Lew Rockwell Institute

With the conclusion of the US election, the thrill has set in for half the country: that we have a chance to re-secure our nation and its ideals. The other half of the nation, however, is in shock and even in a state of mourning.

Meanwhile, in only two days, the drumbeats of “resistance” from that half of the country have begun to sound: Rep Eric Swalwell encouraged his allies on X not to “Go[…] quietly”. This is dangerously inflammatory language, and it warns of a potential Democratic resistance to a peaceful transfer of power.

Insta-marches have begun — as I warned, warned, warned you for months would be the case — in Chicago and then, tick-tock, Philadelphia. Expect more. The tell-tale identically printed signs and instantly-amassed crowds don’t mean that these protests do not present a threat to the newly elected transition team. There will be more eruptions across the country, more instability, more threats to a peaceful transition of power. These will accompany of course power outages, national security crises or “crises”, legal challenges, and other messes, November and December and right up into January.

My point is that these are not just tactical eruptions targeted at actually unseating President Trump and his new team. That is unlikely to be directly successful.

What these are, as President Trump and his advisors should quickly understand, are efforts by my former colleagues in the media and the political establishments to change the subject so as to undermine or derail President Trump’s mandate and to dilute his political capital.

In other words, there is an urgent lesson that the last Trump administration never fully grasped: successful politics is not just transactional. It is also narrative, and mythological, and iconic.

In that wisdom lies the secret power of great kings and Queens, and great Presidents.

President Trump is a businessman, and so thinks, reasonably enough given his field, that applause should follow actual achievements. This is a misleading expectation, however, in Presidential messaging. What audiences applaud is what they have been led to understand has happened to them that is positive, via their having been told a powerful, proactive story.

While President Trump has been in media forever, he and his advisors have not mastered the art of telling a proactive symbolic and iconic political story. They tend to be highly reactive to adverse news coverage and to criticism, which is one of their most concerning vulnerabilities, as this continually misleads them into reactive media strategies.

President Trump’s engagement with the media, and even with live crowds, has insulated him to an extent, and that is a risk at this critical moment in his pre-Presidency. President Trump is used to dealing with “fake media” that continually lie about him no matter what — so in his calculus, he does not need to win them over at all. He is also used to speaking live to adoring crowds. So he is not used to speaking live to people who are unsure of him, or to people who actively hate and fear him.

But his task right now is to make it impossible for the “fake media” to disregard the positive points of his policy initiatives and the great news of his transition’s personnel decisions.

President Trump also urgently needs to lay to rest the active, traumatized fears of the half of the country that did not vote for him and especially of the millions who have been so propagandized by legacy media that they are in active states of apprehension and of grief.

Unfortunately this kind of messaging requires a whole different set of skills and talking points, than did campaigning. President Trump does not, respectfully, understand how to reach past the hostile media to craft a political and mythological narrative that reaches directly to audiences, including what are now — we hope temporarily — hostile audiences.

Why is this such an urgent problem to fix, like this week, like today?

Because this should be a moment in which from the Trump camp issue powerful visual scenes of triumph and blessing and unity for all Americans — even for the ones who hate and fear him.

I appreciate that the Trump and RFK Jr teams are working hard making hires and crafting policies. But in the media vacuum since President Trump was last onstage, enemies of the new American Alignment, including China, are hard at work — churning out, often with the amplification assistance of AI and Chinese-owned TikTok, those insta-protests, as well as “white supremacy” messaging, end-of-democracy messaging, online threats, and video after video of young women’s grief and distress.

The goal of President Trump’s enemies, foreign and domestic, via propaganda and protests, is to whip half the country up into a state of such amygdala-driven fear and rage that they can no longer reason; and so they will accept any crackdown on the peaceful transition to power.

So President Trump and his team need to pre-empt this messaging by getting a powerful message out front that derails it.

Here are my bullet points about how to do that.

1/ Surrogates, shut up and stop your online gloating. The Trump Campaign belatedly got their MAGA surrogates online and in independent media, to stick to disciplined messaging and talking points. The need for this discipline has not ended just because Trump won.

Just because MAGA had a Presidential win, it does not mean that this is the time to let the right’s impulsive, less-mature beasts out of their cages; to the contrary. The time to stick to strict message discipline is today, tomorrow, and for the next four years.

Victory does not mean license — it means even greater discipline, unless you want it all to go to hell.

The opposition wants MAGA surrogates and influencers to sound crude, uneducated, aggressive, misogynist, racist and lacking in empathy. Don’t take the bait.

So: stop making fun of liberal women crying in videos online.

I know, in the conservative media bubble, that you all think these videos and “over-reactions” are ridiculous. But never waste time mocking your opponents, especially in defeat. Learn from their fears and then respect and address their fears.

Women are really scared. Young women are really scared. They have been told they may die in botched back alley abortions now. This is not a trivial fear — it is existential. Others demographic groups fear a racist or Christian Nationalist tyranny.

You all may think those fears are nonsensical, but that would be a mistake.

President Trump and his primary allies —- RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Nicole Shanahan — the women on his team especially — need to be out front every single day with speeches that repeat talking points that allay these fears. Every day they need to give speeches that repeat talking points about peace, equality, unity, inclusiveness, and respect for women. The Unity Movement. The Big Tent. All Americans are welcome and valued in this new golden age about to emerge. All Americans’ rights are to be respected.

Freedom of conscience.

Religious freedom.

Freedom to worship.

President Trump especially needs to give a speech that addresses those voters who feared him most, and who fear and hate him now. He needs to speak compassionately and empathically to them and to their families, saying that he intends to be a President for all Americans, whether they voted for him or not, and whether they agree with him or not.

He must say that he intends to raise the incomes and boost the safety of the families of all Americans, whether they fear and hate him right now or not, whether they voted for him or not.

He must say that he intends to protect the Constitutional rights and liberties of all Americans, whether they fear and hate him now or not, whether they voted for him etc. (Repetition is key to getting talking points to break through to voters and bypass media filters).

He and his team need to say openly and often that they intend to love and welcome and cherish all Americans, of whatever race, creed or color, whatever religion, whatever their families look like (yes please) and whatever their political beliefs. He needs to take back from the Left their buzzwords of “respect” “rights” and even “inclusion.” He needs to talk about “equality” so people forget the false appeal of the Communist term “equity.”

President Trump needs to reclaim for himself the Left’s attack terms. So he should pepper his speeches with restating his “empathy” for all Americans and his “compassion” for all Americans, agree with him or not, etc.

It has never been more important to lay to rest the cheap shots and the straw man caricatures of the opposition.

2/ Appointments have to be accompanied by PR releases and talking points and a round of interviews, and still photos and video clips. Tell the story.

The calls I am getting from liberal friends and family members center, as I warned they would, on abortion rights and on the environment.

President Trump and RFK Jr made an incredibly important appointment: sustainable farmer Joel Salatin, who is a darling of liberal media as well as a hero to many, in a USDA position.

Let us use this case as an example of what to quickly fix.

This appointment is huge, but when you google “Joel Salatin” without “Trump administration”, nothing comes up about this major news. Successful Presidential leadership is not just about achievements, as noted above, but also about telling America about the achievement and, even more importantly, about what it means. Without my liberal mom in Oregon (always my touchpoint for an informed, thoughtful liberal) being told by a Trump or RFK Jr speech about this appointment and farm policy, without a round of interviews with Salatin (on message, with talking points), and without a clear press release sent to media in advance of the interviews so that coverage stays on message, my mom is not going to know that this action represents a huge win for America’s environment.

Without any document — on the website, sent to reporters, presented by the transition’s or campaign’s press person (who is that?) explaining that this is not an isolated hire but part of a well-thought-out MAGA/MAHA environmental agenda, the hire comes and goes, and is lost to the media flooding that would rather cover protests against “white supremacy” in city streets, and videos of crying young women.

Now take that example and multiply it for every task the Trump team is undertaking. The teams need to message about a White House that supports racial and ethnic respect and unity. They need to message about respecting and boosting the lives of women — a slate of policies aimed at making women’s lives easier can do this: policies making sure parents can stay home with kids more easily; policies to showcase women entrepreneurs and small business owners and women in the military; speeches that showcase support for girls’ sports and that shine a light on teen girls’ achievements in science, tech and so on.

A set of events and policies aimed at young people needs to take place.

A set of events that welcomes rabbis, Jewish leaders, Imams, Muslim leaders, etc, to Mar a Lago, have to take place, even if these are brief photo ops. You get it.

All this positive messaging of a thematic agenda — rather than piecemeal announcements — will drown out the drumbeat of fears of a dead environment; a closed democracy; a racist regime; a Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale level of misogyny; as are all being forecast in a Trump presidency.

Read the Whole Article

The post What Team Trump Must Do Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

If you thought Kamala Harris was a sure win in 2024, then you haven’t been paying attention to the epic shift in the cultural zeitgeist over the past few years. The thing that bothers me most about political and social analysis is dealing with people who foolishly assume nothing ever changes. Things change all the time. People can and do learn from the past. Nothing is hopeless, and nihilists are lazy and incompetent.

For example, since 2020 within liberty movement circles there has been a contingent of naysayers claiming that red states were being subversively “turned blue” by leftists relocating during the pandemic. My argument was that this was an idiotic take.

Yes, there were mass relocations across the US but all the data showed the vast majority of these people were conservatives seeking to escape blue state tyranny. I can’t tell you how many “experts” tried to argue with me that Texas, Florida, Idaho, and even my state of Montana were all going to be overrun by progressives. In the aftermath of the election I was once again proven right and they were utterly wrong.

Florida was an absolute landslide for conservatives. It wasn’t even close and I doubt that state will ever come close to being blue again. The same happened with Texas, Idaho, Montana, etc. There was no blue wave. It didn’t exist. It was actually a red wave.

As I noted in my recent article ‘Losing Power? The Elites And The Leftist Mob Would Rather Burn It All To the Ground’, a Trump victory was inevitable along with a conservative mandate. The sea change in American society was evident. That’s why leftists and globalists will continue to use mob actions, economic disaster and geopolitical crisis to burn America to the ground. They know their time is quickly running out and if they can’t control the country, they’ll try to torch it.

Regardless of what you might think of the candidates or the election in general, the fact of the matter is this election was a RESOUNDING rejection by Americans of the woke ideology and the political left. Trump won in a landslide, not just in the electoral college but also the popular vote, and Trump ran on an anti-woke and anti-globalist platform. The public has spoken.

The Democrats embraced woke cultism, they embraced globalist authoritarianism and now they’ve paid the price. Kamala Harris’ embarrassing defeat is the ultimate expression of “Get woke, go broke”. It’s undeniable – No one likes the progressive left. No one likes their race grifting, no one likes their gay and trans grifting, no one likes their targeting of children for indoctrination, no one likes their censorship agenda, no one likes their open borders, no one likes their lying and no one likes their elitism.

Their movement is dead in the water and a lot of them are bewildered as to what happened.  I’m here to explain some of the biggest reasons why they are universally despised…

The Covid Coup

Americans are pissed about the Democrat/globalist attempt to establish a medical tyranny and they aren’t going to forget what happened. Only a couple years ago Democrats and leftist governments around the world were talking about vaccine passports designed to force conservatives to take the experimental vaccine (and the boosters forever).

They were trying to legislate the creation of covid camps for people who refused to comply. They wanted to fine people, lock them up, keep them under house arrest and even take their children away. They shut down the economy, ordered people to wear useless masks, told people to stay six feet apart and they closed down outdoor recreation. They violated every fundamental of viral science in an insane effort to dominate the world.

To this day there are still leftists that wear the masks as a symbol of their fealty to the covid dictatorship. The problem was, they greatly underestimated public resistance to their agenda and it failed. Now, they face a reckoning for their power mongering.

January 6th Propaganda And The Rewriting Of History

Mass conservative protests are pretty rare. We tend to endure quietly and wait for reason to win the day. Violence is not usually in the cards until we are pushed to the brink. This is exactly what happened on January 6th.

Video evidence shows capitol police fired rubber bullets and tear gas grenades into a peaceful and unarmed crowd of protesters. This attack led directly to the crowd fighting back and eventually raiding the building itself. Then, the police ultimately opened the doors to the building and let people wander in. Those protesters walked around for a couple hours and then left on their own. That’s not what an “insurrection” looks like.

Afterwards, Democrats cherry picked limited footage from the event and claimed it was an “attack on democracy” akin to treason. They lied incessantly and staged the narrative that conservatives were domestic terrorists bent on installing Trump as a totalitarian leader. Americans have seen through this nonsense and the election shows it.

Economic Denial

The Biden Admin spent the better part of the last four years trying to deny the reality of stagflation. They have also denied that the economy continues to decline, asserting that the country is in “recovery”, that the jobs market is improving and that inflation is going down.

None of this was true. Inflation is cumulative and just because CPI goes down does not mean prices are going down. Americans are still paying 30% to 50% more on most necessities compared to 2019. On top of that, nation debt and consumer debt have skyrocketed to dangerous levels. One could debate who is ultimately to blame for this (the central banks and establishment elites are to blame), but this doesn’t change the fact that the Democrats tried to hide the threat from the public.

Sexualization And “Transing” Of Children

Leave the kids alone. It was a simple warning from conservatives and leftists refused to listen. Now, they’re going to pay dearly. The woke movement to push trans ideology in public schools is perhaps the most evil scheme our civilization has ever encountered. Gender fluidity is a non-science, a fantasy with no basis in fact. There are only two genders. Period. Pushing confusing gender identity politics on vulnerable kids, often without parent’s knowledge, is monstrous.

The end game of this plan is the chemical sterilization and even physical castration of America’s youth and the majority of Democrats support it. For this alone they should be booted from the country for the rest of their lives.

Beyond the politics, there is also the issue of child sexualization. Democrat politicians have consistently pushed for more degeneracy in public education environments, with sexually explicit content made available even in elementary schools. This is child grooming, plain and simple, and most Americans know exactly where it leads.

Mass Censorship And Government Collusion With Big Tech

The Biden/Harris Administration has been thoroughly busted, first by the exposure of the Twitter Files and then by Big Tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg. It is a fact – The federal government worked directly with legacy media and social media conglomerates to silence public dissent.

They censored contrary data on covid, on the vaccines, on the lockdowns, on the masks, on the mandates. They censored political stories that were harmful to the Democrats like the Hunter Biden Laptop story. They shut down entire YouTube channels and Twitter accounts, destroying people’s access to public discourse as well as their livelihoods. All of this was in absolute violation of the Bill of Rights and the 1st Amendment.

They need to be punished for this, and that’s why so many Americans voted to give Trump a mandate. They want him to deal out retribution on the matter so that it never happens again.

Race Grifting And Calling Latinos “Latinx”

Democrats and woke activists treat minorities as if they are property of the political party. They try to keep minorities firmly chained to the progressive plantation by telling them they are “victims” that need the help of the DNC in order to get “justice.” Clearly, minorities are getting tired of being treated like they’re stupid.

One big factor that I think really crippled Democrats in the election is the woke attempt to “de-gender” the Spanish language by calling Latinos “Latinx”. The Dems went full retard here and it really hurt them. Hispanics voted in record numbers for Donald Trump, and he also doubled his votes among blacks.

I have a message to white liberal women in particular: Minorities don’t need your help, your protection or your pity. Please shut your mouths, shut your legs, go back to your cats and your pointless office jobs and leave them be.

Open Borders And The Great Replacement

The Great Replacement has been falsely portrayed by the corporate media as a “racist” theory, but race has nothing to do with it. The replacement issue is about culture, not skin color.

There is an obvious effort on the part of the progressive establishment to flood the US with third world migrants, thereby erasing the cultural heritage of the west and diluting it with people that have no understanding of individual liberties or responsibilities.

They have offered illegal migrants a host of subsidies and incentives to get them to come to America and they intend to offer these same people amnesty, using American tax dollars to buy off a permanent block of Democrat voters. This would give the leftists a voting majority for generations to come.

It’s not just white Americans that see what’s happening; legal citizens who are Hispanic understand the game as well. Black communities in the US also always suffer when mass immigration takes place and they can read the writing on the wall. No one wants this, which is why the border issue was the top voter concern in every election survey, right next to the economy.

Leftist Arrogance

Progressives have long operated on the fallacy that they are “more educated” than conservatives and are thus smarter and more qualified to dictate the terms of our society. The reality is, most leftists are dumb as stumps.

They live in their own echo chambers on social media. They live in the masturbatory halls of woke academia. They live in dwindling cities controlled by Democrat governments and rarely leave the comfort of their apartments, their dog parks and their coffee shops. They think they are worldly but they know nothing of the world because they never go outside of their ideological bubble. They don’t have the courage to do that.

The reality is, a college degree is a wooden spoon (an award for last place) rather than a legitimate accomplishment these days. Unless a student enters a STEM field they are unlikely to come out of a university with anything of value. These places are indoctrination centers, not pillars of higher learning.

The Inability To Accept Responsibility

Leftists are inherent losers and mentally weak. They were the kids that were babied most of their lives. They were the kids that struggled most with meritocracy in school. They’re the kids that participation trophies were invented for. They have long relied on emotional outbursts rather than effort to get what they want. Instead of improving themselves and striving for something better, they cry victim when they can’t compete.

I never met a leftist in my life that was good at taking responsibility for their own failures. Their narcissism and obsession with personal identity has been exposed. Their fake concern for victim status groups no longer convinces anyone. They desperately want to be the main character in some grand heroic drama that the rest of us applaud, but this is not going to happen.

The best the woke mob can hope for is to return to a life of obscurity where they belong. The more they try to become the center of attention the worse things get for them. Their best bet is to stop trying to rule the world and thank their lucky stars they get to continue living in this country.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Woke Bloodbath: Leftist Movements Are Paying the Price for Their Arrogance appeared first on LewRockwell.

The 2024 election is over, and in some states, big majorities voted for the winner Donald Trump. In Wyoming, Trump won 72 percent of the vote. In fact, more than 60 percent of the voting population went for Trump in 13 states.

Fortunately for the majorities in those states, they’ll get the president they voted for.

However, the outcome would have been different if fewer than a million people—in a nation of 330 million—had changed their votes in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan. Then, Kamala Harris would now be the president-elect.

She would have won even though the voters of more than a dozen states had lopsided majorities in favor of Trump.

Moreover, Kamala could have won even though there was far less enthusiasm on her side. That is, only a single state, Massachusetts, had a voting majority of more than 60 percent for Kamala Harris.

Even If You Win, You Lose

We could come up with many similar examples in the past 24 years. In 2012, for example, Mitt Romney won 60 percent or more of the vote in nine states. 72 percent of the voters went for Romney in Utah. But, in the end, those supermajorities meant nothing, and the people of Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, and several others—who had voted nearly 2 to 1 for Romney—got Barack Obama as president. In 2020, by the way, more than 60 percent of the voters in ten states voted against Joe Biden.

These facts should be remembered the next time that some pundit or politician tries to tell us that democracy is “the voice of the people” or “the will of the majority.” The question that has to be asked is “which majority?” and “which people?”

Indeed, for the people of Utah in 2012 or Massachusetts in 2024, the president that rules over those states was chosen by people who don’t live in those states. Even if 100 percent of the voters in a state vote against a certain candidate, they could still end up with that candidate as president based on the votes of people living somewhere else. Moreover, given that many states don’t have voter ID, it stands to reason that even if a large majority of your state votes for a certain candidate, foreign nationals in some other state may ultimately make the decision for you.

It’s difficult to see how such a method expresses “the will of the majority” when a tiny majority or plurality nationwide so often nullifies overwhelming majorities in a multitude of US states.

On a legalistic level, of course, the courts tell us this is all how it is supposed to be. In presidential elections, it simply doesn’t matter what your local majority says. The only majority that matters is the national majority. This is true even if we take into account the electoral college, which is nothing more than a formula for weighting the national majority vote.

It bears noticing, however, that these national majorities are often not even majorities. In 1992 and 1996, for example, Bill Clinton won the race with 43 percent and 49 percent, respectively. And, when a candidate does manage to win a majority, it is usually very slim. Not since 1988 has any presidential candidate managed to get even 53 percent of the popular vote. The closest anyone got was Obama in 2008. Most presidential races since 1948 have been decided by a majority of 51 percent or less.

The Rules Are Broken in the Age of the Modern Unlimited Presidency

In spite of all this, those who can’t think beyond the status quo—both leftists and conservatives—will simply say “rules are rules.” They’ll go on to insist that we must blindly follow the rules no matter what.

In truth, however, these “rules” were not ratified by any living person, and they were created in an age when the US president exercised very few domestic powers. In the early nineteenth century, presidents could do virtually nothing domestically without Congressional approval, and even those powers were few. Nowadays, however, presidents exercise vast power within the borders of every single US state.

Yet, the current system is based on the idea that even if whole regions of the country vote overwhelmingly against a president, they are still forced to submit to four years of that president’s rule-by-decree, which is what every presidency now is in our post-legislative age of Rule by Executive Order.

Yes, this system is based on “the rules,” but in the world of politics, rules only work until they don’t. Ask the British in 1776 or the Soviets in 1989.

You’re Never Allowed to Leave

The absurdity and injustice of this system is further illustrated by the fact that no matter how much your state’s majority might object to the federal president or his policies, no state or part of a state is allowed to exit the system. Ever.

If a two-thirds majority in your state votes against the federal administration again and again, well, that’s too bad, you’re never allowed to leave. You’ll just have to sit back and take whatever the executive branch decides to dish out. But, hey, you always have your small handful of members of Congress to make little speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives. None of this will ever do anything to protect your state’s population from federal policies—no matter how contrary these might be to your local economic interests and institutions. But, “rules are rules.”

No private non-state organization would ever function in such a fashion. Imagine telling the owners of a public company that no matter how much the management behaves contrary to various investors’ wishes, those investors are never allowed to sell their shares and leave the organization. Imagine telling members of any dues-paying organization that no matter how much the leaders screw over the members, they are never allowed to stop paying dues.

Yet, this is how the “rules” work in America. No matter how much the central government might ignore, abuse, and generally govern against the majority of the voters in your state, you are never allowed to leave. You are never allowed to stop paying taxes to support the very people who couldn’t care less about what you think.

The only way out requires that we stop caring what the rules say. The answer lies in decentralization, secession, and the dismantling of the political system that allowed Obama and Joe Biden to shove their policies down the throats of supermajorities that voted against these presidents again and again. The re-election of Donald Trump does not fundamentally change any of this. Even if Trump were to turn out to be some kind of anti-establishment dream candidate in his second term, the 2028 election is just a few years away.

On the other hand, to accept the status quo is to continue allowing federal technocrats a thousand miles away to literally dictate federal policies to your community.

Unfortunately, like prisoners suffering from Stockholm syndrome, many will elect to continue supporting the central regime because the “rules-are-rules” propaganda has worked very well.

The post National Elections Expose the Sham That Is Centralized “Democracy” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Well, we finally have an American back in the White House. The night after Trump was declared the winner,  I had a fantasy dream about his first day in office.

Trump pardoned Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, and appointed Assange to head the FCC and Snowden to head the NSA.  

Derek Chauvin and the police officers who were falsely indicted and falsely convicted by a corrupt judge and prosecutor who withheld from the trial and jury evidence proving their innocence were pardoned and awarded $25 million each in compensation for their wrongful conviction in one of the worst failures of justice in history.  See:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ffv4IUxkDU  and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFPi3EigjFA 

The media monopolies were broken up for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and for violating the fairness doctrine and weaponizing the air waves for political purposes. The NSA was cleaned up and stopped from warrantless spying on US citizens and violation of their privacy by storing their emails, credit card and internet activities.

All the attorneys who were falsely accused and some convicted of interfering with an election by reporting documented instances of Democrat election fraud were pardoned.  All victims of the corrupt and politicized Biden Justice (sic) department, such as the Americans who were sent to prison by the corrupt Merrick Garland for exercising their First Amendment rights, were pardoned and awarded $10 million each in compensation. The entire Biden Justice (sic) Department was arrested and indicted for violating their oath of office to protect the Constitution of the United States.  The corrupt Democrat judges and Democrat prosecutors were sanctioned and removed from office for weaponizing law to serve their political party.

Former CIA director John Brennon was arrested and indicted, along with FBI director Christopher Wray for high treason for trying to frame the President of the United States.  

Trump’s FDA director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cleared Big Pharma’s operatives out of the FDA, CDC, and NIH and had criminal investigations launched of Big Pharma and Big Food’s poisoning of the American population and influence over university medical and nutritional curriculums.

At the Office of Management and Budget Elon Musk cut $2.5 trillion out of the annual US budget.  Hundreds of US overseas bases were closed, and entire federal agencies and departments disappeared.  

Tariffs were imposed on the offshored production of US corporations, forcing them to return American jobs to America.

At the Pentagon recruitment and promotion were again merit-based.  All race- and gender-based promotions ceased.

The new Justice Department ruled that all “affirmative action” programs, all race and gender privileges are banned for being illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and in violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. 

State and local Democrat officials were compelled to stop their practice of imperiling public safety in the interest of preventing the stigmatization of non-white criminals.

A ban was put on the ability of interest groups to purchase government with campaign contributions.  A war was declared on lobbying in an effort to move public policies toward service to the public’s interest in place of profits to interest groups.

The Department of Education and all federal aid to education was terminated. 

As I began my second cup of coffee, an unsettling realization displaced remembrance of my delightful dream that truth and justice would be restored to America. Long before such a restoration project could get underway Trump and his effective appointees would be assassinated. The evil Democrats and ruling elite and their government and private institutions are still in place.  So are their politicized federal judges who regard the Constitution as a barrier to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  The school boards overseeing the teaching of white kids that they and their parents are racists are still there. The feminists are still in place turning white women against white men. The lie machine posing as a media is still in place. The corrupt and power-crazed federal agencies remain in place.  A demoralized military officered by DEI incompetents is there to be called out against insurrectionist Trump.  

The election of Trump is just the beginning of an insurrection against the anti-American forces that have been successfully assaulting our country for years.  Trump without an army in place is confronted by evil with its army in place.  As determined as Trump is, his chances are far from certain.  If MAGA Americans think that the war is over with Trump’s election, they will be defeated by the institutionalized existing powers that be.  Everything depends on Trump’s appointments.  All it takes is a bad appointment of a weak man as Attorney General and the Trump insurrection is finished.

The insurrection that Trump is leading is an existential threat to the existing evil order. The ruling establishment will most certainly not fold up its tents.  Already we can see the ruling elite moving to gain Trump’s confidence in George W. Bush’s congratulations to Trump on his victory.  Many will be congratulatory and Trump carried away by his success can get the knife in the back.  Trump actually thinks that Dick Cheney was for him but obliged his insane daughter by supporting Kamala. Other Trump opponents will start offensives against Trump on non-negotiable issues.  The media will try to define the pressing problems and in that way derail Trump’s agenda.

Trump is old in years but not in spirit and stressed by eight years of persecution.  That stress is about to intensify.

The post Trump’s First Day in Office appeared first on LewRockwell.

As I’ve said many times, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, I stopped making any more political predictions. I would have bet every penny of my modest net worth that the Queen of the Swamp would be rewarded for her years of loyal criminal service. A lifetime achievement if ever there was one.

This photo reveals a smiling Melania Trump. We’ve been told that she is unhappy with her energetic but elderly husband. Persistent rumors of divorce. Maybe she misses being First Lady, even with all the unfairly negative press. Barron Trump is shown towering over his 6 foot 3 inch father. He is almost certainly taller than his last reported height of 6 foot 7. Maybe he can play in the NBA. If LeBron James can force the league to play his eminently unqualified son, why not Trump? Barron’s a lot taller than Bronny James, and may well be a better basketball player. But he is White. Trump is possibly the first U.S. president who actually looks better eight years after he first took office. The office is known to rapidly age its occupants. But not Trumpenstein. He’s lost weight, and still has that orange glow. His hair has changed in some indeterminate way, but seems to look a little more natural. He looks fit for the job.

I expected a close race. Nip and tuck. Down to the wire. Fantastic finish. And lots of controversy. I thought that, regardless of what happened, millions of Americans would be outraged and distrust the results. There were many early indications that 2024 would just as openly rigged as 2020 was. I saw lots of videos of citizens reporting on the shenanigans they’d witnessed. One guy said they made him vote from his car, brought the machine out to him, and pushed the buttons for him. Democracy in action. There were inexplicable power outages, including at least one scheduled power outage. At a polling place. On Election Day. As always, the marvelous electronic voting machines were breaking down. The clowns in charge of the polling places somehow ran out of basic supplies. One judge-never identified, and certain never to be reprimanded- didn’t show up as scheduled to one polling place, and because of this untold numbers of people were forced to wait hours before rocking the vote.

With all the hints from the likes of The New York Times, which informed us that taking days or even weeks to count the votes was not an indication of fraud, I expected it to be days before we found out which candidate had been installed. I waited for the counting to stop, as it did in 2020, for no logical reason. As a certified oldster, I’ve been around for a lot of elections. Except for 2000, where the delay involved a dispute in one Florida county, Americans have always known who the next president will be either late on election night, or by the next morning at worst. So they really fooled me. Trump dominated the vote almost everywhere. Even where he lost, his totals were higher than they were in 2020 (and 2016). And he even won the popular vote, the first Republican to do so since 1988. I didn’t think it was possible for any Republican to win the popular vote in the diverse and crumbling America 2.0.

So I prepared for some must see TV. I figured that there would be lots of screaming, weeping and gnashing of teeth. Perhaps an on-air suicide or homicide. Rachel Maddow? Joy Reid? The lovely ladies on The View? There had to be a lot of entertainment there. But instead, the response was shockingly muted. I think the breadth of Trump’s genuine landslide just knocked the wind out of them. They all appeared to be in shock, as if they’d received definitive proof that they would one day be judged by the Almighty they don’t believe in. I didn’t want somber. I wanted insane outrage. Pussy hat/transgender level madness. But I just haven’t seen it. Sunny Hostin tried her best, attributing the results to White America, and now Black and Hispanic men, not wanting a Woman of Color to lead them. But it wasn’t convincing. Her heart wasn’t in it. She’s played the race card louder and more irrationally many times before.

On Tik Tok, things were far more entertaining. A prevailing theme from young deranged White women was that Trump’s victory somehow triggered a general sex strike. No copulation for you! A few bitterly claimed that if men thought this meant that they would now want to get married and have babies, they were sorely mistaken. We’ll show you, Trump! Just try to make us have children! I’m sure this sex strike doesn’t apply to all the other invented “genders.” Just “transition” and you can have some kind of sex. With someone. It just won’t result in any pregnancy. Somehow, I don’t see all this resulting in a new day for Incels. I think you’ll be seeing more and more young men “going their own way.” Too many young women have lost their minds. Even if they’re not overweight, tattooed, or green haired, they can be dangerous. Remember, tigers are beautiful creatures. Just don’t sleep with them.

Since all the indications were there that the same chicanery we saw in 2020 was being planned again, only for Trump instead to win a resounding victory, what does this mean? Did Lara Trump really make that big a difference? Republicans claimed that a lot of money was spent on preventing the same kinds of fraud which took place in 2020. I’m never one to accept pat, mainstream explanations, but perhaps there is something to that. Alex Jones claimed that they stopped potential fraud in many places. This assumes, of course, that the elite wanted to stop Trump. And failed. If the elite failed, this was the first time in history that they have. Trump still goes on trial again very soon. Or sentencing. Or something. I just don’t pay much attention to the ridiculous lawfare against him. So it’s still possible that my facetious prediction about him serving as president from Ryker’s Island could come true. Live from Cell Block D!

However you look at it, the math on the number of votes just doesn’t add up. They had us going early on, when counties in Michigan and Pennsylvania featured more votes cast than registered voters. This particular mathematical impossibility was first born during the wonderful Obama years. We are told that both Harris and Trump received fewer votes than Biden and Trump did in 2020. So you had a “record” turnout, but fewer voters. Common Core math. Population increase. Untold numbers of illegals voting. And yet the number of votes went down. It’s a “democracy” thing, you wouldn’t understand. As a mere community college dropout, it’s all beyond my pay grade. I’ll leave it to the “experts” and “fact checkers” to explain. Not that they ever will. Just click your heels three times and display your “I Voted” sticker.

There have been a few reluctant admissions from some on the Left that perhaps pushing the “Woke” envelope so hard wasn’t such a brilliant political strategy. No matter how many vapid celebrities endorse it, you’re never going to get millions of Americans to accept the LGBTQ+ agenda. They know men can’t have babies, and that biological women should have babies. Propaganda otherwise is contrary to human nature. So the millions of unhappy “Woke” fanatics, stricken with severe TDS, are bound to become even unhappier. More committed to “reproductive rights,” which essentially means the right to abortion as birth control. This is the most important issue to unknown numbers of women who are too old to have another chance at abortion. This issue may finish off sexual relations between young male and female cisgenders, if the response from Tik Tok is any indication. At least for Whites.

When Trump was shot at in Butler, Pennsylvania, if was shot at, and then allegedly the victim of yet another aborted assassination attempt, it looked as if perhaps they were setting the stage for Trumpenstein Part 2. But then they threw us a curve ball, by having him supposedly fall in their unreliable polls. The iconic Iwo Jima photo didn’t increase his support? The media droned on incessantly about how his campaign was in disarray. He was supposedly entering the Biden dementia zone. He talked about Arnold Palmer’s penis for no discernable reason. And then, in a video clip taken out of context, appeared to simulate oral sex onstage. He was actually complaining about his microphone, if you haven’t seen the uncut video. Still a ridiculous gesture, and probably meant as a jab at Countess Cackula’s rise from obscurity. And Harris, of course, was undeniably one of the worst political candidates of all time.

So what are we to think of all this? This totally unanticipated Trump landslide? Did he really make so much progress in attracting Black male and Hispanic male voters? Sure, some of them might have related to his famous mug shot, but was it the sanitation worker outfit that put him over? However you look at Trump, that was a brilliant political move. Joe Biden calls his supporters “garbage,” and Trumpenstein rides in a trash truck, and then wears their uniform on stage at a rally. I’m sure that alone caused at least some sanitation workers to vote for him. Back in the day, when I was a lowly Senior Material Handler at a hospital, I might have considered voting for a candidate that donned the blue uniform of the Material Handling department. And say what you want, but Trump displayed extraordinary energy and stamina for a 78 year old. By contrast, Countess Cackula was listless and comparatively inactive.

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The post Mr. Trumpenstein Returns to Washington appeared first on LewRockwell.

Mark lives in modest accommodations. He has a modest job. In his spare time he prepares for his next studio album. He is an accomplished musician.

The building he lives in is on an alley. It is the only building with its front entrance on that alley. Mark cares for the alley as he cares for his own space.

Mark lives in a rough part of downtown San Francisco, in the worst of the worst neighborhoods one could want to exist in. But his humble home, the adjacent alley, and a little bit of the space around is notably watched over by a grown man with a sense of responsibility over the territory in which he lives.

Mark’s presence can be felt. The presence of a responsible man can be felt. There is little that can replace that willingness of a person to just be responsible, even responsible for that which he did not cause.

In the month or two before a public announcement was made by the White House — as it slowly became known in political circles that Kamala Harris would likely be at the top of the Democrat ticket — more effort began to go into making sure San Francisco looked like it was on the mend.

The considerable homeless problem, crime problem, and drug problem that has been allowed to take place in the open, directly in front of police officers suddenly started to be dealt with. The shift could be felt. Until approximately November 15, 2024, until a week or two after the November 5 election, I expect that there will be a mighty continuation of that shift.

In the run-up to the last election in 2022, there was a small shift. This one is more noticeable. During the November 2023 visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping, there was a major and sudden shift — all the homeless were cleared out of the downtown area, making the city look as if it were a model example of what a city should look like.

Within a few weeks following the departure of Xi Jinping, the city looked just as rough and tumble as it normally had over the past decade.

It was all for show.

This current show is partly meant to make sure that no one can look at Kamala, the top cop from San Francisco and California, and say “Look at San Francisco, this is where her broke policies lead.” Well, the truth is, this is where their broke policies lead.

In 2000, a corrupt Texas politician and his team were allowed into the White House. He brought his garbage ideas with him. Sure he spoke a good conservative and Christian game, but he gave America two plus decades of forever wars. The most awful terrorist attack on American soil took place on his watch, and that attack has to date never been properly investigated or explained. He was neither conservative nor did he govern by the Bible. He ushered in a police state unlike anything Americans have known since the internecine conflicts of the 1860s, only so much more total in scope. In 2008, a corrupt Chicago politician entered the White House. He ushered in all-out warfare on the American people in a way that has never existed. In late 2019, he and many others were so bold as to orchestrate a coup on the elected president, that resulted in the elected president’s ouster from office. The 2020 election was stolen and much of the establishment apparatus of all political stripes cooperated or remained silent in the face of that stolen election and coup. They ushered in a puppet regime, which proved a near-immediate failure to the American people. In all but the most gentle of ways, the establishment apparatus of all parties remained silent. Many remained silent, even those who were not part of the establishment. In their immediate circles of influence, no matter how large or how humble those circles were, many Americans said nothing.

We each have circles of influence — big and small.

It has been a pretty special two decades to be alive. It has been a pretty special two decades to watch. Many who know what is happening in their midst only watch. They do not do. They only watch. Shame on you. Who exactly did you think would pull your home, your family, your community, and ultimately your nation out of this mess if not you? You already know you are the most politically and socially aware person of many hundreds or even thousands around you. You already know you see things that many others miss.

Do we not already know that to whom much is given, much is expected?

Stop sitting around and asking yourself “Why don’t the others get it?” The others just don’t get it. Accept that. Move on. Quit spinning your wheels on such a nonsensical question as “Why?”

Move beyond that.

“Why?” truly can be the most self-debilitating question that exists. There are circumstances in which “Why?” is appropriate and there are circumstances in which “Why?” is one of your greatest enemies. The latter is more common.

Just like any tool, the question “Why?” can be used for its proper purposes, or it can be abused. To use the beautiful gift of “Why?” as a stumbling block that leaves you stultified for some two decades, is, dare I say, a terrible abuse of the English language. It is also terrible self-abuse. And it is abrogation of duty.

Were these not such desperate times, I might not be troubled by your abrogation of duty.

But, my friend, these are desperate times, and though we may never have talked before, I know you all too well. You are part of “the silent majority.” You are part of the do-nothing group who sees much. You are one of the mockers who laugh at the stupidity of a home, a family, a community, even a nation who he was called to lead.

Yet, I know exactly what your daily schedule looks like: 16-18 hours of self-abuse and abrogation of duty followed by some sleep, repeated every day for some decades.

You are one who possesses discernment in an era in which so many are blind and in which so many lead everything astray. Why do they lead everything astray? Because they are blind. Can the blind not walk? Yes, they can if they know the way. All they need is someone to show them.

Who would that person be? Who is the one who could show the blind the way?

It is the one who spends 16-18 hours a day on self-abuse and abrogation of duty, followed by some sleep, too busy, too disinterested in developing his voice, too disinterested in making his voice matter, and too disinterested in showing them the way.

Shame on you.

Shame on you for the ways that you have let your home, your family, your community, even your nation get to where it is today.

Shame on you.

Have you really done all you can?

That is a question between you and your Maker. It is not a question between you and me.

Have you done all that you can?

If you have not done all that you can, perhaps some repentance is in order this very day.  Repentance is the act of turning away from a bad way you have travelled, and turning onto a right path. That sincere acknowledgment, that turning away from ways that you have missed the mark, that sincere acknowledgment can echo through one’s life and can produce much good fruit.

Mark, who lives in the very worst, most abject community west of the Mississippi River, tends his alley. He does not own it. He does not get paid for it. No one will ever thank him for his efforts. In fact, people are more likely to get after him for trying than they are to thank him.

The latest orders of Governor Gavin Newsom and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and other political insiders are to superficially clean the streets of San Francisco for the next few months until the November election is settled in favor of the hometown girl, who will then bring the unlimited budget of the Federal Reserve Bank into the coffers of the most connected in San Francisco.

Well, that is happening, and Mark’s alley is one of the places where the displaced homeless and drug addicts are being pushed to. What does Mark do in response? He pushes back. Every single day and in every single way, he wants his little alley, his little corner of the world in which he lives, his little building, his humble accommodations to be just right. He pays attention. He helps. He knows what is going on around him. He knows who is coming and going. He wants his few blocks of community to be watched over.

Do you know why?

Because Mark has a sense of responsibility. That means taking on extra work for things you did not do. That means taking on extra burden for things that you did not do. That means taking on extra accountability for things that you did not do.

The wrong-doing of others, wrong-doing that they will not fix, for all intents and purposes becomes your wrongdoing, so that you can fix it. You become the fixer of that which you did not break. You take responsibility. Things will not remain broken on your watch. Every time there is graffiti, it will get immediately covered up. If you know you are in that kind of neighborhood you always have the paint ready. Every time the new homeless encampment shows up in your alley, you go and ask them to move, and if they do not, you are on the phone with every police officer you know until something is done. If you live in that kind of place, you have the business cards of lots of police officers ready for a moment like that. You vow to take responsibility, and you vow to be as ready as you can, always willing to grow and to do the uncomfortable in order to make things right.

Dear reader, I do not know exactly how you live or where you live. But I know where Mark lives, and I know what the rest of America is like, because I have travelled it well. In the midst of the worst America has to offer, Mark maintains his alley well. That is partly because Mark has eyes to see the difference between right and wrong. Many do. But Mark does not then engage in 16-18 hours of self-abuse and abrogation of duty each day followed by some sleep. Mark instead takes responsibility, even over that which he did not do, and over that which he did not cause, and yes, even over that which is not his own.

Do you?

Or are you a silent partner to what is happening? Cooperating with the downfall that you claim to be so opposed to?

Your self-righteousness in such a moment is unearned. Just because you see what is wrong does not give you any moral high ground. Absent your willingness to take responsibility for that which you did not do, and for that which is not yours, absent that, absent your willingness to constantly expand the territory and improve the territory over which you take responsibility, absent that, you have little business feeling good about yourself in a time like this. You have little business sitting back and saying what a bad job everyone else is doing, what a bad job A, B, or C group has done driving X, Y, or Z into the ground.

The people with eyes to see but who choose to sit and watch, who grab a bowl of popcorn and watch, who perhaps even laugh, or gawk, or mock, at the destruction of something beautiful — they are no friend of mine.

They are also no friend of humanity.

Part of maturity is taking responsibility for that which you did not cause, and having no complaints about the fact that you were the one who had to stand up and do so. That is just who you need to be if you are to be a mature adult. Your responsibility is needed. Your mocking is not needed. Your laughing is not needed. Your complaining that it was you who had to stand up is not needed.

You’re many ways of doing nothing while saying “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” are not needed. The moment you start to speak that or even to count your contributions and to say that you have done enough — the moment you do that, you are no friend of humanity, but a petty and poorly raised child keeping score in life rather than winning in life.

Be a man. Not just a male.

Be a woman. Not just a female.

Maturity is now required of you, even if childhood used to be what was largely demanded of you — no matter your age.

Be the one who is mature enough to take responsibility over the territory around him, without complaint. Totally without complaint — instead of complaint,with gratitude that you were made for a moment such as this, with gratitude that you get to be the adult in the room. With gratitude that you get to be the one that no one will ever thank, certainly that no one will ever apologize to. The the one who doesn’t concern himself with such things. Instead, you are just grateful that you get to be the one who was capable enough in the moment, wise enough in the moment, willing enough to act in the moment.

Imagine that, being one who walks through life grateful for challenges and responsibilities, rather than doing that which has become the norm among American adults — complaining, avoiding, and mocking.

To he who lives in this upright way, he knows that it is a reward all its own. Accepting responsibility and carrying its burden gratefully through life is a reward all its own. You are not thinking about keeping score when you do so. You are not thinking about what is owed to you, who has done what, settling accounts — all of that petty way of thinking is the farthest thing from your mind.

In fact, you eagerly take on more.

You know the greater your burden, the greater the growth of your muscles. Do you understand what an ingrate you sound like to the rest of us when you complain that your burden is too heavy? Do you understand what an ingrate you sound like to the rest of us when you complain that your life contains too much of that which grows you into someone more mighty and more formidable? Do you understand what you sound like to the rest of us when, even worse, when you refuse the challenge and just sit back and mock?

Get as far away from that way of thinking as possible. This time needs more of you. Or you can just be another of the many nearly-useless adult children that have become the norm of American society.

Do you know why America looks like crap? It is not because there are crappy people. It is because the ones who have the vision to see the problem and to see what must be done, those people have better things to do.

Such are no friend to me.

Such are no friend to humanity.

Such cannot be called a man.

Embrace those burdens. Embrace that responsibility. The way out of this mess begins in your life, and it begins with you doing exactly that.

Godspeed dear friend.

The post The One Man in San Francisco Who Cares appeared first on LewRockwell.

Not since the heady days of George McGovern, whose capture of the Democratic Party in 1972 ended in utter ignominy with the Nixon landslide, have two political parties been as deeply and bitterly divided as they were in this latest election, which ended on a clear if unexpected note of triumph for Donald J. Trump. Breaching the Blue Wall by the early hours of November 6 and then smashing his way to a complete conquest of the popular vote, a free and fair election has thus catapulted him to become the next president of the United States.

What an astonishment it proved to be. My wife and I went to bed the night before glumly aware that only bad news would greet us the following day. But like the little boy in that magical movie who, thanks to a father’s sacrificial love, gets to take the tank home, we nearly died laughing for all the joy we felt on hearing the news.

But even with a clean sweep of the White House, including both Houses of Congress and a Supreme Court firmly committed to the rule of law, will a Trump victory make any real difference in the end if the Democrats refuse to go along with the results?

Won’t it instead confirm their worst fears regarding this most hateful man, who from the very beginning they have assiduously sought to vilify and destroy? Yes, they will certainly have to agree to a peaceful transfer of power, to which end both Kamala and her boss, Joe Biden, have already sent their brief congratulatory messages. But it is one thing to concede the outcome of a contest you failed to win—which Kamala managed, belatedly, to do—and something else again to lay down the weapons with which you have been waging an ongoing war. “I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” she added defiantly.

So, to actually hand over the keys to the Executive Office, to authorize the exercise of real power and authority to someone you’d been regularly referring to as another Hitler, how exactly is that going to work? Especially after having referred to millions of his supporters as no better than garbage.

Oh, yes, and let’s not forget the two failed assassination attempts, not to mention any number of lawfare attempts to lock him up for the rest of his life. “If Democrats and other zealous anti-Trumpers are sincere in their proclaimed conceit that Trump is a fierce, unprecedented threat to American democracy,” wrote Andrew McCarthy on the eve of the election, “then they are going to use every potential legal means at their disposal to deny him the presidency.” Including, he suggested, using the January 6 case alleging a conspiracy to cause an insurrection as grounds for the Congress to disqualify him from ever serving.

Even supposing Trump, fresh from his victory, were feeling magnanimous enough to offer Joe Biden a pardon for his own son, would such a gesture endear him to people determined to put him in a maximum-security prison cell?

The idea seems positively surreal.

So, what exactly can we expect in the wake of Trump’s winning the election? Would the current commander in chief, Joe Biden, be prepared to call out federal troops to ensure an orderly and peaceful transfer of power amid riots and protests aimed at preventing an alleged neo-Nazi from becoming the next president and leader of the Free World? Will that be the profile in courage we’ll be looking for in the weeks following a majority of voters having delivered their verdict declaring Donald Trump the next president? That thanks to Joe Biden’s resolute leadership in a time of national crisis, there will be peace in the land to allow his duly-elected replacement to occupy the office he will thereupon vacate?

Does anyone believe that will actually happen?

Such a long way we have come since 1972! The left wing of the Democratic Party may have gone completely bonkers back then, but at least enough of the rank and file remained sufficiently loyal to the Roosevelt-Kennedy legacy they grew up with and prospered under to prevent the McGovernites from running the entire show, much less the rest of the country, which delivered a 60 percent-plus popular vote majority to the Republicans.

My father, a diehard Democrat for years and years, did not hesitate for a moment to jump ship and cast his lot with Nixon, later becoming one of those numberless Reagan Democrats who never looked back. And to think that despite passage of the 26th amendment allowing 18-to-20-year-old Americans the right to vote, a measure McGovern himself helped midwife, it was simply not enough to get him elected.

Of course, what finally did poor George McGovern in, leaving aside the obvious advantage of Nixon being a successful incumbent, was the fact that, thanks to efforts led by his chief Democratic rival in the primary fight, Hubert Humphrey, he’d been tainted with the charge of being squishy on three hot-button issues most Americans were still very much opposed to: amnesty for draft dodgers; acid for all the dropouts and the druggies; and abortion for anyone who didn’t want to be pregnant.

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The post The Left Will Not Go Quietly appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Vatican’s decision to adopt cartoonish, trivialized symbols, such as the blue-haired ‘Luce’ mascot, is a symptom of a disturbing shift within the Church.  The current trend moving the Church away from Her treasury of glorious art to commercialized trinkets is a mere triviality to many, but the history of this move is darker than most realize.

The age-old question of whether life imitates art, or art imitates life essentially asks whether it is the art which impacts society and shapes the culture – and therefore the artist is an agent of change – or whether the artist is merely an agent of expression, reflecting what is already present within the culture.  The partial answer is that it’s a little of both, but what is missing from the equation is that the underlying philosophy of the artist is what drives it all.

The earliest traces of what is today referred to as modern art are firmly rooted in the French Revolution and the so-called Enlightenment, but it didn’t really take off until the late 1800s. Goya’s Romanticism led to Manet’s Impressionism. Van Gogh’s Post-Impressionism led to the avant-garde experimentation of Les Nabis, French painters who transformed the medium and laid the foundation for the abstract symbolism of modern art.

Most of art history is focused on the development of technique or style, but what is often ignored is the actual philosophy of the artists themselves.  One of the early progenitors of modern art, a Romantic artist named Eugene Delacroix, said: “Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”  As a philosophy of art, it excuses imperfection and imprecision, but as a philosophy of life, it suggests something worse: that one need not seek to express truth and beauty with precision because the impression is good enough, and error is not to be avoided.  While this may seem like a stretch, this notion bears out with each succeeding generation of artists.

James Whistler, the American painter who is best known for painting his mother in a rocking chair, once said “Art happens – no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.”  What he is saying is that art is some kind of spontaneous energy that supersedes intelligence which – in a manner of speaking – possesses the artist and simply creates.  This notion of art not only discourages the intelligibility of an artistic rendering but eliminates the objectivity of the art itself, which should be directed toward Truth.

Paul Cezanne – an avant-garde, post-impressionist painter – was called, “the father of us all” by the Communist Cubist, Pablo Picasso.  Henri Matisse called him “a kind of dear god of painting.”  In speaking of the origin of an artistic piece, Cezanne said, “A work of art which did not begin in emotion, is not art.”  This was a revolutionary idea and a radical shift in the nature of art itself.  No longer an expression of the good, the true, and the beautiful, an artistic rendering must now be found in the expression of an emotion.

This radical shift in art from beauty and truth to emotive experience did not happen in a vacuum.  The heresy of Modernism rose to prominence at the same time.  Pope Pius IX warned about some of its errors, and Pope St. Pius X condemned them.  And after a close and careful examination of these two movements, one discovers that the medium of modern art is nothing more than a carefully crafted expression of the Modernist heresy.  The underlying ideology of Modernism is the notion that religion is something that wells up from within as an experience or a feeling, while the reformed nature of art – as defined by the modern artists – is that art is the expression of an emotion or an experience that wells up from within the artist.

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The post Why is Modern Art So Ugly? appeared first on LewRockwell.

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1. Gut Check: Unleash the Power of Your Microbiome to Reverse Disease and Transform Your Mental, Physical, and Emotional Health
2. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil 
3. Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization 
4. The Problem with Socialism
5. Re-Inhabited: Republic for the United States of America
6. What Every Christian Ought to Know
7. Old Money, New Woman
8. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court 
9. The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy
10. The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace
11. The Energy Paradox: What to Do When Your Get-Up-and-Go Has Got Up and Gone 
12. The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging 
13. Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
14. The Pentagon’s Brain 
15. The Wisdom of His Compassion: Meditations on the Words and Actions of Jesus 
16. Cancer: The Metabolic Disease Unravelled
17. How the Brain Works: The Facts Visually Explained
18. Prepper’s Armed Defense: Lifesaving Firearms and Alternative Weapons to Purchase, Master and Stockpile 
19. Leaving Boyhood Behind: Reclaiming the Gift of Manhood and Traditional Rites of Passage
20. The Science of Rapid Skill Acquisition

The post Books of the Week appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Fed has been the source of booms, busts, and the ongoing impoverishment of Americans since the Fed’s founding.

This is why a new, critical look at the Federal Reserve is needed, and why the Mises Institute is now happy to bring you this new documentary on the Fed.

Playing with Fire provides a look at how the Fed uses its expanding power to damage our economy, increase inequality, and to impoverish ordinary Americans. The film also looks at how much the Fed has expanded its own power since the Financial Crisis of 2008.

Featuring interviews with Ron Paul, Tom DiLorenzo, Joseph Salerno, Mark Thornton, Jim Grant, Alex Pollock, and Jonathan Newman, Playing with Fire explains what the Fed is, where it came from, and why it is so dangerous. Perhaps most importantly of all, Playing with Fire shows why we need to end the Fed altogether.

The post Playing with Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve appeared first on LewRockwell.

Part 1

Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of modern times for many reasons beyond the fact that he didn’t have much competition. We are referring, of course, to Tricky Dick Nixon, Jimmy Carter, the Bush’s, Barry and the clown-shows thereafter.

Foremost among the valid reasons for the Gipper’s success, however, was James Baker— the most astute White House chief of staff ever—and his inner team. And at least this much we can say with first-hand knowledge: Baker was not just a smooth, savvy political operator and deft administrator. He was also deeply versed in policy substance and therefore had a unique ability to comprehend, rapidly assess and modulate the relentless inflow to the Oval Office of policy papers and interest group adverts from all corners of the government.

So doing, he kept the Gipper on message and out of countless detours and troubles that would have otherwise sunk his presidency. Indeed, Ronald Reagan earned the Great Communicator moniker in large part because Jim Baker was at his elbow during his formative first term keeping him focused on the core message of restoring noninflationary prosperity at home and peace in the world abroad.

Needless to say, we knew the Gipper and, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s famous riposte to Dan Quayle in the 1992 VP debate, Donald J. Trump is no Ronald Reagan. Indeed, the Donald is the most ill-equipped, ill-prepared and ill-tempered person to enter the Oval Office since Harry Truman at least, and probably Edith Wilson, too. And the latter, of course, was purely an accident—a usurper who surreptitiously seized the reins of government in the fall of 1919 when Woodrow Wilson succumbed to a paralyzing cerebral embolism at the end of his League of Nation’s whistle stop campaign across the USA and neglected to inform the country of his complete incapacity thereafter.

So the truth is, there is only one thing that can prevent the Donald’s impending second-term from devolving into a nation-wrecking gong show. To wit, America needs a 21st century Jim Baker because the Donald is just too damn impulsive, uninformed, self-absorbed and recklessly bombastic to function effectively as the nation’s President on his own steam; and also because the preponderance of official Washington is so deeply infected by the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) that it will otherwise distract hi endlessly and completely in schoolyard name-calling and petty insults, incidents and indecencies.

As it happens, in recent weeks Trump has actually stood up a solid team of newbies to Trump World who can make all the difference. He needs to make RFK Jr. his chief of staff, and Bobby Kennedy, in turn, needs to park in the West Wing directly across from his office the team of Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk and Vice-president JD Vance, too (in a side office away from the VP’s ceremonial digs in the Siberian precincts of the EOB).

As it happens, this is the first time that Trump has been surrounded by a team of serious, informed right-thinking adults not afflicted with beltway-bred UniParty dogma, neocon mental infirmities or wackadoo rightwing xenophobia since he descended down the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015. If given control of the White House switchboard of power, therefore, they could potentially keep the Donald on message and on plan for prosperity at home and peace in the world not unlike what the Gipper accomplished during the Baker era.

Unfortunately, there is good reason to fear that the Kennedy Five could end up in their own form of bureaucratic Siberia. That is, upon being bestowed honorific titles such as special advisor to the president or chairs of White House Task Forces on MAHA (Make America Healthy Again), FW&A (fraud, waste and abuse) and other noble purposes, they end up billeted in empty GSA space far from the beating heart of White House power. And after making recommendations that the real government would readily ignore, the soon to be in-the-ditch Trump Administration wouldn’t have a prayer of implementing them even if they could get the Donald’s undivided attention for more than an hour.

Indeed, we see the handwriting of disaster on the wall already in an article fresh from Politico, which is the Swamp’s preferred organ of UniParty propaganda. Entitled “Who Might Make up Trump’s Cabinet”, it is loaded with pedigreed neocon names for national security posts including Marco Rubio, Robert O’Brien, Tom Cotton and Mike Pompeo. So exactly how would that gang of warmongers and global hegemonists possibly further the cause of peace and drastic shrinkage of America’s dangerously bloated Warfare State?

And while the Politico folks were at it they smoked out Deep State lifers like Bob Lighthizer for Secretary of the Treasury and Eric Hargan for HSS. For crying out loud, Lighthizer has been a corporate trade policy shill for the last three decades and Hargan was the father of Operation Warp Speed at HSS in the first Trump Administration!

All of these dudes were adept at filling the Swamp, not draining it. That’s how they got the Washington chops to make the Politico roster in the first place.

Yet that’s not the half of it. Far more important than the secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury and HSS combined is the chief of staff role. With a typically weak Washington insider you will get ineffective government under almost any president, but totally chaos under the master of chaos himself.

Yet the Politico roster for this make or break post includes two babes in the woods and an utterly failed UniParty GOP lifer. As to the former we are referring to Brooke Rollins, who came from Texas GOP politics and was head of the no-count Office of American Innovation and later the acting director of the equally useless Domestic Policy Council in the first Trump White House; and also Susie Wiles, the daughter of a NFL football player and famous sports broadcaster (Pat Summerall), who had spent several decades running mostly small-time GOP political campaigns until she became chief of staff for Trump’s PAC in exile at Mar-a-Lago.

These two wouldn’t know from a traffic jam in the Roosevelt Room when it comes to Washington power and policy. And the third candidate—the disgraced ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy—has spent his entire career on the public teat filling the very Swamp that the Donald professes to truly drain this time around.

And yet and yet. The Donald’s up and running transition team is co-chaired by two loyalists who know virtually nothing about Washington power and policy-making. This includes Wall Streeter Howard Lutnick, who seems to have a crypto axe to grind and Linda McMahon, former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, who lost a race for the Senate twice and got no closer to the White House during the first Trump Administration than the far side of the Swamp known as the Small Business Administration.

Undoubtedly, these Trump loyalists think Cabinet jobs are very important, when actually it is the five people led by the Chief of Staff that actually count far, far more than even the SecDef. And that’s all the more so in what will otherwise by a chaotic and rudderless Trump Administration 2.0.

Fortunately, it also happens that in addition to the Cabinet-focused Co-Chairs, there are two other people with innate savvy and impressive street smarts on the Trump transition team. They happen to be the Donald’s sons—-Don Jr. and Eric.

And that’s the grand opening for the Kennedy Five. They urgently need to enlist Don and Eric in the cause of staffing the inner circle of the White House with Kennedy, Gabbard, Ramaswamy, Musk and Vance.

And that’s especially true of the latter two. Vice-Presidents can do little more than go to the funerals of newly passed global leaders unless they are included in the inner circle on a daily operational basis in the West Wing. And while Elon Musk may be the richest man on the planet, his only hope of really changing the direction of government is if he is positioned as second Deputy President or Director of OMB.

Still, the sons might well have a decent chance at persuading DJT to bring the Kennedy Five into the inner sanctum because it is evident that the Donald is enamored by the fact that he has been embraced by a Kennedy; and also that the Kennedy Five have been unstinting in their collective efforts to bring his campaign message to a whole new and broader part of the American electorate. In what is still an exceedingly close election in a few key battleground state precincts it will likely prove to be the case that the Kennedy Five made all the difference.

What Don Jr. and Eric have to do, therefore, is to persuade the old man to let the Kennedy Five “go wild” not just on health, food and medicines, but on the Deep State in its entirety— a task which can only be accomplished from the inner sanctum of the West Wing.

Donald Trump: “Robert F. Kennedy cares more about human beings and health and the environment than anybody.” “I’m gonna let him go wild on health. I’m gonna let him go wild on the food. I’m gonna let him go wild on medicines.” “He’s a great guy. He truly cares about this, and it’s an honor.”

Needless to say, the Kennedy Five would have some considerable wood to chop if they are to rescue the Donald from the crash landing of misdirected policy detours. Their job would be to—

• Sideline massive immigrant deportations in favor of targeted removal of criminals and a wide gate for vetted guest workers.
• The harnessing of Trumpian tariffs to revenue raising and/or middle class tax relief rather than out-of-this-world protectionism.
• A one-two punch of bringing the Empire home and slashing the defense budget by 50% in a drive to cap the nation’s exploding public debt.
• A root-and-branch reform of the Fed designed to remove it from the business of enriching Wall Street speculators and monetizing the debts of spendthrift Washington politicians.

Part 2

Unless he takes decisive prophylactic action, the Donald’s impending second term is likely to go into a tailspin so fast as to make even his swollen head spin. That’s because several

early 2025 policy vectors currently percolating in Trump World are likely to ignite fiery and likely fatal political and financial upheavals:

• An attempt by the Stephen Miller faction to launch a sweeping multi-million person deportation campaign that would end-up stymied in the courts and locked in brutal Capitol Hill legislative rider battles, while offering a field day for vicious, relentless MSM attacks on the Donald by the Hitler Howlers and Race Card Hondlers.
• An over-the-top use of Section 232 Trade Act authorities to impose a sweeping 60% tariff on $450 billion per year of goods from China as well as lower but still drastic tariffs on the $3.0 trillion balance of imports from the rest of the world, which together would trigger widespread panic about a new round of severe domestic inflation.
• A thundering return of the bond vigilantes to Wall Street in response to a Christmas-tree tax bill arising from the GOP-controlled tax committees that could add $5-$10 trillion to the Federal deficit over the next decade on top of the $25 trillion already built-into the current CBO baseline, thereby threatening to double today’s $36 trillion public debt.
• A foreign policy firestorm as the the neocon UniParty goes on a full frontal attack against a Trump standstill and partition deal with Putin on Ukraine.

It doesn’t take a vivid imagination to picture the utter calamity that could ensue from any or a combination of these ticking time bombs now embedded in Trump World. And this time it’s not January 2017 with both Wall Street and main street on the upswing after a prolonged struggle to rebound from the Great Recession. Nor is the US economy coasting on the tailwind of trillions of newly printed money at the Fed.

To the contrary, this time it’s the morning after—that is, the harvest period after eight years of UniParty madness on both the economic policy front domestically, as well as the Warfare State’s relentless interventions abroad including a pointless near hot war with Russia. Indeed, what lies ahead is the most colossal mess of governance in modern times, and that’s even before the above four vectors of incipient Trumpian error compound the mayhem.

So as we said in Part 1, the Kennedy Five would face a daunting challenge, but they are actually the only hope for making lemon-aid out of the sour fruit of MAGA as it has marinated on the campaign trail and most especially during the closing weeks. In fact, the Donald has literally gone off the deep-end promising to virtually dismantle the tax code, on the one hand, while pledging to pull the props right out from under the main street economy by unleashing a dragnet of labor market dislocations and hiring blockages in the name of stopping the so-called immigrant “invasion”, on the other.

Still, there is a way for the Kennedy Five, if implanted in and around the White House Chief of Staff’s office, to reshape and redirect these Trump World vectors in a more constructive and productive direction. Starting with the rip-roaring immigration crisis, for example, they could lay out a sweeping reform plan on the dual principles of—-

• A send-them-home “no parole” policy for illegal border-crossing asylum seekers, criminals and drug dealers.
• coupled with a wider and more orderly legal immigration gate at US consulates and embassies for thoroughly-vetted economic refugees and job seekers.

Such a constructive immigration program could also incorporate a strict ban on Federally provided or assisted welfare to all immigrants, legal and illegal, for at least ten years from their documented arrival. At the same time, the initiative could be wrapped in the expansive nomenclature of Reaganite supply-side growth.

The latter follows from the undeniable fact that native-born employment stopped growing six years ago: the employment level of 130.6 million in September 2024 was virtually identical to the level of native-born workers in July 2018 (black line). By contrast, foreign-born employment (purple line) is up +4.5 million or nearly 17% and accounts for the entirety of US employment growth in the period shown below.

The companion undeniable fact is that well over half of historic US economic growth was due to more workers and labor hours employed on the main street economy. So with the number of native-born workers declining year-after-year as far as the eye can see, a legal and thoroughly vetted worker immigration program is imperative if supply-side growth in the US is to be restored and sustained.

A wide, secure gate for legal migrant workers, therefore, must be an integral part of safeguarding the border and boosting the economy at one and the same time.

Index of US Employment Growth Since July 2018

The above imperatives need not interfere with stern control of the border, either. According to government statistics, there are currently 405,786 illegal immigrants in the US with criminal records. Of course, these folks should be deported forthwith, and day one of the second Trump Administration would be not too soon to start.

But it would also not be too soon to also ask why there are more than 400,000 criminals roaming around the USA with Federal permission slips in their pockets (i.e. parole status). And further why are they hidden in a population of 7.6 million undocumented workers employed and paying taxes in the construction (upwards of 25%), food service, lawn care and like and similar labor-intensive industries, and also among upwards of 11.5 million total illegal aliens including family members and children?

The answer is simple, dispositive and just possibly remediable by a “Nixon goes to China” politician with credibility on the issue like Donald Trump. To wit, America is a magnet for low and moderate skill workers because was have a growing, dynamic, technologically-enabled economy but an utterly static and soon to be declining native-born population. So what the supply-side needs is a legal and orderly avenue for obtaining vetted economic migrants in lieu of the lawless, dangerous and chaotic regime now overwhelming immigration control officials at the southern borders.

Furthermore, none of these potential legal economic migrants need come to the border courtesy of criminal coyotes or hazard the Rio Grande or Arizona deserts in the dead of night. Even a legalized quota of 400,000 or more per year for low/moderate skill workers could be administered through the dozens of US embassies and consulates in Mexico and Latin America that already specialize in just that. The State department operations worldwide, in fact, vetted and processed 5.7 million legal immigrant and tourist visas in 2023 without too much muss, fuss or error.

The dirty secret of the Washington UniParty immigration wars, therefore, is that the current immigration system is so obsolete and upside-down that there is only one way for economic migrants to find there way to the millions of jobs that they are now filling from coast-to-coast. To wit, they are required by US statute to come to the border, break the law and make pretend that they are political asylum seekers.

Only then can they get into a bureaucratic asylum cue that stretches for months and years, even as they are paroled into the US interior without being vetted during the interim. And when they are eventually granted asylum only then do they reemerge from an illegal no-man’s land as de facto but legal economic migrants.

The fact is, the immigration mess has now become so pervasive and politically toxic that the Donald could effectively close the border by just shrinking the asylum program to a token few thousand per year, which he undoubtedly has the authority to do via regulation. He could then couple that with a larger scale low-moderate skill worker legal immigration quota (the existing one is only 4,000 per year) with tough vetting done exclusively and far away from the US border in the home countries and cities of potential economic migrants.

Viola. Fox News would have to move on to other, real issues; the Hitler Howlers would be shutdown; and the Washington playing field would be cleared for the Kennedy Five to proffer equally creative solutions to the other three troublesome vectors listed above.

For instance, it would appear that the $25 trillion of additional debt built into the CBO baseline over the next decade is so threatening that the incoming Trump Administration dare not add a single net dollar to that figure. Otherwise, a runaway surge of interest rates and yields in the bond pits—which has already started with the 75 basis point rise in 10-year yields just since the Fed’s recent disastrous pivot to rate cutting—could cause the US economy, which is now lugging $100 trillion of public and private debt, to buckle and break.

At the same time, it is clear that the Donald and his GOP henchman on Capitol Hill are determined to extend all or at least major parts of the 2017 tax cut and to enact other promises that have been made on the campaign trail such as exempting tips and overtime. So one way to square that circle would be to impose a version of the Donald’s tariffs in the form of a pure revenue tariff on all goods coming into the US and then dedicate two-thirds of the receipts to tax relief and one-third to deficit reduction.

With about $3.5 trillion of imports annually, a “revenue tariff” in the low 20% range would generate about $800 billion per year of new Federal receipts. This means that $500 billion could go to off-setting the cost of middle class tax relief and $300 billion to reduction of the existing structural deficit.

To be sure, $500 billion per year for middle class tax relief would not off-set the estimated $1.1 trillion per year cost of the Donald’s entire package of tax cut promises. But by picking and choosing the most important items of rate reduction, family tax credits and business investment incentives in the Donald’s $11.5 trillion 10-year potpourri of tax cuts, the essence of the Trumpian tax promises could be accommodated.

At the same time, $300 billion per year of deficit reduction via allocated tariff receipts would be barely a decent down payment on shrinking the current $2.5 trillion per year of baseline deficits. But that’s where the Kennedy Five would need to fight long and hard to convince the Donald that an America First foreign policy does not need a national security budget of $1 trillion per year, which is the current funding level for national defense and foreign operations, aid and security assistance.

To the contrary, a Fortress America national security posture at $500 billion per year could fully fund the annual cost of an invincible triad stragic nuclear deterrent at $75 billion per year, while still leaving $425 trillion for defense of the homeland shorelines and airspace and a sparse budget for international operations after whacking foreign aid, the UN, NED and other wasteful globalist spending. This would mean closing most of the current 800 US bases abroad and abandoning obsolete security alliances such as NATO.

Needless to say, a policy of bringing the Empire Home is the only route to a true America First posture, but its pursuit would surely foster a “do or die” opposition campaign from the Deep State and the remnants of the UniParty on Capitol Hill.

That’s why the final piece of the Kennedy Five strategy should be made crystal clear. The two people in that group with the “creds” to take on the military/industrial/congressional complex are Tulsi Gabbard, a decorated veteran of the Iraq War disaster, and Elon Musk wielding the budgetary chain saw.

If these two were made head of the National Security Council and OMB, respectively, the Kennedy Five would have a fighting chance of bringing the Donald around to embracing a

$500 billion per year cut in national security spending based on a 21st century Fortress America—a concept that should actually appeal to the Donald.

In turn, coupling this with $300 billion per year of tariff revenues and $200 billion per year of domestic spending reforms and cuts could reduce the structural deficit by $1.0 trillion annually. Such a sweeping fiscal policy shift might be just enough to send the bond vigilantes back to hibernation and to short-circuit the current vicious cycle of rising debt, soaring interest rates and catastrophic increases in public debt service.

Finally, there is one other hurdle the Kennedy Five would need to surmount. When the Donald makes a January deal with Putin to end the proxy war on Russia and partition Ukraine along the current line of contact, all five would have to go on a public relations offensive like never before—lest the Donald be eaten alive by the Putin-bashers of the MSM.

Yet at the end of the day we can think of no anti-war chorus that would be more eloquent, powerful and persuasive to the war-weary American public than Robert Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, JD Vance and Elon Musk. If they couldn’t shore up a Trumpian campaign for an end to the Forever Wars and a return to homeland defense, it simply can’t be done—neither in this world or the next.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

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After the November 5, 2024 election, there will either be 1.) an undeniably big win for one of the two major party candidates, or 2.) there will be a period of huge uncertainty.

I do not know what that period of uncertainty will look like.

I know, however, that there are ways to be prepared for it.

While this goes against the prepper, rugged self-reliance theories, I think it is the main thing that has made sense since the Ides of March 2020: more community.

It’s The Community, Stupid

It is time to get to know your likeminded neighbors. If you do not know if they are likeminded, these days leading up to the election is the time to understand where your neighbors stand.

This is no small matter. You need to be moderately self-reliant, but the world for millennia has had divisions of labor. You can not do everything. You need to know the people who are in close physical proximity to you.

1.) Talk to your neighbors. Do not talk about the weather. The election is not the be-all-and-end-all of life, but asking them what they think about the upcoming election offers you a good opportunity to get them talking about their values. “What do you think about the upcoming election?” can be a good opener to that area of conversation. You do not want to stop there, though. Get below the surface. Get to their values. Understand what they believe.

2.) Join up with the local political party that most agrees with your views and offer to walk your neighborhood for them. They will train you on using software to do that. The software will tell you who the other local members are and how people are registered. You will, again, have an opportunity to talk with people about their values.

3.) Go door-to-door in your neighborhood on behalf of your church, inviting people to church if they do not already have a home church. This will again expand the number of neighbors you know and will get you a chance to talk about values. You do not need anyone’s permission to do this. You can simply start knocking on doors and introducing yourself.

4.) Turn to area organizations you are already a part of, getting down into the values of individuals. Perhaps you see each other at the monthly meeting or exchange a few niceties in passing on Sunday mornings, but have never really gotten to know the person or their values. Now is a good time to be doing that. You, again, do not need anyone’s permission to do this, and right before the election is the exact right time to pressure yourself to get to know your neighbors better.

Even in the least-free corners of this country, there are people living free lives under the radar. People living in those situations tend to have exercised their values a little better, because it is nearly impossible to go with the flow in such places and live a free life. Any place comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. There are advantages to living even in those unfree places. Living in such a place should not stop you from knowing your neighbors, especially the under-the-radar freedom fighters.

It is good to first exhaust existing structures and existing groups that you are a part of. There is no need to reinvent the wheel in most situations.

5.) Offer to work Election Day in your own precinct by contacting your County Clerk. In doing so, you will be meeting your neighbors and checking them in to vote. This is a good option, and certainly better than nothing, but the above options are better. This would be paid work and some positions could be open at last-minute notice. Also, local political parties might be willing to put you in a polling place for unpaid work. The goal, again, is not the pay, it is getting to know your neighbors better and with quick efficiency.

6.) Join an organization such as People’s Rights which focuses on neighborhood participation among neighbors. You can find that organization at PeoplesRights.ws (In case you are wondering about the domain — a court order allowed creditors to seize the main website from the organization after Ammon Bundy hurt the feelings of some doctors who medically kidnapped a breastfeeding infant). It does not need to be that organization. There are others. I recommend the first four options for a quick turnaround because joining People’s Rights often means that you will be put in charge of being a local organizer and thrown into the fray. The options above offer quicker turnaround for a late situation and for the exact purposes of which I am writing. People’s Rights offers a good longer term option.

Working An Election, If Done Right, Is Time Spent In Community Building And Building The Circle Of Good People Around You

The neat thing about working an election is that the same things that work to win an election are the things that work to get you meeting your neighbors. They are good at building community. At the latest stages in the pre-election period (usually the last week or two), it is the GOTV phase. There is not usually a lot of convincing of voters left to do. It is, instead, the time to “get out the vote.”

It is the time to check in with people you know and to verify that they are voting and how they are going to vote (mail-in, early voting, election day in person), and if they need any help figuring out their polling place location or their early voting location and if they need help getting there.

Some people are voting for a different person than you. Those people you do not want to make that generous offer of time to (such as an offer to drive them to the polling place and back). So you need to do voter ID first, which is to figure out who they are leaning toward voting for.

Either Get All-In Or All-Out

Do yourself a favor, commit to get off the couch and start helping, or tune out of the day-to-day drama of the elections and the almost certain drama that will come between now and Inauguration Day.

To help means this: your money and/or your time. There is not much other help you can offer a campaign.

Commit that you are all-in to stop the second round of the ongoing coup we are living through, or commit that you are going to just go back to living your life. Quit sitting on the sidelines pretending.

The Next Three Months Will Be Something That Historians Will Have A Field Day With

After the American color revolution of 2020 (which went from approximately December 1, 2019 to January 20, 2021), after the Ides of March 2020, after the stolen elections of November 2022, and after the false flag attacks, persecutions, and coverups of January 6, 2021, I think it is fair to say that the American ruling class has shown that they are ready to pull no punches in making sure the American people are disenfranchised in the federal elections and at all cost.

Despite what some may say, there are vast differences between the two major party candidates. I consider those who say otherwise to be tremendously ubsophisticated in their understanding of politics. Yes, I understand each candidate comes with many flaws. Trump is not perfect and he is neither the savior nor the comforter that America most needs to turn to. In the political arena, the two candidates are not the same. Below are some theorems for considering.

Any Honest Person Who Says “There Is No Difference In The Candidates” Is Tremendously Unsophisticated In Their Understanding Of Politics, And Undeserving Of Your Time

Some theorems for considering:

Theorem #1: The act of campaigning is vastly different than the act of governing. Politicians campaign to win. They win so they can govern. This makes it hard to know what they will do when they govern. To conflate the act of governing with the act of campaigning is a major mistake in evaluating the politician. The politician campaigning is under no such presumption that the two acts are the same. Nor should you be.

Theorem #2: The anti-confirmation bias theorem: Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.

Theorem #3: Evaluate a politician based on actions and not on words. Self-explanatory, and seldom followed.

Theorem #4: Zionists tend to hate Donald Trump. Trump refused to give them the destabilizing, expansionist wars they asked for. Trump continues to grow that anti-war movement on the right and on the left. Trump seems to hope that his extreme pro-Zionist rhetoric will bridge that divide and earn him a few extra points in the election. Despite four years with the nuclear football in his possession, he never used the codes or brought us into a new war. He spoke brashly and acted brashly, but did not start wars. There is not a more anti-war president that has existed since the Second World War.

Theorem #5: Know-it-alls are wrong. The biggest knuckleheads in the political arena are: libertarians, Bitcoin people, constitutional conservatives, and Christians who think they know everything. The truth is they don’t. Their arrogance is annoying. The same is true about any other group of people fitting this description.

Theorem #6: Know-nothings are wrong. The second biggest group of knuckleheads are those who have pursued higher education and have onboarded the ennui and skepticism of the various post-modernist movements. The very tone of their voice betrays them. They believe nothing can be known. There is no truth. They accept those maxims as truths.

Both groups are knuckleheaded. Truth exists. It can be known. Each one of us have not done the sufficient hard work to get there in all areas of life, so we must approach the world humbly. No one has arrived at a perfect form. Life is a process. And we must be willing to accept that the uncomfortable act of uncovering the truth brings us one step closer to rescuing ourselves from the effective Mk-Ultra effort to lock you into one of the two prior forms of knuckleheadedness and inaction that the CIA and likeminded entities want you comfortably and controllably siloed into.

Our Flawed Constitution And Flawed System Has Excellent And Useful Foundations For Protecting You, And Your Family, And Your Home From Death And Destruction

You are watching a peaceful revolution take place in a system designed to host peaceful revolutions rather than bloody revolutions. That is a neat system that has been handed to us and worth preserving. War is very bad. We do not want it on our homeland. It would probably be a bad time to consent to scrapping the Constitution.

A wiser people than us handed us that gift of a system that can accommodate peaceful revolutions, something I am most grateful for.

Murray Rothbard illustrates repeatedly in Conceived in Liberty, his history of the American Revolution, that once war has begun, no one can ever know the outcome. Unintended consequences abound.

You Are Living Through A Grand Opportunity

You may not understand the arc of history well enough to comprehend the glorious opportunity that you are living through. But if you are sitting on the sidelines right now you kind of suck.

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“I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent.” – Samuel Becket, Endgame

Before he went to Rockaway Beach to bury himself in sand up to his neck, Patrick said to me: “People ask me where I’ve been, and I tell them I’ve gone within to a place that’s so damn dim I can’t see them anymore. Then listen up, they tell me, to what’s going down these days, but my ears are blocked, yet they won’t stop, their tongues just flop like socks.”

He worried me, and I told him so, but he just smiled and added, “Up in the tower the cuckoo strikes his fist to stop the chiming of the bells.”

I told him it is was all very poetic but strange as hell. Why was he talking like that and why was he going to bury himself in sand?

He laughed and said, “Why not? There’s something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head. You’ve heard that one before?”

Inspired by his Irish compatriot, Samuel Becket, he wanted to make a point. What it was he wasn’t sure, only that it required a symbolic statement fitting for this Halloween season at a time of historical grotesqueries.

In some place in his mind he thought of his Aunt Winnie, who was always saying it was too late for her to change her life. She had been saying that ever since Patrick came over from Ireland decades ago. Hearing her, Patrick would think – then what’s the point of going on living, but he never said this to her.

His thinking was ambivalent, to put it mildly. He too was absolutely terrorized by the thought of death. He had these recurring dreams that he needed to use the toilet and everywhere he looked he was faced with toilets overflowing with shit. Every month or so, he would say to me, “To think, one moment you’re here and the next you’re not. I can’t get over it.” Yet he never could make the connection between his dream and his aunt’s neurosis.

Patrick and I had been friends for a long time and I had never known him to act like this. He was an accomplished poet but also a very good musician. When we were in our early twenties, we had been in a band together, The Young Artists. We took the name from James Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Patrick had been born in Cork, Ireland and moved to the Woodlawn section of the north Bronx when he was eighteen, just out of high school. He was living with his aunt and uncle, who were our next door neighbors, and that’s how we met. He had an eye for one of my sisters, but that’s a story I’d rather not touch.

We were both big fans of Joyce and fancied ourselves young artists, wild bon vivants in the mold of J.P. Donleavy’s character in The Ginger Man, Sebastian Dangerfield. Donleavy had grown up a few blocks over in the neighborhood and we both loved his wild use of language and poetry. We also loved Guinness and the neighborhood pubs, all of them Irish, with rollicking music on the weekends and young women as crazy as we were. Our buddy Diego Sandoval, who grew up in Mexico City and whose father, a psychiatrist, knew Fidel Castro, was a member of our group. Diego loved Nietzsche and his idea of the music of forgetting. He loved to free associate, so the three of us would often improvise songs in English and Spanish with a little Gaelic thrown in. It was very Joycean, so like Leopold Bloom, and we often weren’t sure what we were singing but there were times when some spot of magic seemed to touch us and everything made sense. What started as a farce ended as a feast.

Patrick says it’s all a farce now, a spectral theatrical show, just look at the news, it all repeats itself and people never seem to wise up. He thinks everyone is like his Aunt Winnie now, anxiously waiting for death and disaster to strike but denying their repressed anxiety as they participate in a blatant political masquerade led by the phoniest crew of political actors who are leading the world toward nuclear annihilation. Death of the soul at the very least.

I sure as hell agree with him.  As I have said before but which I think bears repeating, this waiting business is a deadly and widespread game.

I remember reading somewhere that some sullen sage once said that life is what we do while we wait for death. It’s not the kind of wise-guy wisdom I would try to refute, especially with today’s widespread public insouciance as our political charlatans make a mockery of the sacredness of life.

The writer William Saroyan once said that he could enjoy thinking that an exception to death would be made in his case. Now that he’s dead for more than half as long as he lived, his enjoyment can be considered short-lived. Kaput.

But wishful thinking aside, there’s no question but that Mr. Death knocks at everyone’s door sooner or later, better never than late, to coin a phrase in reverse and revert to wishful thinking. Nevertheless, it’s hard to deny the fact that he’s coming and everybody’s waiting for his knock. Unless, that is, you are in league with those technologists out in Silicon Valley, such as Ray Kurzweil of Google, who think they are going to employ technology to knock death dead and live forever. But even Ray is waiting for what he calls the Singularity to kick in – the day when humans and computers tie the knot and the former get uploaded or downloaded into the latter, I forget which, and death disappears as humans live in the “cloud.” In the meantime, Ray swallows a few hundred pills a day to keep chugging along until he reaches the promised land.

These artificial intelligence (AI) folks in Silicon Valley and at the World Economic Forum, all besotted on their machine dreams, seem to feel they’re smarter than Plato, Jesus, Buddha, Shakespeare, and other idiots we used to think wise, but I think George Carlin meant to include the Artificial Intelligence crowd when he said:

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

Of course, rather than knock, Mr. Death just might blow the house down. Although it’s a little impersonal and there will be no introductions, a lot of people are waiting for that. Like the early Christians who were eagerly awaiting the imminent end of the world, most people today are unconsciously waiting for a nuclear holocaust – to be seen on the evening news, of course, or maybe announced by a tweet or an instant message as they scroll their little crystal rectangles to see what’s going down.

Everyone will, that’s what going down.

The general consensus seems to be it will solve all problems, which is a brilliant insight in a Humpty Dumpty sort of brillig way in a looking-glass/ technological world where our most amazing technology is the nuclear bomb, rather recently joined in conjugal bliss with the computer that will save us from death.

In any case, what’s there to do? Keep waiting, that’s all, seems to be the popular approach. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think people were looking forward to meeting Mr. Death. For why else are they waiting without raising their voices in protest against U.S. nuclear first strike policy and the trillion-dollar modernization of American nuclear weapons announced by Barack Obama and continued under Donald Trump and Joseph Biden.  Why do they wait in silent fear and trembling as the United States military and CIA maraud across the planet killing and maiming to profit their capitalistic masters?  How can they possibly in good conscience wait while the Israelis with full American support try to obliterate all Palestinians in their ongoing genocidal bloodbath?

That’s the big picture, so to speak, the big waiting game. Waiting in the smaller sense can also kill you, or keep you going (but don’t ask where), depending on your point of view. There are endless variations to this waiting game with the smaller joined to the larger in a powerful synergy that freezes people in their tracks.

This sense of waiting for something terrible to happen permeates the air these days. The media and government pump out incendiary reports in an endless stream of things to fear in an effort to immobilize the population. Neurotic fears have long been known to be most effective tools of social control. When these can be manufactured in great and continuous numbers, they have a cumulative effect of creating growing social anxiety, which is the case today. It is no accident that the dramatic increase in drug usage to quell anxiety, nervous stress, and depression has occurred concurrently with the mainstream media’s propagandistic outpouring of fear-mongering and the drug industries relentless advertising campaigns for their psychotropic fixes.

The news is constantly suggesting that some “apocalyptic” event is just around the corner.

Like: there will be strong thunderstorms at 4:30 PM, or at least a 58.5% chance, so wear your helmet and take shelter.

Like: a woman in South Dakota ate a cherry that had a double pit that caused her to almost choke to death, so be very careful eating cherries; “almost” might be “really” in your case.

Like: the sun is very hot this year, so never step outside unless you are sprayed with chemical sunscreen from head to toe.

Like: there is a bug or bird or some critter that has recently been detected that is carrying a disease so deadly that if it flies by you within 11 ½ inches you will die a slow tortuous death in four days, five at the most.

Like: space aliens are coming for you if the Russians don’t get you first.

All kinds of neurotic fears are endlessly broadcast to keep folks on their anxiety-ridden toes while the real dangers go unmentioned and bubble under the surface. This is the corporate media’s job, of course, one they have perfected.

Wherever you go in the United States, you can see on people’s faces the strain of waiting for some absurd fear to become a reality, while things they should be fearing are repressed.  You can almost feel them holding their breaths in nervous anticipation. It keeps people occupied as they await every presidential election that is “the most important one in your lifetime.”

Yet no one laughs.

The recently deceased wonderful essayist Lewis Lapham said it eloquently in an issue of Lapham’s Quarterly:

In my capacity as human being, I’ve met with most if not all of the descriptives handed down from antiquity, but in my profession as journalist, I’ve encountered primarily the distinctions between what Sigmund Freud in 1917 defines as real fear and neurotic fear, the former a rational and comprehensible response to the perception of clear and present danger, the latter ‘free-floating,’ anxious expectation attachable to any something or nothing that catches the eye or the ear, floats the shadow on a wall or a wind in the trees. Real fear invites action, the decision to flee or fight dependent upon ‘our feeling of power over the outer world’; expectant fear induces states of paralysis, interprets every coincidence as evil omen, prophesizes the most terrible of possibilities, ascribes ‘a dreadful meaning to all uncertainty.’

Ironically, it was Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, the great red, white, and blue American propagandist, who took his uncle’s insights and used them in the service of corporate and government control. By inducing irrational fears of a foreign enemy – i.e. the Soviet Union in the 1950s – as he urged President Eisenhower, you could distract people from the real threat, which was their own government and the CIA with whom Bernays worked overthrowing the democratically elected president of Guatemala, among other evil projects. Fake fears large and small could paralyze the average person and create loyalty to the state and capitalism. They would wait for their protectors to tell them what to do. The present Russia bashing and fear-mongering as well as Israeli propaganda is straight from Bernays’ play book.

Is it any wonder that Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot was such a popular play in the 1950s? Godot never came then and he’s not coming now, but waiting is still the name of the game. The character Vladimir sums up the waiting game:

Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?

It is not just waiting that recurs to me as Patrick undertakes his novel act on the slippery sands of Rockaway.  The autumnal season and especially this weekend of ghosts, the dead, and masks has me thinking once again of my own experience with acting, so I will repeat myself as in a second coming, in the hope of a visionary breakthrough, chimerical as it may be.

Having grown up as the only brother among seven sisters, I was always my parents’ favorite son. With such dumb luck, I never felt the need to be someone I wasn’t and so accepted my favored fate. But from an early age I learned from my sisters what it meant to “put on your face.” Like most girls in a cosmetic culture, they would stand or sit in front of a mirror dutifully applying lipstick, cover-up, and mascara (Italian, maschera, mask) in preparation for their entrances onto the social stage where they would face so many other faces facing and eyeing them. Mirrors meeting mirrors, the looking-glass selves. It seemed to the boy that it was an exhausting act.

At the time, I had only a dim awareness of the depth of people’s playacting, although I don’t think there was much playful joy in it.

I’ve been fascinated by masks, liars, and the role of acting on the social stage ever since I was three years-old and was posed before a large mirror for a professional photographer. Look in the mirror, son. Look at yourself looking at yourself. Pose for us. The photographer’s cigarette providing the smoke.

When Patrick and I met, we realized we had a common interest in the performative nature of social life and so we fashioned our songs and performances around this theme. Diego added great spontaneity. We believed we could use words in a poetical way to reach people below their everyday consciousness.

Patrick has lost his faith in words and thinks a stunt like burying himself in sand up to his neck, like Nag and Nell in Becket’s Endgame, both contained up to their necks in ash cans, might reach people.  I don’t.  Becket had an actual stage and mesmerizing words to match.  Even then, it took years for audiences to appreciate the play’s brilliance. They at first thought he was too depressing and now probably have no idea who he is.

Today is Halloween and Patrick therefore thinks his act might resonate with the day. I told him that I think the only thing he will accomplish is to suggest to people to put their heads deeper into the sand.

As Halloween and the coming weekend transpires, enchantment only increases. I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask. Another Latin word, larva, occurs to me, it too meaning mask, ghost, or evil spirit. The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days, like the wind blowing the dry leaves everywhere.

While etymology might seem arcane, I rather think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well. Shakespeare was right, of course, “all the world’s a stage,” though it’s debatable whether we are “merely” players. It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell.

But who are we behind the masks? Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth holes (the per-sona, Latin, to sound through).

Halloween. The children play at scaring and being scared. Death walks among them and they scream with glee. The play is on. The grim reaper walks up and down the street. Treats greet them. The costumes are ingenious; the masks, wild. The parents stand behind, watching, smiling. It’s all great fun, the candy sweet. So what’s the trick? When does the performance end?

As Halloween ends, the saints come marching in followed by the souls. All Saints. All Souls. The Days of the Dead. Spirits. Ghosts walk the streets. Dead leaves fall. The dead are everywhere, swirling through the air, drifting. We are surrounded by them. We are them. Until.

Until when? Perhaps not until we see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us.

Lying is the leading cause of living death in the United States, and the pharmaceutical companies have no prescription for this one. Not yet, anyway, as far as I care to know.

By the time you read this, Patrick’s performance will be over. I hope he planned to do it at high tide. Otherwise, Patrick’s endgame will be Patrick’s end.

Then I too will be at a loss for words.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Patrick’s Endgame When Words Fall on Deaf Ears appeared first on LewRockwell.

When the special military operation (SMO) was launched to end the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict, the political West insisted that Russia was finished (precisely what it tried to ensure back in the 1990s). Its economy was supposed to be ruined, with the Kremlin even expected to default after much of its forex reserves were frozen (i.e. stolen) by Western banks.

After all this failed, the US-led belligerent power pole tried to impose the laughable price cap on Russian oil, one that even the most prominent Western nations tried to circumvent, including Japan and even the pathologically Russophobic United Kingdom. As for the United States, it continued buying Russian commodities while criticizing everyone else who did. Still, through its Neo-Nazi puppets in Kiev, NATO launched a virtual total war on Moscow in an attempt to disrupt its economy and cause as much damage as possible.

And yet, it all failed once again. The Kremlin secured economic stability despite being forced to conduct the SMO against the entire political West. Not only that, Russia overtook Germany as the world’s fifth and Europe’s largest economy, a humiliating defeat for its EU/NATO rivals who expected quite the contrary. Berlin’s economic performance was worse than in decades, while London was at its lowest in well over 300 years (since 1709, to be specific).

And yet, to “add insult to injury”, even Western data showed that the initial estimates of Moscow’s economic performance were wrong and that it was actually even better in both 2023 and 2024. Updated IMF’s forecast of 2.6% GDP growth doubled its previous assessment. According to the Financial Times, this increase of 1.5% was the largest for any economy featured in an update to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, released on January 30 this year.

Top-ranking Russian officials, including the current Defense Minister Andrei Belousov (previously tasked with economic development), expected the growth to be stable enough for the Eurasian giant to overtake Japan by 2030. However, what was supposed to happen in no less than six years, actually happened in less than six months. According to this year’s data, President Putin’s forecast of increased economic growth (over 3.5-4%) not only turned out to be true, but even conservative, although the mainstream propaganda machine attempted to portray it as “too overoptimistic”. However, the only thing that was actually too overoptimistic was the political West’s expectation that the sanctions would work. Namely, according to earlier World Bank data updates for this year, Russia indeed managed to overtake Japan as the fourth largest economy in the world (in terms of GDP PPP).

It should be noted that GDP PPP (purchasing power parity) is a very reliable metric and far more suitable to measure true economic might than the overblown nominal GDP figures that serve only to feed the oversized ego of the US-led political West. Less than 10 months after overtaking Germany, Russia also zoomed past Japan, leaving Western observers dumbfounded as to how a country they were told would “collapse under the weight of sanctions” and outright theft of its forex reserves managed to accomplish such a feat. What’s more, some sources estimated that the Eurasian giant was among the fastest-growing major economies in the world. In addition, even Moscow’s updated projection of overtaking Tokyo (explicitly set for March 2025 by President Putin) turned out to be “too cautious”, as this unprecedented feat was accomplished nearly a year earlier.

However, the latest estimates of Russian economic performance suggest that things are only getting better for the Kremlin. Namely, in an interview with CBS News, Richard Connolly, a junior research fellow at the Royal Institute of Shared Services in London and an expert on the Russian economy, said that “the number of small and medium-sized enterprises registered in Russia has reached an unprecedented level”. In the aftermath of the exodus of major Western companies who were forced to leave or suspend their activities due to sanctions imposed by their own countries, they left a massive market gap that was filled by domestic businesses. Thus, Russian companies replaced major Western brands, so instead of Starbucks, there’s now Stars Coffee, instead of Zara, there’s MAAG, instead of Coca-Cola, the Russians drink Dobry Cola, etc. Other segments of the economy went through a similar shift.

What’s more, these domestic brands not only replaced their foreign predecessors, but also quickly outpaced them. For instance, back in April, Dobry Cola reported that its 2022 profits were quadrupled in 2023. Connolly says that “sanctions have proven ineffective, essentially resulting in sanctions evasion becoming a sector in and of itself”. It can even be argued that the restrictions imposed by the political West jumpstarted parts of the Russian economy that were small and largely dormant (if not even non-existent prior to the SMO).

What’s more, the Russians are still getting virtually all the goods and services they had before, including through imports via third countries (Georgia, Kazakhstan, China, Turkey, etc). And while some prices are higher, local brands that took over the Western market share are actually more affordable while offering similar or even better quality.

As a result, Russia is experiencing what Connolly called the “fastest economic growth in the last decade”. In other words, much unlike the atrocious Bidenomics, what the bne IntelliNews called Putinomics turned out to be far more effective, particularly considering the fact that Russia is waging a defensive war against the entire US-led political West. According to their report, the Kremlin’s policies are “spurring growth in a new Putinomics”. Apart from the resurgence of investment in defense, “Putin has also launched the National Projects 2.1 program to invest into the civilian economy as well and improve the quality of life for the average Russian, as he made clear in his recent guns and butter speech”. The report further posited that, as a result of Putinomics, “Russia’s poorest regions have been the biggest winners and as bne IntelliNews recently reported, the country’s despair index has fallen to its lowest level ever this year”.

It should be noted that even the infamous CIA admits that Russia is the fourth largest economy in the world. However, while the World Bank’s numbers put Russia’s and Japan’s economies at $5.95 and $5.87 trillion respectively, the actual discrepancy might be far bigger. Namely, the World Bank also estimates that a whopping 39% of the Russian economy is in the shadows, while the same metric for Japan stands at 10%.

In terms of GDP PPP, this would add $2.5 trillion to Russia’s $6.45 trillion PPP-adjusted economic size, which, although still far from India’s $14.6 trillion GDP, further widens the gap with Japan. Expectedly, this economic resurgence is also enabling Moscow to rebuild its Soviet-era military might, resulting in an unprecedented real defense budget of over half a trillion dollars. The political West, powerless to stop Russia’s recovery, now wants to launch a terror campaign to disrupt this.

Source: InfoBrics

The post Russian Economy Zooms Ahead, Outpaces US and EU Growth appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the great gifts of the Trump Era is that we have come to know the institutions we grew up trusting are corrupt. FBI, corrupt. CIA, corrupt. Judiciary, corrupt. Not that we grew up knowing the NIH or the CDC, but we know now they are corrupt, too.

We knew the media and the academy were corrupt, but we have come to realize they may be irremediably corrupt. I did not know that medicine was corrupt. I had a sneaking suspicion that Big Science was corrupt, but now we know for certain.

I certainly did not know there was such a thing as Big Food and that Big Food is corrupt and evil. Also, Big Food is joined at the hip with Big Pharma. They have set up a system where one makes us sick, and the other makes us medicated patients for life.

I am angry at what I have come to know through the work of Casey Means and Calley Means. Brother and sister, she is a Stanford-educated surgeon, though practicing that no longer. He was a Harvard MBA working at the top of major food companies. After what he saw, he walked  away, too.

Did you know that we ingest a credit-card-sized amount of plastic every single week? Did you know that fifty percent of American children have some chronic health issue and that 50 years ago this was a mere one percent? Did you know that seventy-four percent of American adults now are overweight or obese and that close to fifty percent of children are overweight or obese? All of this is tied to our diet.

Casey Means says,

Half the country has prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, and thirty percent of teens now have prediabetes. This was a condition that no pediatrician would have seen in their lifetime 50 years ago. One percent of Americans in 1950 had type 2 diabetes. We have eighteen percent of teens with fatty liver disease, a disease that used to be in late-stage alcoholics.

She says,

Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the elderly. Young adult cancers are up seventy-nine percent. And this is the first year in American history we’re estimated to have over 2 million cases of cancer. 25% of American women are on antidepressant medication. Forty percent of 18-year-olds have a mental health diagnosis. We have the highest infant and maternal mortality rate in the entire developed world, despite spending 2X on infant and maternal care than any other country.

Calley Means explains that the dire state of our health started when Big Tobacco got into massive trouble over secondhand smoke in the ’80s, and they used their enormous cash reserves to buy food companies. Tobacco giants R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris became the largest food companies in the world. And their scientists immediately went to work in making food as addictive as smoking. Food in boxes and bags are now loaded up with sugar and chemicals to increase shelf life. What’s more, along came “ultra-processed food” and seed oils, all poisonous to our bodies. We came to crave these things that harm our bodies.

The next thing Big Tobacco/Food did was capture the federal agencies that were supposed to protect us from such Frankenfoods. Big Tobacco/Food became the largest lobbying operation in Washington, D.C., bigger and more powerful than oil.

Calley Means says, “They shifted their playbook on lobbying and rigging institutions of trust to food.” So, what they did was create the “food pyramid” that says, for instance, carbs are good. We went along, not knowing it was not only wrong but dangerous. And then these same companies became a massive funding source for academic research papers used by federal agencies that say all of this was perfectly fine.

And once we eat their poisonous food and our bodies get all kinds of sickness, we go to our doctor who is trained to see you for a few minutes, refer you to a specialist or two or three or four, and write out Big Pharma prescriptions that you may be on for life. Big Food, Big Pharma, huge profits.

Casey Means says the answer to most of our chronic diseases is nutrition, but eighty percent of medical schools do not have a single class on nutrition. Your doctor will not mention nutrition. He will refer you to specialists and give you meds. Casey says there is nothing more profitable than a chronically sick kid. After they make them fat, Big Food/Pharma wants to put kids on Ozempic for life.

Do you see the cycle here?

Bobby Kennedy has seen this. And now we have Casey and Calley Means. I don’t know about you, but I am angry.

Read the Whole Article

The post Will Trump Save Us From Big Food? appeared first on LewRockwell.

NBC News just reported the following:

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic sent a letter Wednesday to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland accusing the former governor of providing false statements to the panel when he testified on June 11.

In the Republican-led committee’s referral, it says Cuomo “knowingly and willfully made materially false statements” to the panel during its investigation into the New York’s Covid-19 response. The statements in question stem from exchanges about a New York state Department of Health report on nursing home infections and deaths that was released on July 6, 2020.

The report caught my eye because I have long followed the New York nursing home scandal, which I thoroughly investigated for our book The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex.

This particular chapter about the mindbogglingly stupid and criminal pandemic response is so noteworthy that I believe it is worth republishing here on our Substack.

CHAPTER 11: “Cuomosexuals”

On the same day (March 23) that Dr. Bright initiated his scheme to restrict hydroxychloroquine to hospitalized patients, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued the following executive order:

No pharmacist shall dispense hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine except when written as prescribed as an FDA-approved indication; or as part of a state approved clinical trial related to COVID-19 for a patient who has tested positive for COVID-19 with such test result documented as part of the prescription. No other experimental or prophylactic use shall be permitted …

This order prohibited New York pharmacies from filling off-label prescriptions for Covid patients. The exceptionally determined Dr. Zelenko found a way to get around it, but it made his practice much more difficult.

Two days later, on March 25, the New York Department of Health issued the following directive to nursing home administrators:

No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.

As anyone who has ever worked in a nursing home knows, respiratory viruses can rip through the facility and cause severe illness. Virulent common cold rhinovirus outbreaks have resulted in multiple deaths in this setting. By March 25, it was crystal clear that the risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19 is by far the highest for patients over the age of seventy-five. Thus, ordering “confirmed or suspected” Covid patients to be readmitted to nursing homes was the equivalent of forcing foxes into henhouses. What was the New York State Health Department thinking?

On March 27, the United States set the world record of COVID-19 cases, and New York City was the nation’s epicenter—a five-alarm fire of serious infections. On April 10, New York State recorded more Covid cases than any country on earth except the United States in total and its nursing homes were devastated by the contagion. The legacy media was slow to notice this, perhaps because it was blinded by Governor Cuomo’s stardom. He gave daily press conferences in which he spoke about the measures he and his team were taking to keep New Yorkers safe. Millions across the country watched these performances for which he later received an Emmy.

As the spring wore on, reports of mass casualty events in nursing homes emerged, and these drew scrutiny to the Health Department’s March 25 directive. On May 21, the Associated Press reported that over 4,500 Covid patients had been sent back into New York nursing homes. This number would later be revised upward to over 9,000. The AP report coincided with growing suspicion the Health Department wasn’t being transparent about mortality data in these facilities. Suspicion was confirmed on January 28, 2021, when New York Attorney General Latitia James reported that the Department of Health had undercounted nursing home deaths by 50%.

On February 11, 2021, the New York Post published a leaked audio recording of Governor Cuomo’s secretary, Melissa DeRosa, speaking confidentially with the New York State Democratic Committee. On this tape she can be heard apologizing for concealing nursing home data. Though mealy-mouthed, her apology revealed that Cuomo’s team had acted out of fear of getting into trouble with the DOJ.

Basically, we froze because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice or what we give to you guys and what we start saying was going to be used against us, and we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation.

After making this confession, she changed the subject to “the context” of their decision—namely, they were concerned that President Trump would try to politicize the incident in the upcoming election.

“Right around the same time, he [Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” she told the Committee.

For many who followed the New York nursing home story, it seemed emblematic of many pathologies afflicting the U.S. political and media class. First was the nepotism of the Cuomo family, with CNN Anchor Chris and Governor Andrew regularly putting on shows for their fawning, sentimental fans, many of whom called themselves “Cuomosexuals.” T-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, and even a popular music video appeared bearing the term’s definition: In love with competent, reassuring governance by a leader who uses complete sentences and displays common sense during a pandemic.

The Governor’s cult of personality yielded a $5.2 million book deal with Penguin Random House, initiated by an acquiring editor on March 19, 2020, three days before the state went into lockdown. The deal for American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic stipulated the book be ready for publication before the November elections. Governor Cuomo purportedly wrote a 70,000-word typescript in three months while at the same time executing his duties as full-time “Leader” in handling New York’s Covid crisis. The state ethics board approved the deal on the condition that no state resources were used in the book’s production, but that didn’t stop Cuomo from using his staff and a ghostwriter.

Read the Whole Article

The post House Panel Refers Andrew Cuomo for Prosecution appeared first on LewRockwell.

In a recent interview I was asked who would win the American presidential election.  In the US the definition of a “win” can easily be a Democrat theft. Over the many decades during which in former times Democrats represented the working class, the Democrats gained political control of the cities in which the working class resided.  This means Democrats preside over election procedures and what votes are cast and counted. 

I answered that the vote fraud mechanisms Democrats used in 2020 and 2022 in the swing states have now been legalized so that it is legal for the Democrats to steal the 2024 election.  Moreover, some states have made it illegal to require an ID to vote, and Democrat federal judges have tried to force Virginia and other states to include non-citizens on the voting rolls.

On this website I have reported many of the legalized theft mechanisms now in operation.  In the interview I noted that for theft to succeed, the election needed to be close, and that polls rigged by polling more Democrats than Republicans showed a close election.  In other words, the rigged polls are setting the stage for a theft.

But what if the election isn’t close?  Indeed, how can it be?  Lets acknowledge the three elements that weigh heavily against the Biden-Harris Democrat regime.

First the economy, always Americans’ main electoral focus.  The Biden lockdowns by blocking supply gave us inflation. To fight the inflation, we got high interest rates.  The impact on Americans of high inflation and high interest rates is dramatically negative.  Why would Americans vote for more of the same?

Second, the Biden-Harris regime has made it perfectly clear that it intends to keep America’s borders open until millions of immigrant-invaders turn America into a Tower of Babel with no national unity.  The sphere of safety for American citizens is shrinking.  Why would Americans vote for their dispossession?

Third, the wars.  The United States has been at war for the entirety of the 21st century for no national purpose.  Americans are not against wars as long as they win them, but when they lose–as in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ukraine, they turn against the wars.  The Biden-Harris regime have given Americans a losing war in Ukraine. Why would Americans vote for a regime that gave their proud selves another war loss?

Given these demerits against Kamala, what are the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris regime?  There are none for everyday Americans. The accomplishments are only for the Woke leftwing ideologues: curtailments on free speech, use of law as a weapon against Trump and his supporters, normalization of sexual perversity, replacement of merit with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — that is, with unconstitutional privileges in violation of the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act —  based on race, gender, and sexual preferences.  

The Biden-Harris regime has attempted a coup.  The Biden-Harris regime has done its best to overthrow America and to install a Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel.  The November election will tell us how successful their coup has been. 

The coup would have a better chance with a different candidate than Kamala, whose campaign has consisted of laughing her way through her nonsensical answers and derision of Trump, calling him a fascist.  Democrat newspapers such as The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today refused to endorse Kamala.  The  New York Times asked:  “Where is the Fierce Urgency of Beating Trump?”

On October 28 Jeff Bezos wrote in The Washington Post, which he owns, that the reputation of the print and TV media has fallen below that of Congress.  “Our profession is now the least trusted of all.”

Bezos realizes that the liberal media’s lie machine  has lost its credibility.  “Reality is an undefeated champion.”  To regain credibility, Bezos says, the media will have to return to accuracy and cease to sacrifice truth to the promotion of ideological agendas.  “The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite.  More and more, we talk to ourselves.”  

The problem that Bezos and the print and TV media face is that journalism schools only produce ideological activists who are motivated to control explanations to advance Woke agendas and not to report the facts.  You can see the truth of this in the fact that the handful of real journalists America still has — Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Joe Rogen — have all been evicted from print and TV media and operate independent Internet sites.  Where is Bezos going to find an honest editor?  Where is an honest editor going to find an honest reporter?  If he does, why will advertisers support media that does not advance advertisers’ agendas?  America is so purchased by money serving special interests that the re-emergence of truthful reporting is difficult to visualize.  

Bezos is correct to be concerned that today one-person websites such as this one and one-person podcasts have more credibility than The Washington Post.  I think Bezos’ concern and the refusal of Democrat newspapers to endorse Kamala will make it difficult this time for the Democrats to steal another election.  This time it is possible that the liberal newspapers won’t shout with one voice without investigating the facts: “There was no vote fraud.”

Thomas Jefferson said that every 200 years the Tree of Liberty has to be watered with the blood of tyrants.  The watering is long overdue.  The November election is the last chance of Americans to exist as a free people.  Will they piss the chance away?

The post Are the Presstitutes Final Days at Hand? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The poll conducted by the Real Presence Coalition confirms what was already evident when Paul VI authorized the modification of the discipline in this matter. First of all, it was clear that the so-called “reforms” imposed by a group of subversives Modernists did not respond to any request “from the grass roots.” Neither the Novus Ordo nor the new ways of administering Communion were the fruit of a real need of the ecclesial body. The opposite is true, however, that the so-called liturgical reform was intended to help spread the doctrine it contained among the clergy and the faithful, causing the πρᾶξις (praxis) to influence the δόξα (belief). The concept summarized by the adage Lex orandi, lex credendi has been widely adopted by the proponents of the conciliar reform, but in reverse and maliciously: in this case it is not in fact the oρθοδοξία (orthodoxy) that determines the ὀρθοπραξία (orthopraxy), but the ἑτεροπραξία (heteropraxy) that shapes the ἑτεροδοξία (heterodoxy).

The faithful who are asked to kneel to receive Holy Communion in the mouth are led by the gestures they make to recognize the Real Presence in the Sacred Species and to adhere to the corresponding Catholic doctrine. Similarly, the faithful who are asked not to kneel and to touch the Host with their hands end up believing the heterodox doctrine insinuated by the Reformed rites. This doctrinal change is further favored when the ritual change replaces an entirely opposite practice. 

This shows unequivocally that those who meddled with the Liturgy after the Council knew very well what would be the disruptive scope of the Novus Ordo in corrupting the Faith of the people of God. They did not explicitly modify the lex credendi, but wanted to express their deviations in the lex orandi, knowing full well that it would have been much easier to make people lose faith in the Real Presence by making them receive Communion standing and in their hands, rather than preaching these errors from the pulpits while continuing to administer Communion on their knees and in the mouth. The fact that the Hierarchy has imposed standing and holding Communion on the faithful has been perceived as a repudiation of the past and a rejection of previous doctrine.

The evidence for this reasoning is confirmed by an unusual source: ChatGPT, a conversational “artificial intelligence” app. I tried to interrogate ChatGTP not because I consider it a true form of intelligence but because its data processing system identifies causal relationships on the mathematical model and it is therefore interesting to see how an algorithm is able to detect what the mainstream narrative pretends not to see.

This is the question I asked:

If a Pope wanted to weaken the faith of Catholics in the Real Presence, how should he modify the rite of Communion? 

This is the answer I got: 

If a Pope wanted to weaken the Catholic faith in the Real Presence, he might consider some changes to the rite of Communion, such as:

1. Simplified rituals: Reduce the number of ritual elements that emphasize the sacredness of Communion, such as worship or genuflection.
2. Symbolic elements: Promote an emphasis on the symbolism of the bread and wine, rather than on their transformation into the Body and Blood of Christ.
3. Verbal communication: Use language that highlights Communion as a commemorative act rather than an actual encounter with Christ.
4. Modification of prayers: Change prayers and liturgical texts to reflect a more symbolic vision of Communion, minimizing references to the Real Presence.
5. Flexibility in administration: Allow alternative forms of receiving Communion that may seem less sacramental, such as receiving it in a more informal form or without liturgical celebration.

These changes could contribute to a more muted view of the Real Presence among the faithful.

Read the Whole Article

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In his narrative poem The Divine Comedy, 14th-century Italian sage Dante Alighieri reserved the ninth and deepest circle of his Inferno for those scoundrels who betrayed their comrades and leaders — Brutus, Cassius, Judas Iscariot, Satan himself.

A revised MAGA edition of The Divine Comedy might justifiably find space in that circle for people like Liz Cheney, Gen. Mark Kelly, and the editorial staff of The Bulwark.  Although many would put former vice president Mike Pence in there as well, I would not.

I would argue for a lower circle still, a tenth circle.  Although Dante did not say, as alleged, “The darkest places of hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis,” someone did, and it makes sense.  After all, one can respect the traitor for taking a stand, however evil.  But it is hard to respect those who, in times of moral crisis, sit on their hands.

Dark these hellish places may be, but in Republican circles, they are popular nonetheless.  Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, the Bush family, half the staff of the National Review — they have been there for years.  Pence is a late arrival.

Pence’s descent into the political nether world began on January 6, 2021.  At noon on that fateful Wednesday, President Donald Trump began his speech on the White House Ellipse.  In the speech, Trump pinned his hopes on the actions of Pence.

“States want to revote,” said the president.  “The states got defrauded.  They were given false information.  They voted on it.  Now they want to recertify.  They want it back.  All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people.”

From the crowd’s perspective, Pence was going to be the day’s hero or its goat.  Trump made the process seem much simpler than it ever could possibly be, but if he was deceiving anyone, he started by deceiving himself.

“If this happened to the Democrats,” Trump continued, “there’d be hell all over the country going on.  There’d be hell all over the country.”  About this, he was absolutely right.  The left had set up some four hundred protest sites, ready to sabotage a Trump victory.  These protests did not portend to be any more peaceful than those that followed the death of George Floyd.

Trump, however, did not expect violence from his supporters.  “You’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation,” he told them.  “You’re not the people that tore down our nation.”  Trump soon followed with the speech’s most quoted line — most quoted on conservative media, that is — “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”  The House January 6 committee and special prosecutor Jack Smith both edited this line out of their respective documents.  The media never played it.

Just before 1:00 p.m., about 15 minutes before Trump had concluded his speech, Mike Pence tweeted out a letter he had failed to clear with the president.  In the letter’s opening, Pence would seem to have swallowed what the media uniformly called the “big lie” — namely, any suggestion that the 2020 election was something less than “free and fair.”

Wrote Pence, “After an election with significant allegations of voting irregularities and numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law, I share the concerns of millions of Americans about the integrity of this election.”

Later in the letter, Pence affirmed the right of members of Congress to protest what was clearly a flawed election.  “Given the voting irregularities that took place in our November elections and the disregard of state election statutes by some officials,” wrote Pence, “I welcome the efforts of Senate and House members who have stepped forward to use their authority under the law to raise objections and present evidence.”

These, however, were not the words that shaped history.  Said Pence for the ages, “It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.”

Pence did not come to this conclusion casually.  He must have suspected, however, that had he sent the results back to the states for further adjudication, he might have launched a civil war.  What he got instead was a largely peaceful protest that the Democrats shamelessly alchemized into an insurrection.

For the first several months or so after January 6, Pence wandered about in his own limbo.  For all the talk of bad blood between them, he and Trump kept in touch.  At an April 2021 gathering of pastors, reported the Washington Post, “Pence spoke with an almost reverence about the former president.”  He stressed Trump’s accomplishments in office and ignored Trump’s criticisms of his actions on January 6.

If anyone, it was Pence who severed the alliance.  To position himself for a presidential run in 2024, he felt he had to.  Unwilling to attack Trump’s policies, Pence chose to focus on the president’s comportment on January 6.  As the New York Times reported in May 2022, Pence “used high-profile speeches to criticize the former president’s push to overturn the 2020 election results.”

The vice president who on January 6 criticized “significant allegations of voting irregularities and numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law” had moved on.  Apparently, Pence no longer shared “the concerns of millions of Americans about the integrity of [the 2020] election.”

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