Lew Rockwell Institute

“If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.”

– President George W Bush

Three disasters have defined this century. Each was precipitated, perpetuated, and exacerbated by people who used the crisis to accrue more power.

One calamity occurred as the millennium opened. The next as its first decade ended. And the third as this one started.

Our last installment discussed the initial catastrophe. Today, seventeen years after the Lehman Brothers collapse, we examine some causes and consequences of the second.

Predictable Pile-Up

The multi-decade fight against “terror” has cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives. Congress never declared these wars, which were funded by fake money counterfeited by the Fed.

This financial finagling precipitated a predictable pile-up on this century’s road to perdition. As with any economic event afflicting billions of people, the 2008 financial crisis had many causes. But the main impetus was the Federal Reserve.

Under sound money, business cycles always occur within specific companies or industries. But they’re relatively contained.

For a given product or particular market, desire ebbs and favor flows. Supply and demand wax and wane with resource constraints, competitive pressure, customer preference, and price extremes that cure themselves.

But for the entire globe to crest and crash on the same wave means an exogenous force caused a raucous wake. Widespread booms and busts… including the Great Depression and the stagflationary Seventies… have been more extensive and severe since the founding of the Fed.

But the two decade “Great Moderation” after the early ‘80s “Volcker shock” seemed to tame the business cycle. With his Black Monday bailout in 1987, Alan Greenspan created his eponymous “put” that made him the “maestro”.

The Fed has repeatedly reprised his tune throughout this century. That makes sense. Counterfeiting is the only song they know. Like day drinking, speaking two languages, and tax avoidance, ripping people off is cool if you’re rich but can cause problems if you’re poor.

As David Stockton notes, the Fed balance sheet (the amount of money it’s conjured) increased 35-fold since the advent of the “Greenspan put”. Nominal GDP merely quintupled, with real GDP up only half that much.

After the tech bubble burst, the Fed did what it always does: created a new one. Greenspan again rode to the “rescue”.

Primary Accomplices

Like a beach ball under water, the Fed forced interest rates below the level at which they’d have naturally floated. When markets made them let go, everyone got soaked.

In a startling move at the time (tho’ in retrospect it seems like quaint restraint), Greenspan held rates at one percent for over a year. The result was the only recession on record in which house prices didn’t fall. From that “lesson”, politicians and bureaucrats encouraged borrowers to believe they never would.

During the first seven years of this century, more dollars were created than in the previous two centuries combined. In subsequent years, that ignominious record would be repeatedly eclipsed.

Much of this money flowed into mortgages, precipitating an unnatural rise in real estate prices (which was the idea). Easy credit attracted marginal speculators who had no business being in the market.

Not that the Fed didn’t have help. Among its primary accomplices were a couple privileged, state-sanctioned ambiguities known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

These “Government Sponsored Entities” (GSE) purchase mortgages on the secondary market. With an implicit taxpayer backstop, they buy loans from originators, which provides those lenders additional funds to extend new loans.

This process prompts more mortgages than would otherwise exist, making it easier for people to “buy” homes they can’t afford. Government laid the bait that lulled buyers into this trap.

The tax and regulatory benefits GSEs enjoy, plus an essentially unlimited line-of-credit from the U.S. Treasury, diverted resources and distorted markets by allowing these entities to raise money and buy mortgages more easily than private competitors could.

Under political pressure to increase home “ownership” among “disadvantaged” groups, GSEs also enabled lower lending standards by easing requirements on mortgages they bought. This encouraged more reckless loans, as originators knew they could offload them from their books.

Much as student loans and lower admission standards enticed millions into college who had no business being there, the Fed, GSEs, and crony legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and Equal Opportunity Credit Act attracted borrowers into mortgages they would never be able to afford.

“Generally Sound”

As Tom Woods noted in Meltdown, his definitive overview of the financial crisis, even the New York Times conceded these warped interventions “changed homeownership from something that secured a place in the middle class to something that ejected people from it.”

Loose money and low standards (a natural consequence of loose money) affected prime loans too. In many cases it infected them first, and more quickly… which undermines the notion that lenders “preyed” on subprime borrowers.

Adjustable rate mortgages enticed creditworthy speculators and “flippers” to borrow more than they otherwise would. This allowed them to bid up prices, enjoy appreciation, and sell the property before teaser rates rose… all of which attracted more speculation.

This is what the government wanted. For two decades, both political parties, including President George W Bush, urged down payment requirements be subsidized, reduced, or ditched.

As these wishes were increasingly accommodated, Greenspan’s successor, Ben Bernanke, assured us “lending standards are generally sound.” The year George Bush asked lenders to dispense with down payments, the Fed dismissed the idea there was a housing bubble.

Former Chairman Greenspan encouraged borrowers to take advantage of adjustable rate mortgages (without warning that the adjusted rates would eventually take advantage of them).

And why not? For two decades the Fed had implicitly enticed (and explicitly backstopped) reckless behavior its counterfeiting encouraged. As the housing bubble inflated, the people pumping air lamented a lack of affordable homes.

When the burst bubble finally offered the remedy, lower prices became the one tonic that wasn’t allowed. The people who caused the problem promptly pumped more of the debt and bailouts that produced the binge.

To the extent these “saviors” were criticized, it was for being too slow and stingy pouring the booze. As the hangover intensified, the bartenders decided to open the taps.

Read the Whole Article

The post A Brief History of the 21st Century: Part II appeared first on LewRockwell.

Contrary to the assertions of Scofield-duped Christian Zionist evangelicals, God gave NO everlasting unconditional promise of national perpetuity to the Old Covenant nation of Israel. God’s promises of blessings to Old Covenant Israel were conditional to Israel’s obedience to God.

An unconditional everlasting promise was given to the man Abraham. And this promise was fulfilled in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. (Galatians 3:16, 28, 29) But to the nation of Old Covenant Israel was no such promise given.

In my third Prophecy Message from Romans 11, I provided much Scripture that delineated the differences between the unconditional everlasting seed promise given to Abraham (fulfilled in Christ) and the conditional land promise given to the Old Covenant nation of Israel—a covenant that Israel broke—and God then cursed Israel and took the land away from them forever.

Prophecy Message Three is entitled God’s Chosen People, and we have that message in both a DVD and PDF format.

Moses, the man through whom God gave Israel its conditional covenant, made it crystal clear to the nation just how conditional God’s covenant was to them.

But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee:

The LORD shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in all that thou settest thine hand unto for to do, until thou be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the wickedness of thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken me.

The LORD shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies: and shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.

Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people.

And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all nations whither the LORD shall lead thee.

Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity.

Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou hearkenedst not unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee:

And they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and upon thy seed for ever.

Because thou servedst not the LORD thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things;

Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the LORD shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee.

And it shall come to pass, that as the LORD rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the LORD will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked from off the land whither thou goest to possess it.

(See Deuteronomy 28:15 – 68)

In these and many other passages of Scripture, God promised to remove the children of Israel from the promised land (Canaan) forever, because of their disobedience. In this chapter in Deuteronomy, Moses predicted the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians, the destruction of Judah by the Babylonians and the destruction of the Judahite remnant by the Romans.

In short, Old Covenant Israel violated its covenant with God, and God did what Moses declared He would do: He expelled them from the promised land and destroyed their nation forever. The Israelis in Palestine today are NOT Biblical Israelites; they are NOT the biological descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and they are NOT God’s chosen people.

The Israelis are the children of Japheth, not Shem, as are the rest of the Eastern Europeans from which they descended. They have ZERO God-given land covenant in Palestine. They have ZERO promise of national perpetuity from God; there is ZERO promise from God for anyone who attempts to bless, assist, aid or support the Zionist state.

In truth, from its very inception in 1948, the State of Israel has proven itself to be a devilish, murderous, barbaric people—a plague of racism, hatred, ethnic cleansing, war and genocide upon the world. And the more the United States has entangled itself economically, militarily, morally and spiritually with Israel, the more America has invoked the curse of God upon it to the point that today America is little more than a vassal state of the most vile, wicked and bloodthirsty country on the planet.

And after two years of supporting Israel’s maniacal genocide in Gaza, the people of the entire world hold both Israel and the United States in utter contempt. And for good reason. America’s financial and military support for Israel’s crimes against humanity in Palestine are contemptible.

Donald Trump has proven himself to be as much or more of a lackey for Israel as Joe Biden. He is the one man in the world that has the capability to put an end to Israel’s slaughter of innocents in Gaza and the West Bank, but he refuses to do it. As with almost the entire Congress in Washington, D.C., Trump is nothing more than a pimp for Israel. They are all bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. They are the worst kind of prostitutes. They make street walkers look like Sunday School teachers by comparison.

But, ladies and gentlemen, Israel is doing more than murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents; it is expediting its own destruction. Israel has passed the point of no return. Its collapse is certain—and probably imminent.

As it always does, the Western media ignored it, but Yemen’s Houthis delivered a devastating missile attack against Israel, after Israel assassinated Yemen’s civilian prime minister and 12 of his cabinet members.

Here is a YouTube technical analysis from Conflict Skies & Steel of the attack:

Today we are witnessing a historic escalation in the Middle East that is shaking the foundations of regional security. Yemen’s Houthis have launched a daring strike against Israel, targeting the heart of Tel Aviv with a combination of long-range missiles and advanced drones.

This is not just a headline, it is a demonstration of reach, precision and the growing boldness of non-state actors in the modern battlefield. The world is now watching closely as the Houthis challenge one of the most technologically advanced nations in the region, sending a clear and shocking message to Israel and its allies.

Tel Aviv, a city known for its bustling economy and dense population, is now under fire with emergency sirens blaring and streets evacuated in panic. Smoke rises from multiple districts, while Israel’s air defense systems scramble to intercept incoming threats.

The scale of this attack is unlike anything seen in recent years, highlighting a new phase in asymmetric warfare, where precision and surprise trump sheer size and firepower. Citizens report sudden explosions, shaking windows and streets filled with confusion, a stark reminder that modern conflict can reach civilian centers with devastating speed.

The Iron Dome has successfully neutralized a large portion of the attack, but gaps in coverage were exposed, demonstrating that even the most sophisticated defense networks are not infallible.

Streets once crowded with civilians now appear deserted, as emergency sirens and warnings drive people into shelters. This attack is remarkable for its precision, with missiles targeting strategic locations rather than random destruction, showcasing the Houthis’ intelligence and tactical planning.

For Israel, this is a psychological blow as much as a physical one. The population’s sense of security is shaken, and the government must quickly reassess its defensive posture.

Conflict Skies and Steel [YouTube Channel] has been closely analyzing the data, and what stands out is the speed, coordination and audacity of this operation, reflecting a level of sophistication that goes far beyond what many had expected from Houthi capabilities.

The interior of this operation, though brief in visible details, tells a story of meticulous planning and technological evolution. The Houthi appear to have synchronized multiple missile launches with drone operations to overwhelm Israel’s defenses. Open-source satellite imagery suggests that launch sites were strategically positioned and camouflaged deep inside Yemeni territory. Real-time intelligence likely guided the drones to ensure maximum accuracy. The operation reflects a calculated approach, balancing the need for impact with operational security to avoid exposing critical assets.

Even with limited resources compared to a conventional army, the Houthis demonstrated that precision, timing and adaptability are force multipliers capable of challenging the world’s strongest defenses.

Performance of the strike has been extraordinary. Missiles reportedly traveled over 100 to 200 kilometers, demonstrating a significant extension of Houthi range capabilities. The simultaneous use of drones adds an unpredictable element, complicating interception strategies.

The attack successfully stressed Israel’s air defense systems, creating gaps that allowed some missiles to reach their targets. Analysts are evaluating the types of missiles used, with indications of modified scud variants and precision-guided munitions.

Drones provided real-time reconnaissance, potentially allowing operators to adjust trajectories mid-flight. This combination of missiles and UOV highlights the Houthis’ ingenuity, blending traditional long-range attacks with modern drone technology to create a complex battlefield problem.

The unique selling points of this Houthi operation are clear and remarkable.

First, the ability to strike Tel Aviv from Yemen demonstrates a significant leap in operational reach and capability.

Second, the synchronized use of multiple weapons systems, including missiles and drones, showcases an integrated approach rarely seen from non-state actors.

Third, the psychological impact on both Israel and the international community is immense, sending a signal that the Houthis can operate far beyond their traditional theater of conflict.

In conclusion, Yemen’s Houthi strike on Tel Aviv is both shocking and strategically significant. It exposes vulnerabilities in advanced air defense systems, demonstrates the evolution of non-state actors into formidable military threats and emphasizes the psychological and political dimensions of modern warfare.

Civilians are facing unprecedented threats, militaries are forced to reconsider their strategies and analysts are left re-evaluating the assumptions of regional power dynamics.

Israel is hemorrhaging economically, militarily, culturally, politically, psychologically, emotionally and internationally.

The Zionist experiment is over.

Almost every country in the world sees Israel for the satanic monster that it is, and they are enraged. The only major government in the world that remains unconditionally supportive of Israel is the United States—and among the population of the U.S., opposition to Israel is two to one. And Donald Trump’s favorability rating is now worse than was Joe Biden’s—mainly due to his sycophantic support for Israel.

Geopolitical, academic, military and intelligence experts such as Col. Douglas Macgregor, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Major Scott Ritter, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Professor John Mearsheimer, intelligence officers Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern and Phil Giraldi are unanimous in the opinion that Israel’s collapse will come sooner than later.

Netanyahu and his fellow fascists in Israel are possessed with the intention of slaughtering or removing all 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. They really do intend to turn Gaza into Trump’s Riviera of the Middle East. Then, they fully intend to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. Then, they intend to conquer Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Then, they intend to liquidate the Palestinians and Arabs in Jordan and Eastern Egypt (including Cairo) and seize those land areas, including a large segment of Saudi Arabia.

But their devilish designs for a Greater Israel are falling apart. The little country of Yemen is showing the world that Israel—even with the military support of the United States—is ripe for destruction. After decades of missile attacks from Saudi Arabia and the United States (under both Biden and Trump) the Houthis are still standing toe-to-toe against Israel with much mental acumen and military aptitude.

If Israel is stunned and frightened by Yemen, wait until they attack Iran again and see what happens. Plus, the money-worshipping Arab states in the Persian Gulf that have sat back like scared little pussycats and done NOTHING to help their Arab brethren in Palestine know that history is going to forever shine the light of truth on the Arab monarchies for the moneygrubbing cowards they are, while the Houthis will go down in history as the brave little David who stood courageously against the Zionist Goliath—and won.

Israelis by the thousands are fleeing the country. They know the nation is on its last legs. Netanyahu knows his only hope for staying out of prison (or maybe even staying alive) is to keep Israel at war. He doesn’t care one whit how many innocent people he kills, as long as it keeps him in power. He is a demon-possessed madman. And he is trying his best to drag the United States into all-out war along with him.

And given Trump’s slavish devotion to the Jewish billionaires that have been his financial benefactors throughout his entire life, he is proving to be in no mood to put America first, all of his campaign rhetoric notwithstanding. After all, Trump started seven businesses, and all seven went bankrupt. And all seven times the Zionist billionaires bailed him out. It is a fantasy to think that Trump would put the interests of the United States above those of Israel. Trump is Zionist-owned lock, stock and barrel.

But the question might be: Who will die first, Donald Trump or Israel? Because both are on life support.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

The post The Zionist Experiment Is Over appeared first on LewRockwell.

History’s wheel is turning. China builds, India rises, BRICS surpasses the G7—while America punishes allies and empowers its Enemies.

In the West, the year 1492 is remembered for two episodes: Columbus’s arrival in the Americas and the fall of Granada, last stronghold of Moorish Spain. But its larger consequence was geopolitical: the compass needle swung westward, ushering in a centuries long reversal in global fortunes.

Wealth that once streamed toward Asia turned into rivers feeding Europe’s ascent.

Silver, gold, sugar, and spices from the Americas acted like jet fuel. They powered science, industry, and empire. Spain, France, Britain, and the Netherlands—naval and commercial predators—rose on the tide, hollowing out the Ottoman world and diverting trade from India and China to the New World.

Today another hinge of history is swinging. Washington’s unspoken fear of a 21st century turn is no less dramatic: economic gravity shifts eastward, led by China and—critically—India.

Beijing’s gamble in the 1990s—to let capitalism breathe, to draw in foreign capital, and to pour trillions into domestic infrastructure—proved as consequential as a century of US industrial growth.

The Belt and Road Initiative, worth more than $1 trillion, is less an infrastructure plan than a circulatory system of steel and concrete veins, designed to redirect the lifeblood of trade back across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

In contrast, Washington failed to invest in fast sealift or high speed rail, leaning too heavily on military power.

For the last 25 years, America exhausted itself in deserts and mountains, fighting costly wars that drained trillions, cost thousands of U.S. lives—yet delivered little of enduring strategic value.

Worse still, the technology of war is no longer America’s private domain. Precision strikes, robotics, artificial intelligence, persistent surveillance from seabed to space—once rare advantages—are now widely available, even to mid range powers.

The oceans that once carried American commerce and projected US power have become potential minefields. To move lumbering, World War II style forces across the Pacific, Atlantic, or Indian Oceans today is not just dangerous. It borders on suicidal behavior.

History’s cruel truth remains: the last major war seldom looks like the next.

The battle-space of the future is uncharted, yet America’s Armed Forces and its National Military Strategy remain deeply mired in the past.

The erosion of U.S. military advantage cannot be viewed in isolation; it reflects the widening gap between Washington’s appetite for global hegemony and America’s declining economic strength.

Partly because of Washington’s exhaustion, India has been forced to pick up the slack as a net security provider in the Indian Ocean.

At the same time, India has borne the brunt of fighting Pakistan backed insurgents, incurring heavy casualties just as America did.

India is a member of the Quad alliance with the US, Japan, and Australia, and the United States conducts more military exercises with India than with any other country.

Yet Washington recently imposed duties of 50% on Indian goods—more than double the 15% rate applied to Taliban run Afghanistan and far higher than the 19% levied on Pakistan.

This, even though both regimes sheltered and enabled militant networks that killed American soldiers for twenty years. The paradox is beyond belief: the firefighter is fined more heavily than the arsonist.

At the same time, India carries an outstanding $35 billion order book for Boeing passenger jets supporting 150,000 American manufacturing jobs in Charleston, South Carolina, and Everett, Washington. Yet India is penalized at America’s border.

The deeper problem for the United States is structural. Military dominance can no longer disguise economic erosion. According to the IMF, BRICS now outweighs the G7 in global GDP.

Measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), China’s economy is worth $40.7 trillion, India’s $20.5 trillion, while the U.S. stands at just $29 trillion.

China and India together: $61.2 trillion — more than double the U.S. total. This is not a forecast. It is today’s reality.

The turning point came in 2022, when Washington responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with sweeping sanctions.

The effect of weaponizing the Dollar was profound. The dollar looked less like a safe harbor and more like a trapdoor.

From Riyadh to Delhi, from Brasília to Beijing, capitals saw the risk of conducting commerce in a currency that could be switched off at will. De-dollarization, once a theoretical debate, became urgent strategy.

No surprise, then, that nations across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America line up to join BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

They are dissatisfied with a Western order they view as inequitable and extractive. India straddles both worlds—deepening its bond with Washington through the Quad while cultivating ties with Moscow and Beijing in BRICS and the SCO.

Prime Minister Modi’s presence at the recent SCO summit in Beijing alongside President Xi and President Putin reminded Washington that India’s compass will not lock on one direction.

History’s lesson is clear. Trade routes form habits: habits build markets; and markets endure longer than armies. Empire is not lost in a single battle but in the slow corrosion of those habits.

The Ottomans discovered this too late. Nations that consume more than they produce, that intimidate rather than innovate, ultimately sow the seeds of their own decline.

The dollar’s dominance is already eroding. Trade settlements in yuan, rupees, and other currencies increase by the month. The shift is not only monetary: it is strategic.

But the world should remember what American innovation can achieve. From the heartland came inventions and technologies that transformed global life in the last century—from aviation to semiconductors, from biotechnology to the digital revolution.

These capacities still command respect, and if revitalized, they can once again help anchor U.S. prosperity in a multipolar age.

History’s wheel is turning again. Some nations will rise with it. Others risk being crushed beneath its weight.

If Washington seizes the opportunity to adapt—if it makes its business inside the new global order one of commerce and trade rather than unrelenting military intervention—Americans may yet avoid the fate of the Ottomans. But the course correction cannot come soon enough.

Reprinted with author’s permission from X.

The post Global Wealth and Power Are Pivoting to the East appeared first on LewRockwell.

“That was when they suspended the Constitution… There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

What we are witnessing is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people; it is a government over the people.

Call it what it is: political gaslighting—the regime says one thing while doing the opposite, and insists on the citizenry’s trust while dismantling the very checks and balances that make trust possible.

So when the powers-that-be claim to be protecting the Constitution, they’re dismantling it at every turn. In this way, the mechanisms of constitutional government—separation of powers, federalism, due process, and the Bill of Rights—are being hollowed out in plain sight.

Although this dismantling did not start with President Trump, it has accelerated beyond imagining.

What was once a slow bleed is now a hemorrhage—and it is not random. The damage is unfolding on two parallel tracks: a steady, methodical, bureaucratic erosion (rule changes, executive orders, new databases) paired with shock-and-awe surges (National Guard deployments, mass round-ups, headline-grabbing prosecutions).

The words may say “freedom” and “order,” but the deeds smack of tyranny.

Attorney General Pam Bondi vows to punish “hateful” speech even as the administration normalizes hateful rhetoric and violent imagery. Vice President JD Vance promises to “go after” those with a “leftist” ideology while preaching free-speech absolutism for allies.

The Trump administration denounces “hate speech” even as it excuses and downplays the Jan. 6 riots; pledges fiscal restraint while shoveling billions into surveillance, prisons, and domestic deployments; wraps itself in law-and-order while tolerating lawlessness by cronies; sermonizes about faith and morality while normalizing cruelty as governance; and peddles outrage over waste while spending lavishly on the trappings of office.

Rights are framed as absolute for friends and privileges for critics. That is the opposite of constitutional government, which holds everyone—especially those in power—to the same rule of law, applied evenly.

If the government can police ideas, deploy troops at home, run dragnets by algorithm, disappear people into distant prisons, build spectacle cages, and amass power in one office, then no American is safe—including those who cheer these efforts today.

If you believe in limited government, equal justice, and due process—whatever your party—these double standards should alarm you most, because the precedents being cheered today will be wielded against you tomorrow.

What follows is a running ledger of the gaslighting playbook and its constitutional costs.

The Gaslight: “We’re Restoring the Constitution.”
Reality: The “temporary” powers created after 9/11 have hardened into a permanent police-state architecture—Patriot Act surveillance, secret FISA processes and National Security Letters, DHS fusion centers, a diluted Fourth Amendment “border zone,” civil-asset forfeiture, Pentagon 1033 militarization, Real ID, facial-recognition and geofence warrants—now run at full throttle across administrations.
The Cost: A police state.

The Gaslight: “We Value Law and Order.”
Reality: The administration deployed Marines and the National Guard into American streets to police protests protected by the First Amendment. On September 2, 2025, a federal judge ruled that the administration’s deployment of thousands of Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles—ostensibly for immigration protests—violated the Posse Comitatus Act, describing a “top-down, systemic effort” to militarize civil law enforcement. The Constitution’s framers feared standing armies and military occupations of American communities.
The Cost: The death of Posse Comitatus.

The Gaslight: “We Defend Free Speech.”
Reality: Dissent is criminalized, expressive conduct is relitigated, and disfavored groups face terror labels and IRS pressure. Protest is a right, not a privilege, yet the government increasingly recasts organized dissent as conspiracy. After the Charlie Kirk shooting, the White House floated designating “antifa” and other liberal groups as domestic terrorists, bringing racketeering cases against funders, and targeting nonprofits critical of the administration—all while downplaying right-wing violence. Fold in Bondi’s vow to target “hateful” speech and Vance’s pledge to eradicate “leftist ideology,” and power slides from punishing unlawful acts to policing ideas.
The Cost: A weaponized First Amendment.

The Gaslight: “We’re Protecting You from Extremists.”
Reality: Watchlists without due process, elastic “material support” theories, politicized “extremism” labels, and donor targeting that treat journalists, whistleblowers, activists—even parents at school boards—as suspects first and citizens second. Speaking truth to power is reframed as a security risk. In free societies, the state fears the citizen; in unfree ones, the citizen fears the state.
The Cost: Dissent rebranded as extremism.

The Gaslight: “We’re Ending Federal Censorship.”
Reality: On Day One, the President signed an order to “end federal censorship.” Read closely, it asserts sweeping control over how agencies interact with media platforms and broadcasters, rebranding ordinary outreach and fact-checking as First Amendment violations, while positioning the Executive as referee of the private square. By centralizing power over the flow of information in the Executive Branch, it threatens the independence of the very private forums where Americans speak. The test of free speech is whether the government stays out of the marketplace of ideas—not whether it curates it to the President’s liking.
The Cost: The state as speech referee.

The Gaslight: “We Use Smart Tech, Not Dragnet Surveillance.”
Reality: The administration is fusing government databases and outsourcing “intelligence” to private vendors in such a way that data becomes the warrant. ICE’s new $30 million deal with Palantir to build “ImmigrationOS” promises to identify, track, and deport people using AI-driven analytics and cross-agency data sharing. Add in geofence warrants, face-scan dragnets, and fusion-center “suspicious activity” pipelines, and you get a domestic intelligence system that presumes guilt by data trail.
The Cost: Probable cause replaced by algorithms.

The Gaslight: “We’re Tough on Crime.”
Reality: This year, U.S. agencies financed the transfer of migrants to El Salvador’s mega-prison (CECOT), where families and lawyers lost contact with detainees for months. Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention site whetted the government’s appetite for scaled-up incarceration, converting state prisons into immigration jails nationwide. These attempts by the Trump administration constitute an end run around longstanding constitutional protections for anyone accused of a crime. The common denominator is spectacle over justice, expansion over restraint.
The Cost: The death of due process.

The Gaslight: “We’re Compassionate, Not Cruel.”
Reality: The push to clear homeless encampments combines criminalization with expanded involuntary commitments. A July 24, 2025 executive order encourages states to funnel people into institutions and mental-health courts, tying funding to “maximum” use of commitments—an end-run around the presumption of liberty that undergirds due process.
The Cost: Bureaucratic coercion over compassion.

The Gaslight: “We’re Streamlining Government.”
Reality: The separation of powers was intended to serve as a check against any one government agency becoming too powerful. Yet the administration has pressed an aggressive unitary-executive theory to encroach on independent agencies, such as the Federal Reserve. Scholars warn this could erase the independence of agencies designed to check the White House.
The Cost: Checks and balances gutted.

The Gaslight: “We’re Keeping America Safe Overseas.”
Reality: Killing by assassination, not authorization. Twice in recent months, U.S. forces have launched unannounced attacks on Venezuelan boats, killing crews without warning or due process, on the mere assertion that they were drug traffickers.
The Cost: War powers and judicial oversight bypassed.

The Gaslight: “We’re Fixing Wasteful Spending.”
Reality: Having poured billions into surveillance, prisons, and domestic deployments, the “police-state budget” unravels the economy while eroding liberty.
The Cost: A debt-funded police state.

Many who cherish ordered liberty, limited government, fiscal restraint, and constitutional morality would normally recoil at these tactics under any other administration, so why not now?

Principles should not change because the party in power has changed, and yet that’s exactly what continues to drive the double standard.

If there’s a constitutional scorecard, “we the people” are on the losing team right now.

The First Amendment is buckling as protest is chilled, expressive conduct is targeted, opponents are threatened with terror labels, and the Executive Branch expands control over the speech ecosystem.

The Fourth and Fifth Amendments have been weakened by AI surveillance and cross-agency fusion that normalize suspicionless tracking, while offshore detention and coerced commitments compromise due process.

The Eighth Amendment is mocked by harsh, theatrical detention regimes.

Federalism and the Tenth Amendment give way when federal troops step into local policing.

Separation of powers erodes as an inflated unitary-executive theory encroaches on independent agencies.

War powers are skirted by extrajudicial killings abroad. And fiscal responsibility is inverted as surveillance and prison appropriations swell while liberty contracts.

What must happen now?

Congress must codify guardrails against domestic military use—tighten Posse Comitatus, narrow Insurrection Act exceptions, and mandate transparency for any domestic mission. Courts and prosecutors should reaffirm expressive rights, rejecting end-runs around Texas v. Johnson and refusing cases that criminalize symbolism.

Lawmakers must impose bright-line limits on data fusion, bar cross-agency pooling for generalized surveillance, and require algorithmic transparency and adversarial testing before any tool touches liberty. The U.S. must prohibit outsourcing detention to abusive regimes, close loopholes, and apply human-rights scrutiny to every foreign arrangement.

The independence of watchdogs and the Fed needs protection through clear “for cause” standards. States and cities should decriminalize homelessness and fund housing-first approaches instead of coercive commitments.

Congress must reassert war powers, requiring explicit authorization before any attack abroad. And fiscal sanity must be restored: sunset emergency outlays for surveillance and prison build-outs, mandate GAO audits of domestic deployments and fusion contracts, and attach civil-liberties impact statements to major security spending.

Our job as citizens is not to trust the government but to bind it down with the Constitution. “In questions of power,” Thomas Jefferson warned, we must “bind [government] down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Whatever you do, don’t trust the government with your privacy. Don’t trust it with your property: no-knock raids and forfeiture turn “private” property into whatever authorities permit you to keep.

Don’t trust it with your finances: Washington spends money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford. Don’t trust it with your life: force without accountability is not protection.

Above all, don’t trust it with your freedoms: on paper, rights endure; in practice, they are rationed by policy memos, watchlists, and shifting lines in the sand.

This should never be a right-vs-left debate; it’s the State vs. your liberty.

If you wouldn’t trust your worst political enemy with these weaponized tools, you shouldn’t trust your favorite politician with them either.

So think nationally, act locally.

Rebuild the habits of self-government where you live: know your neighbors and officials; know your rights and your city charter; ask who runs the jail and demand transparency; vet the people you entrust with power; and hold officials to account—show up, file requests, appeal, document, organize.

This is the work in front of us—not knee-jerk outrage, but persistent, consistent work to fortify the “chains of the Constitution.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we let emergency rule become ordinary rule—military troops as beat cops, protest as crime, data as warrant, assassination as policy, money as politics—there won’t be a Constitution left to defend.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post Political Gaslighting: The Government’s Latest Playbook for Dismantling the Constitution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Debt has moral implications, and in denying this, we’re choosing a rendezvous with Nemesis

Let’s start with a household analogy. A married couple have four fine children, and since expenses are higher than income, they borrow money in their children’s names to fund their lifestyle and investments. Once the offspring reach 18 years of age, the debt their parents borrowed is theirs to service.

The offspring didn’t get a say in how much money was borrowed or how it was spent, but the debt is now theirs to service (i.e. pay the interest) for their entire lifetimes, as the debt is simply too large to pay off with conventional wages.

The economy changed, and since wages don’t go as far and costs keep rising, the four offspring borrow in their own children’s names to afford the basics of a middle-class life.

The parents are now comfortably retired, drawing on their investments bought with borrowed money. The two generations behind them are now debt-serfs who funded their own lifestyles by borrowing even more money. Since the kind of house their parents bought for 3-times-income is now 6-times-income, the debt required to own a house and fund what is considered the minimum middle-class entitlements is multiples of their parents’ borrowing.

Is anyone willing to call this offloading of ever-expanding debt onto future generations wrong, as in morally wrong, or have we lost the vocabulary and ability to declare the offloading of debt as morally disgraceful, a line that should never have been crossed?

Debt that cannot be extinguished and that is offloaded onto future generations is a manifestation of moral decay, a decay of the moral foundations of the economy and society that is terminal.

So here we are, cheering on a big reduction in the Fed Funds Rate to encourage an expansion of debt, as more debt means more spending and that means more taxes and corporate profits. The manipulation of interest rates and the financial machinery to encourage more debt is viewed as bloodless, absolutely devoid of moral judgment: when it comes to “growth” of asset prices, spending, taxes and profits, there is no wrong, as “growth” is the only good anyone cares about.

This is the perfection of moral decay. Offloading debt onto future generations–money borrowed to prop up a self-serving status quo that focused on expediencies, not future consequences–and then telling the debt-enslaved generations, “we’ll inflate away the debt, and your wages will buy less and less, but no worries, we’ll just borrow more to pay the interest due”–how is this not morally repulsive?

Here is Federal debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is a better measure of consequences, for it illustrates the Federal government’s ability to counter a deep recession by borrowing and spending trillions of dollars is now limited by extreme debt levels.

Those who track the history of government debt generally draw the red-line at 100% of GDP, so 120% is already deep in the danger zone. History is rather decisive: any attempt to add trillions in additional debt at these levels has zero chance of working as intended, i.e. a pain-free way to boost “growth.”

Note the debt-to-GDP ratio actually declined during both the stagflationary 1970s and the 1990s Internet boom. In both eras, the economy was still largely organic, i.e. unmanipulated enough that natural forces (supply, demand, risk aversion, writedowns of bad debt, etc.) could work through excesses of speculation and debt and restore not just balance sheets but legitimacy.

The Federal Reserve no longer trusted the system’s self-correcting capacity and leaped into full-blown manipulation of financial and mortgage markets in 2008-09. The debt-to-FDP ratio soared from 60% to 100% in the post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) “save” of the Federal Reserve, which inflated the money supply and pushed ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) and QE (quantitative easing) to boost borrowing.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Moral Decay of Debt appeared first on LewRockwell.

Charlie Kirk was a popular radio host, and the founder of Turning Point USA. He was shot and killed on September 10, at Utah Valley University, during one of his “Prove me Wrong” appearances before often hostile college students. Immediately, his death became the biggest story in the country, and the response says a great deal about us.

Kirk was hardly the biggest name in the alt media, or the right-wing world. He wasn’t Alex Jones. He wasn’t a household name. He is now. Fox News treated his death like the JFK assassination, and devoted their entire evening schedule to over the top tributes. Kirk became an instant martyr to the Right. President Trump lowered the flags to half staff. Now that sounds outlandish, but remember that President Obama did the same thing for singer Whitney Houston, so the the bar had been set pretty low in recent years. Meanwhile, the Left figuratively danced on his grave, with countless online posters rejoicing over the shooting. He was posthumously smeared as a “racist,” “transphobe,” “hater,” etc. There were too many “I’m not celebrating his death, but….” posts. As Pee Wee Herman once said, everyone I know has a big “but.” Both sides demonstrated once again why America 2.0 is such a shithole, and why those of us who are awake are being forced to live under such corrupt tyranny.

Unlike any member of our “free press,” I’ve actually attempted to look into the logistics of the shooting. You know, the evidence. That’s what they should be doing, of course, but we know they aren’t allowed to investigate anything of substance, and someone has to do it. They tell us that only one shot was fired at Charlie, ironically right after he’d commented on transgender shooters. It struck him in the neck, apparently hitting the jugular vein there, and blood went pouring down the left side of his shirt. My friend Peter Hymans has analyzed the shooting, and has noted that the blood flow doesn’t seem to fit with the alleged position of the assassin. But those who “investigate” these crimes are experts at coming up with conclusions that don’t fit the ballistics evidence. See the JFK and RFK assassinations, for example. And unless I’ve missed it, they still haven’t found the slug that took Charlie’s life. Yet it is matter-of-factly reported that the authorities have identified the weapon.

Establishment sources say the angle of the shot from the rooftop was on a downward, right to left trajectory. Video footage of Kirk being struck, which I have watched far too many times, shows him falling over to the left from the impact. Much as there was in the JFK assassination, when Kennedy’s head can be seen going violently backwards (“back and to the left”), when Oswald was supposedly firing from above and behind, we have a physics problem here. Equal and opposite reaction? I guess we’re just not supposed to trust some “science.” Also, exit wounds are invariably larger than entrance wounds. We only see the alleged entrance wound on Charlie’s neck. Where was the exit wound? What did it look like? Why no ambulance or EMTs? I won’t dwell on Charlie holding onto the microphone after he was hit. It would seem like the shot would cause him to drop it, but maybe that happens sometimes. At any rate, a shot from his left front should logically have knocked him back and to the right.

There are always early reports in these incidents, which subsequently turn out to be “misinformation,” once the authorities establish the consistently unbelievable official narrative. In the Kirk case, We were told that an elderly guy named George Zinn was initially arrested by police, and reacted by shouting, “Shoot me!” He was known, according to the New York Post, as “a political agitator with a string of bizarre arrests dating back to the 1980s.” The crowd seemed to think Zinn was the shooter, but one of the six police officers at the event astutely assured them, “He said he shot him, but I don’t know.” And oddly, the old man was hauled away with his pants down at his ankles. I just wrote about male humiliation rituals, but I have no idea what that was. At any rate, after apparently pulling his pants down, and listening to him plead for them to shoot him, law enforcement released him. It’s not like he was a J6 defendant.

Now, some on the internet, who have gone deeper down the rabbit hole and analyzed how Kirk reacted to the single shot, the blood spatter pattern, the curious actions of his security team, etc., have reported that Zinn was at other significant events. Internet sleuth Ryan Matta claimed that the odds are one in two billion that this same guy witnessed the planes striking the World Trade Center on 9/11, then played a “joke” on the authorities, by sending in a fake bomb threat during the 2013 Salt Lake City Marathon, which took place shortly after the Boston Bombing. To those who are running this collapsing country, Zinn is an obvious “wacko” who is of no significance. And deserved to have his pants pulled down for unknown reasons. To those of us who are capable of critical thinking, Zinn could be a veteran crisis actor, assigned a new and exciting role. Either way, you’ll hear no more of him. And, it must be pointed out that Zinn appears to be yet another non-Irish player in these productions.

The authorities eventually got their man. I say man because it is never men. Never plural. Always a lone nut. America is the only country on earth where political figures are never killed for political reasons. No one powerful ever conspires to knock others off. U.S. leaders might support, and even directly order the murder and rape of civilians in smaller lands that we nonsensically occupy, but they would never resort to putting out a hit on a rival, like common mobsters. The arrest of Tyler Robinson, a twenty two year old apparent incel, was breathlessly announced by our state controlled media. We were told that the authorities had been tracking him for a period of time, before he accessed a rooftop and fired the shot that killed Charlie Kirk. It has not been explained why they were monitoring his movements, which included perching on a rooftop, and yet did not attempt to stop him from firing his weapon.

The official claim here is that Robinson walked into the event with his German Mauser tucked inside his pants, after disassembling it. He then reassembled it on the roof, fired the shot heard all over crossover country, and then disassembled it again, before leaping from the roof, John Wilkes Booth-style, Amazingly, Robinson didn’t break his leg, unlike Booth. Even more amazingly, he took the time at some point to reassemble the Mauser yet again. And then deposited the assembled rifle in the woods, after placing it in a box and wrapping it in a towel, both of which he had handy. Researcher Peter Secosh found that a Mauser cannot be disassembled. When you’re a lone nut assassin, you do things like that. James Earl Ray left a handy package of evidence behind in the doorway of the motel where a fatal shot was fired at Martin Luther King, Jr. And then they took a mug shot of Robinson that really had a bit too much Lee Harvey Oswald to it. They must have used AI to achieve the desired effect.

Echoing what we’ve seen over the past few years, during other emotionally charged events involving guns, both the Left and Right are painting different portraits of the alleged assassin. I’ve seen many memes and social media posts about how awful it was that conservatives blamed transgenders or other liberal demons for the shooting, when “his whole family was MAGA.” This appears to be true, as demonstrated by the photo of his purported mother brandishing an Uzi or something (I’m no expert on guns), while looking pretty attractive in a Sarah Palin kind of way. Now, as is the “new normal” with search engines, I can’t find that photo. Maybe George Zinn has it, wherever he is. Robinson’s grandmother was surprised (and what self-respecting grandmother wouldn’t be surprised that her grandson was an assassin), explaining that he was a MAGA supporter. But she also said he’d never fired a weapon. That’s what happens when you rely on grandmothers to prop up your weak official stories.

Robinson apparently took the time to inscribe some messages on his shell casings. This has become a trend in recent years. All the best patsies are doing it. They reportedly read: “Hey, fascist! Catch!”; “If you read this, you are gay”; and “Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,” apparently lyrics from an Italian anti-fascist folk song. Doesn’t really sound very MAGA to me. The “gay” reference might be connected to the most recent blockbuster disclosure that Robinson had a transgender roommate, and they were involved romantically. So I guess this contradicts all the sneering comments about the Right making up a transgender connection. I think if you’re in a relationship with a transgender, even though you may not technically be “transitioning” yourself, that qualifies as some kind of transgender association. But I don’t claim to know anything, having never “transitioned” even once in my lifetime.

However you look at it, this was not a random, lone nut shooting. Although Kirk had been known as a typical right-wing dedicated Zionist, there is abundant evidence that he had recently been reconsidering his support of Israel. A “longtime friend and Trump insider” told the Grayzone that Kirk had rejected an offer earlier this year, from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who wanted to provide a huge amount of money to Kirk’s Turning Point USA. Kirk had come to despise Netanyahu, referring to him as a “bully.” Concerned about the influence Israel was wielding over the White House, Kirk had advised Trump not to bomb Iran, and the friend recalled how the president angrily “barked at him” in response. Kirk began to be intimidated by powerful Israeli supporters. Tucker Carlson noted, ”Since Charlie Kirk urged Trump not to strike Iran, many of his (Jewish) donors have waged war on him.”

In a recent interview with arch Zionist Meghan Kelly, Kirk reiterated how he supported Israel but that the behavior of “a lot” of Israeli supporters “are pushing people like you and me away, not like we’re going to be pro-Hamas, but honestly, the way you are treating me is so repulsive. I have text messages, Meghan, calling me an anti-Semite….I’m an American citizen…my moral character is now being put into question…You and I believe that we are Americans first…I have less ability to question the actions of Israel than actual Israelis do.” Kirk noted that the threats he’d received were from Jewish “leaders” and “stakeholders.” On August 13, Harrison Smith of Infowars tweeted that “I’m not gonna name names, but I was told by someone close to Charlie Kirk that Charlie thinks Israel will kill him if he turns against them.” If I were in law enforcement, I think I’d consider Israel to be the chief suspect in this case.

As always, because these events are never properly investigated, internet sleuths, and Thought Criminals like me, will ask uncomfortable questions. I do think it’s kind of astounding that both Charlie Kirk and George Floyd share the same October 14 birthday (albeit twenty years apart). I don’t know what that means, but I do know that if Biden had been in office when Floyd died, the flags would probably have been flown at half staff for him. There is the question of the rather unusual (to put it nicely) comments from Kirk’s widow Erika in the wake of his death. Then she topped that by being photographed leaning into Charlie’s casket and kissing his hands. Kirk’s body (but not his head) was filmed, and of course some of those pesky “conspiracy theorists” speculated about the way his hands looked. There was also a picture of his neck, which was wrapped in some kind of bandage with blood still visible. Assuming the photo was real, I think that is unlike any embalmed corpse in world history.

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The post Charlie Kirk: What Really Happened? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In relation to the attacks along the evacuation routes and within designated safe areas, the Commission found that the Israeli security forces had clear knowledge of the presence of Palestinian civilians, including children. Nevertheless, Israeli security forces shot at and killed civilians, including children who were holding makeshift white flags. Some children, including toddlers, were shot in the head by snipers.

The above excerpt (IV. B. ii. f. 215.) is from this report.

From the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights:

Legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (pdf)
by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel

I. 3.
In its previous reports to the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, the Commission found that the Israeli security forces have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including extermination, torture, rape, sexual violence and other inhumane acts, inhuman treatment, forcible transfer, persecution based on gender and starvation as a method of warfare. Furthermore, the Commission found that the Israeli authorities have (i) destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births; and (ii) deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians as a group, both of which are underlying acts of genocide in the Rome Statute and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“Genocide Convention”)

I. 4.
Having concluded that the Israeli security forces committed crimes against humanity, war crimes and the actus reus of two underlying acts of genocide in Gaza, the Commission now addresses the issue of genocide. …

There follows an analysis of the events. The legal definition of genocide requires intent. After having reviewed official statements by the government of Israel the Commission concludes:

C. 220.
On the basis of fully conclusive evidence, the Commission finds that statements made by Israeli authorities are direct evidence of genocidal intent. Additionally, on the basis of circumstantial evidence, the Commission finds that genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference that could be drawn based on the pattern of conduct of the Israeli authorities. Thus, the Commission concludes that the Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

But what can we do?

VI. B. 246.
The duty to prevent and punish genocide applies not only to the responsible State but to all States Parties to the Genocide Convention and indeed to all States under customary international law.

We can, and should of course, personally boycott the Zionist entity to the fullest extend. But it is also on us to press our governments to follow up on the report. There are obligations that must be fulfilled.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post The Obvious Is Now Official – Israel Commits Genocide appeared first on LewRockwell.

In his latest podcast, Peter goes through the just-released August consumer price data and uses the report as a springboard to explain why the markets are misreading the Fed and why ordinary Americans are likely to pay the price. He connects the dots between an understated CPI (Consumer Price Index), the rally in stocks tied to hopes for rate cuts, and why those cuts would be bearish for bonds, inflationary for the economy, and ultimately harsher on workers than many realize.

He opens by framing the CPI release as the last obstacle to the market’s expectation of imminent cuts and why the number mattered so much to traders and policymakers alike:

The reason that it’s been so highly anticipated is because everybody is now betting on rate cuts starting next week and a benign CPI report was the last obstacle. I mean, maybe if this thing came out way hotter than expected, somehow it may have rained on the rate cut parade. So everybody was anticipating eagerly this release just to make sure that the rate cut train wasn’t going to get derailed. And we got the number and it actually was slightly worse than expected, but not enough worse to rain on the parade.

Peter then argues that the official inflation measures are deliberately low and that real inflation is being hidden from the public — a point he makes to explain why markets can’t trust the headline CPI to guide policy:

The CPI has been rigged. It has been engineered to come out with a smaller number than the actual increase in prices which again doesn’t even measure inflation which is the expansion of money and credit. It measures the effect of inflation which is an increase in prices but it deliberately understates the degree to which prices are going up by design. So you really kind of have to double whatever the official number is to get something close to the actual rate. So if inflation is right now annualizing at 5% then it’s probably 10% which makes a lot more sense to me than 5%.

He puts the market’s recent rally into context: it’s a relief bounce driven by a single narrative — rate cuts — rather than improving fundamentals. That mismatch, he says, explains why stocks are pricing in a soft landing that may not exist:

As a result of a horrific week, and the week’s not over yet because this is just Thursday, but as a result of a horrific 80% of a week for jobs, we’ve had this big rally in stocks. The rationale is the Fed’s going to cut, so that’s great for stocks. People also think that the rate cuts are going to help the economy. They’re going to help the housing market. They’re going to stimulate because they look back at prior episodes where the Fed has started a rate cutting cycle, whether it’s 2001, 2002, after the bursting of the dot com bubble, whether it’s 2008, 2009 with the financial crisis or 2020 with COVID, right?

Peter pushes back on the popular view among economists and strategists that the Fed is in “restrictive” territory and can ease a bit while still being contractionary. He says that claim ignores the fact that nominal rates have never exceeded true inflation:

A lot of people are saying, ‘Look the Fed is in restrictive territory and they have room to ease and still be restrictive.’ That is BS. They are not restrictive. They’ve been accommodative the whole time they’ve claimed to be restrictive. I pointed that out because they never got interest rates above the real rate of inflation. And right now they’re not even above the actual rate; if the CPI is now running at 5% a year and you got Fed funds around four, how are you supposed to cut?

Finally, Peter draws a bleak historical comparison: if the Fed gives in to political pressure to prioritize employment over price stability, the social cost will be steep and widespread, potentially worse than the 1970s for many households:

So I think that the implications of the policy that we’re going to get is going to be much bigger. So the average Americans are going to suffer more than they did in the 70s. And it was a lot of suffering. I mean, people had the real value of their wages go down. You know, the reason that so many women entered the workforce in the 80s, it was not because they felt liberated and they went and got jobs. … What happened was their husband’s paycheck lost so much purchasing power during the inflation of the 70s that he could no longer afford to support the family.

This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.

The post Rate Cuts Will Make Inflation Worse appeared first on LewRockwell.

A UN inquiry has found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and that Israeli authorities have “intended to kill as many Palestinians as possible” in the enclave.

Israel has responded to the UN report by calling it Hamas and antisemitic, because that’s all they’ve got. The Israeli Foreign Ministry released a statement claiming the report was authored by “individuals serving as Hamas proxies, notorious for their openly antisemitic positions.”

Blah, blah, blah. The report is Hamas and antisemitic. All human rights organizations are Hamas and antisemitic. There’s a giant global antisemitic Hamas conspiracy dedicated to making it appear as though Israel is committing genocide, just to make Jewish people feel sad.

I can’t stop thinking about 1 sentence in today’s UN report regarding Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“Israeli security forces shot at & killed civilians, including children who were holding makeshift white flags. Some children, including toddlers, were shot in the head by snipers.”

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) September 16, 2025

At this point the only people who still deny that Israel is committing genocide are those who want to make sure nobody does anything to stop Israel from committing genocide.

The list of humanitarian institutions who accuse Israel of genocide now includes:

1. The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory

2. The International Association of Genocide Scholars

3. B’Tselem (an Israeli organization)

4. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (another Israeli organization)

5. Amnesty International

6. Doctors Without Borders

7. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights

8. Human Rights Watch

9. The International Federation for Human Rights

10. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention

The list of humanitarian institutions who say Israel is NOT committing genocide in Gaza includes:

1. Nobody

2. No one

3. Zero

4. Nothing

5. Nada

6. Zilch

7. Sweet damn all

8. A complete absence

9. Diddly squat

10. Bupkis

It is not okay to treat the fact that Israel is committing genocide like it’s a matter of opinion. Every relevant human rights institution on earth says it’s a genocide. Zero equivalent institutions say it’s not. This is a settled matter.

People who deny that it’s a genocide deserve to be taken exactly as seriously as flat earthers. They’re just an extremely evil and destructive version of the thing flat earthers are.

You don’t see news articles about NASA with journalists adding “an agency which many believe is a government hoax designed to trick us into accepting ball earth theory” to their reporting. If a guest mentions Antarctica on the BBC, the news anchor doesn’t interrupt them to say “and we should say here that flat earth theorists deny the existence of that continent, maintaining that it is actually a wall of ice holding the oceans in place.”

You also don’t see reporting which treats accepted science about space and our planet like it’s an opinion held by some. You never see “which many scientists claim exists” when a report discusses outer space, or mentions of the horizon mitigated with words like “which some hold is due to the curvature of the earth rather than laws of perspective and light refraction”. They’re just treated as established facts, and those who disagree with the established facts are not taken seriously.

The genocide in Gaza should be no different. As the old adage goes, if one side says it’s raining and the other says it isn’t, your job isn’t to quote both sides, your job is to look out the window.

The window’s right there, western media. And it’s pouring genocide.

________________

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The post Israel Is Committing Genocide. This Is a Fact, Not an Opinion. appeared first on LewRockwell.

I have been saving up evidences that the former U.S. President Barack Obama should go to prison or be executed for having perpetrated the Russiagate hoax, which has poisoned the minds of the American people to create a public acceptance not only of the American war in Ukraine against Russia that Obama had started by his February 2014 bloody Ukrainian coup which was being pumped in the media as a ‘democratic revolution’, but also for Obama’s Russiagate hoax to portray as being a Russian agent the Republican Party’s 2016 Presidential nominee Donald Trump, and so to encourage the future President Trump to continue the war in Ukraine against Russia that the gutless Trump then did continue on the basis of the Obama Administration’s lies against Russia — lies none of which Trump challenged by presenting the facts. (Instead of Trump disowning and publicly exposing that lie-based Obama war against Russia, Trump even intensified the war by the U.S. against Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine. Under Obama, America had grabbed Ukraine for this purpose — to defeat Russia — and Trump continued with that same purpose.)

As regards Obama’s having perpetrated the Russiagate hoax against Trump and against Russia, the conservative Mollie Hemingway, Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist, headlines in the September 2025 Imprimis, “The Significance of the Recently Released Russia Hoax Documents”, and delivers (and I say this though I am not a conservative) the best summary that I have yet seen of the by-now-voluminous evidences that the Obama Administration DID create that hoax (which the Democratic Party still denies was a hoax); and, to this extent, she has written almost all of the article that I had been collecting evidence to write. I shall therefore present it here (and leaving it without documentation, because I know its documentation and can therefore vouch for all of it myself). The only thing that hers ignores is the possible legal culpability of Obama HIMSELF for the Russiagate hoax. So, I shall say something about that here.

Not to hold a former sitting U.S. President legally liable for his having, by a lie-based fraud, poisoned the minds of the American people to suspect that his successor from the opposite political Party, is a traitor to his country, is itself traitorous, because then it almost forces that successor to continue this war that Obama had himself created. It’s not a total coercion that Obama did, because Trump alone bears the full responsibility for his having caved to Obama’s anti-Russia campaign, and for having continued it. But Trump’s cowardice doesn’t, at all, relieve Obama of his treachery in this matter, which expanded the American inter-Party competition, into the international level, by hamstringing that coward’s (Trump’s) foreign policies; and, so, in this case, thereby weakening, if not crippling, this country, by reducing his successor-President’s freedom-of-action in the international sphere. Obama effectively weakened his successor’s Presidency, and Trump played along with that, because he lacked the courage to refuse to do so. Cowardice (such as Trump’s) is not treason, but for a President (Obama) to (entirely on the basis of lies) intentionally weaken his successor in that office, is to be at war against the United States of America, and is therefore treasonous — and should be prosecuted as such.

So, here is what Hemingway DID include (which is almost all of the rest):

In early January 2017, the Clinton campaign’s “Steele dossier” — a secretly funded collection of made-up stories and gossip alleging that Russia had dirt on Trump and that Trump was colluding with Russia against the United States — was published. Washington would be consumed by the Russia collusion hoax for the next two-and-a-half years. The investigations it spurred would bankrupt Trump associates, destroy lives, and hamstring Trump’s ability to govern. It led to draconian censorship campaigns against conservatives. It hurt Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 general election. But no evidence was found that a single American, much less Trump himself, conspired with Russia.

Fast forward to today. Six months into Trump’s second term, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard have declassified and released long-suppressed documents detailing how President Obama and his spy chiefs laundered the Steele dossier and other falsehoods in an attempt to destroy Trump’s first presidency. The response from Democrats, the media, and many establishment Republicans has been to say that these suppressed documents contain nothing new or significant. Not true.

The Russia collusion hoax was anchored to two central claims: first, that Trump was a compromised agent of Russia, and second, that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump. The first claim was completely debunked after years of investigation. It is on the second and far more plausible claim — which was just as key to the hoax — that the newly released documents shed new light. And the revelations are shocking.

The documents show that in early December 2016, the intelligence community planned to publish a top secret presidential daily brief holding that “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” Once published, this brief would have been read by Obama and his top officials, as well as President-Elect Trump and his designated National Security Advisor, Lt. General Michael Flynn. But the day before publication, the FBI—which had co-authored the brief — announced that it was pulling its support for the brief and would be drafting a dissent. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced that the brief would be held for the following week.

In the end, the brief was never published. Instead, Obama ordered his top spy chiefs to put together an Intelligence Community Assessment — known as an ICA — on “Russia election meddling.” The chiefs were directed to look at how Moscow sought to influence the 2016 election — including with hacking, leaks, cyber activity against voting systems, and “fake news” — and to answer the questions, “Why did Moscow direct these activities?” and “What have the Russians hoped to accomplish?”

Prior to this order from Obama, the spy agencies had assessed that Russia’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election were consistent with Russia’s previous and long-standing election-year meddling and cyber-hacking efforts. They found that Russia’s goal was to mess with and decrease confidence in U.S. elections, rather than help elect particular candidates. But on the evening of December 9, 2016, The Washington Post published a story sourced to unnamed senior Obama officials claiming that the CIA had “concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump.” That was a lie. The process by which such assessments are made by the CIA hadn’t taken place, much less concluded anything. The same false information was leaked to The New York Times: “American intelligence agencies,” it reported, “have concluded with ‘high confidence’ that Russia acted covertly … to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.” Both papers were awarded Pulitzers the next year for their willingness to participate, without a bit of skepticism, in this disinformation operation.

A few days later, Obama poured gasoline on the fire by publicly expressing concern that “potential hacking … could hamper vote counting and affect the actual election process itself.” Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and FBI Director James Comey were working furiously to throw together the ICA Obama had ordered. Typically, such an assessment would take a minimum of several months and include a wide variety of perspectives. This ICA was prepared in two weeks using only five CIA staffers to draft it. Comey, Brennan, and Clapper overruled strenuous objections from senior intelligence officials who were aghast at the inclusion of unsubstantiated claims and unverified gossip. Some who complained had their promotions threatened. Others were told they were not privy to secret intelligence reviewed only by top leadership.

The finished ICA was reported on to Obama on January 5, 2017, and to Trump the next day. In addition to findings that were credible and substantiated, the report said Putin had developed “a clear preference” for Trump and “aspired to help his chances of victory.” It also included, contrary to the public testimony of Obama’s spy chiefs, a two-page summary of the Clinton campaign’s Steele dossier in the most classified version of the report. Comey met privately with Trump at the end of his briefing to tell him about unverified allegations that Russia held proof of salacious sexual and financial impropriety on the part of Trump. Four days later, CNN reported extensively on the meeting and what Trump was told. At this point, the Russia hoax was fully operational and would do severe damage to our country for years to come.

***

One document Ratcliffe released is a “tradecraft review” of the January 2017 ICA. Conducted by career officials at the CIA, the review found that the dishonest leaks by the Obama administration in December 2016 created an “anchoring bias” that polluted the entire document. The review also expressed concern about the ICA’s frantic production timeline; the refusal to allow analysts reviewing the document to see the intelligence its conclusions were based on; and the over-involvement of Comey, Brennan, and Clapper. It found that the assessment gave a “higher confidence level than was justified” to the claim that Russia preferred Trump and that it was tainted by a “potential political motive.”

Gabbard released an even more explosive report. Authored in 2017 and 2018 by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes, it had been hidden in a top secret vault for seven years. It conclusively debunked the ICA’s “key judgement” about Putin’s preference for Trump, excoriated the ICA for using the preposterous Steele dossier as a basis for its claims, and detailed how the views of career intelligence officials were overruled and dismissed.

Brennan had long publicly claimed that he had secret knowledge — separate and apart from the Steele dossier — to support his view that Russia interfered to help Trump. In August and September 2016, he had individually briefed the “Gang of Eight,” the top Senate and House officials who oversee the CIA, and it turned out that Brennan’s so-called secret knowledge was laughable. It was based mostly on three reports that “contained flawed information” and “became foundational sources” for the claim that Putin aspired to help Trump. Veteran CIA officers had said the reports “contained substandard information that was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, implausible,” and “odd.”

Brennan hadn’t allowed some of the information to go through normal vetting procedures when it was collected. And he “personally directed that two of the most important reports not be formally disseminated when he first learned of them,” supposedly because they were so sensitive — a questionable explanation given that the CIA has a special reporting channel for sensitive reports that are restricted to the president and other named individuals.

The only classified information cited in the ICA for the claim that Putin “aspired to help Trump’s chances of victory” was a fragment of a sentence that came from someone who did not personally know Putin. The fragment, consisting of the words, “whose victory Putin was counting on,” had been collected prior to the July 2016 Republican National Convention. So who could even know to which victory it referred? Furthermore, it is not known whether the fragment reflected the sub-source’s opinion of Putin’s thinking, Putin’s actual statements to his sub-source, or the views of someone else reflecting on Putin’s thinking to the sub-source. Its meaning was so unclear that “five people read it five ways,” according to the report.

For these reasons, experienced CIA officers initially omitted the fragment from the ICA. But Brennan ordered that it be included. One senior CIA officer, alarmed that it was the only evidence offered for the ICA’s main conclusion, noted the lack of “direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected.” The ICA also failed to address the strong anti-Trump bias on the part of the source of the fragment.

The ICA claimed that “a Russian political expert possessed a plan that recommended engagement with [Trump’s] team because of the prospects for improved US-Russian relations.” This claim was viewed as “lacking authoritativeness” and the CIA decided not to publish the intelligence even internally when they received it in February 2016. That’s probably because the so-called “plan” was in fact only an anonymous email with “no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification” — not to mention that it was passed along by a foreign country with a noted anti-Trump bias.

The ICA then claimed that Putin’s inner circle “strongly preferred Republican over Democratic candidates because they judged that Republicans had historically been less focused on democracy and human rights.” The phrase “strongly preferred Republican” never appeared in the raw intelligence report and the ultimate source for the claim is unknown. What’s more, the claim that Republicans cared less about democracy and human rights in Russia was implausible. The Select Committee report noted that President Reagan was famous for his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech, but a myriad of other examples could be cited.

The ICA claimed that the “clear preference” report was corroborated by liaison, diplomatic, and press reporting, when in fact none of that was true. The liaison reporting was from 2014 and “didn’t mention Trump at all.” The diplomatic report was a post-election overview from the U.S. ambassador noting that a Russian pundit said Trump and Putin should “work together like businessmen,” hardly corroboration for the claim that Putin’s inner circle preferred Republicans. Indeed, that same ambassador’s note quoted a Russian foreign minister saying that “we do not feel any euphoria” about Trump’s win.

The ICA also omitted intelligence that Putin was telling people he “did not care who won the election,” that he had “outlined the weaknesses of both major candidates,” and that Russia was “strategically placed to outmaneuver either [candidate].” If anything, Russia was preparing for Clinton’s victory and felt she was more predictable. The Kremlin worried that Trump officials would “likely adhere to conservative anti-Russian positions.” Putin “took exception” to a “favorable view” of Trump and said there was “no basis for enthusiasm” for Trump.

The original New York Times report on the CIA’s assessment said that although Russia had allegedly hacked both Republicans and Democrats, it had only released Democrats’ embarrassing emails. In fact, the CIA had no evidence that Russia held embarrassing emails or information on Republicans. It did have evidence that Russia had embarrassing information on Clinton that was never released. This included the fact that Obama and other party leaders thought Clinton’s health to be “extraordinarily alarming,” that Clinton was suffering from “intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness,” and perhaps that she had been placed on “heavy tranquilizers.” If Putin favored Trump, it would be odd not to have released this information in the closing days of the campaign.

The use of weak, disputed, and contradicted intelligence to make the claim about Russia preferring Trump wasn’t the only problem with the ICA. Its use of the Steele dossier was another. Brennan lied publicly when he testified to Congress on May 23, 2017, that the dossier “was not in any way used as a basis for the [ICA] that was done.” Not only was it cited as the fourth bullet point of “evidence” that “Putin aspired to help Trump,” it was falsely described as “Russian plans and intentions” and having come from “an FBI source.” The dossier was presented in a two-page summary that implied some of its findings had been corroborated, misrepresenting “both the significance and credibility” of the dossier, according to the Select Committee report. Further, by hiding the dossier summary in the highest classified version, the Obama spy chiefs were “better able to shield the assessment from scrutiny.”

The documents released by Ratcliffe and Gabbard show that career officers were pleading with their bosses not to assert, falsely, that Russia preferred Trump and not to include the Steele dossier in any way, shape, or form. One wrote: “Based solely on what we DO know now, my bottom line is this — unless FBI is prepared to provide much better sourcing — I believe this should NOT be included in the paper.” Noting that the document had not been formally issued as an FBI product, this same official characterized it as suffering from “POOR SOURCE TRADECRAFT,” as having “extremely sketchy” sourcing, and as failing to “meet normal [intelligence community] standards.”

Career senior intelligence officials worried about the dossier’s author being funded by an anti-Trump entity, even though they didn’t yet know that the funding came from the Clinton campaign. They also worried about the lack of transparency regarding the dossier’s sub-sources — a concern validated weeks later when the FBI finally got around to interviewing primary sub-source Igor Danchenko, a Russian national the FBI had suspected of being a spy, and determined that the salacious allegations in the dossier lacked any credibility. Despite this, the FBI defended the use of the dossier for years and hid Danchenko’s identity from Congress by hiring him as a confidential informant — a ruse allowing them to claim that revealing his identity would endanger ongoing investigations.

When Comey insisted that the information in the document was good, one intelligence official wondered why, if so, it hadn’t been used against Trump during the campaign. Including the Steele dossier in the ICA, this official added, would be like taking supermarket tabloids seriously. Pointing to a December 12, 2016, National Enquirer story headlined, “Muslim Spies in Obama’s CIA,” he asked rhetorically if that report should be included in an ICA as well.

Confronted by a reviewer who wrote that there was “no intelligence to directly support” the claim that Russia aspired to help Trump, and that making the claim would “open the [intelligence community] to a line of very politicized inquiry that is sure to come up when this paper is shared with the Hill,” Brennan called him and another dissenting official into his office and told them he knew better. Confronted with demands from senior officials that the Steele dossier not be included, Brennan insisted it stay in. “[D]oesn’t it ring true?” he asked.

***

In the wake of these recent document releases, the Department of Justice announced in July that it had formed a strike force — a means of allowing federal investigators across multiple agencies to pursue criminals engaged in conspiracies. An unnamed federal prosecutor began securing additional documents from the spy agencies. After collecting the necessary documents, the federal prosecutor will begin speaking with whistleblowers and others with knowledge about how the Russia hoax operation was run. Once his team has a clear picture, they will bring in some of the targets of the investigation for interviews. With the statute of limitations at five years for most of these potential crimes, the Department of Justice may have to show that the conspiracy against Trump is ongoing, a task made easier by the fact that some of Obama’s spy chiefs continue to defend their actions.

Back in January 2017, three days before he was briefed on the Steele dossier, Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer warned President-Elect Trump against criticizing the FBI and the CIA. “Let me tell you,” he said, “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. So, even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Thanks to Trump’s victory last November, it may be Obama’s spy chiefs who will regret taking on Trump.

Hemingway’s account misses, however, one important person, the Russiagate Special Counsel, Robert Mueller’s role in this.

He wasn’t able to obtain any convictions against Donald Trump as having in any way collaborated with Russia’s Government to win the 2016 Presidential election, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that Mueller was serving the public instead of serving some billionaires, known or unknown, here and/or abroad. (Those are the people who control the U.S. Government.) Ever since the start of the “Russiagate” probes, the case against Russia was based upon low quality, unreliable, ‘evidence,’ much if not all of which should have been thrown out, unacceptable to present to any jury — and far less suitable for winning from a jury an actual conviction. And the U.S. ‘news’-media never apologized to the public for having colluded with the Democratic Party, the DNC and its operatives, in order to smear both Trump and the Russian Government. Robert Muller publicly said that he would not recommend any prosecution of Trump about the matter, but he lied to allege that Russia’s Government had significantly affected the U.S. Presidential election in Trump’s favor. (Unlike the accusation against Trump, which was favored by only the Democratic Party’s billionaires, the accusation against Russia was favored by both Parties’ billionaires; and, so, Mueller did endorse that, though that accusation, TOO, was false.)

For example, even according to the pro-Democratic-Party expert number-cruncher on election-polling, Nate Silver, writing 17 December 2018, “If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election, I’m not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there’s not much evidence that they were effective.”

Soon thereafter, Aaron Maté headlined in the Democratic Party’s The Nation magazine on December 28th of 2018, “New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics: Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.” Maté presented lots of evidence to back that up, and this evidence cast severe doubt upon the Russiagate charges that were pursued and the indictments that were obtained.

Even those of the Democratic Party’s media that drew a line against spreading outright falsehoods recognized that the Democratic Party’s officials in the U.S. Government were presenting a shamefully corrupt and deceptive case to indict the sitting Republican President and to smear Russia and its Government in the minds of the U.S. public.

The Special Counsel Robert Mueller was publicly tasked, as the “Special Prosecutor,” to prove these charges and to achieve convictions on them (at least by the U.S. Senate) so that President Trump could be forced out of office for colluding with Russia. If there had been collusion, then, of course, Trump had committed treason and would be doomed. Instead, Mueller displayed dirt on some of Trump’s subordinates. Mueller was hired by Democrats to get a Republican President impeached by the House and then removed from office by the Senate, and then replaced by Vice President Mike Pence (who was acceptable to far more of America’s billionaires than Trump was). Had Mueller been selected on account of his record of honesty, his public trustworthiness, his skill in presenting cases and achieving convictions that don’t get thrown out by appeals courts or otherwise discredited? No. Not at all. But it made no difference anyway, because the entire Russiagate storyline that he had been hired to prove was a complex string of speculations and outright lies, and Mueller wasn’t able to prove even enough of them to make a presentable (though still speculative and unproven) case. No matter: just as Republicans won’t acknowledge that George W Bush had lied through his teeth in order to fool Americans into invading and destroying Iraq, Democrats won’t acknowledge that they were deceived by their own political Party about Russia, Ukraine, and even about Trump. The American public (both Parties of it) are (their voters, if not also their megadonors, are) apparently perfectly satisfied to be serial fools; they do it time and again (for examples: Libya 2011, Syria 2012-, and Yemen 2015-, did no harm to U.S. President Obama’s stature) — they require only that their own Party be the ones making suckers of themselves. This is the worst type of polarized public, the type that’s the biggest threat to the survival of a democracy. Mueller had, for decades, been a cog in this corrupt bipartisan American political lying machine.

Of course, all of these public officials bear a lot of guilt for their involvement in Russiagate, and in Obama’s war against Russia in Ukraine. But, above all, Obama does, because he was the principal behind all of it. (Similarly, George W. Bush remains a respected former U.S. President, though he — like Obama, Biden, and Trump — was among the worst Presidents in all of U.S. history.) There is a stark lack of accountability for U.S. Presidents and former Presidents. And the almost universally deceived American public are a crucial part of that.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post Brennan, Clapper, and Comey, Are Now in Severe Legal Jeopardy Over the Russiagate Hoax. Is Obama? appeared first on LewRockwell.

There was no need for the AWOL, Missing-In-Action Piers Morgan Media, which was never in Gaza, never stood up for Gaza, and never broke down barriers to reach and report about Palestinians sequestered in genocide. Thanks not to the MIA Media, but to Palestinian journalists, the living and the martyred, The Truth about genocide in Gaza continues to be conveyed faithfully and meticulously. ~ilana

With the Genocide of Gaza accomplished; a convoluted coverup has begun. The Johnny-Come-Lately culprits, the professional liars in media, politics, in advocacy and in the tech industry—also the custodians of The Narrative—have commenced their dull recital of excuse-making.

A dull mediocrity which was fully behind Israel—or, alternatively, had confined itself to occasional quips about mass murder in Gaza being antithetical to the American “national interest”—is suddenly simulating belated passion for the truth. Or, versions thereof. All to sanitize their sins.

Having carved out “a place of massive impunity” for Netanyahu and his complicit countrymen, these sinecured, “credentialed” Western elites have duly begun to hijack storylines—even chronology—to absolve themselves of the genocide of Gaza. The same “perpetrator block,” wading in the blood of Palestinians, intends, for now, to remain mum about the territorial asphyxiation of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. There, strategic adaptations of the Twenty-First Century Gaza Holocaust are rapidly and energetically underway. Pursuant to popular demand in Israel proper, Jewish-Israeli settlers are purloining Palestinian land and lives in the West Bank.

I had imagined that the media organ’s formulaic production had reached a nadir in Iraq, when my own passion burned as hot as a Babylonian kiln against that war. The “Truth” about Iraq, I had then observed incredulously, arrived officially only once the Empire’s agents declared it so, and released it in massaged, flattering form. And only as exigencies of power allowed. The sizeable dissident community did not rate a mention.

The current crop of Israel apostles who’ve connived and colluded to suppress truth include, broadly speaking, the Western news, commentary, advocacy and policy-making classes; the overarching tentacular corporate media and its clientele—the military-media-congressional-industrial complex, if you will. In a word, the international Imperial Comitatus: the foot soldiers who share in the loot or aspire to do so (like “Washington’s Arab puppets, whose sound and fury signify nothing”).

The international Imperial Comitatus make themselves known by affinity and affiliation, but mainly by what they do: They “ravage, slaughter, usurp … and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” Originally by Tacitus, the words were popularized by economist Jeffrey Sachs in an epic essay about these influencers, Israel’s co-belligerents.

Israel’s helpers had covered up the Crime of The Century, and now it could out. And although they’ve made excellent time—Palestinian erasure is near complete—these special interests wish, nevertheless, to salvage their standing in the world. They’re doing PR (public relations).

“Gaza panics the pro-Israel media,” said Owen Jones, a dogged British media critic. The genocide-era journalists are “creating a record that’ll allow them to say one day, ‘Here is proof that we denounced and tried to stop the genocide,’” remarked Laith Marouf, a Lebanese geopolitical reporter and commentator. They waited until now, because the genocide comported, broadly, with their worldview. “Media has manufactured consent for the genocide with atrocity propaganda,” seconds Hamza Yusuf, a British-Palestinian writer and journalist. “They did this.” “Western media is Israel’s Iron Dome,” averred Bassem Youssef, commentator, comic and former surgeon.

Although Israel’s abominations have been watched by humanity for the best part of two years; and despite Israel’s industrious, industrial-scale mass murder playing interminably, on a loop—the truth watered-down will only be permitted to come into being, officially, on the say-so of gatekeeping interests and personalities.

Such as Piers Morgan and the Missing-In-Action Morgan Media (shall we call it?).

And so, with pomp and Piers, forever slow on the uptake, those in control of The Storyline prepare to “excavate” a modified version of “the truth” about the Gaza Holocaust.

In attempting to clear his name, Morgan, a spirited evangelist for Israel’s right to practice state terrorism—he calls it “self-defense”—sounded the worst false note: the Iraq Defense: “nobody knew,” nobody could have known. (See “Iraq Liars And Deniers: We Knew Then What We Know Now,” May 22, 2015.)

The reason “nobody knew, or could have known” about a televised genocide, proclaimed the lemon-faced Piers with trademark verbose vacuity, is that there have been no “credible, international journalists” in Gaza!

Did you hear that? Palestinian journalists don’t count! In an instant, the MIA Morgan Media set about canceling the work done by the greatest journalists to have lived and died on the job. As you can see, society’s gate-keepers are also wretched human beings. To further their scheme and vanity, these power-brokers imply that absent their AWOL, MIA Media, we cannot and could not have known what was underway in Gaza.

The Missing-In-Action Media was never in Gaza, never stood up for Gaza, and never broke down barriers to reach and report about Palestinians sequestered in genocide. Now, the same Media asserts that we cannot know—could not have known—what was underway in the tiny Gaza Strip without them. Only Morgan and his ilk could have given us the goods on Gaza.

The Palestinian truth-tellers who’ve been documenting their own demise so as to bring us The Truth, nothing but the manifestly obvious Truth, are being disappeared by their moral and professional inferiors, who had never defended or doffed a hat to the work of these Palestinian journalists—professional or citizen journalists.

Wearily I repeat what has been obvious early on to anyone with some cerebral agility:

There is no neatness and dispatch in the way Israel has destroyed Gaza. It’s not like we’ve got nothing to go on. There are no empirical loose ends to tie up in Gaza; no cobwebs to clear. From the air, from space, from the ground—for all to see—on display in Gaza is, was, has been, the utter annihilation of a civilization.

There is no “fog of war”; there is no fog (only ash). There is no war. There never was anything but a genocidal impetus and the attendant declared intent to commit genocide, followed, in quick succession, by an enacted genocide in which Palestinian humanity was crushed, dismembered and burned alive; dispossessed of home and history on live tv. By Israel.

From terra firma, Palestinian journalists have transmitted unimpeachable evidence of this annihilation. From space, pioneering scientists divined proof of genocide ongoing. Thanks not to the MIA Morgan Media, but to Palestinian journalists, the living and the martyred, The Truth continues to be conveyed faithfully and meticulously.

For the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza is as clear as day—has been since 2023’s end, which is when, for instance, scientists such as Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek (featured in my early Gaza essays) had used Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to monitor the damage to buildings in Gaza. Their aim was to impart a picture of what saturation bombardment had done to Gaza’s habitat and humanity.

Some will experience a Homeric “D’oh!” moment at the next proposition: Beneath this well-documented damage—under the collapsed structures—lie the remains of human beings in their tens-of-thousands, murdered. By Israel.

At this late hour, we do not need the Morgan Media to tell us what is deductively true. “Reality is truth,” as I had put it. Res ipsa loquitur. The thing speaks for itself. Believe your lying eyes was satirist Richard Pryor’s wry phrase for he who has been caught in flagrante delicto. “There is no question any more. There is no need of investigation,” said Martin Griffiths (belatedly, sadly), a former UN diplomat. “We can with confidence and we should with conscience tell it like it is” (08:49 minutes into “Is it a genocide?”).

Whether you speak the language of the law (res ipsa loquitur), the language of facts and apodictic logic (“reality is truth”); gazing upon Gaza, listening to its people and to the humanitarians who rushed to their aid and remained on the crime scene—this was sufficient to know what’s what. By January of 2024, Gaza was ashen and barren. Dresden-level destruction was there for all to see—from the air, from space, and on the ground. Genocide.

The Gaza Holocaust, moreover, has played to a packed house, the world. It has been both a democratic genocide as well as an international genocide, remarked perhaps the only scintillating “genocide scholar,” with a moral compass to match his intellectual heft.

Dr. Martin Shaw pierces the carapace of lies now under construction:

‘The genocide that is being committed now is being committed not just by the Israeli State and the Israeli army. There is a larger perpetrator block. It isn’t just these most obvious core-actors. This is what we could call a democratic genocide, carried out with the active contributions of the Israeli-Jewish population in arms, Israeli right-wing activists who have stood at the gates of Gaza and have tried to block even the little bit of aid that the Israeli government has been willing to let in. And it’s a genocide supported ideologically and practically by a very large segment of the Israeli society: by the political opposition, by most of the media, and by vast majority of public opinion. In this sense, it is a democratic genocide.  The other thing about it is that it’s an international genocide. It is being carried out by the essential support of the United States, which is now in direct partnership, trump with Netanyahu, to complete the project with the forcible removal of the complete population from the territory.’  (9:02 minutes until 10:40 minutes)

The obliteration of Gaza had been achieved well before Piers Morgan’s May, 2025 self-serving pivot, which arose out of “moral panic.” And well before an American whistleblower did the rounds on US media, in June of 2025, bearing witness to the death squads of the misnamed US-Israel Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Picture this: A starving, emaciated, wee Palestinian boy kisses the hand that controls his fate, and cradles a face that looks upon him with some kindness. The American mercenary—a hired security subcontractor for the Isra-American GHF Gulag operation—he may wish to believe that the child does so out of abiding “respect” for our American soldiers.

Palestinian mothers know better.

As an insightful American (novelist John O’Hara) had long-ago remarked: “You don’t keep friends by having them obligated to you,” much less when their very existence depends on your cruel whim. The achingly sad image of Amir, who kissed the hand of whistleblower Anthony Agilar, is that of a hungry, helpless, forsaken Palestinian boy, bowing-and-scraping like a beggar before his only “benefactor.” For these overlords might kill him or feed him as the fancy takes them.

Surrounded by the SS IDF, Palestinian boys like Amir kiss a hand, smile beguilingly, and hope for a miracle: That a kind stranger might rescue them, rather than make them run through daily cycles of “hunger games.” One day it’s the groin that the thrill-seeking gamers of the Israel Occupying Forces (IOF) have been reported to target; the next it’s center-mass they aim for. As recounted by humanity’s finest (the very many medics volunteering in Gaza), the GHF food-procurement massacres are rounded-off with headshot clusters, courtesy of the same gamers: the delirious marksmen of the IDF.

Nevertheless, a Homeric “D’oh!” was duly disgorged by a recent flyover reporter, who pretended to have just discovered genocide two years hence. Gone is “the soul of the place along with the souls who lived here,” intoned this particular ITV News editor, on August 4, 2025.

Our flyover visitor had popped in over Gaza, early in August, as party to an Israel-controlled, airborne contingent that was throwing “paltry, lethal parcels of food aid” on small sections of the Strip, “instead of forcing Israel to open the crossings to over 22,000 aid trucks that remain blocked from entering.”

Missions of mercy these air drops are not. By design, Israel shells the anthills from above. The imperious, complicit “Western and regional states” and their stooges throw parcels of food at the people whom they’ve bombed into oblivion—and into begging. Israel is loving it. Its vampiric i24 News network entertained one Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, friend of i24’s Laura Cellier show, who waxed fat about “flying ‘missions’ over Gaza.”

Throwing a few nutrient-free parcels of dry goods at starving Palestinians from the air; or herding them, for the ostensible purpose of feeding them, into “agricultural cattle pens, like animals in a human abattoir,” to be, then, sprayed with bullets, or targeted by the marksmen of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation: These slow extermination-liquidation operations are, have been, part of Israel’s Final Solution to its Palestinian problem, for the best part of two years. Openly pursued, openly discussed in the Hebrew (with which I am fluent).

Full famine in Gaza has galvanized the West—not to feed Palestinians, but to feign action by convening forums of inaction.

To meager food drops, the West has added fuss and feathers—white noise—about the two-state diplomacy, and has given speeches about recognizing the State of Palestine. This is just what a people being starved and butchered need: speeches. Besides, upwards of 140 states had long-since recognized Palestinian statehood. Had that stopped Israel’s genocide? The fake, defunct two-state “solution” notwithstanding, rhetoric is not what’s needed in the face of a reality, whereby a many-times dislocated population made homeless is being starved and slaughtered out of existence.

If Israel has been exposed, so has the West, with America in the lead.

Israel’s extermination campaign has been sacralized at the highest of political and journalistic altitudes. It is these cagey characters—vicariously involved in genocide or on active duty—who now want to salvage their reputations by sullying the reputation of Palestinian, Gaza-based reporters.

Long months sequestered in genocide, notwithstanding, Palestinian journalists have nevertheless been crisscrossing Gaza, on the scene of every Israeli mass murder; every tent encampment incinerated by the heavy payload-weapons of the Israel Occupation Forces; interviewing and filming by-standers, healthcare workers, assisting the faithful civil-administration functionaries and rescuers (reduced to digging for survivors with homemade trowels); living alongside their families in nylon domes, and standing vigil over dead kin and colleagues in prayer. And now, the chroniclers of Palestine starve with their people.

In truth, it is the Morgan Media, ex officio town criers, that don’t count. Best to express their nullity was the fierce Francesca Albanese, a woman not desperate to feature on Piers Morgan’s low-intelligence, large podcast, alongside his other suck-up guests. Albanese had refused to get drawn into Piers’ broadsheet-sensationalism! The UN’s rapporteur for Palestine (an unpaid, punishing position) told the desk-bound “journalist,” “What you say, Piers, is worth zero.” Your opinion counts for zero.

The epitome of grace in a life-and-death struggle, Palestinian journalists, on the other hand, have been exceedingly polite to the Julius Streicher Media, given that the latter have colluded with the Israelis in the murder of 266 of their colleagues (and climbing). This is more than “the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan combined, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project.” (Via ForeignPolicy.com)

As is the case with the genocide of Palestinians, the news chyrons on your televisions are out-of-date as they scroll by. The Associated Press counted, but failed to name, Israel’s August 25 prey among Palestinian journalists. Four. It fell to readers to name the fallen. Newly martyred for Truth were:

Reuters’ Hossam al-Masri
Al Jazeera’s Mohammad Salama

Freelancer Maryam Abu Daqqa
NBC’s Muath Abu Taha

Forgive me. I should have known that the news scroll across our screens is also reliably wrong. The AP failed to accurately count the fallen. Five.  The AP omitted Ahmed Abu Aziz, a local journalist murdered. The “betrayal of Palestinian journalists in Gaza” peaked with the presstitutes of the International Women’s Media Foundation. Playing procurer and pimp for Israel; the IWMF withdrew a “Courage in Journalism Award” from Gaza-based Maha Husseini. (The reason? Likely “Antisemitism” or housing Hamas: You choose. I won’t dignify another Zionist blood libel.)

Martyred for truth before the five aforementioned were Anas Al-Sharif and his team (here is the live footage via real journalists). The veteran young reporter was the kind of human being whom members of the pampered Morgan Media can only dream of equaling. Like so many of these magnificent Palestinians, Anas Al-Sharif wrote his epitaph, final will and testament, in anticipation of his death because, as night turns to day, the world knows what Israel will do next:

Murder! All the more so if you are a Palestinian reporter chronicling a genocide of your people.

Piers Morgan, who announced in May of 2025 that he “was wrong,” was joined in public expiation by other genocidal British public figures, including politicians such as Tory MP Mark Pritchard. At the eleventh hour, Germany, Israel’s second largest supplier of baby-busting munitions, worried the optics, too. Nineteen months into the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, Chancellor Friedrich Merzagain whimpered that Israel’s operations “no longer appear to [him] as strictly necessary for defending Israel’s right to exist and for combating Hamas terrorism.” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stalled until August 27, which was when she condemned Israeli attacks on Gaza as “beyond the principles of proportionality.” Editorialists in leading western publications joined this coalition of evil.

You know just what a confidence trick and a fraud the Piers-type Israel pivot represents—when a she-devil like podcaster Megyn Kelly feels called upon to add her shenanigans to the production. For glib viciousness, Kelly—whose métier is feel-good militarism and assorted “girly gutter journalism”—is unbeatable. Fifteen minutes and 22 seconds into a July 28, 2025 “visit” with the perfidious Briton, Kelly said this:

“I am reluctant to put too much stock in the images coming out of Gaza, because they are manipulated and they are masters of propaganda. They are fine having their own children starve, just so long as they can put them on camera and show them off to the world. That’s Hamas, and frankly, that’s a lot of Palestinians. So, I’m very skeptical at [sic] taking those images at face value, and saying that it’s Israel’s fault.”

Come August 19, 2025, in an attempt to both stay current and outshine her guest Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kelly was practically climbing over those “phantom” starving Palestinian children, to cast herself as an edgy resister and critic of AIPAC, the Israel Lobby, and its “multiple reachouts” to Me, Myself and I, Megyn Kelly.

Now please lead me to the Vomitorium.

Meloni and Merzagain, whose administrations, like all western nations, have not divested materially or diplomatically from the genocidal entity, share the moral pedigree of a Megyn Kelly and a Piers Morgan. They all resolved to stop framing genocide as self-defense long after the genocide in Gaza was completed.

It was in May-June of 2025 that Morgan morphed Israel’s status from the legitimate exerciser of self-defense to no longer exercising legitimate self-defense. For nearly two years, Morgan had watched Palestinians being “denied the right to life on an industrial scale.” He had tried and succeeded quite well in framing Israel’s mass murder ongoing as self-defense. Until one day when it was not. Piers’ posture is obviously forced, insincere and strategic. Why and where precisely was the pivot-point?

There is no reason in logic. Piers Morgan’s flabby reasoning is reliably circular and self-serving. The point of demarcation—where Israel went from legitimate self-defense to state terrorism—is measured in Piers Morgan Units: in the time it took Morgan to go from avid Israel supporter, to reluctant critic of the genocidal entity (14:41 minutes in).

Circular reasoning, indeed. What reasoning other than circular would one expect from the journalistic circle jerk?

What really motivated “august” members of the Media Circle Jerk, such as Piers Morgan or Megyn Kelly, to rap Israelis on the knuckles, suddenly, for that is all this is?

Joseph Massad, a Palestinian scholar, homes in on what’s afoot among these scullions. While the structure of genocide has been the same throughout, the “suddenly developed moral compunction” is about “the more recent phase of the genocide, where the continued outright bombing and incineration of Gaza in a holocaust is now compounded by the deliberate mass starvation of the Palestinian survivors,” remarks Massad. In essence, the sight of jutting baby bones and distended bellies   is not a good look.

If Piers Morgan and his clones were men of conscience, as they undoubtedly are not, they would come clean; lie low, listen, flagellate, be ashamed, stay ashamed. Piers should be begging Palestinian pardon—perhaps admit to being a mouthpiece of power, and endeavor to listen to his betters.

This staged reckoning comes against the backdrop of Israel’s ongoing, imposed famine-starvation in Gaza. Awash with evil, when Israel is not assassinating negotiators (Qatar) as well as entire governments, heads of civilian portfolios, and journalists across the Middle East (Yemen), the exterminatory Jewish Israel is willy-nilly murdering over 100 Palestinians each day and wounding many hundreds more, consigning the injured to slow death by sepsis and starvation, without hope for recovery.

The Gaza Strip Israel has demolished. Just in case, the genocidal entity has set about demolishing “around 300 residential units a day in Gaza City, aided by the Israeli army’s explosive-laden robots.” Soldiers the IDF are not. Here’s a “news” story from the crypt of an archaic, old-fashioned keeper of records: By November 15, 2023, ancient Gaza City, “the largest, oldest Palestinian city,” was near complete destruction. Given the state of the collective memory, it behooves me to remind readers:

The SS IDF has already crisscrossed the Gaza Strip in one way or another. When Israel announced its plan  to “conquer” Gaza City, you ought to have asked: As opposed to what? Destroy it? Done. Kill tens-of-thousands of its residents? Done. Concentrate the starving population for the purpose of killing more of it? Finalizing what has been a Final Solution? Done and done. Mere semantics. The place, Gaza—city and strip—is ashen and barren.

I deal in words. Stale, worn words. I have none left.

The “Dispossessed of the Earth” are being starved to death by evil-on-earth: Israel and its willing accomplices.

The people of the world are with the “Dispossessed of the Earth,” the Palestinians. The governments of the world and their mouthpieces, North and South, are either nowhere to be seen or, alternatively, with evil-on-earth, Israel.

And that includes the complicit, MIA, Piers Morgan-Megyn Kelly Media.

One of many selfless healers and humanitarians currently operating with great difficulty in Gaza is Dr. Tarek Loubani. By this point, day 711 of the genocide, what Dr. Loubani said on day 236 of Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Flood is amplified many times over. If you have been silent so far—or, enveloped by the warm smell of the herd, are conveniently piping up two years into the sacking of Gaza—you must not be forgiven.

Follow: https://rumble.com/v6toq73-the-real-israel-vs.-hasbara-history.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp_f

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xedE2MSEgRE

*Image via screen picture https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/01/gaza-war-worst-ever-for-reporters-costs-of-war-project/

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Chase Hughes is a former military Chief who specializes in behavior profiling, interrogation, and Human Intelligence operations. He now develops tactics for government agencies and businesses in ‘Enhanced Persuasion’ and people-reading skills.

Chase is also the bestselling author of ‘The Behavior Ops Manual’, and ‘Phrase Seven’.

Chase now teaches advanced behavior skills to law firms, businesses, and the general public. The courses range from violence-prediction and interrogation to extreme influence and people-reading.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination will dominate the headlines—but before the truth is even clear, the disinformation machine is already spinning. This video exposes how suppression, radicalization, and division are weaponized—not by ideology, but by systems designed to keep you outraged, divided, and distracted.

We’ll reveal: • Why suppression is the biggest red flag in history—and why it always signals weakness, not strength. • How highly suggestible people are radicalized—not by one side or the other, but through media outrage loops, algorithmic echo chambers, and deliberate manipulation. • The illusion of “left vs. right”—a distraction designed to pit neighbors against each other while corruption, corporate power, and elites escape untouched. • The common ground we all share: freedom, safety, stability, fairness—and what none of us want: corruption, endless wars for profit, elites with different rules, surveillance states, and justice systems that bend for the powerful but break for the rest of us.

This is not a partisan message. Suppression is weakness. Radicalization is manipulation. Disinformation is the bait. And if you don’t understand how this machinery works, you’ll keep falling for it. Stay until the end—because once you see how these systems operate, you’ll never look at a headline the same way again.

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Andrew Napolitano – What Ever Happened To The Constitution?

Today is Constitution Day, September 17, 2025. All Social Studies teachers in every high school are required by federal law to celebrate the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

The Constitution of the United States of America is the supreme law of the United States.

When I was still teaching, this brief video is what I would show my students.

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Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

https://x.com/Rothbard1776/status/1968064033484890565

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Mike Benz is one of the wisest, most informed, articulate, and knowledgeable persons online.

Mike Benz, former government official and digital liberties advocate

• Executive Director, Foundation for Freedom Online: He currently leads this nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting digital liberties and restoring a free and open internet.
• Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State: During the Trump administration, Benz was responsible for the cyber portfolio in the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs.
• Former White House Speechwriter: Before his State Department role, he served as a speechwriter for President Trump and advised on technology policy.
• Advocacy: He is a prominent, highly respected voice in discussions about online censorship, including guest appearances on podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience, Tucker Carlson where he has discussed alleged government overreach in regulating online speech.
• Early Career: Before entering public service, he worked as a business law attorney in New York, representing tech and financial firms. 

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Click here:

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

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Click here:

Breitbart

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Thanks, Ginny Garner.

The Grayzone

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The word of the day for Catholics is “unity.” For the sake of it, entire congregations are ghettoized (TLM), bishops exiled (Strickland), faculties gutted (Sacred Heart), and dioceses fractured (Charlotte). Strange to think that the peculiar synodality project is more or less based on giving every wayward lifestyle and viewpoint a podium but the faithful who have dedicated their lives and relationships to Christ are pressed into passive, conforming ranks.

One of the many things the heavy hands on the tiller of the Church don’t realize is that unity cannot be forced. In the short term, they may be able to line people up like identical service robots, but it only fuels an equal and opposite reaction farther down the road. It’s Newtonian psychology.

Conformity in an evil age asks us to deny common sense, which is our use of reason. For unity’s sake, we’re told to believe that the Mass attended by almost every saint we’ve ever loved is now something pernicious. The “needle in every arm” campaign asked us to ignore the fact that a novel technology had no long-term safety testing. 1984’s Winston Smith had to swallow the non-sense that freedom is slavery and ignorance strength.

As long as society and the Gospel are in harmony about standards of moral behavior, it’s safe to be a conformist. The vast majority of humans are; rebels have always been anomalous. But when a society is Godless, pornographic, and corrupt, conformity can kill body and soul.

Genuine unity is spontaneous, based on shared belief and experience. It springs from joy and the “click” of recognition when we hear the truth. St. John Paul wrote: “The unity willed by God can be attained only by the adherence of all to the content of revealed faith in its entirety.” So, if unity is really the goal, the road to get there is the whole deposit of faith and not a conniption of administrative flaps.

And yet, many bishops want to take the shortcut of uniformity, executed through cancellations, firings, and fiddly rules about our devotional gestures at Mass. Uniformity is like a knockoff Patek Philippe wristwatch; it looks swanky, but it stops telling time shortly after the street vendor packs up his case and makes a run for it.

All these firings and restrictions will never get us to true unity. The greatest pools of genuine unity are forming around those who are unjustly sidelined—not among the artificially uniform ranks of the compliant. Real unity draws people in; conformity just keeps them quiet.

When Bishop Joseph Strickland was dismissed from his diocese, there was mention of “lack of fraternity” with brother bishops. No one was supposed to say anything about the flaccid response to homosexuality in the Church, or the contradictory remarks of Pope Francis, or the failure to address the McCarrick crisis. As long as no one mentioned the elephant, the bishops were safe in their ballroom, shielded from the laity’s demands. The Strickland Problem was solved by booting him off the line to restore uniformity, a cheap and shortsighted solution.

Bishop Strickland noted recently in an interview for The Catholic Herald that “authentic unity in the Church is never built on silence in the face of error.” Far from losing his voice, the ostracized American bishop has just launched a new website to continue preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ crucified.

When one person speaks up, it’s a reproach to the cowardly and furtive. And if they try to silence the upstart, the opposite inevitably occurs: truth is amplified. And truth will prevail; we are in the prefatory period, just before it does. We can hasten or slacken it by our willingness to do the hard work of discernment and speaking up ourselves.

This is not the time for mindless conformity. It’s not the time to be silent, or to assume that someone else will take care of things. It’s not a time to allow corrupt men, even among the clergy, to drive us into uniform lines of spongy followers. After everything we’ve been through, it’s not the time to abdicate our responsibility to study and discern what’s being told to us by “experts,” including theological ones.

This is a hard call for Catholics because we live within a hierarchy. We’re accustomed to following leaders we assume to be led, in turn, by Christ. But what if they’re not? What of the ones who carry on secret lives, cover up for predators, use the monies we’ve put in the basket to fund support for abortion and other abominations, betray doctrine—and even those not guilty of such egregious violations, who stand silently by, which is a sin in itself for those entrusted with souls?

We have to take the counsel of our Lord, to obey the law of God, which they are charged with preaching (whether or not they do), but we must avoid following them into perdition. This now demands careful deliberation. It’s not the good ol’ days; we have to know our faith very well in order to assess what we’re told. That means study of the Catechism in particular because it is such a direct and concise explanation of the Faith. When bishops and clergy exhibit an ignorance—or a deliberate rejection—of the deposit of faith, we have to be informed enough to know what’s right and what’s not.

When bishops act and speak from their lawful authority on matters of faith and morals, we obey. But we don’t have to do it silently. In fact, canon law defends the dignity of the laity when they respectfully speak up:

Can. 212 §3. According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they (the Christian faithful) have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.

Regina Magazine has just released a film, Bread Not Stones, which is a teaching response to Bishop Michael Martin’s attempt to impose uniformity of worship upon his diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s an excellent example of speaking up reverently to their pastor whom they believe may be acting against the good of the people and the Church.

Those who speak up for truth in this age, who will not conform themselves to falsehood or treachery, stand between us and ruin. Let’s expand their ranks. Within the limits of careful discernment, we must stand up and speak out. Conformity in an evil age is a mortal risk.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

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