Lew Rockwell Institute

I was in the 3rd grade.  After school, Freddie Mullens sold me a “church mouse” in a matchbox for .50c, church mice being popular cartoon characters at the time.  I proudly showed mom when I got home.

“You sucker, you dumbass, you gullible kid,” she scolded as she submerged my new pet in water.

That stung!  So I wouldn’t forget that lesson, she kept laughing at me for months!

In the 4th grade I learned how to reduce fractions to the lowest common denominator, so 32/64 turned out to be a simple-ass half inch!  I could deal with a half inch.

Trump’s Ear

Was it a Secret Service failure or deep state set-up?  Over 64 extraneous “facts” have been spun by our trusty media. I reduced that complex fraction to 2!

1) Were the two SS snipers distracted, forced or paid to look the other way?

2) Did they know an assassin would come out of nowhere, or was Crooks an expected hypnotized MK-Ultra tool?

According to witnesses, the assassin was seen on the roof two minutes before the shooting, indicating the SS snipers either weren’t paying attention or waited for the dastardly deed to be done to dispose of Crooks?  The SS snipers had to know beforehand that a shooter would appear..or be completely surprised at a random gunman on a roof.  Either way they had to see a rifle through their high powered scopes, which begs the question “why did they wait???

I’m no Carlos Hathcock, but on a good day I can nail a coffee can at 150yds with the open sights on my WW2 issue Garand, and hunting always depends on “who sees who first.”  Any experienced woodsman can tell ya that hesitation means no meat for the table!

If this was an attempt at ridding the country of Trump to perpetuate the current criminal regime involving a JFK-style conspiracy, I would expect the two SS snipers to disappear and never come before another Kangaroo commission….or more likely be fired for incompetence amid public outrage.

The reaction from Biden, establishment politicos and media toads was of nominal sympathy for the three other victims and self-serving spin as they buried the events of 7/13 in a haboob of complexity and distraction…as usual.

I was always a fan of Thoreau, “Walden” and SIMPLICITY!  That intersects with the old army slogan; “Keep It Simple Stupid.”  Complexity prevents accurate decision making (remember the bullshit storm of CDC disinformation on covid and the millions who chose wrong and accepted the deadly vaxxx?).

My money at the moment is on the fact that no seasoned hunter or veteran SS sniper would have so carelessly failed to perform….and given the U.S.s long-running M.O. of false flags, psyops, regime change and all forms of dirty deeds in protection of the empire; the whole scenario reeks like the backdoor of a fish market and the Secret Service has a lot of ‘splainin to do.

The post K.I.S.S., Logic, and Liars appeared first on LewRockwell.

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”  – William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)

The always mysterious question when trying to figure out what is happening in this insane world and why it is happening is who are “they”? In the current chaotic atmosphere, “they” are in the process of throwing their senile child sniffing pedophile Trojan horse president overboard because his dementia ridden brain has been laid bare for all the world to see. It isn’t just the Democratic Party throwing him to the wolves.

When you witness the party, supposedly loyal politicians, the regime media, surveillance state spooks, Hollywood celebrities, and globalist billionaires all simultaneously turn on the person they installed in 2020 through a rigged election, you realize the voting public have no say in how this country is run. Whether you refer to “they” as the Deep State, invisible government, ruling elite, globalist oligarchs, or shadowy men in smoke filled backrooms, we are just bit players in this surreal horror movie.

It is no longer a conspiracy theory that we are ruled by unelected men using their wealth to pull the levers of society to benefit themselves and the apparatchiks who do their dirty work. At some level, this type of control has existed since the inception of our country. Andrew Jackson’s tirade in the 1830s revealed there were deceitful men operating in the shadows, with their greedy agendas prevailing over what was best for the people.

 “Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out!”

The capture of our government, media and financial system accelerated during the last century as described by Edward Bernays in his 1928 book – Propaganda. Of course, he wrote this fifteen years after the capture of our financial system, with the Creature from Jekyll Island – the Federal Reserve being created by a cabal of bankers and politicians intent on lining their pockets.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”– Edward Bernays – Propaganda (1928) pp. 9–10

The traitorous president who signed the bill creating the Federal Reserve, in the same year he signed into existence the loathsome income tax, and later promised to keep the U.S. out of World War I, before taking us into that war, supposedly regretted handing over control of the government to a small cabal of dishonorable men. Politicians and Wall Street bankers have been using the debasement of our currency to enrich themselves at our expense, ever since.

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world — no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” – Woodrow Wilson – 1919

For decades the Deep State was able to remain hidden, working in the shadows behind the scenes, with the general population oblivious to their existence. But their existence was outed when they assassinated John F. Kennedy in front of the entire world and took out their CIA patsy on national TV. The CIA, along with their media mouthpieces, created the term “conspiracy theorist” as a derogatory term to keep the public sedated and onboard with whatever narrative they were selling.

The Church Committee in the mid-1970s further revealed the depth and breadth of the traitorous activities of the CIA and the surveillance state bureaucracy. Mike Lofgren defined the Deep State in his 2016 book, describing how the consent of the governed has been nothing more than a fantasy for many decades in this country.

“I have come to call this shadow government the Deep State…a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections” ― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

Still, anyone questioning the officially approved narrative, as propagated by the bought off politicians; captured propaganda spewing regime media; paid-off “experts” in academia, finance, the military and the sciences; globalist organizations; and billionaires with fake foundations, was ridiculed and censored as nutjob conspiracy theorists.

But, since Trump’s unlikely rise to power in 2016 and the subsequent traitorous acts by the Deep State and their lackeys in the government, media, and surveillance state bureaus, in attempting to destroy Trump through the fake Russiagate investigations, two impeachments based on nothing, creating a fake pandemic to rig the 2020 election, instigating a fake insurrection to keep him from running again, using the power of the DOJ to bring multiple fake charges against him, raiding his residence with orders to shoot if necessary, allowing millions of illegals to enter the country and encouraging them to vote illegally to throw the 2024 election, vilifying him as a threat worse than Hitler, and now being exposed using a patsy to try and assassinate him while his Secret Service detail pretended to protect him.

There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind a Deep State/Invisible government is running the show, and we are all nothing more than spectators who are brainwashed into doing what we are told by those who “have our best interests at heart”. After they failed by one inch in blowing Trump’s head off (ala JFK), the narrative being spun is that we all must unite and tone down the vitriol. It is too late, and they know it. This is all for show.

We are now at war with the Deep State, and anyone associated with their criminal deeds. Their need to retain power grows more desperate by the day. They have concluded they must win the upcoming election at all costs, or their unlawful acts over the last eight years will be revealed and retribution doled out to the perpetrators. Their failure in assassinating Trump, does not mean they will not try again.

Their biggest hurdle is their ballot rigging operation only works in the swing states when the vote is reasonably close. The presidential debate and subsequent embarrassing press conferences have revealed Biden to be dementia ridden husk, who can’t even read a teleprompter at this point. Only the most brain-dead liberal kooks will vote for this walking dead candidate.

After Trump’s triumphant post assassination attempt photo-op, with fist raised in victory, his odds of winning the election went through the roof. The potential replacement candidates for Biden are a motley crew of idiocy, failure and low IQ diversity options. When the Deep State was blindsided in 2016 with the Trump victory, they proceeded to derail his presidency by convincing him to hire their Deep State operatives into key roles, while keeping the Congress, DOJ, DOD, FBI, and CIA at war with everything Trump tried to accomplish. If he wins this time, he won’t make the same miscalculations again. And they know it.

We have less than four months until the election. These being the waning years of this Fourth Turning, whatever happens from here on out will only be intensified. There will be no unity. There will be no compromise. Fourth Turnings do not wind down. They accelerate towards a bloody crescendo, with clear winners and losers. The potential for civil and global war rises on a daily basis.

Most of the ignorant, I-gadget distracted, narrative believing masses, have no clue how close the world is to erupting in violent no-holds barred death and destruction. Virtually no one is alive who remembers the horrors of WWII. That is why Fourth Turnings re-occur every eighty years or so. We forget the past and are condemned to relive it. There are several scenarios that could play out.

The Deep State may have provided Trump with a stark reminder about who really runs the show. Will he heed their warning? If so, they may let him win and then continue their control behind the scenes, letting him know they can take him out at a time of their choosing. Trump’s cooperation in this scenario is possible, but after the last eight years of unbridled attacks on him, this may be unlikely.

They could try another assassination attempt, but the world is now aware of their hatred for Trump, and would likely react negatively towards all parties involved in the murder of the past and future president of the U.S. The question is how desperate are these godless authoritarians? How many innocent people are they willing to sacrifice at the altar of mammon and power, to continue their stranglehold on the political, financial, social, and economic structures of the U.S. and western world.

Knowing they will do anything to win and remain in control of the levers of our society, what may seem unthinkable to you and me, wouldn’t make these sociopaths pause for a second. They’ve already killed tens of millions with their fake pandemic and their toxic antidote gene therapy. All done to rig an election, enrich themselves, and cull the herd. We already know the neo-con branch of the Deep State has been saber rattling towards both Russia and China.

We also know false flags are one of their favorite tools to initiate conflict and fill their coffers with blood money. Our blood and their money. We’ve already seen a possible scenario with their puppet Zelensky in the Ukraine. If you can create a national emergency through either a civil or foreign war, you can cancel the election until the emergency is over.

A successful assassination of Trump this past weekend would have initiated some form of chaos in the streets, with the political powder keg poised to be lit by one side or the other. The Deep State is certainly capable of creating a false flag that kills hundreds or thousands of innocents, blaming white nationalist Trumpers for the tragedy. Another George Floyd incident could be cooked up, with Soros unleashing his Antifa and BLM terrorist hordes on cities across the land.

The normal citizens supporting Trump will only be pushed so far, and if they begin to fight back, all hell could break loose. This is what the Deep State wants. Chaos and violence in the streets would be their excuse to “delay” the elections. That would even cause more violence and upheaval. The Deep State thrives on violence, chaos, war, and a fearful populace, begging to be saved.

The Deep State is conducting the war against Russia. The Ukrainian soldiers are being chewed up by the Russian army, but the high-tech aspects of the war are being carried out by Americans, who are the only ones capable of operating the drones and advanced missiles being used against Russia. They know Putin’s red lines. If they choose to start World War III, they will initiate an attack guaranteed to force Putin into a drastic response, attempting to ignite a conflagration across Europe, into the Middle East.

With the US/EU sanction war having pushed Russia, China and the rest of the BRIC countries closer together, China and possibly India would side with Russia in a global conflict. The use of nuclear arms becomes more and more likely as the warring countries become more desperate and pushed into a corner.

The Deep State has no qualms about killing millions to attain their goals and retain their wealth, power and control over the masses. I do believe the next four months will mark a turning point in the history of the world. I fear there will be much bloodshed, but will continue to try and decipher the path of this Fourth Turning and guide my family and anyone choosing to listen towards the light and away from the darkness. I do believe Strauss & Howe’s possible outcomes for this Fourth Turning are an accurate portrayal of what awaits us within the next decade. The odds are stacked against us, but if we give up the fight, we will surely lose. Our choices and actions in the coming days will surely matter. We must fight, fight, fight!! Godspeed and good luck.

1. This Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. For this Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection and bad luck.
2. The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rythm – which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance – could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. Such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.
3. The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. The nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, the Soviet Union only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a thread in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most lethal war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.
4. Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.

Reprinted with permission from The Burning Platform.

The post ‘They’ Will Do Anything To Win appeared first on LewRockwell.

It began with Aaron Bushnell and a visceral response of mine: Why would anyone do such a thing?

Bushnell was the 25-year-old active-duty airman who set himself ablaze on February 25th in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., to protest that country’s brutal war in Gaza. The first question was tough enough, but his dramatic and deadly action also brought to mind other questions that have occupied my thinking, research, and writing in these last several years: What spurs someone to such an unyielding, ultimate commitment to a cause? What kind of political action is actually effective?

When the campus protests over the bloodbath in Gaza exploded shortly after Bushnell’s act, those questions came to seem even more pressing to me.

And not only was I not alone in my interest in Bushnell’s act, he wasn’t even the first American to self-immolate over the fate of the Palestinians. Last December, an unidentified woman set herself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, apparently in a similar protest. She survived, just barely. (In April, a man who self-immolated across from the courthouse in Manhattan where Donald Trump was on trial for illegally trying to influence the 2016 election seemed aggrieved about other things.)

Three incidents, of course, do not an epidemic make, but they do attract attention. So, the phenomenon of self-immolation stayed in the news for a while.

Bushnell live-streamed his action, which was quickly posted on the social media platform Twitch (though that video was soon taken down there). As of this writing, however, it’s still up at Reddit. It opens on the early afternoon of a clear February day, with Bushnell in combat fatigues walking resolutely toward the Israeli embassy. He had emailed some independent news outlets about his protest and, as he walks, he says, “I am an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”

He then props up his cell phone on the pavement, pours some flammable liquid over his head, pulls his cap down, and flicks a lighter on around his ankles. When his uniform doesn’t ignite, he lights the pool of liquid surrounding him. It erupts into flames, which climb his body. Yelling “Free Palestine,” he bucks and moans in what must be unbearable pain before collapsing on the ground. Police and Secret Service agents rush over with fire extinguishers. One points a gun at the crumpled, still-flaming body and yells at him to get on the ground. Off-camera, another responds, “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers!” After the video ends, Bushnell will be loaded into an ambulance and taken to a hospital, where he will soon die.  In its only response, it seems, the Israeli embassy will report that none of its staff were injured.

In the following weeks, third-party presidential candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein will express solidarity with Bushnell; vigils honoring him will be held in several American cities, including Portland, Oregon, where members of the antiwar veterans group About Face will burn their uniforms in his memory; the Palestinian town of Jericho will name a street after him; another active-duty airman will be inspired to stage a hunger strike in front of the White House and, when he’s ordered back to his base in Spain, two fellow members of Veterans For Peace will begin a hunger strike in his stead.

Admirable? Unhinged?

The initial media coverage of Bushnell’s action was straightforward enough, though often giving as much space to the history of self-immolation as to the politics of his protest. A notable exception was a Washington Post column by Shadi Hamid, who considered Bushnell’s position on the U.S. government’s support for Israel and concluded that while his act might have been unreasonable, his sense of powerlessness was not.

It didn’t take long, however, for the focus to shift to the psychology of self-immolation, then to Bushnell’s background and the implication that he was distinctly damaged. About six weeks after the event, the Boston Globe ran a feature on the Community of Jesus, a monastic community on Cape Cod, where the young Bushnell was raised and home-schooled. The story relied heavily on disgruntled former members — one characterized it as a cult — who recalled harsh, group-enforced discipline, practices meant to undermine family bonds, humiliations, and verbal assaults. The article did include a disclaimer toward the end – “It’s unclear what, if any, connection Bushnell’s upbringing had on his final protest.” – but all too clear was a striking skepticism about his psychological stability.

The need to understand and explain (or explain away) such an extreme, self-abnegating act is anything but unusual, nor is the linking of self-immolation to mental disturbance. Bushnell was explicit about his distress over the situation in Gaza and it sounded as if he was also dealing with a sense of moral injury, a malady of the heart as much as the head, but none of that was proof of derangement. Setting yourself on fire for whatever reason is inarguably an act of suicide, yet the mental state of someone at that moment is ultimately unknowable since such suicides almost invariably take their secrets to the grave. When it comes to self-immolation, I’m inclined to take people at their word. Apparently, that puts me in the minority.

“I won’t speculate on the dead man’s mental health,” wrote Graeme Wood in a snotty op-ed for The Atlantic. “He grew up in a cult, described himself as an anarchist, and generally eschewed what Buddhists might call ‘the middle way,’ a life of mindful moderation, in favor of extreme spiritual and political practice.” Fanaticism, he suggested, was Bushnell’s “default setting.”

It wasn’t just those who were unsympathetic to Bushnell’s act for whom the state of his psyche took precedence over the purpose of the protest. It may, in fact, be a particular genius of American democracy that it can absorb dissent and, in that way, blunt revolt, but that seemingly benign tolerance can push activists to ever more radical acts in a bid to focus attention on their cause. Sadly enough, though, when a dissident’s striking (even, in Bushnell’s case, ultimate) political act is reduced to a set of personal maladies, his or her message can be all too easily massaged away.

Probably More Than You Want to Know About Self-Immolation

Self-immolation is a low-cost, low-tech, readily documentable act that’s easy to do without significant planning, assistance, or much forethought. Of course, “easy” might be the wrong word for it, and self-immolation is an exceedingly rare, singular, and extreme form of political protest. Unlike marches or strikes, it involves only one person. Unlike suicide missions, the harm is intended to be inflicted only on yourself. Unlike the slow, wasting away of a hunger strike, it’s seldom reversible and usually fatal. Unlike most public protest, it doesn’t rely on an authority’s response to have an effect. And while most people wouldn’t consider it an option, to those who would set themselves aflame, sooner or later it becomes the only option.

Self-immolation is also heart-stoppingly dramatic, capturing the public’s attention, emotions, and imagination despite, or maybe because of its inherent contradictions. It is at once an act of despair and of defiance, of purity and of bravado. Above all, it defies any idea of acceptable risk. Moreover, as a form of nonviolent protest, it’s shockingly violent, and though our normal urge as humans is to look away from such suffering, the image remains irrepressible.

As it happens, self-immolation as protest has an ancient history. It appears in Hindu tales, Greco-Roman myths, the early Christian era, fourth-century China, and seventeenth-century Russia. It’s happened in protests against America’s war in Vietnam; against the Soviet, Indian, and Sri Lankan governments, as well as Chinese policies in Tibet; and recently in the U.S. over climate change.

According to Michael Biggs, a sociologist who conducted an extensive study of the subject, the motivations and rationales of self-immolators range from the selfless and strategic to the psychological and egocentric. Such an array of reasons is on display in The Self-Immolators, testimony compiled from protesters around the world who set themselves on fire between 1963 and 2013. It makes for sad reading: so many lives, so much anguish, so little effect.

Historically, the effectiveness of such awe-inspiring protest is, at best, unclear. There were certainly cases that did gain widespread attention and so influenced events and policies. As a threesome, consider Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese monk in the iconic photograph, who self-immolated to protest his government’s mistreatment of Buddhists;  Norman Morrison, the American Quaker who self-immolated under then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s Pentagon window to protest America’s war in Vietnam (McNamara was reportedly “horrified,” while President John F. Kennedy exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!”); and Mohamed Bouazizi, the street vendor in Tunisia, whose self-immolation protesting corruption was considered a catalyst for the Arab Spring uprising.

Sadly, however, Bushnell’s action, far more typically, didn’t make a dent in Israel’s belligerence or limit the weaponry and intelligence his country still sends Israel. And the shock of the act, of the image of him burning to death seemed, if anything, to blot out the purpose. Maybe witnessing someone dying in flames, even online, is simply too disturbing to let witnesses easily absorb its intended message. Or maybe the intensity of Bushnell’s moral obligation shamed those who agreed with him and did nothing for those who didn’t.

Too Bad for Words

While it’s hardly burning yourself to death, all those students who camped out last spring, erecting tents on university lawns, defying administrators, and dominating the news narrative for weeks, also faced risks. Though no student protestors died, by demanding institutional responses to Israel’s war in Gaza, some were barred from graduating, denied job offers, summarily kicked out of their housing, physically attacked, and arrested.

And then, as with Aaron Bushnell, we changed the subject. The issue wasn’t this country’s, or any individual university’s role in the war in Gaza — so insisted school authorities, opportunistic politicians, and an obliging media — but free speech and the function of higher education.

In contrast to self-immolation, which is always about the image, language was all-important in those campus protests and became a minefield. The hotly debated meaning of terms and slogans, the name-calling that stopped discussion, the debate over who controlled the debate, the mutual misunderstandings, and the alarming tolerance of intolerance were all exacerbated in the self-enclosed, pressure-cooker communities that college campuses generally are.

Quickly, the “sides” were slotted into pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian categories, flattening any nuance among the protesters, even though a range of sentiments, perspectives, demands, and goals were apparent. That reduction also undermined the prospect for critical analysis, any true exchange of views, or the possibility of minds being changed — everything, in other words, that’s supposed to underpin a liberal education. And whatever happened to the idea of being pro-peace? I don’t remember that label ever being applied to the protests, although the one area most protestors agreed on was the need for a ceasefire in Gaza.

In his keynote speech at MIT’s graduation, entrepreneur Noubar Afeyan acknowledged the  students’ pain over the tragic Israeli-Palestinian conflict and rued his own lack of answers on the subject, concluding, “But I do know this: having conviction should not be confused with having all the answers.”

I have a certain sympathy for that sentiment, though I doubt I did when I was a student with my own set of demands over a different tragic conflict, which leaves me sympathetic to the student activists, too. After all, you don’t need answers to pinpoint a problem accurately or to believe peace is a precondition for finding such answers. Protest isn’t supposed to be nice. Dissent courts the heterodox. The point of a political action is to get in people’s faces, disturb complacency, and command a response. Protest that doesn’t challenge our norms, or at least get people to think about other possibilities, is just spectacle.

Of course, dissent also threatens authority, and the kneejerk reaction of authorities fearing that they’re losing control is to try to take ever more control. Insisting that the students and their organizations were being punished not for their speech but for breaking the rules, university administrators suspended anti-Zionist groups, breached principles of academic freedom, opened the way for violence by ushering the police onto campus, and caved to financial pressure from donors and alumni. And what to make of the suggestion of a Harvard dean, who, “look[ing] forward to calmer times on campus,” argued that the solution was for faculty members to just shut up?

You’d think such beleaguered university administrators would learn. Clampdowns usually backfire and severe punishments hardly make for calmer campuses. The repression, in fact, succeeded mainly in turning the conversation from core issues like war and human rights to an assessment of free speech and the very nature of academia — not to mention good old American anti-intellectualism. Educational leaders were called before Congress to confess; university presidents were fired; hate speech codes, mostly moribund in this century, got renewed attention; and the crisis became focused on campuses riven by incivility and bad words.

Dissension at educational institutions over what kinds of expression are acceptable, no less desirable, has a long history and merits periodic revisiting. I suspect, though, that there’s another reason what we say has bested what we do as the issue du jour: that is, a lot of Americans find it easier to champion the idea of free speech than to demand that Israel get out of Gaza or that the Biden administration rethink its military aid policies.

About 20 years ago, when I wrote a book about free expression controversies, I saw repeatedly how words make convenient scapegoats. Arguments over language are often a way to avoid arguments we’d prefer not to have, even if working through those very arguments could produce the resolutions we want to reach. As paramount as free speech is to me in the pantheon of human rights, I wish in this case — and in Aaron Bushnell’s memory — we hadn’t relegated war to just a background hum but had assessed the validity of the protesters’ demands and dealt with them, as fraught and frightening, involved and painful as that process would inevitably have been.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post When Too Much Is Not Enough appeared first on LewRockwell.

The decision was announced at a White House briefing Monday morning. “In light of this weekend’s events, the president has directed me to work with the Secret Service to provide protection to Robert Kennedy Jr.,” was the quote from Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas.

It’s difficult to read the line “in light of this weekend’s events” and not see an admission on the part of the White House that Secret Service protection was previously being denied to Kennedy, Jr. for political reasons, or out of spite, if those are even two different things in this era. Whatever the original prerogative was for pushing the envelope with that denial, it seems to have been removed by series of paradigm-shattering news events, leading to a flurry of real and symbolic surrenders.

MSNBC likewise made an extraordinary decision Sunday night to pull Morning Joe, with CNN saying the network wanted to “to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television.” As with the Secret Service decision, MSNBC was making a major admission, essentially telling audiences its lead morning news show is either not really a news show, or that its format only holds up under something less than maximum scrutiny. I can’t recall a similar act of self-sabotage in media.

Meanwhile, in a move that went mostly unnoticed, Meta announced Friday that it was lifting restrictions on Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, with CNN citing company sources saying this was done “to ensure that Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, would have equal standing with Democrat President Joe Biden.” The next day, after the attempt on Trump’s life that left firefighter Corey Comperatore dead, Axios ran a story about Democratic reaction. Burying the lede, they quoted a “senior House Democrat” at the bottom, saying, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.”

There’s a longer story to be written about the sudden collapse of many of the core premises of the last eight years of American politics, in particular the notion that Trump is such a unique “existential” threat that the system would not bear treating him like any other politician. In conjunction with Trump’s documents case collapsing and a list of other retreats on the lawfare/prosecution front, we appear headed for a new world, though what that will look like remains very unclear. The two obvious options are retreat from the “at all costs” mindset and a double-down, the double-down being the pattern in the Trump era. Who knows yet, but it’s remarkable to watch.

Check in to this space around noon, when Walter Kirn and I will have more information about our livestream schedule from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. We expect to do two today, and we’ll have more details on the wild intramural fight over Trump’s running mate choice, which lasted through yesterday. Hope to see you all soon.

This originally appeared on Racket News.

The post The Surrender appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the past three years China has accelerated export agreements and industrial operations in Africa, becoming the continent’s largest bilateral trade partner. Given Africa’s complete lack of development and GDP, the Asian rush to cement economic ties might seem strange. However, I would argue that China is adapting to events that haven’t quite happened yet.

I’m referring to a major global shift away from interdependent markets (i.e. traditional globalism) into a chaotic period of trade “protectionism”. I’m talking about the end of the current model of export-based nations supplying goods to the west in exchange for advantageous trade deficits and access to dollars. This will be the era of what I call the “Great Resource Grab.”

I believe China is positioning itself for this era, perhaps out of desperation due to the disastrous economic decline they are currently trying to hide from the rest of the world, or maybe the CCP has been given a warning from globalist interests (China’s government has been exceedingly supportive of the IMF’s one-world digital currency push, and it makes sense that globalists would give them vital information on future disasters in exchange).

Why Africa? Because of the lack of modern development, Africa is a vast land mass loaded with untapped natural resources. China is importing billions in raw materials including vital metals from Africa and they are trying to establish infrastructure to increase the extraction of these commodities. If you’re familiar with China’s rotting domestic conditions, then you understand what is happening here – China has hollowed out their own country and they must spread into other regions to survive.

To be sure, Africa is not the only place in which the Chinese are quietly setting up camp. There are diplomatic agreements with Russia that have given them access to farm land in the north, and the Chinese have even been buying up farmland in the US (nearly 400,000 acres according to official reports). In America, anyone that questions this trend is immediately accused of “conspiracy theory” and I would argue this tells us A LOT about what is really happening.

Yes, other nations besides China are buying up farmland in the US (over 43 million acres of farmland to be precise), and frankly, no one in the establishment media is talking about it. The Chinese purchases make the news because communist nations buying resource rich land in the US makes Americans nervous; but the overall problem is being ignored. Foreign land holdings in the US dwarf those recently purchased by Bill Gates, and no one is addressing the issue.

There is a change happening on a global scale; it’s a silent race to secure as many raw resources as possible. Those who know are stacking land assets, mining assets, energy assets, fresh water sources and circling undeveloped nations like hungry piranha.

Some will claim that the Great Resource Grab is about climate change and governments positioning for impending weather calamity. This is incorrect. If that was the case then China would not be coveting Africa, a continent that would be devastated should global warming predictions ever come true (they won’t). Instead, I believe the change is about impending war, both economic and kinetic.

Global war will be the catalyst for massive trade protectionism and disruption of existing supply chains. Economic sanctions and trade embargoes will shrink exports between East and West down to nothing. And, sadly, western nations with their paper markets will be most injured by this. Our economies are mainly abstract, rooted in currencies with abstract values, equities with abstract values, and debt instruments with abstract values. All of this comes crashing down when nations start desiring physical resources over the false promises of market speculation.

In other words, what we have in the US in terms of raw commodities will be ALL we have for many years to come should the Great Resource Grab come to fruition. Buying from other countries may not be possible, simply because we will be in conflict with them, or because we won’t have anything they want. Meaning, America will have to return to production again on a level surpassing that of the 1960s and early 1970s.

To be sure, this era will be short, maybe lasting around a decade. Eventually, globalists will try to use the worldwide division and subsequent crisis as a vehicle for total centralization. They’ll say “this is why nation states are a bad idea.” They’ll argue that a one-world digital currency system and global economic governance is the only solution. During this debate the average person will face a much different consumer environment than they are used to – One of scarcity instead of plenty.

Globalists will make promises of plenty that they do not intend to keep as western populations struggle to return to domestic production.

By extension, investment in vital commodities used for production and wealth protection would be a good move. Look at what certain foreign entities, central banks and globalist companies are buying up right now and ask yourself “why?” Look at past world wars and what kinds of resources were in short supply; there is a way to protect yourself financially even in the midst of international calamity.  You just have to know some history and accept the fact that the world we live in today is not any safer than it was in the days of international conflict and government rationing.

This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group

The post Global Instability and the Rise of the ‘Great Resource Grab’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò tweeted in support of former President Donald Trump after an attempt on his life at a Saturday rally, suggesting that “anti-globalist” policies link state leaders who have been targeted for assassination.

Adding to the previous criminal attacks against avowedly anti-globalist political leaders, is now this terrible attempt to eliminate President Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump , the leading opponent of the radical globalist Left.

We are deeply grateful to Our Lord who saved… pic.twitter.com/rMmSJLRBqd

— Arcivescovo Carlo Maria Viganò (@CarloMVigano) July 14, 2024

“Adding to the previous criminal attacks against avowedly anti-globalist political leaders, is now this terrible attempt to eliminate President Donald J. Trump, the leading opponent of the radical globalist Left,” Viganò wrote in a Sunday X post.

The archbishop pointed out that Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán have suffered “similar criminal attacks,” and share with Trump a “staunch opposition to the New World Order” and “defense of national sovereignty.”

Fico was shot five times in an assassination attempt in May, only a few days after his government announced that it would not support the WHO’s Pandemic Agreement. Slovakia’s health minister declared the country would not sign any agreements weakening the nation’s sovereignty. Slovakia has also halted arms deliveries to Ukraine, refusing to align with NATO objectives in the region.

As president, Trump sought to preserve U.S. sovereignty through actions such as barricading the southern border against illegal immigrants and withdrawing the nation from the Paris climate accord in 2017, an agreement that focused on international governance and enforcement of high-cost global warming theory fixes.

Read the Whole Article

The post Archbishop Viganò Suggests Assassination Attempt on Trump Due to His Anti-globalist Stance appeared first on LewRockwell.

“The fact that [the Secret Service] allowed a rifle armed shooter within 150 yds to a preplanned event is either malice or massive incompetence.” — Security expert Erik Prince, Navy Seal and founder of Blackwater

One of the most puzzling aspects of the near assassination of Donald Trump on the Secret Service’s watch is the shooter’s expectation to find the buildings within the protected area unoccupied by Secret Service and no agents guarding the sniper positions on the buildings.

It is very unusual that an intended assassin would expect to be able to appear with a rifle in a protected area and not be accosted. In other words, it reeks of the smell of a stand down.

Here is the Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti’s comment:

“The assassination attempt on Donald Trump is surprising only because it happened on July 13, and not earlier — a year, three or eight years ago. The upstart, who challenged not only most of the American establishment, but also the ‘Washington swamp’ as such, has risked his head very much all these years… It is clear that now the ‘swamp denizens’ are biting their elbows because they did not think to kill Trump before November 2016: they underestimated the threat, did not believe in the reality of his victory.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the atmosphere of hatred created around Trump by the Biden regime has led to the near assassination of Donald Trump. “After numerous attempts to remove Trump from the political arena with the help of legal tools, courts, the prosecution, attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate, it was clear to all outside observers that his life was in danger.”

Trump Pledges to Fight Evil

“We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.” — Donald Trump

Trump understands that the real fight is against the evil that has in its grasp the Democrat Party, the media, the liberal-left intellectuals who control the educational system, and the financial system that enslaves the population to debt service.

It is extraordinary that former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama along with Biden and Trump himself have issued statements thanking the Secret Service for their “swift intervention.” Think about this for a minute. To get five presidents, including the nearly assassinated Trump, to issue thanks to the Secret Service, thanks not justified by the Secret Service’s failure, took organization. That this presidential support came so quickly implies prior organization which supports the hypothesis of a planned attack on Trump. It is a pity that Trump himself was roped into participating in what could be a pre-planned coverup.

Swift intervention? After an assassin in plain view of the Secret Service fires a series of shots that kill one person and dangerously injures two others standing behind Trump and misses killing Trump by a quarter of an inch? Only when the assassin finishes firing does the Secret Service intervene.

How does a Secret Service that totally fails in its responsibility to protect a presidential candidate get congratulations for preventing an assassination?

Trump’s assassination failed because Trump turned his head when the assassin shot, thus throwing the bullet off mark. The Secret Service did nothing to prevent Trump’s assassination.

Is it the case that once the Secret Service saw Trump was down, Trump was believed to be mortally injured and it was the time to eliminate, like happened to Oswald, the shooter before he could talk?

I don’t say this is the case. It is a question that needs investigation.

The question of the unsecured buildings from which the intended assassin fired has produced a dispute between the Secret Service and local police. The Secret Service claims the neglected shooting positions were the responsibility of the local police. The local police say they are merely the ordered around adjuncts of the Secret Service, who are in charge. Let’s assume the local police were responsible for the security of the nearby sites. Why did not the Secret Service check if the police performed their alleged duty?

The greatest puzzle is the near assassin’s unencumbered access to perfect spots for a successful assassination.

To those few Americans still capable of thought, the outpouring of former presidents clearing the Secret Service with praise of its non-performance suggests it was an establishment attack on Donald Trump’s life.

Trump’s response to the attack on his life is not promising. Indeed, he is already moving off-task. He says he is going to reunite the country. This assumes that America has no internal enemies intent on destroying her, her values, and her liberties, and in her place erecting a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel.

How can Trump reunite a country when the Democrat half is dedicated to the country’s destruction via open borders and the legitimization of all forms of sexual perversion? Is Trump going to compromise with his enemies and give them, in the false name of unity, part of their agenda?

What is the point of a raised fist with blood running down your face shouting “fight, fight, fight” if you are going to compromise?

Trump has to root out the evil, to extinguish the evil. He has to find and appoint and get confirmed a government that will support him in this battle. Anything less and he is a failure.

The post Further Thoughts on the Near Assassination appeared first on LewRockwell.

I am still in shock.  When I first learned that Donald Trump had been shot, I literally had difficulty processing the information.  I watched footage of the shooting over and over, and honestly I am still trying to put the pieces together.  The Secret Service is supposed to be far better at protecting our leaders than this.  If Trump had not shifted his head at the last moment, he would have almost certainly been killed.  Sadly, firefighter Corey Comperatore was not so fortunate.  He was killed by one of the bullets that the shooter fired.  Trump was hit in the ear, but we are being told that he is doing just fine.  But how long will it be before someone else tries again?

What we just witnessed is truly, truly horrible.  No matter how you plan to vote, we should all be united in denouncing political violence.

For years, many of our political leaders and many in the mainstream media have been using extremely inflammatory language to denounce Donald Trump, and this has caused emotions to run extremely high.

It was only a matter of time before all of that inflammatory language inspired someone to commit an act of great violence.

The following are 7 things that we know about the man that shot Trump…

#1 It is being reported that the shooter is a 20-year-old male named Thomas Matthew Crooks…

Authorities have identified the gunman involved in the attack against former US President Donald Trump on Saturday as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by Secret Service agents at the scene after the shooting.

The FBI named Crooks in a statement early Sunday morning, identifying him as a resident of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania – about 35 miles south of Butler, where Trump was holding his rally.

Crooks fired on Trump while perched on a nearby building rooftop outside the rally’s security perimeter, before being killed by the Secret Service, according to law enforcement officials.

Just like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, Thomas Matthew Crooks has three names.

Is that just some sort of bizarre coincidence?

#2 We are being told that Crooks used “an AR-style rifle” to shoot at Trump…

Law enforcement sources told CBS News that Crooks, from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, had been armed with ‘an AR-style rifle’.

There are some that are claiming that this was a highly advanced rifle that was extremely expensive.  I have not been able to find any official verification of this yet.

#3 Apparently the “AR-style rifle” was originally purchased by the father of Crooks…

Two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press that investigators believe the weapon was bought by the father of Thomas Matthew Crooks, who’s been identified as the shooter, at least six months ago.

#4 The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Crooks also had “explosive devices” in his vehicle…

Authorities found explosive devices in the car of the man who officials say tried to assassinate former President Trump, according to people briefed on the investigation.

The car, which Thomas Matthew Crooks drove, was parked near the Trump rally in Butler, PA, on Saturday.

Police received multiple reports of suspicious packages around near where the shooter was, authorities said, prompting them to dispatch bomb technicians.

#5 Crooks was employed at a nearby nursing home and he successfully passed a background check when he applied…

Crooks worked as a dietary aid, a job that generally involves food preparation, at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation, less than a mile from his home. In a statement provided to USA TODAY on Sunday, Marcie Grimm, the facility’s administrator, said she was “shocked and saddened to learn of his involvement.”

“Thomas Matthew Crooks performed his job without concern and his background check was clean,” Grimm said. “We are fully cooperating with law enforcement officials at this time. Due to the ongoing investigation, we cannot comment further on any specifics. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Former President Trump and the victims impacted by this terrible tragedy. We condemn all acts of violence.”

Preparing food at a nursing home is kind of a dead end job for a 20-year-old that is just starting out in life.  This may have fed into any feelings of desperation and depression that he was feeling.

#6 Crooks was a registered Republican, but his only political donation was to a group “working to increase voter turnout for Democrats”…

Crooks is registered to vote as a Republican in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, according to county voter records. His voter registration status has been active since 2021.

Federal Election Commission records show that in January 2021, Crooks made a $15 donation to the Progressive Turnout Project, a group working to increase voter turnout for Democrats.

#7 His uncle was interviewed by the Daily Mail, and he said that Crooks and his family were “very private” people…

Crooks’ uncle Mark Crooks told DailyMail.com he hadn’t seen the gunman or his parents in years, and described them as ‘very private’.

‘I haven’t seen that part of my family in years,’ he said. ‘Honestly it’s been so long I don’t think much about them

‘It’s a shame. The kid is like a stranger to me. They’re private and they don’t reach out to anybody any time.’

To me, this is an incredibly important detail.

He could have had very serious emotional problems that nobody knew about in advance.

Also, those that are detached from society are the easiest to set up if someone was inclined to do that.

Following the shooting, many liberals were extremely upset that Crooks missed his target.

For example, one young woman posted a video that rapidly went viral in which she very loudly expressed her displeasure that Trump was still alive…

‘We were a second away, we were a centimeter away from half of the problem being gone and you missed,’ Celeste, who goes by cele2t3, screamed in a TikTok video.

Driving in a car, Celeste shared her initial reaction to hearing the sudden news.

‘I just found out about this sh**, it just happened, I haven’t even had a second to process.

She screams at the top of her lungs: ‘You’re telling me somebody finally had the ba**s to bring a “pew pew” and it missed?!’

Yes, there are really people out there that think like this.

In fact, a field director for Mississippi Congressman Bennie G. Thompson was quickly fired after she suggested that Crooks should have gotten some shooting lessons before making his attempt…

Marsaw, 61, the president and vice president of a local NAACP in Natchez, Mississippi, has since deleted the post and her account, but screenshots have been reposted across social media.

She shared: ‘I don’t condone violence but please get some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time ooops that wasn’t me talking.’

In a follow up post, she said: ‘That’s what your hate speech got you!!’

Marsaw has since been fired from her position. ‘I was made aware of a post made by a staff member and she is no longer in my employment,’ Thompson said.

From this point forward, Trump will need to be very careful.

I think that it is probably just a matter of time before someone else tries again.

In my entire lifetime, no politician has been hated as much as Donald Trump.

I don’t understand why the left hates him so much, but they do.

For a very long time, I have been warning that this would be the most chaotic election season in our history, and over the last few weeks things have certainly gotten really crazy.

But we still have more than three months to go until election day.

Unfortunately, I think that there will be a lot more twists and turns before this thing is over.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post 7 Things We Know About the Man That Shot Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

Just days after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, theories are flying from all directions. Many who ridiculed the “conspiracy theories” of conservatives are now suggesting the whole event was a set-up to boost Trump in the polls ahead of the election. Others suggest it was the “deep state” or even foreign actors who organized it.

Former US Navy Seal and founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, claims that “The fact that [the Secret Service] allowed a rifle armed shooter within 150 yds to a preplanned event is either malice or massive incompetence.” He went on to observe that, “unaccountable bloated bureaucracies continue to fail us as Americans,” adding that “unserious and unworthy people in positions of authority got us to this near disaster. Merit and execution must be the only deciding factors in hiring and leadership, not the social engineering priority of the day.”

Video has emerged showing that for at least two minutes law enforcement knew someone with a gun was on a roof aiming at the former President and no one communicated the need to pull Trump from the stage. You can clearly hear the crowd warning law enforcement that someone was on the roof. Yet he was unhindered until the first shots rang out.

Considering this fact, Erik Prince has a point.

If this is like any previous governmental foul-ups, we can expect hearings, investigations, and commissions that will actually serve to hide the official errors or even malicious intent by some in the government. That’s what government does no matter who is in office: protect itself from actual scrutiny and resist being exposed as incompetent or worse.

But what if there was a genuine investigation that actually revealed the truth about what happened at the Trump rally over the weekend? Could we rely on the mainstream media to even report it? This is the same media that, after Trump was clearly shot on live television, reported “Trump escorted away after loud noises at PA rally.” (Washington Post). And “Secret Service rushes Trump offstage after he falls at rally.” (CNN).

This is the same mainstream media that has been comparing Donald Trump to Hitler for years, and now pretends to be shocked that their vile rhetoric ended up in violence. There is a good reason why the mainstream media is regarded by the American public with record levels of contempt.

The current Director of the Secret Service has been interviewed expressing her dedication to “diversity” in hiring agents. What if her dedication to DEI goals led to an agency that is more “diverse” but fails at its core mission? Can we rely on the media to inform us of this? Or will they, as usual, just blame it all on the Second Amendment?

What if the problem with the Secret Service is that it was moved into the bloated, incompetent, and menacing Department  of Homeland Security, the creation of which I strongly opposed when I was in Congress?

We shouldn’t count on hearing the truth about the attempted assassination from the mainstream media. No wonder the elites remain determined to censor social media sites like Twitter/X and TikTok. We live in an empire of lies, propped up by the mainstream media. And seeking the truth in this empire of lies is the greatest challenge for us in the moral bankruptcy in which we live.

The post Why We’ll Never Know What Really Happened in Butler, PA appeared first on LewRockwell.

I had actually almost finished another piece for Substack when people began texting me yesterday about Donald Trump being shot. I never watch the news, so unless MeTV broke into their weekly airing of Three Stooges shorts, I was not going to know about it from my large and trusty television.

Several people have asked for my impressions of this assassination attempt. I am kind of an expert on the subject, seeing as how the JFK assassination first took me down the rabbit hole and has consumed a lot of my thinking for almost fifty years. First off, there is the following image, which has an almost Iwo Jima feel to it. Iconic. Like a scene lifted from Braveheart. It takes a strong man to rise up with blood on his face and instantly raise his fist in defiance. You’d think he might have spent a moment or two worried about his potential injuries. He is seventy eight years old, after all. More importantly, you’d think the Secret Service would prevent him from doing this. Wasn’t he still a potential target? It violated all their procedures to permit this. But it did make for a great picture. I assume it will be used extensively by his campaign.

In this photo, Trump looks a bit like poor Lee Harvey Oswald, surrounded by over seventy police officers in that Dallas basement. And somehow, none of them thought to stand in front of him. Protect his front. Oops. Isn’t that what we’re seeing here? Maybe these Secret Service agents had spent too much time watching footage of Oswald being shot? Did surviving JFK Secret Service detail agent Clint Hill give them a pep talk? On how not to protect a president? I think the same rules apply for ex-presidents. I don’t know, aren’t they trained to throw themselves over the person they’re guarding in such a situation, and rush him off for medical treatment as quickly as possible? I don’t believe propping an injured victim up, so that the crowd (including any other shooters, if not the same would be assassin who clipped his ear) can see him clearly? No one could miss that blood on his face.

Amazingly, Donald Trump can be heard on audio, as he is being lifted to his feet (and not completely covered as standard operating procedure would require), saying, “Let me get my shoes.” What? He was speaking on stage without shoes? The flesh wound to his ear knocked him out of his shoes? I was advised by some on Twitter/X that it is actually quite easy to slip out of your shoes in such a situation, especially if you are very wealthy. Apparently, the more expensive the shoe, the more easily it just slips off in these situations. This seems very dubious to me. But I have never been shot at. And I am known to look for my shoes on sale.

This was the first assassination attempt on an American politician since Ronald Reagan in March, 1981. Forty three years between assassination attempts is a long time for a country like America. What with our love of guns and everything, and our propensity for deranged lone nuts, who manage to circumvent all that sterling Secret Service protection we pay for. There was never any doubt that this act was going to be attributed to a lone nut. In America, politicians are never shot at for political reasons. It’s an American exceptionalism thing, you wouldn’t understand. This was in spite of early eyewitness reports that there were some eight shots, and they had been heard coming from different directions. Uh oh. No, we can’t have that. Different directions means more than one shooter. That never happens here.

So let’s look at some facts, before they are shoved down the memory hole. In all these cases, early reports are the most interesting. The narrative hasn’t been officially established yet. Contrary witnesses appear. The BBC interviewed an eyewitness who described seeing a man scaling a wall in their midst, rifle in hand. He tried to alert the police, but clearly wasn’t successful. Well, really, why should the police be any more alert at a presidential speech than the Secret Service? The interview can be seen at the following link: BBC Interview- Gunman was Visible. Watch it before they take it down. As some anonymous wit pointed out online, they had police on another rooftop, as can be seen in the amusing meme/photo below. But none on the roof the gunman shot from? And these guys didn’t notice him?

Now, I will say that Trump reacted quickly and got down on the ground exceptionally well for an overweight seventy eight year old. Must be all that Diet Coke and fast food. And the small wound on his right ear was the most insignificant injury suffered in a major assassination attempt since Teddy Roosevelt was supposedly protected from a bullet by a fifty page speech in his pocket. Boy, they must have given long-winded speeches in those days. What good fortune. If only JFK had had his Inaugural Address protecting his head on November 22, 1963. That was a pretty long speech, too, albeit no mammoth fifty pager. Teddy Roosevelt was the kind of guy the assassins usually miss. Just like his cousin, the odious FDR. Or Warren Commission member Gerald Ford. Not sure what this says about Trump, but they did miss killing him.

So just who are they attributing this bloody ear wound/near assassination to? The initial reports claimed that Mark Violets, who was associated with Antifa, was the lone nut. He even posted a video on YouTube proclaiming, “Justice is coming.” But Violets was a not a three namer. America has a long tradition of lone nuts, and they like to refer to them using all three of their names. Sure, he was called Lee Oswald by his friends and family, but not the state controlled media. James Earl Ray was known as Jimmy. Even Richard Hauptman was constantly referred to as Bruno Richard Hauptman (he really hated the name Bruno, and no one called him that) as they framed him for the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Trump Shooting: So Many Questions appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Know your enemy” – Sun Tzu

I was curious about this book given the authors’ connection with military intelligence and the endorsements by former presidential advisors. I pre-ordered the book and upon reading it was sadly disappointed. The book requires constructive criticism because it is being touted as some sort of counter strategy to what we are facing in the US today and a guide for any possible incoming Republican president.  We are not up against a Communist Revolution in America today, but Corporate Fascism using Marxism as a cover as explained below.

The main author of “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions” apparently hasn’t a clue who America’s real enemies are that have brought about widespread urban riots, destruction and crime, a planned pandemic, a dubious 2020 presidential election, racialization of the military, an unnecessary war, corrupted schools and institutions, all beginning in 2020.  The author apparently believes it is a Communist revolution. However, this upheaval was not part of a planned Communist revolution of America. Rather, these joint actions have been socially engineered by militant corporate Fascism, not Communism. Neither did any Marxist inspired working class activists participate in the actions involving the 2020 takeover of the US, such as happened in the Haymarket Riots of 1888 in Chicago.  Rather, a combine of 25 high tech corporations in the San Francisco area gave $90 million to activists in 2020 in support of the destruction of small business districts that compete with them.  These funds were additionally used to promote cultural Marxism in our institutions and government.

I use the adjective “militant corporate fascism” above because such corporations have formed their own army against the citizenry just as fascists Mussolini and Hitler were militaristic. But contemporary corporate fascists wear the uniforms of working-class revolutionists and use guerilla warfare tactics. The political warfare strategy used by the corporate fascists is to use guerilla warfare tactics in an uncivil war mainly against the working class: assassinating public figures they dislike by sniper gun fire from gun men and women portrayed as aggrieved, disguised institutional murder by medical means (Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, 1976), permitting aggrieved persons to kill people at random on the streets without punishment or justice, and arson and mass shoplifting against small businesses.

Marxism has always been used as a false ideology of a working-class revolt to justify mass murder and the takeover of a country by oligarchs.  Marx was a newspaper journalist and propagandist who was subsidized by Friedrich Engels’ industrialist family.  Communism is a racket for oligarch banker control, not a proletarian or worker revolt against the factory-owning class. Communism is a strategy to use grievances of social misfits and racial groups to destroy a nation’s leadership class and impose the international globalist class.

The sociological definition of ideology is a set of idealistic proposals that disguise the economic interests of elites.  Most people do not lie and thus believe that others are not lying to them. To understand Marxism, ideology must be kept distinct from lying, deception and propaganda. The individual liar knows he is lying, but the ideologist as part of a social movement or totalistic institution or fascist corporation does not (Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, 1976). They become under the influence of what Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz called “The Captive Mind”.

America is not up against Communism but corporate fascism, which has historically been used when corporations take over control of the government to protect their monopolies and capital flows during periods of large economic contractions.  Fascism is not primarily an ideology but a way to micromanage the economy to the benefit of oligarchs and to the detriment of the working class and small business sectors.  The Depression of the 1930’s was a cover for fascist takeover of family farms for example.  What is driving corporations to take over the government and the economy is the anticipated shrinkage of capital markets to run their monopoly enterprises due to devaluation of monopoly currency issued by the US Federal Reserve used as the reserve currency globally – see Clara Mattei, The Capital Order: How Austerity Paved the Way to Fascism, 2022).

The 25 corporations funding and fomenting riots, arson, vandalism, shoplifting, and mass crime facilitated by permissive local government policing, courts and incarceration, were all involved in a giant conspiracy against the small business sector of the economy. This is because the high-tech sector produces no essential hard goods, tangibles products, food, transportation vehicles, etc.  They are the most vulnerable sector in the economy in a structural downsizing because they produce non-essentials.  These 25 high tech corporations concentrate on providing non-essential entertainment, digital communications, digital food ordering, mass marketing, software, digital gaming, online exercise, artificial intelligence, online shopping, self-driving vehicle technology, venture capital, online dating, online real estate documents, delivery services, investment management, mobile cell phone videos, and big box retail.  They are takers, not makers, and sell nonessential luxury goods and services. But they want to compel consumers to have to use their high-tech devices to maintain their monopolies.

The desired policy of fascism is austerity under the excuse that the national debt needs paid down, but austerity has never succeeded doing so anywhere. Austerity is a policy not of over spending by a Communist government but from bailing out, re-capitalizing, and adding more liquidity to a banking system controlled by unnamed outsiders that lead to greater income inequality and wealth transfers to the rich (Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, 1915) and higher prices due to reduced supply of everything.

Their strategy for monopoly survival in a contracting consumer economy is to put their competitors out of business in an undeclared uncivil war. Passing a law allowing shoplifting up to $900 is a policy to put small businesses out of business. Corporate fascism is murderous and malevolent and can make no claim to moral superiority (Catherline Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, 2021).

They not only want to eliminate the small business sector, but all mediating social structures between the individual and the state such as Christian churches, the so-called bourgeoisie family, and any proprietary family businesses.  Stated differently, they are not Communist Revolutionists wanting to create a “worker’s paradise”, but instead to put the workers out of business, make them dependent on permanent welfar and monopoly corporations and malevolent authoritarian technocratic medicine for their existence.  None of what has just been described above is addressed in the book Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions.

About 95 out of 100 books on fascism are written by fascists who use psychological projection to confuse and blame fascism and malevolent authoritarianism on Capitalism, Christianity, the business class, etc. However, Lew Rockwell’s book Fascism vs. Capitalism (2013) may be a better place to get a clearer understanding.

The post Unhuman Communist Revolution or Corporate Fascist Guerilla Warfare? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Back in early March when the Israel/Gaza conflict was still in its fifth month, longtime progressive icon Ralph Nader published an important column in Common Dreams arguing that the official Palestinian death toll widely cited in media reports probably represented a huge underestimate of the actual reality.

His piece opened as follows:

Since the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on October 7, 2023 (an unexplained collapse of Israel’s defensive capabilities), 2.3 million utterly defenseless Palestinians in the tiny crowded Gaza enclave have been on the receiving end of over 65,000 bombs and missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.

The extreme right-wing Netanyahu regime has enforced its declared siege of, in its genocidal words, “no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, no medicine.”

The relentless bombing has destroyed apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks, critical water mains—just about everything.

The U.S.-equipped Israeli war machine has even uprooted agricultural fields, including thousands of olive trees on one farm; bulldozed many cemeteries; and bombed civilians fleeing on Israeli orders, while obstructing the few trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egypt.

With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000? With 5,000 babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine, and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas Health Ministry’s official count is warranted.

Nader’s piece originally appeared under the explosive headline “How Many Gazans Have Already Died? Perhaps 200,000.” But apparently an editor later changed the title to something much less inflammatory.

• The World Must Calculate the Real Gaza Death Toll
  Ralph Nader • Common Dreams • March 6, 2024 • 1,200 Words

At the time I read it, I thought Nader’s speculative figure of 200,000 Gazan deaths seemed far too high, but the basic point he was making was a very reasonable one. The official body count regularly provided by Gaza’s Public Health Ministry seemed restricted only to those directly killed by Israeli bombs or bullets, excluding the considerable number of Gazans whose cause of death was far more ambiguously connected to the Israeli military campaign. Given the overwhelmingly lockstep pro-Israel skew of the Western global media, that sort of extreme caution was certainly necessary in any public releases, but it must have greatly understated the true civilian death-toll from the conflict.

Nader quoted an article published a few days earlier by a Washington Post reporter that had emphasized the horrific conditions and risk of serious famine.

The bulk of Gaza’s more than 2 million people face the prospect of famine—a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known. Aid groups have been pointing to Israel restricting the flow of assistance into the territory as a major driver of the crisis. Some prominent Israeli officials openly champion stymying these transfers of aid.

Nader quoted numerous other international officials and relief experts who broadly supported this same analysis, notably including UN Secretary-General António Guterres, while also noting that as far back as late 2023, the chair of public health at the University of Edinburgh had predicted that a half-million Gazans might die during 2024 if conditions continued unabated.

Nader’s provocative column received relatively little attention at the time even in alternative media circles, perhaps because most regarded his conclusions as so wildly implausible. But he now seems to have been completely vindicated as The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals, published a short piece estimating the total death toll from Israel’s nine month destruction of Gaza. The three authors argued that the figure would probably exceed 186,000.

• Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential
  Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf • The Lancet • July 5, 2024 • 1,100 Words

The article emphasized that across a wide range of previous conflicts, indirect deaths have always greatly exceeded direct ones, with the ratio generally being between 3 and 15. We would certainly expect this to be the case in Gaza, given that Israelis have destroyed nearly all of Gaza’s hospitals and the bulk of its housing stock, while also inflicting famine conditions upon the suffering population. So the authors applied a conservative ratio of 4 for illustrative purposes, thus producing their estimate of 186,000 total deaths, but the true figure might easily be much higher. In a recent interview, the eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer certainly accepted this analytical framework, and indeed felt that total might be too low.

Moreover, even the direct toll of deaths may have become a serious undercount, as I had argued in May:

Although the official Gazan death-toll reported in our media has remained relatively constant in recent weeks, this is almost certainly an illusion. During the first month or two of the massive Israeli attack, the Gazan Public Health Ministry had maintained very detailed rosters of the dead, including the names, ages, and ID codes of the victims, and regularly released updates of the total, so those numbers seemed absolutely solid. But the Israeli assault soon targeted all of Gaza’s government offices and hospitals, and by early December, the Gazan officials responsible for tabulating the dead had themselves been killed or gone missing, so the count naturally tended to stagnate, even as conditions horrifically worsened for the surviving Gazans.

After less than three months of the Israeli slaughter, some 22,000 Gazans had officially been reported dead, but now after more than seven months of starvation and continuing attacks, including the destruction of all of Gaza’s hospitals and medical facilities, the official body-count reported in our media has only increased to around 34,000, which seems highly implausible…

A recent front-page story in the New York Times reported the tragic case of a particular Palestinian-American pharmacist living in New Jersey, who had personally lost 200 relatives killed in Gaza, including his parents and siblings. That single datapoint indicated the magnitude of the possible media under-count after seven months of horror, and Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia suggested something similar in a recent interview. Although solid estimates are impossible, I’d think a civilian death toll of 100,000 or even something considerably higher seems perfectly plausible at this date.

• Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 6, 2024 • 6,800 Words

These very large death-tolls originally suggested by Nader and now endorsed in the Lancet may shock many readers, but such skeptical reactions are unwarranted. After just a few weeks of the Israeli assault, the Financial Times had calculated that the level of destruction inflicted upon much of densely-populated Gaza was already worse than what had been suffered by many German cities following years of the Allied strategic bombing campaign during World War II:

The catastrophic destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war https://t.co/Hm0YiTNOjr pic.twitter.com/vC3Nx3BP5X

— Financial Times (@FT) December 7, 2023

Moreover, such mass slaughter of Gazan civilians was the obvious, declared intent of the Israeli government. In late December, South Africa filed a 91 page legal brief with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) heavily documenting Israel’s publicly avowed plans for genocide, and within weeks, the ICJ jurists had issued a series of near-unanimous rulings supporting those charges. Given that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly identified the Palestinians with the biblical tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew god commanded be exterminated down to the last newborn baby, and so many other senior Israeli leaders have issued similar pronouncements, we should hardly be surprised that more than nine months of relentless bombing and shelling have successfully accomplished at least a portion of that stated goal.

Read the Whole Article

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We are the world. We are the people. We are NATO. And we’re comin’ to get ya – wherever you are, whether you want it or not.

Call it the latest pop iteration of the “rules-based international order” – duly christened at NATO’s 75th birthday in D.C.

Well, the Global Majority had already been warned – but brains under techno-feudalism tend to be reduced to mush.

So a gentle reminder is in order. This had already been stated in the first paragraph of the Joint Declaration on EU-NATO Cooperation, issued on January 9, 2023:

“We will further mobilize the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, (italics mine) to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens.”

Correction: barely one million, part of the 0.1% plutocracy. Certainly not one billion.

Cut to the 2024 NATO Summit Declaration – obviously redacted, with stellar mediocrity, by the Americans, with the other 31 assorted vassal members duly assenting.

So here’s the main 2024 NATO “strategic” trifecta:

1. Extra tens of billions of dollars in “assistance” to the upcoming rump Ukraine; the overwhelming majority of these funds will be slushing around the industrial-military money laundering complex.
2. Forceful imposition of extra military spending on all members.
3. Massive hyping up of the “China threat”.

As for the theme song of the NATO 75 show, there are actually two. Apart from “China Threat” (closing credits), the other one (opening credits) is “Free Ukraine”. The lyrics go something like this: it looks like we are at war against Russia in Ukraine, but don’t be fooled: NATO is not a participant in the war.

Well, they are even setting up a NATO office in Kiev, but that is just to coordinate production for a Netflix war series.

Those malignant authoritarians

The outgoing epileptic slab of Norwegian wood posing as NATO Secretary-General – before the arrival of his Dutch Gouda replacement – put on quite a performance. Highlights include his fierce denunciation of “the growing alliance between Russia and its authoritarian friends in Asia”, as in “authoritarian leaders in Iran, North Korea and China”. These malignant entities “all want NATO to fail”. So there’s much work to do “with our friends in the Indo-Pacific”.

“Indo-Pacific” is a crude “rules-based international order” invention. No one across Asia, anywhere, has ever used it; everyone refers to Asia-Pacific.

The joint declaration directly blames China for fueling Russian “aggression” in Ukraine: Beijing is described as a “decisive enabler” of the Kremlin’s “war effort”. NATO script writers even directly threaten China: China “cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation”.

To counter-act such malignity, NATO will expand its “partnerships” with “Indo-Pacific” states.

Even before the summit declaration, the Global Times was already losing their cool with these inanities: “Under the hype from the U.S. and NATO, it seems that China has become the ‘key’ to the survival of Europe, controlling the fate of the Russia-Ukraine conflict like a ‘decisive power.’”

The tawdry rhetorical fest in D.C. definitely won’t cut it in Beijing: the Hegemon just wants “to reach more deeply into Asia, trying to establish an ‘Asia-Pacific NATO’ to help achieve the U.S.’ ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy.’”

Southeast Asia, via diplomatic channels, essentially agrees: with the exception of bought and paid for misguided Filipinos, no one wants serious turbulence across Asia-Pacific like NATO has unleashed across Europe.

Zhou Bo, senior fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy and a retired PLA officer, also dismissed the Indo-Pacific shenanigans even before the summit: we had an excellent exchange about it late last year at the Astana Forum in Kazakhstan.

Whatever happens, Exceptionalistan will remain on overdrive. NATO and Japan have agreed to establish a “highly confidential security information” line, around the clock. So count on meek Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to enhance Japan’s “pivotal role” in the building of an Asian NATO.

Everyone with a brain from Urumqi to Bangalore knows that the motto across Asia, for the Exceptionalists, is “Today Ukraine, Tomorrow Taiwan”. The absolute majority of ASEAN, and hopefully India, will not fall for it.

What is clear is that the NATO at 75 circus is absolutely clueless and impervious to what happened at the recent SCO summit in Astana. Especially when it comes to the SCO now positioned as a key node in bringing on a new, Eurasia-wide collective security arrangement.

As for Ukraine, once again Medvedev Unplugged, in inimitable style, delivered the Russian position:

“The Washington Summit Declaration of July 10 mentions ‘the irreversible path of Ukraine’ to NATO. For Russia, 2 possible ways of how this path ends are acceptable: either Ukraine disappears, or NATO does. Still better, both.”

In parallel, China is conducting military exercises in Belarus only a few days after Minsk officially became a SCO member. Translation: forget about NATO “expanding” to Asia when Beijing is already making it clear it is very much present in NATO’s alleged “backyard”.

A declaration of war against Eurasia

Michael Hudson once again has reminded everyone with a brain that the running NATO warmongering show has nothing to do with peaceful internationalism. It’s rather about “a unipolar U.S. military alliance leading toward military aggression and economic sanctions to isolate Russia and China. Or more to the point, to isolate European and other allies from its former trade and investment with Russia and China, making those allies more dependent on the United States.”

The 2024 NATO declaration actually is a renewed declaration of war, hybrid and otherwise, against Eurasia – as well as Afro-Eurasia (yes, there are promises of “partnerships” advancing everywhere from Africa to the Middle East).

The Eurasia integration process is about geoeconomic integration – including, crucially, transportation corridors connecting, among other latitudes, northern Europe with West Asia.

For the Hegemon, this is the ultimate nightmare: Eurasia integration driving Western Europe away from the U.S. and preventing that perennial wet dream, the colonization of Russia.

So only plan A would apply, with absolute ruthlessness: Washington – literally – bombed Russia-Germany integration (Nord Stream 1 and 2, and more) and turned the vassal lands of frightened, discombobulated Europeans into a potentially very dangerous place, right beside a raging Hot War.

So once again, let everyone go back to that first paragraph of the January 2023 EU-NATO joint communiqué. That’s what we’re facing today, reflected on the title of my latest book, Eurasia v. NATOstan: NATO – in theory – fully mobilized, in military, political and economic terms, to fight against any Global Majority forces that may destabilize Imperial Hegemony.

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

The post We Are NATO. And We’re Comin’ To Get Ya appeared first on LewRockwell.

All the high–profile Democrats who’ve been wishing Trump a speedy recovery from his assassination attempt after years of calling him an existential threat are the same people who now treat George W Bush like a cuddly wuddly snugglepoo after years of calling him an evil dictator. The enmity between these factions is a performance, like cage fighters who hug warmly after weeks of trash talk once their match is over and admit all the drama was really just about promoting the fight and selling Pay-Per-Views.

Their actions show you that their conflicts are fake and they’re no more enemies than actors on the stage are enemies, so why should you treat their performance as real? Why buy into the drama of their pretend elections and feigned opposition when they themselves do not? They’re showing you it’s all fake. Believe them.

The two “sides” of mainstream politics are not fighting against one another, they’re only fighting against you. Their only job is to keep you clapping along with the two-handed puppet show as they rob you blind and tighten your chains while your gaze is fixed on the performance.

I have been briefed on the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania.

I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well. I’m praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally, as we await further information.

Jill and I are grateful to the Secret…

— President Biden (@POTUS) July 13, 2024

I have been briefed on the shooting at former President Trump’s event in Pennsylvania.

Doug and I are relieved that he is not seriously injured. We are praying for him, his family, and all those who have been injured and impacted by this senseless shooting.

We are grateful to…

— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) July 14, 2024

There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy. Although we don’t yet know exactly what happened, we should all be relieved that former President Trump wasn’t seriously hurt, and use this moment to recommit ourselves to civility and respect in our politics.…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 13, 2024

All of Trump’s Democratic Party well-wishers prove that for all the whining in recent years about the death of decorum and how vitriolic US partisan feuding has become, they really are all buddies who only pretend to believe the other side is an existential threat to the world.

In Washington they’re all on the same team and have generally cordial relationships with the people on other side of the aisle. They just encourage normal Americans to feed all their discontent with the status quo into a hyper-emotional political environment where the barely-existing divisions between the two major factions are inflamed by mainstream pundits and politicians so that their anger will go toward the completely ineffectual activity of voting instead of more direct and revolutionary measures. From the perspective of the empire managers it’s hostile partisan rage for thee, amicable cocktail party relations for we.

❖

Every single day in Gaza since October 7 has been more outrageous, significant and newsworthy than Trump getting a booboo on his ear.

❖

I’ve been getting a lot of shrill, hysterical comments from Americans insisting that it’s somehow heinous and inappropriate for me to use this political moment to highlight the criminality of the US empire as I do every day using every opportunity I can. I would like to make it clear that I have no respect for this. Less than zero respect.

The emotional hysteria we are seeing around the assassination attempt on Trump is very similar to what we saw around 9/11 and October 7, which historically means some deeply unwholesome policies are about to be rolled out by the managers of the empire. Now is the time to be more critical of the imperial power structure, not less.

If you find it horrifying and evil that I am using Trump’s ear owwie to talk about exponentially more atrocious acts of violence, I can only say: get a fucking grip. Pull yourself together. Your country is backing a literal genocide right this very moment. Stop getting swept up in the media-driven emotional frenzy of the moment, get ahold of yourself, stop thinking uncritically, and start acting like an adult.

❖

The Zionist Federation of Australia is trying to have an Australian journalist prosecuted for unlawful criticism of Israel. Yes, you read that correctly, and yes, that is the actual story here. The CEO of ZFA Alon Cassuto is trying to bring a Human Rights Commission case against renowned former SBS broadcaster Mary Kostakidis for tweeting criticisms of Israel in ways Cassuto claims violate Australian hate speech laws, specifically sharing a speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah wherein he says the words “from the river to the sea the land of Palestine is for the Palestinian people — and the Palestinian people only.”

This comes just days after the Australian government appointed its first “anti-semitism envoy”, a move many have feared would lead to crackdowns on speech that is critical of Israel.

I really cannot overstate how crazy and evil this is. This is probably a good time to once again share my periodic reminder that Australia has no bill of rights, and it shows.

________________

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“Trump is brushing off assassin’s bullets like dirt off his shoulder, racking up a mile long rap sheet of the fakest & gayest felonies known to man, chased through civil court by crazy-eyed harridans deranged by how horny he makes them. Joe Biden has jello for supper at 4pm.” — Aimee Terese on “X”

Dear Hitler, “Joe Biden” wrote his personal note of condolence Saturday night. So sorry to hear that you were inconvenienced by loud noises in PA, where I grew up in the black church. Chris Wray tells me that fine people may be behind it. Will keep you in the loop. Get well soon!

Here’s some more consolation: The New York Times reports this morning that the FBI is looking into the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life as “possible domestic terrorism.” One must ask: are they trying to shed new light on this event, or just blowing more smoke up America’s ass — because that has been the FBI’s specialty for at least the past eight years. We’ll know if they take the definitive step of labeling the act a “hate crime.”

The weakness of narrative-tweaking is beginning to show. The amazing part is that only the elite thinking class of Americans fell for it, exactly the demographic that hangs on every word in The New York Times. The Deplorables out there in Flyoverland delivering Froot Loops to the Piggly-Wiggly and driving fork-lifts around the Amazon warehouse apparently never bought the narrative bullshit generated by the Media-Blob Industrial Complex. You’d hate to suppose that thinking is overrated. Or is it just a certain kind of thinking?

Try as you might to locate some malign, overweening, scheming cabal behind all the trips laid on our country, the truth is probably much simpler: set out on a journey defined by one lie, and then tell a lie to cover the first lie, and then another, and pretty soon you’re lying all over the place about everything until reality gets obliterated. This is exactly what started in 2016 when Hillary Clinton sought to cover up her email and private server scandal with the Russia collusion hoax.

Have you forgotten how entrenched the FBI, CIA, and other agencies dug themselves in on that? It began as dumb-ass insinuation that Donald Trump was a Russian agent, but the FBI turned itself into fantasy factory when they ran with story. They manufactured one sub-plot after another, most of it comically absurd, like the entrapment of General Flynn for having a conversation with the Russian ambassador — as if foreign countries send ambassadors here for some other purpose than communicating with our government officials. Tell me, you Harvard grads who devour The New York Times every morning with your turmeric and wheat-grass detox smoothies: should an incoming White House National Security Advisor not speak with envoys from other lands?

So, following the election of 2016, scores of government officials from Barack Obama and Joe Biden on down set out to wreck Mr. Trump’s turn in office, and ran one hoax after another to disable and dislodge him, and each hoax was a battery of lies begetting more lies. The style of thinking behind all that is called unprincipled. Many of these lies entailed crimes, some of them gigantic frauds perpetrated on the citizenry such as the ballot-stuffing operation that jammed “Joe Biden” into office — and which you were not permitted to speak of on penalty of cancellation and prosecution.

By 2020, “Joe Biden” had racked up enough bribes from foreign lands that he was susceptible to blackmail and thus to manipulation. That his mind was failing through his entire term only made that easier. Both “Joe Biden” and the Neocon gang at State and the CIA were implicated in a web of crimes in Ukraine, and war there was one way to cover all of it up, so they made sure that war happened. The lies and hoaxes continued to multiply, accompanied by huge, destructive pranks — the George Floyd riots, the drag queens in the kiddie classrooms, the wide-open border, the FBI-instigated J-6 riot — and the Democratic Party was embroidered in that whole tapestry of degenerate politics along with the Deep State blob.

In short, the Democratic Party appears to be guilty of programmatic treason against the people of the United States. They know that a reckoning awaits if Mr. Trump manages to return to office. They’ve known it for years. But two recent Supreme Court decisions really amped up their fears: 1) Trump v. the United States establishes presidential immunity from prosecution for acts involving his core constitutional duties; and 2) Loper Bright v. Raimondo establishes that the federal bureaucracy can no longer rule over citizens unchecked by the courts. Both of these would make it much easier for a President Trump to disassemble the Deep State. And of course, that may lead to the investigation and prosecution of Deep State personae who abused their positions — possibly even prison. . . a discomfiting prospect.

The Democratic Party’s cover got blown on June 27th when Joe Biden had to go live in a debate and displayed his mental incompetency for all to see. That shock to the system forced a scramble to replace “JB” pretty late in the election cycle, since now just enough voters may be indisposed to re-electing an obvious human wreck. But the switcheroo effort seems to have lost traction. And the party may have muffed its blackmail leverage over “Joe Biden.” After all, his briberies are all well-cataloged by the House Oversight Committee, including the vast bank records of the many shell companies set up to receive the bribe money.

Is it possible, though, that “Joe Biden” holds blackmail material over his party confederates? After all, he’s still president. He has access to things you’d never dream of and, demented as he is, he has plenty of help close at hand from Hunter, Dr. Jill, and the Lawfare posse for sorting it out. He probably knows a thing or two about his old pard Barack Obama, too, that would make some folks uncomfortable. So, looks like “JB” is fixing to hang in there as his party’s nominee, and whoever doesn’t like it can go suck an egg.

After the stunning events of Saturday evening, it also looks like candidate “Joe Biden” would go down in flames against Donald Trump on November 5, stuffed drop-boxes and all. Not a few Democratic Party bigshots have already made noises about leaving the country if that happens, possibly to nations lacking extradition treaties with the USA. Many others must be gobbling Xanax like Tic Tacs now that Donald Trump has survived the ultimate affront to his existence. You know the old nugget of wisdom: if you come at the king, you better not miss. Ooops.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Shocks to the System appeared first on LewRockwell.

In a recent article discussing how US Treasury Department tax breaks are exploited by groups that raise money in America in support of the Israeli so-called Defense Forces (IDF), I concluded that it does not require any particular brilliance on the part of even a casual observer to realize that both politically and economically Israel and Israelis are not treated like everyone else by governments at various levels in the United States, quite the contrary in many cases. Nevertheless, some key questions must be asked even at risk of being repetitive about Israel’s clearly privileged status. One must consider how is it possible that organizations that are committed to financially supporting war crimes and even genocide by a foreign nation are allowed to have tax breaks that enable them to collect more money which in turn helps them to corrupt the system that feeds them while also empowering those foreign militaries? How is it possible that the foreign army carrying out the war crimes is also allowed to benefit directly from the US laws that have created exemption from taxation? In short, is there no sense of responsibility and/or consequences on the part of American government when it comes to the behavior of the pariah apartheid Jewish state?

In the event, comments and insights from some readers both on my posting and privately in emails and on Facebook have convinced me that I have greatly understated the case. Those who argue, perhaps somewhat in jest, the Congress is the Knesset West and that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are in fact Israeli puppets are very close to being on the mark, making Israel and its all-powerful billionaire funded lobby indisputably in control of many key aspects of American government beyond the obviously targeted foreign policy. Combine that with control over the media and entertainment industries that shape the Israeli preferred narrative at all times, and you have a situation where when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says “jump” 95% of Congress and everyone in the White House begin hopping. We will no doubt see that in play when the monstrous Netanyahu arrives in Washington to address a joint session of Congress on July 24th. The performing monkeys who will appear on television leaping up and down while cheering Bibi will definitely be something to see, though one hopes that at the same time there will also be a million demonstrators surrounding Capitol Hill calling for the head of the world’s leading war criminal.

One thing that should be completely clear is that the United States gets absolutely nothing out of the relationship with Israel, which all flows in only one direction to the tune of what probably amounts to more than a billion dollars a month if all the extras and the inevitable fraud are taken into account. And that does not even include special donations like the $14 billion recently granted by Congress and President Joe Biden to fund Israel’s never-ending war of extermination against the Palestinians. In my recent piece, I took particular aim at 501(c)(3) non-profits set up in New York City and in Massachusetts which exist to provide funds to the Israeli army. Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), based in New York but with twenty branches in the US, boasts on its website that it has provided tens of millions of dollars to the Israeli military. The money contributed is federal income tax exempt and most of the donors are able to write the contributions off on their own federal taxes as an inducement to give. Such non-profits are generally granted that special status through demonstrating that they are religious, charitable or educational. Sending money to the Israeli army satisfies none of those requirements.

Not only does Israel take advantage of a tax break on money coming from groups that are ostensibly US-based, one of my correspondents advised me that the corruption goes far deeper than that, consisting of the fact that 501(c)(3) organizations must be registered through what is referred to as a “domicile.” Most are in the United States but domiciles in Canada and Mexico are also accepted given the economic realities of the North American market. Only one other country has an acceptable domicile and that is, of course, and, inevitably, Israel. In other words, an allowable exemption and the related deductible contribution for US tax purposes, might uniquely consist of US taxpayer money that goes to a charity registered in Israel. As Israeli charities have no reporting requirements vis-à-vis the US Treasury and no mechanism exists to validate their function and activity, they only answer to the government of the state of Israel.

And of course the pandering to Israel includes much more in the way of manipulating the political process to provide benefits to the Jewish state. It has long been a cliché in Washington that any long bill like defense appropriations that passes through the Congress will inevitably have some goodies for Israel inserted in it. Recent and current legislation reflects the perceived need by Congressmen to show the flag, which would be the Star of David rather than the Stars and Stripes, given the Israeli engagement in the military extermination of Palestinians that has no sign of ending as it is entering into its tenth month. The United States is not only funding and arming the Israelis, it is also providing political cover by vetoing nearly every United Nations proposal that would have led to a cease fire accompanied by some kind of exchange of hostages and prisoners. Along the way, no excess by Israel is considered to be too outrageous to require an objection coming from Congress and/or the White House, including Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s proposal that he would relieve the overcrowding in the prisons with Palestinians who are being held without charges by taking them out and killing them, one pistol shot to the head each. Former defense minister Avigdor Liberman has gone one step farther, calling on his country to use its nuclear weapons to obliterate Iran, presumably with full US approval. Israel has also been charged with killing journalists, humanitarian workers, medical workers including doctors, and torturing and starving Palestinian prisoners.

And there is much more. The International Criminal Court ruling that Israel’s Prime Minister and Defense Minister should be on the receiving end of arrest warrants over war crimes and possible genocide in Gaza was responded to by US Congress with a letter threatening the jurors and their families if the court were to proceed. The US also cut off all funding and even cooperation with the United Nations’ UNWRA which, Israel has declared to be a terrorist organization, but which has been the major source of what food and medicine was actually getting through to Gaza in spite of Israeli efforts to block it. Congress also has moved to ignore any reports coming from the remaining Gazan authorities revealing the casualties resulting from the Israeli bombing and other killing, as if hiding the death toll will make it go away. The respected British medical journal The Lancet is now reporting that as many as 186,000 Gazans might be dead, mostly among the rubble of their homes, uncounted because the Gazan officials who would have performed that task are dead and whole families are wiped out so no one is reported missing. It is a far larger number than the ca. 37,000 that keeps appearing in the western media in an attempt to mitigate what Israel is up to.

And there is also the really petty stuff that surfaces regularly from the pro-Israel message control network. Three Columbia University senior officials have been removed from their positions because of comments and private emails they have written deriding the claims of “surging” antisemitism at colleges. Among the “evidence” was an intercepted message suggesting that a panelist could have used recent campus protests as a fundraising opportunity and another that appeared critical of a campus rabbi’s essay about antisemitism. The university will also launch a “vigorous” antisemitism and antidiscrimination training program.” Meanwhile a leading New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, headed by an Orthodox Jew, is setting up an index that will identify law students who have been demonstrating against Israel, creating a “do not hire” list of the names so they will not be offered employment after graduation. “The firm is scrutinizing students’ behavior with the help of a background check company, looking at their involvement with pro-Palestinian student groups, scouring social media and reviewing news reports and footage from protests. It is looking for explicit instances of antisemitism as well as statements and slogans it has deemed to be ‘triggering’ to Jews.” And then there is Donald Trump using the word “Palestinian” as a slur in his debate with Joe Biden and efforts by politicians like Governor Ron DeSantis to reject the arrival of any refugee Palestinians as immigrants to Florida as they are all “terrorists.” You know, little stuff like that and the efforts at criminalization of free speech if it comes to criticizing either Israeli or Jewish group behavior. You know, minor stuff. Pretty soon we Americans will all be terrorized into dancing to the same tune that Congress and the White House dance to. Then it will be too late.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The post Supporting Israel Is Big Business in the United States appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the greatest farces of these modern times is that those who scream the loudest about democracy and human rights are the very same people who violate international norms at every opportunity.

In the June issue of The New Republic, a left-leaning US political journal, a scowling Donald Trump was featured on the cover sporting a Hitler moustache above a caption that read: “American fascism, what it would look like.”

“We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard,” the editors explained in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “After all, [Hitler] spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews – being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.”

We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all,… pic.twitter.com/x79Rkh86O1

— The New Republic (@newrepublic) July 7, 2024

There’s just one problem with the journal’s nervous handwringing: Trump has already served a four-year term as US leader and there was no visible sign of fascist goosestepping down Main Street during that period. In fact, just the opposite is true. While Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, thus triggering World War II, Trump went down in the history books as the first American commander-in-chief in modern times to avoid a military conflict. Now on the campaign trail for the second time, with the insatiable defense industry licking its chops for more profits, the Republican frontrunner has declared he would end the Ukraine-Russia conflict in 24 hours if reelected.

When it is considered that ‘democracy’ today primarily works on behalf of the military industrial complex and other associated business interests, it is easier to understand how Trump is described in the corporate-owned media as an existential threat to the American republic. Peace is the last thing on Washington’s mind, and Russia understands that better than any country.

Back in 2008, the “dictator” Vladimir Putin delivered his now-famous speech at the Munich Security Conference where he warned his Western colleagues on the dangers of military expansion.

“NATO expansion… represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”

Despite Putin’s explicit warning, NATO went on to add an additional six members to the alliance, bringing the total number to 32, with Ukraine, ignoring Moscow’s major red line, scheming to be number 33. For anybody who asserts this is only a “defense alliance” would do well to consider what America’s response would be if all of Latin America and the border state of Mexico were joining a military alliance led by Moscow. Needless to say, we would be knee-deep in bloodshed by now. Yet Russia is supposed to accept an endless military incursion smack up against its border.

This was certainly not the last time Russia attempted to broker a peace deal with Washington. Almost eight years after the 2014 Maidan Revolution, and months before Moscow kicked off its special military operation in Ukraine, the Kremlin released its plan for peace on the continent. Among other things, the draft treaty called for the US and Russia to refrain from deploying troops in regions where they could be perceived as a threat to each other’s national security, as well as a ban on sending their troops and military hardware into areas where they could strike each other’s territory. The treaty was also designed to ban the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Had the Western powers consented to the plan – it barely made headlines in the NATO countries – it’s not difficult to imagine decades of peace between east and west, the very last thing that Washington wants.

Instead, the US and its European puppets placed Russia in an impossible position with regards to the ongoing militarization and Nazification of Ukraine, forcing it to respond as any other country concerned about its national security would.

This leads us to the West’s third favorite bogeyman, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has dared to declare that his country is predominantly Christian and conservative and has every right to stay that way. Orban, whose country now holds the rotating EU Council presidency, went on a peace-making tour with stops in Moscow, Kiev, Beijing, and Washington (where he ruffled more than one hawk’s feathers by visiting Trump at Mar-a-Lago instead of Biden in DC). The frustration on the part of Brussels as it watched the Hungarian “tyrant” speak out in favor of reducing weapons sales was laughable if not downright pathetic.

“Hungary has presented the trips as a ‘peace mission’ to help negotiate a ceasefire for the war in Ukraine. Orban may consider himself as one of the few who can speak to both sides – but in reality he has no mandate to do so,” wrote Armida van Rij, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, a European think tank. The question remains, however, who will speak out on behalf of peace if not Trump, Putin, and Orban? The answer thus far is nobody.

While there are certainly other statesmen besides Trump, Putin, and Orban on the international stage who can make the case for peace, time is running out to hear those critical voices.

This originally appeared on RT News.

The post Trump, Orban, Putin: Why Are All the ‘Dictators’ Hellbent on Peace? appeared first on LewRockwell.

On July 5, the Holy See Press Office issued a press release from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) concerning the case of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, whom the DDF accused of “the crime of schism.” As expected, the press release announced that the DDF had concluded its “extrajudicial penal process” and had declared the archbishop to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

The DDF, the Church’s supreme doctrinal office, had summoned Archbishop Viganò to Rome in a decree emailed to the prelate on June 11. He was directed to appear in person for judgement on June 20, or to submit a defense in writing by June 28. As we reported on June 26, the archbishop announced that he had not honored the summons for the 20th and would not be submitting a written defense on the 28th. “I have not delivered any statement or document in my defense to the Dicastery, whose authority I do not recognize, nor do I recognize the authority of its Prefect, nor do I recognize the authority of the one who appointed him,” Viganò said, referring to radical Cardinal Victor Emmanuel Fernández (the “kissing cardinal”) and Pope Francis.

The July 5 DDF press release states:

On 4 July 2024, the Congress of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith met to conclude the extrajudicial penal process referred to in canon 1720 CIC against the Most Reverend Carlo Maria Viganò, titular Archbishop of Ulpiana, accused of the reserved delict of schism (canons 751 and 1364 CIC; art. 2 SST).

His public statements manifesting his refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff, his rejection of communion with the members of the Church subject to him, and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council are well known.

The Vatican announcement continues:

At the conclusion of the penal process, the Most Reverend Carlo Maria Viganò was found guilty of the reserved delict of schism.

The Dicastery declared the latae sententiae [i.e., automatic] excommunication in accordance with canon 1364 § 1 CIC.

The Vatican press release announcing the excommunication of Archbishop Viganò came just four days before the same office issued the Vatican’s official working document, called an Instrumentum Laboris, for Pope Francis’s ongoing “Synod on Synodality,” the controversial, multi-year process intended to change radically the doctrine, discipline, governance, and liturgical worship of the Church. Begun in 2021, the First Session of the Synod concluded in Rome in October 2023 with the issuance of a “Synthesis Report,” which critics derided as a “Sin Thesis Report,” since it pointed toward continued efforts at promoting sin by overturning Catholic teaching on divorce, polygamy, LGBTQ issues, female deacons, married priests, church governance, and more. Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, the former doctrinal chief of the Church, charged that the globalist agenda of Pope Francis and the Synod on Synodality amounted to “a hostile takeover of the Church of Jesus Christ.”

This “Synod of Bishops,” many critics pointed out, defied the very definition of a synod by appointing many non-bishops as voting participants, including lay men and women and college students. Mere weeks after the conclusion of the Synod, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith launched a global brouhaha by issuing Fiducia Supplicans on the blessing of same-sex couples. Released on December 18, only a week before the celebration of the Nativity of the Christ Child, the papal document authored by Cardinal Fernández was welcomed with howls of glee from the LGBTQ chorus, but was roundly condemned as “heretical,” “blasphemous,” “scandalous,” and “diabolical” by orthodox Catholic priests, bishops, cardinals, and bishops’ conferences worldwide. (See here and here.)

The scandal was magnified by revelations that Fernández, an Argentine protégé of Pope Francis, was elevated by the pope to the DDF post previously held by Cardinal Müller, despite being the author of two erotic/pornographic books.

And having a checkered past as priest and bishop.

According to Cardinal Müller, Pope Francis and the DDF are aware of a massive file on Fernández that should have nixed placing him in that top Vatican slot for doctrine and discipline. Organizations representing victims of clerical sex abuse were quick to denounce the Fernández appointment and accuse him of a long history of protecting predatory homosexual priests and ignoring their victims. (See here and here.)

Thus, it was especially galling to many of the faithful to see Pope Francis, Cardinal Fernández, and the DDF exercise the relatively rare act of excommunication for “schism” in the case of Archbishop Viganò while turning a blind eye to the schism, heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, sacrilege, and criminal sex abuse of the clerical acolytes of “Francis the Merciful.”

The notorious cases of sex abuse covered over by Pope Francis, such as those of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Father Marko Rupnik, are but the tip of the iceberg. There is also the scandalous failure by the Vatican to discipline or excommunicate the rebellious bishops and priests of Germany, Belgium, the United States, and elsewhere who announced that they would bless same-sex couples in blatant defiance of Biblical injunctions, the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church, and ruling by the DDF. (See here and here.) Rather than holding fast to eternal truths, Team Francis/Fernández catered to the militant LGBTQ lobby by promulgating the abominable Fiducia Supplicans declaration to OK blessing “same-sex couples.”

There seems to be no excess on the Left that can arouse Pope Francis’ ire or concern. Pride Masses and rainbow vestments? Fine! Pagan liturgies? Marvelous! Pachamama idol worship? Wonderful! Communist CCP bishops? No problem!

No, it is “rigid” traditional Catholics, particularly those drawn to the Traditional Latin Mass, whom the pope sees as a threat to his “progressive” vision of Church unity. So, while promoting heterodox and heretical clerics and even appointing lay atheists and pro-abortion activists to prestigious Vatican posts, he has all but shut down the Traditional Latin Mass that his predecessor Pope Benedict encouraged, and is persecuting orthodox clergy (Bishop Joseph Strickland, Father Frank Pavone, Cardinal Raymond Burke, to name the most prominent).

This double standard and this intense hostility toward tradition flies in the face of Pope Francis’ boilerplate appeals to “diversity” and his “Church of accompaniment.” His new Instrumentum Laboris for the upcoming session of the Synod on Synodality is replete with hundreds of references to “accompaniment,” “listening,” “dialogue,” “diversity,” “welcoming,” “journeying together,” and other synodal buzzwords. However, there seems to be little, if any, inclination by Pope Francis to offer the same accompanying, welcoming, dialoguing, journeying spirit to traditional Catholics that he so readily extends to Muslims, Hindus, atheists, Buddhists, LGBTQ activists, and communists.

In a lengthy defense entitled “J’Accuse” posted on June 28 on his own website, Archbishop Viganò argues that it is not he who is in schism with the Church, since he adheres wholeheartedly to the Deposit of Faith and “all the true Councils of the Church, which I fully recognize and accept, just as I fully recognize and accept all the magisterial acts of the Roman Pontiffs.” Rather, he charges it is Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis) and his minions who are in schism by embracing “a faith different from that constantly taught for two thousand years by the Catholic Church.”

“I face this trial with the determination that comes from knowing that I have no reason to consider myself separate from communion with the Holy Church and with the Papacy, which I have always served with filial devotion and fidelity,” Viganò avers. “I could not conceive of a single moment of my life outside this one Ark of salvation, which Providence has constituted as the Mystical Body of Christ, in submission to its Divine Head and to His Vicar on earth.”

Viganò calls Bergoglio a usurper, not a true pope. He cites the Papal Bull Cum ex apostolatus officio of Pope Paul IV, which he notes “established in perpetuity the nullity of the nomination or election of any Prelate — including the Pope — who had fallen into heresy before his promotion to Cardinal or elevation to Roman Pontiff.” “It defines,” says Viganò, “the promotion or elevation as nulla, irrita et inanis — void, invalid, and without any value.”

Read the Whole Article

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Note: in the last 24 hours I have received a lot of requests to comment on the recent assassination attempt. Shortly after the events, I did my best to provide a few unique perspectives on the events which can be viewed here, and presently has received over 300k views.

I believe the most effective marketing slogan in history was “Vaccines are safe and effective.” This is because it implies 100% safety and 100% efficacy (which is impossible regardless of the therapy) but simultaneously avoids explicitly committing to that claim. Thus, the product is zealously promoted by its supporters but simultaneously escapes accountability for its continual failures (as no concrete promise is ever broken each time the vaccine is shown to be unsafe or ineffective).

One of the less appreciated consequences of this slogan (“safe and effective”) is that it causes most people to view all vaccines as being equivalent to each other, when in reality they are very different. For example, there have now been multiple high profile admissions that if the mRNA injections had been marketed as “gene therapies” almost no one would have taken them, but since they were instead presented to the public as “vaccines” they were exuberantly taken up across the globe.

In my eyes, one of the few upsides to the COVID-19 vaccine tragedy has been that the scale of harm the vaccines have caused has made the public begin questioning many of the lies that have been used to sell the vaccines to us for decades. For example, at a recent Congressional, in an attempt to escape culpability for a previous lie he’d made, Fauci stated that “I don’t believe any vaccine is 100% effective” and hence dispelled the cloak of ambiguity which has always been used to market these products.

Likewise, as more and more new investigations of the vaccine program emerged around the globe, Stanley Plotkin, who many consider to be the father of vaccinology, made a startling admission:

Postauthorization studies are needed to fully characterize the safety profile of a new vaccine, since prelicensure clinical trials have limited sample sizes, follow up durations, and population heterogeneity.

Which dispels another one of the common lies we hear—that vaccines are the most rigorously tested products on the market (something I would argue is irreconcilable).

Note: in the first half of this series, I discussed a recurring issue with vaccines—their manufacturing process inevitably leading to hot (toxic) lots being produced and injuring many as nothing is done to catch the (“safe and effective”) lots before they hit the market or withdraw them once the injuries emerge. In that article, I showed how this tragedy has repeated itself again and again for over a century and since the medical profession is largely unaware of it, during the COVID-19 vaccine campaign again and again we watched large groups of people be injured by these lots but have few if any doctors sound the alarm about those hot lots.

The Risks and Benefits of Each Vaccine

While I am not the biggest fan of vaccination, I also believe that it is a mistake to be a zealot on either side of the issue i.e., “all vaccines are safe and effective” or “all vaccines are poison you should never touch”. Rather, I believe that the risks and benefits of each one must be understood as some are much more dangerous or unjustifiable than others.

Unfortunately, due to the success of the “safe and effective” mantra, whenever a legitimate criticism is brought up against a specific vaccine, it inevitably is greeted with the blanket faith that applies to all vaccines assuming they are the same (e.g., when many people complained about what the spike protein gene therapies were doing to them rather than being listened to, they simply were dismissed as “antivaxxers”).

Because the safety and efficacy of vaccines vary greatly, and parents frequently contact me asking which vaccines they should give their children, I wrote a popular article (e.g., it’s gotten a few million views on Twitter) attempting to address this question.

Unfortunately, that article had to be on the long end, the question itself is quite complicated as a lot goes into calculating the risks and benefits of each vaccine. Much of this comes from the fact you are giving yourself a known risk (as no vaccine is 100%) in return for a possible benefit (preventing you from possibly suffering a disastrous but unlikely complication of a disease you might never catch) and the fact that most of the data which would be necessary to accurately make that calculation being unavailable to the public.

Nonetheless, even with a significant amount of missing information, it is still often possible to determine if the risks outweigh the benefits.

For example, it’s well-known that children have close to a 0% chance of dying from COVID-19 (with the extremely rare cases that do happen typically occurring in severely immunocompromised children) and that they have a very real risk of suffering a significant, severe or fatal complication from the vaccine.

Likewise, the risk a girl has of developing cervical cancer from an untreated HPV infection is fairly low to begin with (especially since the existing screening methods for preventing cervical cancer have fairly effective at eliminating it) and it is actually fairly unclear to what degree the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer.

If we take America for instance, each year, 0.0024% of women are killed by cervical cancer (a rate which was steadily dropping prior to the HPV vaccine hitting the market), and in the first 12 years Gardasil was on the market, it dropped to 0.0022%, meaning at best, it saved 0.0002% of women. Furthermore, the rate at which the cervical cancer rates were dropping significantly slowed after the HPV vaccine hit the market (suggesting it caused rather than prevented cervical cancer—especially given that the trials for the vaccine found those with a pre-existing infection at the time of vaccination were much more likely to get cervical cancer).

Conversely, the Gardasil HPV vaccine trials showed that 0.133% of the adolescent girls who received the vaccine died (compared to an expected death rate of 0.0437%), indicating that Gardasil killed 0.089% of recipients in return for potentially saving around 0.0002% of them, and hence in the best case scenario killed over 400 times as many people as it saved. Worse still, somewhere between 2.3% to 49% of the individuals who received Gardasil developed a new autoimmune condition, many of which were extremely debilitating (with the exact amount being unknown since Gardasil’s manufacturer deliberately hid it). Worse still, beyond Gardasil being worse than nothing if you already had an existing HPV infection, its “protection” is only temporary and hence requires you to expose yourself to the same risk each time you want to be shielded from catching an HPV infection which could give way to cancer.

Thus, I believe it is fair to argue that the existing evidence and logic should make it very clear that these two vaccines should never be given to our children. Unfortunately, one of the most common tricks in marketing is to narrow our focus to a very specific point and become unable to see the rest of the picture. For example, the COVID vaccines were marketed on the basis of the disastrous COVID complications which sometimes befall children and their risk of passing the virus to their relatives, while the HPV vaccine was marketed on the basis of creating hysteria about cervical cancer and using all the fears surrounding cancer to paint that vaccine a miraculous cure for the condition we desperately needed.

Note: Merck’s One Less Campaign won awards for its effectiness.

As a result, despite the FDA and CDC being deluged with complaints about injuries from each of these vaccines, they kept on insisting the benefits greatly outweighed the risks of the vaccines, did everything they could to bury the injuries from those vaccines, and by and large (at least until recently) got the entire public to adopt the “safe and effective” narrative.

While the other vaccines on the current CDC childhood vaccine schedule aren’t quite as egregious as the COVID-19 and HPV vaccines, there are still many cases where the risks clearly outweigh their benefits (e.g., in the previous article I discussed some of the clear risks with the polio vaccine—something we still give all our children despite polio not existing within America). Conversely, others are much more ambiguous, as some degree of benefit exists from the vaccine which has to be counterbalanced against its harms (all of which is discussed in the longer article which explores the risks and benefits of each of those vaccines).

Note: while specific issues can be traced to specific vaccines, the broader problem is the chronic immune dysfunction most vaccines create (especially as more of them are given) that leads to a myriad of chronic and debilitating autoimmune or neurologic disorders that are now far more frequent than the diseases we vaccinate against. For instance, while research in this area is generally prohibited all the existing studies that have been conducted have found that vaccination vastly increases the risk of common chronic childhood illnesses (e.g., asthma or ADHD) by 2 to 10 times—and sometimes more, and there is also evidence suggesting it affects even more people with a variety of subtle illnesses that are difficult to diagnose (all of which is described in detail here). As a result, I believe if vaccines are to be taken, a good justification is needed for each one under consideration, and only the ones with the best reward to risk ratio should be taken.

Types of Vaccines

One consequence of decades of marketing around vaccines has been people assuming they have comparable risks and benefits. Another has been that they all work in a similar way (hence why experimental gene therapies could be pitched as “just another vaccine”). In reality, there are many important differences between their designs, which makes it possible to predict much of what a vaccine will actually do once it hits the marketplace.

For example, most vaccines are injected into the body (as this makes them much more feasible to deploy). However, most infections (besides exceptions like those from a mosquito or a tick) aren’t. In turn, the body has a series of immunological responses to each stage of an infection, and a very different response is provoked by vaccination that would result from the body simply being exposed to an infectious organism that passed into the respiratory tract.

Because of this, injected vaccines rarely prevent one from getting infected and colonized by a respiratory virus—rather, if they work, they typically just reduce the symptoms of a later infection by mitigating what it can do within the body. This is a very important point because whenever it becomes hard to make the case that the benefits of a vaccine outweigh its risks, the standard fallback position is that the public health benefit of preventing the disease from spreading in the population outweighs the risks one personally entails from the vaccine.

To illustrate, with COVID-19, we were initially told COVID-19 was a lethal threat and that we were incredibly lucky to be one of those who was fortunate enough to get one of the extremely limited vaccines. Then once the initial enthusiasm wore out and the vaccines were everywhere, we were given prizes and gift cards to vaccinate (many of which were absurd such as CNN promoting daily free donuts and drugs, alcohol or a free brothel session being given out for vaccinating) under the justification we were doing a civil service and helping the country by ending COVID-19.

Note: many more of absurd marketing campaigns we saw for the COVID-19 vaccines are detailed here. If you know of any truly obscene ones I didn’t include, please send them to me (e.g., in a comment) so I can add them here. I believe it’s important that the madness we went through during this time is well documented so the generations that follow us can learn from it and not repeat the same mistakes.

Finally, once the bribes stopped working, harsher and harsher mandates were instituted under the justification that they would stop the spread of COVID-19 and it was morally repugnant to put your fellow countrymen at risk of dying.

However, if you take a step back, it should be clear all of that was based on a few false premises.

One of them was that the vaccines would prevent transmission of COVID-19, something injectable vaccines rarely do (rather if anything, they increase transmission by reducing symptoms and hence making individuals silent spreaders of the disease). Furthermore, when the clinical trials for the vaccines were being conducted, outside experts pointed out they were not designed to assess if the vaccines would reduce transmission, and likewise when the pivotal vaccine clinical trials were published, they did not state that the vaccines reduced transmission (rather they simply studied if symptoms of a COVID-19 infection were reduced). Nonetheless, our public health authorities continually insisted they did (as they pushed for more mandates)—even as more and more evidence accumulated showing they did not.

Note: what I found remarkable about this was not that our public health authorities lied, but rather that few if any doctors I spoke to recognized this lie—including holistically minded ones to whom I clearly explained the science (rather they kept saying “if it reduces your chance of getting COVID-19, that means it reduces your chance of transmitting COVID-19”—which likewise demonstrated that they didn’t understand what was actually tested for). This I would argue is similar to how many doctors insisted on wearing masks even after it was shown COVID-19 had an aerosol rather than droplet spread which hence made masking completely pointless (as virus aerosols easily pass through the gaps in masks), and still continued to wear them after large studies showed masking offered no benefit.

In short, I would argue those events highlight the importance of understanding the different types of vaccines. Had this been common knowledge, the public would have refused to follow any mandate of the COVID-19 vaccine that was not designed to create immunity within the nasal mucosa (which remarkably prominent voices in the industry like Bill Gates have now started advocating for since the injected ones failed to prevent transmission).

Note: this article discusses why vaccines consistently fail to prevent disease transmission and the types of vaccines that create mucosal (IgA) immunity (e.g., intranasal sprays, and certain live virus preparations).

Read the Whole Article

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On the Fourth of July last week I celebrated the world’s most exclusive club, Pugs, with my fellow members at a London venue. I had crossed over the Atlantic the day before and missed the fireworks that commemorate the most important revolution to date. 248 years ago the colonists had had enough and declared themselves free from British rule. But you know all that, although there are still lots of half-wits in America who think the country still practices slavery, bigotry, and malice toward women.

Never mind. Fourth of July last week was also election day in Britain, and boy, did members of Pugs take notice. Our president, Prince Pavlos of Greece, did not show up due to an important meeting in Athens, a fact that had our vice president, Sir Bob Geldof, turning into Orlando Furioso over his absence. The Pugs’ yearly lunch is considered more important than any state occasion, with one of the founders—yours truly—and another member, the Maharaja of Jodhpur, flying in from our respective long distances for the occasion. We began lunch at 12:45 and finished at 5:30. Count Bismarck, Arki Busson, Edward Hutley, Roger Taylor, and the previously mentioned Indian prince and yours truly were present. I proposed that Tara and Mark Getty be struck from the membership for failure to pay dues and continuous absences from the twice-yearly meetings. (The other one takes place on the private island of a fellow member in the Aegean Sea every August.) My proposal was ignored while we discussed the latest Sony acquisition of Queen music. Our fellow member Roger Taylor has just pocketed $1 billion, so he generously offered to pay for lunch. Just think of it, play drums and after a while a large corporation approaches you and gives you a cool billion greenbacks for the rights to your music. I have never seen a man so eager to pay for lunch, nor have I known anyone who more deserved the moola.

“If that’s democracy, I’m Donald Duck. Quack, quack.”

Following the very liquid lunch, it was time to discuss politics. For some strange reason the Fourth of July is not celebrated in Britain—they’re bad sports—instead an election was called by the man who stabbed Boris in the back and took his place as Prime Minister. It didn’t work out for him. As a wit at our table said, “A lower-middle-class knight evicted an Asian family from their home.” The Conservatives deserved the drubbing they got, and then some. They governed as liberals instead of conservatives, and they actually thought they could get away with it. Boris won in a landslide as a right-winger five years ago, and the next thing he did was aim for Net Zero, a fantasy that only freaks and Hollywood types pretend to believe in. But here’s my point: If the British system of first past the post is democratic, I am Kamala Harris.

The figures don’t lie, the rigged system does: Labor won in a landslide with 33.7 percent of the vote. His losing predecessor five years ago got more votes but less seats. One-third of the vote gave Labour two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. And it gets better—worse, that is. The Reform party, headed by my friend and the best Englishman around, Nigel Farage, got 4.1 million votes and five seats in Parliament. The Liberal Democrats received 3.6 million votes and got seventy seats in Parliament. If that’s democracy, I’m Kim Kardashian. It’s a distorted system that has the winning party sweeping two-thirds of the seats with less than 34 percent of the vote. Again, if that’s democracy, I’m Donald Duck. Quack, quack.

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