Lew Rockwell Institute

For the entirety of my life I have believed that without justice there is no security and no life.  Justice is more important than national defense, education which today works against justice, and even health.  Justice is based in love, which is why injustice is hated. The problem of our time is that we live in injustice, not in justice.

In the 1980s and 1990s I began reporting on specific cases of injustice. There were the frame ups of child care centers, parents, and grandparents accused of sex abuse of children. I played a role in exposing some of the frame ups, especially the Wenatchee child sex abuse orchestration.  When legislators create a new statute, prosecutors find a way to make hay with prosecutions that boost their all important conviction rates.  When they passed a law that a man could be guilty of raping his own wife, that created a new avenue for women to get rid of unwanted husbands. 

The asset forfeiture laws created an entirely new range of offenses for which an American could be dispossessed of his assets despite the fact that he or she had committed no crime.  Police agents could commit a crime by holding a drug sting on your property and then steal your property for “facilitating a crime.” Your car could be confiscated if you picked up a hitch-hiker who had drugs in his possession.  And so on endlessly.  If you were stopped by police and searched and had more than $100 cash, your money was regarded as intent to buy or sell drugs and could be confiscated.  There were more cases than I could report.

In 2000 my research associate and I published with a division of Random House a book that the publishers titled, The Tyranny of Good Intentions. It sold well for a serious book and a paperback edition followed.

The book establishes many things.  Perhaps the most important is that justice has been subordinated to prosecutorial success.  Prosecutors want high conviction rates, which they get with coerced plea bargains.  Judges love plea bargains, the self-incrimination of which they never challenge because plea bargains clear their courts from time-consuming trials.

I thought the book would have a large impact.  A federal appeal court  cited the book in a ruling, as did a federal district court. And there may have been others of which I am unaware. However, as both the left and the right are committed to using law to get someone, the book did not resonate with the legal profession.  

To be honest, today the justice system should be called the Injustice System, because injustice is what it produces.  Injustice is the product of the system because prosecutors and judges are unconcerned with innocence and guilt.  The prosecutors’ concern is a high conviction rate, easily secured with coerced plea bargains.  The judges’ concern is a cleared court docket. According to official statistics, 97% of all felony cases are settled with plea bargains.  Consequently, the police and prosecutorial evidence against a defendant is never tested in court.  Obviously, defendants and defense attorneys regard juries as tools of prosecutors and understand that the risk of a jury trial is extremely high and that a jury conviction brings a worse sentence than a negotiated plea.  In other words, few defendants expect the system to deliver justice.

As the “justice system” is loaded against justice, this gives power to evil people and to psychopaths.  Any charge they bring will be seen by prosecutors as another conviction.

Let me give a recent example. A man happily married to a woman for 27 years was accused 5 years ago by his wife’s son from a former marriage of sexually abusing him 20 years ago.  The woman has stuck with her husband, not with the son, who has animosities against his stepfather.  No one in the family believes the charges.  

The accused has spent 5 years fighting the charges and the family’s assets have been exhausted with the approval of the family.  The lawyer of the accused has bled the family dry, and then told the accused to plead guilty to a 12 year sentence or otherwise it would be life. 

The accused, abandoned by his attorney, was given 24 hours to self-incriminate, which is what a plea agreement is.

The “evidence” against the accused is a recorded telephone call between the son and the accused.  The son accuses the stepfather of sexual abuse.  The accused, acquiescing to pleas from his wife to try to bring her son back into the family, said that he apologized if he had been less than a perfect stepfather and that the family would welcome his return.  According to the prosecutor, the stepfather’s apology is an admission of sexual abuse, not a general apology for somehow having failed in some way as a parent.

The lawyer of the accused knew of the call for 5 years and did not tell his client of its status as evidence against him until he pressed his client to accept the plea deal.

The accused had an expert analyze the recorded telephone call.  The expert was able to show that there were 16 minutes missing.  These were minutes when the accused took exception to the accusations.

Confronted with the expert evidence, the judge said he would listen to the expert’s report but would nevertheless allow the truncated conversation to be used as evidence.

There you have it.  This is American justice today.  It can happen to you tomorrow.

The injustice is not limited to the stepfather.  The injustice extends to the wife who is left devoid of resources and without a husband.  In twelve years, both will be elderly. Indeed, the entire family is being punished.

Every day more scientific reports appear showing that the Covid “vaccines” are killing and injuring large numbers of people, and that government agencies and medical organizations deceived the public about the “vaccine” risks and prevented effective treatments in order to maximize vaccination.  Yet nothing is done about these enormous crimes.  Instead, the “justice system” focuses on coercing people into self-incrimination.  This is not a society that can ever be made great.

The post Ambition Has Prevailed Over Justice appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Donald Trump doesn’t want the support of anyone who continues demanding the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. That appears to be the message he broadcast in a surprising Wednesday morning social-media diatribe, reinforced by comments he later made at the White House.

Trump characterized the recent flareup brought on by supporters who are angered over the Justice Department’s June 7 Epstein memo as a Democrat-induced “SCAM.” The memo concluded that Epstein killed himself, that there is no client list, and that no “credible evidence” that he blackmailed powerful people exists. The conclusions ignited a firestorm of backlash, most prevalent among his supporters.

Nevertheless, on Wednesday, after nine days of persistent criticism, the president accused  his “PAST” supporters of buying into “bullsh*t.” Then he broke up with them, saying:

Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

This is insane. Trump is calling Epstein the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax”….
Epstein was sex trafficking children. That was NOT a hoax. Trump wants this to go away. Why? This is disgusting behavior. pic.twitter.com/fNIVh36vhP

— Natalie F Danelishen (@Chesschick01) July 16, 2025

“Stupid People”

Trump doubled down later in the day during a White House meeting with Bahrain’s prime minster and Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. He referred to those demanding more information as “stupid people” doing the Democrats’ work. He lumped the Epstein “hoax” with the legitimate Russia collusion hoax and the Hunter Biden 51 intel agents propaganda saga.

BREAKING: TRUMP IS ON A TOTAL POLITICAL SUICIDE MISSION!

Trump: “I call it the Epstein hoax.”

“It’s all been a big hoax. It’s perpetrated by the Democrats and some stupid Republicans, and foolish Republicans fall into the net… They’re stupid people.” pic.twitter.com/Ai0aAjslQH

— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) July 16, 2025

Unclear Position

Why exactly the president claims this to be a hoax is unclear. Epstein was a convicted pedophile. When he died in jail, he was being held on allegations of sex trafficking.

Former Trump national security advisor General Michael Flynn published a social-media post on Wednesday addressed to the president. Flynn prefaced his message with the disclaimer that his criticism came from someone “with the utmost respect and deference to you for all you’ve withstood.” The he said the obvious: The Epstein saga is not a hoax. Echoing the main reason so many are demanding answers, Flynn said transparency was important in order for “a modicum of trust to be reestablished between our federal government and the people it is designed to serve.”

Flynn also pointed out the main reason so many people want answers:

It is NOT about Epstein or the left. It is about committing crimes against CHILDREN. If he were part of an intel operation known or run by our CIA (shame on them) and those responsible MUST be held accountable. If there is another country involved, then shame on them as well. If there are elites inside of our country that committed crimes against CHILDREN (shame on them) and they MUST be held ACCOUNTABLE.

He concluded by recommending that he gather his team and “figure out a way to move past this.”

.@realDonaldTrump I hesitated to write this however, with the utmost respect and deference to you for all you’ve withstood (few know it better than me what the “deep state” can do when they want to turn on a person). The EPSTEIN AFFAIR is NOT about who killed him or if he…

— General Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) July 16, 2025

Trump himself has said — on multiple occasions — that the Epstein files should be released. In June 2024, Fox & Friends host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked him if he would declassify the Epstein files. Trump said, “Yeah, I would. I guess I would,” he said. His response, however, also included some trepidation. He said afterward that he might not “because you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”

A few months later, however, in September 2024, podcaster Lex Fridman told Trump it was “very strange” that a list of “clients” who went to Epstein’s island wasn’t known, to which the president replied, “It probably will be [made public], by the way, probably,” adding, “I’d have no problem with it.”

High-ranking members of the Trump administration, including Vice President J.D. Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Attorney General Pam Bondi have also made public comments in support of releasing the files. Bondi told Fox News in March that a “truckload” of evidence from the Southern District of New York office had arrived at, presumably, main FBI headquarters, and “everything is going to come out to the public” because “the public has a right know.”

The video compilation contrasts the administration’s positions now versus not too long ago.

Remember when the Trump admin kept promising to release the Epstein files? No? We’ve got you. Watch this supercut.

And make sure to subscribe to Zeteo for more: https://t.co/X3GkKbDl2z pic.twitter.com/qdnIZsTLLP

— Zeteo (@zeteo_news) July 8, 2025

Why the Change?

The administration has, obviously, changed its tune. And most critics suspect the story coming out now is nonsense. It not only contradicts public comments made by the very people who are now insisting there is nothing more to see, but piles of research put together by some of the most capable journalists and researchers.

The million-dollar question is: Why?

The Trump administration’s position is creating a rift and alienating supporters. It may even result in political fallout in the 2026 midterms. What forbidden information is worth all that?

Trump has proven incapable of making this story disappear. The administration’s brazen attempt to convince the public there is nothing to see in the Epstein files has only added more fuel to the fire. But, perhaps, it’s the vile acts at the center of the saga that keep this going. The public needs to know if powerful people are raping children and getting away with it. And if so, those people need to be brought to justice — no matter who they are.

This article was originally published on The New American.

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Cultures and civilizations go through cycles. Over time, many civilizations and cultures have risen and then fallen. We who live in painful times like these do well to recall these truths. Cultures and civilizations come and go; only the Church (though often in need of reform) and true biblical culture remain. An old song says, “Only what you do for Christ will last.” Yes, all else passes; the Church is like an ark in the passing waters of this world and in the floodwaters of times like these.

For those of us who love our country and our culture, the pain is real. By God’s grace, many fair flowers have come from Western culture as it grew over the past millennium. Whatever its imperfections (and there were many), great beauty, civilization, and progress emerged at the crossroads of faith and human giftedness. But now it appears that we are at the end of an era. We are in a tailspin we don’t we seem to be able to pull ourselves out of. Greed, aversion to sacrifice, secularism, divorce, promiscuity, and the destruction of the most basic unit of civilization (the family), do not make for a healthy culture. There seems to be no basis for true reform and the deepening darkness suggests that we are moving into the last stages of a disease. This is painful but not unprecedented.

Sociologists and anthropologists have described the stages of the rise and fall of the world’s great civilizations. Scottish philosopher Alexander Tyler of the University of Edinburg noted eight stages that articulate well what history discloses. I first encountered these in in Ted Flynn’s book The Great Transformation. They provide a great deal of perspective to what we are currently experiencing.

Let’s look at each of the eight stages. The names of the stages are from Tyler’s book and are presented in bold red text. My brief reflections follow in plain text.

1. From bondage to spiritual growth – Great civilizations are formed in the crucible. The Ancient Jews were in bondage for 400 years in Egypt. The Christian faith and the Church came out of 300 years of persecution. Western Christendom emerged from the chaotic conflicts during the decline of the Roman Empire and the movements of often fierce “barbarian” tribes. American culture was formed by the injustices that grew in colonial times. Sufferings and injustices cause—even force—spiritual growth. Suffering brings wisdom and demands a spiritual discipline that seeks justice and solutions.
2. From spiritual growth to great courage – Having been steeled in the crucible of suffering, courage and the ability to endure great sacrifice come forth. Anointed leaders emerge and people are summoned to courage and sacrifice (including loss of life) in order to create a better, more just world for succeeding generations. People who have little or nothing, also have little or nothing to lose and are often more willing to live for something more important than themselves and their own pleasure. A battle is begun, a battle requiring courage, discipline, and other virtues.
3. From courage to liberty – As a result of the courageous fight, the foe is vanquished and liberty and greater justice emerges. At this point a civilization comes forth, rooted in its greatest ideals. Many who led the battle are still alive, and the legacy of those who are not is still fresh. Heroism and the virtues that brought about liberty are still esteemed. The ideals that were struggled for during the years in the crucible are still largely agreed upon.
4. From liberty to abundance – Liberty ushers in greater prosperity, because a civilization is still functioning with the virtues of sacrifice and hard work. But then comes the first danger: abundance. Things that are in too great an abundance tend to weigh us down and take on a life of their own. At the same time, the struggles that engender wisdom and steel the soul to proper discipline and priorities move to the background. Jesus said that man’s life does not consist in his possessions. But just try to tell that to people in a culture that starts to experience abundance. Such a culture is living on the fumes of earlier sacrifices; its people become less and less willing to make such sacrifices. Ideals diminish in importance and abundance weighs down the souls of the citizens. The sacrifices, discipline, and virtues responsible for the thriving of the civilization are increasingly remote from the collective conscience; the enjoyment of their fruits becomes the focus.
5. From abundance to complacency – To be complacent means to be self-satisfied and increasingly unaware of serious trends that undermine health and the ability to thrive. Everything looks fine, so it must be fine. Yet foundations, resources, infrastructures, and necessary virtues are all crumbling. As virtues, disciplines, and ideals become ever more remote, those who raise alarms are labeled by the complacent as “killjoys” and considered extreme, harsh, or judgmental.
6. From complacency to apathy – The word apathy comes from the Greek and refers to a lack of interest in, or passion for, the things that once animated and inspired. Due to the complacency of the previous stage, the growing lack of attention to disturbing trends advances to outright dismissal. Many seldom think or care about the sacrifices of previous generations and lose a sense that they must work for and contribute to the common good. “Civilization” suffers the serious blow of being replaced by personalization and privatization in growing degrees. Working and sacrificing for others becomes more remote. Growing numbers becoming increasingly willing to live on the carcass of previous sacrifices. They park on someone else’s dime, but will not fill the parking meter themselves. Hard work and self-discipline continue to erode.
7. From apathy to dependence – Increasing numbers of people lack the virtues and zeal necessary to work and contribute. The suffering and the sacrifices that built the culture are now a distant memory. As discipline and work increasingly seem “too hard,” dependence grows. The collective culture now tips in the direction of dependence. Suffering of any sort seems intolerable. But virtue is not seen as the solution. Having lived on the sacrifices of others for years, the civilization now insists that “others” must solve their woes. This ushers in growing demands for governmental, collective solutions. This in turns deepens dependence, as solutions move from personal virtue and local, family-based sacrifices to centralized ones.
8. From dependence back to bondage – As dependence increases, so does centralized power. Dependent people tend to become increasingly dysfunctional and desperate. Seeking a savior, they look to strong central leadership. But centralized power corrupts, and tends to usher in increasing intrusion by centralized power. Injustice and intrusion multiplies. But those in bondage know of no other solutions. Family and personal virtue (essential ingredients for any civilization) are now effectively replaced by an increasingly dark and despotic centralized control, hungry for more and more power. In this way, the civilization is gradually ended, because people in bondage no longer have the virtues necessary to fight.

Another possibility is that a more powerful nation or group is able to enter, by invasion or replacement, and destroy the final vestiges of a decadent civilization and replace it with their own culture.

Either way, it’s back to crucible, until suffering and conflict bring about enough of the wisdom, virtue, and courage necessary to begin a new civilization that will rise from the ashes.

Thus are the stages of civilizations. Sic transit gloria mundi. The Church has witnessed a lot of this in just the brief two millennia of her time. In addition to civilizations, nations have come and gone quite frequently over the years. Few nations have lasted longer than 200 years. Civilizations are harder to define with exact years, but at the beginning of the New Covenant, Rome was already in decline. In the Church’s future would be other large nations and empires in the West: the “Holy” Roman Empire, various colonial powers, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the French.  It was once said that “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” Now it does. As the West began a long decline, Napoleon made his move. Later, Hitler strove to build a German empire. Then came the USSR. And prior to all this, in the Old Testament period, there had been the Kingdom of David, to be succeeded by Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome.

The only true ark of safety is the Church, who received her promise of indefectibility from the Lord (Matt 16:18). But the Church, too, is always in need of reform and will have much to suffer. Yet she alone will survive this changing world, because she is the Bride of Christ and also His Body.

These are hard days, but perspective can help. It is hard to deny that we are living at the end of an era. It is painful because something we love is dying. But from death comes forth new life. Only the Lord knows the next stage and long this interregnum will be. Look to Him. Go ahead and vote, but put not your trust in princes (Ps 146:3). God will preserve His people, as He did in the Old Covenant. He will preserve those of us who are now joined to Him in the New Covenant. Find your place in the ark, ever ancient and yet new.

This article was originally published on Ultimate-Survival.

The post The Eight Stages of the Rise and Fall of Civilizations appeared first on LewRockwell.

To anyone unfamiliar with the US foreign policy, this certainly sounds like a rather strange interest in a minuscule area that very few people can pinpoint on a map. However, it makes perfect sense, especially when considering the fact that Trump appointed Tom Barrack. It goes to show that Washington DC’s foreign policy is constant and system(at)ic, regardless of the administration. The multipolar world is certainly taking notes and working on a counter-strategy.

The South Caucasus always played a critical strategic role, whether in Antiquity, the Middle Ages or nowadays. Every superpower (whether historic or present) sought to control this volatile region, as it offers unprecedented power projection capabilities. It connects Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, enabling those who control it to dictate how energy and transportation projects will be implemented (or not). Ever since the unfortunate dismantling of the Soviet Union, various regional and global powers have been trying to establish a foothold in the area, particularly by appeasing the oil-rich Azerbaijan. For the United States, its allies, vassals and satellite states, the South Caucasus was a way to further destabilize Russia, particularly in the neighboring North Caucasus, an area wholly within the Eurasian giant, but highly diverse in virtually every sense of the word (ethnicity, religion, culture, etc).

The political West sought to exploit this in order to destabilize the area, particularly through simultaneous support for Islamic radicalism and ethnic nationalism on the one hand, and the extremist neoliberal policies on the other. Unfortunately, there was very little Moscow could do during the 1990s, as it was still trying to reconsolidate itself and prevent further territorial erosion within the Russian Federation itself. After President Vladimir Putin took over, this long-awaited process was finally set in motion, with the Kremlin ending the foreign-backed Chechen War and later intervening in Saakashvili’s Georgia. However, the issue of Armenia and Azerbaijan remained, a frozen conflict up until 2018, when the infamous Nikol Pashinyan (Armenia’s own Saakashvili, just worse) was installed after a NATO-backed coup. His unprecedented betrayal of not just Artsakh (better known as Nagorno-Karabakh), but Armenia itself is pushing the unfortunate country toward destruction.

Pashinyan’s anti-Russian, pro-Turkish and pro-NATO policies have resulted in a strategic disaster for Yerevan, which is now surrounded by enemies on virtually all sides, with the Sorosite regime simultaneously cutting ties with both Russia and Iran, the only two countries in the region that have any interest in making sure Armenia continues to exist. However, Pashinyan has other plans and is actively trying to appease not just Turkey and Azerbaijan, but also the political West, which couldn’t possibly care less what happens to Armenia.

Ankara and Baku are now using Yerevan to connect through its Syunik region. The two Turkic allies refer to it as the Zangezur corridor. For Turkey, controlling this area means that it can finally establish a land bridge with its ancestral lands in former Soviet Central Asia, which is feeding into Erdogan’s delusions of grandeur and fueling the country’s volatile ideological mix of Neo-Ottomanism, political Islam and pan-Turkism.

Although this is a far bigger bite than Ankara can chew, the US-led political West fully supports its aggressive expansionism, primarily because it knows this will inevitably lead to Turkey’s strategic clash with Russia, as well as Iran and China in the long term. Namely, NATO believes that Turkic peoples, whether within Russia or in Central Asia, can play the role of Ukrainians, but actually worse, as these areas are effectively what geopolitical experts call “Russia’s soft underbelly”.

The US-led political West believes that these areas of the former Soviet Union should be destabilized, causing a domino effect that would eventually disrupt Moscow’s counteroffensive in NATO-occupied Ukraine. Simultaneously, the area could also be used as a base of operations against both China and Iran. Beijing’s Xinjiang is particularly vulnerable in this regard, as it has a significant Turkic (specifically Uyghur) population that’s expected to coordinate with Ankara.

In addition, there’s also the question of Iran’s historical province of Azerbaijan, which is a major target for Azeri irredentists. It should be noted that far more Azeris live in Iran’s Azerbaijan than in the homonymous former Soviet republic to the north. However, Baku’s potential ambition to carve up the area and take northwestern Iran for itself is stifled by its small size and the sheer power of Iran. Not to mention that Moscow and Tehran have very close ties and a mutual interest in preventing NATO expansionism in the South Caucasus.

This is precisely why the US is so insistent on moving into the region, more specifically through the aforementioned Zangezur corridor. According to the Middle East Eye, Washington DC seeks to take over the planned transport corridor “in an effort to advance long-stalled diplomatic negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan”. The most prominent proponent of this is US Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack.

During a press briefing on July 11, he confirmed America’s interest in the highly contested region. This is effectively the smoking gun of what many independent authors (myself included) have been warning about for years, particularly when it comes to letting Turkey into organizations such as BRICS and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). Ankara’s role as the US/NATO’s “Trojan horse” in the South Caucasus and Central Asia is quite evident to anyone willing to take a simple glance at the geopolitical situation.

Namely, the plan to encircle Russia with hostile nations from Northern Europe to Central Asia is slowly being set in motion, with the goal of not only destabilizing the Eurasian giant, but also forcing its leadership into a corner that would inevitably result in a violent reaction. In other words, the political West wants to see Russia maintain a level of constant strategic paranoia that the US can use to further break up the country.

This is pretty obvious to the leadership in Moscow, which is why it seeks to use its resurgent military power to prevent such a scenario. This is precisely why Washington DC is in such a hurry to implement the so-called Zangezur project. The 32-km-long corridor remains a major point of contention between Armenia and Azerbaijan, as they hold diametrically opposite views on how this should be implemented, with the former refusing to give up control over the territory.

“They are arguing over 32 kilometers of road, but this is no trivial matter. It has dragged on for a decade – 32 kilometers of road,” Barrack told journalists during a briefing hosted in New York, adding: “So what happens is that America steps in and says: ‘Okay, we’ll take it over. Give us the 32 kilometers of road on a hundred-year lease, and you can all share it’.”

To anyone unfamiliar with the US foreign policy, this certainly sounds like a rather strange interest in a minuscule area that very few people can pinpoint on a map. However, given everything analyzed in this text, it makes perfect sense. Considering the fact that Trump appointed Barrack, this goes to show that Washington DC’s foreign policy is constant and system(at)ic, regardless of the administration. The multipolar world is certainly taking notes and working on a counter-strategy.

Source infobrics.org

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You asked.

Ron Paul answered!

Enjoy the latest #AskRonPaul — End The Fed, Tariff Turmoil & Global Peace in Pieces

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Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

The post We have always been at war with Eastasia appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

The post Mark Dice: Trump Digs Himself In Deeper With More Ridiculous Comments On Cover-Up – But Why? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

LOL!  The video below is from Seattle TV news about a fire at Lake Cushman in the Olympic Mountains west of Seattle. The idiotic announcer says that Mt. Olympus is seen from Seattle and shrouded in smoke from the fire. LOL! You can’t see Mt. Olympus from Seattle. The peaks shown in the video are called “The Brothers.”

Decades ago, I’d take the kids out to the Olympics to go hiking. The highway goes by Lake Cushman. It’s a beautiful lake, but the logging trucks were constant. I had to be on my toes to drive safely.

Also, this was back in the 1980s, the Seattle TV news then was all aflutter about sharks being found in Lake Cushman. They were dead and discovered on the shore. Scientists at the University of Washington posited that there was an underground channel from Lake Cushman to the sea. Turns out that a local fisherman caught some dogfish (small sharks) and dumped them in Lake Cushman as a joke.

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David Krall wrote:

This is a MUST WATCH.   The most complete and comprehensive documentary by Candace Owens of the entire Jeffrey Epstein story.  More to come.

The post The Epstein Files: Dead Men Tell No Tales. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Krall.

Western media as accomplices to the genocide in Gaza – We stand up!

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Thanks, Johnny Kramer .  

United Kingdom Announces Monumental Change On Who Can Vote In Next Election | WLT Report

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David Martin wrote:

I couldn’t have said it better myself, except that I would not state as a matter of fact that Epstein was “murdered in his jail cell.”  I believe the best evidence suggests that Epstein is still alive, and that there’s a very good chance that this guy seen outside a Starbucks in Vancouver, BC, Canada, last September is that man: https://dcdave.com/poet15/EpsteinVancouver2024.png

With his latest clownish remarks on the Epstein case, Trump really looks more and more like the man in “Donald Trump, The Song.“

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. . . by attacking a Catholic church with tanks, killing three civilians and injuring nine.

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Imagine, for a moment, that the ghosts of Shakespeare’s plays—Banquo, Hamlet’s father, Julius Caesar—were to step across the boundary of fiction into the halls of Congress or the modern news cycle. These spectral figures were never meant to take action themselves; they hovered, hinted, warned—but they never engaged the living world directly. Ghosts, by their nature, are unseen, unaccountable, and unanchored. And yet, today, our public square is increasingly crowded with just such figures—not from beyond the grave but from behind screens. Many would rather haunt than inhabit, lob than live, snipe than stand. They posture, provoke, and vanish. We’ve become a nation increasingly governed by those who wish to wield consequence without presence, accusation without ownership, opinion without flesh. And it’s killing our Republic.

We call it “ghosting” now—not just the quiet exit from a text conversation but the deeper cultural reflex of hiding. Of vanishing from dialogue. Of dissociating when the moment requires standing tall. It’s especially ironic in a time when so many men posture online about masculinity, invoking the likes of Andrew Tate as the ultimate alpha. And yet, unlike Tate—agree or disagree—who at least shows up and owns what he says, many of his loudest disciples won’t. They stay hidden, masked, lobbing rhetorical grenades from the safety of anonymity—never stepping into the light of real human discourse.

You’d be forgiven if it happened just once. But when it happens again and again—and I mean innumerable times—you start to notice a pattern. You’re scrolling through the digital town square () and someone lobs a loaded comment. Not a thoughtful question. Not an earnest observation. A grenade.

Of late, one of the most common examples concerns “the Jews.” Sometimes it’s wrapped in pseudo-scholarly language. Sometimes it’s laced with unhinged vitriol. But always, it trades in the same tired insinuations: that Jews—as a monolith—secretly run Hollywood, or debase American culture, or invented liberalism, or faked or exaggerated the Holocaust, or control governments, or are uniquely to blame for the decline of Western civilization. Never mind that no coherent documentation or testimony is provided. Never mind that these assertions collapse under five minutes of genuine scrutiny. They’re asserted as if they were obvious—and if you question them, you must be part of the cover-up.

I’ve seen it in comment threads, message boards, fringe channels, and conspiracy rabbit holes. But what’s even more revealing than the claims themselves—some outlandish, some more insidious—is what almost never happens: the person making them almost never steps forward in full view, name to name, to defend them. They rarely engage in good-faith conversation. They retreat. They obfuscate. They reframe. They ghost.

And I can’t help but think: if you really believed what you just said, if you were convinced it could hold up in the light, wouldn’t you want to bring it there?

This is not about any one controversy. It’s about the spirit of our age—an era of anonymous accusations and ideologically possessed half-truths, hurled from the shadows by people who want to sound brave without being brave. They don’t want to be questioned. They don’t want to be corrected. They want to appear as prophets while hiding behind a handle.

It’s not even that their conclusions are always wrong. Some touch on real patterns worth exploring. But their method reveals something deeper: a collapse of confidence in truth and, with it, a rejection of integrity. They commit the very error they denounce—attributing sweeping evil to loosely associated people based on identity rather than actual proof, while condemning others for doing the same. It is intellectual cowardice draped in the cloak of rebellion.

And what’s worse, this is no longer the exception. It has become a cultural norm.

From its very beginning, the American Republic was built on a different wager: that truth could and should be discovered in the light of open discourse and that citizens—endowed with reason, dignity, and conscience—could bring their ideas to the public square and allow them to rise or fall before the judgment of others.

The First Amendment—freedom of speech—was not intended as a license for chaos but, rather, as the lifeblood of a Republic of equals. It presumed a human being willing to speak what he believed, to own it, and to let it be examined. Thomas Jefferson himself wrote: “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

And across generations, thinkers of every stripe have reaffirmed this. Frederick Douglass, in 1860, warned: “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Abrams v. United States, defended “the free trade in ideas” as the best test for truth. Even John Stuart Mill, James Baldwin, and modern contrarians like Chomsky, Peterson, and Greenwald—though wildly different in worldview—agree on this point: truth must be exposed to challenge if it’s to be trusted.

But today, truth is not being challenged. It is being hidden. Not by governments alone (though the Twitter Files showed government actors and platforms colluding to suppress disfavored but factual information). Not just by the media (which insisted that President Biden was cognitively sharp or that Hunter’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”). But by us. By citizens who no longer believe that reason works. Who treat disagreement as a threat. Who exchange argument for insinuation and accountability for anonymity.

The danger here is not just censorship but a Republic populated by people who no longer believe in the dignity of standing face-to-face.

We’ve entered an era where slander is safer than speech. Where ideas are pushed in memes not reasoned in essays. Where truth is no longer something to be pursued but assumed—so long as it flatters one’s tribe.

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The post Ghosts in the Republic: Truth, Shadows, and the Death of Integrity appeared first on LewRockwell.

In recent years, Dr. McCullough and I have frequently marveled at what appears to be a competence deficit among people who occupy leadership positions. Scarcely a month passes without news of a catastrophe that could have been prevented if those in charge had possessed the competence to assess quickly an unusual or risky situation— or even a clear and present danger—and to take decisive action to avert disaster.

We saw this competence deficit on a grand scale in the medical profession during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the vast majority of doctors showed an astonishing lack of curiosity, imagination, and even open-mindedness when the question arose: Is there anything I can do to help prevent my patients from being hospitalized and possibly dying from this novel illness? Instead, most of the medical profession looked to Anthony Fauci’s NIAID, which was, at best, wrong about everything, and more likely corrupt and nihilistic.

In August 2023 the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui was totally incinerated by a wildfire in which every single institutional leader at the county, state, and federal level demonstrated spectacular incompetence. In what struck me as a national commemoration of this garish parade of stupidity, President Joe Biden flew out to Maui and gave a talk at the local community center in which he remarked that the ground was hot and that he’d once almost lost his cherished ‘67 ‘Vette Stingray in a home fire.

In July 2024, presidential candidate Donald Trump was almost assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania. The stunning lack of the most elementary security measures again demonstrated mind-boggling incompetence. A security guard equipped with a lawn chair, a box of donuts, and pistol could have secured the roof—150 yards from the stage—onto which the gunman crawled with his rifle.

Now comes the news from Texas that Dick Eastland—executive director of Camp Mystic—received an alert on his phone from the National Weather Service at 1:14 a.m. on July 4 about “life-threatening flash flooding.”

At that point, he “began evaluating whether to evacuate the young campers who were sleeping in their cabins without access to electronics,” according to Eastland family spokesperson Jeff Carr. He only began to evacuate 45 minutes later, after the flood was upon them.

This representation strikes me as unfathomably strange and expressive of incompetence of a mind-boggling scale.

Everyone who has spent some time in the Texas Hill Country understands the meaning of the expression “flash flood”—that is, a creek or a river that floods in a flash, leaving humans and animals who are in the flood plain unable to escape.

Dick Eastland had been at Camp Mystic since 1974 and was certainly aware that the camp and other habitations along the Guadalupe River had been been subjected to flash floods in the past that had swept away and drowned people.

In July 1987, ten children at a church camp in Comfort, Texas— about thirty-nine miles downstream from Mystic—were drowned by a flash flood.

Dick Eastland was a man in charge of protecting the lives of hundreds of young girls—girls sleeping in cabins on the bank of the Guadalupe River, in the flood plain. At 1:14 a.m. he received a warning from the National Weather Service of a “life threatening flash flood.” At that point, he had to have understood that a clear and present danger was upon the girls at Camp Mystic. The only rational course of action was to evacuate immediately to higher ground, above the flood plain.

To be sure, the girls would get soaked by the rain when they left their cabins to move to higher ground. However, the air temperature that night was warm, so the risk of hypothermia was negligible compared to the risk of drowning in a flash flood.

Confronted with an unusual and unusually dangerous situation, Dick Eastland apparently lacked the elementary competence to think and act quickly to fulfill his duty. One wonders how many men like him occupy positions of grave responsibility in the United States.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post A Competence Deficit appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Those bastards didn’t send back my article! Now I have to re-type the whole piece before I can submit it somewhere else!” I growled standing by the apartment cluster mailbox on a sultry afternoon of July 3, 1979. “Did they just throw away or steal the stamps from the self-addressed stamped envelope I sent along with my piece?!”

The New York Times logo on the front of a postcard in that day’s mail sparked my ire. I had dropped out of Virginia Tech three years before, confident that I didn’t need a college degree to make my way as a writer. But my strikeouts vastly outnumbered my few successes. My ego had been on half rations for longer than I druthered. A few weeks earlier, I’d sent out maybe my last volley of submissions before throwing in the towel on freelancing. One by one, my pieces straggled back, rejected from the New Republic, Playboy, American Spectator, and Washington Post. There was only one very long shot left in play.

And now this dinky little New York Times postcard was all I had to show for my busted publishing blitzkrieg. Scowling, I flipped it over to peruse another form reject: “We have tentatively accepted your manuscript for use on the Op-Ed Page. If and when the article is scheduled for publication an editor will telephone you to discuss any question that may arise in the editing process….”

Okay, that was better than sending back my manuscript.

I was not aware of any place in Blacksburg, Virginia that sold the New York Times, and the Virginia Tech University Library—the only place that I knew received the Times—was closed on the following day, July 4th. It never occurred to me to phone the Times to see if the article had run. On July 5, I tromped to that library to check the paper.

Yikes! The New York Times labeled me “a writer currently in exile in the Appalachian mountains.” Had their editors heard from law enforcement or the CIA before printing the article? What did the Times know that I didn’t know?! And then I remembered that I tossed in a similar quip in my cover letter with my submission. That sounded better than saying I’d been a temporary typist, highway flagman, Santa Claus, construction worker, peach picker, lawn mower, and—the worst indignity of all—wearing a giant rabbit costume for a Beatrix Potter promotion.

“Why Not Draft the Next Congress?” ruled the bottom of the July 4th op-ed page. Six years earlier, the federal government ended the draft and replaced it with the All-Volunteer Military. Members of Congress were invoking one bogus standard after another to unfairly condemn the new system. Plenty of congressmen claimed that reviving military conscription would produce vast moral and military benefits as well as budgetary savings. I viewed such proposals as the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on the freedom of young Americans.

Using the classic format of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal, I recounted the sordid details of the “failure of the All-Volunteer Congress.” I cited the pervasive “doubts about the intelligence of the recent volunteers” who had “not been able to balance [federal] income and expenditures for 10 years straight.”

It is only the ego-starved who volunteer for Congressional duty now. These people are forced into Congress by their psychological or mental poverty, as no real alternative or treatment exists for their condition.

The moral caliber of Congress would be improved by conscription. The personal background of many volunteers appears conducive to fabrication. Randomly picking people off the street would give a much higher level of honesty and responsibility.

Conscripts “would receive a subsistence allowance (an honorable precedent established during the Revolutionary War), as it would not be right to overpay someone for what he owed to society.”

Compulsory congressional service would “restore the sense of honor, duty, service, and patriotism to the middle-aged.”

Getting published in the Times revived my confidence and I continued banging out articles as my talent ripened. I appreciated that Op-Ed Editor Charlotte Curtis would consider a submission from an unknown writer in southwest Virginia. The Times op-ed page was far more widely read back then before the rise of the internet, podcasts, and social media. I sold the Times dozens of pieces in the following 15 years.

Almost exactly one year after my satire was published, President Jimmy Carter issued a presidential proclamation compelling all American males between the ages of 18 and 26 to register with the Selective Service System. His proclamation was spurred by a law, spurred by rising tensions with the Soviet Union, that Congress enacted to assure that millions of young people could potentially be speedily compelled to report for military duty. The same mandate for draft registration remains on the books, tempting presidents to thrust the nation into foreign quagmires that require far more body bags than recent US military debacles.

In the following decades, Capitol Hill’s know-nothing, no-fault legislating was always near the top of my target list for my articles and books. I mocked the harebrained reasoning and brain-dead logic in congressional floor debates in a Wall Street Journal piece, “How to Think Like a Congressman.” In USA Today, I derided the annual year-end omnibus debacles, rushing to enact thousand-page Towers of Babel that transmogrify into law though no member of Congress read the bill.

Plenty of members of Congress have denounced me and my articles but I never lost any sleep over their wailing. I realized long ago that, as Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “the trade of governing has always been monopolized by…the most rascally individuals of mankind.”

Unfortunately, the mental and moral defects of our legislative class have become far more ruinous to America since my first published scoff. In recent times, squandering hundreds of billions of tax dollars has become simply another congressional perk.

In 1979, Congress spent roughly $500 billion; in 2025, federal spending is expected to reach $7 trillion. In 1979, the total federal debt was $827 billion; now, the debt is $37 trillion and Congress just authorized another $5 trillion in deficit spending. Since 1979, reckless spending has helped destroy more than 80 percent of the purchasing power of the dollar. Since 1979, the Federal Register has printed more than two million pages of new regulations, rulings, notices, and other poxes on domestic tranquility. Congress created thousands of new federal crimes since 1979 to maximize the power of federal prosecutors over private citizens.

And Congress is almost always AWOL on defending citizens’ rights and liberties from presidents and rampaging federal bureaucracies. Americans are increasingly in a similar plight to downtrodden commoners during the 1500s reign of Henry VIII. As historian David Hume wrote almost 300 years ago, the English people “had reason to dread each meeting of [Parliament] and were sure of having tyranny converted into law, and aggravated with some circumstance, which the arbitrary prince and his ministers had not hitherto devised.”

Especially since the 9/11 attacks, many congressmen view “converting tyranny into law” as their job description. The Patriot Act is not even the tip of the iceberg of such abominations. Congress rarely even has the courage or competence to investigate how presidents are trampling the Constitution. Congress and presidents teamed up to drop an Iron Curtain of secrecy around federal agencies, confident that what people don’t know won’t hurt the government. Top members of Congress responded to valiant whistleblowers like Edward Snowden like a mob of peasants clamoring to burn heretics at the stake.

My intellectual barrages have caused no stampedes to repent among either members of Congress or voters. But sometimes pummeling scoundrels is its own reward. And I have not seen any pundit who offered better political foresight than comedian Lily Tomlin: “No matter how cynical you get, it is not enough to keep up.”

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

The post My 46 Years of Contempt of Congress appeared first on LewRockwell.

“When the states legalize the deliberate ending of certain lives… it will eventually broaden the categories of those who can be put to death with impunity.”—Nat Hentoff, The Washington Post, 1992

Bodily autonomy—the right to privacy and integrity over our own bodies—is rapidly vanishing.

The debate now extends beyond forced vaccinations or invasive searches to include biometric surveillance, wearable tracking, and predictive health profiling.

We are entering a new age of algorithmic, authoritarian control, where our thoughts, moods, and biology are monitored and judged by the state.

This is the dark promise behind the newest campaign by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, to push for a future in which all Americans wear biometric health-tracking devices.

Under the guise of public health and personal empowerment, this initiative is nothing less than the normalization of 24/7 bodily surveillance—ushering in a world where every step, heartbeat, and biological fluctuation is monitored not only by private companies but also by the government.

In this emerging surveillance-industrial complex, health data becomes currency. Tech firms profit from hardware and app subscriptions, insurers profit from risk scoring, and government agencies profit from increased compliance and behavioral insight.

This convergence of health, technology, and surveillance is not a new strategy—it’s just the next step in a long, familiar pattern of control.

Surveillance has always arrived dressed as progress.

Every new wave of surveillance technology—GPS trackers, red light cameras, facial recognition, Ring doorbells, Alexa smart speakers—has been sold to us as a tool of convenience, safety, or connection. But in time, each became a mechanism for tracking, monitoring, or controlling the public.

What began as voluntary has become inescapable and mandatory.

The moment we accepted the premise that privacy must be traded for convenience, we laid the groundwork for a society in which nowhere is beyond the government’s reach—not our homes, not our cars, not even our bodies.

RFK Jr.’s wearable plan is just the latest iteration of this bait-and-switch: marketed as freedom, built as a cage.

According to Kennedy’s plan, which has been promoted as part of a national campaign to “Make America Healthy Again,” wearable devices would track glucose levels, heart rate, activity, sleep, and more for every American.

Participation may not be officially mandatory at the outset, but the implications are clear: get on board, or risk becoming a second-class citizen in a society driven by data compliance.

What began as optional self-monitoring tools marketed by Big Tech is poised to become the newest tool in the surveillance arsenal of the police state.

Devices like Fitbits, Apple Watches, glucose trackers, and smart rings collect astonishing amounts of intimate data—from stress and depression to heart irregularities and early signs of illness. When this data is shared across government databases, insurers, and health platforms, it becomes a potent tool not only for health analysis—but for control.

Once symbols of personal wellness, these wearables are becoming digital cattle tags—badges of compliance tracked in real time and regulated by algorithm.

And it won’t stop there.

The body is fast becoming a battleground in the government’s expanding war on the inner realms.

The infrastructure is already in place to profile and detain individuals based on perceived psychological “risks.” Now imagine a future in which your wearable data triggers a mental health flag. Elevated stress levels. Erratic sleep. A skipped appointment. A sudden drop in heart rate variability.

In the eyes of the surveillance state, these could be red flags—justification for intervention, inquiry, or worse.

RFK Jr.’s embrace of wearable tech is not a neutral innovation. It is an invitation to expand the government’s war on thought crimes, health noncompliance, and individual deviation.

It shifts the presumption of innocence to a presumption of diagnosis. You are not well until the algorithm says you are.

The government has already weaponized surveillance tools to silence dissent, flag political critics, and track behavior in real time. Now, with wearables, they gain a new weapon: access to the human body as a site of suspicion, deviance, and control.

While government agencies pave the way for biometric control, it will be corporations—insurance companies, tech giants, employers—who act as enforcers for the surveillance state.

Wearables don’t just collect data. They sort it, interpret it, and feed it into systems that make high-stakes decisions about your life: whether you get insurance coverage, whether your rates go up, whether you qualify for employment or financial aid.

As reported by ABC News, a JAMA article warns that wearables could easily be used by insurers to deny coverage or hike premiums based on personal health metrics like calorie intake, weight fluctuations, and blood pressure.

It’s not a stretch to imagine this bleeding into workplace assessments, credit scores, or even social media rankings.

Employers already offer discounts for “voluntary” wellness tracking—and penalize nonparticipants. Insurers give incentives for healthy behavior—until they decide unhealthy behavior warrants punishment. Apps track not just steps, but mood, substance use, fertility, and sexual activity—feeding the ever-hungry data economy.

This dystopian trajectory has been long foreseen and forewarned.

In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), compliance is maintained not through violence but by way of pleasure, stimulation, and chemical sedation. The populace is conditioned to accept surveillance in exchange for ease, comfort, and distraction.

In THX 1138 (1971), George Lucas envisions a corporate-state regime where biometric monitoring, mood-regulating drugs, and psychological manipulation reduce people to emotionless, compliant biological units.

Gattaca (1997) imagines a world in which genetic and biometric profiling predetermines one’s fate, eliminating privacy and free will in the name of public health and societal efficiency.

In The Matrix (1999), written and directed by the Wachowskis, human beings are harvested as energy sources while trapped inside a simulated reality—an unsettling parallel to our increasing entrapment in systems that monitor, monetize, and manipulate our physical selves.

Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg, depicts a pre-crime surveillance regime driven by biometric data. Citizens are tracked via retinal scans in public spaces and targeted with personalized ads—turning the body itself into a surveillance passport.

The anthology series Black Mirror, inspired by The Twilight Zone, brings these warnings into the digital age, dramatizing how constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear.

Taken collectively, these cultural touchstones deliver a stark message: dystopia doesn’t arrive overnight.

As Margaret Atwood warned in The Handmaid’s Tale,  “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” Though Atwood’s novel focuses on reproductive control, its larger warning is deeply relevant: when the state presumes authority over the body—whether through pregnancy registries or biometric monitors—bodily autonomy becomes conditional, fragile, and easily revoked.

The tools may differ, but the logic of domination is the same.

What Atwood portrayed as reproductive control, we now face in a broader, digitized form: the quiet erosion of autonomy through the normalization of constant monitoring.

When both government and corporations gain access to our inner lives, what’s left of the individual?

We must ask: when surveillance becomes a condition of participation in modern life—employment, education, health care—are we still free? Or have we become, as in every great dystopian warning, conditioned not to resist, but to comply?

That’s the hidden cost of these technological conveniences: today’s wellness tracker is tomorrow’s corporate leash.

In a society where bodily data is harvested and analyzed, the body itself becomes government and corporate property. Your body becomes a form of testimony, and your biometric outputs are treated as evidence. The list of bodily intrusions we’ve documented—forced colonoscopies, blood draws, DNA swabs, cavity searches, breathalyzer tests—is growing.

To this list we now add a subtler, but more insidious, form of intrusion: forced biometric consent.

Once health tracking becomes a de facto requirement for employment, insurance, or social participation, it will be impossible to “opt out” without penalty. Those who resist may be painted as irresponsible, unhealthy, or even dangerous.

We’ve already seen chilling previews of where this could lead. In states with abortion restrictions, digital surveillance has been weaponized to track and prosecute individuals for seeking abortions—using period-tracking apps, search histories, and geolocation data.

When bodily autonomy becomes criminalized, the data trails we leave behind become evidence in a case the state has already decided to make.

This is not merely the expansion of health care. It is the transformation of health into a mechanism of control—a Trojan horse for the surveillance state to claim ownership over the last private frontier: the human body.

Because ultimately, this isn’t just about surveillance—it’s about who gets to live.

Too often, these debates are falsely framed as having only two possible outcomes: safety vs. freedom, health vs. privacy, compliance vs. chaos. But these are illusions. A truly free and just society can protect public health without sacrificing bodily autonomy or human dignity.

We must resist the narrative that demands our total surrender in exchange for security.

Once biometric data becomes currency in a health-driven surveillance economy, it’s only a matter of time before that data is used to determine whose lives are worth investing in—and whose are not.

We’ve seen this dystopia before.

In the 1973 film Soylent Green, the elderly become expendable when resources grow scarce. My good friend Nat Hentoff—an early and principled voice warning against the devaluation of human life—sounded this alarm decades ago. Once pro-choice, Hentoff came to believe that the erosion of medical ethics—particularly the growing acceptance of abortion, euthanasia, and selective care—was laying the groundwork for institutionalized dehumanization.

As Hentoff warned, once the government sanctions the deliberate ending of certain lives, it can become a slippery slope: broader swaths of the population would eventually be deemed expendable.

Hentoff referred to this as “naked utilitarianism—the greatest good for the greatest number. And individuals who are in the way—in this case, the elderly poor—have to be gotten out of the way. Not murdered, heaven forbid. Just made comfortable until they die with all deliberate speed.”

That concern is no longer theoretical.

In 1996, writing about the Supreme Court’s consideration of physician-assisted suicide, Hentoff warned that once a state decides who shall die “for their own good,” there are “no absolute limits.” He cited medical leaders and disability advocates who feared that the poor, elderly, disabled, and chronically ill would become targets of a system that valued efficiency over longevity.

Today, data collected through wearables—heart rate, mood, mobility, compliance—can shape decisions about insurance, treatment, and life expectancy. How long before an algorithm quietly decided whose suffering is too expensive, whose needs are too inconvenient, or whose body no longer qualifies as worth saving?

This isn’t a left or right issue.

Dehumanization—the process of stripping individuals or groups of their dignity, autonomy, or moral worth—cuts across the political spectrum.

Today, dehumanizing language and policies aren’t confined to one ideology—they’re weaponized across the political divide. Prominent figures have begun referring to political opponents, immigrants, and other marginalized groups as “unhuman”—a disturbing echo of the labels that have justified atrocities throughout history.

As reported by Mother Jones, J.D. Vance endorsed a book by influencer Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec that advocates crushing “unhumans” like vermin.

This kind of rhetoric isn’t abstract—it matters.

How can any party credibly claim to be “pro‑life” when it devalues the humanity of entire groups, stripping them of the moral worth that should be fundamental to civil society?

When the state and its corporate allies treat people as data, as compliance issues, or as “unworthy,” they dismantle the very notion of equal human dignity.

In such a world, rights—including the right to bodily autonomy, health care, or even life itself—become privileges doled out only to the “worthy.”

This is why our struggle must be both political and moral. We can’t defend bodily sovereignty without defending every human being’s equal humanity.

The dehumanization of the vulnerable crosses political lines. It manifests differently—through budget cuts here, through mandates and metrics there—but the outcome is the same: a society that no longer sees human beings, only data points.

The conquest of physical space—our homes, cars, public squares—is nearly complete.

What remains is the conquest of inner space: our biology, our genetics, our psychology, our emotions. As predictive algorithms grow more sophisticated, the government and its corporate partners will use them to assess risk, flag threats, and enforce compliance in real time.

The goal is no longer simply to monitor behavior but to reshape it—to preempt dissent, deviance, or disease before it arises. This is the same logic that drives Minority Report-style policing, pre-crime mental health interventions, and AI-based threat assessments.

If this is the future of “health freedom,” then freedom has already been redefined as obedience to the algorithm.

We must resist the surveillance of our inner and outer selves.

We must reject the idea that safety requires total transparency, or that health requires constant monitoring. We must reclaim the sanctity of the human body as a space of freedom—not as a data point.

The push for mass adoption of wearables is not about health. It is about habituation.

The goal is to train us—subtly, systematically—to accept government and corporate ownership of our bodies.

We must not forget that our nation was founded on the radical idea that all human beings are created equal, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

These rights are not granted by the government, the algorithm, or the market. They are inherent. They are indivisible. And they apply to all of us—or they will soon apply to none of us.

The Founders got this part right: their affirmation of our shared humanity is more vital than ever before.

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 task before us is whether we will defend that humanity—or surrender it, one wearable at a time. Now is the time to draw the line—before the body becomes just another piece of state property.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The Wearables Trap: How the Government Plans to Monitor, Score, and Control You appeared first on LewRockwell.

Trump continues to be seized by the delusional view that his Israeli-centred vision could all be accomplished merely by ending the genocide in Gaza.

The big issue emerging from the U.S.’ 22 June strike on Iran – second only to ‘wither Iran?’ – is whether in Trump’s calculus he can ‘rhetorically impose’ the having “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme claim long enough to both restrain Israel from hitting Iran again, yet still allow Trump to pursue his show-stopper headline, ‘WE WON: I’m in charge now and everybody is going to do what I tell them’.

These were the key conflicting issues that were to be hammered out with Netanyahu during his White House visit this week. Netanyahu’s interests essentially are for ‘more hot war’, and thus differ from the Trump ceasefire general stratagem.

Implicit in his ‘In-Boom-Out & Ceasefire’ Iran approach is that Trump may imagine he has created the space to resume his primary objective – that of instituting a broader Israeli-centric order across the Middle East, devolving upon trade deals, economic ties, investment and connectivity, to create a business-led West Asia, centred on Tel Aviv (with Trump as its de facto ‘President’).

And, via this ‘Business Super Highway’, to strike further beyond – with the Gulf States penetrating into BRICS’ south Asian heartland to disrupt BRICS connectivity and corridors.

The sine qua non for any jumpstart to a putative ‘Abraham Accords 2.0 of course – as Trump clearly understands – is an end to the Gaza War; the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza; and the Strip’s re-construction (none of which seems to be in realistic reach).

What emerges rather, is that Trump continues to be seized by the delusional view that his Israeli-centred vision could all be accomplished merely by ending the genocide in Gaza, but with the world watching aghast as Israel continues on a hegemonic military rampage across the region.

The most obvious flaw to the Trump premise is that a chastened Iran somehow has been achieved by Israeli and American strikes. It is the opposite. Iran has arisen more unified, resolute and defiant. Far from being relegated to watching passively from the sidelines, Iran now – in the wake of recent events – resumes its place as a leading regional power. One that is readying a possibly game-changing military riposte to any further strikes by either Israel or the U.S.

What is ignored in all these western claims of Israeli success, is that Israel chose to bet all on a surprise ‘shock and awe’ strike. One that would overturn the Islamic Republic at a stroke. It didn’t work: the strategic objective failed, and it produced the opposite outcome. But the more fundamental point is that the techniques used by Israel – that required months, if not years of preparation – cannot just be repeated again now that their stratagems have been fully exposed.

This White House misreading of the Iran reality signals that the Trump Team allowed themselves to be deceived by Israeli hubris in insisting that Iran was a house-of-cards, primed to collapse completely into paralysis upon the first taste of the Israeli sneak decapitation ‘muscle’ on 13 June.

This was a fundamental error – in a pattern of similar errors: That China would capitulate to the threat of imposed tariffs; that Russia could be coerced into a ceasefire against its interests; and that Iran would be ready to sign an unconditional surrender document in the face of Trump’s threats post-22 June.

What these U.S. blunders speak to – apart from a consistent divorce from geo-political realities – is western weakness masked behind hubris and bluster. The U.S. Establishment clings to its fading primacy; but in doing it so ineffectually, it has instead accelerated the formation of a potent geo-strategic alliance intent on defying the U.S.

The consequence has been the wake up call to other States occasioned by the western slide towards stratagems of outright lies and deceit: The ‘Spider Web’ operation against the Russian strategic bomber fleet on the eve of the Istanbul talks and the U.S.-Israeli sneak attack on Iran two days before the expected next round of U.S.-Iranian nuclear talks, have increased the will-to-resist by China, Russian and Iran particularly, but more generally it is felt across the Global South.

The entire complexion of this war to retain America’s dollar primacy has been irreversibly altered.

All are ‘on guard’ as they see evidence that, with the expectation of NATO’s defeat in Ukraine, the West is ramping up the new Cold War on many fronts: in the Baltic Sea; the Caucasus; the Iran periphery (via cyber attack), and of course via escalated financial war across the board. Trump is again threatening to sanction Iran and any State purchasing its oil. On Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would impose a new 10% tariff on “any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS”.

Naturally, States are preparing against this escalation. Tensions are rising everywhere.

Azerbaijan (and even Armenia) are being weaponised against Russia and Iran by NATO powers and Turkey. Azerbaijan was used to facilitate Israeli drones launched into Iran, and its airspace was used too by Israeli aircraft to circle into the Caspian Sea in order for Israel to launch stand-off cruise missiles from Azeri airspace over the Caspian Sea at Tehran.

Iraqi Kurdistan, Kazakhstan and the Baluchi borderlands have been used as platforms to infiltrate sabotage units into both Russia and Iran to pre-position missiles and drones and sabotage units for asymmetric warfare.

On the other flank of this escalating war, Trump is racing to land a string of ‘trade’ agreements across the Pacific, including with Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia. The aim being to build ‘a cage’ of special higher tariffs around China’s ability to use ‘trans-shipments’ – that is goods imported into other States from China, which are then re-exported to America.

The U.S. set the precedent via Vietnam, with a 40% tariff on trans-shipments that is precisely double the 20% levy on Vietnamese-made goods.

Except that Trump’s ‘shock and awe’ strategy of imposing tariffs to regain industrial activity and to keep the rest of the world subject to dollar hegemony is not working: First Trump was forced to announce a 90-day moratorium on Liberation Day Tariffs in the hope that 90 deals would be struck in the interim – yet only three ‘framework agreements’ were settled. So the Administration is now forced to extend the moratorium yet again (to 1 August). Bessent, U.S. Treasury Secretary, has said that many of the 90 states originally tariffed did not even try to contact the U.S. to work out a deal

The ability to financially punish people for not doing what the U.S. says is drawing to a close. The alternative to the dollar network exists. And it is not a ‘new reserve currency’.

The alternative is the solution envisaged by China: a fusion of Fintech retail payment platforms with banking and Central Banking digital frameworks, based on block-chain and other digital technologies. (The U.S. cannot replicate this approach – as Silicon Valley and Wall Street are at war with each other, and won’t co-operate).

As Will Schryver noted wryly a couple of years ago —

“The empire’s seemingly endless string of hubris-driven blunders has rapidly accelerated the formation of what is quite arguably the single most potent military / economic / geostrategic alliance seen in modern times: the tripartite axis of Russia, China, and Iran …

“It has astoundingly managed to jump from the frying pan of a regional proxy war against Russia into the fire of a global conflict that all three of its steadily strengthening adversaries now view as existential”.

“In my considered opinion, this is almost certainly the single most inexplicable and portentous series of geopolitical blunders in recorded history”.

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

The post U.S. Hubris-Driven Blunders Transform the Entire Complexion of the Wider War appeared first on LewRockwell.

After Donald Trump embarrassed himself by berating a reporter with “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” it seemed likely that he would flip flop and say something to encourage his now disappointed base. But he did nothing of the sort. Instead, he took to Truth Social Media and produced an unfathomable rant.

The post deserves to be quoted extensively. “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” Trump proclaimed. “For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, ‘THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,’ and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files?”

Where do we begin to analyze such verbal legerdemain? We have come to expect the absurd boasts, and having a “PERFECT administration” fits in nicely with having the “strongest economy in history” and “most secure border in history.” Is the line about Epstein never dying an inside baseball remark, alluding to the fact that he is alive, as many believe? Trump now accuses Obama, Hillary, and the Biden administration of creating the Epstein files. If he believes that such things as Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” are more important, then why isn’t it being investigated by his Justice Department? He asks why the leftist “lunatics” didn’t release the “Epstein Files.” Which, of course, he, his attorney general, and the director of the FBI claim doesn’t exist. Trump insists that the FBI should be focused on investigating voter fraud, political corruption, and arresting “thugs and criminals.”

So, did Trump order Kash Patel and/or Pam Bondi to investigate voter fraud, particularly the dubious 2020 election? Who has been deposed? Who has been arrested? Why aren’t Comey and Hillary, at least, being prosecuted for “Russia! Russia! Russia!?” What Trump’s delusional, surrealist statement comes down to is a ridiculous defense of not investigating those who abused the young girls being trafficked by Epstein. Trumpenstein the actor is now being forced to play an even more buffoonish character, one who seemingly has zero awareness of how the MAGA faithful are viewing his recent statements, and his administration’s glaring acquiescence to that swamp he once promised to drain. He knows that we know he knows that he’s lying. He isn’t planning on looking into Hunter’s laptop any more than he is in reinvestigating 9/11 of the JFK assassination. Remember, not long ago, he revealed that he’d always thought Oswald acted alone. As he released the JFK files.

The “National Security State” requires as little information as possible be shared with the unwashed masses. Going back to the Nixon days, there have been constant battles about insiders “leaking” information. Yes, we cannot have the public learning about what we’re really doing. And so everyone in Washington, D.C. hates “leakers” as much as they hate whistleblowers. At least a few officials have dared to suggest that the likes of Assange and Snowden shouldn’t be prosecuted. The “leakers” have no defenders. If that all that sounds very much like what we were told went on in the Soviet Union back when they were the foreign hobgoblin of choice, you may be starting to get the picture. Imagine if they really audited the Pentagon. Imagine if they even just made the budgets of the intelligence agencies public. They’ve never been. And none of your “representatives” are demanding that they be disclosed.

If Jeffrey Epstein, dead or alive, had truly been investigated, and that notorious “list” of glittering celebrities been produced, it would have been the first such case of transparency in my lifetime. We’ve waited over sixty years to force the release of JFK assassination files, which were classified even though the government and the state controlled media assured us that it was the act of a lone, demented Marxist. Who couldn’t satisfy his wife, for good measure. The CIA claimed, at the end of 2024, to have released the last classified files from World War I. Countless files from World War II remain hidden from the public. Why? That was the “good war,” remember? What could we possibly have to hide about that? There are files related to Roswell, New Mexico that remain classified. You know, where something crashed in the desert in 1947. “Conspiracy theorists” say it was an alien craft. The government says it was just a harmless weather balloon, but is keeping things secret, anyhow.

From the time Richard Nixon first popularized the term “national security” to justify withholding information during Watergate, every politician has grown enamored with it. This includes all those elected officials who permitted the southern border to be a revolving door for over forty years now. Somehow, border security isn’t “national security.” And so, they don’t tell us the truth about anything. Pick your topic. POW-MIAs? Untold numbers of American soldiers were abandoned by the government that sent them into harm’s way, going back at least to the Korean War. I included a long section on this in my book Hidden History. It’s a disgrace that those who pressure us to “support the troops” didn’t rescue them after they’d been captured by the enemy. Both World Wars, October Surprise, Iran-Contra, Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City- they lied about all of it. But if you persist in asking questions, if something isn’t classified, they’ll explain that it was “lost,” or accidentally destroyed.

That’s what happened to those intriguing videotapes and other evidence that the FBI found in a safe at Jeffrey Epstein’s stately New York home. They somehow lost it all. Well, to be fair, if NASA can lose the original footage from the first alleged trip to the moon, what can’t our government lose? There are still classified files on Area 51, which the government claimed didn’t exist for decades. They said the same thing about the yearly Bilderberg meetings of international elites, until the late great Jim Tucker started sneaking inside them. The FBI reluctantly responded to Freedom of Information Act requests from Wolfgang Halbig regarding the Sandy Hook incident, and their report is still classified. Why? It was cut and dry, wasn’t it? A demented kid, probably triggered by video games, and with an unfortunate access to guns, acted out of madness, didn’t he? Do we have to prosecute Alex Jones again?

in 2023, the FBI was ordered by a judge to release the information it had on the shooting of young Seth Rich, whom “conspiracy theorists” believe was Julian Assange’s source for leaking documents that incriminated the DNC in rigging the 2016 primaries against Bernie Sanders. They requested another sixty six years of classification instead. Remember, according to our “free press,” this was a random act, a murder that happened during an attempted robbery. Where nothing was stolen. And Rich’s family will threaten to sue those who ask too many questions. At any rate, if they aren’t going to tell the truth about the shooting of Seth Rich, you know they’re never going to disclose what really happened on 9/11. Okay, we admit it was an inside job. We put explosives in the buildings. We blew up Building 7 for good measure, and stole the gold from Building 6. Don’t threaten national security. We’re number one!

It doesn’t matter if someone like the “D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey takes the precaution of saying publicly, as she did on Alex Jones’ show, that she would never commit suicide. She still did. Epstein’s most well known accuser, Virginia Giuffre, supposedly produced a “Deadman’s Trigger,” which was her final video, released after her death, in which she said, “HILLARY HELPED HIM ESCAPE. THE CLIENTS WALK FREE. THE VIDEOS ARE GONE.” Nobody is paying much attention to that. I guess “Deadman’s Triggers” aren’t as important as “conspiracy theorists” think. I’m confident that there is a government Hit Squad that we pay for, in some dark corner of one of our intelligence agencies. Maybe DOGE can get around to finding it, assuming they still exist. Elon Musk is gone, and now feuding with Trump. I remember fondly the early days of 2025, when we were finally learning about waste, fraud, and abuse.

Future President Gerald Ford once claimed that the motto of the Warren Commission he served on was “Truth is our only client.” It’s not possible for there to be a more inaccurate description of the “work” the Warren Commission produced. Our government, through its mouthpieces in the state controlled media, lies incessantly. They are a collective pathological liar. They cover up even when they don’t have to. It’s a “they hate our freedom” thing, you wouldn’t understand. So when the Trump Justice Department just cavalierly announced there was no Epstein List, it didn’t surprise some of us. But it did disappoint millions of MAGA supporters, who have clung to the belief that Donald Trump is different, despite anything he does, or doesn’t do. This billionaire is one of us. Instead of transparency, we got Alligator Alcatraz. Nothing quite sums up the Trumpenstein Project like Alligator Alcatraz.

Alligator Alcatraz is what has become of the “mass deportation” that was promised on “day one,” and hasn’t happened. Well, you have to admit that alligators are cool. Who wouldn’t get excited watching an alligator bite some illegal alien in half? I wonder if Mexico is going to pay for Alligator Alcatraz, like they didn’t pay for Trump’s big, beautiful wall. Big beautiful walls, big beautiful bills. You can’t say Trumpenstein isn’t big on hyperbole. “No new wars” has turned into “bomb, bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.” Trump is flailing, and failing on all points. I guess maybe blaming Pam Bondi for it might work. Scapegoating usually is successful. Poor Pam. Still amazingly hot and youthful at fifty nine, only to potentially be thrown under the Trumpenstein bus. But Trump seems loyal to blondes of all ages, and at least for now is defending her. Maybe it’s time to find a “sleeper cell” so we can get back to bombing Iran.

Trump has proven to be no different than the other Republicrats who have been such a disaster for the public they “represent.” He’s just wilder and crazier. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The majority of Americans have swallowed one whopper after another, for well over a century. They sent their boys “over there” to fight World War I, when no one even bothered to try to give any rationale for it. Later, they planted Victory Gardens. They watched Jack Ruby shoot Oswald on live television and went on with their lives. They bought the 9/11 fairy tale, and rolled over for the Patriot Act and the creation of the unconstitutional monstrosity Homeland Security Department. Homeland Security. National Security. Except for that southern border. That’s where the cheap labor is to be found. And now Trumpenstein wants to grant illegal farm workers, hotel workers, and restaurant workers amnesty. Only we can’t call it amnesty. Just another broken promise. And we’re surprised about Epstein?

Read the Whole Article

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On July 3 U.S. President Donald Trump had a phonecall with the Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation:

President Donald Trump revealed the details of his conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday.

Trump told reporters before he boarded Air Force One for an “America 250” rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, “We had a call, it was a pretty long call, we talked about a lot of things, including Iran. We also talked about the war with Ukraine.”

Trump shook his head and said, “I’m not happy about that,” as the president remarked about the ongoing war he hoped to quickly end.

“No, I didn’t make any progress with him today,” Trump said when asked about a potential deal with Putin to end the Russian offensive in Ukraine.

Trump wanted to pause the war In Ukraine while Putin sees an advantage for Russian troops in the field and wants to continue the war until its root cause, the NATO march towards Russia, is eliminated.

Trump could not get his will. He was also under pressure from neoconservative parts of Congress to commit the U.S. to a longer war against Russia. They asked for shipping more weapons to Ukraine and for penalties against countries which continue to buy oil and gas from Russia.

Yesterday Trump gave in and decided (archived) to give another try to his predecessors failed Ukraine policy :

President Trump said he would help Europe speed more weapons to Ukraine and warned Russia that if it did not agree to a peace deal within 50 days, he would impose a new round of punishing sanctions.

Speaking from the Oval Office, where he met with NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte​, Mr. Trump said the weapons would be “quickly distributed to the battlefield.” He also threatened to impose secondary sanctions, which are penalties imposed on other countries or parties that trade with nations under sanctions.

“I’m disappointed in President Putin, because I thought we would have had a deal two months ago, but it doesn’t seem to get there,” Mr. Trump said.

“It’s just the way it is,” he added. “I hope we don’t have to do it.”

Several additional Patriot air defense missile systems are supposed to be given to Ukraine by NATO countries which would buy new ones when the U.S. is able to deliver them (archived):

Mr. Trump said the United States would sell those arms to European nations, which would ship them to Ukraine or use them to replace weapons they send to the country from their existing stocks.

But Pentagon officials said later that many details were still being worked out.

It is doubtful that new Patriot batteries will help against Russian swarm attacks each with several hundreds of drones and missiles. There is also a severe lack of munitions for these system with new production of Patriot missiles per year still being lower than the monthly consumption in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Trump did not specify what additional weapons and how many of them would be delivered to Ukraine (archived):

What Trump didn’t talk about is that the military assistance might also include authorization for some powerful new offensive weapons. I’m told by a source involved in the decision that this is likely to include permission to use the 18 long-range ATACMS missiles now in Ukraine at their full range of 300 kilometers (about 190 miles). That wouldn’t reach all the way to Moscow or St. Petersburg, but it would strike military bases, airfields and supply depots deep inside Russia that are now out of range. The package might also include more ATACMS.
…
Trump also considered sending Tomahawk cruise missiles, the same weapons fired against Iranian targets last month. If fired from Ukraine, these could hit Moscow and St. Petersburg, and they were included in discussion as late as Friday. But the Tomahawks are off the delivery list for now, I’m told. They could be deployed later if Trump wants even more leverage.

Trump’s determination to squeeze Putin was conveyed in a conversation last week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a source told me. Trump asked Zelensky why he didn’t hit Moscow. “We can if you give us the weapons,” Zelensky said. Trump said Ukraine needed to put more pressure on Putin, not just Moscow but St. Petersburg, too.

ATACMS are an old story. In the overall balance these ‘wonder weapons’ had little effect so far.

Tomahawks are a no-no because they can be nuclear armed. Russia’s strategic defense would have to consider any ongoing Tomahawk attack on Moscow or Petersburg to be a nuclear decapitation strike and act accordingly. The U.S. is unlikely to risk a Russian counterstrike with nuclear weapons.

Trump’s sanction threat against buyers of Russian hydrocarbons is not taken seriously (archived):

[E]xperts doubted the credibility of Mr. Trump’s threat to impose 100 percent tariffs on Russia’s trading partners if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia did not agree to a cease-fire within 50 days.

The scale of China’s mutual trade with Russia — nearly $250 billion per year, including huge oil imports — means that delivering on the threat would throw Mr. Trump into a showdown with Beijing. Analysts said it was unlikely that Mr. Trump would risk a renewed confrontation with the world’s second-largest economy over Ukraine, a country whose fate he has long said is not vital to the United States.

Mr. Trump is also notorious for setting deadlines that he does not enforce, raising questions about whether he will act if the 50-day timer he has set for Mr. Putin expires.

The neoconservative editors of the Washington Post are not convinced that the policy change (if this even is one) will lead to significant changes.

They ask the right questions to then pressure for more measure without regarding the consequences for the U.S. (archived):

But what if Putin refuses to make peace and sticks with his maximalist demands for a dismembered Ukraine under Russia’s thumb? Is Trump ready to ramp up the pressure? Will he sustain the arms shipments once the stockpiles run dry? Will he seize billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets? Will he try to crack down on the shadow tanker fleet that moves Russian oil? And will he follow through on his secondary sanctions threat, with its potentially vast implications for trade with countries such as China and India?

The war against Ukraine has already persisted for far too long, with horrific casualty tolls on both sides. It will only end when Putin realizes he has nothing more to gain, and much more to lose, the longer it goes on. The arms shipments to Ukraine might bring that realization closer. More pressure can bring that day closer still. Now that Trump has issued his ultimatum, he needs to make clear to Putin he means what he says.

In late 2021 Russia issued its demands in form of treaty outlines with the U.S. and NATO. They were disregarded by the U.S.. The war is a consequence of that.

Russia has the means to continue the war until those demands are met. Meanwhile Ukraine is running out of – not weapons but soldiers.

How long will it take for the editors to understand that it is Putin who has the trump cards in this game?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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