Lew Rockwell Institute

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.

The post Leftists Devastate Los Angeles With Fiery Riots Against Trump Immigration Policy appeared first on LewRockwell.

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). 

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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.

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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.

The post Supporting Al Qaeda “Freedom Fighters” Combating Al Qaeda Terrorists appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

The post Trump’s Tariffs Will Destroy American Small Businesses appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Patty S.

The post A Noble Lie – OK City Bombing appeared first on LewRockwell.

Jerome Barber wrote:

Lew,

I have been studying and reading about Technocracy for several years now.  I have made use of Patrick Wood’s books and his website to educate myself.

The following link is the finest, up to date, documentary on the Technocratic transformation of the world I have seen to date.

I highly recommend it to all your readers.  It is 2 hours in length and worth every minute one would invest watching it.

The post The Agenda: Their Vision, Your Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Reuters

The post Israel commits ‘extermination’ in Gaza by killing in schools, UN experts say appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

FAIR Magazine

The post The Hidden Story: Israeli ‘Aid’ Is Part of Genocide Plan appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Jesse Trentadue.

Headline USA

The post 30-Year Cover-Up: Newly Unearthed Records Confirm FBI Lied about OKC Bomb Footage appeared first on LewRockwell.

TimM wrote:

Trump”s technate wet dream.

The post Trump and Palantir building the control grid appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

The post “The 9/11 Hijackers Never Flew the Planes” appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post ‘Send In The Marines!’ – Can Trump Tame California? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

BBC News

The post Civil servants told to consider quitting if they disagree with policy over Gaza appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com

The post Report: Mike Huckabee Working To Keep Netanyahu in Power appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

WSJ News

The post The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Guardian

The post US police agencies took intelligence directly from IDF, leaked files show appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Real News

The post ‘Deadly Exchange’: US sends hundreds of law enforcement to Israel to learn ‘worst practices’ from IDF appeared first on LewRockwell.