Lew Rockwell Institute

Russia and Iran are at the forefront of the multi-layered Eurasia integration process – the most crucial geopolitical development of the young 21st century.

Both are top members of BRICS+ and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Both are seriously implicated as Global Majority leaders to build a multi-nodal, multipolar world. And both have signed, in late January in Moscow, a detailed, comprehensive strategic partnership.

The second administration of US President Donald Trump, starting with the “maximum pressure” antics employed by the bombastic Circus Ringmaster himself, seems to ignore these imperatives.

It was up to the Russian Foreign Ministry to re-introduce rationality in what was fast becoming an out of control shouting match: essentially Moscow, alongside its partner Tehran, simply will not accept outside threats of bombing Iran’s nuclear and energy infrastructure, while insisting on the search for viable negotiated solutions for the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

And then, just like lightning, the Washington narrative changed. US Special Envoy for Middle East Affairs, Steven Witkoff – not exactly a Metternich, and previously a “maximum pressure” hardliner – started talking about the need for “confidence-building” and even “resolving disagreements,” implying Washington began “seriously considering,” according to the proverbial “officials,” indirect nuclear talks.

These implications turned to reality on Monday afternoon when Trump allegedly blindsided the visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the announcement of a “very big meeting” with Iranian officials in the next few days. Tehran later confirmed the news, with Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi saying he would engage in indirect nuclear negotiations with Witkoff in Oman on Saturday.

It’s as if Trump had at least listened to the arguments exposed by the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But then again, he can change his mind in a Trump New York minute.

The finer points of the Russia–Iran–China axis

Essential background to decipher the “Will Russia help Iran” conundrum can be found in these all-too-diplomatic exchanges at the Valdai Club in Moscow.

The key points were made by Alexander Maryasov, Russia’s ambassador to Iran from 2001 to 2005. Maryasov argues that the Russia–Iran treaty is not only a symbolic milestone, but “serves as a roadmap for advancing our cooperation across virtually all domains.” It is more of “a bilateral relations document” – not a defense treaty.

The treaty was extensively discussed – then approved – as a counter-point to “the intensified military-political and economic pressure exerted by western nations on both Russia and Iran.”

The main rationale was how to fight against the sanctions tsunami.

Yet even if it does not constitute a military alliance, the treaty details mutually agreed moves if there is an attack or threats to either nation’s national security – as in Trump’s careless bombing threats against Iran. The treaty also defines the vast scope of military-technical and defense cooperation, including, crucially, regular intel talk.

Maryasov identified the key security points as the Caspian, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and last but not least, West Asia, including the breadth and reach of the Axis of Resistance.

The official Moscow position on the Axis of Resistance is an extremely delicate affair. For instance, let’s look at Yemen. Moscow does not officially recognize the Yemeni resistance government embodied by Ansarallah and with its HQ in the capital Sanaa; rather, it recognizes, just like Washington, a puppet government in Aden, which is in fact housed in a five-star hotel in Riyadh, sponsored by Saudi Arabia.

Last summer two different Yemeni delegations were visiting Moscow. As I witnessed it, the Sanaa delegation faced tremendous bureaucratic problems to clinch official meetings.

There is, of course, sympathy for Ansarallah across Moscow intel and military circles. But as confirmed in Sanaa with a member of the High Political Council, these contacts occur via “privileged channels,” and not institutionally.

The same applies to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which was a key Russian ally in routing ISIS and other Islamist extremist groups during the Syrian war. When it comes to Syria, the only thing that really matters for official Moscow, after the Al-Qaeda-linked extremists took power in Damascus last December, is to preserve the Russian bases in Tartous and Hmeimim.

There’s no question that the Syrian debacle was an extremely serious setback for both Moscow and Tehran, further aggravated by Trump’s non-stop escalation over Iran’s nuclear program and his “maximum pressure” obsession.

The nature of the Russia–Iran treaty differs substantially from that of Russia–China. For Beijing, the partnership with Moscow is so solid, it develops so dynamically, that they don’t even need a treaty: they have a “comprehensive strategic partnership.”

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in his recent visit to Russia, after coining a pearl – “those who live in the 21st century but think in Cold War blocs and zero-sum games cannot keep up with the times” – neatly summarized Sino–Russian relations in three vectors: The two Asian giants are “forever friends and never enemies;” Equality and mutually beneficial cooperation; Non-alignment with blocs; Non-confrontation, and non-targeting of third parties. So even as we have a Russia–Iran treaty, between China and Russia, and China and Iran, we have essentially close partnerships.

Witness, for instance, the fifth annual joint Russia–Iran–China naval exercises that took place in the Gulf of Oman in March. This trilateral synergy is not new; it has been under development for years.

But it’s lazy to characterize this improved RIC Primakov triangle (Russia–Iran–China instead of Russia–India–China) as an alliance. The only “alliance” that exists today on the geopolitical chessboard is NATO – a warmongering outfit composed of intimidated vassals corralled together by the Empire of Chaos.

Cue to yet another hard-to-resist Wang Yi jade pearl: “The US is sick but forces others to take the medicine.” Takeaways: Russia is not switching sides; China won’t be encircled; and Iran will be defended.

When the new Primakov triangle meets in Beijing 

At the Valdai discussion, Daniyal Meshkin Ranjbar, assistant professor in the Department of Theory and History of International Relations at the Moscow-based RUDN University, made a crucial point: “For the first time in history, the diplomatic outlooks of Russia and Iran converge.” He’s referring to the obvious parallels between official policies: Russia’s “pivot to the east” and Iran’s “look east” policies.

All those interconnections plainly escape the new administration in Washington, as well as bombastic Trump–Netanyahu rhetoric that has zero basis in reality – even the US National Security Council admitted that Iran is not working on a nuclear bomb.

And that brings us to the Big Picture.

The Circus Ringmaster – at least until he changes his mind again – is essentially working on a triangulation deal, allegedly offering Russia a transportation framework, access to grain exports in the Black Sea, and Russian banks off the sanction list of SWIFT so he may execute his “pivot” to then attack Iran (deadline to Tehran included).

And if Russia defends Iran, no deal.

That’s as mendacious as Mafia-style “offer you can’t refuse” maximum pressure can get. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov – an exceptionally able diplomat – destroyed the whole rationale: “Russia cannot accept US proposals to end the war in Ukraine in their current form because they do not solve the problems Moscow considers the cause of the conflict.” Even as Moscow “takes the models and solutions proposed by the Americans very seriously.”

As the Russian angle of Trump’s triangulation falters, Tehran is not merely watching the river flow. How Iran adapted for decades to a sanctions tsunami is now firm knowledge deeply shared with Moscow, part of their deepening cooperation enshrined in the treaty.

For all of Trump’s volatility, non-Zionist-contaminated voices across the Beltway are slowly but surely imprinting the rational view that a war on Iran is absolutely suicidal for the Empire itself. So the odds resurface that Trump 2.0 verbal barrages may be paving the way for a temporary deal that will be spun to death – after all, this is always a battle of narratives – as a diplomatic victory.

Bets can be made that the only leader on the planet capable of making Trump understand reality is Russian President Vladimir Putin, in their next phone call.  After all, it is the Circus Ringmaster himself who created the revamped “nuclear Iran” drama. RIC – or the revamped Primakov triangle – duly addressed it, together, in a crucial, discreet, not-publicized recent meeting in Beijing, as confirmed by diplomatic sources.

Essentially, the RIC has developed a “nuclear Iran” road map. These are the highlights:

• Dialogue. No escalation. No “maximum pressure”. Step-by-step moves. Build mutual confidence.
• As Iran re-emphasizes its veto on developing nuclear weapons, the much-debated “international community”, actually the UN Security Council, recognizes, again, Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy under the NPT.
• Back to the JCPOA – and reboot it. To get Trump back on board, the reboot will be an extremely hard sell.

This roadmap was ratified during a second round of RIC trilateral talks in Moscow on Tuesday, where senior officials from the allied nations discussed collaborative efforts to address the challenges faced by Iran.

That summit in Moscow

As it stands, the road map is just that: a map. The breathless Zionist axis from Washington to Tel Aviv will continue to insist that Iran, if attacked, will not be supported by Russia, and extra, non-stop “maximum pressure” will force Tehran to eventually fold and abandon its support to the Axis of Resistance.

All that, once again, eschews reality. For Moscow, Iran is an absolutely key geopolitical priority; beyond Iran, to the east, is Central Asia. The Zionist obsessive fantasy of regime change in Tehran masks NATO’s then penetrating into Central Asia, building military bases, and at the same time blocking several strategically crucial Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. Iran is as essential to China’s long-term foreign policy as it is to Russia’s.

It’s not by accident that Russia and China will meet at the presidential level – Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping – at a summit in Moscow around 9 May, Victory Day in the Great Patriotic War. They will be analyzing in detail the next stage of “changes that we have not seen in 100 years,” as formulated by Xi to Putin in their groundbreaking 2023 summer in Moscow.

They, of course, will be discussing how the Circus Ringmaster dreams of closing down one Forever War just to start another: the specter of a US–Israel attack on their strategic partner Iran – complete with the counterpunch of blocking the Strait of Hormuz (transit for 24 million barrels of oil a day); a barrel of oil skyrocketing to $200 and even more; and the collapse of the humongous $730 trillion pile of derivatives in the global economy.

No, President Circus Ringmaster: You don’t have the cards.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

The post Russia–Iran–China: All for One, and One for All? 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.

“This is economic sabotage. Whether through malice or incompetence or, more likely, both Trump is isolating the United States on the world stage, tanking the markets, worsening inflation, and burdening working families with the cost of his 18th-century cosplay. These aren’t policies. They’re performance art. And the rest of us are footing the bill.”—Oregon’s Bay Area (blog post)

What we’re witnessing is the calculated use of emergency powers to concentrate power in the hands of the president, enrich the Deep State, and dismantle what remains of economic and constitutional safeguards.

Nearly 250 years after our nation’s founders rebelled over abused property rights, Americans are once again being subjected to taxation without any real representation, all the while the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little concern for the plight of its citizens.

Nothing has changed for the better with Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s getting worse by the day.

Having inherited one of the strongest economies in the world, President Trump—whose credentials as a businessman include multiple failed business ventures, bankruptcies, and a mountain of debt and unpaid bills—has managed to singlehandedly torch the economy with his misguided tariffs and self-serving schemes, which are being carried out without any oversight or checks from Congress.

Yet it is Congress, not the president, that holds the authority to control government spending.

This is spelled out in the Appropriations Clause, found in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution, which establishes a rule of law about how the monies paid to the government by the taxpayers are to be governed, and in the Taxing and Spending Clause of Article I, Section 8, Clause 1. In a nutshell, Congress is in charge of accounting for those funds and authorizing how those funds are spent (or not spent).

The founders intended this regulatory power, referred to as the “power of the purse” (to determine what funds can be spent and what funds can be withheld) to serve as a potent check on any government agency that exceeds its authority, especially the executive branch.

As law professor Zachary Price observes, “Given how strong this check is, it may not be surprising that presidents have sought ways to get around it.”

Woven throughout the history of the United States are examples of this constant power struggle.

For instance, Congress used the power of the purse to end the Vietnam War and pull the U.S. military from Lebanon.

Yet while past presidents have sought to expand their authority under the guise of national emergency declarations, Trump simply taken this executive overreach to unprecedented extremes.

Price explains how various presidents from Obama to Biden to Trump have attempted to subvert that same congressional power to press their own agendas, whether by funding the Affordable Care Act, advancing student debt, or as in Trump’s case, by dismantling and defunding agencies funded by Congress.

Executive orders and national emergencies have become a favored tool by which presidents attempt to govern unilaterally. As the Brennan Center reports, presidents have access to 150 such emergency powers, which essentially allow them to become limited dictators with greatly enhanced powers upon declaration of an emergency.

Because the National Emergencies Act does not actually define what constitutes an emergency, presidents have an incredible amount of room to wreak constitutional mischief on the citizenry.

While presidents on both sides of the aisle have abused these powers, Trump is attempting to test the limits of these emergency powers by declaring a national emergency anytime he wants to sidestep Congress and quickly impose his will on the nation.

Trump’s liberal use of emergency powers to sidestep the rule of law underscores the danger they pose to our constitutional system of checks and balances.

Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has used his presidential emergency powers in a multitude of ways in order to mount brazen power grabs thinly disguised as concerns for national security, thereby allowing him to justify tapping into the nation’s natural resources, rounding up and deporting vast numbers of migrants (both documented and undocumented), and imposing duties and tariffs against longtime allies and trade partners.

Thus far, the Republican-controlled Congress, which has the power to terminate an emergency with a two-thirds vote, has done nothing to rein in Trump’s dictatorial tendencies.

These unchecked powers aren’t just a threat to the balance of government—they have immediate, devastating consequences for the economy and working Americans.

Economists fear the ramifications of Trump’s latest national emergency, which he claims will usher in “the golden age of America” through the imposition of heavy tariffs on foreign nations, could push the U.S. and the rest of the world into a major recession by inciting a global trade-war, isolating America economically from the rest of the world, and flat-lining businesses that had expected to boom.

Fears of a recession are growing stronger by the hour.

In addition to sabotaging the economy, laying off tens of thousands of federal employees and dismantling those parts of government which serve the interests of working-class Americans, as well as its aging, disabled and homeless populations, Trump and his cabal of billionaire buddies are dismantling the few remaining checks on public and private corruption—fueling corporate greed at every turn.

This is how the man who promised to drain the swamp continues to mire us in the swamp.

Meanwhile, taxpayers—whose retirement savings have taken a nosedive—are expected to foot the bill to the tune of tens of millions of dollars for Trump’s frequent golf trips to his own golf courses (he’s also charging exorbitant rates to Secret Service to stay at his properties while protecting him), his multimillion-dollar photo ops at the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500, his desire to redo the White House gardens and build a $100 million ballroom, and his latest demand for a costly military parade in honor of his 79th birthday.

While President Trump may talk a good game about his plans for making America richer, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the only person he’s making richer—at taxpayer expense—is himself.

This fiscal insanity, coupled with Trump’s imperialistic and tyrannical ambitions, echoes the very abuses that drove America’s founders to rebel against King George III.

In other words, the government is still robbing us blind.

Trump hasn’t reined in the government’s greed—he’s just been using a different playbook to get the same result: beg, borrow or steal, the government wants more of our hard-earned dollars any way it can get it.

This is what comes of those multi-trillion dollar spending bills: someone’s got to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity, and that “someone” is always the U.S. taxpayer.

The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture, costly stimulus packages, and a national security complex that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to making us any safer.

Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

Trump, a master at saying one thing and doing another, has made a great show of touting his claims to cutting back on government spending through crippling cuts that will impact almost every sector of the American landscape. However, what Trump fails to mention are all the costly big-budget items he’s tacking on that will not only consume his modest claims to saving money by axing essential programs but further mire the country in debt.

Indeed, Trump, the self-proclaimed “debt king,” has presided over one of the most reckless expansions of government spending in modern history while posturing as a fiscal conservative.

Consider that during Trump’s first term, the national debt rose by almost $7.8 trillion.

According to ProPublica, “That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined… It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country. The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration… And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.”

If Trump’s first term was a preview, his second is a full-blown financial coup—waged against the American people with borrowed money.

Let’s talk numbers, shall we?

The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is more than $36 trillion and will grow another $19 trillion by 2033.

The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars.

It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens).

In other words, the government is spending more than it brings in and, in the process, drowning us in an empire of debt.

Interest payments on the national debt are more than $582 billion, which is significantly more than the government spends on veterans’ benefits and services, and according to Pew Research Center, more than it will spend on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture, science and space programs, foreign aid, and natural resources and environmental protection combined.

According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”

In ten years, those interest payments will exceed our entire military budget.

This isn’t governance. It’s looting—by legislation, debt, and design.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians who promise to pay down the debt, rebuild the economy, and protect our freedoms—but deliver only more debt and more control.

Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.

According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in order to spend money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.

Basically, the U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

This is financial tyranny.

In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or in how our tax dollars are spent, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

And now Trump, eager to do away with goods and services for the poor and needy while imposing a greater tax burden on the working-class citizenry (a burden not shared by the nation’s financial elite), wants $1 trillion for the military so it can be even more lethal and prepared to unleash violence around the globe.

That’s in addition to the nearly $1 billion the Pentagon has already spent on Trump’s largely futile bombing campaign in Yemen.

Incredibly, all of these wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

Of course, we the taxpayers are the ones who have to repay that borrowed debt.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex continues to get richer, while the American taxpayer is forced to pay for programs that do little to protect our rights or improve our lives.

This is no way of life.

Once again, we have a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

Once again, we have a judicial system that insists we have no rights in the face of a government that demands total compliance.

And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep footing the bill for tyranny.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if you have no choice, no voice, and no real say over how your money is used, you’re not free. You’re being ruled.

This is no longer the American dream. It’s a financial nightmare.

As political analyst Robert Reich warns, “Make no mistake about what’s really going on here. While the United States has plenty of real problems to deal with, Trump is ignoring them to manufacture the fake emergencies he needs to further enlarge and centralize his power. America’s real national emergency is Donald J. Trump.”

Until we push back, this nightmare will only deepen.

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

The post A Financial Coup: How the Deep State Is Using Manufactured Crises to Seize Power appeared first on LewRockwell.

Steve Miran is the Chairman of President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors.

CEA Chairman Steve Miran Hudson Institute Event Remarks – The White House, Apr 7 2025

Today I’d like to discuss the United States’ provision of what economists call “global public goods,” for the entire world. First, the United States provides a security umbrella which has created the greatest era of peace mankind has ever known. Second, the U.S. provides the dollar and Treasury securities, reserve assets which make possible the global trading and financial system which has supported the greatest era of prosperity mankind has ever known.
…
Let me clarify that by “reserve currency,” I mean all the international functions of the dollar—private savings and trade included. I’ve often used the example that when private agents in two separate foreign countries trade with each other, it’s typically denominated in dollars because of America’s status as the reserve provider. That trade entails savings housed in dollar securities, often Treasurys. As a result of all this, Americans have been paying for peace and prosperity not just for themselves, but for non-Americans too.
…
I’m an economist and not a military strategist, so I’ll dwell more on trade than on defense, but the two are deeply connected. To see how it works, imagine two foreign nations, say China and Brazil, trading with each other. Neither country has a currency that is trusted, liquid, and convertible, which makes trading with each other challenging. However, because they can transact in U.S. dollars backed by U.S. Treasuries, they are able to trade freely with each other and prosper. Such trade can only occur because of U.S. military might ensuring our financial stability and the credibility of our borrowing. Our military and financial dominance cannot be taken for granted; and the Trump Administration is determined to preserve them.

From an economic standpoint the theory Miran describes is bonkers. “Savings housed in dollar securities, often Treasurys” are not U.S. savings as he implies. They are money the U.S. has borrowed, i.e. the savings of foreigners.

His example of the U.S. dollar enabling trade between Brazil and China is just as wrong as his treasuries theory:

Brazil, China ditch US dollar for trade payments, favour yuan – News.au, Mar 31 2023

Brazil has just cut a deal with China to ditch the US dollar when paying each other for trade goods. It’s the latest victory in Beijing’s long-term drive to stomp on the greenback and establish the yuan as the dominant international currency.

The deal, announced Thursday, has revived concerns about the US dollar’s future.

Brazil and China will directly exchange payments without first converting their currencies to a trusted third-party economy.

That’s the traditional role of the greenback.

These ain’t just small numbers:

According to Chinese customs statistics, the bilateral trade volume between China and Brazil in 2023 was US$181.53 billion, a year-on-year increase of 6.1 percent. Of this, China’s exports to Brazil amounted to US$59.11 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 4.3 percent, while imports from Brazil totaled US$122.42 billion, a year-on-year increase of 11.9 percent.

Brazil is not alone in doing this. Several other big countries, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran etc., have dropped U.S. Dollar intermediation in trade with China.

The Trump administration is aware of the problem:

Elon Musk @elonmusk – 22:51 UTC · Mar 29, 2023

Serious issue. US policy has been too heavy-handed, making countries want to ditch the dollar.

Combined with excess government spending, which forces other countries to absorb a significant part of our inflation

Steve Miran says the U.S. military ensures the “financial stability and the credibility” of U.S. borrowing. It does so only in that it destroys small countries which are trying to turn away from trading in dollars. Iraq and Libya are prime examples of this.

Brazil and China are too big to extort them. The consequences of Trump’s tariff mania will show that again.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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I’ve spent decades—starting long before I founded the Vulnerable People Project—working for apostolates that had me talking to anyone who would listen about the vulnerable and their need for the support of Americans like you and me. We who find ourselves in positions of relative privilege and power owe it to our vulnerable brothers and sisters to defend their dignity when they find themselves powerless and under threat.

But after all these years, I’ve come to a sad conclusion: the bleeding-heart Christian social justice Left and the bold, assertive Christian Right are both willing to vigorously defend the vulnerable only when it doesn’t threaten their first-world privileges. Each side champions the vulnerable, but their fervor comes in waves, and it always stops short when the demands of justice come close to the feet of their most cherished idols.

I have been fighting for legal protection for the child in the womb for over 30 years. I have also been a vocal advocate for noncombatants in war zones, criticizing not only the United States—my article “Flying Into the Abyss on John Brennan’s Drone” being a prime example—but also Russia, and, most recently, Israel for their indiscriminate violence and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

As a conservative, I once again find myself in strange company, as I did some 20 years ago when I opposed the invasion of Iraq.

I am embarrassed to point out the inconsistencies of Christians, Left and Right. I know these people, many are my friends, and it’s obvious they’re truly better Christians than I am. Ask my lawyer, who is right now in the middle of getting me out of trouble for a bar fight. It’s baffling that fine, upstanding Christians who live holy lives can cling to opposite but equally violent ideologies while a personally volatile and hypocritical Christian like me is not tempted to either error.

It is striking when I am in a church basement listening to a mainline Protestant pastor speak eloquently on protecting the vulnerable. “Every life matters,” she says. I agree with every word. But I find it mind-numbing and incomprehensible when I have to remind myself that this same speaker supports abortion for all nine months. The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

In the same way, when I find myself in a megachurch for a pro-life event, and I listen to the pastor speak beautifully on human dignity, how every life is worthy of protection, and how we must stand with the vulnerable. I have to blink and scratch my head, knowing this same man makes genocidal comments like, “Flatten Gaza!” and declares that “Palestinians have the spirit of Amalek.” The inconsistencies are insane.

The Christian social justice Left is willing to sacrifice economic interests and protest foreign wars, often with genuine passion for justice. They march against the brutalities of imperialism, the exploitation of the poor, and the ravaging of the environment. They seek to hold the powerful accountable when it comes to policies that oppress marginalized communities and violate human dignity.

But their compassion has a blind spot. While they claim to stand with the weak, they refuse to relinquish sexual libertinism for the common good. For all their fiery rhetoric against oppression, they often vigorously advocate for abortion-on-demand, without exceptions. The defenseless child in the womb is the most vulnerable among us, yet their lives are discarded in the name of autonomy and convenience.

Read the Whole Article

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As I am writing this from London, I will temporarily adopt the useful British expression “chattering class” to describe the people who are currently freaking out in the media about President Trump’s tariff policy causing the S&P 500 to sell off to where it was in February 2024.

Because the stock market has only gone up since 2009 (when it was 768), the chattering class has grown accustomed to it only going up and it perceives the loss of a year’s gains to be the end of the world.

This reaction is itself an expression of how detached from reality the chattering class has become since 2009, when the Treasury and Federal Reserve bailed out the very Wall Street bankers who caused the Financial Crisis of 2008.

Ever since then, all U.S. government and Federal Reserve policies have been for the benefit of the asset-owning class. The American working class simply hasn’t counted, while the middle class (who live mostly from their salaries) has been under constant pressure with the rising cost of housing, healthcare, and college education.

To see what I mean, take a look at the following graph expressing non-existent real wage growth for the last forty years.

It’s true that the working and middle classes have been able to save money by purchasing cheap consumer goods from China. In recent years I have frequently marveled at the low price of textiles and sneakers sold at Costco. As I write, I am wearing a Jim-Dandy pair of navy IZOD sneakers made in China that I purchased at Costco for $15. How it is possible for IZOD and Costco to make any money on this transaction—never mind the Chinese factory owner and the poor Chinese laborers—is beyond me.

Though I don’t pretend to understand “the dismal science” of economics, my common sense tells me that it is unsustainable for the majority of Americans to produce nothing and go ever deeper into debt while consoling themselves that the price of consumer goods manufactured in China remains cheap.

That said, I also doubt that this mess can be unwound quickly. While an economic system is not precisely the same as a natural system, it bears a strong resemblance. Nothing in nature can be radically altered in a short period of time without producing all manner of consequences, many unforeseen.

I suspect that Trump and his advisors have been wargaming their current game of chicken with the Chinese, the financial markets, and the inveterate weenies who infest the mainstream media. An optimistic interpretation is that his tariffs are the opening gambit for negotiations.

Sort of like Saint George, Trump is apparently determined to enter a jousting tournament with the great Chinese Dragon, and it will be interesting to see if he prevails. Who will flinch—the Trump administration or the Chinese Communist Party?

On a strictly personal note, I cannot help but admire the sheer nerve of President Trump. He reminds me of the Spanish bullfighter Juan “Pirata” Padilla, who frequently kneels before a charging bull—sometimes even with his back turned to the animal.

To understand how much nerve this requires, consider that the mere sight of an enraged Toro Bravo would dissuade most people from even stepping into the arena.

I know, I know, being President of the United States isn’t the same as being a Spanish bullfighter. However, going back to my original thesis that the U.S. economic model of the last forty years hasn’t been sustainable: Many reasonable people have been pointing this out for years, but no one in Washington has had the guts to do anything about it until now.

America’s asset-owning class has not had to endure any discomfort since 2009, but some discomfort is an inevitable part of living in the real world. Long before the summer of 1789, many reasonable observers in France understood that the privileges of the ancien régime were unsustainable. However, no one from the ancien régime had the guts to tell his social class that it would need to accept some loss of comfort in order to survive.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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The video below, with Judge Andrew Napolitano and his guest Aaron Maté, discusses some extremely disconcerting developments treating to President Trump’s  deportation and foreign imprisonment policies, and their naked threats to civil liberties of citizens and non-citizens alike. Trump is not only deporting to foreign prisons hundreds (soon to be thousands) of illegal aliens for real crimes committed on US soil (which, by and of itself, has some precedent, though this tranche of criminals is being deprived of all due process in their summary removal).  He is also having legal resident green card holders deported for very specious offenses which basically are the exercising of first amendment rights which umpteen court cases have determined to be constitutionally applicable to ALL legal residents, citizens or not.  And all of the people listed above are being shanghaied out of the country without an initial hearing as a prelude to any deportation, which was confirmed this week by all nine Supreme Court justices as a violation of basic due process.

All of this is extremely dangerous and establishes very bad precedent, but it only sets the stage for much worse abuses of American citizens in the near future.  At about the 13 minute mark, President Trump is actually shown saying – openly, and without even the slightest hint of a thought that this is not a good thing! – that American *citizens* committing grave crimes can be similarly deported to El Salvador and other hell-holes that the non-citizens are being sent to, in order to serve their sentences!  Whoa!

Look, this is earth-shatteringly vile, and beyond dangerous.  It is a massive violation of constitutional law, international precedents, and a direct abuse of presidential authority.  Furthermore, as Judge Napolitano points out immediately after Trump’s words, everything he mentions as examples would involve state, not federal, courts for adjudication, so the overall scenario Trump paints is stretching even thinner the distinction between federal and state jurisdictions.

No matter how horrible or shocking a crime might be, there is absolutely ZERO precedent or legal justification for remanding *American citizens* to foreign prisons for crimes committed within the United States.  Upon conviction, such criminals are to be punished within the state (or federal, when actually applicable) prison systems.  Period.

MAGA had better pay attention to what’s going on here.  Pandering to the law-and-order crowd, which is a major part of the MAGA movement, should be condemned by all of us in this instance.  What Trump proposes is morally and legally repellent, and is an obvious scenario ripe for boomeranging against any of us, under arbitrary circumstances.  If vile criminals who are American citizens can be treated this way, the door is open to water down the criteria for what constitutes a heinous crime in the first place.  Indeed, if legal residents with a green card are already being deported without a hearing for merely speaking their minds about controversial political subjects, how long will it be before American citizens are dealt with similarly?  Does summary deportation and/or foreign imprisonment for American citizens cause concern for you? Well, how about this: will contrived thought-crimes loom in the future for American citizens who run afoul of ever-increasing, arbitrary standards for what constitutes acceptable public discourse, with similar deportation “solutions”?

And (this is the part MAGA better wake up and “get” real quick!), people can say this is no big deal because they support Trump, and thus have nothing to fear, but political winds change frequently in the US, and inevitably there will be a Democrat administration installed who can use the by-then established legal precedents Trump established, and start arresting and deporting to foreign prison hell-holes oh…say… pro-life activists, or people who object to DEI, or transgenderism, or a host of other things that could be cited as liable to this “jurisprudential remedy”!  What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and all that!

This must be opposed, by all of us.  It is a non-starter on moral and constitutional grounds, and on a purely pragmatic level, leaves all Americans potentially subject to this sort of  treatment as political majorities shift back and forth.  A greater sign of the end of constitutional government could hardly be imagined; and no greater gateway to overt tyranny could trump (no pun intended) what’s left of our civil liberties.

Please, for heaven’s sake, watch the video below, and ruminate long and hard on the implications surrounding this issue, for both citizens and non-citizens alike.

The post Is Foreign Imprisonment for US Citizens on the Horizon? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The “Lone Gunmen” pilot episode, titled “Pilot,” which aired on March 4, 2001, is often cited as eerily predicting the 9/11 attacks, as it featured a plot involving a hijacked plane aimed at the World Trade Center. 

The post Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones: Trump, Israel, Secret WW3 Plans, Dire Wolf Resurrection, Infowars Reporter Assassination appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

The navigator didn’t know the day it was of where he was. He forgot that he’d crossed the International Date Line. The navigator was 100 miles west of where he should have been to land on Howland Island.

A man-made invention of time killed Erhart and Noonan. It’s a strange way to die.

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Thanks, John Smith. 

¡Do Not Panic!

The post Meta’s Head of AI Policy Is Ex-IDF Along With One Hundred Other Meta Employees appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Thanks, John Smith.  

The New Arab

The post Pro-Israel group attacks Ms. Rachel over Gaza aid posts appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The American Conservative.

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In what way is the Trump presidency and his financial partners involved in the collapse of stock markets Worldwide.

Major financial actors, using the instruments of speculative trade, have the ability to fiddle and rig market movements to their advantage. There is no such thing as a “Free Market”. These tools of manipulation have become an integral part of the financial architecture; they are embedded in the system.

There are several instruments including futures, put options, index funds, derivatives, naked short selling, etc. used to make billions of dollars when the stock market crumbles.  The more it falls, the greater the gains. Those who make it fall are speculating on its decline.”

The stock exchange has been transformed into a multi billion dollar Gambling Casino.

The market is heavily manipulated. The driving force behind the meltdown is speculative trade. The system of  “private regulation” serves the interests of the speculators.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Trump’s Global Economic Warfare appeared first on LewRockwell.

It is no sin to evade the tax collector. We can hold in contempt all arguments claiming the legitimacy of taxation. These claims can only come from ignorant, misled, or evil men. It may be virtuous to tolerate the first two, but standing silent while evil men plunder our livelihood is an evil of its own kind.

When a stronger man demands of a weaker man, “your money or your life,” there is no dishonor in paying, even though there is special honor in openly defying dishonorable men. The weaker man is under no obligation to respect the thug and thief before him. He is entitled to every form of protection he can muster, be it deceit, escape, subversion, or sabotage. Only one thing is precluded from him: finding one even weaker than himself and enacting the same evil.

This current American “government,” so called by convention, although they are lawless demons controlled by Satan himself, has inherited and perpetuated a system devised by their master, one which I have lived under my entire life: withholding. The very name implies injustice. What can be withheld but that which is entitled?

American employers have enlisted to become tax collectors year after year. In exchange for their robbery, they are given a special privilege: a monopoly on profits from productive labor. Should one of these tax collectors ever question orders, regaining his humanity and the sacred charge of leading free men, he is put down swiftly and without mercy. A crime family can not abide insubordination from its bag men.

Employers must make a choice: who’s side are they on? Much economic analysis discusses how the interests of the employee and the employer are aligned. It is time for the American entrepreneur to put up or shut up. Is he a toady for evil and thieving men, or is he a man in his own right, honorable and true? For those willing to be leaders, openly defy. For the weaker of them, use every form of protection that you can muster, but quit enacting this evil upon your employees.

How shall we protect ourselves from the slave drivers who remain? A man must work. It is a necessary condition of life, like breathing. If a tax were levied on breathing, would we hold our breath out of duty to our country? Would we quibble about the rights of employers to the air they allow us to breathe in their factories? Or would we open our lungs and take what we need?

Every employer is in the process of arbitraging revenues and expenses to make a profit. Since profits are the direct reward for his injustice, profits should be the place where the worker finds his reckoning. Do you get to use the company credit card? Can you use a company vehicle for personal use? Burgers to eat without paying the 50% off, employee “discounted” price? If your employer is not taking care of you, you should take care of yourself.

A man must be devious enough to thrive, but honorable enough to not milk the cow dry. He has his own “going-concern” to worry about. Although the prison may be the proper place for a person like me, it certainly is not a place I ever want to go. If my employer takes me to court, I will find no justice. The judges are on the side of the tax collectors. So it is imperative that we stay out of those houses of injustice.

When a critical mass of people recognize the income tax is unjust, it will go away. No effort will then be necessary to rid ourselves of it. Until then, we must survive and become strong. Otherwise, our rulers and tax collectors will milk us dry, discard us, and reap all the rewards of the crimes they have committed.

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The gold price recently surged to unprecedented levels, surpassing the $3,000 per ounce milestone. This remarkable surge has been attributed to escalating geopolitical tensions, the revival of the trade wars, mounting inflation concerns, and of course, a very uncertain and very worrying outlook for the global economy and for the markets. As they always do, investors have once again flocked to the safe haven that gold unmistakably provides, pushing the price from record high to record high.

However, what is interesting this time is that silver has failed to grab any of the spotlight, which presents a truly rare opportunity for shrewd investors with a long-term vision.

While gold has been dominating international headlines for months already with its record-breaking performance, its “little brother” has remained relatively subdued, currently trading around $29.59 per ounce. This disparity is reflected in the gold-to-silver ratio, which currently stands above 102:1, significantly higher than the historical average of around 50:1. Such an elevated figure suggests that silver is undervalued in relation to gold, pointing to a potential correction as market dynamics evolve.

Of course, as most of my clients and readers know very well by now, my primary focus has never been fixed upon price action or the temporary fluctuations of the precious metals market. This is why I personally don’t find the “$3000/oz” gold price record as exciting as many of my industry peers. Sure, it was psychological barrier and sure, it is meaningful that it was crossed with such ease, but that’s not the most impressive thing about gold’s performance. The bigger picture is far more interesting: the steady rise of the past years and the circumstances under which it occurred are far more telling and offered even more confirmatory evidence to those investors that hold precious metals for the right reasons.

The case for silver is similarly robust. Apart from the potential upside due to market fluctuations, the metal has an iron-clad fundamental case to support a solid outlook. In contrast to gold, silver has a kind of dual identity as both as investment asset and as an industrial metal. It has extensive applications in all kinds of industrial sectors, but especially in so-called “green technologies”, such as solar panels and electric vehicles, that have seen spectacular growth thanks to the “electrification” wave.

Countless governments, especially in the West, have been pushing for years to get rid of fossil fuels in favor of renewables and they have offered extremely attractive incentives, tax cuts and subsidies to anyone promising to do that. And while the demand is certainly there, the supply is not. Decades of underinvestment have led to supply constraints and as the demand steadily rises, likely upcoming shortages.

Even though, as mentioned before, price action is not my primary focus, it is worth noting that there are some interesting dynamics from the speculative side of silver’s demand. One of the reasons we’ve been seeing a weaker performance this time around is that a lot of the speculators that used to flock into silver for quick gains have migrated to crypto, which is why we’re seeing significant fluctuations and volatility there. This, of course, changes nothing about the fundamental investment case – if anything, it strengthens it, as the fact that there are less speculators in the metals market could reduce overall volatility going forward.

Given the current market conditions, and especially the price differential between the two precious metals, investors might consider increasing their silver position. The current price levels are still very attractive and keeping one’s savings in silver is a far superior strategy than sitting on piles of cash that constantly lose value or investing in seriously and artificially overvalued equities.

As silver prices rise and the gold to silver ratio drops, investors can start selling their silver holdings at a profit and reallocating into gold, thereby enhancing the overall value of their precious metals portfolio. This strategy takes advantage of silver’s currently attractive price levels and its anticipated price growth while maintaining a balanced investment in both metals. Most of all, it optimally protects investors and ordinary savers from the extreme risks that lie ahead, from intentional, further currency devaluation and loss of real purchasing power to a severe stock market decline and the possibility of an economic recession, which seems to be getting likelier by the day.

Finally, there’s another argument in favor of silver that many investors often fail to take into account. As governments all over the world keep getting in increasingly dire financial straits due to their ballooning debts, the old fears of gold confiscation are on the rise again in the minds of many physical metal owners. Silver can provide some added protection against extreme scenarios like that, since it has been historically spared from confiscation orders.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Therefore please feel free to share and you can subscribe for my articles by clicking here

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Inoculation with a weak form of disease-causing matter to prevent serious illness is a charming idea that has exerted a powerful hold on the human mind since its first primitive iteration against smallpox, called variolation, was proposed in England and the British American colonies in the early 18th century.

After Edward Jenner published his 1798 pamphlet in which he proposed using cowpox to inoculate humans against smallpox, the idea of inoculation became the central concept of infectious disease medicine and has remained so ever since. A serious student of the history of vaccination will observe that this public health technology has always been more a matter of wishful thinking, faith, and commercial enterprise than unbiased scientific inquiry.

The whiny resignation letter of Peter Marks, Director for the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, is a catechism—that is, “a series of fixed answers or precepts used for instruction in other situations.” Marks is a Defender of the Vaccine Faith, and his resignation letter reminded me of counter-reformation pamphlets of the 16th century that asserted the rectitude of Catholic doctrine and the error of protestant reformation doctrine. Every statement in Marks’s letter is a mere assertion—an Article of Faith.

I rejoice at the news of Marks’s departure, which will have a salubrious and rejuvenating effect on the entire Department.

Health and Human Services will never make a contribution to fostering health if its top positions are filled with ideologues whose primary function is the maintenance of orthodoxy. The agency needs men and women of true intellect and imagination to ask fresh questions and look for answers in places that orthodoxy has made a zone of forbidden knowledge.

Peter Marks, MD, PhD
Director, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
10903 New Hampshire Avenue
Silver Spring, MD 20903

March 28, 2025

Sara Brenner, MD, MPH
Acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
10903 New Hampshire Avenue
Silver Spring, MD 20903

Dear Dr. Brenner:
It is with a heavy heart that I have decided to resign from FDA and retire from federal service as Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research effective April 5, 2025. I leave behind a staff of professionals who are undoubtedly the most devoted to protecting and promoting the public health of any group of people that I have encountered during my four decades working in the public and private sectors. I have always done my best to advocate for their well-being and I would ask that you do the same during this very difficult time during which their critical importance to the safety and security of our nation may be underappreciated.

Over the past years I have been involved in enhancing the safety of our nation’s blood supply, in advancing the field of cell and gene therapy, and in responding to public health emergencies. In the last of these, during the COVID-19 pandemic I had the privilege of watching the vision that I conceived for Operation Warp Speed in March 2020 in collaboration with Dr. Robert Kadlec become a reality under the leadership of HHS Secretary Azar and President Trump due to the unwavering commitment of public servants at FDA and elsewhere across the government.

At FDA, the tireless efforts of staff across the agency resulted in remarkably expediting the development of vaccines against the virus, meeting the standards for quality, safety, and effectiveness expected by the American public. The vaccines undoubtedly markedly reduced morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 in the United States and elsewhere. Many of these same individuals applied learnings from the pandemic during a flawless response helping to facilitate the rapid control of the mpox epidemic in the United States during 2022.

Individuals who participated in these responses remain at the ready to address the infectious threats that undoubtedly will confront us in the coming years, including H5N1, which is now on our threshold. Efforts currently being advanced by some on the adverse health effects of vaccination are concerning.

The history of the potential individual and societal benefits of vaccination is as old as our great nation. George Washington considered protecting his troops in Cambridge, Massachusetts against smallpox early in the revolutionary war so that they would not be susceptible to infection by British troops infiltrating the ranks, and later in the war in February 1777 while encamped in Morristown, NJ, he went on to have the courage and foresight to sign an order requiring inoculation of his troops against smallpox.

Subsequently, refinement of the smallpox vaccine combined with a widespread vaccination campaign resulted in the eradication of smallpox from the globe. The application of the remarkable scientific advances of Drs. Salk and Sabin’s vaccines led to the elimination of polio in the United States. And these are just effects of two of the vaccines that have been associated with saving millions of lives.

The ongoing multistate measles outbreak that is particularly severe in Texas reminds us of what happens when confidence in well-established science underlying public health and well-being is undermined. Measles, which killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia owing to pneumonitis and encephalitis caused by the virus, had been eliminated from our shores. The two-dose measles, mumps, rubella vaccine regimen (MMR) using over the past decades has a remarkably favorable benefit-risk profile.

The MMR vaccine is 97% or more effective in preventing measles following
the two-dose series, and its safety has been remarkably well studied. Though rarely followed by a single fever-related seizure, or very rarely by allergic reactions or blood clotting disorders, the vaccine very simply does not cause autism, nor is it associated with encephalitis or death. It does, however, protect against a potential devasting consequence of prior measles infection, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), which is an untreatable, relentlessly progressive neurologic disorder leading to death in about 1 in 10,000 individuals infected with measles.

Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety, and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at FDA is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety. and security.

In the years following the pandemic, at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research we have applied the same unwavering commitment to public health priorities to the development of cell and gene therapies to address both hereditary and acquired rare diseases. During my tenure as Center Director we have approved 22 gene therapies, including the first gene therapy ever to be approved in the United States. However, we know that we must do better to expedite the development of treatments for those individual suffering from any one of the thousands of diseases potentially addressable by the advances in molecular medicine over the past decades.

Drawing from learnings of the pandemic, the staff at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research are implementing best practices learned during the pandemic such as increased communication with product developers to further expedite bringing needed treatments to those in need. They have also been exploring the dramatic transformation of our regulatory approach to expedite the delivery of directly administered genome editing products.

If thoughtfully approached and further developed and refined, these
treatments have the potential to transform human health over the coming years.
Over the past 13 years I have done my best to ensure that we efficiently and effectively applied the best available science to benefit public health. As you are aware, I was willing to work to address the Secretary’s concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency by hearing from the public and implementing a variety of different public meetings and engagements with the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies. My hope is that during the coming years, the unprecedented assault on scientific truth that has adversely impacted public health in our nation comes to an end so that the citizens of our country can fully benefit from the breadth of advances in medical science. Though I will regret not being able to be part of future work at the FDA, I am truly grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such a remarkable group of individuals as the staff at FDA and will do my best to continue to advance public health in the future.
Sincerely,
Peter Marks, MD, PhD

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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An invasion can be the cause of a war, be a part of a larger strategy to end a war, or it can constitute an entire war in itself. Due to the large scale of the operations associated with invasions, they are usually strategic in planning and execution.

When I hear the word invasion, what immediately comes to mind is one country invading another. We have ultimately learned that the reasons we are given for the invasion are rarely the whole story. There is more often than not a hidden agenda, some element of self-serving and ulterior motives which are never meant to see the light of day. That is the nature of invasion – it is insidious and used for the benefit of the invader and not the invaded. It makes sense – if what we are offering is beneficial to both parties, then an invasion wouldn’t be necessary – an invitation would be extended and the other party given a choice.

We can justify invasion as much as we want – that we are saving and/or improving people’s lives etc. but invasion is still invasion. Some people will always want to be ‘saved’, rather than expending the effort to save themselves, and will welcome the intervention, but there are many who will consider it just a matter of exchanging one form of slavery over another.

If we have invited someone along to a party and they become intrusive, then we can ask them to leave. However, it doesn’t often work that way with invasion. The invader is perceived as the more dominant and powerful, sometimes even as a saviour. However, over a period of time, even if our lives have been saved by the initial invasion, resentment starts to fester and rise to the surface. People start muttering and mumbling, they start asking questions about exactly what benefits the invader received when they ‘saved’ them. These are weighed and measured and often, in hindsight, the cost is agreed to have been much too high. Invasion is never transparent – there is always the danger of exposure.

This guide below can help you in a survival situation

It is difficult to separate invasion into different categories, because each one tends to bleed into the other. Below are the five types invasion.

Physical invasion

Physical invasion is the most obvious and visible one. It comes in the form of sexual assault, torture, beatings and imprisonment of one form or another.

These are all used as acts of war in order to quell the opposition so victory is assured. It begs the question – can we therefore go one step further and say that invasion is in fact an act of war – in whatever form it comes? Invasion of a country, sexual harassment of a co-worker or bullying of someone at school – isn’t it just a matter of degree?

Some hurt and angry children learn to become bullies. If they aren’t healed or made accountable, they become adult bullies. These adult bullies might then have children of their own, who learn their behaviour and continue it into the next generation. Some adult bullies end up as heads of corporations and powerful public figures. This is where global acts of war are likely to begin. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of fear driven behaviour.

Mental Invasion

Bullying doesn’t have to be physical. In these days of social media it has become a violent and cruel form of torture of another human being. Most of these bullies are able to remain anonymous, which makes it more sinister in some ways because there is no-one to be held accountable. The person smiling at you from across the room could actually be the person who is sending the vile messages.

The news is full of stories of people being bullied due to their physical appearance, their sexual orientation, religious beliefs etc. This breaks down the person’s self-worth and self-confidence, to the extent that sometimes even a loving family can’t repair the damage done. This form of invasion can culminate in people taking their own lives, when their feeling of isolation becomes too much to bear.

Forcing our opinions onto others is also a form of invasion. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who is very intense and stares into your eyes while waiting for your response, virtually willing you to agree with them? I have and I know that I have felt very uncomfortable, under pressure and desperately looking for the nearest exit! Invasion has that effect!

Any planting of our own beliefs, or educated guesses, into someone else’s mind as the ultimate truth is a form of invasion. Some years ago I came across the stories of two ladies who had both been diagnosed with the same ‘terminal’ disease, and had both been given 3 months to live by their respective doctors. One of these ladies I met but the other I didn’t because she had taken the doctor’s words to heart, lost hope and passed on a few days before the 3 months was up. The other lady however, though obviously frightened, rejected the doctor’s diagnosis. She had 3 young children and was determined not to leave them. She went on an emotional journey to discover the cause of her illness and went on to heal herself. Fourteen years later and I am told she is still alive and kicking.

It brings to mind a man I met who helped me a lot when I started my own conscious spiritual journey at the age of 19. His name was Joseph Benjamin, and he told the story that 15 years previously his doctor had given him 6 months to live – he was still alive and the doctor was dead. He used to relay that story with gusto.

Spiritual Invasion

I am of the belief that we are spiritual beings having a material experience. Therefore, spiritual invasion strikes at the very core of who we are – it trumps physical and mental invasion every time.

This is where people’s actions come from on a subconscious level – whether they are religious fanatics or atheists, to everything in between those extremes. The physical and mental functions are driven from this core belief.

There are places in the world where people don’t want their photos taken because they believe that their spirit will be captured. There are other places where people believe in being cursed, and that if they don’t behave in certain ways their souls will be condemned to eternal damnation.

I have personally been told about people who cast spells in order to bring someone’s loved one back to them. Maybe a lock of hair, or some belonging, is handed over and a spell is cast. The power of belief is such that often the loved one does return (unless they are strong minded enough to resist), but usually only for a limited period and often it’s not a happy experience. The reason being is that their personal choice has been compromised, they have been manipulated and drawn back against their will – they would never have returned if by invitation alone. Relationships of any kind have to be mutual and not driven by one person, with the other along for the ride.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and to worship or not according to their own inclination. Religious beliefs, like any other, should come from personal experience and not just adopted because it is expected, or because the beliefs have been handed down through generations. What was good enough for your father is not necessarily good enough for you.

Spiritual invasion occurs when people are victimised according to their beliefs, and threatened if they don’t conform. Some years ago I travelled to an island where some of the residents were organising a festival which I participated in. I found some very interesting things there – the ruling family had outlawed any form of medium-ship, tarot reading etc. These were considered as breaking the law, as dictated by a book which had been written in the sixteenth century. There had been a dispensation that for the 3 day festival it was allowed, but after that it was a crime. In fact, one reader who continued doing readings from her hotel room actually had the police knock on the door and tell her to stop. The most interesting, and tragic, thing for me was shown in the handwriting of the youth there – so many young people exhibiting stress, anxiety, depression and sometimes even suicidal tendencies. The future generation were being severely impacted through this enforced lack of freedom to make their own choices.

Acts of love which are actually invasive behaviours

Parents, teachers and mentors who don’t want their charges to ‘grow up’ can become invasive if they aren’t careful. This is usually seen and generally accepted as loving protection. It comes in the form of speaking for their charges long after they should be speaking for themselves, and/or monitoring and over-seeing them so that they never get a feeling of being trusted, or being seen as responsible human beings.

We need to look at our motivation very closely. Are we acting out of love for the other person, or out of fear that we are going to be abandoned, that we won’t be needed any more? Whatever the intention, a feeling of resentment and wanting to escape will inevitably occur, and what could have been a loving and supportive relationship breaks down, and sometimes becomes damaged beyond repair. We all need to know when to let go, and let others make their own decisions without our interference, unless we are invited to comment of course.

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The pundits are having a difficult time understanding how President Trump would fulfill his expressed desire to serve a third term as president. Some of them have fallen back on the possibility that he is joking and just trolling his critics. Others have come up with unlikely scenarios for achieving a third term. For example, one commentator asked Trump whether he planned to have J.D. Vance run as president, with Trump as his vice-presidential running mate. Under this scenario, Vance would resign immediately after the election, thereby elevating Trump to the presidency.

However, there are two problems with that scenario:

One, Trump couldn’t trust Vance to fulfill his part of the bargain. What if Vance changed his mind and decided to remain as president? That would leave Trump as vice-president for the next four years. He wouldn’t be very happy as vice-president. That’s the position that Vice President Garner said “is not worth a bucket of warm spit.”

Two, the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits someone from being a vice-presidential candidate if he is ineligible to serve as president. The 22nd Amendment, which prohibits someone from being elected president more than twice, renders Trump ineligible to run as president.

Trumpsters have raised the possibility of a constitutional amendment that would enable Trump to seek a third term. The problem there is that such an amendment would have to be passed by a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and then ratified by three-fourths of the states. That simply is not going to happen and certainly not within the next three years.

So, does all this mean that Trump is simply joshing about a third term as president in an effort to provoke and upset his detractors?

Not necessarily. There is another path to a third term for Trump, a very viable path, one that he might well be pondering.

Ever since the Constitution called the federal government into existence, there has been a big potential flaw in the system. Under our system of government, the judicial branch of the federal government is the final arbiter of what is legal and constitutional. The potential flaw has always been the assumption that the president would defer to the judicial branch and would comply with adverse rulings of the judicial branch.

This mindset of executive deference to judicial authority even extended to President Franklin Roosevelt, who was president during the “national emergency” of the Great Depression. Even though FDR was furious over Supreme Court rulings declaring his socialist and fascist economic programs unconstitutional, and even though he proposed an infamous “court-packing” scheme to circumvent those rulings, he nonetheless complied with judicial rulings.

But what if a president decided to no longer comply with judicial rulings? In that case, as a practical matter, there is absolutely nothing the judicial branch could do about it, especially given the fact that America now has a national-security state form of governmental structure rather than the limited-government structure on which the nation was founded.

Let’s assume that the judicial branch issues an injunction against the executive branch that the president and his subordinates simply ignore. The court sends a team of U.S. Marshals with a contempt order to serve on one of the president’s subordinates. What happens when that team of U.S. Marshals encounters an infantry battallion of the 82nd Airborne Division, as well as a team of well-placed CIA assassins, that prevents that order from being served and enforced? We all know what happens. The judicial branch is rendered impotent. That team of U.S. Marshals returns to the court with its contempt order in hand.

That’s where the national-security establishment — i.e., the military, the CIA, and the NSA — comes into play. It becomes the means by which the president is able to ignore both the judicial branch and the legislative branch. Thus, the wild card in all this is the vast, omnipotent military-intelligence establishment, whose powers over American “terrorists” include military arrest, torture, indefinite detention, military tribunals, renditions to El Salvador, and even state-sponsored assassinations.

That’s precisely why our Founding Fathers hated big standing armies. They knew that big standing armies enable a ruler to exercise omnipotent, dictatorial, unchecked powers over the citizenry. That’s because it is extremely difficult to oppose the overwhelming power of a big, powerful standing army, especially one that loyally serves its commander-in-chief. As James Madison put it so eloquently, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.” (See my 2013 article “The Dangers of a Standing Army.”)

Thus, let’s assume that for whatever reason — a war with Iran or China in 2027 — or an enormous economic crisis — or both — Trump declares a “national emergency,” much like the “national emergencies” he has already been declaring. Let’s assume that he issues an executive order stating that “national security” dictates that the presidential election will have to be suspended temporarily and that he is willing to remain as president in service to the country.

People file lawsuits and secure injunctions that nullify Trump’s executive decree. He could simply ignore them. What then? How would the judiciary enforce those injunctions and rulings, especially if Trump has succeeded in consolidating his power over the military, the CIA, and the NSA?

Let’s say that Congress votes to impeach Trump and convicts him. So what? On grounds of “national security,” he could ignore that process just as much as he could ignore rulings of the federal courts. How would Congress enforce its impeachment ruling against a president that is backed by the Pentagon, the vast military establishment, the CIA, and the NSA?

Soon after the January 6 protests at the Capitol in the 2020 elections, the Pentagon issued a remarkable statement declaring Joe Biden to be the president. (See my 2021 article “The Pentagon Speaks.”) In my opinion, that was the day that Trump realized that he was no longer going to be president. It might also have been the day when Trump realized how important it is for a ruler to have the deep, unwavering loyalty of a national-security establishment.

Can Trump replace enough generals with generals that are 100 percent loyal to him by 2027? Will he push the boundaries of violating court orders to see what he can get away with? Will he use executive orders to intimidate scared lawyers into silence and even support? Will he and his minions in Congress threaten recalcitrant judges with impeachment in an effort to cow them into submission?

Time will tell. But if Trump, backed by his national-security establishment, comes to the realization that nothing can or will happen to him if he crosses the line and begins openly ignoring and violating adverse rulings of the judicial branch, the road to serving a third term and beyond will be fully open to him.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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It would seem so, if some of the higher prelates have anything to do with it. More than a few of them, at the beginning of Lent, urged us to imitate our “Muslim brothers” as they undergo their Ramadan fasts.

Us imitate them? The Catholic Church had been exercising the rigorous disciplines of Lent for 500 years before Muhammad arose from the sands of Arabia. Have these good prelates forgotten the fasts of the apostles? Or the emergence of Christian men and women braving the wildernesses of Arabia and Egypt to give birth to the great eremitical and coenobitic Orders? Have St. Anthony, the Desert Fathers, or St. Simeon Stylites slipped their minds? Monasticism as it is known emerged from those centuries with the great stress upon taming the beast in man so that he becomes even more than angel.

Perhaps their lapse in memory is due to their predecessors’ devaluation of the whole apparatus of atonement for sin, reparation for past offenses, and the singular value of mortification and fast? Pope Montini, after all, was driven by the need to soften the signature self-abnegations of the Church’s millennial tradition as empty exercises of a benighted past. Thus, the obligatory Friday abstinence, the three-hour fast before the reception of Holy Communion, and many other worthy disciplines that had been emblematic of a robust Catholic existence were cast aside.

Whether Pope Paul VI intended it or not, the “approved” theological cognoscenti of the time were allowed to spin all kinds of romanticized tales to buttress this fatal mistake. One of them touted a Promethean trope, “man come of age.” Recognize that these ranks of “enlightened” thinkers were willing avatars of the decadent ’60s, drinking deeply at the poisoned springs of that antinomian age. Ringing in their callow ears was that ubiquitous refrain, the “age of Aquarius,” so beloved by that deluded generation. For those blessed not to live through those chimerical times, it was that zodiac figure, Aquarius, who embodied a trancelike abandonment to a fanciful life of wanton self-absorption and unchecked sybaritic pursuit.

All too willing, theologians readily surrendered to this siren call, more sophomoric than theological. They traveled hither and yon preaching the message of a liberated self, pursuing the spirit of satiety. All past codes, traditions, and ordered disciplines of the Church’s tradition were mocked, then proscribed as shackling the movements of the “spirit.” Convents emptied, seminaries were drained (or transformed), and priests abandoned their sacred vocation pleading obedience to a higher call of fidelity to self.

Most bishops of that time surrendered; others, who recognized The Lie, surrendered, mistakenly concluding that resistance was futile, rather like a flea struggling to halt a hurricane. And the sacred walls of Mother Church suffered fatal cracks.

Then there was the conceit “man come of age.” This emerged from the decomposing carcass of modern philosophy. The Modern Man of the ’60s had long outgrown the strictures and moral code that were the narcotic of past ages. A New Illumination had arrived, and the Catholic bien pensant treated it like catnip.

Montini had opened the door, and it was now the obligation of these New Catholic Thinkers to remove the hinges. They screeched that the Church before 1965 (hmmm, what infallible marker could that be?), treated its members like children, with imperatives like obedience to moral law, ancient penances, and even time-honored forms of piety.

Abandoning them all was the law of the day. Beneath that mushroom cloud was Old Lent. With the firm hand of their newly won position, they displayed an unrelenting exercise of embarrasing masochism.

Pondering the wounds of the Savior? Nothing more than an unhealthy fixation.

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