Lew Rockwell Institute

 Writes Ginny Garner

Lew,

Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, was confirmed last week. See here.

Lutnick is a big supporter of Israel including its war on Gaza. More at this link including articles by the Jewish Forward, Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin. See here.

The post Trump’s Confirmed Commerce Secretary Supports War on Gaza appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Vasko Kohlmayer.

The post Cartoon: Two Great American Revolutions appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Wayne Goodfellow:

Trump and/or Musk have  talked about a new Golden Age, the prosperity in the U.S. before 1913 when the Federal Reserve was formed in violation of the Constitution, and recently hiring Ron Paul, author of End The Fed, to audit the Federal Reserve. 

See this.

The post Are we going back to a gold standard? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

AXIOS

The post FBI finds secret JFK assassination records after Trump order appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

CNBC

The post What end of the penny means for the economy, piggy banks, and prices appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

The post President Trump pardons former Governor Rod Blagojevich appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

Trump is breaking media brains / NIH cuts indirect payments and scientists freak out.

The post Trust the science: MY science, my pseudo-science, my junk science appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

https://off-guardian.org/2025/02/04/hegemony-and-propaganda-love-your-servitude/ 

https://archive.org/details/pdfy-U2KGKF1O-8lR-Saj/

https://svalispeaks.wordpress.com/

https://mises.org/mises-wire/needy-are-human-shields-american-regime

https://mises.org/mises-wire/forced-sterilizations-peru-paid-us-taxpayers

The post Hegemony and Propaganda: Love Your Servitude! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

Sputnik News

The post Bigger Than USAID Scandal? Clinton Probe to Expose Gates, Soros, and Epstein Links appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

Sputnik News

The post Insider Trading, Color Revolutions, USAID Money-Laundering: What Could Soros Be Jailed For? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

DW News

The post Gaza: The Trump family’s Middle East business interests appeared first on LewRockwell.

The tyranny of COVID-19 caused many doctors  to – quite reluctantly – wake up to the life damaging fraud they were party to and – for many – leaving the Pharma Based Sickness Treatment Model to recreate themselves in the now burgeoning Wellness-Promoting Health System.

One such is Dr. Leigh Willoughby from New Zealand who’s journey took her from, at first, promoting vaccines to later being prosecuted when she tried to stop the fraud after she herself became injured after taking a COVID-19 vaccine.

At first, she was duped by the fear campaigns and took the jab but after becoming vaccine injured (her fellow doctors told her her severe pain and damage was all in her head) – she then – after doing her own research and starting to speak out – was prosecuted!

This is a vitally important – and tragic – story of bravery about this courageous woman.

Her painful journey will inspire you – and likely outrage you – and hopefully will help you help others learn more before they take another poisonous jab themselves.

Please watch the entire interview, HERE – but if you’re time limited – please at least watch @1.5x Speed the 12.5 minute section from ~07:00 to 19:30.

Highly Recommended

The post Medical Gaslighting: How a Medical Doctor Was Vaccine Injured AND THEN Prosecuted For Speaking Out About It appeared first on LewRockwell.

This week, President Trump upended US Middle East policy by announcing that the United States would “take over” war-ravaged Gaza and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” President Trump also said the Palestinians living in Gaza would be (temporarily?) relocated to Jordan or Egypt.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul came out strongly against the proposal. Senator Paul pointed out that the plan contradicted the American people’s vote for “America First.” What was more surprising was that South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham expressed skepticism about sending Americans to take over Gaza. This may be the first time in Senator Graham’s political career that he has opposed sending US troops abroad.

Senator Graham is correct that most South Carolinians are not excited about sending Americans or US tax dollars to take over Gaza. Neither are most other Americans. In fact, polls show that the majority of Americans oppose providing military aid to Israel or other countries.

One of the best comments was made by libertarian scholar and podcaster Tom Woods. He suggested that Trump’s Gaza proposal is the type of wasteful overseas spending that DOGE should be working to eliminate.

Trump’s plan has also been criticized by the government of Saudi Arabia. This could mean that if President Trump follows through with this proposal it will further push Saudi Arabia away from the United States and toward the BRICS alliance.

Some of the BRICS nations want to challenge the dollar’s world reserve currency status. One of the foundations of the dollar’s world reserve currency status is the “petrodollar.” This arose from the deal Henry Kissinger negotiated with Saudi Arabia where the Saudis agreed to use dollars for oil trade in exchange for US support for the Saudi regime. Recently, Saudi Arabia has given signs that it will be willing to use other currencies, such as the Chinese renminbi, for its oil trade.

The loss of the dollar’s world reserve currency status would cause a major US economic crisis. It would force the government to make massive cuts in warfare and welfare spending and could lead to violence and a government crackdown on our liberty.

US “ownership” of Gaza, accompanied by forcible relocation of Palestinians, would cause increased resentment of the US. This could result in increased terror attacks against the US.

Even if a long-term US occupation of Gaza went 100 percent according to plan, the US government, which has an over 36 trillion dollars and growing debt, cannot afford another open-ended overseas military commitment. Instead, President Trump should follow though on his campaign rhetoric about withdrawing from unnecessary military commitments. This, not tariffs, will help make America more competitive on the international economy.

The best thing the United States can do to rebuild Gaza and promote peace in the Middle East is to stop funding Israel’s occupation and blockade of Gaza. Instead, the US should work toward peaceful relations backed by free trade with Israel and its neighbors.

The post The US Should Not Take Over Gaza appeared first on LewRockwell.

In his article “Why They Raped, Pillaged, and Plundered,” Tom DiLorenzo reviews the evidence of war crimes in “General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous ‘march to the sea’ at the end of the War to Prevent Southern Independence,” observing that: “The Lincoln cult – especially its hyper-warmongering neocon branch – has been holding conferences, celebrations, and commemorations [of the march to the sea] while continuing to rewrite history to suit its statist biases.” The dominant historical narratives admire Sherman’s “total war” policies as a corollary of their admiration for Lincoln’s war. Sherman’s war crimes are well-documented, and the aim of this article is not to revisit the evidence of his war crimes but to examine some of the justifications that are often advanced to exonerate Sherman.

The fact that burning civilian towns and homes is a war crime is well understood, and should be obvious to anyone familiar with what Walter Brian Cisco calls the “code of civilized warfare.” In his book, War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, Cisco explains:

Through the centuries, by common consent within what used to be called Christendom, there arose a code of civilized warfare. Though other issues are covered by that term, and despite lapses, it came to be understood that war would be confined to combatants… breaking the code on one side encourages violations by the other, multiplying hatred and bitterness that can only increase the likelihood and intensity of future wars.

Cisco reports that despite this “code of civilized warfare,” some principles of which had been enshrined in the Lieber Code, Sherman insisted that it was necessary to treat civilians in the South as combatants. Cisco explains:

Yet warring against noncombatants came to be the stated policy and deliberate practice of the United States in its subjugation of the Confederacy. Shelling and burning of cities, systematic destruction of entire districts, mass arrests, forced expulsions, wholesale plundering of personal property, even murder all became routine… Abraham Lincoln, the commander in chief with a reputation as micromanager, well knew what was going on and approved.

The Lincoln cult, far from regretting the horrors of that war, continues to view the burning of the South as worthy of celebration. The triumphalist view of Lincoln’s war is reflected in an opinion piece published in the New York Times in 2015, which argued that Sherman’s war crimes were intended “to widen the burden and pain of the war beyond just rebel soldiers to include the civilian supporters of the Confederacy, especially the common folk who filled the ranks of the rebel armies.”

That is depicted as a necessary price to pay to meet Lincoln’s goal of saving the Union: “the March to the Sea reveals the moral ambiguity of war and the extent to which Americans are willing to go when our national existence is at stake.” Sherman himself is exonerated: “the burning of the South Carolina capital was in reality a result of confusion, misjudgment and simple bad luck. It was, in sum, an accident of war.” This moral ambiguity presumes that the morality of war varies according to which side one supports—a blatantly vacuous morality.

Some triumphalists rationalize their celebration of Sherman’s crimes by arguing that war crimes are in some sense “worth it” to bring war to a swift conclusion. David Gordon traces the roots of the view that brutality helps to end war, a view held by people who believe a “humane” war would only drag on needlessly:

As I have already mentioned, the antiwar movement of that time wanted to end war, not make it more humane, and indeed Tolstoy was sometimes tempted to go further. In War and Peace, Prince Andrei suggests that soldiers in battle should act as ruthlessly as possible, for example killing enemy prisoners out of hand. Increasing the horror of war might make it more likely that people would end it. By no means was this view confined to fictional characters; Tolstoy himself was of this opinion, though he later withdrew it, and the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz spoke in similar terms. Moyn lists a number of examples, but one should be added as well: General William Sherman, who justified his tactics of wanton destruction with this same argument.

The argument that Sherman’s atrocities were necessary to end the war is also associated with the perception that if a war is just, and is fought for a “righteous cause,” or what is sometimes described as “the right side of history,” it follows that any atrocities committed to advance that cause are also just. Such theories appeal to those who believe the end always justifies the means. That is a convenient ruse deployed in the service of brutal regimes, but in any case, it must also be asked: what “righteous cause” was Sherman engaged in? As DiLorenzo observes, “The reason Lincoln gave for launching a military invasion of the South was to save the Union.” Saving the Union cannot be a righteous cause for wars of aggression. Wars of aggression are always wrong, as a just war is one fought in defense. As for apologists who argue that Sherman should not be blamed for the devastation caused to civilians by his own troops, because he did not specifically order them to pillage, rape, and murder, that too must be rejected. If this argument were accepted, there would be little way of ever holding army officers morally responsible for the outrages committed by their men.

Another version of the “end justifies the means” argument focuses on the abolition of slavery, arguing that the end of slavery is sufficient justification for not being too concerned about the war. This argument ignores the repeated insistence of both Lincoln and Sherman that they were not fighting for abolition of slavery. Both men were perfectly happy for slavery to continue, and only wanted to prevent secession of the Confederate States. Sherman’s views on the inferiority of black people were so well-known that no one could be under the illusion that he was fighting to promote black welfare. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia:

During the Atlanta campaign of May-September 1864, General Sherman opposed Black enlistment with word and deed. An avowed white supremacist and a reluctant liberator at best, Sherman made no effort to conceal his contempt for African Americans or to disguise the racist dogma behind his opposition to Black soldiers. Such phrases as “niggers and vagabonds,” “niggers and bought recruits,” and “niggers and the refuse of the South” filled his personal letters. Anxious to employ Black workers as laborers, Sherman was determined that the forces under his command would remain exclusively white. On June 3, 1864, he issued Special Field Order No. 16 forbidding recruiting officers to enlist Black soldiers who were employed by the army in any capacity.

Some people argue that even though Sherman repeatedly defended slavery, we should treat that as irrelevant because all that matters is that slavery was, in fact, abolished. So what if Sherman was a “reluctant liberator at best”? Suffice it that liberation followed. They would argue that abolition by itself constitutes an ex post “righteous cause” for the war that can also be attributed to Lincoln and Sherman even though they did not endorse it—they see this as a welcome, albeit unintended, consequence of the war. This argument assumes that slavery would never have ended had the war not happened—an argument that is purely speculative, and makes no attempt to link the war causally to the ending of slavery. For example, it does not explain why other countries in the West were able to end slavery without waging deadly wars.

A final illustration of the abject moral failure of Sherman’s defenders comes from those who now simply ignore the entire war, treating Sherman’s crimes as inconsequential. The New York Times 1619 project, which aims to “reframe American history” as one shaped by slavery, pays scant attention to the reasons for the war or its conduct. Lincoln and Sherman play only a minor role as “white allies” in this version of revisionist history, which asserts that slaves emancipated themselves. Union soldiers are seen as allies of slaves, while Confederate soldiers are cast as enemies of slaves. In this cartoonish view of history, the process of reframing history “requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story.”

Accordingly, it is the activities of black Americans—rather than the Radical Republicans, Lincoln, or Sherman—that are presented as central to the emancipation story. The war is reframed as having been fought by hundreds of thousands of slaves freed from the rebel states by Lincoln’s Emancipation Declaration, who joined the Union army and fought to liberate their brethren still held captive. The justification given for this fictitious framing is that “by acknowledging this shameful history [of slavery], by trying hard to understand its powerful influence on the present, perhaps we can prepare ourselves for a more just future.” But no “just future” can be founded on fairy tales. A just future can only be built on the truth. As David Gordon puts it, “The 1619 Project wants to replace what actually happened with an ideological myth.”

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

The post Revisionist History and Sherman’s War Crimes appeared first on LewRockwell.

“It is axiomatic that those who are beneficiaries of waste, fraud and unnecessary government spending will be the most threatened by the cuts that DOGE is making in these programs. These beneficiaries of waste and fraud are also extremely worried about the reputational, legal and potential criminal risk they will suffer by being exposed by DOGE” — Bill Ackman

I’m so glad that The New York Times explained what Kendrick Lamar was up to in his Superbowl half-time act because all I could make out was a grown man dressed-up like an eight-year-old hollering nursery rhymes in front of a flash-mob. Apparently, KL is engaged in a feud with another rapper named Drake, whom KL styles as a child molester. So, you see, the whole thing was just a bit of wholesome family entertainment. Thank The NY Times, for putting a grad-school spin on it:

Speaking of metanarratives — and apart from the private vendettas on Planet Rap — a nice one is developing at center-stage of US political life: the Party of Chaos using federal judges to oppose the dismantling of their gigantic grift scaffold. In other words, more lawfare to obstruct any earnest effort to effectively reform the management of our country. So, last week, you get Judge Carl J. Nichols in the DC District arguing that the DOGE shutdown of USAID was unauthorized and potentially illegal, lacking congressional approval.

Then, late Friday (when most citizens are checking out of the week’s struggles) Judge Paul Engelmayer out of the Southern District of New York blocked DOGE and other executive branch officials from accessing US Treasury record of expenditures. The injunction, comically, prevents Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant from seeing what his agency doles out money for — that is, from managing anything his department does. The suit that prompted the ruling was brought by nineteen states’ Attorneys General led by NY AG Letitia James. So, you see how this works.

You must also imagine that the White House was prepared for these lawfare shenanigans, though they haven’t shown their hand in response so far. This is a constitutional quarrel, of course, since it concerns who has authority between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary over agency spending and, in particular, who gets to audit it. The actual objective by the plaintiff in these cases (the Party of Chaos) is simply to delay any corrective action.

The DOJ under Pam Bondi can designate the US Solicitor General to petition the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) for certiorari — to expedite the resolution of this constitutional issue as to whether Mr. Trump, as chief executive, and his bona fide appointees, can carry out executive functions. The arguments against that appear to be weak.

It is the President’s duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed, meaning that the departments under him do their jobs correctly, which would give him inherent authority to audit and restructure agencies like USAID. Both judges Nichols and Engelmayer are arrogating executive and legislative functions on policy-making for themselves, triggering a separation-of-powers dispute that the SCOTUS must adjudicate promptly.

What matters most in these cases is that SCOTUS has an opportunity to put up new guardrails against the hijacking of the federal courts for the purpose of lawfare — that is, for political dirty-fighting under color-of-law. The law is slow-moving, arcane, and incomprehensible to most non-lawyer citizens and that is why the Party of Chaos has misused it so liberally.

In any event, DOGE is moving ahead on many other fronts and the next battleground looks like the US Department of Education, an agency which, since its creation in 1979, has only presided over an epic degeneration in the academic performance of young people. The agency has grown since 1979 to 4,400 employees overseeing a $238-billion budget. Otherwise, what it’s mainly accomplished is to enrich the various teachers’ unions and to raise the cost of college tuitions astronomically while degenerating the purpose and value of higher ed. The fifty states were arguably doing a better job on their own without any DOE on the scene.

Meanwhile, it’s satisfying to see the security clearances revoked from Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Andrew Weissmann, Mark Zaid, and Norm Eisen. The reason: among other crimes, they all dabbled in election interference. And “Joe Biden” lost his, too, on account of being too feeble-minded to be trusted with classified information. Who knows what other legal complications lie in waiting up ahead for that whole gang? Lawfare giveth and lawfare taketh away. Or FAFO.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Warfare on Lawfare appeared first on LewRockwell.

With revelations emerging about USAID’s spending spree on friends and pet projects, I was reminded of the following April 2023 exchange between Senator Rand Paul and Samantha Power, Administrator of USAID from 2021 to 2025. I vividly remember the vexation I felt as I listened to the recording on my evening jog the next day. Note how she repeatedly looks Senator Paul directly in the eye and insists that USAID has disclosed the grant documents he has repeatedly requested, even though he repeatedly admonishes her that he KNOWS she isn’t telling him the truth because he has never seen them.

Note as well that in October 2019, when USAID officially ceased funding PREDICT, papers like the New York Times lamented that, bereft of such funds, the program would not be able to predict emerging infectious diseases.

A great deal of evidence indicates that this was precisely the time it became apparent that a novel SARS coronavirus was circulating in Wuhan, almost certainly the result of GoF research conducted as part of the PREDICT program.

In other words, PREDICT predicted nothing—it actually created the monster.

Yet another irony was a letter that Elizabeth Warren—the Supreme Self-Righteous Bloviator of the Senate (SSBS)—wrote on January 20, 2020 to the then Administrator Mark Green, demanding to know why PREDICT funding had been cut off.

I would bet a considerable sum that at least someone in USAID knew in October 2019 about the circulating monster that PREDICT had created with the assistance of the $207 million the agency had given the program over a ten year period.

The evidence is clear: USAID has long been a rogue agency that should indeed be brought under direct State Department Control with new, stringent transparency requirements about its activities and long prison times for people like Samantha Power who conceal the agency’s activities and then lie to Senators about them.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Rand Paul’s Questioning of Samantha Power About USAID to China for SARS-CoV Research appeared first on LewRockwell.

Whenever I ask a holistic physician which commonly used medication classes they believe cause the most harm to society, SSRIs always are one of the top five.

Note: statins (discussed here), NSAIDS like ibuprofen (discussed here), and PPI acid reflux medications (discussed here) frequently make the top five as well.

This is because SSRIs rarely benefit patients (only a minority of depressed patients have a metabolic type that responds to SSRIs) and the drugs have a large number of severe and often life-changing side effects. For example, in a survey of 1,829 patients on antidepressants in New Zealand:

• 62% reported sexual difficulties
• 60% felt emotionally numb
• 52% felt not like themselves
• 39% cared less about others
• 47% had experienced agitation
• 39% had experienced suicidal ideation.

Many of these can be immensely impactful for individuals (e.g., SSRI sexual dysfunction is often permanent and frequently causes severe depression, while emotional anesthesia takes away the joy of life and can cause people to spend years, if not decades, in emotionally toxic situations).

Worse still, the SSRIs are somewhat unique in that they can also harm those not taking the drugs as they can trigger psychotic violence, which results in either suicide, homicide, and tragically, in numerous cases, mass shootings (discussed further here). Furthermore, the pharmaceutical industry was aware of this from the start, but chose to conceal all that evidence to sell the drugs (and only revealed it after lawsuits forced them to).

Note: another example of a pharmaceutical that harms others is the COVID vaccine as it causes certain recipients to shed the vaccine and then significantly harm those around them who are sensitive to shedding—to the point numerous sensitive readers have shared COVID vaccine shedding has greatly impacted their lives (discussed further here).

Maximizing Sales

Much of the medical industry’s appalling conduct makes sense once its actions are viewed through a business lens that seeks to maximize sales. This for instance, is why the SSRIs, rather than being outlawed, were able to become some of the most successful drugs in history (e.g., in 2027, they are projected to be an 18.27 billion dollar global market) and why almost all of their appalling side effects have been hidden from the public. Let’s review some of those unconscionable tactics.

Sales Funnels

A classic principle in marketing is to cast as wide a net as possible for your customers and then gradually pull some of those customers into costlier and costlier products. Since funnels gradually shrink as you go further down them, similar to how fewer customers will buy a product as it becomes more expensive, this method is often referred to as a “sales funnel.”

With the SSRIs, a robust sales funnel exists as:

• Through years of almost unbelievable marketing (discussed further here), depression was redefined to include the normal negative emotions of life. As such, depression became so subjective it became possible to market it to most of the population and patients frequently will ask their doctors to prescribe SSRIs after they encounter an emotional obstacle.

• Numerous mass screening programs exist for doctors to diagnose if someone is depressed (e.g., this is routinely done for pregnant women and the elderly).

• Once a patient is “depressed,” rather than using natural approaches that effectively treat depression, the medical system will aggressively push them to start SSRIs.

• The SSRIs frequently cause a variety of psychiatric issues which require taking even stronger psychiatric medications.

Bipolar Disorder: An Unintended Outcome

Since the SSRIs antidepressants are stimulants, they often trigger mania. In turn, one of the most common problems associated with their use is bipolar disorder (a disease where you alternate from a depressed to a manic state). To put this into context, in 1955, 1 in 13,000 people were disabled for bipolar, and the majority of patients who presented to the hospital for a manic episode permanently recovered. Now, bipolar affects 1 in every 20-50 people, and 83% of them are severely impaired in some facet of their lives.

A significant amount of data has linked bipolar disorder to SSRIs. For example:

• Yale researchers reviewed the records of 87,290 patients diagnosed with depression or anxiety between 1997 and 2001 and determined those treated with antidepressants converted to bipolar at the rate of 7.7 percent per year (three times greater than the rate for those not exposed to the drugs), ultimately resulting in between 20-40% of depressed patients becoming bipolar.

• A survey found 60% of bipolar patients only developed their illness after receiving SSRIs for depression.

• Peter Breggin reported that of 184 patients in the hospital starting Prozac, Zoloft, or Paxil, 11 developed mania and 8 became psychotic, and in Yale, 8% of 533 consecutive admissions were for mania or psychosis caused by antidepressants, and two patients heard voices commanding them to kill themselves.

Note: the psychiatric field gets around this issue by claiming SSRIs “unmask” latent bipolar a patient always had—even though it likely would have never been “unmasked” had they never taken the SSRI in the first place.

Likewise, since the advent of mass psychiatric medicating, the character of bipolar has changed, becoming much more complicated to treat, characterized by much more rapid cycling between the depressed and manic states, and much more likely to produce severe complications like dementia later on. Unfortunately, when the foremost experts in bipolar disorder presented these findings at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference and urged caution in the over administration of SSRIs, they were met with boos from their increasingly upset audience.

As such, the link between SSRIs and bipolar disorder is rarely focused on, and instead the dangers of bipolar disorder (e.g., being 4-6 times as likely to die prematurely) are continually emphasized to justify treating it. This is remarkable given that a strong case can be made that many of the disastrous complications of bipolar disorder result from the highly toxic antipsychotics the disorder is “treated” with, especially since those same drugs are often given to schizophrenic patients, a disorder characterized by similar long term complications (that are rarely seen in countries which do not use the drugs).

In short, a robust sales funnel exists to create lifelong psychiatric medication users, best demonstrated by the fact spending an ever increasing amount of money to “treat” mental illness has only resulted more of it:

Worse still, this sales funnel is particularly effective in capturing young adults who were raised in it (e.g., a recent post-COVID survey of those aged 18-24 found 42% had a mental health condition, including 37.8% with anxiety and 32.8% depression)—and is particularly predatory towards young women:

Note: birth control pills have been strongly linked to causing a variety of mood disorders and personality changes, including roughly doubling the likelihood of depression, with the greatest increase being seen in adolescent girls (a 130% increase). Given that 19.5% of adolescent American girls are put on the pill, those sales quickly add up.

Customer Retention

Since SSRIs “treat” rather than “cure” depression, they typically are a lifelong prescription (which is great for sales). However, since SSRIs have so many intolerable side effects and rarely help those who use them, tactics need to be used to retain those customers and safeguard their recurring revenue.

For instance, patients will often be told (sometimes not only by a doctor but also by a judge) that they lack the judgment to understand their mental illness, and they must hence take the prescribed medication. Likewise, physicians rarely recognize the adverse effects of SSRIs. Instead, they are often trained to attribute them to the patient’s pre-existing mental illness (which frequently leads to horrendous gaslighting and patients sometimes being forced to take the medications against their consent).

SSRI Withdrawals

Like many other stimulants, SSRIs can be extremely addictive. In fact, SSRIs have such a high risk for withdrawals that merely changing an existing dosage or accidentally missing a pill can be sufficient to trigger severe withdrawals (e.g., this has caused many SSRI suicides).

Unfortunately, when this happens, rather than recognize that withdrawals are occurring, physicians typically interpret them to mean the SSRI was effectively treating a severe (pre-existing) mental illness—and thus must urgently be resumed, even though the “mental illness” the patient exhibits was not present prior to them initiating the SSRI.

Likewise, since so few physicians know how to recognize the signs of SSRI withdrawals, almost none know how to treat it. As a result, individuals experiencing SSRI withdrawals frequently make the horrifying discovery that the safety net they thought existed simply isn’t there (an experience which likewise has been shared by many of those who developed significant complications from the COVID-19 vaccines).

As such, many who experience these withdrawals are forced to resume the drugs (as this is often all doctors can offer those patients), thereby ensuring customer retention.

Effects of SSRI Withdrawals

When withdrawing from an SSRI, severe withdrawals (e.g., becoming suicidal or violently psychotic) can happen. As such, I always urge readers to be extremely cautious in how they stop the medications.

However, far more frequently, less severe (and often fluctuating) withdrawal symptoms also occur such as:

• The feeling of an electric shock in your arms, legs, or head (these horrible things are commonly referred to as “brain zaps.”
• Dizziness (mild to severe)
• Visual problems
• Many sensitivities (e.g., to light, heat, a supplement or food).
• Anxiety, which comes and goes, sometimes in intense ‘surges’
• Difficulty in getting to sleep and vivid or frightening dreams
• Low mood, feeling unable to be interested in or enjoy things
• A sense of being physically unwell
• Rapidly changing moods (e.g., spontaneous weeping spells, attacks of sheer terror, or sudden plunges into unprecedented contentless black holes of pure dread).
• Anger, sleeplessness, tiredness, loss of coordination and headache
• A feeling that things are not real (‘derealisation’), or a feeling that you have ‘cotton wool in your head’
• Difficulty in concentrating
• Suicidal thoughts
• Queasiness or indigestion
• A feeling of inner restlessness and inability to stay still (this is known as akathisia and often precedes psychotic SSRI violence).
• Crippling muscle pain or spasms.

Worse still, these reactions are very common (e.g., I know more people than I can count who’ve experienced brain zaps).

In fact, a recent meta-analysis found that 56% of patients who stop using SSRIs experience withdrawals, that 46% who stop an SSRI experience severe withdrawals, and that these withdrawals last for weeks to months. Additionally, it is well known in the SSRI recovery community that the risk of a withdrawal varies greatly depending on the drug (e.g., Paxil is notorious for causing withdrawals, Cymbalta is also a common offender).
Note: a 1996 door-to-door survey of 2003 randomly selected people in England found that 78% of them considered SSRIs to be addictive.

The pharmaceutical industry is well aware of this, to the point they will often deliberately put “placebo” subjects in SSRI trials into withdrawals (by terminating their existing prescription) so they can make the drug group look “better” than the “placebo” patients or provide benzodiazepines to mitigate the negative side effects of the SSRIs (and hence remove them from the trial data).

Note: this is similar to how Merck hid Gardasil’s high rates of severe adverse reactions by using its toxic adjuvant (rather than saline) for the placebo group, resulting in similar injury rates in both groups, which, despite being extraordinarily high, went unquestioned by regulators.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Hidden Dangers of Antidepressants and Why They’re So Hard To Stop Taking appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s no secret that the Catholic Church is bleeding members. According to Pew Research, those who have left Catholicism outnumber those who have joined the Catholic Church by nearly a four-to-one margin. As such statistics continue to worsen, the emphasis on evangelization grows. Yet, few can state what that ought to look like. So much of the focus has been upon reaching “across the aisle” and attempting to assimilate with Protestants.

A recent case of a Catholic young adult group chat that was admonished by clergy for sharing memes with a jocular approach to Protestant themes serves as an example. Catholics, especially younger Catholics, are urged under the name of charity to be more open to Protestants, which is difficult if not impossible to delineate from simply being less Catholic, even though those who promote this behavior would never admit their stance with such candor.

One of the principal arguments posed against enthusiastic Catholics is that they will be offensive to Protestants and thereby drive them away. Thus, be careful about those memes, kids, lest someone might be repelled by jocularity. But this is a rather new mindset, out of lockstep with human behavior and a long chain of saints who said the truth because it was the truth and because people had a right to hear it. In Decem Rationes, Edmund Campion talked of Protestants in a way that might not be considered ecumenical today:

Throughout the whole course of fifteen centuries these men find neither town, village nor household professing their doctrine, until an unhappy monk by an incestuous marriage had deflowered a virgin vowed to God, or a Swiss gladiator had conspired against his country, or a branded runaway had occupied Geneva.

While sharp-tongued, his points were true, and Decem Rationes was massively influential in both aiding conversions and inspiring demoralized Catholics. (Campion was eventually killed for his faith.) If the modern mindset of conversion-by-tepidity were true, Campion would have merely alienated his readers, but that is not what happened.

Sometimes the truth bites, and humor can relieve its sting. Chesterton was well loved for his wit, with which he contended that “Protestantism was born of men who were sure they were infallible, and it has lived on in men who are not sure that anything is infallible.” It’s impossible to say how many people he converted to Catholicism after his own conversion, but we do know that it was considerable and that he was never shy about speaking the truth.

Masses with tambourines, World Youth Days with Tuppernacles, and attempts to mimic the megachurch all ignore that there was anything to draw people throughout the ages. All of these attempts to convert via dilution might lead us to ask: Why become Catholic at all? If Catholicism is merely one denomination among many acceptable options, then why would one assent to the higher mandate that comes with conversion? Catholicism asks us to change ourselves. If it is not possible to delineate Catholicism as being in some sense better than other denominations, then surely those of other Christian faiths would feel no reason for conversion, let alone the sacrifice that so often comes with it.

For many converts, crossing the Tiber means losing contact with family members and being rejected by old friends. People do not endure these things because Catholics are nice people (even though that’s often the case). They do it when they become convinced that what the Church claims of herself is true and that it is, therefore, the best way to serve Christ. They endure the sacrifices as acts of love. The idea that people will be attracted if we speak less about our differences and only about our similarities is simply false. There is no reason to convert to what you already have.

Then there is the topic of what is owed to the faithful Catholics, lest they be surrendered on the altar of conversion. Must we implicitly assert that they would be better off, or at least on equal footing, if they were elsewhere—deprived of sacraments and the deposit of faith? That is what we do when we cower away from speaking about the Faith boldly. It is offensive to assert that the distinctions of our Faith are so trivial as we revere the saints who died for what we now reduce to nuance.

St. Athanasius, when he was battling the Arian heresy, did not back away from speaking of the differences between Trinitarians and Arians, even though it was true that they shared a great deal in common. Yet it matters that some people are in error about that which is most important. So instead of conversion-by-dilution, he asserted that “Even if Catholics faithful to tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the true Church.”

To be clear, nobody is calling for aggression toward potential converts or even anti-Catholic Protestants. But neither is there room for complicit silence, and the latter is far more common today than the former. For decades, attempts to fill struggling churches have been embarrassing capitulations to either other faiths or to the broken world around us.

Read the Whole Article

The post Sacrificing Catholics for Ecumenism appeared first on LewRockwell.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acted shocked and appalled by questions from reporters about Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza on Wednesday, saying it was “evil” to suggest that these poor victims of Israel’s destruction should be allowed to stay somewhere that’s been completely demolished.

“Again, it’s a demolition site right now,” Leavitt said. “It’s not a livable place for any human being. And I think it’s actually quite evil to suggest that people should live in such dire conditions.”

Of course the question of whether or not it was evil for the US and Israel to deliberately create those conditions in the first place is never raised by the obedient press gaggle.

It’s been truly remarkable watching the official imperial narrative pivot from (A) claiming it’s outrageous to suggest Israel was waging a genocidal campaign of annihilation on Gaza, to (B) saying obviously everyone in Gaza needs to leave because the entire place has been annihilated and how dare you suggest otherwise.

White House was asked to clarify if plan is to permanently or temporarily resettle Palestinians.

Leavitt: They need to be temporarily relocated for rebuilding…I think it’s quite evil to suggest people should live in such dire conditions

Is it evil to create those conditions? pic.twitter.com/GyoThqhc40

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) February 5, 2025

This comes as Donald Trump himself proclaims on Truth Social that under his plan the Gaza Strip “would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting.” Such a land transfer would require Israel to forcibly seize all of Gaza in order to cede the territory to the US. If Gaza becomes as a US territory it would of course no longer exist as a Palestinian territory, and would have already been purged of all Palestinians.

And it’s just so surreal how the narrative is changing now that the agenda has moved from destroying Gaza to ethnically cleansing it. It’s requiring some real Orwellian doublethink revisionism.

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: The IDF is the world’s most moral army! It’s a war of defense! They’re taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian lives!

Israel apologists in 2025: Well obviously Gaza’s an uninhabitable wasteland that’s been carpet bombed to oblivion, duh.

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel would never deliberately target civilian infrastructure!

Israel apologists in 2025: We need to move the entire population of Gaza to Egypt and Jordan because all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has been completely destroyed.

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: How dare you suggest that Israel is deliberately destroying healthcare facilities, you blood libeling antisemite!

Israel apologists in 2025: You can’t expect people to keep living in Gaza! Don’t you know there’s no healthcare there?

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel is only targeting Hamas! The only locations with civilians in them that have been bombed are the ones where they’re being used as human shields!

Israel apologists in 2025: These poor Gazans need to be evacuated immediately! The entire strip is a demolition site with hardly any buildings left standing!

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Israel is taking the utmost care with its airstrikes to only target terrorists with the most pinpoint precision.

Israel apologists in 2025: Gaza’s not safe for civilians, the whole place is covered with thousands upon thousands of undetonated ordinances!

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: This will all be over as soon as Hamas releases the hostages.

Israel apologists in 2025: Now that we’ve got our hostages back it’s time to end the existence of Gaza as a Palestinian territory and fill it with Jewish settlements.

Israel apologists in 2023–2024: Blame Hamas! Hamas caused this with their unprovoked attack on October 7!

Israel apologists in 2025: The only possible solution to all the death and devastation that’s been inflicted on Gaza is to advance an ethnic cleansing agenda that we’ve been chasing for generations.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. When the needs of the empire change, so do the narratives.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post As the Gaza Agenda Moves Forward, the Imperial Narrative Shifts With It appeared first on LewRockwell.

What is the meaning of ‘independent’ in English language?

Cambridge Dictionary:

independent adjective (NOT INFLUENCED)

• • not influenced or controlled in any way by other people, events, or things

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th Ed.) and others:

independent /ĭn″dĭ-pĕn′dənt/ adjective

1. 1. Not governed by a foreign power; self-governing.
   2. Free from the influence, guidance, or control of another or others; self-reliant.”an independent mind.”
   3. Not determined or influenced by someone or something else; not contingent.”a decision independent of the outcome of the study.”
   4. Affiliated with or loyal to no one political party or organization.
   5. Not dependent on or affiliated with a larger or controlling entity.”an independent food store; an independent film.”
   6. Not relying on others for support, care, or funds; self-supporting.
   7. Providing or being sufficient income to enable one to live without working.”a person of independent means.”

Following the recent revelations that many outlets and journalist are financed directly or indirectly by U.S. government organization like USAID or NED the mainstream media have set out to redefine the meaning of ‘independent’.

‘Independent’ now seem to be anyone how gets his paycheck from the U.S. while producing reports or rumors designed to fit U.S. policy narratives.

Consider these recent reports:

• USAID and the Media in a ‘Time of Monsters’ – Columbia Journalism Review, Feb 4 2025
  What the aid funding freeze means for independent journalism around the world.
• Foreign Strongmen Cheer as Musk Dismantles U.S. Aid Agency (archived) – New York Times, Feb 5 2025
• Strongmen celebrate as Trump aid freeze hits media – Financial Times, Feb 6 2025
• Independent media in Russia, Ukraine lose their funding with USAID freeze (archived) – Washington Post, Feb 7 2025

From the first one:

[A]ccording to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the aid freeze appears to have put a hold on $268 million that was earmarked to fund “independent media and the free flow of information” this year. In the recent past, USAID had boasted of supporting more than six thousand journalists, around seven hundred independent newsrooms, and nearly three hundred media-focused civil society groups in thirty or so countries—and yet, RSF notes, the full impact of the freeze is hard to measure, since many recipients are “hesitant to draw attention for fear of risking long-term funding or coming under political attacks.”

From the NYT report:

Agency grants to promote democracy, human rights and good governance have gone to support election monitoring groups, anti-corruption watchdogs, independent media outlets and human rights organizations — exactly the kind of oversight that leaders like Mr. Putin detest.

From the Post:

The suspension of USAID has had a dramatic effect on both Ukrainian and Russian independent news outlets that relied on the grants to operate and produced work often critical of their governments.
…
Ukraine’s independent media, a collection of small regional outlets, muckraking investigative websites and internet news platforms, have been reeling since the announcement, with some organizations saying that they are just weeks away from slashing staff or closing down entirely.

“We risk losing the achievements of three decades of work and increasing threats to Ukraine’s statehood, democratic values, and pro-Western orientation,” Detector Media, a journalism watchdog, said in a statement on its website last week.

The last paragraph seems to be an admission that ‘Ukraine’s statehood, democratic values, and pro-Western orientation’, which – when you scratch their surfaces are all quite dubious – are the result of U.S. paid propaganda.

One also wonders how the WaPo writers can write of independent media when even a few paragraphs in the  Ukrainian Detector Media (also U.S. financed) admits that these are depending on foreign payments:

Detector Media’s head Nataliia Lygachova told The Post that she thought “more than 50 percent” of the media organizations that receive foreign grants were dependent on American assistance.

A more correct headline for the WaPo piece is thus:

“U.S. state-funded media in Russia, Ukraine lose their funding with USAID freeze”

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCPR) has been behind several large stories like the Panama Papers which revealed the dirty offshore businesses of a large number of people the U.S. dislikes. In a (highly recommendable) video reportage about the project its founder and publisher, Drew Sullivan, admits on camera that the ‘independent’ organization was launched and is financed by U.S. government entities.

The money, more than 50% of OCCPR’s budget, comes with strings attached. All major management positions within OCCPR have to be confirmed by the U.S. financing agency. OCCRP reporting about crimes the U.S. is involved in is discouraged if not prohibited. You might want to guess where the selected hacked and leaked material OCCPR reports of is coming from …

Over the last week we have learned that many ‘independent’ international outlets are primarily funded by U.S. government entities – directly or through U.S. funded Non-Governmental Organization. Some estimate that 90% of the media in Ukraine is depending on U.S. taxpayer money.

All this came out due to the Trump’s administration’s freeze of USAID money. But there are many more U.S. government entities, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, who each have likewise funds to spend on ‘independent’ foreign media and influence organizations.

It is high time to dismantle networks like these:

WikiLeaks @wikileaks – 3:47 UTC · Feb 8, 2025

USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, “Internews Network” (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and “training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives.
…

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Mainstream Media Boost ‘Independent’ Media Which Depend On U.S. Assistance appeared first on LewRockwell.