Lew Rockwell Institute

As I’ve noted before, I was fascinated by history as a very young boy. And no part of history caught my attention like the founding of this nation. The American Revolution, the War for Independence- call it what you will. The Boston Tea Party. The Minutemen. Paul Revere’s midnight ride. The shot heard around the world.

I know that our Founders weren’t perfect. Thomas Paine, the brilliant writer who produced Common Sense, the pamphlet that helped ignite patriotic fervor in the colonies, wound up hating George Washington, who did indeed seem to have forgotten his invaluable contributions to the movement for independence. Shockingly and inexplicably, the location of most of Paine’s remains are unknown, as I detailed in Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963. Washington’s actions regarding the Whiskey Rebellion besmirch his reputation. He also was unfortunately swayed by the dastardly future Black Broadway star Alexander Hamilton, instead of Hamilton’s ideological foe Thomas Jefferson. This would have a huge negative impact on the future of the young republic.

And then there was Benjamin Franklin, who was a member of the blasphemous Hellfire Club. In the 1990s, some human bones were found in his one-time London home. The court historians were quick to declare that there was nothing sinister about this, and blamed it on a young medical student renting a room from Franklin, who went on to die very young, interestingly enough. But Franklin was an undeniably brilliant man, who discovered electricity among other things. And you have to love someone who said “There is no such thing as a good war or a bad peace.” Not to mention his very clever pickup line, which he used on the fair damsels of eighteenth century Paris, “Would you care to join me in the pursuit of happiness?” That’s way better than “you got any fries to go with that shake?”

Our Founding Fathers were the wealthiest men of their time. The One Percent if you will. Can we picture any One Percenter today like John Hancock, who is said to have written his name so large on the Declaration of Independence in order for King George to read it without his glasses? Think of Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet, and other billionaires meeting surreptitiously in small taverns, passing out radical pamphlets, all for the cause of human liberty. There wasn’t a eugenicist in the bunch. Well, maybe Alexander Hamilton. If he were actually around today, and not just a fake Black Broadway star, he’d be invited to Bilderberg and Bohemian Grove. But the rest of them would be relegated to appearing on humble little podcasts like mine.

Those who signed the Declaration of Independence did truly pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Quoting from my Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963: “Seventeen of those who signed the Declaration lost everything they owned. Nine of these men lost their lives in the conflict. Rhode Island’s William Ellery’s estate was burned to the ground during the war. William Floyd of New York suffered the same fate. Fellow New Yorker Frances Lewis saw his estates destroyed by fire as well, and he was imprisoned and died during his incarceration. One of the richest of all those who signed, William Livingston, died impoverished a few years after the war. John Hart of New Jersey risked not only his fortune, but his family ties. His wife was dying as he signed the Declaration, and he was forced to flee from the British when he headed home to say goodbye. He never saw his thirteen children again, and died in 1779. New Jersey Judge Richard Stockton was another British prisoner, and he too died a pauper. Wealthy banker Robert Morris gave away his fortune in an effort to finance the revolution. He also died penniless….Virginia’s Thomas Nelson, in a perhaps implausible anecdote, allegedly turned a cannon on his own home, which had become General Cornwallis’s headquarters, and destroyed it. He, like so many of the others, died in poverty. South Carolina’s Thomas Lynch, along with his wife, simply disappeared at sea.”

The very wealthy George Washington led his troops in battle. Picture one of our countless chicken hawk political warriors, like Lindsey Graham, subjecting themselves to anything more dangerous than a game of Risk. The American Revolution was a revolt of the One Percent. They weren’t rebelling against any homegrown aristocracy, but the yolk of British rule. They didn’t want to be under the thumb of royalty. Their guiding principles of consent of the governed and no taxation without representation were watershed concepts in human history. The whole consent of the governed thing was shattered by Abraham Lincoln, whose despotism contradicted the intentions of the Founders. As for taxation without representation; does your congressional representative represent you? And are you taxed?

Could there be any bolder words than these? “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson’s unique intellect shines through here, and his thoughts remain relevant, almost 250 years later.

“Endowed by their creator?” That won’t play well in Hollywood, or any big city in America 2.0. This was the basis of the Bill of Rights, which made the Constitution tolerable. How many Americans understand that we are born free; that our rights come from God, not from any government? Pay particular attention to the very clear statement that the People have a right to alter or abolish “any Form of Government” when it no longer suits their needs. Jefferson would be arrested and prosecuted as an “insurrectionist” for such Thought Crimes in America 2.0. He’d be given a small cell, alongside all those January 6 defendants, who’ve been denied all due process. To understand his present reputation, look at his demeaning character in the Broadway play Hamilton. To millions of Americans, he’s the “racist” who “raped” Sally Hemings.

As inhabitants of the most corrupt society in the history of the world, this passage should resonate with all of us: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” Do those “long train of abuses and usurpations” sound familiar? Just imagine the list we could compile.

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A new historical analysis of administrative law exposes FDR’s suppression of civil liberties.

Given the accumulating evidence of corruption within the executive branch of the United States government, it is hard not to believe that we are living through the worst of times, and that the American dream of virtuous republican government is now doomed.

Certainly, this may be the case. But it is more probable (as our framers understood) that republics, since the days of Rome, tend  gradually toward corruption. It’s a miracle, then, that any elements of American rule of law continue to operate. Still, considering that we have weathered significant corruption in the past, there is some hope that we will muddle through. David T. Beito’s review of the questionable legal conduct of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration offers just that notion.

FDR, of course, is a hero in the conventional progressive narrative. His fortitude and virtue are said to have saved American capitalism from collapse during the Great Depression and his conduct as a wartime leader is characterized as instrumental in preserving democracy (or something like it) in Western Europe. Revisionist economic historians have suggested that the New Deal, and the concomitant shifting of control to centralized agencies, prolonged distress in this country. Beito’s account of what amounted to American concentration camps, wartime censorship, mass surveillance, and misuse of executive branch agencies (such as the IRS) for partisan political purposes further impugns the claim that FDR was a man of virtue.

The incarceration of many thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry (known as Nisei or “the second generation”) during World War II is well-known. The unconstitutional nature of that move now seems to be conventional wisdom, although at the time the Supreme Court, in the infamous Korematsu case, upheld the internment camps as a wartime necessity. What was not generally known then, and what Beito makes clear now, is the opposition to that policy on the part of many executive branch officials. The opposition was successfully overridden in no small part by the personal prejudice President Roosevelt and the First Lady held against the Japanese race.

What makes this account even more valuable than the discussion of the detainment of the Nisei, however, is the exposure of FDR’s essentially venal and covert attempts to erode or cancel the constitutional protections of free speech and other elements of the Bill of Rights during his unprecedented four terms in office.

Senator Hugo L. Black, a staunch First Amendment proponent whom FDR appointed to the Supreme Court, comes off here during his congressional career as something less than libertarian. The book’s first chapter reviews Black’s efforts as chairman of the Senate committee ostensibly in charge of regulating lobbying. In reality, he engaged in efforts to intimidate and silence critics of FDR and the New Deal.

One of the signal failings of legal education in the United States for the last century-and-a-half is that we train lawyers to concentrate on the opinions of appellate courts. Students are made to appreciate the nuances of constitutional interpretation and the conflicting strands in the basic doctrines of contracts, torts, property, and civil procedure. Unfortunately, we don’t teach budding lawyers what happens in legislatures, the source of much of our law, since statutes and the conduct of statutorily created administrative agencies have much more effect on our lives than court decisions. Beito’s book, in other words, is a rare look at how the sausage is made. And it is not a pretty picture.

The Black committee’s activities were ostensibly justified by a purported need to legislate in the area of regulation of lobbyists. It claimed the power to examine millions of telegrams sent to and from activists, journalists, and lawyers, and, with the cooperation of the IRS, the tax returns of administration enemies (a latter-day tactic first employed at the instigation of FDR). Not only was this unprecedented governmental surveillance, but the Black committee, with the likely covert support (and probably aid) from the White House, enthusiastically smeared administration opponents with charges of racism and anti-Semitism. As Beito explains, these prejudicial failings could also be laid at the feet of FDR himself.

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Take a moment to contemplate the awesome and terrifying power of the press.

Since 2020, the United States have had a geriatric president who suffers from serious mental deficits. The media discounted this awkward state of affairs as a conspiracy theory or as Trumpist propaganda for years, substantially blunting the political impact of Biden’s dementia. Then, after the president’s terrible debate performance on 27 June, the press made Biden’s incapacity the centre of their coverage, finally welcoming this fact into official regime-sanctioned reality and bringing Biden’s candidacy into crisis. All of this happened within just hours. As I write this, Biden has no more than even odds of securing his party’s nomination, and the press are working overtime to rehabilitate Kamala Harris. Journalists who spent years quietly mocking the vice president for her abrasive personality and her bizarre speaking gaffes are now making the latter a cornerstone of her candidacy. Are you coconutpilled, dear reader?

The Biden Affair is nothing new. So overwhelming is the influence of the press over our politics, that many have described liberal democracies as media-steered regimes, wherein politicians adopt positions and enact policies calculated above all to secure favourable coverage from journalists. Much recent German history appears to support this theory, from the nuclear phase-out of 2011 to the self-imposed migration crisis of 2015 to the lockdown and mass vaccination hysteria of 2020–21.

This is an enticing theory, but I think it actually understates the role of the media. The press do not drive politics so much as they collaborate in the formulation and implementation of policy. Many media stories are themselves political events. They serve to coordinate and direct the distributed actors of our managerial systems, and they construct an adjusted reality designed not only to confine debate, but also to limit the range of conceivable actions to those which our rulers already favour.

So totalising is the influence of the press that it is very hard to escape their illusions and contemplate their reporting objectively. Among the most obtrusive features of modern-day journalism – and a great source of its power – is its unrelenting coordination. Because we’ve grown up with a journalist class that is always on-message, we take this behaviour for granted.

We shouldn’t. It’s actually very weird when you think about it.

Imagine, for a moment, that you wanted to found your own periodical. Maybe you hope to run a weekly magazine or a daily newspaper, maybe you have ambitions of amassing an enormous audience of millions, or maybe you’re content to collect primarily regional readers. Whatever the details, you want to cover national politics in some way. The most rational approach – before you even rent office space or begin to hire staff – would be to study what existing publications are saying and what they’re reporting on, and plan to offer something different. Unless you provide content that your readers can’t get anywhere else, after all, you’ll have trouble convincing anyone to read you.

You’d think, therefore, that the media landscape would be a richly differentiated thing – especially when it comes to big, national stories. Variation like this is present everywhere else in the consumer economy. There are a near-infinite variety of headphones, energy drinks, shoes and coffee makers. Newspapers should be just as varied in their coverage, focus and analysis as all of these other things.

But of course, it is the opposite. Western media resembles much more the consumer landscape of the Soviet bloc. We find the same product on offer everywhere in all leading publications. As in the communist East, variety is confined to a kind of black market – that is to say an array of blogs, social media accounts and alternative (mostly online) publications that you’re not supposed to read and that the official discourse wholly ignores. This anomaly is easy enough to see if you spend multiple hours every day reading news stories. The average consumer of political reporting, however, has a much more casual and sporadic relationship to press discourse, and he’s apt to think that the convergence is entirely natural. The New York Times, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Le Monde report the very same things in the very same way at the very same time, often under extremely similar headlines, because they’re just reporting on the way the world is.

In hard authoritarian regimes, like National Socialist Germany, regime propaganda was an open, blunt instrument. Everybody who read the Völkischer Beobachter knew very well that the paper propagated the official Nazi Party line. The soft authoritarianism of the liberal West, in contrast, manages the information and opinions available to the public in a much more effective manner, namely by pretending not to. Millions of people open their newspapers every day in the belief that they contain accurate accounts of the goings-on in the world, and they form their beliefs and political preferences within this highly convincing illusion.

The distributed propaganda network maintained by our establishment press is very expensive. Especially the opportunity costs are very high. In a healthy, uncoordinated media environment, it would be impossible for somebody like me to make a living blogging about the insanity of German politics. I’d have very stiff competition from a multitude of professional, well-funded journalists who would be fighting at every moment to take my readers away from me by writing the kinds of things I do, only more effectively, more frequently and with fewer typographical errors. Of course I am a very small player in the broader ecosystem of alternative media; the audience for this content is hundreds of millions strong. It consists of all those people who have been written off by the establishment press, as the necessary price of exercising narrative control.

Among the forces that conspire to keep legacy media on-message is their aforementioned collaboration with the political establishment. This collaboration includes a tacit understanding that leading politicians and bureaucrats will only provide interviews and information to regime-adjacent journalists, granting them an effective monopoly on political news.

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The Democrats attempting to pretend Biden is mentally cognizant even after the Debate is an interesting psychological behavior.  Democrats highlighting Trump’s indiscretions is a Pandora Box.   The flippant accusations made without any evidence whatsoever is a tremendous disintegration of intellect.  But perhaps the most egregious is Democrats who have law degrees up the ying-yang and don’t have the most basic understanding of the US Constitution.

If anything, it provokes the need to abolish the Department of Education given it has grossly failed to teach.  But more importantly, will these people ever have a life?  When lying is the basis of a person’s character, the only means of having any relationship would be for ‘appearance’ only.  Like the Clintons.  Billy diddled young women and girls while Hillary diddled younger women.   Their marriage meant nothing.  It was a convenience because it gave the ‘impression’ of stability while in reality it was deviant.

There are some within the evangelical script who declare that anyone who is not an evangelical, not wholesome, not divorced, and wholly committed to their wife is not morally scriptured enough to lead as President.  Wholly ignoring King David.  John Piper is such a man.   And he uses his influence in the church to make political determinations for himself and every one of his congregates.

In fact, what he is doing is passing judgement.   Which is very unbiblical.

The Clintons were hardly the first to make the choice that infidelity is a political illusion.   FDR, Bush, LBJ, Harding and Biden are only the few of the many.  However, it used to be that the media left the personal lives out of the political fever.  Today, personal lives are not only on the table, they are ‘created’, manufactured, and immortalized as truth.

If character were the means for determining a President, we would have had none.  Whatever was reality would morph to slander and libel in a bid to WIN.   But winning doesn’t mean the candidate actually rules – it means the candidate is easily malleable – clay for the Zionist handlers that now seem to have glorified themselves as Zionists dating from the Spanish Inquisition – and Christopher Columbus.

Khazarian Zionists claim Israel and the Middle East belong to them.   Historically.  An idiotic assertion given the demarcation lines of ancient historical powers are not remotely close to any current borders.  In any country – across the globe – including Russia, Europe and America.

What it does reveal is a pathetic lack of actual intellectual acumen in discernment and ideology constructs of the evolution of land grabs.

Because in essence – ALL the land belongs to God and every person and country are simply leaseholds exchanging hands.   Some within the stipulations of God and the Bible – others thru a constant struggle for Domination via WAR.

I attended a seminar years ago wherein we were told to draw what we envision as most important.   By and large, the vast majority of individuals drew homes and households.   Which angered the men who were peddling their view across America.   They asked,  “Don’t you measure your worth by how many you proselytize and convert – hopefully thousands if not hundreds of thousands?”   Evangelicals peddling Mormonism.

Fair warning – the Church has not been kind to me.   So I will not pare my view.  While simultaneously honoring God.  The real God.   The God who has been demonized – subverted – recreated – and spit out by The Vatican.

At what point do our brains evolve beyond the barbarism of war?

King David played dirty.   Not only was he a war monger, but he murdered the husband of his ‘requited love’.   4000 years later we haven’t evolved – an inch.  Our technology is an illusion of progress – that enslaves.   And as I illustrated above, our brains, instead of expanding within growth, compassion, and love, seem to have shriveled in their capacity.  The “Self described Chosen Ones – Jews” haven’t led earth into a utopian enclave of Eden Paradise, but have instead led nearly every conflict and every death.

I doubt that was the message of Jesus.   But then – those who have read the Kabbalah or the Torah would understand better – the purpose of the Khazarian imposters.

Tomorrow is America’s Independence Day.   We celebrate our independence from the insurrectionist assassins we call European Kings and Queens.  The Monarchial dynasties that subjected the peasantry status.   The guillotine.   The debtors of prison.    Russia didn’t enslave us.   China and Iran didn’t enslave us.   Persia, Syria, Iraq, and Iran didn’t enslave us –

I think the MAGA Movement is about cutting the chains of illusion.   Perpetrated upon us by a society, a human-nonhuman race, a Nephilim’ as defined by God which we have been led to ignore.   Zionism.   Because, if GOD intervened, their illusion would degrade like a domino board.

Instead of listening to the whores of words, read their books.  There is NO PERFECT leader.  If nothing else, that is Biblical.   But a leader who assassinates/murders his own people – Zelenskyy/Netanyahu, for profit, will surely be reprimanded in Hell.  An eternity of screaming souls that deafens all sound.   It is much much more than anyone presumes.  And it is – REAL.

FYI:  TO The Two Hackers Who Took Down My Computer Yesterday – know that you conform to the intellectual deviant capacity of those who existed 4000 years ago – whose IQ is on par with Barbarians and cavemen. 

Reprinted with permission from HelenaGlass.net.

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Today is July 4 when we get our annual dose of patriotic propaganda that serves to wrap us in self-righteousness which enables Washington to conduct its wars. Washington has got away with it for a long time, but now has created and brought us into conflict with a powerful adversary.

According to reports, Russia responded to Washington’s cluster bomb attack on civilians in Crimea by informing Washington that the two countries are now at war. What it means, if anything, remains to be seen. It does not seem to have caused any consternation in Washington.

In actual fact hot war between Russia and Washington began in 2008 when Washington surprised Putin by sending a US trained and equipped Georgian army into South Ossetia. The American sponsored invasion resulted in the deaths of civilians and Russian peace keepers. It only took the Russian Army 5 days to defeat the American trained Georgian Army, so Washington did not have time to get more involved.

Putin was again surprised when Washington overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014. Persecution and murder of Donbas Russians followed. Donbas asked to be reincorporated into Russia like Crimea, but Putin refused. Instead, Putin tried to keep Donbas in Ukraine with the Minsk Agreement. Ukraine and Donbas agreed and France and Germany agreed to enforce the agreement, but in fact the agreement was used to deceive Putin while the West built and equipped a large Ukrainian army to retake the self-declared Donbas republics. In February, 2022, Putin was forced by Washington to defend the Donbas Russians from being slaughtered like Israel is doing to the Palestinians. But Putin limited Russia’s intervention in a way that prevented Russia from obtaining a quick victory before Washington could get the West involved and widen the war. Now Putin is presented with US missiles targeting Russian civilians and with French troops in Ukraine.

Washington has been at war with Russia since 2007 when Putin said at the Munich Security Conference that Russia did not accept Washington’s unipolar world. This challenge to Washington’s hegemony put crosshairs on Putin.

Now 17 years later Putin acknowledges the fact that Washington and Russia are at war. The question is what is Putin going to do with his belated recognition of reality?

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I met two out of the three women I’ve most admired, and who lived during my lifetime, the one I never encountered having recently passed away. Margaret Thatcher (and her husband, Sir Dennis) stayed with me in Gstaad, the alpine Swiss village that used to be a paradise before Russian and Arab nouveaux riches discovered it. Lady T, as we and her staff called her, was as kind and friendly to everyone who approached her as she was iron-willed while in power to those who opposed her. The lady saved Britain from becoming Albania, the reason why the left will never forgive her. I treasure the letter she and Dennis sent me to thank me for their trip, and have it up on a wall, next to one from President Nixon, the only two epistles I care to show off with.

The second remarkable lady was Clare Boothe Luce, diplomat, prolific journalist, magnetic public speaker, playwright, screenwriter, conservative, a great beauty, with legs to die for—a real heartbreaker. I met her when she was already old and retired, when my father bought her apartment at 993 Fifth Avenue for a member of my family. She was even then an enchantress, with unmatched wit and knowledge, and always a flirt.

“An aristocrat to the end, never bragging, always modest and radiant.”

The one that I will now write about I never met, but I have admired her heroism since that fateful day in May 1954 when the news came that Dien Bien Phu had fallen. I was in boarding school, and even some of the teachers didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked for a moment of silence. (Refused.) The noblest of all defeats is, of course, Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans fell to a man against thousands upon thousands of Persians. Of numerous other noble defeats, Dien Bien Phu stands out. Here’s the background leading to the battle that saw France lose its faraway empire of Vietnam.

It was called hell in a very small place, where the French high command, Generals Navarre and Cogny in Hanoi, decided to lure General Giap’s Viet Minh forces into a final battle. 15,000 Foreign Legionnaires, mostly Germans, Greeks, and Central Europeans, with only French officers, faced a superior Vietnamese army that had managed to carry heavy guns up into the impassable mountains surrounding the valley of death, as it became known. The commander of the French defenders was straight out of a romantic novel. General Christian de Castries, scion of an old and noble French family, was given the post because of his swashbuckling nature and romantic victories. Typically, he named the outposts defending his central command bunker after his mistresses. There were two Kathryns and a couple of Elianes, and so on until the eight outposts were named.

Rumor had it that John Foster Dulles, then Eisenhower’s secretary of state, had verbally promised the French air cover. True or not, no Yankee planes ever appeared, while Giap’s men bombarded the valley nonstop. The camp turned hellish, with horrendous casualties inflicted on La Legion defenders, who refused to give an inch.

For almost two months in the hell of the besieged base, a 29-year-old military nurse tended to the wounded and consoled the dying in the dark, filthy underground hospital. Genevieve de Galard was a French aristocrat, a Sorbonne graduate who became a nurse for reasons of her own. After a retreat at a Benedictine convent, she volunteered for duty in French Indochina. Already known for having saved soldiers in various missions, her refusal to leave the base before it was surrounded helped morale. In no time everyone was calling her the “Angel of Dien Bien Phu.”

At the time she was reported as the only female in the hellish place, but in reality the other women there were prostitutes who had been caught up in the fighting. Most of them, it seems, were as courageous and as helpful as the patrician Galard. After two months, with the Viet closing in, de Castries awarded her the highest honor of the French state. He called her the “purest incarnation of the heroic virtues of the French nurse.” She had never left the side of the dying and the wounded under the severest of bombardments, holding the hands of those beyond help, changing the bandages, and always offering support to those bleeding in the hell of the bunker.

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Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has been launching a forceful attack on Benjamin Netanyahu in both US and Israeli media for sabotaging peace in Gaza and pushing Israel to the brink with Hezbollah in Lebanon, during which he inadvertently made an interesting acknowledgement which flies in the face of the Biden administration’s feigned powerlessness to rein in Israel’s insanity.

“I accuse the prime minister of Israel of a deliberate attempt to destroy the political-security-military alliance between Israel and the United States,” Olmert writes in an op-ed for Haaretz titled “I Accuse Netanyahu of Betrayal”.

“For many years, Israel’s political stability in the international arena rested on the absolute support of the United States,” writes Olmert, adding, “The entire Israel Air Force relies completely on American aircraft: fighter planes, transport planes, refueler planes and helicopters. All of Israel’s air power is based on the American commitment to defend Israel. We have no other reliable source for essential supplies of equipment, munitions and advanced weapons that Israel cannot manufacture on its own.”

Netanyahu’s controversial planned address to the US Congress, the mood in Israeli politics, the danger of war with Hezbollah, and the future of Israeli leadership: my conversation with former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, from today’s GPS pic.twitter.com/347ML4392t

— Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) June 30, 2024

Olmert’s comments echo those made in November of last year by retired Israeli Major General Yitzhak Brick, who said of the Israeli assault on Gaza, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Contrast these frank admissions by longtime Israeli government insiders with the way the Biden administration has been pretending since the early days of this onslaught that there is nothing it can do to force Israel to be less monstrous and murderous in Gaza, constantly posturing as a passive witness to genocidal atrocity after genocidal atrocity while the western press churn out nonstop anonymously-sourced articles about how secretly upset the president is with the Netanyahu regime.

It’s just a simple fact that Israel’s complete dependence on US support means the Biden administration has all the leverage it needs to force an end to Israel’s aggressions at any time, but instead you’ll get White House officials like John Kirby spouting ridiculous nonsense about how Israel is a completely independent nation to whom the US is incapable of dictating any terms whatsoever.

WHITE HOUSE: “[Israel] is a sovereign nation. They plan their military operations and they conduct their military operations and they make the choices. It’s not like we give them a homework assignment and they have to then turn in their plan to us for grading.” pic.twitter.com/obdGyGE2JF

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) February 13, 2024

When asked by the press back in February if the US was doing anything to deter Israel from its planned assault on Rafah, for example, Kirby replied as follows:

“[Israel] is a sovereign nation. They plan their military operations, and they conduct their military operations, and they make the choices. It’s not like we give them a homework assignment, and they have to then turn in their plan to us for grading. We have said that from our perspective, as a friend of Israel and as a supporter of their efforts to defend themselves, we would expect that any plan for going into Rafah would properly account for the now more than a million civilians that are seeking refuge down there.”

Israel has since launched a brutal assault on Rafah which features regular massacres of civilians, with the IDF now reportedly working toward the complete capture of the entire city. This despite the White House previously having said that a “major ground operation” in Rafah would be a “red line” for this administration.

The US is just as responsible for what’s happening in Gaza as Israel itself, and will be responsible for everything that happens in Lebanon as well. They could end this at any time, and they choose to keep it going instead. As Noam Chomsky once said during the Second Intifada, “They’re not Israeli helicopters, they’re US helicopters with Israeli pilots.”

____________

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Ah, 1776 — a time when the ruling aristocracy taxed Americans without their say, destroyed printing presses of those publishers demanding liberty, and jailed outspoken critics for treason.  How things have changed — not!  If there were one indispensable truth to be learned from America’s glorious Independence, it is this: governments do not give freedom; they take freedom away.

Any smooth-talking politician who pretends that government should be praised for the “gifts” it bestows upon the people is a smiling agent of the Crown fashioning new chains for citizens to wear.  Laws, taxes, and regulations do not liberate human beings; they are the bricks and mortar trapping us inside ever-smaller cells.

Government is the destroyer of liberty.  Bureaucracies do not light the flame of freedom; they snuff freedom’s light out.  People alone (separate from the organizing strictures of the State) secure their liberty by pushing back against and restraining the otherwise ever-growing oppression of power-hungry governments.  Citizens hold the keys to their own prison cells.  They must only find the courage to open up their doors and walk outside.  This was true in 1776; it is no less true today.

What is remarkable about the period leading up to the American Revolution is how quickly public sentiment shifted.  By and large, colonists saw themselves as loyal servants of the English Crown until, suddenly, they were not.  They celebrated King George III’s birthday each year.  They formed militias to aid their king in wars against his European foes.  As late as 1775, few Americans desired anything so radical as political Independence.  The idea seemed far-fetched.

A year after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, half a year after the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and a month after Richard Henry Lee of Virginia urged the Second Continental Congress to declare the United Colonies, “free and independent States,” Americans were well on their way to separating from the British Empire for good.  Colonial delegates agreed to a Resolution for Independence on July 2, approved Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence on July 4, began publishing the Declaration on July 6, and publicly read the Declaration in Philadelphia’s Independence Square on July 8.  A year later, Philadelphia celebrated July 4 as an official Independence Day holiday with music, bonfires, parades, military processions, speeches, and fireworks.  From loyal servants of the Crown to rebellious rabble-rousers who staged mock funerals for King George in the space of two years.  Sometimes History comes at you fast.

Fifteen years earlier, American colonists had been fighting alongside British redcoats in the French and Indian War.  Now they were conducting guerrilla warfare campaigns against English garrisons and seizing English vessels.  America had no navy; young fishermen and sea merchants created one.  America lacked well-trained, professional soldiers.  Sharpshooting hunters with accurate long rifles had to suffice.  America didn’t have enough young men to bear alone the burden of fighting.  Old veterans, patriotic young women, and dedicated wives became instrumental to the Revolution’s success.

Samuel Whittemore, around eighty years old when the British marched on Lexington, is often credited as the oldest colonial combatant.  His obituary recounts the remarkable man’s heroics on April 19, 1775.  “If I can only be the instrument of killing one of my country’s foes I shall die in peace,” he reportedly declared.  Killing a redcoat with his rifle, taking out two more with his horse pistols, and drawing a sword to defend himself from advancing soldiers, Whittemore was shot in the face and bayonetted several times.  “We have killed the old rebel,” the British allegedly exclaimed.  “About four hours after,” his obituary records, Whittemore “was found in a mangled situation…but providentialy none” of the blades had “penetrated so far as to destroy him; his hat and cloaths [sic] were shot through in many places, yet he survived to see the complete overthrow of his enemies, and his country enjoy all the blessings of peace and independence.”  Now that’s an obituary!  Amazingly, Captain Whittemore lived another eighteen years after being left for dead.

I like to think that men such as Samuel Whittemore scared the bejesus out of the British Regulars.  The Crown’s professional soldiers marched in formation and followed rules of gentlemanly conduct, and out of nowhere, some eighty-year-old madman was jumping out from behind a wall and firing on them without warning.  “You’re not playing by the rules,” I bet they cried.  “What rules?” Whittemore probably replied.

His story reminds me of that of Daniel Morgan, who formed a company of Virginia riflemen and marched six hundred miles to Boston in under three weeks in the summer of ‘75.  During the French and Indian War, Morgan had been lashed five hundred times (yet miraculously survived) for punching an English officer in the face.  He never forgot the lesson.  In Massachusetts, he ordered his legendary snipers to take out British officers who believed they were well out of range.  The British army was outraged.  Morgan didn’t care.

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A headline in a news story caught my attention the other day. It reads: “Louisiana now requires the 10 Commandments to be displayed in classrooms. It’s not the only terrifying state law.”  The column appears in The Independent, July 1, 2024, and is by one Gustaf Kilander.

Notice that the author uses the word “terrifying” to characterize the public display of one of, arguably, the bedrock documents that shaped the formation of the American nation and the thinking of its Framers. Indeed, to read the debates leading to the adoption of the Constitution is to plainly understand how deeply influenced the Framers were by not only the Ten Commandments, but by the weight of Christian and Western tradition. (See Elliott’s Debates, a compilation of the debates over the new Constitution).

A brief survey of the writings of such distinguished historians and researchers as Barry Alan Shain, Forrest McDonald, M. E. Bradford, and George W. Carey, plus a detailed reading of the commentaries and writings of those men who established the nation, give the lie to the claim that those men assembled in 1787 sought to outlaw individual state religious tests or establishments.

They did not.

Many of the original thirteen states had religious establishments and tests, including Massachusetts (Congregationalist), Virginia (Anglican/Episcopal), and North Carolina (requiring office holders to be Protestants, and after 1835 up until the War Between the States, only Christians). The US Constitution clearly acknowledged this, and only forbade the establishment of a “national” church. But even then, the Framers assumed that the new nation would reflect its Christian roots, going so far as providing for paid chaplains in the Northwest Territories at the same time they were formulating the Constitution.

Yet, this fundamental misunderstanding characterizes much of modern American thinking, both on the part of liberals AND conservatives.

And thus this 4th of July, I think it helpful to look once again at the 1776 declaration, which preceded the Constitution by eleven years, what exactly it is and what it is not. For far too many Americans confuse the two documents.

We celebrate July 4th each year as the anniversary of America’s declaration of independence from Great Britain. The day we set aside commemorates when representatives from the thirteen colonies took a momentous step that they knew might land them on the scaffold or suspended by the hangman’s noose. They were protesting that their traditional rights as Englishmen had been violated, and that those violations had forced them into a supreme act of rebellion.

For many Americans the Declaration of Independence is a fundamental text that tells the world who we are as a people. It is a distillation of American belief and purpose. Pundits and commentators, left and right, never cease reminding us that America is a new nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Almost as important as a symbol of modern American belief is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It is not incorrect to see a link between these two documents, as Lincoln intentionally placed his short peroration in the context of a particular reading of the Declaration.  Lincoln bases his concept of the creation of the American nation in philosophical principles he sees enunciated in 1776, and in particular on an emphasis on the idea of “equality.”

The problem is that this interpretation, which forms the philosophical base of both the dominant “movement conservatism” today – neoconservatism – and the neo-Marxist multicultural Left, is basically false.

Lincoln’s opens his address, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth …” There is a critical problem with this assertion. It was not the Declaration that “created” the new nation; the Declaration was a statement of thirteen colonies, announcing their respective independence from the mother country, binding themselves together in a military and political alliance. It was the Constitution, drafted eleven years later (1787), after the successful conclusion of the War for Independence, that established a new nation. And, as any number of historians and scholars have pointed out, the American Framers never intended to cobble together a nation based on the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

The Framers of the Constitution were horrified by “egalitarianism” and “democracy,” and they made it clear that what they were establishing was a stratified republic, in which most of the “rights” were left to the respective states (with their own particular arrangements), and in which serious restrictions and limitations on voting and participation in government were considered fundamental. A review of The Federalist Papers confirms this thinking; and a survey of the correspondence and the debates over the Constitution add support to this anti-egalitarianism.

Obviously, then, Lincoln could not found his “new nation” on the US Constitution; it was too aristocratic and decentralized, with non-enumerated powers maintained by the states, including the implicit right to secede. Indeed, slavery was explicitly sanctioned, even if most of the Framers believed that as an institution it would die a natural death, if left on its own. Lincoln thus went back to the Declaration of Independence and invested in it a meaning that supported his statist and wartime intentions. But even then, he verbally abused the language of the Declaration, interpreting the words in a form that its Signers never intended.

Although those authors employed the phrase “all men are created equal,” and certainly that is why Lincoln made direct reference to it, a careful analysis of the Declaration does not confirm the sense that Lincoln invests in those few words. Contextually, the 1776 authors at Philadelphia were asserting their historic — and equal — rights as Englishmen before the Crown, which had, they believed, been violated and usurped by the British government, and it was to parliament that the Declaration was primarily directed.

The Founders rejected egalitarianism. They understood that no one is, literally, “created equal” to anyone else. Certainly, each and every person is created with no less or no more dignity, measured by his or her own unique potential before God. But this, egregiously, is not what most contemporary writers mean today when they talk of “equality.”

Rather, from a traditionally Christian viewpoint, each of us is born into this world with different levels of intelligence, with different areas of expertise; physically, some are stronger or heavier, others are slight and smaller; some learn foreign languages and write beautiful prose; others become fantastic athletes or scientists. Social customs and traditions, property holding, and individual initiative — each of these factors further discriminate as we continue in life.

None of this means that we are any less or more valued in the judgment of God, Who judges us based on our own, very unique capabilities. God measures us by ourselves, by our own maximum possibilities and potential, not by those of anyone else — that is, whether we use our own, individual talents to the very fullest (recall the Parable of the Talents in the Gospel of St. Matthew).

The Founders and, then after them, the Framers understood this, as their writings and speeches clearly indicate. Lincoln’s “new nation” would have certainly struck them as radical and revolutionary, a veritable “heresy.” Even more disturbing for them would be the specter of modern-day neoconservatives — that is, those who dominate the conservative movement and claim to rigorously defend the Constitutional republic against the abuses of the “woke” multiculturalist left — enshrining Lincoln’s address as a basic symbol of American political and social order.

They would have understood the radicalism implicit in such a pronouncement; they would have seen Lincoln’s interpretation as a contradiction not only  of the meaning of the Declaration, but also an undermining of the fundamental document of the American nation, the Constitution of 1787; and they would have understood in Lincoln’s language the content of a Christian and millennialist heresy, heralding a transformed nation where the Federal government would become the father and mother and absolute master of us all, and where a weaponized Executive and its judicial arm could engage in fanatical “lawfare” against any opponent of its goal of totalitarian control.

Thus, as we commemorate the declaring of American independence 248 years ago, we should lament the mythology about it created in 1863, and recall the generation of 1787, a generation of noble men who comprehended fully well that a country based on egalitarianism is a nation where true liberties are imperiled.

This nation is dying a painful death because it has ignored and rejected what our forefathers brought forth.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post The Real Meaning of July 4th and the Heresy of Lincolnian Interpretation appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s a funny scene in Robert Graves’s great novel, I, Claudius, when the son of a German chieftain who has been recruited by the Roman army gets into a shouting match with his brother, who stands at the head of a German army on the opposite side of the river from the Roman army. The brothers are reduced to an exchange of personal insults that culminates with the loyal German accusing his Romanized brother of breaking their mother’s heart.

I’ve often thought of this scene in recent years as I’ve watched the American people divide into roughly two opposing camps that can’t agree on anything and generally regard each other with mutual incomprehension and contempt.

I believe I have done a fairly decent job maintaining cordial relations with old friends and even family members who stand on the other side of the river. On a few occasions, a few have asked me why the camp in which I find myself has lost faith in the U.S. government and mainstream media.

I reply that my disillusionment began with the fraudulent Forever Wars of the Bush administration. This was followed by revelations of gigantic fraud in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis of 2008, and then the Federal Reserve back-door bailouts (with the Newspeak name “Quantitative Easing”) of the big banks that caused the crisis in the first place.

Then came the spectacularly fraudulent Russian Collusion Hoax in 2016, and then the impeachment of Donald Trump in 2020 for actions he took to investigate the dodgy business activities of Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine in 2014-15.

All of the above were demoralizing enough, but then came the official COVID-19 pandemic response in which we were treated to the following:

1). Lab creation of SARS-CoV-2.

2). Fraudulent concealment of the virus’s true origin.

3). Suppression of early treatment to pave the way for the rapid rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.

4). Totally useless but extremely destructive lockdowns in order to pave the way for the rapid COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

5). Nihilistic hospital protocols that killed people with Remdesivir, the withholding of useful drugs, and the inappropriate use of ventilators.

6). Fraudulent claims about COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and safety.

7). Mandates for ineffective and dangerous COVID-19 vaccines.

8). Fraudulent concealment of COVID-19 vaccine side effects and injuries.

In other words, the official pandemic response was the apotheosis of a demoralizing process that began about twenty years earlier. At this point, I struggle mightily to believe anything the U.S. government or mainstream media tells me. This mental state may be best characterized as a total loss of faith.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Pandemic Response Most Demoralizing Event in U.S. History appeared first on LewRockwell.

Julian Assange is free. Sort of. He moved into a larger prison cell called Australia with far too many bars to call it free. Did he win?

The first reaction to the news was jubilation, then cautious optimism. Then the concerns came out. He won his freedom at the cost of a compromise that gave the state a victory. Everybody was quick to point out that for Julian Assange, taking the plea-deal was the right thing to do. I completely agree. This whole post is an illustration of this agreement through a few personal stories.

In the end, the state won. They broke him, they made him say that he is guilty and that he feels sorry. He had to acknowledge that what he did was a crime. Forcing him to lie was the condition of his freedom. They made him dirty to look like them. They created a precedent.
They proved that they can do it and get away with it.

They proved that if any person of any nationality dares to say anything that can be construed as contrary to US interest, that person can be punished, he can be locked up for years without charges, subjected to torture and cruel punishment. It makes no difference for the Americans if they have no jurisdiction over the person or the place where the alleged offence took place; it makes no difference if their accusation is unconstitutional in the US or in the country where the alleged offence took place. The guilty plea made this all – in a way – legal or at least a powerful deterrent.

Do not misunderstand me: 12 years of suffering is unimaginable for most of us and this was the last chance for him to regain any degree of freedom. He did the right thing, but we should understand that this was not a victory. There is nothing to celebrate.

The only things that could make Julian Assange whole again are:

• An unconditional pardon
• A massive compensation for his suffering
• The investigation, indictment, trial and punishment for every single person responsible for causing his suffering.

Is there any chance of any of this happening? The first, maybe. The last, most definitely not.
As I already said it many times:

Nobody is ever punished for their crimes committed under the protective mantle of the state.

My experience is NOTHING compared to his, but it was enough to properly understand the dilemmas. Let me illustrate.

Stories #1 & 2

The tag-line of this Substack is ‘Politics is Personal’
The most painfully personal of my posts is this one:

The two stories pertaining to this post are the first and the second moment in the post above. Go and read them before you continue.
The questions are about the nature of bravery, compromise, submission and cooperation. Not easy questions.

Story #3

I am not a practicing Christian, but I was baptized by the Hungarian Bishop Zoltán Káldy. I only know this because my mother kept telling me as I was growing up.

A few years ago, visiting Hungary, my cousin took me to see his old school buddy, who is an evangelist pastor, ministering five villages in a pretty part of the country. I mentioned to him my personal connection to Káldy.
He was a very controversial figure in the history of the church, he said.
He was an informant of the state and many people held that against him. But we are talking about the clergy in a communist state, I said, where that state had a veto power over who can be a priest or a pastor! He had two options: cooperating or going to jail. Yes, he said, but still…

Picture yourself in that situation! What would be more important to you: your faith or your pride? The need of your flock, or the vain clinging to your ‘integrity’? Understanding fully, that if YOU do not cooperate, somebody else will. There are no good options in a totalitarian state.

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Throughout my life, I have had the experience of being able to clearly see something, and have everyone around me, including a lot of “experts,” insist that what I’m seeing does not exist, and then a few years later have my observation become generally accepted as true. This for example describes my experience with the COVID vaccines, as within a month of them being on the market, I had seen so many significant or severe injuries (and deaths) it was clear to me the shots were much more toxic than a typical pharmaceutical. Nonetheless, regardless of what I said, most of my colleagues (except those who were injured by the vaccines) would not listen to me, and it’s only now that mainstream doctors (or left-wing individuals) are beginning to accept that the vaccines were a mistake.

Similarly, throughout Biden’s presidency, it’s been very clear to me that Biden has progressively increasing cognitive impairment, yet with most of the left-wing individuals I am close to, every piece of evidence I’ve presented to substantiate this allegation is either written off as right-wing propaganda I am being hypnotized by or met with a bizarre excuse to account for Biden’s behavior. Likewise, many of my friends have had similar experiences when discussing this issue within their circle (e.g., to family members).

Yesterday, Biden shocked the world by having a debate performance which made it clear even to ardent Democrats that he was suffering from cognitive impairment. I, in turn, watched the entire left-wing media implicitly or overtly state that Biden was cognitively impaired and that there was panic throughout the Democrat party of him running in November, as it was both clear Biden could not win and that many other Democrats would also lose because many of their voters would not want to show up to vote for Biden and hence would not vote for the rest of the ticket.

This in turn suggests two distinct possibilities:

The first is that this debate was used to swap Biden out of the nomination after the primaries were completed (so an insider the public would never vote for could be appointed to the presidency).

The second is that most of the Democratic party (and much of the mass media) genuinely believed Biden cognitive issues were a “right wing conspiracy” and their responses last night were that of a state of genuine shock.

In this article, I am going to focus on the second possibility as I feel it also ties into the broader issue of vaccine injuries that has swept the Democrat party.

The Vaccine Mass Formation

Whenever you observe groups, you will often observe people defaulting to mimicking the behaviors of the group so that they can fit in and be accepted. In time, this often evolves to there being a very characteristic linguistic style and set of behaviors that emerges—which in many cases seems to be prioritized over the actual substance of what the group is about (e.g., I meet many people who claim to align with “the science” who copy the same phrases and chains of logic prominent scientists like Anthony Fauci use but simultaneously don’t understand any of the scientific points they are discussing).

Many examples of this mimicry occur. For example, I know numerous men who came out of the closest and then rapidly adopted an identical lispy and flamboyant style of speech, while in the New Age field, I’ve noticed the underlying thread they all share in common is a very distinctive style of speech which emphasizes a profound jubilation over a variety of inconsequential things they encounter. What’s remarkable about this mimicry is that you can often provide non-sensical examples of it that are fully embraced by the group (e.g., I periodically send my New Age friends random nonsense created by a New Age language generator which matches the cadence of the New Age field and frequently receive accolades from my friends). Likewise, in academia, it’s been repeatedly shown that if one produces incoherent nonsense that is written in the postmodernist style, it will often make it to publication (and likewise I’ve had a lot of fun over the years with essays from a nonsensical postmodernist language generator many take as being legitimate scholarly writings).

In turn, I’ve noticed that in some groups, this repetition or desire to belong to the group will magnify, and before long reinforce itself into cult-like behaviors that seem completely insane to an outside observer—a process which is particularly likely to happen if a nefarious individual deliberately manipulates the group to create this behavior (e.g., a shrewd marketing team, a talented dictator, or a sociopathic cult leader).
Note: while modern marketing has become remarkably effective at inducing this hypnosis (especially since marketers have the ability to broadcast the hypnotic message throughout the mass media so everyone feels pressured to conform to it), the most powerful manipulation (which is still not possible to standardize) occurs from individuals who figured out how to spiritually manipulate others. In turn, since I’ve seen those people do horrible stuff throughout my lifetime, I previously wrote an article explaining how to recognize spiritual manipulation and not be susceptible to it or the dangerous spiritual practices which accompany it.

Recently, Matthias Desmet brought the world’s attention to the mass formation hypothesis, which is essentially what happens when the concept I just described (individuals wanting to belong to a group and copying its non-verbal behaviors) becomes magnified to the point that they do completely irrational things, hallucinate things at odds with reality (e.g., seeing a face on the moon), and become willing to engage in truly horrific behavior (e.g., genociding another race or sacrificing their children to the state).

Desmet’s hypothesis became popular as it provided a potential explanation for why our leaders chose to enact a series of horrific COVID-19 policies, and continued to double-down on them regardless of how much evidence emerged showing the policies were a terrible idea. Conversely, it attracted a lot of animosity as many interpreted it as removing the responsibility from those who were clearly at fault for inflicting all of these horrors upon us (which I believe to be a misinterpretation of what Desmet argued).

In turn with the COVID vaccines, like many, I noticed there was a hypnotic fixation on them which led to the believers wanting to vaccinate as many people as possible (regardless of the human rights violations that required) and no amount of evidence being sufficient to convince them the vaccines weren’t a good idea.

One of the things I believe was the strongest proof for this was the fact that as the Democrat leadership continued to promote vaccination mandates, they also repeatedly vaccinated themselves despite numerous severe vaccine injuries occurring within their party.

Note: I also observed this with many medical professionals who continued to zealously promote vaccination despite being confronted with injuries in their patients.

Senate Vaccine Injuries

Many large surveys have found that a continually increasing portion of the country believes the vaccines are causing widespread social harms (e.g., a recent poll found a third of Americans believe the vaccines are killing people) and that a large number of people were harmed by them (e.g., one poll found 7% of Americans believe they suffered a major side effect from the vaccines and 34% believe they suffered a minor one). Because of this, in theory, if a large sample of vaccinated individuals could be identified, there should have been a number of significant injuries in them.

As it so happened, the US Senate provided that sample, as we saw numerous unusual and severe diseases emerge in the Democrats there at a far higher rate than had ever happened in the past, and more importantly, those diseases were things strongly linked to the COVID vaccines. Furthermore, those injuries only occurred in Senators who had zealously promoted the vaccines.

Note: it is likely far more injuries than those I listed here occurred within the Senate as due to the political implications of acknowledging a vaccine injury, I would not expect the Senators to publicize them. Those I have listed are simply the ones which were too overt to cover up.

John Fetterman:

John Fetterman, a freshman Pennsylvania Democratic Senator (then aged 52) on May 17, 2022, less than a month after strongly endorsing the vaccine, suffered an ischemic stroke two days before the state primary for his Senate seat. Despite significant signs of cognitive impairment since his stroke, Fetterman somehow won the primary and then the general election. Since becoming elected, Fetterman has had prolonged periods of absence from the U.S. Senate due to needing specialized medical care:

Fetterman was hospitalized for syncope (lightheadedness) for two days beginning on February 10, 2023. Two days after his release he was hospitalized again, for a severe case of major depression. For about two months, Fetterman lived and worked at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As part of his daily schedule at the hospital, his chief of staff arrived at 10 a.m. on weekdays with newspaper clips, statements for Fetterman to approve, and legislation to review. During his hospitalization, Fetterman co-sponsored a bipartisan rail safety bill, introduced after the derailment of a chemical-carrying train in East Palestine, Ohio, close to the border with Pennsylvania; the regulation aimed to strengthen freight-rail safety regulations to prevent future derailments.

On April 17, 2023, Fetterman returned to the Senate to chair the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry subcommittee on food and nutrition, specialty crops, organics and research. The Washington Post said that Fetterman’s “voice stumbled at times while reading from prepared notes” during the subcommittee hearing, but “he appeared in good spirits” and communicated a message about the importance of fighting hunger.

Since that time, Fetterman has had a variety of unusual incidents suggestive of cognitive impairment (e.g., earlier this month he was speeding and crashed into someone).

Ben Luján

Ben Ray Luján is a freshman New Mexico Democratic Senator who repeatedly promoted the COVID-19 vaccines.

On January 27, 2022, Luján (then 49) was hospitalized in Santa Fe after feeling fatigued and dizzy. He was found to have had a hemorrhagic stroke from a torn vertebral artery affecting his cerebellum and was transferred to the University of New Mexico Hospital for treatment, which included a decompressive craniectomy. A statement from his office said that “he is expected to make a full recovery”. Luján returned to work at the Senate on March 3 and stated by April 21 that he was 90% recovered.

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The post Is Joe Biden’s Brain Vaccine Injured? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In this age of relativism, where one often hears reference to “your truth” and “my truth,” there are so many varying interpretations of truth that the concept of truth itself seems devoid of meaning. It is fashionable to see the concept of truth as indistinguishable from opinions or preferences. For example, Mari Fitzduff writes that

for many of us, far from our beliefs being “true,” they are actually born out of a particular social context, allied to physiological needs such as a differing neural sensitivity to threats and the greater certainty that a group can provide. Thus, beliefs are often what is termed “groupish” rather than necessarily true.

The task of deciding which group has the “true” version of facts is then left to expert fact-checkers who will pronounce on what is true or false.

In that light, it is easy to see why those who update dictionaries seek to reflect the common usage of words, rather than to reflect what is true. Dictionary definitions do not purport to be true nor do they claim to reflect any underlying universal truth underpinning the words defined; they are simply statements of how words are conventionally used. For example, the Cambridge Dictionary defines a woman as “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”—that is how the word “woman” is now commonly used, and being defined in that way by the dictionary does not mean that anyone who lives and identifies as female is, in truth, a woman.

Aristotle famously defined truth as facts corresponding with reality: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” In “Mises and the Diminished a Priori,” David Gordon defines an a priori proposition as

a proposition that can be known to be true just by thinking about it: you don’t need to examine the world to see whether it’s true. “2 + 2 = 4” is a priori true: once you understand what the proposition says, you can grasp that it’s true. You don’t need to keep counting objects to see whether the claimed equality holds true.

What does it mean to describe a proposition as true in that sense? In describing praxeological axioms as true, the word “truth” is deployed to mean that “if A implies B, and A is true, then B must also be true.” Science strives for accuracy and tests its propositions empirically or logically to ensure that they are accurate and valid and seeks to establish the correct facts. In ordinary language, we say it is true that 2 + 2 = 4, but “truth” in that context only means accuracy. It expresses a scientific principle that is true in the sense that equating 2 + 2 with 4 is the only formula that works. Anyone who accepts the suggestion of decolonized mathematics that 2 + 2 = 5, or indeed any number we want, would soon find their planes falling out of the sky and their infrastructure collapsing.

Beyond that, the question of what it would mean to say that science strives for “truth” is contested among philosophers. Indeed, many philosophers would say that there is no ultimate truth, in that what is said to be true is always open to question. In The Intellectuals and Socialism, Friedrich von Hayek explains why intellectuals are inclined to question everything:

Orthodoxy of any kind, any pretense that a system of ideas is final and must be unquestioningly accepted as a whole, is the one view which of necessity antagonizes all intellectuals, whatever their views on particular issues. Any system which judges men by the completeness of their conformity to a fixed set of opinions, by their “soundness” or the extent to which they can be relied upon to hold approved views on all points, deprives itself of a support without which no set of ideas can maintain its influence in modern society. The ability to criticize accepted views, to explore new vistas and to experience with new conceptions, provides the atmosphere without which the intellectual cannot breathe.

In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises also explains that neither the natural nor social sciences are concerned with truth in the philosophical sense: “Granted that science cannot give us truth—and who knows what truth really means—at any rate it is certain that it works in leading us to success.” Thus, praxeology, the science of human action, does not seek the truth in the grand “meaning of life” sense that characterizes many philosophical perspectives and perhaps all religions. In Mises’s view, praxeology does not “claim to reveal information about the true, objective, and absolute meaning of life.” Instead, praxeology “is neutral with regard to all judgments of value and the choice of ultimate ends. Its task is not to approve or to disapprove, but only to establish facts.”

Many liberals are also wary of the concept of “truth” and avoid it altogether not only because they are relativists who reject the notion of objective truth, but also because the concept of “truth” is associated in popular discourse with things people must do. Many people think that if something is true, then it follows logically that others must be forced to do it. For example, they would think that as soon as it is established to be true that something is harmful to health, it follows that it must be banned to force people to promote good health. Thus, the enemies of liberty often march under the banner of truth, armed with true principles about what is needed to promote human health. Liberty falls by the wayside. It is true that smoking is harmful to health, and on that basis, the Tory Party in the United Kingdom wants to ban it. As Rothbard warned:

And remember, if today they come for the smoker, tomorrow they will come for you. If today they grab your cigarette, tomorrow they will seize your junk food, your carbohydrates, your yummy but “empty” calories . . . Are you ready for the Left Nutritional Kingdom, with everyone forced to confine his food to yoghurt and tofu and bean sprouts? Are you ready to be confined in a cage, to make sure that your diet is perfect, and that you get the prescribed Compulsory Exercise?

Rothbard warns against this “neo-Puritanical” combining of the theological quest for truth with the statist quest for power: the power of the state to tell everyone what they must do.

In the postmodern age, far from being devoted to the pursuit of truth, statists promote the ideology that truth is anything you want and that each of us can therefore have our own version of the truth. They are devoted not to the pursuit of truth but to the version of “truth” that they think will promote their political goals. As Lew Rockwell observes: “In class after class, the postmodern message is the same: what we call truth is wholly subjective, what we call science is merely the momentary professional consensus, and what we call reality is a fiction made up to sooth our psychological need for order in the universe.”

Far from being designed to embrace the truth, postmodernism rejects the very notion that anything is true.

The post Varying Interpretations of Truth, or Truth as a Social Construct appeared first on LewRockwell.

Today is the two-year anniversary of my Corona Investigative Committee interview.

Many of you may have read my presentation notes in A Mostly Peaceful Depopulation, but you probably haven’t seen the video (transcript included below courtesy of a reader who generously volunteered to tidy up the AI transcript).

The next day, my fearless friend Leslie Manookian—founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund (which just won a major legal victory against vaccine mandates, incidentally)—emailed me this note:

“I told Reiner about you and your work on propaganda and manipulation and recommended he have you on the Corona Investigative Committee.

“I’m writing now to connect you two and will leave it to you to take it from here.

“PS Reiner gets zillions of emails so don’t stress if he doesn’t reply right away!”

I was moved by Leslie’s out-of-the-blue recommendation but assumed I wouldn’t hear back for a while or at all given the lengthy queue the Ausschuss surely has.

I was wrong. Three days later, I heard from Corvin Rabenstein, whom Leslie described as “the man who makes the Ausschuss run!” Corvin—who has since become a friend and now works with Dr. Michael Nehls, author of the riveting The Indoctrinated Brain—invited me to present on the morning of July 1, less than three days away, writing:

“I really like the phrase ‘A Mostly Peaceful Depopulation’, by the way. It gets to the heart of this dystopian situation and points to the role of the media in selling us obvious lies as incontrovertible truths these days.”1

On Wednesday, I started drafting my Retrospective in Whys, with each why flowing fluidly into the next for hours upon hours without interruption. I finally collapsed, got four hours of sleep, and then resumed my brain dump reflecting on the COVID tyranny to date.

Nearly 6,300 words later, I was ready to run it by my husband. I printed up a stack of pages and started reading.

He interrupted me, “You’re not going to just read from that, are you?”

I realized he was right. Not only would it take hours to get through everything I had written, but it would be far less engaging than just talking. I would have to wing it.

So that’s what I did. I had my notes printed up but barely glanced at them, mainly flipping through to find particular quotes.

Oh, and I’d only gotten two-and-a-half hours of sleep before my international debut, totaling six-and-a-half hours over two days.

Thank goodness for adrenaline, caffeine, and the elation of connecting with kindreds whose interviews with experts had informed my own research since 2020, as I noted in my first Recommendations Roundup.

I am grateful I had the opportunity to meet with Reiner Fuellmich, Viviane Fischer, and Wolfgang Wodarg while the committee was still intact—even though Viviane appeared so perturbed (worse than her usual discourteousness, passing notes, texting, and whispering while the guests are speaking), a commenter joked that she must be mad at me because of my hat.

Reiner, on the other hand, was an absolute gentleman and wholly engaged in the conversation. Wolfgang, too, was paying close attention and made his own meaningful contributions.

I couldn’t help but think of Reiner after celebrating the joyous liberation of Julian Assange following fourteen years of political persecution for the crime of practicing journalism by exposing regime crimes.

Read the Whole Article

The post My Corona Investigative Committee Presentation appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s a funny scene in Robert Graves’s great novel, I, Claudius, when the son of a German chieftain who has been recruited by the Roman army gets into a shouting match with his brother, who stands at the head of a German army on the opposite side of the river from the Roman army. The brothers are reduced to an exchange of personal insults that culminates with the loyal German accusing his Romanized brother of breaking their mother’s heart.

I’ve often thought of this scene in recent years as I’ve watched the American people divide into roughly two opposing camps that can’t agree on anything and generally regard each other with mutual incomprehension and contempt.

I believe I have done a fairly decent job maintaining cordial relations with old friends and even family members who stand on the other side of the river. On a few occasions, a few have asked me why the camp in which I find myself has lost faith in the U.S. government and mainstream media.

I reply that my disillusionment began with the fraudulent Forever Wars of the Bush administration. This was followed by revelations of gigantic fraud in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis of 2008, and then the Federal Reserve back-door bailouts (with the Newspeak name “Quantitative Easing”) of the big banks that caused the crisis in the first place.

Then came the spectacularly fraudulent Russian Collusion Hoax in 2016, and then the impeachment of Donald Trump in 2020 for actions he took to investigate the dodgy business activities of Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine in 2014-15.

All of the above were demoralizing enough, but then came the official COVID-19 pandemic response in which we were treated to the following:

1). Lab creation of SARS-CoV-2.

2). Fraudulent concealment of the virus’s true origin.

3). Suppression of early treatment to pave the way for the rapid rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.

4). Totally useless but extremely destructive lockdowns in order to pave the way for the rapid COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

5). Nihilistic hospital protocols that killed people with Remdesivir, the withholding of useful drugs, and the inappropriate use of ventilators.

6). Fraudulent claims about COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and safety.

7). Mandates for ineffective and dangerous COVID-19 vaccines.

8). Fraudulent concealment of COVID-19 vaccine side effects and injuries.

In other words, the official pandemic response was the apotheosis of a demoralizing process that began about twenty years earlier. At this point, I struggle mightily to believe anything the U.S. government or mainstream media tells me. This mental state may be best characterized as a total loss of faith.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Pandemic Response Most Demoralizing Event in U.S. History appeared first on LewRockwell.

To say that I’ve been waiting on pins and needles for the past year or so is putting it mildly. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

This fake World Davos Made in which fat is beautiful, sloth is a virtue, and pedophilia the pinnacle of human love, should have you just a teensy bit anxious.

When we look up and see everything beautiful being systematically subverted, cheapened, or just plain vandalized it’s hard to maintain your compassion, even if it was warranted…. which it isn’t.

Today I come back to write my first public essay in more than a month and we’re a couple of days away from arch-Globalist Emmanuel Macron of France getting trounced by both Marine Le Pen and a fractious left-wing coalition.

Heading into this weekend’s run-offs it’s pretty obvious that Macron’s party, En Marche, will be relegated to the ashbin of history. Macron was a fake populist sold to us by Davos nearly a decade ago to blunt the rise of Le Pen then.

And it really doesn’t matter this time what political ring-fencing the various commies in France do to freeze out a National Front majority in the French Parliament. The tide has turned against them.

It’s not coming back. Just like it has in the UK, the US, the Netherlands, Italy and the rest of the so-called post-Enlightenment West.

That idea right there, “post-Enlightenment,” where we began to reject God for modernity and the supremacy of human reason over the vastness of our ignorance about how the Universe worked, is the key to what’s happening.

And the minute I began writing about Macron I was hit with the memory of Notre Dame burning.

The library was on fire. And the jackals brayed about how great it was.

This happened on Macron’s watch. And he cried crocodile tears for it, as all true Marxist scumbags like him do.

Because they can only have the facsimile of emotions since we all live in a simulation anyway.

At the time I called it a “Symbol of Failing Culture.” But it’s far more than that. Notre Dame’s burning, deliberate or otherwise, was emblematic of how careless our caretakers were about preserving our past.

So obsessed with their pathetic modernity they expropriated nearly all the wealth of France for decades to elevate sloth and neglect beauty while becoming openly hostile to their own history. Their contempt for history was on full display as their rage at religion overwhelmed their basic humanity.

What’s worse to me is descendants of those that built Notre Dame cheering this event because they’ve been inculcated to hate religion of all forms by their Marxist education.

They’ve been effectively immunized against feeling anything but contempt for themselves and their history.

History is history. It doesn’t have an agenda. It exists, for better or worse, to remind us that who we are today is the sum total of who we were then.

Marxists fundamentally believe in creating a man without a history, without connection to his past to mold him into the New Soviet Man.

Argue with me about this all you want Bernie Bros, Corbynites and Richard Wolff acolytes, this is the point of this French post-modernist “life is an absurd simulation” nonsense. It’s simply an excuse to justify the inherent envy at the core of all Marxist thought.

It meant something to millions of people, if not billions.

Its burning was truly a moment of them destroying something beautiful even if the fire was an accident.

Notre Dame was a thing to be envied, for sure. A place of stunning beauty and achievement. A thing worth preserving through the centuries. Of course it had to be destroyed.

The contempt of Macron and his history-challenged fellow travelers at anyone not down with the Commintern was on full display back then.

While they think we shouldn’t have histories, they forget that we have memories.

So, there should be zero surprise today about what has happened at the French ballot box.

Macron and Davos will do everything they can to extend and pretend that they are still in control in France. They may even succeed in saving Macron. In doing so they may even destroy what’s left of France, sacrificing it on the altar of the European Union, but for what?

A meta-stable alliance held together by the scolding of a bloodless German vampire like Ursula Von der Leyen? How long do you think the French go from Yellow Vests to the guillotine?

Because, last I checked, that’s a part of their history Macron is also trying to deny.

Reprinted with permission from Gold Goats ‘n Guns.

The post Macron’s Loss Isn’t an End, It’s a Beginning appeared first on LewRockwell.

That monkey on your back comes in many forms.

We’ve all heard of Disaster Capitalism: the Powers That Be either initiate or amplify a crisis as a means of granting themselves “emergency powers” which just so happen to further concentrate the nation’s wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.

Naomi Klein described the concept and cited examples in her 2008 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and summarized the core dynamic: “Disaster capitalism perpetuates cycles of poverty and exploitation.”

Move over, Disaster Capitalism–make room for Addiction Capitalism.

Addiction Capitalism is my term for the last-ditch / desperation method of guaranteeing sales and profits when everybody already has everything: reduce the quality so everything fails and must be replaced, and addict your customers to your product or service which–what a surprise–only you or your cartel provide.

And since you’ve bought up all the competition and moated your monopoly via regulatory thickets / regulatory capture, consumers must continue paying–or suffer the consequences. Addiction Capitalism is capital’s last best hope when the essentials of life and novelties are both over-supplied. So the only ways to juice demand and maintain profits are 1) lower the quality of goods so they must be constantly replaced (Cory Doctorow’s “ensh**tification”) and 2) addict consumers to services such as social media and products such as smartphones, or create dependencies which are equivalent to addiction, such as dependency on weight-loss medications.

Just as the addict is dependent on a drug, patients are dependent on medications that must be taken until the end of their lives.

Jonathan Haidt’s new book offers a scathing indictment of the intentionally addictive–and destructive–nature of social media and smartphones The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

For another example of how Addiction Capitalism works, consider how tech companies sell a basic accounting software system for a small sum until it becomes a standard for households and small businesses. Then they eliminate outright purchase of the software and switch to a high-cost subscription model. Nice little history of all your financial records you got there; it would be a shame to lose all that by refusing to pay our monthly fee.

Read the Whole Article

The post Move Over, Disaster Capitalism–Make Room for Addiction Capitalism appeared first on LewRockwell.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that a president has immunity for official acts, but not for personal acts. Which is which will be a contentious issue. For example, if a president were to have the CIA, FBI, or Secret Service murder a political rival that would be a personal act. But when President Obama had the US military murder a US citizen suspected of being a terrorist, it was an official act.

But was it? The justification for the murder was suspicion alone, a bare-faced accusation unconfirmed by a trial and therefore in violation of due process. Has it ever been established that it is an official act for a president to have a US citizen murdered without due process? Perhaps it has happened secretly by the CIA but my impression is that President Obama’s murder of the Muslim religious leader who was an American citizen was the first public murder without due process and conviction delivering a death penalty.

Nothing was made of the murder because Americans had been indoctrinated with fear of Muslim terrorists and regarded the murder as an act of war.

When vice president Biden bragged on TV that he forced by withholding billions of dollars in US aid from the Ukraine government unless it fired the prosecutor investigating the Ukrainian company that paid his son $50,000 a month as a director, was it an official act or a personal act? Why has there been no investigation of this self-serving use of presidential authority?

The Supreme Court majority emphasized that a president must have immunity for official acts or he can be stopped by law suits and politically motivated charges from performing his designated functions. In other words, the Court’s decision is based on elementary common sense.

If a president believes an election is fraudulent, it is his responsibility, and thereby an official act, for him to have the election verified. However, the Democrats and whore media defined the issue as “Trump overthrowing the election.” Even experts with the evidence in their hands were indicted for aiding and abetting Trump’s attempted overthrow of the election.

In other words, the criminal indictment brought against Trump assumed without justification that there was no evidence of election fraud. As Trump had appointed a Justice Department and an entire government consisting of his enemies, his own government treated his official action as his private action.

A rally in support of Trump was mischaracterized by Democrats, whore media, and Republicans such as Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell as an “insurrection.”

What we should be disturbed about is the ability of the Democrats and the whore media to disrupt the 4-year term of a US president with a series of false charges that were never confirmed and then to use unconfirmed charges to indict a former president in an effort to prevent him from again running for president.

Prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the indictments against Trump were falling apart. The biased “special counsel” prosecuting Trump was caught lying to the federal judge, who has put the case on hold. Fani Willis entrusted by the White House with Trump’s prosecution in Atlanta has been found to have given her lover $700,000 of taxpayers’ money with which he took Fani on vacations. Her case against Trump is also on hold.

In other words, the legal machinery the corrupt Democrats have employed against Trump is too corrupt to be able to do its assigned political assassination.

Now the Supreme Court knocks the props out from under the main charge orchestrated from the fake “insurrection” charge.The Supreme Court’s ruling makes it clear that the special council’s charges against Trump have no legal basis and should be dropped.

The response of Democrats is revealing. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor claims that “the President is now a king above the law.” Democrat US Representative Bennie Thompson, chairman of the January 6 Insurrection Committee, declared the US Supreme Court to be “lawless and corrupt.”

Why aren’t these charges from Sotomayor and Thompson applied to where they belong? Where were Sotomayor and Thompson when President Obama claimed the power of a king to assassinate a US citizen without due process of law? Where were they when President George W. Bush claimed the power of a feudal lord to detain suspects indefinitely without due process of law?

The collapse of American law from its basis in facts and reason into emotion has been underway for years. No one seems to care. Appointments to the federal courts no longer emphasize knowledge of law and commitment to law as a shield of the people. Instead, people are appointed according to whether a minority or woman is needed, whether inclusion requires a homosexual or a transgendered person. Law is no longer about justice. It is about “equity.” It is about disposing of challenges to official narratives. Law is now used to revolutionize the United States, to convert it into a tower of babel with no capability to constrain the ruling elites’ use of the country to further their own interests.

This is the issue that needs addressing. How can it be done?

The post The Supreme Court Ruled Not for Trump But for the Office of the President appeared first on LewRockwell.

This Pentecost, a hermit in the diocese of Lexington, Kentucky, admitted that she was really a she and not a he. That is not how she put it, but that is what it was. Christian Matson, who was born Nicole Matson, said that she began to express herself as a male when she was 21. She has been taking synthetic testosterone since then, so that if you look at her face now, you will see someone who appears to be a very odd sort of man: bearded, with smallish features, soft-bodied, overweight.

For many years, she has practiced a deception upon the Church, saying she was what she was not. I will grant that she was practicing a deception upon herself at the same time, so that when by her dress, her hair, and her voice-forcing she said to others, implicitly, “I am a man,” a part of her mind could allay any queasy conscience, saying, “Be quiet—I really am a man, so there.”

Let me get one matter out of the way. I will hear that sex is “nonbinary,” existing along a spectrum. That is nonsense. You’re going to get a puppy dog from a litter.  You check to see if it’s a boy dog or a girl dog. It never occurs to you that there is anything else for a dog to be. The doe gives birth to a fawn. That fawn is going to be another doe, or a buck. It is the same with man.

Barring the exceedingly rare birth defect, what you have is a boy or a girl, and that’s it. There is no case of anyone having fully functional reproductive organs of both sexes. Even in the case of those birth defects, you will almost always have one sex or the other predominating in appearance, though it is likely that both will be nonfunctional. You are almost three times as likely to be born with a partial or wholly missing arm or leg than you are to suffer one of those defects (1 in 2,100 versus 1 in 5,800).

The first time I ever heard the word “binary” used in a pejorative way it was by an amiable feminist in the English department at Providence College. She used it to describe certain kinds of logic, implying that there was something peculiarly masculine and therefore reductive and even primitive about it. But, of course, some things are either true or not true: the middle is excluded.

God exists, or He does not exist. Jesus rose from the dead, or He did not rise from the dead. You can either construct a regular heptagon with a straightedge and a compass, or you cannot (in fact, you cannot). A thing cannot be true and not true at the same time and in the same respect. Either the earth’s temperature is rising, or it is not; if it is rising, most of the rise is either due to human activity, whether alone or in synergy with other factors, or it is not.

Moral reality, too, is subject to the same analysis. We Catholics are supposed to be moral realists. We do not determine what shall be right or wrong. We recognize what is right or wrong, regardless of what anybody thinks about it. When we say, for example, that it is wrong to practice deceit, we imply that deceit harms both the deceiver and the deceived—the latter, by the deceit, but the former, both by the deceit and in the act of deceiving. You cannot escape the consequences of sin. It is like ingesting poison.

The doctor who treated George Washington for strep throat believed that bleeding him would help. Of course, it did not; it made the body even weaker, and Washington died. The doctor did the best he knew. He was not malicious, only ignorant. But no one can plead ignorance of what we call the natural law, written upon the heart; and even if your mind and soul are befuddled or benighted, still the sin works its harm. Cannibals do not grow more human by feeding upon human flesh.

The sexual sins do not differ, in this regard, from sins of falsehood or violence. To say that fornication is wrong is to imply that it harms both those who fornicate and the society that accepts it or connives at it. Granted, when everybody around you is doing something bad, your joining in will likely involve no special degree of malice.

How much to blame was Augustine’s friend Alypius, when he got hooked on watching the combats of gladiators in the arena, issuing in bloodshed and death? God alone knows. Alypius tried to resist, after all, while everyone around him took such combats as a matter of course, much as we now do with premarital sex. But who can deny that the Romans were worse for it? It hardened their hearts, it gave them a taste for cruelty, and it cheapened their view of human life.

It is one thing to get mixed up in a brawl. That is often the result of a quick temper, too much drink, an overflow of misdirected energy. It is another to make a practice of brawling; still another, to institutionalize bloodshed for sport.

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The post Recognizing Reality appeared first on LewRockwell.

Retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor has said that “the governing power” of the U.S. lies “in unelected hands” after the first presidential debate highlighting President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline to the whole world.

In a video message published on the YouTube channel Our Country Our Choice, MacGregor expressed his concern for the U.S. after Biden’s catastrophic showing in the first presidential debate on June 27.

“President Biden is not fit to discharge the immense duties of the presidency,” the army veteran stated. “The alarming evidence of his cognitive decline was on display for all to witness. Yet his enablers and political allies continue to exploit the president to substitute their destructive agenda for the interests of the American people.”

“Destructive executive orders and policy directives, many of which were likely signed when President Biden was in a rapidly diminished state of mind, inflicted tremendous damage on our nation,” he said.

Macgregor criticized the Biden administration for facilitating mass illegal immigration, destructive climate change policies, and the waging of foreign wars in Ukraine and Israel.

“President Biden’s manipulators fueled a proxy war in Ukraine that risks drawing us into a catastrophic confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia,” the retired Colonel said. “Their unqualified support for Israel’s disproportionate actions in Gaza erodes our moral authority and credibility as a champion of peace and stability.”

“Sadly, President Biden’s fragile mental state was laid bare for all to see in last night’s debate,” he observed.  “His responses were frequently incoherent. He appeared lost, even confused, struggling to complete basic thoughts.”

“It is time to ask: who truly governs this country?” Macgregor said. “Is it we the people, as our founders intended, or have we surrendered control to unelected bureaucrats, sprawling federal agencies, and affluent donors who do not have the best interests of ordinary Americans at heart?”

“President Biden should retire with grace and dignity and not be cruelly exploited in the twilight of his life,” the Colonel noted.

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The post Colonel Macgregor: Biden’s Cognitive Decline Makes It Obvious the US Gov’t Is in ‘Unelected Hands’ appeared first on LewRockwell.