Lew Rockwell Institute

Have you ever had one of those jarring moments when the lyrics of a song you once jammed to as a kid suddenly hit you with grown-up clarity? Maybe it was hearing Free Bird and suddenly realizing the masses in your high school were swaying to a breakup anthem. Or perhaps at your kids’ Catholic athletic event it struck you that “if you’re into evil you’re a friend of mine” (AC/DC’s Hells Bells) might not be the best fire-up song (pun intended). One of my personal favorites was discovering the biting genius behind Bugs Bunny’s old jab, “What a maroon!”—a mispronounced moron, cloaked in Looney Tunes levity but hitting with uncanny precision.

In this age of moral preening—where every tribe, every talking head, invokes Jesus Christ as the mascot of their cause—here’s the mic drop no one saw coming: Jesus called people morons.

Let’s not sentimentalize or sanitize this. Let’s not mistake it for a clever quip or a throwaway insult. No, in the unflinching light of Matthew 23, Christ—the Incarnate Word, the Author of all goodness, truth, and beauty—looks the most religious men of His day in the eye and calls them μωροί (moroi). Fools. Morons. He does this not to demean but to awaken; not to shame but to judge rightly—and to invite us to do the same.

Not for the sake of casting stones but for the sake of being formed, let’s go there.

When Christ condemned the Pharisees, He did not merely call them blind—He called them μωροί (moroi), the very root of our modern insult moron. “You blind fools!” He thunders in Matthew 23:17. “For which is greater, the gold or the temple that made the gold sacred?”

This wasn’t a slight at their intelligence. It was a judgment on their willful disconnection from reality. The Pharisees weren’t stupid—they were the most educated men of their time. But in the words of G.K. Chesterton, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything but his reason.” That was the Pharisee: spiritually precise, morally unanchored.

The Greek word moros doesn’t mean “uninformed.” It means “dull,” “insipid,” “without savor.” It’s the same root Christ uses to describe salt that has lost its saltiness (Matthew 5:13)—once potent, now worthless. In Matthew 7:26, He warns against the man who hears truth but refuses to live it, calling him moros, a fool building on sand. The word points not to mental deficiency but to moral decay.

This is spiritual blindness: not the inability to see but the refusal to see. And not just among leaders—Christ warns of “the blind leading the blind” (Matthew 15:14) because moral deception often requires an audience that prefers the dark.

This spiritual condition has become the organizing principle of an entire culture. We live in a time when moral inversion is not the exception—it’s the rule. Our public rhetoric is laced with oxymorons not as occasional ironies but as systemic doctrines.

Consider the prevailing catechism of our governing elite:

• Abortion as “health care”
• Indicting political opponents as “justice”
• DEI mandates that exclude for the sake of inclusion
• Denying biology in the name of “gender identity”
• “Following the science”—until it challenges the narrative
• A “free press” that suppresses inconvenient truths

These contradictions aren’t random. They are the fruit of moros logic: when language is severed from reality and blindfolds are treated as badges of enlightenment.

And this brings us, not as a detour but as an inevitable illustration, to the figure who has most exposed this contradiction: Donald Trump.

For nearly a decade, Trump has been cast as a singular evil—fascist, racist, misogynist, dictator-in-waiting. Yet, under his first term, it was the “oppressed classes”—black Americans, Latinos, women, the working class—who experienced rising wages, record-low unemployment, and economic mobility.

In 2024, after four years of cultural gaslighting, censorship, and lawfare, those same groups moved toward him—not because they believed he was flawless but because they saw. They remembered. They refused to keep playing the part of blind followers in a theater of absurdity.

This is the great irony: those screaming “tyranny” the loudest were often the ones imposing it—from university speech codes to federal mandates, from the erasure of women’s sports to the surveillance of parents at school board meetings. The people didn’t just vote against that—they recoiled from it. They refused to call evil good, or good evil. They took off the blindfold.

As Catholics, we must not lose sight of what it means to affirm the truth in a person or policy without canonizing the man himself. Trump has boldly professed a pro-life stance, not only in policy—appointing justices that helped overturn Roe v. Wade—but also through quiet, often unseen acts of generosity: paying off mortgages for struggling families, stepping in to help veterans, funding educational scholarships. These were not headline-grabbing gestures but real assistance rendered quietly, human to human.

Yet, we must also call him to account. His support for IVF and his inability—or unwillingness—to confront the commodification of human life at its earliest stage must not be glossed over. A culture of life must be consistent, or it will collapse under the weight of its exceptions. As Catholics, we must be Trump’s grateful allies where truth prevails—and his prophetic challengers where it does not. We do not worship politicians. We worship a God who is Truth itself.

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The post Jesus Called People Morons: The Sacred Insult That Could Save a Civilization appeared first on LewRockwell.

In what can be called a victory speech over failed neoconservative foreign policy, President Donald Trump proclaimed the end of 30-some years of existing foreign policy in the Mideast. The ideology dragged the U.S. through pointless wars from Libya to Yemen is now dead.

At an investment conference in Riyadh, in a speech little-commented on by the mainstream media, Trump said, “In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. And the interventionalists [sic] were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”

For the first time since the First Gulf War in the 1990s, America is not fighting in the Middle East. Trump arranged a fragile ceasefire with Yemen, where multiple U.S. presidents have waged a proxy war against Iran. Trump is withdrawing American troops from Syria, became the first American president in 25 years to meet with a Syrian leader, and announced alongside his speech the end of sanctions against that country. He is finally negotiating with Iran toward some sort of nuclear deal to replace the one he unilaterally canceled in his first term. Progress has not always been in a straight line, but there has been progress.

One need only to look back on the past decades to see the difference. The United States once overtly supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, leading to thousands of deaths on both sides. Pivoting, the U.S. invaded Iraq in 1991 after Saddam moved into Kuwait. Saudi Arabia was threatened, saved from war by U.S. intervention because of its oil reserves, which the U.S. was then fully dependent on. In the neocon spasms following 9/11, America invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, launching a nation-building plan in both countries to displace national governments with American puppet states and local Islamic traditions with Western ideas on women and society.

Those nation-building actions gave support to warnings issued by Al Qaeda and ISIS that the west sought to neuter Islam and turn the Middle East into a part of a new global empire. Rumors circulated that American troops in Iraq were issued maps of the Syrian border ahead of plans to turn the massive military to sweep west into Syria and Lebanon following the “conquest” of Iraq. As that war brought Iran into the fight, U.S. troops were deployed to Syria, the Turks threatened invasion, and Russian intervention complicated the struggle. ISIS rose to replace Al Qaeda. The U.S. began a war in Libya, overthrowing another ugly but stable government, leading to chaos which continues to this day. Massive streams of refugees flowed into Europe. Yemen dissolved into anarchy and civil war. The Afghan war threatened to spill into Pakistan.

Though actual numbers can never be known, the Costs of War Project estimates over 940,000 people died directly as a result of violence due to American foreign policy in the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. An additional 3.6–3.8 million died indirectly due to factors like malnutrition, disease, and the breakdown of healthcare systems related to these conflicts. The total death toll, including both direct and indirect casualties, is estimated to be between 4.5 and 4.7 million. The Costs of War Project also highlights the significant displacement caused by these conflicts, with an estimated 38 million people displaced since 2001. Some 7,000 U.S. military service members died. The Project estimates the wars cost the U.S. over $8 trillion. Afghanistan today is again ruled by the Taliban, Iraq by Iranian proxies. Nation-building was a complete failure. The broader neoconservative interventionist policy failed.

Indeed, the best summation of America’s decades long policy in the Middle East is Trump’s.

Words are easy, actions often much harder. So what is next? Trump stated his “fervent wish” that Saudi Arabia follow its neighbors, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, in recognizing Israel. He said a nuclear deal is within sight with Iran, adding he “never believed in having permanent enemies.” Both are hard asks.

But in a sign of what may be the most significant change alongside the new foreign policy, Trump met the new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former Al Qaeda jihadist (one makes peace with one’s enemies, not one’s friends) who led a rebel alliance that ousted Bashar al-Assad. Trump posed for a photograph with al-Sharaa and the Saudi crown prince that “dropped jaws in the region and beyond.”

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Yesterday, during a lengthy interview, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz mention the lifting of restrictions on western weapons used by Ukraine.

Media took that as a new revelation:

• Merz says no more range limits for weapons supplied to Kyiv – DW, May 26
• Germany’s Merz backs Ukraine’s long-range missile strikes on Russia – FT, May 26
• Western allies lift Ukraine’s restrictions on long-range weapons, says Merz – Euronews, May 26

> German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced on Monday that Germany, along with France, the UK and the US, had lifted restrictions on the range of weapons they are sending to Ukraine to help in the fight against Russia.

“There are no longer any range restrictions on weapons delivered to Ukraine — neither by the British nor by the French nor by us nor by the Americans,” he said at the WDR Europaforum 2025 at the re:publica digital conference in Berlin. <

Some media even claimed that Merz had cleared the path for the delivery of German Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine:

Germany and its key allies have lifted range restrictions on weapons sent to Ukraine allowing Kyiv to hit targets inside Russia with no external limits, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Monday.

That announcement by the German leader could clear the path for Berlin to finally deliver its powerful Taurus cruise missiles to Kyiv, something that the previous government refused to do so as not to provoke nuclear-armed Russia.

I was astonished seeing this. There had been nothing new in Merz’ announcement.

President Joe Biden had lifted all restrictions on U.S. delivered weapons many months ago:

• Biden allows Ukraine to use US arms to strike inside Russia – Reuters, Nav 18 2024

Britain had even been earlier:

• UK gives Ukraine green light to use British weapons inside Russia – Atlantic Council, May 3 2024

France, also many moths ago, had likewise been open to this.

Moreover Ukraine has long run out of western donated long range weapons:

The green light to fire long-range missiles at Russia means little if “our cupboard is totally empty,” added Ivan Stupak, a former officer with Ukraine’s SBU security service.”

The last ATACMS strike on Russian targets has happened many months ago. The last interdiction of an ATMCMS strike by Russia was reported on January 17. Strikes with British Storm Shadow or French Scalp missiles have likewise vanished.

There was thereby nothing new in Merz’ talk. He had not even mentioned Taurus missiles which will NOT be delivered to Ukraine for several good reasons:

• Taurus contains components which are under U.S. export restrictions. The U.S. would have to green light a delivery of those.
• Taurus is air launched. Ukraine does not have the means, i.e. the right airplanes, to launch Taurus from high attitudes.
• Taurus requires other German systems, and, most crucial, German specialists to be targeted and used.

Merz was clearly surprised that his mentioning of the release of restrictions, which had happened months ago, was suddenly presented as a new development or policy change. Today the chancellor was pushed to clarify it:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that the decision to lift restrictions on the range of weapons supplied to Kiev was made several months ago, RIA Novosti reported.

“As far as I know, and I repeated it yesterday, the countries that imposed range restrictions have long since abandoned these conditions. Therefore, yesterday in Berlin I described what happened several months ago, namely that Ukraine has the right to use the weapons it receives, including outside its borders, against military targets on Russian territory,” Merz said at a joint press conference with Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo.

The media who carried yesterday’s sensational headline have yet to wake up to this. I doubt that they even want to do so. They will most likely ignored Merz’ clarification.

There is an unmissable war-frenzy in the media. Even the tiniest side remark by Trump, Merz or someone else is immediately explained as a war escalation.

The journalists writing those headlines, and the bloggers repeating them, seem eager to push for it.

Who told them to do so?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Recycling Old News Media Push for More War in Ukraine appeared first on LewRockwell.

Remember a year ago when the US BORDER WAS WIDE OPEN and vast numbers of immigrant-invaders were being helped into our country by the Democrats?  NO FEDERAL JUDGE ANYWHERE DID ANYTHING ABOUT THE TOTAL FAILURE OF THE DEMOCRATS TO DEFEND US BORDERS.

NOW THAT THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS TRYING TO SEND THE ILLEGALS BACK, THERE IS NO END OF JUDGES AT WORK PREVENTING THE EJECTION OF THOSE WHO ENTERED ILLEGALLY.

The executive branch, which had been rising in power since the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime, is now unable to perform its lawfully required duty to protect America’s border without appealing to the Supreme Court for help against a politicized anti-American Democrat political operative in a judicial robe.  Large numbers of these despicable creatures have arisen to deny that the President of the United States has any powers of his office.  He must do what they say.

This is a massive change from the George W. Bush regime when President Bush declared his power to hold US citizens indefinitely on suspicion alone without evidence or due process or law.  The judiciary had nothing to say.

This is again a massive change from President Obama’s assertion that he had the power to execute American citizens on suspicion alone without due process of law.  The judiciary had nothing to say.

It is only when a president exercises his clear authority to deport illegal entrants into the US  that the judiciary opens its corrupt mouth.  I have no idea why MAGA-Americans and the Trump administration put up with an utterly corrupt anti-American, anti-white, collection of despicable robed tyrants.  Why aren’t they deported?  President Lincoln deported a US Representative who disagreed with Lincoln’s invasion of the Confederacy.

In the first months of the Trump administration we  have seen time and again judges assuming they are God exercising rule over the electorate.

This time, and there will be several more by tomorrow, Trump is appealing to the US Supreme Court for the judiciary’s permission for him to exercise the powers of his office.  In an office somewhere in the 50 states a robed political activist has ruled that Trump cannot deport illegals unless DHS (Department of Homeland Security) first satisfies an onerous set of procedures invented by the district court political activist “judge” to assess any potential claim under the Convention Against Torture. See here.

Tell me, MAGA-Americans, how the Trump administration can deport millions of illegal entrants under these conditions.  It cannot be done.

I conclude that no more than  perhaps a thousand or two of illegal entrants will ever be deported, which means that American white European ethnicity is being watered down and America  is being transformed into a multicultural Tower of Babel devoid of a common belief system and unity.  Essentially, America is being erased.  

The MAGA Revolution has been brought to heel by the judiciary which is enforcing a Tower of Babel upon America.  

The post Kritarchy Is Taking Over America appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Let there be loneliness, for where there is loneliness, there is also love, and where there is suffering, there is also joy.” – Clark E. Moustakas, Loneliness

As regular readers of this column may know, I like to begin each edition with a story from my life that I hope encapsulates the theme of the book I am featuring. When I started thinking about writing a column on loneliness, I’d sit down in my reading chair at home to quiet my mind or I’d go for a walk in my pleasant neighborhood amidst the fresh spring air and budding trees and search my memory for times when I felt lonely. As I thought back through my life in search of times of loneliness, I found that I either had none or that I had many. That is, it seems that either I’ve never been lonely, or I’ve been lonely most of my life and, like a fish in water, never really knew it because I had nothing else with which to compare it.

I do know that I’ve never felt lonely when I’ve been alone at my house or in some natural setting, such as a beach, or when I’ve gone on solitary retreats to a remote Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, or when I’d spent a month holed up in a ramshackle, off-the grid cabin on the rugged and gloriously desolate northern coast of Maine, far from the madding crowd. If pressed to recall times when I may have felt lonelier than others, it would have to be when I’ve been among other people—eating alone in boisterous restaurants, sitting in a crowded park, even walking down the sidewalks of New York City. So, when the evil ones rolled out the COVID-19 psyop with the lockdowns that were intended to isolate and atomize each of us into individual silos of lonely self-abnegation, thinking we’d eventually hate ourselves enough to give up our individual sovereignty and well-being, I never felt compelled to comply with the jab mandates that followed so I could return to socializing again.

I enjoy my own company or the company of my girlfriend or of a few close friends more than large gatherings of any sort. I’ve always felt this way. The smaller the group the better; and even those occasions are quite rare for me. All during the most rabid phases of the COVID-19 psyop throughout 2020 and 2021, I never felt that I had to trade in my individual autonomy and jump on the jabfest bandwagon to feel a part of any cause or group that was more valuable and more important than what I already had—and what I’ve always had as long as I can remember: a sense of self-possession.

At the time when the government was trying to ban any sort of socializing, I met some new, lovely, like-minded friends, and we got together regularly at our homes—unflappable, unafraid, unjabbed. Living our lives. But not according to the “new normal,” that charade of social distancing that was trotted out to “stop the spread” but was actually just one more nail in the coffin of civilization. Not that. But the old normal. And not one of us ever got sick with what was supposedly going around like wildfire and killing scores of victims all around the world. I knew it was a lie and so did the rest of us. As for myself, no one was going to be able to push me around or twist my arm or hold out some paltry reward like a carrot on a stick for me to chase—such as free doughnuts—to give me something I never wanted in the first place, then or ever.

On top of that, I soon figured out what was really going on and it had nothing to do with a public health crisis. It was a military operation designed to control us. I smelled it like you can smell the rain before the storm. I’d once lived in China and twice visited the Soviet Union. I learned from firsthand experience something about how totalitarian governments operate. So perhaps I’d had a kind of head start in putting together what would turn out to be millions of pieces of this multi-dimensional puzzle—a puzzle whose purpose was to bamboozle and terrorize the credulous masses. What I saw in China and the U.S.S.R. I saw happening here in America in the March 2020 assault on our sacrosanct ways of life, saw the actual threat to our democracy—not the fake threat of the populist movement ballyhooed by the lamestream media the past several years—unfolding before my eyes. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And as I tried to warn others, I saw my social circle, already small, shrink.

In just a few lines from her hefty 1948 tome, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt highlights the essence of what I saw happening with the COVID-19 psyop:

“Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

This awareness has not made my life any easier from the spring of 2020 and right up to the present. I felt—and still feel—the pain of being shunned by many friends who’d allowed themselves to get caught up in the web of lies. I know others who, through their comments here on Substack or via personal emails, since I began writing about the COVID-19 psyop in the fall of 2021, were also shunned by others for not submitting to the diktats of the powers-that-should-not-be. What’s been particularly painful for them to experience—and for me to read about—is the shattering of familial bonds, which was also intended by the evil ones as a key component in their takedown of our culture. For instance, some of those who’ve contacted me are older parents who reluctantly submitted to the trickster jab crusade only because their children would not let them visit their grandchildren without their first getting inoculated. I find such ignorant cruelty utterly unfathomable.

While billions not only submitted to these heinous demands, for whatever their reasons, there are others who fully backed them. Many of us witnessed with helpless despair in our hearts people and organizations of considerable influence whip up angry, unhinged mobs coalescing around the jabfest at every turn—on television news, in newspapers, on TV talk shows, in governments at every level, and among the leaders of our nation’s corporations, schools, hospitals, and nonprofit organizations. You name it, the lies were everywhere. And hundreds of millions of people fell for them. By now, we’ve all heard the tired excuse: We didn’t know. I knew. As did so many others. Our pleas for sobriety fell on deaf ears just as they would a raging alcoholic deep in his cups.

What was driving this insanity? I think it was more than merely the fear of getting sick and dying. Stella Morabito, in a 2022 book of hers that I read around this time last year, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide and Conquer, has this to say:

“It comes from a sense of alienation within the psyche of the individual who wants desperately to be a part of something. He wants to be part of an in-group, often associated with the slogan of being ‘on the right side of history,’ the group that will cure the supposed malady of social injustice. It’s a combination of alienation and the yearning to belong that is the true malady that sparks mob members into action.”

That’s what I think drove the madness, or at the very least fanned its flames.

Back in 1964, when I was 11 years old and Barbara Streisand crooned in the popular song “People” that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” I remember thinking, no, they aren’t. Maybe the song was trying to sell something, to conjure up some beatific vision of dependency, allowing others to define us and bestow value to the self. Although I did not know that then, I was still having none of it. Or maybe my pre-pubescent, developing brain had indeed picked up what I now understand to be the song’s schmaltzy, sentimental, subliminal messaging: Those who don’t need people are the unluckiest people in the world and something must definitely be wrong with you.

Years later, I read Henry David Thoreau’s book, Walden. It was there that I found something that did resonate with my soul. He writes, “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.” And I thought, yes, that’s it. These are the luckiest people in the world. And I’m happy that I can count myself among them. I’m not boasting. I’m not flattering myself. It’s merely the cloth out of which I am cut. Yet, I believe we can all learn how to savor solitude and find out why it’s important to deal with loneliness in a healthy manner.

Solitude and the sort of self-reliance and independent thought that Ralph Waldo Emerson writes about in his 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance,” nurture one another. Emerson writes:

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Co-conspirators in breaking free from the suffocating Victorian conformity of their day, Thoreau and Emerson were chums. Just shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, Thoreau built himself a hut on the north shore of Walden Pond, a small (64.5 acres) and in a surprisingly deep (102 feet at its deepest) glacial “kettle hole” two miles south of Concord, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1845 on land that Emerson owned. Thoreau stayed there for two years. Emerson even paid Thoreau a visit from time to time. In the summer of 1847, a little more than two years after Thoreau first settled in at Walden Pond, Emerson invited him to stay with his wife and children, while Emerson himself went to Europe. Thoreau accepted the offer. In September 1847, he left his cabin and never returned. But he paid homage to his experience in a little gem of a book, which was published in 1854, whose popularity remains to this day. (Walden Pond is now a protected part of the Walden Pond State Reservation. There is a replica of Thoreau’s cabin on the grounds. The original site of the cabin is marked by a pile of stones.)\

Looking back through the years, I wonder if I came into the world unknowingly prepared for the COVID-19 psyop, as well as the myriad of social, political, media, military, and geoengineering ploys and exercises behind the structural decimation of Western civilization leading up to it, some of which I was aware of as they were happening, others of which I’ve only more recently learned about in hindsight, and some of which I’m still discovering. It’s not been a sudden baptism by fire for me; it’s been more like a slow burn, clearing away all the distractions that grow like weeds and have hidden the truth from all of us. No matter when or how these revelations have found me—or I have found them—in a mutual embrace, what I’ve seen I can no longer not see nor deny the unsettling conclusion that the material world is run by psychopaths.

Since one of the primary objectives of the COVID-19 psyop was to secure once and for all the isolation and atomization of each of us in order to compel us to submit to its evil diktats—the lockdowns, the closures, the masking, the jab mandates—to “stop the spread” so we could get back the life they took away from us, I was preternaturally immune to the real virus that was going around. And that virus is the fear of loneliness.

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You’ve probably heard about the turf war between the federal government – Donald Trump – and the state of California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) over who gets to decree “emissions” requirements for motor vehicles sold in California.

And not just in California.

CARB is a state-level bureaucracy that operates effectively as a national one by emitting regulations for California that are followed by the vehicle manufacturers because so many other states have aped CARB’s regulatory emissions that they are effectively obliged to manufacture only “California compliant” vehicles. It would be too expensive to make cars for California and the dozen other states (including New York and most of the New England states as well as western states such as Oregon and Washington) that have aped California’s regulatory regime and then make another batch and sell those in the other states that have not aped California’s regulatory regime.

It would have been much better for the manufacturers if they’d not kowtowed to California in the first place, which is just what they did a long time ago.

CARB began emitting regulations back in the ’70s. The regs required additional hardware be added to new vehicles in order for them to be legal to sell in the state. The regs also limited what could be sold in the state. For example, while GM’s Pontiac division could sell you a new 1979 Trans-Am with the 400 Pontiac V8 and a manual transmission in 49 states, you could only buy the car with the Oldsmobile 403 V8 and an automatic in California, because it was the only drivetrain that was compliant with CARB’s regs. Similarly, certain parts could not be legally sold in CA either unless they carried a “CARB” approved number. (This is still the case today, by the way. There are a plethora of parts that cannot be purchased in CA and that are illegal to install, even if it can be proved they do not increase emissions. Legally, ther only thing that matters is whether they’re . . . legal.)

GM’s mistake – the industry’s  mistake – was to play along to begin with. That never works out – except to the benefit of your enemy. Arguably, what the vehicle manufacturers ought to have done – back in the ’70s – was to tell California its additionally onerous emissions regulations – which exceeded the federal EPA’s requirements – rendered it unfeasible for them to sell new vehicles in the state of California. That they could not justify the additional expense of adding equipment to cars sold only in California in order to be able to sell them legally in the state. This would very quickly have imparted pressure on California’s politicians to yank CARB’s chain because millions of Californians wanting to be able to buy a new car would have demanded it.

Instead, GM and the rest decided to pass the expense along to everyone else – by making all of the vehicles they sold everywhere else  “California compliant.” This included the expense of the winnowing of choices, such as the option to buy a new vehicle with a certain engine or a manual transmission. If it could not be made “California compliant,” it could not be purchased anywhere – because it was no longer available for sale anywhere.

This worked – for awhile – in that car buyers in other states just dug a little deeper and paid more for vehicles that were now all of them “California compliant” even if they didn’t legally have to be. But as always happens whenever you comply with bullies, the bullying increased. CARB decreed new regs requiring “zero emissions” (i.e., battery powered) vehicles be sold in ever-increasing percentages until only “zero emissions” vehicles can be (legally) sold in the state by 2035 . Other states aped CARB, setting the stage for a national de facto electric vehicle mandate, since the only vehicles that can comply with the “zero emissions” regulatory requirement are electric vehicles. (It doesn’t matter, legally speaking, that the manufacture of electric vehicles and the generation of the electricity that powers up their battery packs results in lots of “emissions” – of the dread gas carbon dioxide that some insist is causing the “climate” to “change.” All that matters, legally speaking is that these “emissions” do not emanate from a vehicle’s exhaust pipe.)

This does not work – or rather, won’t – because most people who do not live in California do not want to be forced to buy an EV and couldn’t afford one, even if they did. The vehicle manufacturers are aware of this, but they have complied themselves into a corner. How do they walk it back? It is no easy thing to do. It is on par with getting out of a bad marriage you knew going into it wasn’t going to be good. How much easier it would be now if you’d never reluctantly said “I do” to begin with.

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Tim McGraw wrote:

Hi Bumper,   Pope Leo and the IRS

Thanks for your excellent article on Pope Leo and the IRS. The story of Irwin Schiff’s treatment under “the law” by the IRS and a federal judge is horrific. There was no justice with the IRS. We all pay an exit tax either by renouncing our citizenship or when we die. The IRS wants it all.

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Tim McGraw wrote:

The Mark 84, 2000 Pound Bomb

These are the big conventional bombs being used in wars today, including by Israel against Gaza. 

General Dynamics is the main supplier of the bombs. They have 26 bomb plants in the US and Canada. The main bomb plant appears to be in Camden, Arkansas. They had an explosion there last year:

Explosion at General Dynamics Plant in Arkansas

The bombs cost $16,000 each.

The post The Mark 84, 2000 Pound Bomb appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

The Abandon All Hope Pope.

See here.

The post The Depopulation Death Pope appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Responsible Statecraft

The post Surprise: CIA link to sketchy Israeli aid scheme appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Le Monde

The post In Israel, rhetoric dehumanizing Palestinians and calls for eradicating Gaza have become commonplace appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com

The post US Airstrikes in Somalia Have Surged Under Trump, On Pace To Break Record appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Covert Action Magazine

The post CIA Cold War Experiments Shattered the Minds of Countless Unwitting Victims appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Middle East Eye

The post Father killed, mother abducted and tortured: Gaza boy recounts Israeli raid appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Daily Beast

The post Opinion: The Most Terrifying Company in America Is Probably One You’ve Never Heard Of appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer . 

The post The MRI Surprise No One Is Talking About—Bret Weinstein’s Gadolinium Story appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  Johnny Kramer . 

The post Impossible Challenges appeared first on LewRockwell.

I’m guessing that Javier Milei can.

The post Can You Spell “Political Puppet”? How About “Political Kickback”? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Smith. 

The Guardian

The post Gaza’s youngest influencer aged 11 among children killed by Israeli strikes appeared first on LewRockwell.