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President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth have recently been critical of NATO, calling for the European NATO countries to pay for their own defense. This is all to the good, though it does not go far enough. As the great Dr. Ron Paul has pointed out, “We also need a change in policy. Americans are beginning to understand the economic costs of maintaining a global military empire. US taxpayers are forced to cover more than half of the entire NATO budget while European countries rattle sabers at Russia and threaten war. If Europe feels so threatened by Russia, why don’t they cover the costs of their own defense? Why do poor Americans have to pay for the defense of rich Europeans? Haven’t we had enough of this? I very much hope that President Trump follows through with his plan to drastically reduce our bloated military budget. We can start by closing the hundreds of military bases overseas, bringing back our troops from foreign countries, and eliminating our massive commitments to NATO and other international organizations. We will be richer, safer, and happier.”

We should exit NATO entirely and we should never have started this nefarious and ill-considered organization. NATO was founded in 1949 and originally consisted of twelve member states, and it has now expanded to 32 nations. It was intended as a way to prosecute the Cold War with Soviet Russia, which would be deterred from invading Western Europe, it was claimed, by the presence of NATO armed forces and the possibility of nuclear war, should a Soviet invasion take place. The NATO signatories are committed to come to each other’s defense in case of invasion.

There was no need for this. As David Stockman points out, the Soviets, exhausted from the great losses incurred during World War II, were in no position to invade Western Europe, and that continues to be the case today, despite the anguished fears of such an invasion expressed by skittish European political figures. “To be sure, Stalin was among the most wretched, evil rulers ever to oppress a decent-sized chunk of mankind and would have remained a blight on his own countrymen and ogre before the world during the remaining six years of his despicable life. But he was no threat to the American homeland as the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove in spades.”

Stockman means that a search of the Soviet archives hasn’t turned up any documents showing that Stalin planned to invade Western Europe. “These documents, in fact, amount to the national security dog which didn’t bark. Dig, scour, search and forage through them as you might. Yet they will fail to reveal any Soviet plan or capability to militarily conquer western Europe.”

Stockman proceeds to an analysis of Soviet policy that is fully in line with that of the great Murray Rothbard. After presenting Stockman’s case, I’ll try to show that there is a deeper point that requires our attention. Even if you think that Stockman vastly underestimates Stalin’s aggressive intentions, it doesn’t matter. You might find this a surprising thing to say, but I’ll try to justify it. But first, let’s listen to Stockman: “Washington’s standing up of NATO was a giant historical mistake. It was not needed to contain Soviet military aggression, but it did foster a half-century of hegemonic folly in Washington and a fiscally crushing Warfare State – the fiscal girth of which became orders of magnitude larger than required for defense of the homeland in North America. Needless to say, the arrival of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO – within 25 months between March 1947 and April 1949 when the NATO Treaty was signed in Washington – sent Stalin’s wartime understandings into a tailspin. Slowly at first and then aggressively in the end his initial fear that the wartime alliance was being abandoned by his capitalist allies gave way to a paranoid certainty that they were once again in the business of attempting to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.

But even the resulting Soviet departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance arose from what might well be described as an unforced error in Washington. We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to the aforementioned communist parties coming to political power in France, Italy and elsewhere. But as we have seen, that wasn’t a serious military threat to America’s homeland security in any event because the post-war Soviet economy was a shambles and its military had been bled and exhausted by its death struggle with the Wehrmacht. To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for any electorate who stupidly put them in power. But that would have been their domestic governance problem over there, not a threat to the American homeland over here. Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions in European affairs. These initiatives were clinically described as ‘containment’ measures designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its lane, not a prelude to an attack on eastern Europe or Moscow itself.

But if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry, top communist party echelons and correspondence to and from Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane. To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as a definitely unfriendly scheme of encirclement and an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, or the cordon sanitaire, that Stalin believed he had won at Yalta.”

Now, let’s try to justify the claim I made earlier. Our traditional foreign policy was one of non-intervention in European power politics. The great powers of Europe for hundreds of years been locked in constant struggle to prevent one power from gaining hegemony over the whole continent. If one power gets too strong, the others will balance against it. But the United States decided to avoid participation in this never-ending battle. George Washington defended this policy in his farewell address, and it was continued by Thomas Jefferson. It received a classical statement in John Quincy Adams’s address on the fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution: “the Declaration of Independence:

“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

Our traditional policy, then, was to stay out of Europe, not to prevent one nation from becoming dominant. It is no concern of ours. And this does not mean trying to broker a settlement in the Ukraine war. It means staying out completely. We should not send any weapons there. Let’s do everything we can to return to complete non-intervention in European power politics!

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Last Friday, while leaders around the Western world were up in arms about J.D. Vance’s confrontational address to the Munich Security Council, the Washington Post published a good old-fashioned piece of journalism. From “U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts”:

Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.…

[The] Home Secretary has served Apple with… a technical capability notice, ordering it to provide access under the sweeping U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which authorizes law enforcement to compel assistance from companies… The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand.

This rare example of genuine bipartisan cooperation is fascinating for several reasons. Oregon’s Ron Wyden teamed up with Arizona Republican Congressman Andy Biggs to ask new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for help in beating back the British. While other Democrats like Michael Bennet and Mark Warner were smearing Gabbard as a Russian proxy in confirmation hearings, Wyden performed an homage to old-school liberalism and asked a few constructive questions, including a request that Gabbard recommit to her stance against government snatching of encrypted data. Weeks later, the issue is back on the table, for real.

The original UK demand is apparently nearly a year old, and Apple has reportedly been resisting internally. But this show of political opposition is new. There has been no real pushback on foreign demands for data (encrypted or otherwise) for almost nine years, for an obvious reason. Europe, the FBI, and the rest of the American national security apparatus have until now mostly presented a unified front on this issue. In the Trump era especially, there has not been much political room to take a stand like the one Wyden, Biggs, and perhaps Gabbard will be making.

The encryption saga goes back at least ten years. On December 2, 2015, two men opened fire at the Inland Center in San Bernardino, killing 14 and injuring 22. About two months later, word got out that the FBI was trying to force Apple to undo its encryption safeguards, ostensibly to unlock the iPhone of accused San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The FBI’s legal battle was led by its General Counsel Jim Baker, who later went to work at Twitter.

One flank of FBI strategy involved overhauling Rule 41 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure. The FBI’s idea was that if it received a legal search warrant, it should be granted power to use hacking techniques, if the target is “concealed through technological means.” The Department of Justice by way of the Supreme Court a decade ago issued this recommendation to Congress, which under a law called the Rules Enabling Act would go into force automatically if legislation was not passed to stop it. In 2016, Wyden joined up with Republican congressman Ted Poe to oppose the change, via a bill called the Stopping Mass Hacking Act.

Two factors conspired to kill the effort. First, the FBI had already won its confrontation with Apple, obtaining an order requiring the firm (which said it had no way to break encryption) to write software allowing the Bureau to use “brute force” methods to crack the suspect’s password. While Apple was contesting, the FBI busted the iPhone anyway by hiring a “publicity-shy” Australian firm called Azimuth, which hacked the phone a few months after the attack. The Post, citing another set of “people familiar with the matter,” outed the company’s name years later, in 2021.

The broader issue of whether government should be allowed to use such authority in all cases was at stake with the “Stopping Mass Hacking” bill. It was a problem for the members that the FBI called its own shot in the San Bernardino case, but the fatal blow came on November 29, 2016, when the UK passed the bill invoked last week, called the Investigatory Powers Act. This legal cheat code gave agencies like Britain’s GHCQ power to use hacking techniques (called “equipment interference”) and to employ “bulk” searches using “general” warrants. Instead of concrete individuals, the UK can target a location or a group of people who “share a common purpose”:

THE IPA: Bulk warrants, warrants by location, warrants on groups with “common purpose”

The law was and is broad in a darkly humorous way. It mandates that companies turn over even encrypted data for any of three reasons: to protect national security, to protect the “economic well-being of the UK,” and for the “prevention or detection of serious crime.”

Once the Act passed, American opposition turtled. How to make a stand against FBI hacking when the Bureau’s close partners in England could now make such requests legally and without restriction? The Wyden-Poe gambits were wiped out, and just two days after the IPA went into effect, changes to Rule 41 in America did as well. These granted American authorities wide latitude to break into anything they wanted, provided they had a warrant. As one Senate aide told me this week, “That was a game-over moment.”

Once the British got their shiny new tool, they weren’t shy about using it. The Twitter Files were full of loony “IPA” dramas that underscored just how terrifying these laws can be. In one bizarre episode in August of 2021, Twitter was asked to turn over data on soccer fans to a collection of alphabet soup agencies, including the Home Office and the “Football Policing Unit.” The Football Police informed Twitter that “in the UK… using the ‘N word’ is a criminal offence — not a freedom of speech issue.”

Twitter executives scrambled to explain to football’s cyber-bobbies that many of their suspects were black themselves, and tweets like “RAHEEM STERLING IS DAT NIGGA” were not, in fact, “hateful conduct.” (The idea that British police needed American executives to interpret sports slang is a horror movie in itself.) Accounts like @Itsknockzz and @Wavyboomin never knew how close they came to arrest:

N**** PLEASE: British police invoked the Investigatory Powers Act to get user information about nonwhite football fans

British overuse was obvious, but Twitter elected not to complain. They also kept quiet when American authorities began pushing for the same power. Though the Apple standoff aroused controversy, 50% of Americans still supported the FBI’s original stance against encryption, which seemed to embolden the Bureau. Senior officials began asking for the same virtually unlimited authority their friends in the UK (and soon after, Australia) were asserting. Donald Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, seethed about encryption in a keynote speech at an International Cybersecurity Conference on July 23rd, 2019. The Justice Department was tiring of negotiations with tech companies on the issue, Barr said:

While we remain open to a cooperative approach, the time to achieve that may be limited. Key countries, including important allies, have been moving toward legislative and regulatory solutions. I think it is prudent to anticipate that a major incident may well occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.

God knows what he meant about a “major incident” that “may well occur at any time,” but Barr was referring to the Investigatory Powers Act and imitator bills that by 2019 were being drafted by most U.S. intelligence partners.

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If you want to get a sense of what President Kennedy was up against with his Peace Speech at American University a few months before he was taken out, just look at the reaction to President Trump’s friendly overtures toward Russia in the last few days. The mainstream media is up in arms over Trump’s actions. Multiply that reaction by about 1,000 and you’ll get a sense of what Kennedy was facing with his attempt to move America in a similar direction.

The first thing everyone should be aware of is that Russia must always be considered to be America’s premier official enemy. That’s because that’s the principal way to justify not only the enormously large amount of taxpayer-funded largess that flows into the “defense” establishment but, more important, keeps America as a national-security state rather than have its original, founding governmental structure of a limited-government republic restored.

That’s what the entire Cold War racket was all about. When the Nazis were defeated at the end of World War II, the giant military-intelligence establishment that had been formed as part of the war was not about to let go of its power. Without skipping a beat, it immediately converted the Soviet Union (i.e., Russia) from America’s wartime partner and ally into America’s new official enemy.

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! The Reds were everywhere. North Korea. Vietnam. Cuba. Hollywood. The army. The State Department. Latin America. China. Congress. Martin Luther King. The civil-rights movement. Some even claimed that President Eisenhower was an agent of the Reds.

Through it all, the minds of Americans were imbued with the notion that it was better to be dead than Red. From the first grade in the public (i.e., government) schools to which their parents were forced to send them, American children received deep indoctrination and fear of the worldwide communist conspiracy to take over the world — a conspiracy that was supposedly centered in Moscow. It was an indoctrination that would last a lifetime.

Then along comes John F. Kennedy, who came into office as pretty much a standard Cold Warrior but who then achieved one of the most remarkable breakthroughs in history. Beginning with the Bay of Pigs disaster, followed by Pentagon exhortations to launch a surprise nuclear attack on Russia, followed by Operation Northwoods, and followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy came to the realization that the Cold War was one great big dangerous and deadly racket.

That’s when he committed himself to bringing an end to the deep, ongoing, perpetual anti-Russia mentality with which the American people had been imbued. It was time for America to move in a different direction — one based on peaceful, friendly coexistence with Russia. That’s what JFK’s Peace Speech at American University was all about.

The speech was broadcast all across Russia, the first time that had ever happened. The Russian people were ecstatic to see the distinct possibility of friendly relations between the two nations. I couldn’t help but think about that when I read an article yesterday in the New York Times about a similar reaction among Russian citizens to the possibility of a normalization of relations between Russia and the United States.

As detailed in FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board, it was Kennedy’s decision to move America in a different direction from that desired by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA that got him killed. As a result of what the all-powerful military-intelligence establishment viewed as weakness, incompetence, naiveté, treason, and cowardice, Kennedy had become a grave threat to “national security” and, therefore, had to be removed from power before it was too late.

After the Pentagon-CIA regime-change operation in Dallas, everything was restored to “normal.” The Russians and the Reds were, once again, America’s premier official enemy. They were still coming to get us. The Vietnam War got ramped up to keep the dominoes from falling. 58,000 American soldiers were sacrificed for nothing. The indoctrination in the public schools continued. Americans continued hating and fearing Russia.

Then came the great big unexpected shock when the Russians suddenly brought a end to the Cold War from 1989 to 1991. Everyone had figured that the Cold War racket, along with all the anti-Russia indoctrination, would go on forever.

The “defense” industry went into a panic. Suddenly people were talking about a “peace dividend,” which meant a drastic reduction in military-intelligence spending, a possibility that Trump himself recently mentioned. No one was yet talking about a total dismantling of the national-security state and a restoration of a limited-government republic but that almost certainly would have started entering people’s minds before too long.

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA embarked on a desperate search for a new official enemy to replace Russia. One of the big things they mentioned was the drug war, which is precisely what they are doing today. That’s why the military and the CIA are becoming so embroiled in Mexico — to justify their existence.

For 11 years, the national-security establishment made Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein America’s new official enemy. Saddam is coming! Saddam is coming! He’s going to hit us with WMDs, just like Russia was going to do during the Cold War. But as scared as Americans became of Saddam, it just wasn’t the same as having Russia as the big official bugaboo.

And then the 9/11 attacks occurred as retaliation for the killings that the Pentagon and the CIA were wreaking in the Middle East. The national-security establishment was off to the races again, this time with a new official enemy — terrorism and, to a certain extent, Muslims and Islam. The terrorists are coming! The terrorists are coming! The centuries-old quest to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate is upon us! Sharia law! The USA Patriot Act. Mass secret surveillance. Don’t be scared! We are keeping you safe!

But the national-security establishment was never willing to let go of Russia as America’s premier official enemy. The anti-Russia animus had been a big, perpetual cash cow for the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and their ever-growing army of well-heeled “defense” contractors.

Thus, they began using NATO, the old Cold War dinosaur that had remained in existence after the end of the Cold War to restore Russia to its proper place as America’s premier official enemy. While NATO should have been put out to pasture with the end of the Cold War, it was instead used to begin absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact, in violation of express promises that U.S. officials had made to Russia not to do that.

Knowing full-well what Russia’s reaction would be to such provocations, the Pentagon and the CIA kept NATO moving inexorably closer to Russia’s border. When they finally threatened to absorb Ukraine, they were certain that Russia would invade, just as the U.S. would invade Cuba if Russia were to re-install nuclear weapons in that nation. The U.S. provocations brought to mind National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s confession of having provoked Russia into invading Afghanistan in 1979 to give Russia its “own Vietnam.”

When Russia did invade Ukraine, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA had their premier official enemy back. The Russians are coming, again! The Russians are coming, again! The fierce anti-Russia animus was back. The Russians were going to conquer Europe and then the world — sometime after they conquered Ukraine. The anti-Russia indoctrination in the public schools was restored. Everything was like it was before. The national-security state was back in control and the “defense” industry was back in high cotton with tons of taxpayer-funded largess flowing into their coffers.

Ever since, the U.S. mainstream media been exclaiming against Russia’s “unprovoked” war of aggression while, at the same time, remaining silent or supportive of the U.S. national-security establishment’s deadly and destructive invasion and unprovoked and undeclared war of aggression against the people of Iraq. No big deal. “Thank you for your service!”

And then along comes Trump, who is threatening to bring an end to the renewed Cold War racket. The mainstream media, which undoubtedly is still populated by Operation Mockingbird assets of the national-security establishment, is up in arms — the same way it was when Kennedy was moving America in a direction of ending the Cold War.

The question is: If Trump does attempt to move American in the same direction that JFK was moving America, will the national-security establishment let him get away with it? If it does take him out, like it did with Kennedy, it will be much more difficult to hide its role, given the fact that so many Americans have figured out that they took out Kennedy for doing the same thing.

But the Pentagon and the CIA also know that if they do take out Trump, there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it, just as there was nothing that anyone could do about it when they took out Kennedy.

One thing is certain though: If they do succeed in taking out Trump, the mainstream media will participate in the official cover-up as quickly and completely as they did with the Kennedy assassination.

For more on the U.S. national-security establishment’s regime-change operation in 1963, read:

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James K. Douglass

The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob G. Hornberger

Inside the Assassination Records Review Board by Douglas P. Horne

JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas P. Horne

An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story by Jacob G. Hornberger

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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President Donald Trump gets a lot of things wrong. Chief among them is his crazy plan to ethnically cleanse two million Palestinians from the smoking ruins of Gaza.

But he also gets some very important things very right.

Trump managed to end the longest war in US history, Afghanistan, by cutting off the money that fueled this absurd conflict. Without Trump’s forceful intervention, this conflict could have dragged on for another decade and cost yet another $2 trillion. None of the generals or politicians involved had the guts or sense to end this pointless war.

Now, it appears that Trump may be doing it again in the other pointless war, Ukraine. The US has lavished at least $175 billion fueling the Ukraine War. Given that some of the US aid is hidden or obscured, the true figure may be over $200 billion – this by the US which is deep in hock with a monster debt of $36 trillion which it can’t pay back.

The fact is that CIA and State Department mounted a coup costing $5 billion (according to the senior State Department official, Victoria Nuland who organized it) that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Moscow regime. It’s worth recalling that Ukraine was an integral part of Russia for hundreds of years – longer than Virginia has been part of the USA. Many Ukrainians want full independence from Moscow – others, particularly Russian-speakers, do not. The conflict in Ukraine is a civil war fueled by the western powers in an effort to fragment the Russian Federation and Balkanize its parts.

For Washington’s pro-war neoconservatives, further shattering the former Soviet Union is the ideal strategy. But the neocons and armchair amateurs who led the Biden administration were so blinded by their hatred of Russia and world power ambitions that they utterly failed to see how they were bringing Russia and the US to the edge of war. In fact, the US and some European allies were waging economic and military warfare against Russia that could have gone nuclear at any time.

Fortunately, Russian president Vlad Putin’s iron nerves kept the crisis mostly under control. By contrast, the addlepated Biden kept playing with matches instead of calming down this very dangerous crisis. The west’s mighty propaganda machine kept the war alive. Too many people believed Kiev’s propaganda that Ukraine was actually winning this war. Meanwhile, Ukraine was raking in huge sums of cash. I’ve done business in Ukraine and know how deeply corrupt it is – almost as bad as Detroit or Jersey City.

This foolish war not only brought us to the edge of nuclear war but also laid open the deep dementia of Washington’s war party and fanatical anti-communist fringes. Trump is right when he warns of the ‘deep state.’
We recall the heroic young man, Edward Snowden, who publicly revealed how much the National Security had been violating the law by bugging Americans.

During the long years of the Cold War, America’s eighteen national security agencies became choc-a-bloc with ardent anti-Soviet/Russian senior employees. This included CIA, National Security Agency, Pentagon agencies, offices at State, Treasury, new anti-terrorism outfits, and all across our vast security bureaucracy. They are waging a rear-guard action to thwart reforms and/or reductions. They have repeatedly claimed that Trump was somehow being compromised by Russia.

These deep state minions don’t want peace. They want sharp-edged confrontation with Russia and China, safeguarding the billions in Pentagon and intelligence budgets, and protecting their own careers. We saw how cabals of pro-war officials drove France and Britain into two world wars. This is why the idiotic war in Afghanistan lasted for two decades.

As the great Benjamin Franklin said, ‘no good war; no bad peace.’

Reprinted with permission from EricMargolis.com.

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Rothbardian libertarianism upholds liberty as an ethical and moral standard, and for this reason it is often criticized for being idealistic and utopian. Addressing this critique, Duncan Whitmore argues that the mere fact that we live in a statist society, in which all our liberties are under siege does not mean the fight for liberty is a lost cause. His point is that “the seeming remoteness of victory today does not mean that victory will never arrive.” Despite the growing power of the state, the cause of liberty is still worth continually striving towards. Whitmore quotes T.S. Eliot to substantiate this argument, Eliot’s point being that a worthwhile cause may never be entirely won but it must be kept alive:

If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.

Similarly, in his 1908 book, The Philosophy of Loyalty, Josiah Royce argues that: “Loyalty to lost causes is, then, not only a possible thing, but one of the most potent influences of human history. In such cases, the cause comes to be idealized through its very failure to win temporary and visible success.” The cause being lost does not mean that it will, or should, be abandoned—on the contrary, its supporters continually rally their energies to the defense of the cause. The same is true in defending liberty, including wars fought to defend life, property, hearth, and home. Murray Rothbard wrote that he only considered two American wars to be just wars—the Revolutionary War and the War for Southern Independence. He saw both of these as wars fought in defense of liberty, and expressed his certainty that “the South shall rise again.” To Rothbardians, this defense of liberty (where liberty is understood as an emanation of self-ownership and property rights) is the only circumstance in which war is justified.

The South losing their bid for independence is widely characterized by critics of the South as a “lost cause,” but they do not mean this in the hopeful sense described by Eliot and Royce. Rather, critics of the South use the phrase “lost cause” as a term of derision—they mean that the cause was never worth fighting for in the first place. They deploy the phrase “lost case myth” to signify that the Southern cause never had any merit in the first place. In referring to the Southern cause as a “lost cause,” they do not simply mean that the South lost the war—after all, losing the war is an undoubted fact, but unless we are to assume that might always makes right, we can understand that the side which has the just cause will not necessarily triumph. A just cause may be defeated by a bully with greater firepower.

But when critics describe the Southern cause as a “lost cause myth,” their claim is that the Southern cause was not, in fact, just. They claim that Southerners fabricated a fictitious just cause in the years after the war, purely in order to mollify their injured feelings over losing the war. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, editors of a book titled The Myth of The Lost Cause and Civil War History, are an example of critics who believe the Southern cause to be a myth, a “caricature of the truth.” Clyde Wilson describes their book as follows:

The “Lost Cause,” presumably a belief that the Confederates had a few points on their side of the argument, was something, according to Nolan and Gallagher, invented after the war by Southerners to rationalize their evil, destructive, and failed actions. In support of this conclusion [Gallagher and Nolan] present a history of the development of this false and pernicious “Lost Cause Myth,” beginning with the postwar writings of Edward A. Pollard and Jubal A. Early. These writings, the authors claim, foisted on an unsuspecting world false and deceptive notions such as the admirable character of Robert E. Lee, the skill and heroism of Confederate soldiers against heavy odds, and the honorableness of Southerners in their cause.

Purveyors of the view that the Southern cause is nothing but “lost cause mythology” argue that the South, in fact, fought purely, or primarily, to defend slavery—which is as far from being a just cause as a Rothbardian could imagine—and that the cause had nothing to do with independence or liberty. This is a question of great concern to Rothbardians. In defending the Southern cause as just, was Rothbard also purveying “lost cause mythology”? To understand the context of Rothbard’s defense of the Southern cause, it is important to note that he sees this war as being fought on the same grounds as the American Revolution, which he sees as a just war:

It is plainly evident that the American Revolution, using my definition, was a just war, a war of peoples forming an independent nation and casting off the bonds of another people insisting on perpetuating their rule over them. Obviously, the Americans, while welcoming French or other support, were prepared to take on the daunting task of overthrowing the rule of the most powerful empire on earth, and to do it alone if necessary.

Rothbard draws upon libertarian principles in forming the view that the Revolutionary cause was just: “The Americans were steeped in the natural-law philosophy of John Locke and the Scholastics, and in the classical republicanism of Greece and Rome.” He adds that sovereignty vests ultimately in the people: “sovereignty originated not in the king but in the people, but that the people had delegated their powers and rights to the king.” Indeed, as Rothbard points out, this was the only principled basis on which American revolutionaries could break their bonds of loyalty to King George III while maintaining their integrity and honor:

The American revolutionaries, in separating themselves from Great Britain and forming their new nation, adopted the Lockean doctrine. In fact, if they hadn’t done so, they would not have been able to form their new nation. It is well known that the biggest moral and psychological problem the Americans had, and could only bring themselves to overcome after a full year of bloody war, was to violate their oaths of allegiance to the British king.

Rothbard sees the secession of the Southern states in exactly the same light: “In 1861, the Southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat and assault from the federal government, decided to exercise their natural, contractual, and constitutional right to withdraw, to ‘secede’ from that Union.”

The parallels between the Revolutionary War and the War for Southern Independence are not only drawn by Rothbard; it is a view well-represented in historical literature during and after the war. For example, in 1902 Charles Francis Adams compared George Washington and Robert E. Lee, arguing that we may view Lee with the same regard as that held for Washington:

Washington furnishes a precedent at every point. A Virginian like Lee, he was also a British subject; he had fought under the British flag, as Lee had fought under that of the United States; when, in 1776, Virginia seceded from the British Empire, he “went with his State,” just as Lee went with it eighty-five years later; subsequently Washington commanded armies in the field designated by those opposed to them as “rebels,” and whose descendants now glorify them as “the rebels of ’76,” much as Lee later commanded, and at last surrendered, much larger armies, also designated “rebels” by those they confronted. Except in their outcome, the cases were, therefore, precisely alike; and logic is logic. It consequently appears to follow, that, if Lee was a traitor, Washington was also.

The post Just War and Lost Cause Mythology appeared first on LewRockwell.

Since at least 2014 The United Kingdom has been a major participant in NATO’s proxy war against Russia. During the hot phase of the war it has directed a drone and missile campaign in the Black Sea. It is likely responsible for current attacks against Russia related sea transport. It is developing new naval drones for further assaults on Russia.

Britain had initiated and run massive public relation campaigns blaming Russia for various outrages which, in fact, never had happened. Consider the Skripal Affair, the MI6’s Steele dossier used to launch Russiagate and other operations launched through the anti-Russian Integrity Initiative run by the UK government’s Institute of Statecraft.

It was the Brits who, during the war in Ukraine, directed the Black Sea Attack Network (BSAN) to push the Russian fleet out of Sevastopol in Crimea. British Storm Shadow missile were fired against various ships. Directed by British signal intelligence seagoing drones,  made in Britain, attacked Russian transports as well as the Kerch Bridge.

As the Armchair Warlord explained:

The BSAN sea drone program scored a number of successes and hair-raising near-misses over the course of 2023 and early 2024, most notably sinking the Tarantul-class missile boat Ivanovets with what was likely some loss of life on February 1st, 2024. At that point I suspect that the Russian Navy decided that something had to be done and, having carefully studied their foe, put a plan into action to destroy what was to them the most concerning part of the BSAN – the maritime drone program.

Using a few rusty old ships as bait the Russian command observed the signal activities during Ukrainian attacks, uncovered the British run network, and finally killed it:

Deployed without support in the Kerch Strait during a large-scale (albeit unsuccessful) aerial drone raid, the Kotov attracted the attention of Ukrainian sea drones heading for another round with the Kerch Bridge. Video from the battle again suggests only a modest defensive effort with small arms, with subsequent reports that the ship was abandoned quickly (with few to no Russian casualties) and basically allowed to sink. It’s noteworthy that the remaining drones were, again, easily mopped up by rescuers. And here, after this engagement, the Black Sea Attack Network was undone.

You see, congratulations were in order. Zelensky wanted to personally pin medals on the men who were destroying the hated Russian Black Sea Fleet. So, two days later, the personnel of the Black Sea Attack Network – the drone operators, the planners, the technicians, the officers, bosses and bosses’ bosses, and likely a gaggle of foreign advisors – assembled in a hangar in Odessa to receive accolades from their nation’s leader. Zelensky arrived (with the Greek Prime Minister in tow, apparently, perhaps sending a message to a significant maritime player), pinned medals on chests, shook hands, and departed.

His motorcade was a block away when a Russian Iskander ballistic missile sliced through that hangar’s roof and wiped out the assembled personnel of the Ukrainian sea drone network. It was probably launched the instant he walked out the door.

There were reports of a large number of NATO helicopters flying into Odessa in the strike’s aftermath, and shrieking from the usual suspects that the Russians had “tried” to assassinate Zelensky, as though they couldn’t kill him any time they wanted. Meanwhile, the Russian MoD put out a dry statement that they’d struck a target in Odessa associated with the Ukrainian drone campaign.

There have been no noticeable Black Sea sea drone attacks since.

There is however a new maritime campaign under way against all ships, not only Russian ones, which have recently visited Russian ports:

A spate of blasts recorded across the Mediterranean on tankers that have recently called at Russian ports has security analysts concerned about a new form of attack targeting merchant shipping.

Two Thenamaris aframax tankers – the Seajewel and the Seacharm – have both reported explosions onboard in the past month in the Mediterranean, while the Grace Ferrum product tanker has also been badly hit off Libya, all suffering similar damage – holes in hulls below the waterline, leading to some security analysts to suggest the vessels were targeted with limpet mines.

In late December, the Russian Ursa Major general cargo ship sank in the Mediterranean between Spain and Algeria after an explosion.

Away from the Mediterranean, the Turkish-owned Koala tanker, laden with 130,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, was about to set off from the Russian port of Ust-Luga when three explosions ripped through the rear of the ship on February 9, forcing the crew to evacuate.

Those are five ships so far that have been sunk or damaged by limpet mines attached to the ships after they had  visited Russian ports. This is an intimidation campaign to deter ship owners and operators from servicing anything Russian.

I doubt that the Ukrainian military intelligence, the GRU under the terrorist General Budanov, has the network and divers needed to attack Russia related shipping throughout the Mediterranean. The Brits though, through their various commercial and military activities – ship classification societies, ship insurances, crewing agencies etc. – do have the necessary information and access to ports.

That is why I suspect them to be deeply involved in the current campaign.

More naval warfare will be coming as a new British sea-drone campaign is about to commence:

New British naval drones in testing for Ukraine, ukdj, Feb 6 2025

The Ministry of Defence is putting two newly developed uncrewed maritime systems—Snapper and Wasp—through final testing.

During a Written Question session on 30 January 2025, Luke Akehurst (Labour – North Durham) asked about progress on both systems, referencing remarks from the Defence Secretary’s speech at the ADS Annual Dinner on 28 January 2025.

In response, Maria Eagle, Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence, stated that both Snapper and Wasp are “new uncrewed maritime system[s], which [have] been rapidly developed specifically to support Ukraine.” She added that “The system is currently undergoing final testing and further details will be set out in due course.”

A third British sea-drone system is still under development:

Recently, we reported that the Ministry of Defence (MOD) had announced a Project COOKSON Challenge Session back in January. The event invited industry partners from NATO, Ukraine, and Five-Eyes countries to help shape the development of a versatile, fast, and low-observable maritime system designed for operations in Ukraine and beyond.
…
The MOD described the system as follows:

“A COOKSON system consists of a small, fast, vessel with low observability, with >2 one-way effectors mounted on it, including relevant launch system and support equipment. A COOKSON system should be able to travel to Ukraine via Ground Lines of Communication (GLOC) [and] must fit onto a 40 foot flatbed, ideally a 20 foot flatbed.”

The Snapper and Wasp sea-going drones may appear in the Black Sea within the next few months. Cookson systems will still take a year to be ready for action.

From their work against the first wave of Black Sea drones the Russian naval forces have learned that it is more efficient to destroy the network behind a series of attacks than to defend against each of them.

One wonders how deeply the British Ministry of Defense has thought about that.

This originally appeared on Moon of Alabama.

The post By Drones, Mines and Missiles – The British Naval War Against Russia in Ukraine appeared first on LewRockwell.

In his latest podcast from Wednesday night, Peter addresses the renewed buzz surrounding Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Peter argues that no matter how many cuts are made, the government’s nature ensures that fraud and abuse will persist. Without market forces exerting pressure on bureaucrats, the state has to reason to spend and allocate resources wisely.

To kick off the show, Peter details the bold moves made by the DOGE team operating out of the White House, arguing that their progress—while impressive—is still insufficient for the fiscal challenges ahead:

The representatives of Doge actually have authority granted to them by the president to go through various agencies and departments and try to eliminate what they can without congressional approval, spending that is determined to be wasteful, fraudulent, abusive– and they’re actually making quite a bit of progress. Now, while I think that they are going to be able to make some cuts far more than anything that we saw with the Grace Commission, I don’t think it’s going to be nearly enough to get us out of jail as far as paying for the tax cuts.

Peter then turns his attention to the very nature of government, arguing that waste, fraud, and abuse are inevitable when bureaucrats have no real incentive to be efficient:

They are going to find waste, fraud, and abuse. I mean, anybody who believes that that’s not there is completely naive and doesn’t understand government. … That’s why you want to minimize the amount of government you have, because anything the government decides to do is going to be subject to waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s why it’s a very inefficient process. That’s why you want to completely limit what the government does, because so much is going to be wasted, so much is going to be stolen, there’s going to be so much graft and kickbacks. That is the nature of government. There’s nothing you can do about it.

Peter also discusses mounting evidence of recessionary pressures, including households struggling with debt. He warns that record-high delinquencies in credit card payments are a harbinger of economic distress:

I just read again that delinquencies now are at a 13 or 14-year high. The last time they were this high, we were in a great recession. So normally, in order to get to a point where people can’t make their credit card payments, you’re in a recession. Now, I think we are in a recession, and that’s why people can’t make their payments. But if we’re not in a recession now, just imagine how much worse it’s going to be.

Connecting Fed policy to the fraud DOGE has uncovered, he points out that the current low-interest regime is essentially a giveaway that fuels wasteful borrowing and inflation:

If they’re going to say, ‘Hey, borrow money at 4% and pay it back when inflation is 5%,’ I’m getting free money. There’s no real cost to borrowing. So more people are going to borrow if the government’s going to pay you to borrow. What they need to do is ratchet up interest rates to make borrowing expensive. So fewer people will do it. But they don’t have the guts to actually choke off all that debt-fueled consumption because they know that it will produce a recession and they don’t want that. 

Finally, Peter argues that DOGE should be commended for exposing the character of most politicians and bureaucrats. Even if DOGE won’t sufficiently cut waste, it’ll open many Americans’ eyes to the truth of government:

What’s great about it is a lot of people don’t know this. A lot of people don’t realize how bad the government is. They’re finding out. They’re finally getting their eyes open to the corruption, the criminality that is involved in government. I’ve always said the worst people, the most corrupt people go to government. They’re attracted to government. Even if they’re not corrupt when they go, they get corrupted while they’re there. That’s the only reason they can stay there because if you’re not corrupt, you’re not going to stay in Washington. 

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post Thank You, DOGE! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dear Kash,

I read that you are sending 1,500 FBI bad apples from DC into the states.  Please keep them out of red states.

Perhaps you are hoping they will resign.  Otherwise it is a bad idea.  The FBI are the Democrats’ secret police. They frame red state politicians, sheriffs, and attorneys general in order to advance Democrat power. The FBI even tried to frame President Trump and it seems to assassinate him. FBI agents have no integrity, Kash. If the FBI had any integrity, how could we have had eight years of the FBI’s efforts to destroy Donald Trump?

Please don’t send any to Florida.  If you have any in Florida, please take them out.  We would prefer you keep them all in DC where you can keep an eye on them.  Their presence in states and localities will pollute sheriff departments and local police with FBI corrupt practices.

Do you remember some years ago when it came to light that the FBI crime lab concocted whatever “evidence” prosecutors needed to convict defendants regardless of innocence or guilt?  Have you forgot all the fake “Muslim terrorist” cases the FBI created as proof that Muslim terrorism was loose in America?  The FBI would seek out demented individuals and groups and entice them to participate in a FBI concocted terrorist act and then arrest them prior to committing the act.  Some of these victims are still in prison.  The orchestrated arrests produced the headlines that kept the “war on terror” — actually a war for Greater Israel — going in the Middle East.

Please Kash, spare MAGA America from FBI agents.  Keep them locked up in Washington shuffling papers in bureaucratic tasks that go nowhere.  When they retire or die, don’t replace them.  Let the FBI dwindle away.  We don’t need it.

The post Kash Patel Banishes 1,500 FBI Agents from Washington appeared first on LewRockwell.

The following chart plots America’s bizarre obsession with racism, which germinated around 2010, shortly after Barack Obama was elected POTUS. Note that this obsession became a social contagion long after racism ceased being a socially acceptable belief or sentiment.

This is reminiscent of Tocqueville’s observation that bourgeois hatred for the French Ancient Regime fanned into revolutionary fanaticism after the Ancient Regime began giving up its privileges and making concessions to the burgeoning urban middle class. As Tocqueville remarked, the trouble wasn’t lack of favorable change, but that change didn’t happen fast enough to meet growing expectations.

America’s unhinged obsession with racism since 2010 reminds me of an eyewitness account of the infamous Witch Trials in Trier, Germany in the 1580s

In as much as it was popularly believed that the continued sterility of many years was caused by witches through the malice of the Devil, the whole country rose to exterminate the witches. This movement was promoted by many in office, who hoped for wealth from the persecution. And so, from court to court throughout the towns and villages of all the diocese, scurried special accusers, inquisitors, notaries, jurors, judges, constables, dragging to trial and torture human beings of both sexes and burning them in great numbers.

Scarcely any of those who were accused escaped punishment or were there spared even the leading men in the city of Trier. For the Judge, 2 with two Burgomasters, several Councilors and Associate Judges, canons of sundry collegiate churches, parish priests, rural deans, were swept away in this ruin. So far, at length, did the madness of the furious populace and of the courts go in this thirst for blood and booty that there was scarcely anybody who was not smirched some suspicion of this crime.

Note the observer’s remark that “this movement was promoted by many in office, who hoped for wealth from the persecution.”

As the economist Thomas Sowell has often pointed out over the years, the chief beneficiaries of America’s witch hunt for racism have been the self-anointed leaders of the black community who have promised to expunge racism from our society. The trouble is, just as the American military-industrial complex needs the Russian Bogeyman to stick around, leaders of the witch hunt against racism need racism to stick around. What would they do without it?

Perhaps MSNBC’s decision to cancel Joy Reid’s show signals the beginning of the end of the racism witch hunt.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Is America’s Witch Hunt for Racism Ending? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lowering one’s tax burden is not the reason to pursue self-employment, but it is something worth understanding if you’re exploring self-employment.

It’s tax preparation time, the secular equivalent of crawling around the temple on cobblestones littered with broken glass. When our numbed minds read instructions like this–“Enter the smaller of line 10 or line 14. Also enter this amount on the applicable line of your return (see instructions)”–we wonder which is more applicable–Kafka’s Castle, filled with unseen workers toiling away 24/7 getting nothing remotely useful accomplished, or Huxley’s loving our servitude, or perhaps a tortuous mix of both.

The simplified form for wage earners is much easier, of course, but it offers precious little in the way of deductions or tax breaks. The tax system for wage earners without huge mortgage interest or out-of-pocket medical expenses deductions is relatively skimpy in terms of tax breaks. The complexity–and the tax breaks–apply mostly to enterprises, from sole proprietors on up.

I am not a tax professional, I am only sharing my experience as a self-employed worker. This is not tax or financial advice, it’s an account of what I’ve learned preparing my own taxes for decades. Like most people, I rely on the tax preparation software to comply with tax codes and to do the heavy lifting of preparing the tax return.

Of my 54 years of working and paying taxes, 14 were as an employee and 40 were self-employed, so I have experience in both realms. What continues to amaze me is the number of straightforward tax breaks available to the self-employed / sole proprietor.

Let’s avoid sugarcoating self-employment: it’s difficult, demanding and risky. As a general rule, self-employment demands more of us than being an employee on all fronts: we own it all, victories and mistakes. Regulatory burdens and shadow work eat us alive. Much of what passes for self-employment now is low-paid gig work with little upside.

So there is a trade-off here: self-employment is difficult to build up and keep going (taking a vow of poverty is a good start), which is why so few people manage to earn a middle-class income via self-employment outside the professions (accountant, attorney, etc.)–and even those fields are not easy paths to reliable livelihoods.

But there are tax advantages. Let’s start with business expenses. How we run our business is up to us. If we keep track of legitimate expenses (bought lunch for Client A, drove X miles to post office to mail packages, etc.), then nobody can deny that business expense. And if Client A only spent 10 seconds of an hour-long lunch talking “business,” that’s the nature of business lunches.

Everyone understands there’s wiggle-room in expenses. The system is designed to seek out unsubstantiated claims, not question how we run our business. If you happened to stop at the supermarket on the way to the post office, nobody’s going to nix your mileage deduction. You went to the post office to mail a business-related package, and here’s the receipt.

Then there’s the list of deductions for things you had to pay anyway. The self-employed pay both the employee and employer parts of Social Security and Medicare, so that’s a hefty 15.3% of taxable income. But half of this self-employment tax is deductible.

The cost of your healthcare insurance is also deductible.

Retirement funding is another benefit. Yes, wage earners with 401K plans can contribute big chunks of cash into their tax-deferred accounts, but not every employee has a 401K plan at work. the basic limits for contributing to an IRA (individual Retirement Account) is $7,000–not much in today’s inflationary era.

The self-employed can open a Solo 401K that offers two benefits: the sums that can be stashed in the tax-deferred account are substantial (depending on one’s income and age, $30,000 and up), and the Solo 401K funds can be used to buy precious metals or rental real estate as well as traditional financial assets–options not available to corporate 401K plans.

Then there’s the Qualified Business Income Deduction, a deduction available to most sole proprietor enterprises that tax-prep software such as TurboTax generates automatically.

If you have a dedicated home office, the costs of that percentage of your house can be deducted as an expense.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Tax Benefits of Self-Employment appeared first on LewRockwell.

Now that the Trump Administration has been in charge of the U.S. Executive Branch for two weeks, here is what appears to be underway. Despite the chaotic appearance, the plan being implemented is highly strategic and has been in the planning stages for quite a while. Looking through the fog of Omniwar, here is what the high-speed building of the control grid looks like so far.

Digital IDs

The REAL ID is being supported with a strong push through the states. The immigration effort also appears to be supporting the combination of digital IDs plus biometrics.

Stargate Data Centers

The Stargate initiative involves the building out of data centers sufficient to support a complete control grid and all-digital monetary system.

Stargate mRNA Injections

The proposal for personalized mRNA “vaccines” for cancer (and everything else) indicates a plan to roll out the injection program sufficient to implement the Internet of Bodies and continue to lower life expectancy. Stargate funding also helps support the ongoing global rollout of “mega” vaccine factories. I am not sure how Musk’s desire to add mesh networks to our heads fits in, as I suspect they think injections can get them most, if not all, of the way—and it is much easier to market injections that are “good” for you.

Switching Fiscal Control to Central Bankers

The DOGE takeover of Treasury payment systems, combined with the purge of the civil service, is designed to end congressional control of fiscal flows and policies. This leaves the New York Fed and global central bankers in complete control of the fiscal line. As a practical matter, Musk and his team—and whatever private companies and foreign governments are now sharing those data—have replaced the Executive Branch and Congress in terms of control and operation of the fiscal side of government. So, Musk is operating as the titular “Doge” in the Venetian sense. As Steve Bannon rightly points out, Musk and the Silicon Valley crew could not care less about the American people. We might as well start calling Musk “President Musk.”

Social Credit System

It looks like the DOGE takeover of systems is setting up the infrastructure to start a social credit system as well, using federal payments. “Hate crime” accusations and entrapments are designed to assist here.

Crypto Push

The testing of an all-digital transaction system continues using private crypto, while a regulatory framework for crypto is being put in place, and stablecoins are being used to significantly improve the dollar’s ability to “dollarize” the emerging markets. Any country with a weak currency that finds itself up against a strong dollar will find its citizens recruited into the dollar through stablecoins accessed through their mobile phones and related payment apps.

Land Grab

One of the big goals is to use Bitcoin, which is a Ponzi scheme, to swap for real assets—“$500 trillion of land and minerals,” as Howard Lutnick puts it. If mandated government purchases can run up the price of Bitcoin, and then the 2% who own 70% of Bitcoin can swap their Bitcoin for land on a secret, tax-free basis, they can achieve MBT—the real core of MAGA—“Make Billionaires Trillionaires.” In addition, this will achieve the shutting down of federal cash flows and credit to average people, dramatically lowering the economic footprint of the average American. (Climate change was not working, but plunder will.) The land-grab play can be done through Lutnick and the sovereign wealth funds as well as Treasury through a Bitcoin strategic reserve.

Gaza Genocide

To build part of the control grid, they need to move the Palestinians out to Jordan and Egypt—or continue to genocide them. It seems that there is a bit of a stall on who will take responsibility to get that done. Either way, it appears they believe they need Gaza’s land, water, and oil and gas to complete the control grid, so the Palestinians need to go. The picture is still somewhat unclear about how this will happen and how they will finish clearing out Ukraine.

Marketing

A wide variety of ridiculous cultural and unethical medical schemes have built up hatred to a fever pitch—70-plus genders, transgendering kids, late-term abortions, money laundered to NGOs, and destruction of women’s sports, to name but a handful. Doing lots of different actions to cancel all these things is so delighting Trump’s supporters that they have failed to notice the shredding of the Constitution and the illegal coup. This is combined with crypto speculative profits and massive entrainment pumping through TV and the Internet—likely through porn, gaming, and crypto sites as well as TV sports—to further support the coup and inspire the crowd to despise and/or ignore any liberal or person who tries to warn that DOGE’s access to and use of Treasury’s payment systems, and other actions underway, are massive violations of the Constitution and laws. All you have to do is shadow ban and deride anyone who suggests that the proper response is to enforce the law.

The marketing pitch is that “past lawlessness justifies current lawlessness”; canceling all sorts of heinous, ridiculous, and wasteful expenditures helps promote this. There is little understanding that where that cancellation is done illegally, the courts will often reverse it, and the costs will often be more than the savings. That is what happened to the neocons during Bush I; this is a classic neocon strategy. As the general counsel at HUD (later governor of Oklahoma and executive director of the American Bankers Association) once said when it was pointed out that it was illegal to abrogate a binding contract with a private enterprise: “F**k ‘em! By the time they win in court, we will be gone.” If you know what you are doing, you could cancel all of this stuff relatively quickly on a legal basis, but it does not look like that is happening.

The freedom-fighting community is betting big on RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard going into the administration, not understanding that they are full-on supportive of the land grab and Gaza genocide—which are the big plays. The administration has done a great job of furthering those two picks while muzzling the freedom-fighting community that is hoping to make progress on health, food, and other selected issues. The control grid and the land grab will override any progress made on those fronts, unless it is stopped, which it still can be.

Weather Warfare

This is one of the plunderers’ “aces in the hole.” Weather warfare will continue to support the land grab on an ongoing basis and comes with the ability to manipulate the media—old and new—to suppress the death counts. The takeover of TikTok was necessary for this purpose.

The Bottom Line: This Is a Coup

Last June, I said on Money & Markets that the leaders of the push for a totalitarian control model and the central bankers had decided to back Trump because he could deliver the conservatives into the model. What is happening now has been in the planning at least since then; Trump and Musk are simply Kabuki theater. What I underestimated was the speed at which they would proceed with a full-on coup. However, given that the Department of Defense (DOD) and intelligence agency clouds have all been digitized and put into the hands of Silicon Valley, a complete reengineering of the U.S. government through the digital systems is now possible at high speed.

One big question is how much they will cut off the federal flows. The more federal payments you cut, the faster you can do the land grab, the cheaper the price, and the faster you can force everyone onto an all-digital monetary system. However, if you can mandate government purchases of Bitcoin, you can run the price high and keep your supporters drunk with speculative profits while you put everything else in place. The first trial balloon I heard on using Bitcoin for the land grab—a proposal to shut down all federal flows overnight—was back in 2017, and it amounted to full-on “shock doctrine.” Solari’s deep-dive report for the 3rd Quarter 2024 Wrap Up is on plunder and goes through case studies of how this has been done globally. The folks who have done this—in Russia, in Eastern Europe, in Latin America—have sometimes said that after they finished with the world, they would do North America.

This is a coup. The goal is to destroy the Constitution once and for all. If they succeed, the central bankers will have complete control, as Bank for International Settlements (BIS) general manager Augustín Carstens has openly described. Notice that the New York Fed continues to run the debt and make sure the payments flow, and the markets have not reacted in any dramatic way. That is because the smart money is comfortable with what is happening, and in fact, has generally anticipated what is happening. The U.S. Executive Branch does not run the dollar system, and they can only do what they do if the central bankers continue to allow the payments to flow in and out.

My recommendation to all of us is to bring as much transparency to this as quickly as possible, and implement whatever is possible in your state to protect the Constitution and individual sovereignty. Do everything possible to protect the analog systems and cash and checks; see What the States Can Do. And from now on, as one brilliant ally suggests, I am going to refer to Musk as “President Musk” to help the MAGA team understand what is really happening.

If the current effort is successful, our children and grandchildren will never know the blessings that we have known. Human civilization can stop, but only if we let it. Keep freedom in your prayers and remind yourself that the bigger the breakdown, the bigger the breakthrough. May this year be endowed by grace and the miraculous shifts that divine intelligence can bring.

This originally appeared on The Solari Report.

The post Trump Administration: Digital Control Grid Coming Together at High Speed appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lew,

It won’t be easy at this point for Bill Gates and the depopulation globalists to roll out another plandemic to inject Americans with an experimental mRNA shot. Prior to the Covid con, few Americans questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccines, but now most don’t trust mRNA shots. The new strategy of the globalists is to get the toxin mRNA into the population by injecting the food supply with these jabs.

I asked Grok3, the AI tool now being beta tested on X, if President Trump has authorized the vaccination of chickens to fight bird flu. The answer is his administration has a plan toward vaccinating poultry against avian flu and the USDA granted conditional approval to a drug company to inject poultry for avian flu.

Grok’s response:

As of February 22, 2025, there is no definitive evidence that President Donald Trump has formally agreed to vaccinate chickens for avian flu. However, recent developments suggest that his administration is actively exploring this option as part of a broader strategy to combat the ongoing avian influenza outbreak and address soaring egg prices.

The Trump administration has signaled a shift away from the previous U.S. policy of culling entire flocks to control avian flu outbreaks, a practice that has led to the destruction of over 150 million birds since 2022 and contributed to record-high egg prices. Kevin Hassett, Director of the National Economic Council, indicated on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on February 16, 2025, that the administration is working on a plan that emphasizes “biosecurity and medication” rather than mass depopulation. While “medication” could imply vaccination, Hassett did not explicitly confirm it, instead focusing on developing a “smart perimeter” to manage outbreaks more effectively. He noted collaboration with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and leading scientists to finalize this approach, with further details expected soon.

A significant step toward vaccination occurred on February 14, 2025, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) granted conditional approval to Zoetis, an animal healthcare company, to use its avian flu vaccine in poultry. This marks a potential policy shift, as the U.S. has historically avoided vaccinating chickens due to trade restrictions—many countries do not accept vaccinated poultry exports—and challenges in detecting the virus in vaccinated birds. Zoetis emphasized that the decision to vaccinate commercial flocks rests with federal authorities in consultation with the poultry industry, suggesting that any final approval would require Trump administration endorsement.

Reports from various sources indicate that Trump’s team is considering vaccination as a tool to reduce economic fallout from the outbreak, which has driven egg prices to an average of $4.15 per dozen in December 2024, with a projected 20% increase in 2025. The Washington Examiner noted that allowing farmers to vaccinate could be a cost-effective solution, contrasting this with the Biden administration’s reluctance, attributed to trade and market concerns despite USDA tests in 2023 showing vaccine efficacy. Meanwhile, posts on X reflect public speculation, with some claiming Trump has already greenlit mRNA vaccines for chickens, though no official statement or documentation confirms this as of now.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, in a Breitbart interview, acknowledged vaccination as an option under review but highlighted potential trade disruptions, indicating the administration is weighing multiple factors. The Associated Press reported on February 18, 2025, that the new strategy would stress “vaccinations and tighter biosecurity,” further suggesting momentum toward this approach, though no final commitment was detailed.

In summary, while President Trump has not explicitly agreed to vaccinate chickens for avian flu as of the latest available information, his administration is actively developing a plan that appears to lean toward incorporating vaccines, supported by the USDA’s conditional approval to Zoetis. An official announcement or policy decision would be needed to confirm this direction, and none has been reported by February 22, 2025. Given the administration’s focus on reducing egg prices and its criticism of prior culling practices, vaccination remains a likely component of its emerging strategy.

The post Has President Trump Agreed To Vaccinate Chickens for Bird Flu? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post New Documentary Explores Life and Legacy of Fletcher Prouty, Who Wrote about CIA Covert Operations in His Classic Book The Secret Team appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

The post Whitney Webb – The Elites Are Using AI to Destroy the Human Spirit appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Krall.

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Wayne Goodfellow writes:

This is an impressive speech to the EU parliament by a scholar who was involved directly in major geopolitical events in the U.S. and Europe over the past 40 years. Canada and NATO plus almost all major political parties in Europe and on Parliament Hill in Ottawa are on the wrong side of history. Dr. Sachs’ review of the true history of conflict, endless wars, coups and colour revolutions since the Second World War is based to a large degree on his personal  interactions with political leaders and exposes the dominant narrative of western governments and their mouthpieces, the main stream media, as mostly false. In other words, the foreign policy decisions of NATO countries are based on mostly lies and liars. 

The post Professor Jeffrey Sachs’ Speech to the EU Parliament appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

TASS News

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