Lew Rockwell Institute

In his vitally important article on this issue,1 Karl Hess properly refers to the genuine libertarian movement as a “revolutionary” movement. This raises the point that very few Americans understand the true meaning of the word “revolution.”

Most people, when they hear the world “revolution,” think immediately and only of direct acts of physical confrontation with the State: raising barricades in the streets, battling a cop, storming the Bastille or other government buildings. But this is only one small part of revolution. Revolution is a mighty, complex, long-run process, a complicated movement with many vital parts and functions. It is the pamphleteer writing in his study, it is the journalist, the political club, the agitator, the organizer, the campus activist, the theoretician, the philanthropist. It is all this and much more. Each person and group has its part to play in this great complex movement.

Let us take, for example, the major model for Libertarians in our time: the great classical-liberal, or better, “classical radical,” revolutionary movement of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These our ancestors created a vast, sprawling, and brilliant revolutionary movement not only in the United States but also throughout the Western world that lasted for several centuries. This was the movement largely responsible for radically changing history, for almost destroying history as it was previously known to man. For before these centuries, the history of man, with one or two luminous exceptions, was a dark and gory record of tyranny and despotism; a record of various absolute States and monarchs crushing and exploiting their underlying populations, largely peasants, who lived a brief and brutish life at bare subsistence, devoid of hope or promise. It was classical liberalism and radicalism that brought to the mass of people that hope and promise, and which launched the great process of fulfillment. All that man has achieved today, in progress, in hope, in living standards, we can attribute to that revolutionary movement, to that “revolution.” This great revolution was our fathers’; it is now our task to complete its unfinished promise.

This classical revolutionary movement was made up of many parts. It was the libertarian theorists and ideologists, the men who created and wove the strands of libertarian theory and principle: the La Boeties, the Levellers in seventeenth-century England, the eighteenth-century radicals, the philosophes, the physiocrats, the English radicals, the Patrick Henrys, and Tom Paines of the American Revolution; the James Mills and Cobdens of nineteenth-century England, the Jacksonians and abolitionists and Thoreaus in America, the Bastiats and Molinaris in France. The vital scholarly work of Caroline Robbins and Bernard Bailyn, for example, has demonstrated the continuity of libertarian classical-radical ideas and movements, from the seventeenth-century English revolutionaries down through the American Revolution a century and a half later.

Theories blended into activist movements, rising movements calling for individual liberty, a free-market economy, the overthrow of feudalism and mercantilist statism, an end to theocracy and war and their replacement by freedom and international peace. Once in a while, these movements erupted into violent “revolutions” that brought giant steps in the direction of liberty: the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution.2 The result was enormous strides for freedom and the prosperity unleashed by the consequent Industrial Revolution. The barricades, while important, were just one small part of this great process. Socialism is neither genuinely radical nor truly revolutionary. Socialism is a reactionary reversion, a self-contradictory attempt to achieve classical radical ends: liberty, progress, the withering away or abolition of the State, by using old-fashioned statist and Tory means: collectivism and State control. Socialism is a New Toryism doomed to rapid failure whenever it is tried, a failure demonstrated by the collapse of central planning in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. Only libertarianism is truly radical. Only we can complete the unfinished revolution of our great forebears, the bringing of the world from the realm of despotism into the realm of freedom. Only we can replace the governance of men by the administration of things.

[This article originally appeared in The Libertarian Forum, Vol. 1 No. 7 (July 1, 1969).]

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1 See Karl Hess, “What the Movement Needs,” The Libertarian Forum (July 1, 1969).

2 Barrington Moore, Jr., has shown the intimate connection between these violent revolutions and the freedoms that the Western world has been able to take from the State.

The post The Meaning of Revolution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Abstract:
The contemporary fascination with a so-called “Bitcoin Standard” rests on the same utopian fantasy that once sustained the Gold Standard—that monetary scarcity can restrain political excess. This essay dismantles that illusion. Through historical analysis of the American experience from 1921 to 1971, and a critical exploration of modern fiscal theory, it argues that the problem of government overspending lies not in the nature of money, but in the nature of governance itself. States do not “print” in the naïve sense of creating currency without backing; they borrow, they bond, and they spend the unearned wealth of future generations. Whether denominated in gold, fiat, or digital tokens, the principle remains: borrowing is justified only when it produces tangible, growth-generating returns. Infrastructure investment, by expanding productive capacity, meets that criterion. Ideological boondoggles, designed for political gratification rather than economic yield, do not. A Bitcoin-backed regime would not neutralise state debt—it would merely gild it with cryptographic rhetoric before the inevitable default.

Thesis Statement:
A Bitcoin Standard would neither prevent deficit spending nor enforce fiscal discipline. It would replicate the structural failures of the Gold Standard, revealing once again that monetary systems cannot cure political irresponsibility. Sound economics arises from productive investment, not ideological austerity or speculative scarcity.

Section I — The Fetish of the Standard

Civilisations invent standards when they lose faith in themselves. The standard is the moral prosthetic of a bankrupt culture, a totem erected in the ruins of trust. When men no longer believe in the integrity of their institutions, they seek refuge in metal or code, mistaking mechanical certainty for virtue. The gold standard, and now the fantasy of a Bitcoin standard, both emerge from the same intellectual poverty — the hope that scarcity can substitute for discipline.

The nineteenth century worshipped gold as the embodiment of order. Its adherents believed that tethering money to a finite metal would chain the ambitions of politicians and the appetites of mobs. The faith was theological: gold was immutable, incorruptible, and therefore, by extension, moral. Yet history is unkind to those who mistake symbols for systems. Every empire that swore fidelity to its metallic god quietly betrayed it when power demanded flexibility. The standard remained in rhetoric long after it had been broken in practice. When the ledger conflicted with the sword, the sword always won.

The modern cult of Bitcoin repeats the same catechism, only now in binary form. Instead of divine metal, there is divine mathematics. Instead of vaults, ledgers. Instead of priests, programmers. The narrative is identical: scarcity will purify the system; code will banish corruption. Yet scarcity does not civilise—it merely constrains. And code, like law, is only as incorruptible as the people who execute it. To believe otherwise is to mistake cryptography for character.

The fetish of the standard endures because it absolves responsibility. It allows men to imagine that moral failure can be corrected by mechanism. A politician can promise rectitude without reform; an economist can preach restraint without courage. Both can appeal to an external order to justify their weakness. The standard becomes a moral surrogate, an instrument of denial wrapped in the language of discipline.

Under the gold standard, nations inflated through debt while denouncing inflation in speech. The mechanism of deceit was simple: borrow abroad, spend domestically, and swear that redemption remained sacred—until it wasn’t. Gold never failed them; they failed gold. The same dynamic will haunt any Bitcoin-based regime. Governments will borrow against future Bitcoin flows, issue bonds indexed to digital reserves, and construct a labyrinth of derivatives to simulate liquidity. When reality intrudes, they will call it “temporary suspension,” just as Nixon did in 1971. And another generation will learn that scarcity without integrity is merely a slower road to default.

The moral allure of the standard lies in its false promise of objectivity. It whispers that numbers can tame men, that mathematics can impose virtue on vice. But economics is not a physics of atoms; it is a politics of appetites. The state does not violate standards because they are weak—it violates them because survival demands it. A fixed supply cannot withstand a variable will.

Thus the Bitcoin standard is not revolutionary; it is recursive. It is the latest costume of an old delusion: that systems, once made rigid, will make men righteous. The truth is less elegant and infinitely harder—discipline is not a consequence of scarcity; it is a product of moral and intellectual strength. Gold failed to bestow it. Bitcoin will too.

Section II — The Mechanics of Debt: Printing Without Presses

The image of governments “printing money” is a rhetorical ghost that refuses to die. It conjures visions of reckless bureaucrats flooding the economy with worthless paper, spinning inflation from ink. The truth, however, is far more subtle—and far more insidious. Modern states do not print; they borrow. They transform promises into liquidity, pledging the future to sustain the present. Debt, not the printing press, is the engine of contemporary money creation.

When a government announces new spending, it does not conjure cash from the ether. It issues bonds. Those bonds are bought by institutions, banks, pension funds, and increasingly by the central bank itself. Each bond is a certificate of faith—faith that tomorrow’s taxpayers will honour yesterday’s ambitions. The state thus becomes a conduit for temporal arbitrage: it spends today what it claims it will earn tomorrow. This sleight of hand is the modern alchemy of finance. And like all alchemy, it is sustained by belief.

Central banks operationalise this ritual. When they “expand the money supply,” they are not pushing buttons to mint coins; they are buying government debt, placing those bonds on their balance sheets in exchange for new reserves. These reserves, in turn, ripple through commercial banks as lending capacity, multiplying into credit, investment, and speculation. The entire system rests on the assumption that growth will outpace obligation—that the future will be richer than the past, and thus the debt can be serviced. It is not money that sustains the system, but confidence.

Even under a Bitcoin standard, this process would persist. A government could peg its currency to Bitcoin, claim a fixed supply, and yet continue to issue bonds denominated in Bitcoin units. Investors, lured by yield, would still lend. Banks would still leverage deposits into layered credit instruments. The system would still inflate—not by printing, but by promising. Monetary purity cannot abolish temporal preference. A digital reserve merely changes the vocabulary of deceit.

This is why the inflation debate so often misfires. Inflation is not the consequence of “money printing” but of systemic borrowing against productivity that does not yet exist. When the borrowed funds build roads, energy networks, and productive infrastructure, they seed future returns capable of repaying the debt. When they finance consumption, political patronage, or subsidies that generate no growth, they cannibalise the very economy that must redeem them. Inflation, then, is not a monetary failure—it is a moral one. It is the symptom of a civilisation that spends not to build but to appease.

During the so-called sound-money eras—the gold standard, Bretton Woods, even the early years of fiat—the same mechanism prevailed. The United States financed wars, public works, and global expansion through debt. Gold was the decorative myth, the psychological anchor. The dollar’s credibility rested not on the contents of Fort Knox but on the productivity of the American economy. When that productivity faltered and the liabilities grew intolerable, the peg dissolved. The paper endured because the myth was replaced by another: that fiat itself could embody trust.

Bitcoin’s advocates imagine that immutable code will succeed where gold failed. But mathematics cannot restrain politics. The government that cannot borrow will tax; the one that cannot tax will seize. Power finds its liquidity. Whether through treasury bonds, digital instruments, or backdoor derivatives, the machinery of credit will persist because the machinery of ambition never ceases. To think otherwise is to confuse the protocol for the polity.

The phrase “printing money” survives because it flatters indignation. It gives the illusion that corruption lies in the mechanism, not the motive. Yet the printing press is a relic; the bond auction is the true altar of excess. Nations collapse not because they print too much, but because they promise too much—and lack the courage to stop. Bitcoin will not change this arithmetic. Scarcity cannot sanctify deceit.

Section III — Keynes and the Paradox of Productive Deficit

Few economic thinkers have been more misunderstood than John Maynard Keynes. To his disciples, he became the prophet of spending; to his enemies, the architect of moral decay. Both readings are caricatures. Keynes never preached excess for its own sake. His argument was simple and devastating: when private demand collapses, the state must spend—not to indulge consumption, but to sustain the machinery of production until confidence returns. His doctrine was one of temporary intervention, not permanent dependency.

At its core, Keynesianism was an argument about investment. Deficit spending was justified only when it built the conditions for future surplus. The concept of “the multiplier” was not a licence for profligacy; it was an accounting of return. Each pound borrowed was to yield more than a pound in output, through the restoration of employment and the expansion of productive capacity. The end was growth, not indulgence. The error of later governments was to mistake this emergency medicine for a diet.

The post-war consensus distorted Keynes into a bureaucratic idol. Politicians found in his name a rationalisation for perpetual deficit—a policy of pleasure without pain, borrowing without consequence. They ignored the distinction between capital expenditure and current expenditure. Building a bridge was productive: it connected markets, accelerated trade, and multiplied returns. Expanding welfare without reform was parasitic: it consumed output without creating new value. One increased the capacity of the economy to repay its debts; the other merely redistributed the burden.

Keynes’s actual warning was moral, not mathematical. He wrote that “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.” His philosophy depended on reciprocity—the willingness of governments to save in prosperity what they spent in crisis. But the modern state, addicted to electoral gratification, inverted the principle. Spending became the norm, restraint the anomaly. Every administration promised growth through generosity, not through discipline. Deficit became destiny.

Under such conditions, the deficit ceases to be Keynesian and becomes decadent. When money is borrowed to consume rather than to create, debt no longer serves the economy—it devours it. The productive deficit transforms into the unproductive one: the infrastructure of tomorrow is replaced by the appeasement of today. Subsidised idleness masquerades as compassion; temporary stimulus becomes permanent entitlement. The ledger swells, while output stagnates.

This degeneration is not merely fiscal—it is philosophical. It reveals the abandonment of the causal relationship between effort and reward. A society that borrows for comfort rather than construction loses the moral logic of credit itself. The promise to repay is credible only when what is built yields more than what is spent. Once the purpose of debt becomes political tranquillity, the bond market becomes a mirror of decay.

This distinction—between debt that seeds growth and debt that smothers it—remains the fulcrum of economic integrity. Infrastructure spending, when directed toward projects that unlock productivity, is not wasteful; it is the temporal bridge between potential and performance. A rail network, a power grid, a port—these are engines of compounding utility. They transform labour into leverage. Their debt is repaid not through taxation, but through prosperity.

The opposite holds for ideological projects. Bureaucratic make-work, social redistribution without reform, and vanity subsidies erode both fiscal balance and moral coherence. They feed dependency under the banner of equality, and debt under the illusion of progress. The political left, intoxicated by compassion, calls this justice. The right, terrified of consequence, dares not oppose it. The result is bipartisan insolvency.

Thus, the paradox of productive deficit: debt, used rightly, is civilisation’s accelerator; used wrongly, its executioner. Keynes understood this. His intellectual heirs did not. They took the language of growth and filled it with sentiment. They mistook liquidity for wealth, redistribution for recovery, and permanence for stability. The state became a consumer of capital rather than its steward.

A Bitcoin or gold-backed economy would not change this pattern. It would merely compress the timeline of failure. When the government borrows under a hard standard, the limits appear sooner, but the psychology remains identical. The moral question is not what backs the currency, but what justifies the debt. The ledger can be honest only when purpose is.

Keynes’s original sin was not in his theory but in his followers. He believed in intervention; they believed in indulgence. He sought to preserve capitalism; they used him to dilute it. A century later, his ghost haunts every treasury and parliament that borrows for applause. The paradox endures: a system designed to prevent collapse became the blueprint for perpetual decline.

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In this age of the unrelenting back and forth of social media, where people lob insults and accusations like mortars, it is hard to find genuine charitable rebuttals to another person’s work. This article will endeavor, with charity, to rebut the article “Can Fallen Priests Be Restored to Ministry? Yes—Here’s How” recently penned by Mr. Matt Robinson. Until reading his article, Mr. Robinson and his company, The Shepherd Within, were unknown to me. I applaud his efforts, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to read Mr. Robinson’s article first, then return and read this rebuttal.

Let me start with our principal agreement: the relationship between a bishop and priest is “critical to a flourishing priesthood, and a flourishing priesthood is critical to a flourishing Church.” This is certainly true! However, throughout his article, Mr. Robinson implies that there are only two reasons why a priest is out of ministry. First, for having committed a serious crime such as abuse of minors. He notes, and I agree, that this group is a small percentage, and I will say that some credit needs to be given to the exposure of the abuse and steps taken to remedy it in the last 25 years.

Second, priests are removed from ministry because they have “fallen into a serious sin, crisis, addiction, and the like…issues that are not permanently disqualifying from public ministry.” This group is larger and varies in size depending on the diocese and the health of the presbyterate. But there is a third group that Mr. Robinson fails to mention. This third group has come to be called “cancelled priests,” and I have dedicated the better part of the last several years to helping this group.

The term “cancelled priest” is confusing to some because, at face value, it seems to include priests who belong to one or the other of the two groups identified by Mr. Robinson. Despite this, I remain convinced that the word “cancelled” remains the best term to use when referring to faithful priests who have been unjustly sidelined by their bishop. Why? Because the term properly describes how these priests have been treated.

“Cancelled priests” are a species of the cancel culture of our day; a culture which attacks people who speak the truth, even when that truth offends the gatekeepers of political correctness. It may be said that this third group is the 800-pound gorilla in the room; and, as such, “cancelled priests” are neither identified by nor addressed in Mr. Robinson’s article.

In his article, Mr. Robinson states that “according to The Catholic Project, 82% of priests regularly fear false accusation.” Having spoken to cancelled priests all over the country and the world, I would say this number is accurate, if not low. He notes that many bishops do not agree with this number. But this should not surprise us, since most bishops do not have a father-son relationship with their priests. Rather, the vast majority of bishops see their priests as liabilities, lawsuits waiting to happen, and they treat their priests accordingly.

How do I know this? Because this is the consistent testimony of myriad priests who have sought help. I first noticed this as a pattern in how the priests in my diocese were treated; but I later discovered the same pattern around the country. In fact, the consistency of the firsthand reports that I received from many priests led me to believe that the bishops in the United States of America were all playing from the same playbook.

In times past, before the Boston scandal erupted and the Dallas Charter of the USCCB, a bishop would allow a priest with whom he did not get along to find work outside of his diocese or would send him to an out-of-the-way part of the diocese. In those days, the priest would retain his faculties and a sense of dignity.

Today, almost every diocese has at least a few “cancelled” priests—or if you prefer, “unprofitable servants.” While some priests today may be given the option to find work or (indefinite) study somewhere, many bishops are weaponizing the Dallas Charter, Canon Law, and anything else they can find, to keep priests out of ministry. And the bishops are doing all this under the cover of the quarter-century-old mantra: “If the priest is removed from ministry he must have done something wrong to warrant it.”

If a name were to be given to the bishops’ anti-priest playbook, it would be “The Liability Ledger.” Whether for fear of being accused of protecting predators or just from sheer vindictiveness against a spiritual son, many bishops are using the same plays to remove and humiliate priests.

Here’s how the play typically runs: the bishop calls the priest in for meeting, a meeting for which no reason is given and for which the agenda is unstated. In attendance will be the bishop, or one of his vicars, the diocesan attorney, and, perhaps, a canonist representing the diocese. (N.B. Never attend a meeting where the other side has counsel present and you do not.)

During the meeting, a vague accusation or two will be made or a psychological or spiritual concern will be mentioned. A series of vague questions will follow. While details remain obscure, the bishop and his entourage will generously employ many adjectives: “not pastoral,” “arrogant,” “rigid,” “uncaring,” etc. After that, a psychological evaluation will be encouraged, usually at St. Luke’s in Washington, D.C., or St. John Vianney’s in Pennsylvania, or some other such place. Assurances will be flowing that if the evaluation goes well, everything will be fine.

The team at the institution will be given documents from the diocese to which the priest is not privy, and the priest will be required to give written permission granting access to anyone the bishop deems worthy to see the findings of the evaluation. After the evaluation, an oral and a written report will follow. Then, the priest will be called back in to the chancery and, more often than not, told that he is in need of “in-patient therapy.”

This consists of several months of living at one of these institutes. Cost to the diocese: $800-$1000 a day over several months. If the priest is a pastor, he will be asked to resign his parish. (Fathers, if asked to resign, do not comply. A pastor loses numerous rights in Canon Law if he resigns his office; and the bishop cannot, under obedience, compel a pastor to resign. And, if the bishop attempts to compel your resignation, you have the right of appeal to Rome.)

Pastor or not, the priest will be asked to vacate his residence. If he exercises his canonical right to refuse to go to the institution, the priest will be placed in a residence outside of his parish. Sometimes the bishop will let him live with family.

Whether the priest goes to the institution or not, the parish will be told a vague reason for his removal, asking for prayers. And, in the current climate, this is a death sentence for the priest’s good name, for the first thing that goes through peoples’ minds is that the priest did something horrible.

Yes, the priest can submit an Appeal to hierarchical recourse to Rome, but this can take years. And, if the priest eventually wins his appeal, his reinstatement by the bishop is not guaranteed. In fact, if the priests wins his appeal, many bishops will simply hide behind the line “You are uninsurable.” Meaning, the diocesan insurance company will not allow them to take the priest back into ministry.

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“I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.” ~ Étienne de La Boétie, “On Voluntary Servitude,” Anno Domini 1552

From time to time people ask me what might work well as far as making a better future for themselves and their descendants. Oftentimes these conversations take place in the context of talk of politics.

It is not possible to fix the problems caused by the excesses of politics through the addition of more politics. I’ve said that a great many times. My friend Bill Buppert says it in a more memorable turn of phrase, “You can’t end cannibalism by eating cannibals.”

Friends, I know what you want. You want to be invulnerable, especially to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Specifically you’d rather not suffer from the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, if you like the bard’s play about the Danish prince Hamlet. Perhaps you prefer the language of the committee that drafted the Declaration of 1776? A long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object that evinces a design to reduce you under absolute despotism? Yes, you’d rather not suffer those, would you.

You want to be invisible in that you prefer to be left alone. You don’t want “the Man” coming around to bother you, to ransack your home, civil asset forfeiture your property, murder your children, commit outrageous acts of violence on your family dog, rape anyone in sight, as those in power often have their minions do. Ayn Rand was convinced that to start a whole new civilisation one would need a special electromagnetic shield that would disguise an entire Rocky Mountain valley (Galt’s Gulch, in particular) from the view of aeroplanes. Freeman Dyson pointed out that there is really no place on Earth where a group of people could go to be isolated from the rest of society, no matter how clever they are.

You want to be invincible. When the evil militarised constabulary of Apache county, Arizona came to Milton William Cooper’s home in AD 2001 they murdered him. He had already sent his wife and children away, knowing that the notoriously brutal and murderous deputies were intent on killing everyone in the home. You’d rather not die fighting the authorities over false charges.

You want to come and go like the wind, not barred from entering or leaving places of your choosing. Sometimes, perhaps, like a very light wind, that comes and goes almost without being noticed. Sometimes, perhaps, like a fierce storm wind that blows through and clears out all the terrible things in the way of peace, justice, and decency.

How do you get there?

Perhaps you have despaired of finding a free country. Perhaps, like me, you’ve looked. Done your research. Read Erwin Strauss on How to Start Your Own Country. Gone to the founding conference in AD 1995 of the New Country Foundation. Met Mike Oliver who founded the Republic of Minerva with money from John Templeton. Met with Michael van Notten and his associates, including Spencer MacCallum, and worked on building a new Hong Kong in the Gulf of Aden. Joined what is now called Liberty International and attended various of their meetings over the years. Looked for people talking about individual sovereignty or any sort of independent sovereignty, and met with sons of Confederate veterans, League of the South, Republic of Texas provisional governments (two out of three that were extant at the time I met with them). Attended the Grand Western Conference II and helped compose and set your name to the declaration of independence of the Free Mountain West. Travelled on four continents, looking, and held online discussions with people on the other three continents from time to time.

There are no free countries on Earth. The people involved in human communities in space projects are mostly wicked authoritarians who take Werner von Braun, a former SS officer and slave camp operator, as the example of how they want to do things.

So you might say to yourself, well, if there are no free places on Earth, perhaps we should make one. Or, in a very ambitious moment, consider making several hundred such places. I’ll go you one better.

At Christmas in 1995, I was given a copy of the paperback of Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s book War and Anti-War. You should read it. Quite good, really. In it they discuss a conversation they had with Warren Christopher, a rat fink functionary of war profiteers who served as mass murderer Bill Clinton’s secretary of state 1993-1997. During their chat with him, he told the Tofflers that if people were ever allowed to have their own way about who should live in and around them, there would be over 5,000 countries in the world. The Tofflers mentioned, for further evidence of this view, that there were over 600 native sovereignties in North America, two thousand identifiable ethnic populations in Africa, and several thousand in Asia. The former secretary of state, the late Warren Christopher, hated the idea of having so many “country desks.” It would be very inconvenient, to him, as a functionary, to have to have people who had expertise in the languages and customs and ethnic populations of so many places, so he was in favour of the kind of extreme violence that resulted from the Berlin conference of 1884-5. That conference drew the borders of Africa. It took place in, as the name indicates, the city of Berlin, not in Africa. There was exactly one country from Africa represented at the event, the empire of Ethiopia. All the rest of Africa was regarded as the colonial property, and all the other peoples of Africa were considered the chattel slaves of one or another European empire.

For a time, I had the intention of writing a book that I would entitle “Five Thousand Free Countries,” and mention that very strange Toffler, Toffler, and Christopher conversation toward the opening pages. But, I haven’t gotten around to it. And lately I am inclined to think that five thousand would not be enough. There are on the close order of 10 billion people on Earth, though the bureau rats and politicians and tax collectors and similar filth can’t seem to count them all. Not that I want any enumeration of the population, the lessons from 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21 not having been lost on me. (It is ungodly, wrong, and evil that the constitution for the United States deliberately provides for the enumeration every ten years of the population.)

How many countries should there be? As many as people want. If you and your family don’t want to be in some country that already exists, secede and form your own. After all, in fighting against the evil mass murdering tyrant of England in the 1773-1783 war, the American colonists seceded. Many such cases.

But, a violent revolution to overthrow some other outfit necessarily has to arrange things so that those escaping the authoritarian control of vile tyrants have more power and a stronger military than the people who they are seeking to overthrow. It has always worked out that the revolution is either successful and then betrayed (as the American revolution was betrayed by the convention of 1787) or is successful and then you meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The party on the left is partying on the right, and the beards have all grown longer overnight. The freemasons funded the Bolshevik revolution and the Cuban revolution and quite a few other revolutions, murdered JFK, and did all manner of other violent acts, to gain for themselves more and more power while shedding oceans of blood – arranging the murder in combat of 55 million and the murder in genocides of 262 million during the 20th Century alone.

So, to be candid, although I very strongly encourage you to keep and bear arms, to have guns at home, a good large supply of ammo, and to train in the use of secure communications, night vision gear, body armour, firearms, and explosives, and have a local group of friends and neighbours upon whom you can rely for mutual self-defence, I do not think you are likely to build a new free country out of the embers of some war torn territory. Which, when you look around where you live, is what your home would become if you went to war to overthrow tyranny.

What to do? Stop supporting the tyrants, for one thing. You don’t need their permission to hunt, fish, cut down trees, make a fire, build a home, drive a car, own property. Stop paying them for these things. Stop paying sales tax – every state lets you be sales tax exempt for all purchases for a non-profit organisation, so start one. Every state has a very discounted price for such. There are lots of 501 c 3 groups around, and you can easily get their “taxpayer identification number” and be sales tax exempt if you work at it, contribute to them, help out.

Way back in the late 1990s there were hearings in congress about the internal revenue disservice. Lots of Americans were fed up. The revenuers were ugly, brutal, mean-spirited, vicious, violent, and bad. So congress held hearings to find out what had been done, and there was a great deal of testimony. It was on C-SPAN. You can still watch carefully curated videos of some of the testimony. And the congress critters asked the ugly venal avaricious commissioner from the irs to come say why his staff were so bad and wrong and nasty. So he told them that 66 million Americans the irs thinks should be filing tax papers were not doing so. And he said they didn’t have enough jail cells, enough police to arrest everyone, enough criminal courts to prosecute all of them, so they “had to be brutal” to push the narrative that not filing your taxes is a bad idea.

Since that time, the number of non-filers has increased every year. The last year for which I have good numbers, from the tax agency itself, there were over 125 million non-filers. So why do you file? Well, because they have your address, because you have filed. And they will send you letters. Unless you move and leave no forwarding address. Which might be a burden on you, because you really do have a very nice house. (I myself do not.) But, then, maybe you don’t really want to be free, but comfortable. I cannot help you.

A very great many Americans, for hundreds of years, have been punished, imprisoned, murdered, raped, or tortured by people in power who have claimed they were doing something wrong. Bill Cooper was murdered in 2001 (Remember, remember the fifth of November, the day Bill Cooper was shot. I can see no reason why the deep state treason should ever be forgot.) because he had an outstanding warrant. Not because he had been convicted of any crime, but because gutless cowards in the Apache county Arizona sheriff’s department wanted him dead. So they killed him. Many such cases. Ruby Ridge. The Waco massacre. The battle of Athens, Tennessee. The people in Montrose county, Colorado. Others too numerous to name. Those they capture alive they often torture (January 6 prisoners, for example) and those they imprison often die in jail. Lots of men and women have been raped by the police, sheriffs, jailers, or other inmates in their communities. You perhaps don’t want to look directly at these facts, but, then, you have that really nice home and you prefer to remain comfortable. I myself do not want you to be comfortable, at all, as long as your neighbours are treated with brutality.

Parallel societies

For a great many years I have been aware of what is called Système D. It seems to have begun in 1855 in French West Africa. It has been discussed by George Orwell and the late Anthony Bourdain (murdered by the hired thugs of Adam Schiff on information and belief). So what does the D stand for? Système D is a resourceful and ingenious way of overcoming problems through adaptation and improvisation, especially when faced with difficult or bureaucratic systems. The “D” can stand for various French words like débrouiller (to get on with it or figure things out) or démerder (to get out of the manure or get out of trouble). The concept describes the ability to get things done with limited resources. It can refer to resourcefulness in everyday life. It is also used to describe elements of the informal economy. Sam Konkin called it agorism.

The concept almost certainly originated amongst troops of La Légion étrangère, the French foreign legion. It is also widely known in the Marine Corps as the saying, “improvise, adapt, overcome,” and was made popular in a Clint Eastwood film in 1986, “Heartbreak Ridge.” But it is not an especially militaristic concept. It is about anyone, in any situation, getting themselves out of difficulty.

Americans talk and write about thinking outside the box. Système D is about making your own box, making anything you want without a box, and ignoring the rules, regimentation, strictures, and objections of the arrogant, pompous, ugly, disgusting, foul-minded, rapist, aristo rat, bureau rat, politician filth who think they run things. In many ways, the same concepts date back over 500 years, because Étienne de La Boétie was writing about them in the 1550s. You really ought to read his little pamphlet sized book. Here, go read it now: On Voluntary Servitude.

The short of it is that the tyrants in the District of Corruption are very few in number. Maybe 2.1 million in the military, in all ranks and in all services. Maybe 2.3 million in the bureau rat agencies. (And they are shut down, by the way, and have been since the start of last month.) Mostly, it is you that obeys them, even though they aren’t there.

The tyrants don’t have enough jailers, torturers, spies, listening devices, so they have you. You call the police. You report your neighbours. You complain. You post videos to TikTok. Or maybe you are careful not to do those things. Good for you. But enough of your neighbours are rat finks that you suffer, anyway. So, stop obeying. Stop complying.

Lacerations are red
Contusions are blue
Never call the police
They will hurt you

Stop getting construction permits. Stop paying attention to the prohibition of drilling a water well on your own property. Stop paying attention to the laws prohibiting you from generating your own power. Your truck can generate power. Why are you paying a monopoly utility and all those extra fees the crazy local, state, and feral bureau rats tack on to your electric bill? Make your own power.

Recognise and honour your own power. Do you hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal? Do you? I don’t think you do. I think you have some craven miserable desire to obey people who aren’t fit to clean your shoes. But maybe you should start living up to that creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, the Lord our God, with rights such as life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. We hold it to be a self-evident truth that the only reason governments should ever have been created is to protect these rights, and judging entirely by the ENTIRE HISTORY of all mankind’s experiences, that has never worked. We also hold it to be a self-evident truth that without the consent of the governed, there is no just power to “the government.” So stop consenting. Stop obeying. Stop complying.

And stop telling yourself that if you obey, if you are a good little German, if you don’t yell at them when the Gestapo comes and hauls your neighbours away for being handicapped, mentally retarded, injured, dissident, Jewish, Gypsy, a labour organiser, or in some other way a threat to the military state, they will leave you alone. They won’t. They murdered Vicky Weaver. Lon Horiuchi, the gutless coward fbi hostage “rescue” team member shot her to death while she was holding her infant child in her arms. The gutless evil scum fbi hostage rescue team set fire to the Branch Davidian church because they wanted to barbecue seven dozen Texans, including women and children. And you think if you obey, they won’t prosecute you, lie about you, testi-lie, rape, murder, and destroy you. You are a fool if you think obedience is any defence against the law.

The law is the law of plunder. It isn’t God’s law. Bastiat tried to tell you, but you weren’t paying attention. “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it.” And you let them.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ~ Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago, English translation published 1974.

Do you actually want freedom? Then stop being so obedient. If you tell me that you took an elk in Colorado with a great shot from 100 yards, good on you. If you then go on to tell me that you paid for a non-resident elk tag $825.03 to the bums in the Colorado bureau rat agency, you slimy jerk. Did the elk ask to see your tag before you shot it? Of course not. But you are too frightened to shoot an elk without permission? What are you? “Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you, and may posterity forget you were our countryman,” said Sam Adams.

Do you want to be a part of their system? Pay them for a licence tag for your property and a licence identity card (it is digital, by the way, it is REAL ID, and your department of Homeland Security can use it against you any time they want) in order to drive on the streets that your tax dollars pay for? Why, by the way, are you paying taxes? Why are you so obedient? You are making your neighbours suffer. You should stop.

Why are you sending your children to their schools? They aren’t teaching. They are “educating” which means a systematic instruction. It is propaganda. Stop it. Stop being a part of the evil of unjust men. Now would be a good time to start. After all, if the feral gooferment can be shut down, your state gooferment can, too.

You have no obligation to obey their rules, pay their fees, take their licences, give their nephews jobs inside in offices to write regulations to make everything more expensive and hurt your neighbours. You should stop. Today.

Mutual aid response teams

Did you know there were 676,900 volunteer firefighters in the United States in 2020? That figure represents 65% of all firefighters in America. More than twice as many as the paid bureau rat firefighters in cities. So, it is clearly possible to have fire response teams on a volunteer basis rather than having to rely on taxes.

Two hundred years ago, in the 1820s, the firefighters in cities mostly worked for insurance companies that hired them out of funds paid by people and businesses that had fire protection insurance. So, what did the insurance companies do? The grifters convinced the politicians to pay for the firefighters out of city taxes. Then they didn’t have to hire their own fire fighters. Their profits went way up. You know that company that has the slogan “We are farmers”? Yeah, they aren’t farmers. They’re liars.

Okay, I pretend to hear you say, but it would never work in a big population area? Oh yeah? New South Wales. Population 8.4 million. All volunteer firefighters.

You can cooperate with your neighbours. You can buy radios. You can put a radio in your car or truck. You should, by the way. You can learn how to use it from a few videos online. You can use your radio transceiver on the emergency channels without licence. You can hear what the po-po are saying. You can show up to help at fires if you wish. Help fugitives of injustice escape. Do all kinds of things.

If American communities can have all volunteer fire brigades, and they do, then American communities can respond to crime the same way. And tyranny. And injustice. And invasion. You don’t need to “form a militia.” By definition, if you are an adult and you own a gun, you are the militia. So grow up and start acting like an adult.

You don’t need a permit to sell at the farmer’s market. The people who come around wanting you to collect sales taxes? Those are thieves. They are liars. You have no obligation to them. And they have thugs, bullies with badges, to enforce their will. But why do you obey? You and your friends have radios, and gear, too. So why are you letting people who have bad ideas have it all their way? Citizens can make arrests. Common law courts can be formed to indict with a grand jury and to convict with a petit jury.

You don’t need my permission, either. You can just start doing things. If you are tired of being enslaved, stop obeying. If you are tired of being oppressed, stop complying. If you are tired of the costs of everything, stop paying the mentally deficient and immoral rascals for permission to do things. God didn’t create you to be subservient. You weren’t born with a saddle on your back. The people in power didn’t come out of the womb with boots and spurs. Stop pretending that any of this nonsense is right or proper or ordained.

If you want to be free, you have to choose to free yourself.

This article was originally published on L5 News.

The post Why Free appeared first on LewRockwell.

Many medical policies are driven more by profit than by evidence of what truly benefits patients. Because of this, we frequently see medicine refuse to ever discuss the things that are making us sick (e.g., numerous studies show vaccines make children 2-10X more likely to develop chronic illnesses that are now widespread) while in tandem, we are relentlessly pressured to put all focus onto a few things which do not make enough money for lobbyists to defend them.

In this article, I will explore one of my key frustrations with this dynamic: the medical establishment’s ongoing war on salt. In this article, I will focus on one of my major frustrations with this medical paradigm—the war against salt.

Note: the war against salt began in 1977 when a Senate Committee published dietary guidelines arguing for reduced sodium consumption despite the existing evidence not supporting this. Since then, like many other bad policies, it has developed an nearly unstoppable inertia of its own.

Is Salt Bad For You?

Many people you ask, particularly those in the medical field will tell you salt is bad, and one of the most common pieces of health advice given both inside and outside of medicine is to eat less salt.

Over the years, I’ve heard two main arguments for why salt is bad for you.

First, salt raises blood pressure, and high blood pressure is deadly, so salt is too and should be avoided.

Second, with individuals who have heart failure, eating too many salty foods will create exacerbations of their condition, and as a result, after holidays where people eat those foods (e.g., the 4th of July) more heart failure patients will be admitted to hospitals for heart failure exacerbations.

Note: excessive sodium causes these exacerbations because if an excess amount of fluid accumulates in a compromised system (e.g., because the weakened heart can’t move enough blood to the kidneys to eliminate it), it then overloads other parts of the body (e.g., causing swelling and edema, which, if in the lungs, can be life threatening).

Because of these two things, many in the medical field assume that salt must be bad for you and hence strongly urge patients to avoid it (to the point you often see an elderly patient who loves her salt be aggressively pushed into abandoning it). Unfortunately, the logic behind those two arguments’ logic is less solid than it appears.

The Great Blood Pressure Scam

Since medicine revolves around making money, patient care is often structured to be as profitable as possible. In turn, since recurring revenue is a foundational principle of successful businesses, a key goal in medicine often ends up being to have as many patients as possible on lifelong prescriptions.

In most cases, the drugs that are developed and approved have real value for specific situations, but those situations are not enough to cover the exorbitant cost it requires to get a drug to market. As a result, once drugs are approved, the industry will gradually come up with reasons to give them to more and more people and in turn quickly arrive at the point where many of their customers have greater harm than benefit from the pharmaceutical.

One classic way this is done is by creating a drug that treats a number, asserting that the number has to be within a certain range for someone to be healthy, and then once that is enshrined, narrow and narrow the acceptable range so less and less people are “healthy” and hence need the drug (e.g., this happened with cholesterol once statins were invested). Likewise, this characterizes the history of blood pressure management:

Because of this, many people (particularly the elderly) are frequently pushed to excessively low blood pressures which reduces critical blood perfusion for the organs—which particularly unfortunate as high blood pressure is often a symptom of poor circulation rather than its cause.

As such, reducing the remaining circulation by lowering blood pressure then makes them significantly more likely to get a variety of significant issues (e.g., kidney injuries, cognitive impairment, macular degeneration), the most studied of which is lightheadedness or fainting leading to (often devastating) falls. Additionally, blood pressure medications also often greatly reduce one’s quality of life (e.g., by causing fatigue or erectile dysfunction).

Note: for those interested in learning more about the great blood pressure scam (a lot of what we’re taught about blood pressure is less than accurate), it can be read here.

Low Sodium

A cornerstone of cementing the blood pressure market has been to make everyone terrified of salt (much in the same way making people terrified of the sun is a cornerstone of the lucrative skin cancer treatment market—despite the fact the deadly skin cancers are actually due to a lack of sunlight).

Remarkably, much like the great dermatology scam (which has been able to make a massive amount of money from removing cancers that almost never become life threatening) the link between blood pressure and salt consumption is actual quite tenuous.

For example, the most detailed review of this subject found that drastic salt reduction typically results in less than a 1% reduction in blood pressure. Likewise, doctors rarely recognize that patients in the hospital are routinely given large amounts of IV 0.9% sodium chloride, in many cases receiving ten times the daily recommended sodium chloride we are supposed to consume—yet their blood pressure often barely rises.

Note: some individuals and certain ethnicities are salt-sensitive. They may experience greater increases in blood pressure or worsening of other symptoms when consuming moderate amounts of salt (although this does not apply to the majority of the population).

Despite this, patients are often pushed to eliminate all (or almost all) salt from their life. Beyond this significantly reducing their quality of life (as people like salty foods) it can be dangerous. For example:

• A study of 181 countries found that countries with lower salt consumption have shorter life expectancies.

• Low sodium levels (hyponatremia) are strongly correlated with a risk of dying (e.g., the salt consumption target we are recommended to follow increases one’s risk of dying by 25%). Likewise, a common reason for hospital admissions, are symptoms resulting from hyponatremia (as once sodium levels get too low, it can be very dangerous), and 15-20% of hospitalized patients have low sodium levels at admission.
Note: mild hyponatremia is also associated with an increased risk of death.

• Reduced salt consumption, not surprisingly, increases one’s risk of hyponatremia (e.g., one study one study found salt restriction made hypertensive patients 9.9 times more likely to develop hyponatremia).
Note: many blood pressure and psychiatric medications put you at risk for dangerously low sodium levels (e.g., SSRI antidepressants make you 3.16 times more likely to develop hyponatremia). Additionally, certain patients (e.g., those with autonomic nervous issues) are much more sensitive to salt restriction causing hypotension (low blood pressure).

• Low dietary sodium intake causes a 34% increase in cardiovascular disease and death.

• Rapidly lowering blood sodium levels reduces cardiac output and blood pressure in a manner resembling traumatic shock (which frequently raises the heart rate as the heart tries to compensate for insufficient blood). Low salt consumption, in turn, has been repeatedly linked to tachycardia (and atrial fibrillation).

• Aging kidneys have a reduced ability to respond to changes in blood sodium levels (putting them at greater risk for hyponatremia following sodium deprivation).
Note: three of the most common symptoms of hyponatremia (which lead people to go to the Emergency Room) are fatigue, confusion and difficulty concentrating.

• Many have reported discovering low salt consumption was the cause of their fatigue and lightheadedness (which has also been proven in a clinical trial which treated postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome with increasing dietary sodium).

Note: chronically low blood pressure (e.g., POTS) has been shown to be one cause of chronic fatigue syndrome,1,2 and POTS is often treated with increased dietary sodium.

• Chronic sodium depletion has been linked to fatigue and insomnia.

•Many readers have shared with me that a variety of health issues improved once they began consuming natural salt (e.g., headaches, erectile dysfunction, waking up in the middle of the night or chronically elevated blood pressures).

Note: a variety of other health issues (e.g., worsening of diabetes or a stomach hydrochloric acid deficiency) have also been linked to insufficient dietary sodium.

Read the Whole Article

The post What They Never Tell Us About Salt appeared first on LewRockwell.

“I love Ron Paul. Ron Paul is awesome. I would have Ron Paul on the show regularly. He is a hero because Ron Paul had the courage to … challenge old sacred cows of the Republican Party.” – Charlie Kirk, July 17 2025

Ron Paul’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns influenced and inspired many young people, especially when the candidate spoke at college campuses. One of those young people was Charlie Kirk.

As a teenager Kirk attended events of the Tea Party, the organic grassroots movement inspired by Dr. Paul’s presidential campaigns which can thus claim Dr. Paul as its philosophical and ideological father. Dr. Paul’s principal campaign policies were a non-interventionist foreign policy, ending the Fed and economic liberty. A New York Times profile described Kirk as being “smitten with the astringent libertarian worldview of Ron Paul.” Charlie began speaking at Tea Party rallies with the objective of attracting young people who were becoming victims of generational theft through the profligate spending and bureaucracy of the US government. The initial mission of Turning Point USA when Kirk and Bill Montgomery co-founded the non-profit was promoting economic liberty, limited government, free markets, and fiscal responsibility.

I became aware of the influence of Dr. Paul, a proponent of Austrian economics, on Kirk when I heard former attorney Baron Coleman, who is currently investigating Charlie’s assassination, comment on his YouTube channel that TPUSA was founded in 2012 as “a sort of Mises Institute for college kids.”

Six days after the shocking murder of Kirk, Dr. Paul was already on the case. He questioned the FBI official narrative and asked, “who done it?” in his article published on Mises Institute’s web site.

Lew Rockwell, founder of the Mises Institute, republished this article on his own web site LewRockwell.com.

X’s AI tool Grok  and Chat GPT came up with a lot of interesting details when I did inquiries that sparked further research. Dr. Paul appeared as a guest on The Charlie Kirk Show in 2023 where they discussed non-interventionism and Kirk called Dr. Paul “one of the most influential and ‘prophetic’ congressmen of the last 50 years for foreseeing the crises of endless wars, Fed overreach and inflation.” On February 10, 2025 Kirk endorsed Paul as Fed Chair arguing “Ron Paul would make a great next Chairman of the Fed. No other institution in American life has so eroded the purchasing power of working Americans as the Fed, and as a longtime critic and skeptic, Ron Paul would be a living and breathing force functioning to bring reform and accountability.”

When Kirk endorsed a Texas Comptroller candidate, Charlie described him as “Ron Paul meets Donald Trump,” who matched the populist appeal of Trump with Paul’s fiscal beliefs.

TPUSA shifted its focus when Zionist Pastor Rob McCoy approached Kirk to add Zionist Christian evangelism to the non-profit’s mission. TPUSA started concentrating on religious and cultural issues and with McCoy’s influence Kirk was a fierce supporter of Israel and US funding of its Middle East wars on behalf of the Zionist state. Students continued to be interested in economic issues due to self-interest in their own future attempting to get jobs, buy houses, get married and start families. TPUSA grew to over 850 chapters by 2018 with the assistance of Republican donors including Ron Paul supporter Foster Friess.

As a growing number of the public now know, Charlie’s unquestioning support of US foreign policy began to change. As early as September 10, 2019 Kirk circled back to Dr. Paul’s non-interventionist vision echoing George Washington’s farewell address that warned America against engaging in entangling alliances with foreign nations. “There is nothing conservative about endless war,” Charlie posted on X about US funding the bloody Ukraine-Russia conflict. “Foreign occupation of a country 4,000 miles away while we are 22 trillion in debt puts our country at risk. We have spent 5 TRILLION on these wars since 9-11. With a destabilized region and thousands of American lives lost. End the war.”

Kirk began to question the “special relationship” between the US and Israel. He asked Patrick Bet David on his October 12, 2023 podcast if the Zionist state stood down on October 7 when Kirk knew as a frequent visitor Israel was a virtual fortress with young ISD soldiers every 10 yards. Eventually Charlie spoke out against the ethnic cleansing in Gaza. In July in a room full of people Kirk implored President Trump and Vice President Vance not to go to war with Iran. Trump reportedly reacted angrily. Kirk’s evolution was due to spiritual revelations, listening to his Gen Z supporters, doing his own research, and the influence of his friends Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

Growing numbers of internet sleuths and independent journalists like Baron Coleman who do not believe the FBI official narrative continue to investigate Kirk’s assassination. These grassroots investigators find the government story that a tranny-lover named Tyler Robinson perhaps collaborating with a tranny group did the dirty deed nonsensical and overwhelmingly suspect the Mossad/CIA may have had a hand in planning and executing the murder. A substantial amount of circumstantial evidence in the minds of many lead them to conclude Kirk’s emergence as a politically influential activist for peace and his departure from the warmongering policies of his donors was the likely reason why he was assassinated. Although other factors are playing a role, this conflict between the FBI official narrative believers and doubters is causing what appears to be a fatal fissure in MAGA.

Kirk had a deep respect for Dr. Paul and credited him with challenging the Republican establishment: “He made people defend the indefensible.” In the end, although Charlie expressed his concern to friends that Israel might kill him, he could no longer defend the indefensible himself.

While US foreign policy continues to reflect the deadly agenda of billionaire donors, and Charlie Kirk’s assassination remains an unraveling mystery, Gen Z overwhelmingly opposes war, US foreign aid, military interventionism, and Zionist influence over American policies. As Charlie said of Dr. Paul, “We all follow in your footsteps.” There is a shift within the younger generation and in that there is much hope.

The post Ron Paul’s Influence on Charlie Kirk and the Maga Schism appeared first on LewRockwell.

The more the nation’s Fiscal Doomsday Machine cranks out ever higher spending and fatally rising public debt, the more we realize that the 16th Amendment was a monumental error.

In the end its ratification in 1913 may well turn out to be the inflection point at which American democracy and capitalist prosperity took a fatal turn toward ruination.

It need not have happened had the legislators of that era understood the long-term ramifications of making income taxation the revenue staple of democratic governance. In the first place, of course, any practical appreciation of human nature and the dynamics of democratic governance would tell you that ideally you should tax consumption, not income and wages, in order to defray the necessary costs of government.

That is to say, consumption and spending by the people does not require any inducements from the state—even as too much direct tax burden upon income and wages can most surely reduce the incentives for production, investment, risk-taking, innovation and enterprise.

Still, at least in theory a simple flat rate income tax at today’s revenue levels would not be the end of the world in terms of its disincentive effects and restraint upon production and wealth creation. For instance, during 2024 the sum of employee compensation, interest and dividends and proprietors income was $21.3 trillion versus Federal income tax collections of $2.4 trillion.

So a uniform levy on all types of income at 11.4% would have generated the same Federal revenue as today’s massive Federal income tax code. Accordingly, what would amount to little more than a one-tenth tithe to Uncle Sam would not unduly impair the essential ingredients of capitalist prosperity.

Unfortunately, as the income tax has evolved over the last 112 years Washington impinged ever more heavily upon the core supply-side ingredients of prosperity by taxing work, savings, risk-taking, invention, innovation and enterprise. But more crucially, passage of the income tax opened the door to drastic, politically-imposed redistribution of the wealth via progressive tax rates and unending loopholes and preferences for economic and social behavior that at any given moment a majority of the Congress decided to reward.

Not surprisingly, therefore, what had been 27 pages of statute in 1913 has now evolved into 2,650 pages in the IRS code and another 9,000 pages of implementing regulations. Self-evidently, nearly 12,000 pages of arbitrary and often opaque commands from Washington politicians and bureaucrats is the very opposite of the smooth, prosperity-generating workings of the unseen hand of the free market.

However, unlike the normal progressive critique claiming that the wealthy make out like bandits owing to this 12,000 page tangled web of loopholes, preferences and incentives, it transpires that more nearly the opposite is now the case: To wit, the actual, politically tortured income tax has essentially euthanized the middle class citizenry from the true, crushing burden of Big Government by concentrating the Federal tax burden at the very top of the economic ladder.

The recent release of the inflation-adjusted marginal tax brackets for 2026 provides a good reminder of how a bad idea—the progressive income tax—has been twisted, perverted and mutilated by Congress, especially since 1981. That is to say, after decades of tax cutting by the GOP we have now reached the point that the broad middle and even upper middle class no longer feels the pain of Federal taxation commensurate with Washington’s bloated and growing claim on national income.

For the year just ended (FY 2025) the total Federal spending burden was a cool $7.0 trillion and amounted to 23.3% of GDP. In order to demonstrate this disconnect we have used the 2026 Federal income tax tables appended to the end of this post to calculate the share of household income taken by Federal income taxes and also by the employee share of payroll taxes at intervals from the median income household to the top 1%.

But first it should be noted that among the 154 million income tax filers in 2022, fully 31% or 48 million owed zero Federal income taxes due to the huge standard deduction of $32,200 for joint returns–plus another $2,200 of direct tax credits for each child 18 and under. And another 12 million paid less than $1,000 after all the current day deductions and credits.

In all, fully 122 million households pay a lesser percent of their gross income in Federal taxes than the 23.3% Federal spending share of national income. And for the vast bulk of the population the burden is far, far less.

This is possible, of course, only because 25% or more of Federal spending is being habitually borrowed from future generations (@ 6% of GDP deficits currently) and 65% of Federal income taxes are paid by the top 7% of households. That is to say, due to what has primarily been GOP tax policy over recent decades, the standard deduction and child tax credits have been pushed sky high while marginal rate brackets at the middle and lower end of the income ladder have been pushed very low consistent with supply-side doctrine.

Accordingly, middle class taxpayers have exceedingly low average tax rates relative to Uncle Sam’s voracious helping of national income. For example, based on the new tax tables for 2026 (which reflect the changes in Trump’s OBBBA) consider a two-earner household with two children under 18 years using the standard deduction and bringing home wage and salary income equal to the median household income of about $85,000.

That household would have $52,800 of taxable income after the standard deduction of $32,200 and would owe 10% on the first $24,800 of taxable income and a 12% marginal rate on the balance, thereby generating an income tax liability of $5,840 or just under 7% of gross income.

But the latter would be reduced by $4,400 owing to two child credits of $2,200 each. This means that the median household’s net Federal income tax payment would amount to just $1,440!

So we do mean that GOP tax policy—low marginal rates for the supply-siders and a big standard deductions and generous child credits for the pro-family and natalist factions—has essentially exempted the middle class from Federal income taxes. After all, Uncle Sam’s extraction of just 1.7% from an $85,000 income in 2026 would be roughly equivalent to a weekend at Disney World.

That’s right. Aside from a few adjustments for single households and childless families that do not materially impact the analysis, the bottom line is this: Upwards of 66 million US households at the median income and below pay less than 2% in Federal income taxes to a Leviathan on the banks of the Potomac that devours nearly one-quarter of GDP.

To be sure, this two earner household would also pay a substantial amount to Uncle Sam for the employee share of OASDHI payroll taxes, which currently amounts to 7.65%. But unlike the case of income taxes, much of the public has been bamboozled into believing that Social Security withholding is a form of insurance premium for their retirement fund, and therefore is not quite as onerous as income taxes which go into the bottomless pit of the Federal budget.

That’s nonsense, of course, because there are no real assets in the Social Security trust funds, just intra-governmental IOUs. These payroll levies are actually just a second layer of taxation on labor income. Still, even when you aggregate income and the employee share of payroll taxes for this $85,000 median income household, total Federal taxes under the 2026 schedule would come to $7,943 of just 9.3% of gross income.

Yet that’s the true evil of the 16th Amendment as it has been twisted into a pretzel by modern GOP tax and fiscal policy. The 2026 tax schedule is telling households at the dead center of the income distribution that they can have 23.3% of GDP government for a 9.3% of income charge. Stated differently, they’ll be getting Big Government on the Potomac on sale at 60% off.

Summary Of Federal Tax Burden At 1.0X Median Income or $85,000 Per Annum

• Gross wage & salary income: $85,000.
• Taxable Income after $32,200 standard deduction: $52,800.
• 10% liability on first $24,800 of taxable income: $2,480
• 12% marginal rate on the $28,000 balance of taxable income: $3,360.
• Total income tax liability: $5,840
• Average tax rate on gross income: 6.9%.
• Child tax credits: ($4,400).
• Net income tax payment:$1,440.
• Net payment as % of gross income: 1.7%.
• Payroll tax at 7.65%: $6,503.
• Total Federal Taxes paid: $7,943.
• Total taxes as % of gross income: 9.3%.

Moreover, the case above is not the half of it. As you move up the income ladder from the median, the same outcomes hold until you reach the tippy-top of the distribution.

For instance, in the case of the same two-earner, two-child standard deduction using household with a gross income at 2X the US median or $170,000, taxable income would be $137,880. So after paying 11.6% on the first $100,000 of taxable income it would pay at the 22% marginal bracket on the balance of $37,000.

Accordingly, its Federal income tax liability would total $19,740, less the $4,400 of child tax credits. Again, the actual income tax payment to Uncle Sam of $15,340 would compute to just 9.0% of gross income. That is to say, the current twisted Federal income tax would levy a single digit average rate on a household with $170,000 per year in wage and salary income!

Also, again, when you add the payroll tax, which is not capped until $176,000 for each of the two earners, the 7.65% levy would add another $13,005 of Federal extractions. Still, the combined income and payroll tax burden in this case would amount to $28,345 or 16.7% of gross income.

And, so yet again, no cigar. Even at 2X the median income, our representative wage earning family does not come close to carrying the 23.3% weight of what Milton Friedman properly called the true tax burden—that is, the pay me now or pay me latter spending share of national income.

Summary of Federal Tax Burden at 2X The Median Income or $170,000

• Gross wage & salary income: $170,000.
• Taxable income:$137,800.
• 11.5% tax liability on first $100,800 of taxable income: $11,600.
• 22% marginal rate on balance of $37,000: $8,140.
• Total income tax liability: $19,740.
• Average tax rate: 11.6%.
• Child tax credits: ($4,400).
• Net income tax payment: $15,340.
• Net income tax %: 9.0%.
• Payroll tax at 7.65%: $13,oo5.
• Total income and payroll tax: $28,345.
• Total Federal tax rate: 16.7%.

Thus, you must climb far up the income ladder to find a taxpayer that pays a 23.3% share of its gross income, under the stipulated but typical condition of two earners, two kids and the standard deduction. In fact, only when you get to 4X the median or $340,000 of gross income do you break-even.

In that case, the household’s $307,800 of income after the standard deduction would fall in the 24% bracket. Accordingly, a liability of $35,932 on the first $211,400 (17%) and $23,146 on the balance (24%) would generate a blended liability of $54,668 after the child credits, or 16.1% on the gross income total. Only after adding in $26,010 of payroll taxes do you get total Federal tax payments of $80,678 or 23.7% of gross income.

In short, even when you set the marker to exclude 93% or 122 million of US households do you reach the point that a household is pulling a tax burden equal to the Friedmanite measure of the true Federal spending burden on national income, which currently stands at 23.3%.

So, yes, the current GOP-mutilated version of an inherently bad progressive income tax basically shields the overwhelming share of the voting public from anything that remotely resembles their pro rata share of Washington’s spending spree.

No wonder they don’t give a sh*t about runaway Federal spending and debt.

For want of doubt, we consider a final case that gets us to the boundary of the proverbial top 1%. At the present time the cut off line is $682,557 million for the top 1%, which in the most recent year (2022) consisted of 1.3 million households which paid fully 40.4% of Federal income taxes.

So consider a borderline $680,000 two-earner family which is a smidgen under the 1% boundary. Again, we stipulate two kids and for the sake of conservative bias we assume they too use the $32,200 standard deduction, although in all probability their tax accountants would find a lot more deductions from AGI (adjusted gross income) than $32,200. Still, on $647,600 of taxable income they would pay $116,896 (17.2%) on the first $512,450 of that amount and 35% marginal rate or $47,303 on the $135,150 balance.

That is to say, even at the edge of the 1% boundary, the marginal rate of 35% applies to only about 20% of the household’s gross income. In total, therefore, the Federal income tax paid after the $4,400 of child tax credits would amount to $159,799 or 23.5% of gross income.

As a practical matter, we doubt that the near 1% household is fooled by the shibboleth that the payroll tax is really an insurance premium. But if they did it would amount to saying that even the near 1 percenter in this example is paying exactly the average rate (23.3%) for the entire Friedmanite toll on the overall US economy.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that Washington borrows and spends and runs up the national debt with reckless abandon?

Moreover, in the near 1 percenter case, the 6.2% payroll tax for OASDI would be capped at $376,000, assuming two equal earners, but the HI (Medicare hospital) tax at 1.45% is uncapped. So the total payroll extraction would be $31,684 or 4.66% of gross income. And altogether, income and payroll tax would amount to $191,483.

As it happens, that’s 28.2% of gross household income or barely 500 basis points over the Friedman tax rate calculation for the entire Federal government. Needless to say, when the near 1% are barely pulling their weight on today’s income, it is no wonder that by 2054 under current fiscal policy future taxpayers—some not even yet born—will be lugging $185 trillion of public debt.

Summary of Federal Tax Burden for the Near 1% or $680,000 of Gross Income

• Gross income: $680,000.
• Taxable income at standard deduction: $647,600.
• 22.8% tax on first $512,450: $116,896.
• 35% marginal rate on balance of $135,150: $47,303.
• Total income tax liability: $164,199.
• Tax liability rate on gross income: 24.2%.
• Net income tax after $4,440 child credits: $159,799.
• Net income tax % of gross income: 23.5%.
• 6.2% OASDI payroll tax on $352,000: $21,824.
• 1.45% HI tax on $680,000: $9,860.
• Total Federal tax payments: $191,483.
• Total tax % of gross income: 28.2%.

The truth of the matter is that the bad spawn of the 16th Amendment—the current mangled Federal income tax—is utterly incompatible with today’s massive Welfare State and Warfare State spending enterprises.

The income tax places the overwhelming burden of tax collection on the top 1% and 5% of America’s households, when only the pain of roughly proportionate taxation has a prayer of re-balancing the nation’s fiscal politics as between the spenders and the payers.

Moreover, the payroll tax is almost as bad, given that it heavily taxes workers and employer labor costs at a time when the US has already priced itself out of the global markets owing to the pro-inflation policies of the Fed.

Accordingly, there is only one real solution that might stand a chance of stanching the nation’s headlong rush to fiscal disaster, yet also not exacerbate the economic problem of high-cost labor in the US at all levels of the economy. To wit, replace both the income tax and the payroll tax with a national consumption tax, which would require $4.1 trillion of annual revenue replacement.

In addition, the Federal deficit posted at $2.4 trillion during FY 2025, which would require an additional $1.2 trillion revenue increase if the budget were to be balanced on a 50/50 basis between revenue increases and $1.2 trillion of spending cuts—with the latter distributed roughly evenly between defense cuts and entitlement reforms and means-testing.

In short, on an FY 2025 basis, a true escape from the disaster of the current income tax and payroll taxes would requires a consumption tax of about $5.3 trillion, which, in turn, would amount to about 25% of personal consumption expenditures (PCE) of $21.1 trillion during the fiscal year just completed.

To be sure, that sounds like a tall, if not impossible, order. But here’s the thing: There is not a snowball’s chance in the hot place that the current mangled income tax and economically oppressive payroll tax can be configured to bring the true Friedmanite cost of government to America’s 133 million households in a manner that actually results in less spending and less build-up of the nation’s runaway public debt.

In fact, the only why to tame the Leviathan on the Potomac is to insure that every time a household buys $400 of groceries or $400 of home decor items via Amazon or $400 of rides and refreshments at a theme park—they also pay an added $100 each time for Washington’s Warfare State, Welfare State and endless pork barrel.

The public experiencing that pain over and over and over again is the only way that spending can be curtailed and fiscal catastrophe avoided.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

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International Man: It seems now more than ever that people have less and less in common with others who happen to carry the same government ID.

At the same time, like-minded people are finding each other from across the world.

What’s your take on this trend? What does it mean for the nation-state?

Doug Casey: Once upon a time, like-minded people came to America because of their desire for personal freedom and financial opportunity. That’s part of what made America what it is. Americans were the kind of people that were drawn to the ideals put forth by the country’s Founding Fathers.

But now America is drawing the wrong kind of people. They’re not people who necessarily want freedom. Some do, of course. But many are drawn to the massive welfare benefits, free medical care, and free schooling.

Past migrants may have been dirt poor and ignorant, but they had to make their own way. The State didn’t subsidize them; it gave them absolutely nothing. But that’s not the case today. The character of America has changed, and so have the kind of people who want to migrate here. They don’t want to accept American values. They want to maintain their Somali, Afghan, or Haitian values. Most won’t become Americans; they’ll become United Statesers. America, a republic sharing a common culture, is being washed away and replaced by the US, a multicultural domestic empire.

America used to be totally unique, but now the US is just another nation-state like all the others. Of course, change is a constant in all areas of life. But I’ll miss the America of the before times because it was a refuge for things like free thought, free speech, free markets, and entrepreneurialism. Oh well, nothing lasts forever, and America had a pretty good run.

With that said, the main danger to you is your own government, particularly the US government headquartered in Washington DC, and to a lesser degree, state and local governments. Like other United Statesers, you’re not personally endangered by Iranians, the Chinese, or Russians—they’re on the other side of the world. You are, however, directly threatened by the US government and by other US citizens. They widely, indeed overwhelmingly, now accept socialist and welfare-state principles. Your fellow United Statesers don’t mind turning you into a serf. You’re largely on your own when it comes to trouble.

So at this point, it’s incumbent upon those of us who believe in American principles to find their countrymen wherever they are—not just in this geographical area, not just within the bailiwick of the US government. It’s part of a global trend, actually. It’s happening all over the world in different ways.

The nation-state itself, which has been around since about the 16th century, is rapidly becoming an anachronism, just like kingdoms and principalities which came before it and have joined the scrap heap of history. People everywhere are losing their loyalty to their national governments, much the way our ancestors discarded their loyalty to their kings and princes.

Government, in its present form, is actually on its way out. I say, good riddance.

International Man: The concept of “phyles” originated from a book by Neal Stephenson called The Diamond Age. The book is set in a future world where groups of people come together based on what matters most to them, instead of incidentals they cannot control, like where you were born.

With the growing polarization and divisiveness in the US and other countries, will the concept of phyles become more appealing to people?

Doug Casey: Absolutely. You can no longer rely on people in your own country for much. You may not have anything in common with them. You may not share anything other than the same government ID.

The US used to have a common culture up until the 1960s. But since then, we’ve evolved from a unicultural country into a multicultural domestic empire. People with “Red” views simply can’t relate to those with “Blue” views; in fact, they increasingly hate each other. The situation has been greatly exacerbated with the Covid hysteria, masks, and now near-mandatory vaccinations. Antagonisms are approaching those of Europe’s religious wars in the 16th and 17th centuries. We’re not there yet, but things are moving in that direction.

The old idea of America is no longer relevant. And a large part of the country—the SJWs, the progressives, the socialists, the wokesters, etc.—are actively and purposefully trying to destroy it.

It’s unfortunate but understandable. People want to associate with others like themselves, who share things that are important to them. It doesn’t matter whether what’s important to them is their culture, race, language, religion, occupation, economic status, general worldview, or any of a thousand different things.

People are increasingly going to form relationships based upon things which are important to them. Those things may have little or nothing to do with the government that rules over them. In fact, their “democratic” government will likely be openly antagonistic to them.

Large groups of Americans and United Statesers will view the government as not only unimportant but an unnecessary and dangerous parasite. The average person may not recognize that right now, but the thought will eventually filter through. The same way it did when people almost everywhere started transferring their loyalties from kings and princes to nation-states, democracies, “the people,” and the like.

I know this sounds like an outrageous thought. “Democracy” is almost like a secular god—you aren’t supposed to blaspheme against it. But, in fact, it’s degenerated into something akin to a scam to justify the ruling class and the elite. Sometimes, it’s no better than a mob rule.

I believe people are finding that, rather than geographically defined nation-states, philosophically defined phyles make much more sense.

International Man: Liberland and the Free State Project in New Hampshire are two examples where like-minded people are coming together within a physical location.

Does a phyle require that its members be in the same geographic location for it to be effective?

Doug Casey: That’s certainly ideal. The fact that a lot of libertarians have gathered around the Free State Project in New Hampshire and Liberland are indications of that. They’re straws in the wind.

There are at least a half dozen things like that going on in the world today.

It’s better if like-minded people are physically close to one another. But with things like Skype, Zoom, 5G, and the rest of it, communication has become very good and, practically, free everywhere in the world.

And with transportation technology as good as it is and getting better—notwithstanding governments’ stupid and counterproductive travel bans—you can easily get to wherever you want. A lot of people are going to take advantage of that and go to enclaves where they can be around people like themselves.

What draws people together is not their nationality, their shared government IDs. Things like the Olympic games greatly over-emphasize the importance of the State. As do entities like the UN, the IMF, NATO, and hundreds of similar organizations—they amount to private clubs for government big shots.

In fact, it’s rather degrading for an individual to identify first as an American or Chinese or Brazilian or whatever. These are mostly just geographical accidents of birth and shouldn’t define who an individual is.

What’s really important is your character—that you think rationally and critically and that you follow the two great laws: Do all that you say you’re going to do, and don’t encroach upon other people or their property. I choose to associate with people based on those things, not accidents of birth.

In any event, to the extent people observe certain precepts that support their survival, they’ll stay together in groups voluntarily.

International Man: In your perspective, what makes a community successful? How can differences be handled?

Doug Casey: Two aspects are important. One is economic and the other is legal, philosophical, and worldview-oriented.

For a community to be successful, it has to produce more than it consumes and save the difference. That’s how you achieve economic prosperity either as a community or an individual.

The other aspect goes back to the two great laws that I mentioned above: Do all that you say that you will do, and do not encroach upon other people or their property.

I was talking with Rick Mayberry on my YouTube podcast “Doug Casey’s Take,” and Rick pointed out, quite accurately, that you can test whether these two great laws work, and you can do so scientifically.

For the next week, you can test it out for yourself. When you relate to people, instead of doing what you say you’re going to do, don’t do what you say you’re going to do—and see what happens when you steal other people’s stuff or assault them.

See how that works. Out of the thousands of possible phyles that may form, I’d certainly prefer to belong to those who put those principles first.

International Man: How can like-minded communities and phyles protect themselves from the threat of force and coercion from outsiders?

Doug Casey: Force, violence, and coercion from outsiders is always a worry. Defending oneself from the 20% of society who are what you might call potential trouble sources and the 20% of that 20% who are genuine sociopaths is important. There’s been a lot of writing and thinking on the subject. I won’t go into it here, but I urge everyone to read “The Market for Liberty” by Morris and Linda Tannehill, which is free on the internet.

But your biggest worry is not outsiders—it’s insiders.

It’s the State, your government, that’s the biggest danger by far, as well as people within your own community that the State is ineffective at protecting you from. In fact, the government is exactly where most of these types go. A phyle will naturally be better at protecting its members than the State is at protecting its subjects.

Not all phyles would be benevolent, of course. But they can be very effective at self-defense. The Mafia is a phyle with criminal tendencies, as are the Yakusa, the Crips and the Bloods, and thousands of similar organizations around the world. Their members are pretty safe; few dare aggress against them as they are protected by the group. The same is true of police forces; criminals steer clear of hurting cops whenever possible.

If you’re a member of a phyle with defense capabilities, aggressors will tend to leave you alone because the consequences of hurting one of its members could be dire.

I suspect smart groups would organize themselves for defense but with better ethics and better principles than mafias or police forces do. Police officers are loyal first to each other, then to their employers, and only then to the citizens.

As with any problem that presents itself, the market will solve it. You don’t have to rely on political mechanisms, which inevitably cause more problems than they solve. As governments become more oppressive and break down during the Greater Depression, phyles will rise.

Think of who you want in your phyle.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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Targeting allies and manufacturing foes is the last card available to the Empire of Chaos.

China is right in the middle of a true tech onslaught – which in several ways works as a sort of wrap-up of Made in China 2025, conceived and launched 10 years ago, and a resounding success even facing at least two tariff/sanctions offensives by Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0.

A stellar Chinese analysis by Chen Jing, published by my friends at Guancha in Shanghai, concisely interprets the importance of key vectors and variables linked to the tech onslaught. Here’s an essential breakdown, with my own comments.

The China-US decoupling

The US as a Chinese export market now represents less than 10% of total exports. In parallel, as I observed in my visits to China this year – from Shanghai and Beijing to Xian and Xinjiang – there’s no psychological fear anymore of the much-touted “decoupling”. After the Trump-Xi meeting, it became clear that what is already in effect is a managed decoupling. Beijing is cool, calm and collected: after all, it’s able to expand in markets all across the Global South. Especially because more trade usually walks side by side with more infrastructure development projects: that’s the logic behind the New Silk Roads/BRI.

China’s 15th Five-Year Plan

What was recently debated in four days in Beijing – and will be approved next March during the Two Sessions – is already rolling, as in “decisive breakthroughs in key core technologies in major areas such as integrated circuits, industrial machine tools, high-end instruments, basic software, advanced materials, and biomanufacturing.” That’s all Made in China 2025 material. The conclusion is stark: sooner, rather than later, China simply won’t need anything from the Western high-tech industrial chain. Call it industrial decoupling. And the cards, once again, are Made in China.

The US deb crisis

The analysis recalls a comparison between the US debt in 2019, before Covid – $21 trillion, with $300 billion in annual interest – with 2025: $38 trillion, with interest projected at $1.3 trillion, way ahead of the Pentagon’s budget. You don’t need to be Prof. Michael Hudson to do the math: long-term US debt is the ultimate – unpayable – nightmare. And the US debt has alreay morphed into a US dollar crisis.

The SWIFT factor

The analysis touches on a key issue regarding SWIFT. The US dollar is still responsible for approximately 47% of SWIFT transactions. The yuan share, meanwile, fell from 4.74% in July 2024 to 2.93% in August 2025. So the yuan is not exactly becoming more international. Why? Bacause the yuan is being decoupled from SWIFT, on purpose: China is encouraging the Global South – no less than 189 countries and regions – to use CIPS on international trade/financial transactions. CIPS is progressing non-stop: a year-on-year increase of approximately 42% compared to 2024.

Call it China preparing itself for financial decoupling. Even if Washington decided to cut off China from SWIFT like it did with Russia, Beijing would have no problems leveraging its massive trade power to then really internationalize the yuan.

A new path of globalization, with China at the core?
The rare earth saga.

In 2025, China entered escape velocity. The reaction to the Trump Tariff Tantrum came with unwavering self-confidence. It was a marvel to observe that on the spot in Shanghai. The analysis recognizes that much of China’s force derives from its rare earth potential.

Already in July 2023 export controls were imposed on gallium and germanium. This summarizes China’s share and position in the production of metals and rare elements, showing that “China’s advantages go far beyond the 17 rare earth elements that have recently caused panic and helplessness in the Western camp.”

There are 21 elements in the export control list; only seven are medium and heavy rare earth elements. There are several other categories such as rare refractory metals, rare dispersed metals, rare light metals, and non-ferrous heavy metals.

One of the key points of the analysis is that not only the US, but the G7 as a whole no longer has the power to dictate the rules of the global economy. China “can withstand the G7 on its own”. Especially when the myth of US industrial strength has been shattered.

That opens a new Pandora’s box of discussion: is the global majority already moving to a new path of globalization, with China at its core?

The AI bubble

So AI may turn out to be the US’s last hope to turn the tide. The problem is the humongous size of the US AI bubble – a pillar of the US economy. It will eventually burst – and the consequences are unimaginable.

Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, and others are pouring stratospheric funds into scaling-up large language models (LLMs) and massive data centers. That may not be enough to prevent the AI bubble burst – in an environment dictated by mega-corporations only focused on quick profits.

Cue to a quite worrying prospect fueling their paranoia. Several high-level Chinese models – such as DeepSeek, QWEN and the Kimi K2 series – already dominate global AI open source. The Americans practice “closed-source” – where the thing that matters most is how to monetize their gigantic models.

China is playing a very clever game: delaying the release of Deep Seek R2 – an open source, large-scale model. Why? Because releasing it now would mostly benefit Nvidia’s GPUs, boosting their sales and of course the US stock market.

China is nearly ready to complete domestic GPU computer clusters. DeepSeek R2 is built upon these clusters. The result: that will directly disrupt US dominance. As a Shanghai expert puts it:  “How can American AI, hampered by power shortages, lack of open-source access, and high energy consumption, compete with the low-power, open-source, large-scale model that offers a significant advantage?”

MAGA: the Magically Globally Aggressive model

At the recent AI Future Summit, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang went straight to the point: China would definitely win the US-China AI competition.

A key reason is that China’s AI is about productive capitalism – and not speculation. Chinese AI is primarily used in industrial manufacturing sectors such as mining, energy, water conservancy, metallurgy, and military. Large-scale AI models combined with sensors, industrial communication, and automated control at their core, are largely applied to real-life applications,  addressing real-life problems in meteorology, marine agriculture, earth machinery, aerospace, civil geology. They truly integrate algorithms and computing power into production.

History tells us that all industrial and tech revolutions have been closely related to real-life production – from steel production and  electricity generation to the chemical industry and telecommunications engineering.

All that brings us back to the defining psycho-killer outlook of the Trump 2.0 administration. Incapable of really “winning” a tech war against the largest economy on the planet by PPP, the imperative has switched to harassing and plundering weaker nations seen as easy prey, especially in terms of grabbing their natural resources.

Meanwhile, domestically, Trump 2.0 dreams of reviving manufacturing – the MAGA way. Call it the Magically Globally Aggressive (MAGA) model, deviating attention from what really matters: the monstrous debt; the declining power of the US dollar; the tech bubble; inflation; real geopolitics. Plunder – targeting allies and manufactured foes alike – is the last card available to the Empire of Chaos.

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

The post Why the Trade/Tech Cards are Made in China appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lew,

Candace Owens has the #1 podcast in the world according to Podscribe which publishes monthly rankings of podcasts, publishers and advertisers using real-time measurement data. Her recent spike is due to her investigation into the assassination of her friend TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk. This top metric measures average estimated downloads and views per episode which is 3.5 million in October 2025 for Candace. On her latest podcast, “Ben Shapiro is Crying Again,” she explains how her former boss lied by claiming she accused Charlie’s widow Erika of killing her husband. Anyone who has watched every episode of her podcast since Charlie was murdered knows Candace is telling the truth. Her technique of making her point while ridiculing Shapiro and her analysis that the Israeli lobby’s days of power are over are definitely worth watching. 

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Thanks, Fernando Fiori Chiocca.

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Thanks, John Frahm:

Activist post

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 Johnny Kramer wrote:

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International Man: Gold has seen a dramatic rise recently. What do you think is driving this surge—inflation, geopolitical instability, loss of faith in fiat currency like the US dollar?

Doug Casey: The answer is all of the above.

First, inflation is not retail price rises, as most people think. The rise in prices is a consequence of inflation, not inflation itself. Inflation is the creation of excess purchasing media above the creation of real wealth. Inflation is caused by two things: the Federal Reserve buying assets and increasing its balance sheet, financing government debt by creating currency and credit. And the banking system creating money via commercial loans facilitated by fractional reserve banking.

Short answer: inflation has been a primary cause for gold’s moving up not just over the last few years, but over the last 50 years.

Geopolitical instability? Absolutely. All the world’s currencies, including the US dollar, are fiat instruments. If a government falls, historically, its currency goes with it. People are increasingly looking for some place to put their wealth and savings other than a fiat currency.

And this leads to the last thing you mentioned—a loss of faith in fiat currency itself. The cat is out of the bag at this point, and all over the world, there’s a loss of faith not just in currencies, but governments themselves.

What can you do? You can buy real estate, of course, or you can invest in a productive business—but gold, and more recently Bitcoin, have been the big beneficiaries of this loss of faith.

International Man: Do you believe the dollar’s global reserve status is at risk? If so, what could replace it—a gold-backed system, or something else entirely?

Doug Casey: There’s no question that the dollar’s reserve status is at risk.

Governments recognize each other’s fiat currencies for what they are: the unbacked liabilities of bankrupt entities. And most world governments are, in point of fact, bankrupt.

That’s most dangerously the case of the US dollar, the world’s long-time numeraire. Why should the Chinese, or any other government, hold the currency of its adversary? The currency might be blocked, as it was for the Russians. It will certainly be inflated. Or might suffer an outright default. Governments don’t trust each other, and they certainly don’t want to use the unbacked liability of an often antagonistic or even hostile government.

The major export of the US since about 1980 has not been computers, or Boeings, or soybeans. It’s been dollars. Every year, the trade deficit—the export of dollars—runs in the hundreds of billions. More recently, close to a trillion dollars per year. Those dollars outside of the US amount to liabilities of the US.

If foreigners want to dump those dollars, they’re going to come back home to the US to buy real goods—shares of businesses, buildings, farmlands, what have you. When that happens, the amount of real wealth owned by Americans will plummet, and the amount of fiat dollars inside the country will explode.

A digital currency will aggravate the situation. At that point, money becomes just a computer digit controlled by the central authorities. If you think the situation is unstable now, it’s going to become much more unstable as the world’s governments go to centrally controlled digital currencies.

International Man: You’ve often said, “The dollar is an IOU nothing.” Has that moment of reckoning finally arrived?

Doug Casey: Just because something is inevitable doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily imminent. But at this point, the government has really gone on tilt. It’s completely out of control. I believe we’re now at the edge of the precipice.

DOGE was just a bit of electioneering and marketing on the part of Trump. The interest on the $38 trillion acknowledged US debt will keep rising along with the debt itself. Regardless of what may happen with interest rates over the next year or two, in the long run, they’re headed much, much higher.

Military spending isn’t being cut. As we get deeper into World War III, it will go much higher. Welfare payments are the same. As the standard of living goes down, people will demand more from the government.

The situation is completely out of control. The US has become quite unstable. I was talking about a civil war ten years ago; now they’re making movies about the prospect.

International Man: Some investors think gold’s rally is overextended. You’ve said this is “only the beginning.” What makes you so confident?

Doug Casey: As near as we can tell, there are about 7 billion ounces of gold in existence. The amount of gold is increasing by about 100 million or so ounces per year, or roughly one and a half percent per year.

There are 8 billion people in the world. If the amount of gold in the world were to be distributed equally among them, each person would only have three-quarters of an ounce of gold. As for the number of dollars in the world today—of course, it’s very hard to say how many dollars there really are, depending on which measure of the money supply we’re talking about (M1, M3, and others), or just dollars that are outside the US—in order to back the dollar with a fixed amount of gold and make it redeemable with a fixed number of dollars, it’s probably going to take $25,000 to $30,000 per ounce of gold at present.

In fact, I suspect the next ploy of the government will be to raise the gold price to $15,000 or $20,000 an ounce, much as Roosevelt did in 1934, or Nixon in 1971. I don’t doubt that they’ll package a lot of BLM land into publicly traded stock and sell it, as well.

In the recent past, I’ve said that gold was reasonably priced relative to the price of food, clothes, and houses. It’s about where it “should be.” However, if the dollar is to be once again redeemable with a fixed amount of gold, it has to be much, much higher.

I don’t think we have to worry about the gold market being overextended. The average person doesn’t think about gold, doesn’t own much of it, and is uninterested in it. The public is completely uninvolved in gold. One piece of evidence for this is that the premium of gold coins above the bullion price is still close to the lowest levels in history. But moving up.

Brief story: yes, gold has gone up a lot, but we’re far from a mania in it—and it’s going higher.

International Man: For the average investor, how should one position themselves in this environment—physical gold, mining stocks, royalties, or something else?

Doug Casey: Your savings should be in physical gold, preferably smaller gold coins in your own possession. That should be your foundation for savings—cash gold. Secondarily, you should have a good supply of gold stored reliably offshore.

The two things that we recommend are SWP in the Cayman Islands and the Perth Mint. There are others. But foreign exchange controls around the world are on the way, so it’s very important that you get a significant amount of your wealth outside of your home country.

Mining stocks, relative to the price of gold—and relative to the price of other securities from every point of view—are very cheap right now. With all-in sustaining costs of mining about $1,500 per ounce industry-wide, and gold at around $4,000, companies that are in production are coining money.

Although the market doesn’t seem to care, for reasons we’ve talked about in the past. Mining stocks are speculations that should play a major role in your portfolio. The safest way to capitalize on the success of mining stocks is through gold royalty companies, which are typically paid 0.5%, 1%, or even 2% of every ounce of gold that comes out of the ground—whether the company is profitable or not.

International Man: If we’re truly entering what you’ve called “The Greater Depression,” what role does gold play in surviving—and even profiting from it?

Doug Casey: The whole world is over-financialized today. That’s indicated by the gigantic amount of debt that all entities carry. The average American is buried under mortgage debt, credit card debt, automobile debt, and student debt. Local, state, and federal governments all owe huge amounts of money. The same is true for many corporations.

Most of the money that’s been made for the last couple of generations has been in the financial markets, not by creating real industry and real wealth the way Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller did. Notwithstanding the great advances in high tech, the real money is in financial engineering, not electrical, civil, or chemical engineering.

The whole world is over-financialized. You want to own real wealth as opposed to paper wealth.

As far as the Greater Depression is concerned, yes, we’ve been slip-sliding downhill for the last 50 years. It’s been disguised by increases in technology and by taking on more debt, which amounts to consuming capital from the past and mortgaging the future.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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A couple of recent stories relating to the utter bestiality of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians have exposed the criminality of successive US governments in supporting the Jewish state no matter what it does. Observers of the lopsided relationship understand very clearly that Israel’s lobby in the United States, backed up by Jewish billionaires who are willing to spend whatever it takes to corrupt the political system and buy up the media, has succeeded in making Washington a totally controlled client state manipulated by extreme war criminals like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is rewarded by the near complete loyalty of Congress and the White House. The one sided relationship dominates both Republicans and Democrats and has been most evident in the Presidencies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who have chosen to ignore the reality of the Israeli slaughter of some hundreds of thousands of Palestinians using US weapons and Washington’s political protection in international fora. For what it is worth, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump has spoken out effectively on the murder and torture of the Palestinians by Israel.

The irony of it all is that Washington’s subjugation by Israel, far from being politically neutral, does terrible damage to the United States, both in terms of actual costs and the fact that the US is now reviled by much of the world as it continues to protect and enable Israel as it continues it program to turn the Middle East into a region that it dominates by dint of perpetual slaughter of the original inhabitants. Beyond that, one of the costs of loving Israel so much is the lack of any consequences when it comes to protection of American citizens who find themselves on the wrong end of the Israeli police state. Citizens like Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by an Israeli Army sniper in May 2022, but the US Embassy did nothing to establish responsibility for the murder, leaving it up the Israeli judiciary, which did nothing and may even have rewarded the soldier. Abu Akleh was one of 276 journalists targeted deliberately and murdered by Israeli forces in the past two years.

Going back a bit, the most egregious case of the US abandoning its own to Israeli connivance was the attack on the USS Liberty intelligence ship in international waters in June 1967. Thirty-four crewmen were killed and 174 more wounded and the clear intention was to sink the ship using planes and torpedo boats with their identifications covered to blame the incident on the Egyptians. A cover-up engineered by President Lyndon B Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara followed and repeated attempts by surviving crewmen to open an investigation have been blocked in Congress, most notably by Senator John McCain, whose father was the Admiral that chaired the inquiry held in Malta that decided that it was all a case of mistaken identity, which was a lie. LBJ called back planes that were sent to aid the stricken Liberty and was heard to explain that he would be satisfied if all those “sailor-boys were to go to the bottom of the sea” rather than offend “our good friend” Israel.

Inevitably, stories about Israeli inhumanity are either completely suppressed or substantially modified to make the Jews involved appear to be victims of whatever takes place, what one might refer to as the “holocaust syndrome,” but sometimes the reality is just so horrific, including systematic torture and even the removal of organs from prisoners, that it manages to leak through the damage control and censorship.

Last week, there surfaced a bizarre tale involving the Chief Legal Officer of the Israeli Army, a Major General named Yifat Tomer-Yeralshami. Yeralshami is a woman who was highly respected by her peers though it should be assumed that she was constrained by the policies towards the Israel Defense Force (IDF) as dictated by the Netanyahu regime and its extreme right winger chief National Security officer Itamar Ben-Gvir. Tomer-Yeralshami had been involved in the case of a Palestinian prisoner who had been serially raped in the notorious Sde Terman prison.

Terman was the best known IDF torture center. In October 2024, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel issued a report examining the treatment of thousands of Palestinian detainees after October 7th, 2023. In the report, the commission determined that detainees from Gaza held in Israeli military prisons, including children, were “subjected to widespread and systematic abuse, physical and psychological violence, and sexual and gender-based violence amounting to the war crime and crime against humanity of torture and the war crime of rape and other forms of sexual violence.”

Israeli soldiers were reportedly creative in their rape techniques. Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish-American orthopedic surgeon who was a volunteer medic in Gaza last year, reported how one Palestinian prisoner was treated. “He was raped by female IDF soldiers with a zucchini placed up his rectum and the zucchini was soaked in pork blood” the pork used specifically because pork is forbidden to Muslims, as it is to Jews.

The rape in question being investigated by Tomer-Yeralshami had been carried out by five Israeli soldiers. The incident occurred in July 2024 and the soldiers had been detained after the Palestinian proved to be so seriously injured that he had to be hospitalized. The IDF soldiers raped the man so violently, using in one instance a knife in his rectum, that his intestines exploded and his rectum was ruptured. He has undergone 20 surgeries since what happened to him. The facility where the soldiers were detained was subsequently stormed by a group consisting mostly of Israeli armed settlers led by Ben-Gvir and the men were later released and have reportedly been waiting on a military hearing to determine their possible guilt. They not only claim to be innocent, they believe that they should be rewarded and have even appeared before the press wearing black uniforms and head covers to make their case that comes down to soldiers not being held accountable if they torture or kill Palestinian prisoners.

In this case, the story of the savage rape in the prison would have died in an Israel court but for the fact that the rape was videoed and was leaked to Israeli news network Channel 12, apparently by the General and possibly others in her office, and the story subsequently developed that she had resigned her commission and disappeared. In her resignation letter, she apparently admitted that she had approved the release of a video revealing institutionalized acts of torture committed by the IDF against Palestinian prisoners of war that took place in the Sde Teiman detention camp in July 2024.

Shortly after the footage was aired, Tomer-Yerushalmi was placed on forced leave by the Israeli Defense Ministry after a criminal probe was launched to investigate the origins of the leak. In the months that followed her being placed on leave, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that Tomer-Yerushalmi would not be permitted to return to her post, forcing her resignation. In her resignation letter, Tomer-Yerushalmi stated that “To my regret, this basic understanding—that there are acts to which even the most vile of detainees must not be subjected—is no longer convincing to all,” a tacit admission of the institutionalized abuse sanctioned by Israeli officials within the IDF and Netanyahu government.

Tomer-Yerushalmi disappeared from sight and it was subsequently rumored that she might have killed herself, but she was found subsequently and arrested. The Netanyahu government and its right-wing supporters have tried to benefit from the developing story, claiming that the general’s arrest confirms that the soldiers were “innocent” and that the leaked videos were “fake.” However, the trial of the soldiers is reportedly proceeding, and the videos have been confirmed as genuine. General Tomer-Yerushalmi is now being accused of “treason” for her role in the leak.

This affair could have been a classic case of silencing the messenger who was bearing bad news but it has become clear that the General was not operating alone. The Israeli police claim to possess WhatsApp group communications involving other high-ranking officers connected to the leaked information. The Israeli press has cited eight top officers within the IDF prosecution command headed by Tomer-Yerushalmi. The video and related documents were reportedly actually physically leaked by a junior officer within the military prosecutor’s command, who also confessed to his behavior before the Israeli General Security Organization (Shabak). Some believe that it is unconceivable that General Tomer-Yerushalmi would have made the decision to expose the IDF’s conduct without a green light from up above. Who could give such a green light? Her direct commander, the Israeli chief of staff (Herzi Halevi), or even the defense minister (Yoav Gallant), which would place then at odds with Netanyahu.

Some suspect that the actual objective by the army high command may have been to prove that Israel “has the legal means to prosecute its war criminals”—a message to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague that it should stay away from the case. If this theory is correct, General Tomer-Yerushalmi and those who authorized her were driven by “patriotic sentiments” to protect the behavior of the army soldiers. It may have been an attempt to defuse possible court cases by presenting a false image of ethical accountability. In short, the image of “ethical behavior” replaces any actual concern for ethical conduct, something that is absent from the nation that calls itself the Jewish State with an army that calls itself the world’s “most moral.”

Predictably, as a response to Tomer-Yerushalmi’s admitting she was behind the release of the video from Sde Teiman, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to shift the blame. He characterized the leak as the worst public relations disaster that Israel has ever faced saying “It is perhaps the most serious public relations attack Israel has experienced since its founding—I cannot recall one so concentrated and intense. This requires an independent and impartial inquiry, and I expect that such an investigation will indeed take place.” What Netanyahu was really demanding was a cover-up of what crimes have become systematic in Israel’s torture and killing of Palestinian prisoners.

Another story, equally hideous, concerns the activity of the so-called Israeli settlers, who have been armed by the Israeli government and have been systematically attacking the Palestinians remaining on the West Bank by beating and even killing the Arabs and destroying their livelihoods. It was again a case of a video having surfaced that showed a raid on a Palestinian farm, revealing how the settlers raided a barn containing the farmer’s sheep and lambs. Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone describes the scene and what it means: “Israeli settlers were filmed torturing lambs which belonged to Palestinians in the West Bank. Gouged their eyes out. Smashed them with cinder blocks. Beat them to death in front of their mothers. Lambs. It’s not the most evil thing the Israelis have done. Not by a long shot. Hell, all of human civilization subjects animals to cruel abuses every minute of every day through the horrors of factory farming. But this particular incident shines a special sort of light into exactly what’s going on behind Israeli eyes over there in that sadistic society. Think about the hatred and savagery you’d need to summon up within yourself to gouge the eyes out of a living baby sheep. Think about the kind of person you’d have to become to do something like that to an innocent creature. Those lambs didn’t know they were Palestinian. They didn’t know anything about Hamas or October 7 or the Nazi Holocaust, or any of the other reasons Israelis generally cite for their abuses of human beings. They were just sitting there, doing absolutely nothing that could possibly be construed as harmful by even the most talented hasbarist. And those settlers went in there and inflicted completely gratuitous suffering upon them. This, to me anyway, just says so much about the level of vitriolic hatred by which the state of Israel is sustained. It’s baked in to the way the whole state.”

I rest my case about what is wrong with Israel to include its criminal relationship with the United States. So Mr. Trump, I already know you hate animals just as you hate and seek revenge on anyone who does not agree with you, but what is your response to the murders of children and rapes of prisoners as well as the torture of baby creatures who have done no wrong? Just what is your justification for making the United States a partner and even enabler in the crimes?

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post Torture and Rape Are All in a Day’s Work for Israel’s Defenders appeared first on LewRockwell.

Medicine is strongly biased towards adopting biochemical models of disease as this facilitates costly therapeutics being developed for each disease and hence sustains the medical industry. Unfortunately, in many cases, the biochemical approach to disease, at best can manage symptoms, and as a result, many conditions remain “incurable” while non-patentable natural therapies that can cure them languish in obscurity.

That’s why, despite spending an ever increasing amount of money on Alzheimer’s research (e.g., the NIH spent 2.9 billion in 2020 and 3.9 billion in 2024), we’ve still failed to make any real progress on the disease. This is particularly remarkable given the vast costs to the country (e.g., last year Alzheimer’s was estimated to cost the United States 360 billion dollars) and the even greater social costs that accompany it.

The Amyloid Juggernaut

In 1906, plaques (of amyloid) in the brain were identified as the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. As the years have gone by, the majority of research for treating Alzheimer’s disease has been targeted at eliminating these plaques. Unfortunately, to quote a 2022 article:

Hundreds of clinical trials of amyloid-targeted therapies have yielded few glimmers of promise, however; only the underwhelming Aduhelm has gained FDA approval. Yet Aβ still dominates research and drug development. NIH spent about $1.6 billion on projects that mention amyloids in this fiscal year, about half its overall Alzheimer’s funding. Scientists who advance other potential Alzheimer’s causes, such as immune dysfunction or inflammation, complain they have been sidelined by the “amyloid mafia.” Forsayeth says the amyloid hypothesis became “the scientific equivalent of the Ptolemaic model of the Solar System,” in which the Sun and planets rotate around Earth.

Note: frequently, when a faulty paradigm fails to explain the disease it claims to address, rather than admit the paradigm is flawed, its adherents will label each conflicting piece of evidence as a paradox (e.g., the French “paradox” disproves the notion cholesterol causes heart disease4) and dig deeper and deeper until they can find something to continue propping up their ideology (e.g., cholesterol reducing statins provide almost no benefit for heart disease while having significant side effects yet continue being pushed on patients).

The consistent failure of the amyloid model to cure Alzheimer’s gradually invited increasing skepticism towards it, which resulted in more and more scientists studying alternative models of the disease. Before long, they found other factors played a far more significant role in causing the disease (e.g., chronic inflammation), and by 2006, this perspective appeared poised to change the direction of Alzheimer’s research.

In response, the amyloid proponents pivoted to defending their failed hypothesis was due not to amyloid clumps, bath rather toxic parts of it (oligomers) and a Nature 2006 paper appeared which identified a previously unknown toxic oligomer, Aβ*56, and provided proof that it caused dementia in rats.

This paper cemented both the amyloid beta and toxic oligomer hypotheses (as it provided the proof many adherents to the theory had been waiting for) and rapidly became one of the most cited works in the field of Alzheimer’s research. Its authors rose to academic stardom, produced further papers validating their initial hypothesis, and billions more were invested by both the NIH and the pharmaceutical industry in research of the amyloid and toxic oligomer hypothesis.

It should be noted that some were skeptical of their findings and likewise were unable to replicate this data, but rarely had a voice in the debate:

The spotty evidence that Aβ*56 plays a role in Alzheimer’s had [long] raised eyebrows. Wilcock has long doubted studies that claim to use “purified” Aβ*56. Such oligomers are notoriously unstable, converting to other oligomer types spontaneously. Multiple types can be present in a sample even after purification efforts, making it hard to say any cognitive effects are due to Aβ*56 alone, she notes—assuming it exists. In fact, Wilcock and others say, several labs have tried and failed to find Aβ*56, although few have published those findings. Journals are often uninterested in negative results, and researchers can be reluctant to contradict a famous investigator.

The Amyloid Scandal

At the end of 2021, a neuroscientist physician was hired by investors to evaluate an experimental Alzheimer’s drug and discovered signs that its data consisted of doctored Western Blots (and therefore erroneous assessments of what oligomers were present within research subjects’ brains). As he explored the topic further, he discovered other papers within the Alzheimer’s literature had been flagged for containing doctored Western Blots.
Note: Western blots, used to test for proteins, are one of the few easily detectable forms of research fraud (e.g., we discovered Pfizer submitted fake Western blots to regulators to “prove” their vaccine worked). Regrettably, far more undetectable fraud exists throughout the scientific literature (e.g., independent researchers comparing regulatory submissions discovered Pfizer also submitted doctored data on where the COVID vaccine is distributed in the body).

Before long, the neuroscientist noticed three of those suspect papers had been published by the same author and decided to investigate the author’s other publications. This led him to the seminal 2006 Alzheimer’s publication, which contained clear signs of fraud.

As investigation then uncovered 20 doctored papers written by the author, 10 of which pertained to Aβ*56 (along with a co-researcher attesting to earlier scientific misconduct by the author).

The Amyloid Industry

One of the remarkable things about this monumental fraud was how little was done about it. For example, the NIH was notified in January 2022, yet in May 2022, beyond nothing being done, the NIH gave the suspect researcher a coveted $764,792 research grant (signed off by another one of the authors of the 2006 paper).

In July 2022, Science published an article exposing the incident and the clear fraud that had occurred. Despite this, the researcher was allowed to remain in his position as a tenured medical school professor. It was not until June 2024 that the 2006 article was retracted at the request of the authors—all of whom denied being at fault and insisted the doctored images had not affected the article’s conclusions. Eventually, on January 29, 2025, during his confirmation hearing, RFK cited the paper as an example of the institutional fraud and wasted tax dollars within the NIH, and a few days later, the suspect researcher announced his resignation from the medical school professorship (while still maintaining his innocence).

This odd behavior (e.g., the medical field continues to insist the proven fraud has not disproven the Amyloid hypothesis) likely results from how much money is at stake—beyond the research dollars, roughly 7 million adults have Alzheimer’s—equating to hundreds of billions in potential (Medicare funded) sales each year.

The Failed Amyloid Drugs

Recently, a monoclonal antibody that made immune cells target amyloid demonstrated limited success in treating Alzheimer’s—which was embraced as revolutionary by the medical community, the pharmaceutical industry, and drug regulators. In turn, the first new drug received accelerated approval (which the FDA proudly announced). The second then received a quiet backdoor approval (due to the immense controversy surrounding the first), and the third was partially approved a year and a half later.

Each year, JP Morgan (Chase Bank) hosts a private conference for pharmaceutical investors that sets the tone for the entire industry. In 2023, its focus (covered in detail here) was on the incredible profitability of the new Alzheimer’s drugs and the GLP-1s like Ozempic (which the FDA has also relentlessly promoted). Most remarkably, the (widely viewed as corrupt) FDA commissioner was a keynote speaker, and a few days before the conference, had enacted the second backdoor approval.

However, despite the rosy pictures painted around the drugs (which each attacked different aspects of amyloids), they were highly controversial as:

• The FDA’s independent advisory panel, in a very unusual move, voted 10-0 (with one abstaining) against approving Aduhelm, the first amyloid drug (which targeted amyloid plaques), but the FDA approved it anyways. In a highly unprecedented move, three of the advisors then resigned, calling it “probably the worst drug approval decision in recent U.S. history.”

• That drug was priced at $56,000 a year—making it sufficient to bankrupt Medicare, (which attracted a Congressional investigation).

• Brain swelling or brain bleeding was found in 41% of patients enrolled in its studies. Additionally, headaches (including migraines and occipital neuralgia), falls, diarrhea, confusion, and delirium were also notably elevated compared to placebo.

• No improvement in Alzheimer’s was noted; rather one analysis found it slowed the progression of Alzheimer’s by 20% (although this could have been a protocol artifact rather than a real effect).

The second monoclonal antibody (which targeted amyloid precursors) had a somewhat better risk benefit profile (only 21% experienced brain bleeding and swelling due to reduced targeting of stable amyloid plaques), and 26.4% reduction in the progression of Alzheimer’s was detected in the trail (which for context, translated to a 0.45 reduction on a scale where a reduction of at least 1-2 points is needed to create an impact which is in anyway meaningful for a patient).

The third monoclonal (which targeted amyloid plaques thought to be more pathologic) was also contested as it caused 36.8% of recipients to develop brain bleeding or swelling, like the other amyloid medications, frequently caused headaches and infusion reactions (e.g., nausea, vomiting, changes in blood pressure, hypersensitive reactions or anaphylaxis) and there were reasons to suspect the trial had greatly overstated its minimal benefits.

Remarkably, despite widespread protest against the third drug, the FDA’s new advisory panel voted unanimously in favor of it, even though it had a very similar mechanism, efficacy, and toxicity to the previously unanimously rejected amyloid drug. It should therefore come as no surprise that, when the British Medical Journal conducted an independent investigation, it found that, within publicly available databases, 9 out of 9 (assessable) members of the advisory committee had significant financial conflicts of interest.

Fortunately, despite the aggressive promotion of amyloid drugs and the industry’s best attempts to promote the sector, the market somewhat recognized how bad they were. The first drug had its price halved (then was withdrawn as no one wanted it—making around 5 million dollars total), while the other two have had very modest sales (e.g., 290 million for the most popular one).

Read the Whole Article

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US President Donald Trump presented the agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping as a great success. The United States will reduce tariffs on Chinese imports by 10 percentage points to 47%. In return, China will resume purchasing US soybeans and postpone restrictions on rare earth exports to the US for one year. In reality, this is a limited and precarious trade truce.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made a significant statement before Xi Jinping’s meeting with Donald Trump. Wang Yi warned that ‘a multipolar world is coming,’ urging an end to ‘the politicisation of economic and trade issues, the artificial fragmentation of global markets, and the use of trade wars and tariff battles.’

‘Frequent withdrawal from agreements and failure to honour commitments, while enthusiastically forming blocs and cliques, has subjected multilateralism to unprecedented challenges,’ Wang said, without naming specific countries but clearly referring to the United States.

During the meeting, President Xi Jinping emphasised:

‘China and the United States should be partners and friends. This is what history has taught us and what reality requires.’

The position of the United States is demonstrated by the fact that, a few minutes before the meeting with Xi Jinping, Trump declared that he had ordered the Pentagon to begin nuclear weapons testing ‘on an equal footing’ with China and Russia. In reality, China has not tested nuclear weapons since 1996 and Russia has not tested them since 1990. And although the United States has never ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits the detonation of such weapons, past presidents complied with the Treaty.

On Truth Social, Trump claimed that, in terms of nuclear weapons, Beijing currently ranks third compared to Russia and the United States, but that “within five years, it will be on par with us”. However, Trump failed to mention that China has maintained a limited nuclear arsenal for decades, consisting mostly of medium-range defensive weapons incapable of reaching the United States. Furthermore, it only began producing long-range nuclear weapons after the United States deployed nuclear weapons close to its territory.

At the same time, Trump gave South Korea the green light to build a nuclear-powered submarine, which could be armed with nuclear missiles. The submarine will be built in the United States at a shipyard purchased by a South Korean company in 2024. Australia, through the AUKUS agreement with the United States and Britain, will also be able to acquire nuclear attack submarines clearly directed against China and Russia. In Europe, Ukraine is receiving, through NATO under US command, weapons with ever-increasing range capable of striking targets deep inside Russian territory. Before long, weapons of this type will be manufactured directly in Ukraine through “joint production” agreements with NATO defence industries. Ukraine will thus have weapons with dual conventional and nuclear capabilities directed against Russia.

It is no surprise that, in this situation, Russia is producing and testing new types of nuclear delivery systems: the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, capable of striking highly protected targets at any distance, and the Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater vehicle, capable of autonomously reaching enemy coasts and causing a radioactive tsunami with the underwater explosion of a high-powered nuclear warhead. China is also likely to be producing a weapon similar to the Russian Poseidon.

This article was originally published in Italian on Grandangolo, Byoblu TV.

The post The Policy of Nuclear Gunships. The U.S. War Department Begins Nuclear Weapons Testing appeared first on LewRockwell.

With every Western country experiencing social collapse from a variety of unaddressed causes, such as the rapid loss of jobs to Artificial Intelligence, exhaustion of environmental and natural resources, feminization’s replacement of the male role with sentiment and destruction of the male/female relationship, the loss of integrity and moral behavior to money, and the aggression inherent in the Zionist Neoconservative doctrine of hegemony, I am going to skip writing for today’s posting another dire assessment of our multitude of unaddressed challenges. 

Instead, remembering my previous essay some time ago about English murder mysteries and the authors, I am returning for this morning’s posting to a civilized time in which all was in control.  In the 1920s and 1930s, Great Britain, despite Sir Edward Grey stupidly involving Britain in World War I, Britain was still a great power in control of the seas and international trade. The British pound was the world currency.  The American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, looked upon British power with envy.

Perhaps Wilkie Collins with his books The Moonstone and The Woman In White was the first English mystery novelist.  But it was Agatha Christie’s 66 murder mysteries, most solved not by the British police but by private detective Hercule Poirot and private citizen, Miss Marple.  With Agatha Christie you get a murder mystery, not a novel full of character development and psychological theories of crime. 

 In my view, Christie’s only rival is Dorothy Sayers.  Her sleuth, Lord Peter Whimsey, is one up on Christie’s super sleuths. Sayers only wrote a few murder mysteries before moving on to serious work. A couple are simply murder mysteries, but a love interest appears.  Lord Peter sees injustice in  the case of Harriet Vane, an Oxford University educated woman living  in sin with a disreputable character who is murdered, for which Harriet is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death by hanging. Lord Peter takes up her case, proves her innocence, secures her release and spends five years over, if memory serves, two books, until she finally accepts him to the disgust of his sister-in-law the Duchess of Denver.  

Lord Peter, the second son of the Duke of Denver, the richest aristocrat in Britain, is rich by his own ability.  Lord Peter is a favorite of the Foreign Office and is sent everywhere in the world to maintain the British position.  He is the most desirable batchelor in the realm, and he marries what is perceived as an Oxford educated slut.  Remember, this was a century ago before female sexual liberation.

I have always been puzzled by accounts of male promiscuity.  Sexual intercourse between heterosexuals requires a male and a female.  If only males are libertines, who do they have affairs with?

But to get back on track. Once Harriet Vane appears, Sayers’ murder mysteries become also the development of the relationship between Lord Peter and Harriet.  And more subject matter enters.  Whey Sayers places a murder in an advertising, or perhaps it was a publishing, corporation, she first goes to the trouble of learning how these businesses operate.  In what I think is her mystery masterpiece, The Nine Tailors, she first masters the art of bell ringing.  So, a Sayers mystery can be more rewarding that a Christie mystery as it is a richer tale, not just a murder mystery.

My delight in the books is not the murders.  Indeed, I can reread many times Christe’s mysteries, because I don’t remember the plots.  Wondering about my memory, I realized that I don’t read the books for the mysteries.  I read them in order to escape current reality into a civilize time.  

One wonders if the picture of police behavior in the mystery novels is correct.  I assume it is, because the writers are addressing audiences in their own time and cannot present them with a fantasy.  The police are very restrained not only by their own behavior but by what the suspects will accept from the police. Politeness and respect for privacy rule.  Police have to be very careful in their questioning not to be impertinent. When have you last heard that word used?  Do you know what it means?  It means not showing proper respect. The police do not merely want a suspect with which, guilty or innocent, to close the case.  The police only want the one who is guilty. Today they could not care less.  They just want cases closed. The prosecutor just wants another conviction. The judge just wants a clear docket.

It is so different from today when suspects are browbeat both by their attorney and by the prosecutor to accept a plea bargain, whether innocent or guilty, that quickly disposes of the case, gives the prosecutor another conviction, and keeps the judge’s court docket free.

The limits on the police in the British mystery novels of the 1920s and 1930s are unbelievable today.  So is the behavior of characters in the story who refuse to help the police because it would require them to diverge a confidence.  Imagine the contrast with today when no one can wait to incriminate someone else.

My conclusion is that I wish I had been born long ago and had passed on before our uncivilized time.  Sitting at night reading before bed, I wonder at the civilized world that is lost to us.

The post The World That Was appeared first on LewRockwell.

Revolutions are funny things. They start out almost imperceptible. The final straw itself may be as inconsequential as a single voice in the crowd whose words unleash a tidal wave that sweeps aside the seemingly intractable old order forever.

Even as the cracks in the Eastern Bloc began to materialize in 1989, starting in June in Hungary, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s Romania seemed impervious to the winds of change. They maintained a cult-like grip on power aided by the notorious and ubiquitous Securitate, the secret police.

On 21 December 1989 Ceausescu decided that the best way to quell a bubbling cauldron of unrest in Transylvania over the past several weeks was to appear, himself, with his wife Elena, above Bucharest’s Palace Square. Workers were bussed in and given red banners to wave in support of the regime. It was to be a show of force that would solidify the existing order.

After all, no one would dare challenge Ceausescu to his face.

As he confidently approached the microphone from the balcony and began mechanically repeating the tired old slogans of communism, suddenly a voice broke through with a high pitched scream, followed by an increasing din. The discordant sounds of protest rendered Ceausescu speechless and confused.

That second, when the false edifice of his rule was punctured and the impossibility of his position exposed, communist rule died in Romania.

America’s foreign policy has been a lot like the rule of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Since President Reagan opened the door to the gang of “former” Trotskyites from New York who were hell bent on worldwide revolution while being ideologically driven by their absolute devotion to the state of Israel, US foreign policy has been dominated by an equivalent of Ceausescu’s Partidul Comunist Român.

Anyone who attempted to challenge the neocon dominance over US foreign policy was drummed out of society by the equivalent of Ceausescu’s Securitate. One by one, Pat Buchanan, Joseph Sobran, Sam Francis, the John Birch Society, Ron Paul, and any voice raised in opposition to neocon dominance over foreign policy was brutally attacked by the likes of William F. Buckley, Jr. and his minions of enforcers in the media and the think tanks, and the corridors of power and influence.

Trotsky is reputed – perhaps apocryphally – to have said that, “to oppose the state is to die a slow starvation,” and that is certainly true for any foreign policy analyst over the past 40-plus years who has spoken out against neocon dominance. No jobs, no publications, no way to be heard or even exist.

But suddenly that Berlin Wall has fallen.

Future history may record America’s “Ceausescu Moment” as November 6th, 2025.

The same mainstream/”alt” media and conservatism-industrial-complex that has refused to acknowledge Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s sharp turn against neocon, pro-Israel foreign policy have done their best to harness and re-direct the Charlie-less TPUSA back onto the foreign policy reservation. With a doubting Charlie conveniently gone, they assumed they could ascend the “Palace Square Bucharest” balcony, grab the microphone, and return America’s conservative youth to the “wisdom” of Bill Kristol, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Mark Levin, and the rest of the blood-soaked dinosaurs.

However our own “high-pitched scream” that deflated Ceausescu came on November 6th not from a Mamdani “communist,” or from an “America-hating,” Muslim, nor Hamas-devoted foreign student, nor tortured trans-genderist or even a generic leftist.

No, it came from a corn-fed, conservative, earnest, American student at Auburn University in Alabama with the slow drawl of our great country’s 250 year history. In other words, the epitome of the Red, White, and Blue that burns in the soul of every American patriot.

The young man approached the open microphone and addressed President Trump’s son Eric and his wife Laura – ambassadors of the President’s claim to be the most pro-Israel Administration in US history – with a respectful set of questions.

I’d like to ask about your father’s relationship with Israel. He’s taken over $230 million from pro-Israel groups. In the summer even though the US advised against it, Israel attacked Iran and the US still bombed on behalf of Israel…Israel has not been a good ally to the US since the 1960s when they bombed the USS Liberty.

The crowd of CONSERVATIVE young Americans erupted into wild applause.

Israel is a nation where Christians are constantly under attack… We talk about America first and defending Christians, but how can we do this if we align ourselves with a nation that does not do that itself?

At this point the applause among TPUSA’s conservative youth was deafening.

Deer-in-the-headlights Eric Trump does a Ceaucescu, repeating the slogans of the old order and hoping their magic will still quell the restive population.

You have a nation chanting ‘death to America’ every single day on the streets of Tehran. You have a nation that will develop a nuclear weapon and that will use that nuclear weapon.

These are standard Benjamin Netanyahu talking points from 30 years ago. Laura looked like Elena. Arranging her perfect hair as the crowd remained silent at Eric Trump’s well-rehearsed applause lines. Silence. They’ve heard it all before and they have done their own research and know that these are neocon lies.

Guys: Iran wanted to destroy our way of live they wanted to hurt us they wanted to inflict real pain.

Silence. They’ve done their own research.

Eric then repeats the absurd claim that his father solved eight wars (involving countries whose names he cannot pronounce) and the silence continued. The bumper sticker slogans no longer worked with Charlie Kirk’s kids just as Ceaucescu’s slogans no longer worked with a Romania sick to death with it’s subservience to a dying Communist bloc.

This is a genie that can no longer be put back into the bottle. Toothpaste out of the tube. The same social media harnessed early on by the US “regime change” operatives seeking to fulfil the neocon project has been captured by young American conservatives who are revolting against the destructive “Israel-first” party line of their boomer forebears and no underhanded sale of TikTok to pro-Israel fanatics will change the fact.

From this point on, like Ceaucescu, Trump’s people dare not address openly the number one youth movement of their ideological base. They dare not risk stop after stop being questioned by earnest young conservatives about America’s toxic and self-destructive supplication to the state of Israel. They will go back into Nicolae Ceaucescu’s bunker. Terrified of the very “America First” movement they have launched.

Student to Eric and Lara Trump at TPUSA event in Auburn: “I’d like to ask about your father’s relationship with Israel. He’s taken over $230m from pro-Israel groups… Israel hasn’t been a great ally to the US…they bombed the USS Liberty.”

*Crowd erupts in rapturous applause* pic.twitter.com/kDxXuO1Jbm

— Chris Menahan (@infolibnews) November 6, 2025

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post America’s ‘Ceausescu Moment’ appeared first on LewRockwell.