russia doesn’t want to destroy Ukraine, because it still sees Ukrainians as brothers, misguided and misled, but still part of the same historical and cultural space”. And indeed, this is evident in President Vladimir Putin’s regular statements about the clearly Russian origins of the vast majority of Ukrainians and the inextricable historical, cultural, religious, linguistic and even simple genetic ties between Russia and Ukraine (now mostly occupied by NATO invaders).

Arestovich argues that “Russia could turn this into a real war, the kind that leaves nothing standing, but chooses to fight with restraint, using volunteers and contracted soldiers rather than throwing its full weight into the fight”.

He also thinks that the Kiev regime is still surviving because of a combination of the political West’s massive investment to prolong this NATO-orchestrated conflict and the Kremlin holding back, rather than its own strength, arguing that the aforementioned Russian restraint stems from the desire to avoid widespread destruction in NATO-occupied Ukraine.

Arestovich also mentioned the infamous TCC and its kidnapping of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of regular Ukrainians in order to fill the ranks of frontline troops and contrasted that to Russia’s professional and all-volunteer military.

It should be noted that the timing of this particular statement is rather interesting. Namely, the Russian military is now targeting TCC offices en masse, thus preventing the brutal practice of kidnapping regular men off the streets. Ukrainians themselves are supporting this effort, with many providing the exact coordinates of the offices of this monstrous NATO-run criminal organization. These Territorial Centers of Recruitment and Social Support (TCR and SS or sometimes just TCR), better known under acronyms such as the TCC or TCK, were established with direct Western support (or should we say directive) to enforce conscription of regular Ukrainians and prolong this NATO-orchestrated war. Worse yet, the US-led political West keeps insisting that forced conscription should be expanded to also include Ukrainian teenagers.

Obviously, this makes the Neo-Nazi junta the primary tool of NATO’s genocide against Ukrainians, with the TCC serving as the main enforcer on the ground. The Russian military has long been collecting intelligence on TCC offices and its personnel, so it’s now targeting them with pinpoint precision, disrupting the Kiev regime’s ability to forcibly fill its ranks with more cannon fodder. Expectedly, the Neo-Nazi junta keeps complaining about this, particularly in recent days. TCC personnel are universally hated in NATO-occupied Ukraine, as they’re engaged in corruption, taking bribes to “exempt” the few who can afford it, while everyone else is subjected to utter brutality and effectively sentenced to death if they’re sent to the frontlines. Due to this, TCC personnel are seen as cowards, afraid to fight the Russians, but perfectly happy to force someone else to do it.

Moscow has long sought to neutralize the TCC, but this is much easier said than done, as this monstrous NATO-run criminal organization is one of the Kiev regime’s most heavily protected institutions. Its henchmen are effectively exempt from prosecution and essentially have a carte blanche to do whatever they please, as long as they keep the meat grinder running.

As the situation on the frontlines deteriorates, the Neo-Nazi junta is in panic mode and wants to prevent the total collapse of its defenses, so it needs more cannon fodder. The Russian military is certainly aware of this, so it launched these extremely well-coordinated long-range strikes that aim to prevent this. As previously mentioned, many Ukrainians themselves are helping by providing the exact coordinates of TCC offices, as they realize this could accelerate the end of this NATO-orchestrated war.

Source Infobrics.org

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Voters have always supported the politicians who they have recognized are offering the most freedom.

George Washington’s Federalist Party offered the force to keep the British government away. Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party offered continuing independence but also more freedom than the war-supporting Federalists. Andrew Jackson’s and Martin Van Buren’s Democratic Party offered smaller governments, no central banking, and no debt. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party offered freedom from slavery. Ronald Reagan offered freedom from 1970s inflation.

Voters have a system problem. Since the dawn of Progressive control, starting in 1894, the USA has not had a small-government major party. Fortunately for us, system design is a strong suit for Elon Musk.

Voters also have an off-the-shelf solution ready to use. The Constitution has rules to limit governments’ powers. The Constitution gives these rules force with elegant, multiple layers of sanctions: powers are separated and offsetting, so each separated power will limit others.

But from the founding of the nation until now, no party has been chartered to have an analogous constitution, so that at least one party and its representatives will be limited too. It’s high time that we create at least one such party.

A party that’s limited by a party constitution will be a major, credible advance.

A party constitution will be effective for limiting the party, and this in turn will make the Constitution effective for limiting the governments, because a party is a radically-smaller, much-more-controllable system. A party’s only appropriate power is to help its grassroots voters select good people to run for political offices. Good people will then turn and use their constitutional powers to limit others in governments.

Voters have been choosing between lesser evils, and what they’ve been getting left with has still been evil. Voters know that; voters live through that. Voters haven’t been able to see that they’ve had credible good options.

Elon Musk could easily get overpowered by donations from the cronies who are supported by our massive governments. Musk needs to spend well. Fighting it out in primaries—running cage matches to the political death, under the Republican Party’s rules of engagement, up against well-stocked cronies’ war chests—would be fighting at a severe disadvantage. It’s not desirable. And it’s not necessary. There’s a ready bypass.

A good party won’t need money to get people to hear about it. It won’t need money to smear opponents or scare voters.

Just underwrite the work of achieving and maintaining ballot access for a good party. Ballot access has been proven for years to be achievable, by various lightly-funded parties and independents in various races.

Voters are more than ready to vote for the candidates of a good party.

What voters need to see is that a party will be running candidates across the board in general elections, and that those candidates can be counted on to increase freedom.

Such a party won’t really be a third party; it will be the lynchpin of the second major party.

The dominant major party is the Progressives, who are made up of all Democrats and most Republicans. The second major party is the constitutionalists.

Currently, the constitutionalists’ ranks are being decimated by going along with Trump. Despite this, most Freedom Caucus members and allies would caucus with a constitutionalist party’s politicians. A new party need not fight for and take all the Republican-held territory at the outset. Most all of the people who have wavered would turn back and work seamlessly alongside a constitutionalist new party’s politicians.

The Constitution makes all the necessary actions legal, feasible, and ready to implement. Politicians who actually follow the Constitution will limit governments from day one, increasing freedom.

The Dutch Republic, and then the British Isles, and then the USA each proved spectacularly that an underdog’s resources can lead the world, given the right ideas and approaches.

Constitution support. Ballot access. The keys to a next surge up in freedom are well within reach for Elon Musk, and for we the people. Now, in our time, let’s get this done!

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Right next to our college in India stood a temple dedicated to Rani Sati, a woman who committed sati—ritual self-immolation—sometime between the 13th and 17th centuries. The vagueness of the date is telling: Indians—like much of the Third World—did not historically maintain systematic records. The British compiled much of what is known about India’s past, including the lives of its so-called great kings.

Civilizations such as Greece, Rome, and China preserved detailed historical records to extract moral lessons and maintain a sense of continuity. India, by contrast, relied on scattered oral traditions and myths, offering no stable chronology or critical framework.

Without the civilizational anchors of truth-seeking, introspection, and hence a shared moral vocabulary, society was fixated on short-term gain, blind to history’s causes and consequences. Change was viewed not as a moral necessity, but as a threat to the established order. It was Groundhog Day.

Avoiding Western terms—such as justice, truth, honor, fairness, honesty, and system—when explaining India is challenging. Yet, using these words clouds your understanding of its amorality. You are trying to judge an alien culture by Western standards—projecting rather than understanding. These Western concepts hold little meaning in the Indian context. Employing them traps the Western mind in dualities—good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice—while the Indian amoral mindset lacks such binary distinctions. It acts on what is expedient and what maximizes resource acquisition. There is no inner compass, only the shifting logic of the moment.

In such a culture, the abused does not seek redress but instead redirects the injury downward—toward someone weaker—to restore balance or secure advantage. Moral outrage is absent; in its place is a servile ingratiation. As Western ideals circulate today, this mindset stands in uneasy contradiction with imported, superficial notions of dignity and justice—values loudly professed but not internalized. The result is psychological fragmentation: the individual is unmoored, neither grounded in India’s past nor receptive to the ethical demands of the West. Whatever space once existed for moral growth, self-examination, or feedback has been buried beneath a polished, hollow modernity.

The amorality that characterizes Indian society can be traced to its religious landscape. Far from a coherent system of faith or values, Indian religiosity resists unified doctrine and clings to fragmented, local rituals and symbolic acts, divorced from introspection or ethical inquiry.

It is worth asking where Rani Sati fits within the so-called Hindu pantheon. Growing up, few people I knew identified as “Hindu.” Instead, they followed local deities, family gods, or regional traditions. The very idea of “Hinduism” as a unified religion was a colonial construction—an abstract category that was still slowly filtering into Indian consciousness. In reality, there was no singular pantheon, no coherent system. The transition to this manufactured identity met little resistance because Indian religions were not grounded in commandments, moral doctrines, or values comparable to those in the Abrahamic faiths or classical Western philosophy.

One casualty of this misguided fusion—based on the false assumption of a moral foundation—has been the widespread misunderstanding of Indian religiosity, both by outsiders and, increasingly, by Indians themselves. What remained became confused and performative: rituals were preserved, but their symbolic gestures were mistaken for signs of a moral system. Over time, people even projected a structure where none existed. Yet the defining feature of “Hinduism” has been precisely the absence of structure, consistency, or doctrine.

Every morning, at random intervals through the day, and again in the evening, the temple beside our college rang its high-pitched bells for hours, disrupting our studies. No one dared question the noise lest they offend the sanctity of Rani Sati. On the contrary, students regularly visited the temple to seek her blessings.

I urged my peers to report the disturbance, but none supported me. When I went to the police station alone, I was laughed at. This unquestioning reverence—untouched by moral reflection—reveals something deeper about Indian religiosity: a resistance to introspection, a total reliance on ritual, and a deliberate evasion of reason and ethical inquiry.

I bore no ill will toward Rani Sati, but I struggled to find virtue in worshipping someone whose defining act was self-immolation. It is hard to believe she acted out of love, for love, as an individual or moral sentiment, does not exist in India. Relationships are shaped not by emotional truth or duty but by transaction, hierarchy, and the pursuit of advantage. Devotion, in such a society, is not love but submission, driven by fear, conformity, and peer pressure.

This confusion between spirituality and cultural identity runs deep. What passes for religion in India is a tangled web of tribal loyalties, superstition, and spectacle. It does not elevate the soul or inquire into the good of society—it enforces obedience and chases personal, material reward. The temple is no sanctuary of truth but a stage for ego, display, and appeasement.

Spirituality requires stillness, solitude, and moral courage. But Indian religiosity, rooted in noise and fear, drowns out the possibility of self-examination. The divine is not encountered but outsourced to rituals, intermediaries, and idols that absolve the individual of responsibility.

Indian religions distract the individual with hierarchy and ritual. This externalized obedience bleeds into all domains of life. Cultural identity, mistaken for faith, creates an illusion of depth: one feels devout without honesty, righteous without wrestling with right and wrong. Belonging replaces belief. Ritual replaces revelation. To preserve itself, the system breaks the individual and infuses him—through the social process—with a deep and enduring inferiority complex.

By contrast, Western religious traditions—especially the Judeo-Christian legacy—emphasized moral accountability, truth, and the sanctity of individual conscience. Sin was internal, demanding confession, repentance, and reform, not mere performance. God was obeyed, not bribed. Prayer was a striving for alignment with the good, the true, and the just, not a transactional plea for worldly gain.

Regardless of belief, these traditions cultivated habits of self-reflection, ethical consistency, and justice. The Western individual, though imperfect, was trained to ask: Am I right? A mind shaped by expedience and shielded by relativism asks instead: Am I successful? Am I secure within my herd? This is not to deny Western failings, but their sins were, at least, subject to frameworks of truth and justice.

Without a metaphysical anchor, Indian religiosity is entirely instrumental and focused on outcomes, rather than ethics. And if one avoids projecting Western standards of objectivity or moral duality, it becomes clear that ethics is not even part of the framework. Education and careers are entangled with superstition and divine bargaining. Without a concept of sin, personal growth is impossible—only compliance, fear, and endless cycles of blame and appeasement.

Human beings need anchors. When the inner structure of reason, conscience, and moral imagination is absent, they reach for substitutes—idols, babas, celebrities, and rituals. But these are unstable external props. Lacking the stillness required for introspection, they drown in noise, distraction, chaos, and even overpowering smells and colors. There is no pause, no silence, no integration of experience.

The psyche is slippery—nothing sticks. He cannot process memory, reflect on meaning, or make principled decisions. He can only “learn” dos and don’ts—rules that, shaped by his subjective mental framework, are fleeting and must be continually reinforced through fear.

Identity clings to whatever is near: caste, crowd, religion, or trend. But these are themselves unstable, volatile, impersonal, and ever-shifting. The result is chronic instability, a kind of mass neurosis. What passes for religious fervor or national pride is only fear and disorientation in disguise.

Without inner substance, the human being is the perfect subject for manipulation by superstition, politics, and mass culture. He lives in a state of low-grade psychological panic yet lacks the language, tools, or quietude to name it. He suffers from chronic anxiety—and yet, having never examined causality or consequence, and shaped by fatalism, he can appear strangely confident, unbothered, even indifferent in situations that would drive future-oriented people to paranoia.

At a civilizational level, this absence of inner anchoring creates a gravitational pull toward the lowest common denominator. In the absence of a rational and moral fabric, nothing is sustainable. Financial and intellectual capital dissipate rather than accumulate. Forget building, inventing, or improving—what is received, even on a silver platter, cannot be maintained. Entropy becomes the only law.

But the irrationality of belief was only part of the decay. The social environment offered no refuge; it was a crucible of cruelty. In a culture governed by ritual and hierarchy, cruelty becomes casual—a way to assert dominance in a system that rewards submission and punishes integrity. This moral incoherence seeps into interpersonal life, where violence is not an aberration but a rite of passage, repeated without shame or memory of its origin.

I saw this most vividly at university.

Freshers were routinely subjected to physical and sexual abuse by senior students. They were forced to keep their eyes fixed on the ground in the presence of seniors and treated as subhuman. Often woken late at night and summoned to common areas, they endured humiliation and violence under the guise of “ragging.” The abusers—once victims themselves—perpetuated the violence without guilt. No internal compass told them they were wrong; only tradition assured them they were entitled.

The acts were degrading and brutal: some were made to urinate on live electric wires, fondle each other, or masturbate publicly. Forced anal sex was not unheard of. Many suffered lasting physical harm—one student lost an eye; others sustained permanent damage to their eardrums. Yet this cruelty was rationalized as a method of “mentally strengthening” the victims.

These were not isolated incidents of youthful sadism. They revealed something deeper: how violence, if normalized, is self-sustaining. When those same individuals became seniors, I appealed to them to break the cycle. I reminded them of their own humiliation and urged them not to inflict the same pain on others. They responded with blank stares—and the chilling rationale that they needed “an outlet” for their rage. When I suggested directing that rage toward the seniors who had once violated them, they couldn’t comprehend the idea.

Retaliation was never upward—it was always downward. Those who suffered did not seek justice, truth, or moral redress; they redirected the harm. Victims of scams or theft did not express righteous indignation. Instead, they focused on recouping their losses by scamming someone else. Being wronged was not a call to conscience but a cue to find someone weaker to exploit.

This was a civilizational absence of moral causality. Wrongdoing did not awaken the conscience; suffering did not lead to reflection. Pain taught nothing. It simply repeated itself.

This pattern—harm without introspection, pain without principle—permeated every stratum of Indian society. Injustice persisted not despite education and wealth, but often because of them. Trauma did not soften—it brutalized. Lacking moral frameworks, suffering did not ennoble; it degraded.

What remains is tribalism. In the university, the workplace, the village, or the slum—the same logic prevails: protect yourself, crush the weak, conform, or be cast out. Relationships are not governed by conscience but by group identity and fear. The dynamics I witnessed among elite students were indistinguishable from those in the most desperate corners of the country. Privilege did not civilize; it merely weaponized cruelty with greater sophistication.

People often define “karma” in poetic terms. But what I witnessed was a mechanical continuation of abuse, zero-sum thinking, and a complete absence of justice or fairness. It was the life of an automaton—reactive, unconscious, and morally vacant. Consciousness itself seemed to be missing.

The colonial institutions—bureaucracy, courts, police—meant to restrain such decay and structured to enforce the rule of law had been upended, hollowed out, and repurposed for ends precisely opposed to their original design. Shaped by and dependent on the same unjust, irrational, and amoral culture, they functioned not to deliver justice but to preserve appearances. Their goal was not resolution but equilibrium. Bribes replaced law; silence replaced accountability. Atomized and mistrustful, each person was left to fend for themselves in a society that rewarded conformity over conscience and cunning over truth.

Even in school, the rot was evident. If one student erred, the entire class was punished. Authority served not justice but domination. Teachers routinely abused their power, coercing students into taking private tuition or openly demanding bribes. This wasn’t in some obscure rural school, but my prestigious missionary institution. One teacher, whose home I visited for tuition, casually assigned us household chores. Trapped in her house, I would be asked to fetch her shoes.

Did the priests of the school—some of whom were decent men—truly not know? Or did they, like many others in India, turn away from the corruption beneath their roof?

In India, one quickly learns a harsh truth: anyone who can steal will. It doesn’t matter how much they are paid—or perhaps it does, since higher salaries often fuel greater greed. Bureaucrats began demanding larger bribes as their compensation increased. Dismissing someone for theft is rarely considered; doing so would make daily functioning impossible. In households and institutions alike, theft is not regarded as a moral failure—it is simply another cost of doing business.

By degrees, an image began to form in me: India as an amoral, materialistic society devoid of virtue. Immediate desire was all that mattered. The harm one’s actions caused others was irrelevant. No shared ethical language existed—no sense of justice, fairness, or moral repair. Animalistic instincts reigned, thinly veiled by a crumbling veneer of British formality and borrowed civility.

Living in the UK, I encountered a culture where institutions—however imperfectly—tried to protect the weak, where religion demanded personal transformation, and where truth was not a luxury but a duty. There was often someone, somewhere, who stood for what was right, anchored in fairness, truth, and a shared moral compass.

It became clear that without sane, rational, and ethical leadership, India would not merely stagnate—it would regress. Its institutions and society were already unraveling, slipping back into a pre-colonial wilderness where brute force and superstition replaced reason and law. India’s tragedy is not primarily economic or political but spiritual and moral. What haunts the country is not poverty but the normalization of vice: the ability to witness cruelty without protest, to steal without guilt, to obey without reflection, and to worship without love.

There is no shortage of temples, rituals, or gods, but the inner life is absent. Without a concept of sin, there is no redemption. Without truth, no justice. Without the courage to stand alone, no conscience. In such a society, neither reform nor revolution is possible—only repetition.

India’s thinkers and leaders often invoke the past with pride, but it is precisely the past they must be freed from. What is needed is not a return to some imagined cultural greatness but a civilizational break: a turn toward reason, truth, and moral introspection. India does not, for now, need more scientists or engineers; it requires an education in the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of truth, and the discipline of moral courage.

Alas, no one has yet found a path to this awakening—only a roulette wheel of centuries spinning in vain hope that suffering will, eventually, give rise to conscience. Perhaps India is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be accepted—a society shaped by the absence of inner anchors. It is what it is.

Contrary to what Christian missionaries once believed, nothing may be done. What the West often projects as dysfunction is, more precisely, the absence of the moral architecture it unconsciously takes for granted. When it ceases to project, it may begin to see more clearly—and recognize that India cannot be changed by top-down means. It may even begin to ask whether India needs to change at all.

To expect self-correction where no introspective mechanism exists or to demand progress where entropy reigns is to misread both India and the limits of cultural universality. Without inner transformation—without conscience, reason, and courage—even the systems cannot hold, however inherited or imposed.

The post India: Idols Without Conscience appeared first on LewRockwell.

Trump and his bosses in Tel Aviv has taken one step closer to World War III.  Although Trump has negotiated a ceasefire with Tehran, it is only a temporary solution, not an end to the war that the US and Israel have started themselves. The purpose of the ceasefire between Iran and Israel is to re-arm the Zionist state for another major attack in the coming weeks and months ahead and obviously, Iran knows this.  The Iranians don’t trust anything that comes from the Trump regime. Why would they?  Especially after Israel attacked Iran while Trump claimed that he was seeking a new deal on Iran’s nuclear program even though he pulled the US out of the previous deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal conducted by the Obama regime in 2015.

This is the moment in history that we all in the alternative media have been warning about for a long time that a global war will begin in the Middle East.  The world will remember Trump and the rest of his regime which is staffed with Zionists, neocons and globalists as war criminals who secretly greenlighted Israel’s attack on Iran.

The strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is no surprise given the fact that the US, Israel and their allies has been working on this war plan for years.  Once Trump was running to be the 47th president of the United States, a new war in the Middle East was guaranteed because Iran was the ultimate target.  Trump is a man with an extreme narcissistic ego who has claimed in the past that he is the chosen one, a man who would easily launch a war and be the one to stop “evil forces” in the Middle East from destroying the land of Israel. That’s why Zionists in the US and in Israel supported him from the start.

Keep in mind that Trump had dodged the draft for the Vietnam war five times, four times because he was in college and the fifth time was because he had “heel spurs” which is described as protrusions caused by calcium buildup on the heel bone.  However, there were always remedies to cure heel spurs such as stretching, orthotics and surgery, but according to the New York Times, Trump said that “over a period of time, it healed up.”  I would bet that it miraculously heeled right after the Vietnam war had ended.  Trump acts like a tough guy by sending other people’s kids to die in another war that has nothing to do with the US and its security, but everything to do with Israel’s expansionist plans which is called the ‘Greater Israel project.’ 

Trump’s God Complex

Trump claims that he is the chosen one by God because of lunatics like the former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, an American Zionist who is now the current US ambassador to Israel wrote to President Trump that he “will hear from heaven and that voice” of God. Since Huckabee heard the voice of God, he clearly must be on serious pharmaceutical drugs, but I digress, what Huckabee wrote to Trump is sort of the ‘end of the world’ prophecies, the coming apocalypse for Christian evangelicals.  By now the world sees that Washington is full of neocon warmongers and Zionist psychopaths who are ready to unleash World War III.  What the world is witnessing is an insane regime in the Whitehouse willing to risk an unwinnable war for the state of Israel.

Huckabee said that he is “your appointed servant in this land,” saying he was sent by Trump to Israel “to be your eyes, ears and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave. I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down!”

Although I am not a fan of ‘Politico,’ but they published an interesting story called, ‘Does Trump Actually Think He’s God?’ by Michael Kruse on why Trump thinks he is some sort of God’s chosen leader who was put on earth for a reason.  Trump has been mentioning God even though he is most likely an atheist, an absolute closet globalist and a crony capitalist at heart.  Trump is obviously on the Jeffrey Epstein list, so this is a man who has no morals, but he says that he is chosen by God:

I’m supposed to be dead,” Donald Trump said, the day after he got shot at his rally last summer in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he said four days after that. “But something very special happened. Let’s face it. Something happened,” he said two days after that. “It’s … an act of God,” he said the month after that. “God spared my life for a reason,” he said in his victory speech at Mar-a-Lago in November. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said in his inaugural address at the Capitol in January. “It changed something in me,” he said in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in February. “I feel even stronger”

The next thing that Kruse says is that Trump went from “nihilistic” to becoming “messianic”:

This is new. It’s not how he talked for most of his long and voluble life. He has always, it should be said, seen himself as special, and he has always, of course, been notably self-aggrandizing. But the longtime self-described “fatalist” invariably maintained a sort of shoulder-shrugging acceptance that whatever was going to happen was beyond his or anyone else’s control. Over the last 10 or so months since Butler, however, and especially since his reelection and the start of his second administration, Trump’s outlook has shifted in essence from stuff happens and nothing much matters to something happened and it couldn’t matter more. His rhetoric has gone from borderline nihilistic to messianic

There are videos on YouTube that suggest Trump is the “chosen one,” I wish this was a joke, a comedy, but unfortunately, it’s not, one of the videos is called the ‘7 BIBLICAL SIGNS THAT TRUMP IS GOD’S CHOSEN ONE’:

It is incredible to see how people believe this nonsense.  There are other videos avaliable with the same ‘Trump is the chosen one’ propaganda, in fact, a film produced by a retired firefighter Mark Taylor called ‘The Trump Prophecy’ (see video here) based on a supposedly true story of Taylor’s personal journey to healing, but everything changed in 2011, when he claims that he experienced a revelation from “God” that a new leadership even before the 2016 Presidential Election was going to take place and that will change the world.  Who was that leader?  You guessed it, Donald Trump.  You can’t make this up.  This is not only insane, but also disturbing.

The Associated Press published an article based on the same subject, ‘President Trump Offers Himself as the Chosen One’ as they quoted Trump as saying that he is “the best president for Israel in the history of the world” he continued, “like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he’s the second coming of God.”

All this talk and the people believing that Trump is the chosen one is dangerous.  This is a man who is backed by Israel and his Evangelical Christian’ base who support their president and would give their lives for the state of Israel.

These Evangelical Christians which many live in the US bible belt believe in biblical prophecies and the role of Israel in the “end times” when Jesus Christ returns to the Holyland. They believe that re-establishing the state Israel after thousands of years is in the ancient prophecies and that “Jewish people” which in this case is the Zionists who are not in any way semitic, are returning to the land and that this would bring about the second coming of Jesus.

Maybe the Christian Evangelicals or Christian Zionists should remember what the New Testament says in Revelation 2: verse 8–9 , “And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: These are the words of the first and the last, who was dead and came to life: “I know your affliction and your poverty, even though you are rich. I know the slander on the part of those who say that they are Jews and are not but are a synagogue of Satan.”

Let’s hope, Trump, Israel and his Christian Zionist supporters wake up from their apocalyptic dreams and look at the reality that a world war is upon us and that Jesus Christ will not appear out of the skies and save humanity especially if nuclear warheads are used in the next global conflict.

This article was originally published on Silent Crow News.

The post Trump’s Apocalypse? The ‘Chosen One’ and the Prospects of World War III appeared first on LewRockwell.

Graham Dugas wrote:

Before in 2023

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/08/argentina-election-javier-milei-economists-warning

In between

https://x.com/laderechadiario/status/1941317561167249624

2025 reality

https://x.com/Bangershell11/status/1941388193070448878

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Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

Interesting Engineering

The post 2,000-year-old Roman ‘Bigfoot’ mystery: 5,000 giant shoes unearthed in Britain appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes, Ryan McMaken:

Dan Bongino is exactly who you’d expect him to be: A Ted Cruz level Israel worshipper and servant of the warfare state: 

When recently asked what political issue is “near and dear to your heart” he states: “Israel and the defense of Israel”.

Bongino has now also totally reversed himself on the Epstein “client list” and says the official government position has always been true. 

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After attorney general Pam Bondi claimed that she had Jeffrey Epstein’s client list on her desk, her FBI leaked a memo to Axios that says no such client list exists (and that Epstein did not commit suicide in prison).  I wonder what the Vegas odds are that the exact opposite is true?

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Thanks.  John Frahm.

The Gateway Pundit

The post Over the Past 24 Hours Eight Dormant Bitcoin Wallets Were Awakened for First Time in 14 Years on the 4th of July Withdrawing 80.009 Bitcoins Equaling $8.69 Billion appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

Hi Lew,

Great article! My Mom is 93. My Dad would be 93 as well, but he died at the age of 89. Yes, they had tough childhoods, but they sure were optimistic, hard workers. Mom still is. My parents came from nothing. Dad had to borrow a neighbor’s car in a snowstorm in Minneapolis to take Mom to the hospital when I was born. They worked hard and became millionaires. But they never lost their roots and common touch. They never got arrogant.

People like my parents won’t come again for a long time if ever.

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Thanks, Maureen McKerracher.   

The post “Power’s Out! 7 MUST FOLLOW Survival Rules to Stay Alive” appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post The DARPA Connected “Health & Wellness” Companies On Rumble Posing As The Alt. Solution! appeared first on LewRockwell.

States Rights has been a dominant theme in American history. We all know about the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Tariff of Abominations, the War Between the States, the battle over the civil rights movement, and so on. But I’m not going to rehash American history in this week’s column. Instead, I’m going to ask a more fundamental question. What should Rothbardians think about states rights?

For Rothbard, the key question in all political issues is  how to promote freedom. As he says in The Ethics of Liberty, “Libertarianism, then, is a philosophy seeking a policy. But what else can a libertarian philosophy say about strategy, about ‘policy’? In the first place, surely-again in Acton’s words-it must say that liberty is the ‘highest political end,’ the overriding goal of libertarian philosophy. Highest political end, of course, does not mean ‘highest end’ for man in general. Indeed, every individual has a variety of personal ends and differing hierarchies of importance for these goals on his personal scale of values. Political philosophy is that subset of ethical philosophy which deals specifically with politics, that is, the proper role of violence in human life (and hence the explication of such concepts as crime and property). Indeed, a libertarian world would be one in which every individual would at last be free to seek and pursue his own ends-to ‘pursue happiness,’ in the felicitous Jeffersonian phrase.”

Keeping this basic principle in mind, we should then ask, what is the greatest enemy of liberty? The answer is clear. It is an all-powerful government, In the words of the great libertarian theorist Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy the State.

At this point, you might raise an obvious question. If our enemy is the state, how can there be any question about Rothbard’s position on states rights? Wouldn’t he have to be against them? But thinking about the issue this way is wrong. It rests on an ambiguity. When we talk about states rights in American history, we mean limits to an all-powerful central government. We aren’t talking about increasing the power of the central government but decreasing it.

With that in mind, let’s look at what Rothbard said about a powerful central government: “But, above all, the crucial monopoly is the State’s control of the use of violence: of the police and armed services, and of the courts—the locus of ultimate decision-making power in disputes over crimes and contracts. Control of the police and the army is particularly important in enforcing and assuring all of the State’s other powers, including the all-important power to extract its revenue by coercion. For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as ‘taxation,’ although in less regularized epochs it was often known as ‘tribute.’ Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects. It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.”

The United States Constitution is far from ideal. But the system of government it set up was not at all a powerful central state. It was a loose confederation with a very weak central government. As Mises Institute President Thomas DiLorenzo notes, discussing an important book by the historian Paul C. Graham, “‘Declaration of Independence’ is actually slang for the actual title of the document, ‘The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen united States of America.’  As in all the founding documents, “united States” is in the plural, signifying that the thirteen free and independent states were united in their desire to secede from the British empire.  That is why, at the end of the Revolution, King George III signed a peace treaty with each individual state, not something called ‘the United States government.’

Di Lorenzo goes on: “The first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, declared that each state ‘retained its sovereignty, freedom, and independence.’ They retained, not gained, their sovereignty as ‘free and independent states,’ as they are called in the Declaration.  States rights, state sovereignty, the right of secession, and the states delegating a few powers to the central government as their agent were the ideas of the founders, not creating ‘a new nation.’  There was no pledge of allegiance to ‘one nation, indivisible’; that was an invention of late nineteenth-century socialist and Lincoln worshipper Francis Bellamy. Graham describes the second Constitution as an attempted and failed coup by the nationalists in American politics to destroy state sovereignty and consolidate all political power in the national capitol.  At the constitutional convention Alexander Hamilton, for example, proposed a permanent president (aka a king) who would appoint all governors, with the central state having the right to veto any and all state legislation.  His plan for a centralized dictatorship of course failed, but the nationalists, including Lincoln, would never give up.”

Because of the importance of limiting the central government by means of states rights, Rothbard thought that as much as possible should be left to state and local control. Of course, he was an anarchist, who thought there should be no government at all; but if we did have a government, it should be limited in every way possible.

Here is an example of the way he applied this view. Rothbard says something few other people would think of. Even if you are “pro-choice,” you should still favor overturning Roe v. Wade. “But even apart from the funding issue, there are other arguments for a rapprochement with pro-lifers. There is a prudential consideration: a ban on something as murder is not going to be enforceable if only a minority considers it as murder. A national prohibition is simply not going to work, in addition to being politically impossible to get through in the first place. Pro-choice paleo-libertarians can tell the pro-lifers: ‘Look, a national prohibition is hopeless. Stop trying to pass a human life amendment to the Constitution. Instead, for this and many other reasons, we should radically decentralize political and judicial decisions in this country; we must end the despotism of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, and return political decisions to state and local levels.’ Pro-choice paleos should therefore hope that Roe v. Wade is someday overthrown, and abortion questions go back to the state and local levels—the more decentralized the better. Let Oklahoma and Missouri restrict or outlaw abortions, while California and New York retain abortion rights. Hopefully, some day we will have localities within each state making such decisions. Conflict will then be largely defused. Those who want to have, or to practice, abortions can move or travel to California (or Marin County) or New York (or the West Side of Manhattan.)”

Let’s do everything we can to promote states rights, in order to limit the Leviathan, “that coldest of all cold monsters.” That is what Murray Rothbard would want us to do.

The post What Rothbardians Should Think About States Rights appeared first on LewRockwell.

As a result of recent conversations, my life-long closest friend Diego wrote the following. If you’re lucky as we are, you have such a friend whose interests and thoughts match yours so closely that it seems that you were separated at birth in a dream. We both felt from the days of our youth when chance brought us together that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, it was not he, she, them, or it that we belonged to, or that we would ever gargle in the rat race choir for those who make the rules to terrorize humanity.

By Diego Sandoval

“Does anybody ever say anything?”

“Not really. Everybody talks all his life, and many write for many years, but nobody really says anything. It’s all right, though.”
– William Saroyan, Not Dying: A Memoir

Because I have nothing to say, I am writing this. It’s all right. I have nothing to say because I am disgusted by all the words I have written for deaf ears and by the news that just repeats itself like an endless Greek tragedy to the chorus of commentators of all persuasions echoing each other as if their words made a difference in the butcher’s bench world of ruthless actors with their motto: acta non verba. I’m just sighing, Ma, like another man of many words, Bob Dylan:

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

Life? Yes, Dylan is right: “If you’re not busy being born you’re busy dying.”

But what difference can words make? I don’t know. Quén sabe?

William Saroyan was a witty man, a Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winner, very famous in his day, and he didn’t know either. He claimed he wrote to ward off death and said he expected an exception to death would be made in his case. He was a man hiding in a house of words, always ready to bolt when death came knocking. But he never grasped the contradictory meanings of bolting, a common neurosis and a necrophiliac’s dilemma. He wanted to escape death’s clutches but wasn’t sure whether to run or hide. To bolt or bolt, that is the question he couldn’t answer unequivocally. He decided to obsessively accumulate stuff to barricade the entrance to his soul while writing the opposite. His monitory words insinuated the ineluctable nature of his rat packing.

I have spent my life shedding possessions – call it rat unpacking – having seen too many people possessed by them, and the nothingness of death that they represent. I always sensed that nothing is more real than nothing. Having grown up in Mexico – the country that Octavio Paz referred to as the land of the labyrinth of solitude, the country where death lays heavy on every heart, faithful or doubting, I became a poet, writer, and singer to somehow create a language that would lead me into the realm of silence where true language lives and death is exorcised. I took the stage name Mr. Z  to honor my heroes, Zapata and Zarathustra. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. Few who come to hear me perform know my name’s origins and I never explain. Explain to whom? Why?

I was drawn to William Saroyan’s writing at an early age, probably because of his early efforts to write musically and exorcise the death-themed experiences of his childhood with Armenian immigrant parents, his father being a preacher who died when William was three years-old and he was sent to an orphanage along with his sister and brother. When I was about seventeen years-old I read his first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and was mesmerized, especially by his story, “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8” – its free form musicality with its gaps of silence that tore out my heart. I identified with the story’s protagonist, who was lonely Saroyan at 19 years of age, and how a few chords in a piece of music, even bad music, transported him into ecstatic reveries, even during moments of silence when he wasn’t listening to the record. I memorized this sentence: “He stood over his phonograph, thinking of its silence, and his own silence, the fear in himself to make a noise, to declare his existence.” And then a string of few words came to me – “the music of forgetting” – which have haunted me ever since.

I too hear some secret music and don’t know why I am writing this.  I’m only sighing as I move to the music of forgetting.

For his part, Saroyan, in his abodes of death, eventually wrote many millions of words in maybe seventy-five published and unpublished books, saying nothing about something for someone. It was all right, though, I guess he too was only sighing. A kind of sighing that was a haunting.

Aren’t we all sighing? Isn’t the world news enough to haunt anyone with a heart?

Then he died in 1982 at the age of seventy-two. No exception was made for Billy Boy. He either was or wasn’t surprised, depending on what happens when one dies. He said that in everyone’s secret religion “the idea is to keep death at a distance by means of junk of all kinds, and this junk makes a shambles.” Money, possessions in general, the more junk one can surround oneself with the safer one feels, so that death will have a tough time getting through the clutter to reach you, and in a writer’s case, his most treasured junk – his writing – may be useful in buying death off. This Saroyan said.

When he died, he left two houses in Fresno, California stuffed with shambles. Possessions so junky that they rattle the mind: envelopes of his old mustache clippings, pebbles, rocks, used typewriter ribbons, broken clocks, boxes of junk mail, every piece of ephemera that passed through his grasping hands. He let go of nothing while writing words warning of its futility despite its seeming necessity. He created a foundation in his own name, devoted to the study of himself, to which he left all his junk and to which he bequeathed all future earnings, despite having two children. He thought he was immortalizing himself under the illusion that his shambling rambling words and ratty belongings would free him from the labyrinth of solitude he was leaving. It was not a fit ending for a man who was once the daring young man on the flying trapeze.

Without faith, daring ends in desperate measures. I think Saroyan lost faith in the living.

He forgot his own wise words in the preface to the first edition of his first book:

If you will remember that living people are as good as dead, you will be able to perceive much that is very funny in their conduct that you perhaps might never have thought of perceiving if you did not believe that they were as good as dead.

Isn’t it funny that he left a shambles at home?

Madre, I’m running out of words. Please take my sighs and make them prayers of resistance to the ruthless actors who make this earth our home a bloody shambles.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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