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Ben Bartee

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Stephen Mack wrote:

Lew,

Trump wasting 40 million taxpayer dollars and creating massive inconvenience so that he can smugly celebrate himself applauding the War Machine spectacle like Stalin standing on top of Lenin’s Mausoleum on May Day.

See here.

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“They don’t appear on rich lists. They don’t flaunt their wealth. But behind the scenes, the Wallenberg family controls an empire worth hundreds of billions of dollars. From AstraZeneca to Ericsson, their influence quietly shapes the global economy—but only few even know their name. For over six generations, the Wallenbergs have mastered the art of staying invisible. Their financial empire was built through banking, strategic investments, and political influence, making them one of the most powerful families in Europe. But their history is full of contradictions.

“During World War II, they walked a dangerous line—helping both the Nazis and the resistance. They banked for Hitler, yet also aided in secret plots to overthrow him. They helped save thousands of Jewish lives, but were later blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury for financial dealings with the Nazis. So, how did the Wallenbergs become the secret rulers of Sweden? How do they keep their wealth hidden in foundations while maintaining control over Sweden’s economy? And why does every Swedish government—left or right—have to work with them? This is the untold story of the Wallenbergs, the billionaire dynasty you’ve never heard of.”

Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x…

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Media analyst Mark Dice dives deep into the controversial theories surrounding the dramatic rise in transgender and LGBTQ identification over recent decades. This isn’t just about social media influence – there’s mounting scientific evidence pointing to chemical culprits that nobody wants to discuss. From endocrine-disrupting plastics in food packaging to atrazine herbicide contaminating water supplies, research shows these chemicals are literally feminizing male brains during fetal development.

Studies from University of Rochester found gender-bending chemicals in plastics alter baby boys’ brain development, while other research reveals how these same chemicals can chemically castrate frogs and turn 10% of males into egg-producing females. Even RFK Jr. warned about this “tsunami of toxic chemicals” causing sexual dysphoria. In this stunning in-depth report Mark Dice raises the questions few are willing to ask about what is really causing transgenderism and gender dysphoria in so many people today.

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CNN reported that Trump’s approval ratings regarding immigration enforcement are skyrocketing.  This is a three alarm alert to the Demo-Bolshevik party that has planned and organized the riots and their lying media scum comrades who call burning police cars “peaceful protesting.”

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As the language of Marxism becomes increasingly disguised in moralistic slogans such as “social justice” and “inclusiveness,” many people fail to recognize Marxist theories when they encounter them. They expect theories derived from Marxism to be littered with red flag phrases like “dialectical materialism” or “class conflict,” which would be the dead giveaway that they are dealing with Marxist interpretations. In the absence of such phrases, they deny that social justice theories are Marxist at all.

For example, although the historian Eric Foner is reputed to be a “noted Marxist historian,” he describes himself, not as a Marxist, but merely as “one who grew up in an Old Left family.” Thus, his history of the Reconstruction Era is taught as “objective” scholarship; after all, his work is not Marxist but merely Marxist-adjacent. While WEB Du Bois writes an explicitly Marxist history of the Reconstruction Era—describing it as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”—Foner believes nobody should be described as a Marxist:

JG: Would you be happy to be described as a “Marxist historian” or is there a more accurate term for historians like you, Howard Zinn and others?

EF: I tend to eschew labels. Marx is believed to have said: “I am not a Marxist.” In other words: “I don’t want to be assigned to a single school of interpretation.”

But no-one can understand history who does not have at least some familiarity with the writings of Marx.

I have been powerfully influenced by Marxist insights, especially those of the last generation of British Marxist scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson and others.

But I have also been influenced by black radical scholars like WEB Du Bois, who himself was influenced by Marxism and also by other radical traditions and by feminist scholars.

Understanding history through “Marxist insights” is not merely about being familiar with Marxist theories of historical materialism and the Hegelian dialectic. The greatest infiltration of Marxist doctrine into the social justice discourse does not come directly from notions of class conflict or historical materialism, but from the far more pernicious influence of Marxist doctrine in erasing human will and agency. Marxists insist that human action is inevitably determined, not by individual will or choice, but by one’s economic and social circumstances. As David Gordon explains in “Mises Contra Marx,” the Marxist premise is that human will is governed by the prevailing “forces of production.” Marxists argue that each person’s choices are determined by his historical epoch, his class consciousness, his race, or other socioeconomic structures of his society. By contrast, Ludwig von Mises accords to human beings the will and power to make choices and take purposeful action. In Human Action, he states that “[A]cting man chooses, determines, and tries to reach an end. Of two things which he cannot have together he selects one and gives up the other.” Mises further explains:

Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is human will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.

Mises highlights the importance of the human will and human agency in making choices:

For the term will means nothing else than man’s faculty to choose between different states of affairs, to prefer one, to set aside the other, and to behave according to the decision made in aiming at the chosen state and forsaking the other.

Constant adjustment in pursuit of individual ends and goals is key to understanding human action. According to Mises, “In the course of social events there prevails a regularity of phenomena to which man must adjust his action if he wishes to succeed.”

But how can man “wish to succeed” in the first place, much less “adjust his action” accordingly, if he is merely some kind of automaton responding to the stimulus of his material circumstances? According to Marxists, there are certain predetermined actions that will inevitably be adopted by people who are classified as “exploited” and other actions will always be adopted by their “exploiters.” To Marxists, man does not adjust his actions based on his personal preferences or his own agency but merely follows the collective dictates of his group. By viewing everyone’s actions as determined by their group, it immediately becomes self-evident what their choices must be in every situation—you know what a white person would choose, what a slave would do in any situation, etc.

At the very least, this is regarded by Marxists as the default position and anyone asserting the contrary is regarded with deep skepticism and subjected to the highest standard of proof. They certainly would not get past the academic gatekeepers. For example, there is a widespread belief that there are no happy black people in America, and if any black person claims to be happy, he must be suffering from false consciousness or perhaps he was paid by white people to claim to be happy. In “Why America Has Never Been Great for Black People” Ariana Doss writes that:

Our president’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has always confused me.

As a progressive person, who only views the past to find ways to improve the future, I cannot fathom why President Trump wants to go backwards. When I examine this country’s history, I do not find a time in which I, or any other Black person for this matter, would have wanted to go.

HK Egerton—a black man from North Carolina who defends the Confederate heritage of the South—is depicted by the Southern Poverty Law Center as simply incomprehensible: “I’ve often wondered what could cause him to do such things,” they say. The notion that a black man might not share the SPLC worldview is a deep mystery to them. This expectation that people’s opinions are determined by their class consciousness or race consciousness is held even by progressives who claim to reject Marxist ideology. They regard their worldview as merely a statement of the “obvious” and nothing to do with Marxist theories. Isn’t it obvious that exploited people will be in constant struggle against their exploiters and would never willingly cooperate with them?

There are many problems with this reasoning, but the key point being highlighted here is that it denies the very notion of free will and individual choice. As Mises explains:

Marxism asserts that a man’s thinking is determined by his class affiliation. Every social class has a logic of its own. The product of thought cannot be anything else than an “ideological disguise” of the selfish class interests of the thinker.

Marxist theories developed further by the Frankfurt School and modern critical race theories extend this notion of class affiliation to racial affiliation. Just as one’s thought cannot be anything else other than a reflection of his class interests, so one’s thought inevitably reflects his race. Thus, for example, Ariana Doss speaks not only of her personal opinion, but that of “any other black person.” Mises rejects this worldview. He further distinguishes the purposeful action of man from mere “animal reaction” meaning the innate biological nature of animals such as the “instincts of nourishment, of reproduction, and of aggression,” and rejects “the method of instinct-psychology” which says that the goal of human action is “the satisfaction of an instinctive urge.”

Many champions of the instinct school are convinced that they have proved that action is not determined by reason, but stems from the profound depths of innate forces, impulses, instincts, and dispositions which are not open to any rational elucidation.

Rejecting these irrational theories, Mises argues that “what distinguishes man from beasts is precisely that he adjusts his behavior deliberately. Man is the being that has inhibitions, that can master his impulses and desires.” Human action is deliberate and masterful, not simply determined by one’s history, race, or class. Human action and human choices are not prescribed by the dominant ideology or by prevailing power structures, but by individual will and agency.

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

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In the days of yore, there were kings. Everybody could agree to hate the king because he was rich and well-fed, when most of his minions were not.

Then, a more effective system was invented: democracy. Its originators had in mind a system whereby the populace could choose their leader from amongst themselves – thereby gaining a leader who understood them and represented them.

In short order, those amongst the populace who wished to rule found a way to game the new system in a way that would allow them to, in effect, be kings, but to do so from behind the scenes, whilst retaining the illusion of democracy.

The formula is to create two opposing political parties. Each is led by someone who’s presented as being a “representative of the people.”

You then present the two parties as having opposing views on governance. It matters little what the differences are. In fact, you can have the differences be as obscure and arbitrary as, say, gay rights or abortion, and they will work as well as any other differences. What matters is that your two parties object to each other strenuously on the declared issues, working the electorate into a lather.

Once you have each group hating the other group “on principle,” you’re home free. At that point, you’ve successfully completed the distraction. The electorate now believe that, whatever the trumped-up issues are, they’re critical to the ethical governance of the country.

Most importantly, the electorate actually believe that their future well-being depends on the outcome of the next election – that it will decide whether their own view on the issues will prevail.

In a dictatorship, the leaders try to convince the people to support the dictatorship by claiming that more than 90% of the people voted for the dictator. But this is primitive thinking. It results in the same focused anti-leader sentiment that plagued the kings.

Far better to have the people fail to recognise who their actual rulers are and focus on the candidates, who are mere bit players and are changed as needed.

And, in a country where the illusion of democracy has become refined, the rulers come to understand that elections should not result in an overwhelming victory for one party or the other. Quite the opposite. If it can be arranged effectively, the best election is one that results in a 51% to 49% split.

This ensures that the 49% will not lose hope – that they’ll be both frustrated and angry at their near-miss, and redouble their efforts in the next election in order to have a win. And the 51% will wipe their collective brow in relief at having won, but will fear losing their slim advantage next time around.

Both parties must remain both hopeful and fearful. Keep them focused on each other – hating each other – and they’ll never figure out that you control both candidates like marionettes. The focus should never be on you, the real ruling class.

It’s also quite important to switch winners often. The ball should bounce back and forth from one party to the other frequently, allowing each winning party to dump the other party’s actual accomplishments when they take over.

However, just as important, the new winning party does not rescind the more oppressive accomplishments of the previous party. In this way, it becomes possible for the only long-term accomplishments to be the growing power of the government over the population, not advances for the populace.

And of course, this, by definition, means that the real rulers, the perennial group of individuals who control those who are elected – continually expand their power and wealth at the expense of the electorate.

But what of the candidates themselves? Do they recognise that they’re mere foot soldiers in the game?

Ideally, no. At any given time in any society, there are sufficient people whose egos exceed their abilities. Such individuals are ideal as candidates, as they tend to love the limelight, but will easily cave to the desires of those who made their candidacy possible. No candidate at the higher levels ever attains office without owing his soul to his backers. That ensures that, in spite of their public bravado, they remain controllable by their masters.

What’s extraordinary in this picture is that it’s possible for the populace to figure out the scam and yet, still believe that they live in a democratic system in which their vote may decide the future of the country.

Increasingly, particularly in Europe and North America, the citizenry are becoming aware that the Deep State collectively rule the countries. They understand that this largely invisible group of people are the true rulers, yet they vainly imagine that somehow the puppet leaders that they elect have the power to effect a solution.

Time after time, regardless of how adamant the marionettes are that they’ll follow the will of the people and save the day, in every case, the people’s hopes are dashed and the national policy reverts to business as usual.

In every case, the true leaders create the problems, cash in on them, then present the government as the solution to the problems, then cash in again.

In every case, the electorate pick up the tab and, rather than rebel, vainly hope that the next election will provide them with a group of marionettes who will actually deliver them from evil.

What’s astonishing is not that the Deep State lives only for its own ends, but that the populace recognise that it exists and still imagine that change from the status quo is possible.

Voting is not intended to count. It’s meant to be the pacifier that’s inserted into the public mouth periodically, when the public become grumpy that they must submit to kings.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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“If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.” President Donald Trump, NBC News Interview, March 30, 2025

President Donald Trump is threatening to launch air strikes on Iran for activities that are approved under the terms of Iran’s treaty obligations. This is not a matter on which there should be any debate. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) explicitly grants all parties, including Iran, the “inalienable right” to develop, research, produce, and use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. This “inalienable right” includes the enriching of uranium.

Trump either doesn’t understand what a “treaty” is or thinks its terms should not apply to Iran. For the sake of clarity, a treaty is a formal, legally binding agreement between sovereign states that is governed by international law. It establishes mutual obligations, rights, or rules on matters such as trade, security, nuclear non-proliferation, or environmental protection. A treaty is not optional and cannot be repealed by executive fiat. States that ratify treaties are legally obligated to comply with their terms in good faith. Political leaders, as representatives of the state, are expected to uphold these obligations.

This is all very straightforward which is why we find so it hard to understand why Trump is threatening a country that is clearly “in compliance” with its obligations under the NPT. Here’s what Trump said on Friday on Air Force One:

“They won’t be enriching. If they enrich, then we’re going to have to do it the other way… (air strikes) And I don’t really want to do it the other way but we’re going to have no choice. There’s not going to be enrichment.”

Trump has no legal authority to determine whether Iran can enrich uranium or not. It’s simply not his decision to make. Even Grok—with its obvious pro-Israel bias—understands this. Check it out:

Donald Trump, whether as a private citizen or as U.S. president, has no legal authority under international law to demand that Iran stop enriching uranium. Iran, as a sovereign state and signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), has the right under Article IV to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, including uranium enrichment, provided it complies with its safeguards obligations under Article III and its Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (CSA) with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). No individual state, including the United States, has the unilateral legal authority under international law to prohibit Iran from exercising this right. Any demand from Trump would be a political or diplomatic action, not a legally binding directive, unless backed by a UN Security Council resolution, which would require agreement from other permanent members (e.g., Russia, China). Grok

Trita Parsi explains how Trump has adopted John Bolton’s Iran policy

Also, there is no provision in international law or under the UN Charter that allows one country to attack another country based on its own subjective perception of what ‘may or may not’ constitute a threat. That’s insanity, and it flies in the face of the UN’s efforts to ensure peace and security through collective action and multilateralism. Besides, there is no credible legal case against Iran, because Iran is not violating the rules. What the MSM stubbornly refuses to tell the public is that Iran has no nuclear weapons and no nuclear weapons program. And—according to the IAEA—Iran has been “in compliance” since 2003 and has never diverted nuclear material to a weapons program. In other words, there’s no legal case against Iran at all. Zilch.

So, what is the point of Trump’s fulminations? Why is he threatening a peaceful country that is clearly “playing by the rules”?

Did we mention that the Trump campaign was given over $100 million by wealthy Zionist donors whose driving ambition is to topple the government in Tehran and absorb territorial Iran into Greater Israel?

Could that be a factor? Could that explain why Trump convened 5 separate meetings with Iranian negotiators without once mentioning the issue of “nuclear enrichment”, but then—Surprise, Surprise—did a swift 180 after which he made “zero enrichment” the foundational demand for which he has declared unflinching support?

How do you explain that sudden about-face? Is Trump pursuing an Israeli agenda or putting “America First”?

And why would Trump stake-out such a flimsy, untenable position when he knows that enrichment is the one provision in the NPT on which Iran will never budge?

The obvious answer is that Trump doesn’t want an agreement; he does not want to resolve the issue peacefully. That’s why he focused on the one issue on which there is no flexibility, figuring (quite rightly) that enrichment can be used as a pretext for war. And that’s the goal, war with Iran.

(Readers who have been following developments with Iran closely may recall that Trump’s original demand was that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”. (Iran has agreed to that demand.) But now, he has sneakily changed the wording to “no enrichment” as if the two things are the same. Naturally, the pro-Israel media has not drawn attention to the president’s sleight-of-hand fearing that it would reveal the deceptive game he is playing. But, the fact remains, Trump used the negotiations to look like he genuinely wanted peace, and then quickly moved the goalposts as the “talks” progressed. Bottom line: A peaceful settlement was never Trump’s objective.

This is from an article at The Times of Israel (June 8, 2025:

Iran conducted and covered up “a number” of implosion tests that are key to developing a nuclear weapon in 2003, an analysis of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s May 31 report on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program reveals.

According to the Washington, DC-based Institute for Science and International Security think tank, which analyzed and published key points from the IAEA report, the activities carried out by Iran were in preparation for a “cold test” in the development of a nuclear bomb, which involves the creation of “a fully assembled nuclear device with a surrogate core of natural or depleted uranium rather than weapons-grade uranium. Times of Israel

This is how desperate the Trump team (and their Israeli allies) are to cast suspicion on Iran’s perfectly legal activities. They’ve actually dug up the details of research that was conducted in 2003. (a period during which Iran has admitted to “aspects of a nuclear weapons program.”) Notice that the IAEA report does not suggest that anything illegal is going on today, or that there is any indication that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program, or even that they are diverting nuclear material to some other location. No. What they’re referring to happened more than two decades ago. It’s a joke.

And the same rule applies to the uranium that has been enriched to 60% which the Iranians have admitted to many times in the past. They’re not hiding anything; they’re looking for sanction’s relief, that’s all. Turns out, they don’t like economic strangulation. Are you surprised?

Iran started enriching uranium at higher levels when Trump broke an earlier treaty (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) that was hammered out by Obama, and which was the most exhaustive and stringent nuclear agreement in history. When Trump walked out in 2018, Iran started enriching at 60% thinking they could use it as a bargaining chip in future negotiations with the administration. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way, mainly because Israel wants the “maximum pressure” policy to continue until they are ready to launch aerial attacks on targets in Iran. So, the sanctions have remained in place.

By the way, under the terms of the NPT, Iran is allowed to enrich uranium to 60% as the treaty does not explicitly set a maximum enrichment level for non-nuclear-weapon states. This is a fact, but it is a fact that is omitted in 100% of the MSM coverage of the issue. Why would that be?

Iran Needs Nuclear Energy

Many people believe that a country with vast oil resources like Iran has no need for nuclear energy, but that’s simply not true. Much of Iran’s electricity generation takes place at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, Iran’s primary nuclear power facility, that uses low-enriched uranium to generate significant electrical power and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Iran also uses nuclear technology to produce radioisotopes for medical diagnostics and treatment,… widely used in cancer diagnosis and imaging. Iran claims its nuclear program supports healthcare by providing isotopes for over 1 million patients annually.

Iran also uses nuclear energy in industrial applications, agriculture, water resource management, scientific research, cancer treatment, technology and radioisotope production. The fact is, no country would join the NPT if they were denied the “peaceful use” of nuclear power. Why would they?

Finally….

Americans should realize that nothing one reads about Iran in the western media can be trusted; it is all poisoned with the same, vile anti-Iran hatred and bias. Since the 1979 Revolution to today, US policy towards Iran has been an unbroken chain of relentless hectoring, belligerence and demonization. Washington has never treated Iran with the respect it deserves nor will it in the future. That’s because—on a fundamental level—the entire US political class despises Iran for asserting sovereign control over their-own vast resources and for failing to kowtow to their mucky-muck overlords in Washington. That’s the real issue; Iran has refused to cave in to Uncle Sam’s diktats which is why it must be punished with economic strangulation, “maximum pressure” and, inevitably, war. That is how America treats the peasants in the provinces, with an iron fist.

Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi summed up Iran’s approach at a recent ceremony for the late Ayatollah Khomeini. He said:

“The main foundation of Iran’s foreign policy is based on the principle of renouncing foreign domination. Trump’s ban on enrichment is itself domination, and this is unacceptable to the Iranian people.”

To its credit, Iran has never ‘given an inch’ to Washington’s endless badgering and saber-rattling. They have stuck by their principles and defended their right as a free country to choose their own development model, their own political system and their own collective future without bullying or coercion.

Iran should be applauded for shrugging off Washington’s threats and intimidation, and for its unflinching commitment to the principle of sovereign independence. They have preserved their dignity through 45 years of nonstop hostility and antagonism.

Bravo, Iran.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

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“If Mr. Putin genuinely wants to save the lives of his soldiers and of his civilians then he should end the war conclusively and dramatically right now. This, I believe, is well within his power if he has the will and the vision to act as the situation requires.” — Gilbert Doctorow

I am pleased to see Gilbert Doctorow’s concurrence with my longstanding position that the greatest threat to peace is Putin’s reluctance to bring the conflict in Ukraine to a quick decisive end. Putin’s ongoing war is a direct road to wider war. 

In his ever-widening war Putin has done nothing to prevent the Kiev government from continuing the war.  I have suggested that Putin hoped to use peace negotiations to achieve a wider understanding with the West.  Others have attributed Putin’s inaction to his concern that if Russia acts decisively, the result will be to unite the West to more hostile action.  Still others attribute the never-ending conflict to Russian weakness.  Whatever the cause, the longer the war continues the more it spins out of control.  Although dismissed by Putin, the attack on Russia’s triad is a very serious matter.

Gilbert Doctorow and John Helmer are commentators, analysts, whatever you want to designate them, who seek out the facts instead of pushing official narratives. They don’t always see eye-to-eye, but I read them as a check on my own thinking.  The fact that most so-called experts are pushing narratives instead of correct explanations is why we are in danger from such reckless actions as attacking Russian strategic nuclear forces.  As I have said, that attack should scare the world to death.

Use it or Lose It

Gilbert Doctorow

I note with some satisfaction that my last two essays questioning Vladimir Putin’s ‘softly, softly’ approach to conduct of the war in Ukraine attracted particular support from the Community. In what follows, I intend to take this logic one big step further for the sake of argument. Let us do what Herman Kahn famously proposed in his controversial book of 1962 and think about the unthinkable.

I do this in the knowledge that a fair percentage of readers in Alternative Media, including this web platform, may be pacifist minded. My intention is not to offend them, but to allow them to consider other positions on how this war can be prosecuted to bring it to a close sooner rather than later and to spare the lives of combatants and civilians on both sides of the conflict. All the while, my first concern is to avoid escalation to nuclear exchanges, which is what the Community surely believes to be the underlying motive of Putin’s ‘softly, softly’ approach.

In a world of demented politicians occupying highest office, as in the case of Joe Biden, assisted by wholly irresponsible, insane assistants like Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, ‘softly, softly’ may have made sense. In a world dominated by Realists like Donald Trump it no longer makes sense.

*****

As readers of yesterday’s essay here will be aware, the Russian government is presently pretending that the attack by Ukrainian drones on its strategic bombers last weekend never happened. Mr. Putin spoke about the Ukrainian attempts to sabotage the peace talks the day before they were scheduled to resume in Istanbul on 2 June by staging terror attacks on civilian rail infrastructure in the Kursk and Bryansk oblasts. This allowed him to attach the ‘state supported terror’ label to the Kiev regime and to prepare the world community for a possible decapitating strike some time in the future. But in time present, Russia’s response to the attacks of last weekend were just more of the same destruction it has rained down on Ukrainian drone manufacturing facilities, design offices and arms caches over the past year or more, all without any apparent effect on the intensity of Ukrainian drone counter-strikes on civilian targets within the Russian Federation, not to mention Ukrainian sabotage by paid agents inside Russia.

The only indirect Russian response to the Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s heavy nuclear capable bombers in air bases across the Federation was the seemingly offhand remark by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Ryabkov during this past week that it is unlikely there will be any renewal of the New START treaty which mandated the vulnerable stationing of Russian bombers out in the open when that treaty expires early next year.

The logic of Putin’s conduct of the war has been to minimize casualties among Russian soldiers. That prioritization has dictated against Russia’s staging any further storming of Ukrainian fortified cities such as was practiced in the first year of the war in the capture of Mariupol and Bakhmut. Though Russian forces have been advancing steadily along the entire 1200 km Donbas front for many months now, the big summer offensive that Western military commentators are talking about is unlikely to happen precisely because such offensives normally result in much higher casualties on the attacking side than in the defending side and the Kremlin does not want to reverse its overall advantage in casualties incurred till now, which may be reckoned at 7:1 or better.

Let us be clear eyed: this laudable concern for its soldiery results not only from humane considerations. I believe that uppermost are political considerations. Russia today is not the USSR in 1942. It is a democracy, not an iron-fisted, murderous dictatorship and it is responsive to the wishes of its citizenry, who do not want to lose vast numbers of men on the battlefield for the sake of national interests.

The Kremlin is sticking to its plan of a slow war of attrition that has played out reasonably well till now. However, this war of attrition has not brought Ukraine to the point of capitulation, which is the fundamental precondition for their agreeing to the peace terms set out in the Memorandum that the Russian delegation handed over to the Ukrainians a week ago in Istanbul and made available publicly by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs since then.

Considering the size of Ukraine and of its population; considering the residual military aid it may yet receive from friends around the world even if the USA steps aside; considering the hatred of moskali (pejorative for Russians) in the broad Ukrainian population that the past decade of intense U.S.-paid propaganda has fanned – the naturally arrived at point of capitulation by Kiev is unforeseeable, even if many, myself included, have suggested it could come soon. Supporting this view are the videos of Russia’s war correspondents speaking to front-line soldiers, especially those manning artillery or tanks shown on Russian state television daily: these soldiers are constantly moving positions to stand clear of incoming artillery and drone strikes coming within minutes of what they themselves are firing. This means that the Ukrainian forces are not fleeing the battlefield but are staying and fighting with deadly effect. Regrettably I do not see any of this reflected in the commentaries of my peers.

*****

During the first Istanbul face to face meeting of Russian and Ukrainian peace negotiators, the head of the Russian delegation Medinsky pointed out that Russia is ready to continue the fight with Ukraine to complete victory however long that takes and he made reference to the Great Northern War with Sweden conducted to victory by Peter the Great…over the course of 21 years.

Twenty-one years!

However, the logic of this argument does not hold. As I said long ago, Vladimir Putin launched the Special Military Operation in February 2022 because he and his advisors saw a window of opportunity to end the military build-up of Ukraine and its planned accession to NATO. The window of opportunity was defined by Russia’s having reached a new plateau in development and first deployment of cutting-edge strategic weapons systems giving it an edge of perhaps five years over the United States. It was also defined by the way the economy had been made sanctions proof since 2014.

This window of opportunity would close within five years as the USA caught up in strategic weapons and as Putin’s holding center stage in Russian politics comes to an end for natural reasons of health, life longevity and so on.

In the meantime, the war itself has created new ‘sell by dates’ on its continuation. The rise to power of Donald Trump has pointed to the possible withdrawal of US military support for Europe under NATO, all of which has empowered those voices in Brussels calling for a big expansion of military production and expansion of military budgets in Europe. It is now conceivable that Europe will pose a serious threat to Russia in conventional warfare within a five-year time horizon unless Russia scores a military victory in Ukraine soon, compelling a capitulation not only in Kiev leading to the country’s neutrality but also capitulation in Brussels and Washington leading to negotiations redrawing the European security architecture and bringing Russia in from the cold.

If Mr. Putin genuinely wants to save the lives of his soldiers and of his civilians then he should end the war conclusively and dramatically right now. This, I believe, is well within his power if he has the will and the vision to act as the situation requires.

As I suggested a couple of days ago, an Oreshnik strike on the headquarters of Ukrainian terror operations headed by Kyrylo Budanov in downtown Kiev would seriously curtail if not completely shut down the terror dimension of Ukraine’s fight against Russia. Why wait?

An Oreshnik strike on wherever in Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and his closest advisors happen to be would free up Ukrainian politics for a genuine move towards peace talks as opposed to the charade we see today.

But why stop there? It is widely assumed that the leading country in the West promoting delivery of a humiliating defeat on Russia and the country’s subjugation is the United Kingdom. It is widely assumed that the planners and likely help-mates to the Ukrainians in their implementation of Operation Spider Web last weekend were the Brits.

Accordingly, I believe that the best response to the attack on the Russian nuclear triad of last weekend would be for Russia to quietly sink a couple of British nuclear submarines.

Who would back Britain in a retaliatory strike against Russia? No one! Mr. Trump is not going to put the entire USA under threat of instantaneous destruction from unstoppable Russian missiles by rising to the defense of Mr, Keir Starmer and his warmonger ministers.

To those who fear for Mr. Putin, who admire his saintly forbearance, I repeat the bit of folk wisdom I received from my boss in a multinational corporation back in the 1980s: the cemeteries are filled with irreplaceable people.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Further comment by PCR:

An alternative to Doctorow’s view that “the logic of Putin’s conduct of the war has been to minimize casualties among Russian soldiers” is that Putin, having foolishly relied on the Minsk Agreement that was used to deceive him was not prepared for the conflict that Washington forced upon him. Therefore, the Russian intervention had to be restricted to clearing Ukrainian forces from the independent Donbas republics. Having been trapped into a limited response, Putin was kept in the trap by Western accusations that he had “invaded Ukraine” and would go on from there to Western Europe. If Putin finally mobilized sufficient forces to destroy resistance, the West would find its prediction confirmed and unite to enter the conflict. Thus was Putin trapped in his “Special Military Operation.”

Fearful of an expanded conflict, Putin’s failure to respond to provocations and to enforce his red lines has expanded the conflict into attacks on Russia’s nuclear triad, and Putin side-stepped reality again. The consequences of Putin’s acceptance of provocations is his lack of credibility. The West does not believe that he will really fight. This belief, reinforced by Putin’s behavior, will result in a provocation that cannot be ignored, and WW III will begin.

Doctorow is correct that the only way to avoid a real war is for Putin to quickly produce an overwhelming Russian victory that completely removes Ukraine from the conflict and sends a believable message to the West. This can be done with conventional weapons. At the moment Putin’s non-action has eviscerated the credibility of Russia’s war doctrine.

Will Putin end the conflict with victory, or will he condemn the world to war?

I seldom see intelligent and relevant analysis from Russian commentators . Whether this reflects censorship or a misunderstanding of events I do not know. The Western foreign policy community simply repeats official narratives.

The post Is Putin’s Soft Approach Bringing War in its Train? appeared first on LewRockwell.

I regularly see an armed government worker – some people still bound by their government school conditioning would use the word “policeman” – who likes to hide by the side of an old building up the road from my house; he snugs his vehicle up against the side of the old building and in the shade of a big tree so that it is very hard to see him.

He sits there quietly, like one of those trap door spiders that hides in a little burrow so its prey cannot see it, waiting for the prey to get close a . . . and the trap is sprung. Out rushes the spider to ensnare its prey. Are not armed government workers who lurk in hiding for their prey similar insofar as regards their tactics? – and does it not beg an important question?

If – as we are assured – the object of the exercise is to tamp down what is styled “speeding” (and accepted as being something not merely illegal but also dangerous by the same people whose government schooling causes them to not think much about the distinction between illegal and dangerous) then would it not make more sense to hide in plain sight? If “speeders” – as people who drive even 1 MPH faster than whatever speed the government’s sign says is the maximum allowed are by definition – are a danger then that danger would be reduced via the obvious presence of speed limit enforcers. But – on the contrary – it is evident that the government wants people to “speed” so as to have the excuse to extract money from as many of them as possible via a tag-team of speed limits set so low almost everyone becomes a “speeder” and so potential prey for the trap-door spider who hides and waits.

This even extends to camouflaging the vehicles used to catch “speeders.” In the past, police – I use the term in this sentence because at one time they were more deserving of the honorific – drove clearly marked, clearly visible police cars. They were often two-tone and had (typically) large-font lettering – POLICE – on the doors and clearly visible bubble gum machine emergency lights on their roofs. They were easy to see and on account of that fact, served as a deterrent to “speeders” who saw them.

Isn’t that what was wanted?

Obviously not.

Today, the typical vehicle driven by an armed government worker is very hard to see until it is too late. They are painted in the manner of warships, to be harder to identify accurately, especially from a distance. The POLICE lettering is regularly shaded such that it often cannot be see until you’re already too close and the wig-wag lights are buried behind the grille where you cannot see them until they are turned on and by then it is too late. Even more telling is the way these human arachnids deliberately hide so as to not alert their soon-to-be-victims to their presence.

There is – again – only one explanation that makes sense for this. It is that the whole affair is about money – not “safety.” This armed government I see regularly probably extracts thousands of dollars from his victims each week. Some of this “revenue” – the term used by government-school-conditioned non-thinkers to express what they are taught never to think of as other people’s money, taken from them by the government via its enforcers – ends up paying the enforcer to enforce. The genius of the thing is the way it is intellectually laundered. It is made respectable by making it procedural. Forms to sign and checks to be written rather than having to just hand over money to a strong-arm Guido who shows up at your place of business one day to demand money – or else. The government does the same thing, just elliptically.

In the name of keeping us safe.

That none of us do feel safe whenever we notice the presence of an armed government worker – especially if he is in our rearview and riding our bumper – is extremely telling. Why would people who are not criminals fear and loathe the police? Why, because they are not criminals.

And they are not police.

This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.

The post Trap Door Spider appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is some confusion over Russia’s response to the June 1/2 attacks on railway infrastructure and its strategic nuclear forces.

To recap:

On Saturday/Sunday Ukrainian diversion groups used explosives to destroy two Russian railroad bridges in the Kursk and Bryansk region. These bridges were located some 50 kilometer north of the Sumy region frontline. The hits will impact, if only for a short time, the railway bound supply of Russian forces north of Sumy.

One of the bridge explosions destroyed a civil passenger train. Some 10 people were killed and some 100 were wounded. This was likely intended and thereby a terror attack.

On Sunday morning a large scale operation by the Ukrainian secret service managed to attack multiple strategic airfields throughout Russia. Ukrainian sources claimed attacks on five airfields and the destruction of more than 40 strategic bombers.

Current damage assessment confirms attacks on two airfields and the destruction or damaging of up to 10 bombers.

It is very important to distinguish these attacks. While both coincided with negotiations between Ukraine in Russia in Istanbul, and were clearly timed to influence those, the purpose was larger.

The railroad attacks were planned to hinder rearward logistics of Russia’s operation in Ukraine’s Sumy region. That a civilian train was hit by these was likely seen by the Ukrainian forces as an additional feature but not as a main purpose. Still, it is the mass harm of civilians that make this otherwise permissible attack on a quasi-military target a terrorist act. The Russian side has emphasized this.

The attack on the strategic bombers of Russia’s nuclear triad (land based nuclear missiles, submarine based nuclear missiles, air carriers for launching nuclear bombs and missiles) hit at a much higher level. It was a military attack on a strategic military target. Russia’s publicly announced doctrine allows for the use of nuclear forces to retaliate for such an attack on its nuclear assets. This independent of the immediate source of the attack.

The attack on the railway bridges were an operation that is typical for British services. It has been reported and is well known that British services have advised and helped the Ukrainians to launch sea drones against Russia in the Black Sea, to cross the Dnieper river in Krinki and in other operations of higher propaganda value.

The Russian Foreign Minister has accused the U.K of direct involvement in the terrorist attack.

Several western experts of U.S. special services believe, as the Russian’s do, that the operation against its nuclear forces have a different actor behind them – most likely the CIA. It is unlikely that Ukraine would have been able to identify and target those airfields without the intelligence acquired by U.S. sources. There is also no military benefit for Ukraine to attack Russian air bases far from its territory.

It has been reported that since 2014 the CIA had build some 20 stations in Ukraine from where it operates against Russia. Several high ranking Ukrainian intelligence actors, including the head of its military intelligence service General Budanov, have been trained by the CIA and are actively cooperating with it.

The CIA has a special unit dedicated to long term plans to harm Russia. As the Washington Post once described it:

The warren of cubicles was secured behind a metal door. The name on the hallway placard had changed often over the years, most recently designating the space as part of the Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia. But internally, the office was known by its unofficial title: “Russia House.”

The unit had for decades been the center of gravity at the CIA, an agency within the agency, locked in battle with the KGB for the duration of the Cold War. The department’s prestige had waned after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and it was forced at one point to surrender space to counterterrorism officers.

But Russia House later reclaimed that real estate and began rebuilding, vaulting back to relevance as Moscow reasserted itself. Here, among a maze of desks, dozens of reports officers fielded encrypted cables from abroad, and “targeters” meticulously scoured data on Russian officials, agencies, businesses and communications networks the CIA might exploit for intelligence.

‘Russia House’ was deeply involved in creating the hoax about Russian interference in U.S. elections. Former nuclear weapon inspector Scott Ritter as well as others have asserted that political control over ‘Russia House’ is less stringent than desirable.

Another data point for the CIA’s involvement was a piece by David Ignatius, its spokesperson at the Washington Post which openly threatened further attacks on Russia’s strategic nuclear assets:

Ukraine’s dirty war is just getting started (archived) – David Ignatius / Washington Post

Ukraine has considered a naval version of the sneak-attack tactic it used so effectively on Sunday. The sources said the [Ukrainian intelligence service] SBU weighed sending sea drones hidden in cargo containers to attack ships of Russia and its allies in the North Pacific. But, so far, they apparently have yet to launch these operations.

‘Russia House’ continues to be busy. Still, even ‘Russia House’ needs a legal bases to act which usually comes in the form of presidential findings.

The conclusion from this is that the CIA, with the knowledge of the White House, has planned and directed the Ukrainian attack on Russia’s strategic air fields.

The different qualities of the two attacks on June 1/2 require different responses. One response, throughout the last days, has come by strong Russian missile and drone attacks against military and military-industrial targets throughout Ukraine.

The Washington Post erred when it headlined:

Ukrainian cities pounded by Russia in retaliation for Sunday drone strike (archived) – Washington Post

The assault appears to be retaliation for Ukraine’s extensive attack on Russia’s bomber fleet on Sunday, targeting air bases across Russia and damaging many nuclear-capable aircraft.

The Russian attacks, by each some 500 missiles and drones over several nights, have obviously been in the plans for some time. They are not very special. Russian sources have explicitly said that these attacks were in response to Ukraine’ terrorist attack:

Russian military retaliated against Kiev’s ‘terrorism’ – MOD – RT

The barrage, which included air-, sea-, and land-based missiles as well as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), was a response to recent “terrorist acts” carried out by Kiev, Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Friday.

Ukraine blew up railway bridges in Russia last week, derailing civilian and freight trains and killing at least seven and injuring over 120.

What we have so far seen as Russia’s response to the attacks was only related to the terror attack which harmed civilians.

The retaliation for the attack on Russia’s strategic nuclear assets has yet to come.

The U.S. knows this:

US Believes Russia Response To Ukraine Attack Not Over Yet: Officials – Reuters

The United States believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threatened retaliation against Ukraine over its drone attack last weekend has not happened yet in earnest and is likely to be a significant, multi-pronged strike, US officials told Reuters.
…
The first official said Moscow’s attack would be “asymmetrical,” meaning that its approach and targeting would not mirror Ukraine’s strike last weekend against Russian warplanes.

Russia launched an intense missile and drone barrage at the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on Friday and Russia’s Defense Ministry said the strike on military and military-related targets was in response to what it called Ukrainian “terrorist acts” against Russia. But the US officials believe the complete Russian response is yet to come.
…
Putin told President Donald Trump in a telephone conversation on Wednesday that Moscow would have to respond to attack, Trump said in a social media post.

Trump later told reporters that “it’s probably not going to be pretty.”

Trump claims that the U.S. had not known of the attack on Russia’s strategic bombers. It is possible that Trump did not know about it. He may not have been informed to enable him to give a plausible denial. He may also simply lie about it. There is no doubt though in my mind that the U.S. was involved in it.

There is speculation that Russia will respond by attacking government buildings, especially those of the special services, in Kiev.

I doubt that this is a sufficient response for the attack on strategic nuclear assets. The Ukrainians would take a beating by such a strike but the U.S., which is undoubtedly behind the attack, would be left unharmed.

There would be nothing to deter the U.S., or others, to further chip away at Russia’s nuclear retaliation capability by, for example, attacking – as Ignatius already announces – the bases of Russia’s nuclear submarine fleets.

No. Any response for the attack on Russia’s nuclear forces must include a very strong warning to the U.S. to not further walk down that path.

I do not know if the U.S. military still has some B-52 bombers on Diego Garcia. Destroying those would be adequate. Other potential targets are U.S. submarines and their bases. An attack on U.S. personnel that was involved in planing the attack would also be appropriate.

But all such operation could potentially lead to escalation. Especially while a hawkish Senate and blob is pushing against Trump’s attempt to reestablish good relation with Russia.

Russia will need something different:

Let’s be honest: repeating slogans like “our response will be success on the battlefield” won’t cut it here. Ukraine’s leadership isn’t acting out of military logic, but emotional desperation. Their calculation is political. So Russia’s response must be political, too – emotionally resonant, unmistakably firm, and, above all, creative.

This doesn’t mean rash escalation, but we can’t rely on the old playbook. Hitting the same military targets again and again achieves little. Striking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure? Done. Launching another missile as a ‘demonstration’? Predictable. Escalating to mass casualties? Unnecessary and, frankly, counterproductive.

So what’s left?

Innovation.

Russia must now think asymmetrically. That might mean a covert action so unexpected that it catches Ukraine completely off guard. Or it could involve striking symbolic targets that shift the psychological balance. The key is to remind Kiev – and its patrons – that nothing they do goes unanswered, and that the cost of provocation will always outweigh the benefit.

You are invited to brainstorm in the comments what kind of operation might those criteria.

One asymmetrical response I can think of would be an attack on British, not U.S. owned, strategic assets. Any hit on Britain would be well deserved anyway. A strike against British nuclear assets would be strong enough to be understood by the U.S. as a severe warning while it would be unlikely to lead to escalation. The Brits are unable to escalate on their own and the U.S. will be unwilling to go there.

The planning for any asymmetrical operation will take a while. It therefore do not expect the Russian response for the attack on its nuclear assets to occur with the next days.

Later this week there will be another meeting of Russia’s security council. The revenge for the strike on Russia’s  strategic assets will certainly be part of its agenda.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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LOS ANGELES – Violent and fiery riots unfolded throughout the weekend in Los Angeles as left-wing activists set cars on fire and caused significant damage as they protested Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. In response, President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard to quell the violence.

Much like with the violent Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, Democrats were quick to rush to call the violent and “fiery” protests “peaceful.”

By Saturday, Los Angeles Police Department officers had already arrested 29 people in connection to the “fiery protests,” according to a local NBC affiliate.

Still, New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker said the protests were “peaceful” during an interview on Sunday. Booker and left-wing Governor Gavin Newsom were quick to blame President Donald Trump for sending in troops on Friday to try to maintain order.

“The reality is, we see peaceful protests launching in Los Angeles,” the New Jersey senator said, as reported by Fox News. “A lot of these peaceful protests are being generated because the president of the United States is sowing chaos and confusion by arresting people who are showing up for their immigration hearings.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass also blamed Trump for her own city burning to the ground. “What we’re seeing in Los Angeles is chaos that is provoked by the administration,” the mayor said, parroting the Democratic talking points.

Video shows left-wing activists committing widespread violence, and it remains unclear how Trump himself is at fault.

Violent activists also burned the American flag and shouted vulgar chants at Trump, in addition to calling on their fellow criminals to “burn it down.”

Rioting began on Friday when law enforcement aimed to serve warrants on illegal immigrants.

ABC 10 reports:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers executed search warrants at multiple locations, including outside a clothing warehouse where a tense scene unfolded as a crowd tried to block agents from driving away. Sirens blared as protesters surrounded black SUVs and tactical vehicles. Officers threw flash bangs into the street to disperse people as they shouted and filmed the scene with their cell phones. One demonstrator tried to physically stop a vehicle from leaving.

Trump, for his part, has continued to call for peace and law and order.

“Just one look at the pictures and videos of the Violence and Destruction tells you all you have to know,” he wrote this morning on Truth Social. “We will always do what is needed to keep our Citizens SAFE, so we can, together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

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This video production focusses on the historical transition from Al Qaeda “Freedom Fighters” (1979-1980) to  Al Qaeda “Terrorists” (September 11, 2001).

Phase I. 1979-1980: Supporting Al Qaeda “Freedom Fighters”

Le Nouvel Observateur (LNO): The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated … that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Zbigniew Brzezinski (ZB): Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen [Al Qaeda Freedom Fighters] began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Phase II. September 11, 2001. Going After and Combating Al Qaeda “Terrorists”. “The Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT)

A few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration concluded without supporting evidence, that “Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were prime suspects”.

CIA Director George Tenet stated that bin Laden has the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”

September 11, 2001 marked the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) which was heralded by the media as a humanitarian endeavour.

This was achieved by sustaining the myth that Muslim terrorists supported by the Taliban had attacked the WTC and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The evidence –including the subsequent studies on controlled demolition–have confirmed that this was an outright lie. 

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. 

Phase III. June 2025. The Al Qaeda Bad Guys (recruited by US-NATO), are NOW promoted to the rank of  Pro-Democracy “Good Guy Politicians”, supported by the Washington Consensus (IMF-World Bank). 

.

The Al Qaeda Terrorists No longer Constitute a Threat. “A Good Guy Al Qaeda leader” has become President of Syria, with the endorsement of President Donald Trump.

.

Ironically, this “Good Guy” Al Qaeda leader Al-Jawlani was until recently categorized as a terrorist by the U.S. State Department.

Correction: The 1953 Coup d’état in Iran was a regime change which consisted in reinstating  Shah Reza Pahlavi. The Islamic State was installed in 1979. (M.Ch.)

The original source of this article is Global Research.

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Reporter: “What’s the bar for sending in the Marines?”

Trump: “The bar is what I think it is.“

In Trump’s America, the bar for martial law is no longer constitutional—it’s personal.

Indeed, if ever we needed proof that Donald Trump was an operative for the Deep State, this is it.

Despite what Trump would have us believe, the Deep State is not the vast numbers of federal employees who have been fired as part of his government purge.

Rather, the Deep State refers to the entrenched network of unelected bureaucrats, intelligence agencies, military contractors, surveillance firms, and corporate lobbyists that operate beyond the reach of democratic accountability. It is a government within a government—an intelligence-industrial complex that persists regardless of who sits in the Oval Office and whose true allegiance lies not with the Constitution but with power, profit, and control.

In other words, the Deep State doesn’t just survive presidential administrations—it recruits them. And in Trump, it has found a showman willing to turn its agenda into a public performance of raw power—militarized, theatrical, and loyal not to the Constitution, but to dominance.

What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops federalized; and military weapons, tactics and equipment on full display—is the latest chapter in that performance.

Trump is flexing his presidential muscles with a costly, violent, taxpayer-funded military display intended to intimidate, distract and discourage us from pulling back the curtain on the reality of the self-serving corruption, grift, graft, overreach and abuse that have become synonymous with his Administration.

Don’t be distracted. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be sidelined by the spectacle of a police state.

As columnist Thomas Friedman predicted years ago, “Some presidents, when they get into trouble before an election, try to ‘wag the dog’ by starting a war abroad. Donald Trump seems ready to wag the dog by starting a war at home.”

This is yet another manufactured crisis fomented by the Deep State.

When Trump issues a call to “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” explaining to reporters that he wants to have them “everywhere,” we should all be alarmed.

This is martial law without a formal declaration of war.

This heavy-handed, chest-thumping, politicized, militarized response to what is clearly a matter for local government is yet another example of Trump’s disregard for the Constitution and the limits of his power.

Political protests are protected by the First Amendment until they cross the line from non-violent to violent. Even when protests turn violent, constitutional protocols remain for safeguarding communities: law and order must flow through local and state chains of command, not from federal muscle.

By breaking that chain of command, Trump is breaking the Constitution.

Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by civilian police, despite the objections of local and state leaders, crosses the line into authoritarianism.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

In the span of a single week, the Trump administration is providing the clearest glimpse yet of its unapologetic, uncompromising, corrupt allegiance to the authoritarian Deep State.

First came the federalization of the National Guard, deployed to California in response to protests sparked by violent and aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the country. Then, just days later, the president is set to preside over a lavish, taxpayer-funded military parade in the nation’s capital.

These two events bookend the administration’s unmistakable message: dissent will be crushed, and power will be performed.

Trump governs by force (military deployment), fear (ICE raids, militarized policing), and spectacle (the parade).

This is the spectacle of a police state. One side of the coin is militarized suppression. The other is theatrical dominance. Together, they constitute the language of force and authoritarian control.

Wrapped in the rhetoric of “public safety” and “restoring order,” the federalization of California’s National Guard is not about security. It’s about signaling power.

This is the first time in over half a century that a president has forcibly deployed the National Guard against a state governor’s wishes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s public opposition to the deployment was met not with dialogue, but with the threat of arrest from Trump himself—a move that evokes the worst abuses of executive power.

This is more than political theater; it is a constitutional crisis in motion.

As we have warned before, this tactic is familiar.

In times of political unrest, authoritarian regimes invoke national emergencies as pretexts to impose military solutions. The result? The Constitution is suspended, civilian control is overrun, and the machinery of the state turns against its own people.

This is precisely what the Founders feared when they warned against standing armies on American soil: that one day, the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them. Where the military marches at home, the Republic trembles.

And this is not unprecedented.

It is a textbook play from the authoritarian handbook, deployed with increasing frequency under Trump. The optics are meant to intimidate, to broadcast control, and to discourage resistance before it begins.

Fear is the Deep State’s favorite tool—it doesn’t just control the people, it conditions them to surrender voluntarily.

Thus, deploying the National Guard in this manner is not just a political maneuver—it is a strategic act of fear-based governance designed to instill terror, particularly among vulnerable communities, and ensure compliance.

As President Harry S. Truman observed, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

Under Trump, the lines between a civilian democracy and a military regime continue to blur. American streets increasingly resemble war zones, where peaceful protests are met with riot gear, armored vehicles, and surveillance drones.

America is being transformed into a battlefield before our eyes.

Militarized police. Riot squads. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Stun grenades. Crowd control and intimidation tactics.

From federal law enforcement to local police, from border patrol to the intelligence agencies, the guiding doctrine is the same: treat Americans as suspects first, citizens second—if at all.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

This is the language of force.

This is what happens when the rule of law gets replaced by the rules of force: war becomes the organizing principle of domestic governance, law becomes subordinate to command, and liberty is reclassified as a liability.

The war zone mentality—where citizens are treated like insurgents to be subdued—is a hallmark of authoritarian rule.

This transformation is not accidental—it’s strategic. The government now sees the public not as constituents to be served but as potential combatants to be surveilled, managed, and subdued. In this new paradigm, dissent is treated as insurrection, and constitutional rights are treated as threats to national security.

What we are witnessing today is also part of a broader setup: an excuse to use civil unrest as a pretext for militarized overreach.

You want to turn a peaceful protest into a riot? Bring in the militarized police with their guns and black uniforms and warzone tactics and “comply or die” mindset. Ratchet up the tension across the board. Take what should be a healthy exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turn it into a lesson in authoritarianism.

We saw signs of this strategy in Charlottesville, Virginia, where police failed to de-escalate and at times exacerbated tensions during protests that should have remained peaceful. The resulting chaos gave authorities cover to crack down—not to protect the public, but to reframe protest as provocation and dissent as disorder.

Charlottesville was the trial run—California is the main event.

Then and now, the objective wasn’t to preserve peace and protect the public. It was to delegitimize dissent and cast protest as provocation.

Yet the right to criticize the government and speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

The government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power. While all kinds of labels are now applied to “unacceptable” speech, the message is clear: Americans have no right to express themselves if what they are saying is at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Which brings us to this present moment: there’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.

Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests. Tensions rise, violence escalates, and federal armies move in. Meanwhile, despite the protests and the outrage, the government’s abuses continue unabated.

It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the Deep State. The government wants a reason to crack down and lock down and bring in its biggest guns.

They want us divided. They want us to turn on one another. They want us powerless in the face of their artillery and armed forces. They want us silent, servile and compliant.

They certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, much less attempt to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully.

This is how it begins.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.

Today, California is being staged as the test site for the coming crackdown.

The Trump administration provokes unrest through inhumane policies—in this case, mass ICE raids—then paints the resulting protests as violent threats to national security. The answer? Deploy the military.

It’s a cynical and calculated loop: create the crisis, then respond with force. This strategy transforms protest into pretext, dissent into justification for domination.

There are disturbing echoes of history in these tactics, and they come with grave legal implications. We have seen this before.

It has been 55 years since President Nixon deployed the National Guard to put down anti-war student protests, culminating in the Kent State massacre. During the civil rights era, peaceful demonstrators were met with dogs, firehoses, and police batons. In more recent memory, federal agents cracked down on Occupy Wall Street encampments and Black Lives Matter protests with militarized force.

All of it under the guise of order.

Trump’s tactics fall squarely in that lineage.

His use of the military against civilians violates the spirit—if not the letter—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is meant to bar federal military involvement in domestic affairs. It also raises severe constitutional questions about the infringement of First Amendment rights to protest and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure.

Modern tools of repression compound the threat. AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing software, biometric databases, and fusion centers have made mass control seamless and silent. The state doesn’t just respond to dissent anymore; it predicts and preempts it.

While boots are on the ground in California, preparations are underway for a military spectacle in Washington, D.C.

At first glance, a military procession might seem like a patriotic display. But in this context, it is something far darker. Trump’s parade is not a celebration of service; it is a declaration of supremacy. It is not about honoring troops; it is about reminding the populace who holds the power and who wields the guns.

This is how authoritarian regimes govern—through spectacle. North Korea, Russia, and China use grandiose military pageants to project strength and silence dissent. Mussolini marched troops as theater in carefully staged public displays to bolster fascist control. Augusto Pinochet filled Chile’s streets with tanks to intimidate critics and consolidate power. All of it designed not to honor the nation—but to dominate it.

By sandwiching a military crackdown between a domestic troop deployment and a showy parade, Trump is sending a unified message: dissent is weakness. Obedience is strength. You are being watched.

This is not about immigration. It is not about security. It is not even about protest.

This is about power. Raw, unchecked, theatrical power. And whether we, the people, will accept a government that rules not by consent, but by coercion.

The Constitution was not written to accommodate authoritarian pageantry. It was written to restrain it. It was never meant to sanctify conquest as governance.

We are at a crossroads.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Strip away that consent, and all that remains is conquest—through force, spectacle, and fear.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we allow the language of fear, the spectacle of dominance, and the machinery of militarized governance to become normalized, then we are no longer citizens of a republic—we are subjects of a police state.

The only question now is: will we rise up as citizens of a constitutional republic—or bow down as subjects of an authoritarian regime?

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The Spectacle of a Police State: This Is Martial Law Without a Formal Declaration of War appeared first on LewRockwell.

The NATO summit in The Hague could mark the end of the European Union. The President of the United States has announced that he may no longer be responsible for the EU’s security. If this were the case, there would be an urgent need to reorganize the stability of the European continent. Washington already has its solution: replacing the current German-based structure with a structure centered around Poland.

On June 24, the Netherlands will host the NATO Heads of State and Government Summit. This could be a watershed moment for the organization: upon taking office, US President Donald Trump warned his allies that if each member state did not devote at least 5% of its annual GDP to defense, the Pentagon would relinquish its role as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR). Five months ago, however, most were not devoting even 2.5% of their GDP to defense.

Clearly, it is impossible for member states to increase their defense budgets at such a pace. President Trump’s announcement therefore seemed irreversible. The Pentagon was already planning to withdraw its forces from Europe.

Polish President Andrzej Duda rushed to Washington to meet his American counterpart without an appointment. He managed to see him for a few minutes on February 22, on the sidelines of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He assured him that Poland had begun restructuring its armed forces several years ago; that it aimed to have the largest army in Western and Central Europe; and that it could not move any faster. A conciliatory Donald Trump granted him a reprieve: US troops would be the last to leave Poland.

In Paris and London, meetings were held between defense ministers and chiefs of staff. There was talk of a possible replacement of the United States’ nuclear umbrella with those of France and the United Kingdom. However, this proposal encountered numerous obstacles: first, the United Kingdom did not really possess the atomic bomb, since its facilities depended on its big brother, the United States. Second, the atomic bomb could only depend on one political power. Consequently, states that placed themselves under the protection of another must trust it.

Ultimately, all these discussions came to a halt when Washington suspended all information exchanges for five days. Everyone immediately and cruelly felt that without the power of the United States, their armies were worthless. On the Ukrainian battlefield, the European Union’s weapons were no longer functioning. Defeat was imminent. Within days, the myth of an independent European Union defense system was dead. Everyone made amends.

This excitement, these back-to-back summits, are a hallmark of the negotiations led by Donald Trump. He pushes his interlocutors, lets them consider solutions, brutally shows them that they cannot function without him, and ultimately imposes his solution on them.

In early June, the United Kingdom published its Strategic Defence Review 2025. It’s an ode to protecting the United States. In true British style, the Defense Secretary added to this document the announcement of the purchase of Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II bombers capable of carrying and firing atomic bombs. While this still doesn’t quite add up to 5% of GDP in military spending, these represent lucrative contracts that London could sign in exchange for protecting the United States.

More in line with Donald Trump’s demands, the “Bucharest Nine” (the Baltic countries, the
Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria) and the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) met in Vilnius last week. These fourteen states all committed to spending 5% of their GDP on defense by 2025. They therefore met the challenge, sometimes cheating a little, by including police spending under the same heading.

This leaves 17 member states (excluding the United States) that will not meet Donald Trump’s demands at the Hague summit. How will the United States react? President Trump may consider that he will cease to fulfill his protective duties for these 17 states (including the three largest: Germany, France, and the United Kingdom). He may also consider that, since a minority of NATO members have already fulfilled their commitments, he is granting a reprieve to the others.

This is the thrust of the proposal by Mark Rutte, Secretary-General of the Organization. At the meeting of Defense Ministers on June 5, he stated that an overall 5% investment plan could be broken down into a 3.5% component for capability objectives, plus a second 1.5% component for investments, provided that member states commit to annual plans that allow verification that they are meeting their commitments.

This solution seemed to suit Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, who commented: “We believe that a consensus is close, if not close to a consensus, on a 5% commitment for NATO in The Hague, no later than this month.” He also announced that the next SACEUR would be Belarusian-born General Alexus Grynkewich.

However, Spain still refuses to meet the 5% target. Its Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, publicly rejected it on May 20.

Let’s consider the first possible answer, the one that changes the game. The Lisbon Treaty stipulates that the EU’s security is guaranteed, not by its members, but by NATO. The European Union would instantly become a naked economic giant.

EU experts do not believe Donald Trump will take this step. They argue that, in any case, other NATO members will be able to argue that the 5% requirement was never adopted by a NATO summit (the 2014 summit only called for 3%, not 5%). Trump would not dare impose a rule he defined purely verbally, not because NATO is complying with international law, but because the United States would be more credible if it deployed to the Far East, leaving behind a stable situation in Europe.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented her vision for the future of the EU at the Charlemagne Prize ceremony in Aachen on May 29. She believes the European Union must complete the integration of all Balkan and Eastern European countries (except Russia and Belarus), become a major economic power, and ensure its own security. The problem: why would member states stay if the United States is no longer there to protect them? The Empress did not answer the awkward question.

Let’s return to the hypothesis of withdrawing US protection for the 17 states that do not respect the 5% requirement. Donald Trump makes no secret of the fact that while the EU was formed under a secret clause of the Marshall Plan, it is now part of the “American Empire,” which he rejects. In practice, it only harms the United States (which he considers independent of the “American Empire”). Similarly, Donald Trump makes no secret of his support for the “Three Seas Initiative,” that is, the reorganization of the European continent, no longer around a reunified Germany (and therefore the EU), but around Poland and Lithuania.

This view of things corresponds to history. From the 16th to the 18th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland constituted the “Republic of the Two Nations.” This binational state managed to protect its subjects from attacks by the Teutonic Order, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Swedish Empire. However, due to the opposition of a section of the Polish nobility and its alliance with the Tsarist Empire, the Kingdom of the Two Nations was dismantled. However, during the interwar period, General Józef Piłsudski (Polish Head of State, later President of the Council of Ministers) imagined reviving the Republic of the Two Nations. This is the concept of “Intermarium” and now “Three Seas Initiative.” This intergovernmental body comprises thirteen states: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic. Moldova and Ukraine are associate members, but it is clear that Poland would only want northeastern Ukraine, that is, eastern Galicia.

Donald Trump, who participated in the 2017 summit of the “Three Seas Initiative”, also makes no secret of his desire for this organization to succeed the EU.

Unwilling to be left behind, France has reactivated the “Weimar Triangle,” the Germany-France-Poland summit. Furthermore, on May 9, French President Emmanuel Macron signed the Treaty of Nancy with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The aim is to strengthen military cooperation between the two countries, but still within the framework of NATO.

The fact remains that, if the EU were to disappear, many old territorial conflicts would resurface with the EU’s death. Yet, never, from Charlemagne to Adolf Hitler, including Charles V and Napoleon, have Europeans managed to make peace among themselves. Only the Roman Empire and the “American Empire” have preserved them from their squabbles.

The post EU Members’ Response to President Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

People like Dominic Cummings, chief advisor to former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, have a habit of revealing things we’re not supposed to know about how government operates. They often expose the motives and acts of what many these days call the deep state.

One of the most reasonable definitions of the “deep state” was offered by US defence analyst-turned-writer Mike Lofgren in his 2014 essay “Anatomy of the Deep State“:

[T]here is another government concealed behind the one that is visible[.] [It is] a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out.

The oft-inconvenient comments about that deep state, when uttered by the likes of Cummings, either go unreported by the legacy media or the disclosures are spun to misdirect public attention. That’s because the job of the legacy media and its newer iteration, the Mainstream Alternative Media (MAM), is to maintain the public’s faith in the Establishment and its state—not to prompt us to question it.

Let’s consider the revealing remarks Dominic Cummings made in December 2024 (we’ll insert the names of the current incumbents):

So if you think of two roles, right, the Foreign Secretary [David Lammy] of Great Britain and the private secretary in the PM’s office responsible for foreign affairs [Ailsa Terry], an official whose name has never been in the newspapers, that person [Terry] was, like, ten times more powerful and important than the [foreign] secretary of state [Lammy]. This is something which, I think, people just don’t really realise. [. . .] It’s part of how the whole system has become fake. So, you have fake meritocracy, fake responsibility, and then fake cabinet government. [. . .] [I]t’s all nonsense. The cabinet is just like a staged theatre.

It may come as a relief to many that David Lammy is more window dressing than decision-maker. But that fact does prompt us to ask why, if unelected bureaucrats are running everything behind the scenes, we bother to engage in the political charade at all. Moreover, whom do the bureaucrats serve? And how do we challenge the power of those who really exercise it if they are not the politicians we elect to represent us?

Cummings’ December 2024 comments were not the first politically uncomfortable observations he has voiced in public. I previously reported that during a 2021 Parliamentary Committee hearing Cummings confessed [scroll to 14:02:35]:

In March [2020] I started getting calls from various people saying these new mRNA vaccines could well smash the conventional wisdom. [. . .] What Bill Gates and people like that were saying to me and [to] others in Number 10 was you need to think of this much more like the classic programs of the past [. . .] — the Manhattan Project in WWII, the Apollo program. [. . .] That’s essentially what we did.

On that occasion, Cummings described how “people like Bill Gates and that kind of network” of globalist oligarchs were telling the UK government what its Covid emergency response should be. In other words, Cummings was confessing that the general public’s perception of government is “all nonsense.” Government is just “staged theatre” to keep us believing in the “fake” political system.

The BBC kindly fact-checked Cummings’ 2021 Committee statement to ensure the British people were being properly informed. But, instead of investigating his revelation about an oligarch networks, the BBC desperately tried to convince its audience that politicians alone were the ones making the decisions (even though Cummings had clearly indicated that they are not the decision-makers).

Sky News, for its part, not only failed to report the nature of Cummings’ revelations about the network of “Bill Gates-type people” but squeezed in Cummings’ inference that these oligarchs were some of “the most competent people in the world.” There is, however, no reason to think they are.

Of course, Cummings isn’t the only insider to have blown the whistle on the true nature of the British state. Liz Truss, the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, was similarly shocked. She said:

What I found out when I got into Number 10 [UK prime minister’s residence and government HQ] is that, if I got to the top of the tree, I would be able to implement those Conservative policies. [. . .] What I discovered, is that I was not holding the levers. The levers were held by the Bank of England, the Office of Budget Responsibility [OBS]. [T]hey were not held by the prime minister or the chancellor [UK finance minister].

By virtue of its Royal Charter, the Bank of England is a private enterprise entirely independent of the UK government. The OBR is a public-private partnership that is an independent fiscal policy watchdog. Describing itself that way suggests it simply monitors government fiscal policy—taxation and expenditure. But the OBR also offers forecasts and, by presenting them to the respective parliamentary committees, actually shapes government fiscal policy.

The OBR’s “forecasting methods” are overseen by its advisory panel. This means that representatives from Vanguard, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, EDF Energy, McKinsey, KPMG, Barclays, and a slew of privately funded academic research departments and think tanks, such as Chatham House, are steering UK government fiscal policy—irrespective of which party is elected into office.

Like Cummings’ admissions, Truss’s revelations only confirm something many of us already know: Government policy does not reflect the will of the people. Government is not of, for, and by the people. These are baseless truisms. So, why do we believe them?

Why Do We Believe In Fake Government?

I suggest most people imagine electoral politics is meaningful because the entire legacy media has been perpetuating that illusion for decades, if not centuries. Conditioned as we are, we don’t stop to question the system and its players. Rather, we step back and allow the ones in charge to get on with business as they please.

The same deep state network funds both the corporate wing of the legacy media and the supposedly independent MAM. The corporate branch serves the powerful by directly propagandising for the state and by covering up on behalf of the state. Usually, this is done by calling everything that doesn’t align with a state narrative a conspiracy theory. Thus, the role of the corporate legacy media is to maintain the majority’s faith in government institutions and in the partisan political process.

The MAM’s role, on the other hand, is more subtle, and its objectives are slightly different. The MAM acknowledges concepts such as the uniparty and the deep state. But it then steers the conversation toward advocating some sort of party political solution—usually in the form of one political saviour or another. The MAM’s goal here is to return those who have wandered away from the Overton Window back to a degree of hope that the state can be reformed as long as they continue to engage in the muck of party politics.

The MAM’s other task is to openly discuss suppressed information and thereby gain the trust of those who no longer trust the corporate legacy media. Once that trust is secured, the MAM then reinterprets the previously suppressed information to suggest solutions or narratives that are amenable to the oligarchs but are actually anathema to their audience. In doing so, the MAM averts the possibility of the disillusioned taking any action against the oligarch’s interests by holding them in a state of confusion and apathy.

Here’s a concrete example. American MAM reporters have openly admitted that global governance overreach is a problem. These kinds of admissions are not within the remit of the corporate legacy media. The MAM then advocated the ideas of billionaires like Peter Thiel—a Bilderberg steering committee oligarch and prominent supporter of the Trump administration—as a hopeful solution to globalist overreach. But Thiel is offering gov-corp Technates as a path forward. These Technates are the most extreme form of Technocracy—which is the social control mechanism favoured by globalist institutions like the World Economic Forum.

Thus, the American MAM has acknowledged Republican voters’ wish to escape globalist control but has steered them to blindly accept gov-corp Technates. Encouraged to vote for Trump, what freedom-minded Republican voters have ended up with is perhaps the most authoritarian form of globalist oligarch control imaginable. At the same time, many ordinary Americans evidently believe they have struck a blow against global governance overreach by electing Trump.

That said, we should also note that election results seem to be so heavily manipulated that the degree to which they actually reflect the “will of the people” is highly dubious. Not that it matters much, because government is “fake” anyway.

The Deep State

The “deep state” enables “Bill Gates-type people” to meet and discuss their objectives with the bureaucrats and occasionally with the politicians who will implement the deep state’s collective agenda as policy. The oligarchs we see, like Gates, are really just the “philanthropist” PR guys for the globalist networks that convene within the deep state milieu.

Some politicians are more closely linked to the oligarchy than others. The newly appointed—not elected—Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, is among the most closely connected. In an interview with Juno News, given shortly before he replaced Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party, Carney argued that his perceived weakness—being part of the globalist inner circle—is actually his “core strength“:

I know how the world works, I know how to get things done, I’m connected. [. . .] People will charge me with being elitist or a globalist, to use that term, which is, well, that’s exactly, it happens to be exactly what we need.

While his surprising confession is yet another deep state revelation, legacy journalists don’t care to comment on it with any degree of seriousness. When they do address the subject, they consider mention of Carney’s ties to the “elite” a slur heaped upon him by opponents. In their view, he’s really a liberal-minded free-market capitalist. There’s nothing worth questioning about his so-called “global elite” status. Just forget the deep state and move on.

In August 2023, political scientist Francis Fukuyama published “In Defense of the Deep State.” In that piece, he acknowledges limited aspects of the history of the deep state, which he describes as “a complex of military and security agencies manipulated the political system and operated in a completely non-transparent way to affect politics.”

I believe Fukuyama is referencing the branch of Operation Gladio without saying so. Operation Gladio—a four decades long false-flag terrorist campaign run across Europe by the intelligence agencies—also operated in Turkey. The Turkish branch was exposed when the Susurluk Scandal broke in the mid-1990s—something else Fukuyama didn’t mention, though he alluded to it.

Fukuyama writes that the deep state has been mischaracterised by US conservatives as a permanent and therefore undemocratic bureaucracy. But by arguing that the deep state is simply “the administrative state,” he embarks on a straw man argument:

The United States does not have a “deep state” in the Middle Eastern [Turkish] sense of the term. It has a large and complex civil service at federal, state, and local levels that is responsible for providing the bulk of the services that citizens expect from their government, what is known as the “administrative state”. [. . .] [T]he US “deep state” needs to be defended and not vilified.

Notably, Fukuyama is a longtime member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a deep state think tank. In that capacity, he was influential in the 1990s creation of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Among his other deep state roles, he is an advisory board member of one of the CIA-run nongovernmental operations (NGOs)—the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

In such positions of power, Fukuyama and his fellow propagandists are reframing the deep state—characterising it as something it is not and selling the falsehood to the unwitting public.

The New York Times (NYT), agreeing with Fukuyama’s depiction of the deep state, describes it as “awesome.” Based on a six-minute propaganda-packed video, the NYT contends that the deep state was formed by “the workers otherwise known as civil servants, the everyday superheroes that wake up ready to dedicate their careers and their lives to serving us.”

Political science, however, has disproved the NYT’s and Fukuyama’s straw man arguments by empirically demonstrating that the deep state—as it is commonly perceived—does exist. It appears Fukuyama conveniently—if not deliberately—ignored that objective reality in his 2023 essay. Likewise, the NYT has failed to report the evidence of the deep state’s existence.

In political science, there are several related theories that debunk Fukuyama’s premise. One is the Economic-Elite Domination theory, which proposes that government policies are created for the interests of institutions or individuals whose economic and financial resources are significant. In such a system, the politician’s primary objective is to secure the favour of the so-called “economic elite.”

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Any Catholic with a pulse recognizes that something strange is happening in the Diocese of Charlotte. It has taken a volte-face and decided to walk backward.

Strange, for nothing irks Synodal Catholics more than being accused of looking backward. To them, anything in the Catholic Church that preceded 1965 is anachronistic, in fact, a very offense against God. They kneel at the altar of novelty, embracing its controlling dogma of Progress with its central tenet: tomorrow’s ideas are always superior to yesterday’s. An excrescence of Hegel, you may say.

Perhaps. But you must look further back to the French Revolution. Those cretins sought a bloody do-over of history, daring even to create an entirely new calendar. Their remote inspiration was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who declared, with jagged irony, “sometimes you must force men to be free.” Robespierre and his fellow Jacobins followed that counsel with every thump of the guillotine.

The Modern credo dutifully worships at the shrine of the New. They chant always a New Beginning, death to the past, never look back. No surprise that every modern dictator sings out of this songbook. Pol Pot wished to bring Cambodia into the glorious Present by declaring 1974 year one. He then sadistically decimated one quarter of his population to insure that prized liberation. Not too far away, in China, Mao Zedong embraced that deadly dream even if it meant brutally slaughtering millions of his fellow Chinese to make the point.

Only one thing from the “past” do the Moderns cherish: repression, quick and thorough. Echoes of that contradiction can be seen in America today: law-fare, virtue signaling, free-speech repression, organized pillaging, and exacting conformity. Any trace of the Old Ways is met with swift retribution and social shunning. Anyone esteeming the Past earns Hawthorne’s scarlet letter—but with a cruel twist: not for disobeying God’s Law but for obeying it.

Invariably, this metaphysical vacuum eventually spawns dissenters—namely: Orwell, Huxley, Solzhenitsyn. Something in the soul of men eventually stirs. A brave few remember. And what they remember is our noble Past—that Past with its truth, its wisdom, its solidity, its beauty, and its conformity with the soothing truths of human nature. A few quickly turn into an army. No longer do they want to worship the advance of time. They crave the Timeless.

This return to the timeless is appearing in shocking numbers, to the chagrin of the aging gatekeepers of the Dead Past. One intellectual light is John Mac Ghlionn of The Catholic Herald, who recently gave this growing trend explosive expression:

We were told the future would be limitless, utterly empowering. We were told we would be happiest with fewer rules, fewer roles, fewer traditions. Just vibes. 

But the experiment failed. We’re lonelier. Sicker. Spiritually starved. In place of meaning, we got algorithms. In place of transcendence, we got TikTok therapy. And beneath the saccharine haze of self-care, many young people feel the gnawing presence of something missing. 

If ever there was a punch in the gut of the myth of the Modern, this is it.

Which brings us to the Diocese of Charlotte.

Its new successor to the apostles is one of few remaining devotees of a Dead Past—not the ever-new past of truth, beauty, and goodness but a warrior of a past beginning in 1965. He has drunk deeply at the springs of the Modern Project. For him, every single token of the Church’s Tradition, especially in the Sacred Liturgy, is a noose around the Catholic neck, something to be censured. He looks upon it as an obstacle to that ever-evolving Omega Point. Those in the know tell us that he has mastered transactional techniques so emblematic of the Modern Man. For him, all is process, dialogue, performance. With the Moderns, such leaders abhor finality in being. All must be open to perpetual revision lest the Process be frustrated.

This whole sterile and discredited enterprise is on full display in the bishop’s carefully organized assault on the traditions of the Sacred Liturgy. As with all devoted Moderns, his teeth were set on edge when he arrived in Charlotte a year ago (after the premature and mysterious exit of the esteemed Bishop Jugis) and beheld a diocese returning itself to theological, liturgical, and disciplinary sanity.

It is imperative to understand the world that shaped the bishop’s temperament and perspective: his Franciscan Order. While every religious Order in the Church sealed its compact with Modernity, none did it with as much gusto as the Franciscans (except, of course, the Jesuits). Franciscan formation was (and is) a thorough, unrelenting, and comprehensive program in the abhorrence of the Church’s past—theological, moral, liturgical, and artistic. After years of that steady indoctrination, a priest is launched with the zeal of invading paratroopers. As they mount their offensive, their battle plan is a simple one: take no prisoners.

As with all Moderns, these priests will embrace only one part of the pre-1965 Church: its disciplinary machinery. This works well especially with recalcitrant clergy firmly wedded to the timeless traditions of the Church. Esteeming obedience (to be frank, an unnuanced obedience), they instantly conform. Modern bishops depend upon this knee-jerk conformity.

It must be carefully noted that these Modern priests themselves (and bishops) adhere to a highly selective obedience. In the past twelve years, they shouted obedience to the Holy See, while they have routinely disobeyed the Holy See for all the decades preceding. Aside from this self-serving obedience, they would consider obedience to the Church’s doctrinal, moral, and liturgical tradition to be dangerously retrograde.

Many bishops adhere to this Modern mindset. But none match the ferocity of the new bishop of Charlotte. For a bishop who subscribes to the free-floating, give-and-take, non-committal Synodal Listening, he governs like a medieval bishop—with one glaring difference: medieval bishops wielded the sword against those who lapsed in their Catholic beliefs; the Modern bishops wield it against those who do not. Look at the granular intensity of his liturgical bans. It bespeaks an idée fixe which undermines his celebrated, indiscriminate openness to all things. Not him.  My, even Mao ruled, “let a thousand flowers bloom.”

Tsk, tsk, Bishop Martin.

The bishop of Charlotte labors beneath the carapace of a hollow and spent theological past. He does not seem to notice that the young people today have rejected his fondness for a Woodstock hippy past, now embracing a Chartres pilgrimage future.

Let me return again to the rousing prose of Mr. Mac Ghlionn:

Catholicism offers what the modern world cannot: structure. Discipline. Mystery. It doesn’t whisper that you’re perfect just the way you are. It demands transformation. It demands submission—to something older, wiser, and greater than you. To be Catholic is to live inside a story. A two-thousand-year-old, blood-soaked, gold-threaded, world-shaping story. It has martyrs and miracles. Saints and scoundrels. Architecture that makes you weep. A God who became man. A carpenter who suffered for your sins. A virgin mother crowned in heaven. Try fitting that into a 15-second Instagram reel. …

You don’t walk into a traditional Catholic Mass and feel like you have stumbled into a self-help seminar with hymns. You feel the weight of two millennia settle on to your shoulders. There are no mood boards, no fog machines, no pastors in skinny jeans offering life hacks. There is only the priest, the altar, the sacrifice, and the silence. A silence that, for many, is more honest than any sermon. …

In a culture obsessed with identity, Catholicism offers identity through surrender. Not the curated, performative kind, but a cruciform kind—dying to self to live in Christ. It’s everything the modern self recoils at, which is precisely why it is so powerful.

My goodness! Move over Chesterton.

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Writes Tim McGraw:

Trump already destroyed small businesses back in 2020 with his Covid Lockdown of Lunacy. I guess he’s going for a twofer.

Wall Street Journal

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Thanks, Patty S.

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