Lew Rockwell Institute

A rightly sounds a clarion call for restoring better music at Mass through taking the entire question of music seriously to begin with (which includes paying at least some of the musicians what their knowledge, training, and ability justly deserve). As one who has been singing in and directing choirs for decades, I can only say, “Hear, hear!”

I take issue, however, with a significant component of Meyrat’s argument. He noted that he once attended the traditional Latin Mass and reveled in the “exquisite music [that] lifted the souls in the congregation.” Yet, he later judged it better to go back to his local parish, to the “Mass of the Boomers” with “frequently cheesy” music, because “there’s something to be said about going to Mass with one’s actual neighbors.” And, with a lot of work, one might eventually achieve “suitable music at Mass.”

In a spirit of fraternal conversation, I’d like to suggest that this path may, in fact, be not only difficult but dangerous and that families should think twice before pursuing it.

Children change everything. This is a truth we ponder many times in our lives. First, Christians celebrate each year the coming of a child—the Child, Emmanuel, God with us, the Word made flesh—the infant, the boy, the youth, the man, on Whom all of reality hinges, who is our head, our cornerstone, our deliverer, our life. The annunciation, conception, and birth of this child certainly changed everything in the world; and, in spite of the constant battering of unbelief against the walls of the Church, His advent among us will never cease to purify and polarize mankind until the end of time.

Closer to home, whenever a man and a woman unite in marriage, God intends to change their lives by the advent of their child. By welcoming the child from His hands, they begin a long journey of maturing into their calling as husband and wife, mother and father, and, eventually, grandmother and grandfather.

Parents face difficult decisions as the children grow up. Before, the man and the woman may not have thought much about what movies they were watching, what music they were listening to, what influences they allowed into their lives; but now they might start questioning their habits and trying to improve them.

As much as newborns turn their parents’ lives upside down, new challenges arise when children are expected to begin their education. Is homeschooling the way to go? Is the local Catholic school an option? What about online curricula? As the surrounding society becomes more demented and even parochial schools turn out to be lukewarm or heterodox, Catholic parents who want their children to know and love the Lord and practice the Faith usually reach the conclusion that education must be done in the home, in keeping with the divine right and duty parents have not only to beget children but also to educate them. And keeping children at home for their education definitely changes everything.

Likewise, once children are part of our lives, we need to think more carefully about the liturgy we attend week in, week out. We know how important Sunday is: it is the Dies Domini, the Day of the Lord. We also know how important is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, where we give perfect worship to God through Christ and receive His most holy Body as the divinizing food for our journey. Faithful Catholics intuitively know just how important it is that Sundays and Holy Days be properly set apart, solemnized with reverent, mystical, nourishing, and edifying liturgy. We have a duty to seek this out for ourselves. But, more to the point, we have a duty to seek it out for our children.

Up to a point, one can “out-catechize” the misunderstandings arrived at by children who are judging simply on the basis of sights and sounds. But it is an uphill battle every step of the way when the mainstream form of worship transmits a message contrary to that of any traditional catechism published in the past 500 years. In fact, it’s worse: the liturgy cannot even harmonize with the models of worship given by God Himself to His people, which all Christian liturgies deliberately echoed—until the Novus Ordo. A friend once shared an experience of his, teaching CCD at a local parish:

Today we looked at a model of the Israelites’ Tabernacle in the wilderness and drew parallels to the Church and the Mass; it was a neat exercise and they seemed to be getting into it. But then we went to the CCD Mass and the parallels were messed up by the versus populum celebration, clericalization of the laity, and verbose profanation of sacred time. It seemed to have barely anything to do with the Tabernacle—and yet this is the model that informs the Temple, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Book of Revelation. With this level of disconnect, how are Catholics supposed to grasp anything Scripture says about worship?

The phrase “cognitive dissonance” comes to mind—in reference to so many levels. No parent needs the headache of having to address, in a sort of liturgical postmortem, the errors, ugliness, or irreverence of a Mass one has just attended. It’s uncomfortable at best and discouraging at worst.

Another friend shared with me these insights:

When our oldest started noticing things and asking questions, and knowing that when we face our personal judgment we will be judged on how well we performed our duties of state, we had to leave the diocesan parishes. Not only were the kids getting malnourished; we were getting small doses of poison. My wife and I had the capacity to filter most of it out, but the kids do not. The only option was to correct the priests’ actions and words, but that puts us in the awkward position of possibly disrespecting the one who has spiritual authority over us. And I have a very high view of the priesthood and did not want to be in a position of regularly criticizing priests.

After we started assisting at the TLM, I noticed, as if in retrospect, that I had built up all sorts of defenses to filter out the not-so-good stuff that goes on in your average Novus Ordo Mass. We should not have to filter out stuff as we actively participate (in the proper sense) in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass; I’d say that those filters actually prevent proper participation. At this point, I find it pretty near impossible to pray at a Novus Ordo Mass, and my kids do not want to go to “the English Mass,” as they call it.

My correspondent points out that children are naturally absorptive and inquisitive. We could add to this that they are naïve, innocent, and trusting. So, their experiences are teaching them something about the nature of what they are seeing and hearing far more intensely than do the experiences of older people, who have seen and heard a lot more and had time to process it and learn about things from other sources. We, perhaps, can “shut it out,” close our eyes, meditate on something beautiful we once saw or heard, or “offer it up” as a penance, but their eyes are wide open, taking it all in—and it shapes them. What they see is what they are going to believe, and if we have to keep correcting erroneous inferences from what they see, it will fracture the fundamental axiom lex orandi, lex credendi. After all, how we worship should dictate what we believe, and what we believe should be spotlessly reflected in how we worship. Children, therefore, need to be protected from imbibing contradictions.

Michael Fiedrowicz points out the huge advantage we have in assisting at the old Mass:

The exterior forms of veneration and adoration that belong to the classical rite of the Mass are the best way of guaranteeing the corresponding interior attitudes. Prayers of preparation, genuflections, and bows are not trifles that could be omitted without diminishing the faithful completion of the holy action. The interior encounter with the sacred must manifest itself outwardly, involving and being supported by an exterior form. The traditional liturgy insists that interior sentiments are plausible only if at the same time they appear in an outwardly appropriate manner. In the same way, the liturgy is aware of the formative power that the sensible can exercise on the spiritual condition.

With the number of its sacred signs, the beauty of its altars, the preciousness of its chalices and vestments, and its ceaseless expressions of reverence, the classical rite guarantees this correspondence of interior belief and exterior form. This rite is, so to speak, safeguarded against a possible discord between that which one believes and that which one sees. Here is found the perfected unity and harmony between that which is to be performed and the way in which it is performed. The classical rite does not require anything to be believed that one does not—symbolically—see. (The Traditional Mass, 214–15)

We parents are responsible for the spiritual formation of our children. This is not something that can be outsourced to clergy, CCD volunteers, or parochial teachers. No matter how much formation they are getting from the outside, it is not likely to be enough, and it may not even be correct (by which I mean: in conformity with traditional Catholic doctrine). We need to ensure that the faith of children is fed from pure, uncontaminated sources; that their hope is directed primarily to heavenly realities, with worldly projects in second place; that their charity is enkindled by the sight of loving homage being paid to the Divine Lover and by the sight of other devout believers observing the proper order of charity, which puts God first.

The liturgy is for the purpose of honoring and glorifying God; but precisely by doing this well, it also nourishes us. Ironically, when liturgy is done “for the people,” it ends up not benefiting them because it does not order them rightly to God, who is our Creator and sovereign Lord. Take ad orientem worship: when the priest and the people together face the same direction, toward the East—the symbol of Christ, Sun of Justice, who will return to judge the world from the East, as He tells us in Scripture (Matthew 24:27)—we all immediately experience that the sacred liturgy is something being offered to God, without the need for any tedious explanation. It is quite intuitive. To experience ad orientem negatively, as “being ignored by the priest,” one must actually be brainwashed to some extent.

Read the Whole Article

The post Sometimes We Should Not Try To “Fix” the Local Parish appeared first on LewRockwell.

Comments open on YouTube

The post Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next appeared first on LewRockwell.

In light of the news that President Trump has signed an executive order for a “plan” (as if one were needed) for the release of the JFK assassination files (as well as the MLK, Jr. and RFK files), the following article, that will appear in my upcoming book from Clarity Press, At the Lost and Found, seems appropriate. While it is good that these files might now be released, they are unnecessary to assess the truth behind these assassinations unless one wishes to engage in more “limited hangouts” as described by former CIA agent Victor Marchetti:

Spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.

There is no mystery to who killed these men, unless one wishes to engage in pseudo-debates forever because the truth and its implications are too terrible to bear.

What is the truth, and where did it go?
Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know
“Shut your mouth,” said the wise old owl
Business is business, and it’s a murder most foul
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Don’t worry, Mr. President
Help’s on the way
Your brothers are coming, there’ll be hell to pay
Brothers? What brothers? What’s this about hell?
Tell them, “We’re waiting, keep coming”
We’ll get them as well
– Bob Dylan, Murder Most Foul

Despite a treasure-trove of new research and information having emerged over the last sixty-two years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. They have drunk what Dr. Martin Schotz has called “the waters of uncertainty” that result “in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance, that is.”

Then there are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission.

Both these groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, unknowable or allegedly known, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, ancient history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred more than a half-century ago, so let’s move on.
Nothing could be further from the truth, for the assassination of JFK is the foundational event of modern American history, the Pandora’s box from which many decades of tragedy have sprung.

Pressured to Wage War

From the day he was sworn in as President on January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was relentlessly pressured by the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and by some of his own advisers to wage war – clandestine, conventional, and nuclear.
To understand why and by whom he was assassinated on November 22, 1963, one needs to apprehend this pressure and why President Kennedy consistently resisted it, and the consequences of that resistance.

It is a key to understanding the current state of our world today and why the United States has been waging endless foreign wars and creating a national security surveillance state at home since JFK’s death.

A War Hero Who Was Appalled By War

It is very important to remember that Lieutenant John Kennedy was a genuine Naval war hero in WW II, having risked his life and been badly injured while saving his men in the treacherous waters of the south Pacific after their PT boat was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. His older brother Joe and his brother-in-law Billy Hartington had died in the war, as had some of his boat’s crew members.
As a result, Kennedy was extremely sensitive to the horrors of war, and when he first ran for Congress in Massachusetts in 1946, he made it explicitly clear that avoiding another war was his number one priority. This commitment remained with him and was intensely strengthened throughout his brief presidency until the day he died, fighting for peace.

Despite much rhetoric to the contrary, this anti-war stance was and is unusual for a politician, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Kennedy was a remarkable man, for even though he assumed the presidency as somewhat of a cold warrior vis à vis the Soviet Union in particular, his experiences in office rapidly chastened that stance. He very quickly came to see that there were many people surrounding him who relished the thought of war, even nuclear war, and he came to consider them as insane and very dangerous.

A Prescient Perspective

Yet even before he became president, then Senator Kennedy gave a speech in the U.S. Senate that sent shock waves throughout Washington, D.C. In 1957 he came out in support of Algerian independence from France, in support of African liberation generally, and against colonial imperialism. As chair of the Senate’s African Subcommittee in 1959, he urged sympathy for African independence movements as part of American foreign policy. He knew that continued colonial policies would only end in more bloodshed because the voices of independence would not be denied, nor should they.

The speech caused an international uproar, and Kennedy was harshly criticized by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even members of the Democratic party, such as Adlai Stevenson and Dean Acheson. But it was applauded throughout Africa and what was then called the third world.

Yet he continued throughout his 1960 campaign for president to raise his voice against colonialism worldwide and for a free Africa. Such views were anathema to the foreign policy establishment, including the CIA and the burgeoning military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower belatedly warned against in his Farewell Address, delivered nine months after approving the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in March 1960, a juxtaposition that revealed the hold the Pentagon and CIA had and has on sitting presidents.

Patrice Lumumba

One of Africa’s anti-colonial and nationalist leaders was the charismatic Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, who in June 1960 had been become the first democratically elected leader of Congo, a country savagely raped and plundered for more than half a century by Belgium’s King Leopold II for himself and multinational mining companies. Kennedy’s support for African independence was well-known and especially feared by the CIA, which together with Brussels, considered Lumumba, and Kennedy for supporting him, as threats to their interests in the region.

So, three days before JFK’s inauguration, together with the Belgium government, the CIA had Lumumba brutally assassinated after torturing and beating him. This murder had been approved by President Eisenhower in August 1960 at an NSC meeting where he gave Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA, the approval to “eliminate” Lumumba.

Then on January 26, 1961, when Dulles briefed the new president on the Congo, he did not tell JFK that they had already assassinated Lumumba nine days before. This was meant to keep Kennedy on tenterhooks, to teach him a lesson. On February 13, 1961, Kennedy received a phone call from his UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson informing him of Lumumba’s death. There is a photograph by Jacques Lowe of the horror-stricken president answering that call that is harrowing to view. It was an unmistakable message of things to come, a warning.

Dag Hammarskjöld, Indonesia, and Sukarno

One of Kennedy’s central allies in his efforts to support third world independence was U.N Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. He had been deeply involved in peacekeeping in the Congo and efforts to resolve disputes in Indonesia, the latter being an extremely important country that was central to JFK’s concerns. Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash on September 18, 1961, while on a peacekeeping mission to the Congo. Substantial evidence exists that he was assassinated and that the CIA and Allen Dulles were involved. Kennedy was devastated to lose such an important ally.

Kennedy’s Indonesia strategy involved befriending Indonesia as a Cold War ally as a prerequisite for his Southeast Asian policy of dealing with Laos and Vietnam and finding peaceful resolutions to smoldering Cold War conflicts. Hammarskjöld was central to these efforts. The CIA, led by Dulles, strongly opposed Kennedy’s strategy in Indonesia. In fact, Dulles had been involved in treacherous maneuverings in Indonesia for decades. President Kennedy supported the Indonesian President Sukarno, whom Dulles opposed.

Two days before Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring. The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy’s efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with economic and developmental aid, not military. It was part of his larger strategy of ending conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assisting the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.

Of course, JFK never went to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America’s side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles. And Kennedy’s proposed withdrawal from Vietnam, which was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK’s murder. Soon both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA and Pentagon. In Indonesia, Sukarno would be forced out and replaced by General Suharto, who would rule with an iron fist for the next thirty years, massacring at will with American support.

The Bay of Pigs

In mid-April 1961, less than three months into his presidency, a trap was set for President Kennedy by the CIA and its Director, Allen Dulles, who knew of Kennedy’s reluctance to invade Cuba. They assumed the new president would be forced by circumstances at the last minute to send in ground forces to back the invasion that they had planned. The CIA and generals wanted to oust Fidel Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. This had started under President Eisenhower. Kennedy refused to go along, and the invasion was roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy.
But it was all a sham. Classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had learned the date of the invasion more than a week in advance and had then informed Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, but – and here is a startling fact that should make people’s hair stand on end – the CIA never told the President. The CIA knew the invasion was probably doomed before the fact but went ahead with it anyway.

Why? So they could and did afterwards blame JFK for the failure.

This treachery set the stage for events to come. For his part, sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles – (who, in an absurdity, was later named to the Warren Commission investigating his death) and his assistant, General Charles Cabell (whose brother Earle Cabell, to further the absurdity, was the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed) – and said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

Not the sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within a government whose power was growing exponentially.

Afterwards Kennedy said to his friends Dave Powell and Ken O’Donnell, “They were sure I’d give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the [Navy’s aircraft carrier] Essex. They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”

Kennedy Responds After the Bay of Pigs Treachery

The stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, now even more suspicious of the military-intelligence people around him, and in opposition to nearly all his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in U.S. foreign policy.
In 1961, despite the Joint Chief’s demand to put combat troops into Laos – advising 140,000 by the end of April – Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman, his representative at the Geneva Conference, “Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.” The president knew that Laos and Vietnam were linked issues, and since Laos came first on his agenda, he was determined to push for a neutral Laos.

Also in 1961, he refused to accede to the insistence of his top generals to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in Berlin and Southeast Asia. Walking out of a meeting with his top military advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, “These people are crazy.”

In March 1962, the CIA, in the person of legendary operative Edward Lansdale, and with the approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented to the president a pretext for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Code-named Operation Northwoods, the false-flag plan called for innocent people to be shot in the U.S., boats carrying Cuban refugees to be sunk, a terrorism campaign to be launched in Miami, Washington D.C., and other places, all to be blamed on the Castro government so that the public would be outraged and call for an invasion of Cuba.

Kennedy was appalled and rejected this pressure to manipulate him into agreeing to terrorist attacks that could later be used against him. He already knew that his life was in danger and that the CIA and military were tightening a noose around his neck. But he refused to yield.

As early as June 26, 1961, in a White House meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s spokesperson, Mikhail Kharlamov, and Alexei Adzhubei, Khrushchev’s son-in-law, when asked by Kharlamov why he wasn’t moving faster to advance relations between the two countries, Kennedy said, “You don’t understand this country. If I move too fast on U.S.-Soviet relations, I’ll either be thrown into an insane asylum, or be killed.”

He refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. The Soviets had placed offensive nuclear missiles and 60,000 support troops in Cuba to prevent another U.S. invasion. American aerial photography had detected the missiles. This was understandably unacceptable to the U.S. government. While being urged by the Joint Chiefs and his trusted advisors to order a preemptive nuclear strike on Cuba, JFK knew that a diplomatic solution was the only way out, short the death of hundreds of millions of people that he wouldn’t accept. Only his brother, Robert, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stood with him in opposing the use of nuclear weapons. In the end, after thirteen incredibly tense days, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev miraculously found a way to solve the crisis and prevent the use of those weapons. Premier Khrushchev had promised to take the Soviet missiles out of Cuba in return for Kennedy’s pledge not to invade, which Kennedy gave. Furthermore, JFK sent RFK to meet with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to secretly promise to Khrushchev’s demand that the U.S. then withdraw their missiles from Turkey.

Afterwards, JFK told his friend John Kenneth Galbraith that “I never had the slightest intention of doing so.”

The Fateful Year 1963

Then on June, 10 1963 he gave an historic speech at American University in which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end of the Cold War and the “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” advocating instead a movement toward “general and complete disarmament.”

A few months later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev.
In October 1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. Military troops from Vietnam by the end of the year and a total withdrawal by the end of 1965.

All this he did while secretly engaging in negotiations with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev via the KGB’s Georgi Bolshakov, Norman Cousins, the journalist and editor of The Saturday Review, and Pope John XXIII, and with Cuba’s Prime Minister Fidel Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist Jean Daniel. Of course, secret was not secret when the CIA was involved.
In an interview with Daniel on October 24, 1963, Kennedy said:

I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.

Such sentiments were anathema, shall we say treasonous, to the CIA and top Pentagon generals. These clear refusals to go to war with Cuba, to emphasize peace and negotiated solutions to conflicts, not war, to order the withdrawal of all military personnel from Vietnam, to call for an end to the Cold War, and his decision to engage in private, back-channel communications with Cold War enemies marked Kennedy as an enemy of the national security state. They were on a collision course.

The Assassination on November 22, 1963

Once in the presidency, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peacemaker. He came to see the generals who advised him as devoid of the tragic sense of life and as hell-bent on war. And he was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA. On numerous occasions he spoke of the possibility of a military coup d’état against him.

On the night before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it.”

And we know that nobody did try to stop it because they had planned it. But not from a sixth-floor window.

Who Killed Him?

If the only things you read, watched, or listened to since 1963 were the mainstream corporate media (MSM), you would be convinced that the official explanation for JFK’s assassination, The Warren Commission, was correct in essentials. You would be wrong because those media have for all these years served as mouthpieces for the government, most notably for the CIA that infiltrated and controlled them long ago. Total control of information requires media complicity, and in the JFK assassination and in all matters of importance, the CIA and MSM are synonyms.

The corporate media are the propaganda arm of the CIA.

So they report that The Warren Commission claim that the president was shot by an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, firing three bullets from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository as Kennedy’s car was driving away from him. But this is patently false for many reasons, including the claim that one of these bullets, later to be termed “the magic bullet,” would have had to pass through Kennedy’s body and zigzag up and down, left and right, to strike Texas Governor John Connolly who was sitting in the front seat, causing seven wounds in all, with the bullet only to be found later in pristine condition on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital.

The absurdity of that claim, the key to the government’s assertion that Oswald killed Kennedy, is only visually reinforced and made ridiculous by the famous Zapruder film that clearly shows the president being shot from the front right, and as the right front of his head explodes, he is violently thrown back and to his left as Jacqueline Kennedy climbs on to the car’s trunk to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull and brain.

This video evidence is clear and simple proof of a conspiracy.

Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?

But there is another way to examine it.

If Lee Harvey Oswald, the man The Warren Commission said killed JFK, was connected to the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not “a lone-nut” assassin or not the assassin at all. There is a wealth of evidence to show how from the very start Oswald was moved around the globe by the CIA like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters by Jack Ruby two days later.
James W. Douglass, in JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, the most important book to read on the matter, asks this question:

Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?

This is a key question.

After serving as a U.S. Marine at the CIA’s U-2 spy plane operating base in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher than top secret, a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission) and being trained in the Russian language, Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union. After denouncing the U.S., rejecting his American citizenship, working at a Soviet factory in Minsk, and taking a Russian wife—during which time Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union—he returned to the U.S. with a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow, only to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by a man, Spas T. Raikin, a prominent anti-communist with extensive intelligence connections recommended by the State Department.

He passed through immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted, moved to Fort Worth, Texas where, at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was met and befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset. De Mohrenschildt got him a job four days later at a graphic arts company that worked on maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy missions over Cuba.

Oswald was then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt who in 1977 — on the day he revealed he had contacted Oswald for the CIA and was to meet with the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ investigator, Gaeton Fonzi — allegedly committed suicide.

Oswald then moved to New Orleans in April 1963 where he got a job at the Reilly Coffee Company owned by CIA-affiliated William Reilly. The Reilly Coffee Company was located in close vicinity to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence offices and a stone’s throw from the office of Guy Bannister, a former Special Agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago Bureau, who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services, supplying and training the anti-Castro paramilitaries meant to ensnare Kennedy. Oswald then went to work with Bannister and the CIA paramilitaries.

From this time up until the assassination, Oswald engaged in all sorts of contradictory activities, one day portraying himself as pro-Castro, the next day as anti-Castro, with many of these theatrical performances being directed from Bannister’s office. It was as though Oswald, on the orders of his puppet masters, was enacting multiple and antithetical roles in order to confound anyone intent on deciphering the purposes behind his actions and to set him up as a future “assassin.”

Douglass persuasively argues that Oswald “seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI,” as a provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960-64, in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said, “It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.”

When Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963, de Mohrenschildt left Dallas for Washington, D. C. where he met with CIA officials, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly given a $285,000 contract to do a geological survey for Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which he never did, but for which he was paid. He never saw Oswald again.

Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the picture on cue. She had been introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In September 1963, Ruth Paine drove from her sister’s house in Virginia to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald and bring her to her house in Dallas to live with her. Back in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently got Oswald a job in the Texas Book Depository where he began work on October 16, 1963.

Ruth, along with Marina Oswald, was the Warren Commission’s critically important witness against Oswald. Allen Dulles, who JFK had fired but who amazingly served as a key member of the Warren Commission, questioned the Paines during the course of it, studiously avoiding any revealing questions.

The Paines had extensive intelligence connections. Thirty years after the assassination a document was declassified showing Ruth Paine’s sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her father traveled throughout Latin America on an Agency for International Development (notorious for CIA front activities) contract and filed reports that went to the CIA. Her husband Michael’s stepfather, Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell helicopter and Michael’s job there gave him a security clearance. Her mother was related to the Forbes family of Boston and her lifelong friend, Mary Bancroft, worked as a WW II spy with Allen Dulles and was his mistress.

From late September until November 22, various “Oswalds” are later reported to have simultaneously been seen from Mexico City to Dallas. Two Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theatre, the real one taken out the front door and an impostor out the back.

As Douglass says: “There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald than the Warren Report could use or even explain.”

Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that Oswald impostors were used, as he told LBJ concerning Oswald’s alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He later called this CIA ploy, “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico . . . their (CIA’s) double-dealing,” something that he couldn’t forget.

It was apparent that a very intricate and deadly game was being played at high levels in the shadows.

We know Oswald was blamed for the President’s murder. But if one fairly follows the trail of the crime, it becomes blatantly obvious that government forces were at work. Douglass and others have amassed layer upon layer of evidence to show how this had to be so.

Who Had the Power to Withdraw the President’s Security?

To answer this essential question is to finger the conspirators and to expose, in Vincent Salandria’s words, “the false mystery concealing state crimes.”
Oswald, the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans could not have withdrawn most of the security that day. Dallas Sheriff Bill Decker withdrew all police protection. The Secret Service withdrew the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s car where they had been the day before in Houston; took agents off the back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire. The Secret Service admitted there were no Secret Service agents on the ground in Dealey Plaza to protect Kennedy, but we know from evidence that during and after the assassination there were people in Dealey Plaza impersonating Secret Service agents. The Secret Service approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November 18) where the car almost came to a halt, a clear security violation. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded this, not some conspiracy nut.

Who could have squelched the testimony of all the doctors and medical personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in his neck and head, testimony contradicting the official story?

Who could have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the White House detail by JFK, who warned that he feared the president was going to be assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden seven times and his evidence on the aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago on November 2—a story little known but extraordinary in its implications—is riveting.)

The list of all the related people who turned up dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched, distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up clearly point to forces within the government, not rogue actors without institutional support.

The evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in such depth and so logically that only one psychologically invested in the mainstream narrative would not be deeply moved and affected by his book, the essential book to read on the matter, where there is still more from him and other researchers who have cut the Gordian Knot of this false mystery with a few brief strokes.

Oswald, the Preordained Patsy

Three examples will suffice to show that Lee Harvey Oswald, working as part of a U.S. Intelligence operation, was set up to take the blame for the assassination of President Kennedy, and that when he said while in police custody that he was “a patsy,” he was speaking truthfully. These examples make it clear that Oswald was deceived by his intelligence handlers and had been chosen without his knowledge, long before the murder, to take the blame as a lone, crazed killer.

First, Kennedy was shot at 12:30 PM CT. According to the Warren Report, at 12:45 PM a police report was issued for a suspect that perfectly fit Oswald’s description. This was based on the testimony of Howard Brennan, who said he was standing across from the Book Depository and saw a white man, about 5’10” and slender, fire a rifle at the president’s car from the sixth-floor window. This was blatantly false because easily available photographs taken moments after the shooting show the window open only partially at the bottom about fourteen inches, and it would have been impossible for a standing assassin to be seen “resting against the left windowsill,” (the windowsill was a foot from the floor), as Brennan is alleged to have said. He would have therefore had to have been shooting through the glass. The description of the suspect was clearly fabricated in advance to match Oswald’s.

Then at 1:15 PM in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, Police Officer J.D. Tippit was shot and killed. At 1:50 PM, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the Texas Theater and taken out the front door where a crowd and many police cars awaited him, while a few minutes later a second Oswald is secretly taken out the back door of the movie theater. (To read this story of the second Oswald and his movement by the CIA out of Dallas on a military aircraft on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, documented in great detail by James W. Douglass, will make your hair stand on end. )

Despite his denials, Oswald, set up for Kennedy’s murder based on a prepackaged description, is arraigned for Tippet’s murder at 7:10 PM. It was not until the next day that he was charged for Kennedy’s.

The Message to Air Force One

Secondly, while Oswald is being questioned about Tippit’s murder in the afternoon hours after his arrest, Air Force One has left Dallas for Washington with the newly sworn-in president, Lyndon Johnson, and the presidential party. Back in D.C., the White House Situation Room is under the personal and direct control of Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, a man with close CIA ties who had consistently opposed JFK on many matters, including the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy’s order to withdraw from Vietnam.

As reported by Theodore White, in The Making of the President 1964, Johnson and the others were informed by the Bundy-controlled Situation Room that “there was no conspiracy, learned of the identity of Oswald and his arrest …”

Vincent Salandria, one of the earliest and most astute critics of the Warren Commission, put it this way in his book, False Mystery:
This was the very first announcement of Oswald as the lone assassin. In Dallas, Oswald was not even charged with assassinating the President until 1:30 A.M. the next morning. The plane landed at 5:59 P.M. on the 22nd. At that time the District Attorney of Dallas, Henry Wade, was stating that ‘preliminary reports indicated more than one person was involved in the shooting … the electric chair is too good for the killers.’ Can there be any doubt that for any government taken by surprise by the assassination — and legitimately seeking the truth concerning it — less than six hours after the time of the assassination was too soon to know there was no conspiracy? This announcement was the first which designated Oswald as the lone assassin….

I propose the thesis that McGeorge Bundy, when that announcement was issued from his Situation Room, had reason to know that the true meaning of such a message when conveyed to the Presidential party on Air Force One [and to a separate plane with the entire cabinet that had turned around and was headed back over the Pacific Ocean] was not the ostensible message which was being communicated. Rather, I submit that Bundy … was really conveying to the Presidential party the thought that Oswald was being designated the lone assassin before any evidence against him was ascertainable. As a central coordinator of intelligence services, Bundy in transmitting such a message through the Situation Room was really telling the Presidential party that an unholy marriage had taken place between the U.S. Governmental intelligence services and the lone-assassin doctrine. Was he not telling the Presidential party peremptorily, ‘Now, hear this! Oswald is the assassin, the sole assassin. Evidence is not available yet. Evidence will be obtained, or in lieu thereof evidence will be created. This is a crucial matter of state that cannot await evidence. The new rulers have spoken. You, there, Mr. New President, and therefore dispatchable stuff, and you the underlings of a deposed President, heed the message well.’ Was not Bundy’s Situation Room serving an Orwellian double-think function?

Oswald’s Prepackaged Life Story

Finally, Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty adds a third example of the CIA conspiracy for those who need more evidence that the government has lied from the start about the assassination.

Prouty was Chief of Special Operation in the Pentagon before and during the Kennedy years. He worked for CIA Director Allen Dulles supporting the clandestine operations of the CIA under military cover. He had been sent out of the country to the South Pole by the aforementioned CIA operative Edward Lansdale (Operation Northwoods) before the Kennedy assassination and was returning on November 22, 1963. On a stopover in Christchurch, New Zealand, he had heard a radio report that the president had been killed but knew no details. He was having breakfast with a U.S Congressman at 7:30 AM on November 23, New Zealand time. A short time later, which was approximately 4:30 PM Dallas time, November 22, four hours after the assassination, he bought the Christchurch newspaper and read it together with the Congressman.

The newspaper reports from the scene said that Kennedy had been killed by bursts of automatic weapons fire, not a single shot rifle, firing three separate shots in 6.8 seconds, as was later claimed to have been done by Oswald. But the thing that really startled him was that at a time when Oswald had just been arrested and had not even been charged for the murder of Officer Tippit, there was already elaborate background information on Oswald, his time in Russia, his association with Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, etc. “It’s almost like a book written five years later,” said Prouty. “Furthermore, there’s a picture of Oswald, well-dressed in a business suit, whereas, when he was picked up on the streets of Dallas after the President’s death, he had on some t-shirt or something…”

Who had written that scenario? Who wrote that script…So much news was already written ahead of time of the murder to say that Oswald killed the President and that he did it with three shots…Somebody had decided Oswald was going to be the patsy…Where did they get it, before the police had charged him with the crime? Not so much ‘where,’ as ‘why Oswald?

Prouty, an experienced military man working for the CIA in the Pentagon, accused the military-intelligence “High Cabal” of killing President Kennedy in an elaborate and sophisticated plot and blaming it on Oswald, whom they had for years set up in advance as part of a fake defector program run by the CIA. They brought him back to the U.S. on June 13, 1962 and had him escorted to Fort-Worth, Texas where he was introduced to his CIA handler de Mohrenschildt. The evidence for a government plot to plan, assassinate, cover-up, and choose a patsy in the murder of President John Kennedy is overwhelming.

Five years after JFK’s assassination, we would learn, to our chagrin and his glory, that the president’s younger brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, equally brave and unintimidated, would take a bullet to the back of his head in 1968 as he was on his way to the presidency and the pursuit of his brother’s killers. The same cowards struck again.

Their successors still run the country and must be stopped.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post The Life and Public Assassination of President John F. Kennedy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Having explored the physical and psychological mechanisms of control in a previous article, and their deployment through cultural engineering in yet another article, we now turn to their ultimate evolution: the automation of consciousness control through digital systems.

In my research on the tech-industrial complex, I’ve documented how today’s digital giants weren’t simply co-opted by power structures—many were potentially designed from their inception as tools for mass surveillance and social control. From Google’s origins in a DARPA-funded CIA project to Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos’ familial ties to ARPA, these weren’t just successful startups that later aligned with government interests

What Tavistock discovered through years of careful study—emotional resonance trumps facts, peer influence outweighs authority, and indirect manipulation succeeds where direct propaganda fails—now forms the foundational logic of social media algorithms. Facebook’s emotion manipulation study and Netflix’s A/B testing of thumbnails (explored in detail later) exemplify the digital automation of these century-old insights, as AI systems perform billions of real-time experiments, continuously refining the art of influence at an unprecedented scale.

Just as Laurel Cc served as a physical space for steering culture, today’s digital platforms function as virtual laboratories for consciousness control—reaching further and operating with far greater precision. Social media platforms have scaled these principles through ‘influencer’ amplification and engagement metrics. The discovery that indirect influence outperforms direct propaganda now shapes how platforms subtly adjust content visibility. What once required years of meticulous psychological study can now be tested and optimized in real-time, with algorithms leveraging billions of interactions to perfect their methods of influence.

The manipulation of music reflects a broader evolution in cultural control: what began with localized programming, like Laurel Canyon’s experiments in counterculture, has now transitioned into global, algorithmically-driven systems. These digital tools automate the same mechanisms, shaping consciousness on an unprecedented scale

Netflix’s approach parallels Bernays’ manipulation principles in digital form—perhaps unsurprisingly, as co-founder Marc Randolph was Bernays’ great-nephew and Sigmund Freud’s great-grand-nephew. Where Bernays used focus groups to test messaging, Netflix conducts massive A/B testing of thumbnails and titles, showing different images to different users based on their psychological profiles.

Their recommendation algorithm doesn’t just suggest content—it shapes viewing patterns by controlling visibility and context, similar to how Bernays orchestrated comprehensive promotional campaigns that shaped public perception through multiple channels. Just as Bernays understood how to create the perfect environment to sell products—like promoting music rooms in homes to sell pianos—Netflix crafts personalized interfaces that guide viewers toward specific content choices. Their approach to original content production similarly relies on analyzing mass psychological data to craft narratives for specific demographic segments.

More insidiously, Netflix’s content strategy actively shapes social consciousness through selective promotion and burial of content. While films supporting establishment narratives receive prominent placement, documentaries questioning official accounts often find themselves buried in the platform’s least visible categories or excluded from recommendation algorithms entirely. Even successful films like What Is a Woman? faced systematic suppression across multiple platforms, demonstrating how digital gatekeepers can effectively erase challenging perspectives while maintaining the illusion of open access.

I experienced this censorship firsthand. I was fortunate enough to serve as a producer for Anecdotals, directed by Jennifer Sharp, a film documenting Covid-19 vaccine injuries, including her own. YouTube removed it on Day One, claiming individuals couldn’t discuss their own vaccine experiences. Only after Senator Ron Johnson’s intervention was the film reinstated—a telling example of how platform censorship silences personal narratives that challenge official accounts.

This gatekeeping extends across the digital landscape. By controlling which documentaries appear prominently, which foreign films reach American audiences, and which perspectives get highlighted in their original programming, platforms like Netflix act as cultural gatekeepers—just as Bernays managed public perception for his corporate clients. Where earlier systems relied on human gatekeepers to shape culture, streaming platforms use data analytics and recommendation algorithms to automate the steering of consciousness. The platform’s content strategy and promotion systems represent Bernays’ principles of psychological manipulation operating at an unprecedented scale.

Reality TV: Engineering the Self 

Before social media turned billions into their own content creators, Reality TV perfected the template for self-commodification. The Kardashians exemplified this transition: transforming from reality TV stars into digital-age influencers, they showed how to convert personal authenticity into a marketable brand. Their show didn’t just reshape societal norms around wealth and consumption—it provided a masterclass in abandoning genuine human experience for carefully curated performance. Audiences learned that being oneself was less valuable than becoming a brand, that authentic moments mattered less than engineered content, and that real relationships were secondary to networked influence.

This transformation from person to persona would reach its apex with social media, where billions now willingly participate in their own behavioral modification. Users learn to suppress authentic expression in favor of algorithmic rewards, to filter genuine experience through the lens of potential content, and to value themselves not by internal measures but through metrics of likes and shares. What Reality TV pioneered—the voluntary surrender of privacy, the replacement of authentic self with marketable image, the transformation of life into content—social media would democratize at a global scale. Now anyone could become their own reality show, trading authenticity for engagement.

Instagram epitomizes this transformation, training users to view their lives as content to be curated, their experiences as photo opportunities, and their memories as stories to be shared with the public. The platform’s ‘influencer’ economy turns authentic moments into marketing opportunities, teaching users to modify their actual behavior—where they go, what they eat, how they dress—to create content that algorithms will reward. This isn’t just sharing life online—it’s reshaping life itself to serve the digital marketplace.

Even as these systems grow more pervasive, their limits are becoming increasingly visible. The same tools that enable manipulating cultural currents also reveal its fragility, as audiences begin to challenge manipulative narratives.

Cracks in the System

Despite its sophistication, the system of control is beginning to show cracks. Increasingly, the public is pushing back against blatant attempts at cultural engineering, as evidenced by current consumer and electoral rejections.

Recent attempts at obvious cultural exploitation, such as corporate marketing campaigns and celebrity-driven narratives, have begun to fail, signaling a turning point in public tolerance for manipulation. When Bud Light and Target—companies with their own deep establishment connections—faced massive consumer backlash in 2023 over their social messaging campaigns, the speed and scale of the rejection marked a significant shift in consumer behavior. Major investment firms like BlackRock faced unprecedented pushback against ESG initiatives, seeing significant outflows that forced them to recalibrate their approach. Even celebrity influence lost its power to shape public opinion—when dozens of A-list celebrities united behind one candidate in the 2024 election, their coordinated endorsements not only failed to sway voters but may have backfired, suggesting a growing public fatigue with manufactured consensus.

The public is increasingly recognizing these manipulation patterns. When viral videos expose dozens of news anchors reading identical scripts about ‘threats to our democracy,’ the facade of independent journalism crumbles, revealing the continued operation of systematic narrative control. Legacy media’s authority is crumbling, with frequent exposures of staged narratives and misrepresented sources revealing the persistence of centralized messaging systems.

Even the fact-checking industry, designed to bolster official narratives, faces growing skepticism as people discover that these ‘independent’ arbiters of truth are often funded by the very power structures they claim to monitor. The supposed guardians of truth serve instead as enforcers of acceptable thought, their funding trails leading directly to the organizations they’re meant to oversee.

The public awakening extends beyond corporate messaging to a broader realization that supposedly organic social changes are often engineered. For example, while most people only became aware of the Tavistock Institute through recent controversies about gender-affirming care, their reaction hints at a deeper realization: that cultural shifts long accepted as natural evolution might instead have institutional authors. Though few still understand Tavistock’s historic role in shaping culture since our grandparents’ time, a growing number of people are questioning whether seemingly spontaneous social transformations may have been, in fact, deliberately orchestrated.

This growing recognition signals a fundamental shift: as audiences become more conscious of manipulation methods, the effectiveness of these control systems begins to diminish. Yet the system is designed to provoke intense emotional responses—the more outrageous the better—precisely to prevent critical analysis. By keeping the public in a constant state of reactionary outrage, whether defending or attacking figures like Trump or Musk, it successfully distracts from examining the underlying power structures these figures operate within. The heightened emotional state serves as a perfect shield against rational inquiry.

Before examining today’s digital control mechanisms in detail, the evolution from Edison’s hardware monopolies to Tavistock’s psychological operations to today’s algorithmic control systems reveals more than a natural historical progression—it shows how each stage intentionally built upon the last to achieve the same goal. Physical control of media distribution evolved into psychological manipulation of content, which has now been automated through digital systems. As AI systems become more sophisticated, they don’t just automate these control mechanisms—they perfect them, learning and adapting in real time across billions of interactions.

We can visualize how distinct domains of power—finance, media, intelligence, and culture—have converged into an integrated grid of social control. While these systems initially operated independently, they now function as a unified network, each reinforcing and amplifying the others. This framework, refined over a century, reaches its ultimate expression in the digital age, where algorithms automate what once required elaborate coordination between human authorities.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Algorithmic Age appeared first on LewRockwell.

On January 10th, one day before the 23rd anniversary of its opening, a much-anticipated hearing was set to take place at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility on the island of Cuba. After nearly 17 years of pretrial litigation, the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the “mastermind” of the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001, seemed poised to achieve its ever-elusive goal of bringing his case to a conclusion.  After three years of negotiations, the Pentagon had finally arranged a plea deal in the most significant case at Guantánamo. Along with two others accused of conspiring in the attacks of 9/11, KSM had agreed to plead guilty in exchange for the government replacing the death penalty with a life sentence.

After more than 50 pre-trial hearings and other related proceedings, Americans — and the victims’ families — would finally see closure for those three individuals who stood at the center of this country’s attempt to reckon legally with the 9/11 attacks.

Because of the fact that the defendants had been tortured at notorious CIA “black sites” before arriving at Guantánamo, the case had long been endlessly stalled. After all, so much of the evidence against them came from torture confessions. As it happens, such evidence is not admissible in court under U.S. or international law, or even under the rules of Guantánamo’s military commissions. For obvious reasons, it’s considered tainted information, “the fruit of the poisonous tree,” and so inadmissible in court. Although military commission prosecutors tried repeatedly over the years to find ways to introduce that all too tainted evidence at trial, attempts to do so failed time and again, repeatedly pushing potential trial dates years into the future. As a recently compiled Center on National Security chart shows, the forever delays in those hearings led to calendars of such length as to defy comprehension. In Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s case, for example, such delays have so far amounted to 870.7 weeks.

With the plea deal now set to come before Judge Matthew McCall, who had agreed to delay his retirement in an effort to see this case to its conclusion, attorneys, journalists, and victims’ family members boarded planes, preparing to witness the longed-for conclusion to a case that had seemed endless. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn, however, that the hearing never took place. Delay was again the name of the game. As it turned out, from the moment the plea deal was announced, it became the centerpiece of an intense battle launched by then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

What Happened

Two days after the August 2024 announcement of the plea deal by the “convening authority,” Brigadier General (Ret.) Susan Escallier, the Pentagon official in charge of the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Austin summarily overruled her, revoking the plea deal with little explanation and leaving experts and observers alike confused and disappointed. Had the secretary of defense not been consulted on the plea arrangement? That seemed unlikely. Had political pressure caused him to take such a drastic act? If so, then perhaps after the election he would change his mind and restore it. No such luck.

Whatever Austin’s motivation, Judge McCall refused to take “no” for an answer, declaring his revocation invalid.

McCall made it clear, instead, that he was moving forward. As the judge explained, in the memo that Austin had long ago issued appointing Escallier, he had attested to her independent authority. “Ms. Escallier shall exercise her independent legal discretion with regard to judicial acts and other duties of the Convening Authority.” But even as McCall prepared to go forward, Austin appealed to the Court of Military Commissions Review, asking it to rule that he did indeed have the authority to revoke the plea deal. However, that court then ruled that the secretary had improperly rescinded the deal after it had taken effect.

Still, he refused to give up, seeking help elsewhere. And he found it. On the eve of the scheduled hearing, the Department of Justice filed papers asking the D.C. Circuit Court to prohibit the Gitmo court from moving ahead and to stay proceedings while it contemplated the decision. Those who had flown to Guantánamo then returned home, and a new hearing was set for January 28th at the DC Circuit Court. At issue was both Austin’s authority to take over the plea deal and whether he had the right to withdraw from it, as lawyers argue that the dependents had already started performing their part of the deal. Of course, in the second age of Trump, it is no longer Austin but secretary of defense Pete Hegseth who will decide what happens next.

So, more than 23 years after the 9/11 attacks, here we are in the very same place we’ve been for endless years — on pause again, despite the endless charade of forward steps that go nowhere.

The Mirage of the Military Commissions

At this point, it’s worth asking whether the resolution of those cases by trial was ever a priority — or even a realistic goal. A look back over the course of the military commissions and the 9/11 case suggests some answers.

The Guantánamo detention facility was set up by a presidential military order issued on November 13, 2001. It authorized the detention of war-on-terror captives and mentioned future trials. “It is necessary for individuals subject to this order… to be detained, and, when tried, to be tried for violations of the laws of war and other applicable laws by military tribunals.” Accordingly, the commander of the naval base at Guantánamo spent the early months of the detention operation scouring the base itself for a suitable facility in which to hold such trials. He was surprised when no one at the Pentagon approached him about the need for such a building.

Fast forward six years, a year after those “high-value detainees” already tortured at CIA black sites were brought to Guantánamo. As NBC’s Bob Windrem later reported, an “Expeditionary Legal Complex was built in 2007 in the expectation it would be used for the trial of terrorists accused of murdering nearly 3,000 people with twin attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.” In 2008, the 9/11 defendants were charged. And last April, 17 years later, the Pentagon opened a second courtroom at the cost of $4 million for other cases pending before the military tribunals. Intrepid New York Times Gitmo reporter Carol Rosenberg recently summed up the costs associated with those signs of a continuing belief that actual trial proceedings were indeed in the cards this way: “The war court proceedings have cost hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries, infrastructure, and transportation. Since 2019, the Office of Military Commissions has added two new courtroom chambers, new offices and temporary housing, more lawyers, more security personnel, and more contractors.”

On the surface, it would seem as if the commitment to holding various war-on-terror trials was perfectly real. The price tag was certainly hefty enough, as were the numerous pre-trial proceedings in the 9/11 case, as well as in other cases before the military commissions, each involving charges against those accused of committing acts of terrorism — the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole destroyer with one defendant; terror bombings in Bali, Indonesia, with three defendants; and the cases of several other individuals charged with crimes of terrorism.

Yet given the failure of significant forward movement in such cases for so long, it’s hard not to wonder just how serious the commitment to resolving them ever was and whether the construction of such expensive trial buildings was either a mirage, intended to hide the fact that the cases were destined to go nowhere, or self-deception on the part of presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. (Donald Trump halted the military commissions during his first term in office, leaving them in legal limbo.)

After all this time, only two cases have ever gone to trial, one of which, that of Salim Hamdan, was later overturned. In the other, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul was convicted on three counts, two of which were eventually overturned. (At present, Mr. Bahlul is serving a life sentence at Gitmo, having arrived on its opening day 23 years ago.)

Meanwhile, there have been a grand total of nine plea deals over all these years.  Of those, one convicted detainee is serving out a sentence at Guantánamo that ends in 2032, two convictions have been overturned, and two remain on appeal — a paltry record at best, especially given the grimness of those acts of terror. For all of the time, effort, and money, not to mention emotional distress, the results have been appallingly minimal.

Biden and Gitmo

To his credit, President Joe Biden, who inherited a Guantánamo with only 40 detainees left out of a total population that once stood at 790, seemed determined to make progress both in the military commissions and in releasing some of the remaining “forever prisoners” (a term originally coined by Times reporter Rosenberg to describe those living in the legal limbo of indefinite detention, neither charged nor released).  Biden provided Gitmo watchers (like me) with some hope that the prison, distinctly offshore of American justice, would actually close someday.

During Biden’s years in office, the population was reduced to 15 men — six forever prisoners and nine still part of the military commissions (two of whom are already convicted). Eleven of the Biden releases, consisting of Yemenis sent to Oman, occurred amid the battle over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s plea deal, as if he were whispering to us that we needn’t worry, the road to closure was still available. Yet even that set of transfers suffered from the same sort of one-step-forward-two steps-back shuffle that’s been the essence of Gitmo’s history. The Oman arrangement had originally been planned for October 2023, only to be put on pause once the war in Gaza erupted. One of the men released had been cleared since 2010, only to await arrangements made two presidencies later.

The Biden administration unfortunately never released the last prisoners held without charge or brought the accused to trial. Even in these final moments of his presidency, when he was arguably free to do whatever he wanted, including closing the prison, he chose instead, by virtue of his administration putting the deal on hold, to halt forward progress, leaving us to wonder why.

So here we stand, with Donald Trump back in the White House, awaiting what this will mean for the future of the forever prison.

Once You Break It, You Can Never Really Fix It

Sometimes, when it comes to Gitmo, it almost seems as if forces beyond the capacity of mere mortals are at play. No matter what promises are made, no matter what hope-inspiring acts are taken, no matter what progress occurs, the prison seems to have a life of its own, aided and abetted by those who continue to mount obstacles to any significant steps forward.

Of course, the biggest of the lessons learned should have been to honor the laws, both domestic and international, forbidding torture. Had the United States not authorized a program of what was euphemistically referred to by the administration of President George W. Bush as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sensory bombardment, and all too much more, those trials could have been held in a timely fashion and in federal court on the mainland.

As President Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, had wanted, the federal courts would have been capable of handling such cases without using “evidence”  produced by torture. In fact, one Guantánamo detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, was indeed transferred to the United States for trial in federal court and, though he was acquitted on 284 of 285 charges, he was found guilty on one count and sentenced to life in federal prison. Still, the hundreds of acquittals in his case chased away the idea of trying the remaining Guantánamo defendants in federal court.

From all of this, there’s a basic lesson to be learned: once you violate both fair treatment of prisoners and the basic principles of law, finding an unchallenged resolution to such cases is essentially inconceivable.

In other words, once you break it, you can never really fix it.

Today, that long, soul-crushing, legally abhorrent story stands, at a far greater cost than we might once have imagined, where it has always stood — as a mistake that never should have happened and that, once made, never found a leader able to muster the courage to end it.

The post The Forever Charade appeared first on LewRockwell.

John Helmer wonders if Elvira Nabiullina, the Russian Central Bank director, has set up her protector Vladimir Putin for failure.  

Elvira is known to be opposed to the rescue of Donbas Russians from oppression and extermination by Washington’s puppet in Kiev.  Elvira’s first act of treason against Putin and the Russian state was arranging to leave Russia’s central bank reserves in Western institutions where Washington could seize them.

Her current treason is 21% interest rates which suppress investment and GDP growth and cause inflation which she then uses to justify her economy-killing high interest rates.  Helmer provides the ruinous  inflation rates Elvia’s anti-Russian, pro-Washington policy is causing in Russia. See here. 

The inflation is being used by pro-western elements in Russia to blame the high cost of living on Putin’s never-ending war.

President Trump has concluded that inflation has weakened Putin’s position and that concessions can be wrung from him in exchange for an end to Washington’s support for the war.  Additional pressure is put on Putin by President Trump’s aggressive move against Greenland in keeping with the Biden regime’s “2024 Arctic Strategy” that identifies Russia as the principal target.

From Putin’s standpoint, Ukrainian strongholds are falling rapidly without the drawn-out house by house clearing operations of previous advances.  The liberation of the Russian areas of Ukraine likely will be complete prior to a Trump-Putin meeting.  The meeting will be about the terms of peace with Trump pressuring Putin with more sanctions and Greenland threat to drop some part of Russia’s demand that Ukraine be de-militarized, de-Nazified, and forbidden NATO membership. Putin has received forceful warning not to negotiate away the reasons for which Russia fought an expensive three year war. See here. The Art of the Deal Trump cannot very well agree to the end of the conflict on Putin’s terms without being slammed with the media headline: “Trump Sells Out Ukraine to Putin.”

As Putin has permitted Washington and NATO to attack Russian cities, school children, infrastructure, and military bases with missiles fired by Washington and NATO into Russia without response, Putin is regarded by Washington as a nonentity, a pushover. If Putin and Trump meet, Trump could assume the dominant position and fail to realize that Putin, having fought for more than three years at enormous cost, cannot negotiate away the goals for which Russia has fought, especially with Russia having won the battlefield.  There doesn’t seem to be much room for a mutually face-saving compromise.

Looking at Putin’s situation, President Trump assesses it as “Russia is kind of in big trouble. You take a look at their economy, you take a look at their inflation in Russia. I got along with Putin great, I would hope he wants to make a deal.”

Here is Helmer’s account.  Come to your own conclusion.

The post The Trump-Putin Meeting: Who Will Dominate? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Some eighteen minutes into his second inaugural address, Donald Trump – who had just been sworn in as the 47th president of the United States – made the following proclamation:

“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”

“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.” pic.twitter.com/AmhsQ93OH0

— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) January 20, 2025

It is truly astounding that the president of the United States would have to declare this obvious truth which has been known and honoured by mankind since time immemorial.

In these our depraved times, however, such a declaration was necessary.

Not only was it necessary, but for Trump it was an act of great moral clarity and courage. So much have the dark forces subverted the normal thinking and order of things.

In the last few years, the peoples of the world have been subjected to systematic subversion of reality, of common sense, and of morality by relentless gaslighting and torrents of most egregious lies.

The devious Left has nearly managed to turn everything upside down by launching a comprehensive assault on facts, on truth, and on reality itself.

In the process they have manifested an unrelenting antagonism toward all that is good, normal, right, beautiful, and holy.

The idea that biological men can be women and biological women can be men is, in a way, a denouement of their efforts, for it is difficult to conceive of a greater perversion of reality than that.

To realize how deeply the Left has managed to drag America into the slime of madness contemplate the following:

In 1776 Thomas Jeferson declared: “We hold these truths self-evident that all men are created equal.”

In 2025 Donald Trump was compelled – to paraphrase him somewhat – to say: “We hold this truth self-evident that men are men and women are women.”

Trump’s declaration of this most obvious of truths was a salvo against the forces of darkness in defence of sanity, of moral order and of common sense. It was a salvo in defence of civilisation itself.

It staggers the mind to think what Donald Trump had to overcome to be able to come to the US Capitol to make his pronouncement. Through an unprecedented campaign of hatred, his enemies sought to vilify him, bankrupt him, imprison him, and ultimately kill him.

He withstood everything, even a bullet to the head. On that fateful July day in that Pennsylvania field with blood streaming down his face, he got up and pumped up his fist. And then in the face of death and darkness, he cried undaunted: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Because of his uncommon courage and persistence and his desire to do good for his country and its people, Donald Trump – an imperfect man – emerged as a great leader and a sweeping moral force. His words now carry the weight that makes agents of wrong howl with despair.

When Trump made his historic two genders declaration, the rotunda of the US Capitol erupted in cheers. But not everyone greeted his words of truth with joy and jubilation. There was also despondency and gnashing of teeth. To Trump’s left, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, together with their vanquished party, sat sullen, and stone-faced.

The liars and moral desperadoes that they are, they had inflicted upon this nation insane policies that brought men into women’s locker rooms, toilets, jail cells, and sporting fields. They laughed when concerned parents complained of drag queen hours in school and sent the FBI to shut them down. They perverted the truth, violated reality, and nominated men who pretended to be women into high office.

On January 20, Donald Trump fired a shot that was heard around the world. He cut through years of gaslighting and moral depravity that has soiled so much of our culture.

Hear ye, hear ye all: “men are men and women are women,” he said in essence.

In our troubled day, a statement of this all-too-obvious fact is a kind of revolutionary act. May this mark a turning point and the first step toward our moral healing and restoration of sanity and common sense.

Thank you, Mr. President, for your courage and clarity. Godspeed and may heaven watch over you.

The post Two Genders Only: Trump’s Salvo for Sanity appeared first on LewRockwell.

The idea of inflicting “strategic defeats” on Russia has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy for so long a time that it transcends party lines

Trump’s rhetoric about Russia having lost 1 million men in the Ukraine conflict is not just nonsense (the real number not even reaching 100,000), but his resort to it underlines that the usual meme of Trump being just woefully misinformed is looking less and less plausible.

After touting the 1 million Russian deaths, Trump then suggests that Putin is destroying Russia by not making a deal. Adding (seemingly as an aside), that Putin may have already made up his mind ‘not to make a deal’.

Instead, in a curiously disinterested way, Trump remarks that negotiations would depend entirely on whether Putin is interested or not. He further claims that Russia’s economy is in ruins, and most notably says that he would consider sanctioning or tariffing Russia, if Putin does not make a deal. In a subsequent Truth Social post, Trump writes, “I’m going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR”.

This – plainly said – is a narrative of an entirely different order: No longer is it his Envoy Kellogg or another team member saying it; it is Trump’s own words as President. Trump answers a journalist’s question ‘Would [he] sanction Russia’ should Putin not come to the negotiating table? To which he responds, “that sounds likely”.

What, we might ask, is Trump’s strategy? It seems more as though it is Trump that is preparing for a ‘no deal’. He must be aware that Putin repeatedly has made plain that he is both interested and open to talks with Trump. There is no doubt about that.

Yet Trump subsequently contradicts the ‘loser discourse’ in yet another apparent after-thought: “I mean … it’s a big machine so, eventually things will happen …”.

Here he appears to be saying that the Russian ‘big machine’ ultimately will win. Russia will be a winner – and not a loser.

Maybe Trump is thinking simply to let the dynamics of the military ‘trial of strength’ play out. (If that is his thinking, he cannot utter such sentiment out loud – explicitly – as the Euro-élites would sink even further into a pathological tailspin).

Alternatively, were Trump to be seriously seeking productive negotiations with Putin, it is certainly not a good way to start by being deeply disrespectful towards the Russian people – depicting them and President Putin as ‘losers’ who desperately need a deal; whereas the reality was that it was Trump who earlier had touted getting a deal within 24 hours. His disrespect will rankle – not just with Putin – but for most Russians.

The ‘loser narrative’ simply will stiffen Russian opposition to a Ukraine compromise.

The backdrop is that Russia in any case collectively eschews the idea of any compromise that “boils down to freezing the conflict along the line of engagement: that will give time to rearm the remnants of the Ukrainian army, and then start a new round of hostilities. So, that we have to fight again, but this time from less advantageous political positions”, as Professor Sergei Karaganov has noted.

Moreover, “the Trump administration has no reason to negotiate with us on the terms we [Russia] have set. The war is economically beneficial to the U.S. … and [possibly] also to removing Russia as the powerful strategic support of America’s main competitor ? China”.

Professor Dmitri Trenin similarly predicts that,

“Trump’s bid to secure a ceasefire along Ukraine’s battle lines will fail. The American plan ignores Russia’s security concerns and disregards the root causes of the conflict. Meanwhile, Moscow’s conditions will remain unacceptable to Washington, as they would effectively mean Kiev’s capitulation and the West’s strategic defeat. In response Trump will impose additional sanctions on Moscow. Despite strong anti-Russian rhetoric, U.S. aid to Ukraine will decrease, shifting much of the burden onto Western European nations”.

So why cast Russia as contemptible ‘losers’, unless this forms Trump’s strategy for walking away from the Ukraine issue? If a clear-cut U.S. ‘victory narrative’ seems beyond reach, then why not invert the narrative?‘Mission accomplished’ being obstructed solely by Russia’s ‘loser streak’.

This inevitably leads to the question of what is the meaning – exactly – of the return of America’s “most famous criminal defendant to the White House”, and his promise of a “revolution of common sense”?

“There is no doubt that it is revolutionary”, Matt Taibbi argues:

“Trump galvanized [income mal-distribution] resentment, creating a political Sherman’s march that left institutional America smouldering. The corporate press is dead. The Democratic Party is in schism. Academia is about to swallow a giant bottle of bitter pills, and after the executive orders signed Monday: a lot of DEI instructors will have to learn to code” [i.e., will be unemployed].

Yes, Taibbi observes,

“it makes me nervous to see a murderer’s row of censorious CEOs (particularly Bezos, Pinchai, and the repulsive Cook) sitting in front of Trump, together with other Wall Street luminaries … nonetheless, if the deal was support for Trump in exchange for platforms going back to being merely self-interested profit-gobblers, I’ll take it over the previous cabal. The Wall Street Journal was probably closest to capturing the essence of that idea of the event with yesterday’s header, “The New Oligarchy is a Vast Improvement on the Old””.

Yet to many Russians, however, the impression left by Trump’s ‘loser’ discourse is that ‘nothing changes’ – the idea of inflicting ‘strategic defeats’ on Russia has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy for so long a time that it transcends party lines and is implemented regardless of which administration occupies the White House. And today, a new impetus is apparent – as Nikolai Patrushev warns, Moscow expects Washington artificially to foment friction between Russia and China.

Steve Bannon however, in his usual florid language, goes some way to explain the conundrum of a revolutionary Trump and his disappointing ‘loser discourse’.

Bannon warns that Ukraine risks becoming ‘Trump’s Vietnam’, should Trump fail to make a ‘clean break’, and allow himself to be sucked deeper into the Ukraine war. “That’s what happened to Richard Nixon. He ended up owning the war and it went down as his war – not Lyndon Johnson’s”, Bannon noted.

Bannon “advocates ending America’s all-important military aid to Kyiv, but fears his old boss is going to fall into a trap being set by an unlikely alliance of the U.S. defence industry, the Europeans and even some of Bannon’s own friends, whom he argues are now misguided”.

Bannon’s underpinning premise was made clear during his Zoom call with Alex Krainer. He confirmed that Trump and his team will go on the offensive from day one in office: “The days of thunder begin on Monday”. Bannon wasn’t talking about Trump going on the offensive against the Chinese, Iranians or the Russians, however. Trump and his team are preparing to take on the “they””.

“They”, in Bannon’s words, “are the people who control the world’s most powerful empire and, elections or no elections, democracy or no democracy, they will not voluntarily relinquish their privileges and the control: there will be a fight”.

Yes, the ‘real war’ is the domestic one — not that against Russia, China or Iran, which could become diversions from the main battle.

For comparative purposes, were Trump’s aim truly to agree a negotiated Ukraine ‘compromise’, we need to contrast his rhetorical blatant ‘loser’ jibe with that of John F. Kennedy’s attempt, 59 years ago, to break the cycle of mutual antipathy that had frozen relations between East and West since 1945. Stung by the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Kennedy wanted to break an ossified paradigm. Kennedy – like Trump – sought to ‘End Wars’; to be recorded in history as a ‘peace-maker’.

In a speech at the American University in Washington on 10 June, 1963, JFK praised the Russians. He spoke of their achievements in science, the arts and industry; he saluted their sacrifices in the Second World War where they lost 25 million people, one-third of their territory and two-thirds of their economy.

It was no exercise in empty rhetoric. Kennedy proposed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty – the first of the arms-control agreements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Well, there may be inklings of a Bannon-inspired tentative ‘clean break’ beginning – as Larry Johnson notes:

“The Pentagon reportedly has fired or suspended all personnel directly responsible for managing military assistance to Ukraine. They will all face an investigation into the use of U.S. budget money.

“Laura Cooper, the Pentagon’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, has already resigned, marking the beginning of what some see as a strategic pivot. Cooper was a key figure in overseeing $126 billion in military aid to Ukraine. Her departure, coupled with what appears to be a housecleaning of Pentagon staff tied to Kiev’s war effort, casts doubt on whether Ukraine will continue to enjoy the open spigot of U.S. weapons and funding it received under Biden.

“The restructuring also casts a shadow over the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, which under Lloyd Austin had expanded into a 50-nation coalition supporting Kiev”.

The U.S. has reportedly withdrawn all applications to contractors for logistics through Rzeszow, Constanta and Varna. At NATO bases in Europe, all shipments to Ukraine have been suspended and closed. This falls under Trump’s Executive Order halting global U.S. assistance for 90 days – pending an audit and cost-benefit analysis.

Meanwhile, Moscow and China are duly preparing against the prospect of diplomatic re-engagement with the now President Trump. Xi and Putin held a 95 minute video call a few hours after Trump’s impromptu news conference in the Oval Office – Xi gave Putin the details of his conversation with Trump (which was not timed to coincide with Trump’s inauguration, but rather had been scheduled in December).

Both leaders appear to be sending a common message to Trump — i.e., the alliance between China and Russia is not ephemeral. They are united in common cause to work jointly to assert their respective national interests. They are willing to talk to Trump and engage in serious negotiations. Yet, they refuse to be bullied or threatened.

Nikolai Patrushev, Adviser to Putin and member of Russia’s Security Council, gave the Russian context to this video call between the two leaders:

“For the Biden administration, Ukraine was an unconditional priority. It is clear, [Patrushev says], that the relationship between Trump and Biden is antagonistic. Therefore, Ukraine will not be among Trump’s priorities. He cares more about China”.

Pointedly, Patrushev warned:

“I think Washington’s disagreements with Beijing will worsen, and the Americans will inflate them, including artificially. For us, China has been and remains the most important partner with whom we are connected by relations of privileged strategic cooperation”.

“As for the Russian line in relation to Ukraine, it remains unchanged. It is important for us that the tasks of the Special Operation are solved. They are known and have not changed. I believe that negotiations on Ukraine should be conducted between Russia and the United States without the participation of other Western countries”.

“I want to emphasize once again that the Ukrainian people remain close to us: brotherly and bound by centuries-old ties with Russia, no matter how much Kiev propagandists obsess with ‘Ukrainianness’ claim to the contrary. We care about what is happening in Ukraine. It is especially disturbing [therefore] that violent coercion to neo-Nazi ideology and ardent Russophobia destroy the once prosperous cities of Ukraine, including Kharkiv, Odessa, Nikolaev, Dnipropetrovsk”.

“It is possible that in the coming year Ukraine will cease to exist altogether”.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post Is Trump Positioning for a ‘No-Deal’ With Russia – or Not? appeared first on LewRockwell.

During the past week I’ve been watching the frenzy over Donald Trump’s cabinet confirmations, specifically because the fabric of his cabinet will give us insight into how the next four years of his presidency will play out. One hearing that I found very interesting was Pete Hegseth’s. The level of hostility on display by Democrats entered the realm of slander.

Hegseth was barely confirmed as the Secretary of Defense with Vice President JD Vance making the tie breaking vote. The political left (and some Neo-Cons) seems to HATE this man in a special way, and initially I had difficulty understanding the real reason why.

Hegseth’s opposition to trans membership in the armed forces is surely one reason, but Trump is removing such mentally unstable people from the military regardless. His opposition to women in combat roles might piss off some feminists but the majority of American war fighters agree with him and every concrete study done on mixed gender combat units has shown terrible results.

Then, I watched a debate between progressive commentators vs Michael Knowles and Dave Rubin which illuminated the situation. The conversation was strangely focused on leftist accusations against Hegseth’s supposedly nefarious tattoo and how it relates to the Christian crusades.

The fury over Hegseth, in my view, gives us a peak behind the curtain at what the establishment truly fears, and their fear is triggered by unabashed Christianity. But not just that – It’s Hegseth’s veneration of old Christianity and a time when Christians controlled much of the known world. People like Hegseth are usually obstructed from entering government because they are standard bearers of a philosophy which terrifies globalists.

Is Hegseth a proponent of Christian empire? Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. However, if he is, I wonder if that would be such a bad thing?

The above debate is predicated on classic revisionist propaganda largely conjured by “anti-colonial” academics in the 1990s; a part of the growing Political Correctness and Deconstructionist movements in universities that eventually became the woke monstrosity we are dealing with in 2025. This propaganda has become so ingrained in our educational consciousness that most people today have no knowledge of the crusades, they only know that “crusades = bad”.

The first Christian Crusade is perhaps one of the most important events in western history and one of the most neglected by our academic institutions. The prevailing narrative today is that the crusades were a mindless murderous rampage by Europeans trying to steal the Holy Land from innocent Arabs. This is complete nonsense.

As Michael Knowles points out, the Holy Land, most of the Levant region, northern Africa including Egypt and all lands around the Mediterranean were ruled by Christians from 300 AD onward. This was the old Roman Empire which converted to Christianity officially in 323AD. Yes, that’s right, most of the Middle East and Northern Africa were Christian for centuries.

This Christian realm, which included what we now know as Israel, was split in two during an event called “The Great Schism” in 1054 AD between the Catholics in the West and the Orthodox Church in the East.

The divide created territorial weaknesses which were swiftly taken advantage of by Muslim conquerors when they captured the Holy Land in 640 AD.  Islam, founded by the warlord Muhammad in 610 AD, had united the tribal Arab world under a single religious banner, but also a philosophy of conquest. The Muslims, directed by at least 109 verses in the Quran that call for the subjugation of non-believers who refuse to embrace Islam, set out to capture all of Christendom.

Over the course of a few decades the Islamic armies spread throughout the Levant and Africa, and even began taking lands in Europe including parts of Spain. Christians were persecuted under Muslim rule and often enslaved. Christian cities were sacked and lands stolen. When the Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos asked Pope Urban II for help, the Pope called for Christians to unite and end the Schism.

The East called for aid and the West would answer in 1095 AD. If the crusade was unsuccessful the fall of Christianity was assured.

Without the war to retake Christian lands, Europe as we know it would not exist and much of our world would probably look like one big Taliban village. This frightening prospect is obscured by outliers, events which ended in tragedy or crime. As in all war, villains can pop up on both sides. That said, there would have been no crusades without the Muslim invasions.

Today we face another ideological and cultural invasion, but this time the conditions are more complex.

I believe the progressive attempt to memory-hole the historical record of the Crusades is designed to prevent a new united western world. One could argue that religion is no longer the uniting factor that it once was, and ten years ago I would have agreed. But things are starting to change and if you have a discerning eye you might see, as I do, a movement forming ahead of us that is increasingly spiritual, not secular.

Regardless of how you might feel about Donald Trump, the cultural shift surrounding his return to office cannot be denied. After four years of Biden and Harris trying to institute medical tyranny, instigate a mass immigration crisis, label conservatives a “threat to democracy” and force woke cultism into daily life, it seems as though Americans have had enough. There has been a dramatic evolution within our society; a recognition that we are on the verge of destruction if we continue on the current progressive/socialist/relativist trajectory.

The west stands at the edge of a precipice. I suspect it’s the kind of moment that Pope Urban II witnessed in 1095 AD. Witnesses that wrote accounts of the period describe it as a kind of miracle, a coalition to save civilization from a looming dark age of barbarism. This is how many of us in conservative circles feel now:  That there are great changes coming to erase generations of trespasses if we are willing to seize the day.

In 2025 a lot more people treat leftist ideology and globalism with disdain rather than complacency. The borderless multicultural agenda of the elites is finally facing substantial opposition, at least in the US. I would also argue that there has been a resurgence of interest in Christianity and Christian history; a natural consequence of Americans rediscovering their western cultural roots.

For thousands of years most of human civilization has been a cesspool of primeval domination. There have been no innocent empires, white, brown, it doesn’t matter. The core of nearly every empire has been war, slavery and genocide. The strong have always sought to subsume the weak. Every group of people has engaged in the most sickening of behaviors.

Africans were enslaving each other long before Europeans arrived on the scene. American Indians were participating in slavery, tribal warfare, human sacrifice and cannibalism as a way of life long before white Europeans showed up in their boats. The Chinese and the Mongols were committing the mass slaughter of peaceful kingdoms for most of the Middle Ages, yet progressive historians ignore these events in favor of admonishing the Christian Crusades.

Arabs were some of the worst perpetrators of human bondage and their treatment of the people they conquered made the slavery of early American history look quaint. Often misrepresented as the “Islamic Golden Age”, it is a modern academic myth that Muslims brought “peace and prosperity” and coexistence with them as they sacked the Levant and Europe. Anyone not adhering to Muslim belief was subject to brutality.

Today the west faces a takeover from within as much as it faces a takeover from without. Our own governments have been engaged in covert sabotage, flooding our borders with migrants from the third-world and inviting in ideologies and politics that are completely antithetical to western ideals. Many of these people come have one foot in the archaic.  They don’t believe in things like equality, they believe that predators must rule and victims must submit.

Inviting such people into the US and Europe is clearly an agenda to destroy our civilization through foreign saturation. No government does this by accident.  At the same time there has been a progressive/communist insurgency operating in our midst, funded by globalist interests using corporations and non-profit institutions as support structures for the revolution.

They don’t want a stand-up fight because they know they would lose. Rather, they are seeking to weaken our foundations, to demoralize us so they can pillage at will once we are broken and self-loathing. This is most evident in the UK and Europe where people with common sense are looking from afar at the positive changes in America with a sense of longing. They feel like they’re being left behind – A sacrifice to the multicultural behemoth.

This begs the question: Is saving America enough? Or is it time for a new and perhaps final crusade?

Leftists often talk about “tolerance” and accuse conservatives of going against their Christian fundamentals by refusing to remain apathetic to those who engage in destructive behavior. The political left and globalists speak of tolerance because it goes hand-in-hand with degeneracy. With tolerance comes social decline into debauchery and evil, which is what they most desire.

Tolerance is about suffering through the crimes and violations of others without expecting an eventual correction. Tolerance has NEVER been a Christian value. Rather, the Bible teaches of compassion, and many times it is more compassionate to correct a bad behavior than let it continue. Spare the rod spoil the globalist. We call it “tough love” and it’s necessary for the survival of humanity.

The first crusade was far more than just a geopolitical effort by governments to take back lands that were stolen; it was a massive spiritual correction. It was an endeavor which inspired great unity of purpose among common people. In fact, it was the common people, not the monarchies, that made the first crusade possible. If this kind of event were to happen again it would have to be grounded in similar high minded purpose and populism.

It’s hard to say if such inspiration is possible anymore. I think in America it certainly is, but Europe is questionable. There are growing efforts by conservative leaning parties to defend western values in the EU but they are being met with a vicious totalitarian opposition.

It’s not coincidence that Europe has been overrun with third-world migrants, most of them Muslim, in the past decade. These groups are acting as a blunt weapon, used by the elites to silence dissent by native born citizens.

As I write this the British are being subjected to increasing Orwellian oppression. The AFD party in Germany is under threat even as they grow more accepted by voters; progressive elites are seeking to ban them from elections entirely. The French establishment is using lawfare against their political opposition in the National Rally party and they are working to subvert voter demands. Both Germany and Romania claim they have the right to ignore election outcomes if conservatives continue to win.

There is a coordinated effort across Europe to stop conservative groups from entering government. The only place where the tide has truly turned is in the US (and perhaps Argentina). But we still face a long road and government reform is slow. A movement outside of politics will be needed.

The great fear among centrists and libertarians is that a religious inspired movement will result in theocracy. I share these apprehensions. Yes religious institutions can be corrupted because institutions are controlled by men, but this is true of ALL institutions. How well has secular leadership performed in the past century? Yeah, not so great.

The idea of “separation of church and state” was never intended to remove Christian influences from government. It was designed to prevent government from interfering with individual religious expression. America was founded under Christian doctrine and Christian leadership. A return to that dynamic would be welcome, as long as personal freedom (freedom with responsibility) is maintained.

Make no mistake, the enemy has been trying to build their own religious empire. The woke movement is driven by self worship and the worship of bureaucratic power. Behind the curtain they are not secular and they have more zealotry than any cult in recent memory. They claim to be atheistic and progressive in their principles, yet they happily ally with third-world fundamentalists that hold completely contrary beliefs. Why? Because Islam is not a threat to their ultimate aims; Christianity is.

If a new crusade were to happen, it would have to start here in America. However, if we were to “take up the sword”, as it were, we can do so knowing we are not alone. There are million upon millions of westerners around the world that would welcome us.

There is a deep desire in our society for a return to principles; a need for purity of purpose. I see it daily. People are lost and they need a compass. The question is, who will give it to them? The Luciferian globalists? The woke cultists? The Islamic horde? Or us?

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Do We Need A Final Crusade To Save the Western World? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Join Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley as they explore the captivating life of Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova Oswald Porter, wife of Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Was Marina an innocent housewife, a spy, or a conspirator in one of history’s greatest tragedies?

In this episode of America’s Untold Stories, we uncover Marina’s journey from Soviet Russia to the center of American history. Learn about her childhood under Soviet rule, her tumultuous relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald, and the shocking theories surrounding her involvement in the JFK assassination.

Dive into this deep analysis of her life against the backdrop of Cold War tensions and political intrigue. Through expert insights and historical context, we challenge the narrative you thought you knew.

Don’t miss this thought-provoking exploration of Marina Oswald’s role in history.

The post America’s Untold Stories: The Enigmatic Life of Marina Oswald Exposed appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Jerome Barber:

Lew-

Alan Watt and Bill Cooper saw this years ago.

The post Bread and Circuses – Alan Watt on Sports and Entertainment appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Complicit Clergy

The post 2.9 BILLION Reasons Catholic Bishops Loved Biden But Hate Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Ben Bartee

The post Neocons Seize on CIA COVID Lab Leak Admission to Warmonger With China appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Patrick Foy:

These terror bombs were not “bought and paid for by Israel” as Trump proclaims. Trump does not want to appear to be giving away anything. The American taxpayer is funding this madness. When it comes to Israel, Trump is an amoral fraud. Like Papa Joe Biden before him, Trump is in the pocket of his Zionist donors. Ergo, America is a full partner in whatever Netanyahoo does.

Gaza having been reduced to rubble thanks to Washington’s unlimited assistance under Biden, Trump now suggests that the bombed-out Palestinians be transferred to Egypt and Jordan. I say why not allow them back into Palestine proper whence they were driving out by Israel? In this way they might acquire equal rights as the Jews. What happened to Washington’s “peace process”?

The post Bombs away in Gaza… appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

The post Capitol Police Officer That Evacuated the House & Senate: Jan. 6 Was a Set-Up appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

Filmed in Galway and Connemara, it’s a good movie. The Irish humor is on full display. The scenery is true to life, as are the Irish. I had to use the headphones to understand the accents and the jokes. There are jokes and witty sayings by all the characters. It’s good writing and acting. I like the soundtrack, too.

The post “The Guard”, Movie Trailer appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Will Bill Gates Snatch Up TikTok? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The Federalist

The post RFK Jr. To Be Grilled My Senators Funded By Big Pharma appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Sputnik News

The post Tucker Carlson Says Blinken Did Everything to Accelerate War Between US, Russia appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

The post Peer-Reviewed Study Finds Irrefutable Evidence Supporting Immediate Market Withdrawal of COVID-19 “Vaccines” appeared first on LewRockwell.