Lew Rockwell Institute

Peter recently appeared on the Land Development Podcast to lay out a simple case: inflation is the central problem for the economy, and the market is already signaling that through the surge in precious metals and commodity prices. He ties that trend to current policy choices — tariffs, deficit spending and energy misallocation — and warns those choices will raise costs for ordinary buyers and borrowers.

He starts by noting how the market has rewarded holders of foreign stocks and commodities this year, including precious metals, and how that strength is showing up in client portfolios:

Of course, gold and silver stocks, a lot of silver stocks have tripled, quadrupled this year. Gold stocks have more than doubled. So it’s probably the best year that I’ve had as far as returns for my clients. Even my non-gold stocks, you know, my standard portfolios are up over 40% on the year. So it’s a great year to be invested in foreign stocks, in precious metals, commodities in general, I think.

Peter reads those moves in the precious metals complex as a direct signal about inflation — not as a speculative fad but as the market’s way of pricing in currency debasement. He points the finger at Washington’s policies, arguing that political promises to “get rid of inflation” collide with actions that create it:

I mean, gold is not almost $3,800 an ounce, because there’s not an inflation problem. Silver is not over 46, because we don’t have to worry about inflation. The precious metals are telling us that the thing that we should be worried most about is inflation. And that’s because that’s basically Donald Trump’s economic policy is to create inflation. Even though he campaigned on getting rid of inflation, his entire presidency is about making more inflation.

He explains why politicians tend to avoid the medicine that would actually cure inflation — the short, painful adjustments that markets require — and how that avoidance locks in worse long-term outcomes:

The reason he doesn’t want to actually solve the problems is because doing that brings about a severe recession that nobody can deny. It’s going to mean higher interest rates. It’s going to mean lower stock prices, lower real estate prices. A lot of companies are going to fail because they won’t be able to pay their debt. The government’s going to have to cut spending, including on entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and that’s going to anger a lot of voters.

Those policy choices have concrete effects for everyday purchases, not only for retirees or investors. Peter points to tariffs as a clear, immediate driver of higher costs in housing and construction materials, compounding inflation rather than solving anything:

If you buy a new home and you want some furniture, now there’s 30% extra tariffs on any of it that’s upholstered. So Trump keeps on slapping tariffs. We got them already on steel, on aluminum, and lumber. All the stuff that you need to build homes are not only more expensive because of the tariffs, but they’re going to be more expensive because of inflation, which is going to drive the cost of everything. So you’re not going to have a lot of new supply.

That makes the government’s recent tilt toward promoting cryptocurrencies even more baffling to Peter. He sees a political push to encourage retail buying of Bitcoin and other tokens as a kind of national-scale pump-and-dump that distracts from real investment in productivity, while wasting scarce energy resources that could serve AI development and data centers:

Now they’ve taken the Bitcoin pump and dump scheme and they’ve basically gone national with it where the government is doing the pumping. So the government is trying to help sucker people into buying Bitcoin or Ethereum or all these other you know alt coins … But it is very unfortunate that Trump is encouraging all this, because first of all I talked earlier about where’s the energy going to come from for AI. Well, we’re wasting a lot of energy mining all these tokens. So that’s one thing that we could give up.

This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.

The post Inflation Is the Threat appeared first on LewRockwell.

It was unexpected, but the advocates of generalized war, the Straussians, expelled from the governing bodies of the United States, have regrouped in intergovernmental organizations. To everyone’s surprise, they are present in the European Union, but especially in the United Nations and in the Contact Group on the Defense of Ukraine. Institutions dedicated to peace have been hijacked by the warmongers.

For nearly a year, President Donald Trump has been putting America back in order. He has reestablished the principles of equality before the law and merit-based promotion at the expense of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). He has slashed federal budgets for anything related to imperial spending and attempted to restore the military’s primary function: homeland defense.

At the same time, we all see how he is failing to achieve the peace he hoped for in Ukraine and Palestine. He is letting the Europeans fight not for Ukraine, but against Russia and Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition persisting in its program of a “Greater Israel,” that is, the annexation of its neighbors  [ 1 ] .

However, we fail to see the worst of it: the Straussians, who held the upper hand under George Bush Jr., Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, are still not defeated. They have retreated into two intergovernmental organizations: NATO and the UN.

Outside NATO, they have taken control of the Contact Group on the Defence of Ukraine (formerly the Ramstein Group), which, since 9 September, no longer meets alternately at the US military base in Ramstein and at NATO headquarters in Mons-Brussels, but now also in London.

They, along with Ukrainian intelligence, organized drone flights over Western and Northern European airports. They then pushed for the delivery of German Patriot missile batteries to Ukraine, after secretly organizing the transfer of the first batteries from Israel.

They are still the ones who falsified the reports of the UN General Secretariat on the meetings of the Security Council on 19 and 26 September  [ 2 ] . Contrary to these reports – which we were wrong to believe – the Security Council did not validate the return of sanctions against Iran. Moreover, it did not have the power to do so.

This summer, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom adopted a strange common position on the JCPoA, the nuclear agreement signed during the 5+1 negotiations with Iran. As a reminder, the United States led these negotiations ostensibly to end Iran’s military nuclear program and prevent the country from possessing an atomic bomb. After a round of discussions, the meetings were interrupted for a year while Washington and Tehran concluded a secret protocol about which we know nothing. Then the negotiations resumed and were immediately concluded by a treaty in Vienna. It is also important to remember that China and Russia, who participated in the negotiations, both attested that there had been no Iranian military nuclear program since 1988.

The JCPoA was validated by Security Council Resolution 2231 on July 20, 2015. As a result, the sanctions that the council had adopted against Iran were gradually lifted. However, by the following year, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany were questioning the agreement on the grounds that Iran was conducting research on missiles capable of delivering atomic bombs. Ultimately, on May 8, 2018, President Donald Trump (in his first term) decided to withdraw from the agreement on the grounds that it had not prevented Iran from increasing its military power in the Middle East. On September 19, 2020, Elliott Abrams, President Trump’s representative for Venezuela… and Iran, announced the reinstatement of US sanctions, allegedly by resorting to paragraph 11 of the resolution (” snapback mechanism  “). However, neither Washington, nor London, nor Paris, nor Berlin have ever attempted to resort to paragraph 36 of the JCPoA for the simple reason that they would have had to admit that they were wrong.

However, as Iran, China and Russia have been repeatedly saying for the past five years, the JCPoA was included in Resolution 2231. Therefore, it is not possible to activate paragraph 11 of the resolution without taking into account the commitments signed in the JCPoA  [ 3 ] . And these were initially violated by the Europeans and the United States. China stated: “The United States has re-imposed and continuously tightened unilateral sanctions against Iran and adopted maximum pressure measures. As a result, Iran has been unable to enjoy the economic benefits arising from the JCPOA and has been forced to no longer comply with part of its obligations under the JCPOA.”  [ 4 ] Under international law, there is no doubt that the mechanism of resuming sanctions must be considered a unilateral punishment against Iran and an unfair measure.

These legal considerations are not quibbles. Respect for them is essential to international law. There is a hierarchy of standards and one cannot apply a provision of a text without first applying that of a previous text which is linked to it  [ 5 ]

The fact that the UN administration falsified the minutes of two Security Council meetings, as evidenced by the verbatim transcripts of these meetings, leaves no room for doubt  [ 6 ] . This administration is no longer impartial, but is playing into the hands of the opponents of peace in the Middle East.

Do not imagine that the war supporters only control the UN press service. The day after the publication of the falsified summaries of the Security Council meetings, the General Secretariat drafted a “note verbale” (reference: DPPA/SCAD/SCA/4/25(1)) instituting sanctions against Iran as if they had been approved  [ 7 ] . Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia , the Russian Permanent Representative, almost choked. He immediately drafted a letter to the Secretary-General (reference S/2025/610) which he had distributed to the Security Council  [ 8 ] .

We are going through a situation where the General Secretariat, abandoning the impartiality of its function and the principles of international law, has aligned itself with the legal interpretation of two states, permanent members of the council, France and the United Kingdom.

We remember that in 2016, during the war against Syria, the number 2 of the UN, the American Jeffrey Feltman, and his assistant, the German Volker Perthes, had drafted in their office in New York not a peace plan, but a plan for the capitulation of Syria  [ 9 ] . I had commented on this document that I had analyzed for President Bashar al-Assad in my book Before Our Eyes . Taken aback by its content, most historians remained circumspect. The Syrian Arab Republic having been overthrown by the United Kingdom and Turkey. This secret document will be disclosed on the occasion of the publication of this book in German.

In 2016, the United Nations, formed in 1948 to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” was able, contrary to its official purpose, to act to overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic. It implemented the plan A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm [10]  , written by the Straussians for Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. It can therefore, once again, act for war.

This is likely what President Donald Trump was referring to in his speech to the 80th session of the General Assembly on September 23  [ 11 ] . In that speech, he did not criticize the UN in the name of “American exceptionalism”  [ 12 ] like other US presidents before him, but because it did not intervene in his peace efforts on different continents, in seven different conflicts.

We must understand what is happening today: the enemy is no longer Uncle Sam, it is still the Straussians  [ 13 ] , now within the United Nations and the Contact Group on the Defense of Ukraine. They still want to lead us towards generalized war. They now rely on the Israeli revisionist Zionists  [ 14 ] and the Ukrainian integral nationalists  [ 15 ] .

—

[ 1 ]  “  Netanyahu and Nazism  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , September 23, 2025.

[ 2 ]  ”  Security Council opposes continued easing of UN sanctions against Iran  ” and ”  Iranian nuclear: Security Council endorses return to UN sanctions against Iran by rejecting extension of 2015 resolution 2231  “, United Nations.

[ 3 ]  “  Russian position on the British-German-French interpretation of the “snapback”  ”, Voltaire Network, August 29, 2025.

[ 4 ]  “  Chinese position on the British-German-French interpretation of the “snapback”  ”, Voltaire Network , August 19, 2025.

[ 5 ]  “  Iranian protest against accusations from the United States, France and Ukraine  ”, by Amir Saeid Iravani, Voltaire Network , 5 August 2025. “  Russia’s warning to the UN Secretary-General  ”, by Sergei Lavrov, Voltaire Network , 27 September 2025.

[ 6 ]  Minutes of the meetings of the Security Council of 19 and 26 September 2025. United Nations S/PV.10001 and S/PV.10006 .

[ 7 ]  “  General Secretariat reinstates sanctions against Iran  ”, UN (General Secretariat), Voltaire Network , September 27, 2025.

[ 8 ]  “  Russia asks the UN to withdraw its sanctions against Iran taken in violation of the decisions of the Security Council  ”, by Vassily Nebenzia, Voltaire Network , September 29, 2025.

[ 9 ]  “  Germany and the UN against Syria  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Al-Watan (Syria), Voltaire Network , January 28, 2016.

[ 10 ]  “  A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Kingdom of Israel  ,” by Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, Voltaire Network , July 1, 1996.

[ 11 ]  “  Excerpt from Donald Trump’s speech at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly  ”, by Donald Trump, Voltaire Network , September 23, 2025.

[ 12 ]  Proceedings of the conference organized by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy: American Exceptionalism and Human Rights , Michael Ignatieff, Princeton University Press (2005).

[ 13 ]  “  Vladimir Putin declares war on the Straussians  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , March 5, 2022. “  The Straussian coup in Israel  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , March 7, 2023.

[ 14 ]  “  The veil is torn: the hidden truths of Jabotinsky and Netanyahu  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , January 23, 2024.

[ 15 ]  “  Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists?  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , November 15, 2022.

The post Straussians Take Control of the United Nations and NATO appeared first on LewRockwell.

“When they came in the middle of the night, they terrorized the families that were living there. There were children who were without clothing, they were zip tied, taken outside at 3 o’clock in the morning. A senior resident, an American citizen with no warrants, was taken outside and handcuffed for three hours. Doors were blown off their hinges, walls were broken through, immigration agents coming from Black Hawk helicopters … This is America.”—Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson

When the government can label anyone or anything an enemy in order to wage war, we are all in danger.

That danger is no longer theoretical.

In the same breath that the administration touts lethal military strikes against Venezuelan boats in Caribbean waters, federal agents are conducting coordinated militarized raids on homes in Chicago, rappelling down on apartment buildings from Black Hawk helicopters, dragging families out of their homes, separating children from their parents, and using zip ties to immobilize them—even citizens.

The message—spoken and unspoken—is that the government is on a war footing everywhere: abroad, at sea, and now at our front doors.

This “everywhere war” depends on a simple redefinition: call it a war, and the target becomes a combatant. Call the city a battlespace, and its residents become suspects.

What the White House is doing overseas to vessels it deems part of a terrorist network (without any credible proof or due process), it is now mimicking at home with door-kicking raids, mass surveillance, and ideological watchlists.

With the stroke of a pen, President Trump continues to set aside the constitutional safeguards meant to restrain exactly this kind of mission creep, handing himself and his agencies sweeping authority to disregard the very principles on which this nation was founded—principles intended to serve as constitutional safeguards against tyranny, corruption, abuse and overreach put in place by America’s founding fathers.

Take National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), for example.

NSPM-7 directs a government-wide campaign to “investigate,” “disrupt,” and “dismantle” so-called domestic threats, ordering agencies to pool their data, resources, and operations in service of this agenda.

What makes NSPM-7 so dangerous is not only its declared purpose but its breadth and secrecy. There are no clearly defined standards, no meaningful transparency, and no external oversight. The public is told only that the government will protect them—by watching them.

Yet the danger is not only in what the government hides, but in what it chooses to see.

Even more troubling is the way “threats” are defined.

What is being sold as a campaign to disrupt left-wing conspiracies has expanded to include ideology, rhetoric, and belief.

Clearly, this is not just another surveillance program.

NSPM-7 is a framework for rebranding dissent as a danger to be quashed.

The government has a long history of using vague definitions of “extremism” to justify ever-expanding control. Once dissent is rebranded as danger, every act of resistance can be swept into the government’s dragnet.

Whether through counterinsurgency tactics abroad or domestic militarization at home, the pattern is the same: dissent is rebranded as danger, and those who resist government narratives become subjects of investigation.

NSPM-7 merely formalizes this cycle of suspicion.

It also resurrects an old playbook with new machinery—COINTELPRO, digitized and centralized. The tools may be different, but the logic—neutralize dissent—is the same, now scaled up with modern surveillance and stitched together under executive direction. From there, the apparatus needs only a pretext—a checklist of behaviors, viewpoints, associations and beliefs—to justify recasting citizens as suspects.

For years now, the government has flagged certain viewpoints and phrases as potential markers of extremism.

To that list, you can now add “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-American,” among others.

What this means, in practice, is that sermons, protests, blog posts, or donor lists could all be flagged as precursors to terrorism.

Under this policy, America’s founders would be terrorists. Jesus himself would be blacklisted as “anti-Christian” and “anti-capitalist.”

Anything can be declared a war, and anyone can be redefined as an enemy combatant.

The definition shifts with political convenience, but the result is always the same: unchecked executive power.

The president has already labeled drug cartels “unlawful combatants” and insists the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict.”

The raids in Chicago and the White House’s evolving attitude towards surveillance confirm what follows from that logic: this war footing is not confined to foreign shores. It is being turned inward—toward journalists, political opponents, and ordinary citizens whose beliefs or associations are deemed “anti-American.”

By anti-American, this administration really means anti-government, especially when Trump is calling the shots.

According to local news reports, agents arrived in Black Hawk helicopters, trucks and military-style vans, using power tools to breach perimeter fencing, destroying property to gain entry, and zip-tying family members—including children—as they were separated and escorted from the building.

The imagery is unmistakably martial: a domestic operation staged and executed with battlefield methods.

This “everywhere war” lands on a country already saturated with domestic watchlists and dragnet filters.

Federal agencies have leaned on banks and data brokers to run broad, warrantless screens of ordinary Americans’ purchases and movements for so-called “extremism” indicators—everything from buying religious materials to shopping at outdoor stores or booking travel—none of which are crimes.

The point isn’t probable cause; it’s preemptive suspicion.

At the same time, geofence warrants and other bulk location grabs have exposed who went where and with whom—scooping up churchgoers, hotel guests, and passersby across entire city blocks—while a sprawling web of fusion and “real-time crime” centers ingests camera feeds, social posts, license-plate scans, facial recognition, and predictive-policing scores to flag “persons of interest” who have done nothing wrong.

This is how dissent gets relabeled as danger: by surrounding every American with the presumption of guilt first, and constitutional safeguards—if any—much later.

When merely looking a certain way or talking a certain way or voting a certain way is enough to get you singled out and subjected to dehumanizing, cruel treatment by government agents, we are all in danger.

When the president of the United States and his agents threaten to “intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country”—i.e., those who don’t comply with the government’s demands, we are all in danger.

When the police state has a growing list of innocuous terms and behaviors that are suspicious enough to classify someone a terrorist, we are all in danger.

Today it is drug cartels. Yesterday it was immigrants. Tomorrow it could be journalists, political opponents, or ordinary citizens who express views deemed “anti-American.”

With NSPM-7, the Trump White House is not merely amplifying surveillance power—it is institutionalizing a regime in which thought, dissent, and ideological posture become the raw material for domestic investigations and suppression.

Make no mistake: this is an unprecedented escalation in the government’s war on privacy, dissent, and constitutional limits.

Consider the secret phone-records dragnet operated for more than a decade across multiple administrations—formerly “Hemisphere,” now “Data Analytical Services.”

By paying AT&T and exploiting privacy loopholes, the government has gained warrantless access to more than a trillion domestic call records a year, sweeping in not only suspects but their spouses, parents, children, friends—anyone they might have called. Training on the program has reportedly reached beyond drug agents to postal inspectors, prison officials, highway patrol, border units, and even the National Guard.

This is how a surveillance apparatus becomes a governing philosophy.

A presidency armed with NSPM-7 can fuse that kind of dragnet data with interagency “threat” frameworks and ideological watchlists, collapsing the wall between intelligence gathering and political control.

This is how tyrants justify tyranny in order to stay in power.

This is McCarthyism in a digital uniform.

Joseph McCarthy branded critics as Communist infiltrators. Donald Trump brands enemies as “combatants.”

The mechanism is the same: redefine dissent as treachery, then prosecute it under extraordinary powers.

For those old enough to have lived through the McCarthy era, there is a whiff of something in the air that reeks of the heightened paranoia, finger-pointing, fear-mongering, totalitarian tactics that were hallmarks of the 1950s.

Back then, it was the government—spearheaded by Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee—working in tandem with private corporations and individuals to blacklist Americans suspected of being communist sympathizers.

By the time the witch hunts drew to a close, thousands of individuals (the vast majority innocent of any crime) had been accused of communist ties, investigated, subpoenaed, and blacklisted. Careers were ruined, suicides followed, immigration tightened, and free expression chilled.

Seventy-five years later, the same vitriol, fear-mongering, and knee-jerk intolerance are once again being deployed against anyone who dares to think for themselves.

All the while, the American police state continues to march inexorably forward.

This is how fascism, which silences all dissenting views, prevails.

The silence is becoming deafening.

What is unfolding is the logical culmination of years of bipartisan betrayals of the Bill of Rights, from the Cold War to the digital panopticon

What once operated in the shadows of intelligence agencies is now openly coordinated from the Oval Office.

For decades, presidents of both parties have waged a steady assault on the Constitution. Each crisis—Cold War, 9/11, pandemic—became an excuse to concentrate more power in the executive branch.

The Patriot Act normalized warrantless surveillance. The FISA courts gave secret cover for dragnet spying. The NSA’s metadata sweeps exposed millions of Americans’ phone records. Predictive policing and geofencing warrants turned smartphones into government informants.

Each measure, we were told, was temporary, limited, and necessary. None were rolled back. Each became the foundation for the next expansion.

Against this backdrop, NSPM-7 emerges as the next, more dangerous iteration.

What distinguishes it is not merely scale but centralization: the government has moved from piecemeal encroachments to a bold, centralized framework in which the White House claims the prerogative to oversee surveillance across agencies with virtually no external checks.

Oversight by Congress and the courts is reduced to a fig leaf.

This is how liberties die: not with a sudden coup, but with the gradual normalization of extraordinary powers until they are no longer extraordinary at all.

It is the embodiment of James Madison’s nightmare: the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the same hands.

From red-flag seizures and “disinformation” hunts to mail imaging, biometric databases, license-plate grids, and a border-zone where two-thirds of Americans now live under looser search rules, the default has flipped: everyone is collectible, everyone is rankable, and everyone is interruptible.

That is how a free people become reduced to databits first and citizens as an afterthought.

The constitutional stakes couldn’t be higher.

The Fourth Amendment promises that people shall be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. That promise is empty if the President can authorize the government to sweep up data, monitor communications, and track movements without individualized warrants or probable cause.

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, association, and press. Those protections mean little if journalists fear their calls are tapped, if activists believe their networks are infiltrated, or if citizens censor themselves out of fear.

Separation of powers itself is on the line. By directing surveillance policy across government without legislative debate or judicial review, the White House is usurping authority never meant to rest in a single set of hands.

The risks are not hypothetical.

COINTELPRO targeted civil rights leaders and dissidents. The NSA’s bulk collection swept up millions of innocents. Fusion centers today track and analyze daily life.

What was once shocking—the idea that the government might listen in on every phone call or sift through every email—is now treated as the price of living in modern America.

If those older, less centralized programs were abused, why would NSPM-7—with broader reach and weaker oversight—be any different?

This is not speculation. We have seen this progression before.

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued reports on so-called “rightwing extremism” that swept broadly across the ideological spectrum. Economic anxiety, anti-immigration views, gun rights advocacy, even the military service of returning veterans were flagged as potential red flags for extremism.

The backlash was immediate, and DHS was forced to walk back the report, but the damage was done: dissenting views had been equated with dangerous plots.

That same playbook now risks becoming institutionalized under NSPM-7, which consolidates ideological profiling into a White House-directed mandate.

Imagine a journalist investigating corruption within the administration. Under NSPM-7, their sources and communications could be quietly monitored.

Imagine a nonprofit advocating for immigration reform. Its donors and staff could be swept into a database of “domestic threats.”

Imagine an attorney representing a controversial client. Even attorney-client privilege, once considered sacrosanct, could be eroded under a regime that treats dissent as subversion.

These scenarios are not alarmist—they are logical extensions of a system that places no real limits on executive discretion.

With NSPM-7, the line between foreign and domestic surveillance blurs entirely, and every citizen becomes a potential target of investigation.

Unless “we the people” demand accountability, NSPM-7 will become the new normal, entrenched in the machinery of government long after this administration has passed.

We must insist that surveillance be subject to the same constitutional limits that govern every other exercise of state power. We must demand transparency. We must pressure Congress to reclaim its role and courts to enforce constitutional duty. Most of all, we must cultivate a culture of resistance.

The Bill of Rights is not self-executing; it depends on the vigilance of the citizenry.

Civil liberties groups have already sounded the alarm, warning that NSPM-7 authorizes government-wide investigations into nonprofits, activists, and donors. Law scholars call it a dangerous overreach, a program as vague as it is menacing. Even law firms, normally cautious about critiquing executive power, are voicing concern about the risks it poses to attorney-client privilege.

When so many diverse voices converge in warning, we should pay attention.

And yet warnings alone will not stop this juggernaut, because NSPM-7 is not simply about technology or data collection. It is about power—and how fear is weaponized to consolidate that power.

If we are silent now, if we allow NSPM-7 to pass unchallenged, we will have no excuse when the surveillance state tightens its grip further.

When ideas themselves become a trigger for surveillance, the First Amendment loses.

America has entered dangerous territory.

A government that answers only to itself is not a constitutional republic—it is a rogue state. And NSPM-7, far from securing our freedoms, threatens to extinguish them.

Unchecked power is unconstitutional power.

As U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan cautioned in a recent ruling: “The government’s arguments paint with a broad brush and threaten to upend fundamental protections in our Constitution. But ours is not an autocracy; it is a system of checks and balances.”

Those checks only function if we insist on them.

With congressional Republicans having traded their constitutional autonomy for a place in Trump’s authoritarian regime, the courts—and the power of the people themselves—remain the last hope for reining in this runaway police state.

Cognizant that a unified populace poses the greatest threat to its power grabs, the Deep State—having co-opted Trump and the MAGA movement—is doing everything it can to keep the public polarized and fearful.

This has been a long game.

The contagion of fear that McCarthy once spread with the help of government agencies, corporations, and the power elite never truly died; it merely evolved.

NSPM-7 is its modern form, and Trump a modern-day McCarthy.

That anyone would support a politician whose every move has become antithetical to freedom is mind-boggling, but that is the power of politics as a drug for the masses.

That anyone who claims to want to “Make America Great Again” would sell out the country—and the Constitution—to do so says a lot.

That judges, journalists and activists are being threatened for daring to hold the line against the government’s overreaches and abuses speaks volumes.

One of Trump’s supporters sent an anonymous postcard to Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee assigned to a case challenging the Trump administration’s effort to deny full First Amendment protection to non-citizens lawfully present in the United States. The postcard taunted: “Trump has pardons and tanks… What do you have?”

Judge Young opened his opinion with a direct reply: “Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works in a specific case.”

The judge then proceeded to issue a blistering 161-page opinion that hinges on the language of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

“No law” means “no law,” concluded Judge Young,

In other words, the First Amendment is not negotiable.

Non-citizens lawfully present in the United States “have the same free speech rights as the rest of us.”

This is the constitutional answer to NSPM-7’s everywhere-war logic.

When a president declares anything a battlefield and anyone a combatant, the First Amendment answers back: No law means no law.

It is not a permission slip the government can offer only to favored citizens or compliant viewpoints. It is a boundary the government may not cross.

So the question returns to us, the ones Judge Young addressed: “What do we have, and will we keep it?”

We have a constitutional republic, and we keep it by holding fast to the Constitution.

We keep it by refusing the normalization of the Executive Branch’s extraordinary overreaches and power grabs.

We keep it by insisting that dissent is not danger, speech is not suspicion, and watchlists are not warrants.

We keep it by demanding congressional oversight with teeth, courts that enforce first principles, and communities that resist fear when fear is used to rule.

In closing, Judge Young quoted Ronald Reagan’s warning, issued in 1967: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation  away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.”

Reagan’s words would be flagged under NSPM-7, but it doesn’t change the challenge.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the hard work of defending freedom rests as always with “we the people.”

Let’s get to it.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post Trump’s Everywhere War: An Insurrection Against the Constitution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Recently I explained that “Presidents have little control over their governments.”

The same holds for monarchs and “authoritarians.” There are many examples. I will use one in front of me at this moment as I reread Harry Elmer Barnes’ book, The Genesis of the World War.

World War I was planned by the French President, who wanted to recover Alsace-Lorraine, which Napoleon 3rd lost to Prussia in 1871, and the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador to France, who wanted to take from Turkey the Dardanelles Straits that connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. Their conspiracy to ignite a European war in order to achieve these goals was put in place over several years. The French president, Poincare, and the Russians, Foreign Minister Sazonov and Russian Ambassador to France Izvolski, were not confident to take on Germany and Austria-Hungary without British support. Consequently, they brought the British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey into their plot, without the awareness of the British monarch.

Once the alliances and reassurances among the war plotters were in place, the Russians and French arranged, encouraged, the Serbian assassination of the Austrian Archduke, successor to the throne, and his wife, and if not responsible seized on the assassination to set in motion the wheels of war. Russia took the line that it had to protect Serbia from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire’s retaliation and used Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia as an excuse to order Russian mobilization.

The three monarchs–the British King, the Russian Tsar, and the German Kaiser were first cousins, all being Queen Victoria’s grandsons. On receipt of a telegram from his German cousin warning that a European catastrophe awaited them if war broke out, the Tsar ordered the Russian mobilization to be halted, convinced that the mobilization would not serve to intimidate Austria but to provoke European war. The Tsar’s ministers told him it was too late to countermand the general mobilization, and it proceeded.

The Tsar had been left out of the plot and at best was only vaguely aware of what was afoot. Once the light dawned on the Tsar, he found himself unable to control the military zeal in his government. In a telegram to his German cousin he confessed his helplessness before the militarists:

“I foresee that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure brought upon me, and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war. To try and avoid such a calamity as a European war, I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies (Austria) from going too far.” The Tsar was asking Germany to restrain Austria’s actions against Serbia, which the Kaiser tried to do.

The Kaiser’s response to his Russian cousin’s telegram was: “A confession of his own weakness, and an attempt put the responsibility on my shoulders.”

The war, which resulted from the inability of the British, German, Russian monarchs, and French people to prevent it, destroyed Europe. The war destroyed the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and left Russia in the hands of Lenin. The deaths World War I inflicted on France and the British wiped out a generation of leaders, eliminated aristocrats, who at least had a system of honor whether or not they abided by it, from leadership, and turned the leadership over to “jackets and sheep” to use the apt term of Giuseppe Di Lampedusa. Britain was left so financially weak that it was easy for US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to use WW II to push the British aside and assume for the US dollar the role and power of the country of the reserve currency.

Germany, whose Kaiser tried to prevent WWI was held responsible for it. Consequently, at Versailles, Germany in violation of US President Wilson’s guarantee, was faced with territorial loss and unpayable reparations, which caused WWII and left Europe with Soviet rule over Eastern Europe.

Today the world faces an even more absurd situation. Israel, a tiny country with no resources except American money and protection, has Western foreign policy, and apparently also Russia’s, in its tiny hands. For a quarter century Americans have fought to destroy Arab nations for the sake of expanding Greater Israel. American soldiers were told by their lying government that they were dying and being permanently disabled to protect America from a non-existent Muslim terrorism, when in fact they were dying for Greater Israel.

Now we are on a new road to our destruction in pursuit of the Zionist American neoconservatives’ agenda of a hegemonic America and Israel.  Where is the leadership to stop it?

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A few years ago I wrote a column titled “Be Angry,” in which I defended anger as a legitimate response to the many scandalous actions of Pope Francis. The proximate cause of the article was the appointment of then-Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández as head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith as well as some problematic papal selections for the Synod on Synodality, but those acts were just the latest in a string of scandals during the Francis pontificate. While I knew I was in danger of falling into the “angry trad” stereotype, I simply couldn’t pretend the last pontificate didn’t justify righteous anger.

I still think my anger was justified. Frankly, I’m still angry at the Francis pontificate: it was a disastrous reign that led many souls astray. Francis was akin to an abusive father, who attacked those most faithful to the Catholic religion. It’s understandable and reasonable for a child to be angry at a father who abuses him. As I wrote a few months after my “Be Angry” article, Francis had lost the benefit of the doubt. I also wrote that of course “we cannot let anger rule and control our hearts. Yes, be angry, but make sure it is a righteous anger.” Anger is a dangerous emotion, but it’s not always inappropriate.

Now we have a new Supreme Pontiff in Pope Leo XIV, and a lot of Catholics are starting to get angry with him, particularly after last week. And as weeks go, Leo did have a bad one. First, he seemed to suggest that Catholics who accept the perennial teaching of the Church regarding the permissibility of the death penalty were not “pro-life.” Then, he essentially endorsed Cardinal Cupich’s evil plan to give a lifetime achievement award to a pro-abortion Catholic politician. Finally, the pope presided over a weird environmental gathering in which he blessed a large block of ice. These actions produced many denunciations and much anger in Catholicland. Beyond last week’s actions, some Catholics are already assuming the worst regarding the pope’s first apostolic exhortation, due to be released on October 9, on the subject of the poor and social justice.

Although Leo clearly had some missteps last week (and will continue to have them in the future), I’m not angry and I don’t think other Catholics should be, either. Does this mean I’ve changed my attitude about anger since my previous column? Perhaps a bit, but moreso I believe the situations are not the same.

My columns on being angry and on Francis’ loss of the benefit of the doubt were published in 2023, a full ten years after Jorge Bergoglio’s election. He had a long history of undermining the faith and attacking the faithful. The catalog of problematic papal acts was large and growing. The potential for justified anger, in other words, had been perculating over a long period of time.

St. James in his epistle writes, “Know this, my beloved brethren. Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20, emphasis added). While justified and righteous at times, anger—particularly toward a pope—should not be the default reaction for a Catholic; it should be something that occurs only in extreme situations, and after serious contemplation and consideration. In the case of Pope Francis in 2023, even one who was very slow to anger realized that anger was justified. Pope Leo, on the other hand, has been Supreme Pontiff for only five months; being angry at him already is the definition of “quick to anger.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying one cannot be critical of certain words and acts of our Holy Father. But there’s a difference between careful, calm criticism and anger.

Why are people so quick to be angry at our new pope? Surely the society in which we live in party to blame. It promotes and platforms anger like never before. Social media in particular is fueled by anger: the algorithm rewards anger, so that’s what fills our timelines and influences our emotions.

Yet I don’t think that’s the main driver behind today’s anger at the new pope. I think it’s a hangover effect from Pope Francis. For twelve years the Catholic faithful endured a pope who was, as I’ve said, an abusive father; a man who palpably despised us and what we believe. Now we suddenly have a new father, and so all the emotional baggage from the last father, which is difficult to jettison, is transferred onto him. Any mistake Leo makes brings us back to our feelings toward Francis and projects those feelings onto Leo. This, however, is unfair and uncharitable toward our new Holy Father, and it violates the biblical command to be “slow to anger.”

I have no idea how the Leo pontificate will unfold, and it’s possible we’ll reach the point where it’s clearly justified to be angry at him. Yet Leo is not Francis. There’s no indication that he hates us or hates the traditions of the Church. To look for reasons to be angry with him is, first of all, counterproductive in addressing the crisis in the Church today, for it hides our legitimate criticisms behind a flurry of emotional outbursts. It’s also spiritually destructive to the soul who engages in unnecessary anger. What does it profit a man to fight for the Church and forfeit his soul?

We can lament papal mistakes, and we can urge the pope and other Church officials to more fully embrace the traditional faith as handed on to us, but let’s take a step back, remain calm in our criticisms, and carry on in the faith. Let’s follow the advice of St. James, to be “slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God.”

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

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