Lew Rockwell Institute

Some people will regard my title as hyperbole.  It is not.  Trump, I believe, understands he is in a fight to the death.  The American establishment tried to discredit and ruin him, to imprison him, to assassinate him.  They stole his 2020 reelection from him. They tried to steal his NY properties. It is not possible for Trump to have illusions about what he is up against.  He is up against evil.

Trump knows that the fight is not just about him. It is about America. For decades a corrupt American establishment has been running the government for their benefit at the expense of the American people. Trump says he intends to take government out of the corrupt establishment’s hands and put it back in the hands of the people.  That is the last place the establishment wants it.  For them the struggle Trump began in 2015 is existential. If Trump loses, America loses, and the establishment wins. Civil liberties will disappear, especially for “racist” white people and for people who think there are only two genders. Censorship and false narratives will prevail, and we will live in a belief system constructed for us by the establishment and the whore media for whom government is a profit center.

I don’t know how many of Trump’s appointees understand that they are in a fight to the death. How strong are they?  If Trump doesn’t win, their careers are over. The establishment will see to that. If the Establishment proves to be stronger, will  Trump’s appointees change sides and abandon the fight?

I don’t know how many MAGA Americans understand the stakes. How many of them think that the fight ended with the election victory and now President Trump will put everything right? If this delusion prevails, the emergency extra-legal steps Trump must take if he is to prevail will lack support among his followers.  The whore media will paint a picture of Trump as a tyrant.

Democracies are unstable governmental systems, even when the people are ethnically homogeneous, as was the Roman Republic where governing power resided in the Senate. But eventually different interests replace common interests, and the Senate became dysfunctional. 

At that point in order to get things done Rome had a couple of temporary term-limited dictators. Then, seeing the collapse of the republican order, Julius Caesar broke the rules and crossed the Rubicon. But Caesar, despite his name, was still not a Caesar. His adopted son, Octavius who took the name Augustus was the first Roman Caesar.  Augustus was careful to keep alive the pretense that the Senate was still, at least partially, ruling. But after Augustus, executive authority ruled without pretense.

This is the position in which a dysfunctional American legislature has placed the United States.  For decades the Congress has been losing power to the executive. FDR’s presidency in the 1930s was a major destroyer of the power of Congress.  Roosevelt’s regulatory agencies seized the power over law by how they wrote the regulations that implemented it.  In fact, the New Deal destroyed the power of Congress.  Legislative power moved to the civil service in the regulatory agencies.

Seeing the weakness, the federal courts moved in. Today the federal courts, when it serves the establishment,  legislate and impose limits on executive authority despite the separation of powers, but stand aside when executive orders serve the establishment.

Of the three branches of government, the legislature is no longer of much importance.  

There are no longer only three branches of government in the US. There are four branches, the fourth being the civil service. Once upon a time in a fairy tale the incorruptible, objective civil service was non-partisan and served the American people by keeping the elected government honest. But it was always liberal, because it attracted people who believed in more government.

Today the civil service, recruited as ideological Democrats since the 1990s when Clinton forced civil service retirements in order to make room for blacks and women, is a fourth branch of government, and perhaps the most powerful branch.  Trump and Musk are trying to rein it in, but the judiciary is rushing to its defense. 

Trump and Musk with their opening blitzkrieg had surprising success. But the establishment has regrouped and launched a counterattack, using, of course the corrupt American judiciary.  Judges are no longer appointed for their commitment to justice but for the causes that they support.

Just as American journalism schools teach that the purpose of journalists is not to report the facts but to spin the facts in order to revolutionize society, law school students are taught that their function is not to serve justice but to revolutionize society. Their law school professors having made them confident in using their judicial power for transformative reasons, judges issue their own edicts. These judicial edicts–certainly not legal rulings–are being rapidly issued to block Trump’s effort to bring the government under control and to return the government’s accountability to the elected president. If the President is of the establishment, presidential assertions of power are permitted. Otherwise, the establishment converts the President into a figurehead.

I predicted that the minute Trump moved to “take back the government,” endless lawsuits would be brought to prevent him from functioning as President.

A federal judge has assumed a non-existent authority to block the Department of Government Efficiency from Labor Department data essential for the Department of Government Efficiency to do its job.

Another federal judge has blocked the Department of Government Efficiency from access to Treasury Department data, ruling that the data is too sensitive for the President of the United States to see.  So who can see the data?  If it is protected by privacy laws, how could it have been collected?

A dozen Democrat state attorney generals are also suing to block the Department of Government Efficiency from access to Treasury data, claiming it is an unprecedented violation of privacy rights.  Think about this for a minute.  If the data is private, what is the Treasury Department doing with it?  Why can one Department that reports to the President have the data, but not another?  Can judges deny the President from having information in departments that report to him? Can the CIA deny the President national security data?

Trump’s Justice (sic) Department, which clearly is not yet Trump’s, has sided with the judge who has blocked Trump’s access to the Treasury data. Somehow it is “unlawful” for the President to know what is going on in his government.  If the government is not the President’s, whose government is it? The establishment’s?  The civil service’s?  The judiciary’s?

Professors and university administrators are suing to block Trump’s DEI orders on the grounds that it violates academic freedom.  Of course, there is no academic freedom in universities.  There are entire university departments devoted to monitoring the speech of students and professors and assigning offenders to sensitivity-training.  Scientists who challenged the Covid narrative and the 9/11 narrative were terminated. The reason the corrupt universities are trying to protect Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is that DEI is the source of their power to censor critics of the censorship regime that has been established in universities.

The federal district judge blocking Trump’s shutdown of the totally corrupt USAID is Trump’s own appointment, another of Trump’s first term mistakes.  The extraordinary misuses of funds by USAID have come to light.  I have reported many in the last couple of days.  More are coming. The funds have been used to support “color revolutions,” to purchase the leaders of foreign governments, to support media attacks on skeptics of official narratives and political opponents of Woke policies and open borders. 

The judicial interventions mount.

What can Trump do?

He could have the judges arrested for obstructing the Office of the President, for obstructing justice, or on whatever charge the DOJ cares to invent.  Remember, the DOJ had no problem inventing all sorts of phony charges against Trump himself, against the January 6 protesters, against Mike Lindell, against Trump’s attorneys, against Rudy Giuliani.  Neither has George Soros’ implant of Letitia James as NY Attorney General had any difficulty inventing charges no one has ever heard of. She doesn’t even need charges. She ruins people without charges. Her notorious attack on the website Vdare succeeded in shutting down the website without ever bringing a charge against the site.  She just demanded endless information, the provision of which bankrupted the website.

Letitia James, having violated the privacy of  Vdare’s executives, donors, and many other of this evil woman’s victims, is now self-righteously leading a multi-state lawsuit to block the Department of Government Efficiency from viewing data that the government has already accessed.  In other words, the data has to be covered up because of the corruption that it reveals.  It shows how far the Cultural Marxist “march through the institutions” has progressed.  It is the greatest of ironies that Trump’s Justice (sic) Department has accommodated his Democrat opposition and blocked the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to Treasury Department data.  If Trump doesn’t clean out the corrupt Justice (sic) Department before one more day passes, he might as well resign.

Judges and prosecutors, especially the DOJ prosecutors, long ago abandoned any pretense at applying a rule of law. Law is a weapon of coercion.  Trump must use it against his enemies just as they used it against him.  After the hard struggle to win reelection, why let a corrupt judiciary and Justice (sic) Department prevent him from achieving the agenda for which he was elected?

The weak-minded will say that if Trump behaves as his enemies do he will be just like them.  But that is untrue. They used law as a weapon in order to destroy America.  Trump would be using law to save America.  If Trump doesn’t fight fire with fire, he and America will be consumed by the fire of the weaponized law used by our Woke, DEI, Democrat, Establishment enemies against us.

The Democrats and the Woke intellectuals are the enemies of Americans.  No use pretending otherwise.  The task is to get their tentacles that are destroying our values out of our lives and our government. If this is not done, there is no possibility of making America great again.

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This decrepit, despicable RINO Traitor makes Benedict Arnold or Vidkun Quisling seem like heroic men of integrity, courage, and loyalty. From now on, when you see the [R] after the name of Senator Mitch McConnell, understand it stands for Reprobate.

Purge this satanic warwhore and slimy grifter from Capitol Hill, and cast him into Gehenna where his pathetic and abject cries of weeping and wailing will be dealt with by a vengeful God of retribution and justice.

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Thanks, Gail Appel:

Male/Female/Non-Binary

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Thanks, John Smith. 

The American Conservative

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Writes David Martin:

On the home page of Bitchute today, we are greeted with this message:

On this day in 1809,

Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky. A self-taught lawyer and leader, he became the 16th President, guiding the U.S. through the Civil War. His Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address redefined freedom and equality. Lincoln’s legacy endures as a symbol of unity and justice.

Concerning that proclamation and especially that famous address, permit me to put us in closer touch with reality with my 2008 article, “Mencken and More on Lincoln’s Speech.”  

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Over the past two weeks Elon Musk and his cadre of young computer geniuses have cracked the code. Like Toto pulling the curtain on the Wizard of Oz, they’ve pulled back the cover on government secrecy. They’ve shown how oceans of tax revenue have flowed through Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), charitable-sounding foundations, the UN, and others to fund terrorists, disrupters like BLM, and reporters to promote Democrats and censor the opposition, most often to enrich Democrat politicians and their friends, families, and allies. The news you thought was news wasn’t independently and honestly generated. The charities you thought were genuine, weren’t. It’s one big gaslighting grift and you paid for it.

The mountain of discoveries is more than I can keep up with. Our own Andrea Widburg listed some of what was found in the first tranche of USAID records. This included (just to start) funding anti-Trumper Bill Kristol, along with “religious charities” run by highly remunerated people who can be counted on to advocate strongly for increased immigration and protection of illegal immigrants they brought here. And placed on the welfare rolls for you to support.

Townhall has more. Here’s a brief sample — there’s much much more:

$1 million went toward supporting French-speaking LGBTQ+ groups in West and Central Africa, $3.3 million was blown on normalizing “being LGBTQ in the Caribbean,” and $425,600 helped Indonesian coffee companies become “more climate and gender friendly.”

Mast said $1.5 million had gone toward promoting job opportunities for LGBTQ-identifying individuals in Serbia, $16,500 for fostering a “united and equal queer-feminist discourse in Albanian society,” $47,000-plus on a “transgender opera” in Colombia, $32,000 for an LGBTQ-centered comic book in Peru, $70,880 on a musical promoting DEI in Ireland, $20,600 for a drag show in Ecuador, over $7,000 for a BIPOC speaker series in Canada, more than $39,650 to host seminars at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on “gender identity and racial equality,” $80,000 on an LGBTQ community center in Slovakia, $10,000 on pressuring Lithuanian corporations to push DEI messaging, and $8,000 to promote DEI among LGBTQ+ groups in Cyprus.

USAID’s Office of Chief Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility notified Congress just before Christmas that they’ve earmarked money (about $1 million) for several programs that will support “marginalized” groups in Indonesia, Guatemala, and Kenya. The funding notice said USAID would “engage with Indigenous-led institutions to implement an Indigenous language technology program” in Guatemala.

In March 2023, USAID set aside up to $1 million to help disabled people in Tajikistan become “climate leaders.” The grant notice solicited proposals for a “Disability-Inclusive Climate Action” project in the Central Asian country that would ensure that disabled Tajikistanis are included “in the development of climate change response and mitigation policies.”

In May 2023, USAID unveiled a $1.5 million effort aimed at “empowering women to adapt to climate change in northern Kenya.” Women in the area, USAID wrote, live in “traditionally patriarchal communities” and need training to join Kenya’s fight against climate change. The program would “improve their participation in decision making” and “enhance adaptive capabilities to climate change.”

The only way to keep track of the billions government agencies have blown through and DOGE is saving is to go on X (formerly Twitter) and follow the DOGE and Data Republican (small ‘r’) posts. (The latter devised a more workable search engine and regularly reports what was harder to find and unpublicized in the government databanks.)

It’s not just waste on idiotic projects. Most of these disbursements are funneled through and into the pockets of NGOs located in the Washington D.C. area run by friends and family of Democrat politicians who get the lion’s share of the money.

The Musk-eteers are beginning a dive into other agencies. Musk Says His DOGE Team Uncovered $100 billion in Medicare and Medicaid waste after gaining access to the system. They’ve begun swimming through mountains of Social Security fraud.

They are about to audit the Department of Education and the Department of Defense, which has failed every audit for the last seven years and which cannot account for lost billions.

You may wonder why USAID was selected first, and that is a story in itself.

Trump decided to pause Foreign Aid for 90 days — reasonable enough. A couple days later the White House said this USAID leadership was trying to circumvent this Executive Order. That alerted the DOGE team and Elon confirmed this on X. He said all DOGE did was check to see which Federal Agency was violating Trump’s orders the most and that turned out to be USAID, so that became our focus.”

Naturally, the recipients and beneficiaries of this pork are fighting tooth and nail to stop the audits, doubtless by groups and lawyers that themselves are recipients. Just yesterday Letitia James persuaded a judge in New York to temporarily enjoin the audit of the Treasury Department.

We’ll see how long this and other overreaching by extremist district court judges is allowed to continue. It has already been established how severely compromised these personal records in the Treasury files have been. The Chinese accessed Treasury workstations and unclassified documents as late as December of last year when it was headed by Wally Adeyamo, a Nigerian émigré who once headed the Obama Foundation. In that year (2024), according to the Congressional Budget Office, Treasury illegally disbursed $516 billion dollars for which there had been no congressional authorization.

Read the Whole Article

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A 64-year-old woman with deep family roots in Alabama recently said to me that she was taught in Alabama public school that Abraham Lincoln was “the best president ever.”  That would be a good example of the consequences of what the New England Yankee conquerors labeled “reconstruction.”  The truth is that Lincoln was by far the worst president in American history.  He was certainly the most “reviled” (by the people of the North during his lifetime), as Larry Tagg documented in his book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: America’s Most Reviled President.”  Thanks to the Republican party propaganda machine, which essentially monopolized American politics for the half century after the war, Lincoln was transformed from the most hated and reviled of all American politicians during his lifetime to a saint.  (See The Deification of Lincoln by Ira D. Cardiff).

Here is what the state tells you to celebrate today, Lincon’s birthday:  Lincon destroyed the voluntary union of the Founding Fathers and replaced it with a union held together by war and the mass murder of Southern civilians (at least fifty thousand according to Princeton historian James McPherson), turning it into something resembling the old Soviet Union more than the original American union.

The uniquely American system of federalism was destroyed along with the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution and the states’ rights of nullification and secession, and Americans became the servants rather than the masters of their own government.  Government’s “just powers” no longer came from the consent of the governed, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, but from the barrel of a gun.  Are you beginning to get why the state celebrates Lincoln’s birthday?

Lincoln waged war on Southern civilians for four long years, ordering the bombing and burning of American cities to the ground and rewarding the commanding generals who committed these war crimes of plundering, raping, murder, and arson with promotions and glory.  The population of the South was about 9 million at the beginning of the war.  Scaling the death toll for today’s U.S. population, McPherson’s estimate of 50,000 civilian deaths would be the equivalent of 1.9 million civilians being killed by the U.S. government in just four years.  Coming from Lincoln cultist James McPherson, the 50,000 figure is bound to be an underestimate.

Reading books like War Crimes against Southern Civilians by Walter Brian Cisco, which is based on the U.S. government’s publication The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, one learns how more than twenty-two thousand artillery shells exploded in a six-month period in civilian-occupied Charleston, and that unexploded shells are still being discovered today.  Then there is Sherman’s four-day bombardment of civilian-occupied Atlanta after the Confederate Army had left the city with as many as five thousand artillery shells exploding in a single day.  Thousands of survivors were rendered homeless at the onset of winter.  Lincoln’s favorite general called the site of corpses of women and children in the streets of Atlanta “a beautiful sight” because he thought it would cause the war to end sooner.

Lincoln’s first inaugural address should be known as his “Slavery Forever” speech.  He started out announcing that he had no intention of disturbing Southern slavery (at a time when there were also slaves in Union states); that he never had any intention of doing so; that this was clearly stated in the Republican Party platform of 1860; and that it would be unconstitutional to do so.  He then expressed his strongest support for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which compelled Northerners to capture runaway slaves (and which was enforced in Washington, D.C. during the Lincoln presidency).

Near the end of his first inaugural address Lincoln declared his support for the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution which would prohibit the government from ever interfering with Southern slavery and which had just passed the Republican-controlled House and Senate.  He said he considered slavery to be constitutional and had no objection to it being made “express and irrevocable” in the text of the Constitution.  Irrevocable.

The amendment was named after Ohio Congressman Thomas Corwin but in fact came from Lincoln himself.  Doris Kearns-Goodwin showed in her book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, that before the inauguration Lincoln had instructed William Seward to get the amendment through the senate, which he did.  In his inaugural address he lied about never actually having seen the amendment.  This was a constitutional amendment to enshrine slavery in the Constitution, passed by his own party of which he was the leader, and ratified by his home state of Illinois along with Rhode Island, Ohio, and the “border states” of Kentucky and Maryland which were under U. S. Army occupation at the time.  How dumb and gullible did Lincoln think the American public was to tell them such a blatant lie?

In the same speech Lincoln used the words “invasion” and “bloodshed” as promises of what would occur in any state that refused to collect the tariff tax on imports which had just been more than doubled two days earlier.  At the time more than 90 percent of federal tax revenue came from tariff taxes and there was no central bank to legally counterfeit money.  The South did not intend to send tariff tax revenues to D.C. any more than it would send them to London or Paris, so Lincoln followed through with his threat and commenced the waging of total war on his own country over tax collection.

For over a hundred years the death toll of the “Civil War” was said to be 620,000 but recent forensic research has revised the number to as much as 850,000 with more than double that number wounded.  In terms of today’s population that is almost 9 million deaths in less than four years, all over tax collection according to Lincoln himself.  Are you still wondering why the state celebrates Lincoln’s birthday?

In April of 1861 Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and ordered the military to arrest and imprison without due process tens of thousands of Northern civilians for merely criticizing him and his war policies.  Treason is defined in Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution as “only . . . levying war upon the United States” or “Giving Aid and Comfort to their enemies” (emphasis added).  The word “their” is all important here, as it refers to “United States” in the plural, as in all the founding documents.  It means the individual states, not something called “the United States government in Washington, D.C.”

Lincoln levied war upon the Southern states and he and his entire high command were therefore guilty of treason.  He took it upon himself to redefine treason as any criticism of himself.  He also ordered the shutting down of more than 300 opposition newspapers, imprisoned many of the editors and owners of the papers, and deported his chief congressional critic, Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio.

The slaves were used as political pawns (as their descendants still are today) in a war that had nothing to do with them according to Lincoln himself.  The War Aims Resolution of the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress (the Crittendon-Johnson Resolution) also declared to the world that the purpose of the war was not to disturb “the domestic institutions of the states,” by which they meant slavery, but to supposedly save the union (geographically but not philosophically).

Lincoln and the Republican party ignored the fact that all other nations that ended slavery in the nineteenth century did so peacefully, as did New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and all the other Northern states (See Greatest Emancipations by Jim Powell).  The last slave state to enter the union was West Virginia whose secession during the war was orchestrated by the Lincoln administration which gave the Republican party two more senators.

Lincon was a lifelong advocate of “colonization,” a euphemism for deporting all the black people out of the country.  Whenever he talked about emancipation it was always coupled with “colonization.’  As Phil Magness and Sebastion Page document in their book, Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln, Seward, and others were hard at work literally until Lincoln’s dying day trying to make land purchase deals with other governments and counting how many ships it would take to deport all the black people out of America.

Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation was phony.  It specifically exempted the Republican party-controlled slave state of West Virginia along with all the parishes of Louisiana that were under control of the Union Army at the time, and stated that it would become null and void if the slave states re-entered the union and continued with payment of the federal tariff tax.  It emancipated no one, nor could it have constitutionally.

Lincoln was a corrupt crony capitalist mercantilist on economic policy, advocating protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for railroad corporations, and a government-run central bank to pay for it all.  He signed ten tariff-increasing bills, commenced the massively corrupt subsidization of the transcontinental railroads, monopolized the money supply with his Legal Tender and National Currency Acts, and created a gigantic military-industrial complex during the war.

The “great emancipator” enslaved Americans with the first federal conscription law after hundreds of thousands had deserted the Union Army, even on the eve of great historic battles.  Lincoln ordered the execution by firing squad of deserters and when there were draft riots in New York City in 1863 he sent 15,000 troops from the recently-concluded Battle of Gettysburg who fired into the crowds, killing hundreds in the streets of New York City.

To advance his political career Lincoln broke up with Joshua Speed, with whom he had shared a bed for four years, and married Mary Todd, the daughter of a wealthy Kentucky slave plantation owning family that had close ties to Henry Clay, the leader of the Whig Party.  Lincoln was a Whig for more than twenty years before becoming a Republican when the Whig party dissolved.

When Lincoln’s wife inherited the slaves from her family’s slave plantation they became her husband’s property by law.  Lincoln sold the slaves instead of emancipating them as proven by the bill of sale published in Kevin Orlin Johnson’s book, The Lincolns in the White House.

Robert E. Lee’s wife, a descendant of Martha Washington, also inherited slaves.  General Lee freed them during the war in accordance with his father-in-law’s will.  How many government school students from Alabama – and everywhere else in the South — have been taught this – or anything else mentioned in this article for that matter?

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Charles Lindbergh as the First Global Celebrity Hero

Although I’d never had much interest in American history when I was young, the name of Charles A. Lindbergh was certainly known to me, with the story of that early pioneering aviator always rating at least a few sentences in my introductory textbooks.

I’d vaguely known that Lindbergh had been the first to cross the Atlantic on a solo flight from New York City to Paris, becoming world famous for that daring exploit. A few years later, his story had turned tragic when the kidnapping of his infant son became one of our most infamous crimes, with the entire nation mourning when the young child’s body was found, and the Lindbergh Case prompted changes in federal law. Matters took another dark turn in the early 1940s as Lindbergh became one of America’s leading isolationists, fiercely opposing our entry in World War II, with some of his antisemitic public statements permanently shattering his once-heroic image and leading to accusations that he was a supporter of Nazi Germany.

That small handful of facts largely exhausted my knowledge of Lindbergh, who hardly loomed very large in our history books or our media. I’d never been drawn to the early history of aviation, so I vaguely lumped Lindbergh in with the Wright Brothers, and hardly questioned such minimal coverage.

But very occasionally I’d see reviews of new books about Lindbergh in my newspapers or magazines, and as my interest in American history and our entrance into World War II grew over the last couple of decades, his apparent role in that controversy attracted my curiosity. One of those books had been Lindbergh, a well-regarded 1998 biography by A. Scott Berg, and a couple of years ago I happened to pick up a copy at a book sale for a dollar or two, eventually reading it in order to broaden my knowledge of a historical figure about whom I knew so little.

I found that Berg’s biography fully deserved its Pulitzer Prize, running well over 650 pages and being an excellent, very thorough, and even-handed treatment of its subject, well written and based upon exhaustive archival research.

Although it essentially confirmed the basic facts that I’d always known, I was shocked by the sheer scale of Lindbergh’s fame both in America and the rest of the world, discovering that during the 1920s and 1930s he had loomed far larger than what was suggested by the brief descriptions in the textbooks or media that I’d absorbed. Those accounts now seemed as severely distorted as if George Washington had been relegated to merely four or five sentences in all our American history textbooks.

I think that most of us fail to realize how much our world has been transformed by the creation of the modern media and also just how recently that process unfolded. Large circulation daily newspapers providing news of breaking events only appeared during the mid to late nineteenth century, around the same time that popular national magazines began to hit their stride, while the even more powerful electronic media of films and radio followed during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. This important history was told in Prof. Paul Starr’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning volume The Creation of the Media, which I read last year, though I found his account rather plodding and dull.

These days all of us are aware of the tremendous role that celebrities play in American society and the rest of the West, with these individuals often exerting popular influence far greater than that of almost any of our leading political figures, let alone our academics or writers. But the elevation of such celebrities was impossible before the appearance of the modern media. And what I had completely failed to grasp until reading Berg’s biography was that Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic in 1927 had established him as the world’s first great international celebrity, transforming the flyer at the age of 25 into something entirely new in human history.

Lindbergh’s Wikipedia page runs nearly 25,000 words and one of its sections effectively summarizes many of the striking facts about the immediate consequences of his solo flight. As word spread that his plane was approaching its French destination, 150,000 Parisians flocked to the airport to await him, mobbing his aircraft for souvenirs. The United Press claimed that a million Belgians greeted him when he soon flew on to Brussels, apparently the greatest welcome ever accorded a private citizen. His next stop was in Britain, where a throng of 100,000 awaited his arrival at Croydon airport. These huge, unprecedented numbers were drawn to see a private citizen, being comparable to the largest crowds that had ever greeted the most important kings, emperors, or popes.

The New York Times announced Lindbergh’s achievement in an above-the-fold, page-wide headline “Lindbergh Does It!” When he finally returned to New York City a few weeks later, he was received by the mayor who gave him a ticker-tape parade and the governor who awarded him a special medal at a ceremony attended by 200,000. Contemporary news accounts claimed that some 4,000,000 people saw Lindbergh that day, and according to Berg people were “behaving as though Lindbergh had walked on water, not flown over it.”

The American government created an entirely new award for Lindbergh, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and it subsequently became one of our highest national honors. But because that wasn’t quite enough, a special act of Congress also gave him our Medal of Honor, hitherto restricted to our greatest combat heroes, which President Calvin Coolidge presented to Lindbergh at a White House ceremony. Time Magazine had been founded a couple of years earlier, and on January 2, 1928 it named Lindbergh its first Man of the Year, thereby starting a media tradition that has now lasted for nearly a century. At least 200 songs were written in tribute to his achievement.

Lindbergh soon published his autobiography, which was translated into most major languages and sold more than 650,000 copies during the first year at a time when our population was only one-third of its current size. Lindbergh then spent three months traveling over 22,000 miles to 82 different American cities, giving 147 speeches to 30 million people, representing more than a quarter of our country’s entire population. More than one quarter of the entire American population came out to see and hear Lindbergh in person.

I was absolutely stunned by all of these facts, which I’d never suspected. I’m hardly an expert on these sorts of matters, but I doubt if any later celebrity has ever matched Lindbergh’s mark during the century that followed.

Lindbergh’s flying achievement and the unprecedented scale of his global media celebrity also had some very practical consequences, setting off the huge “Lindbergh Boom” in the worldwide aviation industry. Within months of his triumph, applications for pilot’s licenses in the U.S. tripled, and over the next couple of years the number of U.S. airline passengers rose by an astonishing 3,000% while large numbers of new aviation companies were founded and funded. Thus, Lindbergh and his exploit probably played a huge role in the creation of the American airline industry, which otherwise might have taken many more years to fully come into existence.

Media-driven celebrity culture was an entirely new aspect of our society, and many observers expected the intense popular interest in Lindbergh to fade within a few months or a year, but they were mistaken. The youthful aviator was a rather shy and subdued Midwesterner who hardly seemed eager to be the center of so much public attention, but his diffident reaction provoked the media and the public to even greater continuing interest in all aspects of his life. Indeed, for the next dozen years, Lindbergh’s status as America’s greatest national hero would remain unchallenged.

On a goodwill trip to Mexico in late 1927, he met Anne Morrow, the youthful daughter of our ambassador Dwight Morrow, a former top Wall Street executive, and married her in 1929, with that story-book romance reigniting media attention, as did the birth less than a year later of their first son, Charles Jr.

The Lindbergh baby immediately became one of the most famous infants in American history, so his sudden kidnapping in 1932 produced an absolutely unprecedented wave of public anger and outrage. Although a large ransom was paid, the remains of the baby’s body was later found in a wooded area close to the Lindbergh home. A German immigrant was eventually arrested, tried, convicted, and executed for what the American media called “the crime of the century.” Famed journalist H.L. Mencken described the case as “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”

This was the first such high-profile kidnapping in our national history, and federal law was changed as a consequence, giving jurisdiction to J. Edgar Hoover’s anti-crime investigative unit within the Justice Department. The resulting public attention helped his organization become the very powerful FBI.

Frustrated over the endless media hounding that his family endured and fearful of the lives of his other young children, Lindbergh waited until the conclusion of the murder trial, then took his family into self-imposed foreign exile in late 1935, moving to Europe and mostly living in Britain for the next several years until the eve of World War II.

Lindbergh vs. FDR on War and Peace

Although I found all these aspects of Lindbergh’s public life quite interesting and important, my original curiosity had centered on his later role as the leading public spokesman for the America First Committee (AFC), the national anti-war organization that unsuccessfully opposed our eventual entrance into World War II. Berg’s book devoted only a single lengthy chapter to that subject, hardly unreasonable since those events occupied just a year or two of his subject’s long life. But this merely sketched out a story that I wanted to see covered in much greater detail.

Therefore, I was very pleased last month when a review in the Wall Street Journal alerted me to the release of a new book devoted entirely to that topic. The author was Prof. H.W. Brands, who had published more than thirty popular biographies and histories, two of which had been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

In that Journal review, Roger Lowenstein criticized America First as “a revisionist study” but this only raised my own interest, and just as I’d hoped the book provided exactly the sort of detailed narrative I had been seeking, a very thorough and seemingly even-handed account of those extremely important events. The subtitle was “Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War,” and it accurately characterized the political battle over war or peace during 1940 and 1941 in terms of its two leading protagonists, with the very powerful President Franklin D. Roosevelt facing off against the aviator who ranked as America’s greatest national hero and popular celebrity.

Once we recognize the huge role of media power in determining political outcomes, we see that the contest between an American president and a private citizen who had never held any elective or appointive office was far less one-sided than what might be suggested by our constitutional system of government. Lindbergh’s enormous media clout made him the one figure who could go toe-to-toe with one of America’s most powerful presidents in the arena of public opinion.

Indeed, a few years earlier Lindbergh and FDR had previously tangled on a far less weighty matter, which Berg covered in a half-dozen pages. In early 1934, Roosevelt had abruptly revoked all domestic airmail contracts between the federal government and numerous private airlines, suggesting that these had been awarded corruptly by the preceding Republican administration and instead ordering Army planes to assume responsibility for carrying the mail. The potential financial impact upon America’s nascent aviation industry was devastating, and Lindbergh sent a 275 word telegram of protest to the president, while also releasing a copy to the press, with his statement generating huge public attention.

FDR was outraged at this challenge and directed his minions to attack Lindbergh in the media and blacken his reputation, and for the next couple of months, a public battle was fought over the issue. The president’s Democratic allies had total control over Congress, so Lindbergh was called to testify before a special committee investigating the matter, speaking in a room packed with cameras and microphones. But despite these potentially hostile surroundings, Lindbergh completely carried the day, with one representative describing his resulting constituent mail as running 97% in Lindbergh’s favor. The New York Times and top Washington pundits also soon came out in support of the latter’s position.

One point the renowned aviator made was that Army flyers were probably inexperienced in carrying the very heavy mail payloads, and his warning proved correct, with a dozen of those planes soon crashing and killing their pilots. So despite some face-saving gestures, the result of what became known as the “Air-Mail Fiasco” was the complete surrender of the Roosevelt Administration, which returned airmail service to private carriers. As Berg explained, this was the first great political defeat that FDR had suffered since reaching the White House, and neither man forgot nor forgave that early skirmish.

This incident came years before the beginning of Brands’ narrative so he omitted it, but it surely helped to explain Lindbergh’s audacious willingness to directly challenge the president of the United States over the far more important matter of war and peace.

The battle over American involvement in World War II constituted one of the most momentous political turning points in our country’s modern history, and for more than 80 years this story has been obfuscated by a thick layer of congealed propaganda, with the true facts only very rarely if ever reaching any substantial mainstream audience.

America First, the huge antiwar organization that Lindbergh helped lead, lost that political battle and as a consequence for more than three generations it has been heavily condemned and even demonized in our media descriptions of that era, a fate extended to many of its leaders, Lindbergh foremost among them. This explains why the individual who probably ranked as America’s greatest national hero of the twentieth century was relegated to just a few sentences in my introductory history textbooks.

Many contrary accounts of those important events have been written and published, but nearly all of these have been carefully excluded from mainstream distribution, so that even among well-educated Americans I suspect that relatively few are fully aware that there were two sides to that story.

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This has been a most remarkable week in American history. Donald Trump and his DOGE exposed a mere sliver of the waste, fraud, and corruption that permeates the criminal bureaucracy that our horrific leaders have established. The people are finally finding out, to a very small degree, just how and where their tax dollars are spent.

As you all may be sick of hearing, I came from the Left. Classical liberalism was a beautiful thing. Liberals back then were all for “Sunshine laws,” which would open the process up to the people who pay for it. We believed nothing should be withheld from the public. “National Security” was a laughable term that Richard Nixon was especially fond of. Yes, the government had to withhold files relating to the JFK assassination, for “National Security” reasons. The same government claimed that lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK even though all anecdotal evidence indicated that he liked him. He did it because he was jealous of JFK. He was impotent. He wanted to “prove he was somebody.” And yet, he not only failed to take credit for the crime of the century, he continually denied it, until he was shot down by a low level mobster in front of at least seventy police officers.

So, this “National Security” blanket excuse for leaving the public uninformed, includes the records of minimum wage “losers” like Oswald who we are supposed to believe had no connection to any government agency or powerful manipulators. Well, to be fair, England has us beat. They still have classified files on the Jack the Ripper murders. From 1888. And they actually explained that they are doing this to “protect confidential sources.” The fact that these “sources” would all be at least 160 years old today doesn’t deter them. Maybe they do have that secret life extension technology. It wasn’t until fifteen years or so that the CIA finally declassified the last records from World War I. I suppose their motto is, the less said about that especially senseless war, the better. As of 2021, the National Archives said that there were approximately 33,000 boxes of classified military records from the WWII era.

Despite decades of brilliant sophistication in terms of navigating these rabbit holes, I have to admit that I paid little attention to USAID (United States Agency for International Development), until the shocking recent disclosures from DOGE. RFK, Jr. was among those who’d claimed that USAID was a CIA front, but there are so many CIA fronts that it didn’t register much in the conspiracy world. Now that we are seeing what is presumably only very partial records from USAID, the curtain has been pulled, to reveal the powerful Oz in all his glory. One would imagine that an outfit with such a name would be devoted to….international development. To the non-conspirator, this conjures up images of Alliance for Progress stuff- which is logical, since JFK created both agencies. There was an idealistic notion that the U.S. could help these poorer countries up on their feet, so that they could rule themselves.

But instead, we see expenditures that boggle the mind. Outlandish sums of money thrown at ridiculous DEI projects. Some ridiculous examples include $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities,” $70,000 for production of a “DEI musical” in Ireland, $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia, $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru, and $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala. $68 million was given to the dastardly World Economic Forum, and $37 million to the WHO. There was $50 million to fund condoms in Gaza. They have time for sex, in the midst of all that bombing? There was more than $270 million provided to George Soros’ funded groups. And here we’d thought he was spending his own billions to destroy America. In an extension of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, USAID funded more than 6,200 journalists in thirty different countries, in 2023 alone. $8.2 million was given to “friendly” asset Politico. The New York Times received tens of millions.

Now, I am very skeptical that money was actually allotted to transgender operas and comics, and the like. When I first heard of incredibly specious government expenditures back decades ago, I found it hard to believe. I recall there was supposedly a study on “the main cause of tricycle accidents.” Now, picture how such a study would be conducted. Government employees huddling in shrubbery where young tikes are at play, hoping to see a tricycle crash in real time? No, I thought then, and I think now, that this was a fiction designed to arouse the ire of taxpayers. It’s far more likely that the money for such preposterous projects, including all the DEI stuff, is just funneled into one of those black holes, to be used for unimaginably sinister purposes. Maybe that’s how the fund the Citizen Hit Squad, to silence naysayers. Or the elite just further line their pockets with it. That’s a great skill that they possess.

AP, Reuters, and the BBC were also lavished with taxpayer funds. In other words, our government was financing all those “fact checkers,” who fought to suppress the rabble rousing accusations of Thought Criminals like me. Actor Ben Stiller received $4 million to drool all over former comedian turned Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Chelsea Clinton somehow made off with anywhere from more than $40 million to $84 million through USAID. However, the “fact checkers,” who it must be stressed were probably paid by the same USAID to “debunk” these claims, insist that is just more “disinformation.” No Clinton would ever abscond with money like that. If true, Chelsea’s haul puts to shame Hillary’s once impressive profit in cattle shares. Politico was apparently also given large sums by other government agencies. Hopefully, the details will become clear once those agencies are fully audited.

I’m not sure which is more astonishing; Trump actually instructing DOGE to expose this chicanery, or the histrionic objection to it on the part of the insane Left. Some Democratic Party “representatives” went apoplectic. LaMonica McIver declared that we are at war. Ilhan Omar said we might actually see somebody get killed. And Chris Van Hollen said we have to fight this in the Congress, and in the streets. He called the audit of USAID “the biggest heist in American history.” What? Isn’t this more accurately the exposure of the biggest heist? So think about this. The Democrats are fighting a “war” over what, exactly? The right to keep information about the way government really works from the public? A war for censorship, and absurd “National Security” declarations, a war against disclosure. They don’t want the JFK files, or the 9/11 files released. They don’t want the public to see the official Epstein List.

The “Woke” Left is engaged in a veritable crusade against transparency. Not satisfied with being a “free press” that fights for censorship and state secrecy, they even resorted to doxing, which has become one of their favorite tools. Doing her due diligence for her corrupt masters, Katherine Long of the Wall Street Journal, successfully “cancelled” twenty five year old DOGE staffer Marko Elez, over “controversial” tweets he had made in the past, and boasted of her “victory” in an article titled “DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts.” Long failed to disclose that she had previously worked for the State Department and USAID-linked groups. Elon Musk responded by saying Long’s ties to USAID were “Certainly improper, possibly criminal.” The media also went nuts over a nineteen year old DOGE staffer’s online identity as “Big Balls.” They actually treated this like a bombshell revelation.

The Deep State will not permit any indecent exposure of their continuous crimes, without a powerful struggle. A federal judge has already blocked DOGE from accessing Treasury Department records. That’s Judicial Review for you. I’m the first American since Thomas Jefferson to stress how disastrous Judicial Review is to the Checks and Balances of the Constitution. Conservatives don’t seem to understand this. Somebody tell Elon Musk about my Substack. Maybe he’s got room on the DOGE staff for an old guy who’s passionate about exposing government fraud. I could come up with a more offensive screen name than “Big Balls.” How about “All Lives Matter?” Or “Confederate Sympathizer?” The Treasury Department system handles records of Social Security payments. Why, the public might discover that dead people are still being paid in some cases, and that illegal immigrants have profited from the system as well, using phony “dependents,” as I detailed in my book Survival of the Richest.

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Of all the things I loathe about the Democrat party, its celebration of victimhood takes the cake.  As is true of all political parties infected with virulent Marxism, it does not seek to help those truly in need.  It does the opposite.  It seeks out people who might never have seen themselves as victims and convinces them otherwise.  It is a party whose growth in membership is directly proportional to Democrats’ capacity to convert Americans into victims.

Once a person understands Democrats’ pathological need to harvest new victims, it becomes obvious that they are not in the business of solving problems.  Fixing anything in society only reduces the number of future Democrats.  By celebrating victimhood, Democrats are committed to making things worse today than they were yesterday and even worse tomorrow than they are today.  Their growth model depends upon perpetual misery.

Americans saw this self-destructive phenomenon play out during Obama’s presidency.  Before the 2008 election, race relations between black and white Americans had steadily improved since the ’60s.  Racism was widely rejected as a repugnant practice of the past.  In fact, discrimination based upon the color of a person’s skin had become so offensive that courts were dismantling affirmative action programs that explicitly prioritized race over merit.  A lot of Republican voters, unhappy with their party’s nomination of Senator John McCain, crossed lines and voted for Barack Obama’s nebulous promise of “hope and change” with the expectation that a post-racial America would take root.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder chose another path.  They looked for ways to inflame racial tensions.  They deconstructed a half-century of American racial progress by routinely injecting racial controversy into matters that had nothing to do with skin color.  A black Harvard professor is detained in the Democrat stronghold of Cambridge, Massachusetts?  That’s because all cops are unconsciously racist (even the black ones).  A black male dies in a confrontation with a neighborhood watchman?  That’s because black boys are hunted outside their own communities.  Americans don’t want to pay more for worse health care?  That’s because wealthy white Americans are too selfish to understand the appeal of socialized medicine.

Whenever policymakers fought Obama administration policy, charges of racism were not so subtly leveled against them.  Instead of finally terminating affirmative action programs and other race-based discrimination, Obama and Holder reinvigorated an otherwise dying system of racial preferences and rebranded discrimination as a “virtue” under the umbrella of the Marxist tripe we know now as “diversity, inclusion, and equity.”  When Obama was elected, race relations inside the United States had never been better.  After eight years of an Obama-Holder strategy to make every policy dispute a racial dispute, race relations had severely deteriorated.  There is perhaps no better example of how backward Democrats’ notion of “progress” truly is.

Setting aside the tangible social harm that Obama and Holder inflicted upon Americans, it is not difficult to understand why they chose division over unity.  Had President Obama framed his election victory as vivid proof that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream was reality — proof, in other words, that the content of an American’s character matters much more than the color of that American’s skin — a generational struggle against racial prejudice would have been largely resolved.  Had Obama declared victory over racism, he would have become a transformational figure in American history.  But Democrats are not in the business of solving problems.  Solving problems diminishes the supply of potential victims.  And Democrats’ political success depends upon an ever-growing class of self-identifying victims.

When seen from this perspective, it is easy to understand how cancerous the Democrats’ governing philosophy is.  Unity — or the cultivation of a common national identity and purpose — is antithetical to Democrats’ Marxist directive to rally the “oppressed” against their “oppressors.”  By design, Democrats cultivate grievance and conflict.  They isolate subsets of American society, convince those subsets that they are victims, and cynically exploit Americans’ shared desire to seek justice for the oppressed.  For Democrats, whether some isolated group has actually been treated unfairly or unjustly is irrelevant.  They stir social passions by maximizing perceived insults felt from real or imagined grievances.  Then they feed on those passions to create explosive political movements capable of transforming imaginary victimhood into real political power.

Since the nineteenth century, Marxism has tried to cultivate grievance among a majority of blue-collar workers, but America’s working class has stubbornly resisted.  However bad working conditions might have been in the United States since its inception, the country long maintained the highest rate of intergenerational social mobility in the world.  The children of indentured servants became farmers.  The children of farmers became skilled tradesmen.  The children of skilled tradesmen became entrepreneurs.  The children of entrepreneurs became lawyers, bankers, and even politicians.

In other words, for most of America’s history, the United States has been a “land of opportunity” unburdened by traditional strictures of social caste.  Marxists found it difficult to create a class revolution when American workers were too busy making money and buying land.  Coincidentally or not, intergenerational social mobility in the United States declined only after the rise of the Federal Reserve central banking system, the implementation of broadly enforced income taxes, growing encumbrances upon private property, and the rapid expansion of the twentieth-century regulatory state.

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The world is in danger, mind-numbingly so, from a combination of crises: disease, hunger, mass displacement, racial and economic inequality, war and the threat of more war, a rampaging climate crisis, and an accelerating nuclear arms race (and that’s just for starters) — all occurring in a climate of massive mis- and disinformation that makes it ever harder to build a consensus toward solutions to the multiple problems we face.

Words can’t fully express our current predicament. We need other tools and other ways of making sense of the situation we now find ourselves in.

This should be a time for action and activism on behalf of our species and our planet. While there’s certainly a fair amount of that already, the combined weight of the risks we face makes all too many of us turn inward toward family and friends, or outward to find scapegoats for our problems. And yes, there are still moments of joy, optimism, and constructive action. Unfortunately, they are increasingly hard to sustain amid relentless daily attacks on people’s lives, livelihoods, and basic dignity.

One of the best ways to find a place of balance and light amid all the chaos is by creating and appreciating art, which can get to the heart of the matter by tapping not just the intellect but the emotions, putting us in touch with a deeper sense of meaning too often ignored in our rush to deal with the crises of the moment.

Sending Out an SOS

It’s in this context that I read and viewed Promemoria — Reminder (Sending Out an SOS) by EMA (Enrico Muratore Aprosio), a Geneva-based human rights advocate, humanitarian, and artist. The words in the book, which addresses Covid, the climate, and the prospects of nuclear war through poetry, prose, and storytelling, are compelling. But the artworks that punctuate the text are truly stunning, using bright colors and complex designs that incorporate pictures of both historical and imaginary figures — its images ranging from Karl Marx to Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan to the Mona Lisa (wearing a Covid protective mask).

The book honors the spirit of altruism and courage, most notably in a section dedicated to Mbaye Diagne, a Senegalese peacekeeper who saved up to 1,000 lives amid the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, only to be killed in a mortar attack 12 days before he was set to return home.

Melissa Parke, director general of the Nobel Prize-winning International Coalition to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, captures the sense of the book well, suggesting that Aprosio’s “use of beautiful animals, striking colors, and magical happenings communicates both the urgency of the situation we face and reminds us of what we stand to lose if we don’t change course.”

Appreciating what we still stand to lose couldn’t be more crucial in the world we now face. Savoring everything from the signal achievements of humanity (writ large) to the pleasures and accomplishments of our everyday lives matters deeply, both as a motivation to continue working for change in an ever-messier world and as fuel for sustaining us in a struggle of unknown duration.

Yes, EMA’s book is grimly grounded in reality, even as it (literally) paints a picture of a world that could be so much better. One of my favorite panels in the book is entitled “Every Day More Bullshit,” just because, well, it seems all too sadly appropriate to the moment we’re in.

There’s also a chapter called “Radioactive Beasts,” inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel Animal Farm. The animals Aprosio writes about are worried by the state of the world and concerned that humans aren’t taking the risks posed by current conflicts seriously enough.

In April 2023, some of Aprosio’s fictional beasts were projected onto buildings in New York City’s Times Square with support from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Other portions of the book could be displayed across this embattled planet of ours in a similar fashion to good effect.

There’s more to EMA’s book than can be taken in at a sitting, or even many sittings, or certainly summarized in an essay like this. Still, get your hands on it if you can. It can serve as an inspirational reference work you can dip into at any time to re-energize yourself or contemplate what a different world might indeed look like. In that way, it reminds me of the effects of Afrofuturist art and literature, not because the forms necessarily resemble each other, but because both approaches underscore the desperate need for a bold vision of what a new world might look like — a vision of what anyone trying to change things might dream of.

Artists for Peace

Promemoria is anything but the only current art project that takes on nuclear weapons and related dangers. One of the most interesting current networks is Artists Against the Bomb, a global organization of creators who have produced an amazing array of antinuclear posters, among other works.

Another vital project in a world where nuclear weapons are proliferating and the U.S. is planning to invest up to $2 trillion dollars in the (yes, this is indeed the term!) “modernization” of its nuclear force in the coming decades is Bombshelltoe. It’s a policy and arts collective that defines itself as “a creative organization pushing for an active exploration of arts, culture, and history to promote nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, and disarmament for the next generation.” One of its prominent efforts is the Atomic Terrain Project, which highlights how nuclear weapons have “seeped into our waters and tapped into our soil” and “continue to harm all life, human and non-human alike.”

I was fortunate enough to see an exhibition that the Project mounted at the 2024 New York Art Book Fair entitled “How to Make a Bomb” — a book with the same title was also released then — organized and presented by Gabriella Hirst, Warren Harper, Tammy Nguyen, and Lovely Umayam (the founder of Bombshelltoe). The exhibit was built around a flower, the Rosa Floribunda, or — yes! — “Atom Bomb,” which Hirst describes as “a garden rose that was cultivated and named in 1953 during the Cold War arms race to commemorate Britain’s newfound status as a nuclear power.” Hirst has taken the lead in cultivating (and you might say pacifying) that rose, while getting it planted in gardens throughout the United Kingdom and beyond as an antinuclear gesture of beauty.

At the book fair, attendees could learn how to plant and maintain just such a rose while engaging in conversations about the history and devastating impact of nuclear weapons or checking out basic documents and books about the nuclear age. Such an indirect (even flowery!) route into truly grim subject matter drew interest from people who might not normally pick up a book on, or read an article about, the dangers of nuclear weapons but were fascinated by the physical process of grafting a rose and then willing to stay for open-ended conversations about the growing nuclear dangers in our world.

When asked why the project chose to use a rose as an entry point into discussions of such ominous and grim subject matter, Lovely Umayam noted that “nuclear issues alone can feel abstract and alarmist” and eerily unapproachable. As Gabriella Hirst put it, the project “is about taking the sublime into your own hands and working through that in small ways… to reduce fear among non-experts.”

At the same book fair where I encountered the Rose Project, I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Rejali, an organizer of the art and political website Khabar Keslan. Recent essays there include an interview with Palestinian filmmaker Khaled Jarrar, but I was first drawn to the project’s printed works, including reproductions of stamps from Iran and South Asia going back to the 1950s. There were, of course, numerous stamps portraying the once-dreaded Shah of Iran. There was also one of the CIA’s logo with blood running down it, a reference to the agency’s role in the 1953 coup that installed the Shah as Iran’s autocratic ruler. Perhaps the most emotionally powerful product of Khabar Keslan, however, may have been a collection of poems entitled “Salute to Olives” by the late Omar al-Bargouthi, many of which were written while he was being held in Israeli prisons.

On a planet where nuclear dangers are only growing, both Promemoria and the Atomic Terrain project underscore the importance of finding new ways to communicate about this increasingly fragile and endangered planet of ours that inspire creativity and action rather than fear, paralysis, and denial. At a time when challenges to fundamental rights are hurtling toward us at warp speed, taking the time to experience artworks of any kind can seem like a distinct luxury, but don’t believe that for a second. Such art is a key to reclaiming our humanity and getting in touch with the creative, collaborative impulses that could help save our planet. A pause, artistic in nature, to reflect and recharge our psychic batteries can go a long way toward helping us to cope with this all too strange present moment and build for the future. Promemoria provides us with that precious opportunity.

A Brief History of Culture and Resistance

Music, theater, painting, and other forms of artistic expression have, in fact, been part of every major movement for change in recent memory. The Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s, funded as part of the Works Progress Administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the era of the Great Depression, hired unemployed performers and writers who produced more than 800 plays and dance events. In the process, they highlighted work by under-represented groups, including African Americans via the Negro Theatre Project and the African-American Dance Unit. It also funded foreign language plays in Spanish, Yiddish, and German until Congressman Martin Dies, Jr., head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, led a successful charge to defund the program because of its advocacy of racial equality and other progressive themes.

Theater, however, continued to play a central role in progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s, from Teatro Campesino, born during the United Farm Workers Union’s organizing drives in California; to the Bread and Puppet Theater, a staple of anti-war efforts; and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, whose plays captured a whole range of progressive themes, often in hilarious fashion. And don’t forget the freedom songs that were at the core of the civil rights movement, sung by demonstrators at mass rallies and activists detained in local jails in the South.

The anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s was also sustained and amplified by works of art. Its best-known cultural product was undoubtedly the TV movie The Day After, a fictionalized treatment of the impacts of a nuclear war viewed by more than 100 million people when it aired on ABC in November 1983. But there was also a steady drumbeat of anti-nuclear cartoons, some of which were assembled in a widely distributed collection entitled Warheads. Joel Andreas’s 77-page graphic comic book, Addicted to War: Why America Can’t Kick Militarism, proved to be a primer on the roots of the American war system from the nineteenth-century vision of “manifest destiny” to (in an updated edition) the Global War on Terror, taking on war profiteers and the role of the media along the way.

More recently, groups like the Yes Men and Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir have lampooned corporations and their executives through street theater and by posing as participants in corporate gatherings (and so underscoring the absurdity of their activities and world views). The Yes Men describe their work as using “humor and trickery to highlight the corporate takeover of society, the neoliberal delusion that allows it, [and] the corporate Democrats’ responsibility for our current situation.” Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir ridicule materialism in all its forms from Starbucks displacing local coffee shops to the excesses of the Disney Store in New York’s Times Square.

Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, has similarly engaged in a wide range of politically focused art projects, ranging from a Peace Symphony performed in Hiroshima to The Book of Ice, which addresses climate change, to a wide array of films, articles, and concerts. Robin Bell Visuals has produced films and art installations, including projecting the words “Pay Bribes Here” on the side of the Trump International Hotel in Washington. And there have been scores of antiwar anthems produced in virtually every genre of modern music from folk to jazz to rock to hip hop to heavy metal.

My colleague Khody Akhavi makes short compelling videos on topics ranging from the dangerous rise of AI-driven weaponry to the impact of the funding of think tanks by weapons contractors, the Pentagon, and foreign governments. And the Center for Artistic Activism partners with advocacy groups on specific projects, schools them in artistic techniques, and helps them build art into their campaigns and public education efforts. Their slogan: “we make social and environmental change more effective — and more creative.”

Better yet, the artists and projects cited above are just a sampling of the many forms of political art that have attracted audiences and encouraged activism at the local, national, and global levels. Promemoria is a worthy addition to this tradition. Not only will the book have its own impact, but it will hopefully inspire others to produce projects that address our most urgent problems in new ways, moving people to take action grounded in our common humanity. Given the world we’re now in, it can’t happen soon enough.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

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Yes, a captivity. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (hereafter, DEI) can properly be called a captivity.  Americans were held hostage by this alien ideology born in the claustrophobic classrooms of the Marxist credo for decades. Its noose has finally loosened.

So enveloping was this agitprop that the commanding heights of academe and conventional intelligentsia cast aside outdated things like free speech and launched a campaign of cancel culture, the flip side of Nazi book burning. For years, average Americans crouched in fear at the ubiquity of this Enemy.

No wonder you found yourself rubbing your eyes when The Wall Street Journal recently reported:

Universities are suspending research projects, canceling conferences and closing offices in response to a volley of orders from President Trump banning “diversity, equity and inclusion” across the United States government. The directives threaten vital federal funding and have thrown university leaders into disarray.

To avoid running afoul of the orders, which include “the termination of all discriminatory programs”, some school leaders have assumed a defensive posture on anything associated with DEI.

It seemed as though we were awaking from a nightmare. We had to pinch ourselves. Was its stranglehold abating?

But as the president severed its tentacles, the only thing he was doing was restoring simple common sense. But in the thick fog of Leftist disinformation, simple common sense begins to become uncommon. So uncommon that it soon becomes simply dangerous. Indeed, cause for arrest, as many pro-life folks discovered. Chesterton, as usual, was eerily correct when he wrote in Heretics:

The great March of destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street: it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream: it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

Pause for a moment and savor the depth to which we have fallen. The Leader of the Free World compelled to promulgate a formal document declaring that only two sexes exist—male and female.

Mr. Chesterton, how prescient you were!

Not to appear melodramatic, but we did seem to feel the exhilaration of prisoners of Auschwitz as they were freed by the American GIs.  Recall the slogan over the gates of that death camp: Arbeit macht frei (Work makes you free). And inmates heeded The Lie until they were incinerated as a reward.

Similarly, the American people over the long stretch of their captivity. Over and over, the incessant message was drummed into our ears: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Its invocation was inescapable: in workplaces, government, kindergarten classrooms, Army and Navy, Fortune 500 boardrooms, universities and high schools, legacy media, and newspapers. This perverse ideology blanketed the nation like some toxic slime, leaving the conscience and right reason of Americans teetering.

Normal folks were terrified to speak openly, lest they be overheard and dismissed from employment, or worse. Without exaggeration, conditions in America approached the days of the Stalinist Soviet Union when one out of every two citizens worked for the KGB and children routinely reported anti-party speech of their parents to its agents.

When this tale is told to your grandchildren it will beggar belief. Since most rational men will be incredulous, let us rehearse just a few of the more bizarre tenets of this corrupt and corrupting ideology:

• A guide at the University of California, Irvine, became notorious for its discouragement of the idiom “kill two birds with one stone.” The problem for UCI was not that this hoary phrase is a worn-out cliché, but rather that it employed violent language. They replaced it with the bad rhyme “feed two birds with one scone.”
• Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand, during the pandemic sanctimoniously announced, “We continue to be your single guardians of truth. Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.”
• The mantra “disparate impact on black criminals” became the excuse to allow crime to run rampant. The blatant madness of the claim went unchallenged, unleashing eruptions of violence. But the irrationality of this nostrum was inescapable. For instance, if more college graduates were jailed for white-collar crime, should we cease arresting them because of “disparate impact”? If certain segments of a population are clearly seen to be committing crimes, it is not “disparate impact” to arrest them even though they represent a preponderance of a certain population.

George Orwell identified this agenda better than anybody before or since, first in essays in the 1940s and then in his novel 1984 which introduced Newspeak, a satiric lingua franca that showed how totalitarians impoverished language to crush freedom. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” says a character at the lie-infested Ministry of Truth. “In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

This beloved America of ours came close to becoming Amerika, a client wing of the Davos Global State.

Read the Whole Article

The post RIP, DEI: The End of Our Captivity appeared first on LewRockwell.

Elon Musk’s revelations of the extraordinary corruption in federal departments have made it clear for me why so many Democrat Representatives and Senators without business backgrounds became multi-millionaires and how the presstitute media abandoned by the public remains on its feet.  Their source of wealth and funding is the US budget, which also explains why the budget is so totally out of control.  The political establishment and the media are living on the federal budget, while American taxpayers cannot make ends meet and are up to their eyeballs in debt.

The Federalist reports that just last week Washington Democrats held three press conferences denouncing the US Department of Government Efficiency’s revelations of massive theft and corrupt self-dealing as an invasion of their privacy. These same Democrats, little doubt well paid by the Chinese, never said one word about Chinese hackers breaching the US Treasury Department’s computer security system and stealing documents that the Treasury classified as “a major incident.”  Much less did the Democrats hold three press conferences about the Chinese hacking.

Do you really think Democrats, who have permitted unlimited violation of the American people’s privacy by the CIA, FBI, NSA, Homeland Security, care a whit about our privacy?  The only thing the Democrats are concerned about is the US Department of Government Efficiency’s discovery of their theft and corruption.

We have to ask ourselves where the Republicans have been all these years while the Democrats feasted on the American taxpayers.  Indeed, how long before the RINOs among them ally with the Democrats so that they don’t have to explain their years of non-action.  But note: It was Chelsea Clinton, not Ivanka, who got 84 million dollars of the taxpayers’ money. Ask yourself also: where did Bill and Hillary Clinton get $200 million dollars?

Note also: It is Trump’s regime, not Biden’s or Obama’s, that is rooting out the theft and corruption, and it is corrupt Democrat judges put in office for the sole purpose of protecting Democrats who are doing their best to block all transparency. See this.  

And don’t weep for the civil service complaining about their privacy.  The data is not private. It is in government hands.  There is no basis in law for some corrupt judge to rule that the government cannot see its own data. What the concern is really over is the large percentages of Biden and Obama hires who got the job not on merit but on skin color, gender, and sexual perversion. One reason the US government is so totally dysfunctional is that the Democrats using DEI have destroyed a competent, nonpartisan civil service and substituted one based on skin color, gender, and sexual preference.

Now that the civil service is playing the “angry and fearful” game, you know what kind of people they are.  

Federal Employees ‘Angered’ And ‘Fearful’ At Having To Do What Their Boss Says

—

Elon Musk Calls for Impeaching the federal judge who is helping the Democrats hide their corruption and theft from American taxpayers

It appears that Democrats have been using the US Federal Budget as their personal slush fund. Now that the US Department of Government Efficiency is bringing out the evidence it is uncovering, the Democrats quickly had one of their judges order the Secretary of the US Treasury blocked from examining the information in the cabinet agency that he heads!

The judge was unable to cite any laws or precedent for his unprecedented order that a cabinet secretary has no control over the department he heads or access to its information.

Yes, you guessed correctly, the judge, Paul Engelmayer, is a Jewish Democrat, a party operative protecting the corruption of his party from being revealed. The judge ruled that revealing the evidence would cause “irreparable harm” to the Democrats and “the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information” will make the government data systems more vulnerable to hacking. What the judge’s words amount to is nonsense gabble to protect corruption from the light of day.  Can the United States continue to exist, much less function, when it has Democrat judges this corrupt?

Elon Musk described Engelmayer as “a corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW.”  Is impeachment too light of a sentence?  Would you prefer his execution?

As there is zero basis in law for the judge’s ruling, Trump should ignore the judge’s worthless ruling. Why not just deport the judge along with the illegals?  There is actually precedent for this.  President Lincoln did it to a northern US Representative who merely disagreed with him. See this.

—

The Atlantic Demonstrates the Whore Media’s Extreme Hostility to Trump and to the American People Who Elected Trump

I personally do not believe than any American, not even a single one, is so disreputable, so Anti-American, so anti-white, so anti-sexual morality, so vile and despicable as to subscribe to The Atlantic.  I am convinced that this rag is underwritten by USAID grants and otherwise would not exist.

Perhaps I am mistaken.  Perhaps the American liberal-left is this vile, and they subscribe to The Atlantic in order to have their anti-American beliefs confirmed. Perhaps The Atlantic sustains the poor dears’ fantasies of America’s evils that must be destroyed along with America and all white people.

In The Atlantic’s latest offering of  crude propaganda, which is all that the rag provides, the disreputable rag denounces the Democrat multi-billionaires–Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, and Sam Altman–who censored Trump and all who spoke one word of truth, and  transformes the anti-Trump multi-billionaire coalition  into  Trump’s “overlords” who are bringing lawlessness and fear to objective, nonpartisan, dedicated, competent civil servants with the intent to replace them with sycophantic Trump loyalists.  Clearly, with The Atlantic  it is OK to have Democrat loyalists, but not Trump ones. See this. 

How can we explain a writer penning such totally ignorant nonsense when it is known that the US civil service is overwhelming Democrat partisan as evidenced by its political campaign contributions which range from 86% to 97% Democrat across the federal departments and agencies? See this.

I mean, really.  But it goes on from here. According to The Atlantic, the Trump administration is so corrupt and threatening that it believes it, elected by the people, actually has a right to rule.   What a fool the Trump administration is for believing that its election gives it a right to rule.  Only anti-Americans have a right to rule America. Where do these upstart MAGA Americans come from who believe they have a right to rule in their own country simply because they won an election?

According to the demented The Atlantic, all sorts of constitutional and legal barriers prevent Trump from governing, but none prevent Democrats and their corrupt judges, prosecutors, and media whores from preventing governance from an establishment-disapproved, despite electorally approved, presidential administration.

The writer of this idiocy, Adam Serwer, who according to Wikipedia is blessed with being both black and a Jew, strikes me, and perhaps I am mistaken, as a person far outside the boundaries of intelligent discussion.  He is one of the lost souls who believes that America shouldn’t exist, or should be redefined so that the real America no longer exists. We see now, blinders removed, what the American media is–our worst enemy, an enemy supported by taxpayers’ money, the intent of which is to subvert America and to make Americans slaves to the narratives the media  spins for our enslavement to an anti-American, anti-moral, anti-truth, anti-justice, anti-liberty existence ordained for us by the evil American Establishment presided over by Democrats so totally corrupt that the word doesn’t do the Democrat corruption justice.

The American Media is the scum of the earth. Trump should apply the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and break up the six illegal trusts, which reportedly are controlled by Jews,  that hold 90% of the US media in captive hands. How would you like to be a journalist forced to lie in print and in recorded speech every day of your life in order to have an income?  Those who have integrity find different employment. Those without integrity take the money.  What America has is a media without integrity.

Is Trump so enthralled to Jews that he cannot protect America?  Will the effort to make America great again fail because of Trumps’s subservience to Israel?  Will the Zionist evangelicals, fake Christians, abandon Trump if he frees America from Israel’s domination?

The question we face is:  Is America so subverted by Jewish interests that not even Trump can make America great again.  Is all that awaits America is its obituary?

The post Democrats and Presstitutes Panicked That Musk Is Revealing Their Grift appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, Massachusetts, held oral arguments in the case of Ian Freeman, the libertarian Bitcoin seller who the feds targeted back in 2019. In December 2022, Freeman was convicted by a jury in a U.S. District Court in New Hampshire of four types of offenses: (1) failing to register with the federal government as a Bitcoin seller and conspiring to not register with the feds as a Bitcoin seller; (2) income-tax evasion; (3) money-laundering; and (4) conspiracy to launder money.

After a verdict of guilty on all the charges, the U.S. District Judge entered what is called a judgment of acquittal notwithstanding the verdict on the money-laundering count. He entered that ruling based on the fact that there was no evidence whatsoever to justify the jury’s finding of guilt on that issue. Thus, that left the other  convictions relating to registration, tax evasion, and conspiracy to launder money.

On October 2, 2023, Freeman was sentenced to 8 years in prison on the most important count — the conspiracy-to-launder-money count — and five years each on the registration counts and the tax-evasion counts. All the sentences were ordered to run concurrently — i.e., at the same time. The District Judge denied bail pending the outcome of an appeal and ordered Freeman to be taken into custody. He has been imprisoned ever since. However, he appealed his convictions to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. That’s what the oral arguments were about last Wednesday.

Last July, I wrote a series of articles analyzing these convictions:

The Unjust Conviction of an Innocent Man: The Ian Freeman Case, Part 1
The Unjust Conviction of an Innocent Man: The Ian Freeman Case, Part 2
The Unjust Conviction of an Innocent Man: The Ian Freeman Case, Part 3
How I Came to Investigate the Ian Freeman Case

In those articles, I stated my conviction that the 44-year-old Freeman is an innocent man — yes, a totally innocent man, a man who today is unjustly serving an 8-year sentence in a federal prison camp.

The oral arguments

I attended the oral arguments in the First Circuit Court of Appeals last week in Boston. Also in attendance were around 15 friends and supporters of Freeman as well as his wife Bonnie.

Each side was allowed 15 minutes to present its arguments. Freeman’s attorney went first. The government’s lawyer then presented his reply. Then Freeman’s attorney got some time for rebuttal. If you would like to listen to the oral arguments, you can do so via Youtube here.

Nothing that occurred during those oral arguments dissuaded me from my conviction that the feds have targeted, indicted, prosecuted, convicted, sentenced, imprisoned, fined, and punished an innocent man, as well as permanently deprived him of a large amount of his savings.

In fact, based on the oral  arguments presented by the government lawyers in the case, it was clear to me that the concept of statism is alive and well in the U.S. Justice Department and that the feds continue to inflict their statist wrath on Ian Freeman simply because of his fierce anti-statist views.

The conspiracy-to-launder-money count

In an appeal from a criminal conviction, the lawyer for the accused writes and files what is called an appellate brief, which sets forth the facts of the case and the points and arguments and case law as to why the conviction should be reversed. The government lawyer then files a reply brief stating why the conviction should be upheld. The defendant then has the right to file a rebuttal brief responding to the government’s reply brief.

Freeman’s appellate brief challenged his convictions relating to registration and tax evasion. However, his brief did not challenge the conspiracy conviction. In my opinion, that might well prove to be a grave mistake because it had the effect of leaving the most important conviction — the conviction with the highest prison sentence — intact.

In other words, even if Freeman succeeds on appeal in knocking out the registration convictions and the income-tax convictions, he is still saddled with the conspiracy conviction and its 8-year prison sentence because his lawyer did not challenge that conviction in Freeman’s appellate brief. Thus, even if Freeman wins on the registration and tax convictions, it’s my opinion that from a practical standpoint he has gained nothing if the conspiracy conviction and its 8-year sentence are still left standing.

From what I have been informed, the reason for not challenging the conspiracy conviction was that Freeman’s lawyer was up against a word-count limit that the Court of Appeals imposes on appellate briefs. Given such, however, it seems to me that there were other options: (1) edit and compress the arguments so that all (not just some) of the convictions are challenged within the allowable word count; (2) make sure the most important conviction — i.e., the one with the highest sentence — is challenged within the allowable word count; or (3) file a motion asking the Court of Appeals to grant permission to file an appellate brief that has more words than the rule permits.

There is still one possibility, however, of knocking out the conspiracy conviction. In his appellate brief, Freeman’s lawyer made what is called a “spillover” argument. It holds as follows: Since the jury heard all the evidence relating to the money-laundering charge that the District Judge later threw out, that evidence necessarily “spilled over” and affected the jury’s deliberations and verdict on the conspiracy charge (and the other charges). Therefore, in the interests of justice, the Court of Appeals should reverse and remand the case for a new trial, one in which the jury will not hear the evidence relating to the conviction that was thrown out — that is, the money-laundering conviction.

Moreover, the same spillover argument would apply if the Court of Appeals were to throw out the registration convictions or the income-tax convictions or both. Listening to all that “invalid” evidence that has been thrown out could easily have affected the jury’s verdict on the conspiracy count. Therefore, the case should be remanded to the District Court for an entirely new trial.

I find this argument very persuasive. In my opinion, Ian Freeman is entitled to a jury that considers only the evidence that relates to the charge or charges he is facing. This is especially true given the nature of the evidence supporting the money-laundering charge that the District Judge threw out. As I detailed in “The Unjust Conviction of an Innocent Man: The Ian Freeman Case, Part 1,” that was the evidence relating to the fraud, deceit, deception, and entrapment by the IRS agent Pavel Prilotsky against Freeman. As I pointed out in my articles cited above, there is one big reason why the feds would resort to that type of dark-side misconduct as a way to get Freeman — they knew that they had nothing else on him. After all, if they truly believed that their failing to register, income-tax, and conspiracy accusations had any merit, why would they have felt the need to resort to fraud, deceit, deception, and entrapment as a way to get him?

So, where is the fairness and justice of having the jury hear all that dark-side evidence to support a charge that the judge later rightly threw out, given its clear tendency to prejudice the jury on the other charges? Why shouldn’t Freeman (and everyone else accused of a crime) have the right to have a jury determine his guilt on a particular charge based solely on competent evidence relating to that charge rather than on invalid evidence relating to a bogus crime, especially evidence involving fraud, deceit, deception, and entrapment on the part of some IRS agent who is searching desperately for some crime to pin on Freeman?

It’s usually difficult to ascertain how the thinking of an panel of appellate judges is tending based solely on the questions the judges ask. But at one point in the hearing, one of the judges asked the government’s lawyer if he felt it would be proper to send the case back for resentencing if the Court did end up knocking out one or both charges — those relating to failure to register or the income-tax charges.

What is concerning about the judge’s question is that it refers to sending the case back for resentencing, not for a new trial. That implies that that judge isn’t accepting the spillover argument because the spillover concept holds that a new trial, not a resentencing, is in order. What the judge was getting at with his question was the following: If the Court of Appeals knocks out the either the registration convictions or the tax convictions or both, should the case be remanded to the District Judge to see if he would like to reduce the 8-year sentence on the conspiracy-to-launder conviction in light of the fact that one or both of the other convictions have been set aside? But if the case were to remanded for resentencing, it’s important to note that the District Judge can, if he wants to, mete out the same 8-year sentence on the conspiracy-to-launder conviction that he originally gave Freeman.

The conspiracy count

This returns us to the conspiracy-to-launder charge, which, again, is still intact given that Freeman’s appellate brief did not challenge it. Was there a basis on which to challenge that conviction? Absolutely! The basis for challenging the conspiracy-to-launder conviction was the same basis on which the District Judge threw out the money-laundering conviction after the jury found Freeman guilty on that count — that there is no evidence to support the jury’s verdict.

Keep in mind that a judge cannot second-guess a jury’s verdict. The jury’s verdict is always final. But there is one exception: If there is no evidence whatsoever to support the jury’s verdict, the judge has the right — and the duty — to disregard the jury’s verdict and throw it out.

Thus, when the District Judge was faced with Freeman’s challenge of the money-laundering charge — the charge where the feds engaged in fraud, deceit, deception, and entrapment — he found that there was no evidence whatsoever that Freeman had engaged in money-laundering. Therefore, the judge had the right — and the legal duty — to disregard the jury’s verdict on that count and throw it out. In other words, since there was no evidence to support the conviction, the District Judge essentially found Freeman innocent as a matter of law on the money-laundering charge.

I contend that the exact same principle applies to the conspiracy-to-launder count. I have read the entire trial transcript. There is no evidence whatsoever in the record that Freeman conspired with anyone to launder money, just as there was no evidence whatsoever in the record that Freeman laundered any money. Therefore, I contend that Freeman’s attorney should have challenged his conviction on appeal on that count on that basis — the same basis that the District Court used to throw out the money-laundering charge.

In fact, I contend that the Court of Appeals should throw out the conspiracy conviction on its own accord, even though Freeman’s appellate brief failed to challenge it. When there is clearly no evidence to support a conviction, it is the duty of a court of law to set aside the conviction, even when it is not challenged by the defendant. Justice requires it. Justice demands it.

Keep in mind that a conspiracy count requires proof of an agreement to commit an illegal act (i.e., money-laundering). Where is the evidence that Freeman entered into such an agreement? It is nowhere to be found.

For one thing, the government admitted in a pretrial motion that it was not accusing Freeman of conspiring with the online lovers who were scamming old people out of their money. (See my series of article cited above for a detailed explanation of this aspect of the case.) It also would have been impossible as a matter of law and logic for Freeman to have conspired with the victims of the scam.

That then leaves only one possibility: that the government is claiming that Freeman conspired with his fellow Bitcoin associates to launder money. But the government did not introduce one iota of evidence that Freeman and his associates ever entered into an agreement to launder money or that they even discussed such a thing. There is a simple reason why the government failed to introduce such evidence — it never happened. Freeman and his associates never even thought about laundering money, much less agree to do it or even talk about it.

Sure, they all were in agreement to sell Bitcoins. Selling Bitcoins was their line of work. But an agreement to sell Bitcoins to people does not equal an agreement to launder money, except in statist-land, where statists are bending over backwards to convict and punish a fierce anti-statist libertarian who opposes everything about statist-land.

Moreover, laundering money means taking dirty money and turning it into clean money. Freeman never handled dirty money. More important insofar as the conspiracy count is concerned, he and his Bitcoin associates never agreed to handle dirty money. When the victims of the scams purchased Bitcoins from Freeman, their money was clean. When Freeman followed the victims’ instructions to deliver title to the Bitcoins to their online lovers, the money was still clean. It didn’t become dirty until the moment that the Bitcoins became owned by the online lover-scammers. Again, keep in mind something extremely important: The District Judge found Freeman innocent of the money-laundering charge as a matter of law–that is, because there was no evidence whatsoever that he had laundered any money.

As with the laundering-money conviction that the District Judge threw out, the record is devoid of any evidence that Freeman conspired with anyone to launder money. Again, keep in mind that the District Judge knocked out the substantive charge of laundering money based on no evidence to support it. I contend that the same holds true for the conspiracy-to-launder-money count, which is why I contend that the Court of Appeals has a solemn duty to review, consider, and sustain this point, even though it wasn’t made in Freeman’s appellate brief.

The online lover scams

There is an important point that needs to be made about the government’s appellate brief and its oral argument. The government continues to emphasize the little old ladies who had online lovers who scammed them out of money. That’s what the government also did during the trial. What’s the important point? Simply that Freeman wasn’t part of those scams, which is why the government chose not to charge him with fraud or conspiracy to defraud. If the government had even one iota of evidence that Freeman had conspired with the online scammers to defraud their victims, you can bet your bottom dollar that they would have indicted him for fraud or conspiracy to commit fraud against those scam victims. They charged him with neither. Thus, contrary to what the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Hampshire suggested in a post-sentencing press release, Freeman was never convicted of defrauding anyone. For that matter, that same press release falsely stated in its opening sentence that Freeman had been sentenced for money laundering. That was a flat-out, unmitigated, knowing, deliberate, and intentional lie because the U.S. Attorney’s office knew full well that the District Judge had thrown out the money-laundering conviction before sentencing based on the fact that there was no evidence whatsoever to support it.

What do those online scams have to do with failing to register his Bitcoin business, income-tax evasion, and whether there was a conspiracy to launder money? Absolutely nothing! They were simply a way to suggest that Freeman was involved in scamming those little old ladies without having to charge or prove it and get a conviction on it. It is also a way to induce a jury to convict, as well as induce judges to uphold convictions, based on irrelevant and misleading evidence and baseless accusations.

“Money,” “Funds,” and Bitcoin

Let’s now examine the failure-to register charge and the conspiracy-to-fail-to-register charge, which Freeman fervently opposed in his appellate brief. The following is what the charges are based on:

Congress enacted laws that require people who engage in the “transmission” of “money” or “funds” to register their business with the government. Such laws were enacted many years before Bitcoin was invented. After Bitcoin was invented, Freeman went into the business of selling Bitcoins. Freeman reasoned in good faith that he didn’t have to register his business with the federal government because there is no reasonable possibility that Congress intended to encompass Bitcoin in its definition of “money” and “funds” for the simple reason that Bitcoin had not yet been invented and turned out to be a totally unique invention. Therefore, there was no way that Congress could have envisioned it when it enacted its money/fund transmission laws.

The government’s position, however, was that at some point in Bitcoin’s evolution, Webster’s Dictionary defined “money” and/or “funds” as encompassing Bitcoin. Moreover, the government pointed out in its appellate brief and at the oral arguments that various other appellate courts have held that “money” and/or “funds” encompass Bitcoin.

Let’s accept the government’s position. My question is: So what? What relevance do Webster’s Dictionary and various holdings of appellate courts have to the issue of congressional intent in a law that was enacted long before Bitcoin was invented and long before Webster’s issued that particular dictionary and long before those appellate rulings?

Let’s take the day Bitcoin was invented, which took place several years after Congress enacted its money/fund-transmitting registration laws. Was Bitcoin “money” or “funds” on that day — on the day it was invented? I think even the most dyed-in-the-wool statist would say no. Well then, how about the week after it was invented, when people were first discovering it and talking about it? Again, I think most everyone would say, “No way!”

So, when did Bitcoin officially become “money” or “funds”? When Webster’s Dictionary published the edition that first defined it that way? How about the weeks before the dictionary came out, when the book was being printed? Or is the magical date when the first appellate court made its decision that “money” and “funds” encompass Bitcoin? As I pointed out in my series of articles cited above, there are plenty of financial experts and economists who contend that Bitcoin does not meet the requisite requirements to be considered “money.” For example, the June 2021 issues of Forbes magazine, which is a very well-known financial magazine, published an article in which the author stated, “Cryptocurrencies have been designed to serve as currencies, but they don’t yet fulfill the central functions of money.” But of course, the government’s lawyers would say that dictionary publishers and lawyers know a lot more about finance, money, and economics than financial experts and economists.

I asked Chatgbt whether Bitcoin is “money.” After analyzing the issue, this was its conclusion: “In summary, while Bitcoin exhibits some characteristics of money, it is not universally accepted as such in the same way as traditional currencies.” Well, if that’s the case, how can anyone be certain that the Congress that originally enacted the money-transmission statutes before Bitcoin was invented would not have been one of those who did not accept Bitcoin as “money” or as “funds”?

Thus, while we can be sure that modern-day dictionary publishers and some appellate judges define “money” and “funds” to encompass Bitcoin, what we can’t be certain of is what Congress would have done originally if it had known about Bitcoin. This is especially true given that even dyed-in-the-wool statists would not say that Bitcoin constituted “money” and “funds” from its inception and until it reached the magic date on which Webster’s Dictionary and some federal court of appeals decreed it to be “money” or “funds.”

Given that it is impossible to be certain what Congress would have done had it known about Bitcoin, I contend that we should not be putting people into prison for what we think Congress might have done if it had heard of Bitcoin. That’s not the way our criminal-justice system is supposed to operate. We are supposed to bend over backwards to protect the innocent, not convict them. As the noted 18th-century English legal commentator William Blackstone put it, “It is better that ten guilty people escape than that one innocent suffer.”

There is something else to consider: When a person sells Bitcoins, does he actually engage in the “transmission” of money or funds? I’m certainly no expert when it comes to Bitcoin and I might be wrong about this, but it is my understanding that Bitcoins are never sent or transmitted to anyone. That’s because by their very nature, they remain in the same location on the Internet always and forever. They don’t move. They remain stationary. Given such, there is no way for anyone to “transmit” them. So, why should we assume that Congress would have included them in its statute that criminalized the “transmission” of money or funds?

So, if it’s not transmitted, how does ownership of a Bitcoin change? Through a change in title. The Bitcoin remains where it is. It’s never transmitted. The title to that Bitcoin simply changes with a new ID number when it is sold. Unlike paper dollars, Silver Eagles, or Krugerrands, Bitcoins are not sent to new buyers. The Bitcoin simply ends up with a new identification number of the new buyer.

Imagine that Freeman was in the business of selling real estate. He advertises a lot for sale. A little old lady who has fallen in love with an online lover telephones Freeman and says she wants to buy the lot and that she wants the title of the lot transferred to someone else. Freeman agrees. As Freeman is preparing the deed, she says to him, “Put the deed in the name of John Doe (her secret online lover) and send it to his address.”

Are we to consider that the lot is “money” and “funds” and convict Freeman for not registering his “lot-transmission” business with the federal government? Why not? After all, in certain circumstances at some point in the future, couldn’t real-estate lots be considered to be “money” and “funds”? Haven’t cigarettes been considered “money” in certain situations? Shells? Wampum? And after all, just because the lot isn’t physically transmitted or sent to the buyer, the title to the real estate does change hands, just like it does with Bitcoin.

But here’s the kicker — actually, the super kicker: Many years after the enactment of the statutes under which Freeman was targeted, Congress enacted a law that defined “money” and “funds” to, yes, encompass Bitcoin! Why is that important? Well, if it is so clear that the original money/funds transmission laws encompassed Bitcoin, as the government claims, there would have been no reason for a new law that “clarified” that point. The very fact that Congress enacted the new law is proof positive beyond a reasonable doubt that it wasn’t clear at all that the original law encompassed Bitcoin. And when congressional intent is in serious doubt, we have no business punishing people for failing to comply with the law.

Body snatchers and bee hives

Moreover, consider the harshness of the sentence that was meted out to Freeman on the fail-to-register convictions — five years in prison. Five years! For what amounts to a violation of a ridiculous economic regulation in statist-land. Whoop dee doo! Isn’t that a serious “offense”? Why, I’d say it might even be a threat to the much-ballyhooed concept of “national security,” the most important term in the statist political lexicon. Of course, never mind that the Constitution fails to delegate any power to the federal government to be in the business-registration business. And never mind that Americans were not required to register their businesses with the feds for the first 100 years of our nation’s existence.

If the accused had been a public (i.e., government) high-school principal instead of Ian Freeman, there is no question but that he would have received probation for such a ridiculous regulatory-type offense. That’s because he would have been considered to be part of the collective statism to which most everyone belongs. The feds would have said that he just made a good-faith honest mistake in misinterpreting the statute. They would have slapped him on the wrist, patted him on the back, and sent him home to be with his family.

Not Ian Freeman though. You see, Freeman is different. As a fierce anti-statist libertarian, he doesn’t buy into their little beloved statist system. He stands apart from it. He criticizes, condemns, mocks, and ridicules it. Like other libertarians, Freeman has broken free of the statist indoctrination he received in the public (i.e., government) schools to which his parents were forced to send him. And the statists hate him for it. Their deep hatred of Freeman was perfectly manifested by the fact that they decided to sic an undercover IRS agent on him to defraud, deceive, and entrap him into committing a fake crime.

Recall the movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Statists are the pod people in that movie who are fiercely searching for anyone and everyone whose mind has not been absorbed into the overall statist collectivist mindset. Statists won’t rest until everyone becomes part of the collective and is happy and at peace about it.

Or consider a bee hive. Every drone knows his place and knows what is expected of him to make the hive a joyful and wonderful place. But then along comes Ian Freeman who says, “No, I’m no longer interested in being a part of your hive.” The hive authorities go ballistic. Freeman has become a threat to the hive. He could conceivably cause other drones to question their role in the collective. He has to be dealt with. He has to be targeted, even with fraud, deceit, deception, and entrapment into committing a fake crime. He must be made an example. He must be removed from society for many years so that he is unable to influence any other drones in the hive.

The drug-war racket

Moreover, let’s not forget what all this money-laundering, money/funds transmission, bank-secrecy, suspicious bank activity reports, cash-reporting requirements, and “know your customer” nonsense is all about — the big statist drug-war racket. It’s a racket that has been going on for many decades and has been — and continues to be — a big source of moolah in the form of generous salaries and pensions for federal prosecutors, federal judges, federal clerks, DEA agents, prison personnel, private contractors, and a host of other beneficiaries of the drug-war racket, including officials who receive bribes, payoffs, and proceeds from asset forfeitures as a result of the drug war.

Just ask any of these statist officials: How is your drug war going after some 80-90 years? They’ll look at you blankly for even having the audacity to ask the question. You’re not supposed to ask that type of question in statist-land. You see, each tyrannical measure they have taken to “win” their war on drugs has done nothing more than destroy the freedom and privacy of the American people, including financial privacy. That was precisely why Bitcoin was invented — to restore a bit of financial privacy to the American people after having had this fundamental, God-given right destroyed for decades as part of the failed, deadly, violent, corrupting, and destructive statist war on drugs. That too is why the statists hate Ian Freeman so much — not only because he was selling Bitcoins but also because he was teaching people about the virtues of Bitcoin in protecting people’s financial privacy from the prying eyes of government officials.

The income-tax charges

One of the bright spots for me in the oral arguments was when one of the judges asked the government’s lawyer about the IRS agent who admitted under oath at Freeman’s trial that they didn’t really know whether Freeman owed any back taxes at all. The judge rightly seemed troubled over convicting a person for tax evasion based on the government’s own admission that it wasn’t really certain whether Freeman owed any taxes at all. I found it to be a bright spot because it’s a point I brought up in my series of articles cited above.

The government’s response was that Freeman should have come forward and shown his deductions to establish that he didn’t owe any money. But the IRS agent at trial admitted that they never made an appointment to meet with Freeman to discuss his deductions, as they customarily do with people like public (i.e., government) high-school principals and other “regular” people who are part of the hive. Since he’s not part of the hive and, in fact, opposes the hive, Freeman was not accorded that courtesy.

Nonetheless, it is rather strange to me that the government’s position is that Freeman should have shown his deductions at trial. The reason that sounds strange to me is that I have always believed that in the United States, it’s the government’s job to prove a person’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and not the responsibility of the accused to prove his innocence. Once the government’s IRS witness stated under oath that they didn’t know whether Freeman owed any taxes at all, that should have been the end of the matter. The District Judge should have knocked out the income-tax charges, just as he knocked out the money-laundering charge.

In its appellate brief, the government made a big deal out of Freeman’s opposition to paying income taxes and his sharing that belief with others. Sure, to a modern-day statist, that’s a strange and dangerous position, especially since the income tax, along with the Federal Reserve’s paper-money printing racket, fund the statist hive that keeps federal prosecutors and other federal officials in high cotton.

But what the statists don’t realize is that for the first century of America’s existence, Freeman’s views were the norm. It was the statist views that were considered weird. Don’t forget, after all, that our American ancestors in, say, the late 1800s lived without income taxation, the IRS, the Federal Reserve, paper money, drug laws, bank-secrecy laws, money/funds transmission laws, asset-forfeiture laws, money-laundering laws, and, yes, without even business-registration laws. That’s because those Americans chose to live in a genuinely free society, not a statist one that statists have convinced themselves is freedom.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Statism Was Alive and Well in Ian Freeman’s Appellate Hearing appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Friday’s episode of the Peter Schiff Show, Peter picks up where he last left off– President Trump’s wild trade policy. He touches on everything from tariff threats and the Fed’s inability to combat stagflation, to the dubious nature of job data and the absurdity of a U.S. sovereign wealth fund—all while warning investors about the dangers of missing out on a gold rally.

Peter starts by summarizing recent trade negotiations and tariff reprieves, point out that all of this uncertainty was counterproductive and unnecessary from the start:

Trump could have made those phone calls in private. He could have basically said, ‘Hey, you need to bring more troops down to the border. And if you don’t do that, we’re gonna have these tariffs.’ And that all could have been negotiated quietly and nobody would have known. But I think Trump wanted to get that threat out there to be the tough guy and to show, hey, look, I threatened these tariffs and look what we got. We got these great concessions. Again, he could have threatened it privately and not publicly, but I also think more important, it was kind of like a trial balloon to see how the markets would react. 

He clarifies his position on tariffs. Peter’s not against tariffs per se, but he criticizes the rhetorical bait-and-switch that pro-tariff politicians use to garner support:

People say, ‘Hey, Peter, why are you criticizing these tariffs? Don’t you prefer tariffs to income taxes?’ And I do. I’m criticizing the way the tariffs are being portrayed and what their impact is gonna be because they’re being portrayed as a tax on Canada and Mexico. It’s not, it’s a tax on Americans who buy Mexican and Canadian goods. But actually, even if you don’t buy Mexican and Canadian goods, all the goods that you buy that compete with those goods are gonna be more expensive as a result of the tariffs. 

Turning to recent job figures, Peter questions the reliability of the government’s data, asserting that the numbers were skewed by dubious accounting and an influx of unauthorized labor:

That’s why I keep talking about the fact that the Fed says that it’s data dependent and it depends on this data, which is completely unreliable. None of it means anything when it comes to these jobs. The government doesn’t even know how many jobs were created. So many of these jobs are just made up based on the birth death model. … I wonder if that counts. If you kick out an illegal who’s employed, does that count as a job loss? I guess he’s not unemployed if he’s no longer in the country anymore.

On the topic of stagflation, Peter underscores the inherent dangers of an overly loose monetary policy—one that, in his view, is stoking inflation through an unsustainable expansion of credit:

So this is stagflation. But again, it shows you the Fed is much too loose. If the Fed were fighting inflation, credit wouldn’t be expanding. It would be contracting. Remember, inflation is not just an expansion of the money supply, it’s an expansion of credit because it’s money and credit that bids up prices. So consumers are buying with credit and that means they’re pushing up prices. What the Fed needs to do is contract credit, but it can’t do that because if it did that, we’d have the mother of all recessions. We’d have a financial crisis if the Fed reduced credit.

Peter comments on the recently proposed sovereign wealth fund, an idea he argues is reckless and absurd given America’s fiscal reality:

Are these guys serious? How can they even say this with a straight face? Now they say, well, Singapore has a sovereign wealth fund. Switzerland has a sovereign wealth fund. Norway has one. So why can’t America? Well, there’s a huge difference. These countries don’t have any debt. They have surpluses. Yes, they have government debt, but they’re sovereign wealth funds. Or in the case of Switzerland, Switzerland doesn’t have a sovereign wealth fund, but the Swiss National Bank has a balance sheet that’s almost a trillion dollars. Their total national debt of the Swiss government is about 20% of that. So Switzerland has a huge surplus. They don’t have a $36 trillion national debt. They have no national debt. They have national assets. They’re creditors. They’re not the world’s biggest debtor like America.

Peter closes with analysis of the gold market, which continues to reach new highs. He sees retail investors selling gold as a contrarian indicator. Big money is buying gold while individuals are foolishly selling:

Americans are selling their gold. I mean, what idiots, right? They should be buying, right? The central banks are buying. And I mentioned on that video that the delivery notices on the London Metal Exchange and the COMEX have shot up dramatically, meaning that people are taking delivery of these 100 ounce bars of gold. These are not mom and pop guys who are buying gold in 100 ounce bars. There’s some sophisticated money alongside central banks that are buying up all the gold they can get their hands on. …  So this is the best contrarian indicator I’ve ever seen that you’ve got all the smart money buying and all the dumb money selling. 

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post The Smart Money Wants Gold appeared first on LewRockwell.

From the Tom Woods Letter:

Tulsi Gabbard is on her way towards confirmation as Director of National Intelligence.

Democrats, and some Republicans, are concerned that Tulsi might not lie 24 hours a day, spreading CNN/CIA propaganda that would insult a third-grader, but the rest of us are intrigued by what it might be like to have someone in that position who isn’t a clone of Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton.

What’s been interesting to watch in all this has been the conduct of Bernie Sanders, who’s been his usual phony self.

That Bernie endorsed Hillary Clinton in the face of DNC shenanigans against him and, much more importantly, Hillary’s hawkish and morally repugnant foreign policy — which in the old days progressives would have considered non-negotiable and disqualifying — told us pretty much what we needed to know.

But his behavior regarding Tulsi takes the cake.

He knows full well that the dumb-guy criticisms are false, but because he goes along to get along, he jumped on the anti-Tulsi bandwagon anyway.

Tulsi actually stepped down as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee over its unfair treatment of Bernie, and then went to work for him.

And this is what she gets in return.

In the past, Bernie has described Tulsi as “one of the important voices of a new generation of leaders. As a veteran of the Iraq War she understands the cost of war and is fighting to create a foreign policy that not only protects America but keeps us out of perpetual wars that we should not be in.”

The only reason Bernie opposes Tulsi is his obeisance to the Democratic Party. He surely realizes that from his (alleged) point of view Tulsi is the best he is going to get in that position, and anyone else who might get nominated in her place would be much worse. He knows that. He opposes her anyway.

I used to hear Bernie described as the left’s answer to Ron Paul. You have to be kidding me.

Dr. Paul’s congressional career was entirely different. Ron believed in things — and had a spine.

The post Bernie the Sellout (Again) appeared first on LewRockwell.

In early February, barely two weeks after his inauguration, President Trump intimated that Gaza would become a US territory, with a view to developing a luxury real estate project with mansions, luxury apartments, hotels and casinos.

How many years would it take to remove the ruble and rebuild?

Under Trump’s advisory, Palestinians would be relocated and excluded from their homeland.

“I would like Egypt to take people,…You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘You know, it’s over.’” [Trump told the king of Jordan] ….

“I would love for you to take on more, ‘cause I am looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess. It’s a real mess.”

Video: President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu: Press Conference

Will this Multi-billion Dollar Real Estate Project be Carried Out?  

It’s doubtful. There is an unspoken objective, which is barely mentioned by the mainstream media.

As outlined by Felicity Arbuthnot with foresight 11 years ago in a December, 30 2013 article:

“Israel is set to become a major exporter of gas and some oil, “If All Goes to Plan”.  

Arbuthnot was referring to the ownership of Gaza’s maritime natural gas reserves, which belong to the State of Palestine.  

At the time of writing, the Netanyahu government is planning to appropriate these maritime gas reserves. What this signifies is that Israel is intent upon annexing Gaza as well as destroying an entire country. 

The maritime gas reserves belong to Palestine. Israel’s war against Gaza commenced prior to October 7, 2023 with the outright theft of Palestine’s maritime natural gas reserves. 

Already in July 2023, Israel’s Ministry of Energy (IEM) opened the bidding for the exploration of maritime natural gas in Gaza.

And then, three weeks after October 7,  the Ministry (IEM) announced the granting of licenses to both Israeli and international companies to explore for maritime natural gas.

On October 29, the Ministry on behalf of the Israeli government announced the winning bidders for two Zones within OBR4 (Gaza overlapping with Israeli territorial waters).

The companies include Eni S.p.A (Italy), Dana Petroleum (UK based subsidiary of the South Korean National Petroleum Company), and Ratio Petroleum (an Israeli company).

“Israel awarded gas exploration licenses for Zone G, a maritime area adjacent to the shores of Gaza as depicted in the green area of Map 2 above.

Notably, 62 percent of Zone G falls within  the maritime boundaries declared by the State of Palestine in 2019, in accordance with provisions of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), of which Palestine is a signatory.

In addition to the licenses already awarded in Zone G, Israel has also issued tenders for Zones H and E (as depicted in pink on Map 2); 73 percent of Zone H falls within Palestine’s declared maritime boundaries, along with five percent of Zone E.:” See Adalah

For additional information, please view the Ministry’s press release.

Gaza: “A U.S. Territory”? Is Trump “Attempting” to Bypass Netanyahu?  

Visibly, the illegal ownership of Gaza’s maritime gas reserves by the State of Israel (as mentioned above) is in blatant contradiction with Donald Trump’s recently announced plan to transform Gaza into a U.S territory.

If Trump’s project of a U.S Territory were to be carried out, Gaza’s maritime offshore gas reserves, worth billions of dollars WOULD NOT BE MANAGED BY ISRAEL. They would be brought under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Government with a status similar to America’s 14 territories including Guam, America’s Samoa, the US Virgin Islands. What is at stake is Colonial-style theft in derogation of International Law. Negotiations with oil and gas companies would be under the jurisdiction of the “US Territory”, in liaison with Washington. 

“Territories are areas that belong to and are governed by the “parent” country” [U.S.]

“Territories of the United States are sub-national administrative divisions and dependent territories overseen by the federal government of the United States.

Media reports have casually dismissed  Trump’s US. Territory” Option. No serious analysis or statements were put forth.

At a Press Conference in Washington: Trump suggested that:

“displaced Palestinians in Gaza be permanently resettled outside the war-torn territory and proposed the U.S. take “ownership” in redeveloping the area into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

 President Trump confirmed that the U.S annexation of Gaza would be in the form of a “long-term ownership position”. Meanwhile, Trump has been calling for the exodus of the entire population of the people of Palestine from Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Ironically,  the protest movement against Netanyahu has shifted. Both Netanyahu and Trump are accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

“The long-term ownership” position is tantamount to an act of colonization against the People of Palestine. It suggests the creation of a U.S Territory, which would enable the US government to acquire ownership of Gaza’s maritime natural gas reserves, as well as establish a military base in Gaza. (see below)

Trump Is Leading the Genocide 

Let us be under no illusions. It was carefully a planned “False Flag” Intelligence Op.  The evidence is overwhelming. Western governments as well as the ICJ and IDC have casually identified Israel as the victim of a Palestinian led War resulting in tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths of women and children and the destruction of an entire country.

The False Flag is casually omitted. The word “Genocide” is not mentioned by the International Criminal Court. The Law of Armed Conflict is not addressed. Killing civilians is a crime against humanity. 

The Genocide was carefully planned. The US is not only the driving force behind a military-intelligence operation (US-Israel-NATO), Washington has also provided sophisticated weaponry to kill and destroy, transforming Gaza into a pile of rubble.

Trump is leading  the genocide and the exodus of Palestinians from their homeland.

It’s categorized as a criminal undertaking under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. see below

The End Game is the Appropriation of Palestine’s Maritime Natural Gas and the transformation of Gaza into A U.S Territory.

In solidarity with the People of Palestine. For Truth in Media.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

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Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

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