Lew Rockwell Institute

Most Americans realize that the federal government is drowning in debt and that inflation is out of control.  But very few Americans can coherently explain where money comes from or how our financial system actually works.  For decades, bankers that we do not elect have controlled America’s currency, have run our economy into the ground, and have driven the U.S. government to the brink of bankruptcy.  The Federal Reserve is an institution that was designed to drain wealth from U.S. taxpayers and transfer it to the global elite.  Have you ever wondered why a sovereign nation such as the United States has to borrow United States dollars from anyone?  Have you ever wondered why a sovereign nation such as the United States does not even issue its own currency?  Have you ever wondered why we allow a group of unelected private bankers to run our economy?

Those are some very important questions.  Hopefully what you are about to read will open the eyes of many.  The truth is that our financial system is centrally-controlled and centrally-managed by a group of banking oligarchs who oversee a constantly expanding debt spiral which could come crashing down at any time.  If the American people truly understood how our system works, they would be protesting in the streets right now.  The following are 11 reasons why the Federal Reserve is bad…

1 – The Federal Reserve was created as a way to enslave the U.S. government.  In fact, the Federal Reserve system literally could not function without U.S. Treasury bonds.  Government debt is at the very core of the system, and our federal government is now trapped in a debt spiral from which it can never possibly escape because the system is operating exactly as it was designed.  Our national debt has been rising at an exponential rate, and that will continue to be the case until either the current system collapses or we adopt an entirely new system.

2 – The individual Federal Reserve Banks are not “federal” at all.  In fact, on the official website of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, it is openly admitted that  Federal Reserve Banks “are not a part of the federal government” and that private banks “hold stock in the Federal Reserve Banks and earn dividends”…

The Federal Reserve Banks are not a part of the federal government, but they exist because of an act of Congress. Their purpose is to serve the public. So is the Fed private or public?

The answer is both. While the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations. Member banks hold stock in the Federal Reserve Banks and earn dividends.

3 – Why does the Federal Reserve issue our currency?  The U.S. Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to issue our currency…

[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; . . .

4 – The Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air.  I asked Google AI about this, and this is what I was told…

Yes, the Federal Reserve (Fed) creates money out of thin air by increasing the money supply. This process is called “creating money out of thin air” because it involves adding funds to the economy without printing currency.

5 – The Federal Reserve devalues our currency.  Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost more than 96 percent of its purchasing power.  The truth is that just a two percent inflation rate will wipe out half of your purchasing power within a single generation.  In the chart below, you can clearly see that the beginning of the rapid rise of inflation in the United States coincided with the creation of the Federal Reserve.

6 – The Federal Reserve manipulates the U.S. economy by setting interest rates.  By moving rates higher or lower, the Federal Reserve has the power to create economic growth or to destroy it.  They have the power to inflate massive economic bubbles and to pop them.  Most Americans believe that our presidents “run the economy”, but the truth is that the Federal Reserve has far more control over the economy than the White House does.  As you can see below, every recession since World War II has come after a period of rising interest rates.

7 – The Federal Reserve also controls the national money supply.  They can pump trillions of dollars into the economy or pull trillions of dollars out of the economy without being accountable to anyone.  This can have absolutely disastrous consequences.  For example, inflation started getting wildly out of control after the Federal Reserve dramatically increased the size of the money supply during the pandemic.

8 – The Federal Reserve has become far, far too powerful.  Our financial markets swing up and down whenever a Fed official makes an important statement, and every man, woman and child in the entire country is directly affected by the decisions that the Federal Reserve Board makes.  Ron Paul once told MSNBC that he believes that the Federal Reserve has actually become more powerful than Congress…

“The regulations should be on the Federal Reserve. We should have transparency of the Federal Reserve. They can create trillions of dollars to bail out their friends, and we don’t even have any transparency of this. They’re more powerful than the Congress.”

9 – The Federal Reserve is dominated by Wall Street and the New York banks.  The New York representative is the only permanent member of the Federal Open Market Committee, while the other members rotate.  The truth is that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has always been the most important of the regional Fed banks by far, and in turn the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has always been dominated by Wall Street and the major New York banks.

10 – The Federal Reserve has completely eliminated minimum reserve requirements for our banks.  Fractional reserve banking has always been a way that the bankers have conned the public, but now they have gotten rid of minimum reserve requirements altogether.  This is literally insane.

11 – The Federal Reserve is not accountable to the voters, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is flaunting the fact that he cannot even be fired by President Trump…

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had a clear, direct response when asked during a press conference Thursday if he would step down if asked to do so by President-elect Trump.

“No,” said Powell, whose term as chair ends in 2026.

When asked to elaborate and if he would be legally required to leave, he again said, “No.”

Powell later said it is “not permitted under the law” for the president to fire or demote him or any of the other Fed governors with leadership positions.

Powell’s term will eventually end, but until then he can do whatever he wants.

Shouldn’t we have some way to keep them accountable?

After all, they have an incredible amount of power over us, shouldn’t we have at least a little bit of power over them?

Nobody knows what is really going on inside the Federal Reserve, because we aren’t allowed to see.

Unfortunately, the truth is that they desperately do not want light to be shined on the elaborate “shell game” that they are running.

Have you ever wondered if it was just a coincidence that the personal income tax was implemented just about the same time that the Federal Reserve was created?

Why does the U.S. government have to tax us at all?

Prior to 1913, there was no personal income tax in this country.

If you take a few minutes to stop and think about it, an America where there is no Federal Reserve, no personal income tax and no IRS is not that hard to imagine.

If the U.S. government functioned just fine without all of them at one time, then why couldn’t the U.S. government function just fine without all of them now?

The system that we have now is clearly not working.  The Federal Reserve was supposed to guarantee that our system would be perfectly stable, but in reality our system has become much more unstable.

It is time for different thinking.  It is time for the U.S. government to take back control of our currency and to take back control of our economy.

For more than a decade, I have been on a crusade to bring the Federal Reserve system to an end, and many others have been pushing for the exact same thing.

Now that we have a new administration in Washington, perhaps they will be open to listening to us.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

The post 11 Reasons Why The Federal Reserve Is Bad appeared first on LewRockwell.

From the first day of his return to office Trump has been locked in a life and death struggle with the American Establishment.  In Washington, D.C., either the Democrat mayor or the Democrat judges that sentenced Trump supporters to prison on false charges are delaying or trying to prevent the release of the pardoned prisoners. As of time of writing on Thursday January 23, not all of the pardoned held in D.C. have been released. 

A Democrat Pennsylvania attorney general is trying to find a way to re-arrest the pardoned who live in Pennsylvania on state charges.

A federal district judge in Washington state has blocked Trump’s cancellation of birthright citizenship, an abusive process that allows immigrant-invaders to gain citizenship by getting into the US in order to give birth.  The judge claims, falsely, that this is a constitutional right that the US Constitution grants to immigrant-invaders. The US Constitution’s protections are limited to US citizens.

A number of Democrat governors and mayors have vowed not to comply and even to actively resist Trump’s border defense and deportation of illegal aliens.  Democrat Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said she would absolutely not comply with US Law. 

 Isn’t this what a Southern governor did 50 or 60 years ago when he stood in the schoolhouse door in defiance of President John F. Kennedy?  How is Maura Healey any different? Is it OK because it is a yankee and not a Southerner doing it?

Democrat Denver, Colorado, mayor Mike Johnston said he would call for civil disobedience to protest deportations.  Isn’t civil disobedience one of the charges leveled against the Trump supporters who protested the stolen 2020 presidential election?

The way the American system works is that the president can do whatever he wants as long as the Establishment agrees. But if the Establishment does not agree, the president cannot even keep his oath to defend the Constitution against enemies domestic and foreign. 

The Establishment surrounds the President. The Establishment is the Senate, House, judiciary, media, Wall Street and corporations, CIA, FBI, civil service, universities. Trump’s only support is the people who control no institutions, not even local school boards. The US military has been so corrupted by Obama and Biden that the US military might be unreliable as a defense of American values and Americans’ rights. We are faced with the possibility that American soldiers can find themselves at war with Russian soldiers in order to defend Washington’s rule of tyranny over American citizens.  American Exceptionalism cuts both ways.  It means not only hegemony over foreign peoples but also over American citizens.

With Democrats promising non-compliance and with judges blocking Trump’s every action, we are witnessing the institutionalized establishment’s blatant actions to block any hindrance on their power. The Establishment allowed Trump to return to office, because they are confident that they can block him from success and thus demoralize Americans and end for all time challenges to their rule.

Trump’s attorney general has directed Department of Justice prosecutors to investigate state and local officials who are obstructing Trump’s enforcement of US immigration laws.  It was the 12 years of Democrat presidents in the 21st century who filled up our country with illegal immigrant-invaders, diverting resources belonging to US citizens to support for immigrant-invaders, while American war veterans were left homeless in the streets, who filled up the Justice (sic) Department with advocates for immigrant-invaders. 

Ask yourself,  how are the prosecutors, recruited by Obama and Biden regimes to ride roughshod over traditional American citizens in order to advance Black Lives Matter, Antifa, sexual perverts, indoctrination of school children, DEI in place of merit, and “constitutional rights” for immigrant invaders, going to comply?  The answer is that they will “investigate” and conclude that there is nothing to investigate. They will, for example, resurrect the long dead 10th Amendment–the States’ Right Amendment destroyed by Abe Lincoln–and claim that the dissenting Democrat jurisdictions are merely exercising their 10th Amendment rights.

How are the DOJ prosecutors recruited by eight years of the Cheney/Bush regime going to comply when on their watch the Constitutional protections of US citizens became null and void in order to fight the completely invented “war on terror,”  which, in truth, was a fight for Greater Israel.

What Trump and his Attorney General need to understand is that there is no one in the Department of Justice who has an ounce of integrity and who is not anti-American.  The DOJ has not protected Americans’ constitutional rights for a quarter century and longer. Instead, the DOJ has been busy inventing rights for immigrant-invaders and criminals.

For Trump to move forward, the entire Justice Department has to be replaced. Trump has issued executive orders making it easier to fire civil service obstructionists of the president’s orders and the will of the people. But the civil service union is already at work relying on federal judges to block Trump’s executive order. The law suits will continue forever.  If Trump and his administration accept this prohibition on its ability to govern and keep its campaign promises, the corrupt American Establishment will have won.

Only Americans of my generation know that formerly, in those days when America was great, there were no public sector unions. There was no civil service union, no police union, no firefighters union, no teachers union. Public sector employees were employed to serve the public, not to extort the public by refusing to supply the services for which they were paid unless the public paid up more.

Somewhere along the way federal, state, and local governments found votes and campaign contributions ample reward for selling out the American people to public sector unions.  Now these unions are positioned to block Trump from making America great again.

Thomas Jefferson, the most pure of our Founding Fathers, said that every 200 years a nation has to renew itself with the blood of tyrants and patriots. He was correct in every respect except the 200 years. By 1860 when the US was not even 100 years old, the US Constitution was no longer respected by the Republicans in power. They wanted the tariff at all cost and sold out the US Constitution in order to get it by extraordinary violence and war crimes, all covered up by corrupt US historians who achieved approval and success by serving as court historians.

We have been witnessing, that tiny percentage of us that pays any attention, the Ruling Establishment’s unrelenting attacks on Trump’s appointees.  Tulsi Gabbard has been forced by the Establishment Senate to abandon her opposition to unlimited unconstitutional spying on American citizens by “security” and “intelligence” agencies in order “to protect” Americans by violating their Constitutional rights.   Amazing, isn’t it, that Americans are protected by the government’s violation of their Constitutional rights. Pete Hegseth’s appointment as Secretary of Defense is in trouble based on allegations by a vindictive former wife.

In my opening sentence I wrote that Trump was in his first hours already in a life and death struggle with the American Establishment.  Trump cannot win this war when the Justice (sic) Department, media, Federal judiciary, and US Congress are homes of America’s enemies.  

Americans having neglected Thomas Jefferson’s warning and that of President Dwight Eisenhower, the current Trump regime is America’s last chance. Trump is faced with a powerful and utterly corrupt American Establishment that has been in power since they got the income tax and the Federal Reserve passed in 1913. Effectively, 1913 was the last year of American liberty.

An Establishment in power since 1913 is institutionalized and many times more powerful than a mere president.

Trump and his supporters need to understand that the Establishment is institutionalized in the bureaucracies of his own government.

For decades Americans have been suffering violence from their government. It is way past time to send the violence back, in a double dose, to the criminal American Establishment.

If Trump and his government cannot bring themselves to the real challenge, America is lost. Trump’s agenda will spend four years tied up in law courts.

Democracy is the most effective system ever invented, not for bringing change, but for blocking it.

The Establishment intends to block every Trump change.

The post Trump vs. The Establishment, Who Will Win? appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of my favorite sentences in The Shawshank Redemption — a movie filled with some of Stephen King’s finest writing — comes near the end.  The protagonist, Andy, has broken out of prison and sent a trove of evidence to the press that implicates the crooked warden in multiple criminal conspiracies.  Sitting in his office as police sirens blare and officers beat down his door, the corrupt and abusive warden opts to take his own life.  Morgan Freeman narrates as Andy’s friend and fellow inmate, Red: “I’d like to think that the last thing that went through his head, other than that bullet, was to wonder how the hell Andy Dufresne ever got the best of him.”

Watching President Trump return to the White House in triumphant fashion, I couldn’t get Red’s observation out of my mind.  There are politicians and bureaucrats all over D.C. wondering how the hell Donald Trump ever got the best of them, and although they have no intention of taking the warden’s way out, all their plans to thwart Trump’s movement are dead.  Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, the corrupt lawfare gangs, the corrupt Intelligence Community, and the corrupt corporate news propagandists posing as “journalists,” along with the vast majority of the corrupt, unelected, and unconstitutional administrative state, are all flabbergasted that President Trump again sits in the Oval Office — despite eight years of nefarious and treasonous Deep State plots to throw him in some hellhole similar to Shawshank Prison.

Remember when Andy emerged from the sewage pipe covered in filth and stretched his hands toward God while rain poured down to cleanse his body?  So many MAGA voters are also looking toward the heavens and exultantly whispering, “Thank you, Lord.  Free at last.”

That’s no hyperbole.  Proving yet again that he is a man of his word, President Trump immediately pardoned the J6 political prisoners.  He pardoned pro-life Christians whom tyrant Merrick Garland had imprisoned for protesting abortion.  He promised to free every last victim of the Biden regime’s political persecution, and many have already been informed of their impending release.  Most of these prisoners were first-time “offenders” who were targeted for their personal beliefs.  They and their families endured legal costs, pre-trial confinement, malicious prosecution, judicial malfeasance, and egregiously unnecessary separations from their parents and spouses and children.  Most suffered for their principles.  Most were denied constitutional protections and even impartial juries.  Most were pressured to confess to crimes that they did not commit.  Many with longer sentences wondered if they would ever make it home.  Now they are free.

Joe Biden’s last act in office was to “pre-emptively” pardon members of the Biden Crime Family.  One of President Trump’s first acts back in office was to pardon Americans who never would have suffered had they been registered Democrats.  Four years of injustice make the return of justice all the more magnificent.

As a partial answer to the Uniparty parasites and Deep State saboteurs who wonder how President Trump perseveres and wins, this is how: he keeps his promises.  The criminals who have long run D.C. and the “mockingbird” media who protect their criminal friends still believe that the public regards Trump as a liar and the permanent bureaucracy as a trusted group of “experts.”  Reality is just the opposite.  The American people see in President Trump someone who will give them the unvarnished truth, and they find the permanent bureaucracy a loathsome cabal of backstabbers, charlatans, and tyrants who never hesitate to sell out their country for a quick buck.  Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and even government “scientist” Anthony Fauci all used their sinecures as “public servants” to become millionaires.  Meanwhile, workers in the private sector got poorer each year.  Government “service” is a magnet for psychopaths, sadists, and fraudsters who launder taxpayer dollars into their own piggy banks.

If the American people didn’t completely appreciate how corrupt the U.S. government is when Trump first entered politics, they certainly get it now.  Russia collusion was a lie.  Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was real — as was the Biden Crime Family’s monetization of Joe’s office.  Impeaching President Trump because Joe Biden accepted bribes from foreign adversaries never made sense to anybody with a brain except Mitt Romney.  COVID did come from a lab.  Perforated masks don’t stop viral transmission but do make it difficult for people to breathe.  Economic lockdowns saved no one but killed tens of thousands of small businesses.  School closures saved no one but caused lifetime learning harm for an entire generation.  The 2020 election was neither free nor fair, and there is substantial evidence of electoral fraud.  Government censorship is real.  Mass government surveillance of our private communications is real.  Mainstream news reporters do lie.  And Americans can reclaim lost freedoms only if they reject government propaganda and think for themselves.

Read the Whole Article

The post Deconstructing the Deep State appeared first on LewRockwell.

This, as they say, is one of those weeks when decades happen. You realize that under the fiends fronted by “Joe Biden,” the US government became a demon-driven machine for wrecking lives, perverting the law, and demolishing all scaffolds of decent behavior. And now, it all has to be fixed, cleaned up, fumigated, rectified, rehabilitated.

Scores of executive orders flew out of the Oval Office, rescinding four years of “Biden” regime lunacy in every direction: Censorship, dead. . . Gain of function research, killed. . . CBDCs banned. . . CBP-app for aiding illegal migrants, discontinued. . . border fortified. . . homicidal alien mutts deported. . . World Health Organization, no thanks. . . Paris Climate Accords, fuggeddabowdit. . . DEI, vacated through all of government. . . Green New Deal, scrapped. . . “pride” in mental illness, cancelled. . . Ukraine War, headed for the negotiating table. . . all in four days and so much more coming.

The DEI flimflam is particularly illustrative of the hazards still lurking. The DC blob is desperate to hide its chaos agents by switching their job titles and shuffling them around to hidey-holes in obscure precincts of this-or-that bureaucracy. Being federal employees, of course, they all have searchable names and payroll accounts, so you may be sure they’ll be discovered wherever they’re hiding-out and placed, as ordered, on “administrative leave.” Since DEI was essentially a program to promote incompetence, these employees represent a monumental cargo of dead-weight. So, the next task will be finding a way under the civil service codes to cashier them for good. For instance, reclassifying their job status to render them fire-able.

This is sure to be a major friction-point for the so-called “resistance,” the huge cadre of “activist” Wokesters embedded in the agencies. Cue the army of Democratic Party lawyers who will be filing suits to prevent the chief executive from coherently managing the departments of the executive branch. But there’s a catch: this time, the White House will not be funneling scads of money directly to the NGOs that pay for these blob-adjacent lawyers, nor will they be able to redirect money out of the DOJ, FBI, and CIA for that purpose. The president may also find a way to interrupt the flow of money from foundations financed by malign freelancers such as George Soros and Linked-in founder and billionaire Reid Hoffman (who financed the E. Jean Carroll “rape” trial hoax and many more Democratic Party pranks ).

Another friction point: release of the pardoned J-6 prisoners is being loudly opposed by DC District federal judges such as Tanya Chutkan and Amy Berman Jackson. They don’t enjoy any privilege or prerogative for voicing prejudicial opinions about vacated cases, nor for failing to comply with paperwork needed to discharge them. They can be impeached for that in the House of Representatives. Or, if they actively obstruct releases, the new-and-improved Department of Justice might consider 18 U.S.C. § 242 – Deprivation of rights under color of law.

Meanwhile, goons at the DC jail detained pardoned prisoners unlawfully this week after years of the grossest mistreatment, including solitary confinement in basement “holes” without beds, blankets, or water, and direct physical assault that could be described as “torture.” All of this was countenanced by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, despite plentiful public reports of abuse over the past four years. That is, she knew all about it. This is an argument for finally rescinding Washington DC’s “home rule” status and placing the city and all its departments back under federal management.

Last night, Mr. Trump signed an order to declassify government files relating to the murders of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Of course, the intel agencies holding these files have had a half-century to expunge anything in the files that might reflect poorly on the intel agencies — such as, the long-trafficked rumor that the CIA was behind the killing of all three. Why would you expect to get anything like that? How could the remaining material be anything but a cover-your-ass file? Well, now we shall see. At some point in his first term, Mr. Trump allegedly saw what was in the files and demurred from his promise then to release them. Was it too shocking? Or was it the well-groomed nothingburger described above?

That’s not to say that there’s any shortage of weird, tantalizing documentation around all those cases, inexplicable doings. . . sketchy characters like Oswald, Jack Ruby, Howard Hunt, Clay Shaw, Sirhan Sirhan, Thane Eugene Cesar, James Earl Ray, “Raul” (Ray’s alleged “handler”), Frank Liberto, Loyd Jowers. . . . and curious circumstances like the so-called “magic bullet” that supposedly exited JFK and wounded Texas Governor Connolly, and was later found oddly intact on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital. I guess we’ll find out shortly.

Now, we await the confirmation of Mr. Trump’s cabinet. Pam Bondi’s USAG nomination was held up for a week by peevish freshman Senator Adam Schiff, after she called him out for being censured last year in the House for “reckless” statements — that is, she reminded the committee and the public that Mr. Schiff is a chronic liar. There are rumblings that he will be kicked off the Senate Judiciary Committee (maybe not such a good fit for someone incapable of telling the truth). The preemptive pardon he received last week from “Joe B” might be tested through the courts in the years just ahead. The Judiciary Committee announced that it will convene an inquiry into the whole J-6 fiasco. Do you sense that there is much to discover in that hairball of enigmatic events, hidden actions, concealed motives, and buried evidence?

All this (plus a lot I left out) and the first week isn’t even over yet!

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post The Great Sorting-Out Begins appeared first on LewRockwell.

From the Tom Woods Letter:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) created a panic this week when it announced a pause in “study sections.”

Study sections, says Vinay Prasad, are “groups of mediocre scientists who decide which grants are funded.”

Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, is what I would describe as a moderate in the currently raging debates on various important health questions — he would not satisfy a lot of my readers overall, but he’s not a savage, he takes other perspectives seriously, and he treats dissident voices like yours and mine with respect.

His commentary on this subject is for that reason all the more valuable.

NIH, argues Prasad, “seeks mediocre ideas that tread along established lines and not highly novel views. It does a bad job of funding people who do truly transformational work…. Trump has paused study sections to allow future NIH director Jay Bhattacharya to revisit the priorities. This is completely normal and reasonable.”

After warning that the various woke priorities of the NIH are unlikely to survive a Trump presidency, Prasad notes that the “one type of diversity that NIH is not interested in funding is intellectual diversity. That’s probably a reason why they’ve had so much stagnation on intractable problems such as cancer and neurological conditions.”

To those who warn that the longer the pause goes on, the likelier it is that people will lose their research jobs, Prasad replies:

Some people say that if the pause, which is completely reasonable, continues, people will lose their jobs in research. Of course this is true. I suspect the pause will not continue for a great period of time, but, at the same time, some people in research need to lose their jobs.

The government cannot be a welfare program for everybody doing low quality, low credibility, irreproducible, low value of information research. It has to use public dollars in a wise way. That has absolutely not occurred in the past. A pause is necessary to tackle this intractable problem.

In many ways, Jay is the perfect person to tackle this problem. He’s not a laboratory scientist. He’s an economist. The difference between laboratory scientists and economists is that the latter are much better at thinking brutally and clearly about the trade-offs and expected payoffs of research. Jay has already been on record as saying he thinks the NIH is not willing to push the envelope. It doesn’t fund truly transformative work. I completely agree with him. And he should direct funding in that way….

And the American people that want the envelope pushed. They don’t want continued marginal drugs. They want new ideas. We have made no progress in Alzheimer’s disease in part because of the NIH’s dogmatism. I look forward to a renewed focus on a diversity of ideas in science research.

Finally, if academics want to take a sky is falling approach to every single thing Donald Trump does, they’re only going to exhaust themselves.

The issue here is not government science funding versus no government science funding. Episode #2400 of the Tom Woods Show, with Professor Terence Kealey, made the case for a complete separation of science and state.

I am saying here only that I think Prasad, who would not share my views on funding, is nevertheless correct that NIH bureaucrats have stifled scientific progress in the way they have allocated grant money.

Let’s see what happens under Jay.

The post The Health Sector Is in a Panic appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Monday, in their final hours in office, former President Biden’s team chose to issue a blanket pardon to a number of close political allies and family members. Among that group was former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci.

Fauci was pardoned “for any offense against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through the date of [the] pardon” relating in any way to his time as NIAID Director, on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, the White House covid-19 response team, or as Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor.

In the letter explaining the pardons, Biden defended the choice, saying, “baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families.” Even when those individuals have done nothing wrong, Biden’s ghostwriters reason, “the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.”

Setting aside the fact that this was the exact tactic the political establishment used to try and tarnish Trump’s reputation, it’s revealing that the primary public reason presented for the pardons was to avoid investigations.

There are, of course, plenty of unseemly details about Fauci’s career that the political establishment would not like to see resurface in either the court of law or the court of public opinion. Many were detailed in RFK Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci, such as the secretive and deadly drug experiments on hundreds of HIV-positive foster children at New York City’s Incarnation Children’s Center between 1988 and 2002 and the experiment that locked the heads of Beagle puppies into cages full of flesh-eating insects.

If Fauci had come under the federal government’s microscope, episodes like those could have done much to stain the name of the man Biden recently dubbed “a true hero.”

The same goes for Fauci’s completely inaccurate projection of the danger posed by a strain of swine flu in the 1970s, along with the millions of dollars of damages the government had to pay out due to injuries sustained in the related swine flu vaccine experiments.

Fauci also made similar failed projections relating to the 2005 bird flu, the 2009 swine flu, and the 2016 Zika virus. In all these cases, the virus was nowhere near as dangerous as Fauci had claimed it would be. But his warnings did result in his department and other parts of Washington’s public health bureaucracy getting billions of dollars in new funding.

Of course, these episodes pale in comparison to what Fauci is now most famous for: overseeing the covid pandemic.

Early on, Fauci famously explained on TV that cloth masks cannot stop people infected with covid from filling the air around them with virus particles. He then completely reversed his stance and advocated for universal masking and government mask mandates.

He later claimed his earlier comments on television had been lies meant to trick the public into not buying masks to protect the supply of masks for healthcare workers who, in fact, used a different kind of mask. He then acted confused when much of the public stopped trusting him.

Fauci also went on record in early April 2020 calling for nationwide lockdowns—something he would later deny doing. When some states like Florida started to reopen months later, Fauci warned the governors they were taking “a really significant risk.”

It quickly became obvious to anyone who was actually looking that Fauci was completely wrong about the effectiveness of masking and lockdowns. But Fauci ignored the data and kept pushing for these measures into 2021, after the vaccines had become available.

Another fact that had become obvious early in the pandemic was that children posed little risk of contracting and spreading covid. Yet, Fauci pushed for school closures and later school masking long after both were clearly shown to be unnecessary.

Finally, Fauci made several high-profile claims about the covid vaccines that would quickly prove false.

But making bad projections and giving bad advice isn’t a crime. So why was the political class worried about Fauci being investigated by the Department of Justice? Because a federal investigation would likely have related to the speculation that Fauci played a role in bringing the pandemic about in the first place.

One controversial method for studying viruses involves artificially making the virus more transmissible or virulent. This so-called “gain-of-function” research allows for virus mutation or possible treatments to be analyzed much more quickly, but it brings the risk of a much more dangerous genetically-engineered virus infecting people if a sample leaks out.

We know that an NGO that gets funding from Fauci’s department bankrolled gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the laboratory in Wuhan, China, in 2017 and 2018. And that the same NGO had received federal funding while conducting gain-of-function research going back to 2014, when a three-year ban on using federal funds for such experiments had been implemented and when Fauci’s pardon happens to come into effect.

While there is no evidence that these experiments are related to the coronavirus that would eventually spread out of Wuhan in late 2019 and early 2020, there is still much we do not know about the extent of US involvement in similar experiments at the Wuhan lab around the time covid started to spread.

That fact, paired with the panicked and secretive behavior of Fauci and his colleagues after the first reports of covid started to emerge, has raised suspicion about the possibility of US government involvement in covid’s origin. Biden’s DOJ refused to investigate these matters. But after Senator Rand Paul got Fauci to explicitly deny, under oath, that his department had funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, an investigation into the truth of the claim to determine if Fauci had committed perjury remained a possibility.

That was until Biden pardoned him Monday morning.

A federal investigation would have all but forced the media to revisit many of Fauci’s unseemly actions, failures, and possible crimes. That would have been uncomfortable for a political establishment that has embraced and celebrated Fauci for decades.

But the real danger of a high-profile Fauci investigation, from the political class’s perspective, would come if the public started to ask themselves why a bureaucrat with such a long track record of failure was embraced and celebrated by those in power. And why he enjoyed so much professional success before retiring with a net worth of more than $11 million.

Such questions could lead people to consider that maybe the decades of mistakes that transferred hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to public health agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and the crony healthcare system as a whole were not mistakes after all. That, perhaps, the federal public health apparatus is nothing more than a racket and that officials are professionally rewarded, not for keeping us safe, but for protecting and expanding that racket.

Those are the questions that could well have arisen had a federal investigation prompted a retrospective and examination of the career and conduct of Anthony Fauci. And that is why Biden had no choice but to pardon him.

The post Why Joe Biden Had To Pardon Anthony Fauci appeared first on LewRockwell.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs and SNRIs) have long been marketed as the magical solution to depression and anxiety, promising relief in a convenient little pill. But behind the glossy pharmaceutical ads and doctor endorsements lies a far more troubling reality. These drugs don’t just alter your brain chemistry—they can hijack your emotions, disrupt your life, and lead to consequences far worse than the conditions they claim to treat.

In fact, there’s a dirty secret of the SSRI antidepressants—they cause psychotic violence which typically results in suicide and sometimes in horrific homicide (e.g., mass shootings). Remarkably, this side effect was discovered throughout their clinical trials, covered up by the drug companies, and then covered up by the FDA after the agency received a deluge of complaints (39,000 in the first nine years) once the first SSRI, Prozac, hit the market.

Initially, the media would report on the prescriptions (SSRIs) mass shooters took. However, a gag order went out, it became impossible to know what medications shooters were on, and the topic became taboo to discuss. Fortunately, that recently changed (e.g., after an article I wrote compiling that evidence went viral, Tucker Carlson did a 2022 segment on it and prominent conservatives gradually like Matt Walsh and MTG began speaking openly about SSRI mass shootings).

Note: I recently learned through a CDC official that the CDC has been silently tracking what mass shooters are on and found the SSRI link continues but has not disclosed it due to political earthquakes this admission would cause.

The Toxicology Bell Curve

In toxicology, you will typically see severe and extreme reactions occur much less frequently than moderate reactions:

click to enlarge

Because of this, when a very concerning and unmistakable adverse reaction occurs (e.g., the COVID-19 vaccines causing sudden deaths in young healthy athletes), that suggests you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg and far less severe injuries are also occurring much more frequently. For example, one estimate found that of those vaccinated for COVID, 18% were injured, 0.93% were disabled, and 0.05-0.1% died, while another survey found 41% of those vaccinated were injured, with 7% being severely injured.

In the case of the SSRIs, the psychotic violence they can create, sadly, is also just the tip of a very large iceberg, and there are many less severe ways they warp your mind, body, and emotions.

The Hidden Side Effects of SSRIs

Many datasets show the harm SSRIs cause greatly outweighs any benefits. For example, in a survey of 1,829 patients on antidepressants in New Zealand:

•62% reported sexual difficulties
•60% felt emotionally numb
•52% felt not like themselves
•39% cared less about others
•47% had experienced agitation
•39% had experienced suicidal ideation.

In that survey, other less common reported side effects (in order of decreasing frequency) included: insomnia, nightmares, ‘Fuzzy’/‘zombie,’ jaw grinding, sweating, blurred vision, constipation, disturbed/restless sleep, anxiety, heart palpitations, difficulty thinking, fatigue/exhaustion, strange/vivid dreams, stiff muscles/joints, ‘Brain zaps,’ mania, excessive yawning, panic attacks, memory loss, decreased motivation, night sweats, and decreased appetite.

This list matches what I’ve seen in many other datasets (although others like feeling agitated, shaky, or anxious, indigestion, stomach aches, and diarrhea are also commonly reported).

Note: another major issue with SSRIs (which is unlikely to be detected on a symptom-based survey) is that SSRIs frequently cause bipolar disorder.

Psychotic Violence: A Suppressed Truth

When Prozac was first brought to market in the mid-1980s, the pharmaceutical industry had not yet convinced the world that everyone was depressed and needed an antidepressant. So, instead (given that SSRIs work in a similar manner to a stimulant like Cocaine) Prozac was initially marketed as a “mood-lifter.”

Likewise, in 1985 when the FDA’s safety reviewer scrutinized Eli Lily’s Prozac application, they realized Lily had “failed” to report psychotic episodes of people on the drug and that Prozac’s adverse effects resembled that of a stimulant drug. In turn, the warnings on the labels for SSRIs, such as anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia, hypomania, and mania, match the effects commonly observed with stimulant street drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine.
Note: a large survey of found 44% stopped a psych med because of side effects, a quarter of which were due to SSRI agitation.

In light of this, and SSRI violence commonly being blamed on a “pre-existing mental illness” I thus compiled numerous studies (including ones industry tried to bury) showing the drugs themselves cause violence. For example:

•A Cochrane review assessed 150 studies where healthy volunteers were given SSRIs and found approximately one-third of them deliberately omitted discussing SSRI side effects, and about half of the studies were never made publicly available (presumably to hide their concerning data). Ultimately, 14 of the 150 studies were eligible for meta-analysis (since enough information existed in them for the researchers to know what actually happened), and in these 14 studies, SSRIs were found to double the risk of suicide.

•In 2000, David Healy published a study he had carried out with 20 healthy volunteers – all with no history of depression or other mental illness – and to his big surprise two (10%) of them became suicidal when they received Zoloft. One of them was on her way out the door to kill herself in front of a train or a car when a phone call saved her. Both volunteers remained disturbed several months later and seriously questioned the stability of their personalities.

•Eli Lilly showed in 1978 that cats who had been friendly for years began to growl and hiss on Prozac and became distinctly unfriendly. Once Prozac was stopped, the cats returned to their usual friendly behavior in a week or two.

Note: the FDA hypothesized that SSRIs could reduce violence in some but cause an increase in violence in others. Likewise a review of 84 animal studies showed that reduced aggression upon treatment with SSRI was most commonly observed, but sometimes the animals instead became more aggressive.

Sexual Dysfunction

One of the side effects that I feel best illustrates the poor risk-reward ratio of SSRIs is sexual dysfunction—as not being able to have sex is quite likely to make someone depressed (and in some cases suicidal)—hence often completely invalidating the justification for taking an SSRI to “feel happy again.”

For example, a Spanish study of five of 1,022 patients on the most commonly prescribed SSRIs found:

•The drugs caused sexual disturbances in 59% of them and 40% considered that dysfunction unacceptable.
•57% experienced decreased libido.
•57% experienced delayed orgasm or ejaculation.
•46% experienced no orgasm or ejaculation.
•31% experienced erectile dysfunction or decreased vaginal lubrication.

Note: similar results have been obtained in other studies, and I’ve met many men and women who continued to experience sexual dysfunction long after they stopped the SSRI (as this dysfunction is often permanent).

What I find the most amazing about SSRI sexual dysfunction is that while psychiatrists tend to downplay or ignore it, they simultaneously market SSRIs to treat premature ejaculation—which is yet another example of the drug industry trying to have its cake and eat it (especially given that many of the SSRI manufacturers also sell drugs for erectile dysfunction).

Note: one reason this side effect is under recognized is that embarrassed patients often won’t report it unless they are specifically asked about it (e.g., in the Spanish study, while 59% of SSRI users reported sexual dysfunction, only 20% did so without prompting—something unlikely to be done in a drug trial aimed at getting a medication to market).

Emotional Blunting: Losing the Essence of Life

Once the SSRIs hit the market, I immediately noticed that SSRIs sometimes dramatically altered the personality of those who took them. For example, they often destroyed the drive people had to make something of their life—and in some cases, I sadly watched that derailment continue for decades. Likewise, I began to hear stories of people describing how their experience of life was deadened, often in a manner not too different from how the drugs “numb” your sexuality.

Some of the common stories included:

•Not having emotional responses to things you should have responses to. For example, I saw numerous cases of people being in unhealthy jobs or relationships, seeing a doctor for help with their depression, quickly being put on Prozac, and then wasting a decade of their life because Prozac (or another SSRI) removed their drive to leave that toxic situation. Likewise, I heard many people state that Prozac took away the joy they felt in life.

•Losing the depth and richness of life. This comment for instance, does an excellent job of illustrating that:

click to enlarge

Note: in psychiatry, this emotional anesthesia (not finding things as enjoyable as one used to) is known as “emotional blunting.” Depending on the study (e.g., those mentioned above) between 40-60% of those who take SSRIs experience this side effect, and it’s sometimes rationalized as a necessary trade-off for removing the emotional pain associated with depression.

One of the greatest problems with our society is the belief that the media has marketed to us that we should never have to feel negative emotions. In reality, they are a critical component of the human experience and are frequently necessary for our growth and identifying the correct direction for our lives. Unfortunately, to market depression (and SSRIs) it was necessary to pathologize normal facets of life and turn them into permanent illnesses requiring indefinite treatment.

Read the Whole Article

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Click Here:

Steve Kirsch

The post In California, we’ve vaccinated more elderly people with the COVID vaccine than there are elderly people in the state appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

BOOM! President Trump Ends “Executive Order 11246” from 1965, Liberals MELTDOWN! | WLT Report

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In a historic move, President Trump has signed an Executive Order declassifying all files related to the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK.

But what does this really entail? What secrets have been buried for decades, and what does this mean for American history?

Meanwhile, the ATF was caught rebranding its Chief Diversity Officer in an alleged attempt to circumvent Trump’s orders, and Ross Ulbricht of Silk Road fame is seen smiling post-pardon.

Plus, we’ll cover CNN’s inauguration gag order, the latest MLB Hall of Fame results, and the 97th Academy Award nominations. Don’t miss this jam-packed episode of America’s Untold Stories!

Join Mark and Eric as they discuss the implications of Trump’s actions, the ATF controversy, and much more.

Watch America’s Untold Stories to uncover the truth behind the headlines!

The post America’s Untold Stories: JFK, RFK, MLK Files to be Declassified — Major Revelations? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Chris Sullivan:

They probably ought to put Jacob Hornberger in charge of the files.

I’ve got a feeling it will be somebody else.

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Click here:

Alasdair Macleod

The post Will Comex gold face import tariffs? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

Daily Mail

The post CIA operative reveals mental disorder agency ‘actively seeks to hire’ because it makes for better spies appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

John Leake

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Writes Rick Rozoff:

How can these parties have so much support in Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Serbia, Georgia, etc. when the LGBT/trans-friendly, carbon emissions mandate, anti-Christian, open-borders mass migration, de-facto-merged-with-NATO EU militarized totalitarian police state offers people a veritable total surveillance state utopia?

Fascism!

Greece presidential election: Signs of a conservative swing?

The post Greece is latest “fascist” domino to fall in Europe appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks David Martin.

The post Militant Ignorance appeared first on LewRockwell.

The verb “to inaugurate” originates from Latin and has roots connected to Roman religious practices and rituals. The Latin root is inaugurāre, meaning “to install, consecrate, or dedicate (something or someone) by omens.”

Augurs were Roman priests who interpreted omens (especially the flight patterns of birds) to determine the will of the gods. This would seem to explain the need for black-robed high priests wielding sacred texts and invoking deities on the first day of a new job. Personally, I think handing off the keys to the executive washroom would be sufficient.

By mystical ritual, Donald John Trump was initiated as the 47th president, who will preside over the semiquincentennial of the United States, or what’s left of it after Lincoln shredded the Republic.

The event was marked by a virtual tsunami of competing Executive Orders and Presidential Pardons, from both the outgoing and incoming presidents, the latter cancelling the former even as the ink was drying. The ceremony was moved inside the capitol, ostensibly due to a vicious wave of Arctic global warming.

Note the use of “capitol,” not “capital”. The term derives specifically from the Capitolium, which referred to the Temple of IVPITER OPTIMVS MAXIMVS, located on the Capitoline Hill in ancient Rome. Thus, the term Capitol Hill.

Trump’s inauguration speech was sufficiently rousing, setting forth a litany of goals and visions that would keep several mere mortal administrations busy for the next decade. I’ve never been one for pep rallies, but it wasn’t a bad show.

I nearly leapt to my feet cheering, though I quickly regained composure, when Trump said that he was pulling out of the Paris Accords, dropping the EV mandates, erasing EPA emissions regulations, and turning wildcatters loose. A tear briefly formed in the corner of my eye. I haven’t heard that much rational talk from a political podium in donkey’s years.

Trump made one glaring mistake that annoys me every time I hear it. He stated that henceforth, there would only be two genders, and then proceeded to list the two sexes — male and female. Unless he intends on mangling English grammar like his predecessor, there are three genders — masculine, feminine and neuter — and they are not tied to biological sex. Gender in English only determines the choice of 3rd Person Singular pronouns (he/she/it). If you want more gender fun, try German or Spanish.

I was happy to hear that Trump’s administration would enforce immigration laws. However, a quick glance at my Pocket Constitution failed to turn up any references to interplanetary colonization.

I also noted not a single reference to repealing the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA PATRIOT Act), nor disbanding the supercilious Transportation Safety Administration (TSA). A thorough review of Article V of the Constitution concerning Amendments is probably in order, as well. Not a peep on these pressing issues.

Trump apparently intends to follow the Constitution and Rule of Law only insofar as it advances his agenda. In other words, more of the same. With a bit of luck, this administration will not be as corrupt as Grant’s, LBJ’s, Obama’s, or Biden’s.

I am not immune to excited hopefullism that comes with substantial changes in the milieu. Certainly, the events of November 5th are still making waves around the planet. European and American Bumbledicks are in an existential panic, Canada’s and Germany’s governments have collapsed, the unruly children in the Ukraine and Levant are suddenly subdued, and my crypto wallet has been inflating like an enema bag strapped to a helium tank. Not unwelcome results.

In a 1936 speech, British politician Sir Austen Chamberlain said, “May you live in interesting times,” playfully labelling it a “Chinese curse”. The phrase was further popularized by Robert F. Kennedy, father of the current RFK, in a 1966 speech in South Africa.

The closest thing I’ve found to an actual Chinese proverb along these lines is, 宁为太平犬，莫作乱离人 (Nìng wéi tàipíng quǎn, mò zuò luàn lí rén) — roughly, “Better to be a dog in times of peace, than a human in times of chaos.”

Whichever one you prefer, it is wise to use the momentary lull in the eye of the storm. Now is the time to shore up the battlements and lay in supplies. The Culture War is not yet won, but the winds have shifted and Gandalf may yet appear over the ridge with the Rohirrim in tow.

In any case, I woke up this morning feeling as if a thorn had been pulled from my paw.

This originally appeared on Radio Far Side.

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Trump’s known for his capriciousness, however, so it might be that he either didn’t mean to hint at anything at all in his latest remarks about Russia or he might unexpectedly change his mind about the compromises that he considers to be acceptable for each party during his upcoming call with Putin.

Trump said a few words about Russia shortly after his reinauguration while signing Executive Orders in the Oval Office. They’re important to interpret since they might hint at his peace plan, which he’s yet to officially reveal, but reports have circulated claiming that he’ll “escalate to de-escalate” through more sanctions against Russia and armed aid to Ukraine if Putin rejects whatever deal he offers. He’ll likewise allegedly cut Ukraine off if Zelensky rejects the same deal. Here’s what he said on Monday afternoon:

“Zelenskyy told me he wants to make a deal, I don’t know if Putin does … He might not. I think he should make a deal. I think he’s destroying Russia by not making a deal. I think, Russia is kinda in big trouble. You take a look at their economy, you take a look at their inflation in Russia. I got along with [Putin] great, I would hope he wants to make a deal.

He’s grinding it out. Most people thought it would last about one week and now you’re into three years. It is not making him look good. We have numbers that almost a million Russian soldiers have been killed. About 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed. Russia’s bigger, they have more soldiers to lose but that’s no way to run a country.”

Starting from the beginning, his claim that Zelensky “wants to make a deal” coupled with his uncertainty about Putin’s willingness might be meant to portray the latter as an obstacle to peace, thus possibly setting the stage for the previously mentioned punitive measures. As for his opinion that Putin is “destroying Russia”, that’s hyperbole but frames his counterpart as the weaker of the two, especially when contrasted with Trump’s declaration earlier that day about the start of an American Golden Age.

He then elaborated by pointing to Russia’s inflation rate, which is implied to be the result of the West’s unprecedented sanctions and correspondingly hinting at the possibility of some relief in exchange for Putin agreeing to compromise instead of continuing to pursue his maximum goals. Building upon that, citing Ukraine’s grossly inflated estimate of Russian losses might belie ignorance of the facts if he truly believes their numbers, but it could also reaffirm his expectation that Putin must compromise.

To explain, Trump seems to believe that Western sanctions’ effect on the Russian economy and the battlefield losses that Russia has suffered (both of which are exaggerated in the context that he referred to them) justify proposing compromises from Putin, not giving into his demands. For this reason, it’s likely that the earlier reports about him planning to propose something less than what his counterpart signaled would be acceptable are true, after which he’ll “escalate to de-escalate” if it’s rejected.

Observers can only speculate about the substance of his envisaged proposal, but it might look something like what was suggested at the end of this analysis here, particularly with regards to the proverbial carrots that Trump might offer Putin with regard to Ukraine’s neutrality and phased sanctions relief. As for the compromises that might be requested of Russia, these could include freezing the Line of Contact while being asked to accept only the partial demilitarization of Ukraine and practically no denazification.

Trump’s known for his capriciousness, however, so it might be that he either didn’t mean to hint at anything at all in his latest remarks about Russia or he might unexpectedly change his mind about the compromises that he considers to be acceptable for each party during his upcoming call with Putin. Nobody can therefore say with certainty what he had in mind, let alone what he’ll ultimately do, but this analysis is premised on the assumption that he might have even subconsciously let part of his plan slip.

This originally appeared on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

The post Did Trump Just Drop Some Hints About His Peace Plan? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump yesterday issued a new executive order declaring that so-called “birthright citizenship” does not apply to the children of foreign nationals residing illegally within the United States. The order reads, in part:

 (a) It is the policy of the United States that no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship, to persons: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

There is a common misconception in the United States that the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution mandates that the US government grant citizenship to anyone and everyone born within the borders of the United States. This misconception is largely due to the fact that, for several decades, US courts and technocrats have conspired to redefine the original meaning of the amendment, and thus apply it to every child of every tourist and foreign national who happens to be born on this side of the US border.

Some have even attempted to define access to birthright citizenship as some sort of natural right. This is a common tactic among some libertarians who have twisted the idea of property rights to extend the idea of a “right” to the governmental administrative act known as “naturalization.”

Even when looking at the issue strictly in terms of procedural legal rights, however, it is clear that the current definition of birthright citizenship is in conflict with the law as originally intended and interpreted.

To understand the central point of contention, let’s note the text of the Fourteenth Amendment itself, which states that citizenship shall be extended to: “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof…” Note that there are two qualifying phrases here. The persons in question must be both born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

It is this second qualification that remains a matter of debate.

What does it mean to be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States? This issue is explained by legal scholar Hans Spakovsky who notes that advocates of granting birthright citizenship to anyone born in the United States

erroneously believe that anyone present in the United States has “subjected” himself “to the jurisdiction” of the United States, which would extend citizenship to the children of tourists, diplomats, and illegal aliens alike.

But that is not what that qualifying phrase means. Its original meaning refers to the political allegiance of an individual and the jurisdiction that a foreign government has over that individual.

The fact that a tourist or illegal alien is subject to our laws and our courts if they violate our laws does not place them within the political “jurisdiction” of the United States as that phrase was defined by the framers of the 14th Amendment.

This amendment’s language was derived from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which provided that “[a]ll persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power” would be considered citizens.

Sen. Lyman Trumbull, a key figure in the adoption of the 14th Amendment, said that “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. included not owing allegiance to any other country.

The courts themselves have historically recognized this distinction, noting that the whole purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to grant citizenship to former slaves who obviously were not connected to any other country or sovereign. In the Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872), the court ruled:

That [the Fourteenth Amendment’s] main purpose was to establish the citizenship of the negro can admit of no doubt. The phrase ‘subject to its jurisdiction’ was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.

That second sentence is key:  ”The phrase ‘subject to its jurisdiction’ was intended to exclude from its operation … citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.” This was further confirmed by the Court in 1884 (in Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94) when the Court stated that the idea of birthright citizenship did not apply to Native American tribes which were nonetheless within the borders of the United States:

“[The Fourteenth Amendment] contemplates two sources of citizenship, and two sources only: birth and naturalization. The persons declared to be citizens are ‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ The evident meaning of these last words is, not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance. And the words relate to the time of birth in the one case, as they do to the time of naturalization in the other. Persons not thus subject to the jurisdiction of the United States at the time of birth cannot become so afterwards, except by being naturalized, either individually, as by proceedings under the naturalization acts; or collectively, as by the force of a treaty by which foreign territory is acquired. Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States, members of, and owing immediate allegiance to, one of the Indian tribes (an alien though dependent power,) although in a geographical sense born in the United States, are no more ‘born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ within the meaning of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government, or the children born within the United States, of ambassadors or other public ministers of foreign nations.”

In short, the court recognized that the tribal lands were within the legal jurisdiction of the United States, but this did not mean that everyone born within those borders was automatically granted citizenship. Those tribal members believed to be subjects of “foreign” tribal governments were therefore not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States in a way that conferred automatic citizenship.

Congress further reinforced the court’s interpretation by adopting new legislation granting citizenship to all tribal members in 1924. Had the Fourteenth Amendment really granted automatic citizenship to everyone born within the borders of the United States, no such legislation would have been necessary.

In the year 2024, however, advocates of the new and novel interpretation of “birthright citizenship” insist that the child of foreign nationals automatically becomes a citizen of the United States based entirely on the location of birth.

This is a rather odd way of doing things. In historical practice nearly everywhere, citizenship depends largely on the citizenship of parents, or on the parents’ place of birth, and not on the place where parents happen to temporarily reside when the child is born. Thus, historically and globally, the child of foreign nationals is himself a foreign national. This is true, for instance, of children born to American nationals overseas.

Only in the United States does there appear to be widespread confusion about this.

Of course, some libertarian or “classical liberal” readers might argue that such legal precedents are meaningless, and that everyone “deserves” the legal “right” of citizenship. How citizenship is any sort of natural right or property right, however, remains a mystery. Has the child somehow “homesteaded” his citizenship? Obviously not. Has the child entered into a contract with a legitimate property owner to acquire the “property” of citizenship? To ask these questions is to see the absurdity of them.

On the other hand, it is important to note that a lack of citizenship in any particular place does not negate anyone’s property rights. Real property rights—what Rothbard called “universal rights”—exist regardless of one’s citizenship, where he lives, or where he happens to have been born.

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

The post Birthright Citizenship Isn’t Real appeared first on LewRockwell.

Longtime Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson’s new article about a “second Gilded Age” in America gets it wrong. He writes: “In the first Gilded Age, a few tycoons amassed unimaginable riches — men such as John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan. With their great wealth came great power and influence. When they spoke, presidents listened. On Monday, as a billionaire reassumes the nation’s highest office, in attendance will be the three wealthiest human beings on the planet, according to the Forbes and Bloomberg lists of billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos (who owns The Post) and Mark Zuckerberg.”

While those facts are technically correct, where Robinson goes wrong is in failing to recognize that America had a totally different economic and political system in the Gilded Age period than it now has.

Back then, the powers of the federal government were relatively few and limited. Therefore, people who were making large amounts of money were largely doing so under the principles of a genuine free market — that is, by providing goods and services that other people wanted and were willing to pay for. The federal government had virtually no power to do good things for people or bad things to people. Thus, it didn’t make a big difference if presidents listened or not.

Today, things are totally different. Many Americans make vast amounts of money through the connections, contracts, and influence they have with the welfare-warfare-state/regulated-economy way of life — that is, through the vast overwhelming power of the federal government to do good things for people and bad things to people. This is especially true for those who benefit, either directly or indirectly, from the enormous largess that is pumped into the “defense” industry.

Let’s examine some of the principles of the Gilded Age to see how differently Americans back then thought in comparison to how Americans today think:

1. No income tax, income tax returns, or IRS. Everyone kept 100 percent of what he earned. There was nothing the feds could do about it.

2. No Social Security. Helping out parents and seniors was a voluntary choice.

3. No Medicare or Medicaid. A free-market healthcare system.

4. No welfare state. Charity was voluntary, not coerced.

5. No Pentagon, CIA, or NSA. No national-security state. Just a relatively small, basic military force.

6. Minimal immigration control. Almost all immigrants were permitted entry into the United States.

7. No Federal Reserve or paper money. Gold coins and silver coins were mandated by the Constitution.

8. No foreign wars in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, or Asia.

9. No foreign military bases.

10. No foreign aid.

11. No drug laws. No drug war.

12. Virtually no economic regulations, including minimum-wage laws.

13. Virtually no public-schooling systems.

Do you see any differences between that system and the system under which we all have been born and raised today?

The result of that unusual system? The most prosperous era in the history of man! In decrying the Gilded Age, Robinson makes a common mistake, one that is rooted in the indoctrination that everyone receives in America’s public (i.e, government) school system and state-supported colleges and universities. He fails to see the tremendous increase in the overall standard of living, especially for the poor. It was skyrocketing. That’s why tens of thousands of penniless immigrants were flooding into America every week. For the first time in history, they and their families not only had a chance of surviving for a long period of time, they now actually had an excellent chance of prospering! And they did!

Yes, it’s true that some people, including poor people, were becoming fabulously wealthy. But who cares? Why is that bad, especially when even the poorest people in society were doing so well? The reason the rich were becoming wealthy is that they were improving people’s well-being by coming up with goods and services that were improving people’s lives. People were willing to buy their goods and services. Those goods and services were raising the standard of living for the poor and middle class. Moreover, as part of the production process, the entrepreneurs were providing gainful employment to people, which enabled them to make and save large amounts of money, which provided the capital that was making workers more productive.

The problem occurred when people in the 20th century let envy and covetousness gain control over them. They railed against the “rich” and begin calling for forced equalization of wealth through the income tax and the monetary-debasement process. The problem though is that when they embarked on their equalization schemes, they ended up harming the poor by inflicting lower standards of living on them. Moreover, the fear that began afflicting their lives caused them to relinquish their rights and liberties to an all-powerful national-security establishment, which began producing an entirely new class of rich people.

Oh, did I mention that the Gilded Age was also the most charitable period in history? When people were free to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth, they voluntarily gave much of it away, on a purely voluntary basis. That includes the so-called robber barons. John D. Rockefeller, one of the “robber barons” who Eugene Robinson mentions in his article, gave away $450 million, which in today’s value was equivalent to billions of dollars — and, no, not to get an income-tax deduction because — remember — there was no income tax!

When President Franklin Roosevelt completed the transformation of American society to a welfare-warfare state/regulated-managed economy in the 1930s, one of his central principles was to make certain that Americans would never realize that their political and economic system had changed. He emphasized that the new way of life was simply saving and continuing America’s free-enterprise system. Americans bought it. That’s why today Americans are convinced that the economic and political system under which they have been born and raised is the same “free-enterprise” system under which people in 1870-1900 lived. That’s why people like Eugene Robinson are unable to see that the “first” Gilded Age is dramatically different from the system under which we live today — the system that he incorrectly calls a “second” Gilded Age.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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