Lew Rockwell Institute

Britain’s Keir Starmer is already pulling the rug from under his own grudging declaration. The only hope of change is of the unintended consequences variety

Middle East Eye – 26 September 2025

The reluctant recognition of Palestinian statehood by Britain, France, Australia, Canada this week is a con – it is the same switch and bait that has been blocking the creation of a Palestinian state for three decades now.

Imagine that these four leading western countries had recognised Palestine not in late 2025, when Palestine is in the final stages of being eradicated, but in the late 1990s, during a period of supposed Palestinian state-building.

That was when the Oslo accords were signed with western backing. The Palestinian Authority was established under Yasser Arafat with the apparent aim that Israel would gradually withdraw from the territories it still occupies in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem and begin ruling an emergent Palestinian state.

At Israel’s insistence, let us note, the Oslo accords carefully avoided any mention of the ultimate destination of this process. Nonetheless, the message from western politicians and media was the same: this was heading towards a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel.

Looking back, it is evident why that did not happen when it still looked feasible.

The Israeli leader of the time, Yitzhak Rabin, told the Israeli parliament that his vision was not of a state but of “an entity which is less than a state”: a glorified Palestinian local authority utterly dependent on its bigger neighbour, Israel, for its security and economic survival.

After Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Israeli gunman, his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, was propelled into power by a majority of the Israeli public on a mandate to stop the Oslo process in its tracks.

He repeatedly reneged on commitments to withdraw Israeli soldiers and Jewish settler-militias from the occupied West Bank. In fact, in this period of supposed “peace-making”, Israel colonised Palestinian land at the fastest rate ever.

In 2001, during his time in opposition, Netanyahu was secretly caught on camera, explaining how he achieved this reversal.

Reports this week of a watered-down version of the plan suggest Tony Blair, the war criminal who oversaw the destruction of Iraq two decades ago with George W Bush, may be appointed effective “governor” of a Gaza in ruins.

Read the Whole Article

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During the COVID-19 rollout, patients gradually began to realize that some of the COVID-19 vaccines were more dangerous than others. Initially this was written off as a conspiracy theory. However, as time moved forward, and more evidence emerged to support the “hot lot” hypothesis there was an increasing acceptance of this theory.

At the time, the most common theory I heard raised to account for this was that a large global experiment was being done to assess the effects of various mRNA doses (e.g., one researcher was able to show that the hot lots of each COVID vaccine brand hit the market at different times in a manner that seemed to be coordinated between the manufacturers and that Pfizer’s lots contained a simple code that correlated to their toxicity).

However, while this was possible (as you can put nothing past these people) I was more inclined to an alternative hypothesis: that it was not possible to correctly produce the mRNA vaccines at scale, so there would be a large number of production issues including many either toxic or inactive lots hitting the market.

This theory was based on both my knowledge of the specific engineering challenges the mRNA technology faced and the fact that hot lots are an enduring problem with vaccines.

Because of this, many (myself included) believe the vaccine industry concluded it wasn’t possible to completely clean up their production process while maintaining the economic viability of the vaccines, so they instead focused on getting the Federal government to exempt them from liability for their hot lots under the argument that “vaccines were essential for our national security” so a certain number of people being injured by defective vaccines was an acceptable trade-off to maintain this “vital” national resource.

Given the severity of this allegation, I will now present several incidents where ‘hot’ vaccine lots have been identified in the market.

Adventitious Agents

One of the greatest challenges with producing a biological pharmaceutical is that it has to be grown in a medium (e.g., a virus within cells or a growth medium for bacteria). This introduces a few major issues.

• First, if cell cultures are used, an unrecognized virus may already have infected the cells and contaminated the final product.

• Second, anytime a growth medium is used, unwanted pathogens can also get in (e.g., from the air) and then grow there. This is especially problematic because the same labs that produce these products also often house harmful infectious organisms.

• The entire process inevitably requires a purification stage where the undesired contaminants (e.g., unwanted bacteria, foreign DNA, or toxic components of now destroyed bacteria) are removed. Unfortunately, it is often quite difficult or costly to remove these unwanted contaminants, and the cost frequently exceeds what the manufacturers are willing to pay.

In turn, unwanted biological contaminants (euphemistically termed adventitious agents) are an enduring challenge for the pharmaceutical industry. For example, this recent 2022 review paper highlighted some of the most common “adventitious agents” (e.g., mycoplasma frequently contaminate cultures) and cited a few well-known incidents such as:

• In 1946, a sheep vaccine was contaminated with prions (due to it being sourced from sheep in the early asymptomatic stage of the prion disease scrapie—something similar to Mad Cow Disease), which in turn caused the sheep in the herd that received the vaccine to later get scrapie.

• The FDA reported in 1973 that the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and oral polio vaccine were contaminated with bacteriophages (viruses that eat bacteria). This was due to the blood used to make those vaccines containing bacteria, and the bacteria but not their attached bacteriophages being filtered out of the final product.

• In 1995, the MMR and yellow fever vaccines were found to be contaminated with the Endogenous Avian Retrovirus and the Avian Leukosis Virus.

• In 1997, scrapie was also spread to sheep through another contaminated vaccine.

• In 2004 and 2005, two rotavirus vaccines, Rotarix manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and RotaTeq manufactured by Merck, were found to be contaminated with porcine circovirus-1 (PCV1) after over 100 million doses of the vaccine had been distributed worldwide.

• In 2007, over 1 million doses of the Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccine were recalled due to the detection of Bacillus cereus in the manufacturing equipment.

Sadly, as we investigate the past, it will become clear these events were only the tip of the iceberg.

Note: many reported incidents that I am not aware of didn’t make it to this article, while a far larger number of incidents were never reported, but I nonetheless believe the cases listed in this article are more than sufficient to make the point.  Similarly, as a I discussed in a previous article, while lab leaks with dangerous pathogens are typically not reported, enough documented instances exist within the peer reviewed literature to establish that those leaks are inevitable and impossible to avoid (which in turn argues that this research ever being conducted).

Sir Graham Wilson

Sir Graham Wilson was an eminent bacteriologist from the London School of Hygiene (e.g., in 1923 he coined the concept of herd immunity—an often impossible benchmark that I’ve previously shown has been used to repeatedly sell dubious vaccines to the world). Wilson grew up in a time when many bacterial infections were treated with vaccines or antiserums (particularly antitoxins for the tetanus or diphtheria toxin). At this time, his profession believed anti-vaxxers were irrational and pseudoscientific individuals and that vaccines were “100% safe and effective.”

However, as Wilson became older, he began to see more and more evidence that there were real dangers to vaccination, and that his profession habitually covered it up to maintain the mythology all vaccines were “safe and effective.” In turn, due to Wilson’s stature in the field, many other (anonymous) vaccine experts shared their records of secret vaccine disasters that had occurred with Wilson and helped him to compile a detailed record of published and unpublished vaccine catastrophes that had occurred as many of them harbored immense guilt over what had happened, but simultaneously felt that they could not take on the risk of speaking publicly about it.

From reviewing the record he put together, what I find remarkable about Wilson’s work was how much of it mirrors what we saw a century later—for example, very few people know that one of the original cases of Guillain Barré syndrome was due to a vaccine injury:

In an article published in 1919 Guillain and Barré referred to Landry’s–type paralysis when they reported a fatal case of acute polyneuritis with albuminocytologic dissociation after typhoid vaccination.

In Guillain and Barré’s case numbness and stiffness became apparent in the patient’s legs the day after injection and the following day in his hands. Paralysis gradually came on and by the 9th day was complete in the legs, arms, and face. Bulbar symptoms developed on the 7th day, and on the 10th day, the patient died.

Note: previously I discussed many of the documented cases Wilson unearthed of a vaccination causing a pre-existing illness (e.g., polio) to spiral out of control.

One of the key themes that kept on recurring in the records Wilson unearthed was that many vaccine catastrophes occurred after a contaminated lot was given to a large number of people (typically children or soldiers). Wilson in turn argued that rather than denying these incidents occurred, his profession needed to be honest about them so that the mistakes that led to these toxic ‘hot’ lots could be recognized and hence prevented from happening again. In The Hazards of Immunization, he discussed the following hot lot incidents:

I will now review those incidents in detail.

Note: Wilson documented many severe reactions that occurred from the early vaccinations. In this article, I am only covering the subset of reactions which occurred at a higher rate than the typical rate.

Hot Lots of the Past

Note: I tried to find all the sources Wilson cited (his citations were not that clear). For those not cited, please refer to his 1967 book. Additionally, some of the incidents listed here we not covered by Wilson, and for all of those, direct sources are provided. Lastly, many of the deaths described here were agonizing and horrific, but for brevity, I have not detailed each of them.

Diphtheria

Early diphtheria vaccines utilized the diphtheria toxin to provoke an immune response to it. Since it was so difficult to neutralize its toxicity, numerous accidents occurred due to hot lots being released with an active diphtheria toxin which had a variety of characteristic symptoms (many of which overlapped with other vaccine injuries). For example:

Disturbances of sensibility were sometimes detectable, especially in the older children. They included paraesthesia, formication in the extremities, and diminution in the muscular sense and the orientation of the limbs leading to ataxia. The patellar reflex was first exaggerated, then lost, and regained as recovery took place. One of the earliest symptoms was an exaggeration of the oculocardiac reflex; in several hundred patients it was observed that compression of the eyeball led to stoppage of the heart.

Note: the oculocardiac reflex is now a mostly a forgotten side of medicine (outside of very specific areas of medicine such as surgeries on the eyes). The diagnosis of this reflex is defined by the heart rate decreasing by over 20% after pressure is placed on the eyes (which typically does not happen) due to activation of the vagus nerve. I have a few theories on why vaccine injuries would cause that reflex to stop the heart, but I am not confident in any of them.

Let’s now look at a few of the cases of diphtheria hot lots:

• In October 1919 the city of Dallas Texas began administering the diphtheria toxin (and its antitoxin) to non-immune children. Many different lots were used, and one of those ended up being hot (due to it having over 50 times the maximum permissible levels of free diphtheria toxin). Several hundred doses of it were given (although the exact number remains unknown), and 50 severe reactions to it were reported (with many more not being reported). When 120 of those injected were studied, it was found that 96 had reactions, 12 of which were moderate, 74 which were severe, and 10 of which were fatal.

Each of the 96 Dallas cases in turn had an almost identical progression of symptoms. Their symptoms went in the following order:

1. Intense burning at the site of injection which in a few hours became agonizing.

2. This was accompanied by severe nausea, vomiting, constipation, signs of a kidney injury, extreme swelling of the entire arm, and a reaction that spread into the rest of the body.

3. 24-48 hours after injections, vesicles appeared at the injection site, which leaked a burning fluid, and after they disappeared, left a raw ragged and ill-smelling patch 6-12 square inches (or more) in area which took around 2 to 2.5 months to heal.

4. Around 9-10 days, the heart became highly irregular and this lasted until the 8th to 10th week.

5. Starting at the third week, all the patients had muscles throughout the body become paralyzed (including the ones which controlled neurological functions like vision). Typically, these neurological complications lasted for 18-20 weeks, and tended to be more severe in those who had had a less severe initial reaction to the vaccine.

Remarkably, no investigation over what went wrong in Dallas was ever conducted, so other similar incidents also occurred.

Note: aspects of the incident are discussed within this 1927 book.

• In 1922 a 14-year old in Belgium was injected with a vial of diphtheria toxin (receiving at least 100 times the lethal dose) that had somehow gotten into a batch of tetanus vaccines, and died seven days later from cardiac paralysis.

• In Massachusetts in 1924, two lots were given that became toxic due to being frozen. For one lot, 21 of the 23 who received it, had severe reactions to the vaccine (but none died), while for the other lot, 22 of the 31 had severe reactions. After these incidents were studied, it was concluded that the cold had separated the antitoxin from caused it to agglomerate (clump) together on the bottom of the vial.
Note: colloidal agglomeration and zeta potential are discussed further here (as one of the primary toxicities of vaccines is that they cause fluids in the body like the blood to clump together and stop flowing).

• In Baden in 1924, 34 infants and children received a hot lot, of whom, 6 had no reaction, 11 had mild reactions, and 17 had severe reactions (of which 10 were fatal). A subsequent investigation revealed that when this lot was produced, diphtheria toxin was accidentally mixed with another diphtheria toxin rather than an antitoxin.

• In Tashkent (U.S.S.R.) in 1927, 14 children received diphtheria toxin instead of antitoxin, 8 of whom died. In their case, administering the antitoxin, appeared to prevent their immediate death and instead caused them to die from a progressive paralytic neurological disorder.

• In 1928 in Queensland, 21 children were injected with a diphtheria toxin-antitoxin mixture of whom 12 died. Unlike the other cases, this one appears to have been due to the vaccine being contaminated with Staph Aureus.

• In Columbia in 1930, 48 children were given toxin instead of antitoxin, many became severely ill (often becoming comatose or convulsive) and 16 of them (with 14 dying in 1-3 days and the others dying from progressive neurological symptoms). One noteworthy aspect of this incident was that many of the children developed the characteristic diphtheria membrane in the throat (which gradually suffocates you), suggesting that the toxin itself had an affinity for the throat (rather than just the infection) as no diphtheria bacteria could be found.

• In Italy, in 1933, several hundred infants and children became severely ill after being injected with a hot diphtheria lot, with over 30 dying.

Note: in most of these cases, autopsies also showed damage to organs throughout the body.

Once a safer way to produce the vaccine was discovered (using a toxoid rather than a toxin), production was shifted to the new method. However, incidents still happened with these newer vaccines. For example, in 1948 in Kyoto Japan, over 600 infants and children became ill from one lot, with at least 68 dying (along with 16 more deaths in Shimane). In one sample of 15,561 who received their second injection, 606 fell ill, and 68 died from muscular paralysis (with 59 dying in 1-2 weeks), and it was later discovered these hot lots again contained the free diphtheria toxin.

Given that children were regularly dying from diphtheria, I can understand why governments around the world believed any treatment for it was justified. Nonetheless, given that in each of these cases, the diphtheria toxin maintained a remarkably consistent lethal dose (roughly one-millionth of a gram) they should have done more to ensure that quality control was in place to prevent these agonizing deaths from happening. Sadly, as we’ve seen since then, that lesson still has not been learned.

Note: there was also a 1926 case in China where 33 of 89 people who received a diphtheria toxin antitoxin injection became ill (with 5 dying), from what appeared to be streptococci contamination. Subsequent investigation revealed that the source of this contamination was likely the distilled water used to dilute it.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Century of Forgotten Vaccine Hot Lot Disasters appeared first on LewRockwell.

US preparing options for strikes inside Venezuela.

The attacks could happen “in a matter of weeks”.

The excuse is strikes inside Venezuela on alleged drug traffickers.  This is a hoax like the “Muslim Terrorist Threat” that was Washington’s excuse for its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  The war on terror was a war on opponents to Greater Israel.  The war on Venezuelan drug traffickers is a continuation of Washington’s attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government dating from the Hugo Chavez years and to return Venezuela to American hands for exploitation.  Regardless of any drug traffickers, attacks on Venezuelan territory are acts of war.  Intimidation in support of American hegemony continues.  Will military attacks on drug traffickers in Mexico be next?  Is Venezuela the only country with drug traffickers?  What about Washington’s ally, Colombia?

The real reason for the military attack on Venezuela’s government, along with bagfuls of money, is to encourage the Venezuelan military to overthrow Maduro’s government.  It is a tactic Washington has often used on Honduras. 

Chavez earned the American establishment’s enduring hatred of Venezuela in his speech before the UN in 2006 when he said, referring to US President George W. Bush, that yesterday at this very podium stood Satan himself speaking as if he owned the world.  You can still smell the sulfur. 

Is Trump, blocked from fixing America by the Democrat Civil Service, Democrat judiciary, and Democrat media, turning to war?

If the report from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service is correct that the West is preparing a false fag attack on itself to be blamed on Russia, and the report is correct that Western troops are being placed in Moldavia and Odesa to attack the Russian forces in Transnistria, a wider war is about to break out.

False air space violations claimed by Estonia and Poland have set the stage for the West’s false flag attack on itself.  Moldavia’s excuse is that Transnistria is a part of Moldavia occupied by Russian troops.  The NATO troops allegedly in Odesa can claim to have been attacked by Russian forces in Transnistria.

The Western media, of course, will lie and blame Putin.

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Click Here:

Margaret Anna Alice

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Thanks, David Martin.

The post Former Assistant Secretary of HUD Catherine Fitts: The Kirk Assassination is a PSYOP appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Ginny Garner.

See here.

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Thanks, Ginny Garner.

See here.

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Thanks, Ginny Garner.

The post Inside the Assassination Game: Michael Yon on Charlie Kirk, Zionists and Global Chaos appeared first on LewRockwell.

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At the memorial service for Charlie Kirk (billed as a spiritual “revival” by pastors and evangelicals in attendance), the keynote speaker, President Donald Trump, said the following:

In that private moment on his dying day, we find everything we need to know about who Charlie Kirk truly was. He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika. But now Erika can talk to me and the whole group, and maybe they can convince me that that’s not right, but I can’t stand my opponents. [Emphasis added]

Everyone (including MAGA and the evangelical delusionals) have known since the Republican primary in 2016 that Trump is a morally, ethically and spiritually corrupt human being. That is a hard, stone-cold fact. And this fact is universally known. And if Jerry Falwell Jr. (who was likewise morally corrupt) had not enthusiastically endorsed Trump in the Republican primary—no doubt, due to the fact that Trump’s Zionist spies had photographs of Falwell’s corruption that could be used against him or kept hidden for his endorsement, which he gave—Trump might not have ever been nominated, much less elected. Back then, the evangelical world still had a few scruples and seriously hesitated to support such a completely corrupted candidate.

Those days are long gone. Today, Donald Trump’s corruption corrupts everyone he touches—including America’s evangelicals.

On his Instagram page, Tim Whitaker comments on Trump’s audacious “confession”:

I need you to really understand the context that these words were said in. This is President Trump talking at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. This was billed not just as a service honoring Charlie Kirk but as a revival. There were worship leaders baptizing this event in the name of Jesus. People raising their hands, lifting up their voices, praising Jesus Christ, the same Jesus that taught His followers to love their enemies.

And Trump gets up and says that he hates his enemies. And the crowd: They cheer. They cheer it on.

This is why we say that white evangelical Christianity in America is morally and theologically bankrupt. They do not worship a Jesus that you find in the red letters. They worship a Jesus of empire. They don’t believe in liberating the poor and the oppressed. They believe in a gospel for the rich and the powerful.

And here they are cheering on the words that are in complete opposition to the teachings of Jesus, and they can’t even see it. In their mind, they’re following true Christianity. Anyone who’s not like them is a heretic, preaches a false gospel, needs to be destroyed.

Friends, this is the gospel of the flag and the cross, and it always produces disastrous results.

Amen, Tim!

But Trump’s hypocrisy goes even deeper than “confessing” (boasting) that he hates his opponents during a memorial service for a man who was being eulogized for having the character to love his opponents.

And before proceeding, Trump even used the lesser term for adversary, “opponents,” not the greater term, “enemies.”

Merriam-Webster defines “opponent” as: “One that takes an opposite position (as in a debate, contest, or conflict).”

Merriam-Webster defines “enemy” as: “One that is antagonistic to another; especially: one seeking to injure, overthrow, or confound an opponent; something harmful or deadly; military adversary; a hostile unit or force.”

Jesus told His disciples: But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. (Matthew 5:44 KJV)

Jesus commanded His disciples to love their enemies, those seeking to injure, overthrow them, those seeking to do something harmful or deadly against them. Trump was talking about simple political opponents, those who take an opposite political position from his. “I hate my opponents,” Trump emphatically declared, targeting 58% of the American people who disapprove of his job performance.

In his “confession,” Trump also told the world (and the evangelicals, if they were listening, which they weren’t) that he is NOT a Christian; he is NOT a “born again” child of God. Listen to the Apostle John:

He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now. But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes. (I John 2:9, 11)

By publicly announcing his hatred for his opponents, Trump is declaring that he hates anyone who opposes him regardless if they are his brothers or sisters in Christ, because many “born again” Christians oppose his political policies and philosophies. But the opposing political policies and philosophies held by Christian believers are determined NOT by personality or political party but by sincerely held spiritual and moral convictions of the heart—convictions placed there by the Word of God, the Holy Spirit, Natural Law, moral conscience and the understanding of constitutionalism and American history.

Saint John said even more:

Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him. (I John 3:15)

By saying he hates his political opponents, which includes millions of “born again” Christians, the Holy Spirit-inspired Apostle John says that Donald Trump is a murderer.

And we know that Trump is a murderer—and not just in a spiritual sense.

On his podcast, George Galloway said in his own colorful style:

Donald Trump is basically shooting people all over the world. He has now boasted that he has shot a third boat full of fishermen, if you believe the Venezuelans, or full of drug smugglers, if you believe Donald Trump. And let’s face it, Donald Trump knows a drug smuggler when he sees one. A third civilian boat has been eviscerated, obliterated from the skies by the United States military.

He’s now threatening to fight the Taliban again. He has repeatedly and is threatening to again attack Yemen. He is quite likely to be meeting Netanyahu this very day to discuss another Israeli attack on Iran. He is ready to assume sovereignty over the Gaza Strip, which will bring American forces directly into conflict with the Palestinian resistance there. And his friends have just massacred yet another huge family in the south of Lebanon.

So, if a man that may have lost his marbles is carrying around a nuclear football, we’ve got to wonder whether we need to stay in Russia in this fine worker’s apartment, or whether it’s safe to come home.

The Apostle John went on to say:

If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? (I John 4:20)

Of course, we know Trump is a liar. Most Beltway politicians are pathological liars, but Donald Trump takes lying to an art form.

But Trump was not finished with his hypocrisy during his speech at Kirk’s memorial service. He also said:

Some of the very same people who spent the last eight years trying to sit in moral judgment of anyone who disagreed with them about politics suddenly started cheering for murder… Some of the very people who call you a ‘hater’ for using the wrong pronoun were filled with glee at the killing of a father with two young children, and the same commentators who this week are screaming ‘fascism’ over a canceled late-night TV show, where the anchor had no talent or no ratings, last week were implying that Charlie Kirk deserved what happened to him.

No one can ever accuse Donald Trump of lacking audacity.

But it is totally lost to Trump and his willfully blind lackeys that what he just said is exactly what he—and they—is guilty of. They are sitting in moral judgment of anyone who disagrees with them about the genocide in Gaza, and they are cheering on the mass murders taking place in Gaza by the Israelis. We’re not talking about one man with two small children left fatherless. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of children left fatherless and motherless; hundreds of thousands of fathers and mothers left childless.

Trump went on:

No side in American politics has a monopoly on disturbed or misguided people, but there’s one part of our political community which believes they have a monopoly on truth, goodness, and virtue — and concludes they also have a monopoly on power, thought, and speech.

Yes, indeed!

And it is Trump and his followers that think they have a monopoly on truth, goodness and virtue and DO have a monopoly on power. Trump monopolizes the power of the Justice Department, Congress, the judiciary and the U.S. armed forces—and he uses all of that power against HIS political opponents, domestically and internationally.

And the cold, hard fact is: Most of these opponents are Trump’s opponents; they are not America’s opponents. Trump uses the force of arms at his disposal as President of the United States (much of which is NOT constitutionally provided to him) to fight his own personal battles and the personal battles of his Jewish billionaire donors.

But there’s more from Trump:

The tradition of reason and open debate that Charlie practiced is not a pillar of our democracy; in many ways it’s the basis of our entire society… We will defend it at all costs.

The sheer magnitude of hypocrisy contained in this statement is off the charts. Truly, there are no words to accurately describe it.

Reason and open debate . . . We will defend it at all costs. 

What malarkey!

The Trump administration is doing everything it can to squelch the freedom of reason and open debate. People all over America are being denied earned degrees due to the reason and open debate that Trump doesn’t like. They are being denied an education. They are being jailed. They are being deported. They are losing tenure. They are losing credentials. They are losing positions. They are losing incomes. All because Trump does NOT tolerate reason and open debate—especially when it comes to Israel.

And, of course, Trump purposely avoided discussing Charlie Kirk’s change of heart in not supporting Israel that he was expressing in the weeks leading up to his assassination. He also failed to mention that Charlie Kirk himself told friends that he felt that Israel would assassinate him due to his change of heart.

I invite readers to watch my short video Charlie Kirk Assassination Update here.

It is truly incredible that at an event organized and conducted by mostly professing Christians (including pastors) in which the primary focus of the deceased man’s virtue was his openness to discuss his views with any and all detractors and his tolerance and love for those same people was turned into a forum for the American emperor to boast about his hatred for his opponents, and those same “Christians” laughed, clapped and cheered.

And afterward, they called it a “revival.”

Maybe it was a revival, but a revival of what? Totalitarianism and monarchy? Religious Inquisition?

Once again, Donald Trump did what only Donald Trump can do. What began as a celebration of love for Charlie Kirk was turned into a celebration of hate for Trump’s opponents.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

The post Donald Trump Publicly Confessed That He Is Filled With Hate appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is more true awareness in social media about this terrorism case than in previous cases.  That shot surely was fired by a professional soldier or sharpshooter, not Tyler Robinson.  The Utah governor broke the news that Tyler Robinson is “not cooperating”:

“Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer is ‘not co-operating’ with authorities and has not confessed to carrying out the shooting, Utah’s governor Spencer Cox has said.” – BBC, September 14.

It’s good that he is not cooperating, means he’s lucid.  His mother and father are like his main accusers.  Since he rejected the accusations at the police station, we may wonder how his family, and its retired deputy sheriff friend, got him to go there.  Consider how the parents made their accusation (NYT news, emphasis mine):

“… she saw a photograph of the gunman on the news and thought that the image of a slender young man dressed in dark clothes… looked like her 22-year-old son, Tyler Robinson, law-enforcement officials said.”  “Mr. Robinson’s mother showed the photo to her husband, who agreed that the gunman looked like their son.”

His father said his son “implied” he was the shooter in a phone call between the two (CNN).  Now that Tyler has failed to “cooperate,” will the parents still accuse him?  Such accusation grounds – looked like, implied – are meaningless, but there’s a large cache of “evidence” gathered again against another very young man with no prior criminal record, who was a “stellar student in high school,” and who went from “scholarship student to wanted man.”  (NYT)

Let’s look at the evidence against him, which actually exonerates him.  We may not agree totally, but we should agree on the main facts.

.-  There is a text, allegedly of Robinson, saying that he had hidden the rifle somewhere in the university.  That would explain why there’s no rifle in the stairway pictures.  In the second pictures released, one shows him entering a building – we see the outside area.  The first two pictures released look less like Tyler, so to speak (they don’t look like him at all to me), and appear to be taken higher up.  The second ones show a closer look-alike, but there is no clear shot of his face.  I see they’re two different men and neither one is Tyler Robinson.  In this link, you can zoom these first two pictures.  Reporters should ask for more pictures, clearer ones; and the defense lawyer should.

The second released pictures can be seen in this link.

FBI releases new photos of the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s shooting.

So, the pictures are not of who they pretend to be (in my eyes), and they’re two different impostors.  Why not only one impostor for all fake pictures (and videos)?  It’s a terrorism case, that’s why.

One might as well ask why, on 9-11, the second “plane” went through the southern wall without exploding; why or how does it explode, in all videos, only after it is totally inside; also ask why, after it explodes, the plane nose emerges intact through the northern wall before exploding too (I treated this in an article titled “On Terrorism”) – and for that matter even ask why it’s like nobody notices.

.-  The decisive evidence that conclusively proves Tyler Robinson was set up as “the patsy” is the video showing “him” jumping down from the roof as he escapes.  In all pictures the culprit goes up the stairway, and someone could say the rifle was waiting upstairs, but there is no justification for the absence of the rifle in the escape video.  He left the rifle in the woods nearby, so it has to be seen or noticed in this video.  It’s not, though.

.-  It’s a bolt-action Mauser rifle (98 model).  He has something that waves in his hand, but we see a light object, not such a rifle.  He probably had a plastic in his hand with a black sweater around it.

.-  Pointlessly, he allegedly ran away with the rifle to leave it in the wooded area close to the university.  If he had no rifle to be seen, he might as well take it with him or throw it away somewhere else.  Some could say that the leg started hurting from such a high jump, and that he couldn’t carry it anymore, but that’s outside the video (which shows no rifle), and this video is finally the most conclusive evidence that Tyler Robinson is innocent of this crime, and therefore just a patsy set up by the perpetrator(s).  Determining the perpetrator(s) requires a deep investigation, with access to information, etc., which a private citizen doesn’t have.  However, based on what is published, one can detect and point to the evil supernatural power behind this terrorism.

.-  The video makes it look like it’s an easy jump.  We have problems with this jump too.  The police need to analyze this jump – it’s not easy like that.

The bolt-action Mauser rifle, reported to be an “older model,” weighs about nine pounds.  It’s not a foldable rifle; it’s not in the backpack.  Normally, anyone would throw the rifle down before jumping from a building, to survive the jump.  But not the figure in this video.  Those who don’t own such a rifle may consider a ten-pound dumbbell for comparison.  There’s no way someone with Tyler’s built jumps from that height with a rifle in his right hand, landing and running like in this video.  Even without the rifle, it’s not doable.

He jumps from the 12th rung of the ladder seen below in the link at the end.  To the roof top, it’s more than 16 rungs of this fireman’s ladder which doesn’t reach that high. This lower jumping spot is still a ceiling height.  Even from something like 2 meters, you may hurt yourself if you try to land in a squat position like he does.

This unbelievable jump is in fact the stuff of terrorism, and it’s a crucial type moment: The authorities must overcome this deception.  The deception is the enemy itself.  If people in general will swallow impossible facts with their ridiculous scenarios, then they cannot fight terrorism.  It cannot be that if the evil is too big you regress into childhood.  Someone who didn’t make that jump is being blamed for this attack.

Consider the frame of a door.  He is jumping from higher than that.  Let’s not forget, for a second, that this shooter supposedly had a rifle that is about nine pounds heavy with ammunition (chances are a Mauser rifle was not even used).

The lowest point to which his hamstrings reach upon landing is to a “parallel squat” level, as you see at 0.08 in the video below (freezing it), and he’s already rising up at 0.09, which is impossible really.  The figure doesn’t even land in a deep squat position – doesn’t fall on the ground as part of landing.  The rifle, which he would have in his right hand, doesn’t hit the ground; the right hand doesn’t even touch the ground.  Can Tyler Robinson do this?  It lands like a comics figure (superman, spider-man, that kind of thing).  He picks up something from the ground, but no rifle.

The figure in this escape video most definitely is not Tyler Robinson.  Such a reality determines what is happening in the attack – that it’s a terrorist attack again.  This video’s actual details should be studied and examined well by the FBI (perhaps by some of the other American intelligence agencies too).

What is it if not Tyler Robinson?  The case against him falls by its own weight.  It could be computer graphics, I suppose (but don’t know).  It could be directly supernatural evil.  It’s like the second 9-11 “plane.”  What is that?  Well, it can’t be a commercial plane for sure, unless a United Airlines plane can demonstrate that its parts go through concrete and steel walls like the one on 9-11 does in all the videos, whether they are from the TV networks or from others.  A real investigation of 9-11 could begin right there (it won’t ignore it!); a serious rebuttal may appear funny involuntarily if their scenario is too absurd (I wrote an article, by the way, titled “Book Adventures at eBay,” in a light vein).

I say that a human being cannot jump from the height this figure does, landing in a squat position where the butt does not touch the ground.  For example, no professional football wide receiver can do that.  The New York Times reported that Tyler likes to read comic books and play video games – nobody says he’s an athlete.  Wouldn’t you agree by now that it’s 100% sure he is not the jumper in the video?

I described the terrorism “power” in “On Terrorism” as being “hate” itself, as having zero intelligence, thus zero power in reality.  If it’s a circumscribed power, it’s a damned power, which we can notice.   Is the supernatural attacker here the same one as the 9-11 attacker (rhetorical question)?  Exactly the same one in all such terrorist attacks (I’m not digressing).  What seconds 0.08-0.09 show is better appreciated at the lowest playback speed of 0.25.

The post On the Assassination of Charles Kirk appeared first on LewRockwell.

I don’t hate anyone.  It’s not how I was raised. In debate, never attack the person, but ideas are always fair game.  I think that’s what Charlie Kirk stood for and he was brave enough to do it openly on college campuses where many students (especially on the left) have been indoctrinated to be infantile and intolerant.

The left does not believe in civil debate, free speech and equal rights.  This goes back at least to Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s, the father of political correctness (see his essay “Repressive Tolerance”).  Marcuse, professor of political theory from 1952-1970 at prestigious universities like Harvard and Columbia, taught a fixed-pie view of the world in which there were “oppressors” and “victims.”  Those who got a bigger slice of the pie must have used nefarious means, he reasoned.  Therefore, their supposed victims should be allowed any means to even the score, including the use of violence.

From an ideas standpoint, Charlie Kirk had his faults.  He, like most on the right, did not have a solid grounding in free market economics.  E.g., he supported President Trump’s tariffs.  (Trade is win-win.  To oppose free trade is to fall back into the fixed-pie worldview of the left.)  Kirk was far too political for my taste, and was willing to flip flop on issues so as not to upset Trump.  He was the consummate politician, which meant he was willing to compromise.  He was a political activist who impelled young people to vote for Trump in droves.  He had a massive following.  And in just 11 years, he would have been old enough to run for president.

Recently, Kirk disagreed with Trump on bombing Iran, and voiced his opinion in a meeting at the White House.  This drew the ire of Trump.  In fact, the right has been fracturing over the “forever wars” in the Middle East as well as unconditional U.S. support for the state of Israel.  Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have been increasingly vocal in their opposition, and Charlie Kirk was now joining them.  To them, this is the true “America first” foreign policy.

In fact, Charlie Kirk had long been a loyal supporter of Israel and had major pro-Israel donors all the way back to Turning Point USA’s founding 13 years ago.  His backers had flown him to Israel many times.  But something in him snapped after the October 7, 2023 massacre.  Things didn’t add up and he was starting to ask questions.  He invited Tucker Carlson to speak at his annual conference; when Carlson claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was controlled by the Mossad and running a sex ring to blackmail U.S. politicians, and everyone in DC knew it, the audience erupted in applause.  Needless to say, Kirk’s pro-Israel donors were not amused, putting tremendous pressure on him to cancel Carlson and get back in line.  Benjamin Netanyahu even invited him to visit Israel, but Kirk turned him down.  Netanyahu also promised to line up more financial support.  Kirk turned down the money.

This is what I will remember about Charlie Kirk: a man who believed in civil debate, got many ideas wrong, but had the courage to challenge long-held beliefs.  That, and he left behind a beautiful family, a wife and two daughters, just 1 and 3.

Who killed him?  We’ll probably never know with certainty, but it sure looks like a professional hit.  I’ve added it to my Pearly Gates questions.

(This essay will appear in the upcoming issue of The Coffee Can Portfolio.)

The post The Death of Civility appeared first on LewRockwell.

Henry David Thoreau was one of America’s most eloquent and incisive philosophers. His derision of unjust laws in his essay on “Civil Disobedience” is still catnip 175 years later. His summons to individuals to march to the beat of their own drum is a message that will continue to resonate as long as drums and dissonance exist. Thoreau vividly debunked the folly of people squandering their lives stockpiling unnecessary possessions.

But in his final years, Thoreau mutated into an apologist for bloodthirsty fanaticism and helped foment the American Civil War. Thoreau’s derision of prosperity and of freedom of contract continue to animate anti-capitalist zealots in our time. When Thoreau presumed he was rising above mere economic considerations, he was paving the road to serfdom.

Thoreau’s best-known work is Walden—his chronicle of living by a Massachusetts pond for a couple years. In the book’s peak piety passage, Thoreau declared, “None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.” But Thoreau’s poverty was a kabuki performance. His cabin was a mere 20 minutes away from his mother’s dinner table, where he often took repast.

In the years before the Civil War, Thoreau was almost alone in howling that affluence was damning America. Thoreau bewailed that people were being “ruined by luxury and heedless expense” and proclaimed that the “only cure… is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.” Thoreau’s definition of “heedless expense” apparently included anyone not living in a ramshackle cabin like his at Walden. In the 1840s, the average house in the United States had about 1000 square feet and was occupied by 5.5 people, according to the Census Bureau. People had no indoor plumbing, refrigerators, central heating, or electricity. Did Thoreau believe that Americans would be loftier souls if those 5.5 people were squeezed into 550 square feet instead of a thousand square feet of living space? “Ruined by luxury” was not the reason why the average life expectancy in Massachusetts in the 1840s was 38 years.

Thoreau whooped up minimalism as the one true liberation. “With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor,” he declared in Walden. Barely 20 miles from his cabin, Boston was being deluged by haggard souls fleeing a famine that killed 10 percent of the population of Ireland. Many new arrivals squeezed into ramshackle tenements, plagued by outbreaks of typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis. Food was sparse and diets were rarely healthy, helping spur a far higher mortality rate among Irish immigrants than other city residents. Thoreau disdained the Irish for their “coarse” and “brutish” ways. Thoreau scoffed that “often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune.” My ancestors fled Ireland’s infamous potato famine and arrived in America while Thoreau was at Walden.

Thoreau’s Original Sin is his contempt for voluntary exchange among private citizens. Thoreau proclaimed that “trade curses everything it handles.” Thoreau talked as if there was a spiritual calculus that made society poorer every time that two parties made a mutually profitable agreement.

Except, of course, when Thoreau was the one profiting. Thoreau boasted that he grew seven miles of rows of beans at Walden. His memoir would have been more candid if he added a postscript to his jeremiad: “Trade is a great evil and… hey buddy, ya wanna buy some beans?” Thoreau sold his surplus beans and bought rice, pork, molasses, apples, and farming supplies. Do people lose part of their soul when they swap beans for bacon or what?

Thoreau proclaimed that “trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.” Except when you get a really good price for your “messages from heaven.” Thoreau had the best volunteer literary agent in America—New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley—whom Thoreau met when he was briefly tutoring on Staten Island. Greeley arranged to sell one of Thoreau’s essays for $75 in 1849. This was more than double what Thoreau spent to build his house at Walden—$28.12—and more than 8 times as much as Thoreau’s profit from growing beans—$8.71. (The only way that Thoreau showed a profit from those beans was presuming that his own labor was worthless.) That $75 in 1849 would be roughly $2500 in current dollars, excellent pay nowadays for an essay for 99 percent of aspiring writers. Thoreau paused his principles long enough to cash the check. Greeley wanted to sell more such pieces but Thoreau preferred to devote himself to writing books instead of articles.

Thoreau’s disdain for voluntary exchanges is dicey to reconcile with how he survived selling his own talents. He declared in Walden, “For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one.” Thoreau—whose townsmen recognized as a Harvard University graduate—wasn’t hiring himself out to dig ditches. His primary income in his thirties and early forties came from his work as a surveyor that paid double or triple the wage received by unskilled labor. By developing a well-paid talent, Thoreau earned enough working part time to help pay to publish his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).

Thoreau thrived before surveyors were compelled to get prior approval from officialdom. Entry into almost a third of all occupations is now restricted by government licensing. Government regulations have spurred credentialist mania that make it more difficult to thrive without a college degree. Government restrictions and mandates have imposed far more barriers to independent living than most Thoreau fans recognize.

Thoreau—like other Transcendentalists—had a weakness for moral absolutes that could quickly spiral into drivel. Thoreau castigated railroads and declared that “the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.” A day’s wages at that point was 90 cents—which was the same fare for 30 miles rail travel. Thoreau said it would be faster to simply walk that distance rather than do a day’s work and then pay to ride the railroad. Thoreau proclaimed this as “the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as long.”

Thoreau neglected to include the expiration date for his “universal law.” Thoreau’s “rebuttal” of rail travel was practically out of date by the time Walden was printed 8 years after he left the pond. Rail travel had plunged in price by the end of the century, with some routes costing only a penny a mile for non-first-class passengers. At the same time, wages for unskilled laborers in Massachusetts more than tripled during the 1800s.

Thoreau railed against railroads in part because they were binding together broader swaths of humanity than local towns and villages. Thoreau preferred to keep localities relatively isolated and untainted by humanity beyond the county line. Thoreau rhapsodized about growing beans but the farmland in his part of Massachusetts was far less productive than farmland in Ohio and Indiana. Thoreau fretted about the new competition that local farmers faced but ignored how soaring agricultural productivity could greatly reduce the percentage of people toiling on the land to feed themselves and their families.

Thoreau was able to conduct his “experiment in living” because his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson had recently bought a 14-acre patch of land by that pond. Emerson could afford to buy that parcel in part thanks to the profits from his essay “Self-Reliance,” published a few years earlier. Emerson allowed Thoreau to temporarily live on that land in return for clearing some of the briars and trees.

Private land ownership was the prerequisite of Thoreau’s independent living. What would have happened if Thoreau had tried to do the same thing on land owned by the National Park Service (which was not created until 1916)? The authorities might have viewed him as a squatter and burned down his cabin including all his books and manuscripts in progress while he was out fishing.

While Thoreau portrays private possessions as burdens to self-liberation, earlier Americans recognized property as a bulwark of freedom. In the 18th century, property was equated with “liberty because property secured independence. Material goods were valued less for their market worth, as a means of economic development, or as a capital resource, than as a guarantee of individual autonomy,” as law professor John Phillip Reid noted in his classic work, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution. Such autonomy allows people to follow their own values or seek to build their own destiny. Hungarian economist Janos Kornai—a courageous dissident in the Soviet Bloc—observed in 1981: “The further elimination of private ownership is taken, the more consistently can full subjection be imposed.” Perhaps that is why so many environmentalists and leftists nowadays want to destroy private property.

We can appreciate Thoreau’s brilliance while rejecting his follies. It is possible to avoid deifying possessions without glorifying poverty. Seeking to “rise above economics” too often merely unleashes politicians to drag nations to their ruin.

The post Henry David Thoreau and the Well-Worn Road to Serfdom appeared first on LewRockwell.

Mr. President, most people I know say you can’t and wouldn’t repudiate the Evil Ones known as the Jewish Lobby, Media, and the Parasitic Super-Rich Ruling Class AKA the Deep State. You owe them your election andmay think you need them to stay in Office, but you have the power to stop them before they destroy your presidency and kill you. I don’t say this lightly. The stakes for the evil ones is in the Trillions of Dollars, and they have proven that they will kill for less, much less.

Mr. President, let me give you one small example that exceeds 10% of government income of $428.4 Billion, which is cost of Foreign Aid, Foreign Troop Deployment and Bases. If you add the cost of pure Treason for support of Illegal Invaders, the total is  $578.6 Billion. Simply not spending this amount indicated could revive the American Dream and bankrupt some of the Evil Ones.

President George Washington said it best in his farewell speech: WE HAVE NO DIRECT INTEREST IN EUROPE’S WARS. I would strongly say that we have no Direct Interest in any county except with our own domestic Communism, aka Democrats and illegal Invaders. We can only be defeated by weapons of mass destruction or from within.

Illegal Invaders must be deported as quickly as possible, regardless of cost, before the 2030 Census. Mr. President, there is no doubt that most members of Congress are both petrified and well- bribed by the Evil Ones. Most Members of Congress are Violating their oath of office for bribes and should be investigated, charged, prosecuted and  imprisoned. I estimate that half of the federal government is a Criminal Enterprise with no legal justification for its existence, none. Verify for yourself in the Enumerated Powers in the Constitution.

Mr. President, there are thousands of unconstitutional federal agencies, departments and functions, most of which can be eliminated with an Executive Order because they don’t exist legally. Mr. President, you could start by terminating the Federal Reserve Bank and Fiat currency. End inflation, give us back gold and silver currency with an Executive Order. The evil ones will go insane because they know that if they lose the Federal Reserve Bank and Fiat currency, they will lose control of the country and Trillions of dollars.

Mr. President, You are funding ongoing Communism in Blue Inner-Cities. This is insane. Many people believe that most residents of inner- cities were born out of wedlock, that 50% of babies are aborted and the others are raised by single mothers financed by government, for life, without support of fathers who continue fornicating. Note, it is unlawful to give any Federal Funds to states, so you can use an Executive Order to terminate such  unlawful programs.

Mr. President, the coup of 1913 brought in the Income Tax that reversed the roles of the states and federal government. Prior to 1913, the Federal Government was financed with tariffs and excise taxes. Income Taxes gave a substantial portion of consumer income to the federal government, allowing it to usurp state functions and concentrate power in DC. You could terminate income tax or give a large portion of it to states, while terminating all federal payments to states. Our Constitutional Republic will not function without changes to the income tax.

Mr. President, I voted for you because I believed that you had Charisma, Knowledge, Courage , Integrity and the Support of the People. You are not perfect, but you have done more for American People than any President in the last 100 years. But now you are guilty of two major sins that can destroy you and the country:

1. You are supporting Genocide in Gaza for which the entire world is denouncing us, and our own People are two-to-one against our support of Israel. This is not the way to elect more Republicans. We have been in many conflicts in the area in support of Israel. We have No Direct Interest in any other country and we should bring our troops home and end Foreign Aid.

2. Your election saved us from a civil war and bought time for your programs to forestall the looming Economic Collapse. But so far you have refused to terminate unconstitutional programs and follow the Constitution, which is the only way that we can survive an Economic Dystopia and remain as a Constitutional Republic. You have not indicated that you understand the effects of the role reversal caused by the income tax.

Mr. President, I really believe that you are the right man at the right time to save our country but you must repudiate the Jewish lobby, et al., and return to the Constitution, otherwise failure is guaranteed.

The post President Trump, Divorce the Jewish Lobby, Media, and Deep State To Save Yourself and Our Republic. appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Reagan famously said that the closest thing to eternal life on this earth is a government agency. Surely that aphorism applies to the Federal RESERVE. And most especially when you put a Trumpian ALL CAPS focus on the “reserve” part of its title.

That is to say, the purpose of the 1913 act had nothing to do with the Fed’s present-day “goals” with respect to inflation, unemployment, economic growth, housing starts, business capex, or any other aspect of the ebb and flow of commerce on Main Street. Instead, the Federal Reserve Act’s far more modest remit was to fix the badly flawed “reserve” arrangements of the National Banking Act that good old Abe Lincoln and his Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase had put into place to finance the civil war.

What the latter actually did was to nearly tax out of existence the honest free enterprise state banks that had prevailed during America’s growth explosion prior to the Civil War in favor of a system of federally regulated “national banks”. But the latter were just thinly disguised servants of the US Treasury. In that capacity, they were required to hold US Treasury bonds as collateral to back the issuance of their own bank notes—the latter being the essence of the 19th-century banking business.

As it happened, during the 50 years after the Civil War, fiscal prudence prevailed in Washington—even as the proceeds from Uncle Sam’s “revenue tariffs” soared owing to America’s booming commerce with the world. The result was that nearly 80% of the Civil War Debt was paid down by 1913, and the remaining debt, at less than 3% of GDP, amounted to barely $10 per US citizen.

So at that point Abe Lincoln’s war debt monetization machine was no longer needed, and the Civil War inflation had also been long-extinguished after the US officially went on the gold standard in 1879. Still, the awkward cantilevered reserve-holding structure of the Civil War banking system had lingered on.

The latter required local or so-called “country” banks to retain roughly 15% of their demand deposits as cash reserves, of which 60% could be placed at a dozen or so regional “reserve city” banks. In turn, these regional reserve city banks were required to maintain an even higher reserve ratio (around 25%)—of which 50% could be deposited with a third tier of “central reserve city” banks located in St. Louis, Chicago, and New York City.

Needless to say, during ordinary times, the central reserve city banks, and most especially the New York money center banks, were awash in the cash that would flow in from the “country” banks of the hinterlands and build up through the pyramid of regional reserve city banks. That sea of cash cascading to Wall Street, Chicago, and St. Louis would then frequently be put to work as overnight margin loans to the nation’s original stock market speculators and “hedge funds”.

Of course, the problem was that at certain times of the year, like the fall harvest, or when business conditions changed due to droughts, trouble in export markets, over-investment in new technologies like railroads or mechanized farm equipment, etc., the cash flows in the cantilevered reserve structure would be thrown into reverse. To wit, country banks would draw down deposits at the regional reserve city banks to meet the withdrawal demands of their customers. In turn, the regional reserve city banks would drain deposits from the central reserve city banks, which would be forced to liquidate their margin loans, sending the stock markets into a periodic crash and tizzy of liquidation.

While these periodic “panics” were claimed to cause severe hardships down the line to Main Street and to subtract from national prosperity, present-day scholars like Professor Wicker of Ohio State have shown otherwise namely, that these 19th century panics were very short-lived and did not much interfere with the relentless rise of industrial production, economic wealth and living standards after the Civil War.

Most especially, these “panics” did not establish in any way, shape or form a case for a modern day “central bank” in the business of macro-management of the GDP and unemployment rates; and most certainly did not remotely suggest need for central bank administered 2% inflation target, which would have been pointless under the gold standard, anyway. The latter actually generated a net zero rise in the general price level in the US between 1879 and 1913.

Thus, the Congressional authors of the 1913 act merely sought to remove the reserve structure rigidities of Lincoln’s banking system and most especially its tendency to drain the nation’s banking reserves into the big central city reserve banks. That was, in fact, the first and foremost objective of the act’s intellectual architect and draftsman, Congressman Carter Glass, who was a financially literate small-town newspaper editor from Virginia.

In brief, Congressman Glass’ scheme centered on the creation of 12 equal regional “reserve banks” that would operate “discount windows” empowered to advance cash loans to member banks. Such discount loans were to be based on solid commercial loan collateral and would bear interest at market rates plus a penalty spread.

The implicit point of the scheme was to make the national bank system more liquid and “elastic” by providing “borrowed reserves” to meet customer withdrawal demands in lieu of liquidating cash balances within the tiered national banking system. This discount window-based mechanism was, in essence, a “money printing” scheme, but its purpose was merely to eliminate the cause of banking “panics” on the presumption that the gold standard and free market capitalism would handle growth, investment, inflation, and prosperity without any help from a monetary Sherpa in Washington.

Indeed, the heart of the system was the decentralized reserve banks spread from Boston to Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. The Board of Governors in Washington, in fact, was more an honorific and largely powerless afterthought to give a “Federal” veneer to the scheme. But Carter Glass wanted the core discount loan-making function of the reserve banks to be domiciled as far from the big Wall Street banks as possible.

In short, the Glassian discount window-based money-printing system did not sever the dollar’s link to gold. Nor did it provide any kind of mandate whatsoever for macroeconomic management of the US economy.

And more crucially still, it did not even recognize US Treasury debt as a valid form of collateral to be used by member banks to obtain discount loans or what amounted to “borrowed reserves” at the 12 regionalized Reserve Banks.

Instead, it tethered the Reserve Bank printing presses to the ebb and flow of commerce on Main Street. That is, the reserve banks could print new central bank credit only after goods had been produced and then pledged as collateral for commercial bank credits, which in turn had been rehypothecated for cash advances at the Federal Reserve discount windows.

In short, there was a double barrier against the modern 20th-century form of peacetime “inflation”. To wit, the gold standard remained intact because dollars created by the banking system and the new Federal Reserve could be redeemed for gold without limit—even at the small denomination level of gold coins.

Secondly, under the Glassian monetary regime known as the “real bills doctrine,” supply always preceded demand per Say’s Law. Production of goods in the real economy came first, followed by spendable commercial bank credit and central bank money.

If we fast forward for a moment to March 2020, however, we get a scintillating glimpse of what the Gipper meant by the eternal life of Federal bureaucracies. To wit, in its capacity as the leading bank regulator in the US, the Fed actually abolished any and all “reserve” requirements in the US banking system, and therefore the entirety of its original reason for existence. The replacement regime based on capital and liquidity ratios has no need for central bank credit at all.

But, alas, the Fed did not put itself out of business in March 2020. To the contrary, in less than 26 months, it generated $4.8 trillion of new central bank credit–or more than it had issued during its first 106 years of operation. That’s because the original narrow liquidity purpose of the Federal Reserve banks had long been surpassed by sweeping mission creep that had finally resulted in today’s form of monetary central planning.

And this “mission creep” started almost from the day the Fed went into operation in November 1914. To wit, 30 months after the Fed opened its doors, Woodrow Wilson took America into a pointless war in Europe and needed massive amounts of cash to fund a two-million-man army that was being mobilized, trained, and deployed to France from scratch.

So he committed the greatest possible monetary sin. Namely, he untethered the Fed’s printing press from the ebb and flow of Main Street commerce, allowing US Treasury debt to become eligible collateral for Discount Window loans.

Needless to say, it was off to the races from there. Self-evidently, politicians have an infinite capacity to spend and borrow on the state’s credit when the discipline of rising yields and “crowding out” in the bond pits is short-circuited by central bank absorption of the government’s debt as “collateral” for printing press credits.

As it happened, financing America’s lurch into the Great War provided the playbook for funding the permanent Warfare State and Welfare State that emerged in the century to follow. But at the time it seemed simple and harmless enough: To wit, the US Treasury sold massive amounts of Liberty Bonds to everyday people in a kind of grand Red Cross blood drive, while the folks who bought the bonds were able to borrow most of the payment from their local national banks.

In turn, they could pledge these Liberty Loans as collateral to obtain discount window advances from the Federal Reserve banks to fund their balance sheets; and, conveniently, at interest rates slightly below the yields on the Liberty Bonds, which were the underlying collateral.

Needless to say, this scheme worked for the short duration of the war because the excess demand created by monetizing the war loans was being dissipated in the bloody trenches of northern France. At length, in fact, the household debts to fund the Liberty Bonds were paid off after the war’s end, and the bloated level of Federal Reserve credit which had enabled them was paid down, as well.

But before long, the commercial banks had what amounted to a hissy fit over dividends from the Federal Reserve. The member banks technically owned the Federal Reserve system and had become accustomed to the dividend flow from the surge in discount window loans that had funded the Liberty Bonds.

When the latter had been liquidated after the war, of course, the dividends dried up. So immense pressure developed within the system to rebuild Federal Reserve balance sheets so that system profits and dividend-paying capacity might be restored. And, as post-war prosperity surged by 1923, a solution was found.

To wit, under the guidance of the newly formed FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee), the reserve banks began to buy bonds in the open market based on newly minted Federal Reserve credit, which in turn generated system profits and dividends.

Nevertheless, what started as a money-making side gig was progressively transformed into an instrument of “national policy”. This famously started at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under the leadership of ex-JP Morgan Banker Benjamin Strong.

During the Benjamin Strong era, the national policy objective was mainly to help France and England recover from the fiscal calamity of the Great War, but the die had now been cast. Rather than operating the printing presses to service a passive discount window by issuing commerce-based advances to member banks, the printing presses were now taken over by an FOMC that was in the national policy business and able to operate with virtually unlimited discretionary power over the entire financial system and US economy.

It was only a short leap from there to Greenspanian monetary central planning, but two interim steps by Oval Office miscreants Franklin Roosevelt and Tricky Dick Nixon opened the door to today’s inflationary disaster.

In 1933, FDR decreed that citizens could not own or trade in gold to protect themselves from inflationary central bankers. And then in August 1971, Tricky Dick supplied the coup de grâce by closing the gold window to foreign central banks as well.

Now America’s money was all fiat, all the time. And, not surprisingly, since August 1971, the consumer’s dollar has also lost 87% of its purchasing power.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post How We Got Here: A Brief History of America’s Banking System appeared first on LewRockwell.

It is interesting how President Donald Trump keeps whining about the 20 alleged Israeli hostages that are reportedly still held by Hamas in Gaza, demanding that they be released immediately, while ignoring the hundreds of unarmed Palestinians that are being murdered daily by Israeli military and armed contractors as well as by deliberate starvation. Also, the thousands of Palestinians who had nothing to do with Hamas or Gaza and are nevertheless being held without charge in Israeli prisons under horrific conditions including torture are of no interest to the US president and his team. Trump is of course profoundly ignorant, demonstrated most recently during his 55 minute rambling speech to the United Nations General Assembly in which he attacked both the UN institutionally as well as nearly every delegate and nation represented in the room, minus the Palestinians, of course, for whom he had blocked the issuance of visas guaranteeing that they would have no voice or presence in New York. Trump’s recent performances have also reflected an increase in his demands to harden sanctions and isolate Russia economically, something which is in no one’s interest but the odious President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and the powerful Jewish lobby in the US and Europe.

Never satisfied with anything that he encounters where he is not kowtowed to or flattered, Trump is now having the US Secret Service investigate alleged United Nations sabotage behind three alleged personal insults experienced by him during his UN visit, including a non-functioning escalator stairway, a failure of the auditorium sound system, and a misfunction of the teleprompter (which was apparently being operated by a White House staffer). An always low-class Trump characteristically threatened the teleprompter operator personally by stopping his speech and announcing to the entire assembly “Whoever is operating this teleprompter is in big trouble.”

And Trump also goes well beyond that habitual mouthing off the first thoughts to appear in his large but dysfunctional head in that he lacks any real moral code and/or compassion apart from his cardinal rule, which appears to be “Give Israel whatever it wants!” Indeed, beyond that ongoing foreign policy disaster vis-à-vis Gaza, Trump has a viciousness that rises to the surface on a regular basis, including during his speech at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, where he made clear that Kirk’s path of dialogue with critics was not his way, that he “hated” all his “opponents.”

And Trump’s team also makes sure that everyone understands that America is carrying the flag for the Jewish state. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during his recent visit to Israel, said that a diplomatic solution to the Gaza war may not be possible because “Hamas is a terrorist group, a barbaric group, whose stated mission is the destruction of the Jewish State.” He thus confirmed, first of all, that he fails to understand that it is Israel that has been the terrorist state targeting all its neighbors for the past 80 years. He also confirmed the Trump administration’s full political and military support for the genocide and ethnic cleansing that Israel is engaged in while also providing money and weapons that enable the actual killing to implement “the final solution” for Palestine. Presumably the removal of Palestinians will permit the construction of the Trump Gaza Resort to begin while Jews from Brooklyn can settle an Arab-free West bank, eliminating the possibility of some kind of Palestinian state forever, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised while listing his accomplishments last week.

And there was more action in compliance with Israeli demands apart from the appalling Trump speech. On Friday September 19th, the United States vetoed a crucial United Nations Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, even as Israel was expanding its final ground offensive on Gaza City. The resolution, had been approved by 14 of the 15 members of the council on the day before, calling for an “immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza respected by all parties”, as well as the release of all captives held by Hamas and the end of restrictions on food, medicine and other humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Drafted by the council’s 10 elected rather than its 5 permanent members, the resolution cited the “catastrophic” humanitarian situation in Gaza after nearly two years of unrelenting war, which has killed at least 65,141 people, according to Palestinian health officials, though the “official” number is disputed and the true total of deaths undoubtedly numbers in the hundreds of thousands, with most of the bodies still buried under the rubble or incinerated or torn about by the heavy US-provided ordnance being employed by Israel.

The United States predictably vetoed the effort, the sixth time it has done so to protect the Jewish state from the war crimes it is carrying out. Morgan Ortagus, US deputy special envoy to the Middle East, who is predictably Jewish, raised her arm to vote in something like a Nazi salute and announced that “US opposition to this resolution will come as no surprise. It fails to condemn Hamas or recognize Israel’s right to defend itself, and it wrongly legitimizes the false narratives benefitting Hamas, which have sadly found currency in this council.”

Ortagus also claimed that the starvation narrative is a fabrication, that the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s official declaration of famine in Gaza last month had employed “flawed methodology.” She instead chose to praise the work of the heavily militarized US and Israel backed GHF hubs, where, it has been demonstrated, hundreds of Palestinians have been deliberately targeted and killed while seeking food for their families.

How do the Jews and more particularly the Israeli Jews get away with it? Well, the Jewish billionaires who have corrupted the US political system and media have been able to control the narrative almost completely, though that advantage is beginning to fade as more ordinary Americans have come realize how completely awful the Gaza genocide is. Opinion polls reveal that disapproval of Israel is running at 60% among the American public. There is also a growing sense among the public that Israel and its Lobby in the United States have been manipulating and using the US ever since the founding of the Jewish state. Under Genocide Joe Biden and the feckless Donald Trump that manipulation has been wide out in the open and Israel is now in a position where it is even able to compel America to go to war on its behalf, admittedly a feat that it accomplished initially by way of a Jewish controlled Pentagon under George W Bush when Iraq was destroyed, killing as least half a million Iraqis based on lies generated to demonstrate how Baghdad was a threat potentially armed with “weapons of mass destruction.” Many observers now believe that Iran will be attacked by Israel before the end of the year and Donald Trump will jump right in under pressure from Netanyahu, another extreme case of the “tail wagging the dog!”

To be sure, the Israel Lobby is aware that public opinion is running heavily against the Jewish state and they have now stepped-up efforts to obtain even greater control over the message that is coming out from the media. Their latest success has related to TikTok which has been under attack by groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and its hideous leader Jonathan Greenblatt during the past year for its allowing stories to appear critical of Israeli behavior.

Falling in line with Jewish demands, the White House has announced that the forced sale of TikTok will soon be finalized. To no one’s surprise, the new ownership is led by ultra-Zionist Jewish billionaire Larry Ellison – the largest individual donor to the Israel Defense Force – who will reportedly take full control of the US user data and the site algorithms which the White House says will be “retrained”. That means it will only include material that is positive on Israel.

Ellison, who made his fortune developing Oracle – a database system he originally built for the CIA – already controls CBS, Paramount, MTV, Comedy Central, Showtime, Nickelodeon (which makes kids shows) as well as Channel 10 in Australia and Channel 5 in the UK. Ellison is also expected to finalize control over Warner Bros. Discovery (including CNN, HBO and the Discovery channel) before the end of 2025.

Even before the forced sale is finalized, censorship of TikTok content critical of Israel has already begun. Fox – a Rupert Murdoch pro-Israel asset – is also seeking to join the Ellison consortium, a move that could further extend and solidify the Israeli-aligned information bubble.

The United States still has over three years of the Trump adventure left so more surprises are likely in store. Beyond the national and international news and entertainment media, Israeli-aligned Jewish billionaires already either own or control OpenAI, Google, Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, Palantir, CBS, HBO, and most of Conde Nast (Reddit, Vogue, The New Yorker, Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair) as well as numerous Hollywood studios, regional papers and radio stations. The expansion into all these areas has been deliberate with the intention of using the control to support Israel and also keep the United States in the tight grip of the Jewish state and its domestic US lobby.

At this point my fellow Americans it is time to begin to fight back or surrender to the forces that will strip us of our free speech just for starters and which will create a United States which is controlled by a tiny little murderous fascist state in the Middle East that is willing to bribe and threaten its way to power and which does not in any way share the values upon which our nation was founded. Which way will we go?

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post As Israel Becomes a Global Pariah Trump Ramps Up Support appeared first on LewRockwell.

Are we wise enough to refuse politicians’ offer of “free money” to spend today that was stolen from our future, and from our future generations? Probably not.

Can Social Security be saved for future generations? Many have already concluded it’s hopeless, and if the current trajectory is left untouched, that is pretty much baked in. Only a radical reform of the program’s basic purpose, design and funding mechanisms could return the program to anything resembling sustainability and fairness.

Let’s start with a thought experiment: what if Social Security (SSA) had been an authentic pension plan rather than a pay-as-you-go social welfare program? The program’s accounting artifices obscure the reality that there is no “trust fund” of cash sitting in an account somewhere; all benefits are paid out of taxes collected from workers and employers today.

An authentic pension plan deducts a percentage from workers’ earned income and deposits these into a fund that earns income. The fund is in effect a savings account that accumulates the monthly deposits and interest until the worker retires, at which point the fund starts disbursing monthly retirement payments and continues to collect interest on the fund’s remaining balance.

In contrast, the SSA “trust fund” is an accounting gimmick that makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but it’s nothing more than self-serving delusion. The “trust fund” holds “non-marketable securities,” a nice way of masking the truth which is when SSA payroll tax revenues don’t cover SSA expenditures, the Treasury makes up the difference by selling Treasury bonds–the same way it pays for all other deficit spending.

When Social Security was launched in the late 1930s, the benefits were modest, and many people didn’t live long enough to collect benefits at age 65. The taxes collected from employers and employees were modest. The percentage of the populace who qualified to receive SSA benefits was also modest, while the population paying SSA taxes included every formally employed worker and their employee.

Fast-forward to 1970, the first year I paid SSA taxes as a 16-year old field worker in the summer before my senior year of high school. As the chart below notes, the US population in 1970 was 203 million, and the 25.7 million people who received SSA benefits were 12.6% of the total population. Total SSA program costs were $32 billion. For comparison’s sake, the Department of Defense (DoD) budget in 1970 was $80 billion.

In 2025, the situation has changed. The US population increased 67% to 340 million, the number of SSA beneficiaries has nearly tripled from 25.7 million to 74.5 million, and the program now costs about $1.6 trillion annually–almost double the 2025 DoD budget of $840 billion.

As noted on the chart below, SSA program costs have doubled from $800 billion in 2013, only 12 years ago, to $1.6 trillion today.

As is common when programs have essentially unlimited budgets and vast tax revenue streams, mission creep expanded those eligible to receive SSA benefits to include disability and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). These additional beneficiaries added to the program costs without increasing the tax rate collected from employers/employees, which has been unchanged at 12.4% (6.2% each from employer and employee) since 1990.

(The 2.9% Medicare payroll tax rate collected with SSA payroll taxes has been unchanged since 1986: 1.45% each for employer and employee.)

To answer this question–what if Social Security (SSA) had been an authentic pension plan rather than a pay-as-you-go social welfare program?–I did a deep dive into my own 55-year record of SSA contributions. This required some heavy lifting, as annual changes in inflation and the interest rate paid must be accounted for.

I used the BLS inflation calculator to adjust annual inflation, and the 10-year US Treasury bond yield as the benchmark for interest–in other words, as if my entire SSA payroll tax had been invested at the end of each year in 10-year US Treasury bonds. Yes, I know there are many quibbles with these benchmarks, but at least we can agree they are reasonable benchmarks.

The SSA calculates your benefit based on your highest 25 years of income, so the lowest-income 30 years of my 55 years of paying SSA and income taxes are dropped. The SSA also considers the average income of full-time workers: SSA National Average Wage Index. (On rare occasions, my income exceeded the average, but was generally sub-average.)

Adjusting your income for inflation and then organizing the adjusted number from highest to lowest offers interesting insights into the purchasing power of your wages over time. These reflect each decade’s broad-based standard of living, as the higher the purchasing power of one’s wages, the higher one’s standard of living.

Adjusted for inflation, my highest earnings years were: 1989, 1997, 1990, 1985, 1976 and 1977. Two in the 1970s, when I was 23 and 24 years old, two in the 1980s, and two in the 1990s, decades in which more of the economic expansion “trickled down” to wages, a trend that ceased by the turn of the century when the dot-com bubble burst.

It is a sobering reflection on the US economy that the purchasing power of my wages as an apprentice carpenter at age 23 were rarely equaled in the five decades since. In terms of what my wages could buy, my earnings have never gone as far as they did in the mid-1970s, which is close to the peak of labor’s share of the national income.

By pure happenstance, my monthly Social Security retirement benefit is within a few dollars of the national average, so my record happens to reflect the national average. (I started drawing my benefit at full retirement age 67. I continue to pay both employee and employer SSA payroll taxes on my self-employed income as a scribbler, ahem, “content creator.”)

By age 67, the total nestegg of my SSA payroll taxes (not Medicare, only SSA) collecting whatever yield was paid by 10-year Treasury bonds reached $382,000 at age 67. Assuming the bond yields stay around where they are today–which are historically rather average–my nestegg would fund my retirement benefits until age 87, which significantly exceeds the current average life expectancy of American males (78 years).

I understand that many would say investing the payroll taxes in Treasuries is effectively tossing the money on a bonfire, but consider the possibility that if the entire working populace had a stake in Treasuries surviving a financial bubble collapse, then they might start electing (and re-electing) politicians who wouldn’t stripmine everything within reach to get re-elected. That change in values and voting would change the course of the system.

The point of this exercise is to show that if SSA were converted to a true pension plan system, the average wage earner could accumulate a self-funding pension plan just by investing the payroll taxes in Treasury bonds. Yes, I know many would prefer to invest in gold or bitcoin or stocks, but nobody would be stopping anyone from investing their non-SSA savings however they wished.

Read the Whole Article

The post Can Social Security Be Saved for Future Generations? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the last few days, a significant number of countries have announced their decision to recognize a Palestinian state. At the same time, the leaders of these countries have repeatedly condemned the attacks of October 7. Can you see the problem here? The two positions are logically incompatible.

It makes no sense to repudiate the actions of a group like Hamas as “terrorism” and then cave in to their demands on statehood. And –despite what you might have read in the western media– the explicit goal of the October 7 attacks was the creation of a Palestinian state.(More on that later) So, yes, condemning Hamas’s methods while giving into its demands appears to be hypocritical.

But is that what’s really going on here or are many of these countries simply acknowledging that Hamas is not a terrorist organization at all but a national liberation movement that is justified in defending its land from foreign occupation? (According to Grok– As of September 23, 2025, only 10 countries have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.The designation is basically a hoax to propagandize western populations) Aren’t these nations simply admitting what reasonable people have known from the beginning, that oppressed people have the right to self-determination (including armed resistance) in cases of colonial domination, foreign occupation, or alien subjugation. These rights are guaranteed under international law.

So, these leaders are not hypocrites; they’re just acknowledging the “rightness” of Hamas cause, which is why they are throwing their support behind an independent Palestinian state.

And in case there’s any dispute about “statehood” being Hamas’s primary objective, here’s a short video of Hamas’s former military chief Yahya Sinwar underscoring that very point:

“Within a limited period of months—which I estimate will not exceed one year—we will force the occupation to face two options: Either we force it to implement international law, respect international resolutions, withdraw from the West Bank and Jerusalem, dismantle the settlements, release the prisoners, and ensure the return of refugees, achieving the establishment of a Palestinian state on the lands occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem; or we place this occupation in a state of contradiction and collision with the entire international order, isolate it in an extreme and powerful manner, and end its integration in the region and the entire world, addressing the state of collapse that has occurred on all fronts of resistance over the past years.” SuppressedNews @SuppressedNws

Sinwar warned them, they should’ve listened pic.twitter.com/q1EvKoVaqd

— Suppressed News. (@SuppressedNws) July 20, 2024

There it is in black and white. The explicit goal of the October 7 attacks was the creation of a Palestinian state. So, if we consider the flurry of activity at the United Nations this week, (Note– Canada, the UK, Portugal, France, Australia, Belgium etc have all joined the “recognizers”. As of September 23, 2025, the State of Palestine is recognized by 156 out of 193 UN member states, representing about 80% of UN membership) we must conclude that –on a political level– Hamas is prevailing in its war with Israel. Of course, on the ground, the outcome is entirely different. Israel has obliterated most of the vital infrastructure and killed tens of thousands in a vengeful war of annihilation. Was that part of Sinwar’s plan as well?

It was. With Trump-Kushner’s sinister plan to “vanish” the Palestinian cause for good (The Abraham Accords) by “normalizing” relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors while ignoring progress on the Palestinian issue, Sinwar realized that he must do something truly explosive to capture the world’s attention and put Palestine atop the regional docket. And that is how he settled on October 7; not as a way to inflict military defeat on Israel (Hamas had no hope of that) but to lure Netanyahu into a violent overreaction that would garner the sympathy of people around the world while plunging Israel into deep and protracted isolation.

Did he succeed?

He did, beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, and even Israeli journalists are beginning to acknowledge the strategic foresight of Sinwar’s plan. Check out this blurb from Carolina Landsman at Haaretz just two days ago:

For Netanyahu, the penny has dropped – former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar checkmated him.

Our own avid chess player, Mr. Security, Mr. War on Terror – the man who devoted his life to preventing a formative Palestinian event – was dragged into playing a part in a scripted historical mega-event. Bibi thought he had besieged the Gaza Strip, but it turns out that Sinwar was the architect of a diplomatic siege on Israel.

The goal of Hamas’ October 7 attack wasn’t a military victory; Hamas lacks the tools to achieve that. The goal was to provoke an Israeli response. Hamas’ murderous attack, with enough documentation to fill three Yad Vashems, was planned to drive Israel out of its mind.

It’s not just the righteous man who knows the soul of his animal, as the biblical book of Proverbs says. A Palestinian who has been jailed in Israel also knows the souls of his jailors…. Sinwar knew that Jews had prepared all their lives for the next Holocaust. That’s why Israel stages flyovers of Auschwitz – to promise that in the event of another Holocaust, we will fight back rather than going like sheep to the slaughter.

This conditioning worked, even if it was only against “terrorists in flip-flops,” as Netanyahu once called them, rather than the Nazi war machine. Following Hamas’ attack, there was nobody to stop the gates of hell from opening. Tragically, Israel played the role Sinwar wrote for the country. It embarked on a campaign of vengeance that even the devil couldn’t have imagined.

And that’s what Sinwar was waiting for. He didn’t create a false facade of genocide; he planned a calculated move that involved exposing his entire people to a genocide that Israel would carry out. The Palestinian genocide was the bloody platter on which their state would be served up.

Sinwar, an expert on Zionism and Jews, pressed all the triggers of Jewish trauma . The note he left about taking “a calculated risk” can now be understood not just a risk, but a calculated genocide.

.... judging by what happened at the United Nations, the move seems to have worked. The world saw a genocide, identified Israel as the party responsible and is finally waking up and taking action (and Sinwar understood both the world and the amount of blood required to awaken it).

This time, the Holocaust isn’t the only historic injustice on the world’s mind as it seeks to advance a solution to the conflict. And just as the Holocaust gave birth to the state of Israel, this genocide will give birth to the Palestinian state. The violence Israel is employing in Gaza has rebounded on it like a diplomatic boomerang….

Bibi thought he had besieged the Gaza Strip, but it turns out that Sinwar was the architect of a diplomatic siege on Israel. In Its Vengeful War in Gaza, Israel Played the Tragic Role Hamas Had Scripted, Haaretz

Bottom line: Netanyahu’s malicious ignorance has helped to create the thing he always hated most, a Palestinian state. The question now is whether Hamas can transform this political victory into a distinct geographical entity with its own borders, independent governing body, and sovereign control over its own territory.

We hope they succeed.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The post How Bibi Created a Palestinian State appeared first on LewRockwell.

The only real benefit to this latest western “recognition” of Palestine is that it drew out high-profile Israeli politicians to explain to western liberals in plain English that the entire state of Israel stands opposed to their vision of a two-state solution.

Former Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz has a new op-ed in The New York Times where he explicitly states that opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state is “the heart” of a national consensus among Israelis across the mainstream political spectrum, and that this isn’t an obstacle that will go away once Netanyahu is out of power.

“Too often, Western leaders view our policies in this war not through the lens of national security, but through the prism of individuals — and, in particular, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,” Gantz writes. “The conversation is often framed as a question of what serves the prime minister, as if Israel’s national security begins and ends with one man. This view is mistaken and counterproductive to global stability, regional normalization and Israel’s own security.”

“I myself have been a vocal critic of Mr. Netanyahu,” says Gantz. “But the nation’s core security interests are not partisan property. Today more than ever, they are anchored by a national consensus that is rooted in the hard realities of our region. Opposition to the recognition of Palestinian statehood stands at the heart of that consensus.”

The dangerous & counterproductive mistake Western Leaders make about a Palestinian State & Israel’s security.

To my full New York Times Op-Ed: https://t.co/5q2yjmGoDk pic.twitter.com/a1vFufJ99n

— בני גנץ – Benny Gantz (@gantzbe) September 24, 2025

He’s spelling it out in black and white. The Bernie Sanders-style framing of the nightmare in Palestine as a Netanyahu problem which can be remedied in short order by a two-state solution is a fairy tale that western liberals tell each other so they don’t have to face the cold hard reality that the problem is the state of Israel itself.

This comes after Netanyahu publicly stated that “There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River,” and after former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed that “There will never be a Palestinian state.”

Israel is the problem. Not Netanyahu. Not Hamas. Not that both sides have tragically failed to sit down and find common ground in good-faith negotiations. The problem is that the west established a state in the middle east which holds as its foundational ideology that the people who were living there before that state was created are less than human, and must never have access to the full spectrum of human rights.

The problem is Israel. A state which has always been a racist endeavor from its very inception. A state whose Jewish citizenry are indoctrinated from birth into accepting the hateful, supremacist worldview that is necessary for apartheid and abuse to be accepted as the status quo.

It’s so surreal how Israel can come right out and explicitly say there will never, ever be a Palestinian state and western officials will just keep babbling on about the possibility of Israel and Palestine negotiating a two-state solution as though it never happened. https://t.co/fdocleFU1D

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 23, 2025

No solutions are going to emerge until the west gets real about this. As long as western liberals are still buying into the fuzzbrained escapist fantasy that Israel is just an election away from a two-state solution if the US simply keeps funding the Iron Dome and making nice with Tel Aviv, we’re going to continue seeing Israel inflicting the nonstop violence and abuse that is necessary for it to exist in its present iteration as a state.

Any actual, reality-based solutions are not going to make liberal Zionists happy like their daydream about a two-state solution does. Israel simply cannot continue to exist as a Zionist entity. It needs to be disarmed, dramatically restructured, and comprehensively denazified as a society. This isn’t going to happen without force, and that necessary force isn’t going to be forthcoming from the western world as long as we are deluding ourselves with infantile fantasies.

The Israelis are telling us this is the case themselves, right to our faces. It’s time to wake up.

____________

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