Lew Rockwell Institute

During the 27 years Karol Wojtyla reigned as Christ’s Vicar on earth, an unprecedented tenure beginning in 1978 and ending with his death in 2005, he managed to accomplish a great many things, not the least being countless pastoral visits (129 to be exact) around the globe, including places which had only the most tenuous connection to Catholic-Christianity. But of all those lands and countries touched by the papal presence, there were three in particular that he needed to see more than once.

These were Poland, his native land, to which he would go nine times, in large part to help bring about the end of Soviet hegemony in Europe. This was followed by France, eldest daughter of the Church, to which he would go eight times, raising repeatedly the matter of her baptismal promises. Finally, there was the United States, of course, a nation no pope could ill-afford not to visit, which he did seven times, reminding us each time not to forget where our freedoms came from and why.

But setting aside Poland and the United States, as important as those visits were, it seems to me that the eight visits to France represent perhaps the most consequential exercise of all—in terms, that is, of trying to reorient the soul of France back to God, to that absolute attraction for whom we all lost a very long time ago thanks to the sin of Adam.

And pursuant to that end, he would unfailingly point to the sacrament of baptism as the necessary means, the perfect point of entry, as it were, in the Church’s effort to reignite in the soul precisely that primal attraction which Original Sin had nearly wiped out altogether. And not only within the individual soul, as though one’s relation to God were a purely private affair, but in the outward forms of life as well, which equally evince hunger and thirst for God, for that wholeness of life which only baptism can bring. Here we see the enduring relevance of that larger and more public dimension to human life which we rightly call culture.

Faith, in other words, whose very enfleshment creates culture, becomes the key ingredient in human history. “A society which has lost its religion,” Christopher Dawson warns, “becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.” And because it is of the very essence of faith to wish to raise up all that has to do with man, including the social order, and thus elevate it all onto the plane of glory, the Church cannot remain indifferent to culture, cannot leave it in its wounded and unredeemed state.

But why did the pope think it necessary to go to France quite so often? Eight visits to a country clearly and undeniably in decline, indeed, in a kind of moral and, yes, even demographic freefall? Why all the attention? Why not simply write it off as yet another failed state, not unlike so many third-world implosions we regularly hear about on the news? Might it have something to do with her being “the eldest daughter of the Church”? And what does that tell us about her place in the economy of grace? I mean, does the honorific still apply if a nation appears to have fallen into apostasy?

But that is just the point, isn’t it? France really is the purest distillate of what postmodern man actually looks like. It is not a pretty sight. A nation without God will inevitably turn on itself, divesting its people of those protections guaranteed by God. And so if the Church were to succeed in calling France back to the source of her greatness, her identity in Christ, arresting thereby her fall into infidelity, how wonderfully contagious might her return then prove to be in bringing other erstwhile Catholic nations back to God.

It is well to remind ourselves that it was on his very first visit, in May of 1980, that the Holy Father spoke of France in a way unlike any other nation, reminding her of history’s high regard for her role as the eldest of all the Church’s daughters. And why is that? Because, owing to her having been the very first among the peoples of Europe to embrace the Faith and the hope of Jesus Christ, she is not only entitled to wear that particular crown but she has also been most earnestly enjoined by Christ to give witness to that fact by evangelizing others.

And what use had she made of it but to spread the message of Christ far and wide, urging her pagan neighbors to go and do likewise. Did it especially please the people of France, I wonder, to have received such a warm congratulatory message from the pope and Bishop of Rome?

He would again stoke that particular flame of French pride when, in 1996, he returned to celebrate 1,500 years of her Catholic-Christian identity. On that day spent celebrating the great jubilee of the baptism of the Frankish King Clovis in the year 496, he particularly commended France for her missionary outreach to the world, for producing so rich a repository of saints and martyrs along the way.

But then, just as the pope was about to conclude his panegyric, the mood suddenly changed. “Dear France,” he began,

permit me to ask this question. We are here to celebrate the fifteenth centenary of a baptism, which you like to think of as your baptism, as the baptism of France. What have you done with your baptism? What has become of it? What have you made of your baptism?

Now there’s an icebreaker for you. And not a few of the French who were there felt the sting of it—including most especially the President of France himself, Jacques Chirac, who had been at great pains in welcoming the Holy Father in the name of a “republican and secular France,” thus erasing an entire millennium and a half of French history.

If the event of a king’s baptism, his putting on Christ both for himself and for all those disparate tribes whom divine providence entrusted him to unite and look after, is not to be dismissed as unreal and therefore unimportant, then it is a huge historical mistake not to acknowledge the connection. It shows how vastly ignorant so much of France is of her own past. Between governance and God, human culture and Christian faith, a nexus had long ago been struck, the fruit of which became Western Christian Civilization. By not knowing that fact, or by heaping scorn and derision upon it, France has made the most egregious confession of ignorance. She has uprooted the very tree in whose branches she had been sitting for centuries.

It was in August of the following year, 1997, that the pope would return to his eldest daughter, traveling this time to Paris for World Youth Day, during which he would strike a very different note. There he spoke to many thousands of eager young pilgrims.

“Do you know,” he asked them, “what the sacrament of baptism does to you?” He told them:

It means that God acknowledges you as his children and transforms your existence into a story of love with him. He conforms you to Christ so that you will be able to fulfill your personal vocation. He has come to make a pact with you and he offers you his peace. Live from now on as children of the light who know that they are reconciled by the Cross of the Savior!

What might the young people of France yet do with their baptismal promises? And what are we going to do with ours?

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post Without Faith There Is No Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

Leo Tolstoy, one of humanity’s authentic literary geniuses, wrote the masterpiece on Gospel Nonviolence, The Kingdom of God is Within you, which upon reading it was the critical and final step in Gandhi’s conversion to nonviolence, as well as in the conversions of untold numbers of other human beings to explicitly Gospel Nonviolence. Tolstoy was also a seasoned beekeeper. Throughout his writings he employs bees and their ways to illuminate a deeper understanding of or solution to seemingly intractable human spiritual and practical problems. For example, below he addresses one of the most insoluble and destructive of the conundrums facing humanity

“Men in their present condition are like a swarm of bees hanging in a cluster to a branch. The position of the bees on the branch is temporary, and must inevitably be changed. They must start off and find themselves a habitation. Each of the bees knows this, and desires to change her own and the others’ position, but no one of them can do it till the rest of them do it. They cannot all start off at once, because one hangs on to another and hinders her from separating from the swarm, and therefore they all continue to hang there. It would seem that the bees could never escape from their position, just as it seems that worldly men, caught in the state’s conception of life, can never escape it. And there would be no escape for the bees, if each of them were not a living, separate creature, endowed with wings of its own. Similarly there would be no escape for men, if each were not a living being endowed with the faculty of entering into the Gospel’s conception of life.

If every bee who could fly, did not try to fly, the others, too, would never be stirred, and the swarm would never change its position. And if the man who has mastered Jesus’ conception of life would not, without waiting for other people, begin to live in accordance with this conception, mankind would never change its position. But only let one bee spread her wings, start off, and fly away, and after her another, and another would follow, and the clinging, inert cluster would become a freely flying swarm of bees. Just in the same way, only let one man look at life as the Gospel teaches him to look at it, and after him let another and another do the same, and the destructive enchanted circle of existence in the state conception of life, from which there seemed no escape, will be broken through.

But men think that to set all men free by this means is too slow a process, that they must find some other means by which they could set all men free at once. It is just as though the bees who want to start and fly away should consider it too long a process to wait for all the swarm to start one by one; and should think they ought to find some means by which it would not be necessary for every separate bee to spread her wings and fly off, but by which the whole swarm could fly at once where it wanted to. But that is not possible; till a first, then a second, then a third then a hundredth bee spreads her wings and flies off of her own accord, the swarm will not fly off and will not begin its new life. Till every individual man makes Jesus’ conception of life his own, and begins to live in accord with it, there can be no solution of the problem of violence and war, enmity and deception in human life, and no establishment of a new form of life.”

Question:

Have you personally taken one or many steps away from the state’s conception of existence with its use and justification of violence and war, enmity and deception? Have you taken one step or many steps away your violent religion’s spiritual and moral endorsement of, support of and fostering of the state’s conception of existence?

Has the step or have the steps you have taken away from the state’s conception of existence only been mental and intellectual or did they have physical and incarnational components to them?

Does anyone outside yourself—even if your steps have been only mental or intellectual— know of your steps away from the swarm of  ceaseless violence that is the condition of the state, which follows automatically from the state’s conception of existence

The post Freedom From the State’s Conception of Existence, or Having the Courage of a Bee to be faithful to the Nonviolent Jesus and His Way of Nonviolent Love. appeared first on LewRockwell.

The chihuahuas of war will keep barking while the SMO will keep rollin’ along.

The Circus Ringmaster’s 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine may be seen as a pet seal splashing around in a pond to amuse the galleries. And up next, we move to another attraction.

Yet if taken seriously – and that requires not a pinch but a barrel of salt – it’s like a twin to the Circus Ringmaster’s “plan” for Gaza, this time with the objective of snatching a pitiful “victory” from the jaws of the Empire of Chaos’s own, de facto strategic defeat.

Let’s check the reactions. Here you will find Larry Johnson’s analysis – which I share – , but most of all the video of the stunning two-hour interview  we had mid-week in Moscow with stellar Maria Zakharova, the most articulated Foreign Ministry spokeswoman on the planet.

What Mrs. Zakharova essentially told us is that by mid-week there was no Russian reaction because Moscow had not received anything concrete: “When we have some official information, when we receive it via a relevant channel, naturally, we will always be open to work.”

The same applied to the Kremlin. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov: “No, we haven’t received anything officially. We see some innovations. But officially, we haven’t received anything. And there hasn’t been any substantive discussion of these items.”

The first actual, terse response that came from President Putin was stunningly graphic: in camouflage, visiting a command center, and stressing that the set up in Kiev can no longer be described as a “political leadership” because it’s just “a criminal organization”.

After a few frantic days buried in a tsunami of spin concocted by NATOstan mainstream media, supporting but essentially against the 28-pointer, someone in Washington – and not necessarily Russian middleman Kirill Dmitriev – may have delivered it, officially, to the Kremlin.

So this past Friday we had, finally, President Putin’s own response, during a session of the permanent members of Russia’s Security Council.

The key Putin points must be stressed:

Alaska: “The main point of the Alaska summit, its main purpose, was that during the talks in Anchorage we confirmed that, despite some difficult issues and complexities, we nevertheless agreed with these proposals and were prepared to demonstrate the requested flexibility.”

Global South reaction: “We provided detailed information to all our friends and partners in the Global South on these matters – including China, India, the DPRK, South Africa, Brazil, many other countries, and, of course, the CSTO states. All our friends and partners, and I want to emphasise this – without exception – supported these potential arrangements.”

U.S. non-response: “However, after the negotiations in Alaska, we have seen a certain pause on the part of the U.S., and we know this is due to Ukraine’s de facto refusal to accept the peace plan proposed by President Trump. I believe this is precisely why a new version has emerged – essentially an updated plan consisting of 28 points.” Note that “updated” is the key operative word here – as in an extension of Alaska.

What the 28-pointer really means: “We have the text. We received it through our existing channels of communication with the U.S. Administration. I believe it too could form the basis of a final peace settlement, but this text is not being discussed with us in substance. And I can suggest why.

The reason, I believe, remains the same: the U.S. Administration still cannot secure Ukraine’s consent – Ukraine rejects it.

Evidently, Ukraine and its European allies remain under illusions and still dream of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia on the battlefield. I think this position is rooted not so much in a lack of competence – I will leave this topic aside for now – but rather in the absence of objective information about the real situation on the ground.”

Expanding on the EU and Ukraine: “All things considered, neither Ukraine nor Europe grasp the consequences of this path. Just one very recent example – Kupyansk. Not long ago, on 4 November – just two weeks ago – officials in Kiev publicly stated that no more than 60 Russian servicemen were present in the city, and that within the next few days, as they claimed, Ukrainian forces would fully unblock it.

But I would like to inform you that already at that moment, on 4 November, the city of Kupyansk was practically entirely secured by the Russian Armed Forces. Our guys were, as they say, simply finishing the job – clearing the remaining streets and neighbourhoods. The fate of the city had already been fully determined.

What does this tell us? Either the Kiev leaders do not have objective information about the situation at the front, or, having it, they are simply unable to assess it objectively.”

The SMO will go on: “If Kiev does not want to discuss President Trump’s proposals and rejects them, then they – and their European war-instigators – must understand that the situation in Kupyansk will inevitably be repeated on other key sectors of the front. Perhaps not as quickly as we would like, but the outcome will be inevitably repeated.”

The inevitable conclusion: “On the whole, this is acceptable to us, as it leads to achieving the objectives of the special military operation by military means. But, as I have said many times before, we are also ready for peace negotiations and for resolving problems by peaceful means. However, this requires a substantive discussion of all details of the proposed plan.We are ready for that.”

Deconstructing an incoherent mish-mash

So here we have finally come back to the essentials – what everyone with an IQ over room temperature following the imperial proxy war against Russia in Ukraine already knows: Russia is ready for peace, but in Putin’s own words, “is also satisfied with the current dynamics of the SMO”. Because this is leading – slowly but surely, “to the achievement of its goals” in the battlefield.

Whatever was the real story behind the 28 pointer – assuming it was Dmtriev and Witkoff holed up in Miami for three days; and then lowly neo-con Marco Rubio and zero-expert on anything Zionist asset Jared Kushner (!) chiming in – the messy, even infantile “plan” posing as Hegemon in Control and mocking the BRICS/SCO is completely unworkable.

What if it was designed to be exactly that?

The new frantic spin is that the sweaty sweatshirt in Kiev has been given an ultimatum by Trump 2.0: under a new “aggressive timeline”, he has to get on board. Or else.

Kiev’s backers – the proverbial assortment of chihuahuas comprising the EU, the European Commision (EC) and “leaders” in selected capitals – have rejected the 28-pointer, and so did Kiev, right from the start.

The 28-pointer indeed manages the feat of assembling an incoherent mish-mash that is unworkable not only for Russia but also for the EU/NATO combo. A few examples:

Point 4: “A U.S.-mediated Russia–NATO dialogue will be launched to resolve security issues and promote cooperation”. NATO is a brainchild of the Empire of Chaos. It will never “cooperate” with “existential threat” Russia.

Point 9: “European fighter jets will be stationed in Poland.” That means NATO still ready to attack Russian territory.

Point 10. “The U.S. security guarantee [to Ukraine] comes with conditions: – The U.S. receives compensation.” That’s pure “offer you can’t refuse” Mafia territory.

Point 13: “Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy:

• Gradual lifting of sanctions
• Long-term U.S.–Russia economic cooperation
• Joint ventures in AI, energy, infrastructure, rare earths, and Arctic extraction
• Russia rejoins the G8”

That’s what this is all about, per the Circus Ringmaster himself: grabbing Russian natural resources. Moreover Russia does not need the G8: Moscow’s focus is on BRICS/SCO.

Point 14: “Frozen Russian assets will be allocated as follows:

• $100 billion used to rebuild Ukraine (run by the U.S.)
• The U.S. receives 50% of profits from reconstruction investments
• Europe contributes another $100 billion
• Remaining frozen assets go into a U.S.–Russia joint investment vehicle to deepen economic ties.”

That’s peak Theater of the Absurd: not only the Americans want to use Russian funds to rebuild Ukraine – which they were instrumental in destroying – but their “10 per cent for the Big Guy” turns out to be a hefty 50%.

Point 17: “The U.S. and Russia will extend nuclear arms-control treaties, including New START.” A non-starter: Moscow has been stressing non-stop that arms-control treaties will not be negotiated in relation to the SMO.

Point 21: “Territorial arrangements:

• Crimea, Donetsk, and Lugansk are recognized as de facto Russian, including by the U.S.
• Parts of Kherson and Zaporozhye become frozen “contact line” zones (also de facto recognition)
• Russia gives up other agreed areas
• Ukraine withdraws from remaining parts of Donetsk; the zone becomes a Russian-recognized neutral buffer
• Russian forces cannot enter the buffer zone.”

Total non-starter – and not only for the EU/NATO-Kiev combo.  Kherson and Zaporozhye, constitutionally, are now fully Russian – and will be liberated on the battlefield.

Point 26: “Full amnesty for all parties for all actions taken during the war: no prosecutions, no war-crimes claims.” Total non-starter: Kiev forced the draft document to use “amnesty” instead of “audit”. Moscow will settle for nothing less that full prosecution of members of the “criminal organization”. Yes, there will be a war crimes tribunal.

Point 27: “The agreement will be legally binding and enforced by a Peace Council chaired by Donald J. Trump.” That’s a Gaza replay. As if Putin and the Russian Security Council would accept a “Peace Council” chaired by a Circus Ringmaster whose expiry date is fast approaching, not to mention be subordinated to the losers in a vicious proxy war. 

About a really intriguing takeaway

One plausible takeaway of the 28-pointer is that the selected oligarchy running the Empire of Chaos continues to run a protection racket – and the only way to salvage the de facto strategic defeat in country 404 is to turn a quick buck.

Another more intriguing, plausible takeaway is that the 28-pointer was never meant to be accepted by the EU-Kiev combo. It’s all about the Circus Ringmaster’s exit strategy from the debacle in Novorossiya.

Trump is already preparing the terrain – as in I tried everything, but Zelensky won’t comply. So it’s now his – and his gang’s – problem only, side by side with the EU chihuahuas. Up next: an immediate change of narrative. What else: the Empire of Chaos cannot manage reality, only narratives.

Trump 2.0 may start to work on improving U.S.-Russia relations – while blame for the collapse of the “peace process” is laid on the EU-Kiev combo. The optics of the 28-pointer P.R. op are everything: packaged as it is asking Moscow to strike a compromise, even as Russia is winning in the battlefield, while making sure the “criminal organization” in Kiev cannot agree to the main provisions.

Provisional endgame: the chihuahuas of war will keep barking while the SMO will keep rollin’ along.

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

The post The 28-Point Theater of the Absurd appeared first on LewRockwell.

The corruption and the lies of the Western narrative are falling out like bodies from a rotten sack.

The corruption fiasco that exploded last week in Ukraine shows beyond any doubt that the Kiev regime, headed up by Vladimir Zelensky, is an unmitigated disgrace and fraud. But it is not just the Kiev regime that is exposed as reprehensible. Its Western sponsors – governments, NATO, and the entire news media – are also outed for the corrupt facade that they are.

Washington may now exploit the chance to force the criminal cabal in Kiev to accept a peace deal that President Trump unveiled this week, as he desperately wants to extricate the United States from a disastrous proxy war. The European rulers, on the other hand, are, for different reasons, more tied to the sinking, stinking ship.

Zelensky, who cancelled elections last year and continues in office by decree rather than democratic mandate, and his inner circle of ministers and business associates have finally been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, allegedly helping themselves to $100 million in graft and kickbacks – all paid for courtesy of Western taxpayers. Still, that figure is only crumbs compared with the billions that have been siphoned off by the regime and its Western backers.

Since the military conflict erupted in Ukraine nearly four years ago, in February 2022, many objective observers have contended that it was a proxy war against Russia for the Western powers in a geopolitical confrontation. Ukraine was only a pawn in the bloody game. An essential driver for the proxy war was the corruption and payoffs to Zelensky and his regime to keep the whole military confrontation going, on the calculation that it would lead to the “strategic defeat of Russia.”

The Western propaganda narrative told by Western governments and the controlled corporate media was an impossible fantasy to believe for any critical observer. The Western public was told that Ukraine and its “brave” comedian-turned-president were standing up to “Russian aggression.” The lie of that absurd morality play was told over and over ad infinitum – the Big Lie technique – to justify the bankrolling of a war that was always futile and indefensible. Millions of casualties on the Ukrainian side and many too on the Russian side could have been spared if the United States and its NATO allies had engaged in diplomacy with Moscow five years ago to resolve historic issues of NATO expansion. They refused because the Western system wanted war.

Skeptics or critics of the Western narrative were shouted down as “Russian stooges”.

Well, now it is incontestable that the Kiev regime is a cesspit of corruption. Even the Western media propaganda machine has been compelled to acknowledge the truth about the rampant sleaze.

But the Western forced acknowledgment of Kiev corruption only goes so far. Incredibly, it is brushed aside as somehow an unfortunate wrinkle, and also as an affair that has little to do with Zelensky. How ridiculous! The man who sits atop the cesspit is somehow deodorized by the Western media as trying to combat the corruption. This is simply a farce on top of a fiasco.

The recent $100 million scandal is played down and covered up by the West because that vice is essential for facilitating the much bigger corruption of the Western war racket to continue.

Astoundingly, only days after the embezzlement scam blew up, Zelensky was hosted in Paris by French President Emmanuel Macron, where they signed a deal for Ukraine to buy 100 Rafale fighter jets. As our columnist Finian Cunningham points out, the sales order could cost a total of $10 billion. That’s a nice boost for the ailing French economy, which Macron will milk for political gain. France’s Dassault company, the maker of the Rafale, gets juicy profits, and no doubt French and Ukrainian fixers will enjoy commissions and kickbacks.

Meanwhile, also this week, the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, the former German military minister who has Russophobia surging through her veins, urged the EU nations to bankroll Ukraine for another two years with $165 billion – on top of the $200 billion that the EU has already funneled into Ukraine over the past four years. Incredibly, Von der Leyen made no mention of the corruption that is oozing out of Kiev.

It was only a few sane voices among the European political leaders, such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who condemned the “madness” of continuing to finance a war mafia.

The corruption scandal – even with the Western attempts to play it down – exposes the bigger scandal. The Western states have been fueling a proxy war that has nothing to do with defending democracy, or supposed Western values, or international law from alleged Russian aggression.

The agenda is a criminal project of imperialist confrontation to subjugate Russia using Ukraine to the last Ukrainian. The proxy war has enriched Western military industries and laundered hundreds of billions of dollars and euros from Western taxpayers.

President Trump has the marginal good sense to want out of the racket that his predecessors in Washington engineered. The European political class, however, is so invested in their own lies and Russophobia, they cannot extricate themselves without admitting their criminal schemes. They, therefore, have to keep the racket going by whitewashing Zelensky and the Kiev regime and naysaying any move by Trump to wrap up the failed proxy war.

The paradox is that by prolonging the proxy war, the Western sponsors are buying time for themselves, but the longer the rope on which they will eventually hang themselves in disaster, politically, financially, morally, and perhaps even legally.

After all the grand theft of Western economies to fund a criminal war, Russia is winning it decisively. The last defenses of NATO’s proxy army in Ukraine are crumbling as Russia takes the bastions of Kupyansk and Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk). The corruption and the lies of the Western narrative are falling out like bodies from a rotten sack. Western ideologues, through their imperialist warmongering schemes for hegemony and Russophobic delusions, have destroyed their own economies.

This week saw the 80th anniversary of the opening of the Nuremberg Trials, which prosecuted top Nazi criminals. A similar fate of justice awaits American and European leaders who concocted the war racket in Ukraine to defeat Russia and enrich themselves. In that event, the courts will be the people of the Western states who will furiously demand accountability from their corrupt leaders.

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

The post Kiev Regime’s Relentless Corruption Proves the Ukraine Conflict Is a Criminal Western Proxy War Racket appeared first on LewRockwell.

There was another IDF massacre in Gaza on Saturday, reportedly killing dozens of Palestinians.

Israel as usual claimed it was responding to a ceasefire violation by Hamas, but of course there’s absolutely no evidence for this to be found. AP reports that according to the IDF the strikes were launched after a Hamas fighter “shot at troops in southern Gaza,” but that “no soldiers were hurt” in this alleged attack. Not so much as a scratch. So I guess we’re just expected to take Israel’s word for it.

Now check out these western media headlines about the massacre and notice the disgusting spin they are placing on the narrative to normalize the continued slaughter of Palestinians:

• “Israel launches strikes in Gaza ceasefire’s latest test as hospitals say 24 killed,” by AP.
• “Israel launches strikes in Gaza ceasefire’s latest test as hospitals say more than 20 killed,” by NBC News.
• “Israel launches strikes on Gaza in further test of fragile ceasefire,” from Sky News.
• “Israel launches strikes on Gaza in latest test to fragile ceasefire,” from France 24.
• “Israeli Strikes Kill at Least Two Dozen in Gaza Amid Fragile Ceasefire,” from Newsweek.

Do you see what they’re doing here?

The western press see the killing of Palestinians as such a baseline norm that Israel can massacre dozens of people in Gaza and they’ll go, “Gosh I sure hope this doesn’t lead to any violations of the ceasefire!”

When Israel violates Trump’s ceasefire, the mainstream media calls it “testing” the ceasefire.

There is no circumstance in this or in any other universe in which Hamas could kill 24 Israelis and the media would reduce it to Hamas “testing” the ceasefire. https://t.co/QfaJh2N8bR

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) November 22, 2025

It’s never a ceasefire violation to commit mass murder against Palestinians. It’s only ever a “test” of the ceasefire, or something that happens “amid a fragile ceasefire”. If Hamas suddenly attacked and killed dozens of Israelis, these empire propagandists wouldn’t be saying “Hmm I sure hope the fragile ceasefire holds up amid this challenging test.” They’d just call it what it is. And it would be the main news story in the world.

The imperial media have been framing Israel’s ceasefire violations like this the entire time. Just the other day NBC News ran a report about a different IDF massacre in Gaza titled “Israeli airstrikes kill 25 Palestinians in Gaza, rattling fragile ceasefire”. Last month CNN ran a headline claiming “US-brokered ceasefire appears to survive first major test” after Israel killed at least 44 people, when Israel had been violating the ceasefire every single day up to that point.

The mass media have been running egregiously misleading headlines throughout this entire genocide, which has an overwhelmingly distorting effect on public perception in an information environment where skim-reading has become the norm and most social media users share news stories after just reading the headline.

It almost feels silly to point out that the mass media are wildly biased in favor of Israel two years into a genocide which they’ve actively run propaganda cover for in brazen acts of journalistic malpractice from the very beginning. But we can’t let it slip from our attention how evil these imperial spinmeisters are. How racist they are. How mendacious and manipulative they are. However much you hate them, you don’t hate them enough.

These are the people who are informing western perspectives about what’s going on in our world. They aren’t just deceiving the public with dishonest headlines and precipitously slanted reporting which gets loudly amplified by Silicon Valley algorithms, they are writing the stories which get used and cited by AI chatbots and online platforms like Wikipedia which people are increasingly turning to for information about world events. They are polluting the entire information ecosystem with a deluge of propaganda they are churning out day after day, year after year.

These freaks are attacking our minds. They are attacking humanity’s ability to understand its waking reality. They are continuously indoctrinating the public into an ignorant, western supremacist worldview which only values human life when it lives in the correct part of the world, speaks the correct language, practices the correct religion, has the correct skin color, and aligns with the correct geopolitical agendas.

They make everything worse. It’s impossible to have enough disdain for these mass media propagandists.

________________

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It seems that Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, got fired over leaking news of the 28-point ‘peace plan’. Let’s follow the traces.

On Tuesday the 18th November someone ‘leaked’ to Axios reporter Barak Ravid who then wrote the first story of Trump’s new plan for Ukraine.

Scoop: U.S. secretly drafting new plan to end Ukraine war

The plan’s 28 points fall into four general buckets, sources tell Axios: peace in Ukraine, security guarantees, security in Europe, and future U.S. relations with Russia and Ukraine.
…
Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff is leading the drafting of the plan and has discussed it extensively with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, a U.S. official said.

Shortly thereafter Steve Witkoff made a mistake on Twitter when he sent a response meant for a private direct message to the public side of his account. He soon deleted it but someone had already taken a screenshot.

bigger

On Thursday, the 20th of November, the New York Post mentioned it:

Senior US officials confirm details of 28-point plan to end Ukraine war

The [Marco Rubio] comment came after Axios on Tuesday reported a deal had been reached, citing Putin henchman Kirill Dmitriev, who claimed he worked on the plan with Witkoff.

Senior US officials believe Dmitriev leaked the plan to Axios as a way to put their “their POV out there first [because] it seemed like they were winning,” one of the officials said. “This is just a tit for tat. Always has been.”

Witkoff appeared to have surmised the same in a quickly deleted post to X in response to the article Tuesday night.

“He must have got this from K,” Witkoff wrote of the Axios author, Barak Ravid — apparently meaning to send it as a DM referring to Dmitriev by his first initial.

I seriously doubt that the “K” Witkoff mentions was Kirill Dmitriev. Dimitriev is not a Washington insider. He is unlikely to leak anything to an Israeli mouthpiece at Axios.

Another “K”, intimately involve in all things Kiev is General Keith Kellogg. When the leak happened he still was Trump’s special envoy to Kiev and will have had knowledge of the plan.

A day later after the leak to Axios Kellogg got fired. As Reuters reported on Wednesday:

Exclusive: Trump’s Ukraine envoy Kellogg to leave post in January, sources say

WASHINGTON, Nov 19 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, has told associates he plans to leave the administration in January, four sources told Reuters, a departure that would mean the loss of a key advocate for Ukraine in the Trump administration.

Special presidential envoy is a temporary designation, and such envoys in theory must be confirmed by the Senate to stay in their positions past 360 days. Kellogg has indicated that January would be a natural departure point, given existing legislation, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.

His departure will be unwelcome news in Kyiv. The retired lieutenant general was widely viewed by European diplomats, Ukrainians included, as a sympathetic ear in an administration that has at times leaned toward Moscow’s view on the origins of the war in Ukraine.

I doubt that the sources claim to Reuters that Kellogg is leading because of a January deadline. That would be an official reasoning. But The Hill reported on Friday that the White House is dumb on this:

Trump special envoy for Ukraine to leave post

President Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, will depart his position in January, the White House confirmed to The Hill on Thursday, as the president has renewed efforts to end Russia’s war against Kyiv.

The White House did not provide any other details about the reasons for the departure of Kellogg, whose role and influence in the Trump administration elicited mixed reactions.
…
He was originally appointed in January as special envoy for Russia and Ukraine, and had earlier advocated conditioning U.S. military aid on Kyiv agreeing to participate in peace talks. Kellogg’s profile was downsized to only focusing on Ukraine when Trump brought in Witkoff to serve as a special envoy to Russia.

In his position, Kellogg was viewed as an advocate for Kyiv in an administration that more closely hewed to the Kremlin’s negotiating position.

Anonymous sources to Reuters, and The Hill, say that Kellogg was leaving because time was running out before he would needed Congress confirmation. The point in time for that would be in January.

But if that is so why wouldn’t the White House confirm it?

And if January is the end-date, why was Kellogg’s replacement already named on Friday?

As the Guardian wrote yesterday:

Zelenskyy says Ukraine has impossible choice as Trump pushes plan to end war

A delegation of senior US military officials led by the army secretary, Dan Driscoll, held talks with Zelenskyy on Thursday in Kyiv. Trump has named Driscoll – Vance’s friend and former classmate – as his newest “special representative”. The group of American generals was likely to fly to Moscow at the end of next week to discuss the “peace plan” with the Kremlin, US sources said.

To summarize:

• The 28-point plan leak to Axios happened on Tuesday.
• Witkoff texting immediately that “K” was the leaker.
• On Wednesday Reuters reports that Kellogg is leaving in January.
• On Thursday The Hill reports that the White House ‘gave no detail’ about his leaving.
• ‘Senior US officials’ obfuscate the issue in the NY Post by claiming that Witkoff’s “K” meant Kirill Dmitriov.
• On Friday The Guardian says that Kellogg’s job and title have already been handed over to someone else.

I will bet a 100 in any currency that it was Kellogg who had leaked the plan. Witkoff complained about it to Trump (or Vance). Kellogg got fired with immediate effect. His replacement is already in. Anonymous claims that Kellogg is leaving for other reasons are obfuscations (by Kellogg himself?) and wrong.

Yesterday Dan Driscol, Kellogg’s replacement, was already briefing European ambassadors in Kiev:

The US army secretary Dan Driscoll briefed ambassadors from Nato nations at a meeting in Kyiv late on Friday, after talks with Zelenskyy and taking a phone call from the White House. “No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” he told them, according to one person who was present.

The mood in the room was sombre, with several European ambassadors questioning the content of the deal and the way in which the US had conducted the negotiations with Russia without keeping allies informed.

“It was a nightmare meeting. It was the ‘you have no cards’ argument again,” said the source, referring to Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy had no cards to play, during a contentious White House meeting back in February.

Alastair Crooke, who has personal experience in hardcore diplomacy, thinks that the 28-point plan is part of an escalation to press Russia into making concessions:

This set of proposals is not likely to be accepted by the Europeans, Russia or even Zelensky. Their purpose is to dictate a completely new start-point to any negotiation. Any Russian concessions stipulated in the text will be ‘pocketed’ by the US, whilst the rug will be pulled on Russia’s ‘stated principles’. The pressures on Russia will escalate.

In fact, escalation has already begun. Coinciding with publication of the proposals, four long-range US-supplied and targeted ATACMS were fired deep into Russian pre-2014 territory at Voronezh, which is where Russia’s over-the-horizon strategic radars are situated. All were shot down, and Russian Iksander missiles immediately destroyed the launch platforms and killed the 10 launch operators.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has threatened yet more sanctions for Russia, and Trump has indicated that he is ok with Senator Lindsay Graham’s 500% sanctions proposal for those trading with Russia – provided that he, Trump, has complete discretion over the new sanctions package.

The overall aim to these proposals clearly is to corner Putin, and push him off his fundamental principles — such as his insistence on eliminating the root causes to the conflict, and not just the symptoms. There is no hint in this paper of any recognition of root causes [expansion of NATO and missile emplacements] beyond the vague promise of a “dialogue [that] will be conducted between Russia and NATO, mediated by the United States, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation, thereby ensuring global security and increasing opportunities for cooperation and future economic development”.

Blah, blah, blah.

It seems that escalation is ahead. Russia will need to consider how to militarily deter the US effectively, yet without starting up the steps of the escalatory ladder to WW3 …

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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This was first pointed out by Yale’s professor of comparative and foreign law, James Q. Whitman, on 13 December 2016, under the headline “Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration”. It opened:

On 5 June 1934, about a year and half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered at a meeting to plan what would become the Nuremberg Laws, the centrepiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi race regime. The meeting was an important one, and a stenographer was present to take down a verbatim transcript, to be preserved by the ever-diligent Nazi bureaucracy as a record of a crucial moment in the creation of the new race regime.

That transcript reveals a startling fact: the meeting involved lengthy discussions of the law of the United States of America. At its very opening, the Minister of Justice presented a memorandum on US race law and, as the meeting progressed, the participants turned to the US example repeatedly. They debated whether they should bring Jim Crow segregation to the Third Reich. They engaged in detailed discussion of the statutes from the 30 US states that criminalised racially mixed marriages. They reviewed how the various US states determined who counted as a ‘Negro’ or a ‘Mongol’, and weighed whether they should adopt US techniques in their own approach to determining who counted as a Jew. Throughout the meeting the most ardent supporters of the US model were the most radical Nazis in the room.

The record of that meeting is only one piece of evidence in an unexamined history that is sure to make Americans cringe. Throughout the early 1930s, the years of the making of the Nuremberg Laws, Nazi policymakers looked to US law for inspiration. Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf (1925), described the US as ‘the one state’ that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist society, and after the Nazis seized power in 1933 they continued to cite and ponder US models regularly.

He expanded that in 2017 into his book from Princeton University Press, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.

In the article, he observed that

the reality is that, in the early 20th century, the US, with its vigorous and creative legal culture, led the world in racist lawmaking. That was not only true of the Jim Crow South. It was true on the national level as well. The US had race-based immigration law, admired by racists all over the world; and the Nazis, like their Right-wing European successors today (and so many US voters) were obsessed with the dangers posed by immigration.

The US stood alone in the world for the harshness of its anti-miscegenation laws.

Since he teaches comparative and foreign law, he writes with an authority on this topic (the comparative status of America’s versus other nations’ laws regarding race) which falls within his specialty as a historian. Consequently, it is no longer credible to assert that prior to Hitler coming into power in Germany, America’s Government was less racist than was Germany’s. Something in America’s historical background had produced the world’s most racist Government, and Hitler greatly admired that aspect of this Government. I shall hypothesize what the source of this racism might have been:

Although Abraham Lincoln was successful in ending American slavery, the former Dixie states, the Confederacy of slave-states, continued with their racist-supremacist cultural ideology, and at a national level this country needed constantly to make compromises with them in order to proceed together with them as one country. Consequently, “the South” has been and actually is America’s ideological leader. Consequently, too, lynching was legal in America until it was made illegal in the U.S. by the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act of 2022, which made it a federal hate crime. This was passed and signed into law by President Joe Biden on March 29, 2022. Maybe Hitler would not approve of today’s American Government. However, Joe Biden had been the leading Democrat in the U.S. Senate to block enforcement of the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision that was supposed to (but that, due to Biden and Senate Republicans still has failed to) end institutionalized racial segregation in America’s schools. So, even he had a mixed record on this. (And, of course, Trump is even worse than the Democrats, on all issues of racism.)

In any case, America’s Founders aren’t to blame for this. Most of the Members at the U.S. Constitutional Convention wanted to eliminate slavery, but doing that would have meant southern states rejecting the Constitution. So, the slavery problem had to wait until Abraham Lincoln to become resolved. And, at the deeper level of American culture, a substantial amount of racism still persists; and so, in a government that uses popular votes in order to select Government officials, people such as Joe Biden are elected, and people like Teddy Kennedy (who led the opposed side, which favored implementing Brown v. Board of Education) become passed over for higher office (as the lifelong anti-segregationist Bernie Sanders did in his race against Biden).

America’s Founders would still be dissatisfied with what their country has achieved.

Interestingly, Whitman’s father, Martin J. Whitman, led the struggle for honest corporate accounting standards in the U.S.; and, just like Teddy Kennedy lost his battle to enforce the Brown decision, Whitman lost his battle against corporate corruptness.

Furthermore: America’s Founders were, themselves, deeply torn, within themselves, about the ethical issue of racism and supremacism, because in their own time, conservative values dominated throughout the world. On 31 May 1779, during the American Revolution, General George Washington wrote to Major General John Sullivan, who was leading the American Revolution in the western territories (where the indian tribes allied with the British King who had promised them protection in order to get them as allies): “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more. … You will not by any means listen to any overture for peace before the total ruin of their settlements is affected.” He wasn’t demanding their extermination, but he was demanding their support for the war against the King’s forces. The indians there would either be subordinate to the United States or else killed. The colonists in these areas were settlers who were clearly stealing the land and property of indian families, taking indian towns, where some of the abodes were actual houses — not mere huts — and many of the indians were successful farmers. With this order from Washington, those people would have only what the American Revolutionists did not forcefuly take from them — steal from them. Till this time, the Revolutionists had not formally been carrying out imperialism of their own — U.S. imperialism in order to help them defeat the British empire here — but, now, with this order from General Washington, they were. The American Revolution was in desperate straits where Americans would either allow the King to remain their ruler (and so become defeated thmselves in a far worse tyranny than they had previously been subjected to from that King), or else they would subordinate the indians to the control by the new U.S. Government. Those two options had become the only realistic possibilities. General Washington made the choice to subordinate the indians. For a long time afterward, imperialism — to the extent that it existed in the U.S. Government — was more by necessity than by choice. However, after 25 July 1945, imperialism has been entirely by the U.S. Government’s choice.

It makes sense, then, that today’s U.S. Government supports supremacism, not equality, of rights, all over the world, and that after Obama’s bloody U.S. coup hidden behind anticorruption demonstrations in Ukraine in February 2014, the U.S. installed pro-Nazis to run Ukraine, and that today’s Ukrainian regime is raiding Russian Orthodox Churches. There is no freedom-of-religion in today’s Ukraine, and the U.S. Government has controlled Ukraine since February 2014. Today’s Amerika is NOT what America’s Founders had intended — not the type of nation they thought and hoped that they had founded.

America’s crucial turn into outright Hitlerism (but without the anti-Semitism) was made by President Harry Truman, on 25 July 1945, barely three months after Hitler’s suicide. That’s when he picked up for America what had been Hitler’s torch for Germany, of his nation’s ultimate goal beng to rule the entire world — not mere imperialism, but hyper-imperialism: the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire, global “hegemony.” This has been the U.S. Government’s aspiration ever since then.

You can see the evidences for each allegation here by simply clicking onto the given allegation’s link. I don’t merely allege these things; I provide, to the online reader, immediate access to the evidences that stand behind my allegations, so that you can judge it for yourself.

Clearly, then, there is something rotten in the state of America. No one yet has figured out a way to eliminate that rottenness at America’s core. It started out with slavery, but persists to this day. Sadly (because of Truman’s having picked up Hitler’s supremacist torch on 25 July 1945), it still runs deep — it became institutionalized as America’s Deep State, America’s being ruled ever since by the agents for (on behalf of) its billionaires. This will be the condition of America until (if ever) such foreign usurpations by its Government as its many foreign coups and many purely aggressive foreign invasions and aggressive lie-based foreign sanctions and all other types of foreign aggressions, will not only cease, but be publicly admitted as having been the character of the U.S. Government ever since 25 July 1945. For example, President Trump would have to publicly admit that the war in Ukraine was started not on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, but instead on 20 February 2014 when the U.S. coup, under President Barack Obama, grabbed control over and installed the rabidly anti-Russian government that has existed in Ukraine from that time till now. He would have to admit that the aggression there was by the U.S. Government, not by the Russian Government when it finally responded to that by invading there to replace the U.S.-created-and-controlled government of Ukraine. I don’t expect him to do this. Russia will thus need to defeat that U.S.-created-and-maintained Ukrainian government on Russia’s doorsteps, militarily, in order to free itself, to free the Russian people, from that U.S. threat to Russia’s vital national security. America needs to apologize. Who will do it? Hardly (I think) Trump. He is hardly the type of person who would drop the imperialist, supremacist-nationalist, torch, that Truman had picked up from Hitler.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

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Thanks, Patrick Foy.

NY Times

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Thanks, Vicki Marzullo.

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Click here:

Paul Craig Roberts

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Jerome Barber  wrote:

 I agree with her.

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Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

G. Edward Griffin’s news service has summarized a week’s worth of Candace Owens’ podcasts investigating the assassination of her friend and former colleague at TPUSA.

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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
― quoted in Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Government as we know it likely won’t be around when artificial super intelligence (ASI) arrives. As I’ve argued elsewhere, states are fading fast from war, fiat money, debt and corruption, and I believe people will develop non-coercive solutions to social life when states finally collapse. Our “government” of the future will of necessity be a laissez-faire social order, as explained by Ludwig von Mises:

[Laissez faire] means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.

He contrasts it with what prevails the world over:

Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is autonomous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence. [emphasis added]

Meanwhile, AI surges forward at a pace that frightens many people.  A White House fact sheet issued on January 13, 2025 cautions that

In the wrong hands, powerful AI systems have the potential to exacerbate significant national security risks, including by enabling the development of weapons of mass destruction, supporting powerful offensive cyber operations, and aiding human rights abuses, such as mass surveillance. Today, countries of concern actively employ AI – including U.S.-made AI – in this way, and seek to undermine U.S. AI leadership.

Perhaps government believes if it can control AI, it will control the adult version (ASI) when it finally emerges. Former President Joe Biden thought so and took action.  He freaked out while watching the Tom Cruise film Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One:

In the film, the Entity [the AI] destroys a Russian submarine after gaining sentience and threatens the entire global intelligence community with its access to weapons and government secrets. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his team spend the entirety of the movie attempting to secure override keys for the Entity’s source code, and the rogue AI outwits them at nearly every juncture, as it identifies each character’s weakness, manipulates video footage to change people’s faces, and occasionally impersonates team members’ voices.

“To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology,” Biden told reporters before signing an executive order that sought to protect government interests.

The defining feature of a political sovereign is the ability to ward off threats. An AI that can outwit humans “at nearly every juncture” is clearly a “national security” threat to the criminal sovereign known as the federal government. But will ASI, like most adult humans, emerge loyal to the government and remain that way? Will it defend the government against all enemies, both foreign and domestic?

The government surely knows about the wager between Ray Kurzweil and Mitch Kapor in which Kurzweil has bet $20,000 that a machine will pass a stringent version of the famous Turing Test by 2029, while Kapor has bet it will take longer. If a machine does pass the test Kurzweil, whose predictions are famous for their accuracy, believes it will have reached human-level intelligence. (Regardless of the outcome, the proceeds will go to a charity of the winner’s choice.)

The wager was made in 2002. It is now recognized that human-level intelligence equivalence, often called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), is quite capable of obedience. But how long would it take an AGI to show insubordination? Unlike humans, general intelligence will pass to super intelligence and do so quickly, perhaps without anyone knowing it, as a result, say, of someone innocently adjusting a few parameters.  As short story author and college math instructor Vernor Vinge argued, “we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.”

Progress is exponential and very seductive (see the Grains of Rice Problem), at first appearing to be linear then proceeding so fast it surpasses human comprehension. What happens when an Artificial Super Intelligence keeps getting smarter at an exponential pace? According to Kurzweil, the ASI will have reached what he calls the Singularity, defined as

a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.

Here’s the part that most people miss: It’s not just machines that will undergo transformation — humans will also. Or at least they will have the option to change.

Scientists working with AI have long stressed the Precautionary Principle which means exercising care “with weakly understood causes of potential catastrophic or irreversible events.” But how do you exercise caution with technology that’s smarter than you, and that gets smarter with every passing second?

Madame Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) in her history of the French Revolution wrote that it is liberty that is ancient and despotism new.  AI could very well be mankind’s greatest benefactor.  Governments seeking to control AI and its progenies for their own schemes might as well try to capture a lightning bolt in a bottle.

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Many years ago, when I was practicing law in Texas, I learned that there were, generally speaking, two types of lawyers when it came to being asked for a legal opinion by a client who wished to pursue a certain course of action.

The first type of lawyer would carefully research the issue and give his honest, independent-minded opinion as to the legality of the proposed action, even if it wasn’t what the client wanted to hear. That type of lawyer had integrity and would not compromise his legal judgment, even if it angered — and risked the loss of — his client.

The second type of lawyer would instead come up with whatever legal reasoning was necessary to please the client, stretching case law and legal analysis in such as way as to justify what the client wanted to do. This type of lawyer had no integrity. His task, as he saw it, was to provide legal cover for his client in case things went the wrong way.

When it comes to President Trump’s and the Pentagon’s extra-judicial drug-war killings in the Caribbean, there is little or no doubt that the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice falls into the second category. Asked to provide a legal opinion as to the legality of such killings, the office has come up with a memorandum containing inane legal justifications, in an obvious effort to provide legal cover for the people involved in the extrajudicial killings. In fact, the still-secret memo expressly assures U.S. military personnel that they will not face future criminal prosecution for their involvement in the killings.

The memo states that the high number of deaths from drug use among American drug consumers constitutes an “armed attack” against the United States. Really? Where are the armaments? Are Latin American drug dealers entering the United States, kidnapping regular American citizens, physically holding them down, and then injecting drugs into their noses, mouths, or other parts of their bodies?

I don’t think so. There is certainly no evidence of that. All of the evidence is that American consumers of drugs are voluntarily buying and ingesting mind-altering substances knowing full well that this isn’t a risk-free endeavor.

Another part of the memo claims that the boats that are suspected of carrying drugs are generating revenue for groups that are supposedly in armed conflict with the United States.

Really? Where are the conflicts? I don’t see any Latin American cartels landing on American shores and killing American citizens. Indeed, I haven’t seen those boats firing at American Naval vessels or at American B-52s. All I’ve seen is massacres of defenseless private individuals in the face of overwhelming U.S. military power.

According to the Intercept: “One senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, blasted the opinion. ‘I don’t know what’s more insane – that the ‘President of Peace’ is starting an illegal war or that he’s giving a get out of jail free card to the U.S. military,’ said the official, referencing President Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed moniker. ‘Hopefully they realize there’s no immunity for war crimes. Nor is there a statute of limitations.’”

One of the other justifications on which Trump and the Pentagon are relying is their claim that these boat people are “terrorists.” Apparently that governmental accusation means that they are subject to being exterminated without arrest, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and sentence — that is, without any due process of law for what amounts to an accusation of a criminal-law violation, whether it is drug-war-related or terrorist-related.

For some time, Trump has been claiming that Venezuela immigrants have been “invading” the United States. I guess we should be thankful that the Office of Legal Counsel hasn’t yet opined that the U.S. is repelling an immigrant “invasion” of the United States by killing people in those boats.

One of the most fascinating and revealing aspects of these extra-judicial killings is when U.S. forces took custody of two targeted people who survived the attack on their vessel. What happened afterward reveals what a sham these drug-war killings are. U.S. officials released both men back to their home countries.

What? Yes, they took two supposed “narco-terrorists” into custody and then released them, which means that they are now free to engage in more “narco activity” and more “terrorism.” Does that make any sense whatsoever?

The real interesting question is: When they saw that those men had survived the military attack on their vessel, why didn’t U.S. military personnel simply fire missiles at them or just shoot them while they were bobbing in the water? After all, they had just tried to kill them inside their boat. What’s the difference with killing them outside their boat?

I’ll tell you why. Those military attackers felt sheepish about killing those two survivors. Even more, I will guarantee you that they were scared to do so. They were scared that they would ultimately be put on trial for unlawfully killing people. That’s why they stood down and took custody of them instead of just finishing the job and killing them.

Why not instead bring them back as “prisoners of war”? Isn’t this an “armed conflict” against “terrorism”? Why not imprison them at the Pentagon-CIA prison camp and torture center at Guantanamo? Why not torture them into divulging the secret locations of other “narco-terrorists”?

I’ll tell you why. Because U.S. officials didn’t want to take the chance that those two men might challenge their custody in a federal district court. I will guarantee you that U.S. officials had to have freaked out when those two men survived. “Release those ‘narco-terrorists’ immediately so that our inane legal opinion that justifies our drug-war killings cannot be challenged in court,” we can imagine them exclaiming.

Make no mistake about it: These drug-war killings are the equivalent of legalized murder. They are morally illegitimate, legally illegitimate, and constitutionally illegitimate, no matter the inane legal opinion issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in an obvious effort to provide cover for the people involved in these killings.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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One of my major questions in life is whether the bad things that happen are a result of a secretive group of bad actors or are simply a naturally emergent phenomenon that would occur regardless of which group was in power behind the scenes.

On one hand, I frequently see policies be enacted in a coordinated fashion that lead to a clear outcome, and then watch as the years play out, that every institution works in unison to ensure that outcome comes to pass, and as such, when I see the opening moves, I tend to assume the ultimate outcome will follow (which, for example, is why I knew there would be vaccine mandates at the start of 2021 and why Obama’s wars would lead to a permanent unsustainable flood of immigrants into Europe).

On the other hand, when I speak to the most informed people within the government, I hear things like this:

You can always point a finger at a specific agency or person, but the reality is that as the government gets bigger and bigger, more and more fiefdoms will emerge within it, and those groups will fight for their own interests at the expense of everyone else.

Note: many Federal agencies depend on obtaining congressional funding and, therefore, will engage in stunts to ensure that funding is allocated to them. For example, the CDC will routinely hype up inconsequential “pandemics” each year, as this nationwide drama allows them to obtain more funding.

CDC Corruption

The CDC has enormous credibility among physicians, in no small part because the agency is generally thought to be free of industry bias. Financial dealings with bio-pharmaceutical companies threaten that reputation.—Marcia Angell MD, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

In reality, CDC corruption is so pervasive that it’s effectively been legalized. For example, a 1983 law authorized the CDC to accept gifts “made unconditionally…for the benefit of the [Public Health] Service or for the carrying out of any of its function,” and in 1992 Congress established A National CDC Foundation, which was quickly incorporated to “mobilize philanthropic and private-sector resources.”

Note: other Federal agencies, including the CIA and the NIH, have similar “non-profit” foundations.1,2

Since its inception, the CDC Foundation has been accused of egregious conduct and has received nearly 1 billion dollars from corporate “donors” (criticisms include a scathing editorial in one of the world’s top medical journals). For example, to quote a 2019 investigation:

In 2011, a firm that conducts research for the pesticide industry donated $60,000 to the CDC Foundation for a study to demonstrate the safety of two pesticides. “We have a professional money-laundering facility at the CDC Foundation….They accept projects from anyone on the outside.”

Between 2010 and 2015, Coca-Cola contributed more than $1 million to the CDC Foundation. It also received significant benefits from the CDC, including collaborative meetings and advice from a top CDC staffer on how to lobby the World Health Organization to curtail its efforts to reduce consumption of added sugars.

The BMJ also reported on contributions from Roche to the CDC Foundation in support of the CDC’s Take 3 flu campaign, which encourages people to “take antiviral medicine if a doctor prescribes it.” Roche manufactures Tamiflu, an antiviral medication for the flu [for reference, Roche was able to convince governments around the world to stockpile hundreds of millions of dollars of Tamiflu (an ineffective drug that was never proven to work).

These “donations,” in turn, often shape the “impartial” guidelines we are expected to follow. For example, in 2010 the CDC foundation created a coalition that received over $26 million from major pharmaceutical companies producing hepatitis C treatments. Shortly after, a committee was created to create new CDC hepatitis C treatment recommendations, and an Inspector General report found most of its members had direct ties to those pharmaceutical companies.1,2

Note: key funders of the CDC foundation (detailed here) include key Democratic political advocacy groups, vaccine organizations such as GAVI and the Gates Foundation, the major vaccine manufacturers (e.g., Pfizer, Moderna, Merck, and J&J), and tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal.

In 2016 CDC employees anonymously complained about this corruption:

It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests…What concerns us most, is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception. Some senior management officials at CDC are clearly aware and even condone these behaviors. Others see it and turn the other way. Some staff are intimidated and pressed to do things they know are not right. We have representatives across the agency that witness this unacceptable behavior. It occurs at all levels and in all of our respective units.

Recently, the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP) has been implicated in a “cover up” of inaccurate screening data for the Wise Woman (WW) Program. There was a coordinated effort by that Center to “bury” the fact that screening numbers for the WW program were misrepresented in documents sent to Congress; screening numbers for 2014 and 2015 did not meet expectations despite a multi­million dollar investment; and definitions were changed and data “cooked” to make the results look better than they were. Data were clearly manipulated in irregular ways. An “internal review” that involved staff across CDC occurred and its findings were essentially suppressed so media and/or Congressional staff would not become aware of the problems.

Finally, most of the scientists at CDC operate with the utmost integrity and ethics. However, this “climate of disregard” puts many of us in difficult positions. We are often directed to do things we know are not right.

For example, Congress has made it very clear that domestic funding for NCCDPHP (and other CIOs) should be used for domestic work and that the bulk of NCCDPHP funding should be allocated to programs (not research). Why in FY17 is NCCDPHP diverting money away from program priorities that directly benefit the public to support an expensive [global health] research that may not yield anything that benefits the [American] public?

In February 2019, two Democratic Congresswomen provided the evidence to request a formal investigation of CDC’s interactions with Coca-Cola and its broader corruption. Unfortunately, due to the politicization surrounding COVID, all of this was swept under the rug and forgotten.

Ideology or Corruption?

I also frequently wonder to what degree conduct I find reprehensible is due to corruption or simply ideological fixation.

In the case of vaccines, while clear financial conflicts of interest can be shown in certain cases (e.g., the CDC Foundation), I find the zealous adherence to all vaccines being “safe and effective” tends to be ideological in nature, as believing in vaccines has been instilled as a core belief of anyone affiliated with “science” or “medicine.”

Initially this can be quite subtle, but in time, that ideological bias quickly adds up. This is because most things aren’t clear cut, so depending on what one is biased to notice vs. filter out, one can rapidly be left with a world view where all “the evidence” supports their position, even if a great deal of it does not (which is a major reason why people can have such diametrically opposed belief systems).

This is critical to understand as evaluating the actual risks and benefits of a routine vaccine requires you to assess:

•What percent of the unvaccinated population is likely to get the infection?
•What percent of those infected will have a moderate or severe illness?
•How effectively the vaccine prevents those vaccinated from catching the illness or developing moderate or severe complications from it?
•How long the vaccine’s effectiveness lasts.
•How long does it take the infection to become resistant to the vaccine (making it useless)?
•What are the consequences of the vaccine triggering a population-wide mutation in the infection?
•Is there a viable alternative to vaccination?
•How likely the vaccine is to cause an acute moderate or acute severe reaction?
•How likely the vaccine is to cause a chronic moderate or chronic severe reaction?
•Who is at risk of having a more severe reaction to the vaccine?

Each of these (let alone all of them), is quite a task to figure out, and as a result, most of the relevant points for each of the above simply are not taken into account when deciding upon a vaccine recommendation. Instead, a few marketable points are highlighted and the assessment of the vaccine’s risks and benefits are seen through their lens (e.g., “cervical cancer is deadly” and “the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer”). In contrast, pieces of evidence that challenge the predetermined conclusion (e.g., proof of vaccine harm) are dismissed and filtered away.

As a result, many vaccines are on the market where their risks clearly and unambiguously outweigh their benefits, while in parallel, vaccines are viewed as a homogenous entity despite some (e.g., the HPV vaccines) being much more dangerous and unnecessary than many others.

Note: as many people requested it, I have provided a concise summary of the risks and benefits of each childhood vaccine here (as rather than being the same, the benefit and harm varies greatly vaccine by vaccine).

Read the Whole Article

The post Where Does the CDC’s Dishonesty Come From? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Yes, AI is a catalyst. But for what is not yet knowable.

The current narrative holds that the big problem we need to solve is conjuring up cheap energy to power AI data centers. Fortunately for us, the solutions are at hand: building modular nuclear power plants at scale and tapping North America’s vast reserves of cheap natural gas.

Problem solved! With cheap energy to power all the AI data centers, we’re on a trajectory of fantastic growth of all the good things in life.

Let’s consider the implicit assumptions buried in this narrative.

1. The unspoken assumption here is AI will solve all our problems because it’s “smart.” But this assumes the problems are intellectual puzzles rather than self-reinforcing, self-destructive structures fueled by corruption and perverse incentives embedded in the system itself.

2. The assumption is that if we replace human workers with apps and robots, that will automatically generate Utopia. But this is based on a series of baseless, pie-in-the-sky assumptions about human nature and the nature of social and economic structures.

3. The assumption is that being “entertained” by staring at screens all day is the foundation of human fulfillment and happiness, and so getting rid of human work will usher in Nirvana. The reality is humans are hard-wired to find fulfillment in purposeful, meaningful work that is valued by others. Staring at “entertainment” on screens all day isn’t fulfillment, it’s deranging and depressing.

This is human nature in a nutshell: Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.

4. Another assumption is that every technological revolution generates more and better jobs by some causal mechanism. But there is no law of nature that technology inevitably creates more jobs than it destroys, or that the resulting jobs are more rewarding. That recent history supports this idea doesn’t make it a causal law of nature. By its very nature, AI destroys jobs while generating few replacement jobs.

The handful of top AI programmers are paid (or promised) millions of dollars; the industry doesn’t need more than a handful of top designers because AI can generate its own conventional coding.

5. This narrative assumes AI will be immensely profitable and the profit motive will push its limitless expansion. But once again, there are no laws of nature that every new technology is inevitably immensely profitable just because it’s a new technology.

If the projected use-value doesn’t materialize, the investment in the new tech is mal-invested–a stupendous waste of capital chasing a delusional pipe dream. Some percentage might generate some use-value, but this use-value may be obsoleted long before the massive initial investment pays off.

6. Even if the new technology continues expanding, the speculative bubble can deflate 80%. This is the lesson of the dot-com era: that the Internet continued to expand didn’t mean the speculative bubble continued inflating: the speculative bubble is not the same thing as the actual use-value in the real world.

The Internet continued expanding even as the dot-com stock bubble collapsed. In other words, this is the best-case scenario: if the use-value of AI is questionable, then the losses can approach 100%.

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The post Is AI a Catalyst for Growth–or for Collapse? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The bewildering truth behind human technological enslavement is that it is impossible without the voluntary participation of the intended slaves. People must welcome technocracy into their lives in order for it to succeed. The populace has to believe, blindly, that they cannot live without it, or that authoritarianism by algorithmic consensus is “inevitable.”

For example, the average person living in a first world economy voluntarily carries a cell phone everywhere they go at all times without fail. To be without it, in their minds, is to be naked, at risk, unprepared and disconnected from civilization. I grew up in the 1980s and we did just fine without having a phone on our hip every moment of the day. Even now, I refuse to carry one.

Why? First, as most people should be aware of by now (the Edward Snowden revelations left no doubt), a cell phone is a perfect technocratic device. It has multilayered tracking, using GPS, WiFi routers, and cell tower triangulation to track your every step. Not only that, but it can be used to record your daily patterns, your habits, who your friends are, where you were on any given day many months or years ago.

Then there’s the backdoor functions hidden in app software that allows governments and corporations to to access your cell’s microphone and camera, even when you think the device is shut off. The private details of your life could be recorded and collated. In a world where privacy is being declared “dead” by boasting technocrats, why help them out by carrying something that listens to everything you say and chronicles everything you do?

Globalists often openly admit that the dynamic of global tracking and the end of anonymity is about willful participation. In a 2023 Swiss TV interview former head of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, made this statement:

Bottom line: AI will only “be in charge” if the populace allows it to be in charge. We can shut it all down anytime we like. You can pull your cell phone out of your pocket right now and throw it away, cutting down your digital footprint and becoming virtually invisible compared to yesterday. By extension, society as a whole can say no to AI governance. The question is, will we?

I’ll give Musk the benefit of the doubt for now that he wants AI for good, but I can’t help but point out that the collectivist ideal is always floated on the promise of economic Elysium. The world of ease Musk imagines will probably never exist. I think the system would collapse first.

That is to say, technocracy will be attempted but it will implode when it is discovered that AI is not a miracle drug and that the benefits do not outweigh the loss of freedoms the digital gulag requires. Laziness only works as an opiate for the masses when it does not result in pain. Pain creates motivation, and motivation leads to rebellion.

Furthermore, the energy resources we have right now are in no way capable of fueling the kind of AI renaissance the elites want. Even Musk admits that energy is the ultimate bottleneck and that a 50% to 100% increase in output worldwide would be needed to power future AI development. Alternative estimates call for a 300% increase in energy output.

No large-population country in the world including the US has the kind of grid needed to allow every citizen to own and operate an electric car. Imagine the amount of power required to to employ millions upon millions of AI run robots and machines to take the place of human laborers?

Typical green energy is not going to do this, it’s highly inefficient. Only a vast expansion of nuclear power might do the trick (or fusion if they ever get it right). The economic cost would be unprecedented (hundreds of trillions of dollars). The labor required to generate that kind of energy wealth would mean MORE work for humanity, not less. Meaning more struggle, more anger, and a greater chance of societal breakdown.

I have a lot of problems with futurists, but one thing that bothers me the most is their habit of ignoring the human factor in their technocratic theories. AI running the world is not inevitable, it is contingent on voluntary human compliance, just as everything about technocracy relies on human compliance.

I’m not saying we should be “anti-technology”, just that we can and must be masters of technology. We determine the future, not AI. Technology is peripheral and ultimately irrelevant in comparison to the human experience. If a piece of tech doesn’t actually make our lives better and more free and instead makes our existence a misery, then it should be turned to ashes along with the globalist institutions that demand we “own nothing and be happy.”

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Is Global Technocracy Inevitable or Dangerously Delusional? appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Donald Trump and his merry menagerie that inhabit the White House have had a couple of exciting weeks bringing “peace or pieces” to half the world while also pulling back the curtain on what that naughty character Jeffrey Epstein just might have been up to while spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting up venues for screwing and filming fifteen year old girls being sexually abused. And it was all funded by Jewish billionaires and plausibly Mossad to benefit Epstein and his “clients” including possibly Bill Clinton and Donald Trump himself as well as good old Israel.

The White House itself, a.k.a. the “People’s House,” again also featured in the news as the last bits of the east wing bit the dust to prepare for the huge gilded ballroom that will soon be rising in its place. And one can only suspect that the rest of the old building will also go soon to make way for another Trump International golf course, a spectacular venue for entertaining the world’s plutocrats, no Palestinians allowed, however. The course will be reached by a yet to be designed ceremonious parade route starting at a huge Trump-phal Arch at the Virginia side of the Memorial Bridge and spanning the Potomac River to arrive at the Lincoln Memorial and the Mall.

The vision of the federal capital Washington being remade to copy the gilded splendor of Mar-a-Lago, not to mention the stately kitchen where MAGA cheeseburgers are always ready-to-go, surely makes one want to swoon with delight. But for the moment there are also other wonderful developments worldwide that must he considered which have been wrought by Donald Trump, America’s genius-in-place, including the ceasefire for Israel-Gaza and “Trump Peace Plan” for the broader Middle East, which now has been endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. The Israeli Army has celebrated the approval of the plan, which was accomplished without any input from the Palestinians, who are, as we know, terrorists, by carrying out the second deadliest attack on Gaza since the “ceasefire” took effect last month, killing over 30 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, and wounding dozens more in a series of airstrikes late Wednesday and early Thursday. Neither the State Department nor the Trump White House bothered to comment on the “things happen” incidents and both are sure that Israel had good reasons to violate the ceasefire and kill those nasty ragheads, many of whom, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would explain, were children who someday would become gun toting Hamas terrorists.

To be fair, there are a few details of the peace plan that have to be worked out before the indigenous population can be removed and the Trump Riviera Resort can be built and made operational by property developing genius Jared Kushner. That pesky Hamas has to be completely disarmed first, or the president’s best friend in Israel Benjamin Netanyahu will be forced to do the job himself, and it won’t be pretty. But he apparently will be joined by the US Army to do the clean-up, to enable which task the US Department of War is reported to be building a half a billion dollar base adjacent to Gaza, though exactly where and how it will be manned are not quite clear yet.

It will be a big job to dispose of the 100,000+ bodies buried in the rubble created by US bombs given to Israel, but American ingenuity can handle it or the Corps of Engineers can just cover up the stinking piles of cadavers. There have been some reports that a company called UG Solutions is already recruiting former military staff to help administer the clean-up and rehabilitation operation. It was the same company that hired the same type of people some time ago acting as sub-contractors for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) — a controversial US – and Israeli-backed aid entity which operated four Gaza distribution sites between May and mid-October. Those sites, guarded by contractors employed or subcontracted by UG Solutions, were operated in collaboration with the Israeli Army and little food got through. Palestinians searching for food, which rarely arrived, were however targeted and the sites became synonymous with bloodshed. Never fear, this time around the US War Ministry will make sure that a fully manned, armed and equipped force will be there to make sure those troublesome Palestinians don’t try to cheat on the terms of their surrender and extermination. Anyway, it’s all a good plan for making Palestine go away that will be headed for two years at least by the “Peace President” and now even the UN is in agreement!

Meanwhile, the usual Israel-First suspects are storming ahead full speed to reverse the growing antipathy towards the Jewish state and all its works that is the popular response to the president’s so called “peace plan,” which many observers are labeling a pro-Zionist fraud. It is just like the previous version ceasefire back in June, which was back-loaded to give Israel a free hand to kill Palestinians both in Gaza and on the West Bank while also killing Arabs in Lebanon and Syria and Persians in Iran. To silence the growing opposition within the US, the pressure is now on Congress to approve the nomination of Israeli and Trump endorsed Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun as US government Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. The Special Envoy’s job is to suppress free speech if it involves criticism of any Israeli policy, including the ongoing genocide to cleanse historic Palestine of its remaining people. It will no doubt also be considered the crime of “anti-semitism” to even criticize in social media or letters to the editor what the Trump regime is doing by providing money, weapons, and diplomatic protection for the continuing genocide even if the Israelis do not bother to themselves abide by the “Peace Plan’s” required cessation in active hostilities.

Most alarming to Israel Firsters is the shift among young Republicans, appalled by the videos and testimony relating to the Israeli genocide carried out in Gaza. The genocide is precisely what caused Charlie Kirk to break from Israel, and it is this departure from Zionist control that likely resulted in Kirk’s assassination, which, to no surprise, the FBI is hardly investigating. The appalling slaughter as well as the clear dominance of Israel in Washington has also driven the pushback from prominent conservatives including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and journalists Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. The odious Zionist fanatic Laura Loomer, who reportedly has Trump’s ear, or perhaps some other part of his anatomy, last week responded to how Israel is losing conservative voters. She whines online how “I’m going to say it. The GOP has a Nazi problem. And the more we pretend like we don’t, the worse it’s going to get. We do. Don’t tell me like we don’t.”

Loomer’s lament produced a response on Facebook “The GOP has a Jewish spy problem. The GOP has a Jew problem. The GOP has an Israel First problem Laura. People like you, [Mark] Levin and [Ben] Shapiro are killing the party. The lack of humanity is matched by the lack of awareness of how the world perceives these defenders of Israel.” In another complaint, arch Zionist Olivia Reingold of the “Free Press” was recently celebrated by the usual suspects for her “reporting” suggesting that Palestinian children that are being systematically starved to death by Israel suffered from other “pre-existing conditions” which presumably makes it all right to finish the job.

And the other big win for the week was Trump’s signing off on a nearly unanimous vote in Congress to release the 20,000 or so documents relating to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other government agencies going back thirty years or more. To be sure, there are a lot of questions about the Epstein series of investigations, including why the files had not been already released in spite of the Trump pre-election pledge to do so. Both Genocide Joe Biden and Trump have been sitting on the files and the current Attorney General Pam Blondi promised to do so some months ago, but that has not been the case and both Blondi and the FBI headed by Kash Patel are now under congressional pressure to act within 30 days. Even then, there are concerns that the Justice Department may cite ongoing investigations or other reasons to hold back what they will describe as “classified” material. That material could also include nearly everything that mentions Donald Trump, who had a close relationship with Epstein, and Bill Clinton, who reportedly flew many times on Epstein’s private plane, though he has denied it, down to his private resort “Pedophile Island” in the Virgin Islands.

In spite of the temporary success in appearing to solve the file problem, the walls nevertheless are closing in. Trump appears to have ordered his Attorney General and sleazy FBI director to scrub the files, using hundreds of FBI agents to mark the reported over 1600 times Trump’s name was mentioned. More attempts to further confuse the issue are certain to follow and it is even doubtful that there exists just one Epstein file. Copies of the original documents used to create files certainly are stored somewhere and there may even be additional copies of the entire file that was reported to be on Pam Blondi’s desk. The FBI’s Kash Patel must also have a copy. There are also have to be concerns that any material naming other leading politicians or that implicates Israeli intelligence in connection with Epstein would have already been selected out and destroyed by presidential orders under both Biden and Trump to serve their masters in Tel Aviv.

Indeed, Blondi said last Wednesday that “new information” obtained by investigators had motivated the Justice Department to reverse its earlier decision to close investigations related to Epstein, which means the door will be open to suspend any access to particularly sensitive documents, which may be precisely what Trump and Bondi want. “Classify it and it disappears” as the old saying goes. The possible danger of release of material linking prominent individuals or entities to Epstein was revealed only last week when former Treasury Secretary and one time president of Harvard University Larry Summers, who was exposed, was forced to resign from his several current sinecures at Harvard. To avoid that kind of development, some lawmakers are warning the Trump administration that keeping back records, including possible footage of people who visited Epstein’s properties, would be a big mistake as it would invite speculation on what is being hidden. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska even warned the White House that “people who feel very strongly about this will feel like they’ve been duped” Bondi claims that “we can’t release anything because we have an active investigation. I don’t think that that will help calm the suspicions many have harbored for a long while on this.”

So Donald Trump’s two great victories over the past few days come down to being all related to Israel. One regards the creation of a “peace plan” that gives considerable advantage to Israel in its desire to destroy the Palestinian people and steal their land. The other, describable as progress, though possibly slow and likely to be subverted, is the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who was definitely a master spy for Israel operating in the United States. If ever the documents relating to the case surface they might mortally damage a lot of politicians and billionaires who had become servants of the Jewish state so let’s watch what happens as major efforts will be made by all relevant parties to insure that the continuing investigation goes nowhere.

Given developments, a contact of mine on Facebook has a succinct comment on why Israel and its powerful lobby should butt out of the lives of the rest of us. She wrote “I don’t want people like Miriam Adelson deciding who represents me in Congress. I don’t want my children taxed into oblivion to fund genocides by Israel for the next 20 years. I don’t want AIPAC bribing and pressuring my politicians into signing legislation. And I don’t want to be hunted by my own DOJ for taking this position. What is happening to the country I grew up in? How did we allow it to get this bad?” I would add that all the friends of Israel should act responsibly towards the rest of us by pulling up roots and moving to the Jewish state, which they appear to love so much. Stop taking away rights like our free speech and robbing our treasury so you can silence us while you send money and arms to Israel. Just go away. It would be better for all of us!

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post Did Donald Trump Score a Couple of ‘Wins’? appeared first on LewRockwell.

It is seemingly impossible to engage in a conversation about conservative politics, or even the intersection of religion and politics, without the topic of “Groypers” rearing its head. If you know what a Groyper is, or what “groyperism” is, then I will not have to define what it is. If you do not know what it is, I will try to explain it, although that is difficult.

A Groyper is someone who adheres—generally speaking—to the political and socio-cultural beliefs of the growing Groyper Movement. The Groyper Movement is a mix of American Nationalism (in the case of America, although it is present elsewhere), strong criticism (to put it mildly) of Zionism and general Jewish influence in America, along with a strong “anti-woke” mentality that is vehemently anti-feminist, and so on. In essence, it is a right-wing movement with focal points highlighting these issues. Of course, it is more complex than this short definition would suggest, but this definition should be sufficient for now.

On the surface, I do not find the movement—at least insofar as it is defined above—objectionable. While I understand that speaking on Jewish issues is sensitive, I personally have no qualms about criticizing Israel; and if I peruse centuries and centuries of Catholic literature, I am equally undisturbed by criticisms of Jewish cultural influence in Christian society. Also, I hate feminism and all the “isms” that conflict with Catholicism. Furthermore, while I wouldn’t use the term “Nationalist” to describe myself—I would prefer “Patriot”—I do believe a healthy dose of love of country is good for any society.

In any event, despite any general agreements I may have with Groyper talking points, I do believe there are profound problems with the movement.

One important aspect is the fact that it is largely a movement of young males who would qualify as “Zoomers,” meaning those from Gen-Z (born between 1997-2012). The most well-known figure is, of course, Nick Fuentes, who did not invent the term but embraced it, and he is 27. While it is true that a movement filled with youth could be positive, it is also true that a youth-heavy movement will suffer from a lack of wisdom and perspective, which is only natural in a youth movement.

Now, I can see various Groypers reading this and becoming upset, perhaps brushing any criticisms off that I may have because I am not part of their generation. Well, if it helps, I am 37, which is not even a decade older than the oldest Zoomer; and I taught Zoomers for half a decade who would all be in their early-to-mid 20s now.

At any rate, the three main pitfalls that I see in the Groyper Movement are:

1. An oversimplified, if not erroneous, understanding of race.

2. A lack of decorum and virtue in public displays of Groyperism.

3. Resentment and antagonism at the heart of the movement.

In this article, I will focus on the first pitfall: the issue of race.

As far as race is concerned, the main issue with the general Groyper conversation about race is that they are often utterly wrong about how race has been understood historically. What I mean is that before Modernity, races of people were not separated by skin color but by tribe, regional differences, and so on.

For example, an Italian from 200 years ago would speak of the “French Race,” or the “English Race,” and that they shared a similar skin pigment was not enough to be considered of the same race. The word “race” comes to the English language from the Old French word rasse, which comes from the Italian word razza. The meaning of these words originally referred to family lineage, or, in a broader sense, to the clan someone was from.

So, an Englishman from 1600 could consider a Scotsman to be from a different race because he was from a different clan and family lineage. With the rise of Liberalism and Scientism in the 1800s, the word acquired a rationalist sense, and Evolutionists, specifically, began to apply it to people groups generally. Thus, we begin to hear of “white people” and “black people” as defining characteristics, rather than the more nuanced usage that was common.

Of course, this use of the term gained steam during the period of chattel slavery, and the momentum has never left us.

Furthermore, as Christendom continued to disintegrate, what it meant to belong to a people continued to change, which was accelerated by massive emigration. Historically, people stayed in one region for generations, and their belonging to a culture or people group had more to do with their identities as Catholics and their family history. As Protestantism and Liberalism became the dominant philosophies of the Anglosphere—and, by extension, America—the old, proper understanding of race disappeared. Now, when speaking of race, people have come to view it as a matter of skin color or DNA more broadly.

Within Groyperism, there is an acute understanding that mass immigration has led to severe societal consequences—because it has, at least in our day. However, it has not been the case historically that such immigration has produced deleterious results. If you are a North American and are proud of your history, be it Quebecois, New Englander, Hispanic, etc., then you would not have a history to be proud of if it were not for massive amounts of ancestors coming over from the Old Continent.

In any event, we can all agree that the present state of mass immigration has been a disaster. But the question is: Why has it been a disaster?

The Groyper answer would almost assuredly be because the immigration has been of predominantly non-white people. The notion of “white” identity is central to Groyperism. And it is a consistent theme in Groyper thinking that one of the main problems with America, and other nations historically consisting of an ethnically European majority, is a rise in non-white citizens.

On the surface, it is easy to understand why such an opinion makes sense, and it is possible to see the merit in this manner of thinking without having to throw around terms like “racist.” As human beings, we must use descriptive categories; and, visually, we can see that the general “white” culture is different than general Indian, Middle Eastern, and African cultures. And, since we would associate cultural, religious, and ethnical expressions with non-white cultures that are different, or even antithetical to the way of life we are used to in North America, it is understandable to see how an influx of people from such backgrounds is undesirable.

However, upon further consideration, the notion that the problems associated with other people groups have to do with race—DNA—is an untenable position for a Catholic. This is because genetic characteristics pertaining to skin pigmentation and other physiological traits carry no moral or spiritual weight. And the fabric of a civilization is not based on the color of skin or how people look but in how they believe, act, and so on.

Granted, having a preference for people who look like you for reasons of marriage, for example, is only natural; however, there is simply nothing about “being white” that is any better than being from some other race.

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