Lew Rockwell Institute

I wonder if Putin is as disappointed with the outcome of the French election as I am. The first round of elections gave a large lead to Marine Le Pen’s French Nationalist party. Hoping this would carry through the second round, I saw hope in the idea that European peoples tired of the long domination by Washington of their politics were beginning to break free. Alas, it was nothing but a dream.

What changed so dramatically between the first round and the second round of the votes that reduced the French Nationalists from first to third in the final outcome?

Was the election stolen like the last two US national elections? Peter Koenig explains the theft.

Was the first round just a protest vote unintended as an indicator of a return to French nationalism last witnessed in France during the 10-year presidency of Charles De Gaulle? Le Pen’s nationalist party serves as the place voters register their protests at the ruling party. Although French voters are outraged at the transformation of France into a Tower of Babel, the French people have been successfully indoctrinated by Americans and by the EU to regard nationalism as Nazism. So they vote for French nationalism only as a protest, not as a solution to the ongoing gradual disappearance of the French nation.

Was the disappointing outcome a result of Macron’s establishment party coming together with the French left-wing to prevent a victory for French ethnicity? There are reports that Macron and left-wing party candidates that came in last in the first round dropped out in order to consolidate the vote against Le Pen’s party, which is called “far right.” It is the strange situation throughout Europe and the UK that any party that represents the ethnic basis of the country–British, French, German, Italian, Dutch, etc., is branded “far right.” For decades propagandists have identified ethnic nationalists with Nazis. Europeans are indoctrinated into this way of thinking, and no one wants to “vote like a Nazi.” Consequently, the ethnic nationalities that constitute European countries are unwilling to elect a party that represents them.

Europe and the UK are ruled by parties that are Washington’s puppets.

The French election did produce a change. The French left-wing displaced Macron’s establishment party as the party with the largest number of votes. The ruling coalition will be Macron’s establishment party with the French left. Macron himself is not at risk. What will change will be the ministers. It will be interesting to see how these seats are distributed.

Little will change. The french left is as welcoming to immigrant invaders as Macron’s party. Perhaps French readers will inform me where the French left stands on war with Russia. I suspect that the money and positions that Washington will hand out to susceptible French leftists will suffice to crush any revolutionary intentions. Being elevated into Washington’s confidence is valuable. The French left will be quieted with reduced economic attack on the French working class. As Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote in his classic novel, 
The Leopard, “things have to change so that they can remain the same.”

The question before us remains. Now that hopes of a restoration of European nationalism have been defeated by indoctrinated French voters afraid to vote for their own future, Putin’s hopes of a more reasonable Europe are defeated. How many more hopes does Putin have to see defeated before he has no alternative to acting in defense of Russia?

What form will this defense take?

These questions are not part of the American presidential election. Washington, allegedly a great power, but I think a fragile one, makes decisions about war with no comprehension of the likely consequences.

When I compare American leadership today in government, corporations, media, and universities with the leadership of years ago, I see mindlessness.

Mindlessness is not consistent with being a great power.

The post Hope Betrayed: The French Election appeared first on LewRockwell.

Western empire managers do not actually believe that there is anything “abhorrent” or “horrific” about attacking a hospital  —  at least not one which provides services to Palestinians or other populations who are not favored by the western empire.

A missile struck a children’s hospital in Kyiv on Monday during the heaviest Russian bombardment on Ukraine in months, which stretched across five regions and reportedly killed some forty people.

Kyiv and its western allies are saying the children’s hospital was hit by Russia, while Moscow says the hospital was hit by a Ukrainian air defense missile during Russia’s attack. All that’s clear as of this writing is that the hospital was bombed either as a direct or indirect result of the Russian missile strikes, and that western leaders are responding very, very differently to this news than they have been to deliberate Israeli attacks on hospitals throughout the Gaza Strip.

“Russia’s missile strikes that today killed dozens of Ukrainian civilians and caused damage and casualties at Kyiv’s largest children’s hospital are a horrific reminder of Russia’s brutality,” tweeted whoever runs the US president’s Twitter account, adding, “It is critical that the world continues to stand with Ukraine at this important moment and that we not ignore Russian aggression.”

Russia’s missile strikes that today killed dozens of Ukrainian civilians and caused damage and casualties at Kyiv’s largest children’s hospital are a horrific reminder of Russia’s brutality. It is critical that the world continues to stand with Ukraine at this important moment…

— President Biden (@POTUS) July 9, 2024

“Attacking innocent children. The most depraved of actions. We stand with Ukraine against Russian aggression — our support won’t falter,” tweeted the UK’s new prime minister Keir Starmer.

“This is abhorrent. Striking a children’s hospital — and the innocent children inside — cannot be justified,” tweeted Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, adding, “My heart goes out to the families who are grieving — and Canada’s commitment to Ukraine remains as strong as ever.”

“Russia’s missile attacks on several Ukrainian cities, including a Kyiv children’s hospital are abhorrent,” echoed Australian foreign minister Penny Wong as though responding to some kind of memo. “We condemn the targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals. Australia continues to support the people of Ukraine in the face of Russia’s illegal, immoral war.”

Contrast this firm and unequivocal statement from Wong with her mealy-mouthed, passive-language statement about Israel’s deliberate systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system:

“Hospitals, patients, medical and humanitarian staff must be protected. Australia is deeply concerned by attacks in and around hospitals in Gaza, including an Indonesian-funded hospital in northern Gaza and a Jordanian field hospital.”

Passive language is a political choice pic.twitter.com/kqzZpwwJP6

— naama (@derridalicious) July 9, 2024

And that’s about as strong a criticism as you’ll see from western officials regarding Israel’s relentless assault on Palestinian hospitals. Most haven’t had anything to say at all.

Since October 7 there have been hundreds of documented IDF attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system, which according to the UN has been mostly destroyed by this onslaught.

Oxford University professor Nick Maynard has accused the IDF of “systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system” in Gaza after spending time working there during Israel’s bombardment of the enclave.

According to a new report published in The Lancet medical journal, indirect deaths ensuing from Israel’s assault on Gaza by things like disease and inability to access healthcare services will likely wind up being many times greater than the direct deaths caused by mass military violence, saying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths for every one reported official death would wind up putting the grand total death toll at around 186,000. And that’s with an official direct death toll that is definitely a huge undercount.

Great to see bombing hospitals is bad again.

— Tadhg (@TadhgHickey) July 9, 2024

Where was all the outrage about all this? Where were all the statements from western officials about how “abhorrent” it is to attack those hospitals? Where were all the western news media headlines explicitly naming Israel as the perpetrator of those attacks, like they’ve been doing with Russia? Nowhere to be found.

This is because western empire managers do not actually believe that there is anything “abhorrent” or “horrific” about attacking a hospital — at least not one which provides services to Palestinians or other populations who are not favored by the western empire.

This has nothing to do with concern for human lives and wellbeing. They just want to manufacture more consent for continuing their proxy war in Ukraine.

_______________

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The post Oh, Looks Like Bombing Hospitals Is Bad Again appeared first on LewRockwell.

Well, here we are.  It’s a full blown panic.

It is now obvious that President Biden lacks the mental faculties to carry on the office of the presidency.  And the nervous mice are starting to tiptoe out on the ice and do the ‘noticing in public’ they have avoided the last three and a half years.

The Democrats are now dividing themselves between the culpable and those with culpable deniability.  Who knew?  Who could have known?

It’s time to call a lid on the whole damn thing, Jack.

Now Republicans don’t want to hear that, they want to keep Biden in the race, for obvious reasons.  That’s easy to understand and if he was just running as a candidate and not for reelection, it wouldn’t be a big deal.

But, there is a country to run, every single day.  And we do not know who is running it.  That is beyond politics.  And beyond unacceptable.

Democrats are nervous about Kamala.  Who cares?  She is the Vice President of the United States of America and her job is to step into the vacuum at moments like this.

There will be plenty of time for a post-mortem later, but there can be no pretending that Biden is capable of finishing out his term.  It’s nonsense and everyone knows it.

But the Democrats have never met a rule or standard that they weren’t willing to politicize, and relativize, to their own ends.

They can always screw over President Harris at the convention in six weeks, and give the nomination to someone else.  They can fight the ballot issues at the state level.

But I bet she winds up with the Senile Ice Cream Man’s superdelegates, so maybe everyone should stop worrying and learn to love the Kam…ala.

How did we get here?

According to some, it was because the right wing crankosphere has been too mean.  Calling out the obvious denied the establishment press their ability to do their jobs.

They had to spend all their time doing counter-narrative against internet meanies, otherwise they would have noticed the president is unfit for office.

Well, we’ve been calling him the Senile Ice Cream Man  for over three years over here, so it must be our fault.  We are deeply sorry about that.  Sorry about being able to perceive reality.

Meanwhile, the press is still getting their heads around the possibility of consequences.

Give credit to the New York Times for being able to sniff a change in the zeitgeist and move quickly towards it.  Even as they deserve heaps of scorn for carrying on the farce for so long, they’ve quickly put on their big girl pants and are out doing the journalism thing.  It’s been cringeworthy to watch.

So the press is doing the careful lane change.

But we still have to watch all the Democrats pretend they didn’t know.

“Whip smart” Joe Biden is the best he’s ever been!  That’s what they said on Morning Joe!

You know the show where marriages, and credibility, goes to die.  But, it wasn’t a lie, exactly.

In some ways, Biden hasn’t changed at all.  He was always an egotistical prick who said dumb stuff.  Joe has always made up thinly believable lies based on his patronizing view of the world.  He’s always been awkwardly sniffing people.

Even if you believe “Corn Pop was a bad dude,” do you not remember Biden was the life insurance policy for the first black president?

Obama thought “…I sure don’t want to get shot, who could I pick for VP that would make even an assassin think twice?  Oh, I know, Joe Biden.  No one wants that dumbass in charge!”

Feng Shui of Deck Chairs on the Titanic

Supposedly, poor Doug Emhoff, you know the ‘second gentleman’ was at a debate watch party with Rob Reiner and Jane Fonda.  What did he do to deserve that?

Meathead and Hanoi Jane?

In any case, five minutes in Reiner reportedly started screaming while Jane was crying.  Awkward.  Not as bad as listening to Kamala practice a speech, but pretty bad.

Then you have the Hollywood elites, with their fake surprise and lamentations of betrayal.

I can think of a lot of off-color compound words people might use to describe Ari Emmanuel.  Dumbfuck is not on that list.

He was so surprised to see Biden’s performance, shocked I tell you.  Bitch, please.

It’s instructive that Democrats are only lamenting Biden’s display of mental deficiency because it hurts his chances of winning in November.

They don’t think it’s in any way important to encourage Biden to step down from the presidency because he lacks the mental fitness to execute his office for the seven months remaining in his term.

And because they are so absorbed in the current fire drill that none of them have considered how that makes them look.

C’mon MAN!

In its heyday, the sun never set on the British Empire.  But the sun goes down on Joe Biden every day around three hours after he gets up.  He requires a coterie of flunkies to stage manage his every waking moment.  To insulate him from embarrassing himself.  To help him find the podium in the middle of an empty stage.

He probably can’t even legally sign Hunter’s pardon due to diminished capacity.

But he ain’t leaving.  Not after flubbing a softball interview with Stephanopoulos (22 minutes unedited, what stamina!), followed by angry letters to Democrats challenging them to a convention fight.  Biden was always an antagonizing putz, but now we are just seeing demented defiant rage.

Look, I’m old enough to remember that Smells Like Children is an EP by Marilyn Manson, not what the President says when he’s left unsupervised.  So believe me when I tell you there is a new campaign slogan coming…

Reprinted with permission from Gold Goats ‘n Guns.

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It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Last year, when I heard the news that Cormac McCarthy had died in Santa Fe at the age of 89, I reread No Country for Old Men. He owed the title of the book to Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium”—perhaps the best ever written about growing old.

The novel takes place in Texas in the year 1980, and it’s about an aging Sheriff of a county in far West Texas near the Mexican border who is confronted with evil beyond his experience and understanding. Frequently he expresses bewilderment that such evil has visited his rural county.

The novel is sprinkled with wonderfully memorable quotes. The following are some of my favorites:

The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. but I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It don’t move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that’s what it is.

He could see the truck in the moonlight at the top of the rise. He looked off to one side of it to see it the better. There was someone standing beside it. Then they were gone. There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy. Now you’re goin to die.

People will tell you it was Vietnam brought this country to its knees. But I never believed that. It was already in bad shape. Vietnam was just the icin on the cake. We didn’t have nothin to give to em to take over there. If we’d sent em without rifles I dont know as they’d of been all that much worse off. You can’t go to war like that. You cant go to war without God. I dont know what is goin to happen when the next one comes. I surely dont.

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics. Maybe he did. I told that to somebody at breakfast the other mornin and they asked me if I believed in Satan…I had to think about that. I guess as a boy I did. Come the middle years my belief had waned somewhat. Now I’m startin to lean back the other way. He explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no explanation. Or not to me they dont.

Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I’m gettin old.

I thought of No Country for Old Men when I saw the news that the actor, Mike Heslin, just died at the age of thirty. The people who run this country—whoever they are—need to start thinking very hard about what is killing the young and fit, and then at least try to do something about it.

Dr. Peter McCullough has been trying to awaken the powers that be for almost four years. It is high time that these fools wake up. This paper is a good place for people to start.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post ‘No Country for Old Men’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

When a society envisions children as ‘dollar signs’ instead of human beings – we have Fallen.   When Life is of no consequence – then we have fallen… When we accept that our entire government is not our government but continue to pay them – we have fallen.

We are the zombies walking tentatively through the thorns of Hell hoping that someone will save us.

Have you noticed that the focus as to ‘how many Jews’ it took to take down entire countries is a derision.   Gloating.  It took a mere 300,000 Bolshevik Jews to take down the entirety of Russia and its monarchy.   How?   They preyed upon the weak, the moral, the pious, but the greatest tactic of all was ‘the speed’.  The Bolsheviks took out Russia in the same manner they are annihilating Palestinians.  Humans have no value

When you don’t value life you have no problem with brutality, torture, and dehumanizing innocents en masse.  When your justification for bombing children is they are necessary victims – you are no longer human.   Pastor Baldwin – ‘Might For Right’.  The reason the US refuses to declare a peace treaty with Russia over Ukraine – is simply because of the need to be a Winner, as in Might = Right if you win.

Seven years ago, Pastor Chuck Baldwin described it as ‘lack of honor upon those who pretend to be leaders without the gift of ‘God’s leadership’.   Netanyahu has no honor.  He has no God.  He has declared that a Peace Treaty with Palestine must allow him to continue bombing indiscriminately.  Europe has succumbed to ‘secular Israel’.  The US has succumbed to secular Israel.  And Israel is joined by the 51 military and CIA snivels we euphemistically call generals and intelligence officers – who signed off on a LIE.  Knowingly.  A violation of the Hatch Act – which they claimed did not apply… to ‘contractors’.

The Hatch Act, a federal law passed in 1939, limits certain political activities of federal employees, as well as some state, D.C., and local government employees who work in connection with federally funded programs.   That would include NGO’s.

In other words – not only did these CIA+ officials lie on a paper circulated across the globe – they lied about who is subject to the Hatch Act.   A formal inquiry has NOT been initiated by the esteemed Merrick Garland which could be construed as complicity.  A plea of Ignorance has as much fortitude as the same plea before the IRS – it does NOT exist.   In fact, the sheer number of deviant government officials could tie up a military tribunal for years.

Now they want us to believe a good replacement for Biden is Cackle-toes.  The same woman who dropped out of the presidential race having secured less than 3% of the votes.   The same woman who joins in the Pelosi inebriation ticket. Translation:   We can’t pretend anyone will vote for the brain-dead man, but we can pretend 90 million voted for the Jamaican – who would be her VP?  A Zionist.

Meanwhile, CSIS is still overtly concerned for how they can break the alliance between China and Russia while luring China back into a western controlled sphere.  With NATO in Washington this week, the supposed strategy is to build Europe into a position to take out Russia, while the US focuses its efforts on China – either as friend or military target.  In other words, Jinping will have one last occasion to agree to an Israeli/US coup or the US will use China as the fodder for WWIII.  China will never acquiesce.  Israel will be left to deal with the Middle East.

Again, with what weapons? 

Perhaps we are astray in our thinking.  Perhaps the US has a stash of weapons in its black book – or an array of weaponized satellites… because starting a war with China across thousands of miles seems rather idiotic without weapons or allies.   China and Russia have bases on Cuba.  So a prodded China would release a Cuba response – and the elite bunkers begin to make more sense.  While bunkers can be bought for as little as $21,000 – it is doubtful they would provide much use given their time line is based on a ‘few months’ of survival.  Then what?

France’s election is devolving into riots.  The New Popular Front Party was formed June 10, 2024.  While its banner declares they are socialist, their ideology is Marxist/Communist.  It is difficult to believe that France would vote communist, however it is notable that French election turnout is incredibly low at 18% to 22%.  Le Pen was winning a majority, Israel was vehemently claiming they backed her, Israel is Communist, did they play both sides?   Of course.  That’s how it is done.

It was a bold move on the part of the Zionists. But they have managed to deter uprisings before that challenge their control – and won.  However, this will splinter NATO and the EU.  Perhaps Soros’ prediction that the EU will break apart was based on this election chaos – knowing that the election was rigged.  A broken NATO means Ukraine is abandoned.  Which leaves Ukraine open to the Israel II occupation without sharing their wealth with anyone.  France and the UK will become revisionist replicas of the Soviet Union.  Germany will falter under bankruptcy.  And east European countries will blather blindly.

Monday, Monday…

Reprinted with permission from HelenaGlass.net.

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Donald Trump delivered a speech to the Libertarian Party Convention on May 25th (see it here; read its transcript here), and said that if he becomes President again, America will “quit spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fight other people’s wars”; and on May 28th, the Washington Post, headlined “Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour”, and reported that at one fundraising event for billionaires and centi-millionaires (not for mere voters), “he suggested that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan.” In other words: to him, regarding the current war in Ukraine, and regarding the long-sought-by-the-U.S.-Government war in Taiwan, those two wars and to-become wars (either of which war could easily escalate to WW3, though neither Ukraine nor Taiwan threatens U.S. national security), are not merely “other people’s wars,” but these are our wars — meaning, actually, those American billionaires’ and centi-millionaires’ wars — to which he, as the U.S. President, would respond immediately by bombing, respectively, Russia and China.

However, if he was lying to his megadonors, then he was telling the truth to his voters; and if he was lying to his voters, then he was telling the truth to his megadonors. In that sense, Trump was like a broken clock: it’s right twice each day; it’s not always wrong. But, regardless, a person would be reasonable to surmise that the vast majority of his voters believe that he will discontinue whatever the phrase “other people’s wars” means to them, and that the vast majority of his campaign’s funding comes from individuals who sell to the Pentagon or otherwise are investors in the corporations that derive their profits from all of America’s wars — that all of America’s wars are their wars, instead of merely “other people’s wars.” So, if a tension exists between these two sides (the individuals who provide the majority of the votes in his politics, versus the individuals who provide the majority of the funds in his politics); then, though Trump is telling opposite things to each of the two sides, the majority of the individuals on each ot the two sides of his campaign are believers in what he is telling them; and, therefore, that the real question for both of the two sides of his campaign is: Is he conning us, or is he instead conning the other side of ‘our’ campaign? And, of course, each of the two sides will think that the fools are on the opposite side, not on their own side, of Trump’s campaign. So: Are most of Trump’s megadonors fools, or are virtually all of Trump’s voters fools? That is the question here, is it not?

If that is the case, then Trump’s megadonors are investing in his campaign to take advantage of the fools who will be voting for him; and also Trump’s voters are taking advantage of the money that was donated by Trump’s megadonors in order to persuade them to vote for him. Each of the campaign’s two sides — the voting side and the funding side — is working together as part of the team to make Donald Trump the President again.

And that is how his campaign functions.

In American politics, at least ever since 1945, this has been the normal way for it to function.

I have been tracking Trump and other U.S. federal candidates and elected officials for decades, and have found that consistently what they promise to their megadonors in private (but which has nonetheless subsequently been leaked out) they fulfill on when they become federal officials; and what they promise to their voters they don’t fulfill on. This has certainly been true with both Trump and Biden.

Consequently: the probability is high that if either one of those becomes President for a final term in 2025, there will be WW3, and it will be the final everything. They have been promising that as President they will not let either Russia to win its war in Ukraine, or China to retain its Taiwan Province, and either one of those commitments will terminate our world. So, that is why neither of those is acceptable to vote for.

For an American to simply not fill in the Presidential line on the ballot will be irresponsible, however, because there are other options, including writing in a person’s name there, such as “Col. Douglas Macgregor” who has made unequivocally clear that as President he would NOT proceed any further toward WW3, and that specifically both Ukraine and Taiwan are legally and in reality none of America’s business — no threat, at all, to U.S. national security. But of course he isn’t getting any money from any billionaire; so, the only way he could even conceivably become America’s President is by his name being written onto Presidential ballots.

The American ‘democracy’ has presented to us such unacceptable options so that the prospects that a decent and intelligent person might become President are around zero percent, in which case, the concerns about “electability” ought likewise to count for only around zero percent, and everyone should instead vote only one’s conscience.

Please spread this article to everyone you can.

Reprinted with permission from Eric’s Substack.

The post Why Trump Too Is Totally Unacceptable appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Editor at Large for the Wall Street Journal, Gerry Baker, says: ‘We’ve been “gaslit’ and deceived” – for years – “all in the name of ‘democracy’”. That deceit “collapsed” with the Presidential debate, Thursday’.

“Until the world saw the truth … [against] the ‘misinformation’ … the fiction of Mr. Biden’s competence … suggests they [the Democrats] evidently thought they could get away with promoting it. [Yet] by perpetuating that fiction they were also revealing their contempt for the voters and for democracy itself”.

Baker continues:

“Biden succeeded because he made toeing the party line his life’s work. Like all politicians whose egos dwarf their talents, he ascended the greasy pole by slavishly following his party wherever it led … Finally—in the ultimate act of partisan servility, he became Barack Obama’s vice president, the summit of achievement for those incapable, yet loyal: the apex position for the consummate ‘yes man’”.

“But then, just as he was ready to drift into a comfortable and well-deserved obscurity, his party needed a front man … They sought a loyal and reliable figurehead, a flag of convenience, under which they could sail the progressive vessel into the deepest reaches of American life — on a mission to advance statism, climate extremism and self-lacerating wokery. There was no more loyal and convenient vehicle than Joe”.

If so, then who actually has been ‘pulling America’s strings’ these past years?

“You [the Democratic machine] don’t get to deceive, dissemble and gaslight us for years about how this man was both brilliantly competent at the job and a healing force for national unity – and now tell us, when your deception is uncovered, that it’s ‘bedtime for Bonzo’ – thanks for your service, and let’s move on”, Baker warns.

“[Now] it is going horribly wrong. Much of his party has no use for him anymore … in a remarkably cynical act of bait-and-switch, [they are trying to] swap him out for someone more useful to their cause. Part of me thinks they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. I find myself in the odd position of wanting to root for poor mumbling Joe … It’s tempting to say to the Democratic machine frantically mobilizing against him: You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to deceive, dissemble and gaslight us for years”.

Something significant has snapped within ‘the system’. It is always tempting to situate such events in ‘immediate time’, but even Baker seems to allude to a longer cycle of gaslighting and deception – one that only now has suddenly burst into open view.

Such events – though seemingly ephemeral and of the moment – can be portents to deeper structural contradictions moving.

When Baker writes of Biden being the latest ‘flag of convenience’ under which the ruling strata could sail the progressive vessel into the deepest reaches of American life – “on a mission to advance statism, climate extremism and self-lacerating wokery” – it seems probable that he is referring to the 1970s era of the Trilateral Commission and the Club of Rome.

The 1970s and 1980s were the point at which the long arc of traditional liberalism gave place to an avowedly illiberal, mechanical ‘control system’ (managerial technocracy) that today fraudulently poses as liberal democracy.

Emmanuel Todd, the French anthropological historian, examines the longer dynamics to events unfolding in the present: The prime agent of change leading to the Decline of the West (La Défaite de l’Occident), he argues, was the implosion of ‘Anglo’ Protestantism in the U.S. (and England), with its entailed habits of work, individualism and industry – a creed whose qualities were held then to reflect God’s grace through material success, and, above all, to confirm membership of the divine ‘Elect’.

Whereas traditional liberalism had its mores, the decline of traditional values triggered the slide towards managerial technocracy, and to nihilism. Religion lingers on in the West, though in a ‘zombie’ state, Todd avers. Such societies, he argues, flounder – absent some guiding metaphysical sphere that provides people with non-material sustenance.

However, the incoming doctrine that only a wealthy financial élite, tech experts, leaders of multinational corporations and banks possess the required foresight and technological understanding to manipulate a complex and increasingly controlled system changed politics completely.

Mores were gone – and so was empathy. Many experienced the disconnect and the disregard of cold technocracy.

So when a senior WSJ editor tells us that the ‘deception and ‘gaslighting’ collapsed with the CNN Biden-Trump debate, we should surely pay attention; He is saying the scales finally fell from peoples’ eyes.

What was being gaslighted was the fiction of democracy and also that of America declaring itself – in its own scripture – to be the trailblazer and pathfinder of humanity: America as the exceptional nation: the singular, the pure-of-heart, the baptizer, and redeemer of all peoples despised and downtrodden; the “last, best hope of earth”.

The reality was very different. Of course, states can ‘live a lie’ for a long period. The underlying problem – the point Todd makes so compellingly – is that you can be successful in deceiving and manipulating public perceptions, but only up to a point.

The reality was, it simply was not working.

The same is true of ‘Europe’. The EU’s aspiration to become a global geo-political actor too, was contingent on gaslighting the public that France, Italy and Germany et al could continue to be real national entities – even as the EU scooped up all national decision-making prerogatives, by deceit. The mutiny at the recent European elections reflected this discontent.

Of course, Biden’s condition has been long known. So who then has been running affairs; making critical daily decisions about war, peace, the composition of the judiciary and the boundaries of state authority? The WSJ piece gives one answer: “Unelected advisers, party hacks, scheming family members and random hangers-on make the critical daily decisions” on these issues.

Maybe we have to reconcile to the fact that Biden is an angry, senile man who yells at his staff: “During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction”.

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s very difficult and people are scared sh*tless of him.” The official added, “He doesn’t take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it”.

Seymour Hersh, the well-known investigative journalist reports:

“Biden’s drift into blankness has been ongoing for months, as he and his foreign policy aides have been urging a ceasefire that will not happen in Gaza whilst continuing to supply the weapons that make a ceasefire less likely. There’s a similar paradox in Ukraine, where Biden has been financing a war that cannot be won – yet refusing to participate in negotiations that could end the slaughter”.

“The reality behind all of this, as I’ve been told for months, is that Biden is simply ‘no longer there’ – in terms of understanding the contradictions of the policies he and his foreign policy advisers have been carrying out”.

On the one hand, Politico tells us: “Biden’s insular senior team are well acquainted with the longtime aides who continue to have the president’s ear: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, as well as Ted Kaufman and Klain on the outside”.

“It’s the same people — he has not changed those people for 40 years … The number of people who have access to the president has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. They’ve been digging deeper into the bunker for months now.” And, the strategist said, “the more you get into the bunker, the less you listen to anyone”.

In Todd’s words then, decisions are made by a small ‘Washington village’.

Of course, Jake Sullivan and Blinken sit at the centre of what is called the ‘inter-agency’ view. This where policy mostly is discussed. It is not coherent – with its locus in the National Security Committee – but rather is spread through a matrix of interlocking ‘clusters’ that includes the Military Industrial Complex, Congressional leaders, Big Donors, Wall Street, the Treasury, the CIA, the FBI, a few cosmopolitan oligarchs and the princelings of the security-intelligence world.

All these ‘princes’ pretend to have a foreign policy view, and fight like cats to protect their fiefdom’s autonomy. Sometimes they channel their ‘take’ via the NSC, but if they can, they will ‘stovepipe’ it directly to one or other ‘key actor’ with the ear of one, or other, Washington ‘village’.

Nonetheless, at bottom, the 1992 Wolfowitz doctrine which underscored American supremacy at all costs, in a post-Soviet world – together with “stamping out rivals, wherever they may emerge” – still today remains the ‘current doctrine’ framing the ‘inter-agency’ baseline.

Dysfunction at the heart of a seemingly functioning organization may persist for years without any real public awareness or appreciation of the descent into dysfunctionality. But then suddenly – when a crisis hits, or Presidential debate misfires – ‘poof’ and we see clearly the collapse of the manipulation that has confined discourse to within the various Washington villages.

In this light, some of the structural contradictions that Todd noted as contributory factors to western decline become unexpectedly ‘illuminated’ by events: Baker highlighted one: The key Faustian bargain: the pretence of a liberal democracy operating in tandem with a ‘classic’ liberal economy versus the reality of an illiberal oligarchic leadership sitting atop a hyper-financialised corporate economy that has both sucked the life from the classic organic economy, and created toxic inequalities too.

The second agent of western decline is Todd’s observation that the implosion of the Soviet Union rendered the U.S. so cock-a-hoop that the latter triggered a paradoxical unleashing of global ‘Rules-Based Order’ expansion of empire versus the reality that the West was already being consumed from its roots upwards.

The third agent to decline lay, Todd argues, with America declaring itself to be the greatest military nation on earth – versus the reality of an America that has long rid itself of much of its manufacturing capacity (particularly the military capacity), yet elects to clash with a stabilized Russia, a great power returned, and with China which has instantiated itself as the world’s manufacturing Behemoth (including militarily).

These unresolved paradoxes became the agents of western decline, Todd maintained. He has a point.

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

The post We Were ‘Deceived and Gaslit for Years’, All in the Name of ‘Democracy’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

The public results of the July 4 elections in Great Britain were a foregone conclusion long before they were announced in late May. With how disastrously the Tories had handled governing Britain in the wake of the Brexit referendum, as well as over the course of the Covid hysteria and it’s aftermath, it was a given that a significant chunk of voters would swing their votes to opposition parties and so remove the Tories from power. The main beneficiary was expected to be the long-time opposition to the Tories, namely the Labour party, and the expectation came to fruition, resulting in the resignation of Tory leader Rishi Sunak as prime minister and his replacement by Labour’s Keir Starmer. However the election proved to be more than a mere changeover from one party to another. Hidden in the details of the election results themselves, when evaluated in the light of other events and facts surrounding Britain’s current political situation, is a clear sign that a whirlwind is fast approaching Britain politically. This whirlwind will bring an end to the current British political system by toppling the Elite classes from their perches of power, and breaking apart the last remnants of the storied British Empire, which have limped along in survival mode since it’s great downsizing in the mid-20th century.

As in the United States, Britain’s electoral system is largely a uniparty system with a semblance of choice among parties “approved” by the Elite classes within politics, news, and the aristocracy. However, unlike the United States, Britain’s Uniparty system is split into three major parties: the Tories, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats. The Tories and Labour take turns at the top of the ruling pyramid with the Liberal Democrats, the descendants of the formerly dominant Liberal party, serving as an Elite-approved ‘wildcard’ party. Historically, all parties outside of this tri-party setup have been targeted for marginalization by the Elite classes, and either ignored, slandered, co-opted, or treated with condescension to prevent their rise to any real kind of power or influence.

While this setup has worked well for the British Elite for the majority of the 20th and early 21st centuries, certain long-term trends, as well as plans by certain nefarious actors within their ranks, have begun ripping this setup apart. To preserve their power, and save themselves from the long term trend of consequences of a British government living above its means for far too long, the majority of the British Elites have turned to the globalist plan to re-format the world known as the Great Reset. To that end, they have pushed policies to establish new structures in British society which can be used to support or bring about this Great Reset.

King Charles III is a devoted believer in the Great Reset, and since taking the throne in late 2022 has been using his influence behind the scenes to direct Britain towards this end. It is widely believed he allied with certain forces within the City of London and the Tory party in October 2022 to force Liz Truss from her position as prime minister. Her replacement, Rishi Sunak, had established connections to the World Economic Forum, the globalist organization at the front of the Great Reset campaign, which made the motive behind this move obvious. However, from the beginning of his reign, Charles made it clear through implication that the Labour party and it’s leader, Keir Starmer, were his preferred choice to run the empire and bring about implementation of the Great Reset. Content to let Sunak completely discredit the Tories in the eyes of the populace, and so ensure a larger Labour majority, Charles and the British Elites held off on pushing for an election in the immediate future. They seemed content that everything was trending in the right direction for eventual implementation of their plans.

That sense of complacent waiting vanished in late February 2024 when a local by-election for Parliament revealed a disturbing trend on the part of the British populace in the eyes of the Elites. In the Rochdale constituency, the voters delivered a stunning rejection of the Uniparty by electing populist leftist George Galloway of the Workers Party to fill a seat vacated by the recent death of a Labour member of Parliament. Further alarming the elites, the second place finisher in the by-election was a local businessman running as an independent, and the drop-off in vote totals from the top two finishers to the Uniparty candidates, who placed third, fourth and fifth, was uncomfortably large. That, taken in conjunction with local poll numbers showing an increasing level of dissatisfaction with Labour and Keir Starmer in addition to the Tories, sufficiently concerned the Elites that Prime Minister Sunak felt compelled to make an impromptu speech the day after the election condemning ‘extremism’ and warning through implication against supporting individuals outside the Elite circles like Galloway or his right wing counterpart Nigel Farage.

The reasons for this change in voting trends should have been obvious to the Elite circles if they had bothered to look at reality with their own eyes rather than through the rose-colored glasses of Great Reset idealism. Great Britain’s steady economic decline was leading to growing difficulties in living conditions for the populace, stirring up widespread discontent among the population. When combined with the ruling gentry being perceived as out of touch with the needs of their people, the voters inevitably began searching for other options. This is how voting preferences have changed within electoral systems for decades. One party is perceived as having been in power for so long that they have lost touch with the population, and voters switch over to a different party to change things up for the better (they hope).

However, what the world has not seen before electorally is what happens when an entire class of people, stretching across multiple political parties and ideologies, is perceived as being completely out of touch and in need of being replaced. This is the nature of the phenomenon now unfolding within Britain electorally and politically which, in turn, is leading to the impending whirlwind which is bearing down upon the nation and it’s elites. It is this phenomenon which seems destined to not only completely upend Britain electorally, but to bring an end to the unified political entity known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Read the Whole Article

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Friday morning, after the Trump-Biden face-off, the Washington Post printed the front page headline Biden struggles in testy debate, with letters more than half an inch tall. They were welcome words for the skeptics. We all know how the Post feels about Trump. Few running pages in so-called “TDS” circles said much different. The Donald’s friends in the press might like to consider a few reverse dance-steps too. Did 45 come off sharp and precise? Or, was it just not quite as addled as the other guy?

The apology for Uncle Joe’s feeble performance came up in the WP second sub-head; Trump’s untruths go unchallenged as barbs fly. There’s no doubt he was less than 100% accurate. But then, how close did 46 stay to the facts?

The overwhelming fact is that neither man looked close to a commanding performance. That description should be in broader circulation. Biden’s enemies have nothing to get excited about. How does a prosperous country of 350 million find these two inflicted upon them? I thought we were unduly oppressed when “W” and Prince Al were the choices in 2000. The latter candidate sounded like he would run out of steam groping for the next word. The former sounded like his father; the words didn’t really have to connect at all.

This time it was different. Both had a rough sense of their messages, a little too rough by any 8th grade standard, but straight, sensible sentences and answers evaded either of them.

The supposedly dull, lackluster Eisenhower came across with far more rhetorical force. Has the US degraded into a place without competent public speakers? Or people who fail at articulation altogether?

The rules in this debate were, by my lights, a vast improvement.  That might be Joe Biden’s finest accomplishment. The powers that be should have imposed similar debate structure long ago. By the time two doddering cranks arrive for the second time on the national stage the imposition of decorum is too late. The media sanctioned free-for-all of the past got us here. People looking down on the public from news industry pinnacles are always behind the curve.

 Why anyone could be a devoted fan of either candidate is mysterious. What kind of air-head would want a seat next to Trump or Biden in situations that required lengthy engagement? International travel on Air Force One over the past seven and one half years safely ranks among the top ordeals of the 21st century.

The editorial board of the New York Times authored “TO SERVE HIS COUNTRY, PRESIDENT BIDEN SHOULD LEAVE THE RACE” for the Sunday, June 30 Opinion Section. After going over Biden’s shortcomings they say: “It is a tragedy that Republicans themselves are not engaged in deeper soul-searching after Thursday’s debate. Mr. Trump’s own performance ought to be regarded as disqualifying.” The next two sentences – which could have come from nearly any legacy media source – explain how we get such dismal candidates in the first place. Referring to Trump:

“He lied brazenly and repeatedly about his own actions, his record as president and his opponent. He described plans that could harm the American economy, undermine civil liberties and fray America’s relations with other nations.”

The editors didn’t bother listing all the falsehoods from Atlanta on the 27th. It would be a long tally from either source. What of it?  Boomers endured an adult lifetime of Trump and Biden. Seeing neither of them as truthful, polite or less than narcissistic has never required the human acumen of Dostoyevsky. Joe Biden was widely known as a pathological liar when Trump was just an egomaniacal Big Apple Boor. That he could lie as persistently as Biden is more recent news.

The NYT can be awfully myopic when it comes to plans that “could harm” the economy. Do they notice the many who want out from under the foot of Biden energy policy? This administration is afraid of a gas stove. As home ownership slips out of new buyers reach, cities up and down the East Coast are teeming with vacant commercial square footage. Has the president given any thought to why people are short of living space? The Biden priority is re-engineering every appliance from electric can openers upward.  Has that NYT board noticed the cut price rises have taken out of lifestyles? Kids not named Biden might get raised on Ramen. The gang at 1600 Penn will gladly trade peasant nutrition for artificially inflated fossil fuel costs. Meanwhile, its federal, state and municipal employees – who have to commit murder on film to be fired – that look forward to pensions no one else gets. In times like these incumbents are usually sent packing, whether they can speak English competently or not.

What really astounds prescient readers is the “undermine civil liberties” line. Do the media-crats think nobody has heard about Biden’s creation of a Ministry of Truth? What about the criminalization of protest along political lines, selective prosecutions, strong arming social media, rifling the metadata, going after concerned parents at school board meetings and using churches to find DOJ prey? Biden minions on the Hill are livid with anyone second guessing Fed interference in electronic media. Access for all reduces Democrats into raging enemies of the first amendment. The press corps is scared to death of Trump stifling them like Archie on Edith. Several described PTSD and paranoia when the incredible orange blob was less than polite to them the first time around. What, other than rehabilitation camps, could be next?

In the meantime, they find restricting the reach of Joe Six-Pack’s voice to word of mouth a vital public service. This administration, with its numerous celeb and media friends, is ever in a rage that divergent opinion exists. There is nothing tacit about elitist desire to crush dissent. It is stretching from the classroom to the barroom. While all this goes on, every agency and bureaucracy in the alphabet soup finds itself above answering to the American people. Establishment print dailies have yet to report on the matter – YouTube is awash in videos attesting bureaucratic mum defiance before the legislature of the United States.

Then we get warned that Trump might “fray America’s relations with foreign nations.” Snowden revealed that beltway banditos were listening in on intimate conversation of foreign leadership everywhere. The NYT was mad the public found out – it never occurred to those geniuses it might “fray” anything. National secrets, from the developing world to the G-7 nations, were safely in the hands of Booz Allen. Major media has reincarnated Karl Rove, kingmaker of 2000, as a man to heed. The unnecessary war ginned up by the schemers he placed in the White House has lost relevance on the global playing field. The word “sh—hole” supposedly did more damage than thousands of drone attacks and missile barrages. Victoria Nuland bragging about handing out sandwiches in Maidan Square to feed a Ukrainian coup got little traction in the NYT. That same then high-ranking State official was recorded picking the interim government for country 5000 miles from us that Russia borders on. It was up at YouTube days later. Media rarely gives any attention to high-handed American moves on the global playing field. They prefer to piss and moan about skeptics who bother reporting that diplomatic “experts” contaminate every policy they touch. Noting any connection to new wars, violent unrest and terrorism is deemed treasonous heresy.

None of this should be taken as an endorsement of Trump. The point is media responsibility for the state of the American political arena. Did they actually believe they could get away with a system of selective reporting that would maintain the elitist status quo indefinitely? Are they really unaware of beltway insiders ruling federal fiefdoms with sullen contempt for popular volition?

The latest hot fad in 21st American journalism is ridding the industry of the twin plagues “objectivity” and “both-siderism.” Management is never satisfied, the truth is a moving target. Only yesterday those in charge of “the way it is,” lectured us on the greatness of yesteryear’s press heroism. It was, supposedly, lost in a new era of unvetted voices of deception. The fakes, we soon found, had swiped the expression “fake news” from Associate Professor of communication and media Mellissa Zimdars of Merrimack College. New expressions that include the word “fake” the media runs to like teen hipsters. Once common currency op-edifiers drop them – after finally grasping what they mean. The story in 2016 went that the gold standard maintained by Murrow, Cronkite, Reston, Lippmann and Rather had become a distant presstopia.

Suddenly, that wasn’t good enough. We now find that past professional informers, once canonized, employed “objectivity” as a bludgeon to snub minorities, keep women in the kitchen, promote hate and heterosexuality and entrench the white male patriarchy. The furtive truth, it seems, is always coming into its own. Whatever you do, don’t tinker with it at home. It’s a commodity too volatile for any hands but those of the experts. Catching them afoul of the facts is frequently likened to fascism.

What’s next in the program to legitimize some words and delegitimize others will be interesting. If you’re waiting for it to include what establishment voices got wrong, intentionally left out or simply lied about, don’t hold your breath. Media arrogance, incompetence, hubris and snobbery are what leave the public desperate for alternatives. The choices have degraded to the present two because of an agenda in newsrooms in spite of facts.

The Newspeak word “cheap-fake” is getting a lot less post debate ink. Editorial creep-fakes have taken over. Their next plot to improve on your understanding will be the old one repackaged. ‘Listen to us, nobody second-guessing the academy, the beltway blob, the foundering 4th estate or trusting his own senses can be trusted.’ Once you’ve been poisoned, finding the culprit might come too late

The post Who Cooked This Dish? appeared first on LewRockwell.

What passes for central banking today is really a perverse form of Wall Street-pleasing monetary manipulation. It employs the vocabulary of central banking, but in practice it fundamentally undermines main street prosperity, even as it showers the 1% (the top wealthiest people) with unspeakable financial windfalls.

Stated differently, virtually everything the Fed does for the alleged benefit of the American economy is both unnecessary and a ruse. The Fed has actually become a captive of the Wall Street traders, gamblers and high rollers, and functions mainly at their behest.

The proof of this proposition starts with the startling historical fact that the post-war US economy did just fine without any interest rate targeting, heavy-duty bond-buying or general macroeconomic management help from the Fed at all. For all practical purposes today’s omnipresent Fed domination of the financial and economic system was non-existent at that point in time.

We are referring to the full decade between Q4 1951 and Q3 1962 when the balance sheet of the Fed remained flat as a board at just $51 billion (black line). Yet the US economy did not gasp for lack of monetary oxygen. GDP grew from $356 billion to $609 billion or by 71% (purple line) during the period. That’s nominal growth of 5.1% per annum, and the majority of it represented real output gains, not inflation.

Change in Federal Reserve Balance Sheet Versus GDP, Q4 1951 to Q3 1962.

As it happened, this halcyon span encompassed the immediate period after the so-called Treasury-Fed Accord of March 1951, which finally ended the WWII expedient that had pegged Treasury bills at 0.375% and the long-bond at 2.5o% in order to finance the massive flow of war debt.

The effect of the WWII pegs, of course, was that the Fed had been obliged to absorb any and all US Treasury supply that did not clear the market at the target yields. Not surprisingly, the Fed’s 1937 balance sheet of $12 billion had risen by 4.3X to $51 billion by the time of the Accord, thereby reflecting what amounted to the original version of backdoor monetization of the public debt, which was justified at the time by the exigencies of war.

By contrast, in the post-peg period shown below interest rates were allowed by a newly liberated Fed to find their own market clearing levels. So there was no continuous guessing game on Wall Street about where the next monthly Fed meeting would peg short-term interest rates. Back then, it was understood that the forces of supply and demand down in the bond pits of Wall Street were fully capable of discovering the right interest rates, given the financial and economic facts then extant.

The combination of high growth, robust investment, strong wages and smartly rising real family income, on the one hand, and rock-bottom inflation on the other, surely constitutes the gold standard of performance for a modern capitalist economy.

And yet, and yet. It was all accomplished under a regime of persistent “light touch” central banking that assumed free market capitalism would find its own way to optimum economic growth, employment, housing, investment and main street prosperity. No monetary Sherpa at the Eccles Building was necessary.

Even more crucially, no money printing was necessary, either. The sterling economic results depicted below happened during a 11-year period when the Fed did not purchase one net dime of U.S. Treasury debt!

Per Annum Change, Q4 1951 to Q3 1962

• Real Final Sales: +3.8%.
• Real Domestic Investment: +4.1%.
• Nonfarm productivity growth: +2.5%.
• Real hourly wages: +3%.
• Real Median Family Income: +2.3%.
• CPI Increase: +1.3%

Federal Reserve Liabilities, 1937 to 1962

There is absolutely nothing about this period that makes the superior macroeconomic performance summarized above aberrational, flukish or unreplicable. In fact, President Eisenhower cut defense spending sharply and eliminated the fiscal deficit entirely during his second term. So, the cumulative increase in the public debt during this 11-year period was just $30 billion or a tiny 0.6% of GDP owing to Korean War borrowing early in the period.

But even this modest debt increase wasn’t monetized by Fed bond-buying. Instead, it was effectively financed out of private savings in the bond pits. Long-term bond yields, therefore, actually rose from the 2.5% pegged level shown below for 1942 to 1951 to upwards of 4% by the end of the period, as dictated by supply and demand. Still, the CPI averaged just 1.2% during 1959-1962, meaning that real yields bordered on +3.o% during the early 1960s.

That is to say, at the time, the Fed had seen no need to push real rates to zero and even into negative territory as has been the case for much of the last two decades. The fact is, the main street economy prospered mightily even when inflation-adjusted rates were providing a solid return to savers and investors.

Long-Term US Treasury Bond Yield, 1942 to 1962

What ended the benign economics of 1951 to 1962, of course, was the scourge of War Finance. LBJ (Lyndon B. Johnson) escalated the Vietnam War dramatically after 1963, causing the debt to soar and the 10-year UST to climb to nearly 6% by early 1968. But Johnson was not about to allow market clearing interest rates to fund his misbegotten venture in bringing the blessings of the Great Society to southeast Asia.

So he gave “the treatment” to the Fed Chairman at his Texas ranch and ordered to cut the Federal funds rate to accommodate LBJ’s surging Federal deficit. The latter had grown from $4.8 billion and -0.8% of GDP in 1963 to $25.2 billion and -2.8% of GDP by 1968.

Unfortunately, after steadily and appropriately raising the Fed funds rate from 2.9% in December 1962 to 5.75% by November 1966 as Johnson’s inflationary deficits grew, the funds rate was brought down rapidly to 3.8% by July 1967. In turn, that unleashed a red-hot wave of speculation and inflation, with the CPI rising from a 1% Y/Y (year-on-year) gain in August 1964 to a +6.4% peak in February 1970.

There is no mystery as to why the inflationary genie was now out of the bottle. Between Q3 1962 and Q4 1970, the Fed’s heretofore flat balance sheet (black line) soared skyward, rising from $52 billion to $85 billion over the eight-year period. That amounted to a 6% per year gain, meaning that the precedent for aggressive balance sheet expansion had now been firmly established.

Inflation-Adjusted Yield on 10-Year UST Versus Fed Balance Sheet Growth, 1962 to 1970

The first victim, of course, was inflation-adjusted bond yields (purple line above). As shown above, the healthy +3% real yield of 1962 fell to barely +1% by the end of 1970.

Yet the crucial essence of this “guns and butter” breakdown cannot be gainsaid. To wit, the Fed was not driven to this first round of post-war money-printing and debt monetization because the private economy had gone into a mysterious swoon or failure mode and therefore needed a helping hand from the nation’s central bank.

To the contrary, this was a Washington driven departure from sound central banking pure and simple. And as we will amplify below, it was off to the races of Rogue Central Banking from there.

Once the inflation genie was out of the bottle with the CPI clocking in at 6% by the fall of 1970, the Fed struggled for more than a decade to put it back. Consequently, any focus on stimulating growth, jobs, housing and investment was infrequent and definitely secondary to inflation-fighting.

We amplify the 1970s flood of central bank money and the resulting inflationary mess below, but it is important to note at the onset that despite four recessions (1970, 1975, 1980 and 1981) and very little pro-growth help from what was now an inflation-preoccupied Fed, the US economy did expand at a decent clip during the interval between Q4 1969 and Q2 1987.

The economic growth rate (real final sales basis) averaged a solid +3.1% per annum, but that occurred due to the inherent growth propensities of private capitalism and despite the roadblocks thrown up by periodic bouts of monetary stringency. In fact, three Fed chairman served during that 17.5-year interval—Burns, Miller and Volcker—and with varying degrees of success their focus was overwhelmingly on suppressing inflation, not goosing growth.

As it happened, the growth rates of jobs, productivity and real median family income during this period were not especially outstanding, but these metrics didn’t plunge into an economic black hole, either.

Self-evidently, these outcomes on main street were the work of market capitalism, not the central bank. The latter was leaning hard against inflation during most of the period—so this absence of central bank “help” is just further proof that easy money stimulus is not necessary for solid growth and main street prosperity.

Per Annum Change, Q4 1969 to Q2 1987

• Real Final Sales of Domestic Product: +3.1%.
• Labor hours employed: +1.5%.
• Nonfarm productivity: +1.8%.
• Real Median Family Income: +1.2%.

For avoidance of doubt, here is the path of the Federal funds rate as the above macroeconomic performance was unfolding. To wit, the Fed’s recurrent anti-inflation initiatives caused the funds rate to gyrate wildly like some kind of monetary jumping bean. In the run-up to each of the four recessions designated by the shaded areas of the graph, the increase in the Fed funds rate was as follows:

• 1970: +340 basis points.
• 1974: +960 basis points.
• 1980: +1,290 basis points.
• 1981: +440 basis points.

Needless to say, these successive rate-raising campaigns amounted to hammer blows to the main street economy. There is no way that these violent interest rate swings and the consequent start and stop economic cycles—four recessions in only 17 years— were a tonic for growth during this era of high and volatile inflation.

In effect, the reasonably solid macroeconomic performance quantified above represents a kind of free market minimum. It reflects the relentless drive of workers, consumers, entrepreneurs, businessmen, investors, savers and speculators to better their own economic circumstances—even in the face of inflationary roadblocks and anti-inflation financial manipulation by the central bank.

Federal Funds Rate, August 1968 to June 1987

Of course, the inflationary roadblocks were enormous, and far beyond any prior peacetime experience. Compared to the 1.3% inflation average during 1951 to 1962, the CPI rose at a 5.6% rate over 1969:4 to 1987:2.

And that included the benefit of the sharp drop in inflation engineered by Paul Volcker during the final four years of the period. Thus, during the decade of the 1970s through the Y/Y inflation peak at 14.6% in April 1980, the CPI rose by an average of 7.7% per annum.

In turn, this introduced the wage-earning classes for the first time to the treadmill of robustly rising nominal wage rates, which become almost entirely consumed by sharply rising consumer prices. Thus, during the decade ending in the inflationary peak of Q2 1980, average hourly earnings in nominal terms rose by 7.6% per annum. But, alas, what stuck to the walls of workers’ bank accounts was a gain of only 1.1% per annum during the same period. All the rest was eaten up by inflation.

Y/Y Change in the CPI, 1960 to 1987

If the wage/price treadmill effect introduced after 1969 was the whole story, the impact might be considered minimally tolerable. The resilience of market capitalism was shown to be sufficiently strong so as to overcome much of the inflationary headwinds, along with the Fed’s punishing cycles of anti-inflation tightening.

Unfortunately, however, what also materialized out of the 1970s inflation era were two exceedingly harmful corollaries.

The first was the notion that the job of the central bank was to manage the rate of change in the general price level, rather than the far more modest original remit. The latter presumed the presence of noninflationary gold-backed money—so inflation-management would have been an oxymoron. Consequently, the Fed’s actual statutory mandate was simply to provide liquidity and reserves to the banking system based on market rates of interest. The Fed heads didn’t need to know from the CPI, PCE deflator or any other modern inflation measuring stick that had not yet been invented.

As it happened, however, management of the short run pace by which the general price level is rising was a fateful portal into statist central banking and the plenary management of the macro-economy in which the inflation indices are inextricably embedded. Eventually the bastard son of this strategic opening to vastly expanded state power materialized as the holy grail of 2% inflation.

Yet, here’s the thing. Until the gold-backed dollar was deep-sixed by Nixon in August 1971 and the possibility of rising, persistent and eventually double-digit peacetime inflation materialized in the 1970s, the idea of central bank management of the inflation rate didn’t even exist. That’s because peacetime price stability was the default condition of the gold standard world. Indeed, from the Napoleonic Wars forward, “inflation” and wartime were pretty much synonymous because fiat money was almost invariably a temporary wartime expedient.

The other legacy of the inflationary 1970s was the breakout of high and ever rising unit labor costs in the US economy. This unnecessary but pervasive economic deformation eventually resulted in the massive offshoring of the US industrial economy.

The implication, of course, is that it would have been far better to stick with William McChesney Martin’s golden era of high growth, low inflation, a flat Federal Reserve balance sheet and interest rates driven overwhelmingly by supply and demand forces in the private financial markets. But as it happened, the Fed’s balance sheet during the decade of high inflation was the very opposite of flat.

Under the three successive Chairmen, the Fed’s balance sheet grew at the following compound annual rates:

• Arthur Burns (Feb. 1970 to March 1978): +6.9%.
• William Miller (March 1978 to August 1979): +9.5%.
• Paul Volcker (August 1979 to August 1987): +6.8%.

Growth Lift-off of Federal Reserve Balance Sheet, Q1 1970 to Q2 1987

In a word, Volcker sharply slowed the runaway growth of the Fed’s balance sheet which had occurred under the regime of William Miller—the hapless former CEO of a conglomerate which made golf carts, snowmobiles and Cessna aircraft. But when all was said and done, the Volcker Fed still pumped new money into the economy at a rate barely below that of Arthur Burns. And Burns, of course, was the villain central banker who had ignominiously succumbed to Nixon’s entreaties to “give me money, Arthur” in support of his re-election campaign in 1972.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post Why the Federal Reserve is Running Out of Monetary Oxygen appeared first on LewRockwell.

For most of European history, wars were fought with the understanding that if they became too destructive and costly, they could be concluded with a negotiated settlement. Once it became clear that one side was gaining the upper hand, the other side could sue for peace instead of dragging it out and getting a lot more people killed and property destroyed.

Even during the great 16th century wars between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian nations of Europe, the opposing commanders were occasionally reasonable and humane enough to cease fighting when it became clear that nothing could be gained from prolonging it. The Ottoman siege of Rhodes in 1522 was a notable example, when Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent allowed the Knights Hospitaller to surrender on generous terms.

After Napoleon was defeated in 1815, the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw and stated that no power would ever negotiate with him again. This was an early example of the doctrine of “Unconditional Surrender.” However, this was only after he broke the convention of his confinement to the island of Elba.

During the American Civil War, Union General Grant adopted the policy of “Unconditional Surrender” in dealing with Confederate officers who asked for terms. He did, however, agree to negotiate with General Lee at Appomattox. Though I’ve never found time to investigate it, I have heard that the European general staffs marveled at the iron will of Generals Grant and Sherman to suffer stupendous losses in order to annihilate the enemy instead of negotiating with him.

The policy of Unconditional Surrender reached its apotheosis at the Casablanca Conference in 1943, when Stalin persuaded Roosevelt and Churchill to adopt and announce it as official policy in the war against Germany.

Stalin did this because he was afraid the British and Americans would do a separate peace deal with German military officers who didn’t like Hitler and wanted to get rid of him. Because the Russians were doing most of the fighting, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to Stalin’s demand. Not surprisingly, Nazi propagandists immediately seized upon this declaration as a perfect reason for why the German military should NEVER surrender, but fight bis zur letzten Patrone — “till the last cartridge.”

The trouble with this Unconditional Surrender policy was that it was not only applied to the Nazi regime, but equally to German military officers who would have gladly gotten rid of Hitler. Had the Americans and British supported German resistance officers instead of repeatedly spurning them, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators might have succeeded in getting rid of Hitler and the Nazis in July of 1944.

Numerous historians have noted that by far the most destructive phase of the war was between Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 and and May 7, 1945. This last year of the war also coincided with the most murderous phase of the Holocaust in the extermination camps of German occupied Poland.

Ever since Casablanca, the U.S. military and political class has insisted that there can NEVER be any negotiated settlement. Thus, it seems to me, Putin should have realized that the Americans would NOT negotiate with him after hostilities commenced, but would encourage the Ukrainians to fight (with American arms) bis zur letzten Patrone.

Alone among European leaders, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban seems to understand that the doctrine of unconditional surrender is not a rational approach in dealing with Russia during the current war in Ukraine. According to multiple news reports, Orban’s trip to Moscow has enraged the other European heads of state, who apparently prefer that the Ukrainians kill every male in the country—firing armaments supplied by the West—before negotiating with the Russians.

To this day, I’ve not heard a SINGLE commentator explain why the U.S. and EU did not at least try to negotiate an Austrian style neutrality deal for Ukraine? Austrian neutrality was formalized on October 26, 1955; Russia withdrew its occupational army from Austria and has honored the deal ever since.

Had a neutrality deal been negotiated for Ukraine—and had the Russians subsequently violated it—this would have been grounds for a full-scale war. Why didn’t the Western powers at least give this a try in early 2022?

You cannot make peace from a comfortable armchair in Brussels. Even if the rotating EU-Presidency has no mandate to negotiate on behalf of the EU, we cannot sit back and wait for the war to miraculously end. We will serve as an important tool in making the first steps towards… pic.twitter.com/5pqREmP8EN

— Orbán Viktor (@PM_ViktorOrban) July 5, 2024

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Viktor Orban Defies EU’s Absurd ‘Unconditional Surrender’ Doctrine appeared first on LewRockwell.

Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. —Olivia Nuzzi, NY Magazine

There’s a reason that the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes is so potent: it describes a mentally ill society that retreats into abject unreality, to avoid contending with truth. Alas, this archetypal human quandary shoves such a society towards nemesis: downfall and punishment. And that is exactly the consequence of our news media’s craven, dishonorable, degenerate behavior the past decade.

They have disordered our nation’s consensus about reality with peremptory lying about everything, in service to a political party that lies to its citizens about everything. The big question is: who or what recruited them into serving the Party of Chaos, and why did they go along?

You can explain the media’s initial repugnance to Donald Trump going back to his 2015 debut in politics. Much about him had a low-class odor, despite all the gold-plating — his origins in tawdry Queens, his career as a builder in Manhattan where the trades are mob-controlled, the Atlantic City casino debacle, bankruptcy, ditching Ivana and his mid-life playboy reputation, the tacky TV show, the increasingly mystifying hair-doo, his rough, jumbly manner of speech. Everything about him repelled the Ivy Leaguers who increasingly filled the ranks of national-level journalism.

Despite all that, Mr. Trump raised five kids successfully. The grown ones had careers and they all visibly loved him. With that and his overt masculinity, he assumed the lineaments of the archetypal Daddy, which enflamed the enormous cohort of feminists who had taken over the Democratic Party behind their avatar Hillary Clinton. And when he squeaked out an electoral victory over her in 2016, they were sure it was cheat. The menace of Daddy in da (White) house pushed them over the edge psychologically.

Daddy was all about setting boundaries, which was the antithesis to the “progressive” (and transgressive) agenda of the Dems, and was probably the reason that his talk of “building the wall” along the Mexican border drove them nuts. It signaled patriarchal control of a whole lot of other things, too. Boundaries galore!

Now, it happened that the Democratic Party was also the favored party of the DC permanent bureaucracy, which had been growing and growing for decades and had become overtly politicized during the eight years of Barack Obama. Mr. Trump threatened to downsize this leviathan government, meaning many patronage jobs might be lost. (Boundaries would be imposed!) The warrior branch of this Deep State was the Intel community. The FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the State Dept, and elements of the military were commissioned by the Democratic Party to destroy Mr. Trump.

They used the machinery of the law to lay one trip after another on the president and effectively hog-tied him — RussiaGate, the Ukraine phone call impeachment, the George Floyd anarchy — and when those operations failed to oust him, they ran the Covid-9 caper (with enormous collateral damage to the people and their economy), which enabled rigging the 2020 election with mail-in ballots. Once Mr. Trump was squeezed out-of-office, the FBI turned the J-6 protest at the Capitol into a riot, which Nancy Pelosi then converted into an “insurrection” using the House J-6 committee. The J-6 incident, they dearly hoped, would rid them of Mr. Trump once and for all.

The news media went along with every bit of that, year after year, converting each mendacious act of the party and the bureaucracy into consumable narrative, and lying either overtly about all the ops, or just omitting to report on the dark truth behind it all. Any reality-based thread that happened to leak into public view from independent alt-news reporters was branded by CNN, The New York Times, the WashPo, and many others as “misinformation” — a newish concept produced by a cadre of language Stasi skilled at inverting the meaning of anything to bamboozle the public. It appears that the news media became so invested psychologically in its own dishonest product that it began to believe its own bullshit.

Or, at least, they wanted to pretend to believe it. One of the big problems was that absolutely everything they labeled “misinformation” or “conspiracy theory” turned out to be truthful, and that was becoming an inescapable embarrassment. And then the biggest blunder they made was going along with the Deep State’s selection of “Joe Biden” in the very sketchy Super Tuesday primary of 2020. The old grifter had next-to-zero support in all the preceding preliminaries and somehow (abracadabra !) he swept the field.

By then, the Democratic Party, and its public relations arm in the mainstream media, had descended into florid mental illness. Everything they stood for post-World War Two flipped to its opposite. Suddenly, they were against free speech. They weren’t coy about it. They just made-up some new bullshit about free speech being “hate speech.” Similarly, they were against a free press. They went along with all the misinfo / disinfo bullshit the government cooked up and supported its role in suppressing the news. They were no longer anti-war, the party-of-peace. They were now pro-segregation and pro-discrimination (white people need not apply) according to Critical Race Theory (a childishly sketchy doctrine). Most of all, they were no longer skeptical of anything that the leviathan establishment wanted to do, including abridging the liberties of American citizens.

Then there was the campaign to use the most powerful human instinct, sexuality, as a weapon to disorder the minds of American children, leading even to the mutilation of their bodies — a program that unmistakably tipped toward genuine evil, suggesting that actual psychosis lay behind the Cluster-B crypto-Marxism used to justify it.

“Joe Biden” was fine with all of that, and the news media was fine with “Joe Biden” and whoever was using him as a front. Of course, it was evident during the 2020 campaign that “Joe Biden” was not up to a job as demanding as Chief Executive of the US government — and that was even apart from the dense criminal web of influence peddling discovered around him and his family, which the news media ignominiously ignored. But now the years have gone by and there’s no hiding “Joe Biden’s” rather gravely diminished mental abilities.

Last week’s debate gave away the game. It had the effect of finally turning off the gaslight that the news media has been shining over the republic lo these many years. They can no longer pretend that this president is anything close to okay in body and mind. They can’t annul the gaslighted public’s delayed realization that they’ve been subject to a concerted program of deliberate lying for a long long time.

So now, inveterate pretenders and liars, such as Jake Tapper of CNN and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times — and many others — have to pretend that they were innocently duped into supporting all the turpitudes of the Democratic Party / Deep State axis-of-evil. It is really hard to imagine that they can successfully rehabilitate their reputations. They have done immense harm to our country. It’s hard to see how the Democratic Party might survive, too, no matter who they finally put up for election this year. Of course, there’s still plenty of time left for them to destroy the country altogether. Just keep giving American missiles to Ukraine to fire into Russia and see what happens.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Who Turned Off the Gaslight? appeared first on LewRockwell.

No one would think of the Beltway as being a place of the naive innocents of our society. Washington is the only ecosystem composed entirely of apex predators. Yet, this week everyone seems to be eternally shocked by what has been obvious for years.

The press and pundits are coming off an embarrassing couple of weeks where the Hunter Biden laptop was authenticated in federal court as real. This occurred in the trial of the president’s son almost on the anniversary of a debunked letter of intelligence officials claiming that the laptop appeared to be Russian disinformation. Biden then repeated the claim in the last presidential debates to avoid answering questions over the massive influence peddling scheme of this family revealed by the laptop.

After the story was suppressed before the 2020 election, it took years for the media to admit that, oops, the laptop is surprisingly real.

For years, the press and pundits piled on experts who suggested that Covid 19 escaped from a Chinese lab. The New York Times reporter covering the area called it “racist” and implausible.  Now, even W.H.O. accepts the lab theory as possible and federal agencies now believe it is the most likely explanation.

The response: surprise and spin.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Justice Department has unlawfully charged hundreds of people with obstruction of an official proceeding after the January 6th riot. For years, objections to the excessive treatment of these cases were dismissed as the view of the radical right. Now, even Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson voted to toss out these convictions.

Surprise.

Whether it was the false story about agents whipping migrants in Texas or the photo op claim in Lafayette Park, false stories were disproven only to have a collective shrug from those who spread them.

For years, the press and pundits have repeated like gospel that Trump had called neo-Nazis “fine people.” At the time, most of us noted that Trump condemned the racists and neo-Nazis and made the statement about fine people on both sides of the controversy over the removal of historic statues.

Six years later, Snopes finally decided to do a fact check and, surprise, found that Trump never praised neo-Nazis as fine people. The only person not surprised was Biden who repeated the false story on Friday as true.

Heading into the presidential debate, the White House and the media attacked Fox News and other outlets for “cheap fake” videos designed to make the President look confused and feeble. For months, politicians and pundits have insisted that Biden is sharp and commanding in conversations even after Special Counsel Robert Hur cited his decline as a reason for not charging him criminally for the unlawful retention and mishandling of classified material.

On MSNBC, Joe Scarborough stated “start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And F— you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I have known him for years…If it weren’t the truth I wouldn’t say it.”

Then the presidential debate happened and, after years of being protected by staff, tens of millions of people watched the president struggle to stay focused and responsive.

After the debate, there was total surprise, if not shock, on CNN and MSNBC. Suddenly, it is not a cheap fake but reality.

Just seven days before the debate, the New York Times was running cheap fake articles on how Biden was being wrongly portrayed. The day after the debate, it was calling for him to withdraw from the race after expressing shock at his appearance.

On CNN, Biden biographer and CNN contributor Evan Osnos admitted that many Americans were likely “shocked” by Biden’s appearance: “I don’t think there’s any other way to put it. This was clearly a person who was diminished from where he was on the debate stage four years ago.”

Pro-Biden columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that he was floored by what he saw and that “heartbreaking” appearance of Biden made him “weep.”

Washington is now full of surprises. It is a city of people who display that practiced faux shock that you adopt when you learn in advance that your friends are throwing a surprise party. The key is to look stunned and then mingle.

It is a city of Claude Rains:

The laptop is real, the President is really old, and Washington is really really phony.

The only thing that would be more surprising is if pundits and the press started being a lot less shocked and more honest.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

The post The Art of Being Eternally Shocked appeared first on LewRockwell.

I always found it odd that everyone insisted I avoid sunlight and wear sunscreen during outdoor activities, as I noticed that sunlight felt great and caused my veins to dilate, indicating the body deeply craved sunlight. Later, I learned that blocking natural light with glass (e.g., with windows or eyeglasses) significantly affected health, and that many had benefitted from utilizing specialized glass that allowed the full light spectrum through. This ties into one of my favorite therapeutic modalities, ultraviolet blood irradiation, which produces a wide range of truly remarkable benefits by putting the sun’s ultraviolet light inside the body.

Once in medical school, aware of sunlight’s benefits, I was struck by dermatologists’ extreme aversion to it. Patients were constantly warned to avoid sunlight, and in northern latitudes, where people suffer from seasonal affective disorder, dermatologists even required students to wear sunscreen and cover most of their bodies indoors.  At this point my perspective changed to “This crusade against the sun is definitely coming from the dermatologists” and “What on earth is wrong with these people?”

The Monopolization of Medicine

Throughout my life, I’ve noticed the medical industry will:

•Promote healthy activities people are unlikely to do (e.g., exercising or quitting smoking).

•Promote unhealthy activities industries make money from (e.g., eating processed foods or taking a myriad of harmful pharmaceuticals).

•Attack beneficial activities that are easy to do (e.g., sunbathing or consuming egg yolks, butter and raw dairy).

Much of this issue appears rooted in the controversial history of the American Medical Association (AMA). In 1899, the struggling organization revitalized itself by offering the AMA seal of approval to manufacturers who simply disclosed their ingredients and advertised in AMA publications. This strategy boosted AMA’s advertising revenue fivefold and its physician membership ninefold in a decade. For example, the AMA widely encouraged cigarette smoking, even when it was known to be dangerous:

The AMA then monopolized medicine by establishing a general medical education council, that allowed them to become the national accrediting body for medical schools, effectively eliminating the teaching of competing medical practices like homeopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, and, to a lesser extent, osteopathy, as states often denied licenses to graduates from “low-rated” schools.

The AMA then further solidified this monopoly by having the media widely promote AMA campaigns against “medical quackery” (e.g., treatments they couldn’t buy the rights to) and mobilizing the FDA or FTC against competitors. Many remarkable medical innovations hence were successfully erased from history and part of my life’s work and much of what I use in practice are the therapies the AMA erased from history.

These monopolistic tactics never stopped. For example, after Dr. Pierre Kory testified to the Senate about using ivermectin to treat COVID-19, he faced intense media and professional backlash. Professor William B. Grant, then emailed Kory, stating that the same thing had been done to vitamin D research for decades.

Note: a few doctored trials were published that “debunked” ivermectin, thereby allowing the AMA to erase the vast body of evidence supporting the use of ivermectin—a standard tactic identical to what they did 72 years ago to bury Ultraviolet Blood Irradiation.

The Benefits of Sunlight

One of the oldest proven therapies in medicine is sunlight exposure, which effectively treated the 1918 influenza, tuberculosis, and various other diseases. The success of sunbathing even inspired the development of ultraviolet blood irradiation.

Given its safety, effectiveness, free availability and lack of a lobbyist to protect it, it’s hence plausible that those aiming to monopolize medicine would seek to restrict public access to it. Medicine’s campaign against sunlight has been so effective that many are unaware of its benefits, including:

1. Mental Health: Sunlight is crucial for mental well-being, notably in conditions like seasonal affective disorder, but its benefits extend further, as unnatural light exposure disrupts circadian rhythms.
2. Cancer Prevention: A large epidemiological study discovered that women with higher solar UVB exposure had half the incidence of breast cancer, and men half the incidence of fatal prostate cancer. This 50% reduction greatly exceeds the effectiveness of current prevention and treatment approaches. Likewise, unnatural light has been repeatedly observed to worsen cancer outcomes.
3. Longevity and Heart Health: A 20 year prospective study of 29,518 Swedish women found that sunlight avoiders were 60% more likely to die overall (and 130% more likely to die than the highest sun exposure group). Notably, smokers who got sunlight had the same mortality risk as non-smokers who avoided the sun as the greatest benefit of sunlight exposure is a reduction in death from cardiovascular disease.

Note: the link between losing natural light and conditions such as infertility, diabetes, cancer, poor circulation, depression, ADHD, and poor academic performance is discussed further here.

Skin Cancer

According to the American Academy of Dermatology, skin cancer is the most common cancer in the United States, with current estimates suggesting that one in five Americans will develop skin cancer in their lifetime. Approximately 9,500 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with skin cancer every day.

The Academy emphasizes that UV exposure is the most preventable risk factor for skin cancer, advising people to avoid indoor tanning beds and protect their skin outdoors by seeking shade, wearing protective clothing, and applying broad-spectrum sunscreen with an SPF of 30 or higher.

The Skin Cancer Foundation states that more than two people die of skin cancer in the U.S. every hour, which sounds alarming. Let’s break down what all this means.

Read the Whole Article

The post Dermatology’s Horrendous War Against the Sun appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is nothing natural about this. The way things are. The way we are living. If this was the natural and healthy way for human society to exist, it wouldn’t require mountains of propaganda spin to keep it going.

Without copious amounts of mental narratives being fed to us by people in power, it would never occur to anyone that it’s a good or normal idea to commit to wars of aggression on the other side of the planet, or to back genocides, or to militarize globally with hundreds of military outposts around the world, or to foster systems which allow a few people to have far too much while others have far too little, or to destroy the biosphere we depend on for survival for the sake of shareholder profits. It would never occur to us to accept these things if we weren’t living our lives saturated in a nonstop barrage of narratives explaining that we should accept them.

We live like this throughout our entire lives. Through mass-scale psychological manipulation our minds are twisted into freakish and unnatural shapes to ensure that we will think, speak, act, work, spend and vote in ways we would never otherwise would, all to keep the wheels of this freakish and unnatural dystopia turning. If the powerful did not control the dominant narratives of this civilization, we would be living in a very different world than the one we live in today.

Narrative is how humans tend to get themselves into trouble. The believed thought stories in our minds are what drive us to hate, abuse, harm and kill our fellow humans. They’re what drive us into a state of anxiety even in moments when our bodies are completely safe and all our material needs are being met. They’re what have convinced humans to march out and fight wars and commit atrocities throughout the ages. Most of human suffering ultimately arises from believed thought stories.

But believed thought stories are what shape this civilization. The only reason why power exists where it exists, why nations and their borders exist as they do, why money operates the way that it operates, why laws are written and obeyed, is because we’ve all agreed to believe a bunch of made-up narratives saying that these things are true. Tomorrow Americans could all agree that Taylor Swift is the Dictator Supreme of the United States and that copper pennies are the only form of money with any value, and if enough people believed those narratives, those narratives would become reality.

That’s the power of narrative, and that’s why powerful people pour so much energy into harnessing it. Through the power of narrative, we can be convinced to consent to things as absurd as weapons contractors using their wealth to lobby for wars and militarism, which gives them more wealth that they can then spend on more lobbying. Or working forty hours a week making our boss far more money than we get paid in a company that’s killing our ecosystem just so that we can give our paychecks to some landlord in order to live in a building on the dying planet we were born on, solely because the boss and the landlord happened to luck into owning the company and the building. Or world leaders brandishing armageddon weapons at one another.

This backwards, insane civilization only looks normal to us because it has been deliberately normalized throughout our lives via careful narrative control by the people who benefit from it. Narrative rules our lives.

Without any believed narrative in your head, there’s just peaceful being with what is, and the human animal body tending to its few human animal needs. Add in a bunch of believed narrative and then all of a sudden you’ve got a self, others, desires, agendas, enemies, social standing, goals, inadequacy, stress, a painful past and a frightening future.

It is possible for the human organism to live without believed narratives in the shift in perception commonly known as spiritual enlightenment, and it is possible for humans as a whole to drop the believed narratives that are being imposed on us by the powerful in the same way. And just as enlightenment brings with it the realization that the old way of perceiving was actually an unnatural way of operating, awakening from the dominant narratives of our day will allow us to move into a much more natural way of existing with each other and with our ecosystem on this planet.

You can call this a lofty and unattainable goal if you want, but to me I’m just talking about the one and only adaptation that has any chance of steering our species away from annihilation. Every species hits an adaptation-or-extinction juncture at some point in its existence, and we’re arriving at ours right now. We’ll either transcend our unhealthy relationship with narrative, or we’ll wipe ourselves out via nuclear war or environmental destruction.

Every sign I’m seeing right now suggests we have the ability to go either way.

___________________

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The post This Civilization Is Deeply Unnatural appeared first on LewRockwell.

Recently I came across a November 2015 issue of Road & Track. It contains an article comparing the 1965 Ford Mustang Shelby GT 350, a muscle car of its time, with the 2016 Ford Mustang Shelby GT 350R, a muscle car of its time.

The 51 years difference allowed the 2016 version to reach 60 miles an hour from a standing start 3.1 seconds quicker and allowed a 51 mph higher top speed.

The 2016 version cost 14 times more and weighs 860 pounds more. In addition to inflation I suspect the additional weight accounts for a good share of the additional cost and that the weight is accounted for by safety regulations written by bureaucrats.

These “safety” regulations have more impact on us than cost, weight, and inconvenience. The “safety” regulations have stolen visibility. Think about it for a moment. How does reducing visibility while making cars faster make us safer? Cars used to have tremendous visibility, not only forward but rearward and on the sides. You could check your rear by looking over your left shoulder. You could check your right side with a glance to the right. This wonderful visibility was wiped out in the name of “safety.”

First high-backed seats were mandated so you could no longer look over your left shoulder or your right. Next the side pillars were made massive so that you cannot even see anything on either side, and the front windscreen pillars were made massive so that if you turn left downhill you cannot see if there is anything in the road, such as a child, animal, or pothole. You cannot even see if a road is there.

As you can no longer see to the rear and to the sides the manufacturers use cameras. But unless you are young and learned to drive with cameras, you forget to use them. You are trying to look with your own eyes, and the “safety” bureaucrats have made it impossible. Use our artificial eyes they demand.

There was a time when only sport cars had seat belts. They were lap belts. Next sport cars moved to shoulder belts. This was prior to safety regulation. Sports cars had them because some drivers tended to drive the cars in a sporting manner.

“Safety” bureaucrats next mandated seat belts. Laws were passed to ticket you if you were caught driving without your belts. This was another new infraction that brought revenue to the state.

Next came airbags. At first they were deployed in front of the driver and front passenger. Today the airbags are also in the side doors and above your head. Consequently, what was once an inconsequential fender bender easily repaired at minor cost is now a total loss. The cost of fixing the car might be small, but the cost of replacing the multiple air bags is huge.

Consequently, car insurance costs have skyrocketed. It cost more to insure a car today than it did to insure a house when I was a young man.

When I was a Wall Street Journal editor I came across a study by an economist who investigated the impact of car safety regulations. He found that the safety features made drivers feel more secure, so they drove in more aggressive and risky ways. I wrote an editorial about it.

Isn’t this what we have all observed? People who drive the massive “pickup” trucks and SUVs sit far above the sedan world and drive as if they are invulnerable.

What I have noticed about my 2018 model year “safety” car is that the door lock system is designed to protect against car-jacking and is a massive frustration to the owner who uses the car. Whenever I get out of the car, no other doors unlock. I have to get back into the car and push a button that unlocks the doors so that I can get the groceries out and into the house.

I remember cars that when the driver exited, all doors unlocked. Of course then, we were a homogeneous nation and there was no such thing as car-jacking or robbery in shopping malls and grocery store parking lots.

The personal protection safety features are a response to the tower of babel in which we now live. We see these safety features everywhere. Locked gates, some manned by personnel 24/7, protecting residential areas. Metal detectors in high schools, universities, airports, municipal buildings, congressional office buildings. Directors of corporations cannot get to board meetings without confirmed identification prior to entering elevators. Our multicultural society has resulted in all of us being constantly suspected and in need of clearance at every turn.

When I went to high school there were no metal detectors.

When I was on congressional staffs there were no metal detectors, no police demanding to know my right to enter.

When I attended board meetings, I did not have to prove who I was and my right to be there.

Cyber security is so non-existent that now we need second and even third authentications in order to access our own accounts. This is the contribution that the digital revolution has made to our insecurity.

Once there was pleasure in cars beyond the visibility they offered. Cars gave us mobility. I distinctly remember the pleasure in mobility.

Teenagers in their home garage could create hot rods out of, if memory serves, 1932 and 1934 Fords and Chevrolets. Not only were they a visual picture, they were fast and made wonderful sounds.

1940 Fords were the next step in altered machinery. A hopped up one couldn’t be caught by police cars.

Hot Roders running moonshine became the original NASCAR race drivers.

In high school my best friend had a 1950 Ford flathead V-8 souped to the max. The car would reach 60 mph in 10 seconds when ordinary cars required 30 or 40 seconds. I still remember the sound. It was like a good piece of classical music. It was easy to work on. You could take out the transmission and rebuild it in your driveway.

The car had a police radio, so we always knew where the police were and were careful not to commit any infractions in their vicinity.

With the return of the Chevrolet V-8 in 1955, the flathead era ended. In performance, General Motors took the lead, only to be surpassed by Mopar, Chrysler’s products: Challengers, Daytonas, Superbirds, Dusters, Barracudas, Road Runners. These are all cars that with some tweaking can hold their own with fast cars today. And they had wonderful visibility. The drivers were not reduced to being servants of technology in order to see where they were going.

Today the cost of a car is determined by a regulatory bureaucracy that will force us to spend a billion dollars to save one life. Yet the health care bureaucracy forced most of us to take a “vaccine” that killed us or destroyed our health. Clearly, there is a lack of balance.

Safety should be applied to food, water, and borders. Where it is needed it is absent. Instead, safety is used to eliminate our independence and to drive up the cost of mobility. Our leaders profess to be worried about global warming while they rush into warming things up with World War III.

The post I Remember When We Had Control of Cars appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) announced July 5 that it had declared former U.S Nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò to be guilty of “schism” and automatically excommunicated.

In a statement issued without warning to the Holy See press corps, the DDF stated that its Congress met on July 4 to decide against Viganò. The statement read:

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

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

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

The Dicastery declared the latae sententiae excommunication in accordance with canon 1364 § 1 CIC. The lifting of the censure in these cases is reserved to the Apostolic See. This decision was communicated to the Most Reverend Viganò on 5 July 2024.

Under the terms of the latest edition of Canon Law, one who is excommunicated is prohibited from offering the sacraments. 

On June 20, Viganò revealed that the DDF had, by way of a letter dated June 11, begun an “extrajudicial penal trial” against him, accusing the prelate of “the crime of schism.”

Issued by Monsignor John Kennedy, who leads the DDF’S Disciplinary Section, the Vatican’s letter alerted him to “the crime of schism of which he has been accused (public statements which result in a denial of the elements necessary to maintain communion with the Catholic Church; denial of the legitimacy of Pope Francis; a rupture of communion with him; and rejection of the Second Vatican Council).”

Rebuffing the accusation, Viganò stated at the time that “I claim, as Successor of the Apostles, to be in full communion with the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, with the Magisterium of the Roman Pontiffs, and with the uninterrupted doctrinal, moral, and liturgical Tradition which they have faithfully preserved.”

He further added that “I repudiate, reject, and condemn the scandals, errors, and heresies of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who manifests an absolutely tyrannical management of power, exercised against the purpose that legitimizes authority in the Church: an authority that is vicarious of that of Christ, and as such must obey Him alone.”

In an expansive statement issued June 28, the former U.S. nuncio issued a blistering response to the DDF’s charge of schism, attesting that “[a] schismatic sect accuses me of schism: this should be enough to demonstrate the subversion taking place.”

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In a national poll last month Americans were asked if they believed a new civil war was likely to happen within their lifetime. The establishment media was shocked to report that 47% of the population said yes. Those of us in the liberty media were not so surprised; I believe according to the evidence that we were already a short step away from civil war in 2021-2022.

There were A LOT of guys (millions) getting ready for the possibility of vaccine passport enforcement. Gun ownership in the US hit record highs during that time period and conservative/patriot groups saw a spike in public interest. As it turned out, the “conspiracy theorists” were right all along, there really was an organized agenda to eliminate constitutional protections…

If we had allowed the vax passport policy to take hold, our liberties would have been officially erased forever. Economic freedoms would be abolished. Access to the jobs market and trade would be impossible for anyone refusing the vaccine. Real-time tracking of the population along with a social credit system would have become the norm using mandatory cell phone apps. After that, America would essentially turn into a Chinese-style concentration camp.

A lot of people woke up during that period and realized that an attempt at a totalitarian state in the US was not only possible, it was happening right in front of them. Luckily, anti-mandate conservatives were loud enough and the majority of red states passed legislation to block lockdowns and vax passport efforts. The Biden Administration, the CDC, the WHO and globalist groups like the WEF abruptly backed away from their draconian programs and gave up on the mandates by the end of 2022.  And to anyone who actually believes the CDC numbers on total vaccinations are accurate, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you…

That said, the same people are still in power today and those people are looking for another avenue to institute sweeping controls on the populace. One tried and true method for them to achieve that goal is to start a global war and then use the inevitable chaos and fear to bring in authoritarian measures. In other words, WWIII might be Plan B.

The signs of this plan are everywhere, but perhaps most disconcerting is the growing discussion among western nations about military conscription (the draft).

The most recent passage of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) included a measure to automatically register all males ages 18-26 for the selective service list. To be clear, signing up for the selective service was already mandatory, the new NDAA only made it immediate instead of relying on young men to sign up on their own accord. There has also been a drive to automatically add women to the draft database.

Critics argue that the public is “overreacting” to the bill because it changes very little in terms of the draft scenario. What these people don’t understand is that it’s not the minor revisions in the NDAA that have the public concerned, it’s the overall increase in rhetoric surrounding the draft that matters. Numerous military officials in the US and Europe have mentioned conscription in the past year.

Chris Miller, the former acting Defense Secretary, publicly suggested that the government should bring back mandatory service.

Last month, a Washington DC-based think-tank group called Center For A New American Security (CNAS) released a report in which they war-gamed several conscription scenarios for a large scale mobilization against China. The Department of Defense used to run conscription simulations but has not done so in over 50 years (at least not any simulations that have been made public).  It should be noted that the CNAC’s financial supporter list is basically a Who’s-Who of globalist foundations and corporations from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation to JP Morgan.

The group found that the mobilization of a force of 100,000 new recruits within 200 days would be nearly impossible under current cultural conditions. They noted that the internet and social media present a significant obstacle, ostensibly because it allows people to share unfiltered information.

Even during the covid lockdowns, the insane level of control alphabet agencies and Big Tech companies used to throttle information was not enough to stop Americans from spreading the truth.

The think tank also suggested that any significant draft could only succeed if the public knew they could face real punishment if they refused to comply. Interestingly, in a recommendation to the president the report mentions that ‘older recruits’ should be targeted for conscription FIRST. It doesn’t cite a specific age group, but I find this suggestion highly suspicious – Older American men are more likely to resist any draft effort. Why go after us first, unless the goal is to remove us from the equation and throw us in prisons before we have a chance to organize?

If you think that these kinds of discussions are limited to smoky backrooms in Washington DC among military analysts, think again. Far-left media outlet Vox just published an article titled ‘The World Is Running Out Of Soldiers’, and it’s written as if that’s a bad thing.

Vox seems to be in favor of the war machine and they examine an extensive list of issues showcasing why a draft might be necessary. They specifically mention the Center for a New American Security report and even discuss why drone technology simply isn’t enough to fight the next big conflagration. These people want men (and women) to fill the current gaps in military recruitment and conscription is a built in measure, not only in the US but also in Europe.

Most Americans know that when the government and the media start talking about a sweeping societal change they know the citizenry isn’t going to like, they are trying to incrementally acclimate the public to the eventual enforcement.

The US government and media warnings about low military recruitment numbers have been endless, while “experts” assert that war is coming soon with Russia, China and perhaps renewed conflicts in the Middle East. European governments have also been promoting conscription propaganda while doom mongering over a possible Russian invasion.

The reality is that global elites aren’t “predicting” a war, they are preparing to CREATE a war from thin air. And, in order to create a global war they have to get people to show up and fight. But what if no one wants to fight? What if no one shows up? Conscription is the only answer. The question is, what will the population do when faced with forced military service and forced participation in a war between major national powers?

Public trust in the US government is at all time lows in 2023-2024. Less than 20% of the US population supports a return to the draft similar to what we witnessed during the Vietnam War. People have to care about motivations for a war before they’re willing to die in one. This has never been more true than it is today. Beyond that, we have to take into account who the war fighters are – Who does America typically send to fight and die?

In the past it has always been majority conservatives who joined the cause; the people who had the mental and physical capacity to fight along with the patriotic motivation. These are the front line combat soldiers – Not the rear echelon people. Not the logistics people. Not the mechanics and cooks and people working at a desk; the guys who actually pull the trigger.

The US military has spent the better part of the past seven years driving conservatives away from military service in favor of woke ideology and DEI propaganda. So who is left to do the real fighting? Well, what about progressives?

As the DC think-tanks are well aware, social media outrage over the mere mention of a new draft shows clearly that Gen Z isn’t going to comply with conscription. Progressives are terrified of the idea while conservative are highly suspicious. Not to mention, 70% of Gen Z is physically or mentally unfit to meet basic training standards anyway.

What about adding women to the draft? Doesn’t that double the conscription pool? No, it actually weakens the conscription pool because in order to draft women into combat roles basic training standards would have to be lowered dramatically. As the Marine Corp discovered experimenting with mixed gender units, inclusion of women in combat roles greatly reduces unit performance.  Any military that fields a large number of women under front line conditions will lose, badly.

The men that are qualified to fight are mostly conservatives and they aren’t going to go to war for the current administration. They certainly aren’t going to die for Ukraine and I doubt many are interested in dying for Israel either. If they fight a war it’s going to be here at home to remove pervasive and corrupt puppet officials along with their globalist puppet masters.

Now, whenever I bring up this possibility there’s always a contingent of government-stroking shills that claim this outcome is impossible. Next week I will be publishing an article outlining exactly why any administration seeking to go to war with a conservative citizenry will lose. To summarize, it’s a numbers game and the numbers are in our favor.

Recent surveys show that around 30% of adult Americans are now preppers. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reported a 50% increase from just 2017 to 2020 in people capable of up to 30 days or more of self-reliance. That’s a HUGE concentration of liberty minded people, tens of millions. Along with the 50 million+ gun owners in the US, it’s the largest army in the world by far.

To be sure, there are foreign threats out there. But, it’s hard to take the government’s cries for military readiness seriously when our borders are wide open and they are allowing millions of foreigners into the country every year without knowing who they are. No, the fight is going to be here at home, not overseas, and I think there are a number of political elites that understand this. A global war and forced conscription is their attempt at removing the “malcontents” before we cause them too much trouble.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

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Some may want to praise Jill Biden for standing by husband Joe after his dementia-affected debate performance last week. But in reality she’s standing on him, say critics — in a quest to maintain her prestige and power.

And one of these critics is Mrs. Biden’s ex-husband, a man who says that Jill 2.0 is “not the same person I married or that I recognize in any way.”

Many Americans fed the lie that Joe Biden was functioning well — see this X thread (in which I participated) about a Newsweek writer who insisted three days before the debate that Biden’s health was “perfectly fine” — had their eyes opened last Thursday evening. Biden mumbled, fumbled, and stumbled through the debate in a clear state of sundowning confusion, even though he might’ve gotten the moderators’ questions in advance, some claim (others deny this). But Jill is undeterred.

As RedState wrote the day after the debacle:

Jill Biden cemented her place in history as the worst wife in presidential history Thursday night. Her behavior following one of the most tragic scenes in presidential debate history has all the markings of elder abuse.

Perhaps it’s time to change the term from “First Lady” to “Worst Lady.”

By now, you’ve surely either watched the debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, or you’ve seen a plethora of clips showing in no uncertain terms that the president is barely functioning cognitively.

And you’ve also seen media personalities on the left stopping just short of setting their hair on fire with sheer panic over the fact that the leader of the free world would barely be capable of tying his own shoes at this point. …[Jill] is shamelessly abusing this man before America’s eyes.

Others have accused the Thirst Lady (thirsty for fame and acclaim) of being a “Lady MacBeth.” But perhaps no one is more surprised than the man who was married to her for five years. As the New York Post reports:

“The Dr. Jill Biden who I’ve seen on TV in the last five years is not the same person I married or that I recognize in any way,” Bill Stevenson, who was married to Jill from 1970 to 1975, told The Post Saturday.

“She’s matriculated into a completely different woman.”

… “I just don’t understand why she is so adamant about defending him and keeping him in the race since it appears that he’s struggling,” Stevenson said.

… “I’ve watched Jill grow,” he added.

“I’ve been proud of her at certain moments. I have no hard feelings … I’m just surprised to see her front and center in the middle of this battle after flying under the radar for so many years. She’s always been very driven. People say she’s the one who wants to be president now.”

“Stevenson, who remarried and has a family of his own, once supported Biden, when he ran as vice-president with Barack Obama and when Biden ran for the US Senate in 1972,” the Post continues. But no more.

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Donald Trump seems to have hit on a winning plan for returning to the White House – by convincing voters he is the candidate to prevent World War Three.

The Republican candidate is lately pitching the importance of ending “the horrible war” in Ukraine to prevent the United States from sliding toward a nuclear conflagration with Russia.

Trump is slamming Democrat rival Joe Biden for fueling the conflict by recklessly supplying U.S. weapons that are provoking Russia and risking the start of World War Three. That’s true enough.

After Biden’s disastrous TV debate with Trump last week, the polls are showing Trump slightly pulling ahead. The Democrat campaign is in panic mode after the incumbent president’s shaky performance confirmed public misgivings about his deteriorating mental health.

Still, however, Trump has not capitalized on taking a decisive lead in the polls. The Republican is at most a couple of points ahead of Biden –  even after the latter’s slow-motion car-crash TV debate.

Trump could pick up a lot of ballots among large numbers of undecided voters and propel his return to the White House by posing as the “anti-war candidate”.

At election rallies, the former president is touting his supposed ability to bring an immediate end to the war in Ukraine. Trump is saying he would cut off military aid to Ukraine and call on the Kiev regime to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump is boasting that he could broker an immediate peace deal if he wins the election in November and implement a settlement even before his inauguration in the Oval Office in January 2025. Thereby preventing World War Three between the nuclear-armed U.S. and Russia.

That might seem like a sound campaign plan. A large majority of Americans – some 70 percent – want their government to find a diplomatic solution to the two-and-a-half-year war in Ukraine. This reflects public opposition to the perception of another endless American war and the growing apprehension over an escalation in the conflict between nuclear powers.

Astutely, Trump is tapping into those legitimate concerns.

On the other hand, Biden’s administration is pushing ahead with military support for the Kiev regime in a way that seems insanely reckless. This week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced another $2.3 billion in military aid to Ukraine. Biden has said he will support Ukraine for as long as it takes and shows no sign of backing away from military confrontation. The president has approved the supply of longer-range missiles to Ukraine and given his permission to strike Russia.

The issue of war and peace – and without exaggeration the issue of world peace and survival of the planet – could be the one that wins the White House for Trump.

Biden does not have a reverse gear when it comes to his policy of supporting Ukraine in a futile war that it is losing badly and only provoking Russia.

Such madness is bound to be a vote loser and yet Biden and his administration appear to have no way back from the abyss. Combined with Biden’s appalling policy of supporting Israel – especially for younger American voters who would normally lean toward a Democrat – Trump could exploit the anxiety over Ukraine to his electoral advantage.

It’s not just about the danger of an all-out war with Russia. The American public is rightly incensed by the vast amounts of taxpayer money – over $100 billion at least – being shelled out for a corrupt regime in Kiev while so much public need is neglected at home.

The trouble is Trump’s lack of credibility. Ordinarily, a presidential candidate declaring his opposition to starting World War Three would be a clear winning platform, one would think.

Recall the first time Trump ran for the White House back in 2016 when he promised all sorts of splendid things about making America great again by stopping endless U.S. wars around the world and putting an end to “American carnage” at home.

Trump did not deliver then despite all his braggadocio about “draining the swamp”. During his presidency, Trump broke the taboo of supplying lethal weapons to Ukraine. In 2018, he approved sending $47 million worth of Javelin anti-tank missiles to the Kiev regime while it was attacking the ethnic Russian population in the former Ukrainian territory of Donbass. That military backing of the Kiev regime led to the current conflict after Moscow intervened in February 2022 to stop the merciless killing of the Russian population.

On Trump’s recent bragging about how he would quickly end the war in Ukraine, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, dismissed it as empty “subjective” talk. That’s a diplomatic way of saying Trump hasn’t a clue about resolving the conflict.

Trump is all about the expedient winning of votes, not about winning genuine peace. The only way to create a peaceful resolution in Ukraine and elsewhere is for the U.S.-led NATO military bloc to scale back from Russia’s borders and eventually disband in conformity with international law. NATO is a self-appointed war machine to serve Western imperialist power and one that is in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and the upholding of international law. NATO exists to enforce U.S. power unilaterally without any respect for international law – despite the American and European rhetoric about “rules-based order”.

The war in Ukraine is but one symptom of the United States as a failing and frustrated imperialist power. Washington’s hostility towards Russia is consonant with its relentless belligerence towards China and its support for Israel’s genocide in a desperate bid to control the Middle East. Trump is on board with U.S. imperialist power projection against China and slavishly supporting the Israeli regime. His talk about criticizing NATO expenditures is just carping to get Europeans to pay more for the American protection racket. The only thing different from Biden is a superficial matter of style and a seemingly more reasonable view of the conflict in Ukraine.

Posing as a candidate to avert World War Three over Ukraine might be enough to get Trump back to the White House. It might work as an electioneering ploy. But it won’t change a damn thing about stopping U.S. imperialist violence and the constant threat to world peace that Washington and its NATO war machine engender. The Donald’s “trump card” for peace in Ukraine is another worthless deuce.

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

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