Lew Rockwell Institute

Which is the most irresponsible organization on earth?  The American media or the Democrat judges?

It is a difficult call, but I think the designation of most irresponsible goes to the presstitutes.  The presstitutes are no longer confined to the print and TV media and NPR, but include many internet sites.  There are plenty that are irresponsible independently of ideology and agendas, and there are many websites set up by liberal and leftwing foundations, as well as by USAID and National Endowment for the Humanities to support the narratives that further liberal-left agendas.   

The temporary restraining orders issuing from Democrat judges are almost mandatory if a person or group files a request.  A restraining order is only good for a few days until a hearing is held to determine if the complaint has any merit or standing.  Seldom is such found, and therefore few restraining orders become preliminary injunctions.  A preliminary injunction can actually prevent a policy from being implemented until the challenge to the policy is decided by the appeals court, and if that decision is challenged, by the Supreme Court. The process can take longer than a presidential term.  Thus, invalid injunctions can be used to derail a president’s agenda.

It is the case that the Democrat judges should know by now that the many complaints filed to stop the effort of the Trump administration from converting the US budget from a grift operation into an efficient mechanism for serving the American people are nothing but expressions of political and ideological opposition to the Trump administration.  But it is always a chance that one could be legitimate, so the judges have to follow the procedure and issue temporary restraining orders. The solution is for the Department of Justice to bring charges against those entities that bring illegitimate lawsuits, the only purpose of which is to freeze executive branch decisions.

The US and foreign media describe the temporary restraining orders as “judges block Trump’s presidential orders.”  Only a preliminary injunction that is upheld on appeal can block Trump’s ability to manage his domain–the executive branch.  Judges have zero authority to manage the executive branch, but an irresponsible media is creating the impression that executive decisions reside in the judiciary and not in the executive. 

Another feature of the presstitutes’ irresponsibility is that the media intentionally misinforms the public about the intent and content of Trump’s decisions in order to cause alarm among the public and undermine voters’ confidence in the Trump administration. For example, DOGE discovered that about 40% of requests to change a Social Security recipient’s direct deposit bank to a different bank are scams operated in order to steal the recipient’s Social Security income.  Of course, the theft could succeed only for the months it would take to identify and correct the problem, but in the meantime the recipient could not service any debt, pay any utility bills, and could have critical services, such as power and communication, cut off, and credit rating ruined.  

To avoid these horrors and hardships on the elderly, Elon Musk said that changes in direct deposit instructions have to be made in person with ID.  The idiot and dishonest liberal/left are up in arms over Musk’s “heartless treatment of the elderly” who will be so inconvenienced by having to present themselves at a Social Security office.  Obviously, the idiot liberal/left think it is better for the elderly to be scammed and lose their benefits.  The problem is the insecurity of the digital revolution that has been forced down our throats.  This insecurity is permanent and is one of the reasons I have concluded that the digital revolution is, along with nuclear weapons, the worst mistake that has been made.  We are now trapped in the horror of the digital revolutions, which means the total absence of privacy, and likelihood of stolen identity, bank account, investment account, Social Security, credit card, and a pile of debt.

What we see in the presstitute media is the intention to misrepresent every Trump decision as the blackest of the blackest intentions, and not as efforts to deal with real serious problems.

In other words,  the entire media is acting politically, as a propaganda mechanism, and never as a reporter of news and facts.  Why is this tolerated?

Recently, several people dependent on Social Security have asked me why Trump is taking away their Social Security?  I asked them where did they get that idea.  They said “the media.”  I asked them why they believed an anti-Trump propaganda organization.  It seems that even those who know that the media lies still fall for the lie if the lie makes them feel threatened.

The Trump people need to pay attention to this.  It is correct that today few Americans have confidence in the media, but fear still works.

Enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act is long overdue.  The six mega-media conglomerates are violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and should be broken up and returned to independent hands.  If no one wants the media or sees any future for objective news reporting, the media should be allowed to cease to exist rather than to continue as propaganda ministries.  

As for Democrat judges, it should be understand that they are not judges.  They are political operatives put on the bench for the sole purpose of advancing Woke, DEI, anti-white, anti-family policies and the legitimization of sexual perversity. No Democrat judicial appointee should ever be confirmed, not in this day and time.  The Democrats’ idea of justice has no resemblance to justice. 

Years of liberal domination have largely destroyed American mores, turned women into harlots who “sell their pussy on E-bay,” support themselves on income from their personal porn sites, and vie for who can have the largest number of sexual partners in a 24-hour period. What once was depraved behavior is today an accomplishment. Law schools have turned against the Constitution and teach lawyers that their function is not to apply law but to use law to overturn existing society.  Wherever you look, we see denunciation of what was sacred and affirmation of what is Satanic.  This is the problem that Trump’s effort to restore America faces.

The post Can Affirmation Be Restored to American Mores? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Can we get down to the brass tacks here?

As much as the MAGA folks and friends would like to believe that Trump’s Golden Age of American Prosperity is steaming down the pike, and giving him full credit for slaying a lot of political devils like DEI, green energy, weaponizsation of the DOJ/FBI, getting boys out of the girls’ swim lanes, ending the disaster in Ukraine, standing up Elon Musk and the DOGE boys, canceling the penny and scuttling daylight savings time, too, the truth needs be told.

To wit, when it comes to economics the Donald is as far out to lunch as Sleepy Joe, Barry, Chuckles, Nancy and the Washington Dems ever were. That’s because he’s a rightwing statist who would make Louis XIV proud: L’État, c’est moi (“I am the state”).

But the thing is, the state can’t make prosperity; it can only retard, impair, enfeeble and even crush it. What makes prosperity is just what Milton Friedman said: Namely, the exertions of free men on free markets, enabled by sound money, minimalist government, constitutional liberty and the rights to property and the fruits of their own labors, talents and creations.

As far as we can tell, the Donald has precious little affinity—if any at all—for these bedrock principles of capitalist prosperity and a free society. To the contrary, his policy positions amount to a dog’s breakfast of gripes, grievances, histrionics, nativist humbug and MAGA rally pablum. And even most of that turns on a Brobdingnagian ego that filters everything as a zero sum transaction in which he is the grand deal-maker and unparalleled negotiator who alone can score the “win” and save the day for the nation.

Unfortunately, this leads Donald Trump to a frame of mind which sees America as one giant business enterprise where he has been elected CEO and deal-maker-in-chief. From that august perch, in turn, he claims carte blanche authority to deploy import tariffs taxes at will in pursuit of any and all objectives that strike his fancy.

That is, one day he might be battering $950 billion of annual goods and services trade with Canada in order to punish our neighbor to the north for what has been an average of about $400k per year of Fentanyl seized at the border. Then, the next day he monkey-hammers the EU for a 10% tariff on American-made gas guzzlers for which there is scant market in high fuel-tax Europe—even as American consumers lap up luxury BMWs’, Mercedes’ and Porsche’s not because the US tariff is too low and “stupid” at 2.5%, but because these German brands won the US market from Cadillac and Lincoln fair and square via superior engineering, styling and marketing.

Lately, he’s also been proposing to use tariffs as a foreign policy cattle prod against any country that doesn’t toe the neocon line against Iran or which does business with Venezuela. That is, if you are buying khaki pants from India, which country purchases both Iranian and Venezuelan oil, you’re gonna get the Donald’s “secondary tariff” stick on the back of the neck right soon.

In the case of Venezuela, the impending 25% Trump Tax is especially vexing because the combination of socialist stupidity there and onerous US sanctions levied by Washington have shattered its economy and sent 7 million desperate immigrants fleeing northward. Yet because among these hordes of the economically injured there have been about 135 gang members according to the FBI and ICE (0.00002%), US consumers will be paying a secondary tariff of 25% or $22 billion per year on imports from India alone beginning on April 2nd.

That’s the equivalent of a bounty of $165,000 per alleged gang member. And when you add in all the other countries which will be caught up in Trump’s latest extension of arbitrary state power—that is, secondary tariffs—you can readily see extractions of thousands of dollars per household annually in Trump Tariff/Taxes levied whenever the Donald gets a bee in his bonnet about something not going his way.

Just this weekend, for example, he got “pissed-off” about some apparent Russian conditions for a peace deal in Ukraine—so in an instant the Donald was brandishing a 25% tariffs on oil against erstwhile friend, Vlad Putin. That might amount to something if the US actually bought a single drop of oil from Russia, but we don’t because Joe Biden forbade it and the Donald has left the “Joe Biden” entity’s rules in place.

Yet, again, the tariff that he is threatening Russia with is actually a Carom shot. That is, a second step removed levy on the exports of Russia’s downstream oil and gas customers. In turn, this has your editor slightly perturbed because our next pair of Gucci loafers are going to cost 25% more owing to the fact that they are made in Italy, which buys kerosene and gasoline from Turkey, which is said to be refined from trans-shipped Russian crude oil!

In a phone interview with NBC on Sunday, President Donald Trump said, “if Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia.”

“I was very angry, pissed off” when Putin “started getting into [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s credibility” and “started talking about new leadership” in Ukraine, Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker in a phone call.

So, you see the tangled web here. The Donald is actually fixing to hijack what is virtually the entire commerce of planet earth to punish trade “cheaters” one moment and purported foreign policy malefactors the next. And yet and yet: Why in the world does the Donald think he owns our private business—that is, our economic doings as consumers, entrepreneurs, importers, exporters, investors and wage workers, alike?

Well, no, we are not anarchists here at Contra Corner. We do concede that the Federal government does have (and should have) the power to levy taxes and tariffs, too, if proper constitutional procedures are observed and legitimate purposes of state are served.

But those caveats do not remotely apply to Trump’s current Tariffpalooza. No president should ever be allowed to unilaterally levy tens of billions—indeed hundreds of billions—of taxes on American businesses and consumers just because he wakes up in an ornery mood about something that was in his intelligence briefing or that he saw on “Morning Joe”.

Indeed, in the midst of this current madness with tariff/tax threats flying left and right from the Oval Office every day of the week, we are getting damn close to a frontal Trumpian assault on the the Fifth Amendment guarantees of property rights. That is to say, if your econobox car from Mexico, Mercedes sedan from Germany, Gucci shoes from Italy or khaki slacks from India cost a goodly amount more because the Donald says so, or if you suddenly loose export customers in Europe or Canada that you have spent millions developing over many years owing to retaliatory tariffs levied by their home governments, your Fifth Amendment rights are indeed being trampled upon.

To remind, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides specific protections for private property in both the Takings Clause and the Due Process Clause:

1. “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”.
2. “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”.

In a word, Trump’s rampaging Tariffpalooza amounts to arbitrarily taking property of citizens for public use in the name of his screwball theories of trade or in pursuit of ends having nothing at all to do with trade, such as his negotiations with Putin on Ukraine and demagoguery about stopping the “invasion” by purported Venezuelan gangs. If nothing else, there is absolutely no Due Process at all on the part of consumers and exporters who are being tossed in harms’ way by presidential whim.

Back in the day we were vociferous opponents of the military draft because we did not want our body parts drafted into service in behalf of Washington’s genocidal war on the Vietnamese peoples. And we now insist that no president—even one trying to make America Great Again—gets to unilaterally draft our bank accounts into the service of Washington’s misguided wars on Russia, Iran and Venezuela, either.

To the contrary, if the Donald wants to use the tariff as an instrument of foreign policy, he damn well better go to Congress and get a declaration of war against the “enemy” in question; and, after committee hearings and floor debate, obtain a statutory authorization to levy War Tariffs. Likewise, if he wants to be a rightwing Keynesian and manipulate the free market with trade deals and Tariff/Tax levies to allegedly pump up “growth”, let him get his “reciprocal tariffs” ratified by the congressional finance committees and both Houses of Congress.

Of course, there is not a snowballs’ chance in the hot place that he could get 218 votes in the House and 51 votes in the Senate (using Reconciliation against the filibuster and VP Vance’s vote, too) in behalf of either of these propositions.

So just plain stop it, POTUS!

You are not the Sun King. Your whims are not the embodiment of the State. And your wildass Tariffpalooza tramples on the Constitution likely rarely before.

Besides, the Donald’s underlying claim that he is deep-sixing free market doctrine and playing fast and loose with his proper constitutional remit in order to further the public good just doesn’t hold water. In fact, his whole battle cry that American citizens and workers are being ripped-off by foreigners is just a lot of damn humbug.

To be sure, the Empire has cost America trillions needlessly, but that wasn’t owing to sinister foreign trade cheating or unfair rigging of the playing field by trade bureaucrats here and abroad. Accordingly, the defense spending part of the rip-off can be solved with alacrity by bringing the Empire home, closing 700 bases abroad, recalling 150,000 servicemen stationed in left-over posts from WWII in Europe and Asia and quitting NATO and the rest of the alliances, formal and defacto.

On the global commerce side of the equation, however, there is no there there. The tables below show US tariff levies on our top 51 trading partners (EU-27 shown as one entity), and, in turn, their levies on American exports to their own home markets. In a word, there is nothing unfair about it.

During 2023, according to Grok 3 the US imported $2.862 trillion from these countries (nearly 90% of total imports), and levied tariffs averaging 3.9% of customs value. In turn, that computed to about $112 billion in collections from foreign exporters to the US.

As it happened, the same 51 countries collected but $40 billion of tariff revenues on $1.717 trillion of US exports to these trading partners, which collections amounted to just 2.1% of customs value.

That’s right. On an aggregate basis America’s tariff rates were 85% higher than their tariffs on American exports. Similarly, Washington’s tariff revenue collections amount to 2.8X what these 51 foreign counterparts collected from American shippers.

To be sure, these figures encompasses the sum of all goods entering and leaving the US border with respect to these 51 nations. And, of course, in some cases US tariffs were higher than those of our counterparts and in other cases they were lower or the same.

But here’s the thing. Trade is not a zero sum game on a bilateral basis. There would be winners and losers even in a perfect gold standard world with no tariffs or NTBs (nontariff barriers). But what the tables below show with smoking hot certainty is that foreign tariffs have absolutely nothing to do with America’s chronic, massive and unsustainable trade deficits.

For the real cause of America’s devastating loss of its industrial base, good middle class jobs and relentless off-shoring of production by US companies, the Donald need look no further than the Eccles Building a few blocks from the White House. As we will amplify on another occasion, America’s trade calamity is owing to bad money and the relentless inflation of the domestic economy by the easy money Keynesians at the Fed, not unfair trade practices abroad.

If the Donald really wants to stop the trade hemorrhage and the erosion of America’s very economic vigor, therefore, he needs to clean house at the Fed and put a lock on the printing presses of the central bank. In the interim, however, it only needs be noted that never before has a presidential economic theory been more thoroughly, completely and unequivocally debunked by the actual data, then is the case of trade.

Foreign Tariffs on U.S. Exports to Top 51 Trading Partners And Implied Tariff Revenue (2023)

U.S. Tariffs on Imports from Top 51 Trading Partners and Implied Tariff Revenue (2023)

We have previously suggested that the Donald’s plan for Reciprocal Tariffs will lead to a Demolition Derby. In point of fact, however, the above data surely demolishes the case for such a thing at the very get-go.

No matter how you slice the data, you get big US trade deficits with every bilateral trade partner except the decrepit economy of the UK. Something is causing a big US trade problem, therefore, but it’s most definitely not unfair tariffs or for that matter NTB, either, as we have earlier shown.

Thus, in the case of America’s two big USMCA partners—Mexico and Canada– the combined 2023 numbers are $616 billion of US exports and $897 billion of US imports, generating a thundering deficit of $281 billion. Yet all of that materialized under the Donald’s rules per the USMCA deal he negotiated in 2019 that resulted in 0.00% tariffs on $1.5 trillion of two-way trade.

Next there is the EU-27 where the US had a massive $221 billion trade deficit in 2023 on $931 billion of two-way trade. But, alas, the tiny difference in tariff levies surely didn’t account for the red ink. As shown above, US levied an average 2.0% weighted-average tariff on imports from Europe, while the EU-27 tariffed American exports at 2.7%.

So even if you put a “reciprocal tariff” on the difference it would amount to just $4 billion. And, yes, $4 billion on two way trade of $931 billion doesn’t amount to the proverbial hill of beans.

When you swing over to the Asian trade bilaterals, it gets even more illuminating. The US imported $116 billion of chips, cars, ships and other goods from Korea versus only $67 billion of US exports to Korea in 2023, making for a yawning deficit of $49 billion. However, owing to trade agreements between the two countries, the effective tariffs were 0.0% on both sides of the equation, meaning that tariffs were most surely not the culprit which caused the gap.

In the case of Japan, the story is roughly the same. The long-standing annual US trade deficit with Japan weighed in at $62 billion in 2023, but average tariffs on a bilateral trade-weighted basis were virtually the same at 2.0% on Japan’s imports to the US and 2.5% on American exports to Japan. We doubt, again, that a reciprocal trade equalizer of o.7% or $1 billion would make a damn bit of difference.

Indeed, the latter point holds true even for the two trade partners where tariffs on US exports are appreciably higher than US levies on their imports to America. In the case of the massive deficit of $100 billion or 82% of the two-way trade with Vietnam, the US levy of 2.5% was well below the bilaterally weighted 9.4% tariff imposed on American exports by Vietnam.

Then again, a reciprocal tariff penalty on the difference of 6.9%—applied to all US purchases from Vietnam—would have amounted to just $7.6 billion. Since Vietnam’s massive export of shoes, shirts and furniture to the US is based on cheap labor, we seriously doubt that the reciprocal tariff of $7.6 billion on Vietnamese exports would have changed the massive bilateral imbalance materially.

Then, of course, we get to the monster of the midway—China—and the data most definitely do not vindicate the Tariff Man. Last time around the barn he boosted the weighted average US tariff on imports from China to 19.3%. That 19th century style level was applied to $472 billion of imports from China, and the resulting $82 billion of tariffs were largely paid by domestic importers and consumers.

But it did not stop the bleeding. Despite a far lower average China tariff of 7.5% on US goods coming into the Red Ponzi, US exports in 2023 totaled only $151 billion. In turn, that means the trade deficit weighed in at a huge $276 billion—a level not materially lower than the$311 billion incurred during the last year on the Donald’s watch in 2020.

Indeed, when you look at the data where imports from China totaled $427 billion while exports to China amounted to only $151 billion, it is evident that something is going on with both sides of the equation that can’t be explained by a nearly 3:1 difference in the high US tariff versus the moderate China tariff. To wit, US exports are being stymied by high, noncompetitive costs, while imports from China are being bloated by low super-competitive prices.

Yes, we have an idea as to what this not so mysterious factor is: Namely, the average hourly manufacturing wage in China during 2023 was $5.70 per hour in USD versus $27.50 per hour in the USA. Of course, the Donald undoubtedly thinks this nearly 5:1 wage gap is “unfair”, but that begs the question as to how we arrived at the current towering US wage level when the average US manufacturing wage in 1970 was just $3.35 per hour.

In a word, the Fed inflated us there!

By contrast, at a steady 2.0% per year wage gain in a non-inflationary environment, the US hourly manufacturing wage today would be just $10 per hour, not $27.50. And when you consider all the extra non-wage costs involved in bring goods from China to LA and Boston—ocean freight & insurance, supply chain and quality control management, added inventory carry costs and stocking inflexibility—it is evident that nothing even close to today massive trade deficits with China would exist.

So, again, we would urge the Tariff King to look just down the street toward the Eccles Building. Rather than tax bus drivers in Milwaukee to the tune of thousands per year, why not fire Chairman Powell and his merry gang of money printers and thereby address the root of the trade problem?

Ironically, the only central bank this side of Japan which is more Keynesian than the Fed is the Bank of England, which has truly priced old Albion out of the world market. So the US did have a tiny $3.3 billion surplus with the UK, which we suppose the Donald would consider to be a “win” for the home team.

But no help from the tariff from was actually needed to obtain this narrow “win”. The US tariff on British goods was 2.0% of customs value versus the levy imposed by the Brits of 3.8%. Then again, the stars and stripes team still “won” notwithstanding this slightly higher “unfair” tariff.

In any event, all the data and analysis to the contrary, we are heading into a trade Demolition Derby because the Donald is not only wedded to screwball trade economics, but more importantly because he is under the illusion that he is the state.

Unfortunately for the American people, he’s about ready to learn that the insane eruption of the average US tariff on foreign goods he is about to launch will not be a thing of “beauty” at all. As depicted below it will rollback 75 years of declining US tariffs and lead to something far different than the Golden Age of Prosperity that he has promised.

Alas, you can only get to the latter from freer markets, freer trade, sounder money, sweeping deregulation and deep fiscal retrenchment. That is, a lasting prosperity depends upon a state that gets out of the way, not one that becomes the embodiment of another would be Sun King.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

The post L’État, C’est Moi (‘I Am the State’).Trumpian Version appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the core features of nazism (not the German political Party but its core ideology) is racism, which allows some ethnicites (or “races”) to be advantaged by law, and other ethnicities to be discriminated against by the law — it is, at its very core, AGAINST equal rights under law. Consequently, Adolf Hitler constantly condemned democracy (which can’t exist WITHOUT equal rights under law). Another of its core features is imperialism — support of the idea that a ‘superior’ nation has an international right to expand to control other, ‘inferior’, nations. Those two core features are also AMONG the core features of ANY type of conservatism, which is the reason why Hitler’s Nazi Party was considered to be extremely conservative despite its being obviously extremely radical. The idea that radicalism is necessarily leftist is false — rabidly false: stupid — but it is popularized by the billionaires who control the ‘news’-media, because billionaires are the biggest beneficiaries of the status-quo.

The great progressive, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thought very deeply about and planned constantly (during 11 August 1941 to 12 April 1945 when he died) to design, a post-WW2 world in which there would be equality of opportunity for all peoples under a “United Nations” that would be an all-inclusive democratic international federal republic of nations (a democratic world government) replacing and outlawing all empires and possessing a global monopoly control over all all geostrategically significant weapons so that no nation would be allowed to violate international law — the laws that pertain between nations and never within any individual nation. (His U.N. would have excluded any international dictates that pertain to human rights, since such laws inevitably differ from one nation to another, and each nation will inevitably deal with the matter according to its culture. He knew that the U.N. would be ineffective if it favored some cultures over other cultures. That (supremacism) is the way an empire is, and FDR despised empires, and was designing his U.N. to replace all of them.)

FDR was, on 12 April 1945, replaced by a person who — as the greatest book about him, Frank Costigliola’s ROOSEVELT’S LOST ALLIANCES (referring actually only to the alliance with the Soviet Union) described Truman in its last two chapters — (who) was impetuous where Roosevelt had been instead designing, led with his prejudices instead of from any conscious and empirically based long-term vision, and stupid where Roosevelt had been a unique and utter genius. Truman (under the influence then of his personal hero Eisenhower, and of Churchill) made the decision on 25 July 1945 to reverse his predecessor’s anti-imperialist foreign policies and start some kind of war to defeat the Soviet Union, what came to be called “the Cold War.” The result inspired two of the individuals who had known the most intimately FDR’s plans for the post-WW2 era, his son Elliott Roosevelt, and FDR’s chief advisor in planning the U.N. Charter, Sumner Welles, each to publish in 1946 a book, to record for future historians, what those plans had been, so that FDR wouldn’t get any of the blame for what Truman was now doing (which was to trash FDR’s plan). As Elliott said on page xiii of his 1946 As He Saw It, “All the signs of growing disunity among the leading nations of the world, all the broken promises, all the renascent power politics of greedy and desperate imperialism, were my spurs in this undertaking.” And, as Welles put it on page 1 of his 1946 Where Are We Heading?, “Opportunity after opportunity for understanding between all peoples has been lost.” It had happened that fast after FDR’s death. Their nemesis, John Foster Dulles, issued in 1950, his book War Or Peace, in order to deceive ‘historians’ to think that the U.N. Charter that Truman controlled was no different from what FDR had been planning — i.e., to think that in international relations, there had been continuity between FDR and Truman.

The supremacist idea — the foundationstone of nazism — became institutionalized by Truman and Eisenhower as “the military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower publicly condemned three days before leaving office, so that only his successors would get the blame for it.

The current U.S. President, Donald Trump, is looking for wars against China, Greenland, and Panama, and for Europe to increase its purchases of U.S.-made weapons so as for them to (increase billionaires’ profits and) conquer Russia; so, he’s a neoconservative (supporter of expanding the U.S. empire) like all U.S. Presidents this Century have been. The U.S. is sending weapons to Taiwan to encourage it to break away from China, so that when China invades Taiwan (to prevent that breakaway), the U.S. can then claim to be acting defensively instead of aggressively by invading China. On March 29th, the Washington Post headlined “Secret Pentagon memo on China, homeland has Heritage fingerprints”, and reported that “The document, known as the Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance and marked ‘secret/no foreign national’ in most passages, was distributed throughout the Defense Department in mid-March and signed by Hegseth. It outlines, in broad and sometimes partisan detail, the execution of President Donald Trump’s vision to prepare for and win a potential war against Beijing and defend the United States from threats in the ‘near abroad,’ including Greenland and the Panama Canal.” Some progressive voters had voted for Trump because he claimed he’d do no such things. In America now, it is always Government-by-deception. On March 31st, the geostrategic commentator Alexander Mercouris noted that this policy for a U.S. invasion of China started under President Obama. (Actually, ever since 1945, there has been consistency in U.S. foreign policies: they’ve all been neoconservative.)

So, there is a lot of deception in the formation of what is commonly called “progressivism” or “the far left,” or “democratic socialism,” which, nowadays, is often referred-to as including neoconservatism and other forms of imperialism, so that both that “left” and the “far right” (nazism) support imperialism — which was actually anathema to FDR, and which anathema he shared with Stalin but definitely NOT with Churchill, who was a hyper-imperialist, much like Hitler was (though for a DIFFERENT empire). And to top off that decception, some of the ‘far right’ political Parties in Europe, such as Marine LePen’s National Front, which is decidedly ANTI-imperialist, are suppressed by the billionaires and their media, because they are instead the most progressive major political Party in their country. (This way, the billionaires there can continue in control.)

Regarding instead DOMESTIC policies, today’s ‘progressives’ support reverse-discrimination instead of NON-discrimination — for example, affirmative action, as Gabriel Patrick Wasson documented in his Spring 2004 “Affirmative Action: Equality or Reverse Discrimination?”, is demonstrably AGAINST equality before the law, and, as he noted, “Affirmative action promotes an erroneous view of group rights at the expense and exclusion of individual rights.” (Nazism likewise does.) Furthermore, the extreme affirmative-action viewpoint supports inter-generational ‘reparations’, so that individuals today would qualify for ‘reparations’ for what their slave ancestors had suffered, irrespective of whether or not the ‘compensated’ individual has even been discriminated-against. And who is to pay those ‘reparations’? And why? The whole idea of affirmative action is so stupid — but many self-declared ‘progressives’ support it, because the billionaires who fund the liberal Party and its media would rather that their Party’s voters will blame some other ‘race’ instead of blame those billionaires.

What does all of this show? Billionaires — the aristocrats in today’s world, and they definitely ARE that in the U.S. — will naturally want the public (whose employees and consumers they are) NOT to blame THEM (the billionaires themselves — the few individuals who actually CONTROL the Government) to be blamed for how atrocious the Government is; and, so, the main ways of DEFLECTING that blame, onto the public, are two: one is for the public to become engaged in inter-ethnic strife such that blame goes to other ethnicities (‘races’), and the other is to get the poilitical Parties to hate and blame each other. The billionaires — the people who control the political Parties — may even, that way, become heroes to their Party’s voters (such as Elon Musk has done). The electorate will be blaming the other Party’s voters, INSTEAD OF blaming the billionaires, who are ACTUALLY to blame for corrupting the Government.

FDR famously called the billionaires of his time “economic royalists.” His successor Truman created the system that now prevails in which those individuals have come to have a lock-hold over America’s Government. No solution for this problem can be found in this Party or that Party; no solution can be found in this ‘race’ or that ‘race; no solution can be found in this gender or that gender. The only POSSIBLE way to solve a problem of this type, is a Revolution that removes all billionaires from power and replaces them with authentic representatives of the public. I would suggest that it should be done by lottery (among all adults) for the legislatures, and that those legislators would then have the power to expel from their midst any of them that a two-thirds majority of them vote to expel, and that the entire body will, by majority vote, appoint judges, and will select from among themselves candidates for the Presidency, who have served in the federal legislature for five years or more. There would be no term-limits, and Parties would be illegal. The country would, over time, come to be ruled by professional legislators, who will not be competing against each other. Elections will be replaced by lottery-draws. There will be no “campaigns” to fund. Consequently, over time, the members of the legislature will come to know the strengths and weaknesses of each of the other members. All of the incentives that have caused America to be ruled by a tiny aristocracy of billionaires will have been removed. Just think of it: a country in which billionaires must adhere to the laws, and have no control OVER the laws. THAT would be a truly democratic revolution, even though the public would never vote. It would be a revolutionary revolution. Replacing elections with lotteries is the only way I can think of to get us out of the present situation in which Governments keep going from bad to even worse and are now — throughout at least the U.S. empire — incredibly atrocious. To anyone who opposes this, I ask “And what is YOUR proposed solution?” Whatever that ‘solution’ would be, will be far preferred by the billionaires, over what I have proposed here, which would end the “gravy train” of ‘the elite’.

This is my idea of a political left that’s NOT controlled by billionaires. And as for the political right, that has ALWAYS been representing ONLY the aristocracy — so, a ‘right-wing democracy’ is a self-contradiction: democracy can exist ONLY in a country that authentically has equality before the law — NO one is above the law (there IS no aristocracy).

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

The post A Political Left That’s Controlled by Bllionaires Is Fake ‘Left’: Hypocritical Nazism. appeared first on LewRockwell.

The other day I shared a short post about a video that was going around showing a father in Gaza tearfully cradling the head of his son who was decapitated in an Israeli airstrike, and some guy responded with the comment “Good thing you helped get TRUMP ELECTED!!”

And I must admit I was actually, truly shocked. I mean, what exactly did this fellow think was happening under Biden that whole time?

I saw a post on Twitter where a leftist responded to a liberal who was acting like ICE just suddenly transformed into a modern gestapo under Trump, saying, “Liberals believe in nothing and remember even less.”

And it’s just so true. They don’t believe in anything. They don’t stand for anything. It’s just a team sport for these people. Politics for the mainstream liberal is not about advancing values or building a better world, it’s about their team winning solely for the sake of winning. And because they have no real values or causes beyond winning for its own sake, what their team does when it’s in office doesn’t matter to them.

A Democrat president can be as tyrannical and murderous as he wants and liberals will just brunch away in cheerful obliviousness, content with their knowledge that their team is holding the trophy.

There was never a point where ICE wasn’t that. Liberals believe in nothing and remember even less. https://t.co/lZ1fwSfW46

— Anansi’s Library (@Anansis_Library) March 28, 2025

You see this in the way our friend believes that I “helped get Trump elected” by criticizing the people who were perpetrating an active genocide. He just automatically took it as a given that it was my responsibility to stay silent on Gaza because the person in charge was a Democrat and his veep was running for president. The fact that it was a genocide which needed to be ferociously opposed never entered into the equation for him. All he cared about was winning.

All of the most shocking and gruesome things I have ever seen online were recorded in Gaza during the Biden administration. Nobody who’d paid the slightest bit of attention to Israel’s US-backed atrocities in 2023 and 2024 would believe this was anything new that just started under Trump. But because Gaza is just seen as a political plaything by these freaks, they only care about it now that Trump is in office — and only insofar as it can be used to take points away from the Republicans.

And that’s exactly why they lost. The Democrats calculated that the Harris campaign could simply ignore Gaza without putting any daylight between Kamala’s policies and Genocide Joe’s and still win the election, and they were wrong. Polls show that among people who voted for Biden in 2020 but not for Harris in 2024, Gaza was by far their biggest reason for not doing so. The Democrats believed in nothing and stood for nothing, and nothing is what they got.

Mainstream “centrism” is just as toxic, murderous and tyrannical as Trumpism. These people will watch entire populations being mowed down by the hundreds of thousands via the policies of the people they voted for, and as long as it doesn’t interrupt brunch they’ll keep sipping their mimosas and laughing and tweeting and feeling smugly correct, and then go to bed and sleep like babies in an ocean of human blood.

___________

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The post Liberals Believe in Nothing and Remember Even Less appeared first on LewRockwell.

In this revealing follow-up to their deep dive into the life of Mark Lane, Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley continue exploring the many chapters of one of the most controversial, fearless, and complex figures in 20th-century American legal and political history.

Mark Lane is best known for Rush to Judgment, his groundbreaking book that publicly challenged the Warren Commission’s conclusions about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But Lane’s career extended far beyond the pages of that explosive work. He repeatedly inserted himself into some of the most charged and politically radioactive moments of the last century — and often stood where few others dared.

In this episode, Groubert and Hunley uncover Lane’s lesser-known relationships and legal battles. His defense of James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., raised eyebrows nationwide. Was Lane seeking justice, publicity, or uncovering something deeper in the official narrative? The questions continue decades later.

The story expands into his controversial ties to Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Lane represented the group in the lead-up to the Jonestown massacre — a relationship that has haunted his legacy. What was Lane thinking? What did he know?

But the contradictions don’t stop there. Lane’s work defending James Joseph Richardson — a poor Black man falsely imprisoned for the poisoning deaths of his own children — speaks to a radically different chapter in his career. Lane’s involvement helped lead to Richardson’s release after more than 20 years behind bars, a major vindication in one of the most egregious wrongful convictions in American history.

Mark Lane also put himself on the line at the Wounded Knee standoff in 1973, siding with the American Indian Movement during a tense 71-day siege against federal forces. Lane’s advocacy on behalf of Native Americans highlighted his consistent — if controversial — willingness to challenge federal power on behalf of the disenfranchised.

And then there’s the personal. Lane shared a home with actress and activist Jane Fonda during a time when both were lightning rods for political outrage. He also maintained a surprising connection to Paul McCartney — adding yet another unexpected layer to a life that defies easy definition.

From celebrity connections to courtroom crusades, armed standoffs to assassinations, Mark Lane’s story is not easily summed up — and that’s exactly why it matters. Join Groubert and Hunley as they trace the wide-ranging impact of a man who repeatedly collided with power, challenged the establishment, and never stopped pushing for his version of the truth.

Subscribe to America’s Untold Stories for more episodes that reveal what history books leave out.

The post America’s Untold Stories: Mark Lane from JFK Assassination to Jonestown, James Earl Ray, & Paul McCartney appeared first on LewRockwell.

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We may be witnessing the ongoing destruction of one of the greatest pillars of postwar American global influence and hegemony.

Late last week an astonishing event occurred in American society, and video clips of that incident quickly went viral across the Internet.

A 30-year-old Tufts doctoral student and Fulbright Scholar from Turkey was walking across her Boston-area neighborhood on the way to a holiday dinner at a friend’s house when she was suddenly seized and abducted in the early evening by six masked federal agents of the Department of Homeland Security. The terrified young woman was handcuffed and taken to a waiting car, secretly detained for the next 24 hours without access to friends, family, or lawyers, then shipped off to a holding cell in Louisiana and scheduled for immediate deportation, although a federal judge has now temporarily stayed the proceedings.

Just one of the Tweets showing a short clip of that incident has been viewed more than 4.5 million times, with a much longer YouTube video accumulating another couple of hundred thousand views.

ICE arrested Tufts graduate Rumeysa Ozturk a year after she co-authored a pro-Palestinian op-ed and was flagged for anti-Israel activism.

Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/ih1luFo3zG

— AF Post (@AFpost) March 26, 2025

That very disturbing scene seemed like something out of a Hollywood film chronicling the actions of a dystopian American police state, and that initial impression was only solidified once media reports explained why Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the streets of her home town. Her only reported transgression had been her co-authorship of an op-ed piece in the Tufts student newspaper a year earlier sharply criticizing Israel and its ongoing attacks on the civilian population of Gaza.

Apparently, one of the many powerful pro-Israel censorship organizations funded by Zionist billionaires became outraged over her sentiments and decided to make a public example of her, so its minions in the subservient Trump Administration immediately ordered her arrest.

CBS News covered a local protest demonstration demanding the young woman’s release, and quoted the remarks of one of the participants:

“The university campus should absolutely be a place for the free and open exchange of ideas and the fact that someone can just be disappeared into the abyss for voicing an idea is absolutely horrifying,” said rally attendee Sam Wachman.

Now supposed that such a scene—for such a reason—had taken place on the streets of Russia, China, Iran, or any other country viewed with great disfavor by our government. Surely that incident would have quickly become the centerpiece of a massive global propaganda offensive aimed at blackening the reputation of the regime responsible. Audiences worldwide would have been forcefully told that the arrest demonstrated the terrible dangers of living in a society lacking the freedoms guaranteed by our own Constitution and our Bill of Rights. I don’t recall seeing any recent propaganda campaigns along these lines, so that suggests that such incidents are extremely rare in those countries.

But unfortunately that is hardly the case in today’s America. A day or two before that Tufts graduate student was snatched off the streets of her city, a 21-year-old Columbia University junior went into hiding to avoid a similar fate after federal agents raided her campus dorm to arrest her. As the Times reported, high school valedictorian Yunseo Chung had moved to the U.S. with her family from South Korea when she was 7, but her permanent residency was suddenly revoked for her public criticism of Israeli policy. She was ordered immediately deported back to a country that she barely even remembered.

This followed the storm of controversy unleashed earlier this month by the very high profile arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate student heavily involved in last year’s campus protests against the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Seized in an early morning raid on his campus student housing, which he shared with his wife, an American citizen eight months pregnant, he was taken off to detention, first in New Jersey and then transferred to a holding cell in Louisiana, once again with no initial access to his family, friends, or lawyers.

As a Green Card holder—a permanent legal resident of the U.S.—he was considered fully entitled to all the normal rights and privileges of an American citizen, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that his Green Card would be canceled and he would be deported based upon an obscure legal doctrine never previously employed for that purpose, eliciting a strong legal challenge in federal court. Moreover, his transfer from a New Jersey jurisdiction to a different one in the Deep South also seemed to violate normal legal procedures.

A week after that arrest, Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia doctoral candidate from India on a Fulbright Scholarship, hurriedly packed her bags and fled the country to Canada when she narrowly missed being arrested by federal authorities who raided her student housing. As the New York Times reported:

“The atmosphere seemed so volatile and dangerous,” Ms. Srinivasan, 37, said on Friday in an interview with The New York Times, her first public remarks since leaving. “So I just made a quick decision.”

A day earlier Rubio explained that he had already authorized the arrest and immediate deportation of more than 300 students around the country for their criticism of Israel, so these particular cases obviously represented merely the tip of a very large iceberg.

In past decades, the academic leadership of a top Ivy League school such as Columbia might have stoutly defended the students in its community. But any such resistance was broken when the Trump Administration suddenly pulled $400 million in annual funding. The demands included full cooperation with the arrest of any students critical of Israeli policies, the creation of a new internal security force to suppress any anti-Israel campus protests, and “receivership” for the university’s prestigious Middle Eastern Studies Program, presumably resulting in firm Zionist control.

Acting President Katrina Armstrong bowed to those demands, sacrificing the academic freedom of her faculty members and the personal freedom of her students. But faced with such enormous conflicting pressures, she then resigned on Friday evening, some seven months after her predecessor had resigned for roughly similar reasons.

That same day newspapers also reported that the top leadership of Harvard University’s equally prestigious Middle Eastern Studies Center had been dismissed, probably ensuring that after more than seventy years this independent academic organization would henceforth become firmly pro-Israel in its orientation. Last year, after Harvard’s previous president had strongly defended academic freedom before a hostile Congressional committee, she was quickly forced to resign.

As I casually examined the home page of the New York Times website on Saturday, I noticed five different articles reporting these striking blows to intellectual freedom at a number of our top American universities, and it’s quite possible that I may have missed one or two others.

• Columbia President Is Replaced as Trump Threatens University’s Funding
• Leaders of Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies Center Will Leave
• University of Minnesota Student Detained by Immigration Agents
• Targeting of Tufts Student for Deportation Stuns Friends and Teachers
• How Colleges Are Cracking Down on Students Now

For the last several generations, America’s elite academic institutions have been among the most prestigious in the world, drawing top students from across the globe and constituting a central pillar of our country’s soft power. Until last year, no previous case came to mind of an Ivy League president having been abruptly removed for political reasons. But over the last twelve months, four or five different Ivy League presidents have suffered that fate.

Similarly, I had never heard of any previous cases of peaceful college students being arrested by teams of masked federal officers, either seized from their dorm rooms in sudden raids or snatched off the streets of their local city.

Consider an ironic historical comparison. During the early 1950s the Rosenbergs were convicted and executed for their involvement in a Soviet spy-ring that gave our nuclear weapons secrets to Stalin. But as far as I know their arrest was handled in a very subdued fashion, with merely a couple of FBI agents quietly taking them into federal custody despite the capital charges that they faced. So apparently public criticism of Israel is today regarded as a far more serious and dangerous offense than nuclear espionage had been at the absolute height of the Cold War.

Indeed, the closest historical example that comes to mind were the notorious Palmer Raids of late 1919 and early 1920, which led to the deportation of several hundred immigrants. But these round-ups occurred in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and waves of terrorist bombing attacks across many American cities, with Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer narrowly surviving two separate assassination attempts, including a bombing that destroyed his own Washington, DC home. Meanwhile, most of the immigrants arrested and deported were relatively recent arrivals, generally anarchist or Bolshevik radicals who had declared their intent to overthrow the American government.

Perhaps there have been previous examples of college students arrested merely for writing campus newspaper op-eds advocating peaceful and perfectly legal positions. But I don’t recall reading of any such egregious cases in my introductory history textbooks so I tend to doubt it.

One rather strange aspect of the current situation is that no students seem to have been arrested for voicing public criticism of the American government or even President Donald Trump. Only criticism of the Jewish State of Israel or Jews themselves seems to provoke such severe legal repression. This brings to mind a very shrewd observation, widely misattributed to Voltaire:

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

Since World War II elite American universities have tended to attract the best and the brightest young men and women from around the world, thereby shaping the minds of so many future global leaders. So I suspect that these shocking news stories of harsh ideological crackdowns on academic freedom and sudden dramatic arrests by masked federal agents are already reverberating around the world, severely damaging one of the few remaining pillars of American geopolitical dominance.

Perhaps only small numbers of ordinary Americans have been following the sudden, desperate plight of these top students from Turkey, South Korea, or India, but I think that a very large fraction of the educated elites of those important American allies are fully aware of what has transpired, and they are utterly horrified.

Under the control of its pro-Israel masters, the leading figures of the Trump Administration seem determined to severely wound or actually destroy the foremost institutions of our globally-dominant system of higher education.

Indeed, even before the latest round of these striking incidents, the eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer had declared that the Israel Lobby posed the greatest threat to American freedom of speech, with his views strongly seconded by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and also former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi:

Video Link

Although I was deeply shocked by these harsh Trump Administration attacks against freedom of speech and academic freedom, perhaps I should not have been. In many respects, they merely extended what had already occurred last year under his equally pro-Israel Democratic predecessor President Joseph Biden, as I had covered at the time in numerous articles.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Zionist Destruction of American Higher Education appeared first on LewRockwell.

Sometimes, when a pendulum swings too far, there’s an urge to replace the weight with a wrecking ball.

In some ways, that’s good. Eyesores should be demolished after over-eager architects get out of hand.

Insane and Suicidal

The Biden border policy was insane to the point of being suicidal. That administration didn’t merely allow illegal aliens, it welcomed them… like a Maître d’ showing diners to their table.

From the far reaches of the world, “migrants” were funneled thru the Darien Gap, guided across Central America, escorted up Mexico, and brought into the United States, straining the seams of the social fabric.

Americans who complained about the influx were smeared as (what else?) uncompassionate bigots. But they had every right to resent an orchestrated invasion of their country, and to insist on a say regarding who came in.

They still do.

As with trespassers anywhere, anyone in the United States illegally should be evicted. Some suffering is inevitable when reversing the stream. But blame for that lies with people who encouraged intruders to break the law, not with ones trying to enforce its provisions.

Yet that enforcement must be constitutional. Regardless Americans (understandable) frustrations, the US government can’t just “round people up” without probable cause.

Alarming tattoos, sketchy social media posts, unfamiliar languages, and incriminating affiliations may be valuable leads. But they must be followed down a legal path.

The Trump Administration’s assertions aren’t adequate to kick people out, or to unilaterally ship hundreds of them to another country’s prison.

Bill of Rights

Defenders of extra-judicial seizure and deportations argue that the Bill of Rights applies only to citizens, not to non-citizens.

This is nonsense.

It doesn’t apply to either. It applies only to the government.

The Bill of Rights was written not to grant rights, but to acknowledge them… and to prevent the government from violating these prerogatives that every person possesses.

Here’s how:

The First Amendment stipulates that Congress can do nothing related to religion, speech, petitions, the press, or right of assembly (no exceptions are made for non-citizens).

The Second doesn’t limit whose right to bear arms shall not be infringed. It simply acknowledges that this right exists, and can’t be breached.

The Third prohibits soldiers from being quartered in “any” house.

The Fourth affirms the rights of “the people” (not “the citizens”) to be secure in their persons and possessions, and that warrants can’t be issued without probable cause.

The Fifth asserts that “no person” shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”

The Sixth states that “the accused” (whether citizen or not) shall “enjoy a speedy and public trial”.

The Seventh reinforces the “right of trial by jury”, without limiting it to US citizens.

The Eighth prohibits excessive bail, imposing excessive fines, or inflicting cruel and unusual punishment (on anyone, not just citizens).

The Ninth and Tenth are perhaps most important. The Ninth ensures that explicitly prohibiting the government from doing what the other amendments forbid doesn’t implicitly allow it to do anything else.

And the Tenth reminds us that the US government can’t do anything the Constitution doesn’t explicitly allow, while the states are permitted whatever it doesn’t proscribe.

These amendments were added to ensure the original Constitution wouldn’t be misconstrued to confer more power to the U.S. government than was intended by the men who wrote it or states that ratified it. Not one of them mentions US citizens.

This isn’t to say that non-citizens have all the privileges and protections citizens do. Of course they don’t. Otherwise citizenship would be meaningless. But they do retain their human rights.

Scary Name

None of these include the freedom to enter property that isn’t theirs. Anyone proven to have done so should be kicked out. But they’re entitled to due process before they are. The government doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt. The accused does.

Border “Czar” Tom Homan seems to disagree.

When asked whether presumed criminals deserve due process, he invoked a murdered girl to make his point:

“Due process? What was Laken Riley’s due process?”

This is a deflective cheap shot to stoke emotion and stifle debate. And I say this as someone whose son attends the university where Laken Riley was killed.

Murder victims don’t get due process before they’re killed. How could they? But their alleged killers should afterward. And Riley’s did. He was convicted and sentenced (the nature of which is another debate. I’d be fine if he were consigned to a Salvadoran dungeon).

Homan went on to assert that “that plane [carrying inmates to El Salvador] was full of people designated as terrorists.”

Here we go again.

Have we learned nothing (the author asks rhetorically)? Are we back to the Bush years, with the “terrorist” boogeyman giving overbearing authorities any power they claim?

The State loves nebulous labels like “terrorist”, which cause otherwise rational people to yield real liberty for the illusion of “safety”. But human beings aren’t stripped of their rights because government goons slap a scary name on them.

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 didn’t change that. This law (itself of dubious constitutionality) has been revived by the current administration to legitimize its actions.

The original statute allowed the president to detain, restrain, and deport resident aliens deemed “dangerous” during wartime. This was the act FDR used to confine Americans of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps.

That was obviously a criminal outrage, and one of countless reasons Roosevelt should’ve been impeached. But even that affront was committed during wartime.

Congress has declared no war that would authorize the Trump Administration to use this act (or any other) as rationale to arbitrarily apprehend and expel people without due process.

Illegal immigration and the border-jumpers already here are serious problems that must be addressed. But giving excessive power to the US government is a weird remedy.

After all, that’s the entity that made this mess!

Read the Whole Article

The post A Weird Remedy appeared first on LewRockwell.

I didn’t set out to learn about anti-Semitism from Palestinians. But I did.

My organization the Vulnerable People Project has worked for years to serve vulnerable communities everywhere, from Afghanistan to Chinese-occupied East Turkestan to Nigeria to Gaza. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the first step to defending the vulnerable is to see them clearly.

A characteristic event that makes a group of people vulnerable occurs when the powerful elites of the world turn their backs on them and even make it socially costly to stand with them. It’s then that you find you can’t defend them at all unless you really love them, because love is the only thing that makes those social costs worth it to you—win or lose.

But if you can’t defend someone you don’t love, you also can’t love what you don’t see—or a people you don’t know.

Until I listened to the voices of my Palestinian friends, I did not see or know the Semitic people.

I thought I did. I was an American Catholic, steeped in the language of Catholic social teaching and the American founding—the language of human dignity. I knew the slogans. I’d been to Bethlehem, walked the Via Dolorosa, touched the stone where Christ’s body was prepared for burial. I imagined myself to be an advocate for peace.

But something ugly lived in my blind spots: a comfortable, unexamined anti-Palestinian bias wrapped in piety and slogans about “standing with Israel.” It took a war to reveal it.

Then came the voices of my friends. Rev. Munther Isaac, the courageous Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, was one of the first to break through to me. He didn’t speak in slogans. He spoke with pain, patience, and prophetic clarity. “We are not collateral damage,” he said, pleading with Western Christians to remember that Palestinians are not abstractions in someone else’s theology.

His latest book, “Christ in the Rubble,” is both a cry of lament and a fierce act of hope. In it, Isaac dares to proclaim the presence of Christ—not in conquest, not in the ideology of an empire, but in the bombed-out ruins of Gaza, in the tears of weeping mothers.

I listened to Khalil Sayegh, a Christian from Gaza who refused to conform to either side’s propaganda. A man deeply committed to peace, and no less committed to truth, Khalil told me how the Israeli siege, the bombings, the checkpoints, and the walls had shaped his childhood. And he told me about Hamas—about the fear he and his family endured under their rule. He rejected both the ideology of armed resistance and the ideology of ethnic supremacy. He wanted a future. For his people. For the Jewish people. For all of us.

Khalil’s convictions were not born in any abstract study. He lost his sister and his father to the violence of the Israeli military. They were not statistics; their deaths wounded him deeply and shaped his soul. And still, he speaks without hatred. Still, he calls for peace. Still, he refuses to return evil for evil. In that, he taught me more about resisting anti-Semitism than any book I’ve read or speech I’ve heard.

Listening to Khalil and Isaac didn’t just teach me about Palestinians. It taught me how to see the hatred I had allowed to calcify inside me—hatred I had mistaken for virtue. And it taught me something else: that the struggle against anti-Semitism and the struggle against anti-Palestinianism are not opposites. They are the same fight, as I wrote in a piece at The American Conservative. This one battle will be won only by those with enough moral clarity to reject collective blame and ideological hate—wherever it festers.

Read the Whole Article

The post My Palestinian Friends Taught Me How to Combat Anti-Semitism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last Saturday the New York Times completely abandoned the official narrative of the Ukraine Conflict, thus overturning the apple cart full of lies.  Jeff Childers gives us the gist of the New York Times abandonment of the ruling lie. See here. 

What is the explanation?  My guess is that the Deep State has decided to abandon the conflict and is most likely the author of the Times’ article. The purpose of the article is to set up Zelensky as the scapegoat who caused the war to be lost and to get rid of him so that the conflict can be brought to an end.

These paragraphs show the purpose:

It was going according to plan, the Times sadly said, “until it wasn’t.” The problem wasn’t the Russians, the Americans, or even the slowly draining numbers of trained Ukrainian military forces. No, the problem was one spotlight-hogging Vladimir Zelenskyy. With two y’s, for you’ve got to be kidding me, squared.

“Zelensky was hoping to attend the United Nations General Assembly,” the Times reported. “A showing of progress on the battlefield would bolster his case for additional military support. So the Ukrainians upended the plan at the last minute — a preview of a fundamental disconnect that would increasingly shape the arc of the war.”

Childers’ translation: Zelensky started making his own decisions —ones not approved by the Americans— and the war began unraveling.

A few of us have known from day one that the Ukraine conflict was Washington’s war run out of Wiesbaden.  The questions are:  Why didn’t Putin know, and if he did know why didn’t he do anything?

Now that the New York Times has admitted that the conflict in Ukraine was America’s war with Russia disguised as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a war that, as I have often said, Trump has no stake in, Trump can end the conflict by ceasing to participate.  There is no reason for bureaucrats and emissaries to hold endless negotiations.  Trump simply declares the war is over.

Let’s hope Trump and Putin have the wits to see this.

The post The Deep State Has Used the NY Times To Announce Its Withdrawal from Washington’s Conflict With Russia appeared first on LewRockwell.

On March 15 2025 President Trump started bombing the Houtis in Yemen. The scandal about leaked text messages via signal chat regarding the bombings of the Houtis in Yemen is another diversion from the real scandal. The scandal is not that military information was leaked out to media before the attack. The scandal is that the attack was illegal and unconstitutional. That seems to be ignored.

President Trump had no authorization to bomb the Houtis in Yemen. There was no Declaration of War by Congress. There was no authorization for the use of force by Congress. There are no national security interests at stake and there was no imminent threat to the United States. Bombing the Houtis to send a message to Iran is not a justified reason to bomb the Houtis.

America First Congressional Representative, Thomas Massie, stated that the attacks on Yemen were in fact illegal as evidenced by the leaked signal chat conversation. The President should have gone to Congress as there was no imminent threat.

The United States government is running in the red and required a continuing resolution to keep the government funded. This means that we borrowed money to fund the illegal war on Yemen.

So, this begs the question, who paid for the bombs?

Guess your grand kids did. That seems fair since the grandkids of the people killed will probably grow up hating your grandkids. Since they will likely be targets, we may as well stick them with the bill too.

Now Houtis are targeting U.S. warships. U.S. airstrikes were carried out last night killing a couple more people. Trump stated that he will be bombing the Houtis for a long time and stated that the air strikes were very successful. The United States carried out 65 airstrikes in 24 hours.

The Houtis are interfering with Red Sea naval traffic. The red sea does not impact U.S. commerce greatly. It has a larger impact on Europe.

From AntiWar.com

The Houthis’ message has been that they will meet “escalation with escalation” and that their attacks won’t stop unless there is a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the Israeli blockade on aid and all other goods entering the Palestinian territory.

Apparently, in the leaked signal chat of Trump administration officials, some were celebrating targeting a residential building. That is disturbing.

The United States also carried out airstrikes in Somalia…..

President Trump is threatening to bomb Iran next:

President Trump on Sunday threatened to bomb Iran if a deal isn’t reached on the country’s civilian nuclear program.

“If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before,” Trump told NBC News in a phone interview……….Trump’s threat comes after US intelligence agencies said in their annual threat assessment that there’s no evidence Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon or that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has reversed his 2003 fatwah that banned the production of weapons of mass destruction.

Iran has said that it will engage in indirect talks with the United States, not direct talks. The United States wants direct talks. Although, Iran’s nuclear program is supposed to be a civilian program, the reality is that countries that develop nuclear weapons stop getting bullied.

Trump campaigned on not starting new wars. This neocon policy of military aggression runs contrary to an America First foreign policy, which would center on military noninterventionism. The military budget is a money laundering operation that also targets Americans as we saw with COVID 19 and the mRNA bioweapons attack on Americans.

Neocons are deliberately bankrupting America with these Middle East wars, while getting rich doing it. It is similar to a matador tiring out a bull, setting it up to be gorged. The bull depletes its resources and is finally slaughtered.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had nothing to do with National security. Neither does a war with Yemen and Iran. The propaganda that Iran can’t get a nuclear weapon is getting old. If that was such a terrible threat Russia would stop them. They are closer and if Iran was that reckless Russia would have to act.

The only reason Iran and these other Middle East countries could pose a threat to the United States is because the United States continues to bomb Middle East countries and attack them. This fuels further hatred of the United States. If a bomb blew up your family, my guess is that you may end up hating the folks that delivered that bomb…..

Does anybody still think that Iraq and Afghanistan had anything to do with the September 11, 2001, false flag attack?

Sure, there are cultural differences, and Islam is an aggressive religion. Still, an America First policy would be to not continue military aggression in the region and to have a restrictive immigration policy for people from that region of the world.

The United States can’t afford another war. As the American economy appears to be worsening, the taste for a drawn out war with Iran is not likely. Americans just got suckered into the whole ‘stand with Ukraine’ thing. And that came after the COVID brain washing operation. It is very possible that Americans may say take your war and stick it.

The bottom line is Americans did not vote for a foreign policy of military aggression. They voted for a policy that leans toward military non intervention. Contractors and insider investors may get rich on these wars, but they are doing so by sucking the life out of America and worsening the national debt.

Read the Whole Article

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We do not have free speech to talk about the weather. Our Founders, particularly James Madison who drafted the Bill of Rights, understood that our rights are not privileges granted to us by government. No, it was understood at the founding that these basic natural rights outlined by Madison were granted by our Creator and thus no mere mortal could take them away. And first among these is the First Amendment which recognizes that most basic of our natural rights: the right to express ourselves in any way we wish.

Unfortunately the US government has not always been in accord with this sentiment and has many times in our history been at war with our freedom of speech. From the alien and sedition acts at the beginning of our republic to Abraham Lincoln’s war on speech to the jailing of antiwar activists during both World Wars to Kent State, the political class is all for free speech unless it is threatening to the political class.

Recently a new front has been opened in the war on free speech and it is one that Americans must take seriously. On university campuses across the country students – both American and foreign guests – have taken to protesting US support for Israel’s actions in Gaza, where tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed.

The political class in the United States is determined to defend Israel from its critics and has responded to these protests by threatening and blackmailing the universities if they do not crack down on speech the powers-that-be do not like. Both Presidents Biden and Trump have used the power of US government funding to demand a crackdown on speech they don’t like, with President Trump recently pulling 400 million dollars in federal funding for Columbia University if they don’t silence the protesters.

The real scandal is that nearly every US university – both public and “private” – is government funded in the first place. But for politicians to use the power of the purse to deny students the right to express themselves – as long as peaceful – just adds insult to injury.

Last week a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University was arrested on the street by plainclothes government agents for reportedly simply writing an editorial in her university newspaper expressing her views on the Israel/Palestine conflict. She faces deportation from the country. And she is not alone. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has openly bragged about sending hundreds of students home because they express a political position he disagrees with. Others – including American citizens – have been expelled from their schools and have even had their degrees rescinded. For peacefully expressing a political position that powerful people in Washington disagree with.

You may also agree with the political position of these students. But to cheer their punishment by the US government is to turn your back on the founding principles of this country. Freedom of speech is a natural right not reserved for American citizens but for all of humanity. And it has been a natural right worth defending for nearly 250 years.

First they came for foreign students expressing controversial positions and many Americans cheered because they were not foreign and did not like the opinions. But make no mistake: this war on speech will not end with only foreigners being punished. It never does.

The post Free Speech Is Worth Fighting For appeared first on LewRockwell.

Most libertarians count Murray Rothbard as one of their mentors. They will know that one of Rothbard’s primary mentors was Ludwig Von Mises. But Rothbard dug deeper in his search for libertarian thinking. Here is a little-seen paper that he wrote in 1967:

The first libertarian intellectual was Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism. Little is known about his life, but apparently he was a personal acquaintance of Confucius in the late sixth century BC and like the latter came from the state of Sung and was descended from the lower aristocracy of the Yin dynasty.

Unlike the notable apologist for the rule of philosopher-bureaucrats, however, Lao-tzu developed a radical libertarian creed. For Lao-tzu the individual and his happiness was the key unit and goal of society. If social institutions hampered the individual’s flowering and his happiness, then those institutions should be reduced or abolished altogether. To the individualist Lao-tzu, government, with its “laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox,” was a vicious oppressor of the individual, and “more to be feared than fierce tigers.”

Government, in sum, must be limited to the smallest possible minimum; “inaction” was the proper function of government, since only inaction can permit the individual to flourish and achieve happiness. Any intervention by government, Lao-tzu declared, would be counterproductive, and would lead to confusion and turmoil. After referring to the common experience of mankind with government, Lao-tzu came to this incisive conclusion: “The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished… The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”

The wisest course, then, is to keep the government simple and for it to take no action, for then the world “stabilizes itself.” As Lao-tzu put it, “Therefore the Sage says: I take no action yet the people transform themselves, I favor quiescence and the people right themselves, I take no action and the people enrich themselves…”

Lao-tzu arrived at his challenging and radical new insights in a world dominated by the power of Oriental despotism. What strategy to pursue for social change? It surely was unthinkable for Lao-tzu, with no available historical or contemporary example of libertarian social change, to set forth any optimistic strategy, let alone contemplate forming a mass movement to overthrow the State. And so Lao-tzu took the only strategic way out that seemed open to him, counseling the familiar Taoist path of withdrawal from society and the world, of retreat and inner contemplation.

I submit that while contemporary Taoists advocate retreat from the world as a matter of religious or ideological principle, it is very possible that Lao-tzu called for retreat not as a principle, but as the only strategy that in his despair seemed open to him. If it was hopeless to try to disentangle society from the oppressive coils of the State, then he perhaps assumed that the proper course was to counsel withdrawal from society and the world as the only way to escape State tyranny.

It would seem that little has changed in 2500 years. The drive by some individuals to control others is clearly a permanent condition in every era. The only remaining question is how to deal with it.

In my belief, the number of libertarians will always be few. Just as there will always be those who will stop at nothing in seeking to control others, the great majority of people will always respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the empty promise of greater security, in trade for diminished freedom. Even a country that begins with a people determined to control their own lives and create their own destiny will, over generations, succumb to the empty promises. The deterioration may take one hundred years, two hundred years, or even longer, but historically, every culture eventually gives way, bit by bit, to the empty promises and becomes completely dominated. In the end, each country collapses in economic ruin—the people having lost the desire to produce, as the leaders have bled them dry.

But there is one saving grace to this historical pattern. After a collapse, it all has to start over. Parasitic leaders become anathema. The country begins anew. Those who are productive lead the way, and liberty becomes the byword.

This being the case, anyone who is inspired to believe in the libertarian principle has two choices if he lives in a country that is in the final, most oppressive stages: he can either remain there, swimming against an overwhelming tide, or he can vote with his feet. He can seek out other locations—those that are in the early stages of development, where the residents think as he does, where he is not a threat to “the system” but, by being a libertarian, is actually swimming with the tide.

Certainly, as we can see above, this is what Lao-tzu concluded over 2500 years ago (and that was before his government had the ability to fly a drone over his house.)

Of course, today, we have more options than Lao-tzu. Not only is transportation so good that we can fly anywhere in the world, but the Internet keeps us posted on the information we need to learn of locations in the world that might suit our liking better than the one we presently reside in. There are unquestionably those out there who prefer to be proles—to accept an Orwellian existence. For those who do not—those of a more libertarian bent—the good news is that there are choices—many of them. A better life elsewhere.

Here are a few closing comments from Lao-tzu that I’m fond of, taken from his Tao Te Ching. They further exemplify the fact that the problem of the libertarian is perennial. All that remains is whether we have the wisdom to effect the solution—to seek out those locations in the world that offer a better alternative.

Those in power are meddlesome …

The greater the restrictions and prohibitions,
The more people are impoverished.
The more advanced the weapons of the state,
The darker the nation …

Thus the virtuous attend to contracts
while those without virtue collect taxes …

Act before things exist

Manage them before there’s disorder

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post The First Libertarian? appeared first on LewRockwell.

A U.S. economic ‘re-balancing’ is coming. Putin is right. The post-WWII economic order ‘is gone’

The post-WWII geo-political outcome effectively determined the post-war global economic structure. Both are now undergoing huge change. What remains stuck fast however, is the general (Western) weltanschauung that everything must ‘change’ only for it to stay the same. Things financial will continue as before; do not disturb the slumber. The assumption is that the oligarch/donor class will see to it that things remain the same.

However, the power distribution of the post-war era was unique. There is nothing ‘forever’ about it; nothing inherently permanent.

At a recent conference of Russian industrialists and entrepreneurs, President Putin highlighted both the global fracture, and set out an alternate vision which is likely to be adopted by BRICS and many beyond. His address was, metaphorically speaking, the financial counterpart to his 2007 Munich Security Forum speech, at which he accepted the military défie posed by ‘collective NATO’.

Putin is now hinting that Russia has accepted the challenge posed by the post-war financial order. Russia has persevered against the financial war, and is prevailing in that too.

Putin’s address last week was, in one sense, nothing really new: It reflected the classic doctrine of the former premier, Yevgeny Primakov. No romantic about the West, Primakov understood its hegemonic world order would always treat Russia as a subordinate. So he proposed a different model – the multipolar order – where Moscow balances power blocs, but does not join them.

At its heart, the Primakov Doctrine was the avoidance of binary alignments; the preservation of sovereignty; the cultivation of ties with other great powers, and the rejection of ideology in favour of a Russian nationalist vision.

Today’s negotiations with Washington (now narrowly centred on Ukraine) reflect this logic. Russia isn’t begging for sanctions relief or threatening anything specific. It is conducting strategic procrastination: waiting out electoral cycles, testing Western unity, and keeping all doors ajar. Yet Putin is not adverse either to exerting a little pressure of his own – the window for accepting Russian sovereignty of the four eastern oblasts is not forever: “This point can also move”, he said.

It is not Russia racing ahead with the negotiations; quite the reverse – it is Trump who is racing ahead. Why? It appears to hark back to the American attachment to Kissinger-esque triangulation strategy: Subordinate Russia; peel away Iran; and then peel Russia from China. Offer carrots and threaten to ‘stick’ to Russia, and once subordinated in this way, Russia might then be detached from Iran – thus removing any Russian impediments to an Israel-Washington Axis attack on Iran.

Primakov, were he here, likely would be warning that Trump’s ‘Big Strategy’ is to tie Russia into subordinate status quickly, so that Trump can continue the Israel normalisation of the entire Middle East.

Witkoff has made Trump’s strategy very plain:

“The next thing is: we need to deal with Iran … they’re a benefactor of proxy armies … but if we can get these terrorist organisations eliminated as risks … Then we’ll normalise everywhere. I think Lebanon could normalise with Israel …That’s really possible … Syria, too: So maybe Jolani in Syria [now] is a different guy. They’ve driven Iran out … ImagineImagine if Lebanon … Syria … and the Saudis sign a normalisation treaty with Israel … I mean that would be epic!”

U.S. officials say the deadline for an Iran ‘decision’ is in the spring …

And with Russia reduced to supplicant status and Iran dealt with (in such fantastical thinking), Team Trump can turn to the main adversary – China.

Putin, of course, understands this well, and duly debunked all such illusions: “Set illusions aside”, he told delegates last week:

“Sanctions and restrictions are today’s reality – together with a new spiral of economic rivalry already unleashed …”.

“Hold to no illusions: There is nothing beyond this reality …”.

“Sanctions are neither temporary nor targeted measures; they constitute a mechanism of systemic, strategic pressure against our nation. Regardless of global developments or shifts in the international order, our competitors will perpetually seek to constrain Russia and diminish its economic and technological capacities …”.

“You should not hope for complete freedom of trade, payments and capital transfers. You should not count on Western mechanisms to protect the rights of investors and entrepreneurs … I’m not talking about any legal systems – they just don’t exist! They exist there only for themselves! That’s the trick. Do you understand?!”.

Our [Russian] challenges exist, ‘yes’ – “but theirs are abundant also. Western dominance is slipping away. New centres of global growth are taking centre stage”, Putin said.

These [challenges] are not the ‘problem’; they are the opportunity, Putin outlined: ‘We will prioritise domestic manufacturing and the development of tech industries. The old model is over. Oil and gas production will be simply the adjunct to a largely internally circulating, self-sufficient ‘real economy’ – with energy no longer its driver. We are open to western investment – but only on our terms – and the small ‘open’ sector of our otherwise closed economy will of course still trade with our BRICS partners’.

What Putin outlined effectively is the return to the mainly closed internally-circulating economy model of the German school (à la Friedrich List) and of the Russian Premier, Sergei Witte.

Just to be clear – Putin was not just explaining how Russia had transformed into a sanctions-resistant economy that could equally disdain the apparent enticements of the West, as well as its threats. He was challenging the Western economic model more fundamentally.

Friedrich List had, from the outset, been wary of Adam Smith’s thinking that formed the basis of the ‘Anglo-model’. List warned that it would ultimately be self-defeating; it would bias the system away from wealth creation, and ultimately make it impossible to consume as much, or to employ so many.

Such a shift of economic model has profound consequences: It undercuts the entirety of the transactional ‘Art of the Deal’ mode of diplomacy on which Trump relies. It exposes the transactional weaknesses. ‘Your enticement of the lifting of sanctions, plus the other inducements of western investment and technology, now mean nothing’ – for we will accept these things henceforth: on our terms only’, Putin said. ‘Nor’, he argued, ‘do your threats of a further sanctions siege carry weight – for your sanctions were the boon that took us to our new economic model’.

In other words, be it Ukraine, or relations with China and Iran, Russia can be largely impervious (short of the mutually destructive threat of WWIII) to U.S. blandishments. Moscow can take its sweet time on Ukraine and consider other issues on a strictly cost-benefit analysis. It can see that the U.S. has no real leverage.

Yet the great paradox to this is that List and Witte were right – and Adam Smith was wrong. For it is now the U.S. that has discovered that the Anglo model indeed has proved to be self-defeating.

The U.S. has been forced into two major conclusions: First, that the budget deficit coupled with exploding Federal debt finally has turned the ‘Resource Curse’ back onto the U.S.

As the ‘keeper’ of the global Reserve Currency – and as JD Vance explicitly said – it has necessarily made America’s primordial export to become the U.S. dollar. By extension, it means that the strong dollar (buoyed by a global synthetic demand for the reserve currency) has eviscerated America’s real economy – its manufacturing base.

This is ‘Dutch Disease’, whereby currency appreciation suppresses the development of productive export sectors, and turns politics into a zero-sum conflict over resource rents.

At last year’s Senate hearing with Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve Chair, Vance asked the Fed Chairman whether the U.S. dollar’s status as the global Reserve Currency might have some downsides. Vance drew parallels to the classic “resource curse”, suggesting the dollar’s global role contributed to financialization at the expense of investment in the real economy: The Anglo model leads economies to overspecialize in their abundant factor, be it natural resources, low-wage labour, or financialised assets.

The second point – related to security – a subject which the Pentagon has been harping on for ten years or so,is that the Reserve Currency (and consequentially strong dollar) has pushed many U.S. military supply lines out to China. It makes no sense, the Pentagon argues, for the U.S. to depend on Chinese supply lines to provide the inputs to U.S. military manufactured weapons – by which it would then fight China.

The U.S. Administration has two answers to this conundrum: First, a multilateral agreement (on the lines of the 1985 Plaza Accord) to weaken the value of the dollar (and pari passu, therefore, to increase the value of the partner states’ currencies). This is the ‘Mar-a-Lago Accord’ option. The U.S.’ solution is to force the rest of the world to appreciate their currencies in order to improve U.S. export competitiveness.

The mechanism for achieving these objectives is to threaten trade and investment partners with tariffs and withdrawal of the U.S. security umbrella. As a further twist, the plan considers the possibility to revalue U.S. gold reserves – a move that would inversely cut the valuation of the dollar, U.S. debt, and foreign holdings of U.S. Treasuries.

The second option is the unilateral approach: In the unilateral approach, a ‘user fee’ on foreign official holdings of U.S. Treasuries would be imposed to drive reserve managers out of the dollar – and thus weaken it.

Well, it is obvious, is it not? A U.S. economic ‘re-balancing’ is coming. Putin is right. The post-WWII economic order “is gone”.

Will bluster and threats of sanctions force big states to strengthen their currencies and accept U.S. debt restructuring (i.e. haircuts imposed on their bond holdings)? It seems improbable.

The Plaza Accord realignment of currencies depended on the co-operation of major states, without which unilateral moves can turn ugly.

Who is the weaker party? Who has the leverage now in the balance of power? Putin answered that question on 18 March 2025.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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“Contrary to Western media’s trash talk, Russian military has not been degraded. If anything, it has been significantly upgraded.” —Alex Krainer

You’re going to see what a truly consequential span of weeks, looks like, as Western Civ goes into full churn on April’s doorstep. Remember, TS Eliot called it the “cruelest month.” Too many uncomfortable things are converging, too many ongoing operations are unwinding, too many tensions are breaking.

The conclusion of “Joe Biden’s” Ukraine War fiasco looms. You can tell because The New York Times published a gigantic piece Sunday detailing how the Pentagon and the CIA actually ran all of Ukraine’s tactical operations out of a base in Wiesbaden, Germany — after building a colossal Ukraine war machine post our 2014 color revolution in Kiev. Since the very start of the hot war in 2022, we did all the targeting for the weapons we gave them and planned their every move. What a surprise! (Not.)

The motive behind all that, as conceived by US neo-cons and NATO neo-morons, was to “weaken” Russia, bust it up, and seize its resources. All the sanctions piled on only induced Russia into an import-replacement campaign that actually strengthened its economy, while the war led to a revolution in Russian war-fighting tactics and advanced weaponry. Now, the whole thing is ending in Ukraine’s defeat and the West’s humiliation.

The Times could have published this in 2023-24, but it would have been a major embarrassment for “Joe Biden” and his shadow managers moving into the election. They put it out just now because the jig is up and the paper desperately needs to pretend that it’s ahead of events to preserve the last shreds of its credibility.

Mr. Trump, the uber-realist, knows that the Russians are going to roll up in Ukraine this spring and there is increasingly not much that can be done about that, except to try to put the best face on it — which is, that it wasn’t his war. As long as the coke freak Zelensky remains in charge, Ukraine will be negotiation-unworthy, as the Russian phrase goes. So, US-Russia peace talks were largely diplomatic showbiz. Both Putin and Mr. Trump were painfully aware of this, and hence, Mr. Trump’s latest performative bluster about “more sanctions” will probably not amount to anything.

And also hence, the synchronized idiocy on display in France, Germany, and the UK. They were all-in on the neo-con scheme that is now falling apart and its failure has driven them plumb crazy. As the US drops out of the stupid proxy war, they declare their intention to take it from here and go beat-up Russia. Their war-drums are teaspoons beating on so many quiches.

Soon-to-be chancellor Friedrich Merz proposes an 800-billion-Euro debt spree to finance the re-arming of Germany, which, just now, is utterly incapable of war. He is insane. German industry is collapsing from a lack of affordable natural gas (as arranged by “Joe Biden” blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, danke schön). Turning Volkswagen factories to missile production will not help the German people one bit. It probably will remind them about the Weimar hyper-inflation, though.

Macron pledges to put French boots on the ground in Ukraine. Ain’t gonna happen. Today, his stooge judiciary found political rival Marine LePen guilty of a Mickey Mouse offense in order to bar her from running against him in the next election. Ain’t gonna work. He will provoke the biggest national uprising since the Bastille. His government will be too busy putting down French Revolution 2.0 to play war games in history’s graveyard of armies. Maybe he’ll try nukes. I’m sure that’ll work — if you’re eager to see Russian hypersonic “hazelnuts” rain down on the Île-de-France.

And then, there is the amazing idiot PM Keir Starmer in the UK, calling on his “coalition of the willing” to step up and intervene in the lost cause that is Ukraine. How many hands went up on that call? For practical purposes, the Brits have no war-fighting capacity whatsoever, and no resources for generating such capacity. And, anyway, they are facing some dreadful combo of a civil war / internal jihad against their own indigenous population, plus an economic collapse cherry-on-top.

In short, Europe has so many incipient existential problems that the whole story is about to shift its focus from the already-sealed fate of Ukraine to the very dark prospects for the core nations of Old-World Western Civ. I wouldn’t plan a vacation there this year.

Meanwhile, expect a pile-up of consequence in our own sore-beset USA in the upcoming cruelest month. Today, the DOGE team visits the CIA. It could spell an end to decades of mad frolics emanating from that gigantic black box of black ops. Director John Ratcliffe has cordially invited Mr. Musk’s technicians and he is probably eager to discover exactly what mischief has been hidden from him by the immense, secretive, foul bureaucracy he lately assumed command over.

The Epstein materials recently recovered out of the FBI’s rogue New York offices of the agency are considered so critical by Director Patel that he assigned 1000 agents to review and process the docs full-time. That includes redacting names of many additional sex-trafficked children. Expect to see the release of a lot of that in the next thirty days with dire reverberations in the celebrity realms of politics, finance, and showbiz.

JudgeGate is moving toward its climax at the same time. Tuesday this week, Rep. Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the DC circuit’s lawfare offensive against Mr. Trump’s executive authority. It would be nice to hear from DC district judges James Boasberg, Amy Berman Jackson, Tanya Chutkan, Beryl Howell, and Amir Ali, who have been zealously active in what looks like a coordinated lawfare campaign against the chief executive. Norm Eisen is not a judge, but he is the central conductor of the lawfare orchestra, and he has a bit of ‘splainin’ to do. One can even imagine something like a RICO referral emerge from that rather brazen operation. Anyway, the whole matter is going to land in the Supreme Court before April is out.

Also expect a lot of movement in the Covid-19 story coming out of the newly-reorganized CDC, NIH, FDA, NIAID, and other corners of the public health bureaucracy. Evidence is piling up fast of tragic and awful blowback from the Covid vaccine. There is too much to be ignored any longer and momentous decisions must follow, starting with taking the Pfizer and Moderna shots off-line. The entire regime of data collection, processing, and public release is about to change and the nation will be shocked by what gets disclosed.

Then there are the financial markets. They do not like the kind of shifts in public perception that return of consequence must bring. Gold alone is sending out a very vivid distress signal for everything else pretending to be an asset or a form of collateral. The equity markets have been wobbling for weeks. Look out below as the Easter eggs roll.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Convergence Calling appeared first on LewRockwell.

Only when one reads multiple accounts on an issue one will find the morsels which reveal underlying issues and motives.

Of current interests are the psychological factors in the negotiations between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. That is why I read pieces like this:

Trump on Putin: ‘I don’t think he’s going to go back on his word’ – Politico, Mar 30 2025

President Donald Trump said Sunday he basically trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin to do the right thing as he attempts to hash out a peace deal in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump said of Putin: “I don’t think he’s going to go back on his word. You’re talking about Putin. I don’t think he’s going to go back on his word. I’ve known him for a long time. We’ve always gotten along well.”

Trump’s words seemed to be a softening of his language earlier Sunday.

Saying he was “pissed off,” Trump had been critical of Putin in an interview with Kristen Welker of NBC. “If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” Trump said.

Previously I had read an ABCnews take that was a bit more extensive:

President Donald Trump on Sunday hinted at his apparent frustration with the lack of progress toward a peace deal in Ukraine, telling NBC News he was “very angry” at Putin after the Russian leader again criticized Zelenskyy and called for his removal in favor of a transitional government.

Trump added that he would consider applying new sanctions on Russia’s lucrative oil exports and on any nations purchasing its oil. China and India are among the most significant customers for Russian oil products.

The president later told reporters on Air Force One that his administration was making significant progress toward ending the war. Asked about his relationship with Putin, Trump responded, “I don’t think he’s going to go back on his word.”

“I’ve known him for a long time,” Trump said. “We’ve always gotten along well despite the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.”

Trump had previously allured to the Russiagate hoax when talking about Putin. He seems to see Putin as a victim of the scam just like he himself was a victim of it. I believe this to be, at least in Trump’s eyes, an issue that bonds the two men together. It is what makes a deal possible. It is important – so I wonder why Politico would leave it out.

The AP report of the Air Force One gaggle also has no mention of it:

On his flight back to Washington on Sunday evening, Trump reiterated his annoyance toward Putin but somewhat softened his tone.

“I don’t think he’s going to go back on his word,” he said. “I’ve known him for a long time. We’ve always gotten along well.”

Asked when he wanted Russia to agree to a ceasefire, Trump said there was a “psychological deadline.”

“If I think they’re tapping us along, I will not be happy about it,” he said.

When reports disagree on what was said or happened it is always good to back to the source. Forbes has put up a full video of Sunday’s Air Force One gaggle. Here is my transcript of the relevant part (starting at 6:38 min):

Q: Would you say your relationship with Vladimir Putin is at its lowest point right now?

A: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he going back on his word. You are talking about Putin. I don’t think he is going back on his word. I have known him for a long time. We have always gotten along well. Despite the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax created by Clinton and Schiff and all these lunatics. And that really was a dangerous point. That was a very dangerous thing they did to this country. It was a pure, unadulterated scam, hoax. No, but I think he will be okay. Be if he isn’t …

I was disappointed in a certain way in some of the things he said over the last day or two having to do with Zelenski. Because he considers Zelenski not credible. He is supposed to make a deal with him whether you like him or don’t like him. So I wasn’t happy with that. But I think he is gonna be good. …

It is not only that Trump sees himself and Putin as victims of the Russiagate story. He does regard it as having been dangerous. To make (false) claims about political interference by another nuclear power needlessly could have led, and still could lead, to more serious altercations.

I find it interesting that Trump is thinking in these terms. He knows and fears what a real clash with Russia could lead to.

Why won’t the media relay that?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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“Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there.” – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

A few weeks ago as I was scrolling through my many emails, I stopped at an article in the online version of the New York Times called “HOW COVID REMADE AMERICA,” and clicked to open it. The article was accompanied by several photos taken during the COVID-19 psyop.

Then the unthinkable happened. The first photo I saw showed a large city park with dozens of white circles painted on the fresh green grass, indicating where two (at most) people could gather without risking contaminating, or getting contaminated by, those within any of the other circles nearby. Suddenly, and all over again, I started boiling over with rage.

Who on earth came up with this idea? Who on earth could have possibly complied with it and thought they were doing the right thing? Who on earth could have thought any of this had anything to do with “the science” that all the obedient guinea pigs in that deadly experiment had worshipped as if it had divine attributes? Looking at that photo and at the other photos brought the utter stupidity and sheepish compliance of so many billions of people in those terrible times—and my anger about it all—right back into my life as if it was all still happening right now.

I felt sick to my stomach. It made me so angry and, at the same time, so sad. There, alone in my house, I wanted to scream and cry in the same breath. Howl, I think that’s the word for it. I’ve been thinking that I’ve been suffering from a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. Looking at these photos that accompanied the litany of lies—people sitting in their cars and allowing medical professionals in fully armored hazmat suits shove those long swabs up their noses painfully close to their frontal lobes to test for the asymptomatic presence of a virus that was supposedly so dangerous that it easily spread in the air all around us; the emptied shelves in grocery stores because of panic buying and forced factory closures; masked children outside in a park on a sunny day; the vacant office buildings and empty city streets—and gauging my reaction to them, confirmed my self-diagnosis.

We popularly refer to moments like this as being “triggered.” We make fun of snowflakes being triggered by, say, Trump’s presidential victory that sent many college students across the nation scrambling to “wellness spaces” for a good cry as they piled on the pounds with free cookies and milk. But being triggered is a real phenomenon. Ask war veterans. Ask abuse victims. Ask car accident survivors. A traumatizing event enters the body and lodges in places out of reach of normal consciousness. Until, that is, something happens in the world around us that brings those memories welling up from the unconscious—unwelcomed, unwanted, unavoidable—and into the here and now. A photograph. A sound. A dream. A scene from a movie. A person from your past you catch a glimpse of on a city street. And when that happens the traumatizing event is relived all over again and in real time but only in the mind in a kind of endless and inexpugnable film loop.

There were subheads, equally disturbing, describing how “it” (the virus) remade America: “It broke our faith in public health.” “It shattered our cities and disordered society.” “It shackled the U.S. with debt.” “It destabilized and undermined politics almost everywhere.” “It scarred children.” “It left us sicker.” But there was not any “it” that rained down upon us with so much destruction. It was “they,” and I’m not talking about woke pronouns. I’m talking about the complicity of the New York Times and an entire global army of media apparatchiks for creating the panic about a virus out of thin air by lying about how deadly it was. They and their nefarious collaborators bear the responsibility for the annihilation of so much life on earth and of what we hold dear.

I remembered seeing people being arrested while strolling on beaches or in parks; a cowering, elderly woman in a grocery store signaling at me to pull my mandated mask up over my nose (I was so oxygen-starved and furious that I wanted to ram my cart into hers right there in the condiment aisle); the heinous outdoor seating at restaurants on cold New York City streets; the blocking of my Facebook posts alerting my few hundred contacts about the war that had been launched against us; a friend insisting that everyone invited to her 50th birthday party, which was now going to be held outdoors, wear a mask (I was invited and did not go); seeing people alone in their cars with a mask on; being disinvited to weddings of friends and members of my extended family who were requiring all attendees to be jabbed “out of an abundance of caution”; fake president Joe Biden’s televised, maniacal speeches scolding scofflaws like me to get injected with the bioweapon or else….

***

While looking for a certain book I wanted to write about for this edition of Underlined Sentences, I found A Grief Observed. When the thin volume caught my eye, sandwiched between two bigger books, I knew right away that I wanted to write about it instead of the one I had been looking for. Call it a happy accident. Synchronicity, as Carl Jung might say. I’ve been wanting to write about grief for some time now, so my stumbling upon this book seemed to have a meaningful if not causal connection. It was as if my desire and this book had mysteriously found one another. As if I had not chosen it but rather it had chosen me.

It’s been five years since governments around the world shut down their nations and mandated lockdowns, school closures, and ultimately, in many instances, injections with a bioweapon peddled as a vaccine, and began what would become the death of the world as we’d known it brought down by the greatest of all crimes against humanity. That’s not the only thing I am grieving.

A Grief Observed is a brief and poignant memoir about the loss of a woman who Lewis—an aloof professor and theologian (first at Oxford University then at Cambridge University), a prolific and influential writer, and a devout Christian—met late in life and who died of cancer not long after they had married. Although they had known each other for only eight years, and four of those years as a married couple, Joy Davidman Gresham had come from America and changed Lewis’ life forever: He fell deeply in love for the first and, as fate would have it, the only time, in his life. And he despaired when she died.

In the days immediately following her death, Lewis wrote cursive journal entries in several exercise books for children. And what he wrote in those four books would become A Grief Observed, in which he writes: “I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

Douglas Gresham, the younger of Joy’s two sons, both of whom had eventually come with her to England to live with Lewis, writes in his introduction to my copy of the 1994 edition of A Grief Observed: “The book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane. It tells of the agony and the emptiness of a grief such as few of us have to bear, for the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress.”

***

For the past five years, I’ve lived in grief and have thought about living in grief. What I’m grieving is a different kind of loss from the one that brought Lewis to his knees, yet also deeply personal. I’m grieving the loss of trust and of the people who had broken my trust in them. As the COVID-19 psyop swept o’er the land, I trusted my friends and colleagues to see the evil hoax for what it was, as I did, and to ignore it or rise against it and just say no. To do the right thing and carry on.

But they didn’t. The heart of the matter for me was not what the governments around the world did to us; it’s what so many billions of people, including most of those closest to me, allowed the governments around the world to do to us. It was their uninformed and sheepish and, in some instances, enthusiastic, compliance that felt to me like a stab in the back. We all go through life with crosses to bear. I’ve had—and have—several. But this one—the anger I’ve felt because of this mass compliance—would become, and remain, my gravest, heaviest, and most persistent cross for the past five years.

Curiously, though, with the coming of warmer weather and longer days here in the Northeast where I’ve lived most of my life, I thought I had finally made some kind of tenuous peace with this wretched betrayal of not only myself, but also of all of us who knew better—and, indeed, against the very essence of our shared humanity. I’d started to tap into the energies and introspections of the Christian Lenten season to change something inside me, as Jesus always calls on us to do but during these forty days are asked to pay particular attention.

Over the past five years, I might have passed through the five stages of grief famously described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was beginning to find myself at the fifth stage of an uneasy acceptance with the way things had gone with the COVID-19 psyop, although not without intermittent flare-ups of all the other stages, especially the anger. That’s the one that has most persistently dogged me in my attempts to move on. Never in my life have I felt so angry for so long.

I have turned to some familiar ancient and timeless wisdom for guidance. I have continued to remind myself of a memorable teaching from my years of Buddhist study and practice, which I have noted in previous columns: Harboring anger against someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

As if that simple phrase were not enough to remind me of anger’s toll, there’s this lesson about love as taught by Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians, a lesson many of us are familiar with because it is frequently recited during wedding ceremonies and which I’ve been reading from time to time these days: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13: 1-3)

Then there’s this teaching from the mouth of Jesus himself that I’ve also been re-reading in my Bible: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteousness. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?” (Matthew 5:43-47)

Above all, there are Jesus’ dying words as he hangs in excruciating pain on the cross: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)

What are ordinary, imperfect mortals like me supposed to do with all these timeless, perfect wisdom teachings about forgiveness and love in the midst of the immense brokenness and deadly ignorance of the world in which we’ve found ourselves? One commentator in his blog called Christian Art has these sage words of advice: “Many of us might struggle to identify anyone we’d consider an ‘enemy.’ We often reserve that term for war situations or for people we intensely dislike. However, if we broaden the definition to include anyone who has hurt, upset, or wronged us (even in minor ways) perhaps a few faces come to mind? When Jesus asks us to love these people, He isn’t calling for warm, fuzzy feelings. He appeals to our will, not our emotions. At the very least, we can choose to wish the best for those we find difficult. How do we do this? Through prayer. Praying for someone we struggle with is not only an act of love but also a step towards healing—both for us and, potentially, for them.”

I’ve been praying the last five years, but mostly for myself, to be honest. I’ve prayed for spiritual healing, divine intervention. Not that I’m all that skilled in praying. No matter. As Lewis himself writes in his 1963 book Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer: “I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best…. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard.”

I pray to be caught off my guard. I pray for a spontaneous remission of the cancer of my wrath. I pray because I’ve sometimes felt that I’ve been slowly dying, both inside myself and to the world around me. I pray because I’m also grieving my former self, a self that no longer is. Just like someone who dies no longer is. In my body I am here and appear not much different than I was five years ago. But I sometimes hardly recognize the man inside.

The insane lockdowns may have passed but I’ve continued to isolate myself more than I did before the COVID-19 psyop, and not because I’ve ever been afraid of contracting a supposedly deadly virus that posed no threat to any normally healthy person. It was because I became fed up with anyone and everyone who fell for the ruse, which happened to be nearly all of my old friends and colleagues. And the bitterness lingers like a bad dream that I can, unfortunately, recall in astonishing detail simply because it went on for so long and destroyed so much. Only it was not just a bad dream.

Like a refugee is forced to flee his home country that’s been taken over by a murderous despot and his henchmen and to take up his life in a new country, I’ve felt like an exile even though I’ve never left my home. And now I’m trying to find my footing in this strange, new world that surrounds me.

For the America I once knew is no more. In March 2020, it had been sacked and plundered in a coup d’état run by a shadow state, known by many as the deep state, an unelected bureaucratic cabal of a military-industrial-pharmaceutical-media complex that is accountable to no one. And where I live in the Hudson Valley of New York, a bastion of liberals, who with the invasion of the COVID-19 psyop had suddenly and, to me, inexplicably, abandoned their once proud heritage of supporting free speech, individual sovereignty, and world peace—and among whom I once counted myself—have left me feeling as if I am living behind enemy lines.

For they support none of this now and instead shoot their misguided arrows of blame for all the ills of the nation at the wrong target, thereby missing the mark. It bears noting here that the Greek word for “sin” is “hamartia,” which means “to miss the mark” or “to fail in one’s purpose.” It is commonly used in the New Testament, which was originally written in Greek, to describe various forms of wrongdoing or moral failure. Or, in a word, sin. Which has nothing to do with any sort of lascivious life we normally envision when we think of a sinful world. This sort of sin is far more subtle, as evil often is. It is the sin of ignorance.

***

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you,” Lewis writes in A Grief Observed. “It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with people…. Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”

When billions of frightened souls fell for the ruse, that rope that Lewis writes about—the ties that commonly bind us to one another—snapped. All I had in my hands then was the equivalent of the frayed end of a rope, the other end of which was held by billions of others as they plunged into an abyss of imaginary fear whipped up by those very same lies that I and a pitifully small number of others so easily saw through. And as this happened, I was reminded of another Buddhist teaching of the grief felt by an armless mother watching her only child get swept away by a raging river.

All I could do was roil against that raging river of propaganda for sweeping away my trust in human intelligence and discernment that I had expected would have instinctively led us all to higher ground and out of harm’s way; roil at the deluge of lies that so suddenly flooded the earth in a kind of recurrence of the biblical account of the great flood and Noah and his ark. Only in this version, it was not God who was destroying the world; it was the scorpions that we read about in Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

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“I’ve often wondered why conservative Christians remain the most faithful friends of American Jews but have their friendship repeatedly spurned in favor of a Jewish alliance with the cultural and political left.” So wrote Paul Gottfried, editor of Chronicles magazine, a conservative monthly. The recent war in Gaza began with the butchering of 1,200 innocent Israelis, but as of this moment the response has been more than 55,000 dead Palestinians and over 80,000 wounded—a number of civilian casualties that would mortify Genghis Khan. The slightest mention of these innocent deaths caused by indiscriminate Israeli bombing has the neocons and AIPAC, not to mention my favorite newspaper, the New York Post, claiming the Nazis are back and a new Holocaust is about to begin. Only last week, 463 dead and 600 injured Palestinians were dismissed as if an exterminator had gotten rid of unwanted insects in a housing area. Anyone protesting is more likely to be called a Nazi than to be heard. In Britain, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, two conservative papers, hardly mentioned the casualties of the bombing. Columnist after columnist extolled Israel’s restraint in the face of 1,200 dead, as if the number 1,200 vastly exceeded the number 55,000.

Are Jewish lives far more precious than Palestinian ones? In America and Britain it is a given that Black Lives Matter. Well, they do in America and Britain, but they do not matter at all in Africa. Nor do Palestinian lives matter, at least not enough to be mentioned in America and in Britain. History has been weaponized by Zionists, and the Holocaust is invoked to silence any criticism of Israel. As I write, another 85 flies—sorry, Palestinians—have been killed. Watching this on screen, I see a father holding a dead 2-year-old child and demanding to know: What has he done to Israel? He is guilty of what?

“At times I wonder if Bibi Netanyahu spent his youth pulling wings from insects.”

Netanyahu ordered food, fuel, and medicine to be stopped for 2.3 million Gazans just before the resumption of hostilities. If this wasn’t a major crime, my name is Adolf Hitler. Western media correctly describes the October 7 Hamas attack as sadistic barbarism. What angers me is the same media fails to decry the starvation, the atrocities, and the bombing of women, children, and old people by 2,000-pound bombs provided to Israel by Americans.

Any criticism of Israeli brutalities is immediately labeled anti-Semitic, this being among the oldest tricks of the neocons, those nice guys who gave us the Iraq War; people like the Podhoretzes, the Kristols, the Feiths, the Wolfowitzes, and the Kagans. They knew what they were doing. Dubious accusations of anti-Semitism were reserved for paleoconservatives like my friend Pat Buchanan, a great American patriot who was not fooled about what lay behind the war: Israel worried about Saddam and needed Uncle Sam to pull the rug out from under him.

And then there’s Mearsheimer and Walt, two brilliant intellectuals who criticized the Jewish lobby and wrote some terrific books about the lobby’s influence in America. The level of unhinged, ferocious hatred of their books, devoid of any proof that they are anti-Semitic, was hysterical and venomous. Had they been related to Hitler by blood, and had they partaken in putting Jews in concentration camps, the attacks on their persons would not have been worse. But what really bothers me is the media’s lack of interest where Palestinian deaths and injuries are concerned. We used to think that various human subjects, like Rome’s slaves, gladiators, and barbarians, were not worthy of moral consideration. Eventually we corrected that, or thought we did. Roman emperor Domitian spent his youth catching and killing flies. He became an elder tyrant and the cruelest of them all. At times I wonder if Bibi Netanyahu spent his youth pulling wings from insects.

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Thanks, Gail Appel. 

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