Lew Rockwell Institute

The US has become, in effect, a military guarantor for Qatar. With Trump’s unprecedented Executive Order of September 29, 2025, Washington now “shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure” of Qatar as a threat to the US, pledging to respond with “military” measures, “if necessary”.

For the first time, with the exception of NATO’s Turkey, the US has formally committed to the defense of a regional partner in the Middle East (not Israel).

Expert Bilal Y. Saab argues that the move is “accidental” in the sense that it appears to have been rushed, even sloppy — but it is no less consequential for being so. The timing, indeed, suggests this military guarantee is less the culmination of long strategic planning, and more a reactive wager — a bold recalibration of US posture toward Qatar and, by extension, the Gulf.

I have long been writing about Qatar’s geopolitical relevance as a kind of magnified “small state” actor, so to speak — a diplomatic playmaker in a volatile region. In May I argued that Trump’s Gulf tour (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE) — notably excluding Israel — signaled a deliberate attempt to rebalance the intricate enough US-Israel relationship. Back then, I observed that while Trump’s gestures in the Gulf appeared transactional, they also served to subtly remind even Washington’s closest ally (Israel) that it cannot act unchecked.

The Gulf states, with their financial heft and mediation roles (especially in Gaza and sometimes even Ukraine), arguably offer more immediacy and leverage to Trump’s vision than Israel sometimes does. In that light, Qatar’s elevation to de facto protectorate status may be the logical next step in a broader pivot.

To be sure, Qatar is no newcomer to regional behind-the-scenes diplomacy. Already in 2021 I chronicled how the Qatari authorities in Doha, even during the Gulf blockade (2017–2021), maintained back-channels to Iran and Turkey, and later brokered reconciliations between the Gulf states themselves. Qatar’s ability to straddle Riyadh and Tehran, Ankara and Washington, is part of its diplomatic capital. In short, Qatar’ mediation portfolio has earned it outsized influence.

So, what explains Trump’s unprecedented guarantee? Several interlocking dynamics are at play, and the move cannot be reduced to theatrical one-upmanship.

First, the immediate trigger was clearly Israel’s September 9 missile strike on Doha, targeting Hamas operatives during ceasefire talks. The attack killed a Qatari security officer and jolted the diplomatic equilibrium. Netanyahu eventually apologized — urged so by Trump — with a phone call to Qatari Prime Minister bin Abdulrahman. But that was not enough. In short order, Trump signed the executive order, anchoring the apology in power. The guarantee both shores up Qatar’s mediation role (which the White House explicitly supports in the text) and deters Israel from repeat strikes against the Arab country.

Second, this move is emblematic of Trump’s Gulf tilt and his recalibration of Washington’s regional assumptions, especially regarding a reordering of the US–Israel axis. By empowering Qatar so overtly, Trump signals that Gulf states can secure more direct reciprocity from Washington than Israel might expect — a blunt message, but one consistent with his transactional foreign-policy mindset. The calculus goes: if Qatar mediates Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, even Iran channels, then binding it militarily ensures sustained alignment. This is underreported in most commentaries, but thus far the Qatari guarantee works as both shield and leash, so to speak.

Third, it is also a bet on deterrence as diplomacy. By elevating Qatar’s status through formalized defense guarantees, the US seeks to generate risk for any state considering strikes on Doha. That said, Saab’s critique deserves attention: a presidential Executive Order is easily reversible; it lacks congressional buy-in; and it arguably does not really commit the US in practice. Under scrutiny, the credibility of such a guarantee is thus questionable. If Israel bombs again, will the US confront it? If Iran or its proxies attack Doha, will Trump risk American lives? The absence of mutual obligations in the text is a striking omission too.

Fourth, this may be a signal to other Gulf powers eyeing guarantees. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has long sought a US mutual defense pact, especially in connection with normalization with Israel. Yet somehow Qatar got the prize first. Can Washington afford formal commitments to multiple Gulf states? That would be a recipe for strategic overstretch. Be as it may, Qatar becomes the test case in a way — the barometer for whether the US is ready to anchor regional security rather than outsource it.

At bottom, this Trump guarantee does reflect a broader shift: the Gulf has arguably become the center of gravity in Middle East geopolitics, and not just Israel. The United States now seeks to anchor itself more deeply in regional intermediation networks — and it would appear that little old Qatar, ever graceful amid turbulence, is its chosen vehicle.

Yet history reminds us: power is not just declared in paper, but enforced in presence. For this guarantee to be really more than a rhetorical flourish, Washington would need to translate words into posture: joint exercises, missile defenses, etc.

In the end, one should neither dismiss the surprise guarantee as impulsive theatre, nor accept it at face value as a solid treaty. Rather (as is the case with so many other things pertaining to Trump) one can see it as a bold gamble.

In this scenario, this moment  could mark the beginning of a truly new US-Gulf bargain: Qatar as military partner, mediator, and semi-shield — with Washington more tightly bound than ever in the Gulf chessboard. One should also expect further complications arising from an America-Israeli relationship that today is more complex than ever.

Source infobrics.org.

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International Man: Historically, financial markets have often ended in euphoric blow-offs or painful crashes. Do you think today’s environment resembles past periods like the late 1920s, the 1970s, or the dot-com bubble?

Doug Casey: There’s an old saying in the market: “Money makes the mare run.”

The markets have tended to move much more radically since the Federal Reserve, the creator of money, was itself created. For generations, we’ve had a whole class of market savants, known as Fed watchers, who try to second-guess what Fed bureaucrats are going to do with interest rates, bank reserves, and money creation, because they realize that those things translate into market action.

Because of the Fed’s increasing importance, you can expect more radical moves than ever in the markets. Compare it to an elevator going up and down with a lunatic at the controls—which impresses me as a good analogy.

International Man: Some argue we could see a final, euphoric rally—a “melt-up”—before any collapse. What would need to happen for that to play out?

Doug Casey: A melt-up is not unlikely. Trump is actively trying to control the Fed by replacing its governors with sycophants who see things the way he does. In other words, print lots of money and manipulate for low rates. Trump wants the Fed to do what he tells them, despite the Fed’s theoretical independence. Of course, Fed independence has always been a fiction. But if he succeeds in dropping the pretense, we can count on a genuinely wild and crazy monetary policy.

The odds of a melt-up are high based on that, despite some extremely shaky and unsound fundamentals. Frankly, the government almost has no choice but to keep printing and suppressing interest rates. If they don’t, the economy is likely to have a catastrophic, deflationary collapse. They want to avoid that at any cost.

International Man: If there is a melt-up, do you see it being concentrated in specific sectors like tech, AI, or commodities, or across the broader market?

Doug Casey: By every parameter, the market is more overvalued now than ever before in history. How you play it depends a lot on your view of history, your own psychology, and your own skill set. But right now, mining stocks and energy stocks are super cheap.

Mining stocks are particularly interesting. They’ve been in a quiet bull market this year, starting from extremely low levels. Many of the smaller, obscure stocks have tripled and quadrupled, completely under the radar. Who knows, or cares, what companies with market caps of, literally, a few million dollars do? Even if they go up a thousand times from here, they still only be “small caps,” too tiny for major institutions to buy. Some of the big miners have gone up 50% or even doubled. Despite that, they’re still close to the cheapest levels they’ve ever been in history.

I’ve always been friendly toward small mining stocks for reasons I’ve explained in the past. But especially now, since they’re at the beginning of a gigantic bull market. The market hates energy stocks as well right now, and they’re the other place to be. Many have dividends—depending on whether we’re talking oil, gas, coal, or uranium—of up to 10% or 15%.

The way I see it, the stock bubble is headed there. Should you stay in tech, which has been in a humongous, unparalleled bull market for what seems like forever? There’s another old market dictum: “High tech, big wreck.” It’s especially true when the whole world is concentrating on it. These stocks are, to use a patented Trumpism, “at levels you can’t believe, that nobody’s ever seen before.”

International Man: On the other hand, what do you see as the biggest triggers for a market melt-down? Debt, geopolitical risk, currency crisis?

Doug Casey: You just named the Trifecta of the next financial panic.

Debt is created directly and indirectly through the Federal Reserve, most importantly with the reserve requirements of the commercial banking system. A sound banking system would operate on 100% reserves. A dollar someone deposits for 3% might be lent for 6% for a one-year term. End of story. In today’s world, where money can be created by the banks, a dollar can be lent, redeposited, and used as a reserve to create more money ad infinitum. It’s a daisy chain based on nothing. That’s on top of the distinction between time deposits and demand deposits being totally lost.

Unlike the 1929 collapse, there’s now a huge amount of mortgage, automobile, credit card, and student loan debt. None of these things were problems back in the late 1920s. Mortgages were typically for five years. There were no student loans. Cars were bought with cash. Credit cards didn’t exist.

And on top of that, add government debt, which was trivial back then. Debt is the major risk for a deflationary credit collapse. If anybody can’t pay, neither can the next guy. Down go the dominoes…

Number two: geopolitical risk. The big current catalyst is tariffs. Bear in mind that the amount of trade in the world today—in both relative and absolute terms—is vastly greater than it was pre-1929. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs made imports too expensive for Americans. Since the Europeans couldn’t sell to us, they couldn’t afford to buy from us. The result was corporate bankruptcies and massive unemployment. That compounded the deflationary debt collapse. It’s much more serious now than it was pre-1929.

We should, rather obviously, include war as a geopolitical risk. The Ukraine war isn’t over by any means. In fact, it’s clear that Europe, idiotically, is gearing up for a major war against Russia. The Israel-Iran war isn’t over, nor is the Israel-Palestine war. That wouldn’t matter, except that the US treats Israel as the 51st state. And maybe we’ll see some problems with Qatar, whose security the US has just guaranteed—oddly, just when nuclear-armed Pakistan is guaranteeing the security of Saudi Arabia. We have lots of overlapping treaty obligations, similar to what we saw before World War I. The same thing could happen again.

In addition, Trump is looking to launch an unprovoked attack and perhaps an invasion of Venezuela. The geopolitical risk today looks extraordinarily high, as the US looks for new tar babies to punch around the world.

Number three: the currency. The whole world sees the dollar as a hot potato; it’s an unsafe, depreciating asset. As the rest of the world uses the dollar less and less, for all the reasons we’ve covered in the past, it will lose value rapidly. Remember, the dollar, not soybeans or Boeings, is by far our largest export, and greatest liability. At some point, trillions of offshore dollars will come home to buy title to American assets, and that will create a giant political problem. It’ll be bad for everything—except the price of gold.

International Man: For the everyday investor who doesn’t have access to complex strategies, what should they be doing right now to prepare?

Doug Casey: This question merits a book for an answer. But what stands out to me right now is that everybody and his dog is in the stock market. And unbelievably, over a third of the stocks traded today are ETFs. Of every description, even ETFs on just one stock, using debt or options to internally leverage the moves in that stock. While they can be convenient, ETFs amount to a scam for Wall Street to siphon an additional 1% or so of fees per year out of the markets. Their existence is further proof of how overfinancialized the US economy is.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Coming Melt-Up or Meltdown—and How To Protect Yourself appeared first on LewRockwell.

The BLS has come out with another huge rug-pull on its nonfarm payroll count. And also, predictably, this has triggered loud blathering from both Wall Street and the White House on behalf of exactly the wrong conclusion.

To wit, we don’t need any more Fed rate cuts! And we don’t need a new eruption of money-printing, either, because the real cost of debt is already dirt cheap.

For instance, here is the inflation-adjusted Fed funds rate over the last four decades:

Since the turn of the century, the geniuses on the FOMC have pegged the real Fed Funds Rate at negative levels nearly 80% of the time. And even as of July 2025—three years after allegedly pivoting to inflation-fighting—the real Fed funds rate is only positive by 110 basis points. That’s far below real rates of 250 to 500 basis points, which prevailed before Greenspan went all in on money-printing in response to the dot-com bust.

Still, based on the blatant noise in the BLS’s “useless” jobs numbers, as they were described by even JD Vance, the rate cut chorus implies that the current skinny 110 basis points of positive return to savers and depositors is way too much.

Supposedly, the dire economic weakness implied by the BLS error confession means that the real cost of overnight money for gambling and other short-term purposes should be shoved back below the zero bound yet again in order to keep the economy from tumbling into the recessionary drink.

To be sure, another recessionary spell may well be underway. But for crying out loud—it’s not due to high interest rates. To the contrary, it is the easy-money fostered mountain of public and private debt—now totaling $103 trillion—that has ground economic expansion to a halt.

And we do mean a near halt. Industrial production, for instance, has been essentially flatlining since Q2 2023.

The truth is, the Fed’s elephantine balance sheet and interest rate-pegging regime are also still fueling dangerous financial bubbles and rampant speculation.

The Fed’s interest rate repression has so distorted the debt markets, in fact, that it has enabled the Wall Street nincompoop running the US Treasury to buy back tens of billions of long-term US Treasury bonds, of all things, and finance these purchases by issuing T-bills into the phony FOMC-controlled short-term money market.

What unfathomable insanity. There is no other way to put it.

So, yes, the good folks at the BLS have disappeared another 911,000 jobs for the year ending in March 2025. But so what?

After all, there is nothing new about the agency’s gross incompetence, given that this latest rug pull comes on top of the 818,000 jobs the BLS disappeared for the year ending March 2024 and the 306,000 jobs for the year ending March 2023 that also got a “just kidding” markdown. That’s 2.035 million jobs gone up in revisionary smoke during the last 36 months in the context of 12 material downward benchmark revisions in the last 20 years (versus only four material upward revisions).

Obviously, a lot more people should be fired than the hapless BLS commissioner who got canned by Trump a while back.

To wit, what’s not fit for purpose here isn’t merely the numbers crunchers at the BLS, but the 12-person monetary politburo at the FOMC, which has been foolish enough to make the monthly nonfarm payroll survey the be-all-and-end-all of the “incoming data” by which they supposedly macro-manage the entire $30 trillion US economy.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

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Many individuals I’ve spoken to believe Peter Marks is the government official most directly responsible for the entire COVID catastrophe, and those I know who directly interacted with him despise him. For that reason, six months ago, I published a detailed exposé of his conduct throughout the pandemic, both to highlight the systemic issues within our healthcare bureaucracy that must be fixed and to disincentivize other health officials from following in his footsteps. Since that time:

• Despite immense industry pushback, he was replaced with MAHA appointee Vinay Prasad

• Marks has made statements on the national media which display either a profound degree of ignorance of vaccines or a cult-like devotion to them, such as telling CBS the MMR vaccine absolutely does not cause encephalitis—despite this specific injury being one of the only vaccine injuries the Federal Government acknowledged as real and eligible for compensation when it created the the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986.
Note: the primary reason DMSO (a safe and affordable substance with remarkable therapeutic applications against a wide range of “incurable” ailments) never entered mainstream medical practice was because the FDA, feeling DMSO’s broad therapeutic potential threatened their control of American medicine, waged a multi-decade war against it despite widespread opposition from the public, Congressmen, scientists and physicians across the country. One journalist who interviewed the successive FDA commissioners throughout this saga was struck by how “lacking [they were] in solid information about the most spectacular and controversial drug of our time” and how often they simply quoted nonsensical misinformation the FDA had previously put out about the drug without a basic understanding of it—something I would argue also applies to Peter Marks.

• Yesterday, it was announced that Peter Marks had started working with Eli Lilly, where he will oversee molecule discovery and infectious diseases at Lilly. While his salary has not been publicly announced, the AI systems I queried said given the existing precedent, he would likely get 2-6 million this year (a big upgrade from his roughly $200,000.00 FDA salary)—and possibly much more (e.g. 10-15 million).

This understandably enraged the vaccine injured parties who directly interacted with Marks over the last four years, so I felt it was important to revisit exactly what Marks did and discuss the broader revolving door in regulatory medicine.

Note: last year, the FDA approved Eli Lilly’s anti-amyloid monoclonal antibody for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (granting the application Fast Track, Priority Review, and Breakthrough Therapy designations). I showed in last weekend’s article, that these costly drugs do close to nothing (they may slightly slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease) while simultaneously creating a variety of severe symptoms including giving over a quarter of recipients brain bleeds and brain swelling—yet remarkably, safer and much more effective Alzhemier’s therapies have languished in obscurity.

Sociopathic Structuring

A frequent criticism of corporations (which I believe also applies to governmental bureaucracies) is that their organizational structure encourages sociopathic behavior. This is because members of these entities are shielded from legal or personal accountability for their actions, with any wrongdoings being attributed to the corporation as a whole. In contrast, the main form of accountability most members face is the pressure to advance the institution’s mission (e.g., make more money), leading to the proliferation of increasingly unethical methods to achieve that goal.

To illustrate, consider this quote from Peter Rost, a former executive at Pfizer and one of the few pharmaceutical leaders to speak out against the industry:

It is scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob. The mob makes obscene amounts of money, as does this industry. The side effects of organized crime are killings and deaths, and the side effects are the same in this industry. The mob bribes politicians and others, and so does the drug industry … The difference is, all these people in the drug industry look upon themselves – well, I’d say 99 percent, anyway – look upon themselves as law-abiding citizens, not as citizens who would ever rob a bank … However, when they get together as a group and manage these corporations, something seems to happen … to otherwise good citizens when they are part of a corporation. It’s almost like when you have war atrocities; people do things they don’t think they’re capable of. When you’re in a group, people can do things they otherwise wouldn’t, because the group can validate what you’re doing as okay.

In looking through what went awry with the COVID-19 response, while Fauci was commonly blamed for all that went amiss, I kept running into another less-known individual who, while hidden within the FDA bureaucracy, I believe was directly responsible for many of the mishaps that happened

This was because Peter Marks was:

•The primary person who covered up the reports of COVID vaccine injuries (and instead repeatedly told the world they were “safe and effective”).

•Kept on pushing the FDA’s chief vaccine scientists (who were very pro-vaccine) to accelerate and condense the approval timelines for the COVID vaccines (as those approvals were needed to legally implement Biden’s vaccine and booster mandates). Eventually, Gruber and Krause reported their were no more corners they could cut to further accelerate the COVID vaccine approvals, at which point they were removed from the COVID vaccine approval process and Marks took it over (at which point the unjustifiable approvals and mandates quickly followed).

As such, I felt Marks should not be in the agency and put together a detailed summary of his gross malfeasance at the FDA throughout COVID-19 in the hopes his abhorrent conduct could become widely known. Shortly after, Marks announced his resignation in a spiteful letter that concluded with:

I was willing to work to address the Secretary’s concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency…However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not
desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.

This, in turn, prompted Robert Redfield (Trump’s 2018-2021 CDC director) to make a Twitter account to state:

Secretary Kennedy and Commissioner MartyMakary have the responsibility to build their own team at the FDA to move our nation forward. It was extremely disappointing to see Dr Peter Marks’ vindictive comments towards Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. in his resignation letter. I firmly believe RFK will be the most consequential Health Secretary in our nation’s history.

Note: Redfield, to my knowledge, is the only CDC director who went into private practice (he treats long COVID) after leaving the CDC (whereas in contrast most directors accept lucrative or prestigious positions following their tenure).

Following Mark’s resignation (which many news outlets claimed was forced), many news outlets attempted to paint him as saint and a victim of RFK’s “war against science”

This gushing coverage of Marks, in turn, I would argue was due to his background. Specifically:

• Prior to joining the FDA, Marks was an academic hematologist and oncologist with an “average and unimpressive publication history” (none of which related to vaccines, but one of which extensively discussed the global need for fully informed consent and stated “those that have only pretended to move [towards informed consent] will have the greatest difficulty”).

• Prior to joining the FDA, he’d also worked for several years the pharmaceutical industry (although oddly, no information exists online as to which companies he worked for—although one was likely Novartis).

• While at the FDA, he prioritized pushing through extremely expensive gene therapies (22 in total—most of which cost over half a million dollars), including some highly questionable ones (e.g., he overruled three FDA review teams and two top officials to push through a failed muscular dystrophy treatment which subsequently killed a patient).
Note: Robert Malone recently showed that Peter Marks was not qualified to be a senior regulator and had minimal knowledge or background in molecular biology, immunology or vaccinology (and worse still, repeatedly chose to overrule the FDA scientists who did).

• Marks was seen as a global leader in commercializing this field (e.g., he helped direct Germany’s national program to develop gene therapies, his resignation shook the entire sector, and following his resignation, large drops occurred in the stocks of key gene therapy companies).

Fake Empathy

Roughly a century ago, a new industry which combined propaganda, marketing and the emerging science of psychology was created by Freud’s nephew and rapidly took off because of how effectively it shifted public opinion. Since that time Public Relations (PR) has been continuously refined and this invisible industry has gradually gained a monopoly over pubic discourse and gotten a stranglehold on our society.

Since so many backwards policies (e.g., medical ones) originate from PR campaigns, I’ve thus tried to expose the common tactics this industry uses (e.g., having “experts” spam a persuasive soundbite across every media platform), as when you can’t see it, those tactics exert a powerful subconscious pull on the listener, but once you are able to see them, they become immensely transparent and you begin to see through so many of the lies that are fed to us.

Note: I have long found it immensely aggravating how often public figures (e.g., politicians) will successfully repeat PR lines you can tell they clearly do not believe what they are saying as there is no conviction behind their words and frequently they will subsequently say or do things which clearly demonstrate they did not mean what they’d said at the time). Likewise, I have always greatly disliked how when corporations do something evil and get caught, and it will puts out a statement which begins with “we are deeply saddened by …” and then somehow are absolved of their culpability for what happened

In my eyes, one of the most critical points to understand about PR is that the industry has made it much easier (and cheaper) to create a positive perception by paying a PR firm to do that than it is to earn the positive perception through one’s actions. Similarly, public policy has shifted towards policies being determined by whether or not a PR firm can sell them to the public rather than if the electorate supports them.

Note: much of the PR apparatus depends upon having a total monopoly over information (so that nothing can challenge the absurd narratives millions are spent to make be entrenched in our society). One of most profound shifts in our society has been the ability of information to freely diffuse across social media, thereby breaking the monopoly on truth which used to be afforded to those PR campaigns and allow contrary narratives which challenge the absurdity of many of these PR campaigns to rapidly disseminate and dispel those campaigns (e.g., I’ve had numerous times where this Substack successful dispelled a multi-million dollar propaganda campaign and since I am just one of many people doing that, it’s not financially feasible for traditional PR campaigns to continue to control the narrative).

Within medicine, one of the most common complaints patients have is that their doctors “don’t show empathy” towards them—a situation I believe ultimately results from the fact doctors have so little time with all the patients they see that the fundamental human capacity to be present to another’s experience gets overloaded and they instead default to interacting with their patient’s through an abstract script to get through the day.

In turn, while I sometimes come across individuals (e.g., doctors or politicians) who have the capacity to quickly be present to large numbers of people, normally the only viable solution to this problem is to spend more time with each person. Unfortunately, the current insurance payment scheme incentivizes those short visits (which I believe is incredibly shortsighted as many chronic issues can only be solved with longer visits that cost much less than the innumerable short visits that take their place).

As such, the medical industry chose to address this lack of empathy not by giving patients what they wanted (a doctor they felt connected to) but rather by creating the facade of empathy. This for example was accomplished by training medical students to robotically repeat “empathy statements” (e.g., repeating back what the patient said or stating “I’m sorry to hear that”), as in many cases, that indeed works.

Note: due to how profitable medical students are, there has been a proliferation of medical schools which has required gradually dropping the standards for admission (as our declining education standards has led to a lack of qualified college graduates). Because of this, the profession recently relaxed some of core graduation requirements such as their first board exams being switched to pass/fail and the pass/fail in-person basic assessment of clinical skills (where physician “empathy” was evaluated) being permanently cancelled due to COVID social distancing.

Most recently, I saw this on display in a viral video where a popular YouTube doctor (who’s taken a lot of pharmaceutical money) “debated 20 anti-vaxxers” and then received many variants of these two responses:

• “I am deeply impressed by the incredible empathy and compassion Dr. Mike gave these people.”

• “I cannot believe how moronic and misinformed those people were; Dr. Mike is a saint for talking to them the way he did.”

Conversely, after I watched it the following points jumped out at me:

1. Many of the people selected to appear challenged vaccination by promoting extreme and hard to defend views, thereby making it possible to make viral clips of their statements to smear all criticism of vaccines (whereas in contrast individuals with extensive familiarity on many of the topics were not invited so that Dr. Mike’s “expertise” could go unchallenged).

2. His responses typically were a mixture of standard vaccine talking points (e.g, all evidence of vaccine injury presented to him did not count because “correlation is not causation”) followed by “empathetic” statements.

3. Because of the smooth hypnotic pace he used, false statements that went unchallenged were peppered in such as:

• He asserted VAERS overreports vaccine injuries when in reality less than 1% of injuries make it into VAERS (as the government never wanted a publicly available injury database and once a law forced its creation, the government has worked for decades to undermine VAERS).

• He “compassionately” claimed the Federal vaccine injury compensation program existed to help individuals injured by vaccines and that they could sue a vaccine manufacturer if they were unsatisfied with the verdict—when in reality it is nearly impossible to have most injuries be acknowledged by that program and even harder to be able to sue a manufacturer outside of it).

• He argued that “vaccine immunity is superior to natural immunity” (which is false as vaccine immunity often creates a very narrow immunity pathogens rapidly evolve a resistance to). Then as people started to point that out, he pivoted to stating “vaccines do not put you at risk of infection like an actual infection so they are superior due to the lower risk entailed in become immune” and was not called out for moving the goalpost from efficacy to safety.
Note: there is also strong evidence vaccine side effects are often much greater than those from a natural infection (best demonstrated by how many more people have permanent complications from the vaccines than a COVID infection.

In short, his actions were a classic example of the (incredibly cruel) gaslighting many patients experience when, after being injured by a pharmaceutical, they are told the injury is entirely in their head. In some cases that’s done in a rude and confrontational way, but in many others, it’s instead done in a deceptive and compassionate manner which still traps you in the same box.

Note: one noteworthy fact about this doctor is that in addition to “combating misinformation” throughout COVID, he also used his large platform to repeatedly advocate for social distancing and mask wearing—but like many other proponents of that doctrine, subsequently got caught flagrantly violating it (in his case at his birthday party where he was maskless and tightly packed amongst women he’d invited—after which he essentially refused to apologize for his hypocrisy).

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Israel continued to hammer Gaza with military explosives on Thursday despite the announcement of the first stages of a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

Israel always does this. When normal people get a ceasefire agreement they think “Good, this means we can finally stop fighting and killing.” Whenever Israelis get a ceasefire agreement they go, “This means we have to hurry up and kill as many people as possible before it takes effect.”

But it does appear that the killing and abuse will at least diminish for a time, which is an objectively good thing no matter how you slice it.

The first stages of the agreement reportedly entail a partial withdrawal of IDF troops, Israel’s starvation blockade officially ending, humanitarian aid being allowed into the enclave, and both Israel and Hamas releasing captives and stopping the fighting.

Drop Site News reports that according to Hamas sources, subsequent ceasefire phases will entail “No surrender, no disarming, no mass exile, but most of all a permanent end to the war.”

SCOOP: this is the agreement document between Israel and Hamas under the title “Comprehensive End to the Gaza War” – including the signature of the mediators. More details of my story – at @kann_news pic.twitter.com/1qGPGFck7q

— Gili Cohen (@gilicohen10) October 9, 2025

It remains to be seen if there will be any movement toward a lasting ceasefire beyond the first stage. When an agreement was reached late last year it never made it beyond the first phase and then the Trumpanyahu administration declared a siege and resumed the killing.

The far right members of the Netanyahu regime certainly seem like they don’t expect the ceasefire to hold.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a statement that Israel has a “tremendous responsibility to ensure that this is not, God forbid, a deal of ‘hostages in exchange for stopping the war,’ as Hamas thinks and boasts,” and that “immediately after the hostages return home, the State of Israel will continue to strive with all its might for the true eradication of Hamas and the genuine disarmament of Gaza.”

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir issued similar remarks, saying that he and his Jewish Power party will use their leverage to dismantle the Netanyahu government if it “allows the continued existence of Hamas rule in Gaza.”

Netanyahu himself has been studiously avoiding any talk of commitment to a lasting ceasefire, mostly limiting his public statements to the significance of freeing Israeli hostages.

Notice how it doesn’t say words like “ceasefire,” “withdrawal,” or “end of war.” pic.twitter.com/HqSWje4313

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) October 9, 2025

So there’s not a whole lot to feel optimistic about here. If the killing does stop on a lasting basis, it will be a pleasant surprise.

If it does, we can only surmise that the US and Israel calculated that the worldwide PR crisis created by the genocide was getting too severe to sustain, which would be a win for all of us. Trump has gone on record to say that “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world. Now I am gonna get all that support back.”

Either that, or they calculated that they’re going to need all their firepower for a planned war with Iran. Which would of course be terrible for everyone.

We shall see. For now at least it will be nice for everyone to have a breather. If things really do calm down I’m going to do something I’ve never done in my entire writing career and try to take a full weekend off work to decompress. Focusing on a live-streamed genocide for two years takes a toll on the mind and body.

Here’s hoping for a better future.

_____________

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The post The Ceasefire appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Kremlin is urging American foreign-policy makers not to give Ukraine long-range Tomahawk missiles it can use to strike deep within the Motherland, pointing out this would directly implicate the U.S. Stateside noninterventionists worry their country may be catapulted into another hot war.

Giving Kiev missiles with a range of up to 1,500 miles will lead “to a new serious stage of escalation of the Ukrainian crisis,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Wednesday. Moreover, it “will not just send the confrontation into a downward spiral, but also cause irreparable damage to Russian-US relations,” since the missiles’ use is “simply impossible without the direct involvement of the US military.” She added that this would be a shame, especially since the two sides “have just begun to display certain elements indicating the resumption of a bilateral dialogue.”

According to reports from early this month, somebody with President Donald Trump’s ear convinced him that providing Ukraine with weapons and intelligence to strike inside Russia is a good idea. Trump personally signed off on the decision, per The Wall Street Journal. The rationale is that hitting Russia where it truly hurts, its energy infrastructure, will cripple its ability to fund the war. Energy, particularly gas and oil, is Russia’s primary revenue generator. India and China are its main clients. While Europe has significantly decreased its dependence on Russian energy, some analysis indicate that India and China have more than made up for those losses over the last few years. At the same time, the Ukrainians’ swarm of drone attacks on Russian oil refineries appear to be somewhat effective. The Russians are now importing gasoline from their neighbor and ally Belarus, The Moscow Times admits.

Trump the Peacemaker?

Trump is once again frustrated with the Kremlin. Despite holding several talks with and rolling out the red carpet in Alaska for Russian head of state Vladimir Putin, the war rages as intensely as it ever has. The two sides are lobbing drones and missiles at each other nonstop.

Trump insists his goal is to foster peace. His series of talks with the leaders of both nations, his hitherto refusal to level more sanctions against Russia, despite persistent pressure from American and European warhawks to do so, and his record of peace-brokering in other conflicts (news is breaking that his involvement has helped secure the release of the remaining Israeli hostages) suggest the president genuinely seeks peace. But this latest decision, along with his refusal to completely halt all American aid to Ukraine, casts some doubt.

Before Trump met Putin in Alaska, Ukraine had warmed up to the idea of giving up territory, or “land swapping,” as Trump called it, particularly the area which is already occupied by Russia and is overwhelmingly ethnically Russian. But there has been no indication that they’re willing to give up on seeking membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This, the Russians have consistently contended, is the primary “root cause” of the war. As we have pointed out in several previous reports, this Russian grievance is legitimate.

Noninterventionists like Ron Paul and retired General Michael Flynn have criticized continued U.S. involvement in this war. Another group of people who would likely have opposed how the Trump administration is dealing with this situation are America’s wise early leaders.

The Founders on Foreign Folly

In our June 23, 2025 print issue, we republished an older article titled “Minding Our Own Business” in which we reminded readers of what three early American presidents thought about U.S. meddling abroad.

George Washington saw Europe as a region full of drama that does us no good to be ensnared in:

Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence, she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns…. Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of any permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.

Then there’s the famous maxim from John Quincy Adams about the  problem with going half a world away to hunt down dragons:

America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own…. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication in all wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom.

And for those who remain unconvinced, here is what the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, had to say about getting involved in foreign entanglements:

Our first and fundamental maxim should be, never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe; our second, never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with cis-Atlantic affairs. America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe…. She should therefore have a system of her own, separate and apart from that of Europe.

In that same TNA article, we cited the prophetic words of essayist William Graham Sumner. Writing in regard to the Spanish-American War, Sumner predicted that a dangerous precedent had been set:

[E]xpansion and imperialism are at war with the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American people, and they will plunge us into a network of difficult problems and political perils…. The people … who now want us to break out, warn us against the terrors of “isolation.” Our ancestors all came here to isolate themselves from the social burdens and inherited errors of the old world…. What we are doing is that we are abandoning this blessed isolation to run after a share in the trouble.

This article was originally published on The New American.

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The reason war archives are withheld from publication for years after the war is over is that time is needed for court historians to instill in the minds of the population that the official narrative is correct and that any deviation from the official narrative is a conspiracy theory. The claim that the withholding of the actual facts is a national security matter is a complete lie. The war is over. The enemy is defeated. No “national security” is any longer involved.  But the facts have to be suppressed until a false explanation can prevail.

That Americans have swallowed false narratives time and again raises the question whether the American population is intelligent.

Recently I had a conversation with a normal Republican.  The media, which is hostile to Republicans, has nevertheless successfully set in stone that Putin and Russia are evil enemies seeking our destruction. When I explained the actual facts, he said that we had different opinions. In other words, facts are not facts. They are just opinions. So the official explanation has the same weight as the facts.

The media indoctrinated Americans that Putin invaded Ukraine as the opening gun of reestablishing the Soviet Empire. This has been the Western propaganda, and it has succeeded in preventing any focus on what the real issue is.

As I have stressed, when the real issue cannot be acknowledged, the opportunity for more misinformation is created, and war results from the inability to see clearly enough to make good decisions.

When facts are overwhelmed by propaganda,  it guarantees the failure of civilization.

The post War Is Our Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

The President of the Unites States Donald Trump had demanded to be given the Noble Peace Price. But following that demand would have been disastrous for the already blemished prestige of the Noble. The government of Norway, which strongly influences the decisions of the Nobel Peace Price committee, was in a pickle:

With hours to go until the announcement of this year’s Nobel peace prize, Norwegian politicians were steeling themselves for potential repercussions to US-Norway relations if it is not awarded to Donald Trump.
…
Mr Trump has long been outspoken about his belief that he should be awarded the peace prize, an honour previously bestowed on one of his presidential predecessors, Barack Obama, in 2009 for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.

In July, Mr Trump reportedly called Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s finance minister and the former Nato secretary general, to ask about the Nobel prize.
…
The newspaper columnist and analyst Harald Stanghelle speculated that retribution from Mr Trump – if it were to come – could take the form of tariffs, demands for higher Nato contributions or even declaring Norway an enemy.

After some talks behind the scenes it was decided to give the price to a different person than Trump but with the very obvious intent to also satisfy Trump by furthering a major foreign policy aim of his:

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado who lives in hiding after attempting to run against President Nicolás Maduro.

Machado, 58, was recognized for keeping “the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness” and “ever-expanding authoritarianism in Venezuela.”
…
She leads the Vente Venezuela opposition party, but was blocked from running as the nation’s president and expelled from office in 2014. She now lives in hiding and faces “serious threats against her life,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

The Trump administration has long aimed at ousting Nicolas Maduro, the socialist leader of Venezuela. It has positioned its military assets around the country and is planing from regime change under false pretense:

Shortly after taking office, Trump declared Tren de Aragua to be a foreign terrorist organization that had “flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs.” In July, the president ordered the Pentagon to target certain Latin American drug cartels. By August, there were eight naval vessels—including destroyers, a cruiser, and a littoral-combat ship—operating in the Caribbean Sea. By September, the first of four boats had been struck, and 21 alleged drug traffickers have now been killed. Last week, the administration sent a confidential notice to Congress signaling its intent to carry out more strikes. The campaign could extend inside Venezuelan territorial waters or include drone strikes inside its land borders, defense officials told us.
…
But it is far from clear that the ties between Maduro’s government and Tren de Aragua are as extensive as the Trump administration has suggested, or that they exist at all. Ronna Risquez, author of the book El Tren De Aragua, told us there was “no evidence” that Maduro leads gang or drug-smuggling operations; an internal memo from the U.S. National Intelligence Council arrived at a similar conclusion. It’s also not clear that Venezuelan drug operations, centralized or otherwise, are significant enough to merit the country being singled out as a threat to American lives. Venezuela is not a major cocaine or fentanyl producer. And even though most of the world’s cocaine grows in neighboring Colombia, Venezuela is also not a major transit hub.

Trump’s ‘anti-narco terrorist’ campaign is clearly aimed at regime change. This despite extensive offers by the Venezuelan government to allow the U.S. to profit from Venezuelan riches (archived):

Venezuelan officials, hoping to end their country’s clash with the United States, offered the Trump administration a dominant stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth in discussions that lasted for months, according to multiple people close to the talks.

The far-reaching offer remained on the table as the Trump administration called the government of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela a “narco-terror cartel,” amassed warships in the Caribbean and began blowing up boats that American officials say were carrying drugs from Venezuela.

Under a deal discussed between a senior U.S. official and Mr. Maduro’s top aides, the Venezuelan strongman offered to open up all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, give preferential contracts to American businesses, reverse the flow of Venezuelan oil exports from China to the United States, and slash his country’s energy and mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian and Russian firms.

That offer wasn’t enough for a greedy Trump:

The Trump administration ended up rebuffing Mr. Maduro’s economic concessions and cut off diplomacy with Venezuela last week. The move effectively killed the deal, at least for now, the people close to the discussion said.

The Trump administration did away with generous offer because it is confident that its plans for regime change will achieve a total domination over Venezuela.

The new Noble Peace Price laureate, María Corina Machado, plays a big role those plans.

Who is that lady you might ask. In July 2024 the NY Times published a friendly portrait of her (archived):

Ms. Machado, a conservative former member of the national assembly once rejected by her own colleagues, has not only corralled Venezuela’s fractious opposition behind her, but has also captivated a broad swath of the electorate with a promise for sweeping government change.
…
If the opposition wins, Mr. González, 74, will be president. But from Washington to Caracas, everyone understands that Ms. Machado is the driving force behind the movement.
…
She became a political activist in 2002, helping to found a voter rights group, Súmate, that eventually led a failed effort to recall Mr. Chávez. She was a darling of Washington — the U.S. government provided financial aid to Súmate — and became one of Mr. Chávez’s most detested adversaries.

But it wasn’t just the government that loathed her. Among colleagues in the opposition, she was often viewed as too conservative, too confrontational and too “sifrina” — Venezuelan for “snobbishly high class” — to become the movement’s leader.

She has said that the politician she most admires is Margaret Thatcher, the conservative icon known for her stubbornness and fealty to the free market. And Ms. Machado has long supported privatizing PDVSA, the state oil company, a move other opposition leaders say would put Venezuela’s most valuable resource in the hands of a few.

Machado, while on the U.S. payroll, was involved in a 2002 military coup attempt in Caracas:

Questions still surround Ms. Machado’s actions in 2002, when dissident military officers and opposition figures led a short-lived coup meant to oust Mr. Chávez. Ms. Machado was at the presidential palace during the installation of a new president, Pedro Carmona.

In the 2005 interview with The Times, Ms. Machado insisted that she and her mother were in the palace that day only to visit Mr. Carmona’s wife, a family friend — not to support the coup.

More recently, in a 2019 interview with the BBC, Ms. Machado called on “Western democracies” to understand that Mr. Maduro would only leave power “in the face of a credible, imminent and severe threat of the use of force.”

Machado even asked the Zionist war criminal Benjamin Netanyahoo for military support in a coup (edited machine translation) :

María Corina Machado asked the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, a military intervention in Venezuela, through a document posted on its social network X in 2018.
…
Machado described the military intervention of “power and influence” against the Venezuelan government.

“Today sending a letter to Mauricio Macri, President of Argentina, and to Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, to ask them to apply their strength and influence to advance the dismantling of the criminal regime in Venezuela, intimately linked to drug trafficking and terrorism,” she wrote.

In addition, the document points out that Machado was “convinced that the international community, according to the doctrine of the responsibility to protect, is called to give Venezuelans the support needed to generate the change,” a change of government.

Machado is still in cahoots with  (and likely still payed by) the U.S. to further regime change in Venezuela (archived):

[U.S. Secretary of State] Rubio met with five opposition figures in May who secretly fled to the United States in what he called a “precise operation.” He has praised the opposition leader, María Corina Machado, whom he called by her nickname, the “Venezuelan Iron Lady,” in a tribute this year.
…
Pedro Urruchurtu, an adviser to Ms. Machado, said in an interview that the opposition had developed a plan for the first 100 hours after Mr. Maduro’s ouster that would involve a transfer of power to Edmundo González, who ran for president against Mr. Maduro last year.
…
“What we’re talking about is an operation to dismantle a criminal structure, and that includes a series of actions and tools,” Mr. Urruchurtu said, adding: “It has to be done with the use of force, because otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to defeat a regime like the one we’re facing.”

The opposition’s plans include persuading other governments to take diplomatic, financial, intelligence and law enforcement actions, he said.

To recap – the Noble Peace Price committee is giving the price to an opposition politician in South America who is on the payroll of the U.S. government and has been involved in previous military coups attempts in her country. Her advisor is arguing for the use force to overthrow the government. Ms. Machado’s plan is to the sell out whatever Venezuelans have to the foreign empire that pays her.

The Noble Committee and Norway may, for now, have saved themselves from Trump’s wrath but the decision to award the price to Ms. Machado is another huge blemish to its record.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Fearing Trump’s Wrath Nobel Committee Hands Peace Price To Regime Change Puppet appeared first on LewRockwell.

In 1918, the Austrian political scientist Joseph Schumpeter delivered a now-famous lecture titled “The Crisis of the Tax State.” The question he addressed was whether or not the First World War would bring about a destructive fiscal crisis for European states. Would the burdens of post-war debt and taxation threaten to destroy these states? Many at the time believed that it would be difficult or impossible to fiscally recover from the enormous debts and tax liabilities incurred by states during the war.

Schumpeter, however, concluded that the states of Europe would easily survive whatever fiscal strains might be caused by the war. After all, he noted, the states of Europe were well developed “tax states” by the early twentieth century. In the short and medium term, at least, the ruling regimes of Europe could essentially raise revenue at will, and the state organizations themselves thus faced no existential crisis. If the states of Europe did fail, he noted, it would be for some reason other than fiscal collapse, such as conquest or revolution. Nonetheless, “the hour will come,” he noted, that the drive to endlessly increase state revenues would eventually consume and destroy the private sector. But, in 1918, he predicted (correctly) that the day of reckoning was not yet at hand.

Now more than 100 years later, it’s clear that Schumpeter was right. No states collapsed due to an inability to raise taxes. As fiscal demands increased on states, it was not the states who suffered. The taxpayers, on the other hand, fared less well.

Unfortunately, Schumpeter’s conclusions apply to the modern-day United States as well. Like the states of Europe, the United States is now a full-blown “tax state” in that lawmakers of the central government can raise taxes with minimal political or institutional effort without meaningful legal resistance from any other domestic institution. Consequently, as the burdens of debt and upward-spiraling welfare costs continue to put pressure on the Treasury, the answer will be to simply raise taxes—and the taxpayers will absorb it.

Moreover, the history of modern democratic regimes confirms that interest group politics will ensure that spending continues unabated. In other words, given the lack of meaningful obstacles to accelerated taxation, there is no institutional or legal way out of this. The only way that the power of the tax state will be meaningfully challenged is through the dismemberment of the state through secession, or through outright dissolution of the existing state and the founding of an entirely new successor state.

The US Is a Tax State 

But first: what is a tax state exactly?

Schumpeter emphasizes that the reason tax states so easily endure fiscal pressures is the fact that tax states can so efficiently, with minimal friction, extract revenues from the domestic population. This is made possible by these characteristics of tax states, which are also characteristics of modern states in general:

1. Centralization: taxes are directly imposed by the central government. The central government does not rely on regional or local governments to collect taxes or enforce tax laws. (This does not preclude regional or local governments from imposing their own taxes.)
2. Unilateral power: The central government can raise taxes unilaterally. The central government’s legislature or executive has the prerogative to raise taxes on its own authority without the permission of any other sovereign within the state’s territory. Put another way, no regional or local government has the ability to veto a tax increase or legally prevent its implementation.
3. The central government freely decides how revenues are spent. Once tax revenues are collected, the central government spends the revenues in whatever manner is preferred by the central state’s legislative power.
4. Taxes are not fees or a payment for a service. Strictly speaking, a fee is a payment that is designed to fund a specific service, and only those who “benefit” from the service pay the fee. Tax “benefits,” on the other hand, are not tied to any particular service. Tax states are not legally held to any sort of reciprocal duty to spend tax revenues in a manner that benefits those who pay the tax.

The United States government fulfills all these requirements of tax states. In the United States, the Congress can raise direct taxes on the population at any time by simply increasing the income tax.  Recent experience has also shown that the US president can unilaterally raise import taxes to any level he prefers. This doesn’t even require a vote of any kind. And, should these taxes prove insufficient to meet the needs and preferences of the central government, the central government can borrow legally unlimited amounts of money.

Moreover, when more debt is needed, the central bank will often purchase some portion of the central government’s bonds to subsidize and push down interest rates on government debt. This process is made possible through monetary inflation, allowing the central government to extract revenue via monetization of debt and an “inflation tax.”

Throughout this process, no state or local government can legally prevent these tax increases, and no institution outside the central government has any say over how the dollars are spent. Nostalgic sentimentalists may try to console themselves with feel-good stories about the United States being a decentralized, federalist state under some alleged “rule of law.” But, when it comes to taxation, the United States is clearly a de facto unitary state.

The Rising Tax Burden 

This is good news for the American state itself. As federal spending continues upward unabated, the federal government will continue to have untrammeled access to more revenue. Where a tax increase in Congress cannot be had, the central government can simply turn to monetary inflation or to new tariffs, implemented via a “stroke of the pen” at the central bank or in the Oval Office.

For the taxpayer, however, it’s all bad news. Fiscal pressures on the central government will continue to mount, but there will be no discussion of austerity, spending cuts, or anything else that would actually lessen the spending obligations of the central government.

The exigencies of democratic coalition politics will ensure cuts will not happen. To cut spending on any major program would mean political suicide for many members of Congress and endanger critical fundraising needs for candidates and party organizations. Thus, there will be no substantial cuts, least of all to the largest federal programs that put the most pressure on federal revenues: Social Security, Medicare, military, and interest on the debt. There certainly will be no cuts to spending on interest on the debt—now topping a trillion dollars per year. To do that would be to prompt a sovereign debt crisis.

Instead, the central government will just keep going back to the well of taxation over and over, either through more ordinary taxes, or through an ever growing inflation tax. We’re already seeing this at work in how the central bank has already effectively abandoned its so-called two-percent target for price inflation. The official price-inflation rate sits at 2.9 percent, and the central bank is easing monetary policy. (If price inflation does go down at this point, it will be thanks to declining economic conditions, not to restrained monetary policy.)

What the Future Holds—and the Battle of Ideas

In the short term, economic booms and busts will come and go, but over the medium and long term, the true tax burden on taxpayers will continue to grow and grow. So long as most of the American population considers the US government to be a legitimate state, there will be no impediment to the state continuing to extract ever larger amounts of revenue from the domestic population.

Over time, this will lead to more and more impoverishment for the productive population, but what alternative will the taxpayer have? It is clear that democratic elections will not reverse the trend. If elections were any threat to this trend, we would have seen some evidence of it by now. Even with rising price inflation, rising import taxes, and historic deficits, taxpayers have shown little interest in cutting federal spending. Even among those voters who claim to be for fiscal austerity, most draw the line at any cuts that endanger their favorite federal programs. For example, “hands off my Medicare” is a favored refrain for those who pretend to care about cutting government spending.

There is no legal or institutional mechanism that will bring this to an end. Even as interest on the national debt soars, and as the requirements of federal social benefits continue to rise, the “answer” will simply be more debt and more taxes. If interest rates get “too high” the central bank will intervene with monetary inflation. This will lead to higher inflation, but this will allow the state to meet its political “obligations” with cheaper dollars.

Most of the taxpayers—few of whom understand why federal debts and federal spending increase price inflation—will be fine with this, and they’ll blame price inflation on greed or global oil prices. In short, the end game will likely look like something we witnessed in Latin America during the 1980s: ever increasing government spending coupled with runaway inflation. The state, however, will remain intact through it all.

The only way out will be through the dismemberment of the state through secession, or through the dissolution of the state—hopefully in a peaceful manner similar to that of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, no true opposition is likely to materialize until the middle classes and working classes have endured years of downward mobility. It will be only then that a critical mass of the population abandons its faith in the regime—a misplaced faith formed by decades of state propaganda and public “education.”

For those who actually value freedom, prosperity, and reining in the state, the best thing we can do right now is this: work to speed up the process of state disintegration by exposing the evils of the spending-inflation scam to a portion of the public large enough to force true reforms. As we say at the Mises Institute, “we learn economics to know how we are being ripped off.” Countless millions of taxpayers are being ripped off. But they still don’t understand how or why.

On top of this work, it is critical to ceaselessly work to undermine the public’s view of the American state’s legitimacy. No state that steals, inflates, and impoverishes on such a massive scale could possibly be considered moral or legitimate, or beneficial. As the collapse of the enormous and militarily powerful Soviet state showed us, the key to winning against the state is to increasingly expose how the state mercilessly exploits the taxpayers.

Ultimately, this is a battle of ideas.  As Ludwig von Mises knew, we can only win against state power if we first win in the battle of ideas.

The post The Crisis of the American Tax State appeared first on LewRockwell.

Underneath the patina of newsworthy slogans is a moral and intellectual sewer the size of the Serengeti. I am of course referring to The New York Times, and the hailing of a cold-blooded murderer as an American hero. The latest such outrage is about Joanne Chesimard, a black 78-year-old woman who died in Havana, Cuba, last week. The Times used her “revolutionary” name—Assata Shakur—as if she were some kind of black Joan of Arc. She was nothing of the sort, just a cold-blooded murderer of a state trooper in 1973.

I will not go on about this ghastly individual whom the left has turned into a kind of Robin Hood. Robbing banks, getting willingly laid rather a lot by black gangsters, and having absolutely no remorse for killing a married father and state trooper in cold blood might make her a heroine for the Sulzberger gang, but not for little ole me. She was scum, and she will rot in hell, God willing.

My point is that like her ideology, her assumed name was a contradiction in terms. How dumb must one be to take on the name of the oppressor? I’ll tell you, they have to be both dumb and blind. That includes a few rappers and many politicians of the left, and a jerk like her obituary writer for the Times called Haberman. (Known for the minute size of his willy.)

It is indicative of her ignorance that this Chesimard woman took the name Assata Shakur, an African or Arab appellation, in order to distance herself from her American roots. Many blacks in America tend to do that, especially sports stars, which only confirms my belief that God gives athletic ability with one hand and takes away brain cells with the other. It is as if Jews adopted German names after the war, and Palestinians took on Jewish names of late.

“How dumb must one be to take on the name of the oppressor?”

Let’s start at the beginning: Slavery was a universal institution that existed from the dawn of time, and across the globe, societies employed slave labor even as troops. Five thousand years ago Egypt, Greece, Carthage, and Rome practiced slavery. Farther south, Africans were busy enslaving other Africans and selling them to the Arabs and Romans. It is a fact that the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad legitimized slavery, but somehow this is not mentioned nowadays. Algerian and Tunisian raiders enslaved more than a million white Europeans between the 16th and 18th centuries.

The Muslim slave trade endured for fifteen centuries and transported 17 million slaves, mostly Africans. The European total of transported slaves was 11 million shipped across the Atlantic. Exploiting the West’s orgy of self-flagellation, the African Union has just joined the Caribbean Community (Caricom) in demanding reparations from Britain and from Uncle Sam. The Caribbean group wants 18 trillion greenbacks, the Africans a bit more.

Racism, exploitation, and oppression are words that types from down South use as often as Americans use the f-word. The trouble is, I read and know history, and their claims are as bogus as some Hollywood female breasts. As I stated before, Africans have been enslaving other Africans for centuries. They sold them to the Romans and to Arabs in 1563, a few years before any whites arrived on the Dark Continent. The Kingdom of Kongo (yes, spelled with a “K”) exported 4,000 to 8,000 slaves annually.

Three hundred years later, Oman Arabs ran slave plantations off the east coast of Africa. In Northern Nigeria, one of the largest slave societies equaled the number enslaved in the United States (4,000,000). African rulers virulently opposed British antislavery efforts. Unsold slaves were threatened with death. Yet American blacks today continue to adopt Muslim and African names, a bit like Jews adopting Adolf as their favorite first name, or Palestinians naming their newly born Bibi.

Joanne Chesimard adopting the name she did only showed her historical ignorance. As does the N.Y. Times again and again in its futile attempts to undermine American society.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post What’s in a Name? appeared first on LewRockwell.

You can call this bragging and don’t have to believe it. I got my start sorting the sublime from the repulsive at the tender age of seven. Hanging out at a slightly older boy’s house, let’s call him Mike, is when and where my standards erupted. It was the day that bloodthirsty intolerance for ugly expressions first got stoked.

The Herman’s Hermits song “Mrs. Brown You’ve got a Lovely Daughter” came on the radio. Our host felt that the Hermit’s needed accompaniment. He also seemed to believe his guests would be keen on it. My first impulse was to bolt. But the adult capacity to grin while enraged strangely came over me. The delectable snacks the mother of that house was known to lay out stopped a hasty exit from happening. It is absolutely degrading what a preteen will go through for a first-class pastry.

It’d be too cruel describing Mike’s stab at matching Scouse, Mancunian or whatever you call Peter Noone’s dialect crooning that sappy goo. Hearing “Daw-tuh” from the kid only once would bring violent emotions out of a baby-cuddly golden retriever. Dramatizing his noises busting moves extinguished any lingering traces of pity in an instant. There was a Tonka toy dump truck on the floor nearby; it looked perfect for the purpose of justifiable homicide. My brain already had a bit of a legal turn. One snag stood in the way of permanently silencing Michael. Without hearing from him themselves, could a jury be convinced of how justifiable, humane and necessary his elimination actually was? It was chicken, but I kept on grinning instead.

As years have passed, both my rationality and self-restraint have seriously eroded from those innocent days. Distance from the objects of my disgust is all that has kept me this side of the penitentiary. Society pays the price when the sensate among us cower in the face of artistic atrocity. The depravity has gone so far that aesthetic crimes against humanity are funded by governments in the name of enlightenment.

During the postwar renaissance somewhere between half and a full day’s pay – in a menial job – could place a teenybopper within fifty feet of a performing musical genius. Now, they fork out 6, 7 or 8 days pay for sounds resembling the kind Mike inflicted. And the people calling themselves critics keep cheering them on.

In 1975 a kid working an 8-hour shift at McDonald’s earned $16.80. For no more labor he could see Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones or Jethro Tull with money left for hot dogs and soda. Today, people with college degrees put in a full week, or more, for acts that may merit less than Tonka toy treatment but should certainly not go unpunished. When perv-formers go to jail for statutory, extortion or shooting each other, it is not necessarily their worst crimes being penalized.

As this is written the top five Spotified artists are Bruno Mars, Lady Gag-Gag, The Weaknd, Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish. Bruno will playing in Vegas. You can see him, from the next county, for $329. The Lady is on at Madison Square Garden at rates ranging from $456 to $5500. With those price ranges you can envision how far out of range the peasantry will reside – a good ear might not mind.  In 1975 you could almost touch the amps for ten bucks. Presently, with extra fees and taxes accounted for, it takes more than two days for even Californians toiling the trenches to be skied. Make that more than four in most other states. The conciliation is that amp static is only somewhat distinguishable from the “music.” In a decade, will anybody be streaming command performers from the reeking 20s of the early 21st century? People still crank up Patsy Cline six decades later.

If only the purge of pulchritude was restricted to the audio-sphere. It is easier today for a physically handicapped person to traverse a Japanese TV game show obstacle course successfully, than it is for an unconnected peon to get his script before a Hollywood producer or director. What do all these hoops and hurdles do for the cause of decent drama getting screened?

After falling asleep in the first one, going to John Wick: Chapter 4 was an act of time-to-kill desperation goaded by reviews like this from Collider:

It’s official – John Wick: Chapter 4 has taken the Keanu Reeves action franchise to new heights. At the time of writing, the film has become the top-rated film of the entire franchise as far as Rotten Tomatoes critics scores go – it’s also become the first in the series to crack the 90% barrier, currently sitting at 93% after a love-bombing from film critics.

Numerous other reviewers called it “unpredictable.” How many times do you have to head butt a sports arena wall without a helmet, like Gus Ferotte did in Jack Kent Coke stadium in 1997 with one, to find a guy doing cartwheels while making impossible pistol shots not moronic? We also hear of “plot twists.” Like what? Being found inexplicably while on the lam at every turn? Or surviving getting shot more times than both Bonnie and Clyde? Meanwhile, Wick’s foes run the gamut of occupations from desert sheiks to sushi slicers. How many chapters before a knitting grandma goes at him with her needles?

Elsewhere Denzel Washington intersperses actual acting, like in Roman J. Israel, Esq., with playing an unarmed codger crushing half-a-dozen athletic 25-year-olds training ordnance on him in multiple Equalizer inflictions. Screenwriters must spend all afternoon assembly lining these schlock-fests. For every time Robert McCall looks at his watch, watchers in theaters with functioning gray matter have look at theirs 3 more.

Of course, not all action flickery follows the same unpredictable routine. We are inundated with others where it’s family hit men trying to retire. Alas, those who live by the sword. Fortunately, they never lose their edges. It comes in handy as beleaguered heroes unpredictably vanquish forces the size of army divisions in finales. Imagine the frustration of script readers spiking treatments that so unoriginally fail to include this mandatory parting shot.

You might find the latest from Tom Cruise hard, if not an impossible mission, to sit through too. The first hour of the latest one features Ethan Hunt fawned over as the savior of mankind by everyone from the president on down. It’s like the slobbering of an Operating Thetan in the presence of L. Ron himself. Who needs supernatural superheroes when we’ve got Ethan Hunt? If he hasn’t matched every super-human deed of immortals yet, wait a few more sequels.

But what about serious drama? That’ll get us closer to brutal reality. The latest blockbuster in ’thinking man’s film,’ The Brutalist, has done a double layout with a full twist over the orca. It’s more of a ‘what were they thinking’ film.

Only a nincompoop asks why a world renowned architect leaves New York City to sweep floors in a Podunk furniture store. What fascist forces keep the land of the free from knowing who this junkie genius is? Pliant viewers are expected to walk in already aggrieved for wounded prodigies who might have to slug it out like those hideous common Americans. The film’s model, Marcel Breuer, never endured anything close. The filmmakers rely on the general dearth of erudition evident in themselves – and expected from audiences — doing this 180.

Deep in Penn’s Woods Lazlo Toth, the protagonist, works for Cousin Attila who has been Christianized by a shrill shiksa wife. She’s a catty Catholic whose Hitlerian Hebrew-phobia is soon revealed. What kind of woman, other than a nascent Nazi, has a problem when a guy misses the toilet by three feet? Put her name up there next to Irma Grese.

In the meantime, our hero is cheated out of his fee for remodeling a library by Harrison Lee Van Buren.  The gauche tycoon is later peer pressured by the smart set into liking the new space. He tracks down the man he stiffed for what turns out to be new, improved exploitation. After rescuing Laz from penury Van Buren introduces the architectural genius to society. What else could be next but a commission to design a multi-million dollar contract?

Then, true to form, the gentile town council pulls a fast one on a Holocaust survivor. The community center they’ve commissioned him to draw up must also fill the role of defining local faith. Lazlo brilliantly positions a skylight to shine a crucifix on the altar at noon. That’s a plot untwist necessary for anyone slow enough to have missed the message of exclusion viewers were hosed down with for the first 60 minutes.

The uncircumcised, who were often circumcised in the era, weren’t done with him yet. If Harrison junior can’t have Lazlo’s taciturnly traumatized niece … wasn’t there other prey in the family? When Sr. takes Toth to Tuscany pursuing marble comes the TMI moment from hell. The master builder succumbs to local revelry. Once all liquored up and staggering into the tunneled quarry is when old Harry makes his move. Like Simon Legree with Cassy, Van Buren will have his way with the servants. The next morning the sodomizee looks none the worse for wear and tear. He says “yes boss” quicker than Paul Newman blackjacked by Strother Martin. It comes as a surprise when Toth’s wife turns out to know hubby was raped. The audience didn’t even know Lazlo did. Going by the narrative depicted, did he really mind?

Aint’ that the West writ large? First they Holocaust him, then strong-arm his genius for callous Christianity and finally let him have it like a bitch-boy in the prison shower. Don’t commit the hate crime of thinking that doesn’t summarize US welcome of Holocaust survivors to a T. The only safe question is why Hollywood hasn’t confronted America with their collective guilt before now.

It is during the picnic where Harry Jr. can’t get his grimy paws on Toth niece Zsofia, when the brutal “truth” comes out. Putting Lazlo and family up and back in business, including him in Van Buren outings while providing opportunity no one else does … is really begrudgingly ”tolerating” the despised immigrant. Why, they’ve turned the Statue of Liberty upside down! Persecuted wunderkind’s only respite is a spike of euphoric horse in the arm.

It’s time to incorporate didactic messages from the enlightened. If you can’t find a way to be gay, black, trans, Jewish, Muslim, handicapped and female simultaneously … when’s the next Nuremberg Tribunal? It’ll be womanned by Joy Reid, Randi Weingarten and Al Sharpton. Calling out The Brutalist for being as inanely silly as it is, is quite verboten. We are expected to stand in awe …cuz finally we see what we really are.

Saying that there isn’t the vaguest resemblance in this tall tale to anyone’s experience ever misses the point. The audio-visual branch of the victim industry’s role eradicating hate entails manufacture of an ersatz reality coining more villains to hate. The notion that Lazlo Toth would be an object of homoerotic allure to a Daddy Warbucks like Harrison Van Buren is a shock to the senses. Whatever your taste or persuasion, that genuine plot twist would have kept Lot’s wife from looking back.

We’ve reached the point where you have to get really high to get high art. The pretentiousness of professional critics has weaseled its way into commerce. It can be costly telling clients that what they’ve been told about The Brutalist – and better believe to qualify as culturally hip — makes no sense. When prospects say otherwise it’s necessary to grin like I did at seven. Nobody wants to miss out on the treats.

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President Trump is ushering a “Golden Age” alright, just not the one MAGA voters were expecting. Instead of getting government off our backs, and no more wars, Americans have been saddled with warmongering on a daily basis, and a turbocharge of government spending, debts and inflation! Those people who want to protect themselves Trump’s reckless government policies are piling into gold and sending the price to new all-time highs.

The post $4,000 Gold — Not The “Golden Age” MAGA Voters Were Expecting appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

Hi Lew,

Mr. Kramer makes the mistake of equating money with happiness. And chemotherapy being less vomit-prone? Jeez, if you have cancer, you are in for a tough time anytime.

Happiness is subjective. I was happier in the 1950s to 1990s, even though I was poor. Now, I have money, but liberty is dying. Society is dying. Human interaction is dying. This world from 2001 on sucks! 

Money isn’t happiness.

The post Re: John Stossel: The myth of the good old days appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

OnePeterFive

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Today, millions of Americans say that they believe that the United States is on the verge of a major economic collapse and will soon be entering another Great Depression. But only a small percentage of those same people are prepared for that to happen. The sad truth is that the vast majority of Americans would last little more than a month on what they have stored up in their homes. Most of us are so used to running out to the supermarket or to Wal-Mart for whatever we need that we never even stop to consider what would happen if suddenly we were not able to do that. Already the U.S. economy is starting to stumble about like a drunken frat boy. All it would take for the entire U.S. to resemble New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina would be for a major war, a terror attack, a deadly pandemic or a massive natural disaster to strike at just the right time and push the teetering U.S. economy over the edge. So just how would you survive if you suddenly could not rely on the huge international corporate giants to feed, clothe and supply you and your family? Do you have a plan?

Unless you already live in a cave or you are a complete and total mindless follower of the establishment media, you should be able to see very clearly that our society is more vulnerable now than it ever has been. This year there have been an unprecedented number of large earthquakes around the world and volcanoes all over the globe are awakening. You can just take a look at what has happened in Haiti and in Iceland to see how devastating a natural disaster can be. Not only that, but we have a world that is full of lunatics in positions of power, and if one of them decides to set off a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon in a major city it could paralyze an entire region. War could erupt in the Middle East at literally any moment, and if it does the price of oil will double or triple (at least) and there is the possibility that much of the entire world could be drawn into the conflict. Scientists tell us that a massive high-altitude EMP (electromagnetic pulse) blast could send large portions of the United States back to the stone age in an instant. In addition, there is the constant threat that the outbreak of a major viral pandemic (such as what happened with the 1918 Spanish Flu) could kill tens of millions of people around the globe and paralyze the economies of the world.

But even without all of that, the truth is that the U.S. economy is going to collapse. So just think of what will happen if one (or more) of those things does happen on top of all the economic problems that we are having.

Are you prepared?

The following is a list of 20 things you and your family will need to survive when the economy totally collapses and the next Great Depression begins….

#1) Storable Foo

Food is going to instantly become one of the most valuable commodities in existence in the event of an economic collapse. If you do not have food you are not going to survive. Most American families could not last much longer than a month on what they have in their house right now. So what about you? If disaster struck right now, how long could you survive on what you have? The truth is that we all need to start storing up food. If you and your family run out of food, you will suddenly find yourselves competing with the hordes of hungry people who are looting the stores and roaming the streets looking for something to eat.

Of course you can grow your own food, but that is going to take time. So you need to have enough food stored up until the food that you plant has time to grow. But if you have not stored up any seeds you might as well forget it. When the economy totally collapses, the remaining seeds will disappear very quickly. So if you think that you are going to need seeds, now is the time to get them.

#2) Clean Water

Most people can survive for a number of weeks without food, but without water you will die in just a few days. So where would you get water if the water suddenly stopped flowing out of your taps? Do you have a plan? Is there an abundant supply of clean water near your home? Would you be able to boil water if you need to?

Besides storing water and figuring out how you are going to gather water if society breaks down, another thing to consider is water purification tablets. The water you are able to gather during a time of crisis may not be suitable for drinking. So you may find that water purification tablets come in very, very handy.

#3) Shelter

You can’t sleep on the streets, can you? Well, some people will be able to get by living on the streets, but the vast majority of us will need some form of shelter to survive for long. So what would you do if you and your family lost your home or suddenly were forced from your home? Where would you go?

The best thing to do is to come up with several plans. Do you have relatives that you can bunk with in case of emergency? Do you own a tent and sleeping bags if you had to rough it? If one day everything hits the fan and you and your family have to “bug out” somewhere, where would that be? You need to have a plan.

#4) Warm Clothing

If you plan to survive for long in a nightmare economic situation, you are probably going to need some warm, functional clothing. If you live in a cold climate, this is going to mean storing up plenty of blankets and cold weather clothes. If you live in an area where it rains a lot, you will need to be sure to store up some rain gear. If you think you may have to survive outdoors in an emergency situation, make sure that you and your family have something warm to put on your heads. Someday after the economy has collapsed and people are scrambling to survive, a lot of folks are going to end up freezing to death. In fact, in the coldest areas it is actually possible to freeze to death in your own home. Don’t let that happen to you.

#5) An Axe

Staying along the theme of staying warm, you may want to consider investing in a good axe. In the event of a major emergency, gathering firewood will be a priority. Without a good tool to cut the wood with that will be much more difficult.

#6) Lighters Or Matches

You will also want something to start a fire with. If you can start a fire, you can cook food, you can boil water and you can stay warm. So in a true emergency situation, how do you plan to start a fire? By rubbing sticks together? Now is the time to put away a supply of lighters or matches so that you will be prepared when you really need them.

In addition, you may want to consider storing up a good supply of candles. Candles come in quite handy whenever the electricity goes out, and in the event of a long-term economic nightmare we will all see why our forefathers relied on candles so much.

#7) Hiking Boots Or Comfortable Shoes

When you ask most people to list things necessary for survival, this is not the first or the second thing that comes to mind. But having hiking boots or very comfortable and functional shoes will be absolutely critical. You may very well find yourself in a situation where you and your family must walk everywhere you want to go. So how far do you think you will get in high heels? You will want footwear that you would feel comfortable walking in for hours if necessary. You will also want footwear that will last a long time, because when the economy truly collapses you may not be able to run out to the shoe store and get what you need at that point.

#8) A Flashlight And/Or Lantern

When the power goes off in your home, what is the first thing that you grab? Just think about it. A flashlight or a lantern of course. In a major emergency, a flashlight or a lantern is going to be a necessity – especially if you need to go anywhere at night.

Solar powered or “crank style” flashlights or lanterns will probably be best during a long-term emergency. If you have battery-powered units you will want to begin storing up lots and lots of batteries.

#9) A Radio

If a major crisis does hit the United States, what will you and your family want? Among other things, you will all want to know what in the world is going on. A radio can be an invaluable tool for keeping up with the news.

Once again, solar powered or “crank style” radios will probably work best for the long term. A battery-powered until would work as well – but only for as long as your batteries are able to last.

#10) Communication Equipment

When things really hit the fan you are going to want to communicate with your family and friends. You will also want to be able to contact an ambulance or law enforcement if necessary. Having an emergency cell phone is great, but it may or may not work during a time of crisis. The Internet also may or may not be available. Be sure to have a plan (whether it be high-tech or low-tech) for staying in communication with others during a major emergency.

Read the Whole Article

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The US – that powerful nation standing for peace, self-determination and liberty – as Charles Hugh Smith discusses, is a spectacle, an artifice, a lie.  Smith refers to Guy Debord’s 1967 book, and Debord’s subsequent Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.

Debord seems to have completely anticipated my life as a child of the Cold War and adult participant in the rise of the executive warfare state. What’s more, he explained it:

The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of the integrated spectacle is characterised by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalised secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.

The constructs in which we operate provide for endless intellectual challenges, often taking us down deep rabbit holes.  But rabbit hole or not, all of us are living and producing within a simulated liberty, accompanied by – to paraphrase Debord and Smith – hyper-complex technological systems, unitary and ahistorical governments, and all-encompassing state and techno-narratives created to replace the humane and silence humanity.

We are fascinated by what we see on our screens – in Gaza, in Ukraine and now Venezuela, even in the Pacific.  Yet, we must have been getting a snack when the plot twisted and the peace and America First campaign morphed into Tomahawks to Kiev, brutal US-assisted genocide in Gaza, the US Navy blowing up fishermen and other civilians in international waters at will, without consequence.

The media summary of the latest Gaza flotilla was pure Hunger Games-style pablum: “It was the first time since Israel imposed a naval blockade on Gaza’s waters in 2009 that an unauthorised humanitarian mission has reached closer than 70 nautical miles from the territory.”  What is an ‘unauthorized’ humanitarian mission?” Apparently they’re quite common, as we saw with Bush 43 and Katrina, feeding the homeless, and even Peanut the Squirrel.

The current idiotic fiascos – NATO’s Ukraine and Israel’s expansionist murder spree – have been curiously unwinnable, and even more curiously, unstoppable.  Trump complained he didn’t understand how difficult it would be to end these wars. The vast majority of countries represented in the United Nations probably agree with Trump on this point – why can’t the stupidity and inhumanity just be stopped (ideally by the US government simply ceasing to fund them)?

Complex systems invariably illustrate path dependency, and authoritarian human herd management requires a complex system. The human cattle chutes created to distribute aid (and bullets) by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – led by Zionists who work for the IDF, as former employee Lt Col Tony Aguilar explained – are a vivid example of the very limited options these complex state systems are capable of producing.

States are defined and measured by how they use the tools of war against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Israel, a state engaged in an ever expanding civil war, is an excellent example. Land owners displaced and brutalized since 1948 rebel against those who displaced, and then subjugated, them.  To prevail, Israel built a western-inspired military and intelligence apparatus, with Zionist wealth, subterfuge and relentless Western enthusiasm for Euro-colonialism’s last gasp in the Middle East.  The result was decades of increasingly focused apartheid, punctuated by mass punishment and ever more frenzied ethnic cleansing.

Since 2013, Ukraine has experienced civil war, egged on and facilitated by a US/NATO search for meaning, and expanded military practice ranges. Ukraine and Gaza both serve as testing grounds for newer weapons, technologies and tactics as well as for broad-based narrative control, manipulation of emotion in siphoning GDP away from citizens and into global war industries without valid national security interests or democratically declared war, and development of AI and secret mathematical algorithms to create popular support for state objectives, and silence those who might question them. Debord’s “eternal present” is a goal largely achieved in the West – and strongly resisted in the rising East and South. Perhaps that explains everything.

Washington has been actively participating in these civil wars, with electron and bomb, political lies and narrative maintenance. Americans watch, discuss, are entertained and frightened by them, from afar. We have already paid for our tickets, the actors, directors, studios and advertising. Federal Reserve money creation, government accounting malpractice and the 35% state toll on everything we make or do means we are invested, without our consent or even the common courtesy of a prospectus telling us that past success is no guarantee of future results.

Has the next American civil war started yet?  If civil war can be defined by the militarized command, control and exploitation of one part of the state or society by another, it’s been going on in the US for a long time.  The McLean House in Appomattox exists as historical marker rather than end-point.

The good news is that path dependency of the state ultimately ensures its demise.  Ukraine’s backers “are trapped by their own contradictions: a war they cannot win but dare not end, a financial burden they cannot sustain but fear to drop.” Trump’s Nobel-Peace-prize-clock-is-ticking demand for unconditional surrender of Gaza to Israel, couched as a peace agreement, is the price of path dependency. To have “peace,” Trump and Netanyahu have “only” one option – to rain down hell like no one has ever seen on the one and a half million surviving Palestinians on the strip.

In Israel’s case, endless militarism, racism, territorial expansion and failing to fact check their own propaganda has broken their budget, gutted their economy, increased their dependence on geriatric Christian Zionists, and ruined the Zionist promise of a safe place for Jews in the world. The US government, Israel’s ugly golem, faces similar global contempt, in no small part for demonstrating to everyone the incompetence of its expensive weapons systems, the lack of courage of its civilian and military leadership, and the disorganized unraveling of the US military empire, which does not win, place or show in races of state technology, logistics, energy, or diplomacy.

But, Palantir, you say, and all of the commercialized Hasbara here in the US? And what about the unconstitutional uses of the military and the posse comitatus experimentation conducted by DC and the brainiacs who run it?  I suspect these are jagged responses to ongoing civil war, rather than preparation for it.  Path dependency and history both tell us the state is rarely prepared for foreign wars, and even less so for domestic ones. It is typically late to the party, and always inappropriately dressed.

State minders over-estimate the power of government-curated diversion and circuses, and overlook a copious by-product of the “eternal present” of Debord’s integrated spectacle.  This by-product is boundless cynicism, fostering disbelief of the state, renewed interest in human connectedness and inspiration outside the state, and a thousand naturally occurring forms of civil disobedience and smiling anti-authoritarianism.  The civil war is ongoing, and Trump sits astride a state that is reacting, as states tend to do, far too late and with one path-dependent hand tied behind its back.

The post Is Trump Preparing for the Next Civil War, or Already Fighting It? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Spectacle of Cowardice

The memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, had hit the maximum capacity of its facility after 200k people had turned up. Members of the Trump administration, including President Trump himself, gave speeches dedicated to Charlie Kirk and his life’s mission at Turning Point USA. His wife, Erika Kirk, had given an emotional speech forgiving the killer, saying that her husband always wanted to save young men, young men such as his killer. This is all well and good; however, NBC had painted this memorial as a “revival” of American conservatism and Christianity. Stephen Miller said that “the day Charlie died, the angels wept.” JD Vance had told the crowd that this event was not a funeral but a revival in celebration of Charlie Kirk. President Trump, as well, compared the memorial to an “old-time revival.” It’s not a hard comparison considering all the people with their hands raised in prayer throughout the service. Then there were the comments of martyrdom, with speakers such as Vance claiming that Kirk is a martyr for the Christian faith in the old-school tradition. Tucker Carlson asked those in the crowd to raise their hands if Kirk had centered them a “little closer to Christ.”

This is where the failure of the Christian “revival” in America begins its steady decline after years of growth among the American youth. Many may disagree, but was this not a victory for Christian churches of all denominations, for America? The Babylon Bee, always experts in vanity, had released a satire piece to Kirk’s memorial entitled “Satan: I’ve Made a Huge Mistake.” It goes like this:

“Well, this isn’t going like I planned at all,” sighed Satan, as churches once again were filled to overflowing around the nation. “Listen to all that worship. How are even more people praising God in the face of death? Ugh. I’ve really screwed the pooch this time.”

Many in the BLM organization and movement believed themselves to be the winner of American politics and the corrector of American history after rioting and burning multiple major cities throughout the nation and forming such a coalition that allowed Joe Biden to be the most “popular” president in US history. But where are they now? In the simplest terms, the system of Power no longer needs them, at least not at this moment, and so their movement fizzled instead of being reinvigorated after Trump’s reelection. This “revival” had first exposed the cowardice of the masses; their optimism had blinded them to the fact that Trump and his administration had hijacked the movement-an administration rife with broken and failed promises in ending wars and releasing the Epstein list, among other economic and domestic failures. Of course no Epstein list could ever be released, do people really expect those running the system to be arrested? They also fell for the recreation of the image of Charlie Kirk, a man who was being dragged through the mud for his undying support for Israel just days before his death, only to be a martyr, a secret Catholic, and someone who was actually changing his mind about Israel.

It was a masterclass in perception management, and conservatives and Christians all over America had fallen for it. This “revival” movement sits in the same chair that BLM had once sat in back in 2020; the hippies of the 1960s had once sat in it too. To understand this, and the future of America, we must understand what the cowardice mask wearers of optimism do not: the true nature of Power.

The Hivemind

After the deaths of Iryna Zakruska and Charlie Kirk, many came out and claimed that they had felt a shift in their spirits, an unease. They had found that their opinions were not only being shared by millions of others in real life and on social media, as if everyone was coming to the same conclusion all at once. The National Review had called it a “racial awakening” among the right; a black man stabbing the only white girl on the train and claiming “I got that white girl” had angered and brought about a release of natural tribalism that the American experiment had attempted to erase in the melting pot. Similarly, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the popular Catholic influencer, Franco Fernandez, voiced his opinion on how strange the year 2025 has been, saying:

“Charlie Kirk gets murdered today, it’s 2025, a school shooting in Colorado today, 2025. Catholic church school shooting in Minneapolis in 2025. (…) This isn’t just any year, this year has been marked the year of the Jubilee by the Catholic Church. Now Pope Francis passes away, 2025, a mass amount of Christians have been going through a lot, which could possibly be spiritual warfare from the stuff I’ve been reading.”

Seeing the reactions to the murder of Zakruska and Kirk, Franco is right to make such assumptions; where he is wrong, however, is the cause of these mass feelings. These reactions, while truthful and full of emotion, are manipulated and taken over by the same systems of Power that control the organized chaos of the American political scene and its thousands of individuated wants and needs. The founder of public relations in America had written about this process in depth in his book “Propaganda.” He claims:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.”

This isn’t to say that young Christian converts or members of the clergy are not legitimate believers; instead it’s an understanding that their faith is both a choice and a target for manipulation, as are all other forms of belief. Just as it’s an option for a young college student to choose clubs and organizations, so it goes with religion. An Evangelical Baptist can convert to Eastern Orthodoxy one day and then neo-paganism the next; lukewarm Christians are a result of this society. A child may grow up in a religious household but decide later in life he does not want to be religious; his school was not religious, nor were his friends. Unlike in the days of old, when being a different religion or denomination was taboo or met with violence, people now have a choice; this is another way in which the power of religious institutions is repressed for the sake of stability and Power within the system.

Kirk’s memorial service was one such act of manipulation in the sphere of democratic organization. On one hand, it was painted as a revival of Christian faith, a service for a man martyred for his Christian beliefs, and an arm-raising glory for the optimistic hope for real patriotic Americans. While on the other hand, the memorial was painted as something more like a circus of unserious actors, with Kirk’s wife walking out onto the stage with WWE pyrotechnics wearing a suit of white and President Trump hugging the crying widow while looking into the camera and biting his lip. This memorial was one way in which Bernay’s secret government, the organized minority, maintains a balance of perception within the United States, ensuring no real winner and no real rebellion.

The Portrait Curse

The memorial service was just one major example of perception management and the containment of this present American moment. Any other day, the perception is managed by first understanding what the American masses are thinking; fortunately for them, there is no shortage of information. The very opponents of the system are the same ones who feed it; the ones who pour their heart out on social media for reactions and comments feed the system with their rebellion. The crudeness of Nick Fuentes, the bombast of Alex Jones, and the faceless Twitter user saying whatever he wants, unafraid of any consequence because his real identity is hidden behind lines of code. This new generation of counterculture rebels, the traditionalist religious or others, have fallen into the same trap the hippies had during the 1960s and 70s. Both groups believed themselves to be an unstoppable wave of change, but if anything these two seemingly different generations have in common, it’s their incessant desire to be heard, praised, and have the rush of dopamine that comes with it.

The difference between the hippies of the past and traditionalists of today is more minuscule than one may think. The anti-state, anti-capitalism, and pacifist stance of the hippies were the exact tools used to not only contain the hippies but also draw their desires and energy away from revolution and street demonstrations and into the realm of eastern spirituality, sex, and drugs. Even their counterculture, once used as a way to antagonize the system they fought against, was absorbed, and like a portrait curse in fiction where one becomes trapped in a two-dimensional realm of paint, became a part of the American pantheon, forever trapped in the capitalist superstructure they rebelled against in their youth: rock’n roll and Cheech and Chong. One of the reasons this occurred was because of an organization called SRI International located at Stanford University. Jay Ogilvy, the Director of Psychological Values Research at SRI, explained this process in the documentary Century of the Self, saying:

“The idea was to create a rigorous tool for measuring a whole range of desires which are values that were prior to that time had been kinda overlooked, they say in business what gets measured gets done. We were basically telling manufacturers if you’re really going to satisfy not just basic needs but individuated wants, whims and desires of more highly developed human beings, you’re gonna have to segment, you’re gonna have to individuate.”

Because social media did not exist in those days, surveys were sent out across the country. Amina Marie Spengler, the Director of Psychological Values Research Program, explained that this process had great success. The return rate was as high as 86%, and some surveys even had notes attached to them asking to send more surveys. The reason why this occurred, she explained, was because they were “asking people to think about things that they had never thought about before, and they liked thinking about them. Like what they felt inside, what motivated them, what was important to them.” Through their surveys, people were placed in identifiable groups that were then used by businesses in their commercial representation and their product strategy. Another way opinions were collected were with focus groups, their opinions would shape the way industries engineered the masses. In the modern day, surveys, as well as focus groups, have fallen out of favor; they no longer have the same pull amongst the youth in 2025 as they did in 1978. While social media tweets and comments can be used to bring about a similar process, the rise of fake bot accounts could send wrong signals to companies and the system of Power.

One way this is worked around is through formal-large-scale debates and the allure of an individual’s vanity; this could be a liberal student eager to defeat Charlie Kirk in a public setting or a traditional wife influencer staring into the screen over a captioned statement while sad music plays. The young traditionalists may abhor the hippies, but the desire to be heard and to be praised for their intellect and rebellious spirit in fighting injustice remains the same. An example of this is the Youtube channel Jubilee, which often holds debates between liberals and conservatives; sometimes big names appear, other times it is only random individuals. Following the end of the Iran-Israel conflict, the questions on Zionist expansionism and Jewish influence in American politics exploded and split the Trump voting base. Two weeks after the end of this conflict, Jubilee invited the liberal Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan to debate twenty far-right conservatives. During this debate, a young man laughed and proudly proclaimed himself a Fascist, and another was open in his belief that Hasan should get out of his country. One wonders where these men were during the supposed height of white supremacy at Charlottesville; maybe they just didn’t exist. In the end, it doesn’t matter who won that focus group debate; the system was able to tap into the general feelings of a large portion of the country.

This is why the American right, the “revival” movement, and its outside elements, such as the Nick Fuentes crowd, are doomed to fail. They see themselves winning because their messages spread through social media, but this is exactly what will doom them. No one questions why Hitler speeches, once heavily censored on Youtube, can now be found easily and subtitled in English or dubbed in English by AI. The Nazi film “Triumph of the Will” was once impossible to find; now multiple channels all of a sudden post full versions subtitled in English. These people who loudly type their right-wing opinion must sound like madmen to the system of Power, it’s like a lunatic ranting his beliefs, feelings, and intellectual superiority to a doctor across the table while another takes his pulse. Afterwards the doctors will decide what to do with him.

The Shadow Erupts

While these are the outside factors that will contribute to the inevitable disaster awaiting the Christian sect in American politics, the rise of Christianity attaches itself to large and ancient institutions such as the Catholic and Orthodox Churches; the animating spirit of the movement is still based entirely on the individual instead of the collective. Because of this, the individual will face the reality that he must sustain his faith entirely alone; where once the whole town or the whole country was religious as a social norm, they no longer have this social safety net, and most people do not have the willpower to sustain lifelong beliefs by themselves. The failure of Christian politics will also come inwardly, an implosion based on their personalities, minds, and their very psychology. Sigmund Freud had once described the human personality as having three elements that create our complex human behaviors. These elements are the id, the part of the mind that is considered illogical, wishful, and deals with impulsive urges such as sex; the ego, the part of the mind that grounds you in reality, that weighs costs and benefits of an action, and that gives direction to the mind; and then there is the superego, the part of our mind that internalizes our morality and our ideals, that suppresses the id’s urges and that can ground us in ideals and not in reality.

Americans, even before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, have an imbalance of the id. They have heightened materialistic tendencies and a vanity that surpasses other groups of people in the world. This trend can be seen in the post-war boom in the 1950s; competition for who owned the best house, the shiniest car, the newest kitchen appliance, and the best-trimmed lawn created a culture of selfish individualism craving the praise and approval of those around them. In the 1960s this mentality morphed into something new: who can express themselves best, wear the most colorful clothing, and be the most peace-loving fighter of injustice in the capitalist system? The hippies found a moral and idealistic ideology grounded in fighting the Vietnam War and the injustices facing black Americans at the time, but it was also an individualistic movement based on freeing oneself from the constraints of society. The hippie movement sought to live close to nature, satisfying instinctual urges through sex, LSD, and rock and roll, their superego morally justifying their behavior. But eventually their rebellious energy was drained, their members splitting off into new factions or buying in completely to the commodification of their counterculture. The founder of the Yippie Party had explained this process in himself in 1978, saying:

 “I was willing to die and I had a martyr complex in the sense, I think we all did, and I’ve given up that ideal of sacrifice. I’m not as overwhelmingly moved by injustice as I was, and now we have reincarnated ourselves from within.”

One of his compatriots and co-founder of the party, Stew Albert had given his explanation as to why these events unfolded as it did, claiming:

“Basically the politics were lost, and totally replaced by this lifestyle and then the desire to be deeper and deeper into the self. By now a grandiose sense of the self, the original Yippie founder Jerry Rubin definitely moved in that direction, and I think he was buying into the notion that he could be happy and fully self developed on his own. Socialism in one person. Although that of course is Capitalism.”

American society since then has openly encouraged people to confront and fulfill their urges; this can be sexual, or it can be self-expression in their wild dress. The 1980s, for instance, was rife with this: rock bands wearing tight black clothing and makeup, singing about sticking to the man, like Twisted Sister; sexual dances like Michael Jackson’s; or sexual lyrics like those found in the music of Rick James. Modern American society has only slid more into depravity in the decades since the 1980s; pornography is readily available for free, with children exposed at an incredibly young age, some as young as eleven. Movies, TV, and music urge violence, sex, and drugs; the youth are brought up on all of this. The children are brought up on a different superego, an imbalance in id and sense of right and wrong. Elders are often upset at the immense disrespect of the youth in nearly all aspects, but they fail to realize they had supported, maybe even created, the circumstances that allowed for this to happen. But over the last few years, there has been an unexpected rise in traditional religiosity among this depraved youth. Were they tired of the dissatisfaction that indulging in their urges left them? Perhaps, but this is not the end of whatever struggle the minds of Americans are going through. Freud taught against an imbalanced superego because depression, anxiety, and even suicide are common in this state of mind; it is this truth that will cause the implosion of the Christian political scene.

Another psychologist, Carl Jung, described the id as an archetype known as the “shadow.” Jung explains that suppressing the shadow will only cause its qualities, such as anger and ambition, to gather strength and erupt and project out into others. Both anger and ambitions are sins; the Americans repress these qualities, among many others, which were only natural to them, and so they erupt. The Christians will say they fell back into sin and continue to repress this shadow until the qualities they fear most erupt with more strength until they accept it, and this manifests in new politics, away from pacifist churches and into a party apparatus. Vilfredo Pareto explained in 1900 that times of great crisis always bring with them a rise in religiosity, but they did not win the 20th century; the parties did. The documentary “Century of the Self” interviewed a German man who once attended a Nazi march; he explains:

“I could see from afar, how those hundred thousand people when they passed Hitler, they became completely delirious. They began to shout his cries I will never get out of my ears “heil, sieg heil” demented. And here I got confirmation how those irrational forces, uncontrollable forces, in Germany in the Germans had erupted, had broughton out, were running wild, where the party, marching, marching on.”

A star always shines brightest before its destruction, it implodes and then explodes and leaves no trace of itself except dust and residue. The Christians too shall go back to being residues on the outskirts of politics.

The Grand Inquisitor

Christians, nor the American right, should  delude themselves that there are simple means of obtaining true Power. The power that the right and left currently hold are nothing but tools used by the state apparatus for its own benefit; this is both BLM and Turning Point USA. The current men and women that run the narrative for the American right are too cowardly, too loud, and too liberal to do what is needed to fix the runaway train the world knows as America. Herman Goering once told his men, “Every bullet fired from the barrel of a police pistol was my bullet. If you call that murder, then I am the murderer.” Who in American politics can or will say such a thing? Would JD Vance? Nick Fuentes? They’re averse to violence and too patriotic. It is true that the state has a monopoly on violence; its position must be enforced with strength. The leaders know this and clothe their violence in the linen of an animating spirit. In Dostoevsky’s novel, “The Brothers Kazminov,” more specifically, the story of the “Grand Inquisitor,” who used fire to enforce his rule and bring glory to God.

A man commits a miracle and the crowd gathers around him, confused by hope. The Grand Inquisitor orders the arrest of this mysterious man, and in their discussion, the Power of the divine and the Power of the world, meet. The inquisitor explains:

“In the end, it will be to us that they come to lay their freedom at our feet, crying “make us slaves if you will, only feed us, feed us.” They will realize they can never have freedom and enough bread for everybody, that they are too vicious, too rebellious, too insignificant ever to be free. And we shall feed them, proclaiming falsely that it is done in your name.”

Who can delude themselves into thinking they can change this one absolute fact, that in the end the people will always pick security and bread over freedom? They do not have the willpower to conquer their urges, let alone the willpower to run a government:

“We took from him Rome, and the Sword of Caesar, why did you reject that last gift? Had you accepted the council of the mighty spirit you would have answered every need of man on earth, whom to worship, whom to entrust with his consciousness, how all may be peacefully united in one single common ant hill. By accepting the mantle of Caesar you would found a world kingdom, and blessed that world with the gift of tranquility.  We accepted it for you, and in doing so of course rejected you, and followed him.”

Every nation was born out of an animating spirit and a myth that makes its people wake up every morning and be prideful in their country and mission, even if it’s a lie. Its founding must be based on violence and repression of its rebels, otherwise there would’ve never been a country in the first place:

“It is true of course that men everywhere are against our power and take pride in his rebellion, but that is of no importance, it is a rebellion of school children against their teacher. The thrill of it will pass and they will have to pay dearly for it. They will cry out in their despair, “he who created us rebels must have meant to mock us. They shall say this knowing it to be blasphemy and their blasphemy will make them even more unhappy.”

Could a pacifist, a Christian so devout to his faith, be willing to take the mantle and be a leader in a Catholic or Orthodox government to stop sin and the bread and games that distract people from their aim of Heaven and God?  This man can never be in this position because he will never understand the true nature of Power, he can never make it to this point because this position requires a man of a different nature, even if they both proclaim the same faith.

“Of course we shall allow them to sin, every sin will be redeemed, for we will take their punishment upon ourselves. They will bring us the most agonizing secrets of their consciences, and they will accept our solutions with joy, going quietly to meet their deaths. Those millions of happy children, snuffed out quietly in your name. Beyond the grave they will find nothing, but while they’re alive we shall keep that secret from them, for the sake of their happiness here on Earth. And lure them with an eternal reward in Heaven, for if there were anything in the next world, it certainly wouldn’t be for them. It is prophesied that you would come again with your elect and that you will conquer, and we shall say that your elect saved only themselves, but we saved everybody, and we who took their sins upon us will stand up before you and say judge us if you can and if you dare!”

To run America, there must be an understanding that to deal with a violent land, you must use violence to fight back. The cartels in the south do not play by the same rules or have the same moral guilt as the Americans or the Europeans. Every American wants to be president because he believes he knows how to fix the country; meanwhile he tears himself apart over the guilt of looking at a woman with lust; meanwhile, his enemies hold no similar feelings of guilt or humility. In the 1996 film, “Gotti,” the opening monologue by John Gotti, former head of the Gambino crime family, explains this perfectly:

“Yeah so you humble me. So what you got? You got a war. You got a global war. You got your Chinks, Dominicans, Asians, Russians, Columbians, Jamaicans. What they doin? They desecrate the nation. You got your variable f***in’ snowstorms of cocaine, smack or whatever they shove in their veins. There’s no rules. There’s no perimeters. There’s no feelings. There’s no feelings for this country. You got anarchy. So… 5-10 years from now, they’re gonna wish there was an American Cosa Nostra. 5-10 years from now, they’re gonna miss John Gotti.”

 Today, the American right deludes itself with the ideals and hope of patriotism, hoping that calling upon the dead mythos that is now demonized and shunned by half the country will help. If a nation had followed its set of rules and ideals every day of its existence, and it led them to a point of catastrophe, then what was the point of that rule? Donald Trump is the ultimate manifestation of collapsing American power; he’s boastful about strength and patriotic in his fervor, and yet his administration has failed. He is a populist who was contained and became a mouthpiece for true Power. There is a real problem of intelligence within the American political class. Trump and his administration have proven to be incapable of dealing with the domestic and foreign issues facing America, and they are even leaning into the old habits of previous presidents. No one in this administration will be able to solve the problems facing America; the democratic process drains the country while the populists drain the energy from their support base through failed promises and sensationalism. The bureaucrats as well do not have what it takes to fix the problems facing America. Much like the Soviet system, the bureaucrats see the coming collapse, and instead of fixing the problems, they milk the country dry of everything it’s worth.

The Living Organism of Revolution

What had started innocently in 2016 with debating blue-haired liberals and making funny videos has morphed into something far more dangerous. The rhetoric today consists of civil war and revolution, but the revolution has already been born. The Russian and German people in the aftermath of the First World War had seen revolution as a living organism; it is born in a single moment, it craves blood, it brings instability, and it then dies when the period of stability follows. In the 1992 film, “The Chekist,” which follows the activities of the Russian secret police who bring order and destroy the revolution’s enemies, Comrade Srubov begins:

“No, Revolution is not an idea, it’s a living organism, a huge pregnant woman. Not the one Marx made up and clothed in a white gown. There is a myth about a prolific woman, dressed in a lousy canvas shirt. Through her body swarm parasites. We gotta squash them all! Especially in this country, where for centuries the respect for the individual is undermined. We, more than anyone, need an iron law-and-order: Otherwise… our end would be inevitable. But the most frightening thing…will be general mutiny. Therefore, our emerging Revolution will only succeed, if we force the storm… into the bounds of constructive order. Understand? That’s where Marx’ white gown comes in.”

 In the Hollywood minds of the people, they see revolution as involving them. How could a revolution occur without me? They may say. They need me and my individual strengths! After the Soviet collapse, Russia fell into worse troubles than before; the former Soviet officials who milked the country’s money and resources became the oligarchs, and crime was rife. This was a revolution because it demanded blood before stability could occur. Srubov resumes:

“Yes, the Revolution is a fierce starveling. It’s hungry for blood. Sucks the blood out of the best men. But it is essential to satisfy its thirst with blood. To shock and renew this world, it’s required to suffer anguish, filth and misery. The new isn’t born without torture and blood.”

This living organism that currently resides in America demands its blood as well. Thomas Jefferson knew this when he said that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” The stupid huddled masses, however, will not be the heroes in the real story; eventually they shall lay their freedom at Power’s feet and cry, “Feed us, feed us, make us slaves if you will,” and only then will the revolution die, its body dressed in the animating spirit of the time, whether this is Fascism, Marxism, Christianity, or something else. America should admit its situation; there would be more dignity in it.

The post This American Moment: Cowardice Masked by Optimism appeared first on LewRockwell.

On the last day of September, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned about 800 generals, admirals, commanders, officers, and senior enlisted leaders of the U.S. military from around the world to a meeting at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.

“Good morning and welcome to the War Department because the era of the Department of Defense is over,” began Hegseth.

I’ve got news for Secretary Hegseth, there never was an era of the Department of Defense. The DOD was formed by the National Security Act of 1947, which set up a single Secretary of Defense over the Army, the Navy, and the newly established Air Force. (The Marine Corps is part of the Navy but has its own commandant.) The last time the United States actually declared war on a country for “defensive” purposes was during World War II when it declared war on Japan after Pearl Harbor and then declared war on the other axis powers of Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Department of Defense has always been a Department of Offense and Intervention: Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Grenada, Honduras, Libya, Persian Gulf, Panama, Colombia, Philippines, Bosnia, Somalia, Macedonia, Haiti, Kuwait, East Timor, Serbia, Yemen, Syria, and, most recently, Iran.

Not one of these military actions was in defense of the United States. They were all done to carry out a reckless, belligerent, and meddling foreign policy.

To his credit, Hegseth said some good things in his speech:

This administration has done a great deal from day one to remove the social justice,

politically correct, and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics. No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction or gender delusions. No more debris.

For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniformed leaders for the wrong reasons, based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.

I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat unit with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men, or troops who are not fully proficient on their assigned weapons platform or task or under a leader who was the first but not the best. Standards must be uniform, gender neutral and high. If not, they’re not standards. They’re just suggestions, suggestions that get our sons and daughters killed.

When it comes to combat arms units, and there are many different stripes across our joint force, the era of politically correct, overly sensitive, don’t hurt anyone’s feelings leadership ends right now. At every level, either you can meet the standard, either you can do the job, either you are disciplined, fit and trained, or you are out.

Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops. Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world. It’s a bad look. It is bad, and it’s not who we are.

However, he also said some troubling things in his speech:

You see, this urgent moment of course requires more troops, more munitions, more drones, more Patriots, more submarines, more B-21 bombers.

We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.

We have to be prepared for war, not for defense. We’re training warriors, not defenders. We fight wars to win, not to defend.

Hegseth, who has been held up as a great example of a Christian leader, said his message to U.S. “enemies” was “FAFO,” a slang term that stands for “F**k around and find out.” His speech contained a few other words of profanity as well. But hey, Trump takes the Lord’s name in vain and most MAGA Christians don’t bat an eye.

After Hegseth concluded his speech, President Trump spoke for over an hour. In typical Trump fashion, he said: “We are the United States military. The best, the boldest, the bravest that the world has ever seen. We will fight, fight, fight, and we will win, win, win.” Trump wants dangerous U.S. cities to be “training grounds” for the military, and says he is “committed to spending more than $1 trillion on the military in 2026.”

In his speech, Hegseth referred to Trump’s liberation day tariffs. “Today,” he said, “is another liberation day, the liberation of America’s warriors, in name, in deed and in authorities.”

But if he really wanted to liberate America’s warriors, he should have said things like this about the military—

The military will no longer fight wars that are not constitutionally declared.

The military will no longer serve as the president’s personal attack force.

The military will no longer police the world.

The military will no longer fight unjust wars.

The military will no longer make widows and orphans.

The military will no longer carry out reckless, belligerent, and meddling foreign policy.

The military will no longer station troops all over the world.

The military will stop helping to create terrorists, insurgents, and militants.

The military will stop going where they have no business going.

The military will no longer invade other countries.

The military will no longer fight unnecessary wars.

The military will no longer pretend to defend our freedoms.

The military will close all of its foreign bases.

The military will no longer engage in offense and call it defense.

The military will finally leave Germany, Italy, and Japan since World War II ended 80 years ago.

The military will no longer bomb countries that are no threat to the United States.

The military will no longer occupy other countries.

The military will no longer support a network of brothels around the world.

The military will no longer kill civilians and call it collateral damage.

The military will no longer fight foreign wars.

The military will no longer maintain golf courses on Okinawa.

The military will no longer fight immoral wars.

The military will no longer defend other countries.

The military will no longer waste U.S. taxpayer dollars.

The military will no longer maim and kill people who are no threat to the United States.

The military will bring all of its soldiers home to American soil.

The military will never let a drop of American blood be shed except in the actual defense of the country.

The military will no longer be a global force for evil.

The military will no longer go abroad seeking monsters to destroy.

These are the things that Pete Hegseth should have said about the military. Anything less is just death and destruction as usual with a little more masculinity and a little less wokeness.

The post What Pete Hegseth Should Have Said About the Military appeared first on LewRockwell.

As most of the world’s “liberal” democracies continue to embrace more ruinous censorship, war, crippling inflation, crushing debt, and rising crime, many who pine for a different type of political order understandably look to regime types other than the modern democratic state. In some cases, monarchy is offered as an alternative.

The idea has been embraced by a variety of groups including Catholic integralists, moral traditionalists, and classical conservatives of the variety of Burke and de Maistre. Each group has its own reasons for supporting monarchy as a regime type.

Some libertarians can be found among monarchists, as well. In these cases, those who support monarchy say that state power is likely to be more restrained under monarchy than it is under other regime types.

Is this true? The answer is: it depends. It depends on the type of monarchy we are talking about, since some monarchical regimes are notable for centralized and unrestrained state power, while other types of monarchy are characterized by extremely weak states and decentralized power.

For example, the absolutist monarchs—most famously the French King Louis XIV—were enthusiastic about consolidating state power, and protecting the monarch’s claim to total sovereignty. The European monarchies after the fifteenth century were largely notable for rapid growth in centralization and overall state power.

There is little to admire about these later European monarchs and their states from a libertarian perspective. The best that can be said about them is that they compare favorably to many modern states in terms of the amount of income and wealth they extracted from the taxpayers. That however, is often just due to the fact that the monarchies of that era lacked the “efficiency” of modern technological state administration fueled by a highly liquid cash economy. Those monarchs would have taxed more and regulated more if they had had the practical ability to do so. After all, many absolutists explicitly stated that they considered the king’s power to be unlimited.

Moreover, given that the monarchs of Europe failed utterly to prevent the rise of twentieth-century socialist regimes, it can hardly be said that absolutist monarchies provide a reliable backstop for the preservation of freedom. Indeed, monarchies after the sixteenth century generally paved the way for the strong states that eventually formed the administrative core of the socialist and kleptocratic states that came after.

But there were also forms of monarchy that were characterized by a very weak state—if a state can even be said to exist at all in those times and places. These were the monarchies of the Middle Ages in which the monarch was greatly restrained in his exercise of power by a highly decentralized political model and by numerous competing powers who prevented the king from exercising full sovereignty.

If libertarians are going to make pronouncements about the desirability of monarchy, it is important to make distinctions among different types of monarchy. .

Europe’s Medieval Monarchs and the Polycentric Political Order 

If weak state institutions are desirable, then the medieval type of monarch is preferable. Medieval institutions, however, have suffered centuries of bad press, so to speak, because they are association with feudalism, and we all “know” that feudalism was a system of political repression. What most people think of when they hear “feudalism,” however, better describes the later system of absolutism. For example, students of history have all seen the “pyramid” of political power that supposedly represents feudalism. There is the king at the top, and then there is everyone below him who supposedly takes orders from the king. That, however, is not how feudalism worked, and medieval kings did not sit atop a regime and issue orders to meek and obedient underlings

So, how did medieval monarchies work and why do some libertarians say they were in many ways preferable to modern centralized states?

For one, European monarchs in the Middle Ages usually lacked anything we might call a bureaucratic state. There was no permanent government of civil servants or royal officials to carry out the edicts of the monarch in any consistent manner. Rather, “the state” as an identifiable organizational entity did not exist. As a result, the monarch’s ability to govern relied on his personal network of extended family and close allies to carry out his policies.

Contrary to modern misconceptions of feudalism as a static hierarchy, feudalism was, in fact, a system of extreme political decentralization and fluid power structures. The king was not “sovereign” in the sense that he enjoyed a monopoly on violence within his realm, nor was he necessarily the final arbiter of disputes and political contests among his subjects. Rather, the feudal monarch tended to be a primus inter pares in relation to other lords—or a “prince among equals,” to use Hendrik Spruyt’s phrase.1

Or, as described by historians Vladimir Shlapentokh and Joshua Woods, “In many cases … the power of kings was only marginally greater than that of lower lords, the church, and various tribes and warrior clans.”

They continue:

“central authority in society is relatively weak and unable to fully regulate other power centers; a sort of pluralism of “the few,” to use Aristotle’s terminology. The model anticipates frequent conflicts and a low level of state-provided security for individuals and groups, though it does not suppose a complete absence of social order or stateless anarchy.2

This was, as Salter and Young describe it, a form of “hierarchical polycentricity” in which no monarch (i.e., a prince or lord or king) could rule by edict or expect automatic compliance from assumed subordinates.3 The feudal king could exercise sovereign and autocratic rule only within his own privately owned estates, and not within the lands of his vassals. Far from being powerless subjects, members of the nobility often exercised sovereign authority of their own, complete with the means to defend that sovereignty.

Rather, monarchs had to gain a sort of voluntary compliance from other elites within this polycentric order. Where compliance did not exist, it could not be easily forced. To coerce compliance required the use of military resources that were, from the king’s perspective very expensive. So, compliance was often bought instead:

With few resources at their disposal, kings of the early Middle Ages were forced to yield part of their power to local emissaries, and ultimately to make them landowners with the right to bequest their property to their descendants. This was the price they paid to establish a modicum of order in the kingdom’s territory. The central authority resorted to decentralizing power as a way to secure order in society and tap local resources.4

But even in cases where the king secured “friendship” from lords by handing out lands and titles, these friendships could evaporate if the nobles believed the king was not respecting the legal rights of his own noble vassals.5 Moreover, since much of this nobility were able to assert their own sovereignty through the use of the nobles’ own military resources, kings could not simply have their way with their subjects. On top of this, the monarch faced substantial institutional resistance from the Church which jealously guarded its own autonomy and control over its own properties. Monarchs often faced opposition from ecclesiastical authorities as much as the secular nobility.

Consequently, except for those lands where the king was the immediate landlord and owner, there was no clear or reliable direct transmission of the monarch’s will from the top down to lesser underlings within the kingdom:

“Although laws did exist and were, to some extent, respected by the people, many areas of life were unregulated or beyond the reach of the central authority.”  Although a hierarchical relationship existed between lords and vassals, “power was not a pyramid; it was scattered” … Societies of the Middle Ages were marked by “a dispersal of political authority amongst a hierarchy of persons who exercise in their own interest powers normally attributed to the state”…6

Within a kingdom the monarch therefore exercised two types of power. There were the monarch’s personal estates on which the monarch exercised autocratic power, limited only by Church law or the danger of uprisings by laborers. It was only in these places that a monarch exercised true centralized legal control. But outside the king’s personal domains, power was fragmented and limited.

In France during the Middle Ages, for example, these lands were the crown lands or the “royal domain,” and did not include all of the lands within the kingdom. During this period, vast areas of France were held as the personal possessions of other lords, many of whom might be rivals of the king. Indeed, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the ruling monarchs of France were not even the largest landowners in the kingdom, meaning the French kings were forced to deal with many other French nobles as functional near-equals in many cases.

In those areas where the king was the owner of the private property that was his estate, the king exercised personal rule over his lands and was personally responsible for the defense and maintenance of these lands. The king as owner had to maintain roads and other infrastructure such as mills. The king had to provide military defense for himself and his servants. The king was expected to act as judge and arbiter for legal cases that occurred within his personal domains. The right to feudal rule was, at least in theory, to be premised on the lord’s faithful execution of these contractual duties of customary law, owed to his own vassals and laborers.7

The fact that this sort of monarchy is sustained largely by personal ownership of private property is key. Since the monarch was personally responsible for his own privately owned lands, he was motivated to ensure that his lands were well maintained and defended. To engage in unnecessary war or immoderate exploitation of the population was to risk the impoverishment of his domains, which would endanger the owner’s position within the feudal order. Put another way, where a monarch exercised personal rule, he had “skin in the game” over the long term.

Within this system, monarchs could also expect fierce resistance from other private property owners who were themselves concerned about the viability and prosperity of their own private lands. In the feudal model of the Middle Ages, monarchs were expected to pay for their own acts of governance out of their own revenues from fees, dues, and other sources of income from the king’s private property. Taxation was considered a last resort, and other major landowners were not easy targets for taxation. Thus, a king who must largely self-finance his political agenda was less likely to throw away his own money on unnecessary wars or other boondoggles. Consequently, those over whom the king claimed lordship were quick to assert their own independence from royal demands in a variety of way. In this we find early notions of political freedom as we understand it today. Moreover, the idea was widespread among the nobility, the Church, and other “subjects” who were powerful enough to resist. This is why historian Alan Harding notes that “the word ‘liberty’ is everywhere in medieval charters and legal records … in the great majority of cases it does refer to an essentially political freedom.”8

So, a monarch within a system of personal rule and polycentric political power will be constrained in his exercise of power, and the financial cost of the king’s missteps and abuses will be largely internalized within the king’s own personal estates. In this political milieu, it remains difficult for the monarch to simply impose new taxes and externalize the cost of bad governance.

Limited Monarchy Contrasted with Absolute Monarchy

Clearly, this type of monarchical governance stands in stark contrast to later absolutist models. By the late sixteenth century in France, for example, the king—in that case, Henry IV—finally managed to bring virtually all the land in France under the legal control of the royal domains. Yet, civil government by then no longer resembled the weak personal rule of the Middle Ages, and it could not be said that the royal domain was any longer the private property of the the king. By then, the monarchy had become an institutional corporation of a type we might call “public.” Under the monarchs of the early modern period, the monarch had become protectors and agents of something much larger we now call the state.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were therefore a time of growing bureaucracy, standing armies, and taxation. Moreover, because the king now finally had a veritable army of civil servants at his disposal, enforcement of state regulations became far more consistent and widespread and punitive.

The ideology of absolutism also spread, and its in this later age in which the idea of the “divine right of kings” came to be used to defend ever greater autonomy and power for the monarch. As Murray Rothbard notes, the French Theorist Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century created a new idea of the state as something quite different from the polycentric medieval “state.” For Bodin, all political power within the kingdom—including the Church which was finally forced to become a junior partner to the secular monarch—was to “be subordinated to the power of the king.” Bodin’s thinking persisted well beyond his death. Rothbard continues:

Among the absolutist writers following Bodin, the 17th-century servitors of the absolute state, all hesitance or piety to the medieval legacy of strictly limited taxation was destined to disappear. State power, unlimited, was to be glorified.

So, if we are to consider the desirability of monarchy through a libertarian lens, it is important to make distinctions between greatly differing types of monarchy. Some monarchical systems have existed alongside weak states, decentralized power, and significant limitations on the ability to tax—and, accordingly—wage war. Other types of monarchy are founded upon a strong centralized state, and the promotion of the monarch himself as complete sovereign.

Some types of monarchy are better than others.

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

—

1 Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 40.

2 Vladimir Shlapentokh and Joshua Woods, Feudal America: Elements of the Middle Ages in Contemporary Society (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011), p. 17.

3 Alexander Salter and Andrew Young, The Medieval Constitution of Liberty (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2023), p. 115.

4 Shlapentokh and Woods, Feudal America, p. 13.

5 Matin Wolfe, “French Views on Wealth and Taxes from the Middle Ages to the Old Regime,” The Journal of Economic History 26,No. 4 (Dec. 1966), p. 467-8.

6 Vladimir Shlapentokh and Woods, Feudal America, p. 13

7 Jacob Viner, Religious Thought and Economic Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978) p. 104-5.

8 Alan Harding, “Political Liberty in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 55, No. 3 (July 1980): 423.

The post Should Libertarians Be Monarchists? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The so-called peace plan put forward by U.S. President Trump is a non-starter that won’t work, according to international legal expert Alfred de Zayas.

The so-called peace plan put forward by U.S. President Trump is a non-starter that won’t work, according to international legal expert Alfred de Zayas.

De Zayas says Trump’s much-ballyhooed initiative is not a peace offer. It is an ultimatum demanded by criminal rogue regimes that are responsible for genocide – the United States and Israel.

Professor De Zayas points out that Donald Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have no credibility. Both are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. The very idea of Trump proposing a peace deal amidst an ongoing U.S.-backed mass slaughter, where there is no legal prosecution of the perpetrators of genocide, nor for the illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and numerous other war crimes, is grotesque and absurd.

The appointment of British former leader Tony Blair to oversee Trump’s “peace plan” in Gaza is another insult.

“He should be behind bars as a war criminal,” says de Zayas, referring to Blair’s role in launching the U.S.-British war on Iraq in 2003, based on lies, killing over one million people.

On the issue of Gaza, the problem is that Israel, with support from the U.S. and European states, has been grossly violating international law and UN treaties for decades with impunity. This shameful lack of accountability and enforcement of international law makes Israel and its Western sponsors criminal regimes. It is nonsense to expect such serial violators to now propose a peace deal when they have not been held to account for a litany of crimes.

De Zayas says we need a ceasefire in Gaza urgently, with massive humanitarian aid for a population being deliberately starved to death by Israel. But any resolution must be applied with international law and justice for the horrific crimes.

Trump’s plan is a whitewash of the genocide. The Western mainstream media are also guilty of covering up the depth of horror. The media are ridiculously spinning Trump’s offer as genuine and credible, perhaps with a few flaws pooh-poohed here and there. The media are not reporting on the true horror and Western complicity in genocide. That’s because their long-time role is to serve as a propaganda service to sanitize the crimes and systematic lawlessness of Western rogue regimes.

Professor Alfred de Zayas teaches international law and history at the Geneva School of Diplomacy. He has worked as a UN staff expert on human rights for nearly 50 years.

His latest book is The Human Rights Industry (Clarity Press, 2023), see here: https://www.claritypress.com/product/human-rights-industry/

Catch his recent articles on wide-ranging international issues at Counterpunch: https://www.counterpunch.org/author/alfred-de-zayas/

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

The post Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan Won’t Work, It’s an Ultimatum Under Genocide appeared first on LewRockwell.