Lew Rockwell Institute

The Aussies just trashed their relations with Iran based on nothing but obscure say-so.

Australia throws out Iran ambassador over alleged antisemitic attacks

Canberra expelled Tehran’s ambassador after accusing Iran of masterminding at least two antisemitic attacks on Australian soil.

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the country’s intelligence services had linked Iran’s military to arson attacks in Sydney and Melbourne, throwing out an ambassador for the first time since World War II, a move The Sydney Morning Herald’s national affairs editor dubbed “the diplomatic equivalent of the nuclear option.”

Iran rejected the charge.

I have searched and read several news pieces on this issue and have found no mention of any fact that would connect two months ago arson incidents in Australia with Iran.

The whole thing came out of nowhere based solely on the say-so from the Australian spy service ASIO:

What Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called ASIO’s “deeply disturbing conclusion” is that the Iranian government was involved in these “extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil”, identified as the activities of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

There is no mentioning on what, if anything, ASIO’s alleged conclusions are based on. There are guesses:

No doubt “protecting sources” will mean that the detail of these “links” will never see the light of day [despite curiosity as to why Iranian security would have even the slightest interest in attacks on Jewish businesses in Australia] but recent history tells us that Mossad and the CIA are almost certainly responsible. These are the same agencies, after all, that fed us a steady stream of fake war propaganda including the supposed WMDs in Iraq, claims of Hamas bases under Gaza hospitals and fake stories about Iran being on the verge of producing nuclear weapons.

Canberra’s diplomatic attack on Iran comes as the Israelis prepare for a second round of aggression against Iran and while the Australian public, through huge rallies, has been expressing its outrage at the Albanese government’s collaboration with the Gaza genocide and demanding punishment of the Israelis.

How is Iran supposed to profit from arranging criminal arson attempts against some random synagogues in Australia?

One might assume that the whole thing is coming up now to calm Zionist anger at Australia which has become more aggressive after ten-thousands of Australians had expressed outraged over Israels ongoing genocide of Palestinians:

Albanese was just last week labeled “weak” by his Israeli counterpart after he said Australia would recognize a Palestinian state: The two countries have seen relations nosedive, with Canberra barring an Israeli far-right politician from entering Australia and Israel revoking the visas of Australian representatives to the Palestinian Authority.

There may also be a larger context to this:

chinahand @chinahand – 8:01 UTC · Aug 26, 2025Seems as tell that another attack on Iran spearheaded by Israel and backed by g7 is forthcoming

That another round of Israeli aggression against Iran is coming has been predicted for some time:

[W]ith its June attacks, Israel achieved a partial victory at best. Its preferred outcome was for Trump to fully engage, targeting both Iran’s conventional forces and economic infrastructure. But while Trump favors swift, decisive military action, he fears full-scale war. His strategy in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities was thus designed to limit escalation rather than expand it. In the short term, Trump succeeded—much to Israel’s chagrin—but in the long run, he has allowed Israel to trap him in an escalatory cycle.

His refusal to escalate beyond a limited bombing campaign was a key reason that Israel agreed to a cease-fire.
…
Regardless of whether Iran resumes uranium enrichment, Israel is determined to deny it time to replenish its missile arsenal, restore air defenses, or deploy improved systems. That logic is central to Israel’s “mowing the grass” strategy: strike preventively and repeatedly to prohibit adversaries from developing capabilities that could challenge Israeli military dominance.

This means that, with Iran already rebuilding its military resources, Israel has an incentive to strike sooner rather than later. What’s more, the political calculus around another attack becomes much more complicated once the United States enters its midterm election season. As a result, a strike could very well take place within the coming months.

This, of course, is the outcome that Iranian leaders want to deter. To dispel any illusion that Israel’s “mowing the grass” strategy works, Iran is likely to strike hard and fast at the outset of the next war.

If Israel decides to again attack Iran the question is when, and to what extend, the Trump administration will again jump in.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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For many Catholics, the Covid era was regarded as an illumination of sorts. Churches were shuttered, government slipped on an iron glove, and separations began to ensue. These could be seen as contractions, if you will, prior to the more serious birth pangs foretold in Matthew 24: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom…Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me” (Matthew 24:7, 9).

We also saw, in relation to the issue of Covid vaccination, a kind of secular division among friends, coworkers, and family. Some took the government and health authorities at their word. Others were more skeptical. “They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” (Luke 12:53).

Although it may make me an outlier in my orthodox/traditionalist Catholic circles, I am not arguing that the refusal to “take the jab” during this particular time period merits a particular virtue in and of itself. (My own views are more in line with that of philosopher Edward Feser on a Catholic “middle ground,” lest anyone accuse me of not putting my cards on the table. Like Feser, I did not regard Covid vaccination specifically as “a hill to die on.”) To this I would draw a contemporary parallel to St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians:

So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and that “There is no God but one.” But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do. (1 Corinthians 8:4, 7-8)

A similar parallel may be found in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, chapter 2, over the issue of circumcision.

And yet, though I would not consider myself an “anti-vaxxer” (and I do not use that as a pejorative, but simply for the sake of argument) or a vaccine skeptic, there are certain traits that I have found in many of my friends who refused the Covid vaccine that I find enviable because I do not possess them myself.

Stubbornness

During Covid, most of my friends unwilling to vaccinate were what I would charitably call “stubborn.” I used to think of stubbornness, or “hard-headedness” as a character flaw, something “reasonable” people would find incorrigible. But when I read many of the lives of the saints and martyrs, I find that this trait actually aids them in the realm of perseverance—which is necessary for salvation.

One inspiring saint in this regard is St. Eulalia, who was born in the third century in Spain. At 12 years old, stubborn and bull-headed, she would sneak out of her parents’ house in the middle of the night in search of pagans to defy. She would spit at their idols and defy their threats of torture in order to gain the red crown. There was also St. Crispina, who refused to sacrifice to idols, was called stubborn and insolent by the proconsul, and was martyred.

When St. Felicitas was brought before the prefect of Rome for being a Christian and refusing to worship foreign gods, she admonished him. “Do not think to frighten me by threats, or to win me by fair speeches. The spirit of God within me will not suffer me to be overcome by Satan, and will make me victorious over all your assaults.” He urged her to think of her seven sons, who were being lined up to be tortured, but still she refused. “You are insolent indeed,” he said in exacerbation.

Read the Whole Article

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In his speech on the occasion of the so-called “Independence Day” on August 24, the Neo-Nazi junta frontman Volodymyr Zelensky made numerous promises. He started out by praising the infamous Maidan coup that brought NATO’s Nazi puppets to power in former Ukraine. His following line was the “unwavering determination to restore 1991 borders”, where he mentioned “our Donetsk, our Lugansk, our Crimea” and “reminded everyone that all of this is Ukraine”. Zelensky stated that he believes “Ukraine can achieve this — achieve peace, peace across all its land”. The Kiev regime frontman praised his forces, bragging about “truly stopping the second army of the world” and supposedly “destroying the myth of the invincible Russian army”.

These ludicrous claims come at a time when leaked data shows that the actual ratio of losses for the Neo-Nazi junta forces is now worse than 13:1 and that they’ve lost close to two million men, most of whom are forcibly conscripted. Worse yet, they’re now even being killed by the most radical Nazi units whose sole raison d’être is to prevent their retreat “by any means necessary” in unwinnable firefights with the advancing Russian military. Mind you, the personnel in these so-called “barrier detachments” aren’t even fighting the “evil Russians”, but are only waiting to see who’s trying to retreat among forcibly conscripted Ukrainians and then proceed to shoot them, as evidenced by verified combat footage. Is this really a “struggle for freedom”?

Well, Zelensky claims it is. Interestingly, he also mentioned the failed Kursk oblast (region) incursion as if it were something positive. Even more interestingly, Zelensky stated that “no one can forbid us [long-range] strikes [deep within Russia], “because they deliver justice”. He also mentioned the so-called “Operation Spider Web”, which was a series of sabotage attacks on Russian strategic aviation. The Trump administration just decided to send ERAMs (Extended Range Attack Munitions) that should be delivered in the next six weeks. The United States insists that they’ve “put limitations in place” on how these weapons would be used, supposedly “to prevent uncontrollable escalation”. Well, how does one reconcile that with the promises Zelensky made in his speech?

In fact, he also stated that “this is Ukraine now” and that “this Ukraine will never again in history be forced into the shame that the ‘Russians’ call a ‘compromise'”. In other words, the talks between President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump were all “for nothing”, according to Zelensky. This comes after Vice President JD Vance stated that Moscow supposedly “made significant concessions” during these talks. Obviously, both of these things cannot be true at once. If Zelensky’s idea of a “just peace” is to “completely defeat” Russia, this isn’t a concession, but a demand that the Kremlin capitulates. What reason would the latter have to accept such terms? Is the Russian military losing 13:1 and with nearly two million casualties?

However, while he keeps talking about the so-called “just peace”, Zelensky is only promising more war (obviously, not for himself, but for hundreds of thousands of forcibly conscripted Ukrainians). He also insisted that “our future will be up to us alone” and that “the world knows it and respects it, respects Ukraine, and accepts Ukraine as an equal”. Zelensky is a comedian and this would certainly be a laughing matter if millions of lives weren’t at stake (possibly billions if we consider the fact that the chances of uncontrollable escalation are still there, precisely thanks to extremist regimes such as the Neo-Nazi junta). And yet, he continued with nonsensical statements about the supposed “respect for Ukraine” and its alleged “rightful place at the table”.

“Ukraine can truly gather and unite the world’s leaders in a single day. Ukraine, with which America and the whole world want to jointly produce drones. Ukraine, which restored unity between Europe and the US and is now the foundation of this alliance. Ukraine, which stands firm and can defend itself. Therefore, Ukraine is heard, Ukraine is counted, Ukraine is listened to. Its place is at the table; it is not told, ‘Wait outside.’ It is told, ‘The decision is yours alone,'” Zelensky said with a straight face.

He also claimed that “both the US and Europe agree: Ukraine has not yet won, but it certainly will not lose” and that “Ukraine is recognized — not as a poor relative, but as a strong ally”. Zelensky is insistent that “this is what the ‘coalition of the willing’ is about” and that “Ukraine will achieve lasting peace because it will receive security guarantees so strong that no one in the world will ever again even think of attacking Ukraine”. He never revealed who would (or could) give such guarantees, but given his previous statements about nuclear weapons, this should certainly be taken as a potentially serious threat. The main takeaway of this year’s “Independence Day” speech is that Zelensky just raised the stakes and effectively declared total war on Russia.

It should be noted that these statements aren’t mere rhetoric. On August 25, only a day after his speech, the Neo-Nazi junta unveiled a new, longer-range, land-attack version of the R-360 “Neptune” cruise missile, itself a copy of the Soviet-era turbojet-powered Kh-35. Colloquially known as the “Long Neptune”, the upgraded missile reportedly has a range of around 1,000 km, with no information on other specifications. Just like the Kh-35, the original R-360 “Neptune” is a subsonic anti-ship cruise missile with a range of approximately 200 km. In 2023, the Kiev regime revealed it fired a land-attack version of the missile, dubbed the “Neptune-MD” by some analysts. Its range was also reportedly 1,000 km (it’s possible this is the same missile).

This comes approximately a week after the Neo-Nazi junta revealed the FP-5 “Flamingo”, another land-based cruise missile which is effectively a crossover between the Nazi German V-1 flying bomb (essentially an early cruise missile concept) and the Soviet-era Tu-141/143 turbojet-powered drone. It allegedly has a range of 3,000 km and a massive warhead weighing around 1,150 kg. Albeit a very rudimentary design that could easily be picked up by Russian air defenses, it could give the Kiev regime means of mass terror strikes on Russian cities (after all, this was Nazi Germany’s concept of total war Zelensky is now threatening to unleash). The Russian military already destroyed most of the “Sapsan” program precisely for this reason.

Source Infobrics.org

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Trans shooter Robert Westman, 23, who goes by the name of Robin Westman, murdered two children and injured at least 17 others at a Catholic school in Minneapolis today, the same school he once attended.

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Writes Bill Madden:

This book, is difficult reading but it reinforces the point that the USA has been a plutocracy since the beginning.  Plundering by our wealthiest families is on display during the 1800s with the construction of the railroads.  Huge areas of land on either side of the proposed rights of way were given to the early Robber Barons to use, lease or sell as they wished.  It is almost certain that some of the revenue derived from this excess land found its way back to the politicians and bureaucrats making it all happen.

The Civil War destroyed states rights as the central government became increasingly more powerful in relation to the states which, according to the Constitution, were supposed to retain all power except for the Enumerated Powers granted the federal government by the Constitution.  It has become understood by many that: “States rights died at Appomattox”.

The implementation of the income tax in 1913 gave the central government the financial clout to oppress the people and dispense tax revenue as bribes to control the states.  During that same year, the Federal Reserve was created to loot the masses by charging interest (currently, one trillion dollars a year) on money that the Constitution directs Congress to coin for free.  Tax free foundations were also created to insulate the wealth of the super-rich from the planned ravages of the income tax.

My feeling is that the super-rich have always had the power in our country and that the noose around the necks of the American people has, over the years, only grown tighter.

—

From: Bob Avery

Speak the truth about the military rule of the United States

Speak out about what really happened now

The United States has been under military rule since January 2001. That is when the Bush administration used the military and intelligence to shut down all discussion of the rigged election that brought them to power and they took over the federal government by force.

We have continued to be under military rule under Obama, under Trump, under Biden and now, even more so, under Trump again. He has not aged well and this dictatorship has not aged well either.

We are ruled by a totalitarian military government that is dressed up in democratic clothing.

It is fascism in participatory drag. A brutal and parasitic wolf in empathetic sheep’s clothing.

 

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 Murray Sabrin writes:

Lew:

Trump should change his name to Fidel Trump.  He is making FDR look like a free market conservative.

CNBC News

 

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The bold new Cracker Barrel logo is everything modern branding should be: ditch the past, erase tradition, and marginalise farmers. After all, every time that’s been tried around the world, it’s been a roaring success, right?

So hop aboard this AI Parody celebration of yet another rebrand that proudly tosses heritage straight into the trash. Kill the past, if you have to.

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It seems that Putin has indeed succeeded in finding an exit out from the imposed western cordon sanitaire.

Trump’s ascent to a portion of the ‘Mythic’ has become only too evident. As John Greer has observed:

“It’s becoming difficult even for the most dyed-in-the-wool rationalist to go on believing that Trump’s political career can be understood in the prosaic terms of ‘politics as usual’”.

Trump the man, of course, is in no way mythic. He’s an elderly, slightly infirm, American real estate oligarch, with lowbrow tastes and an unusually robust ego.

“The ancient Greek word muthos originally meant ‘story’. As the philosopher Sallust wrote, myths are things that never happen but always are”.

Later, myth came to mean stories hinting at a kernel of inner meaning. This doesn’t imply a requirement to be factual; yet it is this latter dimension that gives Trump “his extraordinary grip on the collective imagination of our time”, Greer suggests. He comes back literally from everything thrown to destroy him.

He becomes what Carl Jung called ‘the Shadow’. As Greer writes:

“Rationalists in Hitler’s day were consistently confounded by the way the latter brushed aside obstacles and followed his trajectory to the bitter end. Jung pointed out in his prescient 1936 essay Wotan, that much of Hitler’s power over the collective mind of Europe came boiling up out of the realms of myth and archetype”

Wotan in myth is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife – now here, now there – and works magic. Jung thought it piquant to a degree that an ancient God of storm and frenzy – the long quiescent Wotan – should come to life in the German Youth Movement.

What has this to do with the Alaska summit with President Putin?

Well, Putin seemingly paid due attention to the psychology underlying Trump’s sudden request to meet. The Russians treated Trump in a very respectful, courteous and friendly fashion. They implicitly acknowledged Trump’s sense of an inner mythic quality – which Steve Witkoff, his longstanding friend, has described as Trump’s deep conviction that his ‘commanding presence’ alone can bend people to his will (and to America’s interests). Witkoff added that he agreed with this assessment.

As just one example, the White House meeting with Zelensky and his European fans produced some of the most remarkable political optics perhaps in history. As Simplicius notes,

“Has there ever been anything like this? The entire pantheon of the European ruling class reduced to snivelling children in their school principal’s office. No one can deny that Trump has succeeded in veritably ‘breaking Europe over his knee’. There is no coming back from this turning point moment, the optics simply cannot be redeemed. The EU’s claim to being a geopolitical power is exposed as sham”.

Less noticed perhaps – but psychologically crucial – is that Trump seems to recognise in Putin a ‘mythic peer’. Despite the two being poles apart in character, nonetheless, Trump seemed to recognise a fellow from the pantheon of putative ‘mythic beings’. Watch again the scenes from Anchorage: Trump treats Putin with huge deference and respect. How unlike Trump’s disdainful treatment of the Euros.

In Anchorage however, it was Putin who displayed the calm, composed, dominating presence.

Yet what is plain is that Trump’s respectful conduct towards Putin has exploded the West’s radical demonisation of Russia and the cordon sanitaire erected versus all things Russian. There is no coming back from this other turning point moment – “the optics simply cannot be redeemed”. Russia was treated as a peer global power.

What was it all about? A pivot: Kellogg’s frozen conflict paradigm is out; the Putin long-term peace plan is in; and tariffs are nowhere mentioned.

What is clear is that Trump has decided – after some reluctance – that he has to do “do Ukraine”.

The cold reality is that Trump faces huge pressures: The Epstein Affair stubbornly refuses to fade away. It is set to rear up again after Labor Day in the U.S.

The western Security State narrative of “we are winning”, or at least, “they are losing”, has been so powerful – and so universally accepted for so long – that it, of itself, creates a huge dynamic, pressing for Trump to persist with the Ukraine war. Facts regularly are twisted to fit this narrative. This dynamic has not yet been broken.

And Trump is trapped too, into supporting the Israeli slaughter – with the images of massacred and starved women and children turning the stomach of the younger, under 35, electoral demographic in the U.S.

These dynamics – and the economic blowback from the ‘Shock and Awe’ tariff attack to fracture BRICS – together threaten Trump’s MAGA base more directly. It is becoming existential. Epstein; the Gaza massacre; the threat of ‘more war’, and job worries is roiling not just the MAGA faction, but American young voters more generally. They ask, is Trump still one of ‘us’, or was he always with ‘them’.

Without the base behind him, Trump likely will lose the Midterm Congressional elections. Ultra rich donors pay, but cannot substitute.

What emerged from Anchorage therefore is a meagre intellectual framework. Trump minimally decided to no longer stand in the way of a Russian-imposed solution for Ukraine, which is, in any case, really the only solution there can be.

This framework is not a road map to any ultimate solution. It is delusional therefore, as Aurelien outlines, to expect that Trump and Putin were going to ‘negotiate’ an end to the war in Ukraine, “as though Mr Putin were to pull out a text from his pocket and the two of the them were then to work through it”. Trump anyway is not strong on details, and is wont to meander discursively and inconclusively.

“As we get closer to the endgame, the important action is elsewhere, and much of it will be hidden from public view. The broad outlines of the end of the military part of the Ukraine crisis have been visible for a while, even if the details could still change. By contrast, the extremely complex political endgame has only just started, the players are not really sure of the rules, nobody is really sure how many players there are anyway, and the outcome is at the moment as clear as mud”, Aurelien opines.

Then why did Trump suddenly ‘pivot’? Well it was not because he has had some ‘Damascene conversion’. Trump remains a committed Israeli Firster; and secondly, he can’t resile from his pursuit of dollar hegemony because that aim, too, is becoming problematic – as the American ‘bubble economy’ begins to unravel, and the under-30s fidget, living in their parents’ basement.

It is to Trump’s advantage (for now) to let Russia to ‘bring’ the EU and Zelensky to some negotiated ‘peace’ – through force. The U.S. ‘China hawks’ are increasingly agitating that China is close to an exponential lift-off – both economically and in tech – after which, the U.S. will lose its ability to contain China from global pre-eminence. (It is however probably already too late to stop this).

Putin too, is taking a big risk in offering Trump an off-ramp, through accepting to work towards a stable long-term relationship with the U.S. It is not Finland of 1944, where the Soviet army did force an Armistice.

In Europe, the élite believe that Trump’s peace outreach to Putin will fail. Their plan is to ensure it fails by playing along, whilst ensuring through their conditionalities, that no such agreement materialises. Thus proving to Trump that ‘Putin is not serious about ending the war’. Thus impelling American escalation.

Trump’s part of the bargain with Putin clearly is that he will shoulder managing the European ruling strata (mainly by flooding the info-sphere with contradictory noise), and through containing the American hawks (by pretending he is wooing Russia away from China). Really? Yes, really.

Putin too, faces internal pressures: From Russians convinced that ultimately he will be forced to enter into some form of interim Minsk 3-type outcome (a series of limited ceasefires that would only exacerbate the conflict) rather than achieve ‘victory’. Some Russians fear that the blood that has been spent so far may prove to be but a down-payment on more blood to be expended in a few years ahead, as the West rearms Ukraine.

And Putin faces too, the hurdle of Trump viewing his relationship with him through narrow New York real estate ‘lense’. He still does not seem to understand that the key question is not so much Ukrainian territories as it is about geo-strategic security. His enthusiasm for a trilateral summit seems to rest on the image of two real estate tycoons playing the board at Monopoly and swapping properties. But it is not like that.

It seems however, that Putin has indeed succeeded in finding an exit out from the imposed western cordon sanitaire. Russia is acknowledged as a great power again, and Ukraine will be settled on the battlefield. The two great nuclear weapons powers are talking to each other. That is important, in itself. Will Trump be able to secure his base? Will ‘game over’ in Ukraine (if it happens) be enough for MAGA? Will Netanyahu’s next genocidal rampage in Gaza explode the Trump ‘cope’ vis-à-vis MAGA? Very possibly, yes.

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

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History does not always conform to what the dominant scholarly theories of court historians may lead us to expect. In his essay “The Task of the Modern Historian,” Thomas Babington Macaulay observes that historians may formulate valid theories of what they would logically expect to have happened in a particular era, but unfortunately their theories soon displace any interest in the truth about what did in fact happen. They have been “seduced from truth, not by their imagination, but by their reason.”

In today’s context, the dominant narratives explain history by reference to theories of race relations. Historical explanations which do not fit comfortably within these theories are treated with skepticism or dismissed as false. For example, in light of the moral consensus that slavery is wrong, we would not logically expect black men to stand with slaveowners, and so we presume that no black men in fact did so. Any reports of black men having done precisely that must then surely be fanciful, commonly dismissed as part of a “lost cause myth” that romanticizes the Old South. By reasoning that the facts should conform to what we would logically expect to have occurred, we are “distorting narrative into a conformity with theory.” The theory matters most, and that in turn dictates the narrative arc into which we insert those facts that we deem to be relevant. The reasoning is circular. We regard as “fact” only that which fits the narrative and adjudge that fact to be “true” because it fits the narrative. Macaulay observes:

…unhappily, [historians] have fallen into the error of distorting facts to suit general principles. They arrive at the theory from looking at some of the phenomena, and the remaining phenomena they strain or curtail to suit the theory.

One indicator of historians being less interested in truth than in their pet theories is their dismissal of any author who is not a “historian.” Whether the author’s claims are true or not is almost irrelevant—what matters most is whether his credentials qualify him to write about history. Commenting on The Tragic Era, a book by Claude G. Bowers on the Reconstruction Era, one reviewer wrote: “The book is written by an historically untrained politician with a cause to advance or an ax to grind.” He dismissed the book as “downright propaganda.” Bowers had set out to cover an aspect of history that had been overlooked, namely, the views of “the able leaders of the minority in Congress” and the “brilliant and colourful leaders and spokesmen of the South.” For following a path that departed from the established history profession who were almost united in praising the winners of the war, his book was deemed to be unprofessional. The reviewer added that,

From the point of view of the historian the book is without any particular value…the book contains no facts which have local or national significance; and most of the facts presented are intentionally distorted… Internationally this work can serve only to discredit the nation.

Are historians not interested in learning what the minority in Congress thought of the events in question? The reviewer who derides Bowers for being partisan argues that Bowers was supporting the wrong side because “in 1866 the Negroes were reduced to a state as deplorable as slavery itself,” and therefore needed “the protection of the ballot by which their re-enslavement was prevented.” Given that free black people could not vote in the North in 1866, and neither could women, it could be said that this reviewer, too, is promoting “downright propaganda” by supporting the Radical Republican claim that lack of voting rights was just as deplorable as the slavery which had just been abolished. The reviewer’s comment that Bowers’s book might “discredit the nation” could equally well be treated, using his own approach, as evidence that his concern was more with Bowers discrediting the “righteous cause myth” of the war than with the historical veracity of Bowers’s arguments. In other words, the reviewer himself could be accused of that which he accuses Bowers. The reviewer adds:

While Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens made mistakes which require exposure they should at the same time be lauded for assisting in the preservation of the Union, for the defense of that flag at which most of the author’s ideal Americans shot at for four years.

Are we to assume that Bowers’s partisan defense of the South is “downright propaganda” while the reviewer’s partisan defense of the Union is not propaganda? Another review, titled “history as present politics” argues that The Tragic Era was “perhaps the single most widely read history of Reconstruction and therefore a work of considerable influence,” which he sees as very unfortunate because he views Claude Bowers as motivated by politics. Bowers wrote, “The Constitution was treated as a doormat on which politicians and army officers wiped their feet after wading in the muck.” While that is indeed an overtly political comment, one would hope a historian would at least be interested to ascertain whether it was true. Is it true that the Radical Republicans treated the Constitution with contempt? What does “truth” mean in the context of politically-contested history?

It is important to note that in these debates, it is not the facts themselves that are disputed, but the interpretation of those facts. As Macauly notes, the debates concern questions of “comparison and degree,” with disputes over the emphasis that ought to be accorded to various facts:

For this purpose it is not necessary that [historians] should assert what is absolutely false, for all questions in morals and politics are questions of comparison and degree. Any proposition which does not involve a contradiction in terms may, by possibility, be true; and if all the circumstances which raise a probability in its favor be stated and enforced, and those which lead to an opposite conclusion be omitted or lightly passed over, it may appear to be demonstrated. In every human character and transaction there is a mixture of good and evil; — a little exaggeration, a little suppression, a judicious use of epithets, a watchful and searching skepticism with respect to the evidence on one side, a convenient credulity with respect to every report or tradition on the other, may easily make a saint of Laud, or a tyrant of Henry the Fourth. (emphasis added)

In the example of the “myth of black Confederates,” the establishment view is that black Confederates are mythical because, while they did exist, they were so few that any reference to their existence should be dismissed as an attempt to minimize the moral repugnance of slavery. Similarly, the establishment view is that while the South indeed had grievances about states’ rights, the Constitution, or unjust tariffs that punished the South while favoring the North, these grievances pale into such insignificance when compared to the institution of slavery that they should be dismissed as an attempt to “whitewash slavery.”

As Macaulay says, when disputes concern questions of comparison and degree, or when the only subject of debate concerns the motives of the historian or value judgments about his ideological beliefs, readers may acquire a false view of history even though neither side has technically asserted any false facts. Without “lying” about the facts, the conclusions they draw may nevertheless be false: “A history in which every particular incident may be true, may on the whole be false.” False conclusions are easily derived when historians fall into the error pointed out by Macaulay, namely, “distorting facts to suit general principles.”

Without positively asserting much more than he can prove, he gives prominence to all the circumstances which support his case; he glides lightly over those which are unfavorable to it; his own witnesses are applauded and encouraged; the statements which seem to throw discredit on them are controverted; the contradictions into which they fall are explained away; a clear and connected abstract of their evidence is given. Every thing that is offered on the other side is scrutinized with the utmost severity; every suspicious circumstance is a ground for comment and invective; what cannot be denied is extenuated, or passed by without notice; concessions even are sometimes made; but this insidious candor only increases the effect of the vast mass of sophistry.

The historians of slavery are now caught in a hopeless debate over whether it was brutal or benign, as each side “gives prominence” to favorable examples and asserts them with “unhesitating confidence.” They cannot accept that the actual facts may support one or the other side in specific cases, because the debate is not about the facts but about whose narrative should be dominant. The establishment historians get to dismiss any opposing narrative as a “myth.” Cancel culture steps in, and the search for truth is forgotten. Facts that undermine the dominant narrative are then easily “glided lightly” over, “sifted with the utmost care” and treated “with the utmost bitterness of language.” Hypocrisies and double standards are explained away as merely incidental to the overarching narrative.

If it cannot be denied, some palliating supposition is suggested, or we are at least reminded that some circumstance now unknown may have justified what at present appears unjustifiable. Two events are reported by the same author in the same sentence; their truth rests on the same testimony; but the one supports the darling hypothesis, and the other seems inconsistent with it. The one is taken and the other is left.

Macaulay is right to observe that when both sides of a debate are prone to such distortion, the impartial observer or the reader who consults opposing interpretations is likely to gain some insight into the truth. This is why cancel culture is such a destructive trend. Those who cancel their scholarly opponents for supporting the “wrong” ideology are themselves guilty of supporting ideologies that their opponents would regard as “wrong.” The difference is that when those who happen to control the reins of power shut down all opposing views, impartial observers are less likely to have the opportunity to ascertain the truth about history.

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

The post How Scholarly Theories Impede the Search for Historical Truth appeared first on LewRockwell.

With speculation mounting that Trump could pardon her, MintPress profiles the family of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. From her media baron father, who acted as a high-level spy for Israel, her sister, working to push Tel Aviv’s interests in Silicon Valley, her brothers, who founded a dubious but highly influential anti-Islamic extremism think tank, and nephews in influential roles at the State Department and White House, the Maxwell clan have wide-ranging ties to U.S. and Israeli state power. This is their story.

Releasing Ghislaine, Burying the Epstein Files

Speculation is growing that Ghislaine Maxwell could soon be freed. Despite campaigning on the promise to release the Epstein Files, there are increasing signs that the Trump administration is considering pardoning the world’s most notorious convicted sex trafficker.

Last month, Trump (who contemplated the idea in his first term in office) repeatedly refused to rule out a pardon, stating to journalists that “I’m allowed to do it.” Just days later, Maxwell was transferred across states to a minimum-security facility in Bryan, Texas—a highly unusual practice. Neither women convicted of sex crimes nor those with more than 10 years remaining on their sentences are generally permitted to be transferred to such facilities. The move sparked equal measures of speculation and outrage.

The decision to relocate Maxwell came after somebody—potentially a source within her team itself—began leaking incriminating and embarrassing evidence linking Trump to Epstein. This included a birthday card Trump sent Epstein, featuring a hand-drawn nude woman, accompanied by the text: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

For years, Maxwell aided her partner Jeffrey Epstein in trafficking and raping girls and young women, creating a giant sex crime ring in the process. Epstein’s associates included billionaires, scientists, celebrities, and politicians, including President Trump, whom he considered his “closest friend.”

In 2021, two years after Epstein’s mysterious death in a Manhattan prison, Maxwell was found guilty of child sex trafficking offenses and was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The news that Trump may soon free such an infamous criminal sent shockwaves through his base and drew charges of blatant corruption from the media. “Is there any reason to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell except to buy her silence?” ran the headline of one article in The Hill. Meanwhile, Tim Hogan, senior Democratic National Committee adviser, denounced what he claimed was a “government cover-up in real time.” “Donald Trump’s FBI, run by loyalist Kash Patel, redacted Trump’s name from the Epstein files—which have still not been released,” he said.

Robert Maxwell: Media Tycoon and Israeli Operative

While many of Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes have come to light, less well-known are her family’s myriad connections to both the U.S. and Israeli national security states. Chief among these are those of her father, disgraced media baron and early tech entrepreneur, Robert Maxwell.

A Jewish refugee fleeing Hitler’s occupation of his native Czechoslovakia, Maxwell fought for Britain against Germany. After World War II, he used his Czech connections to help funnel arms to the nascent State of Israel, weapons that helped them win the 1948 war and carry out the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of nearly 800,000 Palestinians.

Maxwell’s biographers, Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, write that he was first recruited by Israeli intelligence in the 1960s and began buying up Israeli tech corporations. Israel used these companies and their software to carry out spying and other clandestine operations around the globe.

Maxwell amassed a vast business empire of 350 companies, employing 16,000 people. He owned an array of newspapers, including The New York Daily News, Britain’s Daily Mirror, and Maariv of Israel, in addition to some of the world’s most influential book and scientific publishing houses.

With business power came political power. He was elected to the U.K. parliament in 1964 and counted U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev among his closest friends.

He used this influence to advance Israeli interests, selling Israeli intelligence-gathering software to Russia, the U.S., the U.K., and many other countries. This software included a secret Israeli backdoor that allowed the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, to tap into classified information gathered by governments and intelligence agencies around the world.

At the same time, it was expanding its espionage capabilities, Israel was developing a secret nuclear weapons program. This project was exposed by Israeli peace activist Mordechai Vanunu, who, in 1986, leaked evidence to the British press. Maxwell—one of Britain’s most powerful press barons—spied on Vanunu, passing photographs and other information to the Israeli Embassy—intelligence that led to Vanunu’s international abduction by Mossad, and his subsequent imprisonment.

His death was also surrounded by controversy, similar to Epstein’s. In 1991, his lifeless body was found in the ocean, in what authorities ruled a bizarre accident whereby the tycoon had fallen from his luxury yacht. To this day, his children are split on whether they think he was murdered.

The rumors that Maxwell had, for decades, been acting as an Israeli “superspy” were all but confirmed by the lavish state funeral he received in Jerusalem. His body was interred at the Mount of Olives, one of the holiest sites in Judaism, the spot from which Jesus is said to have ascended to heaven.

Virtually the entirety of elite Israeli society–both government and opposition–attended the event, including no fewer than six living heads of Israeli intelligence organizations. President Chaim Herzog himself performed the eulogy. Also speaking at the event was Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who stated that “Robert Maxwell has done more for Israel than can today be said.”

In the United Kingdom, however, he is remembered less fondly. A man with a fearsome reputation, Maxwell ruled his media business with an iron fist, in a similar vein to Rupert Murdoch (another individual with extremely close links to Israel). After his death, it transpired that he had stolen more than $500 million from his employees’ pension fund to bail out other failing companies in his empire, leaving many of his workforce’s retirement plans in tatters. As the newspaper, The Scotsman, remarked ten years later in 2001:

If [Maxwell] was despised in life, he was hated in death when it emerged he had stolen 440 million [pounds] from the pension fund of Mirror Group Newspapers. He was, officially, the biggest thief in British criminal history.”

Isabel Maxwell: Israel’s Woman in Silicon Valley

Even before it had been published, Isabel Maxwell– Robert’s daughter and Ghislaine’s older sister– managed to obtain a copy of Thomas and Dillon’s biography. She immediately flew to Israel, The Times of London reported, where she showed it to a “family friend” and deputy director of Mossad, David Kimche. These actions did little to beat the book’s central allegation that her father was indeed a high-level Israeli “superspy.”

Isabel has enjoyed a long and successful career in the tech industry. In 1992, along with her twin sister, Christine, she founded a company that developed one of the internet’s first search engines.

After the pension scandal, however, she and her siblings shifted their focus to rebuilding every facet of their father’s collapsed business empire. The sisters sold the search engine, netting enormous profits.

As Israeli outlet Haaretz noted, in 2001, Isabel decided to dedicate her life to advancing the Jewish State’s interests, vowing to “work only on things involving Israel” as she “believes in Israel.” Described by former MintPress journalist and investigative reporter Whitney Webb as “Israel’s back door into Silicon Valley,” she has transformed herself into a key ambassador for the country in the tech world.

“Maxwell created a unique niche for herself in [tech] as a liaison between Israeli companies in the initial development stages and private angel investors in the U.S. At the same time, she helps U.S. companies interested in opening development centers in Israel,” wrote local business newspaper, Globes. “She lives intensively, including innumerable flights back and forth between Tel Aviv and San Francisco,” it added.

Israel is known to be the source of much of the world’s most controversial spyware and hacking tools, used by repressive governments the world over to surveil, harass, and even kill political opponents. This includes the notorious Pegasus software, used by the government of Saudi Arabia to track Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, before assassinating him in Türkiye.

Isabel built on her father’s political connections. “My father was most influential in my life. He was a very accomplished man and achieved many of his goals during his life. I learned very much from him and have made many of his ways my own,” she said. This included developing intimate ties to a myriad of Israeli leaders, including Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest associates.

During the 2000s, she was a regular participant at the Herzliya Conference, an annual, closed-door gathering of the West’s most senior political, security and intelligence officials, in addition to being a “technology pioneer” at the World Economic Forum.

She was also placed on the board of the Israeli government-funded Shimon Peres Center for Peace and Innovation and the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies, two organizations closely associated with those former Israeli prime ministers.

In 2001, she became the CEO of iCognito, taking the job, in her words, “because it [the company] is in Israel, and because of its technology.” The technology in question was aimed at keeping children safe online—highly ironic, given that her sister was actively trafficking and abusing minors throughout that period.

Isabel was a much more serious and accomplished individual than Ghislaine. As Haaretz noted:

While her younger sister, Ghislaine, makes the gossip columns after breakfasting with Bill Clinton or because of her ties with another close friend, Britain’s Prince Andrew, Isabel wants to show photos taken of herself with the grand mufti of Egypt, or with Bedouin in a tent, or of visits to a Gaza refugee camp.”

In 1997, Isabel was appointed president of the Israeli tech security firm, Commtouch. Thanks to her connections, Commtouch was able to secure investment from many of the most prominent players in Silicon Valley, including Bill Gates, a close associate of both the Maxwell family and Jeffrey Epstein himself.

Christine Maxwell: Funded by Israel?

Isabel’s twin sister, Christine, is no less accomplished. A veteran of the publishing and tech industries, she co-founded data analytics firm Chiliad. As CEO, she helped oversee the production of a massive “counterterrorism” database that the company sold to the FBI during the height of the War on Terror. The software helped the Bush administration crack down on Muslim Americans and tear down domestic civil liberties in the wake of 9/11 and the PATRIOT Act. Today, she is the leader and co-founder of another big data corporation, Techtonic Insight.

Like her sister and father, Christine has a close relationship with the State of Israel. She is currently a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), where, her biography states,

She works to promote innovative academic research that leverages enabling technologies to empower proactive understanding and combatting the great dangers of contemporary antisemitism, and enhancing the ongoing relevance of the Holocaust for the 21st century and beyond.”

ISGAP’s board is a who’s who of Israeli national security state officials. This includes Natan Sharansky, former Minister of Internal Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, and Brigadier General Sima Vaknin-Gil, the former Chief Censor for the IDF and Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Diplomacy. Also on the board is Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.

The think tank was a key player in the U.S. government’s decision to repress the 2024 Gaza protests on university campuses nationwide. The group produced reports linking student leaders with foreign terrorist organizations and promoted dubious claims about a wave of anti-Semitism washing over American colleges. It met frequently with both Democratic and Republican leaders, and urged them to “investigate” (i.e., repress) the leaders of the demonstrations.

ISGAP has continually warned of foreign influence on American campuses, producing reports and holding seminars detailing Qatar’s supposed stranglehold over the U.S. higher education system, and linking that with growing anti-Israel sentiment among America’s youth.

Yet if ISGAP wished to investigate other foreign government influence operations, it would not have to look far, as its own funds overwhelmingly come from a single source: the Israeli state. In 2018, an investigation found that Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs (then headed by Brigadier General Vaknin-Gil herself) channeled $445,000 to ISGAP, a sum representing nearly 80% of its entire revenues for that year. ISGAP failed to disclose that information to either the public or the federal government.

At the height of the concern over foreign interference in American politics, the news barely registered. Since then, the Israeli government has continued to bankroll the group to the tune of millions. In 2019, for example, it approved a grant of over $1.3 million to ISGAP. Thus, in her role as a fellow at the organization, Christine Maxwell is the direct beneficiary of Israeli government cash.

Third Generation Maxwells: Working In the US Government

While Robert Maxwell’s daughters were close to state power, some of the family’s third generation have taken up positions within the U.S. government itself. Shortly after graduating from college, Alex Djerassi (Isabel Maxwell’s only son) was employed by Hillary Clinton on her 2007-2008 presidential campaign. Djerassi drafted memos, briefings, and policy papers for the Clinton team and helped prepare her for more than 20 debates.

The Clinton and Maxwell families are closely intertwined. Ghislaine vacationed with Hillary’s daughter, Chelsea, and appeared prominently at her wedding. Both she and Jeffrey Epstein were invited multiple times to the Clinton White House. Long after Epstein was jailed, President Bill Clinton invited Ghislaine to an intimate dinner with him at an exclusive Los Angeles restaurant.

Although she failed in her bid for the White House, President Obama named Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, and one of her first actions was to appoint Djerassi to her team. He quickly rose in the ranks, becoming Chief of Staff at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. In this role, he specialized in developing the United States’ policy towards Israel and Iran, although he also worked on the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and accompanied Clinton on visits to Israel and the Arab world.

While at the State Department, he served as the U.S. government representative to the Friends of Libya and the Friends of the Syrian People Conferences. These were two organizations of hardline, hawkish groups working towards the overthrow of those two governments, and their replacement with U.S.-friendly regimes. Washington got what it wanted. In 2011, Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi was overthrown, killed and replaced by Islamist warlords. And last December, longtime Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, fled to Russia and was replaced by the founder of al-Qaeda in Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.

Djerassi was later appointed an associate at the U.S.-government-funded think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. While there, he again specialized in Middle East policy, his bio noting that he “worked on matters relating to democratization and civil society in the Arab world, the Arab uprisings, and Israeli-Palestinian peace.” Today, he works in Silicon Valley.

While Djerassi’s fortunes were tied to the Clinton faction of the Democratic Party, his cousin Xavier Malina (Christine Maxwell’s eldest son) backed the right horse, working on the Obama-Biden 2008 presidential run.

He was rewarded for his good work with a position in the White House itself, where he became a Staff Assistant at the Executive Office of the President. Like his cousin, once his time in office was over, Malina also secured a position at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace before pursuing a career in the tech world, working for many years at Google in the Bay Area. He currently works for Disney.

While the actions of parents and grandparents should not determine the careers of later generations, the fact that two individuals who come from a multi-generational family of unrepentant spies and operatives of a foreign power secured positions at the center of the U.S. State is at least worthy of note.

The Maxwell Brothers: From Bankruptcy to Counterterrorism

Much of the Maxwell clan is most influential in American and Israeli politics. However, brothers Ian and Kevin also hold considerable sway over affairs in their native Great Britain. Although being acquitted of charges over widespread allegations that they helped their father, Robert, plunder over $160 million from his employees’ pension fund, the brothers kept a low profile for many years. Kevin, in particular, was known for little more than being Britain’s largest-ever bankrupt, with debts exceeding half a billion dollars.

However, in 2018, they launched Combating Jihadist Terrorism and Extremism (CoJiT), a controversial think tank pushing for a far more invasive and heavy-handed government approach to the question of radical Islam.

In his organization’s book, “Jihadist Terror: New Threats, New Responses,” Ian writes that CoJiT was set up to play a “catalyzing role in the national conversation,” and to answer “difficult questions” arising from the issue. Judging by the content of the rest of the book, this means pushing for even more extensive surveillance of Muslim communities.

Within Britain, CoJiT was a highly influential organization. Its editorial board and contributors are a who’s who of high state officials. Individuals participating in its inaugural conference in London in 2018 included Sara Khan, the government’s Lead Commissioner for Countering Extremism, and Jonathan Evans, the former Director General of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency.

Like so many Maxwell projects, CoJiT appears to have wrapped up its affairs. The organization has not updated its website or posted anything on its social media channels since 2022.

In fairness, in the past few years, the brothers have had other priorities, leading the campaign to free their sister Ghislaine from prison, insisting that she is entirely innocent. In a manner reminiscent of Robert Maxwell, however, it appears that Kevin may have failed to pay the defense team; in 2022, Maxwell’s lawyers sued him, seeking unpaid fees of nearly $900,000.

The Infamous Mr. Epstein

For years, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein ran a sex trafficking ring that exploited hundreds of girls and young women. They were also connected to vast networks of the global elite, including billionaire business owners, royalty, star academics, and foreign leaders, among their closest acquaintances, leading to intense speculation about the extent of their involvement in their many crimes.

It is still unclear when Epstein first met with the Maxwells, with some alleging that he was recruited into Israeli intelligence by Robert Maxwell. Others state the relationship only began after Robert’s death, when he saved the family from penury following its financial problems.

Only one month after his 2019 arrest, Epstein was found dead in his New York City prison cell. His death was officially ruled a suicide, although his family has rejected this interpretation.

Perhaps the two most powerful individuals in Epstein’s circle of confidants were Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Clinton, already infamous for the numerous accusations of sexual misconduct against him, is known to have flown at least 17 times on Epstein’s private jet, nicknamed the “Lolita Express,” and was accused by Epstein victim, Virginia Giuffre, of visiting Little St. James Island, the multimillionaire’s private Caribbean residence, where many of his worst crimes took place.

Trump, arguably, was even closer to the disgraced financier. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” he said in 2002, “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it.” Like Clinton, Trump flew on the Lolita Express. Epstein attended his wedding to Marla Maples in 1993, and claimed to have introduced him to his third wife, Melania.

Unfortunately, while Epstein’s ties incriminate the entire political spectrum, coverage has often been framed as a partisan issue. A MintPress study of over one year of Epstein coverage on MSNBC and Fox News found that each network downplayed his connections to their preferred president, while emphasizing and highlighting the links to the leader of the other major party. As a result, many in the United States see the affair as an indictment of their political rivals, rather than of the political system as a whole.

There also remains the question of Epstein’s links to intelligence, something that has been openly speculated about in the media for decades, even years before any allegations against him were made public. Throughout the 1990s, Epstein’s biographer Julie K. Brown noted, he openly boasted about working for both the CIA and Mossad, although the veracity of his claims remains in doubt. As Britain’s Sunday Times wrote in 2000, “He’s Mr. Enigmatic. Nobody knows whether he’s a concert pianist, property developer, a CIA agent, a math teacher or a member of Mossad.” It is possible that there is at least a grain of truth to all of these identities.

Epstein met with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns three times in 2014. Burns would later be named director of the CIA. Burns’ proximity to Epstein, however, pales in comparison to that of former Israeli Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Between 2013 and 2017 alone, Barak is known to have traveled to New York City and met with the convicted criminal at least 30 times, sometimes arriving at his Manhattan mansion incognito or wearing a mask to hide his identity.

Numerous sources have commented on Epstein’s connections to Israeli intelligence. A previous girlfriend and victim of his, referred in court documents as Jane Doe 200 to hide her identity, testified that Epstein boasted about being a Mossad operative and that, after he raped her, she could not go to the police because his position as a spy made her fear for her life.

“Doe genuinely believed that any reporting of the rape by what she believed to be a Mossad agent with some of the most unique connections in the world would result in significant bodily harm or death to her,” reads the court filing.

Ari Ben-Menashe, a former senior official in Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, claimed that Epstein was a spy and that he and Ghislaine Maxwell were running a honeytrap operation on behalf of Israel. Four (anonymous) sources told Rolling Stone that Epstein had directly worked with the Israeli government.

Unlike much of the Maxwell family, however, his Israel and intelligence connections are based largely on testimony and unverified accounts. His only known trip to the country was in April 2008, just before his sentencing, a move that sparked fears he would seek refuge there.

Nevertheless, there has been intense public speculation that he could have been working for Tel Aviv. At the Turning Points USA Student Action Summit 2025, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson stated that there is nothing wrong, hateful or anti-Semitic about asking questions about Epstein’s foreign connections. “No one’s allowed to say that the foreign government is Israel, because we’ve been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty,” he said, before expressing his exasperation about the media’s silence on the issue.

What the hell is this? You have the former Israeli prime minister living in your house, you have had all this contact with a foreign government, were you working on behalf of the Mossad? Were you running a blackmail operation on behalf of a foreign government?”

Carlson’s comments drew harsh condemnation from former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. “The accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false. Epstein’s conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the State of Israel,” he wrote.

“This accusation is a lie being peddled by prominent online personalities such as Tucker Carlson pretending they know things they don’t,” he added, concluding that Israel was under attack from a “vicious wave of slander and lies.”

Whatever the truth about Epstein, it is indisputable that the powerful Maxwell family holds wide-ranging connections to U.S., British and Israeli state power. It is also beyond doubt that if the full story of their activities were ever to reach the public, it would incriminate a significant number of the world’s most powerful people and organizations. Perhaps that is why Trump has, in short order, gone from promising to release the Epstein Files to potentially releasing his accomplice.

This article was originally published on MintPress News.

The post The CIA, Mossad, and Epstein: Unraveling the Intelligence Ties of the Maxwell Family appeared first on LewRockwell.

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”—Ray Bradbury

Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than President Trump’s latest executive order calling for criminal charges for anyone who burns the American flag—a symbolic act long upheld by the Supreme Court as protected political expression.

This push is not about patriotism—it is political theater.

For an administration under fire—from the Epstein cover-up to tanking approval ratings and mounting constitutional crises—flag burning serves as symbolic outrage staged as political cover, a culture-war diversion to distract from more serious abuses of power.

Consider the timing: on the very same day Trump announced penalties for flag burning, he also signed an executive order establishing “specialized” National Guard units to patrol American cities under the guise of addressing crime.

This is the real bait-and-switch: cloak military policing in patriotic theater and hope no one notices the deeper constitutional violations taking root.

In other words, Trump’s flag fight is a decoy.

Yet in today’s climate, where mobs on the left and censors on the right compete to silence speech they dislike, even this form of protest is under fire.

In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Texas v. Johnson that burning the flag of the United States in protest is an act of protected free speech under the First Amendment.

Today, that ruling matters more than ever, yet there is an important distinction: the First Amendment protects the right to burn your own flag as political expression but not to vandalize public property in the process.

That distinction matters: the Constitution protects dissent, not destruction.

And it’s exactly that distinction—between lawful protest and punished expression—that makes the flag-burning debate so important.

Although the courts have held that symbolic acts of protest deserve the highest protection, the culture wars have turned those protections into battlegrounds. For decades, mobs, politicians, and bureaucrats alike have worked to silence unpopular or politically incorrect opinions.

Whether it’s a student disciplined for refusing to recite the Pledge, an athlete demonized for kneeling during the National Anthem, or a dissenter deplatformed for expressing views outside the mainstream, the message is the same: toe the line or be punished.

This new Age of Intolerance is not limited to the cultural left.

President Trump has been waging his own right-wing brand of cancel culture: sanitizing museums, scrubbing exhibits of “unpatriotic” narratives, renaming anything that doesn’t fit his preferred version of history, and punishing dissenters with executive orders and loyalty oaths.

What the left enforces with trigger warnings and deplatforming, Trump enforces with prosecutions, cultural re-branding and militarization.

They are snowflakes of a different political persuasion, but the result is the same: dissent is silenced, history is rewritten, and only the approved narrative remains.

And here’s the danger: when symbolic outrage is used as a political smokescreen for militarization and constitutional erosion, it distracts Americans from the machinery of control being built in real time. The fight over flags and museums is not just about culture—it is the smokescreen for expanding surveillance, militarization, and police-state powers.

That is why the sudden outrage over disrespect for the country’s patriotic symbols rings so hollow. In a culture where the flag is already plastered on bikinis, beer koozies, and billboards—with little outcry—it’s not reverence that’s driving this crackdown. It’s control.

Worse, it divides the nation and distracts us from the steady rise of the police state.

So, what do the courts actually say about patriotic symbols and protest?

As the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear, Americans have a right to abstain from patriotic demonstrations (West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette, 1943) and/or actively protest that demonstration, for example, by raising one’s fist during the Pledge of Allegiance (Holloman ex rel. Holloman v. Harland, 2004). These First Amendment protections also extend to military uniforms (worn to criticize the military) and military funeral protests (Snyder v. Phelps, 2011).

Likewise, Americans have a First Amendment right to display, alter or destroy the U.S. flag as acts of symbolic protest speech.

In fact, in Street v. New York (1969), the Supreme Court held that the government may not punish a person for uttering words critical of the flag, writing that “the constitutionally guaranteed ‘freedom to be intellectually . . . diverse or even contrary,’ and the ‘right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order,’ encompass the freedom to express publicly one’s opinions about our flag, including those opinions which are defiant or contemptuous.”

The case arose after Sidney Street, hearing about the attempted murder of civil rights leader James Meredith in Mississippi, burned a 48-star American flag on a New York City street corner to protest what he saw as the government’s failure to protect Meredith. Upon being questioned about the flag, Street responded, “Yes; that is my flag; I burned it. If they let that happen to Meredith, we don’t need an American flag.”

In Spence v. Washington (1974), the Court ruled that the right to display the American flag with any mark or design upon it is a protected act of expression. The case involved a college student who had placed a peace symbol on a three by five foot American flag using removable black tape and displayed it upside down from his apartment window.

Finally, in Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Court held that flag burning was protected speech under the First Amendment. The case arose from a demonstration near the site of the Republican National Convention in Dallas during which protesters marched through the streets, chanted political slogans, staged “die-ins” in front of several corporate offices to dramatize the consequences of nuclear war, and burned the flag as a means of political protest.

In other words, it is precisely the unpopular, controversial, and even offensive expression that the First Amendment exists to protect. As Justice William Brennan wrote in Texas v. Johnson, “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.”

More three decades later, that principle is constantly betrayed in practice.

In today’s climate, both political tribes are eager to wield censorship as a weapon. One side shouts down speakers; the other side bans books, rewrites curricula, and prosecutes symbolic dissent like flag burning.

The battlegrounds may differ—college campuses versus classrooms, corporate platforms versus government edicts—but the impulse is the same: to punish those who dare to disagree.

It’s all part of the same authoritarian playbook.

Seen in this light, censorship creep in the name of tolerance becomes even more dangerous.

Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive—provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.

This is why unpopular political protests such as flag burning matter so much: they are the test case for whether we still believe in freedom “for the thought that we hate.”

If freedom means anything, it means that those exercising their right to protest are showing the greatest respect for the principles on which this nation was founded: the right to free speech and the right to dissent.

Frankly, the First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty.

Let’s not confuse patriotism (love for or devotion to one’s country) with blind obedience to the government’s dictates. That is the first step towards creating an authoritarian regime.

One can be patriotic and love one’s country while at the same time disagreeing with the government or protesting government misconduct. As journalist Barbara Ehrenreich recognizes, “Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”

That spirit is disappearing. Instead, Americans now rush to silence those they dislike.

This selective tolerance—the essence of cancel culture—is exactly what my late friend and First Amendment champion Nat Hentoff used to denounce as “Free speech for me but not for thee.”

Once that mindset takes root, the First Amendment is already half-lost.

That double standard lies at the heart of our present crisis.

Indeed, I would venture to say that if you’re not speaking out or taking a stand against government wrongdoing—if you’re marching in lockstep with anything the government and its agents dole out—and if you’re prioritizing partisan politics over the principles enshrined in the Constitution, then you’re not a true patriot.

Real patriots care enough to take a stand, speak out, protest and challenge the government whenever it steps out of line.

There is nothing patriotic about the lengths to which Americans have allowed the government to go in its efforts to dismantle our constitutional republic and shift the country into a police state.

The irony is this: it’s not anti-American to be anti-war or anti-police misconduct or anti-racial discrimination—but it is anti-American to be anti-freedom.

What we are witnessing, in the flag-burning debate and far beyond, is a culture war in which political tribes police thought, speech, and even symbolic protest. Those who refuse to conform—whether they burn a flag, take a knee, question authority, or simply refuse to parrot the official line—are demonized, deplatformed, and sometimes even criminalized.

The upshot of all this editing, parsing, banning and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state. Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.

And while Orwell imagined it as dystopian fiction, we are living its early chapters now.

The First Amendment is being whittled down not just by government decree but by a culture that rewards conformity and punishes divergence.

In such an environment, burning a flag is not the real danger. The real danger is a society that no longer tolerates free thought at all.

The First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world. When there is no steam valve to release the pressure, frustration builds, anger grows, and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.

The lesson is clear: America requires more than voters inclined to pay lip service to a false sense of patriotism. It requires doers—a well-informed and very active group of doers—if we are to have any chance of holding the government accountable and maintaining our freedoms.

We need to stop acting as if showing “respect” for the country, flag and national anthem is more important than the freedoms they represent.

Listen: I served in the Army. I lived through the Civil Rights era. I came of age during the Sixties, when activists took to the streets to protest war and economic and racial injustice. As a constitutional lawyer, I defend people daily whose civil liberties are being violated, including high school students prohibited from wearing American flag t-shirts to school, allegedly out of a fear that it might be disruptive.

I understand the price that must be paid for freedom.

None of the people I served with or marched with or represented put our lives or our liberties on the line for a piece of star-spangled cloth: we took our stands and made our sacrifices because we believed we were fighting to maintain our freedoms and bring about justice for all Americans.

Responsible citizenship means being outraged at the loss of others’ freedoms, even when our own are not directly threatened.

The Framers of the Constitution knew very well that whenever and wherever democratic governments had failed, it was because the people had abdicated their responsibility as guardians of freedom. They also knew that whenever in history the people denied this responsibility, an authoritarian regime arose which eventually denied the people the right to govern themselves.

Citizens must be willing to stand and fight to protect their freedoms. And if need be, it will entail criticizing the government.

This is true patriotism in action.

Love of country will sometimes entail carrying a picket sign or going to jail or taking a knee or burning a flag, if necessary, to challenge injustice.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the real danger isn’t someone burning the flag.

The greatest danger we face is the U.S. government torching the Constitution.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post Burning the Flag or Torching the Constitution: Only One Destroys Freedom appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is nothing more tragic than a life devoid of purpose.  Without meaning, souls wither away.  Anybody who has interacted with drug addicts whose only “purpose” is to secure another “fix” knows this to be true.  The human part of those so afflicted steadily disappears as the body is overtaken by a desperate need to remain in a sedated state of oblivion.

Almost every city in America has a “no-go” zone of hardcore homeless addicts who shuffle along the streets like zombies from a horror movie.  The sight is surreal and a shocking reminder that even the most powerful country in the world regularly fails to beat back the advances of Hell.

As a society, we used to at least pretend to care about the drug epidemic in America.  We declared “war on drugs,” but the drugs won.  The Reagan administration produced some effective public health campaigns, but the drug cartels south of the border became only more powerful over time.

As Democrats and some libertarians pushed for the legalization of serious narcotics this century, state governments and federal agencies not only stopped enforcing drug laws, but also accepted that sizable populations across America would be permitted to suicide while the rest of us disinterestedly watched.  From urban streets to abandoned houses in forgotten rural towns, drug-addled zombies pursue one “purpose”: to die.

Some might say “to each his own” or “it’s none of my business.”  Adulthood, after all, is about taking responsibility for your own actions.  And it is almost impossible to talk someone out of destroying himself.  With every breath we take, glass of water we drink, and bowl of food we eat, staying alive is a choice.  Those who reach for the needle, it is often said, are making a “choice,” too.

Still, if Americans understood how many of the zombie homeless are veterans, formerly stable people whose lives spiraled out of control, or neglected citizens who have lived on and off the streets since childhood, maybe more people would offer a helping hand.  Sometimes we invite Hell into our lives, and sometimes Hell swallows us whole.  Blessed are those with the strength to drag lost souls back home.

Why do Democrat mayors in cities such as San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore carve out entire neighborhoods for homeless zombies to prowl?  It’s not some “libertarian” embrace of the supposed “freedom” to do drugs.  It’s certainly not some “compassionate” policy meant to “accept” people as they are.  Within one hour of walking the streets of zombieland, no rational person could conclude that these dens of squalor, violence, indignity, and wretchedness are anything other than the outstretched tentacles of Hell.

I think Democrats protect these hellish spaces because they serve an evil purpose: As zombielands grow, they swallow up more and more of society.  The bigger they become, the more attractive they are for damaged souls and malcontents chasing death.  Like abortion on demand up to (and sometimes after) a baby’s birth, municipally sanctioned drug lairs exist to churn out dead bodies.  They operate as both depopulation machines and as blaring foghorns spewing out hopelessness in all directions.

Something that conservatives generally understand and that leftists do not is that “government” and “society” are two different things.  Government is a blunt instrument that claims to act on behalf of society but really acts according to its own institutional interests.  Society is a much broader concept that includes all of the cultural, religious, intellectual, and personal relationships that bind a people together.  Should the federal government ever fall, American society might persevere and rebuild.  Should our society collapse, no government can glue the pieces back together.  Government is coercion; society is choice.  Strong societies create strong countries; strong governments often destroy countries.

When Democrat politicians defend the propagation of zombielands across America, they advance the government’s interests, not society’s.  How could deadly drug zones possibly advance government interests?  That question brings us back to an essential ingredient of every human soul: purpose.

As far as governments are concerned, people lacking purpose are either useful or dangerous.  How are they useful?  Militaries, law enforcement agencies, and vast bureaucracies are built with people seeking purpose.  It is comforting to believe that government institutions are innately patriotic.  In reality, governments use patriotism to achieve institutional objectives.  They say, “Do this for your country.”  What they mean is, “Do this for your government.”  Governments feed on people who need purpose.  They provide purpose in exchange for obedience.

This kind of arrangement exists whether the government in question rules Baltimore’s streets or a superpower nation.  Gang life flourishes because boys who are desperate to find purpose in life are offered a gun and a street corner to defend.  Since the putative conclusion of WWII, war has continually raged somewhere on the African continent.  While the rest of the world does what it can to ignore the carnage, one generation of child soldiers after the next finds purpose with a rifle.  All that “purpose” ensures short, violent lives.

When people without purpose cannot be corralled into government service, they are potentially dangerous.  Such people might just find that their purpose is to oppose the government.  Government bureaucracies’ most important function is to coerce people into submission.  When possible, this coercion is done quietly, if not invisibly.  Police forces keep order.  Credit scores encourage timely payment.  Banks require the use of government money.  Public pensions ensure that government workers and retirees obey.  Public shaming and the rise of “cancel culture” are effective government tools for controlling citizens.

When government coercion fails to control citizens, society begins to realize that its interests are not identical to the government’s.  Consider the mass resistance movements now forming throughout the United Kingdom.  After decades of flooding the country with illegal aliens who have gone on to commit heinous crimes and undermine social unity in the U.K., government authorities are now contending with the reality that the British people have found a purpose that threatens government supremacy.  The government’s failure to protect society has given society a pressing reason to seize control of the country from the government.  No matter how many new censorship laws parliament passes to silence citizens, the British government will not be able to suppress the public’s newfound purpose to defend itself.

Now consider this: The people who are right now building an artificial intelligence structure to manage the world believe that A.I. will replace all human workers.  Elon Musk told a technology conference just last year that there will soon “come a point where no job is needed.”  He predicts that everyone will be living on government-provided income.

Musk paints this future as a rosy one but recognizes that “the question will be one of meaning.  Does your life have meaning?”  Whether he is being honest about his optimism or not, he at least understands that the question of human purpose will come to the forefront in the next few years.

Governments around the world are obviously much less optimistic.  Growing censorship in the West, mass digital surveillance, plans for “vaccine passports,” and the rollout of central bank digital currencies all suggest that governments ostensibly supportive of “human liberty” are actually constructing totalitarian systems of control.  They are investing heavily in an infrastructure meant to ensure that society’s purpose strictly mirrors the government’s objectives.

Freethinkers who refuse to comply should take a hard look at the zombielands across the United States.  Governments don’t care if purposeless people kill themselves.  They will do everything they can, however, to make sure that people don’t find purpose in opposing government policy.

For those agnostics who have yet to see that the coming battle is ultimately a spiritual one, think again.  We are in a war between good and evil.  Be careful where you stand.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Human Purpose Threatens Government Control appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israeli news outlet Haaretz has published a harrowing report on starvation in Gaza which further discredits the Israeli narrative that the photos of skeletal children we’ve been seeing are antisemitic Hamas propaganda, for anyone who’s still clinging to delusions about such things.

Haaretz reporters were taken by doctors on video tours of hospitals in Gaza, conducting interviews with numerous medical personnel and obtaining many photos of civilians showing signs of extreme starvation. Throughout the report we encounter story after story of severely emaciated children, mothers unable to breastfeed starving babies because of their own starvation, people with preexisting conditions severely exacerbated by malnutrition, diseases spreading due to crippled healthcare infrastructure and ruined immune systems, and wounds failing to heal due to inadequate food intake.

The article is one of the more uncomfortable things I’ve seen throughout the entirety of this genocide, and that’s saying something.

“What we saw there left no room for doubt about the scale of the horror,” write Haaretz reporters Yarden Michaeli and Nir Hasson.

“Seventeen youngsters had deteriorated into a state of severe malnutrition without preexisting health conditions; 10 suffered from previous illnesses,” they write, saying “Anyone who claims that the images of starvation in the Gaza Strip are a result of acute genetic or other diseases, and not due to a grave shortage of food, are lying to themselves.”

The tour of Nasser Hospital lasted about an hour. Dr. Ahmed al-Farra went from bed to bed, while another member of the hospital staff held the camera. We saw children whose bodies were blighted by hunger, with bones jutting out @YardenMichaeli & @nirhasson https://t.co/gBTGdvjLea

— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) August 23, 2025

This comes as the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) formally declares that the people of Gaza are suffering from a famine that “is entirely man-made”, which must be halted and reversed with extreme urgency.

Israel has of course denounced the IPC’s findings as antisemitic Hamas propaganda, with the Israeli Foreign Ministry saying that “The entire IPC document is based on Hamas lies laundered through organizations with vested interests,” and Benjamin Netanyahu branding the report “a modern blood libel, spreading like wildfire through prejudice.”

You might find this response ridiculous, and of course it is, but really, what else does Israel have left? When all major human rights institutions are accusing you of horrific crimes, your only options are either (A) admit the obvious fact that there’s no way every single mainstream humanitarian organization is lying about your actions, or (B) claim that they’re all in on a giant globe-spanning conspiracy because of a nefarious prejudice against your religion.

Of course they’re going to go with (B). This is Israel we’re talking about, after all.

When a nation keeps having to publish denials that it is intentionally starving civilians, you can safely assume it’s because that nation is intentionally starving civilians. If you saw someone on social media loudly denying the latest allegations that they are a child molester over and over again for two years, you probably wouldn’t let them babysit your kids.

I have never once felt the need to publish a denial that I am intentionally starving people, because I have never intentionally starved anyone. It’s not something I’ve ever found myself needing to say even one time, let alone many many times constantly.

You don’t see the government of Ireland constantly denying that Ireland is intentionally starving civilians, because Ireland is not intentionally starving civilians.

You don’t see pro-China spinmeisters frantically churning out propaganda denying that China is intentionally starving civilians, because China is not intentionally starving civilians.

You don’t see Brazilian internet trolls aggressively swarming the comments of anyone who says Brazil is intentionally starving civilians, because Brazil is not intentionally starving civilians.

You don’t see the Pakistani government paying social media influencers to assert on their platforms that Pakistan is not intentionally starving civilians, because Pakistan is not intentionally starving civilians.

You see an intense campaign of narrative management aimed at denying that Israel has been intentionally starving civilians because Israel is intentionally starving civilians. That’s why all the constant government denials, the endless propaganda and spin pieces and PR stunts, and relentless online trolling operations have been necessary.

Most Israel apologia at this point is just people pretending to believe things they don’t really believe. Palestinians aren’t really being starved. Gaza looks like a gravel parking lot because Hamas put explosives in all the buildings. The IDF has a low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio. Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure was destroyed because Hamas was hiding under all the hospitals. Nobody actually believes these things. They’re just pretending to believe them in order to justify genocidal atrocities and help ensure that they continue.

They’re really the worst people in the world.

_________________

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The post Only Liars And Manipulators Say Gaza Isn’t Starving appeared first on LewRockwell.

A friend and supporter of this newsletter just sent me a report “that the Trump administration is reportedly negotiating to turn Intel’s $10.9 billion CHIPS Act subsidies into a 10 percent equity stake in the company.” If finalized, Washington would be among Intel’s largest shareholders.

Reporter Vance Ginn at the Daily Economy does a fine job of enumerating why this is a bad idea for U.S. citizens and taxpayers, and I recommend reading his report.

The contemplated U.S.-Intel deal is, it seems to me, an example of yielding to the siren song of Fascist Corporatism.

Nowadays, we think of “Fascism” as a doctrine exemplified by the German police and military state during the Third Reich. However, the roots of this doctrine lie in the writings of the Italian philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, who postulated that the optimal political and economic system is akin to a Merger of State and Corporate Power.

Gentile postulated that this was not only a doctrine of great economic utility, but also the best arrangement for promoting the moral and spiritual health of the modern nation state.

Gentile was probably being sincere when he theorized about this. Nowadays, the primary temptation of Corporatism lies not in its purported utility for forging a strong national identity and allegiance, but in its utility for clever and ambitious money-grubbers.

During the pandemic, we saw companies like Pfizer and Moderna form a symbiotic relationship with officers of various U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Defense — so symbiotic that it became very difficult to delineate the corporations from the U.S. government agencies that extravagantly supported them.

Since the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex during the 1940s and 50s, U.S. industrial corporations have been inextricably linked to U.S. government agencies. To give just one of many examples, Robert McNamara began his career in the military working for General Curtis LeMay. Later he worked for the Ford Motor Company and ultimately became its president, and then he became the Secretary of Defense for Kennedy and Johnson.

Senior officers and directors of the industrial services company, Brown & Root, were key supporters of Lyndon Johnson’s political career, and he rewarded the company handsomely after escalating the war in Vietnam, thereby helping the company to win the moniker “Burn & Loot.”

Donald Rumseld and Dick Cheney enjoyed similar careers, moving back and forth between the private and public sectors. Shortly before Cheney became a key figure in America’s Iraq War fiasco, he was the CEO of Halliburton, whose stock price enjoyed a 5X return between March 2003 and June 2008.

During the bird flu scare of 2005, President Bush asked Congress to allocate $7 billion in emergency funding to prepare for the possibility of the bird flu mutating into a human epidemic. He specifically asked for $1 billion to be allocated for the purchase of Tamiflu, jointly developed by Gilead Sciences and Roche. It just so happened that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a major shareholder who made millions from the trade.

All of these clever and ambitious money-grubbers teach us that fastest way to get rich is to persuade the U.S. government that you are selling a strategic asset.

2005 was a windfall year for the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, whose lobbyists worked closely with the Bush Administration to pass the PREP Act. This radical piece of legislation has served as a key instrument for giving U.S. government agencies emergency power and for enriching the pharmaceutical industry in the event of a pandemic—real, perceived, exaggerated, or fabricated.

One of the most powerful supporters of Theranos—the fraudulent blood testing company started by Elizabeth Holmes—was former Secretary of State, George Schultz. He still had cronies in the Pentagon who were keen to purchase Holmes’s bogus machines for the military.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the blossoming of similar cozy relationships. FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb was appointed to Pfizer’s Board of Directors shortly after he left the agency. Likewise, six months after he gave approval to Moderna’s new COVID-19 vaccine, FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn was offered a position at the venture capital firm that was one of Moderna’s primary backers. Among major media players, Jim Smith, the CEO of Reuters, was appointed to Pfizer’s Board of Directors in 2014 and is also on the international business council of the World Economic Forum.

Moncef Slaoui was head of vaccine development at GlaxoSmithKline until 2017. At the time President Trump appointed him to lead Operation Warp Speed, he was a board member of both CEPI and Moderna, a primary candidate for Warp Speed funds. Though he resigned from the Moderna board to avoid a conflict of interest, he retained his stock options, which gained $2.4 million in value on the day the company announced favorable preliminary results of its Phase I trials. This raised concerns about his neutrality in judging its vaccine’s safety and efficacy data, so he agreed to divest his shares of Moderna stock.

Like Krupp and I.G. Farben during the Third Reich, U.S. corporations are bound to U.S. government institutions like the DoD, DARPA, NIH, HHS, and BARDA in an arrangement that strongly resembles Fascist Corporatism.

It seems to me that in trying to understand these relationships, it is useful to consider President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address in 1961. His warning to Americans about the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex is now more relevant than ever, and all Americans should be throughly acquainted with this speech.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse – Focal Points.

The post Fascist Corporatist Temptations appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Something happened in 2021” that has jeopardized air travel safety, according to a disturbing report by Dr. Kevin Stillwagon, a retired airline pilot and immunology expert.

Mounting evidence points to the COVID-19 vaccinations that airlines, acting under pressure from the U.S. government, mandated or otherwise coerced their cockpit, cabin, and ground crews into taking.

Since 2021, there has been a marked increase in deaths of “younger” airline pilots while long-term disabilities for pilots have skyrocketed. All of this has been accompanied by an astronomical increase of near-miss incidents at the nation’s airports.

“Incapacitations of pilots are definitely increasing, especially in younger pilots,” Stillwagon said in a video discussion with Nicolas Hulscher, an epidemiologist and administrator at the McCullough Foundation.

“There was a 40% increase in pilots dying early – before mandatory retirement age of 65 – in 2021,” Stillwagon said.

“Starting in 2021, pilot long-term disabilities have tripled,” he noted. “Prior to 2021, there was only one near-miss at the Washington National Airport (DCA).  But after 2021, there were 28 near-misses per year.”

Airline Pilot Incapacitation Crisis After Illegal mRNA Shot Mandates — With Dr. Kevin Stillwagon and Nicolas Hulscher https://t.co/Cps1jGvK42

— Nicolas Hulscher, MPH (@NicHulscher) August 15, 2025

The mRNA COVID-19 jab was illegally forced on airline pilots

Stillwagon maintains that from the outset, the mRNA COVID-19 shots were illegally forced upon the nation’s airline pilots.

“They were illegal because you cannot put an experimental product into a pilot, as found in the ‘Aeromedical Advice Manual,’ given to all aeromedical examiners,” he pointed out.

Commercial pilots are legally prohibited from taking experimental medicines and face losing their medical certification for taking anything other than FAA-approved drugs.

If a pilot takes an unapproved medical product, flight surgeons must take administrative measures to revoke or deny issuance of the pilot’s flight physical certificate until the FAA rules on the safety of that product. Yet UAL encouraged, coerced and even paid pilots to violate this federal law.

Pilots who were forced into submitting to the experimental jabs found themselves trapped in a horrific catch-22, with their careers hanging in the balance. Those who accepted the COVID-19 jab under duress were not only strong-armed into violating their religious beliefs, they were forced to choose between abiding by FAA safety rules or breaching those rules, putting their health and the safety of their passengers at risk.

“This is exactly why we are seeing sudden heart failure in younger and younger people,” Stillwagon said. “We’re also seeing brain fog in pilots and air traffic controllers which can result in their ability to think properly (and) their reaction times.”

The COVID-19 mRNA jab can also induce seizures that, if experienced by an airline pilot during a flight, can produce disastrous results. 

“This is a big deal,” Stillwagon declared. “This is huge.”

mRNA vaccines ‘were never safe nor effective’

mRNA-based injections instruct human cells to produce a genetically engineered version of coronavirus “spike protein” in order to trigger an immune system response.

Developers of the mRNA vaccines failed to foresee that once inside the body, the repeated development of the spike proteins can’t be controlled. For some recipients of the vaccines, their bodies became a human factory for the production of the spike protein, able to travel via the bloodstream from the injection site to their entire body, including major organs, the brain, liver, spleen, bone marrow, and reproductive organs.

As the immune system does its job attacking the cells it recognizes as “infected” due to the presence of the spike proteins, it attacks those organs and tissues, causing inflammation, myocarditis, and grotesque blood clots.

“The spike protein is directly toxic, and can directly damage tissues,” Stillwagon said.

‘Airline pilots are the ‘least monitored component in the cockpit’

Stillwagon said that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has failed to sufficiently collect data on the health of pilots since the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccines.

While aviation authorities and airline management focus a great deal of attention on how well pilots comply with general operating procedures while behind the controls in the cockpit – proper maintenance of airspeed, flaps usage, etc. – glaring pilot “data gaps” remain.

For instance, the FAA reportedly keeps no record of pilot injection history, and for some unknown reason, the agency discontinued its centralized pilot incapacitation database in 2022. Stillwagon suspects it’s because aviation authorities didn’t want information contained in the database to be seen by the public.

“The data silence that the FAA has created is preventing systemic trends from being detected,” he said.

“We monitor aircraft oil temperature to within a tenth of a degree centigrade, but we don’t track whether the pilot has the potential for cardiac or cerebrovascular events,” Stillwagon said.

“The pilot is the least monitored component in the cockpit,” he declared. “In modern aviation, we treat the jet like a data-rich spacecraft – and the pilot like a black box.”

“Science has gotten confused over the years,” Stillwagon said. “The problem with vaccines is mainly ideology. It’s almost like a religion.”

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post Sudden Deaths, Incapacitations Soar Among COVID-Jabbed Airline Pilots appeared first on LewRockwell.

Introduction

In an August 1 interview, Tucker Carlson and his guest, Candace Owens, verbally attacked Nick Fuentes. Owens had claimed that after having a very successful interview with Fuentes, who was given free rein on the show to talk about whatever he liked, but had suddenly become “triggered” and continually insulted her after the interview was released for reasons unbeknownst to her. She continues by claiming that Fuentes had attacked the notion of marriage, that he had attacked “non-crazy” right voices like Dave Smith to discredit them, and that he had told Tucker that Fuentes had “little boy insecurity.” Tucker Carlson was incredibly receptive to her claims and added that Fuentes may actually be involved in the American intelligence community because Fuentes knew that Tucker’s dad was CIA before he even did; he ended by claiming that Nick was working on behalf of the CIA to disrupt the election of Joe Kent, whom the CIA supposedly hated, Tucker claimed:

“Nick Fuentes, this child, this little weird gay kid in his basement in Chicago, is participating in a super PAC to bump off Joe Kent. Like, I’ve been around that my whole life, I know what that is.”

Since that interview, this dispute has spread to nearly every major right-wing talking head and organization, which is leading to everyone tearing each other apart. Nick Fuentes has responded to Owens and Carlon on his podcast called “America First.” He claims that it was a well-known fact that Tucker Carlson’s father, Richard Carlson, was heavily involved in CIA activities. This included being appointed the associate director of the United States Information Agency and director of the Voice of America, an organization that was considered to be the “voice of the American government.” Even President Putin, during their one-on-one interview, mocked Carlson for being rejected by the CIA back in his twenties. There are many more accusations and attacks being flung around, including Elon Musk and Milo Yiannopoulos accusing Fuentes of being an FBI asset during January 6th, with Fuentes responding by using text messages by Milo that incriminate him of being an FBI asset. This internal war among these right-wing talking heads is not only ridiculous, but also plays into the hands of the state. Instead of becoming an organized minority and being an effective coalition, they split into factions and destroy each other.

Divide and Conquer

It is not unusual for governments to break the power of rival castles within their sphere of influence, whether this is done by force, by defamation, or through sly tactics, depending on the characteristics of that state. But no matter its character, the organized minority, as prescribed by the elite theorist Gaetano Mosca, will work to lead the disorganized mass but also actively break the power of any attempted coalition. He explains:

“In reality the dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority. A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one.

This sort of containment is done to both right and left-wing groups; the post-war liberal order had sought to maintain its power through these means. During the Cold War, communists throughout Europe were defanged and their leaders split into factions of pacifists, parliamentarians, and a small shunned faction of idealists and militants. In a 1985 documentary, “The Mayor of Montellimone,” the communist mayor, Dino Labriola, faces this exact problem of complacency and infighting. When a northern company comes to build a dam near the small southern village, Labriola hopes that they will employ some of the many unemployed youths in the village. When the company shuts down his demands, the mayor makes a plea to the Ministry of Labor and the Communist Party Headquarters in Rome, in which he receives no support. Finally, Dino assembles the town’s socialist councilors to organize a strike; the meeting went terribly. Dino begins:

“We tell the provincial employment office that if they don’t meet our demands we’ll start a strike and occupy the site. The battle of the dam is not just about employment, it’s about everything. It’s an historic occasion: if we don’t win now, we never will.

The meeting fell apart; many of the socialist councilors felt as if Dino had cut them out of the loop and was being undemocratic and confrontational, wishing only to make the council into yes-men. These splits were common after CIA attempts to break the power of the Italian Communist Party in Italy. Revealed in the National Security Archives, the US Ambassador to Italy, Clare Boothe, oversaw financial support to centrist Italian parties and awarded union contracts to loyal members to weaken the communist hold on labor unions. By divide and conquer, the communists had lost complete control over Italy, and the end result was ineffective, non-confrontational councils in small towns.

Shattering Organization

In regard to the modern American right, a similar result has occurred in the sheer number of factions and deviations over the past decade. Some of the most popular conservative talking heads of the last decade, such as Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, are seen increasingly as neocons who have a paid interest in keeping Israel first. Other right-wing figures are now facing defamation of character, usually from members of the same political orientation. Carlson and Fuentes accusing each other of being CIA assets or FBI informants will be stains on their reputations where neither can really be trusted. But it seems that these two figures are considered prominent leaders of the America First movement after President Trump had betrayed his campaign promise of peace by backing Israel against Iran and by protecting pedophiles by not releasing the Epstein list, going as far as to say Epstein even stole a girl from Mar-a-lago, putting Trump’s knowledge of Epstein’s activities in question.

Why are these two figures being elevated into leadership positions in the American right? For Nick, online rhetoric places him in a position equivalent to a chosen one, that he is the de facto leader of America First and the future leader of America. This propped-up position of leadership will only cause deeper divides in the American right; one user even claimed that Fuentes was the leader of all white people, but when confronted by a police officer about being a white supremacist, Fuentes had no problem pulling out his Mexican ethnicity to pull the conversation away from there. While he has done impressive research into Tucker Carlson and has been a vocal opponent of Israel, he eventually devolves into ranting and raving. Perhaps this says something about his personality and emotional stability that will make for disastrous leadership, and this is exactly why some may want him as leader of the right.

If Tucker Carlson really is a CIA asset, this opens up a secret aspect about the American government that is anti-Israel. Doing an interview with the Iranian president in the immediate aftermath of the 12 Day War and creating spheres where men and women can come in and talk about the crimes of Israel: segregation in Gaza, war crimes, Mossad and Epstein, and genocide are just some of Tucker’s work within the last two months. John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower, had claimed in interviews that the CIA has a deep-seated hatred for Israel and has a deep mistrust of the Israeli intelligence agencies, going as far as even banning the Mossad from Langley. While the CIA can never be trusted, they do have an interest in maintaining power and stability, something Israel has threatened both directly by attempting to draw America into war with Iran and undermining negotiations, and indirectly by creating a large anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States.

You Killed Us, Dave

The system will deal with Israel in its own way; multiple G7 nations, including Italy and France, have already set plans to recognize Palestine as a state as early as September; the pushback from America has been minimal. Since October 7th, Israel has revealed a nature about itself that will never be cleared. By butchering innocent people and asserting control over foreign governments, it seemingly modeled its image off of Dave Kleinfeld. Israel has crossed lines a nation can never come back from and took America along for the ride; the only question is if America will sink with Israel or leave it to its own “beautiful future.”

The post The Fuentes-Carlson Dispute Reveals the Containment of the Right appeared first on LewRockwell.

“They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.  It’s hard to explain.”
–  J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

With all the hullabaloo about President Donald Trump’s “peace” gestures toward Russia over Ukraine and the resetting of U.S.-Russia bi-lateral relations, it is worth remembering the “pivot to Asia” announced by the Obama administration in 2011 and the coup d’état it carried out in Ukraine in 2014.  For those who might not remember, I would recommend two films: John Pilger’s The Coming War on China and Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire.

They are two prongs of a long-term U.S. strategy to maintain American preeminence throughout the world by countering Russia and China simultaneously, if not equally at once. Such strategy is not determined by someone like President Donald Trump speaking or acting impulsively, as is his wont, but by bankers, financiers, éminences grises, and pale-faced scholarly guns-for-hire in stately buildings reserved for such deliberations.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, there is a consistent foundational foreign policy strategy from one American presidential administration to the next with necessary little detours here and there, and arguments within the ruling class about tactics. Long-term strategy is capacious enough to include sudden seeming shifts in policies that are couched in cover stories that beguile even the smartest people. Wishes fuddle the minds of the most astute. They serve to obscure the interests of U.S. dominance of the world, a dominance that is now threatened, and one that Trump is not abandoning, even as he adjusts American tactics on the fly.

The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and its magazine, Foreign Affairs are where the ruling elites of the United States debate and determine American foreign policies from administration to administration, regardless of political party. The CFR is the preeminent U.S. think tank; it is over one hundred years old, financed by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations and its members have included former CIA Director Allen Dulles, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and many other high government and financial figures, including David Rockefeller, who served as  chairman between 1970-1985.

“Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US media outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).” It is evidence of why the corporate mainstream media is an adjunct of the U.S. propaganda system. To become a member is to be baptized into the U.S. ruling establishment and its vast propaganda network that includes, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern describes it: the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, MICIMATT.

Donald Trump is a headline grabber who ultimately follows orders. He is not, as claimed, an outlier. Unusual he may be – bizarre in many ways – but he has his supporters within the dueling factions of the ruling elites. Nothing could clarify this more than the events of the past weeks, from his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska to his meeting in the White House with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenski, his fellow entertainer, and his European entourage of jugglers and clowns. They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.

“Whenever I take up a newspaper,” the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote in his play Ghosts, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”

Such is what I see when I read today’s press about Trump, the peacemaker. Having been around a few years, his actions strike no shock of the new in me, but rather bring to mind a walk down a city street where old ghosts meet to whisper a description I once read of most corporate mainstream journalists – “No ideas and the ability to express them.” Or to put it another way – only ideas they have been fed and the ability to regurgitate them. So Trump is either described as a traitor who has been manipulated by Putin or a man genuinely seeking the end of America’s efforts to surround and crush Russia.

Neither is true. We are captives in a contronymal game (a contronym being a word having contradictory meanings, such as “refrain”: to desist from doing something or to repeat).

Someone is playing someone. Who is playing whom and why I will leave as a question for readers’ research. See, for example, the work of another key think tank – the Rand Corporation’s 2019 study, “Extending Russia,” – that cooly sets out various options for the U.S. to use in undermining Russia as if it were suggesting possible menu items at a restaurant. Without a knowledge of history, Donald Trump appears to be a radical departure from past American presidents. That he opened a dialogue when he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska seems significant. It is true that talking is better than walking away, but only when the intentions that underlie it are honorable, and in this case, I find that doubtful.

Let me use an analogy that may at first seem “by the way” and therefore not apt. I think it is. When it came to the assassination of President Kennedy, the CIA and its media mouthpieces weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” to besmirch the names of those who questioned the Warren Commission Report. The corporate mainstream media (MSM) have echoed this ever since and thus the term came to be one applied to dissenters of all sorts, even those who believe the most outlandish things, such as Elvis didn’t die but was taken up by aliens where he now commands a spaceship called Suspicious Minds, named for one of his hit songs.

Conspiracists were those who had these insane thoughts that there were elements within the government, notably within the CIA, FBI and Pentagon, who would assassinate their own leaders and those devoted to peace. Over the years this term came to be mixed with that of “the deep state,” shadow government, rogue network, etc. The “official” position was that such conspiratorial thinking was undermining the official good government and was the work of lunatics; it assumed that the government didn’t conspire to commit crimes, only lone nuts did, and then crazier nuts tried to pin it on elements within the government such as the CIA. These people were said to be paranoid.

But over the decades scholars have clearly shown that many of the claims of the “conspiracy theorists” were correct despite the best efforts of MICIMATT to create fantastically absurd “conspiracy” stories that they have used to ridicule serious thinkers and researchers. This mode of attack was weakening and along popped Donald Trump “straight” out of the TV screen. A larger than life big mouth who appealed to voters who felt that they were being screwed by the elite elites, which they were and are (Trump, after all, is a super-rich New York City real estate tycoon that no one except the most astute propagandist would choose to run for the presidency). Trump promised he would get to the bottom of many of the “conspiracy theories” – such as the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and the events of September 11, 2001, etc. – but he never will. He was going to expose the crooks, clean out the swamp, and make government as pellucid as a pristine mountain stream. Like all the charlatan presidents, he campaigned as a peacemaker and then waged war directly or through barely concealed proxies (war being the lifeblood of the U.S. economy) – Ukraine, Israel, Syrian “rebels” (i.e. terrorists), etc. The charade of his “peacemaking,” although weakening, still casts a spell over many people who fail to understand who formulates American foreign policy strategy.

If there is a so-called deep state responsible for the aforementioned assassinations, etc. and it controls U.S. presidents, then it controls Donald Trump. If Trump is truly trying to end the U.S. proxy war via Ukraine against Russia and establish good relations with its long-term arch-enemy, either the “deep state” has decided this is the best long-term strategy to try to maintain world dominance and it has tricks up its sleeve to attempt to do so, or else it will prevent Trump from carrying out his ostensible intent.

However, if there is no hidden “deep state,” just the official U.S. public state whose policies are largely determined in the dens of the aforementioned think tanks whose works are openly available, a government that does what it wants under various cover stories – two most significant ones being “the deep state” and “conspiracy theory” – then Trump may be its most fantastic contronymal creation, the epitome in his person of what Orwell meant by Doublethink:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

It is important to remember how all the rhetoric surrounding the term “deep state” has been so craftily used and mixed with that of “conspiracy theory” that it is worth considering it part of a very sophisticated propaganda campaign to scramble minds.

Few would dispute the fact that there is a ruling class in the United States and that its interests are not those of ordinary Americans. This is so obvious I will elide further comments about it. Everyone knows how wealth controls the electoral system; that it has corrupted it beyond repair.

Logic suggests that if a “deep state” is posited opposed to the official “open” government, and if it can be eliminated by a “good” politician, then the good guys will be back in charge and a return to the status quo effected.

So we must ask the question: What is the opposite of a contronym?

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Trump’s Contronymal ‘Peace’ With Russia appeared first on LewRockwell.

The virtually universal ‘history’ of Israel’s founding is that it was done first by a “God” in Genesis as follows:

Genesis 15:18-21

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the Euphrates, including the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, the Caananites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”

Deuteronomy 7:1-2

“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance: the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. You must put them all to death.”

Deuteronomy 7:16

“Destroy every nation that the Lord your God places in your power, and do not show them any mercy.”

Deuteronomy 20:16-18

“When you capture cities in the land he Lord your God is giving you, kill everyone. Completely destroy all the people: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has ordered you to do. Kill them so that they will not make you sin against the Lord by teaching you to do all the disgusting things they do in the worship of their gods.”

Israel’s Government takes such passages as ‘justifying’ what they do to Palestinians. And the vast majority of Israelis agree with that viewpoint. America’s Government says it doesn’t like what Israel is doing, but nonetheless continues to provide almost all of the weaponry and satellite intelligence in order to do it.

And then Israel was allegedly (though, as I’ll document, it actually wasn’t at all) recreated in modern times by the British. Britain’s Government was even opposed to the creation of Israel, at the time when Israel was created.

Here, for example, is a popular instagram summary of that alleged recreation of Israel [along with factual corrections by me of it in brackets], reflecting a typical — and entirely Zionist mythological — account of ‘how’ this reincarnated Israel came to be ‘reincarnated’:

In 1916, a Polish [no, Belarusian] Jewish doctor [no, biochemist], named Chaim Weitzmann, had [no, he chose] to go to Manchester England and get a job as a chemist working in a factory [no, as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester]. Britain was in a war and were running out of artillery shells, and one day this Chaim Weitzmann lights a match next to mold on a piece of corn. And it blows up. [No, this was no such happenstance: Churchill in 1915 had requested Weitzmann to produce large quantities of explosives for artillery shells.] And it turns out that Chaim Weitzmann invented acetone which then becomes the major [component of] fuel [no, explosives] for the rest of the British Army during the remainder of WW1, for the artillery shells. So, Chaim Weitzmann just happened to be a Zionist [no, he had actually helped to found the Zionist movement, even prior — for example, he attended the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 and each one thereafter]. And because he developed acetone, Chaim Weitzmann comes into contact with the foreign minister of Great Britain, Alfred Lord Balfour. [No, Balfour had personally known Balfour — then Britain’s Prime Minister — in 1905.] And just at this moment 1917, the British Army is about to defeat the Turks in what was then called Palestine. And Balfour comes up with this notion, I am a religious Christian, I believe that the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, I am going to give this land, in the name of the British Empire, to the Jewish people. So Chaim Weitzmann says I know this guy in Washington, his name is Louis Brandeis, and he happens to be a good friend, I think, of Willson, the President. And so they go, Weitzman and Balfour, May 10th, 1917. They go through with Brandeis, into a meeting in the oval office, with Woodrow Wilson. And 12 minutes later they come out with Wilson’s Agreement for this Balfour Declaration. All because an obscure chemist lit up a piece of corn and invented acetone.

For more:

https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-195/unforeseen-consequencesthe-partnership-of-winston-churchill-and-chaim-weizmann/

https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/the-weizmann-contribution/3007435.article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann

However, in fact, the Balfour Declaration was ONLY a declaration by the Tory or Conservative Party’s then Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour, who was backed by Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, who equated Zionism with ALL Jews, the vast majority of whom actually had no interest in, or else outright opposed the creation or ‘re-creation’ of, an “Israel.” Tory England, Britain’s Government at that time, represented ONLY the aristocracy, all OTHER Jews (and all other British subjects) counted for nothing in this.

The Balfour Declaration was a 2 November 2017 Declaration by the English Government, to Lord Rothschild, which was sent to Rothschild as a letter from Balfour, for Rothschild’s approval and acceptance, which Rothschild promptly did — and then had the letter published in Britain’s newspapers on November 9th. It was a commitment by the Conservative Party, to Rothschild. It was NOT (as Zionists always falsely assume and infer it to have been), some kind of international commitment or “treaty.” It was instead merely an expression of fealty to Lord Rothschild, BY the UK’s Conservative Party, at that time. Here is the document:

Foreign Office,

November 2nd, 1917.

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist

Federation.

Yours sincerely

Arthur James Balfour

Afterwards, as events made increasingly clear that the Zionists in Palestine were doing a lot to “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” non-Tory British Governments (such as immediately after WW2) opposed it, and rejected it. So, by the time when U.S. President Harry Truman, on 14 May 1948, actually created Israel and then promptly sent it weapons to impose it against Arabs both inside and outside the former Palestine (which is what virtually everyone had feared would happen), even Britain’s now-Labor-Party) Government were apalled at what Truman had done. Only inside America was there no effective opposition to it.

U.S. President Harry Truman alone made the decision to create the nation of Israel — no one else, not Britain’s Government, not its Balfour Declaration, and not Chaim Weizmann nor David Ben Gurion, nor any other individual or organization, did. He did it himself.

Here, in his own words — some directly from him, and others from one of his advisors who worked with him on it — is the reasoning that led him to do this:

outtakes from a post-presidency (“early 1962”) documentary about Truman:

“MP2002-345 Former President Truman Discusses Mediating Two Sides”

“There they were on both sides. There I was in the middle between both sides. I was in the position of the referee in a prize ring when the two big wrestlers turned on the referee instead of going ahead with the wrestling. I was in real trouble.” (The Truman Library says that Truman is probably referring there to the arguments over the recognition of Israel, but that film-clip includes no surrounding context, not even the question that he was responding to.)

——

https://web.archive.org/web/20231203203715/https://www.americanheritage.com/exclusive-interview-clark-clifford

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/1YSEK

“An Exclusive Interview With Clark Clifford”

April 1977, American Heritage magazine

Q: What do you think were the motives of those in the State Department who fought so hard against the Jewish state? It has been suggested in some quarters that anti-Semitism was involved.

A: I would not make that charge. The motives, I might suggest, were twofold. To begin with, at that time the British influence on the State Department, particularly when it came to Near Eastern affairs, was very strong. The British had been the mandatory power for all those years, they knew the personalities and the issues and the geography, and they were listened to. Of course, the original British intent under the Balfour Declaration had been to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But in 1948 that declaration was “old stuff” to the British foreign office, a policy shaped before some of its members were even born. They were not influenced by it, and as a result, neither was our own State Department. [NOTE: ‘historians’ who presume that the Balfour Declaration played a role in Israel’s coming into existence are not historians. In fact, the UK’s Foreign Office in 1948 was actually opposed to there being any Israel.]

Then, too, our military advisers, with rather unusual prescience, looked twenty-five years ahead and foresaw our coming great dependence on oil. It was rather foresighted of them, in fact. [Not so: FDR was very actively discussing with King Saud the question of a possible Israel becoming established in Palestine, and he knew that in the post-War period, a U.S.-Saudi partnership would be vitally important. This belief came from FDR, not from “the military,” nor from “the State Department.”] But they assumed that the only possible way to secure the oil was to placate the Arabs, because the Arabs were going to win any conflict with the Zionists. I remember Jim Forrestal [first Secretary of Defense, 1947-49] telling me once: “Look, Clark, it’s simple arithmetic. There are 450,000 Jews out there, and thirty-five million Arabs. The Arabs are going to push the Jews into the sea.” [That statement, too, reflects Clifford’s having been close to Truman, never to FDR.]

You see, both the State Department and the military leaders were thinking in purely strategic terms, for which they can’t be blamed. But they were totally ignoring humanitarian and moral considerations. The President understood the strategic problems involved, but he always approached the issue with a deep concern for the fate of the Jews who had suffered so terribly during the war, and with an urge to do something for the survivors. He was always a great fan of the underdog, you must remember, because he identified himself with underdogs. And his own reading of ancient history and the Bible made him a supporter of the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, even when others who were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews were talking of sending them to places like Brazil. He did not need to be convinced by Zionists. In fact, he had to work hard to avoid the appearance of yielding to Zionist pressure, and that was one of the reasons why some Zionist tactics which were blatant and clumsy were actually counterproductive. All in all, he believed that the surviving Jews deserved some place that was historically their own. I remember him talking once about the problems of repatriating displaced persons. “Every one else who’s been dragged away from his country has someplace to get back to,” he said. “But the Jews have no place to go.”

Q: Did he ever talk to you about the role of his friend and former business partner Eddie Jacobsen, who is said to have influenced him in this direction?

A: Yes, he did. But of course it’s important to emphasize that Eddie Jacobsen did not in any way influence Harry Truman’s decision on the recognition of Israel. He did, in fact, as the President stated in his memoirs, come to visit the White House, and he urged the President to see Chaim Weizmann, which he did. The President was glad to see him as an old friend, but he was perfectly aware that Jacobsen was not familiar with the overall situation, and that he had been sent to see him by the Zionists, who naturally would use every conceivable channel to the President. He didn’t mind, but he told me that he said to him, in effect: “Eddie, don’t get involved in this. It’s more complicated than you understand.”

Q: One final question about politics. By the spring of 1948, Henry Wallace was in the presidential race; the Dixiecrat walkout hadn’t happened but was in the offing. Surely some of the President’s advisers must have thought of the political impact of any decision on the Jewish state.

A: By that spring we had polls showing that Wallace was doing very well in New York — that he was murdering us, in fact. He didn’t have a majority, but he was going to get many, many votes — he did wind up with about 500,000—and they would all come from our camp, not from Dewey’s. So, frankly, we had written off New York. We knew Wallace was going to cost us the state, and the President therefore had no possible motive for recognition of Israel that was based on a bid for the “New York Jewish vote.” That was simply not a factor.

——

Furthermore: On 11 July 2024, the “Jewish Journal” headlined “Though some internal disagreements in the U.S. government remained, Truman recognized Israel minutes after its official founding on May 14, 1948.” and reported that Clark Clifford’s statement that Eddie Jacobson had had nothing to do with Truman’s decision (“Eddie Jacobsen did not in any way influence Harry Truman’s decision on the recognition of Israel.”) was entirely false: Jacobsen persuaded the reluctant Truman to meet with Weizmann to hear his case (that approving and arming Israel would weaken the Soviet Union) for approving and supporting Israel, and Weizmann (playing upon Truman’s hatred of communism) convinced Truman; Weizmann was crucial. This means that Jacobsen was also crucial. And behind Weizmann stood the Rothschilds. So, for Truman, it wasn’t ONLY the Bible; it was ALSO his hatred of communists — who are atheists (whom he hated).

In short: Truman assumed that “the Jews” were the “underdogs”; he was the umpire; and God had given that land to “the Jews” who “gave us our moral code entirely”; but he didn’t want to give them everything, because “the Arabs” had oil and wouldn’t tolerate his giving “the Jews” all of the land that the Zionists (which perhaps Truman thought all Jews were) were demanding (his thinking was loaded with unexamined and thus even unstated assumptions) — all of Palestine.

In other words: If the Bible hadn’t said that God gave land there to “the Jews”; or, if Truman hadn’t thought that the Bible instead of the U.S. Constitution “gave us our moral code entirely”; or, if Truman hadn’t thought that the Palestinians (the overwhelming majority population) were the “top dog” on the question of whether a “Jewish nation” should be established on their land; then probably the result would have been no Israel, which his immediate predecessor, FDR, would almost certainly have been intending for the outcome to be — a flat no to the Zionists (whom FDR despised — and he recognized that not all Jews were Zionists; FDR knew the difference between “Zionists” and “Jews”; Truman did not).

Bottom line: If FDR had survived, it’s almost certain that there would have been no Israel. And this had nothing to do with anti-Semitism; it had to do with FDR’s not being racist, in any way except, perhaps, his being anti-Japanese. Also important was that FDR did not believe that “the Jewish people gave us our moral code entirely.” He knew that the Constitution isn’t, at all, based upon the Bible. FDR was a genius, but Truman was anything but that, and quickly reversed FDR’s foreign policies 180 degrees, so that America’s foreign policies after FDR are almost the opposite of what FDR had been aiming for — whereas FDR was intensely anti-imperialistic, Truman aimed to turn America into the world’s first-ever all-encompassing empire, dictating to all other countries. Truman created the Military-Industrial Complex, the “standing army” that America’s Founders had condemned, and the CIA and so much more, including its numerous coups and ongoing “regime-change” operations, to grow the empire. We live in Truman’s world, not in FDR’s (except for his social programs that lasted).

And on 26 May 1948, the New York Times reported that Britain’s Government were furious that Truman had done this:

“PLAN TO AID ISRAEL UPSETS THE BRITISH; New U.S. Policy Development Held to Dim Cease-Fire Hope — Termed Grave Blunder”

LONDON, May 25-The news of President Truman’s projected loan to the State of Israel dropped like a bomb into Foreign Secretary Bevin’s office today as he was talking with United States Ambassador Lewis W. Douglas. The Foreign Secretary, it is understood, had previously told the Ambassador that King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan was prepared to accept a cease-fire in Palestine. Mr. Douglas appeared to have been caught by surprise by the news from Washington. It is believed at the Foreign Office that hopes for a cease-fire have been dimmed although not extinguished. This will be listed by the British in their annals of diplomacy as one more grave blunder by the American President. When Mr. Bevin heard the news, it is reported, he threw up his hands in despair. But he had already turned elsewhere for support, it was disclosed by the Foreign Office. Britain suggested to her four partners in the Brussels Pact that it might be desirable for the five Western European powers allied under that treaty to coordinate their policies on Palestine. No suggestion was made as to a common policy that they might adopt. …

The primary problem is to work on the Arabs, and those in close touch with British Foreign Office affairs in recent weeks know that the British have been trying very hard to bring about a truce. The British policy has been to seek tranquility through the Arabs, whereas it is stated here that American policy has been to strengthen the Zionists in their determination to fight and by so doing has played into the hands of Arab extremists. King Abdullah’s forces are in Jerusalem, say the British, simply because he had to placate his extremists. President Truman’s projected loan to the State of Israel will be interpreted by the Arabs as money to buy arms to fight them, the British believe, and hence the Arab extremists may well get the upper hand and wreck the efforts to achieve a cease-fire. Whitehall was virtually despairing tonight of finding common ground with the United States on the Palestine issue.

On that same day, the NYT also reported that:

WASHINGTON, May 25-Dr. Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel, met President Truman today and came away with the belief that the embargo on arms for the Middle East would be lifted and that his country would get a loan for arms and reconstruction. It was Dr. Weizmann’s first mission as the head of the state, and it appeared that he had started auspiciously. As he told of the meeting, it was evident that Mr. Truman had given a sympathetic ear to the problems of embattled Israel. Dr. Weizmann appealed for a loan of $90,000,000 or $100,000,000 to arm his country and to bring in 15,000 displaced persons from Germany each month. He also told the Chief Executive that the question of lifting the embargo was urgent. Mr. Truman’s answers to both proposals, according to Dr. Weizmann, were more than perfect. The two Presidents conferred for about a half hour. Mr. Truman had suggested the meeting so they could discuss the problems before Dr. Weizmann returned to Palestine to assume office. Dr. Weizmann said that his impression was that “my plea for a loan was not in vain.” “He [President Truman] said there was no trouble about that because the Jews paid their debts,’ Dr. Weizmann continued. “I believe this is true because I don’t think we owe anybody anything.” He referred to the loan as “a medium-sized loan” but one that by American standards might be considered “a small loan.”

“It would be, first of all,” Dr. Weizmann explained, “for military purposes and also for reconstruction, which is beginning. The first phase of this reconstruction program is to bring in 15,000 displaced persons from Germany monthly. To do that you need housing, transportation and food.

Weizmann got all that he had requested.

On 11 July 2024, the Zionist “Jewish Journal” headlined and reported how Weizmann had managed to get Truman to do this:

“Though some internal disagreements in the U.S. government remained, Truman recognized Israel minutes after its official founding on May 14, 1948.”

As Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani recount in their magisterial new biography of Chaim Weitzmann, the State Department under president Harry Truman was inclined against supporting the U.N.’s partition plan. The Zionist leadership was hoping to have Weitzmann, the renowned scientist and internationally respected former head of the World Zionist Organization, champion their cause to the president. But Truman refused to meet with him. Desperate, the Jewish leaders turned to Eddie Jacobson, a Jew from Kansas City. Truman and Jacobson had been haberdashery partners decades prior, having co-run an 18-by-48-foot clothing store together in the Glennon Hotel. Though the business failed, Jacobson remained a trusted friend of Truman over the years and had access to Truman in the White House.

As Reinhartz and Golani tell it, Jacobson “showed up and asked Truman to see Weitzmann. When Truman again refused, Jacobson pointed to the bust of one of Truman’s heroes, President Andrew Jackson. He said that he, too, had a hero, a man he himself had never met, just as Truman never met Jackson. In his opinion, Jacobson said, this man was the greatest Jew of his time … ‘My hero,’ Jacobson told the president, ‘is a gentleman and distinguished statesman. I am speaking’ Truman’s former partner said, ‘of Chaim Weitzmann.’”

Truman agreed to a secret meeting on March 18. Weitzmann, battling years-long health ailments and a high fever, “did not plead nor try to get into Truman’s good graces, nor did he issue threats. He knew that [Secretary of State] Marshall and his State Department team had warned the president that the Yishuv’s left-wing advocated a Jewish state aligned with the Soviet bloc. Weitzmann assured the president that these fears were largely groundless and that the best way to ensure that Israel would align with the West would be to embrace it.” He also, Reinharz and Golani wrote, “made a brilliant pitch about how recognition would win Truman the Jewish vote and swing key states in his favor.” Having argued his case, Weitzmann received a warm handshake from Truman. He then was helped up, escorted out a concealed side door and driven off in a car with curtained windows.

Though some internal disagreements in the U.S. government remained, Truman recognized Israel minutes after its official founding on May 14, 1948. By May 25, Chaim Weitzmann, now president of the State of Israel and no longer having to hide his presence, returned to the White House. He presented Truman with a gift of a Torah scroll in appreciation of America’s support.

Truman went against the advices from his own Administration, and against what Britain’s Government and all of the Arab Governments were urging upon him, and gave this Truman-created Zionist (racist-fascist-imperialist supremacist) nation of Israel all of the money and weapons it needed in order to start their Nakba, the extermination that now is in the process of finally becoming completed in Gaza, and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

This is what the Zionists — including the U.S. Government and its entire empire — DON’T report. This is the history of Israel’s creation, without any of the myths about it.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post How Genocide Against Palestinians Got Baked Into Truman’s Creation of Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

Part 1

Donald Trump doesn’t really deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Not after his unprovoked bombing of a country (Iran) that is no military threat whatsoever to the American Homeland. Not after continuing to green-light and arm Israel’s genocidal madness on Gaza and elsewhere. And not, most especially, after fronting for an even bigger defense budget than the bloated $1.0 trillion per year monstrosity that the UniParty already had in place.

Indeed, Washington’s $1 trillion war machine is a dangerous historical aberration on the world stage. It thrives in a tax-adverse democracy only by virtue of funding a vast ecosystem of arms merchants, think tanks, NGOs, PACs, lobbies and war-mongering politicians, which perpetuate a false narrative of foreign perils, threats and enemies that are largely its own self-justifying fabrications.

Still, Trump should get his Nobel prize anyway for breaking out of the Warfare State’s utterly false narrative on Ukraine and blundering his way into an end to the hideous proxy war on Russia being conducted there.

Indeed, you don’t have to read too much between the lines of the Alaska summit to see that a peace fix is in—perhaps to be inked a few weeks hence in Moscow; and that the Donald’s guests at the White House last week—-the un-useful idiot, Zelensky, and the clown car of European leaders—Macron, Merz, Starmer, Rutte and van der Leyen, especially—will be afforded an opportunity to like it or lump it, as they appeared to be doing during this Oval Office stunt staged by the Donald:

The tragedy and outrage, of course, is that the main points of the peace deal coming out of the summit could have been achieved years ago. And sans the sheer waste of $150 billion of US weapons and economic aid, the loss of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives, and the utter destruction of a country that was essentially taken hostage by the neocon hegemonists and military-industrial complex arms merchants that ruled the roost on the banks of the Potomac until the Donald stumbled into the Oval Office the second time.

After all, anyone with even a modicum of common sense, historical knowledge and minimum regard for human decency should find nothing objectionable in the following apparent “Elmendorf Meeting” formula, And that’s notwithstanding all the Munich-betrayal howling by neocon politicians and MIC bag carriers in the establishment media on both sides of the Atlantic.

Key Elements Of The Elmendorf Formulation:

1. A comprehensive peace deal and sustainable settlement of “root causes” of the current conflict will be agreed upon first to be followed by a cease fire later, not vice versa as had been demanded by Zelensky and his European supporters.
2. Ukraine won’t join NATO or function as a stalking horse to bring NATO’s military capacities to Russia’s back yard.
3. The four Russian-speaking provinces plus Crimea that voted to secede from Ukraine will be permitted to do so after some minor and symbolic “swapping” of territories around the current line of contact. That is, Russia would get all of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts (i. e. the Donbass) in return for not attempting to capture the small areas of Zaporizhia and Kherson that are still on the Ukraine side of the contact line.
4. A fig-leaf of security guarantees will be afforded to the rump of Ukraine via an ad hoc squad of European, US and other guarantors. This will provide an “article five” type security “commitment” on paper, albeit without any real mechanism to activate and execute it–including no American “peacekeeping” boots on the ground.
5. The rump state of Ukraine will by quasi-demilitarized via a sharp limit on the size of its armed forces and the nature and lethality of its armaments.
6. The Trump-threatened secondary sanctions against India and China for buying Russian oil will be withheld to enable the execution phases of the deal to go forward.
7. No further arms or intelligence support to Ukraine will be provided by the US or NATO during the peace process implementation.
8. A milestone-based lifting of US/NATO primary sanctions on Russia will be phased in—so long as Russia adheres to the deal and stays in the territorial/political lane specified in the upcoming agreement.
9. Various aspirational future economic opportunities for both sides will be appended to the deal as an expression of Trump-style deal-making.
10. Free elections will be held in the rump state of Ukraine upon the implementation of the peace treaty and the exile of current corrupt Ukrainian leaders including Zelensky.

The heart of the deal, of course, is the territorial partition. As is evident from the map below, 95% of Luhansk (dark red area) and 75% of the Donetsk oblast are already under Russian military control and that will go to 100%. On the other hand, the 20% to 25% of Kherson and Zaporizhia claimed by Russia will remain under Ukrainian control (light red area) as is presently the case on the battlefield. This is a far better deal for Ukraine than is likely to occur upon further combat, where its forces have been in relentless retreat for months.

After the proposed “swap”, therefore, roughly half of historic Novorossiya (New Russia) will be ceded back to Russia– from whence it came after being settled and developed during the time of Catherine the Great (late 18th century) by Russians. Indeed, the whole of Novorossiya had been an integral part of the late Czarist Empire during the 19th century. It ended-up inside the borders of what had been a tiny kingdom along the Dnieper River of Cossack warriors and brigands in 1922 for reasons of convenience to the bloody Bolshevik rulers who had sized power during the war-induced collapse of Czarist Russia in October 1917.

Likewise, Crimea lasted as an integral Russian territory even longer. After being purchased by Catherine the Great from the Ottoman’s in 1783, Crimea was solidly Russian—even through the time of the Crimean War of the 1850s when Russian nationalists turned back the imperial advances of England and France; and remained so until 1954, when the Ukrainian-born Soviet tyrant, Nikolai Khrushchev, emerged atop the post-Stalin power struggle and rewarded his Ukrainian comrades on the Politburo with Crimea as a door prize.

It is to be taken for granted that the Donald knows nothing of this history. Then again, perhaps an alert publicist at the White House might note that the Donald’s deal at least unwinds half of the Soviet tyrants’ border drawing with respect to Novorossiya.

Even more to the point, the ethno-linquistic map below fits like a hand-in-glove to the Elmendorf Settlement. That is, when the anti-Russian and neo-nazi nationalists took-over the Kiev government during the CIA-NED-State Department sponsored coup in February 2014, the Russian speaking areas in the yellow portions of the map moved to secede in a manner echoing America’s own Declaration of Independence against a tyrannical ruler.

It was only the subsequent US/NATO funded attack by Kiev on these seceding provinces that started the Ukrainian civil war and ultimately brought about the Russian intervention in 2022.

The fact is, when it comes to sovereignty the present borders of the fake state of Ukraine are what actually materialized under the point of Bolshevik machine guns a century ago. What the Trumpian settlement will actually do is restore the more natural ethno-linquisitic borders that encompassed Novorossiya for a century and one-half prior to the Soviet tyranny.

In any event, the map below tells you all you need to know about why much of the Donbass revolted and sought separation after the ne0-Nazi Maidan coup. To wit, one of the first acts of the new government was to outlaw Russian as an official language for tens of millions of inhabitants in these yellow-marked areas whose mother-tongue was Russian!

For want of doubt, here is a map of the last free presidential election in Ukraine in 2010. The pro-Russian candidate who won, Janukovych, received upwards of 80-90% of the vote in the darker blue areas of the Donbass east and southern rim of the Black Sea. These are the very same territories which are heavily Russian-speaking per the ethno-linguistic map above, and which will be permitted to secede from Ukraine on the settlement implicit in the Elmendorf Deal per the second map above.

Would it actually be too much trouble for the hyperventilating neocons in Washington and the mainstream press to just eyeball these three maps? What is happening is actually a clean-up of 100 years of misbegotten history, not a betrayal of the Ukrainian nation, whatever that actually is; or, most certainly, not a repudiation of Imperial Washington’s phony “rules-based order”.

The truth is, hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have died because a viper’s nest of Washington neocons overthrew the winner of the 2010 election as shown below, thereby igniting the bloodbaths and demolition derby’s that have now led to the imminent partition of a communist-built nation that was never meant to last.

Moreover, as we will amplify in Part 2, the claim that this history is irrelevant and that the so-called Budapest Memorandum of 1994 guaranteed the current Ukrainian borders—-drawn by communist tyrants or not—is risible beyond belief. After all, the Budapest Memorandum was inked at the very moment that President Bush, Secretary of State Baker, the German Chancellor and numerous others had also guaranteed Moscow that NATO would not move “one inch to the east”.

As shown below, so much for the utter hypocrisy of the Washington neocons! Since 1997 14 former Warsaw Pact satellite have joined NATO. So bravo to the Donald for having been too lazy to have absorbed their mendacious narrative.

Meanwhile, the European clown car is lined-up in the Oval Office trying to save their own political hides after years of leading their countries down the destructive primrose path of proxy war on Russia. In the case of Germany especially, they have badly wounded their own economies and living standards in subservience to the sanctions and economic warfare leveled against Russia by the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.

No wonder the Donald has rendered them desperate. The upcoming Elmendorf Settlement will reveal them (save for Giorgia Meloni) to be knaves and incompetents who deserve to be driven from office at the earliest possible date.

Part 2

Last Monday was a good day for world peace. Zelensky put on a suit (of sorts) and kept his mouth shut—even as the Clown Car of his European sponsors dutifully sat on the floor of the Oval Office cross-legged and feigning rapt attention to the random stream of consciousness emanating from behind the Resolute Desk.

So, yes, at last the peace fix is in with respect to ending the madness of Washington’s proxy war on Russia. Within weeks there will hopefully be a crowning summit in Moscow where the Donald will earn his Nobel Peace Prize, owing to the inking of some version of the potential 10-point agreement outlined in Part 1.

Alas, the tricky part will be to gussy-up a completely hollow “security guarantee” (item # 4) that will tiptoe around Putin’s understandable red line that there be no NATO boots on the ground in the rump of Ukraine. Still, some version of peacekeepers and trip-wires for the “article-5 like” guarantee will be needed in the deal.

But we think threading that needle won’t be so difficult, either. The Donald has already taken the possibility of American boots on the ground off the table and nobody wants Russian-hating Brits in Ukraine or a return to the Russian borders of German-speakers in uniform for the third time in 110 years.

Then again, it is likely that French soldiers bearing muskets that have never been fired and dropped only once could form the nucleus of an “observers” force. The latter might include a pick-up squad of UN draftees from Algeria, Azerbaijan and Argentina, if they start with the “A”s.

In any event, just about any fig leaf of rag-taggers will do. That’s because the giant lie upon which the whole Ukraine insanity has been predicated is about to be eviscerated. To wit, this has always been about Washington’s aggression against Russia in the form of the pointless and duplicitous expansion of NATO to Russia’s doorstep after 1997; the US-instigated Maidan coup in February 2014 that overthrew the legitimately elected president and ruptured the delicate balance of Ukrainian politics; and the subsequent NATO supplied and funded attack by the neo-Nazi putschists in Kiev on the breakaway Russian speaking provinces of the Donbass and the south, who were fleeing for their lives.

Accordingly, we are about to witness the geopolitical equivalent of the tree falling noiselessly in the empty forest. That is, there will be no Russian forces on the move westward at all.

The truth is, Putin is way too smart, realistic and civilized to attempt to recreate the Soviet Empire as per the false narrative of the Washington/NATO neocons. He never wanted to even rule the Ukrainian, Polish, Belorussian, Hungarian, Romanian and others nationalities who inhabit the left bank of the Dnieper River and in the west and north of Ukraine.

And that’s to say nothing of shooting his own country in the economic and political kneecaps by attempting to occupy and subdue Russian-hating Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Germans, Danes, and the inhabitants of the hapless bankrupt socialist states further west. And heaven forfend, who in their right mind would think that the degenerate, wokified socialist precincts of the British Isles are any kind of prize whatsoever?

Indeed, the chutzpah of the British pols like Starmer and the UK nomenklatura is a wonder to behold. There is not a would be conqueror on the planet today (or in the known past) who would see anything from the cliffs of Dover to the Scottish Out Stack that is worth the candle of invasion.

In short, the very idea of an expansionist Russia and Putin-with-a-mustache is an utterly bogus lie. There is no there there. Whatsoever.

And the fact that nothing untoward is going to happen when the Donald partitions and cuts loose the fake state of Ukraine is the real reason that he should get the Nobel Peace Prize. The impending “Elmendorf Deal” will knock the props out from under the whole case for Empire and the very business of the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.

At length it will actually make pursuit of the dream that Trump ventured to utter out loud early in his second term about world disarmament and a 50% cut in defense budgets a realistic possibility. That’s because once it becomes clear that there was nothing to the Russian Menace, the case against Red China will become all the more dubious, as well.

After all, the red rulers of Beijing have staked their very tenure in power and likely their lives on the prosperity emanating from becoming the Factory Floor of the planet. And no one, especially the wily comrades of Beijing, are foolish and stupid enough to make war on $3.5 trillion per year of global export customers.

So it just may be that these words the Donald spoke upon being sworn to office for the second time will turn out to be the most powerful and consequential 36 words spoken by any US President. Ever.

“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia, and I want to say, ‘let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that.”

At the time we said, yes, from the Donald’s lips to god’s ear and all that. The practicalities and obstacle-strewn path from here to there seemed will nigh insuperable.

But with the Ukraine Peace Settlement now in tow what our twice-baked President has actually done is to blow the Overton Window of permissible national security discussion wide open. Indeed, once you reach the point were tabling this fear-obliterating idea at a joint summit with the two endlessly demonized heads of America’s purported enemies becomes feasible, everything—and we do mean everything—heretofore prohibited is on the table for fresh, open discussion.

After all, you don’t need to be a student of the intricacies of the $1.0 defense budget to recognize that when you cut the Pentagon’s rations by half the whole globalist national security framework left over from the Cold War’s demise 34 years ago collapses.

That’s because once you ixnay the Russian (and Chinese) Menace and essentially euthanize NATO, as will now happen in the wake of the Elmendorf Settlement, you can bring the Empire home—and all the national security apparatus that goes with it. To wit, 750 foreign bases and 173,000 US troops posted in 159 countries; globe spanning Navy and Air Force 0perations; and alliances large and small, from NATO to the Taiwan Straits, to so-called peacekeeping missions throughout the Middle East and north Africa.

Stated differently, what you can fund on just 50% of today’s defense budget, as we amplify in Part 3, is an invincible strategic nuclear deterrent and an impenetrable defense of America’s coastlines, airspace and sovereign territory.

And yet, and yet. That’s all we actually need!

It would fully accomplish the fundamental national security goal of keeping America’s 347 million citizens free and safe from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.

Indeed, whether he recognizes it or not, President Trump’s bold entreaty would amount to invalidating every notion of Empire. It would pave the way for returning to America’s pre-1914 policy as a peaceful Republic, safely minding its own business behind the wondrous gifts of Providence—the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats which separate the homeland from any serious potential military foe anywhere on the planet.

At the present time and for the foreseeable future, it goes without saying that there are only two nations even remotely capable of posing a military threat to the American homeland—Russia and the People’s Republic of China. Yet the bottom line strategic reality is that Russia doesn’t have anywhere near the requisite economic heft to threaten America, and China doesn’t have a even a semblance of the economic running room to go on a global military aggression campaign.

With respect to Russia and despite all utter demonetization of Putin, which hopefully well now be undone, no one has even attempted to make the case that he’s so stupid as to believe his $2 trillionof commodity-based GDP is any match for the world-leading technology-based $30 trillion GDP of the United States.

Indeed, the whole Russian ogre thing is based on a purely fanciful derivative case. Namely, the aforementioned arm-waving claim that Putin will take the Baltics next, then Poland and thereafter march on thru the Brandenburg Gate into Berlin on the way to France, the Low Countries and across the English Channel to London—again, assuming Putin is also stupid enough to want to occupy the economic basket case of a Starmerized Little England.

In other words, implicit in Washington’s current consensus foreign policy posture is the notion that Russia is actually a big threat to America because it will eventually attack, occupy, pacify and militarize the entire continent of Europe! Well, unless stoutly resisted by the War Capital of the World on the Potomac.

After all, that’s the only scenario by which Moscow could possibly get the economic heft, manpower and military means to materially threaten the US. In the end, therefore, the threat is not posed by Ruuskies per se, but, apparently, by Russified Germans, Poles, Danes, Spaniards and Frogs.

To repeat: There is not a shred of evidence that this is Putin’s plan or that he would remotely have the economic and military wherewithal to accomplish such a sinister purpose were he so inclined, which most evidently he is not. To the contrary, Putin’s aim by the very evidence of the Elmendorf deal he is about to agree to is far more limited and reasonable: Namely, to keep NATO out of his backyard in an ancient piece of the Russian Empire that was called Novorossiya or New Russia during most of its history.

Again, that was the name of the Donbas and Black Sea rim region before Lenin and Stalin created the artificial country of “Ukraine” for the purely administrative convenience of operating their brutal tyranny. Yet in even attempting to retake the Russian half of Ukraine, Putin had a hard time mustering the requisite military power—to say nothing of conquering the rest of Europe.

Fortunately, the cat is now out of the bag. The Elmendorf Deal shows exactly why Russia is not on the warpath toward the conquest of Europe. To wit, after the impending Trump-Putin deal there will be no NATO in Ukraine and the country will be partitioned between the Russian-speaking regions of the Donbas, Crimea and the Black Sea rim, on the one hand, and the Ukrainian and Polish speaking regions of the west and on the left bank of the Dnieper River, on the other.

That’s all Putin every wanted anyway, and it will be the proof in the pudding that discredits the hideous notion that Washington must fight Russia by proxy over there in order to not have to fight it in Luxembourg or on the cliffs of Dover.

That is to say, once the war is settled and Ukraine partitioned, Putin’s special military operation will come to an abrupt halt at whatever turns out to be the exact frontier as between the breakaway republics and the rump of Ukraine. In turn, that will prove in spades that there exists not even the remotest prospect of a Russifed Europe, and therefore any real Russian threat to the security of the American homeland.

So, yes, the defense budget can be cut by 50% in part because. among other things, the 62,000 US troops shown above that are now stationed in Europe could be brought home forthwith. Even more importantly, US NATO membership and commitments could also be abandoned, meaning that the ridiculous idea of being committed under Article 5 to the mutual defense of such nationlets as North Macedonia, whose 10,000 man active duty military is smaller than 12,000 man police force of Chicago, would also expire.

Part 3

To repeat: the geopolitical equivalent of a tree is about ready to fall unheard in the global forest. Once the Trump/Putin peace deal is inked, not a single element of the neocons’ scary bedtime stories about Russian aggression will be heard anywhere on the planet.

To wit, Putin has no interest in what will be the nationalist anti-Russian rump of a neutralized Ukraine. There will be no Russian flag flying over Kiev or Lviv.

Likewise, nothing untoward will happen in the three Baltic states, either. That’s in part because once they see that poking the Bear next door doesn’t pay and isn’t safe, the often noisy anti-Russian fulminations of politicians in these countries looking for some cheap campaign demagoguery will go radio silent forthwith.

The same goes for Poland. And why in the world would Putin invade eastern European countries like Slovakia or Hungary, which have stoutly opposed the NATO aggression in Ukraine . And that’s to say nothing of Romania, which actually elected a Russian-favoring president until it was ixnayed by Brussels and the CIA.

Moreover, after having even failed to conquer all of Russian speaking Donetsk, what kind of idiot actually thinks that Germany, Italy, France and England are next in Putin’s alleged expansion plans?.

With respect to China, the single most important thing to recognize is that it is the very opposite of the old Soviet Empire, which was based on economic autarky and scant trading relationships with the world outside of the Warsaw Pact. Accordingly, had it been both inclined and capable of offensive military aggression toward the rest of Europe and or even the US—for which the now open archives of the old Soviet Union reveal scant evidence—there would have been no collateral disruption of its basic economic function. The latter was purely an internally-focused regime of centralized state socialism, which, needless to say, didn’t work but didn’t depend upon commerce with the so-called “free world”, either.

By contrast, after Mao was sent off his rewards in Red Heaven, China pivoted sharply to the outside world under the leadership of Mr.Deng and his successors; and they did so under the banner of so-called Red Capitalism, which amounted to an extreme version of export mercantilism.

Consequently, China’s exports soared by 14X during the two decades between 2000 and 2022, rising from $250 billion to $3.5 trillion per year. So doing, the Chicoms essentially took themselves hostage, meaning that every province, city, village, factory, rail line, trucking operations, warehouse and port operation along the length and breadth of China got deeply entangled with just-in-time economic production for customers across the planet, as depicted in the graphic below. Accordingly, China’s economy would collapse on the spot were Beijing to disrupt the daily flow of $10 billion of merchandise goods to Europe, the Americas and the balance of Asia.

Indeed, had its post-Mao leadership been hell bent on foreign conquest, which most clearly it was not, the Beijing regime’s very survival would have been compromised by the resulting disruption to the greatest factory-economy the world has ever seen.

That’s surely why Washington’s idiotic “domino theory” during the Vietnam era was repudiated in spades by subsequent history. That is, Washington wasted 59,000 American lives and upwards of 3 million Vietnamese lives before eventually fleeing from Vietnam. Yet afterwards the Chinese didn’t even try to capture Hanoi because Beijing was busy building-up a massive manufacturing and export economy.

In other words, China is inherently not a military threat to the US, nor is there any evidence that it is expansionist—even in its own region. There is undoubtedly a reason why after thousands of years, the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indonesians, Malayans and Filipinos stick to themselves; and also why a reunification of the Han Chinese on the mainland with their kin on Formosa would have virtually zero implications for the rest of the region.

The state of Taiwan exits only because Washington stood it up in 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war fair and square to Mao and the reds. Were Washington to step aside, it is likely that in a short time Taiwan would be hardly distinguishable from Shanghai across the Yellow Sea.

That is to say, the US does not need the massively expensive 7th Fleet and US Marines and large parts of the Air Force to contain China. The latter’s giant Ponzi economy perched as it is on $50 trillion of debt and upwards of $3.5 trillion per year of exports does all the containing that America’s military security actually requires.

At the end of he day, if Donald Trump’ impending “America First” foreign policy triumph in Ukraine means anything at all, it’s that the current $1.4 trillion national security budget including foreign operations and veterans is double the size that an adequate homeland defense shield actually requires. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that in relentless pursuit of its own self-serving aggrandizement, the military/industrial/intelligence complex has massively inflated America’s Warfare State into an “extra-large” when what is really needed in the world of 2025 is a snug-fitting “small.”

And now, the Donald has dramatically opened the door to downsizing America’s crushing national security budget to exactly that, thereby paving the way for a return to Thomas Jefferson’s wise admonition urging,

“…peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Indeed, the way for the Trump Administration to shoe-horn roughly $1 trillion of DOD spending into a $500 billion budget was laid out a long time ago by the great Senator Robert Taft at the very dawn of the Cold War. He argued that the modest threat to homeland security presented by the war-ravaged corpus of the Soviet Union and the collectivist disaster imposed on China by Mao could have been readily handled with–

• An overwhelming strategic nuclear retaliatory capacity that would have deterred any possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail.
• An invincible Fortress America conventional defense of the continental shorelines and air space that would have been exceedingly easy to stand up, given that the Soviet Union had no Navy worth speaking of and China had devolved into industrial and agricultural anarchy owing to Mao’s catastrophic experiments with collectivization.

That eminently correct Taftian framework has never changed since then—even as the technology of nuclear and conventional warfare has evolved apace. For modest military spending Washington can keep its nuclear deterrent fully effective and maintain a formidable Fortress America defense of the homeland without any of the apparatus of Empire and no American boots on foreign soil, at all.

In fact, the case for a true America First policy––that is, returning to the 1914 status quo ante and a proper Fortress America military posture––has powerfully strengthened during the last three decades. That’s because in today’s world, the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail. That is to say, the threat that one of its two nuclear adversaries could develop a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal, and effective that it could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.

Fortunately, neither Russia nor China has anything close to the Nuclear First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of their own country and people if they attempted to strike first. After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s–all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.

For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of 4-5 warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.

So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located, and neutralized before any would-be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started. Indeed, with respect to the “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find or take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.

And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move. Likewise, the 400 Minuteman III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, thereby further compounding and complicating an adversary’s First Strike calculus.

Needless to say, there is no way, shape, or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case as to how the Trump Administration could actually cut the defense budget by 50%. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.

That’s right. The core component of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget as detailed on a system-by-system basis in the table below. Thus, in 2023 the nuclear triad itself cost just $28 billion plus another $24 billion for related stockpiles and command, control, and warning infrastructure.

Moreover, this key component of this nuclear deterrent–the sea-based ballistic missile force–is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the entire next decade. That’s only 1.9% of the $10 trillion CBO defense baseline for that period.

So the question recurs with respect to the DOD’s current spending level. After setting aside $75 billion for the strategic nuclear triad, how much of the remaining $1.0 trillion+ would actually be needed for a conventional Fortress America defense of the continental shorelines and airspace?

The starting point is that neither Russia nor China have the military capability, economic throw-weight or intention to attack the American homeland with conventional forces. To do that they would need a massive military armada including a Navy and Air Force many times the size of current US forces, huge air and sealift resources, and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities that have never been even dreamed of by any other nation on the planet.

They would also need an initial GDP of say $50 trillion to $100 trillion per year to sustain what would be the most colossal mobilization of weaponry and materiel in human history. And that’s to say nothing of needing to be ruled by suicidal leaders—which characterizes neither Putin nor Xi— willing to risk the nuclear destruction of their own countries, allies, and economic commerce in order to accomplish, what? Occupy Denver?

The entire idea that there is currently an existential threat to America’s security is just nuts. After all, when it comes to the requisite economic heft, Russia’s GDP is a scant $2 trillion, not the $50 trillion that would be needed for it to put invasionary forces on the New Jersey shores. And its ordinary defense budget (excluding the SMO) is $75 billion, which amounts to less than four weeks of waste in Washington’s $1.0 trillion monster.

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

Therefore, it didn’t grow organically in the historic capitalist mode; it printed, borrowed, spent, and built like there was no tomorrow. As we indicated above, therefore, the resulting simulacrum of prosperity would not last a year if its $3.5 trillion global export market–-the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright–were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.

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

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

The fact is, in an age when the sky is flush with high-tech surveillance assets neither China nor Russia could possibly secretly build, test and muster for surprise attack a massive conventional force armada without being noticed in Washington. There can be no repeat of the Japanese strike force–the Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku–steaming across the Pacific toward Pearl Harbor sight unseen.

Indeed, America’s two ostensible “enemies” actually have no offensive or invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier–a 1980s-era relic which has been in dry dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships nor a suite of attack and fighter aircraft–and at the moment not even an active crew.

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

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

So let us repeat: There is simply no GDP in the world––$2 trillion for Russia or $18 trillion for China––that is even remotely close in size to the $50 trillion or even $100 trillion that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the home economy.

Donald Trump is therefore on to something huge, whether he realizes it or not. To wit, Washington’s globe-spanning conventional war-fighting capability is completely obsolete!

Fully one-third of a century after the Soviet Empire collapsed and China went the Red Capitalist route of deep global economic integration, it amounts to utterly extraneous and unneeded muscle.

For want of doubt, consider that Washington equips, trains, and deploys an armed force of 2.86 million. But rather than being devoted to homeland defense, the overwhelmingly purpose is to support missions of offense, invasion, and occupation all over the planet.

As depicted in the graphic above, this obsolete Empire First military posture still includes among others–

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

All of this unnecessary military muscle stands as a costly monument to the hoary theory of collective security, which led to the establishment of NATO in 1949 and its regional clones thereafter. Yet the case for Empire and its global alliances was dubious even back then. In fact, the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove conclusively that Stalin had neither the wherewithal nor intention to invade Western Europe.

What military capacity the Soviet Union did resurrect after the bloodletting with Hitler’s armies was heavily defensive in character and lumbering in capabilities. So the alleged communist political threat in Europe could have been wrangled out by these nations at the polls, not on the battlefield. They did not need NATO to stop an imminent Soviet invasion.

Needless to say, once the Washington-based Empire of bases, alliances, collective security, and relentless CIA meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries was established, it stuck like glue–even as the facts of international life proved over and over again that the Empire wasn’t needed.

That is to say, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed. The aberrational rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen because the good people of England, France, and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s.

Instead, they arose from the ashes of Woodrow Wilson’s pointless intervention in a quarrel of the Old World that was none of America’s business. Yet the arrival in 1918 of two million American doughboys and massive flows of armaments and loans from Washington enabled a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles rather than an end to a desultory world war that would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt, and demoralized, and their respective domestic war parties subject to massive repudiation at the polls.

As it happened, however, Wilson’s intervention on the stalemated battlefields of the Western Front gave birth to revolution in Russia and Lenin and Stalin, while his machinations with the victors at Versailles fostered the rise of Hitler in the rump of a dismembered and reparations-encumbered Germany.

To be sure, in the end the former did fortunately bring about the demise of the latter at Stalingrad. But that should have been the end of the matter in 1945, and, in fact, the world was almost there. After the victory parades, demobilization and normalization of civilian life had proceeded apace all around the world.

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

So, in the post-war period world communism was not really on the march and the nations of the world were not implicated in falling dominoes, nor were they gestating incipient Hitlers and Stalin’s. But the new proponents of Empire insisted they were just the same, and that national security required the far-flung empire that is still with us today.

So there is no mystery, therefore, as to why the Forever Wars go on endlessly. Or why at a time when Uncle Sam is hemorrhaging red ink like never before, a large bipartisan majority has seen fit to authorize $1.2 trillion per year for vastly excessive military muscle and wasteful foreign aid boondoggles that do absolutely nothing for America’s homeland security.

In effect, Washington has morphed into a freak of world history––a planetary War Capital dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, paladins of foreign intervention and adventure, and Warfare State nomenklatura. Never before has there been assembled and concentrated under a single state authority a hegemonic force possessing such enormous fiscal resources and military wherewithal.

Not surprisingly, the War Capital on the Potomac is Orwellian to the core. War is always and everywhere described as the promotion of peace. Its jackboot of global hegemony is gussied up in the beneficent-appearing form of alliances and treaties. These are ostensibly designed to promote a “rules-based order” and collective security for the benefit of mankind, not simply the proper goals of peace, liberty, safety, and prosperity within America’s homeland.

As we have seen, however, the whole intellectual foundation of this enterprise is false. The planet is not crawling with all-powerful would-be aggressors and empire-builders who must be stopped cold at their own borders, lest they devour the freedom of all their neighbors near and far.

Nor is the DNA of nations perennially infected with incipient butchers and tyrants like Hitler and Stalin. They were one-time accidents in history and fully distinguishable from the standard run of everyday tinpots which actually do arise periodically. But the latter mainly disturb the equipoise of their immediate neighborhoods, not the peace of the planet.

So America’s homeland security does not depend upon a far-flung array of alliances, treaties, military bases, and foreign influence operations. In today’s world there are no Hitlers, actual or latent, to stop. The whole framework of Pax Americana and the Washington-based promotion and enforcement of a “rules-based” international order is an epic blunder.

In that regard, the Founding Fathers got it right more than 200 years ago during the infancy of the Republic. As John Quincy Adams approvingly held,

“[America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings…She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Needless to say, peaceful commerce is invariably far more beneficial to nations large and small than meddling, interventionism, and military engagement. In today’s world it would be the default state of play on the international chessboard, save for the Great Hegemon on the banks of the Potomac. That is to say, the main disturbance of the peace today is invariably fostered by the self-appointed peacemaker, who, ironically, is inherently the least threatened large nation on the entire planet.

The starting point for a Trumpian “America First” military posture and a 50% cut of the military budget, therefore, is the drastic downsizing of the nearly one-million man standing US Army.

The latter would have no uses abroad because there would be no cause for wars of foreign invasion and occupation, while the odds of any foreign battalions and divisions reaching America’s shores are virtually non-existent. With a proper coastline garrison of missiles, drones, attack submarines, and jet fighters any invading army would become shark bait long before it saw the shores of California or New Jersey.

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

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

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

By core missions we refer to the Navy component of the strategic nuclear triad and the Navy’s large force of attack and cruise missile submarines. As it happens, here are the current manpower requirements for these key forces:

• 14 Ohio-class Strategic Nuclear Subs: There are two crews of 155 officers and enlisted men for each boat, resulting in a direct force requirement of 4,400 and an overall total of 10,000 military personnel when Admirals, overhead, support, and woke compliance is included (or not).
• @50 Attack/Cruise Missile Subs: There are two crews of 132 officers and enlisted men for each boat, for a direct requirement of 13,000 and an overall total of 20,000 including Admirals and overhead etc.

In short, the core Navy missions of a Fortress America defense involve about 30,000 officers and enlisted men or less than 6% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps. On the other hand, the totally unnecessary carrier battle groups, which operate exclusively in the service of Empire, have crews of 8,000 each when you count the escort ships and suites of aircraft.

So, the 11 carrier battle groups and their infrastructure require 88,000 direct military personnel and140,000 overall when you include the usual support and overhead. Likewise, the active-duty force of the Marine Corps is 175,000, and that’s entirely an instrument of invasion and occupation. It’s totally unnecessary for a homeland defense.

In short, fully 315,000 or 60% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps functions in the service of Empire. So, if you redefine the Navy’s missions to focus on strategic nuclear deterrence and coastal defense, it is evident that more than half of the Navy’s force structure is not necessary for homeland security. Instead, it functions in the service of global power projection, policing of the sea lanes from the Red Sea to the East China Sea and platforming for wars of invasion and occupation.

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

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

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

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

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

In terms of homeland security, much of these expenditures are not simply unnecessary––they are actually counter-productive. They constitute the taxpayer-funded lobby and influence-peddling force that keeps the Empire alive and fully funded on Capitol Hill via lavish appropriations for every manner of consultancy, NGO, think tank, research institute and countless more.

Even then, a 38% allowance or $70 billion for the Defense Department functions (which include the hidden by currently massive over-funding of the CIA and other intelligence agencies) would more than provide for the true needs of a Fortress America defense.

Overall, therefore, downsizing the DOD muscle would generate $410 billion of savings on a FY 2025 basis. Another $50 billion in savings could also be obtained from eliminating most funding for the UN, other international agencies, security assistance and economic aid. Adjusted for inflation through the next four years of Trump’s term, the total savings would eventually come to $500 billion year.

Fortress America Budget Savings:

• Army: $140 billion.
• Navy/Marine Corps: $96 billion.
• Air Force: $65 billion.
• DOD agency-wide: $111 billion.
• UN contributions and foreign economic and humanitarian aid: $35 billion.
• International Security Assistance: $15 billion.
• Total Savings, FY 2025 basis: $462 billion.
• 8% inflation adjustment to FY 2029: +$38 billion.
• Total FY 2029 Budget Savings: $500 billion.

At the end of the day, the time to bring the Empire home is long overdue. The $1.3 trillion annual cost of the Warfare State (including international operations and veterans) is no longer even remotely affordable–-and it has been wholly unnecessary for homeland security all along.

All of this should have been obvious long ago, but the Overton Window was so narrow that the sheer nakedness of the Empire could not be spoken about in polite company. But now Donald Trump has done exactly that, and it will make all the difference in the world.

So let President Trump’s tripartite summit happen soon and begin the great defunding of the world’s hideously bloated Warfare States. The latter is now 10o-years overdue, but, at last, Donald Trump may be the best hope for peace since August 1914. And for that he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize and then some.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

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