Lew Rockwell Institute

The Attempt by Harvard University to resist the efforts of the Trump administration to take control of this academic and research institution which has tremendous power in American society, and to set forth a structure whereby the Federal Government (which refers to the private consulting firms and private intelligence firms that actually run the Trump administration and not to the qualified professionals within what is left of the government) could well end up developing into the equivalent the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 by what would become Confederate forces. That was most definitely what Trump’s strategists like Stephen Miller intended. You might notice that the letter was received at Harvard on 164th anniversary of that act.

We know the billionaires want to create a civil war between factions of the little people (especially the little people who think that they are not little like the president of Harvard) so as to avoid the people rising up against the billionaires and demanding that their ill-gotten wealth be seized.

I want to share the letter sent to Harvard by the Trump team (I want to say the Thiel and Adelson team) the response to the Trump administration from Harvard University, and the letter from Harvard’s president to the faculty of Harvard.

I have no interest in defending Harvard. Harvard refused to take a stand against the abuse of the term “anti-semitism” to suppress free speech, and it has refused to allow a discussion about the 9.11 incident, the counterfeiting of money by the Federal Reverve, the COVID 19 reign of terror, or many other state crimes. It has a parasitic relationship with the military industrial complex.

See my letter to President Garber of Harvard from May 7, 2024

Response to Harvard President Garber’s Orders That Protesting Students be Placed on “Involuntary Leave” A call to focus on the real crimes at Harvard

Harvard is a pawn of investment banks. The Harvard endowment is referred to by bankers as “a fund with a little university attached on the side.” Nevertheless, Harvard offers much to the world, even if private equity has distorted its mission.

Trump is not trying to return Harvard to its mission of pursuing scientific truth and scholarly integrity, but rather he is trying to make it conform with his demands for subservience so as to make it easier to make such demands of other institutions and thus establish a complete dictatorship.

We will have to oppose this take over eventually, so we might as well do it now. As Hillel the Elder said, “If not now, when? If not me, who?”

We can denounce the deep corruption at Harvard while defending its academic value. we can demand a change in Harvard’s mission while standing up to dictatorship just as we can walk and chew gum.

Please do take the time to read these critical documents as they give a sense of how the fight may play out. Perhaps it will be a fight between elites seeking benefits (like the fight in the Civil War between the Vanderbilts and the plantation owners) and at the same time be a fight between citizens and the new oligarchs, a fight against slavery—even if that is not what the Trump administration or Harvard had intended. History is not made by them, however.

—

Trump Administration letter to Harvard

Letter Sent to Harvard 2025-04-11

Dr. Alan M. Garber

President

Harvard University Office of the President

Penny Pritzker

Lead Member,

Harvard Corporation

Harvard Corporation Massachusetts Hall Cambridge, MA 02138

Dear Dr. Garber:

The United States has invested in Harvard University’s operations because of the value to the country of scholarly discovery and academic excellence. But an investment is not an entitlement. It depends on Harvard upholding federal civil rights laws, and it only makes sense if Harvard fosters the kind of environment that produces intellectual creativity and scholarly rigor, both of which are antithetical to ideological capture. Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment. But we appreciate your expression of commitment to repairing those failures and welcome your collaboration in restoring the University to its promise.

We therefore present the below provisions as the basis for an agreement in principle that will maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government. If acceptable to Harvard, this document will constitute an agreement in principle, which the parties will work in good faith to translate into a more thorough, binding settlement agreement. As you will see, this letter incorporates and supersedes the terms of the federal government’s prior letter of April 3, 2025.

● Governance and leadership reforms. By August 2025, Harvard must make meaningful governance reform and restructuring to make possible major change consistent with this letter, including: fostering clear lines of authority and accountability; empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, and, from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter; reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty; reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship; and reducing forms of governance bloat, duplication, or decentralization that interfere with the possibility of the reforms indicated in this letter.

● Merit-Based Hiring Reform. By August 2025, the University must adopt and implement merit-based hiring policies, and cease all preferences based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin throughout its hiring, promotion, compensation, and related practices among faculty, staff, and leadership.

Such adoption and implementation must be durable and demonstrated through structural and personnel changes. All existing and prospective faculty shall be reviewed for plagiarism and Harvard’s plagiarism policy consistently enforced.

All hiring and related data shall be shared with the federal government and subjected to a comprehensive audit by the federal government during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028.

● Merit-Based Admissions Reform. By August 2025, the University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.

Such adoption and implementation must be durable and demonstrated through structural and personnel changes. All admissions data shall be shared with the federal government and subjected to a comprehensive audit by the federal government—and non-individualized, statistical information regarding admissions shall be made available to the public, including information about rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests—during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028. During this same period, the dean of admissions for each program or school must sign a public statement after each admissions cycle certifying that these rules have been upheld.

● International Admissions Reform. By August 2025, the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism. Harvard will immediately report to federal authorities, including the Department of Homeland Security and State Department, any foreign student, including those on visas and with green cards, who commits a conduct violation. As above, these reforms must be durable and demonstrated through structural and personnel changes; comprehensive throughout all of Harvard’s programs; and, during the reform period, shared with the federal government for audit, shared on a non-individualized basis with the public, and certified by deans of admissions.

● Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring. By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse. This audit shall begin no later than the summer of 2025 and shall proceed on a department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit basis as appropriate.

The report of the external party shall be submitted to University leadership and the federal government no later than the end of 2025. Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests.

Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.

If the review finds that the existing faculty in the relevant department or field are not capable of hiring for viewpoint diversity, or that the relevant teaching unit is not capable of admitting a critical mass of students with diverse viewpoints, hiring or admissions within that department, field, or teaching unit shall be transferred to the closest cognate department, field, or teaching unit that is capable of achieving viewpoint diversity.

This audit shall be performed and the same steps taken to establish viewpoint diversity every year during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028.

● Reforming Programs with Egregious Records of Antisemitism or Other Bias.

By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.

The programs, schools, and centers of concern include but are not limited to the Divinity School, Graduate School of Education, School of Public Health, Medical School, Religion and Public Life Program, FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.

The report of the external party shall include information as to individual faculty members who discriminated against Jewish or Israeli students or incited students to violate Harvard’s rules following October 7, and the University and federal government will cooperate to determine appropriate sanctions for those faculty members within the bounds of academic freedom and the First Amendment.

The report of the external party shall be submitted to University leadership and the federal government no later than the end of 2025 and reforms undertaken to repair the problems. This audit shall be performed and the same steps taken to make repairs every year during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028.

● Discontinuation of DEI. The University must immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name, and stop all DEI-based policies, including DEI-based disciplinary or speech control policies, under whatever name; demonstrate that it has done so to the satisfaction of the federal government; and demonstrate to the satisfaction of the federal government that these reforms are durable and effective through structural and personnel changes.

By August 2025, the University must submit to the government a report—certified for accuracy—that confirms these reforms.

● Student Discipline Reform and Accountability.

Harvard must immediately reform its student discipline policies and procedures so as to swiftly and transparently enforce its existing disciplinary policies with consistency and impartiality, and without double standards based on identity or ideology.

Where those policies are insufficient to prevent the disruption of scholarship, classroom learning and teaching, or other aspects of normal campus life, Harvard must develop and implement disciplinary policies sufficient to prevent those disruptions. This includes but is not limited to the following:

Discipline at Harvard must include immediate intervention and stoppage of disruptions or deplatforming, including by the Harvard police when necessary to stop a disruption or deplatforming; robust enforcement and reinstatement of existing time, place, and manner rules on campus, including ordering the Harvard police to stop incidents that violate time, place, and manner rules when necessary; a disciplinary process housed in one body that is accountable to Harvard’s president or other capstone official; and removing or reforming institutional bodies and practices that delay and obstruct enforcement, including the relevant Administrative Boards and FAS Faculty Council.

Harvard must adopt a new policy on student groups or clubs that forbids the recognition and funding of, or provision of accommodations to, any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment; invites non-students onto campus who regularly violate campus rules; or acts as a front for a student club that has been banned from campus.

The leaders or organizers of recognized and unrecognized student groups that violate these policies must be held accountable as a matter of student discipline and made ineligible to serve as officers in other recognized student organizations. In the future, funding decisions for student groups or clubs must be made exclusively by a body of University faculty accountable to senior University leadership.

In particular, Harvard must end support and recognition of those student groups or clubs that engaged in anti-Semitic activity since October 7th, 2023, including the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee, Harvard Graduates Students 4 Palestine, Law Students 4 Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the National Lawyers Guild, and discipline and render ineligible the officers and active members of those student organizations.

Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.

Harvard must investigate and carry out meaningful discipline for all violations that occurred during the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 academic years, including the Harvard Business School protest of October 2023, the University Hall sit-in of November 2023, and the spring encampment of 2024. This must include permanently expelling the students involved in the October 18 assault of an Israeli Harvard Business School student, and suspending students involved in occupying university buildings, as warranted by the facts of individual cases. o The Harvard president and police chief must publicly clarify that the Harvard University Police Department will enforce University rules and the law. Harvard must also commit to cooperating in good faith with law enforcement.

● Whistleblower Reporting and Protections.

The University must immediately establish procedures by which any Harvard affiliate can report noncompliance with the reforms detailed in this letter to both university leadership and the federal government. Any such reporter shall be fully protected from any adverse actions for so reporting.

● Transparency and Monitoring.

The University shall make organizational changes to ensure full transparency and cooperation with all federal regulators. No later than June 30, 2025, and every quarter thereafter during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028, the University shall submit to the federal government a report—certified for accuracy—that documents its progress on the implementation of the reforms detailed in this letter.

The University must also, to the satisfaction of the federal government, disclose the source and purpose of all foreign funds; cooperate with the federal government in a forensic audit of foreign funding sources and uses, including how that money was used by Harvard, its agents, and, to the extent available, third parties acting on Harvard’s campus; report all requested immigration and related information to the United States Department of Homeland Security; and comply with all requirements relating to the SEVIS system. We expect your immediate cooperation in implementing these critical reforms that will enable Harvard to return to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence.

Josh Gruenbaum

Commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service

General Services Administration

Sean R. Keveney

Acting General Counsel

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services

Thomas E. Wheeler

Acting General Counsel

U.S. Department of Education

—

Harvard’s response

Dear Messrs. Gruenbaum, Keveney, and Wheeler:

We are writing in response to your letter dated April 11, 2025, addressed to Dr. Alan Garber, Harvard’s President, and Penny Pritzker, Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation.

Harvard is committed to fighting antisemitism and other forms of bigotry in its community. Antisemitism and discrimination of any kind not only are abhorrent and antithetical to Harvard’s values but also threaten its academic mission.

To that end, Harvard has made, and will continue to make, lasting and robust structural, policy, and programmatic changes to ensure that the university is a welcoming and supportive learning environment for all students and continues to abide in all respects with federal law across its academic programs and operations, while fostering open inquiry in a pluralistic community free from intimidation and open to challenging orthodoxies, whatever their source.

Over the past 15 months, Harvard has undertaken substantial policy and programmatic measures. It has made changes to its campus use policies; adopted new accountability procedures; imposed meaningful discipline for those who violate university policies; enhanced programs designed to address bias and promote ideological diversity and civil discourse; hired staff to support these programs and support students; changed partnerships; dedicated resources to combat hate and bias; and enhanced safety and security measures.

As a result, Harvard is in a very different place today from where it was a year ago. These efforts, and additional measures the university will be taking against antisemitism, not only are the right thing to do but also are critical to strengthening Harvard’s community as a place in which everyone can thrive.

It is unfortunate, then, that your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms long Messrs. Gruenbaum, Keveney, and Wheeler April 14, 2025 Page 2 recognized by the Supreme Court.

The government’s terms also circumvent Harvard’s statutory rights by requiring unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law. No less objectionable is the condition, first made explicit in the letter of March 31, 2025, that Harvard accede to these terms or risk the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding critical to vital research and innovation that has saved and improved lives and allowed Harvard to play a central role in making our country’s scientific, medical, and other research communities the standard-bearers for the world.

These demands extend not only to Harvard but to separately incorporated and independently operated medical and research hospitals engaging in life-saving work on behalf of their patients. The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.

Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle. Harvard remains open to dialogue about what the university has done, and is planning to do, to improve the experience of every member of its community. But Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.

Letter to Faculty from the President of Harvard

The Promise of American Higher Education

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

For three-quarters of a century, the federal government has awarded grants and contracts to Harvard and other universities to help pay for work that, along with investments by the universities themselves, has led to groundbreaking innovations across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields.

These innovations have made countless people in our country and throughout the world healthier and safer. In recent weeks, the federal government has threatened its partnerships with several universities, including Harvard, over accusations of antisemitism on our campuses.

These partnerships are among the most productive and beneficial in American history. New frontiers beckon us with the prospect of life-changing advances—from treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes, to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, quantum science and engineering, and numerous other areas of possibility. For the government to retreat from these partnerships now risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals but also the economic security and vitality of our nation.

Late Friday night, the administration issued an updated and expanded list of demands, warning that Harvard must comply if we intend to “maintain [our] financial relationship with the federal government.” It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner. Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the “intellectual conditions” at Harvard.

I encourage you to read the letter to gain a fuller understanding of the unprecedented demands being made by the federal government to control the Harvard community. They include requirements to “audit” the viewpoints of our student body, faculty, staff, and to “reduc[e] the power” of certain students, faculty, and administrators targeted because of their ideological views. We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement. The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

Our motto—Veritas, or truth—guides us as we navigate the challenging path ahead. Seeking truth is a journey without end. It requires us to be open to new information and different perspectives, to subject our beliefs to ongoing scrutiny, and to be ready to change our minds. It compels us to take up the difficult work of acknowledging our flaws so that we might realize the full promise of the University, especially when that promise is threatened.

We have made it abundantly clear that we do not take lightly our moral duty to fight antisemitism. Over the past fifteen months, we have taken many steps to address antisemitism on our campus. We plan to do much more. As we defend Harvard, we will continue to:

• nurture a thriving culture of open inquiry on our campus; develop the tools, skills, and practices needed to engage constructively with one another; and broaden the intellectual and viewpoint diversity within our community;
• affirm the rights and responsibilities we share; respect free speech and dissent while also ensuring that protest occurs in a time, place, and manner that does not interfere with teaching, learning, and research; and enhance the consistency and fairness of disciplinary processes; and
• work together to find ways, consistent with law, to foster and support a vibrant community that exemplifies, respects, and embraces difference. As we do, we will also continue to comply with Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act makes it unlawful for universities to make decisions “on the basis of race.”

These ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate. The work of addressing our shortcomings, fulfilling our commitments, and embodying our values is ours to define and undertake as a community. Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere. All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.

Sincerely,
Alan M. Garber

This originally appeared on Emanuel Pastreich – Fear No Evil.

The post Trump Forces Declare War on Harvard appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump’s war on global commerce is just plain nuts, and not just the pure economic part of it either. With each passing day we hear from more wanna be MAGA big thinkers arguing that the Donald’s Trade Rampage is also about geopolitics and four dimensional Trumpian chess designed to restore America’s global leadership and technological dominance for years to come.

Well, no, true economic prosperity and technological advance comes from entrepreneurs, investors, inventors and risk-takers operating on the free market. They don’t need any help at all from loud-mouthed Washington politicians who generally have no idea what they are talking about and, more importantly, no skin in the game. That’s why the latter are both ineffectual and dangerous: To wit, the Washington pols are always happy to burden, block, batter and impair the honest enterprise of companies large and small if they get it in their minds that “national security” or “national greatness” require the heavy hand of bureaucrats, tax collector, regulators and pork dispensers.

That’s the essence of Trump-O-Nomics. It amounts to nothing more than a rightwing/populist appropriation of the normally leftist-led approach to mobilizing the state’s heavy-hand for the purpose of fixing problems that are either non-existent or badly misdiagnosed. In the case of the yawning US trade deficits and the hollowing out of America’s once vibrant industrial economy, the massive Trumpian Tariff maneuvers are about as far afield from the real issues as anything every dreamed up by FDR, LBJ or Barrack Obama; and these Trumpian misfires are already fostering immense collateral damage that’s breaking to the surface everywhere.

For instance, when we saw this missive from Goldman Sachs earlier today we initially presumed that its trading book was heavy with Boeing stock and that, as they are want to do, Goldman was putting out a sheep-shearing call to lighten its book at the expense of its customers. After all, how in the world could a 145% tariff on China not result in some retaliatory damage to the world’s leading commercial jet supplier by the folks in Beijing who control upwards of 25% of the total global commercial jet market?

We think the impact to Boeing is very small because China had already stopped taking Boeing deliveries and stopped ordering Boeing aircraft during the last Trump administration, such that there is no real reduction to implement,” Goldman wrote in a note to clients in the late afternoon hours of the cash session.

Needless to say, it was the bolded part of the sentence after the “because” point that changed our mind. It turns out that single-handedly the Donald has already wiped out the largest market of one of America’s premier exporters and aerospace powerhouses that consistently puts huge “winning” trade surplus scores on the board. Well, at least according to Trump’s way of splainin’ things.

Thus, if you look back at 2014—a time before the Donald volunteered to come to Washington and help—Boeing shipped nearly $1o billion of civilian aircraft to China in a single year. Alas, after Trump launched his first trade war on China in 2018-2019, Boeing sold a total of only $6.5 billion of planes to China during the entirety of the five years over 2019-2024!

Stated differently, during the period 2010-2018, Boeing shipped $79.8 billion of planes to China, which accounted for 62% of the combined duopoly market with Airbus. During the last five years, however, Airbus shipped 630 planes to China versus a mere 89 by Boeing, causing Airbus’ $42 billion of sales to tower over Boeing’s $6.5 billion, That is to say, thanks to the Donald’s misguided trade meddling a company owned by a socialist consortium of European states has had handed to them on a platter a stunning 87% share of the global aircraft market!

You can’t get more destructive than this. And for what?

Well, apparently, to get even with China for scooping up US labor-intensive manufacturing jobs that the Fed had inflated right out of the global market.

Boeing Versus Airbus Sales To China in Units And Dollar Value, 2010 to 2024

To repeat from Part 3, US unit labor costs by 2024 stood 470% higher than they had been in 1965 when the US was still running balanced accounts with the world, and when the Fed understood “sound money” to require o.o% inflation.

Stated differently, under a regime of sound money the urgently required deflationary purge demanded by the rise of the low-cost exporting economies would have caused the red bars in the chart to fall after 1992, not continue to climb skyward as it actually did. Accordingly, the solution to America’s unsustainable trade deficits lies in root and branch reform at the Eccles Building a few blocks from the White House rather than a madcap eruption of global trade wars over tariffs and NTBs, which have virtually nothing to do with the trade deficit problem.

Nonfarm Unit Labor Cost Index, 1965 to 2024

Again, just consider the US/China trade balance in 2023 for the top 50 US imports from China which was hideously lop-sided. Yet it is not remotely possible that this 18:1 ratio between imports and exports was caused by trade barriers to US exports or other kinds of cheating by China’s trade bureaucrats. To the contrary, it was due to a vast gap between labor and other production costs in the two economies, pure and simple.

Trade Balance in 2023 for Top 50 US Imports From China:

• Imports: $397 billion.
• Exports: $22 billion.
• Balance: -$375 billion.
• Import/Export Ratio: 18:1

As it happens, tariffs self-evidently have little if anything to do with this extreme imbalance. Thus, among the top 50 US imports, the actual US weighted average tariff on these goods from China was 23.0% versus China’s 26.2% tariff on the same 50 categories of US exports in 2023.

Obviously, this trivial 320 basis point tariff differential on this common group of 50 four-digit HS categories does not remotely explain a 18X trade imbalance in favor of China. Nor is there any evidence that so-called NTBs (nontariff barriers) to US exports explain it, either.

The fact is, labor intensive manufacture of shoes, shirts, furniture and industrial commodities account for the imbalance. Even iPhones, desk tops and commodity semi-conductors were moved to China by Apple Inc. and other Silicon Valley based US companies in order to capture the labor cost arbitrage, as we elaborate below.

Moreover, the relatively high dueling tariffs imposed by both sides as of 2023 (23% vs. 26%) were entirely due to the trade wars that the Donald started during his first term in the Oval Office. Again, China’s tariff on these 50 categories of goods was just 7.5% on a MFN basis in 2017 before the Trump tariffing rampage started. So what has been gained, unfortunately, is not a reduction in US imports from China, but just higher off-setting duties on US export sales to China.

The lopsided imbalance of imports from China has not changed despite the Trumpian tariffs because, as indicated above, since 1992 the US price level has risen by 131%. Not surprisingly, the American market soon became flooded with labor-intensive Chinese shirts, shoes, sheets, toys and furniture at first; and then electronics, iPads, iPhones and computers in an even greater flood as time went on and Chinese manufacturing moved up the value chain.

As we also indicated previously, the nominal wage gap in USD was already large in 1992, but has steadily expanded ever since. In fact, in nominal USD terms the US/China manufacturing wage gap of $16.50 per hour in 1992 has more than doubled to $34.25. The figures below for both countries were supplied by Grok 3 and include both hourly pay plus full-loaded benefits absorbed by employers.

Hourly Wages: US-China=labor gap:

• 1992: $16.80-$0.33=$16.50.
• 2007: $29.81-$1.36=$28.45.
• 2024: $43.46-9.35=$34.14

In short, the Fed has inflated its way into a flood of imports from China and other low labor cost exporters. For example, the footwear and apparel category generated $41.7 billion of US imports from China in 2023 versus just $0.5 billion of US exports to China. That was due to the $34/hour wage gap, not trade barriers or intellectual property theft or any of the other risible claims made by the Trumpites

Likewise, the imbalance in toys and video games was $34.6 billion of imports from China versus $0.3 billion of US exports to China. And in this case, the duty rate is 0.0% on both ends of the two-way trade. So perforce, unfair trade barriers were not an issue in this market.

In the case of furniture, lighting and plastic products, the imbalance was similar at $29.3 billion of imports from China versus $1.0 billion of US exports to China. But the current Chinese import duties on US exports in these categories tell you all you need to know. Prior to 2018, China’s MFN tariff on these products averaged just 5.3%, which is hardly a roadblock to a competitive foreign producer.

But in his wisdom, the Donald raised the US tariff on furniture, lighting and plastic products to 25% during his first term, causing the Chinese to retaliate by raising their tariff from the MFN average of 5.3% to an average of 30.5% on these products in 2023. Of course, high-cost US exporters of these products were not very competitive in China anyway, but the Donald’s tit-for-tat on tariffs during his first term closed the door entirely. And, now, his latest 125% tariff is transparently a tax grab that can’t possibly help close a 29:1 import/export ratio.

The story is similar in the case of flat-screen TVs. Here the figures were $13.8 billion of imports from China and only $0.1 billion of US exports to China. That’s a 138:1 import/export ratio but its clearly not due to tariffs or other NTBs. In this case, China’s MFN tariff was just 3%, but when the Donald raised the US rate on flat-screen TV imports to 25% during this first term, the Chinese countered with a 28% rate as of 2023.

Again, what’s the point? The 138:1 import/export ratio in this product category was due to China’s superior cost structure and production infrastructure. Trade barriers had nothing to do with it.

In the case of solar panels, electric motors and air conditioners, the US imported $22.5 billion from China versus exports in these categories of just $1.2 billion. Again, the MFN tariff in China was just an average of 7%, but by 2023 stood at an average of 24% owing to the Donald’s raising the US tariff on China-made goods in these categories to 25% the first time around.

Even in the case of so-called high tech products, the fully rational move by Apple Inc and others to source iPhones, laptops, AirPods and semiconductors from China was driven by yawning labor and other cost differentials. Consequently, the three product categories which encompass these Silicon Valley designed and engineered products showed imports of $136 billion versus exports of just $7.3 billion in 2023.

Again, that was a 19:1 import/export ratio. Moreover, the resulting $129 billion deficit in these three notionally “high tech” categories accounted for 46% of the entire US trade deficit with China of $279 billion in 2023.

Then again, this huge imbalance wasn’t owing to tariff or other kinds of trade cheating. In fact, China’s normal MFN duty on the US exports of $7.3 billion in these three high tech categories was just 1.5% on a weighted average basis. And even after the first round of Trump trade wars it was only 9.7% under the retaliation rates China imposed on bilateral trade with the US in 2023.

By contrast, the actual US tariff on imports of these high tech products from China in 2023 was nearly $27 billion or 25%. And until the weekend reprieve, which was subsequently clarified to be not a reprieve but another short-term “pause”, it would have been $154 billion or 145%!

As we indicated previously, these massive imbalances in even high tech products are owing to yawning differences between the inflated US cost structure and that of China’s freshly minted factories and just-out-of-the-rice-paddies industrial labor force.

For want of doubt, we requested Grok 3 to build up a bill of production costs for the Apple iPhone X based on actual production costs incurred by its supplier, Foxconn, in its world-scale plants versus the comparable costs of building the components and assembling the final product in a plant based in Austin, Texas.

The table speaks for itself. US labor and other production costs would be 45% higher ($1,043 versus $720 per unit), and that includes the supply chain costs of getting the product from China to a US distribution warehouse on the west coast.

Accordingly, there is no mystery to the entire trade deficit story. Even in the case of high tech products where US producers have overwhelming technological and intellectual property superiority, US producers have gone off-shore to manufacture their products because over the last five decades the Fed has inflated the bejesus out of the American economy.

iPhone X Cost Build-Up (China vs. USA, 2023, Pre-Tariff)

So, enough already! What the Donald in his “wisdom” is actually saying is that the free people and businesses of America are not permitted under his writ to buy low-cost goods from China because the red capitalists of Beijing have not sufficiently inflated their own cost structure to catch up to the relentless US inflation generated by the Fed.

When all else fails, of course, the Trumpites resort to sputtering about the great China threat to America’s place of world leadership. On the military front, however, China doesn’t have the GDP heft to even think about landing on the California shores, notwithstanding Wall Street’s endless kowtowing to the China Boom.

Indeed, when it comes to the threat of a conventional military invasion the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century. That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles would consign a Chinese naval armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters.

Likewise, neocon knuckleheads have been jabbering about China’s growing Navy, which numbers 400 hulls compared to 305 ships in the US Navy’s fleet. But what they don’t say is that most of these Chinese units are coastal patrol boats, which likely couldn’t even make it to the coast of California, anyway.

In terms of Naval power projection capability, the proper measure of lethality is not the number of hulls; it’s the total displacement tonnage. In this connection, the US Navy has 4.6 million tons of displacement, averaging 15,000 tons per ship. By contrast, China’s Navy has but 2.0 million tons of displacement, averaging only 5,000 tons per boat. That is to say, the Chinese Navy is totally visible, assessable and trackable, and is not remotely of the size and lethality that would make an invasion of America remotely plausible.

At the end of the day, however, what really debunks the China Threat nonsense is its jerry-built, debt-entombed economy.The fact is, China has accumulated in excess of $70 trillion of debt in barely two decades, and is therefore not some kind of sustainable economic giant that will conqueror the global economy. In fact, it is a Ponzi living on borrowed time and borrowed money.

As shown in the chart below, its bank debt alone now totals $63 trillion, which is up by 13X from the $5 trillion outstanding just 20 years ago in 2004. Owing to this madcap debt explosion, much of which built unused infrastructure and empty apartment buildings, the debt of China’s state-run banking system is nearly three times the footings of the US banking system.

Stated differently, China didn’t grow organically in the historic capitalist mode; it printed, borrowed, spent and built like there was no tomorrow. The resulting simulacrum of prosperity would not last a year if its $3.6 trillion global export market—-the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright—were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.

To be sure, China’s totalitarian leaders are immensely misguided and downright evil from the perspective of their oppressed population. But they are not stupid. They stay in power by keeping the people relatively fat and happy and couldn’t possibly wish to risk destabilizing a towering economic house of cards that has not even a vague approximation in human history.

Despite this, we never want for round-house claims that China’s economic house of cards doesn’t matter because it is hell-bent on dominating a battlefield that is “asymmetric, economic and digital” according to one critic we read today.

But to the contrary, Red Capitalism is the greatest economic Ponzi in world history, and is neither stable nor sustainable. It will ultimately tip-over under its own weight of excess debt and sweeping malinvestment—just like the Soviet Union did for different reasons.

Washington simple needs to mind its own business, let free enterprise flourish at home, allow freedom of commerce abroad for American companies and entrepreneurs, slash the defense budget by 50%, balance the Federal budget, eliminate 75% of Federal regulations and get out of the way.

There is nothing “national” or geostrategic about this. It’s just beltway bullshit made up by Washington lobbies, think tanks, NGOs and busy-bodies trying to justify their own illicit claims on budgets and power. And now they have captured the Trumpite trade howlers, as well.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

The post We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Trade War With China appeared first on LewRockwell.

Join us in Auburn, Alabama to hear Ron Unz on “The True History of World War II; USS Liberty Survivor Phil Tourney on “The Attack on the USS Liberty”; retired Airforce Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski on a personal perspective on Pentagon Lies; Wanjiru Njoya on “Reconstruction Reconsidered”; Scott Horton on How DC restarted the Cold War with Russia and the Ukraine disaster; Brion McClanahan on “The Rightous Cause Conquers the World”; Ilana Mercer on “The Real Israel”; Hunt Tooley on how World War I spawned the total state; Yours Truly on the “false virtue” of American imperialism; and other great speakers.

It was banned in Miami, but not in Auburn.  The Oscar-winning documentary, “No Other Land,” will be shown on the afternoon of May 15 just before the evening cocktail reception.  Come and join us.  You’ll never hear any discussions like this on the FOX War Channel.

The post Don’t Miss the Mises Institute’s Historic “Revisionist History of War” Conference May 15-17 appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Will Trump Ship Americans To El Salvador Gulag? appeared first on LewRockwell.

An influential strategist from a NATO member commiserates.  https://thecradle.co/articles/blue-homeland-architect-warns-nato-has-failed-and-the-eu-wants-turkiye-on-its-knees

The post Everyone Agrees, NATO is So Over appeared first on LewRockwell.

Over the course of the past three millennia, Western Civilization has faced many apocalyptic challenges and existential threats, both internal and external.

I believe we stand today, as a civilization, quivering on an oscillating precipice facing perhaps our greatest danger, one as real and threatening as the series of Medieval invasions from multiple hostile forces, the Magyars (Hungarians) from the east, the Viking expansion from the north and the Arabs from the south, all followed by the Bubonic Plague which ravaged the continent. In the 20th Century the West faced and defeated the onslaught of those twin totalitarian tyrannies, National Socialist Germany and Marxist/Leninist Socialism of the USSR.

Those who hate and seek the destruction of the West wear many ideological guises and raiment.

The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this Dialogue. The Spirit of Western Civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everyone is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education.

Logos is an ancient Greek term. It means reason as expressed in human speech. The Greeks believed reason to be the controlling principle in an orderly, harmonious universe (cosmos).

The faculties of reason (conceptual thought) and language (propositional speech) are what distinguish human beings from other creatures.

Accordingly, man is described as “the rational animal.” As philosopher Mortimer Adler points out in his book, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes:

. . . man is the only talking, the only naming, declaring or questioning, affirming or denying, the only arguing, agreeing or disagreeing, the only discursive animal.

Philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand develops this idea further in her book, For the New Intellectual:

Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food, and the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch – or build a cyclotron – without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.

But to think is an act of choice . . . Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs, or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival – so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think.’

Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think – not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment . . . Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality.

Human beings are capable of abstract thought, the transcendence of their immediate environment, and the emancipation from the perpetual present.

In one of the most important books of the 20th Century, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, historian Carroll Quigley elaborates on this crucial idea of abstraction:  

Both man and universe are dynamic, or changeable in time, and the chief additional complexity is that both are changing in a continuum of abstraction, as well as in the more familiar continuum of space-time. The continuum of abstraction simply means that the reality in which man and the universe function exists in five dimensions; of these the dimension of abstraction covers a range from the most concrete and material end of reality to, at the opposite extreme, the most abstract and spiritual end of reality, with every possible gradation between these two ends along the intervening dimensions that determine reality, including the three dimensions of space, the fourth of time, and this fifth of abstraction. This means that man is concrete and material at one end of his person, is abstract and spiritual at the other end, and covers all the gradations between, with a large central zone concerned with his chaos of emotional experiences and feelings.

In order to think about himself or the universe with the more abstract and rational end of his being, man has to categorize and to conceptualize both his nature and the nature of reality, while, in order to act and to feel on the less abstract end of his being, he must function more directly, outside the limits of categories, without the buffer of concepts. Thus man might look at his own being as divided into three levels of body, emotions, and reason. The body, functioning directly in space-time-abstraction, is much concerned with concrete situations, individual and unique events, at a specific time and place. The middle levels of his being are concerned with himself and his reactions to reality in terms of feelings and emotions as determined by endocrine and neurological reactions. The upper levels of his being are concerned with his neurological analysis and manipulation of conceptualized abstractions. The three corresponding operations of his being are sensual, emotional or intuitive, and rational.

The sequence of intellectual history is concerned with the sequence of styles or fads that have been prevalent, one after another, as to what emphasis or combinations of man’s three levels of operations would be used in his efforts to experience life and to cope with the universe.

Early Christianity, influenced by Greek philosophy, borrowed the term “Logos” as a symbolic representation for Jesus Christ. Logos was the divine wisdom manifest in the creation, government, and redemption of the world. It was identified with the Second Person of the Trinity.

In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God; and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was made nothing that has been made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness grasped it not. There was a man, one sent from God, whose name was John. This man came as a witness concerning the light, that all might believe through him. He was not himself the light, but was to bear witness to the light. It was the true light that enlightens every man who comes into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But to as many as received Him He gave the power of becoming sons of God; to those who believe in His name; who were born not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. And we saw His glory – glory as of the Only-begotten of the Father – full of grace and truth.

The Gospel of John 1, 1-14

With this Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian intellectual inheritance (in addition to the various elements offered by the barbarian Germanic tribes and the Muslim world) Western civilization has developed as “logocentric” or reasoned speech-centered.

From the time of the Protestant Reformation, particular emphasis has been placed upon the written word as a means of transmitting and recording knowledge, away from the earlier “art of memory” or oral tradition of classic Greek and Roman antiquity.

“Printing was to bring about the most radical alteration ever made in Western intellectual history, and its effects were to be felt in every area of human activity,” noted James Burke in his excellent book, The Day The Universe Changed.

“The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest, most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature known as Homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. That record covers nearly twenty-five hundred years in an unbroken stretch of this animated oddity’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, logic, politics, botany, zoölogy, medicine, geography, theology, — everything, I believe, that lies in the range of human knowledge or speculation. Hence the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience. Our studies were properly called formative, because beyond all others their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children; and if one wished to characterize the collective mind of this present period, or indeed of any period,—the use it makes of its powers of observation, reflection, logical inference,—one would best do it by the one word immaturity.” ― Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Anyone remotely aware of the dynamic interplay of ideas and events in the world for the past several decades is well aware that in the media, in the academy, and in the corridors of power, Western Civilization is under a vicious and aggressive assault. This has particularly accelerated in the past few weeks. Here are vital unapologetic defenses of the West and its definitive legacy in shaping the world:

The War on the West, by Douglas Murray

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, by Douglas Murray

Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis, by James Lindsay

The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, by Heather Mac Donald

When Everyone Kneels, Who Will Stand Up for Western History and Culture? article by Giulio Meotti

“In Defense of Western Civilization,” article by Richard Finger

How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity, by Rodney Stark

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.; (EWTN series The Catholic Church: Builder of Civilization; online at YouTube)

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, by Anthony Esolen

Civilization, by Kenneth Clark; (BBC TV series Civilization); online at YouTube (here)

Phoenix: The Triumph of the West, by J. M. Roberts; (BBC TV series The Triumph of the West; select episodes online at YouTube)

The Great Books of the Western World, by Mortimer J. Adler (Author, Editor), Clifton Fadiman (Editor), and Philip W. Goetz (Editor)

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos , by Jordan B. Peterson

The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, by Allan Bloom

The Camp of the Saints, by Jean Raspail

“Must It Be the Rest Against the West?” article by Matthew Connelly and Paul Kennedy

“The Coming Anarchy,” article by Robert Kaplan

“The Superiority of Western Values in Eight Minutes,” Speech by Ibn Warraq

Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy, by Ibn Warraq

“Sharia’s Incompatibility with Western Values, Explained,” article by Immanuel Al-Manteeqi

The Theory of Education in the United States, by Albert Jay Nock

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man by Albert Jay Nock

The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, by Henry Adams

What If Everyone Had A Classical Education?” TED presentation by Rebekah Hagstrom

“The Trivium of Classical Education: Historical Development Decline in the 20th Century and Resurgence in Recent Decades,” A Dissertation Presented to The Graduate Faculty of Greenleaf University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Randall D. Hart, July 2004.

The post Western Suicide: Cause and Effect appeared first on LewRockwell.

Why Marxist Organizations Like BLM Seek to Dismantle the “Western Nuclear Family”

Épater le bourgeois (shock the middle classes) has been the revolutionary rallying cry of the left in the cultural war against Judeo-Christian morality and the nuclear family for well over a hundred and fifty years.

It lies at the epicenter of Modernism, Marxism, Fascism, National Socialism, Progressivism, Feminism, Environmentalism, and Homosexualism.

For fascinating, in-depth explorations of bourgeois (middle class) culture, see Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture 1815-1914, by Peter Gay;  The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud Volume 1: Education of the Senses, Volume 1, by Peter Gay; The Tender Passion: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 2, by Peter Gay; The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3, by Peter Gay; The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 4, by Peter Gay; Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 5, by Peter Gay; Victorian Minds: A Study of Intellectuals in Crisis and Ideologies in Transition, by Gertrude Himmelfarb;  The De-moralization Of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, by Gertrude Himmelfarb; and One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution, by Gertrude Himmelfarb; The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, by Deirdre McClosky; Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t explain the Modern World, by Deirdre McClosky; and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capitol or Institutions, Enriched the World, by Dierdre McClosky.

The classic and definitive statement of elitist contempt for bourgeois culture is Eminent Victorians, by the scathing, bitchy biographer Lytton Strachey. Strachey, who along with his homosexual lover and fellow Cambridge Apostles initiate, economist John Maynard Keynes, were unabashed advocates of “the higher sodomy,” setting forth the destructive agenda for generations of anti-bourgeois subversion.

Later the Apostles served as the breeding nest for treason by spawning Soviet espionage agents Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Michael Straight. 

Following in the degenerate path blazed earlier by Keynes, the postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault sexually assaulted young boys while living in Tunisia.

See also Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, by Peter Gay; Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, by E. Michael Jones; Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872-1927, by Daniel Albright; France: Fin de Siècle, by Eugen Weber; Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, by Carl E. Schorske; Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, by Peter Gay; Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, by Mel Gordon; Modern Times: The Word from the Twenties to the Nineties, by Paul Johnson; The Shock of the New, (DVD) by Robert Hughes; Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies, by Paul Buhle and David Wagner;  Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture, by Chris Robe’; Enemies of Society, by Paul Johnson; The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, by Robert Nisbet; and Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America.  

The post Épater le bourgeois (shock the middle classes) Has Been the Revolutionary Rallying Cry of the Left in the Cultural War Against Judeo-Christian Morality and the Nuclear Family for Well over a Hundred and Fifty Years appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Getting vaccinated every year is the best way to lower your chances of getting the flu.” That is the declaration of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) at its website’s page dedicated to immunization for flu. The problem is that actual medical investigation instead indicates the shots are a dud when it comes to protecting people from flu.

The latest study showing this comes from the Cleveland Clinic. The results show a 27 percent higher rate of flu in the 2024-25 flu season among the Cleveland Clinic’s almost 44,000 employees who took the flu shots mandated by the Cleveland Clinic compared to among its almost 10,000 employees who escaped the mandated shots via claiming medical or religious exemption. Alex Berenson provided the details in an April 8 article at his Unreported Truths. The study authors’ conclusion that “We were unable to find that the influenza vaccine has been effective in preventing infection” Berenson aptly calls “a masterpiece of understatement.”

One obvious outcome suggested by this study is that the Cleveland Clinic and other businesses should end their mandates that employees take flu shots.

Most people would think that a job of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), so long as it exists, would be to pull colossal failures like the flu shots off the market, or at least to warn people that the shots look like they are all risk and no benefit. However, as it has done with other spurious pharmaceutical products, HHS is acting as a flu shots promoter. It goes so far on its flu immunization page as to recommend that, with quite limited exceptions, people over six months old take the shots yearly.

In February, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. signaled his desire that, instead of promoting that people take vaccines such as flu shots, the focus be on promoting that people exercise informed consent. There is a long way to go on achieving this objective. Where is the mention at the HHS flu immunization web page of indications the flu shots do not work? Where is the sharing of information about the people who have reported being hurt by the flu shots and who have even received compensation for flu shots injuries? Why are the shots still recommended for people down to the age of six months old?

The United States government and HHS do not have Americans’ backs on flu shots. HHS’s shots pushing does, though, help bring in the profits for pharmaceutical companies.

Reprinted with permission from The Ron Paul Institute.

The post The Dud Flu Shots appeared first on LewRockwell.

We assume that Player One in the White House is having fun.  Between moments of boredom with the whole thing he appears to enjoy time playing a video game, one like SimCity in which players build their own communities.  But the game Donald Trump plays allows him to build his very own TrumpWorld.

So far, his world includes global mapmaking.  Nobody serious much cares or thinks that America is elevated and Mexico diminished by renaming the Gulf of Mexico, but for a dedicated gamer it is like calling out other players online.  It thrills Player One in TrumpWorld since it represents unilateral might.  Then there are the options of making Canada a state, taking Greenland and the Panama Canal by force, or displacing millions of people to create the Gaza Riveria Resort, a luxurious playground for the rich and famous.  And this is only the first level!

Trump, who we are told simply doesn’t read much of anything that’s not on a teleprompter, is so completely mesmerized by video that he appoints people to office based on their appearance on TV.  It bestows a reality on them that others lack and in TrumpWorld it is a major qualification for high office:  Pete Hegseth, Dan Bongino, Sean Duffy… you get the idea.  His Kennedy Center board appointees include Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiroma.   Being a Fox News host or contributor is best, but others on TV can get the presidential nod, and even become ambassadors, too.

For a former reality TV star, it is the most fun ever to have your own global reality video game.  You can upend all of world trade, commerce that makes greater prosperity possible, with nothing more than a notion and the push of a button.  On a whim Player One can threaten one tariff rate one day and another the next, changing frantically from day to day.  This makes planning and production virtually impossible for anyone engaged in business.  But it’s okay since it’s only a video game.  It’s his world. Any inconvenience or cost digital beings suffer in the changing gamescape is not really real in a reality video game reality.

Trump World should have been carried a warning for extreme violence. It was packaged as peaceful, but it’s clear now that thundered threats of bombardment are major tools of fun and play.  “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before!”  Wow!  That’s awesome!  “Your country gets blown to smithereens,” Cool!  “Hell will rain down upon you like nothing you have ever seen before!”  Boys playing games online talk like that.  Normal people in the real world, people with healthy human consciousness don’t.  But TrumpWorld is just a hyper-exciting game, one that now features fresh new images of people being incinerated right before our eyes.  “Oops!”  So realistic! So exhilarating!

As you would expect of a serious gamer, even before his first go-around Trump showed himself to be uncommonly interested in wielding deadly power. He repeatedly pressed a foreign policy adviser during the 2016 campaign to explain why the US couldn’t use its nuclear weapons. Like so many other role-playing and real time strategy games – Fallout, and Command and Conquer – TrumpWorld now includes the thrilling prospect of carnage by nuclear weapons.

What if things go amiss?  No worries.  TrumpWorld’s Player One can always take a break and play some golf.  One game is as good as another.  If everything gets broken down or blown up in TrumpWorld, he can pause and reset.

Can’t he?

The post Trumpworld: Ready Player One! appeared first on LewRockwell.

In an amusing display of British pride and solipsism, the venerable Times of London once ran the headline “Fog in Channel – Continent Cut Off.”

Overly arrogant individuals sometimes find it difficult to recognize that they are not the center of the universe, and that instead they might actually be considerably less large and powerful than those they intend to overawe, cut off, or isolate.

This sort of notion was also famously expressed in a Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoon I remember seeing during my childhood. One of the Looney Tunes characters—I forget which one—was perched on the branch of a tree and idiotically decided to destroy his adversary by sawing it off. Since cartoons may easily defy physical laws, his ridiculous plan actually succeeded and that branch remained suspended in mid-air while the rest of the tree suddenly plummeted to the ground. But real life is considerably different than what was portrayed by Warner Brothers cartoonists.

Some may disagree. I’ve sometimes wondered whether the surprising trade policies that President Donald Trump announced over the last couple of weeks might have been inspired by those Bugs Bunny cartoons of the 1950s. Perhaps he assumed that they accurately portrayed real life events and decided to apply that same strategy to America’s international trade problems.

Certainly the sudden, unilateral application of new tariffs against every other country in the world—ranging from a stiff minimum of 10% against the entire human race to a China rate that ultimately reached an absurd 145%—seemed more like something out of a cartoon than normal economic policy planning.

The initial tariff rates shown in the chart that Trump held up at his April 2nd announcement produced a jaw-dropping reaction by nearly all economic observers. I suspect that many of them may have wondered if he’d somehow gotten his dates confused and the whole exercise had actually been intended as an April Fools’ joke.

I was recently interviewed by a right-wing British podcaster named Mark Collett, and he suggested that Trump’s erratic and mercurial political decisions reminded him of the Roman Emperor Caligula, leading me to concur with his historical analogy.

Caligula is probably best known for announcing that he would appoint his horse Incitatus to the consulship, the highest political office of the Roman government, and also for declaring himself to be a living god. But I think that if Trump had given his favorite dog or cat a Cabinet post and even Tweeted out a few fanciful claims regarding his own divinity, the negative impact upon America’s position in the world might have been considerably less damaging than what was caused by his outrageously bizarre tariff proposal.

Tariffs are just a type of tax levied on imports, and America annually imports well over $3 trillion dollars worth of foreign goods, so tariff taxes obviously have a huge economic impact. But Trump suddenly raised those taxes by more than a factor of ten, taking them from around 2.5% to 29%, rates far, far beyond those of the notorious 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and reaching the levels of more than 100 years ago. This certainly amounted to one of the largest tax increases in all of human history.

According to our Constitution, tariffs and other tax changes must be enacted by Congressional legislation. But Trump ignored those requirements, instead claiming that he had the power to unilaterally set tariff tax rates under the emergency provisions of a 1977 law that no one had ever previously believed could be used for that purpose.

Across our 235 year national history, all our past changes in tariff, trade, or tax policy—including Smoot-Hawley, NAFTA, the WTO, and Trump 45’s own USMCA—had always been the result of months or years of political negotiations, and then ultimately approved or rejected by Congress. But now these multi-trillion-dollar decisions were being made at the personal whim of someone who had seemingly proclaimed himself a reigning, empowered American autocrat.

As might be expected, Trump’s huge tax increase on $3 trillion of imports quickly led to a very sharp drop in stock prices, but Trump declared that he was unbending and would never waver. China had prepared for exactly such an economic attack, and when it soon retaliated with similar tariffs on American products, Trump counter-retaliated, with several days of those tit-for-tat exchanges eventually raising tariff rates against China to an astonishing 145%, essentially banning almost all Chinese goods. Many other countries and the EU also threatened similar retaliatory tariffs, but since their tax rates were governed by law rather than autocratic whim, their responses were necessarily much slower.

However, just a week after he announced those gigantic tariffs against the entire world and repeatedly promised to maintain or even further raise them, Trump suddenly changed his mind. Although he kept the Chinese rates at those ridiculous levels, he declared that tariffs on all other countries would suddenly be reduced to a very high but rational 10% rate for the next 90 days while he decided what to do.

Thus, during the course of a single week, Trump had raised American tariffs by more than a factor of ten, then dropped them by a factor of two, representing exactly the sort of tax policy we might expect to see in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Trump’s totally unexpected reversal naturally produced a huge rebound in stock prices, which recovered much of the ground that they had previously lost, and Trump boasted about all the money that his friends had made from that unprecedented market rebound. This led to some dark suspicions that our unfortunate country had just witnessed one of the most outrageously blatant examples of insider trading in all of human history.

Across thousands of years, the world has seen many important countries ruled by absolute monarchs or all-powerful dictators, with some of these leaders even considered deranged. But I can’t recall any past example in which a major nation’s tax, tariff, or tribute policies have undergone such rapid and sudden changes, moving up and down by huge amounts apparently based upon personal whim. Certainly Caligula never did anything so peculiar, nor Louis XIV nor Genghis Khan nor anyone else who comes to mind. Lopping off the heads of a few random government officials was one thing, but drastic changes in national financial policies were generally taken much more seriously. I don’t think that Tamerlane ever suddenly raised the tribute he demanded from his terrified subjects by a factor of ten, then a few days later lowered it back down by a factor of two.

What will our tariff rates on $3 trillion of imports be like in a few months? I doubt that anyone can say, even including the current occupant of the Oval Office. For example, late Friday night the Trump Administration apparently exempted smartphones, computer equipment, and other electronics from his Chinese tariffs, hoping that the timing would help hide that further abject surrender from the American population.

Consider America’s major business corporations or even its small mom-and-pop operations. Nearly all of these have some substantial connection to international trade, even if they merely rely upon ordinary products that they buy at Costco or Walmart. On April 2nd, Trump announced his huge new tariffs that would greatly raise the price of those products or possibly lead to their disappearance, then on April 9th he changed his mind and suspended those tariffs for 90 days, but still proposed to afterward enact them, while essentially banning nearly all Chinese imported goods with a 145% tariff that may or may not continue.

Under those circumstances, how could any rational corporate planner—or even sensible small-businessman—formulate any long-term investment plans? For at least the next 90 days, virtually all business investment will surely remain frozen, except perhaps for a little panic-buying. It’s hardly surprising that consumer sentiment quickly reached the worst levels since record-keeping began.

Read the Whole Article

The post Donald Trump’s Looney Tunes Trade Policy appeared first on LewRockwell.

I’ve often thought that the UK hasn’t had any good leaders since Lord Salisbury, the last prime minister of Queen Victoria’s reign, who died in 1902.

Lord Salisbury (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil) was a prudent and sensible man who understood that most ambitious schemes undertaken by people in government are likely to be ruinous. Recognizing the folly of getting into alliances with Europe’s Continental powers, he maintained the policy of “splendid isolation.” His pessimistic view of government scheming was encapsulated in the credo:

Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.

I am certain that Lord Salisbury would have been appalled by pretty much every major decision made by the British government since his death, especially its gross mismanagement of affairs on the European continent in the first decade of the 20th century. The British government’s unnecessary alliances with France and Russia and its needlessly unfriendly posture towards Germany were, it seems to me, foolish at best, and more likely bloody-minded, especially when one considers that the British Royal family was from Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II was Victoria’s grandson.

The British government’s treatment of its young men during World War I—herding millions of them into cold, muddy, water-filled, rat infested trenches, where they were subjected to round-the-clock artillery barrages—strikes me as one of the most outrageous abuses of human beings ever perpetrated.

While Churchill is often idolized as Britain’s great 20th century leader because of his rousing speeches during World War II, it’s not clear to me that any of his decisions arose out of any sort of special prescience or judgement. After Neville Chamberlain declared war on Nazi Germany on Sept. 3, 1939, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty—a position he was holding when the Royal Navy attempted to defend Norway from the German navy. This operation ended in disaster on June 8, 1940, when the German battle-cruisers Scharnhost and Gneisenau caught the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her two escorting destroyers Acasta and Ardent in the Norwegian Sea, sinking all three ships, with the loss of 1,519 British sailors. Even though Churchill was head of the Navy, it was Prime Minister Chamberlain who took the flak for the incident and resigned, leaving his office open to Churchill.

Chamberlain declared war on Germany because it invaded Poland, which it intended to use as a staging ground for its invasion of the Soviet Union. The paradox of this decision was that Britain’s ally, the Soviet Union, invaded Poland sixteen days after the German invasion. At the Yalta Conference in Feb. 1945, Churchill agreed to leave Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe under the de facto control of Joseph Stalin.

It seems to me that Britain’s awful leadership reached a new summit with Tony Blair and has become steadily more dreadful ever since. It may have reached its Grotesque Globalist Apotheosis with Rishi Sunak. After working at Goldman Sachs, Sunak co-founded a hedge fund registered in the Cayman Islands (to avoid paying taxes) called Theleme Partners.

He and his French co-founder, Patrick Degorce, apparently named the fund after the Abbey of Thélème—a fictional institution featured in the books of the 16th century monk François Rabelais. The inhabitants of the Abbey follow the motto “Do what thou wilt.” This motto was adopted the 20th century English occultist Aleister Crowley, who called his philosophical system Thelema.

Theleme Partners was one of the earliest investors in the pharmaceutical company Moderna (when it only had ten employees). One wonders if Degorce received the investment tip from his fellow Frenchman, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel.

When Sunak left Theleme Partners in 2013 to go into politics, his interest in the fund was placed in a blind trust, but it’s hard to believe he didn’t know that the fund retained its huge ($500 million) position in Moderna.

While he was serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer, his government signed a deal for 5 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine. Shortly after Sunak became Prime Minister in 2022, his government signed a 10-year-investment partnership with Moderna “to build a state-of-the-art vaccine manufacturing centre with the ability to produce up to 250 million vaccines a year.”

In other words, Sunak is the poster boy for the sort of “young globalist leader” who benefits from “public-private partnerships” between guys who control the public purse strings and their financial-pharmaceutical industry cronies.

Between 2020-2022, mRNA vaccines were all the rage in British government circles. Now it’s sending billions to Ukraine’s unelected oligarchy that has a well-documented history of money-laundering and other gangster racketeering.

A decisive factor in making this kind of chicanery possible is the conspicuous dumbing down of the British public, which may now be even more ignorant and brainwashed than the American public. The results in London are plain to see. Guys like Rishi Sunak and his globalist cronies make millions doing dodgy deals with Moderna, the beneficiaries of Britain’s “Net Zero” policy, and Ukrainian oligarchs. They live in the posh parts of town, dine in the fabulous restaurants, and visit the splendid shops of Mayfair.

Most taxpaying Londoners—people who don’t have hedge funds domiciled in the Cayman Islands— struggle to pay for their housing in neighborhoods that are dreary and dystopian.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Why Is the UK Government So Awful? appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Donald Trump wants to be a modern ‘Stupor Mundi or wonder of the world. The last ‘stupor mundi’ was the celebrated German Holy Roman Emperor and crusader, Federick II, known as ‘Barbarossa.’

It appears that President Trump seems determined to become the most important and commented upon person on earth. So far, he has succeeded brilliantly. So far, that is. As of this writing, Trump’s tariff crusade has become a debacle, making him and the United States the objects of hatred and fury around the plant – except for farm regions in the US and among Israel’s supporters. Now even the farmers in the Dakotas are mad as hornets at the president from Queens, New York for wrecking the soya bean market with new tariffs.

To many professional money men, it appears that Trump’s Russian roulette with tariffs threatens to bring a serious recession or worse. One of America’s smartest, most successful money managers, Ray Dalio, just warned that Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff proclamations and other economic policies threaten an eventual global meltdown. Dalio is a noted financial pessimist, but we are unwise to ignore his jeremiads now that America is up to its ears in too much debt.

As a historian, my mind goes quickly back to another financial miracle-worker, the infamous Scot, John Philip Law. He was a gambler who somehow convinced the bankrupt French king Louis XIV to replace gold coins with new paper money. Law created a paper company, the Mississippi Company, that was supposed to mind vast caches of gold.
Law became the richest man in Europe.

In 1720, Law’s company collapsed when it was unable to pay out gold for paper money. He fled to Venice. French state finances have never been the same since. Two other major get rich fast financial scams followed: the South Sea Island fraud and the great Tulip disaster.

We may be seeing a modern version of the Great Mississippi financial fiasco as scoundrels get their hands on the levers of state finance. Trump’s goals in his tariff jihad may be legit – to make America very rich for a short while before the rest of the world gangs up on the unloved USA.

But Trump’s methodology has been calamitous. He and his minions have ignited a worldwide panic, damaged US allies, enraged much of the globe and caused massive damage to world finance and business. And for what? To make President Trump the Stupor Mundi of the moment. Ego on steroids.

What all this betokens is the opening salvo of a coming US-China war. The 17th and 18th century trade wars offer ample evidence of how trade rivalries lead to wars. We are doing it again. We are wildly unwise to revert to the mercantilism of past eras during the nuclear era.

Even at the very end of his life, King Louis XIV knew his warlike, mercantilist policies were wrong. He urged his successor, Louis XV, to eschew expensive wars and to study peace. Young Louis followed this excellent advice and devoted himself to conquests of the boudoir.

The post Stupor Mundi appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s a marvelous scene in the 1984 movie, This Is Spinal Tap, in which guitarist Nigel Tufnel points out to an interviewer that he chooses Marshall amplifiers because, unlike most amplifiers (with volume knobs that go from one to ten), “These go to eleven… It’s one louder, innit?”

The interviewer tries to explain that they’re only numbers, stamped into plastic knobs and don’t represent actual decibels of sound in any way.

Nigel tries to take this information in for several seconds, but fails to understand the obvious logic. When his mind draws a blank, he reverts back to his previous statement and says, again, “These go to eleven.”

Poor Nigel. He’s made up his mind to believe a false premise, because the thought is so appealing.

We can all laugh at Nigel’s inability to understand that his amplifiers are actually no louder than other amplifiers, yet, when we see the same lack of logic in investment circles, we often regard it as not only normal, but correct.

Of course, investment philosophy can be made highly complex, or it can be disarmingly simple: what goes up, must come down. If we accept the validity of this comment, we might also reason that the higher the market goes, the harder it will fall when the bubble bursts, and, of course, the greater the damage it will do to investors when it does.

In the run-up to the 2008 market crash, I frequently suggested to friends and associates who were heavily invested in the market that a crash was on the horizon. In most cases, the reaction I received was, “All my investments are in high-return stocks. If I got out of them, I couldn’t live as well as I do.” “Yes,” I would reply, “but if you don’t get out in time, you’ll lose far more. Your loss will be equal to the depth of the retrenchment. Then, you’d have to live on far less than if you simply got out now.”

I’m sorry to say that the great majority of those with whom I spoke remained in the market… and lost a major portion of their wealth as a result. Worse, when they recovered (with much-diminished lifestyles) they went right back to high-return (and therefore high-risk) stocks. Ipso facto, they’re once again primed for another major loss with the next crash.

In each of the above cases, the investors pursued whatever investment would give them the greatest immediate return. Unfortunately, they put no further thought into their investments than that one short-sighted objective.

It should be mentioned that, back in 2007–2008, when the above discussions were taking place, the investors in question would say, “Everybody agrees that these stocks have a long way to go before there’s a correction. I’d be stupid if I didn’t cash in on that ride.”

By “everybody,” they meant their brokers and all the pundits from Wall Street who appeared on television news programmes—each of whom stood to gain from over-investment and malinvestment in the markets. Indeed, at the time, they all predicted that the market was “going to the moon.”

And this was not the first time that such a prediction occurred. In fact, such predictions have become the byword of every bull market. It’s for this reason that no bull market ends with a whimper, but with a major upside spike. Investors dive in most heavily in the final days of a major bull market.

When warned of a crash, investors generally say, “I’ll wait until I see the turn downward, then I’ll get out.” But, in fact, there’s no “aha moment” to signal them to exit the market. Quite the contrary. If the market does take a sharp dip, the brokers and television pundits describe the drop as a correction and advise investors to “buy on the dip.”

If we consider all the above, it’s no wonder that major bull markets end with an upside spike. And it’s no wonder that crashes are so massive in their destruction. Investors are all-in just prior to the crash.

The astonishing fact is that such a large percentage of investors believe the “going to the moon” story, and that a crash takes out the vast majority of them. Like Nigel Tufnel, their desire to believe that, “these go up to eleven” overrides what should be their common sense and reason that, in fact, there is no real eleven; there is no ride to the moon.

Does this mean that investment is inherently a “dog’s breakfast” and that you should avoid it? Not at all.

But rather than “chasing the trends,” which more often than not end in heartbreak, a very simple philosophy toward investment can prove quite successful.

• Be prepared to do your homework. Seek out investments that you feel have real promise, but, as yet, are not popular and are therefore priced very low. (Warning: this can at times be quite a lot of work, as you’ll reject the great majority of investments you investigate.)
• Buy low, when conventional wisdom says that the investment in question is going nowhere. (If you find that you’d missed a sleeper and it’s now shooting upward, be prepared to let it pass you by—there are other sleepers that you can still buy low.)
• Take profits off the table at intervals. If for any reason you don’t get out in time, you’ll want to have regained your original capital outlay.
• Get out when it becomes clear that everybody and his dog is buying the investment. (Don’t try to guess the crash date. It’s virtually impossible to squeeze out the last dollar before a crash, and sell at precisely the right moment.)
• Don’t regret getting out a year (or more) early. You have your wealth intact and are poised to get back in when the crash has bottomed. (In this regard, you’ll be in a small group, which will make your position that much stronger when it’s time to reinvest.)

It should be said that there are those rare investments that enjoy a meteoric rise, and they’re just as prevalent now as in other eras; however, even those investments are subject to the same natural laws of economics. They, too, tend to get oversold at some point and when they do—when the brokers and television pundits are saying that they are now headed to the moon—that’s the moment at which you might wish to remind yourself that “there’s no eleven,” and sell.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post These Amps Go Up to Eleven appeared first on LewRockwell.

Holy Week is no mere ritual rehearsal for Christians; it’s a political dynamite keg, detonating the myth of human order built on blood. Jesus’ trial, crucifixion, and resurrection expose the scaffolding of power—then and now—as a rickety structure held together by scapegoats and silenced victims. As we navigate our fractured polis in 2025, the Passion narrative demands we confront the same temptations: to cheer for Barabbas, to wash our hands with Pilate, or to abandon the One who reveals the stones crying out for justice.

The Gospels unravel the political with surgical precision. Jesus enters Jerusalem to Hosannas, a king on a donkey, mocking the pomp of empire. Days later, the crowd—fickle as any mob—trades him for Barabbas, a man whose name in the earliest texts is Jesus Barabbas, a violent revolutionary mirroring the establishment’s own brutality. The symmetry is no accident. Barabbas represents the allure of might-makes-right, the seductive promise of force to bind us against a villain. Sound familiar? Our politics thrives on this old magic trick: rally the crowd against a demonized other—be it a marginalized group or a foreign foe in some proxy war. Yet the cross exposes this as a lie. The knowledge of the Lord, as Habakkuk 2 foretold, fills the earth like water, not through conquest but through the slain Lamb who unmasks the guilt we project onto scapegoats.

Habakkuk’s warning haunts Jesus’ words. The prophet condemns cities founded on bloodshed, their walls built with “unjust gain” (Hab. 2:12). In ancient practice, this wasn’t metaphor—immurement, the ritual sacrifice of victims sealed in foundations, was the cornerstone of many societies. Jesus alludes to this when he predicts the stones will cry out if the crowd falls silent (Luke 19:40). And silent they became, abandoning him to the cross. Yet the stones did cry out—not just in the temple’s rubble in 70 AD, but in the resurrection’s seismic ripple. The Passion revealed Israel’s hypocrisy: a nation claiming purity while rejecting prophets, excluding lepers, and mirroring the pagan sacrifices it condemned. Jesus, the cornerstone, becomes both the first victim buried under the city’s weight and the capstone lifted high on the cross, exposing the violence propping up every polis—Jewish, Roman, and ours.

Consider Caiaphas’ chilling logic: “It is better that one man die than the whole nation perish” (John 11:50). This is the scapegoat mechanism laid bare, the crowd’s dispersion of guilt onto a single figure to preserve order. Gentile societies did the same, projecting violence onto mythological gods to obscure their shame. The cross dismantles this. Jesus, numbered among the transgressors, reveals the victim’s innocence, shattering the unanimous fervor that binds societies against a “guilty” other. Pilate and Herod, rivals united in his persecution (Luke 23:12), show how power aligns to excise the misfit who disturbs the status quo. The Sanhedrin fears the crowd; Pilate fears revolt; Herod plays the sycophant. Politicians, then as now, are weak before the mob’s volatility.

This politically charged Gospels texts didn’t just expose politics, it transformed it. Jesus’ followers, emboldened by the resurrection, cared for plague-stricken pagans when Rome’s elite fled. Their nonviolent witness won hearts, forcing the empire to adapt. By the fourth century, Rome adorned itself with the cross—a scandal we can scarcely grasp today. Imagine a meek libertarian dissident like Ron Paul becoming the rallying symbol for both our parties; even that falls short of this historical scandal. A tortured, abandoned God, forgiving his killers, was no mere mascot. Yet Rome’s conversion was half-baked. It abandoned gladiatorial games and overt sacrifice but clung to slavery and war. Christianity’s demystification of guilt-projection clashed with sacrificial violence like oil and water, leaving Rome ripe for schism and collapse.

Today, the stones still cry out. Every story of victims—whether nonviolent prisoners like those Steve Bannon met in jail, or casualties of wars we fuel in Israel-Gaza or Ukraine-Russia—haunts our collective conscience. Jesus tied the stones’ cries to Jerusalem’s fall in 70 AD, when Israel’s zeal for violence mirrored Rome’s and left both exposed as complicit in the same sin. America stands at a similar crossroads. Our politics, like Caiaphas’, justifies flesh-and-blood victims for “national security” or “progress.” We cheer Barabbas-types—leaders promising strength through exclusion or war—while ignoring the Lamb who redefines polis not as the victors’ club but as the refuge for the least of these.

The Passion’s political implications are radical. It reveals power as a house of cards, sustained by silencing victims. The resurrection vindicates those victims, proving that no empire, no mob, can bury the truth. Jesus’ movement upended history toward the marginalized, as he predicted. But it also warns us: clinging to sacrificial violence—be it cultural scapegoating or global wars—dooms us to Rome’s fate. The cross haunts every nation, breaking us into rivalry and schism until we repent.

America must choose now. Nonviolence and repentance are not moral platitudes; they are political necessities. The alternative is more rubble, more cries from the stones we’ve buried. Holy Week is not a call to nostalgia and private religion but to revolution—a revolution of the heart that dismantles the altars of might-makes-right. The Lamb has spoken. Will we listen, or will we keep building on blood?

The post The Stones Still Cry Out: Holy Week’s Political Reckoning appeared first on LewRockwell.

Americans have become so accustomed to living under tyranny that they are probably incapable of recognizing tyranny.  Once upon a time, April 15 was the annual day of infamy.  It was the day you had to pay your income taxes. 

Americans have been subjected to a tax on their working lives for less than half of their existence as a free people, or, to correct myself, as a former free people.  With the gradual long-term demise of American education, helped along by the US Department of Education, the content of what Americans know has dramatically changed.  Once they knew who they are and the principles on which their liberty rested.  Today they know how to play video games, write software for programs that regulate their lives from instructions their cars give them to how the NSA and businesses spy on them. They know movie trivia, the affairs of celebrities, the standings of their college football teams, their golf scores, and the expense of their wives’ remodeling of kitchens and baths. 

But they don’t know much else, except the Democrats know that Trump is evil. And America and white people are racist and evil. And there are many genders.  And illegal immigrant-invaders have the same, or greater, rights as American citizens.  Just ask any Democrat federal district judge.  And still  Americans vote for Democrats.  In other words, the question is:  Are the American people capable of self-government?

The historical definition of a free person was a person who owned his own labor.  Historically most people were not free.  They were either slaves of serfs.

A slave did not own his own labor.  His owner did.  His owner purchased the slave’s labor when he purchased the slave. He purchased the slave in order to acquire his labor which was needed as there was no available labor force to hire. Instead, producers had to acquire a work force by making a capital investment, not by paying a wage. In place of a wage, producers had to purchase labor by purchasing slaves, often warriors who were captured in the black King of Dahomey’s slave wars.  Many black Africans who became slaves in the New World, were the defeated black warriors in Dahomey’s slave wars. Those who themselves were fighting for slaves became, in defeat, slaves.  

The fact that a black warrior class, which constituted a percentage the slaves on 19th Southern cotton and tobacco plantations, never revolted, not even when provoked by Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” when no while male adult  presence was on the plantations, is proof that the Northern propaganda against the South had hatred of Southerners as its purpose.  It is amazing but a fact that the world view of every person on planet Earth is contaminated by propaganda accepted as fact.  Almost every narrative people believe is false.

A Medieval serf owned the largest part of his labor. The lord of the manor on which the serf lived had use rights to no more than one-third of the serf’s labor, and serfs had use rights to a portion of the land.  

We can look at the lords use rights in the serf’s labor as a form of taxation. A system of use rights predates and is different from a system of alienable rights, rights that can be bought and sold.  But if we ignore the exchange, which involved the serfs rights to use the land in exchange for the rights of the lords to use the serfs’ labor, we have the fact that serfs did not own the full portion of their labor.  This is the identical position of all peoples who today labor under an income tax.  

In other words, the medieval era was brought back to Americans with the income tax in the second decade of the 20th Century.

From their inception until 1913–really until 1918–Americans were still a free people.  The income tax introduced in 1913, along with the Federal Reserve–two disastrous events in American history–turned free Americans into the serfs of the government.  Your labor, and the income from it, no longer belongs to you.  Your feudal lord, your “constitutional democratic” government, has the same claim to your labor as a feudal lord had on a serf’s labor in the medieval era.

The handful of conspirators who snuck a medieval fiscal policy into free America were far more clever than the American population and legislative leaders.  They brought the income tax in at such a high threshold and such a low tax rate that no threat was perceived.  

Some decades ago I wrote the story.  When the constitutional amendment to pass what was an unconstitutional income tax was presented to states for ratification, few states had citizens with sufficient incomes to be subject to income tax.  I remember that the Georgia legislature said it had no objection to the income tax, because there was no one in the state with an income large enough to be subject to the tax.

What the state legislatures overlooked is that once an income tax is in place, all that is needed is a “crisis” and down go the thresholds and up go the tax rates.  This happened to Americans with the First World War.

Instead of seeing April 15 as the day Americans turn over to a master a share of their year’s working time, Americans experience a bonanza.  They get a “tax refund,” a gift from the government in time for their summer vacation. For them, income tax withholding is a form of forced saving. They are overwithheld and denied the use of their money all year and then receive it as a “refund.”

Imagine their view toward the income tax if they had to pay the full amount annually on April 15. If you hadn’t been withheld, you would be faced with an income tax payment the size of a mortgage payment, car payment, and credit card payment combined. Your view toward the government would not be the same as the view that results from being handed a refund.

From the government’s standpoint, this is the advantage of the withholding tax.  You never see the money in the first place. Your salary is the take-home amount.  The employer pays the tax for you.  You file a  tax form, and money from the government appears.  

Government regards it as wonderful how stupid Americans are, and  stupid Americans regard it as wonderful that the government sends them money every year for their summer vacations.

How exactly do you make a government this corrupt and a people this stupid great again?

Prior to the income tax the work force received weekly pay envelops with cash.  What workers earned was not recorded in order that it could be taxed by withholding.  No one needed a bank.  The income tax turned your work time into a criminal offense should you misstate it on your income tax return. Thus, for the first time among a free people a workers work and how he reported it became a possible criminal offense leading to the imprisonment of the “free” worker.   If truth be known American taxpayers have been subject to worst punishment than slaves on 19th century cotton plantations.

Yet, after 100 years there are no protests. Serfdom is so institutionalized that it is not recognized.

Taxation has many inequities.  I will point out one of them–the narrative of a capital gain.  Let’s take the example of a home.  Over time house and land prices rise with inflation.  For example, when I was in high school the price of an upper middle class house in the city in which I lived was $20,000 – 25,000.  After decades of life in the house its value would be much higher.  If the property is sold, the government will say you have a capital gain in the price rise. But the price you receive is the replacement cost of the house.  You have no gain.  Indeed, after closing costs and real estate commission, you cannot replace the property with your net receipts.  So where is the gain?  The same holds for financial instruments.  There is no such thing as a long-term capital gain.

For investment properties you can avoid the capital gains tax by reinvesting the sale proceeds into another investment property, but this avenue is not open to homes used for residence.

There are short-term capital gains from, for example, financial market participants conducting arbitrage or front-running stock trades and making a penny or fraction of a penny per share in large volumes.  In reality this is ordinary income from a day’s work.

Americans are accustomed to thinking of inequities in the tax laws in terms of loopholes for the rich, but the worst inequities go beyond the special pleading and lobbying successes of organized interests.

For most of our history the US government was financed by tariffs.  If we could return to tariffs as the basis for government revenue, we could regain our freedom.

The post April 15 Provides a Wonderful Lesson on How Government Conditioned Americans to Tyranny appeared first on LewRockwell.

Peter returned to the mic Friday to examine the latest fallout from Trump’s trade policy. He decodes the so-called “Liberation Day” rhetoric used by the administration, reiterates the unintended economic consequences of protectionist measures, and warns that the United States might soon face an unprecedented financial crisis. Peter also discusses practical financial strategies, urging listeners toward safe haven assets like gold as a critical hedge in these uncertain economic times.

Peter starts off by questioning the surprise expressed by mainstream analysts when confronted with recent market shifts, noting that what seems unexpected to many aligns with his long-standing predictions:

I’m watching in the financial media, and people are talking about all the moves in the market that nobody expected. Everybody is talking about how nobody thought that the dollar would go down or that bonds would go down and rates would go up with tariffs. Everybody was surprised by the markets because everybody’s been saying it’s counterintuitive. Well, it’s only counterintuitive if your intuition is wrong. Everything that has happened since Liberation Day is exactly what I said would happen before Liberation Day as a response to the liberation.

Peter challenges Trump’s triumphant portrayal of reciprocal tariffs, pointing out the hidden realities beneath the surface. Instead of a victorious economic policy, he sees a misguided and harmful tax on the American people:

When Trump announced these reciprocal tariffs, he was so proud. All this fanfare, this is liberation day: ‘Hey, I got great news for you, I’m going to make everything you buy way more expensive. I’m going to hit you with the biggest tax increase ever, but he doesn’t put it in those terms.’ He’s like, ‘This is great, I’m hitting them, America is fighting back, we’ve been screwed over, we’ve been taken advantage of, now we’re fighting back, this is our Independence Day, this is our liberation.’ It was all BS. What I said at the time on my podcast is he’s liberating us from our standard of living, from all of our low-cost goods. He’s liberating us from low interest rates, he’s liberating us from our stock portfolios and our equity in those portfolios.

Furthermore, Peter exposes the deeper strategic failure of Trump’s trade policy. He argues that the president’s leverage has evaporated, noting the credibility damage caused by tariff flip-flopping:

If he actually wanted to use tariffs as a negotiation leverage, he’s lost it. He can’t negotiate anymore with the threat of tariffs because now the world knows that it’s an empty threat. He’s a paper tiger. Because if Trump puts back on those high tariffs, the markets are going to crash. The markets rallied massively because he removed those reciprocal tariffs that aren’t even reciprocal. So how is he going to put them back? Who is he fooling, right? He’s exposed himself.

Peter doesn’t mince words about where the economic situation could lead. He warns we’re standing at the brink of a severe financial crisis—one potentially far worse than the 2008 housing collapse—precisely because the next crisis will lie in sovereign debt and the Treasury market itself:

We are on the precipice of the worst financial crisis that we’ve seen, and there’s not going to be any bailouts because when the financial crisis was about the mortgage market, the government could bail out the mortgage market because the government was able to buy up the toxic assets and replace it with its own credit, so people wanted treasuries. But if the treasuries are the epicenter of the crisis, it’s a sovereign debt crisis. Who’s going to bail out the United States? The only ones that could have are China and Japan, but we’ve alienated them, so they’re not coming to our rescue. All you got is the Fed, but when the Fed bails us out, it’s massive inflation.

With inflation looming large, Peter reiterates his strong conviction in gold and gold mining stocks as reliable protection against the brewing storm within the financial system. He points out that the sector will continue to benefit from central banks adding to their gold reserves for the foreseeable future:

The primary reserve asset all around the world is going to be gold, right? I don’t think the rest of the central banks would be buying European debt. Certainly the European central banks aren’t going to be buying it, so they’re going to be in gold, right? And so these gold mining companies have huge customers. Central banks are going to be great customers, because they’re going to be price takers. Whatever the price is, they’ll buy it, because they need it.

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post Tariffs Trigger Looming Financial Crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Donald Trump is acting faster than any other politician of his generation. In a dozen weeks, he has already overturned “American imperialism” in favor of his “exceptionalism.” This is still not the end of the problem, but it represents a considerable step forward for both the United States and the rest of the world.
Simultaneously, he has slashed the federal bureaucracy by eliminating agencies outside his purview and laying off 230,000 federal employees.

It’s been more than three months since Donald Trump began his second term in the White House. He’s issued a staggering number of executive orders of all kinds, giving the impression of a muddled personality. However, despite the short time he’s had, his first results are beginning to show.

Decolonizing the “American Empire”

He initially sought to decolonize the “American empire.” However, after his 2017 attempt failed resoundingly, he changed his approach. On his eighth day in office, he removed the permanent seats of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA Director from the National Security Council by executive order.  [ 1 ] This led to a revolt in the senior administration, which led him, sixteen days later, to dismiss his National Security Advisor, General Michael Flynn.

This affair left its mark, as the National Security Administration intervened during the last election campaign to falsely assure that Hunter Biden’s computer did not exist and that those who claimed to have seen it were Russian disinformation agents  [ 2 ] . Donald Trump also stripped them of their top secret clearance in the first days of his second term  [ 3 ] .

This time, Donald Trump took the bull by the horns: he forced early retirement of all the civil servants who had fought against him during his first administration and dissolved the Federal Executive Institute that trained them  [ 4 ] . Once this level of personalities was purged, he also withdrew the security clearances of 15 politicians (including former President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) to make sure they would not stand in his way again  [ 5 ] . “Never two without three,” they say: so he fired six more civil servants from his National Security Council  [ 6 ] on April 2, because they were still working with their Straussian friends  [ 7 ] .

With those people out of the way, President Donald Trump began peace talks on Ukraine, Palestine, and Iran. Each responded when he put the unelected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in his place, but he also put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his place twice .  [ 8 ] The first time, he responded to his plan to annex Gaza by telling him he would rather build a new Riviera than see him occupy it; the second time, he told him he could do nothing to divide Syria, and he could not attack Iran either.

Certainly, for the moment, none of these three hot spots are at peace, but things are moving quickly:
• In Ukraine, he has made it clear that Crimea, Donbass, and part of Novorossia are indeed Russian. Furthermore, it is clear that a presidential election will have to be held. The “integral nationalists”  [ 9 ] already know that they have lost. On the territories to be divided, the only two Ukrainian demands are, on the one hand, to recover the civilian nuclear power plant in Zaporozhye (something to which Russia is firmly opposed  [ 10 ] ) and whether or not Moscow will be allowed to annex Odessa without having to conquer it.
• In Palestine, he has made almost all the actors admit that Hamas could not return to power in Gaza, but he cannot find an alternative to the “revisionist Zionists” (that is, the disciples of the fascist Vladymyr Jabotinky  [ 11 ] ) in Israel. Donald Trump has failed to stop the massacre of Palestinians, who are still starving in Gaza, or to end the sectarian massacres in Syria, which is still dominated by jihadists, but he has forced Israel to abandon its ambitions in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.
• In Iran, he is only just beginning and has not yet made the Islamic Republic admit that it cannot safely arm the Shiite minorities in the region, but he has not yet offered to guarantee their security by any other means. The situation here is more difficult because he has threatened Iran, as he did with Ukraine and with the Palestinians, prompting an immediate hardening of Tehran’s stance  [ 12 ] .

In all three cases, President Trump used his armies without fighting: he briefly suspended the intelligence that the Pentagon was providing to the Ukrainian armies  [ 13 ] causing a military collapse; he also briefly suspended the delivery of arms to Israel, even if this point was not publicized, but caused very serious concern within the Israeli general staff. Conversely, he is accumulating forces in Diego Garcia to threaten Iran  [ 14 ] . His only military action will have been to attack Ansar Allah in Yemen; a murderous and tactically useless action, the Yemenis being prepared for it, but useful to get his message across to Iran.

Clean up the federal bureaucracy

Alongside his reorganization of US foreign relations, President Donald Trump has begun to “trim the mammoth,” that is, to prune the useless branches of the US federal state. This is the other major project of the “Jacksonians,” that is, the disciples of President Andrew Jackson  [ 15 ] . To do this, he relies on the oligarch Elon Musk. However, the richest man in the world is not a Jacksonian, but a libertarian. His concern is not to destroy the unconstitutional attributes of the federal state for the benefit of the federated states, but to reduce its weight. In this case, these two distinct objectives are served by the same actions, at least so far.

In twelve weeks, Elon Musk has managed to register the resignations or dismiss 230,000 federal agents. While we certainly view this approach as savage, the fact remains that he is not questioning their competence, but their usefulness, which is quite different. Most of them were ensuring the application of rules that should not have existed. This does not mean that they are bad, but that they are not part of the function of the federal government and should therefore not be implemented with taxpayers’ money. This downsizing has accidentally brought to light numerous cases of corruption, for example, a $900,000 grant awarded by the Small and Medium Enterprises Agency to a nine-month-old baby. However, the real issue is not yet there. $6 billion in Pentagon grants have just been canceled, notably those offered to universities, with no connection whatsoever to the defense of the United States. Once DOGE has access to the nation’s accounts, it will be able to see what each transfer made by the federal government is used for, such as the salaries paid to numerous foreign leaders. It is therefore understandable why the legal battle is underway to keep all this secret.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) projects $150 billion in savings over the year from these cuts to bureaucracy and the fight against fraud, a gain of $931.68 per taxpayer. It’s small compared to what was projected, but absolutely substantial.

No comparison should be made between the United States and other states, only with the European Union, whose federal bureaucracy is equally opaque, as the current scandal of hidden subsidies to NGOs shows  [ 16 ] .

(…To be continued)

—

[ 1 ]  “  Donald Trump dissolves the organization of US imperialism  ,” by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , January 30, 2017.

[ 2 ]  “ Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails ”, Voltaire Network , October 19, 2020.

[ 3 ]  “2721 Donald Trump strips intelligence officials involved in political falsification of their clearances”, Voltaire, international news – No. 117 – January 24, 2025.

[ 4 ]  “2872 Donald Trump dissolves the American ENA”, Voltaire, international news – No. 120 – February 14, 2025.

[ 5 ]  “3138 Donald Trump withdraws the security clearances of 15 opposition figures.”, Voltaire, international news – No. 126 – March 28, 2025.

[ 6 ]  “  Trump Fires 6 NSC Officials After Oval Office Meeting With Laura Loomer  ”, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan & Ken Bensinger, The New York Times , April 3, 2025.

[ 7 ]  “  Vladimir Putin declares war on the Straussians  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , March 5, 2022.

[ 8 ]  “2228 Benjamin Netanyahu cooled by his visit to the White House  ”, Voltaire, international news – No. 128 – April 11, 2025.

[ 9 ]  “  Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists?  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , November 15, 2022.

[ 10 ]  “  Statement by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant  ”, Voltaire Network , March 26, 2025.

[ 11 ]  “  The veil is torn: the hidden truths of Jabotinsky and Netanyahu  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , January 23, 2024.

[ 12 ]  “  Iran denounces US threats to peace  ,” by Amir Saeid Iravani, Voltaire Network , March 31, 2025.

[ 13 ]  “  The West against CRINK  ”, by Manlio Dinucci, Translation M.-A., Voltaire Network , April 5, 2025.

[ 14 ]  “3185 The Pentagon is preparing for a possible war against Iran”, Voltaire, international news – No. 127 – April 4, 2025.

[ 15 ]  “  Donald Trump, an Andrew Jackson 2.0?  ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network , November 19, 2024.

[ 16 ]  “3249 The scandal of the opaque financing of certain NGOs by the European Commission”, Voltaire, international news – No. 128 – April 11, 2025.

The post Donald Trump’s Projects appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Sunday Israel bombed the al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, which readers may remember as the hospital that Israel ferociously insisted it didn’t bomb in October 2023 and accused anyone who said otherwise of antisemitic blood libel. According to a statement from the Episcopal Church’s Diocese of Jerusalem, this is now the fifth time this hospital has been bombed since the beginning of the Gaza onslaught.

The IDF is predictably claiming there was a Hamas base in the hospital, because that’s what they always do. The hospitals are Hamas, the ambulances are Hamas, the journalists are Hamas, the UN is Hamas, the schools are Hamas, the children are Hamas, every building in Gaza is Hamas, and anyone who disputes this is also Hamas.

God this gets old.

❖

Israel, October 2023: How dare you say we bombed Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital? We would never bomb a hospital!

Israel, 2023–2025: *bombs all hospitals in Gaza*

Israel, April 2025: We just bombed Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital again.

❖

Saying that opposing genocide is hateful toward Jews is like saying that opposing child molestation is hateful toward Catholics.

❖

Western Zionists will be like, “All this hate for Israel makes me feel anxious and unsafe!”

Really? Are you sure that’s what you’re feeling? Are you sure it’s not guilt? Gut-wrenching guilt about all those dead kids in the genocide you support? Or cognitive dissonance, because your entire worldview is wrong?

❖

People often say I hate Israel, but what’s weird is they say it like it’s a bad thing.

❖

So far the “President of Peace” has started a relentless bombing campaign in Yemen, reignited the Gaza holocaust, and shifted more US war machinery to west Asia in preparation for war with Iran, all while getting ready to announce the first ever trillion-dollar Pentagon budget.

Trump is just as awful a warmonger as Biden. If there’s a war with Iran he’ll be far worse. He hasn’t even gotten a Ukraine ceasefire.

❖

The western political faction that’s doing the most to help murder children in Gaza are not the “Yeehaw kill them Arabs” fanatics of the far right, but the “Gosh it’s so complicated, both sides hate each other and they’ve been at war for millennia” fence-sitting of the so-called moderate.

The latter is far more destructive because it’s much more widespread and accepted in mainstream western discourse. You can’t be a good talkshow liberal if you’re saying you want to exterminate every living organism in Gaza, but if you hem and haw about ancient unresolvable conflicts and how complicated it all is, you can maintain your vaguely progressivish self-image while still encouraging everyone to allow the western empire to continue backing an active genocide.

And it’s just complete nonsense. This isn’t complicated; it’s exactly what it looks like. A military force backed by the most powerful empire in history is waging a campaign of extermination and ethnic cleansing to eliminate an undesirable population by raining military explosives onto a giant concentration camp full of children. There are two sides to most conflicts. There are not two sides to this one.

And this isn’t an ancient conflict, it’s the culmination of abuses which were initiated by western powers dropping a brand new settler-colonialist ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization after the second world war. There was no reason to believe the middle east would not have joined the rest of the world in settling into a more peaceful status quo after WWII without western imperialists forcefully inserting an artificial apartheid state into the region like a shard of glass into a foot and then keeping it there by any amount of violence necessary.

Sure the middle east had plenty of violence prior to the world wars, but if you’ve ever read American and European history you’ll know this wasn’t anything unique to the middle east; it was the norm around the world. It wasn’t until after WWII that things settled down a bit and westerners grew accustomed to a more peaceful status quo; the only reason the middle east wasn’t allowed to join in that movement was because of aggressive western intervention.

By just shrugging saying “Yeah the Israelis hate the Palestinians and the Palestinians hate the Israelis, who’s to say who’s right,” this mainstream line tacitly promotes the notion that we should just let things play out as they are rather than doing everything we can to stop an active genocide that’s being backed by our own leaders. And this is the position put forward by most of the people with prominent voices in our society. They’re not just not helping, they’re discouraging everyone else from helping too.

___________________

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 Saying It’s Antisemitic To Oppose Genocide Is Like Saying It’s Anti-Catholic To Oppose Pedophilia appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump might have inadvertently come up with the perfect solution to America’s decades-old, ongoing, never-ending, perpetual immigration crisis. That solution entails making America so ugly that foreigners will no longer want to come here.

After all, that’s what North Korea did. Like the United States, North Korea militarized and sealed its southern border, established a police state, and isolated itself from the rest of the world. Today, no one is striving to get into North Korea because the government has made the country so ugly.

Many foreigners are cancelling vacation plans to the United States. Others are selling American vacation homes. They are wise to do so. Otherwise, they could suddenly find themselves on a U.S. military transport plane carting them to the maximum-security, anti-terrorist torture and brutality camp in El Salvador. As U.S. Justice Department officials are telling federal judges, once people have been delivered to El Salvador, as compared to the Pentagon/CIA torture and brutality camp at Gitmo, U.S. officials are powerless to get them released. What foreigner wants to take that chance by coming to the United States, legally or illegally?

Of course, the ugliness does not just extend to the mistreatment of people here in the United States. With Trump’s tariffs and trade-war antics, it now extends to harming people all over the world by bankrupting and impoverishing foreign citizens. The victims include extremely poor people who supposedly have been taking advantage of college-educated Americans by selling goods and services to them. Who wants to visit a country that adopts economic policies that wreak destruction among innocent foreigners who aren’t even trying to get into the United States?

No doubt operating under a deportation quota, U.S. immigration officials are now revoking student visas for foreigners studying in colleges and universities across the land. The reason? They are foreigners. Some of them are college seniors, which means they don’t get to graduate. That’s ugly.

But the fact is that President Trump is not the root cause of America the ugly. He’s just a manifestation of the very bad, rotten systems under which Americans live today. It’s those systems that have made America ugly. There are nine systems to which I am referring, all of which work in tandem:

1. The welfare-state system;
2. The regulated/managed economy system;
3. The income tax/IRS system;
4. The paper-money/Federal Reserve system;
5. The national-security state system;
6. The drug-war system;
7. The immigration-control system;
8. The foreign empire/intervention system; and
9. The public (i.e., government) school system.

America has not always had these nine systems. For example, if we consider the period 1880-1910, which is my favorite time in all of history, Americans living at that time had none of these systems. In fact, those Americans hated and rejected everything Americans today stand for and favor. Interestingly and not coincidentally, it was in the year 1893 that the song “America the Beautiful” was written.

When 20th-century Americans rejected those nine founding systems of our nation in favor of statist systems, they thought they were ushering in a “great society,” to use President Lyndon Johnson’s term, or, to use Trump’s phrase, a “golden era.”

In fact, those nine systems converted America into an ugly nation, one that is clearly being destroyed from within. Financially, the federal government is now $36.7 trillion in debt, an amount that climbs ever year, including during Trump’s first term as president. It will continue increasing during Trump’s second term in office. That debt now amounts to $330,000 per taxpayer. How many taxpayers can pay their share of this massive debt?

But far worse than the financial mess is the moral rot at the center of the American empire. With the welfare state, Americans do their best to use the IRS to take money from whom it belongs in order to give it to people to whom it does not belong. They call that coercion “care and compassion.” At the same time, they scramble desperately every April 15 to find as many income-tax deductions as possible in an effort to keep their own money from being looted. It is a system in which Americans are at constant war against each other, including intergenerational war with such socialist programs as Social Security and Medicare.

To help finance the ever-growing expenditure of these nine systems, the Federal Reserve has been inflating and debasing its paper money ever since its inception in 1913, a monetary phenomenon that current-day Americans falsely blame on private-sector “greed.”

In the name of keeping us “safe,” the national-security state has been given omnipotent, totalitarian powers over the citizenry, including state-sponsored assassinations, torture, indefinite detention, or rendition to Gitmo or El Salvador as accused “terrorists.” It also wreaks massive death and destruction around the world with invasions, occupations, coups, provocations, sanctions, and embargoes.

Today, an increasing number of American are choosing to live in foreign countries rather than here in the United States. In fact, it is ironic that more than a million Americans have chosen to live in Mexico, the country that is supposedly filled with murderers, rapists, and robbers who are supposedly trying to get into the United States to kill, rape, and rob us.

The drug war, which just happens to be the most racist government program since segregation, has given us a society of massive violence, not to mention that it has destroyed our liberty and privacy in the never-ending effort to “win” it. Of course, no one bothers to notice that the entire drug war is devoted to preventing countless Americans from getting their hands on the drugs that they wish to ingest. It’s just another way that America the ugly manifests itself.

But it’s clearly not the only way. Suicide is now the second-leading cause of death for teens and young adults aged 10-34. That’s what America the ugly has produced — young people checking out of life early.

It’s also worth mentioning the irrational mass killings that have become a normal and integral part of all this the ugliness.

The problem is that thanks to America’s state-controlled educational system, 21st-century Americans, in the name of “freedom,” remain as wedded to these nine statist systems as their 20-century predecessors. The last thing they want to do is acknowledge that these systems have not only failed to achieve the “great society” or the “golden era” but instead are the root cause of America’s ugliness. And so Americans do two things: (1) Elect a man on the white horse who will be the one who finally — finally! — makes their beloved nine systems work, even if he has to make America uglier in the process, and (2) do what totalitarian regimes have done throughout history — target unpopular scapegoats who can be blamed for the ugliness arising from bad systems, such as illegal immigrants, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Muslims, or whoever.

America the Ugly. Why not make that our new national anthem?

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post America the Ugly appeared first on LewRockwell.

On today’s Tuesday Newsday episode of America’s Untold Stories, Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley dive into a chilling, developing story: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s mansion was set ablaze while his family slept inside. Shocking new details reveal the suspect intended to physically harm the governor, turning this case from political unrest into an attempted assassination plot.

We also examine Harvard’s fiery public response to Trump’s demands, setting the stage for what could become a billion-dollar battle between academia and the White House. Plus, Hollywood reels as China officially retaliates against Trump’s tariffs by reducing U.S. film imports, shaking the entertainment industry to its core.

Taylor Lorenz is under fire for her bizarre praise of alleged killer Luigi Mangione. Meanwhile, a deportation mix-up forces the Trump administration to address wrongful removal—and punt responsibility.

Closing out the show, we look at how Trump’s endorsement is turbocharging Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ohio gubernatorial campaign.

Don’t miss this explosive, headline-packed Tuesday Newsday.

The post America’s Untold Stories – Governor Josh Shapiro’s Mansion Torched in Midnight Arson Plot appeared first on LewRockwell.