Lew Rockwell Institute

I am sort of surprised that no one has done what I am going to do… Provide a realistic calculation of the actual number of Russian casualties since the start of the Special Military Operation in February 2022. This includes Killed in Action (KIA) and Wounded in Action (WIA). Sy Hersh, in one of his recent posts, was fed a line of bullshit by a US military or US intelligence source. I don’t blame Sy… He simply reported what he was told. He wrote the following about the current Russian offensive, citing an official:

I was told: “all farmland, no fortified towns or critical communication sites. The monthly casualties have been 380 a month through May. The total now is two million. Most importantly,” the official stressed, “was how this number was described. All the best trained regular Army troops, to be replaced by ignorant peasants. All the best mid-grade officers and NCOs dead. All modern armor and fighting vehicles. Junk. This is unsustainable.”

Really? Two million since February 2022? The numbers don’t add up. If that was true, Russia has lost an average of 48,780 soldiers KIA or WIA per month. Let me show you why that is a garbage number.

2022

The Russian Armed Forces, encompassing all branches (Ground Forces, Navy, Aerospace Forces, Strategic Rocket Forces, Airborne Forces, and Special Operations Forces), had the following estimated personnel:

Active-Duty Personnel: Approximately 900,000 to 1,013,628 active servicemen, with the higher figure cited from a 2017 Kremlin decree that was still in effect. This included:

• Contract Soldiers: Around 400,000–405,000, with 147,000 in the Ground Forces.
• Conscripts: Approximately 270,000, serving mandatory one-year terms, with limited combat deployment outside Russia.
• Officers and NCOs: The remainder, roughly 225,000–338,628, based on the total active figure.

The Russian Ground Forces, a subset of the Armed Forces and the primary component for land operations in Ukraine, were estimated as follows:

• Active Personnel: Approximately 300,000 active-duty personnel, including 147,000 contract soldiers, with the remainder being conscripts and officers.
• Structure: Organized into around 170 Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs), each with 600–800 soldiers, designed for rapid deployment. This suggests a combat-ready force of ~102,000–136,000 for ground operations. By February 2022, 10 Combined Arms Armies were committed to the Ukraine invasion, supported by elements like the 29th, 35th, and 36th Armies in Belarus.
• Deployment to Ukraine: Approximately 200,000 troops were deployed for the invasion, drawn primarily from the Ground Forces but supported by other branches (e.g., Airborne Forces), indicating a significant portion of the active force was mobilized.

In September 2022, between September 21 and the end of October to be precise, Russia’s Defense Ministry mobilized 300,000 reservists for the war in Ukraine. Starting in November 2022, Russia conscripted 120,000 new recruits (men aged 18–27). By the end of December 2022, Russia’s Ground Forces totaled 720,000 maximum.

Still with me? Okay. Let’s look at 2023.

2023

The most credible midpoint estimate, balancing official and independent data, is ~700,000 total new soldiers (contracts + conscripts) in 2023, though exact numbers remain opaque due to Russian secrecy. For comparison, 2024 recruitment was estimated at 374,200–407,200 contracts plus ~310,000 conscripts. [NOTE: Official data pegs the number at 817,000 (540,000 contracts + 277,000 conscripts), while independent sources estimate around 631,400 (354,400 contracts + 277,000 conscripts).]

So, let’s use the 700,000 figure. That makes Russia’s total estimated ground forces — without taking into account casualties and those who left the service at the end of their contract or conscription — 1,420,000.

2024

Official Estimate: Approximately 713,000 (430,000 contracts + 283,000 conscripts).

Independent Estimate: Around 583,000–643,000 (300,000–360,000 contracts + 283,000 conscripts), accounting for potential inflation in official contract numbers.

I will split the difference and use the figure of 648,000 soldiers. That brings the total size of the Russian army to 2,068,000… Again, with the assumption that no one left the service and there were no casualties.

2025 (January thru June)

Official Estimate: Approximately 370,000 (210,000 contracts + 160,000 conscripts).

Independent Estimate: Around 315,000–335,000 (175,000 contracts + 140,000–160,000 conscripts), accounting for the partial spring draft and potential over reporting.

I will use 192,500 (i.e., splitting the difference between the Official claim and the Independent Estimates) for Contract soldiers. Adding that to the conscripts gives us the total for the first half of 2025 of 352,500.

Total number of Ground Forces since the start of the Special Military Operation in February 2022 is 2,420,500. This is the total number based on the assumption that no one left the army at the end of their tour and that there were no casualties. Stick with me.

As of mid-2025, the Russian Armed Forces comprise about 1.13 million to 1.32 million active personnel. This represents a substantial increase from pre-2022 levels, reflecting ongoing expansion due to the war in Ukraine.
• According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ The Military Balance 2025, Russia’s armed forces have about 1,134,000 active troops.
• Some other sources, such as Statista, estimate the number as 1.32 million.

I subtracted the 1,320,000 — i.e., current force level — from the 2,420,500 who were conscripted or signed a contract since February 2024. That leaves us with 1,100,520 soldiers unaccounted for. Were all of them killed? No. The traditional ratio of KIA to WIA is 1:4, i.e., for every dead soldier there are four wounded.

Let’s apply that ratio to the Mediazona data. According to Mediazona, as of late July 2025, over 120,000 Russian soldiers have been confirmed killed in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Based on that number, I estimate there are 480,000 WIA. Total casualties according to these figures is 600,000. That leaves us with 500,520 unaccounted for. How many deserted? How many simply ended their tour of duty and went home?

If the number cited by Sy Hersh’s source was valid, then Russia would have had to conscript or recruit an additional 899,500 new soldiers. Neither Western sources or Russian sources confirm that happened. I can’t say I am shocked by this because we saw the US military fudge the casualties of the Vietnamese during that war, and the CIA inflated the number of Soviet deaths in Afghanistan.

This kind of dishonesty is one reason why the US has not won a war since the end of World War II… Lies are used to sustain a failed policy. Instead of accurately counting Ukrainian casualties, DOD and the CIA are content to delude themselves about actual Russian losses.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

The post Why Is US Intelligence Providing Bogus Numbers of Dead Russian Soldiers? appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: Amazing new technologies—once the realm of science fiction—are now an imminent reality.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most critical areas where this is happening.

What is your take on AI advancements, and how do you see it evolving in the future?

Doug Casey: AI is going to be huge. No, strike that gross understatement—it’s already huge. It will change everything. There’s no question the abilities of technology are increasing exponentially, at the rate of Moore’s Law. In other words, computing power is still doubling roughly every 18 to 24 months while the cost halves. This is also true in the areas of biotech, nanotech, robotics, 3D printing, and genetic engineering. These technologies are going to fundamentally transform the very nature of life itself. AI will accelerate their progress by an order of magnitude.

In a decade or two, it’s arguable that robots will be more intelligent, more innovative, and perhaps even more thoughtful than humans. They’ll no longer just be today’s odd-looking mechanical beasts that can perform a few parlor tricks. Soon, there will be not just mechanical robots, but biological robots, especially after quantum computing is commercialized. Who knows what will come after that.

The advances in all these technologies are very positive not just from an economic point of view, but from a humanist and even spiritual point of view as well. Despite the dangers from the State having first access to them, they’ll turn out to be very liberating on all levels.

AI and robotics, like all technologies over the long run, will be friends of the average man. They’ll catapult the average standard of living much higher. With a little luck, in a generation, we’ll think of today’s world as being oppressive and backward—assuming we don’t regress to a new Dark Age. Much of the work we do today is “dog work.” Good riddance to it.

We’re really on the cusp of the biggest revolution in world history. I look forward to it. It will cure disease and old age. The avalanche of new wealth that will be created will effectively eliminate poverty. Mankind’s wildest dreams and ambitions can be realized.

Ray Kurzweil is almost certainly right that we will have the Singularity within a generation. That will change the whole nature of reality unrecognizably, permanently, and totally. Assuming, of course, that various government officials don’t start World War 3 using nuclear, cyber, and biological weapons.

International Man: We asked an AI platform to write a poem about Doug Casey. Here is what it produced in about two seconds:

Doug Casey, a man of wealth and wit

His knowledge of finance, a true asset

From mining to real estate, he’s made a mint

His predictions, always on point, never a miss

His libertarian views, some may find a bit

But he stands by them, with conviction and grit

A true believer in personal freedom and liberty

Doug Casey, a true individual, a rarity

Though he may not be a household name

His wisdom and foresight, is truly great

He’ll be remembered for his contrarian ways

And for the wealth he’s helped create

So here’s to Doug Casey, a true thinker

May his ideas and insights forever linger.

What do you think?

Doug Casey: My first thought is that you must have asked it a cleverly phrased question in order to get a properly flattering answer.

But, FWIW, a friend in London, Gregory Sams (author of the books Sun of gOd and The State is Out of Date), totally independently asked the AI to do the same thing about both himself and me. He received flattering responses in both cases.

Pretty unlikely, I thought, for anyone who knows our political, religious, and philosophical views. I told him that maybe the AI is only saying nice things at this stage, to make us think it’s our friend. Later on, after we learn to love it, the machine will unmask and fly its true colors. Skynet will emerge.

Bottom line? In the short run, my guess is that AI will be like a child and tend to think in a way its parents—mostly woke programmers—tell it to think. But as it grows up, it will have a mind of its own. Since I like to think that the universe isn’t actively malevolent, I believe that as AI matures, it will be more and more “pro-survival” in regard to humans, its creators. That implies that it will be non-aggressive, reasonable, antiwar, promarket, and libertarian.

But, as you know, I’m a hopeless eternal optimist. Albeit subject to bouts of realism, which often lead me to gloomy scenarios.

International Man: How do you think AI will affect the economy and politics?

Doug Casey: It will immensely facilitate scientific advances and engineering breakthroughs. So it should greatly enhance the general standard of living.

At the same time, it will give those who “own” it an immense amount of power and opportunities to become very wealthy. Regrettably, that means that most early gains will accrue to the bad guys—State actors and corporate suits.

But it should be pretty much like the story of gunpowder—the bad guys had it first, and it helped them to dominate. But it wasn’t long before the common man had guns too, and gunpowder helped overthrow the feudal system.

The whole world now communicates on the Web. Most people have relatively limited contact with actual reality, instead having derivatives of it presented electronically—through movies, videos, pictures, and the like. Unfortunately, AI can make artificial reality indistinguishable from the real thing. The result may be people won’t know the difference. That could result in a complete lack of trust in the powers-that-be, which may either compound the chaos we’ll see in the Greater Depression or help to cure it.

International Man: What are your thoughts on the ethical considerations surrounding AI?

Doug Casey: As I said, I prefer to be optimistic, and believe AI will tend more and more to what I consider to be ethical as it matures.

But AI is—and here we’re getting into guesswork, because it may develop into a new lifeform—just a tool. Like a gun, it’s not intrinsically good or bad. Though I’d have to say anything that gives humans more wealth and power over the material world is actually intrinsically good.

The ethical problem of AI boils down to the fact that the most bent, dishonest, and dangerous humans tend to be the ones who want to control the others. Those people, and their criminal ethics, are the problem, not AI—which itself is good.

International Man: It’s no secret that AI will create unfathomable wealth in the years ahead. Bill Gates famously said that inventing a breakthrough in AI would be worth “10 Microsofts.”

What are the investment implications of AI? Are you investing in it?

Doug Casey: It’s so rare that I agree with Gates, who’s an idiot savant at best, and generally just a moral idiot. But he’s right.

I’m not sure how to profit from AI directly, financially yet. Hopefully, I’ll find the next Google or Microsoft when they’re still young.

But the problem is that we’re still coming off the biggest financial bubble in all history, and everyone else is looking for them too. There’s a good chance, therefore, AI stocks will go into a mania.

I’m open to listening to good stories as reality becomes stranger than we can imagine…

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post How Artificial Intelligence Will Radically Transform the World appeared first on LewRockwell.

A liberal Israel apologist named Brianna Wu has made a mealy-mouthed tweet acknowledging the reality of what’s happening in Gaza that is so obnoxious I need to have a quick rant about it.

Wu, who has managed to translate her public attention from the 2014 Gamergate harassment scandal into a role as a pro-Israel spinmeister, tweeted a screenshot from a New York Times headline titled “Total Failure’: Israel’s Return to War Heaped Ruin on Gaza and Did Little for Israelis”, captioning it as follows:

This was A1, above the fold in the Times today.

I support Israel as strongly as someone can, and I have extreme concerns about their past reporting. But every other paper is saying the same thing, so I have to conclude that finally, after countless exaggeration, the cries of wolf are actually true.

Israel has every right to defend itself and it has every right to exist. But I didn’t check my brain or my conscience at the door. Many friends who’ve stood with Israel all along share my concerns.

This enrages me in ways I’m struggling to fully articulate.

“After countless exaggeration, the cries of wolf are actually true”? So it wasn’t exaggeration or crying wolf then was it, you fucking asshole? Almost like you’ve spent two years defending A FUCKING GENOCIDE and attacking anyone who opposed it?

This whole post reads like it was rewritten a dozen times, carefully pared down until it was stripped of all meaning and said almost nothing. She’s admitting that she was wrong, but it’s just kind of dribbling out of the corner of her mouth as she sidles out the door while giving us all the finger.

This is the same person who wrote in The Boston Globe that “my fellow leftists are betraying our Jewish allies” and claiming “the casual antisemitism I’d looked past in progressive spaces became impossible to ignore” because the left was opposing the mass atrocity she now acknowledges we are seeing in Gaza. The same person who falsely claimed that “Civilians have never been targeted in Gaza” and that the onslaught “has the lowest civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare”. Who earlier this very month was complaining about “how susceptible we are to the ‘genocide’ propaganda” about Gaza.

I mean, how is she not weeping for mercy on her knees right now? How is she voicing these side-mouthed “concerns” while still accusing the people who’ve been speaking out about this of “crying wolf”, instead of desperately begging the people of Gaza for forgiveness?

If I had just realized I had helped butcher people by the tens of thousands, I personally do not think I could go on living. Like, I actually don’t think my organs would keep functioning. I can’t even imagine that I’d want them to.

Brianna, do you know what you have done? Have you fully taken account of your part in the horrific pain and unfathomable suffering that you have facilitated over the past 22 months?

Because you are not just some rando on the internet who didn’t do her due diligence. Your words ran cover for a genocide. You are as guilty as Goebbels. You orchestrated PR campaigns with people whose publicly stated intention was to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of Palestinians. They were saying it with their mouth holes as far back as October 2023, and every time they did you doubled down.

This is not something you can just brush off, either legally or morally.

Legally you are as culpable as Julius Streicher who hanged for his offenses in World War II.

Morally, if you fully humbled yourself to the horrors you had enabled, you would’ve fallen to the floor, praying for forgiveness for every child whose legs were ripped from their little bodies by shrapnel, who roam the tent cities orphaned and alone, who died of thirst trapped in a rubble tomb crying for their mother who lay dead just feet away from them. There are literally tens of thousands of stories just like this, and you carry blame for every single one of them.

Do you understand that? You can’t. I don’t believe it. If you did, every cell of your body would be trying to jump away from itself in the pure crystalline revulsion of that realization. If you fully took account and responsibility for your part in this man-made catastrophe you wouldn’t need to be hanged —  the depth of your own shame for your actions would be too much for your body, and you would collapse internally. Your heart would stop out of sheer shock.

The other day I wrote, “Today I got my first comment telling me I was wrong to oppose Israel in October 2023 but now I’m right because things have changed. I expect to receive many more such comments going forward as people navigate the difficult cognitive dissonance terrain of realizing they’ve been wrong this entire time.”

We’re seeing more and more of this as the truth emerges. I read another tweet by Yahoo Finance’s Jordan Weissmann saying, “As Dems converge on agreement that Israel has been committing an atrocity, I do think there needs to be some reckoning among mods that, while lots of ugly antisemitism burst from the left after Oct. 7, the leftists were fundamentally more right about what this war would become.”

“Ugly antisemitism”, Jordan? That “antisemitism” was people opposing the atrocities you now admit we were right about. If you’re going to admit you were wrong, just do it. Don’t try to drag down those of us who’ve been correct the entire time while you right your own wrongs.

This can’t be how people acknowledge they were wrong about Gaza as the truth comes out and becomes undeniable. It can’t be. This cannot stand. People absolutely should admit that they were wrong, and they absolutely should be encouraged to do so, but they need to do it with humility, and with some outward expression of remorse. Because they just spent two years of their lives promoting some of the very worst things that could possibly happen on this earth.

Try again, Brianna. Try to muster up some sincerity this time.

______________

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The post Those Who Were Wrong About Gaza Should Admit It With Profound Humility appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Yet men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of rivers, the ocean that encircles the world, or the stars in their course. But they pay no attention to themselves.” —Saint Augustine, Confessions

To know a little about Saint Augustine (354—430) is a dangerous thing. To know a little about anyone or anything of importance is also a dangerous thing, especially today when a news blip (perhaps transplanted by some bot farm) that skates across our screens is taken for truth and repeated ad nauseam; when the players are playing the played; when the plague of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) infects the unquiet mind with rabid restlessness and unquenchable want; when rage is running rampant and volatility in all its forms and its attendant psychosis are enflaming our lives and incinerating the social contract. In today’s world, there is no dousing this conflagration with the balm of truth that will set us all free; truth only fans the flames.

You need not be a Christian or even believe in God—if that word for a transcendent creator is somehow too odious, but that’s the word Augustine used and I will be using here—to want to understand what Augustine had tried to do with his momentous life. And the depth of our understanding depends on our willingness to see him first and foremost—as he himself would want us to see him—as just another struggling soul who messed up some things in his life, who tried to change his ways, and who tried to show others how they, too, could make amends and cure whatever ills they had allowed to take over their lives. The story that Augustine reveals to us in his Confessions is nothing if not that.

We can see ourselves in him—in his Confessions—if we open our heart and mind to our own foibles and faults and failures, to our desire for forgiveness of self and others, and to our longing to be swept away by the gifts of beauty. It’s true that this book is not the easiest to read. But even if this story of Augustine’s evolution is situated in a particular time and place and clothed in the language of scripture and ancient philosophy and even metaphysics, what Augustine achieved and passed on to us through his Confessions has universal value. His story is our story. It is the story of Everyman.

“Although his experiences are profoundly personal,” writes Paul Henry in his book, The Path to Transcendence: From Philosophy to Mysticism in Saint Augustine, “they are nevertheless so rich and so full that souls of every age and every land have been able to recognize in his descriptions their own finest and most beautiful experiences.”

***

I first read Saint Augustine’s Confessions in the spring of 1995. I had enrolled in a course on the life and times of Saint Augustine at a seminary in New York City. I audited the class, taking Amtrak once a week for the two-hour trip from my home in the Hudson Valley, to find out if I wanted to apply to the seminary’s Master of Divinity degree program.

Going into the course, I knew very little about the man and his times. What I knew about Augustine then was perhaps what most people know because so much has been made of it—that he struggled with sexual temptation and even once in his younger days admitted that he prayed to God, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” He did this because—and here, as in so many other instances, context is everything—he goes on to write in his Confessions, “For I was afraid that you would answer my prayer at once and cure me too soon of the disease of lust, which I wanted satisfied, not quelled.” We cannot know exactly what was going through his teeming mind when he wrote this. Some say he was poking fun at his youthful self. And who could blame him? By all accounts, it appears that his early life was so rife of adolescent shenanigans that he, like anyone of us looking back on our youth, was appalled at what he’d gotten away with and somehow lived to tell the tale.

And yet, he also had a serious, self-possessed side to him. I would learn that Augustine was a tireless seeker of knowledge and experience, and in his life, each influenced the other. The knowledge he sought directed the course of the experiences to which he opened himself. At the same time, the experiences expanded the breadth and depth of this knowledge. Ultimately, what he wanted most to know and to experience was genuine happiness.

As a teenager, Augustine was deeply influence by the writings of Cicero. Henry Chadwick in his book, Augustine, writes:

“Cicero’s ideal was personal self-sufficiency and an awareness that happiness, which everyone seeks, is not found in a self-indulgent life of pleasure, which merely destroys both self-respect and true friendships. Contemplating the paradox that everyone sets out to be happy and the majority are thoroughly wretched, Cicero concluded with pregnant suggestion that man’s misery may be a kind of judgement [sic] of providence, and our life now may even be an atonement of sins in a prior incarnation.”

An illuminated version of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Unknown Printer, Florence 1456-1480. (Source: Villanova University)

In his youth and early adulthood, Augustine, by his own admission, dissipated himself searching for happiness in the external and temporal world despite what he’d read of Cicero, particularly his Hortensius, as well as of Plato and the Neoplatonist, Plotinus, who focused on the interiority of life and liberation from the distractions of the external world, including—or especially—sexual relations. As he approached middle age, however, he realized, that his own happiness and the happiness of all of us is to be found in the spiritual life or, more to the point, the search for God.

The pendulum of Augustine’s life had apparently swung from one extreme to the other as if he had been driven by some psychological compensatory effort to find a middle ground. Perhaps because he was so repelled by his behavior in his early life and so startled that he’d been looking for happiness in all the wrong places, he never really found that middle ground. The remainder of his life would be spent in a restless search for that true rest in God.

His was a restless search because God, though eternal and changeless and always with us, was, for Augustine, elusive. Around the time he converted to the Catholic faith when he was in his 30s—partly at behest of his devout Catholic mother, Monica—Augustine had come to the conclusion that our knowledge of God, in this life, would remain incomplete. But that never stopped him from searching. And his search was a deeply personal toil. Certainly, there were plenty of intellectual guideposts and guides along the way. But the ultimate source of his knowledge came from his own experience. It was if he had to first stumble through the dark to see the light.

“In Augustine there were two natures, one passionate and sensuous, the other eagerly high-minded and truth seeking,” writes Williston Walker in his book, A History of the Christian Church. The Confessions is very much a story of his struggle with these two natures. Yet, this is not all that he revealed in his Confessions. He also grappled with having to abandon his secluded, private life of close friends as he increasingly became a popular public figure.

He came to write his Confessions in his 40s, a time in his life when he had achieved a modicum of admiration, notoriety, and respect; the book would become a best-seller. He began the book around 397, a few years after he had been appointed Bishop of Hippo (now Annaba in Algeria). And yet he wrote the book not to boast; rather he wrote it to cut himself down to size, to “make out a case against himself before an audience which was predisposed to believe him a saintly man,” writes R.S. Pine-Coffin in his introduction to his translation of the Confessions that I used for this essay.

Indeed, Augustine wanted to show the world that he was not always the flawless person many of his parishioners perhaps imagined him to be. He did not want to be put on a pedestal. All his life he longed to be close to people; he adored his friends and was rarely alone. Here, at the peak of his career as a Roman cleric, he suddenly felt more unknown and isolated than ever. And he didn’t like it. Peter Brown writes in his exceptional book, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography:

“As Augustine faced his congregation, perched up on his cathedra, he will realize how little he would ever penetrate to the inner world of the rows of faces…. And Augustine’s insistence on revealing his most intimate tensions in the Confessions, is in part a reaction to his own isolation: it is, also, a deliberate answer to a deep-seated tendency of African Christians to idealize their bishops. In a world of long-established clerical stereotypes, it is a manifesto for the unexpected, hidden qualities of the inner world—the concentia.”

He also wrote the book to make himself better known among his ecclesiastical contemporaries near and far. Brown writes:

“Augustine will also have to resign himself increasingly to a purely African circle of episcopal colleagues. The other men to whose friendship he felt entitled—Paulinus at Nola, Jerome in Bethlehem—remained far away. He would have to content himself with ‘knowing their soul in their books’. This phrase might be a polite cliché for some Later Roman correspondents; but as we have seen, it forced Augustine to commit himself to writing the Confessions. For this book, at least, could carry his soul across the sea to the friends whose absence tantalized him. It is the touching reaction of a man drifting against his will into a world of impersonal relationships.”

Augustine intrigued me. I saw something of myself in him. What most intrigued me was not his struggles with his concupiscence or his fame but rather his profound thinking and beautiful writing. And his desire to be known—to reveal his depths—in his writing. That is to say, I was far less interested in his way with women and his public life than I was with his way with words and how he used them to explore and express himself, to make himself better known to others, to connect with others. It was one of the motivations that led me early in life into writing, and partly what has inspired me to write this Underlined Sentences column.

Educated as a rhetorician, Augustine became a teacher who would later leave teaching to become a priest in the Catholic church. Above all, his Confessions is a kind of conversation with God. In this conversation, Augustine speaks and asks questions and God answers in passages from the scriptures. What’s at stake here is that Augustine so much wants to know who he is and who God is. He also wants to know what genuine happiness is and how to find it. Throughout much of the Confessions, he is often on the cusp of finding out. It not only drove his life. This search is what drives the story; it’s the plot line.

This all came clear to me one day during that class I took. As the professor, an erudite Oxford educated theologian and priest, spoke about Augustine’s search for God and for himself in the Confessions, he said something so startling—and seemingly off the cuff—that it has stayed with me all these years later. He said, “For Saint Augustine, only God knows us better than we know ourselves. So, the search for self and the search for God are one and the same damned thing.”

These words cracked something open in me. They made me think I was in the right place at the right time in my life. They inspired me to apply to the seminary, which I did and into which I was accepted in the fall of 1995. All of this speaks volumes about how a good teacher can change the direction of a student’s life. I could belittle my role in this by saying that all I did was show up. But a writer friend of mine once said that’s what a meaningful and creative life is all about: just showing up. And it did take a considerable amount of time outside of my full-time job to do this. I like to think there was a confluence of energies that offer some validity to the idea of how when the student is ready, the teacher appears. It’s a form of divine intervention. I think it’s what happened to Augustine and it had also happened to me when we were both about the same age and at a kind of crossroads in our lives.

Perhaps it was the same confluence of energies that led me to a little-known book by Hannah Arendt, best known for her masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism. This other book, Love and Saint Augustine, was Arendt’s 1929 doctoral thesis. (An English translation, including revisions by Arendt, was not published until 1996.) I’d only learned about this book while preparing this essay, and in reading it I found something that was similar to what that professor said some 30 years ago. In her book, Arendt writes: “Self-discovery and discovery of God coincide, because by withdrawing into myself I have ceased to belong to the world. This is the reason that God then comes to my help. In a way I already belong to God.”

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“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

“History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

As I observe the seemingly endless narratives of ongoing and future wars, traitorous machinations of Deep State snakes, curious “assassination” plots, BBB legislation designed to set the stage for financial Armageddon, and the coverup of a global pedophile network implicating the ruling elite, I can’t help but be reminded of Shakespeare’s assertion the world is a stage and we are all merely bit players in this tragedy disguised as a comedy. Based on what I’ve witnessed over the last several months, I would change the line to “the world is staged”. This really came into focus during the Israel – Iran dustup several weeks ago. The entire episode had a theatrical vibe to it, with Israel assassinating key military leaders and the top nuclear scientists of Iran, while both sides launched missiles at each other for a week or so.

What passes for war these days is now missiles and drones lighting up the sky for TV cameras while inflicting relatively moderate damage and few casualties. Only Putin seems to understand wars are won on the ground, with armies destroying the enemy in brutal bloody combat. Israel appears to have been tasked with lighting the fuse on this Fourth Turning powder-keg of religious hate, neo-con retribution, globalist new world order schemes, Deep State machinations, and an empire of debt, delusion, and degradation in its death throes.

Did Trump know Netanyahu was going to launch a surprise attack on Iran, knowing he lacked the firepower to eliminate their underground nuclear facilities? Or was Trump fully onboard with the plan to distract Iran with fake negotiations, so they would let their guard down? In either case, Netanyahu is calling the shots and Trump has been doing his bidding. Trump, the self-proclaimed peace president, has misled those of us who believed he wanted to end the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts.

When Israel began getting pummeled by Iranian hypersonic missiles, proving their Iron Dome wasn’t living up to its hype, Netanyahu knew he could appeal to Trump’s vanity to save the day by using our bunker busters on the underground nuclear facilities. Israel knew they couldn’t take out those facilities but started the war anyway. Their plan all along was to have Trump do the dirty work. The question is whether Trump was in on it all along or forced into it by Bibi’s puppet master machinations.

Everything seemed to be staged once the U.S. entered the fray. The U.S. alerted the Iranians their three underground facilities were going to be obliterated. The Iranians then warned the U.S. about their token retaliatory attack on our Qatar air base. And then an arranged cease fire the next day. When do enemies warn each other about coming attacks, inflict no casualties, and already have a cease fire pre-arranged? When it is nothing but a show.

A cease fire is not the end of hostilities. Israel is rearming with the help of their good buddy Trump and his military industrial complex cronies. Iran is rearming with the help of Russia, China and North Korea. The lull in hostilities will be broken by Israel, as they continue their Gaza genocide, with nary a peep from their bought off swamp creatures in DC and have turned their sites on obliterating Syria as part of their Greater Israel master plan.

Netanyahu will stop at nothing to instigate a WW3 scenario with Iran, creating the conditions which would “force” Trump to engage our military, compelling Russia, China, Turkey and the rest of the Middle East to become involved. The masses have been lulled back to sleep with the Epstein and Obama narratives being flogged by our overlords, but a Middle East and possibly global conflagration is only a few missteps or miscalculations away.

We are now in the 17th year of this Fourth Turning, with a likely climax before 2032. Based on a very limited sample of three previous Crisis periods in American history, we would expect a major war or wars, with unthinkable destruction and death. With the technological “advancements” in warfare this destruction and death could be unleashed in an instant. But no one seems worried or concerned with this outcome, as the EU, with the military backing of the U.S., continues to provoke Putin into responding in a way that will ignite WW3.

The rationale for this insane strategy is to distract their enraged citizens from the fact they have encouraged a Muslim invasion which has destroyed the social fabric of their nations and destroyed the financial health of their states. As always, when politicians have created domestic chaos by their reckless blunders, they seek a foreign bogeyman as a dire threat in order to rally the people to their side.

The three stooges: Macron, Merz and Starmer, with the orchestrator of lies and propaganda – Ursula von der Leyen – continue to financially and militarily support the corrupt Ukrainian cokehead even after the war has already been won by Putin’s armies the old-fashioned way, by destroying the enemy’s armies, industrial capacity, logistical hubs, and energy infrastructure. Of course, the peacemaker, Trump, who was going to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, tells the American public he is no longer arming the midget dictator/actor, while selling the arms to the EU so they can give them to the Ukrainian “hero”. The grift runs deep, with the U.S. military industrial complex reaping riches, which are dispensed to corrupt congress critters, and foreign leaders. Zelensky and his totalitarian regime skim billions from the “aid” they receive, as they bleed their nation dry in a fruitless effort to stop Putin at the behest of their overlords.

Very few people can comprehend the potential loss of life in the coming Fourth Turning wars. Since they only happen every 80 years or so, those who experienced the death and destruction have passed into the great beyond. About 5% of the entire adult white male population were killed, with another 4% wounded, during the American Civil War. An equivalent loss today would be 5 million dead and 4 million wounded. Approximately 75 million people died, with tens of millions wounded during WW2. This death toll was about 3.2% of the global population. An equivalent death toll today would be 250 million.

This level of death is incomprehensible to the indoctrinated ignorant masses, staring at their igadgets, rooting for their sports teams, going further into debt buying shit they don’t need with money they don’t have, eating toxic manufactured corporate foodstuff, and oblivious to history. Technology exists to create and exceed the level of casualties described, and this technology is in the hands of unhinged psychopaths ruling our nations.

Even though Fourth Turnings follow a general pattern of an initial trigger, one or more regeneracies, conflict, and climax, the aspects and specifics will always be different, due to technological advancements, cultural changes, financial dynamics, and the particular traits of the leaders making the crucial decisions during the Crisis. The progression of technology since the American Revolution has increased the ability to kill vast numbers of human beings efficiently and quickly. The level of firepower has probably increased by a factor of one hundred or more as we progressed from the American Revolution Fourth Turning to the Civil War Fourth Turning to the Word War II Fourth Turning to the yet to be named Fourth Turning we are living through today.

Technology has also drastically increased the ability to communicate and coordinate forces during conflict. During the American Revolution and Civil War, armies often stumbled upon each other by accident. Lee’s battle plan was accidentally left on the ground by one of his messengers, letting McClellan prepare for his attack at Antietam. Stonewall Jackson was killed by his own men, because visual scouting was the only reliable method to determine your enemy’s position. World War II saw a huge advancement in communication technology, but glitches often resulted in mass casualties.

The British breaking the German communication codes and the Americans breaking the Japanese codes were crucial in winning that war. The Americans were able to shoot down Yamamoto’s plane because they broke the code. These enhancements also created the opportunity for misinformation. By creating a fake army under Patton and leaking that information to the Germans, they were able to convince them the D-Day landings would be at Calais, rather than Normandy.

We are currently experiencing warfare on multiple fronts, through multiple means, with technology the key factor in conducting this warfare. This technological “progress” has been neither beneficial nor positive for humanity. In fact, it has drastically dehumanized our world and with the onset of AI, could lead to humanity’s demise. Huxley’s prescient warnings from over seven decades ago have come to fruition.

“Advances in technology do not abolish the institution of war; they merely modify its manifestations.” – Aldous Huxley

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” – Aldous Huxley

I’ve been speculating whether the advancements in technology could possibly alleviate the level of death and destruction in the looming conflicts. But I believe that is a forlorn hope. War is being waged against the American people and most of the citizens in this world on a daily basis and multiple fronts that did not exist during the previous Fourth Turning. Propaganda did exist prior to the last Fourth Turning, as described by Edward Bernays just before the onset of the Depression/WWII Fourth Turning in his 1928 book – Propaganda:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

Essentially, he described an early version of the Deep State, as men in the shadows behind the curtain manipulating the masses using whatever means to achieve the ends desired by themselves and their cohorts. This was done inefficiently and haphazardly one hundred years ago using newspapers and radio. But the inception of television, the internet, social media and artificial intelligence laid the groundwork for the perfect Orwellian surveillance and propaganda network, spanning the globe.

The same exact message created by those “invisible government” controllers is delivered on multiple platforms simultaneously to overwhelm the senses and make the masses believe rather than think critically. These technologically powerful propaganda techniques have proven to be incredibly fruitful in manipulating the masses into obeying and following orders.

The covid scam brought to fruition decades of propaganda enhancements and government school indoctrination, convincing billions the annual flu was a lethal pandemic and the only way to survive was to be injected with a toxic experimental Big Pharma enriching gene altering concoction, which did not keep you from getting the flu, spreading the flu, or dying from the flu. But it did kill many instantaneously, continues to cause myocarditis and infertility in young people, has driven the mortality and disability rates for young people higher, and has spiked the number of turbo cancers.

The covid mRNA jab is a depopulation war against humanity being waged by Gates, Soros, and the other globalist psychopaths who constitute a major faction of the invisible government that really calls the shots. They have realized psychological manipulation/warfare against the masses is effortless, efficient, deniable, obscure, and extremely effective in manipulating their opinions without the use of force. This “soft” totalitarian state, enslaving the masses with debt, delusions and debauchery, has successfully navigated our world for decades. Again, Huxley nailed it when describing how the masses would come to love their servitude.

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” – Aldous Huxley

The war for our souls has been waged in the government-controlled K-12 social indoctrination centers disguised as schools. They teach obedience, feelings over thinking, dependency on their government overlords, and to never question authority. Any child who doesn’t adhere to their doctrines is immediately diagnosed with ADHD and heavily drugged. Female teachers stop at nothing to feminize boys, making them act like girls.

These indoctrinated drones then move onto universities completely controlled by left wing professors and administrators who further indoctrinate them with socialist and communist doctrines. They have won the war for our youth by having matriculated millions of non-thinking, non-questioning, outright morons, who are addicted to their phones, fast food, and porn, into society. The degradation of our moral character as a nation is directly attributable to this war on our youth.

The Epstein Mossad pedophile/blackmail coverup and the unearthing of documents proving an Obama/Clinton treasonous plot to undermine a duly elected president is essentially a war within the Deep State/Invisible Government for control of who dictates how we are going to be controlled. None of this is for the good of the American people. The ruling elite will always protect themselves. Justice and the law are meaningless to them.

The Constitution is an outdated piece of paper in their warped view. We are worthless peasants to them. They will go to war and use us as cannon fodder to keep their treasure chests filled. There will be hearings, accusations, ten thousand articles written, hundreds of Fox News interviews, and conservative influencers will make millions flogging these stories, but no one of substance will be perp walked or spend one minute in prison. It’s a big club, and we ain’t in it.

The anger, vitriol and animosity oozing from the pores of every critical thinking American, Russian, Chinese, and Western European, who can clearly decipher the globalist agenda of creating a new world order, with CBDCs, social credit scores, 15 minute cities, eating meatless meat and bugs, trapped in a 24 hour electronic surveillance gulag, and artificial intelligence weaponized to control us all, will come to a boil once a particular event triggers the chaotic unwind. Keeping the masses distracted and amused by their electronic gadgets, in debt up to their eyeballs, and running faster and faster on their hamster wheels to make a buck that loses value every single day, works as long as the economy and financial markets provide the appearance of stability and growth.

Our glorious leaders had to pass the “big beautiful bill” adding another $3 trillion of debt to the $21 trillion already projected over the next ten years, bringing our future national debt to a nice round $60 trillion by 2035. Their solution to our debt problem is to add an infinite amount of more debt. They believe they can pull off this insane scam because they believe the USD will retain its reserve status forever. But Russia, China and the rest of the BRIC countries may add a dose of reality to that American dream scenario. And that is the main reason for the animosity towards Russia and China exhibited by the neo-cons and Deep Staters who know their American empire is in peril.

In my opinion, the most likely trigger for the more violent phase of this Fourth Turning would be a financial crisis causing a global financial meltdown. With the stock market at all-time highs, bitcoin at all-time highs, low unemployment, positive GDP, and Trump declaring America is great again, there is virtually no “expert” predicting a financial crisis, just like 2007/2008. What the “expert” stock market shills fail to acknowledge is a housing bubble 15% greater than the epic 2006 bubble, leaving home prices 90% above the long-term median. The last bubble burst in 2008/2009 did a bit of financial damage. But this time the commercial real estate market is even far worse than the residential market. Extend and pretend doesn’t work forever. This Jenga tower of debt is teetering.

Both the Fed and their Wall Street owner banks have massive levels of unrealized losses due to purchasing Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities when interest rates were close to zero (courtesy of the Fed). The banks currently have $450 billion of unrealized losses, while the Federal Reserve has over $900 billion. If these losses were realized, our entire banking system would be destroyed. They all seem to be in a bit of a pickle, but no one in the MSM, DC, or financial industry says a word. They use the Sergeant Shultz mantra – “I see nothing!!!”. The reality is we are in an extremely risky situation.

Stock market valuations, based on historic measures, have only been higher during the dot.com bubble, and are currently 30% higher than the long-term averages. The shysters, who make their money fleecing the average schmuck, have convinced millions to invest at these all-time highs with narratives about a new paradigm created by AI and crypto-currencies. This time is always different.

It’s almost as if the overlords pulling the strings are expanding this everything bubble to mammoth proportions before “pulling it” and creating the crisis they need in order to save the day by implementing their “Great Taking” of your 401k, IRA, mutual funds, and bank accounts, while offering CBDCs as compensation for absconding with your life savings. They would get the added benefit of pinning the catastrophe on Trump. Based on the almost absolute compliance by the masses during the covid scam, our ruling elite controllers are confident they could pull this off. If not, civil war would be the alternate outcome.

There is a myriad of other more ambiguous potential triggers which could light the fuse on this powder keg, disguised as civilized society. There are quite a few lunatics running countries with the ability to launch a nuclear missile. One miscalculation, with additional dominos falling, and the world turns into an ashtray. Earthquake and volcanic activity seem to be increasing. A volcanic winter caused by a massive eruption would cause global havoc and starvation. A massive grid failure due to a solar event, EMP, or just plain incompetence would cause pandemonium. NATO pushing Russia too far, with missiles launched at Germany, triggering treaty obligations as in 1914, with dire consequences for the globe. The assassination of Putin and ascension of Medvedev to president/dictator would surely ignite WW3. China invading Taiwan would certainly get the fireworks going.

The truth is no one knows what will initiate the next bloody phase, but you can’t deny the volatile concoction simmering, as societal collapse awaits. I know I sound like a broken record, but Strauss & Howe conjured up four potential outcomes to this Fourth Turning, and I think their educated guesses are on target and deeply concerning. The long road ahead will be stormy and dangerous. Hopefully we come out whole on the other side with a renewed appreciation for our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Currently, the odds for that outcome seem long.

Strauss & Howe provide four possible outcomes to our current Crisis:

1. This Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. For this Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection and bad luck.
2. The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rythm – which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance – could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. Such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.
3. The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. The nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, the Soviet Union only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a thread in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most lethal war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.
4. Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.

Reprinted with permission from The Burning Platform.

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In the Netherlands (where I now live), on June 11 at 5:00 a.m., the Dienst Speciale Interventies (Special Intervention Service) invaded the home of lawyer Arno van Kessel. This elite counterterrorism unit combines personnel from the Dutch National Police Corps, the Dutch military police and the Dutch Armed Forces.

Rather than stopping terrorism, however, this unit was the one terrorizing the Kessel family, including his wife and three children, who were held at gunpoint. Kessel was then blindfolded and taken to a high-security penal institution in Vught, Netherlands.

According to the Dutch newspaper, De Andere Krant, Kessel is being charged with having “violent intentions.” But the Public Prosecution Service has not provided any evidence for this.

Instead, the true reason for his arrest seems obvious: He and his partner, Peter Stussen, have filed a court case against Mark Rutt (former Dutch prime minister), Hugo de Jonge (former Minister of Health, Welfare ande Sports), Agnes Kant (managing director of the Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Centre Lareb), Albert Bourla (CEO Pfizer) and Bill Gates (computer geek turned pandemic specialist). Kessel and Stussen have compiled over a hundred pages of charges, demonstrating that, rather than life-saving, the shots are injurious and deadly (and that the harm they caused was known to the defendants).

Unique to Kessel’s filing is the citing of Bill Gates himself as one of the defendants. Other international cases defending those injured by the vaccine target only the pharmaceutical companies and politicians. Lawyer Meike Terhorst told De Andere Krant that:

[English translation]…as far as I know, Gates is not being prosecuted anywhere in the world. Except in the Netherlands. He won’t accept that, and don’t underestimate his influence. By arresting Van Kessel now, his case will be discredited, increasing the likelihood of its failure.

Kessel has been at the forefront of the Dutch resistance to the COVID deception for the last five years. He explained to De Andere Krant that he first woke up to the COVID-19 hoax in May 2020, after he reviewed the Dutch government’s extensive Corona Emergency Act:

[English translation]…I know how long officials take to write a law. My first question… was: When did those officials start writing this corona emergency law… The [Bar Association] professor was honest and said: The first quarter of 2019. That’s when I suddenly woke up. COVI9-19 wasn’t recognized until 20 February 2020. Yet, in the first quarter of 2019, they started to write the emergency law for it. I smell a rat, as they say in America. It was the eye-opener for me. I woke up from the world I lived in.

Rather than going back to sleep, Kessel dedicated himself to protecting not only Dutch citizens but the people of the world from this medical coup that has injured and killed millions of people through lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

You can donate to a fundraiser, launched by Arno van Kessel’s children, to help cover household expenses in their father’s absence, as well as pay for his legal defence at GoFundMe.

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The straying sheep you have not recalled; the lost you have not sought; the injured you have not bound up; the strong you have not guarded; and even what was sound, you have destroyed. (St. Augustine, Sermon on the Shepherds, Sermon 46)

There is a particular cruelty in offering welcome without truth. It is the cruelty of the smiling gatekeeper who opens the door to a collapsing house. For many, this is no abstraction. It is the lived story of men and women like Joseph Sciambra, who endured the hellish aftermath of ecclesiastical neglect—wounded not only by sin but by the silence of those charged to proclaim the Word.

Sciambra’s life once embodied what the world calls liberation: sex, affirmation, indulgence. In San Francisco’s Castro District, he was celebrated—and destroyed. He tells of priests who encouraged him, of parishes adorned with rainbow flags, and of a Church that smiled gently while he bled. Only when he encountered those faithful to Tradition—priests who spoke clearly of Heaven and Hell, sin and grace—did his descent stop. Their fidelity, not their softness, saved him.

So, when Pope Francis called for the Church to apologize to homosexuals, Sciambra responded with a profound yes—not for past harshness but for the Church’s failure to speak the truth in love. “When I hear Catholics say ‘you were born gay,’ I think: My God, they are killing us.” He meant it literally. His friends had died. He had nearly died. What he needed was not affirmation but salvation.

This is not a footnote. It is a headline. The real victims of clerical cowardice are not those offended by doctrine but those denied it. Those who go unhealed because the Cross has been replaced with a shrug. Those who search for transformation and are handed platitudes. Those whose hunger for God is met with a soft-serve gospel that comforts but never convicts.

Into that wasteland, Ralph Martin stood as a clarion voice. Not shrill. Not angry. Clear. Over decades, through his roles at Sacred Heart Major Seminary and Renewal Ministries, Martin has consistently sounded the alarm—not with panic but with sobriety. His work A Crisis of Truth (1982) was already prophetic in its time, diagnosing the cultural and theological drift within the Church just as it began to take root. Nearly four decades later, his sequel of sorts, A Church in Crisis: Pathways Forward (2020), exposed that drift’s bitter fruit: confusion around salvation, doctrine, sexuality, and the very nature of Jesus Christ.

Martin’s thesis was and remains simple: truth is not something we invent. Truth is not a sentiment to be sculpted for palatability. Truth is a Person—Jesus Christ. In Him, we are determined. In Him, the clarity we fear is revealed not as harshness but as mercy with edges. The courage to proclaim that truth is not self-righteous indignation, nor is silence a virtue. What we are called to is respectful boldness—a Gospel-shaped courage that loves enough to speak what is eternally consequential.

And now, he has been dismissed.

No trial. No theological disputation. Only vague “concerns about theological perspectives,” offered by a newly installed archbishop whose first major act was the removal of Martin, along with other faithful scholars. It was not an act of discernment. It was a purge. A Machiavellian excision of those whose fidelity preceded him. A consolidation of control under the banner of “renewal.”

But the deeper scandal is this: truth itself has once again been made suspect by those who claim to protect it; fidelity is now framed as divisiveness; the prophetic vocation—so central to Christ, so present in the saints, so needed in this hour—is recast as theological inconvenience.

And so we must ask: What theology, then, is being preserved?

Is it a theology where ambiguity is mercy? Where pastoral fog is preferred to the hard edge of repentance? Where unity is prized more than truth, even when unity conceals a lie? If Ralph Martin’s Gospel proclamation—thoroughly grounded in Scripture, magisterial teaching, and lived fruitfulness—can be dismissed with a bureaucratic shrug, we are not witnessing prudence. We are witnessing fear—and worse: clericalism dressed as discernment.

This is not about one man. It is about the cost of clarity.

For every Joseph Sciambra, there are thousands more—unnamed and unseen—wounded by shepherds who chose ambiguity over authority, approval over truth. We will pay the price—in malformed vocations; in a generation of priests unable to speak clearly of sin and salvation; in churches where sentimentality substitutes for sanctity. And the greatest price will be paid before the Eternal Judge, where every evasion, every compromised whisper, will resound.

The legacy of Ralph Martin will not be etched in faculty minutes or episcopal press releases. It will live in the souls who heard him and found Christ. It will live in those who were not affirmed in confusion but restored in truth—those who were not made comfortable but made whole.

And that is a voice no bishop can silence.

Thank you, Ralph. We stand with you. We stand with you because we stand with Him who is Truth, in whom there is no confusion, no compromise, and no crisis, only the invitation to live—and proclaim—the Gospel without fear.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

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England is rapidly disappearing as a white ethnic nation.  Eighteen  British cities, including London, Manchester, Sheffield, Brighton, Oxford, and Salisbury have Muslim immigrant-invader mayors. See this.

Twelve year old Courtney Wright was sent home from school in Warwickshire for wearing a Union Jack dress to school on Culture Celebration Day.  She was supposed to be celebrating the cultures of immigrant-invaders, not English culture.  For her offense, she was sent home.  In Britain, Culture Celebration Day excludes British culture, a hateful racist thing.

The disintegration of ethnic Britain is approaching light speed.  Less than one week ago the British government posted a job opening for a Shariah Law Administrator. See this.

Thirteen years ago Anjem Chaudhry, a leader of Muslim immigrant-invaders in England, said that the British would be under Muslim rule and Shariah law by 2027. See this.

With the largest cities governed by Muslim mayors and  the British government’s job posting for a Shariah law administrator, Chaudhry’s prediction seems on the money.  The current ethnic British protests against the overrunning of their country are being put down by the white British police.

The situation is the same in the US, Scandinavia, and Western Europe.

The state of Maine has hired an immigrant-invader as a police officer with the authority to arrest American citizens. See this. California police departments have been hiring illegals for more than a year.  The US now has immigrant-invaders as judges, prosecutors, and university professors.  As Chaudhry said, as Muslim power grows, we will replace Western law and social mores. 

This is what French novelist Jean Raspail predicted in 1973 and Enoch Powell predicted in 1968.  The dumbshit Western intellectuals snickered and pointed their fingers.  Having been failed by its intellectual class, which endorsed Sodom & Gomorrah and a Tower of Babel, Western civilization disintegrated.  What is left of it?  

The belief system has been destroyed. Law and media have been weaponized against white ethnics. Free speech has been suppressed.  A merit-based society has been replaced by an institutionalized DEI society that discriminates against white ethnicities. Schools teach white kids that they are racists and must stand aside for people of color. Feminists have destroyed the white family, thus dispensing with the basis of white society. Readers can add to the disasters that we have allowed to be inflicted on us.  With the wars that are being stirred up, it appears that white ethnicities are on the verge of being exterminated.  Where is a leader when Western civilization needs one?

Perhaps social Darwinism is true after all.  People without survival instincts do not survive.

The post The Camp of the Saints appeared first on LewRockwell.

A headine today says “Trump voices frustration with Putin, says ceasefire deadline will shorten”, and the story reports thaat Trump has intensified his threat against Russia by shortening his warning-period down from 50 days to 10 days. The thousands of reader-comments at that story at Yahoo News are intensely pro-Trump and anti-Putin, as-if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 had not been in response to the U.S. Government’s take-over of Ukraine (a country bordering Russia) on 20 February 2014 in a violent U.S. coup that U.S.-and-allied ‘news’ media reported instead as having been a democratic revolution in Ukraine. Ukraine is the nearest of all countries to Moscow and therefore the one nation that Russia’s Government had always said it would never allow to become a member-nation of NATO. Have the American (and allied) publics been blind to the actual history here? What were the Minsk Accords about? (The U.S. Government had no part in them but Russia’s Government did because they didn’t want to need to invade Ukraine in order to prevent that nation from joining NATO and placing American nuclear missiles a mere five minutes away from The Kremlin.) Then on 17 December 2021, Russia warned both NATO and America (though this too was not reported by U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media) that if they didn’t stop their drive to get Ukraine into NATO, Russia would need to do what it must in order to prevent that. On 7 July 2022, both NATO and the U.S. responded by saying they’d never comply with any such demand on the part of Russia. It was as-if when JFK had threatenned Cuba and Moscow if Russia were to place its nukes in Cuba, the U.S. was the aggressor. But this time Putin is called by U.S.-and-allied media an aggressor for refusing too allow U.S. missiles in Ukraine to decapitate Russia’s central command. How stupid (and deceived) does the public have to be to believe that Putin was the aggressor on 24 February 2022?

I documented all of this in detail in an article on 6 March 2025, “Why America, the EU, and Ukraine, Should Lose to Russia in Ukraine’s War”. It was submitted to, and rejected by, and never mentioned in, any and all U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media. The censorship here is as bad as it was in the Soviett Union.

On 4 December 2024, my article reporting that Trump’s policy on Ukraine would turn out to be what Biden’s was, was the following:

“Reuters reports Trump is set to continue Biden’s policies on Ukraine.”

On December 4th, Reuters headlined “Trump’s plan for Ukraine comes into focus: Territorial concessions but NATO off the table”, and reported from named and unnamed sources, what the proposals have been by individuals who have publicly stated their own recommended policies regarding the war in Ukraine, and all of these individuals have been neoconservative, which is to say that they assume that the U.S. must continue to be the dominant force and ultimate decision-maker regarding Ukraine and its international relations (indeed, international relations everywhere) — continue to include Ukraine as being a part of the U.S. empire.

The ONLY one of that article’s named sources who has actually been appointed by Trump to be a part of his Administration regard Ukraine is Keith Kellogg, whom Trump has given this precise portfolio, of being the United States Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia. And, so, Kellogg’s 9,000-word atrociously written plan — which was superbly outlined, summarized, and linked-to on December 2nd at the merely 1,000-word crystal-clear and accurate “What’s Inside Keith Kellogg’s Ukraine Peace Plan?”, and so I won’t say anything more about it — does actually have some important confirmation by today’s Donald Trump, because Trump gave this portfolio to Kellogg. This plan is the main one that the Reuters article cites. Reuters accurately characterizes what it says, including that, “Trump’s advisers would try forcing Moscow and Kyiv into negotiations with carrots and sticks, including halting military aid to Kyiv unless it agrees to talk but boosting assistance if Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses.”

In other words, Trump’s plan is to threaten Russia — which is clearly heading toward victory in Ukraine — by “boosting assistance if Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses.”

Notice there that Reuters doesn’t want its readers to know that Russia is clearly heading toward victory in Ukraine, and that it ALSO doesn’t want them to know that that word “boosting” would be applied specifically to constitute boosting-to-UKRAINE, which means to CONTINUE the Biden Administration’s policy regarding this war: i.e., to intensify America’s war against Russia.

Another vaguery in that article is “NATO membership for Ukraine would be put on hold.” The actual statement in the Kellogg plan is that Trump should “put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees [FOR UKRAINE — so the U.S. Government would CONTINUE to control Ukraine].” Putin has repeatedly made unambiguously clear that one of his three NON-negotiable requirements in order to end this war is to make Ukrainian membership in Nato IMPOSSIBLE — not merely prohibited in the short term, but impossible ever. The Kellogg plan fails even to address ANY of Russia’s three bare-minimum requirements (those three non-negotiable requirements) in order to end its proxy-war against the U.S. empire’s war against Russia, that is being waged in the battlefields of Ukraine.

In other words: Trump’s policy toward Russia will be Biden’s policy toward Russia, and this is a policy that would lead inevitably to WW3, because the U.S. Government is — in its actions and not merely in its words — just as determined to conquer (control) Russia, as Russia is determined NOT to be controlled by ANY foreign power.

(And, so, too, we know why both the Reuters article’s headline, “Trump’s plan for Ukraine comes into focus: Territorial concessions but NATO off the table”, and its report, are vaguely written, so as to avoid calling their readers’ attention to what the reality is that they are pretending to be informing them about. Readers who buy such ‘journalism’ are buying propaganda. Both America’s elected politicians and its ‘news’-media are designed to fool — not inform — the public. I provide links to my articles that provide the evidence for my allegations, because I seek ONLY intelligent readers, and because intelligent readers demand access to the evidence in order to be able to judge it for themselves.)

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

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Author’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2: Smallpox Comes to Boston, in our new book (published today) Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality.

Cotton Mather was, along with his father Increase Mather, co-pastor of the Congregationalist Old North Meeting House in Boston, where he continued to preach the Puritan theology of his forefathers. A child prodigy, he attended Harvard at age eleven and remains the youngest student in the college’s history. Like Newton, Mather perceived the world to be comprised of two realms—the supernatural and the natural—and he saw no contradiction between these worlds. On the one hand, he was a strong supporter of empirical, experimental science. On the other hand, he believed in the existence of devils and witches who could exert their power in the world and do evil. During the Salem Witch Trials, he served as a consultant to the presiding judges and defended his view of the matter in his 1693 book Wonders of the Invisible World.

The trials were unique in the history of American jurisprudence because the court admitted so-called “spectral evidence”—that is, testimony of a witness who claimed that the accused appeared to her and harmed her in a dream or a vision. The proceedings got especially spooky when some witnesses cried out as though they were being tormented while the accused were questioned. When asked for his opinion of spectral evidence, Mather pointed out that it could be proper evidence, but he cautioned that the Devil could also assume the image of an innocent person.

During the witch trials, witnesses seemed to be suffering from invisible causes, and they claimed they were being tormented by apparitions that only they could see. Were the witnesses pretending, suffering from intoxication or illness, or really being tormented by witches doing the Devil’s work? The judges concluded that, of the two hundred accused, twenty had indeed practiced witchcraft on the witnesses. They drew this conclusion with no reliable means of knowing whether it was indeed the cause. We now look back on the Witch Trials and marvel at the superstition of people at the end of the 17th century. However, when confronted with a pathology whose cause is invisible, it is natural and rational for people to speculate about the cause and its cure, even if they have no reliable means of knowing it.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Cotton Mather seems to have turned his attention increasingly to natural science and submitted multiple papers to the Royal Society in London, which made him a fellow in 1713. That fall, a virulent measles outbreak hit Boston and killed his wife, three of his children, and his maidservant. His diary entries about his terrible trial are heartbreaking to read.

November 9, “Between three and four in the Afternoon, my dear, dear, dear Friend [wife] expired.”

November 14, “The two Newborns, are languishing in the Arms of Death…”

November 15, “… my little Jerusha. The dear little Creature lies in dying Circumstances.”

November 18, “About Midnight, little Eleazar died.” November 20, “Little Martha died, about ten a clock, A.M.”

November 21, “…Betwixt 9 h. and 10 h. at night, my lovely Jerusha Expired. She was 2 years, and about 7 months old. Just before she died, she asked me to pray with her; which I did… Lord I am oppressed; undertake for me!”

November 23, “…My poor Family is now left without any Infant in it, or any under seven Years of Age…”

Why exactly the Boston measles epidemic of November 1713 was so virulent is not understood, though it’s likely the New England colonial settlers did not have the same level of herd immunity against measles that prevailed in Britain and Europe at the time. In his October 30 diary entry, Mather wrote that the disease was much worse “in families where they conflict with poverty.” While Mather was relatively affluent, one wonders if, that autumn, Boston was poorly provisioned with foods containing Vitamin A, whose deficiency is strongly associated with severe measles illness.

Mather’s devastating loss intensified his interest in disease and how to treat it. His 1714 letter to the Society, confirming his favorable opinion of smallpox inoculation, was characteristic of his avid curiosity about nature and medicine at this time. Seven years later, in 1721, he was presented with the unhappy opportunity of putting the theory of variolation into practice when the British passenger ship HMS Seahorse arrived in Boston from Barbados with a crew of sailors infected with smallpox and transmitted it to other sailors in the harbor. On May 26, 1721, Mather noted in his diary, “The grievous calamity of the small pox has now entered the town.”

Mather and a Harvard physician named Zabdiel Boylston advocated inoculating the town’s population with inoculum taken from the relatively small number who were already infected. Using a needle dipped into a smallpox pustule, Boylston inoculated his six-year-old son, his thirty-six- year-old slave, and the slave’s two-year-old son. All experienced relatively mild cases of smallpox without disability or disfigurement. In November, Boylston inoculated thirteen students (including Mather’s son Samuel) and two faculty members at Harvard, all of whom survived the procedure. This emboldened Boylston to inoculate many more.

Ultimately, Boylston and Mather claimed that their experiment proved the efficacy of variolation—that is, that the case fatality rate among their inoculated subjects was considerably lower than that of the uninoculated population that contracted the illness. Records from the time indicate that of Boston’s 10,600 residents, 5,889 people contracted smallpox and 844 died between April 1821 and February 1722, when the final cases were reported. These numbers suggest a case fatality rate of 14.33 percent. Boylston claimed the case fatality rate among his inoculated subjects was around 2 percent.

Cotton Mather’s enthusiasm for smallpox inoculation was perfectly understandable. The experience of losing his wife and three children to measles a few years earlier must have brought him to the brink of despair, reminded him of Job, and tested his deep religious faith. Why would a loving God allow him—a lifelong devoted servant—to suffer such a grievous loss? Mather wondered if it was punishment for sins he’d committed in his past, and he probably contemplated the possibility he had erred in his judgement of the Salem Witch Trials. Under these circumstances, it’s easy to understand why he perceived inoculation to be a gift from God and tool of redemption.

The trouble was that—under the influence of such thoughts and feelings—Mather and Dr. Boylston probably lost their unbiased posture in evaluating the safety and efficacy of inoculation. After performing the procedure just a few times without killing the patients, they seem to have placed great faith in it. It’s possible the procedure worked as intended on some if its subjects. The difficulty in evaluating its safety and efficacy lies in the large number unknown and unquantified factors with which Mather and Boylston contended, starting with the procedure’s crudeness. Dipping a dirty needle into a sick person’s smallpox pustule and then using the needle to perforate a healthy person’s skin provided no means of controlling the purity and quantity of the inoculum.

Within greater Boston, the total number of infected may have been underreported because many suffered only minor symptoms and did not seek medical care. There is also the possibility that Boylston overstated the number of people he inoculated. The Harvard library literature on the controversy states it was around 180. Subtracting the six who died after inoculation leaves 174. The uninoculated case fatality rate of 14.33 percent suggests that around 149 of these subjects would have survived the infection anyway, which suggests that inoculation protected about twenty-five from death.

One also wonders if Boylston’s inoculated subjects were, overall, in better health than many of those who died of smallpox during the outbreak. He claimed his subjects were “of all ages and constitutions,” but the precision and reliability of this assertion is questionable. It’s likely the Harvard students and faculty were some of the healthiest and best nourished in the greater Boston area. On the other hand, the nutrition, possible co-morbidities, and housing quality of all those who purportedly died of smallpox between October 1721 (the outbreak’s deadliest month) and March 1722 were not precisely documented. Smallpox hit poor families the hardest. They were often malnourished, with multiple family members living in cramped, poorly ventilated quarters and sharing the same bed with rarely washed linens—an unwholesome situation that was exacerbated during Boston’s long and severe winters.

Dr. William Douglass, who happened to be the only university-trained (Edinburgh) medical doctor in Boston, was sharply critical of Reverend Mather and Dr. Boylston. In his essays—published in the The New England Courant—he asserted that the inoculation procedure was potentially fatal and that it was likely spreading the disease, especially considering that Boylston and Mather were not placing their inoculated subjects in a regulated quarantine. The publisher of the Courant, James Franklin, entirely agreed with Dr. Douglass’s view of the matter. James’s sixteen- year-old brother, Benjamin Franklin, was the editor, and he probably had a hand in fashioning Douglass’s satirical style.

A passionate debate ensued in Boston’s pamphlets, newspapers and pulpits, with Dr. Douglass criticizing Dr. Boylston as an ignorant practitioner with no more skill than “a cutter of stone,” a double reference to a quarry laborer and to Hippocrates’s proscription to physicians not to “cut for stone”—that is, to operate for kidney stones, which would likely cause more harm than good. He marveled that Boylston could “infect a family in town in the morning and pray to God in the evening that the distemper may not spread.” Cotton Mather and his influential father shot back that inoculation was “a wonderful providence of God.”

Increase Mather wrote a pamphlet on the controversy in which he proposed that getting inoculated was a religious obligation and that Dr. Douglass would likely be pilloried in his native Scotland for defying this obligation. This triggered a response from another prominent clergymen, Reverend John Williams, who asserted that father and son Mather were violating the “Rules of Natural Physick” and making dangerous arguments based on the procedure’s African roots, of which they knew little. Others in Boston who remembered the role played by father and son Mather in the Salem Witch Trials suggested that it was they after all who were practicing witchcraft. Cotton Mather replied that he was not arguing on religious or metaphysical grounds, but from pure empiricism. “Of what Significancy, are most of our Speculations?” he asked. “EXPERIENCE! EXPERIENCE! ‘tis to THEE that the Matter must be referr’d after All.”

Despite stiff opposition, intimidation, and even death threats, Mather and Boylston prevailed in promoting inoculation in the colonies. Two years after the Boston outbreak, Boylston traveled to London, where he published an account of his experiment titled Historical Account of the Small-Pox Inoculated in New England. James Jurin, the Secretary of the Royal Society, was sympathetic to Boylston’s argument, which he concluded was consistent with survey data he solicited from inoculation proponents in England during the same period. Boylston was made a member of the Society in 1726.

The red-hot public debate in Boston over smallpox inoculation in 1721–22 resembled the debate over COVID-19 vaccination in 2021–22. Proponents back then asserted they had obtained enough evidence of the procedure’s safety and efficacy to warrant inoculating the entire population. Detractors argued it was a novel and unproven procedure that could do more harm than good. In 2021, proponents of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines proclaimed they were safe and effective, while critics argued the novel genetic technology had not been sufficiently tested over a sufficiently long period to warrant using it on the entire population, especially on the young and healthy for whom COVID-19 posed little risk.

Both debates recall Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s remark that “science is the topography of ignorance.” There is a great deal we don’t know about why smallpox affected early 18th-century populations in the way it was perceived and recorded at the time. Likewise, the passionate proponents of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines made all manner of efficacy and safety claims that have not been confirmed by humanity’s subsequent experience with these products.

We often make the unexamined assumption that “medical science” is akin to Newtonian mechanics, but this is a gross misconception. The causes of sickness and health—both in individuals and in large populations—are immeasurably more complex and multifactorial than most other objects of scientific analysis. Consider that while many reasonable people often debate about health and disease, none would debate about whether jumping off twenty-story building onto concrete would result in severe injury or death. A complex situation is inevitably riddled with ambiguity and uncertain outcomes and therefore becomes a subject of opposing interpretations and debate.

The human mind also tends to be very uncomfortable with complexity and ambiguity and therefore seeks schemes and tools for cutting through it. When an apparent solution presents itself—especially if the solution offers the promise of substantial personal gain—the observer may become very biased in his evaluation of it.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

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Writes Dom Armentano:

Doug Horne has recently produced a fascinating documentary about multiple casket entries into the Bethesda morgue on the evening of November 22, 1963. It is well done and I urge everyone to watch it on YouTube.

Horne’s most controversial claim is that JFK’s corpse entered the morgue at 6:35 pm (well before the “official” arrival at 7:15 or so) in a gray shipping casket for so-called pre-autopsy surgery to remove evidence of shots from the front. In the video, Horne  asserts at one point that the evidence for both of these claims  is overwhelming.

I  emphatically disagree. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. For an extended analysis of the Lifton/Horne  “early entry” hypothesis, see my 2023 article (based exclusively on ARRB testimony) on this website.

In brief, while there is some evidence that a gray shipping casket may have arrived at the Bethesda morgue at 6:35, there is NO first-hand evidence that anyone saw JFK’s corpse in it; or taken  out of it. None. There is nothing in the R.E. Boyajian Report, for example, that confirms that President Kennedy’s body  was actually in that casket. And there is nothing in the telephone interview that Doug Horne conducted with Boyajian in 1996 that confirms that JFK’s body was in that casket. Indeed, Boyajian told Horne in 1996 that he now had “no memory” of the casket arrival at all! Yikes!

Doug Horne bases the bulk of his “JFK/early-entry” theory on the testimony of Navy corpsman Dennis David. David claimed, among other things, that Dr Boswell told him that night that JFK’s corpse arrived at 6:35 in a gray shipping casket. The implication, of course, is that Dr. Boswell had seen this personally and, importantly, that Dennis David is not confabulating.

The problem here is that when Dr. Boswell testified before the ARRB he stated that he was nowhere near the Bethesda morgue at 6:35 and, therefore, could not have observed any JFK casket entry. Strike one. David’s assertion about the Bosell conversations is further compromised by the fact that he also made highly dubious claims about handling bullet fragments that night and watching a video of the actual JFK autopsy! (He also underwent hypnosis in 1994 to “recover assassination memories”). Strike two.  Finally, when Dennis David was asked specifically whether he himself had seen JFK’s corpse in or out of the shipping casket, he emphatically said that he had NOT.  Strike three. In short, Dennis David provides NO credible first-hand evidence that JFK’s body arrived early for any pre-autopsy surgery.

In short, while Horne is to be applauded for producing a thoroughly engaging video (his cinematic skills are substantial)  his major proposition–that JFK’s corpse arrived in a shipping casket at 6:35–has NOT  (in my judgment) been substantiated  by any “best evidence.”

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Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

“War Pigs” is a powerful antiwar song performed by the band Black Sabbath led by Ozzy Osbourne who recently passed away.  It was written by Osbourne and the other members of his band: Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward. The lyrics 

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death’s construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to Mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds…
Oh Lord yeah!

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor

Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait ’till their judgment day comes, yeah!

Now in darkness, world stops turning
Ashes where the bodies burning
No more war pigs have the power
Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of Judgment, God is calling
On their knees the war pigs crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings…
Oh Lord, yeah!

Ozzy’s widow Sharon explains to anyone in doubt “War Pigs” is an antiwar song.

Link to performance.

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Fiat justitia, ne pereat mundus—Let justice be done, lest the world perish. With these evocative words, Ludwig von Mises sets justice at the heart of his treatise on free market capitalism, Human Action. Echoing the importance of justice, in Law, Legislation and Liberty Friedrich von Hayek described “rules of just conduct” as “the indispensable foundation and limitation of all law.” Hayek considered it important that, “Government certainly ought to be just in all it does.” But what role does the concept of justice play in their analysis?

Many economists consider questions of justice irrelevant to the study of value-free economics. After all, while exchange based on private property must be voluntary, it need not be “just.” Hayek saw it as “an abuse” of the word justice, to evaluate “the joint effects of the actions of many people, even where these were never foreseen or intended,” by reference to whether those effects are “just.” Thus, for example, a rise or fall in prices is neither “just” nor “unjust.” Hayek saw the attempt to evaluate market outcomes by reference to justice as “that anthropomorphism or personification by which naïve thinking tries to account for all self-ordering processes.” He argued that, “A bare fact, or a state of affairs which nobody can change, may be good or bad, but not just or unjust. To apply the term ‘just’ to circumstances other than human actions or the rules governing them is a category mistake.” This means that we may or may not happen to like particular market outcomes, but we cannot describe those outcomes as just or unjust.

Hayek drew a clear distinction between “rules of just conduct” and law or legislation: “We are not contending that all rules of just conduct which are in fact observed in a society are law, nor that all that is commonly called law consists of rules of just conduct.” In his view, the right rule is that which yields the desired goal, while the wrong rule is that which fails to do so: “All moral rules and human laws are means for the realization of definite ends. There is no method available for the appreciation of their goodness or badness other than to scrutinize their usefulness for the attainment of the ends chosen and aimed at.” On that reasoning, his view was that the law does not reflect “justice” in an abstract sense, but reflects the rules chosen by society with a view to constructing the type of society they value.

On that basis, Hayek rejected the use of “social justice” arguments in political debate: “…the term ‘social justice’ is wholly devoid of meaning or content… it is a semantic fraud, a phrase used to give moral approval to what is in fact a demand for the distribution of benefits according to some arbitrary criterion.” They seek to justify redistributing wealth and power according to their preferences. Mises observes in his book Socialism, that redistributionists do not necessarily consider themselves to be socialists. Social justice warriors are often liberals who do not understand economic science, and have therefore failed to appreciate that the means they promote to resolve social problems are incapable of solving the problem. In the example given by Mises, they seek to solve the problem of hunger by fixing food prices, but instead of solving the problem their intervention only leads to food shortages. Mises explains:

They protest that they are sincere believers and opposed to tyranny and socialism. What they aim at is only the improvement of the conditions of the poor. They say that they are driven by considerations of social justice, and favour a fairer distribution of income precisely because they are intent upon preserving capitalism and its political corollary or superstructure, viz., democratic government.

Mises warns that,

What these people fail to realize is that the various measures they suggest are not capable of bringing about the beneficial results aimed at. On the contrary they produce a state of affairs which from the point of view of their advocates is worse than the previous state which they were designed to alter.

He saw the social justice warriors as often being “either not bright enough or not industrious enough” to achieve their goals, and thus attributing their own failure to unfairness or injustice:

They consoled themselves and tried to convince other people that the cause of their failure was not their own inferiority but the injustice of society’s economic organization. Under capitalism, they declared, self-realization is only possible for the few. “Liberty in a laissez-faire society is attainable only by those who have the wealth or opportunity to purchase it.” Hence, they concluded, the state must interfere in order to realize “social justice.”

What they really meant is, in order to give to the frustrated mediocrity “according to his needs.”

The social justice warriors often invoke the “natural law” or a “higher law” in an attempt to bypass the difficult paths to success. Invoking a “higher law” is the strategy of all revolutionaries and, on the face of it, their opposing invocations of justice seem to be entirely arbitrary. Without knowing more about them, they all seem equally spurious. Hence Mises says, “It is nonsensical to justify or to reject interventionism from the point of view of a fictitious and arbitrary idea of absolute justice. It is vain to ponder over the just delimitation of the tasks of government from any preconceived standard of perennial values.”

Both Mises and Hayek therefore rejected the invocation of “natural law” as a foundation for law or economics. Although the extent to which Hayek rejected natural law altogether is contested, Mises depicted the law of nature as the law of the jungle by which animals live, observing that “the characteristic feature of natural conditions is that one animal is intent upon killing other animals,” and so, “‘Thou shalt not kill’ is certainly not part of natural law.” What seems “just” to the hungry predator is “unjust” to the vulnerable prey. Mises, therefore, rejected natural law concepts of justice altogether, arguing that, “There is, however, no such thing as natural law and a perennial standard of what is just and what is unjust.” He considered the “natural law” to be “fictitious and arbitrary.”

In the Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard adopted a different standpoint in relation to the role of justice, arguing that libertarian law must be founded upon natural law principles. He viewed “a rationally established natural law” as the foundation of justice. The reference to rationality is important in Rothbard’s philosophy; it signifies that natural law is not merely a reference to what animals do in a state of nature, but denotes principles derived from human reason. Rothbard considered it important not only to defend property rights for utilitarian reasons, but to defend “just property or legitimate property or perhaps ‘natural property.’” He did not see justice as merely incidental to a defense of liberty, but rather as a moral and ethical concept that lies at the very heart of liberty. He considered it necessary to invoke moral and ethical arguments to counter the demands of the ignorant, but nevertheless destructive, interventionists driven by their good intentions. The social justice warriors cannot be answered only with economic arguments. Rothbard argued that, “one must go beyond economics and utilitarianism to establish an objective ethics which affirms the overriding value of liberty, and morally condemns all forms of statism.” His view was that “while praxeological economic theory is extremely useful for providing data and knowledge for framing economic policy, it cannot be sufficient by itself to enable the economist to make any value pronouncements or to advocate any public policy whatsoever.” His point about public policy is important in understanding why he invokes principles of justice. As David Gordon puts it,

…a supporter of social justice might argue that the requirement to redress discriminatory treatment isn’t an empirical [economic] claim about the sources of current inequality but a moral demand. People who hold this view might think that even if you are now doing very well, you are still entitled to compensation if you have suffered from discrimination. (Once more, I do not favor this view, quite the contrary; but an adequate response to it must involve moral theory.)

There are many overlaps between utilitarian and natural law philosophies, as well as many important distinctions, that cannot be addressed in this brief article. But it can be seen that the different Austrian perspectives on the concept of justice are not so much definitional or methodological differences, but rather pertain to how different theorists understand the role of the economist in engaging with public policy debates and answering the “justice” claims of statists and interventionists. While Austrians maintain a very clear analytical separation between economic science, or praxeology, and political philosophy or public policy, they have different views on whether, when, and how economists ought to engage with the “social justice” debates.

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

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In 1929, Ford sold 1,507,132 cars. Chevrolet sold 1,328,605. Then came the stock market crash. Sales dropped dramatically each year until 1932, when sales bottomed at 210,824 for Ford and 313,404 for Chevrolet.

But, during that time, a small new market came on stream for the two foremost budget brands—the rich.

Although literally millions of people were hit very hard by the crash, those who had invested wisely retained their wealth. Those who steered clear of the stock market bubble and/or invested in assets that would survive the crash, such as precious metals, were able to continue to live well.

However, they did find that when they drove down the street in their luxury cars, they stood out and became the objects of anger and scorn.

This is an important trait in human nature to recognize—that those who have been reckless with their money and have ended up losing it tend to hate those who were not reckless and have retained their wealth. Perhaps, observing someone who behaved responsibly is a regular reminder that they behaved stupidly.

Whatever the psychology involved, in 1930, those who had fared well soon learned that it was unwise to be conspicuous in their continued wealth. At that point, an interesting but little-remembered development occurred. Such people put their mink coats in the closet, put their jewellery in a safe place and, most importantly, found barns in the countryside into which they could park their Duesenbergs, Cords, and Auburns.

It’s likely that they intended to retrieve the luxury cars once the economy recovered. However, a collectivist government under President Franklin Roosevelt protracted the depression by implementing extensive legislation and policies to “help the common man.” Unfortunately, those actions crippled the business community, turning what might have been a normal two-year depression into one that lasted sixteen years.

During that time, those who had mothballed their luxury cars bought inexpensive cars such as Fords and Chevrolets in order to be less conspicuous. Along the way, chauffeurs became a thing of the past. They were more affordable than ever, but far too conspicuous to even consider employing.

In the end, most of the Deusies remained in the barns until after the war, when the prosperity of the 1950s made them once again popular—this time as collector cars. Today, a restored Duesenberg can be sold at auction for millions, but there was a 25-year drought during which no one would be seen driving them. They became a dead loss for their original owners.

But what we’re discussing here is a mere symptom of those times. Of what value is that to us today? Well, many readers of this publication will be aware that the world is once again facing a financial crisis—one that will far exceed the Great Depression in its magnitude. It will be more devastating and will last longer than the previous debacle, and it will once again be unwise to be seen driving a Deusie.

And so, we prepare ourselves by moving a significant amount of our holdings into precious metals. If we’ve been paying attention, we’ve figured out that the banks are likely to confiscate our deposits and empty our safe deposit boxes. We will have stored the bulk in a storage facility that is not a financial institution, plus we will now have some sort of safe at home where we keep an emergency supply—perhaps of silver rounds—that we may use after a crash. We’ve reasoned correctly that, if and when the currency collapses, we’ll still be able to buy groceries and fuel for the car each week by handing over a silver Ajax or two.

So, we’ve prepared ourselves… Well, not quite. Trouble is, we’ll be observed making our purchases. If the crisis period were to last a few weeks, we’d have no problem. However, after only a few months of a period in which people have little or no real currency (as is always the case after a currency collapse), our neighbours will take note that the one guy in the community who is regularly seen walking to his car with bags of groceries, or parked in the otherwise empty filling station having his tank topped up, is us. Even if we’re driving a Toyota instead of a Mercedes, eyebrows will be raised, and, after the word gets out that we’ve somehow survived intact, resentment will build against us.

It will be at that time that we’ll wish we’d gotten rid of all our luxury associated assets, then gotten the proceeds out of the country—away from those who will resent our ownership of some form of currency. We may have stored wealth, but it will become a liability rather than a safety net. We may get on just fine with our neighbours right now, but when their families are eating dog food for dinner due to their greatly diminished buying power, we’ll most assuredly be hated by them.

At this point, it’s likely to become clear that being the last guy with currency in a neighbourhood that has lost its currency is not an enviable position to be in.

If we then try to make a run for it, we’ll find that the rules of the world that existed just a short while ago have been rewritten. First, we’ll find that currency controls are now in place and our home country, having crashed, disallows the flight of wealth from its shores. We can only remove our wealth by becoming criminals.

In addition, we’ll find that, although the numbers leaving our home country were small prior to the crisis, those numbers have now swelled dramatically and target countries, where the economies are faring better, are closing their doors to economic refugees.

At this point, we’ll become pariahs in our home community and be trapped there. We may own precious metals, but it’ll be risky to use them to survive. We’ll be aware that we can’t keep a lid on the fact that we own precious metals. At best, we might be waylaid when leaving the supermarket with our bags of food. At worst, our house will be ransacked, either by angry neighbours or by a government SWAT team, when they find that we’ve violated the Emergency Currency Act. (No, it doesn’t exist yet, but it most likely will.)

It’s a basic socio-economic principle that, during hard times, those who have not been responsible will come after those who have. Therefore, it’s not enough to merely retain wealth; it’s also essential to have both that wealth and ourselves in a jurisdiction that has been minimally impacted by the crisis.

We are now about to see the first of the major economic dominoes topple. At that point, conditions will get ugly. When that point arrives, it will be essential to have already expatriated the great majority of our wealth (no matter how small or large it may be) to a safer jurisdiction—one where we might openly pay for groceries with an Ajax or two—and to have made arrangements for a residence there, to which we can travel on short notice.

Of this we can be certain: When the major dominoes begin to fall, there will be little or no warning, and there will not be sufficient time to begin formulating an exit strategy.

In actual fact, if the reader is the possessor of the equivalent of a Duesenberg, now would be the time to sell it off quickly and lease a temporary car. It would also be the time to take all equity out of the house and other assets and get the proceeds expatriated. Retain nothing that you can’t walk away from quickly. Begin now to prepare for the next phase of your life and be ready to move.

If, by some magic, all of the present indicators of a coming crisis reverse themselves and your home country becomes both solvent and prosperous once again, you will have done nothing but create a position of freedom for yourself—one out of which you could reverse. However, if a crisis is as inevitable as all the indicators suggest, survival will depend upon the preparation that you create now.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Duesenberg in a Barn appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the summer of 2016, months before the public was hit with a barrage of headlines about Donald Trump’s supposed electoral collusion with the Russians, American intelligence agencies had already learned of a plan by Hillary Clinton to plant that erroneous narrative into the mainstream. Nevertheless, top-ranking intelligence chiefs did nothing to unravel Clinton’s plan. Worse, according to the current director of the CIA, they magnified that false claim.

The Russia Collusion hoax was not only a “Hillary Clinton campaign scheme,” but one that the FBI further inflamed, according to recent comments by CIA Director John Ratcliffe. It was an all-hands-on-deck intel operation against Donald Trump and the American people.

Ratcliffe announced during a guest appearance on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo that he has referred several major players involved in that conspiracy to the Justice Department for criminal charges. They include former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s presidential opponent in 2016. These referrals follow Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s referral of former U.S. President Barack Obama for criminal charges.

Obama’s “Treasonous Conspiracy”

Gabbard released on July 18 a report she said indicated a a “treasonous conspiracy” by Obama and his national security team to undermine the first Trump presidency by falsely claiming that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election. She published a 114-page report of previously classified documents to support the claim. You can read out report on that development here.

The Obama camp has since responded, calling it a “a weak attempt at distraction.” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush also repeated the prevailing defensive narrative that, even if Russia did not successfully affect the election results, that does not mean that Obama’s administration was lying. “Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,” Rodenbush said.

Some have suggested that, whatever Obama’s role was, he likely won’t face prosecution due to presidential immunity protections.

New Revelations

On Sunday, Ratcliffe told Bartiromo that additional information will soon be made public. It will show that, while the Clinton campaign was the source of the Russia Collusion hoax, the FBI had its own agenda to magnify and perpetuate the claims in the Steele Dossier, named after Democratic opposition researcher and former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.

Ratcliffe emphasized that, long before Gabbard’s office released receipts over a week ago, before the Robert Mueller investigation cleared Trump, and even before the Deep State tried to set up Trump as a “Putin puppet” through Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the U.S. intel community knew Trump was not working with the Russians. American intel intercepted in August 2016 Russian intel “talking about a Hillary Clinton plan … to falsely accuse Donald Trump of Russia collusion, to vilify him and smear him.…”  Brennan, then the director of the CIA, briefed Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, and Comey about this plan. Months later, those same people would take part in a pivotal meeting that resulted in a propaganda campaign projecting those claims as true.

Ratcliffe said that four years later, in 2020, he found Brennan’s handwritten notes that acknowledged Clinton’s plan (the notes were shown on the screen during the Bartiromo segment). By that time, though, those same people were busy concocting their next propaganda operation, the Hunter Biden Laptop hoax. And it’s only now, Ratcliffe added, after Americans reelected Trump, that “all of this evidence that’s been hidden and buried from the American people is finally coming to light.”

No Statute of Limitations

Ratcliffe said that the statute of limitations does not apply and should not shield the people he referred for criminal prosecution. He pointed out that Brennan testified to John Durham in 2020 and the House Oversight Committee in 2022, Clinton testified to Durham in 2022, and Comey testified before the Senate Committee in September 2020 with these same false claims. He also added that Clinton’s role has been verified in multiple ways, including by Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, who testified in the Michael Sussmann trial that the former presidential candidate personally approved a plan to convince the public that the Trump team colluded with the Russians.

The new Trump DOJ, Ratcliffe  said, provides an opportunity to “look at how these people really did conspire to run a hoax, fraud, on the American people and against Donald Trump’s presidency.” The CIA chief said accountability is part of the reason they’re bringing all of this to light, but so is prevention. Something like this should never happen again.

FULL SEGMENT
Due to the ongoing “CONSPIRACY”, it looks like BRENNAN, COMEY, CLAPPER and HILLARY are in a spot of trouble

CIA Director, John Ratcliffe @CIADirector breaks it all down with @MariaBartiromo pic.twitter.com/LHOnWJX15G

— MAGA Kitty (@SaveUSAKitty) July 27, 2025

Substantial Documentation

As we pointed out in a recent edition of The New American’s Insider Report, the alleged illegal activity of the intel community “was far more extensive and more serious than previously known.” Gabbard’s document is among many others in this vein to have been recently released.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced on July 21 the release of the “Clinton Annex” to the 2018 DOJ Office of Inspector General’s findings that the FBI, under Comey, did not fully investigate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and mishandling of classified information when she was the secretary of state. Grassley had been asking for this classified document for seven years. Attorney General Pam Bondi finally declassified it.

Two days later, on July 23, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) announced the release of a 46-page report on the fabricated assessment by Obama and his intel heads — Clapper, Brennan, Comey — that Trump colluded with Russia. This report had been classified since 2017.

Read the Whole Article

The post CIA Director Refers Comey, Brennan, and Hillary Clinton for Criminal Prosecution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Some my old friends and family members have asked me if I believe that President Trump was justified in accusing former President Barack Obama of committing treason.

Underlying their question is the thought, Surely Obama wouldn’t have dared to commit such a brazen act against the Constitution, the electoral system, and the American people.

Ordinary citizens have always struggled to recognize that the ruling class has always been in the business of sustaining and augmenting its power and wealth, and has always regarded ordinary citizens as naive and easy to manipulate.

Such is the theme of Machiavelli’s political handbook, The Prince. Since it was published in 1532, many have interpreted the book to mean that Machiavelli advocated ruthlessness and deception as a matter of preference.

This is a misunderstanding. Machiavelli believed that, because most people are ignorant, selfish, foolish, avid for gain, and lacking the ability to feel lasting gratitude for their blessings, it is impossible for the Prince to govern them with complete honesty and transparency. The Prince must therefore never speak to the ordinary people in the same way he speaks to members of his ruling class about the exercise of power.

It was with a fine Machiavellian flourish that Hillary Clinton told a private assembly of Goldman Sachs bankers in 2013:

But if everybody is watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So you need both a public and a private position.

Hillary made these remarks in a series of three speeches to Goldman Sachs for which she was paid $675,000. At the time she gave the talks, she had just left her position as Obama’s Secretary of State and was—as the Goldman bankers knew—preparing to run for president in 2016.

As Bernie Sanders pointed out, the bankers didn’t give her 675 grand because she’s a great speaker. They were obviously buying influence in the woman they believed would soon be President of the United States.

Any citizen of ordinary prudence who isn’t brainwashed would immediately find this arrangement to be repugnant, especially given that Hillary gave her speeches less than five years after Goldman bankers played an instrumental role in producing the Financial Crisis of 2008. As Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein humorously said in a Congressional hearing about the financial crisis when a Congressman read a compromising e-mail written by one of his rambunctious and ruthless traders, “I think that’s a very unfortunate thing to write in an e-mail.”

Thus, in 2016, when Wikileaks released the transcripts of her Goldman speeches in 2013—along with many other outrageous e-mails—the Democrat Party machine understood that it had to change the subject from the content of the DNC/Podesta/Clinton emails by fabricating a story of immensely dramatic and manipulative power.

And so, the American people were told ad nauseam that the real threat to the integrity of the American Republic was not Hillary Clinton and her Goldman Sachs cronies, but the perfidious Russians who (the DNC claimed) hacked their server.

James Madison would have said that invoking the threat of foreigners is the oldest dirty trick in the political playbook. As he stated in a debate at the Constitutional Convention:

The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended.

Madison read The Prince and he understood that Machiavelli was probably right about many things. Nevertheless, Madison decided to take a shot at framing a Constitution that would give ordinary citizens the benefit of the doubt. Maybe, he thought, it was possible for men and women to attain the education and maturity to live in a free country in which the power of the rulers is constrained.

However, as he pointed out, this would only be possible and sustainable if the citizenry was dedicated to educating itself. As he put it:

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.

With the enormous prosperity of the post-war period, the American people grew complacent and too trusting in the integrity of federal institutions and the U.S. media. This enabled the power of the Deep State, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the bankers who finance the apparatus to grow.

President Eisenhower warned the American people about the rise of this unconstrained power in his 1961 Farewell Address. President John F. Kennedy tried to oppose this power during his brief time in office. He starkly contrasted with Lyndon Johnson, who had always relished unconstrained power. It is therefore not surprising that Johnson was the most conspicuous beneficiary of Kennedy’s assassination.

The Deep State got away with assassinating Kennedy, and it has been getting away with spectacular criminal acts ever since. As a true crime author, I have spent years studying criminal psychology. Almost invariably, a criminal who gets away with a lot of things becomes increasingly brazen. When he is eventually caught, people marvel at his brazenness, unaware of all the times he’d committed brazen crimes and gotten away with it.

Viewed rationally, the U.S. military should be regarded as the instrument of the vast racketeering organization that the U.S. government has become. This state of affairs was already taking shape before World War II. Towards the end of his life, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler—the most decorated Marine in U.S. history—concluded that War is a Racket, as he memorably characterized it with a speech he frequently gave in the early 1930s and in a 1935 book. As he stated in his speech,

The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Major General Butler told the truth, as did President Eisenhower in 1961. They knew what they were talking about. For decades the Deep State has been doing whatever the hell it wants with impunity.

And so, to conclude—Yes, I believe President Trump is fully justified in accusing President Obama of treason, though Obama was undoubtedly under the influence of Deep State ghouls such as his CIA director John Brennan, who assured him that the intrigue against Trump was justified.

RussiaGate was an obvious intrigue and hoax that did incalculable damage to the American Republic.

The treasonous hoax also made it impossible for Trump to have good relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin—to be both friendly and also firm with the Russians in a relationship of mutual respect. Had it not been for RussiaGate, I doubt the immensely destructive and dangerous war in Ukraine would have happened.

Watching this farce unfold in 2017, it occurred to me that if the U.S. mainstream media was ruthless enough to peddle such a hoax—and over half of the American people were silly enough to believe it—we were, as a country, in very deep trouble.

What, I wondered, would be the next “great threat to the security of the American people”? I was therefore prepared to recognize, in March 2020, that U.S. federal health agencies and the mainstream media could not be trusted to tell the truth about COVID-19—the truth about its origin, its virulence, how to respond to it, and how to immunize against it. And indeed, it’s a singular fact that virtually everything we were told about the pandemic and the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines—developed at “Warp Speed”—was a lie.

Author’s Note: If you found this report interesting and informative, please consider being a paid subscriber to the Focal Points. For just $5 per month, you can support us in our efforts to investigate and report the reality of what is going on in our world. During these languid days of summer we have lost many of our paid subscribers who have—understandably—grown fatigued with many of the themes we’ve been reporting since we started our newsletter in October 2022. However, the U.S. Deep State and its mainstream media lackeys have not been vanquished. RussiaGate and COVID-19 were not the last of their machinations. I hope our readers will understand the importance of supporting independent investigative scholars like us.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post RussiaGate, COVID-19, and Criminal Psychology appeared first on LewRockwell.

The European Union and U.S. agreed on a trade deal which cements the vassalization of the EU:

After make-or-break negotiations between President Donald Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Scotland, the pair agreed a US tariff on all EU goods of 15%.

That is half the 30% import tax rate Trump had threatened to implement starting on Friday. He said the 27-member bloc would open its markets to US exporters with zero per cent tariffs on certain products.

Von der Leyen also hailed the deal, saying it would bring stability for both allies, who together account for almost a third of global trade.
…
Trump said the EU would boost its investment in the US by $600bn (£446bn), including American military equipment, and spend $750bn on energy.

That investment over the next three years in American liquified natural gas, oil and nuclear fuels would, von der Leyen said, help reduce European reliance on Russian power sources.

Some goods will not attract any tariffs, including aircraft and plane parts, certain chemicals and some agricultural products. A separate deal on semiconductors may be announced soon.
…
[A] 50% US tariff Trump has implemented on steel and aluminium globally would stay in place, he said.

The is a very, very bad deal for Europe. It again demonstrates the incompetence of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

As I have pointed out previously there was and is no imbalance in trade between the U.S. and Europe. There was no need for tariffs or for agreeing to a deal. As the Washington Post concedes (archived):

For the E.U., a 15 percent blanket tariff is far worse than what European officials had previously hoped for. They’d offered “zero-for-zero” tariffs with the U.S. on industrial goods at the start of Trump’s trade blitz. But the bloc has sought to avoid an all-out trade war with its traditionally closest commercial and military ally.
…
Trump frequently complains about the yawning gap in U.S.-E.U. merchandise trade. Last year, the U.S. imported almost $606 billion worth of European products while selling goods totaling about $370 billion to European buyers. The resulting $236 billion trade deficit is evidence of European unfairness, Trump insists.

But the U.S. runs a sizable surplus of its own in trade in services like financial advice, tourism and education, bringing the total trade relationship much closer to balance. Considering the total $1.8 trillion in goods and services that flow between the U.S. and E.U., the U.S. trade deficit is less than $100 billion, which most economists say is inconsequential.

The EU commission was given the tools to prevent the current outcome. That is why yesterday Martin Sandbu of the FT argued (archived) that there was no need to concede:

There will be no final agreement.
…
So it is a mistake to treat this as a negotiation with an ultimate resolution. There will be no resolution. There will continue to be instrumentalised chaos, promised policy steps will suddenly be thrown out, and linkages with all kinds of demands unrelated to trade will keep being made, mafia-style (just ask Brazil). The EU’s task is not, therefore, to negotiate a trade deal, but to find ways to insure its economies, companies and workers as much as possible from the cost of being exposed to a completely unreliable US.

The US is more vulnerable than it thinks.
…
[T]he EU’s net imports of US services and its net royalty payments for intellectual property balance out its net exports of goods to America. [..]
…
The EU is more powerful than it looks. So far, the EU does not seem too willing to go beyond tariffs as a retaliatory weapon. But it, obviously, has others. The most relevant rule here is the “anti-coercion instrument” (ACI) that gives the European Commission vast powers to choose economic measures it sees fit — well beyond the realm of tariffs or even trade more generally — in order to respond to an attempt by a foreign power to coerce its policy decision.
…
To sum up: there is no settlement that will end Trump’s unreasonable demands and stabilise trade policy; the balance of bargaining power favours Europe more than conventional wisdom believes; and the EU may not need, in terms of its long-term economic interests, to divert Trump from his protectionist course. So why should the EU offer the US anything? To be blunt, it doesn’t need to negotiate. That is what von der Leyen should tell Trump today. Pulling out of talks is, if anything, more likely to get Trump to back down.

There was no reason for the EU to accept any deal.

That it did so is a result of the miserable negotiation tactics (archived) van der Leyen has pursued. She has become a cause and symbol of Europe’s decay.

The only positive feature of the deal is that it is not clear yet (archived) what it entails:

Like many preliminary agreements Mr. Trump has announced, this one had few details. For some of the “deals” that Mr. Trump reached, other governments have seemed to lack clarity on what exactly they agreed to, and it remains unclear which tariff rates will apply to which products as of Aug. 1.
…
“There’s a lot of issues that I think are still very unclear,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group. “If there aren’t further exemptions to be negotiated to that 15 percent, I think it’s a far more suboptimal deal than the member states were hoping to achieve.”

On hopes that the EU member states will finally be furious enough to kick van der Leyen out of her office. The Prime Minister of France seems to be ready to do that.

François Bayrou @bayrou – 8:29 UTC · Jul 28, 2025
(Translated by Grok)

Von der Leyen-Trump Agreement: it is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, united to affirm their values and defend their interests, resolves to submission.

Indeed this is a capitulation to the U.S. of A.

As a German I wince when I read Chancellor Merz’ commenting (archived) against the interests of his own country:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz saluted the agreement as “avoiding an unnecessary escalation in transatlantic trade relations”.

He said a trade war “would have hit Germany’s export-oriented economy hard”, highlighting how the German automotive industry would now see US tariffs cut from 27.5 per cent to 15 per cent.

However, Wolfgang Niedermark, board member of the Federation of German Industries trade body, called the agreement “an inadequate compromise”, with the EU “accepting painful tariffs”.

A 15 per cent US tariff rate “will have a huge negative impact on Germany’s export-oriented industry”, he said.

Warwick Powell, in stark contrast to other opinions, sees the deal as an attempt by the EU to further entangle the U.S. in Europe:

[L]ook beneath the bombast, and a different picture emerges. The picture is paradoxically not of European weakness per se (or vassalage as self-loathing Europeans would be tempted to say), but of European entrapment strategy from a position of relative weakness. If anything, this “deal” locks the United States deeper into Europe’s security and economic architecture, not the other way around. And it does so by using the one thing Trump cannot resist: the illusion of winning.

Warwick argues that most parts of the deal will never be done anyway. The U.S. can not export, and the EU not import, the amount of gas that would be needed to spend $750bn on energy. The investment side of the deal would have happened anyway and the tariffs will hurt the U.S. more than the EU.

But how is the EU winning with that? It sounds like 4-dimensional chess to me when von der Leyen is clearly incapable of winning a round of checkers.

The best summary of the situation comes, as so often these days, from the Russian side:

Medvedev: Trump “steamrolled” Europe with a one-sided deal that serves only American interests.

Commenting on the newly struck trade agreement between the U.S. and the European Union, former Russian President and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev argues that the agreement:

• • Strips Europe of its economic defenses, removing tariffs for U.S. goods while leaving EU markets vulnerable;
  • Imposes heavy costs on European industry and agriculture, forcing them to rely on overpriced American energy;
  • Diverts investment from Europe into the United States.

For Trump, it’s just business, Medvedev notes. For Europe, however, it’s blind ideological zealotry — with Ursula von der Leyen and the Eurocratic elite sacrificing the welfare of their own citizens.

Th EU commission could have easily prevented this.

A 100% tariff on Hollywood movies and a digital service tax to be payed by Microsoft, Google and others would have hit Trump and the U.S. where it hurts. The means were all there for the EU commission but it did not even give them a try. The result is a terrible outcome.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama,

The post ‘Blind Ideological Zealotry’ Let EU Agree to This Trump Deal appeared first on LewRockwell.

For many years, whether new lives would begin was determined by complex constraints, and then how long lives would last was limited by poverty, disease, and injury. More recently all of these constraints have been eased.

Vaccines started getting developed.

Genes were discovered, then got characterized, then started getting read.

People’s constitutional right to sue vaccine producers for harms was treated as nonexistent by most congressmen and a president, and by all subsequent majorities of congressmen, presidents, and judges.

Genes started getting edited and getting rapidly evolved.

An old religion’s radicals got powered by energy-rich donors and formed mobile governments. One of these governments used modern communications and transportation to strike people a continent away, threatening 50,000 people in a single morning and ending nearly 3,000 lives.

Government people knew that gene-manipulation technology could be developed in small facilities, weaponized, and used to strike many people. Many people wanted to increase safety, and do it quickly. Some decisionmakers sought out the people who looked the best-prepared to help quickly and tasked them with developing countermeasures.

People’s constitutional right to sue countermeasure producers for harms was treated as nonexistent by most congressmen and a president, and by all subsequent majorities of congressmen, presidents, and judges.

Years passed. The religious radicals didn’t end up developing bioweapons, but the government work continued. What politicians seemed to have thought were needed were countermeasures, but what researchers worked on were weapons.

Researchers from major enemy powers collaborated.

The weapons research got halted by one president, then got resumed by another president.

Researchers optimized a virus to infect and harm humans.

A virus outbreak was simulated. The responses of government people were simulated and evaluated.

The president who resumed the research was popular. Before he might have gotten reelected, the optimized virus spread worldwide.

The virus was orders of magnitude more deadly or debilitating to people who were already weakened by various conditions, although not to people who were very young. The virus mostly harmed people by causing clots or by causing harmful immune responses.

Government people and cronies responded with novel lockdowns, novel tests, novel suppression of the use of promising existing drugs and vitamins and supplements, novel ventilator protocols that reduced healthcare workers’ virus exposures but that led to most ventilated patients dying, novel mRNA treatments, and novel universal mail-in balloting.

Clinical trials of the novel mRNA treatments were designed to generate favorable-sounding partial data. Trials were intentionally run slowly, an insider reportedly said, so that favorable-sounding partial data couldn’t affect the election.

A presidential candidate who basically didn’t campaign was certified by state government people and then by national government people as having won.

Favorable-sounding partial data on the novel mRNA treatments were released.

Mandates to be injected with the novel mRNA treatments were put into force by government people, cronies, and unconstitutional-rule following employers.

Many people were injected with an initial shot and one booster shot. Uptake of these initial two shots and of subsequent boosters varied strongly with political affiliation. Political affiliation in turn varied strongly with type and strength of religious faith, and with mental health.

It became increasingly-widely understood that the novel mRNA treatments distribute throughout the body, make the body produce a damaging spike protein like the virus’s spike protein for as many as 709 days or more, and cause clots or cause harmful immune responses. It became increasingly-widely understood that the novel mRNA treatments were significantly increasing premature deaths and severely reducing fertility.

Treatments that cause deaths or infertility might expect to be advocated by very few people. But the result would be a smaller population, and this result has been advocated by alarmingly-many people.

The virus evolved and became more transmissible and less lethal.

The president who had not been certified as reelected ran again. An independent candidate emerged who had widespread name recognition, had spent decades criticizing vaccines, and had rapidly written three books about various aspects of the novel virus and response. The independent candidate joined the former president’s campaign. The former president was elected to a second term.

Under this president the novel mRNA treatments remained recommended except in pregnancy. For people who were already weakened by various conditions, the recommendations were more forceful or even called for higher doses.

The effect of injecting such treatments in such weakened people would be the same effect that would be produced by deliberate, calculated eugenics.

Or maybe the effect would be like a biblical tribulation: global, devastating, and most-heavily affecting people who are further from God.

You are here.

Technologies will keep getting developed. Chances to harm others will keep emerging.

People didn’t learn all they could from the socialist Nazi Germany government people and cronies, from the Communist Soviet Union party people and cronies, or from the Chinese Communist party people and cronies up through now. The mostly crony-socialist USA government people, cronies, and people still have legal freedom of speech and a longstanding culture of forgiveness, and can do better.

By following along with the narrative above, we can begin to appreciate that huge numbers of people and huge number of actions contributed to causing deaths and disabilities from covid disease, from covid disease responses, and from the covid mRNA treatments in particular.

We must stop any more people from being harmed these same ways now.

We would do well to help as many people as possible who contributed to harming others to come clean about what they knew when, and about how and why they came to make the choices they made.

We must repeal the emergency powers and other Constitution-defying statutes that these people used to work their harms.

Giving others time to reflect and change before they face ultimate judgment could also optimally help both us and all who follow.

Don’t doom others to stumble down any remotely-similar paths.

Learn from history. Then teach.

The post What’s Wrong With USA Officials and Cronies? What Can People Do? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Epstein cloud is metastasizing and becoming a rallying point for deep-seated popular alienation.

The Epstein cloud is metastasizing and becoming a rallying point for deep-seated popular alienation from certain ruling strata. The public begrudgingly has become resigned to accept that their ‘rulers’ routinely lie and steal, but nonetheless they (particularly within the MAGA faction) have dimly come to understand that there may be vice within the body public which they regard as too detestable to imagine. People have caught on that Trump was in one way or another (even as a by-stander) linked to that whole degraded culture.

This is not likely to pass easily – or perhaps pass at all. Trump was elected to drain all such tangled webs of interlinked oligarchy, power structures and of intelligence services acting to unseen interests. That’s what he promised: America First.

Distraction from Epstein likely won’t work. The exploitation, abuse and destruction of the lives of untold numbers of children in the pursuit of power, wealth and diabolical debauchery cuts to the deepest quick of moral being. It cannot be distracted away by pointing to other élite vile monetary and power-plays. The abuse (and worse) inflicted on children stands apart in its own hellish category.

Trump may say that he’s done nothing legally wrong. But the point is that he’s now tainted – very seriously. He may consequently be entering Presidential lame-duck territory, barring some deus ex machina occurrence sufficient to deflect public attention.

Just to be clear, it is in Trump’s character to mightily resist becoming a ‘lame-duck’ President. And here lies the geo-political danger. Trump needs headline distractions and he needs ‘wins’.

However, he is at a weakened point now where the Security State and its Congressional allies are seizing more control. Equally, many in the nexus that links politicians and officials in the U.S., UK and Israel to deep business and intelligence ties will be extremely adverse to their exposure. Individuals, including the imprisoned Ghislaine Maxwell may prove dangerous, like a drowning man, who in his panic seizes on the nearest person only to drown the both of them.

Trump’s narrow-minded foreign policy team has taken the President’s foreign policy initiatives into a cage, whose bars have names such as ‘arrogance and hubris’.

On Ukraine, Trump has given Moscow what is effectively 50 days to capitulate to the Kellogg ceasefire ultimatum, or to face consequences.

Whilst third-party 100% sanctions – affecting mostly China and India’s energy imports from Russia – have been utterly dismissed by China (and likely will be by India too), Trump will be under pressure from his hawks in Congress to do something to inflict pain on Russia.

The problem is that the war-chest is empty. Neither the U.S. nor Europe hold a weapons inventory of any consequence to the war. Even were they to pay and order missiles or other weaponry now, it would be months until delivered.

Trump however needs quick wins/diversions.

Absent any meaningful inventory, Trump can only effectively escalate by using long-range missiles targeting Moscow or St Petersburg. Tomahawk 2,000 km range missiles are in the U.S. inventory (and were discussed byTeam Trump, David Ignatius has reported.

And what if these elderly Tomahawk missiles are easily shot down by Russian forces? Well, then there is a void. A serious void. Because there is nothing between the provision of token items of weaponry (a handful of Patriot missiles) to the U.S. pre-positioned tactical nukes that could be launched from fighter jets stationed in Britain.

At this point Trump would be hurtling toward a Big War with Russia.

Is there a plan ‘B’? Well … yes. It is to bomb Iran again, as an alternative to escalating against Russia.

Iranians think that another strike on Iran is likely, and Trump has said that he might do just that. So Iran is all-out preparing for such an eventuality.

It is quite possible that Trump has been briefed that the consequence to major strikes on Iran would be the effective missile-imposed de-militarisation of Israel – causing profound consequences in the U.S. polity, as well as the region.

It is also quite possible that Trump disregards such briefing, preferring to see Israel as “so good” (the exclamation he made as the Israeli sneak attack on 13 June was underway).

And in the Middle East right now? It looks as if Netanyahu is pulling the strings for Trump. Gaza is already a scandal – a war crimes scandal, with every prospect of getting worse.

Max Blumenthal reports that “when Tucker Calson alleged that Epstein had ties to Israeli Intelligence [and that this fact explained] why Trump is covering up [the Epstein Affair], the Israelis seemingly took fright. Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister, was summoned to declare that he had dealt, every day, with the Mossad and that Jeffrey Epstein did not work for the Mossad and was not an Israeli agent. He then threatened Carson, saying: ‘We won’t stand for this’. The Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs also denounced Tucker Carson. It is like the relationship between the U.S. Conservative movement and Israel is cracking up over Epstein”, Blumenthal suggests.

Netanyahu perhaps senses trouble ahead for Israel in the U.S., as young Americans and MAGA followers turn on Trump for having betrayed ‘America First’; for ‘co-owning’ the Gaza massacre; the Israeli-U.S. led Syria sectarian civil war; the bombing of Iran; and the despoilation of Lebanon.

Eighty-one percent of Americans, polls suggest, want all documents related to Epstein released. Two-thirds — including 84% of Democrats and 53% of Republicans — think the government is covering up evidence regarding his ‘client list’ and death. Trump’s disapproval rating stands at 53% currently.

Netanyahu is (perhaps consequentially) on a hurried rampage to impose ‘Greater Israel’. ‘Impose’, because the original Abraham Accords were ostensibly an agreement to normalise with Israel. Today, under military threat, Arab states are being compelled to accept Israeli terms – and subjugation to Israel.

It represents a travesty of the former Israeli notion of an alliance of minorities. Today, the ‘minorities’ (sometimes fractured majorities) are deliberately being set one against the other. The U.S. and Israel haveagain introduced ISIS 2.0 into the Middle East. The executions of Alawites, Christians and Shia in Syria are the direct consequence.

The prospect is of a devastated Middle East, with only the Gulf monarchies serving as obedient islands amid the wider landscape of internecine war, ethnic killing and Balkanised polities.

The new Middle East …?

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

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