Lew Rockwell Institute

“The United States boldly broke with the ancient military custom of swearing loyalty to a leader. Article VI required that American Officers thereafter swear loyalty to our basic law, the Constitution… Our American Code of Military Obedience requires that, should orders and the law ever conflict, our officers must obey the law… This nation must have military leaders of principle and integrity so strong that their oaths to support and defend the Constitution will unfailingly govern their actions.”—“Loyalty to the Constitution” plaque located on the grounds of the United States Military Academy

Every military servicemember’s oath is a pledge to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

It is not an oath to a politician. It is not an oath to a party. And it is not an oath to the police state.

Yet what happens when those same men and women are being told—by their own government—that obedience to power and loyalty to a political leader come before allegiance to the Constitution they swore to uphold?

That question isn’t hypothetical.

It is the moral line now being tested in real time, and it goes to the heart of what kind of country we are: do we live in a constitutional republic governed by the rule of law, or in a militarized police state where “legality” is whatever the person with the most power and the biggest army say it is?

The answer becomes painfully clear when you look at what our troops are being ordered to do—and what “we the people” are tacitly allowing them to be ordered to do—in the so-called name of national security.

Members of the military are now being deployed domestically to police their fellow American citizens in ways that trample the spirit, if not the letter, of the Posse Comitatus Act.

It’s legally dubious enough that the military is being used to enforce immigration crackdowns and police protests in American cities. But now they’re being tasked with killing civilians far from any declared battlefield in the absence of an imminent threat—all while being told that questioning the legality of those missions is itself a form of disloyalty.

So, which is it: obedience to the Constitution or the Commander-in-Chief?

At the center of this latest maelstrom is a report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a verbal order to “kill everybody” on a maritime vessel in the Caribbean that was suspected of transporting drugs.

According to multiple accounts, after an initial “lethal, kinetic” strike disabled the vessel and killed nine men on board, a second strike was carried out to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage—an alleged “double tap strike” that legal experts warn could constitute murder or a war crime if the survivors no longer posed a threat.

In all, the boat was reportedly hit four times: twice to kill the eleven occupants on board and twice more to sink the boat.

Intentionally killing survivors clinging to the remains of a boat in the middle of the ocean, in the absence of an imminent threat, whether or not the U.S. is engaged in “armed conflict” with drug cartels, is unlawful.

Murder on the high seas is a crime.

Even the Pentagon’s manual on the law of war says combatants who are “wounded, sick, or shipwrecked” no longer pose a threat and should not be attacked.

Some Republicans who have, until now, turned a blind eye to the Trump administration’s most egregious offenses against the Constitution appear reluctant to let this one slide.

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has done an about-face.

Hegseth—who bragged about watching the September 2 strike live—now claims he wasn’t in the room when the second strike happened.

Suddenly, the White House—which had been gleefully chest-thumping over its power to kill extrajudicially—is signaling its willingness to scapegoat subordinates in the chain of command.

The man with his head on the chopping block is Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley.

Clearly, it’s a lesson learned too late: when you’re dealing with power-hungry authoritarians, loyalty is no guarantee of protection. It’s always the men and women who carry out the unlawful orders—not the ones who give them—who end up paying the price.

Here’s the problem, though. While the media fixates on who will bear the blame for ordering the double-tap strike, the government war machine is moving forward, full steam ahead.

The Sept. 2 boat strike was part of a broader Trump administration campaign of maritime attacks that has already killed at least 80 people at sea, all without a formal declaration of war or due process—evidence of who they were or what they had done—to warrant an extrajudicial execution.

This is yet another of Trump’s everywhere, endless wars—this time at sea—sold as toughness on “narco-terrorists” at a moment when his poll numbers are slipping, economic promises have failed to manifest, and new Epstein-related revelations continue to surface.

When presidents manufacture new fronts in a forever war whenever they need a distraction, we should all beware.

The Trump administration has tried to frame this preemptive maritime war on suspected “narco-terrorists” as a “non-international armed conflict” with designated terrorist organizations.

Yet what it amounts to is an undeclared war, launched in international waters, without just cause and without congressional authorization.

The legal landscape is not murky—it is clear.

Most of the public debate has revolved around those technical legalities—what kind of conflict this is, which statutes apply, which court might have jurisdiction—yet what is really at stake is whether we are training a generation of American troops to believe that loyalty to a leader can excuse disobedience to, or even override, the Constitution.

Three bodies of law converge here: the Constitution’s allocation of war powers, the international law of armed conflict, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

First, there has been no declaration of war by Congress. Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war. The president cannot start wars based solely on his own authority.

Second, the law of armed conflict and the law of the sea forbid killing shipwrecked survivors who pose no immediate threat.

Third, the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires every servicemember to refuse manifestly unlawful orders.

A command to “kill everybody” is precisely the kind of order these guardrails were written to forbid.

The rationale that “I was just following orders” is not a defense to war crimes. That is the core lesson of the Nuremberg Trials and the modern law of armed conflict.

Of course, the police state wants mindless automatons who obey unquestioningly.

Reporting on the trial of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker in 1963, Hannah Arendt explained, “The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.”

Arendt, a Holocaust survivor, denounced Eichmann, a senior officer who organized Hitler’s death camps, for being a bureaucrat who unquestioningly carried out orders that were immoral, inhumane and evil. This, Arendt concluded, was the banality of evil, the ability to engage in wrongdoing or turn a blind eye to it, without taking any responsibility for your actions or inactions.

Coincidentally, the same year that Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published, Martin Luther King Jr. penned his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which he points out “that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

In other words, there comes a time when law and order are in direct opposition to justice.

Every military recruit is supposed to learn in basic training that there is a duty to obey lawful orders, and an equal duty to disobey manifestly unlawful orders.

No president—Republican or Democrat—can override that principle.

The Commander-in-Chief may issue orders, but he does not get to erase the Constitution or rewrite the laws of war by fiat.

The White House rationale—that a preemptive “kill everybody” attack “was conducted in self-defense to protect U.S. interests”—should terrify every American.

If the government can redefine “self-defense” to justify killing incapacitated survivors on a sinking boat, then it can justify killing anyone—at home or abroad, in uniform or out of it.

No matter how the White House spins it, however, these are crimes and those involved—from Hegseth on down—could find themselves in legal jeopardy and should be held accountable.

The pressure on the military is mounting.

The Orders Project, a nonpartisan initiative that helps connect servicemembers with outside legal counsel, reports a spike in calls from military personnel concerned that they could be asked to carry out an illegal order or pressured to take part in missions that violate their training in the laws of war.

Given Hegseth’s much-publicized approach to waging war without constraints—he has openly derided the military’s Judge Advocate General corps and championed a more “unshackled” approach to lethal force—these concerns are reasonable.

Indeed, there has been enough cause for concern that six members of Congress, all with military or national security backgrounds, recorded a message reminding servicemembers what the law requires: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders…you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our constitution.”

For re-stating what every recruit is taught in basic training, these lawmakers have been accused by President Trump of “sedition” and branded as “traitors” who should be arrested and punished by death. The FBI has reportedly opened an investigation. Hegseth has even threatened to recall one of the lawmakers—Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain—to active duty in order to court-martial him for his remarks.

The message from the top could not be clearer: allegiance to the Constitution is a crime.

Every person like myself who has served in uniform has experienced the tension between following orders and honoring that oath. Discipline requires obedience, but a constitutional republic requires lawful obedience.

That is why the oath matters.

It is not an oath to a man, a party, or a policy agenda. It is an oath to a charter of law: the Constitution.

At West Point, a 1943 “Loyalty to the Constitution” plaque proclaims: “should orders and the law ever conflict, our officers must obey the law.”

That principle is not antiquated. It is the foundation of American civil-military relations. Remove it, and what remains is not a republic but a personality cult with weapons.

The danger becomes even clearer when you examine the rhetoric now shaping national policy.

For instance, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently urged the president to impose “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

A harsher irony is hard to find.

A good case could be made that it is, in fact, the U.S. government that is flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. Just consider Trump’s steady spate of presidential pardons, the latest to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring with drug traffickers to move cocaine into the U.S.

According to U.S. prosecutors, Hernández—quoted as saying he wanted to “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos by flooding the United States with cocaine”—took bribes from drug traffickers and had the country’s armed forces protect a cocaine laboratory and shipments to the U.S.

So the president is blowing up boats in the Caribbean he claims—without proof—are ferrying drugs all the while pardoning someone who was convicted of conspiring to transport hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S.

This corrupt double standard has become business as usual for the Trump administration.

Now Trump wants to launch land attacks on Venezuela, a country that is conveniently richer in oil reserves than Iraq—all in the so-called name of fighting the war on drugs.

The rapid buildup of U.S. military forces in the Caribbean—which according to news reports includes a range of aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers, and amphibious assault ships capable of landing thousands of troops, as well as a nuclear-powered submarine and spy planes—far exceeds what would be needed for a supposed counternarcotics operation and is worrisome enough on its own.

Yet conscripting the military to do the dirty work of the police state—and then throwing them under the bus for doing so—takes us into even darker territory.

The U.S. government’s weaponization of the armed forces for political power is a betrayal of the Constitution, but it is also a betrayal of the very men and women who swore to give their lives for it.

This has never been about public safety.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this has always been about power—who wields it, who is protected by it, and who is crushed under it.

And once a government shows a willingness to break faith with its defenders, it will break faith with anyone.

A government that can discard its military service members can discard its whistleblowers and truth-tellers who expose corruption.

A government that can discard its military service members can discard its journalists, judges, and watchdogs in the press and the courts who insist on transparency and limits to power.

A government that can discard its military service members can discard its political opponents and dissidents, its religious and racial minorities, its immigrants and asylum seekers, its small business owners and workers who organize, its parents and community members who speak up locally, and any citizen who dares to say “no” when the state demands “yes.”

This betrayal of those who swore an oath to the Constitution is not an accident—it is a warning.

Be warned.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The Constitution vs. the Commander-in-Chief: The Duty To Disobey Unlawful Orders appeared first on LewRockwell.

In this essay, I will take on the Putin Hero Worship that is all too common among Russian cheerleaders in Alternative Media. Their misreading of the man and his conduct of the war will multiply 10 times over when a peace is concluded that meets many, though not all of Russia’s objectives.   Yes, we told you so, they will be crowing: peace has come because Putin has made all the right moves and trashed the West.

However, there is a strong argument to make for exactly the opposite interpretation of what has been going on for the nearly four years of this war, namely that it got off to a very bad start and has been drawn out needlessly because of the peculiar strategy that Team Putin put in place and has stuck with notwithstanding mounting fatalities and a worsening international environment that threatens to escalate from the present proxy war against Russia into a Europe wide kinetic war that will devastate the Continent

. If indeed the war ends in the next couple of months, it will be largely due to the efforts of Donald Trump, who is determined to reach a geopolitical settlement with Russia for his own Realpolitik reasons, namely to break up the Russia-China alliance. Regrettably, I agree with Trump that Putin would fight on for years to come in the flawed belief that he is sparing lives by his war of attrition approach and that a total military victory is achievable.  It is not, given the go-for-broke irrational commitment to continuing the war by the EU Member States.

As I have been saying for some time, this war will end and there will likely be Ukrainian capitulation thanks to the political collapse of the Kiev regime, not because the Ukrainian army has been driven from the field of battle. And Kiev is being pushed towards political collapse today by Team Trump more than by anyone else.

****

If we may go back to the very start of the Special Military Operation, I maintain that Team Putin had not done due diligence regarding the likely Ukrainian army response to an invasion and had not fielded an invasion force in the numbers essential for it to succeed.

In my chat with Peter Lavelle on the podcast The Gaggle a couple of weeks ago, Peter reminded me that in the weeks before the start of the Special Military Operation, when I was still a regular guest on the RT show ‘CrossTalk,’ I had been one of the very few analysts in Alternative Media to have predicted the Russian invasion. I do not remember that, but it could well have been so because I am no military expert and would not have seen that the 150,000 troops that the Russians amassed across the Belarus border from Ukraine were only one third the number that normal military doctrine tells you are needed to perform such an operation as crossing into enemy territory to capture the capital and force regime change.

Just a few months into the SMO, I heard from a taxi driver during the hour-long trip from my apartment in an outlying borough of St Petersburg to the city center how Team Putin has stunned his own military intelligence people by not consulting with them before staging the invasion.  And what would a taxi driver know about such things, you may ask.  Well, this driver just happened to be a retired military intelligence officer who remained in touch with his former colleagues and heard the story from them.

Yes, in Russia at various times taxi drivers have been exceptional sources of information. Just remember that Vladimir Putin himself admitted in a public Q&A a year or so ago, that at the start of the 90s he, too, had been a taxi driver for a while just to put bread on the table, given the general economic collapse.

It is fairly obvious that Team Putin expected the Ukrainian military to raise the white flag at the first sign of Russian troops invading, just as they had done in 2014 on Crimea.  One might guess that Putin and his close advisers did not appreciate how effectively British and other NATO trainers had been during the intervening 8 years in reshaping the Ukrainian army. The Russian appeals to the Ukrainian officers to rebel against the extremist nationalist government in Kiev and against the Nazi battalions in their own midst fell on deaf ears.

Indeed, you may go on to ask whether a good people manager like Putin could really ignore the protocol of government administration and not consult with the agency responsible for providing military intelligence.  But this very behavior has in the past two weeks been repeated in a manner for us all to see when Putin completely sidelined Sergei Lavrov and the entire Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the peace negotiations with the USA and Ukraine, relying instead on a relative outsider and neophyte in such matters, Kirill Dmitriev.

Indeed, if the Russian command had poor military and political intelligence on the enemy at the start, it has not become better informed ever since. I point to the ‘surprise’ Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk oblast of the Russian Federation that it took more than six months of fierce fighting to uproot and expel. It is hard to understand why his Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov was not sacked over this disgraceful failure to secure the Russian Federation borders, why no one had checked the fortifications that were supposed to have been built with federal money in Belgorod and Kursk, but never were, or were built with inferior concrete because of local government corruption.

The whole strategy of waging war ‘the Russian way’ brought in by Vladimir Putin  in February 2022, in contrast to the U.S. style ‘shock and awe’ to overwhelm the enemy, has dragged out the war vastly longer than was necessary, has created more killed and severely maimed Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, and has invited Western intervention which all could have been avoided had Putin followed Soviet practice in such matters and used a hammer to crush the fly instead of a napkin.

The lessons of the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 were precisely that massive troop presence must be brought to bear for successful regime change by force of arms. In both cases, the Soviet invasions were cruel, but in the end relatively few people died and the whole exercise was over in a matter of days, at most weeks, not years as is the case today.

These lessons have not been absorbed by Team Putin to this day. For inexplicable reasons the Boss in the Kremlin refuses to make a decapitating strike in Kiev to end the fighting at once without further loss of life.

As I say above, it is the intervention of Donald Trump that is bringing down the Kiev regime. The United States stands behind the anti-corruption investigations that already have greatly weakened Zelensky’s position following the forced resignation of his head of the Presidential Administration and power behind the throne, Andrii Yermak.  It is Team Trump who have been sidelining Europe, letting the air out of the balloon of the Coalition of the Willing, and preparing the way for capitulation by Kiev before anyone in Brussels can raise a finger.

Don’t get me wrong. I have the greatest respect for Vladimir Putin as the man who put Russia back on its feet economically, socially and in military might after the collapse and disgrace of the 1990s. For these achievements, he may be honored for decades to come with monuments all around the Federation. But as we say in the business world: ‘horses for courses.’  And Putin, the nation builder in peacetime has been making too many wrong moves as Commander in Chief of a nation at war.

This article was originally published on GilbertDoctorow.com.

The post Putin Has Been Wrong About This War From the Beginning appeared first on LewRockwell.

The knives are out for the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The leaks from the Pentagon about him will continue until Hegseth is gone.

The officers do not want a boss who is giving illegal orders while scapegoating the generals and soldiers who follow them:

At the White House on Monday, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, read a statement that said Mr. Hegseth had authorized the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, “to conduct these kinetic strikes.”

She said that Admiral Bradley had “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”

Bradly gets pushed forward to take the beating while Hegseth and Trump claim innocence:

Bradley will have the chance to address outstanding issues about the strikes when he speaks with lawmakers Thursday behind closed doors. Some lawmakers have said the Trump administration appears to be making Bradley into something of a scapegoat.

“Looks like they’re throwing him under the bus,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), often a critic of the administration, “but these kinds of decisions go all the way to the top.”

Adm. Bradley had the poor choice of following an illegal order or getting fired.

In my recent piece abut U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean I suggested that the head of Southern Command, Adm. Alvin Holsey, was made to retire because he rejected orders to kill survivors of U.S attacks:

On the very same day those survivors were rescued, October 16, the DoD announced that the head of its Southern Command was ‘stepping down’: ..
…
It now seems clear that Admiral Holsey got fired for not following Hegseth’s illegal order and for ordering the rescue of the survivors of the strike.

A piece in today’s Wall Street Journal confirms this impression:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shocked official Washington in mid-October when he announced that the four-star head of U.S. military operations in the Caribbean was retiring less than a year into his tenure.

But according to two Pentagon officials, Hegseth asked Adm. Alvin Holsey to step down, a de facto ouster that was the culmination of months of discord between Hegseth and the officer. It began days after President Trump’s inauguration in January and intensified months later when Holsey had initial concerns about the legality of lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, according to former officials aware of the discussions.

Hegseth has now claimed (archived) to have not seen no survivors when he was in the room watching the stream of a second strike happening that killed survivors of an allegedly smuggling boat:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that “a couple of hours” passed before he was made aware that a September military strike he authorized and “watched live” required an additional attack to kill two survivors, further distancing himself from an incident now facing congressional inquiry.
…
“I did not personally see survivors,” he said in response to a reporter’s question, “… because that thing was on fire and was exploded, and fire, smoke, you can’t see anything. You got digital, there’s — this is called the fog of war.”

That, however, contradicts the original reporting of the issue. The Washington Post wrote (archived) that Hegseth was watching the video stream when survivors of a strike were clearly visible and was aware of the order to kill them:

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

The NY Times reports further details (archived):

Before the Trump administration began attacking people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved contingency plans for what to do if an initial strike left survivors, according to multiple U.S. officials.

The military would attempt to rescue survivors who appeared to be helpless, shipwrecked and out of what the administration considered a fight. But it would try again to kill them if they took what the United States deemed to be a hostile action, like communicating with suspected cartel members, the officials said.

After the smoke cleared from a first strike on Sept. 2, there were two survivors, and one of them radioed for help, the U.S. officials said. Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the operation, ordered a follow-up strike and both were killed.

The reasoning is ludicrous. Survivors of a murderous strike are to be rescued. But survivors who call for help to be rescued have to be killed:

Under the plans Mr. Hegseth had approved, Admiral Bradley interpreted the purported communications between the initial survivors and colleagues as meaning that the survivors were still in the fight, rather than shipwrecked and helpless people whom it would be a war crime to target.

The whole legal construct behind these strikes is obviously nonsense:

The Pentagon’s defense of its actions rests heavily on the premise that there was a “fight” in the first place. In defending the campaign of summary killings at sea as lawful, the administration has relied on Mr. Trump’s disputed determination that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that people suspected of smuggling drugs for them are “combatants.”

A still-secret memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel accepts Mr. Trump’s claims about the nature of drug cartels and that there is an armed conflict. Based on that premise, it concludes that the boat strikes are lawful.

One of its key related conclusions, according to people who have read it, is that suspected cargos of drugs aboard boats are lawful military targets because cartels could otherwise sell them and use the profits to buy military equipment to sustain their alleged war efforts.

The Pentagon’s emphasis on the purported radio communications appears to rely on that logic. The idea appears to be that without a second strike, another boat could have come to retrieve not only the survivors but also any of the alleged shipment of cocaine that the first blast did not burn up, so calling for help was a hostile act.

The OLC memo is intentionally confusing cause and effect.

People and cartels are greedy. They sell drugs to make money. Whatever arms they may have are used in support of that primary aim. They are in business, not in an ‘armed conflict’. They do not to fight wars for lebensraum or ideologically reasons:

A broad range of legal experts reject the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s claim that this is an armed conflict. They say that there is no armed conflict, that crews of boats suspected of smuggling drugs are civilians, not combatants, and that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have been giving illegal orders to commit murder.

Hegseth has given orders to murder civilians. If this were an ‘armed conflict’ Hegseth would have committed a war crime.

Or, as conservative commentator George Will scathingly remarks (archived:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.

Pete Hegseth has long argued for more brutal wars, for more unfair fights to satisfy his inner psychopath:

In books and on television, Hegseth argued for years that U.S. military leaders should relax rules for American forces, allowing them to fight unburdened by concerns of future courts-martial. More freedom to operate, he insisted, and less regulation by military lawyers would make troops more lethal and effective, and could be justified under the laws of war.
…
Hegseth’s views were shaped by his own experience in the Army. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005, in the northern city of Samarra, which was a counterinsurgency hotbed. The regiment’s Charlie Company, which included Hegseth, employed such aggressive tactics that it was referred to by some soldiers as the Kill Company [archived]. Four of its soldiers were later court-martialed on charges of killing unarmed Iraqis. Three of them were convicted; one case was thrown out on appeal.

Hegseth has cited a JAG briefing on “legal and proper engagement” that he says he and fellow troops received when they deployed. Hegseth says his soldiers were told they couldn’t fire on an armed man unless it was clear he posed a threat.

Hegseth pulled his platoon aside and told them to ignore the legal advice. “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains,” he says he told them, according to his 2024 book “The War on Warriors.” “Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat.”

Hegseth brought such convictions to the Pentagon. In February, when he fired the top JAGs, he said they could be potential “roadblocks” to lawful orders “given by a commander in chief.”

Defense Secretary Hegseth’s inherent brutality is likely the reason why he got hired for his position:

Trump selected Hegseth as defense secretary partly because of his views on loosening the rules of engagement, two people familiar with the presidential transition said.

It is high time for Congress to rein both men in.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post The Knives Are Out for Hegseth appeared first on LewRockwell.

European NATO allies have called a NATO Emergency Summit to discuss NATO’s continued existence and whether the US key partner could still be trusted.

Every American signal of US withdrawal brings Russia closer to her target – defeating NATO, not with bullets but with time. This is being recognized gradually by European “leaders”, NATO members which today – 1 December 2025 — came to a climax that called this Emergency NATO Summit in Brussels.

Alliances are not marriages. They can and do gradually fall apart. This seems to be the case NOW. It is no longer a question whether NATO will follow its Washington leadership – or break apart – or continue as a European alliance. The latter is unlikely as European-NATO leadership is today divided to the point where no long term strategy can be expected to lead a NATO military force, let alone bring together a unified budget for a military force – which calls itself a defense force, but in reality, is and has been since 1991 an aggressor, an international war machine.

Professor John J. Mearsheimer explains in detail the challenges faced by NATO, its European leaders and the likelihood that NATO may break apart.

Listen to Professor Mearsheimer’s assessment on this 15-min video:

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Is NATO Breaking Up? appeared first on LewRockwell.

On January 16, 2019, 130 acres of rural North Carolina land near Raleigh were purchased by Carolina Murugan Temple (CMT). A month prior, their plans to build the largest Hindu statue in North America were approved by the county. Under construction now, CMT plans to build a 155-foot-tall statue, which will sit on a 35-foot pedestal. It will be taller than the Statue of Liberty, which stands at 151 feet, not including the pedestal. This new development is a continuation of the Hindu acculturation in North Carolina; in October of 2022, the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Cary unveiled its 87-foot Tower of Unity and Prosperity at a ceremony attended by then North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper.

Along with new temples and 190-foot idols, tracts of land in rural North Carolina areas are also being bought up by Indian companies with the intention of building Hindu communities. One such company, Sustaino LLC., has purchased nearly 400 acres of land across the state. One of their current projects, Vedic Village, is set to include an on-site yoga studio and Hindu temple. The structure of the community is all self-contained, essentially a commune in nature. While their website claims, for legal reasons, that they do not restrict residency based on race or beliefs, the very nature of the community says otherwise.

Further down south, in Texas, a similar development has faced significant criticism. The Meadow, formerly known as EPIC City, is a 402-acre site on the outskirts of Josephine, Texas. Similar to the Hindu-centric Vedic Village, The Meadow’s community plans include homes, a mosque, a religious school, a senior living center, as well as retail spaces. While the inner workings of The Meadow are not as commune-esque as those of proposed Hindu communities, the objective is the same in both cases: to create an isolated community in which these anti-Christian religions can thrive and grow.

The pushback in Texas has been strong—from locals who opposed the development at a town meeting all the way up to Governor Greg Abbott launching investigations into Community Capital Partners, the backer of the development. There appears to be little to no backlash at this increasing Hindu colonization in North Carolina, perhaps due to a lack of press coverage on these developments, although some have spoken out about the new idol statue that is in the works.

The locals who are pushing back against a Muslim city in Texas are getting raked over the coals for “Islamophobia.” Some reports denounce North Carolinian pushback to the 190-foot-tall statue of the false god Murugan as “Hinduphobic.” Are the rejection of false religions and the fear of the colonization of rural America irrational, as the suffix “phobia” suggests? No. Rather, it is the rational response to growing demonic influence in American culture. We see the atrocitiesbeing committed in the United Kingdom by Muslim majority migrant groups; we do not want that here.

John Adams said in a letter to the Massachusetts militia, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The moral framework upon which America was founded, upon which the Constitution rests, is that of Christianity. Our system of government is incapable of functioning without this framework, as we see so clearly in the current collapse of our country in response to the growth of secular humanism. Muslims will inevitably submit to Sharia, not the Constitution or Bill of Rights. The polytheistic pagan worship of Hinduism is so contrary to a Christian understanding of the human person and the Western philosophical tradition upon which our nation was founded that it can in no way be compatible with our system of law.

To give credit where credit is due, I respect the audacity of these groups and religious organizations for taking the initiative to build communities for their followers. They at least know the truth that to expand and grow as a faith, they must join together; their strength is in their numbers. While Muslims and Hindus continue to build isolated communities, mosques, temples, and more, the leaders of American Catholics are preoccupied with climate change and synodality. Attacks on the Tridentine Mass, such as those in the Diocese of Charlotte, serve only to further isolate faithful Catholics and prevent the growth of parish communities.

While our backs are turned in our preoccupation with hand-wringing about the virtues of ecumenism, enemies of the Faith are busy taking over. The internal persecution of traditional Catholics is currently weakening the global church—and it will only continue to do so. Ecumenism without conversion is an empty gesture; it does as much good as giving cash to a drug addict.

American Catholics and Christians must firmly oppose the ideological takeover of our country, whether from secular humanists, Muslims, Hindus, or any other false belief system. We need to work together to strengthen our parish communities and work outward to effect real change in our neighborhoods. Christ said the world will know us by our love, not by our passivity. It is time the faithful start pushing back.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

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In a recent article, The Intelligence Branch Answers to No One, J. B. Shurk posits the inherent danger to self-government of secrecy.

“Can self-government exist alongside centralized intelligence agencies?  Espionage agencies seek secrets and keep secrets.  To the extent that they inform the public what they know, they decide which secrets can be disclosed.  Now this may be the only way for a clandestine service to operate, but it certainly does not equip the public to make fully-informed decisions.  When choosing which policies or representatives to support, voters know nothing of substance within the classified world.”

Recently I heard Mathieu Pageau describe The Simple Act That Could Have Prevented “The Fall”. (Taken from the transcript so it seems a bit confused, my highlights.)

“When Eve offered the apple to Adam, Adam should have asked God and said, hey, God. By the way, Eve is offering me this. This is what she told me. What’s cool? What should I do? Very simple. Exactly. But. And why why should he ask. Because it contradicts if it didn’t contradict. You know if, if she was giving something that didn’t contradict what God said, you know, wouldn’t have to ask God. You know, if you have free will, you could do. But it’s something that directly contradicts what God said. So in that case, yes, you should inquire. It seems obvious actually when you say no. But this is a real this is a real social phenomenon. I mean, this is how things get subverted. People say things about other people and then they don’t. They make sure you don’t. You don’t connect. See, it’s all about connecting things, right? It’s all about communication and connecting things to God. And he kind of broke that communication. The snake broke it. He’s like, I’m telling you a secret about God. And he’s like, you’re not going to ask him, are you? Because I’m saying he has bad intentions. So if he has bad intentions, why would you ask him? You know, I already convince you that God was lying to you, so why would you then go ask God if he is lying to you? Know you won’t see that’s that’s how Satan tricks people. It’s he makes sure that there’s no communication. See? And this is why, by the way, this is why, the most powerful thing in the world is secret stuff like secret, like that. Let’s say we’re talking about governmental function. Intelligence agencies are more powerful than governments. That’s why they can be. They’re not necessarily, but they can be It’s also why the occult appeals to many people. A cult to something that’s hidden. People like the idea of secret power. absolutely. Yeah. And secret in the sense that. Yeah. Secret from everyone else. That’s one thing too. But you see that the thing is too, there’s nothing wrong with secrets, but they can be used to subvert. And so you got to be careful. It’s like it doesn’t mean secrets are bad, but you got to be real careful when you’re dealing with anything that tells you not to say something.”

In Pageau’s understanding, the great sin of the Fall was not eating the apple but keeping the act a secret from God.

A very entertaining five hours is available by listening to a reading of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. The plot revolves around the total confusion begot by the secrecy of undercover police espionage agents against anarchist terrorists. The reading is by Ruby Love at her Substack Classics Read Aloud. In a perfectly intended pun, it is a real gem. (Classics Read Aloud is a most unusual spinoff of Doomberg.com, a site for exceptional analysis of energy markets and geopolitics presented by a green chicken.)

However, while I am fully on board with the danger of government secrets, what about private secrets?  I am not very secretive myself, at least I don’t think so. But I can keep a secret or perhaps it is more apt to say I am discreet. My mother was a very nervous person. For that reason I did not tell her what was going on in my life. In college I told my roommates to never call my mom in an emergency. Luckily, there never was an emergency.

I understood my intuitive response to her nervousness had merit when I went to work in Oak Ridge, TN at the Department of Energy’s Y-12 Plant. I was given a Q clearance which is equivalent to Top Secret. As a young engineer working on facilities support I never worked nor even understood that I had seen secret information. However, one day walking through a building I came across a sign indicating the area was a part of the Fogbank project. I had fun accidentally saying the word fogbank in conversation after that. It was only decades later that I learned that Fogbank is a code name given to a secret material used in nuclear warheads. The key concept of secrecy I learned with my Q clearance is the need to know. Never tell someone something unless they need to know it. Decline to listen to someone tell you something unless you need to know it. I think I was right not to tell my mom about much of my typical activities because she really did not need to know. In the news today there is much about the Epstein files and other government activities that I think the public does need to know; at least to some extent, what, why and how the secret intelligence agencies operate.

At the moment I am trying to keep the secret that I bought a new television as a Christmas gift for my family. Clearly, they never read my posts at LRC.

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