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In Memory of Nawar al-Awlaki, Age 8.

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Writes Tim McGraw:

Biden gave these cluster bombs to Zelensky in Ukraine, but this bombing happened on Trump’s watch. Trump needs to do something about this. If he doesn’t, it means that Trump condones it. This is one of the traps set for Trump by the outgoing Biden regime.

US Cluster Bombs Target Civilians in Ukraine War Zone US Tax Payer War Crime by Patrick Lancaster

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John Leake

 

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Pete, Tulsi, Kash, and RFK: The Sum of All Democratic Fears

The left has good reason to be very afraid of this quick-witted quartet.

by Tim Donner

Once upon a time, Senate scrutiny of a president’s Cabinet appointments was essentially pro forma. The advice and consent of the upper chamber of Congress was necessary, but despite whether the incoming president was a Republican or Democrat, it was largely a formality. Senators from both parties mostly agreed with the basic premise that a president deserves to surround himself with whomever he desires. But that was in normal times. And as we well know, the second Trump presidency, like the first, is anything but normal.

A trip to the time capsule reveals that the only Cabinet nominee in the last 40 years to be rejected by the Senate was George H.W. Bush’s choice for secretary of Defense, John Tower, in 1989. All but one of Bush 41’s other nominees received unanimous approval. More recently, the Cabinets of three consecutive two-term presidents – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama – sailed right through. Only one of Clinton’s nominees received more than two votes in opposition. Only Bush 43’s three attorney generals and two other nominees got more than two downvotes. Things were not quite as smooth for Obama, but only five of his nominees over two terms exceeded 30 opposing votes. Many of those three presidents’ selections over 24 years were approved by voice vote.

Democratic Bipartisanship Dissolves

Things began to change in 2017, but even then, the only Trump nominee to come close to being rejected was Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who eked out approval 51-50. Five other Trump nominees received 40 or more votes in opposition but gained approval by margins of no less than five votes. After the GOP’s bitter, disputed loss of the presidency and both chambers of Congress in 2020, Republican opposition was tame compared to what we are witnessing with Trump’s second-term Cabinet.

Republicans joined Democrats in approving the nomination of Washington insider Lloyd Austin as Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense by a vote of 93-2. Even Biden nominees who would later become ripe subjects for Republican wrath, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, were easily approved, Garland by a 70-30 margin and Buttigieg by 86-13. And Antony Blinken, who rounded up those infamous 51 spies to claim the Hunter Biden laptop was likely the product of a Russian hack, was approved as secretary of State 78-22. The only Biden nominees who came close to being rejected were HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Jared Bernstein, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, both approved by 50-49 margins.

The Quick-Witted Quartet

That brings us to the present day and four of the most controversial cabinet nominees in our lifetime: Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Bobby Kennedy Jr. This whip-smart quartet represents the sum of everything Democrats fear in the second Trump era: shockingly disruptive and virulently anti-establishment. Hegseth barely snuck through as secretary of Defense by the thinnest of margins, 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. The other three are likely headed for confirmation in the coming days – and there is nothing Democrats can do to stop them beyond hoping more than three Republican senators break ranks. With the GOP holding a 53-47 majority in the upper chamber, hectoring, lecturing, and assailing these nominees, as Democrats have done in recent days, will amount to little more than sound and fury, signifying nothing.

On top of Trump’s seemingly countless executive orders on everything from the southern border to the Panama Canal, this is the clearest evidence yet of how different the second Trump presidency is from the first when Trump was a novice forced to settle largely for DC insiders. And Democrats have ample reason to fear the disruption sure to be wrought by this foursome.

As Defense secretary, Hegseth will re-instill the “warrior spirit” in a military depressed by the DOD’s obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) during the Biden years. As the prospective director of National Intelligence and FBI director, respectively, Gabbard and Patel have made crystal clear their commitment to cleaning house, ridding their departments of flagrant bias and the weaponization of justice and intelligence that marked the last four years of Democratic rule. Kennedy’s singular mission is to “make America healthy again,” vital for a nation suffering from record levels of preventable disease. His is an exceedingly consequential initiative but one that was barely on the radar of previous administrations. Nevertheless, RFK Jr. is particularly galling to Democrats who see him as a turncoat, a traitor to the legendary liberal legacy of his family. They are utterly appalled by his refusal to unquestioningly agree with their conventional wisdom, particularly as it relates to their controlling, heavy-handed approach to vaccines.

Elections do indeed have consequences. And in the case of Donald Trump, the contrast between his Cabinet and the one that would have been assembled by Kamala Harris could hardly be more striking. After spending the entirety of the last decade attempting to bring down their reviled enemy by any means available, the left is now reaping the whirlwind in the form of not just the 47th president but the like-minded warriors who will surround him for the next four years.

 

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“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” —Gospel of Matthew 5:3-12

Last March, at a hospital in the small city of Hudson in upstate New York near where I live, I was checking in to have some bloodwork done as part of an elusive search to get at the root cause of a possible neurological condition. I was sitting on one side of a row of desks and a nurse was sitting across from me, tapping away at a computer keyboard to record my answers to her questions.

The hospital stands high on a hill on a choice chunk of real estate with a view to the west toward the Hudson River in the distance and the rolling, rounded shoulders of the Catskill Mountain range beyond. The hospital architects had taken advantage of this position and designed the building with large windows on the western side so you could see all of this natural splendor that often makes me think of the 19th-century Hudson River School of art. Among the school’s most renowned practitioners were Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Cole, whose homes and studios stand today as museums little more than a stone’s throw from where I was sitting.

It was sunny outside with a few fluffy, scattered clouds that looked like real clouds, not the gauzy products of chemtrails with which the skies of this area are regularly sprayed. I was grateful for that. I wanted to be in a good mood. I don’t like hospitals or needles—or suspicious-looking clouds.

At one point in her line of questioning, the nurse asked me, from a list of possibilities, what my religious affiliation was. The question took me by surprise. When the nurse recited the final choice of “none,” I repeated “none.” I said it without really thinking about it. Click went the keyboard. I was surprised by the question. Was a simple blood draw capable of putting me in such a state that I’d need last rites?

As the nurse asked me several more questions and as I sometimes glanced out the wall of glass at the vast expanse of beauty outside, I thought about what I’d just done. We are at war, I thought. And, as the saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes, I thought. And I thought I’d better come clean and do whatever I could to get right with God right then and there and not waver for another second longer. For who knows when or where or how the evil ones in high places will strike next? Or how bad it will be? The presidential election was still months away and there was no telling then what was going to happen between then and November or how the election was going to play out, if the grotesque nightmare we’ve been living under since the stolen 2020 election was going to continue for yet another four years—or not.

That first, automatic response of mine had little to do with any irresolution on my part. I said “none” because I thought that my religious affiliation was no one’s business but my own. But then I thought, no. Why hide anything about that? What was I afraid of? I remembered Jesus telling his followers early in his ministry about how no one lights a lamp and then covers it up; you put it on a lampstand and it gives light to all of the house. In the same way, he said, let your light shine before others. And I also thought of one of Jesus’ disciples, Peter, denying that he ever knew Jesus as Jesus was being tortured in the hours before his execution. I do not, I thought, want to be that guy.

“Can we go back and change my religious affiliation?” I asked.

“Sure,” the nurse said.

“Make it Christian.”

She nodded, clicked on the keyboard. And there it was, on my official medical record. There was no priest to witness this unexpected turn of events. No baptism. No holy water. No visible water of any sort anywhere except in the slow-moving Hudson River maybe a mile away and in a nearly empty water cooler by the door. No confession of sins. No recital of the Nicene Creed. The heavens did not open. I saw no angels or doves. It was all just between me and the nurse. And God.

***

Jesus was not a Christian, of course. He was Jewish. And, of course, no one was called a “Christian” in the earliest days of what we call Christianity today. Those who came to follow Jesus were Jewish men and women who felt disenfranchised and subjugated by both their corrupt religious overlords—the Sadducees and the Pharisees—and the Roman occupiers of Palestine.

They came to believe Jesus knew something important about life (and death) that they did not, and he made no bones about it. They were drawn to him at first because of his miraculous healings of “every disease and every sickness among the people” (Matthew 4:23). And while those healings continued, what ultimately drew people to him were the words he spoke. Because he spoke his mind. And because he spoke to a transcendent reality that is always with us and toward which, through thick and thin, we can always aspire. We know this today because we have written records from eyewitnesses of some of the things he said back then, some of which are collected in the New Testament. We can see for ourselves that Jesus did not mince words.

And, to be sure, his followers must have found solace and support in his words. Jesus had no intention of creating a new religion or a church. He wanted to put people in touch with a sense of their own divinity and the holiness of their existence in the eyes of God without the intercessions of legalistic customs and insignificant rules, as had been the order of the day.

I imagine that being in his presence must have felt like a breath of fresh air. He spoke of forgiveness, compassion, respect, and love—the higher ideals of human behavior to which we can aim for to lead a more perfected life. He must have made people feel seen and understood, inviting them into a new community of both transcendence and belonging as opposed to the harsh realities with which they felt at odds, out of place, and hounded.

The healing of the lepers; the stilling of the storm on the Sea of Galilee; the casting out of demons; the parables; the feeding of the thousands; the walking on water; the transfiguration; the cleansing of the temple; the betrayal by Judas; the so-called Last Supper; Jesus’ trial; crucifixion, death, resurrection; and the unstoppable movement of the long-suffering Jewish people that emerged as a result—all of that which we read about in the Gospel of Matthew—would come much later. But what really drew people to Jesus while he was alive was what he said and how he said it—with courage and conviction. He apparently feared nothing and no one but God. And he showed others how to be the same. As we might say today, what’s not to like? He was a superstar.

***

Among his words are what we now call the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is the first of five of what are known as the “great discourses” in the Gospel of Matthew (which most sources say was composed between 80 and 90 C.E.). And the opening lines of the sermon are what we now call the Beatitudes, of which there are nine in the Gospel of Matthew. In this gospel, the Beatitudes appear as his first teaching. And the Beatitudes were also revealing something new to which people were also drawn. It was what I learned in seminary to call the “transvaluation of suffering.”

This message stood over and against the way the world was or was perceived to be. Jesus spoke to the pain of spiritual poverty, of grief, and of persecution—and said that if you suffered under any of these conditions you were blessed. And you were blessed because in your suffering you were offered the unconditional promise of salvation, not just in the world to come, but in this life—here and now. It was, as far as we know, the first time anyone had spoken publicly in such a manner.

“And beyond this, silence reigns—doubtless a strategy of self-defense in view of their absolute powerlessness politically, a strategy also adopted later by the rabbis,” writes Hans Dieter Betz in his 1985 book, Essays on the Sermon on the Mount. “Despite such conditions, it is noteworthy that the SM [Sermon on the Mount] betrays no sign of defeatism, despair, or apocalyptic panic.” What’s more, Betz writes, the community who heard and lived by the ideals Jesus spoke of in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount “lived in unbroken confidence that it would endure and prevail against the storms of history and the hardships of human life. Seen in this way, the SM can almost be called a ‘manual for survival.’”

During the first several months of the COVID-19 psyop, many of us felt like we were being forced into silence. I remember when nothing I wrote in social media or said in person to my newly captured old friends and colleagues about what we were truly up against could get through to them. Worse, I was sometimes attacked for being a “conspiracy theorist.” It was beyond frustrating; it was ominous. What had happened to all of them? I wondered—and still wonder. Among the swarms of the willing, the compliant, and the villainous jab devotees, I felt like an army of one in a battle to bring those I know and love back from their insanity. And it was a battle I was losing.

At that point, the only way onward, for me, was inward. I will not say that I surrendered but I can say that I retreated. I did so to rearrange much of my life in ways I had never anticipated I would have to do. But I reconciled myself with the conclusion that this is what happens when you are living in a nation at war and you are among the small resistance. This involved finding new friends where I live—even when the government mandated us not to gather—and connecting to new people on social media—people who saw what I saw, believed what I believed. Who knew, in short, that what we were up against was not good, far from it. I also changed my mind about what I liked to read. And last year, I started writing this column, based on the new things I was reading, and now I can also include in my emergent community the subscribers to Underlined Sentences, for whom I am profoundly grateful.

Biblical scholars quibble over the sources of the Beatitudes and speculate as to whether Jesus actually said them in the order in which they appear in the gospels of Matthew (Matthew 5:3-12) and Luke (6:20-23), where they are part of what is known as the Sermon on the Plain (this sermon does not appear in the gospels or Mark or John), or if they were put there by the writers of these gospels to compose a cohesive whole. There is, however, enough agreement that the Beatitudes are rooted in Jesus’ ministry, represent his teaching faithfully, and exemplify what would become a venerable Christian tradition.

Taking on an analysis of any passage in the Bible is a daunting task. There are libraries of hefty tomes and entire lives of Biblical scholars dedicated to the critical examination of every word in the Bible. What I want to do in this essay is to offer a glimpse into how I believe the Jesus movement began. I have chosen the Beatitudes as a window into the entire Jesus movement, because the unconditional salvation spoken of in the Beatitudes epitomized Jesus’ “good news” of God’s deliverance. I don’t want to get into the weeds and “unpack” the text, as it was said of exegetical examinations when I was a seminarian. Rather, I want to unpack—very briefly—the time in which Jesus spoke these words and explore why they appealed to certain people at the time of Jesus’ earthly life.

I also want explore some striking similarities between that time and the times we’ve been living in the past five years. Because I have found—and some of my awakened friends have found—that among the many writers we follow on Substack, as well as people who host video interviews and writers of other blogs we follow, either seem to be revealing their Christian leanings little by little or have confessed outright, loudly, and proudly their conversion to the faith. I am including myself among them. And we’ve all wondered why this is and why now?

***

The Jewish men and women of Jesus’ day would have generally understood salvation as both material and national prosperity. We read in The Anchor Bible Dictionary: “Salvation involves being delivered from slavery (Deut 24:18), separation from one’s family, and the threat of death. It means victory in battle, the freedom to marry, the gift of descendants, a long life, and the protection needed to enjoy one’s rightful patrimony.”

True, there is a spiritual, other-worldly dimension to Jewish salvation, especially in the Jewish apocalyptic teachings. But it is not akin to what Jesus uniquely espoused in the Beatitudes. This was that new thing. We read in the Life Application Study Bible:

“With Jesus’ announcement that the kingdom was near (4:17), people were naturally asking, ‘How do I qualify to be in God’s kingdom?’ Jesus said that God’s kingdom is organized differently from worldly kingdoms. In the kingdom of heaven, wealth and power and authority are unimportant. Kingdom people seek different blessings and benefits, and they have different attitudes.”

The Oxford Companion to the Bible tells us that the Beatitudes speak to “those who stand before God empty-handed, vulnerable, seeking a right relationship with him and others, open to receive and express his mercy and forgiveness with integrity, ready to experience and to establish peace.”

Jesus’ kingdom is not just another place in time and space; Jesus’ kingdom is in this world. This is also what distinguishes Jesus from Judaism. This is a dual feature that emerged early in Jesus’ ministry. Robert Guelich, in his 1982 book, The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundation for Understanding, writes: “In Jesus’ person and ministry the good news about God’s promise-fulfilling, redemptive activity is announced.” We read in the old English translation of the Geneva Bible of the Gospel of Luke that Jesus tells the Pharisees that “the kingdome of God is within you” (17:21).

Ultimately, the growth and success of the Jesus movement, even before the existence of any written documents, was not going to depend on any of the prevailing traditions of the day—wisdom, prophecy, miracle-healer, wonder-worker. The growth and success of the movement was going to depend upon building communities around the idea that suffering is a good thing. For what greater (and timeless) suffering is there than when the individual is pitted against the state? This struggle is the signature of aligning our personal will with the will of God, and of this we can ask for no higher a calling. “If my heart is in accord with God’s heart, I am blessed, and I can experience the great peace, even in the midst of suffering,” writes John S. Dunne in his 2000 book, Reading the Gospel.

***

In the Gospel of Matthew there’s an episode in which Jesus retreats to the desert, where he is tempted by the devil. The devil tempts him three times. In the last temptation, the devil takes Jesus to a high mountain—perhaps replicating Moses’ climb up Mount Sinai where he encounters God—and shows him all the kingdoms of the world. There, perhaps with a sweep of his hand, the devil tells Jesus that all of it would be his if he fell down and worshipped the devil. Jesus tells the devil to worship and serve “the Lord your God,” whereupon the devil fled.

Jacques Ellul, a French philosopher and lay theologian, in his 1991 book, Anarchy and Christianity, offers this exposition on the meaning of that exchange:

“Jesus does not say to the devil: It is not true. You do not have power over kingdoms and states. He does not dispute this claim. He refuses the offer of power because the devil demands that he should fall down before him and worship him…. We may thus say that among Jesus’ immediate followers and in the first Christian generation, political authorities—what we call the state—belonged to the devil and those who held power received it from him.”

The four canonical gospels that we have today in the New Testament were so intentionally written and designed that it can likely be no accident that in the Gospel of Matthew, right after this confrontation with the devil, was when Jesus began his ministry by teaching, preaching, and healing to both Jews and Gentiles alike. It is as if out in the desert with the devil he’d had his ultimate trial—a come-to-Jesus moment, if you will—from which he came away enlightened and enthused to share with others what he’d learned from his own agonizing personal experience—the one way to learn that nobody can refute or fact check.

At first, he spoke in synagogues, where he preached the gospel, the good news—that the kingdom of heaven has come, that God is with us and that he cares for us. “Enormous crowds were following Jesus—he was the talk of the town, and everyone wanted to see him,” we read in the Life Application Study Bible. “The disciples, who were the closest associates of this popular man, were certainly tempted to feel important, proud, and possessive. Being with Jesus gave them not only prestige, but also opportunity for receiving money and power.”

This was when Jesus pulled his disciples aside—at this point it was just Peter, Andrew, James, and John (a crowd might have gathered later because at the end of his sermon in the Gospel of Matthew (7:28) we’re told that the crowds were “astounded at his teaching”)—to have a talk with them as if to warn them not to feel too important about themselves and let their teacher’s popularity get to their heads. When Jesus was alone with these disciples, they gathered on a hillside near Capernaum for a private audience with their beloved teacher. There, in a kind of initiation, he delivered his Sermon on the Mount (some say this occurred over several days) and spoke those now-renowned words that make up the Beatitudes. I find it hard to imagine that these four men who’d left behind their domestic lives and livelihoods as fishermen that this message was anything close to “good news,” that this was what they had signed up for.

The Life Application Study Bible again:

“Jesus began his sermon with words that seem to contradict each other. But God’s way of living usually contradicts the world’s. If you want to live for God you must be ready to say and do what seems strange to the world. You must be willing to give when others take, to love when others hate, to help when others abuse. By giving up your own rights in order to serve others, you will one day receive everything God has in store for you….

“Each beatitude tells how to be blessed. ‘Blessed’ means more than happiness. It implies the fortunate or enviable state of those who are in God’s kingdom. The Beatitudes don’t promise laughter, pleasure, or earthly prosperity. To Jesus, ‘blessed’ means the experience of hope and joy, independent of outward circumstances.”

What’s also particularly striking about this movement is that the oppressive environment in which Jesus lived and taught brought on what the rulers of the day could not have anticipated. Individuals were thrown back upon themselves to reconsider the world in which they lived, the traditions in which they were formed and raised. History tells us that back then there were people who felt so squeezed and traumatized that Jesus’ appearance in their lives forced them to question the old and established ways of being and to form something new and apart from the everything they’d believed in before. What they all had in common was the idea that the world was not right.

Although I don’t want to dissect any words or phrases in the Beatitudes, I will say this: much depends on translation and historical context. For example, the terms “the meek” or “the poor” refer “to those who stand empty-handed before God in total dependence upon him,” writes Guelich. “The term in no way connotes weakness or softness, an attitude rather than a condition.” I think of it as having the strength of a willow tree, to bend and not break, in the storms waged against us.

Then and now, the best way to understand religion and society is to see religion in terms of two different functions: religion can support the order of things or it can serve as an ideological fortress to stand up against the status quo. Religion is either a state-sanctioned movement or it is “other.” The early Christians associated themselves with the latter. And this is what would eventually get them into a lot of trouble.

I’m coming around to thinking that we’ve found ourselves in a similar situation these 2,000 years later. Over the past five years, many of us had become the unwitting heirs of this “other” movement and have likewise found ourselves getting into a lot of trouble with the ruling cabal who wanted us to shut up by censoring us in all forms of media, and goading us to just go away.

Curiously, it was not so much the religion of those in the Jesus movement that threatened the rulers back then. From its earliest days under the Roman empire, the movement was seen not as a religious problem but a political one. Jesus began preaching and teaching and healing in public, but the movement would later be forced underground, to meet in private homes and even in catacombs of the dead. And it was this that disturbed the authorities. It was the movement’s meeting in private and the authority’s inability to control them. And I don’t believe it is much of a stretch to say that much the same can be said of many of us in the past five years, particularly in the early days of the COVID-19 psyop.

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More good news from the front lines – in the war against the pushing of devices.

VW has just announced it won’t be bringing one of its newest devices – the ID 7 sedan – to the United States. On account of “changing market conditions,” by which is meant there’s not much of a market for devices – and because of the changes ushered in with the ushering out of the Biden regime.

The new Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, has “directed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to reconsider rules covering the 2022 model year through the 2031 model year for cars and trucks. The agency in June said it would hike Corporate Average Fuel Economy requirements to about 50.4 miles per gallon by 2031 from 39.1 mpg currently for light-duty vehicles,” according to a report published by Automotive News.

The headline of the Automotive News article reads: “Newly confirmed U.S. Transportation chief moves to repeal Biden vehicle fuel economy standards.”

Elections apparently do matter.

The 2020 election – if you want to call it that – brought us Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, the outgoing secretary of transportation. That brought us a near-doubling of federal CAFE “standards” – as these edicts are styled. They are not optional suggestions. Vehicle manufacturers are forced to comply with them. And the only way to comply with a 50.4 MPG CAFE requirement is to manufacture lots of devices – i.e., electric vehicles such as the ID 7.

This “works” to create an “incentive” to manufacturer devices. Not a mandate, per se. So President Trump hasn’t got it quite right when he talks about ending the “EV mandate” because at least at the federal level, there isn’t one. Per se. But the regulations – especially CAFE regs – effectively mandate EVs. It’s an extremely clever ploy by the car-hating Leftists that infest the DOT and EPA and the entire federal bureaucracy. More finely, who hate that people who aren’t them and most especially the working and middle class Deplorables who insist on driving V8-powered trucks and SUVs like the ones government apparatchiks get driven around in.

CAFE has been used for decades to dwindle down the size of vehicles and of engines available in mass-market vehicles that working and middle class people used to be able to afford and with the doubling of the “standards” under the Biden Thing the pincers were about to close completely, effectively forcing everyone into a device.

The 2024 election just prevented that.

“Artificially high fuel economy standards designed to meet non-statutory policy goals, such as those NHTSA has promulgated in recent years, impose large costs that render many vehicle models unaffordable for the average American family,” reads Duffy’s memo. “They also put coercive pressure on automakers to phase out production of various models of popular (internal combustion engine) vehicles.”

Italics added.

“Non-statutory policy goals” refers to edicts that were never passed by the legislature – Congress, in this case. Here Duffy touches on something of critical importance in that CAFE “standards” are not constitutional because Congress didn’t pass a law requiring vehicle manufacturers to meet them. The federal apparat just decreed them. More finely, the federal apparat has arrogated unconstitutional power to – effectively – legislate “standards” on its own arbitrary say-so. That it allows “public comment” prior to imposing whatever “standards” it likes does not legitimize the arbitrary saying-so. It is patently contrary to foundational language of the federal Constitution, which endows Congress only with the lawful authority (as distinct from arrogated power) to legislate.

Federal regulations such as CAFE “standards” operate as de facto laws, being enforceable as if they were laws. Since neither the EPA nor the DOT are mentioned in the Constitution and since the Constitution grants legislative power to Congress alone, a strong prima facie argument cam be made that not only are federal regulations such as CAFE “standards” unconstitutional usurpations of the legislative authority, apparats such as EPA and DOT are themselves unlawful – all of the foregoing being unconstitutional.

If Congress wants to pass a law that says vehicle manufacturers must build vehicles that average 50.4 miles per gallon or – going farther – that they must build electric devices only – Congress has statutory authority to do that, at least in terms of process. Such laws may themselves also be unconstitutional but at least they are laws emitted by the legislative body with the sole statutory authority under the Constitution to make laws at the federal level.

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Now that RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearings are about to begin (today on 1/29—which can be watched here and tomorrow on 1/30), we are entering one of the most pivotal moments in the history of America’s health. Because of this, I believe it is critical to understand the context behind what’s actually going on, and for each of us to immediately contact our Senators by phone and email (whose contact information can be found here).

I thus significantly revised a eight-week-old article on the war against America’s health that provided much of the critical context over what’s actually going on behind the scenes now. This was done both so that we can pre-empt those tactics to secure RFK’s nomination, but also so that you see exactly what they are doing and hence can spot the next time it’s done (as what’s being done to RFK Jr. is so blatant and over-the-top many are recognizing it).

Note: I make a point to avoid repeatedly posting on political subjects (rather than those directly related to our health), but given how consequential RFK’s nomination will be for our health, I made an exception.

Silencing Dissent

Since COVID-19 began, those who tried to warn the public about the clear dangers of how we were addressing COVID-19 (e.g., lockdowns, vaccines, and remdesivir) have been targeted and silenced. While many were initially in disbelief our government could do something like this, more cynical parties (e.g., myself) suspected something like this would happen (as it always does) and caught the early warning signs of it.

In my eyes, beyond the over-the-top marketing throughout the media to promote the COVID boondoggle, there were three particularly noteworthy (and interwoven) facets to this campaign:

1. Widespread censorship of opposing ideas (e.g., GoFundMe deleting fundraisers for individuals who had severe COVID vaccine injuries and nowhere else to turn for help since those fundraisers alerted people to the vaccines not being completely “safe and effective” and most of the news networks refusing to question the COVID narrative). Of note, from the start, I assumed there had to be shadow banning occurring (as I could see the effects of it happen in real time) and coordination between the social media platforms and the Biden administration—an illegal activity which was gradually confirmed by lawsuits (e.g., due to the Twitter file) and other leaks that revealed shadow banning was widespread on the tech platforms.

2. The establishment targeted anyone who dissented against the narrative in a coordinated fashion. For example, many absurd complaints were used to target the medical licenses of physicians who were saving patients from dying from COVID (e.g., Meryl Nass, whose suspension was so absurd that 13 members of Maine’s legislature formally complained to the medical board about it).

3. A very aggressive and coordinated campaign to neutralize anyone who disputed the narrative on social media. Early on, I began to suspect this was happening because I’d see the same bad actors (typically doctors) use the same sculpted talking points. In April 2024, I found out an industry funded group did indeed exist, and that:
•Many of the people I’d suspected were in a coordinated conspiracy did indeed belong to a secret group (“Shots Heard”) dedicated to fighting misinformation online.
•That group was tied to the Federal Government and funded by the pharmaceutical industry.
•That group, one by one, would target dissident healthcare workers and attempt to both get them removed from social media, to have their medical licenses taken away or get them fired from work, and in some cases, to directly harass them at their homes.

The Vast Pharmaceutical Conspiracy to Silence Dissent Online

Fortunately, while these individuals were highly coordinated and had a significant amount of support behind them, they lacked an effective understanding of how to effectively influence online opinion (in part because their positions are lies—which makes them much harder to sell to the public). As such, while they were able to create a great deal of misery for activists who bravely challenged the COVID cartel, they were fairly ineffective at defending the narrative.

Recently, it began to be disclosed that the pharmaceutical and processed food lobbyists were targeting RFK Jr. to block him from getting his appointment as HHS (so they could continue poisoning America for profit). As I looked into what was happening, I noticed numerous similarities to what I’d observed with Shots Heard. I thus reached out to two Substack investigative journalists who have done great work throughout the pandemic, Sonia Elijah and John Davidson and asked them to help me look into this. Sure enough, they found what I’d expected would be there.

Lydia Green

Recently CNN hosted a hit pierce on RFK Jr. which featured a mom trying to find a way to explain how RFK “betrayed her” by convincing her to raise her child in a healthy manner.

After I saw this, my first thought was, “that was quite the attempt to make following a healthy lifestyle seem bad” followed by “her language was very sculpted, I wonder if a public relations firm hired her.” I then asked John Davidson about her background, and sure enough (as Davidson shows here) found out that she was in ‘Shots Heard’ and had a long history of working to promote the vaccine industry.

Furthermore (as you often see with PR firms after they’ve finished crafting the rhetoric most likely to benefit their client), her talking points were also featured in many other mainstream left-wing publications (e.g., NPR, Toronto Star, Cosmopolitan UK, AP, The Guardian, Newsweek, MSN)—something I find noteworthy because of just how absurd and nonsensical her arguments were.

Sometimes, the sculpted language they use is very clever, but other times it is patently ridiculous, especially when looked back upon after the current social hysteria has passed (e.g., consider many of the absurd lines used to sell the COVID vaccines or what Lydia Greene is saying). One particularly noteworthy one was used on national television to sell a smallpox vaccine campaign George W. Bush pushed for prior to invading Iraq (under the lie Saddam had smallpox he could release on the United States) that was quickly terminated because it gave too many people myocarditis.

Marsha: I want to see the vaccination made available, I want to see the vaccine made available soon, and I want my children to get it.

Announcer: After September 11th, Marsha Jordan-Burk asked her pediatrician to vaccinate her children against Smallpox.

Pediatrician: Their sense of urgency is, they don’t want their children getting destroyed the way the World Trade Center was destroyed.

Announcer: But Dr. Barnett had to tell her and many other parents since that there is no vaccine. The reason is a lack of supply.

Note: the disastrous experimental anthrax vaccine campaign (which disabled 250,000 military personnel) was initially justified under the Gulf War belief Saddam would unleash anthrax on our soldiers (which he never did).

In short, to quote Davidson’s investigation of that CNN segment:

So we have yet another organization masquerading as concerned former anti-vax moms who have been given an unbelievable amount of domestic and international press but are nothing more than an astroturf organization entirely funded completely by the HHS/CDC to spread their pro-vaccine messaging.

Note: Davidson also highlighted how another prominent “grassroots” and “parent-created” vaccine advocacy organization (Voices for Vaccines) takes money from almost every large pharmaceutical company on the planet.

Food Lobbyists

In a recent article, I discussed the chronology of the FDA’s War Against America’s Health and life-changing natural medicines like DMSO (which rapidly addresses chronic pain and a wide range of injuries) and GHB (which safely cures insomnia and the illness that results from chronic sleep deprivation).

Unfortunately, after industry failed to convince Congress or the Courts to block these efforts (as science was not on their side), they pivoted to directly pressuring the executive branch (e.g., the Secretary of Agriculture) to sabotage the FDA’s efforts to regulate industry, and just six years after he started, Harvey Wiley, the first head of the FDA (who was one of the most respected public servants in the country) resigned as he felt he could do more to help us as a private citizen than from within the government.

Because of this, many toxic food additives got “grandfathered” into our food supply as “generally recognized as safe” and to this day many chemicals that are legal to put in American foods have been banned in Europe.

In my eyes, the key takeaway from this time was how relentless the food industry would be to protect selling toxic and adulterated foods and that they used many of the same tactics we see now (e.g., cutthroat lobbying, blackmailing newspapers they advertised in not to support clean food laws and aggressively peddling paid off scientific “experts” to promote junk science). This in turn, led Wiley to argue that the only way to create political change to ensure a safe food supply was for the public at large to demand it.

The Monopolization of Food

Throughout history, two realities have always governed food.

First, food shortages are one of the greatest things which threaten a government’s stability. As such, leaders throughout history have been terrified of famine (to the point some were willing to start wars to reduce their population) as it often leads to rebellion and the ruling class being kicked out.

Second, one of the most reliable strategies for generating wealth and power has been to monopolize life-essential resources, and ever since the post-civil war era of the Robber Barons (where Rockefeller monopolized the oil industry), this tactic has become increasingly popular. For example, America’s public transportation industry was monopolized and then gutted (making sure cars were necessary), Rockefeller took over and transformed education into something that enslaved rather than empowered the populace, and many of the problems we face in medicine resulted from oligarchs like Rockefeller monopolizing American medicine (e.g., they funded the American Medical Association which aggressively eliminated superior natural therapies from competing with the medical industry).

Because of this principle, there has been increasing pushes to monopolize the food supply. On one end, Communist nations have done it by trying to eliminate independent farmers so the citizenry are forced to rely upon the state to be fed—policies which have led to some of the greatest carnage in history (e.g., Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine and Mao’s Great Leap Forward).

In Western society, this monopolization often follows a similar pattern once a viable strategy to monopolize a life-essential resource is discovered:
•An improved (scientific) way of obtaining the same life-essential resource is introduced to the society.
•Because of the apparent superiority of this approach and aggressive marketing and lobbying in favor of it, the population gradually shifts to using it rather than the traditional means of obtaining the life essential resource.
•In time, almost all of the population has lost the ability to obtain resources as they had traditionally done.
•Once all sources of competition are eliminated, the costs of (often unsustainable) the new way of doing things are continually raised until it becomes significantly worse than what preceded it.

Note: there are many examples of how this was done in medicine (e.g., I’m currently working on the medicalization of childbirth). Likewise, many clean and affordable energy technologies have been ruthlessly suppressed so that the costly and environmentally damaging technologies we use now can remain commercially viable (which I covered here).

In the case of agriculture, one of the most pivotal shifts occurred after World War I, when our newly created industrial capacity to create phosphate explosives was repurposed to create phosphate fertilizers. In tandem with this, the scientific consensus shifted to plant nutrition being primarily a product of the available nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) in the soil.
Note: ammonium nitrate, another common fertilizer, was also a key explosive used in World War I.

The NPK approach to agriculture initially dramatically increased crop yields, but was also quite problematic as it did not take into consideration the micronutrients (e.g., minerals) plants needed for growth, resulting in over-farmed soil quickly becoming nutritionally depleted and a variety of issues following (e.g., poor farming practices creating the devastating Dust Bowl during the great depression and large monoculture plantations which required increasing amounts of pesticides and herbicides to keep those nutritionally deprived plants viable).

Note: many believe the nutritional depletion of our soil is one of the root causes of the loss of vitality, which has gradually emerged over the last century (although I believe it began with the smallpox vaccine due to the blood stasis it created throughout the body, an issue which worsened with each subsequent vaccine [due to them also adversely affecting the physiologic zeta potential)). For those interested in learning more about the massive and sustained loss of vitality that has occurred over the last century (and what caused it), I synopsized our exploration of the subject here.

In my eyes, three other pivotal shifts in the food supply also help paint a critical picture of what happened to the food supply.

First, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture made the decision that America needed to transition from small family farms to large monoculture operations (his motto was “get big or get out”), a policy which coincided with major agribusinesses taking over the farming sector and farming subsidies which entrenched this new status quo. In contrast, family farms began to disappear from America.
Note: the farming subsidies work by setting a base price for each cash crop (e.g., corn) and then compensating farmers if they receive less for a crop than its set value. This forces farmers to overproduce the crops to compensate for the small margins and gives the processed food industry an incredibly cheap source of raw food materials. As a result, most of the processed foods we eat are components of those raw materials (e.g., corn, wheat, soy), along with chemical additives to turn them into “foods.”

Second, the tobacco industry (which had suffered numerous devastating defeats in court), in the 1980s decided to diversify by investing in the processed food industry. There, the industry scientists who had figured out how to make cigarettes highly addictive directed their focus to doing the same with processed foods (and from a young age marketing them to the entire population). As a result, these foods became extremely addictive—a Machiavellian tactic that allowed them to override the natural reflex humans would have to reject their unhealthy foods with a craving to consume as much of them as possible.
Note: David Kessler, the former head of the FDA, in his book The End of Overeating, shares that industry heads in the processed food industry admitted to him they deliberately engineered their foods to be addictive.

Third, the “Gene Revolution” (which was brought on by the US completely relaxing all regulatory safeguards on genetically modified foods) caused our food supply to be flooded with a wide range of experimental genetically modified organisms (GMOs). While a variety of issues exist with these organisms, I believe the most consequential ones are:
•They typically require much higher amounts of agricultural chemicals (e.g., Roundup) to grow and hence adversely affect people sensitive to higher levels of pesticides (which is a sizable portion of the population).
•There are a variety of ways GMOs adversely affect human health (that will almost never be studied by mainstream science).
•They can be patented and thus are aggressively used to monopolize agriculture. For example, many GMO crops are engineered not to produce seeds, so farmers have to purchase them each time they want to farm. Likewise, one of Monsanto’s infamous tactics was successfully suing farmers who had Monsanto’s GMO crops growing in their field because they drifted over from a neighbor’s farm. Most tragically, many of the predatory agricultural corporations (and groups like The Gates Foundation) have pushed GMOs on less affluent peoples and nation-states.
Note: Monsanto was acquired by Bayer in 2018 and technically no longer exists.

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The post Who’s Trying To Stop America From Being Healthy Again? appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s not just that they tell us what to think, it’s that they train us how to think.

From grade school on we are fed a framework for thinking about the world whose premises are completely fraudulent. Any analysis which does not take place within that framework is portrayed as ignorant at best and dangerous extremism at worst.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about politics, we are trained to assume as our starting point that elections are real and that the official democratically elected government is the only power structure calling the shots in our country. We are trained to assume that decisions get made in our government based on how people vote in elections between two parties who oppose each other and promote the most organically popular positions on important issues in order to win votes. This is all complete bullshit, but it’s the foundation we’re taught to premise all our ideas and opinions about political matters upon.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about government, we are trained to assume as our starting point that the people running things in our country are known to us and occupy official positions in our capitol. We are trained to assume that if we have a problem with the way things are going, there are official channels through which the powerful can be held to account and real changes can be advanced. The fact that we are actually ruled by unelected plutocrats and empire managers who often have no position in the official government is never seriously entertained.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about the media, we are trained to assume as our starting point that we live in a free country with a free press instead of a dystopian civilization where the news media function as the propaganda services of our rulers. We are trained to assume that while some parts of the media may have obvious biases regarding which mainstream political faction they favor, it’s still possible to get a more or less accurate read on what’s happening in the world by listening to both sides of that ideological divide. None of this is true, but it’s the framework in which all mainstream analysis of the western media occurs.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about foreign policy, we are trained to assume as our starting point that the US and its allies are more or less a force for good in this world, and that all the stories we hear about the governments and groups it works to destroy are more or less true. We are trained to assume that while the western power structure is imperfect and might make mistakes here and there, it must never stop killing and tyrannizing foreigners, because if it does, the bad guys might win. The easily quantifiable fact that the US-centralized empire is by far the most tyrannical and abusive power structure on earth never enters into the discussion.

This is the conceptual framework for thinking about the world that people are trained to espouse, first in school, and then throughout the rest of their lives by the mass media. If they go to university, as the most powerful people in our society typically do, then this framework is hammered home far more aggressively — especially in the most esteemed universities that the so-called “elite” tend to come from.

No thoughts which arise from outside this framework are taken seriously in mainstream politics, media, or academia. They might occasionally be entertained by friends over a bong or between chuckles on a podcast, but they are kept in the margins. This is reinforced by the way people learn that in order to ascend to influence and success they need to adhere to a specific way of thinking about things, thereby ensuring that all the most influential voices align with the authorized framework as well.

Ferocious disagreement is permitted, but before the debate even begins everyone involved needs to adhere to the founding assumptions of the official framework. After that you can argue as passionately as you like with the other side of this manufactured divide, because your ideas cannot pose any serious threat to your rulers.

And this, ultimately, is why the world looks the way it looks: because powerful people have been so successful at manipulating the way the public thinks about things. Our minds are inundated with propaganda telling us what to think, but more importantly they are shaped and programmed how to think about any new information they might come across.

Most of us are psychologically bent to the will of the powerful before we would ever even be in a position to begin thinking about opposing the status quo. We are herded like livestock away from thoughts of revolution and change, led by tightly controlled minds the way a bull is led by the ring on its nose.

Once you see how pervasive the conditioning is, you understand why getting real revolutionary movements going faces so much inertia. We won’t be able to free ourselves until we find a way to free our minds.

____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post They Don’t Just Tell Us What To Think, They Train Us How To Think appeared first on LewRockwell.

US Democrat Senator Bob Menendez, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was sentenced to eleven years in prison by federal district judge Sidney Stein for acting as an illegal agent for Egypt and accepting cash and gold bars as payment.

How does this differ from the $1,417,811 bribe that Big Pharma pays in campaign contributions to Senator Bernie Sanders or the $821,941  campaign contribution Big Pharma pays to Senator Elizabeth Warren?  If you think these sums don’t make Sanders and Warren agents of Big Pharma, you are out of your mind.  Warren is doing her Big Pharma assigned job by trying to block Robert Kennedy’s confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Congress is up for sale, and it is purchased with campaign contributions. Everyone in Washington knows that members are purchased by lobby groups, such as Big Pharma, the military/security complex, agribusiness, energy, the Israel Lobby, and so on.  A corrupt or stupid Supreme Court legalized the purchase of the US government by lobby groups.  This is the reason that Congress does not represent the people who elect Congress. You can blame your lack of representation squarely on the US Supreme Court. One can’t help but wonder if there were under the table payoffs.

An uninformed person might answer that Menendez was paid personally, whereas campaign contributions are not personal money.  But, in fact, retiring members are entitled to take their election war fund with them.  Those planning to retire pay attention to building up their re-election funds.

An uninformed person might say that Menendez’s payments came from a foreign government, whereas campaign contributions are coming from American interests.  But what about the vast sums that Israel pours into purchasing the US government?  What is the difference between Egypt and Israel?  The difference is that AIPEC is not required to register as foreign agent and is treated as an American lobby group.  All efforts to have AIPEC register as a foreign agent have been blocked.  Many Zionist neoconservatives have gotten away with accepting money from Israel without having to register as representing a foreign agent.  Consider also that every year the Congress appropriates billions of dollars to Israel which Israel uses to purchase the US government with campaign contributions.  Our own money is used to enslave us to Israel and Jewish interests.  You can see how complete Israel’s ownership of the US government is by Congress’ invitation to Genocide Netanyahu to address the US Congress and award him 53 standing ovations while he conducts genocide against Palestine.

Generally speaking, when a senator or representative is prosecuted by the Justice (sic) Department it means someone wants him out of the way.  It is unclear why Menendez was in the way.  He was essential on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in getting the sanctions on Russia in place.  It is unclear what he could have done for Egypt that would harm any of Washington’s interests.

The sanctimonious judge Stein said: “The public cannot be led to the belief that you can get away with bribery, fraud, and betrayal.”  The judge doesn’t know what he is talking about. Lobbies get away with bribing every member of the House and Senate every day.

How can Trump make America Great Again when lobbies own the government?

The post The Arbitrary Hypocrisy of American ‘Justice’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

I was reading one of James Howard Kunstler’s exquisite essays when I stumbled upon a hilarious conversation in his comment section.  Discussing President Trump’s turbocharged criminal alien relocation efforts, a reader named Mitch observed, “People keep asking who’s going to man the grills, pick the crops, clean the houses when all the illegals get deported.  We have lots of useless government-paid parasites that could fill those jobs nicely.  They’re educated, speak English, and currently produce nothing but obstacles.”

Bandit replied, “But bureaucrats don’t do work.  They wouldn’t have a clue how to do anything useful, and I’m sure they don’t have the mental capacity to learn.”

Il faut savoir noted, “Working on farms is hard and demanding.  We have produced SOFT generations, heads down on their cell and social media, and have hyped their worthless degrees as big deals.  Getting some time on the farms and doing hard hand labor would not only get them in shape, but show them what the true value of work means.”

Finally, Beth Nicolaides dreamed, “I’d like to see a new IRS hire picking lettuce.”  (Me, too, Beth!)

I think this online conversation gets to the nub of the most pressing crisis in America: there has been a decades-long disconnect between the vast government bureaucracy and the American people whom that bureaucracy purportedly “serves.”  When President Wilson first empowered a permanent administrative state to handle the “business of governing,” he envisioned an educated workforce immune from the day-to-day passions of politics but uniquely qualified to direct the operations of the American state.  That was at best a naïve dream and at worst a calculated strategy to deprive the American people of their democratic powers and elevate a faculty lounge of Wilson clones as a new noble class.  (When it comes to academics, it’s difficult to know whether their love for impractical theorizing or narcissistic god complex is the root cause of their real-world failures.)

Without any doubt, the steady expansion of the federal government over the last hundred years has been an unmitigated disaster.  From its inception, Wilson’s “modern” bureaucracy became a home for scarcely camouflaged Marxist-socialists who wished to burrow inside the federal government and “transform” America’s Constitution from within.  They sabotaged Americans’ interests and undermined Americans’ individual liberties.  By hook or by crook, they constructed a hiring system that prevents their subsequent removal.  No matter how poorly they perform or how malicious their intent to damage the United States, bad government workers remain employed.

“Rule by mediocrity” has created a widening gulf between the American people and their government.  It has enabled a few million bureaucrats to work around the will of voters.  It has effectively transitioned America from a representative republic to a “blob”-ocracy that listens to and represents only the blob.  Consequently, Americans see their government as something separate from themselves — an exotic beast that has grown in spite of the Constitution’s explicit limitations.

Adding insult to injury, none of Wilson’s dreamy benefits materialized from the construction of a “professional” government.  Elevating “experts,” he insisted over a century ago, would allow the federal government to react quickly to domestic problems and foreign challenges.  “Smart” people who were well trained for the tasks at hand would be equipped to overcome any difficulty at a moment’s notice.  Do those descriptions remind anyone of the federal government?

It’s been four months since Hurricane Helene devastated the southern Appalachians, and FEMA still can’t find western North Carolina on a map.  The Pentagon wasted billions of dollars over the last four years fighting “climate change” and “white supremacy” while fast-tracking delusional men with fake breasts into positions of command.  California — which prides itself as a kind of premier “laboratory” for the federal government — cut its firefighting budget, stopped executing controlled burns of dangerously combustible brush, and diverted record rainfalls into the Pacific in order to save a “sacred” fish.  When wildfires predictably destroyed parts of L.A., California’s inept “laboratory” of “professional bureaucrats” were not smart enough to understand that empty fire hydrants had been the city’s undoing.  Instead, the “experts” blamed their own incompetence on “global warming.”

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President Trump just wrote the following on his Truth Social account:

It does indeed appear that—for reasons that are now obvious—the designated route for rotorcraft traversing that section of the Potomac imposed a 200 foot ceiling. Tracking data reported by FlightRadar24 and FlightAware indicates the incident CRJ700 was descending through 375ft when it stopped transmitting.

If all of the above is confirmed, it raises the pressing question: Why did the Black Hawk pilot exceed the altitude limit by almost 2X?

According to an ABC News report, the pilot and crew were “very experienced.”

It was a very experienced group,” said Jonathan Koziol, a retired Army chief warrant officer with more than 30 years experience in flying Army helicopters. Koziol has been attached to the Unified Command Post created at Reagan National Airport to coordinate efforts following the deadly collision.

Koziol confirmed to reporters on a conference call that the male instructor pilot had more than 1,000 hours of flight time, the female pilot who was commanding the flight at the time had more than 500 hours of flight time, and the crew chief was also said to have hundreds of hours of flight time.

Though all of this experience sounds great, it makes one wonder all the more why the helicopter grossly exceeded a critical altitude limit for helicopters crossing the Potomac on the final approach to Washington Reagan.

The setting and timing of the disaster—in Washington D.C., a few days after Pete Hegseth was sworn in as Secretary of Defense—strike me as intriguing.

I wonder if the Army can be trusted to conduct and disclose the results of a full and transparent investigation instead of stonewalling—like it did when it came to investigating why its Patriot missile battery shot down a Navy F/A-18 Hornet on April 2, 2003.

From my years of reading military history, I know there was—until very recently—a widely held, firm conviction that mixing young males and females on board military vessels often results in a breakdown of discipline and attentiveness to duty. Did the male instructor have a romantic relation with the female student, perhaps one that had become volatile? NOTE: I am not claiming that this was the case; I am merely pointing out that if I were Secretary Hegseth, I would inquire about this possibility.

I also wonder about possible mental health deterioration in the military in recent years, with the Biden administration’s fetish for COVID-19 vaccines, transgender weirdness, and DEI.

Finally, even before this incident, I have wondered if the Trump administration will have to contend with crises arising from deliberate acts of sabotage. If I were an investigator, I would at least consider the possibility that the altimeter or other critical equipment on board the Black Hawk had been tampered with by a saboteur.

Here I would like to be very clear that I am NOT presenting conspiracy theories. I am merely stating the theoretical possibilities I would examine if I were investigating the accident.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post President Trump: ‘The Blackhawk Helicopter Was Flying Too High’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

The case for getting out of NATO now encompasses four fundamental propositions:

• First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
• Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
• Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser treaties and commitments in Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
• Fourthly, canceling NATO and its clones requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into a planetary War Capital dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, paladins of foreign intervention, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.

As to the impending fiscal calamity, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan campaigned against the soaring Federal deficits in 1980 the public debt was $930 billion and about 30% of GDP. But it had erupted to $20 trillion by Donald Trump’s first election, now stands at $36 trillion and 125% of GDP and will be hitting $62 trillion by the mid-2030s.

Yet even that figure embodies CBO’s most recent Rosy Scenario fairy tale under which Congress never again adopts a single new spending increase or tax cut, including the impending $5 trillion extension of the expiring 2017 Trump tax cuts. And CBO is also pleased to forecast no recessions, no inflation recurrence, nor any other economic crises for the remainder of this decade and forever thereafter, world without end.

This dream also assumes that 7% of GDP deficits and annual interest expense of $1.7 trillion by 2034 will bring an average yield on the public debt at just 3.4%.

Yes, and if dogs could whistle the world would be a chorus! Give the average yield a minimally realistic 250 basis points boost, however, and now you have $3 trillion of annual debt service expense and a $4.5 trillion annual deficit by 2034.

In short, there is a doom-loop building inside the Federal fiscal equation under which soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable fiscal wildfire, powering the public debt upward to $150 trillion or 166% of GDP by mid-century under CBO’s baseline. Of course, long before the debt actually hits this staggering figure, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.

In truth, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in the hot place of containing America’s impending public debt disaster unless the Empire is brought home and the national security budget is slashed by the aforementioned $500 billion per year. That’s especially urgent because – the merits aside – there is no chance whatsoever of getting big slices like this out of  the other two fiscal biggies, Social Security and Medicare, surrounded as they are by a wall of political terrorists on the left.

Fortunately, slashing the Pentagon by $500 billion is not only doable but fully warranted on the merits. Today’s bloated Empire-serving Warfare State is not remotely necessary for homeland security and the proper foreign policy of a peaceful Republic.

In this context, let’s start with the big, nasty national security budget numbers. Under a comprehensive reckoning for FY 2025 the total comes to just under $1.4 trillion, including:

• $927 billion for the national defense function.
• $66 billion for international operations and aid.
• $370 billion for veterans disability and health care.

When this stupendous total is looked at in historic perspective, three things standout. First, the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the subsequent disappearance of the heavily armed Soviet Empire into the dustbin of history left no visible trace on the national security budget.

In fact, at the peak of the Cold War in 1962 when the Soviet’s were at their industrial prime and JFK faced down Khrushchev in Cuba the comprehensive national security budget in today’s dollars stood at just $640 billion. That was barely 46% of the current level, and was still only $810 billion in 1990 on the eve of the Soviet collapse.

So what transpired thereafter is truly astounding. An adversary armed to the teeth with upwards of 37,000 nukes and nearly a 4 million man conventional armed force vanished entirely from the face of the earth, and yet and yet: The US national security budget kept rising skyward to the present $1.4 trillion without missing a beat.

The second key point is that the big budget increase during the Cold War occurred not in the heat of confrontation during the 1950s and 1960s but during the Reagan era of the 1980s when the Soviet Union was already on its last leg economically and politically. Yet between 1980 and 1990 the constant dollar national security budget soared by +42%, from $570 billion to the aforementioned $810 billion.

The explanation for this is straight-forward. During the Reagan Era the neocons hijacked the Republican party and cast its historic fiscal prudence to the winds. So doing, they claimed that massive defense increases were needed because the Soviet Union was on the verge of a nuclear first strike capacity.

That latter was an abject lie as proven by the fact that less than 10% of the Reagan defense build-up actually went to the strategic nuclear arsenal. By contrast, the overwhelming share of the 140% increase was allocated to conventional forces including the 600-ship Navy, massive increases in air power, new generations of battle tanks and armed personnel carriers, expanded air and sealift capacities and extensive new cruise missiles and electronics warfare capabilities.

All of these latter forces had but one purpose – overseas power projection and the conduct of wars of invasion and occupation in a world in which the US was not threatened in the slightest by any industrial power with expansive land-based and other conventional warfare capabilities.

The real effect of the Reagan defense build-up, therefore, was to supply future administrations with the military wherewithal to launch serial adventures in Regime Change. Thus, the Forever Wars from the First Gulf War onward were enabled by the Reagan build-up of unneeded conventional military capacity.

So when real defense spending should have been cut in half by $400 billion (FY 2025 $) after 1990 it was actually expanded by $600 billion to fund recurrent adventures in regime change and global intervention.

Thirdly, the Forever Wars have been a physical, medical and fiscal disaster. Currently 5 million wounded veterans receive disability compensation and 9 million receive health care benefits. That’s one out of every 30 adult Americans, and the overwhelming share of these VA beneficiaries are vets who served in the Vietnam War and the Forever Wars which followed.

Accordingly, what needs be described as the “deferred cost” of Empire has literally shot the moon. In today’s dollars, veterans benefits have risen from $57 billion in 1962, mainly representing WWII veterans, to $370 billion. This 6.5X rise represents the frightful human and fiscal tab for Vietnam and the Forever Wars.

So the question recurs. How did a peaceful Republic secure behind the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats, which until 1949 eschewed permanent “entangling alliances” abroad consistent with the wisdom of Washington, Jefferson and the Founders, end up with an global Empire and massive Warfare State budget that it doesn’t need and can’t any longer afford?

The answer, we believe, lies in three strategic mistakes made on the banks of the Potomac in 1917, 1949 and 1991, respectively, that have enabled the rise of a destructive Empire and its self-fueling Warfare State fiscal monster. Of course, the latter can only be eliminated by returning to Jefferson’s admonition that America should pursue –

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

For most of its history, of course, America had adhered to this advice yet had been invasion-free owing to the great Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats. These blessings of Providence, in turn, enabled America to remain a peaceful Republic because its favorable geography precluded the need for a large standing military, heavy taxes, a powerful central government and, most especially, the need for entangling alliances with foreign nations.

In fact, an early treaty with France was canceled by Congress in 1797, meaning that the nation was free of permanent alliances for the next 152 years. Even as late as 1919 Congress prudently rejected the entanglements of the League of Nations Treaty after Woodrow Wilson’s foolish crusade not only failed to make the world safe for democracy but paved the way to the vast carnage of WWII.

It was only thereafter that an inexorable slide toward Empire incepted in 1949 when the Senate ratified the NATO Treaty. But, as we will argue, that was based on utterly false lessons from the world wars and a misguided theory of collective international security.

To be sure, prior to the giant historical error  of NATO in 1949, Jefferson’s admonition had been the default position of American governance. This was demonstrated by the radical demobilization of military forces even after America had elected to go to war in both 1917 and 1941. In both cases, the drastic rise and fall of military budgets left an unmistakable marker which reflected an underlying commitment to non-intervention abroad as a peacetime policy norm.

Thus, the US military budget on the eve of World War I was just $11 billion when expressed in present day dollars (2025 $) and amounted to a slim 0.9% of GDP. That’s because America had no foreign allies to support and it was the great ocean moats not a diminutive $11 billion military budget on which the nation’s homeland security safely rested.

After Wilson plunged American forces into the stalemated trenches on the Western Front, constant dollar military spending in today’s dollars soared 18-fold to $194 billion by war’s end in 1919. That amounted to nearly 15% of GDP at the wartime peak, but shortly after the armistice a sweeping demobilization began.

Soon, 100% of the troops were home – along with the bloated phalanx of wartime diplomats and civilian support operatives. Accordingly, defense spending bottomed out at just $12 billion in 1924, amounting to a 93% reduction from the wartime peak and just 0.8% of GDP.  The pre-war status quo ante had thus been fully restored, implying that the lurch into a foreign war and entanglements had amounted to a one-off venture, and a bad one at that.

Indeed, Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in the Great War was by then widely understood by the public to have been a calamitous mistake. The liberty and security of the American homeland had not been remotely threatened because by 1917 the German Fleet was quarantined in its Jutland home–port by the Royal Navy and all sides to the conflict were running out of draftable men, materiale, morale and fiscal resources.

Accordingly, on the date Congress declared war (April 6, 1917) there was not even the slightest chance of a German attack on America. Yet Wilson had plunged the US into the stalemated carnage of the old world for the vainglorious purpose of acquiring a powerful seat at the post–war peace conference, and so doing tipped the balance on the Western Front to a victory by the Entente powers led by England and France.

That is, the natural end to this pointless “world war” would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt and demoralized, and their respective domestic “war parties” subject to massive repudiation at the post-war polls. But the arrival of two million fresh American doughboys and massive flows of armaments and loans from Washington literally rechanneled the course of history, enabling a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles – a travesty that sowed the seeds for the even more destructive and calamitous second world war.

Specifically, Wilson’s foolish intervention encouraged a last futile offensive by Russia in the summer of 1917, the failure of which gave birth to the bloody Revolution of Lenin and Stalin later that fall. Likewise, Wilson’s machinations with the victors at Versailles and their parceling out of the parts and pieces of Germany to France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and others fostered the stab-in-the-back myth and revanchist campaigns on which Hitler rode to power.

More importantly still, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed in the years after 1945. To wit, the Wilson–enabled and wholly aberrational rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen, as claimed, because the good people of England, France and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s. These monsters of the 20th century were not resident in the DNA of nations nor do they continuously lurk among the lesser tinpots who rise from time to time to authoritarian tyranny among the far flung nations of the earth.

To the contrary, they were aberrations – freaks of historical happenstance. That means that even after the two catastrophic world wars there was no baseline case for Empire as a requisite of America’s homeland security. Washington and Jefferson were still correct even in 1946 and beyond.

The permanent Washington-based Empire of bases, alliances, collective security and relentless CIA meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries that arose after 1946 was therefore the second unforced error – one that flowed from Wilson’s original mistake.

For a brief moment after WWII ended, of course, Jefferson’s admonition had prevailed when another massive post-war demobilization occurred, laying the ground for a return to the pre–1914 status quo ante. Accordingly, the war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home from Asia, Europe and the Seven Seas after August 1945, reducing it to just 1.47 million by 1948.

So doing, they also abruptly closed the fiscal sluice-gates to what had become America’s Brobdingnagian war budget, which had peaked at $83 billion in 1945 before plunging to just $9 billion by 1948.

Moreover, when translated into present day dollars, the magnitude of this second demobilization becomes crystal clear: Constant dollar spending (FY 2025 $) dropped form $1.7 trillion in 1945 to just $125 billion by 1948, marking another stunning 93% reduction in post-war military spending.

And well it should have. Among the burned out and exhausted lands abroad after V-E Day and V-J Day there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.

Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults; Germany’s industrial and urban areas had been laid waste by bomber storms night after night for months on end; Italy had long since hung its wartime leader in a convulsion of political upheaval; France was barely functioning economically and politically after four years of brutal Nazi occupation; England was utterly bankrupt and so demoralized that its electorate had thrown its wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to the political wolves; and that is to say nothing of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia.

And we do mean prostrate. During WWII Soviet Russia had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop 32,000 industrial enterprises that had been pulverized along with upwards of 70,000 towns and villages destroyed, leaving tens of millions of Soviet citizens destitute owing to the brutality of both their communist rulers at home and the German invaders who had descended upon them from the west for the second time in 25 years.

In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There was not even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland after 1945. Nor was there any need whatsoever to maintain bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way and involve Washington in the “entangling alliances” against which Jefferson and Washington himself had forewarned.

And yet and yet. Washington’s incipient “War Party” of military contractors and globe-trotting operatives and officialdom gestated in the heat of World War II and jazzed-up on $1.7 trillion of war spending was not about to go quietly into the good night. Instead, the Cold War was midwifed on the banks of the Potomac when President Truman fell under the spell of war-hawks like Secretary James Byrnes, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal and the Dulles brothers, who were loath to go back to their mundane lives as civilian bankers, politicians or peacetime diplomats.

So exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and eight months after Armageddon had been visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the out-of-power but inveterate war-mongering Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri.

That was the opening call to the Cold War, which was powerfully seconded barely 10 months latter when the then accidental US president from the same state delivered his “Truman Doctrine” speech to the Congress. That latter was a belligerent oration which ignited the Cold War and the costly, suffocating post-1947 web of entangling alliances and the budget-crushing American Empire it fostered.

In light of all that was known then and which has transpired since, however, it can be well and truly said that the ruckus in Greece and Turkey caused by local communist parties, which was the basis for Truman’s declaration, didn’t amount to a hill-of-beans with respect to the homeland security of America. These long ago political skirmishes should get but a scant mention in world history books, and none at all in America’s.

That is to say, with respect to Turkey Stalin wanted a port on the Dardanelles, as had all the Russian Czars for generations before him. But so what? The only thing he could have choked off was his own minuscule export shipments from the Black Sea regions.

Likewise, after a decade of brutal political and economic oppression by a homegrown dictatorship during 1936 to 1941 and then by the Nazi, Italian Fascist and Bulgarian occupiers during WWII, the Greek people were seeking more relief than could be delivered by the sickly exiled King George II. The British in their purported wisdom had put the latter back on the Greek throne in 1946.

As it happened, the population of Greece at the time was 7.3 million and even in today’s dollars its GDP was just $50 billion and $7,000 per capita. In short, Greece was a museum piece of western history that had seen its better days but by then was an economic cipher. Had the local communist party come to power absent Truman’s intervention – with the aid of Stalin or not – that misfortune for the Greek people would have had no bearing on America’s homeland security 5,000 miles away on the far side of the Atlantic moat.

As it happened, of course, the Truman Doctrine was the handiwork of Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson. The latter was a pompous Yale-trained international lawyer from Washington’s elite Covington & Burling, who had been a New Dealer during the early 1930s and then came back as an assistant secretary of state for economic policy in February 1941.

From that perch he had designed the American/British/Dutch embargo that cut off 95% of Japan’s oil supply and paved the way to Pearl Harbor. Indeed, he was actually the “trigger man” for America’s entry into World War II when he unilaterally acted to shut-off 100% of Japan’s oil while FDR was away meeting with Churchill at the famous “Atlantic Charter” confab in Newfoundland in August 1941.

Acheson was also an inveterate anglophile who apparently suffered from empire-envy. He thus imagined that America should step into Great Britain’s imperial shoes when it emerged economically crippled and politically fractured from WWII and could no longer provide financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey.

So upon this advice from the Brits in February 1947, Acheson had sprung into action. In a pivotal meeting shortly thereafter between Congressmen and State Department officials, Acheson articulated what would later become known as the “domino theory.”

He stated that more was at stake than Greece and Turkey, for if those two key states should fall, communism would likely spread south to Iran and as far east as India. Acheson reportedly concluded that “not since the days of Rome and Carthage” had such a polarization of power existed.

That was utter poppycock, but even then neither Iran nor India had any meaningful bearing on America’s homeland security. Should their people have made the stupid mistake of voting in the small but noisy communist parties that had taken root in both countries after 1919 it would have been of little note nor material threat to the liberty and security of Americans from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.

The Greek-Turkey aid gambit of March 1947, of course, was just the opening salvo. Soon the baleful idea that communist political gains anywhere in democratic Europe were to be viewed as cause for national security alarms gathered momentum on the banks of the Potomac. That unwarranted leap took root especially among the wartime dandies and policy potentates who had fashioned and led America’s global mobilization during WWII.

Accordingly, the modest $400 million aid to Greece and Turkey quickly ballooned into the Marshall plan announced in June 1947. Now the economic dislocations in France, Italy and elsewhere in western Europe and the resulting political gains of the communists and other leftist parties became the basis for drastically expanded US intervention.

Again, in today’s dollars the Marshall plan provided upwards of $175 billion to Western European countries between 1948 and 1951. Needless to say, by virtue of doling out such tremendous sums of money – which in present day dollars exceeded current Ukraine spending so far – Washington was soon knee-deep in the domestic politics, economics and inter-country relationships and intrigues of post-war Europe.

But why? There was not a snowballs’ chance in the hot place that a communist Italy or communist France or red Luxembourg would have been a military threat to the US. Or even that in league with Soviet Russia they would have posed a conventional military challenge on the New Jersey shores 4,000 miles to the further side of the Atlantic moat—most especially when the United States still had a monopoly on the A-bomb.

Indeed, the US had left WWII with the greatest assemblage of naval power in human history. This included 28 aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 72 cruisers, 377 destroyers, and numerous other vessels. Altogether this amounted to 10 million tons of naval vessel capacity or more than six times the 1.5 million tons of the Soviet Navy, whose fleets consisted of far fewer and far less lethal warships.

Needless to say, therefore, neither the Truman Doctrine nor the Marshall plan advanced America’s homeland security in any material manner. The requisite military muscle had already been bought and paid for during WWII.

But these interventions did grease the slippery slope to NATO and entangling alliances and interventions stretching to all four corners of the planet in the years ahead. And they did most definitely set off alarm bells in the Kremlin, where the hyper-paranoid Joseph Stalin everywhere and always expected treachery from friend and foe alike.

That was a given – considering the slippery, blood-soaked path by which he had climbed to absolute power in the Soviet Union itself and the treachery of Hitler’s double-cross after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the subsequent devastating invasion of Russia by the Nazi. So it is not surprising that Stalin soon suspected that his wartime allies – especially with FDR and Churchill gone – were laying the groundwork for the isolation and encirclement of Soviet Russia, exactly as the US, England and France had attempted after WWI.

To be sure, Stalin was among the most wretched, evil rulers ever to oppress a decent-sized chunk of mankind, and would have remained a blight on his own countrymen and ogre before the world during the remaining six years of his despicable life. But he was no threat to the American homeland as the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove in spades.

These documents, in fact, amount to the national security dog which didn’t bark. Dig, scour, search and forage thru them as you might. Yet they will fail to reveal any Soviet plan or capability to militarily conquer western Europe.

They show, therefore, that Washington’s standing up of NATO was a giant historical mistake. It was not needed to contain Soviet military aggression, but it did foster a half-century of hegemonic folly in Washington and a fiscally crushing Warfare State – the fiscal girth of which became orders of magnitude larger than required for defense of the homeland in North America.

It is in the nature of human history, it seems, that a wrong path taken like Wilson’s error in plunging America into the Great War in 1917, frequently begets another baleful turn. In this case, the slippery slope had further materialized when Britain and America had needed to align with the vile red tyrants of Moscow to rid the world of the Hitlerian nightmare after 1941.

Indeed, the need for this wartime alliance with the devil seemed so urgent at the time to both Churchill and FDR that they more or less ceded the nations of eastern Europe to the then advancing Red Army at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. That historic meet-up, by the way, was in Russian Crimea, not the Ukraine.

In return for Stalin’s continued march toward Berlin and promise of help in vanquishing Japan in the Far East as well, the Big Three principals reached an understanding that the Soviet Union would exert significant influence over Eastern Europe, including Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and parts of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

Of course, free elections and democratic governments were to arise in areas occupied by the Red Army, but neither Churchill nor FDR went to any length to provide the enforcement mechanisms to ensure this would happen. It was a case of saying Eastern Europe is in your sphere of influence, Uncle Joe – by wink from the cynical Churchill and by nod from the doddering Roosevelt.

For his part, of course, Stalin was then in the business of rescuing his bloody regime from the near extinction event that had accompanied the Nazi invasion. His aim, therefore, was not about the ideological project of extending communism westward. Instead, it was focused on driving the remnants of the Wehrmacht from his own country and establishing an invincible “cordon sanitaire” from the Baltic to the Adriatic, as Churchill himself later charged, so as to never again allow marauding armies from western Europe to invade and plunder the Russian motherland.

Needless to say, the arrival of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO – within 25 months between March 1947 and April 1949 when the NATO Treaty was signed in Washington – sent Stalin’s wartime understandings into a tailspin. Slowly at first and then aggressively in the end his initial fear that the wartime alliance was being abandoned by his capitalist allies gave way to a paranoid certainty that they were once again in the business of attempting to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.

But even the resulting Soviet departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance arose from what might well be described as an unforced error in Washington.

We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to the aforementioned communist parties coming to political power in France, Italy and elsewhere. But as we have seen, that wasn’t a serious military threat to America’s homeland security in any event because the post-war Soviet economy was a shambles and its military had been bled and exhausted by its death struggle with the Wehrmacht.

To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for any electorate who stupidly put them in power. But that would have been their domestic governance problem over there, not a threat to the American homeland over here.

Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions in European affairs. These initiatives were clinically described as “containment” measures designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its lane, not a prelude to an attack on eastern Europe or Moscow itself.

But if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry, top communist party echelons and correspondence to and from Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane. To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as a definitely unfriendly scheme of encirclement and an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, or the cordon sanitaire, that Stalin believed he had won at Yalta.

To be sure, writing off this string of what came to be called “captive nations” would have amounted to an embrace of realpolitik that would have made moralists and anti-communist ideologues uneasy in the extreme. But as it happened, abandonment of Eastern Europe per the Yalta zones of influence scheme was exactly what became Washington’s de facto policy until the very end of the Cold War in 1991, anyway.

That is to say, the uprisings against the Soviet hegemon in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 generated no response from the West beyond empty speeches and hortatory resolutions from western parliaments. The whole policy of “containment”, therefore, was actually just a large-scale and sustained effort by Washington to steer European politics away from the communist Left.

But why in the hell was thwarting the foolishness of communism in Europe America’s business at all? That is, NATO was essentially an instrument of political control on the European side of the Atlantic, not a military shield that added any incremental security for the citizens domiciled on the North American side of the pond.

So the question recurs as to exactly why was America’s fully warranted post-war demobilization reversed for no good reason of homeland military security?

Part of the answer is embedded in the prevalent Keynesian theorem popular in Washington at the time which held that post-war demobilization would result in a devastating collapse of so-called “aggregate demand” and a resulting spiral into depression. Unless treated with aggressive counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization measures, therefore, it would be the 1930s all over again.

However, most of Europe was fiscally incapacitated owing to the impacts of the war. The economic aid proffered by Washington through the Marshall plan, therefore, amounted to a surrogate form of Keynesian stabilization against a depressionary relapse.

Needless to say, the hive mind on the Potomac had it all wrong, and the evidence was right in its own backyard. During the very first year of demobilization, in fact, the US private sector economy came bounding out of the starting gates after being freed from wartime controls. Real private GDP grew by nearly 27% in 1946 over prior year and never looked back, and it did so with no fiscal stabilization help from Washington, which was blocked by a Republican Congress.

What in 1945 had been a private sector GDP of $1.55 trillion in today’s dollars had jumped to nearly $2.0 trillion by 1947 and to more than $2.3 trillion by 1950. Thus, even as the US was making the turn from a war economy to the booming prosperity of the 1950s, private sector GDP expanded by nearly 50% with the growth rate clocking in at 7.6% per annum over the five-year period. So the American economy never came close to tumbling into the feared Keynesian abyss.

That the prevailing Keynesian theorem was just plain wrong, however, was well illustrated by the contemporaneous economic rebound in the western zone of Germany. The latter’s economy took off well before the Marshall Plan aid made any substantial impact owing to Ludwig Erhard’s famous turn to currency reform and free market policies.

In short, Washington’s Soviet “containment” policies were unnecessary as a matter of America’s homeland military security – the only valid basis for the foreign policy of peaceful Republic. Yet based on fuzzy thinking about economics and the taste for international power politics that had been acquired by Washington’s ruling class and military contractors during WWII the US stumbled into the very entangling alliances that Washington and Jefferson had forsworn. These European entanglements, in turn, surely and inexorably formed the gateway to Empire and the fiscally crushing Warfare State that now plagues the nation.

The irony, of course, is that there was actually nothing to “contain’. The documents show the Soviet leadership’s prime concern was consolidating the territory and security gains in Eastern Europe which the USSR had won with blood and treasure in the war against Hitler.

Thus, for several weeks after Secretary Marshall’s June 5, 1947 speech at Harvard, the archives show that Soviet leaders hoped it might prove to be a source of capital for the reconstruction of the war-damaged USSR and provide an opening for it to extract the war reparations from Germany about which Moscow was totally obsessed.

As the details of the American plan unfolded, however, the Soviet leadership slowly came to view it as an attempt to use economic aid not only to consolidate a potentially hostile Western European bloc, but also to undermine recently-won, and still somewhat tenuous, Soviet gains in Eastern Europe.

At length, therefore, Stalin ordered Poland and Czechoslovakia to withdraw from the intra-Europe consultation meetings in July 1947 that involved discussions with the west about joining the Marshall Plan – discussions he had initially blessed. Thereafter, all Soviet bloc participation in the Marshall Plan ceased and Stalin’s calculus shifted sharply from accommodation and towards a strategy of confrontational unilateral action to secure Soviet interests.

Nor were the Kremlin’s fears entirely an exercise in Stalin-style paranoia. As Scott D. Parrish, a leading scholar of the Soviet archives, concluded,

…What the new documentation helps us see more clearly, then, is that the real difficulty and source of conflict in 1947 was neither Soviet nor American “aggression.” Rather, it lay in the unstable international economic and political conditions in key European countries which led both sides to believe that the current status quo was unstable… And it was this same environment that compelled Stalin to respond to the plan with a series of tactically offensive maneuvers which fanned the flames of confrontation even higher. This decisive moment in the emergence of the Cold War was thus more a story of tragedy than evil.

The Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb in 1949 did not change the equation or gainsay the case that the entanglements of the Marshall Plan and NATO were a mistake. Crucially, neither did it create a military requirement for US air bases in Europe or alliances with European countries.

Instead, home territories and the open oceans and skies turned out to be more than adequate for basing the nuclear arsenals of both sides, as the Cuban Missile Crisis fully clarified.

Indeed, once both sides had the A-bomb the age of nuclear deterrence or MAD (mutual assured destruction) commenced. Notwithstanding the fringe views of Dr. Strangelove types like Herman Khan, nuclear war was soon deemed to be unwinnable and the focus shifted to the ability to reliably deliver a devastating second strike in response to a potential nuclear provocation.

This “assured” destruction was itself the defense against nuclear attack. But to be an effective deterrent the opposing side had to believe that its opponent’s ability to deliver was operationally full-proof and highly certain to happen.

In this respect during the strategic bomber age of the 1950s the US had such deterrence capacity early on – with long-range strategic bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union and returning with mid-air refueling. These strategic bombers including the B-50 Superfortress and the B-36 Peacemaker had impressive range capabilities, with the latter reaching 10,000 miles.

However, it was the introduction of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress in 1955 that removed any doubt. The B-52 had a range of nearly 9,000 miles without aerial refueling, even as it carried a payload of A-bombs far heavier than any previous aircraft, was powered by far more reliable engines and could attain altitudes beyond the reach of interdiction.

As it happened, the Soviets were late to the strategic bomber game, even after they detonated a serviceable nuke in August 1949. At the time and for several years to follow the Soviets relied upon the Tupolev Tu-4 to deliver their A-bombs, which was a reverse-engineered copy of America’s earlier, far less capable B-29. Accordingly, the Soviet bombers faced significant challenges, including limited range and payload capacity, which made it difficult to deliver a meaningful number of nukes to the U.S. without risking detection and interception.

Still, the Soviets soon learned the deterrence game. When the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile age (ICBM) materialized in the second half of the 1950s, the Soviets were the first to demonstrate a successful ICBM in mid-1957. Yet not withstanding the vaunted “missile gap” charge by JFK during the 1960 campaign, the Soviet Union had only deployed 4 ICBMs by 1960.

The United States did not conduct its own first successful ICBM tests until October 1959. But by the end of the following year it had deployed approximately 20 Atlas ICBMs, which figure grew to 129 ICBMs by the peak of the liquid fueled rocket era in 1962. So there was a missile gap alright, but one massively in the US’ favor.

As the decade unfolded, both sides developed far larger numbers of more powerful, reliable and securely-protected, solid-fuel ICBMs, but neither the logic nor logistics of nuclear deterrence ever changed. To wit, the core national security policy of both sides remained based on the certainty of a devastating second strike retaliation against the cities and industries of a foe, delivered by ICBMs securely based in hardened underground silos in their home territories.

As technology evolved the same logic was extended to submarine based missiles, which were not only hidden even more securely in the deep ocean bottoms, but also required no allied partners to operate.

In short, by the time the Cold War reached it peak in the mid-1960s, two thing had been established. First, strategic nuclear deterrence was the heart of national security for both sides and was operated unilaterally from bases in the home country of each. In America’s case, therefore, the technological advances of the 20th century in no way negated the wisdom of the Founders’ 18th century admonition to eschew entangling alliances.

Secondly, throughout the entirety of the Cold War the Soviet Union never presented any meaningful threat of conventional military attacks on the USA, which remained secure on the far side of the great ocean moats.

In fact, even at its military peak in the 1980s the Soviet Navy had but a single Nimitz class aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, and only a handful of amphibious ships and troop transports capable of reaching America. This rudimentary sealift capacity would have faced, in any event, insuperable challenges landing on the New Jersey coast owing to lack of air cover, antisubmarine protection and sufficient refueling logistics.

Thus, a Secret CIA analysis from 1979 (now unclassified) admits:

Soviet armed forces do not maintain units designated as intervention forces nor do their military writings describe intervention as a basic military mission. In fact, their writings generally reflect a lack of interest in putting forces ashore to fight in distant areas. Available classified writings focus almost entirely on the wartime mission of the Soviet armed forces on the Eurasian landmass in a NATO-Warsaw Pact war.

Thus, even in the second half of the 20th century, NATO was not any kind of militarily necessary defense asset for the US. To the contrary, from the very get-go NATO was a make-work project for the State Department and foreign affairs officialdom including wartime spooks who were out of business after August 1945; and, at length, became a marketing organization for the US military-industrial complex and its congressional pork barrel champions.

Stated differently, NATO was not about homeland military security but was actually a globalist project of international politics that eventually transformed Washington into a menace and the War Capital of the World. So doing, NATO and the whole string of entangling alliances it begat elsewhere on the planet, functioned to actually diminish America’s homeland security, even as it added mightily to its fiscal cost.

That’s because the nearly 300,000 US servicemen remaining in Europe during the Cold War and the scores of bases and facilities which supported them were stationed there as “trip wires”. Their purpose was to bring the US to the fight immediately upon a Soviet incursion in western Europe. While the latter was an exceedingly low-probability contingency, it should have been addressed, in any case, by Europe’s own military capabilities from its own fiscal resources. After all these years, Donald Trump is absolutely correct on that matter.

The great irony, of course, is that Washington’s plunge into “entangling alliances” has had the effect of sharply lessening Europe’s Warfare State costs by shifting these burdens to American taxpayers. The latter consequently funded a globe-spanning Warfare State that massively exceeded the military requirements of homeland security.

So while NATO and its regional clones brought no extra homeland security, what America did get was the privilege of indirectly footing the bill for Europe’s generous Welfare State, which gobbled up with alacrity the fiscal resources that might otherwise have gone to defense.

As the great Senator Robert Taft held at the time, the modest threat to homeland security presented by the war-ravaged corpus of the Soviet Union and the collectivist disaster imposed on China by Mao could have been readily handled with a invincible nuclear deterrent and conventional fortress defense of America’s airspace and shorelines. As he said in his speech against ratification of the NATO Treaty:

… If we undertake to arm all the nations around Russia from Norway on the north to Turkey on the south, and Russia sees itself ringed about gradually by so-called defensive arms from Norway and Denmark to Turkey and Greece, it may form a different opinion. It may decide that the arming of western Europe, regardless of its present purpose, looks to an attack upon Russia. Its view may be unreasonable, and I think it is.

(But) how would we feel if Russia undertook to arm a country on our border; Mexico, for instance?

On another occasion Taft made clear that even in the incipient Cold War World of 1950, the wisdom of the Founders still pertained:

Our traditional policy of neutrality and non-interference with other nations was based on the principle that this policy was the best way to avoid disputes with other nations and to maintain the liberty of this country without war. From the days of George Washington…. it has always opposed any commitment by the United States, in advance, to take any military action outside of our territory.

For want of doubt, just consider that every single war fought after the 1949 NATO Treaty ratification was unnecessary and a scandalous waste of American treasure and blood – to say nothing of the millions of foreigners who have been killed and maimed by these military interventions and occupations.

That is to say, how in the world was America’s homeland security enhanced by the pointless bloodbath on the Korean peninsula just one year after NATO’s birth? Had China and the regime in Pyongyang prevailed would Seoul today actually look that much different than Shanghai?

For crying out loud, the economic and social regime of Shanghai and Seoul are essentially irrelevant to America’s homeland security way over here on this side of the Pacific moat.

Likewise, what was accomplished by the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. Since that paved the way for restoration of the brutal thievery of the Shah and the even more benighted rule of the mullahs who replaced him, exactly what was the point? Denying the Soviets a Persian Gulf port for a blue water Navy that it never actually had?

Soon came the partition of Vietnam, its own civil war and an utterly heinous Washington intervention that brought death to 58,000 American soldiers along with 300,000 wounded and 75,000 severely disabled for life. And that’s to say nothing of 3.4 million Vietnamese – 60% of whom were civilians – whose lives were snuffed out and for what?

So that this “domino” would not fall into the laps of the Chicoms, which were allegedly doing the bidding of the Kremlin? Yet what in the world did this slaughter contribute to America’s homeland security then and most especially now?

After all, three decades after the Soviets passed into the dustbin of history and 52 years after Nixon went to Beijing and was feted by Mao, Vietnam remains an “unfallen” domino. Rather than being under the thumb of Beijing, in fact, the red capitalists of Vietnam are now exporting even cheaper tennis shoes and flat panel displays to America, thereby taking away market share on the shelves of Walmart from the red capitalists of China.

Indeed, in the light of history all of the Forever Wars and interventions that flowed from the Empire which was built upon the false foundation of NATO were not just pointless; they were tantamount to criminal undertakings – given the historical stupidity of their purpose.

And yet and yet. The list of interventions and regime change adventures goes on and on – almost always on the grounds that these disasters were necessary to support local “allies” or bolster regional stability. On that score, the Forever Wars visited upon the middle east are especially loathsome.

The first Gulf War, for instance, amounted to a fight between Saddam Hussein and the Emir of Kuwait over directional drilling in the Rumaila oilfield that straddled their border. But so frickin’ what!

There is not the slightest case that this intervention on behalf of a purported “ally” in Kuwait that we didn’t need in the first place had any benefit to to the homeland security of America. It simply provided occasion for a CNN reality TV show about tank battles in the desert.

The same can be said of the shock and awe campaign a decade later that finally suspended Saddam from the end of a rope – only to open Iraq to anti-American chaos led by the dominant vengeance-seeking Shiite population. Ditto for Libya, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon – all victims of Washington conducted or supplied military assaults that had absolutely nothing to do with the military defense of the North American continent.

Indeed, the interventions boxscore since Washington abandoned the Founders’ wisdom regarding foreign entanglements and the peaceful, solvent Republic which went with it is approximately 0 wins, 12 losses.  Every single one of these significant interventions in behalf of entangling alliances and Washington’s global empire have been a failure.

That surely has profound implications. It must perforce mean that the predicate on which they were based was deeply and dangerously flawed.

Yet that’s not the half of it. Today the Empire is flat-out bankrupting what has become a Leviathan on the Potomac that has no resemblance whatsoever to the peaceful Republic that Ben Franklin warned would be an everlasting challenge to keep.

In fact, the case for a true America First policy – that is, returning to the pre-1948 status quo ante and a proper Fortress America military posture – has powerfully strengthened during the last three decades.

That’s because in today’s world, the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail. That is to say, the threat of an adversary with a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal and effective that it could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.

Fortunately, there is no nation on earth that has anything close to the Nuclear First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people if it attempted to strike first.

After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s – all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.

For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four-to-five warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.

So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located and neutralized before any would be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started.

Indeed, with respect to the “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find or take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.

And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move.

Likewise, the 400 Minutemen III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, thereby further compounding and complicating an adversary’s First Strike calculus.

Needless to say, there is no way, shape or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case for drastically downsizing America’s military muscle. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.

That’s right. The core component of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget as detailed on a system-by-system basis by CBO. Moreover, the sea-based ballistic missile force is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the entire next decade. That’s only 1.9% of the $10 trillion CBO defense baseline for that period.

So after setting aside $75 billion per year for the strategic nuclear triad, how much of the remaining $900 billion+ in the CBO defense spending baseline would needed in a post-NATO world shorn of America’s entangling alliances, foreign bases and foolish overseas commitments such as decreeing which Chinese factions are permitted to rule Taiwan.

That is, what would be the cost of a conventional Fortress America defense of the continental shorelines and airspace?

The starting point is that in the present world order there is no technologically-advanced industrial power which has either the capability or intention to attack the American homeland with conventional invasionary forces. To do that you would need a massive military armada including a Navy and Air Force many times the size of current US forces, huge air and sealift resources and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities that have never been even dreamed of by any other nation on the planet.

You also need an initial GDP of say $50 trillion to sustain what would be the most colossal mobilization of weaponry and materiale in human history. And that’s to say nothing of needing to be ruled by suicidal leaders willing to risk the nuclear destruction of their own countries, allies and economic commerce in order to accomplish, what? Occupy Denver?

Obviously, no nation has the GDP or military heft to successful execute and invasion of the American homeland. Russia’s GDP is a scant $2 trillion, not the $50 trillion that would needed for it to put invasionary forces on the New Jersey shores. And its ordinary defense budget apart from the SMO is $75 billion, which amounts to about four weeks of waste in the Pentagon’s $950 billion monster.

As for China, it doesn’t have the sustainable economic heft to even think about landing on the California shores, notwithstanding Wall Street’s endless kowtowing to the China Boom. The fact is, China has accumulated in excess of $50 trillion of debt in barely two decades!

Therefore, it didn’t grow organically in the historic capitalist mode; it printed, borrowed, spent and built like there was no tomorrow. The resulting simulacrum of prosperity would not last six months if China’s $3.6 trillion global export market – the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright – were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.

To be sure, China’s totalitarian leaders are immensely misguided and downright evil from the perspective of their oppressed population. But they are not stupid. They stay in power by keeping the people relatively fat and happy and would never risk bringing down what amounts to an economic house of cards.

Indeed, when it comes to the threat of a conventional military invasion the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century. That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles would consign an enemy naval armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters.

The fact is, in an age when the sky is flush with high tech surveillance assets a massive conventional force armada couldn’t possibly be secretly built, tested and mustered for surprise attack without being noticed in Washington. There can be no repeat of the Japanese strike force steaming across the Pacific toward Pearl Harbor sight unseen.

Indeed, America’s ostensible “enemies” actually have no offensive or invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier – the aforementioned 1980s era relic which has been in dry-dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships and suite of attack and fighter aircraft nor even an active crew.

Likewise, China has just three aircraft carriers—two of which are refurbished rust buckets purchased from the remnants of the old Soviet Union (actually Ukraine!), and which carriers do not even have modern catapults for launching their strike aircraft.

In short, neither China nor Russia will be steaming their tiny 3 and 1 carrier battle groups toward the shores of either California or New Jersey any time soon. An invasionary force that had any chance at all of surviving a US fortress defense of cruise missiles, drones, jet fighters, attack submarines and electronics warfare, we’d dare say, need to be 100X larger.

Again, there is also no GDP in the world – $2 trillion for Russia or $18 trillion for China – that is even remotely close in size to the $50 trillion, or even $100 trillion, that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the home economy.

Still, Washington maintains a globe-spanning conventional war-fighting capability driven by NATO and other foreign entanglements that it never really – even during the cold war. But now, fully one-third of a century after the Soviet Empire collapsed and China went the Red Capitalist route of deep global economic integration, it amounts to utterly extraneous and unneeded muscle.

We are referring, of course, to the 173,000 US troops in 159 countries and the network of 750 bases in 80 countries. This includes:

• 19 bases and nearly 34,000 troops in Germany.
• 44 bases and 12,250 troops in Italy.
• 25 bases and 9,275 troops in the .
• 120 bases and 53,700 troops in Japan.
• 73 bases and 26,400 troops in South Korea

All told, Washington equips, trains and deploys an armed force of 2.86 million not for purposes of homeland defense but overwhelmingly for missions of overseas offense, invasion and occupation all over the planet. So if Washington withdrew from NATO and its clones, conventional military requirements would shrink drastically.

The starting point for a post-NATO military posture, therefore, is the drastic downsizing of the nearly one-million man standing US Army. The latter would have no uses abroad because there would be no cause for wars of foreign invasion and occupation, while the odds of any foreign battalions and divisions reaching America for hand-to-hand combat with the US Army, as it were, are virtually non-existent. With a proper coastline garrison of missiles, attack submarines and jet fighters any invading army would become shark bait long before it saw the shores of California or New Jersey.

Yet the 462,000 active-duty army soldiers at $112,000 per year each have an annual budget cost of $55 billion, while the 506,000 army reserve forces at $32,000 each cost upwards of $16 billion. And on top of this force structure, of course, you have $77 billion for operations and maintenance, $27 billion for procurement, $22 billion for RDT&E and $4 billion for everything else (based on the FY 2025 budget request).

In all, the current Army budget totals nearly $200 billion, and virtually all of that massive expenditure – nearly 3X the total defense budget of Russia – is deployed in the service of NATO and Empire, not homeland defense. It could readily be cut by 70% or $140 billion – meaning that the US Army component of a $450 billion Fortress America defense budget would absorb just $60 billion annually.

Likewise, the US Navy and Marine Corps spends $55 billion annually on 515,000 active-duty forces and another $3.7 billion on 88,000 reserves. Yet if you look at the core requirements of a Fortress America defense posture, these forces and expenses are way over the top, as well.

By core missions were refer to the Navy component of the strategic nuclear triad and the Navy’s large force of attack and cruise missile submarines. As it happens, the direct manpower requirements for the 14 Ohio-class Strategic Nuclear Subs is about 4,500 and the overall total is about 10,000 military personal when Admirals, overhead, support and woke compliance is included (or not).

Likewise, the 50 or so attack and cruise missile subs have two crews of 132 officers and enlisted men for each boat, for a direct requirement of 13,000 and an overall total of 20,000 including Admirals and overhead.

In short, the core Navy missions of a Fortress America defense involve about 30,000 enlisted men, officers and overhead brass or less than 6% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps.

On the other hand, the totally unnecessary carrier battle groups, which operate exclusively in the service of Empire, have crews of 8,000 each when you count the escort ships and suites of aircraft, meaning that the 11 carrier battle groups and their infrastructure require 88,000 direct military personnel and 140,000 overall when you include the usual support and overhead.

Finally, the active-duty force of the Marine Corps is 175,000, and that’s entirely an instrument of invasion and occupation. It’s totally unnecessary for a homeland defense because the latter includes neither the “halls of Montezuma or the shores of Tripoli”.

In short, fully 315,000 or 60% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps functions in the service of Empire. So, if you redefine the Navy’s missions to focus on strategic nuclear deterrence and coastal defense, it is evident that more than half of the Navy’s force structure is unnecessary muscle.

Instead, it functions in the service of global power projection, policing of the sea-lanes from the Red Sea to the East China Sea and platforming for wars of invasion and occupation.

Overall, the current Navy/Marine Corps budget stands at about $236 billion when you include $59 billion for military personnel, $81 billion for O&M, $67 billion for procurement, $26 billion for RDT&E and $4 billion for all other. A $96 billion or 40% cut, therefore, would still leave $140 billion for the core missions of a Fortress America defense.

Among the services, the $246 billion contained in the Air Force budget is considerably more heavily oriented to a post-NATO Fortress America versus Empire-based national security posture than is the case with the Army and Navy. Both the Minuteman land-based leg of the strategic triad and the B-52 and B-2 bomber forces are funded in this section of the defense budget.

And while a significant fraction of the budget for the manning, operations and procurement of conventional aircraft and missile forces is currently devoted to overseas missions, only the airlift and foreign base component of those outlays inherently function in the service of Empire.

Under a post-NATO Fortress America defense, therefore, a substantial part of the conventional air power, which includes upwards of 4,000 fixed wing and rotary aircraft, would be repurposed to homeland defense missions. Accordingly, upwards of 75% or $180 billion of the current Air Force budget would remain in place, limiting the savings to just $65 billion.

Finally, an especially sharp knife could be brought down upon the $181 billion component of the  current defense budget which is for the Pentagon and DOD-wide overhead operations. Fully $110 billion or 61% of that huge sum – again more than 2X the total military budget of Russia – is actually for the army of DOD civilian employees and DC/Virginia based contractors which feast upon the Warfare State.

In terms of homeland security, much of these expenditures are not simply unnecessary – they are actually counter-productive. They constitute the taxpayer-funded lobby and influence-peddling force that keeps the Empire alive and fully funded on Capitol Hill. Even then, a 38% allowance or $70 billion for the Defense Department functions would more than provide for the true needs of a Fortress America defense.

Overall, therefore, re-sizing the DOD portion of the national security budget to a post-NATO world would generate $410 billion of savings on a FY 2025 basis. Another $50 billion in savings could also be obtained from eliminating most funding for the UN, other international agencies, security assistance and economic aid. Adjusted for inflation through the end of the second Trump term in FY 2029 the total savings would come to $500 billion per year.

Moreover, the resulting allowances (FY 2025 basis) of $60 billion for the Army, $140 billion for the Navy, $180 billion for the Air Force and $70 for DOD-wide operations would shrink the defense component of the Warfare State to $450 billion per year. In current dollars of purchasing power that happens to be exactly what Eisenhower thought was more than adequate for national security when he warned of the military-industrial complex during his farewell address 63 years ago.

At the end of the day, Bush the Elder should have parachuted into the NATO Ramstein air base in Germany and declared “mission accomplished” 34 years ago when the Cold War officially ended – even after 42 years of an unnecessary and largely counter-productive existence.

But surely now the time to bring the Empire home is long, long overdue. The $1.4 trillion annual cost of the Warfare State is no longer even remotely affordable as it fuels a spiraling public debt that menaces the very future of constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity in the American Republic.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post NATO: The Case To Get Out Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

Was it the miasma of cognitive dissonance blackening the air-space over the DC swamp that caused the deadly collision of AA Flight 5342 and a Blackhawk Helicopter this week — an impenetrable fog arising from the fetid exhalations of so many hyperventilating swamp creatures brooding between the urges of fight-or-flight as Mr. Trump deploys his chosen pest-controllers across the Potomac Basin?

Altogether, these many parasitical swamp creatures make up the greater DC blob, and the blob convulsing and fibrillating is what you witness in these committee hearings with Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. For instance, fake “progressive” Bernie Sanders (D-VT) faced with the reveal that he leads his colleagues in pharma “contributions” (just under $2-million) . . . or fake Cherokee Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in a fugue state over the perceived threat of Mr. Kennedy to pharma profits . . . or presidential pardon recipient Adam Schiff (D-CA) lecturing Mr. Patel on ethical behavior. . . or Ms. Gabbard enduring the meltdown of Senate Intel Committee tool Michael Bennet (D-CO).

Behind these histrionics by the big gators and peccaries of the collapsing Democratic Party is pure scintillating fear. They are afraid that all of their hoaxes and lies of recent years will be exposed in the months ahead. And they fear that such exposure might lead eventually to legal complications for them. All of that implies loss-of-power, the single element that demonically drives their careers.

The fact is they have already lost their grip on the levers of power and, for the moment, that is all that matters. They especially no longer control the Department of Justice, its subsidiary, the FBI, the many public health agencies under Health and Human Services, and the many-footed intel “community,” as it styles itself. These agencies are where the truth about our national affairs has been locked up. Now, the citizens will either see what’s there, or find out what has been deliberately destroyed — such as the internal agency email correspondence over RussiaGate, the Covid-19 operation (and the deadly vaxx campaign), the J-6 affair (and the pipe-bomb sideshow), the weird, documented irregularities of the 2020 election, the Ukraine War money-laundering shenanigans, the manifold janky DOJ prosecutions of Mr. Trump, and much more.

Every day now since January 20, heads explode all over DC as the executive orders roll out and the insanity of whatever lurked behind “Joe Biden” gets systematically expunged from the order of things. And as this happens, the more plainly deranged the past four years looks. Did they really believe that men dressing-up as women would improve the US military? Or was it a traitorous effort to weaken and demoralize our armed forces? Was DEI a public ethics exercise or a massive jobs program for incompetents?

In what way did “Joe Biden’s” Department of Homeland Security imagine that funneling known criminals, certified lunatics, and saboteurs across the border squared with their duty to protect and defend the country? And how did it happen that US taxpayers’ money got shelled out to fake “religious” NGOs in Mexico minting debit cards for border-jumpers, handing them wads of cash, cell phones, airplane tickets, fully-equipped backpacks, and apps for evading arrest? In effect these NGOs took over the exact job description of “coyote” formerly performed by the criminal cartels — leaving the cartels free for the more lucrative rackets of dealing fentanyl and trafficking women and children.

The corruption in all this has been supernatural, and the fact that, until late 2024, seventy-million Democratic Party American voters thought this was all okay is extra-supernatural. What happened to their minds? The cliché of “Trump derangement” doesn’t really answer that. What it probably comes down to was the stunningly successful mind-fucking operation run by the blob (the CIA and the darker elements of the DOD in particular), in league with captured news media, to bend and distort the consensual perception of reality — all of which leads to the question: why?

The two main answers to that seem to be 1) Some organized entity seeking to destroy the country for instance, the Chinese Communist Party, or the World Economic Forum, or 2) that the blob had evolved into such an overt criminal racketeering operation that it increasingly and desperately needed to keep covering its mighty ass. Thus, the Democratic Party became the blob’s enforcer and the news media became its propaganda arm. And the “thinking class” of America especially got ignominiously hosed by all that.

There’s a pretty good chance that blob agents in the Senate will successfully block the confirmations of Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. They are all superlative candidates for the particular jobs at HHS, ODNI, and the FBI. But know this: excellent as they are, there are a great many other worthy, dedicated, and stalwart warriors in this land who can take their places if necessary. The blob has already lost in the political battle-space. All they can manage at this point is some rearguard action.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Six Ways From Sunday appeared first on LewRockwell.

The issue of California secession isn’t going away.

Last week, the California secretary of state approved a new ballot measure on secession for the signature gathering phase of the initiative process. If activists are able to collect enough signatures by late July, voters in 2028 will be able to vote yes or no to the question “Should California leave the United States and become a free and independent country?”

A majority vote for this measure wouldn’t sever ties with the United States government, of course. It would merely create a commission to study the option of political independence.

Even if the measure managed to get a majority vote, it would do little, legally speaking. On the other hand, it certainly would continue a political and ideological process that is a necessary—albeit insufficient—condition for eventual separation.

The issue of redrawing California’s borders has arisen repeatedly over the past twenty years., Whether we’re talking the “Six Californias” attempt to break the state up into smaller pieces, or the 2017 “Calexit” campaign, talk of radical change to California’s status quo isn’t going away. This repetition of calls for change is essential to laying the ground work for eventual secession. Each new campaign in itself has few implications for the short term, but in longer term, pushing the option over and over does make secession more likely. After all, as we’ve seen in the dozens of successful cases of secession since 1945, an important first step is thinking in terms of separateness and independence.

California Secession Would Be Great for “Rump America”

Unfortunately, we are only at the beginning of a long process, but most of us who presently reside in the tax farm called “the United States” would be much better off if California were to secede as soon as possible.

Now, I know that many of my readers are not big fans of California—or at least the politicians elected by the people there—and are not inclined to cheer on the state’s political activists. Nonetheless, for those of us who actually want to improve prospects for greater freedom and less state power in North America, we ought to wholeheartedly support secession for California.

The immediate benefits should be clear. In a recent article on Trump’s call for annexing Canada, I noted that adding Canada to the US would be like adding a second California. Such an annexation would greatly shift American political ideology to the left and import millions of new voters who favor policies like government-controlled healthcare and draconian gun-control measures.

California secession would work in the opposite direction. By placing California outside the borders of the United States, the US would free itself from millions of voters who, like Canadians, generally favor high taxation, runaway government spending, stringent gun control, and harsh government regulations of nearly every kind. American politics would shift much more in favor of free markets, relative fiscal restraint, and public safety. California’s 52 members of the House of Representatives would be eliminated from the US Congress, as would be the state’s two senators. Most of these, of course, are dedicated social democrats of the Kamala Harris variety. The political and ideological status quo among America’s elected officials would be transformed overnight.

This would by no means change the US into a laissez-faire paradise, but the positive change would be immense.

Moreover, California residents would cease to be US citizens, and thus would no longer be eligible to vote in US elections. No longer would residents of nearby regions like Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Texas have to suffer waves of Californian migrants who are free to recreate the disastrous political realities of California in new locations.

The damage done by these migrant Californians is magnified by the fact that, so long as California is part of the United States, a Californian’s citizenship seamlessly transfers to the new state. That is, Californian migrants are able to almost immediately participate in the political system in their adopted homes—to the disadvantage of longtime residents. After California secedes, this unfortunate situation would come to an end, and Californians would become foreign nationals when living in the “Old United States.” No longer would the corporatist Silicon Valley “elites”—most of whom are dedicated servants of the surveillance state—and the retired civil “servants” of California, living on fat pensions, be able to so easily hijack the political institutions of non-Californians.

Nor would these foreign nationals from California be eligible for the welfare state of Rump America. After all, without California policymakers present to block every attempt at reforming the US’s broken system of naturalization, Americans would be free to ensure that foreign nationals no longer receive free money from the taxpayers. Rather, only migrants who are able to support themselves would find it feasible to relocate to the Old United States.

This isn’t to say that no one from California would be welcome. Without the opportunity to live on the dole, and without immediate access to the benefits of citizenship, it is likely only the most motivated and industrious Californians would seek to emigrate to Rump America. The minority of Californians who actually value freedom and fiscal sanity, and who are capable of leaving other people alone, should be welcomed with open arms in Rump America.

Secession Is the Future

Admittedly, this is all unlikely to happen in the short term. A response one often hears from those who reflexively defend the status quo is “it will never happen.” But in the world of politics, “never” is an absurdly long time. One can consult any political map of the world as it was 100 years ago to see just how non-permanent political institutions are. Rather, political disintegration of the United States is inevitable. It happens to every large state eventually, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s as only one recent example. In the late 1980s, most of these prophets of what will “never happen” also told us that the USSR would last for many generations more.

The United States is already well down this road. Culturally, the US is heavily splintered and divided. The average resident of, say, Massachusetts or New York views the average resident of Texas or Alabama with contempt and fear. Similar feelings likely run in the opposite direction. Donald Trump, being hailed as having won a “landslide” victory, couldn’t even eke out more than 50 percent of the vote. 48 percent of American voters liked Kamala Harris enough to actually cast a ballot for her. This is not a country that is united in any sense of the word.

Rather, the United States is today held together only by an intricate system of federal patronage. The federal government, using taxpayer money, essentially pays people to make sure they remain attached to, and dependent on, the central government. For example, the federal welfare state has been fabulously successful at making a large portion of the population hooked on the government’s social benefits. As we saw in the failed secession vote in Scotland in 2014, pensioners will reliably support the central government so long as it continues to dole out cash to these elderly wards of the state. American recipients of Social Security are no different. Few of these will support secession if it disrupts access to their precious government checks.  Meanwhile, an enormous system of farm subsidies, military spending, federal contracts, and NGOS ensures that millions of Americans owe their livelihoods to the central governments. Movements toward secession threaten to disrupt these gravy trains.

On the other hand, disintegration will come when the patronage system begins to falter. As the US rushes toward a federal debt of forty trillion dollars—soon to be followed by fifty trillion—the US government will find it harder and hard to balance its growing debt payments with the usual “generosity” of the state. Americans will then have to look to other institutions for their livelihoods, their pensions, and their “free stuff.” That is when secession starts to become a far more attractive option. After all, why stay attached to a political system that takes so much, and offers so little in return?

Until then, the best we can do is agitate for disunion, independence, and an orderly dismantling of the American leviathan state. It’s good preparation for the inevitable future.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

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Word traps and false logic don’t lead to dominance of the future or monopolistic grips on limitless profits.

The heart of the current euphoric expectations for AI is a simple but problematic proposition: the equivalence of function equals intelligence. If using natural language requires intelligence, and a computer can use natural language, then it’s intelligent. If it takes intelligence to compose an essay on Charles Darwin, and an AI program can compose an essay on Charles Darwin, then the AI program is intelligent.

The problem here is this “equivalence is proof of intelligence” is a function of word-traps and false logic, not actual equivalence; what is claimed to be be equivalent isn’t equivalent at all. In other words, the source of confusion is how we choose to define “intelligence,” which is itself a word-trap of the sort that philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to resolve using koan-like propositions and logic.

Imagine for a moment we had twenty words to describe all the characteristics of what we lump into “intelligence.” We would then be parsing the characteristics and output of AI programs by a much larger set of comparisons.

The notion of equivalence goes back a long way. As science developed models for how Nature functioned, the idea that Nature was akin to a mechanism like a clock gained mindshare.

The discoveries of relativity and quantum effects blew this model to pieces, as Nature turned out to be a very strange clock, to the point that the “Nature as a mechanism” model was abandoned as inadequate.

We have yet to reach the limits of the “equivalence is proof of intelligence” model, which is as outdated and nonsensical as “the universe is a mechanism” model. We keep finding new examples of equivalence to support the idea that a computer program running instructions is “intelligent” because it can perform tasks we associate with “intelligence” because we’re embedded in a mechanistic conceptualization of the entirety of Nature–including ourselves.

So there is much excitement when an AI program exhibits “emergent properties,” meaning that it develops behaviors / processes that weren’t explicitly programmed. This is then touted as an “equivalence proving intelligence:” this “ability to create something new” is proof of intelligence.

But Nature is chockful of emergent properties that no one hypes as “proof of intelligence.” Ant colonies generate all sorts of emergent properties, but nobody is claiming that ant colonies have human-level intelligence are are poised to take over the world.

AI programs parrot content and techniques generated by humans. Since they use natural language, we’re fooled by equivalence into thinking, “hey, the program is as smart as we are, because only we use natural language.”

The same conceptual trap opens in every purported equivalence. If an AI program can find the answer to a complex problem such as “how do proteins fold?”, and do so far faster than we can, we immediately project this supposed equivalence into “super-intelligence.”

The problem is the AI program is simply parroting techniques generated by humans and extrapolating them at scale. The program doesn’t “understand” proteins, their functions in Nature or in our bodies, or anything else about proteins that humans understand.

Defining anything by equivalence is false logic, a false logic we fall into so easily because words are traps that we don’t even recognize as traps.

Wittgenstein concluded that all problems such as “is AI intelligent?” were based in language, not the real world. Once we become ensnared in language and its implicit byways and restrictions, we lose our way. This truth is revealed by words that have no direct equivalent in other languages.

One example of this is the Japanese word aware (a-waar-re), which has a range of nuanced meanings with no equivalent in English: a sweet sadness at the passage of time, a specific flavor of poignant nostalgia and awareness of time. This word is key to understanding Japanese culture, and yet there is no equivalent word in English, either in meaning or cultural centrality.

In other words–what if there is no equivalent, and the supposed equivalence is nothing more than a confusion caused by word-traps and false logic? The entire supposition that we can model human intelligence with mechanistic equivalences (intelligence is a mechanism) collapses, along with projections of “super-intelligence.”

The temptation to keep trying to equate “intelligence” and programs with mechanistic equivalence is compelling because we’re so embedded in the mechanistic model we don’t even realize it’s a black hole of false logic that has only one possible output: nonsensical claims of “intelligence” based on some absurdly reductionist equivalence.

The temptation in this mechanistic conceptual trap is to reckon that if we only define our words more carefully, then we’ll be able to “prove equivalence is real.” This too is false. Wittgenstein eventually moved away from the model of the imprecision of language is the source of all our intellectual problems. It isn’t that simple: more precise definitions only generate more convoluted claims of false equivalences.

The book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (via B.J.) lays out the false conceptual assumptions holding up the entire edifice of AI.

Michael Polanyi’s classic Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy explains that knowing is an art, a reality explored by Donald Schon in The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action.

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