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Putin-the-Unready?

Sab, 04/10/2025 - 05:01

Leaders of European countries with limited military ability are openly declaring their preparation for war with Russia.  The Baltic states, Poland, Netherlands, France, Germany, and the UK speak if they look forward to a war that would utterly destroy them.  It is a mystery as Russia poses no threat to them and wants nothing from them but a mutual security agreement.  

I believe Putin himself has responsibility for this state of affairs.  Putin’s efforts to restrain the conflict in Ukraine have been misunderstood.  Putin is perceived as irresolute and the Russian military as incapable.  Trump calls Russia a paper tiger and speaks of Ukraine with sufficient European help transitioning from the defense to the offense and invading Russia.

This extremely dangerous way of thinking is the reason I have often said that Putin’s never-ending, ever-widening war was a strategic blunder, a blunder that Putin continues to make.

With European politicians declaring their preparation for war, is Putin paying attention, or will he again be Putin-the-Unready as he was in South Ossetia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014, in 2022 when Russia was forced to intervene in Donbas, and when the Russian strategic bomber force was attacked on June 1, 2025?

Putin’s restraint and Lavrov’s pleading for negotiations have convinced the West that Russia is an easy target.  This mistaken conviction is fomenting a major war.  

Russians do not seem to understand the situation.  This morning on RT political analyst Nadezhda Romanenko attributes the Western war talk to “Western anxieties and domestic political calculations.”  It would be more realistic to attribute the war talk to setting up Russia as an aggressor that must be deterred.  The Russians simply cannot comprehend that they are targeted as an obstacle to Western hegemony.   Everywhere in the West  the image that is maintained is Russian aggression.  Wikipedia, for example, describes the 2008 Russian war with Georgia as Russian aggression, the 2022 intervention in Donbas as a Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Estonia and Poland recently made claims of Russian entry into their air space.  Every possible sign of Russian aggression is created.  The West is uninterested in Putin’s reassurances.  Why is Russia unable to understand this?

The post Putin-the-Unready? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Vaccine Amnesia: Why Did the Media Stop Covering Vaccine Disasters?

Sab, 04/10/2025 - 05:01

A key theme I’ve tried to highlight in this publication is that the same medical catastrophes keep repeating (because those responsible are never held accountable), so by understanding what happened in the past, you can see and understand what is happening now and what will likely happen in the future.

For example, because vaccines are “risky but necessary,” the medical profession and government, again and again, concluded that they needed to tell the public all vaccines were “safe and effective” as the potential injuries a mass vaccination campaign would cause were outweighed by “necessary” benefit the vaccines could offer. As such, examples can be found again and again of severe injuries being systematically covered up for the “greater good” (e.g., the earliest documented example I know of this happened in 1874 with the smallpox vaccine) and health authorities concocting the same set of excuses we’ve seen since smallpox as to why those vaccines failed to prevent the diseases they were supposed to.

Since the risks outweigh the benefits for most vaccines (detailed here), a mass vaccination paradigm can only be sustained by censoring all evidence of harm, and then using that absence of evidence as proof the vaccines are safe. As such, over the decades, we’ve seen more and more be done to conceal those harms.

For example, as I showed here, for almost a century, severe neurological injuries following vaccination were routinely reported in the medical literature. Now however, vaccine injuries are censored, and it is virtually impossible to get anything critical of vaccines published in a “reputable” academic journal.

Likewise, despite the “science” saying vaccines are safe, it’s nearly impossible to get ahold of any raw dataset which could objectively answer that question—which Steve Kirsch awoke the public to throughout COVID-19 by publicizing the endless stonewalling he ran into during his relentless quest to get that data.

Note: VAERS, a publicly available injury database the public could submit to, was originally created as part of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act to address an unwillingness by both doctors and vaccine makers to ever report injuries (and hence claim the absence of them was evidence they didn’t happen). Once the act was enacted, the media, government, and medical industry has done all they could to sabotage and disparage it (as they never wanted an open reporting system).

Oddly enough, one of the few datasets we got access to on the dangers of the COVID vaccines originated from South Korea, where electronic medical records from the national health insurance service (totaling roughly half of Seoul’s population) were analyzed, which revealed a large increase in many common disorders.

Following this, another study was published, which revealed the COVID vaccines caused a 68% increase in depression, a 44% increase in anxiety and dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, and a 93.4% increase in sleep disorders.

I mention this, both because it’s unconscionable no one else was ever given access to databases which could have shown these serious issues, and because recently, I learned through Sonia Elijah that they completed a study everyone who’s seen a rapid cancer following COVID vaccination has waited years for. Assessing the link between COVID vaccines and cancer, it found six were significantly elevated in vaccine recipients one year after receiving the vaccine:

Thyroid (+35.1%), Stomach (+33.5%), Colorectal (+28.3%), Lung (+53.3%), Breast (+19.7%), Prostate (+68.7%).

Additionally, they found many cancers were increased by boosting:

Pancreas (+125%) Stomach (+23%) Brain (+24%) Esophagus (+21%) Liver (+17%) Bile Ducts (+55%) Bladder (+21%) Cervical (+27%), Prostate (+26%), Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (+201%)
Note: the increase in Pancreas and Stomach cancer was statistically significant.

If you take a step back, and consider how many people received the vaccines, the social costs of cancer spikes like these are staggering and the decision to withhold data like this from the public to “avoid creating vaccine hesitancy” was one of the greatest crimes of the COVID catastrophe.

Mass Media Censorship

Actions like this were only possible due to the corporate media suppressing all dissent against the vaccines—even when large numbers of Americans felt the mandatory vaccines were severely injuring or killing their recipients and the press hence had a foundational duty to cover.

In response to a FOIA request filed by TheBlaze, [Biden’s] HHS revealed that it purchased advertising from major news networks including ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as cable TV news stations Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, legacy media publications including the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, digital media companies like BuzzFeed News and Newsmax, and hundreds of local newspapers and TV stations. These outlets were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety.

Note: the amount spent per network is unknown, but likely totaled a billion.

Because of this, many people in the media wanted to speak out against the vaccines, but effectively could not, and to my knowledge, other than a few Fox hosts lightly criticizing them, only two did. One, a recently hired reporter at a local station, on live television announced Fox was muzzling stories the public wanted to hear (and was promptly fired) after which she provided secret recordings to Project Veritas corroborating this censorship.

The other was Tucker Carlson, who was able to leverage both being the most popular news host in America and having a show which did not rely upon pharmaceutical funding to speak out against the vaccines without being fired. Nonetheless, this was still a huge risk for him and eventually, after airing this remarkable 4-19-23 segment (which took a lot of courage), at immense cost to Fox News, was immediately fired.

After leaving Fox News, Tucker began speaking openly about how much pharmaceutical money prevented stories highlighting their dangers from ever being aired. Likewise, other former news hosts have corroborated his accounts. For example:

When I was on Fox News and we talked about the possibility of vaccine injuries … They would RUN out to the set to tell you to shut that down.—Megyn Kelley

Likewise, Sharyl Attkisson (an acclaimed CBS investigative journalist) has extensively chronicled (e.g., in her 2020 book and even more so in her 2025 book) how in the early 2000s, the pharmaceutical industry, feeling the pressure from negative coverage of disastrous vaccination programs was creating for them, lobbied to prevent future negative coverage. Once this happened, it became impossible for her to air well produced segments which were critical of any vaccine initiative, and likewise, that in the post-2000s, stories on vaccine risks “disappeared” due to advertiser pressure.

However, things were not always this way. Rather, major networks used to air numerous scathing stories about vaccine disasters—and in many cases, the dangers they covered were so explicit by current journalistic standards that I frequently find sharing those (previously inconceivable) segments with people on the fence about vaccination opens their minds to the entire mess.

Let’s now review some of the forgotten vaccine disasters and the evolving censorship emerging alongside them.

Mass Censorship

The Vietnam War was considered by many to be the event that broke the public’s trust in the Federal Government.

Note: many believe the specific event which turned the American public against the Vietnam War was the My Lai massacre—an event where American soldiers decided to commit war crimes against Vietnamese civilians until a different group of American soldiers on their own volition decided to stop the massacre. I went back and forth on explicitly detailing it in this article, as I believe it’s critical to understand what war brings out in people, but I eventually decided it was too graphic for many of the readers.

This loss of trust in the government of course alarmed the government, and led to the Pentagon conducting a coordinated campaign to prevent this from happening again, which was accomplished by:

•Ending the draft and switching to an all volunteer army.

•Ensuring the public was only fed a sanitized picture of what happened in each future war (e.g., with embedded journalists providing government approved footage and the mass media being strongly discouraged from providing any footage which exposed the horrors of each war).

Note: Major Colin Powell was one of the Pentagon officers who led the effort to cover up the Mai Lai Massacre. He then rose through the ranks, eventually becoming George Bush’s Secretary of Defense and infamously lied to the UN about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction—a lie that killed hundreds of thousands of people and cost the US trillions of dollars. Powell’s case is one of many which illustrates how much the government rewards those who cover up its atrocities.

It is hard to even begin to describe how much work was put into hiding the horrors of war from the public, and sadly it was remarkably effective, transforming war from something much of the American public vehemently opposed to an abstract idea they were largely apathetic towards.
Note: the best documentary I have seen explaining how military propaganda transformed as the decades went by is “Why We Fight.

The sanitizing of war, in turn, has many parallels to the evolving medical censorship we’ve faced. For example, the same public relations firm that created a heart-wrenching but entirely made-up testimony to drag the US into the Gulf War, has a long history of working with the pharmaceutical industry and was contracted to both promote the COVID narrative and eliminate vaccine hesitancy.1,2,3

Read the Whole Article

The post Vaccine Amnesia: Why Did the Media Stop Covering Vaccine Disasters? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Leftists and Globalists Have Merged Into the Same Horrific Entity

Sab, 04/10/2025 - 05:01

America is thoroughly divided. It has been divided and polarized for many years. Anyone who thinks they can stop it or fix it is fooling themselves. Anyone who thinks that conflict is avoidable is delusional. Anyone who thinks the division is “artificial” or a “false left/right paradigm” is naive. It is very real, tangible and undeniable.

Many would argue that the core problem is the globalist cabal, influencing the population from the shadows, stoking violence from useful idiots and controlling every aspect of civil unrest. While these social engineers very much exist and they do try to play both sides of the chess board, they are only able to influence conflicts to a point.

They didn’t create the conditions that make the conflict possible. Those conditions are inherent and eternal. The globalists merely exploit the divisions that already exist. Leftists WANT the power to destroy conservatives. They want control and they want to see blood. It’s the thing that subconsciously drives every political decision they make.

Globalism as an ideology or a conspiracy has no power without the divergent and psychopathic subset present in every single society on Earth. Around 5% of any given population has narcissistic, sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies.

Around 23% of the US population reports dealing with at least one mental illness and is likely to be taking some form of medication. Many of these people would still be considered “functional” in daily life, but not necessarily capable of controlling their emotions or avoiding reactionary behavior.

Then you have around 25% of the US population with an IQ of 89 or less (well below average). This element of the public is deficient in critical thinking skills and they are more easily manipulated.

These are just the intrinsic problems.

When it comes to environmental factors, there’s the less obvious but always present element of academia that is “so smart they are dumb”. People who are educated but also heavily indoctrinated with an ideology that feeds their insecurities and their biases. Many of these activists are people with mental and emotional deficiencies trying to fill a void in their lives. They have no original ideas and they will rabidly and arrogantly defend the beliefs that they have been programmed with.

Easily corruptible Americans exist across the political spectrum, left, right and center. However, today you are more likely to find most of them on the extreme left.

A number of studies link far-left ideology with psychopathy and narcissism, and the majority of incidences involving legitimate politically motivated violence are committed by leftists (I outlined in my last article how data from left-wing NGOs like the ADL is rigged to make it appear that conservatives are “more violent” when we are not).

It’s important to understand one vital thing; the key to grasping the root of the leftist problem: Leftist ideology, socialism, Marxism, communism, globalism, wokeness, etc. attracts mentally unhinged people.

It sometimes creates them, but mostly it gives dangerous and unstable people a home, a club, a place to feel as if they are the majority and that they are on the right side of history.

These stunted aberrations already exist everywhere, but in a healthy system they are usually isolated from each other and from normal society. In an unhealthy system without morals, responsibilities or self restraint, they thrive. The woke movement is a metastic mechanism; a relentless magnet that pulls in the ugliest elements of society and weaponizes them to attack the whole body.

This is how every communist revolution starts – By gathering the dregs of a population together and telling them they are “the victims”. It then turns that mob loose for the sole purpose of burning down a target nation.

Maybe 20 years ago the “false left/right paradigm” was an apt description of our nation’s quandary. Today the term does not apply. The leftists and the globalists have become one body, one entity. They are the same enemy, working hand-in-hand. You cannot defeat the leftists without defeating the globalists, and you cannot defeat the globalists without defeating the militant leftists (and by the way, Neo-Cons are also leftists).

I would make one distinction here: There are people who consider themselves tied to the liberal left but they are actually centrists. They might be misled or uneducated on the facts, they might let their emotions rule their thinking, but they are not necessarily friends of the globalists. Some of them hate globalism as much as conservatives do, but they wrongly believe that globalism is a product of free market capitalism and conservatism.

Globalism is fundamentally socialist, not capitalist. It is built first on corporations which only exist because of artificial government charter and government protection. The central bank bailouts, for example, protected numerous corporations from the financial consequences of their mismanagement. The idea of “too big to fail” is a socialist policy, not a capitalist one.

Central banks are a primary plank of the Communist Manifesto, not free market ideology. Furthermore, globalism forces nations into interdependency instead of advocating for self sufficiency and redundancy. In other words, it’s about top-down control and removing choice from free markets. The political left proudly promotes this kind of system. They despise public choice.

This is why the leftists and globalists are perfect allies.

Globalists at the World Economic Forum (the Davos crowd) have been pushing the “Great Reset” for the past decade. This reset is decidedly leftist in its goals. They want a “sharing economy” in which private property is abolished. Citizens would be required to borrow everything they have from the government, from apartments to cars to dinner plates. As the WEF says, you would “own nothing and be happy”.

It is a purely communist concept and fully supported by the political left.

Then there’s the climate change agenda which demands carbon taxation, the dismantling of industry, the government regulation of the public diet and food supply, as well as population control (based on the lie of man-made global warming). Again, these are draconian restrictions that leftists cheer for.

How about open borders and the end of nationalism? Leftists and globalists agree here, too. Both groups are ready to go to war in order to force western populations to accept mass immigration from the third world. Entropic immigration is a tool for ending western civilization, and leftists joyfully expedite that collapse.

In terms of philosophy, progressive ideology and globalist theory intertwine into a symbiotic beast called “moral relativism”. Every element of the woke movement is based in selfish aggrandizement. All of its ideas require a morally relative framework that values hedonism over self restraint. In their minds, one cannot be free until one abandons all responsibility and conscience.

It’s a confusing juxtaposition: They believe they are not free until they are allowed to entertain their darkest fetishes. At the same time, they want to micromanage the behaviors of everyone else.

You will never see conservatives trying to defend this kind of thinking. You see leftists defending it all the time. In my view, two recent events make our irreconcilable differences abundantly clear: The pandemic response and the shooting of Charlie Kirk.

During the pandemic we witnessed a clear fracture between conservatives and leftists in how we view freedom. Most leftists applauded the lockdowns, the mandates and the vaccine requirements. It wasn’t that they were afraid of Covid: They reveled in the vicarious power.

They became animals frothing at the mouth for more. They demanded that conservatives be fined, imprisoned, forced to comply with the mandates. Many even wanted our children taken away.

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination by a gay leftist (who confessed to his parents that he committed the attack after they recognized him in suspect photos), millions of other leftists danced, sang and cheered for the murder. They called for more blood, more death. They were in ecstasy.

This was a defining moment for me, and I think it was a defining moment for our nation. The mask was completely torn away. Now we know, without a shadow of a doubt, the woke left is a purely evil movement. Not misguided. Not misunderstood. Not well meaning but stupid. They are evil.

We need to accept the reality that we can no longer treat these people as if they are our fellow countrymen. As President John Adams once stated:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Our nation was not made for leftists. That is to say, we are at war with a moral relativist enemy that wants to see us erased from history. The fact that this enemy lives next door to us is incidental. I’m willing to fight for our constitutional rights, but not the rights of people that want to see the constitution burned.

Few if any of the Founding Fathers would have tolerated the woke left in their lifetime. They would have kicked them out of the country without regret.

The most peaceful solution to our problem would be nothing less than a shared agreement of national divorce. The political left and the globalists must be separated from the rest of us, cast to their own degenerate communist enclave. A place where they can sink or swim based on their insane dystopian theories on society (much like North Korea).

They could give up on their ideology, embrace moral objectivity, meritocracy and national identity; but we all know that’s not going to happen.

The final choice, and the most likely, is that we go to war. In which case, leftists would not last long and the globalists would escape overseas.

Mark my words, the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the numerous attacks by leftist activists are just the beginning. I predicted this outcome right after Donald Trump’s election win and I warned that, like all communist uprisings, the violence will continue to escalate. The assassinations will pile up unless something is done.

At bottom, everything the political left champions falls perfectly in line with the globalist vision for the future. They are not separate, they are the same organism. When you see an Antifa thug, an NGO activist or a transgender militant, what you are looking at is a willing appendage of globalism, not a “patriot” trying to be heard.

This is why I can no longer tolerate the impotent calls among some conservatives and libertarians for “unity”. Nor the calls for “forgiveness” and “reconciliation”.  Our most fundamental beliefs are mutually exclusive. It’s a childish notion to think you can coexist with the devil in the same house when his only desire is to see your destruction.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Leftists and Globalists Have Merged Into the Same Horrific Entity appeared first on LewRockwell.

January 6 Is the Day the US Government Staged a Riot To Cover Up a Fraudulent Election

Sab, 04/10/2025 - 05:01

Dear friends, I must ask a question. What have you done for America lately? In fact, what have you done for America today?

In the continued light of the increasingly suspicious-looking death of Charlie Kirk, this is an especially good question to be asking. For there are many destructive forces working overtime to see to it that this land we live in becomes a far less free and far less prosperous land.

While Charlie Kirk may not have been perfect, he dedicated a great deal of his life to promoting liberty in this land, and encouraged many to do the same.

When I ask, “What have you done for America lately?” I am not asking about what you have done for the federal government or for your state government. I am, instead, talking about what you have done for the idea that solidified itself some four hundred years ago on these shores, the idea that life can be different than in stultified Europe and that men can live free. It is an idea that, over time, grew refined in some eras and grew more dull in other eras.

The FBI Is Beginning To Admit The Role They Played On January 6

We now have a leaked, 50-page FBI document that tells us that some 274 plain-clothes FBI agents showed up at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, with more than 300 agents total present. Its accuracy is confirmed by FBI Director Kash Patel, though his verification of the document creates more questions than answers, since former FBI Director Christopher Wray neglected to mention these details to Congress.

Suddenly, four years later, we are hearing for the first time from the FBI that 274 plain clothes FBI agents were present, but it was only for “crowd control” we are assured by Mr. Patel.

Additional Factors

Alongside the “Crowd Control Theory,” Mr. Patel has already been the star in classic tales of nonsense such as “The Charlie Kirk Lone Gunman Theory,” by which a young man who looks like Lee Harvey Oswald, Jr. complete with a bolt action rifle, does what is physically and chronologically impossible by bending space and time.

Mr. Patel is also known for classics such as the “Epstein DID Kill Himself Theory” and the “Epstein Had No Additional Accomplices Theory, So Let’s All Just Close The Case And Stop Talking About It.” Mr. Patel’s willingness to state the inaccurate on key cases of national importance has already impacted his pursuit for a more trusted FBI.

He is rapidly becoming the poster-child of MAGA inaction, evidence-free “trust me” style statements, and Republican unwillingness to do the unpleasant work of enforcing existing laws for the well-being of the American people.

To add to the preposterousness of the Crowd Control Theory, do not forget the lie of omission contained within spook-speak that an “agent” is different than an “asset,” and that no FBI Director is ever required to point that out to you. While we are starting to learn about agents that day, we have no idea from official sources how many assets were present.

For years, people who were on the ground on January 6, 2021 have insisted that government and Antifa provocateurs were present. Congressman Clay Higgins gave Tucker Carlson more than a year ago, a ballpark estimate close to the size of the leaked Patel estimate. The evidence is increasingly coming together that people within the federal government staged a riot on January 6, 2021, to cover up a stolen election. The time is much later than any of us realize and the government at all levels is far more complicit than many politically involved people will acknowledge.

America Is An Idea

Yes, America is an idea. And America is a culture that grew up around that idea. War will not stop America. Division will not stop America. Disagreement will not stop America. And not every person who pays taxes to the federal state is what I would call an American. America is bigger than a piece of land. America is a concept, an opportunity, and a culture, a culture that some choose to opt out of with their choices on how they exist.

But then there are others.

And in some periods of American history, those who called themselves patriots were enemies of that of freedom, but bootlickers of the state. While at other times, they were right there as well-aligned with those concepts as can be.

American culture exists where you sacrifice to encourage that liberty in your presence.

Something Very Good About The People Who Showed Up On January 6

On January 6, 2021, hundreds of thousands of heroes, perhaps even upwards of one million, gathered together in Washington DC to do exactly what people should do when they learn an election has been stolen.

The sad thing is not that more did not gather — what a defeatist way to see the world; afterall, the apathetic exist in all eras, so why focus your attention there. Nor is the sad thing that, so many opposed them — also what a sad way to see the world; for both the misinformed and those who oppose freedom, also, exist in every era.

The place to focus on a day like January 6, 2021: that America was strong enough in the year 2021, even after so much brainwashing and gaslighting took place in 2020, that some one million people would take time off work, off school, away from their duties, and pay their own way to Washington DC, some even spending the night or even several nights there, with additional days spent in travel, because they sincerely believed that the 2020 election had been improperly conducted, even stolen, and that their elected representatives needed to peacefully hear from them.

A million people showing up for that speaks volumes about the health of the idea known as America.

What a sad testament it would be if no one cared enough to show up in such a situation. But that is not the scenario we are in. America is very much alive and well. However, the government of this land has grown anathema to the concepts that make America what it is. In fact, the taxes paid in the United States are almost entirely weaponized against the people who most exemplify the culture and the concept that is America.

The “Get Trump” Movement Is About “Putting America In Its Place”

There was a two-year Mueller Investigation in which FORTY full-time FBI agents were handed to Robert Mueller to do anything he wanted with them as long as he followed his mandate to “get Trump.”

Donald Trump has positive and negative dimensions. We can go back and forth all day about that. Regardless, he was the rightfully elected leader of this country in 2016, and to work not in favor of him as a government employee, but to do anything possible to delegitimize his presidency was to work against the people who elected him.

What a very important side-note to, therefore, add here. All of these efforts to “get Trump” were not efforts to neutralize a single individual: Donald Trump. He was not, actually, the problem. All the people who supported him and who he helped empower were the problem, with the former especially being a problem.

Donald Trump has been part of a movement of torch-bearers who have helped awaken a land of sleeping lions.

The effort to “get Trump” was about “getting the American people,” about neutralizing the American people, about neutralizing you, and me, and ostensibly your wife, and my wife, and our kids, and brothers and sisters, and neighbors, and families, and all these people who civilly voted for a peaceful transfer of power to Donald Trump.

Those Who Make Violent Revolution Inevitable

These attempts to neutralize Trump are quite dangerous.  As President Kennedy said in March 1962, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

It isn’t about Trump. Those of us who love Trump, tend to love him because he enables America. Those of us who love Trump, love him because he lifts the boot off the neck of the increasingly lifeless body that is America.

It’s Not About Trump, So Just Get Past That Mental Blockade Already

Is Trump perfect? That is not my standard. I know enough Bible to know that perfection is not expected of us. Regardless, it isn’t about Trump.

That political focus is a distraction — it is about the people energized by a Trump presidency. You are the enemy. There are even people who do not vote who are energized (in a good way) by the Trump presidency, or never-Trumpers, too, as well as moderates, and some radical leftists even. Some of these people may be well-intentioned and there are likely many more like them to follow. It’s not about Trump. It’s not about politics. It’s not about right and left. It is so much more important than that.

America is an idea. And it is a culture that has formed around that idea.

And there are many people, some of them quite powerful, who want to choke the life out of that idea and out of that culture. Because they believe that if they can do that, they can do the same to the rest of the world so much more easily, though there are a plethora of motivations beyond that common and sinister one.

America Changed Forever

On September 10, 2025, America forever changed. Charlie Kirk was shot that day. A man who gave everything for his country was shot that day, but also a man who gave everything for his Savior was shot that day.

We owe it to that man, to our progeny, to our forebearers, and to the idea and culture that is America to get to the bottom of what happened to Charlie Kirk. We owe it to those same people to live much like Charlie Kirk — not to just give occasionally for America and for faith, not to just tithe our time and tithe our resources for America and faith, but to give everything we have for those two important causes, causes that I might even say are one and the same.

Our Founding Documents, Our American Culture

The Mayflower Compact is one of our founding documents. The Declaration of Independence is also. To a lesser degree, but still important, the US Constitution is, especially with the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, which were not added for some four years after the US Constitution was ratified by the first state. These are founding documents alongside essays, such as the collection known as “The Federalist Papers” and also the collection known as “The Anti-Federalist Papers.” Those are our founding documents, and so are many other letters written between founding fathers part of our founding documents, and the most important of those founding documents is the Bible.

I am not demanding every American be a Bible thumper, or Bible reader, or even a Bible believer. I am not saying that, at all. I am saying, that if you want to get back to the basics of what America is, you are not going to get there without the Bible. You cannot take those other founding documents and the concepts contained therein out of the context of the most important American founding document, the one that all other founding documents must be read through — The Holy Bible.

It ain’t a Judeo-Christian culture, either. It’s a Christian culture. That isn’t pointed out with the goal of offending anyone. That is pointed out with the goal of achieving laser focused clarity on where America needs to return to if it wants to return to basics, if it wants to return to first principles.

And with that, I must ask, “What have you done for America lately?”

You don’t owe me an answer. But please give yourself an answer.

And don’t judge yourself alongside some of the bums you know in life. Because if you do, you will be a bum-quality of American.

Judge yourself against someone like Charlie Kirk.

The post January 6 Is the Day the US Government Staged a Riot To Cover Up a Fraudulent Election appeared first on LewRockwell.

TACO Man at Bat

Sab, 04/10/2025 - 05:01

Well, here’s hoping that the TACO man (Trump Always Chickens Out) finally grows a pair, steps up to the plate and is willing to ride this shutdown to a new record beyond the 35 days it took him to capitulate in January 2019. After all, these are desperate times fiscally—so anything that might wake-up the somnolent public to the budgetary disaster that is careening down the pike is worth some serious bumps and grinds on the national stage.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Washington has gone from the ridiculous to the sublime when it comes to managing the nation’s fiscal affairs. The chart below shows the Federal deficit on a rolling 12-month basis and the scandal of it literally screams out.

First, on the eve of the pandemic and lockdown collapse in February 2020, the Federal government was still running a $1 trillion or 4.9% of GDP deficit at a point in the business cycle fully 128 months after the Great Recession bottomed in Q2 2009. By all historic standards—even by Keynesian counter-cyclical fiscal doctrine—-the Federal budget was supposed to be in near balance by then because the fiscal equation had already benefited mightily from the longest continuous economic expansion in American history.

Secondly, a traditional reason for fiscal consolidation during the post-recession recovery period was to position the government to weather any adverse economic or international storms which might come down the pike in the future. And, of course, the mother of all calamities incepted within months when the real GDP plunged at a staggering 33% annualized rate in Q2 2020 in response to the pandemic and the sweeping Washington-ordered lockdowns of the US economy.

At that point, the normal cyclical contraction of revenues and surge of safety net spending threw the Federal budget into deep deficit in its own right. But that was drastically compounded by a never before imagined Covid relief spending bacchanalia over 2020-2021 that piled $6 trillion of added spending on top of the regular budget.

Accordingly, the 12-month rolling deficit reached $4.05 trillion in April 2021, which figure computed to an unheard of 17.3% of GDP. That should have been a big enough shock to scare the living bejesus out of every politicians inside the beltway, sentient or otherwise.

Alas, it didn’t. When the US economy re-opened thereafter, and notwithstanding unprecedented monetary stimulus, the Washington pols sat on their hands, even as Sleepy Joe Biden piled on even more spending for pork barrel infrastructure, Green New Deal waste and corporate welfare for the likes of Intel. Consequently, the Federal deficit remained stuck in the $2 trillion range.

So here we are five years on from the pandemic recession bottom and with a so-called Republican government in control of the House, Senate and White House. And yet the 12 month rolling deficit just clocked in at 6.3% of GDP, representing a level of wanton fiscal profligacy like never before.

Nevertheless, the above chart is only a warm-up. The real disaster coming down the pike is owing to the fact that three months ago the Trumpified GOP enacted the MOABB (mother of all budget busters) aka the One Big Beautiful Bill Act or OBBBA. It will result in a cool $155 trillion being added to the public debt by mid-century.

The OBBBA, in fact, turned the Federal budget into a Fiscal Doomsday machine that is literally unstoppable by means of ordinary legislative decorum. So you need a budgetary crash landing like the one hopefully triggered today at 12:01 AM to have any hope of arresting the current plunge into fiscal calamity.

As it happened, the OBBBA as written would have resulted in a Federal fiscal posture that would add $117 trillion to the public debt by 2054, which figure would rise to +$133 trillion when you price out OBBBA without the accounting gimmicks. Still, how anyone thinks that quintupling the publicly-held debt from today’s $30 trillion to $163 trillion over the next three decades, is a plausible route to the Golden Age of Prosperity is pretty hard to figure.

Even then, the truth is surely far worse. Just remove one brick from the edifice of CBO’s Rosy Scenario economic forecast—perpetually low interest rates—-and the fiscal dragons truly come surging from the Federal budget’s vasty deep. That is, if you assume the weighted average UST yields will clock in at4.25% rather than 3.5% over the next three decades, the added debt with the permanent extension of the OBBBA would amount to $155 trillion.

That’s right. Faced with a veritable Fiscal Doomsday Machine as embodied in the current CBO baseline, the Trumpified GOP has essentially embraced a budgetary path to a $185 trillion public debt by mid-century, representing a crushing 218% of GDP.

To be sure, neither wing of Washington’s UniParty is putting anything on the table that will slow the rising dotted red line in the graph above by even a whisker. The so-called “clean CR” championed by the GOP Congressional leadership, for instance, amounts to a ratification of all the unhinged discretionary spending increases enacted during the pandemic under the Trump 1.0 COVID-relief spending bacchanalia plus all of Sleepy Joe’s additional pork that was layered on top thereafter.

So what we have is this: Total appropriated spending (discretionary) in the GOP’s ballyhooed “Clean CR” will be up by +29% from the already pork-ridden budget of Trump 1.0 in FY 2019, and higher by+33% on the nondefense side of the ledger. And this is the plan of the so-called good guys!

Discretionary Appropriations, FY 2019 to FY 2025

Still, the GOP’s proposed spend-a-thon isn’t the half of it. The Dems are refusing to embrace the CR unless that GOP agrees to cancel the modest Medicaid savings contained in the OBBBA and extend yet again the costly ObamaCare “enhanced” subsidies which were layered on during the pandemic spending madness.

So as shown in the table below, capitulating to the Dems’ demands would generate $1.3 to $1.5 trillion of additional red ink over the next decade on top of the mountainous debt already baked into the fiscal cake.

10-Year Cost Of Senate Dems’ Health Care Spending Demands

Needless to say, the Medicaid cuts contained in the OBBBA were eminently plausible. They included $700 billion of 10-year savings owing to a requirement that able bodied Medicaid recipients need to “work” 80 hours per month—albeit “work” was defined so broadly as to include just ambling around looking for a job or taking any kind of job training, whether in lawn bowling or tiddly winks. Of course, we’d say hell yes to tossing off the Medicaid rolls any and all non-disabled adults who can’t manage to “work” 20 hours per week in this manner.

The OBBBA also required that the states stop enlarging the scam by which they purportedly “tax” medical providers. That’s because, in turn, the state Medicaid programs then slip the same loot back to doctors, hospitals and other providers in the form of higher reimbursement payments compliments of Uncle Sam.

That’s right. At the present time states raise upwards of $45 billion per year from so-called “provider taxes”, which providers, in turn, get the $45 billion back as reimbursements for their “cost” of service. While there have been various Federal efforts to block such scams, the current 6% cap on provider taxes as a share of patient revenues tells you all you need to know. State fiscal authorities have been on a path toward round-tripping their entire share of Medicaid costs to Washington, but the modest tightening of the cap (to 3.5% of provider revenues) contained in the OBBBA is apparently more than the Senate Dems can live with.

Then there is the ObamaCare topper subsidies and coverages that were signed into law during the pandemic. These included lifting the original 400% of the poverty line cap on ObamaCare subsidy eligibility, meaning an added layer of free stuff regardless of income. The “enhanced” ObamaCare features also included Federal subsidies for ObamaCare health insurance after premium costs reach 8.5% of income, down from nearly 10% under prior law.

These enhancements to the original ObamaCare subsidies were way over the top by any stretch of the imagination, but were justified at the time by the so-called pandemic emergency. Accordingly, the were made subject to an early sunset clause (December 2025) that has now come due.

But holy moly. Just a smidgen of historical perspective reveals how the Trumpified GOP has utterly abandoned the party’s assigned role as the sentinel of fiscal rectitude in the process of democratic governance in America.

Thus, back in the day we thought the Medicaid rolls were already bloated at 20 million recipients, representing about 8.8% of the US population in 1980. So the Reagan budget proposed to modestly rollback the Federal matching payment ratio, which would have cut baseline Medicaid spending of $21 billion per year by 7.5%. These cuts were then passed in watered-down form but subsequent history shows that they were not nearly up to the task.

By the eve of the sweeping ObamaCare expansion, therefore, the Medicaid rolls as of 2008 had already increased to 50 million, representing 16.4% of the US population. Of course, with the Obama expansion the Medicaid rolls were off to the races, reaching 70.2 million and 21.7% of the US population by 2016.

Needless to say, Donald Trump’s noisy 2016 campaign pledge to repeal ObamaCare never got off the ground in the UniParty politics of Washington. In fact, rather than repeal ObamaCare the Donald signed—and bragged about—the massive expansion of Medicaid embedded in the $2 trillion CARES act of March 2020. By the time the dust had settled on Donald Trump’s sweeping expansion of free stuff during the final year of his first term, the Medicaid rolls hit 90 million and 27% of the US population by 2022!

Since then, there had been a slight reduction t0 8o million recipients, as some of the pandemic era coverages expired. Yet what we had prior to the modest OBBBA reforms was a vastly bloated Medicaid safety net that had expanded way beyond its original contours. That is, after being focused for several decades narrowly on the dependent poor population receiving family assistance or SSI for the blind, disabled and elderly poor, Medicaid had been expanded since 2009 to cover fully 24% of the entire US population. That’s nearly 3X the coverage rate that most GOP legislators had been willing to rollback in 1981.

As a result, just since the turn of the century constant dollar Medicaid spending has soared from $358 billion (2024$) to $914 billion or by 2.6 X. But as the table also makes clear, the major cause of that spending explosion has been the doubling of the recipient rolls from 40 million to 80 million, even as constant dollar spending per recipient has risen by +28% per the last column below.

Total Federal/State Medicaid Spending and Recipients, 2000–2024

In short, if the TACO man again capitulates to the Dems after a few weeks of shutdown in order to keep the government open and his ratings from sagging further, it will mark a very important turning point. It will literally mean that any serious attention to the nation’s soaring public debt is likely over and done—at least through 2028; and after that point the debt/bond yield/interest expense doom loop may be too powerful for any democratic government to stop.

After all, notwithstanding the modest OBBBA cuts the Medicaid safety net is still standing mighty tall. While CBO estimated it would marginally reduce the current 80 million Medicaid roll by 11 million or so, the program would still cover 21% of the entire US populationThat’s nearly 2.5X more than the 1980 level and 50% more than the pre-ObamaCare coverage ratio.

Turning to the larger picture, it is plainly evident that the UniParty has been crab-walking the nation into socialized medicine through the backdoor. And now by attempting to restore the pandemic era add-on to ObamaCare and repeal the OBBBA Medicaid cuts the Congressional Dems are attempting to ratify exactly that.

As shown in the tables below, enrollment in Federal medical insurance programs stood 49.5 million and 21.0% of the population in 1980, when Ronald Reagan came to town vowing to shrink the Welfare State, including the encroachments of socialized medical care. Alas, the Gipper and his heirs and assigns on the GOP side of the aisle whiffed, allowing the UniParty to push expansions that have now taken Federal medical insurance coverage to 165 million or damn near 50% of the US population

Enrollment In Government Medical Insurance Programs, 1980 to 2024

Needless to say, supplying 165 million American with medical care doesn’t come cheap. Back in the day when the Reagan Revolution put its sights on shrinking the Welfare State, total government spending for medical insurance programs amounted to $57.1 billion and just 2.0% of GDP.

By the time the Donald got to the Oval Office the first time he inherited a medical insurance spending tab from Obama and all the other UniParty expansions that had gone before which stood at $1.214 trillion and 6.5% of GDP. By 2020, however, the very un-Reaganite Trump Administration had presided over the rise of government medical insurance outlays to $1.501 trillion or 24% more than big spender Obama.

Needless to say, the $1.926 trillion level in place in 2024 wasn’t nearly enough for the Congressional Dems, and, actually the RINOs and UniParty Republicans who are waiting in the wings to capitulate to the Dem health care demands after a few weeks of performative whining about “runaway” spending and deficits.

That’s right. As a practical matter we are already beyond $2 trillion per year of spending for socialized medical care, and the only thing that can even modestly restrain that fiscal tidal wave is the hoped for resolve of the TACO man. And, yes, “hope” is not usually an efficacious strategy.

Government Spending For Medical Insurance, 1980 to 2024

In short, 45 years on from the abortive Reagan assault on the Welfare State, the GOP as a functioning majority has given up the fiscal ghost. Indeed, if you can’t rollback the runaway growth of socialized health care, in fact, it’s all over except the shouting.

Indeed, the GOP’s ability to slow the tide of fiscal red ink by even a tad now depends entirely on whether the Donald has the gumption to force Senator Chuckles Shumer and his legions of big spenders to blink.

It’s actually “Casey at the bat”. If Trump fails the test it will be all over except the shouting because the GOP has already mostly surrendered in the battle against the Welfare State. Here is the current 10-year baseline cost of the major Welfare State programs, and what the GOP was willing to cut at the time of OBBBA’s enactment: Namely, small nicks from Medicaid and Food Stamps, which amount to just 2% of baseline spending for these programs.

All the rest—Social Security, Medicare, ObamaCare, SSI, family assistance and school lunches and veterans benefits—have been given a hall pass by the Donald and the GOP leadership.

2026-2035 Baseline Spending for Major Welfare State Programs and Proposed GOP Cuts:

  • Social Security: $21.3 trillion.
  • Medicare:$16.4 trillion.
  • Medicaid/ObamaCare: $10.1 trillion.
  • Food Stamps: $1.1 trillion.
  • Supplemental Security Income(SSI): $0.8 trillion.
  • School lunches and family assistance: $0.8 trillion.
  • Veterans comp and pensions: $3.2 trillion.
  • Total Major Welfare State Programs: $53.7 trillion.
  • GOP Medicaid cut: ($0.8 trillion).
  • GOP Food Stamps cut: ($0.3 trillion).
  • Total GOP Welfare cuts: ($1.1 trillion).
  • GOP Welfare Cuts As % of 10-Year Baseline:-2.1%.

So these GOP two percenters are surely dreaming somewhere off in fiscal la la land. When in addition to the above Welfare State budget you further set aside $9.2 trillion for defense and $9.0 trillion for interest expense over the next decade you have $72 billion of baseline spending out of the $88 trillion 10-year total (FY 2026 to 2035) or 81% . That is to say, three months ago the GOP struggled to consolidate its ranks to pass just $1.1 trillion of cuts in a small corner of the Welfare State.

Yet even these minimal “cuts”, which amounted to exactly 1.25% of total baseline spending, are about to get shit-canned in the name of keeping the government open. Well, unless the Donald decides that the current blood sport battle with Shumer and the Dems will be good for his ratings—something that only time will tell.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

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Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: an American Lesson for Pam Bondi, Donlad Trump & Netanyahu

Sab, 04/10/2025 - 05:01

Freedom needs no justification. It is an end unto itself. You are deficient in American solidarity if you don’t stand up for non-violent protest and all speech ~ilana 

Let us be clear about what freedom of speech à la America truly means:

The words people speak, chant, write and tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or burn, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia; the goose-stepping, Hitler salutes they muck around with—provided no physical aggression is involved (violence against animals included), all this counts as protected speech, licit in natural law.

So long as oddities and idiosyncrasies, whether performed alone or in groups, thoughts harbored privately or shared in public—so long as no violence accompanies such speech or behavior; so long as your mitts stop at the next man’s face (or at the next mutt’s fury face, Kristi Noem): SPEECH. It’s all speech. It should be free, unfettered and as wild and as wanton as can be.

At their worst, expressions of ostensible antisemitism, Naziism, racisms or other antipathies amount to thought crimes, nothing more, if expressed as a belief system severally or collectively, rather than in palpably violent actions.  Whether your thoughts are spoken, chanted, written or preached; be they impolite or impolitic: they are, at worst, no more than thought crimes.

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. Thought crimes ought to be ferociously protected by a free people. By logical extension, any accusations of antisemitism, Naziism or other antipathies and racisms, are especially suspect when emitted as a meme from American institutionalized power structures.

One such obscenely wealthy and worthless power structure is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), or Defamation League—a more apt moniker once suggested by Elon Musk, before he joined the ADL in severely censoring some speech on the X platform. The ADL is a meddlesome shakedown operation, in the mold of the Southern Poverty Law Center (“Smear Artists for the Total State,” wrote Tom DiLorenzo). It has taken it upon itself to decide who lives and who dies socially and financially on the basis of the unfortunate individual’s ideas, spoken and written.

In the American tradition, thoughts and words spoken or written that are politically impolite—again, racism; Naziism, antisemitism—retain protected status as speech beyond the adjudication of law-makers, bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats and technocrats.

Sniffing out racists or anti-Semites is an absolute no-no for any and all self-respecting, libertarian-minded Americans, or any American, for that matter. Like creedal libertarians, Americans don’t, or should not, prosecute thought crimes or persecute thought “criminals.”

Ours should be The Skokie Standard of free speech and thinking (which I articulated in August 2022). What is The Skokie Standard of free speech? In 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took a stand for free speech by defending a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, where many Holocaust survivors lived. The Skokie Standard of free speech is one that champions unpopular expression, and vigorously defends all marginalized speakers and thinkers, rather than purveying and protecting state and corporate ideology du jour.

Let me repeat what the Skokie Standard of free speech stands for here: However which way they are grouped, the words people individually or collectively speak, chant, write and tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or stomp, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies, rituals and protests they perform; the insignia, paraphernalia, the goose-stepping, Hitler salutes they dick around with—provided no physical aggression is involved, all that counts as protected speech.

Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, RIP, got it. On May 2, 2024, Kirk wrote the following: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t get it. No wonder even Glenn Greenwald, once a practicing constitutional attorney—and a man of manners and decorum—regularly appends “dumb” and “lacking any grasp of constitutional law” to any mention of Bondi, who said this after Kirk’s murder:

The Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech… There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech. And there is no place—especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie — [for that] in our society,” Bondi told a podcaster likewise cerebrally compromised.

If you thought the nation’s chief law enforcement officer had blurted out on an impulse such promises of unconstitutional hate-speech prosecutions; I’m sorry to say that Bondi only doubled down. In scant regard for the letter and spirit of American constitutional law, she advised employers, on September 15, of their “obligation to get rid of people who are saying horrible things.”

While “The First Amendment doesn’t stop private employers from choosing to fire people for speech; it can be illegal for the government to use its power to pressure a private company into firing a staff member.” In America, not even do celebrations of Kirk’s assassination count as threats of violence or incitement to violence. In fact, “government retribution for speech,” lambasted U.S. District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, “is directly forbidden by the First Amendment.”

For our libertarian purposes, moreover, speech should never be defended by deploying a contents-driven defense, such as that a book, an utterance or their author must be spared on account that the person is good and his words are not racist and are against bigotry.

The Argument from Freedom means arguing process, not content. Racism, (alleged) antisemitism or Naziism in targeted literature or in protests should always and everywhere be a peripheral issue. Or, preferably, no issue at all.

The Argument from Freedom means arguing not over the contents of publications like Mein Kampf or the merit of protests for Palestine, but for their publication and practice irrespective of their contents. Which is why I say freedom’s argument is an argument from process, not content.

Freedom makes the case for an unfettered free market in ideas, good and bad. Freedom argues for politically impolite books to be published and read freely. It demands that all offensive literature be available to the free men and women who inhabit the free society. And not because of history; so that we don’t forget it or repeat it. Rather, freedom needs no justification. It is an end unto itself. You are deficient in American solidarity if you don’t stand up for non-violent protest and all speech.

Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, and verbally provoke people in power, unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured, deported, even killed.

Ultimately banning books or proscribing speech and speakers as the kangaroo courts of Britain, Europe and Canada do legally, assumes a lack of choice and agency among ostensibly “free” human beings. It’s also predicated on the acceptance of a higher authority which decides for the rest of us which cultural products are fit for our consumption.

I thus put it to you, dear reader, left and right, that speech restrictions stateside in the form of the Antisemitism Awareness Act mirror the worst of British and western Europe’s anti-speech tribunals. Tabled by a Republican and a Democrat, S. 4127, which mercifully is still in committee, would embed state agitprop throughout American education. For posterity. Aside being in violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the Antisemitism Awareness Act would utterly enervate discourse in our country and criminalize vast tracts of speech as well as proscribe actions that are licit in constitutional and natural law.

Left, Right and libertarian; we can and must, then, join in unapologetically rejecting the very idea of policing, purging, persecuting or prosecuting people for holding and expressing politically unpopular ideas in action or in speech.

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Is the Family Collapsing?

Sab, 04/10/2025 - 05:01

It all begins with the brain.

Humans are smarter than other primates because we have bigger heads and bigger brains.  Having big heads means that human babies must be born while the head size is small enough to pass through the birth canal of the mother without rupture, and the resultant baby is consequently small and totally incapable of surviving without constant and complete outside care and protection.   That in turn means that both parents, and often grandparents, must tend to the child night and day for at least the first few years and often longer.  That in turn means a pair-bonding unit together long enough to tend to the child’s needs, and thus the creation of the family, a social feature that no other creature has evolved to the extent we have, not even chimpanzees, our closest relatives among primates.

The family, then, is the social unit that makes us the most successful mammal ever created.  To it we owe our primacy in stable, coherent communities and in larger units such as tribes and nations.

Why then are we allowing it to collapse?

Throughout the civilized world human populations are decreasing. The replacement rate for almost all developed societies is inadequate. The world birth rate has decreased dramatically from 37.8 per 1,000 women to 32.6 in 1970 and then 17.5 in 2020, 17.3 in 2025.  In America the birth rate has declined from 24.8 in1950 to 18.4 in 1970 and 10.9 in 2020 and 10.7 in 2025.  Most people do not want families, or any but small families.  Add to this the decline in people who are even getting married, which has declined worldwide for the last 50 years and is down to under 5 marriages per 1000 people in developed countries; in the U.S. from 8.2 per thousand in 2000 to 6.8 in 2010 and 6.1 in 2023, the lowest ever recorded.

The family, in short, is disappearing.

It might not be necessary to name a culprit, but one glaring party stands out: the state.  It has always been in the interest of the state to diminish any other sources of power in society so as to strengthen its own.  The parish, the guild, the prince or margrave, these have all been relegated to minor roles as central authority has increased, and the welfare/warfare state of the 21st century is the apex of this enlargement. The family, too, has become less influential in daily affairs as politicians and bureaucrats intrude, and what the extended family, local church, and father’s union used to provide in times of need is now the province of the state.

In the U.S. there are now 95 government programs giving subsidies in food, health, housing, and other benefits to poorer households, amounting to the equivalent of some $135,000 a year for a family of four in 2023, so that the father’s role as central provider is entirely displaced and indeed the father comes to have to particular role in the family’s well-being at all.

With all that it is no surprise that since the War on Poverty began in 1965 with the state’s takeover of family earnings, the percentage of households in the labor force has dropped by half, from 70 to 36 per cent, meaning that the parents of at least a fifth of the nation don’t even have to get out of bed.

Obviously without fathers children can easily drift to crime, and the correlation between fatherless boys and illegality is nearly absolute. But the effect on many other aspects of society is also palpable and deplorable, and there is no sign that this is going to change with a Trumpian anti-crime government in charge.

I’ve said for some time that Western civilization is collapsing. The dolorous status of the family nowadays, that most basic unit in primate superiority, is proof of its immediacy.

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Latest with MacGregor on Looming Wars

Ven, 03/10/2025 - 21:14

Writes Transportphenomena:

I very rarely watch political YouTubes, primarily because they’re almost always way too long, and also don’t contain anything that I can’t get through written source material, which I can read about 100 times more quickly than I can watch a video. But …

There are certainly exceptions, and Col. Douglas MacGregor perhaps most of all. In a segment of one of the videos below they discuss a paper that MacGregor wrote, at the request of RFKJ, who in turn gave it to Trump, which was eventually read by a number of WH staff, including Hegseth — and somewhat misunderstood or misapplied.

 The two videos, each of which (I believe) are about 55 minutes long. Throughout both (with very different emphases in each), they discuss the looming wars in Israel (finishing the extermination of the Palestinians, and instigating war with Iran), Russia (ultimate goal being regime change) … and oh! – let’s not forget about invading Venezuela!

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Diddy Begs for Mercy

Ven, 03/10/2025 - 21:13

Click Here:

TCN Morning Note

 

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The digital euro is on the move

Ven, 03/10/2025 - 20:12

Thanks, John Frahm. 

Gateway Hispanic

 

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FBI Cuts All Ties With ADL, Calling It ‘Political Front’ Disguised As A Watchdog

Ven, 03/10/2025 - 20:11

Brian Dunaway wrote:

Next: How About the SPLC!

Arguably worse than the ADL is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). It’s sickening that anyone listens to these charlatans – it’s bad enough that the entirety of the MSM has been using them as a source for decades, but the law enforcement community!?

From what I can gather, the FBI has used the SPLC as a source for many years but does not hold them in very high regard. Nevertheless, after stating more than once they would no longer consider them a source, the boys in the Bureau can’t seem to kick the habit.

As recently as Oct 2023, US Senators Lankford and Grassley sent a letter to the FBI, asking for them to, at long last, cut all ties. The letter stated that “The SPLC is an extremely biased and unreliable source that classifies organizations as ‘hate groups’ if they promote traditional conservative values. Their website features a ‘hate map’ that shows the location of these hate groups. Users of the website can filter the hate map to single out hate groups. These filters include ‘Christian Identity’ and ‘Radical Traditional Catholicism.’ The FBI should not lend credibility to an organization that labels traditional values as ‘hate.’”

During a Sep 2025 House Judiciary Committee hearing, Patel acknowledged a complaint from Rep. Chip Roy regarding this hate map.

The time has come, Mr. Patel!

 

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Intueas: Why are Spiritually Awakened People Leaving Society?

Ven, 03/10/2025 - 19:31

Intueas keeps repeating himself. Intueas isn’t aware of his audience, and he doesn’t respect their intelligence. He keeps hitting the same nail with a sledgehammer.

Still, the video has some good points. There are energy vampires out there. It is very difficult for me to be in crowds and around people. But I have no intention of going back to the collective to save it or pave the way for it. I can handle people in ones and twos. 

It’s an interesting video. The narrator is right. More and more, especially since the Covid lockdowns, people are retreating from society. Social media is losing its appeal. So are podcasts, and political videos. It’s all a show. A show of mass delusions.

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Deficits & “Stimulus” Checks = More Inflation & A Huge Bubble That Will Burst

Ven, 03/10/2025 - 18:06

President Trump is considering “stimulus” checks (again). We should all remember the last time that President Trump sent out “stimulus” checks. It was the “CARES Act,” which ignited the massive inflation that we’re still suffering from today. How can a government that has no money, because it racks up record deficits, be in a position to give out “rebates” anyway? Tariffs (that Americans overwhelmingly pay) don’t put the government books into the black. The government is way in the red. Why tax Americans with tariffs to begin with? When a government (via the Fed) prints money for “stimulus,” it’s yet another tax.

 

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Erika Kirk An Israeli Honey Trap?

Ven, 03/10/2025 - 08:57

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

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Generals Gathered in Their Masses…

Ven, 03/10/2025 - 05:01

On Tuesday we observed one of the strangest spectacles of our time. President Trump and his “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, called a mandatory meeting of all the top brass in the US military. Some 800+ general officers, admirals, and the like gathered at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia for a doubleheader talk from Hegseth and Trump.

Because such an event is nearly unprecedented – at least in peacetime – the days leading up to the meeting were increasingly filled with speculation and even dread.

Tensions between the US and Russia are soaring over reports that the Trump Administration may provide and assist in the launching of Tomahawk missiles – capable of both hitting Moscow and of carrying nuclear weapons. The Putin Administration pointed out the obvious: such weapons would require the active participation of US intelligence as well as trained US or NATO personnel and should they be used would bring Russia and the US/NATO to a state of war. It is a war that, given both US and Russian nuclear doctrine, could very quickly rise to the level of an exchange of nuclear weapons and total destruction.

Likewise, media reports and observers of the movement of military equipment have been raising a red flag over the past several days on the massive movement of US fighter jets and aerial refueling tankers from the US toward the Middle East. Observers point out the similarity to the days leading up to the US attack on Iran in late June, just over three months ago. With Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu in town earlier this week, has President Trump been talked into again joining Israel in its war on its neighbors?

Additionally, US warships have been gathered off the coast of Venezuela for weeks and at least three speedboats accused of running narcotics have been blown out of the water by the US military. The New York Times reported on stepped up US efforts to overthrow the Venezuelan government and install a new leader (as the Trump team attempted and failed in his first term). Media outlets are reporting that the Trump Administration is even considering military strikes deep inside Venezuela, which would of course be unprovoked acts of war.

What to expect of the gathering of the generals? Many of us waited at the edge of our seats.

What we were able to see was a pair of not particularly well-prepared – and less well-received – speeches by Trump and Hegseth on transforming the US military into a “MAGA” force and the evils of late middle-aged rotundity among senior military personnel. The crass treatment of America’s tip military officers – whether some deserved criticism or not – will likely have an effect opposite of what was intended.

The pauses in the pre-prepared speeches meant to allow for applause were met with stony silence.

Fat-shaming and chest-pounding is not the way to go about building esprit de corps in the US military. Especially when such a dressing-down was broadcast to the rest of the country via live video hook-up.

But what if some of our initial sense of dread was not misplaced? In his essential Sonar21 blog, former CIA officer Larry Johnson wonders whether there was a (very) public message delivered to conceal a secret and more dangerous message.

First Johnson quotes Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalist blog:

After Charlie Kirk, perhaps I have become too fond of complicated theories.

But it’s ludicrous to have called so many senior guys in for such a silly agenda. A stern memo and/or video sessions would have done.

So the big stoopid meeting, IMHO was to cover for a smaller gathering that had to be done in person. And where whoever was summoned would be a big tell as to what the focus was.

Johnson then signals his agreement with the speculation:

No, Yves… I think you nailed it. Besides the massive US naval force parked off the coast of Venezuela, we are now hearing that US tanker aircraft are flying to the Middle East via England. We saw the same phenomena in the days preceding the June 24 attack on Iran.

If the Trump administration is planning a coordinated attack on Venezuela and Iran, the commanders of USCENTCOM and USSOUTHCOM would be involved. While the plans for such attacks could have been discussed over a SVTCS (i.e., Secure Video Teleconferences), those sessions usually have dozens of straphangers watching. If you want to keep close hold on such planning, you do it in person. If the CENTCOM and SOUTHCOM commanders had been called to Washington alone, the odds are high that someone would have reported this. With the presence of the US naval force off the coast of Venezuela and the movement of US aircraft towards the Persian Gulf, this likely would have attracted unwanted attention… Well played Ms. Smith!

What Larry Johnson writes here makes a good deal of sense. Even in Trump World, spending millions of dollars to publicly dress-down the US military makes little sense. A memo or video hook-up would have been far more effective and less disruptive.

Was the real purpose of this spectacle to hold a secret side meeting to give orders for an impending, multi-continental war? We’ll know soon…

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

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Fed’s Quiet War Against the Middle Class

Ven, 03/10/2025 - 05:01

International Man: The Federal Reserve recently cut interest rates. What does it signal about the current state of the US economy?

Doug Casey: Let me introduce the subject with a joke.

Einstein dies and goes to heaven. St. Peter greets him effusively and says, “Unfortunately, Mr. Einstein, because we’re a centrally planned economy- for obvious reasons—we have a temporary housing shortage, and have to put you up with three roommates for a while.”

Einstein goes to his new apartment, and the first guy comes up to him and says, “Mr. Einstein, I have an IQ of 130, and I’d love to get to know you better.” Einstein says, “Great. After lunch, let’s bounce around a few concepts of astrophysics that have been on my mind.”

The second guy comes up and says, “Mr. Einstein, I’m not as smart as that first guy. I’ve only got an IQ of 100, but I still want to get to know you better.” Einstein says, “Great. Let me put away my grip, and let’s play a game of chess.”

The third guy comes up and says, “Mr. Einstein, I’m not as smart as those other guys. I’ve only got an IQ of 70, but I still want to get to know you.” Einstein says, “So, where do you think interest rates are headed?”

That says a lot about guessing the direction of interest rates, but they’re actually the most important single indicator in an economy. Rates are the price of capital, the lifeblood of an economy. Interest rates are analogous to blood pressure and pulse readings for a human. When a central bank lowers rates, it’s equivalent to giving a human amphetamines; when they raise them, it’s like a dose of barbiturates. Central bankers are like a quack doctor, poisoning the economy by distorting economic signals.

I understand why Trump wants lower interest rates. They encourage people to buy things, consume, and borrow money. That increases consumption, business earnings, and employment. Amphetamines also give a great artificial high. But low rates discourage saving, and without saving, there’s no capital. The immediate and direct consequences of lowering rates might be an artificial boom. But the indirect and delayed consequences are a very real bust.

Interest rates should not be dictated by politicians and bureaucrats. Borrowers and lenders will arrive at the “correct” level of rates.

International Man: Traditionally, the Fed has two mandates: price stability and maximum employment.

Lately, Stephen Miran—a Trump-appointed Fed governor—has argued for a “third mandate”: moderating long-term interest rates.

What do you make of that?

Doug Casey: Not only shouldn’t the Federal Reserve have mandates—it should be abolished. Unfortunately, it’s become so intertwined with the economy that people now believe it’s part of the cosmic firmament. The Fed determines the amount of money and credit, its cost, and the way the banks operate. It finances the government’s debt, which is especially important since the government is bankrupt. But I hate talking about what “should” happen; “should” only happens in a dream world.

Initially, the Fed only had one mandate: price stability, which was a ridiculous lie. Then, maximum employment became the second “traditional” mandate. And now they’ve taken on a true impossibility: controlling long-term interest rates.

Since the Fed was created, the dollar has lost over 95% of its value. Forget about price stability; the general price level has gone up by a factor of over 20, which is a total and abject failure. The Fed is necessarily an engine of inflation, a means of printing money.

As for the second mandate, maximum employment, the way to create it is laissez-faire. That means low taxes, low regulations, and sound money. They’ve totally failed at that as well.

And now, idiotically, they’re talking about lowering long-term rates. That’s impossible, because the only way the Fed can lower long-term rates is by buying massive amounts—many trillions—of long-term bonds. But they can only do that by creating trillions of new fiat currency. Bond prices will fall to new lows, and interest rates will rise to new highs.

These people don’t have a clue about economics or the way the world works. Trump wants to pack the Fed with puppets who will print money, vainly trying to keep interest rates below the rate of currency debasement. The result will be a catastrophe.

Instead of moving to “Abolish the Fed”, as Ron Paul famously advised, Trump is foolishly expanding its mandate.

International Man: For the average American—someone with a mortgage, some savings, maybe a 401(k)—how do these potential shifts in Fed policy translate into real-life consequences?

Doug Casey: A lower standard of living, class warfare, and eventually chaos. Among many other things, the average American and his leaders don’t understand the relationship between borrowing and savings. Unless there are savings—people producing more than they consume and putting aside the difference—there can’t be borrowing. If there are no savings, there’s nothing to borrow, so they have to liquidate capital saved by past generations, or mortgage their future.

As for what you should do, with 30-year mortgage rates around 6%, should you get a mortgage or not? Let me refer you back to the joke I told a few minutes ago. But if you can get a 30-year 6% mortgage now, I’d do it. Long-term rates are headed up, and the dollars you owe will depreciate.

But in the kind of chaos that’s being created in the world today, on many fronts, your best investment is in yourself. It’s critical that you and your family have as many skills and abilities as possible. No matter how things sort out, you want to be in a position to survive and prosper. I urge you to get my new book, The Preparation. It covers a host of things that most people haven’t even considered. Sorry for the commercial, but I think it’s important.

International Man: Do you think people should be more worried about inflation eroding their savings or about the risks of a market crash?

Doug Casey: This argument has been going on at least since the 1960s. Will the Fed’s creating ever more fiat credit to service past debt and “stimulate” the economy result in runaway inflation? Or will the debt burden and the strains on the economy become so bad that the whole rotten structure collapses in a catastrophic deflation?

We’ve been walking the razor’s edge for the last 70 years, and we’re still on it. Despite monetary stupidity, though, lots of things have gotten better because of two things. One, lots of people produce more than they consume, and save the difference. Two, technology has continued advancing. That’s cause for optimism, but those factors are due to the efforts of only a portion of the population called the middle class. And they’re numbers are in retreat.

Meanwhile, the worlds of finance and economy have become much riskier and more dangerous every year. At this point, I don’t see how they can save the US dollar. It’s a hot potato. But with the stock market and debt levels at all-time highs, the odds of a catastrophic deflation are rising.

Which will it be? Flip a coin. Either is possible, perhaps both in sequence: first a crash and then runaway inflation. Or runaway inflation followed by a crash. The only certainty is increasing levels of chaos.

International Man: What can ordinary people do right now to protect themselves and their savings in this increasingly chaotic environment?

Doug Casey: I’ve recommended that people buy gold and silver forever. Gold is finally at a reasonable level now relative to everything else. But I think it’s going much higher simply because it’s the only financial asset that’s not simultaneously somebody else’s liability. The public still isn’t buying it, however, as shown by the tiny premiums on gold coins. At some point, the public will panic into gold and silver, because—excepting Bitcoin—there’s really no place else to hide.

Having said that, I would direct your attention to the only parts of the stock market that are really cheap right now—and they’re very cheap—namely, mining stocks and oil and gas stocks. We’re in a major bull market for mining stocks, rising from very depressed levels. They’re superb speculations with high potential.

Hydrocarbons are extremely cheap, selling at around the cost of production. Everybody hates them. Producers sport dividends between 5% and 10%. I remain a big fan of coal stocks—which are often yielding up to 15%. Most people are completely unaware of this, as they are of the inevitable uranium bull market.

When you’re buying gold, I think it’s also very important that a portion of it is offshore. As big as your financial risks are in today’s world, your political risks are even greater. Therefore, you should be diversifying your assets internationally. I suggest that you buy your gold and silver either with SWP in the Cayman Islands or with  Perth Mint.

Both are low-cost and convenient, and both make a lot of sense for buying offshore gold and silver.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Fed’s Quiet War Against the Middle Class appeared first on LewRockwell.

American Juncture as Israel’s Eighth Front Ignites

Ven, 03/10/2025 - 05:01

Putin can live with Trump’s ‘Janus schizophrenia’ – as Russian forces advance on all key battle fronts.

The second stage to Trump’s ‘hand-off’ of the Ukraine war to the Europeans was clearly set out in his Truth Social post of 23 September. In the first phase of the hand-over, Trump withdrew from being the primary supplier of armaments to Kiev, and indicated that from now on Europe would have to pay for virtually everything – with weapons purchased from U.S. manufacturers.

Of course, Trump knows that Europe is fiscally ‘bust’. It hasn’t the money to fund itself, let alone a major war. He then ‘rubbed salt’ into this fiscal crisis wound by challenging NATO states to be first in line to sanction all Russian fuels. That won’t happen, of course either. It would be madness.

In this latest Truth Social post, Trump takes the Keith Kellogg line to its reductio ad absurdum“Ukraine, with the support of the EU, can take back the country [Ukraine] to its original form – making Russia look like a ‘paper tiger’… and who knows, maybe go even further that that!”

Sure – Kiev advancing to the doorstep of Moscow? Pull the other leg, Mr Trump. Of course he is trolling Kellogg and the Europeans.

Then, following Trump’s meeting with Zelensky, France, Germany and the UK at the UN, a draft UNSC resolution was proposed echoing the European and Coalition of the Willing’s undiluted demand for Russian capitulation. Trump allowed U.S. officials to participate actively in the Resolution discussion – but then, at the last moment, had the U.S. veto it.

In this convoluted way, Trump thus succeeds – like Janus – to face two directions at once: Facing one way, he is 100% behind Ukraine, extolling Ukraine’s ‘Great Spirit’ and adopting the Kellogg line that Putin is in big trouble. But ‘facing the other way’, Trump contrarily commits to “not restricting the possibility of peace talks, nor having tensions escalate further”.

Putin can live with Trump’s ‘Janus schizophrenia’ – as Russian forces advance on all key battle fronts. The bottom line is that the White House has signalled that it is not interested in war with Russia. That’s obvious. There is anyway a more concerning war brewing inside the U.S.

This war is Israel’s Eighth Front – Netanyahu recently has taken to proclaiming it thus. The Eighth Front is in America. And it is there precisely because America dominates the world media.

The so-called ‘Rules-Based Order’ blueprint (if it ever truly existed beyond narrative) has been ripped up by Israel – very deliberately and cold bloodedly.

Tom Barrack, Trump’s long-standing friend and Envoy to the Middle East – when asked what the U.S. endgame was for the Region – dismissed outright talk of ‘peace’: “When we say peace, it’s an illusion”, Barrack said. “There’s never been peace. [Some] people may say, well, they’re fighting over borders and boundaries. [But that’s] not what they’re fighting over. A border or a boundary is [merely] the currency of a negotiation”. He continued: “The end result is somebody wants dominance, which means somebody has to submit. In that part of the world … there’s no Arabic word for submit. They can’t wrap their head around submit …”.

War without limits; without rules; without law – and without ethical boundaries more particularly – becomes the prerequisite to achieving the utter subjugation of all opposition.

Netanyahu’s former National Security Adviser, Meir Ben-Shabbat, writing (with Asher Fredman) in Foreign Affairs in September, affirmed that: “Israel no longer adheres to red lines that its neighbours believed that it would never cross. Israel will not grant immunity to any leaders of hostile groups, no matter their political title or location”. When Ben Shabbat writes ‘hostile’, it is a pleasantry for meaning ‘non-compliant’.

This new doctrine is about Israeli ‘dominance’ – and for that, others logically must ‘submit’, Barrack insists. Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister, Ron Dermer, has suggested that a ‘submission’ sufficient to make Israel ‘feel fully safe’ would only emerge through the Muslim-Arab consciousness being seared by an utter ‘de-radicalising’ defeat.

Netanyahu’s ‘Eighth Front’ notion therefore derives from the proposition that full Jewish dominance (such as U.S. Envoy Barrack outlines) requires a certain dominance in America too. Israel cannot accomplish this dominance alone – it needs the unquestioning support from America that keeps the flow of money, armaments and operational support flowing.

Until recently, this unreserved support was attained through ultra-rich Jewish billionaires ‘buying’ American politicians and influencers – and purchasing the mainstream media outright. However, the rise of alternative media as the main source of news for Americans has changed the calculus and sent ripples of fear through the Jewish billionaire community.

The Charlie Kirk assassination came in the wake of multiple pressures on Kirk arising from Jewish billionaires concerned that the key American youth constituency was turning against Israel, as Max Blumenthal has outlined. The conflict with Kirk’s big Jewish donors exposed the wider issue of their dominance across U.S. influencer politics. The ensuing controversy has led to an all-out effort by pro-Israel billionaires to seize control of alternative U.S. media, particularly Tik Tok. (All U.S. social platforms have an algorithmic leaning toward Israel, whereas Tik Tok doesn’t. The pro-Israeli billionaires who are set to buy Tik Tok insist that its algorithm must be ‘retrained’).

“[What Zionists] face”, Blumenthal asserts, “is a political tsunami [of political realignment] in the United States, and they have no way of holding it back. And that’s why, in the wake of Kirk’s death, and in the days before his death, some of these Zionist Money Men have started a full-on takeover campaign of the U.S. Media. It’s like a full court press in the United States. Netanyahu had been waging a Seven Front War in the region, and now the United States has become the 8th Front. And they want to prevent anyone from being able to express themselves anywhere in the digital online ecosystem by just buying it all”.

Few among those billionaire donors who supported Kirk’s organisation, TPU.S.A, have done more than Robert Shillman to make clear the underlying nature to the 8th Front war: “With this pen, and my cheque book, I provide the ammunition!”, the billionaire proclaimed to applause, during a gala of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (ZoA) in 2021.

“I wield the pen to provide ‘ammunition’ [donations] to those organisations like ZoA on the front lines of this battle confronting enemies of Israel and the Jewish people – defending against Islamists who wish to destroy Israel and radical Leftist Jew-haters who wish to destroy the Jewish people”.

How does this affair read across into pressure on Trump to persist in prosecuting the Ukraine war effort against Russia? What is it that links hugely rich Jewish donors, classic U.S. Russophobes and the European Establishment together in the common cause of pressuring Trump to go hard on Russia? The answer is that donors and U.S. and European pro-Israeli élites all have a shared interest in having Russia preoccupied (and, in their view, weakened) by the conflict in Ukraine. Their particular concern is the prospect of Middle East war. They do not want to see Russia or China engage directly in support of Iran, were it to be attacked militarily. These élites fear for the future of Israel, particularly should Iran be empowered by BRICS allies. They prefer a Russia bogged down and not returning as a Middle East player again – something that could crimp the ambition for Jewish/Israeli supremacy across the Region.

Recall that in 1992, the then-Under Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, author of the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine, declared that, with the Soviets pushed out from the Middle East, the U.S. had become the unchallenged sole superpower in the region and could pursue its global agenda. Wolfowitz highlighted the exit of Russia as the crucial factor in achieving U.S. hegemony over the Middle East.

Recall too that in the wake of the E3 sanctions ‘Snapback’ invocation on Iran on 28 August, Russia and China jointly signed statements denouncing the E3 procedural vote as “illegal and procedurally flawed”. In one sense, it provides the grounds for China and Russia to ignore any subsequent sanctions imposed on Iran under the snapback provision. It is the first time that Russia and China have directly challenged the UN Security Council and implicitly indicated they will ignore any Snapback sanctions.

However, viewed from a different perspective, the joint denunciation of Snapback could open the door to ‘a return to the region’ by Russia (and China) through providing military support to Iran – were it to be attacked by Israel, the U.S., or both.

With Russia presently fully engaged in Ukraine, it is less likely to want to initiate direct support to Iran in the event of an attack (Russia is acutely alert to the dangers of over-extension). Were the

Ukraine war to be over, then Russia might have fewer scruples about directly intervening in support of Iran. The same would apply for China in the event of the Ukraine conflict having reached some outcome.

The last thing that the triumvirate of Jewish Zionist influencers, the U.S. Russia hawks and the European pro-Israel élites want is Russia ‘back in the Middle East’. That would constitute a nightmare for them.

When U.S. Envoy Tom Barrack was asked if Israel felt the need for another ‘definitive strike’ on Iran, he replied:

It [does] seem as though they’re marching towards a resolution of the entire problem – which is what Gaza is – right? I would imagine that just getting Gaza under control, and Hezbollah under control and the Houthis under control is not fruitful – if you don’t get the Iran regime under control. I have no information as to what they’re going to do, but I wouldn’t rule that out … We need to cut the heads off of those snakes and chop the flow of funds. That’s the only way you’re going to stop Hezbollah”.

So the out-of-the-blue-shooting of Charlie Kirk has ‘unexpectedly’ occurred at a key juncture in Netanyahu’s regional dominance bid – highlighting the already waning support for Israel amongst a cohort of young Americans.

The Kirk murder inadvertently has unlocked too, the next phase of the long simmering cultural war in the U.S. Kirk’s assassination has already become as significant as any in recent American history.

If Rober Shillman’s words to his Jewish audience advocating “confronting enemies of Israel and the Jewish people – defending against Islamists who wish to destroy Israel and radical Leftist Jew-haters who wish to destroy the Jewish people” was not a clear and broad enough declaration of war, then hear Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, addressing the crowd at the Charlie Kirk Memorial Service – to huge applause from the 100,000 present at the service:

“The Light will defeat the Dark. We will prevail over forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine that which they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that has arisen in all of us. Because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us: What do you have? You have nothing. You are wickedness, envy, hatred. You are nothing. You can produce nothing. We are the ones who build, who create, who lift up humanity”.

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

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