Lew Rockwell Institute

A war with Iran would be 10 to 15 times worse than the Iraq War in terms of casualties and costs… And we would lose. We would undoubtedly lose…. Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson

There has been much discussion about the relocation of B-2 bombers to Diego Garcia in anticipation of a potential conflict with Iran… However, the B-2 excels primarily against small, unsophisticated, and impoverished nations equipped with outdated air defense systems. …In short, the B-2 is a sophisticated tool for intimidating weaker adversaries but is largely ineffective against modern Integrated Air Defense Systems (IADS). Mike Mihajlovic @MihajlovicMike

Recent reports and satellite imagery indicate a significant buildup of US military assets at Diego Garcia, a strategic base in the Indian Ocean. The Pentagon has deployed seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers (capable of carrying nuclear payloads) numerous C-17 transport planes, ten KC-135 refueling tankers, an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, and two carrier groups to locations where they can be used in a preemptive attack on Iran. The unprecedented buildup coincides with recent threats by President Donald Trump regarding Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. On Friday, Trump delivered another ominous warning to Iran during a briefing at the White House. He said:

Iran is very high on my list of things to watch. … We will have to talk it out or very bad things are going to happen to Iran…. My big preference is that we work it out with Iran, but if we don’t work it out, bad, bad things are going to happen to Iran.

The increase in warnings along with the deployment of B-2 bombers has caused a stir among analysts, many of who now believe that Trump is planning to target Iran’s nuclear facilities with “low yield” nuclear bunker buster bombs that are designed to penetrate and destroy underground, fortified facilities. If that action were to take place, Iran would be forced to launch massive retaliatory attacks on US and Israeli bases, naval assets, critical infrastructure and oil facilities across the Middle East. And, if those attacks were able to inflict significant damage on US or Israeli targets, then we could see a rapid escalation to a nuclear war, a scenario that seems more likely now than ever before. This is an excerpt from an interview with former weapons inspector Scott Ritter:

…seven B-2 bombers have been deployed from Whitman Airforce base in the United States to Diego Garcia. This is an unprecedented deployment. And they are matched with 10 KC-31 Tankers; that’s what’s needed to launch an attack against a target like Iran. This is something that should wake people up because there is real potential for conflict….The fact is there are B-2 bombers, there are Ohio class submarines, there are nuclear weapons attached to each of these weapons systems; nuclear weapons that have been built for the sole purpose of attacking targets like these that exist in Iran. … I am simply stating the fact that the Trump administration has a nuclear posture attached to a nuclear employment plan that will use nuclear weapons in a conflict against Iran, and we can’t pretend that that doesn’t exist. Scott Ritter; minute 5:40

It’s worth noting, that the Trump administration is on the verge of launching a war on a country that poses no national security threat to the United States, nor does it threaten US interests in the region. Iran’s only crime is that it occupies a piece of real estate in a region where Israel is determined to be the dominant power. That means Iran’s military capability must be significantly diminished by Israel’s favorite pit-bull, the United States. To that end, wealthy Zionists filled Trump’s campaign coffers during the last presidential election knowing that Trump’s vast popularity would be useful in advancing the Israeli agenda. The primary goal of that agenda has always been the obliteration of Iran’s military capability so that Israel can emerge as the as the regional hegemon unopposed. Trump is merely playing the role for which he was chosen. Here’s more from Ritter:

Scott Ritter—When Trump was president last time (2016) he redid the Nuclear Posture Review and the Nuclear Employment Guidance. And the Nuclear Employment Guidance is the war plan. The war plan was rewritten so he could launch nuclear strikes on Iran. So we’re ready to launch strikes on Iran today, the plan was implemented… we have the weapons, we’ve identified the targets ….

Question—What was rewritten?

Scott Ritter—You need specific weapons-types…. We do now have a new nuclear “low yield” bunker busting bomb that will penetrate and destroy the facility with minimal fallout (We have similar nukes on Trident submarines in the region that can be used in a decapitation strike on Iran) We are ready to go to war against Iran. We have already made that decision; the plan exists.

Question—So what you’re telling me is that, if Iran develops a nuclear weapon…

Scott Ritter—We will strike, and they will be annihilated… They’ll never know what his them, and they’ll never recover from it.... The American plan will not kill tens of millions of Iranians, but it will kill tens of thousands of Iranians, destroy the nuclear infrastructure, and set Iran back forever. The alternative for Iran is to negotiate away their nuclear (program) Scott Ritter

This is why Ritter is so worried. He seriously believes that Trump is planning to preemptively attack Iran’s nuclear sites which would set the dominoes in motion triggering a nuclear war. To me, this seems like a reasonable concern, but, surprisingly, Ritter’s analysis has ignited a firestorm among a number of his supporters online who have (overnight) turned into some of his most vicious critics. Here’s a short clip from a post by Sony Thang@nxt888 that has been widely circulated on X:

Scott… Let me tell you plainly: If the U.S. uses nuclear weapons against Iran—even “tactical” ones—the spell breaks. Forever. The myth of Western restraint dies in the open. The lie of rules-based order evaporates in radioactive dust….

China won’t wait to be next. Russia will tighten its alliance with Tehran. The Global South will turn its back for good. And every nation not under Washington’s boot will know the truth: if you don’t arm yourself, you will be annihilated.

That’s not proliferation. That’s inevitability.

You say, “Only one nation walks away.”

No, Scott.

No one walks away from nuclear war. Not cleanly. Not economically. Not morally. But let’s entertain your scenario.

Iran is wiped out. Oil hits $500 a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz is a graveyard. The global economy implodes—not just Europe and Asia, but the dollar itself, because trust dies when empire burns its last moral pretense.

And here’s the part your Pentagon fantasies never compute: It’s not just bombs that bring nations to their knees. It’s legitimacy. Once lost, never regained.

And the U.S.? Already staggering from endless wars—it won’t rise from the ashes of another charred country. It’ll sink into them.

You claim you “assess the world as it is”?

Then look again. The American empire is not ascending.

It’s cornered. It’s flailing. It’s threatening annihilation not out of strength, but fear. Fear that the world it dominated is slipping away. Fear that Iran refuses to kneel. And fear that history, which you once claimed would hold America accountable, is no longer on your side.

So, keep listing your bombers, your submarines, your low-yield fantasies. Because beneath all that steel and strategy lies a single truth:

You’ve already lost the moral war.

And when that goes? Everything else follows. Sony Thang

The overall thrust of these critiques is a tacit objection to any move by Iran to compromise (or negotiate) with the Trump administration. This is generally perceived as “caving in” to the evil empire. (which, in many respects, is true.)

It’s worth noting, that Iran is not currently in violation of The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) nor has it been in the past. In fact, Iran has willingly complied with numerous additional protocols and confidence building measures (that were never imposed on any other country) all aimed at allaying fears that it was secretly developing nuclear weapons. But as Tulsi Gabbard confirmed recently, and former CIA Director William Burns before her; Iran does not have nukes, is not building nukes, and has not broken its agreements under the NPT. The whole matter is a mendacious confection concocted by powerful Zionists and their media collaborators who want to destroy Iran in order for Israel to become the dominant power in the Middle East.

It’s also worth noting the dishonest way this crisis has been presented to the American people. The public has been led to believe that Trump is trying to prevent nuclear proliferation when, in fact, the administration is demanding that Iran abandon its ballistic missile program as well.

On March 23, 2025, on Face the Nation, Trump advisor Mike Waltz stated bluntly that Trump’s demands include the dismantling of Iran’s “strategic missile program”. But Iran’s ballistic missiles do not violate any international law nor are they banned under any treaty obligation. Trump is simply ordering Iran to surrender the means by which it defends itself or face military action by the US. Is that a reasonable demand?

No, it is national suicide. And, once again, the origin of this insanity is Benjamin Netanyahu who has consistently urged the U.S. to take stronger action against Iran’s missile capabilities. (Israel’s agents in Congress introduced the MISSILES Act in July 2023 to codify U.S. sanctions on Iran’s missile and drone programs, citing Israel’s security. At the same time, Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign has included “missile-related entities”…”credited to Netanyahu’s input.”)

In short, Iran is being asked to willingly disarm itself so Israel can do to Iran what it is currently doing to Syria and Lebanon. Why would they do that?

They won’t. They will open back-channel communications with Trump’s envoys and continue to comply with their treaty obligations but eventually Trump will order air-strikes on nuclear targets in Iran signaling the beginning of the war. And that will pit America’s out-of-date weapons cache up-against Iran’s state-of-the-art ballistic missile systems that will—as Will Schryver opines—expose American weakness, not reinforce the widespread mythology of untouchable American strength.

The reasons for this are easy to understand. Following last year’s tit-for-tat missile attacks between Israel and Iran, a fantastical narrative emerged that Israeli air strikes on Iran were successful while Iranian missile attacks on Israel failed to do any significant damage. But nothing could be further from the truth. Israel’s air campaign was sharply rebuffed by Iran’s advanced multi-layered air defense systems while the vast majority of Iran’s long-range hypersonic ballistic missiles cut-through Israeli vaunted air defense systems striking targets without interference.

How do we draw these unusual conclusions?

By checking the documented accounts of what actually took place. For example, consider this early account of Israel’s October 26 attack by former intelligence officer Alastair Crooke:

Question—Did Israel cause any meaningful damage to Iran in its attack on October 26?

Alastair Crooke—No, but something significant did happen, because the attack was supposed to lead off with the destruction of the air defense systems…. what they call SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) The aircraft was supposed to destroy the air defenses in Iraq, Syria and Iran so the second and third waves would come in with conventional weapons to destroy the targets that had been selected for them. But the second and third wave could only enter Iranian airspace if it was safe for them to do that. (if the air defenses had been properly suppressed) Now what happened (although we don’t know precisely) is that those second and third waves never happened. We got into the first wave and the Israelis said “That’s it, we’re finished. It’s over. We won and it’s a great success.”

What seems to have happened is that the Israeli aircraft with their long-range missiles to destroy the air defense systems never got closer than 70 kms to Iran, too far for their missiles to lock on to the air defenses because they needed the signals to lock onto. …The key thing they said—and this is from Israeli sources—“We’ve discovered an unknown air defense system over Tehran province.” So what seems to have happened is that they (the Israeli aircraft) were being locked onto by another air defense system so they were frightened to go ahead and they scrapped the attack. They then simply released their long-range missiles (Most of these missiles are guided by GPS and the Russians are highly adept at jamming GPS.) But …this unexplained air defense system, was possibly a Russian air defense system that can attack stealth fighters like the F-35s. … If you have a missile that has a radar capacity that is able to identify a stealth fighter, then the whole idea of the attack on Iran seems to have collapsed….

All the conventional bombers carrying conventional weapons wouldn’t go into the area because it was too dangerous, it was not a secure area. The airspace was dominated by air defense that threatened the stealth fighters themselves.

This has huge geostrategic implications if this is what in fact happened…. You see, there was a three-phased plan; and when the plan was scuppered, they just announced the plan as if it had happened. “We’ve succeeded. We flew over Tehran; we suppressed their air defenses, we bombed targets and we destroyed their missile capacity.”

It’s just hype. It’s not true. Judging Freedom, Alastair Crooke, YouTube

Keep in mind, Crooke’s account is just one of many accounts that relay the same basic facts and the draw the same basic conclusions. And those conclusions, as we stated earlier, are linked to “Iran’s advanced multi-layered air defense system that can counter any potential Israeli attack on the homeland.”

In short, there is no evidence that either Israel or the United States have the ability to effectively penetrate Iran’s air defense system and destroy the targets they need to obliterate to win the war.

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The Right- both “awake” and in conservative slumber- are still rejoicing over Donald Trump’s glorious election to a second term as president. He won every swing state, we are told repeatedly. Or is it battleground state? I get confused. I guess either one works. Think Hamas and Hezbollah.

Trump certainly seemed like a winner at first, bull rushing around with autopen in hand, writing executive orders and breaking the china. But what exactly has changed? Well, the stock market has collapsed. This is almost exclusively due to Trump’s ass backwards policy of implementing- or constantly threatening to implement- tariffs on other countries. That would be fine, and a good way to protect American industry. Except that our industry is gone. Shipped offshore. Outsourced for cheaper foreign labor, under NAFTA and other disastrous trade deals. You have to build new factories, and start actually making products again, so you can provide domestic competition to imports. Obviously, that should be done before you place any tariffs on anyone. What Trump is doing is a bit like what we saw in Alice in Wonderland; sentence first, verdict afterwards. Unless your goal is to crash the market.

So, while Republicans brag, beat their chests, and chant “USA! USA!” repeatedly, the seemingly tamed “Woke” Democrats continue to rest on their laurels. And, when the occasion calls for it, to win again. They always win. Trump signs a long overdue executive order, abolishing birthright citizenship. A typical federal judge, using the never constitutional power of Judicial Review, simply overturns it. Trump waits for “his” Supreme Court to help him out and declare it constitutional. “His” Supreme Court has rarely been on his side. Virtue signaler extraordinaire Amy Coney Barrett never is. Yeah, let’s wait for “our” Supreme Court. That’s what “democracy” is all about. Getting the right unelected judge, or group of unelected judges, to decide important issues. Thomas Jefferson tried to warn against this, when John Marshall simply usurped the checks and balances and created the all powerful judiciary.

What the MAGA faithful should be learning is that you can’t govern exclusively by executive order. Theoretically, Trump should have easy sailing in getting his ideas passed into law. After all, Republicans are a majority in both houses of Congress. But as is very obvious, most Republicans are RINOs and will never support any actual “America First” policies. Even if you get all members of the “Freedom Caucus” on board, the average Republicuck is going to side with the establishment. Every time. Sure, you have the great Thomas Massie, suddenly widowed after his interview last year condemning the influence of AIPAC, but Trumpenstein has decided that the best Republican in Congress must be defeated for reelection. Meanwhile, the Giant Orange Man has once again endorsed his golfing buddy, macho Lindsey Graham, for yet another term in the Senate. Why do you think I call him Trumpenstein?

So, the MAGA people have Trump’s fiery rhetoric. They have the fact that he won all the swing states. Or all the battleground states. They believe that during his first term, he created “the strongest economy in this country’s history.” I mean, it’s only been eight years or less. Are MAGA memories really that short? Trump has made all kinds of fanciful proposals regarding taxes. Apparently Congress just voted down his plan to stop taxing tips. That was thanks to the Democrats. Party of the little guy. I believe they approved eliminating taxes on overtime, but this apparently applies only to federal workers. Do any of them work overtime? Do any of them even put in their scheduled forty hours a week? But Trump will still brag about this incredible accomplishment. He’ll just leave out the part about it applying only to those who’ll never need it. Like the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free slaves in the North.

The Democrats, my old party, are gearing up to go full clown show. Front and center is the lovely Jasmine Crockett, our first really, really ghetto member of Congress. Now, she grew up in a decidedly non-ghetto environment, which is the case with all of our non-upwardly mobile “representatives.” You may have seen tape of her speaking the King’s English as well as the average White boob. But when she dons the persona of Ghetto Girl, she suddenly sounds like one of Snoop Dogg’s side bitches. She keeps it all too “real.” Recently, she derided Governor Greg Abbott of Texas as “governor hot wheels.” This was a tasteless barb aimed at the fact Abbott is confined to a wheelchair. Predictably, Ghetto Girl refused to apologize, claiming nonsensically that she was referring to Abbott’s practice of shipping illegals to other states. Remember the furor over Trump waving his arms in a spastic way, supposedly making fun of the disabled?

Ghetto Girl also was recently quoted, during her non-apology over the Abbott remarks, as saying that “we should punch,” becoming the first known elected political leader in America to endorse physically striking someone you disagree with. Well, it’s really just an extension of “punch a Nazi in the face,” which every poor “marginalized person” applauds. The Democrats’ other new political star is none other than ESPN talking head Steven A. Smith. If you haven’t watched Smith’s act- and it is definitely an act- it consists of very loud shouting, misuse of big words, and continuous racial idolatry. That is Jason Whitlock’s term for playing the perpetual victim card, claiming that everything and everyone is “racist,” and that you, as an ill educated buffoon who has nonetheless recently signed a $100 million contract to spew out predictable “Woke” talking points, are in fact somehow a victim of “racism,” too.

Smith is just as much as advocate of physical violence, of might makes right, as the lovely Ghetto Girl is. He has become embroiled in a truly theatrical, contrived “feud” with NBA star Lebron James, and let everyone know recently that he would most assuredly have thrown a punch at Lebron if he had “laid hands” on him. Steven A. is a really, really tough guy. Just like Jasmine Crockett is really, really ghetto. Jason Whitlock destroyed Steven A.’s fake background with some real journalistic research. He proved conclusively that Steven A. lied about his college, maybe even his high school basketball career. As Whitlock says, Steven A. is a pathological liar. Which I suppose alone makes him qualified for a political career. And the mainstream Right is actively promoting Steven A. as a credible politician. Sean Hannity has him on regularly. Meghan Kelly and Patrick Bet-David sing his praises.

Trump signed an executive order outlawing DEI practices in government. I don’t know that he has this power, but he signed such an order. Recently, my own Fairfax County school board voted 16-0 to implement “gender studies” for elementary students. That sounds pretty “DEI” to me. I guess they didn’t get Trump’s message. Furthermore, I guess voters don’t mind paying these petty tyrants to not educate their children, because none of them appear to have been voted out. The same thing is going on in neighboring Loudon County, epicenter of the angry parent protests, where the “Woke” school board still reigns with unbridalled power. As I said at the time, if we can’t effect change at this kind of local level, we can’t effect change. Either most parents with young children want them to be subjected to insane Tik Tok teachers changing their pronouns, or they aren’t counting any of their votes.

As I stress consistently, we can only “win” anything by coming together. By using the only real weapon we have, which is a tremendous advantage in numbers. If you’re not an insane virtue signaling parent, go to your school board meetings, and if you are too afraid to speak up, at least stand behind the brave parents who do. If those lonely moms and dads just had a big group cheering them on, the corrupt board members wouldn’t be able to cavalierly have them thrown out by the always compliant police officers there. Is it really that hard to get angry about your children being subjected to gay pedophilic pornography like Gender Queer? To be read to by hairy, half-naked men pretending to be female strippers? For White parents to object to their kindergartner being guilted over the real and imagined transgressions of his ancestors? If you can’t get outraged about this kind of lunacy, what would it take to outrage you?

So the “Woke” Left, while seemingly on the ropes, is employing some kind of updated Rope a Dope on the Right. And it’s just as scripted and contrived as Muhammad Ali’s strategy once was. Trumpenstein is hitting them with haymaker flip flops and Hall of Fame level trolling. I’m looking to see any real improvements. I’m still waiting for the first politician to do anything that results in a positive impact on my life. I drive around and I don’t see less people. I guess they aren’t dying off from the vaccine in my area. I guess the illegals haven’t been rounded up in my area. Maybe the lovely Kristi Noem can come stand in front of our local prison and tease the sex-starved prisoners, like she did with the mega prison in El Salvador. There were supposedly vicious gang members behind bars in the background, but they seemed really tiny. Kristi needs to get her green screen people more training. And stop wearing $50,000 Rolexes.

The even lovelier Rep. Anna Paulina Luna told Fox News (who else) that she has been made aware of film being withheld by NBC, which supposedly shows patsy Lee Harvey Oswald standing “next to the vehicle,” in her words, at the time of the shooting. I hope she isn’t clumsily describing the so-called Prayer Man, an indistinct figure in the rear doorway of the Texas School Book Depository Building. Some contend that the figure is Oswald, which would of course all by itself prove that he didn’t shoot Kennedy. She also described conferring with Oliver Stone, who is set to testify before her committee. That should be interesting viewing, although she really should have sought out the humble community college dropout who now has seniority on just about everyone else in the JFK assassination research community. Although, of course, that would have instantly discredited me in the eyes of some.

The Woking Dead appear to be losing all the time. Look at the horrific remake of Disney’s classic Snow White. Although person of color Rachel Zegler did everything she could to discredit the film before anyone saw it, it still managed to hit the theaters. For like a week or so, before flaming out spectacularly. Zegler has to be seen and heard to be believed. Her incantation of “Weird! Weird!” evoked memories of the best of late medical examiner D. Wayne Carver’s press conference discussing the Sandy Hook case. Although the remake of Snow White will experience perhaps a record loss at the box office, Disney CEO Bob Iger doesn’t care. He has already slammed the criticism as politically inspired. He has no regrets about casting an obnoxious, batshit crazy leading lady who not only isn’t White, but proudly anti-White. To play a character who was named for her translucent white skin.

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When I was in graduate school I read all of the literature on how European revolutionary doctrine had destabilized Russia in the late 19th century. This process culminated with the Bolsheviks—animated by the crude doctrine of Marxism-Leninism—unleashing hell on the country. The bibliography is vast, and I suspect that few Americans or Englishmen alive today have read many of these books.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin was a young man, he participated in this corrupt system as an intelligence agent stationed in Dresden between 1985 and 1990, where he apparently worked with the Stasi—the German Democratic Republic’s horrible secret police.

However, there are many indications that, at some point after 1991—or perhaps even during his KGB service—he had something akin to a Damascene Moment in which he saw that the secular state religion he served was corrupt.

I have never met Putin and I know nothing about his character. However, according to Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, who is said to be Putin’s intellectual and spiritual advisor, Putin has genuinely rejected the Marxism-Leninist doctrine of his youth.

Here it should be noted that the West has always struggled to understand the Russian mind, which Churchill famously described as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside and enigma.”

Dugin’s Russian brand of conservatism would doubtless strike most people in the West as strange and politically incorrect. I sense that some of this thinking can be traced back to Dostoevsky’s 1871 novel Demons, about young Russian revolutionaries who has been possessed by European secular-socialist ideology.

For all of Russia’s own corruption and problems, the country nevertheless presents a fascinating counterbalance to many of the incredibly stupid, destructive, shallow, and childish cultural and political currents in the West.

One of my best friends is a Russian who, because of his family’s Jewish ancestry, was allowed to leave the Soviet Union in a deal struck between Reagan and Gorbachev. His family settled in Vienna, where he grew up. After studying math at Cambridge, he returned to Moscow, where he lived for a few years and experienced what he described as “the time of my life.” He understood as well as anyone all the country’s problems, but he nevertheless found most Russians to be extremely friendly and funny.

Especially refreshing for him was the conspicuous absence of Cultural Marxism and other doctrines that have poisoned the American and English university systems. He also developed an inordinate fondness for Russian women and—despite the extreme anti-Russian sentiment with which he must now contend in his current home in London—he continues to maintain a great relationship with his Russian girlfriend. Understandably so—she is a lovely and intelligent girl.

I mention this because I was appalled by the recent New York Times report (The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine) that the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense have provided all of the sophisticated weapons and targeting that have enabled the Ukrainian military to kill up to 700,000 Russians.

I believe the totality of circumstances indicates that the U.S. government and the CIA have, since 2014 at the latest, persistently and systematically baited Russia into taking military action against Ukraine to counter the U.S. de facto takeover of the country—a takeover with objectives and activities that are relentlessly hostile to Russia right on its doorstep. An exceptionally educated friend who grew up in Ukraine completely agrees with this assessment.

My own experience in Russia has been limited to visiting St. Petersburg, founded by the Russian Czar Peter the Great in 1703. Vladimir Putin was born in St. Petersburg, and I suspect that at least part of him shares the the Russian’s Czar’s fascination with European culture. His story reminds me of Mausolus, a ruler of what is now western Anatolia (in Turkey) in the Persian Empire between 377-353 B.C. While Mausolus had a reputation for being a stalwart ruler of Persian cultural and political sensibilities, he became deeply involved through military action in Greek affairs. Ultimately he seemed to become a greater lover of Greek culture than most Greeks, especially where art and architecture were concerned.

Since 2022, I have frequently told anyone who would listen that the United States should adopt a policy of recognizing that Russia has legitimate economic and security interests. The majority of people with whom I have spoken have accused me of being a “Putin Apologist” or “Putin Stooge” and they have asked me why I would trust Vladimir Putin.

My response has always been, “Why should I trust Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, and Olaf Scholz?”

Indeed, it seems to me that, since around the year 2008, pretty much everything we’ve heard emanating from Washington D.C., London, Paris, and Berlin is dubious at best, and mostly a lie. Most of the policies implemented by Europe’s elites have been detrimental to the working and middle class citizenry of Europe. Germany’s insane “Green Energy” policies have been a total disaster for its skilled manufacturing sector—until recently the envy of the West—and its insane immigration policies have been a disaster for public safety and the security of German women.

In recent years, the government of Great Britain has repudiated the nation’s long and venerable tradition of free speech. Nowadays the UK is a place in which Big Brother is Watching and severely punishing those who violate the state’s growing restricted speech code. A couple of years ago, British comedian and author, Konstantin Kisin (who was born and raised in Russia and is a strong critic of Vladimir Putin) pointed out that in one recent year, 400 people had been arrested in Russia for things they said on social media. In same year, 3,300 people were in arrested in the UK for things they said on social media. This is, it seems to me, is absolutely shocking.

Yesterday came the news that Marine Le Pen was banned from the next presidential race because of an accounting irregularity. The charges reminded me of similar law-fare tactics the Democrat Party used against Donald Trump.

Since 2020 in the West, we have experienced COVID-19 mRNA vaccine mandates, censorship, and the banning of political opposition.

Considering this, I pose the following provocative question: Could it be that—for all of its faults—the Russian nation is now something like a defender of Western Civilization from the militant barbarians who have taken over the politics and culture of the West?

Before readers respond with comments, I hope they will bear in mind that I am NOT asserting this to be true, I am merely asking the question. It to me that asking provocative questions is the first step to opening up serious thought and inquiry about a complex and difficult subject.

This originally appeared on Focal Points – Courageous Discourse.

The post Is Russia Now the Defender of Western Civ? appeared first on LewRockwell.

“If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”—James Madison

It’s no joke: America is becoming a Constitution-free zone.

Little by little, our rights are being whittled down in the name of national security.

Where do you draw the line?

How much tyranny will Americans tolerate in the name of national security?

At what point does this slippery slope of power grabs lead to dictatorship?

Will we let border police trample on the rights of everyone they encounter, including legal residents and citizens? Turn a blind eye when men, women and children are forcibly detained by gangs of plainclothes agents and made to disappear? Will we accept a national ID card that enables the government to target individuals and groups it deems undesirable? Will we tolerate AI-powered surveillance cameras and drones that track us more effectively than they protect us? Will we censor ourselves, fearing that any expression of dissent will mark us as anti-government?

Will we abandon the constitutional principles our founders fought for? This is the bargain the police state demands of us.

Take immigration, for example.

President Trump wants us to believe that the nation’s security is so threatened by illegal immigrants that we should tolerate roving bands of ICE and border patrol agents disregarding the Constitution at every turn.

But these government agents aren’t just disregarding it—they’re trampling it with the blessing of the man who swore to “preserve, protect and defend” that very same Constitution.

First Amendment rights to free speech, assembly, and protest. Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Fifth Amendment guarantees of due process. Sixth Amendment protections ensuring a right to legal counsel. Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishments. Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection under the law.

All of these and more are being imperiously swept aside in the Trump Administration’s pursuit of an America “for Americans and Americans only.”

Trump has invoked wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act to justify the expulsion of illegal immigrants, whom Trump has likened to terrorists, killers, criminals, and enemies of the state.

However, with national security being used as a pretext to strip away rights on a larger scale than just criminals, the individuals targeted by the Trump Administration’s overreach represent a broader cross-section of American society: immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who live and work in the mainland of the United States. (It is estimated that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $97 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, contributing $59.4 billion to the federal government, including payments for federal income tax and federal social insurance such as Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment Insurance. In other words, they are paying for entitlement programs for which they do not receive benefits.)

Individuals whose visas allow them to legally reside in the U.S. are also being rounded up and made to disappear without due process.

The reports of how these round-ups are being carried out—with ambushes on city streets, in broad daylight, at the hands of masked, plainclothes officers, and without any charges being levied, court hearings or defense attorneys notified—are beyond chilling.

Some are being targeted based on their nationality. Some are being racially profiled. Some are being classified as criminal based solely on the fact that they have tattoos. Some, like Abrego Garcia, are being mistakenly snatched up and deported to private prisons in foreign countries, beyond the physical reach of U.S. courts.

As Garcia’s attorney warned, the Trump Administration seems to have adopted the mindset that “the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

And then there are the scientists, doctors, academics and students who are being rounded up because at some point they voiced their concerns about the mounting death toll in Palestine.

With the Trump Administration now equating even the perception of antisemitism as terrorism, that puts anyone in the government crosshairs who even dares to suggest that the killing of civilian women and children in Palestine is wrong.

For example, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk wrote an op-ed calling for the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel. That’s all it took for her to be placed on the government’s enemies list, stripped of her visa without warning or notice, surrounded on the street by a small army of masked agents, and whisked out of state to a detention center 1500 miles away without any family or friend knowing her whereabouts.

These arbitrary roundups and deportations are not just violations of the Fifth Amendment’s due process protections. They also trample the First Amendment’s right to free speech and assembly, particularly for those who speak out against government policies.

These actions are not limited to just immigrants or perceived enemies—they extend to anyone daring to challenge the status quo. Whether it’s activists, academics, or everyday citizens, being targeted for political expression is an assault on the very essence of free speech.

In this way, these round-ups represent the beginning of the slippery slope, leading not just to arbitrary detentions and the expansion of private prisons as an extension of the police state but to an eventual authoritarian regime where dissent is suppressed, and constitutional rights are discarded.

This is not just happening at the southern border.

These round-ups are increasingly occurring in cities like New York, Boston, and northern Virginia, with many U.S. citizens also being swept up in warrantless searches, surveillance, and overreach from federal and local law enforcement.

Where once the nation’s border constituted a thin line, it is becoming an ever-thickening zone dominated by authoritarianism and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

This zone impacts millions of Americans who have never been near a border—citizens who live in everyday places, like urban and suburban areas, yet are subject to government overreach.

As journalist Todd Miller explains, that expanding border region now extends “100 miles inland around the United States—along the 2,000-mile southern border, the 4,000-mile northern border and both coasts… This ‘border’ region now covers places where two-thirds of the US population (197.4 million people) live… The ‘border’ has by now devoured the full states of Maine and Florida and much of Michigan.”

Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, or 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

In this authoritarian reshaping of America, no one is safe, not even in their own homes.

The government’s ever-expanding, Constitution-free zone translates to greater numbers of Americans being subject to warrantless searches, ID checkpoints, transportation checks, and even surveillance on private property far beyond the boundaries of the borderlands.

From facial recognition software to mass data collection, surveillance technology is being used to monitor immigrants and ordinary citizens alike who are not suspected of any crime.

With Trump considering plans to turn a portion of the southern border into an expansive military installation policed by active-duty troops, we’re going to see even more of these assaults on our freedoms. As Trump promised after Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was arrested because of his anti-war activism, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”

Miller explains:

“In these vast domains, Homeland Security authorities can institute roving patrols with broad, extra-constitutional powers backed by national security, immigration enforcement and drug interdiction mandates. There, the Border Patrol can set up traffic checkpoints and fly surveillance drones overhead with high-powered cameras and radar that can track your movements. Within twenty-five miles of the international boundary, CBP [Customs and Border Protection] agents can enter a person’s private property without a warrant.”

Across the nation, local police forces are becoming militarized extensions of federal agencies like CBP and DHS, routinely receiving federal funds and training to act as armed enforcers of national security policies. By the time you add the military into that equation, you’ve got all the necessary ingredients for martial law.

The CBP, with its more than 60,000 Customs and Border Protection employees, supplemented by the National Guard and the U.S. military, is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a national police force imbued with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies.

Just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to local police agencies in the form of grants to transform them into extensions of the military.

As Miller points out, the government has turned the nation’s expanding border regions into “a ripe place to experiment with tearing apart the Constitution, a place where not just undocumented border-crossers, but millions of borderland residents have become the targets of continual surveillance.”

In much the same way that police across the country have been schooled in the art of sidestepping the Constitution, border agents have nearly unlimited discretion to stop, search, interrogate and arrest anyone they “suspect,” based on arbitrary factors such as:

• Driving an unusual vehicle.
• Passengers appearing “suspicious.”
• Having a dusty or modified car.
• Avoiding eye contact or looking too long at an officer.

These arbitrary and broad criteria make it easy for any citizen to be targeted without just cause, turning everyday travel into a potential confrontation with law enforcement. In other words, anything goes when it comes to the police state’s justifications for undermining our rights.

These troubling developments at the borders are just one part of a broader erosion of constitutional rights that has been underway for decades in the name of national security.

When we look back at history, we see a consistent pattern of political power grabbing in the name of national security. From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the War on Terror, the price of security is always paid by our freedoms—and each step we take brings us closer to a system where those in power determine the limits of our liberty by using national security as an excuse to curtail fundamental freedoms.

Fast-forward to the present, and Donald Trump capitalized on this historical pattern by claiming that the only way to keep America safe from dangerous immigrants was to build an expensive border wall, expand the reach of border patrol, and enlist the military to “assist” with border control.

Continuing this trend, Joe Biden sent thousands of active-duty troops to the southern border, in anticipation of more than 10,000 illegal crossings per day—reinforcing the military presence and fortifying the unchecked power at the border.

And now Trump is doubling down on everything he and his predecessors have done to fortify this unchecked power.

This pattern of exploiting national security fears for authoritarian control has continued into the present day with Trump’s immigration crisis becoming a pretext for greater control, a strategy to stoke fear and justify authoritarianism.

Yet despite the propaganda coming from the White House, the looming problem is not so much that the U.S. is being invaded by hostile forces at the border, but rather that the U.S. Constitution is under assault from within by a power-hungry cabal at the highest levels of power.

Before long, the only Americans qualified to live freely in Trump’s America will be those who march in lockstep with the Deep State’s dictates, and even absolute compliance is no guarantee of safety.

It used to be that the Constitution was our only reliable safety net, but that is being systematically dismantled.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government is now the greatest threat to our safety, and there’s no border wall big enough to protect us from these ruffians in our midst.

The answer to this growing tyranny begins with us—“We the people.”

The Constitution should not be negotiable. Freedom is not negotiable.

You want to make America great again? Start by making America free again.

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The United States of Tyranny: America Is Becoming a Constitution-Free Zone appeared first on LewRockwell.

The upheaval we are witnessing with Trumpism affects the United States, its national relations, and the domestic politics of its allies. It may seem strange that European leaders would criticize the President of the United States for his policies at home, in violation of the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of a foreign country. However, while they do not suffer from his reforms at home, they are enduring the unspeakable consequences they provoke at home. These are only just beginning.

The period we are experiencing, with the rapprochement between the United States and Russia, is shaking up the global political scene. In doing so, all intergovernmental institutions are being disrupted. It appears that some of them responded to an unofficial objective, which everyone was careful not to state publicly, but which has not stood the test of time. Others were pursuing actions contrary to their official objectives, which was not a problem when all their members were in agreement, but seems unbearable today. Ultimately, multilateralism, as it was practiced, was anything but multilateral.

The G7 and NATO are already broken

The political coordination of the “West” was ensured by the G7, a series of meetings at all levels, which developed a common discourse. However, during the virtual meeting of heads of state and government on February 24, 2025, US President Donald Trump refused to sign the final communiqué and threatened his partners with leaving the G7 if they published it without his agreement  [ 1 ] .

For the past month, G7 meetings have been taking place without the United States. Thus, during the virtual meeting of national security advisers on March 28, in which Ukraine was involved, the American Michael Waltz did not participate  [ 2 ] .

It is clear that there is no longer any political coordination from the “West.” Consequently, there is no longer any military coordination either.

The French and British, initially in competition, then by mutual agreement and consultation, have launched a series of meetings of allied heads of state and government. They seek to ensure the continent’s security under the French and British nuclear umbrellas. But, as it stands, this idea cannot work because the problem has been poorly framed.

Indeed, for the moment, they interpret the events as a shift of the United States’ armies from Europe to the Far East, while President Trump seeks to put an end to the “American Empire”, both by ideology – he is a Jacksonian  [ 3 ] – and by necessity – he is managing the debt crisis  [ 4 ] -.

In the allies’ hypothesis, it would be enough to increase the military spending of each to compensate for the US withdrawal, whereas, if it is a question of the end of “American imperialism” as I maintain, it is not so much the budget of the Atlantic Alliance as its mode of organization that is in question. Washington no longer wishes to assume command of the whole, but simply to show the way.

However, while European states and their Canadian, Australian, Korean, and Japanese allies all obeyed the United States, they did not get along with each other. The history of the European continent is an endless series of rivalries, conflicts, and wars, with the sole exception of the Roman Empire. At the time, populations submitted to Rome to protect themselves from invasions. After its fall, the Vikings and Mongols pillaged the continent. The empires of Charlemagne, Charles V, Napoleon, or Hitler never knew peace. Today, no imminent danger is forcing Europeans to unite. Hence the invention of a supposed Russian threat, as if the “Red Army” were preparing to parade on the Champs-Élysées.

Two weeks ago, on March 19, the RAND Corporation, the US military-industrial lobby, suggested creating a “European Deterrence Council” with France, the United Kingdom and other key European states such as Germany and Poland  [ 5 ] . However, strategic nuclear weapons cannot be a means of deterrence in the absence of strong conventional armies. However, none of the Europeans have any, the current French and British armies are not intended to defend their territories, but to project themselves into neo-colonial operations, mainly in Africa.

NATO’s enormous resources are compromised. All it takes is for the United States to stop sharing its own resources for nothing to work. Their battlefield intelligence is essential to the operation of the weapons they have purchased. Furthermore, if they do not wish to be involved in a conflict, they will have to block the use of the heavy weapons they have sold, from armored vehicles to aircraft. What was designed to contain the adventures of some allies is now stifling them all.

Moreover, the same problem will arise with the heavy weapons sold by France and the United Kingdom, which have also all been equipped with inhibitors. Paris and London will also have to block them when, after the defeat of Ukraine, Poland attempts to recover Eastern Galicia and Hungary recovers Transcarpathia. And what will become of NATO when Romania attempts to recover Moldova?

National and intergovernmental institutions reveal their true faces

At the helm of the Department of Economic Efficiency, Elon Musk is slimming down the US bureaucracy. Public opinion is listening as he reveals the Biden administration’s mismanagement. As a libertarian, Musk is content to shrink the federal government. But behind this fight, President Trump is destroying, piece by piece, all the budgets of “American imperialism.” He has revoked most of USAID, the so-called humanitarian aid agency that served as a front for the CIA. He is also attacking the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the two agencies that legally provide grants to extend the CIA as part of the “Five Eyes” (i.e., cooperation between Anglo-Saxon secret services). Every day, we discover new agencies with obscure activities that extended “American imperialism” around the world. The latest, the small US African Development Foundation, located near the White House, barred DOGE agents from entering its premises, which it had guarded with its own police officers. Its employees holed up like madmen so that no one could discover their purpose.

All NGOs and political parties around the world that the US federal government subsidized will have to find new sources of funding or close.

I can’t resist telling you how, among allies, this system is crumbling to its foundations. For example, the French NGO Reporters Without Borders, which claims to defend “the right of every human being to have access to free and reliable information,” is in reality a CIA agency. It refused to defend me when I was threatened and had to leave France. However, President Trump has just shut down propaganda radio and television stations. Without any qualms, Reporters Without Borders has joined forces with Voice of America employees to sue the US administration and demand the reinstatement of the station’s so-called “journalists.”

Or again, the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, linked to the French Socialist Party, has gradually allied itself with CIA pseudopods. Today, it employs, for example, Rudy Reichstadt, founder of Conspiracy Watch, already heavily subsidized by France. While claiming to be a supporter of the Munich Charter, which specifies the rights and responsibilities of journalists, this figure has described us, in nearly 300 articles, as “forgers,” without ever indicating how we have falsified reality.

The collapse of these Washington-subsidised NGOs and political parties corresponds to the awareness that the European Union is reproducing this system. This includes agencies comparable to USAID, USIP and NED. While all experts have long known that the EU subsidises NGOs to speak well of it and others to denigrate its opponents, the extent of its propaganda is only now being discovered. The Hungarian Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) has just published a study by Thomas Fazi on EU propaganda subsidies  [ 6 ] .

We learn, for example, that the EU has launched programs to “combat the Eurosceptic discourses already spread by autocratic elites” (RevivEU) or to “denationalize European engagement” (EU TURN 2025); programs that add to the funding of cronies, such as the Robert Schuman Foundation to combat “Eurosceptic and national-populist mythology” or the European Policy Centre to speak well of international migration and ill of Russia.

We already knew, from studies by the European Centre for Law & Justice (ECLJ)  [ 7 ] , that the European Court of Human Rights, far from being an impartial tribunal, was the preserve of the employees of the speculator George Soros. We now know that the European Union, far from being an administration that respects the diversity of its members, manipulates its budget against its “citizens”.

We have not yet reached the stage of slimming down the European Union and the Council of Europe, but there is an awareness of the corruption of the Brussels bureaucracy and the Strasbourg justice system.

Conclusion

The multilateralism we have known within the institutions of the “West,” the G7 and NATO, persists, but is paralyzed. These organizations will quickly disappear in their current form. To continue, they will have to radically change their form.

Similarly, the so-called “civil society,” far from being the emanation of citizens as a complement to democratic institutions, now appears to be riddled with hybrid organizations working behind the scenes for States, without the knowledge of their citizens and against them.

—

[ 1 ]  “  France, unable to cope with the shock of Donald Trump  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , February 25, 2025.

[ 2 ]  “  Andriy Yermak Held a Conversation with National Security Advisors to G7 Leaders  ”, Presidency of Ukraine , March 28, 2025.

[ 3 ]  “Misinterpretations of the evolution of the United States”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , First part January 28, 2025, Second part February 4, 2025.

[ 4 ]  “  Is Donald Trump managing the possible collapse of the “American empire”?  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , March 11, 2025.

[ 5 ]  “  Nuclear Deterrence: Can Britain and France Take on America’s Role in Defending Europe Against Russian Aggression?  », Rand Corporation , March, 19, 2025.

[ 6 ]  The EU’s propaganda machine: How the EU funds NGOs to promote itself , Thomas Fazi, March 2025.

[ 7 ]  NGOs and ECHR judges (2009-2019) and The Impartiality of the ECHR – Problems and Recommendations (2023), Grégor Puppinck, European Centre for Law and Justice.

The post Will Intergovernmental Institutions Withstand the End of the ‘American Empire’? appeared first on LewRockwell.

According to- Melissa Lin: Increased risk of security breach: A cashless society may bring about increased risks to personal and national security. From a personal security standpoint, the risks we already experience when we lose credit cards or our phones would only be exacerbated in an environment without paper currency.

Cash is one of the last man-made means of protection that he or she has against governments that have grown to a degree of power that they never had before.

The Dangers of a Cashless Society

There are two predominant dangers that come with a cashless society, and just about every negative that you can think of due to such will fall into one of these two groups:

1. Denial of purchasing power
2. A complete loss of anonymity

Denial of Purchasing Power

A cashless society is a controlled society. If everything must go through an online banking or credit card process, then you have just lost virtually all control over what you buy.

Anything that is not politically sanctioned(guns, ammo, body armor, helmets, particular books, particular website premium subscriptions, political donations, etc.) could very easily be vaporized overnight.

This, of course, would drive the makers and holders of such products into a black market to barter their goods, and this in turn would be responded to by the use of overwhelming government force. This will come in the form of Stryker vehicles, concussion grenades, snipers, and men with automatic rifles and body armor.

Don’t believe me? Read FA Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Totalitarian governments must resort to force simply for the sole reason that people will naturally refuse to comply with widespread theft of their own goods. This force will only continue to grow in its usage.

Totalitarians do not accept blame for their own economical failures. The state is the end of all things to them, and as such, the end justifies the means – no matter how terrifying such a means may be.

A Complete Loss of Anonymity

Once cash is abolished everywhere, your attempts at any form of anonymity will be destroyed.

You already have an amazing amount of data that has been collected from you from your Internet search history, GPS data, voting history, bank statements, credit card statements, phone data, and a host of other publicly available information that easily allows people to deduce information from you.

And where humans fail, algorithms thrive. I have a hobby interest in algorithm creation (particularly multiple linear regression analysis) and have used it within my healthcare job as a means of predicting patient attendance rather accurately on any given day. I’ve also used them to (somewhat less accurately) predict when a patient was going to have episodes of heart block.

Algorithms are a powerful tool, and the more data you feed them, the stronger they get. With the amount of data that has been collected on you already, the government may be able to make a much stronger prediction about who you are, what you believe, and what you possess than you would’ve ever thought possible.

Just think about what a cashless society would mean for the following purchases:

• Medicine – The government can now invade your medical privacy to see what meds you need to live as well as know what could either improve or hamper your condition. For those who don’t believe that this is a concern, just keep in mind that it wasn’t that long ago that the US military was warning its soldiers against getting genetic testing to determine their family tree. Why? Because it was deemed to be a security risk. What do they know here that we don’t?
• Food – Algorithms can easily predict when you are buying much more than what you could eat within a particular span of time. This then means that food stores can be predicted and located. Come disaster time, your house could easily be one of the first that is targeted for “hoarding”. And what happens if it’s determined that those with large food stores are likely to be “domestic terrorists”?
• Firearms and Body Armor – This is the low-hanging fruit here. Weapons, ammunition, body armor – they could all be easily tracked (and later confiscated). Buying “too much” of one particular product may cause red flags to be attached to your file, and you could very easily end up with a visit from an alphabet agency full of men carrying what is now a felony for you to own.
• Ham Radios – There already seems to be an attack against ham radio users as the government has realized that this is the route that many fearing censorship/silencing are turning toward. If you can shut down all communication other than what is government sanctioned, you have effectively silenced free speech.
• Media – Do you like to watch documentaries that may be labeled as conspiracy theories? Is it that hard to imagine a “misinformation tax” to discourage Americans from imbibing in certain forms of media? Why not? We’ve already seen the “death by a thousand cuts” approach being used with firearms so that the argument can be made that “no, you can have a gun, but you just have to fill out these fifty forms, pay a $4000 fee, and have a license. See? There’s no infringement whatsoever.”

To think that the same idea couldn’t be applied to the news commentators that you like to listen to is naive.

Here are some arguments that will be used for a cashless society:

Physical Money Shortages

Throughout 2024 we were told that there was a coin shortage throughout the U.S.

As a result, retailers either quit giving coin change back or strongly discouraged customers from asking for it.

Kroger actually resorted to either giving you back your money in the form of credit vouchers (to that particular store of course) or by donating the change that they owed you to charity.

Control Over Dangerous and Illegal Purchases

In what can only be viewed as an incredibly ironic wordsmithing, we will be told that one of the benefits to a cashless society is that we can finally rein in purchases that are deemed by the government to be dangerous to the public.

Guns, ammunition, freedom-oriented books (“radical terrorist recruiting material”), and the like will be argued against so that we can keep our society safe. Notice that there is always an emphasis on safety throughout this entire process.

A Fomite of Disease

Once again, 2024 set the stage here. Cash purchases plummeted worldwide, with credit cards filling in the void as people began to avoid any and all cash purchases with the hopes of not getting themselves sick.

This was a talking point spouted throughout the mainstream media in 2024 and will continue to be used in the future as the push for the abolition of cash continues.

Cost of Creation Outweighs the Actual Value of Money

We see this already with the US penny. It actually costs 2.41₵ to produce a single penny.

While our government currently has no problem with making fiscally irresponsible decisions, when it finally does come around to deciding that “you know what, pennies aren’t worth it” – or any other form of cash for that matter – there will be nobody that will argue against them.

This decision will be portrayed as a means of reducing wasteful spending, and anyone who argues against this given reasoning for the abolition of cash will be labeled as an idiot who can’t do proper math.

Read the Whole Article

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Are you a tech optimist or pessimist? Do you think our advancing technology—in areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and space technology—will make our world better or worse? And do you think the new technologies of the last two centuries have more helped or harmed the advancement of mankind?

I’ve found that the more traditional a Catholic is, the more likely he is to answer those questions pessimistically. He’s more inclined to be skeptical of the claims coming from tech optimists that we can make a better world through man-made technology. We see this skepticism particularly in the “back to the land” movement that has grown popular among a certain segment of Catholics in recent years.

I spent the first fifteen years of my career as a software developer, and my start coincided with the internet revolution of the 1990s. So I’ve heard many promises of a tech utopia, and how new technologies will “change the world” (an apparently mandatory phrase in every tech CEO’s company pitch). There’s no question that technology has changed the world, particularly in the last three decades—but has that change been for the better?

Recently Vice President J.D. Vance addressed some of those issues in an insightful speech given to a summit of technology leaders. Vance tackles one of the biggest concerns of advancing technology: how it impacts the workforce.

Since the days of the Luddite movement of the early 19th century, people have worried that new technology will replace their jobs. For 200 years it has been mostly blue-collar workers, whose jobs demand physical labor and thus are most easily replaced by technology, who have been at the forefront of the anti-technology movement. But since the advent of AI, knowledge workers (like me) have cause for concern. Will Crisis Magazine one day be essentially run by AI? Will AI write and edit the articles? For all I know, some of the articles already submitted and published by Crisis were written primarily by AI. (While writing this piece, I used the AI agent Grok four times to assist me—and just six months ago I never used AI tools. But Grok is far more efficient than a Google search. I also used Grok to generate the image used with this article.)

Vance addresses these concerns adeptly, and he goes deeper than the standard answer, “New Technology just transfers jobs to other, better, industries.” I encourage you to read his speech. However, even though he quotes Pope John Paul II, Vance focuses only on economic issues; he doesn’t address cultural and spiritual issues that arise from new technology tools. Yet these are issues that Catholics need to be contemplating.

When we take a step back we can see how transformative new technologies have been just in the past three decades. The internet, social media, and then the smartphone have radically changed life as we know it in our society. Younger people today don’t realize how different things were before everyone was always connected and had what amounts to a supercomputer in their pockets.

How exactly do we quantify this transformation? Has it been a net benefit or net negative for our culture? It’s hard to judge. The severe reduction of actual direct interactions with other people has clearly had an unfavorable impact on most of us, and studies have shown an increase in loneliness associated with smartphone usage. Furthermore, recently an article in the Financial Times (paywalled) indicated that cognitive skills in teens and young adults have been sharply declining, with the main culprit being the smartphone.

These are disturbing trends, to be sure, but the biggest concern for Catholics should be the spiritual impact of advancing technology. For years I’ve studied the numbers regarding the practice of Catholicism in America, and I’ve noticed a huge drop in the practice of the faith starting at the turn of millennium and especially among young people—right when internet usage was exploding. I strongly suspect that there’s a direct connection between those two things, but I admit I have no hard data to support that claim. My contention is that in many ways the internet—and particularly social media—has replaced the local church as a source for community and for answers to life’s biggest questions. The advent of AI “companions” could further accelerate an already alarming trend.

After mentioning all these concerns, it might surprise the reader to know that I still consider myself a “tech optimist”; or, at least, I lean more toward optimism on the spectrum between utopia and dystopia. I don’t think technology can bring about an earthly utopia (the fatal conceit of my favorite childhood show, Star Trek), but at the same time I believe the Catholic Faith and an authentic Catholic culture can thrive in a future technology-driven world.

For example, I’m amazed at how many people I’ve met who have become Catholic or returned to the practice of the Faith through finding Catholic content online. I know a young lady who decided during Covid lockdowns to research online which religion was the true religion, and ended up becoming Catholic and joining a Catholic religious order!

In an ironic twist, the rise of the traditional Catholic movement in America has been primarily driven by the internet. Back in the 1980s the vast majority of Catholics had completely forgotten about the TLM, and there was no easy way to make it more known, what with all the powers-that-be in the Church opposed to it. You practically had to know a secret password to find someone who might tell you more about traditional Catholicism. But today you can’t even dip your toe into the waters of Catholic social media without encountering devotees of the ancient Mass and other traditional practices of the Faith.

And not to toot the Crisis horn too much, but I regularly meet people who tell me that Crisis helped them with their practice of the Faith during this tumultuous time in the Church’s history, and of course Crisis Magazine lives entirely on the internet. I wouldn’t be doing this internet-based job if I didn’t think it was a net benefit to souls. Modern technology is a dangerous tool, to be sure, but it’s a tool that can also be wielded for the Lord.

Read the Whole Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can we get down to the brass tacks here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So just plain stop it, POTUS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a word, the Fed inflated us there!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/ih1luFo3zG

— AF Post (@AFpost) March 26, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video Link

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

Read the Whole Article

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

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

Insane and Suicidal

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

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

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

They still do.

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

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

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

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

Bill of Rights

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

This is nonsense.

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

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

Here’s how:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scary Name

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

Border “Czar” Tom Homan seems to disagree.

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

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

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

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

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

Here we go again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Whole Article

The post A Weird Remedy appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Whole Article

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

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

These paragraphs show the purpose:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From AntiWar.com

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

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

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

President Trump is threatening to bomb Iran next:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Whole Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those in power are meddlesome …

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

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

Act before things exist

Manage them before there’s disorder

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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