Lew Rockwell Institute

At least 10 children have died because of the COVID shots, according to a recently publicized email from Trump Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials.

“At least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” FDA Chief Medical Officer Vinay Prasad wrote on Friday in an email to staff, obtained by The Daily Caller.

“This is a profound revelation. For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children,” Prasad said in the memo.

The finding corroborates that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recently linked at least 25 pediatric deaths to the COVID shot, via information from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Both counts likely significantly underestimate the real number of pediatric deaths from the shots, considering that studies have found vaccine injuries have been seriously underreported to VAERS.

In his Friday memo, Prasad ripped the Biden administration for pressuring the injection of these experimental mRNA shots into children.

“Healthy young children who faced tremendously low risk of death were coerced, at the behest of the Biden administration, via school and work mandates, to receive a vaccine that could result in death,” wrote Prasad.

“In many cases, such mandates were harmful. It is difficult to read cases where kids aged 7 to 16 may be dead as a result of covid vaccines.”

The disturbing admission by the Trump administration’s health agency highlights the silence of the Biden administration about these deaths and raises further questions about its integrity or lack thereof.

“Why did it take until 2025 to perform this analysis, and take necessary further actions? Deaths were reported between 2021 and 2024, and ignored for years,” wrote Prasad. He acknowledged that the vaccines potentially killed more children on balance, considering that they had virtually no risk of dying from COVID.

“The truth is we do not know if we saved lives on balance,” he wrote. “It is horrifying to consider that the US vaccine regulation, including our actions, may have harmed more children than we saved. This requires humility and introspection.”

The Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) will reportedly strengthen its safety protocols for vaccines, including by requiring more clinical trials as opposed to relying on antibody laboratory studies, modifying the annual flu vaccine release, and examining the effect of administering multiple vaccines in one round.

This year, the CDC removed COVID shots from its recommended “vaccines” for healthy children. A CDC panel had voted in 2022 to add the COVID shots to the childhood immunization schedule despite their experimental nature and the fact that they were produced in a fraction of the time ordinarily required to bring a vaccine to market.

The push for COVID shots for children was spearheaded at least in part by CBER Director Peter Marks, who pushed for full approval of the COVID shots even for the young and healthy and laid the foundation for COVID shot mandates.

A large, growing body of evidence shows that the mRNA shots were dangerous to human health in a wide variety of ways and caused deaths at a rate far exceeding usual safety standards for vaccines. As Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, an ear, nose and throat specialist in Houston, Texas, explained to Tucker Carlson in April:

Normally, the FDA will put a black box warning on a medication if there have been five deaths. They will pull it off the market if there have been 50. Well, according to VAERS, (the) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – and it’s vastly under-reported, which I have seen firsthand – there have been 38,000 deaths from these COVID shots.

That number has since increased, according to VAERS, which now reports 38,773 deaths, 221,257 hospitalizations, 22,362 heart attacks, and 29,012 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis due to the COVID shot as of August 29, among other ailments.

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post Trump FDA Says COVID Shots ‘Killed’ at Least 10 Children, Promises New Vaccine Safeguards appeared first on LewRockwell.

My post on Trump’s war on Venezuela two days ago mentioned a Washington Post report (archived) about a war crime directly ordered by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth:

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

The Intercept had previously reported (archived) the second strike the U.S. military had launched against survivors:

People on board the boat off the coast of Venezuela that the U.S. military destroyed last Tuesday were said to have survived an initial strike, according to two American officials familiar with the matter. They were then killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.
…
Last week, a high-ranking Pentagon official who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity said that the strike in the Caribbean was a criminal attack on civilians and said that the Trump administration paved the way for it by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force earlier this year.

“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the War Department official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”

The high-ranking Pentagon official is correct in that the strikes against boats in international waters are criminal attacks on civilians.

But the killing of survivors of such strikes is more than that. It is undoubtedly a war crime.

Hegseth’s order to kill survivors was clearly illegal. It was the duty of the soldiers in the line of command to reject the order. That they have not done so but followed the order is in itself a war crime.

How do we know this?

Because the Department of Defense’s LAW OF WAR MANUAL (LOWM) (pdf) says so:

18.3 DUTIES OF INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF THE ARMED FORCES

Each member of the armed services has a duty to: (1) comply with the law of war in good faith; and (2) refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit violations of the law of war.

Further down the Manual uses the exact case in question,  an order to kill survivors at sea, as an example of an illegal order:

18.3.2 Refuse to Comply With Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations.
Members of the armed forces must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations. In addition, orders should not be construed to authorize implicitly violations of law of war.

18.3.2.1 Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations.
The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.27

Every soldier down the line of command, from the commanding general receiving Hegseth’s verbal order down to the guys who pushed the button to launch the missile had the duty to reject the order. Those who have not done so are themselves guilty.

The footnote in 18.3.2.1 points to the case of the Canadian hospital ship HMHS Llandovery Castle which on 27 June 1918 had been torpedoed by a German U-Boot:

The sinking was the deadliest Canadian naval disaster of the war. 234 doctors, nurses, members of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, soldiers and seamen died in the sinking and subsequent machine-gunning of lifeboats.

In 1921 a German court sentenced two officers to years in prison because they had followed the illegal order of the submarine’s captain, Helmut Brümmer-Patzig, to kill the survivors.

According to the footnote in the LoWM the court said:

“It is certainly to be urged in favor of the military subordinates, that they are under no obligation to question the order of their superior officer, and they can count upon its legality. But no such confidence can be held to exist, if such an order is universally known to everybody, including also the accused, to be without any doubt whatever against the law. This happens only in rare and exceptional cases. But this case was precisely one of them, for in the present instance, it was perfectly clear to the accused that killing defenceless people in the life-boats could be nothing else but a breach of the law. As naval officers by profession they were well aware, as the naval expert Saalwiachter has strikingly stated, that one is not legally authorized to kill defenceless people. They well knew that this was the case here. They quickly found out the facts by questioning the occupants in the boats when these were stopped. They could only have gathered, from the order given by Patzig, that he wished to make use of his subordinates to carry out a breach of the law. They should, therefore, have refused to obey.”

It can not be more clear. The DoD’s Law of Warfare manual is using the case of killing survivors at sea as an example of an illegal order. Today the court would say:

“They could only have gathered, from the order given by Hedseth, that he wished to make use of his subordinates to carry out a breach of the law. They should, therefore, have refused to obey.”

There are signs that one commanding officer did his duty and refused to execute Hegseth’s illegal order. On October 16 the U.S. military attacked another, the sixth, vessel. Two of the four people on board survived and were rescued:

President Trump said that the two survivors of a U.S. military strike Thursday on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea will be returned to their countries of origin.
…
One survivor is from Ecuador and the other is from Colombia.

Thursday’s strike marks the sixth known boat attack in the area since last month — and the first known attack with survivors. Mr. Trump said the strike was against a submarine carrying mostly fentanyl and other illegal narcotics.
…
A Navy helicopter transported the survivors from the semi-submersible to a Navy ship, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to CBS News on Friday.

“It is the custom of the sea to save people who are at risk in international waters. You don’t sort of sail on. That’s against every principle of naval activity,” Eugene R. Fidell, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, told CBS News on Friday. “You’re supposed to save people, even though the people here are people who are only in danger because the U.S. was attempting to kill them.”

On the very same day those survivors were rescued, October 16, the DoD announced that the head of its Southern Command was ‘stepping down’:

The military commander overseeing the Pentagon’s escalating attacks against boats in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration says are smuggling drugs is stepping down, three U.S. officials said Thursday.

The officer, Adm. Alvin Holsey, is leaving his job as head of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees all operations in Central and South America, even as the Pentagon has rapidly built up some 10,000 forces in the region in what it says is a major counterdrug and counterterrorism mission.

It was unclear why Holsey is leaving now, less than a year into his tenure, and in the midst of the biggest operation in his 37-year career. But one of the U.S. officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said that Holsey had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.

It now seems clear that Admiral Holsey got fired for not following Hegseth’s illegal order and for ordering the rescue of the survivors of the strike.

Hegseth meanwhile reveals himself as veritable psychopath:

Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth – 0:37 UTC · Dec 1, 2025

For your Christmas wish list…

@U.S. Southern Command

There are signs that Congress is waking up to the issue (archived) and that Hegseth’s order may well have real consequences for him:

A top Republican and Democrats in Congress suggested on Sunday that American military officials might have committed a war crime in President Trump’s offensive against boats in the Caribbean after a news report said that during one such attack, a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors.
…
The lawmakers’ comments came after top Republicans and Democrats on the two congressional committees overseeing the Pentagon vowed over the weekend to increase their scrutiny of U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean after the report. Mr. Turner said the [Washington Post] article had only sharpened lawmakers’ already grave questions about the operation.

The senators and member of congress should grow a spine and use their power over the budget to reign in the president. The secretary of defense must be fired from his position. Admiral Holsey must be reinstate as Southern Command.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Soldiers Have ‘Duty To Refuse’ Hegseth’s Order To Commit War Crimes appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Beethoven.” Berthold Genzmer (ca. 1890).

December 16 is a special anniversary, a significant one in the history of our Western Christian civilization, but one that should not be forgotten. On that date, 255 years ago in 1770, the musician and composer Ludwig van Beethoven was born in the city of Cologne (Koln) in the Rhineland in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. Traveling to Vienna as a young man, he spent much of his life there as one of the greatest composers of music of all time. His compositions and his persona continue to resound through the ages—as long as there is a Western and Christian culture to admire and celebrate.

Recently, I came upon a study of his life, a study that attempts to revise some of the commonly-held misconceptions about Beethoven, that somehow he was wrapped up in the secular ideals of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and even its anti-religious, or anti-Catholic ideas.

Written by Nicholas Junkai Chong (Columbia University, 2016), the work is a PhD dissertation which is titled “Beethoven’s Catholicism: A Reconsideration” and it makes a number of significant points, among which that Beethoven was much closer in many of his views to the post-Napoleonic traditionalist Restoration than many other chroniclers have admitted. Indeed, we remember the story of his original dedication of his famous “Eroica” symphony (no. 3) to Napoleon, whom he had thought would “liberate” Europe, but then tore that dedication up, instead dedicating the work to Prince Lobkowicz, his patron, certainly no liberal. But that is just one instance, and there are others, including long passages from his letters, his Tagebuch [“Diary”], and the Heiligenstadt Testament, and books that he read by contemporary (and orthodox) theologians, that indicate that his early enthusiasm for the ideals of “liberté” and “egalité” were tempered by an abiding faith that eventually triumphed over many of his earlier illusions. And to this we must add his solid loyalty to the Habsburg Empire and its Kaiser.

Cultural giants like Beethoven have made precious contributions to our Western Christian heritage, a heritage that is critically threatened in our time by demonic and Gnostic demiurges who seek nothing less than the complete perversion of two millennia of Christian culture which brought together the salvific Gift of the Old Testament Hebrews, the philosophy of ancient Greece, and the classical traditions of Rome.

Beethoven was an integral part of that continuum. And like so many others who have contributed to our inherited corpus of art, music, architecture, and literature, he stands above the ages athwart the disintegration and the frenzied assaults on what the poet William Butler Yeats called (in his poem, “The Second Coming”) the “rocking cradle” of Bethlehem—that “rocking cradle” of the Christ from which our culture proceeds.

Just as the post-Marxist and Progressivist academics and mobs and their allies in our cowardly political and media elites wish to put all reminders of our past—those monuments and symbols—whether Confederate or colonial, in remote museums, safely away from the inquiring eyes of most of our citizens, so, too, those epigones of Evil, those cultural vandals who would destroy our inheritance, wish to lock up our sacred traditions of music, literature, and the arts away from our population for whom that inheritance is a birthright. Or, separate them and make them practically inaccessible. And, far worse, “re-interpret” them using new templates based entirely on “race” and “gender”—thus, “women’s studies” which views literature and music through the lens of “masculine oppression” and “toxic masculinity” throughout the ages.

In December 1940, at the end of a live national Saturday matinee broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Gaetano Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment, as author Paul Jackson (in his volume, Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met) recounts, the famous soprano Lily Pons advanced to the front of the stage, and holding a French flag aloft, sang “La Marseillaise.” The audience erupted in emotional enthusiasm…not just there in New York, but across the entire nation where as many as forty million listeners tuned in and heard her salute to a defeated France. Forty million Americans in every state and territory (out of around 130 million citizens) were united not only in remembering fallen France, but by and in a culture and musical tradition they all shared, and, even if not devotees of opera, which they at least understood to be part of their precious cultural patrimony.

Today that unity no longer exists. It has been rent asunder by the very guardians of that cultural inheritance, those entrusted with its care and transmission, who have succumbed to the Dark Lord and the enticements that emit from the foulest voices and most fetid enemies of our civilization.

It was the Roman poet Juvenal two millennia ago in his Satires who wrote, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?,” which translated means: “Who is guarding us against the guardians?” Today we must ask the same questions: Who is guarding us against the cabal of our Intelligence Agencies which now serve as instruments of the Deep State?—Who is guarding us against a political class bought and paid for by globalists who have no loyalty to country or to faith, but rather only to their secularized vision of a global Godless Utopia?—Who is guarding us against the academic elites who control our educational system and pollute the minds of our children?—Who is guarding us against the feculent pollution of our cultural and artistic heritage?

For decades—since before the Second World War—increasingly powerful Elites have controlled the destiny of the American nation. And this dominance has meant not just the revolutionary overthrowal of the traditional political order, but also the veritable abortion of our cultural heritage.

After an initial enthusiasm for and flirtation with what he thought Napoleon might bring to Europe, Beethoven became a strong supporter of the Habsburg monarchy…and an avowed foe of the Napoleonic destruction of the Old Order. He understood what that meant, just as the Blessed Pius IX after the Revolution of 1848 understood the deleterious effects of liberalism and its fanatical desire to destroy Christian civilization.

In 1813 to celebrate the great victory of the Marquess (later Duke) of Wellington over the French at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain (June 21, 1813), Beethoven composed a wonderful little ceremonial piece—“Wellington’s Victory”—a kind of short audially evocative symphonic poem depicting that momentous battle that freed Spain from Napoleonic tyranny. In it he interpolated both French and British airs and songs, including a rousing version of “Rule, Britannia!” (The Brits were on the “good” side back then.) It stands as a musical symbol of both the cultural response that Christian Europe then offered to “the great thief of Europe” as well as a paean to military triumph over the forces of Revolution.

Today both Europe and the United States appear prostrate before the even more frenzied offspring of those 19th century revolutionaries. Let us, then, in 2026 seize upon the signs of Hope—those signs of contradiction against Modernism and Progressivism—and, like our ancestors, like Wellington and, yes, like a Beethoven with the scales removed from his eyes, raise up the banners of Christ the King.

While advancing once more beneath His Cross, we intone the Laudes Regiae: “Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!” chanted at the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day in the year 800 A.D. And we could do no better than letting “Wellington’s Victory” become our symphonic clarion call of militant crusade against our powerful enemies who seek nothing less than the extinction of our culture, our faith and us.

The post Beethoven, the Duke of Wellington, and the Laudes Regiae appeared first on LewRockwell.

Michael Wolff is being pilloried, and although he’s a friend, he deserves some of it because of his dealings with the arch pimp and blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein. For any of you traveling abroad in North Korea, what Wolff has done is play uncle to the blackmailer-pimp, no longer with us, thank God. Michael Wolff has become rich by writing books—hatchet jobs, actually—on Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump. Media types don’t like Rupert because his newspapers are mostly conservative. Media types are usually physically ugly and politically left-wing. Ergo, they don’t agree with Rupert and wish he had never come over to these shores and rescued papers like the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. He also started Fox News, and Fox dominates not only the news cycle but also late-night shows. If Fox didn’t exist, a certain Queens real estate developer would not be living in D.C. as I write. Hence Michael Wolff does not like Rupert. But I do, and I also like The Donald, another person Michael Wolff really dislikes. But I will forgive Michael Wolff anything because of his beautiful wife, Victoria, and I do accept the fact that I’m a sucker for any person of the feminine sex who happens to be beautiful. I simply can’t help it, despite years of trying to resist it.

“What I find amusing is how desperate the media in general and the Times in particular are to try to connect Trump with Epstein.”

Neither Rupert—my onetime boss at the New York Post and London’s Sunday Times—nor The Donald fell for Epstein’s tricks, despite Michael’s advice to the pimp and blackmailer. Both men are too smart and have been around the quad for too long, as they say, to fall for them. Rupert would not be caught dead in the moral sewer that was Epstein. I wish I could say the same for The Donald and Michael Wolff, but however hard Michael tries, along with Trump haters like the Times and New Yorker types, The Donald did not ever get involved with Epstein except having his picture taken at various crappy lowlife parties, now described by the know-nothing media as glamorous shindigs. The onetime head of Harvard, Summers, yes, onetime world’s richest man Gates, yes, onetime president of the Unites States Clinton, maybe, former head of Apollo Leon Black, definitely, but not The Donald. Michael Wolff wanted to entrap Trump with the scumbag but never managed it. He made a fortune trying, though. Good for you, Michael, but it’s a pity your name comes up with that of Epstein.

What I find amusing is how desperate the media in general and the Times in particular are to try to connect Trump with Epstein. Ms. Giuffre’s book is now considered the Bible by the Brit hacks who managed to bring down Andrew Windsor. The fact that she took 12 million greenbacks from him, and after that committed suicide, has not made her story at all suspect to the Brits. The most ignored passage in her book is the one that absolves Trump, the one stating that he acted like the perfect gentleman as far as she was concerned. It must be very frustrating for all those ugly little people at the Times, being unable to hang a crime on Trump. Some of them might even take out their frustrations on their long-suffering, homely wives. The one I feel most sorry for is Summers, an innocent about women who only asked for advice. Summers should not have resigned any post because he did nothing wrong.

Wolff advised Epstein to let Trump hang himself. The Donald is too smart for that. I have written this before, but here it goes once again: A woman I was seeing on the side long ago was asked by Epstein about me. He wanted to meet me. I told her to get lost. Some time later, while sitting in a port-side café in Saint-Tropez, my wife and I were approached by Ghislaine Maxwell, whom I knew from London in the past. She almost begged us to attend a party she was giving. My wife said we were about to sail away, and we actually did. There was no way we would ever be seen with such lowlifes.

So here is my question: How could someone like Leon Black, a shark if there ever was one, pay millions to the pimp Epstein for market info? It had to do with you-know-what, as Epstein was a con man and the shark knew more about markets than Epstein could ever hope to. I can see Larry Summers being taken in because as an academic he’s an innocent where the fair sex is concerned. Gates, ditto. Never mind. The best thing Epstein ever did was to do himself in, but leave it to the left-wing media to reach for straws. Poor things, they’ve got three more years of Trump. Maybe a Russian connection or some hooker’s claims might save them. They live in hope.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post Crying Wolff appeared first on LewRockwell.

How many who voted for Trump would have voted for him if Trump had told them they’d get more new wars?

We are apparently on the cusp of another one, with Venezuela. It has the ring-echo of Ronald Reagan’s war with Grenada, if anyone remembers that. That war was more like a stomp – of a Caribbean island that was a nation in the same sense that a kid’s lemonaid stand is a business. Anyhow, Reagan didn’t run on ending wars. Trump did. So why is he starting them – and why with Venezuela?

Two reasons come to mind – and there are probably others.

The first is that Trump sees war – as all Maximum Leader types do – as good because it tends to rouse the manufactured patriotism of the populace, which serves to distract them from the problems besetting them and to get them to forget that the Maximum Leader is the cause of their problems. Herman Goring had much to say about this. The Chimp may have actually read about what Goring said, or had Dick Cheney read it to him.

Republican voters – in the main – are very susceptible to War Fever. This ought not to be especially surprising given the origins of the Republican Party, which was founded by the man who waged war against Americans who foolishly took seriously that stuff about self-government and consent of the governed. Lincoln and the Republicans schooled Americans about the truth of that, to the accompaniment of belligerent, crusader anthems – My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

Today’s Republicans favor a mellower soundtrack – I’m proud to be an American! Where at least I know I’m free! – that’s as delusional as it is syrupy. But – then and now – the rank and file rally ’round the flag and what they are told it stands for.

But Reagan’s splendid little wars – there was also the Libyan Business – took place at a time when Americans were able to afford the rah-rah’ing because they could afford groceries as well as new cars and a home in the suburbs. Groceries are becoming a kind of luxury for many and a house something akin to what the idea of someday owning a mansion (and a yacht) was back when having a million bucks’ net worth meant you were rich rather than upper middle class.

Today’s Americans are as sick of war – and paying for them – as they are of the sight of people still wearing “masks.” Yet they discover to their astonishment that they might as well have voted for Biden and put the “masks” back on again – insofar as the wars are concerned. Trump must be either catastrophically unaware of how little the American people – especially his base – want another war, or he is aware and just doesn’t care. The latter – if it is so – suggest that Trump may be on the verge of becoming a Maximum Leader in fact rather than just de facto. Maximum Leaders just do as they please, which is pretty much what Trump has been doing. Maybe he is on the cusp of making it official, as by declaring an insurrection – and then who cares what Americans think?

Project Esther is not a fictional story. Nor is Palantir unreal. Same goes for the new Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. Did Trump voters vote for that?

Does it matter that they didn’t? might be a better way to ask that question.

There’s another reason why Trump might be taking us to war against Venezuela, which by the way would be something akin to what National Socialist Germany did when it went to war against Poland (alongside the Soviet Union, but Americans tend not to be aware of that fact). When National Socialist Germany did it, it was said to be a war crime – punishable by death, for the leaders of National Socialist Germany. It is apparently something else when America’s leaders do it. Just ask The Chimp.

Back to the reason for the apparently imminent attack on Venezuela, which has not attacked nor threatened to attack America. Not militarily. But Maduro – the Maximum Leader of Venezuela – has promised to “ditch” the dollar – and that is a far worse threat to America’s Maximum Leader. Venezuela, which is a huge producer of oil, wants to accept other currencies as payment and that paints a target on his back. Or rectum.

Ask Gaddafi about that.

None of this is going to make America Great Again. But that’s as beside the point as the rest of Trump’s promises.

We bought the ticket – and now it’s time to take the ride.

This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.

The post Another War . . . appeared first on LewRockwell.

If we’ve learned anything about the so-called “leaders” of Europe in recent years, they are consummate virtue signalers, and like all virtue signalers, they do it to cloak their true motives. The entire architecture of the E.U. and its member nations ensures that the governments remain steadfastly unaccountable to the people they are supposed to represent.

Europe’s leaders present themselves as being chiefly concerned with the moral and ideological dimensions of politics. Rarely if ever do they speak about the E.U.’s precarious financial state.

As John Cochrane at the Hoover Institute recently characterized it:

The 2010 sovereign debt crisis was the earthquake. The ECB, feeling it was the only game in town, intervened on a large scale, including making large sovereign-bond purchases and lending to banks to fund their sovereign-bond purchases. Then-ECB president Mario Draghi famously pledged “whatever it takes.”

Eventually, an adjustment-program mechanism emerged, allowing support with conditionality and imposing some losses on some creditors. But this institutional reform later fell from grace, and has been crowded out by other ECB interventions starting in the early 2020s. Self-imposed rules on bond purchases weakened with each new intervention.

Bond buying in the quantitative-easing era further enlarged the ECB’s sovereign bond holdings, and surged during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The ECB introduced “flexibility” in purchases to keep sovereign spreads from rising. Inflation climbed sharply starting in 2021 while the ECB continued bond purchases and kept rates low. That surge undermined confidence that the bank could and would control inflation, making any future crisis more unstable.

So here we are. Europe is in a fragile state. Overregulation and bureaucracy stifle innovation and growth. Member states’ debts have risen dramatically. The ECB holds large portfolios of sovereign bonds, and is widely expected to buy more anytime yields or spreads threaten to rise. Banks remain stuffed with sovereign debt, so any sovereign crisis becomes a bank crisis.

The next crisis will challenge European sovereign debts. That crisis may be bigger than even the ECB can handle without chaotic defaults, financial meltdown, or sharp inflation.

Increasingly I wonder if guys who run the ECB (European Central Bank) are far more nervous than they would ever admit to the European press.

The ECB is located in Frankfurt, Germany. The city’s once famous newspaper—the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—is now staffed by amazingly sophomoric columnists who rarely if ever question official policy about anything.

I suspect that if one examines Europe’s negotiations with Ukraine’s oligarchs in the matter of Ukraine’s planned accession to the E.U. and NATO, the proposed agreements contain provisions that would bolster—at least on paper—Europe’s precarious financial condition. Though most people don’t realize it, financial motives have been a major driver of wars for the last two hundred years.

I suspect that Europe’s passionate desire to maintain the proxy war in Ukraine is primarily driven by financial considerations—not for the citizens of Europe, but for the dreadful people who currently hold power and are determined not to relinquish it.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

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The US-Russian peace plan for Ukraine certainly puts an end to a conflict. But, above all, it paves the way for a reinterpretation of history. No, the Russian military operation was not an “illegal, unprovoked, and unjustified military aggression,” but rather the implementation of Security Council Resolution 2202, in accordance with international law. If the people of Europe recognize that they were mistaken, or that they were misled, they will change their regimes just as Ukraine will change its own.

The Ukrainian-Russian conflict is coming to an end: the Russian and American presidents have agreed on a 28-point plan, modeled on the one adopted by the Security Council for the Jewish-Arab conflict  [ 1 ] .

While the guiding principles were approved at the Anchorage (Alaska) summit on August 15 by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin themselves, the details were negotiated by Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev in Miami from October 24 to 26. This agreement was only officially disclosed to Rustem Umerov, secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, early last week, before his flight to Qatar. The unelected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, learned of it in detail on November 20, when Dan Driscoll (Secretary of the Army), General Randy George (Chief of Staff of the Army), and General Chris Donahue (Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe and Africa) presented it to him.

Over the past three months, Russian forces have bombarded the “integral nationalist” units (“Banderists” or “neo-Nazis,” according to Kremlin terminology) of the “White Führer,” Andriy Biletsky. As a result, he emerged defeated from the successive battles of Mariupol (May 2022), Bakmut/Artyomovsk (December 2023), and Pokrovsk (November 2025).

On November 11, the State Department gave the green light to the release of “Operation Midas,” a vast investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) conducted with the assistance of 80 American investigators. It has already led to the resignation of two ministers—Herman Halushchenko, Minister of Justice, and Svitlana Grynchuk, Minister of Energy—and the flight of Rustem Umerov (already mentioned) to Qatar. The resignation of Andriy Yermak, the head of the presidential administration, is highly likely to follow. At that point, Volodymyr Zelensky will be completely exposed: the key political figures on whom he relied will be destroyed. He will have no choice but to accept Donald Trump’s plan or flee himself.

Contrary to what one might think, the unelected president did not seek to modify the conditions of the peace plan when he met with the US delegation on November 20, but to add an amnesty; not an amnesty for war crimes, but for acts of corruption.

Even now, Ukrainians who have remained in the country (a third of the population has already fled Ukraine, half to Russia, half to the EU) are violently opposed to the self-proclaimed president. He was elected to fight corruption, and he has fueled it to unprecedented levels. In November, several riots turned the population against military recruiters. Even the “hardline nationalists” now believe he can no longer help them achieve their apocalyptic goals against Slavs and are urgently planning to overthrow him.

The member states of the European Union, who envisioned and prepared for a protracted war, cannot accept a capitulation that dare not speak its name. Each is now confronted with the brutal end of its dream. Clearly, the fall of the Ukrainian regime will be followed by that of the European leaders who supported it.

Indeed, the time has come to take stock. The European Union initially provided €1 billion in cash, then its military committee established a clearing house allowing Ukrainians to select weapons from the stocks of EU member states’ armed forces. Finally, the Union made its own resources, such as its satellites, available. Over time, the EU contributed more and more: up to €3 billion in July and August.

Let no one believe that this is solely the initiative of Commission officials. On March 1, 2022, the European Parliament, elected by universal suffrage, held a session with President Zelensky, who spoke via video link. It adopted NATO’s position, which disregards the Minsk agreements and considers the Russian special operation against “core nationalists,” pursuant to Security Council Resolution 2202, as an “illegal, unprovoked, and unjustified military aggression.” It was the Parliament that adopted a resolution (P9_TA(2022)0052) paving the way for the EU’s full support of the Zelensky regime, which many member states readily endorsed.

When President Trump and Vice President Vance confronted Zelensky in the Oval Office on February 28, 2025, some governments consulted with one another. A series of back-and-forths took place between Paris and London, both vying to lead a coalition of the willing. Ultimately, only the British remained. London formed a military alliance with the Baltic states (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, the Netherlands, and Sweden) and added Ukraine on November 5. This constitutes a purely British NATO within NATO.

France, although not a member of this alliance with the United Kingdom, is not lagging behind. But it is now more a matter of posturing than action. On November 17, President Emmanuel Macron signed a letter of intent with his unelected counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, stating that, when domestic industry is able, it will build and sell 100 Rafale fighter jets to Ukraine. Then, on November 18, he sent his Chief of the Defence Staff, General Fabien Mandon, to tell the Congress of Mayors of France that the French should prepare to lose their children in an imminent war against Russia.

Volodymyr Zelensky made a panicked phone call to his allies on November 21. Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, and Keir Starmer stressed once again, according to the Élysée Palace, “that all decisions with implications for the interests of Europe and NATO require the joint support and consensus of European partners and NATO allies respectively.”

They all met on November 22nd in Johannesburg, South Africa, for a meeting of G20 heads of state and government, with the exception of… Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The final declaration contained only one vague sentence on the subject: “Guided by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter in its entirety, we will work for a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Ukraine, as well as to end other conflicts and wars around the world.” Such platitudes hardly justified such a meeting. Consequently, the Europeans consulted behind the scenes to develop a counter-proposal.

The European press simply presents the Russian-American peace plan as “favorable to Moscow,” which is neither the case nor the point. The plan, as far as we know, stipulates that Crimea and the two Donbas republics (Donetsk and Luhansk) are Russian. But this was already the case BEFORE the war. It also stipulates that the rest of Novorossiya will be allocated along the front line. In other words, almost all of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, but not the port of Odessa, which would have allowed Russia to establish territorial contiguity with Transnistria, a candidate for membership in the Russian Federation.

In addition, the plan requires that the Ukrainian army, currently 800,000 strong, be reduced to 600,000 strong, that it renounce long-range missiles capable of striking Moscow (which it does not currently possess. This was the debate over US Tomahawks and German Taurus missiles), and that it renounce NATO membership, but European fighter jets may be stationed in Poland.

From a Russian perspective, the most important thing lies elsewhere: the denazification of the Kyiv regime. This is a fundamental objective of which NATO members have never been aware. Denazification requires an educational program in each country to educate them about the other’s culture, similar to the one implemented in France and Germany at the end of World War II.

Moscow has thus achieved what it fought for, but not what it has long hoped for: NATO’s retreat to its 1991 borders. This will always be a source of conflict. The European Union must be aware of this. It should not be surprised to see this conflict continue.

On the US side, Washington pledges to lift sanctions against Russia and to reintegrate Moscow into the G7/8.

Certainly, President Donald Trump is on the verge of succeeding in extricating his country from this mess. But this is only to force the European Union to face its responsibilities.

The reconstruction of Ukraine, estimated at $200 billion, will be split equally between the EU and Russia. Each country will contribute $100 billion. The Russian funds will be drawn from reserves frozen during the conflict. These funds will be controlled by the United States, which will receive half of the revenue generated by these investments.

Finally, if Ukraine renews its commitment not to build nuclear bombs, half of the electricity produced by the Zaporizhzhia power plant will be allocated to Ukraine and half to Russia.

The hardest part is not mentioned by anyone: the European Union (and consequently NATO) will have to recognize that these events did not constitute an “illegal, unprovoked and unjustified military aggression”, but a legitimate application of Security Council resolution 2202, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and international law.

A period of introspection is necessary for everyone. All have contributed to this war, the number of victims of which remains unknown. High-ranking officials in Brussels acted with hubris, EU member states behaved like herds, and the people of Europe convinced themselves that they embodied peace.

It is this realization that seems most important and that will bring about the fall of the regimes that wished and worked to “bring Russia to its knees”.

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[ 1 ]  “  Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine  ”, Voltaire Network , November 20, 2025.

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